WhirledView

Here's the Video

by Cheryl Rofer

via Barron YoungSmith and Kevin Drum.

But Kevin, Barron has it, well, not quite right.

It's not "largely irreversible." There are other possible ways to cool the Yongbyon reactor, as was pointed out not totally convincingly in the release of information about that Syrian building the Israelis targeted.

I know, we all like to think of those hyperboloid towers as emblematic of and essential to nuclear plants. But they just run cooling water through them to get rid of the excess heat a power plant produces. They're on coal plants as well, and sometimes industrial plants.

It would be more irreversible to fill the reactor vessel with concrete. That would be irreversible.

And any country can throw the inspectors out, any time. They're just people, not even armed.

But I hate to seem to be coming out on the side of John Bolton.

It's a good thing that this was done, in both practical and symbolic ways. Perhaps even more important that the North Koreans encouraged recording of the event. I've been looking forward to posting the video.

And hey! How about some positive coverage for the Los Alamos National Laboratory? They've been working on the disablement for some time now, the real stuff that can make this irreversible. Even wearing suits in hot summer weather -- that's really a sacrifice for Los Alamos scientists. (6/30 - I see that Jeffrey now says that that's not Kevin Veal in the suit. I don't know Kevin and I don't know who it is in the suit.)

Our Nuclear Future

by CKR

John McCain wants to build 45 nuclear plants by 2030. Barack Obama says nuclear is worth considering. Even James Lovelock, associated with the Gaia hypothesis that says the earth is one big living organism, says we need nuclear power.

Public perception of nuclear power has been unfavorable since some time after I got inspired by the idea of power too cheap to meter. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had something to do with that, but anything that is associated with mushroom clouds and an element named for the god of the underworld via the outermost planet is going to face an uphill battle.

Several people have been urging me to write something in response to McCain’s proposal. The more I’ve thought about what to write, the more it has all seemed one big ball of wax, with strings and fuel rods embedded. So I can pull at whatever string or fuel rod and see what comes out.

Jane Harman provides a place to start (thanks, J.!). The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is obsolete. That’s a lousy place to start, actually, but let’s consider that an editor at the Wall Street Journal provided that headline, which is consistent with the rightwing allergy to treaties, and move on to what Harman actually says.

The NPT guarantees the nuclear fuel cycle to its signatories, which are all the countries of the world but four, and those four developed the nuclear fuel cycle anyway. Having the nuclear fuel cycle allows a country to build nuclear weapons with the addition of only a few bells and whistles.

So we need to internationalize the fuel cycle, with heavy safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A more promising approach might be to create an international consortium of fuel centers that provide enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuel, and end-to-end oversight of nuclear resources. Driven by market demand, private companies could operate facilities with IAEA oversight, and participating states would agree not to engage in independent enriching and reprocessing. Material would be purchased from the international market, thereby creating supply assurance for nations who fear being denied fuel.

I can quibble with Harman’s exact wording, but overall she’s got it right.

A private company is building a uranium enrichment facility in Eunice, New Mexico. This could be a place to start internationalizing the fuel cycle. We’ve got to do more than just talk about it. Another private facility in one country, supplying that country’s needs alone, is business as usual. And if we’re serious about both proliferation and increasing energy sources, we’ve got to start now.

McCain, of course, is for business as usual. Harman doesn’t mention Eunice or Mohamed ElBaradei’s call for internationalizing the fuel cycle, which came before President Bush’s call for the GNEP, which she mentions and gets wrong. What is wrong with GNEP is not that Bush is “as a research and development initiative,” but rather that he put this US-centric initiative out as a competitor to ElBaradei’s initiative. And, yes, all us Amurricans know that our country is totally reliable and fair, but others might just have a different viewpoint.

That’s just one point relating to McCain’s 45 nuclear plants by 2030. Other questions abound. What about the waste? (I do think that Yucca Mountain is the answer to that one, but it’s the first question others come up with.) What about reactor safety? Is uranium available for fuel? Could a company break ground by 2030 if they applied today, given the permitting process? Will anyone want a reactor in their neighborhood? Does the construction capacity exist, or can it be developed, to build these plants?

And you can probably think of others. To be continued.

The Manichaean Conservatives

by Cheryl Rofer

U.S. vs. Them, by J. Peter Scoblic, Viking Penguin, 2008.

Peter Scoblic has a grand unified theory of conservatism and national security: the division into good and evil comes before everything else for conservatives. He uses this theory to make sense of a long history of defective conservative prescriptions for national security.

Today’s conservatism was born in the years after World War II, when the world was more Manichaean than it is today: the United States faced the Soviet Union. Conservatives, reeling from their economic failure in the Great Depression and political failure in pushing an isolationist foreign policy in response to Hitler’s rise, needed a New Look. William Buckley and others supplied it: a combination of moralism based on absolute good and absolute evil, along with a preference for war over diplomacy.

Scoblic makes his case persuasively for the the last half of the twentieth century. I’m not so sure that the case works as well for the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps, however, we are too close to the Bush administration, not yet able to shear away the detail to show the clear lines of conservative thought. Nor can we yet read the minutes of the meetings, the proposals for action, the written arguments for and against those proposals.

The conservative record is impressive: MacArthur’s insistence on taking the Korean War to China; the insistence that Eisenhower roll back the Soviet Union by nuclear strikes; opposition to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; opposition to and denigration of the United Nations; distrust of the CIA; a love of missile defense; a hatred of treaties. All fruitless and wrongheaded, some actively dangerous.

IAEA, Syria, Iran

by Cheryl Rofer

The International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors met today.

Syria will allow IAEA inspectors into the country to investigate the al-Kibar site, although it's not clear whether the inspectors will actually visit the site. The visit will be June 22-24. The Syrians have bulldozed the site and erected another building where the alleged reactor building stood.

Because of the bulldozing and because there probably was no reactor fuel in the building when it was bombed, there is very little that can be determined from soil sampling. It might be useful for the inspectors, if they go to the site, to take photographs of the surrounding land that can be compared with the CIA photos of the outside of the building and the overhead photos. I've been wondering in particular about a linear feature that might have something to do with the alleged underground water storage tank, which doesn't seem to have shown up during the bulldozing.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA Director, again urged Iran to come clean on those experiments that seem to have had something to do with nuclear weapons. But, on the other hand, some of the documents that are claimed to support these suspicions aren't being made available to Iran.

ElBaradei, however, said the investigation had also been hampered by the IAEA's inability to provide copies of the intelligence documents to Iran for perusal. The reason, diplomats say, is U.S. concern about exposing its sources.

"The agency received much of the information ... only in electronic form and was unfortunately not authorised to provide copies to Iran," the IAEA director said.

"Release of documents that are not sensitive from the proliferation perspective, including those purportedly showing interconnections between the three categories of alleged studies, would clearly help the agency in its investigations."

Iran has dismissed the information as fabricated or related solely to conventional military activity.

It sounds like the information comes from the "laptop of death," which some of us have been suspicious of for some time. We've heard much less about that laptop lately.

But if Iran isn't presented with the information, their claim that the information is fabricated is about as good as the information itself.

John McCain on Nuclear Nonproliferation

by CKR

John McCain seems to have broken with President Bush today on several aspects of his nonproliferation policy.

He is more favorable to international treaties, for starters. He recognizes that the United States and Russia, with the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, must take the lead in eliminating those weapons.

The United States cannot and will not stop the spread of nuclear weapons by unilateral action. We must lead concerted and persistent multilateral efforts. As powerful as we are, America's ability to defend ourselves and our allies against the threat of nuclear attack depends on our ability to encourage effective international cooperation. We must strengthen the accords and institutions that make such cooperation possible.

However, he is vague about the treaties. He seems to say that we must work with Russia to extend the START treaty, but his words are weaker than that, and he doesn’t mention that START is used to verify the Moscow Treaty, which he doesn’t mention at all, although he does say he would like “a new arms control agreement with Russia reflecting the nuclear reductions I will seek.” Not clear whether those reductions would be below the Moscow Treaty’s 2200. We should “move quickly with other nations to negotiate a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty” and “seriously consider Russia's recent proposal” to expand the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to include other countries in banning these missiles. He is also willing to talk to China on strategic and nuclear issues, hopefully bringing them into a warhead-reduction regime.

One Person Can make Make a Difference

by CKR

Glenn Kessler today tells us about one of them: Christopher Hill, who has been in charge of the negotiations with North Korea. Hill has managed to persuade North Korea to begin decommissioning its plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon and to make its records of plutonium production available.

Somehow, Hill managed to persuade Condoleezza Rice and George Bush to let him run the negotiations his way. And he made it work.

But Jeffrey Lewis tells us that the rumor mill says that Hill will be leaving his position “any day now.” Lewis speculates that Hill is being pushed out by the Cheney faction. That’s entirely possible. I’d add another factor.

Through deft use of public appearances and the news media, Hill also has become an international figure in his own right. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last year hailed him as a "diplomat par excellence" whose "persistence and skillful negotiation have brought us close, I believe, to resolving this last legacy of the Cold War." Along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Aga Khan, Hill is even a finalist for Britain’s prestigious Chatham House Prize -- given to the statesman who has had the greatest impact on international relations -- for keeping the North Korean "talks alive and viable, against seemingly impossible odds," including the "complex internal politics of Washington."

Two things are wrong here, from the point of view of Hill’s bosses and the broader bureaucracy. One is that he’s doing a good job where the earlier application of the conventional wisdom (conventional within the administration, that is) failed. The other is that he is getting credit for it from outside.

It doesn’t matter that he really is doing a good job. It does matter that others in his organization, and perhaps (even worse), his bosses have their noses out of joint.

I’m hoping that someone (Condi? The Prez?) will take things in hand, keep Hill on, and shut down the others. We need more diplomats like Hill. And keeping him on would signal to others in the State Department that this is how they should do their jobs.

But the combination of political and bureaucratic knives can be pretty deadly. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Another Post on That Syrian Whatever

by CKR

Given President Bush’s speech to the Israeli Knesset last week, in which he warned against appeasing Hitler nations he doesn’t like, I’m currently leaning toward the theory that the motivation for releasing the intelligence information on the Syrian site that Israel bombed last year was to discourage the Israelis from negotiating with Hitler Syria, with perhaps a frisson of fear to inject into the US presidential campaign.

Today, Gabriel Schoenfeld, associate editor of Commentary, accuses Joe Cirincione, president of the Plowshares Foundation and author of Bomb Scare, of not being “worth his boron” in criticizing that intelligence information.

Schoenfeld’s previous claim to fame is an article in which he wondered whether the New York Times should be prosecuted for releasing national security secrets in reporting on illegal administration electronic surveillance practices. We can see from the outcome of that article that Schoenfeld wasn’t worth his electrons on that one.

And, of course, it is the crew at Commentary that has been beating the drums for attacking Iran and all that other fun war stuff.

I’m looking forward to what Cirincione will have to say, but in the meanwhile, here’s my take.

Subnational Activity in Syria?

by CKR

I have persuaded my colleague MC to expound on why that site in Syria might not have been run by the Syrian government. There is an additional point to be made, as well.

It seems to me that the publicly available facts on the site and on the Israeli raid are as consistent with this hypothesis as with the hypothesis that the site was run by the Syrian government; perhaps more so in places. As I noted about the ISIS report, alternative hypotheses need to be considered in interpreting overhead photos, and, indeed, what informants may provide.

So let’s assume that the installation was a reactor or somesuch producer of dangerous materials. But let’s consider that those constructing it were from a subnational group. Here are my colleague’s reasons, with one of mine thrown in with her permission.

Syria did not anticipate the attack. Syria did not condemn the attack. Syria has not come up with a story line to explain what was going on at al Kibar. A government most likely would have a cover story ready in case the enterprise was discovered. Some in the Syrian government may have known about it or even participated in it, but most likely not in an official capacity.

There seems to have been little or no tracking of this area by satellite. One of the signatures that would draw attention would have been movement of Syrian government traffic. Apparently there was little such movement.

A subnational group would spend and implement the minimal amount needed to get to their goal. They would not spend on security because it would be less added-value and more added-headaches in terms of bringing more people (who might be tracked, who might leak) into a top secret venture. They would not spend a huge amount of money burying a facility underground if their goal was to create enough nuclear material for a handful of weapons.

There is little concern in the facility design for the health of their workers (by having a shorter stack, for one example) which may indicate that the builders didn’t plan to be there long.

A government behaves in certain predictable ways, including putting up fences and guard stations to protect from the curious and for simple bureaucratic routine. How far outside its routine and bureaucratic comfort zone can a government go, even to protect against detection?

Being unaware of such an enterprise would be a major embarrassment to any government. That embarrassment, along with the desire to make the site unavailable to other free-lancers, would account for the rapid and complete clearing of the site by the Syrian government.

I think that this hypothesis is also persuasive with regard to the way the incident has played out internationally. I’ll try to post on that later.

The ISIS Report on Al Kibar

by CKR

The Institute for Science and International Security has issued a report on the al Kibar site in Syria. It does a number of things well, but its scope is limited to analysis of overhead photos and photos of the building. Perhaps a report on the reactor photos is in the works.

The authors, David Albright and Paul Brennan, use the site as a case study of how hard it can be to detect nuclear installations, particularly if the builders go to some lengths to conceal them. This, of course, assumes that the site was indeed a reactor installation.

Let me first say what the report does not (and cannot) address. The provenance of the ground-level photos of the building was not disclosed in the CIA video, nor was the associated intelligence that whoever took the photos provided. The report also does not address directly whether North Korea was involved in the building of the reactor. Evidence for this claim was thin in the CIA video, which presented only a photo of two men standing together, one in a running suit and one in a business suit. For any of us who have attended international conferences, there are undoubtedly hundreds of such photos out there. The CIA is said to have much more information than was released. Albright and Brennan cite “U.S. government experts knowledgeable about intelligence assessments about the Al Kibar reactor” as some of their sources.

The provenance of the photos probably legitimately involves concerns about sources and methods. Presumably a spy was inserted into the construction operations, or someone within those operations was turned. Presumably that person has been removed from that position, or it might be too dangerous to publish the photos at all. However, since limited numbers of people must have come to and gone from the operations, some danger to that person remains. An explanation of the provenance would likely expose his identity.

However, given the propensity of the Bush administration to overstate its case with regard to intelligence, questions will remain until the provenance of the photos is known; otherwise there is no way to know whether the photos of the building are from the same site as the overhead photos, nor whether the inside photos are inside of that building.

Albright and Brennan try to decipher how some of the distinguishing marks of the Yongbyon reactor, the shape of the building, cooling towers and gas stacks, might have been disguised or redesigned.

Massive Retaliation

by CKR

Hillary Clinton, answering a question that contained two hypotheticals—that Iran had its own nuclear weapons and that it attacked Israel with them—threatened to “obliterate” Iran with “massive retaliation.” Not once, but five times (one, two, three, four, five), mostly under direct questioning. So we may presume that she means it, that it wasn’t too late at night, and she didn’t misspeak.

Gary Sick gives us some background on “dual containment,” which may be what is behind Clinton’s pairing of nuclear threats with her concept of a nuclear umbrella for the non-Iran states of the Middle East.

The idea presumably would be to prevent the sort of nuclear proliferation that Joby Warrick writes about in today’s Washington Post. Forty or more developing countries have signaled interest in starting nuclear power programs, and of them, a half dozen have said that they are planning to enrich uranium or reprocess nuclear fuel. Those capabilities, in particular, make a weapons program possible. Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, and Turkey are all interested in nuclear power. United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have vowed never to pursue uranium enrichment or fuel reprocessing, but they are interested in nuclear power.

The price of oil is one of the motivators to own the nuclear fuel cycle, but regional stability may be more important to the Middle Eastern states, along with the prestige of having nuclear weapons, a way of signaling to the world that they have arrived militarily.

It’s easy and convenient to blame this on Iran, but let’s step back a bit.