Daily Socotra

11 August 2006

Tritium

Sorry to be dancing on the edge of the apocalypse this week. I don't mean to be doing it; events of the wider world have intruded into what should be a boring series of postcards about the gracefully declining plant facility of Big Pink, and the quiet disintegration of the residents.

We now appear to have competing bands of global jihadis, the largely Sunni monsters of al Qiada who are presumably responsible for the latest threat to commerical aviatio, and the Shias, led by the Iranians. I wonder if they are competing for leadership in the attack on the West, the one we won't seem to wake up to.

I can't blame the Iranians for our somnolence, but viewed from their perspective, they are on a roll, what with their hidden Imams and days of reckoning. Goodness knows we have been able to put their scheming and ankle-biting aside for years, even after their little surrogate thugs in the Hezballah killed all those young Marines at the Beirut Barracks, and my friend Wheels in the Embassy.

But the latest lunacy appears unforgivable. Forgive me, there are so many, let me concentrate on the one where their President denies the murder of the Jews and Gypsies in Germany, while in the same breath declares his desire to drive them into the sea. Oh, and the nuclear weapons thing, and the proclamation of the Day of Judgment.

Like they were in a position to do that. As if.

It all makes me tired. It was one thing for the Greeks to take Darius the Great seriously, but it is long past time that we should have pinned somebody's ears back over the Embassy thing. That was ridiculous.

The Embassy was sovereign US soil, that is the law of nations, just like the Iranian legation to the UN in New York. I forget when everything changed. In the Dominican Republic there was some unpleasantness and one of the Marine Guards shot someone who tried to come over the wall. He got the Silver Star, if I recall. In Tehran, they surrendered without a shot.

The whole thing makes me tired.

So it was with some sense of the surreal that I found myself at lunch the other day at the Caucus Club with the Administer of the National Nuclear Security Agency, Ambassador Linton Brooks.

We invited him because he is responsible for all the weapons and nuclear research aspects of the Department of Energy. He is one of those great Americans in public service. He was a nuclear-qualified naval Officer, a ship-driver, if I am not mistaken, from the days when the US Navy had dozens of nuclear-power surface ships. We had a policy of "I can neither confirm nor deny" about whether we had nuclear weapons on board almost all our ships, and although retired I am not going to divulge their presence or absence.

But I will tell you that the marines on my ships would have cheerfully killed you if you got too close to the wrong magazine, if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, the Ambassador is a stout fellow of a certain age. Certainly old enough not to have to do any of the things he does, which are pretty interesting. He is a little portly, and a pretty good trencherman. He is the only guest to our luncheons who managed to talk right through the three courses and finish the same time we did.

The Ambassador is a legend in a pretty esoteric business, quite literally the last of the breed, and mentor to the current generation of leadership. Tim Sample, former Staff Director of the House Intelligence Committee and current director of the Intelligence and National Security Association (INSA, formerly SASA) started off as an assistant to the Ambassador.

In sum, he has four decades of experience with nuclear weapons. He was Special Assistant to the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Atomic Energy, responsible for all Navy nuclear programs and for international nuclear weapons cooperation, Director of the Navy's Strategic and Theater Nuclear Warfare Division, and Director of Defense Programs on the NSC staff in the Reagan White House.

He got his Ambassadorship as the lead negotiator on the SALT I and II treaties with the first Bush Administration. He is a warrior and a peacemaker, and above all, a most practical man.

The Clinton years were pretty barren for the nuclear warriors. I remember the shock the community felt when Hazel O'Leary was confirmed as Secretary of Energy. She announced that she did not require any briefings from what she quaintly termed "Old white bomb-builders," and that was when I began to be concerned for the safety of our nuclear stockpile. The Ambassador retreated to the Center for Naval Analysis over in Arlington, where he was Vice President for research and analysis. He advised Sandia National Labs, where they design weapons, and looked at the stockpile issue while he was there.

Back in the day, the Administration joined the comprehensive test ban treaty, and we could no longer test the awful things, and there was the real possibility that they might not work.

Now that I think about it, that might have been the point. The sorry state of things was just one of the little legacies that Mr. Clinton left for Mr. Bush. See, the thing is that the weapons-grade plutonium in the bombs needs a trigger to begin the chain reaction. US designs (which are some of the most elegant in the world) use a material called tritium as the trigger devise.

The problem is that tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years, which is to say that half the radioactive material will decay into non-radioactive helium every decade. For the life of the Iranian Revolution, for example, which is right around thirty years, one of our weapons would have lost half its trigger, then half of that, and half again, just as the loonies were about to get their own.

Kind of ironic, wouldn't you say?

Anyhow, you can be very happy that Linton Brooks is on the job. He has people out securing the radioactive material at the dozens of research facilities in the world so the Iranian and the North Koreans don't get their hands on the stuff. As we lunched, forty kilos of weapons-grade material was being spirited away to safeguarded facilities in Russia. He is also managing the program to upgrade the physical defenses that the Russians maintain. That has been a challenge for them, since the whole country was a prison camp when the Soviets ran the place, and a series of comprehensive upgrades has been necessary.

He talked energetically about working with his Russian friends, and I had the feeling that there was a real fondness there for his old adversaries. They have so many issues in common, after all.

When it came time, over the desert course, I got a chance to ask him about tritium, and he positively beamed. He said that things were nearly as bad as they seemed, since we have been destroying enough weapons that we have been able to harvest a reprocess the remaining radioactive material.

That said, he was pleased to announce that the first tritium production run was about to start down at the Savannah River facility, and we would be producing enough to keep everything in equilibrium soon. I told him I was pleased to hear that, but remained concerned about the health of the weapons in storage.

That is when he beamed the brightest. "We will acquire the first Reliable Replacement Warhead- the RRW- early next year. Thereafter we will be refreshing the inventory by several units a year," he said, waving a fork. "This is a real success story. We will have achieved a stable stockpile, and renewable sources of tritium."

Looking down at his watch, he announced that he had to get back to the Forrestal Building and get back to doing whatever it was he did for a living. We gave him a nice round of applause as he picked up his portfolio and left the room. We had basked in the presence of one of the best of the Cold Warriors.

We were mingling, talking about how important a stable stockpile was when the lead edge of a security detail came up the corridor. I had to get out of their way; I don't like to interfere with them. Following not far behind was Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff, who is almost a dead-ringer for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I politely called out that we thought Mr. Chertoff was doing a heck of a job, and was startled to see that DC Mayor Tony Williams was right behind the Secretary, bow tie and all.

I like the mayor, and he was kind enough to stop and chat for a while, even if he wouldn't say what he was going to do next. Former director of the FBI William Webster was there, too, but he doesn't have much to do these days, and he hung out with us for quite awhile.

I left the Caucus Club with a spring in my steps. I haven't felt this good about nuclear weapons in years. I had a positive glow as I headed up 13th Street toward the office.