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Above: The Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince, after and before. Credit: Lisandro Suero

Here’s how former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in an interview with Esquire, summed up the state of governance in Haiti after last week’s earthquake:

The UN was, in effect, decapitated. The Haitian government was disabled by the destruction of the presidential palace and the president’s offices, and the parliamentary building. There are senior parliamentarians still missing. Members of the cabinet still missing. The prime minister and the president are fine, and they’re setting up shop around the airport. And the U.S. has given them communications equipment.

Haiti’s one small bit of luck at this miserable time is the readiness of the United States, among other countries, to jump to the rescue. The situation of Port-au-Prince at this moment is similar to that of New Orleans in late August and early September 2005: the local authorities were instantly overwhelmed by the disaster, leaving the U.S. federal government to step in.

So what happens when the U.S. federal government itself is the victim of catastrophe and “decapitation”? That’s what we ought to expect in the event of National Planning Scenario #1, a 10-kiloton nuclear ground burst in Washington, DC. With the heart of the federal city in ruins, the U.S. government will have to pull itself up by the bootstraps. So who’s going to lead?

The Haitian case suggests that who lives or dies under these sorts of circumstances is a matter of chance. As mentioned above, President Rene Préval survived the earthquake, although he’s been scarce. Much more damaging to the relief effort was the loss of the top UN officials in Haiti, whose bodies were pulled from the rubble of the Christopher Hotel on Saturday.

So let’s ask, what happens if the President of the U.S. were killed or incapacitated in a citywide disaster of similar magnitude? If this event were to happen tomorrow, Vice President Joe Biden would take over. Unless he had suffered a similar fate, or could not be found — in which case, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would take the oath of office. Unless she, too, could not be found, which brings us to the President of the Senate Pro Tempore, the Honorable Robert C. Byrd. Here’s the gentleman from West Virginia in a picture from last May:

By longstanding Senate tradition, the ceremonial role of President pro Tempore is bestowed upon the member of the majority party with the longest tenure in office. Over the last several years, that’s often been either Sen. Byrd — who has now served longer than any other Senator in the history of the institution — or the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who celebrated his 100th birthday while in office.

Leadership is pretty important in times of crisis. Given the advanced age and uncertain condition of the most senior Senators, the current setup gives Murphy’s Law too much of an opportunity to parlay a grand national tragedy into a threat to the constitutional form of government itself. One way or another, that really ought to change.

Comment [3]

What better occasion than Christmas to ponder nuclear terrorism?

According to a Dec. 19 story by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times, the forthcoming Nuclear Posture review will be just as much about preventing nuclear terrorism as about nuclear deterrence.

It’s a good idea, and — in hindsight — a perfectly natural one after the last decade’s worth of discussions of the role of “non-state actors.” But there’s a difficulty in the mismatch between counterterrorism and the notions that ordinarily fall under the rubric of nuclear posture: weapons systems, platforms, bases, stockpiles, alert rates, infrastructure, and so forth. So, the Times reports, the idea will translate to more support for intelligence and forensics.

Oddly, though, the story doesn’t mention the one “core” area of nuclear posture that does relate directly to the threat of terrorism, and always has: the security of U.S. nuclear weapons.

To get a sense of how much a chestnut this is — there’s the holiday, again! — look no further than the latest release in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, Documents on Global Issues, 1973–1976. Steven Aftergood of FAS Secrecy News helpfully points out the most interesting item — at least for readers of this blog — an Intelligence Community report from 1976 on the threat of nuclear terrorism.

The authors concluded that terrorist groups were unlikely to try to acquire nuclear weapons in the near future, mainly for reasons that no longer apply in 2009 — most importantly, the “internally generated limits to the level of violence they are willing to inflict.” Apparently for the same reason, the authors saw the residual nuclear terrorist threat mainly through the lens of Thunderball-type blackmail scenarios, a view that most terrorism experts probably don’t share today:

By the nature of terrorist behavior patterns, we believe that some form of indirect use of nuclear explosives is more probable than direct use. Specifically, a major motivation for terrorist seizure of a nuclear weapon would be to acquire a credible threat for blackmail and/or publicity. It is judged that most terrorist groups attempting to seize a weapon would do so without the specific intention of detonating it. In an extreme situation, however, some might attempt a detonation.

But never mind. Just where would the terrorists get their nefarious device, assuming they were to try to seize a complete weapon? After consulting a playbook found in the stateroom of the Disco Volante, why, the answer is “NATO,” of course:

If an attempt at seizure of a weapon was made, the one targeted would probably be a US weapon deployed abroad…. This is true not only because of the wide deployment of such weapons but, more importantly, because of the great political importance assigned by terrorists to targets involving the US presence abroad…. We note that all US weapons deployed abroad have control devices of varying degrees of sophistication that are designed to insure weapon safety or to preclude unauthorized use and that would require time and effort to overcome.

PALs are your friends, but not a panacea. And as Bob van der Zwaan and Tom Sauer recently reminded us in the Bulletin, security at some NATO facilities that store nuclear weapons isn’t up to snuff.

The precise implications of this concern for a Nuclear Posture Review focused on preventing nuclear terrorism are left as an exercise for the reader.

In the meantime, happy holidays! Here’s a little something for your enjoyment.

Comment [4]

A recent news article reporting the significant shortfall of He-3— a rare isotope of helium—has received an unfortunately small amount of attention. Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has planned on putting 1,400 He-3 based neutron detectors in ports around the world to scan cargo containers for nuclear weapons. Since the primary source of He-3 in the US is from the decay of tritium used to boost nuclear weapons, these highly sensitive detectors have seemingly tied the prevention of nuclear terrorism to replenishing our nuclear stockpile. On the other hand, some back of the envelop calculations seem to show that natural helium can be enriched to the required purity of He-3 fairly cheaply using gas centrifuges normally processing uranium for either power plants for weapons.

The average wonk-reader—who is admittedly better informed on nuclear matters than the average person on the street—can still be forgiven for not immediately knowing how He-3 is related to detecting smuggled nukes. It has, of course, to do with He-3’s propensity for absorbing neutrons; those subatomic, electrically neutral particles given off by the spontaneous fission of fissile materials. Even thermal neutrons absorbed by helium-3 (whose nucleus consists of two protons and one neutron) cause the emission of a charged proton and a tritium nucleus. If the He-3 gas is in a proportional counter, these charged particles ionize the gas and result in a detectable signal. In essence, the He-3 has converted a neutral particle (the neutron originally released during the spontaneous fission inside a nuclear warhead) into a charged particle whose passage through the He-3 gas itself can be easily detected.

This progressions of images shows how a single pair of ionized charges gets amplified by the proportional tube’s electric field to a point where it can easily be detected.

Of course, He-3 is not the only material that does this. Other detectors include devices based on a boron-fluoride gas (BF, with the boron being the B10 isotope) to detect neutrons inside a proportional counter. But BF gas can only be run at relatively low pressures (and hence, low densities) and still function as the gas for a proportional counter. This in turns means that BF-based detectors, if they are going to have a large probability of detecting the one or two neutrons per second given off by a weapon’s pit in a reasonable amount of time, must be very thick. For instance, a high density He-3 detector has an absorption length of 0.9 cm while a typical BF-based detector’s absorption length is almost 20 times as long. That means that a He-3 detector could be 2.9 cm thick and have a very high detection probability—assuming the neutron goes in the direction of the detector in the first place. A BF-based detector with the same effective thickness (measured in absorption lenths) would be 54 cm thick.

Not only would such a thick detector be inconveniently thick in the hustle and bustle of a large port, it would be thick enough to absorb a significant additional amount of background neutrons from the top and sides. Consider a hypothetical detector with a 1m x 1m face. (I have no idea what the actual DHS detector looks like and, at this point, don’t really care. After all, these calculations are at the level of policy and not preamps.) About 200 background neutrons from cosmic rays cross through every square meter on the Earth’s surface every second. The front face of each detector therefore contributes this amount to the count; the detector must wait and count the signal until its additional number of counts amount to a statistically significant difference from the expected background count. The larger the background, the longer the detector must wait. The large BF detector sides contribute 108 additional counts for a total additional of 216, more than doubling the background. (The astute reader will notice I’ve only counted two sides, which is a “thin detector” approximation.)

A high density He-3 detector, on the other hand, has only an additional twelve counts each second. This difference has a significant effect on the time required to look at each shipping container, as we will see in the next section.

Battling the Background

All fissile material suffers spontaneous fission at some level. Of course, some fission much more often than others. The table below gives the number of fission neutrons emitted by three types of material: U238, U235, and Pu239 for a given amount of material. It also shows how long a single detector would have to sit and scan a typical 12 meter long shipping container. This could be significantly shortened by a more efficient setup with three detectors scanning a single cargo container (you win because of the R-squared effect of decreasing distance) but that might run into other difficulties I haven’t thought of yet.

Material	Neutrons per gram per sec	Material Mass	Scan Time
U235	0.00001	23.5 kg	~7000 hours
U238	0.0136	2.5 kg	20 min.
Pu239	0.022	4 kg	3 min.

Clearly, U235 is essentially undetectable. But even weapons grade uranium still has enough U238 to be detectable, even if you have to wait 20 minutes for each scan. By way of comparison, if BF-based detector is used, its increased width more than doubles the background and more than quadruples the scan time. So a BF detector would take approximately 46 minutes to scan each container for a 25 kg uranium pit using 90% U235.

That’s a whole bunch of He-3!

DHS probably selected He3 detectors because they figured it would be very hard to shield a bomb so that it didn’t emit neutrons. I hope they are right, though I can think of several things to do that might be efficient ways of shielding the neutrons. Assuming the type of detectors I’ve been talking about (a square meter face and three absorption lengths thick), each detector needs 93 grams of He-3. And 1,400 such detectors means 130 kg of the stuff. That’s a whole bunch of He-3, especially if you wait around and collect He-3 from the tritium decays! Not to mention the political implications of starting up tritium production again. ( The US has only produced a total of about 225 kg of tritium between 1955 and 1996.) There has to be a better way of producing He-3 for these detectors and I think there is. But for that, you will have to read tomorrow’s post: He-3 & DHS: A Modest Proposal. (Hint: it has to do with the fact that He-3 diffuses through He-4 more than 13,000 times faster than U(235)F6 diffuses through natural UF6.)

Note added: Perhaps a future post will consider the consequences of perfect detectors detecting only all the bombs in cargo containers. Thats not to say that you wonk-readers cannot comment on that of course.

Comment [17]

Loyal readers may know John Mueller, who holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at The Ohio State University. (I know, that’s so awesome.)

Mueller is rather less worried than I about an instance of nuclear terrorism — he’s also less worried about proliferation, arms races or any prospect of nuclear use at all. Mueller has a very provocative new book, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, in which he suggests that what he calls nuclear alarmism distorts our national security policy.

On October 29, Michael Krepon and I will serve as discussants. Michael is author of wonderful, Better Safe Than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb, which is a nice counterpoint to Mueller’s book in terms of striking the right balance between concern and hype.

Anyway, the meeting is a welcome chance for me to try out some ideas that I’ve been working on as part of a New America Foundation effort on reframing what used to be called the G-WOT.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda
(Oxford University Press, 2009)

BOOK FORUM
Thursday, October 29, 2009
11:00 AM (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring the author, John Mueller, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Ohio State University; Michael Krepon, Co-Founder, Henry L. Stimson Center; and Jeffrey G. Lewis, Director, Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative, New America Foundation. Moderated by Justin Logan, Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute.

The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

Having informed readers in previous books that their fears of war and terrorism are overblown, iconoclastic political scientist John Mueller has set his sights on nuclear weapons. For Mueller, nuclear weapons have never represented much of a threat given states’ fundamental unwillingness to use them. Moreover, our current worries about terrorists obtaining such weapons are essentially baseless. As Mueller points out, there is a multitude of reasons why terrorists will not be able to obtain nuclear weapons, much less build them themselves and successfully transport them to targets. Atomic Obsession concludes with a judgment that our efforts to prevent the spread of WMDs have produced much more suffering and violence than would have been the case if we took a more realistic view of such weapons.

Please join us for a discussion of this provocative new book.

Cato events, unless otherwise noted, are free of charge. To register for this event, please fill out the form below and click submit or email events@cato.org, fax (202) 371-0841, or call (202) 789-5229 by 11:00 AM, Wednesday, October 28, 2009 . Please arrive early. Seating is limited and not guaranteed. News media inquiries only (no registrations), please call (202) 789-5200.

Comment [3]

This is major league weird and a significant coup for WikiLeaks.

Walter Griffin, of the Bangor Daily News, reports:

James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.”

According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings’ home after his shooting death on Dec. 9.

[snip]

It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.

Also found was literature on how to build “dirty bombs” and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups. This would seem to confirm observations by local tradesmen who worked at the Cummings home that he was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia around the house, including a prominently displayed flag with swastika. Cummings claimed to have pieces of Hitler’s personal silverware and place settings, painter Mike Robbins said a few days after the shooting.

[snip]

Cummings grew up in California and lived in Texas before moving to Maine in August 2007. Although Robbins said Cummings told him he made his money in Texas real estate, it appears that the actual source of his wealth was a trust fund established by his father, a prominent landowner in the Northern California city of Fort Bragg. An Internet search of the James B. Cummings Trust indicated that it has an annual income of $10 million.

Comment [8]

Spelled out in Anthrax spores

Disease is a funny thing. The general tendency of the public is to blame the ill person. Nothing illustrates this better than the way societies treat people who have acquired AIDS/HIV. However, the public health officials in the Philippines are doing a good job of expanding that “policy” of victimizing the victims with their quarantining 12 postal workers who handled a package filled with a suspicious powder. Let me say this so that people understand: you cannot catch anthrax from someone who is sick with anthrax, even respratory anthrax. Decontaminate them, give them antibiotics, but do not quarantine them. I hope emergency personnel will learn this lesson for the future otherwise our first responders are going to be in a real bind if a terrorist attack ever actually occurs again.

ps I have been traveling all weekend to get here to Italy so there was a delay in some of the moderation of posts recently.

Comment [11]

I just picked up a copy of Richard Clarke’s Your Government Failed You (HarperCollins, 26 bucks).

A light, easy read. The chapter on military issues is a little too breezy — it covers way too much ground with far too little care.

For example, Clarke states that “Sensing that Republicans were using military affairs as a wedge issue, Clinton appointed a Republican senator, Bill Cohen, to replace Aspin.”

Of course, Clinton actually replaced Aspin with another Bill — Democrat William J. Perry (1994-1997). Cohen would wait until the cabinet shuffle at the start of President Clinton’s second term.

Little errors or not, I am still looking forward to reading the chapter on intelligence failures.

Comment [2]

The “Would they? Could they?” debate in regard to nuclear terrorism is an old one. There has been a lot written about whether terrorists want to use nuclear weapons and, if they do, whether they have the technological capability to “make it so”.

A PhD student at King’s, Simen Ellingsen, has come up with what I think is a rather clever way of summarising this debate: in the form of a graph (or, more accurately, a scatter plot). He has given me permission to reproduce this graph here (thanks, Simen).

Obviously, it’s slightly tongue in cheek but what Simen points out (and is worth taking note of) is the reasonably strong correlation. Generally, authors who think terrorists could, think they would (May being the exception).

It’s interesting to speculate about why this is. My guess is that those “terrorism experts” who don’t believe that terrorists want nukes, selectively present evidence that building nukes is hard. In contrast, those “technical experts” who think that building nukes isn’t so hard, tend to assume intent.

Anyway, Simen has an article coming out in next month’s Defense and Security Analysis, about the application of game theory to measures to counter nuclear terrorism, and it’s well worth a read.

Comment [23]

If a nuclear bomb were to go off in a U.S. city, how long would it take to get info on what kind it was and where it came from?

Los Angeles Times had an article about nuclear forensics and government teams who are working on detection. I appreciate the attempt to make it sound cool…elite teams with radiation-detecting helicopters!

About every three days, unknown to most Americans, an elite team of federal scientists hits the streets in the fight against nuclear terrorism.

An independent study (led by Michael May at Stanford) on forensics and policy approaches should be out next month. Jay C. Davis, a retired weapons scientist working on the forensics study, gives some goals for a forensics time:

Davis said it was hoped that nuclear forensics could determine the size of a detonation within one hour; the sophistication of the bomb design within six hours; how the fuel was enriched within 72 hours; and the peculiar details of national design — “Does this look like a Russian, a Chinese or a Pakistani device, or something we have never seen before?” — within a week.

It’s a pretty good article with some interesting details on how detections teams would work after locating a nuclear device.

(Also, despite all my hopes, I have not in fact moved a tropical island without internet. I am just in grad school. Happy Hour deserves a break from the books however, so hope to see you at Big Hunt on Wednesday!)

Comment [2]

Sorry for the light posting — I almost finished a post on whether or not Pakistani nuclear weapons have permissive actions links, but just plain ran out of time.

Anyway, I need to strap on my tie, head over to Carnegie and give my talk on the Chinese ASAT test with Gregory Kulacki. Tomorrow I am in Dubai for the balance of the week talking nuclear proliferation. No idea how much I will be able to post.

If you really need to console yourself, I propose pre-ordering Mike Levi’s forthcoming book, On Nuclear Terrorism (right).

Once I get a copy, I suspect we’ll have Mike down to give a talk or something appropriate.

The other thing you can do is visit Delancey Place — edited by Richard Vague — and sign up for what he describes as eclectic little excerpts delivered to your inbox every day. The daily excerpt is often the highlight of my day.

Last night, Jill and I went up to New York to attend a gala hosted by the NYU Tisch School of Performing Arts honoring Richard, among others. Anyway, we had a blast — though I am very tired today.

Richard, on the other hand, seems to possess endless energy. In addition to editing Delancey Place, running a major corporation and generously supporting the arts, he is also a policy wonk. You might have seen his monograph, Terrorism: A Brief for Americans — Report Issued by a Concerned and Conservative CEO. You can watch Richard delivery a briefing on the monograph.

Comment [2]