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Former Crypto-Analyst Analyzes the Danger of Nuclear Weapon Stockpiles
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that noted encryption pioneer Prof. Martin Hellman has a new passion; estimating the risk of our current nuclear weapons policies. His web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, asks the question, 'How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.' Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.' The web site and a related statement therefore urgently call for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct his startling conclusion. The statement has been signed by seven notable individuals including former NSA Director Adm. Bobby R. Inman and two Nobel Laureates."
...which are managed by a monkey and operated by people with a god complex.
I find the summary misleading. I thought the risk analysis was about incidents with nuclear weapons when at peace, but he only calculates the risks of all out nuclear war.
While it's an interseting number it's not a useful one to take a decision, since one of the sad premise of today's war strategy is that, since others have the nuclear weapon, you must have it too. No one is going to dump his nuke stocks because he might have to use them some days.
It's like doing an article summary saying "having a gun in your room is dangerous", when it really means "a gunfight is something that might happen".
I would have been more interested by numbers about the effects of an all out nuclear war. The only ones I can remember are that a US president was told (during the cold war) that scenarios predicted 300 million american death *at best* in a *winned* nuclear war against Russia. The second one ( which I'm not sure about) is that, at the peak of the number of nukes between US and Russia, they could have "destroyed the earth 52 times" (killed everything on it? phisically shatter?).
Does anyone have more details concerning these numbers?
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
Basis of his 'estimates'? Access to SIOP? Access to any other data, either physical or strategic of our, our allies or our 'adversaries' nuclear weapons/plans? Oh.. zero? By all means lets trumpet his 'work' outside his area of training as authoritative, complete with requisite frightening headlines.
While he may have "woken up" to the threat of nuclear weapons, and can use his established reputation to help reduce the threat they pose, he is certainly not an expert and his opinions (for that is all they are) carry no greater weight than yours or mine.
Beware of celebreties with a cause.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
That's reassuring, because it seems unlikely that my home will ever be surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.
Would it be better if my home was surrounded by thousands of oil refineries instead?
Oh, whoops, I'm in Houston, it probably is.
I also wonder if the murder of the ex-KGB agent using polonium was a covert warning - because, of course, if you have access to enough polonium you can made a gadget to trigger a plutonium weapon, which can be quite small and, even if it fails to create a fission explosion, has enough HE to spread radioactives over a large area.
Our desire for cheap international trade based around largely uninspected shipping containers exposes us to an enormous risk.If all shipped goods had to be properly inspected at point of entry, trade would suffer a bit, it would be less attractive to make things cheaply in China or Thailand, but a huge hole in the security system would be fixed. It's ridiculous that air travelers are inspected at vast inconvenience and expense when it is literally possible to import a bomb's worth of uranium or plutonium with no real checks at all.
Amusingly, after demonstrating how pathetic the security systems for freight are, one of the authors of the article was put on the airport watch list for several months, thus demonstrating that the no fly and watch business is about control and shutting up awkward people.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Real scientists should shun these kinds of people. This guy has a completely unverifiable model and feeds garbage information into it. He's trying to predict the likelihood of deterrence failing. But it's never failed, so he has no data to go off of. Not only has it never failed, when we think deterrence has been close to failing, we have no way of knowing how close. There's simply no way to assign probabilities to complex chains of events involving humans.
There's nothing to be learned from a model like this. It's just a good way to lie to yourself and others. It's not falsifiable. It's not science. It's politics.
and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.'
So if one of these nuclear power plants exploded (that's the risk being talked about here?), how large would the crater be, expressed in Libraries of Congress? Also, how likely would such an event be, expressed in chances of successfully dropping a penny from the top of the Empire State Building into someone's pocket?
You just got troll'd!
If having all these nuclear weapons is "equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.", then I feel pretty safe... I mean, despite all the hype around "nuclear disasters" at these power plants, they have proven very safe when managed properly. Most nuclear plants have been running in the U.S. and France for more than 30 years without issues.
But I doubt this is where Mr Hellman was coming from. Instead, he was using the hype of the nuclear power plants being bad and dangerous to (unsuccessfully) draw a comparison to try to scare people, making him just another alarmist (sorta like Al Gore is for Global Warming).
Instead of trying to scare people with such silly hype and alarmist speech, could we an intelligent conversation? Thanks.
The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse - the fissionables have zero chance of exploding.
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I got inducted as a Tau Bate in college, when I was studying EE. A lifetime subscription to 'The Bent' was one of the two biggest benefits (the other being the special ring that gets you free sodas from vending machines).
The Bent usually has great cover articles. Sometimes you get an article of the multi-cnetury history of global position determination, sometimes an explaination of the LIGO project. On rare occasion, you get a Libertarian discussing how things could be changed for the better in modern America; I generally agree with the articles, but realisticly they have as much chance of implementation as Ron Paul has of getting elected. Getting an article into The Bent is a great way to get it in front of some of the brightest people in the world, so I can see why Hellman used it.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....The Chernobyl plant exploded, and the biggest fear during the TMI incident was of an explosion. Explosions can include chemical and/or pressure driven events, not just fission chain reactions.
That's patently false, especially if you consider the risks of sabotage or terrorist attacks, which are probably higher than the risk of technical failure. Shit happens.
Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
It used to be (in the 50s) that scientists predicted the survival of human civilisation in Africa and Australia after a nuclear war.
After the 60s pretty much everyone predicted (maybe they now predict, if they didn't factor in the dust problem, but calculated with nuclear stockpiles ready somewhere around the 1960s) the end of life as we know it if there was a nuclear war.
The reason is pretty simple. Because of the large detonations a lot of dust would be thrown into the air. It would be so much and would be thrown so high that it would turn the earth dark shutting out the sun. That is called nuclear winter. It would kill all live that depends in some way on the sun.
While radiation is a problem, it is by far not the biggest one. The term "nuclear winter" can be a bit misleading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
I prefer to assume that it was a criminal gang, on the basis that the officials of the KGB and its successor are not stupid. If a Russian mafia organisation has access to significant quantities of radioactives and the necessary laboratory facilities, this is a demonstration that they could potentially build a bomb, and transport bomb making materials on civil aircraft and around London. If the real KGB wanted to kill somebody, I am sure they could do it far more easily and less traceably, without causing a diplomatic incident.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
(But that is a reasonable question -- you get points for skepticism.)
This teaches 2 related lessons about journalism and science:
(1) There are 2 kinds of publications in the world -- those that check their facts and those that don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. This is why some obscure guy publishing a blog can be more reliable than most major newspapers and TV stations. (Or in this case, why IEEE Spectrum is more reliable than most daily newspapers.)
(2) There are 2 kinds of scientists in the world -- those who gather a consensus of experts before going public, and those who don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. (This is why that story recently about cell phones causing brain cancer by an Australian neurologist was complete bullshit.) Hellman is competent enough in science to know that.
According to TFA http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6099
Hellman's method isn't unfamiliar to those trying to gauge the risk of failure for complex systems, such as nuclear reactors. IEEE Spectrum asked J. Wesley Hines, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, to examine Hellman's methods, which were detailed in the appendix of the Bent article. "I only read the appendix but feel his argument is rational and also feel his methods are justified," says Hines. "Some could argue with the numbers he used, but he does give logical reasons for using those numbers and admits that they have large uncertainties since the events have been rare in the past."
Robert N. Charette, who runs the risk-management consultancy ITABHI and is a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum, agrees with Hines. However, he says Hellman should have also turned the analysis on its head. "The other side of the risk equation is, suppose you get rid of nuclear weapons. Does that increase the probability of war? Pretending there aren't any nukes, how many wars would we have had?"
And the signers http://nuclearrisk.org/statement.php The above statement has been endorsed by the following Charter Signers:*
Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics; see also Nobel Announcement
Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, Verisign Inc.
Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President's Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board; see also NY Times article
Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director NSA and Deputy Director CIA
Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of FDA
Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics; see also Nobel Announcement
(BTW, here's a tip for any student. You used to be able to get a student membership in the IEEE, which includes a subscription to Spectrum and another (expensive) IEEE magazine of your choice, for some ridiculously low amount like $12 a year. It's a great deal for the magazines alone, although IEEE membership has even better benefits that most students don't even know about.)
I'm old enough to remember being told it would never happen and not be smug about it like the earlier poster. The risk is pretty low but a relatively minor accident in the Ukrane (steam explosion in only one of several units) had major consequences.
They are different issues anyway. Extreme secrecy combined with declining resources to look after existing weapons and people chosen for reasons other than competance create one set of problems and increasing proliferation create others. There were treaties to prevent furthur weapons development but ironicly the end of the cold war changed that and there are new nuclear weapons being developed in the USA as well as the places we all like to complain about. Perhaps there is also a new weapons program in Russia but it just hasn't got anything in the press yet.
If somebody could convince those old idiots that think the cold war was the good old days to retire we could be part of the solution instead of a major addition to the problem.
Most nuclear plants have been running in the U.S. and France for more than 30 years without issues.
Most, without issues?. Not all? What does most mean to us?
1. -- Some exerpts from "The Politics of Power: Risks and Costs of Nuclear Power Plants": http://www.garynull.com/The%20Politics%20of%20Power%20Final%20&%20Final%20Footnotes.pdf
The NAS (The National Academies of Science (NAS) report, Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation,) finding had long ago been discovered and presented by John Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California and Chairman of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (CNR). Dr. Gofman said the following in 1994:
The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell...Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't...I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer ... it's not a question of 'We don't know.' The DOE
has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can
now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this
truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.
and
Critics complain that nuclear energy is expensive because of (1) the time and resources it takes to build and decommission nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities; (2) the hidden costs of mining the uranium ores, reprocessing and storing the waste, and purging the environment of radioactive pollution; and (3) costly health problems from exposure to low level radiation. The Department of Energy (DOE) has admitted that, "economic viability for a nuclear plant is difficult to demonstrate."
Thomas Cochran, a nuclear physicist and Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says that nuclear power is "uneconomical, it has a safety problem, it has a horrendous proliferation problem on the global level, and it has a long-term waste problem that hasn't been solved."iii He notes that "nuclear power would be a great solution to greenhouse gases" that cause global warming, were it not for those four problems!
2. -- http://www.atomicarchive.com/Reports/Japan/Accidents.shtml This link is a list of "Major Nuclear Power Plant Incidents" from around the world, including the US.
Here's another one from last year in Michigan: http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/02/palisades_nuclear_power_plant.html
3. -- http://www.redcross.org/images/pdfs/code/nuclear_power_plant.pdf and http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/nuclear_power_plants.shtm are links to the Red Cross and FEMA nuclear power plant incident preparedness documents.
4. -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7553564094124690254
AMBASSADOR DE SADE:
It was to have been announced at the party congress next week. I did not know the fools would make it operational until then.
GENERAL TURGEDSON:
Well, what the hell is a Doomsday Machine?
AMBASSADOR DE SADE:
Well, it has been explained to me that, if you add a thick Cobalt-Thorium-G jacket to a nuclear device, the radioactivity resulting from such a nuclear explosion will retain its lethal power for a hundred years.
Our scientists calculated that the detonation of fifty of our biggest nuclear devices, jacketed in Cobalt-Thorium-G would enshroud the earth in a hundred years of lethal radioactivity from which no human life could escape. In ten months the Earth would be as dead as the Moon.
The word is 'cryptanalyst', not 'crypto-analyst'. And Hellman is a cryptographer (or cryptologist), not a cryptanalyst. Cryptographers create encryption schemes; cryptanalysts break them.
People make those claims because they're good arguments. When you find a problem in something you've built, do you fix it, or give up and scrap the whole project? By your logic, we shouldn't be building houses, much less anything more complex. Chernobyl *was* poorly-designed and (at the time of the accident) run by a skeleton screw of incompetents. TMI *was* due to fixable problems, and injured, let's see, *nobody*.Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
The Bhopal chemical plant accident has killed 20,000 people and injured over 120,000. Chemical plant accidents are much more common than nuclear plant accidents and are often much more dangerous. Do a search for "United States refinery accidents". Several of the links on the first page are for lawyers -- that's how much worse it is. Does that mean we should shut down all chemical plants? No, because the problems are correctly recognized to be with the design and operation of the plants, which (despite what you seem to think) are not "anomalies" but systemic problems that can be fixed. Plants with good safety systems and procedures still have accidents, but few to no people are killed. Look at the history of nuclear power accidents and you'll see that almost all of them are like this. A reactor goes critical, but is contained. A worker doesn't follow procedure when replacing a part -- he's killed, but nobody else is.
Chernobyl was 22 years ago. TMI was 29 years ago. If nuclear power is so dangerous, why do the same two (bad) examples keep getting talked about over and over? Why do we have to turn to the Soviet Union (hardly a world leader in safety) for an example of a real disaster? The answer is that fear of nuclear power, like fear of terrorism, is largely a modern-day bogeyman created by a failure to understand the scale of the risks involved.
Visit the
So, how many nuclear reactors in this country have been sabotaged or the object of terrorist attacks? Zero? There is little basis for the assumption that they are especially vulnerable (I'd worry more about being in the local Mall when someone with a dynamite vest decided to REALLY terrorize us).
Yah, too bad the only "anomalies" that nuclear power suffered under were Chernobyl (not a stupid design, but the test being run there that caused the problem was definitely an idiotic test) and TMI (where, basically, noone was injured, or even exposed to enough radioactivity to be harmed - I could wish the four traffic accidents I've seen so far this AM had produced so few injuries).
Fact is, nuclear power is still safe as houses (safer, if New Orleans is any guideline - did you know that there are two reactors within the area of effect of Katrina? Nothing happened to them, they didn't even bother shutting down).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
ABCDEFCGHICJKHLCMNAOCDEFCHJKCHCGJDPMECQKKR
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and their Doomsday Clock, it is 5 Minutes to Midnight:
http://www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/
They also mention the main non-nuclear threats like global warming and the other WMDs.
Many will sy we manufacture many complex things, like planes and cars, but these have real world legal consequences if they do not work. What about the launch vehicle? How many launch vehicle blow up on the pad during launch? And those has been carefully build and tested. How many components on space shuttle fail? How many caps or resisters are put in wrong? How many space craft, built we assume with more care than warheads, have failed immediately after deployment due to failure of compenents?
Without RTFA, I don't know what the threat is, but the greatest threat is upon launch some significant percentage of out nukes will just blow up over the US, or in the silos, leeching fissionable material across the heartland. I think the trigger mechanism are reliable enough that once detonated, most will work, and there is little risk of unintented detonation.
As far as the risk of others making nukes, I don't know. The fissionable material has been quite available for 15-20 years, and most parties do not seem interested. There are just so many other safer and more reliable ways to massacre huge number of people. A nuclear missile is a weapon of war, not a weapon of terror, and mostly even the first world countries seem to prefer the violence of the later to the relative order of the former. No one likes to be regulated, i guess. Then there is the sheer technical difficulty. There is a reason why we use conventional bombs rather than biological agents, nuclear materal, or magical binary liquid bombs. Because other than being useful in writing fantasy novels to start and continue offensives that bankrupt countries, anything else than conventional weapons are really more complicate they need be.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Whenever the next generation cannot read,
and/or forgets how to maintain nuclear power plants like Chernobyl
or, say, Minuteman missiles in their silos,
it is time to get worried.
VERY WORRIED!
RR
I'm an old timer who can remember duck and cover drills (don't look at the bright light, etc.) in school, and used to have a copy of the Army's old 1956 manual on The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, did lots of reading - used to subscribe to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, etc. - and tend to follow that stuff even today, only more casually. When we lived in Southern California in the 1950's, I can remember the AEC announcing A-tests and putting directions to the public parking area in the papers, and if the wind shifted they blasted away anyway!
Among my eclectic readings, I recall in the 1960's there was a John Birch Society reading room not far from our home, and I liked to keep track of all the elements out there. I recall a book there written by the former head of AEC security who stated the Soviets had not made a bomb of their own prior to 1954 except that they had stolen material and or bombs from the US. Given that we used to have prototypes of the latest Soviet tanks and airplanes undergoing testing at various government proving grounds at the time that seems pretty credible (they used to fly the brand new MIG-21, not yet operational in the Soviet Air Force, out of an air base in San Antonio, where we lived, and the newspapers and TV stations were "discreet"). I used to read a lot of heavy literature on MAD, etc., and one of my favorite remembrances of the literature of that era was a parody of the captain of the Titanic which began: "If struck by an iceberg - we would never strike first -....."
I recall in the '73 (?) Middle East War, there were comments in the paper and on TV that the US had detected Soviet nuclear weapons on a ship moving through the Dardanelles (out of the Black Sea into the Med), and this from a plane flying at 20,000 feet. Supposedly they were heading to Egypt to give the Egyptians some real firepower to use on Israel. The supposed response of the Israelis was to line up their nukes next to attack aircraft for the next overflight of a Russian satellite. The shit you used to see in the papers if you were on the lookout for this sort of thing!
Those of you old enough to remember the demise of the Soviet Union may not have noted the obscure note on the wire services (quickly removed) during the time that the Soviets had moved something like 500,000 troops to a base near the capitol of Estonia. The reports were of a commando raid on a Soviet weapons storage facility elsewhere in Estonia, and "unconfirmed reports" were that 25+ weapons went out through the wire that night. For the next week, all the papers and TV news reports, and I mean all of them, showed pictures of groups of unhappy bored Soviet soldiers still on their bases. In fact, they never left their bases until they returned to the former Soviet Union. Stories were that the Soviets had been given a message about what would happen if the soldiers ever left their barracks. The bizarre staged photos of the troops "still on their bases" seems to support this.
My point of the three previous comments is that there has probably been a long history of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials escaping from proper command and control - probably literally from the days of the Manhattan Project. The remote detection capabilities of 35 years ago means that any re-assurances that there are no nuclear materials unaccounted for should not be in the least reassuring!!! If you are sensitive to the meaning of words, you will note, for instance, that they have never, not once, said that nuclear materials or actual weapons were not stolen from the former Soviet Union. The US and the Russians are unanimous in this subterfuge. "We have accounted for all of them." Even given evidence that a substantial number of weapons were in fact no longer in the Russian arsenal.
Then today there are the Pakistani's, the North Koreans and probably the Chinese peddling nuclear bomb technology and materials. The efforts of Iran to get the bomb (and they never stopped, which is obvious even in the body of the famous recent National Intelli
Just because the cold war is over people tend to assume nuclear war isn't much of a risk anymore. I think the risk of a nuclear war is high and increasing, and believe that nuclear weapons are still the number one threat to the survival of the human race.
More countries have nukes than at the height of the cold war, some of those (india and pakistan for example) with pretty belligerent attitudes towards each other. The US is increasing its already massive arsenal, and working on a missile defense system that most of the other nuclear powers see as a first strike weapon. This encourages proliferation and increases tensions, for example with russia.
Add to that the impending consequences of global warming, and the struggle for resources this will no doubt trigger, and the powder keg that is the current conflict over dwindling oil resources in the middle east, and I think the risk of a serious global conflict that could spill over into nuclear war is much higher than is generally credited.
The only sane path is still multilateral disarmament. The longer these weapons exist the more the cumulative probability of their use approaches 1, you don't need to be a cryptographer to work that one out.
The reason is the effects of an accident: ruining the real estate values of the area of a small US state for almost a century. It doesn't matter that the radiation effects wouldn't actually be all that dangerous or that not all that many people would be killed. The way people perceive the accident would cause a huge disruption to a large area, and it would have negative affects hugely disproportionate to the actual damages.
Chernobyl was a big factor in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a country which had survived Stalinism and utter devastation in WWII. Rightly or wrongly, a major nuclear power accident is extremely traumatic. People just don't get that worked up over diffuse threats such as how many people die from coal soot. Your complaints won't change the psychology of the population at large, nor will it make the risks of an accident or attack exactly zero. And that was the reason I made my post: the GP post was essentially claiming that the risks are zero. They aren't, and the characteristics of a nuclear incident make its effects much more damaging to society than chemical plant accidents or mundane threats that routinely kill thousands of people per year.
Back in the late seventies, early eighties, when we were locked into a nuclear stalemate, I and much of the world were reasonably quite concerned. Back then, I read literally dozens of text books on the subject of nuclear deterrence and war fighting strategies. I was 'extremely' well informed. I am nowadays, much more concerned about other things. I would be the first to admit that a terrorist use of a nuke is a high probability, but there is virtually zero chance that such an event would lead to a global nuclear war.
... assumes that the experience of the first 50 years of deterrence can be extended into the future."
From the article:
"This simplified analysis
The experience of the first 50 years CANNOT be extended into the future. Those first 50 years were very different animals. We were poised in a 'mexican standoff' with a superpower enemy possessing a vast nuclear arsenal that feared and hated us. We no longer have such a superpower enemy. Even if Russia started to hate us the way the Soviet Union used to, they are no longer a superpower, they are a pale shadow of what the Soviet Union once was. Their existing arsenal is so old and unmaintained, most of their missiles wouldn't launch and the warheads wouldn't detonate. Most of their weapons are no longer in service. They maintain enough to serve as a deterrent against a nuclear attack by an opposing nation, but that is it. They cannot wage nuclear war.
There is only one nuclear war fighting capable nation on earth right now and that is the US. The US is not about to fight a nuclear war with itself. No other nation will use nukes against the US, unless their very existence was at stake and the US knows to not attack nations that could ship a bomb to us in a shipping crate. Global nuclear war requires two opponents both possessing a nuclear war fighting capacity. Deterrent forces alone are not sufficient for anything other than deterring the other guy from attacking. In order to strike first, you need a 'first strike' capacity, the idea that you have sufficient weapons to knock out with your first strike, the other guy's ability to strike back. Only the US has this capacity.
From the article:
"Because this estimate is based on a simplified, time invariant model, it does not apply to the current point in time when relations between the U.S. and Russia are significantly better than they were, on average, during the last 50 years. However that does not invalidate its conclusions."
Er, yes it does invalidate its conclusions. Obviously. The author suggests that the time may come when US/Russian relations deteriorate and asserts that this would then recreate the old situation. However Russia is no longer a superpower and could never again challenge the US in this regard. The Chinese could in theory build up to challenge the US in a new nuclear stalemate however and if China ever starts to build up it's nuclear forces, we would then have cause to worry. However we would likely see evidence of that sort of a buildup long before the threat matured and hopefully could take diplomatic action to change the situation.
Note also that China does not need to challenge the US with nukes. They hold a very effective deterrent against US aggression by the quantity of US dollars they hold in their reserve. If they were to ever dump those dollars into the global finance system, it would create a domino effect on the US dollar that would utterly crash the US economy. Both China and the US authorities know this.
As a total aside; a missile shield in the hands of the US could invalidate the deterrent forces of those nations possessing them. The US in theory could launch a disarming first strike against a nation and then use it's missile shield to shoot down the few missiles the disarming strike missed. This would result in the US being able to initiate a nuclear strike with impunity, even against a nation possessing a nuclear deterrent force. This is why a missile shield is opposed by most nations. In reality of course, such a disarming first strike could not be sure of stopping the shipping crate nukes that likely would be coming in retaliation.
Peter
Security seems to refer to this from a distance. And, while it may have changed in the 25 years since, too many times the folks running things and allocating resources for security, completely miss the main point of the word security.
To give you a furinstance, I was out riding on my motorcycle one Sunday afternoon, basically touring the areas back roads to see what might be around over the next hill. I won't name the area although it can be found on google maps if you know where to look. Anyway, I came across a side road, with an open wire gate laying in the weeds, and both the road and the fence looked as if they had had very little traffic or maintenance since they had been erected decades back. Turning in and puttering along, smelling the roses, the trail went over a small rise & then descended a hundred feet or so into a valley about half a mile across, and I could see at the top of the rise on the other side where this road seemed to continue to, what looked like a small building not much bigger than one of the outhouses we had when I was a child. Getting to the bottom of the valley I was able to see that it was covered with long piles of dirt. Approaching close there was a heavy door, and a rad sign on it. Then it went ding as to where I was, so I left back up that trail just as slowly as I came in since I didn't want to raise a dust cloud. Knowing where it was on the main road, I drove the bike down there the next sunday to check my memory of the little building and found it occupied by 2 guards whose eyes were carefully scanning the traffic. And never, ever, looking behind them at what it was they were supposed to be guarding. I would have thought that our repositories would have had more sophisticated alarm systems than what they obviously didn't have, and which allowed me to ride into the place from the backside, apparently completely un-observed.
I don't call that security, in fact I'd call it totally incompetant on the part of whomever was in charge.
I should have been spreadeagled with a few carbines cocked and locked while they 'checked me out'.
I have been that scene too since I use to do maintenance at a few of our titan sites back in the day. Sometimes whoever requested my services at the site would forget to tell the guards I was coming...
The population of the psychology at large is not fixed. Fear of nuclear power was and continues to be propagated by anti-nuclear activists, who happen to be louder than other people. It can be unmade, but not if people who know what they're talking about refuse to speak out.
Personally, I rank the real damage caused by coal plants as bigger threat than imaginary damage caused by lowered property values. Actually, I would love a nuclear plant in my back yard -- it would make it that much cheaper to buy a house.
Visit the
For another (older but still very relevant) look at this and related issues (such as what to do with the plutonium by-product of power generating reactors), look no further than John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy. It's an extraordinarily interesting issue that will only become more pressing as time goes on. Unfortunately, it isn't as widely reported on as it used to be, which I suspect is due to political/embarrassment reasons...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
These are items which in the US and Russian inventories, have been tested and tested and tested. The US and the former Soviet Union performed thousands of nuclear tests. Granted, they haven't, to my [limited] knowledge, done and "all up" test of a ballistic missile with warhead. Something about the atmospheric nuclear test ban gets in the way of such a test. The re-entry vehicles have been well tested. Every now and then, they pull a missile, take the warhead off, put in an inert warhead, and test launch it. Personally, I would have high confidence to both US and Russian nuclear weapons. Sure, in a real war scenario, some will fail, just like any other produced complex device, but I'd guess that far more work correctly than fail.
Remember: Every nuke has a warm heart. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
... Cooling of more than -20C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than -30C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.
I didn't put the link there for fun. Here is an interesting part:
2007 study on global nuclear war
A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in July 2007[3], Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences[4], used current climate models to look at the consequences of a global nuclear war involving most or all of the world's current nuclear arsenals (which the authors described as being only about a third the size of the world's arsenals twenty years earlier). The authors used a global circulation model, ModelE from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which they noted "has been tested extensively in global warming experiments and to examine the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate." The model was used to investigate the effects of a war involving the entire current global nuclear arsenal, projected to release about 150 Tg of smoke into the atmosphere (1 Tg is equal to 1012 grams), as well as a war involving about one third of the current nuclear arsenal, projected to release about 50 Tg of smoke. In the 150 Tg case they found that:
A global average surface cooling of -7C to -8C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still -4C (Fig. 2). Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about -5C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land
Actually, krakatoa was only about 200 megatons so it would only take about 10 groundburst detonations, assuming our most powerful 20MT H-bombs to equal that. Of course, the average warhead on an ICBM is smaller than that, usually around 300KT. Assuming an average of 1MT per missile due to multiple warheads, we would be well beyond Krakatoa levels in any kind of nuclear war. Also keep in mind that krakatoa did reduce the amount of sunlight by a fair bit, though not for that long.
I am quite annoyed at the incredible sloppiness at the IEEE site.
I quote from their site thus:
"Hellman has set up a Web site related to his nuclear deterrence work. From there you can download the Bent article. You can also view a statement signed by Richard L. Garwin, who came up with the design for the first hydrogen bomb;..."
Where IEEE dreamed this
First hydrogen bomb was the Teller-Ulam design, who share the patent, tested Nov 1, 1952, yield 10.4 MT, codename 'Mike'. The history of that design is pretty well known (for example, see Rhodes, 'Dark Sun'). Things were very stuck around 1950. The 'Classical' H-bomb design did not work according to computer simulation. So things sat in 1950.
Then, suddenly, something new: Stan Ulam pointed an new idea out to Teller, and Teller came up with another idea, and it was a *staged* approach, "technically sweet" (as Oppy put it). Mar 9, 1951, a paper with the first half was published (quite classified). Within a month, Teller thought of the second critical part. (Rhodes, pp. 776). Suddenly everyone thought there was a legitimate chance. There was high activity work leading to a full scale test in late 1952. It worked.
Now, where is 'Inventor Garwin'? He is not even in the index of Rhodes' book. (!!)
But from fas.org, looking up Garwin, I see: "He received the B.S. in Physics from Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, in 1947, and the Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1949." and "After three years on the faculty of the University of Chicago, he joined IBM Corporation in 1952,
Ahh, I see. He got his Ph.D. in Physics, presumably while secretly helping Los Alamos, and joined the U of Chicago, where he sneaked ideas to Stanislav Ulam and Edward Teller across the desk, as it were, you know, down the hall, a mere thousand miles away.
I've usually found that on nearly anything, when they can't get the basics right, there are serious flaws in the rest. And yes -- there are serious flaws, as to be expected.
Quick example: tritium. United States weapons are designed to use tritium as a booster in the primary stage. The trouble is, tritium is radioactive, and has a 12 year half-life. It goes bad quickly, in other words. Try to fire a nuke whose tritium has been sitting around for, oh, 24 years (two half lives), and you may get yourself a fizzle yield. This is called "embarrassing", especially if you didn't get a warranty on that nuke from Nukes 'R 'Us.
At Pantex, in near Amarillo, TX, where we are disassembling nukes to keep up with treaty obligations, the last I read was that we were tearing down 3 warheads to gather enough tritium to refill 1. This means there are, well, boneyards full of nukes that
I generally find that people who are trying to scare a new "We're All Gonna Die In 20 Years" movement up never think of the tedious reality of these things.
I'm an older guy.
I remember the scare tactics.
1970's: Overpopulation.
1980's: Nuclear War (and Nuclear Winter)
1990's: The Ozone Layer
Incredibly, we're all still alive.
I have seen this game before and I think I can tell you what it's all about. Someone's trying to start up another "We're all gonna die in 20 years" movement.
Right now is the time to hammer a wooden stake through its heart.
Frankly:
Bullshit!
The thesis is stupid. "Deterrence is dangerous"? Look around. We're all still alive despite the most psychotic leadership imaginable in charge of tens of thousands of nuclear
A deterrent is, basically, a threat. The problem with threatening other people is that you may end up in a situation where you have to carry out your threat. One can only speculate whether the cold war could have been avoided, but if we want world peace at some point in the future, we have to work towards reducing the level of threats globally. This may be a scary prospect for some, but at the end of the day, it is the only way. The US likes to see itself as 'the leader of the free world' - do you guys have the courage to lead the way towards world peace?
So this guy that is very good at math, does some math, and says that we'll all die in a nuclear war? Can he do a shitload of math next that will tell me if water is still wet?
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