Analysis | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

America's nuclear future: Does the public have a fair say in it?

Seth P. Tuler — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:33:59 -0800

For the past two years the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (BRC) has worked to develop a strategy "for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle." The Commission's final report was released on January 26. It is too early to assess the policy outcomes of the BRC's effort, but we can take stock now of how effectively it provided opportunities for stakeholder and public engagement.

A hinge moment for the BWC?

Kirk C. Bansak — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:58:46 -0800

Although it was an eleventh-hour decision, the Seventh Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) Review Conference in Geneva did manage to produce a consensus final document this past December. As the saying goes, "a win is a win," and in the end the final document -- adopted with less than an hour to go in the three-week meeting -- would not have derived any more force if adopted earlier.

The defensive nature of China's "underground great wall"

Hui Zhang — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:19:41 -0800

There has been a lot of prominent discussion lately (in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among other places) about the size of China's nuclear arsenal, based on a study by Georgetown University professor Phillip Karber, "Strategic Implications of China's Underground

Nuclear scientists as assassination targets

William Tobey — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:28:40 -0800

Since 2007, international media have reported the violent deaths of four scientists and engineers connected with Iran's nuclear program and an attempt on the life of a fifth. The news reports on such killings are murky, incomplete, and, in some instances, likely inaccurate. The motivations and identity of the persons behind the killings are also obscure, but the fact that they are taking place is undeniable.

Nuclear nomads: A look at the subcontracted heroes

Gabrielle Hecht — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:01:36 -0800

In the days after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station last March, the international media celebrated the heroism of the "Fukushima 50" -- the plant and emergency workers who exposed themselves to extremely high radiation levels to get the reactors under control. Their efforts, it seems, were doomed from the start. Three of the reactor cores melted down anyway. And the cleanup will take decades.

North Korea from 30,000 feet

Niko Milonopoulos — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:17:35 -0800

The first publicly available overhead imagery that suggested North Korea was constructing a new nuclear reactor at its Yongbyon complex appeared on November 4, 2010. Charles L. Pritchard, a former special envoy for negotiations with North Korea and the president of the Korea Economic Institute, along with a delegation from the institute provided the first confirmation of this construction after a visit to Yongbyon that week.

Restructuring defense R&D

Subrata Ghoshroy — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:05:46 -0800

In view of the United States' massive budget deficits, there is growing, bipartisan recognition that the current level of defense spending -- about $700 billion per year -- is no longer sustainable. The Obama administration has made a variety of proposals to reduce the defense budget; cuts to big-ticket weapons programs like the F-22 or the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are routinely mentioned.

How the reset was upset

Yousaf Butt — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:37:13 -0800

President Barack Obama's much celebrated "reset" with Russia was upset recently. In late November, President Dmitry Medvedev announced the end of negotiations on missile defense cooperation, and threatened to withdraw from the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) if the United States remained committed to its missile defense program in Europe. Though it hasn't quite reached the The Black Sea region is one of the world's critical crossroads, a strategic intersection of east -- west and north -- south corridors that enable the free flow of people, ideas, and goods from Asia to Europe and from former Soviet territory to the Middle East and Africa. It is also the center of the world's nuclear black market.

The legacy of Reykjavik and the future of nuclear disarmament

Paul F. Walker — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:08:29 -0800

After two exhausting days of debate, negotiation, and concession in Reykjavik, Iceland, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had come to a dead end. An improbable agreement for nuclear disarmament was in jeopardy because the delegations quibbled over one word: "laboratory." Could the United States test its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) -- an embryonic antiballistic missile system known as "Star Wars" -- in space, or should research and development stay grounded?

International humanitarian law and nuclear weapons: Irreconcilable differences

Dean Granoff — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:48:29 -0800

There are more than 22,000 nuclear weapons in existence today, and their destructive capacity is of a magnitude that dwarfs imagination. Most deployed nuclear weapons would detonate with a force more than 10 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and some would be hundreds of times more destructive. Experts agree that even a limited exchange of, say, 100 nuclear weapons, a fraction of the world’s stockpile, could devastate the global climate and trigger widespread famine, resulting in a cascade of horrific consequences.

Politics, bureaucracy, and the proliferation of nuclear knowledge

Sharon K. Weiner — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:29:27 -0800

In October of 1996, Vladimir Nechai committed suicide. His death was newsworthy, but not because of the means; suicide was not so unusual in Russia, largely due to the widespread financial deprivation in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nechai's act was reported by the Western news media because of his position as director of one of the Soviet Union's premier nuclear weapons research and design facilities. According to the note he left behind, Nechai took his own life partially out of shame.

Fukushima and the inevitability of accidents

Charles Perrow — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:38:13 -0800

The March 11, 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan replicates the bullet points of most recent industrial disasters. It is outstanding in its magnitude, perhaps surpassing Chernobyl in its effects, but in most other respects, it simply indicates the risks that we run when we allow high concentrations of energy, economic power, and political power to form. Just how commonplace -- prosaic, even -- this disaster was illustrates just how risky the industrial and financial world really is.

Chain reaction: How the media has misread the IAEA's report on Iran

Greg Thielmann — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:00:28 -0800

When, earlier this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report on Iran's nuclear program, several media agencies and politicians walked away with two messages: that the Vienna-based agency now refutes past estimates of the US intelligence community, and that Iran is now making a break for the bomb. Both representations are false. Yet these assertions have been repeated often enough to give them traction with the public and Congress.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian: The West is pushing Iran in the wrong direction

Ali Vaez — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:08:37 -0800

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a lecturer and research scholar at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is the highest-ranking member of Iran's political elite living in the United States. He has been a close adviser to many key Iranian figures across the political spectrum, ranging from the moderate former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and reformist former President Mohammad Khatami to conservative former speaker of parliament Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri and the former chief nuclear negotiator and current head of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani.

Fatwas for fission: Assessing the terrorist threat to Pakistan's nuclear assets

Charles P. Blair — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:40:45 -0800

Pakistan has long been considered a potential source of nuclear weapons for terrorists, even before it had a full-fledged nuclear program and decades before it demonstrated a yield-bearing nuclear explosive capability.

Who's a weapons scientist?

Sharon K. Weiner — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:46:50 -0800

In its most recent report on Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) argues the country may be close to being able to develop a nuclear weapon. The agency also claims that important technical help was provided by an outside expert, identified by other sources as Vyacheslav Danilenko, a researcher who, until 1989, had worked for three decades at a leading Soviet nuclear weapons research and design institute.

Coming not so soon to a theater near you: Laser weapons for missile defense

Subrata Ghoshroy — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:36:17 -0800

Once upon a time not so long ago, glossy posters, press releases, and other public relations materials flooded congressional offices and newsrooms inside Washington's Beltway, touting the futuristic antimissile project known as the Airborne Laser (ABL). The publicity campaign included an artist's rendition of a Boeing 747, modified so a reddish laser beam shot from its nose turret. As if they were publicizing a blockbuster movie, ABL posters carried the words "Coming soon to a theater near you."

Amerithrax review: Lessons for future investigations

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:07:47 -0700

When the National Academy of Sciences issued its review of the FBI anthrax investigation earlier this year, the press fixated primarily on one point: The report found no conclusive evidence that Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist the government contends was responsible for a series of anthrax-laced letters mailed in 2001, produced them.

Nuclear liability: The market-based, post-Fukushima case for ending Price-Anderson

Mark Cooper — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 15:36:29 -0700

The need to revisit and revise regulations regarding financial responsibility for nuclear accidents has been clear and compelling for at least a quarter of a century (since Chernobyl) and has been made overwhelmingly obvious by Fukushima. The political opening to revise these regulations will vary from nation to nation, but is particularly small in the United States.