Monitoring Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear-Explosive Materials An Assessment of Methods and Capabilities (2005) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 15-44
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From page 15... ...
The motivation and scope for this study were not confined to understanding the transparency and monitoring possibilities and requirements germane to more ambitious arms control regimes. The study has also focused on potential applications to the continuing challenges of keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of proliferant states and terrorists; for example, the United States has emphasized the need for verification in the complete elimination of 1The specialized meanings intended here for "transparency," "monitoring," "verification," and related terms are provided in Box 1-1.
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This committee's studies include Committee on International Security and Arms Control, The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997)
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CONTEXT Nuclear weapons are evidently deemed by the states that possess them to confer security benefits outweighing the costs and risks of acquiring and maintaining these arsenals. Similarly, states that have no nuclear weapon program but do possess stocks of NEM in connection with civil nuclear energy or research activities evidently believe the economic and scientific benefits of NEM possession justify the costs and risks of such possession.
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Relevant stocks of NEM include not only the inventories in military programs but also NEM in research reactors and the increasing quantity of plutonium in civil nuclear power programs. Besides what is in actual nuclear weapons, enough additional NEM exists in military and civil nuclear facilities worldwide to make something like 100,000 additional nuclear weapons.
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The specific timetables and measures for improving the management of nuclear weapons and NEM stockpiles will depend on the international political climate, which will determine both the security advantages and risks of diverse approaches. While there have been temporary setbacks, over time increasing transparency has become a more important and politically feasible tool for managing and limiting nuclear weapons and NEM inventories.
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The remainder of this section is organized around four aspects of nuclear risk reduction -- limiting and reducing existing nuclear arsenals, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to additional countries, limiting nuclear tests, and securing nuclear weapons and NEM -- to illustrate how each has been affected by the possibilities and limitations of technologies and methods for transparency and monitoring rather than a chronological presentation.
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Counting strategic delivery vehicles (that is, missiles, missile launchers, and aircraft) became available as a surrogate for verifying the nuclear weapons themselves in determining and limiting the size of strategic nuclear forces.
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The treaty set numerical limits on deployed strategic nuclear delivery vehicles (ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers)
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Hundreds of on-site inspections have been successfully carried out under the START I and INF treaties, providing a substantial experience base to draw on for any future arms reduction efforts.6 But no provisions required control or dismantlement of the nuclear weapons "retired" as a consequence of the agreements. As concern rose in the early 1990s about the security of nuclear weapons with the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States undertook unilateral initiatives on strategic and nonstrategic nuclear weapons to supplement the formal treaty process, calling on the Soviet Union to reciprocate and suggesting specific actions the Soviets could take.7 On September 27, 1991 President Bush announced a number of major steps, including: · unilateral withdrawal of all U.S.
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In January 1992 the new Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, reaffirmed Gorbachev's unilateral pledge and extended it to include the dismantlement of half of Russia's air-launched tactical nuclear weapons, half of its nuclear weapons for antiaircraft missiles, and one-third of its tactical sea-launched nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Although these unilateral declarations were not subject to verification, it appears that all nuclear weapons outside Russia were successfully repatriated.
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Although the Russians initially rejected both these proposals, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin at a summit meeting in Helsinki, Finland, in March 1997 nonetheless agreed to the framework for a START III Treaty that would reduce strategic nuclear forces to a level of delivery vehicles equivalent to 2,000-2,500 "actual" nuclear weapons, and would contain measures "relating to the transparency of strategic nuclear warhead inventories and the destruction of strategic nuclear war 9 "The Russian Federation and Ukraine signed an Agreement on the Procedure for Movement of Nuclear Munitions from the Territory of Ukraine to Central Pre-Factory Bases ... for the Purpose of Dismantling and Destroying Them, which gave Ukraine the right to send three-man observer teams to each of the serial production facilities in Russia to monitor the process of dismantlement of warheads removed from Ukraine.
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The treaty does not include reserve strategic nuclear weapons or nonstrategic active and reserve weapons, however.11 President Bush broke with previous U.S. insistence on strict verification of all nuclear arms control agreements and the increasingly intrusive verification measures developed through the INF and START process -- the Moscow Treaty contains no transparency or monitoring provisions to support verification.
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The Moscow Treaty and other U.S. actions are based on a desire and an intention to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons and eliminate surplus stocks of weapons-grade material."13 Similarly, in a report to Congress on implementation of the Moscow Treaty in March 2003, the State Department emphasized that while the treaty did not include verification measures because of the new relationship with Russia, this new relationship is expected to lead to "increasing openness," which will be "increasingly useful as the deadline for meeting the Treaty's central obligation approaches."14 The United States and Russia have established a Consultative Group on Strategic Security, which includes three working groups, the first one of which is focused on transparency in strategic offensive force reductions.
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All other parties agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons but retained the "inalienable" right to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. In return, the nuclearweapon states agreed to share peaceful nuclear technology and to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." As of early 2005 there were 189 states parties to the NPT; India, Pakistan, and Israel are not members, and North Korea announced its withdrawal from the treaty in January 2003.16 To verify compliance with their commitment the NPT requires signatory non-nuclear weapon states to negotiate safeguards agreements with the IAEA to confirm that their declared nuclear facilities and materials are used only for peaceful purposes, and to provide "timely warning" of any diversion of nuclear materials from peaceful programs.
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While they are in force in less than a third of the parties to the NPT, they include a large fraction of the NPT non-nuclear weapon states with major nuclear activities on their territory.17 The Nuclear Suppliers Group, an informal committee that coordinates export policies on equipment and materials of potential significance to nuclear weapons programs, is actively discussing making acceptance of the Additional Protocol a condition of nuclear supply, as President Bush and the other leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized democracies have proposed.18 The traditional and enhanced safeguards, which provide extensive multilateral experience with applying transparency and monitoring to civilian NEM and some limited experience with military stocks, are discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The United States has sought additional ways to limit the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
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"effective national export and trans-shipment controls over such items."21 Limiting Nuclear Tests22 It is technically possible for a state and even a terrorist group with access to NEM to build a simple nuclear weapon similar to 19 In addition to the United States, the original members were Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Canada, Norway, Russia, and Singapore have joined subsequently.
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President Eisenhower initiated negotiations on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1958 with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom with the goal of stopping the U.S.-Soviet race to build ever more powerful thermonuclear weapons.
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The JVEs laid the foundation for future technical cooperation between Russian and American scientists.26 At the 25th Anniversary Review Conference of the NPT in 1995, a renewed commitment by the five nuclear weapon states to reduce their nuclear arsenals was a critical element in achieving the necessary consensus for extending the treaty indefinitely beyond its original 25-year lifespan. The achievement of a CTBT was frequently cited as a litmus test of the willingness of the nuclear weapon states to reduce their dependence on nuclear weapons.27 The United States played a leading role in the successful multinational negotiation of a CTBT, which was signed in 1996 by the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France.
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. 29For comprehensive and regularly updated analyses of programs in these areas, with annotated links to other information available on the Internet, see the Web site maintained for the Nuclear Threat Initiative by Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials available as of January 2005, at: http://www.nti.org/cnwm.
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Nevertheless, by the end of 2004, just over 230 tons of Russian HEU had been down-blended to LEU; and the deal is now proceeding at a rate of about 30 tons of HEU per year.32 The HEU Purchase Agreement has also been the principal area where formalized transparency measures have been successful, with transparency measures in place to confirm that the LEU delivered to the United States comes from HEU, and to provide at least modest confidence that the HEU in turn came from nuclear weapons. 30For a discussion of key impediments to progress, see National Research Council, Overcoming Impediments to U.S.-Russian Cooperation on Nuclear Nonproliferation: Report of a Joint Workshop (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2004)
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Neither the United States nor Russia has verified the dismantlement of any nuclear weapons by the other party. Tentative accords reached in the mid1990s to exchange data on warhead and nuclear material stockpiles, and to exchange inspections of storage facilities for excess nuclear materials, have never come to fruition, and have since been abandoned.
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investment of roughly $1 billion per year in threat reduction over the ensuing 10 years.35 The U.S. Congress, following the September 11th attacks, provided hundreds of millions of dollars in supplemental funding for efforts to secure nuclear and radiological materials, and has also authorized the administration to spend a portion of available threat reduction funds wherever in the world they may be needed, not only in the former Soviet Union.36 Similarly, the IAEA has established a Nuclear Security Fund, substantially increasing the pace and scope of its efforts to help member states ensure that nuclear and radiological materials and facilities are not vulnerable to thieves and terrorists.37 The United States and Russia have stepped up the pace of returning potentially vulnerable HEU that they supplied to facilities around the world.
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and Soviet/Russian nonstrategic nuclear weapons to the United States and Russia and to elimi nate many of them are examples of the latter approach. Unilateral initiatives offer significant advantages in flexibility and the ability to move quickly in the face of rapidly changing conditions, but in the absence of for mal monitoring or verification they may do little to re duce uncertainties.
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The United States and the Soviet Un ion/Russia, for example, have relied on treaties for most of their arms control agreements. · Measures pursued in a cooperative fashion generally involve continuous communication or consultation among the parties at a number of levels.
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Methods will be considered for making and confirming declara tions and for monitoring the elimination of nuclear weapons and the fabrication of new weapons as re placements. · Chapter 3 explores technologies and processes that could be used to improve transparency, monitoring, and verification for NEM associated with both military and civil nuclear programs, including measures to reduce the stocks and flows, and to undertake disposal of NEM.
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Monitoring includes all activities conducted to gather information on the status of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons associated facilities -- whether declared or undeclared and whether subject to an agreement or not -- including agreed multilateral technical means, National Technical Means, inspections, and other sources of information. · Multilateral technical means refers to information gathering and analytical capacities deployed by multi national bodies; for example, the IAEA currently de ploys instrumentation, inspectors, and analytical capa bilities related to the agency's responsibilities under the NPT and associated agreements.
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From page 41... ...
Confidence in compliance with an agreement, accuracy of a declaration, or the absence of given categories of weapons, materials, or activities not covered by agreements or declarations is based on the results of monitoring activities and the perceived adequacy of those activities in relation to potential avenues of evasion and deception. Strategic and nonstrategic nuclear weapons are categories based on the capabilities and intended uses of such weapons and their delivery vehicles.
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From page 42... ...
and Soviet thermonuclear tests 1953 Atoms for Peace plan proposed by President Eisenhower 1957 Establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency 1958 Official technical discussions on verifiability of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by Scientists from the United States and Soviet Un ion and their allies; beginning of formal U.S., U.K.
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From page 43... ...
INTRODUCTION 43 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty signed 1976 Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty signed 1979 SALT II signed 1987 INF Agreement signed 1991 START I signed 1991-92 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives by Presidents Bush, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin 1991 First Nunn-Lugar legislation passed 1993 HEU Purchase Agreement signed 1993 START II signed 1995 International agreement for indefinite extension of the NPT 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed 1998 Indian nuclear tests and first Pakistani nuclear tests 1999 U.S. Senate refuses consent to ratification of CTBT 2001-02 United States withdraws from the ABM Treaty and Russia withdraws its ratification of START II 2002 Treaty of Moscow signed 2003 North Korea announces its withdrawal from the NPT
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