Mushrooming Spread of Nuclear Power

As tensions mount in Southern Europe, Albanian warplanes drop nuclear bombs on Naples. Tel Aviv is destroyed by a nuclear attack from an unidentified country; Egyptian atomic bombs devastate London and Washington; China, the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Britain are drawn into war. Soon mushroom clouds cover nearly the entire planet.

That chilling plot for the end of the world was sketched nearly two decades ago by Nevil Shute in his bestselling novel On the Beach. At the time, it seemed farfetched. Only three nations possessed atomic weapons. Now six nations have them, at least a couple of dozen other countries have the capability to develop them--and suddenly Shute's scenario seems frighteningly possible.

Even if the Soviet Union and the U.S. agree on new restrictions on their nuclear arms at the continuing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (which after four years have not yet achieved any reduction in atomic arsenals), nuclear technology and resources are now so plentiful that almost any country determined to do so can build atomic bombs.

It was just such a dread prospect that this month caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the minute hand of its "doomsday clock" three minutes closer to midnight (TIME, Sept. 2).

For a decade, membership in the club remained constant, with China in 1964 the last to join the U.S. (1945), the Soviet Union (1949), Britain (1952) and France (1960). After its atomic explosion last May, India is now the world's sixth nuclear power. Others will certainly follow. Experts note that ten countries already have the economic and scientific resources to develop the bomb before the end of the decade (though none has yet announced plans to do so): Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea and West Germany.

Naive Belief. Japan, the one country to have experienced a nuclear attack, has an understandable aversion to developing atomic weapons. If the Japanese or the Canadians, who sold India its reactor under an agreement prohibiting development of a bomb, wanted a nuclear capability, though, they could easily have it, as could the West Germans, who renounced all nuclear weapons in 1956 as a condition for joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Israel also could quickly become a nuclear power. Since the late 1950s it has had a large atomic reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert; the reactor has been turning out enough fissionable material over the past ten years to build at least one Hiroshima-size bomb annually. Because a bomb can be physically assembled in a matter of weeks if all materials are ready, Israel for all practical purposes could already have a nuclear arsenal of about 13 bombs.

Fourteen other nations are potential members of the club: Algeria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Libya, North Korea, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and Venezuela. Though they are not nearly as advanced as the first group, they could become atomic powers by the end of the century--and sooner if they decide that it serves their interests.

Until the Indian test, there was a general if naive belief that nations outside the club would be constrained from producing nuclear weapons by the widespread moral revulsion against such arsenals. India's explosion, however, has removed much of the taint of going nuclear. In a wave of empathetic machismo following the test, Buenos Aires' independent daily La Opinion declared: "India is more respectable now." New Delhi insists that its nuclear "devices" will be used for peaceful purposes only, such as petroleum and natural-gas exploration. Most experts snicker at the disclaimer. "A bang is a bang. The technology is the same," insists a Canadian official. Adds Professor George Quester, director of Cornell University's Program on Peace Studies and author of The Politics of Nuclear Proliferation: "No one has yet bought himself a big firecracker and been able to let it go at that." In fact, India may now even be tempted to expend the resources to develop a costly hydrogen bomb.

India's explosion has already triggered a disturbing reaction among its neighbors in the traditionally tense Persian Gulf-Arabian Sea area. Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar AH Bhutto warned that his country, which has fought four wars with India since 1947, "will never surrender to any nuclear blackmail by India. The people of Pakistan are ready to offer any sacrifices and even eat grass to ensure nuclear parity with India." Iran's Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who has been spending billions of dollars in recent years on conventional armaments, warned darkly: "If small nations arm themselves with nuclear weapons, Iran will seek possession of them sooner than you think."

If any of the nuclear powers decide to take the fateful step, there is little to stop them. Constructing an atomic bomb requires access to no secret information. Even in 1945, the basic principles of nuclear weapons were widely known. A booklet, declassified in 1961 and now available for $4 from the U.S. Department of Commerce, describes in detail--complete with diagrams--the technical problems the U.S. encountered constructing its first bomb. It is not surprising that four years ago a precocious 14-year-old sketched the workings of a nuclear explosive and included it as part of a bomb threat that terrified Orlando, Fla., for 36 hours. Nor is cost a deterrent. University of Virginia Professor Mason Willrich, a nuclear-arms expert, estimates that a weapons fabrication and assembly plant that can manufacture ten fission warheads annually costs about $8 million to build. Each 20-kiloton warhead would run less than $15 million, plus the cost of the fissionable material. This is within the reach of even the most impoverished nation willing to divert resources from social programs.

The major obstacle to nuclear weapon proliferation so far has been the limited availability of the fissionable materials needed for the chain reaction:

U-235 or Pu-239. The natural element uranium contains only .7% of the isotope U-235. It must be enriched to 90% for use in nuclear warheads, a vastly expensive and complex process. A typical plant using a gaseous diffusion method covers about 90 acres, uses about 400 million gallons of recirculating cooling water per day, requires 1,300 megawatts of continuous electrical power (enough to meet the needs of a city of about 600,000) and costs about $2 billion to build. Only the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China have such gargantuan processing plants; they thus have been able to exercise tight control over the distribution of enriched U-235. But a much smaller and more economical gas centrifuge method is being developed for enriching U-235. Once it is perfected, many more nations will be able to produce their own supplies of uranium in the quantities and concentrations needed for explosives.

More Tinder. Plutonium (Pu-239) is not found in nature, but will become increasingly abundant. It is the artificial byproduct of the fission that takes place within nuclear power generators. After complicated processing, it can be converted into a warhead, and that is what worries experts. As the soaring price of fossil fuels encourages an increasing number of nations to buy nuclear plants to generate electricity, substantial amounts of Pu-239 will become available. "There will simply be more and more tinder lying around," observes Francois Duchene, the director of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The reactor that the U.S. is planning to help Egypt build could produce enough Pu-239 tinder annually for about ten bombs. If Israel goes ahead with its ambitious plans for a Nuplex sea water desalination plant, the Pu-239 byproduct could be used for more than 50 bombs each year. Already there are 562 power-producing or research reactors in operation or under construction in 33 nations. By 1980, it is estimated, up to 1 million lbs. of Pu-239 will have been accumulated in the world's civilian nuclear power industry; a warhead with less than 22 lbs. could destroy a medium-sized city.

Such vast quantities of fissionable materials not only raise the specter of nuclear proliferation but also of deranged people or extremists making their own nuclear weapons. It no longer is absurd to imagine Palestinian terrorists or urban guerrillas stealing enough Pu-239, hiring scientists and manufacturing an easily transportable nuclear explosive. As Arms Expert Dr. Theodore B. Taylor points out, one terrorist group with one bomb could blackmail a metropolis. The University of Virginia's Willrich fears that some day a black market in fissionable materials could develop, with syndicates of organized criminals stealing from private reactors and selling to individuals or governments.

Only one major attempt has ever been made to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. It was the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, completed in 1968 and signed by 84 nations. The treaty required the members of the nuclear club to neither give their weapons away nor assist any other nation in producing them. The non-nuclear nations that signed promised not to accept nuclear arms or manufacture them. However, France, China and India never signed the treaty, and at least a dozen of the potential nuclear powers have either not signed or not ratified it, including Israel, Egypt, Japan and Argentina. Even the countries that have ratified the treaty could change their minds. A new government or policy could lead to a nation's abrupt withdrawal from the N.P.T. The U.S. and the Soviet Union had hoped that N.P.T. would be the cork that effectively sealed the nuclear genie in the bottle. Instead, concludes Duchene, "N.P.T. is like a cork on a rising tide."

No Solution. Moreover, no controls are foolproof. "With even the best safeguards, you can never keep track of all the plutonium," cautions George W. Rathjens, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Some of it could be diverted clandestinely to make weapons." Rathjens, who has extensive experience dealing with nuclear affairs and arms control matters, reasons that the only real safeguard would be "a single international monopoly controlling all aspects of the nuclear energy industry." That is unlikely, he concludes, because "governments today are not prepared to pay that price for control. It would require a substantial surrender of sovereignty by all nations."

Most experts on nuclear politics share Rathjens' pessimism.

Long gone is the optimism expressed by President Harry Truman in the autumn of 1945, only months after the U.S. detonated the world's first nuclear explosion. Truman noted then that control of the bomb was "the No. 1 problem of the world at the present." He added that he was confident that "we would in time come to some intelligent solution." More than a quarter-century later, the problem remains--and there is no solution in sight. The doomsday clock ticks on.

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