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On Sunday, WaPo ran an article about visiting Oscar Zero, a missile silo in North Dakota. (See the State Historical Society of North Dakota website and an article in the Bismarck Tribune.)

You can’t actually visit it yet. And the article doesn’t contain any actual details about the visit — it is largely an exercise in navel gazing, with the Cold War-threat of apocalypse serving as a starting point for the author to discuss a book he read about the end of the world (Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization), an early 1990s visit to the Fulda Gap and his shrinking 401(K).

Yawn.

Come to think of it, here is the full-text of the article without the narcissistic passages:

Take a slow, loud elevator cage down into the depths of Oscar Zero, as it is called — the launch control center for what used to be a bevy of Minuteman III nuclear missiles aimed at the late, great Soviet Union — and return with us now to those days of the Cold War when, unlike today, even when things were bleak, they were at least clear.

“In the movie ‘WarGames,’ we were the first to go,” Delore Zimmerman, a Grand Forks economic development specialist, recalls cheerfully.

When you’re surrounded by 150 Minuteman III silos, with 400-plus warheads, spread out geometrically across eight very large counties from the Canadian border to Interstate 94, you have an extremely clear idea of what the end of the world looks like. Kind of consoling, actually, in its lack of ambiguity.

[snip, ponderous thoughts about the perilous state of the world]

After a while, you think about this at the bottom of Oscar Zero.

Its portion of the actual missile fields that made North Dakota one of the world’s great nuclear powers has been gone for a decade, destroyed as part of an agreement between the United States and Russia. Oscar Zero, however, has been preserved in the hope that the State Historical Society will one day be able to reopen it as a museum. Such an attraction is seen as an economic development opportunity, bringing in tourists. Oscar Zero is not yet open to the public, but if you’ve got friends in the economic development community, it’s possible to find someone with a key who will show you around.

That would be John Clark, a Cooperstown native who maintains the place just as it was on July 17, 1997, the day the nuclear warriors stood down. When Clark was in the Air Force, he served as a “nuclear weapons specialist.” He would test the cone-shaped warheads electronically to make sure they would work. You ask him if that was spooky. More in hindsight than at the time, he says.

The command post deep underground is in a concrete pod perhaps 30 feet high and 50 feet long. You enter it through a tunnel sealed by a three-foot-thick blast door. The floor on which you stand, gazing at the desks full of ancient electronics, is suspended from the top of the pod by giant shock absorbers about 2 feet across and 20 feet long. The chair on which you sit to look at the “status alert” display board — which includes lights labeled “Enabled,” “Lch in process” and “Missile away” — is similar to an airline pilot’s captain’s chair. It has a four-point seat belt that comes over your shoulders. Oscar Zero is majorly prepared for the ground to move beneath your feet.

Let’s suppose you’re the kind of person who would read a blog like this. (You are.) Let’s further suppose that you happen to be in the Washington, DC area with a few hours to kill.

Check out the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum. It’s fun for the entire nuclear family. Really, weapons of mass destruction that would seem controversial downtown fit in just fine out by Dulles Airport. And regardless of one’s feelings about nuclear delivery vehicles, a visitor can’t help noticing that a lot of them really look sweet.

For starters, consider the AGM-86A Air-Launched Cruise Missile. It wouldn’t seem halfway out of place on a sci-fi movie set.

Then there’s the Poseidon Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile.

Your eyes do not deceive you: it’s a woody! [Not quite, as explained in the comments.]

The all-natural fuselage material of the C-3 must serve some functional purpose, but as an aesthetic statement, it’s hard to top. That’s the retro nuke to have on display in your living room. And when you think about it, it’s not that much more incongruous than decades’ worth of classic station wagons like this one.

(Chinese Transporter-Erector-Launcher with whitewall tires, eat your heart out.)

Finally, the Enola Gay must have its due.

As an object for contemplation, it has few peers. Visually, a few impressions stand out: the sheer size of the machine, its elegant lines and gleaming finish, the quadruple death’s-heads of the sculpted engines.

For anyone aware of the plane’s significance, its presence chills an otherwise cheerful space. Is there a more awful symbol of destruction? Perhaps the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Obviously, we don’t place messages in the crevices of the Enola Gay. (The Museum staff would frown upon that.) But possibly it has a message for us.

I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks and then have a conference out in Monterey so my posting may be a bit sporadic (read non-existent) until I get back. I hope to visit the museum at Los Alamos on my travels (assuming I’m allowed to) so I might have some good pictures to share on my return.

In the meantime I leave you with a story that broke in the UK this morning about the cause of an accident on a UK nuclear submarine in 2002:

A nuclear submarine crashed after tracing paper was used to mark its course, it has emerged.

HMS Trafalgar ran aground during a training exercise off the coast of Skye in November 2002.

A Royal Navy board of inquiry criticised the decision to put tracing paper over charts so student officers could not draw on them.

It said the tracing paper obscured vital information that could have prevented the crash.

Classic.

It reminds me of when the Royal Navy was awarded the Ignoble Peace Prize a few years back ‘for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout “Bang!“’.

As many of you know, I am a sucker for nuclear tourism. This summer, while at Los Alamos, I got a chance to see the“High Bay” building (above) — where the “Fat Man” implosion device was assembled.

Los Alamos National Laboratory was able to restore the building with funds from the Department of Energy, National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

Now the Atomic Heritage Foundation and others are working to convince the National Park Service to preserve the B reactor at Hanford, which produced the plutonium used in Fat Man. McClatchy’s Les Blumenthal has the rest of the story:

A National Park Service advisory committee will decide in early December whether to recommend placing the B Reactor on the list of National Historic Landmarks. Final listing decisions are made by the interior secretary.

The National Park Service also is considering whether to include the reactor, along with the world’s first uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Trinity test site at Los Alamos, N.M., where the first nuclear bombs were tested, in a national historical park that would tell the story of the Manhattan Project. A draft report is expected next spring and a final version at the end of 2008. Congress would make the final decision.

The Atomic Heritage Foundation has images of the B reactor, as well as links to stories about the tours in the Tri-City Herald and Seattle Times.

Some of my friends oppose preserving these sites, fearing that the exhibits will be one-sided hagiography of the nuclear weapons enterprise. After the Enola Gay fiasco at the Smithsonian, I understand their concern. Still, I come down firmly on the side of preserving important historical sites while we still can, leaving the fight over interpretation to future generations.

For more on the Atomic Heritage Foundation, you can take a look at their website or read John Arnold’s profile in the Albuquerque Journal.

The German Federal government is working with a German history museum in Bonn, the Haus der Geschichte, to transform the former Emergency Seat of the Constitutional Organs of the Federal Republic (Ausweichsitz der Verfassungsorgane des Bundes)—Germany’s answer to Mount Weather—into a tourist destination.

The New York Times has a story by Mark Landler complete with gorgeous photographs by Marcus Gloger (see above).

The stroy avoids the bunker’s Nazi past, which I gather was a bit of a controversy when German authorities decided to repurpose a World War II railroad tunnel built with slave labor.

For further information about the bunker as object, I recommend this article with even more gorgeous photographs by Andreas Magdanz.

The article, written by Jürgen Reiche, director of exhibits at the Haus der Geschichte, is wonderfully German:

No other site in Germany – nor any other place in the world for that matter—offers a more authentic description the political history of the twentieth century in a more impressive way, communicates the military, technical, cultural, and social history of German in a more emotional way, and provokes us to think about the past, present, and future more emphatically.

“What right do we have,” asked the daily newspaper “TAZ” about the started demolition, “to be shocked at the criminal destruction of cultural items by the Taliban, when we are depriving ourselves of memorials to our own history?”

And who, we might add, wants to be responsible for destroying forever one of the most German places in Germany, a combination of idyll and decay, achievement and contempt, just as perfectly organized and straightened up as it is unfathomable and profoundly labyrinthine, a mirror of German mentalities and continuities – and hiding it from public attention? This site must be preserved!

And now we will reflect upon the misery of childhood.

Two Words: ROAD TRIP

The head of the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization (Esfandiar Rahim-Masha’i) has said: Foreign tourists can visit Iran’s nuclear centers. In order to learn more about this report, we’ve telephoned the deputy head of the Tourism Organization. Hello, Mr Malekzadeh. Please go ahead.

(Mohammad Sharif Malekzadeh) In the discussion that Mr Masha’i had with the president, Dr Ahmadinezhad, the honourable president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, voiced his consent for all tourists to visit Iran’s nuclear centers and sites. And this is a turning point in terms of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s transparency in all scientific and practical dimensions.

On a more serious note, Mohammad Sa’idi, Deputy Chief of the Iranian National Atomic Energy Organisation, proposed that France should establish a consortium to enrich uranium in Iran:

“The best solution to dispel the worries about Iran’s nuclear activities is not to demand a suspension” of enrichment, the deputy head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, Mohammad Saeedi, told AFP.

“We have an idea that technically and legally is the best solution.

“It is that France creates a consortium with Eurodif and Areva to carry out enrichment in Iran and thus they can closely monitor our nuclear programme,” he added, referring to France’s enrichment specialist and its parent company.

Rice called the idea old, while the French called it totally new—though both were attempting to say the same thing, which in case you missed it, was that the proposal doesn’t really address the matter at hand. Javier Solana ginned up a little more enthusiasm, calling it interesting.

For what it is worth, I don’t really understand how this works—Eurodif enriches uranium with the extremely inefficient gaserous diffusion process (hence, the dif). Areva established the Enrichment Technology Company (ETC)—a joint venture with Urenco—to use Urenco TC-21 centrifuges under a “black box” arrangement to protect the proprietary technology. (More on black boxes).

Geoff Forden and John Thomson have proposed putting a URENCO plant in Iran, instead of building an enrichment plant in Russia.

Ultimately, these kind of deals come down to a sort of theoretical trade-off. There are two ways to make it “hard” for Iran to build a bomb: One way is to restrict Iran’s access to information and technology; the other is to propose monitoring and verification efforts to make any decision to move toward a bomb a very public decision.

Neither offers a guarantee—the 2002 revelation of Iran’s clandestine centrifuge program demonstrates both that controlling technology is difficult and that, even with lots of warning, we might not be able to stop a country like Iran. As we try to decide how much enrichment work we can accept in Iran and under what safeguards (or monitoring, really), we can imagine a hypothetical policymaker with an indifference curve that defines the rate at which she is willing to allow Iran access to enrichment technology in exchange for better capabilities to monitor Iran’s activities.

As Iran’s scientists learn more about centrifuges, we need to learn more about Iran’s scientists.

The Forden and Thomson proposal reflects a judgement that Iran is going to learn lots about centrifuges—and they’ve got 164 reasons to think so. Gaining as much access as possible, therefore, is worth—to Forden and Thomson—letting Iran have really awesome (although black boxed) centrifuges just kind of hanging around (under reasonable safeguards). For others, no amount of monitoring will make it okay for Iran to have a centrifuge plant on its soil.

You see can see, I think, a different willingness to trade in Matthew Bunn’s proposal to allow Iran to conduct certain activities under a suspension and the response by David Albright and Jackie Shire, driven by different assessments of how much Iran is likely to learn anyway.

At the extreme—and making a deal politically difficult—are those who shall remain nameless who can’t stomach the idea of Iranians knowing anything about centrifuges (save for maybe that they spin); a hopeless goal brilliantly parodied by the The Onion ...

Report: Iranian Science Teachers May Be Enriching Students

September 26, 2006 | Issue 42•39

WASHINGTON, DC—A recently released Pentagon report is raising new worries that Iran has been operating several large facilities designed solely for the purpose of enriching mass quantities of high-grade students.

“We have reason to believe that specially trained Iranian science teachers are taking raw, unrefined brain power and bombarding it with knowledge at accelerated levels,” said U.S. Undersecretary Of Defense For Intelligence Stephen Cambone at a Tuesday press conference. “If current levels of student concentration remain this high, Iran could be a mere five to eight years away from developing an atomic scientist.”

The awesome photograph of a “standard overland bus (old type)” in Iran was taking by Holger Spamann, who has some really fantastic pictures of his bicycle trips.

Some of you may remember that, over my summer vacation, I visited the first Chinese nuclear weapons design base, in Qinghai Province. (See What I Did Over Summer Vacation: China’s Los Alamos July 6, 2005).

A loyal reader notes that the Chinese government is spending more than $10 million to renovate the site.

Who wants to go with me?

Funds given to former nuclear base
2006-03-20

THE central government has decided to spend 93 million yuan (US$11.6 million) to better protect the country’s first nuclear weapons research and production base in Qinghai Province, according to official sources.

The money will be used to build exhibition halls, renovate ruins of the former atomic bomb base and improve the surrounding environment, according to the Qinghai Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau.

The publicity department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee has decided to allocate 10 million yuan towards the project.

Covering more than 1,100 square kilometers in northwestern China, the former atom bomb base was the birth place of the country’s first atomic and hydrogen bombs. It was built in 1958. The government closed it in 1987 to support demands for the destruction of all nuclear weapons in the world. The retired atom bomb base was handed over to the provincial government in 1993.

Xihai Town, the current name for the base, will be turned into an exhibition center on the birth and growth of China’s atom and hydrogen bombs, said an official.

“The retired base was expected to become a platform for spurring the patriotic spirit of the general public,” said Ma Weimin, deputy head of the Qinghai Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau.

Note: My Iran posts, the second of which will appear later today, are being crossposted at Wampum, home of the Koufax Awards.

Next week, Paul and I will be blogging at TPM Cafe. Feel free to submit questions.

The Chinese government is opening a nuclear technology museum in Mianyang, home of the China Academy of Engineering Physics:

China’s first theme museum, on the course of development of nuclear technology, will be set up in Mianyang City, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, according to a China News Service report on Monday.

The museum, which is now under construction, is expected to open in April.

With a total investment of 250 million yuan (US$31 million), the museum will be divided into four big exhibition sections, namely nuclear technology, wind tunnel technology, computer science, and Changhong vision technology.

[snip]

In addition, the exhibits will also showcase the people and touching stories behind the “two bombs and one satellite” program. The program describes the detonation of China’s first atom bomb in 1964, which was followed by the successful launch of a missile in 1966 and explosion of a H-bomb in 1967. The launch of China’s first satellite “Dong Fang Hong” in 1970 was a declaration to the world that China had mastered satellite technology.

Some of you may know how much I like visiting Chinese nuclear museums. See: What I Did Over Summer Vacation: China’s Los Alamos, July 06, 2005

Having an avid interest in the history of China’s nuclear weapons program, I’ve always wondered what life was like at China’s “Los Alamos”—the Northwest Nuclear Weapons Research and Design Academy near Haiyan, where China’s first nuclear weapons were designed and built.

Eventually, China’s nuclear weapons design and fabrication facilities were moved to a “third line” facility in Mianyang, Sichuan Province.

The facility near Haiyan (officially Plant No. 221) is now open to tourists ... like me:

When [Plant 221] opened in 1958 it was regarded as a mysterious and forbidden zone, covering an area of 1,170 square kilometers. To the outside world, it was known as the Qinghai Mine.

Now the local government has erected billboards near the site to attract tourists.

Dotting one wall of a geometrically shaped building surrounded by reinforced cement structure are the holes researchers peered through to observe the nuclear testing explosions. The dilapidated site at present was the former No. 6 Factory of the base, called the “shooting range.”

Some hundreds yards away is the famous “No. 1 Pit in Asia,” where nuclear waste is buried.

This is what I did over summer vacation.

In fact, that’s me (_above, right_) standing next to the “shooting range.” I am a little freaked out to know nuclear waste is buried a few hundred yards away.

I feel fine, thanks for asking.

The facility—now called “Atomic City” for obvious branding reasons—also has a museum (_left_). The museum has a model of the base, mock-ups of the first nuclear weapon and a DF-3 RV, and many documents including period identification badges.

Those, along with other cool nuclear accoutrement—are kept in a room closed to foreigners … well, some foreigners.

No photographs permitted.

This is how DIA described the facility—located near Qinghai Lake (also known as Koko Nor)—in 1972:

Koko Nor is the major nuclear weapons R&D center in China and, up to the present at least, it has been the major weapons fabrication center as well. It has facilities for high explosive and fissile component production, general component (cases, electrical systems) production, final weapons assembly, HE component testing, and environmental testing.