08/15/08 – Gordon Prather – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm pleased to welcome back my friend, Dr. Gordon Prather.
He writes for Antiwar.com every weekend, every Saturday and Sunday, you can find his article.
It's Antiwar.com slash Prather for the address there.
And Dr. Prather, you should know, spent his entire life working for the US government in the military.
I believe he was in the Navy.
Then he worked at the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, designing and making and testing nuclear weapons.
He was the chief scientist of the army, the right hand man of various senators, helping them to draft the policy and implement nuclear nonproliferation policy and such like that.
He's a real expert.
You can go read his bio for yourself at Antiwar.com slash Prather.
But I just want you to know that when we talk about nuclear weapons with our in-house nuclear physicist here, that he really does know what he's talking about.
You won't find any Scott Ritter articles challenging his expertise, to say the least.
Welcome back to the show, Doc.
Oh, that's fine.
Yeah.
I'm glad to be back, Scott.
I would like to make a correction, though, and that's when I was in the nuclear weapons business in the Navy and when I was at the Lawrence Livermore lab and later at Sandia National Laboratory.
I was not a government employee, at least I don't consider being a naval officer a government employee.
Then, of course, the labs, one of the key reasons for their success is that they are contractor-operated.
In the case of Lawrence Livermore, operated at that time by the University of California Board of Regents, and Sandia, when I was there, was operated pro bono by AT&T, Ma Bell.
And then since 1991 or 2, I have not worked for government.
So the period of my government employment was from 1977, when I left Sandia National Laboratory, until the end of the Reagan administration, in which I was a political appointee.
Okay.
So that's just a waste of a lot of time there.
No, that's okay.
I should have just read the damn thing instead of going off the top of my head.
Yeah.
Okay.
So here's the funniest thing that I've read in a long time.
Close doesn't count, except in horseshoes and five megaton exo-atmospheric enhanced radiation nuclear explosions.
That was in one of the columns that I wrote just as the Bush-Cheney administration came in, in 2001.
And the article essentially focused on the difference between what the Clinton administration had tried to do in terms of anti-ballistic missile defense, and what some Los Alamos National Lab scientists had proposed in an unclassified article in the Strategic Review in the fall of 1991.
Now this is very important right now, because the polls just finally agreed.
They signed on the bottom line yesterday afternoon, right?
Well, I don't know about that, but anyway, the title of their article was Countering the Threat of the Well-Armed Tyrant, and then a Modest Proposal for Small Nuclear Weapons.
Now, I don't want to waste a lot of time on this, but the way our system works, and it's also the way, at least in theory, the Russian system works, is the military goes to essentially the civilian sector and says, we need a nuclear weapon with the following characteristics.
And so the civilian sector, in our case it's Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia, come back and say, well, these are the things that we could do.
And so it's in the nature of this relationship that these Los Alamos scientists, Dowler and Howard, made this proposal.
There were four different kinds of new nuclear weapons that they suggested there.
And there was a 10-ton yield-penetrating micro-nuke to destroy bunkers.
There was a 100-ton yield.
Bear in mind that ...
How big was Hiroshima?
Yeah, 20 kilotons.
20 kilotons was the ...
So we're talking thousands, a thousandth of ...
We're talking about really small yields.
So real, that's why they call them a micro-nuke, I guess.
Well, the micro-nukes were only 10 tons, and that's about the yield, though, of our atomic demolition munitions, which we had deployed all over Europe.
And of course, when the Soviet Warsaw Pact collapsed, President Bush, the elder, proceeded to start bringing all of those weapons back to this country and dismantling them and recovering the fuel that was in them, the fissile material.
Okay, so that's 10 tons.
That's good for blowing up a bridge or something.
A hundred-ton yield mini-nukes were to counter ballistic missiles, and a thousand-ton yield tiny nukes were for use on the battlefield.
And they also proposed having some high-power microwave and electromagnetic pulse-generating nukes.
Okay.
My article basically pointed out that we really do have a need for these 100-ton yield mini-nukes to counter ballistic missiles.
Now, the reason the yield is so small is that in ordinary nuclear weapons, you boost them and then you use the neutrons that come out of the boost to fission a whole bunch of more material.
So, in an ordinary nuclear weapon, almost all the yield is from fission.
But in a 100-ton yield mini-nuke, you don't have all that extra fissile material in there, and what you wind up doing is having enhanced radiation, both X-rays and neutrons.
And since these things are going to counter ballistic missile re-entry vehicles way out in space—well, not way out in space, but outside the atmosphere—virtually all the yield goes into enhanced radiation.
And so, that's to be contrasted with the original Spartan anti-nuclear ABM counter warhead, which was, I think it's 5 megatons, weighed 1,000 tons or something like that—not 1,000 tons, but a ton.
Okay, so— Well, you say in that article that, you know, the old plan, the 5 megaton bomb, that was for basically shooting into space and setting off a massive nuclear explosion in order to attempt to thwart dozens or even hundreds of incoming Russian warheads at a time, whereas the smaller kiloton, smaller yield interceptors, because the technology is better, they can steer them better, lock onto targets better, that they could use smaller yield nuclear explosions in space, and being closer to the actual warheads themselves can kill them with the radiation and not have to resort to using these massive megaton blasts, right?
That's right.
That's correct.
It can almost make it directed energy, that is, it doesn't go out uniformly in all directions and it does minimal disturbance of the atmosphere.
Those Spartan 5 megaton jobbies, we discovered right away in operations like Starfish, that it causes huge electromagnetic pulses, but dipole radiation from its interaction with the atmosphere, even though it's way outside the atmosphere, but it still does that.
Okay.
Well, at any rate, I was, in my article in 2001, I said the ABM system that the Clinton administration had been working on did not involve a nuclear weapon of any sort, it involved what they called a kinetic kill vehicle.
Right, shooting a bullet with a bullet.
Yeah, and the big problem was, is that it was to be a mid-course intercept, kind of, re-entry vehicle intercept, outside the atmosphere, and so we were going to be firing a hot bullet at something that was cold, and the system depended upon being able to home in on the infrared signature of the incoming re-entry vehicle.
Oh, come on.
It was very, very low.
Boy, that sure sounds like a government program to me.
Wait a minute.
But the reason given by the Clinton administration for pursuing this course was that, well, you know, they might have anthrax in that warhead, and not a nuclear weapon at all, and if you just use the enhanced radiation warhead, small enhanced radiation warhead outside the atmosphere, it might not kill all those anthrax germs.
Really?
That was their rationale.
And so they put, I don't know how many, hundreds of billions of dollars into developing this program where they would shoot a bullet at a bullet, and the bullet that they would be shooting, the anti-ballistic missile, would operate on infrared.
It would be a heat-seeking missile in order to hit metal vehicles in outer space that radiate nothing but cold.
Well, it's worse than that.
The kinetic energy kill vehicle, which would be detached from the missile at high altitude and be headed in the general direction of the incoming re-entry vehicles, and it would be almost hypersonic velocities.
It was the one that had the infrared sensors, okay?
If it missed an inch, as I say in my article, that's as good as a mile, whereas if they had relatively small mini-nukes, enhanced radiation warheads, which the labs know how to build, then you've got some chance of knocking down these incoming re-entry vehicles.
Okay.
Well, in any case, the Bush administration didn't take my advice and they went ahead and, as best I can tell, they just continued development of the Clinton system.
And that's the one that we're deploying in Alaska.
I gather it's also the one we now have agreed to deploy in Poland, for goodness sake.
And I think that's part of the deal for the Czech Republic.
They decided, well, if we're going to get the radar station here, we want the missiles to protect it, too.
So what that means is those systems, if deployed in Poland, in the Czech Republic or wherever, are intended to intercept the Russian ICBMs that are headed towards us, you know, not the United States, not Poland, not Czech Republic, in mid-course, that is, outside the atmosphere.
So the Poles have just now demanded and got the terminal defense system that we've got deployed in lots of places, and it's also similar to what we've got on our fleet, the Aegis cruisers, which is a terminal, in comes the re-entry vehicle, and it's hotter than a pistol, and you intercept it, again, not with nukes, with some kind of kinetic kill vehicle.
But at least you've got some chance of doing it if it comes roaring in from space and it's hot as a pistol, and you've got a missile that can calculate the trajectory and it knows approximately where the hell it's going to be at some future point, and you've got other and other kinds of sensors to supply tiny corrections to your Patriot missile and ballistic missile system.
Can you comment on the administration's claims that the purpose behind all this is to protect us from a rogue missile by a state like North Korea or Iran that may someday be able to come up with one rocket that they can shoot at us, something like that, versus Russia?
Well, as I've just said, if they deploy that missile defense system in Poland, which we were now apparently agreed to do, where's Poland halfway between Russia and us, or something like that?
I mean, it's clearly not intended to defend Poland, and that's why the Poles have demanded that we provide them this other system, this Patriot system, which would be effective against some kinds of ballistic missiles that were aimed at the Poles.
And what the Russians have done, since the Clinton administration first started moving NATO eastward towards Moscow, is they've developed a whole new class of ballistic missiles that they claim, and I suppose it's probably true, it's called Iskander S-26 is the designation, but it's a missile that is especially designed, a fairly short-range ballistic missile that goes up in a depressed trajectory, doesn't go up real high so you can't see it from a long ways away, and then it comes back down and then essentially maneuvers in order to defeat the radars and the other kinds of systems on the Patriot battery.
In other words, it's designed to counter the point-defense kinds of ABM systems that we and the Israelis and our fleets and all these other people have developed.
And there are statements today by Russian generals in charge of their ballistic missile program saying, OK, Poland, by accepting those Patriots, demanding that you get those Patriots, you've just made yourself a target.
You're our first priority now.
And we've got the missile that can take those dudes out, you know.
Your Patriots are just a red flag that you've flung in our face.
Well, see, this is what I'm getting at.
It sort of seems like it's nothing but putting targets there and, you know, troop wires for war, but what kind of incredibly elaborate system would they have to install in Poland that could actually counter a Russian attack on the United States?
It would have to be massive.
Well, I don't know.
If you've got ten launchers in Poland and ten in Czech and you've got another ten in Alaska and maybe ten in Canada, who knows how crazy people will think.
All of those together, they're all going to be these, as far as I know, they're going to be these kinetic kill mechanisms.
But the warheads on this new class of Russian depressed trajectory Patriot killers, they ain't going to be kinetic energy kill mechanisms.
They're going to be small nuclear weapons.
Yeah, geez, let's hope it doesn't come to that kind of conflict with them.
Can I ask you about Iran?
Well, I don't know much about Iran, but go ahead.
Well, you know about the IAEA and you know about what the IAEA says about Iran, and it seems to me abundantly clear in, you know, chaos radio land and among people who read antiwar.com, but I'm pretty sure that among the rest of our society, it just has not been made plain, Dr. Prather, what the IAEA has concluded about the Iranian nuclear program or even what the CIA has concluded for that matter.
I was wondering if you could help explain the situation a little bit.
Well, in the run up to the war on Iraq in 2003, none of the intelligence estimates by this country, our intelligence services, ever even mentioned the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had been in Iraq at least once a year in 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, going back like that, to check on to see whether or not their seals and their padlocks and all that sort of thing on what remained of anything nuclear in Iraq were still intact.
And when they went in, they would see no sign whatsoever that anybody had made any attempt to meddle with those locks.
There was tons of yellow cake under IAEA seal and padlock, and they would report that at least once a year to the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors.
And then, of course, the inspectors actually went in, but anyway, back to the intelligence estimates.
They never ever mentioned any of that.
You would never know from reading our intelligence estimates that there was such a thing as the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And it continues to this day, this NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, that was released in 2007, late in 2007, that said, we assess that the Iranians ceased their nuclear weapons research program in 2003 and have not restarted it.
We have assessed, and they don't even mention the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been given almost total license to go anywhere in Iran they want to go and to talk to anybody they have any legitimate reason to talk to for all those years, for four years.
And so when they come out with the National Intelligence Estimate, you'd never know, reading it, that the IAEA even existed.
And it's the same thing over and over again.
When Condi Rice or somebody like that comes along and makes some statement about Iran's nuclear weapons program, again, they act just like that the IAEA doesn't exist.
And of course, that's the purpose, or that's one of the purposes of having all signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty subscribe to the IAEA safeguards and physical security regime, because they are the experts.
And they know when something weird is going on in a nuclear program in some country that they're watching.
And in particular, they know perfectly well that the Iranians are not developing or not producing weapons-grade nuclear material.
Furthermore, they couldn't be able to develop that capability without the IAEA knowing it.
Okay, now see, let's reiterate a couple of things here, because I think you just hit on two of the major points there.
Well, first of all, there is such a thing as the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They have a safeguards agreement with the Iranian government.
And they do have, as you described, more or less carte blanche to inspect whatever they want there.
The Iranians have voluntarily agreed to go much beyond what their safeguards agreement requires of them.
And that's been true since 2003.
Now, they're no longer totally cooperating as they once did.
But they're still in complete compliance with what is required of them under their safeguards agreement that they signed as a result of being a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And now, there is a difference.
Is this what you're telling me, scientifically speaking, somehow there's a difference between 3.6% pure uranium-235 and 90-something percent pure?
One is low-grade enriched uranium for electricity.
The other is what they call weapons-grade.
You could make a bomb out of this.
So one, you're telling me there's a difference there, Mr. Nuclear Physicist.
And two, you're telling me that they couldn't make the switch between what sort of percentage they were enriching the uranium to in the presence of the IAEA, without the IAEA immediately recognizing what was happening in front of their eyes.
Yeah, what happens in the uranium-235 enrichment business is you don't enrich the uranium-235.
All you've got is what's there.
What you do is you cast out nearly all of the uranium-238, which amounts to 97-something or other percent of natural uranium.
In other words, if you start out with many tons of uranium hexafluoride, natural uranium hexafluoride, and you go to weapons-grade U-235, you don't have much output.
And you'd have to be an absolute idiot, even if you didn't realize that they had reconfigured their uranium enrichment cascades so as to continue to enrich and enrich and enrich and enrich and enrich.
Because what you're really doing is you're throwing out, throwing out, throwing out, and throwing out.
And so what you wind up with is really, really not very much weapons-grade uranium.
And you've told me before they would need, what, 120 pounds of above-90% pure U-235 in order to make a single, most simple sort of gun-type fission nuke?
Yeah, and of course, I think that's the lowest.
The South Africans made some weapons, and they only weighed about a ton, and they may have gotten down to maybe 100 pounds of weapons-grade uranium.
But they never tested them, so we don't know whether or not they would have been effective or not.
But this is another, what is the word, sneaky thing that Condi and the rest of these people pull, especially the Israelis.
They take the most sophisticated weapon design they know about, and they take the amount of fissile material that's in it.
And they say, okay, that's a threshold, and that's how much material you would need.
But that's not true for somebody who's just starting out in the world, like South Africa or North Korea or somebody, or even Iran.
You don't start out with the most sophisticated design that you can think of.
You make the simplest thing you can think of, and that's a gun weapon.
And in order to make a gun weapon, what you really need is two 60-pound pieces of almost pure uranium-235.
And that's what the Iranians don't have?
Not only do they not have it, but their Ayatollah in charge says that it is against our religion, and we absolutely would refuse to have anything to do with developing nuclear weapons.
And whether we want to take the word of an Ayatollah or not, there simply is no evidence anywhere that he's lying.
Well, that's correct.
And that's what the National Intelligence Estimate of, I guess it was last November or December, said, is that they said, well, we think they had a program at one time, but in 2003 they stopped it.
Well, there's no evidence, as far as the IAEA is concerned, that they ever had a nuclear weapons program.
Ever.
But, of course, the Iran National Intelligence Estimate just ignores the existence of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been making inspections in Iran since 1970, 1974 or 5, I don't remember exactly when they first started.
And then since 2003, the Iranians have voluntarily said, okay, notwithstanding the fact that you're only supposed to be able to go here on certain times and given us plenty of warning and all that sort of thing, you can go anywhere you want to if you've got some reason.
And you can talk to anybody you want to if you've got some reason, and you can go through our files.
And this funny story that's just come out recently is that this business about the manual that supposedly showed them how to cast uranium into hemispheres, according to the article I read, literally it fell out of a box of stuff that was in storage that the IAEA inspectors were going through.
And they say, what the hell is this?
And the Iranians say, gee, I don't know, I never saw it before.
Well, and they at least confirmed that the Pakistanis have a brochure just like this that they give everybody they sell enrichment equipment to.
So it's a pretty easy explanation where they got it, and no real reason to believe that they would have had to ask for it to get it or anything like that.
And then pitch it into a cardboard box and put it in a warehouse someplace.
I don't know.
Well, the news right now, and I think it's fairly serious, and the Russians obviously think it's serious, is that by demanding to have these terminal defense ABM systems for their own protection, they've made themselves a number one target of Russian ballistic missiles.
This is one of the laws of physics, right?
Every action an equal and opposite reaction?
Well, I think it's even probably a little more involved.
The Russians have developed over the last 20 years, since the Clinton administration and now the Bush administration has pushed NATO eastward right up to the gates of the Kremlin, practically, they deliberately developed this nuclear weapon to counter exactly this sort of thing.
In other words, in the past, mostly what they had along these lines, this is during the Cold War.
They would have had tactical war missiles and bombs and things like that to conduct their war in Europe, in the Folda Gap and all that sort of thing.
But since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there's not supposed to be any of that.
They withdrew all of their nuclear weapons that were intended to be used in that war, and we did the same, unilaterally.
Bush just did it.
Bush the elder did it, and brought them all back to this country.
But apparently now we've got some more nuclear weapons back in these countries.
Well, and that Red Army that you were worried, or your job back in the day was making sure could not pour across that Folda Gap, no longer exists.
That's right.
And now we are arming a bunch of those Warsaw Pact countries, and we're even trying, apparently, to get a country, Georgia, and maybe Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union, to arm themselves so as to further threaten the Russians, who are already somewhat paranoid, you know.
Yeah, well, and with good reason.
All right, we're already over time here, Doc.
I've got to let you go, but I want to urge everybody to check out Dr. Gordon Prather's new article.
It's called, McCain Speaks for Every American?
The answer to that, by the way, sir, is no.
It's totally unrelated to what we're talking about here, or somewhat unrelated.
But I'm glad we had this little talk, and I just want to call your attention, the Russians understand the significance of the Poles now having Patriot missiles, anti-ballistic missiles, point-defense ballistic missiles.
And one last thing.
Go ahead.
I've got this quote here that says, I'm looking right at it, it's starting me to believe, The Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, standing by the Georgian President, signed a cease-fire agreement with Russia on Friday.
Ms. Rice then declared that all Russian troops must leave Georgian territory immediately.
Now, is this woman nuts, or just totally an idiot?
What do you suppose a cease-fire agreement that was proposed by Russia would include?
Sure as hell wouldn't have been the immediate and orderly withdrawal of Russian armed forces and the return of those forces to Russia.
I've got to tell you, the headline, Rice travels abroad to amend cease-fire agreement, to undo it, and to say, I love this, the phrase still, territorial integrity.
Even though, of course, Abkhazia and Ossetia have been autonomous, whether recognized by the United Nations or not, they've been autonomous since the fall of the Soviet Union a generation ago.
And here she's going to undo the peace treaty?
That's incredible.
I think I mentioned in my latest article, I ran across it and I didn't know it, but Stalin, Joseph Stalin, who was a Georgian, had already granted those two provinces, essentially, autonomy.
They were autonomous for administrative purposes, in the Soviet Union.
It's been that way since the 20s.
Right, that is, the communist leadership in Ossetia and Abkhazia, they took their orders straight from Moscow, not from Georgia.
Right.
In those days.
Well, I don't know, they were semi-autonomous, that is, they had their own little governing outfit or something.
In other words, they've been pretty much the way they were now, even when they were part of the Soviet Union.
Right.
They were their own separate satellites back then.
Yeah.
Their own little government and their own little, you know, I don't know, I'm sure Stalin wanted to murder a bunch of them, he could have, like he did in Ukraine, but, well, at any rate.
Okay, well, it just boggles the mind.
Non-President, I'm going to make you Secretary of State.
You can go around and tell everybody they can make whatever they want.
Whatever you do, is there some way we can keep Condi Rice in Hawaii or some damn place?
Yes, in your own vacation, keep her there?
Yeah.
All right, see you later.
Yeah, we'd certainly only be better off for it.
All right, thanks very much.
All right, folks, that's Dr. Gordon Prather, our in-house nuclear physicist at Antiwar.com.
His new article will be running this weekend, McCain Speaks for Every American.
That's Antiwar.com slash Prather.