THE STUFF THAT BOMBS ARE MADE OF
Quigg, Samuel H. Day Jr. and Catherine Thiel
The Stuff That Bombs Are Made Of Reagan's nuclear bail-out would enlist power plants in the arms race BY SAMUEL H.DAY JR. AND CATHERINE THIEL QUIGG Six years ago, in the twilight of Gerald Ford's...
...He wanted answers to two questions: Would a nuclear test ban be in the best interests of the United States...
...He said the Department would be hard-pressed to meet the weapons demands of the 1980s...
...If we breach the distinction between military and civilian nuclear programs, it makes it much harder to preach that separation to others," said Joseph Nye, who coordinated nuclear nonproliferation policy in the Carter Administration...
...commercial reprocessing plant at West Valley, New York, had to close in 1972 after only six years of operation because of environmental and public health problems...
...Their argument, spelled out behind closed doors, was that the testing of nuclear weapons detonations was necessary to assure the reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile...
...The employe, who knows the correct number but is sworn to keep it secret, took a deep breath md said: "Just between you and me, that number is too low...
...The budget had jumped from $6.6 million in fiscal 1980 to $30.5 million in fiscal 1981., Within the current decade, Committee members were told, the Department plans to spend another $560 million, including $200 million for a laser isotope separation plant capable of enriching several tons of plutonium a year...
...Out of sight and out of mind of the general public, two decades of uninterrupted underground testing have enabled the superpowers (principally the United States) to develop an ever-widening assortment of sophisticated nuclear weaponry...
...In undermining the "deterrence" value of nuclear weapons, a test ban treaty might well bring about nuclear war...
...Even before Reagan entered the White House, the Department of Energy had issued dark warnings of a plutonium shortage and had begun beefing up its weapons-grade plutonium production and reprocessing facilities at Hanford, Washington, and Aiken, South Carolina...
...It was then that the Department of Energy let out the word about Livermore's secret experiments...
...Their paper was a technical sensation because it pointed to a solution for the most difficult problem in the development of nuclear energy—the enrichment of uranium at reasonable cost, for power as well as bombs...
...The Landauer position paper had been declassified in error by the Livermore laboratory, Representative English explained in a letter to the FAS after a classified briefing from the Department of Energy...
...It has been...
...It stated: "The assurance of continued operabil-ity of stockpiled nuclear weapons has in the past been achieved almost exclusively by non-nuclear testing...
...The real objective is to go after commercial spent fuel," says Thomas B. Cochran, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was the first to raise the alarm about the potential use of commercial fuels for weapons production...
...Gilbert estimated the plutonium content of the A "position paper" emerged in February 1980...
...Reactors designed for weapons material production yield plutonium rich in Pu-239...
...nuclear power development policies at home and abroad, has rested for decades on the assumption of a substantial technical and economic barrier separating production of the two grades of plutonium...
...The experimental technique, then in its infancy at the Federal Government's Liver-more and Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories, was called "laser isotope separation...
...test ban negotiator...
...Richard L. Garwin, a physicist with extensive weapons experience, and J. Carson Mark, head of the Los Alamos theoretical division from 1947 to 1973...
...In the United States, the Government's three uranium enrichment plants, employing the principle of gaseous diffusion, cost $3 billion each and consume more electricity than the entire continent of Australia...
...Reprocess it, pull out the plutonium...
...When the Department of Energy refused, after long delays, to release any part of UCRL-52911, the Federation of American Scientists last June brought the matter to the attention of Representative Glenn English of Oklahoma, chairman of the Government Information and Individual Rights Subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations, who was then holding hearings on the workings of the Freedom of Information Act...
...With the technology close at hand, why not turn to the commercial nuclear power program to help ease the shortage...
...The effectiveness of the barrier stems from the enormous degree of U-235 enrichment— from .7 to 90 per cent—required for weapons-grade uranium...
...Nevertheless, the labs seemed impelled to answer the arguments raised by Bradbury, Garwin, and Mark...
...Department of Energy, several West European governments, and the Soviet Union...
...It was potentially a far easier and cheaper way of refining weapons material from uranium, the basic element fueling nuclear energy...
...decreased about [dclctcd| since then...
...A member of the Nuclear Energy Council, an industry lobby, told The New York Times, "This could be a public relations disaster...
...In addition to providing firepower for the nuclear weapons buildup, Gilbert and others said the new laser isotope separation process would enable the Department to purify the plutonium content of the existing weapons stockpile, reducing radioactive exposure of military personnel, especially sailors who must share cramped quarters with nuclear-tipped missiles in the strategic submarine fleet...
...weapons builders secured a key concession: Testing would be prohibited only in the atmosphere...
...The second, built in Morris, Illinois, by the General Electric Company in the late 1960s, encountered such serious engineering problems that it never opened its doors as a reprocessing plant...
...The stockpile...
...But the U.S...
...A third commercial reprocessing plant has been nearing completion at Barnwell, South Carolina, but the revolutionary new breeder reactors that would ultimately consume the plutonium to be recovered at Barnwell have been slipping farther and farther into the future...
...It had been stamped "secret-restricted data," thus ensuring that it could not be publicly examined or debated...
...I put that question recently to a Department of Energy employe in pointing out to him that some peace activists are now placing the total as high as 35.000...
...The institutions which design and build nuclear weapons, fighting as if their lives depended on it, have grown accustomed to repelling the attacks of the test banners, but recently they lost a skirmish...
...Rather than separate the fissionable U-235 from other isotopes of uranium, Livermore aimed to separate Plu-tonium-239 from other isotopes of plutonium...
...The secret plutonium laser isotope separation program came to public light in September and October 1981 in the course of the unveiling of the Reagan Administration's new policy on "reprocessing"—the recovery of usable plutonium from the spent fuel rods of commercial nuclear power reactors...
...I hope that this explanation is helpful," English concluded...
...yield had been declining at least since the early 1970s...
...nuclear arsenal must be wildly high...
...Hearing of this, arms control advocates responded with a letter to Carter signed by three prominent nuclear weapons experts—Norris E. Bradbury, a former director of the Los Alamos lab...
...nuclear weapons builders: What if the Russians were to disguise their weapons tests as "peaceful nuclear explosions...
...uranium for nuclear power plant operations, by contrast, needs to be enriched only to 3 per cent...
...In the mid-1970s, under pressure from the powerful Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy to leave uranium enrichment experimentation to Exxon and Los Alamos, the Livermore laboratory quietly began training its laser beams on plutonium instead...
...Senator Gary Hart of Colorado fired off a letter to Secretary Edwards: "The very consideration of such a plan undermines the historic basic assumption of the Atoms for Peace program: that a clear distinction exists between the military and commercial applications of nuclear technology...
...No one contested Johnson, and hts figure caught on in arms control circles...
...In the meantime, however, two arms control organizations—the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Center for National Security Studies— filed a Freedom of Information Act request for release of an unclassified version of UCRL-52911...
...It did so by releasing the transcript of a classified hearing by a House Armed Services subcommittee early in March, just six weeks after the new Administration took office...
...Those who stay will lose their expertise because they do not have to face the hard reality of experimental validation...
...AND CATHERINE THIEL QUIGG Six years ago, in the twilight of Gerald Ford's Presidency, two American scientists caused an international stir by announcing a U.S...
...Department of Energy produces three new warheads a day—or about 1.000 a year— the estimate has been creeping up to 30.000...
...About 17,000 new warheads would be needed over the next decade to arm the new MX missiles, the Trident submarine rockets, the Pershing II, the cruise missile, and a host of other delivery systems...
...weapons labs retreated to other objections...
...But for those who want to do away with testing—and with the nuclear weapons establishment itself—the matter is still open...
...But what about the problem of all the impurities in the reactor-grade plutonium—the Pu-240, the Pu-241, and the Pu242...
...Carter's drift toward military escalation, following the Iranian hostage seizure and the Afghanistan invasion late in 1979, removed any immediate threat to the labs and doomed the U.S.-British-Soviet CTBT negotiations then under way in Geneva...
...readily and economically be separated from the remaining 99.3 per cent by means of a laser beam...
...It also subsided as a matter of public concern, because a recession in nuclear power plant construction produced a glut of enriched uranium, and a diminished interest in new enrichment facilities...
...For the remainder of Ford's term in office, through four years of the Carter Administration, and well into the regime of still another President, laser isotope separation disappeared from public view...
...The plutonium separation program would meet a variety of military needs, the Department's representatives testified...
...M The Numbers Game How many nuclear warhead* does the United States have in its arsenal...
...But the intended pace and scale of development suggested a larger purpose...
...This is contrary to popular opinion in the outside world that wc have been building up our nuclear stockpile...
...industry's unprocessed fuel rods at seventy tons...
...rare to the point of non-existence for a problem revealed by the sampling and inspection program to require a nuclear test for its resolution...
...The Department's weapons-grade plutonium needs are acute because plutonium, better suited for smaller warheads, is replacing enriched uranium as the nuclear deII If we erase the distinction between military and civilian nuclear programs, it makes it II much harder to preach that separation to others tonating material in atomic weapons, said F. Charles Gilbert, the Department's acting deputy assistant secretary in charge of nuclear materials...
...Further complications arose because once it was determined that the preprint was classified, the fact of its classification was also classified...
...Forty pages of testimony that included the remarks of C. Paul Robinson, the bright young uranium enrichment researcher now risen to the rank of Associate Director for National Security Programs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the story of how the United States had penetrated the mystery of converting its commercial nuclear power reactors into nuclear bomb factories...
...One set of problems stemmed from technical difficulties encountered in reprocessing the highly radioactive reactor-grade plutonium...
...The bizarre combined result in this case was that the FAS was denied in total a declassified version of a document which, in fact, had been declassified more than six months before by its author and submitted to a magazine," wrote Jeremy Stone, the Federation's director...
...Unlike uranium, which occurs in nature, plutonium is an artificial element, produced by burning uranium in a nuclear reactor...
...But last fall's revelations about Livermore's secret experiments changed all that...
...At the February 1976 meeting of the American Physical Society, C. Paul Robinson and Reed J. Jensen, from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, presented research results showing how Uranium-235, the fissionable isotope which accounts for only .7 per cent of natural uranium, could Samuel H. Day Jr., a contributing editor of The Progressive, is an author, lecturer, and political organizer based in Madison, Wisconsin...
...The intent of the nuclear industry always has been to "reprocess" the spent fuel rods, recovering their energy-rich plutonium and unburned uranium...
...He and several House Democrats launched legislative efforts to block the plutonium mining program...
...Newspeak: The Secret Weapon Twenty-four years ago, beset by worldwide protests over radioactive fallout and confronted with a Soviet proposal to ban all further nuclear weapons testing, a troubled President Eisenhower sought counsel from his Scientific Advisory Committee...
...What if the Russians were to doctor the weapons tests to make them look like earthquakes...
...The fears of Cochran and others seemed confirmed by Reagan's long-awaited nuclear policy statement on October 8, which spoke of reviving the industry by providing a "stable market" for plutonium reprocessing...
...But a few months ago, like some strange mutant grown monstrous in its long hibernation, laser isotope separation reappeared on stage as a full-fledged actor in today's unfolding nuclear policy drama...
...While Representative English pressed the Department of Energy for an explanation, other test ban proponents joined the attack...
...But the reprocessing plan ran into trouble in the early 1970s...
...We've spent years reassuring the public that nuclear power is separate from the weapons program...
...With an end to nuclear testing, UCRL-52911 warned, it would not be possible to design or deploy safer, more secure, cleaner, or more efficient nuclear weapons...
...There can be little doubt that, in the final agony of the nuclear power industry, "atoms for peace" is now rapidly returning to the military womb from which it sprang...
...Accompanied by the two lab directors^—Harold Agnew of Los Alamos and Roger Batzel of Livermore— Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger, himself a former director of the Atomic Energy Commission, called on Carter and told him that a comprehensive test ban treaty would be the ruin of the U.S...
...But the astonishing nature of the Reagan bailout did not emerge until his Secretary of Energy, James B. Edwards, began floating trial balloons late last summer...
...It is also generally known, however, thai as new weapons are added to the stockpile, older ones are retired and recycled...
...nuclear power industry...
...There are so many advantages to reprocessing," Edwards, a former dentist, told a meeting of the Energy Research Advisory Board on September 3. "One of the advantages, for example, is that we are going to be needing some more plutonium for our weapons program, and the best way I can see to get that plutonium is to solve your waste problem...
...The uranium would be recycled into fresh fuel rods and the plutonium would be similarly recycled or stored for use in a new kind of nuclear reactor, the plutonium-fueled "breeder reactor," now being developed by the U.S...
...The continued separation of "atoms for peace" from "atoms for war," which under-girds U.S...
...Physicists Hugh DeWitt of the Livermore lab and Gerald E. Marsh of the Argonne National Laboratory wrote an article for the Bulletin telling of the exist-" ence of the two nearly identical documents, one of which the Department had refused to declassify, and asking what the laboratories were trying to hide: "The answer is that the arguments against the comprehensive test ban treaty presented in the Landauer article cannot, we believe, withstand open and critical scrutiny, even though they represent, presumably, the best thinking of the weapons establishment...
...S.H.D...
...nuclear weapons program...
...Despite that gesture to private enterprise, the owner of the Barnwell reprocessing plant, Allied General Nuclear Service (AGNS), announced ten days later its intention to write off half its share in the plant because of regulatory and financial uncertainties...
...The most chilling aspect of the re-emergence of the new technology is that while no one outside the nuclear community was watching, the weapons labs found a way of applying laser isotope separation to plutonium, the other fissionable element that produces nuclear power and nuclear bombs...
...Three years ago F. Charles Gilbert, a highly placed administrator in the nuclear weapons program, told The Progressive that the number of weapons and their tola...
...the plutonium derived from reactors designed for nuclear power generation is thoroughly contaminated with heavier plutonium isotopes—Pu-240, Pu-241, and Pu-242—making it far less suitable for nuclear bomb manufacture...
...For most of the last decade—all during the Ford and Carter years—plutonium-laden spent fuel rods piled up in the storage pools of nuclear power plants all over the country...
...Roughly half of the nuclear activities long considered at least in part to be the responsibility of the private sector could, in effect, be nationalized...
...The battle, still far from resolved, is over whether the United States, by agreement with other nuclear weapons powers, should cease the experimental detonation of atomic weapons...
...The reasons why the paper should have remained classified were also classified, he added...
...Gilbert made that point again last March in testimony to a House Armed Services subcommittee...
...Finally, in November, the Department of Energy dropped its efforts to suppress the Landauer position paper, explaining to Representative English that "changed circumstances"—presumably, the publication of the DeWitt-Marsh article—had brought the preprint into the public domain...
...breakthrough in the technology of producing fissionable material for atomic bombs...
...By then, everyone knew that the Reagan Administration had plans for a massive increase in nuclear weapons production...
...Like the "peaceful atom" trip itself, the inevitable return journey bodes well neither for American democracy nor for world peace...
...There was an obvious reason for the Government's weapons designers to focus the new laser separation technology on Plutonium-239: That is the plutonium isotope that best lends itself to nuclear detonation...
...Even more interesting than the contents of UCRL-52911 was a notation on its cover...
...Since ii is also widely believed, although it has never been confirmed, that the U.S...
...When the Soviets agreed to forego "peaceful nuclear explosions," and when they agreed to the implanting of U. S. seismic monitoring equipment in their own soil, the U.S...
...What does the Department of Energy have to lose by disclosing the correct number...
...The most commonly accepted estimate by those who don't know the secret is25.000 to 30.000, Those numbers had their origin in the mid-1970s, when David Johnson, a researcher for the Center for Defense Information, added up the Pentagon's nuclear weapons delivery systems and ventured a guess of 25,000...
...Separating Plutonium-239 from less desirable isotopes would build up the supply of high-grade weapons material...
...Others outside the industry were even more emphatic...
...Painstakingly, the Department of Energy's top experts explained to the friendly Armed Services Committee members how they had applied Robinson's uranium enrichment research to plutonium separation, discovered that it fit, and escalated the work into a fullblown demonstration project at the Livermore Lab...
...without testing, there was no assurance the weapons would work...
...Yet he is trying to preserve a semblance of it because he sees an ominous portent in the nuclear bailout policy now unfolding under Reagan...
...It is no longer just a gleam in the eye of Professors Robinson and Jensen or even of such proprietors as Exxon, which has shared in the research and taken out patents in the name of a subsidiary, Jersey Nuclear Avco Isotopes, Inc...
...Allied General's lack of enthusiasm for the bailout was shared by many others in the industry...
...The Livermore classification office approved the sanitized version—the Bulletin preprint—in August 1980, but, unexpectedly, the magazine rejected the manuscript, not realizing its political significance, whereupon Landauer decided to make no further attempt to publish it...
...The Robinson-Jensen paper was also a political sensation because it showed unmistakably that the United States, the international community's most fervent advocate of restraints and safeguards in atomic energy development, was secretly at work on a project that could remove one of the most effective barriers to the worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons...
...He added: "Since commercial reactors would be providing a strategic nuclear material, the Department of Energy weapons program may have to assume title over spent fuel in exchange for a payment or credit for the value of the recovered plutonium or uranium...
...If Gilbert is to be believed, most current estimates of the U.S...
...In addition to the heightened danger of worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons, Alvarez warned in a recent memorandum, "Mining weapons-grade plutonium from civilian reactor fuel will radically alter the nature of U.S...
...That would be enough for about 10,000 nuclear warheads of average size...
...I consider the matter closed...
...The Ford Administration's reaction to the uproar was typical of the way problems are handled in the nuclear weapons field: Rather than reassess its potentially troublesome new program, the Government tightened the secrecy rules and barred the publication of any further research reports...
...Ronald Reagan stepped into that mess with a promise to revitalize the nuclear industry...
...The other general problem underlying plutonium reprocessing was the gnawing uncertainty over whether it was wise to undertake large-scale production of so dangerous a substance, only a few pounds of which could be fashioned—albeit with great risk and uncertainty—into a crude atomic bomb...
...Didn't Secretary Edwards understand that you couldn't make decent weapons out of that kind of stuff...
...The conclusions of the committee were "yes" to the first question and a tentative "yes" to the second, recalls Herbert F. York, who served on the committee then and later became the chief U.S...
...The 1958 Science Advisory Committee recommendation led to a voluntary, mutual weapons testing moratorium that lasted fourteen months, and then, in 1963, to a test-ban treaty among the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain...
...That is a view which even the industry's friends are coming to share...
...That left Government purchase as the only option for the reprocessing of commercial spent fuel...
...It was a problem that had vexed scientists since the dawn of the nuclear age...
...The stable market would be the weapons program...
...Could a test ban be adequately monitored...
...Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all made it their expressed goal to negotiate a "comprehensive test ban treaty"—a CTBT—with the Soviet Union, finishing the job that had been begun in 1963...
...Behind it looms the larger question of whether the nuclear weapons program itself should continue to grow...
...The first U.S...
...The answers seemed straightforward enough to settle the matter then and there, but they touched off one of the longest-running battles in the history of the American nuclear weapons program...
...The details are worth recounting because of the light they shed on the bizarre and Byzantine tactics of the nuclear establishment, which usually conducts its affairs behind the screen of "national security...
...Robert Alvarez, Washington representative of the Environmental Policy Center and a determined investigator of the harmful effects of nuclear fission, is under no illusions about the "clear distinction" between the civilian and military nuclear programs...
...In 1977, when President Carter instructed American negotiators to seek a five-year treaty with the Soviet Union, the national weapons labs rolled out their biggest guns...
...Government ownership of civilian spent fuel brings with it major new responsibilities such as away-from-reactor storage of spent fuel, fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste treatment, and permanent storage...
...Wc have actually been decreasing it...
...And so nuclear weapons testing went underground...
...The distinction between the "weapons-grade" plutonium produced for military programs and the "reactor-grade" plutonium that commercial nuclear power reactors yield has long been of technical and political importance...
...With the nationalization and remilitarization of nuclear power in the United States, Alvarez sees a curtailment of the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a chipping away of the public accountability once forced upon the industry by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and a return to the time when Congressional jurisdiction of nuclear matters was restricted to a select few...
...What the President apparently had in mind was to unshackle plutonium reprocessing, expedite Federal breeder reactor research and development, and provide unspecified other subsidies for the hard-pressed industry...
...S.H.D...
...But always the policy has foundered on objections raised by the U.S...
...Anxious to smoke out the new arguments, a Livermore weapons physicist who supports the test ban treaty, Ray E. Kidder, prevailed on Landauer to prepare a sanitized version (all it took was the deletion of a few key words and a couple of photographs) and submit it for publication in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...
...Written by Joseph K. Landauer, an assistant associate director of the Livermore lab, it was entitled "UCRL-52911-National Security and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," and given wide distribution in the nuclear weapons community...
...Laser isotope separation is now well on the way toward full-scale development and may hold the key to the nuclear future envisioned by Ronald Reagan...
...Catherine Thiel Quigg is research director for Pollution and Environmental Problems, Inc., a public-interest group in Palatine, Illinois...
...While it is possible to make nuclear weapons from reactor-grade plutonium, the process is so risky and the results so unreliable that governments have tried it only on an experimental basis...
...UCRL-52911 trotted out the old arguments about verfication and stockpile reliability, and embellished them with the warning that a test ban treaty would cost the United States its best weapons scientists and engineers: "Some will leave weapons work for other fields or will leave because of the lack of experimental confirmation necessary for scientific professionalism...
...Two other established uranium enrichment techniques, based on the principles of centrifugal and aerodynamic separation, are only marginally cheaper and simpler...
...The closeness with which that number is guarded has led to wild variations in the assumptions of those who debate nuclear weapons policy...
Vol. 46 • February 1982 • No. 2
