The archival record makes clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that “legitimized” the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants. The atomic bomb was detonated over the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. There could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons in future scenarios in which many American soldiers’ lives are at risk and there is no guarantee that a future US president would follow the law of armed conflict. That is why the United States needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance and presidents who care about law and justice in war.

Read the rest at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Jason Reinhardt was leading a multi-lab effort within Sandia National Laboratories to improve the United States’ ability to detect and prevent illegal nuclear material from entering the country.

A senior member of Sandia’s technical staff at that time, Reinhardt would explain the technical dimensions of his work to policy experts and inevitably hear the same questions: “How do I understand the risk?” or “How do I compare the different risks involved?”

Reinhardt wanted to know more about the discipline of risk analysis so, in 2011, he returned to Stanford (where he’d earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2005) to pursue a PhD in Management Science and Engineering, with Prof. M. E. Paté-Cornell, the department’s founding chair, as his advisor. He focused on creating a systematic and risk analytic look at the technical and political components of nuclear deterrence.

Reinhardt also worked with Siegfried Hecker, a professor in Management Science and Engineering who was then the Science Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Hecker introduced Reinhardt to his CISAC colleagues and encouraged him to attend the weekly seminars where political scientists, historians and diplomats presented their ideas on critical international issues.

“CISAC was one of the places where policy-inclined technical people could sort of bathe in policy discussions for a while,” Reinhardt said. “I use that terminology, really just soak in it.”

In the seminars, lectures and other events, Reinhardt studied how policy experts thought and talked. “I came over there and started listening,” he said. “Oh, that’s what the debate’s really about. I’m a lab geek, I thought it was a technical problem.”

If the problem were strictly technical, Reinhardt would have been able to speak with authority. He had no trouble discussing probability distributions, modeling approaches and complicated mathematical equations with other science-minded souls. But nuclear deterrence demands collaboration across academic disciplines—the hard sciences as well as political theory, international relations, and economics—and Reinhardt wanted policy makers to see the full picture and understand his ideas and their implications for policy.

“CISAC was a bootcamp of how to interact in the policy world, how to understand how that world thinks and acts,” Reinhardt said.

While pursuing his PhD, Reinhardt accepted a pre-doctoral fellowship at CISAC and enjoyed exploring this new world. But, an engineer by training, he also wanted to dig into a project where he could flex his technical skills while sitting elbow-to-elbow with political scientists, international relations experts and other policy wonks.

Hecker, an internationally-recognized expert in nuclear security and a former director of Los Alamos National Labs, understood the desire and had the solution. Hecker had been working with the Russian government for years, beginning after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1989, to secure Russian nuclear assets. For nearly as long, he’d also been working with the Chinese government to make sure their nuclear assets did not fall into the wrong hands.

Siegfried Hecker presenting to American and Chinese national security scholars.

Hecker invited Reinhardt to join the project at the Stanford Center at Peking University, a mini-campus that serves as a bridge across the Pacific for faculty and students from Stanford’s seven schools.

“Jason was just superb,” Hecker said of Reinhardt. “When you combine his Sandia background with his work with Eisabeth Pate-Cornell at MS&E, you have some of the world’s leading expertise in systems analysis which means a very methodical, engineering look at how you make decisions under complex environments.” 

In China, Reinhardt teamed with Larry Brandt and Leonard Connell, who were both CISAC affiliates and risk analysts at Sandia, to create a course that applied a systems analysis approach to nuclear terrorism. They ran the exercise with Chinese professionals to explore the probability of terrorists obtaining and transporting nuclear materials.

“We had a proper seat to learn how Track II interactions between countries are done,” Reinhardt said. 

Jason Reinhardt giving talk at SCPKU on systems approach to verification of North Korea’s Nuclear program in Beijing, Oct. 2019.

Hecker, Reinhardt and the others traveled back and forth to China a few times a year—until COVID stopped international trips—to share their knowledge and deepen the understanding of the risks. The experience energized Reinhardt.

“Where else are you going to get that?” he asked. “I was able to sit down and have a technical analytic discussion about a nuclear issue with Chinese researchers who are thinking about the same thing.”

On Stanford’s campus, Reinhardt often found himself in equally intense conversations with CISAC faculty and international security experts like former Secretary of Defense William Perry, Scott Sagan, a leading authority on the politics of nuclear risk, and Martha Crenshaw, who is among the world’s top experts in terrorism.

Reinhardt also observed courses like “International Security in a Changing World,” which Crenshaw co-taught with Amy Zegart, a political scientist who advised the Clinton and Bush Administrations on foreign policy, national security and intelligence. 

When he returned to Sandia, with the wealth of international experience and a newly minted PhD, Reinhardt was quickly promoted to a role where he oversees 20-some people who focus on risk analysis around cyber threats to critical infrastructure in the US.

“Essentially, I build methodology for people to think about really nasty problems from a risk perspective in a national security sphere,” he said. “I’ve worked on that for nuclear weapons, for deterrence, and now for cyber stuff.”

Reinhardt also spends time educating colleagues so individuals on either side of the tech/policy divide can talk to one another. And he’s engaging with Purdue University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, through Sandia’s Academic Alliance, to help propose a new course, learning from those he observed at Stanford such as the one Crenshaw and Zegart taught.

When Reinhardt reflects on his time at CISAC, he says it didn’t convert him from a technical expert into a policy expert as much as it introduced him to their world and allowed him to be more effective working within it.

“Because of the fellowship, you’re going to understand how policy people think and you’re going to understand their world enough that you can actually talk to them,” Reinhardt said. “And hopefully, if you do your job right, they’ll start to understand the technical world so that they can talk to you.”

The Stanford Center at Peking University.

This is the first in an on-going series of profiles of CISAC pre- and post-doctoral fellows.

Seventy-five years ago, before 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, Los Alamos scientists successfully conducted the world’s first nuclear weapons test. The test, which physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer named "Trinity" after a line from a poem by John Donne, altered the course of World War II, changed the way scientific discoveries are pursued, and cemented the relationship between science and national security.

Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for over three decades and served as director for nearly 12 of those years. He joined CISAC in 2005 and served as the Center’s Science Co-director from 2007 – 2012.

In a video produced by Los Alamos to commemorate the historic events of 1945, Hecker reflects on the meaning of that moment. Here, Hecker answers questions to place those events into context of today’s national security landscape and his current work.

As you say in the video, the Trinity project brought scientists from all over the world to Los Alamos and asked them to collaborate on the most sensitive project for the American government. At the time, that must have seemed radical, but did multidisciplinary, international collaboration become the norm?

 It may seem odd, but it would be more difficult today than it was then. The U.S. was at war and concerned about Hitler’s Germany winning the race to the atomic bomb. It was actually the Brits that tried to convince President Roosevelt to mount a major effort to build the bomb. It was Europe that was the center of great physics at the time and it was Hitler who caused many of the best scientists to flee Europe and come to the United States – we welcomed them with open arms. We had the industrial capacity to mount such an enormous enterprise and did not have the enemy at our doorstep. But we needed their scientific skills and could not have developed the bomb in 27 months without them. Unfortunately, today we have retreated to more of a bunker mentality and are not as welcoming as we were then. For that matter, we’re not as welcoming as we were in 1956, when America allowed me to immigrate from Austria.  

The scientists involved in this project had the agility to switch designs as they made new discoveries. Could you describe the type of talent and skills that allowed them to pursue new ideas so quickly?

Success of the Manhattan Project is typically viewed as the work of physicists. But it was really an incredible array of talent – spanning physics, chemistry, mathematics, computing, engineering, materials and others, that allowed it to deal with surprises like the gun-assembly not working with plutonium. That collaboration also allowed the team to redirect its energy when they found out that although plutonium may have been the physicist’s dream, it was an engineering nightmare. The metallurgists found a fix by adding a bit of gallium as I explain in the video. Understanding why that’s so occupied a good part of my scientific life at Los Alamos.

How does your time at Los Alamos National Laboratory relate to the work you do now with students and pre- and post-doctoral fellows at CISAC?

Once the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, I turned much of my attention to working with the Russian nuclear establishment to mitigate the new nuclear dangers resulting from the political chaos. My Russian nuclear colleagues and I captured twenty-plus years of collaboration in our book Doomed to Cooperate. It turned out that CISAC became a great place for me to continue this work in 2005 and to expand it to the other nuclear countries around the world. Once at Stanford, I found that one of the most rewarding things I could do was to teach and work with students and post-docs. That’s what I continue to do today in what we call Young Professionals Nuclear Forums. We bring together around a dozen young Americans to work with their counterparts in Russia on nuclear challenges. We do the same with Chinese and American young professionals.

Since its founding, CISAC has always had two directors—one with a science background and the other from the social sciences. As both a former director of CISAC and Los Alamos, can you explain how an academic center like CISAC, with that kind of combined leadership, can help to prepare the next generation of thinkers in international security?

That’s one of the things that attracted me to CISAC. From CISAC’s founding days of John Lewis (political science) and Sid Drell (physics), the Center has tackled problems at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. And, that’s where the hard problems lie. By focusing on the challenges that arise at this intersection, CISAC can help to educate the next generation of national security specialists to tackle the world’s difficult problems. It’s a great place to be if you are interested in international security.

Watch The Science of Trinity 

On the quiet Friday afternoon of March 11, 2011, Natsuo* was working in Fukushima, the capital city of Fukushima prefecture. At 2:46 p.m., a devastating earthquake of 9.0 magnitude hit the Pacific coast of Japan, where the prefecture of Fukushima is situated. Natsuo recalled to me the sheer power of this earthquake: “The whole office shook like hell, everything began to fall from the walls. I thought to myself ‘That’s it … I’m going to die!’”

Natsuo quickly returned to her hometown of Koriyama City, unaware that the earthquake had triggered a massive tsunami, which inundated an important part of the prefectural shoreline and ultimately claimed the lives of nearly 20,000 people. On top of the initial devastation, the tsunami severely damaged the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Plant, in Ōkuma, Fukushima, located on the east coast of Fukushima prefecture. She later learned on TV that something “seemed wrong” with the nuclear power plant. “During that time,” she said, “I tried to get as much information as I could, but the media weren’t being clear on the situation.”

Read the rest at Sapiens

Nearly ten years after meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant caused a nuclear disaster, researchers have uncovered important new information about the extent and severity of the meltdown and the distribution patterns of the plutonium that have broad implications for understanding the mobility of plutonium during a nuclear accident.

According to a paper published July 8 in Science of the Total Environment, microscopic particles emitted during the disaster contained not only high concentrations of radioactive cesium, as previously reported, but also the toxic metal plutonium. These microscopic radioactive particles formed inside the Fukushima reactors when the melting nuclear fuel interacted with the reactor’s structural concrete.

“The study used an extraordinary array of analytical techniques in order to complete the description of the particles at the atomic-scale,” said Rod Ewing, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.

Ewing collaborated with researchers from Kyushu University, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo Institute of Technology, National Institute of Polar Research, University of Helsinki, Paul Scherrer Institute, Diamond Light Source and SUBATECH (IMT Atlantique, CNRS, University of Nantes).

The researchers found that, due to loss of containment in the reactors, the particles were released into the atmosphere and many were then deposited many kilometers from the reactor sites. Studies have shown that the cesium-rich microparticles, or CsMPs, are highly radioactive and primarily composed of glass (with silica from concrete) and radio-cesium (a volatile fission product formed in the reactors). But the environmental impact and their distribution is still an active subject of research and debate. The new work offers a much-needed insight into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, (FDNPP) meltdowns.

Geochemist Satoshi Utsunomiya and graduate student Eitaro Kurihara of Kyushu University led the team that used a combination of advanced analytical techniques, including synchrotron-based micro-X-ray analysis, secondary ion mass spectrometry, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, to find and characterize the plutonium that was present in the CsMP samples. The researchers initially discovered incredibly small uranium-dioxide inclusions, of less than 10 nanometers in diameter, inside the CsMPs; this indicated possible inclusion of nuclear fuel inside the particles.

Detailed analysis revealed, for the first-time, that plutonium-oxide concentrates were associated with the uranium, and that the isotopic composition of the uranium and plutonium matched that calculated for the FDNPP irradiated fuel inventory.

“These results strongly suggest that the nano-scale heterogeneity that is common in normal nuclear fuels is still present in the fuel debris that remains inside the site’s damaged reactors,” said Utsunomiya. “This is important information as it tells us about the extent [and] severity of the meltdown. Further, this is important information for the eventual decommissioning of the damaged reactors and the long-term management of their wastes.”

With regards to environmental impact, Utsunomiya said, “as we already know that the CsMPs were distributed over a wide region in Japan, small amounts of plutonium were likely dispersed in the same way.”

Gareth T. W. Law, a co-author on the paper from the University of Helsinki, said the team “will continue to experiment with the CsMPs, in an effort to better understand their long-term behavior and environmental impact. It is now clear that CsMPs are an important vector of radioactive contamination from nuclear accidents.”

Bernd Grambow, a coauthor from Nantes/France, said, “While the plutonium released from the damaged reactors is low compared to that of cesium; the investigation provides crucial information for studying the associated health impact.”

Utsunomiya emphasized that this is a great achievement of international collaboration. “It’s been almost ten years since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima,” he said, “but research on Fukushima’s environmental impact and its decommissioning are a long way from being over.”

Ewing is also the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security, a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spoglie Institute for International Studies and. Professor of Geological Sciences in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). Co-authors of the paper include Eitaro Kurihara, Masato Takehara, Mizuki Suetake, Ryohei Ikehara, Tatsuki Komiya, Kazuya Morooka, Ryu Takami, Shinya Yamasaki, Toshihiko Ohnuki, Kenji Horie, Mami Takehara, Gareth T. W. Law, William Bower, J. Frederick. W. Mosselmans, Peter Warnicke, Bernd Grambow, Rodney C. Ewing, and Satoshi Utsunomiya

Integration of analytical techniques was accomplished through an international network that included Kyushu University, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo Institute of Technology, National Institute of Polar Research, University of Helsinki, Paul Scherrer Institute, Diamond Light Source, SUBATECH (IMT Atlantique, CNRS, University of Nantes) and Stanford University.  

This article was adapted from a press release produced by Kyushu University.

Read Particulate plutonium released from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns

Media contacts:

Josie Garthwaite

School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences

(650)497-0949, josieg@stanford.edu

Jody Berger

Center for International Security and Cooperation

(303)748-9657, jody.berger@stanford.edu

President Donald Trump’s chief arms control envoy last week acknowledged the possibility that the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) could be extended, but he added, “only under select circumstances.”  He then put down conditions that, if adhered to, will ensure the Trump administration does not extend the treaty.

New START and Extension

New START limits the United States and Russia each to no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers and no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads.  It expires by its terms on February 5, 2021 but can be extended for up to five years.  The Trump administration has adamantly refused to do that.

From the perspective of U.S. national security interests, extending New START is a no-brainer.  As confirmed by the State Department’s annual report, Russia is complying with the treaty’s limits.  Extension would keep Russian strategic forces constrained until 2026.  It would also ensure the continued flow of information about those forces produced by the treaty’s data exchanges, notifications, on-site inspections and other verification measures.

And extension would not force a single change in U.S. plans to modernize its strategic forces, as those plans were designed to fit within New START’s limits.

Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, have raised New START extension since the first days of the Trump administration.  In 2017, Trump administration officials deferred on the issue, saying they would consider extension after (1) completion of a nuclear posture review and (2) seeing whether Russia met the treaty’s limits, which took full effect in February 2018.

Russia fully met the limits in February 2018.  At about the same time, the administration issued its nuclear posture review.  Yet, more than two years later, New START extension remains an open question.

On June 24, Amb. Marshall Billingslea, the president arms control envoy, briefed the press on his meeting with his Russian counterpart two days before in Vienna.  Asked about extending New START, Amb. Billingslea—never a fan of the treaty or, it seems, any arms control treaty—left the option open.  However, he described three conditions that will block extension.

China

Amb. Billingslea’s first condition focused on China, which he claimed had “an obligation to negotiate with [the United States] and Russia.”  Beijing certainly does not see it that way—saying no, no and again no—citing the huge disparity between the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal and those of the United States and Russia.  China has less than one-tenth the number of nuclear warheads of each of the two nuclear superpowers.

To be sure, including China in the nuclear arms control process is desirable.  But Beijing will not join a negotiation aimed at a trilateral agreement.  What would such an agreement look like?  Neither Washington nor Moscow would agree to reduce to China’s level (about 300 nuclear warheads).  Nothing suggests either would agree to legitimize a Chinese build-up to match their levels (about 4,000 each).  Beijing presumably would not be interested in unequal limits.

This perhaps explains why, well more than one year after it began calling for China’s inclusion, the Trump administration appears to have no proposal or outline or even principles for a trilateral agreement.

For its part, Moscow would welcome China limiting its nuclear arms.  The Russians, however, choose not press the question, raising instead Britain and France.  Amb. Billingslea pooh-poohed the notion, but France has as many nuclear weapons as China, and Britain has two-thirds the Chinese number.  The logic for bringing in one but not the other two is unclear.  The question raises yet another hinderance to including China.

A more nuanced approach might prove more successful.  It would entail a new U.S.-Russian agreement providing for reductions beyond those mandated by New START.  Washington and Moscow could then ask the Chinese (and British and French) to provide transparency on their nuclear weapons numbers and agree not to increase their total weapons or exceed a specified number.  Much like his president, however, the arms control envoy does not appear to be into nuance.

Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons

Amb. Billingslea’s second condition dealt with including in a new negotiation nuclear arms not constrained by New START, especially Russia’s large number of non-strategic nuclear weapons.  Again, this is laudable goal, but getting there will require much time and unpalatable decisions that the Trump administration will not want to face.

Russian officials have regularly tied their readiness to discuss non-strategic nuclear arms to issues of concern to them, particularly missile defense.  The Trump administration,  however, has made clear that it has zero interest in negotiating missile defense.

Even if Moscow severed that linkage, negotiating limits on non-strategic nuclear weapons would take time.  New START limits deployed strategic warheads by virtue of their association with deployed strategic missiles and bombers.  The only warheads directly counted are those on deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

By contrast, most if not all non-strategic warheads are not mounted on their delivery systems.  Monitoring any agreed limits would require new procedures, including for conducting on-site inspections within storage facilities.  This does not pose an insoluble challenge, but it represents new territory for both Washington and Moscow.  Working out limits, counting rules and verification measures will prove neither quick nor easy.

Verification

Amb. Billingslea earlier suggested some dissatisfaction with New START’s verification measures, though he did not articulate any particular flaw, and, as noted, the State Department’s annual compliance report says Russia is meeting the treaty’s terms.  Last week, he made verification measures for his desired U.S.-Russia-China agreement the third condition for New START extension. 

Verification measures are critical.  Treaty parties have to have confidence that all sides are observing the agreement’s limits or, at a minimum, that any militarily significant violation would be detected in time to take countervailing measures.  Working out agreement on those measures will prove a long process, even in just a bilateral negotiation, especially if it addresses issues such as stored nuclear weapons.  That is not just because of Russian reluctance to accept intrusive verification measures such as on-site inspection; the U.S. military also wants verification measures that do not greatly impact its normal operations.

Russian officials have reiterated their readiness to extend New START now.  Amb. Billingslea’s conditions will thwart extension for the foreseeable future.  That’s unfortunate.  By not extending New START, the Trump administration forgoes a simple action that would strengthen U.S. national security and make Americans safer.

Ending the moratorium would not advance U.S. security interests.  The United States has conducted about as many nuclear weapons tests as the rest of the world combined (and 30 percent more than the number conducted by the Soviet Union/Russia).  U.S. weapons scientists learned more from testing.  When I served as a diplomat at the American Embassy in Moscow in 1988, I accompanied a U.S. team to the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk (in what is now Kazakhstan).  Our Soviet hosts showed us a vertical shaft for an upcoming underground test; it was about three feet in diameter.  A U.S. team member from the test site in Nevada, which the Soviets would visit the following month, commented that U.S.-drilled vertical shafts for nuclear tests typically were nine to eleven feet in diameter.  That maximized the area above the weapon for instruments that would gather a burst of data in the nanosecond before they vaporized.

The testing moratorium and the CTBT, if ratified and entered into force, would seem to lock in an area of U.S. advantage regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear effects.  Why would we want others to test and erode that advantage?

Up until the idea of gaining leverage with Beijing and Moscow arose, the primary possible reason for a return to testing was if it became necessary to confirm the reliability of a weapons type in the stockpile.  However, the National Nuclear Security Administration has overseen for 25 years the Stockpile Stewardship Program, intended to confirm that U.S. nuclear weapons are safe, secure and reliable without having to test them in a manner that produces a nuclear yield. To do so, the program uses supercomputers, modeling and tools such as the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility (think of the world’s most powerful X-ray device).

Each year, the commander of Strategic Command and the directors of the national nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore certify the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile.  When I visited Los Alamos several years ago, the director told me that, as long as the Stockpile Stewardship Program was funded, he was confident that nuclear testing was not needed.  He added that, as a result of the program, weapons scientists had learned things about how nuclear weapons work that they did not and could not learn from testing nuclear weapons underground.

The smart thing for U.S. national interests is to continue the moratorium, ratify the CTBT, and press others to ratify so that the treaty can be brought into force.  The Senate failed to give consent to ratification in 1999, due to concerns about how to maintain the stockpile’s reliability without nuclear testing and about monitoring the treaty.  The Stockpile Stewardship Program, just in its beginning stage then, can now answer the first concern and has been doing so.

As for monitoring a test ban, U.S. national technical means have improved over the past two decades, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization has established the International Monitoring System with some 300 stations around the world.  It can detect underground nuclear explosions down to below one kiloton (the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons) as well as detecting tests in the atmosphere or ocean, both of which are banned by the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.  Once in force, the CTBT also provides for an inspection mechanism.

As former Secretary of State George Shultz said in 2013, senators might have been correct not to consent to ratification in 1999, but given the Stockpile Stewardship Program’s development and enhanced monitoring systems, they would be right to vote for ratification now.

Conducting a nuclear test to bring China and Russia to the negotiating table will not work.  It will instead open the door for others to resume testing and close a nuclear weapons knowledge gap that favors the United States.  That will not make us safer or more secure.  It is an unwise idea that hopefully will continue to meet resistance within the U.S. government.