FAS Strategic Security Blog

Claims that nuclear weapons need to be as safe as a coffee table might drive warhead replacement

By Hans M. Kristensen and Ivan Oelrich

The latest study from the JASON panel is an unambiguous rejection of claims made by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the nuclear weapon labs, defense secretary Robert Gates, and U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) that some or all U.S. nuclear weapons should be replaced to ensure the future reliability of the arsenal.

The executive summary of the study, Lifetime Extension Program (LEP), finds “no evidence that accumulation of changes incurred from aging and LEPs have increased risk to certification of today’s deployed nuclear warheads.”  The study concludes that the lifetime of today’s nuclear warheads “could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in LEPs today.”  [Emphasis added.]

The JASON appears to have prevented a wasteful and counterproductive nuclear warhead replacement program. Even so, we expect parts of the report’s conclusions to be used by proponents of nuclear warhead replacements in the months and years ahead.   Continue reading »

by Ivanka Barzashka and Ivan Oelrich

After a cascade of disclosures and official announcements, followed by a great deal of conjecture from experts and the media, the Fordo enrichment plant, Iran’s newest enrichment facility located in the mountains near Qom, opened its doors on October 25 to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections. The US, France, and Britain accuse Iran of building the facility covertly and “challenging the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime.” Iran claims the accusations are “hypothetical” and “fantasy” and are part of a conspiracy against Iran’s nuclear program. The Agency has an indispensable role of providing an objective technical account of the facility and ultimately determining whether Iran violated its Safeguards Agreement. But how much can we expect to learn from the first visit to the facility and would that provide sufficient information to resolve the accusations made against Iran?

The text under the Iranian flag with the atomic symbol says, "Nuclear power is our undeniable right."

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On Friday, President Obama announced that the United States knows of a new, undeclared, and hidden underground gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment facility in Iran, near the city of Qom.  Some news reports suggest that 3000 centrifuges will be housed there.  How significant is this discovery?  Well, just in time, our crack FAS researcher, Ivanka Barzashka, has posted on the FAS website a calculator to help you answer questions just like that.

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President Obama has once again pushed nuclear weapons, and his vision for a world free of nuclear weapons, to the center of the world’s stage with his speech yesterday before the United Nations’ General Assembly and his chairing of the United Nations’ Security Council meeting this morning. He reiterated his goal of ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), of negotiating a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) that would end production of bomb-grade nuclear material (something the Bush administration supported in theory but without any verification procedures), of negotiating a treaty with Russia that will “substantially reduce” strategic nuclear warheads, and of strengthening the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The President also said “We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts, and reduces the role of nuclear weapons.” This morning, as chair of the UN Security Council, the President got unanimous consent to Council resolution that endorsed all the points made before the General Assembly.

The President’s remarks are powerful and plain and were overwhelming well received by all of us who have long hoped that the world might someday be free of nuclear weapons. Still, I am worried that the message has been clearer at the UN, and in Prague, than it is here in Washington. If we look at the direction the bureaucracy and politics are taking here, there is reason to worry that the President’s vision will be dangerously diluted. Continue reading »

by Ivanka Barzashka and Ivan Oelrich

A much anticipated IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear activities was leaked today.  The report indicates that, among other things, Iran has conceded to additional safeguard at Natanz.  This is a welcome development but occurring amidst a contested Iranian election, European threats of increased sanctions, continuing oblique hints of Israeli military action, and US talk of cutting off Iranian gasoline imports if nuclear talks are rejected.  How important are these increased safeguards? Do they represent a change of course for Iran? Continue reading »

A recently released report, U.S. Nuclear Deterrence in the 21^st Century:  Getting It Right, by the ad hoc New Deterrent Working Group with a forward by James Woolsey, is an interesting document.  I believe this report is significant because it might typify the arguments that will be used against arms control treaties in the upcoming Senate debates. Continue reading »

The Congressional Commission on the strategic posture report released yesterday is what the Air Force calls a “target rich environment.” There is a lot to shoot at. This essay follows up on the post that Hans Kristensen and I published yesterday. I want to continue the theme I discussed yesterday that the recommendations of the report are based on assumptions about nuclear weapons characteristics, assumptions that are implicit, unexamined, and unsupportable.
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The final report from the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission seems focused on hedging rather than leading.

By Ivan Oelrich and Hans M. Kristensen

The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission report published today is definitely not the place that the President or the nation should look for new ideas on how to reduce the role of nuclear weapons and lead the world toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

Even for a compromise document written by a diverse group, it is a work of deeply disappointing failure of imagination.  The recommendations can be summarized as:  the nuclear world should stay pretty much the way it is but at slightly lower force levels, incrementalism is the most we can hope for, and even that should be approached very cautiously.

The report comes close to dismissing the President’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons – and the enthusiastic support it has generated worldwide – as a utopian dream:  “The conditions that might make the elimination of nuclear weapons possible are not present today and establishing such conditions would require a fundamental transformation of the world political order.”  The United States should retain a viable nuclear deterrence “indefinitely.”  The Commission surrenders to the nuclear problems of the world rather than recommending a proactive way forward out of the mess.

Of course, the Commission is not opposed to nuclear reductions per se and supports them under certain conditions, but it recommends that the approach “balances deterrence, arms control, and non-proliferation.  Singular emphasis on one or another element,” the report says, apparently hinting at disarmament, “would reduce the nuclear security of the United States and its allies.”

If the Commission’s report is any preview of the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review, we should expect minimal changes in nuclear forces, structure, or mission.  The report recommends a nuclear policy of “leading and hedging” but seems to be focused on hedging.

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Last Wednesday, 8 April, the Federation of American Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) jointly released FAS Occasional Paper Number 7, From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence — A New Nuclear Policy on the Path Toward Eliminating Nuclear Weapons.  As part of the release, my coauthors, Stan Norris of NRDC and Hans Kristensen of FAS, and I held a panel discussion at the Carnegie Endowment, where each of us presented results of our research that is covered in the paper.  This essay summarizes my comments on that panel.

There are three things we describe in this paper.  First, we are proposing a new set of military missions for nuclear weapons—actually the “set” is just one mission, second, we are describing what that mission would look like, and, third, we are describing one way to actually get that single mission properly implemented.
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By Ivanka Barzashka and Ivan Oelrich

Yesterday, on Iran’s national Nuclear Technology Day, President Ahmadinejad announced the country’s latest nuclear advances, which seem to have become an important source of national pride and international rancor. April 9 marks the day when Iran claimed to have enriched its first batch of uranium in 2006. Yesterday, Ahmadinejad inaugurated Iran’s Fuel Manufacturing Plant (FMP) at Isfahan and announced the installation of a new “more accurate” type of centrifuge at the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz.

A fuel fabrication facility, the last element of the front-end fuel cycle, is where nuclear reactor fuel is made. For light water reactors (LWR), such as the one in Bushehr, uranium is mined, turned into yellow cake, and converted to uranium hexafluoride (UF6), the UF6 is enriched using centrifuges, converted into uranium oxide pellets, and made into fuel rods, which go into the reactor core. For pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWR), such as the one in Arak, uranium doesn’t need to be enriched, so the yellow cake is directly converted to uranium oxide pellets. Continue reading »