But Bush’s Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) still mark an extraordinary moment in history, the point at which it might be said that the US truly won the Cold War. For decades, the superpowers had been piling warhead upon warhead. As historian Raymond L. Garthoff has noted, Bush’s September speech and Gorbachev’s response were a time when the arms race ran in reverse—downhill. Furthermore, the PNIs showed that ponderous negotiations aiming at a treaty were not the only way to cut nuclear arsenals. Unilateral arms control turned out not to be an oxymoron. And it was perhaps a good example of the deftness with which Bush handled the US response to the USSR’s collapse and Russia’s rebirth as a separate state.

Peter Grier, “When the Nuke Plan Changed”.  Air Force Magazine, September 2011.  Read the whole thing; it’s really an excellent piece on the origins of the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, the 1991 reductions in U.S tactical nuclear weapons order by President George H.W. Bush, which led the Soviet Union to take similar steps, dramatically increasing U.S. security.

Yesterday, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) began construction of a new 45,000 square foot $142 million high explosives facility at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. The public account (which cites the wrong cost estimate) of the groundbreaking primarily focused on how the new facility, called the High Explosives Pressing Facility (HEPF), will replace old buildings and increase efficiency. In reality, the HEPF is part of a plan to significantly increase the United States’ capacity to produce high explosives for nuclear weapons.

According to NNSA planning documents, the Pantex Plant is in the process of increasing its capacity for manufacturing high explosives for nuclear weapons from 1,000 to 2,500 pounds per year. As part of that plan, the HEPF will almost double the number of explosive hemispheres Pantex produces, from 300 to 500 hemispheres per year (explosive hemispheres are part of a weapon’s Nuclear Explosive Package).

In theory, the HEPF will allow Pantex to produce explosives for up to 250 warheads per year. In practice, this facility will be used to generate explosives to replace those in existing nuclear weapons and for testing purposes. According to the Department of Energy’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget request, “this project [the HEPF] will provide a new high explosive (HE) main charge pressing facility with capability and capacity to meet the needs of changing weapon complexity, projected workload, and the Life Extension Program activities in the future including the W76, W78, and W88 Programs.” The budget also states that current explosives in nuclear weapons could be replaced with Insensitive High Explosives, another possible motivation for building a facility with a greater production capacity.

Why Does NNSA Need to Produce More Explosives For Fewer Weapons?

A couple months ago, I was at an event with an NNSA official who was talking about the nuclear weapons complex. I asked the official why NNSA was building facilities with greater production capacity if the number of U.S. nuclear weapons was decreasing. The official’s answer was that nuclear weapons production facilities were being sized to fit the amount of work being planned, not the number of weapons in the stockpile.

This has always seemed like an odd answer to me.  Shouldn’t there be a relationship between the size of the stockpile and the amount of work needed? Shouldn’t both of those things help to inform the size of the production facilities? The HEPF is a good example of this paradox.

That being said, however, an analysis of current trends cannot help but lead one to assume that it is unlikely that there will be any American nuclear weapons based on European soil ten years hence. That decision cannot be seen in advance as either good or bad; it is just likely. It is time to start thinking about the Alliance’s preferred alternatives.

Jeffrey A. Larsen, “Future Options for NATO Nuclear Policy, August 30.  Larsen is president of Larsen Consulting Group and an adjunct professor at Denver, Northwestern, and Texas A&M universities. He is also a retired Air Force command pilot and the first director of the Air Force Institute for National Security Studies.  He has written extensively on tactical nuclear weapons.

For more information on NATO’s dilemma as it pertains to the future of dual capable aircraft, check out the following useful sources, including a piece by yours truly:

Parting words: Gates and tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (Link)

NATO, Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control (Link)

Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Germany: Time for Withdrawal? (Link)

Happy International Day Against Nuclear Tests!  For a brilliant reminder of why a permanent legal ban on nuclear testing is vital, check out Daryl Kimball’s moving take over at Armscontrolnow.  

Looking for another nuclear testing-related item to put on your calendar?  
The “2011 Article XIV Conference” on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) will be held September 23 in New York.

Hosted by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, this will be seventh conference on the ratification and implementation of the CTBT (for background information our  site is chock full of CTBT resources, including a fact sheet here).  

The CTBT calls for an indefinite ban on all nuclear test explosions in all environments, to inhibit the research and development of new nuclear weapons. Since opening for signature in 1996, 182 states have signed the treaty and 154 have ratified it. However, before the treaty can “enter into force” (i.e. be made into international law) the 44 countries that possessed nuclear power reactors or research reactors at the time the treaty was negotiated have to sign and ratify the pact.  Nine of these countries still need to deposit their articles of ratification: China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Egypt, Indonesia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel, the United States of America, India and Pakistan.

Representatives from all countries are invited to participate in the conference – whether they have signed or ratified the treaty or not.  Those states that have already ratified the treaty use the conference to promote the treaty’s goals and urge states that have not done so to sign and ratify the treaty so as soon as possible.  They will also propose concrete measures to hasten entry into force, such as by urging countries with nuclear weapons research programs to refrain from developing new nuclear devices.

At the last conference in 2009, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon underlined that the CTBT is essential to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and urged states to ratify immediately, rather than wait to follow another country’s lead.    

In 2009, the U.S demonstrated renewed commitment to the treaty and the Article XIV meeting.  For instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attended and spoke at the conference, the first high-level U.S. official to do so in almost ten years.  
The U.S. also secured the Security Council’s unanimous consent for a U.S.-proposed resolution on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament that dedicates the Security Council to actively promote “a safer world for all and to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons in accordance with the goals of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons….”

The U.S. Senate voted against ratification of the CTBT twelve years ago in 1999, but the case for the treaty has only grown stronger. In 1999, the Senate primarily opposed to the treaty because they believed a ban on nuclear testing was unverifiable and worried that the U.S. nuclear arsenal would grow outdated without testing.  Today, verification methods have greatly improved and the U.S. – which has observed a self-imposed ban on U.S. nuclear testing for the last ten years – has demonstrated that it can maintain its nuclear arsenal even without tests.  The Obama administration has urged the Senate to reconsider the treaty as soon as is feasible.

While the onus of signing and ratifying the treaty falls squarely on the individual countries, U.S. ratification is likely a necessary (albeit not sufficient) step to spur the other eight remaining holdouts to ratify the treaty.  China, for instance, has hinted that it would ratify if the U.S. did so.  

U.S. ratification could also help stem Iran and North Korea’s nuclear aspirations because it would give the U.S. added credibility to sustain and expand international cooperation against states that do not comply with their nuclear proliferation obligations.    

U.S. ratification of the CTBT is a painless and effective means to increase national security.  As Ellen Tauscher, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, put it earlier this year, “In short, ratification helps us get more of what we want.”

An August 20 article in the New York Times by William Broad highlights a disturbing advance in the technology to enrich uranium which could have serious proliferation risks.  

The new technology uses lasers to enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants.  The idea has been around for a long time, but it has proven too difficult to implement – until now.  General Electric (G.E.), in conjunction with Hitachi, has been successfully testing this technology for the past two years, and is now petitioning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a $1 billion dollar plant in Wilmington, N.C.  

Center Advisory Board member Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist and former advisor to President Clinton, told Broad that we’re “…on the verge of a new route to the bomb.”

Concerns about the proliferation risks of the technology are not new.  The New York Times article refers to a September 30th, 2009 letter spearheaded by the Center and other organizations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission highlighting concerns that the technology could make it easier for other countries to develop clandestine uranium enrichment capabilities that could lead to the development of nuclear weapons (read the letter on our website here).  Earlier this year the American Physical Society petitioned the Commission to urging it to make the completion of a proliferation risk assessments a condition of licensing.

Supporters of the technology believe that it will lower the cost of enriching uranium for use in nuclear power plants.  They argue that this would make it easier and cheaper to produce the fuel for nuclear power plants.  

However, the use of lasers in the enrichment process could also lead to the creation of much smaller and therefore harder to detect enrichment facilities.  Such plants would make it difficult for the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that states are complying with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.    

For example, Iran has been working on laser enrichment technology since the 1970’s, but it has kept the results secret.  Successful implementation of the technology in the United States would likely encourage Iran, and others, to continue their own research.

This new technology opens the door to increased proliferation.  As Dr. von Hippel pointed out “We should have learned enough by now to do an assessment before we let this kind of thing out.” At the very least, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should call for a careful and thorough assessment of the proliferation risks of the technology to ensure a full understanding of it costs and benefits.