Editor’s Note: The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea—to use North Korea’s official name—this month detonated a nuclear device in an undisclosed underground location. The widely criticized test was “confirmed” by seismic detectors in the United States and elsewhere, but experts outside of North Korea could not guarantee that what their seismographs reported was actually the result of an atomic bomb test. World leaders from Beijing to Washington rhetorically denounced North Korea’s provocative move, but so far, no specific consequences have been agreed upon, even as North Korea threatens further tests. Moreover, experts warn that many other countries may already possess the technology, the know-how, and the material to produce nuclear weapons.

* Listen as Al briefly explains how he feels about North Korea's recent move.

Is there—beyond the political rhetoric that North Korea’s atomic blast ignited in capitals around the world—any immediate cause for alarm or concern?

In the following Q&A with Office of University Relations writer Juan Miguel Pedraza, UND historian Albert Berger, a widely quoted scholar of nuclear policy and atomic weapons, explains what he thinks about North Korea’s move, about nuclear weapons in general, and about the future of strategies such as deterrence and disarmament.

Pedraza: The nuclear threat has been with us since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, near the end of World War II; at that time, Germany and Britain also were working on atomic bombs.

The Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon in 1949, just a couple of years after British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described the “Iron Curtain” between East and West. Since then and despite concerted efforts to the contrary, more countries acquired the atomic bomb. Now, North Korea joins that club, and Iran is likewise promising to build a nuclear arsenal, too.

What’s your take on these developments?

Berger: Iran with nuclear weapons seems to scare people more than North Korea with nuclear weapons; they're both perceived by Americans as irrational. Just off the top of my head, I think that Iran seems irrational in an expansionist, destructive-to-its-neighbors mode. There's always the potential for that in North Korea, but it's always been a lot more reserved.

My suspicion, without any real evidence, is that North Korea doesn’t want nuclear weapons in order to use them; they want them in order to sell them, which could be more dangerous than if they wanted them to use. There's some indication that there’s been some information exchange between Pakistan and North Korea —the concern is that these new nuclear nations that none of the old nuclear powers trust seem to be cooperating with each other.

Pedraza: Were we this bothered when Russia and others got the bomb?

Berger: Of course, it bothered the United States terribly when the Soviet Union got the atomic bomb and broke the American monopoly; that led to a big arms buildup; it led to the hydrogen bomb. However, there wasn’t a whole lot of fuss when the United Kingdom, France, and even China got the bomb, even though John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s talked about a world in the not-too-distant future when 30 countries might have the atomic bomb.

Pedraza: When did we start seriously talking about limiting the spread of these weapons?

Berger: In a sense, President Kennedy’s observation was the origin of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1968 during the Johnson Administration . Of the seven confirmed nuclear powers (confirmed meaning that they have publicly tested atomic bombs ) only five have signed. Neither India nor Pakistan, two of the confirmed nuclear powers, nor Israel (which does not admit to nuclear tests or to owning a nuclear arsenal) have signed or ratified the treaty. North Korea pulled out of the agreement awhile back.

Pedraza: The West’s talk about “nonproliferation” seems to be kind of one-sided—after all, we officially launched the nuclear age by using two of these weapons of mass destruction against largely civilian targets. Why, indeed, are we so worried about Iran or North Korea?

Berger:   Why is it that we get bothered by anyone having the atomic bomb while we refuse to admit that they have the right to be bothered by our having the atomic bomb? When you refer countries such as India or China or Pakistan or North Korea, to the NPT, their response is almost always “where do the ‘great’ nuclear powers —the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), the UK — get the moral authority, to complain about our nuclear weapons when they still have theirs.”

There is a clause in the original NPT that commits those nations that already had nuclear weapons to work toward their abolition and their removal from the environment. Basically, the signers of the NPT that were nuclear powers said they'd do their best to get rid of nuclear weapons ; but, of course, that hasn’t happened.

From countries such as Iran and North Korea, there are always charges of hypocrisy against the Americans, the British, and the Russians because there are no indications that any of the original members of the nuclear club are going to disarm.

Pedraza: Isn’t it also a fact that the original Big Four nuclear club—the U.S., the UK, France, and the Soviet Union—wasn’t all that keen on strictly limiting the spread of these weapons?

Berger:  True—and I’d say that the role of the French is especially peculiar; France early on contributed to nuclear proliferation through its cooperation with other countries. For example, there’s a great deal of suspicion that the French were the enablers for the Israelis. The presumably civilian Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona is reported by the Federation of American Scientists, among others, as the source of nuclear material for Israel’s arsenal; that reactor is, I believe, of French origin.

And one of the reasons that the Israelis were so certain that the Osirak reactor that the Iraqis were building near Baghdad back in 1981 was designed for the production of nuclear weapons fuel was because it seemed similar to the reactor at Dimona. Believing that the Iraqis intended to build nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered a pre-emptive strike on Osirak; it was the world’s first air strike against a nuclear facility. The French-built reactor was destroyed.

Pedraza: Up to this point, we’ve talking nuclear weapons; but there’s another, peaceful dimension to atomic technology that has been expressed in items such as the U.S. Commerce Department’s short-lived experiment, the yacht-like passenger freighter NS Savannah. How do we reconcile peaceful and, according to some folks, sorely needed uses of nuclear energy with the ever-present potential for such technology to be weaponized?

Berger: The problem with nuclear proliferation is that nuclear energy is, by its very nature, dual-purpose technology. It has numerous benign civilian uses, the most common being the production of electricity. It also has myriad applications in medicine and other sciences. Of course, in a developing country—especially with today’s high price of oil—nuclear reactors are seen as a way of generating cheap energy, something that these countries very much could use.

I saw a cartoon recently that depicted Iran generating electricity with nuclear power while they’re sitting on top of all that oil; but the reality is that for Iran oil is mostly for selling. They need the cash. Every barrel that they pull off stream to fuel an electric power plant is a barrel they can’t sell abroad . The problem with all this logic, however, is the nuclear fuel cycle.

Pedraza: Sounds like we’re getting into nuclear physics now, an area most of us would find completely intractable. Can you briefly tell us what you know about how this technology works?

Berger: Nuclear reactors, in the normal course of their operation, can produce plutonium as a byproduct of a controlled nuclear reaction. Some reactors do that more efficiently than others.
It’s not as easy to make a bomb out of plutonium as it is to make a bomb out of enriched uranium, but neither is it that difficult for trained people who want to do it.

The bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, was fueled by enriched uranium. The scientists were confident enough that it would work that they never tested it. Actually, they couldn’t test it because there wasn’t enough enriched uranium to make both a test device and a bomb. It exploded with a force of roughly 15 kilotons, the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT (or dynamite). The earliest estimates for the recent North Korean test were in the 1 to 4 kiloton range. Hydrogen bomb blasts are measured in millions of tons of TNT .

In fact, the United States had enormous resources of uranium available for the original Manhattan Project (the World War II atomic bomb development project). But in order to get enough enriched uranium to make the Hiroshima bomb , U.S. Army units tracked down the German atomic bomb project and shipped back to the United States the enriched uranium they found. Some of the uranium that went into the Hiroshima bomb actually came from the German atomic weapons project—if you want to read more about that, check out “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes.

That (Hiroshima) bomb was relatively simple: they took two pieces of uranium, each of which was too small to create a chain reaction by itself and they fired them, by means of conventional explosive charges, toward each other in what was essentially a gun barrel. One of the pieces of uranium was shaped like a donut; the other piece was the donut “hole” that would exactly fit into the first piece. When they came together, it produced a chain reaction, or nuclear explosion.

You can’t do that with plutonium.

The physics department can tell you exactly why—I’m not a physicist nor am I an expert in nuclear technology—but it turns out that the mass of plutonium required to set off an explosion varies with temperature and pressure.

So instead of a bomb with a gun barrel, which with plutonium as the bomb material would have been big and unwieldy, they put a relatively small sphere of plutonium in the middle of a sphere of chemical explosives, shaped charges similar to anti-tank rounds, which focused the blast wave inward, on the center of the sphere, where the plutonium is.

When the pressure and the heat of the explosion  hits the plutonium core, what had been too small to be a critical mass becomes critical, and you get an explosion.

That is why today you can have nuclear weapons that are so much smaller than they used to be. Now you’re running up against the limits of my technical knowledge.

In any event, what we’ve heard from both Iran and North Korea, and what we heard way back when from Iraq, was about uranium “separation.” There are at least two isotopes of uranium—the difference is in atomic weight. The more common variety has an atomic weight of 238; the much less common variety has an atomic weight of 235. More than 99 percent of all the uranium that is mined is U-238.

In order to get an explosive chain reaction with U-238, you would need an enormous volume of the stuff, a lot more than you could put in an airplane or a missile. You need far less U-235 than U-238 to make a nuclear explosion. So the first objective of just about everyone who was or is trying to build an atomic bomb is to separate U-235 from U-238.

Both varieties are found in the same ore, which normally contains less than 1 percent U-235. There are several ways to separate the two, one of the most effective being the centrifuge method. The heavier material goes one way, the lighter material goes another. There also are electromagnetic methods.

In World War II, they turned the stuff into a gas and ran it through what was essentially an enormous cascade of strainers; the smaller U-235 atoms would get through the strainers, the slightly larger U-238 atoms would be trapped. You run that operation thousands of times and you get the same result, the separation of U-235 from U-238. The level of enrichment that you need to get a chain reaction in a nuclear reactor is much lower than the kind you need to create a bomb.

That’s why uranium separation equipment is one of the things that people go looking for when they're asking “are they building an atomic bomb?” You can also use a reactor to produce plutonium.

Pedraza: So, at its core, atomic technology can’t be seen to be only for peaceful purposes or only for weapons, correct?

Berger: Basically, that’s correct—there’s an enormous amount of stuff, from a basic nuclear reactor to the separation technologies to all of their component parts, that’s all dual-use. It all can have a perfectly peaceful purpose at the same time that it carries the potential to make nuclear weapons. That’s where a lot of the controversy comes from.

So you get dialog that goes something like this:

“Oh, Iran, you’re going to bomb Israel, you’re going to destroy American troops or the Sunnis in Iraq, which is why we can’t let you have nuclear weapons.”

“Well,” Iran responds, “we just need the electricity.” 

This sort of dialogue has gone on before with the potential nuclear powers.  It is going on now with Iran, although North Korea now speaks openly of its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The trouble, of course, is that both of these possibilities can be true at the same time, no matter who has the nuclear technology, whether we're talking Iran or  North Korea.

Thus if you’re going to depend on nuclear power to generate electricity, you’re going to have proliferation. And the problem goes all the way back to the Eisenhower Administration (Editor’s note: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1890-1969, was Supreme Commander of all the Allied troops in 1944-1945; he was 34th president of the United States, 1953-1961). Eisenhower proposed the Atoms for Peace program. The idea behind that was the United States and the Soviet Union together would contribute “fissionable material ” to countries that wanted to generate electricity with nuclear power.

This was atomic energy for peaceful purposes , a step toward peace in the Cold War, a collaboration between U.S. and the USSR . However, the Russians said no. So Eisenhower implemented Atoms for Peace unilaterally, at which point the Soviets emulated him and began their own atoms-for-non-military-purposes program. China built its first atomic bombs with fuel from that Soviet program.

Pedraza: Clearly, atomic science—both in its military and in its ostensibly peaceable guises—has been socially and politically troublesome from the beginning. So where does North Korea’s nuclear weapons program fit in the global scheme of things?

Berger: It’s interesting that the Bush Administration says that North Korea is destabilizing because, by enunciating his doctrine of pre-emption and pre-emptive strikes, Bush effectively gave the North Koreans their excuse. Bush said we’re going to evaluate threats to the United States and, if we see an imminent threat coming down the pike, we’re going to get rid of it ahead of time; we’re not going to wait to be struck first. In the words of then-national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, talking about the Bush Administration’s discussion about the possibility of attacking Iraq, on CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer in 2002, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

When Bush says that we’re going to pre-empt a threat , he is, in effect, giving (North Korean leader) Kim Jong-il the rhetorical opening to say “the United States is planning an attack on us,” which it almost certainly is not . At the moment, the Chinese are as much concerned about North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities as we are . They are closer to the problem.

By going into Iraq, Bush said, “Yes, we have this pre- emption doctrine and here’s an example of it.” So Kim Jong-il can say, “Here’s the pre-emption doctrine, and then comes the invasion of Iraq, so we can see the same scenario for us.” You can’t argue with that logic, as little as you might like Kim Jong-il, who’s saying “Bush plans to do to us what he did to Saddam Hussein.”

In that sense, the United States, under its current administration, created the environment for this particular problem by enunciating the doctrine of pre-emption . It gives everybody an excuse. It’s a very dangerous policy to enunciate—although, to be honest, the doctrine of pre-emption was always there.

The public American scenario was that someone would attack us with ballistic missiles. It would take 30 minutes for the missiles to get from wherever they were launched to the United States. In those 30 minutes, we would send the information up to the president, then get an authorization from the president down to the guys in the silos; they’d turn the keys, and off we would go, presumably before they themselves were destroyed by the incoming missiles.

Well, it doesn’t work that way.

Getting messages up and down the chain of command that fast in practice doesn’t work, no matter how urgent the situation is—all you have to do to confirm this is look at 9/11; look at Hurricane Katrina, where the garbling of information up and down the chain was terrible, where mutual communications even at the same level was awful.

In the best of all possible worlds, communications technology would work as intended; everything would have flawlessly gone up and down the chain of command in real time. In practice, that’s not the way it happens.

In 1955, when we were talking airplanes instead of guided missiles, two industrialists working for the Gaither Commission (formed by the Eisenhower Administration in 1957), went to visit General Curtis LeMay at Strategic Air Command headquarters. They had just discovered that the Strategic Air Command could not get its planes off the ground in the 20 minutes it had originally boasted that it could. By the time they could actually get most of their planes airborne, they would actually have been destroyed on the ground by incoming Soviet missiles. You still had the problem of planes being parked wingtip-to-wingtip, just like they were in Pearl Harbor.

So the Gaither Commission ers went to LeMay with their findings, and LeMay said that he was well aware of these so-called problems. However, LeMay explained, there really weren’t any problems because his intelligence was so good that he would know what the Russians were up to a week in advance, and before they get a chance to do anything, he said, “I’m going to kick the (expletive deleted) out of them!”

These two industrialists argued with Gen. LeMay, saying “(pre-emption) is not our policy.” And, according to one of them, LeMay responded with, “Well, that’s my policy .” The other remembered that LeMay said that “my job is to make it possible for the president to change the policy.”

Once the Soviet Union got nuclear weapons and the notion of a Soviet first strike came online, the idea of hitting the Soviets first was always there, particularly as it became a matter of missiles rather than aircraft. In a nuclear interchange, whoever fires first has the advantage. This is when we’re talking about very large arsenals looking at each other.

Pedraza: But that superpower scenario has changed. We’re now talking different, and apparently much more complicated, nuclear threats.

Berger: Yes, today, with the North Korean situation, we’re talking about a different threat scenario. The fact is that nuclear weapons have stood traditional—that is, pre-nuclear—military doctrine on its head. For example, with conventional weapons, secrecy protects you. But if an adversary does not know what you’re doing with nuclear weapons, it’s very easy, very tempting, for them to conclude that you’re doing something that requires them to act to protect themselves.

So, today, for example, you might get North Korea or some country like it saying, “Oh, my goodness, we don’t know what the Americans are up to, we can’t see what they’re doing, so they’re obviously planning to attack us; therefore, we have to fire first and take advantage of all of those things that make a first strike more effective than the second.”

In that sense, if the Russians or any other potential adversary could see everything that you’re doing, they could also see that you’re not doing anything harmful. And the very fact that they can see what you’re doing argues against taking that first strike, against doing anything that no one is going to like.

When the Soviet warning system began to go down for lack of maintenance, the United States considered it to be in the U.S. best interest to keep their system working—in other words, we’re paying to help maintain that system because then they would know for sure that we weren’t doing anything to threaten them. Secrecy actually detracts from military security when you’re talking about nuclear weapons.

In North Korea’s case, then, it might be argued that, because they announced their intentions, they're playing a fairly stock nuclear game.

But of course, they’re also trying to intimidate. For what reason, I’m not sure; it would be the height of foolishness for them to initiate anything. We think of them as irrational, but are they irrational enough to initiate a situation which would call for nuclear retaliation against their country? In that sense, that’s one of the reasons that I think that North Korea presents us with a difficult problem, but one that, eventually, will be manageable.

Editor's notes: Curtis LeMay, a veteran of several World War II European bombing campaigns—including personally flying as commander several of the most dangerous bombing raids over Germany—was head of the Army Air Force that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He became a leading proponent and organizer of the U.S. aerial nuclear power, including the Strategic Air Command.