Abstract
A more even-handed Uncle Sam
This is a laudable point, but Albright neglects completely the fact that the U.S. government has always put short-term political and diplomatic objectives ahead of long-term nonproliferation efforts.
Indeed, when the historical record is examined, it becomes apparent that the United States has been the fountainhead of almost all post-war proliferation of nuclear weapons. Since 1943, the United States has:
• Unwittingly (unwillingly and unknowingly) provided to Soviet agents all the information required to design and manufacture its first atomic weapons.
• Provided both indirect and direct technical and material support to Britain so it could build its own atomic and thermonuclear weapons.
• Provided indirect technical support (“negative guidance”) to France as that nation developed its atomic weapons.
• Provided indirect support to Israel (including, in 1968, several kilograms of weapons-grade uranium) for that country's nuclear weapons program.
• Provided heavy water for use in a Canadian research reactor from which India's first plutonium was generated during the early 1970s.
• Looked the other way during the 1970s and 1980s as Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons (harrying the Soviets in Afghanistan superseded the prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons).
• Looked the other way as South Africa developed its now-abandoned nuclear weapons program. (The United States still officially pretends that a joint South African-Israeli nuclear test in the southeast Atlantic in 1979 never occurred, despite evidence provided by U.S. surveillance satellites.) Although the United States did make token efforts to slow the South African program (in 1977 the Soviet Union and the United States persuaded South Africa to cancel a planned nuclear test), those efforts were never as serious or as strong as they could have been.
Albright and others might put their energies to better use by arguing for stricter U.S. controls on technology exports and less hypocritical foreign policies, than by arguing for the continued classification of information which is by now widespread. Until the United States puts into action an even-handed policy that includes denying nuclear technology even to its staunchest allies, it will have no credibility in this political arena.
Editor, Swords of Armageddon, (www.uscoldwar.com)
A bomb or not?
Michael Flynn's article “Empty Quiver, Bent Spear, or …?” (November/December 2000 Bulletin) is an interesting preface to a story that is still unfolding. Flynn recounts how, during a training mission in February 1958, a B-47 collided with an F-86 fighter plane. The B-47 jettisoned a “bomb” near the mouth of the Savannah River.
At the time of the accident, the air force and navy said the jettisoned object was merely a bomb component.
In the months following the accident, however, the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission told the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in four separate letters that the ejected device was in fact a nuclear weapon–a Mark 15 bomb.
One letter stated that the bomb was “without nuclear capsule” (without the fissile core) while, oddly, the other three letters omitted such language.
Was the lost Mark 15 armed? A 1966 letter from Assistant Secretary of Defense J. E. “Jack” Howard to the Joint Committee seemed to resolve the controversy. In it, Howard testified “for the record” that the ejected bomb was a “complete weapon”–a description most took to mean an armed nuclear bomb. (The letter also described three other accidents involving lost nuclear weapons.)
But, in a fax to me last September, Adm. Craig Quigley, spokesperson for Defense Secretary William Cohen, released an unredacted paragraph of Howard's 1966 letter (in the original declassified version of the letter the bomb type was blacked out). As Flynn reports, the unredacted paragraph described the missing bomb as a Mark 15 Mod 0. According to the air force, because Mod Os were not sealed–their capsules were removable–the bomb involved in the training mission must not have been armed.
But the story doesn't end there. In the weeks following Quigley's fax, Howard was interviewed by two Georgia television stations. On both occasions, he said he remembered the letter and he confirmed that the bomb was armed. In fact, he referred to it as a Mod 2, the designation for the sealed-pit variant of the Mark 15. He brushed aside the contradiction between his current statements and his 1966 letter by saying that he had access to all the necessary documents at the time to conclude that the bomb–whether a Mod 0 or a Mod 2–was indeed armed.
Why would Howard remember this letter so well after so many years? His 1966 letter came on the heels of one of the most embarrassing nuclear accidents in U.S. history. Three months earlier, a B-52 bomber crashed near Palomares, Spain, losing a Mark 28fi bomb. For months, the international press railed against inept American nuclear practices. It was only through good fortune that, 81 days after the accident, the bomb was finally located by a deep submersible traversing a trench 2,850 feet beneath the surface of the sea.
Angered by the adverse publicity caused by the Palomares accident, the Joint Committee called a special hearing in Washington, calling Howard to testify about other lost nuclear weapons. The Joint Committee also knew that just a few months earlier another bomb had been lost off the coast of Japan.
Howard answered in writing several days after the hearing, indicating that the bomb lost near Savannah, Georgia, was in fact armed. Despite Howard's recent statements–and pressure from Georgia Cong. Jack Kingston to come clean about the accident–the air force continues to contend that the bomb did not contain a capsule.
On November 2, air force officials said that the bomb casing contains some uranium which, the air force added, is not a danger to public health. By early December, the air force had not yet decided whether to recover the bomb. But Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat, has asked the Pentagon to become directly involved.
Questions remain: Should a disputed set of documents be used to provide assurances to the public that a missing nuclear weapon–a weapon that hasn't been seen or physically evaluated for 42 years–is harmless? Or, all things considered, should a Nuclear Emergency Search Team be called in to remove the bomb, which lies in 30 feet of water perilously close to a large urban area?
Incidentally, the other lost bombs described in Howard's 1966 letter have been declassified. The other “complete weapon” was a Mark 43, which the uss Ticonderoga “lost over the side” in 1965 somewhere in the “western Pacific.”
The two “weapons less capsules” incidents involved two Mark 5s lost off the coast of New Jersey and a nuclear depth charge lost near Astoria, Oregon.
Louisville, Kentucky
G-Fan magazine, “the journal of giant Japanese monsters,” has reprinted Janne Nolan's article “When Three Heads Are Better Than…Three Heads” (July/August 2000 Bulletin). In the article, Nolan describes the 1964 movie Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster– in which Rodan, Godzilla, and Mothra team up to defeat Ghidrah–as a “clear demonstration that even mutants, despite tiny brains and a Darwinian environment, can understand the imperatives of cooperative security.” As the September/October 2000 G-Fan explains: “Godzilla and collective security: If you don't see the connection, no less a braintrust than the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will spell it out for you.” G-Fan is on line at www.g-fan.com.
In “The Rock is a Hard Place” (November/December 2000), Michael Flynn reported that a British nuclear-powered attack sub, the HMS Tireless, has been stranded in Gibraltar since last May, when a leak was discovered in the sub's reactor. Despite widespread protests in Gibraltar and Spain, the navy decided to repair the sub in Gibraltar, arguing that the damage was minor. Since the article was published: Britain has recalled 11 nuclear-powered attack subs, seven of which show signs of similar reactor problems (Sunday Times, November 19, 2000). Quoting unnamed sources, the Guardian reported on October 28 that the reactor leak resulted from a “catastrophic design fault” in the reactor's cooling system and that the reactor came close to a meltdown, a claim the navy denies. The European Union asked Britain in mid-November to respond to concerns that radioactively contaminated water might be released during repairs.
Sins of omission
In a recent lecture trip to Duke University, I spotted a very long article in the Homecoming supplement of the University's newspaper, The Chronicle (November 17, 2000). I read it with both interest and concern.
The article, concerning John Browne, was mostly about his student life at Duke, his accomplishments in physics, and his scientific career at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The headline told readers that Browne now heads Los Alamos.
What was excluded was any mention of the Wen Ho Lee case or of the two missing hard drives–scandalous incidents that have happened at Los Alamos under Browne's watch. The article also ignored controversies regarding the mismanagement of the laboratory. The fact that the University of California recently reprimanded Browne for lax security was apparently not newsworthy.
One surprise in the article was Browne's statement that he would like eventually to return to teaching college students: “I think it's especially important to get students engaged in thinking about ethics and research because that's where the field is headed.”
I am curious about what kind of “ethics” Browne will teach his future students. Under oath, Browne's colleagues and subordinates exaggerated the seriousness of the data downloaded by Wen Ho Lee. As a result of their testimony, which Browne fully supported, Wen Ho Lee was unjustly put in solitary confinement for nine months without a trial. What sort of ethics would this man teach his students?
Asian American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Nuclear-Free Future Awards
Last October I traveled to Ber-lin for the presentation of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards, a program established in 1998 by a consortium of Munich groups led by Claus Biegert. The awards are designed to draw attention to problems caused by uranium mining and nuclear technology.
Four Nuclear-Free Future Awards were given in 2000:
• The Inverhuron and District Ratepayers Association, a group of community volunteers in Ontario, Canada, received the Resistance Award. Alarmed by accidents and increased incidents of disease, the association began investigating a local utility, Bruce Nuclear Power Development, to find answers. The group is suing for an independent review of a proposed nuclear waste facility.
• The late photographer Yuri I. Kuidin was given the Education Award for his work documenting the effects of radiation on the people of Kazakhstan. His daughter Alyona Kuidina accepted the honor on his behalf.
• For their work establishing solar power as an energy source in rural India, the Barefoot College of Tilonia in Rajasthan, India, was given the Solutions Award.
• The Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Klaus Traube, director of Interatom, who for years has spoken on behalf of the environment.
The 2001 Nuclear-Free Future Awards ceremony will be held at Carnsore Point, Ireland.
Peru, Illinois
Alyona Kuidina accepts a Nuclear-Free Future Award for her late father, Yuri Kuidin.
Darkness in El Dorado that deal with radiation studies are the book's weakest. Confused chronology, mistakes of detail, and reasoning by innuendo reduce their persuasiveness.
But overall, the book is as insightful as it is important, and despite the ongoing debate over the merits of many of Tierney's allegations, Darkness in El Dorado has already had a huge impact beyond scientific circles. In Venezuela, the Office of Indigenous Affairs has placed a moratorium on permits for non-governmental visits to the country's indigenous-populated territories, pending a thorough investigation. This marks the first time a country has sealed off its native inhabitants from foreign contact in order to protect them from the potential dangers of scientific and medical research.
Darkness in El Dorado will become standard–if disputed–reading on the methods used to study native populations. It may also provoke more investigations into U.S. Cold War experiments.
Correction
During the editing process, two errors were introduced into Raymond L. Garthoff's article, “Polyakov's Run” (September/October 2000 Bulletin). The article erroneously stated that in 1978 David Binder identified William Sullivan as the source for suspicion that Dmitri Polyakov fed disinformation to the United States on Soviet chemical and biological weapons. But it was Edward J. Epstein who revealed Sullivan as the source in his 1989 book, Deception. Epstein also did not support the notion that Polyakov worked for the United States. The editors regret these errors.