Silencing the Bomb Read online

  On July 8, 1987, Bache also wrote to van der Vink, the head of the OTA study on seismic verification, complaining about Evernden’s “Post-Meeting Calculations and Discussions.” He stated, “From a technical perspective it seems that the Evernden & Archambeau work should collapse on its own weight, but I realize that it is difficult to discuss anything in this subject from a purely technical perspective.” Bache took his opinions and political views as correct and those of others, like me, as tainted. I did not reply to him.

  DARPA had previously set up a Center for Seismic Studies in Arlington, Virginia, which operated under contract to the consulting firm S-CUBED and employed several excellent seismologists. When Romney retired from DARPA, he moved to SAIC. The contract for operating the Center for Seismic Studies was soon up for renewal. Two consulting firms—S-CUBED and SAIC—bid to run it. Even though S-CUBED had much greater seismological expertise, the contract was awarded to SAIC. As far as I know, S-CUBED did not complain officially to DoD; complaining likely would have jeopardized their obtaining future DoD contracts. An irony is that S-CUBED was purchased by Maxwell Industries, which later did away with S-CUBED on the grounds that it was not making enough money. Scientists at S-CUBED then moved to SAIC.

  CONGRESSIONAL ACTIONS TO HALT NUCLEAR TESTING

  Congress moved on several fronts toward a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In February 1986, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a joint resolution by a vote of 268 to 148 requesting that President Reagan resume negotiations with the USSR toward a Comprehensive Treaty and submit the Threshold and Peaceful Explosions treaties to the Senate for ratification. A similar proposal had passed the Senate by a vote of 77 to 22 in 1985. The House passed an amendment in August 1986 deleting funds for all U.S. tests in 1987 larger than one kiloton provided the Soviet Union would do likewise and would also accept a U.S. monitoring program. The House dropped its amendment prior to the Reykjavik summit when the Reagan administration agreed to submit the Threshold and Peaceful Nuclear Explosions treaties to the Senate for its advice and consent. The House voted again in May 1987 on a similar amendment. That November formal negotiations opened in Geneva on the limitation of nuclear tests.

  In September 1992, the U.S. Senate, by an overwhelming vote, passed the Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell Nuclear Moratorium Amendment, which had three key elements. One set a deadline for the United States to stop testing. The second required a major scientific effort to ensure that we could maintain confidence in our nuclear weapons, absent actual nuclear tests. The third mandated that the next administration negotiate a CTBT no later than September 1996.

  Just before the presidential election of 1992, President George H. W. Bush reluctantly decided not to veto a funding bill that included the moratorium amendment. It phased out U.S. nuclear testing except for fifteen tests, at most, if they were needed to deal with safety or reliability issues. Hazel O’Leary, President Clinton’s energy secretary, stated that no tests of those types were required.

  Nevertheless, some members of Congress and several of the directors of the nuclear weapons labs in the United States continued to argue that nuclear testing was needed to ensure that our existing stockpile of weapons would work if testing ceased, to develop new and safer weapons, to ensure that other countries would not cheat under a full test ban treaty, and to retain expertise in designing and maintaining nuclear weapons.

  STRONG VIEWS BY KIDDER ABOUT QUESTIONABLE NEEDS FOR NUCLEAR TESTS

  Ray Kidder, one of the most senior nuclear scientists at Livermore, argued that few U.S. nuclear explosions had been conducted to test the reliability of existing weapons a number of years after each weapon had been tested several times prior to its deployment. Later tests for reliability were so few that they were not a meaningful statistical measure of reliability. He said that most explosions, in fact, had been detonated to test new nuclear designs. A few were for so-called effects tests, which subjected electronic equipment, satellites, and delivery systems to the blast, heat, and radiation from a nearby nuclear explosion. Kidder clashed with several officials in the weapons labs over the need to continue testing existing weapons to confirm their reliability. Congress asked him to put his views in writing, which he did.

  In 1985 Kidder published the percentage of U.S. nuclear weapons tests of various yields from 1980 through 1984. He argued that peaks in the number of tests near 5 to 20 and 150 kilotons could be taken as a measure of their perceived high military value. During that period, the military significance of tests below one kiloton was perceived to be low as judged from their small percentage (see Figure 12.6). The large numbers of tests near 150 kilotons resulted in part from testing strategic weapons at reduced yield that otherwise would have exceeded the limit of the Threshold Treaty. That limit of 150 kilotons was not important to the physics of weapons. Yields between 5 and 20 kilotons, however, were very important because they involved testing the primary (fission) triggers for thermonuclear weapons and testing at partial yield the ignition of the fusion (secondary) stage of weapons.

  MY PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT WITH TEST BAN ISSUES

  I was busy in the 1980s and 1990s on test ban issues and other aspects of the control of nuclear weapons. I co-taught a course on the nuclear arms race for undergraduates in 1984 and 1985. While it drew only twenty-five students per year, it attracted very bright undergrads from Columbia College and graduate students from the School of International and Public Affairs. The latter wanted more technical background on the arms race. I was a member of the Columbia University Seminar on Arms Control (for faculty and invited guests) from 1984 to 1996. In 1987 Paul Richards and I co-taught a Seismology Seminar course at Lamont on the “Verification of Nuclear Test Ban Issues.”

  From 1988 through 2000, I spoke in public on several occasions about the verification of nuclear testing. I participated in the Belmont Conference on Nuclear Test Ban Policy in 1988 and was an invited speaker at the Princeton Symposium on NonProliferation and Nuclear Testing in 1992. On May 31, 2000, I co-organized a second symposium for the American Geophysical Union on the Verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. I was a member of the board of directors of the Federation of American Scientists from 2000 to 2003 and was on their test ban panel.

  INTERNATIONAL SEISMIC MONITORING EFFORTS

  Starting in 1976, much happened at the international level as well as in the U.S. government on developing improved and more sophisticated systems of seismic monitoring of nuclear tests, including a rapid international exchange of data. In their 2009 book Nuclear Test Ban: Converting Political Visions to Reality, Ola Dahlman of the National Defense Research Institute of Sweden and his colleagues describe more about those international developments from 1976 until the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996.

  In 1976 the UN’s Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD) established “an Ad-Hoc Group of Government-appointed experts to consider and report on international cooperative measures to detect and identify seismic events, so as to facilitate the monitoring of a comprehensive test ban.” It was referred to as the Group of Scientific Experts (GSE) and reported to the CCD and its successor, the Conference on Disarmament (CD).

  Experts from many countries spent huge amounts of time each year on these endeavors, indicative of the importance most countries attached to halting testing and the development of more sophisticated nuclear weapons. China, France, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the UK, and the United States had long-standing programs in nuclear verification. Those governments picked some of their own scientists to represent them on the GSE. The U.S. representatives, who were appointed by the government, tended to be more conservative than many of us in the U.S. arms control community. Seismologists from small countries became involved in the technical details of monitoring through their participation in the GSE.

  The GSE worked to design a global seismic verification system with rapid exchange of data, initially using the telecommunications system of the World Meteorological Organization. Fortuna
tely, seismology and meteorology had long traditions of exchanging data globally on earthquakes and weather. The GSE proposed to collect information at special international data centers.

  The first large-scale test, called GSETT-1 (Group of Scientific Experts Technical Test-1), took place for two months in late 1984. It involved the daily exchange from seventy-five stations in thirty-seven countries of very basic seismic parameters, such as the arrival times and amplitudes of P waves from earthquakes and explosions. Prototype International Data Centers, which prepared preliminary lists and final bulletins of seismic events, operated in Moscow, Stockholm, and Arlington, Virginia (near Washington, DC). The DARPA Center for Seismic Studies, which was one of these, was also the U.S. prototype National Data Center. Ann Kerr of DARPA was the U.S. coordinator for GSETT-1.

  The GSE held a technical workshop on the design and function of an international data center in October 1987. The international group concluded after GSETT-1 that a future global system should involve seismic data that were recorded digitally. It conducted the second large test called GSETT-2 in 1991. By then many of the stations recorded data digitally, and more seismic array stations were operating.

  The group conducted its third and last large-scale test, GSETT-3, starting full-scale operation on January 1, 1995, with data from sixty countries. It served as a prototype for the verification system adopted during the negotiations for the CTBT from 1995 to 1996. A single international data center located in Arlington, Virginia, received seismic waveform data in digital form. Waveforms contain much greater information than the exchange of simple parameters like the arrival times of P waves during GSETT-1. The center employed a staff of about fifty people from various countries.

  The GSETT tests continued through the buildup of facilities for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) in Vienna, Austria. The center in Arlington closed its prototype International Data Center (IDC) function in March 2000. Data from stations making up what was called the International Monitoring System (IMS), a part of the CTBTO, shifted from Arlington to Vienna. The computers and data handling in Vienna were similar to those in Arlington.

  The GSE and its tests fostered international cooperation on tangible tasks. It also provided aid to developing countries in establishing modern seismic stations and arrays, training personnel and familiarizing diplomats and scientists with knowledge about nuclear verification. It showed that an international monitoring system and data transmission were realities and not abstract concepts. DARPA provided substantial funds for the operation of the data center in Arlington and for much more powerful computers and programs to analyze seismic waveforms.

  INITIATIVES AND FUNDING BY DARPA

  DARPA formed a Research and Systems Development Initiative, which they announced to industry in November 1987. In addition to the operation of the prototype national and international data centers, the initiative proposed a next generation capability for integrated data processing, high-speed global communication (mainly by satellite), authentication of data, long-term storage of what were then vast amounts of data, and a research test bed for examining new concepts and for signal analyses. The operation of a state-of-the-art center in Vienna, rapid communication of data, processing of full waveform data, and rapid distribution of data and results to national data centers would not have occurred so quickly without DARPA’s initiatives and funding.

  In contrast, the U.S. national center was a stand-alone facility. Its database was available only to designated users in the United States. The national center included work on yield estimation, which the international center did not, and analysis of classified U.S. data.

  DARPA’s method of operation was to contract the development of seismic instruments, arrays, satellites, communications, data analysis, and research to private industry and occasionally to universities. It employed relatively few people itself in nuclear monitoring. In contrast, the weapons labs did many similar tasks in-house with their own personnel. Alewine was the director of DARPA’s Nuclear Monitoring Office from 1980 to 1996, when he became deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear treaties and his office was transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is now retired.

  DARPA officials stymied consideration of a full test ban by the U.S. government for decades on the grounds that it could not be verified and argued for twenty years that the Soviet Union was testing weapons with yields larger than those permitted under the TTBT. By 1987, however, officials in DARPA became very involved in helping to create modern instrumentation and data transmission facilities for monitoring a full test ban. That decision was likely driven by four factors: (1) increased political pressures in the United States and internationally for a CTBT, (2) recognition that DARPA could no longer continue arguing about the yields of Russian explosions, (3) acknowledgment that Russia was testing within the 150-kiloton limit of the Threshold Treaty, and (4) wanting to show that DARPA could draw upon and use its long technical and scientific expertise in defense issues, as it had done it developing the Internet.

  DARPA’s influence on U.S. policies about nuclear monitoring and a CTBT was profound. In my estimation, much of their long influence was negative and based on poor science. Officials well below the level of the secretary of defense generated most of DARPA’s policies about testing, which were then passed up to higher authorities. The U.S. Defense Department had employed “red teams” to criticize some proposed policies, but to my knowledge it did not do so for test ban issues. More independent analysis within the executive branch of the U.S. government and stronger congressional oversight might have helped to resolve test ban controversies much sooner. The 1988 report Seismic Verification of Nuclear Testing Treaties by Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment helped to constrain test ban issues technically, but it occurred more than thirty-five years after the first hydrogen bomb explosion.

  12

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

  A debate started in 1972 and lasted until 2009 about the identification of so-called problem or anomalous seismic events that some people believed to be difficult to identify. Occasional problem events such as these, which are likely to occur about once a year, require more detailed examination than most earthquakes do. The following examples illustrate that with special studies, all of them through at least 2009 can be identified as earthquakes. I pay particular attention in this chapter to very small seismic events near the Russian test site on Novaya Zemlya, several of which the U.S. government claimed were either nuclear explosions or possible explosions.

  U.S. PAPER SUBMITTED TO THE UN IN 1972 ON ANOMALOUS SEISMIC EVENTS

  In August 1972 the U.S. government presented a working paper, A Review of Current Progress and Problems in Seismic Verification, at the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD) of the United Nations. It listed twenty-five “anomalous” or “problem” seismic events that presented difficulties in identifying underground explosions as opposed to earthquakes using the difference between long-and short-period seismic waves by the Ms-mb technique, discussed in chapter 6. The U.S. working paper described them as “false alarms,” identifying them as likely earthquakes that lay either in or close to the nuclear explosion portion on an Ms-mb diagram.

  Although no author is listed on the 1972 working paper, officials in the Department of Defense likely wrote the document with data processing being performed by a consulting firm. Like many other official U.S. reports, it emphasized many problems in seismic verification and indicated that the Ms-mb technique might well fail to identify future seismic events. Other than stating the need for more research, it did not take a problem-solving approach. These reports typically convey the sense that the “glass is half empty.” The report’s implication clearly was that seismic identification was not good enough to justify the United States’ entering into a full test ban treaty.

  Although considerable information from other seismic stations was
readily available, most of the original magnitudes in the 1972 report were determined using data from only one or two stations. Four years later, in 1976, Lamont graduate student Robert Tathum, research scientist Donald Forsyth (now at Brown University), and I made a thorough study of each of the twenty-five events included in the 1972 report, using available unclassified seismic data. We increased the number of good mb determinations from the original 83 in the 1972 report to 242. We published our results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

  We showed that with additional data about half of those twenty-five events had Ms-mb values that put them clearly in the earthquake population—that is, those events ceased to be “anomalous.” Several of the remaining problem events occurred at depths of 15 to 30 miles (25 to 50 km). They could be identified easily because nuclear explosions have not been set off at depths greater than about 1.2 miles (2 km). The greatest depths of petroleum and other wells do not exceed 7 miles (11 km). The sole exception was a single super-deep hole drilled to a depth of about 10 miles (15 km) for scientific purposes by the Soviet Union in hard, ancient rock at a huge cost. It was unstable and shrank in size at those depths and would therefore have been unsuitable for a nuclear test.

  This left one unresolved sequence of problem events in a small, very mountainous area of Tibet that occurred during a three-month period in 1968 and 1969, and some events in this swarm were larger than magnitude 5. Nevertheless, at several stations the first motions of their P waves clearly were downward, indicating they were earthquakes and not explosions. Other events in the swarm had waveforms almost identical to those of the larger events in the series, which led us to conclude that all of them were earthquakes. Even in 1974, we were able to identify all of the claimed twenty-five “anomalous” events as earthquakes. Today much better seismic data exist from stations within Asia, so that events like these can be readily identified.