Al Jazeera English The US and Israel attacked Iran – saying it cannot have nuclear weapons – while the Islamic Republic denies trying to build one. The two are among nine countries armed with such weapons. So who decides who can have nuclear arms? And have the Israeli and US attacks increased the risks that more countries will want them?
Presenter: Adrian Finighan
Guests: Tariq Rauf, former head of verification and security policy coordination at International Atomic Energy Agency. Laicie Heeley, nuclear arms control and non-proliferation specialist, editor-in-chief of Inkstick Media in Washington DC. Tariq Ali, historian, editor at New Left Review journal in London.
China is on track to massively expand its nuclear arsenal, just as Russia suspends the last major arms control treaty. It augurs a new world in which Beijing, Moscow and Washington will likely be atomic peers.
By David E. Sanger, William J. Broad and Chris Buckley David E. Sanger and William J. Broad have covered nuclear weapons for The Times for four decades. Chris Buckley reports on China’s military from Taiwan.
WASHINGTON — On the Chinese coast, just 135 miles from Taiwan, Beijing is preparing to start a new reactor the Pentagon sees as delivering fuel for a vast expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, potentially making it an atomic peer of the United States and Russia. The reactor, known as a fast breeder, excels at making plutonium, a top fuel of atom bombs.
The nuclear material for the reactor is being supplied by Russia, whose Rosatom nuclear giant has in the past few months completed the delivery of 25 tons of highly enriched uranium to get production started. That deal means that Russia and China are now cooperating on a project that will aid their own nuclear modernizations and, by the Pentagon’s estimates, produce arsenals whose combined size could dwarf that of the United States.
This new reality is prompting a broad rethinking of American nuclear strategy that few anticipated a dozen years ago, when President Barack Obama envisioned a world that was inexorably moving toward eliminating all nuclear weapons. Instead, the United States is now facing questions about how to manage a three-way nuclear rivalry, which upends much of the deterrence strategy that has successfully avoided nuclear war.
China’s expansion, at a moment when Russia is deploying new types of arms and threatening to use battlefield nuclear weapons against Ukraine, is just the latest example of what American strategists see as a new, far more complex era compared to what the United States lived through during the Cold War.
China insists the breeder reactors on the coast will be purely for civilian purposes, and there is no evidence that China and Russia are working together on the weapons themselves, or a coordinated nuclear strategy to confront their common adversary.
But John F. Plumb, a senior Pentagon official, told Congress recently: “There’s no getting around the fact that breeder reactors are plutonium, and plutonium is for weapons.”
It may only be the beginning. In a little-noticed announcement when President Xi Jinping of China met President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last month, Rosatom and the China Atomic Energy Authority signed an agreement to extend their cooperation for years, if not decades.
When President Xi Jinping of China met President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last month, Russia and China’s nuclear authorities signed an agreement to extend their cooperation for years.Credit…Grigory Sysoyev/Agence France-Presse, via Sputnik
Most people study nuclear warfare by studying the new developments in the weapons themselves. Hugh Gusterson takes a different approach. Instead of studying the weapons, he studies the nuclear scientists who created them. He took to the TEDxFoggyBottom stage to share what he learned.
Dr. Gusterson’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the conditions under which particular bodies of knowledge are formed and deployed, with special attention to the science of war, the military, and nuclear weapons.
His research addresses the problem of how to understand knowledge as a cultural formation, and how to analyze the historical and structural transformations of science and technology. He asks questions such as: How do cultures of science initiate and shape participants? How can we critically assess universalist claims about scientific and military “truths?” How do scientists justify their complicity with the projects of nation-states?
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community
Smoke rises behind the Islamic State flag after a battle with Iraqi security forces and Shiite militia in the city of Saadiya in November, 2014.
Photo credit: Reuters
cisac.fsi.stanford – Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he was concerned that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could buy, steal or build a nuclear weapon capable of killing a hundred thousand or more people in a single strike.
And, he said, stopping the flow of oil money to ISIS should be the main, short-term objective of the United States and its allies in the fight against the terrorist organization.
“They have demonstrated their objective is just killing as many Americans as they can, or Europeans as the case may be…and there is no better way of doing that than with nuclear weapons,” Perry said. Tiếp tục đọc “Perry Warns Against the Dangers of a Nuclear ISIS”→
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