ArmsControlWonk.com

AQ Khan and Samar Mubarakmand, flanking the man in the blue beret (believed to be General Zulfikar Ali). Reproduced from the Nuclear Weapons Archive.

A.Q. Khan is easily the most famous person associated with Pakistan’s nuclear program. By fostering the image of being the “father” of Pakistan’s Bomb, he gained public acclaim and the protection of the state — even after his entrepreneurial activities seriously weakened Pakistan’s national security and caused great embarrassment. How much Khan was freelancing, and how much he was operating under high-level guidance, will remain very murky.

Khan contributed significantly to Pakistan’s bomb program by spiriting out of Holland designs to manufacture centrifuges, and by setting up a Uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta. But A.Q. Khan was hardly the brightest light in Pakistan’s nuclear firmament. This distinction may belong to someone little known in the West: Dr. Samar Mubarakmand. Let’s open the shoe box files to learn more about Mubarakmand.

He joined the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in 1962, which sent him to Oxford to receive a doctorate in physics. A.Q. Khan enriched uranium (and himself); Mubarakmand had more consequential assignments. Beginning in 1983, He conducted the first and subsequent “cold tests” of Pakistan’s bomb designs. He was also the man in charge at Chagai when Pakistan tested those designs in 1998. Mubarakmand was additionally responsible for developing and producing Pakistan’s solid-fuel missiles.

Samar Mubarakmand has avoided the spotlight as much as A.Q. Khan welcomed it. A while back, Scott Sagan passed along to me transcripts of two of Mubarakmand’s rare public addresses that shed light on his contributions to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs. These transcripts also suggest that he and A.Q. Khan are not the best of friends.

Here are some excerpts from Mubarakmand’s speech to the Khwarzimic Science Society in Lahore, delivered on November 30, 1998 (full text), when the dust was still settling after the Chagai tests:

The true father of the Pakistani nuclear program was Dr. Rafi Muhammad Chaudhary. He migrated to Pakistan from Aligarh University and established the Physics Department at the Government College Lahore.

The PAEC (Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission) was told that whenever you were ready, you would detonate a bomb. So we were all very enthusiastic. We were running day and night concentrating on our effort. But…the mandate was withdrawn from us when we were ready.

On the morning of the 11th of May [1998], one of our friends, in the Armed Services, phoned me and said, “Have you heard the news today?” I said, “What?” He said, “The Indians have conducted the explosion in Pokhran.” So I said, “Congratulations.” I was genuinely happy. He said, “You are congratulating us on the Indian tests?” I said, “Yes, because now we would get a chance to do our own tests.

The PAEC… is an island of excellence… Our life expectancy is 122nd in the world; in the literacy rate, we are the 162nd, and in per capita income we are the 122nd. The access to health services gives us a ranking of 148, and in clear drinking water we are 114th in the world… In nuclear weapons, we are the 7th in the world.

Nobody works in our organization for money or fame. We do not believe that sensitive work can be done by publicizing it. It should be done quietly, and so there is no lust for fame in this organization. There is honesty, dedication.

I can tell you this – the miracle of teamwork I saw in Chagai. We were there for about 10 days. The PM (Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif) had told me, “Dr. Sahib, please do not fail, we cannot afford to fail. IF WE FAIL, WE CANNOT SURVIVE. (Emphasis in prepared remarks.) This is an hour of crisis for Pakistan.” He was dead sure that if we failed, they would have attacked our nuclear facilities.

Mubarakmand also gave a rare, extended interview on Pakistan’s GEO-TV on March 20, 2007 in which he inferentially compared his contributions to Pakistan’s nuclear programs with those of A.Q. Khan:

I visited Chagai for the first time in 1981… When the tests were conducted, our team went there on 20th May, and on 28th May, in the early morning, the tunnels were plugged and the preparation for the test was complete, and on 28th May, around 3pm, was the time selected for testing. So at that time, at around 2:45pm, some of our guests arrived to witness the tests, and Dr. Qadeer Khan sahib was also one of them… It was the first visit of his life to Chagai. He came at the invitation of the Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and he arrived 15 minutes prior to the explosions.”

Comment [3]

At left, is an Iranian numerically controlled lathe milling machine forming cooling channels in a rocket engine.

It is impossible to tell the scale of this engine — and therefore impossible to uniquely link it to the Safir second stage.

However, machining these channels, as opposed to using a corrugated insert, is a major technological change from SCUD technology.

***

David Wright and Ted Postol have done a really first rate job of analyzing the U’nha-2 and Safir development programs, as exemplified by their excellent article on the U’nha-2. But I think it is important to at least consider an alternative: these missiles represent a much larger portion of indigenous production than just assembling components. This is not to say that Wright and Postol are wrong in their conclusions, only to consider the question.

An International Missile Development Consortium?

North Korea is widely viewed as not testing their missiles enough before they sell them to “client” states. The Nodong missile, which forms the basis for the Shahab-3 and its variants, was tested successfully just once before “being sold to Iran and Pakistan.” This is an unreasonable flight test program and has led many to conjecture that North Korea is either buying complete missiles from Russia, missiles already engineered and developed, or missile components. That could, of course, be very possible and has unfortunate implications for the West’s relationship with Russia. Another alternative of this basic idea, just a small variant really, is that North Korea bought the production line for an obsolete or canceled missile system and modified it to fit its own special circumstances. With this head start, it then formed an international “consortium” with Iran and possibly Pakistan to continue the development. Moving its development program into other countries would have significant advantages for North Korea. For one, while Iranian missile launches are controversial, they do not appear as controversial as the DPRK’s missile tests. This is even more true for Pakistan where any controversy is mainly a regional one.

Such a development consortium would not be the first one ever created. The one I am most familiar with is the Badr 2000/Condor II development program where Iraq, in essence, funded the development of the missile by several other nations. Iraq received a number of contributory production plants that increased their capabilities considerably while failing to produce the desired missile. If North Korea bought the equipment for an obsolete or canceled production line, this would undoubtedly violate many of the rules of the MTCR but might not be as suspicious a violation, especially in a country suffering from the economic catastrophe that was Russia in the 1990s, as selling missile components. After all, most of the equipment could be considered dual use and could appear in separate manifests etc. All the subterfuges proliferation profiteers have used in the past. Importantly, it is much, much easier to reverse engineer a production line than it is to reverse engineer a missile component. After all, once you know the production line components, it is quite easy to buy similar or even exactly the same production equipment else where. The difficulty in reverse engineering is to infer the production scheme.

Too Advanced for Purchasing Production Lines?

An Iranian welding the Shahab engine injection head.
This illustrates the shop-floor know-how that is so
important — and so hard to acquire.

If this happened for the Nodong missile, is it possible it could also happen for an SS-N-6? In fact, it seems even more likely to me that it would happen for these more advanced missile components. The world is full of SA-2 engines, as Iraq showed by purchasing these engines in late 2002 ( see UNMOVIC’s Compendium, volume IV, p. 581.) The closer they get to strategic weapons, the more they come under the control of various treaties. (I’m not sure if SS-N-6 missiles ever came under any of the START etc. treaties, do any of you wonk-readers know?) It is possible that makes them harder to illicitly dispose of. It makes their production lines, however, that much more valuable.

( See my posting on estimating the costs of just the know-how associated with the Badr-2000. That alone was worth $75 million.)

What Proliferators Want

Proliferators, just as would-be producers of civilian products, want access to the technology and they are very seldom satisfied with just components. In fact, the financial inducements needed to entice developing countries into foregoing civilian technology transfer have to be considerable. It seems unreasonable that both Iran and North Korea would voluntarily put themselves into the situation David and Ted suggest, that they only have a finite number of components, and make themselves susceptible to the types of international restrictions that would eventually shut off their missile programs.

Comment [19]

The first time I met Piers Millett, we were having a drink at Mr. Pickwick Pub in Geneva.

Now, Piers — one of only three members of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Implementation Support Unit in Geneva — is in town.

Long-time readers know one of my hobby horses is the fact that the policy community obsesses about phantom BW programs at the expense of international cooperation to fight the spread of virulent influenza. Someday, a lot of people are going to suffer for this particular sin.

Anyway, along with my friend Paul Walker at Global Green USA, I am hosting a talk and a wine reception for Piers here at the New America Foundation:

Strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention
Discussion and Wine Reception

Unlike the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) has no mechanism to ensure compliance and verification.

Given the dramatic advances in the life sciences over the past decade, the international community urgently needs to discuss strengthening the BWC.

Join the New America Foundation and Global Green USA as Piers Millett, one of the three experts from the BWC Implementation Support Unit in Geneva, and Paul Walker, president of Global Green USA, discuss how best to combat bioterrorism and the spread of bioweapons
.
Start: 07/08/2009 – 3:30pm
End: 07/08/2009 – 6:00pm
New America Foundation
1899 L Street NW Suite 400
Washington, 20036
United States
See map: Google Maps

RSVP

Participants
Featured Speakers
Dr. Piers Millett
Political Affairs Officer
Biological Weapons Convention Implementation Support Unit

Dr. Paul Walker
Director, Security and Sustainability
Global Green USA

Moderator
Dr. Jeffrey Lewis
Director, Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative
New America Foundation
Publisher, ArmsControlWonk.com

Please come and join us. RSVP here.

Comment

James collected a couple of articles on Yinhe incident for an October 2008 post entitled, The Yinhe Incident.

Worth revisiting.

Comment

According to David Sanger in the NYT, some folks in the Administration are thinking very carefully about the intelligence problem in interdiction:

Pentagon officials are clearly not eager to confront the Kang Nam 1. The intelligence about what is on board is typically murky. Some say they suspect small arms, which are banned by the United Nations resolution but hardly a major threat. Members of Mr. Obama’s team who served in the Clinton administration remember past embarrassments, including the interception of a Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical precursors in the early 1990s. When the ship was finally cornered, the cargo turned out to be benign.

That’s the Yinhe incident, for those of you keeping score at home.

X-posted from TW.

Comment [4]

A couple weeks ago, Benn Tannenbaum invited Ted Postol to come down to Washington. Ted gave a fascinating talk, in which he argued that the second stage of the Unha may be a re-purposed SS-N-6.

This is a plausible answer to the BM-25 — the North Korean bought kits to use as a second stage of the Taepodong series.

David Wright and Ted have a provocative article in the Bulletin suggesting that the Unha-2 “second stage appears identical to the single-stage Soviet R-27 sea-launched ballistic missile, called the SS-N-6 in the United States, which the Soviet Union first deployed in 1968.”

First the bad news: An SS-N-6 second stage massively increases the range-payload curve (doing away with the golf ball of death), putting CONUS within range of a 1 ton payload from North Korea.

Now, the good news: North Korea can’t indigenously manufacture the second stage, so if we can secure the rest of the SS-N-6 kits components (and cut off external assistance), the North Korea ICBM program is at a technological dead-end:

Analysis of the Taepodong-1 and Unha-2 launchers strongly suggests that they may be designed and built around components of Soviet missiles. The apparent lack of testing of these components by North Korea suggests that they aren’t indigenously produced systems but are existing components that North Korea has been able to combine to build multistage launchers. The Taepodong-1 appears to have used a modified Nodong missile for the first stage; a modified engine from a Soviet surface-to-air missile for the second stage; and the engine from a solid-fueled Soviet SS-21 tactical missile for the third stage. As noted above, the second stage of the Unha-2 appears to be a modified SS-N-6 missile, which was produced by the Makeyev bureau in the 1960s.

It’s possible that North Korea learned, with significant Russian assistance, to manufacture Scuds and Nodongs and is therefore not limited in its number of these missiles, assuming it can acquire the necessary materials. But this is much less likely for the SS-N-6, which is a far more advanced system due to its use of highly optimized rocket motors, very energetic propellant, and a complex airframe fabricated from aluminum alloy.

None of this evidence is conclusive, but because it has important policy implications, it should be a high priority for the United States to assess it and work with Russia to determine what technical assistance and components North Korea may have received.

Comment [8]

Many nuclear experts recently gathered in Oslo for an event on nuclear disarmament, organized by the Nobel Institute.

Bruno Tertrais, attendee and friend of wonk, sends along this photo of what, for him, was the highlight of the meeting: A talk by Joachim Rønneberg, “who, in addition to bearing a slight resemblance to Clint Eastwood (and is now 90), was the first successful counter-proliferator in history. He led the Norwegian team that conducted Operation Gunnerside, the sabotaging of the Nazi-occupied Norwegian heavy water plant in February 1943.”

Bruno might think Rønneberg looks like Clint Eastwood, but Kirk Douglas (right) played the Rønneberg character in The Heroes of Telemark.

Of course, Kirk is also father of Michael, no slouch when it comes to acting himself, who fights proliferation in his capacity as Ploughshares Board Member.

Bruno did not ask whether any of Rønneberg’s descendants were available for a short visit to Arak — no visa required.

Comment [2]

Iran is obviously investing a lot of its political, intellectual, and financial resources into the Natanz enrichment center. But can we come up with a figure for how much it has cost Iran? Perhaps we can estimate it based on costs associated with Western equivalents. I have attempted to do this below. The result is simply a ballpark figure and I should warning you that making budget estimates, just as making sausages, is not a pretty sight!

Warning: What follows might not be suitable reading for the infirm or small children!

Centrifuge Production Know-how…$75 million
Industrial know-how, the techniques actually used by the shop-floor workers, is vitally important for the successful production of any sophisticated item. Unfortunately, it is determined by how much the market will bear. How then should we estimate it? I decided to look at how much Iraq paid (or, rather, was willing to pay) for the know-how to build an advanced solid-propellant missile, the Badr-2000 (aka the Condor II). This know-how cost is explicitly stipulated in the contract Iraq signed with its supplier state: $75 M, after correcting for inflation. It could be argued that Iran might be willing to pay considerably more for the know-how for centrifuge production but any such guess would be just that. (This, as I warned you, is the ugly part.)

Construction of the underground facility…$55 million
ISIS has done a great job in following the construction of the Natanz facility using satellite reconnaissance. Assuming that the holes dug for the “cut-and-cover” enrichment halls are 25 meters deep, then the excavation costs (at $3 per cubic yard) is $7 M. The concrete, at $70/cubic yard, (and assuming floors, ceiling, and walls are 2 meters thick), is then $37 M. Those do not add up to the $55 M but if you assume a 50% “penalty” for working in a desert, then that’s what you get. (Again, ugly.)

Centrifuge production…$140 million
Given that Iran bought the know-how and initial production lines (production equipment not included, ugly!), I am only estimating the cost per centrifuge here. That comes from the cost per centrifuge for URENCO centrifuges as being leased to France. (Ugly, ugly! Let me be clear before somebody takes offense: when I say ugly, I mean my method of estimating is ugly.) You could argue that URENCO centrifuges are more sophisticated and therefore should cost more. Or you could argue that cost is determined by the relative level of sophistication of the production line compared to the past experience of the producer. (That’s what I assume; ugly, ugly, ugly!) I then get a per centrifuge cost of $20,000. Seven thousand of them therefore means a total of $140 M. The one thing that does not make sense is to cost them per SWU; manufacturers produce centrifuges not SWUs.

Grand total cost = $270 million and counting

Comment [5]

Dan Pinkston pointed out this gem from KCNA:

Taedonggang Beer

Pyongyang, June 25 (KCNA) — The beers including black beer and rice beer made by the Taedonggang Beer Factory are these days popular with the Pyongyang citizens.

Beer houses are crowed with working people who look pleased with their successes in the current 150-day campaign.

It was Juche 91 (2002) that the just built Taedonggang Beer Factory began supplying beer to the citizens.

The cold and soft Taedonggang beer rich in gas content immediately came into great favor among the customers by catering to their tastes.

Its fermentation degree is 77.5 percent.

The beer houses distributed rationally in residential quarters regularly serve beer carried to them directly from the factory.

The refrigerator vans carrying beer have a traffic privilege on the streets of Pyongyang like cars carrying soybean milk to children.

The citizens call Taedonggang beer “cold yet warm beer” as it is associated with the warm care of General Secretary Kim Jong Il for the people.

Comment [7]

A couple of weeks ago, I complained that the Los Angeles Times‘s Ralph Vartabedian wrote a misleading story on the W76-1 stockpile life extension program (W76 Problems Seem Overblown, June 3, 2009).

Bascially, Vartabedian used a relatively minor delay in the delivery of a “classified part” — the arming, firing and fuzing (AF&F) system — that had held up delivery of the first W76-1 in order to reprise now resolved concerns about the manufacture of a different “classified component,” aka FOGBANK. (For more on FOGBANK, see FOGBANK, March 7, 2008).

The two are problems are very different, since the AF&F system is not part of the physics package and can be replaced without testing. NNSA, to my mind, badly managed the FOGBANK production process and prematurely released a self-congratulatory press release, but neither sin justifies Vartabedian’s alarmist warning “about the Energy Department’s ability to maintain the nation’s strategic deterrent.”

After Vartabedian’s story, I was surprised that Peter Stockton from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) doubled down on the issue, insisting that the problem was not with the AF&F, but rather the production of FOGBANK (Show me the FOGBANK, June 7, 2009). I was (and am) very skeptical of that claim:

Now, Peter Stockton at POGO tells Munger that the hold-up is still related to FOGBANK:

[snip]

So, which is it? What Stockton said certainly was true, at least until recently. GAO stated while awaiting FOGBANK, Pantex remained “in ‘stand-by’ mode, which includes maintaining the skills of the technicians who will assemble refurbished W76 weapons.” (I suspect “stand-by” mode refers to the process described by Stockton.)

But is it still true in Spring 2009? I have to say, I would be very surprised if the problem continued to relate to FOGBANK. My money is on the AF&F system.

Well, it seems my suspicions were correct — or at the very least, NNSA is sticking to its story.

Frank Munger, of the Knoxville News-Sentinel and the excellent Atomic City Underground, reports an “unspecified number of W76 warheads are fully assembled, certified and ready for delivery to the military” though delivery won’t take place for several more months. “[NNSA public affairs chief Damien] LaVera reaffirmed earlier reports,” Munger also writes, “that there is an issue with the warhead’s arming, fuzing and firing (AF&F) system.”

Here is the text of LaVera’s email, relating to the issues dating back to first production unit of the W76, that Munger posted on his blog:

After the first production unit was completed in September 2008 and before the Nuclear Weapons Council accepted the W76 into the stockpile, a specific vulnerability in one of the AF&F components was discovered. This was a minor design tolerance issue that only impacts the operation of some of one component. The component is a safety and surety feature that is designed to permanently lock the component and disable the warhead if an incorrect arming signal is sent. The component is one of several redundant safety features that is designed to permanently lock and disable the warhead if an incorrect arming signal is sent in an accident. As a result of this design tolerance issue, under a very improbable accident condition, a locked AF&F component could unlock, though the warhead would remain unarmed.

As the AF&F components are produced, they are screened to determine whether this design variance will impact performance. If it is determined that it will, the AF&F component is pulled aside and used for other purposes. If AF&F performance is not affected, it is installed on the warhead. None of the AF&F components with this problem were ever installed on any of the refurbished W76 warheads. This problem did not delay delivery of W76s to the Navy beyond the fall 2009 timeframe we discussed.

We are currently implementing a design modification to permanently address the issue. While the problem with this AF&F component has not delayed delivery of the refurbished W76 to the Navy, correcting the design tolerance issue will remove the need to screen the AF&F components.

Comment