Former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker assesses North Korea’s claim to have detonated a hydrogen bomb in an underground nuclear test this week. Hecker is one of the world’s top experts on the North Korean nuclear program. He has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, and is the only Western scientist known to have ever been inside a North Korean uranium enrichment facility. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a research professor of Management Science and Engineering.

Do you believe that North Korea actually detonated a hydrogen bomb in its latest nuclear test?

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. Since this test worked, they will have achieved greater sophistication in their bomb design – that is the most worrisome aspect. This is their fourth test – with each test they can learn a lot.

What makes a hydrogen bomb a more threatening weapon than a conventional atomic bomb?

A hydrogen bomb can be a hundred or a thousand-fold more powerful than a fission bomb. Certainly a blast of a megaton will be much more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, but the more important part is the ability to deliver at long range and to do it accurately. That is what would threaten the United States and its allies most; even with the size of nuclear blasts they have already demonstrated.

White House officials say that initial data from nearby monitoring stations are not consistent with a hydrogen bomb test. How will we know for sure whether it was a hydrogen bomb or not?

The short answer is that we may never know. The telltale signs of a hydrogen bomb are very difficult to pick up in a deeply buried test. Typically hydrogen bombs have greater explosive power or yield. This test is currently believed to have resulted in a seismic tremor of 5.1 on the Richter earthquake scale. That would make it roughly equivalent to the third nuclear test in February 2013. At that time, North Korea claimed it tested a miniaturized atomic bomb – there was no mention of a hydrogen bomb. My estimate of the yield for the 2013 test is roughly 7 to 16 kilotons – which is in the range of the 13-kiloton Hiroshima blast. As far as destructiveness, a Hiroshima-scale explosion is bad enough. Detonated in Manhattan, it may kill as many as a quarter million people. The power of the 2013 and the current explosion is more consistent with fission bombs than hydrogen bombs.

Can you rule out the possibility that it was a hydrogen bomb?

I find it highly unlikely that the North tested a real hydrogen fusion bomb, but we know so little about North Korea’s nuclear weapons design and test results that we cannot completely rule it out. A modern hydrogen bomb is a two-stage device that uses a fission bomb to drive the second stage fusion device. A two-stage device is very difficult to design and construct, and is likely still beyond the reach of North Korea today. However, by comparison, China’s early nuclear weapon program progressed rapidly. It tested its first fission bomb in 1964 and less than three years later demonstrated a hydrogen bomb – and that was 50 years ago. North Korea has now been in the nuclear testing business for almost 10 years, so we can’t rule anything out for certain.

If it wasn’t a hydrogen bomb, what kind of bomb might it have been?

What may be more likely than a two-stage hydrogen bomb is that they took an intermediate step that utilizes hydrogen (actually hydrogen isotopes) fuel to boost the explosive yield of the fission bomb, a sort of turbocharging. Such a device has a fusion or “hydrogen” component, but is not a real hydrogen bomb. It allows miniaturization – that is making the bomb smaller and lighter. Moreover, it would be the first step toward eventually mastering a two-stage hydrogen bomb.

The most important aspect then is to miniaturize, whether it is a fission bomb, a boosted fission bomb, or a hydrogen bomb. The Nagasaki bomb weighed 5,000 kilograms. It was delivered in a specially equipped B-29 bomber. North Korea wants to demonstrate it has a deterrent. To do so, it needs to be able to credibly threaten the U.S. mainland or our overseas assets. For that, you have to make the bomb (more correctly, the warhead) small enough to mount on a missile. The smaller and lighter, the greater the reach. 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.

How close is North Korea to being able to credibly threaten a nuclear strike against the mainland United States?

North Korea is still a long way off from being able to strike the US mainland. It has only had one successful space launch. It needs a lot more, but it has a large effort in that direction.

Do you think North Korea conducted this test for political or technical reasons?

North Korea had very strong technical and military drivers for this test, as well as follow-on tests. The political environment is mostly what has constrained it from testing earlier and more often. However, this test demonstrates that Pyongyang is willing to weather the political storm this test will bring. It has done so for all previous tests.

What are your current estimates on the size of North Korea's stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials?

Much like in the area of sophistication of the bomb, we have little information of what North Korea actually possesses. The best we can do is to estimate how much bomb fuel, plutonium and highly enriched uranium, they may have produced and estimate how many bombs they can produce from that stockpile. My best estimate at this time is that they may have enough bomb fuel for 18 bombs with a capacity to make 6 to 7 more annually. That, combined with the increased sophistication they surely achieved with this test, paints a troublesome picture.

How should the U.S. respond?

I am concerned about we haven’t done to date. Washington has lost many opportunities we have had since North Korea began its nuclear weapon production in earnest in 2003. One thing that’s clear is that doing what we and the rest of the world have done so far – half-hearted diplomacy, ultimatums, and sanctions – have failed, so these are not the answer. 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. 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.

It’s been 29 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but two nuclear security experts affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) say there are still lessons to be learned from the worst nuclear accident of the 20th century.

In a new book by Sonja Schmid, the former CISAC science fellow argues that the consensus in the West about the cause of the disaster – that it was an inevitable result of a deeply flawed, backward Soviet system –  has precluded Western nuclear industries and policymakers from meaningfully incorporating the Soviet experience into their own practices.

The book, “Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry”, is being praised by leading experts in the nuclear security field, including Freeman-Spogli Institute (FSI) Senior Fellow David Holloway who wrote: "[Schmid's] argument that the Soviet experience has to be incorporated into our broader understanding of the nuclear industry is both convincing and important."

Schmid was a social science research associate at Stanford University, a science fellow at CISAC, and a lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Stanford from 2005-2007. She is now an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s STS Department.

Schmid credits CISAC with providing resources crucial to the conception, research, and completion of “Producing Power,” including multiple travel grants to conduct research for the book, help with editing preliminary drafts, and a final book edit.

Schmid also tapped CISAC’s stable of nuclear experts. Along with Holloway, CISAC Associate Director for Research Lynn Eden mentored and supported her project. Siegfried Hecker, an FSI senior fellow, connected her with multiple Russian interviewees.

“Mentoring Sonja was a great pleasure. She came to CISAC with deep insight about the close connection between Soviet state bureaucracies and the reactor design choices that those bureaucrats made. It was an amazingly interesting and ambitious project,” Eden said.

“CISAC is a scholarly community that encourages and supports outstanding research and writing that is in some way policy-relevant,” she said. “For our pre- and post-doctoral fellows especially, we want to encourage them and help them to think deeply and/or broadly about a question that affects people’s lives, and to write clearly about it.”

Edward Geist, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, said Schmid’s book is the first to grapple with the institutional history of Soviet nuclear power.

“The traditional accounts have tended to organize events around a ‘what went wrong’ narrative,” said Geist, whose article “Political Fallout: The Failure of the Emergency Management at Chernobyl”, appeared in the spring issue of Slavic Review. ”There’s a school of thought that emerged in the Soviet Union and was readily picked up abroad that says the Chernobyl disaster was the ultimate example of everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union,” Geist said.

This worries Geist, who specializes in nuclear power, Soviet history, and emergency management.

“As a result of having lived through the worst, Russian and Ukrainian nuclear energy industry leaders, to my mind, actually have a more realistic mindset regarding the hazards of nuclear energy than their Western counterparts,” Geist said.  “While a catastrophic nuclear accident in the United States is really unlikely, the nuclear industry claims to have made nuclear power safe through superior methods and procedures–and that attitude can forestall effective emergency planning.”

The Chernobyl disaster hurt popular trust in nuclear energy, including in the United States. The still-popular narrative that Chernobyl was a problem purely of Soviet making was spun by representatives of nuclear industries in other countries to protect their interests from popular backlash.

By detailing the decision processes and procedures behind the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactor choice, design and commercialization, Schmid aims to show that the Soviet process was rational and the product of expert input rather than an irrational byproduct of the Communist regime. Chernobyl, in short, was an accident of history rather than a byproduct of an illegitimate system and should therefore be studied by members of the Western nuclear industry and policymakers.

“The Western nuclear field has more to learn from the Soviet experience than they care to admit. The bureaucratic practices of the Soviets are not really that unique to them and can be repeated by our bureaucracies,” said Geist.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan was a case in point. Fukushima’s reactors were designed and built by Americans.

It’s Schmid’s hope that by putting Chernobyl in the context of what was a sophisticated nuclear energy bureaucracy that had many more successes than failures, much like its American counterpart, that lessons of caution can be drawn by the latter.

“What Chernobyl has demonstrated (and Fukushima has only confirmed),” writes Schmid, “is that organizing a civilian nuclear industry remains at best a high-stakes process of trial and error.”

Geist, with an eye on his field of emergency management, agrees.

“The lesson from Chernobyl and Fukushima is accidents happen no matter what procedures or levels of sophistication, but accidents need not be catastrophes if you’re willing to learn from others’ errors and incorporate them into planning.”

In a rare and exclusive interview in the Tehran Times, CISAC and FSI Senior Fellow Siegfried Hecker tells Iranian journalist Kourosh Ziabari that the only way forward for the country’s nuclear program is transparency and international cooperation.

The interview comes during an unprecedented period of rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Several days after his inauguration last August, President Hassan Rouhani called for the resumption of negotiations with the so-called P5+1, a group of six world powers using diplomatic efforts to monitor Iran’s energy program.

In September, President Barack Obama called Rouhani, marking the highest-level contact between the United States and Iran since 1979 hostage crisis.

The P5+1 and Iran are drafting a comprehensive nuclear agreement to ensure that Tehran is not building a nuclear bomb, but trying to expand its nuclear energy program. The International Atomic Energy Agency has given Iran until Aug. 25 to provide more details about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program.

In the interview, Ziabari did not pull any punches with Hecker.

“You’ve argued that Iran doesn’t possess sufficient uranium reserves like Japan, and its uranium enrichment program is not cost-effective,” Ziabari asks. “However, you know that Iran’s nuclear program was first launched in 1950s as part of the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. At that time, the United States thought that it’s beneficial to help Iran with its nuclear energy program, because Iran was an ally, but now, Iran is a foe, and does not need nuclear power anymore. Is it really like that?”

You can read Hecker's response and the entire the Q&A in its entirely on Ziabari’s website.

In Feburary, the Iranian government republished an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by Hecker and Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. The story ran in Farsi on at least one official website. That could reflect, the scholars say, a genuine internal debate in Tehran regarding the future of its nuclear program.

William J. Perry was only 18 when he found himself surrounded by death, a young U.S. Army mapping specialist in Japan during the Army of Occupation. The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II had just come to an end. 

“The vast ruins that once had been the great city of Tokyo – nothing, nothing had prepared me for such utter devastation that was wrought by massive waves of firebombing rained down by American bomber attacks,” said Perry, who was then shipped off to the island of Okinawa in the aftermath of the last great battle of WWII.

More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed in that closing battle of 1945, codenamed Operation Iceberg. 

“Not a single building was left standing; the island was a moonscape denuded of trees and vegetation,” Perry told a rapt audience during a recent speech. “The smell of death was still lingering.” 

The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs.

 “It had taken multiple strikes by thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of high explosive bombs to lay waste to Tokyo,” he recalls. “The same had been done to Hiroshima and then to Nagasaki with just one plane – and just one bomb. Just one bomb. 

“The unleashing of this colossal force indelibly shaped my life in ways that I have now come to see more clearly,” said Perry, who would go on to become the 19^th secretary of defense. “It was a transforming experience. In many ways – I grew up from it.” 

William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.

William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.  Photo Credit: U.S. Army

Now, nearly seven decades later, the 86-year-old Perry has come full circle. His new winter course will take students back to his fateful days in Japan after the United States became the first – and last – nation to use atomic weapons. He’ll go through the Cold War, the arms race and expanding nuclear arsenals, and today’s potential threats of nuclear terrorism and regional wars provoked by North Korea, Iran or South Asia. 

Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today (IPS 249) – to serve as the backdrop for an online course at Stanford next year – concludes with the declaration Perry made in 2007: The world must rid itself entirely of nuclear weapons. And students will get a primer on how to get involved in organizations that are working on just that. 

“They did not live through the Cold War, so they were never exposed to the dangers and therefore it doesn’t exist to them; it’s just not in their world,” Perry said of millennial and younger students. “I want to make them aware of what the dangers were and how those dangers have evolved.”

Perry and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, both Democrats, joined former Republican Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger in launching a series of OpEds in The Wall Street Journal (the first in 2007) that went viral. Together they outlined how nations could work together toward a world without nuclear weapons.

“I think I have some responsibility since I helped build those weapons – and I think that time is running out,” Perry said in an interview. 

Perry helped shore up the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, procuring nuclear weapons delivery systems for the Carter administration. Later, as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton, his priority became the dismantling of nuclear weapons around the world. 

Today, he works on the Nuclear Security Project along with Shultz, Kissinger and Nunn. Former New York Times correspondent Philip Taubman documents their bipartisan alliance in the book, “The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb.” That fifth cold warrior is Sidney Drell, the renowned Stanford physicist and co-founder of CISAC. 

Taubman, a consulting professor at CISAC, will guest lecturer in Perry’s class, along with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway, Martha Crenshaw and Scott Sagan. Other speakers are expected to include Shultz, a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Andrei Kokoshin, deputy of the Russian State Duma; Ashton B. Carter, who just stepped down as deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Joeseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.

The world is far from banning the bomb. According to the Ploughshares Fund, an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons remain in the global stockpile, the majority of which are in Russia and the United States.

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President Barack Obama declared shortly after taking office in his first foreign policy speech in Prague that because the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons, Washington “has a moral responsibility to act.” 

“So today, I state clearly and with conviction, America’s commitment to seek the peace

and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama said back in May 2009. 

Perry – a senior fellow at CISAC who received his BS and MS from Stanford and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics – laments the regression of the movement to dismantle the nuclear legacy of the Cold War. 

Obama has so far not acted on his pledge in his contentious second term, as China and Russia expand their stockpiles. North Korea and Iran are attempting to build nuclear weapons and India and Pakistan are building more fissile material. The U.S. Senate still has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the U.S. and Russia have not moved forward on a follow-up to the New START Treaty. 

Perry recognizes that the issue is slipping from the public conscience, particularly among young people. So he’s putting his name and experience behind a Stanford Online course slated to go live next year. It will correspond with the release of his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” and will take a more documentary approach, weaving together key moments in Perry’s career with lectures, archival footage and interviews and conversations between Perry and his colleagues and counterparts. 

"Bill Perry has had a remarkable career and this project draws on his unparalleled experience over a pivotal period in history," said John Mitchell, vice provost for online learning. "We hope his brilliant reflections will be useful to everyone with an interest in the topic, and to teachers and students everywhere." 

At the heart of his winter course, online class and memoir are what Perry calls the five great lessons he learned in the nuclear age. The first four are grim remnants of what he witnessed over the years: the destructive nature of the atomic bombs on Japan; his mathematical calculations about the number of deaths from nuclear warfare; his work for the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and one pre-dawn call in 1978 from the North American Aerospace Defense Command saying there were 200 missiles headed toward the United States from the Soviet Union. That turned out to be a false, but terrifying alarm. 

His fifth final lesson is hopeful, if not cautionary. It goes like this: 

As secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, Perry oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and the United States and helped the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to go entirely non-nuclear. In that mission, he often visited Pervomaysk in the Ukraine, which was once the Soviet Union’s largest ICBM site, with 700 nuclear warheads all aimed at targets in the United States. 

On his final trip to Pervomaysk in 1996, he joined the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers to plant sunflowers where those missiles had once stood. 

“So reducing the danger of nuclear weapons is not a fantasy; it has been done,” Perry said. “I will not accept that it cannot be done. I shall do everything I can to ensure nuclear weapons will never again be used – because I believe time is not on our side.”