Nuclear Diner

For the last few years, the rollout of the clock on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been a flop. This year was the worst. People on my Bluesky timeline didn’t know what it meant, or worse, mocked it. What does a change of 4 seconds mean on a base of 89 seconds? I certainly don’t know.

The clock originally represented the opinion of a group of experts on the probability of nuclear war. It went back and forth over the years, coming closest to midnight (nuclear war) during the Cuban missile crisis. That made a certain kind of sense.

But a few years back, the board dumped a bunch of things into the mix: nuclear weapons threats, the disruption caused by artificial intelligence, biosecurity concerns (deliberate and natural), and climate change. I have no idea how all those things can be put into one measure. Al Mauroni gives it a try and gives more background on the clock. I agree with Al and have an additional concern. It’s time to drop the clock.

This week, the last of the arms control treaties lapses. Arms control is dead. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are killing lots of other things – both human and our expectations of how the world works. I believe we will wrest back control, but it will not be the world in which those treaties were negotiated. We will need new forms, new agreements, new expectations.

Arms control tamed the wild nuclear excesses that bloomed through the first three decades of nuclear weapons. We have eliminated tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and have made the world safer through the attitudes and beliefs those changes fostered. But the world has been different, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and when Trump and Putin are out of power, it will be different from today. I don’t know what that world will look like, and neither do you.

The old appeals to public concern about nuclear weapons have been inoperative since around the time we lost the Soviet Union as the ultimate enemy. The 1990s were a time when people wanted to believe we didn’t have to think about nuclear weapons ever again. The appeals of the 1960s, and even of the 1980s, lost their power. Global warming took their place as the apocalyptic threat.

But the arms control community, the people who publish The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, did not change along with the public. The clock is one indication of this.

The pulse of arms control slackens, the breathing becomes hoarser. We know that the end comes Thursday. There will be something new after that.

Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money

To use the word “negotiations” about tomorrow’s meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, if we consider its historical use for other actions between representatives of their nations, is to commit a category error.

Historically, negotiations on ending wars or treaties or trade or any of the numerous issues that must be sorted out between nations have been carried out by subject-matter specialists: nuclear scientists and engineers for arms control treaties; financial and commerce specialists for trade; and ending a war may require specialists in many areas, including the history and sociology of the nations involved, manufacturing and financial experts, and geographers.  Skillful interpreters are needed for the face to face interactions, and translators to make sure that the documents convey the same legal meanings in all languages involved.

As far as we know, Trump has employed only his golf buddy, Steve Witkoff, who knows nothing of Russian history or language, nothing of conventional or nuclear arms manufacture or capability, nothing of trade or national boundaries and the humans living within them. He may know a bit about New York real estate finance, which probably doesn’t help much with sanctions, and he’s open to whomever shows up at the table as his interpreter.

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My colleague at Balloon Juice, Tom Levenson, has written another book. Tom is a popular-science writer and has written a number of books on various aspects of science – climate, Newton, Einstein are a few.

So Very Small is particularly relevant to our time. It traces the development of germ theory while also giving an account of how science develops. Tom is on Bluesky, and his comments there suggested to me that the book would be a relative of Microbe Hunters, by Paul de Kruif, a book that was formative for me.

Microbe Hunters, as I recall from decades back, is a series of vignettes about the various scientists who found particular microbes and successfully associated them with disease, sometimes finding a cure or prevention. As a child, I had no trouble imagining myself as one of the scientists: Robert Koch and anthrax, Louis Pasteur’s swan-necked flasks, those who used mercury as a harsh cure for many things, including syphilis.

Levenson uses many of the stories of Microbe Hunters in a different way. Imagine watching your children or neighbors get sick and die and not know why. There are patterns but they do not point clearly to a cause. Some commonality – dead bodies and bad odors suggest that perhaps a malign miasma wafts its way toward the unfortunate. Or they may have been weak to begin with, and something went wrong inside their bodies. Or, of course, God’s inscrutable will.

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I have a number of questions about the overhead photos of the bombing at Fordo. I haven’t done a detailed photo analysis like this in a long time – probably back to the photos of what turned out to be a Syrian reactor under construction in 2007. And I’m not up to date on how the MOP bombs work, so these may be dumb questions. But I haven’t seen them asked or answered.

At the very least, perhaps this analysis will help people to understand how it’s done.

A number of news outlets report that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has assessed that the damage at Fordo was not extensive, not the obliteration that Donald Trump claims. Trump has been at odds with the intelligence agencies on a number of issues around the attack he ordered on Iran’s nuclear sites. I choose to believe the intelligence agencies over Trump’s vibes. But it is an early assessment and can change.

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