The first and only nuclear weapons ever used killed over 100,000 people and caused long-term health, psychological, economic and environmental damage | National Archive/Newsmakers
LLAW’s CONCERNS & COMMENTS, Monday, (03/18/2024)
The following article from Politico.eu deals with the same topic as I posted about yesterday evening — and that is the problem with our “Leaders”, and though this discussion mentions only 5, there are 9 of them, who could easily begin WWIII, and given enough time there will soon be more. They must all be dethroned before one of them pushes the nuclear button.
As I said yesterday, and I’ll say it again today, there is just one way to get rid of our nuclear armed “leaders”, and that is via protests and demands of you and me and the rest of the subordinate human population around the globe by whatever means are required. I believe that if we unite with a peaceful single intent internationally, we can make it happen, but time is of the essence . . . “The voice and the pen can be mightier than the bomb.” (line borrowed and upgraded from novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
However, the remedies suggested in this article, “more diplomacy and resilience-based solutions”, are far too weak to work. We have been trying to do that for nigh on 80 years, and have failed with every attempt. The only solution is to, as I have subtitled all of my 573 Posts in 573 consecutive days, “End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”. That requires removing the insanity of egomaniacal power-crazy “leaders” of every country that has nuclear anything, including nuclear power plants or even visions of grandeur in their envious eyes. ~llaw
POLITICO.eu
As ‘Oppenheimer’ wins big, we should worry about lowering of nuclear thresholds
Just as Oppenheimer challenged Truman on U.S. nuclear strategy, we too must challenge our leaders’ attachment to nukes.
Sophie-Jade Taylor is a senior network development and communications manager at the European Leadership Network nonprofit. Retired Air Marshall Sir Graham Stacey is a senior consulting fellow at the European Leadership Network.
Last summer, director Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” captivated the global public, making history as the highest ever grossing biopic. And having already won big at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, the film closed awards season by sweeping the Oscars last weekend.
The film brought fresh awareness of the unique, destructive power that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s creation unleashed. The first and only nuclear weapons ever used — the “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima and the “Fat Man” on Nagasaki — packed the equivalent of 15,000 and 21,000 tons of TNT respectively, killing over 100,000 people and causing long-term health, psychological, economic and environmental damage.
By comparison, the world’s most powerful nukes today yield over 1.2 megatons of TNT — 60 times more than Oppenheimer’s bombs.
And much like Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves and then U.S. President Harry S. Truman, today’s leaders once again find themselves facing huge moral and strategic choices at the dawn of a new technological age. The full weight of nuclear devastation lies in the hands of just a select few. Their decisions have profound implications for humanity — and this shouldn’t be left to chance.
Recognizing the unimaginable horror a modern nuclear conflict would unleash, as recently as January 2022, all five leaders of the nuclear weapons states reaffirmed that a nuclear war couldn’t be won and must never be fought.
All five leaders of the nuclear weapons states recently reaffirmed that a nuclear war couldn’t be won and must never be fought | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
Yet, we have been witnessing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s irresponsible nuclear saber-rattling around Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There have been worrying reports of rock-bottom thresholds for nuclear use — with enemy incursion into territory, the destruction of strategic weapons delivery systems, and even conventional weapons use deemed as posing an existential threat to Russian statehood.
And though Moscow outwardly rejects the policy, such ambiguity seemingly points toward communicating “first strike” capabilities, which rightly should be condemned and carefully assessed.
On the other hand, China continues to push states for political commitments toward the universalization of a No First Use Policy, while also furthering the development of its own arsenal under a worrying lack of transparency — a dilemma that has added complexity to an already intricate and perilous geopolitical chessboard.
Meanwhile, in the West — seemingly without much public discussion or comment — we’ve seen a worrying trend in declarations that states could use nuclear weapons to deter “non-nuclear threats,” again lowering the so-called nuclear threshold in an attempt to provide a quick fix to nuanced challenges.
At this very critical moment, “Oppenheimer” has brought discussions of nuclear weapons back into the public arena. And while the attention will undoubtedly recede, ongoing public engagement on these issues must not. Civic engagement shapes policymaking, and at a time of rising nuclear risks and growing temptation for states to become more reliant on their nuclear weapons, the public deserves a better understanding of when and why a catastrophic weapon may be deployed.
For example, in 2021, the British government stated that while it wouldn’t use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state, it remained open to reviewing its policy should any threat from “emerging technologies” with “comparable impact” make nuclear weapon use necessary. Similarly, in 2022, the U.S. declared that the aim of its nuclear arsenal was to deter both nuclear and non-nuclear “strategic-level attacks.” Problematically, however, neither the U.K. nor the U.S. have detailed what “comparable impact” or “strategic-level attack” may mean.
These policies not only lower the nuclear-use threshold and increase global nuclear risks, but they may not even be feasible, given most contemporary threats against states now sit outside the military realm.
While it’s near impossible for a nuclear strike to go undetected, the same isn’t true for emerging technologies such as AI and autonomous systems. By their very design, these technologies are largely democratized and untied to a single government. For instance, the challenge of attribution in cyber is well-documented, and while cyber-attacks have been linked to state-sponsored hacking groups, these groups couldn’t be easily deterred by the threat of a nuclear strike.
As a 2021 U.K. parliamentary report on risk assessment and mitigation noted, today’s security risks do not respect national borders; rather, they have international impact and require global responses. In this new risk environment, governments must focus on developing their national resilience and preparedness to mitigate threats — not just use the blunt and horrific instrument of nuclear weapons as a cure-all.
Increasing the already harrowing role of nuclear weapons in foreign policy undermines the moral and legal position of nuclear weapons states. The logic and evidence behind the current U.K. and U.S. policies of relying on nuclear weapons as a panacea must be subject to greater public and parliamentary scrutiny — as should be the case with open democracies who say they have transparent nuclear policies.
Amid rising global volatility and technological uncertainty, it’s imperative for states to explore non-nuclear solutions that emphasize international cooperation, diplomacy and societal resilience. And there’s an opportunity here for the U.K. and the U.S. to lead the way in international law and treaties that respond to non-nuclear strategic threats more effectively.
Instead of resorting to old playbooks, both policymakers and the public must appreciate that emerging technologies require a new mindset in their management and new legal constructs to regulate their proliferation, development and control. Recent international efforts like last November’s Bletchley AI Safety Summit and the agreement to begin a dialogue on AI risks by U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are important first steps. But much more needs to be done.
Just as Oppenheimer, haunted by his role in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, challenged Truman on U.S. nuclear strategy, we too must challenge our leaders’ continued attachment to nukes — weapons that can only destroy — and push toward more diplomacy and resilience-based solutions to today’s complex challenges.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… Things to Do · All Things to Do · All PPH Events … Many of the tests involved nuclear-capable missiles designed to attack South Korea and the mainland …
The following article is a summary of an interview of Tom Shanker’s opinion concerning the Director of National Intelligence’s Threat Assessment of nuclear war threats. My thoughts are that Putin, who is a dictator who has indiscriminate power over his country, is an old man who believes if he can’t take his power and idealism with him, no one else can either, including his own people. That means he will do what he decides to do, because as Shanker says, he doesn’t care about public opinion and unless he is assassinated or he dies suddenly, he will due whatever he has a mind to.
But then, too, regardless of what Putin may decide to do, there are “Threats” coming from every nuclear armed country on the planet, so who knows who, when, and why one of them will push the nuclear button that would most likely mark the end for us all, and all other living creatures as well . . . ~llaw
GWU’s Thom Shanker: DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment; Take the Russian Nuclear Threat Seriously
THOM SHANKER: Russia remains one of our most significant threats. It is a nuclear power and has been for a long time, so that has not changed. But this newly belligerent, hostile Putin is taking aim at the United States.
People always ask me if there is a new cold war with Russia. My answer is we’re already at war with Russia, or at least Putin is at war with us. The Director of National Intelligence predicts that Putin will absolutely accelerate his malign attempts to influence our election this year using all sorts of cyber, AI, and all that in ways far greater and perhaps more damaging than last time around. So that is their biggest concern, and that is putting aside Putin’s illegal invasion of the sovereign Ukraine.
ANDREW WALWORTH, REALCLEARPOLITICS: Putin gave an interview yesterday where he talked about nuclear weapons again. He said, “We are ready to use any weapons when talking about the existence of the Russian state, damaging our sovereignty or independence.” That’s being interpreted as saying he might deploy nuclear weapons in Europe. How seriously should we take that?
THOM SHANKER: Very seriously, at our risk do we not believe what Putin says out loud. In 2007, he said he might invade Georgia. That happened in 2008. He talked about Ukraine being a natural part of Russia, he invaded twice in 2014 and 2022. So when Putin talks about the possibility of tactical nuclear weapons, we better listen carefully. That said, there are strong reasons why he says that, not just for battlefield purposes. He wants to scare the American people and all of the NATO citizenry into not supporting Ukraine for fear of a nuclear weapon being dropped in Europe. We should take it seriously, nuclear weapons have always been part of Russia’s warfighting plans, but there is a strategic communications aspect to this as well. Most analysts think Putin would not resort to tactical nukes in Ukraine except as an, “I’m about to lose” scenario. And right now, things on the ground are going relatively well for Russia, so why should he do that?
ANDREW WALWORTH: How much of this do you think is for domestic consumption in Russia? He’s got to keep his people in line and scared, I guess.
THOM SHANKER: Yes and no, which is not a helpful answer. There is a Russian domestic part of this. He goes on television, people are watching, but Putin doesn’t care about Russian public opinion. Russia has lost more men in the battle for Ukraine. It is the highest number since World War Two and Putin is still conscripting, sending men off to fight and die. So he doesn’t really care about public opinion, he is going to win the election. He’s very stable in power right now. So I think he tips his hat to the Russian psyche, saying, “We are strong, we have nukes.” But this is not about him courting some constituency in his population that he thinks he might lose. That is not happening.
The headline here: Putin doesn’t care about you. Putin to Russian people: drop dead.
…
[The DNI’s] assessment of China is very sophisticated. With Putin, Putin is likely to meddle in our election because he has a favorite candidate. He says he doesn’t but it is true. One of the two candidates, buy threatening NATO, by saying we shouldn’t fund Ukraine, serves Russia’s interests more than the other candidates.
China is interesting. They don’t really have a preferred presidential candidate, because on this at least, Trump and Biden are fairly aligned in wanting to stand firm to the rise of China. To me, as the DNI’s report says, China’s interest in election meddling is just to mess with our heads and mess with our domestic politics, to make things even messier. To which I say, “Why bother? It’s already happening, we’re doing it on our own.”
ANDREW WALWORTH: The DNI report did talk about China first, and I think spent more time on that than on Russia. When you look at China right now, what’s your major concern and how worried are you about what they’re doing in the South China Sea, when it comes to Taiwan?
THOM SHANKER: That to me is the real threat. The election meddling came first with China because they’re better at it, and more sophisticated. They have more tools. And because Russia has a clear incentive whereas China is more subtle.
I am deeply worried about potential Chinese aggression against Taiwan. China has interests in a stable global economy, their growth is dependent on it and they’re facing challenges at home. At the same time, China is almost neuralgic about reuniting with Taiwan and making it formally part of China. It is a real challenge for what U.S. policy is. Most of our military platforms are simply outdated. Aircraft carriers can’t operate closely because of Chinese air defenses. There’s a lot of exciting work being done in drone research, where we could flood the Taiwan straits with thousands of cheap drones, some with intelligent gathering abilities, some with weapons, to make China wonder. The whole point of how we deal with Chian is deterrence. We don’t want to get into a shooting war with China. We want to suppress fires, not get to them. We want to have the kinds of new technologies that make China wonder, if we launched an attack on China today, might we not succeed? It’s all about advanced warnings, intelligence, and cheap attritable weapons systems. Not these super expensive big top carriers which are so vulnerable.
…
What I look at is an aggressive China and Russia, that we talked about. Look at North Korea continuing with weapons development, Iran, the situation in Gaza which will upset the entire Mideast for a generation, and the Houthis threatening shipping in the Red Sea. I’m deeply concerned that we’re going to look back on these months and say, we didn’t know it then, but that is when World War Three started.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… all sorts of cyber, AI, and all that in ways far greater and perhaps more damaging than last time around. So that is their biggest concern, and that …
1 nuclear power plant into the sea concluded Sunday, with the next round possibly starting next month, the plant’s operator said. Tokyo Electric Power …
While this is a significant decline from the approximately 70,000 warheads owned by the nuclear-armed states during the Cold War, nuclear arsenals are …
… nuclear weapons to attack Britain … It will be remembered for the accompanying threats to unleash a humanity-obliterating nuclear war upon the world.
Once again, in the following ‘optimistic’ story about submarines that carry nuclear weapons of mass destruction, we see how nuclear “deterrence” means “fear”. Whether ‘deterrence’ stems from the air, on land, or underwater, remains the same — useless. All we really have to rely on to avoid nuclear war, which would automatically lead instantly to WWIII, or Armageddon” (as it’s called in this article) is ourselves and our world-wide universal cooperative power of voice and the written word to demand our leaders to STOP. And the longer we take to speak out, the less likely our voices will ever be heard . . .
If just one nuclear armed nation drops a nuclear bomb via a missile or airplane, or uses invading troops and and ground-based tactical nuclear weapons, or eradicates a major city with nuclear armed submarines, “deterrence” instantly becomes useless regardless of how a nuclear weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is delivered. Like agreements, treaties, covenants, or any other pretense of world peace, does not ensure defense because in the nuclear war world there is no defense. Nuclear war is a synonym for annihilation ( or Armageddon if you prefer that word). There can be no ‘winner’ because we would all be equal ‘losers’, including Mother Earth and our fellow living critters of all kinds.
So, how pitiful it is that we continue to spend trillions of dollars that could be used for peaceful purposes, and everything else imaginable that we humans have including a life (that one would thing ought to be enjoyable) trying bassackwardsly to defend ourselves from weapons that cannot be defended against (except perhaps by a few anti-missile missiles), which would be useless in an actual all-out nuclear attack. And, as for ‘minor’ use of nuclear weapons (for instance, say, Russia on Ukraine), I have to wonder what country would be stupid enough to launch just ‘a little’ nuclear attack, because in a full scale nuclear war, all that minor attack would be is ‘outrageous’ and ‘intolerable’, and would be instant nuclear target practice for whatever kind of nuclear ‘armageddon’ is very shortly going to follow.
How on Earth does one get ready for the the nuclear “unthinkable” as used in the Headline of this article, even as such as it infers in this story. Nuclear armed submarines are a clever nuclear war weapon of mass destruction, but they are no different from missiles, airplane bombers, and so-called ground “tactical nuclear weapons” that are multiple times more powerful than those atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
There is only one way to avoid nuclear war weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear power plants), and that is to get rid of them before they get rid of us. And the only way to do that would mean that ‘World Peace’ has to come first. And I hope y’all go to bed tonight wondering how on Earth that will ever happen. ~llaw
The ‘Armageddon base’ where America’s nuclear capability is ready for the unthinkable
A tour of the US Fleet Forces Command headquarters at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia provides a chilling glimpse of the power that lies beneath the waves
Beneath the ocean’s tranquil surface lurk the silent titans of our age: nuclear submarines.
These leviathans have the power to transform bustling metropolises into irradiated wastelands in the blink of an eye.
Their most chilling aspect, however, lies not in their devastating might but in their ghost-like ability to glide unseen and undetected through the world’s oceans.
As tension between the US and Russia continues to rise amid the war in Ukraine, Washington and Nato have voiced concern over increasing submarine activity in the Atlantic.
Deterring Moscow
“Russian submarines are the only existential threat to the United States, especially with their capabilities to remain undetected in the oceans,” says Admiral Daryl Caudle, head of US Fleet Forces Command.
The National spoke to the admiral and other naval officers during a tour of US Fleet Forces Command headquarters at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, the largest naval base in the world.
It is also known as the “Armageddon” or “Doomsday” base because it houses an unparalleled number of nuclear missile platforms.
The base is a port for 18 American submarines, most of which are equipped to carry nuclear warheads.
Admiral Caudle told journalists that Moscow, despite its “significant economic problems”, has concentrated on building “strategic capabilities for its nuclear submarines and developing space programme capabilities”.
According to Global Firepower, Russia has 65 submarines, making it the world’s largest submarine-operating country.
It is believed that the Russian Navy has about 21 nuclear-powered submarines, including eight strategic and 13 nuclear-powered attack vessels, along with some diesel-powered models.
“We know their [Russian] submarines can operate under the ice in their patrol areas, and their missiles can reach almost anywhere in the world, which is naturally a source of concern as well,” Admiral Caudle says.
Admiral Caudle speaks to journalists about US nuclear submarines. Mohamed Maher / The National
Deterrence, he emphasises, is the only way to counter this threat.
US Strategic Command plays a role in this through “deploying our own set of ballistic missile submarines through an extended deterrence model, and we can extend deterrence to include additional threats as well”.
“This is the naval component of the nuclear triad,” Admiral Caudle says.
The nuclear triad, known as the Tripartite Nuclear Deterrence Strategy, refers to the US strategy that relies on three types of nuclear weapon launch systems: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), strategic bombers and nuclear submarines.
The US has three types of attack submarines: the Los Angeles class SSN 688, the Seawolf-class and the Virginia-class SSN 774.
The Virginia is expected to be the backbone of the US submarine fleet until about 2070.
The purpose of the triad is to ensure the US has several independent means of launching a nuclear attack, thus increasing the difficulty of completely disabling the state’s nuclear capability.
Threats abroad
“Maritime security requires a continuous presence in the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the High North and the Atlantic Ocean, around Africa and of course in the Arabian Gulf,” Admiral Caudle says.
“This is our mission in Nato.”
The Gulf has become an increasing area of concern for the US, as Yemen’s Houthi rebels continue to launch attacks on commercial shipping lane in the Red Sea.
While the Houthis are far from possessing nuclear capabilities, their close alliance with Iran, which is widely believed to have the ultimate goal of building a nuclear weapon, has many countries on high alert.
As to tension with Russia, which has also become more aligned with Iran militarily, Admiral Caudle says that US naval patrols are conducted in the Baltic Sea to ensure security in the vital area.
This encourages co-operation with new partner states Sweden and Finland, as well as Germany and the Baltic states.
Training and technology
The US submarine fleet comprises about 54 per cent of the country’s nuclear deterrence arsenal.
Submariners undergo rigorous training and must meet high standards to qualify for service.
The intense training is needed for using advanced technology in the latest submarines, such as the Virginia-class vessels.
Commander Brian Rhoades, commanding officer of the Submarine Learning Facility Norfolk, told journalists that training helps submariners learn to work in harsh conditions and simulates real combat situations.
Training at the centre is mainly conducted on Virginia-class models.
The new generation is equipped with advanced cameras, remote sensing and eavesdropping devices, in addition to traditional sonar.
But the periscope, one of the distinctive features of traditional submarines, will remain, as significant improvements provide a panoramic view of the surface when the vessel is under water.
Deterrence in the Pacific
US, UK and Australia announce joint security initiative
In September 2021, the US, the UK and Australia signed a security agreement, Aukus, under which Canberra will acquire nuclear submarines for the first time, despite it being a non-nuclear state.
The agreement was aimed at countering China’s rising military influence in the Pacific Ocean, with tension increasing with neighbours Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, in addition to Taiwan.
“One of the reasons we agreed to proceed with Aukus … is that we see it as a means through which we can help ensure safety and security in the region, and also for peace in the Indian and Pacific oceans,” Bonnie Jenkins, US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told The National.
After the signing of the agreement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused the three nations of engaging in “hegemonic practice” and said the deal demonstrates a “Cold War mentality” towards China.
Beijing has also accused Aukus of undermining nuclear non-proliferation agreements.
But Ms Jenkins emphasised that the agreement did not breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “in any way”.
“Australia will not develop any nuclear weapons. It will not acquire nuclear weapons. It will not enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel,” she said.
“We will ensure that everything we provide to Australia cannot be used in a way that enables them to use nuclear fuel to make a nuclear weapon.”
Updated: March 15, 2024, 11:08 AM
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are 3 Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… nuclear war with the West. But Ukraine’s soldiers have been struggling … It also comes as Democrats’ patience with Israel has worn increasingly thin …
… threats as well”. “This is the naval component … nuclear attack, thus increasing the difficulty of completely disabling the state’s nuclear capability …
Given the warlike and nuclear position of the conditions on planet Earth these days, I have to wonder why we fight so hard against the ideal kind of universal government we call (with propagandized conditioned disdain) Socialism, which is where, if done properly, and without corruption that exists in every other form of government, society, or social system as well anyway, we just might manage to eventually achieve world peace, equality, and tranquility (that I call Felicity) for all of humanity, nature, the environment, and all other living things before we exterminate ourselves with nuclear war, and/or all other things nuclear, including nuclear power plants.
Instead of WWIII, we should give global Socialism one last try because we are running out of chances to save ourselves from extinction . . . ~llaw
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are 3 Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
China has slapped down Vladimir Putin after the Russian president said that he was ready for nuclear war. Beijing said nuclear powers should “jointly …
… Yellowstone Caldera or a smaller heat source, according to the NPS. 7 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK. Palette Spring at Mammoth Hot …
The mainstream news is still conjecturing about Putin’s new threat(s), now added to. Some of the MSM articles below try to understand its content, meaning, and seriousness . . .
But also there is one Yellowstone story that could calm us all down a bit. Resident Alien is playing on Netflix these days and here is a story from a future series and episode: Five Thoughts on Resident Alien‘s “Lovebird”
This week on Resident Alien, Harry decided he would move in with Heather to her home planet, naturally leading Asta to plot to break them up so he would stay committed to protecting Earth. D’Arcy, however, was more troubled to learn Ben is an alien abductee, and struggled with whether to tell him or not. Oh, and Max decided to steal Harry’s model of the Yellowstone Caldera for the science fair.
1. So Much… Tongue
I know, it’s a comedy, so it’s not very profound to say it’s funny as hell, but good lord, Harry and Heather’s sexual antics completely broke me; I know it’s absolutely revolting that they’re do it in Asta’s truck, on the sofa in Harry’s office, and in her bathroom, but goddamn it’s hysterical – like D’Arcy says, it’s as if Asta has two cats who are constantly in heat. The scene where Harry declares his plan to leave Earth was an amazing mix of plot progression and epic cringe comedy, and Alan Tudyk & Edi Patterson deserve all the awards for their relentless portrayal of Harry and Heather’s passion, as do Sara Tomko & Alice Wetterlund for not breaking character. And the shot of Heather pooping on Lady Liberty? Well, now I really have seen everything.
2. Truth Hurts
Harry can tell Asta and D’Arcy aren’t on board with his full-blown love affair and gets really obnoxious about it, stating they’re just jealous and that’s why they’ll die lonely old spinsters, among other rude comments. Still, his claim D’Arcy is needy gnaws away at her, leading her to decide to tell Ben the truth to prove she’s not selfish. Harry’s behavior was correct in the sense sometimes true friends call each other out on their bullshit, but he’s not self-aware to realize in his case that he’s just weaponizing the truth to hurt them, and that if he were in their shoes, they’d be trying to break him and Heather up too – which is all very ironic for the one giving a monologue about potentially causing an imbalance, chemical or otherwise.
3. Max You Little Shit
Max asks Harry for his help creating an impressive science fair display, but he and Heather bully him out of their home, not wanting to be bothered, so the boy steals the caldera model and the grey chemical Harry was studying while they’re in the bedroom. Stealing the model I can understand, that was petty revenge, but the chemical? That was very immature and reckless: did Max learn nothing from the last time he stole something mysterious from Harry? What a smug little man you’re becoming. At least the incident led Ben and Kate to admit they’re pretty bad parents, and Harry to discover the greys were planning to use the chemical in conjunction with the caldera eruption to make Earth’s gravity more suitable for them.
4. Patience is More Like an Archipelago Than a Town
There’s so much going on in Patience now, I’m not surprised Asta forgot to tell D’Arcy Jay’s staying with them now. Mike’s on Joseph’s trail, while trying to uncover what the physics formula in Peter’s diary is, but the constant mockery Liv is facing over the documentary causes her to lose faith in herself, and believe she caused Wendy’s murder by inviting Peter to the town. Torres also shows up to warn Mike that he’s stepping into something far beyond his usual field of expertise.
Fortunately, Kate cheers Liv up with her newfound interest in alien abductions, leading her to pass on details of a nearby support group; their conversation also causes Kate to discover the tracking chip in the back of her neck. D’Arcy then shares the truth with Ben, awkwardly it must said, and I could only imagine how helpful it would’ve been if she knew what Kate’s going through; still, at least Ben seems open-minded about the idea. Oh, and David Logan managed to duplicate Peter’s ability to see aliens’ true forms – what a busy episode!
5. Heartbreak!
The episode ends on an eerie note, as the little ditty Harry composes about Heather on the guitar gives way to Joseph grabbing her on the street, and blackmailing her into spying on him for the greys. Poor Harry: he’s especially vulnerable given he feels he can share everything with her. My first thought was that Mike better find Joseph soon, which led me back to him bumping into Torres on the street: wasn’t that rather sudden and random? And didn’t Mike mentioning her (still unseen) son come across awkwardly? What if it was Joseph in disguise? Or what if… Lena is a hybrid too?
Continued below (But not here on “All Things Nuclear” . . .
– We learn from her foster mother that Jay is ADHD and queer, so I take back what I said last week: Jay was the show’s first LGBT character.
– I’m not surprised Kate’s the worst-rated teacher at the school: I do not recall ever seeing her teach a class.
– Harry realizing he should’ve used “sex” instead of “intercourse” in his song was absolutely note-perfect, as I had the exact same thought. Oh no… what is this show doing to me?
– It’s wild we’ve had Terry O’Quinn in two episodes where he’s shirtless, doesn’t have any dialogue, and in this part, dressed like the Borg.
See you next week for “Bye Bye Birdie,” which certainly doesn’t sound ominous. I’m serious by the way, doesn’t the thought of Ann-Margret fill you with joy? Anyway, “time to say goodbye!”
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Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can’t speak Cantonese or Arabic.
Now back to a new kind of fiction, based on possible future reality: In order to edit and update the Preface to the in-progress novel “Ell Nuclear Diablo” , re-edited and now altogether in a single introductory opening to the story that will be presented here on a bi-weekly basis updated every two weeks on this nightly Post, I have delayed Chapter 1 for two additional weeks in order to provide the ‘Preface’ to new readers and others who may have already read part or all of the former draft, with a new suggestion about how the reader and I can keep up with current story as it is posted.
I will Post a single chapter at a time instead of in segments as I had originally planned to do. This will provide more continuity and easier recollection of the content of each story and the overall novel. I suggest that you copy and paste each chapter (including this revised and edited “Prologue” to your own download/document file under the file name “El Nuclear Diablo” and gradually add to the novel, which will make it easier to read on your own time and also have it all in one place rather than spread in new bi-weekly “All Things Nuclear Posts”. You can begin that ‘book-building’ effort tonight by copying the ‘Preface’ to the new file you set up. I hope you will assemble the book in this manner, but if you can’t but still want to read the story you can find it here either on Substack or on my own “LLAWs Worlds” website on every Thursday night’s Post. I have added a new Heading description to isolate the bi-weekly Post, beginning tonight, just below:
”El Nuclear Diablo” Preface (Thursday, 03/16/24)
El Nuclear Diablo
“Let the Bastards Freeze to Death in the Dark” ~Nuclear Industry Quote after the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, directed at concerned Scientists, worried citizens, and public protesters.
By Lloyd Albert Williams-Pendergraft (writing as the fictional “Albert Lloyd Williams)
Prologue (complete version)
. . . introduction written from Juneau, Alaska, by Albert Lloyd Williams, Nuclear Physicist & Chief Nuclear Engineer, Williams’ Atomic Laboratories, San Francisco
Early Spring, 2026
Does it really matter who, exactly, is to blame, or why humankind is savagely devouring the native resources of planet Earth until there soon will be nothing left but lichenless barren rocks, the salty seas, countless grains of sand, and a poisonous atmosphere? It ought to be not enough to just know it is a critical unvarnished ugly truth. The question should be more like, “When will it happen and is there no way out of it?” Should it not?
I can only wonder if highly intelligent, but virulent, forms of our human species have, for countless eons, long traveled through the universal cosmos continually seeking, finding, and lavishly consuming, ultimately ravaging the natural resources, the flora and the fauna, t the environments of this and other living rich blue-green planets also once full of fossil fuels and innocent living resources similar to Earth’s in order to ensure and serve their own survival at the expense of all else in their way. Obviously, we are the only species on this planet who rape and ravage the earth with such savagely uncontrolled vigor on such a large scale. We are the ultimate u ultimate fungus, the ultimate lethal mushrooms. And I have to also wonder if there are not multiple, or at least two species of us.
Not to ridicule Darwin at all, but does his theory of evolution, based on studies of inbreeding pigeons and chickens, really make much sense to you in this context? Does it not seem to you that we humans may be collectively aggressively demanding, ruthless, impolite, unwelcome extra-terrestrial galaxy-trotting invaders doing our parasitic thing here on Earth rather than a native natural-born integral integrated key part of our indigenous homo-sapiens and the native animal population—as Darwin would have us believe? What about the Octopus, sir?
Could it be possible we or they are simply biologically genetically patterned to look and act like homo sapiens? Or perhaps vice versa? At least some of us? Maybe even a whole lot of us? How do we know the difference between the real human beings and genetically altered or cloned ones? Which one am I? Which one are you? Do any of us know? I use the terms “we”, “us” or “our” and “they”, or “them”, or “their interchangeably here because in this context I don’t know who or what I am—an “us” or a “them”.
I just know that I am extremely uncomfortable with our or their willfully passionate desire to destroy everything on the planet for personal power, wealth, and a life of comfort at the expense of the rest of us or them. I don’t know about you, but it sure seems to be that way to me, so that’s why I consider myself to be an us.
At the very least we need to consider the possibility of at least one species of them and one of us. The only way we will ever know who we really are is through our unfettered natural mindful emotions—our feelings of love, care, and respect for Planet Earth, ourselves, and all her fauna and flora—or, conversely, our unnatural lack of those emotions or feelings. Yet we often disguise these characteristics, presenting the opposite of ourselves as themselves, or the other way around. But despite the hidden complexity, our future may depend on solving this psychological dilemma.
If our demise (at least partially) has happened before, it will likely happen again. And there is, in today’s worlds, a very quick, relatively easy long-lasting, if not eternally, way to create such a scenario as an extinction level event, not from an act of nature or a god, but from our own actions. ~llaw
# Before the Beginning of the End
Our small party of seven women (including two teen-aged daughters) and five men (one a teen son) left California from Carmel Bay bound for Juneau, Alaska, on a rainy Friday morning five days after the “accident” that began at Pacific Gas and Electric’s El Diablo Cañón nuclear power plant on a sunny Monday morning, disrupting the entire United States electrical power grid system in a single day before becoming a global disaster by Thursday afternoon. We all knew what had happened and we knew it was not an accident like the MSM was reporting to all of us around the world until by Thursday morning there was no reporting at all. What our little group did not know was who and what was responsible, but we all had our own suspicions. No one wanted to discuss them, because at this point it didn’t really matter anyway. The irrevocable damage was done. We also knew the rain was not a good thing now, or in the long run as time goes by. But, laughably enough, one of us who had the foresight to bring along a Geiger counter reported excitedly, a wide grin on his face, “Hey, it’s okay for now.” No one smiled back. We had a long way to go and we were no more than a mere one hundred and fifty miles north of the remains of the Diablo nuclear facility releasing massive doses of nuclear radiation from every ruptured cell it had, both internally and from its own filthy poisonous airborne waste.
These last several days we have followed spring’s warming north along the western United States and British Columbia coasts by yacht. Any boat is ripe for the pickings of choice at any deserted marina, which would likely be most all of them, although two of our crew also happen to be the legal owners of our schooner, which offers us all some conscience relief.
California, Oregon, and Washington (other than the shoddy shutdown activity at Diablo Canyon, have long been devoid of operational nuclear power plants with the exception of Washington’s inland Richmond plant (known as the “Columbia River Generating Station”), which, unlike Diablo Canyon was, is not in the process of closing, leaving it to be the only functional nuclear power facility anywhere in the entire Pacific Northwest or anywhere else along the western Pacific coastline from the Aleutians to Tierra del Fuego. We very soon will be looking forward to scientific help from the governmental and corporate experts in eastern Washington who are still to this day handling and cleaning up the fallout from the infamous Hanford plutonium military arms manufacturing disaster that has contaminated wide swaths of earth and the Columbia River for decades. Oregon has not had an operating nuclear power plant since the mid-1990s when their only facility, near Mt. St. Helens, developed structural cracks forcing the plant to close, and British Columbia has, quite honorably, never built one. Alaska’s only nuclear facility was shut down more than fifty years ago, and today it uses diesel engines to generate steam. Juneau is the closest downwind haven from nuclear airborne protection and freedom from contamination that the climate and geography can offer, along with the fortunate absence of nearby previously operational nuclear power facilities, providing at least a temporary refuge from the eastern Asian Pacific together with the central and eastern United States, eastern Canada, and European soon-to- be extinction level atmospheric conditions.
Some of the oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and meteorologists who were already here in Juneau are trying to determine the predicted world-wide safe zones and timelines, comparing Juneau’s and its surrounding weather patterns and wind history. They have long understood the favorable high-altitude wind currents from the north and southeast creating wind havoc among the treacherous three-thousand+ foot mountain ranges rising from sea level providing conditions that hopefully will carry airborne radiation far above and around us for a few months at least, giving us critical time to figure out just where the world’s few survivors will need to migrate and congregate. We know, too, that global communications will be inadequate to the point of probable futility, possibly requiring some of us to travel, sometimes long distances afoot, to gather these groups together and guide them to new promising safelands.
Our future could turn out to be very much like an extended encore and final Mad Max film, although, ironically, Australia has no nuclear energy power plants, which they banned officially in 1998. But true isolated tribalism will return everywhere to the few of us who are left to make our way on a mostly neutered and dead planet that will eventually consume Australia as well, although it may be the last bastion of life along with New Zealand, whose leaders have also banned nuclear reactors save for the joing U.S. military/Australia world-wide espionage Pine Ridge project near Alice Springs. Yet this death threat by human hands meddling with something akin to the power of the sun will eventually be a significant part of their survival story as well as our own.
A new way of life in a desolate lonesome world does not normally make for a pretty picture–nor a heart-warming romantic adventure tale. But still…so long as there is hope there is a story… ~llaw (Spring, 2026)
# Back in the Day
More than fifty years have passed since I first learned that nuclear power plants and weapons of mass destruction were fueled by uranium, an element my well-worn dog-eared Webster’s 1940-something dictionary defined essentially as a “worthless low-level radioactive mineral found in the ground.” The reason I remember this definition is because of a letter I received in January of 1969 from a mining company in central Wyoming’s “Gas Hills”, oddly named Lucky Mc (pronounced “Lucky Mac”) Mine, inviting me to an employment interview at the mine site and to please call to set up a date and time for the meeting. I had that old broke-spine 1940s Webster’s dictionary on my bookshelf in our small trailer house, so I looked up the definition. What the hell had changed? What were nuclear plants’ and nuclear bombs’ ingredients if not refined uranium? Of course I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
The mine, I was told in the letter, was owned by a company known as Utah Construction and Mining Company, which was then best known for building the Hoover Dam, but was now a major player in mining, primarily of coal and uranium. Intrigued, I found a pay phone at the General Store in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and made the telephone call. The interview took place a couple of weeks later in mid-January, and I was offered a job as a senior accountant, which I immediately accepted, ending my old job as a field office manager for a highway construction company that had recently transferred me from Grand Junction, Colorado, to a new project between Laramie and Rawlins in southern Wyoming. So I had set up shop in an office trailer halfway between the two towns, preparing for road construction to begin in early spring.
But having a growing family with two young pre-school children and an infant daughter, I was thankful for the opportunity to settle into a new life in a more permanent location than highway construction offered, so I was pleased to accept the job offer.
As I learned my new job, I soon became the chief accountant and then the administrative manager at the mine site, directly overseeing more than one hundred white collar employees. The company grew rapidly in its uranium branch to include a new mine known as the “Shirley Basin Mine,” blossoming Utah Construction and Mining Company into a new and more sophisticated reformed Utah International Inc, and a bit later, a subsidiary of General Electric Company with a new name for the mining division known as Pathfinder Mines Corporation General Electric, among other well-known products, manufactured not-so well-known nuclear reactors so Utah International with its Pathfinder Mines was a natural fit. During those early days, I learned a lot about the mining and milling operations of uranium, including extremely complicated accounting, security, health and safety, as well as how the fuel production and the multi-step enriching process, governmental regulations, and how the marketing and selling of uranium was accomplished. In the beginning the only customer the company, as well as the entire uranium industry, had was the United States’ Atomic Energy Commission, and we were the major producer and provider of relatively stable basic enriched uranium (U308), which would be refined into U238 and U235, the active isotope in nuclear reactors (as well as nuclear weapons), to the government (including the TVA) until deregulation allowed us to sell mill refined U3O8 uranium to operational nuclear power plants as well as plants under construction and in development.
One of these new nuclear power stations was Pacific Gas and Electric’s under construction facility, known as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, in San Luis Obispo County, California, near Avila Beach. The original facility, Unit 1 of course, began construction in 1968 followed by Unit 2 in 1970. During the following decade Utah Construction & Mining Company, by then known as Utah International Inc, profited immensely from the sale of uranium to American, Canadian, French, German, and other nuclear power facilities around the world. Doing business with PG&E was one of my first clues that rules and regulations were meant to be manipulated and broken by aggressive dollar-worshiping companies. But that’s another story, part of which I will relate later in the book.
# Back to the Present
What happened at Diablo Canyon between early 2024 and its planned decommission in late 2025, and the horrid global devastation that followed just two short years later, is what this story is all about, and it shames me every day of my life that I was once a willing contributor to the shape of the macabre issues to come within the nuclear power industry. There are few of us left alive who know the factually complete and chronological entirety of this doomsday tale, but I am thankful and even proud to be one of the few because I have the knowledge and the motivation to relate this horrific tale without prejudice. I have an absolute moral and ethical obligation to pass my knowledge of this world-class man-made armageddon (spelled with a small but still doomsday-deadly “a”) event along to those few who will come after the rest of us, hoping for a different way whether it be for better or for worse. Your choices and your chances are extremely limited, and I wish you, as well as us, all the best.
At an overly ripe eighty-something, as I write this dystopian-like tale, my mind is clear and fixed on the events that led to this catastrophe that with proper regulatory enforcement and diligent responsibility by the United States government and industry corporate officials might never have happened. A common failure of mankind is to brazenly think of ourselves as collectively invincible, making us just delusional enough to fool ourselves into believing that we are smarter and more resourceful than Mother Nature. We have proven ourselves wrong countless times concerning thousands of vital issues, but through the ages we have made and continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Who was the wise man who said, “The definition of insanity is making the same mistakes over and over again but expecting different results.”?
Just the relatively minor accidents at nuclear facilities (most of them politically covered up or not commonly known) over the years including the more well-known Hanford (Richland), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—along with the common political knowledge that several nations—not all of whom were American allies—ability to cyber-attack our nuclear power plants and our electrical distribution grid systems, ought to have been enough to give us fair warning that—contrary to pseudo-science, corporate greed, political belief and public opinion—nuclear power was never safe, but in reality was and is the single most dangerous and destructive power generating concept ever developed for all kinds of reprehensible reasons. When something goes nuclear wrong, it goes irreparably wrong, most likely impossible to control or recover from the impending disaster that will last for several hundred to a few thousands, although the half-life of bismuth radiation has been measured at twenty billion billion (yes, twenty billion + billion), years so we in this lonely corner of the universe might consider ourselves lucky for no reason. In 2022 there were four hundred and fifty nuclear power plants operating world-wide and sixty more were under construction. Today, of course, there are none.
Despite Webster’s grandfatherly definition of uranium, this same earthly tragedy has apparently happened on our planet at least once before—more likely twice — and though much (including Biblical references, quiet speculation, and outright conspiracy theories) has been written about the evidence and the possibility, few of us seem to understand nor have ever cared that a similar nuclear world devastation actually occurred, at least once, thousands of years ago, nor that the archeological and anthropological scientific community did not investigate, research, endorse or even acknowledge the historical evidence. This does not surprise me, but today what scientists and historians believe is immaterial because now what is left of our world is all that we need to worry and care about—events of the past, rightly so, mean nothing. We are long past the life-saving threshold of learning from our mistakes. including our willful ignorance.
We humans seem to have been running a rigged three-legged race against one another to run asunder the entire planet against the natural environmental care and protections of Gaia. In a blind and greedy rush to subconsciously exterminate ourselves and fatally poison our only home—planet Earth and all her abundant bounty—we have, through American style financing of intentional international environmental degradation, hawkish threats of nuclear war, or the patriarchally personalized political, bureaucratic and corporate industrial pandemic earth-cancer super-spreaders that I call those who would “freeze ‘em to death in the dark.” I personally heard this same man say this same phrase, with their–often profane–variants, more than just once or twice. The phrase was coined by the President and CEO of a major mining company I was involved with, echoing his indignant objections to public protests over Three Mile Island in the 1980s. Note that all of these doomsday contestants during their race toward human extinction—indeed, by natural extension, including all life–had their in-common triple arsenal of the half-life of airborne nuclear radioactive emissions teamed up with ground and water waste radiation, their three legs at the end entirely unbound, allowed to run the basins and ranges without restrictions, making all of them self-proclaimed “winners” of their race into the likes of Dante’s, or, maybe, Diablo’s, Inferno.
###
Beginning, March 28, 2024: Chapter 1: On the Way to Juneau, Alaska . . .
We have reached Canada and passed through customs, mooring on Vancouver Island for the night, happy to find an open restaurant at the harbor, although we have more than ample food and other supplies on board the schooner, which, by the eay, bears the title “The Pacifier”. It has certainly lived up to its name during the early days of our journey north. It will take us three or four days to travel the additional 800 nautical miles along the coastline to reach Juneau.
At dinner we are delighted to meet a team of six employees from the Hanford Project, who are also on their way by boat to Juneau for essentially the same reasons we are and we agree to travel together the rest of the way, giving us a more comforting feeling concerning the remainder of our trip. Over our dining, we discuss the implications and share our knowledge about the future of North America and, indeed, the world and what the prospects are to provide pockets of preservation for human life, and in general where we think those places might be. The discussion is not a confident one, nor is it at all pleasant. But we all realize that we have to do our best to have some success in our unexpected new mission in our lives.
###
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one (for fun)Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… emergencies. These include emergencies … nuclear power. The agency prepares and … Emergency Management Agency – and the Federal Emergency Management …
So, the nuclear world buzz tonight is all about Putin’s latest threat to the rest of the world, or at least to the West. Without posting an article tonight, following, borrowed from Reuters, is the crux of the new threat that perhaps makes it more serious than the usual mundane threat of ‘deterrence’ . . . and remember this is an election year, and consider seriously that the likely GOP presidential candidate who is mentally incompetent and who is Putin’s friend and idol very, very, seriously. For this reason I believer Putin will maintain the status quo at least until the election unless the U.S. and NATO send troops into Ukraine. ~llaw
NUCLEAR DOCTRINE
In a U.S. election year, the West is grappling with how to support Kyiv against Russia, which now controls almost one-fifth of Ukrainian territory and is rearming much faster than the West and Ukraine.
Kyiv says it is defending itself against an imperial-style war of conquest designed to erase its national identity. Putin says he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in Feb. 2022 to bolster Russia’s own security against a hostile West.
Putin reiterated the use of nuclear weapons was spelled out in the Kremlin’s nuclear doctrine, which sets out the conditions under which it would use such a weapon: broadly a response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, or the use of conventional weapons against Russia “when the very existence of the state is put under threat”.
“Weapons exist in order to use them,” Putin said.
Putin’s nuclear warning came alongside another offer for talks on Ukraine as part of a new post-Cold War demarcation of European security. The U.S. says Putin is not ready for serious talks over Ukraine.
Reuters reported last month that Putin’s suggestion of a ceasefire in Ukraine to freeze the war was rejected by the U.S. after contacts between intermediaries.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said this week that, without more Western support, Ukraine would lose more territory to Russia which would embolden Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, told the Senate Intelligence Committee it was in U.S. interests to help Kyiv get into a stronger position before talks.
Putin said Russia would need written security guarantees in the event of any settlement.
“I don’t trust anyone, but we need guarantees, and guarantees must be spelled out, they must be such that we would be satisfied,” Putin said.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
“Therefore, I don’t think that here everything is rushing to it (nuclear confrontation), but we are ready for this.” The Biden administration has said …
Rethinking Nuclear Power: Evolution & Future of Nuclear Energy · Why Do Animals Play? The Science Behind Play Behavior · The Role of Fungi in Climate …
OMG! $1.6 Billion in 2025 for a Nuclear Energy Office Budget that is an administrative agency? Have we gone crazy? Don’t answer that — I already know the answer.
A small part of the budget is reserved to help Deploy U.S. Reactors Internationally to what I gather 3rd World countries who may not be contributing at all to global warming/climate change, but to hap-hazardly spread nuclear power around the planet indiscriminately is a really bad idea, just as Biden’s ‘carrot and stick’ uranium sales to poorer countries who ‘want’ to build nuclear power plants — or do they really want to traffick in nuclear fuel for building bombs — especially with HALEU fuel (although I don’t know (and they probably don’t either) if there is enough HALEU or even military grade uranium to go around) to fire them up in an effort to compete with Russia’s uranium fuel varieties of enrichment. Low enrichment does not mean that it increases the the safety of avoiding accidents at new nuclear power plants. We human beings should not be doing this kind of stuff because we are not qualified to do it.
The really bad news is that we are increasing our risk of nuclear extinction when we should be doing the exact opposite. Einstein may well be turning over in his grave. It is as though we are bound and determined to do the lemming thing and follow each other over the proverbial cliff, purposefully exterminating ourselves. What we need is world peace, as Einstein said, not a world of nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs. Read on . . . ~llaw
The request includes $694.2 million in research and development activities that will help advance important reactor and fuel technologies, address gaps in the domestic nuclear fuel supply chain, and harness the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to optimize the performance of the nation’s fleet of reactors.
Below are five key takeaways from the FY25 budget request for nuclear energy.
1. Access to HALEU
HALEU reguli made from EBR-II spent nuclear fuel at Idaho National Laboratory.
Idaho National Laboratory
NE is requesting $188 million to secure a near-term supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for DOE-supported research and demonstration projects.
The funding complements the Department’s longer-term strategy to expand its domestic enrichment capacity through purchase agreements with industry partners to help spur demand for additional HALEU production.
The recently passed FY24 spending bill directed $2.72 billion to further build out a low-enriched uranium and advanced nuclear fuel supply chain. It will also help assure there is an adequate supply of low-enriched uranium fuel to meet the current needs of U.S. reactors and our allies to eliminate the nation’s dependance on Russian fuel services.
2. Developing New Reactor Technologies
The FY25 request includes $142.5 million to support the continued execution of five advanced reactor projects supported through DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
NE is also requesting $56 million to establish new testing facilities at the national labs, including $12 million to finish the construction of the NRIC DOME at Idaho National Laboratory.
The funding also includes $16.5 million for DOE’s MARVEL microreactor testing platform to complete the fabrication of its fuel and key components.
NE is also requesting more than $18 million to initiate construction of the LOTUS testbed that will be used to test first-of-a-kind technologies to generate data required for design and licensing.
3. Boosting University R&D
NE is requesting $143 million to support emerging technologies developed by U.S. universities, colleges, and small businesses.
The funding will also be used for university infrastructure improvements and fuel services, along with workforce development activities such as scholarship and fellowship opportunities.
NE is inching closer to eclipsing the $1 billion funding mark with more than $990 million awarded to colleges and universities across the country since 2009.
4. Additive Manufacturing and AI
The FY25 request also includes $32 million to advance the use of cutting-edge digital tools and manufacturing methods to strengthen nuclear supply chains and help optimize reactor performance.
This funding includes $17 million to support the qualification of additively manufactured materials for use in nuclear reactors and $9 million to develop and demonstrate advanced sensors, instrumentation and control systems, including potential ways to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to advanced reactor designs and operations.
The two technologies combined could drastically reduce the time it takes to test, qualify, and deploy new reactor components and fuels.
The remaining $6 million will address high priority supply chain needs for the near-term deployment of advanced reactors.
5. Deploying U.S. Reactors Internationally
Finally, the FY25 request includes $8 million to support several U.S. international projects, including providing workforce development, training, and technical expertise to new and emerging nuclear energy countries in Africa, Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe.
The funding will be used to establish regional clean energy training centers in key markets to provide capacity-building and professional development opportunities in regions looking to develop or grow their civil nuclear programs.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
As global conflicts increase the possibility of nuclear war, it’s certainly important to talk about the ongoing legacies of the bombings of Hiroshima …
The Atomic Energy Advancement Act is not only a practical, commonsense solution but also a bipartisan one. It will modernize licensing and streamline …
In a fission reactor, neutrons bombard the nuclei of atoms of certain elements. When one such nucleus absorbs a neutron, it destabilises and breaks up …
… threats from Kim’s military. He has urged his soldiers to grab lessons from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as the nature of combat evolves.
Okay now! I just watched the Academy Awards (Oscars) for the 1st time in maybe a decade because I wanted desperately to see the nuclear bomb-building Manhattan Project movie (that we all need to see) that put an abrupt ending to World War II at the expense of common everyday citizens living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan and, indeed, “Oppenheimer” did win the Best Picture award.
That made my old heart and fretful mind happy! And to my mind we all need to watch it now, or again and again, until we finally understand what all things nuclear can and will do to humanity and all the rest of life on planet Earth if all things nuclear are allowed to continue as a part, no matter how small, of our world(s).
So in the here and now, a tragic historical novel my co-author and I wrote can be read and used to compare, on a much smaller scale of course, that makes the concept of nuclear war, much easier to understand what and how it can affect humanity, So, I urge you to buy the books, read them and consider the impact that mankind’s greed and desire for power over others can have on those others.
I just want to see and somehow ensure that our own recently published novel “The Sweetwater Conspiracy” (in two parts and two books) be read by as many of us as possible so that we can easily relate to the problem with war, no matter on what scale it happens, and also for the story to become a movie production like no other because this19th century story is a predecessor ‘nuclear anything’ demonstrating what powerful men then and now wearing the blinders of greed over their collective third eyes can do to this beautiful world of love and life that Mother Earth granted us free of charge, and yet we made a literal trash can out of it, mainly in a few hundred years, and are now trying to finish the destruction, for which we will likely pay the ultimate price unless we do a prompt about face and create a new world peace and order that is, without doubt, our one and only way to survive. And even with that mandatory global effort the chance of survival has become questionable.
Why do I want our historical novel ‘The Sweetwater Conspiracy” to be popular enough to rate a Pulitzer Prize, and to be filmed and nominated for an Academy Award and winning? It has nothing to do with me personally, nor my co-author either. though it might help pay a few bills, llolloll. The answer is that it is the same story of power-crazed, money hungry, politically obsessed men failing to understand that the feminine way on this Earth and that their inability to make world peace — because men will never agree with global unity — is the only way we can avoid self-extermination and manage to survive as a species.
This almost identical scenario to ” Oppenheimer” on an easier to follow and understand scale of the gunslinging settling up of old west of the late 1800s.”The Sweetwater Conspiracy” tells the amazing story of why the male of our species, when they’re not shooting themselves, with their narrow minds full of self-importance, greed, misogyny and their complete domination of the young single female at the risk of her life who might somehow compete with them and their cattle is decidedly not to be allowed the same opportunities and freedoms of the man who does the same thing, no matter how more modest or practical than those men’s felonious claims to sprawling free-graze range, who insist on ruling their territorial ranches with no competition from anyone, especially of the feminine persuasion.
The story is built on the true story of an atrocity that even in the late 1880s in the Wyoming Territory of the United States of America, and then purposely spread across our country and on to Britain, an interested Germany and beyond, by a few men’s fabrications full of outright lies upon lies that the American History books still to this day report as an historical fact that in reality is nothing at all close to the truth.
We need to fix that huge historical mistake for the sake of one woman’s name that was, under duress, intentionally given to her by the Wyoming Press who were intimidated into reporting the fervent fabrications to protect a few wealthy cattlemen with deranged visions of some kind of eternal power and wealth, not much different than our powerful leaders in this nuclear world of today, rather than in the cattle world of the old wild west that eventually required federal Marshall Law for the first and hopefully the last time over the range wars between the wealthy ranchers and the dirt-poor homesteaders who Abraham Lincoln had innocently encouraged to “go west” in order to settle up the country.
This tale is identical to what we are doing in today’s world(s), but on a global scale compared to the mountains, valleys, and rivers of Wyoming and surrounds. Male dominance didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now, and it will never work . . .
This novel, in two parts and two books, will tell you why . . . Let’s make it a Pulitzer prize winning story, and the Academy Award winning movie sometime in the next few years. I want to live to see it happen, and so should you, because you-all collectively, not me alone, are the only ones who can do it by supporting it . . .
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
“He actually said to me ‘young people are not that concerned about nuclear weapons, it’s not really at the forefront of their fears’. … all our films …
This unexpected setback underscores the persistent vulnerabilities of nuclear power, despite heightened focus on emergency backup power post-Fukushima …
Extended deterrence based on nuclear-sharing in Europe was a crucial part of US and NATO strategy throughout the Cold War, with Russia’s 2022 invasion …
Oppenheimer’s Lessons for Nuclear Threats Today. 7 minute read. Robert … We must learn those lessons, avoid repeating the mistakes from the Cold War, …
From the Einstein/Russell Manifesto on July 9, 1955
LLAW’s CONCERNS & COMMENTS, Sunday, (03/10/2024)
It is all well and good that many anti-nuclear individuals from scientists to conscientious objectors to authors like me, and to just plain common ordinary citizens who have tried to crucify the idea of war and more recently nuclear war, which, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell jointly tried desperately to point out in the old cover image above, is equivalent to perishing, better known today as extinction.
Yet nobody has succeeded in destroying all things nuclear rather than allowing all things nuclear destroy us and all other life on planet Earth. So it is that 80 years later the threat is still there and rapidly growing more critical in a nuclear world of intolerance, universal hatred, and untold kinds of division among nuclear armed nations with the capability of ending it all virtually instantly. And as I have publicly said hundreds if not thousands of times, like Einstein and Russell and others, that world peace is the only way to save ourselves and all the innocent other life forms as well. ~llaw
NOT JUST OPPENHEIMER
How other scientists tried to change nuclear weapons policy for the better—and how some succeeded
J.Robert Oppenheimer was the charismatic physicist who led the World War II project to design the Hiroshima and Nagasaki fission bombs and, after the war, was for five years the US government’s leading technical advisor on nuclear weapons policy. His career as an advisor ended in 1954 after he recommended against developing 1,000-times-more-powerful thermonuclear bombs.
Oppenheimer was re-introduced to the public last year in the eponymous Christopher Nolan film that drew huge worldwide audiences and earned 13 Oscar nominations. He was not, however, the only scientist struggling with foreign policy and security issues once the world realized that nuclear explosives could be made. Many other scientists tried to influence nuclear weapons policy—and some did successfully.
Nuclear arms control
NIELS BOHR
Niels Bohr was 60 in 1945 and second only to Einstein in fame among 20th-century physicists for explaining the energy levels of electrons in atoms, creating the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to which young physicists flocked from all over Europe to develop the new quantum mechanics, and then explaining nuclear fission.
After Bohr escaped from Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943, he was invited to visit Los Alamos, where he learned that the United States was well on its way to making fission bombs.
He focused immediately on the dangerous nuclear arms race that would result once the Soviet Union had the bomb. As was his wont, he engaged colleagues in prolonged, deep discussions which resulted in his concerns and ideas spreading among the physicists in the project. (In 1964, two years after Bohr’s death, Oppenheimer would record a magnificent appreciation of the impact of Bohr’s concerns.)[1]
In the summer of 1944, admirers obtained meetings for Bohr with both Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a memo written for Roosevelt, Bohr summarized his proposal:
“[T]he terrifying prospect of a future competition between nations about a weapon of such formidable character can only be avoided through a universal agreement in true confidence [and] will therefore demand such concessions regarding exchange of information and openness about industrial efforts, including military preparations, as would hardly be conceivable unless all partners were assured of a compensating guarantee of common security against dangers of unprecedented acuteness… Personal connections between scientists of different nations might … offer means of establishing preliminary and unofficial contact.”[2]
Roosevelt expressed interest in Bohr’s idea of talking with Stalin about the bomb, but Churchill vetoed it. The British prime minister was particularly irate at Bohr’s suggestion that the basis for such a discussion could be laid by communications among Western and Soviet scientists. Fearing Bohr might leak nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, Churchill told his science advisor, “Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.”[3]
Niels Bohr, December 1945. (AIP)
“Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.”
—Winston Churchill
JAMES FRANCK
LEO SZILARD
EUGENE RABINOWITCH
GLENN SEABORG
The following year, Bohr’s efforts were picked up by a group of scientists at the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory (also known as the “Met Lab”) at the University of Chicago, where the US plutonium-production reactors were designed.
In May 1945, as the decision to use nuclear bombs on Japan was being finalized, Arthur Compton, director of the Met Lab, allowed James Franck, 63, to organize a study of the “social and political implications” of nuclear bombs. Franck, a German refugee, had been sensitized to the social responsibility of scientists, in part by Bohr, after allowing himself to be recruited into Germany’s World War I poison gas program.
The co-authors of the resulting “Franck Report”[4] included the irrepressible genius, Leo Szilard, inventor of the nuclear chain reaction and co-designer with Enrico Fermi of the first nuclear reactor; Franck’s research collaborator, Eugene Rabinowitch, later founding editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; and chemist Glenn Seaborg, 33, co-discoverer of plutonium and other “transuranic” elements (artificial elements heavier than uranium), and later, during the 1960s, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission.
The Franck Report argued for not bombing Japanese cities, assessing that a post-war nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union would be inevitable if the United States were to use nuclear bombs in a surprise attack on Japan. It urged instead that the atomic bomb be demonstrated to representatives of the United Nations, which had just had its founding meeting in San Francisco in April 1945, and that the UN be consulted on its use.
President Roosevelt had just died and the report went to the “Interim Committee” chaired by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who asked Oppenheimer, Compton, Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence (head of Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory) whether any demonstration of nuclear weapons could be as effective in convincing Japan to surrender as bombing Japanese cities. The four reported back, “We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”[5]
The Interim Committee’s formulation of the question ignored, however, the lesson the Soviet Union would draw from a secret US-UK decision to use nuclear bombs in a surprise attack on an enemy.
Stalin had launched a nuclear-weapons development program in 1943, based on intelligence about the US-UK nuclear-weapons program. After the bombing of Hiroshima, however, Stalin gave the Soviet nuclear-weapons program a priority similar to that the United States had given when it was driven by fear of a Nazi nuclear bomb. Stalin reportedly told the leaders of his nuclear program, “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed!”[6]
Bohr’s concerns were correct.
Leo Szilard was one of the seven signatories of the 1945 Franck Report that warned of a nuclear arms race. (Argonne National Laboratory / AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
James Franck (left) and Enrico Fermi worked together at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory during the Manhattan Project. (AIP)
The Franck Report was principally written by Eugene Rabinowitch, founding editor of the Bulletin. (Rabinowitch Family Archives)
Arthur Compton’s letter introducing the Franck Report to Secretary of War Stimson.
International brainstorming
JOSEPH ROTBLAT
BERTRAND RUSSELL
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Joseph Rotblat was a Polish physicist on a fellowship in the United Kingdom when Hitler’s army invaded Poland. Rotblat had already carried out an experiment in Poland that demonstrated the possibility of a chain reaction in uranium. In the United Kingdom, Rotblat helped start the British nuclear-weapon program and then joined Los Alamos when the British effort was folded into the US nuclear-weapon program.
Like the other refugee physicists from Europe, Rotblat acted out of fear that the Nazis might be the first to get nuclear bombs.
In 1944, after US intelligence had concluded that the Nazis never had a serious nuclear-weapons project, according to Rotblat, General Groves told a dinner group at Los Alamos that the new rationale for the US nuclear project was to “subdue” the Soviet Union. Rotblat decided to leave.[7]
After his return to the United Kingdom, Rotblat pioneered the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancer. He also worked with Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, mathematician, and public intellectual, to recruit eminent international scientists to endorse a manifesto Russell had written calling on scientists from around the world to “assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution.”[8] Albert Einstein’s endorsement of Russell’s manifesto was his last public act before his death in 1955, and it became known as the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto.”
Rotblat became the first secretary general of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, named after the village in Nova Scotia where the first meeting was held in 1957 to discuss how to reduce the danger of nuclear war. Through the 1980s, Pugwash working groups developed the technical bases for nuclear and also chemical, biological, and conventional arms control agreements. Rotblat and Pugwash shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”
Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of “glasnost” (openness) and “common security” owed an intellectual debt to Bohr and Pugwash. The circle around Gorbachev who advocated for the new approach to foreign and security policy called it the “new thinking”—inspired, according to Gorbachev’s reformist foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze,[9] by the lines in the Russell-Einstein manifesto:
“We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”
Joseph Rotblat with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during a Pugwash workshop in Moscow, February 1995. (Pugwash)
Joseph Rotblat’s Los Alamos ID badge photo. He left the Manhattan Project in 1944 on moral grounds, the only scientist to do so.
“We have to learn to think in a new way.”
—from the Russell-Einstein manifesto
Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein’s Manifesto
Civilian control of US nuclear research and development [10]
FEDERATION OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
After the end of World War II, the younger scientists in the different installations of the Manhattan Project organized to educate their fellow citizens about the policy issues that would have to be dealt with now that nuclear weapons had been created. Groups were organized at the University of Chicago’s Met Lab; Los Alamos; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the US World War II uranium enrichment facilities had been built; and MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, where US wartime radar development was based.
The first nuclear policy issue on Congress’ agenda was how to manage post-war nuclear research and development.
The War Department (renamed the Defense Department in 1949) drafted a bill sponsored by Rep. Andrew May and Sen. Edwin Johnson. The younger atomic scientists feared the bill would result in even academic nuclear research being subject to military secrecy, but Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Lawrence signed a letter urging the bill’s rapid passage, creating a temporary split between the senior and younger scientists.
The site organizations sent representatives to Washington to present their views. Within a month, they had established a small volunteer-staffed office and created the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later renamed Federation of American Scientists). Members of Congress and journalists were eager to meet the young articulate atomic scientists and learn about their concerns.
By the end of 1945, the May-Johnson bill was bogged down in controversy and an alternative bill emerged that put control of nuclear energy under a civilian-led Atomic Energy Commission. This was a success. The influence of the atomic scientists on policy quickly faded, however, after as public interest subsided and the scientists returned to research and teaching.
After the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test in August 1949, Washington hunted for who had revealed the secret of the bomb to the Soviets. The scientists responded that the key secret—that fission bombs could be made—had been revealed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And a report commissioned by General Groves, the War Department’s overseer of the Manhattan Project, had also revealed how the United States enriched uranium and produced plutonium.[11] But US officials were not convinced: There must have been a mole among atomic scientists.
In 1950, Klaus Fuchs, who had been a member of the British delegation in Los Alamos during World War II, confessed to sharing information with the Soviets, including the design of the Nagasaki bomb. Nuclear scientists who advocated nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet Union then came under heavy surveillance. The FBI’s investigative files on the Federation of American Scientists grew,[12] and the organization went into decline until it was revived in 1970 under the presidency of mathematician Jeremy Stone.[13]
Scientists of the Manhattan Project formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists in 1945 to advocate for international and peaceful control of atomic energy. (Oregon State University Special Collections)
The influence of the atomic scientists on policy quickly faded as public interest subsided and the scientists returned to research and teaching.
Driving nuclear tests underground
With the development of the much more powerful thermonuclear weapons, atmospheric nuclear testing became a political issue. For high-yield thermonuclear tests, the United States moved its testing from Nevada to the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific, while the Soviet Union moved its high-yield testing to the remote Arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya.
In 1954, winds blew the radioactive fallout from the US 15-megaton Bravo test on Bikini atoll in an unpredicted direction, contaminating an inhabited atoll, Rongelap, and a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon No. 5.
Fortunately, the residents of Rongelap were on its southern islands, where the fallout was 10 times less than on the northern islands, and were evacuated before they received lethal doses.[14] However, many children developed thyroid tumors, the population suffered additional health problems, and the atoll was eventually abandoned.
All this was successfully hushed up by the United States, but the Japanese fishing boat returned to Japan with its crew suffering from severe radiation illness, with one death resulting. Their fish was radioactively contaminated. A global furor resulted.
The high doses received by the Rongelap islanders and the Japanese fishermen were from local radioactive fallout. Roughly half of the radioactivity from Soviet and US high-yield nuclear tests ended up in the stratosphere, however, from which it slowly filtered down globally. A community effort in St. Louis collected 320,000 baby teeth and found easily measurable levels of strontium-90, a 30-year half-life radioactive fission product with a biological uptake similar to calcium.[15]
LINUS PAULING
ANDREI SAKHAROV
Two scientists, Linus Pauling in the United States and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union, pointed out that huge quantities of radioactive carbon 14 also were being created by neutron absorption in atmospheric nitrogen. They estimated that millions of cases of serious health effects would result during that isotope’s long decay period (half-life of 5,600 years).[16]
In 1957, Pauling and his allies collected the signatures of 11,000 scientists on a petition calling for the end of nuclear testing in the atmosphere. In 1960, he was subpoenaed to testify before the US Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and questioned about whether his efforts were Communist-abetted.[17]
In 1961, at a meeting of Premier Khrushchev with the leadership of the Soviet nuclear program, Sakharov addressed Khrushchev to argue that most of the planned Soviet high-yield tests were unnecessary. According to Sakharov’s recollection, Khrushchev responded that that the tests were necessary to deter US nuclear threats and told Sakharov, “I’d be a jellyfish and not Chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov!”[18]
Two years later, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear tests everywhere but underground. That same year, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution. Sakharov’s efforts as an insider were relatively invisible to the outside world, but, in 1975, he too received the Nobel Peace Prize recognizing “his struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament and cooperation between all nations.”[19]
Linus Pauling, 1954 Nobel prize winner for chemistry, holds up a sign opposing atmospheric nuclear testing at a rally near the White House, April 28, 1962. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
“I’d be a jellyfish and not Chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov!”
—Nikita Khrushchev
Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov twice appeared on the cover of Time magazine—first in 1977, two years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, and again in 1990, a few months after his death.
Limiting ballistic missile defense
RICHARD GARWIN
HANS BETHE
PAUL DOTY
MIKHAIL MILLIONSHCHIKOV
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided the United States would deploy defenses against incoming ballistic missiles. Johnson’s decision came despite his science advisors arguing that the system being proposed could easily be countermeasured and would provoke a Soviet nuclear buildup in response.[20]
Johnson was under political pressure at the time from the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, who claimed the Soviet Union was ahead in ballistic missile defense. Johnson later decided not to run for reelection because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam war, and Nixon got elected the next year.
The Nixon administration inherited the Johnson administration plan, which would have proceeded as planned but for two facts. First, in the absence of today’s homing technology, the long-range space interceptors were equipped with nuclear warheads 300 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.[21] Second, the Defense Department decided to base the nuclear-armed interceptors in the suburbs of major US cities—starting with Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Honolulu, New York City, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.
This deployment resulted in “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) uprisings by suburbanites living near the proposed deployment sites who felt at risk of accidental nuclear explosions of the interceptor warheads.
Two senior government science advisors, Richard Garwin and Hans Bethe, decided to publish in Scientific American their arguments about the many ways in which a country like the Soviet Union, with the level of technology required to build intercontinental ballistic missiles, could equip them with decoys and other countermeasures to confuse or blind the radars guiding the interceptors.[22] Other scientists argued more generally that the deployment of defenses would provoke offensive buildups to still higher levels. In fact, that happened with the development of missiles with multiple independently targetable warheads in anticipation of missile defenses.
The Garwin-Bethe article made the issue accessible to members of Congress who had become interested in the issue because of the NIMBY uprisings. In response, the Nixon administration hastily moved the interceptors away from the cities and renamed the system “Safeguard.” But the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings anyway, inviting the scientist critics as well as Defense Department officials to testify, and Congressional opinion shifted against the system.
It took a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Spiro Agnew, about a year into the new administration, to win Senate approval for funding to construct the first two interceptor sites. The Nixon administration saw the writing on the wall and decided to use the Safeguard system as a bargaining chip to be negotiated away with the Soviets.
The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with its 1974 protocol limited the United States and Soviet Union each to one interceptor site with 100 interceptors—a hardly significant number given that the each country was on its way to 10,000 nuclear warheads deployed on long-range ballistic missiles.
At first reluctant to agree to limitations on defensive systems, the Soviet leadership came to accept the merits of an ABM Treaty, in part thanks to discussions between US and Soviet scientists. Arguments similar to those made by Garwin and Bethe had circulated in discussions at Pugwash meetings in the mid-1960s and in bilateral meetings of the so-called Soviet-American Disarmament Study Group, organized by Harvard chemist Paul Doty in collaboration with Mikhail Millionshchikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Shortly before his death in 1972, Millionshchikov drafted a report to the Academy crediting the ABM Treaty and other agreements to those informal discussions.[23]
Editorial cartoon about the “not-in-my-backyard” movement opposition to the Johnson Administration proposed deployment of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in US suburbs. (via Frank von Hippel)
The Soviet leadership came to accept the merits of an ABM Treaty, in part thanks to discussions between US and Soviet scientists.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
EVGENY VELIKHOV
THOMAS COCHRAN
AARON TOVISH
CHARLES ARCHAMBEAU
The end of the US-Soviet nuclear arms race was made possible by a series of different events, including, in the United States, a grass-roots uprising calling for a “freeze” on the nuclear arms race in the early-1980s and, in the Soviet Union, the choice by the Soviet Communist Party’s Politburo of Mikhail Gorbachev as its next general secretary in 1985.
Gorbachev’s first nuclear arms control initiative was to declare a unilateral Soviet test moratorium to begin on August 6, 1985 (Hiroshima Day). His hope was to turn the Kennedy- Khrushchev Limited Test Ban Treaty into a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by ending underground nuclear testing as well.
When the Reagan administration refused to join the moratorium, physicist Evgeny Velikhov, who had succeded Millionshchikov as vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was an arms control advisor to Gorbachev, searched for a way forward. In October 1985, at the centennial celebration of Niels Bohr’s birth in Copenhagen, Velikhov suggested to me the idea of inviting an outside group to verify that Soviet testing had stopped.
Thomas Cochran, a physicist with the US Natural Resources Defense Council, was interested and had the backing of the chairman of the Council’s board, and Aaron Tovish, then with Parliamentarians for Global Action, had found a seismologist, Charles Archambeau, who was able to recruit a team of seismologists from the University of California, San Diego to monitor the Soviet Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. After a first meeting in Moscow in May 1986, the effort moved quickly and, in July, the seismologists set up a monitoring station at the first of three geologically favorable locations around the test site.[24]
This initiative immediately excited test ban advocates in Congress.
The effort to achieve a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had failed two decades earlier because of Soviet unwillingness to allow as many on-site investigations of suspect seismic events as the United States was demanding. Now a new Soviet leadership was allowing a US group to establish in-country monitoring stations—unilaterally! Congress began to press the Reagan and then George H.W. Bush administrations for test-ban negotiations and finally, in 1992, imposed a moratorium on US nuclear testing as long as other countries—especially Russia—did not test.[25]
Serious negotiations followed on a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was opened for signatures in 1996. To date, the treaty has been ratified by 177 states, but it has not yet come into force because Annex 2 of the treaty requires ratifications by 44 specific countries.[26] Among the nine nuclear-weapon states whose ratifications are required, only France and the United Kingdom have done so. China, Israel, Russia, and the United States have all signed, however, and the Vienna Convention on Treaties requires countries that have signed a treaty to comply with it unless they unsign. India and Pakistan have not signed but have not tested since 1998. North Korea, which also has not signed, has not tested since 2017.
The different issues above show that, when there is public interest, scientists’ efforts to advance nuclear arms control have been able to change policies. Unfortunately, since the end of the Cold War, public and therefore congressional interest in nuclear arms control have waned, and the nuclear military-industrial complex has taken back control of nuclear weapons policy in the United States.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thinly-veiled nuclear threats, China’s nuclear-weapons buildup, and non-nuclear-armed states pressing for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, however, nuclear arms control is becoming salient again. Will public interest meet this historical moment?
Editor’s note: In October 2023, the US Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, which has about a thousand members, convened a meeting at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to explore the possibilities for an international mobilization of physicists. This article is based on a talk given at that meeting. The author thanks Matthew Evangelista, author of Unarmed Forces: The Trans-national Movement to End the Cold War(Cornell University Press, 1999), who also gave a talk at that Trieste meeting, for his comments and suggestions.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… about reaching into the nuclear arsenal. … At least initially, their use would look nothing like an all-out nuclear exchange, the great fear of the …
Three major environmental groups filed a lawsuit to stop California from extending the life of its last nuclear–power plant. The lawsuit from San Luis …
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The intercepts revealed that for the first time since the war in Ukraine had broken out, there were frequent conversations within the Russian military …
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Every now and then, science serves up poison pills. Knowledge gained in the course of exploring how nature works opens doors we might wish had stayed shut: For much of the past year, our newsfeeds were flooded with stories about how computational superpowers can create amoral nonhuman “minds” that may learn to think better than we do (and then what?). On the big screen, the movie Oppenheimer explored a threat people have lived with for nearly 80 years: How the energy of the atom can be unleashed to power unimaginably destructive bombs.
When potentially catastrophic inventions threaten all humanity, who decides how (or whether) they’re used? When even scientists toss around terms like “human extinction,” whose voice matters?
Such questions were at the core of the Oppenheimer film, a blockbuster now nominated for more than a dozen Oscars. To me, the movie hit home for a different reason. I spent a great deal of time with Frank Oppenheimer during the last 15 years of his life. While I never knew his brother, Robert, Frank remained anguished over what he felt was Robert’s squandered opportunity to engage the world’s people in candid conversations about how to protect themselves under the shadow of this new threat.
KC Cole and Frank Oppenheimer mixing images in Bob Miller’s Everyone Is You and Me (1980), an Exploratorium exhibit exploring perception, optics and light. Courtesy of KC Cole
During the post-World War II years, the emotionally close ties between the brothers (Robert—the “father of the atom bomb”—and his younger brother, Frank—the “uncle” of the bomb, as he mischievously called himself) were strained and for a time even fractured. Both hoped that the nascent nuclear technology would remain under global, and peaceful, control. Both hoped that the sheer horror of the weapons they helped to build could lead to a warless world.
They were on the same side, but not on the same page when it came to tactics.
Robert—whose fame surged after the war—believed decisions should be left to experts who understood the issues and had the power to make things happen—that is, people like himself. Frank believed just as fiercely that everyday people had to be involved. It took everyone to win the war, he argued, and it would take everyone to win the peace.
In the end, both lost. Both paid for their efforts with their careers (although Frank eventually resurrected his ideas as a “people’s science museum” that had a worldwide impact).
Given that the question “Who decides?” underlies so much of today’s fast-evolving sciences, the brothers’ story seems more compelling and relevant than ever.
Ethical education
In many ways, the Oppenheimer brothers were very much alike. Both studied physics. Both chain-smoked. Both loved art and literature. Both had piercing blue eyes, inherited from their mother, Ella Friedman Oppenheimer, an artist with a malformed hand always hidden in a glove. Their father, Julius, was a trustee of the Society for Ethical Culture, dedicated to “love of the right.”
They shared a Manhattan apartment with maids, Renoirs and books piled down the halls and into the bathrooms. Ella was terrified of germs, so tutors and barbers often came to them. Frank had his tonsils out in his bedroom. Both boys attended Ethical Culture schools in New York, so morality was baked into their upbringing.
But they were also in other ways opposites.
Robert and Frank Oppenheimer as children. Frank Oppenheimer, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
Robert was, by his own admission, “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.” Frank was anything but. He sneaked out at night to scale New York City’s rooftop water towers; by high school, he was using the electric current in the family home to weld whatever metal he could get his hands on. He took apart his father’s player piano (then stayed up all night putting it back together).
Robert got through Harvard in three years and received his PhD from the University of Göttingen two years later, in 1927, at age 23. Frank didn’t get his PhD until he was 27. Robert was arrogant, picky about his company. Frank would talk with anyone and did, later befriending even his FBI tail.
When Robert joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, he was described as “a sort of patron saint,” always center stage, smooth, articulate, captivating. When Frank arrived at Caltech many years later for graduate work, he was described as standing “at the fringe, shoulders hunched over, clothes mussed and frayed, fingers still dirty from the laboratory.”
Still, they loved each other dearly. Frank, eight years Robert’s junior, wept when his older brother left for graduate school in Europe. Robert wrote Frank that he would gladly give up his vacation “for one evening with you.” He sent his little brother books on physics and chemistry, a sextant, compasses, a metronome, along with letters full of brotherly wisdom. My personal favorite: “To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.”
In summer, they retreated to a cabin in the mountains of New Mexico, which Robert called Perro Caliente (Spanish for “hot dog”). They rode horses over 13,000-foot peaks, 1,000 miles a summer. During one night ride, Robert got knocked off his horse. “He was very thin anyway,” Frank said. “Here was this little bit of protoplasm on the ground, not moving. It was scary, but he was all right.”
On a road trip back to Caltech, Frank rolled the car into a ditch, breaking Robert’s arm. When Robert stopped at a store to get a sling, he came back with a bright red one, to cheer up his little brother, who he knew was feeling bad about the accident.
Frank Oppenheimer holds a gyroscope during his time as a high school teacher in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in the late 1950s. Stanley Fowler / Courtesy of KC Cole
The world around them was fraught, with fascism on the rise in Germany, Italy and Spain. The Depression meant people were still out of work. Robert kept mostly aloof from politics, but Frank dived in. He married a University of California, Berkeley, student who was a member of the Young Communist League, then joined himself. He admired the Communists for taking unemployment seriously—and for understanding the threats posed by Hitler and Mussolini. His personal tipping point was the treatment of Black swimmers at a Pasadena public pool: They were allowed only on Wednesdays; the pool was drained before the white swimmers came back on Thursday. Only the Communist Party seemed concerned.
Robert didn’t approve of Frank’s decision to join the party, and he didn’t approve of his wife, Jackie, either, referring to her as “that waitress.” He accused Frank of being “slow” because it took him what Robert regarded as too long to get his PhD. He called Frank’s marriage “infantile.” The feelings became mutual. Jackie later regarded Robert and his wife, Kitty, as pretentious, phony and tight.
Frank soon realized that he wasn’t cut out to be a Communist, and he quit. He felt the party was too authoritarian and not as interested in social justice as in petty bickering. (Robert never joined, although Kitty had been a party member.)
From quantum theory to atom smashers
The brothers were both working as physicists when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Robert, the theorist, was sharing the revolutionary physics of quantum mechanics with his American colleagues at Berkeley and Caltech, where he had joint appointments. Frank, a natural-born experimentalist, was working with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley on the rapidly developing technology of particle accelerators—known to some as “atom smashers.”
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer confers with Leslie Groves, the military lead of the Manhattan Project. U.S. Department of Energy / Public Domain
Once it became clear that the enormous energy contained in the atomic nucleus could be used to build a bomb—and that Nazi Germany might well be doing just that—President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a major American effort to beat them to it: the Manhattan Project. It came as a surprise to everyone when General Leslie Groves tapped Robert as director. Seemingly overnight, the ethereal young man who enjoyed reading poetry in Sanskrit became the ringleader of the most concentrated collection of brilliant minds ever assembled—scientists summoned from around the world to a makeshift lab on a desolate New Mexico mesa, where they would build an atomic bomb to stop Hitler.
Frank, meanwhile, worked with Lawrence on what he called “racetracks” (officially calutrons) used to coax small but vital amounts of pure uranium-235 out of a dirty mix of isotopes by steering them in circles with magnets. Uranium-235, like plutonium-239, is easily split, just what was needed to set off a chain reaction. Since no one knew how to bring together a critical mass of the stuff to make an explosion, two designs were pursued simultaneously. The plutonium bomb acquired the nickname Fat Man; the uranium bomb was Little Boy.
Frank helped supervise an enormous complex for uranium separation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Frank liked Groves, and Groves, in turn, liked Frank—and later defended him when he was booted from physics for his politics.
As the time to test the bomb approached, Frank joined his brother at the Trinity site, a dry scrubby desert formerly part of the Alamogordo Bombing Range. Frank, who saw his job (ironically enough) as a “safety inspector,” mapped escape routes through the desert and made sure workers wore hard hats.
Leslie Groves, center, Robert Oppenheimer, in a pale hat, and others pose next to the remains of the tower destroyed by the testing of the Trinity bomb in a photo dated from September 1945, after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. U.S. Department of Energy / Public Domain
Finally, on July 16, 1945, the go-ahead was given. After a long night on edge watching driving rain and lightning rage around “the gadget”—a Fat Man-style plutonium bomb perched on a 100-foot-tall tower—the proverbial (and literal) button was pushed.
The brothers lay together at the nearest bunker, five miles away, heads to the ground. Frank later described the “unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple and very awesome … and all the thunder of the blast was bouncing, bouncing back and forth on the cliffs and hills. The echoing went on and on.” The cloud, he said “just seemed to hang there forever.”
Frank and his brother embraced each other: “I think we just said: ‘It worked.’”
On August 6, 1945, Little Boy was dropped on the pristine city of Hiroshima—which had been deliberately untouched by U.S. bombs, the better to assess the damage. In an instant, the city was all but flattened, people reduced to charred cinders, survivors hobbling around with their skin peeled off and hanging from their bodies like rags. An estimated 140,000 people were killed in the attack and in the months after, according to Japanese authorities.
Frank heard the news outside his brother’s office at Los Alamos. “Up to then I don’t think I’d really thought of all those flattened people,” he said. The U.S. bombing of Nagasaki with Fat Man just days later brought the death toll even higher.
Some physicists saw their success as a moral failure. Still, many—including Frank and Robert—also hoped this new weapon would cause people to see the world differently; they hoped it would ultimately bring about peace. “Those were the days when we all drank one toast only,” Robert said: “‘No more wars.’”
Intolerable weapon
After the war, the brothers’ lives diverged, driven by circumstance, in ways that were painful to both.
Robert was a hero; he mingled easily with the powerful. Famously, he was Einstein’s boss—director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He chaired a committee to advise the government on a new and vastly more powerful type of bomb—the hydrogen bomb. Rather than split atoms, it fused them, using the physics of stars. The H-bomb could be 1,000 times more powerful than Little Boy.
Robert’s committee voted unanimously against developing it. “The extreme dangers to mankind inherent in this proposal wholly outweigh any military advantage that could come from this weapon.” They described it as a “threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable.”
Frank, meanwhile, had joined the physics department at the University of Minnesota, building detectors to catch cosmic rays streaming from space with equipment tethered to balloons he frequently lost but chased gamely through Cuban forests and other remote locations. He was excited about their discovery that the cosmic ray particles were not merely protons, as people had assumed, but the nuclei of many elements—from hydrogen to gold—implying that some were forged in supernova explosions.
At the same time, he was giving speeches “all over the map,” as he put it, trying to educate the public about nuclear bombs, trying to explain what 1,000 times more powerful really meant. He spoke to bankers, civic associations, schools. He argued that so-called “smart” people weren’t all that different from everyone else. The mistrust of the “hoi polloi,” Frank thought, stemmed largely from the tendency of people to credit their own success to a single personal characteristic, which they then “idolize” and use to measure everyone else by the same yardstick.
He believed people would educate themselves if they thought their voices mattered. “All of us have seen, especially during the war, the enormous increase in the competence of people that results from a sense of responsibility,” he said. Building the “racetracks” during the war had required training thousands of people “fresh from farms and woods to operate and repair the weirdest and most complicated equipment.”
Frank Oppenheimer, left, works on one of his cosmic ray detectors, which were carried high into the atmosphere by balloons. Courtesy of KC Cole
Soon, his physics career was cut short. The FBI had been keeping tabs on both brothers for years, pausing only for the war, when military intelligence took over. Agents followed them everywhere, tapped their phones, planted microphones in their houses.
In 1949, Frank received a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he refused to take the fifth, but also refused to testify about anyone other than himself. He was effectively fired from the University of Minnesota physics department, leaving the chair’s office in tears.
Attempts to find work elsewhere were blocked at every turn, despite support from multiple Nobel laureates, Groves and even H-bomb enthusiast Edward Teller. Finally, an FBI agent told Frank flat out: If he wanted a job, he had to cooperate. “Then I realized what the wall was.”
Out of options, and having just purchased a ranch to live on “someday,” Frank and Jackie became serious cattle ranchers, learning from neighbors and veterinary manuals. (The FBI was right on their tails, pestering neighbors for information, suggesting they were broadcasting atomic secrets to Mexico.) All the while, Frank thought and wrote about physics and peace, civil rights, ethics, education and the critical role of honesty in science and public life.
Robert did not approve of any of Frank’s activities. He thought there wasn’t time to bring the public in on the debate; he thought he could use his fame and power to influence policy in Washington toward peaceful ends. Frank expressed his disgust at what he considered his brother’s futile and elitist approach. Robert made it clear that he thought the idea of becoming a rancher was a little silly—as well as beneath Frank.
Frank felt he could no longer reach him. “I saw my bro in Chicago,” Frank wrote his best friend Robert Wilson at Cornell University in an undated letter probably from the early 1950s. “I fear that I merely amused him slightly when, in brotherly love, I told him that I was still confident that someday he would do something that I was proud of.”
A man destroyed
Robert’s now-famous downfall was swift. Many great books have been written about the subject (not to mention Christopher Nolan’s colossal film); in effect, he was punished for his opposition to the H-bomb, probably his arrogance and naivete as well. After a series of secret hearings, his security clearance was revoked; he was, by all accounts, a ruined man.
It wasn’t something Frank liked to talk about. “He trusted his ability to talk to people and convince them,” Frank said. “But he was up against people that weren’t used to being convinced by conversation.”
Some of Robert’s most poignant testimony during the hearings involved Frank. Asked if his brother had ever been a Communist, Robert answered: “Mr. Chairman … I ask you not to press these questions about my brother. If they are important to you, you can ask him. I will answer, if asked, but I beg of you not to ask me these questions.”
The broader tragedy for both brothers was that the creation of the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction—a thing too horrible ever to use—didn’t much change how people viewed war. The H-bomb was just another weapon.
“What undid him,” Frank said, “was not just his fall from official grace, but the fact that this fall represented a defeat for the kind of civilized behavior that he had hoped nations would adopt.”
Robert died at the age of 62, in 1967. Frank’s last memory of his brother is poignantly familial. Robert was lying in bed, in great pain from throat cancer. Frank lay down beside him, and together they watched “Perry Mason” on TV.
A new path
While Robert was being politically destroyed, Frank had started teaching science in a one-room schoolhouse. Before long, students from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, were winning the state science fairs. Eventually allowed into academia by the University of Colorado in 1959, Frank promptly built a “library of experiments” out of equipment scavenged from other labs.
That “library” in time grew into a vast public playground of scientific stuff housed in the abandoned Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Exhibits—sometimes sophisticated and delicate—were meant to be played with, even broken; no guards stopped people from touching anything, no rules prevented theft—and, remarkably, there was almost none. He called it an “Exploratorium” so people wouldn’t think it was a “museum” where good behavior was expected (although he liked the idea that “no one flunks a museum”). Top scientists and artists from around the globe contributed time and talent. Barbara Gamow, wife of the physicist George Gamow, painted a sign to hang over the machine shop: “Here is Being Created an Exploratorium, a Community Museum Dedicated to Awareness.”
Frank Oppenheimer stands at his Pendulum Table exhibit at the Exploratorium. Courtesy of KC Cole
In the end, I like to think Frank proved his brother (and most everyone else) wrong about the willingness of everyday people to engage and learn. The “so-called inattentive public,” he’d said, would come to life if people didn’t feel “fooled and lied to,” if they felt valued and respected. And if people got addicted to figuring things out for themselves, they’d be inoculated against having to take the word of whatever bullies happened to be in power. Society could tap into this collective wisdom to solve pressing global problems—the only way he thought it could work.
Today, decades after Frank’s death in 1985, Exploratorium-style science centers exist in some form all over the globe.
I count myself as one of Frank’s many thousands of addicts, hooked on science (a subject I’d found boring) the minute I met him in 1971. (In a weird resonance with today, my first foray into journalism was a piece on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia for the New York Times magazine.) I was interested in peace, not physics. Frank talked me into writing for him, explaining optics and wave mechanics to the public. My first editor was Jackie. Over the years, Frank and I spent endless hours chatting about life, art, science and his family, including his brother.
Nolan’s film Oppenheimer doesn’t offer much insight into Robert’s thoughts on science and peace or science and human morality. However, Robert did think and talk about these ideas, many of which are collected in his 1954 book Science and the Common Understanding, as well as other places.
Frank continued to get upset (and a little drunk) every August 6, the day Hiroshima was bombed. He’d rub his forehead hard, as if he were trying to rub something out. He had much the same reaction to many previous dramatizations of the Oppenheimer story, because he thought they focused too much on the fall of his brother, rather than on the failure of attempts to use the horror of the bomb to build a warless world.
Frank’s fierce integrity permeated our work together: He refused to call me writer/editor because he said that meant writer divided by editor. Instead, I was his Exploratorium Expositor.
If someone said, “It’s impossible to know something, or impossible to adequately thank someone,” he’d argue: It’s not impossible, it’s only very, very, very hard.
No matter what impossible thing Frank was trying to do, he refused to be stopped by so-called “real world” obstacles. “It’s not the real world,” he’d rage. “It’s a world we made up.” We could do better. In fact, so many of what we came to call “Frankisms” seem more relevant today than ever:
“The worst thing a son of a bitch can do to you is turn you into a son of a bitch.”
“Artists and scientists are the official noticers of society.”
“If we stop trying to understand things, we’ll all be sunk.”
Navigating the dark side of science, I think, will require attending closely to all of these. The “real world” we’re presented with is not the way things have to be. We shouldn’t become sons of bitches. We can never stop noticing or trying to understand.
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