A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. He is also a novelist of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on future submarine technology and tactics, which appeared in The Submarine Review, received literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. His recent novel Crush Depth made the Military Book Club's Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late 2002. Tidal Rip was released
from Wm. Morrow/HarperCollins in hardcover in November, 2003, and the paperback edition (October, 2004) quickly hit high on the Barnes & Noble bookstores weekly National Bestseller List. Joe's next book, Straits of Power, was published in hardcover in late November, 2004, and before Christmas broke into Amazon's Top 10 Men's Adventure Fiction.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life Member of the following organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. In August, 2004, Joe was made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge. In November, 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc.
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March 2, 2005
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
The threat of rogue-state and terrorist nukes won't be contained easily or soon. Daily reports in the news media show that nuclear proliferation remains a very serious threat. If anything, progress (or lack thereof) on several fronts ought to make us more worried than ever. These "fronts" - in what amounts to a global cold war against the spread of fission weapons - range from infamous poorly-guarded arms storage depots in Russia, to fresh and troubling intell on the full extent and duration of Dr. A. Q. Khan's nuclear underground, to the yo-yo delay games and nose-thumbing extortion that masquerade as diplomacy by Iran and North Korea. Being subjected to blackmail by a rogue state or terrorist group possessing (or almost or maybe possessing) nukes is unpleasant enough. This cold war could become hellishly hot, if an enemy builds or buys or steals a nuclear weapon and sets it off against a populous target.
Most unfolding news stories about uranium-fueled bombs seem to inadvertently focus on what are in fact intermediate steps on the technical road to obtaining a weapon. Words like "centrifuge" and "uranium hexafluoride" have entered the common vocabulary, recognized (if not entirely understood) by the average man or woman on the street. As with all things bearing on national defense, knowledge is power, for everyone. Events on the other side of the world, in secret laboratories or clandestine arms-dealer meets, can affect our daily lives right here at home. So it's good that Americans and other peace-loving nations' civilians are climbing the learning curve about nukes, even as their governments experience the pitfalls of trying to negotiate with pariah regimes. It's regrettable that such multi-layered learning effort is needed, but this is one context where ignorance most certainly isn't bliss.
Yet a knowledge gap exists, in the spread of beneficial understanding into popular culture, regarding two aspects of bad guys getting their hands on working nukes. The intermediate technical stages referred to above, covered well in the media, amount to industrial processes for which access is all too widespread already, complex and expensive though these processes might be. That is to say, they amount to specific means for going from raw material to a finished product. They're phases in the middle of a journey that requires a beginning and an ending to pose real danger. It's the beginning and the ending that appear to be somewhat neglected in the willy-nilly, bootstrap education going on. Reducing these knowledge gaps would seem worthwhile, both providing a better perspective on the overall problem of rogue nukes, and suggesting further points at which proliferation attempts could be detected and restrained.
The two issues deserving further exposure are:
1. How hard is it to get unprocessed uranium?
2. How much processed U-235 is needed for a powerful bomb?
To cut to the chase, the answer to question 1 is: Not as hard as you might think. The answer to question 2 is: Less, and maybe a lot less, than you might suspect.
Obtaining raw uranium: Uranium ore, as a mineral, occurs naturally as a type of uranium oxide, known as yellow cake because of its color and consistency. Early in the Atomic Age, yellow cake was believed to be rare. Rich deposits, suitable for mining, were highly valued - so valued that in the 1950s investment frauds based on fictitious uranium mines were common. Then it was realized by geologists that yellow cake, in varying degrees of concentration, could be found throughout much of the crust of Planet Earth. (A sign of this is that uranium is the precursor of a familiar homeowner's headache today: radon gas. Radon, a radioactive element itself, is one product in the chain of elements produced as uranium atoms decay. Radon is a hazard because, being a gas, it percolates upward through the crust to accumulate in poorly-ventilated basements.) Unrefined uranium as a commercially viable resource, whatever its intended use, exists in large reserves in countries ranging from the U.S. and Canada to South Africa, Australia, China, Mongolia, many parts of the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere. The total of these worldwide reserves has been estimated to run to tens of millions of tons. Since the uranium isotope U-235 useable for fueling reactors and bombs averages about 0.7% of all uranium, the reserve of potential bomb fuel runs to a few hundred thousand tons. That's a lot of bomb-grade uranium. And that's just on dry land.
Another source of uranium is common seawater, where a dissolved form of yellow cake constitutes about three parts per billion. This doesn't sound like much, until you combine several tidbits of info, which you might classify as uranium trivia factoids - except there's nothing trivial about U-235-fueled atom bombs. Factoid one is that the total volume of seawater in all the world's oceans, measured in liters (roughly a quart), is the number 14 followed by twenty zeroes. That's a very big number. Factoid two is that the total of pure U-235 dissolved in all this seawater - the 0.7% of the three parts per billion - weighs about thirty million tons. That's one spicy meatball.
How hard is it to extract ocean-borne uranium? Japan, one country always interested in energy independence, in the 1970s ran an experimental plant to filter out uranium from the sea. The all-up cost of obtaining uranium ore this way, as measured in the price of a kilowatt-hour of electricity, was competitive with the cost of obtaining that power from barrels of oil.
Any country with a coastline and the necessary technology can presumably do what Japan did thirty years ago. Seawater extraction as a means toward getting raw ore for refining U-235 is therefore a dual-use technology. Refinement processes might be disguised in any coastal desalination plant, whose outward purpose is producing large amounts of drinking water. Such plants are increasingly common, especially in the Third World. Should the International Atomic Energy Agency start inspecting desalination plants for embedded, covert uranium extraction? Maybe we do need to put a cork in this vast U-235 pipeline.
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