Tag Archives: nuclear proliferation

April 2020 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?

Most hopeful story:

  • Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month.

this year’s doomsday clock

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The good news is the clock has not been moved any closer to midnight. The bad news there are only two minutes to go, which is as close as they put it at any point during the cold war. The reasons they give are climate change and, yes, good old nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear realm, the United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and announced it would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), grave steps towards a complete dismantlement of the global arms control process. Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, the urgent North Korean nuclear dilemma remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs of “nuclear modernization” that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

NYT on Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Program

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The New York Times has a disturbing article about Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program. It is somewhat of an open secret that their nuclear program has been to bankroll Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program over the years. The U.S. and most media outlets that I am aware of have turned a blind eye to that, even as we have been attacked by some of their citizens and fought against their extremist proxies for 17 years now. We also fought two wars in Iraq at least partly to protect their government against aggression. Apparently they are asking for nuclear energy technology that can be used for peaceful purposes, but it can also be weaponized, and they are resisting efforts to include unconditional UN weapons inspections in any deal. Putting more nuclear materials within potential reach of these extremists, whether in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia itself, seems like a bad idea.

can a nuclear warhead trigger a volcano or earthquake?

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I think you have to take this with a grain of salt, but yes, according to this dubious Russian source. The article bases part of its argument on Giphys of Terminator 2 and 2012.

The president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems believes that an “asymmetrical response” would work much better for Russia, as it is able to produce nuclear weapons with a yield of more than 100 megatons.

If “areas with critically dangerous geophysical conditions in the US (like the Yellowstone Supervolcano or the San Andreas Fault)” are targeted by those warheads, “such an attack guarantees the destruction of the US as a state and the entire transnational elite,” he said.

The production of around 40 or 50 such mega-warheads for ICBMs or extra-long-range torpedoes would make sure that at least a few of them reach their target no matter how a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia develops, the expert said.

Digging into Wikipedia a little bit, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested was in fact a 50-megaton bomb detonated by the USSR in 1961, and it was originally designed to be 100 megatons. The largest ever detonated by the US was 15 megaton device in 1954. It is worth noting thought that modern nuclear missiles can have 8 or more warheads attached to them.

terrifying Putin quote

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Vladimir Putin either made a very terrifying statement here, or it just didn’t translate well.

An AI arms race doesn’t necessarily have to be a winner-takes-all scenario, though. Putin noted that Russia did not want to see any one country “monopolize” the field, and said instead: “If we become leaders in this area, we will share this know-how with entire world, the same way we share our nuclear technologies today.”

What a generous guy.

nuclear proliferation and non-state actors

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This post on Lawfare talks about three ways people and groups other than nation-states could get their hands on nuclear weapons.

That entails blocking the pathways to terrorist acquisition of a nuclear weapon. There are three possibilities for how a terrorist organization might acquire the bomb: transfer—the sale or handoff of a weapon from a nuclear-weapon state; leakage—the theft of a nuclear weapon or weapons-grade fissile material; and indigenous production—the construction of a nuclear device from illicitly obtained weapons-grade fissile material.

Each pathway to nuclear acquisition by a non-state terrorist group is contingent on an act of commission or negligence by a state. The “leakage” of a weapon to a terrorist group would originate from one of the nine nuclear-weapon states or the 22 states (at current count) with weapons-grade fissile material in their civilian stocks. Among this group, the countries of greatest concern regarding the nexus of proliferation and terrorism—North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia—are each continuing their development of nuclear weapons and risking broader proliferation, including to non-state actors.

North Korea is on the verge of a strategic breakout both quantitatively, by ramping up its number of warheads to possibly as many as 100 weapons by 2020, and qualitatively, by mastering warhead miniaturization. And it would have few qualms about selling nuclear materials for the right price. Pyongyang is known, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, for its willingness to “sell anything they have to anybody who has the cash to buy it.” Pakistan continues to build up its nuclear arsenal (including the development of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons), employs terrorism as an instrument of state policy, and faces the internal security threat of radical Islamists attempting to infiltrate its nuclear establishment. And Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union’s vast nuclear arsenal and stocks of fissile material, terminated its nuclear-security cooperation with the United States under the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program put in place by the Nunn-Lugar Act in 1991.

the value of nuclear weapons

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Moral considerations aside, Richard N. Haas gives a clear explanation of why nuclear weapons are attractive to countries.

Decades ago, Israel made such a calculation in the face of Arab threats to eliminate the Jewish state. More recently, Ukraine, Libya, and Iraq all gave up their nuclear weapons programs either voluntarily or under pressure. Subsequently, Ukraine was invaded by Russia, Iraq by the US, and Libya by the US and several of its European partners. Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya were ousted.

North Korea has avoided such a fate, and the third generation of the Kim family rules with an iron fist. It is doubtful that the lesson is lost on Kim Jong-un.

You could try to estimate what it would cost for a particular country to have a conventional military equal in deterrent power to a few nuclear weapons. And the answer is almost certainly that they couldn’t afford it, even if they had the people and technology and productive capacity necessary. So a nuclear deterrent seems very logical. Of course the problem is that when everybody has them, or even a substantial fraction of countries has them, the risk to everybody becomes much higher than if nobody had them.

Another thing I learned from this article is that the UN General Assembly in July created (I don’t know if that is the right legal word) a treaty designed to facilitate long-term disarmament and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. It may not be legally binding or backed by serious political power at the moment, but it shows leadership and could give serious, ethical leaders something to point to in future negotiations. Imagine for example if China, Russia, and the United States decided to throw their weight behind this.

small modular reactors

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Even though there haven’t been a lot of commercial nuclear reactors built in the U.S., nuclear energy research and development has progressed since the plants we are most familiar with from the 1970s. Here is Forbes talking about a new type of small modular reactor.

This nuclear reactor is something that we’ve never seen before – a small modular reactor that is economic, factory built and shippable, flexible enough to desalinate seawater, refine oil, load-follow wind, produce hydrogen, modular to make the power plant any size, and that provides something we’ve all been waiting for – a reactor that cannot meltdown.

This last point is the really big deal with SMRs. The small size of each module changes the surface-area-to-volume ratio such that heat can be siphoned off easily so that the reactor can’t melt down…

Refueling of SMRs do not require the nuclear plant to shut down. The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio of NuScale’s reactor core, that sits below ground in a super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete power blackout, with no humans needed to intervene, no AC or DC power, no pumps, and no additional water for cooling.

I support nuclear energy provided the risks of past designs can be mitigated, and it sounds like there is progress in that direction. Uranium still has to be mined, enriched, transported, and disposed of safely, of course, and safer reactors do not address that issue. There is also the proliferation issue, coupled with the fairness issue of who gets to decide which countries are allowed to have nuclear technology and which are not. But there are no zero-risk options. With the health and climate risks of continuing to burn fossil fuels on a massive scale becoming more obvious every day, we should be giving nuclear a cautious look.

the party platforms on nuclear weapons

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Yesterday I suggested a realistic path to elimination of U.S. nuclear weapons – phasing out of everything but submarine-launched weapons as they become obsolete, renewed participation in global nonproliferation efforts, negotiations with other nuclear powers to give up their weapons in exchange for elimination of the submarine weapons, then finally robust inspections and verification. Let’s see what the U.S. political party platforms have to say.

The Republican Platform:

We must modernize nuclear weapons and their delivery platforms, end the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, and rebuild relationships with our allies, who understand that as long as the U.S. nuclear arsenal is their shield, they do not need to engage in nuclear proliferation.

The Democratic Platform:

Democrats are committed to preventing the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and to eventually ridding the planet of these catastrophic weapons. We believe America will be safer in a world with fewer weapons of mass destruction. Donald Trump encourages the spread of nuclear weapons across Asia and the Middle East, which would weaken the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and he is unwilling to rule out using a nuclear weapon against ISIS.

Democrats want to reduce the number of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons around the world, as well as their means of delivery, while retaining a strong deterrent as long as others maintain nuclear strike capabilities. We will strengthen the NPT, push for the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and stop the spread of loose nuclear material. Democrats will be informed by a new Nuclear Posture Review in determining continued ways to appropriately shape our nuclear deterrent, with the aim of reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons while meeting our national security obligations. Democrats will also seek new opportunities for further arms control and avoid taking steps that create incentives for the expansion of existing nuclear weapons programs. To this end, we will work to reduce excessive spending on nuclear weapons-related programs that are projected to cost $1 trillion over the next 30 years.

The Green Platform:

Our government should establish a policy to abolish nuclear weapons. It should set the conditions and schedule for fulfilling that goal by taking the following steps:

  • Declare a no-first-strike policy.
  • Declare a no-pre-emptive strike policy.
  • Declare that the U.S. will never threaten or use a nuclear weapon, regardless of size, on a non-nuclear nation.
  • Sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Our pledge to end testing will open the way for non-nuclear states to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which has been held up by our refusal to sign the CTBT. Honor the conditions set in the NPT for nuclear nations.
  • Reverse our withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and honor its stipulations.
  • End the research, testing and stockpiling of all nuclear weapons of any size.
  • Dismantle all nuclear warheads from their missiles.

The Libertarian Platform

No individual, group, or government may initiate force against any other individual, group, or government.

The protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of government. Government is constitutionally limited so as to prevent the infringement of individual rights by the government itself. The principle of non-initiation of force should guide the relationships between governments.

We support the maintenance of a sufficient military to defend the United States against aggression. The United States should both avoid entangling alliances and abandon its attempts to act as policeman for the world.

I suppose I like the Green statement best, but I am enough of a realist to suggest we establish moral authority by eliminating most of our weapons, but could keep a small number of submarine-based weapons in place and use them as a bargaining chip to get concessions from others. I am also enough of a realist that unless and until we have some sort of runoff or ranking-based voting, I’ll vote for the best candidate with a reasonable chance of winning. That pretty much leaves me supporting the Democrats’ somewhat tepid but basically on-target message. Getting defense-industry money out of politics would make it more likely that a Democratic leader could actually make real progress toward implementing their rhetoric.