[sacw] New York Times on Indian Nukes

[Harsh Kapoor]

FYI
(South Asians Against Nukes)
------------------------------------------
1. NY Times piece on last year's undetected India nuke tests.
2. NY Times: Thomas Friedman column on the CTBT.

The New York Times
Oct. 10, 1999

Undetected Indian Blasts, Cited as Monitoring Failures, May Themselves
Have Failed
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

A mystery unfolded last year when India, on May 13, announced that it had
set off a pair of nuclear blasts. The global network of seismometers --
sensitive devices buried deep in the earth to monitor shock waves from
distant earthquakes and blasts -- recorded no faint rumbles emanating from
India's underground test site in its northwestern desert. There was no
blip, no twitch of pen or meter suggesting the awesome power of the atom
had just been released.

Had India faked the explosive tests? Were they flops? Or had small blasts
eluded the eavesdroppers? And if they had, what did that mean for a global
ban on nuclear blasts in which compliance was to be assiduously verified?

These questions have a strong bearing on the bruising battle in Washington
over whether the Senate should bless Washington's participation in the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which more than 150 nations have signed.

Friends and foes have engaged in a war of words, with arms control experts
from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Energy warning
Congress that the United States would have a hard time knowing if foreign
states were secretly setting off small blasts. But last week two of the
world's top groups of earth scientists weighed in heavily on the side of
treaty backers, saying technology could easily police the ban.

The test ban supporters say that even current sensors are up to the job
and that the network called for by the treaty will be even better.
Moreover, this official network will be augmented by the rapid global
spread of all kinds of private sensors, including seismometers and spy
satellites. All this, treaty advocates say, will make it hard to hide all
but the smallest blasts.

Though the treaty's opponents point to the Indian claim as a test-ban
embarrassment, the emerging consensus among nuclear experts is that what
failed that day was not global monitoring but the pair of explosive
devices. ''The Indian claims were exaggerated,'' said George Perkovich,
author of '' India's Nuclear Bomb'' (University of California), to be
published this week. The problems were so great, he added, that India left
another nuclear device in the ground undetonated.

To police the globe for clandestine blasts, the nuclear test ban treaty
calls for 321 monitoring stations -- 170 to detect underground shock
waves, 80 to sniff the air for telltale radioactivity, 60 to listen for
revealing sounds and 11 to track undersea booms.

''If a suspicious occurrence cannot be resolved through consultation and
clarification,'' says a treaty document, ''each state party has the right
to request an on-site inspection.''

The array of seismic monitoring devices should be be able to detect
nuclear blasts as small as a kiloton, or equal to 1,000 tons of high
explosives. On recording gear for earthquakes, experts say, such a blast
would measure about magnitude 4, like a minor tremor.

In the bomb business, 1,000 tons is indisputably small. The weapon that
leveled Hiroshima had a power of about 15,000 tons, and the first hydrogen
bomb was about 700 times as powerful, enough to cause the Pacific isle of
Elugelab, one mile in diameter, to vanish.

The American Geophysical Union and the Seismological Society of America,
in a joint statement released on Wednesday in Washington, said that when
arrays of sensors called for by the treaty are all switched on worldwide,
''no nation could rely upon successfully concealing a program of nuclear
testing, even at low yields'' in which blasts are very small.

Gregory E. van der Vink, an earth scientist at Princeton University who
helped draft the statement, said existing instruments already exceed the
treaty's monitoring goals.

In fact, for places like underground test sites in China and Russia, Dr.
van der Vink added, the sensitivity of existing seismic detectors is
already up to hundreds of times better than necessary.

The scientists said the treaty's own 170 seismic stations will be
augmented by thousands of private ones run by universities and research
institutions worldwide.

Most private seismic sensors track earthquakes. But for decades such
detectors have also been used for monitoring arms control treaties and
nuclear blasts, whose characteristic signatures in most cases are easy to
distinguish. ''We've had 40 years to work on this and we've done quite
well,'' Jeffrey Park, a Yale geologist who helped draft the scientists'
statement, said last week.

The scientists cautioned that no verification system can be perfect. But
they added that treaty monitoring would be good enough to detect all but
the most egregious cheating, which would require not only great cost and
skill but would probably be exposed anyway by satellite photographs,
atmospheric sampling, or the growing web of seismometers.

Some of the trickiest spots to monitor are old underground nuclear test
areas -- like Novaya Zemlya in Russia's northern archipelago, Lop Nor in
China's northwestern desert and the Nevada Test Site in the American West
-- where the treaty allows non-nuclear tests, including the detonation of
conventional explosives to compress nuclear fuels short of firing.

Such tests are considered vital for checking weapon safety and
reliability. Although it can be hard to distinguish their seismic effects
from those of very small nuclear blasts, nuclear blasts emit certain
radioactive isotopes of xenon, a colorless, odorless, highly unreactive
gas -- gas that invariably percolates up through the ground. Sniffing for
such gas is to be a main job of atmospheric surveillance.

Lawrence Turnbull, a top C.I.A. seismologist, has long warned of clever
ways to evade detection of nuclear explosions. In 1995, he briefed
industry executives on how foes could use large mines or caves for small
clandestine blasts. The surrounding air would soften the bomb's shock
waves, in theory making them so diminutive as to be undetectable.

Lynn R. Sykes, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of
Columbia University and an authority on detecting nuclear blasts,
dismissed the C.I.A.'s fears as groundless.

''Testing in a cavity is portrayed as easy, when in fact it is exceedingly
difficult,'' he said. And experts say even deft clandestine tests would
still emit telltale xenon gas, in theory allowing the cheats to be
exposed.

What of small blasts that somehow managed to escape detection? After the
cold war, official disclosures made clear that the superpowers had
occasionally done very small tests underground. Most of these small
explosions -- all below 1,000 tons -- were done after the superpowers had
mastered the art of producing big blasts. The intentional making of tiny
nuclear explosions can be difficult for a novice.

''The chance of a beginner doing anything under a kiloton is zilch,'' said
Dr. Ray E. Kidder, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California and a former bomb designer. Besides, he noted,
there would be strong incentive to progress to larger blasts more useful
for bomb design.

But Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., a former Pentagon official in the Reagan
Administration who now directs the Center for Security Policy, a private
Washington group that opposes the test ban, said tests below 1,000 tons
were sufficient to investigate some aspects of the atomic triggers used to
ignite hydrogen bombs.

''That can be very valuable militarily,'' he said in an interview. ''And
from such a successful test you can extrapolate.'' Small blasts, he added,
echoing the view of some intelligence officials, "can escape detection."

Mr. Gaffney concluded that the treaty is a bad thing. ''Our hands are
tied,'' he said. ''And everybody else does what they want.''

Chart: ''An Alarming Silence'' To assure compliance with a treaty banning
underground nuclear testing, scientists plan a worldwide network of
seismographs to detect blasts. Doubts about such a system were raised by
the failure of seismometers to detect even a blip last year when India
claimed it had exploded two bombs on May 13.

Intensity of the Two Indian Nuclear Tests
Recorded in Nalore, Pakistan
MAY 11, 1998: Magnitude 5.1 Richter
MAY 13, 1998: No recorded signal
(Source: IRIS, PIDC) Map shows locations of existing monitoring stations.
A total of 321 stations are planned.

o o o o o o

The New York Times
October 10, 1999
Op-ed column

FOREIGN AFFAIRS / By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Arms Control in 30 Seconds

This is a column about why the Senate should ratify the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty. But first, a word about cable TV.

I was in Cuba last week and watching the news on CNN International.
Suddenly, the announcer cut in and said they were breaking away for a
"Live Event." I braced myself. An earthquake? A nuclear leak? No. It was a
speech by President Jiang Zemin of China at a Fortune magazine business
conference in Shanghai (sponsored by CNN's owner, Time Warner). I listened
to the speech and it was utter pablum. That was confirmed when an hour
later CNN led its next news broadcast with a report on the Jiang speech,
saying that he said nothing new. In other words, this "Live Event" was
just a stunt by CNN to hype its own conference. Not good.

Then last week I turned on "Larry King Live" and saw the wrestler Hulk
Hogan being interviewed, live from a wrestling match, where he was
commenting on the suitability for President of his former wrestling
competitor and now Minnesota Governor, Jesse Ventura. So we have one
wrestler commenting on another wrestler running for President.

One thing about the cold war is that it was a serious time because we
faced a serious moral threat, Communism, and a serious strategic threat,
the Soviet Union. Networks didn't play around with phony news; wrestlers
didn't do foreign policy. What strikes you these days is what an unserious
time this is without a serious enemy.

Some of this has to do with the lulling effect of rising stock markets. I
believe economic integration influences geopolitics and reduces the risk
of war. Look at India. Its nationalist party, the B.J.P., came to office
two years ago vowing to test India's nukes. It suffered a serious loss of
foreign investment as a result. Upon his re-election last week, the
B.J.P.'s leader, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, bluntly declared
that nuclear testing was not his priority anymore, saying: "The priority
is to build a national consensus on the acceptance of global capital,
market norms and whatever goes with it. You have to go out and compete for
investments."

But while globalization clearly affects geopolitics, it doesn't end it.
India can still get crazy, which is why arms control still matters. For
the hidden hand of the market to work, you always need a hidden fist. And
this brings us back to the test ban treaty. I don't expect the average Joe
to be out campaigning for the C.T.B.T. He has his own job to worry about.
Framing important issues is the job of leadership, of Presidential
candidates and of the responsible media.

But what we have today is either pandering to this lack of seriousness, or
a reduction of every issue to political-point-scoring. One day the
Republicans shoot down the Democrats' nominee for a Federal judgeship, on
partisan grounds, and the next day they want to shoot down a nuclear test
ban treaty on the same grounds. Hey, why not? What the heck? But where
have the Democrats been? This treaty was ready two years ago! Why hasn't
the Administration mounted a real education campaign?

There are legitimate verification issues raised by those serious
Republicans who oppose the C.T.B.T. But they shouldn't be deal-breakers.
This is a good treaty. Under it, 320 seismic monitors will be installed
around the world to detect tests, we will have an important political
lever to pressure India and Pakistan not to test anymore, and we will make
it much harder for China to develop miniaturized warheads for a
multi-warhead missile, because to do that China would need live testing
and this treaty bans that. And if someone cheats, the U.S. retains the
right to pull out. How can we maintain pressure on India, Pakistan and
China not to test anymore if we insist on the right to test forever? The
Republicans, rightly, howled over China's theft of our nuclear weapons
designs, but now they want to set China free to test them!

We're talking nukes, folks. This deserves serious consideration, not a
cheap, quick-draw debate and vote.

"Unfortunately, since the public seems to have decided that our national
interest is not threatened today, politicians can behave as if they don't
have to make policy on the basis of the national interest," says Council
on Foreign Relations policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. "The public just
doesn't check that box anymore."

Sooner or later, we will regret that.