Arms Control Wonk

Jane Perlez, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt highlight in the New York Times a leaked cable from the US Ambassador in Pakistan in June 2009 stating that Pakistan delayed “a visit by U.S. technical experts to discuss logistical and other issues” as part of a plan to remove US-origin spent fuel from a Pakistani research reactor.

Pakistani officials feared “If the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.’”

Actually, the effort to remove the HEU from the reactor was initially reported in May by Bryan Bender, in the Boston Globe, in May 2009, citing “two administration officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.”

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Many of New START’s harshest critics argue that the Treaty’s monitoring provisions are deficient. They have an odd way of demonstrating their commitment to verification — by systematically trying to kill off treaties with on-site inspections and clauses protective of monitoring satellites. This approach makes sense if you’re trying to weaponize space, not if you’re trying to find out what somebody worth watching is up to.

Warning: This week’s post has heavy viscosity. Non-hard-core wonks may wish to skip to the bottom line.

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The first “revelation” from the Wikileaks cache is something we already knew — that there are US nuclear weapons stored in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Turkey — at least, as of November 2009.

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I know a lot of you with .gov and .mil addresses have been warned to stay far, far away from the Wikileaks material.  I am going to spend a lot of time over the next few weeks going through the cables carefully, pulling out the things that I think are most interesting.  So, even if you can’t wade through all the nitty gritty stuff yourself, I will do my best to pick out the nuggets of gold.

My overall reaction is that the cables are quite exculpatory.

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As Michael has recently reminded us, the possession of nuclear weapons by two adversaries may lessen the chances of all-out war, but it does not prevent — and may even encourage — more limited forms of conflict. Western strategists have held this view since at least the 1950s, and lately have used it to explain the pattern of Indo-Pakistani clashes since the nuclear tests of 1998. (See The Stability-Instability Paradox, Nov. 2, 2010.)

The same phenomenon now appears to be at work on the Korean Peninsula.

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Lost amidst President Obama’s announcement that the US would support permanent membership on the UN Security Council for India, was this little nugget in the India-US Joint Statement calling for a nuclear dialogue among nuclear weapons states:

They affirmed the need for a meaningful dialogue among all states possessing nuclear weapons to build trust and confidence and for reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs and security doctrines.

Now I am all for such a dialogue, but it caused a flurry in the Indian press, including an article by our friend Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu, that seemed to suggest the Indian side interpreted this as a move to create “a framework which has the potential to transcend the NPT, while remaining faithful to the twin goals of non-proliferation and the elimination of nuclear weapons.”  Or, as an Indian official told Siddarth “We are constructing a paradigm beyond the NPT.”

Transcend the NPT?

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Here are the IAEA Director-General Reports on Iran (GOV/2010/62) and Syria (GOV/2010/63).

Thank you, Dear Readers, for responding so well to the Best Quips Competition. Our panel of judges will be sorely tested. It’s good to know that, in these hard times, some of you insist on keeping a sense of humor. You have one more week to submit entries.

My very first Shoebox entry paid homage to Enrico Fermi’s quip about nuclear energy in the summer of 1945: “It would be nice if it could cure the common cold.” Linus Pauling, the son of a druggist, did try to cure the common cold, proposing generous dosages of Vitamin C. Pauling won the Nobel Prize twice, first for Chemistry, then for campaigning to stop nuclear testing and to ban the Bomb.

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To place a new nuclear facility at Yongbyon is to prepare it for exhibition. Nothing else makes that point as well as the easily overlooked third new building mentioned in Sig Hecker’s latest trip report, after the light-water reactor (LWR) and the gas centrifuge enrichment plant (GCEP): “the new three-story Guest House.” Decoded, the message reads: Come visit Yongbyon, where sanctions aren’t working.

The exact placement of the GCEP and the LWR-in-progress contain a message of their own. First, as a recent DigitalGlobe image shows, the LWR construction site occupies the area of the disabled 5 MW(e) Magnox reactor’s former cooling tower.  (See the ISIS image brief.) Second, as Jeffrey points out, the GCEP stands on the site of the Magnox reactor’s fuel-fabrication building. As I’ve written in a contribution to the current issue of Uranium Intelligence Weekly, these changes almost certainly would not prevent restoration of the reactor to operational status, but they do convey that making plutonium at Yongbyon no longer rates as a high priority.

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Fuel Fabrication Facility. Empty Machine Shop from which lathes have been removed. Exhaust ducts are still in place. Photo credit: W. Keith Luse

Well, well, well.  It isn’t just a light water reactor that North Korea is constructing on the decaying Yongbyon site.

The North Koreans also showed Sig Hecker a 2,000 centrifuge enrichment facility in what was the empty Fuel Fabrication Plant at Yongbyon

Brazen, huh?

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