Off to Pakistan

I will be in Islamabad next week, giving a talk and meeting some people. I am then traveling within Europe. In other words, blogging may be very light for a while and I apologize for that.

My journey will be an interesting one, although I doubt that I will meet with Abdul Qadeer Khan, who’s house arrest seems to be ending. The discussion is starting at Arms Control Wonk, and I’d like to join Chris Griffith in warmly recommending Gordon Corera’s Shopping for Bombs if you’d like to learn more. Gordon managed to do a drive-by of Kahuta during his research trip (he didn’t stop for tea).

I’ve heard from two persons ‘in the know’ that Khan himself have read the book. The first person told me that Khan threw the book into the wall in uncontrollable rage. Another person, closer to the man, told me that Kahn likes and recommends it. I would lean for the latter scenario, since the book downplays PAEC and flags KRL.

There is so much to write about, especially on Iran, but it just have to wait for a week or so.

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain earlier today gave a landmark speech on the responsibility to engage more seriously in disarmament. I know many people are treating this speech with some scepticism, but whatever McCain's motivation, and given Barrack Obama has already explicitly leant his weight to the vision, this is the clearest indication yet that nuclear disarmament has now achieved the mainstream - and it is now out of touch to oppose it. McCain has clearly distanced himself from the record of the current Administration:

“If you look back over the past two decades, I don’t think any of us, Republican or Democrat, can take much satisfaction in what we’ve accomplished to control nuclear proliferation… No problem we face poses a greater threat to us and the world than nuclear proliferation.”

There were a number of remarkable features of this speech, given the Republicans’ recent record on arms control. McCain emphasised the importance of the bipartisan approach:

“The truth is we will only address the terrible prospect of the worldwide spread of nuclear arms if we transcend our partisan differences, combine our energies, learn from our past mistakes, and seek practical and effective solutions.”

He emphasised the role of international cooperation:

“It is a vision not of the United States acting alone, but building and participating in a community of nations all drawn together in this vital common purpose… We must strengthen existing international treaties and institutions to combat proliferation, and develop new ones when necessary… The United States cannot and will not stop the spread of nuclear weapons by unilateral action. We must lead concerted and persistent multilateral efforts. As powerful as we are, America’s ability to defend ourselves and our allies against the threat of nuclear attack depends on our ability to encourage effective international cooperation.”

He outlined his support for a larger and more powerful IAEA, for international fuel banks available to those that renounce their own enrichment and reprocessing facilities, and an international repository for spent nuclear fuel.

He signed up to the vision of a nuclear weapon free world:

“A quarter of a century ago, President Ronald Reagan declared, “our dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.” That is my dream, too… Such weapons, while still important to deter an attack with weapons of mass destruction against us and our allies, represent the most abhorrent and indiscriminate form of warfare known to man.”

He talked of an early nuclear posture review, with deep cuts the intention:

“I will seek to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal to the lowest number possible consistent with our security requirements and global commitments. Today we deploy thousands of nuclear warheads. It is my hope to move as rapidly as possible to a significantly smaller force.”

While clearly unwilling to turn his face against all new warheads, he says:

“I would only support the development of any new type of nuclear weapon that is absolutely essential for the viability of our deterrent, that results in making possible further decreases in the size of our nuclear arsenal, and furthers our global nuclear security goals.”

… and then goes on to explicitly rule out the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.

In contrast to the current Administration, he understands the need to continue the verification measures at the heart of the START arrangements with Russia:

“we should be able to agree with Russia on binding verification measures based on those currently in effect under the START Agreement, to enhance confidence and transparency.”

… and the need to work rapidly towards the abolition of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, and to collaborate with Russia over missile defense, and sharing early warning data. He also committed to increasing Cooperative Threat Reduction funding.

He supports the establishment of a fissile material treaty, and the further development of the Prolfieration Security Initiative. But perhaps most remarkably, given the politics of the issue in Washington and having opposed ratification in 1999, he advocates ‘taking another look at the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’, hinting that technical developments may have been sufficient in the meantime to win sufficient confidence and support in Congress.

This is a speech that represents a clear departure not only from the current Administration, but also John McCain’s past record. It is a landmark for those working towards the mainstreaming of multilateral disarmament and in opposition to unilateralism and the modernization of nuclear forces.

Paul Ingram, Executive Director, BASIC

Chagai: a story of nuclear rivalry

In the hot afternoon of 28 May 1998, an Mi-17 transport helicopter laboured its way towards the towering Chagai Mountain range in Western Pakistan.

It's passengers were about to witness the pinnacle of more than thirty years of hard work, and an investment of several hundreds of millions of US dollars. Five nuclear devices had been placed into a double s-shaped tunnel drilled into the tall mountain looming ahead of them.

Traveling inside the helicopter's passenger compartment was the heads of Pakistan's two rival nuclear organizations: PAEC Chairman Isfaq Ahmed and KRL Director Abdul Qadeer Khan.

It was the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission, under the leadership of Munir Ahmad Khan, that had established much of Pakistan's nuclear infrastructure by the time A.Q. Kahn returned to the homeland. In 1976, Munir Kahn celebrated his 50th birthday looking back at a long international career within the International Atomic Energy Agency. His organization was firmly in control of the country's embryonic bomb programme.

Munir Kahn liked to operate silent and deep. To him, the 10 year younger A.Q. Kahn must have been an annoying up-start: brash, careless and ruthless.

The younger Khan had ambition, plans and stamina. He assumed control over his laboratory after a vicious power struggle with the older Khan and the much larger PAEC. He did so with relative ease, indicating that he had plenty of political cover from Pakistan's highest political strata.

Twenty years later, there was in effect two bomb programmes in existence in Pakistan. KRL had exclusive control over uranium enrichment. It had also branched into the shaping of uranium metal into cores, weapon design, and delivery vehicle research, development and testing. PAEC was doing parallel work in all these areas. It also controlled the nuclear power plants (and access to the plutonium route to the bomb).

What happened within this two organizations during the 1980s and 1990s is largely uncharted. It is likely that they started work on several designs: both domestic and imported. The KRL design was clearly acquired from China. The origins of PAEC designs are mostly unknown.

It is quite likely that the organizations proceeded on several tracks at once, much like the Soviet Union did 40 years earlier. The first Soviet design was much more powerful and efficient than the US Manhattan Project design. But since Fuch had leaked detailed specifications to the Soviets, Stalin and Beria thought it was prudent to proceed with constructing proven designs first. Something similar could have happened in Pakistan.

Irrespective of which bomb design was tested in 1998, however, PAEC held one trump-card; it owned and controlled the test site. KRL had no suitable sites of their own, and had seemingly been relegated to the back seat.

It is possible that the heads of PAEC and KRL had laid their rivalries aside during this day. In less than an hour, Pakistan, a developing nation in which only about half the population knew how to read and write properly, was about to take an overt step into an exclusive but dangerous club. Pakistan was about to test their first series of nuclear weapons.

Anatomy of a test site

The Chagai test site is located about 935 kilometers southwest of Islamabad. It is a harsh area of our planet, with very little rainfall. Its rock is very dry, which minimizes the risk of venting and contamination of the local water table. It does ensure that the detonation is firmly coupled to the rock, however, making it easier for others to estimate the yield of the detonations.

The site itself is unassuming from the air (see my placemark). A dirt road leads up to the site from a dried up river bed. A support camp is located about a kilometer south of the presumed tunnel entrance, which is served by a number of small shacks and a small unpaved road.

The site was known to US intelligence, however. They had been monitoring the test range ever since India's test a couple of weeks earlier. According to a 26 May 1998 CNN report:

"They continue to make preparations and appear to be very close to being in a position to conduct a test should they decide to do so," said a U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The level of preparation should suggest that they do indeed plan to conduct a test."

U.S. spy satellites have been monitoring activity at the Chagai Hills test site in western Pakistan. In particular, they have noted tunneling activity that typically precedes an underground test. The satellites also have observed the laying of explosive monitoring equipment and the setting up of observation and measuring posts.

The double s-shape and Khan's arrival

According to Dr. Samar Mubarakmand, the current PAEC chair, the site was surveyed and prepared between 1977 and 1982. He claims that PAEC personell arrived to the complex on 20 May and that they prepared for the test for a week. On the morning of 28 May 1998, the Pakistani Army moved in to seal the tunnel and clear the range for the pending shot.

A.Q. Khan is reportedly posing in the tunnel in the picture above. Supporters of PAEC often claim that Khan arrived to the site only 30 minutes before the test. This view is difficult to reconcile with the photograph. The photo must have been taken some time before the test - and definitively before the tunnels were sealed. Of course, Kahn could also have been snapped in some other tunnel, somewhere else.

The tunnel had a double s-shape configuration. According to a speech by Mubarakmand:

The designing of the tunnels is also a very intricate thing. It is not just blasting a hole into a mountain. Again there is a lot of science. I shall tell you why. If you have a straight tunnel and you put the bomb at the end of the tunnel, you plug the tunnel with concrete and explode the bomb, the concrete is really going to blow out and so all the radioactivity is going to leak out through the mouth of the tunnel. We did not want this to happen. The tunnel is not designed safe but is designed in the form a double-S shape and when we detonate the bomb, the pressures are very great. They move the mountain outward and you use the force of the bomb to seal the tunnel. When the rock expands under the explosion, the rock moves in the direction so that it seals the tunnel. So the tunnel collapses inward by the force of the tunnel. This is how you seal the tunnel through the force of the bomb.

The tests

Unsurprisingly, underground nuclear tests are as violent as their above-ground cousins. The Pakistanis would have needed to ensure that their tests were appropriately separated from each other. According to the now-defunct PIADS, the yield of two devices was 25 kilotons and 12 kilotons respectively. The remaining three devices were in the sub-kiloton range.

Since the tunnel was s-shaped, this would have left some room to deploy the devices at a safe distance from each other. The cavity from the largest test would have had a 50 meter radius. To use a tired analogy, the Statue of Liberty would have just fitted inside the newly formed space.

As a rule of thumb, horizontal tunnel tests are generally spaced with a minimum shot separation distance of twice the combined cavity radius plus 30 meters. Chagai-1 would have been placed at some 205 meters from Chagai-2. Chagai-2, in turn, would have been placed some 130 meters from the sub-kiloton devices, which would need to have been spaced at approximately 83 meter intervals. In other words, all five tests would have fitted comfortably within the tunnel.

The big bang (turn off your sound)

It is not clear how successful the test was. The yield estimates are consistently lower than Pakistani declarations. This indicates that one or several devices did not perform as planned. It remains unknown to this day which device failed and which device worked as planned. It doesn't matter that much, however, since Pakistan demonstrated its ability to detonate a nuclear weapon.

Over the next ten years, Pakistan and India would work towards perfecting their arsenals, and develop suitable delivery systems. This silent arms race is still surging ahead.

Setting the story straight on Iraq

Sometimes, life is easy. This came in from a well-informed reader:

I read your article on Syrian deception with interest.  I have concerns of my own, but I would ask you to set the story straight on Iraq. People keep repeating the story that the power lines to Tarmiya were buried for deception.  The truth is that there are two high voltage steel tower power lines marching across the landscape to a huge power substation 1.5 km outside the gate.  It is still there to be seen in Google Earth.  The lines are only buried for the last little bit.  The substation was noted before the first Gulf War and was one of the reasons Tarmiya was thoroughly bombed as a precaution, even though the IC did not know what it was.  Image analysts are trained to look around a site, not just zero in on it and the source of power needed to be found, and it was.

He continues:

The other reason for bombing was the high security around the site:  walls anti-aircraft, fences, security lighting.  The sometimes repeated story that Tarmiya had a low security signature is not true! (the same was true at Ash Sharqat which was a virtual carbon copy of Tarmiya and the power lines to the substation are plainly visible from the Mosul highway.) All of this was known before the first Gulf War and was used for targeting.  If it has been forgotten since then, it is to the shame of the rumour repeaters! I don't think anyone is using IR imagery to spot power lines these days.  Panchromatic and SAR work just fine.  The transformers at the power station should give a nice glow! Now, was it really a reactor at Kibar?  Maybe we'll know some day!

This rumour repeater stands corrected.

Syrian deception

David Albright and Paul Brannan have produced yet another excellent analysis of the likely Syrian nuclear site near Al-Kibar. I have written about it in previous posts here and here, and Jeffrey Lewis's outfit have produced an enormous amount of high quality analysis.

In their briefing, Albright and Brannan describe a clever Syrian deception strategy involving a very elaborate counter-IMINT tactics, also known as 'hiding in plain view'. In 2003, the Syrians, together with their North Korean contractors, ran the gauntlet by erecting a fake roof and walls on a large, partly buried, North Korean reactor. They did so in the hope that reconnaissance satellites passing above wouldn't cover their part of the world, or that the imagery analysts on the receiving end of the data wouldn't pick up on the unusual construction.

Moreover, the counter-IMINT tactic involved not constructing new roads, or putting up other significant tracks, airfields, rail tracks, air defences and site security. In other words, their main strategy would have been to minimize the visible signature of the facility. In the military, it's known as camouflaging your position. One Russian word for camouflage is "Maskirovka".

Soviet lessons...
Before 1991, Syria and the Soviet Union enjoyed the closest of relations. The Syrian military was equipped and trained by the Soviets, and Eastern European military advisors littered the hot Syrian Desert. After 1991, the Soviets seized to exist, but the classes they taught seem to be remembered by their Syrian clients. The premier doctrine of the Soviet Armed forces was to rely on subterfuge, speed, depth and decisiveness in their operational art. A critical part here was the doctrine of strategic deception.

The doctrine was developed during the Second World War (or the Great Patriotic War). In the view of the Soviets, successful strategic deception depends on the thoroughness of similar measures on lower levels. What use is the best cover, they argued, if it is blown by sloppy movement security or poor communications discipline? In my mind, the meticulous attention to the slightest detail was on proud display in the run-up to Operation Uranus, which in 1942 totally encircled the German Sixth Army. The Germans were totally overwhelmed by the sheer speed and force of the Russian advance – and seem to have been totally unaware that it was coming. In 1976, Lieutenant General M.M. Kiryan summarized the main lessons learned by the Soviets in this way.

1. Mislead your enemy about your intentions;
   
2. Maintain the secrecy of your plans;
   
3. Hide your combat preparations;
   
4. Use new weapons, techniques and forms of combat when possible;
   
5. Direct your main strike correctly, and make sure to strike at the right time;
   
6. Use your forces in a surprising manner;
   
7. Manoeuvre rapidly and strike decisively;
   
8. Conduct fraudulent actions and engage in deception; and
   
9. Always use the terrain, weather, time of year and season to your advantage.
   

In my mind, another contributing factor to the success of Soviet deception in World War 2 was the poor quality of German intelligence. This led to the Germans constantly underestimating the strength of the Russian divisions and the vast size of the Russian reserve. The Germans also tended to underestimate the capabilities of the Soviets – both intellectually and technologically. Underestimating your foe often comes with a terrible price.

... applied by Syria
The Syrians made clever use of camouflage in more than one sense. The obvious use of cover was to hide the true shape of the structure by erecting a false roof and walls. Albright and Brannan also suggest a clever connection to the electrical grid through a water treatment plant located some five kilometres to the east of the site.

They argue that similar camouflage had been deployed by the Iraqis in the mid-1990s. Indeed, the power lines to the Tarmiya EMIS facility were buried so that they could not be picked up on the infrared. That way, the true nature and capacity of the site could be concealed. The Iraqis also minimized the use of security and fencing in order to minimize the visual signature of the site.

The Syrian strategy was as successful as the Iraqi. It worked for years. Albright and Brannan reveal that in 2005, US analysts found the building but could not figure out what it was for; it was "odd and in the middle of nowhere". It was only after the Israelis shared ground photos of the site that the US realized what the box on the Euphrates really was. At the end of the day, human intelligence proved to be the most reliable. For the proliferators, let this (again) be a lesson never to allow cameras onto sensitive sites. After all, another partially underground facility in a neighbouring country was exposed through extensive use of snappy snaps. There is a reason, I suppose, as to why cameras are often the first piece of inspector kit to be banned.

Remarkably, US or Israeli intelligence have not suggested that they have access to signals intelligence of any kind. The Syrians must have consistently used excellent transmissions discipline and security, with low power transmitters, direct landline, or simple communications silence. Moreover, sensitive documentation must have been couriered rather then sent over some sort of electronic medium. E-mails must have been a big no-no. The light and noise discipline has been truly impressive.

It remains to be seen if the IAEA will get any form of meaningful access to the Al-Kibar site. And I am deeply sceptical that Ephraim Asculai's suggestion that the IAEA should play hardball with the Syrians will lead anywhere but straight into a brick wall. The Syrian's do not want to admit to something that would reek of non-compliance with the NPT. Moreover, by denying that the site was nuclear, they've essentially painted themselves into a corner. They could have gotten away with a simple safeguards breach (by failing to declare the reactor at its design stage) by playing the "peaceful programme" card.

It's too late for that game now.

Lessons for the future
I do believe, however, that satellite imagery should play a greater role in multilateral verification. The lack of satellite imagery processing capacity is a major lacuna in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Regime. More important, however, is to shore up a solid inspection mandate for the IAEA. This cannot be done through willpower alone, but must include some diplomatic and political wrangling. States enter into agreements voluntarily, and safeguards agreements are not an exception. IAEA inspectors are not snake-eaters that can be parachuted into hostile territory (I've met a few, and they don't appear to be the combative type). All their inspection activities happen with some form of consent by the host State.

However, when they do get access to a states territory, they shouldn't get trapped by a narrow legal mandate. The Agency is authorized by its member States to 'establish and administer safeguards designed to ensure that special fissionable and other materials, services, equipment, facilities, and information made available by the Agency or at its request or under its supervision or control are not used in such a way as to further any military purpose' (see art III (A) (5) of the Statute). The Statute also envision a broad legal mandate, where inspectors '...have access at all times to all places and data and to any person who by reason of his occupation deals with materials, equipment, or facilities which are required by this Statute to be safeguarded ...' (see art XII (C) (6)).

Safeguards in application today are a far cry away from being as comprehensive as they were envisioned in the 1950s. Indeed, when States start to think about improving the safeguards system, they should be thinking about getting back to basics.

Moreover, strong export control legislation coupled with an aware industry has proven to be an effective obstacle to proliferation. It will be interesting to see how the Yun story pans out. You kill one network, another pops up?

Shakti IV and V

Ten years ago today, India claims to have completed Operation Shakti by detonating two more nuclear devices. It said that device number four was a 0.5 kiloton low-yield device, and that device number five was a 0.3 kiloton experimental device. These tests are the most controversial in India's test cycle since they could not be detected by any seismic stations outside India. In 2001, Carey Sublette wrote that:

... no outside seismic station has reported any evidence of tests on this day. The closest CTBT monitoring station was in Nilore, Pakistan 740 km to the north of Pokhran. This station is estimated to have sufficient sensitivity to detect a test at least down to 25 tons in Pokhran, yet no signal was detected. Wallace estimated that with standard seismic coupling, the test would have had to total no more than 10-15 tons to escape all detection. Assuming very poor coupling (and India's description of one test being conducted in a dry sand dune lends some support to this) allows yields up to perhaps 100 tons to escape detection, still far smaller than those claimed. The seismic signals detected for Pokhran-I and Shakti I-III provide a benchmark for evaluating the detectability of small tests. Even if India's claims of 12 kt and 43 kt are accepted for the two tests (thus indicating that seismic signals from this region are weaker than expected), the seismic signal of 800 tons of yield would be easily detectable unless extreme decoupling of both devices is assumed. Given the reported haste in shaft construction, and the unsophisticated shaft construction techniques used by the India Army, the use of deliberate decoupling measures seems ruled out.

As noted above, if India tested in a sand dune, it would have been poorly coupled to the rock, which would have muted the signal. Yet, at the time Svein Mykkelveit's NORSAR estimated the maximum combined yield to 0.2 kilotons, and Brian Barker and others estimated the maximum combined yield to 0.03 kilotons. In other words, if India tested on 13 May 1998, it is likely that the tests failed.

A defence was written by Rajagopala Chidambaram in an May 2002 article entitled 'The May 1998 Pokhran Tests: Scientific Aspects'. There, he presents a gamma spectrum of a sample allegedly taken from the Shakti V shaft. He claims that the inability of the monitoring station in Pakistan to record any seismic signature on 13 May is because 'the threshold limit for seismic detection is much higher in, say, a sand medium than in hard rock: the Pokhran geological medium comes somewhere in between'. Indeed, he is implicitly questioning the very feasibility of seismic detectability of low yield tests.

The confirmation would come through acquiring radionuclide data from the test. However, despite an initial report of 'radiation sickness' at the neighbouring  town no fallout seems to have been picked up at India's borders. If airborne sampling was carried out (and one has to assume that India's borders were packed with whatever capability the superpowers could hurry there), it wasn't reported. It is also not known how distinguishable the later samples would be from the 11 May Shakti test series.

There are three possible explanations why India's 13 May 1998 test was not detected by seismometers abroad.

• There was no test. Shakti-IV and V never happened;
  
• The test was a fizzle. Both charges failed to detonate, or produced a very low yield (well below the announced 0.8 kilotons); or
  
• Shakti-IV and V was an successful attempt at achiving marginal criticality.
  

Most analysts seem to lean towards the second explanation, rather than seeing the 13 May 1998 incident as a failure for verification. Would the same event happen today, more CTBT monitoring stations would have been deployed (including noble gas monitoring stations). With an increasingly potent verification regime, violations are bound to be detected.

And to be fair, it did detect fairly low-yield detonations coming from left field, even in its first year of operation.

Pokhran-II

Ten years ago today, India decided to take the step into the nuclear weapons club. It had already detonated a 'peaceful' nuclear device 24 years earlier, in 1974, but had refrained from making its weaponization efforts overt.

If India thought that labeling the test 'peaceful' would somehow stop Pakistan from responding, it was very wrong. The 1974 test signaled the start of a febrile arms race in South Asia. A young AQ Khan brought European centrifuge technology to Pakistan, and set up his own shop close to Rawalpindi, see my post here. By the mid 1980s, Pakistan had amassed enough nuclear material for its first atomic bomb.

For more than a decade, the two states had nervously held back on making their capabilities known. Most of this time, this was due to external pressure, foremost from the United States. Both India and Pakistan knew that setting of a nuclear device would impact on their relations with the US, but they also knew that relations would settle down to normal relatively quickly.

By 1996, there was a new political power rising in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Atal Behari Vajpayee, ran on an nationalist platform and had a strong defence agenda. Indeed, the nationalist government had already ordered a test in 1996. The device had been lowered into the zero room and were ready to be fired by the time Vajpayees short lived (13 day) government had dissolved. When Vajpayee lost power, the device was lifted out of the shaft and site operations returned to normal maintenance.

The 1996 preparations were on a massive scale, and prompted the writing of Vipin Gupta and Frank Pabian's legendary paper entitled 'Investigating the Allegations of Indian Nuclear Test Preparations in the Rajasthan Desert'.

It would take two more years, however, before the BJP dream could come through. This time, the Indian military would make an effort to hide its test preparations to the largest degree possible. India's final preparations were done at hours when there was no satellite reconnaissance coverage of the site. They made sure that heavy equipment was returned to the exact same parking spot at the time of the next overpass, making scene change recognition difficult. When they rolled out their diagnostic cables, they made sure that they were covered by sand. They even replaced removed vegetation in order to conceal the dig.

Some of these precautions are visible today. For instance, it is very difficult to identify the old cable layout running from the Control Bunker to the drill-holes from available Google Earth Imagery, see my GE placemark of the site.

The week of the test

On 1 May 1998, a four truck convoy under the command of Colonel Umang Kapur left BARC for Mumbai Airport. The devices were then flown in AN-32 aircraft 890 kilometers to the North, to Jaisalmer Airport where they were again loaded into four trucks. The remaining 80 kilometers were travelled by road.

At Pokhran, the devices were taken directly to the preparation building (code named 'Prayer Hall') where scientists and technicians carried out final tests to ensure that the weapons were ready to detonate. Nine days later, on 10 May 1998, the first three devices were moved from Prayer Hall to their respective test shafts. All three shafts where L-shaped, and about 150 to 200 meters deep. The Shakti-III shaft was considerably shallower (since the weapon was of a smaller yield).

Cables had been laid out so that all three weapons would be detonated simultaneously. This had been common practice in the nuclear weapon States during the Cold War, so that the competition would not pick up valuable telemetric data from the test.

All work was carried out during the night. When the sun rose, and temperatures climbed over 30 and then 40 degrees centigrade, everything was in order. It must have been a hot, nervous and sweaty wait for the Indians on site. Abdul Kalam, the scientific advisor to the Indian defence minister must have smoked at least a pack before wind conditions became suitable for the shot.

At 14:45, the firing keys were given to the range safety officer. At that point, the temperature had reached 42 degrees centigrade. It must have been very hot in the control bunker, located about 2.75 kilometers from the three zero rooms. After final safety checks, and confirmation that the range was clear, the keys were transferred to one representative of BARC and one from the DRDO. Together they unlocked the countdown system. At that point, history became a matter of automation, and at 15:45 local time the three devices exploded, effectively opening a new chapter in India's long history.

I've uploaded an annotated GE placemark of the site here.

The Nuclear Weapons Archive has published a list of all principals involved in the test.

Project Leaders:

• Dr. Avil (Abdul) Pakir Jainulabdeen Kalam, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, Head of the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO); and
  
• Dr. Rajagopala Chidambaram, Chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Chairman of the Department of Atomic energy (DAE)
  

Development and Test Teams:

• Anil Kakodkar, Director of BARC
  
• Satinder Kumar Sikka, Lead for Thermonuclear Weapon Development
  
• M.S. Ramakumar, Director of Nuclear Fuel and Automation Manufacturing Group; Lead for nuclear component manufacture
  
• D.D. Sood, Director of Radiochemistry and Isotope Group; Lead for nuclear material acquisition
  
• S.K. Gupta, Solid State Physics and Spectroscopy Group; Device design and assessment
  
• G. Govindraj, Associate Director of Electronic and Instrumentation Group; Lead for field instrumentation
• K. Santhanam; lead for test site preparations
• Chairman of the Department of Atomic energy (DAE)

Finally left the clocks to the Swiss

Today, Paul Ingram and myself held a rather poorly attended seminar on what NPT State parties can do to promote nuclear disarmament. I say poorly attended, since we had about 10 participants. However, that’s not bad considering that the conference was not in session, and that the palace was virtually empty. We also had to compete with the United States for those few souls that were around. You can find my presentation here and Paul’s here.

In my presentation, I make a suggestion to dust off an old French initiative to set up a multinational satellite reconnaissance office (let’s call it an MSRO). In my mind, satellite imagery is now firmly placed in the public domain. Google Earth has completely transformed the way many of us view the planet (the stars, and soon the oceans). One could envision a system where States with space intelligence assets offers some of their older capabilities to this office. The difference between that imagery and that provided by Google Earth is that the former would be delivered in near real time.

Individual organizations such as the CTBTO, the IAEA or the OPCW would then have secure accounts, enabling them to access the data they subscribe to. This way one could even envision some modest savings since a single rather than several organization would handle the data collection, collation and distribution.

This way, States would also be able to control the data they supply. By control, I don’t mean turning the intelligence tap on and off. Rather, I suspect that States would want to mask their true capabilities by putting some sort of filter in place between the raw data feed and the product that the MSRO receives. The filter could, for instance, manipulate the resolution on supplied imagery.

Combining satellite imagery with scene change recognition software would enable these organizations to detect suspicious construction earlier than today.

Verifying nuclear disarmament

Yesterday, we had a productive meeting here in Geneva, and I'd like to thank those that showed up. The competition for attention was fierce, with Greenpeace hosting a meeting on the Middle East with no less than three Israelis on the panel. Despite that, we had some 40 participants in attendance. This is not bad, given that it also was lunch time.

Afterwards, it became very clear that many more states are interested in our work, and that they want to become involved. We had had a few feelers before Geneva, but did not expect, I have to admit, this kind of response. It is, I have to admit, kind of exciting to feel that the project is on the roll. The most important thing, of course, is to keep our internal schedules and deadlines.

I have uploaded my own presentation to the VCI homepage. It will appear in a more formatted form on the VERTIC website, when I get back home.

If you're in Geneva, don't miss the UK national presentation on verifying nuclear disarmament. The Foreign Office will attend and outline progress on their own project, which is run by Mark Fitzpatrick at IISS. In true transatlantic spirit, the US scheduled their own presentation on article VI to run simultaneously ... I hope it's not going to be too much of a scheduling conflict.