IPFM International Panel on Fissile Materials - Fissile Materials & Nuclear Weapons

[This entry is drawn from Appendix A of the 2009 Global Fissile Material Report: "Fissile Materials and Nuclear Weapons." The printed version includes endnotes and, in some cases, additional figures. Entries are updated to reflect current data.]

The recognition of the need for nuclear disarmament and the question of how to achieve it are as old as the nuclear age. In June 1945, before the first nuclear weapon had been built, in what became known as the Franck Report, a group of scientists working on the U.S. atomic bomb program warned that:

“The development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past. […] In the past, science has often been able to provide adequate protection against new weapons it has given into the hands of an aggressor, but it cannot promise such efficient protection against the destructive use of nuclear power. […] In the absence of an international authority which would make all resort to force in international conflicts impossible, nations could still be diverted from a path which must lead to total mutual destruction, by a specific international agreement barring a nuclear armaments race.”

In its first resolution, the United Nations General Assembly established a Commission and tasked it to draw up plans “for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.” The Acheson-Lilienthal Report, authored largely by Robert Oppenheimer, and the official U.S. and Soviet proposals to the United Nations (the Baruch and Gromyko Plans respectively) of 1946 were the most prominent attempts to realize this goal. The Gromyko Plan included the first proposed text for a nuclear disarmament treaty in the form of a Draft International Convention to Prohibit the Production and Employment of Weapons Based on the Use of Atomic Energy for the Purpose of Mass Destruction.

In this chapter, we review briefly the effort to secure nuclear disarmament over the past six decades, the renewal of the nuclear debate over the past few years, and some of the major issues this effort will need to address today.
In succeeding chapters, we discuss in more detail some of these issues and the options for accounting for and eliminating nuclear weapons and the fissile materials that make them possible.

Early efforts

In 1946, the elimination of nuclear weapons seemed a comparatively simple task. There was just one nuclear-weapon state, with an arsenal of about ten Nagasaki-type nuclear bombs. Long-range missiles had not been developed, civil applications of nuclear energy lay in the future, and the bureaucratic, military, industrial and doctrinal complexes and many of the rationales and justifications that would be erected around nuclear weapons during the Cold War had yet to come into being. The early hopes for nuclear disarmament were frustrated, however, by the onset of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union.

Many states, organizations, civil society groups, and individuals including prominent scientists, held fast to the goal of nuclear disarmament. (Figure 2.1) They could not achieve their ultimate goal but did help bring about agreements to limit nuclear weapons testing and restrain the arms race. The first diplomatic success was the 1963 partial Test Ban Treaty, which aimed to end nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, under water and in outer space. (Figure 2.2) Unfortunately, it lifted the public pressure on governments to end explosive testing which continued unabated underground.

FIGURE 2.1. Albert Einstein declares his opposition to the atomic bomb and to the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in a press conference in Princeton (10 February 1950). Credit: National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Figure 2.2. Linus Pauling outside the White House, Washington DC, protesting against nuclear weapons testing (28 April 1962). The following day, Pauling joined other Nobel Prize Winners at a White House meeting called by President Kennedy to honor them. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

The number of nuclear-weapon states steadily increased, however, with Britain, France and China developing nuclear weapons by the late 1960s. In an effort to curb the further spread of nuclear weapons, the US and USSR, now nuclear “superpowers,” and the UK negotiated the 1970 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) with a group of non-weapon states and agreed in Article VI “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” A number of countries abandoned incipient nuclear weapons programs over the next two decades, but Israel, India and Pakistan stayed outside the Treaty and developed nuclear weapons, as did DPRK, which joined the NPT but later withdrew (Table 2.1).


Country	Date of first nuclear test	Date of accession to NPT
United States	July 16, 1945	1970
Russia	August 29, 1949	1970
United Kingdom	October 3, 1952	1970
France	February 13, 1960	1992
China	October 16, 1964	1992
India	May 18, 1974	-
Israel	?	-
Pakistan	May 28, 1998	-
North Korea	October 9, 2006	1985 (withdrew 2004)

Table 2.1. First nuclear weapons tests by current nuclear weapon states, 1945-2009.

During this period, there were occasional dramatic proposals for eliminating nuclear weapons. In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev outlined a three-stage plan for nuclear disarmament within fifteen years. Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi proposed a similar time-bound program in 1988, envisaging the abolition of all nuclear weapons by 2010.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, as part of the preparations for the 1995 Review and Extension Conference of the NPT, which was to decide whether and for how long to extend the Treaty, there were many studies on and reports and statements supporting nuclear disarmament by political leaders and groups of eminent former policy makers and officials. A prominent example was the Canberra Commission of 1996. The final agreement on indefinite extension of the NPT included a consensus decision on "principles and objectives for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament" which contained the beginnings of a program of action. This decision included a commitment to “the determined pursuit by the nuclear-weapon States of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goals of eliminating those weapons.”

In 1996, responding to a request from the United Nations General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the United Nations system, issued a unanimous advisory opinion ruling that Article VI of the NPT required nuclear-weapon state parties to the Treaty “to bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament.” At the April 2000 Review Conference of the NPT, the weapons states agreed in the final document to an "unequivocal undertaking ... to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals." There have been continuing reductions in the sizes of the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, but they each still contain thousands of nuclear warheads and there is no program yet to achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

The Nuclear Disarmament Debate Renewed

The complete elimination of nuclear weapons is being discussed again today, however, with some seriousness. This is most evident in the prominence recently given to the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world by President Barack Obama of the United States and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom. Russian President Medvedev joined President Obama in an April 2009 statement declaring “we committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world.” At the July 2009 L’Aquila G-8 Summit, the leaders of France, the U.S., U.K., and Russia declared that “we are all committed to seeking a safer world for all and to creating the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.” There also have been a series of op-ed articles by former leaders and officials from a number of countries over the past two years supporting the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Charting a path to elimination today is a more difficult challenge than six decades ago. There are now nine nuclear armed-states and, in the case of the United States, military alliance commitments to about 30 non-weapon states that include the possibility of using U.S. nuclear weapons in their defense. In the transition to a nuclear-weapon-free world, at least a few of these countries will want their security concerns to be recognized and addressed. Some states will be concerned about the conventional military power projection capabilities of the great powers. Some also will seek to maintain by other means the status and standing in the international system that they currently have by virtue of their nuclear weapons. These concerns will shape the scope of a nuclear weapons ban and decisions such as on whether to eliminate long-range ballistic missiles along with nuclear weapons, and political issues such as whether to restructure the powers and membership rights of the United Nations Security Council.

The past several decades have shown, however, that successful wars of conquest and occupation have become near impossible even for great powers. And countries do not need nuclear weapons to remind each other that their modern societies are vulnerable to long-range attack. Since September 11, 2001, industrialized countries have become acutely aware that nuclear-power and chemical plants as well as skyscrapers could be attacked with catastrophic results. As wealth becomes based more and more on knowledge and integration into the global economy, and if competition for land and natural resources can be held in check, fears of wars of conquest may recede further.

At the same time, more than 60 years of nonuse despite innumerable wars show that policy makers and the militaries of nuclear-armed states have come to understand that nuclear weapons are unusable. A recent examination of the attitudes toward nuclear weapons in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) reported that, since the end of the Cold War, a “lack of interest in and attention to the nuclear mission and nuclear deterrence [has become] widespread throughout DoD.” This was exemplified in an August 2007 incident in which six nuclear armed cruise missiles were transported between the Minot and Barksdale U.S. Air Force bases without authorization and without the knowledge of those involved, and for 36 hours remained unaccounted for (Figure 2.3). Since this incident came to light, the U.S. Air Force has been trying to re-organize its nuclear weapon management.

Figure 2.3. An Advanced Cruise Missile is loaded onto the wing of a B-52 at Minot Air force Base (North Dakota). In August 2007, six nuclear-armed Advanced Cruise Missiles were inadvertently loaded onto B-52 bomber and flown to Barksdale Air Force Base (Louisiana). The transfer remained unaccounted for at both bases and by the crew until discovered 36 hours later. Source: Jocelyn Rich, U.S. Air Force, picture available on wikipedia.org.

Resistance to nuclear disarmament today comes primarily from policy makers, former officials and intellectuals who have come to embrace nuclear deterrence and from the nuclear-weapon-complex, which relies on these weapons for its existence. Public sentiment world-wide largely is in favor of nuclear abolition, with polls showing overwhelming majorities even in the nuclear weapons states (except Pakistan, where margins are much smaller) in favor of an international verified agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons. The issue is not, however, keenly felt and public opinion is not mobilized into an anti-nuclear movement on the scale that has been able in the past to impact policy.

Disarmament Challenges

There are several challenges facing the transition to a nuclear weapon free world and to assuring its security and stability. These include the mechanism or process shaping the disarmament trajectory, the issue of reversibility, the management and elimination of fissile material stocks, and the risks of nuclear weapon reconstitution or proliferation using material and capabilities in civilian nuclear energy programs.

Overall agreement or step-by-step? One of the overarching issues is whether countries commit to the explicit goal and an agreed framework for achieving nuclear disarmament, or whether they continue with an ad hoc approach of nuclear reduction and non-proliferation steps.

Both approaches have been and likely will continue to be used. As part of the 2000 NPT Review Conference, the nuclear-weapon states party to the Treaty agreed to a program of thirteen steps towards the goal of meeting their obligations under Article VI. These steps included meeting specific targets and set timelines. There have, as yet, been no formal talks among the five nuclear weapon states that are Parties to the NPT on achieving these obligations but their year-2000 agreement has helped frame the subsequent debate. At the same time, the United States and Russia, which account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weaponry, have engaged in a fitful step-by-step bilateral process of arms control and reductions that has yielded significant reductions in their nuclear arsenals.

The balance between an agreed plan for disarmament and a step-by-step approach will have a bearing on declarations of stocks of fissile material. It would be natural in an overall plan for the nuclear-weapon states to commit to prepare and declare a complete inventory of their fissile material holdings early in the process, even if verification were to come later. In a step-by-step approach, declarations might be limited to material “excess to military requirements” as and when states chose to so decide.

Irreversibility. In the transition to zero -- and for some time even in a disarmed world -- a considerable degree of reversibility would be inevitable. As states give up nuclear weapons, they will have stockpiles of fissile material freed up by dismantling their weapons and a cohort of weapons design and engineering experts. They also will retain legacy production plants and former nuclear warhead R&D, production and maintenance facilities, all of which will require monitoring until they are decommissioned or converted to civilian purposes.

In 1984, disarmament advocate Jonathan Schell argued that the possibility of nuclear rearmament could actually help secure abolition, since in a world free of nuclear weapons “the knowledge of how to rebuild the weapons … would keep deterrence in force.” A state considering possible nuclear breakout would be restrained by the prospect that others could quickly follow suit. Schell has also observed, however, that the impulse for breakout and the need to prepare to deter it would wane with time, since the political, legal, and moral pressures that have prevented nuclear weapons use since 1945 would be strengthened in the transition to a nuclear-weapon-free world.

The issue of reversibility has been recognized and addressed more recently by nuclear-weapon states and non-weapon states as part of the NPT. The NPT thirteen steps, agreed in 2000, included a commitment for “The principle of irreversibility to apply to nuclear disarmament, nuclear and other related arms control and reduction measures.” Some states have adopted this approach. France, when it ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), shut down and decommissioned its nuclear test site in the South Pacific, after a controversial series of tests in 1996. Also, after it decided to end its production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, it shut down and decommissioned its military HEU and plutonium-production facilities at Pierrelatte and Marcoule respectively.

In a world in which states agree not to commit resources to acquire or maintain nuclear weapons, theoretical knowledge of nuclear weapons would survive but capacities to make them would atrophy. As sociologist Donald MacKenzie has noted:

“Outside of the human, intellectual, and material networks that give them life and force, technologies cease to exist. We cannot reverse the invention of the motorcar, perhaps, but imagine a world in which there were no car factories… where no one alive had ever driven, and there was satisfaction with whatever alternative forms of transportation existed. The libraries might still contain pictures of automobiles and texts on motor mechanics, but there would be a sense in which that was a world in which the motor car had been uninvented …”

Fissile material controls. If nuclear weapons are to be eliminated, the plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) that are at their cores will have to be eliminated. Also, stocks of these materials produced to fuel nuclear reactors, but which could be used to make nuclear weapons, will have to be minimized and the remainder heavily safeguarded. The importance of controlling fissile materials as a means of achieving and securing nuclear disarmament was advocated in the 1945 Franck Report, which discussed both rationing access to uranium and “book-keeping on the fate of each pound of uranium mined,” and in the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which proposed placing under international ownership and operational control all uranium mining as well as uranium enrichment and plutonium separation facilities.

Such improvements in international fissile-material controls are merited even if nuclear disarmament turns out to be unachievable in the near future. With or without complete nuclear disarmament, deep cuts in fissile-material stocks and strengthened controls are required to support deep cuts of nuclear weaponry, bolster the non-proliferation regime, and prevent nuclear terrorism.

Today disarmers are faced with ten thousand warheads in service, a similar number awaiting dismantlement, and materials and components from tens of thousands more. There are also more than a hundred HEU-powered ships and submarines and over a hundred research reactors fueled with HEU mostly weapon-grade. More than 90 percent of the weapons, components and materials are concentrated, however, in Russia and the United States. The magnitude of the disarmament challenge in the remaining seven states is much less.

There also are thirty states with nuclear power plants that produce spent fuel containing plutonium as part of their normal operation and enough already-separated civilian plutonium to produce at least 30,000 nuclear warheads. Once again, however, most nuclear fuel cycle facilities and the separated plutonium are concentrated in a relatively small number of states.

Also, a great deal of experience has been accumulated in exercising national and international control over nuclear materials and technology. Fissile material accountancy and monitoring lie at the heart of the system of IAEA safeguards required by the NPT to verify that non-weapon states are abiding by their commitments not to divert fissile material to nuclear-weapon production.

The importance of including reduction of fissile material stocks in the nuclear-disarmament agenda is widely understood. Russia and the US are eliminating significant fractions of the fissile material recovered from their excess Cold War warheads and, in 2009, the United Nations Conference on Disarmament agreed to begin talks on a treaty banning the production of new fissile material for nuclear weapons. The talks may begin in 2010.

Securing nuclear-weapon elimination will require the international community to develop structures and confidence to respond to non-compliance immediately and effectively. One option to increase confidence in the likelihood of enforcement might be to place all nuclear material under international ownership and make national appropriation of nuclear material an offense under international law.

Even a robust verification system could not assure, however, that all fissile materials had been accounted for in a world in which enough fissile material has been produced to make more than 100,000 nuclear warheads. Measurement errors and material lost irretrievably in wastes and during testing by the United States and Russia in particular, will make it impossible to verify to a level of 99 percent (i.e. to within the equivalent of 1000 warheads) that all fissile material has been disposed of or placed under international monitoring. It is worth noting, however, that the uncertainty will be concentrated in the United States and Russia, which produced by far the largest amounts of fissile material and numbers of nuclear weapons, and carried out the most nuclear weapons tests. Assessing the adequacy of technical verification and the significance of uncertainty will be a political judgment.

Ultimately, the international verification system will have to be complemented by societal verification in which a large enough fraction of citizens are committed to maintaining a nuclear-weapon-free world that they can be depended to “blow the whistle” when they become aware of clandestine nuclear-weapon stockpiles and activities.

Nuclear power and nuclear disarmament. The organization of nuclear energy will be one of the more important technical factors shaping the possibility and difficulty of nuclear-weapon reconstitution or proliferation. At one extreme would be a world with reprocessing and enrichment plants in many countries, with huge stocks and flows of separated weapon-useable plutonium and HEU in nuclear fuel cycles that could facilitate rapid rearmament. This world could have the civilian and naval fuel cycles in some weapon states today replicated in many countries: reprocessing and plutonium recycle as in France, naval reactors fueled by HEU as in the U.S., fleets of HEU-fueled research reactors as in Russia, civilian national enrichment facilities as in the US, Russia, Japan, etc. In this world, the technical barriers to nuclear rearmament would be at their lowest.

A world with higher technical barriers to nuclear rearmament would be one where separated weapon-useable fissile material would be very scarce. Spent-fuel reprocessing would have been abandoned in favor of interim storage – as has already occurred in most countries with nuclear power plants. HEU-fueled nuclear ships and submarines would have either been replaced by LEU-fueled vessels, as has been happening in France, or phased out. Stocks of HEU would have been blended down and plutonium disposed of. And all uranium enrichment would occur at facilities owned by companies from more than one country and operated by multinational teams.

The most substantial technical obstacles to any nuclear rearmament would be in a world with no military or civilian nuclear activities whatsoever, except possibly those required to produce essential radioisotopes. Even then, however, there would be the enduring problem of some states having stored civilian spent nuclear fuel containing plutonium, and spent naval fuel containing highly enriched uranium, that could be accessed for weapons.

The debates today over the future role of nuclear energy and the proliferation and control of nuclear fuel cycle technology and the means to prevent its use for weapons mark only the beginning of a discussion that will become increasingly important as the world moves towards eliminating nuclear weapons.