Sleepwalking With the Bomb (22 page)

What was not defensible, by contrast, was what happened after the end of the Afghan War in February 1989. The nuclear horses thus had already left the nonproliferation barn. Pakistan had done everything short of exploding an actual nuclear device. However, in 1990 the George H. W. Bush administration teamed up with liberals in both parties in Congress to try to close the proverbial barn door and punish Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons. President Bush declined to certify that Pakistan was complying with nuclear proliferation safeguards, making the country ineligible to receive military aid from the U.S. And despite harboring several million Afghan War refugees, Pakistan also received no economic aid.

On May 13, 1998, India openly tested a weaponized nuclear war-head. Its Hindu nationalist government made no attempt to call this explosion “peaceful.” Two weeks later, Pakistan showed how close it had been to full nuclear-weapons-club membership, responding with its own tests, one of which employed five separate devices.

The fecklessness of belatedly attempting to stop the unstoppable became abundantly clear after September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks galvanized America into action against al-Qaeda, and Pakistan’s cooperation was vital in this latest Afghan campaign. But blowback in the form of intense anti-U.S. feeling, most notably in the Pakistani intelligence agency (the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, often just called “ISI”), meant Pakistani cooperation was not forthcoming.

It took Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s famed dire threat (“We will bomb you back into the Stone Age!”) to get Pakistan to even partially side with America again, after the 9/11 attacks. But Pakistan’s support has never been wholehearted, with elements in the ISI playing on the other side, and the government either unable or unwilling to purge them. When Khan revealed his nuclear proliferation distribution network in 2004, his countrymen treated him as a national hero.

In 2005 President George W. Bush lifted military aid restrictions on Pakistan (and on India, but those restrictions had been imposed by President Clinton after India’s 1998 nuclear tests), but the damage had been done, and more was to follow. The 2011 plan to kill Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid deep inside Pakistan had to be kept secret from Pakistani officials for fear that Islamists within the Pakistan government would tip off bin Laden. (An August 1998 U.S. cruise missile strike aimed at bin Laden’s Afghan base camp was compromised when Pakistani officials alerted him; bin Laden fled before the missiles completed their two-hour flight to reach their target.) Al-Qaeda sought to acquire Pakistani nuclear bombs from 1998 to 2001. American pressure after the 9/11 attacks short-circuited bin Laden’s plans. The inevitable price of the 2011 raid—though clearly worth paying to get bin Laden—was a further erosion of U.S.-Pakistani relations.

The prospect that an Islamist regime could overthrow Pakistan’s current government—and thus gain control over Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal—has reportedly induced the U.S. to develop contingency plans for taking out or seizing Pakistan’s arsenal. But unless the U.S. knows exactly where all Pakistan’s bombs are, such a mission would have no realistic prospect of complete success. Uncertainty is a huge deterrent to U.S. preemptive action.

O
CTOBER 27
, 1970 was not a happy day for authorities in Orlando, Florida. Disney World’s opening was a year away, and they found themselves facing a nuclear bomb threat: pay $1 million and guarantee an escort out of the country, or else a hydrogen bomb would be detonated. Looking at a drawing of the device neither the FBI nor the Atomic Energy Commission would give assurance that it could not work. With the city on the verge of paying up, local police found out that the threat was a hoax perpetrated by a 14-year-old high school student.

Nuclear knowledge is now widely enough distributed so as to answer publicly most of the questions scientists had to answer during the Manhattan Project. According to a top U.S. bomb designer, seven of the eight problems scientists then had to solve are now answered in the public record. The eighth element, the right people, the scientists themselves supplied. Even by the time of India’s first bomb (1974), all the complex scientific questions were answered. A nation that could assemble the right personnel and gain access to the right resources would see the rest follow in due course.

As nuclear bomb knowledge spreads in states that might harbor terrorists, we find two fundamental truths about private parties and nuclear proliferation. First:
Private parties cannot now create nuclear fuel, nor will they be able to for some time to come.
The process of becoming nuclear capable has taken most states more than a decade. Private parties have vastly inferior resources and thus will not manage the huge set of complex tasks needed to produce nuclear fuel from scratch anytime soon. Neither the uranium nor the plutonium route can be taken without industrial-scale processes—thousands of supersonic-speed centrifuges for uranium isotopic separation, or a nuclear reactor and chemical nuclear-waste-separation system for plutonium—to create the fuel.

But there is ongoing research into laser enrichment technology. If its boosters prove correct as to its potential, it may make it possible to enrich uranium without full-size industrial facilities. Proponents claim that facilities one-quarter the size of current plants could be used, making their activities harder to monitor by satellite surveillance. However, even a quarter-size facility is well beyond realistic scale achievable in home garages and backyards.

But any smaller-scale enrichment innovation would be a boon to aspiring nuclear terrorists and their state suppliers. Pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is an application to build a Global Laser Enrichment plant, filed by a consortium of GTE, Japan’s Hitachi, and Cameco, a Canadian uranium mining company. The NRC is expected to rule on the application in 2013.
³³

The second truth follows from the first:
There are only three common ways private parties can obtain nuclear fuel: sale, gift, or theft.
³⁴
The first two ways involve a nuclear state as voluntary sponsor; the third way involves a state’s gross negligence. No matter how sophisticated, all terror groups seeking to obtain and use nuclear weapons need state help. An effective counter-proliferation policy must target nuclear states as top priority.

But what of the “dirty bomb” or “radiological device”—a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material? Couldn’t a private party throw that together without help from a state? Because a nuclear explosion is not involved, a potential dirty-bomb maker can select elements that are both easier to obtain and have more rapid rates of decay than uranium or plutonium.

Every radioactive element has an average half-life, the time span in which half its atoms will decay. An atom decays when its nucleus spontaneously emits radiation (often transmuting the atom into a new element). Early researchers named this nuclear radiation using the first three letters of the Greek alphabet: 1.
alpha particles
, composed of two protons and two neutrons, are the most dangerous form of radiation, but can be stopped by a sheet of paper or clothing; 2.
beta particles
, electrons, which can be stopped by a sheet of aluminum; and 3.
gamma rays
, which cause radiation sickness and are only attenuated by a much thicker shield, like a centimeter of lead.
³⁵

The more gradually a radioactive substance decays, the less lethal the instant exposure. Fissile Pu-239 has a half-life of 24
thousand
years, and this is one of the reasons that it is more dangerous than U-235, with a 700-
million
-year half-life, or U-238, with a half-life of 4.5
billion
years—roughly the age of the Earth and one-third the age of the universe.

The bad news is that fashioning a dirty bomb is a relatively simple exercise. Simply lace a conventional explosive with radioactive material. A terrorist would want to use something that releases its radiation more rapidly than fissile plutonium, and is thus more quickly harmful. The half-life of cesium-137 and strontium-90 is a couple of decades, while cobalt-60’s is just over five years, and Iodine-131’s is eight days. Unfortunate for terrorists, but good news for their intended victims, is that one can’t turn radioactivity on and off. Dirty bombs are thus more hazardous to the bomb maker than to their targets (except those killed by the explosion itself). As physicist Richard Muller writes in
Physics for Future Presidents
(2008):

[A]ll dirty bombs have the same problem: intense radioactivity from the unexploded bomb that can kill the terrorists, and diluted radioactivity after it is exploded that drops below the threshold for radiation illness, unless the area attacked is very small.

Evidence of the hazards of working in close proximity to nuclear material was provided by the deaths of two Manhattan Project scientists who accidentally generated a supercritical mass by momentarily merging two spheres of beryllium around a plutonium core, unleashing a lethal dosage of radioactive neutrons.

That no radiological device has been detonated despite the many radioactive materials available (cesium-137, for example, is found all over the world in unsecured or poorly secured medical facilities) suggests that it remains too dangerous for too little payoff.

So much for a stateless entity making a radioactive bomb. What about just stealing a real nuclear bomb? Top nuclear security experts believe that Pakistan has fairly sophisticated devices to prevent unauthorized use of its arsenal (as does India). Even without terrorists, a situation with two hostile, nuclear-armed, countries facing each other is extremely dangerous. Is the solution for America, a veteran of such situations since 1949 and a pioneer of nuclear safety devices since the late 1950s, to share command safeguards with nuclear weapons states, as it did with the Soviet Union after the Cuban Missile Crisis?

At first blush it may seem like a good idea. But sharing with the former Soviet Union was a safer proposition than sharing with a highly unstable country like Pakistan, an Islamic rogue state. It was safer still than sharing with a pure rogue state like North Korea or a revolutionary Islamic regime like Iran. At issue is what may occur if a nuclear device is stolen, sold, or given away.

Consider if Pakistan, after an Islamist takeover, transfers a weakly secured device to al-Qaeda (or if Iran transfers a weapon to Hezbollah). Perhaps, as a demonstration of terrorist power, the transferring state decides to target Germany. But instead—because of some action the French government takes at the time, like banning headscarves—the terror group manages to compromise the inadequately secured device and detonates it in France.

From the viewpoint of the terrorist group, which has no physical return address of consequence (caves in Yemen, let us say), either country works fine. But the state sponsor has a return address—and thus detonation in nuclear-armed France versus in nonnuclear Germany can prove a fatal difference.

Better safety devices enable a sponsor state to transfer a weapon with greater assurance that it will be used at a time and place of its choosing,
rather than used at the discretion of the terrorist group. Hostile powers that sponsor terrorism would thus highly value command and control safeguards not only for safer handling, but also for offensive strategic reasons.

For the United States, the Indo-Pakistani case illustrates the extreme difficulty of pursuing a purist anti-proliferation policy given other compelling foreign policy goals. For countries we assist, it shows that determined states can conceal clandestine nuclear programs. What it shows above all is that
whether a recipient of nuclear material initially intends to fashion a nuclear bomb is irrelevant, because the decision to pursue a bomb can be made at any time.
Once on the cusp of nuclear-club membership—i.e., in possession of a sufficient quantity of highly enriched nuclear material to make a bomb—a nuclear-capable state can cross the weaponization threshold rapidly enough to preclude preventive action.

India and Pakistan each have perhaps a hundred nuclear warheads pointed at each other. These provide, besides potential for nuclear catastrophe on the Asian subcontinent, stark evidence of the futility of the United States trying to induce others to reduce their arsenals or end their nuclear programs by “setting an example.” Both countries deploy a varied arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles and aircraft.

America’s 1967 decision to freeze its nuclear warhead numbers and then begin reducing them—and its 1992 unilateral decision to end qualitative improvements—has not in any way encouraged India or Pakistan to do the same. To the contrary, Pakistan aims to double its already sizeable nuclear arsenal within a few years.

There is one more major proliferation frontier for Pakistan, which it may soon enter: the Gulf Arab states. Pakistan would reap a huge petro-dollar bonanza if Arab states, fearing a nuclear Iran, decide to purchase bombs from the world’s only Islamic nuclear power. This prospect is far from theoretical.

Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Feisal, warned several times in late 2011 that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon capability his country would have no choice but to go nuclear. Saudi petrodollars funded Pakistan’s renegade nuclear program. As it takes most countries that pursue nuclear weapons a decade or more to achieve them—Iran’s post-Shah program began in 1984—the Saudis will not wait. They will purchase bombs over a barrel (of oil, literally). They need not, initially, rely on Pakistani missiles, as setting up a ballistic missile infrastructure requires years. Instead, they can take bombs and put them on the F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers that they have purchased from the U.S.