Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

408Brittle Powerguards (Moglewer 1981).142 Hsu 1981. The late Nobel Laureate inchemistry Harold Urey, foresaw early thatbombs could be smuggled into the U.S.anonymously (Urey 1945).143 Bass et al. 1980:55.144 Leader 1981.145 Singer & Weir 1979.146 Royal Commission on EnvironmentalPollution 1976; Ayres 1975; Barton 1975;Grove-White and Flood 1976; Justice 1978;Sieghart 1979.147 It is, however, theoretically possible thatour government, or some other government,has in fact capitulated to a non-hoax nuclearthreat and is implementing, in the guise of normalincremental policy shifts, concessions dictatedby an extortionist. The degree of opennessand public trust associated with governmentalaffairs, at least in the United States,makes this hypothesis seem very unlikely, butit cannot be altogether excluded. Certainly,there is a lingering air of suspicion aboutapparent efforts, as the Comptroller General ofthe United States saw them (Burnham 1979a),to block a full investigation into alleged theftsof bomb material in the mid-1960s.148 Could terrorists get a stolen militarybomb to explode when they wished? ModernU.S. bombs, including all those in Europe(Miller 1979:59), are equipped with“Permissive Action Link” (PAL) devices.These require the entry of electronic authorizationcodes before the bomb becomes armed.Repeatedly entering the wrong code irreversiblyscrambles the electronics so that thebomb cannot be detonated without firstrepairing the circuitry. This outwardly reassuringscheme raises three questions whichcannot be answered from open literature:• Is it true that PAL-equipped bombs cannotbe set off without a currently authorized code,even by the more than fifty thousand peoplewith up-to-date PAL training? Retired AdmiralGene LaRocque has stated in paraphrase(DeNike 1975a), that “existing PALs malfunctionoften enough during practice drills thatgetting around them has become a regularpractice. On any nuclear-armed U.S. Navyship [some seventy percent of U.S. warships,according to the Admiral], there are four orfive technicians trained to do this.” If so, PALis hardly tamperproof.• Can a military bomb be carefully dismantledso as to recover its core? (And perhaps itsother main components: any arming and firingcircuits, and indeed everything else up todetonators, could be readily replaced by anelectronics expert.) It is possible to detonatethe high-explosive components of a militarynuclear bomb in an asymmetrical way whichdisperses the fissionable core beyond recoverybut does not produce a nuclear explosion. Itwould be technically possible to arrange forthis to happen automatically if the bomb istampered with. For safety reasons, however,most if not all U.S. bombs apparently do notembody this precaution. (Military commandersdo not want high explosives going off andscattering toxic plutonium around their magazines,ships, and aircraft.) Defense SecretarySchlesinger stated in 1974 (Miller 1979:62)that “emergency destruction devices and procedureshave been developed so that nuclearweapons may be destroyed without producinga nuclear yield in the event that enemy captureis threatened.” But that is clearly not the sameas an automatic anti-tampering safeguard.• What are the corresponding safeguards inbombs made by other countries? It seemsimplausible that some, especially developingcountries, will have developed the elaborateand very costly mechanisms used in modernU.S. and British bombs for command, control,and operational safety (including “one-pointsafety”—designing bombs so that a single detonatorcan fire inside them without causing anuclear explosion: developing this featurereportedly cost billions of dollars).149 Talbot & Dann 1981.150 Several are in swamps or under the oceanand have not been recovered (SIPRI 1978).151 In 1961, for example, the U.S. Air Forceaccidentally dropped on North Carolina a twenty-four-megatonbomb—equivalent to threeVietnams or twelve World War IIs. It failed toexplode because one, and only one, of its sixsafety devices worked. Some bombs now inservice allegedly contain unstable high explosiveswhich tend to go off when dropped only afew feet (Solomon 1981). A nuclear air-to-seamissile was reportedly fired by accident by anAmerican F-102 over Haiphong Bay in the mid-1960s (SIPRI 1978, citing the Washington Post)