Environment & Climate Change

"One of the dramas playing out this month in New York at the 2015 Review Conference for parties to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) concerns the future of discussions on establishing the weapons of mass destruction free zone in the Middle East..."

"...[W]hen the smart scientists decided to add global warming and biological harms to the clock's matrix in 2007, their previous laser focus on nuclear Armageddon lost its impact. Their explanation of why things have gotten one minute worse is a laundry list that includes nuclear proliferation, Iran, Japan's nuclear disaster and its effects on nuclear power investments, carbon emissions, and virulent strains of viruses that can be used for lethal purposes."

Article in The Nonproliferation Review

At the very least, Congress should reconsider its position of "once approved, always approved."

A paper by the National Security Advisory Group

Most national security debates concern the outcomes of policies, neglecting the means by which those policies are implemented. This book argues that although the US military is the finest fighting force in the world, the system that supports it is in disrepair. Operating with Cold War-era structures and practices, it is subject to managerial and organizational problems that increasingly threaten our military's effectiveness.

The operation of dedicated plutonium-production reactors and large gaseous-diffusion uranium-enrichment plants (GDPs), can be detected remotely using commercial observation-satellite imagery. Declassified Corona imagery is used to demonstrate that the new generation of commercial observation satellites with 1-meter spatial resolution will be able to detect vapor plumes inside and downwind from large operating natural-draft cooling towers. Low-resolution Landsat-5 thermal infrared images have been shown by other authors to be able to detect warm water discharges from reactors into lakes, rivers, etc. Here, the same systems are shown to be able detect the elevated temperature of the roofs of large operating GDPs. Commercial-satellite observations could therefore play an important role in increasing confidence in declarations that plutonium-production reactors and GDPs have been shut down as a result of a fissile material-production moratorium or Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty.

Fifty-five years ago this week, America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So began the nuclear age.

It hasn't gone as the experts predicted. There have been no "limited" nuclear wars, and although nine nations did eventually acquire nuclear weapons, an additional 20 countries started down the nuclear path only to stop and reverse course. Today, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the cornerstone of international efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, has more members than the United Nations.