Monthly Archives: March 2008

P Crail and Yongbyon Photos

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You should be seeing more work from guest-bloggers and new TW.com residents around these parts.

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First up is my successor at ACA, Peter Crail:

Stanford’s Siegfried Hecker, along with his delegation partners Joel Witt and Keith Luse, have posted “pictures”:http://newsphotos.stanford.edu/Hecker/ and “captions”:http://lis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/5220/tr08DPRKcap.pdf
from their visit to Yongbyon last month. The pictures are similar to the ones the State and Energy Departments have been showing in various briefings, but couldn’t share more widely out of concern it would piss off the North Koreans. So now that these pictures are out there, whether their concerns weren’t warranted, or if it was simply okay for them to be shared unofficially, I can’t say. The important thing is, the argument that the six party process has been able to accomplish something concrete (albeit not everything it set out to do for now) can now be publicly backed by visual evidence.

Of course, the place wasn’t exactly pristine to begin with. Kind of like Dr. Strangelove meets the Grapes of Wrath. But we also have to keep in mind that these our the conditions that some of our own technicians have been working in to get this dirty work done.

The above photo is captioned:

bq. Location where two cranes (up-down, left-right) were formerly located. These cranes transferred the spent fuel basket into the receiving hot cell and positioned the basket at the shearing station. (Minus-1 level of reprocessing plant.)

Documents For Download

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I’ve decided to place a bunch of documents on the blog that I find myself using repeatedly. I think they’re all available elsewhere, but hopefully it will be helpful to have them all in one place. It’ll help me, anyway; perhaps others will also find them useful.

I plan to update them regularly until I run out. But you don’t have to wait for me to put up a blog post – just click the new link on the left side that says “documents.” Some other stuff is available there too. Thanks to Greg the “Hexive”:http://www.hexive.com/ god for making it happen.

I started with some of the relevant chapters from OTA’s 1993 report _Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction._ [Props to “FAS.”:http://www.fas.org ] To download the documents directly, click these links: “Nuclear Weapons,”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/4 “Chemical Weapons,”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/5 “Biological Weapons,”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/6 “Delivery Vehicles.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/7

A companion paper can be found “here.”:http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ota/9341.pdf I had trouble uploading the whole thing, so click the link.

Nuclear Terrorism: Not Gonna Happen

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That’s a simplified version of the conclusion reached by Chris McIntosh and Ian Storey in a “paper”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/3 that they were gracious enough to allow me to post.

[*Update:* The title and date are posted “here.]”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1592/title-for-mcintosh-and-storey-paper

I’m still reading through it, but I think these excerpts sum it up:

*The arguments made in favor of the probability of the nuclear terrorism rely on a series of false equivalences and a fundamental misreading of the way that recent events implicate our broader understanding of terrorist strategy.* Building on a combination of organization theory and recent empirical work on the basic rationality of terrorist groups and strategies, we propose an approach to terrorist strategy that describes in formal and informal terms the process of strategic choice (and particularly choice of certain strategic tools over others, a variable almost universally neglected in current approaches) during terrorist campaigns and suggests that *nuclear terrorism remains improbable in the extreme.* Although the names of actors have changed and terrorism has come to dominate strategic thought across the globe, *America’s metropolitan centers have no more to fear than they ever have from the possibility of nuclear terrorism.*

The one-sided appearance of the current debate over terrorist nuclear attack is sustained by a theoretical elision that has gone largely unnoticed even among those who find the scenario unlikely. *Since the ‘80s, the debate has largely centered around the probability of acquisition; if a terrorist organization successfully acquires a nuclear capacity, proponents of the nuclear terrorism scare believe it is only a matter of time before that weapon will be used in an attack on the United States. This conventional formulation assumes that a terrorist organization has only two choices once acquisition occurs—either to use it or not.* Presumably an organization wouldn’t desire such a capacity unless they wished to use it, so there is an implicit equation between acquisition and use. As such, most literature and by extension most foreign policy initiatives focus on the supply side.

In this paper we will argue that *the likelihood of nuclear terrorist attack is so slim as to render it virtually unthinkable. Contrary to contemporary conventional wisdom, our theorizing demonstrates that there is no one-to-one linkage between acquisition and “use”.* This paper will proceed in four parts. In the first section, we establish that even if certain individual terrorist behavior cannot be modeled or explained strategically, internal and external pressures push terrorist organizations to behave in a strategically rational manner. The deductive models made possible by this intuition are
also pragmatically necessary, given the lack of access to data on terrorist organizations and the very real need to heighten understanding of these organizations’ behaviors. Our next section will criticize the current understanding of nuclear weapons “use” as a binary between attack and nothing. Despite decades of Cold War theorizing on the ways that a nuclear weapon can be utilized strategically short of literal attack, little to none of this literature has been applied to terrorist activity. In this section we will offer an alternative taxonomy of choices that terrorist organizations with a nuclear capacity possess as well as a model that articulates the dynamics involved in these strategic choices. We will also offer a rough expected utility model that reflects the variables that would go into any organizational decision regarding how to use their newfound capacity. In the final section, we will offer *three sets of arguments undermining the case for the likelihood of nuclear attack: opportunity costs, the value placed on organizational survival, and the conflation between capitulation and surrender.*

You can download a copy “here.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/3 Share it with your friends, if you have any.

123 Agreements

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For those who care, NNSA has a couple of good sites RE: 123 agreements.

“This one”:http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/na-20/cooperation.shtml lists all of the countries with which the United States has such agreements.

“This one”:http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/na-20/loc_pgm_acpune.shtml
is from the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation and lists of their programs. Very handy.

God, I am a geek.

Speaking of which, geeks everywhere are mourning “the passing”:http://www.slate.com/id/2185914/ of Gary Gygax.

Arab League on Israeli Nuclear Disclosure

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The potential impact of an Israeli decision to disclose its nuclear arsenal crossed my mind today when I saw “this AP story”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961275.html about a statement from the Arab League.

I couldn’t find an English version of the original statement, but this is how the article described it:

*As soon as Israel announces it has nuclear weapons, the Arabs will announce their withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty,* the statement said.

[snip]

Arab countries, all of which are signatories to the treaty, have long called for a nuclear-free Middle East and expressed their concern over Israel’s apparent possession of nuclear weapons.

They said that *if Israel admitted to having the weapons, they would call on the UN Security Council to pressure Israel to destroy its nuclear arsenal and bring its other atomic installation under international inspection.*

If this did not happen, Arab countries would leave the treaty and not sign any new one until Israel itself joined.

Ack.

Chinese and UK Nuclear Weapons Numbers

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I was recently doing some research on China’s nuclear arsenal and realized that “this 2004 Chinese MFA statement”:http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjb/zzjg/jks/cjjk/2622/t93539.htm is frequently cited as a guide to how large Beijing’s arsenal may be.

The relevant portion reads:

bq. Among the nuclear-weapon states, China has performed the least number of nuclear tests and possesses the smallest nuclear arsenal.

Obviously, more data has emerged on the Chinese arsenal since 2004, but I think one factoid warrants a bit of attention: the United Kingdom claimed in its “December 2006 Defence White Paper”:http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/uk/doctrine/sdr06/index.html that it had

bq. the smallest stockpile of nuclear warheads amongst the nuclear weapon States recognised under the NPT…

At that time, London possessed about 200 operationally available nuclear warheads and also had a stockpile of warheads. The UK still has such a stockpile, the number of which is kept secret..

In any case, this data may no longer be _that_ relevant, given that (based on the Chinese Military Power reports from the last few years) Beijing appears to be increasing its arsenal while London has been “implementing reductions.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1575/uk-nukes-hit-new-low

Chinese Military Power

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It “came out”:http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/China_Military_Report_08.pdf yesterday, but I didn’t notice until this morning. The DoD briefing is “here.”:http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4165

I’ll have a couple of posts up about Chinese nuclear weapons in a bit.

Iran: UNSCR 1803

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The UN SEcurity Council adopted Resolution 1803 yesterday. The text can be found “here”:http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/sc9268.doc.htm and the relevant excerpts are below. The vote was 14-0-1 (Indonesia abstained).

Relevant Excerpts:

[The Security Council]

“3. Calls upon all States to exercise vigilance and restraint regarding the entry into or transit through their territories of individuals who are engaged in, directly associated with or providing support for Iran’s proliferation sensitive nuclear activities or for the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems, and decides in this regard that all States shall notify the Committee established pursuant to paragraph 18 of resolution 1737 (2006) (herein “the Committee”) of the entry into or transit through their territories of the persons designated in the Annex to resolution 1737 (2006), Annex I to resolution 1747 (2007) or Annex I to this resolution, as well as of additional persons designated by the Security Council or the Committee as being engaged in, directly associated with or providing support for Iran’s proliferation sensitive nuclear activities or for the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems, including through the involvement in procurement of the prohibited items, goods, equipment, materials and technology specified by and under the measures in paragraphs 3 and 4 of resolution 1737 (2006), except where such entry or transit is for activities directly related to the items in subparagraphs 3(b) (i) and (ii) of resolution 1737 (2006);

“4. Underlines that nothing in paragraph 3 above requires a State to refuse its own nationals entry into its territory, and that all States shall, in the implementation of the above paragraph, take into account humanitarian considerations, including religious obligations, as well as the necessity to meet the objectives of this resolution, resolution 1737 (2006) and resolution 1747 (2007), including where Article XV of the IAEA Statute is engaged;

“5. Decides that all States shall take the necessary measures to prevent the entry into or transit through their territories of individuals designated in Annex II to this resolution as well as of additional persons designated by the Security Council or the Committee as being engaged in, directly associated with or providing support for Iran’s proliferation sensitive nuclear activities or for the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems, including through the involvement in procurement of the prohibited items, goods, equipment, materials and technology specified by and under the measures in paragraphs 3 and 4 of resolution 1737 (2006), except where such entry or transit is for activities directly related to the items in subparagraphs 3 (b) (i) and (ii) of resolution 1737 (2006) and provided that nothing in this paragraph shall oblige a State to refuse its own nationals entry into its territory;

“6. Decides that the measures imposed by paragraph 5 above shall not apply where the Committee determines on a case-by-case basis that such travel is justified on the grounds of humanitarian need, including religious obligations, or where the Committee concludes that an exemption would otherwise further the objectives of the present resolution;

“7. Decides that the measures specified in paragraphs 12, 13, 14 and 15 of resolution 1737 (2006) shall apply also to the persons and entities listed in Annexes I and III to this resolution, and any persons or entities acting on their behalf or at their direction, and to entities owned or controlled by them and to persons and entities determined by the Council or the Committee to have assisted designated persons or entities in evading sanctions of, or in violating the provisions of, this resolution, resolution 1737 (2006) or resolution 1747 (2007);

“8. Decides that all States shall take the necessary measures to prevent the supply, sale or transfer directly or indirectly from their territories or by their nationals or using their flag vessels or aircraft to, or for use in or benefit of, Iran, and whether or not originating in their territories, of:

(a) all items, materials, equipment, goods and technology set out in INFCIRC/254/Rev.7/Part2 of document S/2006/814, except the supply, sale or transfer, in accordance with the requirements of paragraph 5 of resolution 1737 (2006), of items, materials, equipment, goods and technology set out in sections 1 and 2 of the Annex to that document, and sections 3 to 6 as notified in advance to the Committee, only when for exclusive use in light water reactors, and where such supply, sale or transfer is necessary for technical cooperation provided to Iran by the IAEA or under its auspices as provided for in paragraph 16 of resolution 1737 (2006);

(b) all items, materials, equipment, goods and technology set out in 19.A.3 of Category II of document S/2006/815;

“9. Calls upon all States to exercise vigilance in entering into new commitments for public provided financial support for trade with Iran, including the granting of export credits, guarantees or insurance, to their nationals or entities involved in such trade, in order to avoid such financial support contributing to the proliferation sensitive nuclear activities, or to the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems, as referred to in resolution 1737 (2006);

“10. Calls upon all States to exercise vigilance over the activities of financial institutions in their territories with all banks domiciled in Iran, in particular with Bank Melli and Bank Saderat, and their branches and subsidiaries abroad, in order to avoid such activities contributing to the proliferation sensitive nuclear activities, or to the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems, as referred to in resolution 1737 (2006);

“11. Calls upon all States, in accordance with their national legal authorities and legislation and consistent with international law, in particular the law of the sea and relevant international civil aviation agreements, to inspect the cargoes to and from Iran, of aircraft and vessels, at their airports and seaports, owned or operated by Iran Air Cargo and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line, provided there are reasonable grounds to believe that the aircraft or vessel is transporting goods prohibited under this resolution or resolution 1737 (2006) or resolution 1747 (2007);

“12. Requires all States, in cases when inspection mentioned in the paragraph above is undertaken, to submit to the Security Council within five working days a written report on the inspection containing, in particular, explanation of the grounds for the inspection, as well as information on its time, place, circumstances, results and other relevant details;

“13. Calls upon all States to report to the Committee within 60 days of the adoption of this resolution on the steps they have taken with a view to implementing effectively paragraphs 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 above;

“14. Decides that the mandate of the Committee as set out in paragraph 18 of resolution 1737 (2006) shall also apply to the measures imposed in resolution 1747 (2007) and this resolution;

“15. Stresses the willingness of China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States to further enhance diplomatic efforts to promote resumption of dialogue, and consultations on the basis of their offer to Iran, with a view to seeking a comprehensive, long-term and proper solution of this issue which would allow for the development of all-round relations and wider cooperation with Iran based on mutual respect and the establishment of international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme, and inter alia, starting direct talks and negotiation with Iran as long as Iran suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, as verified by the IAEA;

“16. Encourages the European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy to continue communication with Iran in support of political and diplomatic efforts to find a negotiated solution including relevant proposals by China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States with a view to create necessary conditions for resuming talks;

“17. Emphasizes the importance of all States, including Iran, taking the necessary measures to ensure that no claim shall lie at the instance of the Government of Iran, or of any person or entity in Iran, or of persons or entities designated pursuant to resolution 1737 (2006) and related resolutions, or any person claiming through or for the benefit of any such person or entity, in connection with any contract or other transaction where its performance was prevented by reason of the measures imposed by the present resolution, resolution 1737 (2006) or resolution 1747 (2007);

“18. Requests within 90 days a further report from the Director General of the IAEA on whether Iran has established full and sustained suspension of all activities mentioned in resolution 1737 (2006), as well as on the process of Iranian compliance with all the steps required by the IAEA Board and with the other provisions of resolution 1737 (2006), resolution 1747 (2007) and of this resolution, to the IAEA Board of Governors and in parallel to the Security Council for its consideration;

“19. Reaffirms that it shall review Iran’s actions in light of the report referred to in the paragraph above, and:

(a) that it shall suspend the implementation of measures if and for so long as Iran suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, as verified by the IAEA, to allow for negotiations in good faith in order to reach an early and mutually acceptable outcome;

(b) that it shall terminate the measures specified in paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 12 of resolution 1737 (2006), as well as in paragraphs 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of resolution 1747 (2007), and in paragraphs 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 above, as soon as it determines, following receipt of the report referred to in the paragraph above, that Iran has fully complied with its obligations under the relevant resolutions of the Security Council and met the requirements of the IAEA Board of Governors, as confirmed by the IAEA Board;

(c) that it shall, in the event that the report shows that Iran has not complied with resolution 1696 (2006), resolution 1737 (2006), resolution 1747 (2007) and this resolution, adopt further appropriate measures under Article 41 of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations to persuade Iran to comply with these resolutions and the requirements of the IAEA, and underlines that further decisions will be required should such additional measures be necessary;