Nuclear Forensics and Attribution Act Before Congress
The Nuclear Forensics and Attribution Act is currently before the House. The text of the bill is worth looking into. I am currently working on a book on nuclear terrorism and the deterrence of nuclear terrorism is one thing I am looking at. Forensics includes pre and post detonation attribution, but we must be mindful of limitations as the Bill points out
...Though identifying intercepted smuggled material is now possible in some cases, pre-detonation forensics is a relatively undeveloped field. The post-detonation nuclear forensics field is also immature, and the challenges are compounded by the pressures and time constraints of performing forensics after a nuclear or radiological attack...
The Bill basically calls for greater investment in graduate Radiochemistry programs and, very importantly, calls for the President to work on the development of international forensics agreements
...It is the sense of the Congress that the President should--
(1) pursue bilateral and multilateral international agreements to establish, or seek to establish under the auspices of existing bilateral or multilateral agreements, an international framework for determining the source of any confiscated nuclear or radiological material or weapon, as well as the source of any detonated weapon and the nuclear or radiological material used in such a weapon;
(2) develop protocols for the data exchange and dissemination of sensitive information relating to nuclear or radiological materials and samples of controlled nuclear or radiological materials, to the extent required by the agreements entered into under paragraph (1); and
(3) develop expedited protocols for the data exchange and dissemination of sensitive information needed to publicly identify the source of a nuclear detonation...
What is interesting about all this is that the Bill skirts with a negligence doctrine for the deterrence of nuclear terrorism
...A robust and well-known capability to identify the source of nuclear or radiological material intended for or used in an act of terror could also deter prospective proliferators. Furthermore, the threat of effective attribution could compel improved security at material storage facilities, preventing the unwitting transfer of nuclear or radiological materials...
I am afraid that this robust conception of deterrence would tend to undermine the internationalisation of forensics. Why cooperate to provide "dissemination of sensitive information" if unwitting transfer comes within the ambit of deterrence?
One might add that such a sharing arrangement wouldn't fly under the envisaged forensics regime. Here we get bi-lateral and multi-lateral exchange of information but the US (or whichever state is targeted) does the forensics. Better to have the Department of Safeguards at the International Atomic Energy Agency do the actual nuclear forensic work for this would make it easier to develop data sharing protocols.
This would be a truly international regime on nuclear terrorism which would encompass both the gathering of raw data and the forensics.
Let us assume that there is a robust global sharing arrangement and that forensics works. One suspects if both conditions are met that the deterrence of deliberate transfer would be robust. No rational state would transfer from a declared facility. So, deliberate transfer would only rationally occur via a clandestine facility.
What then for forensics?
What then for deterrence?
Avalon Air Show And The Super Hornet
Despite everything that you have read here one of my favourite events was held over the weekend, namely the Avalon Air Show. This year saw the final appearance of the F-111. Its temporary replacement, the F/A 18 Super-Hornet was on display.
Boeing and the USAF pulled out all the stops. The show had a relatively long display of the Super-Hornet, which even included a weapons complement.
Now the commentary told us many little details about the wonders of this aircraft, although we were not told one interesting little detail.
Namely, the Royal Australian Air Force high command didn't want this aircraft much.
Obama’s QDR And The Two Wars Policy
A report has appeared in The New York Times on some background thinking behind the up and coming QDR, which will include a Nuclear Posture Review. Now the article itself is concerned with conventional force posture. The main premise of the article is that strategic planners are thinking of ditching the "fight two wars" basis behind force capability planning
...For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere...
Don't forget that the two wars scenario assumed two "major" wars against "rogue states." It is indeed the case that Iraq and Afghanistan has demonstrated the problems with the two wars strategy. However, we need be mindful that both wars have involved the over-throw of political regimes, which leads to the need to engage in state-building and opens up the real possibility of insurgency. The original two major wars scenario said little, to nothing, about regime change operations.
The original construct always assumed that hostilities would be initiated by the adversary. The argument went that developing a military force able to defeat any attempt to break-through dual containment in the Persian Gulf and blunt a North Korean assault along the DMZ, at the same time, would deter the initiation of hostilities in these areas. In this way, it was argued, the "two major wars" construct was a posture of conventional deterrence.
Michael Klare, a US strategic analyst (a very good one too), published a book at the time (early '90s) that the two major wars (although such ideas existed from Nixon onwards) argument was actually a means to maintain roughly cold war era defence capability planning in the absence of the NATO Central Front. I found Klare's arguments to be persuasive, and I still find them persuasive.
If you look at the argument carefully you can see that the potential ditching of the two-major wars policy actually errs toward the side of greater permissiveness in so far as the use of military power is concerned, as was developed by the Bush Administration. That's important for the naive who imagined that Brand Obama would lead to some dramatic sea-change in regards to the use of military force. Real change would consist in Obama stating that the purpose of military power is to deter and defeat aggression against the United States. Quite clearly, the QDR will not challenge the notion that US military power is needed for global order and stability and thereby is configured for external intervention, rather than defence.
...A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama...
Why is the US military fighting two counter-insurgencies? It is fighting them because it has replaced two regimes. Counter-insurgency in defence planning is a technical term meaning regime change. If the purpose of military power is to deter aggression or then defeat an aggressive military force, i.e. like the Gulf War, then the issue of counter-insurgency need not arise.
The issue with counter-insurgency also focuses on protracted conflict
...But Pentagon officials are now asking whether the current reality, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already outlasting World War II, really fits any of those models. “One of the things that stresses our force greatly is long-duration operations,” the senior Pentagon official said. “It’s the requirement to continue to rotate forces in over many, many rotations that really strains a lot of the force...
It was said during the war in Bosnia that the respective military forces were only able to sustain operational warfare over a 3-5 day period. The Napoleonic wars were a part of the "age of decisive battles." Despite much optimism from Rumsfeld and others that a "transformed force" would lead to a new age of "decisive battles" the US military is now very much conscious that regime change can lead to protracted military conflict.
The problem with current thinking then, from what I can gather with this article, is not the number of wars that strategic planning assumes but rather that US conventional planning has proceeded hitherto upon an assumption that conflict would consist of decisive engagements over a relatively brief period of operations.
The issue seems to be with the duration of conflict, not necessarily the number.
Obama’s Afghan Surge
I have an essay on the Obama Afghan surge, including links to very important documents, at On Line Opinion
GAO Report On B61 And W76 LEP
The GAO has published a pretty damning report on cost over-runs and poor scheduling on both the B61 and W76 LEP. The B61 LEP was pretty dysfunctional. The report makes it clear that the B61 LEP did meet its schedule, but only after the NNSA decided not to replace a critical component (which it called "a plastic") with a newly designed component and re-manufacture of this component proved not to be necessary as the downsizing of the B61 class (esp the tactical variants) enabled the use of "spare parts" for the B61 LEP.
What made the B61 LEP especially dysfunctional was the poor interface between STRATCOM and the weapons complex at a critical juncture in the Phase 6.X process
...Specifically, NNSA tested the B61 in conditions that it later learned were no longer used by DOD. In conducting its tests, NNSA was following DOD’s specifications to meet all of the weapon’s original requirements established in the 1960s. According to the Phase 6.X process, a critical military requirement, which NNSA relied on for its tests, should have been reviewed during the Phase 6.2/2A study during 2001 and 2002. Instead, 2 years elapsed before STRATCOM notified NNSA that the requirement was no longer necessary, and it took another 2 years—until March 2006—to finally change the requirement. As a result, NNSA dedicated time and resources to develop an alternative material and conducted tests following the requirement, which STRATCOM later criticized as being operationally unrealistic testing...
Think about that. The NNSA was using the DoD mission requirements for the B61 family from the 1960s! The B61-11 is an EPW, and one of its desired missions is "agent defeat" of chemical and biological weapons buried in underground facilities. Whether that mission requirement can be met is of course another story, but it is amazing that NNSA should have used military requirements from the 1960s for the B61-11. The B61-11 mission requirement is relatively new.
The W76 LEP issues essentially revolves around Fogbank, a material used in the interstage of the W76 warhead.
...NNSA developed a risk mitigation strategy to avoid potential cost overruns and schedule delays related to the manufacture of Fogbank but failed to effectively implement it. As a result, NNSA’s original plans to produce the first refurbished W76 weapon in September 2007 slipped to September 2008...
Now there are some interesting revelations as to why this arose
...At the beginning of the W76 life extension program in 2000, NNSA identified key technical challenges that would potentially cause schedule delays or cost overruns. One of the highest risks was manufacturing Fogbank because it is difficult to manufacture. In addition, NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency. Finally, NNSA had to build a new facility at the Y-12 plant because the facilities that produced Fogbank ceased operation in the 1990s and had overruns or schedule delays. This schedule increased risk to meeting the program schedule because any delay would leave less than 2 years to conduct test production runs, which NNSA determined were necessary for perfecting the process. In addition, the Fogank facility was the first new manufacturing facility to be built at Y-12 in 30 years; therefore, a lack of recent experience with construction project management and implementing safety guidelines heightened the potential for problems. In fact, the contractor building the facility underestimated the time needed to complete preparations for start-up, including training and certifying staff to use the equipment and calibrating instruments...
Clearly this goes beyond Fogbank recycle. It is worth noting that according to the above the DoE no longer had the "knowledge" to manufacture Fogbank. Sometimes the loss of an ability to do something is equated for the loss knowledge needed to do that something. For instance one might loss the ability to ride a bike, but that would not mean that one has lost knowledge of how to ride a bike. Such examples are used by philosophers to demonstrate that knowledge and ability are two different kettle of fish.
The GAO report clearly states that the DoE lost the knowledge and not just the ability to manufacture Fogbank. This is a stunning conclusion, especially given the reasons; that proper records were not kept of the production process.
I believe that things were not that stark. I think that the ability to manufacture Fogbank was lost, but not the knowledge required. This knowledge would consist of the underlying physics and chemistry, which I am sure was well understood within the complex.
Of course, that could be a wrong analysis but if so that would be pretty amazing.
These things are not without RRW implications. The following citation shows that the SSP works, and also tends to support my belief stated above
...In 2000, NNSA considered replacing Fogbank with an alternate material that was less costly and easier to produce but abandoned the idea because NNSA was confident that it could produce Fogbank since it had done so before. In addition, LANL’s computer models and simulations were not sophisticated enough to provide conclusive evidence that the alternate material would function exactly the same as Fogbank. Still further, the Navy, the ultimate customer, had expressed a strong preference for Fogbank because of its proven nuclear test record. In response to the Navy’s preference and the lack of sufficient test data on the alternate material, NNSA did not pursue the development of an alternate material until 2007.
In March 2007, however, NNSA again considered producing an alternative material when it was unable to produce usable Fogbank and was facing the prospect of significant schedule delays. Computer models and simulations had improved since 2001, enabling greater confidence in the analysis of alternate materials. Thus, NNSA began a $23 million initiative to develop an alternate material. LANL officials told us that NNSA plans to certify the use of the alternative material by the end of 2009 for the W76 warhead and if NNSA faced additional Fogbank manufacturing problems during full-scale production, the alternate material could then be used instead of Fogbank. Had NNSA continued research and development of an alternate material during the program, it would have had more information on the viability of using the alternate material in the weapon before March 2007. This additional information also might have provided the Navy greater assurance that an alternate material performed as well as Fogbank...
Notice that the NNSA was "confident" it could produce Fogbank "since it had done so before." This supports the notion that what NNSA lost was not knowledge about how to produce Fogbank, but the ability to produce Fogbank.
Recall that the need to produce new less problematical nuclear weapon components, such as alternative materials for the interstage of a two-stage thermonuclear warhead and Be reflectors for the primary, were big selling points for RRW. The above citation shows that the NNSA is confident it can do this even under the SSP model. This provides some evidence for the notion that re-designed physics packages are mission centric concerns.
It is entirely apt that the GAO report should conclude with some comments on RRW
...All of these management issues raise significant questions about NNSA’s ability not only to complete life extension programs on time and on budget that meet all refurbishment objectives, but also its ability to manage the design and production of new weapons, such as the proposed reliable replacement warhead. NNSA and DOD state that the reliable replacement warhead is a way to replace the nation’s aging stockpile with a safer, more reliable, and more secure warhead than those currently in our stockpile, and plan to use the Phase 6.X process to design and manufacture this warhead. Because NNSA did not properly follow the Phase 6.X process, meet all refurbishment objectives for the B61 bomb, and conduct all planned tests, it raises questions about NNSA’s ability to design a new weapon that meets DOD’s needs and also provides sufficient confidence to DOD that a new weapon will perform as expected without conducting underground nuclear tests. In addition, NNSA’s failure to implement its risk mitigation strategy for the highest risk to the program and implement lessons learned from prior life extensions, like the W87 warhead, does not inspire confidence in its ability to achieve the program’s goals on time and on budget...
Indeed.
The B61 LEP component at issue is potentially much more interesting than Fogbank. I everybody will pretty much focus on Fogbank, but consider the B61
...NNSA assumed that it would not need time for development and production engineering because it would reuse rather than manufacture critical materials—one of the most critical of which was a plastic. Before fully determining whether the plastic could be reused, NNSA developed a production schedule with fixed delivery dates. However, additional tests showed that NNSA could not reuse this material because it did not function properly under certain conditions. NNSA therefore decided to develop an alternative material with superior properties that would work under all conditions. Since NNSA did not include any cost or schedule contingencies in its baseline to address unforeseen technical challenges, development work on an alternative material posed a significant risk to meeting the program’s milestones and added $11 million to the program’s cost. NNSA was unable to produce a substitute that could retain the shape needed for the B61 bomb and would perform under all delivery conditions. NNSA’s effort to manufacture this alternative material resulted in significant schedule delays and cost overruns...
OK. So what happened?
...In response to NNSA’s request, STRATCOM, which is responsible for developing and reviewing military mission requirements, reviewed the military needs for the B61. After STRATCOM reviewed its needs, NNSA was then able to abandon its attempt to develop an alternative material, which it could not successfully manufacture to meet requirements, and was able to reuse the original material in the B61 bomb...
See why the B61 plastic is much more interesting than Fogbank? It's more interesting because the new component was related to a revised STRATCOM mission requirement. After STRATCOM did the NNSA a favour and dropped the mission requirement the Phase 6.X process could proceed without manufacturing an entirely new component.
What was the mission requirement that STRATCOM ditched? That's the big question.
I'm widely speculating now, but perhaps this new component was related to the stresses and strains inevitably faced by an EP warhead. It would most likely be some following on from NSPD-14.
Contact.
Categories
Archives
About the Author
Marko is also interested in philosophy, especially the theory of knowledge, and science, especially physics, and considers himself to work within the naturalist and enlightenment tradition. He is writing a book on nuclear terrorism.