Lt. General Robert G. Gard, Jr., Chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, discusses the ‘terrorists with nukes‘ rhetoric at the Nuclear Security Summit, unsecured fissile material in countries that are beyond the limited scope of Nunn-Lugar, the less-than-stellar security at many US and Russian nuclear sites and how getting the facts right on Iran’s nuclear program is difficult even for the well-informed.
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Alright, sorry to fake you out guys, we'll listen to Anthrax later.
Now we've got to start the show.
Our first guest on the show today is retired Lieutenant General Robert G. Gard, Jr.
He's the chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, we talked to him a couple of weeks ago about possible consequences of war with Iran, and now I figure it's time to catch up on nuclear policy.
We've got a new START treaty, I think, a new treaty with Russia, we have new Iran news, and also the summit on nuclear security that Barack Obama sat at the head of the table at the other day.
So welcome back to the show, General Gard, how are you doing this morning?
Pleased to be here.
Alright, so I guess let's start with this summit on nuclear security.
Almost every leader in every country was invited to this thing, what did they accomplish?
Well I think what was done was to raise the realization among many of the leaders worldwide of the dangers of an attack by terrorists with a nuclear explosive device.
This has not seemed real to too many people, and we've tended to treat this in a routine way instead of giving it the priority it deserves.
And you think that that, well, how much priority does that deserve?
I mean, the idea that a stateless group could get together an actual nuclear fissionable nuclear weapon and set it off in the United States, is that a pretty big danger, you think?
I would say it is a relatively low priority, but it is not only possible, but over time even probable, unless we secure the fissile materials that they could use to fashion a nuclear explosive device.
Well there's a guy named Richard Mayberry, who's sort of a financial prognosticator kind of guy with a newsletter, and he's been pretty good.
He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union back in, I guess, 85, 86, something like that.
And his prediction is that at some point, somebody is going to nuke DC.
If it's not a nation state like Russia or China, it would be a terrorist group, because you can't just go around the world making millions and millions and millions of people want to kill you without some of them actually doing it at some point.
He wasn't necessarily saying, you know, I'm an al-Zawahiri is going to do it, or something like that, just that as a matter of probability, here we have a world with thousands of nuclear weapons, and here we have a world with millions of people who have reasons to take revenge on the United States.
Yes, and the problem is that there is enough loose plutonium and highly enriched uranium, some of it not secured very well at all, so that should terrorists get their hands on it, and once they get it, it would be extremely difficult to intercept it if they tried to move it into one of our ports or across our borders and explode it in this country.
So what we must do, and what the summit was all about, was to secure that material at its source, make it much more difficult for terrorists to buy or steal any of it.
All right, now, since the end of the Cold War, Senator Dick Lugar has basically spearheaded the effort.
There was originally the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici bill, I think it was, those three, that I think right after the end of the Cold War, they said, let's buy up all the extra fissionable material we can find on the planet, plutonium, highly enriched uranium, all the former Soviet republics that had nuclear weapons stationed there, and we'll just, you know, the Russians need the money, and we don't want a bunch of loose nuclear material around, and yet, as far as I can tell, Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. did basically nothing to further that policy, and yet, my understanding is that Barack Obama was kind of taken under Dick Lugar's wing in the Senate, and was, I think he even brought him on a tour of Russia, didn't he?
And kind of really impressed on this young man that something's got to be done about all this extra, especially plutonium, in the world.
Yes, Barack Obama, then Senator Obama, did accompany Senator Lugar on a tour of Russia, but the non-Lugar program was essentially to secure Russian weapons, and to get the weapons out of three of the states in the former Soviet Union, and back to Russia.
But there's material elsewhere, and John Lugar has made a good deal of progress in securing Russian weapons, and to some extent, Russian fissile materials, but there's more out there than just in Russia and the United States.
And there, John Lugar's writ did not go beyond that, and consequently, there is now, in places like South Africa and Brazil and other countries, highly enriched uranium that is not as well secured as it needs to be.
And what the summit was all about was to gather world leaders together, try to point up dangers, and to get them to commit to taking positive action, to nail down these materials, before terrorists can get their hands on them.
All right, now I know that highly enriched uranium could even mean 20% medical grade, but to be weapons-grade, it's got to be roughly 94% or better uranium-235.
So when you're talking about highly enriched uranium in Brazil and in South Africa, are you talking about weapons-grade?
I thought at least the South Africans had given up all of their weapons-grade material, along with their weapons.
Oh, they'd given up all of their weapons.
There was, just a year or two ago, a raid in Pelham Daba in South Africa, which is a facility east of Johannesburg, that had enough highly enriched uranium in it for 25 weapons.
An armed group of four men got through the outer fence, got through the electronics, got into the control room, shot an armed guard, and spent 45 minutes there.
So by no means have we policed up the highly enriched uranium from all these countries, even in the case of South Africa, which has given up its weapons.
Okay, so now, the agreement that they reached yesterday, it's not a new treaty, or it doesn't add anything to the Non-Proliferation Treaty or anything like that.
It's basically just a general agreement by all these states that they're going to give up the rest of their weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, is that right?
Some states made a commitment, for example, Vietnam and a couple of others that I don't recall right now, saying that they would repatriate their highly enriched uranium.
The problem is that in the 1950s and 60s, we had something called an Adams Peace Program, where we provided highly enriched uranium to fuel research reactors in some 26 countries.
And not to be outdone, the then Soviet Union responded by doing the same thing in some 17 countries.
So you're quite right that you can produce medical isotopes with uranium enriched only up to 20%, but unfortunately, the highly enriched uranium that we exported was quite concentrated and definitely weapons-grade.
Yeah, I guess some of the older reactors, they have the light water reactors and so forth now, but some of the older ones really did run on the very highly enriched stuff, right?
Yes, and there's still a lot of that out there.
There is around the world right now some 3.5 million pounds of highly enriched uranium.
Now that does count the US and Russia, but we're not immune.
Our security has not been as stringent in some of our facilities as it should be.
And the Russians have highly enriched uranium spread in some 50 locations.
And there's always the risk of an inside job on selling it to terrorists.
So a lot of work remains to be done.
Now I was surprised to hear you say that Vietnam had a nuclear program.
I wasn't aware of that at all.
Well, I believe that that's one of the countries to which the Soviet Union provided a research reactor and materials, and Vietnam did agree to repatriate its highly enriched uranium that was used in a research reactor back to Russia.
Now one thing that was really surprising was that during the news conference, Barack Obama called on Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, obviously as a nuclear weapons state.
What do you think's going to happen there?
Well I don't think that Israel is likely to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
What do you mean as a non-nuclear weapons state or as a nuclear weapons?
Well I mean they'd have to admit that they have nukes if they're going to join the NPT.
Well that's right.
Technically in the NPT there are only five so-called nuclear weapons states.
The others that have developed a nuclear capability since then are not recognized by the United States or by the Adherence Treaty as technically nuclear weapons states, even though they have them.
Yeah, and I guess the original, pretty predictably I guess, the first news story said that the Israeli response was, yeah right, and that's basically the end of that.
They're not going to join the NPT.
No, and I don't think that it's likely that India and Pakistan will either.
All right now, yesterday I had some really good guests on the show, but I was just overtired General Garden.
I just kind of phoned it in, it wasn't that good of a radio show, and I kind of had the blues about it, until the Wolf Blitzer show came on yesterday on CNN.
And I realized, wow, at least comparatively speaking, I have the best broadcasting situation here going on in probably all of the New World.
It was unbelievable, the nonsense on Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday.
They did a whole segment on the Iranian nuclear program that made no mention, not one mention at all, didn't even offhandedly imply the existence, sir, of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the safeguards agreement, or any inspections going on.
They basically just said, well, Iran now has enough uranium to make a bomb.
Even though it's safeguarded, it's at 3.6%, very small amounts of it are at 20%, none of it is at 94% weapons grade.
None of it could be diverted to make it weapons grade without the IAEA knowing about it.
And yet they talked about this for 10 minutes more, maybe, on the Wolf Blitzer show yesterday, with no mention whatsoever of any safeguarding of the Iranian nuclear program.
Basically they ended with, it's a big mystery, and for all we know, they're going to have a nuclear bomb put together by the day after tomorrow and kill us all.
Well, I think you're correct that the Natanz facility, which is the location that the Iranians use to enrich uranium, is under IAEA scrutiny at the present time.
What we don't know is whether they have other facilities that have not yet been exposed.
You'll recall that several months ago, they announced that we knew they were constructing a second facility, and sheepishly the Iranians admitted it, even though it is not yet operational.
Well, I'm not so sure about that.
I mean, isn't it the case that they declared it to the IAEA at the end of September, or pardon me, at the end of October?
And then after that, Obama pretended to bust them for something they'd already declared to the IAEA?
No, they hadn't declared it until we publicly announced it and exposed it.
I'm not so sure.
I remember it all being hinged upon the assertion in the New York Times that was made by anonymous officials that the only reason they came for it is because they knew we were about to bust them.
But they never even proved that.
Maybe they did.
Maybe they announced it a few hours before we did, because we'd been tracking it for over a year.
Well, I knew that part.
And in fact, I like parsing this, because the CIA had just put, according to Newsweek, Mark Hosenball had just in September of last year, 2009, we're talking about here, put papers on the President's desk saying they stood by the NIE that said that they believed that the Iranians had not made a decision to embark on a nuclear weapons program.
And that was well after, as you just said, well after the CIA knew good and well about the construction of this facility at Natanz.
But I would go back and check the timeline on who leaked what, because it seemed to me like they made a big deal out of saying we busted them.
But in fact, they had already reported what they were doing to the IAEA.
And then the administration just said, well, they only admitted it because they knew we were about to bust them.
But they never proved that.
Well, we had been tracking it, unless officials in our government have lied publicly.
Oh, yeah.
Well, they do that all the time.
We had tracked it for a year, and we're about to announce it.
I think you're correct now that I think back that Iran quickly admitted that they had it.
I think, I don't know, it was the same day or the day before we exposed it.
But the worrisome thing is that they were working on that thing for quite a good while.
They failed to fulfill their obligation to notify the IAEA, and the protocol under which they're operating required them to do so.
Now I'm not an alarmist.
I recognize that Iran does not yet have enough highly enriched uranium, or at least enriched highly enough to produce a weapon.
What's worrisome is that if they can enrich it from about 4% up to 20%, then it gets easier to take it up to 90%.
Now you can produce a weapon, an explosive device, with less than 90% enriched uranium.
In fact, the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima was about 80%.
Most of the weapons that advanced countries have now, you're quite right, have 90-plus percent highly enriched uranium.
But the concern is that if they, well, right now they have enough low-enriched uranium at around 4 or 5%.
They have enough of it.
So if they took the material already enriched and proceeded to enrich it further to get it up to 80-90%, they have enough to make a warhead.
Now the concern is that they'll do what the Koreans did, namely withdraw from the treaty when they enriched the uranium, and then they can put the highly enriched uranium together in such a way that they have an explosive device.
Now does that mean they have the missile to stick it on and launch it against the United States?
No.
That's not going to happen for a number of years.
But the concern is that they will go right up to what Mohammed al-Baradei calls a breakout point.
That is, they have enough highly enriched uranium to make a weapon, they're proceeding to develop a missile, and then at time X they will decide to withdraw from the treaty claiming that their supreme national interests require it.
There are stipulations in the treaty that permit withdrawal.
Right.
Well, and this is, I think, the crux of the matter here, is that they could, in fact, you know, assuming that they have all their centrifuges working well enough, that this breakout capability, as you said, where they could withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty and so forth.
But the point is, they have, all of their uranium is accounted for, and they cannot make that uranium weapons grade without withdrawing from the treaty, kicking the IAEA out of the country like the North Koreans did, and announcing to the world, now we're making bombs.
And this is the part that has me upset, particularly about Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday, but about the narrative about Iran and their nuclear program in general, is that they cannot divert that uranium to military purposes without announcing to the world that that's what they're doing.
I mean, when they take, you could just as easy say they have enough uranium in the ground to make a bomb.
Well, first they have to enrich it to uranium hexafluoride, or not enrich it, but transfer it to uranium hexafluoride gas, and then they have to enrich it up to 90 something percent or at least 80 something percent, as you say there, to get something workable at all for a gun-type nuke.
And anyway, all I'm getting at is, I agree with your details, I'm just saying these are the details that they always leave out.
How can it be?
I mean, we're talking about a push in the United Nations for brand new sanctions, which, you know, Congress's version amounts to a blockade, which is an act of war, you know, as you well know, General.
I mean, we're talking about serious policy based on a giant half-truth, right?
Well, look, right now they're enriching uranium.
We have offered to swap fuel rods for their medical facility for their low-enriched uranium.
They initially agreed and then backed off.
I don't care whether we do it on their soil or elsewhere, I think we should try to follow that up so that they won't have enough low-enriched uranium that, if they continue to enrich it, they can produce enough for weapons.
I'm not so much concerned that they'll suddenly attack somebody with a single nuclear weapon and commit suicide, as I am, the impact that it will have in the region and cause others to kill.
They need to develop weapons so they can deter Iran.
The problem is they can continue to enrich uranium right now, even with the IAEA watching them do it and get it up at higher levels of enrichment.
In other words, no one has stopped them yet from continuing to enrich uranium, despite the UN Security Council resolutions, three in number, urging them to cease and desist.
Although it seems to me, and I'm like you, I'm against anybody having nuclear bombs.
I'm also against America enforcing that rule on other countries, but it seems to me like basically the UN resolutions that demand that the Iranians stop enriching uranium are illegal.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty, which we are signatories to and are bound to respect, and they are signatories to, protects their unalienable right to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
If the United Nations Security Council said the United States can't enrich uranium, I'd grab a rifle.
It's none of their damn business.
You're absolutely right.
Article 4 of the NPT gives all states an inalienable right to pursue atomic power for peaceful purposes.
The problem in the case of Iran was that, even though they were signatories to the NPT, they had a program that was concealed for 18 years before a defector blew the whistle on them.
So you've got a little bit different situation in the case of Iran that violated their obligations under the NPT, and that's what triggered the UN Security Council resolution.
I'm sorry to keep arguing with you, sir, and it very well could be that I don't quite have my facts straight on this, because I am just a layman radio show host here.
But I always thought that basically what happened there was Bill Clinton violated the NPT repeatedly by refusing to let, and intervening with China and Russia to prevent them from selling turnkey facilities to the Iranians.
They were forced to the black market, and then all they were doing was working with, basically buying uranium enrichment equipment from the heavily CIA infiltrated AQ Khan network that the CIA knew had been around for a generation, had a booth at all the arms shows and brochures.
There was nothing even that black market or secret about the AQ Khan network, and we forced them to do it anyway.
The Chinese were ready to sell them a reactor back in 1996 or whatever.
We gave them a reactor when the Shah was there.
I mean, look, the fact is when they developed a uranium enrichment facility as signatory to the NPT, they had an obligation to reveal it to the IAEA as a non-nuclear power under the NPT, and they didn't do it.
But I thought that that's only, that the rules say that's six months before you introduce nuclear material into the equipment.
It's not necessarily required that a country disclose that they actually have equipment or that they plan to use it at some point.
No, but they were enriching uranium.
They had done that.
Well, Natanz was empty in 2005.
They took the BBC on a tour of it.
They didn't start enriching uranium until at least late 2005 at Natanz anyway.
Well, you may be more knowledgeable than I.
Well, I'll send you a link.
They got a picture of it.
It's a giant, empty, underground Walmart-sized warehouse where the Israelis did bust them, and ISIS did bust them in having the Natanz facility there, maybe in the reverse order.
It might have been ISIS got it first, but it was still just under construction.
They were still months and months away from...
So this is what I'm getting at, is that, yes, there's a nuclear program, but there's so much hype about it, even General Guard and even me, and I deal with this stuff every day.
It's hard to parse it all.
There's so much, and there's so much deliberate myths and disinformation on the issue, where it just seems like the Iranian government is guilty of something, but nobody can figure out what, other than to say, well, maybe they have some secret stuff that we don't know about, which is the Rumsfeld standard for starting a war, you know?
Well, it could be that we phonied up all of the information that was taken to the UN Security Council that caused the Security Council to pass the resolutions, but I doubt it.
And there have been three of them, and when you get Russia and China to go along, there's probably some validity to the information that caused the resolutions to pass without being vetoed.
Well, we'll see.
I'm sorry that I went on so long, kept you on so long about Iran, because I really wanted to ask you about the New START Treaty, or exactly whatever it is, between us and Russia, and I'd like to ask you again and again and again about what you see as probable consequences of any American or Israeli or combined war against Iran.
But we'll have to save that for another time.
I hope I can have you back on the show sometime soon, sir.
Okay.
Nice talking with you.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
I really appreciate your time on the show.
Bye.
All right, everybody.
That is Lieutenant General Robert G. Gard, Jr.
He is the chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
It's armscontrolcenter.org.
