Ten days before the events of 11 September 2001, Stephen Younger arrived in Washington, DC, to replace Jay Davis as the director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. DTRA, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, is part of the Department of Defense and serves as the US hub for developing strategies against weapons of mass destruction. “I wasn’t surprised to be offered the job, because the administration was very kind in discussions of how I might be able to come to Washington,” says Younger, who was previously the senior associate director in charge of the stockpile stewardship program at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “We talked about several types of positions, and, after some discussion, this was the one that seemed the best fit.”
The fit seems apt: In 2000, Younger published his widely disseminated unclassified paper, Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century, to stimulate long-term thinking about the strategic capability of the US nuclear stockpile in light of the end of the cold war. DTRA’s mandate involves working with all branches of government concerned with weapons of mass destruction, and a range of activities from arms control to arms development. The agency carries out arms control both by monitoring international treaties and through a program that involves the cooperative destruction of weapons of mass destruction. Arms development consists mainly of developing weapons to destroy or neutralize hostile weapons of mass destruction before they can be used against the US and providing combat support to the US military.
“Our job is to make the world safer by reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction,” says Younger. “How can you do that most effectively? We look at the grades of threat, then we identify the best technologies and systems for reducing that threat by working with industry, academia, and the national laboratories.” DTRA doesn’t have a laboratory system of its own, so the agency has “no obligation to take care of our own researchers,” Younger says. “Our job is to find the best product for our customers.” Most of the weapons DTRA conceives take from one month to two years to design and build.
Younger, who has a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, started his career in the 1970s at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST). In 1982, he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he developed several underground nuclear bomb tests and led the nuclear-driven x-ray laser design group. He moved to Los Alamos in 1989. There, he helped develop the first programs in lab-to-lab cooperation with the nuclear weapons institutes in the Russian Federation, and in 1995 he founded the Center for International Security Affairs. He also testified in federal court three years ago on the potential security problems resulting from classified data mishandled by former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee.
Younger oversees a five-year-old agency that has about 2100 employees and a $2 billion budget. The organization is an amalgamation of several previous civilian and military agencies. “In a sense, we are like America itself in that we are a blend of several cultures,” says Younger.
Challenges
During the past year, DTRA has concentrated on two basic challenges: how to find weapons of mass destruction and, once found, how to destroy them. These undertakings involve fundamental physics, Younger says. Physics puts limits on the sensitivity of radiation detectors, and that, in turn, influences how officials search for weapons-grade plutonium or uranium.
Younger points out that DTRA is actively developing enhanced conventional weapons for specialized combat roles, such as eliminating chemical and biological agents with the minimum amount of collateral damage. “This is a very difficult problem because there is incomplete information about the target, the organisms [biological agents] are very difficult to kill, and you have to achieve an extraordinary success rate in killing the organisms to ensure that a sufficient number doesn’t survive that they could cause problems, either in the local countryside, or when our forces move through the area later on,” he says. If it isn’t possible to destroy a biological weapon, he adds, then “what you really want to do is deny the utility of that weapon to the adversary.”
“We have several programs … to look at advanced methods for agent defeat, such as generating a high enough temperature for a long enough period to kill biological organisms,” he says. “This appears to be a promising route, but lacking that ability, the best we may be able to do is immobilize the agent until ground forces have arrived.”
According to Younger, a series of simple questions defines weapons research at DTRA: “Can you make it? Can it be built safely? Can it be built in a way that is operationally usable?” Although the questions may be simple, the new weapons are not, he says. “It used to be that a weapon consisted of a casing filled with high explosives, and there may or may not be a guidance system associated with it. Now we can look at the type of effect that we would like to provide for you—high temperature, low temperature, high pressure, low pressure, or a pressure pulse over a protracted time. Do you want a lot of fragmentation, or no fragmentation at all? Do you want a pressure pulse prior to a high-temperature pulse? “
When he knows what the weapon is supposed to do, says Younger, the questions turn to “What kind of fill, what kind of explosive, what kind of molecule would produce that effect? How do you make a lot of those molecules [and] what kind of bomb casing would you put those molecules into? What kind of fuse will enable those molecules to operate … and what kind of guidance package will put [the weapon] onto the target? In the past, questions like that could take a number of years to answer. I think we’re moving into a time when it will take a number of weeks to answer.”
The success of developing these new, tailored systems depends on carrying out computer simulations and mixing and matching existing technologies, adds Younger. He points to the thermobaric weapon designed to take out tunnels in Afghanistan as an example of a new DTRA weapon. “We did that in near-record time,” he says. “We were able to take an existing molecule, decide what type of fuse we wanted, decide what type of guidance package [was needed], pull them off the shelf, put them together, and create a fundamentally different type of weapon.”
Safeguarding the US
The terrorist attacks on US soil led DTRA to establish priority programs such as protecting military bases by developing a perimeter detection system for nuclear materials. “There are two aspects to that problem,” says Younger. “One is the detector itself; the second is the integration of that detector into an operational defensive system. It’s not enough to have a detector that works just in the laboratory. It has to work outside, in the rain, it has to be operable by a person with a limited education, it has to work when the batteries are weak, and when the electricity goes off. So it’s not enough to have the detector; it has to work in the field, and that’s what we’re testing.”
“Since 9–11, we have done quite a bit of work in simulating the effects of a weapons-of-mass-destruction event in an American city so we can better understand those effects,” says Younger. “Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are each frightening,” he says, “but with chemical and biological there is at least some time to act.” This research, he adds, has resulted in a set of playbooks, now used by government officials, that describe how the local, state, and federal governments should respond after an attack, how to deal with false alarms, when to evacuate, and who should be notified.
But it is another, less concrete set of simulations that intrigues Younger. “To understand the problem of terrorism … we’ve had the idea of trying to combine simulation with cultural studies,” he says. Accordingly, the agency tries to predict how US actions will be interpreted by terrorists under certain conditions. “We have done some preliminary work there and it is actually quite promising,” he says. The research attracts Younger because of his strong interest in history and philosophy. “We believe that detectors and weapons treat symptoms of terrorism, and we need to deal with the problem of terrorism. That’s fundamentally a social—political problem, not a technological problem. But perhaps technology, through simulations, can improve our understanding of these personalities and help us to deal with them.” DTRA is not the only group working in this field, but the problem—how terrorists react—is so difficult that “it’s worthwhile to have several different approaches,” Younger says. He adds that one may find some answers through researching historical records, given that other societies in the past have dealt with terrorism. “I think we can do a better job at looking at what worked and what didn’t.”
The ongoing debate on whether to publish research that is sensitive but unclassified is “an exceptionally difficult problem,” Younger says. “The solution … will have to involve government and the research community working together. Clearly, we wish to keep dangerous information out of the hands of terrorists or potential adversaries, but, on the other hand, the free flow of scientific information has proved vital in maintaining the economic vitality of this and many other countries. I do not believe we have yet achieved a balance.”
Despite being in Washington for more than a year, Younger still thinks of Los Alamos as home. “I miss my friends and colleagues at Los Alamos,” he says, “but I have the opportunity to work with a large number of fine people who are doing excellent work. We’re doing an important mission for the country, and we have about the right resources to carry out that mission. I don’t think any professional can ask for more than that.”
