from New Scientist, 16 July 2005
"I AM become death, the shatterer of worlds." These words from the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita, flashed through physicist Robert Oppenheimer's mind as he watched the first atomic bomb test in a desert in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. Code-named Trinity, the bomb that he developed changed the world forever.
Six decades later, we are struggling to come to terms with Oppenheimer's legacy. Thousands of tonnes of plutonium and highly enriched uranium have been produced by both civilian and military nuclear programmes of many countries. The world's nuclear arsenal stands at 27,000 bombs, most of them far more powerful than those the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki within a month of the Trinity test.
As many as nine countries may possess nuclear weapons today, and dozens more have access to nuclear materials and the technology to turn them into bombs. "Sixty years after the dawn of the atomic age, the nuclear chickens are coming home to roost," says Nigel Chamberlain of the British American Security Information Council, a think tank based in London and Washington DC.
To prevent all this fissile material going astray, if it hasn't already, 89 countries agreed last week to keep a closer watch on the movement of nuclear materials. And at last week's summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, the G8 countries renewed their pledge to raise $20 billion over the next 10 years to help Russia deal with its staggering stockpiles of Soviet-era fissile material and dismantle its nuclear submarines.
But such efforts may not be enough to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. North Korea seems to be on the verge of testing a bomb. Iran is defiant about enriching uranium for civilian nuclear power, while other countries are worried Iran may build a bomb. Meanwhile, the states that have nuclear weapons are holding onto their arsenals and the technologies that make them possible. Some of them are even considering building newer weapons while urging other countries to forswear them, a stand that many call hypocritical and hold responsible for the failure of month-long talks in May to stem the spread of nuclear weapons.
At the heart of this global nuclear quagmire lies what the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has referred to as the "Janus-like character of nuclear energy". The reactors that produce power also produce plutonium, which can be extracted by reprocessing the spent fuel. Plutonium can be used in fast breeder reactors, which produce more plutonium than they use for fuel, and are still in favour in India, Japan and Russia. It can also be mixed with uranium to make mixed-oxide fuel (MOX), which is being used in 30 reactors in Europe. Japan plans to use MOX in a third of its reactors by 2010. Of course, the plutonium can also be used to make bombs.
A similar dilemma confronts those enriching uranium in centrifuges to increase the concentration of the fissile uranium-235 isotope in the fuel. This boosts the efficiency of nuclear reactors that use uranium for fuel, but the technology is also used to make highly enriched uranium for research and for nuclear submarines and weapons.
This conundrum was first recognised in an expert report for the US undersecretary of state, Dean Acheson, in 1946. The processes of developing atomic energy for peace and for war "are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent", the report concluded. "There is no prospect of security against atomic warfare in a system of international agreements."
But international agreements have been the only real recourse the world has had to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The most important one is The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which came into force in 1970. The treaty commits countries without nuclear weapons not to acquire them, but it also gives them the "inalienable right" to develop nuclear technology and to participate in "the fullest possible exchange" of nuclear materials for peaceful purposes.
At one level, the treaty has worked. Since the 1960s more than 20 countries have rejected nuclear weapons programmes, the most recent of them being Libya. And thanks to US and Russian disarmament, the total number of nuclear warheads worldwide has also fallen by 38,000 since 1986.
The treaty was strengthened in 1995 when 173 nations agreed to an open-ended commitment to reject nuclear weapons if the five "nuclear-weapon states" allowed under the treaty - the US, UK, Russia, China and France - would eventually eliminate their arsenal. "It could be a lot worse," says Gary Samore, a former nuclear policy adviser to the Clinton administration and now with The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Some, however, think it is a lot worse. The treaty has failed to stop some countries from developing nuclear weapons. In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Israel's nuclear installation near Dimona, shocked the world with claims that Israel had stockpiled 200 nuclear warheads. Then in 1998, India tested five nuclear bombs; two weeks later Pakistan followed with six of its own.
Israel's secretive weapons programme has raised tensions in the Middle East. Iraq, Libya and perhaps Iran have all pursued nuclear weapons programmes. Libya and Iran were greatly helped by enrichment and other nuclear technologies acquired from the smuggling network masterminded by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb. The network was uncovered in 2003.
North Korea, too, bought uranium enrichment technology from Khan's network. In addition, the regime has started extracting plutonium from its reactor and reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, 100 kilometres north of the capital Pyongyang, and has declared that it has nuclear weapons.
India, Israel and Pakistan have refused to sign the NPT, and North Korea formally opted out of the treaty in 2003. The treaty is in further trouble now, with the five nuclear-weapon states being accused of failing to keep their promise to eliminate their nuclear weapons. The five countries still maintain enormous stockpiles of bombs and there are signs that the US and UK are developing new nuclear weapons. Earlier this month the US senate agreed to give the Bush administration $4 million to assess the feasibility of nuclear "bunker busters", and the UK is actively investigating new warheads to replace those carried by Trident submarines.
Such was the backdrop for the month-long review conference of the NPT held in New York in May. "The world has reawakened to nuclear dangers, both new and old," Kofi Annan told the delegates from 153 countries who attended the conference. But after a month of procedural wrangling, they reached no substantive agreement, made no final declaration and launched no new initiatives to control nuclear proliferation. The outcome was described as "particularly disheartening" by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency.
Many are pointing fingers at the US and Iran, who blocked agreements to control the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Both countries were guilty of "behind-the-scenes manipulations" to avoid "any outcome that would constrain their own nuclear options", says Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy in London. "The fact that the majority of states lacked the will or backbone to stand up to them sends a dangerous message to would-be proliferators and existing nuclear weapons possessors."
While few are worried that the failure of the conference poses an immediate threat to world security, the outlook for the longer term is more worrying. There are fears that the countries with nuclear weapons could be joined by others, particularly if North Korea tests a nuclear bomb and Iran tries to build one.
"It's not a very good situation," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defence think tank in Alexandria, Virginia. Pike says that developments in North Korea and Iran could have knock-on effects such that "a decade from now the nuclear club could also include Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Saudi Arabia".
Even if countries were to swear off nuclear weapons and dismantle existing arsenals, there remains the problem of safeguarding the stockpiles of weapons-grade fissile material. The twin legacies of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing over the past decades are daunting. About 1900 tonnes of highly enriched uranium is now in the possession of 46 countries. Another 1855 tonnes of plutonium, about a quarter of it reprocessed and separated, has been stockpiled around the world, mostly in the UK, France, Russia and Japan. The reprocessed plutonium alone is enough to build more than 100,000 nuclear bombs.
"While the probability of a nuclear device being acquired and used by terrorists is relatively small, it cannot be dismissed, and the consequences would be devastating," says ElBaradei.
To try to avoid the nightmare of a terrorist nuclear attack, experts met in Vienna, Austria, last week to strengthen the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, which has been in force since 1987. The 89 states that signed the amended convention will be legally bound to protect all nuclear facilities and materials, whether in use, storage or transport. The original convention dealt with fissile materials only during international transportation.
ElBaradei is convinced that as well as making nuclear material secure, it is essential to restrict access to critical nuclear technologies. He proposes that all enrichment and reprocessing plants be brought under international control and that a five-year moratorium be imposed on the building of any new plants.
But these suggestions have made little headway because countries are unwilling to cede control of their plants or to forgo their expansion plans. Despite condemning North Korea's plutonium-reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, Japan is planning a major plant of its own at Rokkashomura. And while pressing Iran to abandon its plans for uranium enrichment at Natanz, the UK and Germany are involved in a consortium that is pushing ahead with plans for a $1.2 billion enrichment plant near the city of Eunice in New Mexico.
Reprocessing and enrichment by the nuclear power industry have given states such as Iran, Brazil, Japan and Germany "a formidable latent [weapons] proliferation capability", says Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC. "The non-proliferation regime, effectively undermined by the narrow self-interest of the nuclear industry, must be viewed as a failure."
Other commentators, however, insist that the nuclear power industry is not to blame. "Removing nuclear energy from the world wouldn't prevent determined states from getting nuclear weapons," says Malcolm Grimston from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He says the enrichment and reprocessing should continue to be controlled as they have been until now - by suppliers of plutonium and enriched uranium getting together and exporting under tough controls.
According to a report released in March by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, "the world has arrived at a nuclear tipping point". It remains to be seen which trend will dominate the world. Will it be the positive trend of more countries giving up nuclear weapons programmes than begin them? Or the negative one of growing stockpiles of fissile material, intransigence of the nuclear-weapon states when it comes to reducing their arsenals and reluctance of the handful of states with newly acquired weapons to sign the NPT?
The report, a result of talks between more than 150 experts from 20 countries, argues that decisions over the next few years - such as banning the production of highly enriched uranium, pausing reprocessing of plutonium and converting research reactors to use low-enriched uranium as fuel - will determine whether nuclear weapons will be controlled "or if a dangerous new wave of proliferation will engulf the world".
It's not a comforting vision. In the desert in New Mexico, where a black obelisk stands in the middle of a shallow depression to mark the spot where Trinity exploded, it is quiet. But the shock waves from the day the A-bomb was born are still reverberating.
