The Rogue Nuclear Threat
Cohen, Sam T. & Douglass, Joseph D.
The Rogue Nuclear Threat BY SAM T. COHEN AND JOSEPH D. DOUGLASS, JR. S oon after World War II the United States, via the United Nations, sought to put nuclear weapons under international control....
...Roughly five million containers enter U.S...
...Let it explode in the harbor when the container is opened...
...Why would a country build a Nagasaki-vintage warhead knowing it could get the same bang in a far smaller package and without needing nearly so much plutonium...
...As Edward Teller once said, "The most difficult thing about designing an atomic bomb is to design one that doesn't work...
...Or will these distinctions be minor when compared with the political consequences...
...As it turned out, he was right...
...That would be more than adequate...
...Part of the U.S...
...Missing from this assignment is the fact that nuclear warheads and their delivery systems have advanced technologically over the years at an astonishing rate and that this information is generally available to any nation that wishes to exploit it...
...Building a missile to deliver a five thousand-pound payload is a lot more demanding than building or buying a missile to deliver a fifty-pound payload...
...To overcome fears that the Soviet Union would scuttle the effort, the CIA—in accord with White House desires—predicted that it would be well into the 1950s before the Soviets would be able to test their first atomic bomb...
...Mostly they mirrored U.S...
...Assumptions that are delimited, usually for political reasons, do a great disservice not only to the very idea of "intelligence but more fatally to the decision-makers, and, most important, to the nation and its citizens...
...He was profoundly correct, perhaps more than he realized...
...policy, with little relation to the actual Soviet doctrine, as clearly stated in Soviet classified military and political writings...
...ports each year...
...assessments of "would be" nuclear powers is that they will follow the course the United States took in its weapons development process, half a century ago...
...In sum, assessing the path of an allegedly backward rogue nation to achieving a nuclear threat may be quite different from doing so based on the assumptions of the past...
...harbor...
...Today the United States uncomfortably recognizes that Russia's nuclear stockpile is far greater than ours, although we have no basis for judging how much larger...
...Even defining a rogue-nation nuclear threat loses its meaning when one recognizes the demonstrated propensity for non-rogue nations to use rogue nations and non-nation players as surrogates, to mask their own intentions and presence behind the scenes...
...Moreover, where the intelligence analysts all run out of ink is the critical question: What happens if and when such an "anonymous" bomb does explode...
...His prediction was within a month of the actual Soviet test, whereupon the CIA turned on him and accused him of withholding information from them...
...estimates of Soviet nuclear capability were consistently underestimated...
...Such a nation can also steal a warhead or buy one, or so we have been led to believe in the wake of 9/11...
...Should a nuclear device explode in New York City or Washington or Los Angeles, will it really matter whether the explosion was twenty or two kilotons or how dirty the plutonium was...
...Still further, who needs an ICBM...
...While deplorable, the story of the first Soviet atomic bomb is an example of how nuclear "intelligence" is riddled with ignorance, incompetence, and just plain White House politics—not reality—dictating intelligence estimates...
...Yet, there is nothing to stop a non-rogue state with the expertise, capability, contacts, and know-how from orchestrating a nuclear event, or two or three, to create massive psychological, political, and economic damage, with that event designed to have all the telltale evidence implicating a rogue nation or non-state terrorist group...
...The most glaring assumption in U.S...
...Less than 3 percent are inspected...
...Obvious examples of such nations include North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, all of which are developing nuclear weapons and some of which may already have a worrisome number...
...For a rogue nation to achieve a meaningful deterrent capability, the yield of itswarhead has to be highly predictable...
...To assign only a handful of warheads to, say, North Korea, can be dangerously wrong...
...Thus, their first rogue nation warhead also will be of the Nagasaki vintage, even though there is ample open-source information of potentially huge reductions in size, weight, and the requirements for fissile material, plutonium in particular...
...Today, the same yield can be obtained in a warhead weighing less than fifty pounds, less than one foot in diameter, and with a significantly lower plutonium investment...
...Based on his reading of unclassified Soviet technical papers, he estimated that the Soviets were likely to test an atomic bomb within a matter of months...
...When global politics changed in the early 1990s, terrorism as a matter of policy suddenly became non-state supported, and this is still the case today...
...The greatest obstacle was the Soviet Union...
...At the same time, a young intelligence analyst at the Atomic Energy Commission came to a different conclusion...
...Fifteen years ago, international terrorism was, after considerable hand-wringing, recognized as being mostly state-sponsored...
...In the unlikely event that a container harboring a nuclear warhead be selected for inspection one day, well, so what...
...The system was developed and helped detect the first Soviet test, in August 1949...
...Today it is not just a case of a rogue nation building its own weapon...
...However, the U.S.-Russian nuclear firebreak mythology—religiosity, as the case may be—does not automatically apply to rogue nations, which are judged to be far less "responsible" or rational than the United States andmaybe—Russia respecting the use of weapons of mass destruction...
...Nuclear war is far too complex and loaded with unknowns to allow anyone, irrespective of how precisely calculated his warhead yields are or how sophisticated his computer programs, to gain a meaningful understanding of this vast imponderable...
...This is especially true when the delivery problem is considered...
...How will we assign blame when the evidence is vaporized...
...As happened with the U.S...
...Considering the immense destructive power of these warheads, it makes precious little difference whether the yield is twenty, ten, or even five or two kilotons—almost any yield below the theoretical maximum will suffice...
...To make matters worse, the young analyst—still in his twenties—had persuaded one of the AEC commissioners to go to President Truman and convince him of the immediate need for an airborne monitoring system...
...The warhead used to destroy Nagasaki in 1945 weighed some five thousand pounds, was about five feet in diameter, and used six kilograms of highly enriched plutonium, producing a yield of about twenty kilotons...
...The problem is starkly evident in the tactical area, where the Russians have thousands of nuclear weapons while—contrary to popular opinion, as reflected in the writings and spoken words of various news commentators—the United States actually has none...
...This again reflects the U.S...
...To assess a rogue country's nuclear warhead stockpile on the basis of sophisticated analytical requirements is ludicrous and arrogant, if not outright blind...
...Thus there are numerous routes to a capability that does not have to be large orhave predictable yields...
...Truman concurred...
...There is an endless array of possible tactics for placing a nuclear warhead, for example, in a container that eventually finds its way into a U.S...
...intelligence-agency arguments against a rogue nation acquiring such a capability is that highly enriched plutonium is normally produced only in special nuclear-fission reactors...
...The dominant states that supported, organized, and taught the terrorists were the Soviet Union and China, mainly the former...
...But that's the way the game is played in Washington in order to downplay the immediacy of the threat and thus pacify the citizenry...
...Given the close associations of rogue nations and terrorist and related groups, the operation itself can be divided in any number of ways and produce a disaster in ways that would give any customs inspector pause...
...Nor is this the end of the possibilities...
...The imbalance is rationalized by assuming, mirror-image-wise, that neither side would ever dare cross the nuclear firebreak because of the unpredictable, potentially catastrophic consequences...
...Using the smaller-sized warhead, the rogue nation can use a solid-fuel missile that is mobile, concealable, and capable of reaching the United States long before the United States could deploy an effective national missile defense system...
...Sad but true, in the years that followed, U.S...
...As Gertrude Stein might have explained it, "A bomb is a bomb is a bomb...
...logic in preparing to fight an all-out nuclear war, which required high-quality warheads and dependable performance, and in turn meant the use of highly enriched plutonium...
...government's politicized estimate of when the Soviets would "become a nuclear power," we have assigned to those rogue nations a technological backwardness that has little foundation...
...This was nonsense then and still is...
...Notwithstanding the irrefutable evidence that the Soviets had exploded a nuclear warhead of their own making, it was still a year before the CIA reluctantly acknowledged the test had actually taken place...
...As for the value of a "dirty" plutonium warhead—one having a high content of Pu240 that undergoes spontaneous fission, thereby emitting neutrons that might accelerate the chain reaction—pragmatically this is not all that significant in the context of political reality...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2
