Hey folks,
I want to address several topics that people have raised, but I'll handle what BBo brought up here in this post, which also relates to the proliferation topic raised by moosey.
I'll handle the technical details that Zog raised about Silex separately, and I also owe Moosey a response about the plutonium topic he brought up.
I came across this forum probably a couple of years ago because posts made on it come up enough in google searches about Silex, and you guys have a better sense of reading the tea leaves about Silex's financials, corporate statements, etc... than in the media. That makes sense because you're investors and have an incentive to be as informed as possible about the company's prospects.
I'm an independent researcher associated with academic institutions and think tanks in the United States, and I have a lot of contacts around the world among people who work on nuclear issues. I'm really just a few years into my career in the US foreign policy/national security world after having earned a PhD in physics a few years ago.
The perspective that I come at this from is almost certainly much broader than the folks on this forum, but I don't have a strong opinion about whether Silex is commercialized or not. I also have no influence with anybody who has a say in that, which as far I can tell is now up to Silex Systems unless the Australian government wanted to step in and stop it. A well informed US president could probably convince the Australian government to stop it, but as I've indicated previously, I'm not convinced that that would do much good even though I am sympathetic with the view that the world might be a bit safer. In any case, this is likely only temporary. Yet there may be benefits from Silex going ahead, which I'll get to. I don't have any insight into the US Department of Energy's thinking about Silex or Paducah. All I can say for sure is that the DOE is a massively mismanaged agency that in my view should be focused on cleaning up the nuclear legacy of the Cold War, but political and economic constraints (plus poor leadership) often push it to just makes things worse. DOE employees have told me that any internal discussions about Silex are mostly forbidden due to the sensitivity of the issue and, I assume, because people recognize the risks of the technology.
Regarding proliferation, on one level many folks on this forum are right about Silex and proliferation risk. The technology is out there. If people want to do it, they can. I believe anyone who is patient enough to learn and determined enough may be able to successfully build a nuclear weapon with this technology. At least I don't see a basis that should preclude one from making this judgement. From your perspective I would imagine, it would seem like this judgement makes the prospect of Silex commercialization irrelevant from a proliferation standpoint. May be true, may not be true. I don't know. No research is likely to help answer the question.
But this is where it gets complicated and enters realms that not even the top intellects that the United States used to have (but no longer has) in American foreign policy have ever seriously grappled with (the possible exception is George Kennan, but that was more about nuclear weapons in general). Maybe Silex is no different than centrifuge technology from a proliferation standpoint. After all, on what basis would you conclude there is some barrier that complicates the centrifuge route that is absent from the Silex route? Centrifuges have the same detection challenges that Silex has in terms of area footprint and energy use. Scientific analysis may lead you to conclude that there is no difference, and that Silex therefore presents no greater risk. Reaching a different conclusion would probably require assigning some weight to a detail that most scientists (particularly physicists) would just wave away and conclude that proliferation is a problem to be managed by convincing countries that they don't need to possess nuclear weapons. In short, the technology probably doesn't matter. May be true, may not be true.
But at this level of generality it may not be that useful, and in any case, US attitudes in national security circles have no where near adjusted to the notion that convincing countries that they don't need nuclear weapons is where the strategic thinking needs to head. In fact, the United States has still not really understood very well what the collapse of the Soviet empire meant for it in national security terms. The psychology shaped by the Cold War and the notion that the collapse of the Soviet economy was a win for the United States probably prevented the United States from accurately understanding where it found itself in history after 9/11. And this coupled with a failure to understand how US military technology was going to be neutralized against the most pressing threats is probably what led the US to invade Iraq in 2003. American domestic politics is still largely keyed to a culture shaped by the Cold War so many years after the threat has receded, but the United States simply doesn't have the political or intellectual leadership it needs to move beyond it. American identity is too tightly tied to a notion that prevents us from even thinking clearly about our problems. This is obviously bad for the world, not just Americans. I promise I'll get to how this could relate to Silex.
I've studied Silex enough to conclude that the technology appears remarkable at separating uranium isotopes. It's the accessibility of the laser technology and how it's changing that worries me. Laser enrichment has long been acknowledged among top-flight physicists as a possible game-changer in proliferation.
There is a very serious chance that a lot of people just have no clue about centrifuges and would not know where to go to even meet someone with the knowledge. Even if they looked at stuff on the internet and studied it, it would require some serious determination to learn how they work, much less how to manufacture them and then assemble them. But lasers? It's one of the most rapidly developing areas of technology, and the applications for them grow everyday. Regardless of whether nuclear power expands or Silex is commercialized, it not a stretch to imagine that this could be the most preferred route to nuclear weapons acquisition in the future. As I've indicated, it's just condensation repression and you need a laser with the right capabilities. The laser is the toughest part it appears, but this development is being driven by improving cancer treatments, telecommunications technologies, etc... I mean, I know it would simply be ridiculous to believe that this is going to be stopped.
I guess my main concern is I don't want to see gasoline thrown on the fire when the US attitude may be limited to just deciding to drop some bombs on countries to blow up problematic laser programs. It's an issue of how the thinking to manage the proliferation problem has not caught up to the growing vulnerability. Silex commercialization is a danger primarily because of the potential to accelerate things before the US can adjust its broader attitude. Commercialization is a worldwide signal that a successful company is using lasers to enrich uranium, and they therefore imagine it's better economically to do that than to use centrifuges. This could drive more research programs to do the same thing because one company will not be left alone to reap the benefits, and it could establish black markets where technology, knowledge, and skills are transferred into nuclear weapons programs. And the detection challenges of Silex plants could exacerbate this. Again, may be true or may not be true. But the risk should be acknowledged.
One problem is that US foreign policy pretty much only responds to stories that pop up in the newspaper and then the goal becomes getting them out of the newspaper; there is no strategy about what kind of a world the US wants (here I mean in a level of detail about what is practically possible, not just in campaign slogans) no matter what conspiracy theories other people want to invent. This has been a problem since the end of the Cold War, when the United States believed it was infinitely more powerful than any other country once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we both were and very much were not. As I said, it was not recognized that US military power was not applicable against many other kinds of emerging threats. We still have not adjusted. We also react to empirical judgements about what Iran or North Korea are up to instead of understanding that the technical basis regarding nuclear weapons construction (and how its changing) indicates a vulnerability that cannot be managed by the tools we have relied upon.
What I am trying to show is that there is a massive problem within the American elite. Yet by and large, this is not what the American elite thinks. They think the problem is average Americans. I also define the American elite as political and government elites, most of the journalists with major US media companies, university professors, Wall Street and other corporations, top nongovernmental organizations, lawyers, etc... In other words, the places where educated Americans from elite colleges make their living.
Average Americans today are not perfect and never will be, but if you compare them to what Abraham Lincoln had to deal with, today's Americans are far ahead of their ancestors. They are more highly educated, less racist, and more tolerant than ever before. Religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities are more free to live their own lives more openly with less fear than ever before. Despite whatever Trump is doing or has said, this is still true. Average Americans are also more interested in viewpoints of other countries and cultures than in any past generation. Again, they are not perfect. They are not walking encyclopedias of knowledge about foreign leaders or European philosophy. And if world power was determined by fifth grade math scores, the United States would probably rank just ahead of the African country of Chad.
By contrast, however, the United States has never in its entire history had an elite less prepared to carry out its duty. And it's pretty difficult to push back against Trump when your elites suck. Many of the problems are in elite American education institutions, which offer shoddy, cheap, feel-good illusions that are packaged as flattering lies. It is simply impossible to have a capable elite if it is not informed about science and history; yet that is where we are. The American elite is a flabby minded, strategically inept, and morally confused parody of itself. And this barely even scratches the surface.
Average Americans know this, and I believe it's probably the primary reason Trump won the election. He was never going to be an answer to our problems, but the instinct that powered this revolt is a sign of social health. Average Americans have simply lost faith in the experts, hate politicians, and can't stand people who only peddle inauthentic versions of the conventional wisdom. The fact that so many Americans were willing to say so out loud is a good sign, not a bad sign.
Now, Trump will probably go down as the worst president in US history, and may start a nuclear war before he's done. Or, maybe he's removed from office or is beaten in 2020. The way the economy is growing lately, however, I'd say there's an outside shot of him ending up on Mount Rushmore. None of this is really the point, even though this guy seems pretty crazy. The point is that nothing will change unless the American elite gets better. I don't believe Barack Obama was a very good president, but I would still probably choose him over anyone else in American public life. However, if the United States can't get better presidents than Barack Obama, the United States probably won't make it. It's just that simple. I still have no idea what he really truly cared about, and there was probably no chance that he could have lead the country effectively. So, he's probably the best we can manage, but if we can't do better we're doomed? Yeah, that's pretty much where I come down.
On Trump, there are still not enough basic questions being asked in elite circles about why 60 million people voted for him, and what counts for analysis about this question typically settles on the notion that ignorance, racism, or hate fueled his rise, or that the Russians must have done something.
This is what I'm talking about. The American elite simply does not understand the United States very well, and neither Democrats or Republicans really understand how to govern the United States. This has been true for many years.
But this ignorance is in no area more evident to me than with regards to nuclear proliferation. This is obviously a monster of a topic, with a very long and complicated history, and it should certainly be considered amazing that only nine countries have nuclear weapons when many more were expected to by this point. The thoughts offered about why this is true are interesting, but at the end of the day nobody really knows. What scientists have concluded about certain cases (Libya, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran) is that intelligence agencies were only watching small groups that they knew about, and when countries did not have the confidence to build weapons indigenously, they eventually went to one of the groups outside their country being monitored, which then tipped off national intelligence agencies to the fact that people were up to no good. It may be that the lack of confidence in themselves plus watching the AQ Khan network and offshoots of it may explain why more were not successful in obtaining nuclear weapons. Of course Pakistan eventually got weapons (the US decided their help in Afghanistan in the 1980s was more important than trying to stop them), and Saddam Hussein was well on his way along the centrifuge route with help from German engineers when the US invaded Iraq during the Gulf War in 1990.
On both counts, suppliers being well known and limited as well as states lacking indigenous technical sophistication, this is no longer true. This is also true with centrifuges, but Silex has the potential to blow this wide open.
Now, this was always going to happen eventually, with it just being a matter of time but no one knowing when. Laser enrichment, however, need not drive future nuclear weapons acquisition. This is a demand issue primarily, but many countries may not internalize it that way from a technical standpoint if they either have not thought about it that much or believe that they are not capable of acquiring nuclear weapons. This means that the conclusions of physicists and countries without much technical confidence may differ. The risk is that the judgement of more countries begins to align with that of the best physicists and that security circumstances then drive nuclear ambitions. And it's my view that the US is largely clueless about this, or just simply cannot accept the implications.
If you doubt US shortcomings in analyzing this problem, just look at what the US has done since George W Bush was elected president.
It subjected the rest of the world to a global war on terrorism after 9/11, and US troops ended up torturing Iraqi citizens after beginning a war on false pretenses. The Iraq war was supposed to stop Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, and because he didn't get them, ended up being dragged out of a hole by US troops. Iran also started a nuclear weapons program in response to George W Bush labeling them part of the "axis of evil." They then wanted to negotiate with the US back in 2004 when they only had 100 centrifuges, but the US said no. The recent Iran deal in 2015 talked them down from 19,000 centrifuges, but this was only after Iran mastered enrichment technology, which raises a whole host of doubts about how much protection the Iran nuclear deal provides. Following the US debate about the Iran nuclear deal is maddening. I don't think anyone is honestly grappling with what should follow this deal, but it also is not clear if the current deal is very good. Again, the crucial question is what Iran believes it needs to do on the question of nuclear weapons.
Moving on the North Korea, in response to confronting North Korea about clandestine uranium enrichment in 2001, the North Koreans abandoned the Agreed Framework and began reprocessing spent fuel rods to separate plutonium. In response, the US pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty with only the suggestion that the world had changed. This had serious adverse consequences in US-Russian relations that we are still living with, and now after years of one US president after another claiming that what North Korea was doing was unacceptable, they may have about 60 nuclear weapons and ICBM city-strike capability. This is a bit of a red herring since they could probably deliver a nuclear weapon from a small boat outside of Los Angeles. After Libya abandoned it's WMD programs, the US along with NATO in 2011 embarked on what was probably the most prolonged assassination attempt in human history to remove Gadaffi from power. The lesson here is that Saddam Hussein and Gadaffi would probably both still be alive if they had first acquired nuclear weapons.
Barack Obama came into power suggesting that the world get rid of nuclear weapons, but with respect to Russia, the US only added more conventional counterforce capabilities and missile defense to the point where Russia will not discuss any more one-for-one nuclear reductions unless the US puts its other nonnuclear capabilities on the table. The US shows no signs of considering Russia's concerns here, and has moved a long way away from Robert McNamara's influential view in the 1960s that is was not in US interests for Russia to believe it's nuclear deterrent is threatened. I don't think Russia's deterrent is threatened, but they are pretty paranoid about what the US is up to. They are also currently in violation of the INF treaty, and the US is trying to figure out how to respond. This has the chance of really dividing NATO over the coming years.
The US is also scheduled to modernize every part of its nuclear triad with money it does not have when it can't even remotely educate it's children well. Nuclear modernizations are already proceeding in other countries, but the US should really know better that acquiring new capabilities on its weapons is not smart and that a more stable nuclear posture is one that is technologically boring. It's not one that signals to the world that its national security depends upon replacing every single warhead and delivery system it has. The point is this is not the behavior of a serious country that is concerned with its role in the world in trying to stop nuclear proliferation. In other words, the strategy is not well aligned with the vulnerabilities. Stopping nuclear proliferation within the right geopolitical framework is another question, which is very complicated. The US mostly just tries to do some things, and then when they don't work out, feels bad for a while, and then moves on. It doesn't make connections very well with what it's done.
This has to change, and if Silex is commercialized and takes off, the US has a few choices: ignore it, conclude that it has to be more aggressive earlier at using other means of pressure to prevent countries from acquiring a latent nuclear weapons capability ( a judgement that does not only apply to Silex), or it can change it's attitude based upon a technically valid judgement about what it cannot control and understand what tools are possible to help make the world a safer place.
Right now, the US is confused about what Silex even represents. There's no play in the playbook for it. You could respond by saying, "But centrifuges are a problem, too." Right, but this could be very different from an accessibility standpoint. Lasers really should be considered different than centrifuges. Silex lasers probably are complicated enough now, but more people know about it than centrifuges, and the technology won't stay there. In short, Silex may lower the threshold for how determined you have to be to acquire nuclear weapons.
What the United States needs, and a successfully commercialized Silex plant could provide the impetus for, is thinking about nuclear proliferation and the national interest. This is something that every former respected US secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor says, but somehow we seem to never get around to it. Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have both stated that nuclear proliferation should be rethought, that better arrangements are necessary, and that the US must find a way to get rid of its nuclear weapons.
Up until now, the US only springs into action when another country's demonstrated capability really is deemed dangerous enough that its threatens US national security interests (like Iran and North Korea). Without this empirical judgement, the US mostly doesn't care. It's all focused within other US agencies on monitoring, export controls , etc... Good things to do, but will prove ineffective. People at intelligence agencies run around looking at satellites trying to detect large buildings housing nuclear weapons programs, but given that both centrifuges and Silex could occupy fairly small spaces, assigning the weights on the area footprint is probably wrong.
US strategy and thinking are not aligned with the vulnerabilities (it's mostly just getting stories out of the newspaper), and the defense establishment is completely untethered from anything resembling reality. When you don't have a strategy, the military industrial complex can scare Congress into giving it money for just about whatever it wants.
I apologize for the length of this post, and for a bit of an outside-the-box perspective on what ails the United States, but I hope it provides a context for where I'm coming from. Silex could force the United States to accept that the way it's been doing things has to change. It's not the only reason why the US should think differently, but that's how the world works. You need a reason to start somewhere.
I promise to answer questions and comments that Zog and Moosey have raised in another post.
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