Ron Smith: Politics and Policy

It has just been reported that President Obama has been engaged in extensive consultation with an independent foreign policy expert.  He is apparently contemplating making an important policy statement about the use of nuclear weapons.  Specifically, he proposes to address the issue of nuclear deterrence and the associated doctrine of ‘no-first-use’. 

Quite right, you might think.  President Obama has been much criticised for his reliance in these matters, on an inner circle of political appointees, who have not had the requisite expertise.  This has been the burden of much of the criticism from his three previous Secretaries of Defence.

Bryan Leyland: “Things you know that ain't so” - nuclear radiation

As the American humorist Will Rogers said: “It’s not what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” 

Low levels of nuclear radiation are dangerous.

Ron Smith: The first nuclear test at Malden Island

On the morning of 15 May, 1957, I was on the upper deck of HMS Messina, with the rest of the ship’s company.  We were stopped some twenty-five miles northwest of Malden Island.  It was 11am and, since Malden Island is only a couple of hundred miles south of the equator, it was already hot.  Certainly, we would have seemed over-dressed, clothed, as we were in long-trousers, socks and boots, and a long-sleeved shirt.  This outfit was then topped-off with heavy white gauntlets and (of the same material) a substantial balaclava.  The latter two items were what the navy called, ‘anti-flash gear’.

From the loudspeaker system, we heard, “This will be a live run.”  We knew what that meant, because we had practiced this performance.  The Vulcan bomber, whose vapour-trail we could see high above us, was carrying a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb.  The bomber was flying from Christmas Island, four hundred miles away, across the equator, the base for a series of weapon tests, of which this was to be the first.

Ron Smith: The Effects of Radiation

Nearly thirty years ago an extraordinary accident occurred in a steelworks in Taiwan, as a result of which, a substantial batch of recycled steel became contaminated with radioactive Cobalt-60 from discarded medical isotopes. The resulting steel was used in the construction of apartment buildings, businesses and schools in Taipei and its suburbs. That this had happened was not discovered until nearly ten years later, and the full extent of the radiation exposure was not realised for another ten years. Some people lived in the contaminated apartments for almost twenty years before they were finally evacuated. At about this point, serious systematic studies of the health consequences for long-term inhabitants of the apartments, and users of the schools and businesses, were undertaken by Taiwanese medical academics. They were ultimately published in the Spring 2004 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Ron Smith: Sheep and Nuclear Waste

Greenpeace and other activists recently spent almost a week chaining themselves to railway lines, dressing up as sheep and blocking roads in a determined, but ultimately fruitless effort to block a shipment of nuclear waste from France to Germany. It would have been much more in the interests of German tax payers and energy consumers (not to mention the German police) if they had spent only a fraction of the time they devoted to the imaginative planning of fresh stunts, to attempting to understand the nature of the material whose transportation they condemn and the extensive arrangements that are made for its safe storage and ultimate disposal. Here are the basic facts for those interested in nuclear power and the use of civil disobedience by those who oppose it (and I speak as one who has actually been to the plant in France, where the material originated, and to the Gorleben facility, where it now is). And if any reader has a friend in Germany, it might be a kindness to pass this on.

Ron Smith: Bushehr and the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Programme

The international community continues to condemn Iran for nuclear activities that, in their context, can have no other purpose than the production of fissile material for the fabrication of nuclear weapons. However, there is an important distinction to be made between the proliferation significance of the Bushehr power reactor, that is about to come into operation, and virtually all the other nuclear activities that Iran has been engaged in for a number of years (see my columns on this site on September 6th and 19th of last year). To be sure, the processing of uranium ore, its conversion into uranium hexachloride, and subsequent enrichment could be claimed to be relevant to the manufacture of fuel rods for civilian purposes. The trouble with this justification is that Iran really only has one plant that could use these rods (Bushehr) and the fuel for this has already been provided by Russia, who also completed the building of the reactor. Indeed, the Russian contract under which this was done specifies that in addition to supplying fresh fuel, they will also take away the spent fuel, for storage, or reprocessing. Iran, therefore, needs to do nothing in the way of preparing fresh fuel itself and nothing in the way of ‘completing’ the nuclear fuel cycle by reprocessing.

Ron Smith: New Zealand and Nuclear Cargoes

They say that you always remember where you were when you heard certain items of momentous news, like the death of President Kennedy, or Princess Diana. In my case this principle also applies to when I first became aware that shipping containers of refined uranium ore (yellowcake) were passing through New Zealand ports. It was on 11May 1998 and I was sitting in a conference room of the Cooperative Monitoring Centre of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The hosts were demonstrating, to a small audience of academic and diplomatic persons from the Asia-Pacific region, technology they had developed for the continuous GPS monitoring of the transportation of sensitive material. In this case it was container loads of yellowcake from South Australia. We watched a moving light on a large computer screen as the cargo left Adelaide and moved along the Victorian coast to Melbourne and thence on to Sydney. I should say at this point that we were mostly well-known to each other (having met together on previous occasions) and the fact that I was from ‘anti-nuclear’ New Zealand was also well-appreciated.

Ron Smith: The Significance of Chernobyl

Whenever the subject of civilian nuclear power arises, we sooner or later come to Chernobyl. For some this is the rhetorical equivalent of playing the ace. To mention the events of April 26, 1986, is taken to end all serious debate on the desirability of nuclear power as an energy source. But the reality is (to continue the metaphor) that it is a cheap ‘trick’.

Ron Smith: Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

The project of abolishing nuclear weapons has attracted a great deal of passionate support down through the years but the debate has been typically characterised by imprecision in specifying what the end state would be and how it would be maintained. A sequence of possible measures might be envisaged. As a first stage, all nuclear explosive devices (warheads) would be separated from their delivery systems and then broken down. The core fissile material would then removed and safely held or destroyed. It is taken as axiomatic that merely de-alerting nuclear strike systems, or separating the warheads, would not amount to nuclear disarmament, though it could be seen as a measure that would increase security. In such a case, it would simply be a matter of how long it would take to reconnect the warhead with its delivery system.

Ron Smith: Nuclear Waste - Opportunity or Imposition

The town of Carlsbad, in southern New Mexico, is famous for the enormous and widely visited Carlsbad Caverns, some 20 miles south of the town. Much more recently, Carlsbad has also become known as the site (just east of the town) of the first operating deep-geological repository for long-lived nuclear waste. I first visited what became known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the middle of 1999, the year it opened and I was there again, a little over twelve months later, at an international meeting devoted (of course!) to discussing the disposal of nuclear wastes.