nuclear-news

Students Aren’t Learning About Nuclear Weapons. That’s a Major Problem.  AT TOP https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a33917558/nuclear-weapons-education-in-schools/   Popular Mechanics,  BY CAROLINE DELBERT, SEP 4, 2020  

• Not enough young people have access to even the option of studying nuclear weapons dynamics, an industry report says.
• Nuclear weapons development continues around the world.
• The current nuclear risk workforce is aging out, with few interested in replacing them.
• At the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, innovation advocate Sara Z. Kutchesfahani says the vast majority of U.S. students don’t learn about nuclear weapons in high school, or even in most relevant college coursework. Kutchesfahani says that low level of knowledge, combined with industry factors, means the nuclear workforce itself is about to hit a critical state.
• Kutchesfahani is writing on behalf of an industry thinktank, N Square, a “funders collaborative” that advocates for nuclear threat reduction. She says the lack of flow of new, younger workers into the nuclear sector will create a dangerously unbalanced workforce demographic in an industry that will still need a lot of support for the foreseeable future. Even if nuclear weapons are never used, they must be maintained carefully. If they’re “disarmed” in the future, trained people must handle and dispose of or recycle them.
• In the essay, Kutchesfahani likens nuclear weapons awareness and literacy to the idea of climate change awareness and curricula, because, she says, both are existential threats:
  

  “[I]f school boards, curriculum writers, and teachers and professors continue to ignore the topic of nuclear weapons and do not include it in class curricula, the public will continue to be unaware of the existential threat these devastating weapons pose to humanity, and the professional field will have difficulty sustaining itself.”
  Much of nuclear investment in 2020 is in energy—for better or worse, world powers are treating next-generation nuclear power like the next big thing and even using that as a way to underfund investment in wind, solar, hydro, and other sustainable forms of energy.

  But there has also been a new kind of nuclear warhead developed and now tested in 2020, a low-yield warhead launched from a submarine that, again, is publicly billed as a “deterrent” to other nations’ nuclear aggressions, particularly Russia.

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• The fact remains that as long as there are nuclear weapons in play on the world stage, the world must realistically discuss them. That’s separate from politics, or even whether advocates are for or against nuclear weapons at all. If someone walked into your home while juggling flaming batons, you’d suddenly wish you had a flaming batons expert to help you decide what to do next.