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  SILENCING THE BOMB

  LYNN R. SYKES

  SILENCING THE BOMB

  One Scientist’s Quest to Halt Nuclear Testing

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2017 Lynn R. Sykes

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-23154419-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sykes, L. R., author.

  Title: Silencing the bomb : one scientist’s quest to halt nuclear testing / Lynn R. Sykes.

  Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017010287 (print) | LCCN 2017044883 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231544191 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231182485 (cloth : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Nuclear weapons—Testing. | Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (1996 September 10) | Nuclear arms control. | Sykes, L. R.

  Classification: LCC U264 (ebook) | LCC U264 .S96 2017 (print) | DDC 341.7/34—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010287

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book atc [email protected].

  Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

  Cover image: Corbis Historical Collection / © Getty Images

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. A HURRIED TRIP TO MOSCOW IN 1974 TO NEGOTIATE THE THRESHOLD NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY

  2. DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

  3. FROM THE EARLY NEGOTIATIONS TO HALT NUCLEAR TESTING TO THE LIMITED TEST BAN TREATY OF 1963

  4. ATTEMPTS TO HIDE NUCLEAR TESTS: THE BIG-HOLE EVASION SCHEME

  5. U.S. OVERESTIMATION OF SIZES OF SOVIET UNDERGROUND EXPLOSIONS: 1961–1974

  6. NEW METHODS TO IDENTIFY UNDERGROUND TESTS: 1963–1973

  7. CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS ON A COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN

  8. PEACEFUL NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS

  9. HEATED CONTROVERSIES OVER YIELDS OF SOVIET TESTS AND AN UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT AT A CTBT

  10. CONTINUED DEBATE ABOUT YIELDS, ACCUSATIONS OF SOVIET CHEATING ON THE THRESHOLD TREATY, AND ITS ENTRY INTO FORCE

  11. RENEWED INTEREST IN A CTBT, THE OTA REPORT, AND THE GROUP OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERTS: 1979–1996

  12. DEALING WITH “PROBLEM” OR “ANOMALOUS” EVENTS IN THE USSR AND RUSSIAN REPUBLIC: 1972–2009

  13. NEGOTIATING THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN: GLOBAL MONITORING, 1993–2016

  14. MONITORING NUCLEAR TESTS SITES AND COUNTRIES OF SPECIAL CONCERN TO THE UNITED STATES

  15. SENATE REJECTION OF THE CTBT IN 1999

  16. THE CTBT TASK FORCE AND THE 2002 AND 2012 REPORTS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES

  17. STRATEGIC NUCLEAR WEAPONS: SOVIET AND U.S. PARITY

  18. NUCLEAR WAR, FALSE ALARMS, ACCIDENTS, ARMS CONTROL, AND WAYS FORWARD

  Glossary and Abbreviations

  References

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I thank my wife, Kathleen M. Sykes, for her careful editing and advice. I thank Dan Davis, Paul Richards, and Frank von Hippel for carefully reading the manuscript and for their comments. I have worked with each of them on nuclear arms control issues for many decades. I also appreciate my many interactions on test ban issues with Charles Archambeau, Ola Dahlman, Göran Ekström, Jack Evernden, David Hafemeister, W-Y Kim, Peter Marshall, Meredith Nettles, and Gregory van der Vink. I also thank Kevin Krajick for his editing.

  Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the United States have worked for decades to achieve nuclear test ban treaties. They include the following:

  Arms Control Association

  Center for Defense Information

  Council for a Livable World

  Federation of American Scientists

  Friends Committee on National Legislation

  Friends of the Earth

  Institute for Science and International Security

  Lawyers Alliance for World Security

  Natural Resources Defense Council

  Peace Action

  Physicians for Social Responsibility

  Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

  I thank all of them for their long contributions to nuclear test bans and arms control.

  INTRODUCTION

  I have long wanted to write about my fifty years of work toward bringing about an international treaty that would completely ban the testing of nuclear weapons. I was fortunate to have participated in the negotiation of a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union in 1974. For more than fifty years I have also witnessed firsthand strenuous opposition in the United States to test bans by a cast of characters who sometimes acted from nefarious motives. The use of nuclear weapons is an issue that threatens our very existence. This is a story I believe needs to be told.

  The quest for a complete ban on nuclear testing is now more than sixty-five years old. The process of ratification could exceed the seventy-two years it took from 1848 until 1920 to enact a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote in the United States. The treaty has yet to enter into force because all countries possessing either nuclear weapons or reactors have not ratified it. Nevertheless, Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France, and Israel have not tested nuclear weapons since they signed it in 1996; India and Pakistan, which did not sign the treaty, have not tested since 1998. In these important ways the treaty has been very successful.

  A major nuclear exchange between the superpowers would be a disaster of unprecedented destruction and horror, the worst in all of human history. An exchange between India and Pakistan alone could kill more than half a billion people and affect other countries, particularly China. Although the Cold War is over, weapons of the superpowers are on hair-trigger alert and could be fired in response to false alarms or by unauthorized users.

  Other tasks pulled at me through the years: research on earthquakes in the greater New York City region, revisiting early work on plate tectonics, and long-term earthquake prediction as new information became available, as well as working as a consultant to New York State regarding the likelihood of earthquakes near nuclear power plants located along the Hudson River not far from New York City. During my forty years as a professor prior to my retirement in 2005, I advised about thirty graduate students at Columbia University, raised funds for their support, and usually taught two classes each year in a dozen different areas of the earth sciences, environmental hazards, and the nuclear arms race.

  Now, at eighty years old, I have made time to reflect upon my life—professionally and personally. My undergraduate years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened doors to me, both scientifically and culturally. The Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University, where I landed as a graduate student in 1960 after college with a degree in geology and geophysics, had been formed only a dozen years earlier. I was in the right place at the right time as I became involved in the birth of plate tectonics and the development of methods to verify a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. My chosen field of seismology, the study of earthquakes, is the primary science and technology for detecting, locating, and identifying underground nuclear tests. Methods for examining earthquakes are very similar to those for nuclear explosions.

  In 1966, after halting research on another project, I worked on the mechanisms of earthquakes and demonstrated that new seafloor was being formed along mid-oceanic ridges and that continental drift, long rejected by many scientists, was a reality. I was f
ortunate that the early part of my career and the following decade coincided with the Golden Age of funding of the earth sciences in the United States.

  My years as a graduate student, from 1960 to 1965, were a particularly frightening time during the nuclear arms race. Intercontinental ballistic missiles were being deployed, and very large nuclear devices and weapons were being tested in the atmosphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the world alarmingly close to nuclear war. Deeply concerned, it was at this time that I became committed to do whatever I could in forwarding the process of better verification of nuclear tests. Detection and identification of underground explosions have been two of the prime concerns of those involved with a full test ban treaty.

  My decision to specialize in studying earthquakes brought with it an awareness of the importance of a full halt to the testing of nuclear weapons as well as further steps toward nuclear arms control. Realizing the devastating consequences of a nuclear conflict, I made a major commitment to do whatever I could to affect the signing and ratification of a comprehensive test ban that would encompass the monitoring of then difficult-to-identify underground explosions and bring an end to atomic testing.

  My work on nuclear tests and their detection and identification began in 1965, soon after I completed graduate work at the Lamont Geological Observatory. Most of the following chapters are devoted to work I did personally and to my interaction with key individuals, government agencies, and other organizations for the next fifty years. I have emphasized contributions made through the years to better identify nuclear explosions; bureaucratic struggles in the United States over nuclear monitoring, including claims that Russia cheated on two test ban treaties; the desirability of a full test ban treaty; other steps toward the control of nuclear weapons; and the dangers of nuclear war. I have attempted to the best of my ability to cover both the political and the technical and scientific aspects of the long quest for a complete test ban.

  My involvement with negotiations for the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which took me to Russia in 1974, led me to work for the next fifteen years on estimating the sizes (yields) of Soviet nuclear explosions. I have been involved in long debates in the U.S. government, sometimes referred to as the “yield wars,” where some agencies and people in the United States claimed that the Soviet Union was cheating on the Threshold Treaty. Several times during the 1980s, I was called before Congress to testify concerning the sizes of Russian explosions and was able to demonstrate that the USSR, in fact, was not cheating, as some governmental hawks would have liked us to believe. I argued further that the United States and other countries needed to move toward a complete and verifiable ban on nuclear testing.

  My work in the 1990s also involved dealing with the possibilities of evasive nuclear testing, a subject that was of paramount concern and a stumbling block to a full test ban in the United States in 1963 and again in 1999.

  I have tried to make this book accessible to a wide audience of educated people, including students and others interested in learning more about the development of the nuclear age through the eyes of an insider, as well as those involved with arms control, public policy, and the history of science. It is not intended as a textbook or a journal article on nuclear tests, monitoring, or earthquakes.

  I decided to begin this book with my sudden trip to Moscow in 1974 to participate in the negotiation of a treaty to limit very large underground nuclear explosions. I go on to describe the development of nuclear weapons and early attempts to ban their testing. While the book is in historical order, I discuss major scientific and political developments as they occurred within the context of a particular subject. For example, in chapter 4 I emphasize claims in the United States in the early 1960s that other countries, particularly Russia, could test evasively and thus escape detection. I then return to evasion in chapter 15 during the Senate’s rejection of the full test ban treaty in 1999. In chapters 5, 9, and 10 I describe long continuing arguments about determining the sizes or yields of Soviet nuclear explosions, their overestimation by the United States, and the final resolution of the “yield wars.”

  One of the major challenges in monitoring a full test ban has been differentiating the seismic signals of underground tests from those of the many earthquakes that occur every day. In chapters 6, 7, 11–14, and 16 I enumerate major scientific improvements over time in identifying underground tests.

  Peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs), which are covered in chapter 8, are relevant to a full test ban treaty because they cannot be distinguished from tests of weapons. The Soviet Union conducted many PNEs in thick salt deposits, where it is possible to construct large underground cavities and then detonate small muffled explosions evasively in them. In chapter 13 I describe the successful negotiation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and of an extensive set of global stations set up to monitor it. Chapter 16 includes reports by the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, in which I participated, that focused on the monitoring of that treaty and on ongoing efforts to insure that the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work into the future. I close with a final chapter on the dangers of nuclear war, the control of nuclear weapons, limiting their delivery systems, and possible ways forward.

  I am currently at work on a companion book, Plate Tectonics and Great Earthquakes: One Scientist’s Perspective on Fifty Years of Earth Shaking Events, which covers my involvement in groundbreaking discoveries in the development and testing of plate tectonics during the 1960s, as well as later work on great earthquakes, long-term earthquake prediction, shocks within the North American plate, risks to nuclear power reactors, and much more. It includes two chapters on my personal life and education.

  The intertwining of science with arguments about halting nuclear testing continues today as it has since the early 1950s, when the first attempts to stop tests occurred. A number of heroes and villains stand out in the long road to a total ban on nuclear testing. Here is my story.

  1

  A HURRIED TRIP TO MOSCOW IN 1974 TO NEGOTIATE THE THRESHOLD NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY

  My phone rang, waking me from a sound sleep at 5:00 a.m. Only a few hours before, I had returned home to New York City from three days of canoeing in the Adirondacks during the Memorial Day weekend of 1974. The caller was Eric Willis of the Department of Defense, who asked me to join a U.S. team that was leaving that evening for Moscow to negotiate what was to be called the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, or TTBT.

  As I struggled to wake up, I agreed to be part of the group. Eric thanked me and told me I needed to get down to Washington, DC, immediately to pick up my visa before the Soviet embassy closed at noon. I took an 8:00 a.m. flight and, in my rush to get there, did not have time to put together clothes, scientific materials, or money. Hours later, I returned to New York, hurriedly packed, phoned a few people to let them know what I was doing, went to the bank, and headed back to Washington on an Eastern Airlines shuttle.

  I had only the tail number of the Air Force plane that was leaving from Andrews Air Force Base with the U.S. delegation. My Eastern Airlines pilot radioed ahead that I was coming, and the plane to Moscow waited for my slightly late and breathless arrival. I had no idea if our sojourn in Moscow would last a few days or several weeks. Neither did the other members of the delegation. We ended up spending close to a month in Moscow.

  Our group was initially described as one for “technical discussions” of a possible Threshold Treaty. A staff member for Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s secretary of state, informed us that our purpose was to explore whether the Russians were sincere about negotiating a bilateral treaty with the United States to limit the size of underground nuclear explosions. We soon learned that they indeed were interested.

  In an effort to counter the ongoing political storm over Watergate, Kissinger had advised the U.S. government to seek a relatively quick and modest arms control treaty with the Soviet Union. Negotiating a more complex and comprehensive treaty, such as a Strate
gic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) to limit long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons, would have been a much too ambitious and lengthy endeavor. The Soviet Union was attracting international attention in 1974 by pressing for a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) while the United States resisted, citing concerns about verification and the reliability of the nuclear stockpile. At a meeting between Kissinger and Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko in March 1974, they agreed in principle to seek a ban on nuclear explosions above some yet-to-be-determined size. I did not know this when I joined the negotiating team on the plane to Moscow.

  Our U.S. Air Force plane to Moscow, which had no passenger windows, stopped in Copenhagen. NATO allies were then informed about the general purpose of our mission. When we arrived in Moscow, Soviet “handlers” met us and took us to the Rossiya Hotel. Adjacent to Red Square, its twenty-one-story tower then loomed above the Kremlin walls and the cupolas of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Our “handlers” and others from the KGB wore expensive sport coats or suits that definitely were not available to ordinary Soviet citizens.

  I knew the Rossiya from stays in Moscow for an international meeting on geophysics in 1971 and as part of a U.S. delegation on earthquake prediction in 1973. Each floor had two kindly looking elderly women who observed our comings and goings. Except for Walter Stoessel, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, a State Department employee, and interpreters, no one else in our delegation knew Russian. Most had not been to the Soviet Union previously. From my one-semester course in Scientific Russian at Columbia, I knew the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet and some Russian words. I could not hold a conversation in Russian, but I was able to read signs, find my way around central Moscow, travel on the subways, and order breakfast from coffee bars in the Rossiya.

  Our delegation included representatives from the Department of Energy, which funded the laboratories that developed and tested nuclear weapons, the departments of Defense and State, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ambassador Stoessel, a career diplomat, headed our delegation. Norman Terrell, who worked for Helmut Sonnenfeldt, senior counselor to Kissinger, made many important decisions. Terrell was the primary link to Kissinger and a panel called the “back-stopping” committee, a group of experts on nuclear testing, back in Washington.