Interesting!
Another example where ChatGPT hallucinates stuff. I first checked Wikipedia and saw this correct history:
> The name is derived from the Hindi word "bhang", a locally grown variety of cannabis which is smoked or drunk to induce intoxicating effects, the joke being that one would have to be on drugs to believe the bhangmeter detectors would work properly.
ChatGPT on the other hand claimed something completely different and unrelated to the origin.
> The term “bhangmeter” is the more technically correct and widely used name, stemming from a whimsical contraction of “bang” (referring to the explosion) and “V. F. H. Metzger”, who contributed to its development.
I wonder if ChatGPT will perform worse when you address it like you did here, with sentence fragments akin to a google search, instead of asking it things in a conversation.
I asked “how did the bhangmeter sensor get its name?” and got a complete and accurate response.
Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not that much information available? I've kind of tired myself of the technical details of how the weapons work, the modes of delivery, and the (feeble) countermeasures. But the theory about why we have to keep developing them (arms race) is really fascinating (in a macabre way). It's so easy to have a child's view that WMD are terrible (and yes, they are) and therefore should be eliminated. But the fact that they are so terrible is paradoxically why we have to keep advancing them. I want to learn more about that.
> Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not that much information available?
I don't have a youtube video for you, but I do have a book recommendation: Thomas Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict" from 1960.
The writing is extremely clear and accessible, by the standards of nobel-prize-winning economists.
Thank you, I will check out the book. Yes I forgot that it is essentially economics at the core of it. All of the same economic arguments also apply to biological weapons too. Here's to hoping neither is ever used.
I'd also argue that all of the states that have nuclear weapons have historically used them as a bargaining chip or trump card. Employing them, on the other hand..
To add to more Nuclear War / Strategic Theory info is another RAND fellow,
Herman Kahn[0][1], and his book On Thermonuclear War [2]
> Nuclear latency or a nuclear threshold state is the condition of a country possessing the technology to quickly build nuclear weapons, without having actually yet done so.
> There are many countries capable of producing nuclear weapons, or at least enriching uranium or manufacturing plutonium. Among the most notable are Japan, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia.
> Taiwan and South Korea have both been identified as "insecure" nuclear threshold states—states with the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons and the security motivations to seriously contemplate such an option.
That is interesting. Makes me think about the stories in the past few years that U235 can theoretically be condensed from seawater. Not good for proliferation.
If it's proved viable wouldn't it allow anyone with access to the sea to obtain uranium? (I know you need concentrated U-235 to make an explosion, but just getting to yellowcake is enough to attract attention, right?).
It would still require a lot of power and a lot of infrastructure to do it. If a country or organisation would try to go down that route others would see that they spend a lot of effort on slurping seawater through machines they can’t explain with anything else.
That is the bottleneck how nuclear non-proliferation is enforced. You can hide your intentions, but you can’t hide that a lot or energy is flowing into a process you don’t have a good explanation for. Because of this detecting a sea water sourced extraction would be even easier than a nuclear program based on mined uranium. (Because you need to enrich from an even weaker starting condition.)
What happens after detection is either diplomacy (they ask the country to stop nicely, reminding them of the consequences) or force (bombing the facilities).
Uranium can be obtained anywhere if cost is no object. If you own a house with a modest sized lawn, the top meter of soil probably contains several kilograms of uranium.
> If you own a house with a modest sized lawn, the top meter of soil probably contains several kilograms of uranium.
At first I thought "surely that cannot be right", then did some calculation and it seems you are right?
This report[1] states that: "Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive element that is present in nearly all rocks and soils; it has an average concentration in U.S. soils of about 2 pCi/g (3 ppm)."
I took the 3ppm figure from this and assumed that means 3g per million gram of soil. (This assumption might be a mistake, but I don't know how better to interpret it.)
Then I googled and found 1000 square meter to be a reasonable size of estimate for the lawn size and 1400 kg/cubic meter seems to be a reasonable soil density.
Then just multiplied these together "1000 * 1 * 1400 * (3 / 10*6) = 4.2" and found that indeed. As a rough estimation your statement seems to be right! (I mean of course you did know this :D I just wanted to show how I checked in case others are as surprised by the statement as I was.)
I didn't realize that either (it sounds unbelievable but it's not). It (may) also explain why radon is such a big deal for some people. There's that much U below you (and much more as you go through the crust), if enough of it is "hot" and releases Radon (which I believe is a decay product, might be wrong) it can build up enough to poison the occupants of the house.
If you are interested in the topic I recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast for on-going non-proliferation news. Or if you are interested in more historical stuff The Reason We're All Still Here or The Deal podcast from the same folks.
I personally recommend this book quite highly. It focuses on the U.S/Soviet arms race, so slightly out-dated if you want to know about the modern landscape of nuclear arms politics, but many of the same dynamics among the major states (particularly relevant today for Russia and U.S conflict) still apply. It's also an entertainingly written book aside from being very informative.
One thing I've been thinking about recently is how lucky humanity was to have developed nuclear weapons precisely when we did. One could imagine a multitude of technologies that potentially pose an existential threat - rogue AI, grey goo, genetically engineered super-viruses, etc. Even mundane technologies like prolonged fossil fuel consumption or CFCs can have disastrous consequences if a society does not realize it is capable of causing its own extinction and thus never stops. While it's possible to anticipate some of the dangers, the roads that lead to these technological endpoints are paved in good intentions - there are so many good reasons to advance computers or genetics, etc. Preventing proliferation of these threats might not even be possible once the technologies advance far enough. Further, all these existentially threatening technologies become possible once a civilization learns the same few principles - if you have the knowledge of physics and chemistry to develop one, you're within a few decades at most of developing any of the others.
How fortunate then are we that the first really existentially threatening technology we developed was the atomic bomb? It's a technology that is so obviously destructive, and so distantly related from any useful application, so alien in its method of function, that it's perhaps the only technology in history to be near universally seen as too dangerous to use at scale. It requires both secret knowledge and immense industrial capacity to make even a single device, nonetheless enough devices and delivery systems to actually pose that existential threat, and thus we only need a small handful of large nation states to agree not to use them. It's arguably the very easiest existential threat to handle. Since developing them, we have become cognizant of our civilization's threat to itself, and now every advancement we make is met with the question "does this pose any existential risk?" which our forebears never asked, and which we ourselves might not have asked otherwise.
But it's not just that we developed nukes first. The timing down to the month was critical. Our first nuclear weapons were dropped in the last days of the worst war our planet had ever known. We only had a few, and the decision to drop them was made by people who did not witness nor fully comprehend their destructive potential. As it happened, in the peace that came about after the end of the second world war, there was an opportunity to observe the devastation the bombs had wrought, for the hatred that had led to their use to subside, and for the nuclear monopoly to be broken before another major war could start. But imagine if the bomb was developed a bit earlier, say midway through WW2, we might have dropped dozens or even hundreds of bombs, completely normalizing their use and irradiating large sections of continents before anyone really second guessed it. Conversely, if the weapons were developed in peacetime, either before or after the war, then the threat might go completely unrecognized and no one would think twice about opening the next war with an all out nuclear attack, or perhaps without the wartime funding we would just never have developed them at all and never recognize our species' ability to destroy itself. It's very well possible that if we had discovered the neutron a few years earlier, or if the US had not committed so many resources to the Manhattan project, or if Japan had surrendered a little earlier, we might now be extinct.
Wonderful comment, mainly because it consideres several cords of thought about their development that I've never considered before or seen covered in this specific way.
Many people have described the so-called Nuclear Peace that followed the second world war, and which holds to this very day, and while some disagree about its reality, I think it's a very real thing that has been one of the major reasons why no two major nation states have gone into open war since WWII, but the question of timing for nuclear weapons development as a cause for these weapons leading to the underlying psychological causes of the nuclear peace is interesting.
I personally do believe the Nuclear Peace is still very present in geopolitics. I can very easily imagine say, China invading the obvious target of eastern Russia, or Russia having launched a broader invasion of eastern Europe instead of just Ukraine were the background threat of nuclear bombs not always looming behind all these potential acts of war between major powers.
Even back in the late 40s and early 50's, when Stalin was alive and very much in love with the idea of launching yet another war to conquer even more of Europe, I think he was specifically restrained for the same reason. Just a few examples among many.
Not youtube videos but I would recommend Henry Kissinger's book Diplomacy which talks about this to some extent (although that is not the primary focus of the book).
I think the key in the original sentence is: "indigenously developed".
Though given the talent for engineering we're currently seeing from Ukraine, I'm not sure that Russias nuclear weapons where not developed by Ukrainians.
Anyway, the point is that those three countries gave up weapons develop and produced by the Soviet Union, not internally in those countries solely.
They also never had sole custody and control over the weapons themselves or the tools to enable them. The weapons were in, say, Ukraine, but they were never Ukraine's.
Much like the US had weapons in Turkey (for many years, IDK if they still are), but those weapons were under US control. (Although if the combination on the safeties is still all 0s, that may be less than completely accurate.)
The difference is that all those now-independent countries were parts of the Soviet Union when the weapons were placed there. So it's more like the US stationing weapons in North Dakota, and then North Dakota breaking away.
> 3 other countries have given up their Soviet nuclear weapons: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine
That's not entirely true. AFAIK, nuclear weapons in these countries were tied to control structures in Moscow and required other resources like maintenance and new materials which were placed in other parts of Soviet Union. So when these countries became independent, they couldn't realistically maintain or even use the weapons without a very significant investment.
> they couldn't realistically maintain or even use the weapons without a very significant investment
All those who cry about nuclear weapons in the one former Soviet state clearly doesn't know what happened to the parts of the Black Sea fleet what was transferred to the one former Soviet state.
"The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest Convention Center with US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst others in attendance,[3] prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, "except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations." As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.[4][5]"
To be fair: the geopolitical goal wasn't "peace" in the abstract, it was to prevent nuclear weapons from being abused or lost by a failed state. Russia wasn't "trusted" per se, but they were felt to be a safer stability bet on the whole than a tiny breakaway state with minimal history of self-rule.
In hindsight, that was wrong of course. But the logic seemed clear and everyone agreed at the time.
Ukraine wasn't a "tiny breakway state" - it had some of the heaviest USSR industry, crop production, education facilities / educated populace, and most combat capable military units due to being on the border of Europe.
It has since sold off a lot of this due to corruption. However, just a couple of nukes could have avoided this whole fiasco. There are modern, deprecated (read: late 80s) launch facilities, even one of which could have prevented the war (possibly).
> However, just a couple of nukes could have avoided this whole fiasco.
Yes. Or it could have resulted in Ukraine using the same weapons to blackmail its neighbors in the same way Russia is doing now. The point to the decision was risk management. There were zero "good" options for what to do with the USSR nuclear arsenal. But leaving it all under the unitary control of a giant established military bureaucracy that had managed not to blow up the world for 50 years seemed "less bad" than just handing them out like candy to all the follow-on bootstrapped governments.
Yeah, probably. But it's not as if they had a lot of good options during those years. They had to jumpstart their post-soviet economy. The west did a great job dangling the right amount of carrots in exchange. Then there were the technical challenges of reverse engineering and removing Russian command and control system to be able to utilize those nukes.
A.K.A. "Tell me you have the bomb without telling me you have the bomb."
Technically, they probably didn't have to test it to know it worked. But for a nuclear weapon to be an effective deterrent you have to demonstrate it somehow. But you still need plausible deniability to abide by the world standards of peace-loving democracies /s
They also had a test site in the Kalahari desert. The plan was to detonate a nuclear weapon within the territory of South Africa in case they where threatened by communist Angola, to show that they had and was serious about using nuclear weapons. The idea was that this would force Western powers to intervene on the side of South Africa, to avoid nuclear weapons being used against Angola.
Israel has total military domination over Gaza and would never need to resort to nuclear weapons. The notion is absurd and some guy's ill-considered bluster isn't betraying some secret agenda.
The Israel nuke theory comes more into play for an opponent like Iran. While Iran is already the backer of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi, insurgent groups within Iraq, among others, if Iran really got involved it would be Tehran that would be the demonstration.
Yes. He just revealed that it was discussed at the table, with the others, not that he was the problem for discussing it with them, however impractical or decided against of course; the problem was revealing it, it seems, by how they censured him without much consequence after it was revealed
