US: the most dangerous nuclear state
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Shireen M Mazari
While much is being made of Pakistan's nuclear assets, facts on the ground reveal the US to be the most dangerous nuclear state in the world with a track record of failed command structures and failed safety systems for its reactors. Without making any value judgements, I want to simply present the data available from public international sources regarding the nuclear track record of the US.
First, and most recent, was the horrifying revelation that a US B52 bomber flew across the US carrying six nuclear-armed cruise missiles which led to a "Bent Spear" alert -- a code for an incident involving live nuclear weapons. Each of these W80 nuclear warheads had the destructive power of 10 Hiroshima bombs. According to the published data, the nukes were "lost" for 36 hours after the plane took off on August 29, 2007, from a base in North Dakota. So while western, including the US, analysts raise the bogey of the possibility of "loose nukes" in Pakistan in an almost hysterical fashion, we already have the reality of loose nukes in the US.
What is even more disturbing about these loose US nukes is the lack of security that seems to surround US nuclear weapons. Apparently, according to reports, the US airmen had replaced official procedures for handling these missiles with an "informally devised plan of their own". Given the extremist and psychologically disturbed personnel within the US military -- remember Abu Ghraib -- and the tendency of the US to bring in the private sector into the management of security, the international community should have some contingency plan to prevent the loose nukes incident being repeated again in the US. The danger is even more acute because religious extremists in the form of born-again Christians actually hold office in that country.
Nor is the nuclear safety problem in the US only related to loose nukes though that is certainly at the top of the threat spectrum. The other serious issue relating to US nuclear safety is of missing fissile and other nuclear-related material -- especially since unlike in Pakistan, in the US the private sector is a major part of the nuclear industry. Even a cursory look at the disappearance of nuclear-related material from US facilities should be enough to show the threat of nuclear terrorism from the US.
For instance, between 1957 and 1965, 100 kilograms of uranium 235 disappeared from a nuclear recycling plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. This was weapons grade material and enough to produce more than one bomb. The president of the firm was reported to have close ties with Israel, but the mystery of the disappearance of this fissile material was never solved. In fact, US officials showed little reaction to Euratom's report of the missing uranium on the grounds that the material would have to undergo complicated reprocessing to be turned into a weapon. According to a report in Time magazine (April 12, 1976), Israel had operationalized a reprocessing facility in 1969, and had used it to produce a limited number of nuclear weapons.
Nor was this a one-off incident. Again, in 1979, nine kilograms of weapons grade uranium was found missing from a nuclear fuel plant in Erwin, Tennessee. More recently, in July 2004, an inventory of US classified weapons data revealed that four hard disk drives were missing. While two of the drives were subsequently found to have been improperly moved to a different building, the two others' remained unaccounted for.
Then, in October 2006, the BBC reported that the FBI is investigating whether information from a US nuclear weapons laboratory was found in a police drugs search of a New Mexico trailer park. According to police officials, the material and classified information recovered during the search appeared to have come from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Earlier, in August 2006, it had been revealed that the lab had released sensitive nuclear research data by email. Interestingly, in an ABC News report in October 2005, Christopher Steele, the senior safety officer of the US government's nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, had stated that he could not vouch for the safety of this facility. According to Steele, the equivalent of 5,000 pounds of plutonium in barrels of radioactive waste was being stored outside the laboratory under a tent. Also, March to April 2005, in New Jersey, a package containing 3.3g of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) was inadvertently disposed of.
Finally, the US has also led the field in nuclear proliferation -- and not simply in the form of US citizens but the state itself, and the beneficiary was primarily Israel. The father of the US atomic bomb was eventually stripped of his security clearance by the US Atomic Energy Commission once his views on the hydrogen bomb production became suspect and his loyalty was suspected because of his alleged links to communist parties and groups.
According to Sir Timothy Garden, a fellow at Indiana University, Israel signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with the US in 1954. Between 1955 and 1966, more than 50 Israeli nuclear specialists completed a probationary period in the largest US scientific institutions. Israel received 6-10 kilograms of uranium a year starting in 1955. The total grew to 40 kilograms by 1966. The US provided Israel with a small nuclear reactor in 1955, which became operational in 1960. In 1958, US spy planes photographed the Dimona complex, but the US Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) inspections of the Dimona facilities in the late 60s were hampered because of non-cooperation on the part of the Israeli government. In addition to controlling the extent of the inspections as well as the timing, according to Rohan Pearce, Israel constructed false control panels and bricked up corridors to fool AEC teams. As Pearce puts it, "an October 1969 US government memo, reporting on discussions between State Department officials and a representative from the AEC, implied that the US government had no problem with Israel possessing the facilities for building nuclear weapons." The memo made it clear that the US was not prepared to support a real inspections effort.
Despite all these public facts, the US continued to aid and abet Israel's nuclear and military capability. In October 1998, Israel and the US reached an agreement that committed the US to enhancing Israel's "defensive and deterrent capabilities." An agreement reported by the BBC in February 2000 between the two related to cooperation in nuclear and other energy technologies and this agreement allowed Israeli scientists to once again gain access to US nuclear technology. So it is hardly surprising to find that by October 2003 Israeli and US officials admitted that they had collaborated to deploy US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Israel's fleet of Dolphin-class submarines.
Nor is this all. The British and Americans, who have tried to make themselves out as champions against WMD and staked so much on this issue, are themselves in cahoots on WMD build-up and proliferation -- the latter from the US to Britain. And all this is under the legal cover of their 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement which the US Congress has renewed every ten years. The US supplies of WMD to Britain are crucial to Britain's support for US policy and WMD exports to the UK include Trident D5 missiles and nuclear weapons components and technology. For years, Britain has also exploded its nuclear weapons at the Nevada test site in the US.
In September 1994, Greenpeace had released a report documenting the US government's violations of domestic law and international treaty obligations by transferring "sensitive nuclear technology" to Japan. The report, entitled, "The Unlawful Plutonium Alliance", revealed that the US Department of Energy had negotiated an agreement in 1987 which allowed for the transfer of advanced plutonium separation or "reprocessing" technology to Japan.
In the face of this evidence, which is merely a tip of the iceberg, and by its own judgemental standards, the US is clearly the most dangerous nuclear state in the globe.
The writer is director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad. Email: smnews80@hotmail.com
US: the most dangerous nuclear state
