Silencing the Bomb,by Lynn R. Sykes (introduction)

S i len c i ng

the bomb

One Scientist’s Quest to Halt Nuclear Testing

LYNN R. SYKES

Introduction

I

have long wanted to write about my fifty years of work toward bringing about an international treaty that would completely ban the testing of nuclear weapons. I was fortunate to have participated in the negotiation of a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union in 1974. For more than fifty years I have also witnessed firsthand strenuous opposition in the United States to test bans by a cast of characters who sometimes acted from nefarious motives. The use of nuclear weapons is an issue that threatens our very existence. This is a story I believe needs to be told.

The quest for a complete ban on nuclear testing is now more than sixtyfive years old. The process of ratification could exceed the seventy-two years it took from 1848 until 1920 to enact a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote in the United States. The treaty has yet to enter into force because all countries possessing either nuclear weapons or reactors have not ratified it. Nevertheless, Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France, and Israel have not tested nuclear weapons since they signed it in 1996; India and Pakistan, which did not sign the treaty, have not tested since 1998. In these important ways the treaty has been very successful.

A major nuclear exchange between the superpowers would be a disaster of unprecedented destruction and horror, the worst in all of human history. An exchange between India and Pakistan alone could kill more than half a billion people and affect other countries, particularly China.

Although the Cold War is over, weapons of the superpowers are on hairtrigger alert and could be fired in response to false alarms or by unauthorized users.

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Other tasks pulled at me through the years: research on earthquakes in the greater New York City region, revisiting early work on plate tectonics, and long-term earthquake prediction as new information became available, as well as working as a consultant to New York State regarding the likelihood of earthquakes near nuclear power plants located along the Hudson River not far from New York City. During my forty years as a professor prior to my retirement in 2005, I advised about thirty graduate students at Columbia University, raised funds for their support, and usually taught two classes each year in a dozen different areas of the earth sciences, environmental hazards, and the nuclear arms race.

Now, at eighty years old, I have made time to reflect upon my life— professionally and personally. My undergraduate years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened doors to me, both scientifically and culturally. The Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University, where I landed as a graduate student in 1960 after college with a degree in geology and geophysics, had been formed only a dozen years earlier. I was in the right place at the right time as I became involved in the birth of plate tectonics and the development of methods to verify a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. My chosen field of seismology, the study of earthquakes, is the primary science and technology for detecting, locating, and identifying underground nuclear tests. Methods for examining earthquakes are very similar to those for nuclear explosions.

In 1966, after halting research on another project, I worked on the mechanisms of earthquakes and demonstrated that new seafloor was being formed along mid-oceanic ridges and that continental drift, long rejected by many scientists, was a reality. I was fortunate that the early part of my career and the following decade coincided with the Golden Age of funding of the earth sciences in the United States.

My years as a graduate student, from 1960 to 1965, were a particularly frightening time during the nuclear arms race. Intercontinental ballistic missiles were being deployed, and very large nuclear devices and weapons were being tested in the atmosphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the world alarmingly close to nuclear war. Deeply concerned, it was at this time that I became committed to do whatever I could in forwarding the process of better verification of nuclear tests. Detection

Introduction xiii

and identification of underground explosions have been two of the prime concerns of those involved with a full test ban treaty.

My decision to specialize in studying earthquakes brought with it an awareness of the importance of a full halt to the testing of nuclear weapons as well as further steps toward nuclear arms control. Realizing the devastating consequences of a nuclear conflict, I made a major commitment to do whatever I could to affect the signing and ratification of a comprehensive test ban that would encompass the monitoring of then difficult-to-identify underground explosions and bring an end to atomic testing.

My work on nuclear tests and their detection and identification began in 1965, soon after I completed graduate work at the Lamont Geological Observatory. Most of the following chapters are devoted to work I did personally and to my interaction with key individuals, government agencies, and other organizations for the next fifty years. I have emphasized contributions made through the years to better identify nuclear explosions; bureaucratic struggles in the United States over nuclear monitoring, including claims that Russia cheated on two test ban treaties; the desirability of a full test ban treaty; other steps toward the control of nuclear weapons; and the dangers of nuclear war. I have attempted to the best of my ability to cover both the political and the technical and scientific aspects of the long quest for a complete test ban.

My involvement with negotiations for the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which took me to Russia in 1974, led me to work for the next fifteen years on estimating the sizes (yields) of Soviet nuclear explosions. I have been involved in long debates in the U.S. government, sometimes referred to as the “yield wars,� where some agencies and people in the United States claimed that the Soviet Union was cheating on the Threshold Treaty.

Several times during the 1980s, I was called before Congress to testify concerning the sizes of Russian explosions and was able to demonstrate that the USSR, in fact, was not cheating, as some governmental hawks would have liked us to believe. I argued further that the United States and other countries needed to move toward a complete and verifiable ban on nuclear testing.

My work in the 1990s also involved dealing with the possibilities of evasive nuclear testing, a subject that was of paramount concern

xiv Introduction

and a stumbling block to a full test ban in the United States in 1963 and again in 1999.

I have tried to make this book accessible to a wide audience of educated people, including students and others interested in learning more about the development of the nuclear age through the eyes of an insider, as well as those involved with arms control, public policy, and the history of science. It is not intended as a textbook or a journal article on nuclear tests, monitoring, or earthquakes.

I decided to begin this book with my sudden trip to Moscow in 1974 to participate in the negotiation of a treaty to limit very large underground nuclear explosions. I go on to describe the development of nuclear weapons and early attempts to ban their testing. While the book is in historical order, I discuss major scientific and political developments as they occurred within the context of a particular subject. For example, in chapter 4 I emphasize claims in the United States in the early 1960s that other countries, particularly Russia, could test evasively and thus escape detection. I then return to evasion in chapter 15 during the Senate’s rejection of the full test ban treaty in 1999. In chapters 5, 9, and 10 I describe long continuing arguments about determining the sizes or yields of Soviet nuclear explosions, their overestimation by the United States, and the final resolution of the “yield wars.”

One of the major challenges in monitoring a full test ban has been differentiating the seismic signals of underground tests from those of the many earthquakes that occur every day. In chapters 6, 7, 11–14, and 16 I enumerate major scientific improvements over time in identifying underground tests.

Peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs), which are covered in chapter 8, are relevant to a full test ban treaty because they cannot be distinguished from tests of weapons. The Soviet Union conducted many PNEs in thick salt deposits, where it is possible to construct large underground cavities and then detonate small muffled explosions evasively in them. In chapter 13 I describe the successful negotiation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and of an extensive set of global stations set up to monitor it.

Chapter 16 includes reports by the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, in which I participated, that focused on the monitoring of that treaty and on ongoing efforts to insure that the U.S.

Introduction xv

stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work into the future. I close with a final chapter on the dangers of nuclear war, the control of nuclear weapons, limiting their delivery systems, and possible ways forward.

I am currently at work on a companion book, Plate Tectonics and Great Earthquakes: One Scientist’s Perspective on Fifty Years of Earth Shaking Events, which covers my involvement in groundbreaking discoveries in the development and testing of plate tectonics during the 1960s, as well as later work on great earthquakes, long-term earthquake prediction, shocks within the North American plate, risks to nuclear power reactors, and much more. It includes two chapters on my personal life and education.

The intertwining of science with arguments about halting nuclear testing continues today as it has since the early 1950s, when the first attempts to stop tests occurred. A number of heroes and villains stand out in the long road to a total ban on nuclear testing. Here is my story.

SYKES

Praise for

“Lynn R. Sykes has a long record of using seismology to study the imporPhoto by Kathleen Sykes

tant question of how to differentiate nuclear explosions from earthquakes.

Lynn R. Sykes is Higgins Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He is renowned for his contributions to the science of seismology, especially plate tectonic theory. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

That experience makes him uniquely qualified to present this cautionary tale about the sclerotic process by which well-founded scientific insight filters its way into the politically loaded formulation of national policy—particularly defense policy.”

Daniel Davis, Stony Brook University

“When he signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, President Bill Clinton called it ‘the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in arms control history.’ Lynn R. Sykes was one of the leading scientists in that half-century-long battle. Although testing has stopped—except in North Korea—Republican opposition has blocked ratification of this treaty in the U.S. Senate. Sykes’ lucid inside accounts of the science underlying the detection of nuclear testing and the battles over the test ban’s verifiability are therefore not just of historical interest but also relevant to contemporary concerns.”

Frank von Hippel, cofounder, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University

S i len c i ng the bomb

Silencing the Bomb

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK

S i len c i ng

the bomb

One Scientist’s Quest to Halt Nuclear Testing

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LYNN R. SYKES

In December 2016, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their iconic “Doomsday Clock” thirty seconds forward to two and a half minutes to midnight, the latest it has been set since 1952, the year of the first United States hydrogen bomb test. But a group of scientists— geologists, engineers, and physicists—has been fighting to turn back the clock. Since the dawn of the Cold War, they have advocated a halt to nuclear testing, their work culminating in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which still awaits ratification from China, Iran, North Korea—and the United States. The backbone of the treaty is every nation’s ability to independently monitor the nuclear activity of the others. Noted seismologist Lynn R. Sykes, one of the central figures in the development of the science and technology used in monitoring, has dedicated his career to halting nuclear testing. In Silencing the Bomb, he tells the inside story behind scientists’ quest for disarmament.

Called upon time and again to testify before Congress and to inform the public, Sykes and his colleagues were, for much of the Cold War, among the only people on earth able to say with certainty when and where a bomb was tested and how large it was. Methods of measuring earthquakes, researchers realized, could also detect underground nuclear explosions. When politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain attempted to sidestep disarmament or test ban treaties, Sykes was able to deploy the nascent science of plate tectonics to reveal the truth. Seismologists’ discoveries helped bring about treaties limiting nuclear testing, but it was their activism that played a key role in the effort for peace. Full of intrigue, international politics, and hard science used for the global good, Silencing the Bomb is a timely and necessary chronicle of one scientist’s efforts to keep the clock from striking midnight.