The ability to enforce the NPT has always been linked to the UNSC veto.

There have been monumental failures. Particularly important was the covert support of the Reagan administration for the Pakistani bomb program, which alas led to A.Q. Khan.

Still what could the IAEA do besides whine? How loudly did it dare whine?

The Additional Protocols are fixes to the original optimistic NPT.

Safeguards, love them. The more the merrier as I see it.

Still, when the Veto leaves the NPT itself virtually toothless, what do we expect?

The Veto leaves the major nuclear powers and their separate foreign policy interests able to prevent any collective support for Additional Protocols – or indeed an NPT – which they do not wish.

May the UN coerce nations like India, Israel, and Pakistan to come under controls and safeguards? Hah. Will the ability of any of of the ‘permanent members’ of the UNSC – which happen to be the major nuclear weapons states – to vex any action be ended?

The efforts of an army of nattering diplomats will come to naught so long as all they are doing is discussing what might be enacted, employed and enforced IF it does not offend the current foreign policy goals of 5 nations who are beyond responsibility and accountability.

Admittedly a long quote.

What is the policy on the length of quote allowed?

Or is there another way other than range to judge what missiles they test? (I would presume – perhaps falsely – that North Korea would cover up their missiles until just before launch to avoid satellite photos.)

What’s really interesting is how little confirmed or shared facts there are, even about launches – see the differeing opinions on what North Korea launched in July 2009.

Russia’s opinions on the BM025 are now out of date – The missile exists at least to the extent that North Korea has shown at least 8 of them with bespoke TELs off in their recent parade. And the analysis on here about the Unha 2 launch suggests that a BM-25 formed the second stage – which, along with the first stage, performed within North Korea’s prior outlined paramaters (as they fell within their exclusion zones).

Since only the third stage failed with the Unha-2, clearly they almost have an operational satellite launch vehicle, which could be modified into a primitive ICBM in a number of years – but they can only achieve either with an enthusiastic testing programme, which they show no signs of undertaking.

http://213.251.145.96/cable/2010/02/10STATE17263.html

[DO NOT POST THE FULL TEXT OF WIKILEAKS CABLES ON THIS SITE. YOU MAY QUOTE FROM THEM, BUT NO/NO FULL TEXT OR SECURITY MARKINGS.]

Is it possible to hide underground tests or make them look like earthquakes?

It’s said there are several seismic characteristics distinguishing underground tests from earthquakes:

* Magnitude of about 4 or higher (unless it’s a micronuke or fizzle)

* Shallow depth (few hundred meters instead of several kilometers)

* High shear to pressure wave ratio (S/P ratio)

* A sudden onset (no pre-tremors)

* Presence of Raleigh waves (kind of very long range surface wave)

* The “focal mechanism” model which summarizes all seismic data is different

A detonation inside a large air filled cavity is known to attenuate seismic signals by 1-2 magnitudes. This is less surprising if we note that only about 0.5% of the explosion energy is usually converted into radiated seismic energy. Since almost all energy is absorbed it makes sense that different conditions may significantly vary the residue converted to seismic signals.

Detection of surface waves requires being close to the focus (less than 1500km). Such data may be often unavailable to the international community.

What about the other signs? It may sound like science fiction but seismic signs can be manipulated in principle.

An earthquake hypocenter (focus) depth is determined by the lag of reflected surface waves behind the body waves. Suppose an underground test is conducted on an island in the middle of a large deep marsh. The deep mud ring will block (decouple) the original surface waves and a well timed conventional explosion performed outside it may be mistakenly interpreted as the reflected surface waves of the main blast, misleading depth measurements and causing gross over-estimation of the hypocenter depth. If depth is computed to be more than a few kilometers a natural origin is automatically assumed. Note that the secondary explosion need not be very strong if performed in a high coupling area (i.e. rocky hills).

The calculated seismic moment may be about a magnitude lower than the measured body waves but a calculated depth of say 10 km will be more convincing.

The Raleigh waves will be also blocked by the deep mud ring. A well planned chain of pre-blast conventional explosions may mask the sudden onset, if needed. A sophisticated design of the blast chamber could possibly reduce the S/P ratio, e.g. if it’s shaped like an horizontally “S” letter. Another way to produce more shear waves is to detonate two devices inside two parallel horizontal tunnels near the opposite ends.

Could a complete and correct “focal mechanism” produced with such methods? Probably not, but seismologists have to work sometimes with partial data and since they deal with complex systems they allow error margins. A reasonable imitation of a natural focal mechanism may be acceptable, especially if the culprit is considered “nice”. You can’t conduct a detailed investigation for every medium sized seismic event.

All this may seem like a wild speculation but there is good reason to think it actually happened. The scientific community should be on the lookout for novel monitoring evasion scenarios.

The main reason for this is that nuclear power stations are chock full of secondary and tertiary systems that are designed to trip the reactor and bring things to a halt in a controlled way. These back-up systems are typically independent of software e.g. they rely on a loss of signal and then gravity, natural convection, compressed gases, etc. Therefore in order to create a real disaster at Bushehr it’s likely that several protection systems would have to be disabled at once. This happened, for example, at Chernobyl, where operators knowingly took the plant outside of the range that the protection systems normally would have permitted, but it’s hard to see how Stuxnet could do anything much worse than trip Bushehr unless the operators override other, non-software protection systems. Even if Stuxnet did cause a trip, power stations are designed to start up and shutdown / trip many times in their lifetime, without too much deleterious effect, so the consequence of a Stuxnet attack on Bushehr would be to cause the plant to trip until such time as someone wonders if there’s something wrong with the software.

In any case, PWRs such as Bushehr are not considered to be the greatest proliferation risk among reactors – partly because used fuel from PWRs contains a lot of Pu-240, which is undesirable in a weapon. Therefore why attack Bushehr when the much more worrying Arak heavy water reactor appears to be continuing its construction? (Having said that, for all I know, Arak IS the target of Stuxnet!).

Unlike power stations, nuclear centrifuges (particularly if they are supercritical) are very susceptible to damage as they move between standstill and operating speed. Additionally, it takes some days (or weeks) for a centrifuge cascade to reach equilibrium. Therefore if an undiscovered worm like Stuxnet became active on average, say, once per month it is easy to imagine that it would have a serious impact on an enrichment programme.

If Stuxnet is a cyberattack, then my vote is that it was an attack on Iran’s centrifuges.

The “polyacryl” in the bottom right hand corner of the screen probably refers to polyacrylate; polyacrylate ion exchangers are particularly good at the removal of heavy metal ions, which would be necessary in the primary circuit of a PWR (such as Bushehr).

I’m not so confident as you that there are no Siemens control systems at Bushehr. As far as I can tell, Stuxnet was designed to attack PCS7 controllers; so unless these have a specific export or end-user restriction, why should these controllers not have been purchased by a Russian contractor and then installed in Bushehr?

I also think the Siemens spokesman was being (perhaps unintentionally) a little misleading if he said, “according to global security standards, Microsoft software “may not be used to operate critical processes in plants”.

Until a few years ago the standard Siemens product for running power stations was Teleperm XP – often referred to a TXP. This was a Unix based master control system that controlled most of the process, and which linked to faster controllers (running Simatic S5) for things like turbine supervision. Since this wasn’t regarded as a “failsafe” system there was a separate system in the background (used to be called AG 95F). One of the disdavantages of TXP and its associated controllers was that the S5 software couldn’t be changed while the unit was in operation, so in rsponse to this (and many other improvements that they wished to make) Siemens created an interim product called T2000, which has now been replaced by T3000.

Why all this history? Well T3000 is Windows based, and it allows changes to be made to the controllers of the turbines (and other fast processes) while they’re running. As far as I know there is still a separate, failsafe “protection” system operating in parallel with T3000 (though I’m sure it’s no longer called 95F). So you can see that if the Siemens spokesman had said that Microsoft products may not be used to provide “protection” (in the sense of its technical, C&I meaning) to critical plant I’d have agreed; but to say that Microsoft based software can’t be used to OPERATE critical processes is incorrect because it already is at many power stations around the world.