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 16th
    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).

Center for Security Policy

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