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NPR 14.1: the US Highly Enriched Uranium Declaration

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NPR 14.1: the US Highly Enriched Uranium Declaration REPORT THE U.S. HIGHLY ENRICHED URANIUM DECLARATION: TRANSPARENCY DEFERRED BUT NOT DENIED Steven Aftergood and Frank N. von Hippel In February 2006, the Department of Energy (DOE) released its historical account of U.S. production and disposition of highly enriched uranium (HEU) through 1996. The report was unclassified and had been completed in 2001, but it required five years of petitions and appeals under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) before the Bush administration was forced to release it. According to the report, in 1996 the United States had a stockpile of 741 metric tons (MT) of HEU with an average enrichment of 84 percent. Of that stockpile, 178 MT of HEU with an average enrichment of 62 percent had been declared excess for military purposes. In 2005 and 2006, an additional 70 MT was declared excess and 138 MT was put into a reserve for future use as naval reactor fuel. An estimated 5 MT of HEU was lost due to ‘‘normal operating losses,’’ and there was a residual discrepancy of about 3 MT between the number obtained by subtracting cumulative disposition from cumulative production and the actual 1996 stockpile. This article discusses the value of this information and provides insights about the feasibility of declaring additional U.S. weapons HEU excess and the ultimate limits of nuclear disarmament verification. KEYWORDS: Highly enriched uranium; secrecy; Department of Energy; Freedom of Information Act In February 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) finally released its report, Highly Enriched Uranium [HEU]: Striking a Balance*A Historical Report on the United States Highly Enriched Uranium Production, Acquisition, and Utilization Activities from 1945 through September 30, 1996 (henceforth, the HEU Report). This report is interesting both in its own right and also as a case study in the gyrations of the secrecy culture in the U.S. government. In this article, we discuss first the decade-long debate over government secrecy that preceded the DOE’s decision to release it, then what can be learned from this 164-page landmark document, and finally, the value of nuclear transparency and the report’s relevance to some of the central questions of nuclear arms control and disarmament. Background The HEU Report emerged from the ‘‘Openness Initiative’’ that was launched by Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O’Leary in December 1993. The Openness Initiative was a response to the Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2007 ISSN 1073-6700 print/ISSN 1746-1766 online/07/010149-13 – 2007 The Monterey Institute of International Studies, Center for Nonproliferation Studies DOI: 10.1080/10736700601178630 150 STEVEN AFTERGOOD AND FRANK N. VON HIPPEL changed security environment associated with the end of the Cold War, the demands of concerned members of the public, and internal agency imperatives to modernize an anachronistic security policy. Openness meant the creation of new channels of communication and new public information for assessing DOE performance, past and present. ‘‘Classification policy must reflect current worldwide realities (technical, military, economic, and political),’’ O’Leary’s reformed DOE declared in 1994. ‘‘The balance of risks and benefits has changed, reflecting widespread diffusion of technology, altered military and political relationships such as the breakup of the Soviet Union, and heightened concern about proliferation by Iraq, North Korea, and others.’’1 While the Openness Initiative was largely characterized by declassification of numerous categories of nuclear information, there was more to it than that. In fact, the ensuing classification policy review also led to increased classification for certain other categories of information, in accordance with the discriminating approach often described as ‘‘high fences around narrow areas.’’ In 1996, the DOE published a history of U.S. plutonium production, Plutonium: The First 50 Years, United States Plutonium Production, Acquisition and Utilization from 1944 through 1994, including official disclosure of the total plutonium inventory.2 The DOE said: ‘‘As a result of this declassification, the American public will have information that is important in consideration of the proper management and ultimate disposition of the plutonium stockpile.’’3 The DOE also announced that it would prepare a companion study on HEU: ‘‘Since the Department has received numerous inquiries from the public, a similar report will be written about the production, use, disposition, and inventories of highly enriched uranium covering the last 50 years and will be released in about 1 year.’’4 The Struggle over the Report’s Release But the promised delivery date was repeatedly postponed. As late as 2005, despite continuing pressure from public interest groups, members of Congress, and former department officials, DOE formally refused to release any portion of the document. In 2006, however, facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) challenge, the HEU Report was finally published with only limited redactions. The decade-long struggle for disclosure of the document reflects the DOE’s ambivalence over public disclosure of nuclear information, the reflexive secrecy that has characterized the nuclear weapons complex throughout its history, and shifting conceptions within government of the requirements of national security policy. The DOE’s return to its traditional secrecy was accelerated by a series of embarrassments during the late 1990s. There were highly publicized losses of classified materials at its weapons design laboratories, allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage, the Wen Ho Lee controversy, and more.5 Later, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) rescinded online public access to most of its unclassified public reports.6 In an often indiscriminate rush to secrecy, LANL even removed a web page THE U.S. HEU DECLARATION 151 containing the periodic table of the elements and placed it behind a password-protected portal. It was not an auspicious time to set a new standard for nuclear transparency. Yet the successful outcome of the dispute over the HEU Report underscores the virtue of persistence in confronting official secrecy and reaffirms the continuing potency of the FOIA as a lever for opening sealed government files. The initial delays in producing the HEU Report were not due to a resistance to openness, however, but rather to the difficulty of the task itself. The record of HEU production was more fragmentary and complex than anticipated. As of January 1997, the HEU report had been ‘‘delayed by more than 6 months due to difficulties with identifying, accessing, and analyzing historical production and transaction data, which have proved more difficult than was the case with the earlier report on plutonium.’’7 Nevertheless, DOE reaffirmed its commitment to publication of the HEU Report. ‘‘This report will provide assistance to worldwide nonproliferation efforts by revealing where United States highly enriched uranium resides in the United States as well as in other nations. It will also assist regulators in environmental, health, and safety matters at domestic sites where this material is stored or buried,’’ DOE said in 1997.8 Later that year, however, Secretary O’Leary left the DOE, and the Openness Initiative that had been so visibly identified with her tenure began to lose momentum. The HEU Report was only completed and formally declassified in January 2001, the transition month from the Clinton to the Bush administration. In anticipation of ‘‘media interest,’’ an internal DOE memo said, ‘‘options for release of the report are being developed.’’9 By 2002, however, DOE had settled back into the pre-O’Leary policy of non-disclosure, whose implementation mantra could have been ‘‘deny, delay, and obfuscate.’’ This policy was completely compatible with the information policy of the new Bush administration. Because the HEU Report had already been declassified, however, it could no longer be withheld on national security grounds. DOE officials therefore strained to find another basis to block public access. ‘‘The requested document is a draft record that reflects the tentative views of the authors,’’ ventured DOE FOIA Director Abel Lopez in an April 10, 2002 letter. ‘‘The opinions contained in the document are recommendatory...and exempt from disclosure.’’10 ‘‘That’s nonsense,’’ said Roger Heusser, who, prior to retiring, had been director of DOE’s Office of Nuclear and National Security Information, responsible for DOE classification and declassification policy. ‘‘The document is an historical accounting of information rather than recommendations,’’ said Heusser at the time. ‘‘I am quite familiar with the document,’’ he wrote in an appeal to DOE security officials. In fact, ‘‘I declassified it.’’11 Nevertheless, Heusser’s own request for a copy of the document was also denied, as were requests from public interest groups, arms control specialists, and the National Academy of Sciences. The intervening events of September 11, 2001 naturally led to a reassessment of security policies government-wide. The threat of terrorism became a new rationale for DOE to withhold the HEU study. ‘‘The report contains unclassified but sensitive security information that terrorists could use as a road map to the locations of DOE fissile nuclear materials and by that provides targeting information for potential malevolent acts,’’ wrote Joseph S. Mahaley, director of the DOE Office of Security, in a June 2003 letter 152 STEVEN AFTERGOOD AND FRANK N. VON HIPPEL to Sen. Gordon H. Smith (Republican of Oregon) explaining the department’s continuing refusal to release the document.12 In this same letter, however, Mahaley told the senator that, ‘‘I have recently directed that a revision of the report be prepared that will remove the sensitive portions that caused the original document to be withheld from the public.’’ One would have thought that the stage was finally set for release of a revised version of the HEU Report. But one would have been mistaken. In 2005, disclosure of the HEU Report was again denied in its entirety.
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