The Council on Foreign Relations just released a “Special Report,” U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation by Michael Levi and Charles Ferguson. Mike and Charles are first rate thinkers but I disagree with almost every aspect of their report.

The report is seductively misleading because many of the recommendations make good sense given the presumptions and context of the report. But the presumptions and context are wrong. So first, we need to step back and examine the context. The authors state early on that “…the Bush administration has stirred deep passions and put Congress in the seemingly impossible bind of choosing between approving the deal and damaging nuclear nonproliferation, or rejecting the deal and thereby setting back an important strategic relationship.” [p. 3] This is true, but the problem is with the deal, not the implementation.
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Almost 70 percent of people in European countries that currently store U.S. nuclear weapons want a Europe free of nuclear weapons, according to an opinion poll published by Greenpeace International. In contrast, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested in an interview with Der Spiegel last November that the Europeans want to keep U.S. nuclear weapons.

Question: “Do You Want Europe to be Free of Nuclear Weapons or Not?”

Background: U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe

Deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey was brought up in a debate in the Turkish Parliament today by Turkey’s former Ambassador to the United States, Sukru Elekdag. According to an article in the Turkish paper Hürriyet, Elekdag called attention to a report, US Nuclear Weapons In Europe, which asserts that the U.S. Air Force stores 90 nuclear bombs at the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.

The report was published one year ago, but the initiative by Elekdag, who represents the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is the first time the findings have been brought before the Tuskish Parliament. The Tuskish debate follows calls last year in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands for a withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe, something NATO and the Pentagon have rejected. Elekdag pointed out that nuclear weapons were removed from Greece only a few years ago and that Turkey’s continued allowance of U.S. nuclear bombs at Incirlik is hard to explain to Muslim and Arab neighbors.

In a whopper 231-page report published today, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission presented 60 specific recommendations for how to move the nonproliferation and disarmament agenda forward.

The recommendations are familiar to anyone involved in these matters over the past 50 years: reduce the danger of nuclear arsenals; prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; outlaw weapons of mass destruction; etc.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) was established in 2003 by the Swedish Government acting on a proposal by then United Nations Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala to present realistic proposals aimed at the greatest possible reduction of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. The Commission is chaired by Hans Blix, the former Executive Chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and includes among others William J. Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Jayantha Dhanapala, the former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, and Alexei G. Arbatov of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The Commission’s report uses the World Nuclear Forces overview co-produced by Federation of American Scientists for the SIPRI Yearbook to describe the status of existing nuclear arsenals, but the report does not dwell on past nuclear arms reductions which are often used by the nuclear weapon states to say they have done enough. Instead, the Commission calls for new and additional actions to curb existing weapons of mass destruction arsenals and prevent new ones from emerging. Commission chairman Hans Blix writes in the foreword that “the climate for agreements on arms control and disarmament has actually deteriorated” in recent years and “nuclear-weapon states no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously.”

That is certainly true. Nuclear disarmament has all but disappeared from the arms control agenda, and the nuclear weapons states instead use proliferation to justify their own nuclear weapons which they are busy modernizing and tailoring against the new enemies. Proliferators, in turn, use the offensive military postures of the nuclear weapon states as an excuse to develop their own nuclear weapons.

The Commission’s recommendations are a wide-ranging list of constraints that, if implemented, will constrain all actors, existing nuclear weapon states as well as proliferators. But from the outset, the report is strongly at odds with the policies of several of the major nuclear weapon states, particularly the United States. The Commission is unlikely to have many friends in the current White House, which will almost certainly reject its call for a revitalization of the “thirteen practical steps” to disarmament adopted at the 2000 nuclear nonproliferation treaty review conference, steps that have specifically been rejected by the Bush administration.

Other recommendations include a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons, an idea the U.S. will almost certainly reject, as will many of the other nuclear powers. A no-first-use policy has been explicitly rejected by the United States and NATO, and Russia has abandoned its no-first-use policy. The report also calls for nuclear weapon states to abandon the practice of deploying nuclear forces in a triad of sea-, land- and air-based delivery platforms, something most of the nuclear powers insist is necessary. The Commission also wants nuclear weapon states to end deployment of nuclear weapons outside their own territories, an indirect call for a withdrawal of the remaining U.S. nuclear bombs from Europe.

With an eye to the new roles that existing nuclear weapon states are creating for their nuclear arsenals against proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, the Commission recommends that nuclear weapons states “refrain from developing nuclear weapons with new military capabilities or for new missions,” and they “must not adopt systems or doctrines that blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons or lower the nuclear threshold.”

Some of the Commission’s recommendations extend to indirect measures, such as a freeze on ballistic missile defense systems, a key priority for the United States and increasingly also other countries. The Commission also wants assurances that Iran will not be attacked or forced to change government in the conflict over the country’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Surprisingly, the report does not recommend that India and Pakistan join the non-proliferation treaty, although their absence is said to hurt the regime. Instead, both countries are urged to join a number of other initiatives such as the Comprehensive test Ban Treaty.

The report’s greatest weakness may be that it doesn’t sufficiently incorporate “the other side” of the debate and therefore runs the risk of being seen as a manifesto of arms control proposals from the past that “preach to the choir” rather than presenting new ideas on how to move the agenda forward.

On the other hand, the fact that the Bush administration’s policies – and those of several other nuclear powers i.e. Russia – are so at odds with a revitalized disarmament and nonproliferation agenda suggests how necessary the Commission’s recommendations are. The United States has considerable leverage on these issues, the report acknowledges, but all countries – not only the proliferators – must accept constraints on their own operations if the disarmament and nonproliferation agenda is to move forward. The alternative is indefinite insecurity for all.

Full WMD Commission report

Update (February 22, 2007): DTRA announces that Divine Strake has been canceled.

In a surprising move, the National Nuclear Security Administration last week withdrew (!) its Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for Divine Strake, a document issued in April that declared that a planned detonation of 700 tons of chemical explosives at the Nevada Test Site “would not result in the suspension or dispersion of radioactive materials or human exposure to radioactive materials.”

The question therefore is: Does this mean that Divine Strake could result in the suspension or dispersion of radioactive materials or human exposure to radioactive materials? And do other assurances about the test need to be reassessed?

The decision to withdraw the FONSI, NNSA says in a press release, which is not available on their web site, was made “to clarify and provide further information regarding background levels of radiation from global fallout in the vicinity of the Divine Strake Experiment.” That seems to be beaucratish for “sorry, we were wrong.”

The revised Environmental Assessment for Divine Strake, which has not been withdrawn but could potentially be revised, concluded earlier this month: “Results confirm there is no radiological contamination within the impact area of DIVINE STRAKE; therefore, no contamination could be resuspended into the environment.” The claim echoes the statement made last month by the Environmental Protection Specialist for Divine Strake, Linda Cohn: “There is literally no way this experiment can pick up radioactive contamination because it does not exist here.”

Yet since “here” is the Nevada Test Site, the home of well over 1,000 nuclear explosions in the past, many of which scattered radioactive nuclear fallout over adjacent states, many were surprised by NNSA’s radiation-does-not-exist-here-assurance. The FONSI withdrawal follows a lawsuit that claims the government failed to complete required environmental studies for Divine Strake. NNSA’s withdrawal of the FONSI acknowledges that atmospheric testing in the 1950s and 1960s “resulted in the dispersion of radioactive fallout throughout the northern hemisphere,” presumably also at the Nevada test Site. Time will tell whether NNSA ignored public health to get approval for Divine Strake.

Time will also test another of the government’s claims: That Divine Strake is not related to nuclear weapons missions at all. This claim is particularly problematic because the government in consecutive budget requests informed Congress that the experiment is intended to provide information that will permit warfighters to set the yield accurately when attacking underground facilities with nuclear weapons.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), NNSA’s contractor for Divine Strake, confirmed in writing to FAS on April 3, 2006, that “Yes, the event described [in the budget documents] is Divine Strake,” and even elaborated that “Better predictive tools will reduce the uncertainties involved with defeating very hard targets, and therefore reduce the need for higher yield weapons to overcome those uncertainties.”

When that confirmation became public, DTRA suddenly change its story, saying it had made a mistake and that Divine Strake was is not related to nuclear weapons missions at all. The nuclear reference “got left in” improperly, DTRA told Washington Post, and there is “no relationship between this test and any new nuclear weapons.” Moreover, DTRA later explained to me, even though the 700 tons of explosive exceeds [by far] the capability of any conventional weapon – but fits nicely with the low yield of the B61 nuclear bomb – the “explosive amount represents no specific weapon, nuclear or conventional. Warfighters can use the models for their planning. Their planning is for conventional, advance conventional and high energetics weapons.” But not for nuclear weapons?

Contrast that explanation with the statement made by DTRA’s director of the counter-WMD program, Douglas J. Bruder, on CNN in late April: “Particularly a charge of this size would be more related to a nuclear weapon.”

It is true that the Pentagon is developing non-nuclear weapons to destroy underground targets, but the claim about “no relationship” to nuclear weapons is suspect also because Los Alamos National Laboratory as recently as in 2004 conducted a high-speed computer simulation of a 10-kiloton nuclear earth-penetration weapon against the same tunnel that is used for Divine Strake. The 10 kiloton is considerably less than the 400-kiloton single-yield of the existing B61-11 earth-penetrating nuclear bomb currently in the stockpile, but it might be a yield that was envisioned for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP).

Yet Congress has repeatedly rejected the Administration’s request to fund work on the RNEP, partially due to concern that more useable nuclear weapons with lower yields for these kinds of earth-penetrating missions will make nuclear weapons more acceptable to use.

“Officials who say they are using this Divine Strake test in planning for new nuclear weapons seem to be ignoring Congressional intent about no nuclear weapons,” Congressman Jim Matheson said after a tour at the test site and a DTRA briefing in late April.

The political explosiveness of Divine Strake far exceeds its military power and the government appears to be walking a fine line to avoid a clash with Congress – so fine that it can’t seem to get its story straight.

Divine Strake Background

The week before last, Harold Brown and James Schlesinger argued in an op-ed in the Washington Post that the United States should arm some of the ballistic missiles on the Trident submarine with conventional warheads. Michael Gordon had a story in yesterday’s New York Times explaining that Rumsfeld fully supports the idea and hopes to get the system operational within two years. This is the implementation of the Global Strike plan that FAS’s Hans Kristensen has recently documented in detail.

The idea is that we might get some indication that something dire is about to happen but only have a moment to act because the vulnerability of the target will be fleeting, requiring that it be attacked within an hour. It is a challenge to try to think of any such situation. The Times article proffered a meeting of terrorists. Terrorists who we knew enough about to monitor their communications, but without knowing their locations (otherwise we could have attacked them earlier), terrorists who are going to get together for a meeting that will last an hour (if shorter, then even the Trident couldn’t get them), but no longer (because then cruise missiles have time to get to them). Readers should try their hand at thinking up other scenarios and ranking them for plausibility.

Our recent experience with intelligence should make us wary but intelligence that has to be digested in a half hour (the other half of the hour goes to the missile’s flight time) should be particularly suspect. One could even imagine the enemy spoofing the system, drawing a multi-million dollar missile onto an empty barn, or worse, the Chinese ambassador’s mistress’s apartment. Can we be confident, after half an hour’s research, that the target is not the Chinese ambassador’s mistress’s apartment?

Like many other proposals out of the Pentagon, this one is far too broad; it squanders resources on hypothetical threats because it fails to take into account the actual world we live in. We need this system because of some unnamed threat in some unnamed place. But where? North Korea? When are we likely to not have a military presence near North Korea that could launch air craft or cruise missiles? The same with Iran. If there were terrorists in Mongolia, this might make sense. So tell us that the system is for attacking targets in Mongolia. Then we can evaluate it honestly.

This proposal should (but probably won’t) raise some profound fundamental questions. The conventional warheads have to be mounted on Trident missiles because they are the only launch platform that is routinely forward deployed within the requisite half hour flight time. So the first question is: why? Why are Trident submarines—carrying missiles capable of flying thousands of miles in thirty minutes and armed with highly accurate nuclear warheads of hundred of kilotons yield—forward deployed at all times? If we ignore what the government says and just focus on the structure and deployment of our nuclear forces, their primary mission is clear: the US nuclear force is still deployed to execute a disarming nuclear first strike against Russia’s central nuclear forces. No other mission comes even remotely close to justifying the current force posture. This proposal would be a good thing if it resulted in a serious reevaluation of the role of the US nuclear forces and Trident in particular.

The implausibility of a target is really a minor problem; by itself that would mean this new system would be, at worst, simply a waste of money. A much graver concern is the dangers such a system might raise. If the Russians and the Chinese can detect Trident missiles launches (and both can to a limited degree), then, when the missile breaks the surface, how do these potential target nations know that the missile is a conventional missile headed toward North Korea and not a nuclear missile headed toward them? While thinking about this, consider that the Russians are not stupid, they can look at the US nuclear force posture and figure out what its primary mission is. Also, when considering nuclear weapons, a cautious worst-case analysis is called for. We should plan for a time when relations with China or Russia are strained. Does the “they’ll trust us” argument work the day after a US reconnaissance plane has been forced down? If the Chinese or Russians see a Trident launch, they will assume (a) that it is nuclear and (b) headed toward them until they get evidence that it is not.

Fortunately, I have the answer: de-nuclearize Trident. Don’t convert just one or two missiles per boat to conventional warheads but all of them. Follow the lead of the surface Navy and eliminate the nuclear/conventional ambiguity by removing all nuclear warheads from the Tridents and inviting in Russian and Chinese observers to confirm it. The Chinese do not have any intercontinental nuclear weapons on alert and if, as the US declares, we have no plans for a disarming first strike against Russia, there is absolutely no plausible justification for keeping Trident constantly forward deployed armed with nuclear warheads. A de-nuclearized Trident armed with conventional warheads would be a big improvement over what we have today.

On a recent trip to Tucson, Arizona I visited the Titan Missile Museum, something I recommend for all FAS blog readers who might be in the area. The tour was great. You get to visit the silo and the launch control area. They even have a decommissioned Titan missile in the silo. All very impressive.

I confess, I was a bit apprehensive about the lecture I was going to get as part of our orientation. I fully expected it to be a Cold War propaganda fest. But the comments were, in fact, quite good. There was one description of deterrence that I could have quibbled with a bit but overall I was pleased. Still, it is sometimes best to look to a child for clarity. One young visitor sent in a drawing that I think sums up the Titan missile perfectly, everything else is just details. I posted it here.

The Pentagon yesterday released its annual warning of the growing Chinese military threat. This year’s version continues the refrain from previous years and reiterates the conclusion from the recent Quadrennial Defense Review that China now is seen as the top large-scale military threat to the United States.

The signs of a Chinese threat are all there: An increasing defense budget that may equal half of ours in 20 years, new long-range mobile nuclear missiles that will be harder for us to destroy, an increase in the number of nuclear warheads that can hit the United States to perhaps as much as two percent of the warheads we can hit them with, new cruise missiles similar to the hundreds of cruise missile we have deployed in the region for decades, warships that may be able to disturb the unhindered operations of our carrier battle groups and surface action groups, a handful of nuclear-powered attack submarines that our 30 nuclear-powered attack submarines in the Pacific will have to sink too, more fighters and bombers that will be harder for the hundreds of advanced fighters we have deployed in the region for decades to shoot down.

This year’s Pentagon report dedicates more space than previous versions to discussing the big unknown: will China abandon its policy not to use nuclear weapons first? Of cause, there is “no evidence that this doctrine has actually changed” and China’s senior leadership assured Rumsfeld in 2005 that it “will not change,” the report states. Yet the attention this issue gets in the report suggests that the Pentagon suspects a change is underway. The circle of “military and civilian national security professionals” that discuss the value of the no-first-use policy “is broader than previously assessed,” the report hints.

Just imagine if China had a nuclear policy like the United States: a first-use nuclear doctrine with highly-accurate flexible nuclear forces on high alert, many of them forward deployed, capable of conducting a decapitating preemptive first strike. That would be highly destabilizing.

So let’s try not to get to that situation. Unfortunately, after having targeted China for 50 years, the Pentagon is reacting to China’s military modernization in the old-fashioned way: moving the majority of its nuclear ballistic missile submarines into the Pacific, increasing the number of attack submarines operating in the region, and forward-deploying bombers and cruise missiles to Guam. It has even built a whole new war plan, known as Operations Plan (OPLAN) 5077, according to Willliam Arkin, to defend Taiwan which includes options for attacks on the Chinese mainland, even the potential use of nuclear weapons.

Last time we got into this tit-for-tat game with a large military power it took 50 years, trillions of dollars, and several nuclear crises to get out. The Pentagon’s report on China’s military modernization should warn us that it is important that the White House and Congress take charge of U.S.-Chinese relations so we avoid a new Cold War in the Pacific.

See also: Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2006 | China’s Nuclear Submarine Cave

At first glance, who could complain about replacing current nuclear warheads with ones that are more reliable? After all, since we have them they should work. But the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program may do no good, may do much harm, and will cost a lot if carried forward.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) Program is, as one might guess from the name, intended to develop more reliable nuclear warheads to replace existing warheads. One of the most important Congressional supporters of the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program, Congressman David Hobson of Ohio, was recently quoted saying, “This [the RRW] is a way to redo the weapon capability that we have and maybe make them more reliable, make them better mission capable.”

There are a couple of problems with this statement. First, it implies that there is some problem with the reliability of the current stockpile. I was recently at a meeting held under the “Chatam Houes Rule” (that is, I can use what was said at the meeting but I cannot attribute it) to discuss the RRW. Among several of the participants, who had extensive knowledge of nuclear weapons’ design and the stockpile stewardship program, a debate arose about the reliability of the current arsenal. Some claimed that the current arsenal is 98% reliable while others challenged that number, arguing that the reliability is better than that. No one suggested the reliability was less. The fact is, the current arsenal is extremely reliable and there are no foreseeable problems that will change that assessment. (One should note that 98% “reliable” does not mean that 2% of the weapons will not go off, but that they might explode with a yield somewhat less than specified; so a 400 kT bomb that explodes with a yield of 300 kT is considered “unreliable.”)

It is possible that an RRW could be more reliable than current weapons. If the current arsenal is 98% reliable, then an RRW could, in theory, be 99% reliable. But 98% is a pretty high bar to vault and it is not at all clear that an RRW could be made more reliable than existing weapons. Moreover, there is no conceivable meaningful difference between the two cases. If some war plan depends on the difference between 98% and 99%, then we need a new war plan, not a new warhead. Also, the warheads sit atop missiles that are reckoned to be about 90% or so reliable, which swamps the unreliability of the warheads themselves. Indeed, given the finite number of weapons and tests that might be available even in theory, it will be difficult, from a statistical point view, to even measure the difference between 98% and 99%. In this case, the RRW is clearly a solution to a problem that we either do not have or don’t need to fix. It is highly unlikely that the RRW will be more reliable than the highly reliable current arsenal and certainly not meaningfully more reliable. There are two great dangers here: The first is that discussion about the “need” for a new “reliable” warhead will make people think that current warheads are not reliable when they are, making us do something uncalled for, or even reckless, to solve a non-existant problem. The second, ironically, is that after an RRW has been introduced a new group of decision-makers will realize the thing has never been tested and might begin calling for renewed testing.

It appears, however, that the main justification for the program is not the first “R” (increased reliability), but the second “R” in RRW (to replace existing warheads). Some who acknowledge that the current stockpile is adequately reliable nevertheless claim that maintaining the stockpile, and that level of reliability, will become increasingly expensive. An RRW might reduce those costs, but not necessarily. There are, as yet, no detailed cost estimates for the RRW Program so it is merely an assertion to say that the program will save any money.

Besides, the Departments of Defense and Energy are not going to stop the stockpile stewardship program for existing warheads while the RRW is being developed. There are several hints that the RRW will be deployed, not in place of existing warheads, but in parallel with existing programs. Even if the new warhead replaces old warheads in a one-to-one exchange, the old warhead program will remain in place until it has been completely replaced by the new warhead. There is some indication that the military users will want to keep the two types of warheads deployed in parallel for some time, a decade or more, to reassure themselves that the RRW holds up to its billing, before completing any replacement. The Replacement Warhead Program might eventually be cheaper than the current Stockpile Stewardship Program, but the two programs together can’t possibly be cheaper than Stockpile Stewardship alone. And costing less is not enough if “saving” that money requires a big up-front investment. As Richard Garwin has pointed out, we have to take into account the discounted value of future savings. It makes great sense to spend $1.00 today to save $1.10 tomorrow but it makes no sense to spend $1.00 today to save $1.10 thirty years from now.

The National Labs are energized by the RRW Program because it allows them to exercise their design skills. One of the stated objectives of the Administration is to have a responsive nuclear weapons “complex” and building a new warhead will test, and help maintain, that complex. Indeed, one way to look at the RRW program is to see the warhead as just a means to an end; the end is keeping a ready nuclear design and manufacturing capability. Last autumn I wrote a short article on the RRW in the FAS journal, the Public Interest Report. Logically, it had to be written in the form of, “If the RRW turns out to be X, then Y…” because it was not at all clear then what the RRW program really was. The program is still not entirely clear, but clearer. It seems that the RRW is grist for the mill of the nuclear weapons complex. The overarching objective is indefinite maintenance of a warm nuclear weapons manufacturing base. The Department of Energy, no matter how far into the future it looks, cannot envision an America without thousands of nuclear weapons.

The Arms Control Association has a good piece on the RRW.

The administration has a new plan: as it prepares for production of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) to replace most of the nuclear warheads in the operational stockpile, it will “accelerate” dismantlement of retired nuclear warheads to “assure other nations that we are not building up our stockpile.”

According to this plan, Deputy Secretary of Energy Clay Cell told the House Energy and Water Subcommittee last week, the DOE will “increase dismantlements planned for FY 07 by nearly 50% compared to FY 06,” and is “committed to increasing average annual warhead dismantlements at the Pantex Plant by 25%.”

Big percentages sound good, but here’s the problem: Since the DOE didn’t plan to dismantle very many warheads in 2007 anyway, increasing the rate by 50% won’t dismantle much either. As congressional and administration sources told the Washington Post, fewer than 100 warheads have been taken apart annually in recent years.

Under the new plan, assuming an increased annual dismantlement rate of 150 warheads, it will take the DOE over 28 years to dismantle the roughly 4,300 warheads it has pledged will be cut from the stockpile by 2012. To meet the deadline, DOE will have to increase the dismantlement rate to more than 700 warheads per year.

What does “accelerated dismantlement” look like? It looks like what we did back in the 1990s, when the United States scrapped some 11,000 nuclear warheads! Since then, the DOE’s priorities have changed from nuclear dismantlement to life-extension of the “enduring” nuclear stockpile. For the next decade, unless Congress or a new administration intervenes, DOE will be busy extending the life of the stockpile rather than dismantling it.

But since an official objective of the administration’s new plan is to “assure other nations,” why not tell them what the warhead numbers are? Why this Cold War nuclear secrecy? The numbers need to be kept secret, the nuclear custodians warn, because if we told other nations how many warheads we dismantle, they might be able to figure out the size of our stockpile, and that would be bad for national security. But how does the administration plan to assure other nations if they cannot be told? While we wait for the administration to figure that out, here is the stockpile number: today, roughly 9,960 warheads; in 2012, nearly 6,000 warheads. Reassured?

The Chinese nuclear stockpile appears to be only half as big as previously thought, according to a new overview published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Up to 130 warheads may be deployed out of a total stockpile of some 200 warheads. Several new weapon systems are under development which the Pentagon says could increase the arsenal in the future, but past US intelligence projections have proven highly inflated and inaccurate. The new overview will be followed by a more detailed report published by the Federation of American Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council this spring.

See also: Chinese Nuclear Submarine Cave Discovered

Our ace FAS researcher, Lucas Royland, has developed a simple calculator that allows prediction of when Iran will first have enough highly enriched uranium to build a simple gun-assembled nuclear bomb. We must emphasize that the calculator gives the best case (from the Iranian point of view, the worst case from the rest of the world’s point of view). In other words, the user enters, for example, the rate at which Iran can produce centrifuges. The calculator assumes those are used to best efficiency as produced. There are never any management errors, supply problems, or misallocation of resources, that is, the things that always slow down any real-world construction project. So, for the parameters entered, the calculator gives the “not before” date.

The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , announced on Tuesday that Iran has successfully enriched uranium to levels useable in a nuclear reactor. The calculator shows that the announcement is important but not quite as momentous as it might first appear. Certain events really are “milestones.” The day before the United States exploded the first nuclear bomb or the day before the Soviets launched Earth’s first artificial satellite, no one could be absolutely certain the feat was possible but the day after we knew it was possible. The Iranian announcement is not in this category.

The Iranians had built some centrifuges using plans and parts bought from Pakistan. The world knew they had some experience operating individual centrifuges. But no centrifuge can enrich uranium to reactor grade; the output from one centrifuge is passed on as the input to the next, and so forth through several layers in what is called a “cascade.” Optimizing a cascade is a complex business and the Iranians linked their 164 centrifuges together to study the problem. Using this small experimental cascade, the Iranians were able, they claim, to enrich some small quantity of uranium from a natural concentration of 0.7% U-235 to 3.5% U-235. This is an important accomplishment but not a Sputnik-like milestone. It is one step in a long engineering and production process that eventually will lead to the capability to produce significant quantities of bomb-grade uranium and, perhaps, the material itself if the Iranians chose to go that route.

The Arms Control Association has a great resource page on Iran. Anthony Cordesman and Khalid R. Al-Rodham released this week a long review of the Iranian nuclear program.