Can We Still Blow Up the World?

I was recently asked the following questions: How many times could we blow up the world with the number of nuclear missiles New START will take off the table? And with the number still on the table afterwards, how many times can we blow up the planet?  Here is my response:

I’ve actually never thought there was a good answer to the questions you pose.  First of all, you can’t really “blow up the world.”  What you can do, though, is destroy civilization and potentially annihilate the human species and most complex life.  We could do the worst we can to the planet and it will survive us, although not in a way we would necessarily recognize over the next few hundred thousand years.  And it is unlikely that members of our species would be here to observe the planet at all after an all-out nuclear war.

That Little Problem of Nuclear Energy

 I recently wrote this short piece for an online publication in the UK called The Fresh Outlook.

Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant makes the world a more dangerous place. There – I said it. On this point, I am in agreement with the hardliners in Israel, the United States and the West in general. Where our viewpoints diverge, though, is why it is dangerous and what we should do about it.

Article IV of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty gives “the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.” In this sense, Iran is well within its rights to develop and operate one or more nuclear power plants.

However, given the relative ease with which a country can employ dual-use technologies to clandestinely develop a nuclear weapons programme, perhaps it is time to reconsider spreading nuclear power plants across the globe. Apart from the astronomical expense, danger of operation and lack of a plan for highly toxic waste, a double standard of encouraging nuclear energy in “good” countries and trying to prevent it in “bad” countries simply cannot hold.

A silver lining?

Climate of austerity creates window of opportunity for nuclear disarmament
Last week, the United Kingdom was under the spell of the coalition government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, which unveiled the biggest cuts in public expenditure in decades. Announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in the House of Commons last Thursday, the Spending Review proposes a £81bn ($127bn) cut in public spending over four years. These measures have been both applauded as necessary to tackle Britain’s deficit and condemned as leading the country into a double-dip recession. Time will tell where the truth lies.

What is certain is that departments will undergo cuts averaging 25%. Although substantially less, the 8% cuts (or £4.7bn) that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) faces still translates into 42,000 service personnel and civil servants losing their jobs over the next five years and the cancellation of high-profile equipment.

A day ahead of the Spending Review, Prime Minister David Cameron presented in the House of Commons his government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review to clarify the strategy behind the MoD cuts. The first wide-ranging analysis of British defence spending since 1998, the strategy takes some steps toward recognizing Britain’s diminished standing in the current world order and associated security and military requirements. For example, it makes clear that the UK will not be able to mount large scale operations like those in Iraq and Afghanistan for at least a decade and emphasizes the importance of conflict prevention as opposed to military intervention. Unfortunately, however, it does not go far enough in shifting resources accordingly. It still envisions the UK as a global player and proudly portrays the country as “punching above its weight” in conventional military terms. Fortunately, it seems the review process has opened the door to allowing more realism in further assessments of Britain’s defence policy and force structures.

The 65th Anniversary of the Nuclear Age

July 16, 1945 marked the beginning of the Nuclear Age. On that day, the United States conducted the first explosive test of an atomic device. The test was code-named Trinity and took place at the Alamogordo Test Range in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto Desert. The bomb itself was code-named “The Gadget.”

The Trinity test used a plutonium implosion device, the same type of weapon that would be used on the city of Nagasaki just three and a half weeks later. It had the explosive force of 20 kilotons of TNT.

The names associated with the test deserve reflection. “The Gadget,” something so simple and innocuous, was exploded in a desert whose name in Spanish means “Journey of Death.” Plutonium, the explosive force in the bomb, was named for Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. The isotope of plutonium that was used in the bomb, plutonium-239, is one of the most deadly radioactive materials on the planet. It existed only in minute quantities on Earth before the US began creating it for use in its bombs by the fissioning of uranium-238.

There is no definitive explanation for why the test was named Trinity, but it generally seems most associated with a religious concept of God. The thoughts of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project to create the bomb and the person who named the test, provide insights into the name:

“Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: ‘As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.’ That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person'd God.’”

New START Op-Ed Roundup!

This week saw a slew of op-eds about New START. It began when The Washington Post published former MA governor Mitt Romney’s op-ed on Tuesday, June 6th. Not only did Romney toe the conservative line regarding the ratification of New START, but he also concocted some new gems most Republicans don’t even use, such as the issue of placing ICBMs on bombers. On Wednesday, John Kerry wrote his own op-ed slamming Romney; Kerry even got in a personal dig, claiming Romney blatantly ignored the facts because he was in a “footrace to the right against Sarah Palin.” The same day, Steven Pifer and Strobe Talbott, analysts from the Brookings Institution, also wrote op-eds for The Washington Post debunking Romney’s claims. Yesterday, Jon Kyl’s piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal. To nobody’s surprise, Kyl did not support New START, but his piece was considerably tamer than Romney’s.

Many bloggers have already written extensively about these op-eds, but here's a conciser version of what you need to know...links and highlights after the jump:

New START vs. FY2011 Budget

In his Prague speech, President Obama proclaimed in order for the world to be free of nuclear weapons, the U.S. must spearhead a reduction of its nuclear arsenal. He won the hearts of many in the non-proliferation field when he stated that the U.S. would begin reducing its stockpile under his administration. How disheartening to us all, then, when we learned that his FY2011 budget reflected exactly the opposite. Far from committing funds for disarmament, he actually slashed the dismantlement program by 40%. By caving to conservative demands of modernization, Obama not only breaks his Prague promise, but acts against the spirit of New START.

New START is a follow-on to an agreement originally made between the U.S. and USSR to dismantle the relics of the Cold War, in order to build relations between the two adversaries, as well as reduce the risk of a nuclear accident. How strange then, that as the U.S. agrees to dismantle several hundred weapons with one hand, it funds the construction of weapons fuel facilities and Life Extension Programs (LEP) for aging arsenals with the other.