Nuclear Deal : Weapons Program Compromised
From: The Deccan Chronicle , July 21, 2006
The Asian Age , July 21, 2006
We Need More N-Tests for Our Defence
By
Dr.A.Gopalakrishnan
The total silence which the government has maintained on the Indo-US nuclear deal ever since the two recent Bills have been passed by the US Congress, is beginning to be broken, in small steps, through the speech given by the foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, in Delhi on July 14, and the Prime Minister’s brief remarks on his return from Russia. Saran has warned that the final legislation in the US Congress "could well include some references that we may find unpalatable — but, we must focus on what is essential. India’s obligations will only be those that we undertake in the bilateral 123 cooperation agreement and the safeguards arrangement with IAEA." But these details are known only to the PM and his close advisers and neither Parliament nor the leaders of the major Opposition parties have been taken into confidence.
There is another zone of silence, this time in Washington, which too we need to take note of. The vociferous non-proliferation lobby consisting of arch rivals of the Indian nuclear programme for decades, have been writing strong letters to the US Congress and have given individual and scholarly testimonies to both the Congressional committees ever since July 2005. Their central theme of opposition all along has been that the Congress should intervene in this nuclear deal and ensure that India’s ability to sustain and improve its nuclear arsenal is severely limited and curtailed as early as possible. But this opposition has totally disappeared after the two Congressional Bills were passed last month. The obvious reason is that these Bills have fully taken care of all their major concerns, and their silence alone should be a matter of grave concern to our people.
If one studies these Bills carefully, it is easy to understand wherefrom US non-proliferationists are drawing their comfort. To recap, Section 3(b) of the House Bill (HR-5682) along with the annual presidential reporting required in Section 4(o) 1(A-D) will make it mandatory that India achieves a moratorium on fissile material production for weapons-use and conclude a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) to which US and India can become parties, at the earliest possible date. Anticipating that it will take some time to conclude the FMCT, Congressman Schiff has passed an amendment to HR-5682 which requires US to encourage India not to increase its production of weapons usable material at un-safeguarded facilities. If India was hoping to stockpile imported natural uranium in advance, so that our indigenously mined uranium can be used mostly for the weapons programme, this possibility is also blocked by another Schiff amendment which requires that "Indian nuclear weapon programme shall not derive any benefit — from the provision of nuclear fuel (from abroad) in such a manner as to facilitate the increased production of highly-enriched uranium or plutonium…" Add to this India’s commitment under this deal to shut down Cirus, one of the two reactors which produce weapon grade plutonium, by 2010, and we can certainly expect an early capping of the weapon-usable fissile material inventory in India at a sub-optimal level.
After the conclusion of this deal, if the Indian nuclear programme is looking forward to benefit through technology transfer, it is most likely in the areas of spent-fuel reprocessing, uranium enrichment, and perhaps heavy water production. India has certain technologies and plant systems of indigenous design in each of these areas, but they do need substantial improvements before they can reach world standards in performance. A nuclear weapon state (NWS) or a non-nuclear weapon state (NNWS) which is a signatory of the NPT, will have no legal bar to obtain such commercial technologies from developed nations. But because we are insisting on keeping some of our nuclear facilities still outside the IAEA safeguards, Section 106(b)A of the Senate Bill clearly bans "the export to India of any equipment, materials or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent-fuel or the production of heavy water." However, in their own commercial interest, the Bill exempts India from this ban, provided we import such technologies to run a multinational facility in India under safeguards, as part of a multilateral programme to develop proliferation-resistant fuel cycle — thereby also trapping India to be a client state under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). This would lead us to purchasing foreign reactors for the indefinite future, abandoning the three-stage indigenous nuclear power programme based on Bhabha’s vision. In short, the very few technology areas where we were looking forward to gain through this deal, are cleverly banned from inclusion, unless we are willing to be perpetual customers for foreign reactors. This is simply unacceptable.
As expected, the US Congress has ignored India’s voluntary moratorium on nuclear weapon testing, and asserts in Section 110 of the Senate Bill that nuclear cooperation will cease if the President determines at any time that India has detonated a "nuclear explosive device." Interestingly, the Senate Bill is explicit in quantitatively defining a nuclear explosive device as any device designed to produce the instantaneous release of an amount of nuclear energy that is greater than the amount of energy that would be released from the detonation of one pound of trinitrotoluene (TNT). (The definition of a nuclear explosive device as given in Section 112[8] of the Senate Bill has a printing error. I am reliably informed that the words "one point" which appear on line six of Section 112[8], have to be replaced by "one pound.") The crucial importance of this definition, coupled with the ban imposed in Section 110 on testing, needs to be understood from the point of view of India’s ability to ensure the safety and reliability of its existing nuclear arsenal and the feasibility of making reliable design improvements for higher yield or/and for reducing the size and weight of warheads in the future.
In the absence of full-scale explosive tests, countries will have the alternative of conducting one or both of two classes of lower-yield tests. In the so-called "sub-critical" tests, no critical mass is formed during implosion and no self-sustaining chain reaction occurs. The nuclear energy release will be negligibly low and, according to US interpretation, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) will not be violated if such tests are done. In a "hydronuclear" test, however, the implosion causes a supercritical mass to be formed for an extremely small time interval, but not maintained long enough to permit the device to deliver full explosive nuclear yield. During the CTBT discussions, both the US and UK governments had insisted on retaining the flexibility to conduct hydronuclear tests with nuclear yields up to four pounds of TNT equivalent, but under the current deal, the US wants to restrict India to a one-pound TNT limit, just one-quarter of the level which they themselves considered as essential minimum. This would make it extremely difficult, almost impossible, for India to conduct meaningful hydronuclear tests for verifying the safety and reliability of our existing nuclear arsenal or for modifying or compacting the present warheads.
The CTBT was signed by all the five nuclear weapon states on September 24, 1996. France and UK ratified it in April 1998, and the Russian ratification followed in June 2000. The US Senate rejected the CTBT in October 1999, and China and the US are the only two nuclear weapon states which are yet to ratify the treaty. Ever since 2001, however, pressure has been building up in Russia to withdraw from the CTBT in national interest. In April 2002, V. Mikhaylov and Y. Adamov, two former ministers of atomic energy, have expressed the view that "Russia will eventually face the choice of resuming explosive tests or foregoing nuclear weapons altogether." According to them, "although mathematical models, computer simulations, and sub-critical testing may provide some assurances, in the long run (explosive) tests would be required to confirm both the safety and reliability of nuclear warheads." The US views are not very different.
On January 9, 2002, Ari Fleischer, then White House press secretary, said, "President Bush has said that we will adhere to the no-testing policy, but we would never rule out the possible need to test to make certain that the (nuclear) stockpile, particularly as it is reduced, is reliable and safe. So, he has not ruled out testing in the future, but (currently) there are no plans to do so." On October 7, 1999, Richard Garwin, the renowned US nuclear weapon scientist, testified before the US Senate, "Without nuclear tests of substantial yield, it is difficult to build compact and lightweight fission weapons and essentially impossible to have any confidence in a large-yield two-stage thermonuclear weapon or hydrogen bomb, which can readily be made in the megaton class. This limits greatly the destructive power that can be wielded by newly nuclear states such as India and Pakistan, once they are brought under a test ban." And such a test ban will indeed be achieved indirectly by the US under the provisions of the present Indo-US nuclear deal.
I have never been a participant in the Indian nuclear weapons programme nor am I hawkish about India becoming a thermonuclear power. But the intention of this article is to point out that many of the contentions of the Indian nuclear establishment about our weapons capabilities are questionable, on the basis of the enormous body of evidence openly available on the weapons development programmes of the five nuclear weapon states. Countries like the US and Russia, who have conducted and gathered data from a total of 1,030 and 715 explosive nuclear tests, respectively, still feel that they cannot ensure the reliability and safety of their arsenal, merely through sub-critical or hydronuclear tests and computer modelling. Nor are they confident that design or configuration changes or size reductions on warheads can be reliably done without explosive tests to validate them.
In contrast, having done just a total of six explosive tests, Indian weapon scientists bragged openly in 1998 that they need not do any more tests and they are capable of making future designs of fission, boosted-fission and thermonuclear weapons on the basis of these meagre data and some computer modelling. It is an open secret that the single thermonuclear warhead we tested in 1998 has failed, as ascertained by a number of weapons specialists who have analysed the data. Our capabilities in computer modelling of weapons performance and in conducting sub-critical and hydronuclear tests are, to say the least, much below that of the US and Russia. Therefore, knowing the competence of the scientists involved, I can only imagine that their open statement was elicited by the BJP government in 1998, just to support its desire to call for a unilateral moratorium on further tests, for political and tactical reasons. But unfortunately, this false over-confidence of the weapon scientists, which has no scientific or technological basis whatsoever, has come to haunt us now, with the Americans taking them on their word and pegging India firmly onto a no-test, no-fissile production path for the foreseeable future through the current deal. The impact of this future path on the minimum nuclear deterrent of India, and whether this deterrent will remain credible years from now, is a matter worth debating before we plunge neck-deep into the Indo-US deal.
[Dr A. Gopalakrishnan is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board , Government of India. He can be contacted at : ]