As larger nations that have nuclear weapons attack smaller nations that don’t have nuclear weapons, conventional wisdom is that more nations will want nuclear weapons. This is less certain than much of the discussion makes it out to be.

Three of the nations that have nuclear weapons – the United States, Russia, and China – also have large land masses and large militaries. The United Kingdom and France have held their nuclear weapons in connection with the United States, allied through NATO. India and Pakistan have developed nuclear weapons within their rivalry, although India also has concerns about China. Israel is in a class of its own. North Korea, in addition to its nuclear weapons,  holds South Korea’s capital, Seoul, hostage via conventional weapons. Additionally, China is North Korea’s patron.

Nuclear weapons, it is argued, provide an inffallible deterrent, but deterrence is broader than nuclear weapons. It is the sum of factors that warn off a potential aggressor, the factors that can make an attack or invasion cost more than its potential benefit. Thus, North Korea’s proximity to Seoul and its relationship to China are part of its deterrence and were effective before it acquired nuclear weapons. Even so, Donald Trump threatened nuclear attack during his first term as President, when North Korea had nuclear weapons.

Read More

It’s time to say it again: It’s highly doubtful that the Iranians were pursuing a nuclear weapon. And they certainly don’t have any.

Donald Trump insists that (one of the purposes/ the purpose) of his attack on Iran is to make sure they never get a nuclear weapon. He has also tried to look reasonable by saying “All they have to do is say they will not build a nuclear weapon.”

Iran has done that second thing already, by ratifying the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. When North Korea decided to build nuclear weapons, they withdrew from the treaty. Iran has threatened to withdraw, but they haven’t. This is a signal of their intention not to build nuclear weapons.

Trump’s insistence seems more like that of a middle-school boy sitting on another, hollering “Say uncle.” Big strong ayatollahs must come to Trump with tears in their eyes and say it.

Read More

You may have seen the uproar about a possible Chinese nuclear test in 2020. It’s being publicized mainly because the Trump administration wants 1) to beat on China and 2) to have an excuse to start up nuclear testing again.

Earlier this week, Christopher Yeaw, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation presented a statement to the Council on Disarmament in Vienna that included a seismic trace of what the administration claims to be a Chinese test on June 22, 2020. Although formal complaints about a test go back to the Biden administration, this is the first time that evidence has been presented for it.

Why is this important? Let’s back up to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the 1990s.

Read More

For the last few years, the rollout of the clock on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been a flop. This year was the worst. People on my Bluesky timeline didn’t know what it meant, or worse, mocked it. What does a change of 4 seconds mean on a base of 89 seconds? I certainly don’t know.

The clock originally represented the opinion of a group of experts on the probability of nuclear war. It went back and forth over the years, coming closest to midnight (nuclear war) during the Cuban missile crisis. That made a certain kind of sense.

But a few years back, the board dumped a bunch of things into the mix: nuclear weapons threats, the disruption caused by artificial intelligence, biosecurity concerns (deliberate and natural), and climate change. I have no idea how all those things can be put into one measure. Al Mauroni gives it a try and gives more background on the clock. I agree with Al and have an additional concern. It’s time to drop the clock.

This week, the last of the arms control treaties lapses. Arms control is dead. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are killing lots of other things – both human and our expectations of how the world works. I believe we will wrest back control, but it will not be the world in which those treaties were negotiated. We will need new forms, new agreements, new expectations.

Arms control tamed the wild nuclear excesses that bloomed through the first three decades of nuclear weapons. We have eliminated tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and have made the world safer through the attitudes and beliefs those changes fostered. But the world has been different, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and when Trump and Putin are out of power, it will be different from today. I don’t know what that world will look like, and neither do you.

The old appeals to public concern about nuclear weapons have been inoperative since around the time we lost the Soviet Union as the ultimate enemy. The 1990s were a time when people wanted to believe we didn’t have to think about nuclear weapons ever again. The appeals of the 1960s, and even of the 1980s, lost their power. Global warming took their place as the apocalyptic threat.

But the arms control community, the people who publish The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, did not change along with the public. The clock is one indication of this.

The pulse of arms control slackens, the breathing becomes hoarser. We know that the end comes Thursday. There will be something new after that.

Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money

To use the word “negotiations” about tomorrow’s meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, if we consider its historical use for other actions between representatives of their nations, is to commit a category error.

Historically, negotiations on ending wars or treaties or trade or any of the numerous issues that must be sorted out between nations have been carried out by subject-matter specialists: nuclear scientists and engineers for arms control treaties; financial and commerce specialists for trade; and ending a war may require specialists in many areas, including the history and sociology of the nations involved, manufacturing and financial experts, and geographers.  Skillful interpreters are needed for the face to face interactions, and translators to make sure that the documents convey the same legal meanings in all languages involved.

As far as we know, Trump has employed only his golf buddy, Steve Witkoff, who knows nothing of Russian history or language, nothing of conventional or nuclear arms manufacture or capability, nothing of trade or national boundaries and the humans living within them. He may know a bit about New York real estate finance, which probably doesn’t help much with sanctions, and he’s open to whomever shows up at the table as his interpreter.

Read More

My colleague at Balloon Juice, Tom Levenson, has written another book. Tom is a popular-science writer and has written a number of books on various aspects of science – climate, Newton, Einstein are a few.

So Very Small is particularly relevant to our time. It traces the development of germ theory while also giving an account of how science develops. Tom is on Bluesky, and his comments there suggested to me that the book would be a relative of Microbe Hunters, by Paul de Kruif, a book that was formative for me.

Microbe Hunters, as I recall from decades back, is a series of vignettes about the various scientists who found particular microbes and successfully associated them with disease, sometimes finding a cure or prevention. As a child, I had no trouble imagining myself as one of the scientists: Robert Koch and anthrax, Louis Pasteur’s swan-necked flasks, those who used mercury as a harsh cure for many things, including syphilis.

Levenson uses many of the stories of Microbe Hunters in a different way. Imagine watching your children or neighbors get sick and die and not know why. There are patterns but they do not point clearly to a cause. Some commonality – dead bodies and bad odors suggest that perhaps a malign miasma wafts its way toward the unfortunate. Or they may have been weak to begin with, and something went wrong inside their bodies. Or, of course, God’s inscrutable will.

Read More

I have a number of questions about the overhead photos of the bombing at Fordo. I haven’t done a detailed photo analysis like this in a long time – probably back to the photos of what turned out to be a Syrian reactor under construction in 2007. And I’m not up to date on how the MOP bombs work, so these may be dumb questions. But I haven’t seen them asked or answered.

At the very least, perhaps this analysis will help people to understand how it’s done.

A number of news outlets report that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has assessed that the damage at Fordo was not extensive, not the obliteration that Donald Trump claims. Trump has been at odds with the intelligence agencies on a number of issues around the attack he ordered on Iran’s nuclear sites. I choose to believe the intelligence agencies over Trump’s vibes. But it is an early assessment and can change.

Read More

The Ukrainian drone attack hit two components of the Russian nuclear force. The primary purpose of the attack was to destroy the planes that launch cruise missiles at Ukraine. Some of those planes are also the types that carry nuclear weapons. There also were hits at Severomorsk, the headquarters of the Northern Fleet and Russia’s ballistic missile submarines. We have much less information about the hits at Severomorsk, so I won’t say more about it in this post. I want to make clear that from what we know, no nuclear weapons were involved in today’s action. The primary nuclear bomber bases were not targeted.

As much as a third of Russia’s nuclear bomber fleet was destroyed. No new bombers have been produced for some time, and there are no facilities to produce them. This has serious implications for the nuclear balance between Russia and the United States.

Read More

Last week I saw an obituary in the New Mexican of someone who made a difference in my life. We were professional colleagues, never close friends. But that difference was consequential beyond me, and I had questions I wanted to ask him. I didn’t realize he had been in town all this time.

In the 1990s, the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) was launched by the United States, the European Union, Norway, and Japan. Its purpose was to find work for weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union, so that they would not feel it necessary to sell their nuclear weapons expertise. The countries that had been part of the Soviet Union were unable to pay those scientists. The scientists were asked to propose work to the ISTC, which would then evaluate and, if appropriate, fund the proposals. This also served to help the scientists adjust to the international ways of proposals and funding, which was different from what they were accustomed to.

Steven (Steve) Gitomer was the Los Alamos National Laboratory liaison to the ISTC. He distributed information about the current proposals to those of us who were interested. Many of the proposals were physics-related, studies of semiconductors and stars. But in one group was a proposal from Kazakhstan’s Institute of Nuclear Physics to survey radioactive contamination at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS). It sounded a great deal like what I was doing at Los Alamos, so I asked Steve to send me the proposal.

Read More