Much of the essence of human behavior has been illustrated by stories of supernatural beings and ordinary people. The Bible is full of them. So is Arabian folklore, with its stories about genies and people who release them from some kind of container. My big Webster dictionary defines genie, or Finn," as "any of a class of spirits, lower than the angels, capable of appearing in human or animal forms, and capable of influencing mankind for good and evil." Other definitions stress the evil side of genies. For my purposes here I choose the Oxford English Dictionary reference to "the horrible genie of civil murder."
The story of "The Fisherman and the Genie" may be the source of a statement often made in discussions of abolition of nuclear weapons, that "the nuclear genie cannot be put back in the bottle." A poor fisherman finds an opaque brass bottle in his net. When he opens it black smoke emerges and takes the form of a huge and fearful monster....I couldn't resist bringing along some copies of illustrations of the release of the genie as shown in several children' story books....This first one strongly suggests the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima... The next are hardly pictures of benevolent servants.
In the versions of this story I've seen so far, the genie is always put back in the bottle or otherwise contained. The genie is sometimes released again, sometimes not. Containment of the genie is achieved by taunting it along the lines that it's a fake because it could obviously never have fit in that little bottle. When the genie is tricked into showing how he can get back in the bottle, the fisherman claps the top back on. In a modern variant of the story, called "Do Not Open," all this is done by Miss Moody, who lives at land's end with her cat, Captain Kidd. Her taunt is that the huge monster doesn't scare her at all, that only a mouse could do that. When the genie turns into a mouse, Captain Kidd gobbles it up, then burps. No more genie.
I think of the nuclear genie as the capacity to release the cosmic energy that had never been manipulated in significant quantities by humans until nearly the middle of the 20th Century. To achieve this capacity we had to make the immensely powerful stuff that is needed to make nuclear explosives. Today this means plutonium or highly enriched uranium, neither of which exist naturally on our planet. If we can contain these materials and the means for their production the nuclear genie will be powerless.
Tomorrow people may find ways to bypass the need for these very special materials, and use only the fusion of naturally occurring isotopes of light elements, principally deuterium and lithium, to make nuclear weapons. This will make control of the nuclear genie much more difficult When the nuclear genie was released at Alamogordo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki he had less than 100 kilograms of the heavy special nuclear materials. These could fit in a small shoe box, yet they explosively released the energy equivalent of three piles of high explosive each bigger than the White House.
The nuclear genie has proliferated enormously since it was first released. Active disclosed or denied proliferation of the original genie is now proceeding in at least a dozen countries. Latent proliferation of nuclear weapon technologies is proceeding rapidly as more and more countries acquire nuclear power plants and other technologies that bring countries much closer to having nuclear weapons, whether or not their governments have yet called on the genie to provide them. Some countries, such as Sweden, have also undertaken extensive secret development of nuclear weapon technology up to but not including deployment of actual weapons.
None of the first five admitted customers for the nuclear genie's services show any substantive signs of ever giving up those services. No wonder that other countries are going after them too, albeit secretly or ambiguously.
The United States and Russia still have tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, yet their nuclear weaponeers continue working on new types of nuclear explosives. These include possibilities for pure fusion weapons, and for weapons that can beam microwaves, at immense power levels, to disable targets in space or on the ground-and many more. Some of this work is now being done cooperatively by weaponeers in both countries. The billions of dollars being allocated by the U.S. Department of Energy to what is euphemistically called "stockpile stewardship" are being used to keep U. S. nuclear weaponeers actively working on their wares, whether or not a zero yield Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty goes into force soon.
Nuclear terrorism or nuclear attacks prompted by leaders of undisclosed governments, against which the threat of nuclear retaliation is ineffective, are rapidly becoming more credible. The information, materials, and equipment needed to make easily transportable nuclear explosives continue to become more and more accessible worldwide. Plutonium and highly enriched uranium, especially in Russia, are being repeatedly reported as having grossly inadequate physical security. Reports of international smuggling and black markets in these materials are becoming commonplace.
More than 400 nuclear power plants in 30 countries have so far produced about four times as much plutonium as was ever designated for the world's nuclear weapons. These nearly 1 million kilograms of commercial plutonium represent an advanced state of global "latent" proliferation of nuclear weapons. This plutonium, after chemical extraction from spent fuel, can be used to make all kinds of destructive, deliverable, and reliable nuclear weapons that have been developed.
Production of plutonium in these power plants was not the result of a decision to get nuclear weapons. It happens automatically. The plutonium remains in the reactor fuel if it is not chemcally separated. About 200,000 kilograms of this plutonium have been chemically separated from the spent fuel, mostly for storage and possible eventual use as nuclear fuel, in Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. Commercial separation of plutonium from U. S. spent fuel started some 25 years ago, at West Valley in Western New York, but was discontinued in a few years. The amount of plutonium separated there was only several tons-enough to arm a nation but small compared with the US military plutonium stockpile. Inadequate management of radioactive wastes released at West Valley has left a gruesome legacy there that will cost at least another billion dollars to deal with adequately.
The world's present inventory of a million or so kilograms of plutonium is distributed in various forms in thousands of places. It is in operating nuclear power plant cores; in spent nuclear fuel stored at nuclear power plant sites or elsewhere; in stockpiles of stored separated commercial or military plutonium compounds such as plutonium oxide or plutonium nitrate solution; in the form of plutonium metal in so-called "pits"from dismantled nuclear weapons; in deployed nuclear weapons. Thousands of kilograms of plutonium are also in huge accumulations of wastes from nuclear fuel processing and fabrication of nuclear weapons. Roughly 10,000 kilograms of plutonium released by underground nuclear tests are mixed with huge quantities of underground soil and rock at the Nevada, Semipalatinsk, and other nuclear test sites. Another thousand or so kilograms of plutonium have been released to the atmosphere by above ground nuclear tests, mostly before 1963. There are even a dozen or so kilograms of plutonium on the moon, and perhaps several hundred kilograms that were propelled to outer space by nuclear tests in the early 1960s.
There are also now about one and one half million kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HE) in the world, most of which was produced for use in nuclear weapons. Yet the several tens of thousands of kilograms of HE produced for other purposes, such as research and test reactors, also represent real or potential nuclear weapon proliferation threats in many countries.
The facilities and expertise needed for chemical extraction of plutonium from spent fuel and enrichment of uranium to weapon grade levels are also increasingly accessible worldwide.
Along with proliferation of the unique, artificial materials needed for nuclear explosives, the expertise and tools and facilities needed to produce and concentrate them, and incorporate them into nuclear explosive devices, have also proliferated globally. Many nuclear genies are now accessible to many masters-not only leaders of different governments and military establishments, but, quite possibly, to terrorists and other criminals.
Perhaps the greatest dangers of all are of military bombardment or sabotage of places where there are especially large accumulations of highly radioactive materials. These materials could contaminate huge areas to dangerous levels if released by bombardment with chemical or nuclear explosives, or by appropriate manipulation of equipment by people who forcibly take control of a facility containing large quantities of radioactive materials. Such facilities might include operating power reactors, storage pools or dry cask arrays storing spent fuel from many reactors, burial sites for high level radioactive wastes from military or civil fuel reprocessing, long term surface storage facilities for tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel, or surface storage facilities for plutonium removed from dismantled nuclear warheads or extracted from power reactor spent fuel.
So the nuclear genie has proliferated considerably since it was first released. If the plutonium and HEU were all separated from other chemicals, their total volume would now be the same as a moderate sized living room-not exactly a shoe box, but still tiny compared with any measure of the destructiveness of the materials if used for making nuclear weapons. By now the capacity for destructive use of the nuclear genie is clear off the human scale of things, but the size of global genie's stockpiles of these materials remains comparatively small.
This suggests a guiding principle for taking and then maintaining control of the nuclear genie and his offspring. I call this the "The Principle of Containment." As long as significant quantities -that is grams or more-of fairly concentrated plutonium or enriched uranium exist on Earth, they are surrounded by physical barriers and sensitive equipment that will reliably detect the transfer of any of these nuclear materials from places where they are supposed to be, at least temporarily, to where they are not. All possible entrances to and exits from such facilities are kept to a minimum, and are continuously monitored. If the monitors signal any unauthorized transfer of nuclear material, additional barriers are closed and a system of prevention of theft or other illegal transfer of any of the materials goes into action. The response system can expand in size and effectiveness to thwart any credible attempt to defeat it.
As a part of a strategy for global containment of plutonium and enriched uranium until safe and reliable ways to dispose permanently of both have been developed and put into action, ways to maintain effective international control over such systems need to be worked out. Some details of all this have been studied, and there already is some experience with such containment systems. I have found this to be a very challenging but extremely interesting subject I can't cover here in any detail. Possiblities for secure containment of the nuclear genie's source of energy in a volume that is not necessarily huge on the human scale of things therefore still exist, at least for a while longer. But we had better get moving.
We need a frequently articulated global taboo on nuclear weapons and the facilities, processes, and materials that are needed to make them. This taboo follows naturally from widely shared, personal moral convictions about weapons of mass destruction. It has troubled me deeply for many years that my country has, without letup, been prepared, under some conditions, to launch nuclear weapons that would kill millions of innocent people. To me, and to most people I talk to these days, this is preparation for mass murder that cannot be justified under any conditions. We humans must find alternatives to retaliation in kind to acts of massive and indiscriminate violence.
This taboo needs to be extended worldwide to any action that violates any international laws that relate to the research, development, production, or possession of nuclear weapons.
At the same time negotiations of an international nuclear weapon abolition treaty should start immediately in the appropriate United Nations organizations and perhaps others. I join others now pressing for completing these negotiations by 2000, and for elimination of all nuclear weapons and the means for making them no later than 2010. A frequent objection to the choice now of this kind of time table for completing abolition of all nuclear weapons is that it will take decades to dismantle all the world's nuclear warheads at the maximum rate that is possible with the existing facilities for doing this. I have two responses. The first is to propose rapid expansion of these facilities as needed to accomplish the global dismantlement in less than ten years. The other response is to suggest two stages of disablement of the warheads. The first might be to enclose individual warheads or clusters of them in extremely heavy containers that would take major cooperative efforts for, say, months to re-open without safely destroying or seriously disabling the warheads. This is another example of a challenging but extremely interesting technical problem connected with nuclear abolition.
Details of internationally monitored systems for dismantling nuclear warheads have been proposed in some detail. An important issue has been the provision of international assurances that, once identified for elimination, the warheads are, in fact, safely taken apart, the non-nuclear components destroyed, and the special nuclear materials securely stored for ultimate disposal. This must all be done in ways that assure that no special nuclear materials are secretly removed or withheld from secure internationally monitored storage. It also needs to be done without revealing secrets of nuclear weapon design beyond authorized people from the owner country. The principle of containment can be maintained in ways that assure that these criteria are met. Although warhead dismantlement has not yet been done under direct international, or even bilateral controls, rather detailed studies show that this can be done effectively and quickly-that is within less than 10 years to dismantle all the world's warheads.
International assurances that all warheads and special nuclear materials belonging to each country have been revealed and made available for disposal must be as technically effective as possible, but probably can never be perfect. Further assurance of adherence can result from what Joseph Rotblat has called "Societal Verification." That would build on worldwide popular acceptance of a severe taboo against violating an abolition treaty. It would also establish specific ways for whistle blowers to reveal cheating while being effectively protected against reprisal for blowing the whistle. Substantial and much publicized rewards for whistle blowing that reveals real attempts to cheat can probably help considerably.
How can the plutonium and enriched uranium from warhead or bulk material stockpiles be safely and permanently disposed of? The answer that applies to enriched uranium is straightforward. It can be mixed with sufficient natural of depleted uranium to render it unable to sustain a fast nuclear chain reaction. The required concentration of uranium-235 to do this is about 6%, nearly ten times its concentration in natural uranium. This would require substantial re- enrichment of the uranium-235 to provide the kind of uranium necessary for making nuclear explosives.
Solving this problem for plutonium is much more difficult, because there is no way to denature" plutonium with any of its isotopes in such a way as to make the plutonium unusable as the key material for nuclear explosives. Several possibilities for making the plutonium very difficult to retrieve for making weapons are being investigated and proposed, but much more work is needed to find the least dangerous way to dispose of the plutonium permanently. Among these possibilities are chemical processing to embed the plutonium at low concentration in a glassy substance the would be difficult to process, perhaps spiking the mixture with radioactive fission product wastes to make the plutonium even more difficult to extract after arduous removal from deep underground burial. Another possibility, which looks very difficult but still interesting is destruction of the plutonium by fission by neutrons produced in targets of very high current proton accelerators. Still another possibility that is looked at now and then, but never enough to be able to assess definitively, is disposal in space, or, more specifically, in the sun. I've looked at this last possibility enough to feel sure that it cannot be ruled out simply on the grounds of likely launch failure, if the designers pay close attention to ways to assure containment of the plutonium under all conceivable accident circumstances.
Effective enforcement of a global ban on all nuclear weapons will be much more difficult in a world in which nuclear power flourishes than one in which it is also abolished. This prohibition could include a ban on possession or production of any of the materials required for nuclear explosives-now specifically plutonium or enriched uranium. This would remove the need for any distinctions between peaceful and military uses of these materials. It would also strengthen the reliability of systems for detecting violations regarding the allowed presence of special nuclear materials by being able to emphasize detection of any of these materials being transferred from where they are supposed to be to where they are not, rather than accurate measurement of all transfers of these materials.
Pure fusion power, if developed as an economically attractive power source, would retain many of the technological connections with nuclear weapons, contributing to their substantial latent proliferation. I'm especially concerned about the spread of intimate knowledge of the principles of nuclear explosives resulting from the proliferation of facilities and research programs supporting the pursuit of what is called inertial confinement fusion. The idea has been around since the early 1 950s, initially in pursuit of ways to make nuclear weapons that would not require any plutoniunm or enriched uranium. This evolved into a concept for making electric power by extracting the energy from rapidly repeated small explosions energized by fusion reactions between isotopes of hydrogen. This work, which started at the Livermore nuclear weapon laboratory, was originally highly classified, and much of it still is. But plasma physicists and others in commercial enterprises in the US, and in various laboratories in other countries have for decades been publishing detailed results of working on approaches to this type of nuclear fusion. As a result, very sophisticated computer codes, material properties data needed to make them accurate, and detailed exchanges of information and excitement about ways to make thermonuclear explosions have proliferated widely through conferences and publications. Major inertial confinement fusion programs have been underway for years not only in the five announced nuclear weapon states, but also Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, India, Japan, and probably at least a dozen other countries. Humanity is in much greater need for other forms of technology, that are no where nearly as closely connected to weapons of mass destruction. I therefore argue against supplying funds for work on inertial confinement anywhere, and for at least considering a global ban on further research and development on inertial confinement fusion.
Thus the principal focus of global nuclear abolition should be on banning possession of any plutonium or enriched uranium, even of low enrichment, and the keeping of any such materials that are in storage, transport, or processing stages under international safeguards against use for any purpose. This need not interfere with medical uses of nuclear energy that can be supplied without use of the fission process, or with basic scientific research.
If nuclear power of all types is phased out within a decade or so, how can the world make up for this loss of energy?
How about greater use of fossil fuels? There are many unresolved questions about the world's reserves of fossil fuels, and the environmental consequences of continuing to use them as the world's main source of commercial energy. Perhaps most important, it is now becoming much less controversial that continued large releases of carbon dioxide from fuel fossil combustion (as opposed to combustion of biomass) will enhance climatic instabilities that are perhaps already more severe than any time in recorded history.
But there are two very attractive opportunities for shifting global energy production and use away from fossil and nuclear fuels. These are reduction in demand by using energy much more efficiently, and shifts to locally appropriate renewable forms of energy derived directly or indirectly from sunlight.
There are countless specific opportunities that show promise of economic and environmentally benign competition with fossil or nuclear fuels anywhere in the world. A few of the huge number of different attractive possibilities include energy conservation in buildings, industries, and transport vehicles; solar electrolytic or thermochemical splitting of water to make ordinary hydrogen for "hydrogen economies" or to increase production of other renewable fuels, such as methanol or methane; enclosed ponds with transparent covers for efficient photosynthetic conversion to elementary plant forms, such as algae, for subsequent conversion to fuels; wind power and pumped hydroelectric power to help meet energy demands at times or seasons when accessibility of sunlight is relatively low-to name very few of the promising alternatives.
There is plenty of space in most regions for an all solar energized world if opportunities for daily and seasonal storage of renewaable energy are appropriately used. At an overall efficiency of 15% for conversion of incident solar radiation to some form of primary energy, the world's present total demand for energy could be met using less than 0.5% of the world' s land area. Local energy self sufficiency achieved with locally collected solar radiation even looks like a real possibility in regions where annual sunlight availability is relatively low and energy consumption per unit land area is high, such as in Japan or Northern Germany. An interesting possiblity, so far little explored, is using lakes or coastal ocean regions for support of floating, very flexible solar radiation collectors designed to survive local weather or tidal extremes. This might be especially interesting near densely populated areas with relatively poor annual insolation. Thorough assessment of envronmental impacts need to be integral parts of new solar energy technology development.
The benefits of intensive, cooperative, worldwide action in response to such opportunities could be universal, huge, and prompt. Humankind now has the chance, perhaps only for a short time, to recapture and then reject the nuclear genie first released by humans 50 years ago-energy that is much easier to use to detroy than to build-and reach out together to embrace the light from our sun, which for a very long time, has sustained all life on Earth.
How about the source of power of the nuclear genie? Do you want it to remain free, or do you want to help put it back in a transparent but strong bottle?
Last modified: Thu Apr 19 00:14:25 2001
regehr@cs.utah.edu