Kemp: Statement on the Iran Nuclear Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)

The U.S. drafted Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between the EU/E3+3 negotiators and Iran is a remarkable achievement. It has excellent specificity on technical constraints, timelines, and sequencing. The terms spell out a fair and equitable deal for all parties. JCPOA will allow Iran's peaceful nuclear program to grow at a natural pace, is effectively verifiable, and provides a solid fifteen year window during which the United States and other members of the P5+1 can build stronger relationships with Iran to reduce Iran's incentives for nuclear weapons. The negotiators are to be congratulated!

There are, however, important outstanding elements that must be clarified in the coming months. The text of the JCPOA says that no uranium enrichment will occur at Fordow, and that approximately two-thirds of the current 2976 centrifuges installed there will be removed. This leaves about 1000 centrifuges at Fordow, with some fraction enriching elements other than uranium. Although the Fordow capability is notionally a non-uranium capability, unless specifically designed to be incompatible, those centrifuges could be rapidly repurposed for enriching uranium under a breakout scenario. If those centrifuges are only first generation IR-1 centrifuges, they will not significantly affect the breakout calculation. U.S. officials have confirmed that this is their understanding, however, the text of the terms released leaves some ambiguity.

Other oustanding questions do not enter the breakout calculation, but are nonetheless important and will take considerable effort. For example, the extent of research allowed could be more carefully sepecified: will research on laser enrichment or other isotope separation and isotope breeding techniques be allowed at sites other than Fordow? Also, the mechanism by which Iran will maintain its LEU inventory below 300kg UF₆ needs to be specified. The parameters for the redesign of the Arak reactor are already well in hand, but arrangements for exporting spent fuel will be difficult to negotiate. Principles for the long-term enrichment plan beyond 15 years needs to be resolved.

Many of these outanding areas are also issues for other emerging nuclear-power countries. The excellent work of the negotiating teams lays the ground not only for a peaceful resolution of the Iran nuclear issue, but can also help address the connection between nuclear power and nuclear proliferation more generally. If it takes up the charge, Iran can become a leader in securing a world free of nuclear weapons, helping to find ways for others to share in the fruits of nuclear energy.

R. Scott Kemp
Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

LNSP's Kemp Speaks on the Iran Nuclear Deadline

Mareena Robinson | Nuclear Science and Engineering

On Nov. 19, the MIT chapters of Global Zero and Radius hosted a roundtable discussion on the status of negotiations between Iran and the E3+3 the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—about Iran’s nuclear program. The discussion covered the history of the diplomatic process, the forces influencing current negotiations, and the likelihood and implications of a successful agreement.

Prof. R. Scott Kemp, former Science Advisor at the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control.

R. Scott Kemp, an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) at MIT and director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy (LNSP), led the discussion. Before joining the faculty, Kemp served as science advisor in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control, where Iran was his primary responsibility. He has continued to participate in Track II talks—those involving non-state individuals and groups—since leaving government service.

Kemp brought a mix of technical and political insights to the discussion, covering many intricacies of the diplomatic constraints. The event opened with Kemp setting the stage for the current negotiations, beginning with the inauguration of President Hassan Rouhani and the appointment of Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif as Iran's chief negotiator. Kemp asserted that this change in leadership marked a political shift that opened up the possibility of engagement that was not possible with the previous Iranian administration. On November 24, 2013, the new leadership agreed to a Joint Plan of Action that froze escalatory actions on both sides. After an extension in July of this year, the one-year anniversary and putative deadline for an agreement is now just days away.

Kemp said it was very unlikely that a final agreement would be reached by the November 24, 2014 deadline. "I'm sorry to say, but there is virtually no chance that a final deal will happen by Monday,” Kemp said, “but that's not as bad as it sounds." It is still possible, he added, that negotiators might achieve agreement on a framework for the broad outlines of a deal. Kemp said the element of brinkmanship pushes important decisions to the deadline. He reported that the Nov. 9–10 meeting between Foreign Minister Zarif, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and EU envoy Catherine Aston was unproductive beyond reaffirming that all sides continue to believe that a deal is in the best interest of all parties and that an extension of some sort seemed likely.

Kemp identified three primary issues that remain unresolved: the size of Iranian stockpiles of low-enriched uranium, the duration of the period for which Iran would accept restraints and special inspection provisions, and the number of centrifuges Iran would operate during that period. Based on his expertise in enrichment technology, Kemp explained the tradeoffs between these parameters. The mission of the E3+3 negotiators is to lengthen Iran's nuclear "breakout" time to something like 12 months by reducing the number of centrifuges in operation and the stockpile of enriched uranium in Iran's possession. Iran, by contrast, argues that it needs to retain a significant capability because of their future civil energy plans and face-saving considerations. Based on personal conversations with Foreign Minister Zarif, however, Kemp articulated reasons why believed these claims were not the entire story. Kemp had proposed to Zarif several ways Iran could retain its centrifuges by using them for non-provocative purposes, such as enriching molybdenum for medical purposes. Zarif appeared uninterested in non-uranium alternatives, suggesting that Iran saw its nuclear program as having a military-strategic value.

Aron Bernstein, a professor in the MIT Physics Department and faculty advisor for MIT’s Global Zero, echoed Kemp's view, arguing that Iran’s enrichment capabilities serve as a "virtual nuclear weapon," giving the Iranian leadership the option to arm themselves in the future. In addition to this, Kemp explained that nuclear capabilities, whether for civilian or military purposes, are an intense source of pride for the Iranian public, making it difficult for the leadership to relinquish these capabilities while preserving their dignity.

Many other issues were discussed during the 90-minute roundtable, including the response of Saudi Arabia to a successful deal between Iran and the West, and how a final agreement would impact the strategic calculus for Israel. While nobody in the room was confident in predictions about the future, participants did agree that a successful deal would be a productive step towards lowering the tension between Tehran and the West. Kemp articulated a large agenda of foreign-policy items for which a warming of relations with Iran would be useful, including the problems of ISIS and Middle East stability.

Mareena Robinson-Snowden, the president of the MIT chapter of Global Zero and a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the NSE department, described the event as "an opportunity to explore the various issues influencing the success of this deal and provide people with a forum to discuss the meaning and impact of this event at the ground level. The entire world is awaiting the outcome of these negotiations, and will be actively listening to the decisions announced on the morning of November 25th."

LNSP hosts the Honorable Rose Gottemoeller

John Hanson | Nuclear Science and Engineering

The Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy welcomed the Honorable Rose Gottemoeller, U.S. under secretary of state for arms control and international security, for a roundtable lunch discussion with students and faculty last Friday. The discussion focused on the application of new technologies in arms control, and the role that NSE can play.

The Honorable Rose Gottemoeller, under secretary of state for arms control and international security.

Photo: David Carpenter

Gottemoeller was the chief negotiator for the most recent U.S.-Russian arms-reduction agreement called “New Start,” which reduced deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 per side. One important challenge limiting further reductions in future agreements is the lack of a verification technology able to protect secret warhead information. NSE professors Scott Kemp and Areg Danagoulian lead a research project to develop those tools. When asked to what extent the lack of a verification approach was holding back further diplomatic efforts, Gottemoeller said that while it is not the immediate problem, as the United States first needs a “willing dance partner” in Russia, verification was the next problem on the list. She expressed concern that, as in the past, the technology might not be ready when the political opportunity suddenly arose, but she added that she “gets the feeling that we could be ready” after talking with researchers at NSE.

Gottemoeller also spoke on how personal technology could improve inspection regimes, calling this the future of arms control. First, inspectors need better tools that go beyond current limitations to pen, paper, and a ruler. Second, she hopes that ubiquitous sensing on mobile platforms could provide unprecedented sensor grids or opportunistic detection of nuclear material. Finally, she added that real-time process monitoring for nuclear materials, rather than simple material accounting, will become ever more important. These ideas received considerable discussion, as well as the idea of using open-source information with data fusion to infer potential treaty violations. Gottemoeller agreed with a view that open-source data is not given sufficient attention by policymakers.

The under secretary also discussed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the United States signed in 1996 but which has not been ratified by Congress. She argued that the treaty offers the United States a clear national security benefit by preventing other countries from developing more advanced weapons while locking in the U.S. advantage in this area, and that past concerns about undetectable cheating have been overcome by technology. Gottemoeller discussed her strategy for building support for the treaty’s ratification starting with the public. By speaking on the issue at universities, and focusing on regions with populations most affected by nuclear weapon testing, she hopes to build grassroots support on what should be a strong bipartisan issue. Gottemoeller, who said she has been “accused of being the great optimist,” found a similarly optimistic group at the roundtable discussion Friday, and the resulting discussions gave reason to believe that the optimism is well founded.

The lunch discussion was followed by a public talk on the “Future Prospects for U.S.-Russia Arms Control,” jointly organized by Prof. R. Scott Kemp of NSE and Subrata Ghoshroy of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

Video of Rose Gottmoeller's public lecture

Areg Danagoulian Joins LNSP

Peter Dunn | Nuclear Science and Engineering

From early in its development, the nuclear community has emphasized the need for a “culture of safety.” Today, with an increasing range of potential nuclear threats, there is growing emphasis on a “culture of security”—and MIT NSE has augmented its presence in this area by appointing Assistant Professor Areg Danagoulian to contribute to its security-related technology research.

Danagoulian will collaborate with Assistant Professor Scott Kemp, a specialist in nuclear technology policy, and other NSE and Physics faculty and scientists in the newly formed Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy, which studies technology-policy interactions in nonproliferation, arms control, materials security, and verification. He will also co-teach class 22.09, Principles of Nuclear Radiation Measurement and Protection and 22.071, Electronics, Signals, and Measurement.

“The great thing about this department is that you have technologists like me working in close multidisciplinary collaborations with policy researchers and information theorists,” says Danagoulian, who earned an SB in Physics from MIT and a PhD in Experimental Nuclear Physics from the University of Illinois. “That’s ultimately what’s needed to solve these problems—policy research driving technological development, and vice versa, technological progress that shapes policy.”

Danagoulian worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory before a five-year stint as senior scientist at Passport Systems Inc., a Billerica, Mass., developer of technologies for detecting nuclear weapons and materials hidden inside shielded cargoes.

“It’s a difficult but important task,” he notes. “If an organization has the intellectual capacity to obtain and smuggle a weapon, they’ll know how to shield it.” That’s the driver behind one of Danagoulian’s main research thrusts—a program funded by the Department of Homeland Security that will develop shield-penetrating particle beams for active scanning of freight containers, trucks, and other cargo carriers.

When a beam of “interrogating particles” is sent into the container, “it excites the hidden materials, and triggers processes in fissionable material,” explains Danagoulian. “That generates emissions unique to those materials—fast neutrons, and characteristic gamma rays for isotopes of uranium or plutonium.”

Existing beam technologies are relatively inexpensive, but inefficient because they emit at a wide range of energy levels, only a fraction of which are useful. Danagoulian’s post-doc and student researchers will seek a monochromatic beam source that emits at a fixed energy level. This would make the process faster and more effective, and slash the radiation dose—an important consideration for many reasons, including risk to electronic devices, and to stowaways who sometimes secret themselves in cargo containers.

Related work will explore tunable beam sources that can change the energy of interrogating beams to detect specific isotopes and materials, and new combinations of electronics and light-detecting materials for better detection devices.

Danagoulian’s other major line of research (funded by the Department of Energy and also involving Senior Research Scientist Richard Lanza) will address another challenging topic—compliance with international disarmament treaties that require verifiable destruction of nuclear weapons.

“Inspectors would be limited to eyeballing weapons earmarked for elimination,” Danagoulian says. “They can’t look inside, or gather spectral or nuclear data, because the other side doesn’t want them to extract highly secret information, but they need some way of ascertaining that the weapons aren’t fakes.”

The approach being pursued, called ‘zero knowledge detection’, will develop methods of ascertaining authenticity through comparison to a known weapon—creating, in effect, a comparator that can tell whether two devices are identical without revealing anything about them, perhaps through measurement of nuclear resonance fluorescence. There will be heavy student involvement in this research, with participants learning to utilize simulation, build proof-of-concept systems, and conduct data analysis en route to a working system.

Ultimately, notes Danagoulian, verifiable destruction could not only help larger countries, but also provide regional nuclear powers, like India and Pakistan, with incentives to reduce or even eliminate their arsenals.

More broadly, he says, nuclear security is a matter of risk reduction. “We can never bring the risk to zero, but can we reduce it by a factor of 10, or 100? I find it fascinating, and intellectually stimulating—and I really wanted to work on something meaningful, that would improve society and make the world safer for my children.”

LNSP's Kemp on Rethinking Nuclear Nonproliferation

In a major new article published this week in International Security, MIT Professor R. Scott Kemp argues the barriers to nuclear weapons are no longer technological.

Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office

What is the best way to prevent countries from acquiring nuclear weapons? The vast majority of nonproliferation efforts attempt to control access to sensitive technologies. However, a new study by Scott Kemp, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, suggests that this approach might not be working. In an article published tomorrow in the journal International Security, Kemp examines the history of the most common proliferation technology—the gas centrifuge, used to extract a weapon-suitable isotope of uranium from a larger supply of that element—and finds that existing nonproliferation policies would not have stopped historical instances of its development. Kemp, a former science advisor for nonproliferation in the U.S. State Department, argues that governments need to reinvent how they look at nuclear proliferation in the modern age, turning their attention to the security threats and status symbols that motivate states to seek nuclear weapons in the first place. He talked with MIT News recently.

Iran's former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inspects a carbon-fiber centrifuge rotor made possible by increasing globalization of previously sophisticated technologies. Photo: president.ir

Q. Why should nuclear nonproliferation efforts no longer focus on the technological hurdles to weapons production?

A. The study looks primarily at the gas centrifuge, which has become the proliferation technology of choice. We studied the history of 21 centrifuge programs; interviewed program technical directors from nearly a dozen nations, including Pakistan and Iran; and studied the technology requirements behind the centrifuge itself. We concluded that while technology was once a barrier, that barrier slowly disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, and today there is really no way to stop countries from producing centrifuges suitable for making nuclear weapons.

This is a very different conclusion than the premise upon which the United States built its nonproliferation policies back in the 1950s. The engineering and manufacturing tools needed for proliferation were state of the art back then, but modern technology has moved well beyond those requirements, and what was once difficult is now surprisingly easy.

There is still a hard part, however: States must know how to run a research and development program. History shows one or two instances—namely Libya, and possibly Iraq—where the state seems to have been limited by its internal political, bureaucratic, and cultural institutions. These will remain important barriers for a small subset of future proliferators, and in this respect technology barriers can help exacerbate those internal limitations.

Q. What kind of approach to nonproliferation do you recommend?

A. My conclusion is that we need to get past the idea that we can control the destiny of nations by regulating access to technology. International security must ultimately resort to the difficult business of politics. To the extent that states seek nuclear weapons because of security threats, we will have to work to mitigate those threats.

Then there are also examples in history where states were motivated to acquire nuclear weapons because of their symbolism and status. This situation is more difficult. We will have to consider the possibility of strengthening normative barriers to the acquisition of nuclear weapons: in other words, establishing social factors that increase the chances a leader will be vilified, instead of worshipped, for seeking nuclear weapons.

Fortunately, there is useful precedence for normative barriers in the areas of biological and chemical weapons. While a very small number of dictators have built chemical weapons in the past, these states were universally shunned by the international community and ultimately suffered regime collapse, leaving few states interested in attempting a repeat. It should be possible to build a similar normative barrier for nuclear weapons as well, although it will take time and a serious look at the utility of our own nuclear arsenal.

Q. Your article lists more than a dozen countries that developed centrifuge technology independently. Many of them, such as Italy and Sweden, never took the further step of building nuclear weapons. Why have some countries stopped short of building actual weapons?

A. In fact, most countries have stopped short. They seem to be satisfied having only the capability to build nuclear weapons, just in case they need them at a future time. However, even though these states are weapon-capable, this situation is highly preferable to one in which states possess nuclear arsenals under active military control.

The self-restraint of states is perhaps best explained by the character of modern international relations. Many countries enjoy strong economic and security ties with nonproliferation advocates, like the United States. Faced with the decision of acquiring a nuclear weapon, especially absent of any real security threat, versus enjoying strong economic and political ties with the international community, most states likely judge the latter to be more attractive.

Norms play a role, too. The international community universally condemned nuclear weapons at the end of World War II. Most people don't remember this, but the first United Nations General Assembly Resolution called for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. Nearly all nations have further codified their willingness to forgo or abolish weapons by signing the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, and many continue to believe that forgoing nuclear weapons is an important element of responsible global citizenship.

The difficult cases are those states that have limited relationships with the international community, like North Korea; the pariah states that feel they have made enemies of the superpowers, like Iran; and states for which their existence is at stake. The U.S. facilitation of the Arab Spring rebellions, and the situation in the Ukraine, are examples of extremely worrisome events that could encourage states to rethink the value of nuclear weapons. If we want to avoid a highly proliferated world—one where devastating nuclear war might break out and possibly result in a global environmental catastrophe for us all—then in my view the United States will have to be more sensitive to these political dynamics. Half-century-old technology controls cannot possibly hold up forever.