The Slimming Of Nukes

THEY'LLbe the size of a tea-cup and weigh less than a kilogram each. They won't cost much. They'll be easily compatible on delivery systems like small missiles and artillery systems. And they'll yield the equivalent of 1 to 10 tons of TNT. But that's not where Fourth Generation Nuclear (FGN) weapons make their real killing. Their biggest attraction is: they're based on atomic and nuclear processes not restricted even under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

Herein lies the contradiction in global non-proliferation regimes. While current generation N-weapons are 1,000,000 times more powerful than conventional ones, FGN weapons are only 1,000 times more potent. So, while unleashing the power of the atom and revolutionising conventional warfare,they still won't be "weapons of mass destruction". And so, won't contradict any international law. Says Andre Gsponer, nuclear physicist at the Independent Scientific Research Institute, Geneva: "FGN weapons will fill the gap that exists today between conventional and nuclear weapons."

At the cutting edge of this technology today are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, the UK, Russia, China, France), Germany and Japan. But analysts say the danger of FGN weapons—given their low cost and small size, factors that allow R&D to proceed in greater secrecy—is that more and more countries could well jump onto the bandwagon.

"The signing of the CTBT and the implementation of politically-correct programmes might well herald the 'Golden Age' of thermonuclear weapons proliferation," comments Jean-Pierre Hurni, who co-authored a technical report on FGN weapons with Gsponer last year. As of now, no one's stopping the construction of what are called large Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) simulation facilities, he says. The upshot? "We'll soon witness the emergence of a number of virtual thermonuclear weapons states as well as the diffusion of FGN weapons."

바카라 웹사이트"It's amazing how the perception has come about that research on more and more sophisticated nuclear weapons has stopped," says Suren Erkman, director, Institute for Communication and Analysis of Science and Technology, Geneva. "Many political analysts believe the Star Wars programme has stopped. If anything, it has accelerated. Under new names (like GPALS: Global Protection Against Limited Strike), its public visibility has momentarily decreased, but the science and technology behind directed energy weapons is still active."

While these new weapons use either fusion or fission fuels as their main explosive charge, the yield generation mode in the fission process is the subcritical mode which is not forbidden under the CTBT. Sub-critical fission burns are not suitable for making high-yield weapons, but they do just fine for mini-nukes with 1 to 100 ton yields.

In other words, long-term technological dynamics are at work, quite independent of the diplomatic and political facade. After decades of making crude N-weapons, this is allowing some countries to envision sophisticated nukes.

For this type of explosive, the preferred technique is to use magnetic compression to increase the density of the fissile material and a very small amount of anti-matter to initiate the critical burn. While anti-matter and lasers will be used as igniters, the main charge could be deuterium-tritium pellets 0.5 cm in size and compressed by a factor of 1,000. Says Gsponer:"In the compression of pellets the world record is held by Japan. They achieved a density 600 times more than the initial density. "

바카라 웹사이트Moreover, over the last 10 years, laser intensities have increased by over four orders of magnitude. Superlasers are said to be the biggest discovery in nuclear physics in the last 10 years. Even with increasing intensity, they're exceedingly compact and cost in the region of $1 million upwards. France-based BM Industries sold a superlaser to China last year for $1 million. A Russian superlaser facility has been set up in St Petersburg, funded by a western consortium that doesn't want to see Russian scientists escape with their capabilities to the 'unmanageable' Third World.

SINCE the '60s, the US has been consistent in its policy of 'not defining precisely what constitutes a nuclear explosion'. This has led to contradictions in the CTBT, which, on the one hand, "permits no yield from nuclear (fusion or fission) explosions—not one kiloton, not one kg, not one mg of yield, but zero yield". On the other hand, it allows micro-explosions with a yield of the order of 10 tons.

Says Gsponer: "The reason for not including micro-explosions in the scope of the NPT or CTBT as suggested by India comes largely from the unwillingness of the nuclear weapon states to accept restrictions in this area of research." Adds Erkman: "For the nuclear weapon states in the West, live detonations of second and third generations bombs are no longer of any use. They gained positive publicity for the so-called abstention but also shut the door down on others."

It's how the West banned the atmospheric tests of the '50s and '60s. They claimed it was because they didn't want radiation fall-outs in other countries. The real reasons were military. The particles travelled a long distance in air and they could reveal a lot of critical information about the design and mechanisms of the detonated device. They didn't want the 'enemy' to know that.

Also, the fact that sub-critical experiments were not prohibited by the CTBT was clear when the US conducted its first sub-critical test of the post-CTBT era in July '97. The first three negative reactions to this, within days, were from China, India and Indonesia. It took the European Parliament and 15 more countries seven months to call upon the US to refrain from such tests.

But a US state department report appended to President Bill Clinton's letter in September '97 expressly analyses "ICF and other similar experiments" as examples of CTBT-permitted activities "which, while not involving a nuclear explosion, may result in the release of nuclear energy".

Even the Germans, while signing the CTBT in '96, said "nothing in this treaty shall be interpreted or applied in a way as to prejudice or prevent research into and development of controlled thermonuclear fusion and its economic use".

What is interesting, however, is how military experts view the development.

At a conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in '95, Admiral David Jeremiah, former vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, US, said: "The battlefield of the future will be dominated by smart weapons that will allow us to reduce wholesale destruction and the tremendous expenditure of ordnance. The goal is finer precision, more selectivity, less need for mass."

Big nukes, he said, are "increasingly less useful to us" in military terms. He called them "political tools used by one nation of influence on the population of another, not tools we in the military need to carry out military operations". By this strict battlefield logic, the slimming of nuke technology has "a greater potential to radically change the balance of power".

All this isn't red-hot news either. Back in '80, Freeman Dyson wrote in Disturbing the Universe: "A permanent test ban would be a dangerous illusion because future improvements in weapons technology would create irresistible pressure towards secret and open violations of any such ban. In other words, fission-free bombs are the wave of the future...any political arrangement which ignores or denies their birthright is doomed to failure."

A year later, the question of the link between ICF and pure-fusion weapons was raised by physicists W.A. Smit and P. Boskma. It also prompted '67 Nobel laureate Hans A. Bethe, head of the theoretical division of Los Alamos during World War II, to ask the US to ban "all physical experiments, no matter how small their yield, whose primary purpose is to design new types of N-weapons".

In '78, Gsponer was one of the first physicists to see the coming of the Star Wars and write a paper on it before Ronald Reagan formalised it. Now he's the first to alert us on how FGN weapons are mushrooming under nonproliferation umbrellas. Says he: "The CTBT is just an instrument legitimising possession and perfection of N-weapons by nuclear states. What you really have to know is what's going on how in the laboratories and what it's leading to."