Transcript

Prelude: The Soviets Reach Out

The transcript below may contain errors.

TOM COCHRAN: You needed three people to do this work. You needed a Gorbachev at the top. You needed a Velikhov who could make decisions independent of Gorbachev, but who didn’t have time to do the work. You needed under him, under Velikhov, someone who was senior enough who could make the train run. And in the case of verification, that was Mikhail Kaban. We had Kaban, Velikhov and Gorbachev.

SHELLY LESHER: Welcome to My Nuclear Life. I’m Shelly Lesher. In 2023, the Stanley Center for Peace and Security contacted me about a joint project. They were interested in recording an oral history of the Black Sea Experiment. I had never heard of this experiment, but quickly became interested. When researching the event, three names kept appearing. Frank von Hippel, Tom Cochran, and Steve Fetter. Frank is a professor and founding co-director of the program on Science and Global Security at Princeton. At the time of the experiment, Frank was the chairman of the Federation of American Scientists. Tom is now retired, but at the time was the director of the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council. You might remember Steve Fetter from episode 39, US Nuclear Weapons and the Nuclear Posture Review. He is currently a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. At the time of the project, he had just arrived at the university to start his career after leaving a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

The Black Sea Experiment is an amazing story on many levels, but it is too long to tell in one episode, so this will be two. We will first meet Tom and Frank today with the background information and the next episode will feature the experiment itself, which is where Steve comes in. I want to note the project was a joint endeavor with the Soviet scientists. I attempted to contact them, but the only ones that are alive are still in Russia. And with this current state of US-Russian relations, I was unable to speak to them. I want to start with the Natural Resource Defense Council.

TOM COCHRAN: Natural Resources Defense Council.

SHELLY LESHER: Yes. So what was it and how were you involved?

TOM COCHRAN: There were a half a dozen Yale Law School graduates in the late 60s, around ’69 that wanted to start an environmental law organization, a non-profit, and they went to the Ford Foundation and the Ford Foundation teamed them up with some senior lawyers in New York and gave them the seed money. And they spent the first year fighting with the Nixon administration to get a tax exemption and then got off the ground in 1970 as a law firm with these partners, and the senior partner was John Adams, but the other, who was from New York and formerly with the feds. The students, he was a little more senior, but the students says, “Okay, John, you can be the executive director, but you only get the same vote that we get. This is a partnership.” And I came to know one of the partners, Gus Speth, who is a brilliant lawyer. He was suing the AEC over the breeder reactor program to force them to prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement.

And I had been hired a couple of years earlier and was working at Resources for the Future to write a book on the nuclear power industry. And I wrote a book on the breeder reactor program. So I was looking for a job and I teamed up with Gus to go after the breeder program, in the event he won the lawsuit, which he did on appeal. And Gus went into the Carter administration and I stayed at NRDC and spent from ’73 to ’83 fighting the breeder program and reprocessing with attorneys, suing the government and suing the Atomic Energy Commission and commenting on environmental impact statements and draft impact statements and giving congressional testimony and the like. When Reagan came into office in ’83, I decided we had killed the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee. It was actually a coalition that led to its demise. The Congress quit funding it. When Reagan came in because he was beefing up the weapons program, the nuclear weapons program, I wanted to get in that side of the business.

But in those days, the only people outside of government that the government would listen to was the Arms Control Association. And I realized that in order to get into that business, I needed to establish myself. And I teamed up with a young man named William Arkin, Bill Akin, and we started writing what was called the Nuclear Weapons Databook Series, and we published the first volume on US nuclear warheads and delivery systems. It was reviewed by McGeorge Bundy, who was then at the Ford Foundation, but he gave it a good book review in the New York Times Book Review, and so that put us on the map.

And while we were writing them, we were interested in collecting data on nuclear testing. And I read some technical papers out of Livermore, a technical paper, and realized they were conducting secret tests. When they fired off a very small test and decided that nobody could detect it, they wouldn’t declare it as a test. And this guy at Livermore had plotted a curve of tests and he’d fudged it a little bit to make it unclassified. And I used that curve to back out how many secret tests there were, published a little paper on US secret nuclear tests.

SHELLY LESHER: So these secret tests were not from the Soviet Union, these were US secret tests?

TOM COCHRAN: Right. And then we sat around the office and were talking about this. And in those days, Greenpeace was sending in teams to the test site, and we would help them by telling them when the next test would be. Arkin figured out how to learn when they were going to test. But it occurred to me that if we had seismic stations close to the test site and we didn’t have to be on the test site, we could actually reveal these secret tests when they occurred. But I also realized nobody was going to fund that because it would be one-sided and reveal US secrets and so forth. And one day, a reporter that was also my friend suggested, “Well, why don’t you do the seismic recordings of Soviet tests as well?” And that led to me drafting a letter to Reagan and Gorbachev. Gorbachev, when he came into office in ’85 declared a moratorium on testing.

Reagan said, “No, it’s all propaganda and you can’t verify it, and they won’t let us in the Soviet Union,” and so forth. That cheating on the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which turned out to be not the case. So I drafted a letter and went, and through this reporter friend got a meeting with Vitaly Churkin, who was a junior officer at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He later became the Russian spokesman at the UN, but he’s deceased now. But I proposed writing these letters and he had some suggestions that were not helpful. And so my next step was to go to Jeremy Stone, who was the head of the Federation of American Scientists, had been interacting with Soviet scientists, doing seminars and retreats and so forth. So I called him up and said, “Jeremy, how do I talk to these Soviet guys?” And he said, “Well, I’ll invite you to the next conference we’re having with them outside of Washington DC.”

I went to that conference and there was a delegation headed by a guy in the academy named Kokoshin, Andrei Kokoshin, later became head of the Industrial Defense Operations. But at the time, he was just a researcher and a member of the academy. And so at this meeting, I pitched this idea of joining together and monitoring the two test sites. I got a favorable response or I thought I got a favorable response from him. And so I started talking to Frank von Hippel who was at the same meeting, and Frank said, “Well, I’m going to Moscow fairly soon with the Five Continent Peace Initiative and I’ll talk to Velikhov.” So he goes and talks to Velikhov and they agree to have a meeting in Moscow on test ban verification.

SHELLY LESHER: I’m sorry. Who’s Velikhov?

TOM COCHRAN: Evgeny Velikhov was one of several, but a few vice-presidents of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But he had known Gorbachev before Gorbachev became chairman of the Communist Party, when Gorbachev was doing some agricultural work. And so Velikhov became one of Gorbachev’s principal science advisors. And so he could get hold of Velikhov and get things done through him. But Evgeny Velikhov was also an academician. Velikhov was also a risk-taker and was willing to do things even if he didn’t have Gorbachev’s permission, which was great.

SHELLY LESHER: So he was a good ally to have. He was the right contact.

TOM COCHRAN: It turns out, this is jumping forward a little, you needed three people to do this work that I ended up doing. You needed Gorbachev at the top. We now have Putin at the top, and so you can’t do it anymore. You needed a Velikhov who could get to Gorbachev, who could make decisions independent of Gorbachev, but who didn’t have time to do the work. He had about 40 different projects. He had children’s camp projects going on with the US and he was a fusion energy physicist. So you needed under him, under Velikhov, someone who is senior enough who could make the train run. In the case of verification that was a senior administrator at the Institute of Physics of the Earth that does all this seismology named Mikhail Kaban. So we had Kaban, Velikhov and Gorbachev.

SHELLY LESHER: And so if one of those people weren’t involved, none of this would’ve happened?

TOM COCHRAN: Nothing would have worked.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: I’m Frank von Hippel and we’re in the Princeton University’s program on Science and Global Security.

SHELLY LESHER: So how did you become the president of the Federation of American Physicists?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Yeah. I was the chairman-

SHELLY LESHER: The chairman?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Not the president. The elected chairman. In the 1970s, they got a new full-time CEO, president, Jeremy Stone, who revived the FAS, and we got to know each other and he decided I should be the chairman of the FAS. And somehow I was elected chairman. At that time, the FAS had about 5,000 members. So that’s how I became the chairman. And we’re now in the late… Around 1980.

SHELLY LESHER: Do you think that’s why the Soviet scientist reached out to you?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, we now get to President Reagan’s 1983 Star Wars speech announcing the Star Wars program. And that led to the Soviet Academy of Sciences setting up a Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace Against the Nuclear Threat.

SHELLY LESHER: They’re really for those punchy titles, aren’t they?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Right. Later on, when I was on a foundation board with Andrei Sakharov, Sakharov proposed the title for the Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity.

SHELLY LESHER: I had that highlighted because I’m like that is a great title.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: And I said, “That’s a little long. Could we make it shorter?” And he says, “Well, Frank, what do you want to leave out? Humanity? Survival? Development?” So that’s the name. The name stuck.

SHELLY LESHER: He certainly wasn’t going for an acronym. He was to the point. This is what the committee’s about.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: So anyway, the Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace and Against the Nuclear Threat wrote a letter. I think there’s probably several organizations, probably the National Academy of Sciences. And one came to the FAS, and Jeremy had actually been to Moscow a number of times to promote the idea of a treaty limiting ballistic missile defenses. And it didn’t make sense to the Soviet leadership. But after a while, they became persuaded. And in fact, this helped lead to the 1972 ABM Treaty, which limited both missile defenses on both sides to ultimately to a hundred interceptors at one location, which the Soviets had around Moscow. We couldn’t just defend Washington, so we ended up with no interceptor. So they wrote us a letter and said, “You helped persuade us, our missile defense was bad, ineffective, and provocative of an offense, defense arms race. Have you changed your mind?” And Jeremy wrote back that we had not changed our mind. And he proposed, actually, we come to Moscow, go to Moscow to discuss this, and they invited us to Moscow.

SHELLY LESHER: So were these the scientists or were these the people in Moscow in the government?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: No. These were members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It turned out to be one non-scientist in the leadership of this group. It was under the chairman of Evgeny Velikhov, who was the vice president of the Soviet Academy. And he had his deputies, [inaudible 00:15:41], who was the head of the Space Research Institute, and Sergey Kapitsa, who was the physicist. His father had won the Nobel Prize. Kapitsa had become the Carl Sagan of the Soviet Union. He had a weekly television show on science on national TV. He said that Carl Sagan was the Sergey Kapitsa of the United States. Then Andrei Kokoshin, who was the non-scientist, I think trained as an engineer who was at the US-Canada Institute, which was pushing for detente at the time under Georgi Arbatov.

SHELLY LESHER: So as a physicist, did you think that you could have an impact in changing the relationship between the Soviet Union and the US?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: No, I had no idea that we would have an impact. But it was interesting to talk to the Soviet scientists, and we went back and forth a number of times. This was for two years from 1983 to 1985, and then Gorbachev took over as the chairman of the central committee of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union. And we learned that this group was also advising Gorbachev. And then after that, the sky was the limit in terms of actually having things happen as a result of our brainstorming.

SHELLY LESHER: What was the idea then when you got together? You said sky was the limit, so what were you thinking?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, actually, Gorbachev had the first initiative, and I don’t know what role Velikhov and company played in this. He picked up something that Khrushchev had done, which was he wanted to accomplish the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Khrushchev had actually only achieved a limited test ban treaty, which had ended testing everywhere, except underground, testing had continued underground. So on the way to that, Khrushchev had actually initiated a unilateral test moratorium, and ultimately the underground part of it had been defeated by Edward Teller and his colleagues who claimed that you could conceal underground testing. And so Gorbachev initiated a unilateral test moratorium on Hiroshima Day, 1983, August 6th. But he said it would continue only for a limited time unless the US joined. The Reagan administration made clear they were not interested in joining.

SHELLY LESHER: What was the reasons that the Reagan administration didn’t want to join?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: One was Star Wars. Teller had actually been part of the selling of Star Wars by saying that he had invented a nuclear explosion power X-ray laser that could be launched into space and shoot X-ray beams that would shoot down Soviet warheads.

SHELLY LESHER: Why did anyone believe that?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: It was a scandal at Livermore, actually. But Reagan believed it. Teller had been an advisor of his. He sort of respected Teller greatly as the self-declared father of the U.S.H bomb.

SHELLY LESHER: Yeah, okay. Sorry. Didn’t expect you to know why anyone would believe that, but it’s just…

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, there was a lot of criticism-

SHELLY LESHER: Isn’t that crazy?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: There was a lot of criticism in the physics community by really eminent people like Garwin and Bethe and so on. So anyway, so then time was running out and a lot of pressure on Gorbachev. I was recruited. There was an organization called the Parliamentarians for Global Security, I think, I’m not sure, that it recruited me to be their advisor and a visit to Shevardnadze to try to encourage them to keep it up, that it was making a difference politically in the world. And then I met Velikhov later in 1985 in Copenhagen at the 100th centennial of Niels Bohr that we were both invited to. And he said to me, “Maybe we can get more attention if we invite somebody to come in and verify.” Because the Reagan administration also is saying, “How do we know that they’re not testing?”

SHELLY LESHER: Trust but verify, of course.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: And he said, “Well, maybe we can get an international group to come in and verify that we’re not testing.” And so we organized a meeting, I think it was May 1986, where I found three groups that were interested in doing this. And they came and it turned out that the only group that actually could move on this was the Natural Resources Defense Council.

TOM COCHRAN: We go to this meeting in May at the Soviet Academy in Moscow. So we get over there and have a conference for a couple of days, and there are three presentations made, four actually by Americans. One was by a guy named Charles Archambeau from the University of Colorado who was pushing the idea of using high frequency seismic signals, recordings to distinguish chemical explosions from nuclear explosions. And then there was [inaudible 00:20:54] from Five Continents Peace Initiative, but they couldn’t do anything without the permission of the Reagan and Gorbachev together. So they had a presentation, but they were toast because they would never get…

SHELLY LESHER: They couldn’t take action.

TOM COCHRAN: Right. And then they had a presentation from a man from the US Geological Survey who also couldn’t get anything done. He was really more interested in, not so much in the test issue, but in furthering the USGS Geological survey issues. I said, “Let’s just do it. We’ll put together a seismic team and you put together a seismic team. We’ll show that we can work together, monitor the test sites, get the data out, show the world you can verify a low threshold test ban treaty.” And Velikhov met with his team and decided right away that they wanted to do this, but they didn’t have permission. So they sent us off to Saint Petersburg for weekend vacation while they sorted things out. And when we got back, Velikhov calls Frank and says, “We want to do the NRDC proposal.” So Adrian DeWind and I go in with Frank and others, meet with Velikhov, and Velikhov says, “Okay, who am I agreeing with?”

And we said, “The Natural Resources Defense Council, here’s chairman of the board.” And so says, “You guys go off and work up an agreement. We’ll sign it tonight. I’ve got to go to another meeting.” And so we did that, and we signed the agreement that night. And since DeWind was there, we could agree on how big this project was going to be. When we got it, [inaudible 00:22:42]. I wasn’t a seismologist. I didn’t know anything about pulling together a team. So I went to Archie [inaudible 00:22:48] and said, “Arch, would you help us?” And he became our technical advisor, and he pulled together the team, an initial team, and then a more permanent group from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

SHELLY LESHER: So how important was it that the NRDC was a non-profit and not part of the government?

TOM COCHRAN: Oh, it wouldn’t have happened. I mean, first of all, before we went to Moscow, DeWind knew the Deputy Secretary of State. We went over and talked to him and Paul Nitze and one other person told him what we were planning, got a letter from Whitehead, the Deputy Secretary of State, which didn’t say don’t do it. He just said, “Keep in mind what the US government position is and so forth.” So we took that as a green light, but the defense department, when they’ve got wind of it after it happened, they started opposing it.

But DeWind had the foresight. As soon as we got the signed agreement, we went to the Bolshoi and then went to the New York Times. And Bill Keller at that time was the head of the Moscow office. He writes a story in the New York Times. It says, New York attorney signs arms control agreement with Soviet Union. That appears in the paper the day before we get back to New York. And fortuitously, it turned out that the big funders were meeting the day after we got back and we walked into this funder meeting, they’d read the paper and told them what we had and immediately got funding for the project from Carnegie and Ford.

SHELLY LESHER: So you’re getting emotional talking about this?

TOM COCHRAN: Yeah.

SHELLY LESHER: Is this a really proud moment in your career?

TOM COCHRAN: My career was a series of lucky breaks, and this was one of them. It turns out that the lesson learned from this and the Black Sea Experiment, which we’re coming to is you can write proposals, scholarly articles, which I’ve done and you’ve done, and you’re lucky if people read them and if people in the government read them, they’ve got their own agenda and they’re probably going to do something else. If you do a demonstration, it takes it to a new level. We went to Moscow with 20 tons of seismic equipment, a team of seismologists, go out to the test site area. We have 50 reporters with us.

SHELLY LESHER: So that was something that you did that… I mean, that wasn’t luck on your part, that was strategic for you.

TOM COCHRAN: Yes, we invited the New York Times and Washington Post. And the lesson though is if you do a demonstration, you’ll get a lot more attention. I mean, if it’s a decent demonstration, you’ll get a lot more attention than if you just write an article. That’s kind of what distinguished my path after that from von Hippel’s path. He was great and we worked symbiotically, we worked together. He was great at-

SHELLY LESHER: Absolutely.

TOM COCHRAN: Getting the right people together, having technical meetings, writing papers and so forth. And it turns out through this proposal and the fact that DeWind was with me and so forth, we became a demonstration crew. NRDC since 1970, we were doing public policy advocacy. So we knew how to advocate for our issues. And the lesson there is you have a playing field. You can play in the Congress, you can play in the administration, you can play in the courts, in the non-profit area, and there’s a symbiotic relationship between these. And you can play with the press. The press won’t write a story unless they’ve got a hook. The hook could be a lawsuit or something. NRDC was good at knowing how to play in these various fields in a symbiotic way. And the demonstrations added a new level to that because you immediately got world attention.

SHELLY LESHER: So the seismic test, you were able to see a low yield test that was done?

TOM COCHRAN: Well, interestingly, see, Velikhov didn’t have permission. We show up in Moscow. He says, “I want you back in a month.” We had to get export licenses to take 20 tons of equipment to the Soviet Union, and we get over to Moscow with a seismic team and 20 tons of equipment and Velikhov’s kind of sick and in the hospital. And he hadn’t gotten permission for us to go out to the test site. So we were stuck in Moscow while we negotiated a solution to this little problem. And the solution was if the Soviets resume testing, we would shut off our instruments. And we said, “Fine.” Actually, the politicians didn’t realize that the seismologists were more interested in listening to US tests from the Soviet test site than listening to the Soviet tests, because that would enable them to verify the attenuation as the seismic signals travel from the United States to-

SHELLY LESHER: So explain that to me. So you would set up your seismographs at the Soviet test site so that you could detect the US tests from Nevada?

TOM COCHRAN: Soviet Union and vice versa. I’m just saying the seismologists were more interested in listening to a US test in Nevada because that enabled them to understand the density of the earth under the Soviet test site and the transmission attenuation. And so when they put the instruments in the US and listen to the Soviet tests-

SHELLY LESHER: Interesting.

TOM COCHRAN: And that by the way, resolves some disputes over whether the Soviets were testing above the 150 kiloton threshold. And so when we first went back… First we went over to set up just some surface detectors. The seismologists wanted to put some really first-rate underground systems and high-frequency instruments. The Soviets built the underground cavities after they agreed on the sites. We went back to look at these new sites and what they’d done, and took three congressmen with us and a lot of reporters, and they took us to the edge of the test site and set off a 20 ton chemical explosion to then go back and show how sensitive the seismic instruments were in recording this chemical explosion. This gets written up by Bill Broad in the New York Times and so forth, and Washington Post.

SHELLY LESHER: So in that paper, you have this wonderful graph of a seismic signal. And what is this show?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, this was a graph I showed Gorbachev, actually. It was July 1986. Velikhov organized an international meeting of scientists on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as part of his campaign to keep the moratorium alive. And Gorbachev came, and Velikhov asked me to give a presentation to Gorbachev, and I showed this presentation that one of the seismologists had given me on how much seismology had improved since the 1960s, and it showed a seismogram of an earthquake using traditional seismology. And then they had gone to higher frequencies, recording higher frequencies. And when you tuned into the higher frequencies, you saw a spike in the middle of this earthquake. And that was a very low yield test at Semipalatinsk.

SHELLY LESHER: And I mean, it’s obvious.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Yeah.

SHELLY LESHER: I mean, it’s beautiful, and I bet the technology now is even better.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Yeah. I think the high frequency was a big breakthrough, going to the higher frequencies, and that also reduced the impact of the decoupling mechanism that Teller had proposed of exploding the bombs in a big cavity to muffle the seismic signal. The effectiveness on higher frequencies, much less.

SHELLY LESHER: The other thing that’s curious to me is that the idea of hiding a nuclear test during an earthquake, you don’t know when an earthquake is coming, so you have to have someone there 24/7 waiting for an earthquake to start, and then… I mean, it’s just so ridiculous.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, they had other scenarios, testing behind the sun and things like that to fight the idea of a nuclear test ban.

SHELLY LESHER: Was this the US thinking that’s what the Soviets would do, or was this…

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Yeah, this was scenarios that Teller’s people were making up for how the Soviets could cheat.

SHELLY LESHER: That just… They all just seem so ridiculous.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Yeah. Well, I mean that shows you the paranoia of the times, really, and the idea that in fact, cheating could result in a breakthrough like Teller’s x-ray lasers.

SHELLY LESHER: I think that just tells me how much the US was thinking about how they would cheat.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, perhaps. Yeah, perhaps.

SHELLY LESHER: Because I wouldn’t have thought of any of this, but I’m not thinking of cheating.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, I think it was mostly to promote paranoia and opposition. We would, of course comply with any treaty that we signed, but the Soviets would cheat in any way that they possibly could.

SHELLY LESHER: But it’s interesting that it was the Soviets that reached out to you.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Yeah, this was a new Soviet Union, and they ended up breaking down US skepticism with initiatives like this, like allowing in-country monitoring and that became the basis. In-country monitoring became part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was finally signed in 1996, although US still has not ratified it.

SHELLY LESHER: So the seismic activity was one way to see if someone was cheating. What was the other stumbling block to getting the US to trust the Soviets?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Velikhov then started dealing with these issues one by one, and Tom Cochran was his primary partner on this. Tom had been so effective, including in getting journalists interested and Congress interested.

TOM COCHRAN: In the subsequent year, we were fighting the DOD over whether we could get Soviets into the United States to man the similar setup around the Nevada test site. That finding was resolved, and we took a bunch of people and Velikhov out to one of the sites we had set up in Nevada. I say we, by this time this is Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This is John Berger. John arranges to set off a chemical explosion in Nevada near the test site and test the instruments like the Russians did, like the explosion in Kazakhstan.

Now coming back, I’m on the plane with Velikhov coming back from Reno. We sit next to each other and we say, “Okay, what are we going to do next?” At that time in ADA, there was a lot of discussion by the governments about lowering the number of nuclear weapons on each side. And the problem with verifying tactical nuclear weapons and particularly tactical nuclear weapons on ships, surface ships, not the SLBMs, but the cruise missiles. Velikhov had been told by the head of [inaudible 00:35:48] Institute, this guy told Velikhov he had an instrument, he could see a nuclear weapon a mile away. That was incorrect. The guys around Velikhov who were working with von Hippel knew that was incorrect.

There was this group called the Committee of Soviet Scientists Against the Global Threat or something like that, working with FAS, writing papers, and they were writing a paper about how well you could detect a nuclear weapon, how far away and so forth. So Velikhov was in tune to the issue, and we agree on the plane. Okay, let’s do an experiment with some radiation detectors, passive radiation detectors to see what the utility of these passive detectors are in detecting the presence or absence of nuclear weapons. So he goes back to Moscow and I start doing research on detectors and people to do this work. And I learned that one of the best detectors you could get was made by a company called Princeton Gamma-Tech, and it was a intrinsic germanium detector that operates at liquid air temperature. And so I was ready to buy $70,000 worth of equipment, and there I was, am I going to buy this? This is big money for NRDC, and then the thing falls apart. So I’m communicating with Velikhov, fax or however, and are we going to have a ship or not? I get the word back. Yes.

SHELLY LESHER: Thank you for listening. And a special thanks to Tom and his many pictures of the Black Sea Experiment. Frank for his hospitality at Princeton and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security for sponsoring this episode. You can find more information on the podcast website mynuclearlife.com. Until next time, I’m Shelly Lesher, and this has been My Nuclear Life.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Stanley Center for Peace and Security or any other agency, institution, or partner.

 

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Transcript

The Black Sea Experiment: Data Taking and Legacy

The transcript below may contain errors.

STEVE FETTER: In fact, I hold out hope. I think maybe what I’ve really learned is that things can change dramatically, very quickly, for the good, maybe as well as the bad, but right now we’re going through rather discouraging times in the field of nuclear weapons and arms control.

And when people, myself or students, become discouraged and bordering and hopeless, I like to remind them in 1983, there was this Reagan administration official talking about the need to be prepared to fight and win a nuclear war. That with enough shovels, we were going to get through it.

SHELLY LESHER: Oh my gosh.

STEVE FETTER: And just in a few years that all changed.

SHELLY LESHER: Welcome to My Nuclear life, I’m Shelly Lesher.

This is the second of two episodes on the Black Sea Experiment. In the last episode Tom, Velikhov, and their teams had arranged for seismic tests of both US and Soviet nuclear testing sites and demonstrated they could work together. Frank had given a briefing to Gorbachev, and everyone was making headway in Congress and the court of public opinion. Velikhov had just given Tom the go-ahead to purchase some very costly germanium detectors. Now, we’re ready for the Black City experiment.

Frank von Hippel picks up our story. Remember at the time, Frank was the Chairman of the Federation of American Scientists.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: But the last stop was the Black Sea Experiment.

SHELLY LESHER: Okay.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: What happened was the Soviets wanted to include sea-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missiles in the START Treaty, the first START Treaty. And the US said “It doesn’t make any sense, because you can’t tell the difference between a conventionally-armed cruise missile and a nuclear-armed cruise missile.”

SHELLY LESHER: Could you remind us what the START Treaty is?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: The START Treaty was the second nuclear-arms reduction treaty that came out of the Gorbachev-Reagan developing a relationship. And the purpose was to reduce the number of strategic warheads on missiles and bombers by half, on each side.

And it was after the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces Treaty, which had eliminated intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles, which were, at that time, in Europe, and in a confrontation in Europe.

SHELLY LESHER: So we’re heading in the right direction.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Yeah.

The sea-launched cruise missiles on US ships were within range of Moscow, the cruise missile, and so they wanted to include them as well. But the US had said, “How can you do this? You can’t tell the difference between conventional and nuclear.”

And so an Institute Director came to Velikhov and said, I have a way to detect the difference from kilometers away. And Velikhov, without checking, went to Gorbachev, and Gorbachev announced that they had a way to do this.

SHELLY LESHER: Did the institute person even say what that way was? Or just like, “Hey, I have a way.” And Velikhov was like, “Okay, great.”

FRANK VON HIPPEL: It was not clear. Sagdeev, he concluded that this made no sense, and he was very embarrassed that his chairman had misled Gorbachev. And so he came to me and he said, “Well, let’s do a joint study on how you can detect warheads.” And we did, and wrote a book on the subject.

SHELLY LESHER: Reversing the Arms Race.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Reversing the Arms Race: How to Achieve and Verify Deep Reductions in the Nuclear Arsenals. So it was broader than just this, but it included a study of how you could detect warheads.

SHELLY LESHER: So could you detect them from kilometers away?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: No, but there was something better than what we demonstrated that I’ll tell you about.

SHELLY LESHER: Okay.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: We did this study, and Steve Fetter played a leading part in it, and we had some Soviet scientists as well. It was a joint study between the Committee of Soviet Scientists and the FAS.

SHELLY LESHER: So who got the team together?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Sagdeev and me. Sagdeev brought a couple of people from his institute and I recruited the US group.

SHELLY LESHER: How’d you recruit Steve Fetter?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: I knew Steve Fetter from way back, and so he was an obvious choice.

SHELLY LESHER: And you thought, “Hey, he can read gamma rays.”

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, yeah, and there were some other people, too.

So we wrote this and Tom came to us and said, “Well, why don’t we demonstrate this?” Then Velikhov went to Gorbachev and Gorbachev blessed it.

SHELLY LESHER: Tom Cochran from the Natural Resource Defense Council returns to our story. He is working with Velikhov on joint demonstrations and brought the germanium detectors to Russia.

So you guys decide to buy these detectors and then you got to ship.

TOM COCHRAN: I go to the FAS group that I’ve been working with, because I’m working with Frank doing the studies they’re doing and get their help in putting together a team which was Fetter, myself, Lee Grodzins from MIT who worked with Union of Concerned Scientists, Marty Zucker at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Harvey Lynch at Stanford Linear Accelerator.

So we put together a team, bought two sets of instruments, and we need to test them and figure out how to use them and so forth. So we go up to Brookhaven and take one set of one detector and one multichannel analyzer, and Fetter and I go up. I happened to have, because I bought in 1979, a slug of depleted uranium, 15 pounds of depleted uranium, which, under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations, an individual could own it without a license for research or educational purposes. So I bought this slug and I’d been using it for…

SHELLY LESHER: Research and educational purposes.

TOM COCHRAN: Yes, I would say… It fit in a Coke can and I would take it and have a talk about nuclear weapons.

So we take the slug and the equipment up to Brookhaven, take it up on the airplane, no problem. Go out to Brookhaven, check everything out, all the equipment out. Fetter and I come back to JFK Airport. A bunch of men come over. We are having a hamburger before we get on a flight and a bunch of guys come over and says, “Come with us. Is that your suitcase over there?” Which they had taken to as far away as they could out the window. I said, “Yeah, that’s my suitcase.” And he said, “Well, what is it?” And I said, “Well, it’s 15 pounds of depleted uranium.” They said, “Well, we’re not going to let you put it on the plane.”

I said, “Can I leave it here with you? I’m coming up here tomorrow for a meeting in New York.”

They said, “No, but you can take it over and check it at the baggage check.”

SHELLY LESHER: But it goes on the plane.

TOM COCHRAN: They wouldn’t let it on the plane, but they would let me take it to the center of the terminal and put it in the baggage check overnight, and I go home, come back the next day, pick it up, take it to New York City, and FedEx it home. Crazy.

But anyway, so we all checked out the instruments, and then in July, all the arrangements are made and we had such good fortune with the congressional delegation during the seismic studies, we organized another delegation, this one led by Congressman John Spratt, Bob Carr from your neck of the woods, who had been on the previous delegation, and Congressman Olin from Virginia.

We took the team, the two sets of instruments, we took some NRDC people. We took what we called observers, which were people I was working with through von Hippel, including Von Hippel, Barry Blackman, Bill Arkin, Mallory Thomas, and then we took three Congressmen and they had their aides. So we show up Moscow then fly our of Yalta. They put us up on a hospital ship. The night before we go out onto the cruiser, which was then called the Slava, and it was the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet.

SHELLY LESHER: There’s this whole thing that Steve told me about, with only having 10 minutes to take data. How are you able to negotiate the amount of time to take data?

TOM COCHRAN: We have a reception on this hospital ship where everybody’s staying. They came to me the night before this reception said, “You can’t record but for 10 minutes.”

SHELLY LESHER: And that’s not something you expected?

TOM COCHRAN: No. The night before, the day before, we tested the two sets of instruments and one of them didn’t work. So now we’re down to one set of instruments.

SHELLY LESHER: Good thing you had two.

TOM COCHRAN: Yeah, lucky.

So Steve and I sitting on the launcher over the warhead, they told us where the hot sweet spot was, because they’d been there for a couple of days measuring, and the KBG guys standing over us. And so we do some practice, only test our instruments get everything right, so we recorded an extra 14 minutes of data practicing before we were all set to do the real thing. So we came home with 24 minutes of data.

SHELLY LESHER: This is the first time we hear from Steve Fetter. He is a professor from the University of Maryland, and, as you will hear, is the one actually taking the measurements.

You come in, it’s the group of US scientists, and then there’s the Russian scientists. So this is July 5th, 1989 when you’re on the Black Sea, and you have seven different detectors used. So why are you using all these different types of detectors?

STEVE FETTER: Well, our main detector, and in fact I think the only one that we were responsible for, was the high-purity germanium detector. And that was unique in being able to make high-resolution measurements where you could resolve the individual gamma rays that are associated with the decay of particular isotopes of plutonium and uranium. And that’s valuable for being able to conclusively determine that it’s plutonium, high-enriched uranium that you’re measuring.

The other instruments were provided by Soviet scientists. The one that I remember the best is a large neutron detector that was mounted in a helicopter that flew over the ship and was able to detect the neutron emissions from the warhead. So that’s more sensitive, because there’s a smaller neutron background and plutonium, which is in almost all warheads, is a pretty potent, pretty bright neutron source.

SHELLY LESHER: And you can detect it just by flying over in a helicopter?

STEVE FETTER: Yes.

SHELLY LESHER: Which is different than what you had to do?

STEVE FETTER: Yes.

SHELLY LESHER: Let’s go back to your high-purity germanium detector, because the germanium detectors that I use now have to be cooled with liquid nitrogen. Was this the case? Because it says here it was two keV resolution, so that’s a nice germanium detector.

STEVE FETTER: Tom Cochran purchased a commercial unit and we brought the detector with us. I can’t remember whether we probably needed an export license for this. I think we did bring our own Dewar, but of course we needed the liquid nitrogen, and the Soviets supplied the liquid nitrogen for that. And of course we had to wait for it to cool down and to calibrate it.

I think we brought our own calibration source, in the form of Coleman mantles, which are have thorium, I think impregnated with thorium, because obviously transporting radioactive sources… Real radioactive sources or calibration sources probably would’ve also required a export license.

SHELLY LESHER: But they didn’t say anything about your mantles?

STEVE FETTER: No, no.

SHELLY LESHER: We’re going camping. No lantern, but we have the mantles.

STEVE FETTER: Well, I don’t know whether we looked at other common items. I think a banana, probably, is too weak to use as a calibration source.

SHELLY LESHER: Interesting. I wonder if you could do that now, bring a mantle.

STEVE FETTER: I think so.

SHELLY LESHER: But I wonder if the TSA would stop you at this point because of the radiation.

STEVE FETTER: I don’t know, but this is the pre-9/11 days.

SHELLY LESHER: Of course. I think I have my favorite sentence in your paper, “We made the following measurements on the Slava, three measurements totaling about 24 minutes on the launch tube directly above the warhead.”

STEVE FETTER: Yes. They allowed me to sit right on top of the launch tube, right above the warhead. They had made a little X at the point that was right below the warhead, but I verified that that was the location by running a little simple Geiger counter along the tube to, in fact, confirm that this was the place with the highest count rate.

SHELLY LESHER: So wait, you straddling the missile basically?

STEVE FETTER: Yeah, sitting on top. I think you can see a photo of me, maybe not in that article. We have other photos of me sitting on top like, yes, like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.

SHELLY LESHER: Are you sitting there with your instrument and everybody’s staring at you?

STEVE FETTER: Yeah, they’re standing around. I was basically the person responsible for placing the detector and operating the multichannel analyzer to make sure that it was counting properly.

SHELLY LESHER: Were you scared you were going to drop something? Because there’s not a lot of room up there?

STEVE FETTER: No, but it’s surprising. You could easily walk around. It wasn’t so small. I don’t remember feeling uncomfortable, but then I’m fine in high places.

SHELLY LESHER: Okay. And it says 24 minutes. So you didn’t get that all in one go?

STEVE FETTER: No, and this is a little embarrassing, so we were only supposed to count for 10 minutes, and the Soviets were worried about a long count time. I later learned, and Frank von Hippel will confirm this, that the head of the Soviet laboratory didn’t want this measurement made at all with a high-resolution detector, because of the fear that it would reveal classified information. But I just decided to keep on counting, and I was encouraged to do so by my team members. “Just count as long as they’ll let us count.”

Looking back, we actually got a total of 24 minutes, more than twice what the Soviets wanted us to do.

SHELLY LESHER: So were you able to reveal secret Soviet technology when you did that? Is the germanium detector that good?

STEVE FETTER: The germanium detector is very good, and you can resolve many of the individual gamma ray emissions, and that can allow you to, well, to do several things.

One is the age of the plutonium, when it was separated by the ratios of different lines from different isotopes, because the plutonium-two-forty-one decays to Americium-two-forty-one, so there’s a bit of a clock. And the isotopic composition of the materials, which, in the Soviet Union, was an official secret. So the US, we did not consider the isotopic composition of our plutonium necessarily as classified information, but in the Soviet Union, and I think it remains in Russia, classified. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it’s a secret.

But then you also can learn something about the amount of plutonium, or enriched uranium, and that’s, I think, not a great secret, because it’s known roughly how much plutonium it takes to make a nuclear pit.

SHELLY LESHER: Would it matter if you knew specifically how much plutonium was an Soviet weapon?

STEVE FETTER: Well, I had long maintained that this was not really that sensitive because we know already about how much. But there were people, this was still the Cold War, and there were people who said, “No, there is militarily significant information.” If you have an estimate of how much plutonium, Russia or the United States has produced, then knowing how much is in a warhead that can reveal something about how many warheads you could have. Also, it could reveal something about the vulnerability of a warhead to certain missile defenses, because in the old days the Soviet Union had a nuclear, anti-ballistic missile system that would defend Moscow with nuclear explosions, and so knowing how much nuclear material is in a warhead can indicate something about how vulnerable it is to missile defenses, nuclear missile defenses.

I think the bigger concerns, though, were about details of the design. And that is much harder to learn about through these kinds of measurements, but by looking at how different emissions, at different energies from the same isotope are preferentially absorbed, you can learn something about the materials that are between the plutonium, or the enriched uranium, and the detector.

SHELLY LESHER: There’s steel because that’s the outer shell. And so you can figure out what’s between the pit and the steel.

STEVE FETTER: Exactly.

SHELLY LESHER: Is that that big of a deal though?

STEVE FETTER: Well, again, I think that for countries that already know how to make nuclear weapons, this is not such a great secret.

SHELLY LESHER: It’s what I was going to ask, if the US already knows how to make a weapon, the Soviets already know how to make a weapon? So I guess that’s my question.

STEVE FETTER: Would anything that you learn allow you to defeat the weapon? No, not that I can see.

SHELLY LESHER: But I guess if you didn’t understand what you and your group were measuring, you could be in fear that it would?

STEVE FETTER: Or suppose you had thought of a design concept that your adversary had not, something that was more advanced, one that allowed a more efficient design, that got a higher yield out of a given amount of material, or allowed a smaller device. That would be considered, especially in the 1980s, that would’ve been considered to be militarily sensitive.

Now, the US weapons, though, generally were smaller, had a higher yield-to-weight ratio, were more optimized than the Soviet weapons. But some people would say, “Oh, we couldn’t allow our weapons to be subject to such measurements.”

SHELLY LESHER: Of course not.

STEVE FETTER: Because they would show the Soviets how to… And I always thought that was silly that the Soviet scientists knew perfectly well how to design nuclear weapons of all shapes, and sizes, and yields. And if they chose to make theirs a little more large and robust, it was probably a design decision, deliberate decision they made, not some lack of knowledge.

SHELLY LESHER: You make this conclusion in the paper that you can’t determine if it’s a warhead or not based on just count rate, but that you need to look at the actual lines. And why is that?

STEVE FETTER: In order to determine that it contains plutonium, or a certain amount of plutonium, which most people were thinking that would be the signature characteristic.

A distinctive attribute of a nuclear weapon is that it has a certain minimum amount of plutonium, and so by looking at those distinctive gamma-ray emissions that occur only from certain isotopes of plutonium, like plutonium two-thirty-nine, you can say it is definitely plutonium, and you can get a rough idea of how much plutonium. You can say, is it more than, say, a few kilograms? Which is what you need for a nuclear weapon. If it was just a gross count rate, it could be any radioactive source.

SHELLY LESHER: Is it harder, then, to measure the gamma-ray lines than just to measure a gross count rate?

STEVE FETTER: Yes, especially to this high resolution.

SHELLY LESHER: What’s the probability then of people incorporating these germanium detectors as opposed to just a simple Geiger counter that would count rates?

STEVE FETTER: I think it’s unlikely. Now in the START Treaty, and then the new START Treaty, there was a question about, “Well, how do we know that an object is a nuclear weapon?” And they decided to use neutrons rather than gamma rays. And neutrons, again, are fairly distinctive, because there aren’t very many substances that emit neutrons. Plutonium is a pretty powerful neutron source, particularly plutonium-two-forty, which is the second most abundant isotope in plutonium that’s produced in nuclear reactor. And they chose neutrons because it didn’t give any design information.

They basically said, “Well, we’ll assume that if an object is not a nuclear weapon, it doesn’t emit neutrons.” And so in the START inspections, when they count the warheads on a missile inspectors actually go, and can ask to see the top of a missile, and they can count the number of warheads, except we may want to protect certain information and put a drape over the top. And there may be things other than a warhead, like a package of countermeasures, or decoys, or penetration aids. That may occupy one of the spaces on top of a missile, and so they use a neutron detector, the actual warheads will produce a neutron signal. But if it’s not a warhead, if it’s one of these other objects, even though it may look pointy, it won’t have a signature.

So the neutron detector is how this problem was solved in practice in New START.

SHELLY LESHER: Then why do the gamma rays?

STEVE FETTER: Well, that is a good question. One of the reasons is it was thought that we might enter into new types of agreements that, rather than simply count a warhead, we would want to verify it was a particular type of warhead, or verify that a particular type of warhead had been dismantled. And so, one of the concepts that we and others were investigating is the idea of a template.

That you could say, go into the field, and select a warhead at random from a Minuteman missile, or a Soviet missile, and then take the gamma ray signature, which is very distinctive, very unique, no other warhead, no other type of warhead, would produce that pattern of gamma-ray emissions, and then you could use that as a template then for other warheads that when other warheads were delivered, maybe to be dismantled at a dismantling facility, you could do that same measurement and say, “Oh, it matches. It’s a W-78.” Or it doesn’t match, and it’s something else.

SHELLY LESHER: That makes more sense.

STEVE FETTER: It does, and it actually works quite well. The US uses these systems internally to identify its warheads and its components, but there’s great concern about the sensitivity, about sensitive information being revealed. And so when we’ve built such systems like during the early or mid 1990s, there was a lot of cooperation, lab-to-lab cooperation between the Department of Energy Laboratories and Russian Laboratories.

They used either low resolution detectors, gamma ray detectors like sodium iodide that don’t have the high resolution…

SHELLY LESHER: And they’re cheap.

STEVE FETTER: Or neutron detectors.

And often went to criteria that were much more relaxed, like for confirming that the material that’s stored in a facility that was built using US funds to store pits, it was decided that we would just confirm that it had at least a certain amount of plutonium using neutron measurements. Again, partly because of concerns that high resolution gamma ray measurements would reveal too much information.

SHELLY LESHER: So your measurement was too good?

STEVE FETTER: Yes, too good.

SHELLY LESHER: So you did reveal one thing about the Soviet missile, which was what type of uranium they were using?

STEVE FETTER: Yes, that they had used reprocessed uranium, and this was one of the things they considered secret. In the United States it was known that we used reprocessed, high-enriched uranium that had been reactor fuel.

So for example, the uranium that’s used in US nuclear submarine reactors is high-enriched uranium. When it’s discharged at the end of the core life, it’s still is high-enriched, it’s about 50% still enriched, and the US was reprocessing that. But in the reactor, other uranium isotopes in particular, U-232 build up, and the U-232 has a powerful high-energy gamma ray emission. And we detected that quite distinctly, and we could estimate what percentage of the HEU was uranium two thirty-two.

SHELLY LESHER: Were you surprised by that or you expected it because the US was using the reprocessed fuel?

STEVE FETTER: I didn’t expect it, it was only after measuring it and determining that there was really no other source that we realized what it was. And then I think only at that point realized that the US also had been reprocessing HEU and our uranium also would be contaminated with that same…

Which is actually not a bad thing because it makes HEU far more detectable than it otherwise would be, because U-232 being a light isotope is preferentially enriched in the enrichment process. And mostly U-235, which is the main isotope in HEU, has a very weak gamma emission. The main emission I think is 187 keV, and that’s very easily shielded.

But this 2.6 MEV gamma ray, that’s hard to shield.

SHELLY LESHER: Very much so.

STEVE FETTER: Easy to detect. And so I think that if you’re worried, for example, as many of us became later on about nuclear material that had become vulnerable to theft or diversion, there were several cases of HEU, I think 20 overall 20 publicly-known cases of smuggling of HEU from the former Soviet Union. It was a bit reassuring to know that it was contaminated, likely contaminated in this way, and that would be more detectable.

SHELLY LESHER: That is good to know. And you knew that because of this experiment?

STEVE FETTER: I’m sure that the US government, US intelligence, they had come close to, in other ways, to Soviet nuclear weapons. They probably had made their own measurements, but of course I don’t know about any of that. So I don’t know whether we truly… I doubt that we truly discovered this.

SHELLY LESHER: Well, but this is all unclassified, so it can enter the public discourse, which is very different than whatever’s behind the wall.

So you have one line that you didn’t identify, the 1942.7 line. Did you ever identify that?

STEVE FETTER: No, I had even forgotten that was the case.

SHELLY LESHER: Oh, I thought maybe you were still trying to figure it out.

STEVE FETTER: No, although I should ask a person at Idaho who I recently participated in a UNIDIR, the UN Disarmament Research Institute had conducted an experiment or a demonstration of trying to verify the absence of nuclear weapons on a base.

And there was a person from Idaho National Laboratory there, and he asked me about the Black Sea Experiment, and I provided the raw data to him. So I should ask whether… Now that you’ve reminded me about that line, I should ask, “Did you identify that?”

I think we mentioned I used three curve-fitting programs just to see, including one that I wrote. So maybe it was a flaw in the curve fitting.

SHELLY LESHER: I don’t know. I do gamma ray spectroscopy and we have a background line at 1942.

STEVE FETTER: Oh, what is that?

SHELLY LESHER: I’m going to look it up for you.

I left that last part in for all the nukes listening and knew I had to include a follow-up because if, like me, you needed to know where that 1942 line came from.

This line does show up in all the data I took at Kentucky. So it is a background line, although we also never identified the source. So Steve and I emailed back and forth, and I think we’re pretty sure that it is a calcium line. The most abundant is calcium 40, although it has a low-end gamma cross section, it can capture a neutron resulting in calcium 41, which has a strong gamma ray at 1942.7 keV, an exact match to the background line in their spectrum.

What can you tell me about the Soviet experiments? Because those were different.

TOM COCHRAN: Kurchatov was the main nuclear laboratory in Moscow, and it was the predecessor to the two Arzamas and Chelyabinsk labs that moved out of the city. And Velikhov later became head of the Kurchatov Institute.

So they had a neutron detector they could fly around in a helicopter, and had been using it to spy on American ships. And this helicopter comes flying by at about a hundred meters above the ship, and records a signal from the plutonium in the warhead. Later, a bunch of us are in Moscow, and go to the Kurchatov Institute, and they tell us more about this device they had built. They had pictures of American sailors looking up at their helicopter.

SHELLY LESHER: They were that close?

TOM COCHRAN: The US had mounted, on some ships, antisubmarine torpedoes that they could launch from the surface ship nuclear warhead on it. The Soviets could see those. They claimed they could see warheads in a aircraft carrier, but they couldn’t count them, because they’d be stored below deck.

SHELLY LESHER: But it’d still be useful to know if they existed on the aircraft carrier.

TOM COCHRAN: Right. So they could detect warheads with that.

The rest of the Soviet experiments were inferior. They had the Institute of Physics of the Earth, which we were doing the seismic work with them. They came with a truck full of sodium iodide, crystal detectors. So they just put the truck on a ship and sail the ship by the… And they could detect the ship, because the gamma rays from the cobalt in the ship steel of the ship, but they couldn’t see the warhead.

Then the [inaudible 00:33:55] Institute brought their gamma ray spectrometer. This was essentially a detector at the bottom of a tube that allowed them to shield the detector from all directions except where the tube was looking. And I think that’s the one that probably led the head of that Institute to tell Velikhov he could see things a mile away. They left it on shore. They couldn’t see the warhead on the ship, which was in the harbor, good ways from shore. So that didn’t pan out.

Now, they also brought sodium iodide detectors, which just didn’t have the resolution to detect the warhead, but didn’t have the resolution to tell them anything. And I think they had a germanium detector that was not as good as the Princeton Gamma Tech instrument. So they had one instrument that was really excellent, flown in this helicopter, that would detect neutrons, and we had one really good instrument to detect the gamma ray spectra.

SHELLY LESHER: Were there any additional experiments after this one or was this the end?

TOM COCHRAN: That was the end.

What happened next was we still had the seismic program operating. The Scripps team felt like they’d collected about all the data they needed to collect from the three sites, and they were interested in moving the sites to other areas of the Soviet Union. And we were negotiating with the Institute of Physics of the Earth to do that.

About the same time we had done what we needed to do and we were ready to turn it over to the government. And Chris Payne, who was then working for Ted Kennedy, Chris had been on his part of the FAS group. He had been with us from the beginning. He wrote some legislation that effectively turned over our project to the Air Force.

Now, the Air Force was the federal agency in charge of seismic monitoring worldwide for nuclear testing. So in effect, the Air Force began funding Scripps instead of NRDC funding Scripps.

SHELLY LESHER: Good.

TOM COCHRAN: It was all done very quietly so nobody knew that the Air Force was taking over the NRDC project, but that’s what happened. And then at some point, Scripps, I guess finished their work. So that closed things out.

SHELLY LESHER: Do you think maybe there’s a lesson learned?

TOM COCHRAN: One of my recommendations to people who are still in the business and working, spend 95% of your time on your day job, but take 5% of your time and try to change the world. Nine out of 10 of those will fail, but if you can hit just one, keep trying these far-out chances. It’s great potential return. Give it a shot. Just spend five, 10% of your time going after the big things, internationally.

SHELLY LESHER: Well, Tom, we thank you for going after the big things. You’ve made a difference in the world.

What is the moral of the story from the Black Sea Experiment?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: That actually didn’t deliver any results unlike the seismic, it was another example of openness on the part of the Soviet Union, but I think it didn’t have much impact, I don’t think. The US still didn’t want to include the nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles in the STRAT Treaty. And in the end, what they did was they said, “We’ll tell you how many we have. Annually, we’ll send you a number and you’ll just have to trust us.” And at that point, the Soviets accepted that.

SHELLY LESHER: But you were able to prove that you could verify a warhead from just an empty missile.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: It was a real missile in the tube, but yes, but this was never been implemented in any arms control agreement. And I think the Soviet approach, the neutron detection was a much more plausible one.

Well, I think actually the method is an issue in the verification of the START Treaty. How do you know how many warheads there are on a missile? And that requires on-site inspection. And when that happens, the US, and probably Russia, put a cover over the warheads, but they can measure bumps, see whether there are neutrons coming out of which bumps on the on-site verification. That’s with neutrons detectors.

SHELLY LESHER: So why do you think people cite the Black Sea Experiment as so important in nuclear verification?

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Well, it was a landmark. It was the only time that a country has measured and published the gamma spectrum from what another country’s warhead.

SHELLY LESHER: It is remarkable.

FRANK VON HIPPEL: Within the arms control community it’s famous, but it didn’t have an impact on arms control.

SHELLY LESHER: Looking back, how has that influenced your career? How was it to be there at that time?

STEVE FETTER: Well, it was very exciting. I was young. I guess I didn’t appreciate how special all of that was. I was too young to know how.

SHELLY LESHER: Of course.

STEVE FETTER: And that was a unique moment in history where the Soviet Union was undergoing this transformation, and then, soon, a collapse. The strain of that was just too great for the system to bear.

In fact, I hold out hope. I think maybe what I’ve really learned is that things can change dramatically, very quickly, for the good, maybe as well as the bad, but right now we’re going through rather discouraging times in this field, in the field of nuclear weapons and arms control, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the suspension of Russia’s compliance with New START, the decision just last week by the Russian Duma to un-ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the buildup of nuclear forces by China, the continued missile testing by North Korea, the inability to reinstate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran.

So there’s just so much that is negative. And when people, myself or students, become discouraged and bordering and hopeless, I like to remind them in 1985 things looked very bleak. Or 1983, there was this Reagan administration official talking about the need to be prepared to fight and win a nuclear war. That, with enough shovels, we were going to get through it.

SHELLY LESHER: Oh, my gosh.

STEVE FETTER: And just in a few years that all changed.

SHELLY LESHER: You were sitting on top of a Soviet missile.

STEVE FETTER: Yes.

SHELLY LESHER: And so I like to remind people using that incident that things can change very quickly, and that we really need to be prepared to take advantage of those opportunities when they arise.

Thank you for listening. And a special thanks to Tom, and his many pictures of Black Sea Experiment, Frank for his hospitality at Princeton, Steve for meeting me in London, it was a real hardship, and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security for sponsoring this episode. You can find more information on the podcast website MyNuclearLife.com.

Until next time, I’m Shelley Lesher, and this has been My Nuclear Life.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Stanley Center for Peace and Security or any other agency, institution, or partner.

 

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