Crossing the Red Line: The Nuclear Option

By Gerald E. Marsh (Hackensack, NJ, World Scientific, 2019). ISBN 978-9813276826 (hardcover), $20.

Gerald Marsh will be familiar to P&S readers for his numerous contributions on topics such as missile defense, climate change, and nuclear power and proliferation. Now retired, Marsh served as a consultant to the Department of Defense on nuclear policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, with the United States’ Strategic Arms Reductions Talks delegation, and worked in the Strategic & Theatre Nuclear Warfare Division of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations from 1983-93. In this book, he addresses the incentives for developing nations to develop nuclear weapons, the expertise needed to do so, and technical aspects of ballistic missiles. North Korea is the main example, but every nuclear power appears. While this volume runs to 240 pages, one-half of it is Appendices, the text is double-spaced, and there are numerous photographs, drawings, and graphs. Several sections are reproductions of articles or material drawn from P&S or other sources. There is no bibliography, but there are a number of footnotes with references.

Chapters 1-4 cover background material: The origins of nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), why developing countries want nuclear weapons, and how their spread might be controlled. Marsh sees the motivations for developing countries to acquire nuclear weapons as being to have a regional advantage (Iran, North Korea), or to prevent interference by more developed nations. For a regional player such as North Korea to threaten the United States, however, it will need to lighten existing warheads for use on its missiles. As to thwarting proliferation, Marsh views the NPT as flawed in that countries can acquire nuclear technology for ostensibly peaceful purposes, but then withdraw from the treaty, and advocates that it be strengthened via better intelligence-gathering.

Chapters 5-9 examine the history and current status of the North Korean nuclear and missile programs and the physics of rocketry. The treatment of plutonium production draws heavily from Carson Mark, Frank von Hippel, and Edwin Lyman’s well-known paper on the properties of reactor-grade plutonium which appeared in Science and Global Security. The key graphic is a plot of what payload masses could be delivered to various distances by the current Hwasong-15 missile. While American cities lie within the achievable range, the payload capacity is apparently still too low, and Marsh feels that ICBM-level warheads are beyond what North Korea could achieve in the next decade without an extensive testing program. But North Korea should not be underestimated: It took them only about a decade to go from a sub-kiloton detonation to one of 120 kt. If Japan and South Korea develop their own nuclear weapons over fears that America will not come to their defense in a regional crisis, there will be further nuclear proliferation.

Chapters 10-12 return to the issue of nuclear proliferation. Here I learned some things of which I was unaware: That Israel may have conducted three tests in the 1979 Vela incident, and that Israeli agents likely destroyed two reactor cores in France destined for shipment to Iraq. There are also speculations on how proliferation may have enhanced stability: There has been no (overt) Arab-Israeli war since 1973, nor a China-India-Pakistan conflict since 1999. But while Marsh sees the China-India-Pakistan triangle as stabilizing, he believes that if Iran were to develop a bomb and Saudi Arabia were to follow suit, the resulting Israel-Iran-Saudi triangle would be unstable due to the presence of radical Islamism. If proliferation is to be controlled by international law and enforcement, nations will have to give up some sovereignty; Marsh makes no comments on convincing existing nuclear powers to give up their stockpiles. As to negotiations with North Korea, Marsh feels that the requirements will need to include a formal end to the Korean War, a non-aggression treaty, an end to sanctions in return for the dismantlement of the North Korean weapons program, and that country’s return to the NPT.

Appendix A runs to 72 pages, and is a reproduction of a paper on North Korean missiles and US missile defense by Theodore Postol which appeared in P&S. Appendix B, also drawn from a P&S article, deals with the possibility of nuclear terrorism; Marsh feels that the danger of a reactor-grade weapon is overblown in view of the radioactivity involved and the difficulty of fabricating a high-explosive assembly. Appendix C is a brief background on China, mostly focusing on conflicting claims in the South China Sea. Appendix D is a history of Islamic terrorism that really has nothing to do with nuclear weapons or missiles.

Overall, I don’t know what to make of this book. Events in North Korea will likely quickly render it out of date. It is not clear what audience Marsh has in mind. If his target group is policy-makers, the discussions seem brief and inconclusive, and I doubt that such readers would be interested in, say, a derivation of the rocket equation from first principles. For technical readers, much of what Marsh relates is already available in the P&S articles he cites. Existing volumes such as the Proceedings of the 2017 FPS conference on Nuclear Weapons and Related Security Issues offer deeper analyses of both policy and technical issues (P&S, April 2018). Some facts lack much in the way of context. For example, it is remarked that the plutonium core of the Fat Man bomb weighed only about 6 kilograms, but that the bomb as a whole weighed in at over 4600 kilograms; no explanation of the difference is offered. The caption to a photograph of W88 warheads points out that the tips of the missiles appear different from the material of their bodies, but offers no speculation on why. My impression is that the chapters seem more like summaries of talking points used to provide background for a student seminar, not attempts at deeper analyses. For those who want to buy this book, it's worth noting that the electronic version lists at a considerably lower price than the hardcover one.

Cameron Reed
Department of Physics (Emeritus)
Alma College, Alma, MI
reed@alma.edu

These contributions have not been peer-refereed. They represent solely the view(s) of the author(s) and not necessarily the view of APS.