Why you should care about nuclear weapons
There are two things that scare Austin Powers. The first are “circus folk” because of their “small hands” and the fact that they “smell like cabbage.” And while this may just be an idiosyncrasy of a fictional, time traveling secret agent, his second fear is all too real: nuclear war.
It may seem that in today’s world of stateless terrorists, roadside bombs, a worldwide economic recession and the frightening possibility of virulent pathogens jumping over borders and oceans, the singular concern of the Cold War seems almost quaint. Although the U.S. and Russia have large nuclear arsenals, there is very little fear of an actual nuclear conflict. In some ways, this makes sense. Since the end of the Cold War, steps have been taken to reduce the possibility of nuclear war, from the U.S. agreeing to de-target missiles with nuclear warheads pointed at Russia to a de facto ban on American nuclear testing since 1992.
Considering that our collective finger is no longer on the nuclear trigger, did it make sense for President Obama to publicly pledge steps towards nuclear abolition in his recent speech in Prague? After all, there are surely more immediate issues. Also, how on earth could Obama ever convince the governments of Russia, Iran, India and Pakistan that they should get rid of their own nuclear arsenals, let alone the American public that we should get rid of ours?
In light of all these barriers to any real success, why even try? It’s actually pretty simple: not only does the combined nuclear arsenal of the world have the capacity to, if used, kill hundreds of millions of people, there is a huge danger in just one weapon getting away. Even if Russia, the U.S. or other nuclear nations never reduce their arsenals to zero, every nuclear weapon around is one that could be stolen or accidentally deployed. While we’d like to think that the U.S. Air Force, which is responsible for most of our nuclear arsenal, can keep track of their deadly charges, recent history is hardly reassuring. And if the U.S. is slacking on nuclear safety, then Russia or Pakistan can’t be doing much better. If just one nuclear weapon were detonated by a terrorist group in the United States, not only would the immediate death toll be incredibly high, but the resulting deaths from American retaliation would probably dwarf the initial impact. And you could forget about any protections for civil liberties if one of our cities were to become a 21st century Hiroshima.
Aside from the benefits gained by actually reducing the number of nuclear weapons, there are diplomatic and political reasons to make a commitment to nuclear abolition. According to international law, we have to.
The U.S., along with the four other nations that are “allowed” to possess nuclear arsenals under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), have pledged, under Article VI of the treaty, to pursue disarmament and eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
The set-up under the NPT has always struck many other countries as very unfair. Why should China, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S. be allowed to maintain their nuclear arsenals, while every other country has to agree not to develop weapons if they want access to the technology and material for civilian nuclear power generation? This is why a good faith, effort and commitment to disarm is so important; otherwise, the United States cannot credibly enforce the rest of the NPT and, more generally, convince countries that feel threatened by the U.S. or by a hostile neighbor that they should not develop their own weapons.
Although Obama’s commitment to nuclear reduction and eventual abolition stands in stark contrast to President Bush’s more expansive and isolationist nuclear policies, it’s not exactly novel. Ronald Reagan, who greatly feared the use of nuclear weapons, was the only president to actually propose total disarmament to a Soviet leader, as he did with premier Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit in 1986. In that same tradition, four stalwart members of the foreign policy establishment, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn have authored a statement calling for eventual nuclear abolition along with a whole host of other steps to reduce nuclear proliferation.
So Obama’s call for a world free of nuclear weapons is both realistic and idealistic and a little bit cold-eyed and strategic, all while being optimistic and hopeful. And if Kissinger, Perry, Shultz and Nunn are any indication, Obama may be a dreamer, but he’s not the only one.
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Nuclear weapon discussion a little too intense? Read about students discussing international development and social entrepreneurship at the Global Engagement Summit. Or you can return home.
The answer to proliferation is the Thorium fuel cycle and the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). Dr. Edward Teller, the father of Fusion, after a lifetime of work on every aspect of nuclear technology had at the end of his life come to this conclusion in his final study: the LFTR is the best of all possible reactor types.
The LFTR is a very simple, efficient, and elegant type of reactor. It can start up on any kind of nuclear fuel, bomb material, or nuclear waste product to produce very high temperature heat and at the same time breed more fuel in the bargain. This thrifty approach to nuclear energy greatly appeals to me, but I became even more interested in the LFTR when the details of a new patent were revealed by Dr LeBlanc (see below @ minute 53). It opens up the possibility of building a very compact but powerful reactor that can run for 30 years without refueling. It can be operated remotely in an unattended fully automated intrusion detecting mode and sited underground while it breeds self perpetuating new fuel within the thorium structure of the reactor itself.
In order to get to its fuel, U233 that has been produced inside the very solid metal walls of this 200 ton reactor containment vessel, a proliferator must destroy and disassemble the reactor, lift its heavy reactor core out of a 100 meter deep reinforced aircraft crash proof hole in the ground, then cut the thorium containment vessel up into small pieces while enduring heavy killing gamma radiation exposure, next reprocess these reactor pieces using isotopic separation since the U233 is denatured with enough U238 to make chemical separation of bomb grade U233 impossible, and do all this without being detected. Now, this is a tall order for any proliferator and may just be an impossible assignment.
At the end of the service life of the Lftr, the reactor vessel is sent back to the factory where it is reduced to liquid fluoride salts that become the feedstock of a next new Lftr. This feedstock can only be used by the new Lftr and not for bombs. A few handfuls of waste products are held at the factory for a few hundred years to cool down before they are mined for the many precious elements contained within like platinum and iridium. Now that’s what I call a safe, efficient and thrifty mode of operation!
The Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland has some good thing to say about thorium as follows:
http://www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/future_nuclear_power.pdf
To learn more see one of the following:
Aim High
http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh
What Fusion Wanted To Be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
Liquid Fluoride Reactors: A New Beginning for an Old Idea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So
Axil
April 13, 2009 at 1:16 am
So let’s see-the way we will all be safer is by offering to unilaterally reduce our own weapons and ignoring Iran and North Korea.. Brilliant. Making unilateral concessions is fine-if they lead to something. Seems to me that nothing Obama talks about leads to anything but diminishing the nation he is suppose to LEAD…
I saw him apologize a lot and bash his country while on foreign soil-but it seems that what he got are 5000 trainers who can not actually fire back at the Taliban murderers whose goal is to kill them…That sounds like a big help.
I heard Obama apologize to the Muslim world (I guess apologizing for civilization making the subhuman misogynistic and murderous cult of Islam look bad). I don’t know what we got for this groveling.
So the same week that North Korea launches rockets with Iranian onlookers to listen to “the world without nuclear weapons” reminds me that Obama really doesn’t know the basics of human, US or world history and never actually had a job of any consequence and doesn’t even know the terminology of the subjects he babbles about.
bruce peters
April 13, 2009 at 3:11 am
Bruce -
The author (and President Obama, for that matter) never said anything about unilateral reductions of our nuclear weapons. This is always raised by people who favor nuclear weapons, but it’s never the case. It is clear that successful disarmament will have to be through a phased, verifiable, MULTILATERAL process.
If you have a valid point to argue, fine. But don’t invent an opinion that doesn’t exist to try to give credence to your position.
Rick
April 13, 2009 at 11:52 am