Fifty years ago on January 30^th, “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb,” a seminal political-military satire and dark comedic film premiered. Based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert, the film gave us some of the most outrageously humorous and simultaneously satirical dialog in the history of the silver screen. For example, Peter Sellers as the President of the United States, “Gentleman, you cannot fight in here. This is the War Room.” Director/producer Stanley Kubrick produced a masterpiece that not only entertained viewers but turned out to be incredibly predictive about U.S.-Soviet Cold War nuclear policies, strategies, and outcomes.

The U.S. Air Force refused to cooperate with Kubrick and his production company because they felt that the premise of an accidental nuclear war being launched by a U.S. general wasn’t credible. In fact, on December 9, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur requested authorization to use atomic bombs against 26 targets in China after the People’s Liberation Army entered the Korean War. The Soviet Union had tested their first A-bomb the year before, so it is certainly possible that MacArthur’s use of such weapons could have triggered a nuclear conflict. In terms of nuclear accidents or “broken arrows” as the U.S. military refers to such events, there have been dozens of incidents including a January 17, 1966 Air Force crash involving nuclear warheads that contaminated thousands of acres in Palomares, Spain (although thankfully fail-safe switches on the damaged atomic bombs prevented any nuclear explosions). A computer generated false alert (one of countless false warnings over the years), on November 9, 1979 almost triggered nuclear Armageddon when President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was informed at 3 a.m. that 2,200 Soviet missiles were within minutes of impacting on the U.S. mainland. It turned out to be a training exercise loaded inadvertently into SAC’s early warning computer system.

Actor George C. Scott played a Strategic Air Command (SAC) general named Buck Turgidson not unlike real life Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer. In 1969, Moorer proposed salvaging the war by targeting North Vietnam with two nuclear bombs – a proposal allegedly lobbied for by President Nixon’s Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger. After it is discovered that Sterling Hayden’s character, General Jack D. Ripper has on his own authority (a credible possibility until coded locks were installed on most U.S. nuclear weapons later in the 1960s and on submarine-launched nuclear missiles in the late 1990s)¹ ordered an all-out nuclear attack on Russia by his squadrons of B-52 bombers (an aircraft the United States still relies on after sixty years of deployment), General Turgidson pleads with Peter Sellers’ character President Merkin Muffley to consider, “…if on the other hand, we were to immediately launch an all-out and coordinated (nuclear) attack on all their airfields and missile bases, we’d stand a damn good chance of catching them with their pants down…I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-20 million (Americans) killed, tops, depending on the breaks.” Ironically nuclear war advocates Colin Gray and Keith Payne literally quoted Turgidson’s casualty figures verbatim when in 1980 they advised then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that America could fight and win such a war against the Soviet Union.²

But Peter Sellers, who incredibly played three roles in the film, excelled as the title character Dr. Strangelove, an amalgam of NASA’s Werner von Braun, who built Nazi V-2 rockets by turning his back when SS soldiers worked thousands of Jewish conscripts to death and was part of Operation Paperclip, a group of German scientists amnestied by the United States (and the Soviet Union handpicked its own Nazi brainpower) after the war to help build Cold War weapons, Edward Teller, who worked on the hydrogen bomb, helped found Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was an Atoms for Peace enthusiast and advocated for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI- the “Star Wars” missile shield), and Herman Kahn, who worked at RAND, then founded the Hudson Institute, and wrote the seminal “thinking about the unthinkable” book On Thermonuclear War, published in 1960.

Deep in the bowels of the War Room, Dr. Strangelove responded to the Russian ambassador’s fearful notification that even if only one of the U.S. nuclear bombs struck Russia, the result would be the triggering of a doomsday machine. Sellers’ character admonished the ambassador, “But the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret. Why didn’t you tell the world, aye?” Coincidentally again, truth followed fiction according to David Hoffman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 work The Dead Hand, as in November 1984, the Soviets did indeed construct a partially automated retaliatory nuclear strike system called Perimetr and tested it. Stranger still, Colonel Valery Yarynich of the Soviet Union’s Strategic Rocket Forces pointed out to his superiors that it was irrational and inconsistent with deterrence theory for them to go out of their way to hide Perimetr’s existence from U.S. leaders. This occurred during the height of the Cold War when the United States possessed 11,000 strategic nuclear warheads to the Soviet’s 9,900. In total, including tactical and intermediate-range bombs, the United States led 20,924 to 19,774 warheads.

When General Turgidson expressed skepticism that the Russians had the brains to build such a doomsday machine, Dr. Strangelove strongly disagreed, noting that such a system was entirely feasible. “The technology required is even within the means of the smallest nuclear power. It requires only the will to do so….It is remarkably simple to [build]. When you merely wish to bury bombs, there’s no limit to the size. After that they are connected to a gigantic complex of computers.” This echoed the real life February 1955 radio broadcast of German Nobel Laureate Otto Hahn, who first split the uranium atom in the late 1930s. Hahn warned that the detonation of as few as ten cobalt bombs, each the size of a naval vessel, would cause all mankind to perish. In the early 1980s, astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists³ examined and subsequently built-on analyses of the last few decades via the TTAPS study. They concluded that as few as 100-200 nuclear warheads exploding within the span of a few hours could credibly trigger a nuclear winter, plunging temperatures dramatically in the northern hemisphere as tremendous nuclear firestorms block the sun’s rays, leading to wholesale starvation, exposure, and the radiation-borne deaths of billions of people worldwide.⁴ 

Dr. Strangelove was originally scheduled for its first screening on Friday, November 22, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy earlier that day caused the producers to delay the film’s release date by several weeks. Time was needed to not only heal the nation’s gaping wound but to edit the film to remove some objectionable material relating to the murder of the president. Coincidental references by the hydrogen bomb-riding Slim Pickens character Major T.J. “King” Kong that the survival kits carried by each bomber crewman could help provide them a pretty good time in Dallas was redubbed to “Vegas.” A concluding sequence of a free-for-all pie fight in the War Room was edited out for stylistic reasons and also removed George C. Scott’s objectionable dialogue that, “Our commander-in-chief has been struck down in the prime of his life.” Not so coincidentally, perhaps, JFK’s murder and Nikita Khrushchev’s Politburo ouster in 1964 (the year of the film’s actual release), ended a post-Cuban Missile Crisis-Almost Armageddon (October 1962) apotheosis by both leaders to prevent another nuclear crisis. They cooperated in an earnest effort to prevent another visit to the brink of extinction by working to end the Cold War and reverse the nuclear arms race in favor of peaceful coexistence. The results of their labors cannot be underestimated—the Hot Line Agreement and the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

Today in 2014, “Dr. Strangelove,” along with other antiwar films like “Fail Safe,” “The Sum of All Fears,” “On the Beach,” “War Games,” and “Olympus Has Fallen,” remind us that all of humanity must acknowledge that nuclear war is not a blast from the past or an obsolete fear from a remote period in history. It is a real life current and future threat to our global civilization – indeed to our species’ continued existence on this planet.

But has anyone studied the actual possibilities of a nuclear Armageddon?  Aside from Dr. Strangelove’s analysis discussing a study on nuclear war made by “the Bland Corporation” (which is obviously a reference to the real-life Rand Corporation), the answer is a definitive “yes.” According to Ike Jeane’s 1996 book Forecast and Solution: Grappling with the Nuclear, the risks of large-scale nuclear war average about 1-2 percent per year, down from a high of 2-3 percent annually during the Cold War (1945-1991). But Dr. Martin Hellman of Stanford and other analysts believe that as more decades pass since the only recorded use of nuclear weapons in combat (Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945), the probability may increase to ten percent over the duration of this century.⁵ 

While President Barack Obama has called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, so too have past American leaders as diverse politically as Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Ralph Nader. Meanwhile thousands of nuclear warheads – 90-plus percent in the hands of America and Russia – still exist in global arsenals. Both countries continue to spend tens of billions of dollars annually to update, improve, and modernize their nuclear forces. For example, U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) have increased dramatically in accuracy from a 12 percent chance of destroying a hardened Russian missile silo to 90-98 percent effectiveness; thus giving these weapons a highly effective “kill” probability and putting pressure on Russia to launch its silo-based ballistic missiles on warning of attack. While U.S. missile “defenses” may soon include “Rods from God,” 20-30 foot long, two-foot wide tungsten cylinders fired from U.S. Air Force space-based assets, the Russians have also upgraded their aging Cold War arsenal by building dozens of new Topol-M ICBMs and Bulava SLBMs.

Substantial progress in reducing this Armageddon threat cannot be accomplished until decades-long objections by overly conservative members of Congress, the Russian Duma and both nations’ military leadership are lifted. Such multilateral, verifiable (new technologies make this relatively easy to achieve), measures include a global comprehensive nuclear test ban (laboratory sub-critical nuclear tests not excluded), and the standing down from heightened alert levels of not only Russian and American strategic and tactical nuclear weapons but those of China, France, Britain, Israel, Pakistan and India. This would transition all sides’ dangerous nuclear weapons from the physical capability of being fired in 15 minutes or less to 72 hours or longer—don’t we at least deserve three days to think about it before we destroy the world? We also need an accelerated global zero nuclear reduction agreement as well as an essential, little-mentioned but critically important move that the mainstream corporate media has rarely granted its stamp of legitimacy. This would be a unanimous United Nations demand as voiced by leaders in America and Russia, for the phase-out of all nuclear power plants, research as well as production facilities (with the exception of a handful of super-guarded medical radioisotope manufacturing and storage facilities) in the next 10-15 years.

Eliminating not just existing stocks of nuclear weapons, but also all of the 400 global nuclear power facilities is the trump card in the deck of human long-term survival. There are numerous issues including: proliferation, nuclear accidents, the long-term sequestration of tremendous amounts of deadly nuclear wastes, the economic non-competitiveness of nuclear energy, and the realization that nuclear plants are not a viable, safe or reasonable solution to global warming especially in the long term (since plutonium-239 has a half-life of an amazing duration of more than 20,000 years)! Dr. Strangelove’s circular slide rule-assisted calculation requiring humanity to survive the war by remaining in deep underground mineshaft spaces for merely a century was ergo a definite miscalculation—sorry Herr Merkwurdichliebe. ⁶ 

Five decades later, the hauntingly humorous end title lyrics and music of “Dr. Strangelove,” accompanied by actual images of awesome Cold War-era nuclear tests, serves as a read-between-the-lines warning to the human race: “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.” Nuclear weapons and nuclear power – indistinguishable in terms of the deadly threat to our species – must be eliminated now before it is too late. A penultimate but overwhelmingly appropriate edit of George C. Scott’s last line in the film is especially relevant here. “We must not allow a nuclear Armageddon!”

Additional Sources

Walter J. Boyne, Beyond the Wild Blue: A History of the U.S. Air Force, 1947- 1997, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 394.

Columbia Pictures Corporation-Sony Pictures, 40th Anniversary Edition: Dr. Strangelove.  Documentary- “Inside Dr. Strangelove,” 2004.

Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume 2. Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 749-751.

The Defense Monitor (Center for Defense Information), Vol. 15, No. 7, “Accidental Nuclear War: A Rising Risk?” by Michelle Flournoy, 1986.

The Defense Monitor (Center for Defense Information), Vol. 36, No. 3, “Primed and Ready- Special Report:  Nuclear Issues,” by Bruce G. Blair, May/June 2009.

Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic:  The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, pp. 242-247; 261-263.

Premiere (Magazine), “The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All-Time,” April 2004, p. 58.

Carl Sagan, “The Case Against SDI,” Discover, September 1985, pp. 66-75.

H. Eric Semler, et al., The Language of Nuclear War: An Intelligent Citizen’s Dictionary. New York:  Harper & Row Publishers, 1987, p. 44.

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States. New York: Gallery Books-Simon & Schuster, 2012, pp. 272, 362, 540-42.

John Tierman, editor, Empty Promise: The Growing Case Against Star Wars. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1986, pp. 2-3.

Louis Weber, editor, Movie Trivia Mania. Beekman House-Crown Publishers, Inc., 1984   p. 21.

Jeffrey W. Mason is a nuclear weapons, arms control, outer space, and First Contact scholar, published author and scriptwriter for acclaimed PBS-TV documentaries who possesses two MA degrees—one in international security. He has worked for the Center for Defense Information (11 years) where he helped produce award-winning PBS-TV documentaries on child soldiers, the Hiroshima bombing, and “The Nuclear Threat at Home.” He worked for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the State Department, Professionals’ Coalition for Nuclear Arms Control, Congressional Research Service, Amnesty International, Clean Water Action, and the International Studies Association. 

The concept of strategic stability emerged during the Cold War, but today it is still unclear what the term exactly means and how its different interpretations influence strategic decisions. After the late 1950s, the Cold War superpowers based many of their arguments and decisions on their own understanding of strategic stability¹ and it still seems to be a driving factor in the arms control negotiations of today. However, in absence of a common understanding of strategic stability, using this argument to explain certain decisions or threat perceptions linked to the different aspects of nuclear policy tend to create more confusion than clarity.

In the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) report,² the Obama administration used the term strategic stability as a central concept of U.S. nuclear policy vis-à-vis Russia and China. Altogether it appeared 29 times in the report, in reference to issues mostly related to nuclear weapons capabilities. In the U.S.-Russian bilateral relationship, strategic stability was associated with continued dialogue between the two states to further reduce U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenals, to limit the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategies, and to enhance transparency and confidence-building measures. At the same time, the United States pledged to sustain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear arsenal by modernizing its nuclear forces, retaining the triad, and “hedging against potential technical problems or vulnerabilities.”

On the other hand, Russia seems to use the term strategic stability in a broader context, claiming that the question of ballistic missile defense, conventional prompt global strike, and the militarization of outer space all affect strategic stability between Moscow and Washington. U.S. modernization efforts in these areas are seen as attempts to undermine the survivability of the Russian nuclear arsenal and steps to gain strategic advantage over Russia. Therefore, Moscow has been repeatedly arguing that any future arms control agreement should address all factors which affect strategic stability.³

Although these are the issues which Russia explicitly mentions in reference to strategic stability, there is another “hidden” issue which might also have a counterproductive impact on long term stability because of its potential to undermine strategic parity (which seems to be the basis of Russian interpretation of strategic stability).⁴ This issue is the non-deployed nuclear arsenal of the United States or the so-called “hedge.”

During the Cold War, both superpowers tried to deploy the majority of their nuclear weapons inventories. Reserve nuclear forces were small as a result of the continuous development and production of new nuclear weapons, which guaranteed the rapid exchange of the entire stockpile in a few years. The United States started to create a permanent reserve or hedge force in the early 1990s. The role of the hedge was twofold: first, to guarantee an up-build capability in case of a reemerging confrontation with Russia, and second, a technical insurance to secure against the potential failure of a warhead type or a delivery system. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union, during the first years of the 1990s, the United States was skeptical about the democratic transition of the previous Eastern Block and the commitment of the Russian Federation to arms control measures in general. Therefore, the Clinton administration’s 1994 NPR officially codified – for the first time – the concept of a hedge force against the uncertainties and the potential risks of the security environment.⁵ This concept gradually lost importance as the number of deployed strategic and non-strategic nuclear weapons kept shrinking on both sides and relations improved between Washington and Moscow. By the end of the 1990s, the main rationale for upholding the hedge force shifted towards the necessity of maintaining a back-up against technical failures. Although the nuclear arsenal was aging, a moratorium was declared on nuclear weapons testing, and several production facilities were closed. Therefore, it seemed imperative to retain fully functional nuclear warheads in reserve as an insurance policy.⁶

While the Clinton administration’s NPR was not too explicit about what the hedge really was, both the Bush and the Obama administrations made the specific role of the hedge clearer. Although technical considerations remained important, the Bush administration’s 2001 NPR refocused U.S. hedging policy on safeguarding against geopolitical surprises. The administration tried to abandon Cold War “threat-based” force planning and implemented a “capabilities-based” force structure which was no longer focused on Russia as an imminent threat but broadened planning against a wider range of adversaries and contingencies: to assure allies, deter aggressors, dissuade competitors and defeat enemies.⁷ This shift in planning meant that the force structure was designed for a post-Cold War environment with a more cooperative Russia. Therefore, the primary goal of the hedge was to provide guarantees in case this environment changed and U.S.-Russian relations significantly deteriorated.

Regardless of the main focus of the acting administration, the hedge has always served two different roles which belong to two separate institutions: the military considers the hedge a responsive force against the uncertainties of the international geopolitical environment, while the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) views the hedge as a repository to safeguard the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal. These two institutions advise the administration on the required size of the hedge. Since the end of the Cold War, both the United States and Russia considerably reduced their deployed nuclear warheads, but Washington retained many of these weapons in the hedge. By now there are more non-deployed nuclear weapons than deployed nuclear weapons in its military stockpile.

According to the Federation of American Scientists,⁸ the United States has a military stockpile of 4,650 nuclear weapons, of which roughly 1,900 strategic nuclear weapons are deployed (this includes bomber weapons on bomber bases as deployed) and another approximately 200 non-strategic nuclear weapons are deployed in Europe. Altogether this leaves around 2,500 non-deployed nuclear weapons in reserve – approximately 2,200 strategic and 300 non-strategic.⁹ This hedge force¹⁰  provides the United States with a capability to increase its deployed nuclear arsenal to more than 4000 nuclear weapons within three years.¹¹ In the long run, this capability might feed into Russian paranoia over anything that can potentially undermine strategic parity and it could become a serious roadblock on the way toward further reductions in deployed strategic as well as non-strategic nuclear arsenals.

The Obama administration has already indicated in the 2010 NPR that it is considering reductions in the nuclear hedge. According to the document, the “non-deployed stockpile currently includes more warheads than required” and the “implementation of the Stockpile Stewardship Program and the nuclear infrastructure investments” could set the ground for “major reductions” in the hedge. However, in parallel to these significant reductions, the United States “will retain the ability to ‘upload’ some nuclear warheads as a technical hedge against any future problems with U.S. delivery systems or warheads, or as a result of a fundamental deterioration of the security environment.” In line with the 2010 NPR, the 2013 Presidential Employment Guidance also envisions reductions in the deployed strategic nuclear arsenal and reaffirms the intention to reduce the hedge as well. The Pentagon report on the guidance¹² discusses an “alternative approach to hedging” which would allow the United States to provide the necessary back-up capabilities “with fewer nuclear weapons.” This alternative approach puts the main emphasis on the technical role of the hedge, claiming that “a non-deployed hedge that is sized and ready to address these technical risks will also provide the United States the capability to upload additional weapons in response to geopolitical developments.” According to Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, this might imply that the hedge will no longer contain two categories of warheads – as there will be enough reserve warheads to protect against technical failures and potential geopolitical challenges.¹³ However, at this point it is still unclear if (and when) this new approach will lead to actual force reductions in the non-deployed nuclear arsenal.

In the meantime, the United States could achieve several benefits by reducing the hedge. First, reducing the number of warheads (which require constant maintenance and periodic life extension) could save a few hundred million dollars in the federal budget. Second, it could send a positive signal to Russia about U.S. long-term intentions. In his 2013 Berlin address, President Obama indicated that his administration would seek “negotiated cuts with Russia” to reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons below the ceilings of the New START Treaty.¹⁴ In terms of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, Moscow has already met the limits of the Treaty and seems to be reluctant to negotiate any further cuts until the 2018 New START implementation deadline or until the United States also meets the Treaty limits¹⁵ (which – in light of the current trends – is probably not going to happen earlier than 2018). In addition, the deeper the two sides reduce their deployed strategic nuclear arsenals, the harder Russia tries to press the United States to include all other issues which affect strategic stability (especially ballistic missile defense). The United States has tried to alleviate Russian concerns over missile defense by offering some cooperative and transparency measures but Moscow insists that a legally binding treaty is necessary, which would put serious limits on the deployment of the system (a condition that is unacceptable to the United States Congress at the moment). Therefore, the future of further reductions seems to be blocked by disagreements over missile defense. But the proposed reduction of the hedge could signal U.S. willingness to reduce its strategic advantage against Russia.

Despite the potential benefits, U.S. government documents¹⁶ have been setting up a number of preconditions for reducing the size of the hedge. Beyond “geopolitical stability,” the two most important preconditions are the establishment of a responsive infrastructure by constructing new warhead production facilities and the successful completion of the warhead modernization programs. The Department of Energy’s FY 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP) proposes a so-called 3+2 warhead plan that would create three interoperable warheads for ballistic missiles and two for long-range bombers.¹⁷ The transition to interoperable warheads could, according to the plan, permit a reduction of the number of warheads in the hedge. In light of the current budget constraints, it is still unclear if the program will start as planned and even if completed according to schedule, the gradual reduction of the technical hedge would not begin until the mid-2030s. Similar challenges will arise if the administration wishes to link the reduction of the hedge to the construction of new warhead production facilities – some of which have already been delayed due to budget considerations, and the exact dates and technical details of their future completion are still unclear.

The preconditions would mean that significant reductions in the hedge¹⁸  are unlikely to materialize for at least another 15 years. Meanwhile, the deployed arsenal faces two scenarios in the coming decades: the number of warheads and delivery platforms could keep shrinking or arms control negotiations might fail to produce further reductions as a result of strategic inequalities (partly caused by the huge U.S. non-deployed arsenal). Under the first scenario, keeping the hedge in its current size would be illogical because a smaller deployed arsenal would require fewer replacement warheads¹⁹ in case of technical failures, and because fewer delivery platforms would require fewer up-load warheads in case of geopolitical surprises. Maintaining the current non-deployed arsenal would not make any more sense under the second scenario either. If future arms control negotiations get stuck based on arguments over strategic parity, maintaining a large hedge force will be part of the problem, not a solution. Therefore, insisting on the “modernization precondition” and keeping the current hedge for another 15 years would not bring any benefits for the United States.

On the other hand, President Obama could use his executive power to start gradual reductions in the hedge. Although opponents in Congress have been trying to limit his flexibility in future nuclear reductions (which could happen in a non-treaty framework), current legislative language does not explicitly limit cuts in the non-deployed nuclear arsenal. After the successful vote on the New START Treaty, the Senate adopted a resolution on the treaty ratification which declares that “further arms reduction agreements obligating the United States to reduce or limit the Armed Forces or armaments of the United States in any militarily significant manner may be made only pursuant to the treaty-making power of the President.”²⁰ However, if gradual cuts in the hedge would not be part of any “further arms reduction agreement” but instead implemented unilaterally, it would not be subject to a new legally binding treaty (and the necessary Senate approval which comes with it). Similarly, the FY2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was adopted in December 2013, does not use explicit language against unilateral reductions in the hedge.²¹ The NDAA only talks about preconditions to further nuclear arms reductions with Russia below the New START Treaty levels and it does not propose any limitations on cutting the non-deployed arsenal. In fact, the NDAA encourages taking into account “the full range of nuclear weapons capabilities,” especially the non-strategic arsenals – and this is exactly where reducing the United States hedge force could send a positive message and prove beneficial.

The 2013 Presidential Employment Guidance appears to move towards an alternative approach to hedging. This new strategy implies less reliance on non-deployed nuclear weapons which is a promising first step towards their reduction. However, the FY 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan links this reduction to the successful completion of the ongoing nuclear modernization programs, anticipating that the number of warheads in the hedge force will not change significantly in the near future. Its fate will mainly depend on congressional budget fights.

This might send a bad signal to Russia, where U.S. missile defense developments and its alleged impact on strategic stability are already a primary source of concern to the Kremlin. As a result of aging technologies and necessary retirements, Russian nuclear forces have been constantly decreasing, and despite all modernization efforts,[ref]Russian has an ongoing modernization program, in the framework of which it has already begun to build a new heavy ICBM and a multiple-warhead Bulava SLBM.[/ref] it is expected that by the early 2020s the ICBM arsenal will shrink to 220 missiles.²² Russia already deploys 40 percent less strategic delivery systems than the United States and tries to keep the balance of deployed weapons by higher warhead loadings. This does not give Russia the ability to significantly increase the deployed number of warheads – not just because of the lower number of delivery vehicles but also because of the lack of reserve warheads comparable in number to the United States hedge force. In this regard there is an important asymmetry between Russia and the United States – while Washington keeps a hedge for technical and geopolitical challenges, Moscow maintains an active production infrastructure, which – if necessary – enables the production of hundreds of new weapons every year. It definitely has its implications for the long term (10-15 years) status of strategic parity, but certainly less impact on short term prospects.

In the meantime, the United States loads only 4-5 warheads on its SLBMs (instead of their maximum capacity of 8 warheads) and keeps downloading all of its ICBMs to a single warhead configuration.²³ Taken into account the upload potential of the delivery vehicles and the number of warheads in the hedge force, in case of a dramatic deterioration of the international security environment the United States could increase its strategic nuclear arsenal to above 4000 deployed warheads in about three years.

Whether one uses a narrow or a broader interpretation of strategic stability, these tendencies definitely work against the mere logic of strategic parity and might have a negative effect on the chances of further bilateral reductions as well. Cutting the hedge unilaterally would definitely upset Congress and it could endanger other foreign policy priorities of the United States (such as the CTBT ratification or negotiations with Iran), but it would still be worth the effort as it could also indicate good faith and contribute to the establishment of a more favorable geopolitical environment. It could signal President Obama’s serious commitment to further disarmament, send a positive message to Russian military planners and ease some of their paranoia about U.S. force structure trends.

Anna Péczeli is a Fulbright Scholar and Nuclear Research Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Additionally, Péczeli is an adjunct fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, where she works on nuclear arms control. Péczeli earned a master’s degree in international relations from Corvinus University of Budapest, and is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, which focuses on the Obama administration’s nuclear strategy.

Be careful of self-fulfilling prophecies about the intentions for Iran’s nuclear program. Often, Western analysts view this program through the lens of realist political science theory such that Iranian leaders seek nuclear weapons to counteract threats made to overthrow their regime or to exert dominance in the Middle East. To lend support to the former argument, Iranian leaders can point to certain political leaders in the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, or other governments that desire, if not actively pursue, the downfall of the Islamic Republic of Iran. To back up the latter rationale for nuclear weapons, Iran has a strong case to make to become the dominant regional political power: it has the largest population of any of its neighbors, has a well-educated and relatively technically advanced country, and can shut off the vital flow of oil and gas from the Strait of Hormuz. If Iran did block the Strait, its leaders could view nuclear weapons as a means to protect Iran against attack from powers seeking to reopen the Strait. (Probably the best deterrent from shutting the Strait is that Iran would harm itself economically as well as others. But if Iran was subject to crippling sanctions on its oil and gas exports, it might feel compelled to shut down the Strait knowing that it is already suffering economically.) These counteracting external threats and exerting political power arguments provide support for the realist model of Iran’s desire for nuclear bombs.

But viewed through another lens, one can forecast continual hedging by Iran to have a latent nuclear weapons capability, but still keeping barriers to proliferation in place such as inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In particular, Iranian leaders have arguably gained considerable political leverage over neighbors by just having a latent capability and have maintained some legitimacy for their nuclear program by remaining part of the IAEA’s safeguards system.

If Iran crosses the threshold to make its own nuclear weapons, it could stimulate neighbors to build or acquire their own nuclear weapons. For example, Saudi leaders have dropped several hints recently that they will not stand idly by as Iran develops nuclear weapons. The speculation is that Saudi Arabia could call on Pakistan to transfer some nuclear weapons or even help Saudi Arabia develop the infrastructure to eventually make its own fissile material for such weapons. Pakistan is the alleged potential supplier state because of stories that Saudi Arabia had helped finance Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and thus, Islamabad owes Riyadh for this assistance. Moreover, Pakistan remains outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore would not have the treaty constraint as a brake on nuclear weapons transfer. Furthermore, one could imagine a possible nuclear cascade involving the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt, all states that are developing or considering developing nuclear power programs. This proliferation chain reaction would likely then undermine Iran’s security and make the Middle East further prone to potential nuclear weapons use.

I would propose for the West to act optimistically and trust but verify Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes. The interim deal that was recently reached between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Russia, France, China, United Kingdom, and the European Union) is encouraging in that it places a temporary halt on some Iranian activities such as construction of the 40 MW reactor at Arak, the further enrichment of uranium to 20 percent uranium-235 (which is about 70 percent of the work needed to reach the weapons-grade level of 90 percent uranium-235), and continued expansion of the enrichment facilities. Iran also has become more open to the IAEA’s inspections. But these are measures that can be readily reversed if the next deal cannot be negotiated within the next several months. Iran is taking these actions in order to get relief from some economic sanctions.

Without getting into the complexities of the U.S. and Iranian domestic politics as well as international political considerations, I want to outline in the remaining part of this president’s message a research agenda for engineers and scientists. I offer FAS as a platform for these technical experts to publish their analyses and communicate their findings. Specifically, FAS will create a network of experts to assess the Iranian nuclear issues, publish their work on FAS.org, and convene roundtables and briefings for executive and legislative branch officials.

Let’s look at the rich research agenda, which is intended to provide Iran with access to a suite of peaceful nuclear activities while still putting limits on the latent weapons capacity of the peaceful program. By doing so, we can engender trust with Iranians, but this will hinge on adequate means to detect breakout into a nuclear weapons program.

First, consider the scale of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. It is still relatively small, only about a tenth of the capacity needed to make enough low enriched uranium for even the one commercial nuclear plant at Bushehr. Russia has a contract with Iran for ten years of fuel supply to Bushehr. If both sides can extend that agreement over the 40 or more years of the life of the plant, then Iran would not have the rationale for a large enrichment capacity based on that one nuclear plant. However, Iran has plans for a major expansion of nuclear power. Would it be cost effective for Iran to enrich its own uranium for these power plants? The short answer is no, but because of Iranian concerns about being shut out of the international enrichment market and because of Iranian pride in having achieved even a modestly sized enrichment capacity, Iranian leaders will not give up enrichment. I would suggest that a research task for technical experts is to work with Iran to develop effective multi-layer assurances for nuclear fuel. Another task is to assess what capacity of enrichment is appropriate for the existing and under construction research and isotope production reactors or for smaller power reactors. These reactors require far less enrichment capacity than a large nuclear power plant. A first order estimate is that Iran already has the right amount of enrichment capacity to fuel the current and planned for research reactors. But nuclear engineers and physicists can and should perform more detailed calculations.

One reactor under construction has posed a vexing challenge; this is the 40 MW reactor being built at Arak. The concern is that Iran has planned to use heavy water as the moderator and natural uranium as the fuel for this reactor. (Heavy water is composed of deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen with a proton and neutron in its nucleus, rather than the more abundant “normal” hydrogen, with a proton in its nucleus, which composes the hydrogen atoms in “light” or ordinary water.) A heavy water reactor can produce more plutonium per unit of power than a light water reactor because there are more neutrons available during reactor operations to be absorbed by uranium-238 to produce plutonium-239, a fissile material. The research task is to develop reactor core designs that either use light water or use heavy water with enriched uranium. The light water reactor would have to use enriched uranium in order to operate. A heavy water reactor could also make use of enriched uranium in order to reduce the available neutrons. Another consideration for nuclear engineers who are researching how to reduce the proliferation potential of this reactor is to determine how to lower the power rating, while still providing enough power for Iran to carry out necessary isotope production services and scientific research with the reactor. The 40 MW thermal power rating implies that if operated at near full power for a year, this reactor can make one to two bombs’ worth of plutonium annually. Another research problem is to design the reactor so that it is very difficult to use in an operational mode to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Safeguards and monitoring are essential mechanisms to forestall such production but might not be adequate. Here again, research into proliferation-resistant reactor designs would shed light on this problem.

Regarding isotope production, further research and development would be useful to figure out if non-reactor alternative technologies such as particle accelerators can produce the needed isotopes at a reasonable cost. Derek Updegraff and Pierce Corden of the American Association of the Advanced of Science have been investigating alternative production methods. Science progresses faster when additional researchers investigate similar issues. Thus, this research task could bear considerable fruit if teams can develop cost effective non-reactor means to produce medical and other industrial isotopes in bulk (or whatever quantity is required). If such development is successful, Iran and other countries could retire isotope production reactors that could pose latent proliferation concerns.

Finally, I will underscore perhaps the biggest research challenge: how to ensure that the Iranian nuclear program is adequately safeguarded and monitored. One of the next important steps for Iran is to apply a more rigorous safeguards system called the Additional Protocol and for a period of time, perhaps from five to ten years, apply inspection measures that go beyond the requirements of the Additional Protocol in order to instill confidence in the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program. Dozens of states have ratified the Additional Protocol, which requires the IAEA to assess whether there are any undeclared nuclear material and facilities in the country being inspected. The Additional Protocol was formed in response to the finding in 1991 in Iraq that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear technicians were getting close to producing fissile material for nuclear weapons, despite the fact that Iraq was subject to regular IAEA inspections of its declared nuclear material and facilities. The undeclared facilities were often physically near declared facilities. There are concerns that given the large land area of Iran, clandestine nuclear facilities might go unnoticed by the IAEA or other means of detection and thus pose a significant risk for proliferation. The research task is to find out if there are effective means to find such clandestine facilities and to provide enough warning before Iran would be able to make enough fissile material and form it into bombs.

A key consideration of any part of this research agenda is how to cooperate with Iranian counterparts. For this plan to be acceptable and achievable, Iranian engineers, scientists, and leaders must own these concepts and believe that the plan supports their objectives to have a legitimate nuclear program that can generate electricity, produce isotopes for medical and industrial purposes, and provide other peaceful benefits including scientific research. Thus, we will need to leverage earlier and ongoing outreach to Iran by organizations such as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advance of Science, and the Richard M. Lounsbery Foundation. Future workshops with Iranian counterparts are essential and companion studies by these counterparts would further advance the cause of legitimizing the Iranian nuclear program.

Several scientists and other technically trained experts in the United States have already been assessing aspects of this agenda as I indicated above with the mention of Updegraff and Corden’s research. Also, without meaning to slight anyone I may not know of or forget to mention, I would call out David Albright and his team at the Institute for Science and International Security, Richard Garwin of IBM, Frank von Hippel and colleagues at Princeton University, and Scott Kemp of MIT. This group is doing insightful work, but I believe that getting more engineers and scientists involved would bring more diverse ideas and more technical expertise to bear on this challenge to international security.

Engineers and scientists have a fundamental role to play in explaining the technical options to policy makers. For FAS, in particular, such work will help revitalize the organization as a true federation of scientists and engineers dedicated to devoting their talents to a more secure and safer world. FAS invites you to contact us if you have skills and knowledge you want to contribute to this proposal to help ensure Iran’s nuclear program remains peaceful.

Charles D. Ferguson, Ph.D.

President, Federation of American Scientists

Have you ever watched a football match where thousands of attendees witness an event that the officials missed? Sometimes there is wisdom in the crowd, especially a crowd who understand the rules of the game. Officials, no matter how dedicated and hardworking they may be, cannot be everywhere or look everywhere at every moment. Indeed, sometimes just one set of eyes can call attention to what should have been obvious or would have been missed.

Consider the individual with administrative responsibilities working for an import/export company who has been told that the company works on the acquisition of farming equipment. Invoices and shipment information cross their desk for large diameter carbon fiber tubes or those made from maraging steel or high-speed electronics, potential items for a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facility or nuclear weapons detonation fire sets. Maybe they are laborers in the company’s receiving facility and are responsible for uncrating and repackaging these purchases. They are witnesses to illegal activities and, if they remain uninformed, these individuals would simply go about their everyday tasks.

Shouldn’t we consider a way to reach the citizens of the world to make the world a safer place?  Shouldn’t we explore how the power of the web and crowdsourcing might have a profound impact in the area of nonproliferation? Part of the power of the web is how inexpensive it is to explore concepts and allow users to vote with their participation and support.

This article describes the concept of Citizen Sensor¹, which aims at leveraging citizens around the world to further strengthen the nonproliferation and international safeguard regime. Start by imagining a world with new and inexpensive methods of vigilance against the spread of nuclear weapons by producing as many knowledgeable citizens as possible – using the observations of crowds and attentive individuals through the power of the web.

The detection of undeclared nuclear facilities and nuclear weapons programs is unequivocally the greatest challenge facing the International Atomic Energy Agency. The common theme for all nuclear nonproliferation challenges is the exposure of people to information, but they are often unaware of the actual application or nature of their work or of the items and activities they see. Or, even if they are aware, they are not sure where to turn to or how to safely inform others. By using the web as both an education tool and a reporting platform, Citizen Sensor aims to alert them to this type of threat, instruct them on how they can help with early detection through education and vigilance and share their knowledge to try to deter those who seek to create a nuclear weapon or other weapons of mass destruction. From the proposed website: “The problem of nuclear proliferation is much like a puzzle – one piece of the puzzle may not show you much, but a collection of pieces will. By combining even seemingly innocuous pieces of information we can help deter nuclear threats and provide nuclear security for the world at large.”

Elements of the Internet-based Citizen Sensor Culture

A variety of potential elements could influence the creation of the Citizen Sensor. These include:

• Proliferation indicator training – What are the most important signs that might indicate proliferation is happening and how do you watch for them? Citizen Sensor would educate the web-based community as a formidable mechanism for early detection of the construction of clandestine nuclear facilities and discovery of weaponization activities. The website would allow education through words and pictures.
• “Neighborhood Watch” as a sharing platform – Post your evidence/suspicions anonymously or signed for discussion and analysis by the crowd.
• “Amber” or “911” type alert for urgent real-time events – If nuclear or radiological material or sensitive information goes missing, mobilize people to help law enforcement find them.
• “Suggestion” box – What are your ideas on how to improve a Citizen Sensor website?
• Testimonials – What supporting activities can be shared with the general public in order to encourage this work?

The concept of Citizen Sensor reaches beyond its website; it would leverage information and capabilities on other websites (such as the IAEA, Google Earth, and Wikipedia) and it will develop an international culture of informed training, watchfulness, and reflection regarding proliferation, coupled with statistical and social science analysis of the information exchanges and discussions that transpire.

Citizen Sensor would include tools for education, information discovery, and anonymous reporting, and could serve as a test bed for other researchers to experiment with specific data processing and social science techniques. These include incentives for the public to participate and methods to screen for incorrect information.

Training modules on all elements of the nuclear fuel cycle, single/dual use items, and aspects of weaponization would be developed, along with search tools to allow users to discover any linkages/matches from their “found” information to be translated into written and/or visual knowledge.

A successful Citizen Sensor website would catalyze a watchful and credible culture of citizen sensors – a worldwide community that produces potential actionable threats and concerns that those with authority and power would consider and act upon. It could be a significant deterrent to proliferators, as it targets the very human resources they count on.

As smart phones continue to grow in computational and sensor capability, new applications continue to arise.  GammaPix™ works with the camera of iPhones²  and Android-based³ smart phones to detect radioactivity. The app allows you to measure radioactivity levels wherever you are and determine if your local environment is safe. The app can be used for the detection of radioactivity in everyday life such as exposure on airplanes, from medical patients, or from contaminated products. GammaPix™ can also be used to detect hazards resulting from unusual events like nuclear accidents (such as Fukushima), a terrorist attack by a dirty bomb, or quietly placed and potentially dangerous radioactive sources. As this technology becomes more widespread, a way to gather, process, and post the information is needed. Educating the public on its limitations is just as important as its capabilities, and Citizen Sensor website could potentially accomplish both aspects.

If Citizen Sensor had already been operational, perhaps it could have helped during the 2013 theft in Mexico of a cobalt-60 radioactive source. The thieves apparently had not been aware of what they had stolen, but what if they had been interested in making a radiological dispersal device? Just as an Amber Alert aims to help officials find a missing child or a 911 call is used for emergencies in the United States, perhaps a Citizen Sensor alert could help find missing radioactive materials.

Through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, the world is building a surveillance network to detect nuclear tests. According to an article in the Washington Post, “the nearly-completed International Monitoring System is proving adept at tasks its inventors never imagined. The system’s scores of listening stations continuously eavesdrop on Earth itself, offering clues about man-made and natural disasters as well as a window into some of nature’s most mysterious processes.”⁴ What might thousands of people, educated observers, and radioactivity-detecting smart phones find?

Requirements

Citizen Sensor must be as open as possible, without any government affiliation, by hosting through a non-governmental organization. It must be unencumbered by government policy and/or regulations.  It must be responsive to current events and actively maintain updated information. Knowledgeable developers of websites and training modules for nuclear fuel cycle facilities, proliferation indicators, and sustained funding are all key factors for any chance of success.

The effort must be international and multi-lingual with capabilities that evolve over time as experience and suggestions drive its future. Contributions can be either public posts or private messages and can be either anonymous or signed. It is certain there will be false positives, and issues and concerns that do not point to proliferation activity. Both the culture and software must be structured to minimize false positives and protect it and contributors from the ramifications of false positives. It will also act as a nexus for discovery tools at other websites offering maps, images, knowledge, and analysis tools.

The challenge that is faced is the support (financial and skills) to make this concept a reality. This includes recruiting scientific talent to populate educational modules, website creation and operators and methods to promote the Citizen Sensor and its potential to educate citizens about the nature of nuclear materials and proliferation.

Editor’s Note

If interested, please send feedback and ideas to citizensensor@inl.gov. 

Mark Schanfein joined Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in September 2008, as their Senior Nonproliferation Advisor, after a 20-year career at Los Alamos National Laboratory where, in his last role, he served as Program Manager for Nonproliferation and Security Technology. He served as a technical expert on the ground in the DPRK during the disablement activities resulting from the 6-Party Talks. Mark has eight years of experience working at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, in the Department of Safeguards where he served four years as a safeguards inspector and as Inspection Group Leader in Operations C, and four years as the Unit Head for Unattended Monitoring Systems (UMS) in Technical Support. In this position he was responsible for the installation of all IAEA unattended systems in nuclear fuel cycle facilities worldwide. 

With over 30 years of experience in international and domestic safeguards, his current focus is on conducting R&D to develop the foundation for effective international safeguards on pyroprocessing facilities and solutions to other novel safeguards challenges.

Steven Piet has worked 31 years at Idaho National Laboratory. He earned the Bachelors, Masters, and Doctor of Science degrees in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  He has 57 peer-reviewed journal articles and is author or co-author of 3 book chapters – in the fields of nuclear fuel cycles, fusion safety and technology, environmental science and decision making, and stakeholder assessment and decision making. For the nuclear fuel cycle program, he framed questions, searched for broadly acceptable and flexible solutions, promoted consensus on criteria, evaluated trade-offs, and identified R&D needs and possibilities to improve concepts; and was responsible for development of the world-leading multi-institution fuel cycle system dynamic model VISION.   For the Generation IV advanced nuclear power program, his lab-university team diagnosed public/stakeholder issues and heuristics.

He has also been a Toastmaster for almost 9 years and has attained the educational achievement level of “Distinguished Toastmaster,” which less than 1% of Toastmasters achieve. As Club President, his club achieved President’s Distinguished Status. He was recognized as Area Governor of the year (2011-2012) and Division Governor of the year (2012-2013) and now serves as District Lt Governor of Marketing.

A congressional impasse on what to do with U.S. reactors’ spent nuclear fuel could last to 2017 or beyond unless a compromise can be found between the House and Senate. The House has voted to support finishing review of the site license application for the Yucca Mountain repository, but the Senate has not. Facing opposition from the state of Utah, Private Fuel Storage, LLC, has let a license for storage for twenty years of 40,000 metric tons (tonne) of spent nuclear fuel (i.e. from 40,000 tonne of uranium originally loaded into reactors) lapse. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 allowed for the federal government to build a monitored retrievable storage facility (MRS) for up to 10,000 tonne, but there has been insufficient support for this in Congress.

Resolving the Impasse

A recent review ¹ considered two suggestions for keeping the current impasse from dragging on for years. One was to approve funds to complete the Yucca Mountain site license review, but give Nevada control over transportation to the site. If the application were approved, this could reduce the time needed to come to an agreement with Nevada on terms for opening the repository by several years. However, prospects for such a compromise in the current Congress are dim.

Another suggestion was to revisit the payment amounts specified in the “benefits agreements” in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA). These amounts are $20 million/yr while a repository is open to receive spent fuel and $10 million/yr while an MRS is open. These amounts will likely be less than 60 percent of their purchasing power on the originally scheduled Yucca Mountain opening date of 1998. The purchasing power of the annual benefits payments would likely decline by about another factor of two over the time envisioned to fill the facility to its licensed capacity. Even without taking account of other considerations discussed below, this situation creates a prima facie case for revisiting the benefits payments.

The estimated cost of spent nuclear fuel disposal exceeds $600 per kg of waste. (This is a cost per uranium originally loaded into commercial reactors; estimate is based on the amount spent on Yucca Mountain so far and the Nuclear Waste Fund balance that the Department of Energy previously estimated as adequate.) The annual benefit payments now allowed for by the NPWA amount to a fraction of a percent of the total project cost. A private property owner would likely balk at such a small return on a valuable asset, so it is hardly surprising that the Nevada Congressional delegation is united in opposition to execution of the terms of the current Yucca Mountain license application.

The suggested benefits payment in the title of this article is “up to $80/kg.” This maximum amount would be annually adjusted for inflation starting every year after 2013 in order to maintain its purchasing power. The $80/kg figure comes from an interchange during a July 31, 2013, appearance of Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz before the House’s Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.[ref]Oversight of DOE’s Strategy for the Management and Disposal of Used Nuclear Fuel and High-level Radioactive Waste, U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, July 31, 2013, http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/%E2%80%9Coversight-doe%E2%80%99s-strategy-management-and-disposal-used-nuclear-fuel-and-high-level[/ref] Noting a cost estimate of $5.6 billion to conduct a search for a new repository site, the subcommittee chair twice asked why this sum should not instead be given to Nevada. Divided by the 70,000 tonne capacity specified in the Yucca Mountain site license application (90 percent of which is for commercial spent fuel), this would amount to $80/kg. While these questions may have well been a rhetorical device highlighting an additional expenditure (thought unnecessary), there is merit in giving this question serious consideration.

Why Sooner Rather Than Later?

There are several problems with looking to open Yucca Mountain within the existing NWPA and its current benefits agreements. The license application only allows for 63,000 tonne of commercial spent fuel. More than that has already accumulated. Any attempt to expand the licensed capacity would face the challenge of revision of the NWPA through normal congressional procedures, rather than the straight up or down vote required if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves the current license application. Also, opening Yucca Mountain in the context of the current NWPA is likely to face determined opposition from Nevada on all legally available fronts and lead to extensive delays. A particular Achilles’ heel of the license application is a provision to install billions of dollars’ worth of protective titanium-palladium alloy protective shields upon site closure. This is under the assumption that humans nearby will continuously use wells near the site for a million years; but never in that time will the value of the installed metal lead to intrusion to recover it. Even if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers the possibility of intrusion to be outside its purview, there is no guarantee of successful legal challenge against this or any other provisions of license for construction and operation.

Recent decisions to close the Crystal River (FL), Kewaunee (WI), Vermont Yankee (VT), and San Onofre (CA) reactors highlight the growing amounts of spent nuclear fuel stranded at sites with no operating reactors. Without a place to move stranded spent fuel for many years until Yucca Mountain is (maybe) ready to receive shipments, each stranded fuel site costs millions of dollars per year to secure. Additionally, until there is a U.S. state available to willingly host spent commercial reactor fuel, there is virtually no possibility of the United States being able to negotiate agreements that preclude another country enriching uranium or reprocessing in pursuit of economic efficiency and nonproliferation objectives in exchange for permanent U.S. acceptance of spent nuclear fuel. While an opportunity to export spent fuel is only one consideration in determining whether a country of potential future concern acquires weapons-relevant nuclear capabilities, the potential consequences of these capabilities eventually falling into the wrong hands can be enormous. Failure to promptly resolve the spent fuel management problem in the United States thus ties the country’s hands in an arena with national and international security implications.

Promoting Flexibility

It is important to avoid an overly narrow focus concentrating only on repository siting. Thus, what is specifically suggested here is for the federal government to allow one or more states to charge up to $80 ($US2012)/kg to take spent fuel into a facility licensed to manage it for at least 100 years. This could be any combination of underground and above ground facilities in one or more states. The time frame of 100 years is chosen for two reasons. First, the dominant radiation hazard and heat load from casked spent fuel is from cesium-137 and strontium-90, which both have half-lives of about 30 years. Once these have decayed for about 100 years, it is easier either to dispose of the spent fuel underground or (less likely in the United States but still pursued in other countries) reprocess it to recover plutonium to fuel nuclear reactors.

Secondly, the most recent Waste Confidence Decision revealed a consensus among Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners that nuclear waste can be safely stored above ground in dry casks for at least 100 years. To actually license such a facility for so long requires that it have capability for repackaging material in dry casks and moving casks to new storage areas as needed; this should be readily manageable. Also, while there could be problems with licensing Yucca Mountain to contain radioactive materials for a million years, there seems to be little question that it could safely contain spent nuclear fuel for at least 100 years. As long as the federal government retains title to the spent fuel, licensing 100 years of storage at one or more locations should leave ample time to observe the results of other countries’ efforts and adequately research alternatives (for example, deep boreholes that would make recovery of weapons usable fissile materials much more difficult over the long term).

The phrase “up to” $80/kg is chosen deliberately in case more than one state is willing to host a spent nuclear fuel management facility. This would allow a competitive environment where states would in fact only be able to charge what the market will bear, thus potentially reducing outlays from federally controlled funds.

Two things should be kept in mind concerning a substantial increase in benefit payments beyond that called for in the NWPA. First, considering the cost of expected delays, legal costs, expense of managing stranded spent fuel, and ability of utilities to plan for what is going to happen upon retirement of aging nuclear reactors, it is not unlikely that charges of up to $80/kg will turn out to be “cheap at the price” compared to the alternative. Second, payments to host states can be put to good use for other needed purposes, while much of the money otherwise spent in a contentious siting process will be spent on what could be avoidable costs.

It is not clear whether $80/kg will be sufficient to encourage Nevada to cooperate with licensing Yucca Mountain, or to encourage other states to host spent fuel management facilities. What Nevada authorities and representatives would need to ponder is whether they might eventually get stuck with Yucca Mountain and only the comparatively paltry and inflation-eroded benefits payments called for in the NWPA. Preparation of legislation to amend the NWPA to update benefits payments might at least start a conversation about what level of compensation to prospective host states would be suitable. In light of the four imperatives enumerated above, there is much to recommend for making the attempt.

Clifford E. Singer is Professor of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering  and of Political Science at the University of Illinois, and is currently co-director of the College of Engineering Initiative on Energy Sustainability Engineering. Singer received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois, a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. He subsequently did research in plasma physics, advanced space propulsion, and the computational simulation of thermonuclear plasma performance at the University of London, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institutes for Strömungsforschung and Plasmaphysik at Göttingen and Garching in Germany. As a local elected official he was briefly the final Chair of the Champaign County Solid Waste Disposal association, and he has supervised thesis research on the Illinois/Kentucky Low Level Radioactive Waste Compact. He is currently supervising research on global energy economics with emphasis on spent nuclear fuel management, sources of energy for transportation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Prior to completing a sabbatical leave at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Technology and Security Policy in Washington, DC, he was the Director of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS).

Saturday, August 17, 2013 at 2:35 am

Suburban location—Anywhere, United States

Three men enter a darkened building of a mid-size university closed for summer break. The university has unarmed security guards that make periodic checks of the campus building exteriors, and the local law enforcement agency is a county police department that interacts with the university on an “occasional” basis. The men enter a third floor laboratory housing a Cesium 137 irradiator. The irradiator is used by faculty and students to expose tissue samples to high levels of radiation during their research. Using simple tools, they partially dismantle the device and remove the radioactive source capsule containing 3,000 curies of Cesium 137. The three perpetrators move the material in a crudely constructed lead bucket providing light shielding and minimal protection to them, and place the material in a self-storage locker ten miles away. The theft goes unnoticed until Monday morning when it is reported to the county police. The county police are not immediately concerned or recognize the significance of the theft or the amount of radioactive material taken.

Monday, August 19, 2013 at 10:45 am

Urban location—Anywhere, United States

Over the past two days, the three perpetrators have taken the radioactive material and assembled it with explosives stolen from a construction site into a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD), commonly called a “dirty bomb.” The device has been transported to a medium-sized city, one hundred miles from the university. All three men are suffering from radiation sickness but are able to detonate the device in the city’s business and financial district. Seven people, in addition to the three terrorists, are killed in the explosion. The resulting contamination from the dispersal of the Cesium 137 produces general panic due to health concerns, along with potentially devastating financial consequences.

The above scenario is fictional but will serve as an introduction to the discussion of what could have been done to deter or interdict the attack. Could the university and local police have had strategies to better secure the radioactive materials that were stolen? Could the local police have been notified in a timelier manner through a closer working relationship with university radiation safety professionals? Could police have searched for the material after it had been stolen, while in transit, during assembly at self-storage facility, or while en route to the final target?

The attacks of September 11, 2001, heightened the nation’s concerns regarding all forms of terrorism in the U.S., including the potential use of radioactive materials in a terrorist act. The possibility of such an attack has been of particular concern because of the widespread use and availability of radioactive materials in the United States industry, hospitals, and academic institutions. Loss or theft of such materials, in risk-significant quantities, could lead to their diversion for malicious use in a Radiological Dispersal Device. This past April’s bombing at the Boston Marathon again raised such concerns. In the wake of the Boston attack, Richard Daddario, Deputy Commissioner for counterterrorism at the New York City Police Department, testified that the psychological and economic fallout from a radiological “dirty bomb” event could demand a much longer recovery than a conventional strike. ¹

An RDD is a device or mechanism that is intended to spread radioactive material from the detonation of conventional explosives or other means. An RDD detonation would likely result in few deaths (mainly from the explosion), but substantial social and economic impacts could result from public panic, decontamination costs, and denial of access to area for extended periods of time.

The economic consequences of an RDD attack could be enormous.  As a point of reference, according to an estimate by Bloomberg Businessweek, it cost $333 million to shut down Boston for a day to facilitate the manhunt for Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Imagine the costs of closing a large portion of any major city for substantially longer periods. An attack at a port could also have major economic consequences. A 2007 study published in Risk Analysis estimated that the economic consequences from a shutdown of the harbors due to the contamination from a plausible dirty bomb scenario could result in losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including the decontamination costs and the indirect economic impacts due to the port shutdown.²

Global Threat Reduction Initiative

In order to prevent a radiological attack, the United States government sponsors a broad range of programs designed to prevent, detect and respond to the loss or theft of nuclear and radiological material. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) is a Department of Energy (DOE) program designed to reduce the amount of vulnerable nuclear and radiological material located at civilian sites worldwide and improve protection of these materials. Because the bulk of its work is pursued overseas, the program is best known for its international activities, in particular removing vulnerable nuclear material from, for example Kazakhstan, and securing high risk radioactive materials, for example in Russia.  However, a lesser known and equally complex element of GTRI is its domestic component carried out in the United States. The domestic component involves the interaction and cooperation between federal government officials, scientists and policy makers with state and local police, emergency officials, and operators of private and public institutions, such as hospitals.

This article is intended to describe the domestic component of the GTRI; how it is implemented, why it is needed and how state and local officials take advantage of the program. The goal of this article is to present the joint views of a local police official together with those of a scientist and former policy maker and to explore the technical and policy issues associated with domestic threat reduction programs.

The Context

Radiological materials are located throughout the United States (see Figure 1) with the majority of high activity sources located in large urban population centers. A successfully deployed RDD using radioactive sources commonly found in public facilities such as hospitals could potentially result in radioactive contamination that could require relocation of inhabitants, prohibit the use of facilities, and have debilitating economic impacts. ³

Most radioactive sources in the U.S. are regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and state authorities. GTRI works with civilian sites to enhance security for their radiological materials; however, it does not regulate them. Participation with GTRI is voluntary on the part of sites although GTRI has an aggressive outreach program to encourage sites to participate. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office provides assistance to state and local officials in establishing an overall architecture for detecting nuclear and radioactive material that are not under regulatory control, e.g. which have already been lost or stolen. This detection assistance supports the GTRI’s efforts by providing equipment and training to establish a general baseline for state and local first responder nuclear and radiological detection capabilities, but is not focused on specific sites.

Some have expressed concern that funding for radiological threat reduction is better spent overseas, in particular in countries that do not have a strong regulatory infrastructure, as the U.S. does.  Indeed, GTRI’s overseas accomplishments are much more frequently in the news.  In the U.S., the protection of sources is primarily the responsibility of the owner/operator, following the requirements of the regulator. So, why should the federal government spend funds to protect radiological sources when they should already be adequately protected? Through the current and evolving program, GTRI and partner agencies and institutions have created a strong partnership for a well-rounded domestic security program. The domestic portion of GTRI has evolved to one that seeks to fill the gaps that may exist in the very complicated relationship between local, state, and federal agencies in preventing and responding to radiological security incidents. The focus of the program is shifting toward sustainability of completed security upgrades and improved response capabilities and communication networks.

Figure 1

Locations in the U.S. with risk-significant quantities of radiological sources. ⁴

Domestic Security Enhancement Program

Since GTRI’s domestic security enhancement program began in 2008, it has worked with host sites to enhance security at more than five hundred buildings which host over four million curies of radioactive materials. GTRI physical security enhancements are applied on a voluntary basis to assist sites in the prevention and detection of any unauthorized access to radiological sources located in their facility. The physical protection principle of detection, specifically early detection, means that detection of a theft is early enough in the act that it can be stopped at the site or nearby. Ideally, early detection should allow time for response forces to prevent an adversary from acquiring the radioactive material. GTRI’s detection upgrades build upon sites’ existing security measures but may include enhancing the following physical protection system components:

• Biometric access control devices
• Door alarms
• Motion sensors
• Cameras
• Duress buttons
• Radiation sensors
• Electronic tamper indicating seals
• Remote monitoring systems

The Insider Threat

A remote monitoring system (RMS) is a critical security measure for detecting an insider threat because the insider (by definition) will have access to the device containing the radioactive material, or to the material itself depending on the type of facility. The insider will also have authorization to use some or all of the site’s access control and detection devices without sending an alarm of unauthorized access. In addition to detecting an insider, the RMS also improves the response by a site’s local law enforcement or other responding agencies by providing them with critical assessment information immediately.

For most U.S. sites, timely notification to local law enforcement is critical to prevent potential theft attempts. The RMS integrates what GTRI calls critical alarms (e.g., device tampering to gain access to the radioactive source(s), increased radiation levels indicating that the source has been removed from its shielding, communications loss between the site and monitoring station, or loss of power) with real time live video images. For increased protection, the RMS is housed in a tamper-indicating housing with battery back-up to ensure its continued operation. To address information security concerns, the RMS also encrypts the video and alarm data. The RMS can send alarm and video data simultaneously to onsite and offsite security and local law enforcement monitoring stations to prevent single-point failures in a site’s security and response planning.

Enhancing Delay Measures

Along with early detection capabilities, GTRI also provides sites with delay enhancements that impede an adversary’s progress to access nuclear and radiological materials. By increasing the delay time and adding valuable minutes in an adversary’s attack time lines, responders have more time to interrupt the adversary before they can remove and steal these materials. GTRI’s delay systems may include:

• Device tie downs
• Security cages
• Security grating
• Hardened doors/rooms
• Ballistic glass
• In-Device Delay Kits

A particularly important delay enhancement is the In-Device Delay kit for irradiators. The National Research Council, a private nonprofit institute, performed a risk and consequence analysis, which showed Cesium Chloride irradiators pose relatively higher security risks compared to other radiological materials.⁵ To help mitigate this risk, GTRI and DHS developed In-Device Delay (IDD) kits for Cesium irradiators that can be installed on the device. The installation of the IDD kits on selected irradiators significantly increases the time and/or difficulty involved if an intruder tries to remove a source—while not impacting the functionality of the irradiator—and consequently is an important element of security enhancements.

Response Capabilities

One of the most important elements of any security system is a timely, well-equipped, well-trained response team of appropriate size to interrupt and neutralize the adversary before they gain access to the radioactive source or immediately after they gain access.  First responders from state and local law enforcement do not work with nuclear material or radiological sources on a daily basis and may lack knowledge of the risks posed by these materials.  GTRI has therefore made a focused effort to provide security personnel and local law enforcement with the tools and training to help prepare them to respond to an event involving nuclear or radiological material.

In 2008 GTRI began to sponsor table top exercises for GTRI partners at select nuclear and radiological sites in the United States. These exercises are conducted at predominately private institutions, hospitals and universities and bring together key decision-makers from the actual agencies that would respond to a terrorist WMD incident. At the exercise, host level players include on-site security forces, radiation safety personnel, facility managers and public affairs personnel. At the city and state levels, players can include police, fire, hazmat, EMS, Office of Emergency Management, regulatory agencies and National Guard Civil Support Teams. At the federal level players can include the FBI, DOE/NNSA nuclear response assets the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The overall exercise objectives are to promote cross-sector communication, cooperation, and team-building among public and private sector first responders and to exercise FBI lead responsibility for criminal investigation. In addition, the exercise allows players to examine newly developed tactics, techniques, and procedures resulting from GTRI voluntary security enhancements. The exercises promote attack prevention through intelligence sharing and a coordinated approach to neutralize the threat, along with site specific integrated response planning with federal, state, local, and private sector partners.

Since the first GTRI exercise in December 2008, there have been 29 Silent Thunder table top exercises at state and private universities, hospitals, research and test reactors, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Institutes of Health. To date, 329 FBI agents and 3760 players and observers have participated in these GTRI table-top exercises.

Additionally, at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, GTRI offers participants a three-day alarm response training course. This training includes hands-on exercises and classroom training and teaches site personnel and local law enforcement how to protect themselves and their communities when responding to alarms indicating possible theft of radiological materials.

Removing Disused Sources Before They Can Become a Threat

The final element of GTRI’s domestic radiological security effort involves the removal of sources that are unused and may ultimately be lost or stolen due to lack of attention. In addition to security enhancements, GTRI’s Off-Site Source Recovery Program (OSRP) removes thousands of excess or disused sources in the United States annually. The initial scope of the project included a narrow group of sources (those that fell into the regulatory category of Greater than Class C (GTCC) low-level radioactive waste), but since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, OSRP’s scope has expanded to include the recovery of other sources. ⁶ Over the years, OSRP has recovered more than 30,000 sources from more than 1,000 sites located in all 50 U.S. states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico.⁷ By removing sources from facilities that no longer had a use for them, GTRI has removed the risk of these materials to be potentially used in a RDD, thus resulting in permanent threat reduction.

From “Global” Threat Reduction to “Local” Threat Reduction

At its core, the GTRI domestic program is a partnership between federal officials, state and local officials and facility operators. One example of this is in Philadelphia, where over a dozen sites are protected in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area by the GTRI Program, ranging from hospitals and universities, drug manufacturers and government research labs, to one of the American Red Cross’s largest blood distribution centers. Law enforcement agencies (the Philadelphia Police Department being the largest), have benefited tremendously from GTRI’s tabletop exercises, training at the Y12 National Security Complex, and personal radiation detectors provided by the GTRI Program.

The Philadelphia region had an existing Preventive Radiological Nuclear Detection (PRND) program supported by the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) of DHS that the NNSA was able to use as a vehicle to integrate their source security into the overall effort to prevent radiological and nuclear terrorism. This created a very effective two tiered “inside-out” and “outside-in” prevention strategy. The existing deployment of nuclear detection assets protected special events and provided a 24/7 “steady state” coverage from threats from outside the region. The regional law enforcement agencies, assisted by DNDO, were able to field a range of detection equipment on a daily basis, including aircraft, mobile and marine systems. The addition of the GTRI program allowed for the protection of radiological sources of concern within and near relevant facilities while bolstering the defense against an “insider threat” due to the closer relationships created by participation. This “inside-out” approach took Philadelphia’s protection and response effort to the next level by adding source security as a priority. The previous outwardly focus PRND program was equipment and personnel driven while the GTRI Program stresses relationship building between the partner sites and their local law enforcement agencies.

The scenario depicted at the beginning of this article would have multiple chances at prevention/interdiction in the Philadelphia model. The GTRI alarm systems and response programs would have protected the material and facilitated an immediate response and the existing detection assets could be deployed to recover any stolen material. Together, the two programs form an effective deterrent.

The University of Pennsylvania has been the largest beneficiary of the GTRI Program in the area, and has served as a model site for others in the nation for implementing the security and emergency response upgrades. All partners, facility and law enforcement, have enjoyed a much closer relationship that extends to joint training and exercises as well as facility operators providing subject matter expert support to the overall PRND effort.

Due in part to the GTRI program, in October 2013, all the protected facilities alarm notifications are received in the regional “Fusion Center”, the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center (DVIC), creating another layer of defense and allowing for a regional protection and response capability.

Conclusion

As mentioned at the outset of this paper, some in the policy community believe U.S. radiological protection dollars are better spent overseas, where regulatory controls are not as effective as those in the United States. It is true that despite years of effort, many other countries do not have strong regulatory infrastructures for managing access to radiological and nuclear material and funding overseas is well spent. However, as illustrated above, this view does not fully take into account the multifaceted needs of radiological security, which requires the integration of the facility operators, state, local and federal capabilities. Moreover, while sources overseas are generally less well regulated and protected than U.S. sources, radiological sources in the U.S. should receive special attention because they pose the greatest risk: diversion closest to a target of the attack minimizes the likelihood of detection through the global detection capabilities overseas and at U.S. borders. In this view, it makes little sense for the federal government to help provide for a security measure overseas, but not domestically, where the risk may be higher.

A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report is instructive in regard to the limitations of regulatory controls. GAO was asked by Congress to determine the extent to which NRC’s regulations ensure the security of radiological sources at U.S. medical facilities and the status of NNSA’s efforts to improve the security of sources at these facilities. GAO reviewed relevant laws, regulations, and guidance; interviewed federal agency and state officials; and visited 26 hospitals and medical facilities in Washington, D.C. and 7 states. The review concluded that existing regulatory requirements do not consistently ensure the security of high-risk radiological sources at the 26 selected hospitals and medical facilities visited. According to the review, one reason for this is that the requirements are broadly written and do not prescribe specific measures that hospitals and medical facilities must take to secure medical equipment containing sealed sources, such as the use of cameras or alarms.  Rather, the requirements provide a general framework for what constitutes adequate security practices, which is implemented in various ways at different hospitals. Some of the medical equipment in the facilities visited was more vulnerable to potential tampering or theft than that of other facilities because some hospitals developed better security controls than others. ⁸

Protecting America from a radiological attack requires a strong alliance between facility operators, state, federal and local officials. In the U.S., the NRC sets the regulatory framework that includes security requirements, licensing, inspection, and enforcement. But the regulatory framework is insufficient for all threats; rather it provides a common baseline level of security. GTRI works with sites to build upon these security standards set by NRC and state regulations. GTRI’s voluntary security enhancements provide sites with security best practices which further enhance security above regulatory requirements. Because the GTRI upgrades are voluntary and may have cost implications for the facility operators as well as state and local authorities, it is essential that all partners are aware of the threats and risks involved in working with certain radioactive material as well as programs to mitigate these risks.

Warren Stern is Senior Advisor in Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Nonproliferation and National Security Department.  In 2010, he was appointed by President Obama to lead the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office at DHS and before that, Head of the IAEA’s Incident and Emergency Centre.  He has also held a number of leadership positions at the U.S .Department of State, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and CIA.

Lieutenant Edward Baldini is a twenty four year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department and has been assigned to the Counter Terrorism Operations Unit since its inception in spring 2002. He has assisted in development of Counter Terrorism Training at the local, state and national level. He has been very active with Preventive Radiological/Nuclear Detection (PRND) mission and has assisted the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in several initiatives. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Philadelphia University and a Master’s Degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also a graduate of Northwestern University Center for Public Safety’s School of Police Staff and Command.

Formed over 6 billion years ago, uranium, a dense, silvery-white metal, was created “during the fiery lifetimes and explosive deaths in stars in the heavens around us,” stated Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias.¹ With a radioactive half-life of about 4.5 billion years, uranium-238 is the most dominant of several unstable uranium isotopes in nature and has enabled scientists to understand how our planet was created and formed. For at least the last 2 billion years, uranium shifted from deep in the earth to the rocky shell-like mantle, and then was driven by volcanic processes further up to oceans and to the continental crusts.  The Colorado Plateau at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where some of the nation’s largest uranium deposits exist, began to be formed some 300 million years ago, followed later by melting glaciers, and erosion which left behind exposed layers of sand, silt and mud. One of these was a canary-yellow sediment that would figure prominently in the nuclear age.

From 1942 to 1971, the United States nuclear weapons program purchased about 250,000 metric tons of uranium concentrated from more than 100 million tons of ore.²  Although more than half came from other nations, the uranium industry heavily depended on Indian miners in the Colorado Plateau. Until recently,³ their importance remained overlooked by historians of the atomic age. There is little doubt their efforts were essential for the United States to amass one of the most destructive nuclear arsenals in the world.  By the 1970s an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 of the 12,000 miners employed in the United States were Navajos. ^{4 5}

From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, they dug up nearly 4 million tons of uranium ore – nearly a quarter of the total national underground production in the United States.⁶  In doing so they were sent into harm’s way without their knowledge,  becoming the most severely exposed group of workers to ionizing radiation in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.

For minimum wage or less, they blasted open seams of ore, built wooden beam supports in the mine shafts, and dug out ore pieces with picks and wheel barrows. The shafts were as deep as 1,500 feet with little or no ventilation. The bitter tasting dust was all pervasive, coating their teeth and causing chronic coughing.  They ate in the mines and drank water that dripped from the walls. The water contained high quantities of radon – a radioactive gas emanating from the ore. Radon decays into heavy, more radiotoxic isotopes called “radon daughters,” which include isotopes of polonium, bismuth, and lead. Radon daughters’ alpha particle emissions are considered to be about 20 times more carcinogenic than x-rays.⁷ As they lodge in the respiratory system, especially the deep lung, radon daughters emit energetic ionizing radiation that can damage cells of sensitive internal tissues.

The miners were never warned of the hazards of radioactivity in the mines in which they inhaled, ingested and brought home along with their contaminated clothing. Withholding information about the hazards of the workplace was deeply embedded in the bureaucratic culture of the nuclear weapons program. In 1994, a previously secret document (written in the late 1940s) was made public by the Department of Energy which crystallized the long-held rationale for keeping nuclear workers in the dark.

“We can see the possibility of a shattering effect on the morale of the employees if they become aware that there was substantial reason to question the standards of safety under which they are working. In the hands of labor unions the results of this study would add substance to demands for extra-hazardous pay . . . knowledge of the results of this study might increase the number of claims of occupational injury due to radiation.”⁸

Kee Begay worked in the mines for 29 years and was dying of lung cancer. “The mines were poor and not fit for human beings,” he testified at a citizen’s hearing in 1980. Begay also lost a son to cancer. “He was one of many children that used to play on the uranium piles during those years. We had a lot of uranium piles near our homes –just about fifty or a hundred feet away or so. Can you imagine? Kids go out and play on those piles.”⁹

For many years the Navajos and other tribes living in the Colorado Plateau used uranium ore in sand paintings and for body adornment. By 1896 samples of this ore were passed along to mineralogists at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Initially confounded by its properties, the Smithsonian experts concluded this was an extremely rare mineral containing uranium and vanadium.

That same year, French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium crystals emitted “luminous rays” on photographic plates. Two years later, Becquerel’s colleagues Marie and Pierre Curie painstakingly extracted tiny amounts of two new elements that they named polonium and radium from several tons of uranium ore in an abandoned shed in Paris. Emitting millions of times more of these mysterious rays than uranium, Marie Curie coined the term “radioactivity” to describe their energetic properties.

News of the discovery in Colorado came quickly to the Curies, who were seeking richer ores than those from eastern Germany. In 1897, aware of growing scientific interest in their native country, chemists Henry Poulot and Charles Volleque (who lived in Colorado), purchased 10 tons of this mysterious ore and sent samples to the Paris School of Mines in France,¹⁰ where they were also analyzed by Marie Curie.¹¹ A year later it was named Carnotite after Aldophe Carnot, the Inspector General of French mines.

By 1910, a 20 by 60 mile oval strip of carnotite with countless visible swaths of canary-yellow became one of the world’s first major radioactive metal discoveries – helping to usher in the nuclear age. By 1912, nearly all of the uranium ore went to European firms. Its vanadium content (used to harden steel), came into heavy demand during World War I for use in armaments as it would during World War II.

The Colorado Plateau became one of the world’s most important sources of radium, which at a price of $160,000 a gram in 1913 became the most precious substance in the world. About three tons of uranium contained one gram of radium. Half went for use in medicine and the rest was used for luminous paint on dials and other instruments.

By the mid-1920s, the U.S. uranium boom ended when far richer deposits were found in the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo. While uranium mining continued in Colorado, the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) of Belgium dominated the world uranium market. In the shadow of the highly lucrative radium boom, a revolutionary and fiercely competitive scientific exploration of its radioactive properties would reveal the enormous energy contained in the atoms of uranium. ¹²

Spurred on by the scientific discoveries and growing consensus among scientists and engineers that atomic weapons fueled by uranium could be made in a relatively short period of time by Germany, the United States launched an unprecedented crash program in December 1941 under the auspices of the Manhattan Engineering District (MED) of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After surveying the known uranium sources, the MED concluded that the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo, the Eldorado Mine in Canada, and the Colorado Plateau were the three most important locations of uranium mining in the world. After being warned by a British scientist in 1939, Edgar Sengier, the head of Union Miniere’s that owned the Congo mine, managed to secretly ship 1,250 tons to the United States in late 1940, where it was stored in a warehouse in Staten Island, New York.

Described as a “freak occurrence of nature” by a top official of the early U.S. nuclear weapons program,¹³ the Congo mine yielded the highest concentrations of uranium (30-70%)¹⁴ of any mine in the world since.¹⁵ By comparison, the Congo ore contained as much as much as 7,000 times the concentration uranium than mined in the United States.  Between 1942 and the late 1950s, the U.S. nuclear weapons program plant processed approximately roughly 20,000 tons of uranium oxide from the Shinkolobwe mine.^{16 17 18}

Under the MED, the government assumed total control over the production, milling, refining, and use of uranium. This was done out of an office in New York City. Because of its higher purity and immediate availability, uranium from the Belgian Congo proved to be the most significant supply.

By the end of the war, the Colorado Plateau provided 2,698,000 pounds of uranium oxide, (about 14 percent of the project’s uranium needs)¹⁹ with the rest coming from the Belgium Congo and Canada.  However, the Plateau’s ore reserve was considered very important because it was considered the world’s third largest reserve and primary domestic source of uranium. Grand Junction, Colorado became the center of this secret operation.

On August 1, 1946, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, which created a new civilian-controlled Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This new agency consisted of a civilian panel, and a panel of senators and congressmen who formed the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE).  As it was during the war, all nuclear facilities and uranium remained under federal control with the government as the only producer of fissionable materials. Even though mining and milling were left to the private sector, the government remained the sole customer with total control over the industry.

Given the potentially tenuous dependence on foreign supplies, the AEC realized that the enormous uranium demand to fuel plutonium production reactors being constructed at the Hanford site in Washington and the uranium enrichment plants in Tennessee and Kentucky could not be met without a major increase in domestic mining. By 1948, the AEC stimulated a uranium mining boom that led to the discovery of other important ore findings on the Navajo reservation and elsewhere. Mining companies promptly entered into agreements that included requirements to hire and train tribal members. In addition to the Colorado Plateau, uranium mining extended to the Black Hills of South Dakota, Northwest Nebraska, Spokane, Washington, the Wind River Indian Reservation and other sites in central Wyoming, the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, and the Texas Gulf coast.

In the Colorado Plateau alone, uranium mining increased by nearly 150 times from 1948 (54,000 tons of ore) to 1960 (8 million tons).  The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s uranium purchases exceeded $2.4 billion (2013 dollars) in 1960 alone, making it the third most valuable metal mined in the United States.²⁰

The AEC also encouraged private companies to establish mills and buying stations to process the ore.  After milling, about 99 percent of the ore is left behind as waste containing significant amounts of long-lived radiotoxic elements such as radium 226 (which has a half-life equal to 1,625 years). At the end of 1961, there were 25 active uranium mills with a daily capacity of 20,800 metric tons of uranium oxide. Nearly half of the total ore mined was milled in the Grants, New Mexico area.²¹

More than 230 million tons of uranium mill tailings in the United States have accumulated, dwarfing the volume of all radioactive waste from the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation.  Only after widespread contamination containing long-lived radiotoxic elements such as radium 226 drew public alarm were regulations established for the remediation of uranium mill tailings in 1980.

The hazards of uranium mining were known for centuries. As early as 1556, dust in the Ore Mountain mines (Erzgebirge, bordering Germany and what is now the Czech Republic), was reported as having “corrosive qualities, it eats away the lungs and implants consumption in the body…”²² By 1879, researchers found that 75 percent of the miners in the Ore Mountains had died from lung cancer. By 1932, the Ore Mountain miners were receiving compensation for their cancers from the German government.

Uranium mining was convincingly linked to lung cancer by dozens of epidemiological and animal studies by the late 1930s.²³ In 1942, Wilhelm C. Hueper, the founding director of the environmental cancer section of the National Cancer Institute, brought the European studies to light in the United States—concluding that radon gas was responsible for half of the deaths of European miners after 10 to 20 years of exposure.²⁴ By this time, uranium had become a key element for the making of the first atomic weapons. Dr. Hueper was blocked from further publications and discussion in this area by his superiors- who informed him that it was “not in the public interest.”²⁵

In defiance to the AEC, Dr. Heuper prepared a paper discussing the hazards of uranium mining for the Colorado Medical Society in 1952. Shields Warren, Director of the AECs Division of Biology and Medicine, ordered the head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to direct Dr. Heuper to remove all references to uranium mining hazards.  Declaring he had not joined the NCI to be called “a scientific liar,” Dr. Heuper withdrew from the conference and sent a copy of his paper to the President of the Society. The Surgeon General soon forbade him from any further epidemiological research on occupational cancer, and he was further prevented from traveling on official business west of the Mississippi River.²⁶

A year before Dr. Heuper’s confrontation with the AEC, researchers from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in the confines of Cold War secrecy, conclusively showed that radiation doses to the miners’ lungs were from radon decay products.²⁷  Around that same time, PHS researchers reported in a classified progress report that radon levels were “310 times the accepted allowable concentration.”²⁸

Radiation doses were calculated to be “twice to nearly ten times the allowable amount of radiation… In the worst cases, they were exceeding allowable weekly doses in less than one day, and were reaching total annual doses in just a week.” ²⁹ The report concluded, “It is not surprising the exposure to radiation doses of this magnitude should produce malignancies.”³⁰

At private meetings with the AEC, mining companies bitterly resisted ventilating the mines, claiming that it would close smaller operations and raise the price of uranium. “While it has a big effect on the price of ore,” an AEC Health scientist argued at a meeting of agency’s Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine in 1956. “By the time you get it into a reactor or into a bomb that differential is insignificant.”³¹

By 1957, PHS official Henry Doyle told a hostile audience that radon concentrations in some domestic mines were 67 times higher than in the German mines, where a lung cancer epidemic had been long identified. He also pointed out that the average radiation lung dose to miners in the Colorado Plateau was 21 times higher than allowed in AEC nuclear weapons plants.³² By 1962, the Public Health Service revealed that radon exposure in the mines was statistically linked to lung cancer among miners in the United States.³³

Lung disease associated with radon exposure was “totally avoidable” declared Merrill Eisenbud, a former Chief AEC health scientist in 1979. “The Atomic Energy Commission …is uniquely responsible for the death of many men who developed lung cancer as a result of the failure of the mine operators, who must also bear the blame, because they too had the information, and the Government should not have had to club them into ventilating their mines.” Lung cancer risk for Navajo miners was subsequently reported in 2000 to be nearly 30 times higher than for non-miners.³⁴ The percentage of cancer cases linked to radon exposure was comparable to what Wilhelm Heuper first reported in 1942.

While the Navajos were contributing to the increase of ore production during the 1950s, production of fissionable materials was reaching its height. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. nuclear arsenal contained more than 30,000 warheads.³⁵ This is when President Johnson ended production of highly enriched uranium for weapons and sharply curtailed plutonium production – signaling an end to AEC uranium purchases that would stop by 1971. The once booming uranium market was now stagnant, with some of the oldest and largest companies on the Colorado Plateau pulling out.  Between 1961 and 1966, domestic uranium ore production dropped by 50 percent.³⁶

In early March of 1967, the Washington Post ran a series of front-page stories by John Reistrup exposing decades of failure by the U.S. government to prevent what had become a growing epidemic of lung cancers among uranium miners. Keying off Reistrup’s stories, the Post’s editorial board castigated the Johnson Administration and Congress for presiding over “death mines.”³⁷

Moved by the stories, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz took unilateral action in May of 1967, proposing the first federal standard to limit radiation exposures in U.S. uranium mines. It would reduce the average radon concentrations measured in the mines that year by more than three times. True-to-form, it provoked  immediate opposition by the industry and the JCAE, which held 12 days of hearings in an effort to block the Labor Department. Wirtz was undeterred, arguing “ventilation is a cost item. It doesn’t belong on the same balance sheet with cancer.”³⁸ By the late summer the standard was endorsed by the Johnson Administration, but delayed its implementation until 1971.

By this time, the Department of Defense declared that its uranium stockpile goals were met and stopped purchasing uranium. Moreover, Congress authorized a cutback on acquisitions. The AEC would no longer guarantee prices for crude ore and cancelled its exploration campaigns. As a result, the demand for uranium slowed and insecurity crept over the mining industry. The United States would never again experience the enormous uranium boom brought on during the first 30 years of the nuclear arms race.

Even though there was a significant body of evidence spanning decades of deliberate negligence by the U.S. government, federal courts denied claims by the miners and others exposed to radioactive fallout from Nevada nuclear weapons testing, on the grounds of sovereign immunity stating, “all the actions of various governmental agencies complained of by plaintiffs were the result of conscious policy decisions made at high government levels based on considerations of political and national security feasibility factors.”³⁹

It took more than 20 years and a considerable amount of effort by the miners, their families, before the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed in October 1990. The Act offered a formal apology for sending people into harm’s way and provided a one-time compensation to each victim in the amount of $100,000.

Ten years later, Congress passed even more sweeping legislation, known as the Energy Employee Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. It not only provided compensation for the many thousands of nuclear weapons workers, but also expanded the benefits for uranium miners – increasing the lump sum to $150,000 per person and providing health care. Financial compensation came too little and too late. It would never be enough for an illness and death that could have been prevented.

The legacy of U.S. uranium mining lingers on. More than three billion metric tons of mining and milling wastes were generated in the United States.⁴⁰ Today, Navajos still live near about one third of all abandoned uranium mines in the United States (~1,200 out of 4,000).⁴¹ Only after a concerted effort by Navajo activists to spur congressional investigations in 1993 and 2006, has the U.S. government recently promised to complete remediation of abandoned mines, nearly a century after the first uranium leases were issued on Navajo land.⁴²

Robert Alvarez is a Senior Scholar at IPS, where he is currently focused on nuclear disarmament, environmental, and energy policies. Between 1993 and 1999, Mr. Alvarez served as a Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment. While at DOE, he coordinated the effort to enact nuclear worker compensation legislation. In 1994 and 1995, Bob led teams in North Korea to establish control of nuclear weapons materials. He coordinated nuclear material strategic planning for the department and established the department’s first asset management program. Bob was awarded two Secretarial Gold Medals, the highest awards given by the department.

Whether an oil and gas company is working in the United States or is spread throughout the world, it will face geopolitical and cyber risks which could affect global energy security.

Geopolitical Risk

There are numerous geopolitical risks for any oil and gas company. Even if a company just works in the United States, it needs to know what is happening in countries all over the world, especially those countries that are large oil and gas producers. Because oil markets are so tightly connected globally, major political events in oil exporting states could seriously affect the price and even availability of oil. An attack on an oil platform in Nigeria, a terrorist event in Iraq, the closing down of port facilities in Libya and many other examples come to mind. Consider the potential effects of a major attack on the Ab Qaiq facility in Saudi Arabia. If this facility is damaged or destroyed on a large scale by rockets or bombs, the world oil market could be out 6-7 million barrels of oil a day- out of the 90-92 millions of barrels a day the world needs. World spare oil production capacity is about 2.3 million barrels a day. It could take some time to get this online. The spare production can be ramped up, but not immediately. Given that the grand majority of excess capacity in the world is located in Saudi Arabia and that this excess capacity could be significantly cut back with damage to Ab Qaiq, the situation is even riskier.

Another major risk nearby is transits through the Straits of Hormuz. About 16-17 million barrels a day goes out of the Straits. Any attempts to close the Straits (even unsuccessful ones) could have significant effects on the prices of various grades of oil. Even with the seemingly warming in relations between the U.S. and Iran, it is still possible that things could take a turn for the worse in the Gulf region. If the present negotiations with Iran break down, tensions could rise to even higher levels than before negotiations began. This could bring discussions of the military option more public. If there is a major conflict involving Gulf countries, the United States and its allies, then all bets are off on where oil prices may go. There could be many scenarios: from oil prices increasing $100 over the pre-conflict base price to well over $200 over the pre-conflict base price.

In many other parts of the world, geopolitical risks going “kinetic” can affect oil markets. Syria is a potential whirlpool of trouble for the entire Middle East. Egypt and Libya are far from stable. Algeria could be heading into some rough times. The Sudan’s will remain problematic and potentially quite violent for some time to come. The East China Sea and South China Sea disputes are not resolved. The Central Sahara could be a source and locale for troubles for some time to come.

Terrorist events can happen anywhere. Google Earth allows terrorists and others to get very close looks at major oil and gas facilities, transport choke points and more. Also, there are not that many tankers plying the vast seas and oceans of the world. Some of the most important routes are between the Gulf region and East Asia and Europe. Others travel from West Africa to Europe, and less so to the United States than before its shale oil revolution. The Mediterranean has many important tanker shipping routes. The Red Sea is a crucial route for both ships going north and south. Over 50 percent of oil trade happens on maritime routes. Many of these tankers cross through vital chokepoints like the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, The Bab al Mandab, The Suez Canal, The Turkish Straits, The Danish Straits, The Panama Canal, and various harbor and river routes where risks may be higher r at sea. Even whilst at sea, ships are at risk as shown by pirate attacks and hijackings off of East Africa, West Africa and previously off of Indonesia. There are about 1,996 crude oil tankers. However, only 623 of these are of the Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC) or Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) variety that are the most important for transporting crude oil economically over long distances from the Gulf region to places like China (the biggest importer of oil), the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Europe. VLCCs can carry about 2 million barrels of oil while ULCCs can carry up to 2.3 or, rarely, 2.5 million barrels of oil. Normally these massive ships carry crude oil, but sometimes carry many different types of crude oil. Smaller petroleum tankers may carry both crude and refined products depending on their trade routes and the state of the markets at any times. There are about 493 Suez Max tankers, which can hold about 1 million barrels of oil and refined products and about 408 Afrimax vessels, which hold about 500,000 to 800,000 barrels of crude or refined products. Additionally, there are 417 Panamax vessels, which can carry 300,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil or refined products.

This may seem like a lot of ships to some. However, especially in tight markets, the pressure is immense to keep these ships at sea and to keep them on time. Moreover, there are lots of logistical complexities in trying to keep the crude moving at the right times and to the right places. If anything disturbs this complex economic and logistical ballet of behemoths, then the economic effects could be considerable. If the oil does not arrive on time then refinery production and deliveries of refined products to markets could be disturbed. Most countries have crude and product reserves to handle short term disruptions that may result from tanker losses. If the tanker losses are large or other disruptions occur in the supply chains of crude via ships, then those reserves could be worn down. It takes well over a year to build one of these tankers.

If the market for tankers is soft and some available tankers are moored in port, (such as when close to 500 hundred ships and dozens of tankers were moored off Singapore a few years ago), then the chances are better of getting the shipping logistics back to normal faster. However, problems could still arise in getting ships needed in Houston or Ras Tanura from Singapore. The travel times of these massive ships add considerable costs and disruptions.

When disruptions occur, some crude cargos can change direction and can be sold and resold, depending on the sorts of contracts that are in effect, along the way. Sometimes the disruptions are from political events, such as revolutions, insurrections, civil instability, and natural events like hurricanes and tsunamis. For example, when the tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, many cargos were delayed or reconfigured. However, these sorts of events are different from terrorists blowing up a series of ships, as the psychology is different.

There is a certain amount of flexibility built into crude tanker transport markets, but a larger question is what would happen if many of them were taken out in various parts of the world. Would such a “black swan event” cause great disruptions? This is most likely. The follow on question would be how the tanker and other connected markets would react to this to help resolve the logistical attacks and how this might affect tanker insurance and lease rates.

Given that the crude and other products feed into other supply chains and markets, there could be cascades of disruptions in many parts of the world from a significant attack on even one large VLCC. Attacks on more ships would become increasingly more complex and costly in their effects.

If even one ship is sunk with a missile, the effects on oil markets and the world economy could far outweigh the mere few hundred millions of dollars in value the tanker and its cargo may represent. Ports, pipelines, refineries, tankers and other parts of the oil, transport and other infrastructures could be affected.

The destruction of an oil facility in a sensitive area that may be worth a few billion dollars could have a negative economic impact globally in the hundreds of billions, if not more. Attacks on the Houston Ship Channel, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, the Jubail Complex in Saudi Arabia, Kharg or Lavan Island in Saudi Arabia could have considerable impacts economically and even militarily.

The impacts of attacks on these facilities would be stronger when oil and tanker markets are tight, and when the world or salient regional economies are growing quickly. An attack on a major tanker route out of Saudi Arabia heading to China or Japan will have a lot less effect on tanker and oil markets when there are excess tankers at anchor, and when there is excess capacity in oil production to make up in a relatively short time than when both tanker and oil markets are tight and there is little excess capacity. The less elastic the markets, the more effect any attacks will have. If a terrorist group wanted to have the most impact on the world economy it would likely attack in times of high growth in various important economies and when there is little excess oil capacity and no spare tankers. Often these three markets are tied together. When the global economy is growing quickly oil markets are under stress. When oil markets are under stress then tanker markets are stressed.

Looking to the future, some countries could be facing political turmoil such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela. This turmoil is not deterministic, but it is also not completely out of the bounds of probability. Depending on the type of turmoil, damage, and loss of production and export capacity, these events could have significant effects on world oil markets.

If such turmoil is going to happen, it is better for the world oil markets and the world economy that these happen during times of greater excess production and export capacity than the losses in oil production and export capacity from the turmoil. The worst of all possible combinations would be the loss of production and export capacity during very tight market times in a country where most of the excess capacity is found, which is in Saudi Arabia. If the world economy is growing quickly all around, then the effects of such turmoil will be far greater than if the world economy is in a slow growth period.

There are also regional aspects; during the 2011 Libyan Revolution, Europe’s economy was starting to dig itself out of a deep recession that had affected most European countries. Most of Libya’s oil that was cut off for a while was supposed to go to European countries, especially Italy, Spain, and France. Libyan oil production was about 1.7 million barrels a day until the civil war/ revolution began in February 2011. About 1.5 million barrels a day was exported. After the beginning of the conflict, production dropped to about 200,000 barrels a day, and did not recover until the post-civil war “recovery” that began about 8 months later. In the period between the start of the civil war/ revolution and the start of the ramp up, oil production dropped to 100,000 barrels a day and then on down to about zero barrels a day. Very little was exported during the times of the conflict. The fact that many European economies were growing slowly, or in some cases not growing at all, helped alleviate the potential effects of the cutting off of oil shipped from Libya. About 85 percent of Libya’s oil exports before the conflict went to Europe. The countries that relied considerably on Libyan were Italy, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, and France. However, most of these were in slow-growth phases due to the ongoing recession and growing financial crises in their countries. The tanker markets were also soft and there was significant excess capacity of oil production in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis tried to backfill some orders for Libyan crude, but some of these did not work out well due to the heavier, sourer nature of the available Saudi crude compared to the usually light, sweet crude out of Libya. Switzerland is different from the other European countries as its “consumption” of Libyan oil was mostly for trading the oil in hedge funds and the big commodity firms in Geneva. The rest of these countries needed it for their overall economic needs.

Libyan crude production increased to about 1.4-1.5 million barrels a day until further problems occurred in mid-2013 with strikes at the ports and some energy facilities. Production is now down to 200,000 barrels per day. The effects on prices has been a lot less this time than during the civil war due to new, more flexible trading arrangements and better planning for such contingencies out of Libya, but also because the European economy and tanker markets remain weak.

Many Americans may think that they are relatively immune from geopolitical turmoil in oil disruptions because of the shale oil and gas revolution in the United States and Canada. However, there is potential for the increase in trade of oil with Canada which will result in greater access to oil and gas.  But, this will not buffer the United States from the vagaries of oil prices caused by geopolitical events. This is mainly due to oil being a globally traded commodity.

Unlike the oil industry, the natural gas industry is not fully globally integrated, but it looks to be heading that way. As more countries invest in both conventional and unconventional reserves production, the development of LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) export and import facilities, and expansions of major international pipeline networks, the world natural gas market will have some great changes. Some of these may include the convergence of prices of natural gas globally. Recent prices of natural gas (FOB – Freight on Board, where the buyer pays for transport costs) in China were about $15 per MMBTU (Million British Thermal Units), a common measurement of natural gas amounts. In Japan they were in the $16-17 ranger per MMTBTU. In many parts of Western Europe LNG (FOB) prices were about $9-11 per MMBTU. Natural gas in the United States recently has sold for about $3 per MMBTU. Qatar could sell at cost for much lower, as it sells to the United States for about $3 MMBTU similar LNG that it sells to China and Japan for much higher prices. With the convergence of prices, the lower cost countries will likely be the survivors. Others may have to drop out if they have to export the LNG at a loss, unless the country subsidizes these exports, which would be problematic under the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements.

Those countries that develop their LNG export facilities the fastest will capture more of the most important markets (such as Japan, South Korea, and especially the potentially gigantic market in China), than those countries that doddle along in their decisions to export or not. The future of global gas markets is more of a very competitive and very expensive 4D chess game played by very powerful people, rather than just some engineering or economics exercise as some look at it.

As the now regional and segmented natural gas markets develop into global integrated markets, they  will become more efficient and regional prices will start to converge toward a global price, much like oil. As the global natural gas markets develop, there will be more spot markets developed and less need for long term contracts in many instances. For decades, oil and gas prices were linked. As a global natural gas market develops, and especially with the further spread of the shale gas revolution, fewer and fewer natural gas contracts will be linked to oil prices. However, this integration of the natural gas industry globally also brings the risk of terrorist or political driven turmoil at or near LNG ports, LNG ships, and even in the market trading centers in places far removed from the United States. The more globally integrated the natural gas markets are, the more likely reverberations to prices will occur globally, rather than just locally. It is sort of like dropping a large rock in a pond with many barriers compared to dropping a large rock in a pond without many barriers in it. The waves will have more extensive effects without the barriers.

At the moment, the United States has a special domestic market that is fairly immune from outside events, as one would expect that they would happen in Canada, the United States’ major natural gas trading partner. This will change over time as U.S. natural gas markets get more connected with the world. The United States have some buffers during difficult gas shocks globally due to massive shale gas reserves. However, it could take a long time for these reserves to surge into the domestic markets to make up for the price increases.

Large profits can be made in exporting natural gas to places like China, Japan, South Korea, and Western Europe where gas prices are much higher. Over time those price differentials will decline because more LNG and piped gas will be flowing to the more profitable markets, hence putting pressure on prices.  Global gas prices will tend to converge, but not entirely given different extraction, production, liquefaction and gasification prices.

With greater integration there are also new risks to consider. Some of these include potential attacks on major LNG facilities as natural gas becomes a more vital part of the world economy and some countries. There are also increased risks that as the global markets get more integrated in natural gas, events distant from the United States could affect prices in the United States much like what happens now with oil markets.

There are great profits to be made from exporting the potentially massive amounts of natural gas (mostly shale gas), from the United States into these newly developing world markets. (The greatest profits can be made in the first years of the development of these markets prior to the lowering of prices in Asia, Europe and higher priced areas as the markets get integrated.)

However, nothing is ever certain and some planning and emergency regulations may be required to help potential shocks from entering U.S. markets. Complete immunity is not possible when a market is globalized, but with proper consideration risks might be mitigated. A very large natural gas strategic reserve system might be best built and filled when the natural gas is cheap for times when it may be less accessible (likely for the short run given how quickly shale gas pads and production can be set up).

Cyber Risks

According to Europol there have been many cyber-raids in 2012 on logistics and computer networks connected to container ships by criminal gangs to obtain the illegal drugs they had hidden in the holds of the ship. The gang truck drivers were able to find the containers, get the security codes, and were able to get the drugs off the ship without being caught. This could be the start of far more serious cyber-attacks on shipping and maritime logistical networks. The oil and gas industry is information intensive and it is hard to get around that. Computer systems, the internet, and other cyber-based devices and operations are key elements to the operations of the industry. For example, Saudi Aramco and many other oil companies in the Middle East region have been cyber-attacked in recent years.

In addition, cyber-attacks have both financial and real effects, including distortions in the prices of oil and gas. Hacking into the derivatives and futures markets could wreak serious havoc on the industry. Real effects could include attacks on SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems that control oil and gas pipelines. SCADA is also used in refinery operations.  If a container ship can be hacked, how far off is it when an LNG or oil tanker is taken over or hacked? Tanker traffic is often controlled and monitored via computer systems and the internet. Clever cyber warriors and others are likely trying to crack these systems (or potentially have even cracked them at times), but the industry would rather not discuss such events. It may be entirely possible to use something like STUXNET on affected SCADA systems to send the wrong signals to those trying to monitor the complex logistics of the shipping. A ship may be seen on the company’s monitor being one place, whereas it might be somewhere else. That is anyone’s guess, but I suggest that is not impossible. The new pirates attacking tankers may be cyber-pirates sending in malicious code, not just the barefoot Somalis and others tossing hook anchors on to the stern of the tanker and climbing up.

Cyber risk can also have considerable effects on the overall supply chains for the oil and gas industry. To get an oil rig, a refinery, a series of pipelines up and running takes a massive administrative supply chain effort that could involve sometimes hundreds if not thousands of subcontractors and suppliers that have to get things done in a specific order and on time. Anyone who has built a house or even had a kitchen remodeled knows how important it is to get the carpenters, electricians, masons, and roofers to be on schedule and in the right order. Now consider the complexity of getting all the right people, equipment and information on schedule and in the right order in the build out of a complex oil rig in 10,000 feet of water 150 miles at sea with millions of dollars (and maybe lives) at risk due to any scheduling mistakes.

A cyber-attack on major refineries and pipeline systems could bring costs that may seem unthinkable at the moment. However, this could just be a matter of time if the industry does not constantly update its protective systems and understanding of the risks. The industry remains constantly vigilant as hackers and cyber-warriors like the SEA (Syrian Electronic Army) are always looking for opportunities to attack. Constant vigilance will not be enough if one of these attackers gets “lucky” and gets through. The sophistication of cyber warriors and hackers is not static, nor should the sophistication of the oil and gas industry to counter these threats be static.

Note: All opinions expressed are those of the author alone. Sources supplied upon request.

Paul Sullivan is the Adjunct Senior Fellow for Future Global Resources Threats at the Federation of American Scientists and a Professor of Economics at the Eisenhower School at the National Defense University. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University and a columnist for newspapers in Turkey and Mongolia.

Dr. Sullivan is an expert on resource security issues, with a special focus on the nexus of energy, water, food and land. He is also an expert on issues related to the economics, politics, and militaries in the Middle East and North Africa. 

The election of Hassan Rouhani as the president of Iran has breathed new life into the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. In recent months, a flurry of meetings has raised hopes that this program can remain peaceful and that war with Iran can be averted. But barriers still block progress. Among the major sticking points is Iranian leaders’ insistence that Iran’s “right” to enrichment be explicitly and formally acknowledged by the United States and the other nations in the so-called P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany). While it is a fact that Iran has enrichment facilities, it is not a foregone conclusion that Iran has earned a right or should be given a right to enrichment without meeting its obligations. Enrichment is a dual-use technology: capable of being used to make low enriched uranium for nuclear fuel for reactors or highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

Iran has consistently pointed to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) itself as using the word “right.” Indeed, the beginning of Article IV of the NPT states, “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.” [Emphasis added.] But rights come with responsibilities. In particular, the remaining part of the first sentence of Article IV concludes: “without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty.” Article I puts responsibility on the nuclear weapon states not to transfer nuclear explosives or assist a non-nuclear weapon state in manufacturing such explosives. Article II places responsibility on the non-nuclear weapon states to not receive nuclear explosives or to manufacture such explosives. Article IV is also linked with Article III, in which non-nuclear weapon states have the obligation to apply comprehensive safeguards to their nuclear programs to ensure that those programs are peaceful. Nuclear weapon states can accept voluntary safeguards on the parts of their nuclear programs designated for peaceful purposes.

Iranian leaders have also often said that they want to be treated like Japan, which has enrichment and reprocessing facilities. But Japan has made the extra effort to apply advanced safeguards to these facilities. Specifically, it enacted the Additional Protocol to the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, which gives the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to a country’s entire nuclear program and requires the IAEA to assess whether there are any undeclared nuclear materials or facilities in that country. In effect, the IAEA must act like Sherlock Holmes investigating whether there is anything amiss throughout a nuclear program rather than acting like a green-eye shade wearing accountant who just checks the books. Iran had been voluntarily applying the Additional Protocol before early 2006 when its nuclear file was taken to the UN Security Council. Then Iran suspended application of these enhanced safeguards.

While the deal announced on November 11 between the IAEA and Iran to allow the IAEA additional access and information on selected facilities and activities, it does not go far enough. Iran has left out the Arak heavy water research reactor and the Parchin site, in particular. The Arak reactor, which could start operations next year, has the type of design well suited to being able to produce weapons-grade plutonium. If Iran had a covert hot cell to reprocess irradiated fuel from this reactor, it could extract at least one bomb’s worth of plutonium per year depending on the level of operations. The Parchin site has been suspected of previously being used for testing of high explosives that might be relevant for nuclear weapons design work. Iran has stated that this is a military site not related to nuclear work and thus off limits to IAEA inspectors. Arak and Parchin are just two outstanding examples of sites that raise concern about Iran’s intentions and potential capabilities.

Without a doubt, Iran has the right to pursue and use peaceful nuclear energy. But before it is given a formal right to continue with enrichment, it has to take adequate efforts to ensure that its nuclear program is fully transparent and well safeguarded. The United States and its allies would concomitantly have the obligation to help Iran meet its energy needs and remove sanctions that have been in place against Iran’s nuclear program.

Starting from literally table-top science in 1939, the development of a full-fledged nuclear weapons production system in the United States by late summer 1945 is properly regarded as a near-miraculous achievement. It’s no surprise that the Manhattan Project has long been hailed as one of the great success stories of modern science and technology.

But it has become increasingly common to invoke the Manhattan Project as a general exemplar of applied science. Using Google’s Alert service, one can see that almost every week someone, somewhere, calls for a “new Manhattan Project.” Apparently, we need a Manhattan Project for cancer, for AIDS, for health, for solar power, for alternative energy, for fusion power, for thorium reactors, for global warming, for cybersecurity, for nutritional supplements (!), and, most literally, for protecting the island of Manhattan from the rising seas.

The historical trends of this invocation can be roughly charted with the Google Ngram Viewer, which charts word frequencies across the massive Google Books corpus. Searching for the terms “a Manhattan Project for” and “a new Manhattan Project” reveals the following interesting trend regarding relative usage in American English:

Figure 1

Relative instances of the phrases “a Manhattan Project for” and “a new Manhattan Project” in the Google Books corpus. A similar trend can be found for “a Manhattan Project,” though there is more noise due to phrases like “a Manhattan Project veteran.” Google Ngrams Viewer is case-sensitive.

As the data shows, while such phrasing in general was not completely unheard of during the Cold War, it was pretty rare. Only with the fall of the Soviet Union did this specific phrasing start to rise in frequency.

The Manhattan Project ought to mean much more than just “a big government investment,” should it not? But if we did want to draw out lessons from the Manhattan Project, in order to better use it as an exemplar for contemporary discussions, what would we say? What would a call for a new Manhattan Project really mean if we took it seriously?

The overriding factor of the Manhattan Project- the policy that touched everything and affected everything it touched- was secrecy. As such, one obvious contradiction in calling for a “new Manhattan Project” is there were no public calls for a project to develop an atomic bomb because it was secret. Instead, there was private lobbying for such work. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard famously wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 arguing for government investigation into the possibility of the military applications of uranium fission, and this resulted in the creation of a small, exploratory “Uranium Committee.” Several not-terribly-productive years later, after seeing enthusiastic calculations from the United Kingdom, the work was scaled up, turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers, and formally became the Manhattan Project. This too was done in secret by well-connected insiders. Had anyone actually made a call for an American atomic bomb effort, they would have been rudely silenced by the Manhattan Project security team for drawing too much attention to the issue. ¹

This secrecy also quite deliberately meant that only the slimmest accountability was enforced. Congress was purposefully excluded from the “secret,” because, as the scientist-administrator Vannevar Bush put it to Roosevelt, “it would be ruinous to the essential secrecy to have to defend before an appropriations committee any request for funds for this project.”² For this reason, all of the early funding for the research was taken out of special discretionary funds that Roosevelt had at his disposal, the beginnings of the famed nuclear “black budget.” When Congressmen attempted to investigate or audit the mysterious project that was soaking up so many precious wartime resources, they were scolded and shooed off.³  Eventually a small group of politicians were brought into the fold for the express purpose of green-stamping any further appropriations requests and enforcing silence amongst the other Senators and Representatives.

This secrecy also masked cost overruns. When Bush got Roosevelt’s approval for an expanded black-budget funded effort for the bomb, he guessed it would cost $400 million, what he admitted was “a serious figure.”⁴ But the bomb proved to be much more costly to construct. As the work proved to be more difficult and expensive, the total amount of funds (and manpower and material) seamlessly increased. The final Manhattan Project would consume some $2 billion, five times the original estimate, and employed nearly one out of every thousand Americans in one capacity or another at its peak, the vast majority working in ignorance of the ultimate purpose.⁵

The secrecy also hid mission creep. The initial work had been done out of fear that the Germans were devoted to building a bomb (an assumption that proved to be not correct — while the Germans did investigate the question in an exploratory fashion, they never dedicated the resources or manpower necessary to actual constitute a true bomb production program). The American atomic bomb, then, was originally meant to be a deterrent, not a “first strike” weapon. But as the work progressed and resources were invested in the development, a mostly-unquestioned assumption took over that the first atomic bombs were meant to be used, whether the enemy in question had atomic bombs themselves. Similarly, the focus shifted from Germany to Japan. Towards the very end of the project, a group of scientists at the University of Chicago (among them many of those who would later found the Federation of American Scientists) attempted to open up a discussion about this shift, but their proposals were never taken seriously by those in positions of power.⁶ From the very beginning, however, the question of wartime policy was explicitly limited to less than a dozen individuals, in the name of secrecy as well as simplification.

What of the long-term consequences of the atomic bomb? Because of the haste and secrecy of the wartime work, these were only rudimentarily explored, and only a handful of opinions were considered. A small “Interim Committee” was appointed by the Secretary of War in May 1945 with the goal of considering end-of-war problems. Postwar, they primarily directed their attentions towards approving of the post-Hiroshima “publicity” strategy (their term), domestic legislation whose insulated, military nature led to its almost immediate rejection by the postwar Congress, and only the vaguest of considerations about what the implications of atomic weapons were for the postwar international order. As a result, the United States left World War II with no coherent domestic or international position with regards to atomic energy, leading to missed opportunities and policies founded on deeply incorrect assumptions, such as the existence of a unitary atomic “secret” and the long-term viability of an American nuclear monopoly. At a minimum, it also led to the postwar decline of the expensive Manhattan Project infrastructure, causing a languishing of the American nuclear program until the late 1940s.

Separately, most invocations of the Manhattan Project frame it as a primarily “scientific” endeavor. But while the importance of the pure and applied scientific contributions was mighty, the bulk of the effort and resources for the work went towards engineering and construction. The fissile material sites at Hanford and Oak Ridge consumed around 80% of the total expenditures. Los Alamos, the “hub” of scientific research, accounted for only 4% of the expense.⁷ This is not to discount the contribution of science or the scientists. Rather, it is to emphasize that the atomic bomb production effort was less of a scientific endeavor than it was a massive collaboration between the military, the civilian federal government, industrial contractors, and academic scientists. Every one of those components was necessary for the final outcome — it was a true military-industrial complex before we had a term for it.

As an aside, we now also know that the much-vaunted, much-championed secrecy of the atomic bomb — which had so many problematic side-effects — did not keep the Soviet Union from infiltrating the project deeply. Even the ignorance of the Axis powers seems, under close scrutiny, largely due to the fact that their intelligence-gathering capabilities in the domestic United States were largely stillborn (as was the Axis nuclear program), and that they missed many high-profile leaks and other indications. In other words, while the secrecy apparatus had so many problematic implications for policy both wartime and after, it was not even especially effective at keeping the secrets in question.

Instead of “the Manhattan Project” being a stand-in for a large, government-supported scientific effort, we ought to regard its legacy in a much more nuanced way. It was indeed a large government effort, one where academic science played an important role. But it was also a full-fledged, over-budget government-military-industrial collaboration, one where the requirements of secrecy trumped all other concerns, including democratic deliberation, consideration of long-term consequences, and consideration of mission creep. And this secrecy itself proved fallible, keeping Congress and the American public out of the discussion, but not Joseph Stalin.

Scholars still debate the role of the atomic bomb in the surrender of Japan and the morality of using the weapons against largely civilian targets. But even if we accept that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end the war, American attitudes towards the bomb were marked by heavy ambivalence even at the time.⁸ As such, even if the atomic bomb is taken as a “means to an end” of the application of science and technology to specific problems, it is a troubling one. Do those who call for new Manhattan Projects want their results to be so similarly fraught, so similarly morally and historically divisive?

Of course, nobody who invokes the Manhattan Project as something to be emulated means it in quite a complex and problematic a register as described above. There are very few modern projects that even resemble the Manhattan Project (though some of the newly-revealed surveillance programs of the National Security Agency may fit the bill in terms of their scope and secrecy).  But that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be invoked frivolously and trivially. Even heavily abstracted, it is a troublesome exemplar.

Are there better examples of national triumph that could be invoked instead? In truth, most large-scale projects have had their critics and detractors. Project Apollo is today sometimes nostalgically invoked as an example of an unambiguous good, a sign of lost American scientific greatness. Historians would be quick to point out that it was not perceived as such in its time — that there were many who saw it as an extravagant piece of Cold War propaganda at a time when the country was undergoing deep and lasting changes due to domestic social unrest. Still, as far as applications of science, technology, and government funding go, even its most problematic aspects are far tamer than the many tens of thousands of deaths that resulted from the Manhattan Project.

There is also the “War on Cancer,” which suffers from the unfortunate fact that cancer is still a major killer, making it seem like a failure. This is perhaps an unjustified conclusion, given the number of cancers which are now considered treatable, and the amount of raw knowledge gained about cancer in general through this program. But it is understandable, so why is it not invoked quite as frequently?

We might also consider the Human Genome Project as such a model, especially for projects which involved collaboration between government laboratories, academic scientists, and corporate interests. The Human Genome Project was a massive, long-term collaboration on a goal which by itself provided arguably little tangible outcome, but created new tools, new analytical methods, and new opportunities for future medical and commercial benefits. This model has its detractors, as does any large-scale application of money to specific scientific outcomes. And the commercialization of biology may, in the end, provoke as many ethical quandaries as the militarization of physics did.

The only conditions in which we should want to create another Manhattan Project, with its warts and all, are those in some way comparable to those that led to the original Manhattan Project: existential threats on the magnitude of those posed by the fear of a Nazi atomic bomb. Even then, anyone embarking on such an endeavor should be aware that the Manhattan Project itself was not a model for an orderly, democratic, unambiguously positive government science project. It was problematically un-transparent, over-budget, under-considered project to create weapons of mass destruction which were then debuted to the world by being detonated over two cities mostly inhabited by civilians. That’s a pretty heavy load to invoke trivially.

Alex Wellerstein is an Associate Historian at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. He received his PhD from the Department of History of Science at Harvard University in 2010. He is currently in the final stages of a book on the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States, from the Manhattan Project to the present. He is also the author of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.

On November 28, 2002, terrorists fired two Soviet-designed SA-7 man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) at an Israeli plane destined for Tel Aviv as it departed from Moi International Airport in Mombasa, Kenya. The missiles missed their target but the incident was a wake-up call for governments around the world. Shortly after the attack, the United States created an inter-agency task force to counter the threat posed by MANPADS, with other countries following suit. These countries launched several initiatives aimed at securing and destroying surplus, obsolete and poorly secured stockpiles of missiles; strengthening controls on international transfers of MANPADS; and improving information sharing on the international trade in these weapons. But are these efforts enough?

In the report, “The MANPADS Threat and International Efforts To Address It”, Matt Schroeder, Director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project, assesses the terrorist threat from MANPADS, evaluates efforts by the international community to curb this threat, and proposes additional measures that governments can take to further reduce the illicit proliferation and use of MANPADS.

The Federation of American Scientists would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for their invaluable contributions to this report: James Bevan, Jeremy Binnie, Peter Courtney-Green, Gene Crofts, Alan Flint, Andy Gleeson, Jose Manuel Heredia Gonzalez, Paul Holtom, J. Christian Kessler, Stephanie Koorey, Jonah Leff, Cheryl Levy, Maxim Pyadushkin, Steve Priestley, Saferworld, Small Arms Survey and officials from the Organization of American States, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Wassenaar Arrangement , along with officials from numerous governments.  Without their talent and support, this study would not have been possible.

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Speech by Hans M. Kristensen
Director, Nuclear Information Project
Federation of American Scientists
To the Deterrence and Assurance Working Group
USAF Global Strike Command
Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana
May 7, 2013

Editor’s Note: The following remarks were presented to the Deterrence and Assurance Working Group at USAF Global Strike Command at Barksdale Air Force Base in  Louisiana on May 7, 2013.

Let me begin by thanking General Kowalski for the invitation to come down here to Barksdale Air Force Base and address the Deterrence and Assurance Working Group.

I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit that for someone working in the NGO nuclear arms control community standing here today is somewhat akin to being in the lion’s den.

Be that as it may, few in my community discuss deterrence and assurance directly with the military community, which I believe is a significant problem for the public debate because it leaves an enormous gap in perceptions about the issues.

And I also understand that deterrence and assurance is not just – or even predominantly – about nuclear forces, but I have to limit my talk so the nuclear issue is what I will focus on today. And let me emphasize from the start: I do not have clearance. So this is an unclassified observer looking in from the outside.

In the public debate we assess nuclear force levels based on a very simple equation of how much terrible damage ought to be enough to deter anyone.

In the nuclear planning community the first issue is of course also deterrence, but it is as much about assessing what kinds of forces and scenarios are needed if and when deterrence fails.

This perception gap means that we – the arms control community on one side and the military on the other side – essentially talk about two different things.

Right now the public debate is very much dominated by the issue of costs. How much can we afford and for what purpose and how much and of what kind do we need to have sufficient deterrence and assurance?

Most people in my world feel that the nuclear posture is still far too dominated by Cold War thinking and out of sync with the world we live in today or can see on the horizon. I am not of the opinion that one can just do away with nuclear weapons in a heartbeat but I believe there are possibilities for significant responsible reductions that still leave more than enough for deterrence and assurance to work.

How much depends on the role and tasks the president assigns to the nuclear force. That can change. It has changed. And it will continue to change. Anyone can see that nuclear weapons states and allies have very different perceptions about how many and what types of nuclear weapons it takes to deter and assure sufficiently.

If you ask Russia and the United States, the answer is that several thousand nuclear warheads are needed for immediate tasks, technical hedge, and reconstitution in case of geopolitical surprises. But if you ask China, Britain and France the answer is a few hundred. In India, Pakistan and Israel the number required for national security is even lower.

Similarly, Russia and the United States also insist that a Quadrad (that is a Triad of strategic launchers plus non-strategic nuclear forces) is needed, each leg with unique attributes to provide sufficient flexibility and options for deterrence and assurance to work and the national leadership to have enough different options in a crisis. China, India, Pakistan and possibly Israel are also trying to build Triads, but theirs are much smaller and less capable. France used to have a Triad, but gave up its land-based missiles in the 1990s and now says that a Dyad is sufficient for its national security needs. Britain has gone even further to a Monad with a single weapon system and is even debating whether it needs that anymore.

Russia and the United States also say that deterrence and national security require that more than 1,500 of their warheads are deployed on launchers, and that several hundred of those warheads must be on high alert 24/7/365 and ready to launch in a few minutes. Britain and France say they can do with much lower readiness levels, while China, India, Pakistan and Israel don’t see a need to have warheads deployed on launchers or on alert at all.

In 2009, a newly elected President Barack Obama re-energized the international arms control community with a speech in Prague that committed the United States to “take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons” and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy” to “put an end to Cold War thinking.”

The speech scared the heck out of the nuclear community and had it not been for the Minot incident just two years earlier and the subsequent effort to reinvigorate the Air Force nuclear mission, the air-delivered nuclear posture both here in the United States and in Europe might have looked very different today.

The ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons is not new but has been U.S. policy since the 1960s, regardless of whether the administration at the time was Republican or Democratic or whether they were increasing or decreasing the nuclear arsenal. But the pledge to “put and end to Cold War thinking” seemed new. Unfortunately, the president did not explain what he meant by that other than to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.”

That role or prominence has of course already decreased significantly since the Cold War as missions and tasks fell away with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the demise of the Soviet Union, and improvements in conventional capabilities. The Quadrennial Defense Review, Ballistic Missile Defense Review and Nuclear Posture Review all hinted of further reductions in the role of nuclear weapons, but this appeared to depend on further improvements in non-nuclear capabilities.

Because of this change, the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) determined that the United States “is now prepared to strengthen its long-standing ‘negative security assurance’ by declaring that the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.”

Previously, this long-standing policy depended on whether a non-nuclear adversary was in an alliance with a nuclear weapon state, but by issuing the new “strengthened assurance,” the NPR stated, ”the United States affirms that any state eligible for the assurance that uses chemical or biological weapons against the United States or its allies and partners would face the prospect of a devastating conventional military response…” (Emphasis added).

This language has been widely used by officials and interpreted by analysts and journalists as the NPR reducing the role of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear attacks. President Obama has even stated publicly that he has reduced the role. “As President, I changed our nuclear posture to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” he said in a speech at Hankuk University in South Korea last year. “We’ve narrowed the range of contingencies under which we would ever use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.”

The year before that, National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon declared that the NPR had created a “new doctrine” that “reduces the role of nuclear weapons in our overall defense posture by declaring that the fundamental role of U.S. nuclear forces is to deter nuclear attacks” (emphasis added) as opposed to deterring conventional, chemical and biological attacks.

But it is not clear to me how and to what extent a reduction in the role has happened because of the NPR. When has the “fundamental role” of U.S. nuclear weapons not been to deter nuclear attack? Moreover, the reduction in the role that has taken place appears to have occurred well before the NPR following the elimination of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional threat to Europe and subsequent improvements in U.S. and allied conventional capabilities and counter-weapons of mass destruction capabilities. Even the “strengthened assurance” comes with a huge exemption. According to the NPR:

“In the case of countries not covered by this assurance – states that possess nuclear weapons and states not in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations – there remains a narrow range of contingencies in which U.S. nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring a conventional or CBW attack against the United States or its allies and partners. The United States is therefore not prepared at the present time to adopt a universal policy that the ‘sole purpose’ of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the United States and our allies and partners…” (Emphasis added).

Neither the public, allies, friends nor adversaries know much about U.S. nuclear war planning, except that the current strategic nuclear war plan is called OPLAN 8010-12 Strategic Deterrence and Force Employment, and that it is a “family” of plans with a myriad of options directed against half a dozen potential adversaries. But since all of these adversaries are exempt from the “strengthened assurance,” it is hard to see how the NPR has reduced the role of nuclear weapons.

In fact, according to one former White House official, the strengthened negative security assurances were “deliberately crafted to exclude countries like North Korea and Iran which threaten our allies – or countries that depend on us – with a range of potential nuclear, biological, chemical and conventional threats.”

Of course, President Obama also said in Prague that as long as nuclear weapons exist the United States will retain a safe, secure and effective nuclear arsenal. He also acknowledged that nuclear disarmament might not happen in his lifetime.

Not surprisingly, everyone has been cherry picking his or her favorite bit of the speech. The arms control community and State Department focus on the bit about reducing the numbers and role of nuclear weapons, the military focuses on the bit about maintaining and modernizing the nuclear arsenal, while conservative lawmakers have been focusing on preventing further reductions.

And in return for a yes vote on the New START Treaty, the administration agreed to significant nuclear modernizations – by some accounts $214 billion – over the next decade. In fact, it has been amazing to see the Obama administration securing more funding for nuclear modernization than the Bush administration was able to do. As a former administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration commented a couple of years ago: “I would have killed for such a budget.”

The twin-commitments to reductions and elimination on the one hand and sustainment and modernization on the other hand have created a somewhat schizophrenic nuclear policy where it can be hard to see what the focus is.

Whether one likes it or not, however, the pledge to reduce the role of nuclear weapons is now a central element of U.S. nuclear policy and to the international community’s perception of what it is.

So it is very important for deterrence, assurance, as well as non-proliferation goals that the role – reduced or not – is not blurred or spun too much. It has to be real and genuine. There are two regions where this is particularly important.

One is the Korean Peninsula where the interaction between deterrence and assurance is particularly striking. The United States has for many decades sought to deter North Korea and assure South Korea, but with North Korea’s nuclear tests the mission has recently taken on new importance.

But with nearly 30,000 U.S. troops deployed in South Korea, large-scale joint exercises, bombers rotating through Guam, eight ballistic missile submarines patrolling in the Pacific with hundreds of nuclear warheads, annual joint U.S.-South Korean statements reaffirming the nuclear umbrella, and significant U.S. and South Korean conventional force modernization over the past two decades, how does one deter the North more or better? And if all of that does not assure the South, what will?

Yet when North Korea earlier this year set off a third nuclear test, launched a missile in defiance of the international community, and issued direct nuclear threats against the United States, all of the above capabilities, operations and statements didn’t seem to matter very much. So B-2 and B-52 bombers were deployed as well to demonstrate extra deterrence and assurance. But how do we know that they made any difference in Pyongyang or in Seoul? What we could see, however, was that they played directly into the North Korean brinkmanship by being used to justify the next outrageous threat. I think what worried me the most was how willing each side was to walk up the escalation ladder until someone finally said: “hold on a minute.”

But now we’re committed. So next time North Korea does something stupid and we do not send the bombers, then what are we signaling? And if sending bombers only makes North Korea ramp up its threats even more, will we then have to re-deploy non-strategic nuclear weapons to South Korea to be taken seriously?

In Europe the situation is very different. There is little need for nuclear deterrence but plenty of people who say they need assurance. After two decades of unilateral reductions of U.S. non-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe and NATO saying Russia is not an adversary and the remaining weapons are not aimed at anyone, the 2010 Strategic Concept and 2012 Deterrence and Defense Posture Review concluded that the weapons in Europe should not be reduced more unless Russia was willing to reduce its inventory of non-strategic nuclear weapons.

Yet Russia is not a military threat to NATO and does not have the conventional capability to conduct a large-scale attack. So it is using non-strategic nuclear weapons to compensate for the much more advanced conventional forces of the United States and NATO.

Nor are the national security concerns of Eastern European countries and their need for assurance about Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons. They are about border security, organized crime, minority issues, and a general and understandable uneasiness about Russia after years of being occupied by the Soviet Union. Indeed, if Russian eliminated all of its non-strategic nuclear weapons tomorrow, the Eastern European NATO countries would probably have exactly the same security concerns that they say they have today.

So in Europe the challenge is how to transition the alliance out of the remnants of the Cold War posture of forward-deployed non-strategic nuclear weapons to something that better captures the essence of Europe’s security situation today and better expresses the direction NATO wants to take in the future. Right now the Alliance seems stuck in the mud. Indeed, non-strategic nuclear weapons deployed in Europe are probably the least credible form of assurance because they are the least likely to ever be used or needed for the security concerns that face Europe today or in the foreseeable future.

So in conclusion I want to say that there are obvious deterrence and assurance challenges but I believe that they are predominantly about non-nuclear capabilities. The nuclear mission is in the background and it can be reduced further. And I am pleased to see that despite a recent tendency to take advantage of Congressional opposition to further nuclear reductions and instead modernize the entire legacy Cold War posture, the military community is spending more time thinking and planning about non-nuclear missions in support of deterrence and assurance.

Although there are nuclear challenges and any nuclear use would be horrific, I think the current scaled-down Cold War nuclear posture is above and beyond what it needed for sufficient deterrence and assurance. In a report to Congress in May last year, the Office of the Secretary of Defense – in a coordinated assessment with the Intelligence Community – expressed an extraordinary confidence in the nuclear posture even against the most severe of all potential nuclear threats.

It concluded that even if Russia conducted a disarming first strike, even significantly above the New START Treaty limits, it “would have little to no effects on the U.S. assured second-strike capabilities that underwrite our strategic deterrence posture” (emphasis added). Moreover, the DOD report stated, the “Russian Federation…would not be able to achieve a militarily significant advantage by any plausible expansion of its strategic nuclear forces, even in a cheating or breakout scenario under the New START Treaty, primarily because of the inherent survivability of the planned U.S. Strategic force structure, particularly the OHIO-class ballistic missile submarines, a number of which are at sea at any given time.”

I want to end with this statement because when we in the public debate read such an official assessment, we find it hard to understand why it is necessary to retain the large nuclear force structure and alert posture that we have today – not least in the current fiscal environment. Despite the challenges with Russia, it would be helpful to reduce the asymmetry in strategic nuclear forces to help remove some of the drivers for worst-case planning and improve the incentives to reduce overall force levels.

The Pentagon and the White House already have decided that it is possible to meet deterrence and assurance requirements with fewer nuclear weapons than we have today. And the administration’s long-overdue NPR Implementation Review might reduce the targeting and alert requirements. So the nuclear force level is not going to go up or stay the same but it will decline further in the future. The challenge for Air Force Global Strike Command therefore is not how to fight reductions but how to sustain sufficient deterrence and assurance at lower levels.

Let me end here and open up for any questions you might have. Thank you.

Hans Kristensen is theDirector of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists where he provides the public with analysis and background information about the status of nuclear forces and the role of nuclear weapons. He specializes in using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in his research and is a frequent consultant to and is widely referenced in the news media on the role and status of nuclear weapons.

His collaboration with researchers at NRDC in 2010 resulted in an estimate of the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile that was only 13 weapons off the actual number declassified by the U.S. government. Kristensen is co-author of the Nuclear Notebook column in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the World Nuclear Forces overview in the SIPRI Yearbook.