nuclear-news

New communications can help to rid the world of nuclear dangers

Crowdsourcing Nuclear Problems, NPR 8 Feb 2012 “….Rose Gottemoeller, acting undersecretary of state for arms control, ….. She’s behind a campaign to discover how new
communications tools can help rid the world of some of the dangers of nuclear weapons.  Gottemoeller is an avid user of Twitter, and it made
her wonder how Twitter and other methods of crowdsourcing a problem
can help her in her work.

“Can it help us to understand what’s going on with a nuclear facility
in a certain country, for example, or what’s going on with the
production of chemicals at a chemical plant?” she says.

Or could it help determine the number and status of deployed nuclear
warheads — a topic that couldn’t be more sensitive? Gottemoeller was
the chief American negotiator on the New START agreement with Russia,
and now a year into its implementation, she is thinking about the next
items on the arms control agenda.

“As we look to the future of nuclear arms reductions, for example,
we’re concerned about going after smaller objects like warheads and
monitoring warheads,” she says. “How can we be helped by the kind of
information that’s readily available throughout the cybersphere?”…
The Institute for Science and International Security has been posting
satellite photos of nuclear sites in Iran for several years,
monitoring the development of important facilities, says Joe
Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.

“What used to be the sole tool of great states can now be purchased by
an NGO,” he says.

But civilian and nongovernmental organizations are only beginning to
appreciate the potential of these technologies, says Cirincione, who
is also a Twitter fan.

“You can imagine how you can take that kind of transparency and
verification technologies that satellites give you,” he says, “marry
it up to the networking capabilities that Facebook, Twitter and the
Web give you, and you can really start to imagine a verification
regime that would make it very difficult for any state to hide a
significant nuclear capability.”…
There are dangers as well. The use of Twitter and Facebook has already
raised concerns in many national police and intelligence services.
This kind of activity can still be viewed as espionage.

“If people try to organize groups along this basis, I would think
those states could say that that’s a violation of the state’s monopoly
on this function,” he says, “and you could say it’s an act of treason
or espionage, and people may be putting their lives at risk.”
The WikiLeaks disclosures raise directly the question of what’s a
secret and what’s public information, Cirincione says, and as a
result, the gap between them narrowed even further.

“States still have very deep, dark secrets that they guard jealously.
It’s just that it’s harder and harder to do that, and when they break,
they break instantaneously and globally,” he says.

But one of those garage tinkerers might some day devise an app that
turns an iPhone into a Geiger counter. It’s already possible to keep
track of government radiation sensors with an iPhone. New technology,
however, could give citizens the ability to detect and track radiation
on their own — perhaps from hidden, loose nuclear material or from an
accident at a nuclear power plant.
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/08/146589700/a-new-weapon-against-nukes-social-media

February 9, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, media