Wake-Up Call From Novaya Zemlya: Zero-Yield Nuclear Test Ban Is Unverifiable, Russians Will Cheat, U.S. Will Suffer

(Washington, D.C.): The front-page of
the Washington Times revealed
today that Russia is suspected of
having conducted a nuclear test earlier
this month. Such a test would be
a violation of Russia’s obligation under
international law not to act in a manner
inconsistent with the object and purpose
of the Comprehensive Test Ban (CTB), a
treaty it signed last year. It
should also serve as a dramatic opening
salvo in the fight expected to occur in
the U.S. Senate as it begins the
ratification debate on that treaty in
coming months.

While Defense Department and White
House spokesmen went to considerable
lengths to stress that the Clinton
Administration has “reached no
conclusions” about the Russian
“event,” Dr. Ralph Alewine,
director of the Pentagon’s nuclear treaty
programs office, is quoted by the Times
as saying, “We do have information
that a seismic event with explosive
characteristics occurred in the vicinity
of the Russian nuclear test range at
Novaya Zemlya on 16 August.”

‘Would You Believe…’

The Russian government has claimed
that it did not conduct any nuclear test;
it says that the activity detected on 16
August by a world-wide array of seismic
monitors was caused by an underwater
earthquake. A U.S. official speaking on
background to the Washington Times,
however, dismissed suggestions that the
event could have been caused by an
earthquake: “This doesn’t pass the
rules for saying it was a natural
event….It could be due to anomalies in
the system, or it could be it was an
explosion.”

The Center has learned that there
is considerable circumstantial evidence
to support the conclusion that the 16
August event was, indeed, a covert
Russian nuclear test. Activities
traditionally associated with
preparations for an underground test at
Novaya Zemlya were detected shortly
before the blast. And, as the Washington
Times put it: “Initial data on
the event produced ‘high confidence’ that
the activity detected was a nuclear test
equivalent to between 100 tons and 1,000
tons of TNT.” In fact, 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.”

In other words, the inclusion of
Russian-supplied information — whose
accuracy must be somewhat suspect since,
as a U.S. official told the Times,
they “have yet to be outfitted with
special equipment that could spot any
data-tampering by the Russians” —
muddled the exact location, and
therefore, logical conclusions about the
character of the event. This
would hardly be the first time that the
American government discounted its own
information and amended or rejected its
conclusions in order to find the Kremlin
in compliance.⁽¹⁾
It could be one of the few times,
however, when the U.S. is allowing the
Russians to make a mockery of data
collected by and available to many
other nations.

What About Russian
‘Decoupling’?

Questions about the ability of the
Russians — or, for that matter, other
nations — to exploit the tendency of
democracies like the United States to
“see no evil” when confronted
with non-compliant behavior are
especially troubling in the CTB context.
Thanks to the determination of
anti-nuclear zealots within the Clinton
Administration and pressure from kindred
nuclear abolitionists outside it, the
U.S. government agreed in the negotiating
end-game to make the Comprehensive Test
Ban a “zero-yield” treaty. This
step was taken even though it was clear
that such a treaty could not be verified.

Even the more honest CTB proponents
have acknowledged that the planned
International Monitoring System for this
Treaty will be expected, as one put it
recently, “to detect, locate and
identify with high confidence [i.e.,
about 90%] non-evasive
explosions with yields of about
one-kiloton conducted underground,
underwater or in the atmosphere.”
(Emphasis added.) If efforts are made to
conduct “evasive” tests,
though, confidence particularly in the
ability to identify underground nuclear
detonations will diminish — especially
since “at lower yield levels, the
number of non-nuclear events of similar
size increases (e.g., mining explosions
and earthquakes on land, explosions for
geophysical exploration, and volcanoes at
sea, meteorite impacts in the
atmosphere).”⁽²⁾

Just how doable it would be to conceal
“evasive” underground
explosions through the technique known as
“decoupling” — for example, by
diminishing the seismic signatures
created by the detonation by putting
distance between the device and the walls
of its underground cavity — was
documented 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:

“Salt domes can be used to fully
decouple underground explosions,
making them difficult to detect
by teleseismic means. Existing
salt cavities can be used to
decouple yields in excess of 10
kilotons and new cavities, if
required can be made
inexpensively by solution mining.
The detection of even a small
explosion in salt would be a
matter of concern, though, since
high explosives are not generally
used in and around salt. However,
recent calculations of
cavity decoupling suggest that it
is feasible to partially decouple
a nuclear explosion of about 10
kt or so in hard rocks that its
teleseismic signal might be
masked by a simultaneous signal
blast mining detonation using
chemical explosives.

“The construction of a
cavity with the required volume
in hard rock is judged to be
feasible and even larger volume
openings can be provided if the
length to diameter is increased
[i.e., by using a tunnel rather
than spherical or hemispherical
cavities]….The cost of
construction of such openings —
even with U.S. construction
practice and labor costs — is
minimal compared with the cost of
a nuclear weapons development
program. Openings of larger
aspect ratio are easier and less
expensive to construct than
spherical or hemispherical
cavities. To the extent
that these larger aspect ration
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 Russian nuclear test on 16 August at
Novaya Zemlya may well have been an
exercise in decoupling; some believe it
may have produced a bigger signature than
was expected. Knowledgeable U.S. experts,
however, judge the Russians to understand
the physics of decoupling better than we
do and to have had more experience in
experimenting with it. If so, it could be
that the detonation actually had a far
higher yield than the estimated
upper band of 1 kiloton reported in the Washington
Times.

In any event, this
incident is very likely to be a foretaste
of what is to come. Russians and
other nations will secretly conduct
underground nuclear tests^{(3)
— with or without the use of decoupling
techniques — in order to perfect new
weapons designs and/or assure that
existing ones remain in working order. By
exploiting inherent uncertainties about
the signatures of low-yield tests, such
nations will almost certainly be able to
escape detection. And, even if against
all odds they are detected, the
present U.S. effort to make excuses and
otherwise tamp down concern about these
events can only heighten expectations
that there will be no penalties for doing
so.(4)}

Meanwhile, Back in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the costs to the United
States of a treaty that will — for
reasons made clear by the Russian covert
test and enumerated above — be
unverifiable, unenforceable and
ineffective in its stated purpose of
stopping all nuclear tests (to say
nothing of halting nuclear proliferation)
are sure to prove very high indeed. As
the recently released summary of a Center
for Security Policy High-Level Roundtable
Discussion on the Future of the U.S.
Nuclear Deterrent⁽⁵⁾
makes clear, the permanent prohibition on
nuclear tests imposed by the CTB will
have a grave as well as highly
asymmetrical effect on America’s
deterrence capabilities. In this
connection, the following section from
the summary is particularly noteworthy:

“As weapons that were
designed for a service life of 20
years remain in the active
inventory long beyond that point,
changes in the chemical and other
properties of their component
parts occur that can impinge
dramatically, even
catastrophically, on such
weapons’ performance. In
the absence of periodic testing,
there is no certitude that such
changes will be detected, let
alone properly corrected….

“The prohibition of
underground testing also
complicates — and therefore adds
uncertainty to — the
modernization of existing nuclear
weapons. Indeed, some zealous
proponents of the CTB maintain
that the Treaty actually prohibits
such modernization, citing
comments by senior Clinton
Administration at the time the
Treaty was signed. This point
demands clarification before the
Senate is asked to advise and
consent to such a treaty since it
will be, as a practical matter,
impossible to maintain a
credible U.S. deterrent if
obsolescent weapons cannot be
replaced or even repackaged (as
was recently accomplished when
the B-61 bomb was modified to
enable it to attack deeply buried
targets).⁽⁶⁾

“Roundtable participants
repeatedly expressed the view
that it would be quite risky to
try to reproduce weapons that are
now in the inventory but that
have not been manufactured for
many years if realistic
underground detonations could not
be used to prove that the new
designs performed according to
specification. (The risks will be
all the greater to the extent
that those charged with the
original design and fabrication
of such weapons are no longer
available….)

“The ominous strategic
implications of an American
deterrent force comprised of
obsolescing nuclear weapons will
only be compounded if the United
States also fails to take steps
to replace aging delivery systems
(i.e., land and sea-based
ballistic missiles, manned
bombers and missile submarines)
— none of which is currently in
prospect, let alone in the
budget.⁽⁷⁾

“True believers in the
notion of abolishing nuclear
weapons, by the United States
unilaterally if not via
multilateral agreement, are
untroubled by this prospect.
After all, as one Roundtable
participant described their view:
‘Why modernize nuclear weapons if
they are going to go away [or go
to insignificant numbers] in 10
or 15 years?’ It is
imperative that those who
appreciate that the U.S. will
have to have credible nuclear
forces for the foreseeable
future, however, recognize that
American nuclear weapons cannot
simply be put “on the
shelf” indefinitely;
modernization (in one form or
another, e.g., rebuilding,
repackaging or replacing existing
systems) will have to take place
on an ongoing basis.”

The Bottom Line

In a press statement issued in the wake of
the Washington Times‘ report,
Senator Jon Kyl — one of the U.S.
Senate’s most knowledgeable and respected
experts on military and arms control
matters — observed:

“Based on press reports, it
appears Russia has violated its
commitment not to conduct nuclear
tests. Russia’s action raises key
questions: When will the Clinton
Administration get serious about
Russian violations of its arms
control commitments, including
its pledge to halt arms sales to
Iran and to destroy its chemical
weapons stockpile? And why should
we proceed with treaties like the
CTBT when countries like Russia
are willing to violate their
treaty commitments? In addition,
the reluctance of the
Administration to publicly
conclude that Moscow has violated
its pledge to halt nuclear
testing raises serious concerns
about the verifiability of a
complete nuclear test ban.”

These are the right sorts of questions
for the Senate to be asking. If there is
a silver-lining to the cloud cast by the
Russian nuclear test, it will be if those
questions get properly answered — an
outcome that must surely result in Senate
rejection of this unverifiable and
dangerous Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

– 30 –

1. One relevant
example of this reprehensible practice of
self-delusion was the United States’
repeated practice during the 1970s and
1980s of contorting its methodology for
calculating the size of Soviet
underground detonations in the face of
evidence that Moscow was ever more
brazenly cheating on the Threshold Test
Ban Treaty’s 150-kiloton limit on such
explosions.

2. Naturally, the
farther away from an identified test site
such activities occurred — for example,
in a mining tunnel — the greater will be
the inclination to attribute anomalous
seismic data to a non-nuclear event. This
reality would render absurdly ineffectual
the oft-proposed idea of permanently
closing nuclear test sites in order to
prevent cheating scenarios.

3. To be sure,
some may opt for other approaches. South
Africa only recently ended years of
speculation by acknowledging that an
“event” in the South Atlantic
was indeed caused by its secret
detonation of a nuclear device.

4. While the CTB
provides for on-site challenge
inspections, present staffing plans
contemplate conducting only 3-4 per year.
Given the expense involved — both
financial and diplomatic — it seems
likely that only very clear cut cases of
suspected violations will be challenged.
And there are, for reasons discussed
above, likely to be very few of those.

5. See the
Center’s summary entitled The
Future of U.S. Nuclear Deterrence
(No. 97-P 117,
25 August 1997).

6. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled ‘Penetrating’:
Clinton’s ‘New’ Nuclear Weapon
Underscores Continuing Need For Nuclear
Deterrence, Danger Of The C.T.B.
(No. 97-D 75, 2
June 1997).

7. Currently, only
the Minuteman III ballistic missile
program is undergoing a major
service-life extension program.