The Solution to the United States Ageing Nuclear Arsenal

The Solution to the United States Ageing Nuclear Arsenal
Cleantech 23 Feb 09 

The United States’ thousands of nuclear warheads have the explosive equivalent of over 1 gigaton of TNT. It’s an amount of energy that could literally move mountains, reroute rivers, alter climate, and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions or even billions of people, through fire, radiation, and starvation………..

…………….In the March 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum, Francis Slakey and Benn Tannenbaum argue that the current program of “stockpile stewardship,” with some modifications, will be sufficient to preserve the U.S. arsenal for the foreseeable future. It isn’t necessary, and may even be counterproductive, they say, for the United States to pursue new warheads.

 

The Solution to the United States Ageing Nuclear Arsenal

February 23, 2009 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Editorial: Cut the bluster in nuclear disarmament talks

Editorial: Cut the bluster in nuclear talks The Dominion Post | Monday, 16 February 2009

Few issues in international affairs are as riddled with cant and hypocrisy as that of nuclear proliferation, writes The Dominion Post.

The United States regards Iran’s nuclear programme which the Iranians maintain is only for the peaceful generation of power as abhorrent and and a huge danger to world peace. At the same time it turns a blind eye to the nuclear programme of Israel, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

US President Barack Obama’s answer when asked if he knew of any nuclear power in the Middle East was an evasive warning of the dangers of an arms race in the region. If he had chosen to answer honestly, he would acknowledged that Israel, which will neither confirm nor deny whether it has the bomb, is thought to have about 200 nuclear warheads. He would have pointed out that the Israelis will not allow international surveillance of its Dimona nuclear plant, in the southern Negev desert.

Similarly, the US was equivocal in its response when Pakistan became a nuclear power, and agreed to share nuclear technology with India, another country that joined the nuclear club after the non-proliferation treaty.

It is also easy to forget that the non-proliferation treaty was founded on a bargain. Countries without the bomb agreed not to go chasing after it; those with the bomb agreed to work towards getting rid of their arsenals. There has been much talk and some progress in achieving that but thousands of weapons still remain.

One estimate, by the Federation of American Scientists, is that the US still has 9400 warheads, though only 2200 operationally deployed in a strategic role, and with a good proportion of the others retired and awaiting being dismantled. The same organisation estimates Russia has about 2700 deployed strategic warheads, but is also reducing its arsenal and intends to be down to 1800 by 2015.

Those numbers are still an obscenity that defies belief and, especially in the case of Russia, with its rundown infrastructure, terrifyingly high……………………….Mr Obama’s desire to “restart” the conversation with Russia over nuclear weapon reductions and work on further cutbacks in the two countries’ arsenals is welcome. His recognition that only then will Russia and the US “have the standing to go to other countries and start stitching back together the non-proliteration treaties that, frankly, have been weakened over the last several years” is exactly what is needed in both Washington and Moscow.

Editorial: Cut the bluster in nuclear talks – Editorials – The Dominion Post

February 16, 2009 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Can Obama stop the bomb in the senate stimulus plan?

The Huffington Post 3 feb 09 by Joseph Romm

A radioactive dirty bomb has been dropped on the Senate stimulus package.

On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to add $50 billion in nuclear loan guarantees to the economic recovery package (S. 336). This “would more than double the current loan guarantee cap of $38 billion” for “clean energy” technology.Yet this provision would not create a single job for many, many years, but would saddle the public with tens of millions of dollars more in toxic loans. As I noted in my 2008 report, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power“:

In August 2007, Tulsa World reported that American Electric Power Co. CEO Michael Morris was not planning to build any new nuclear power plants. He was quoted as saying, “I’m not convinced we’ll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline,”…………………

Why are we still propping up an industry that can’t survive without the taxpayer swallowing both the economic risk of an actual meltdown and the risk of the new nukes melting down financially — all for a mature technology that has already received more than $100 billion in direct and indirect subsidies (see “Nuclear Pork — Enough is Enough“)?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-romm/can-obama-stop-the-nuclea_b_163110.html

February 2, 2009 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Commentary: Will Obama see sense about nuclear threat? – science-in-society – 26 January 2009 – New Scientist

Will Obama see sense about nuclear threat? * New Scientist 26 January 2009 by Lawrence Krauss

THE possibility that, in an Obama administration, science will drive rational public policy provides an unprecedented opportunity to deal with a gnawing yet persistently neglected threat to the world: nuclear weapons.

No government is likely to declare how many strategic nuclear warheads it has, but the US and Russia are thought to possess at least 5000 apiece. The 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty required each nation to have no more than 2200 “operationally deployed” strategic warheads by 2012, yet this represents no real progress towards disarmament, as the target number is essentially identical to that proposed at the 1997 summit on nuclear arms reduction between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki, Finland.

As we object to Iran’s apparent efforts to join the club of nuclear weapons states we should remember that the US, Russia, France, the UK and China have failed to meet their obligations to disarm, some four decades after they all signed the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Reducing the size of our nuclear weapons stockpile would not reduce our ability to deter a nuclear attack – a fact acknowledged by politicians such as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and William Perry. Even 500 active warheads would be sufficient to kill hundreds of millions of people around the world. Reducing the size of the nuclear stockpile would bring one key benefit, though. Maintaining a huge and complex nuclear infrastructure is not cheap. In a time of increasing budget concerns, this is one area where savings could be achieved with little or no cost to security………………………In this new year, as the country and the world look to Barack Obama with hope, he has signalled his intent to address one clear global threat, namely climate change. Leading the world away from the nuclear precipice will require at least as much sound thinking and political courage. Lawrence Krauss is director of the Origins initiative at Ar

Commentary: Will Obama see sense about nuclear threat? – science-in-society – 26 January 2009 – New Scientist

January 28, 2009 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment