THINGS WHICH FOLLOW: PART D FOR Doomsday
(Something happened that demands a recognition in this blog: Iran has increased it's military presence in Syria. In Yedioth Ahronoth, Ron Ben-Yishal suggests the northern border already troublesome and deadly with Iranian and Syrian support of Hezbollah will become even more threatening. Russia has given it's blessing to the rise in Iranian strategic placement of support. Iranian warships could hover close to Israel and threaten shipping from Israel. Planes could be placed in Syria to threaten an air attack. Troops could mass at the Syrian border. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who said that any Iranian deployment is legitimate so long as Syria approves, has been meeting this week with the leader of Libya. The instability there gives their leader a need for distraction which the rallying cry to destroy Israel would surely provide. The Biblical scenario is coming much closer to fruition.)
(And in the US, the people of Alabama chose to reject Moore, a man accused of molesting women and actually vote for a democrat. It seems the stomachs of even the deepest South republicans have a gag reflex after all. Apparently a monument to the Ten Commandments doesn't insure election if you are busy violating a few of them. It may also be a reaction to the public actually seeing the depth of betrayal in the latest tax cut for the large corporations and the wealthy. And the promise from McConnell to continue the tax cutting in six years "if" the repubs are still in power. )
Lookin' Out For Number One
They advertise it on the television
I hear 'em plug it on the radio
How we've come to this, I really do not know
Givin' glory to the human race now
Man's evolving to a "higher plane"
We will see the wrath of God if things don't change
People lead about by blind ambition
And nobody wants to be outdone
And they say ya gotta look out for number one
Jesus is still in control of my life
He's the Master and second to none
One day the Lord will break open the sky
So I guess you could say I'm lookin' out
I'm lookin' out for number One
Usin' people just to gain position
Whatever happened to the Golden Rule
We've become a generation of power hungry fools, yeah
People livin' for their reputation
To make a name that everyone will know
What'll it take to show ya life's no one man show
If ya think that life is out to get you
And you feel you've gotta protect yourself
Turn it over to the one who knows you so well
Jesus is still in control of my life
He's the Master and second to none
One day the Lord will break open the sky
So I guess you could say I'm lookin' out
I'm lookin' out for number One
Oh, Jesus is still in control of my life
He's the Master and second to none
Oh, one day the Lord will break open the sky
So I guess you could say I'm lookin' out
I'm lookin' out for number One
I'm lookin' out for number One
I'm lookin' out for number One
Yeah, yeah,
I'm lookin' out!
http://www.independent.co.uk
THERE was a queue to get into the Chinese market in Vladivostok. It was below freezing on a clear-sky Saturday morning and the ground inside the fenced-off market was solidly packed ice. The Chinese merchants stood in front of their goods, stamping their feet against the cold.
The Russian customers picked through the piles of leather jackets, jumpers, underwear, sunglasses and video games. They pretended to turn their noses up at the quality of the goods, but bargained hard - to the point of fisticuffs - when they wanted to buy something.
The Chinese, mostly from the poor north-east Chinese province of Heilongjiang across the border, have got used to the abuse, the bribes they have to pay, and even the Russian gangs who roam the streets at night looking for Chinese to beat up. The money they make in Vladivostok more than compensates for the hardships. 'I hate it here,' said Li Jinhua, standing in front of a collection of television antennae. 'I hate the food, I hate the cold weather, and I hate the attitude of the people. But the money is good.' Lately, however, the Chinese have also had to deal with the full force of the local government, which last month introduced policies designed to keep them out of the country.
Here, in the Far East corner of Siberia, where Russia is hemmed in between the Pacific and China, the East-West conflict is being waged with gusto - in bare-knuckled form. Friction between the East and the West is nothing new: Britain's confrontation with China in the Opium wars is still being played out in the struggle over Hong Kong and the attempt by the US Navy in 1853 to open Japan to world trade is still unfinished business.
But nowhere are the tensions between East and West more visible, nor racist feelings more raw, than in the newly opened Russian Far East. For 50 years Vladivostok, as base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, was entirely closed to outsiders. After it opened in 1992 a flood of industrious Chinese labourers and merchants entered the city and the surrounding region and the Russians were not ready for them. As they undercut local merchants in the markets, while taking labouring jobs for lower wages than Russians were prepared to accept, resentment began to grow.
Beatings of Chinese became common last year: few now go out after dark. There are no Chinese restaurants in Vladivostok - perhaps the only city in the world with a large Chinese population so deprived. And last November the provincial government announced strict visa regulations for Chinese coming across the border. At the same time Chinese merchants were de facto banned from the centre of the city and forced to sell their goods on the outskirts. And Cossacks have set up unofficial posts along the border to stop anyone who tries to sneak across without the right papers.
'Our biggest problem now is the police,' said Zao Dongwan, who was selling underwear and running shoes in the market. 'They want bribes all the time - if we do not pay, they either beat us, or take away our passports.' The cost of a visa is officially 1,200 roubles (45 pence) but Mr Zao said police now expect a minimum of 120,000 merely to consider the application. And, even with a visa, police often demand arbitrary contributions from the Chinese.
(This underlines (snicker) that the two Asian giants are not likely to ever smile, shake hands and sing love songs to each other. W)
It is as if history were repeating itself. Before the Russian revolution Vladivostok was a colourful, cosmopolitan city with European and Japanese businessmen and Chinese shop-keepers and labourers mixing easily with the Russian (minority) population. Even in the 1920s 40 per cent of men of working age were Chinese. Russia's Far East has always had a labour shortage and the Chinese were quick to plug the gap. But Stalin gradually got rid of the Chinese, finally shooting several hundred in 1938 as alleged spies and deporting 10,000 to China.
Now the city is opening again - and the old Stalinist suspicions of outsiders are being revived. 'China has begun to carry out a policy aimed at penetrating the territories of Siberia . . . this policy includes shifting surplus population from North-east China,' claimed Victor Larin, director of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East.
Dr Larin, who specialises in Chinese history, said the Chinese are seen as a potential 'Fifth column within the economy - it is that which the local authorities are trying to stop'. In a survey carried out by Dr Larin's institute last year only 2 per cent in Vladivostok said they would work with Chinese if they had the choice.
Fears of a masterplan in Peking to infiltrate and eventually dominate the economy of Russia's Far East may be exaggerated. But there is no doubt that in the Chinese provinces neighbouring Russia, particularly Heilongjiang, many opportunities glisten just over the border. Heilongjiang has 35 million people, Vladivostok and its province of Primorye a mere 2.2 million. This weight of people, and the pressure to make money at any cost in today's China, will mean more Chinese trying to profit from the rich natural resources of Russia's Far East.
And that in turn will mean racial tension as Russian jealousy of Chinese enterprise and thrift mounts. For the time being, with the Chinese less visible in the city, tension has gone down. But, says Victor Cherep kov, the mayor of Vladivostok, this is temporary. 'The measures against the Chinese are not efficient, and the consequences have been minimal. The numbers of Chinese have not gone down - they are just becoming more clever at getting into Russia.'
War with either Korea means two giants at risk as well as that small country. No sane person could consider an attack on either the North or the South and expect to not have the two giants involved.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/siberia-russias-economic-heartland-and-daunting-dilemma/
Siberia has loomed large in perceptions about Russia’s place in the world. Throughout Russia’s
modern history, Siberia’s size—it encompasses more than three-quarters of Russia’s total
territory—and its geostrategic position astride the Eurasian landmass have contributed significantly
to Russia itself. And the exploration and development of Siberia have helped shape Russian national
identity. Siberia has been seen as Russia’s “treasure chest,” the source of new wealth, new territory, and folk traditions that evolved alongside the unique cultures of Siberia’s indigenous peoples. Russian writers have extolled Siberia as the “untamed frontier” and a “New World” savior for the rest of Russia. As late as the 1980s, a statement attributed to Mikhail Lomonosov, the great Russian scholar of the eighteenth century—”Russia’s power will grow with Siberia”—adorned the walls of Russia’s science classrooms.
Siberia, as the primary repository of Russia’s massive natural resource base, has played a vital role in
underpinning the Russian economy. Furs from the forestlands across the Ural Mountains and Siberia,
along with salt and minerals, bolstered the economy of Muscovy and the early Russian empire from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Siberia’s mineral resources fueled the industrialization of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century and the development of Soviet industry after the 1917 revolution. West Siberian oil became the mainstay of the late Soviet economy from the 1960s, and it remains the backbone of the Russian economy today.
According to Russian calculations, Siberia holds just under 80 percent of Russia’s oil resources, about 85 percent of its natural gas, 80 percent of its coal, similar amounts of precious metals and diamonds, and a little over 40 percent of the nation’s timber resources. As a result of this rich base, and its exploitation, Siberia is in many respects what geographer David Hooson would call Russia’s “effective national territory,” or its economic heartland—the region that produces a surplus relative to the size of its population and that essentially supports the rest of the country. As a number of recent studies by geographer Michael Bradshaw and economist Peter Westin have demonstrated, with the exception of the city of Moscow and the industrial region of Samara in the Urals, the major contributors to the Russian economy in terms of per capita gross regional product (GRP) are all natural-resource regions, primarily in Siberia and the Russian Far East. The oil-producing
region of Tyumen in West Siberia tops the list; then Chukotka, also a major energy producer; Sakha
(Yakutia), the site of Russia’s world-class diamond industry; Magadan, a major mining region; Sakhalin, the island repository off the Pacific coast of one of Russia’s richest new finds of oil and gas; and Krasnoyarsk, a vast coal mining, mineral, and precious metal producing region.
http://russiatrek.org/tyumen-city
Tyumen is a city in Russia, the capital of the Tyumen region, the first Russian city in Siberia. It is located in Western Siberia on the Tura River flowing into the Tobol River. The distance to Moscow is 2,081 km.
The population of Tyumen is about 697,600 (2015), the area - 235 sq. km.
The phone code is +7 3452, the postal codes - 625000-625062.
The idea of any war with Russia is daunting enough let alone the realization of the size of the place with Siberia added and all those resources to call upon in any extended war. The oil resources in Tyumen alone would fuel many long battles.
And what would you attack them with if you were an enemy?
Nuclear weapons would ruin the value of the resources but would be the only potential threat to the vastness of the Russian bear.
Even without the Ice Age idea, the threat of nculear weapons from either the US or Russia is huge:
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nuclear-weapons-expansion-risk-2017-1
Few words issued by President-elect Donald Trump could matter more than his recent rhetoric on nuclear weapons.
"The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes," Trump posted to Twitter on December 22, 2016.
The next day, he bucked his aides' dismissive spin: "Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all," Trump allegedly told MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski over the phone.
Trump is worried about the nuclear weapons modernization efforts of Russia, which in 2014 violated a key arms reduction treaty, plus the emerging threat of North Korea. His tough-guy attitude echoes Cold War-era logic: outmatch your adversaries, or risk a nation-destroying preemptive strike.
But this line of thinking is exceedingly dangerous in a future US president. It not only ignores disquieting facts about nuclear weapons and threatens to further implode a global half-century-long effort to reduce nuclear armaments, it also increases the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
Trump's push for nuclear proliferation is the worst possible option, not even worthy of being a last resort.
Here's why.
Enough nukes already exist to destroy both the US and Russia
Russia currently possesses 7,300 nuclear weapons. The United States has 7,100. Together, these armaments comprise about 93% of all nuclear weapons on Earth. By contrast, China has about 260 warheads.
Less than a quarter of these weapons are actually deployed in the air, on land, or at sea — the so-called "triad" of defense. Also, an uncertain number are smaller, "tactical" devices meant for the battlefield. (Such devices are their own can of worms, as we'll show shortly.)
But such caveats make little difference.
Most US and Russian arms are officially deemed as "strategic," such as the submarine-launched W88 thermonuclear warhead, and they tend to be many times more powerful than the bombs the US dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Those unprecedented attacks leveled cities and killed more than 100,000 people.
Purely looking at the known numbers of strategic warheads, the US has deployed and stockpiled enough to destroy every Russian city with a population greater than 50,000 (about 300 cities altogether) many times over. Similarly, Russia likely has enough to decimate every US city larger than 100,000 people (also about 300 cities) multiple times.
This is the raw essence behind nuclear deterrence: You won't destroy us because we can destroy you.
(Effectively ignoring that there are plenty of weapons to destroy each other already. Except for the one truth none of these folks share with anyone. More on that after this article. W.)
If establishing such a stalemate is still the guiding principle behind the existence of nuclear weapons, then the current US arsenal is more than adequate psychological warfare. Adding more weapons, as Trump suggests, would do little to enhance or change this perceived advantage.
In fact, it'd make a terrifying situation even worse.
Weapons systems — and people — are flawed
Right now, hundreds of strategic US nuclear weapons are on "hair-trigger alert," also called "on alert" or "launch-on-warning".
This dangerous Cold War-era policy means such weapons can be launched within a few minutes of detecting an adversary's preemptive nuclear strike — or a false signal of one.
Many strategic weapons, like Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) deployed across middle America, can't be disabled once they leave a silo.
Yet no human creation is perfect. You can build the world's smartest, most seemingly foolproof machine, and it will still contain flaws. In the case of nuclear weapons systems, such flaws run the risk of accidental launch, detonation, and incredible loss of life.
Tallying up nuclear weapons accidents is exceedingly difficult, especially due to their classified nature, but information that has been released is alarming.
"[M]any dozens of incidents involving nuclear warheads are known to have occurred in the United States — and likely many more that have not been made public," according to a 2015 fact sheet by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It continued: "[T]he more of these incidents that occur, the greater is the chance that one of them will lead to a nuclear detonation."
Thirty-two known incidents were "broken arrows," or when a nuclear weapon was accidentally launched, fired, detonated, stolen, or lost. Eleven are weapons the US military never recovered, including one of two powerful thermonuclear bombs it accidentally dropped and nearly detonated over North Carolina.
A uranium pit from one of the weapons is still somewhere at the bottom of a swamp.
(I emphasize this because any one of those lost bombs could show up somewhere at any time. When you consider the results of a detontation and add it to the missing weapons factor, you wonder why the recoverey of those weapons has never been prioritized by governments. That we know of. W.)
Writer Eric Schlosser has chronicled some of these all-too-common misadventures in "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety". The 2014 book closely follows the story of a Titan II ICBM that exploded in its silo, nearly setting off a powerful warhead that could have laid waste to Arkansas and nearby states. (The cause? A maintenance worker who accidentally dropped a tool.)
In light of Trump's recent statements, Schlosser revisited some of his book's material in a recent piece for The New Yorker, in which he described alarming, ongoing technical problems with "aging and obsolete" nuclear weapons and their command-and-control systems.
Schlosser also highlighted the risks of being human. Using Minuteman III system as one example, he wrote for The New Yorker:
"[In 2014], almost a hundred Minuteman launch officers were disciplined for cheating on their proficiency exams. In 2015, three launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana, were dismissed for using illegal drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. That same year, a launch officer at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for heading a violent street gang, distributing drugs, sexually assaulting a girl under the age of sixteen, and using psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen. As the job title implies, launch officers are entrusted with the keys for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles."
National leaders who can order nuclear strikes are also fallible humans.
Take Pakistan's defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, for example. Asif publicly rattled his nation's nuclear sabers in late December after reading (and apparently believing) a fake news article about Israel threatening his country with nuclear weapons.
More nukes would increase the chances that a weapons system and the people behind their operation would fail. It would also heighten the risk of a weapon, especially small tactical ones, falling into the hands of terrorists.
Luckily, the US is actively working to reduce the chance of disaster.
During the first presidential debate, Trump claimed that "Russia has been expanding their — they have a much newer [nuclear weapons] capability than we do. We have not been updating from the new standpoint. [...] We are not — we are not keeping up with other countries."
(Now I want you to realize the reason Reaganites say the USSR fell apart was that we caused that regime to overspend itself into such debt it had to give up the union and collapse. Many of those same Reaganites now back the massive overspending and the Trump idea to kick it up as we race against a successful Russian economy building program. The failure to remember history leads to repeating it and the repeats are almost never good ones. W.)
(But you need to remember something else. The US Defense industry is directly or indirectly responsible for fully 1/4 of the US economy. The US government is propping up the economy with its spending even as it is collapsing the middle class and letting the poor and desperate go whatever way they may while claiming there isn't enough money. It is an odd corner the US government under Republican rule has painted itself into. But it is an obvious one that leads to the feeding of a military industrial complex that has the money and influence to keep supporters in power and help eliminate anyone who disagrees with them. W.)
While it's true that Russia is upgrading its weapons, partly in response to sanctions and partly in response to US nuclear weapons advancements, Trump's assertion that the US "has not been updating" and is "not keeping up" is either a bold lie or fallacious.
For example, Russia does not currently have a working early-warning satellite system; it went offline 2 years ago, Schlosser said. This means the US gets 30 minutes of warning with an ICBM launch. Russia's land-based radar systems, meanwhile, can give only a few minutes' notice before a warhead lands.
Trump's oft-repeated statements on nuclear weapons also suggest that he does not understand the truly bewildering amount of taxpayer dollars the US has spent maintaining and improving its nuclear weapons systems.
In his book "Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940", Stephen Schwartz, a professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, calculated how much the US government spent on nuclear weapons through 1996.
His conservative estimate is that the country spent, at minimum, $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons. That's in 1996-adjusted dollars, though; in 2016 dollars, this amounts to more than $8.9 trillion.
Putting this titanic amount of money into perspective, Schwartz told an audience during a 1998 presentation at the Brookings Institution:
"[N]uclear weapons spending over this 56-year period exceeded the combined total federal spending for education; training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; community and regional development (including disaster relief); law enforcement; and energy production and regulation. On average, the United States has spent $98 billion a year [$150 billion in 2016 dollars] on nuclear weapons."
(When the Congress and President move to cut or destroy every social program that might have rescued the US from the awful consequences of the above spending action because there isn't enough money in the coffers for the social programs and the constant military spending, please remind yourself not to be standing too close to any of these people on Judgement Day. I don't know about you, but I have enough sins of my own I don't want any of the fallout from these guys to catch me. W.)
Today, a similar spending trend continues.
"The current and planned U.S. investment in nuclear forces is unrivaled by any other nuclear power," stated a December 2016 report by the Arms Control Association.
Business Insider has called Trump's attention to the fact that the US plans to spend more than $1 trillion in taxes over the next 30 years to modernize its nuclear arsenal. (The government pegged the cost at about $450 billion over 20 years, but these estimates aren't realistic, according to several independent reports.)
The nuclear triad modernization program, requested by President Barack Obama, endeavors to refurbish aging weapons systems, improve reliability, narrow targeting, lower the risk of malfunctions, and actually reduce the number of deployed, ready-to-go weapons.
(With one detail ignored. They are refurbishing weapons but not the missiles that launch them. The "old reliables" that have failed in the past remain in place. W.)
Any call to expand the US nuclear arsenal while failing to address this controversial program, as Trump did throughout the 2016 election, and continues to as president-elect, belies a vast government expenditure and suggests a worrisome ignorance or dishonesty.
The effects of this program could extend well beyond US and Russian borders, too.
.
Despite both the US and Russia taking thousands of warheads offline since 2010 (as part of the New START treaty), some experts believe the arms race Trump seeks is already happening under Obama's watch. A primary concern surrounds two new tactical weapons the US military plans to build.
The first is a new land-launched nuclear cruise missile. Former UK defense secretary Philip Hammond has said such weapons look like non-nuclear cruise missiles to enemies and adversaries, so their existence could lead to confusion that ends in nuclear war.
The second — the US military's B61-12 gravity bomb design — is perhaps more troubling, in that it might lead to routine use of nuclear weapons. While billed as an upgrade, many experts say it's effectively a new weapon with new capabilities.
The B61-12 will recycle four older-style bombs that simply fell to target with a precision of about 300-550 feet. The rebuilt bombs, however, will have new pop-out fins and thrusters to guide them to a target with a precision of less than 100 feet. Their explosions will be adjustable, too, so the military can detonate them at yields several times greater down to several times less than the first atomic bombs.
The Federation of American Scientists and former US military leaders say such features make tactical weapons imminently more usable in battle. And if tactical weapons are used in a future conflict, the taboo against use of any nuclear weapons is likely to fall apart. Some experts even argue that tactical weapons use could lead to a nuclear holocaust. (Of note: As late as August 2016, one of Trump's foreign policy advisors said the incoming president asked at least "three times" why the US couldn't use its nuclear arsenal.)
US development of advanced tactical weapons also sends a signal to other countries: Namely, that it's ok to develop them, too.
The most worrisome country for this to happen is not Russia or even Iran or North Korea, but Pakistan (which has 140 nuclear weapons) in its longstanding and bitter feud with India (which has 110 nuclear weapons).
"Pakistan is outnumbered by India in terms of conventional forces and is growing increasingly reliant on the threat of the early use of tactical weapons to deter an attack," journalist Julian Borger wrote at The Guardian in 2016.
If that does happen, a small-scale nuclear war could ensue — and wreck the planet.
(Moreover, the threat of India as a massive army against China would be greatly reduced if Pakistan were to open fire on its populous Hindu enemy. W)
Simulations show that in a war where India and Pakistan each detonate 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs over cities, more than a quarter of the Earth's ozone layer would disappear within 2 years. The surge of incoming ultraviolet light would wreck ocean ecosystems, increase the rate of skin cancers, stunt plant growth, and more.
Also, all the carbon from burning cities would partially blot out the sun, plummet average surface temperatures to 1,000-year lows, and lead to a nuclear winter scenario that'd trigger global famine due to food shortages.
Adding weapons and increasing their capabilities is a surer path toward such a catastrophe. There are, however, ways to steer humanity away from this alarming risk.
What is the solution?
The more nuclear weapons exist and are upgraded, the more likely they are to be used — either intentionally or accidentally — and expose our species to the risk of an unprecedented nuclear calamity and possibly a horrifying extinction.
The solution is not easy but straightforward: Do not expand any nuclear arsenals. Instead, continue to reduce weapons stockpiles, ideally until they are all gone.
(Understand a US strategist would say this is suicide for the US which would be vulnerable ti invasion from lesser more populous countries without this weapons superiority. Military would likely be tempted to seize power and "protect the country" from this "mistake." W.)
The US can't ignore ongoing threats from Putin to modernize and expand Russia's nuclear arsenal. Nor should we idly sit by while North Korea works toward its first fully functional nuclear weapons system, including an ICBM capable of reaching the US, or as Pakistan develops tactical weapons — and endeavors to give commanders the authority to use them on the battlefield.
...
Most importantly, however, as Schlosser and others argue, it's past time that we stop assuming nuclear weapons are safe or ignorable relics of the Cold War.
Instead, we all need to have frank and honest discussions — in our homes, at work, and with elected officials — about the reality of nuclear weapons, including their numbers, risks, cost, and imminent threat to the future of humanity. Every weapon we dismantle is one step farther away from the worst kind of mishap imaginable.
There is a dirty little open secret about all this stockpiling of nuclear weapons: some things in the bombs and missiles may not work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/60e8aj/what_is_the_shelf_life_of_a_nuclear_weapon_how/
There are several "aging" issues with nuclear weapons:if they use tritium for "boosting," it has a really short half-life and needed to be replaced every few years plutonium self-irradiates, which changes its chemical and nuclear composition over time (whether it does so in a way that will make it unviable is what is being studied — so far the labs have said "it'll still work"; JASON said it won't affect yield for at least a century, but as with all tricky issues there are disagreers) there are conventional high explosives, wires, circuits, etc., which, aside from just aging as things do, are also undergoing small amounts of irradiation from the fissile material, and that induces chemical changes
there are also "exotic" materials in the weapons whose long-term shelf-life isn't clear (e.g. weird aerogels), esp. under long-term irradiation.
So you have a lot of things that might go wrong over time, plus one thing (the tritium) that will definitely go wrong over time.
As for straight up regular radioactive decay — the half lives of U-235 and Pu-239 are long enough that this doesn't matter much. If your bomb at 6 kg of Pu-239 and you do nothing to it for a century, you'll have 5.98 kg of Pu-239 at the end of that century. I don't think that's going to make much of a difference. At some point, I guess, you'll get a low level of plutonium, but check this out: if you waited 500 years, you'd have 4.66 kg of plutonium left, which is making you think, oh, maybe that's not viable, right? But in that time the decays would have generate 1.34 kg of U-235! So while your critical properties would have changed a little bit, you still have ~6 kg of fissile material. You have to wait on the order of several million years before you really start to lose fissile material to decay (because the Pu-239 converts to U-235 and U-235 has a much longer half-life). Anyway, this is just an illustration of the decay aspect — it's actually not likely relevant to your question, because the other components will surely decompose long before that's an issue.
NPR transcript:
November 30, 2006
6:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
DAVID KESTENBAUM
The National Nuclear Security Administration says the rate at which nuclear weapons materials degrade is slower than they once believed. That means the the nation's nuclear arsenal may not need updating as soon as was thought. But the debate in Congress about the long-term reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile continues.
JOHN YDSTIE, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm John Ydstie.
RENÈE MONTAGNE, host:
And I'm Renèe Montagne. Good morning.
A new study suggests that plutonium, the critical component of nuclear weapons, may have a surprisingly long shelf life. Some U.S. weapons are close to 30 years old and scientists have worried the plutonium inside them may be slowly deteriorating. The new findings released yesterday suggest that's not the case, that plutonium could survive a very long time.
NPR's David Kestenbaum reports.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: The problem with plutonium is it's only been around since World War II, so it's hard to say how it ages over the long haul. Plutonium is radioactive. And when the atoms decay, they send bits and pieces plowing through the rest of material, potentially causing damage. The official estimate had been that plutonium should hold up for at least 45 years. The new findings indicate the weapon pits should be okay for almost twice that - 85 years at least.
The Department of Energy is planning to build a new facility to remanufacture plutonium cores for bombs. Stephen Schwartz says the new findings mean there is no rush to do that. He edits the journal called “The Nonproliferation Review.”
Mr. STEPHEN SCHWARTZ (Editor, The Nonproliferation Review): Plutonium aging, other warhead reliability problems, they've all been touted as reasons why we have to go back and start remanufacturing weapons. And if we're going to do that, they'll say well, we've got to build an entirely new weapon's complex. I think this calls into question whether or not that's a wise and necessary course of action.
Notice the sentence. During the great scrapping of nuclear weapons during the Reagan- Gorbachev era, many sources suggested that the reason was the weapons themselves were no longer functional, not because of nuclear deterioration, but because the decaying radioactive materials emitted radiation that went into the surrounding steel casings of the weapons and the nickel in the steel accumulated that radiation and the effect of the accumulation was to make the various instruments of the weapon malfunction. One of the rumors for the cause of the missile exploding in the silo recorded above. Nickel still accumulates radiation and is still used in the highest grade steels. The possibility is simply that some or many of the older weapons in nuclear arsenals may well fail in a battle situation.
About Vladivostok's fate and that of any American city hit:
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200508/viewpoint.cfm
In contrast to a chemical or biological agent, a "small" (10 kiloton) nuclear weapon detonated in a major city would kill more than 100,000 people and reduce tens of square kilometers to rubble almost instantly. Even a crude nuclear device that fizzled would destroy many square kilometers of a city and kill tens of thousands of people. A large (1 megaton) nuclear weapon could kill millions of people and destroy hundreds of square kilometers within a few seconds. Those who survived a nuclear explosion would have to deal with severe physical trauma, burns, and radiation sickness. Vital infrastructure would be destroyed or damaged, and radioactivity would linger for years near and downwind of the explosion. Unlike the effects of a chemical or biological weapon, the devastating effects of a nuclear weapon on a city cannot be reduced significantly by actions taken before or after the attack.
How might a nuclear weapon be delivered to a US city? The current administration has tended to focus on the possibility that an emerging missile state such as North Korea or Iran could use long-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States. However, the US intelligence community considers long-range ballistic missiles the least likely method an enemy might use to attack the United States, and no emerging missile states currently have missiles that could reach the US homeland.
Russia currently has about 6,000 nuclear-tipped intercontinental-range missiles capable of striking the US homeland and China has about 20, but neither North Korea nor Iran currently has missiles capable of reaching the United States. The longest-range missile North Korea has tested (once, in 1998) is its Taepodong I. With two stages, this missile is thought capable of lofting a nuclear warhead about 2,000 km, half the distance required to reach Alaska from North Korea and about a third the distance needed to reach Hawaii. In the 1998 test, a small third stage was added and blew up in flight. If the Taepodong I had a third stage that worked, it could probably loft about 500 kg, less than the mass of an unsophisticated nuclear warhead, a distance of 3,000–4,000 km, less than the distance to Alaska or Hawaii. North Korea has for a decade been reported to be working on a more advanced missile, the Taepodong II, which might be able to loft a nuclear warhead far enough to reach Alaska or Hawaii but probably not other parts of the United States. Iran has tested a ballistic missile that has a range of 1,300 km and is reportedly developing a more advanced missile that is expected to have a range of 2,000–3,000 km, far less than that needed to strike the United States.
Developing a system that can deliver a nuclear weapon using a long-range ballistic missile requires mastering many challenging technologies. The nuclear warhead must be light enough to be carried by the missile and must be capable of surviving the harsh conditions of launch and re-entry at hypersonic speeds. If the attacker has only a few nuclear weapons, the missile must be reliable and accurate enough to risk using it to deliver a weapon.
Frederick K. Lamb is Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Director of the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was the co-Chair of the APS study group on boost-phase intercept systems for national missile defense.
The new A-Bomb of communication may be quantum encryption.
http://www.newsweek.com/china-using-quantum-physics-take-over-world-695026
Now, thanks to a technology called quantum encryption, the dream of perfectly secure communication is real. It could help free the world from online fraud and identity theft, hacking attacks and electronic eavesdropping. It could also enable terrorists and criminals to communicate with absolute secrecy—and governments to hide their secrets without anyone ever finding out. In a world of unbreakable encryption, all human electronic communication could become entirely private—with mind-boggling consequences, both good and bad, for cybersecurity.On September 29, that world came significantly closer to reality. A team of cryptographers and physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a half-hour video call with their counterparts in Vienna using quantum encryption, a technology that makes it impossible to hack or overhear communications.
The new encryption standard “is what has me most excited, and most worried, of all recent technological innovations,” says a senior U.K. intelligence official not authorized to speak on the record. “It’s a world-changer.” And at the moment, experts say, while the major technical innovations in quantum technology are still being produced in such Western institutions as IBM in Armonk, New York, the University of California (backed by Google) and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (backed by the European Union), it’s the Chinese who are far ahead in terms of implementation.The Beijing-Vienna call was made over a conventional Skype-type internet connection—but what was revolutionary was a secure encryption key generated in a quantum device mounted in a Chinese satellite. And, crucially, the quantum physics that created the key means any attempt to break the code can be immediately detected. “Quantum crypto is as close to unbreakable ciphers as one can possibly get,” says Artur Ekert, a professor at the University of Oxford and inventor of the model on which the Chinese based their system.
Ekert’s encryption method is based on an extraordinary effect known as quantum entanglement. The phenomenon is so bizarre and inexplicable that even the man who discovered it, Albert Einstein, was baffled. In 1935, he described the effect as “spooky action at a distance.”Here’s how it works: Two particles of light—known as photons—in separate locations can be made to precisely copy each other’s behavior even when separated by vast distances. Exactly how this happens is still not understood, but the phenomenon was demonstrated in lab conditions back in 1984. What’s remarkable about September’s Beijing-Vienna experiment is that scientists were able to use quantum entanglement to make a secret key composed of a string of data bits appear simultaneously in different corners of the Earth.What’s more, the Chinese team, led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan, has built an entire real-world quantum-encrypted communications system. The Chinese have linked base stations, satellites and thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable to transmit the quantum keys across the country. “It didn’t require the discovery of a new physical principle,” says Charles Clark, an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute who pioneered quantum communication over distance. What’s impressive is the scale and distance over which the Chinese have made their system work.
“It’s a spectacular demonstration,” Clark says.Until now, all cryptography had basically relied on creating mathematical puzzles that were beyond an enemy’s technological capabilities to solve. Today’s standard for encryption—so-called public key technology, which is the basis of all internet authentication and supposedly secure communications applications, such as WhatsApp—is much more complex than Enigma."
The King of the East orders his armed forces into action.
Before the US attacked, even before calling the US President, the King activated an encrypted communications device which in turn activated small explosives packages embedded in both the generator and the back-up generator for the bunker of the North Korean command. He did not have a chance to stop the launching but this act ends their ability to communicate with the outside forces and stops the oxygen recycling and scrubbing action and stops all the elevator escape procedures. Miles underground, the North Korean command group will slowly suffocate. Effectively ending their direction of their forces.
In the sea of Japan, the US fleet has been holding it's own for fifteen minutes against the now leaderless armed forces of a small country. Destroyers have been lost to land to sea missiles but the carrier has endured. It's fleet of planes have outfought anything sent against them.
US military command in South Korea has been attacked by conventional weapons. The order to launch a nuke against Soule was not given before the communications went down. They rally their ground troops then see that the nuclear armaments have hit NK and make a physical invasion risky until the dust clears. SK government orders everyone that can into available shelters. Fallout now becomes as much an enemy as North Korea.
US commanders in Japan are caught off guard. They notify the Japanese government even though they already know from the weapons fire and net postings. They have begun their efficient movement of their people into shelters and into their designated positions in case of nuclear disasters.
Three Chinese submarines have been shadowing the US force in the Sea of Japan since they arrived there years ago. They have become the constant shadow ignored but not forgotten. Their encrypted messages arrive at the same time and they follow them to the letter.
Nuclear tipped torpedoes are launched from different directions, from the strait with the East China Sea, from the strait with the Sea of Okhotsk. Nuclear war in a small pocket of water and land becomes even more concentrated.
The King of the North gets word that his port city on the Pacific is lost. He is now truly aggravated. His plan in Israel was stymied and his forces were annihilated. He lost considerable resources. Then the US collapse wounded his buying power and the head of the EU gutted the World Bank and established his own bitcoin system for the world to rescue the economy and, of course, establish himself as the controller. The King of the North has been outplayed. Now he knows he must conquer Europe to gain any kind of control over his future. But the fools ruling in the US have made this even more difficult by their attack on North Korea and their "error" with the bomb. His people are now dying and his port will be useless for decades at least.
If he knew the King of the East was acting, he might be able to await the outcome. Instead he decides to take action. Taking the wildcard US out of play will simplify his life and let his people know that Russia still matters.
(Something happened that demands a recognition in this blog: Iran has increased it's military presence in Syria. In Yedioth Ahronoth, Ron Ben-Yishal suggests the northern border already troublesome and deadly with Iranian and Syrian support of Hezbollah will become even more threatening. Russia has given it's blessing to the rise in Iranian strategic placement of support. Iranian warships could hover close to Israel and threaten shipping from Israel. Planes could be placed in Syria to threaten an air attack. Troops could mass at the Syrian border. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who said that any Iranian deployment is legitimate so long as Syria approves, has been meeting this week with the leader of Libya. The instability there gives their leader a need for distraction which the rallying cry to destroy Israel would surely provide. The Biblical scenario is coming much closer to fruition.)
(And in the US, the people of Alabama chose to reject Moore, a man accused of molesting women and actually vote for a democrat. It seems the stomachs of even the deepest South republicans have a gag reflex after all. Apparently a monument to the Ten Commandments doesn't insure election if you are busy violating a few of them. It may also be a reaction to the public actually seeing the depth of betrayal in the latest tax cut for the large corporations and the wealthy. And the promise from McConnell to continue the tax cutting in six years "if" the repubs are still in power. )
Lookin' Out For Number One
They advertise it on the television
I hear 'em plug it on the radio
How we've come to this, I really do not know
Givin' glory to the human race now
Man's evolving to a "higher plane"
We will see the wrath of God if things don't change
People lead about by blind ambition
And nobody wants to be outdone
And they say ya gotta look out for number one
Jesus is still in control of my life
He's the Master and second to none
One day the Lord will break open the sky
So I guess you could say I'm lookin' out
I'm lookin' out for number One
Usin' people just to gain position
Whatever happened to the Golden Rule
We've become a generation of power hungry fools, yeah
People livin' for their reputation
To make a name that everyone will know
What'll it take to show ya life's no one man show
If ya think that life is out to get you
And you feel you've gotta protect yourself
Turn it over to the one who knows you so well
Jesus is still in control of my life
He's the Master and second to none
One day the Lord will break open the sky
So I guess you could say I'm lookin' out
I'm lookin' out for number One
Oh, Jesus is still in control of my life
He's the Master and second to none
Oh, one day the Lord will break open the sky
So I guess you could say I'm lookin' out
I'm lookin' out for number One
I'm lookin' out for number One
I'm lookin' out for number One
Yeah, yeah,
I'm lookin' out!
http://www.independent.co.uk
THERE was a queue to get into the Chinese market in Vladivostok. It was below freezing on a clear-sky Saturday morning and the ground inside the fenced-off market was solidly packed ice. The Chinese merchants stood in front of their goods, stamping their feet against the cold.
The Russian customers picked through the piles of leather jackets, jumpers, underwear, sunglasses and video games. They pretended to turn their noses up at the quality of the goods, but bargained hard - to the point of fisticuffs - when they wanted to buy something.
The Chinese, mostly from the poor north-east Chinese province of Heilongjiang across the border, have got used to the abuse, the bribes they have to pay, and even the Russian gangs who roam the streets at night looking for Chinese to beat up. The money they make in Vladivostok more than compensates for the hardships. 'I hate it here,' said Li Jinhua, standing in front of a collection of television antennae. 'I hate the food, I hate the cold weather, and I hate the attitude of the people. But the money is good.' Lately, however, the Chinese have also had to deal with the full force of the local government, which last month introduced policies designed to keep them out of the country.
Here, in the Far East corner of Siberia, where Russia is hemmed in between the Pacific and China, the East-West conflict is being waged with gusto - in bare-knuckled form. Friction between the East and the West is nothing new: Britain's confrontation with China in the Opium wars is still being played out in the struggle over Hong Kong and the attempt by the US Navy in 1853 to open Japan to world trade is still unfinished business.
But nowhere are the tensions between East and West more visible, nor racist feelings more raw, than in the newly opened Russian Far East. For 50 years Vladivostok, as base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, was entirely closed to outsiders. After it opened in 1992 a flood of industrious Chinese labourers and merchants entered the city and the surrounding region and the Russians were not ready for them. As they undercut local merchants in the markets, while taking labouring jobs for lower wages than Russians were prepared to accept, resentment began to grow.
Beatings of Chinese became common last year: few now go out after dark. There are no Chinese restaurants in Vladivostok - perhaps the only city in the world with a large Chinese population so deprived. And last November the provincial government announced strict visa regulations for Chinese coming across the border. At the same time Chinese merchants were de facto banned from the centre of the city and forced to sell their goods on the outskirts. And Cossacks have set up unofficial posts along the border to stop anyone who tries to sneak across without the right papers.
'Our biggest problem now is the police,' said Zao Dongwan, who was selling underwear and running shoes in the market. 'They want bribes all the time - if we do not pay, they either beat us, or take away our passports.' The cost of a visa is officially 1,200 roubles (45 pence) but Mr Zao said police now expect a minimum of 120,000 merely to consider the application. And, even with a visa, police often demand arbitrary contributions from the Chinese.
(This underlines (snicker) that the two Asian giants are not likely to ever smile, shake hands and sing love songs to each other. W)
It is as if history were repeating itself. Before the Russian revolution Vladivostok was a colourful, cosmopolitan city with European and Japanese businessmen and Chinese shop-keepers and labourers mixing easily with the Russian (minority) population. Even in the 1920s 40 per cent of men of working age were Chinese. Russia's Far East has always had a labour shortage and the Chinese were quick to plug the gap. But Stalin gradually got rid of the Chinese, finally shooting several hundred in 1938 as alleged spies and deporting 10,000 to China.
Now the city is opening again - and the old Stalinist suspicions of outsiders are being revived. 'China has begun to carry out a policy aimed at penetrating the territories of Siberia . . . this policy includes shifting surplus population from North-east China,' claimed Victor Larin, director of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East.
Dr Larin, who specialises in Chinese history, said the Chinese are seen as a potential 'Fifth column within the economy - it is that which the local authorities are trying to stop'. In a survey carried out by Dr Larin's institute last year only 2 per cent in Vladivostok said they would work with Chinese if they had the choice.
Fears of a masterplan in Peking to infiltrate and eventually dominate the economy of Russia's Far East may be exaggerated. But there is no doubt that in the Chinese provinces neighbouring Russia, particularly Heilongjiang, many opportunities glisten just over the border. Heilongjiang has 35 million people, Vladivostok and its province of Primorye a mere 2.2 million. This weight of people, and the pressure to make money at any cost in today's China, will mean more Chinese trying to profit from the rich natural resources of Russia's Far East.
And that in turn will mean racial tension as Russian jealousy of Chinese enterprise and thrift mounts. For the time being, with the Chinese less visible in the city, tension has gone down. But, says Victor Cherep kov, the mayor of Vladivostok, this is temporary. 'The measures against the Chinese are not efficient, and the consequences have been minimal. The numbers of Chinese have not gone down - they are just becoming more clever at getting into Russia.'
War with either Korea means two giants at risk as well as that small country. No sane person could consider an attack on either the North or the South and expect to not have the two giants involved.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/siberia-russias-economic-heartland-and-daunting-dilemma/
Siberia has loomed large in perceptions about Russia’s place in the world. Throughout Russia’s
modern history, Siberia’s size—it encompasses more than three-quarters of Russia’s total
territory—and its geostrategic position astride the Eurasian landmass have contributed significantly
to Russia itself. And the exploration and development of Siberia have helped shape Russian national
identity. Siberia has been seen as Russia’s “treasure chest,” the source of new wealth, new territory, and folk traditions that evolved alongside the unique cultures of Siberia’s indigenous peoples. Russian writers have extolled Siberia as the “untamed frontier” and a “New World” savior for the rest of Russia. As late as the 1980s, a statement attributed to Mikhail Lomonosov, the great Russian scholar of the eighteenth century—”Russia’s power will grow with Siberia”—adorned the walls of Russia’s science classrooms.
Siberia, as the primary repository of Russia’s massive natural resource base, has played a vital role in
underpinning the Russian economy. Furs from the forestlands across the Ural Mountains and Siberia,
along with salt and minerals, bolstered the economy of Muscovy and the early Russian empire from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Siberia’s mineral resources fueled the industrialization of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century and the development of Soviet industry after the 1917 revolution. West Siberian oil became the mainstay of the late Soviet economy from the 1960s, and it remains the backbone of the Russian economy today.
According to Russian calculations, Siberia holds just under 80 percent of Russia’s oil resources, about 85 percent of its natural gas, 80 percent of its coal, similar amounts of precious metals and diamonds, and a little over 40 percent of the nation’s timber resources. As a result of this rich base, and its exploitation, Siberia is in many respects what geographer David Hooson would call Russia’s “effective national territory,” or its economic heartland—the region that produces a surplus relative to the size of its population and that essentially supports the rest of the country. As a number of recent studies by geographer Michael Bradshaw and economist Peter Westin have demonstrated, with the exception of the city of Moscow and the industrial region of Samara in the Urals, the major contributors to the Russian economy in terms of per capita gross regional product (GRP) are all natural-resource regions, primarily in Siberia and the Russian Far East. The oil-producing
region of Tyumen in West Siberia tops the list; then Chukotka, also a major energy producer; Sakha
(Yakutia), the site of Russia’s world-class diamond industry; Magadan, a major mining region; Sakhalin, the island repository off the Pacific coast of one of Russia’s richest new finds of oil and gas; and Krasnoyarsk, a vast coal mining, mineral, and precious metal producing region.
http://russiatrek.org/tyumen-city
Tyumen is a city in Russia, the capital of the Tyumen region, the first Russian city in Siberia. It is located in Western Siberia on the Tura River flowing into the Tobol River. The distance to Moscow is 2,081 km.
The population of Tyumen is about 697,600 (2015), the area - 235 sq. km.
The phone code is +7 3452, the postal codes - 625000-625062.
The idea of any war with Russia is daunting enough let alone the realization of the size of the place with Siberia added and all those resources to call upon in any extended war. The oil resources in Tyumen alone would fuel many long battles.
And what would you attack them with if you were an enemy?
Nuclear weapons would ruin the value of the resources but would be the only potential threat to the vastness of the Russian bear.
Even without the Ice Age idea, the threat of nculear weapons from either the US or Russia is huge:
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nuclear-weapons-expansion-risk-2017-1
Few words issued by President-elect Donald Trump could matter more than his recent rhetoric on nuclear weapons.
"The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes," Trump posted to Twitter on December 22, 2016.
The next day, he bucked his aides' dismissive spin: "Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all," Trump allegedly told MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski over the phone.
Trump is worried about the nuclear weapons modernization efforts of Russia, which in 2014 violated a key arms reduction treaty, plus the emerging threat of North Korea. His tough-guy attitude echoes Cold War-era logic: outmatch your adversaries, or risk a nation-destroying preemptive strike.
But this line of thinking is exceedingly dangerous in a future US president. It not only ignores disquieting facts about nuclear weapons and threatens to further implode a global half-century-long effort to reduce nuclear armaments, it also increases the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
Trump's push for nuclear proliferation is the worst possible option, not even worthy of being a last resort.
Here's why.
Enough nukes already exist to destroy both the US and Russia
Russia currently possesses 7,300 nuclear weapons. The United States has 7,100. Together, these armaments comprise about 93% of all nuclear weapons on Earth. By contrast, China has about 260 warheads.
Less than a quarter of these weapons are actually deployed in the air, on land, or at sea — the so-called "triad" of defense. Also, an uncertain number are smaller, "tactical" devices meant for the battlefield. (Such devices are their own can of worms, as we'll show shortly.)
But such caveats make little difference.
Most US and Russian arms are officially deemed as "strategic," such as the submarine-launched W88 thermonuclear warhead, and they tend to be many times more powerful than the bombs the US dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Those unprecedented attacks leveled cities and killed more than 100,000 people.
Purely looking at the known numbers of strategic warheads, the US has deployed and stockpiled enough to destroy every Russian city with a population greater than 50,000 (about 300 cities altogether) many times over. Similarly, Russia likely has enough to decimate every US city larger than 100,000 people (also about 300 cities) multiple times.
This is the raw essence behind nuclear deterrence: You won't destroy us because we can destroy you.
(Effectively ignoring that there are plenty of weapons to destroy each other already. Except for the one truth none of these folks share with anyone. More on that after this article. W.)
If establishing such a stalemate is still the guiding principle behind the existence of nuclear weapons, then the current US arsenal is more than adequate psychological warfare. Adding more weapons, as Trump suggests, would do little to enhance or change this perceived advantage.
In fact, it'd make a terrifying situation even worse.
Weapons systems — and people — are flawed
Right now, hundreds of strategic US nuclear weapons are on "hair-trigger alert," also called "on alert" or "launch-on-warning".
This dangerous Cold War-era policy means such weapons can be launched within a few minutes of detecting an adversary's preemptive nuclear strike — or a false signal of one.
Many strategic weapons, like Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) deployed across middle America, can't be disabled once they leave a silo.
Yet no human creation is perfect. You can build the world's smartest, most seemingly foolproof machine, and it will still contain flaws. In the case of nuclear weapons systems, such flaws run the risk of accidental launch, detonation, and incredible loss of life.
Tallying up nuclear weapons accidents is exceedingly difficult, especially due to their classified nature, but information that has been released is alarming.
"[M]any dozens of incidents involving nuclear warheads are known to have occurred in the United States — and likely many more that have not been made public," according to a 2015 fact sheet by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It continued: "[T]he more of these incidents that occur, the greater is the chance that one of them will lead to a nuclear detonation."
Thirty-two known incidents were "broken arrows," or when a nuclear weapon was accidentally launched, fired, detonated, stolen, or lost. Eleven are weapons the US military never recovered, including one of two powerful thermonuclear bombs it accidentally dropped and nearly detonated over North Carolina.
A uranium pit from one of the weapons is still somewhere at the bottom of a swamp.
(I emphasize this because any one of those lost bombs could show up somewhere at any time. When you consider the results of a detontation and add it to the missing weapons factor, you wonder why the recoverey of those weapons has never been prioritized by governments. That we know of. W.)
Writer Eric Schlosser has chronicled some of these all-too-common misadventures in "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety". The 2014 book closely follows the story of a Titan II ICBM that exploded in its silo, nearly setting off a powerful warhead that could have laid waste to Arkansas and nearby states. (The cause? A maintenance worker who accidentally dropped a tool.)
In light of Trump's recent statements, Schlosser revisited some of his book's material in a recent piece for The New Yorker, in which he described alarming, ongoing technical problems with "aging and obsolete" nuclear weapons and their command-and-control systems.
Schlosser also highlighted the risks of being human. Using Minuteman III system as one example, he wrote for The New Yorker:
"[In 2014], almost a hundred Minuteman launch officers were disciplined for cheating on their proficiency exams. In 2015, three launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana, were dismissed for using illegal drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. That same year, a launch officer at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for heading a violent street gang, distributing drugs, sexually assaulting a girl under the age of sixteen, and using psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen. As the job title implies, launch officers are entrusted with the keys for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles."
National leaders who can order nuclear strikes are also fallible humans.
Take Pakistan's defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, for example. Asif publicly rattled his nation's nuclear sabers in late December after reading (and apparently believing) a fake news article about Israel threatening his country with nuclear weapons.
More nukes would increase the chances that a weapons system and the people behind their operation would fail. It would also heighten the risk of a weapon, especially small tactical ones, falling into the hands of terrorists.
Luckily, the US is actively working to reduce the chance of disaster.
During the first presidential debate, Trump claimed that "Russia has been expanding their — they have a much newer [nuclear weapons] capability than we do. We have not been updating from the new standpoint. [...] We are not — we are not keeping up with other countries."
(Now I want you to realize the reason Reaganites say the USSR fell apart was that we caused that regime to overspend itself into such debt it had to give up the union and collapse. Many of those same Reaganites now back the massive overspending and the Trump idea to kick it up as we race against a successful Russian economy building program. The failure to remember history leads to repeating it and the repeats are almost never good ones. W.)
(But you need to remember something else. The US Defense industry is directly or indirectly responsible for fully 1/4 of the US economy. The US government is propping up the economy with its spending even as it is collapsing the middle class and letting the poor and desperate go whatever way they may while claiming there isn't enough money. It is an odd corner the US government under Republican rule has painted itself into. But it is an obvious one that leads to the feeding of a military industrial complex that has the money and influence to keep supporters in power and help eliminate anyone who disagrees with them. W.)
While it's true that Russia is upgrading its weapons, partly in response to sanctions and partly in response to US nuclear weapons advancements, Trump's assertion that the US "has not been updating" and is "not keeping up" is either a bold lie or fallacious.
For example, Russia does not currently have a working early-warning satellite system; it went offline 2 years ago, Schlosser said. This means the US gets 30 minutes of warning with an ICBM launch. Russia's land-based radar systems, meanwhile, can give only a few minutes' notice before a warhead lands.
Trump's oft-repeated statements on nuclear weapons also suggest that he does not understand the truly bewildering amount of taxpayer dollars the US has spent maintaining and improving its nuclear weapons systems.
In his book "Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940", Stephen Schwartz, a professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, calculated how much the US government spent on nuclear weapons through 1996.
His conservative estimate is that the country spent, at minimum, $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons. That's in 1996-adjusted dollars, though; in 2016 dollars, this amounts to more than $8.9 trillion.
Putting this titanic amount of money into perspective, Schwartz told an audience during a 1998 presentation at the Brookings Institution:
"[N]uclear weapons spending over this 56-year period exceeded the combined total federal spending for education; training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; community and regional development (including disaster relief); law enforcement; and energy production and regulation. On average, the United States has spent $98 billion a year [$150 billion in 2016 dollars] on nuclear weapons."
(When the Congress and President move to cut or destroy every social program that might have rescued the US from the awful consequences of the above spending action because there isn't enough money in the coffers for the social programs and the constant military spending, please remind yourself not to be standing too close to any of these people on Judgement Day. I don't know about you, but I have enough sins of my own I don't want any of the fallout from these guys to catch me. W.)
Today, a similar spending trend continues.
"The current and planned U.S. investment in nuclear forces is unrivaled by any other nuclear power," stated a December 2016 report by the Arms Control Association.
Business Insider has called Trump's attention to the fact that the US plans to spend more than $1 trillion in taxes over the next 30 years to modernize its nuclear arsenal. (The government pegged the cost at about $450 billion over 20 years, but these estimates aren't realistic, according to several independent reports.)
The nuclear triad modernization program, requested by President Barack Obama, endeavors to refurbish aging weapons systems, improve reliability, narrow targeting, lower the risk of malfunctions, and actually reduce the number of deployed, ready-to-go weapons.
(With one detail ignored. They are refurbishing weapons but not the missiles that launch them. The "old reliables" that have failed in the past remain in place. W.)
Any call to expand the US nuclear arsenal while failing to address this controversial program, as Trump did throughout the 2016 election, and continues to as president-elect, belies a vast government expenditure and suggests a worrisome ignorance or dishonesty.
The effects of this program could extend well beyond US and Russian borders, too.
.
Despite both the US and Russia taking thousands of warheads offline since 2010 (as part of the New START treaty), some experts believe the arms race Trump seeks is already happening under Obama's watch. A primary concern surrounds two new tactical weapons the US military plans to build.
The first is a new land-launched nuclear cruise missile. Former UK defense secretary Philip Hammond has said such weapons look like non-nuclear cruise missiles to enemies and adversaries, so their existence could lead to confusion that ends in nuclear war.
The second — the US military's B61-12 gravity bomb design — is perhaps more troubling, in that it might lead to routine use of nuclear weapons. While billed as an upgrade, many experts say it's effectively a new weapon with new capabilities.
The B61-12 will recycle four older-style bombs that simply fell to target with a precision of about 300-550 feet. The rebuilt bombs, however, will have new pop-out fins and thrusters to guide them to a target with a precision of less than 100 feet. Their explosions will be adjustable, too, so the military can detonate them at yields several times greater down to several times less than the first atomic bombs.
The Federation of American Scientists and former US military leaders say such features make tactical weapons imminently more usable in battle. And if tactical weapons are used in a future conflict, the taboo against use of any nuclear weapons is likely to fall apart. Some experts even argue that tactical weapons use could lead to a nuclear holocaust. (Of note: As late as August 2016, one of Trump's foreign policy advisors said the incoming president asked at least "three times" why the US couldn't use its nuclear arsenal.)
US development of advanced tactical weapons also sends a signal to other countries: Namely, that it's ok to develop them, too.
The most worrisome country for this to happen is not Russia or even Iran or North Korea, but Pakistan (which has 140 nuclear weapons) in its longstanding and bitter feud with India (which has 110 nuclear weapons).
"Pakistan is outnumbered by India in terms of conventional forces and is growing increasingly reliant on the threat of the early use of tactical weapons to deter an attack," journalist Julian Borger wrote at The Guardian in 2016.
If that does happen, a small-scale nuclear war could ensue — and wreck the planet.
(Moreover, the threat of India as a massive army against China would be greatly reduced if Pakistan were to open fire on its populous Hindu enemy. W)
Simulations show that in a war where India and Pakistan each detonate 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs over cities, more than a quarter of the Earth's ozone layer would disappear within 2 years. The surge of incoming ultraviolet light would wreck ocean ecosystems, increase the rate of skin cancers, stunt plant growth, and more.
Also, all the carbon from burning cities would partially blot out the sun, plummet average surface temperatures to 1,000-year lows, and lead to a nuclear winter scenario that'd trigger global famine due to food shortages.
Adding weapons and increasing their capabilities is a surer path toward such a catastrophe. There are, however, ways to steer humanity away from this alarming risk.
What is the solution?
The more nuclear weapons exist and are upgraded, the more likely they are to be used — either intentionally or accidentally — and expose our species to the risk of an unprecedented nuclear calamity and possibly a horrifying extinction.
The solution is not easy but straightforward: Do not expand any nuclear arsenals. Instead, continue to reduce weapons stockpiles, ideally until they are all gone.
(Understand a US strategist would say this is suicide for the US which would be vulnerable ti invasion from lesser more populous countries without this weapons superiority. Military would likely be tempted to seize power and "protect the country" from this "mistake." W.)
The US can't ignore ongoing threats from Putin to modernize and expand Russia's nuclear arsenal. Nor should we idly sit by while North Korea works toward its first fully functional nuclear weapons system, including an ICBM capable of reaching the US, or as Pakistan develops tactical weapons — and endeavors to give commanders the authority to use them on the battlefield.
...
Most importantly, however, as Schlosser and others argue, it's past time that we stop assuming nuclear weapons are safe or ignorable relics of the Cold War.
Instead, we all need to have frank and honest discussions — in our homes, at work, and with elected officials — about the reality of nuclear weapons, including their numbers, risks, cost, and imminent threat to the future of humanity. Every weapon we dismantle is one step farther away from the worst kind of mishap imaginable.
There is a dirty little open secret about all this stockpiling of nuclear weapons: some things in the bombs and missiles may not work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/60e8aj/what_is_the_shelf_life_of_a_nuclear_weapon_how/
There are several "aging" issues with nuclear weapons:if they use tritium for "boosting," it has a really short half-life and needed to be replaced every few years plutonium self-irradiates, which changes its chemical and nuclear composition over time (whether it does so in a way that will make it unviable is what is being studied — so far the labs have said "it'll still work"; JASON said it won't affect yield for at least a century, but as with all tricky issues there are disagreers) there are conventional high explosives, wires, circuits, etc., which, aside from just aging as things do, are also undergoing small amounts of irradiation from the fissile material, and that induces chemical changes
there are also "exotic" materials in the weapons whose long-term shelf-life isn't clear (e.g. weird aerogels), esp. under long-term irradiation.
So you have a lot of things that might go wrong over time, plus one thing (the tritium) that will definitely go wrong over time.
As for straight up regular radioactive decay — the half lives of U-235 and Pu-239 are long enough that this doesn't matter much. If your bomb at 6 kg of Pu-239 and you do nothing to it for a century, you'll have 5.98 kg of Pu-239 at the end of that century. I don't think that's going to make much of a difference. At some point, I guess, you'll get a low level of plutonium, but check this out: if you waited 500 years, you'd have 4.66 kg of plutonium left, which is making you think, oh, maybe that's not viable, right? But in that time the decays would have generate 1.34 kg of U-235! So while your critical properties would have changed a little bit, you still have ~6 kg of fissile material. You have to wait on the order of several million years before you really start to lose fissile material to decay (because the Pu-239 converts to U-235 and U-235 has a much longer half-life). Anyway, this is just an illustration of the decay aspect — it's actually not likely relevant to your question, because the other components will surely decompose long before that's an issue.
NPR transcript:
November 30, 2006
6:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
DAVID KESTENBAUM
The National Nuclear Security Administration says the rate at which nuclear weapons materials degrade is slower than they once believed. That means the the nation's nuclear arsenal may not need updating as soon as was thought. But the debate in Congress about the long-term reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile continues.
JOHN YDSTIE, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm John Ydstie.
RENÈE MONTAGNE, host:
And I'm Renèe Montagne. Good morning.
A new study suggests that plutonium, the critical component of nuclear weapons, may have a surprisingly long shelf life. Some U.S. weapons are close to 30 years old and scientists have worried the plutonium inside them may be slowly deteriorating. The new findings released yesterday suggest that's not the case, that plutonium could survive a very long time.
NPR's David Kestenbaum reports.
DAVID KESTENBAUM: The problem with plutonium is it's only been around since World War II, so it's hard to say how it ages over the long haul. Plutonium is radioactive. And when the atoms decay, they send bits and pieces plowing through the rest of material, potentially causing damage. The official estimate had been that plutonium should hold up for at least 45 years. The new findings indicate the weapon pits should be okay for almost twice that - 85 years at least.
The Department of Energy is planning to build a new facility to remanufacture plutonium cores for bombs. Stephen Schwartz says the new findings mean there is no rush to do that. He edits the journal called “The Nonproliferation Review.”
Mr. STEPHEN SCHWARTZ (Editor, The Nonproliferation Review): Plutonium aging, other warhead reliability problems, they've all been touted as reasons why we have to go back and start remanufacturing weapons. And if we're going to do that, they'll say well, we've got to build an entirely new weapon's complex. I think this calls into question whether or not that's a wise and necessary course of action.
Notice the sentence. During the great scrapping of nuclear weapons during the Reagan- Gorbachev era, many sources suggested that the reason was the weapons themselves were no longer functional, not because of nuclear deterioration, but because the decaying radioactive materials emitted radiation that went into the surrounding steel casings of the weapons and the nickel in the steel accumulated that radiation and the effect of the accumulation was to make the various instruments of the weapon malfunction. One of the rumors for the cause of the missile exploding in the silo recorded above. Nickel still accumulates radiation and is still used in the highest grade steels. The possibility is simply that some or many of the older weapons in nuclear arsenals may well fail in a battle situation.
About Vladivostok's fate and that of any American city hit:
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200508/viewpoint.cfm
In contrast to a chemical or biological agent, a "small" (10 kiloton) nuclear weapon detonated in a major city would kill more than 100,000 people and reduce tens of square kilometers to rubble almost instantly. Even a crude nuclear device that fizzled would destroy many square kilometers of a city and kill tens of thousands of people. A large (1 megaton) nuclear weapon could kill millions of people and destroy hundreds of square kilometers within a few seconds. Those who survived a nuclear explosion would have to deal with severe physical trauma, burns, and radiation sickness. Vital infrastructure would be destroyed or damaged, and radioactivity would linger for years near and downwind of the explosion. Unlike the effects of a chemical or biological weapon, the devastating effects of a nuclear weapon on a city cannot be reduced significantly by actions taken before or after the attack.
How might a nuclear weapon be delivered to a US city? The current administration has tended to focus on the possibility that an emerging missile state such as North Korea or Iran could use long-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States. However, the US intelligence community considers long-range ballistic missiles the least likely method an enemy might use to attack the United States, and no emerging missile states currently have missiles that could reach the US homeland.
Russia currently has about 6,000 nuclear-tipped intercontinental-range missiles capable of striking the US homeland and China has about 20, but neither North Korea nor Iran currently has missiles capable of reaching the United States. The longest-range missile North Korea has tested (once, in 1998) is its Taepodong I. With two stages, this missile is thought capable of lofting a nuclear warhead about 2,000 km, half the distance required to reach Alaska from North Korea and about a third the distance needed to reach Hawaii. In the 1998 test, a small third stage was added and blew up in flight. If the Taepodong I had a third stage that worked, it could probably loft about 500 kg, less than the mass of an unsophisticated nuclear warhead, a distance of 3,000–4,000 km, less than the distance to Alaska or Hawaii. North Korea has for a decade been reported to be working on a more advanced missile, the Taepodong II, which might be able to loft a nuclear warhead far enough to reach Alaska or Hawaii but probably not other parts of the United States. Iran has tested a ballistic missile that has a range of 1,300 km and is reportedly developing a more advanced missile that is expected to have a range of 2,000–3,000 km, far less than that needed to strike the United States.
Developing a system that can deliver a nuclear weapon using a long-range ballistic missile requires mastering many challenging technologies. The nuclear warhead must be light enough to be carried by the missile and must be capable of surviving the harsh conditions of launch and re-entry at hypersonic speeds. If the attacker has only a few nuclear weapons, the missile must be reliable and accurate enough to risk using it to deliver a weapon.
Frederick K. Lamb is Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Director of the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was the co-Chair of the APS study group on boost-phase intercept systems for national missile defense.
The new A-Bomb of communication may be quantum encryption.
http://www.newsweek.com/china-using-quantum-physics-take-over-world-695026
Now, thanks to a technology called quantum encryption, the dream of perfectly secure communication is real. It could help free the world from online fraud and identity theft, hacking attacks and electronic eavesdropping. It could also enable terrorists and criminals to communicate with absolute secrecy—and governments to hide their secrets without anyone ever finding out. In a world of unbreakable encryption, all human electronic communication could become entirely private—with mind-boggling consequences, both good and bad, for cybersecurity.On September 29, that world came significantly closer to reality. A team of cryptographers and physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a half-hour video call with their counterparts in Vienna using quantum encryption, a technology that makes it impossible to hack or overhear communications.
The new encryption standard “is what has me most excited, and most worried, of all recent technological innovations,” says a senior U.K. intelligence official not authorized to speak on the record. “It’s a world-changer.” And at the moment, experts say, while the major technical innovations in quantum technology are still being produced in such Western institutions as IBM in Armonk, New York, the University of California (backed by Google) and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (backed by the European Union), it’s the Chinese who are far ahead in terms of implementation.The Beijing-Vienna call was made over a conventional Skype-type internet connection—but what was revolutionary was a secure encryption key generated in a quantum device mounted in a Chinese satellite. And, crucially, the quantum physics that created the key means any attempt to break the code can be immediately detected. “Quantum crypto is as close to unbreakable ciphers as one can possibly get,” says Artur Ekert, a professor at the University of Oxford and inventor of the model on which the Chinese based their system.
Ekert’s encryption method is based on an extraordinary effect known as quantum entanglement. The phenomenon is so bizarre and inexplicable that even the man who discovered it, Albert Einstein, was baffled. In 1935, he described the effect as “spooky action at a distance.”Here’s how it works: Two particles of light—known as photons—in separate locations can be made to precisely copy each other’s behavior even when separated by vast distances. Exactly how this happens is still not understood, but the phenomenon was demonstrated in lab conditions back in 1984. What’s remarkable about September’s Beijing-Vienna experiment is that scientists were able to use quantum entanglement to make a secret key composed of a string of data bits appear simultaneously in different corners of the Earth.What’s more, the Chinese team, led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan, has built an entire real-world quantum-encrypted communications system. The Chinese have linked base stations, satellites and thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable to transmit the quantum keys across the country. “It didn’t require the discovery of a new physical principle,” says Charles Clark, an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute who pioneered quantum communication over distance. What’s impressive is the scale and distance over which the Chinese have made their system work.
“It’s a spectacular demonstration,” Clark says.Until now, all cryptography had basically relied on creating mathematical puzzles that were beyond an enemy’s technological capabilities to solve. Today’s standard for encryption—so-called public key technology, which is the basis of all internet authentication and supposedly secure communications applications, such as WhatsApp—is much more complex than Enigma."
The King of the East orders his armed forces into action.
Before the US attacked, even before calling the US President, the King activated an encrypted communications device which in turn activated small explosives packages embedded in both the generator and the back-up generator for the bunker of the North Korean command. He did not have a chance to stop the launching but this act ends their ability to communicate with the outside forces and stops the oxygen recycling and scrubbing action and stops all the elevator escape procedures. Miles underground, the North Korean command group will slowly suffocate. Effectively ending their direction of their forces.
In the sea of Japan, the US fleet has been holding it's own for fifteen minutes against the now leaderless armed forces of a small country. Destroyers have been lost to land to sea missiles but the carrier has endured. It's fleet of planes have outfought anything sent against them.
US military command in South Korea has been attacked by conventional weapons. The order to launch a nuke against Soule was not given before the communications went down. They rally their ground troops then see that the nuclear armaments have hit NK and make a physical invasion risky until the dust clears. SK government orders everyone that can into available shelters. Fallout now becomes as much an enemy as North Korea.
US commanders in Japan are caught off guard. They notify the Japanese government even though they already know from the weapons fire and net postings. They have begun their efficient movement of their people into shelters and into their designated positions in case of nuclear disasters.
Three Chinese submarines have been shadowing the US force in the Sea of Japan since they arrived there years ago. They have become the constant shadow ignored but not forgotten. Their encrypted messages arrive at the same time and they follow them to the letter.
Nuclear tipped torpedoes are launched from different directions, from the strait with the East China Sea, from the strait with the Sea of Okhotsk. Nuclear war in a small pocket of water and land becomes even more concentrated.
The King of the North gets word that his port city on the Pacific is lost. He is now truly aggravated. His plan in Israel was stymied and his forces were annihilated. He lost considerable resources. Then the US collapse wounded his buying power and the head of the EU gutted the World Bank and established his own bitcoin system for the world to rescue the economy and, of course, establish himself as the controller. The King of the North has been outplayed. Now he knows he must conquer Europe to gain any kind of control over his future. But the fools ruling in the US have made this even more difficult by their attack on North Korea and their "error" with the bomb. His people are now dying and his port will be useless for decades at least.
If he knew the King of the East was acting, he might be able to await the outcome. Instead he decides to take action. Taking the wildcard US out of play will simplify his life and let his people know that Russia still matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment