Arms Control Wonk

We’ve now passed the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and widely expected acts of nuclear terrorism have yet to occur. One example: Graham Allison predicted in Nuclear Terrorism (2004) that, “In my considered judgment, on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.”

We all know that the most likely form of nuclear terrorism is the use of a “dirty” bomb. There is no shortage of material for these instruments of mass disruption, and much of it is not well secured. As for an improvised nuclear device, we know about successful intercepts of small quantities of fissile material, but not about successful transactions. If there is opportunity – and presumed motive – why hasn’t a dirty bomb attack – or far worse – already happened?

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Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) successfully sponsored an amendment to the House version of the FY2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would require Defense and State to submit a report on redeploying tactical nuclear weapons removed from South Korea in 1991, although the language is slightly more delicate in referring to the “Western Pacific.”

“What will they want next?” my colleague Jon Wolfsthal asked, “an MC Hammer comeback tour?”

Oh boy. Where to start?

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Oh, my.

An IAEA inspector, Okseok Seo of South Korea, has died in an auto accident near Arak in Iran. (If you search the transliteration used by the Iranians, Seo Ok-seok, you’ll just get news stories relating the auto accident.)

Accidents, of course, happen.  Given that many people in Iran and elsewhere believe that there is a campaign to murder Iranian scientists associated with the nuclear and missile programs, however, suspicious minds will wonder whether this accident is some form of retribution — either directly or perhaps the indirect result of overaggressive security types.

We don’t know that.  We simply have to wait patiently for more information.  Obviously, I would expect an enormous amount of scrutiny.

Perhaps to avoid jumping to conclusions about the case of Okseok Seo, I want to discuss a mystery that has fascinated me for the past 18 months.  I thought I would, briefly, recount the case of Pierre Noir — as far as I know, the only other on-the-job fatality involving an IAEA inspector.

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Are we winning or losing the battle against proliferation? This simple question does not have a simple answer because bad headlines mask quiet progress.

Since the 1960s, reports on the status of proliferation have almost always been pessimistic. It doesn’t pay to wear rose-colored glasses in this business, since optimistic projections can lead to broken careers. Besides, there is usually ample reason for pessimism because the hardest cases overshadow modest gains. One example: more countries are signing up to the Additional Protocol, but Iran still restricts access at suspect sites.

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Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker have sent along an Addendum, following up on their original analysis posted here and which  spawned so much press coverage.

The issues it raises continue to be very interesting.  I am embroiled in several very interesting discussions, one of which is occurring in the comments to my previous post, Real Fake Missiles.  My favorite moment has been encountering the acronym BFRC — Big F*cking Red Cloud.  Here are some descriptions I found elsewhere:

The thing that always scared us was, in Gemini, when the Titan [was] flight-pressurized.  And we had that glorious BFRC.  You’re familiar with that term?  It stands for “big fucking red cloud.” See, whenever they had a leak, they said, “Don’t open the elevator door!” It was big red stuff.  You’re talking about nitrogen tetroxide all around us. http://books.google.com/books?id=LWMivGgbM7kC

NTO leakage on the engine test stands at WSTF was known as a “BFRC.” One might hear over the loud speakers, “We have a BFRC on 3!” A new secretary asked her boss, “What does BFRC mean?” Like a pluperfect idiot he told her. “BFRC means Big F*cking Red Cloud.” Shortly thereafter a directive came down from the head-shed that from that time forward, BFRC’s would be referred to as “Propellant Excursions.” I really believe to this day that “BFRC” better described the urgency of the situation. http://www.spacetweepsociety.org/category/space-history/apollo/

NTO, of course, is what North Korea may use as an oxidizer.  I wonder how to say Big F*cking Red Cloud in Korean?

The other day I joked that I am the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation program which means, lately, I am the Director of the North Korean Nonproliferation Program. Yeesh.

Many of you have noticed that Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker’s paper on the mockups garnered a significant amount of press attention, including a nice story in the New York Times by Choe Sang-hun with Bill Broad, who took a break from his battle with the Yoga-Industrial Complex.

I think most people agree that the missiles are mock-ups, but that raises a second question:  Are the mockups “complete fantasy missiles,” as Markus and Robert argue, or are they indicators of what’s to come?

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There is a long history of deceptive practices and bogus military displays designed to project greater firepower than is actually available. In my military dictionary, this is known as creative deterrence, or deterrence on the cheap. A classic case in point occurred during the July, 1955 Moscow Aviation Day, which stoked fears in the United States of a bomber gap.

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There is all sorts of wild talk, mostly around the possibility of a third DPRK nuclear test.  But that’s hardly the weirdest, most disturbing thing occurring on the Korean peninsula.

The North Korean propaganda campaign against South Korean President Lee Myung-bak is in high dudgeon with all manner of ugliness.  Particularly unpleasant examples can be seen in a series of cartoons showing Lee as a rat.  There is something really shocking about them, possibly because the artistic cues are all very modern but the sentiment expressed is distinctly medieval.

Take a gander at the cartoons below the jump.

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The summer of love (at least in the San Francisco Bay Area) was in 1967. The summer of arms control was in 1960. Longstanding readers of these posts may recall my ten favorite books on arms control. Two of them – Schelling and Halperin’s Strategy and Arms Control and Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security, edited by Donald G. Brennan — gestated in a 1960 summer study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when serious brainpower – including Brennan, Schelling, Halperin, Jerome Wiesner, Bernard Feld, Henry Rowen, Victor Weisskopf, Louis Sohn and Hans Bethe — conceptualized the practice of nuclear arms control.

There was a companion volume to Brennan’s book, Summer Study on Arms Control: Collected Papers, which has hardly seen the light of day. It’s a low-budget production published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that includes informal musings, seminar notes, graphics, rough computations and short papers – the raw material for what became known as nuclear arms control.

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