Nuclear Spin-Control: Clinton See-No-Evil Response To Apparent Russian Test Offers Bitter Foretaste Of C.T.B.

(Washington, D.C.): The front
page of today’s Washington
Post serves as the Clinton
Administration’s vehicle for
damage limitation in connection
with Russia’s apparent detonation
two months ago of a nuclear
device in violation of its
obligations under the
Comprehensive Test Ban (CTB)
Treaty. In the course of a long
article, various worthies declare
on the record and on background
that the signals detected
emanating from the vicinity of
the Russian test site on Novaya
Zemlya Island on 16 August were
actually produced by an offshore
earthquake. Several of them
proceed to castigate the U.S.
intelligence community for
initially concluding otherwise.

It is not hard to fathom why
the President’s men would go to
such lengths to muddy the waters
over this event: The Kremlin has
a well-established track record
of cheating on treaties they have
been ratified by the United
States. For their part, the U.S.
executive and legislative
branches — under both Republican
and Democratic control — have an
equally well-established record
of ignoring such behavior. Still,
if the Senate were to conclude
that the Russians had started
cheating even before its advice
and consent was given, the
already highly controversial CTB
could wind up being D.O.A.

‘No Accident,
Comrade’

Not surprisingly, the outlet
chosen for the Administration’s
spin-control was the Washington
Post‘s R. Jeffrey
Smith. Before joining
the Post, Smith cut his
reportorial teeth writing
articles for Science
Magazine assailing President
Reagan’s security policies⁽¹⁾
A favorite topic was challenging
charges of Soviet non-compliance
with various arms control
agreements. (Incredibly, he even
found fault with the finding that
the Krasnoyarsk radar was a
significant violation of the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a
fact subsequently acknowledged by
Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard
Shevardnadze, among others.) In
his present capacity as one of
the Post‘s national
security correspondents, Smith
has been unable to conceal either
his abiding enthusiasm for arms
control or his disdain for those
who challenge its assumptions or
results.

These sentiments are much in
evidence in today’s article
entitled “U.S. Officials
Acted Hastily in Nuclear Test
Accusation: CIA Hesitates to Call
Russian ‘Event’ a Quake.”
After describing the
understandable consternation felt
by the Clinton Administration
when confronted on 18 August with
a classified CIA alert that
concluded “Russia probably
had conducted a nuclear test two
days earlier on an island near
the Arctic Circle,” Smith
writes:

“There was only one
problem: The CIA’s report
about the location of the
‘event’ was wrong,
according to various U.S.
intelligence and defense
officials, independent
scientific experts, and
the British, Norwegian
and French governments.
The event actually
occurred roughly 80 miles
at sea and, these
officials and experts now
say, was almost certainly
an earthquake.”

Such a public declaration of U.S.
government misfeasance was
evidently deemed necessary since:

“…The
Administration has not
yet publicly given Moscow
a clean bill of health, a
circumstance that some
U.S. officials and
independent scientists
claim is partly due to a
lingering distrust of
Russia’s military
operations in the
vicinity of the test site
and partly to the
reluctance of the CIA and
senior policymakers to
acknowledge that they
made a diplomatic and
scientific goof.“
(Emphasis added.)

Interestingly, the National
Security Council arms control
czar seems, uncharacteristically,
to be part of the problem for the
would-be apologists. Smith quotes
him as saying as late as 17
October that, “We are still
trying to talk with the Russians
[about the Novaya Zemlya event
but] our assessment from the
technical side…[is] it was more
likely than not explosive in
nature.”

Hold Your Horses

The possibility that the facts
do not warrant a retraction of
the original conclusion that the
Novaya Zemlya “event”
was probably a covert nuclear
test is completely discounted by
Smith and the sources, named and
unnamed, that he quotes. The
following are among the reasons
why the initial assessment cannot
be ruled out:

• As Smith himself reports,
  there was
  considerable evidence
  that the Russians were
  preparing an underground
  nuclear test at Novaya
  Zemlya for roughly the
  period of the event:
  “…The head of
  Russia’s atomic energy
  ministry, Viktor
  Mikhailov, recently had
  visited the vast test
  site, and the [CIA] had
  snapped satellite
  photographs showing test
  equipment being lowered
  into the ground, with
  telltale diagnostic
  cables leading away from
  the holes into nearby
  buildings.

“As one
intelligence analyst
said, activities
at the site on both Aug.
14 and Aug. 16 were ‘a
dead ringer for [those
in] test shots’
by Moscow over the past
10 years. The Air Force
Technical Applications
Center (AFTAC), a
little-known organization
based in Florida that
conducts classified
studies of Russian
nuclear blasts, was
alarmed enough to order a
plane equipped with
radiation detectors to
fly downwind from the
site on the first of
these two dates, but it
found no trace of a
nuclear explosion.”
(Emphasis added.)

• The “sniffer
  plane” did not
  detect evidence of a
  nuclear test before the
  event on the 16^th
  but it was not on station
  afterwards. As a
  result, it is
  irresponsible to cite the
  lack of telltale
  radioactive debris —
  what Smith calls “no
  sign of unusual
  radioactivity” — as
  proof there was no test.
  In fact, if the Russians
  were interested in
  concealing a covert
  underground explosion,
  they would be entirely
  capable of waiting until
  the sniffer plane was out
  of the area before firing
  their device.
• The Center for Security
  Policy understands that the
  best sensor for
  monitoring seismic
  signatures emanating from
  the Novaya Zemlya region
  was not operating at the
  time of the event.
  According to one source,
  it had ceased to function
  not too long before 16
  August — after
  experiencing a
  “mysterious”
  power surge. Even if the
  Russians were not the
  source of that
  incapacitating surge,
  they may well have been
  aware of its effect, and
  the attendant decrease in
  U.S. certitude about the
  source and character of a
  seismic event in the
  region. Moreover, the
  value of information
  supplied by other sensors
  reportedly was degraded
  by the geology of the
  island, their distance
  from the site and
  uncertainty about the
  fidelity of those
  controlled by the
  Russians and not
  configured to resist
  tampering⁽²⁾
• There would have
  been, as Smith, put it
  “no record of
  telltale underwater blast
  sounds, no underwater
  drilling or extraordinary
  activity of any kind in
  the Kara Sea off Novaya
  Zemlya before, during or
  after the event,” if
  it were caused by an
  underground explosion in
  a hole on the island
  itself.
  Knocking down this
  strawman hardly validates
  Smith’s declaration that
  “the CIA…has found
  nothing to corroborate
  its initial report.”
• The seismic
  evidence obtained from
  this event is not
  inconsistent with
  signatures from a “decoupled”
  nuclear test — a type of
  test well within the
  technical abilities of
  the Russians and that one
  would expect to see in a
  CTB environment.
  “Decoupling” is
  a technique that can mask
  a detonation’s seismic
  signatures by putting
  distance between the
  device and the walls of
  its underground cavity.
  It was described in an
  important unclassified
  analysis prepared in
  November 1994 for the
  Pentagon organization
  then-known as the Defense
  Nuclear Agency. The
  accompanying Report
  Documentation Page of
  this study, which was
  entitled “The
  Feasibility of Evasive
  Underground Nuclear
  Testing Through
  Decoupling,”
  provides the following
  unclassified abstract:

“…Recent
calculations of cavity
decoupling suggest that it
is feasible to partially
decouple a nuclear
explosion of about 10
kilotons or so in hard
rocks that its
teleseismic signal might
be masked by a
simultaneous signal blast
mining detonation using
chemical explosives….To
the extent that…larger
aspect ratio openings do
not degrade the
decoupling, the
possibility of even
larger yield (perhaps as
much as 50 kilotons or
so) evasive testing
cannot be
discounted.”
(Emphasis added.)

The Bottom Line

As the Center for Security
Policy observed when the Novaya
Zemlya event was first revealed,
it is but a foretaste of what is
to come:

• Since the zero-yield
  Comprehensive Test Ban
  signed by the Clinton
  Administration is
  unverifiable, there will
  be many more instances in
  the future of
  “ambiguous”
  events in which there is
  reason to believe a test
  has occurred but a lack
  of clear-cut proof one
  way or the other.
• When such incidents
  arise, the community of
  seismic experts can be
  relied upon to challenge
  any finding of
  non-compliance.⁽³⁾
• Perhaps worst of all,
  given this experience,
  intelligence analysts
  will be still less
  inclined to reach
  politically unwelcome
  conclusions, even though
  common sense and the
  preponderance of the
  evidence suggest that
  prohibited testing has,
  in fact, occurred.

It behooves the United States
Senate to examine with care all
the facts concerning the Novaya
Zemlya event. It must confront
the reality that no
inspection regime imaginable —
let alone that provided for by
the Comprehensive Test Ban —
will ensure that the true
character of all future
“ambiguous” events is
discovered. And it must
abjure the seductive appeal of
the CTB’s more rabid proponents
to open up U.S. non-fission
nuclear experiments to
international monitoring in the
vain hope that doing so will
eliminate any ambiguity arising
from activities the Russians
claim to be of a similar
character. Such a proposal will
do nothing to enhance confidence
about the real concern
— covert testing away from
declared test sites that are
relatively closely monitored —
while potentially compromising
the security of American nuclear
weapons designs and capabilities.

In addition to these critical
topics, the Senate needs
to consider the implications of
the larger mosaic of the Clinton
Administration’s
“denuclearlization”
policies, of which the
Comprehensive Test Ban is but one
part. These include: profound
uncertainties concerning the
so-called Stockpile Stewardship
Maintenance Program (notably
regarding the availability and
utility of an array of expensive
new facilities intended to
perform diagnostic
experimentation heretofore done
with nuclear tests); the
dismantling of the production
complex that supports the U.S.
nuclear stockpile; the hemorrhage
of trained and experienced
weapons designers out of
government service; the lack of a
secure source of tritium, a
rapidly decaying radioactive gas
without which none of
America’s modern weapons will
work; and the declining security
of the facilities where plutonium
and highly enriched uranium are
held.⁽⁴⁾

If responsible Senators do
their job on the foregoing
issues, they will surely
conclude that the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty is fatally
flawed, incompatible with U.S.
national security requirements
and unworthy of the Senate’s
consent.

– 30 –

1. From
1983 to 1986, Smith authored at
least ninety generally critical
articles concerning Reagan’s
military and arms control
policies.

2. As the
Center noted on 28 August in its Decision
Brief entitled Wake-Up
Call From Novaya Zemlya:
Zero-Yield Nuclear Test Ban Is
Unverifiable, Russians Will
Cheat, U.S. Will Suffer
(No. 97-D
119), the Washington
Times reported that day that
it was only “after data from
the Russian monitoring stations
were analyzed further” that
“the initial conclusion that
the suspected blast occurred very
near the test site was revised to
place its center miles
offshore.”

3. Setting
aside the strongly exculpatory
comments from scientists cited by
Smith, consider the past track
record: When confronted with
repeated evidence of Soviet
violations of the Threshold Test
Ban Treaty, this community
routinely adopted the “We’d
rather switch than fight”
leitmotif, successively changing
the estimating methodology in
such a way as to exonerate the
USSR.

4. These
and a good many other topics were
explored in depth in the 15 July
1997 Center for Security Policy
Roundtable held on “The
Future of U.S. Nuclear
Deterrence.” Please see High-Level
Roundtable Discussion Reveals
U.S. Nuclear Deterrent’s
Credibility, Reliability
Imperilled ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-P_117″>No. 97-P 117,
25 August 1997).