04/13/09 – Gordon Prather – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dr. Gordon Prather.
He's our in-house nuclear physicist at Antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com slash Prather.
And he has been an advisor to senators and worked in the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and in the U.S. Navy, in the Office of Secretary of Defense, was the Chief Scientist of the Army, and knows a whole lot about making nuclear weapons and testing them, and also is an expert on the international nonproliferation regime of the United Nations under the Nonproliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and especially the relationships between our government, those agencies, and the so-called axis of evil.
Welcome back to the show, Doc.
How are you?
I think I'm fine.
Well, that's good to hear.
So let's start off with Iran.
How do you view the Obama administration's tack on Iran policy so far?
How do you see it as differing, if at all, from the Bush years?
Well, on the basis of some remarks that our new U.N.
Ambassador Susan Rice, as opposed to Condoleezza Rice, there doesn't seem to be much change.
There is this very strong bias, is the only thing I can think of to call it, that the Iranians are bound and determined to develop nuclear weapons, and that their uranium enrichment program, which they instigated as a result, in my opinion, of having their turnkey uranium enrichment gas centrifuge program that they had contracted with the Soviet Union.
Yeah, it was the Soviet Union, I think, when they originally contracted it.
But in 1995, President Clinton put so much pressure on them, Yeltsin was then, I believe, President of Russia, that the Russians caved in and canceled this turnkey gas centrifuge-driven uranium enrichment program.
Now, earlier, the Iranians had contracted, they were original investors, they had a 10% investment in an organization, a semi-commercial, non-state entity called URDEF, which was to enrich uranium, and they had a 10%, $1 billion investment in that, which was made under the Shah, and so we got unhappy with them, because of the hostage crisis in the embassy and all that sort of thing, that we essentially have, to this day, not allowed the Iranians to either recoup their investment, I don't know what $1 billion in the 70s would turn into today, but let's say $5 or $6 billion now.
Okay, well, they've never gotten a penny back from that, and they've never gotten any enriched uranium from it, and so my own view is, it's perfectly understandable that they would say, okay, what are we going to do now?
The United States is apparently determined to keep us from having nuclear power plants and having fuel for them.
And so I can understand easily why they might have turned to Pakistan, and they keep talking about the AQ Khan smuggling network, the nuclear smuggling network, and somehow or another, it was illegal for the Iranians to have bought stuff from them.
But, you know, as I've pointed out in a number of columns, and Defense Weekly has pointed out, in 2000, in the year 2000, when Clinton was still president, the AQ Khan Laboratories openly marketed, they had brochures the whole nine yards, and all the associated equipment you would need for sale, including their second generation, the managing steel rotor, supersonic rotor, highly efficient gas centrifuges, that even Mohammed ElBaradei was kind of concerned about that the Iranians were developing.
And I gather they have, you know.
I don't know what their new gas centrifuges are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are essentially their own version of the Pac-2 steel rotor supersonic gas centrifuges.
Well, that is what they were claiming in the news the other day, in fact, I think, that they had the P-2, so-called P-2 centrifuges going.
So basically what you're saying is that when you look at the history of how America prevented them from buying nuclear equipment from Russia back in the day, you're looking back in history to something that nobody else ever seems to take into account, as that's what motivated them to enrich uranium in the first place.
But so, I guess the original question, though, is, has the Obama policy changed?
I guess you're saying it hasn't, that the American policy, and therefore, I guess, the UN policy, is that there may not be uranium enrichment on Iranian soil.
That has not changed, is that right?
I don't think you can talk about a UN policy, because as I understand it, the majority of the members of the UN General Assembly, and the majority of the members of the International Atomic Energy Agency General Conference, support the Iranians' right to the fullest possible peaceful use of nuclear energy, and that includes, and you keep reading these articles, it says these Arab leaders are so much opposed to it.
Well, you know, let's have some evidence for that.
It isn't obvious to me, I've not seen anything that would support the conclusion that the members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, or the Arab League, or any of these other things, view the Iranian safeguarded uranium enrichment program, and nuclear reactor programs, as being a military threat to them.
I just don't see that, I haven't read it.
Have you seen any indication, either, that there's any kind of parallel program somewhere?
I mean, a lot of people say, you know, reasonable anti-war people say, hey, come on, if I was Iran, I'd be making nuclear weapons, I would have a secret cave somewhere with a separate set of centrifuges, or something like that.
Do you see any indication that that's the case?
Or do you think they really have just opened their books wide, and they're being honest about what they're doing there?
Well, I think that if you really wanted to have nuclear weapons, you would do what almost every, as far as I know, every country in the world has done, except South Africa.
South Africa developed its own uranium enrichment technology.
Nobody would let them have it, you know.
They were a pariah, and so they developed their own.
They used what's called a nozzle technology, very inefficient.
It uses an extremely large amount of electricity.
And they had this system that was set up.
They hadn't signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, so there was no IAEA safeguarding or oversight over what they were doing.
And what they did is that they had their standard set of, you know, thousands of these nozzles, and they would enrich it to about 3% or so uranium-235.
And then what they did, and since nobody was watching over their shoulder, is they did have a separate facility not far away where they would take some of the low-enriched uranium and put it into this other set of uranium enrichment cascades and enrich it up to 90%.
But, you know, there are several things about that.
First of all, their low-enriched uranium facility was under no kind of scrutiny by anybody, and so there was hardly any, you know, they'd just drive a truck up and cart it away and go over to their little secret site.
Well, anyway, they managed to make over a period of years enough uranium-235, essentially 90% uranium-235, and so they constructed a total of six gun-type weapons, the kind little boy, the kind we dropped on Hiroshima.
Now, that's a simple thing to do if you can get that much essentially pure uranium-235.
But each of the weapons that they made, they never tested them because they didn't think they needed to.
Each of those weapons weighed about, well, over 1,000 pounds.
And I don't know what the yield would have been, but only a few kilotons.
Our little boy weighed 5 tons, 10,000 pounds, and not because of the weight of the uranium-235 so much as on the weight of the tamper and all the other stuff that was put around the target so that when the projectile and the target merged, there would be a lot of mass there that had to be blown out in order for the chain reaction to be quenched.
And so, you know, it's not clear what the yield would have been of these South African weapons, but in any case, they were essentially non-deliverable.
And the South Africans knew that.
Well, at any rate, in the late 80s, this was before the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
They were about to get rid of white rule and, of course, apartheid.
And for various reasons, they decided, well, maybe we better join the Nonproliferation Treaty.
And so they applied, which would have required them to put all of their nuclear stuff under a safeguards agreement.
And so they went in and essentially blended down the highly enriched uranium, the weapons-grade uranium, into fuel for their reactors.
And they planted grass, and they got rid of that facility and planted grass there.
Well, so I think it was 1990 or 1991, the IAEA came in for the first time to essentially provide oversight over all of their nuclear programs.
And almost immediately, the IAEA discovered what had been done there, you know.
This is well after the fact.
But that's the only instance I know of where anybody has gone the highly enriched weapons-grade uranium route to a nuclear weapon.
And although we hear from people like David Albright, who fancies himself or presents himself as being an expert on nuclear weapons, although I don't know what basis he could possibly have for that, that he has seen blueprints, I think the way he puts it, that were found in the Libyan files, or allegedly found in the Libyan files, when in 2003 they got rid of all their nuclear activities, that they had blueprints for what they say was a Chinese implosion-type nuclear design that had been tested by the Chinese, that employed a uranium-235 ball or pit, if you want to call it that.
I've not heard of that, and I've never heard anybody who knows anything about nuclear weapons who would verify that that is the case.
It's one thing for somebody who doesn't know anything about nuclear weapons to say that he's seen blueprints of a uranium-235 implosion weapon that had Chinese markings on it and was tested in 1964 or something like that.
But I'll wait until somebody who knows something about it, that I know knows something about it, says that that's the case.
As far as I know, we never ever did anything like that.
What, in terms of a secret program, I guess, post-Manhattan Project, you mean?
No, no.
As far as I know, as soon as we perfected the plutonium-based, the plutonium-239-based implosion device...
That's when you quit making them out of uranium.
Well, we continued to make a few gun weapons because they're so robust, but they were essentially still non-deliverable.
You've got to have something like a B-29 to carry the damn thing to the target.
Hey, let me ask you this.
If the Iranians wanted to start taking the uranium that they've enriched to 3.6% or so U-235, and they wanted to reintroduce that to the centrifuges and start enriching it to above 90% purity that you could possibly make a bomb out of, would that be against their safeguards agreement to make high-enriched uranium if, say, for example, they just let it sit there and they don't start making a bomb out of it, they keep it under IAEA seal?
Or would they be able to get away with that and go all the way to that step before, in the ultimate nightmare of the Israel lobby or whatever, finally withdrawing from the NPT and kicking the inspectors out and announcing that they're trying to make a bomb?
Well, I don't think there's anything in the safeguards agreement, I haven't looked at it recently, that would prohibit them from, subject to IAEA safeguards, saying, OK, we're just going to see if we can reconfigure some cascades and all this sort of thing, and we're going to try to make 90% uranium-235.
They'd have to have some reason, I would think, for doing that, or otherwise somebody could conceivably...
The IAEA would be obligated to report, as it does periodically, to the UN Security Council and to the UN General Assembly what they were doing, and I would think that under those circumstances, somebody in that region, around Iran, could petition the UN Security Council and say, look, this looks to us like it's a threat to the peace, what they're doing, even if it was legal under their safeguards agreement to do it.
But the IAEA, as I read things, would not have the authority to say, no, you can't do that.
Well, that would certainly be, regardless of the law, because it doesn't seem to have much effect, really, that would certainly be one of the red lines that the Israeli and the American government talk about every so often.
It would seem like if they were to begin to enrich to weapons grade, because there is no other plausible excuse for it except to make a bomb out of it, right?
To make it that purity.
I'm not saying they are, and I don't want anybody to misunderstand, because right now everything is safeguarded at 3.6%.
Well, our reactors, naval reactors, in our nuclear submarines so-called, and I presume also in the Russian submarines, I don't know this about the Russian submarines, use weapons grade uranium-235.
That's the fuel form.
That's how they, I don't know what it is now, but it used to be like 13 years, they would load this fuel into one of our submarine reactors, and then they would run for 13 years.
Full bore if you wanted it to.
Yeah, but the Iranians don't have anything like that, right?
Nuclear subs.
We know they certainly don't, and I don't, you know, I can't think of any reason why they would want it, and there's no indication that they are going to do that.
They never indicated that they intended to do that.
Yeah, I think everybody just presumes that they're guilty and that there's really even no excuse for enriching to 3.6%.
Why not just buy it from Russia, already enriched, if you really don't want to shoot us with it?
These bad experiences, you know, at least two that I know of.
The Eurodiffs, they took their money and ran, you know, and the Iranians got nothing back for it.
No enriched uranium for nuclear power plants and didn't get their money back.
Well, so if the Obama team is basically saying, well, we'll reach out to you and we want to have talks with you, and yet they basically have the same Bush position that uranium enrichment is still illegitimate in Iran, what does that say about the larger Obama-Biden-Clinton administration approach to the nonproliferation regime?
I mean, you've written at length about how the Bush-Cheney-John Bolton-Condoleezza Rice crew, what they did basically was they realized they had to try to destroy the nonproliferation regime in order to have an excuse to attack the Axis of Evil countries that they named, and how they've really wrecked the nonproliferation regime in the process of doing so, coming up with those excuses.
So what do you think about what the Obama team is doing?
Are they going to try to repair it back to the Warren-Christopher days, or are the days of the IAEA and the safeguards agreement and all that basically done now?
Well, I think that you stated it very clearly and correctly, that the Bush-Cheney cabal set out to destroy almost everything of an international nature that could conceivably put some kind of limitations on what they wanted to do in the world.
It was deliberate, and they were successful.
From my standpoint, of course, being a nuclear type, you can understand why I might think so, I think it's their biggest legacy, is that they've completely done away with, I mean, done in.
They started with North Korea by making accusations against them, which have yet to, there's been no evidence whatsoever that those accusations were accurate, and they forced North Korea to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty, and you see the results of that.
North Korea now has a half dozen to ten, maybe, plutonium-239 implosion nuclear weapons.
They're probably not deliverable, but they got them, and you could deliver them by U-Haul or a slow boat from North Korea or something like that, San Francisco or someplace.
Okay, so they started with them, went on to Iraq by claiming that even though the IAEA inspectors were on the eve of the invasion, Operation Iraqi Liberation, or whatever it was called, Operation Iraqi Freedom, maybe?
Yeah, I think they originally called it Operation Iraqi Liberation, but then they realized the acronym was OIL, and they thought, oh no, that's a little too obvious.
Okay, yeah, Freedom, Freedom, yeah.
Well, in any case, literally on the eve of the invasion, the IAEA was reporting and said, we've been on the ground there for three or four months now, and as best we can tell, what little things that the Iraqis had left in 1998 when we pronounced them to have nothing, is deteriorated even further.
There's nothing there, absolutely nothing there.
And we've looked at these aluminum tubes that you're so unhappy about, and we've decided that they were ordered exactly for the purpose that the Iraqis said it was, which was the bodies for 81-millimeter mortar rounds, or maybe the barrels, I'm not sure, but at any rate.
In defiance of the IAEA seal of approval on Iraq, we went ahead anyway on the grounds that he had a secret nuclear weapons program.
Now, that's two.
Then the next thing that they, and of course there's been this constant claim that the Iranians were hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons, although there's been no evidence whatsoever that surfers, after years of going anywhere and seeing anything and talking to anybody that the IAEA has any legitimate reason for seeing or going to or talking to, they still have found no instance whatsoever that the Iranians have attempted to divert safeguarded materials to a military purpose.
Then, of course, the next thing that the Bush-Cheney administration did, they just about put an end to the whole nonproliferation treaty, the National Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, nuclear suppliers group, nuclear weapon proliferation prevention regime, was to sign this special deal with India, which was not a signatory to the nonproliferation treaty, had nuclear weapons in the stockpile and had tested them as recently as 1998 and had precipitated the Pakistani test a few weeks later, which I could go into, but I don't quite understand how the Pakistanis were able to conduct underground tests of nuclear weapons just a few weeks after the Indians unexpectedly tested a bunch of them themselves.
The Bush administration got Congress to change some of our laws to accommodate this special nuclear deal we were going to have with India, and they were not going to be required to sign the nonproliferation treaty, and they got the nuclear suppliers group to make special exceptions for India.
And so, if Obama comes to the presidency, well, it's going to be hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
That's all I can say.
Well, do you think that they really want to?
I think in Hillary Clinton's confirmation testimony before the Senate, she really sounded a lot like you in her concern over the future of the nonproliferation regime.
No offense.
I didn't read her confirmation testimony.
Was it on TV?
I certainly didn't watch it.
Yeah, I saw it on TV, unfortunately.
Okay.
Well, the thing about it is that in the Clinton-Gore administration, a lot of the rhetoric was exactly the same as Obama's today.
I mean, you can almost go back and they were going to get rid of all the nuclear weapons in the world and all that sort of thing.
But a big driver behind the Clinton-Gore people, and even to a certain extent, even with the Bush-Cheney people, which they took advantage of, were all of these people that are so opposed to anything nuclear, any, you know, peaceful or otherwise.
And this is just an aside, but with all this global warming hoo-ha that we're now going to undergo for at least the next three and a half, four years, they're going to be talking about how do you, they're going to be carbon dioxide cap and trade laws.
They're going to be doing everything but expand nuclear power.
First of all, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
So the EPA has no business whatsoever regulating it.
But apparently Obama's going to say, okay, EPA, you can regulate carbon dioxide emissions and you can establish a cap and trade program and all that sort of thing.
Okay.
But if these people were to be serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, they wouldn't be advocating building a hundred jillion windmills all over the countryside, which would give you electricity when the wind blows.
They would go to the premier, dependable, cost-efficient source of carbon-free emission energy production, and of course that's nuclear power.
Well, let me ask you, you know, they say… And I'm not an advocate, never have been an advocate of nuclear power, you know.
Well, Doc, you know, people say that the nuclear power companies really can't survive without massive subsidies.
Is that not right?
Well, I don't know the answer to that.
I know when I was in the… You know fission is efficient because you've seen it in the laboratory is your point.
No, no.
When I was in ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Administration, in the planning and analysis assistant director office, my responsibilities were to do essentially the oversight over the budget submission for all the nuclear programs except the weapons programs, which is kind of funny in a way.
But in Washington, you're always put in charge of something that you don't know anything about.
If you've been in the business, that is until Obama and his economist came into town.
But the experience was disqualifying.
You were a suspect if you knew anything about nuclear weapons, and so you couldn't possibly be in charge of that.
But anyway, I had all these other things that were nuclear.
And it was very obvious that the reason that nuclear power was costing as much as it did was because the intervenors were intervening at every stage of the licensing process, which was state, local, and some federal, to drag out the time between when the decision was made to site a particular plant at a certain place and when it actually came online.
And in the 70s, interest rates had gone sky high.
And so any plant that was built in those days, and that included even some coal-fired plants, but certainly the nuclear plants, half the cost of the electricity to the consumer resulted from the interest during construction being recovered.
Well, and you've also talked in the past about Jimmy Carter's rules.
I don't know if it was an executive order or what that forbids the reprocessing of the fuel down to its inert stages.
And so that's why we end up having all this surplus of dangerous nuclear waste that they want to just dig a hole and yuck a mountain and bury it because humans in the future will figure out something to do with it.
I think you've explained before to me that you could do something with it right now.
You could fission all this waste down to harmless product if only the government would allow you to do it.
Well, I don't think that's exactly what I said.
What I said is in the old days...
I'm doing my best to overstate everything on the show today.
You walk it back for me there, Doc.
Okay.
In the 70s, when Carter...
He may not have actually signed that executive order, but he certainly was his intention.
And that was certainly the result is that we have yet...
The Iranian president just got through saying that they've got a complete fuel cycle now in Iran.
Well, no, they don't.
At least I don't think they do but they do not have the capability of reprocessing spent fuel and recovering the usable uranium and plutonium that's in that fuel and making new fuel elements from it.
Now, the Russians do, and there's an entity in Europe that does.
But in this country, we've never ever done it ourselves.
By the way, we do not have gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facilities in this country.
Can you believe that?
I mean, in that respect, the Iranians at the moment are ahead of us technologically in several other ways.
But also, we do not have in this country, thanks to Jimmy Carter, we don't have a closed fuel cycle.
The spent fuel is not chemically reprocessed.
And in those days, the spent fuel in the 70s, the spent fuel from ordinary power reactors had about two-thirds of the material unburned in that fuel.
That is, all you really had to do was to separate out chemically the uranium and plutonium that was still in that fuel and then all the bad stuff, the fission products and the things that are so radioactive, you put them somewhere else, you know?
And then you take the uranium and the plutonium that you have recovered from that fuel, which is, basically, it's only a third spent, you know?
You got two-thirds of your original investment there.
Okay, well, we don't have such a facility.
And until very recently, and I don't know if it's changed or not, we prohibited any country who got fuel from us in the first place to go into their nuclear reactors from having that fuel reprocessed.
Is there even a pretended good reason here that some fool believes that, for some reason, it's better to keep a bunch of radioactive waste and bury it in a mountain rather than continuing to process it until it's more inert, at least?
Sure, all those people who oppose everything nuclear, including peaceful uses of nuclear power, want to make the problem as bad as they possibly can.
And so they fight, fight, fight, fight against having such a thing as the...
The Yucca Mountain.
Yeah, the Yucca Mountain.
Let me change the subject here, because we've got to start wrapping this up here.
We're already over time, but I want to get back a little bit on foreign policy here, which the question is about right-wing scaremongering at Newsmax.com and WorldNet Daily and terrible places like that, about how the Iranians, assuming, I guess, in our wildest imagination that they had a gun-type uranium nuke, could somehow shoot it in a missile over America and, by way of a giant electromagnetic pulse, short out all of our circuits.
And I just wonder if you can share, with your vast experience in nuclear weapons technology, what you know about the subject, and is that something that Americans ought to be worried about, that we're going to get EMPed in our jammies?
Well, Newt Gingrich has been on this kick now for several years.
He wants to be president, and he apparently thinks this is something that will help him get to be president.
But most recently, he's been accusing the North Koreans, or being worried about the North Koreans doing it.
In my view, it would not be possible, with a gun-type uranium-235 weapon just like that, to do anything, even if they could manage to get it over the United States somehow or another, at 250,000 to 500,000 feet.
I don't know how they'd do that.
But even if they could, it's not the kind of thing that would result in very much electromagnetic pulse.
Well, now, and I'm sorry, because it's my fault, too, for mixing up the analogy and the hypothetical here.
But as you already said, the Bush administration basically has nothing to show that the North Koreans have been enriching uranium.
They made their bombs out of plutonium that they harvested from their reactors after Bush broke the deal with them.
So what about one of their plutonium bombs, as compared to, say, an Iranian uranium bomb that also doesn't exist?
Well, it might generate some electromagnetic pulse.
So the device that we first set off at high altitude was designed.
It was an enhanced radiation device, like a megaton yield, designed to intercept out in space, near space, incoming Soviet ICBM warheads.
It took years and years of development to develop a device like that that would be effective against an incoming, out in outer space, a cold ICBM.
Once we discovered, though, this electromagnetic pulse that went along with the detonation in outer space of such a device, then what we did was, in this country, is we immediately, and the way we discovered it was kind of a problem, that there were some power interruption, power networks in Hawaii that were 700 miles away that were disrupted.
The first thing we did was to spend like a zillion dollars making sure that all of our weapons systems and bases and things like that, we went around and we had these test devices, and we would set off a pulse of some sort and make sure that these things, missile silos, whatever, everything, airplanes, aircraft, were not susceptible to that.
That is, there weren't any loops.
There weren't any bare loops out there, secondary loops, that would be susceptible to this EMP pulse.
I don't know to what extent we did that to our grid, electrical grid in this country, but I assume, well, I'm sure we did something.
Well, so to ground us back in reality, this sounds like the kind of thing that if the Russians set off some of their biggest multiple, maybe hundred megaton hydrogen bombs, thermonuclear bombs.
Actually designed to enhance the radiation output.
Right.
So this is something that a third world state like Iran or North Korea could never hope to achieve in a hundred years.
Yeah.
Well, at the present time, North Korea apparently can't even figure out how to hold their weapons, their implosion devices together long enough or to have uniform enough compression or something like that that they can get really very much of the yield out of the plutonium that they've got.
Right.
Their bomb that they tested a couple of years back fizzled and only kind of half detonated, they say, right?
Well, the Russians claimed higher and they had a seismic yield measurement and they're right next door and they know, you know, in order to have a reliable seismic yield measurement, you need to know depth of burial and you need to have the geology well characterized in that area and then you have to be ready to make the measurement and then, you know, have that sort of thing.
I mean, we did a lot of that at the Devada Test Site.
We always had well instrumented seismic yield measurement devices around and all that sort of thing and it gives you an immediate number.
It's not very accurate but, you know, you know right away and there are certain characteristics to the seismic signal that may or may not, you know.
Well, but it certainly wasn't, I mean, from all accounts, it was not a complete and successful test though, right?
No, but the Russians did claim it was in, you know, several kilotons which is more than anybody else has been willing to admit.
Yeah, well, and more than anybody ought to have the power to detonate.
All right, well, listen, I got to cut it here because I have another interview lined up but I really appreciate all of your writing, Doc, as always and your time on the show today.
Okay, well, I hope that it was of some use.
The main thing, of course, is that it would be nice if we had somebody who knows something about nuclear weapons, who really knows, you know.
Yeah, well, that's you.
I don't know what's been going on in the last 20 years but I think practically nothing, you know.
That's my impression.
All right, well, thanks very much for your time today, Doc.
Sure.