Nuclear Weapons Production Complexes in a Disarmed World

ABSTRACT

Any effective nuclear disarmament regime will need to consider how to deal with the infrastructure that supported the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons. Such infrastructure carries within it the seeds for re-armament. This paper presents a framework of potential actions to be applied to facilities within nuclear weapons production complexes in a disarming and a disarmed world. This framework has two axes. The first identifies key capabilities and facilities that are integral to the production of both simple fission weapons and more advanced boosted and thermonuclear weapons. The second axis explores the range of actions that can be taken to constrain nuclear weapons production infrastructure which would either directly or indirectly influence the capacity for future reacquisition of nuclear weapons. In exploring these themes, the paper asks what are the crucial nuclear facilities or processes that are likely to be key in enabling potential re-armament? And what types of actions can be considered to constrain the re-armament potential of these facilities? Considering how to enhance the degree of disarmament irreversibility will entail posing and answering difficult questions on the fate of nuclear weapons complexes, and not just nuclear weapons.

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear weapons
• nuclear weapons production complex
• disarmament
• nuclear fuel cycle
• irreversibility

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See the definition in Elbahtimy (2023).

² For an exposition and critique of the limitations of the nuclear proliferation paradigm see Pelopidas (2011).

³ While the production, maintenance and disposal functions are more familiar components of the complex, recycling is the process through which fissile material are extracted from a warhead to be re-used for other purposes. Fissile material pits are formed from highly purified radioactive metals or alloys, which can be chemically purified and recycled apart from small quantities lost through radioactive decay, chemical processing losses, and pit forging/machining. The material’s useful life is limited by its isotopic composition, which denatures over time, eventually passing a point where its expected performance falls below acceptable levels, and it must be disposed of or subjected to chemical purification and refabrication.

⁴ It is of course possible to produce weapons at the at a slow rate within suitable R&D facilities as was done in the in the United States under the Manhattan Project, yet such capacity is much more limited compared to the industrial scale capacity to produce these weapons that was achieved later as the complex grew and expanded.

⁵ United States Code, Title 50, Ch 42, § 2501, para (6).

⁶ Defence Nuclear Organisation website. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/defence-nuclear-organisation/about

⁷ The Convention is in UN Document A/62/650 and provides a definition of “Nuclear Weapons Production Facility” as “any nuclear facility which produces materials which have been or may be used for military purposes, including such a reactor, a plant for processing nuclear material irradiated in a reactor, a plant for separating the isotopes of nuclear material, a plant for processing or fabricating nuclear material, a plant for the construction or assembly of nuclear weapon components, or a facility or plant of such other type as may be deemed a Nuclear Weapons Production Facility by the Technical Secretariat”.

⁸ For details of States Parties’ legal obligations under the non-proliferation treaty, see, e.g. Joyner (2011).

⁹ Examples of nuclear espionage which would have contributed to the early requirement for secrecy include several identified individuals who worked on the Manhattan Project and provided secrets to the Soviet Union, such as Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass (see, e.g. Rhodes (1995)). Examples of early state-to-state nuclear cooperation in nuclear weapons include the sharing of information on nuclear weapons between the United States and the United Kingdom under the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement (see, e.g. Baylis (2008)) and the cooperation between France and Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s (see, e.g. Pinkus (2002)).

¹⁰ The texts of the Voluntary Offer Agreements with the five NPT Nuclear Weapons States can be found on the International Atomic Energy Agency website here: https://www.iaea.org/topics/safeguards-legal-framework/more-on-safeguards-agreements

¹¹ The United States, for instance, produces tritium through the Watts Bar facility, an otherwise “civil” nuclear power plant (Woolf and Werner 2021, 19, 23, 31).

¹² See the excellent reports and data compiled by the International Panel on Fissile Materials available here: https://fissilematerials.org/.

¹³ The five states whose first nuclear explosion took place before 1967 have all stopped or are believed to have stopped fissile material production. The other four states with known active nuclear weapons programmes are still producing fissile material. This is according to the individual country reports from the International Panel for Fissile Materials, available online from https://fissilematerials.org/.

¹⁴ Details of electromagnetic separation processes can be found in US Department of Energy Office of History and Heritage Resources (n.d., 165–169). Details of Iraq’s use of this process are available in Albright, and Hibbs (1991).

¹⁵ Example radiation dose rates from US spent fuel assemblies are ~ 100 Gray per hour 10 years after removal from a reactor, meaning that a fatal dose of radiation would be received within minutes, and severe long-term health effects would occur within seconds, according to US NRC Office of Public Affairs (2019, 1).

¹⁶ A breakdown of the components of thermonuclear weapons and the US experience in dismantling them in the 1990s can be found in US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment (1993, 35–39).

¹⁷ For a comparative overview of nuclear weapons R&D capabilities: Medalia et al. (2013).

¹⁸ In heavy water reactors, the calandria is a large tank with numerous parallel tubes running through it, filled with heavy water providing the neutron moderating function. The fuel is placed within the tubes running through the calandria, and coolant passes through the tubes.

¹⁹ For some proposals on conversion of Russian facilities after the end of the cold war see: Bunn (1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hassan Elbahtimy

Hassan Elbahtimy is Senior Lecturer in the Department of War studies at King’s College London and previously served as Director of the Centre for Science and Security Studies (CSSS) and as Trustee and Executive Committee member of the British International Studies Association (BISA). He has written widely on international security and arms control and disarmament issues including in Foreign Affairs, Journal of Strategic Studies, Security Studies, and the Nonproliferation Review, among others. His research was awarded the McElveny Grand Prize by the Nonproliferation Review.

Ross Peel

Ross Peel is a Research and Knowledge Transfer Manager in the Centre for Science and Security Studies (CSSS) in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. In this role, he leads research activities on nuclear security and safeguards, and examines the role of nuclear power plants in war and as tools of international diplomacy. Prior to joining King’s College London, Ross spent time in industry as a Nuclear Systems Consulting Engineer with Nuclear-21 Ltd. He gained his PhD in nuclear energy engineering from the University of Sheffield in 2017.