PLENTIFUL ENERGY

much further risk does the IFR add, if any? In fact, in some ways does it not
actually improve the situation?
Specialized knowledge about detail of weapons fabrication doesn‘t add as much
to understanding as one might think. The ―secret‖ of atomic weapons has been no
secret for decades. Over the years, the politics, definitions, and nuances of nonproliferation
have developed a language of their own, which doesn‘t excessively
enlighten. But common sense goes a long way.
There is an important distinction to be made between the ability of nations to
successfully develop nuclear weapons, with all the resources and advantages a state
possesses, and the efforts of a sub-national group attempting to assemble a weapon
in secret for whatever their purposes may be. A nation can establish a laboratory of
highly technically skilled scientists and engineers, construct the kinds of reactors
and enrichment facilities precisely suited to the purpose, and put in place all of the
ancillary facilities needed to create and maintain an armory of deliverable nuclear
weapons, storable for as long as desired. The clandestine group must rely on stealth
and thievery. The state‘s need is for specialized knowledge, the clandestine group‘s
for theft of a weapon, or at the very least the theft of the material for it. Both require
suitable fissile material of the right isotope. A state can build the facilities to make
it, or, if it so chooses, it could build facilities to transform material diverted from
existing civilian facilities to material usable in a weapon. Unauthorized diversion
from civilian reactors under safeguards would be necessary if this were the path to
be taken, and a price would be paid. But construction of the relatively simple
reactors adequate for weapons plutonium production has been the usual course,
rather than involving their power production capacity, for the nations now
possessing nuclear weapons. For a nation, considerations such as these and their
decisions to move ahead are matters of political will, not of technological barriers.
For practical purposes, the clandestine group is limited to purchase or theft.
Knowledgeable weapons designers have made the point that almost any
composition of plutonium in theory could be used to make a weapon. [3]
Nevertheless, as we shall see, apart from a single U.S. test in the early 1960s with
plutonium whose isotopic composition was called ―reactor-grade‖ at that time (as
opposed to ―weapons-grade,‖ 7% or less Pu-240) but which may have been much
lower in Pu-240 than plutonium that would be called ―reactor-grade‖ today, the
practicality hasn‘t been demonstrated successfully, although apparently there were
two British trials in the 1950s. A former director of the U.K. Atomic Weapons
Research Establishment at a conference in London on plutonium disposition in
1994 stated flatly (in the presence of one of the authors (Till)) ―we tried reactorgrade
plutonium a couple of times. We never will again.‖ In fact, history has
demonstrated that nations that have successfully developed weapons using
plutonium invariably have used plutonium that was at least 93% pure Pu-239,
which suggests good reasons for doing so.
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