The New York Times

January 4, 2004
THE ATOMIC CLUB

If the Bomb Is So Easy to Make, Why Don't More Nations Have It?

By GREGG EASTERBROOK

LIBYA has pledged to dismantle its atomic weapons program. That is obviously good news, in addition to being a victory for George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy. But what, exactly, is Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi giving up? Not much.

"Libya was in no position to obtain access to nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future," says a statement by the Federation of American Scientists, an independent group that tracks arms control issues. After visiting Libya last week, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, declared the country's program at "very much at an early stage." Libya may be closing down its nuclear program because it wasn't working anyway.

This points to an important reality about nuclear weapons: they are extremely difficult to make. Claims that bomb plans can be downloaded from the Internet, or that fissile material is easily obtained on the black market and slapped together into an ultimate weapon, seem little more than talk-radio jabber. Nations like Libya that have made determined attempts to obtain atomic munitions have not even come close.

Saddam Hussein, while leader of Iraq, spent billions of dollars and many years pursuing atomic weapons, without success. It now appears his nuclear program was put into limbo sometime during the 1990's, perhaps for the pragmatic reason that it wasn't working. Pakistan, which may have played a role in various other bomb efforts in the developing world, had hundreds of engineers working for decades to devise its atomic device. North Korea devoted a high percentage of national resources to decades' worth of research before, probably, it acquired an atomic bomb. Iran's nuclear program, which dates to the last shah, has been working on a weapon for a quarter century so far.

In Libya's case, beginning in the 1970's the government sought assistance of various kinds from Pakistan, China and the former Soviet Union. Soviet technicians helped Libya build a small research reactor at a place called Tajura. The Qaddafi regime later tried, unsuccessfully, to buy a large power-generation reactor from a Belgian company, possibly hoping it could be refitted for production of weapons material.

Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that American forces recently seized a shipload of centrifuge equipment bound for Libya. The seizure might have been a factor in Colonel Qaddafi's decision to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons - though Washington officials said that before the ship was seized, American intelligence agents had already quietly visited Libya, at Colonel Qaddafi's invitation, to inspect the sites that the country proposed to shutter.

Atomic bombs have proved difficult for countries like Libya to make for several reasons. The "enrichment" of uranium or plutonium to weapons-grade concentrations is a fantastically complex undertaking, involving reactors that cost billions of dollars or centrifuge facilities that are also costly and complicated. Atomic bomb engineering and fabrication involve extremely precise calculations, exotic materials and unusual specialized components that even enormous cost-is-no-object government programs in the United States and the old Soviet Union found hard to manufacture.

Attempts by developing nations to make an ultimate weapon have gone slowly even though they have concentrated on atomic bombs - the kind dropped on Japan in 1945 - rather than the far more powerful thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, which have never been used, except in tests. (Making a hydrogen bomb involves even more complex calculations, precision manufacturing and rare substances, like the hydrogen isotope tritium. )

In 1979, a national controversy erupted when The Progressive magazine printed an article describing the hydrogen bomb's basic engineering principles. Commentators proclaimed that many nations and even individual terrorist cells would respond by building hydrogen bombs.

Yet since 1979, no nation has joined the hydrogen bomb club. After decades of work, India and Pakistan exploded only 1945-style atomic bombs. (Six years ago, India announced that it had conducted underground tests of a thermonuclear bomb, but analysts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concluded that only the 1945-style atomic part of the device actually detonated.)

Both the Israeli and the now decommissioned South African ultimate-weapon programs sought atomic, not hydrogent, bombs. The engineering, construction and manufacturing challenges of the hydrogen bomb are so great that even the United States, Britain, France, China and the former Soviet Union had great difficulties fabricating it.

North Korea now appears to have succeeded in making several atomic devices of the 1945 variety. It agreed last week to allow an unofficial United States delegation to visits nuclear weapons complex, at Yongbyon, so perhaps North Korea's progress will be known soon.

Atomic weapons of the 1945 type are horrible enough, so the international threat posed by North Korean weapons may turn out to exceed any threat posed by Mr. Hussein's Iraq. But it took North Korea decades to acquire an atomic threat, even under circumstances of total national fixation on weapons development, and total government contempt for the needs of its citizens.

Iran's nuclear program continues to grow more disturbing. The nation possesses a large Russian-designed reactor called Bushehr that is expected to become operational in about two years.

"Twelve to 15 months after the reactor goes into operation, it will contain roughly 60 bombs' worth of near-weapons-grade plutonium," the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nonpartisan group in Washington, recently warned.

After news reports in 2003 asserted that Iran had secret nuclear installations in a place called Kolahdouz, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors visited the location and found nothing worrisome. But last year, inspectors did find traces of highly enriched uranium at two Iranian nuclear sites, including a "pilot" enriching facility at Natanz.

Iran is known to be working on both centrifuges and lasers to enrich uranium, and has been cagey with the international agency about its importation and manufacture of some uranium byproducts related to weapons manufacturing. There seems to be a strong prospect that Iran will eventually have a bomb - but attained only after vast investments of money, time and technological skills.

Other nuclear proliferation dangers continue to mount around the world. Syria has tried to buy reactors from China and Argentina; currently, Russia is helping Syria build a small reactor that is officially for "research" purposes.

Algeria has a small reactor at a place called El Salam, and claims its purpose is to make isotopes for medical research. But the "medical" reactor is ringed by antiaircraft missiles, and the Federation of American Scientists said in a study that the El Salam site "has a theoretical capacity to produce from three to five kilograms of plutonium a year, approximately equivalent to one nuclear weapon."

It remains possible that some government or terrorist organization could assemble a crude atomic device that would explode with far less power than the Hiroshima bomb, but with more force than any conventional munitions. And "dirty bombs" - radioactive material scattered by conventional explosives - might be effective weapons of terror. Merely the word "radiation" could set off panic in a big city, regardless of whether a dirty bomb actually dispersed enough radiation to pose general danger.

For the moment, Libya's decision to abandon its fruitless atomic program serves as a reminder that the ultimate weapon is, thankfully, not easy to come by. Numerous governments have invested billions of dollars and years of effort in trying to build atomic warheads, and have not been successful.

Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor at The New Republic, is the author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better and People Feel Worse," published by Random House.


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