U.S. CAPABILITY TO MONITOR SOVIET COMPLIANCE WITH THE THRESHOLD TEST BAN TREATY (TTBT) AND THE TREATY ON PEACEFUL NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS (PNET) REPORT of the SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE September 14. 1990.-Ordered to be printed SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE [Established by S. Res. 400, 94th Cong., 2d Sess.] DAVID L. BOREN, Oklahoma, Chairman U.S. CAPABILITY TO MONITOR SOVIET COMPLIANCE WITH THE THRESHOLD TEST BAN TREATY (TTBT) AND THE TREATY ON PEACEFUL NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS (PNET) SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE'S EFFORT The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has formal responsibility for reviewing all treaties before they are acted upon by the full Senate. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's role is to support this process by providing both the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate as a whole with its assessment of the monitoring and counterintelligence issues raised by these treaties. This report is the culmination of more than two years of research and analysis by the Committee regarding the monitoring and counterintelligence issues raised by the two nuclear testing treaties. Along with its active promotion of enhanced monitoring capabilities during the annual intelligence authorization process, the Committee routinely follows arms control negotiations to keep abreast of such issues and then devotes intensive attention to them as agreement becomes more imminent. In October of 1988, when agreement on the new Protocols before the end of the Reagan Administration appeared possible, the Committee commissioned a series of formal, on-the-record briefings for its staff. These briefings were provided in late 1988 and early 1989. A second set of on-the-record briefings was held in July of 1990, after the new Protocols were signed. The Committee held a series of three hearings later in July, taking testimony from the Honorable Manfred Eimer, Assistant Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (testifying for ACDA Director Ronald F. Lehman II); Ambassador C. Paul Robinson, Chief U.S. Negotiator at the Nuclear Testing Talks; General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Major General Gerald Watson, Director, Defense Nuclear Agency; the Honorable John C. Tuck, Under Secretary of Energy; Dr. Victor E. Alessi. Director. DoE Office of Arms Control; Dr. John H. Nuckolls, Director. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Dr. Siegfried Hecker, Director. Los Alamos National Laboratory: Dr. Lawrence K. Gershwin, National Intelligence Officer for Strategic Programs (testifying for Director of Central Intelligence William H. Webster): Dr. John T. Kriese. Chairman. the Director of Central Intelligence's Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee; Mr. Douglas J. MacEachin, Chief, the Director of Central Intelligence's Arms Control Intelligence Staff; Dr. William R. Graham, former Science Advisor to the President; and Dr. Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, Director Emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Additional U.S. officials submitted written testimony. On August 2, 1990, the Committee obtained an on-the-record staff briefing regarding counterintelligence and security issues in the Treaties and U.S. preparedness to meet those challenges and to implement the verification provisions of the Protocols. Briefers at that session included: Brigadier General Roland Lajoie, Director, On-Site Inspection Agency; Mr. Harry B. Brandon, Deputy Assistant Director, Intelligence Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation; Dr. Victor E. Alessi of the Department of Energy; Mr. Jay Stewart. Director. Office of Counterintelligence, Department of Energy; Mr. James Magruder. Assistant Manager for Operations and Engineering, Nevada Test Site; Mr. Ray W. Pollari. Director of Counterintelligence Programs, Department of Defense; and Mr. John J. Bird, chief, the Director of Central Intelligence's Treaty Monitoring Center. On September 19, 1988, the Committee requested that the Director of Central Intelligence produce a formal document, approved by the National Foreign Intelligence Board, on the ability of the U.S. Government, through cooperative and unilateral means, to monitor Soviet compliance with the two Treaties. This request led first to an analysis published by the Director of Central Intelligence's Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee in July of 1989, and eventually to a National Intelligence Estimate published in July of 1990. To maximize the usefulness of the National Intelligence Estimate, the Committee asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to submit to the Director of Central Intelligence his assessment of the levels of Soviet evasion that he would consider militarily significant, and the Secretary of Energy to provide an assessment of the Soviet technical, logistic and programmatic requirements necessary to conduct such evasion. Thus, although the National Estimate is an intelligence document, it is directly relevant to the policy maker and reflects the combined expertise of many agencies in the Executive branch, with input from the National Laboratories. The Committee has also received numerous responses to questions for the record that were submitted to the Executive branch after its July hearings and briefings regarding the two treaties. The results of these inquiries have been integrated into this report. In addition, the Committee staff has traveled extensively to visit U.S. facilities involved with nuclear tests and nuclear test monitoring: the Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories: the Nevada Test Site; the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) facility at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida; and the AFTAC facility at McLellan Air Force Base in California. Finally, the Committee solicited and obtained the written views of numerous outside experts in arms control, seismology, and nuclear testing fields. The culmination of this intensive effort is a classified report of over 100 pages. which addresses in detail the verification Protocols. U.S. collection and analytical capabilities, cooperative verification measures. Soviet compliance, evasion scenarios. monitoring judgments. safeguards. counterintelligence issues, and implementation concerns. The following are key unclassified findings from the classified report. INTRODUCTION TO THE TTBT AND PNET On June 1, 1990, in Washington, D.C., Presidents Bush and Gorbachev signed new verification protocols for two previously-signed but unratified treaties the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1974 and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty of 1976 explosions. that place a 150-kiloton limit on the yield of underground nuclear The 150-kiloton limit embodied in the TTBT and the PNET is part of the decades old effort to place restrictions on nuclear testing. In his prepared testimony before the Select Committee on Intelligence on July 19, Ambassador C. Paul Robinson, who negotiated the treaty protocols, stated: "You may recall that in the 50's and 60's the U.S. conducted nuclear weapon tests with yields many times greater than 150 kilotons. The Soviet Union conducted tests with even higher yields. Thus, the yield limitation imposed by the Treaties is a significant limitation. The arms control rationale for imposing such a yield limitation was to prevent, or at least restrain, the development of very high-yield weapons." The Treaty on the Limitation of Underground Nuclear Weapons Tests, more commonly known as the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), was signed on July 3. 1974. The new Protocol to the Treaty requires that each party specify the geographic boundaries of each weapons test site, provide certain geological and other data about the site. allow the Verifying Party the right to on-site hydrodynamic shock wave measurements and in-country seismic measurements for tests above 50 kilotons, and allow the Verifying Party to conduct on-site inspections for all tests above 35 kilotons. The TTBT covers all underground nuclear explosions that occur at designated weapons test sites, while the separate PNE Treaty applies to any such explosions away from these sites. The TTBT provisions do not apply to underground nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes (peaceful nuclear explosions or PNEs) because, at the time it was signed, the Soviets insisted on the right to carry our large-scale PNEs that might require explosions larger than 150 kilotons. The Treaty on Underground Nuclear Explosions for Peaceful Purposes (or Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty - PNET) was signed on May 28, 1976. The PNET provides for the right to carry out multiple, or "group," explosions with a total yield of up to 1,500 kilotons, but only if the yield of any individual explosion involved does not exceed 150 kilotons and if (for group PNEs with aggregate yields above 150 kilotons) the Verifying Party approves of verification procedures for the PNE. All group PNEs with aggregate yields above 50 kilotons must be carried out in such a way that the individual explosions involved can be identified and measured. The new Protocol to the PNET spells out the procedures to be used to ensure that no individual explosion exceeds 150 kilotons. The most important method involves estimating the yield by using on-site equipment to measure the hydrodynamic shock wave from the explosion of devices above 50 kilotons (or of each explosion in a group PNE with a total planned yield over 50 kilotons). For group explosions with total planned yield over 150 kilotons. a local seismic network would also be used to detect each explosion. Although the TTBT and PNET are separate treaties, they are intimately linked and have the same basic purpose to prohibit explosions exceeding 150 kilotons. The U.S. approach to the PNET was based on the presumption that there is no essential |