According to the British counterintelligence group MI5, over 360 private companies, university departments, and government organizations in eight countries, including Israel, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, India, Egypt, the Pakistani High Commission in London, and the United Arab Emirates, have been procuring nuclear technology and equipment for use in nuclear weapons construction. Companies in Cyprus and Malta may also be fronts for these weapons of mass destruction. MI5 states that the nuclear arms supermarket is larger than anyone realized and that front companies in the United Arab Emirates are the hub for the nuclear weapons trade.1
Because of the coming “renaissance” of the nuclear power industry, twenty-five countries and consortia will have access over a period of two decades to Generation IV reactors fuelled by plutonium. Some will also have “closed nuclear fuel cycles,” with their very own reprocessing plants to produce plutonium, since the U.S. Department of Energy and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in their wisdom, have involved these countries in their Generation IV International Forum—the International Projects on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles (INPRO). This diverse collection of states includes Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Republic of Korea, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as the consortiums of Eurotom and the European Community. So at the same time that the IAEA and the U.S. government profess extreme concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, they are actively promoting and encouraging the dissemination of technology, expertise, and materials that make proliferation likely.
With sophisticated technology the minimum amount of plutonium required to make a bomb is 1 to 3 kilograms (2.2 to 6.6 pounds),2 however the generally accepted amount is 5 kg of weapons grade plutonium and 8 kg for reactor grade plutonium. The design is available on the Internet; the essential materials can be bought at any hardware store. A homemade plutonium bomb would be difficult to make but a bomb using highly-enriched uranium would be less so. And the world is awash in plutonium. Russia and the United States each have 34 metric tons of plutonium accrued from the dismantling of nuclear weapons. If they continue dismantling more old nuclear weapons, they will accrue another 100 metric tons of free weapons-grade plutonium, while hundreds more tons of plutonium will remain in the nuclear arsenals of the world.3
Apart from the military plutonium, over 1,500 tons of plutonium has been produced by civilian nuclear power plants globally.4 Although much of this material remains locked up in spent fuel rods mixed with highly toxic radioactive materials, countries such as Japan, France, India, Russia, and other European countries have been busily extracting their civilian plutonium from spent fuel rods by reprocessing their spent fuel. These countries have stockpiled over 200 metric tons at three large reprocessing plants: the Cogema facility in La Hague, France; British Nuclear Fuel’s Limited Sellafield plant in Cumbria, England; and Mayak in Russia.5 The Japanese are constructing a new reprocessing complex at Rokkasho on the northern island of Hokkaido;6 and Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and the United States are among the other countries that already possess commercially separated plutonium.7 If, as proposed by some, 2,000 new nuclear power plants are constructed over the next decades on the fallacious grounds of combating global warming, commercially produced plutonium could increase to 20,000 metric tons by 2050, dwarfing present inventories.
This is plutonium madness. Only one-millionth of a gram is a carcinogenic dose, and plutonium has a half-life of 24,400 years. In 1994, a report by the National Academy of Sciences described the Russian and U.S. military-derived stockpiles of plutonium as “a clear and present danger to national and international security,” and a report by the British Royal Society in 1998 addressing the British stockpiles of plutonium concluded that “the chance that the stocks of (civil) plutonium might, at some stage, be accessed for illicit weapons production is of extreme concern.”8
Unfortunately, although plutonium has been accumulating in vast stockpiles for many years, and at least five possible methods of plutonium disposal exist, to date not one laboratory or country has taken the most important essential steps to address the issue of loose plutonium. However most of these disposal methods leave much to be desired.
1. Plutonium could be mixed with uranium as MOX, or mixed oxide fuel, to be fissioned in light water civilian power reactors. This is not a good idea because it increases the amount of plutonium in civilian reactors, and, should there be a meltdown, there will be a large and very dangerous dispersal of plutonium to the four winds. Furthermore, the production of MOX fuel requires reprocessing of plutonium from weapons material, a very dangerous and dirty process.
2. Excess plutonium could be “transmutated” or fissioned in a fast reactor and converted to fission products that last 600 years, not 500,000 years, and that cannot be used for bomb fuel. But this does not solve the problem because these fission products are extremely radioactive, are medically dangerous, and concentrate avidly in the food chain compared to plutonium. However 600 years is still a very long time in human terms—24 generations. Furthermore, most of the plutonium is converted to fission elements with 0.7 to 1% of plutonium remaining.9
3. Breeder reactors could use the plutonium to generate electricity while breeding more plutonium. This is an extremely dangerous technology as previously described.
4. The plutonium could be mixed with high-level nuclear waste, making it inaccessible to thieves because extremely intense gamma radiation would deter their intrusion.
5. MOX fuel, a mixture of plutonium and uranium, fashioned into ceramic pellets, could be placed in zirconium or stainless steel fuel rods, which could then be mixed with intensely radioactive spent fuel rods from reactors. This lethal combination could then be stored in massive cylinders placed in deep geological storage facilities. Thieves would have great difficulty accessing this material deep underground and would be heavily irradiated if they approached the rods.10
In light of terrorist attacks using conventional weapons, it is only a matter of time before someone steals enough plutonium to make an adequate nuclear weapon. Then we proceed into the age of nuclear terrorism.
Meanwhile, with the world awash in plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the Bush administration pursues its own nuclear armament development policy that makes it increasingly likely that a rogue nation will procure and possibly use nuclear weapons. The United States has adopted three contradictory stances at the same time:
• It is aggressively forging ahead to build more nuclear weapons, stating that it will use them preemptively even against non-nuclear nations.
• It is instrumental in denying the right to build nuclear weapons to all but a handful of countries.
• In the context of promoting nuclear energy, it has offered dozens of countries nuclear technology and access to nuclear power fuel. The fission process makes plutonium, which can then be separated by reprocessing and converted to fuel for nuclear weapons. While the Bush proposal includes taking the spent fuel back to the United States, it is not clear that that process can be undertaken with no cheating.
Thus, even as there is much hand-wringing at the United Nations about the possibility that Iran and North Korea may be developing nuclear weapons, eight nation-states—Russia, the United States, France, China, Britain, India, Israel, and Pakistan—possess their own nuclear arsenals, and others are free to develop weapons without the admonitions that the United States and the United Nations are imposing upon Iran and North Korea. This strange juxtaposition of opposing attitudes needs to be examined in the context of the sixty-five-year history of nuclear fission and related weapons development.
The term nuclear weapon encompasses several varieties of bombs, each of which employs different explosive mechanisms. An atomic bomb can be fueled by either plutonium or uranium. An atomic bomb works by either imploding its plutonium trigger with chemical explosives, which exerts tremendous symmetrical forces upon the plutonium, or by exerting huge pressures upon a mass of highly enriched uranium 235. The plutonium or uranium reaches critical mass, causing an explosion equivalent to the explosion of thousands of tons of TNT.
A hydrogen bomb is made of three components: a primary composed of an atomic bomb, which explodes first with a fission reaction; a secondary composed of deuterium and lithium, which then produces a fusion reaction similar to the reaction in the sun; and a tertiary mechanism produced when the uranium capsule of the bomb undergoes fission and explodes. A hydrogen bomb is relatively cheap for a country to build compared to deploying thousands of soldiers on the battleground, and the explosions can be of megaton range—equivalent to millions of tons of TNT. Most bombs today are hydrogen bombs.
America made three atomic bombs in 1945. The first was named Trinity after the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and was exploded at Alamogordo in New Mexico in July 1945. The second, a uranium bomb called Little Boy, was exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the third, a plutonium bomb called Fat Man, was exploded over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Little Boy and Fat Man killed over 200,000 people, initiating the age of nuclear genocide.
The United States continued to make nuclear weapons after the end of the Second World War. Russia soon discovered the secret and joined the nuclear club in 1949; then Britain, France, and China got on board. In 1970, these five nations decided in theory that nuclear weapons should be abolished in the long-term and that, in the short term, only they should have the bomb; all others must be excluded from the nuclear club. To that end they drafted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which stated categorically that the nuclear nations would disarm and that nonnuclear weapons nations could not develop nuclear weapons. As compensation, the non-nuclear nations would be given access to “peaceful nuclear technology”—research reactors, nuclear power plants, and nuclear technology. The NPT, therefore, essentially gave non-nuclear countries the capacity to produce their own nuclear weapons, even as it forbade them to do so.
Under Article VI of the NPT, the nuclear armed nations also undertook not to enlarge their nuclear arsenals and to negotiate in good faith to secure their abolition. Since 1970 when the NPT was signed, the nuclear weapons nations have done the opposite, increasing their arsenals significantly.11
The overall state of world nuclear proliferation today is as follows:
• Eighteen countries now own uranium enrichment facilities which enable them to produce highly enriched uranium—the fuel for nuclear weapons. These countries include Pakistan, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, China, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.12 It is not clear what uranium enrichment facilities Israel or North Korea now possess.
• Under the legal auspices of the NPT, seventy countries now have small research reactors, most of which are fuelled with highly enriched uranium, a fuel also suitable for nuclear weapons production.13 These small research reactors also manufacture plutonium, making nuclear bomb materials available at each end of the research reactor’s operation. Civilian nuclear power plants are mostly fuelled with low enriched uranium, unsuitable for nuclear weapons, but they manufacture plutonium—over 200 kilograms per year. And although some say that it is well nigh impossible to make a nuclear weapon from reactor-grade plutonium, in 1962 the United States tested such a nuclear weapon, and it worked very well.14 Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is extremely worried about this situation and says that these widely distributed nuclear facilities are “latent bomb plants.”15
• Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, including the United States, Britain, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, China, and North Korea—an increase from the original five nuclear nations that signed the NPT.
• ElBaradei estimates that within a decade as many as forty more countries will have the ability to make nuclear weapons, and this may be an underestimate.16
• The United States has 10,500 nuclear weapons; Russia has 20,000; Israel has 110 to 190 or more; China has 400; France has 450; Britain has 185; India has 65; Pakistan has 30 to 50; North Korea has 2 to 9.17
Apart from the fact that so many countries now have access to nuclear technology, technologists from most of these countries were trained in nuclear technology by the nuclear-armed states, predominantly the United States. For instance, between the years 1955 and 1974, more than 1,100 Indian scientists received sophisticated nuclear training at U.S. nuclear facilities.18
In summary, seventy countries that now have the ability to develop their own nuclear arsenals are constantly being provoked as they observe the “nuclear club” refusing to disarm while the United States constructs even more nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia still maintain thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, 2,500 on the Russian side and over 5,000 on the U.S. side. This means that hydrogen bombs are constantly mounted on their missiles, which are maintained in launch mode, and a command from the president of either country could launch a nuclear war within minutes.
Moreover, the early warning systems are now so tenuous that nuclear war could occur by accident and not by design. The Russian early warning systems are decrepit and failing, and none of their early warning satellites are operable so that they are blind most of the time. This is a very dangerous situation because the United States still maintains a first-use winnable nuclear war strategy against Russia. Consequently, the Russians are never sure when or if the United States will launch a nuclear strike and destroy them and their population in a nuclear holocaust.19
So serious in this situation that Boris Yeltsin in January 1995 came within ten seconds of pressing his nuclear button and destroying the United States by accident.20 Because the missiles only take thirty minutes to go from launch to landing, and because it takes fifteen minutes for the nuclear command and control to determine whether or not the attack is real, both the Russian and the U.S. presidents are provided with only three minutes to make their launch decision.
With this situation as background, the Bush administration has adopted some very provocative and dangerous policies–all of them in direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty—which inevitably have led and will continue to lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in other countries. For example, although the Cold War is over, a new semi-autonomous agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration, was established by Congress in the year 2000 within the Department of Energy to oversee the development and production of new nuclear weapons. Los Alamos National Labs has just produced its first trigger for an atomic bomb since the Cold War ended, a sphere of finely honed and lathed plutonium that nuclear scientists call a “pit.” Los Alamos Labs have the capacity to produce 30–40 pits a year, and the plan of one DOE study is to make 500 new American hydrogen bombs annually, comparable to Cold War rates.
Because hydrogen bombs need tritium—radioactive hydrogen—for their fusion mechanism, the United States is also now proceeding to manufacture tritium at the Tennessee Valley Authority Watts Barr commercial nuclear power plant in Tennessee, which is then sent to the Savannah River site in South Carolina to be extracted by a new Tritium Extraction Facility. This is the first time since 1992 that tritium for nuclear weapons has been produced in the United States, and this is one of the few times that commercial and military enterprises have been combined in the United States.21
On the strategic front, the Bush administration has drafted a revised plan allowing military commanders to request presidential approval to use nuclear weapons to preempt an attack by a nation or terrorist group deemed to be planning to use weapons of mass destruction. These military commanders will also be permitted to use nuclear weapons to destroy known enemy stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The document says that preparations must be made to use nuclear weapons and to show determination to use them “if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use.” The United States has always had a “first-use” policy against nuclear-armed nations, but now this strategy is also being applied to non-nuclear nations for the first time. The “revised plan” reflects a preemptive nuclear strategy first enunciated by the White House in 2002.22 Had this strategy been in place before the invasion of Iraq, a nuclear attack could have been justified to “take out” Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction.
Other disturbing features of this document include authorization of the use of nuclear weapons against states without WMDs—to counter potentially overwhelming conventional adversaries, to secure a rapid end of a war on U.S. terms, or to “ensure success of U.S. and multinational operations.” The draft document also gives the Pentagon permission to deploy nuclear weapons in parts of the world where their future use is considered most likely, and it urges troops to train constantly for nuclear warfare.23 Although Congress voted in 2004 to discontinue research on the earth-penetrating nuclear bunker buster, this draft document calls for its continued development, and the U.S. Senate voted in July 2005 to revivify the bunker buster.24
With this combination of strategies and weapons developments under way in the world’s most powerful nation, it is no wonder that many countries are pushing to develop their own nuclear arsenals. As Joseph Rotblat, an original member of the Manhattan Project who resigned from the project on moral grounds, said shortly before he died in August 2005, “If the United States, the mightiest country in the world, militarily and economically, feels that it needs nuclear weapons for its security, how do you deny this security to countries that really feel vulnerable.”25