North Korea nuclear missile strike on US mainland is ‘inevitable’, says Defence intelligence chief
Donald Trump recently called North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a ‘madman’, The Independent, Mythili Sampathkumar New York @MythiliSk 26 May 17,The Defence Intelligence Agency chief has said it is “inevitable” that a nuclear weapon launched fromNorth Korea would hit the US mainland.
Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the possibility of an attack was very real after a recent nuclear missile test conducted by Pyongyang.
He warned that if the isolated country and its leader Kim Jong-un are left on the “current trajectory the regime will ultimately succeed.” However Mr Stewart said it was “nearly impossible to predict when” that would be.
He and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates were pressed for a timeline repeatedly but refused to give a concrete answer out of fear that it may reveal what intelligence the US has been able to gather on Pyonyang.
“We do not have constant, consistent [intelligence and surveillance] capabilities and so there are gaps, and the North Koreans know about these,” Mr Coates said.
Mr Coates also testified in the hearing that what makes North Korea a particularly “grave national security threat” is Mr Kim’s “aggressive” leadership. He seems determined to develop a nuclear missile capable of reach the west coast of the US, called an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
The test, scheduled for Tuesday, is the first time the United States will try to intercept an ICBM.
The United States has used the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, managed by Boeing Co. and in place to counter attacks from rogue states such as North Korea, to intercept other types of missiles but never an ICBM.
While U.S. officials believe Pyongyang is some years away from mastering re-entry expertise for perfecting an ICBM, it is making advances. This week the head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said that if left unchecked, North Korea is on an “inevitable” path to obtaining a nuclear-armed missile capable of striking the United States.
The remarks are the latest indication of mounting U.S. concern about Pyongyang’s advancing missile and nuclear weapons programs, which the North says are needed for self-defense.
U.S. officials said that the test had been planned well in advance and was not in reaction to any specific event.
The Missile Defense Agency said an interceptor based out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, one of 36 in California and Alaska, will be used in the test to shoot down a target similar to an ICBM over the Pacific Ocean.
The system has carried out successful intercepts in nine out of 17 attempts dating back to 1999. The most recent test was in 2014. Last year a science advocacy group said the system has no proven capability to protect the United States. (Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by James Dalgleish)
The Pentagon Can’t Believe Trump Told Another President About Nuclear Subs Near North Korea
“We never talk about subs!” three defense officials told BuzzFeed News after a transcript of a call between President Trump and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was published. BuzzFeeed News, May 25, 2017,Nancy A. Youssef BuzzFeed News World Reporter Pentagon officials are in shock after the release of a transcript of a call between President Donald Trump and his Philippines counterpart revealed that the US military had moved two nuclear submarines towards North Korea.
“We never talk about subs!” three officials told BuzzFeed News, referring to the military’s belief that keeping submarines’ movements secret is key to their mission.
While the US military will frequently announce the deployment of aircraft carriers, it is far more careful when discussing the movement of nuclear submarines. Carriers are hard to miss, and that, in part, is a reason the US military deploys them. They are a physical show of force. Submarines are, at times, a furtive complement to the carriers, a hard-to-detect means of strategic deterrence.
According to the transcript, released Wednesday, Trump called Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte April 29, in part to discuss the rising threat from North Korea. During that call, while discussing ways to mitigate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions, Trump said: “We have two submarines — the best in the world. We have two nuclear submarines — not that we want to use them at all. I’ve never seen anything like they are but we don’t have to use this, but [Kim] could be crazy, so we will see what happens.”
During the same call, Trump also called the North Korea leader a “madman with nuclear weapons” and celebrated Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.” The Filipino leader has supported the alleged extrajudicial killing of 8,000 people since he took office in June, part of his purge to rid his nation of drugs. Duterte has bragged about committing murder himself, called former president Barack Obama a “son of a bitch” and once threatened to suspend the bilateral agreement between his nation and the United States that allows US troops to visit the Philippines.
“Keep up [the] good work, you are doing an amazing job,” Trump told Duterte during the call.
A US official who had previously seen a version of the transcript confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the published version appeared accurate.
By announcing the presence of nuclear submarines, the president, some Pentagon officials privately explained, gives away the element of surprise — an irony given his repeated declarations during the campaign that the US announces far too many of its military plans when it comes to combatting ISIS.
Moreover, some countries in the region, particularly China, seek to develop their anti-sub capability. Knowing that two US submarines are in the region could allow them to test this.
Finally, it is unclear why Duterte would need to know the specific number of subs in the region. The Philippines is not a part of US military efforts to deter North Korea, so why would Duterte need to know such details?
BBC News 24 May 2017 The United Nations has warned that President Donald Trump’s plans to cut contributions to peacekeeping will make such work “impossible”.
The US administration signalled heavy cuts to UN operations, in its budget proposals released on Tuesday. The US foots more than a quarter of the UN’s $7.9bn (£6.1bn) peacekeeping bill.
A spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the organisation was willing to discuss how peacekeeping could be made more cost-effective.
Mr Trump’s budget proposal declares new “attention on the appropriate US share of international spending at the United Nations”.
The document does not provide a detailed breakdown, but Reuters news agency reports the drop in funding for the operations could amount to $1bn.
The spokesman said the UN was studying Mr Trump’s plan. “The figures presented would simply make it impossible for the UN to continue all of its essential work advancing peace, development, human rights and humanitarian assistance,” he said.
The draft treaty is the culmination of a sustained campaign, supported by more than 130 non-nuclear states frustrated with the sclerotic pace of disarmament, to prohibit nuclear weapons and persuade nuclear-armed states to disarm.
Nine countries are known or believed to possess nuclear weapons: the US, UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. None has supported the draft plan.
The draft treaty obliges state parties to “never under any circumstances … develop, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices … use nuclear weapons … [or] carry out any nuclear weapon test”.
States would also be obliged to destroy any nuclear weapons they possess and would be forbidden from transferring nuclear weapons to any other recipient.
Costa Rica’s ambassador to the UN, Elayne Whyte Gómez, who chaired the treaty drafting conference, said she expected revisions and there was “a good level of convergence among the delegations, especially on the core prohibitions”.
Disarmament advocates say the draft treaty, supported by dozens of countries, is now on track to be discussed at a second session in New York in mid-June that could end with the document’s adoption as a UN treaty in July.
The US and other nuclear powers have argued states should strengthen and improve the 47-year-old nuclear non-proliferation treaty instead of adopting a total ban.
US officials have cited the threat posed by North Korea, which has conducted a series of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile tests this year, as reason why nuclear deterrence – and gradual nuclear disarmament – is still needed.
Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons (Ican), said the draft language was strong in categorically prohibiting nuclear weapons.
“We are particularly happy the text is rooted in humanitarian principles and that it builds on previous prohibitions of unacceptable weapons, such as biological and chemical weapons, landmines and cluster munitions.”
Fihn urged nuclear-armed and nuclear alliance states to join discussions over a ban treaty, as demonstration of their commitment to disarmament.
“Nuclear weapons are ethically unacceptable in the 21st century. Intended to indiscriminately kill civilians, this 1940s technology is putting countless of lives at risk every day. Their continued existence undermines the moral credibility of every country which relies on them. A treaty to ban them, as a first step towards their elimination, will have real and lasting impact.”
The efficacy of a ban treaty is a matter of fierce debate.
Support has been growing steadily over months of negotiations but it has no support from the nine known nuclear states, which include the veto-wielding permanent five members of the UN security council.
Critics argue that a treaty cannot succeed without the participation of the states that possess nuclear weapons, or the alliance states that enjoy their protection.
During months of negotiations, Australia has lobbied other countries, pressing the case for what it describes as a “building blocks” approach of engaging with nuclear powers to reduce the global stockpile of 15,000 weapons.
But proponents say a nuclear weapons ban will create moral suasion – in the vein of the cluster and landmine conventions – for nuclear weapons states to disarm, and establish an international norm prohibiting the development, possession and use of nuclear weapons.
Non-nuclear states have expressed increasing frustration with the current nuclear regime and the piecemeal progress towards disarmament.
With nuclear weapons states modernising and in some cases increasing their arsenals, instead of discarding them, more states are becoming disenchanted with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and lending their support for an outright ban.
IB Times 22nd May 2017 In the wake of the “WannaCry” cyberattack which resulted in widespread disruption of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), attention has now turned to other forms of infrastructure.
One security expert has warned Britain’s nuclear weapons are at risk of being targeted. The UK nuclear deterrent, known as Trident, consists of four Vanguard-class submarines which can carry up to 16 ballistic missiles, each armed with up to eight warheads. Most of its computers, however, reportedly run on a legacy variant of the under-supported Windows XP operating system. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/are-britains-nuclear-weapons-systems-vulnerable-mass-cyberattacks-1622811
How To Dismantle A Nuclear Weapon, Gizmodo, Terrell Jermaine Starr and Jalopnik, May 24, 2017 “…..Getting Rid Of Plutonium Is Harder
For one, there is no civilian use for plutonium in the United States because you can’t break it down or blend it. In other words, it is always ready to be used for weapons. In fact, according to Live Science, of its five common isotopes, only plutonium-238 and plutonium-239 are used for anything.
Pu-238 is used for powering space probes and Pu-239, the isotope we’re talking about, goes through a fission chain reaction when concentrated enough. And when that process takes place, it is nuke-ready.
By the way, Plutonium is pretty damn radioactive and contains the “worst kind of fission byproducts that could enter the environment as a result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster,” as Live Science notes (emphasis ours):
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, plutonium enters the bloodstream via the lungs, then moves throughout the body and into the bones, liver, and other organs. It generally stays in those places for decades, subjecting surrounding organs and tissues to a continual bombardment of alpha radiation and greatly increasing the risk of cancer, especially lung cancer, liver cancer and bone sarcoma.
There are documented cases of workers at nuclear weapons facilities dying within days of experiencing brief accidental exposure to plutonium, according to the Hazardous Substances Data Bank.
Furthermore, among all the bad things coming out of Fukushima, plutonium will stay in the environment the longest. One isotope of plutonium, Pu-239, has a half-life of 24,100 years; that’s the time it will take for half of the stuff to radioactively decay. Radioactive contaminants are dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of their half-lives, meaning that dangerous plutonium released to the environment today will stick around for the next half a million years.
That is why Japan’s reported goal to use plutonium for civilian reactors have the U.S. and China worried. At one point, Japan had around 10 tons of unseparated plutonium in-country; 37.1 tons are in France and the United Kingdom. China fears Toyko could possibly use the plutonium to develop nuclear weapons, although the Japanese did give up 331kg of it in 2016.
Collina said it’s a good thing the U.S. has no plans to use plutonium for civilian purposes.
“You can’t blend down plutonium,” he says. “It’s always weapons-usable. So if you use this stuff at nuclear power plants, you’re basically spreading weapons-usable nuclear material all around. It’s a proliferation problem because we don’t want to set the example for other nations to say, ‘I’m going to use plutonium in my civilian power program’ and therefore create a cover for a secret weapons program. We want to have a pretty clear line that says, ‘Plutonium is only used for weapons and you should not use plutonium if you’re not using it for weapons.'”
As for actually getting rid of plutonium, the process is not environmentally friendly and it never will be. Most of the plutonium that is separated from nukes is stored at the Savannah River Site (SRS), near the Georgia border. Plutonium is also stored at the Pantex Plant. It’s authorised to store 20,000 plutonium pits; current estimates find that 14,000 are stored in the facility.
But here’s the catch: you can never make it truly safe, and no one wants it near them. For example, the Department of Energy, through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is currently overseeing construction of a facility at SRS to make MOX fuel from weapons-ready plutonium. It would then be used for commercial use.
The problem is that no one wants plutonium storage facilities in their backyards. The American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, expressed concerns over the MOX fuel initiative when she was governor of South Carolina. Her issue was that the feds were supposed to remove a ton of plutonium from the state by January 2016 and ship it to another facility in New Mexico or process it for commercial use through the facility; neither happened, so she sued the Department of Energy. A federal circuit court dismissed the case.
Officially, MOX fuel is not being used in the United States, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Europe uses MOX fuel, but its plutonium is from spent nuclear fuel rather than nuclear weapons.
Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid resisted the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository project, which was supposed to be a deep geological repository storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste like Pu-239. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, the Yucca Mountains were supposed to be the key destination for storing this waste, but Reid worked with Obama to end funding for the project.
Where To Send It?
So, if no one wants plutonium in their backyard here on planet earth, where can it be disposed? Well, there have been a bunch of wild ideas, like blasting it into the sun. Which, as the video below explains, is a pretty bad idea.
Hitting the Sun is HARD
You also have to factor in the possibility the space ship won’t make it to orbit. “Space shuttles crash,” Collina said. “So if you had just one crash with a space shuttle full of plutonium, that would ruin your whole day.”
How To Dismantle A Nuclear Weapon, Gizmodo, Terrell Jermaine Starr and Jalopnik, May 24, 2017 Dismantling the world’s 15,000 nuclear weapons is one the most important geopolitical challenges humanity faces. That number seems bleak, given the current state of affairs. But if you wanted to dismantle just one warhead, here is what it would take.
Those warheads make the world a dangerous place, but we have to keep in mind there were more than 70,000 nuclear warheads in existence at one point. Though Cold War-era non-proliferation treaties were central to the massive cuts, most nuclear warheads were retired or dismantled during the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. President George H.W. Bush cut 9,500 during his term as president; in 1992 alone, he cut 5,300 warheads, which was the most by any president ever in history. During the 2000s, his son cut the stockpile by more than half to 5,270 warheads. Together, the son and dad president team cut 14,801 warheads from the stockpile.
Comparatively, President Barack Obama cut a mere 507 warheads, but relations between Russia and the U.S. were quite chilly during his term and both nations increasingly saw each other as military threats.
But the U.S. and Russia have their own arms issues. The New START treaty between the United States and Russia is the most important non-proliferation treaty in the world right now, yet its extension appears to be in limbo. India and Pakistan, though they only have 250 warheads between them, could ruin the earth’s atmosphere if they ever engaged in a regional nuclear conflict.
Politics aside, however, once a nation agrees to cut its nuclear stockpile, how does it happen, where and when? We spoke with a few nuclear weapons experts who walked us through the process of how this actually happens, with the focus on how the Americans do it.
The Question Of Dismantlement Versus Retirement
Once a president decides to cut down the nuclear arsenal, he or she must decide if they want to retire or dismantle the warheads. It is important to know the difference. Tom Collina, Director of Policy at Ploughshares Fund — an anti-nuclear weapon philanthropic group — says that current treaties do not focus on the actual dismantlement of weapons.
“They only require that weapons be retired or removed from service,” he said. “They do not require that weapons be dismantled. So, you can have the New START treaty lowering the number of deployed systems you can have, but that doesn’t mean those weapons get dismantled. It just means they get put into storage.”
There is no verification process for determining if a nuclear warhead is destroyed or not once they get to storage, because they are simply are too small to see from space, Collina explains.
Missiles are different.
Those, along with bombers and submarines, are under treaty, and their dismantlement can be verified via satellite, simply because they’re so big. You can see a missile being chopped in half or a bomber’s wings clipped from space.
But a nuclear warhead itself, which is much smaller? That is simply not possible.
Right now, there are around 2,800 warheads in retirement in the U.S., meaning they are no longer stockpiled. As the State Department explains, once a retired warhead is removed from its delivery platform, it is no longer useable and is not considered part of the nuclear stockpile. The tritium bottles are also removed. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that is critical to powering a bomb. Other “limited life components,” like the neutron generators, are also removed.
The warhead is stored in a depot where they hopefully will move on to the next process of being destroyed.
Separating A Warhead
The key components of a nuclear weapon, besides the metals used to construct its exterior, are uranium, plutonium, tritium boost gas, the neutron generator and other elements, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. And separating a warhead is the hardest and most dangerous part of dismantlement.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is the governmental body that oversees the dismantlement process, which takes place at the Pantex Plant, in the Panhandle of Texas. Pantex is the primary plant where nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly occurs. The warhead is taken to an underground bunker, where its parts are separated.
just one warhead, here is what it would take.
Those warheads make the world a dangerous place, but we have to keep in mind there were more than 70,000 nuclear warheads in existence at one point. Though Cold War-era non-proliferation treaties were central to the massive cuts, most nuclear warheads were retired or dismantled during the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. President George H.W. Bush cut 9,500 during his term as president; in 1992 alone, he cut 5,300 warheads, which was the most by any president ever in history. During the 2000s, his son cut the stockpile by more than half to 5,270 warheads. Together, the son and dad president team cut 14,801 warheads from the stockpile.
Comparatively, President Barack Obama cut a mere 507 warheads, but relations between Russia and the U.S. were quite chilly during his term and both nations increasingly saw each other as military threats.
But the U.S. and Russia have their own arms issues. The New START treaty between the United States and Russia is the most important non-proliferation treaty in the world right now, yet its extension appears to be in limbo. India and Pakistan, though they only have 250 warheads between them, could ruin the earth’s atmosphere if they ever engaged in a regional nuclear conflict.
Politics aside, however, once a nation agrees to cut its nuclear stockpile, how does it happen, where and when? We spoke with a few nuclear weapons experts who walked us through the process of how this actually happens, with the focus on how the Americans do it. Continue reading →
North Korea missile passes re-entry test in breakthrough for nuclear programme, Telegraph, Julian Ryall, in Tokyo 20 MAY 2017
The ballistic missile launched by North Korea on May 14 successfully re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, according to analysts, a significant breakthrough for Pyongyang’s missile programme.
Defence officials in South Korea and the US have confirmed that the launch of the liquid- fuel Hwasong-12 was a success.
North Korea claimed that the weapon reached an altitude of 2,111.5 km (1,312 miles) and travelled a distance of 489 miles before breaching Japan’s Air Defence Identification Zone and splashing down in the Sea of Japan……..
How much damage could North Korea unleash even without nuclear weapons?, ABC News By Michael Collett, 21 May 17, There’s been a lot of focus on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and specifically, its hopes of developing a missile that could deliver a nuclear strike on the United States.
But what can be lost in the discussion of the country’s recent missile tests is the vast military capabilities the country already has.
This morning, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said any military solution to the North Korea crisis would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale”.
This is why a diplomatic solution is widely seen as the only solution.
What do we know about North Korea’s military?
Nick Bisley, executive director of La Trobe Asia and editor-in-chief of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, says the military is the second most important institution in North Korea behind the Kim dynasty.
“The whole economy and the purpose of the state is organised around ensuring that the military has vast capacity,” he said.
So despite North Korea having an estimated population of about 25 million — not much more than Australia — it has the second biggest military in Asia behind China……..
North Korea has vast artillery capabilities that are targeted on Seoul, which has a population of 10 million and is less than an hour’s drive from the DMZ……..
BOMBSHELL FINDING Cold War nuclear weapons warped Earth’s magnetosphere – revealing what the true fallout could be if World War 3 broke out
Chaos sparked by Cold War nuke tests is only just becoming apparent – and it’s a chilling prediction of what might be in store for our fragile planet, The Sun By Margi Murphy, 19th May 2017
NASA have released chilling details about how Cold War nuke tests affected our planet.
Several nuclear tests were carried out by the US and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. But it’s only now that scientists are realising what the true fallout was.
The military exercises replicated the same devastating effects that solar storms can have on our planet – including blackouts and communication failures.
Detonating explosives at heights of between 16 and 250 miles above our planet’s surface temporarily distorted the Earth’s magnetic field line. This directly impacted satellites by damaging onboard electronics and disrupting communications and navigation signals.
Utility companies in Hawaii were strained and several satellites near test sites stopped working.
For years, extra radiation – which is what caused the satellites and electronics to fail – lay trapped inside Earth’s magnetosphere, a region surrounding Earth that defends us from solar flares.
The nuke tests were behind some very strange sights in our skies, too.
One triggered an aurora similar to the Northern Lights to appear over the Equator instead of the poles.
Aside from the radiation that would wipe out vast swathes of life on Earth, all power and satellite systems could be completely warped – sending us back to the Stone Age.
North Korea links nuclear advances to ‘hostile’ U.S. policy, Globe and Mail, EDITH M. LEDERER AND MATTHEW PENNINGTON, The Associated Press, May 19, 2017 The U.S. defence chief warned Friday that a military solution to the standoff with North Korea would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale,” while the North vowed to rapidly strengthen its nuclear-strike capability as long as it faces a “hostile” U.S. policy.
North Korea tested a longer-range missile last weekend, which experts say was a significant advance for a weapons program that aims at having a nuclear-tipped missile that can strike America. The test triggered a new U.S.-backed push for a fresh round of U.N. sanctions against the North.
At the United Nations, North Korea’s deputy ambassador, Kim In Ryong, was defiant. He said North Korea would never abandon its “nuclear deterrence for self-defence and pre-emptive strike capability” even if the U.S. ratchets up sanctions and pressure “to the utmost.”
Speaking to reporters, Kim hailed the test launch and said that if the Trump administration wants peace on the divided Korean Peninsula, it should replace the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War with a peace accord and halt its anti-North Korea policy.
At the Pentagon, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said the missile test showed North Korea isn’t heeding cautions from the international community. However, he stressed the need for a peaceful resolution by working through the U.N. with countries including China, the North’s traditional ally and benefactor.
“If this goes to a military solution it is going to be tragic on an unbelievable scale, and so our effort is to work with the U.N., work with China, work with Japan, work with South Korea to try to find a way out of this situation,” Mattis said at a news conference.
Cold War Nuclear Explosions Freakishly Impacted Space Weather https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/05/cold-war-nuclear-explosions-freakishly-impacted-space-weather/Rae PaolettaMay 19, 2017,The overdrawn game of nuclear chicken between the USSR and the United States — now known as the Cold War — lasted about 45 years. While neither superpower ever deployed nukes on each others’ soil, high-altitude bomb testing caused a kerfuffle in Earth’s atmosphere. Though the conflict has (thankfully) long since ended, newly declassified information suggests it might have impacted space weather in ways we never anticipated.
According to a new paper published in Space Science Reviews, the high altitude nuclear testing conducted by both the USSR and United States created “artificial radiation belts” near Earth. Our planet is naturally surrounded by Van Allen radiation belts — zones of highly-charged particles. But the energy from nuclear explosions created hot, electrically charged regions within the atmosphere that induced geomagnetic disturbances, and even produced radiation belts of its own. As you can probably guess, the results were not so great — according to the study’s authors, this resulted in “major damages to several satellites” that orbited Earth at a fairly low altitude.
Radiation and high-energy particles from the Sun frequently interact with Earth’s geomagnetic field, in the phenomenon known as space weather. When enough of these high energy particles rain down on the magnetosphere, it can severely damage communications satellites and even electrical power grids on the ground. But the radiation from nuclear blasts in the ’60s is an extreme example of how humans can also screw with our geomagnetic field, which is salient to understand but also terrifying.
Seriously, who would have guessed that missions with names like Argus, Teak and Starfish would have this kind of an impact? The radiation released from Argus alone caused an flurry of geomagnetic storms over Sweden and Arizona, according to the new study.
“The tests were a human-generated and extreme example of some of the space weather effects frequently caused by the Sun,” study’s co-author Phil Erickson, an assistant director at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, told NASA. “If we understand what happened in the somewhat controlled and extreme event that was caused by one of these man-made events, we can more easily understand the natural variation in the near-space environment.”
By understanding how human-caused geomagnetic disturbances impact our atmosphere, space agencies hope to better understand how to protect astronauts in Low Earth Orbit from the impacts of space weather, too. Maybe studying artificial space weather can even shed light on how a future monster solar storm will impact our electric grids and technology.
Also, hopefully we can calm down with the nukes here on Earth’s surface.
Stephen Rademaker: North Korea is a nuclear state. We have to live with that, and here’s how Stephen Rademaker, Washington Post | May 19, 2017 Last Sunday, North Korea successfully demonstrated for the first time that it could strike U.S. territory in the Pacific. After more than 25 years of wrestling with the North Korean nuclear threat, it’s time to recognize that North Korea is not merely seeking to gain bargaining leverage against us. Rather, it is determined to possess nuclear weapons, and we need to develop a realistic strategy for containing, defending against and deterring what will be a persistent and growing nuclear threat.
There’s every reason to continue pursuing sanctions and diplomacy, but we should not premise our policy on the expectation that such efforts are going to succeed in persuading North Korea to change course. We must also recognize that there is no acceptable military solution to the problem.
Even before the North produced its first nuclear weapon, the United States calculated that the potential cost for any military strike was too great for America and South Korea. Now that North Korea has nuclear weapons, as well as missiles that can reach Guam and beyond, this logic is even more compelling.
It is indeed true, as the Trump administration has concluded, that China has the wherewithal to compel North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons. But China is a great power that has had plenty of time to think through its policy. It is concerned, but clearly not panicked. More important, it perceives plenty of downsides to overreacting, including the potential collapse and absorption of its ally, North Korea, into America’s ally, South Korea.
So great is our dependence on China that, like hostages held by a kidnapper, all previous administrations developed a sort of Stockholm syndrome, coming to believe that China was doing everything it could to help solve the problem, when it manifestly could do more. After 25 years, we should not assume that more hectoring, promises or threats will persuade China to act in ways it believes contrary to its interests…….http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/stephen-rademaker-north-korea-is-a-nuclear-state-we-have-to-live-with-that-and-heres-how
The preamble of the treaty to ban nuclear weapons now under consideration at the UN will be greatly strengthened if it includes a summary of the long-term environmental consequences of nuclear war, as described by a series of peer-reviewed studies done by prominent scientists working at major US and Swiss Universities, as well as at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. These studies are considered to be the most authoritative type of scientific research—subjected to criticism by the international scientific community before final publication in scholarly journals—and the findings of these studies remain unchallenged.
The research predicts that a nuclear war fought between emerging nuclear weapon states—with less than 1 percent of the explosive power contained in the global nuclear arsenals—can produce catastrophic long-term damage to global environment and weather. A war fought with 100 atomic bombs can result in the coldest average annual surface temperatures experienced in the last 1,000 years, and this prolonged cold (and drought) would last for several years before temperatures began to return to normal. Medical experts predict that this prolonged cold would lead to a global famine causing up to two billion people to starve to death. Climatologists also predict that such a war would cause major damage to the Earth’s protective stratospheric ozone layer, leading to a doubling of harmful UV-B radiation in the populated mid-latitudes.
The studies also forecast that a war fought with US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons would create post-war Ice Age weather conditions across the Northern Hemisphere in a matter of weeks. These catastrophic changes in weather would be the result of a global stratospheric smoke layer, produced by hundreds or thousands of nuclear firestorms, which would block up to 90 percent of sunlight over central North America and Eurasia.
The loss of warming sunlight would cause temperatures in these central regions to fall below freezing every day for one to two years. Because the stratospheric smoke layer could not be rained out, it would remain for a decade or longer, affecting both the northern and southern hemispheres. Growing seasons in the large agricultural zones would be eliminated for many years, dooming most humans and animals to starvation from nuclear famine.
Confusion: nuclear war or a nuclear weapon? To date, there has been an unfortunate avoidance (among both diplomats and nongovernmental organizations involved in the ban treaty) of any explicit discussion of the effects of nuclear war; instead the language of the general conversation has tended to focus on the effects of a nuclear weapon, in the singular. This is evidenced by the wording of the Humanitarian Pledge, which was issued on December 9, 2014 at the conclusion of the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. Notice that the pledge states:
“Understanding that the immediate, mid- and long-term consequences of a nuclear weapon explosion are significantly graver than it was understood in the past and will not be constrained by national borders but have regional or even global effects, potentially threatening the survival of humanity.” (emphasis added)
This statement is technically incorrect, as a single nuclear weapon explosion cannot produce “global effects, potentially threatening the survival of humanity.” Only a nuclear war, fought with the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, is predicted to have the capacity to produce the catastrophic consequences capable of wiping out most peoples and nations. Likewise, scientists predict that a war fought with atomic bombs of the emerging nuclear weapon states can cause global weather changes that will likely lead to mass starvation. But a single nuclear detonation cannot produce such an effect.
The apparent confusion about the effects of a single nuclear weapon versus the effects of nuclear war were also reflected in the UN Resolution 70/47, titled “Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons.” It was passed in December 2015 and contains this language:
Welcoming the facts-based discussions on the effects of a nuclear weapon detonation that were held at the conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons convened respectively by Norway in March 2013, Mexico in February 2014 and Austria in December 2014…” (emphasis added)
It is imperative to avoid any similar confusion of cause and effect within the text of the ban treaty now being written. The scientifically predicted consequences of nuclear war must be clearly distinguished from those likely be to be caused by a single nuclear weapon detonation.
Science should be part of the ban treaty. The best way to avoid confusion over the effects of nuclear weaponry on the world environment would be to include authoritative scientific predictions—detailing the likely consequences of a range of nuclear conflicts—as supporting evidence in the preamble of the ban treaty. The existential threats explained by these peer-reviewed scientific studies provide the most powerful arguments imaginable against the existence of nuclear weapons and nuclear arsenals.
A series of studies were conducted at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research Earth System Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado, and ETH Zurich, which used a state-of-the-art computer modeling to evaluate the environmental consequences of a range of possible nuclear conflicts. The five peer-reviewed studies listed below evaluated the consequences of a war fought with atomic bombs:
Mills, Michael, Owen B. Toon, Richard P. Turco, Douglas E. Kinnison, Roland R. Garcia, 2007: Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105 no. 14, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0710058105. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/105/14/5307.full
Mills, Michael J., Owen B. Toon, Julia Lee-Taylor, and Alan Robock, 2014: Multi-decadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict. Earth’s Future, 2, 161-176, doi:10.1002/2013EF000205. Retrieved from http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/MillsNWeft224.pdf
Stenke, Andrea, C. R. Hoyle, B. Luo, E. Rozanov, J. Gröbner3, L. Maag, S. Brönnimann, and T. Peter, 2013: Climate and chemistry effects of a regional scale nuclear conflict. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 13, 9713-9729, doi:10.5194/acp-13-9713-2013. Retrieved from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/9713/2013/
Another important peer-reviewed study describes the catastrophic long-term environmental consequences of a large-scale nuclear war fought with strategic nuclear weapons:
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