War and Peace: John Oakberg '69

RELATIONS BETWEEN IRAQ and the U.N. Security Council had been deteriorating for years. Four days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait under dictator Saddam Hussein in August 1990, the council imposed a crippling financial and trade embargo against the country. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. led military action against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War.

         Despite skyrocketing malnutrition, lack of medicines, and a scarcity of clean water, the desert nation’s most deleterious effects were economic—without the ability to export oil, Iraq lost 61 percent of its gross national product overnight. Hussein continued to be uncooperative with U.N. inspectors trying to determine his country’s nuclear capabilities.

         The embargo would remain in effect until 2010, although much of it was lifted following the fall of Hussein in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom, spurred by intelligence that Iraq had obtained weapons of mass destruction.

         For most people, weapons of mass destruction equal nuclear bombs.

         While the weapons information eventually proved unreliable, the idea was believable to those working with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—the United Nations’ “Atoms for Peace” organization. Among those watching closely in the early years of the 21st century: John Oakberg, a 1969 Auburn alum and IAEA information systems analyst.

THE IAEA HAD BEEN FORMED in 1957 during the Cold War, as nuclear energy was discovered and its potential for good—or bad—spread unease among societies worldwide. While promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy, the organization also served
as a watchdog of who was doing what.

         And in 1992, the discovery of sensitive documents hidden by the Iraqi government had the international community feeling shaken. After months of tense exchanges between IAEA inspectors and the Hussein government, the finding uncovered what many had feared since before the first Gulf War: hidden nuclear facilities, secret long-distance missile testing and the complex machinery necessary to detonate a nuclear warhead. The WMDs weren’t there yet, but Iraq had clearly been working in that direction.

         “Saddam was essentially building his own Manhattan Project,” said Oakberg, who returned to Auburn in May to receive an
honorary degree from his alma mater. The Manhattan Project was a military project begun in 1942 to produce the first U.S. nuclear weapon.

         “Iraq was building the same technology the Manhattan people had used in the 1940s to build the Hiroshima bombs,” Oakberg says. “Saddam had nuclear material, but he couldn’t use it for bad purposes because Iraq was subject to safeguards and he would have been caught. If you want to call it a loophole, the area that was not covered [by the sanctions] was nuclear activities.”

         Working at the IAEA from 1982 to 2007, Oakberg was
heavily involved in the creation and regulation of international nuclear regulation protocols designed to keep countries from
using nuclear material incorrectly or irresponsibly.

         Under their Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT,
member countries receive assistance and resources to build nuclear reactors in exchange for annual inspections of nuclear material by trained IAEA specialists.

         Despite acquiescing to the treaty, Iraq during the Hussein administration was anything but compliant.

         Only permitted to inspect Baghdad’s acknowledged stockpile of nuclear material, inspectors watched as clandestine facilities were built in front of them without explanation. 

         “Everybody did observation, but you couldn’t take action,” Oakberg says. “If you look at Al-Tuwaitha, there were three places where an inspector could go and that was it. Some countries were more lax, but in Iraq, you can observe and think “that looks like an enrichment plant,” but you better keep your mouth quiet.

         Internally, IAEA inspectors discussed Iraq’s clandestine activities among themselves, but limitations in the standing NPT charter prevented them from taking action.

          “We knew it but there wasn’t anything that we could do.” 

         The 1992 discovery confirmed that at least 22 other locations at the Al-Tuwaitha site had been exposed to nuclear activity through the production of an atomic warhead, while Iraq’s policy of parallel sourcing confirmed the purchase of unaccounted equipment.

         Facing a rogue nuclear weapons program under a noncompliant government bureaucracy, the IAEA decided that more potent measures had to be taken, lest the United Nations be little more than bystanders in an unregulated arms race.

         “There was this realization that the whole tenet of nuclear safeguards under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was not sufficient,” Oakberg says. “The legal instruments were strongly enhanced. As a result, [now] there’s a different kind of inspection beyond the complementary action. The inspector is allowed to go into places that don’t have nuclear material but have activities.”

         The ensuing regulations enacted, known
as the “Additional Protocol,” gave IAEA inspectors the teeth they needed to expose and eventually dismantle Iraq’s secret nuclear program through nonviolent clerical empowerment and international sanctions.

         Comprehensive analysis of future designs, transportation of sensitive equipment and the possession of dual-use nuclear material used to make “dirty bombs” would all come under the IAEA microscope, toughening methods of building a nuclear reactor or enriching uranium to make plutonium in secret.

         Advanced environmental sampling allowed under the Additional Protocol would eventually lead investigators to discover undeclared plutonium production in North Korea in 1994 and in Pakistan in 2004.

         In 2005 Oakberg, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and their associates at the IAEA received the Nobel Prize in Science “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest way possible.”

OAKBERG’S LIFE WAS shaped by nuclear energy.

         His hometown of Oak Ridge, Tenn., is steeped in the nuclear research community as part of the Manhattan Project. Along with Los Alamos, N. M., and Hanford, Wash., Oak Ridge was essential to not only the Manhattan Project, but also to the world of nuclear physics, research, development and commercialization.

         While the implementation of atomic chemistry heralded a new age of science and technology, the aftermath of the bombs used by the U.S. to end World War II sent nuclear scientists scrambling to shift research from military to peaceful purposes.

         When President Harry S. Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act in 1946, management of nuclear weapons and nuclear power was successfully transferred to civilian control under the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor of the IAEA. In Oakberg’s hometown, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory supplanted the military research operation, expanding the area’s economy and bringing in a highly educated population.

         In 1952, a 5-year-old Oakberg moved with his family to
Oak Ridge from Ames, Iowa, where his father, a research geneticist, studied the effects of ionized radiation in mice with the lab’s biology division. His mother, who held a master’s degree, instilled a love of learning in Oakberg and his two brothers.

         Pursuing a career outside of science never crossed his mind.
“I was fortunate to be in a very scientifically oriented place,” he says. “Back in the 1950s, if you tacked the words ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ onto anything it was magic.”

         Oakberg’s father was determined his son would get a challenging education, which led to one of his most memorable Auburn experiences.

         Though his family did not watch college football growing up, his father was aware that Auburn had won the national championship in 1957 and expressed concern that Auburn was little more than “a big Southern football school,” Oakberg says.

         Touring campus for only a day, the elder Oakberg told his son to wait in their ’64 Ford outside the newly built Ralph B. Draughan Library while he went inside.

         “That’s what he used to gauge whether or not I would get the academic education he wanted: what reference material was there, who was published there, that type of thing. He came back out
and said, ‘Okay, you can go here’.

DESPITE UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS of transparency around the world, the 1992 discovery at Al-Tuwaitha, Iraq,
was a sobering reminder of the dangers lurking just outside
the IAEA’s scope.

         As Iraq made headlines around the world, IAEA Director General ElBaradei was routinely called on to deliver statements based on research done by Oakberg and his team throughout
the 1990s.

         ElBaradei testified before the second Gulf War that Iraq’s nuclear capability was conclusively diminished and that Hussein did not possess any weapons of mass destruction following the measures taken under Additional Protocol.

         When the IAEA was awarded the Nobel Prize for Science in 2005, it was the culmination of more than a half-century of work by the whole of the International Safeguards community. 

         Though awarded specifically for their efforts during the Al-Tuwaitha affair, without the people organizing the travel arrangements or the inspectors gathering information around the world, systems analysts wouldn’t be able to do their jobs, Oakberg said.

         Asked about winning the Nobel Prize, Oakberg compares
it to “winning the Heisman trophy and the National Championship at the same time,” but admits it was the furthest thing on his mind when
he graduated from Auburn nearly 40 years earlier.

         While minoring in geography and foreign languages would serve him well throughout his career, everything boiled down to that math degree, he says. 

         “It proves that solving equations and proving
theorems can lead to a fairly successful career, and that’s what it was. What your brain has to engage in order to prove a complex theorem or solve a complex equation as an information analyst. That’s what a math degree did for me.”

         At Auburn’s 2015 Spring Commencement Oakberg received an honorary Doctorate of Science from the university, an honor he places next to the Nobel Prize.

        MANDATORY RETIREMENT FORCED Oakberg out of the
IAEA in 2007, but he soon found work as a safeguards consultant for the U.S. Government for Emerging Nuclear Powers, still helping developing countries meet IAEA and NPT requirements.

         Though outside the IAEA for the first time since 1982,
Oakberg still maintains contacts within the agency and praised the recent deal that would allow Iran to develop nuclear power plants under extra measures that will restrict their program for the next 15 years.

         Thanks to the efforts of the IAEA and people like Oakberg dedicated to curbing the use of nuclear weapons, the world is not on the brink of atomic warfare—but the potential still exists.

         Even if every country agreed to NPT and Additional Protocol, there’s always the risk of isolated groups acquiring nuclear capabilities in secret, making transparency and open communication between parties more important than ever. 

         “If I were to say what would be No. 1 on my wish list, it would be for every country in the world to agree to NPT,” Oakberg says. “Let’s do that first, and then let’s worry about the weapons.

“I wonder what it would take to get the whole world to just do away with the dang things?”