Sleepwalking With the Bomb (29 page)

The treaty prohibits the “testing, use, manufacture, production or acquisition by any means whatsoever of any nuclear weapons” and the “receipt, storage, installation, deployment and any form of possession of any nuclear weapons.” Cuba’s compliance is conditioned on reaching a satisfactory agreement with the U.S. over Guantanamo Bay—which makes its compliance essentially illusory. There is no prospect of the U.S. ceding Guantanamo any time soon, even if eventually all terror detainees are transferred elsewhere.

The United States, ever ardent for disarmament treaties, signed both protocols (supplemental agreements) to the Tlatelolco treaty. Protocol I requires outside powers retaining territories in the zone (U.S., UK, France, and the Netherlands) to adhere to the treaty and not bring nuclear weapons into the zone. Protocol II requires all declared nuclear weapons states to respect the nuclear-free status of the zone. It has been signed by all five Security Council nuclear powers (the five permanent members: U.S., UK, France, Russia, China). Israel, which is unlikely to import nuclear materials into the region, has not signed because it is not a declared nuclear power. India and Pakistan are not parties to nonproliferation treaties.
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The Latin American equation could be radically altered by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez—an aspiring Fidel Castro seeking to lead all Latin American countries in revolution against American influence in the region and against governments allied with the U.S.—provided he survives his bout with cancer. Chavez desires to send uranium ore to Iran for its nuclear program. Eventually, he might seek Iran’s aid in launching a nuclear weapons program for Venezuela, in violation of Tlatelolco’s nonproliferation norms. Assuredly Chavez would follow North Korea’s example of blithely ignoring signed agreements if they interfere with his plans.

S
INCE THE
mid-1970s, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi had a standing offer to purchase nuclear weapons from any seller. He was an eager supporter of terrorism against the West—worrying, among others, Reagan, who wrote in his diary in 1987, “Someone like Qaddafi could develop nuclear weapons and perhaps smuggle them into the United States.”

In 1986, Libyan terrorists had bombed a West German discotheque, killing a U.S. soldier and a Turkish woman and injuring over 120 (40 of them Americans). In response, Reagan ordered the bombing of Libyan barracks and airfields, just missing Qaddafi himself. Qaddafi answered that bombing by downing Pan Am flight 103 on December 21, 1988, days before the end of Reagan’s term of office. After these violent interchanges and sponsorship of terrorism worldwide, what made Libya decide to abandon its nascent nuclear program in 2003?

Though negotiations had been going on for years, and were tied to a settlement of Libyan liability for the Pan Am bombing, it seems clear that the factor uppermost in Qaddafi’s decision was fear that his country would be next after Iraq on the allied coalition target list. Libya committed to dismantling its WMD programs within days of America’s “shock and awe” air assault on Iraq in March 2003. As Dr. Johnson famously quipped, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

South Africa, on the other hand, already was a nuclear-weapon state when it voluntarily disarmed. It began a commercial nuclear program in the 1950s under Atoms for Peace, and by 1965 could produce enriched uranium for a bomb. South Africa’s military nuclear program began in 1974, following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal that brought decolonization—and with it, instability—to the region. With Marxist dictators seizing power in neighboring countries in the years following—in Mozambique and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)—South Africa had no incentive to disarm.

Also significant for South Africa’s nuclear weapons program was its relationship with Israel. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel’s formerly warm relations with pro-Arab African nations came unglued, Israel turned to South Africa as its supplier of uranium ore, which it is unable to mine domestically. Israel reportedly traded its design expertise to enable the South Africans to build gun-type uranium A-bombs in return for uranium to make atomic bomb “primary” triggers for “secondary” hydrogen bombs.

Weapons designers Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman (
The Nuclear Express
) believe that Israel also wanted from South Africa a clandestine site to test a neutron bomb, presumably for use against Egyptian and Syrian tank assault in event of a repeat of their 1973 surprise attack. They note that it took China, a sophisticated nuclear-club member, five tests to get a working neutron bomb. They conclude that Israel tested a neutron bomb 1,500 miles southeast of Cape Town on September 22, 1979, to make it appear to outside observers as a South African test. The signals matched French weapons, but Israel, as noted earlier, obtained weapons expertise from France.
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The Soviets were energetically backing Communist “liberation” movements in Africa, all of which South Africa adamantly opposed. Evidence of a South African nuclear test would have strengthened South Africa’s hand in supporting regional allies against Russia’s Marxist proxies. In 1976 the Soviets persuaded the U.S. to cooperate in pressuring South Africa not to conduct a nuclear test at its Valindaba site. (Reed and Stillman drily note that in Zulu the word means, “We do not talk about this at all.”) By 1978 Valindaba was producing enough highly enriched uranium to make one bomb per year, and when P. W. Botha succeeded John Vorster that year as prime minister, he pressed for more. In the 1980s South Africa produced six uranium gun-trigger devices. Needing no testing, these enabled South Africa to go nuclear without alerting the world and risking nonproliferation blowback.

By the mid-1980s the Cuban-backed Marxist rebels were making progress in the ex-Portuguese colony Angola—just north of the guerrillas fighting South African control of South West Africa (now Namibia). South Africa reportedly had contingency plans to use a uranium bomb on Luanda, the Angolan capital, in event of war.

In 1989 F. W. De Klerk became South African head of state, and oversaw the end of apartheid. In November 1989 he ordered Valindaba to be closed and his country’s half-dozen uranium bombs dismantled. By September 1991 the task was done. His apparent motivations were to end international isolation and to prevent nuclear weapons from falling under control of a black African leader. This despite the evident fact that the new South African leader, Nelson Mandela, was as unlikely as anyone on the planet to use nuclear weapons.

South Africa’s decision had two real-world impacts: it reduced weapons-grade nuclear material suitable for theft, and it was a political symbol of voluntary nuclear disarmament as the Cold War ended. But several thousand South African nuclear scientists were now seeking new employment, joining thousands of jobless Russian scientists. They were ripe for picking by nuclear aspirants.

T
HE MOST
significant voluntary disarmament moves were made in three republics formerly part of the Soviet Union: Ukraine, Belarus, and Muslim-majority Kazakhstan. The prime incentive these nascent countries had for surrendering their arsenals was that it would facilitate separation from post-Soviet Russia. They had no great incentive to keep them—using them against the West or against Russia would surely have resulted in their own destruction.

Securing their nuclear material against diversion by hostile states or sophisticated terrorist groups proved a grand challenge. Once again,
The Nuclear Express
provides unmatched narrative detail, in this case, on the technology and logistics of securing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. The scale of the problem was breathtaking.

Between entering the atomic age in 1949 and its year-end breakup in 1991, the USSR produced 1,200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and 140 to 162 metric tons of plutonium reprocessed from nuclear reactor waste. If a tenth of a percent of the material went missing, there would be 1.3 tons of weapons-grade uranium and 310–360 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium loose in the world, enough for dozens of nuclear bombs.

Further, as the Soviet Union dissolved there were still some 27,000 Soviet nuclear weapons—including 11,000 thermonuclear ones—to be dismantled, much of this arsenal located in the three former Soviet republics. Having been part of the former Soviet Union, and thus parties to the 1991 START I Treaty, they agreed to transfer their entire arsenals to Russia. Of the three, Belarus had the fewest weapons—81 warheads on mobile ICBMs (an arsenal nearly as large as that of India or Pakistan). Ukraine’s immense arsenal of 5,000 nuclear warheads—several times larger than the arsenals of Great Britain and France
combined
—made it the
world’s third-largest
nuclear power. And Kazakhstan had nearly 2,000 warheads—including an estimated 1,000 multi-megaton warheads sitting on the monster SS-18, the largest ICBM ever built.

Kazakhstan faced even thornier problems than disposing of weapons. Its nuclear test area underwent 456 tests in 41 years, the highest number of tests for one test site, massively contaminating the test site soil. Worse, Kazakhstan had to find a way to rid itself of its weapons-grade uranium used in Russian nuclear submarines. In late 1994 the U.S. sent massive military cargo planes on a secret airlift mission to Kazakhstan to pack up and remove the fuel. In an operation that equaled anything Hollywood could serve up, they succeeded in getting their cargo out just before Iranian buyers could get their hands on the stuff for use in crude uranium “gun-trigger” devices.

Amazingly, by 1996 all three former Soviet republics were nuclear weapon free. In 2012 Ukraine’s final shipment of weapon-grade uranium was sent to Russia.

H
OSTILE STATES
manipulate the international community to frustrate nonproliferation enforcement. North Korea and Iran have been following the same playbook, with North Korea having already crossed the finish line and Iran rapidly approaching it. They use dummy firms to purchase prohibited items; they launder money to fund their program; they make serial offers of pseudo-concessions to curry goodwill; and they use negotiations to stall.

When nice does not work they use not-nice: threats of war, or other forms of intimidation—terrorism, hostage taking, etc. They use elaborate schemes to evade inspection regimes—phony accounting, commercial use, and materials unaccounted for.

North Korea, to put it gently, has played U.S. diplomats—and several presidents—like the proverbial violin. Former president Jimmy Carter’s 1994 visit to Pyongyang is just one of these cases. Traveling there against the wishes of President Clinton, Carter came back with news that the North was ready to make a deal, and would stay within the Nonproliferation Treaty. Indeed—but on its terms, not ours.

When State Department diplomat Robert Gallucci returned to the U.S. after signing the Agreed Framework that laid out the U.S.-North Korea deal President Carter had worked out, the Americans assumed that the crisis had passed. After all, North Korea had committed to shut down its Yongbyon facility, whose design and operation facilitated production of weapons-grade plutonium. Pyongyang also agreed to use plutonium fuel for commercial reactor production only. In return the U.S. agreed to supply the North with two light-water nuclear reactors designed to be less usable for proliferation (that is, plutonium production). The U.S. also threw in fuel oil to help the North meet its domestic energy need.

Needless to say, North Korea deceived inspectors over the next eight years, as it clandestinely diverted fuel for a bomb. Its October 4, 2002, statement to U.S. diplomats that it had developed a uranium-enrichment capability for a bomb was not sufficient to convince the Bush administration that the North had in fact joined the nuclear club, but it led to the suspension of nuclear cooperation on November 21.

Less than a month later, the North announced it would restart its Yongbyon facility, and it formally announced its withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty at the start of 2003. Its underground atomic test in October 2006 proved that the world’s nuclear club had a new member.

Yet this reality only intensified U.S. diplomatic efforts—at times via the “six-party talks” that added South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia as parties—to tame the North’s nuclear program. Carrot and stick diplomacy followed, with, as ever in such talks with bad guys, more carrot than stick. In 2007 the U.S. unfroze $25 million of assets on Pyongyang’s promise that the money would be used for humanitarian purposes. In 2007 North and South Korea agreed to hold talks aimed at a final formal peace treaty to officially end the Korean War.
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On October 11, 2008, the Bush State Department took North Korea off the terrorism list, making it eligible for more aid.

The North responded to these gracious gestures early in 2009, conducting a series of long-range missile tests of multistage missiles, including one shot fired over Japan, towards Hawaii (though landing short of it). Pyongyang also seized two journalists who had wandered over the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas, holding them for 140 days. It took a personal visit from former president Clinton to obtain their release, thus saving them from a show trial and many years in prison. And in May 2009 it conducted a second underground nuclear test, one more powerful than its first, though generally believed to be less powerful than the 14-kiloton Hiroshima blast—the North’s designs remain rudimentary. As this book went to press the North was preparing to conduct its third nuclear test. Or it may be a fifth test, given that monitoring equipment has suggested, though analysts have been unable to confirm, that tests have taken place twice since its second test. This uncertainty shows that nuclear forensic detection is far from guaranteed to detect clandestine activity.