[cdn-nucl-l] A Brief For Power and Against Weapons

["Adam McLean" <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted in Science Magazine, Volume 295, Number 5555, Issue of 25 Jan
2002, p. 632 (seems to be quite the 'nuclear' issue!)
Looks like a good new book (printed August, 2001).  Available at
www.chapters.ca for the quoted price, $45 Can.

Adam

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A Brief For Power and Against Weapons
A review by Frank N. von Hippel*

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Megawatts and Megatons A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?
Richard L. Garwin and Georges Charpak
New York, Knopf, 2001. 431 pp. $30, C$45. ISBN 0-375-40394-9.

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The world certainly needs an authoritative introduction to issues of
nuclear power and nuclear weapons for the intelligent and concerned
layperson. With Megawatts and Megatons, Richard Garwin and Georges
Charpak have done the best job at providing such an account to date.
Early in his career, Garwin helped design the first U.S. thermonuclear
explosive during a summer spent at Los Alamos with his Ph.D. advisor,
Enrico Fermi. Currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, he has advised the U.S. government and public on various
aspects of nuclear weapons over the past several decades. Georges
Charpak, a French physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN), won the 1992 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in
developing particle detectors. Megawatts and Megatons builds on a book
the authors published in French in 1997 (1).

Their new book divides naturally into two halves. The first is a primer
on nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and ionizing radiation. The authors
exert a special effort to make the physics accessible. They effectively
use illustrations by the French cartoonist Jean Jacques Sempé,
reminiscent of the drawings in the Mr. Tompkins books with which George
Gamow demystified quantum mechanics and relativity a half century ago.
For example, neutrons slowing down in a reactor are depicted as frogs
jumping down a stairway on which uranium-238 atoms, represented as
snakes, lie in wait ready to swallow them and transmute into plutonium.
Once the authors have thus oriented the reader, their pedagogy becomes
more conventional.

The second half of the book presents the authors' views on topics
ranging from the futures facing nuclear power and weapons to "making the
best use of scientists." The chapter with this phrase as its title is
particularly interesting because it includes brief accounts of some of
Garwin's experiences on a number of panels of "independent and
competent" scientists advising the U.S. government on a variety of the
major nuclear issues of the past 50 years.

Some of these panels provided invaluable peer review for half-baked
proposals. From such inside positions (and as an outside critic), Garwin
has argued time after time that proposed national missile defenses could
easily be circumvented or tricked by even unsophisticated attackers. He
also tells of less well-known proposals such as the bizarre Project
Pacer, in which scientists from Los Alamos suggested that turbines for
generating electrical power could be driven with steam heated by daily
60-kiloton nuclear explosions in huge steam-filled cavities beneath the
power plants. Other panels helped launch much more practical programs,
such as the spy satellites whose images of Soviet nuclear weapon sites
provided a much better basis for U.S. policy than worst-case projections
such as the 1960 "missile gap."

This collaborative work required the authors to deal with the issue of
separating and recycling the plutonium in spent nuclear fuel, a central
irritant in relations between the United States and France for more than
two decades. The United States became disenchanted with recycling
plutonium for use as a fuel after India used the first plutonium it
separated from spent fuel rods to make a "peaceful" nuclear explosion in
1974. France, however, went ahead with recycling plutonium and has even
earned about $10 billion by reprocessing spent fuel from countries that
encountered political opposition to long-term domestic storage of the
material. Today, the French nuclear establishment insists that the
recycling of plutonium is environmentally preferable to the American
plan for burying spent fuel from U.S. reactors under Yucca Mountain,
Nevada.

The authors agree that either approach can be made acceptable but
emphasize that plutonium separated from spent fuel from civilian power
reactors--of which there is currently more than 200,000 kilograms--must
be guarded as nuclear weapons material. This fact is uncomfortable in a
world newly concerned about nuclear terrorism. It took only six
kilograms to make the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

Terrorists could explode a small weapon to destroy the heart of a city.
The United States or Russia could do much worse. Both possess the means
to destroy all of the world's 2300 cities having populations greater
than 100,000. Garwin and Charpak worry that this destructive potential
has become invisible since the end of the Cold War. The United States
and Russia each still keep about 2000 warheads on missiles that are
ready to launch within 15 minutes. The authors note the urgency "for
reasonable minds to work toward a reduction in the stockpile of weapons
to a level that no longer threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of
totally innocent people." They suggest that the United States and Russia
reduce their arsenals to 1000 total warheads apiece, including stocks of
weapons-usable materials counted in warhead equivalents. After reaching
this immediate goal, further reductions could come through multilateral
negotiations, first with Britain, France, and China and eventually
including Israel, India, and Pakistan. These steps might lead to a
single nuclear force of 200 weapons controlled by a veto-less United
Nations Security Council.

Megawatts and Megatons concludes by reminding us that progress in
nuclear disarmament has only been achieved as a result of an aroused
citizenry: "[I]t is well within the ability of governments and industry
to achieve these goals. But it will happen only if an informed and
concerned public pushes them to recognize and solve these problems."
Perhaps the wake-up call of September 11 will re-engage the public with
the problem of eliminating the nuclear Doomsday Machine with which we
have come to live too comfortably. Reading this instructive book will
help.

Reference

G. Charpak, R. L. Garwin, Feux Follets et Champignons Nucléaires (Odile
Jacobs, Paris, 1997). 

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The author is at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1013, USA. E-mail:
fvhippel@princeton.edu