New Tech Makes Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Verifiable

Harperdog writes "In 1999, Senate Republicans rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty on the grounds that it wasn't verifiable. The National Academy of Sciences feels this is no longer true, due to new technology. Quoting: 'Technologies for detecting clandestine testing in four environments — underground, underwater, in the atmosphere, and in space — have improved significantly in the past decade. In particular, seismology, the most effective approach for monitoring underground nuclear explosion testing, can now detect underground explosions well below 1 kiloton in most regions. A kiloton is equivalent to 1,000 tons of chemical high explosive. The nuclear weapons that were used in Japan in World War II had yields in the range of 10 to 20 kilotons.'"

Comments

Subtext

[TheSpoom]

They rejected the treaty on the ground that they're the United States, and nobody's forcing them to give up their nukes. They just couldn't say that.

Re:Subtext

[SomePgmr]

I'd think we could maintain a working stockpile based on modeling and existing test results.

A test ban seems more like a non-proliferation strategy... which I'd think we would want.

Re:just a thought

[vlm]

lead by example and scrap them

Lead towards what... I love nukes, they make total world war unthinkable, thats why we don't do it. At the rate of one world war per generation, we're a couple behind now, so we'd have to catch up. The more nukes, the more unthinkable war becomes. The opposite, the fewer nukes, the better idea total world war appears. Given a choice of world war, or nukes, I'd prefer the nukes.

Getting rid of them dooms my son to die overseas in WWIII... or even worse, die here in WWIII. Seem like a kinda nasty thing to do to a kid, when all you have to do to prevent it, is fill a couple bunkers with nukes.

Another way to put it is you can either set off non-nuke weapons in bulk about once a generation, or you can not set off nuke weapons. The latter seems preferable.

Re:It's a test ban, not a weapons ban

[Virtucon]

At the Atomic museum (Bradbury Science Museum) in Los Alamos there's an old telephone sitting on a desk that acts as the metaphor for how they test the Nuclear Arsenal. "What if you couldn't use the phone but had to make sure it worked?"

"you could test the bell"
"you could test the wiring"

I haven't been there in awhile, but that's what they used to describe how LANL and the other labs insure that when the "phone" needed to be used, it could.

Frankly, I miss the days when we all worried about "fallout" from the latest Soviet or Chinese tests. Also, my Grandparents lived in Las Vegas and we used to get the "rumbles" when we visited. My Grandfather would say "They just dug another hole"