Stanford nuclear experts said they were skeptical of North Korea’s claim that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb this week.

However, they said the test was an important step forward for North Korea’s nuclear program and would have a destabilizing effect on the entire region.

“I don’t believe it was a real hydrogen bomb, but my greatest concern is not so much whether or not they actually tested a hydrogen bomb, but rather that they tested at all,” said Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has “a track record of exaggerated statements, hyperbole and outright lies,” according to Scott Sagan, Caroline S.G. Munro professor of Political Science.

“The propaganda machine in North Korea has made all sorts of claims about Kim Jong-un’s personal prowess and his history, and it is totally unsurprising that he might make exaggerated claims about North Korea’s military prowess,” Sagan said.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he also doubted that North Korea had detonated a two-stage hydrogen bomb.

“Whether it’s a hydrogen bomb or not, it’s very dangerous, destabilizing development,” said Perry.

“It’s obvious they’re working to increase the capability and size of their nuclear arsenal and that represents a huge danger to the region and creates major instability and major concerns on the part of South Korea and Japan.”

Many North Korea watchers had been anticipating another nuclear test.

“We’ve thought that the North Koreans could test at any time – that the tunnels were ready, that they could do this at any time – so it would be a political decision, not a technical decision,” said Thomas Fingar, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Hecker said North Korea’s latest nuclear test would move the country closer to being able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and mount it on a missile, extending the reach of their nuclear weapons.

“They will have achieved greater sophistication in their bomb design – that is the most worrisome aspect,” Hecker said.

“At this point, what makes their nuclear arsenal more dangerous is not so much explosive power of the bomb, but its size, weight and the ability to deliver it with missiles.”

On the diplomatic agenda, the U.S. and its allies will likely push for stronger sanctions in the wake of the tests, according to Kathleen Stephens, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and William J. Perry fellow at Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC).

“In the UN the U.S., Japan and South Korea will likely look for another, and stronger, UN Security Council resolution, presumably with some efforts to attach to it some teeth and strengthen sanctions,” Stephens said.

The U.S. Congress is currently considering financial sanctions that would cut of all access to U.S. banks for any banks dealing with the North Koreans.

But financial sanctions would likely be less effective in dealing with North Korea than they had been with Iran, according to Fingar.

“It’s like hitting a masochist,” said Fingar.

“North Korea is relatively insulated from the external economy, where Iran wasn’t. Iran had a middle class, you could make sanctions hurt, they could have a real effect. You could make it hard for the North Koreans to buy luxury goods, but at the end of the day, is that going to bring down the regime?”

Financial sanctions against North Korea could have the unintended consequence of also hurting China, said David Straub, associate director of the Korea program at APARC.

“This could be problematic for China because many of the transactions that North Korea conducts would be going thorough Chinese banks, and the Chinese, understandably might not be happy about the US financial sanctions on them, in effect,” Straub said.

Perry recommended that the U.S. reinvigorate diplomatic talks with North Korea in collaboration with China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

“I would not give up on negotiations with North Korea yet,” Perry said.

“What could have been done many years ago was following through on negotiations with North Korea at the turn of the Century, which were proceeding robustly in the last years of Clinton’s second term, but were abandoned by the Bush Administration...That was a geo-strategic error.”

But Hecker said those negotiations would be harder now.

“I have previously argued that we should focus on three “No’s” for three “Yes’s” – that is no more bombs, no better bombs (meaning no testing) and no export – in return for addressing the North’s security concerns, its energy shortage and its economic woes,” said Hecker.

“This could have worked when I first proposed it 2008 after one of my seven visits to North Korea. It will be more difficult now."

The Department of Energy's long-term plan for dealing with material contaminated with plutonium and heavier elements from the U.S. weapons program is to bury it underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.

The Energy Department's plan aims to safeguard nuclear material for the next 10,000 years. But three Stanford nuclear scientists point out in a new commentary article in the journal Nature that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was not designed to hold as much plutonium as is now being considered for disposal there. And, in fact, the site has seen two accidents in recent years.

"These accidents during the first 15 years of operation really illustrate the challenge of predicting the behavior of the repository over 10,000 years," said Rod Ewing, the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

What's more, there's more plutonium proposed for disposal at WIPP in the future, a result of treaties with the former Soviet Union and now Russia to decrease the number of nuclear weapons by dismantling them.

A recent assessment of what to do with the plutonium from dismantled weapons has proposed that the material be diluted and disposed of at WIPP. But this analysis does not include a revision of the safety analysis for the site, wrote Ewing and his two Stanford co-authors in the Department of Geological Sciences, postdoctoral scholar Cameron Tracy and graduate student Megan Dustin.

They call on the U.S. Department of Energy, which operates WIPP, to take another look at the safety assessment of the site. Particular emphasis should be on the estimates of drilling activity in the oil-rich Permian Basin, where WIPP is located, and on the effects of such a huge increase in the plutonium inventory for the pilot plant.

"The current regulatory period of 10,000 years is short relative to the 24,100-year half-life of plutonium-239, let alone that of its decay product, uranium-235, which has a half-life of 700 million years," the researchers wrote.

"We cannot be certain that future inhabitants of the area will even know WIPP is there," they added. As a result, it is important to understand the impact of future drilling in the area.

The waste is stored 2,150 feet below the surface in hundreds of thousands of plastic-lined steel drums in rooms carved out of a 250-million-year-old salt bed. The repository is at about half of its planned capacity and slated to be sealed in 2033.

The researchers question some of the assumptions used in the safety studies. For example, to determine the odds of oil drilling in the future, the study uses a 100-year historical average drill rate, even though drilling has intensified in recent decades, throwing this assumption into question.

The Stanford experts also suggest more attention to how the buried materials may interact with each other, particularly with salty brine, over centuries. A single storage drum may contain a variety of materials, such as lab coats, gloves and laboratory instruments; thus, the chemistry is complex.

Ewing said that the complacency that led to the accidents at WIPP can also occur in the safety analysis. Therefore, he advises, it is important to carefully review the safety analysis as new strategies for more plutonium disposal are considered.

Rodney Ewing, senior CISAC fellow and Frank Stanton professor in nuclear security, has been honored with three prestigious awards in the geological and mineralogical sciences.

Ewing will receive two medals at the Geological Society of America’s next annual meeting in Baltimore at the end of this month: the Ian Campbell Medal for Superlative Service to the Geosciences from the American Institute of Geosciences, and the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America for scientific eminence.

He is being recognized for his groundbreaking research on nuclear materials and his contributions to nuclear waste management.

“Rod Ewing is a modern mineral scientist at the top of his field who has excelled in both science and service,” according to the citation for the Campbell Medal.

“Dr. Ewing has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of radiation damage in minerals and the design of waste forms for high-level nuclear waste. And he continues to have a major impact on the policies underlying nuclear waste management in the United States.”

The international impact of professor Ewing’s research into nuclear waste storage is also being recognized with the IMA Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association, which will be awarded at a meeting in Rimini, Italy next September.

Today’s landmark deal between six world powers and Iran, which would limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions, was an important step toward stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb.

However, the key challenge for the international community will be making sure Iran keeps its part of the bargain, according to Stanford experts.

“Both sides have made a series of compromises that will help Iran’s economy in exchange for constraining its nuclear capabilities – and that’s a deal worth making, in my view,” said Scott Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro professor of political science and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

“Iran will still have a technical capability to develop nuclear weapons, given the technology and materials that they have, but under this deal it will both take them a much longer period of time and would require them to take actions that would be easily discerned by the International Atomic Energy Agency, so it constrains their break-out capabilities in important ways.”

[[{"fid":"219719","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"title":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","width":"870","style":"width: 400px; height: 266px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]The U.S.-led negotiations also included fellow United Nations Security Council members Britain, China, France, and Russia, as well as Germany – a group known collectively as as the "P5+1."

Sig Hecker, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said the nuclear deal was “hard-won and is better than any other reasonably achievable alternative.”

“Iran agreed to considerably greater restrictions on its program than what I thought was possible before the Joint Plan of Action was signed in November 2013,” said Hecker.

Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law, called it the “least bad deal” for both Iran and the international community.

“Nobody gets everything they want,” Milani said. “Every side gets some of what they want.”

Under the deal, Iran would be allowed to continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes in its energy and health industries.

But it would have to reduce the number of its centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, and cut its stockpile of low enriched uranium down from more than 20 thousand pounds to about 660 pounds.

“Reducing that stockpile actually lengthens the breakout time more than any other measure,” said Hecker.

These limits were designed to increase the “breakout time” it would take for Iran to produce enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon from the current two to three months, to one year over a period of the next 10 years.

The agreement still faces a series of political hurdles before it gets implemented, and will face tough scrutiny from a Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, as well as the parliaments of European countries that were parties to the talks.

“I think it’s going to be hard for the U.S. Congress and [European] parliaments to kill the deal and be perceived as the ones who would rather have a war than give diplomacy a chance,” said Thomas Fingar, distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

[[{"fid":"219720","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"The Iranian delegation attend the final plenary session in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"title":"The Iranian delegation attend the final plenary session in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","width":"870","style":"width: 400px; height: 268px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]If the deal survives the inevitable political challenges, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will be responsible for confirming that Iran is living up to its obligations.

“The key is going to be the effectiveness of the verification procedures and IAEA access,” Fingar said.

“There’s an element of trust, but a far more important part is the rigorous verification protocols.”

As soon as the IAEA confirms that Iran is abiding by the terms of the agreement, economic sanctions can be lifted.

Sagan warned that the international community should not be surprised if Iran pushed the limits of the agreement, and should be ready to reimpose economic sanctions if Iran violated the deal.

“We should anticipate that Iranian opponents to the agreement will try to stretch it and do things that are potential violations and that we have to call them on that, and not treat every problem that we see as unexpected,” said Sagan.

“We should anticipate such problems and be ready, if necessary, to reimpose sanctions. Having the ability to reimpose sanctions is the best way to deter the Iranians from engaging in such violations.”

But Hecker said the international community should focus on incentivizing Iran.

“The best hope is to make the civilian nuclear path so appealing – and then successful – that Tehran will not want to risk the political and economic consequences of that success by pursuing the bomb option,” he said.

Image

Iran faced the threat of military action if it continued to press forward with its nuclear program.

While Russia and China had both signaled that they were likely to abandon the sanctions regime if talks fell apart.

One of the key challenges to reaching an agreement was “finding a language that would allow both parties to declare victory”, according to Milani.

“Iran has clearly made some very substantive concessions, but Iran has also been allowed to keep enough of its infrastructure so that it can declare at least partial victory for the domestic political audience."

Now the scramble is on in Tehran to claim credit for the deal.

Reformists, led by current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, hope it will strengthen their hand as they head into the next election.

On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives believe it could give them the edge in the battle to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader.

“They understand that whoever gets the credit for this will be in a much better position to determine the future leadership and future direction of Iran’s foreign policy,” said Milani.

It’s too early to tell what impact the agreement might have on Iran’s foreign policy, which is often at odds with U.S. interests in hot spots like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. But Sagan said today’s deal was an important step in making sure that future conflicts with Iran don’t go nuclear.

“Hopefully those disagreements will be played out without the shadow of nuclear weapons hanging over the future, and that’s a good thing.”