International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation

Qualitative disarmament by tritium control

A linkage between nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation within a cut-off agreement

Martin B. Kalinowski

Introduction

Although a negotiating mandate for a verified agreement on a cut-off of the production of fissile material for weapons was agreed at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva in early 1995, negotiations never actually started. In 1997 the CD could not agree at all on its agenda. In face of this current impasse at the CD, three strategies may be of importance to make any progress:

1. Make use of other multilateral fora to reach agreements between a limited number of states,

2. Agree on an international inventory of weapons-usable nuclear material as an important and agreeable starting step for progress towards a cut-off agreement.

3. Identify further steps which have equivalent impact on all relevant states. Especially the impact on recognised and threshold nuclear-weapon-states should be balanced.

All three of these strategies are discussed in previous paper.1 The third one will be dealt with here. It will be shown that tritium control could meet the demand for equivalent steps.

Integrating disarmament into the cut-off mandate

Overcoming the current impasse at the CD will necessarily require some compromise between States which emphasise disarmament and those which stress non-proliferation. For a successful start of negotiations on a cut-off agreement this can mean to follow one out of two approaches. Either a linkage is made between a cut-off mandate and separate negotiations on nuclear disarmament, or disarmament measures are integrated within the cut-off mandate.

The first approach might be realised by immediately starting negotiations towards a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) which might serve as a framework for progress in both nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament in a reciprocal way.2 Although many non-aligned states favour or even demand the first approach, only the second one is considered in this paper. It belongs to the step-by-step approach which is complimentary to the first one, the comprehensive approach.

The second approach aims at including special provisions into a cut-off agreement which have a disarming effect on nuclear-weapon-states. Frequently it is stated that the reduction of stockpiles from past production may serve this purpose. This is definitely the case, if these reductions go as far as eliminating any military nuclear material that is not placed in nuclear weapons of the active arsenal. Nevertheless, this paper recommends to consider tritium control as a provision with leads to qualitative disarmament with a similar but stronger effect compared to dealerting or sequestration of nuclear weapons.

Before introducing this concept of qualitative disarmament by means of a tritium production cut-off, another argument on including a disarmament provision into the cut-off is explained to provide further motivation.

Disarmament provision to balance the non-proliferation effect

Besides of giving in the demand to link non-proliferation and disarmament measures there is another strong argument speaking in favour of integrating a disarmament measure into a cut-off agreement. It is the clearly accepted demand that a cut-off agreement should be non-discriminatory. Some people take the narrow view that only obligations which are physically identical for all states would be non-discriminatory. However, it has to be taken into account that identical provisions may have different impact on the perceived national security interests of different groups of countries.

For example a provision that all states should stop the production of fissile material for weapons purposes or outside of safeguards seems attractive due to the identity of demands on all states, but it has different impacts on various states. The nuclear-weapon-states do not need further production of fissile materials and in general have already a production moratorium in place. On the other hand, the threshold states may have the feeling that their nuclear options are significantly restricted especially if stocks from past production are included in the ban.

A mandate at the CD which is in this sense discriminatory and any agreement based on such a mandate will be hardly acceptable to those states which see themselves in a disadvantage. Therefore, it is imperative to search for reciprocal measures which have equivalent impact especially on the five recognised nuclear-weapon-states and on the nuclear threshold states.

Thus, the only way of taking reciprocity serious is to accept the different impact and to even aim at a cut-off agreement that includes both provisions which have a non-proliferation effect on threshold countries as well as a disarmament effect on nuclear weapon states. Any measure that puts the unsafeguarded weapons-usable material and production facilities in nuclear threshold states under some sort of control serves per definition the goal of non-proliferation. Therefore, it is necessary to look for provisions which are clearly serving nuclear disarmament.

Clearly, the reduction of weapon-usable materials from past production has a disarming effect. Is there a chance to find reciprocal provisions by including past stockpiles into the cut-off agreement and how should these be defined?

One could follow the argument that the reduction of stockpiles of nuclear-weapon-usable material is a disarmament measure. In fact it would help to freeze the current active arsenal and it would make past progress in nuclear disarmament irreversible. It can even be counted as disarmament, if one takes the view that warheads are completely disarmed only after their dismantlement and after transferring the material from the military realm to international safeguards.

It remains the question whether unsafeguarded stockpiles in nuclear threshold states should be included into the ban as well.

When looking from the perspective of going from very deep cuts down to a nuclear-weapons-free world one can get a more clear understanding of equivalent steps. The nuclear threshold states have a policy of nuclear ambiguity which means that they neither deny nor confirm whether they have nuclear weapons. They are known to possess sufficient amounts of nuclear-weapons-usable material to produce a number of nuclear weapons. It is suggested here that never in the process towards a nuclear-weapon-free world shall these states be recognised as nuclear-weapons-states. When these states join the nuclear disarmament progress they should reduce the upper limit of their stocks of nuclear-weapons-usable materials while the recognised nuclear-weapon-states further reduce the limits of their nuclear arsenals. In the last step towards eliminating nuclear weapons the threshold states should surrender the remaining stocks of material while the nuclear-weapons-states surrender the remaining nuclear weapons. The complete surplus of nuclear material of the latter may be put under control at an earlier stage.

From this logic it becomes apparent that the reductions of stocks of weapons-usable materials in the two different groups of countries are not equivalent. Materials in threshold states should be regarded equivalent to nuclear weapon arsenals in recognised nuclear-weapon-states. Therefore, the current mandate at the CD for cut-off negotiations cannot be made non-discriminatory simply by including reductions of stocks from past production in all countries into the agreement.

Technical steps for qualitative disarmament

A different way to address disarmament within a cut-off treaty can be identified when considering qualitative disarmament of nuclear weapons. There are various proposals of qualitative disarmament under discussion. These include dealerting3 a No-First-Use Treaty, and withdrawal of nuclear weapons from foreign territory. The effect of qualitative disarmament lies in marginalizing nuclear weapons. Eventually it will be a small step for complete elimination of the remaining and qualitatively disarmed arsenal. This concept is different from quantitative disarmament, since it would not reduce the number of nuclear weapons. However, the numbers can be reduced at the same time by different agreements.

A linear grade of technical steps of qualitative disarmament is defined here by the increased time required to prepare a qualitatively disarmed nuclear weapon for delivery to a military target. In effect, a low grade of qualitative disarmament prevents the effective capability for launch-on-warning. A high grade of qualitative disarmament may result eventually in disassembling all nuclear warheads and abandoning the capability of rapid re-deployment. The following steps of qualitative disarmament with increasing time required for making them ready for delivery can be taken:

1. Technically the first step of qualitative disarmament of nuclear weapons is to put them off alert. This can be done by removing the targeting coordinates from the executing computer programmes which control the delivery systems. This is a narrow notion of dealerting. It is easily and possibly even automatically reversible within minutes.

2. Dealerting can be improved by removing nuclear warheads from delivery systems. This is reversible within hours.

3. The third grade of qualitative disarmament is achieved by removing the nuclear warheads from the deployment site of the delivery system. This proposal is also known as sequestration. According to the above given definition sequestration is the more effective the further away the storage site is located. Providing for a sufficient distance, the weapons can be put back on alert within days.

4. As a fourth step, nuclear warheads can be dismantled into main components which are stored at different places. For example three different storage sites can be found for the fissionable core element (e.g. the plutonium pit), the tritium ampoule and the metal casing. All sites can be different from the place which holds the equipment for assembling the weapon. To reverse this step, it will probably take weeks.

5. Yet another improvement of qualitative disarmament can be achieved by removing tritium from nuclear warheads. Assuming that all nuclear weapons today rely on tritium for boosting of their yield, they are rendered dysfunctional after removal of their tritium. All weapons can be restored to full capability by replacing the tritium. Two variants of tritium control are possible.

a) If the production of tritium is banned, this kind of qualitative disarmament will only affect a limited number of warheads after the decay of the military tritium inventory went below the demand of the current arsenal.

b) The complete arsenal could be involved, if the tritium ampoules are removed from all nuclear warheads and their positions are sealed and inspected to verify that no tritium is replaced. It takes a few months to reproduce tritium and it may take years to construct a production facility in the case that no reactor is kept in cold stand-by for this purpose.

Qualitative disarmament effect with a weak timetable through a ban on tritium production

As a result of these considerations, a measure within an agreement on nuclear-weapons-usable materials that may have some impact on disarmament in the nuclear-weapon-states would be a control of further production of tritium (variant (a) of the above given point 5 of qualitative disarmament). This is because fresh supplies of this material may be necessary some time early in the next century in the case that nuclear disarmament stops to keep pace with the natural decay of this radioactive superheavy hydrogen isotope at 5.5% per year.4 Therefore, it is suggested here to take a ban on tritium production in recognised nuclear-weapon-states as a measure that is equivalent to an appropriate control of fissile materials in threshold states. In the year 1988 a similar suggestion with the intention of using the decay of tritium as a forcing function for nuclear disarmament was discussed in the USA.5 This proposal was rejected on good purpose mainly with the argument that it would resemble the dog wagging its tail. If one tries to force nuclear disarmament by using the tritium decay as a forcing factor, then one is diverting the delicate negotiations about stockpile reductions. The proposal made here is significant different from the one put forward earlier. If tritium is taken out of a nuclear weapon, it is made dysfunctional but it is still a nuclear weapon and this process is reversible.6 Tritium can be introduced again into the same weapon. Therefore, this process is kind of like taking nuclear weapons off alert for a longer time. It will take longer to get them on alert again. In the worst case it may take about one or a few years to produce the required amount of tritium, depending on how long tritium was allowed to decay below the demand and depending on the capacity of dedicated production facilities.

Since it is considered here that only fresh production of tritium will be banned, the existing military inventories can be redistributed on the warheads in the active arsenal. It should be noted that the number of nuclear weapons which are affected by such an approach will be very low at the beginning and increasing slowly with time. No inspection of warheads would be required. It has only to be verified that no more tritium is produced. This is relatively straight forward and the verification of a plutonium production ban is even much easier, if no reactor would be reserved for tritium production. This can even be done non-intrusively by remote monitoring.

When will USA and Russia be prepared to agree to such a step? So far, the USA and Russia did not include nuclear warheads in any disarmament agreements. START I and II restrict only the number of delivery systems. Though, it has been proposed that the dismantlement of nuclear warheads should be included in START III, it is still more likely that USA and Russia will prefer disarmament measures which avoid provisions which directly involve the warheads. Therefore, the proposal made here may even be easier acceptable than inspected sequestration of warheads and delivery systems.

The advantage of such an approach is that a weak linkage is established between non-proliferation efforts directed against threshold states and disarmament measures addressing the recognised nuclear-weapon-states. This weak linkage avoids the seemingly unbridgeable gap between nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. The linkage is weak because a ban on tritium production may never have a restricting effect on nuclear arsenals provided that independently conducted disarmament keeps pace with the decay of tritium. If START II is realised no tritium production is necessary for at least the next two decades. Thus, the decay of tritium provides a soft and - if perceived to be necessary, a reversible - time bound framework for nuclear disarmament and thus enables to achieve a compromise between the NAM states and the nuclear-weapon-states regarding such a demand.

1. M.B. Kalinowski, Prospects for a cut-off of weapons-usable materials or How to overcome the current deadlock between complete nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation as a precondition for a successful NPT review process, INESAP Information Bulletin No. 13, July 1997, pages 7-10.

2. A draft model NWC was drafted by NGOs and launched on April 7 in New York. The drafting group was convened by the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP) and input on physical and technical issues was provided by the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation (INESAP).

3. Dealerting of nuclear weapons is proposed in various studies like the Report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (August 1996). It is explained by B. Blair, Global Zero Alert for Nuclear Forces, Brookings Institution, 1995, and F. v. Hippel, De-alerting, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May/June 1997, page 35.

4.. M.B. Kalinowski, International Control of Tritium - A Technical Assessment of Measures for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, forthcoming as volume 4 of the Science and Global Security Monograph Series (edited by H.A. Feiveson), Gordon and Breach Science Publishers: New York et al. 1998.

Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), The Tritium Factor - Tritium's Impact on Nuclear Arms Reduction, Washington/Cambridge 1988.

5. A warhead without tritium is still a nuclear weapon with a significant yield because the unboosted fission primary still works with an explosive yield of around one kiloton TNT. In case of warheads with selectable yield the lowest yield which is of military interest is still working without tritium. See M.B. Kalinowski, The impact of complete elimination of tritium on a nuclear arsenal. See appendix A, pages 187-196 in M.B. Kalinowski, L. Colschen: International Control of Tritium to Prevent Horizontal Proliferation and to Foster Nuclear Disarmament, Science and Global Security 5 (1995) 131-203.

6. See for example M.B. Kalinowski, The Role of Tritium Within a Verified Cutoff of Fissile and Fusionable Materials Production, in: W. Liebert, J. Scheffran (eds.), Against Proliferation - Towards General Disarmament, proceedings of the First INESAP Conference at Mülheim in August 1993, Agenda Verlag, Münster 1995, pages 61-64; regarding the verification see especially appendix B, pages 197-203 of Kalinowski/Colschen (1995) op.cit.

Martin Kalinowski is Senior Researcher at IANUS, Technical University Darmstadt.

Adress: Zintl Institut, Hochschulstrasse 10, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany, tel +49-6151-16-3016, fax +49-6151-166039, email:kalinowski@hrzpub.tu-darmstadt.de