Renewed Nuclear Testing in China?

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Anne Pellegrino 0:22

And I'm Anne Pellegrino, an independent analyst in Monterey, California. What are you baking this week, Anne? I made some sourdough discard blueberry muffins this morning.

Jeffrey 0:35

What is sourdough discard? It sounds like a fantastic indie band from Portland.

Anne 0:41

Oh my God. It's when you have to feed your starter, you like discard half of it. And usually you can just like dump it in the trash or you can bake other delicious things with it. It's like having, yeah. Well, I wouldn't say it's like having a baby because that would be really disparaging to people who actually have children.

Jeffrey 1:02

You mean children who are driving us crazy as we suffer through shelter-in-place? Yeah. I'm actually hiding from my children. So Anne knows, but listeners should know, I am broadcasting from my bathroom.

Anne 1:21

If you listeners remember when Jeffrey and I were in Vienna and we had to film, we had to record in a palace. And so to prevent the echo, Jeffrey locked himself in between The doors of two rooms.

Jeffrey 1:41

Right, two fancy ballrooms with double doors. There's actually like a space between the doors, which is, you know, like a normal person's closet. But, you know, if you were a Habsburg, it was your frickin' threshold. But yeah, go ahead.

Anne 1:57

So... It cracked me up back then because it looked like he was on a toilet. But today, Jeffrey is actually...

Jeffrey 2:05

I am sitting on a toilet. Not doing any business, mind you. Not doing any business that you know of.

Anne 2:14

Anyways, we are here today to discuss... We've been trying to actually record this podcast for a couple weeks, so apologies for the kind of backlog. But accusations of... Potential preparations to potentially test a nuclear device at Lop Nur in China.

Jeffrey 2:40

You can't prove that they're not doing it. Prove they're not doing it, Ann. You can't prove it. You can't prove they're not doing it. And I say they are, so they are. Unless you can prove they aren't.

Anne 2:49

Broken record.

Jeffrey 2:50

Yeah. So listeners, the State Department compliance report is out. And last year, there was a little bit of new language suggesting that Russia and China might be conducting extremely low yield nuclear tests, which I like to call mouse farts. And this year, last year was really Russia's turn. So if you don't remember the State Department report, the compliance report, it wasn't sort of done in isolation.

There was a big politicized rollout. So the head of DIA went to the Hudson Institute. He gave a talk where he very publicly accused the Russians and the Chinese of conducting very low-yield nuclear tests. Remarks before he even gave them were given to Michael Gordon of the Wall Street Journal, who made sure he was in attendance at this otherwise boring meeting.

He made sure to ask a question about that. So you got a couple of Wall Street Journal stories out of it. And then it followed up with the compliance report. So there was a very publicized rollout last year to make the argument that the Russians were conducting low-yield nuclear tests with some reference to the Chinese. And this year, I think thanks in part owing to the Wuhan virus, it's China's turn to take center stage with accusations that China's conducting extremely low yield nuclear tests.

Anne 4:17

We should probably, you know, if you would indulge me and I can read the very short paragraph in this executive summary of the report because the actual report hasn't dropped on the State Department's website, but it's very thin. And so... You can't prove they're not doing it, Anne. I know, but the language... Prove they're not. I dare you, prove they're not.

Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm just going to read it quickly because... I think it's important. How do you know they're not? Don't you love our freedom, man? Anyways, up first, under nuclear testing moratoria as interpreted in accordance with the U.S. zero-yield standard, the People's Republic of China.

Jeffrey 5:00

Before you even read this, can I say this is worded in this goofy way? Because The US has signed but not ratified the CTBT. And Republicans hate the CTBT, the ban on nuclear testing. And so they can't, the compliance report can't assess China's compliance with the CTBT because we don't believe in that. So instead they say nuclear testing moratoria as interpreted in accordance with the US zero yield standard, which is some , but go ahead.

Anne 5:36

Anyways, it says, China maintained a high level of activity at its Lop Nur nuclear weapons test site throughout 2019. China's possible preparation to operate its Lop Nur test site year-round, its use of explosive containment chambers, extensive excavation activities at Lop Nur, And lack of transparency on its nuclear testing activities, which has included frequently blocking the flow of data from its international monitoring system stations to the International Data Center, oh gosh, operated by the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, raised concerns regarding its adherence to the, quote, zero-yield standard adhered to by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in their respective nuclear weapons testing moratoria.

Ugh.

Jeffrey 6:22

And it's important to note that that is actually quite carefully written. But the careful wording of the compliance report is not what matters politically. It's the public rollout. So even though that is very carefully written, The way that that information appears in the Wall Street Journal is not, right? The opening of that article is, China might be secretly conducting nuclear tests with very low explosive power, despite Beijing's assertions that it is strictly adhering to an international accord banning all nuclear tests.

So those two sentences are not the same, but one purports to summarize the other. And I do think it fairly summarizes the political argument being made by others, including your boyfriend, Tom Cotton.

Anne 7:21

Gross.

Jeffrey 7:22

He likes birthday cake.

Anne 7:23

But really, okay, I'm not baking for him.

Jeffrey 7:26

He eats birthday cake all year round. He's quirky and nice. Do you know this?

Anne 7:31

No.

Jeffrey 7:31

There was one of these little puff pieces, you know, tried to make him quirky and relatable as opposed to insane. And so the example given was that he and his wife bonded over their shared love of eating birthday cake, even when it wasn't their birthdays.

Anne 7:47

That's gross. That makes me want to vomit. But anyways, it's really just, I mean, he came out swinging like immediately after this and was like, you know, once again, attacking the CTBT. But before we get to that, you had some stories you wanted to tell me?

Jeffrey 8:04

Oh, I do, because... You know, for listeners, thanks to the joy of open source, we do monitor activity at China's Lop Nur nuclear test site. And one of my favorite blog posts, which, by the way, it's the first nice thing Heather Williams ever said to me. I was so pleased. I still, we were at a meeting at CSIS and she indicated she'd read that post and I thought, oh, that's so nice.

The test site that China used to conduct nuclear tests up until it signed, but has still not ratified, the CTBT in 1996, is still there. And so we have always kind of kept an eye on it. And in the era when it was a lot harder to get Commercial satellite imagery. There was just a kind of a funny thing that I noticed, which is I was reading this I think it's a really great paper, but I assign it to my students and they tell me it's boring.

It's Mark Fiske's Accurate Locations of Nuclear Explosions at the Lopnor Test Site Using Alignment of Seismograms and Iconos Satellite Imagery.

Anne 9:29

Okay, I spent a very long time trying to do that with the Novaya Zemlya test site. I know you did. So I feel an affinity for that research.

Jeffrey 9:38

So your other students can just- It was also very mathy because he was trying to come up with corrections for the seismograms. Using the tunnel adits, because basically this, LAPNR is a very large test site, and this is just one portion of it, but this particular portion, which is where all the horizontal tunnels were, you know, it's basically, there's a line of mountains, and then there are, in FISC's satellite image, there are these four tunnels running into the mountains.

And I just kind of loved this because that, I think the image was from maybe 99 or 2000. 2000. But at the time I went into Google Earth because I didn't, you know, we didn't, Planet didn't exist. We didn't have the kinds of partner relationships then. You know, in 2005, I guess I was still working at the University of Maryland as a graduate student.

But in Google Earth, There's a 2005 image, and I was trying to compare Fisk's image to the Google Earth image, and I couldn't get it to work. And then I realized it's because they dug a new tunnel between 2000 and 2005. And so that is literally precisely the kind of activity that might cause the US to conclude that a country was going to conduct a really low-yield nuclear test.

Anne 11:02

There are other things that can be done in those tunnels related to testing, but the jumping to conclusions that it's a low-yield nuclear test is one, I think... Disingenuous, and yeah, it's disingenuous.

Jeffrey 11:24

Well, and we actually now have some insight into how little the intelligence community knew about this stuff, because there's a declassified 1995 document where they saw activity at Lop Noor, right? And they weren't sure what that activity was, and they had three hypotheses. One was a nuclear artillery shell, which we can talk about in a second. One was a safety test.

And then the third was a hydro nuclear experiment. And it's kind of grim, but the document notes that a hydro nuclear experiment went out of control at China's Southwest Institute of Fluid Physics in 1993, resulting in contamination that forced scientists to seal off a portion of the laboratory. Such mishaps may have motivated the Chinese to transfer their hydro-nuclear activities to Lop Nur, which was like, holy crap.

So I have always assumed that that new tunnel was for conducting either subcritical or other small events. I mean, one of the things that's very frustrating about this debate is, Whether something is a subcritical test, which would not be prohibited by the treaty, by the CTBT, or whether something is a hydronuclear test, which would be prohibited, you can't tell that from a satellite image.

All you can say is there is a new tunnel.

Anne 12:56

Right.

Jeffrey 12:56

And so like the fact that the intelligence community believes they're really, really small hydronuclear tests, as opposed to non-yield producing subcritical tests is, Like, unless you're there, you don't know that. And that's kind of what the article actually says, right? So when you look at the compliance report, it's activity at the test site. And if you look at General Ashley's remarks, I think they're very telling.

I'll read them for you. Because the question is like, okay, so you know they're doing nuclear activity at the test site. Is it subcritical tests? Which, by the way, we do in the U.S. And, of course, you know we do in Novaya Zemlya, which we'll talk about, or which you know the Russians do in Novaya Zemlya. But...

Whether it's that a subcritical test, which is fine or a hydro nuclear test, here's what Ashley says, based on the United States experience in developing nuclear weapons, we understand the efforts required for China's substantive and rapid expansion of their nuclear weapons program and its capabilities. So it literally starts off with, well, if we were them, Right, which by the way, newsflash, you're not.

US government information indicates China is possibly preparing to operate its test site year round in a development that speaks directly to China's growing goals for its nuclear force. Further, China continues to use explosive containment chambers at its nuclear test site. And China leaders, it's mistaken the way it's written, but and it should say Chinese leaders previously joined Russia and watering down the language of the P5 statement that would have affirmed a uniform understanding of zero yield testing.

Like there ain't nothing there. It's literally like buses show up, people go in a tunnel. We don't know what they do in the tunnel, but we think it's bad and you can't prove it's not bad.

Anne 14:56

Well, I know a way. Yeah. Yeah. We could prove whether something fishy was going on or not.

Jeffrey 15:05

You do know, don't you?

Anne 15:08

Yeah, you know, just would require just, you know, easy, simple, simple ratification of the CTBT. Yeah, because then you could have an on-site inspection. Yeah. Yeah, you could do that. Who would have thought?

Jeffrey 15:24

Who would have thought that the people...

Anne 15:27

But you know, Ann, that would mean...

Jeffrey 15:29

That would mean you would have to want an answer to this question. And it may be that you don't want an answer to this question because you just don't want to be in the CTBT at all. And it's easier to blame the Chinese than admit that you're the asshole who wants to do hydro nuclear tests.

Anne 15:48

I just, I get it. I know. Oh, it definitely is. Oh, it's totally, it is just an attack.

Jeffrey 15:54

Russians are doing it and the Chinese are doing it. Why?

Anne 15:56

Because I want to do it. Right. It is just an attack on the CTBT. And, you know, we could get into all of the political ramifications of what would happen if the United States actually did that. But I just, you know, I, maybe because I'm naive. I don't think so. I, I, I, I, Honestly, working with you, I became quite cynical, but I just think that like these stupid arguments are such, God.

Jeffrey 16:26

Well, the thing that will make you cynical is having the same article for argument for 20 years.

Anne 16:31

Yeah.

Jeffrey 16:32

I mean, I've only been through two rounds of it so far. But at some point you start to doubt the good faith of your interlocutors. Yeah. And I should say, by the way, just to make sure that all the facts are on the table, I do think that the proximate cause of the freakout is that China has again done some excavation in one of the tunnels.

So one of the tunnels, they pulled some spoil out, which indicates they're digging. And so, you know, that could be for a number of reasons. It could be that, it certainly could be that they're going to do new hydronuclear tests. I mean, right? I can't prove they're not. It could be that they want more space to do subcritical nuclear tests.

It also, frankly, could be that they want to make sure that the test site is ready to conduct a full-yield nuclear test if the moratoria break down.

Anne 17:22

Yeah. Oh, I would – if I were China, if I were Russia, I would totally be hedging my bets right now. Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:27

And it's important to keep in mind that we focus so much on what the Chinese and the Russians are doing at their nuclear test sites. But the Nevada test site is kept in a constant state of readiness. The U.S. does subcritical tests underground at Nevada. The U.S. has a policy of being able to conduct on relatively short notice a full yield nuclear test at the Nevada test site.

And during the deliberations for the nuclear posture review, it was reported there were people who wanted to resume yield testing. And so... In an environment like this, you don't have to think that the Chinese are totally innocent. To have a little perspective that in an environment in which the Russians and the Chinese have real doubts about our commitment to the CTBT, that they may either be taking steps that we don't like, or they may be hedging.

But all that goes back to your point, which is we could do things about this, right? If we really wanted to, we could do it. Because, I mean, we know where these things happen, right?

Anne 18:31

Mm-hmm. But it's never gonna happen, right?

Jeffrey 18:39

Yeah, so for listeners, the thing that we're bemoaning is, Anne and I, we went through this last year with Russia, where we had spent so many years on Nevaezemlya, the Russian nuclear test site, including, I think, commissioning the first high-resolution satellite photographs of the damn place.

Anne 19:02

In this day and age of available commercial satellite imagery. Yes.

Jeffrey 19:08

You know, we hired that Israeli company to take some pictures, which was crazy because it was just cloudy all the damn time. And then eventually Planet started taking. And those pictures were panchromatic, right? They were black and white. Yeah. And then finally, Planet started taking color pictures of the site. So we really, for the first time, got really great images.

And we could see that Russia was maintaining the test site, which again, the U.S. does and China does.

Anne 19:32

And Russia was open about it, too. I mean, there were articles that were written about it.

Jeffrey 19:36

Oh, no, no. It was all secret. And they put it in a secret language called Russian that you would have had to read. Oh, my gosh. Just like the Chinese. All those characters. Don't you think that's somehow suspicious?

Anne 19:49

Yeah. Uh-huh.

Jeffrey 19:52

But we actually, right, we could see, the US has an underground facility where we do subcritical tests. Russia looks like it was building a dedicated facility for its subcritical nuclear tests. The US accused the Russians of doing more than that. Like, we could negotiate test site transparency measures.

Anne 20:12

We could do that. And it fell on deaf ears.

Jeffrey 20:18

I pitched it to the Obama administration. I said, there's all these claims that we don't agree on what zero yield is, which I'm not sure I believe, but whatever. Why don't we... Go and talk to the Russians and maybe the Chinese and reaffirm the agreement on zero yield that I believe was reached in the CTBT and negotiate some test site transparency measures, which by the way, the Russians have proposed.

And I got patted on the head and thanked for my interest in national security.

Anne 20:49

God, how condescending.

Jeffrey 20:52

So we could do the same thing here, right? Because we can see all the tunnels and you know who'd really like this. Who? Ferens. Oh, yeah. Ferens really wants to put anti-neutrino detectors in tunnels next to subcritical test facilities because you could detect very low-yield events.

Anne 21:17

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 21:19

Which, by the way, I think is a really good idea. It's funny. He was having an argument with somebody. So the idea would be you would have an agreement that said these activities are permitted and these activities are prohibited. So you'd have a pretty clear demarcation between subcritical tests and hydronuclear tests that produce some yield. You would have to have an agreement to restrict subcritical testing to these declared facilities.

And then you could, at the declared facility, put an anti-neutrino detector, which would be large and would cost like tens of millions of dollars. But I don't know, the scientists always think that like, that's like a lot of money. And I'm always like, hey, Ferens, how many F-35s is that? And then I think you could verify in a non-intrusive way to a very high degree of confidence that countries weren't conducting series of hydronuclear tests, which, by the way, they would have to do.

You're not really going to just do a one-off low-yield event. You're going to do a series of them. And the chance that somebody would get away with it would be very limited. The thing I was laughing about was the scientists were all like, well, they could just do one secretly someplace else. And it was like, guys... Spotting the big tunnels underground, that's the thing we're good at.

Like, yes, yes, they could. That would be an intelligence challenge. But it turns out if you could, it's impossible to remotely tell if something's subcritical or hydronuclear. It actually is feasible to imagine that you would catch somebody digging a new tunnel for a subcritical test or for a hydronuclear test. Since, as the Chinese scientists at MIT The Southwest Institute of Fluid Mechanics discovered.

You really don't want to do this in a lab space.

Anne 23:08

Oh, gosh.

Jeffrey 23:09

That must have been nasty.

Anne 23:12

I don't even want to.

Jeffrey 23:15

Oh, I have a coda to all this.

Anne 23:17

OK.

Jeffrey 23:18

When I finished my dissertation, I went back to China and Hu Sida, who used to be the head of the Chinese nuclear weapons program, Had arranged for my history of China's nuclear weapons program to be translated into Chinese. And so he said, have you read it? And he sat down with me and for two hours answered every question I had.

It was incredible. Holy smokes. And the best part was I showed him this declassified document about the artillery shell. And his reaction was hilarious. What was it? I'm trying to remember the exact phrase, but it was in Chinese. But it was something to the effect of, I don't think the CIA understands very much about us at all.

He just laughed at the report. Like, you know, in fairness, he was just, that was, that was very clear after taking your class. Yeah, but before we beat up on them too much, yeah, it's, it's a hard job. I mean, like, I'm pretty sure that every single analyst who was puzzling over whatever the hell was happening at Lop Nur would have loved to have two hours with Husita. Yeah, so it's complicated.

Anne 24:45

But the point is you can arrange to go ask, right?

Jeffrey 24:49

You could negotiate test site transparency measures. You could let them come see ours. We could go see theirs. You could do it if your goal was to solve the problem. But if your goal is to have the problem so that you don't have to sign the CTBT, then solving it is unwelcome.

Anne 25:10

What a world. We would live in if just like one thing would go right in like 2020.

Jeffrey 25:17

Yeah, that was called the 1990s. They were awesome. I know you were a kid, but it was great.

Anne 25:27

I don't remember anything bad.

Jeffrey 25:28

Well, there was lots of bad stuff, but it all kept getting fixed. So, you know, you had bad stuff, but you also had this incredible feeling that you could fix things. Like, do you remember the hole in the ozone layer?

Anne 25:41

I mean, yeah, but not when I was like four.

Jeffrey 25:44

Yeah, like when I was a kid, there was a hole in the ozone layer and it was caused by chlorofluorocarbons. And it was in the Republican administration, too. It's like, oh, well, we should ban those terrible things. And it was the same arguments you hear today, which is, oh, my god, if you get rid of CFCs, the entire economy will collapse.

And people are like, that's silly. It will be fine. And sure enough, it was silly. It was fine. And there's no hole in the ozone layer. But today, those arguments are effective in keeping us from doing the things we need to do, which sucks. Yeah so on that happy note, it's not a happy note. I know, I'm, we gotta have a happy note. Tell me more about your bread now.

Anne 26:32

That's a happy note. I've been doing cookies lately.

Jeffrey 26:37

So this is the solution. You will make a big, beautiful plate of cookies. We'll get you a mask. We'll put you on a plane. We will send you to Lop Nur. You will give them the cookies and they will let you go see the test set up. And then you will invite them to come to Los Alamos.

Well, actually come to Nevada, right? And we'll have somebody here bake them cookies.

Anne 26:59

All right, I'll start working on my recipes.

Jeffrey 27:01

They can bring their own cookies. They can bring their own cookies.

Anne 27:05

Have those, what, the mooncakes?

Jeffrey 27:07

Yeah, I was thinking. I was thinking of the mooncakes. If you enjoy the podcast, you can help us keep making podcasts by becoming a patron. Just go to patreon.com forward slash ACW podcast. For $5 a month, you get access to our backers only Slack channel where we pass around satellite imagery, documents, and all kinds of cool stuff.

And you can actually get that for only $3 if you're a student, honor system only. But either way, you will be helping to sustain this enterprise. Help Fee and Sourdough. So Anne, thank you for joining me. It's always a pleasure. And thank you for listening.