All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
For the first time in years, talking throw weights is back in vogue: President Barack Obama has outlined a vision of a world free of nuclear weaponry, and nuclear policy experts are starting to talk seriously about reshaping the arsenal.
Stephanie Cooke began reporting on about the nuclear world nearly three decades ago; her new book, In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age, reads like an insider's guide to this renewed debate. We recently spoke with Cooke about the secret history of the bomb, the threat of nuclear proliferation, and visiting radioactive destinations.
Danger Room: When you began reporting on the world of nuclear energy in the early 1980s, the threat of clandestine nuclear weapons programs was starting to appear on the radar: The Europeans were trying to figure out what to do about A.Q. Khan's theft of nuclear secrets from Holland, the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq. What scenario frightens you most today?
Stephanie Cooke: Like everybody else I'm worried about the situation in Pakistan, and the build-up of fissile material in both India and Pakistan. But what also frightens me are the things few people talk about publicly, like whether the threat of a nuclear North Korea will force Japan to use its plutonium stockpile to make weapons. The fact we even have to consider this, by the way, once again demonstrates the fine line between civil and military uses of nuclear energy — that Japanese plutonium stems from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from Japanese power reactors. A nuclear Iran is not necessarily inevitable, but the Iranians have crossed a technical threshold at Natanz, which means that in the event of a political decision to defy the International Atomic Energy Agency, they could produce enough highly-enriched uranium for one or two weapons within a matter of months rather than years.
Longer-term, the prospect of a major nuclear renaissance in the Middle East worries me since countries like Syria and Egypt have already flirted with nuclear weapons. I don’t think Saudi Arabia would like to sit idly by if its neighbors are building bombs.
DR: You knew people like Hans Blix, Mohamed ElBaradei and David Kay -- key figures of the arms control world -- before they were household names. You also got to know some of the people associated with the very early days of postwar nuclear development. How did you gain access to this secretive world?
SC: With great difficulty. As a reporter for NuclearFuel and Nucleonics Week in the early ‘80s I had no choice but to dive in as best I could. I attended numerous conferences and worked the phones like any good journalist and gradually gained the trust of people in the industry - not all of them but a good many. That said, many of them insisted on talking on background and they didn't exactly spill stories into my lap. Later, when I was working on a story about the IAEA for a magazine, Blix, who was then still the agency’s director-general, tried to bar me from the agency because he was unhappy about a critical op-ed piece I had written. I had to get the U.S. mission in Vienna to intervene on my behalf. But that was in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, which was a difficult time for Blix and the agency, and he has since gained a lot of credibility by standing up to the second Bush administration in the build-up to the second war in Iraq. I have talked to Blix in the meantime and I think we are on good terms now.
DR: The Department of Energy, you recently wrote, "has nuclear weapons in its DNA"; what do you think about proposal forwarded by the Obama administration to fold the nuclear weapons complex into the Department of Defense? Can the military do a better job of oversight than the civilians?
SC: I have mixed feelings about that. Proponents of the idea would argue the military is less trigger-happy when it comes to nuclear weapons than civilian overseers, and that to trim costs it would happily cut back the weapons complex as it did in the early 1990s. On the other hand, I think it might set a bad example, particularly for other countries. But one thing that is important to realize is that the so-called military-civilian divide here is a bit illusory. To take one example: the Department of Energy (DOE) uses Tennessee Valley Authority power reactors to make tritium for its bomb program. The other thing to remember is that the weapons themselves are under military control — the DOE controls all the plant that produces and maintains them. The main point I was trying to make is that the nation needs an agency truly devoted to finding a long-term solution to meeting future energy demand. What we have instead is an agency in which two-thirds of the budget is devoted to maintaining the weapons stockpile and dealing with the nuclear clean-up. Those activities should probably be split up and turned over to a new organization but my suspicion is it won’t happen because there are so many other challenges the administration is facing.
DR: When you began covering the nuclear issue, you were a something of a believer in nuclear energy. What started to shake that belief? At what moment did you really begin to see the intimate connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry?
SC: I started covering nuclear energy a year after Three Mile Island. Numerous investigations were underway into what went wrong. People like Henry Myers in the House (described in the book) were looking into all sorts of other questionable and in some cases criminal activities by utilities engaged in nuclear activity. At the same time, the industry was still in the throws of a dispute over shipping U.S.-origin nuclear fuel to India after the 1974 explosion. I talked endlessly to Henry and to people like Len Weiss, Sen. John Glenn’s chief scientific advisor, and Victor Gilinsky, a Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner chief who had made nonproliferation one of his specialities. Len was one of the authors of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978 (NNPA), written in direct response to the Indian explosion; Gilinsky had strenuously opposed the U.S. fuel shipments once he deemed them in violation of the NNPA. None of these people were on the record as being opposed to nuclear energy and at the time I’m not certain any of them really were. But for their willingness to criticize, they were treated contemptuously by the industry, which I was aware of, and I couldn’t help but think the industry was overly defensive, instead of being deeply troubled by what was happening as they should have been. I remained neutral in my reporting, as was required by the terms of my job, but the positive feelings I had had about nuclear energy were gradually eroded.
DR: What was the most unusual thing that you had the chance to see in your decades covering the nuclear world?
SC: Probably the most impressive thing I saw covering the nuclear industry was the Rossing uranium mine in the Namib Desert. I stood on a drill rig as it bored into the desert. My head was splitting after that. Everything about the mine was huge, including the ore crusher which consisted of three large mortar-and-pestle-like structures sitting side-by-side,into which the ore was dumped and crushed. The trucks were enormous. We stood high above and slightly behind the ore crushers on a catwalk but it was too loud to talk. (Factoid: uranium from the Rossing mine is what’s being fed into the Natanz enrichment plant in Iran — a fuller story is in the book.)
The most depressing thing I ever saw was the Sellafield plutonium plant in Britain, which has turned the Irish Sea into the world’s most radioactive salt water body — I devote a section of a chapter to it. A tour of the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Texas was interesting – we got to stand inside a Gravel Gertie where the final assembly operations took place. But the most revealing aspect of that trip were the interviews I conducted with people living on the plant’s periphery. A story unfolded about their past and their dawning awareness that a plant they had just accepted all these years was actually causing harm to the water they (and their cattle) drank and to their land. Their formerly unswerving trust in the government had all but disappeared.
DR: Over the past several months, we've seen renewed calls for nuclear abolition -- from Cold Warriors like Kissinger and Shultz to President Obama. Based on your experience, do you think the nuclear establishment is ready? Or will these institutions, above all, fight for self-preservation?
SC: I believe that like any institution they will fight for self-preservation. In that sense, I don’t think the DOE weapons complex is much different from the auto industry in Detroit. They want to keep their jobs, preserve their pensions, and so forth. I will never forget what the head of the local Metal Trades Council told me ahead of my tour of the Pantex facility in 1994, after the Soviet collapse, when the plant was opened to reporters in a newfound spirit of openness. He said, “The trust the government has in Russia isn’t shared here. Most of us think we’ll be back building them (warheads) in a few years...One guy summed it up for all of us: ‘Russia was a reliable enemy. As soon as we get another reliable enemy, we will go back to work.’”
When you consider what these people are doing, such remarks are pretty scary. But they don’t have too much to worry about at the moment — if Obama’s weapons reduction cuts come through there will be plenty of dismantling work ahead for a number of years. A bigger question is what to do about the national laboratory complex.
