Nuclear Weapons

It’s the birthday of Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, instrumental in creating the atomic bomb in the mid-20th Century.  When WWII was over and he had a chance to reflect on all this, he wrote:

“It is clear that such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground […]The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”

As we sit here 75 years later, it appears that, albeit a huge “danger to humanity as a whole,” nuclear proliferation is a fact of human life.  No fewer than nine countries have nuclear weapons, and some of these hate each other’s guts, e.g., India and Pakistan, North Korea and anyone who threatens the reigning nut-job, Russia and the U.S. (after Trump’s bromance with Putin comes to an end), and Israel and its numerous enemies in the region.

Rather than making nuclear war less likely, the U.S., the most powerful nation on Earth, is going the other way, building out its nuclear arsenal and canning international agreements that put asunder mutually assured destruction, which is really the only thing preventing a first strike.

Ironically, it is not sanity and a desire for peace and safety that may cause a ratcheting down of nuclear arms, but rather the rise of thorium as fuel for nuclear reactors.  The decay of thorium follows an altogether different path than the fission of enriched uranium, meaning that it cannot be used as weaponry.  Obviously, the presence of thorium doesn’t imply the absence of uranium, but once the latter can only be used for bombs, its use will have no justification other that mass destruction, which, one could expect, will be something of a deterrent.

The current bulletin of atomic scientists begins: Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger. There is nothing normal about the complex and frightening reality just described.

These scientists have set the “doomsday clock,” i.e., the imaginary clock on which midnight represents the end of civilization as we know it, at two minutes before midnight, the closest it’s been since the 1950s.  And yes, there is nothing “normal” about this–whatsoever.