Our Nuclear Security CEO Speaks: Listen in & Read her Entire Speech, published 16 March 2018; Doomsday Clock

Read her written text below; prepared and researched by the TTD Research & Development Communications Team Lead by its own Colonel Mason. All copyright applies.

What the World Must Know Urgently About Nuclear Security

? Copyright 2018, Colonel R. F. Mason & PHalres    All Rights Reserved

To be delivered in a speech by Phrantceena Thate-Halres, at San Diego, CA, EUEC conference Mar. 5-7, 2018

·       Introduction—and you may have questions

• You may have questions later and I can answer many of them, the more detailed items feel free to submit in writing.  My business cards are on the table by the door.
• The things I am about to tell just might keep you up at night. 
• We’ll cover Russian and American weapons grade plutonium that was supposed to be destroyed and why it is still around posing a danger to the entire world. And one of our states is suing the US government for a million dollars a day over that issue, we’ll get up to date on that.
• I’ll also cover what Russia is doing in retaliation for the US breaching a treaty with them on disposing dangerous nuclear materials of both countries.
• And I will end with what insiders secretly believe is the one biggest threat to nuclear security worldwide as of right now.

·       Is doomsday closer than ever?

Many scientists believe so.  Each year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit group that sets the hands of the symbolic "Doomsday Clock," decides whether the events of the previous year pushed humanity closer or farther from destruction. In January they moved it closer, the clock is now two minutes to midnight, as close as it was in 1953 at the height of the Cold War.

Rachel Bronson, who is president of the atomic scientists group, says that we have “extraordinary danger of the current moment.” She went on to say “the greatest risks last year arose in the nuclear realm with North Korea's weapons program,” but insists the US government is responsible too, quote: "Hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions on both sides have increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation."

Put those words “accident or miscalculation” aside for a bit because we will come back to them later.

In his State of the Union address a few weeks back, president Trump excoriated North Korea again while saying nothing about dangerous weapons grade plutonium lying around in South Carolina. 

·        Remember Mega-tons to Mega-watts?

That was an agreement with Russia to use bomb grade uranium for reactors to generate electricity.  Since 1987 the United States and countries of the former USSR have signed a series of disarmament treaties to reduce the nuclear arsenals by about 80%.

Nuclear materials declared surplus to military requirements by the USA and Russia have been converted into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.

Mega-Tons to Mega-Watts ran until 2012, and there were times in this country where a large percentage of nuclear power being generated here was being done with excess Soviet era nuclear weapons materials. It was mostly uranium, though, not plutonium.

So what is happening with all that Plutonium?

It is still in stockpile. We’ve dumped our share in South Carolina at a site called Savannah River where it is being ignored by the Trump administration … but not by the people of South Carolina who have to live with it. 

To force solving the problem Congress mandated that the U.S. Department of Energy would pay South Carolina one million dollars per day, beginning January 1, 2016, for every day the department failed to remove from the state one metric ton of weapons-grade defense plutonium. The requirement is in place during the first 100 days of each year from 2016 through 2021. So last summer the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit against the federal government to recover a million dollars a day the U.S. Department of Energy owes the state for failing to meet its promise to remove plutonium from the Savannah River Site in 2016, 2017 and, I am told, soon they’ll sue for 2018. Meantime the US Department of Energy, a cabinet post with a secretary so inept and unqualified for the job he once said it should be eliminated, is stonewalling in the courts against South Carolina, and the dangers linger on.  By the way, and I am sure you are wondering, this is not political. Both the government of South Carolina and the US president belong to the same political party, Republican. And as a diversion, Secretary Perry at DoE asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to create market rules that would compensate plants that have a 90-day supply of fuel on hand -- a feature that largely props up the dying coal industry.  Of course the FERC ultimately rejected the proposal.

So, while president Trump, in his State of the Union address, is calling for huge sums to be spent by the states rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, dangerous weapons grade nuclear materials are largely being ignored in South Carolina. As a token, the new Trump budget request includes the same old solution offered many times before, a so-called “orderly and safe closure of the South Carolina facility.” But is there such a thing? As with our agreement with Russia we would destroy the weapons grade material through Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication known as MOX that ideally would be transported a short distance across the Savannah River from South Carolina to Georgia to be burned in a new nuclear power plant, the first one being built in this country in three decades, operated by Georgia Power. But instead the Trump budget wants to degrade the plutonium through a method deceptively known as “Dilute and Dispose” where it would be rendered less dangerous and then disposed by rail transport through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, then finally dumped in underground caves in New Mexico.  

Because of treaties, US officials have long acknowledged that they  would need Russian approval, but Vladimir Putin told reporters last April that the dilute-and-dispose method was unacceptable because the plutonium could still be retrieved from the mixture and used for weapons. So it appears the label “dilute and dispose” is false. Diluting the dangerous material hardly renders it useless and being stored in easily accessible caves can hardly be considered as disposing. 

So in retaliation for this country not fulfilling our agreement to destroy this dangerous weapons grade nuclear material, the Russians are dumping theirs north of Kazakhstan in a place called Mayak, storing all manner of Soviet era and later nuclear materials there, including weapon tips, and where radiation seeps into surrounding rivers, lakes and atmosphere by the hour.

·       We know Russia enjoys making mischief

Vladimir Putin has said how he laments the collapse of the Soviet Union, and all that plutonium and weapons tips just lying around has to be tempting. ………….

So now let us divert our attention to North Korea. Let me ask you a question, who shares the northern border with Korea? Most answer they believe it to be China, but are wrong, China borders to the west.  Russia is the northern border and Vladivostok is where mother Russia berths her Pacific fleet. 

Is Russia retaliating against the United States by covertly feeding the rapid rise in the nuclear capabilities of North Korea? Some government people secretly think so, but no one is saying anything publically. The instability that comes with the nuclear armed North is a detriment to Russian rivals, both China and the US, with the big benefactor of unrest or even armed conflict there being mother Russia.

We put that question to Dr. Edward Morse, renowned professor of nuclear energy, University of California at Berkley, who told us “We look back at our records from Berkley and MIT and we provided a good bit of the world with competent nuclear engineering capability which has gone to places where we have had a fractious relationship because of their desire to make nuclear weapons. Indeed, North Korea got their training elsewhere … including Russia, this country, and Western Europe.” But some believe with the speed at which North Korea is advancing its nuclear threats there is no other answer but that Russia has a big hand in it now.

In the meantime, with the Winter Olympics now over in the South, North Korea nuclear tests are expected to resume and national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, has been urging the president to order a limited strike on Pyongyang, Capital of North Korea, something akin to a bloody nose for a schoolyard bully. Our leading authority on both Koreas, Victor Cha, has warned the White House that a so-called "bloody nose" strike against Pyongyang would risk pulling the US into a disastrous war that would endanger hundreds of thousands of lives. Once Cha was the leading candidate to be US ambassador to South Korea, but of course Cha couldn’t get along with the president on the question of hitting the North so his nomination was pulled.

·       Not all are blind in Washington to these dangers

Our congressional leaders are quite concerned our current president is a lightweight on a bunch of things, especially when it comes to nuclear security. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has said “president Trump is new to this line of work.” And a scientist named Sharon Squassoni, a senior specialist on weapons of mass destruction at the Congressional Research Service, writes in her new book, Through a Fractured Looking Glass, that “the Trump administration is hampered by a deficit of expertise … and of deference for the normal workings of government.” That the “broad policy choices it makes now about the US nuclear arsenal, arms control, and efforts to deter nuclear proliferation will affect world strategic stability far into the future.”

At U. C. Berkley, Dr. Morse agrees, saying “The world is a scary place. It’s scary for reasons of nuclear proliferation in the hands of state players. We still have the possibility that terror groups will get their hands on nuclear explosive materials, although that has not been as newsworthy lately, so if that is actually happening it is hard to say.” And Dr. Morse says he thinks nuclear power plants in this country are safe in the way they have physical installations in place to protect spent fuel.  “I don’t see any terrorist threat that’s involved with that” says Dr. Mores.  It’s the crazy people in power with their hands on the nuclear buttons that make the world so unsafe.

So with no evidence that terrorists pose the nuclear threats, it is the world’s leaders themselves who pose the biggest terrorist threats. And what do nuclear scientists believe is the biggest threat of all? We asked leading nuclear authority Paul Ebel, senior advisor to the World Institute for Nuclear Security in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Ebel gave a quick answer, human error in sensitive places and situations.

And we saw that demonstrated first hand this past January 13, a Saturday, when a false nuclear missile attack alert was issued over television, radio, and cellphones in Hawaii. The alert said there was an incoming ballistic missile threat to Hawaii, advised residents to seek shelter, and concluded "This is not a drill." This went on for 38 minutes before it was rescinded.

A person named L. A. Webb wrote the New York Times, saying: “I live in Hawaii, and that was the most frightening day of my life. Imagine learning that you have only minutes to live.  I texted my family that I loved them because the cell service was overloaded and I couldn’t get a call out. Saturday was real. I don’t know if we will ever fully recover.”

Our contacts at the Department of Defense told us that NORAD, North American Aerospace Defense Command, detects danger of incoming rockets and, together with two other government oversight agencies, alert civilian governments, this case Hawaii.  We were assured NORAD played no role in the false nuclear warning. 

The man who issued the false alarm, a civilian employed by Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency, says he is getting death threats. So we asked Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anthony, Director of Public Affairs with the Hawaii National Guard heading up the investigation, that if NORAD didn’t sound the alert how did this happen? Colonel Anthony said the operator “made a statement that he really thought there was a missile attack coming, however, his actions on that day don’t really lend any credence to that statement.” WHAT????? Then if NORAD didn’t sound the alert how did this guy get the idea that there was an attack coming,? We asked Colonel Anthony … after a long pause, the colonel answered “that is a very good question!” And he added, “I don’t want to say for the record that this individual may have been deceitful in his response.” Anthony went on to say he doesn’t believe it was a prank, there will be no criminal charges, it was “clearly a mistake, and clearly this individual did not follow the procedures correctly, and after … all hell broke loose he came up with a statement.” But “it is a matter of clicks on a mouse, you are looking at a computer screen that says ‘this will send out an actual alert. Do you want to do that?’ and then he clicked on that.”

With tensions currently so high between the US and North Korea we can see any number of dangers in crying wolf. Colonel Anthony says measures now in place to prevent this happening again, at least in Hawaii, include “instituting a two-person activation/verification rule for tests as well as actual missile launch notifications, and a cancellation command that can be done automatically that can be triggered within seconds of an error, has been put in place.”

But these safeguards are initiatives of the United States, what about other world players with similar fears? Are their safeguards as good as ours? Do we feed their fears and undermine their safeguards by threats of giving some nation state a “bloody nose?”

As Professor Morse reminds us “The world is a scary place. It’s scary for reasons of nuclear proliferation in the hands of state players.” And Paul Ebel goes even further, the biggest danger is in human error in sensitive places and situations.

So I leave you with this question, how serious should we take that Doomsday Clock? How close to midnight in the world of humankind are we

really? Biologists suspect we’re living through the sixth major mass extinction now.  Earth has witnessed five, when more than 75% of all earth’s living species of any kind disappeared. Paleontologists spot them when species go missing from the global fossil record: 439 million years ago, 86% of all manner of life on Earth was wiped out; 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost; 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost; 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost; and 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost; “We don’t always know what caused them but most had something to do with rapid climate change,” says Melbourne Museum paleontologist Rolf Schmidt. 

In his book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, geneticist author Adam Rutherford points out that three of the four known human species have already died off, not only the Homo-Neanderthals of which we are all familiar, but two other human species also. Let me rephrase that: Of the four evolved human species ever in existence on this earth, we are all that survive. And in the scheme of life, we Homo Sapiens have only been around for a short period. Will our period be the shortest still because of our own folly?

      To survive, we have to constantly be searching for that surprise, the very thing that will indeed happen but of which no one has thought of yet.

·       About TTD

• I founder, chairman and CEO of TTD
• a trailblazer for the security industry.  
• lead the nation’s first woman- and minority-owned business
• focused on providing security for nuclear plants and other energy infrastructure
• has amassed extensive experience with the United States Military and National Security.
• has protected people and assets of the National Guard, the North Carolina Governor's plane, colonels and generals at military installations
• have been providing security for many organizations, companies and public figures for years,
• interacting at all levels  
• security training academy at TTD,
• have enlisted the most elite group of Delta Force Special Ops, as well as the national and international Secret Service, both current and retired.
• those who follow key safety principles are less likely to be targeted by criminals.