Two Examples of Adverse Impacts of Technology on U.S. Security
W. K. H. Panofsky
Stanford University
Here, I am talking about the negative consequences of two selected but extremely important technological developments: the evolution of weapons of mass destruction and the physical heritage of the Cold War. In choosing this topic, I am not even remotely implying that the consequences of technology are predominantly negative but only that these particular developments constitute a profound threat to human civilization and that remedial actions are urgent and necessary.
The term “weapons of mass destruction” is conventionally applied to nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, and chemical warfare agents. Yet these three technologies are drastically different as measured by their potential dangers. Nuclear weapons have increased the destructive power that can be packed into a given means of delivery of munitions by a factor of about a million. Thus, they have profoundly changed the nature of potential war. Chemical weapons are also important weapons of terror, but, in terms of their military effectiveness, they are not significantly different from the same weight of weaponry delivered as conventional high explosives. Biological weapons, if they were delivered and distributed over wide areas in the most effective way, could produce casualties, per unit of weight of munitions delivered, comparable to that of nuclear weapons. Happily, there is so little experience with biological warfare that this assessment is most uncertain, and, therefore, a military planner could hardly depend on such projected effectiveness.
Thus, the term “weapons of mass destruction” is unfortunate. A better term might be “weapons of indiscriminate destruction” since the effect of such weapons is difficult to localize. These three types of weapons are also very different in several other important respects. Just because of their extreme destructive power, defenses against delivery of nuclear weapons must meet such a high standard, to be effective, that such a standard is unattainable. The penetration of even a single nuclear warhead through defenses would generate an unimaginable catastrophe, and nuclear weapons could be delivered to the U.S. homeland by so many diverse means that defenses would have to be unrealistically comprehensive to interdict all of them. In contrast, both chemical weapons and biological weapons could be successfully countered by passive defenses such as gas masks and protective clothing. In addition, preventive immunization can be effective against biological agents under certain circumstances.
Nuclear weapons are a relatively recent result of science and technology. The possibility of extracting energy from nuclear forces was ridiculed as recently as in the 1930s. However, it became a reality during the 1940s as a result of the discovery of nuclear fission and its harnessing, for both constructive and destructive purposes, in the form of nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons work. Two nuclear bombs, whose explosive power was only one-tenth of that of the average of stockpiles of the nuclear weapons now held by Russia and the U.S., killed one-quarter million people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many hundreds of nuclear tests were carried out until they were stopped by the recent signature of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in September 1996, which, however, has not as yet legally come into force. It is characteristic of these tests that their success rate has been exceedingly high. In contrast, chemical warfare agents have been used only rarely: by the Germans in World War I, in the Iran-Iraq War, and in selected other instances. Biological weapons have not been used in organized warfare, but they have a long history; one might consider Moses’ introduction of the plague into Egypt, to persuade the Egyptians to “let my people go,” as the first recorded instance of biological warfare.
Thus, today, nuclear weapons really stand alone in their threat to humanity among the weapons of mass destruction. With the end of the Cold War, that threat has shifted from the risks inherent in the mutual standoff between the Soviet Union and the U.S. to another series of threats— the threat of inadvertent, unauthorized, or accidental use and the threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. Thus, the means to counteract the nuclear danger should have dramatically shifted since the end of the Cold War. But I am sorry to report that current U.S. policy is still severely inadequate in availing itself of the opportunities for drastic de-emphasis of nuclear weapons as instruments of international policy.
Figure 1 shows the buildup of the number of nuclear weapons during the Cold War and the build-down that is now proceeding. More than 60,000 nuclear weapons were produced during the Cold War. Today, U.S. nuclear policy is governed by what has been designated as a Nuclear Posture Review, which was promulgated by the administration at the end of 1994. That policy proclaimed a “reduced hedge” posture,whichendorsed thereductionsinstrategicapons delivery systems provided for by the two STARTeaties; these were negotiated during the Cold War butovide for a hedge of nuclear weapons to be retained inse Russia resumed a more threatening posture. As asult, about 10,000 nuclear weapons are being retained the U.S. “enduring stockpile.” Russia retains comparable numbers of nuclear weapons and has recently increased its emphasis on nuclear weapons to compensate for the growing deterioration and inferiority of their conventional armaments. However, these numbers remain sufficient to threaten extinction of civilization on this hemisphere.
These numbers are enormous. These continued inventories constitute severe risks of accident or inadvertent use, in particular on the Russian side since the effectiveness of central control over nuclear weapons is in increasing doubt. Somehow, in the political discourse among nations, the physical reality of nuclear weapons tends to be submerged; they tend to be considered to be just one of many tools of bargaining among nations. Because “non-use” over nuclear weapons has been preserved since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and because nuclear weapons tests since 1963 have been carried out below ground and have now ceased altogether, few, if any, political leaders have ever experienced the visual impact of a nuclear explosion.
The residual danger of these nuclear weapons, aside from accidental detonations, remains large. Despite the signature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and its Indefinite Extension in 1996, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to smaller states continues to constitute a major risk to the security of the U.S. In a real sense, nuclear weapons are the “great equalizer” among weak and strong nations in just the same sense as firearms are the great equalizer between the physically strong and the physically weak. Thus, the large peaceful democracies in the world have the most to lose by the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
It is frightening to recognize how close to an all-out nuclear exchange the world came during the Cuban Missile Crisis. When the Russians deployed short-range nuclear tipped missiles in Cuba and this deployment was detected by satellite surveillance, President Kennedy was given the luxury to deliberate for a full week on the appropriate response. If this deployment happened today, reaction would have to be almost instantaneous since the deployment would be detected not only by state operated intelligence systems but also by commercial observation. While deployment of missiles in Cuba did not greatly increase the military threat to the U.S., since long-range missiles launched from the Soviet Union could reach the U.S. in thirty minutes and could not be stopped by defenses, the location of threatening nuclear weapons in a state proximate to the U.S. was simply politically unacceptable.
Interestingly, the Russians lived with such a threat for a long time because the U.S. had deployed nuclear missiles in Turkey. Yet, President Kennedy was advised to attack Cuba unless the Soviet missiles were removed, and this, by implication, could well have escalated to an all-out nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviets. Krushchev offered withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba in exchange for U.S. withdrawal of the missiles from Turkey. President Kennedy rejected that offer but decided on the wise course of imposing a naval blockade on ships from the Soviet Union to Cuba. In response, Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba, and the U.S. later secretly withdrew their missiles from Turkey. Thus, the crisis disappeared. It is interesting to note that the severity of how close civilization was to extinction was viewed quite differently in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The U.S. government and a number of its citizens were fully aware that this crisis led them to the brink, while the Russian citizenry remained unacquainted with the crisis for some time. At any rate, the Soviet Union was accustomed to being “under the gun” for a protracted period.
The whole crisis is characterized by the fact that political perception of the nuclear weapons deployments, as they relate to national prestige, took precedence over direct consideration of the physical danger. We have to be continually reminded that the awesome expansion of destructive power made possible by nuclear weapons is a matter of physical reality, which should profoundly modify traditional thinking about the use of force in international relations and the balance of offense to defense, should armed conflict arise. We must recognize that the U.S. and Russia have lived, and are continuing to live, in a situation of “offense-dominance” in which delivery of nuclear weapons cannot be stopped as long as they exist in significant numbers. Thus, the nuclear danger persists today, and current policies, either by Russia or the U.S., have only shifted but not ameliorated the danger.
As long as nuclear weapons continue to be in the possession of the five declared nuclear weapons states and the three “undeclared” states believed to possess them, the continuation of the non-use tradition has to rest on dissuasion of the possessors of the weapons from using them in anger. In turn, this dissuasion has to be achieved diplomatically or, failing that, by the fear of unacceptable consequences if nuclear weapons are used. Thus, mutual deterrence, which is believed to have been the basis of the non-use of nuclear weapon during the Cold War, continues to be a fact of life today. However, as long as deterrence is restricted to what I call the “core function”, that is the use of nuclear weapons only in response to the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons by others, this mission can be achieved by a much smaller number of warheads than are projected to remain in stockpiles today.
The two signed START treaties, of which START II has not yet been ratified by Russia, and the projected START III treaty, which was agreed to at the Helsinki Summit (1997), reduce strategic nuclear weapons only. The type of drastic reduction in the number of nuclear warheads that the current situation permits should go much beyond the START framework since, technically, only a few hundred nuclear weapons, provided they are survivably based, should be sufficient to satisfy the core function.
Yet nuclear weapons cannot be “uninvented.” This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that nuclear weapons provide what analysts call “existential” deterrence, a situation in which the potential existence of nuclear weapons adds a great deal of caution to the conduct of international affairs, as it did during the Cold War. I note that the U.S. and Russia, with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis mentioned above, avoided any direct military conflict or even contact throughout the Cold War. The bad news is that, even if the world manages to proceed to the prohibition of nuclear weapons, no one can be sure that they will not reemerge clandestinely, through retention of limited stocks by those now possessing them, or be manufactured in small quantities by what are now non-nuclear states.
Thus, the U.S. and the industrial democracies should have the strongest possible motive to proceed rapidly beyond the bilateral START framework to a multilateral regime of drastic, progressive restraints. All nuclear weapons states and all nuclear weapons (not only strategic) should be included in such a process. In addition to drastic reductions in the number of nuclear weapons, the “hair trigger” should be removed from those still deployed, and the large massive response options now in the war plans should be canceled. Following such progressive restraints, the world hopefully may, in time, reach a condition in which prohibition of nuclear weapons may become a reality. This complex and protracted process appears the only approach by which the adverse impact of the development of nuclear weapons technology on U.S. security, and also world security, can be mitigated in time.
Let me turn now to the second adverse impact, and that is the issue of the physical heritage of the Cold War. During the Cold War the Soviets and the U.S. gave absolute priority to production of potential weapons with little regard of any other consequences. The environmental impact of weapons production was largely ignored, but, most important, no consideration was given to how to unbuild those items should they no longer be needed. As a result, we are inheriting widespread pollution from such production, in particular that of nuclear weapons, but also the vast stockpiles of munitions of conventional arms and chemical weapons. Nuclear weapons are now becoming a burden on society rather than an asset to security. For technical and safety reasons, the costs, both militarily and societal, of managing these stockpiles are frequently higher than building them to start with. In some cases, we do not even today have a clear solution for dealing with this physical heritage of the Cold War.
The contamination problem is particularly bad in respect to past production practices of nuclear weapons. Some of these production plants, such as the Rocky Flats site in Colorado, are so contaminated that they have been condemned for future use and have become what is euphemistically called an “environmental site.” Almost half the total budget of the Department of Energy for the past few years has been consumed by environmental remediation.
In the news today is the problem of landmines, of which over 100 million have been produced during the Cold War and are distributed in fields throughout the world, largely in Cambodia, Africa, and parts of the former Yugoslavia. As a result, about 25,000 people annually, a large fraction of whom are children, are being killed or maimed by these devices. Note that, on the average, it costs about three dollars to make one of these mines but up to $1,000 to clear one of them from the field.
Let me address in detail two further examples of this physical heritage: the accumulation of chemical weapons and the problem of management and disposition of the excess plutonium withdrawn from nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, the Soviets and the Americans accumulated approximately 40,000 tons and 30,000 tons, respectively, of chemical munitions. These are enormous amounts considering that lethal doses are measured in milligrams. In the U.S., most of these agents are contained in assembled shells and similar means of lethal delivery. In the Soviet Union, and now Russia, most of the materials are stored in the form of the chemical agents themselves. Political agreement between the U.S. and Russia has been reached for some time to destroy these munitions and their lethal payloads. These bilateral agreements have now been superseded by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention that has been signed by 160 nations and that is now in force since over sixty-five nations have ratified the agreement, including, most recently, the U.S.
Notwithstanding these political agreements, actual dismantlement of chemical munitions and destruction of the lethal agents is quite another matter since all feasible physical dismantlement processes are difficult and expensive. The U.S. carried out a pilot program on Johnston Island in the Pacific for high temperature incineration of these munitions. That pilot program destroyed most of the material derived from chemical weapons stocks that accumulated in Europe during World War II and thereafter. That program has cost about one billion dollars but has destroyed less than ten percent of the accumulated U.S. chemical munitions. The plan is to destroy the balance of the U.S. chemical munitions by incinerating them in plants that essentially copy the Johnston Island installation and that are to be located close to the sites where the munitions are stored in the U.S. The first such plant has been built in a depot near Toele, Utah. Construction of that plant has caused opposition from local environmental groups, and such opposition is expected when the remaining plants in the U.S. are to be built.
In Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, the difficulties inherent in destroying chemical munitions are in some respects even more daunting; the problems are both technological and financial. The Russians decided to pursue a different technology, called neutralization, for destroying lethal chemical agents. This method is believed to be less expensive than the incineration practiced by the U.S. but could generally not be used by the U.S. since their agents are difficult to extract from U.S. munitions. Yet this cheaper method is still believed to cost more than the equivalent of $3 billion. While some Western subsidies towards the chemical weapons destruction in Russia have been forthcoming, there is not as yet a meaningful timetable for proceeding with the work. This is an unhappy situation, but at least there seems to be a sincere will on both sides to deal with the problem.
More complex is the management and disposition of the fissile materials, which are being withdrawn from the nuclear weapons that accumulated during the Cold War. According to the Arms Control Agreements reached between Russia and the U.S., the total stockpiles of nuclear weapons has declined, and further reductions are in process. In rough terms, these nuclear weapons and the stockpiles associated with the nuclear weapons program contain more than 100 tons of plutonium each in the U.S. and in Russia and contain more than five times as much of highly enriched uranium (HEU). I note for discussion’s sake that something like four kilograms of plutonium can make a nuclear weapon, and the amount for HEU is correspondingly larger. Thus, these fissionable materials are sufficient to make many tens of thousands of nuclear bombs.
The already achieved reductions and the planned further shrinkage of nuclear weapons stockpiles are the good news. The bad news is that, as a result, large quantities of fissionable materials will become excess to nuclear weapons needs. The United States has already declared somewhat above fifty tons of plutonium as excess to military needs, and the Russians are believed to have a surplus of plutonium even greater. The amounts of HEU are larger by about a factor of five.
What do we do with all these materials? They cannot be released in dilute form into the environment, either the atmosphere or the oceans, because of their toxicity and radioactivity. They cannot simply be buried.
They must be carefully guarded so that they cannot fall into the hands of other countries or even independent terrorists.
Technically, the problem is relatively straightforward to solve for HEU; that material is produced originally by enriching natural uranium, which contains about 0.7% of the fissionable isotope U235 . Weapons-usable uranium is enriched to contain a minimum of over twenty percent of that isotope, and actual nuclear weapons material is nearly pure U235. Thus, all that has to be done to make the material again useless for weapons production is to mix it with natural uranium, or the depleted tails of the enrichment process, so that it contains only three to five percent U235. The resultant material is called low enriched uranium (LEU), and it constitutes the fuel for the vast majority of the world’s nuclear reactors. The U.S. and Russia have signed a “deal” through which 500 tons of weapons uranium is to be blended down to LEU and sold to the U.S. over the course of the next twenty years. The price is about twelve billion dollars.
This path is not open for excess plutonium from nuclear reactors for two reasons: All isotopes of plutonium are fissionable, and, therefore, blending weapons grade plutonium with other plutonium isotopes does not lead to material unsuitable for nuclear explosives. Moreover, measured in economic terms today, plutonium as a fuel for commercial nuclear reactors is not economically competitive with low enriched uranium for a number of reasons. Burning plutonium requires either the design and deployment of future reactors specially designed for burning plutonium or requires the manufacture of so called mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which would contain between three to seven percent of plutonium by weight. This fuel can be burned in existing light water reactors, which constitute by far the largest fraction of the world’s nuclear power plants, but this process is costlier than the use of conventional enriched uranium fuel. MOX fuel complicates the control problem of such reactors, and, therefore, most but not all existing reactors would require control modifications to burn MOX. Moreover, the majority of existing reactors can burn only a small fraction of MOX as part of its fuel. Safeguarding of plutonium-bearing fuels further adds to total costs. No reactors in the United States are now licensed to burn MOX, and the process of licensing is costly.
After totaling the costs of all these measures, it is clear that using the plutonium withdrawn from nuclear weapons for generating electric power cannot be justified economically today. If MOX-containing weapons plutonium is to be used by the electric utilities, the process must be subsidized. As a result, the “value” of plutonium measured in strictly economic terms is negative today. However, as the second figure shows, the “value” of this material can be viewed in a variety of ways by different parties. Plutonium today does not have economic value—but it has a huge value to a terrorist or the leader of a state bent on acquiring a nuclear arsenal! Therefore, the questions of management and disposition of plutonium must be addressed as a problem of national and international security and not as a problem of economics of energy generation. But the countries of the world should be willing to expend significant resources in order to minimize the risk of the plutonium falling into irresponsible hands.
The Value of One Ton of Plutonium
The situation is even more complex. Not only is excess plutonium produced from dismantling of nuclear weapons, which the United States and Russia are doing at a rate between 1,500 to 2,000 weapons per year, but plutonium is also produced in commercial nuclear reactors. In such machines, plutonium is produced from the irradiation of U238 in the nuclear fuel, and that plutonium is a component of the spent fuel, which is stored worldwide in cooling ponds or concrete casks associated with nuclear power plants. Fortunately, that material, which contains roughly 1,000 tons of plutonium, is essentially theft-proof because it is so radioactive that a potential thief would kill himself if he would remove the fuel rods from the current enclosures. Moreover, such fuel rods are heavy, so very elaborate equipment would be needed for their removal. Today, the spent fuel from the world’s nuclear reactors does not constitute a significant risk of being diverted to illicit parties, but the risk remains that the plutonium can be recovered (reprocessed) by the owners of the spent fuel.
Even here there are some problems. The U.S. has a policy leaving the plutonium unseparated from its highly radioactive partners in the spent fuel rods, but some countries of the world reprocess or separate the plutonium as part of their commercial nuclear power fuel process. Around eighty tons or so of the plutonium has been separated worldwide. This material together with the 200 or more tons contained in nuclear weapons or withdrawn from nuclear weapons must be considered a “clear and present danger” due to possible diversion and unauthorized use.
Ultimately, the spread of nuclear weapons can be stopped or reversed only if nations are persuaded that their security would be served better if they did not possess nuclear weapons than if they did. Thus, while fundamentally the outcome of non-proliferation efforts is a political issue, technical barriers can and must be erected to make acquisition of nuclear weapons more burdensome and time consuming. All nuclear weapons, be they fission or thermonuclear weapons, require fissionable materials. Withholding plutonium and highly enriched uranium, from potential states or even from terrorists who wish clandestinely to build nuclear weapons, is the only technical means we have in stemming the spread of nuclear weapons to other states or unauthorized parties.
Whatever method of eventual disposition is chosen, no significant amount of weapons grade plutonium will be “disposed” for at least two decades. Therefore, the world must be concerned immediately about the fate of the plutonium now resulting from weapons dismantlement and then stored until disposal can have its impact. In other words, the world is condemned to baby-sit this material safely for decades.
Currently the United States and Russia are each proceeding with dismantlement of nuclear weapons unilaterally. Both sides have made statements about their dismantlement rates, but these have not been subject to any form of mutual or multilateral verification. The storage of the resultant materials remains a national responsibility, with some transparency measures in place on the United States side but with little movement in that direction by the Russians.
It is essential that the openness to the international community of all these moves prior to disposition increase dramatically. While the problem is disproportionately larger in Russia, the United States could also make moves beyond those already announced by the DOE. For the U.S., such transparency moves regarding weapons plutonium stockpiles are desirable both for their own sake and in the interest of reciprocity in persuading the Russians.
The first step towards increasing transparency should be the establishment of a mutual regime by both countries declaring numbers of nuclear weapons, the total quantities of fissionable materials in both the military and civilian fuel cycles, and the location of such stockpiles. Last year, Secretary of Energy O’Leary declared slightly over fifty tons of plutonium as excess, but we have only estimates of the Russian inventory and excess. While such declarations cannot be verified to standards meeting those customary in formal arms control agreements, supporting confidence-building measures could be adopted. Among these are mutual availability of operating records of production reactors and enrichment facilities, examination of the physical condition of such installations, and so forth. There is considerable likelihood that examination of such records and facilities would uncover discrepancies if declarations were at variance with the facts.
The next step would be establishment of secure storage facilities on both sides into which a maximum amount of plutonium withdrawn from nuclear weapons, initially in the form of “pits,” would be transferred. The understanding would be that removal from such facilities would only be permitted into safeguarded commercial nuclear fuel cycles. Safeguarding of such storage facilities would initially be bilateral, to be negotiated between the Russians and the United States, with a view of eventual transfer to the International Atomic Energy Agency. United States assistance to the construction of such intermediate storage facilities in Russia has now been guaranteed, at least in part, in order to provide incentives for the Russians to proceed in this direction. Plans have been completed for the facility to be located near Krasnoyarsk in Russia. In the United States the plutonium “pits” withdrawn from the weapons are being stored at the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas. Other surplus materials remain stored in various plants in the U.S. Plans for a consolidated storage facility are under discussion, but no final decision has been made in the United States about where and when to build such a facility.
Finally, there is the matter of disposition itself. While the plutonium from excess nuclear weapons constitutes a clear and present danger due to its risk of diversion into unauthorized hands and its risk in aiding a potential future reversal of existing arms control agreements, its disposal must be considered in the context of the much larger quantities of the plutonium contained in spent commercial fuel rods. Plutonium contained in the spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants contains a mixture of isotopes different from that preferred by the nuclear weapons designer. The former mix of plutonium is called “reactor grade” while the latter is called “weapons grade.” Although the military use of the reactor grade plutonium offers some problems to the nuclear weapons designer, there is no question that nuclear explosives in the range of a few kilotons can be designed with confidence using reactor grade plutonium and following simple design principles. With advanced technologies, devices of much higher explosive power can be confidently built with reactor grade plutonium. Happily, most of this civilian plutonium is contained in spent fuel rods and, therefore, is inaccessible to potential thieves because of the large mass and high level of radioactivity of the rods. However, the fraction of that plutonium that has been “reprocessed” must be guarded under standards similar to those pertaining to the guarding of nuclear weapons themselves.
When considering the options for disposing of the weapons plutonium, one should aspire to the “spent fuel standard,” meaning that the risk of diversion of the disposed material for possible weapons use should be no larger than that associated with diversion of the plutonium contained in spent civilian reactor fuel. To do better than that simply wastes money and time unless the much larger total world resource of plutonium, not only the material withdrawn from weapons, were subject to such more complete elimination methods. But, eventually, we must face up to the grave risk posed by just that total world inventory since the radioactivity in spent fuel rods will cease to be an effective barrier once it has decayed over the decades and centuries.
Disposition of weapons plutonium in keeping with the spent fuel standard can best be accomplished by two alternative methods: (1) Burning the plutonium as MOX in existing or evolutionary nuclear power reactors. MOX is civilian reactor fuel produced by mixing plutonium oxide with ordinary uranium oxide. (2) Mixing the weapons plutonium with high level waste from reactors and vitrifying the combined material into large glass logs to be eventually introduced into deep geological repositories.
The MOX route has been technically well demonstrated in Europe. In the U.S., MOX use has been only experimental, but there exist a small number of reactors which could handle 100% MOX fuel loads. It is planned to put this material into electric-utility-owned reactors, and the utility industry has expressed substantial interest. The design and construction of new advanced reactor types is not warranted for bringing the weapons plutonium to the spent fuel standard because reactors of existing commercial types can do this job more quickly and more cheaply. Given a will to proceed, the job can be done in one or two decades.
The vitrification option is in advanced development for high-level waste, and the introduction of plutonium as an additional component has been studied, but some technical problems remain. Officially, as of January of this year, the United States is pursuingoptions: burning plutonium as MOX in reactorsmmobilizing the material in glass or ceramic logs. The first method is suited best for the material from disassembled bombs, while the second method may be most practical for the residual material left over from the various manufacturing steps, such as scrap from machining, chemical residues, and the like. This residual plutonium is left in many different chemical forms.
The great question is, of course, whether Russia will be amenable to these same disposition options. They do have a family of light water reactors that, with some modification, could burn MOX safely, but at this time this approach is not too popular among Russian authorities since they would prefer to stockpile the plutonium until a new generation of breeder reactors can be activated. However, currently the economic circumstances in Russia are such that it will be a long time until Russia will have designed and built any new nuclear reactors of any type. This path is dangerous considering the long time of storage that would be required and the technical and economical uncertainties besetting the Russian nuclear breeder programs. The Russians take a generally negative attitude to “throwing away” the weapons plutonium, notwithstanding its lack of economic value, and vitrification is indeed a “throw-away” option. Notwithstanding these Russian misgivings, the Russian scientific community expert in this field has been persuaded to pursue the two options favored in the United States.
In Russia, control over fissionable materials has become shaky. While the Soviet Union was still intact, control over things nuclear was based on very tough discipline and on the high morale of the troops who were guarding these materials. There was, however, relatively little rigid accounting of fissionable materials. Technical devices that would automatically detect when such materials might be illegitimately removed from their designated storage sites were rarely used. Now the discipline has disappeared; morale is poor, and troops are frequently underpaid; therefore the effectiveness of guarding these materials is in considerable doubt. Thus far, there have only been a small number of instances of smuggling of nuclear materials that have been discovered and that have been widely publicized. Fortunately, the quantities involved have been small, and apparently none of these materials have been directly diverted from the Russian weapons establishments; rather they originated from research facilities and nuclear submarine bases. However, because of the poor quality of what is called Materials Protection Control and Accounting (MPC&A), it is extremely difficult to evaluate how serious the problem really is.
A major step has been to assist the Russians both financially and technically to upgrade their MPC&A procedures. A large number of Russian nuclear facilities have been improved in this respect, although the American support program has not yet reached the primary military facilities in Russia. Beyond this strengthening of Russian accounting and protection, the dominant question is how American decisions will influence Russia. Clearly the Russians will not make much progress on the disposition of plutonium unless the Americans move forward and set an example. Yet, while setting a good example is a necessary part to induce the Russians to move forward rapidly, the Russians will eventually make their own choice based on their interpretation of their interest. But it is the potential societal and political instability in Russia that generates doubt on how secure this material really can be kept in Russia, and it is for this reason that we strongly urge the Russians to proceed rapidly with disposition. Happily, there are many cooperative activities at many levels — laboratory-to-laboratory and government-to-government — addressing these problems.
Beyond motivating the Russians by American example, and by diplomatic persuasion at many levels, there is the question of money. The Russian Atomic Energy Ministry (MINATOM) would like to recapture the value of its basic investment, which has been sunk in manufacturing its large stocks of plutonium. However, as mentioned above, plutonium is not competitive on the nuclear fuel market with the more conventional LEU based fuels. Thus, whichever way Russia turns with respect to plutonium disposition, it is very likely that some form of subsidy from the West will be required to expedite disposition of plutonium. Again, international discussions on this subject are ongoing.
This is where matters stand today. The problems brought on by the physical heritage of the Cold War will take decades to resolve and will require financial investments of many billions of dollars that the U.S. will make, hopefully with additional contributions from other nations. Progress is being made but there are many pitfalls on the way.
There are three overriding lessons to be learned from the dangers inherent in the excessive production of lethal devices during the Cold War and today’s difficulties in dealing with the resulting surplus. First, physical realities must be communicated honestly to decision-makers and must not be overridden by politics or perception. Secondly, science and technology cannot be coerced by political mandate to deliver what cannot be achieved. Finally, the old adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you wish peace, prepare for war) should be changed to Si paras bellum, utque para pacem (If you prepare for war, also prepare for peace)!
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