Newsweek’s Sharon Begley opines on the need for nuclear forensics:
The U.S. has not stood out in advancing the cause of nuclear attribution even at home. A 2008 analysis by physicists and nuclear chemists for the American Physical Society and AAAS concluded the U.S. has too few experts (about 50) in nuclear attribution, and many are close to retirement. Training programs for the minimum of 35 new Ph.D.s needed over the next decade are “inadequate and underfunded,” it warned; equipment to analyze debris after a detonation falls short of “the most modern and effective standards that prevail” in such countries as Japan and France.
Yet a 2008 bill was stripped of $4 million authorized to train experts. Even the Nuclear Forensics and Attribution Act that Obama signed in February “doesn’t have any money” to remedy the shortfall of equipment and expertise, says Tannenbaum.
That is breathtakingly stupid, for nuclear forensics has made real advances lately. Nuclear materials have atomic and chemical properties that may survive detonation and “serve as unequivocal markers of specific sources, production processes, or transit routes,” Michael Kristo of Lawrence Livermore National Lab told a U.S.-Russia workshop on nuclear security. Uranium can have a unique signature depending on where it was processed; the kind of reactor used to make weapons-grade plutonium leaves a telltale ratio of isotopes. The fraction of particles of different sizes in uranium-oxide powder can indicate what uranium conversion process was used, and therefore where it was carried out, while the dimensions of nuclear fuel pellets are often unique to a manufacturer. The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 varies by region, and so can be used to pinpoint where nuclear fuel pellets were produced. Pollen and spores can indicate the route a nuke traveled (though only if it’s intercepted; if it goes off, pollen and spores are incinerated).
Even so, it may be impossible with today’s techniques to unambiguously trace nuclear materials to a unique source. That, Kristo warned, underlines the need to discover “new signatures…of the material that reveal the creator.”
