IAEA Iran Report Preview

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IAEA DG Mohamed ElBaradei made some public remarks. It’s a mixed picture.

Update: see “the actual report”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/158/Iran.pdf.

Highlights from “Reuters”:http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE51G5JL20090217:

“They haven’t really been adding centrifuges, which is a good thing,” ElBaradei said at a think-tank in Paris, adding: “Our assessment is that it’s a political decision.”

[snip]

“Natanz is supposed to have 50,000 centrifuges. Right now they have 5,000,” he said, adding that Iran had not added a “significant” number of centrifuges.

[snip]

“No, I’m not obviously happy with the degree of cooperation … They shut off any cooperation with the agency over the past few months,” said ElBaradei, who has for years called on Iran to do more to help his agency’s investigations.

“Iran right now is not providing any access or any clarification with regard to those studies or the whole possible military dimension,” he added.

ElBaradei played down fears of an imminent Iranian bomb.

“They will have probably in a year or so enough low enriched uranium which, if converted to highly enriched uranium, and if they have the know-how to weaponise it and to deliver it, then they can have one nuclear weapon,” he said.

But many other steps would have to be taken to produce a weapon, such as walking out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelling U.N. nuclear inspectors and mastering the technology to produce a nuclear explosion, he said.

“If I go by the intelligence community in the U.S., they are saying that they still have 2-5 years to be able to do that — to develop a weapon — which to me means that we have at least enough time for diplomacy,” he said.

Related: ElBaradei’s last term is winding down. The AP’s George Jahn “profiles”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jiRSE2djCKxpy0LYT6SaecqOfCyQD96E21DO0 the two leading candidates for IAEA Director-General.

Courtship Rituals of French SSBNs

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Various accounts have described the damage to Le Triomphant as the result of a low-speed collision — a glancing blow — that nevertheless crushed the French submarine’s sonar dome, which goes on the nose of the boat. By contrast, scrapes and dents on HMS Vanguard were allegedly visible to observers (meaning they were somewhere on its top half) as it proceeded homeward up the Firth of Clyde. It follows that the French boat was trying to nuzzle its British cousin.

[Update: Judging by “this video”:http://banthebomb.org/ne/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1022&Itemid=1, there was no visible damage to the top half of the Vanguard.]

But really, I’m not here to talk to you about the private lives of mechanical whales of mass destruction. “Old news”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1858/stuff-happens already. What’s of more interest is how the two organizations have reacted.

First, a bit of background. According to Stephen Saunders, a retired senior officer of the Royal Navy, the longstanding absence of France from the NATO military command structure raises questions about whether the French Navy participates in the alliance’s “waterspace management”:http://www.janes.com/media/releases/pc090217_1.shtml arrangements.

Judging by “the comments of French Defense Minister Herve Morin”:http://www.welt.de/english-news/article3220555/French-and-UK-may-coordinate-submarine-patrols.html to the French radio station Canal Plus, it doesn’t, but would like to:

“There’s no story to this — the British aren’t hunting French submarines, and the French submarines don’t hunt British submarines,” Morin told Canal+ radio.

“We face an extremely simple technological problem, which is that these submarines are not detectable. They make less noise than a shrimp.”

He said the submarines’ mission was to sit at the bottom of the sea and act as a nuclear deterrent.

“Between France and Britain, there are things we can do together….one of the solutions would be to think about the patrol zones,” Morin said.

As it was undersea, so it is on land: the French taking initiative, the British displaying reticence. UK officials seem to have little to say about the matter. In fact, the only statements I can find online are couched grudgingly, as “reactions to”:http://www.blogs.mod.uk/ “tabloid newspaper articles”:http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/Royal-Navy-News-HMS-Vanguard.html?&changeNav=6568.

The French are almost chatty by comparison. Not only did they publicize the collision “before they even knew what it involved”:http://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/base/breves/incident_sous_marin (“probablement un conteneur” — can’t you hear the Gallic shrug?), but they declared the “collision entre sous-marins”:http://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/base/breves/collision_entre_sous_marins without fuss, and even threw in an “official communiqué”:http://www.defense.gouv.fr/defense/votre_espace/journalistes/communiques/communiques_du_ministere_de_la_defense/communique_du_ministere_de_la_defense_du_16_02_09. And then there’s M. Morin’s modest proposal.

In fairness, I should mention that just last month, three retired senior UK military men called for “scrapping the nuclear deterrent outright”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5525682.ece. Reticent, that is not. But their stand does not seem to be winning the day.

A final note: the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reports an “uptick in Russian SSBN patrols during 2008”:http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2009/02/russia.php. All that’s cold is warm again. Or the other way around.

And with that, what you were waiting for: the “musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2LQGigK-0.

Stuff Happens

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Much remains to be explained about the remarkable encounter between two nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic in early February. The whole affair really puts the Foxtrot* in “WTF”:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whiskey_tango_foxtrot.

One angle probably not worth fixating on is the idea, mooted in the “comments at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2188/when-ssbns-collide, that this was no coincidence. There’s just no plausible reason to operate SSBNs intentionally in proximity to one another.

But meant another way, perhaps it was no coincidence. It’s easy to “underestimate”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1849/whats-the-chance “probabilities”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1855/whats-the-chance-ctd for at least a couple of reasons.

First, the “role of iteration”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1849/whats-the-chance. If the chance of a bad event per patrol is one umpteenth, the chance of a bad event per umpty-ump patrols may be a good bit higher. (It’s the complement of the chance-of-no-bad-event-per-single-instance raised to the power of the number of instances.) We tend to overlook this.

The implications of this point for the chance of general nuclear war are left as an exercise for the reader. Happy spreadsheeting, and sleep well.

Second, the “assumption of independence”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1855/whats-the-chance-ctd. It’s simplicity itself to do calculations such as the one above, but it assumes that each instance is not influenced by any other instance. They’re all mutually independent. But whether it’s satellites or sous-marins, there routinely seem to be reasons — physical, technical, geographic, etc. — to operate in similar or overlapping patterns. In short, there are dependencies between events. This, too, is easy to overlook. Among other things, it makes the math a great deal harder.

The implications of this point for credit default swaps are left as an exercise for the reader should be lost on no one by now.

All of which is a way of saying that the “shut-mouthedness of the French and British navies”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/world/europe/17submarine.html about this event is no indication of anything more sinister than the wholly reasonable desire to preserve secrecy about their SSBN patrol areas. Based on what’s been published so far, you can already make some educated guesses about the general vicinity of this event, which ought to be enough to make anybody a little uneasy.

It helps to recall why the boat goes under the water in the first place: so you can’t see where it goes.

*Yes, I realize that neither of these boats has much in common with a “Foxtrot”:http://www.russiansublongbeach.com/Scorpionfacts.html except that they all go under the water.

What’s The Chance? Ctd.

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Yes, it’s the “theme”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1847/iridium-cosmos of the “week”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1849/whats-the-chance.

According to the “BBC’s defense correspondent”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7892294.stm, the undersea collision of HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant was not too likely:

“This is clearly a one-in-a-million chance when you think about how big the Atlantic is,” she said.

Now, clearly that’s a figure of speech rather than a considered estimate. And perhaps it’s one of those probabilities that’s altogether too easy to lowball. As a source explains later in the same item, submarines like to hang around and spend time together:

Nuclear engineer John Large told the BBC that navies often used the same “nesting grounds”.

“Both navies want quiet areas, deep areas, roughly the same distance from their home ports. So you find these station grounds have got quite a few submarines, not only French and Royal Navy but also from Russia and the United States.”

Par-tay.

Here it is, your “musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUG2SQK03tU.

HRC on DPRK HEU, Pu

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The Secretary of State has something to say about fissile material in North Korea, but the transcript is not yet online. [Update: here’s the “transcript”:http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/02/117345.htm.] From “Glenn Kessler”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/15/AR2009021501790.html:

“There is a debate within the intelligence community as to exactly the extent of the highly enriched uranium program,” Clinton told reporters traveling with her to Asia on her first voyage as the chief U.S. diplomat.

[snip]

“The Agreed Framework was torn up on the basis of the concerns about the highly enriched uranium program,” Clinton said. “There is no debate that, once the Agreed Framework was torn up, the North Koreans began to reprocess plutonium with a vengeance because all bets were off. The result is they now have nuclear weapons, which they did not have before.”

[snip]

“My goal is the denuclearization of North Korea,” Clinton said. “That means a verifiably complete accounting of whatever programs they have and the removal of the reprocessed plutonium that they were able to achieve because they were given the opportunity to do so.”

“When they move forward” on ending the program, she added, “we have a great openness to working with them,” including “a willingness to help the people of North Korea.”

Perhaps Secretary Clinton meant to say that the North Koreans have more nuclear weapons than before the Agreed Framework was torn up. (If memory serves — this was back in late 2002 — the North Koreans were the first to declare the AF dead, but remained within the NPT and kept Yongbyon on ice until the U.S. cut off HFO deliveries.) But perhaps she meant exactly what she said.

Jeff has already “laid out the issue”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1907/north-korean-reprocessing-campaigns, so it needn’t be explained all over again here.

IC on North Korea: No Consensus on HEU

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Speaking of primary sources, here’s the “Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community”:http://www.dni.gov/testimonies/20090212_testimony.pdf (PDF). It’s already gotten a great deal of attention for A) emphasizing the threat posed by the _global_ — i.e., not just national — economic crisis, and B) stating that al-Qaida in Pakistan has suffered “a succession of blows as damaging to the group as any since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001” at the, um, hands of “America’s flying killer robots”:http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/predator/. (The “UK’s, too”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/04/raf_reaper_reaps_at_last/.) But all that’s been covered elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to how the assessment deals with North Korea.

Right after the major sections on the global economic crisis and “turning the corner” on al-Qaida are some words about “the Arc of Instability.” This seems to be the successor to such colorful geo-political constructs as the “Axis of Evil”:http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html and the “Shi’ite Crescent”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,518131,00.html. Basically, it’s the Middle East plus Pakistan and Afghanistan. Notice which perennial trouble spot is missing!

This is followed by “Rising Asia.” The “rising” part means China and India, but eventually — starting on page 24 in a 45-page document — we do reach a sub-section on North Korea and its nuclear program:

…Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions and proliferation behavior threaten to destabilize East Asia. The North’s October 2006 nuclear test is consistent with our longstanding assessment that it had produced a nuclear device. Prior to the test, we assessed that North Korea produced enough plutonium for at least a half dozen nuclear weapons. The IC continues to assess North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability in the past. Some in the Intelligence Community have increasing concerns that North Korea has an ongoing covert uranium enrichment program.

And it goes on for a bit from there. But what leaps out (especially with the added emphasis) is the divided and equivocal statement on uranium enrichment.

Update: I forgot to mention it, but this is not entirely new news. For background, see “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2153/nork-heu-3-12-years-old, “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2156/more-on-nork-heu, and “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2163/yet-more-on-nork-heu.

Pakistan MFA on Khan Release

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Following up on Josh’s “post”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1842/khan-walks-back from the other day, I give you the two relevant statements from Pakistan’ Foreign Ministry. The “one from 6 February”:http://www.mofa.gov.pk/Press_Releases/2009/Feb/PR_55_09.htm called AQK a “free man.”

Perhaps responding to some of the, um, somewhat negative reactions to that announcement, the Ministry said “the next day”:http://www.mofa.gov.pk/Press_Releases/2009/Feb/PR_57_09.htm that Islamabad

bq. has dismantled the nuclear black market network and no individual associated with it enjoys any official status nor has access to any strategic facility.

I know how much you all like primary sources…

Pointing Fingers at Russia

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Back in a previous blogging existence, I observed that “nobody is attributing new developments in Iranian missile technology to Russia”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2013/irans-ashura-missile-mystery — at least, not yet.

Now the inevitable seems to have begun, deep in one of the recent “comment marathons”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2181/why-would-a-2-stage-safir-be-surprising#comment at ACW:

I can’t help but wonder if this all isn’t about “more modern materials, tools and computing power”, but rather “expert russian rocket scientists working in their iranian-financed north-korean exile-design-bureau on improving ancient soviet technology secretly provided by modern-day russia”…

Those in the know will recognize this as an idea associated with “Robert Schmucker”:http://www.schmucker.de/, a Munich-based technology consultant and entrepreneur. Schmucker maintains that the Nodong/Shihab-3/Ghauri missile is actually a heretofore unknown device of Soviet vintage, with the designs and engineering provided to North Korea by corrupt and enterprising Russians. The AQ Khanski network, as it were.

(See the 17th slide of this “Schmucker briefing”:http://www.prif.org/fileadmin/content-ABM/schmucker.pdf for an instance of this claim.)

Although wrong, this idea is certainly intriguing and not as ridiculous as it might seem. Here is why. “Daniel Sneider”:http://fsi.stanford.edu/people/danielcsneider/ wrote in the San Jose Mercury News of July 25, 2006:

I encountered one crucial tentacle of Kim’s program some 14 years ago, in late October of 1992.

A group of 64 Russian rocket scientists, accompanied by their wives and children, were stopped just as they were about to board a flight to North Korea. The scientists were employees of a super-secret facility in the Urals, the V.P. Makeyev Design Bureau, responsible for the development of the Soviet Union’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

As the bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor, I pieced the story together later from Russian press accounts and interviews with the scientists and others. A middleman with apparent official backing had offered the bureau, starving for orders and left adrift by the sudden end of the Cold War, work in North Korea.

Scientists who were making the equivalent of $15 a month jumped at offers of up to $4,000 a month to help a former Soviet ally. In the spring, a group of 10 scientists had gone for an initial foray. The Koreans, one of the scientists told me, initially never directly asked about nuclear warheads or missile designs. They claimed only to be interested in rocket science.

The Russians came home that fall and signed up dozens of their comrades as recruits. But the project was not officially sanctioned, and the KGB held them outside of Moscow for two months while the broker tried to re-negotiate their departure. Russian officials later described the North Koreans’ aim, without mentioning them by name, as an attempt to build “combat missile complexes that could carry nuclear weapons.”

North Korea began with copies of Soviet short-range Scud missiles and moved on to medium-range “Nodong” missiles, but they lacked the range and accuracy to meet Kim’s target. A decade after the airport incident, in 2003, credible reports emerged that the North Koreans were deploying a new, far more accurate missile based on the Soviet SS-N-6, a submarine-launched rocket developed by Makeyev in the 1960s. The Nodong-2, as some labeled it, could reach all U.S. bases in Japan and possibly even to Guam.

Now, there are just a couple of problems with extending the SS-N-6 paradigm to the Nodong.

First, the “work on the Nodong goes back to the late 1980s”:http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/NK/Missile/65_681.html, before the collapse of the Soviet Union set in motion the dynamics described by Sneider.

Second, the Soviet precursor to the Nodong doesn’t exist. It’s a figment.

Applying the same kind of reasoning to Iran’s new generation of post-Scud, post-Nodong space launchers/ballistic missiles is still more problematic, since these devices “don’t seem to exist in North Korea”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2013/irans-ashura-missile-mystery, where the nefarious Khanski Gang is supposedly at work.

Here’s a different idea: if there are indications of Russian technology in the Iranian missile program, it’s because “the Iranians had considerable access to Russian expertise and training in the 1990s”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1998_03/rusiran — not because devices were transferred to them lock, stock, and barrel.

I hesitate to say it, but there does still seem to be some resistance out there to the idea that anyone not severely melatonin melanin-challenged can work with sophisticated technologies…

Just saying.

What’s The Chance?

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Econo-blogger extraordinaire Felix Salmon writes:

“Low-Probability Disaster of the Day, Exosphere Edition”:http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2009/02/12/low-probability-disaster-of-the-day-exosphere-edition?tid=true

From “Andy Pazstor”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123438921888374497.html:

Pentagon brass, satellite industry executives and NASA leaders for years have publicly expressed concern about the dangers of orbital debris. But the odds of a direct hit between satellites were considered so small as to be basically unthinkable.

Is there a way of distinguishing, ex post, between (a) the ex ante probabilities having been wrong, and (b) the collision having been genuinely improbable? I’m going with (a).

This is a really meaty question, actually. It’s not, as one might suppose, a deterministic problem, as there is a human element involved in steering active satellites away from anticipated collisions. (Expect some hard questions to be asked about how this collision came about.) It’s just the sort of complex and continuously occurring situation that “nuclear deterrence wonks often think about”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5301.html, in fact.

So if one were to assess the probability of a sat-sat collision beyond a first approximation, it would probably involve interrogating experts to get their probability estimates. And no, you really could not know if their probabilities for this or any other specific question were right or wrong. But you can establish, “after the fact”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7959.html, which experts provide accurate probabilities, and which don’t. What is more, with creativity and good preparation, you can even get a pretty solid idea of who is accurate and who isn’t “well before the fact”:http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/History/20thCContemporary/?view=usa&ci=9780195064650. All without resorting to “black magic”:http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/?p=6.

One thing you probably shouldn’t do is to try to judge the accuracy of past predictions by what happens now, “post-Iridium-Cosmos”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1847/iridium-cosmos. This event presumably reduces the odds of the next sat-sat collision, since operators will be more vigilant for a good while. There’s that slippery human element again.

Then again, sat-sat collisions are the least of our worries. The real threat is sat-debris collisions. Not only are these relatively common — David Wright identifies “seven such incidents since 1991”:http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/space_weapons/technical_issues/colliding-satellites.html — but we should expect the fresh debris generated by Tuesday’s debacle to accelerate the trend.

For The Record

A side note. “Andy Pasztor’s WSJ article”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123438921888374497.html contains a startling inaccuracy:

Industry officials say Iridium has identified the Russian craft as a Cosmos series satellite launched in 1993, weighing more than a ton and including an onboard nuclear reactor. That couldn’t be independently verified. Experts have said the chance of radioactive debris surviving a fall through the atmosphere and reaching inhabited areas is very small.

Rest assured, there was no nuclear reactor on board. Although “such a thing has been contemplated”:http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:syQ5XIH1lFMJ:https://research.maxwell.af.mil/papers/ay2004/affellows/Downey.pdf, so far as I’m aware, it’s never been done, and at least in my naive estimate, the practicalities seem daunting. That is presumably why this claim “couldn’t be independently verified” — which maybe means that it shouldn’t have been published, either.

(And let’s not even get into “Project Orion”:http://books.google.com/books?id=r_Gu4f0QxrkC.)

What Pazstor’s confused source probably was thinking of was a “radioisotope thermoelectric generator”:http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator (or RTG), used to power deep space probes, the occasional satellite, or, in Russia, “various other things that require power, but people don’t routinely visit”:http://www.bellona.no/bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/navy/northern_fleet/incidents/37598. (RTGs have also provided Iran’s nuclear research agency with “an embarrassingly lame excuse for experimental Po-210 production”:http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/IaeaIran/iaea_note172004.pdf.) Long story short, a pellet of plutonium (or other radioisotope) gives off heat, which is used to generate electricity.

But, as it happens, this wasn’t the case, either. Pavel Podvig has “flagged”:http://russianforces.org/blog/2009/02/collision_in_space.shtml the dead bird as a “Strela-2M”:http://www.astronautix.com/craft/strela2m.htm comsat, which apparently involved chemical batteries of some type.

Hey, live and learn.