Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
June 4, 2009
How to Stop Nuclear
Proliferation? Send in the Cyber-Battalions
Thirty years ago, I
was asked to testify before the Senate Energy Committee on nuclear
proliferation. Like many people asked to testify, I was blindsided by
the honor of the thing. When I came to write my testimony, like others
before and since, I was limited to a litany of the woes of
proliferation. There were no good answers. Now, there are technological
possibilities for intruding into a proliferator's workplace.
I did emphasize to
the Senate the difficult moral argument involved: I told the senators
that our posture was to ask the world's lesser countries to trust us
because we did not trust them. A ticklish point, that – made all the
more so by the inevitable appeal of a nuclear arsenal to non-entity
countries.
But when it comes to
proliferation, the nuclear club has a larger obligation: To keep itself
small.
Every new
proliferator is a threat to the world, and most likely a threat to
itself. The fact is that a primitive nuclear weapon is a danger to its
makers as well as to the world at large.
Throughout the Cold
War, the United States handed safety technology to the Soviet Union,
including failsafe switching and insensitive TNT. Both sides realized
that an accidental detonation could lead to a hostile exchange in the
confusion. It would have been world annihilation by mistake.
So dangerous were
the earliest U.S. nuclear weapons that Fat Man and Little Boy were
assembled on their flight to Japan. One has to wonder, and to worry,
about the safety of North Korea's bombs, and even of Pakistan's.
Thirty years ago,
there was no answer to proliferation except hand-wringing and sanctions,
which historically have not worked. The Iranian sanctions have been
broken by Russia, China and many European countries. The North Korean
sanctions have been broken by China, which provides food and fuel to
control the flood of refugees from North Korea into China.
So the stealthy
technological option becomes imperative.
That possibility
involves a secret, anonymous attack on the proliferator that can be
confused with an earthquake or with the failure guidance systems of the
proliferator's rockets. These would appear to be design malfunctions,
not secret attacks. Particularly with North Korea, rocket failure will
undermine its fragile sense of worth, and cause the military to think it
is very vulnerable.
It is believed that
North Korea set out to build a plutonium weapon from plutonium bred in a
Russian-supplied research reactor. But North Korea apparently switched
from a planned plutonium weapon to a highly enriched uranium weapon. If
so, good. It is easier to disrupt uranium enrichment than the
reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium.
This is also our
advantage with Iran. There are many ways to enrich uranium, but three
stand out – gaseous diffusion of the kind used by the United States
during World War II, gas centrifuges and the South African nozzle
method. All have the same objective – to separate and concentrate
uranium 235 from the more plentiful uranium 238.
Gas centrifuge is
the most favored. It is what the Iranians are pursuing, and probably
what the North Koreans are using. It is efficient, but it requires
incredible engineering.
Think of a
centrifuge as a great cream churn, except this one spins at 1,500
revolutions per second. One report says that a centrifuge can fail as a
result of the imbalance produced by a single fingerprint. In order to
stop a proliferator using enriched uranium, you would need either to
create a huge vibration that would cause the centrifuges to fly apart or
cut the electricity supply.
The electricity
option is tempting. It is difficult to conceal a power plant and easier
to disrupt its output if it is computer-controlled, as most are. If
North Korea's plants are so primitive that they are not vulnerable
through computers, other vulnerabilities need exploiting.
Some commentators
have called for war against North Korea and for the Israelis to bomb the
Iranian installations. The former would bring all-out war back to the
Korean Peninsula and the latter would unite the Arabs with the Iranians,
incite war and starve the world of oil.
A better way is to
surreptitiously throw science at the miscreants, disrupt the flow of
electricity in Iran and the flight of rockets in North Korea.
Thirty years ago, we
were babes in the woods about arresting nuclear proliferation. Today we
can look to the countermeasures of stealthy cyber-invasion. No bombs
please, send in the electrons.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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