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Yes, thank you very much.
Well, this is the beginning of the talk
because, as you all know, Comic Sans
makes hard things funny.
And since nuclear weapons is a pretty
tough topic, I thought we should start
off on a lighter note, I guess.
But the first thing that I want you all
to notice is if we move from jokes about
nuclear weapons to real things,
it doesn't get any less bizarre.
Now, if you consider this photo,
this is.
Yes, yes.
This is a general of the United States
military who at the conclusion
of the first testing series of
nuclear weapons after the attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1946
celebrates the great outcome
of the operation by slicing into this
wonderful mushroom cloud cake together
with his wife and some other military
guy.
So there you have it.
It doesn't get any less bizarre.
Just one serious disclaimer
before we start now, I'm going to be
talking a lot about different countries
because nuclear weapons is a problem that
really applies worldwide.
And what I've learned, I went to the
University of Hamburg, I learned peace
studies. I'm a physicist is of course,
shaped by where I live and
what I've heard.
And also I use sources accessible to me,
especially language wise.
That means mostly in English and German,
I can really read Russian sources.
I can't use Chinese sources or anything.
So what I want to say is when I talk
about the motivations and the history of
different countries, I'm going to be
talking about countries with a very
detailed history and very intricate
history like Pakistan, India and Israel.
I will, of course, not be able to
accurately and completely represent the
history and the motivations and the
context of all the actions of these
countries in such a short time.
So if you find that my perspective
is biased, that I'm speaking from the
Western point of view
or anything, then I'm sorry, because
I don't really want to do that.
And I will be happy to, you know, talk
about that afterwards.
OK, so let's get into things
now. I'm going to spider myself
with the topic of the talk.
What did happen to nuclear weapons?
I mean, the Cold War is over, right?
That was when all the nuclear weapons
were like a big problem, but that
was the end of the 80s that went away.
Well, no, no, no, no.
The nuclear weapons are still there.
And that is the problem.
That is the problem because it didn't
diminish. You know, they
didn't just magically disappear and they
didn't get any less deadly just because
that part, which we call
the Cold War of the 20th century,
sort of passed.
So the main questions,
one particular fact, which is
by itself kind of funny, is that in
the world, by international treaties,
five countries are allowed legally
to have nuclear weapons.
Now, that number has gone
up to 13 during the course of the 20th
century, and it has by today
gone down by nine.
OK, so how did that happen?
You know why five?
Why isn't it five?
What's going on there? That's one thing
we're going to be talking about.
We're going to be talking about a lot of
abbreviations and complicated
topics.
And I hope that by the end of the talk,
at least each one of those abbreviations
you should have seen and know what
it's about and of course, what can
you do? So that means if
you're interested in helping solve the
problem of nuclear weapons or want to
know more about what's going on in all
this context, then I'll be providing you
with a few tips towards the end of the
talk.
OK, now nuclear weapons
are made of some stuff and there are some
special materials that have to be used
in order for a nuclear weapon to work.
One of these is uranium, which
is a heavy metal element that
is naturally found in the earth, in
minerals.
But in order for it to be useful for
constructing nuclear weapons, you need to
make a process called enrichment
work with it.
And that means that the
the ratio of the isotopes so let's
say the different parts of different
types of uranium that you find when you
take it out of the earth, you have to
change that and you have to change it
dramatically like you see in the natural
uranium. I just see that
I think I got the numbers wrong
on the left one.
Oh, OK.
There enrichment means that of one
particular isotope.
You need to make the ratio much bigger.
Yeah. On the left. That should say that
should be reversed.
No, no, no, it should.
OK, I'll just move to the next slide, I
guess
what I want to say is this enrichment
process is extremely complicated and
extremely expensive.
So if you're thinking of getting nuclear
weapons, well, this is one way of doing
it. But it's going to be a lot of work
and it's going to cost a lot.
The alternative that you have is
plutonium, which is another element, but
it's not found naturally in nature
because it decays relatively quickly.
When I say quickly, I mean tens of
thousands of years as opposed to the
millions of years for uranium.
Now, this little bulk of plutonium,
which weighs something between 10 and 15
kilograms, is actually a critical mass.
So it could explode in a nuclear
runaway fission reaction if it had a
different shape, which is why they were
able to take a picture of it.
If this was a ball, if it was
a ball, it would be a critical mass and
it would explode, but in the shape of a
ring.
It's not dangerous.
So this small.
Well, it is dangerous.
I'm sorry.
And this you get out of nuclear reactors,
the ones you use for electricity
generation, you just run
your nuclear reactor and you power your
light bulbs and computers and blinking
lights.
And what naturally sort of comes out
from this process is plutonium.
Now, you can speed that up.
You can put in some extra uranium to get
out some extra plutonium.
But basically you just need a normal
nuclear reactor. And that, in comparison
to the uranium enrichment, is something
which is relatively easy to do as we're
going to be seen.
OK, so these are the two materials and
then you put them together into a nuclear
weapon. By the way, these pictures,
they're all from Wikipedia.
I mean, there used to be jokes about how,
you know, how to build a bomb, but now
they're coming after you. Well,
everything I'm going to show has been out
there for years. So I'm not a target.
I'm not a target.
So the most basic design is called
the gun type, which is where you have to
subcritical masses.
So that means box of nuclear material
that are too little to explode by
themselves and you put them together.
Normally this is illustrated as
hemispheres which are pushed together.
Hemispheres don't really work.
What you have is a tube or
sort of rings that you shoot
onto a stick.
And this works with uranium.
And this is sort of the the simplest way
in which a nuclear bomb can be assembled.
This doesn't work with plutonium
for complicated nuclear physics
kinds of reasons.
The fission reaction starts
too early because of too many prompt
neutrons.
But anyway, this only works with uranium.
Now, the other way of doing it is
what's called an implosion type device.
And there you have a hollow sphere.
So that means you have plutonium not not
in a compressed ball, but a
ball with a hole in the middle, if you
will.
And there is a very, very intricate and
complicated set of explosives around
it. And at the moment of ignition,
these explosive compress the ball into
a hard sphere, into a smaller sphere.
And that then is a critical mass.
And this initiates the runaway reaction
which makes the bomb explode.
You can make these kinds of setups
smaller and lighter, which is why
practically all the nuclear weapons
states have gone to this implosion type
device as opposed to the gun type device.
You can put Tresham or deuterium
or mixture of both inside and this
cause boosting.
So you have the same nuclear weapon that
would explode as it is
and it would make some big explosion.
But then you can put tritium or deuterium
in it and the explosion will be even
bigger, which is why this.
Actually, pretty harmless isotopes of
hydrogen that are deuterium antiracism
are actually relevant to the
proliferation of nuclear weapons because
it's a material that you can use for
boosting to
show you how far this development can go.
You see here the Davy Crockett,
which is a nuclear device,
a nuclear bomb that was developed
by the US military and stationed here in
Germany even.
And this is as bad
an idea as it looks.
The ratio, so meaning how far
this thing can fly is somewhere between
two and four kilometers.
And the radius
at which it will give you a lethal a
deadly dose of radiation is about one
kilometer. So you have to be a very
good shot and very, very sure of the
wind direction and everything in it.
Well, it wasn't never used in the
field, luckily, of course, like many
other weapons.
But they also had this.
Then we come to what's called the
hydrogen bomb or a thermonuclear
device or in technical terms,
the teller alarm designed.
This all means basically the same thing,
which is that you take the normal nuclear
weapon as if it weren't bad enough
as it is and you smack
on a sort of fusion assembly
is what it's called.
And this ordinary nuclear
bomb then ignites the fusion
part of it, which makes for a much, much
bigger explosion.
And to illustrate how much bigger
this explosion can get now, I have scaled
these icons, which you see there, the
little speck between the gun type and the
15 kiloton.
This scales by area of the eye can
with the explosive yield.
So the size and the destructive
force of the explosion of the other types
that I'm going to add now, which is
the that implosion type, which is sort of
the biggest
the biggest conventional type nuclear
weapon that you can build without any
fusion involved.
And then we have the biggest fusion
weapons that have ever been invented.
And this, of course, I think many will
recognize is a photograph of the Czar
Bomba explosion, which was a
about 60 megaton explosion
that the Soviet Union did in 1961
after deciding that they wouldn't go for
the 100 megaton, which they had actually
designed it for because they didn't
really know what it might do to the
Earth's atmosphere or anything.
So that was the biggest explosion that
ever happened. Actually, the soundwave,
you know, the shock, if you're standing
anywhere in the next part of 100
kilometers of this, you will hear a big
noise. This shock sound
wave traveled around the Earth three
times and they measured it in Norway
and in Australia and everywhere after
this one explosion saw that
was a very big one.
But for now, I would like to go
back and focus on these small explosions,
because, sadly enough, these are the
only types of explosions that have well,
now, sad
as it is, they have been used in war.
And this was the explosion that was
caused by it, by
which I mean the attacks on the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in 1945.
So these were bombs, one of
the very simple gun type, a uranium
assembly and one of the implosion
type with plutonium that had been tested
before in the Trinity test of 1944,
which was the first nuclear explosion
that ever happened on Earth
with the gun type assembly.
And I've told you, you shoot a ring onto
a stick. This assembly was so simple that
they did not test it before.
The first time this type of explosion
ever happened was when it destroyed a
city.
OK, so that was where it was used in war.
And when this happens, the
effects of the bomb are actually
manifold. It's not just one thing
blows it all away.
The explosive blast, that means the air
that is pushed, that is about
a little less than half of all the
energy, the total energy that is
released.
The heat radiation makes for another
about half and only five percent,
you may say, goes into radiation.
But of course, given how big
the explosion is, this can still do
substantial damage, especially to living
beings. And with a device
called a neutron bomb, which
is actually just a regular
a regular nuclear bomb with some
materials and some different radioactive
metals added to increase
the output of radioactivity in this
explosion, it can go up to about
20 to 30 percent of the total energy
released in the form of radiation.
Now, the effects, of course,
are well known. This is a before and
after picture of the city of Hiroshima
and well, yes, it's a river.
And yes, there are buildings between it
and then there aren't.
And this is what the cityscape looked
like after the explosion.
And this, as I said, was just about under
half of the total destructive energy
that went into, you know, flattening
these buildings.
Now, the other almost half
went into heat radiation that can
instantly and with the speed of light,
literally set things on fire
at a distance. Now, the thing that you
see on the left is the shadow
of this ring kind
of device that you see there.
So the bomb exploded to the left and
front of the picture and where the heat
radiation hit the wall between
it's well created some sort of
ash, I would guess, and made the wall
lighter. But where it hit the metal,
this didn't happen. And so it leaves a
shadow.
And a similar thing happened to
the woman who was photographed on the
right, the burn marks on
her body. This is going to be the only
picture of injured people.
I'm sorry I will show this, but it's very
illustrative.
The burn marks on her back matched
the pattern of color that was on her
clothing and whether clothing
was darker. There was more heat radiation
absorbed, and this meant that the
skin was burned worse than in
other places where the garment was not as
light or was not touching
her skin at the moment of the explosion.
Now, the third thing, of course, the
radiation causes radiation poisoning.
It destroys the DNA
and human cells. And this leads to
reproductive errors, which leads to a
very ugly sickness. And I chose not to
put any pictures of it in it.
Now, this sickness usually
has a time of several days.
It takes before the really bad effects
set in. So most of the people were sort
of walking around.
Well, yeah, some of them were walking
around the day after the explosion
wondering what happened.
And then many of them additionally
had to go and find medical help because
then only they realized that they
contracted some sort of sickness as an
after effect of the explosion, which, of
course, was not known.
They thought there was some sort of
incredibly powerful bomb and now the city
is gone. But, hey, I'm alive.
But then this after effect of
radioactivity and radiation poisoning set
in, which was not known.
So people didn't know what was happening
to them. This was made especially
worse because rain falling through
the ash, the radioactive
ash of the fallout from the burning
of the city, the
water rain falling, washed out this ash
and got into people's systems because
they were drinking the water because
obviously there was no other form of
water supply available at the time.
So it's a pretty, pretty bad weapon.
Now, to get back on a lighter note, let's
see what would happen if this happened
with a modern bomb on a modern city.
And let's say the United States chose to
bomb this Congress
with a 10 megaton bomb, which is the
biggest device that they have invented.
Why? Well, something about Snowden
and the NSA and, you know, there is
probably lots of reasons.
Now, this may sound funny, but think
about it with drone strikes.
This is about the way it works, right?
Some guy and some people next to him, but
bomb them anyway.
So what would happen?
We see here a map of the city of Hamburg.
And this is a wonderful tool
called Nuch Map. I've put the address
there and you can calculate
you just give it some location on a map
and it knows about population density and
stuff. You can even simulate wind
direction, fallout, everything.
So if they chose with this large weapon
to bomb Congress, then the city of
Hamburg would be pretty much gone.
At least half the population would be
dead. There would be a crater two
kilometers in diameter, and pretty much
all the populated areas of the city would
have their buildings flattened.
So that is what would happen.
Now, think about the destructive
power of just one of these weapons
and now observe how many there are.
And you will
see that the United States
and Russia, what used to be the Soviet
Union, have the largest number
of these nuclear weapons.
And then there's small numbers and
small numbers of nuclear weapons in just
a handful of other countries.
And the terms that we use to describe
these situations is vertical
proliferation for the number of nuclear
weapons that are in some place.
This tells us that for vertical
proliferation, the US and Russia are
the biggest well, the biggest problems.
And for horizontal proliferation,
we might find it interesting to find out
how we can prevent more countries from
getting nuclear weapons or even reducing
the number of countries so that we can
focus better on disarming those that are
there now
for vertical proliferation.
This is a time chart of how many
weapons, how many nuclear
warheads the United States and the Soviet
Union or Russia had at different points
in time. And we can see that it was
basically growing
and a bit different, you know, in
distinct fashion. This is all to do with
economies and politics of the Cold
War. I'm not going to get very much into
that.
But one interesting feature we can see
is that the beginning of the 90s, there
was this rapid decline in the arsenals of
both states.
And this was due to contracts
that these two countries negotiated
that would say, OK, the prospect
of destruction if one of us,
too, chose to attack the other is bad
enough as it is, we might as well
limit the number of nuclear warheads
just to have some sort of calculable.
There was this notion that
you could really plan and then you could
control the idea of nuclear war
if it had broken out.
And, well, there's no games of reducing
the number of weapons that you have.
They were a big tool, as you can see,
for almost now, for most
of the decades, there have been different
treaties in effect.
And as it now stands, both of
these countries will should not have
more than a couple of thousand nuclear
warheads and active duty.
But verification is a big problem going
to present this
at the end a little bit.
Verification means that, well, OK, now
they agree they've signed a contract, OK,
you get rid of some of your weapons and
you'll get rid of some of your weapons.
Now prove it.
Well, this is extremely difficult because
obviously Russia is not going to let
United States nuclear engineers just walk
into their building, you know, bomb
building, building
and start to take them apart or look
at the construction plans or anything.
You have to involve other countries.
You have to involve technical methods.
There's things called information
barriers, and it gets really, really
complicated.
OK, so that much for the vertical
proliferation, which as we've seen,
leaves us with a large enough number
we have at the moment.
Oh, yeah. This is one funny treaty
that the United States and Russia signed
in 1994.
This was the targeting treaty which
in which both parties assured
the other, OK, we're not pointing our
missiles at you anymore.
If there was a missile that could be said
to some target, we would set the target
to undefined.
Or if it's a rocket that absolutely
needs a target to operate, we will set it
into the ocean.
This is the Minuteman three rocket that
is still deployed in the United States.
But how difficult
do you think it would be and how much
time do you think it would take to
actually load a new set of targets
right into the 1960s mode?
Well, no, not at all.
This was a symbolic treaty, but that
doesn't mean it was useless.
You know, it was a gesture that defined
much of the atmosphere of the early and
mid 90s.
And the negotiations for disarmament
of these weapons and other sorts of
weapons is what's called a trust
building. Measures now to get into
the mindset of the 1960s, which
was when one of the most important
treaties of nuclear disarmament
was signed, like to present you with a
very short song written
and sung by Tom Lehrer and American
political comedian that only had a very
short career of
absolutely brilliant political satire in
the United States in the 60s.
We're going to be listening to him to get
a feeling of what people were thinking
about nuclear proliferation in the 1960s.
First, we got the bomb, and that was
good because we love peace and
motherhood, then Russia got the bomb,
but that's OK because the balance of
power is maintained that way.
Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve
because they are on our side?
I believe China got the bomb
but have no fears.
They can't wipe us out for at least five
years. What's next?
So I just pause here for a second.
He's asking who is next and
the things that he he's describing
without the mention of the United
Kingdom, which apparently didn't matter
much at all to him.
Five nations had managed to
develop nuclear weapons by themselves and
tested them successfully and even
developed fusion devices, which you see
on the bottom timeline.
France, he says, is on our side,
I believe, by which he means that France
developed, even though it's a sort of a
member of NATO, it developed the
nuclear force explicitly to be separate
from NATO, so different from the
United Kingdom, which has its nuclear
arsenal integrated into NATO.
France wanted this as a tool for,
you know, to maintain and guarantee their
sovereignty.
OK, now we're going to be listening to
Tom Lehrer, what he thinks is going to
happen after that.
Up in Indonesia claimed that they
were going to get one any day.
South Africa wants to.
That's right. One for the black and one
for the White House next time.
Egypt's gonna
get one jump
just to use on,
you know.
So Israel is getting
tense, wants one in self defense.
The Lord is my shepherd, says the Psalm,
but just in case, we've got to get
a bomb.
Luxembourg is next to gold
and who knows, maybe Monaco
will try to stay serene and calm
when Alabama gets the bomb.
Next the next news,
my
next.
So that was that apparent, yes.
Thank you, Tom.
Now, luckily, Luxembourg and Monaco did
not happen, and I've been unable
to find out, I bet someone of you could
tell me if there are actually nuclear
weapons stationed in the state of Alabama
and the United States, as Tom, that
indicates that might be a cause for
concern.
So what did happen next?
Right. He mentioned Indonesia not going
to be talking about that much anymore
because it didn't turn out to be an
important player. But Israel, obviously.
And so let's see what happens.
So in this climate in 1968,
the International Atomic Agency was
founded and had brokered this
nuclear nuclear nonproliferation treaty
that was meant to prevent a larger
number of states getting nuclear
weapons. And the deal is there.
The deal is five states can ever
have nuclear weapons, and
that is the USA, Russia, the UK, France
and China, which had managed to do so.
By that point.
Everyone else can never have nuclear
weapons, but they can get nuclear
reactors, you know, for power generation
and the economy and everything.
And there will be safeguards, which means
that the IAEA will maintain a presence
and will make inspections in order to
watch that there is no nuclear material,
you know, made
push to the side for nuclear weapons
construction, which in the end did
happen, though, which is why I've
outlined that point and read non-nuclear
weapon states do get nuclear
energy technology, and that is a problem
for nuclear weapons proliferation.
And it's just a fact.
OK, as you see, the big five
and a large number of other states
actually find this a great deal.
Five states in the world currently do
not. And we're going to be looking at who
these five states are and what happened
there.
So first is Israel,
which already in the 1960s managed to,
as it is thought, managed to develop
nuclear weapons.
Now, the technology and technological
help from France and Germany has been
pretty well documented.
But it's every everything is very secret.
And Israel has never admitted to
possessing nuclear weapons.
It's sort of an open secret in the
community.
It gets very, very awkward at diplomatic
meetings because there will be like, OK,
the nuclear weapon states and everybody
looks at Israel is was like, what?
They're their official policy
is that they would not be the first to
introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle
East, that's the most explicit
thing anyone's ever gotten them to say.
OK, the next day.
Now we're talking about 10 years later
is India, which managed by means
of very, you know, industrious work.
And some brilliant nuclear physicist
like Bahbah
managed to develop nuclear weapons of
their own.
And the first nuclear test that they
conducted was in 1974.
It was called the smiling butat test,
and they declared it a peaceful
explosion,
OK? This led because they were
in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, actually, to a nuclear embargo.
That should mean that no other state in
the world that has signed the treaty
could sell any nuclear
power technology to India.
But in the course of the decades, it
turned out that India is too interesting
a market for power companies
to actually be bound by things like
international contracts.
And so now United States
and other companies
and economic actors are happily
selling nuclear technology to India.
India is very explicit in saying that
the nonproliferation treaty is unfair
because some states get to have nuclear
weapons and other states can never have
nuclear weapons.
And it would join the contract if they
were awarded the status of the sixth
nuclear power in the world.
OK, Pakistan, they
were motivated by conflict and by the
breakup of their country, which ended in
the in the founding of Bangladesh
and very, very troublesome
history. They also managed with some
ingenuity of their own, especially by
this gentleman, a metallurgist, a nuclear
physicist called Abdul Qadeer Khan
to develop nuclear weapons.
But he had big help from
a URENCO, which is a company
that makes nuclear power technology
in the Netherlands, where he worked
legally and looked at some documents
and took some documents home and maybe
shipped some materials home.
And in the end, Pakistan was in
possession of a nuclear bomb through
totally, you know, peaceful nuclear
power, which where he had managed to
circumvent the safeguards or where
they had been lax or even no safeguards
in place.
The funny thing is Abdul Qadeer Khan
has been suspected of having helped other
countries, you know, try and implement
a nuclear weapons program of their own,
Iraq, Libya, North Korea.
And so by some countries, he is
considered to be, you know, a criminal
because he has been proliferating nuclear
weapons throughout the world.
In Pakistan, though, he is considered an
honored citizen and he has received high
honors because they see it as
an essential tool of maintaining
and securing the sovereignty
of their state.
Now, North Korea has also managed as the
last country
historically to develop nuclear
weapons.
They are guided by their ideology
of self-reliance, you know, of never
relying on anybody or any actor
other than themselves.
And this, of course, means that to have
very powerful weapons under your control
is a useful thing.
Again, here, Abdul Qadeer Khan
was implicated in having helped nuclear
development in North Korea.
The first nuclear test that
North Korea conducted was in 2006.
And that was actually the first test that
had happened then in eight years.
And we're going to be seeing that that
actually was a big deal.
So here's the updated conversation
about the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, where you see what the countries
are thinking of all this.
India doesn't like it.
Pakistan agrees with India.
The only thing where they do
South Sudan, they have nothing
to do with nuclear weapons at all.
They're just so new they haven't gotten
around to signing it.
OK, so this was the.
Yeah, and historically, there have been
other cases. South Africa was also
mentioned in the song by Tom Lehrer, and
they actually were seeking to develop
nuclear weapons.
They were motivated more by, you know,
securing a strategic political position,
which is also manifested
in the fact that they developed these
bulky gun
type devices with uranium, uranium, which
they had acquired by agreements with
Israel.
And there have been no known.
There was a small caveat, which you're
going to see later. There have been no
nuclear tests conducted by South Africa
as far as we know.
And luckily, the political shift that set
in in South Africa
at the end of the apartheid regime at the
beginning of the 90s led to them
abandoning their nuclear ambitions,
submitting to IAEA safeguards,
joining the nonproliferation treaty and
ending, you know, their nuclear episode.
And they're the first and only country to
really have done so in this way so far.
So that's could go South Africa.
OK, these three states, the
Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus,
became nuclear states overnight
in a cold winter night in 1991,
and you may guess how that happened.
The state that had formerly possessed the
nuclear weapons just wasn't there
anymore. And they suddenly found that,
OK, we're a new state now.
Oh, we have nukes
now. The control that they exerted
was limited because the weapons were
placed on their territory.
But they didn't have really operational
control. They didn't have all the codes.
They didn't necessarily have officers
of their own who knew how to operate
everything. So it was more of a
bargaining chip, but it was very
it was very valuable to them.
And in an enormous act of
negotiation,
it was managed to to convince
them to give up these nuclear weapons, to
ship them back to Russia
in exchange for money and guarantees
of security, meaning, for example,
that Russia, as the former hegemonic
power of the Soviet Union, would never
invade any of these states.
That was 20 years ago.
And Ukraine is not amused.
OK,
some other cases
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty just
took, you know, a point in time to define
for whom it is OK to have nuclear weapons
and for whom it isn't, and other states
that might, you know, technologically
have been able to develop
nuclear weapons of their own.
You can find some lists where some names
are floating around. Sweden,
surprisingly, is mentioned a couple of
times, Germany, Japan.
But then they had political incentives
not to do that.
But some states do think it is unfair
that just at some point in time it was OK
to develop nuclear weapons and now it
isn't for anyone else.
They've even had military force used
against them. On the right, we see
satellite pictures.
The upper one is from the 1980s
in Iraq, and the lower one is from 2006
in Syria, where the Israeli military
bombed these these
installations for fear of
there being a production of nuclear
weapons ongoing.
And other states that have listed here
have had political pressure put
on them and prevented
them from becoming nuclear states, which
in the long run, I think is a good idea,
because the less nuclear states we have,
the better. But especially
looking at the countries that did
succeed, even though they were in breach
of the nonproliferation treaty.
Like India, Pakistan,
this leads to a lot of resentment between
certain groups of countries, especially
between some Arab countries and Israel.
OK, so, yeah, this is
one big fuckup of the West now of Europe.
Sharing is caring, as we know, and
the United States is sharing their
nuclear weapons with us.
In a program called Nuclear Sharing,
United States nuclear weapons are
stationed in five countries in Europe,
Germany, Italy, Turkey, Belgium
and the Netherlands. Now they're
stationed there.
The nukes are inside non-nuclear
weapons states under the nonproliferation
treaty.
Isn't that sort of breaching the
nonproliferation treaty?
Well, I think yes. And most sensible
people think that this is a breach of the
treaty and the United States, NATO should
not be doing that.
They have a position on this.
If you ask them how can you be stationing
nuclear weapons in Germany?
And they say, well, they're only
stationed, you know, we didn't give them
away. They're under our control.
But German pilots are trained
on fighter jets.
If they work
to throw these nuclear weapons.
There is training going on to train
German military pilots to throw a nuclear
bomb. The United States Senate on, you
know, just looking out for them.
And this is a this is a real screamer.
The NATO and the United States say the
nonproliferation treaty is meant to keep
the peace.
If nuclear war breaks out, then
there's no peace anymore.
So it's OK if we give away the weapons,
even in peacetime, because they're meant
for war.
Yes, there's no better explanation.
OK, so we might ask ourselves, is
the nonproliferation treaty working?
You know, are we preventing states
from getting nuclear weapons or is it
just one big unfair
fuckup of treaties?
Well, you can I'd like to look
at it this way.
At the middle of the 20th century,
it was relatively hard to develop
nuclear weapons. And five states did so
over the course of 20 years.
And they were well developed nations with
large scientific resources.
After that, after the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty had been signed
in 50 years, only four other
countries have joined the ranks of these
unofficially, even though nuclear
power and reactor technology has become
much more widely available.
And in terms of the spread of knowledge
about all these systems and the weapons,
it has actually become easier to attain
nuclear weapons. So I guess we can say
that the Nonproliferation Treaty is sort
of working for most of us.
Let's get to another topic,
which is nuclear testing.
You take a bomb that you have developed
and you're so proud of the bomb, you want
to show everybody how well it works and
you exploded somewhere and you take data
and you you being all science about
it.
And some states have gotten
some really horrible ideas about that.
This is a picture of the US military.
They used to do this kind of thing in the
1950s.
But other states have also had some some
very bad ideas about nuclear testing like
France.
Take a nice holiday paradise,
Pacific Atoll and decide to
bomb the shit out of it.
Poor thing.
OK, so nuclear testing is
obviously destructive, disruptive, and
we're going to be looking about looking
at what it does
worldwide nuclear testing.
This is a chart of how many nuclear test
explosions have been done by what country
over the course of the century.
And there's two main features, I think,
of this graph that we can focus at and
try to find out what's happening there.
Again, we see that the United States and
the Soviet Union or Russia make up most
of the problem, most of the testing.
And then we see this gap at the end of
the 50s.
What happened there?
There was practically no nuclear tests
in 1958 and 59.
And then they sort of end at the
beginning of the 90s.
You know, there is some tests, but
compared to 10 or 20 years before,
nuclear testing has all but stopped.
And we're going to be looking at why this
happened. Now, two treaties have been
crucial in shaping this
state of affairs. That's the partial test
ban treaty of 1963 and
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996
in very different situations, of course,
one during the height of the Cold War and
the other after that ended.
Now, the partial test ban treaty
prohibits nuclear test explosions
in the atmosphere, in the open air, in
outer space.
They did that and under water,
which kind of looked nicer, I guess, or
something.
So this is not allowed anymore.
And most of the states and most of the
important players signed this treaty,
France and China have never signed it.
And they have conducted atmospheric and
underwater nuclear tests after the 1960s.
But they mostly stopped in the 80s and
90s. France was the last actually
the last of the five
nuclear weapon states, the five allowed
nuclear weapon states to make tests.
And that was in 1998.
North Korea has also not signed, but
overall, it was a pretty effective
treaty. Why did they sign this treaty?
Well, isotopes, that means
types of nuclear atoms
that are formed in nuclear explosions and
only in nuclear explosions
have been released into the atmosphere in
large numbers because there was a lot of
testing going on.
And this release nuclear materials into
the atmosphere and of course, by currents
and rain and everything that managed to
spread all around the world
and to have were especially important
that a cesium 137 and
strontium 90 and they were
found actually in children's teeth and
in milk. And this happened
in the 50s and 60s in the United States.
They ask schoolchildren to send
in their milk teeth, the first teeth that
fell out, you know, when they were
growing up and send them in for science
in order to find out if nuclear testing
actually affected them. And the result
was, yes, yes, children
that lived in states where nuclear
testing was happening or was nearby
had higher levels of these isotopes in
their system. And when it pointed
to the article, you
can find it there. It's a publication
called The Appendix Dear Science.
It says, my name is Kathy.
That's just that's just so sweet.
OK, but it's macabre.
Of course, they were asked to send in,
you know, parts of their bodies to see
how radioactive they were.
OK, this is levels now
of these isotopes
in the in the atmosphere.
And you can see in the left graph that
the levels were steadily rising.
The the green curve is
in Austria. So it's the northern
hemisphere and the southern
the red curve is the southern hemisphere,
where it took a little bit longer to
to spread around the globe because much
of the testing was done on the northern
hemisphere.
So we can see that, well, OK, the axis is
actually not very fairly put.
You can see that this is the natural
level of about half
of about 100.
What do we have there, actually?
Mega Curie's?
Yeah, it's a unit for radioactivity.
And it rose to almost double the
natural levels on the northern hemisphere
in the 1960s.
And this concern politicians and
concerned the public.
And so there was talk of stopping nuclear
explosions in the atmosphere and that was
what happened.
Now, I'd like to point you to the graph
on the right, which you will notice
is marked in French.
And it is therefore a very good reason.
There also we see levels of radioactivity
rising over the course of time and
peaking in the 1960s before
then falling off over a longer period
of time. Now, what is this data?
Well, a French nuclear
research institution in Bordeaux put
bottles of red wine in a gamma
spectrometer and they look for lines
of cesium 137, the signature
of this isotope.
Now, this specific isotope, as I said,
is not natural. It does not naturally
occurring earth, but only when nuclear
explosions happen.
So they actually devised a way
to find out for some bottle of
wine if it could credibly come
from before the 50s or not, because if
there's any trace of cesium 137 in
it, it must have been
closed in the 50s or later.
And so they did that. And this, of
course, affected.
This is useful for art history,
you know, finding out when a picture was
sealed or something for many kinds of
things. You can just you
can just look at stuff in terms of did it
happen before or after the start of
nuclear testing?
Now, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is
a treaty with a very simple purpose, and
it's rather short and it says don't
cause nuclear explosions, don't call them
peaceful like India did.
Don't try to hide. It just don't.
And the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Organization is supposed
to look over this treaty.
And its operation is being prepared
by a preparatory commission, which leads
to this kind of bulky name of the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Organization Preparatory Commission.
I've had the chance to practice.
So they are setting up
a network to see where nuclear explosions
happen. And they have a big campaign
going on of raising awareness for nuclear
testing. And the problem that it poses,
because, as I said, nuclear testing has
not happened much in the world over the
last 20 years.
There's not as big a sense of that
being a problem of nuclear testing being
an actual problem and a danger, as there
was, for example, in the 1960s.
And they sponsored a video
that is called nineteen forty five to
ninety eight by an artist named Sal
Hashimoto.
And it's got this sort of video game, you
know, of visuals and
it shows all the nuclear explosions that
happened over the course of these years.
And it's got eerie sound effects.
It's about 15 minutes long and it's very
depressing and eerie to watch.
Now, of course, we don't have the time
for that. And I found out I
don't know if this will be funny or
horribly inappropriate, but we'll see
if you speed this up real fast and give
it funny music then.
OK, let's look at it.
OK, yeah.
Mr. Hashimoto, I'm very sorry.
So you may have wondered about the
explosions going on in Africa, that was
France, because they didn't want nuclear
explosions in their own country.
They had Algeria for that.
OK, so the CTBTO
PrepCom is an organization that is
supposed to find out when a nuclear test
is happening. And this is not as easy as
it seems.
They had a big, big field exercise going
on in Jordan just a couple of weeks ago
where hundreds or even thousands of
officers and technicians
went to Jordan and had a big exercise
of what it would look like to actually
inspect somewhere where they suspect
that a nuclear explosion might have taken
place. They will collect air samples,
they will collect ground samples, they
will collect witness testimony and
then try to find out if in some state
that is being inspected, there has been a
nuclear explosion.
Why is this hard? Well, we have a case
study which we can look at, and that is
the Vela incident,
which describes something that happened
on a on a day in 1979
in the southern Indian Ocean.
The United States had for a
large amount of money and over a long
time developed a specialized set of
satellites to look for nuclear
explosions. They were equipped with
cameras and with radiation detectors, and
they were sent all around the world to
look for nuclear explosions.
And then something happened.
But they can't really say if it was a
nuclear explosion.
This is the definition of you had one
job and failed,
but much of it is classified.
So we can't really know there is
a theory.
You could almost call it conspiracy
theory. Nothing is confirmed that
it may have been a joint operation by
South Africa and Israel, which
would be if this were true and there
is nothing to support that.
I want to stress this the only test
that South Africa or Israel had ever
conducted.
But the satellites were not useless after
all. They at one time found
that radiation was coming from
the wrong direction, from outer space.
And this led to the discovery of gamma
ray bursts and other galaxies, which was
a big deal for astrophysics.
So.
All right, thank you, Vola program.
OK, so the CTBTO
is setting up this is setting up this
measurement network, and it's a very
intricate and large network we see at
the top left and infrasound station
in some barren part of Norway and
the top right, we see a radionuclide a
radioactivity measurement station in
China and peaking at
the bottom left there is and
there is, what's it called?
A seismic measurement station in Niger,
in Africa.
And to the bottom right there is a hydro
acoustic. So a sound traveling through
water measurement station near the South
Pole. And they have set up I
think it is more than a thousand stations
by now that span all around the globe.
And they started only about 15 years
ago. So that's a job well done.
And now if something like the Valla
incident were to happen again, they had a
good chance of finding out if it was a
nuclear explosion or not.
The only chance that they had of trying
out the system of sensors and everything
was for the North Korean nuclear test of
2006 and the subsequent two
tests that North Korea has done.
Now, nobody will ever admit
that they might have been happy that
nuclear that North Korea conducted a
nuclear test because there's nothing to
be happy about. But it was a test
for this network that they set up where
they couldn't really do much of
simulation. So it was a real world test
that was at least interesting.
And they managed to confirm that there
actually was a nuclear test there.
What's the problem? So the city.
But it sounds pretty nice.
OK, testing has almost stopped.
We've got this measurement network set
up. We've got the CTBTO working on it
all, spreading awareness.
Well, the treaty is not in effect.
It's just, you know, a
bunch of people have signed, work has
started, but it's not an effective
treaty. It's not binding yet.
And this is because the treaty has sort
of a self limiting provision
that only if certain states sign
and ratify the treaty, it will become
effective and the signatures and
ratification that are missing.
I've laid out there the USA,
Barack Obama, when he ran for his first
presidential term, promised that he would
really go for it and try to push Congress
to ratify the treaty.
But then nothing happened.
Of course, it doesn't have much control
over Congress and they just don't want to
do it because they say that for the
safety of the United States, it is
essential to retain at least the
possibility of starting nuclear tests
again, even if they haven't done so for
almost 25 years now.
So that's a problem.
But we can see again,
as well as with the nonproliferation
treaty, it's sort of an awkward position
of things, half working and half not
working because nuclear tests have
de facto almost stopped when
the treaty was signed in 1996.
Only a couple of tests by India,
Pakistan, France.
Oh, I did. Wrong by France.
I said the last test was in 98, wasn't
96.
So very few tests happened
and it's almost working, even though the
treaty, as I said, is not in effect.
So, OK, we I guess we should push
for more ratification now to the
part of me telling you what you can do
and what everyone can do and what I would
like, you know, people to get involved in
and think about when it comes to nuclear
weapons, hackers.
That is what this conference is about.
By a large part, you can look
up a talk by what's good,
where he does a great summary of the
technological problems of nuclear
disarmament.
You can find it on the media C.C.C.
repository.
And there he will say that, as I said,
those things like information barriers
and stuff like that.
And there's a lot of hard work to be
done. And if you look at Woodstock,
then you can find out where you could
help if you're a coder or, you know,
you're into hardware and stuff.
OK, this slide I've been looking forward
to for months since I thought of that
talk.
If you are a citizen of some specific
country, then this might help you
choose a path where you'd like to push
your government to do something very
interested. Is there someone from
Pakistan or India and the audience?
OK, pity I don't see anybody, but if
you're listening in, you
could use, you know, your democratic
pressure to to push
for CTD signature.
Of course, the North Korea, that is a bit
awkward. I wouldn't want them to push
their government for anything.
And I actually I don't even want to joke
about it. So,
OK, but even citizens in all of these
countries here in Europe, we should get
rid of the nuclear sharing program of
NATO and.
And it would be a big help if the CTBTO
actually went into effect finally.
Now what everyone can do, regardless of
where they live or where they work,
what needs to be done, we need to find a
concept that sort of replaces the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty because it's
unfair, as certain countries think, and
it doesn't really fit into the Times
anymore.
The CTBTO, this wonderful organization
helping to set up this network, needs
help, especially with publicity,
because they're not very well known, but
they're doing great work.
You can do that. You can find them on
Twitter. They put out a lot of great
stuff.
And we need to solve the problem of
proliferation through nuclear power
because where there are nuclear reactors,
there is a chance of someone developing
weapons and this needs to be solved.
Somehow we could devise better reactors.
We could get rid of nuclear power.
There's different ways, but we just have
to find one or and in the
end, what we all might do is just
do away with got to have nuclear weapons.
This may be a long way off, but I hope
we'll get there.
And thank you very much for your
attention.
Thank you for a great talk.
We now have about 10 minutes of Q&A,
if you absolutely insist on leaving
now, please be very, very quiet to not
disturb the Q&A.
And if you can just stay until
the end of the talk, it's only ten more
minutes. We have six mikes.
There's one, two, three, four, five and
six in the back.
So just line up after the microphone.
So we are so I can see who has to
who wants to ask a question.
Also, if you're in the chat there, CIC
and we have a human computer interface
here to read them out.
So please, microphone number one,
our high yield on
nuclear physics.
Medical physics got something
to remark at first.
Right now we are seeing China deploying
these days, the first
submarines and submarines nuclear
missile crisis.
So as they are joining the submarine
force with nuclear rockets
for a second strike capability
right now, and of course,
it is possible to build a nuclear arm of
natural uranium.
It will only weigh 30 tons.
So you can't deploy it, but it works.
And as a hollow shell,
loads have the advantage of producing
more power because you don't need a metal
shell to increase the combustion,
so as your produce the
pressure to the inside, you keep the
stuff together.
So could you produce material
is done.
So my question is,
where did you get the data from
pollution in Japan
after the nuclear strikes?
That wasn't data about pollution
in Japan.
So you mentioned in the sheet,
but this is a move to the left to
say, no, our model is just nope, nope.
We have to
excuse me referring on what.
Right. What to.
So there is.
Oh, well, those are estimates.
Of course, those are estimates.
Of course, there were no there were
no real good measurement methods.
And if they were, then no data was ever
published.
Oh, yes.
OK, could you please and carry on the
discussion after the talk.
We have only a few minutes of Q&A
Internet. Please go ahead.
Internet is slow today.
Yeah, sorry, um.
That's the comprehensive test ban applied
to private persons.
No, I don't think so, but
it's geared towards state actors.
You know, it's not a bad question, but
most of the countries have laws that
say you can't cause a nuclear explosion.
You can look this up in the German
because that's where it says that's how I
fear a nuclear explosion.
And if I find this vinegar, it's
stuffed.
Followings speaking listeners, that means
that you have to go to jail for five
years if you cause a nuclear explosion.
Microphone number three, please.
Hello. In the 2600
magazine recently, there was an article
stating that the Minuteman missile
is locally controlled and
after a countdown expires,
it can be controlled remotely.
It also stated that the Minuteman
crews had turned this into
a game where they would allow
the countdown to get as close to zero
as possible before resetting
it.
Have you heard about this?
Can you state on its accuracy
and have any other countries done
anything similar?
I'm not aware of this report, but there
has been a report that was widely
publicized as John Oliver's
television show, where they talked about
bad things happening in the United States
nuclear force. There was cheating going
on during safety tests and things like
this. So it wouldn't surprise
me very much there during the Cold
War that developed this mindset of,
you know, it's all just big numbers.
You cannot imagine a million dead people
if you push one button.
So you just kind of go crazy
and think it's a game or something.
That's what happens.
Number four, please.
Yes, I have a rather short question,
don't you think we need nuclear weapons
now to deter Vladimir Putin
from doing nasty things?
Well, no, because Russia
and the United States are both nuclear
powers and there
is not much sense in threatening someone
with the use of nuclear force ever,
especially if they have their own
Putin does.
Well, yes, but so do many others.
And I don't want the war escalating, so
let's not threaten anyone with that.
Internet in
Hashimoto is house video,
you can see month long process of no
nuclear tests at all.
Only when someone starts again, other
countries immediately, immediately react
by tests of their own,
some kind of ping pong going on.
Good question, I guess.
Well, some of this may be, you know, the
inaccuracy of the records of when exactly
the tests did happened, though, that is
actually pretty well documented.
No, I would say the testing mostly
happened in in campaigns.
They would do a shot of five nuclear
tests over, let's say, a week,
and then there would be a pause of
several of several weeks
or months before the next campaign
started.
So I would I would say that during the
60s, which was where we saw the video
from, this was mostly coincidence.
But of course, in 1998,
in the case of India and Pakistan, that
was not a coincidence.
India conducted a nuclear test and
within a week after that, Pakistan
conducted a nuclear test.
And that was clearly a reaction.
Mike, number one, please.
Yes, thank you for this excellent talk.
I want to add a little detail when it
comes to the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty.
So basically, one of the backgrounds of
the US pushed in the 90s for the for
this treaty was that
the nuclear weapons
community deemed dissimulation simulation
capacities good enough not to
conduct any real tests anymore.
So the Clinton administrative sort
of forged a diplomatic initiative
out of it and basically
went ahead and pushed other countries to
sign this because they were confident
that they can test the weapons
virtually.
And apparently they gave some coats
to China and France sort of
did this test to recalibrate their models
in 96.
And now basically
the time that in the 90s
they thought they need or that they
could guarantee this
has run out. So basically, I said 20
years old, which is now
is what we can guarantee
all weapons to to work.
This is called a nuclear stockpile
stewardship program.
And they do verification in
the functionality of the weapons and
guarantee the military commanders that
they work.
So my question now is, do you expect new
tests to happen in the
coming years? Because all those designs
from the 70s, 80s are not verified
anymore?
Or will they continue
to rely on computer simulations
in this case?
Well, the simulation capabilities, of
course, have become much, much better
since the 90s. And so actually there is a
bigger chance of, you know, making
successful tests with simulations
only. But it is true that nuclear weapons
degrade over time after some decades.
You can't say for sure how the materials
have changed.
So you're not sure if they work?
Well, I just hope that the political
pressure and the worldwide political
situation is such that a
renewed nuclear test by one of
the big actors like Russia or the United
States would carry such a public
outrage that they dare not just
make another test. Again, it may be legal
if they wanted to do that, but I hope
that the public outcry that they fear
would be so bad.
They're not going to try my number
two and make it quick, please.
Quick heads up.
Officially, Alabama does not store
or produce nuclear weapons.
And a question
maybe, you know, are there any
movements against Semin nuclear weapons
or weapons that don't actually
try to cause a chain reaction,
but use nuclear
stored inside them to produce heat
in order to explode like tank engines
and stuff like that, like the U.N.
uses in Afghanistan?
Well, you have
you have depleted uranium ammunition,
of course, where they use uranium just
because it's a very hard metal
and that causes radiological problems for
the population, those rises in cases of
cancer.
And if they try to conceal
that in any way, conceal
to to if there are
any movements against these types
of ammunition because they also be
followed.
Well, there is the idea of a fissile
material cut off treaty that would mean
that all the nuclear weapons capable
material like uranium and plutonium in
the world have to be controlled.
And you have to really write down how
much you have and where it is and have
safeguards in place.
So I guess that would encompass this
type of material so that it couldn't get
into the wrong hands and be made into
weapons.
So let's hope also beside the CTBTO
being ratified that the fissile material
cut off treaty can really happen.
OK, we are out of time, please.
Once again, thank Michael.