A Push To Ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty? (thebulletin.org) 67
Lasrick writes: Hugh Gusterson thinks a symposium sponsored by the U.S. Energy Department was the first sign that the Administration is readying a push to finally ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). "Conceding that the earlier drive to ratify the treaty in 1999 ended in a humiliating defeat for the Clinton Administration, [Secretary of State John Kerry] said that "the factors that led some senators to oppose the treaty have changed, so [senators'] choices should change too." The article goes into the technology that has developed over the last 15 years that make testing unnecessary.
Testing is unnecessary. (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like something apple would say.
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Yeah they didn't want to admit they hadn't even checked to see if it worked while held to your ear. Massive QA failure.
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Littoral Combat Ship.
I was all sorts of excited when I first read about this. Then, I realized I was reading it wrong.
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And holding it wrong. Or at least that's what she said!
Missing credibility right now (Score:3)
Re:Missing credibility right now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Right . He has only arranged a deal to shut down the Iranian nuclear weapons program. You know, that thing that Mitt Romney called "the greatest threat that the world faces"? Nothing at all.
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Who would have begun bombing? Obama doesn't give a shit if Iran gets The Bomb, and he sure as shit doesn't care if they use it, given their first target would be Israel.
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A 'non-treaty' that has so many holes that people are already debating if Iran has already broken it. The only thing the deal does is makes sure to delay Iran getting a nuke until after Obama (and, therefore, Kerry) leaves office.
Who is debating if Iran has already broken it? The same people who are still spinning BS about the Iranians getting 24 days to delay inspections to undeclared sites (more like 17 days), claiming that Iranians will be inspecting their own facilities or that the US has to defend Iran in a war?
The Iran deal is a good idea, the only reasons to oppose it have nothing to do with keeping Nukes away from Iran.
Similarly ratifying the CTBT is a good idea that makes the world safer, improves the US's reputation, and i
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No, there is a reason to oppose a complete ban on nuclear weapon testing outside of politics.
So, let's say we use simulations to verify our weapon design. Does that simulation prove the weapon works as intended? No, it doesn't. Only detonation of the weapon will prove it works as intended.
In computer engineering we us simulations all the time. Creating a real actual integrated circuit costs a lot of money. Even using FPGAs in testing costs money because it's a lot easier to simulate a test bench than to
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The thing is that no one is able to match the US's combination of previous testing data and simulation abilities so in a no-test world (or a world with only 1 or 2 symbolic tests) the US has a huge advantage over other nations claiming Nuclear capabilities.
This is why the US no longer performs Nuclear tests, so they can raise the diplomatic costs of performing tests for other nations. And since the US isn't going to start testing anyway ratifying the treaty only makes the diplomatic cost for other nations h
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Undoing misclick mod.
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A deal with no method of enforcement or verification, relying entirely on Iran's stellar promises and clean hands.
Get bent.
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Kerry has another year as head of state...
No he doesn't.
John Kerry is Secretary of State.
Barack Obama is Head of State.
("Head of State [wikipedia.org]" has a clearly defined meaning and it's got nothing to do with the State Department.)
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Just about what I was going to say. Really it's a matter of if Obama wants it, a majority of Republicans will vote against it.
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Treaties only we obey. Let it rot another quarter century and if — after that time has passed — China and Iran want to sign+ratify, we'll see. In the meantime, pursuing this non-problem serves as evidence that we've solved all of our actual problems.
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China has signed it but like the US has not ratified it. Iran? who cares.
India and Pakistan have not signed it.
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you gotta be kidding, those things run on backpack/suitcase nukes
Re: Testing is necessary (Score:2)
Am I the only one that... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Am I the only one that... (Score:4, Informative)
Atmospheric tests were banned by treaty in the '60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And how do you plan on dealing with fallout?
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The real world nuclear devices are not clean, even without counting fission primary they aren't even "fusion" weapons, but a fission-fusion positive feedback system. so half the energy comes from fission and half from fusion (again completely ignoring primary trigger)
There are estimates of cancers and deaths from all that testing, the answer is they performed all those detonations and killed and maimed thousands. let's stop doing that, m'kay?
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Go ahead and chug a shot of the mercury, elemental mercury will just go right through you with no worries. Compounds of mercury are a different matter.
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Kellogs? Don't eat processed sugar and bleached flour breakfast cereals, that shit will kill you
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I think it's one of many things that we just didn't realise how dangerous it was at the time. Just some the things I can think of. Mercury used to be sold as a toy to children. Radioactive glow in the dark paint. Drinking radioactive water for better health. Shoe-fitting xray machines.
Anyone would tell you that those were terrible dangerous ideas today but at one time it was considered safe.
At one point in time there was a large push to find a peaceful use for nuclear explosives (see the DOE's plowshare pro
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Atmospheric tests were banned by treaty in the '60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And how do you plan on dealing with fallout?
Move? Fallout does not rain down immediately. It takes quite some time for particulate matter raised by a nuclear explosion to come back back to ground. All an observer needs to do to avoid fallout is not hang around long after watching the detonation. Also, an aerial detonation produces negligible fallout anyway.
That does not mean it is safe, though. If you can see the explosion than the primary X-rays and gamma rays can "see" you. I don't think there is any safe way to directly observe a nuclear ex
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And how do you plan on dealing with fallout?
Stay upwind
Testing is necessary. Might be be better to do it space, on the moon, for mining...
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The test detonation is not really the dangerous part at this point It's the weather. In years past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (1954 Castle Bravo) the winds have shifted and exposed unexpected areas to fallout.
I would like to think we can predict the weather better today than we could in the 1950's but If you have ever tried to plan around a weather forecast you know how inaccurate they can be.
Afaik kim jong un has not agreed to any nuclear testing treaties although so far all the claimed tests have t
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Hundreds actually, if you're only counting atmospheric tests although some were underwater and a handful in the stratosphere. The US fired off about 220 atmospheric tests, going to underground testing after the Sunbeam series of tests in Nevada in 1962. The Soviets did a lot fewer; the US has carried out more than half of all the nuclear tests by all nations.
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A fun video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I thought covering the myth of "Can you really make a home-made nuclear bomb with information from your local library?" was what Mythbusters had planned for their final episode and they were going to set off a real one in Alameda for the high speed cameras as their grand finale....
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How to make a nuclear weapon is (as far as I know) not particularly hard to figure out. Even in the Manhattan project the major hurdle wasn't the bomb design, it was acquiring the necessary nuclear materials. E.g. they were so confident in the design dropped on Hiroshima they never tested it in advance.
Now, of course, it's even easier. Apparently in the 50s the US government wanted to see how easy it would be for countries to acquire the bomb, so they had a couple newly minted physics Ph.D.s attempt to d
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If testing is unneceessary than what is the point? (Score:2)
Underground testing was never an environmental problem. Ending all testing has always been about ending the nuclear arms race.
If technology allows the existing arsenal to be tested without detonating anything then it is only a small step further for new designs to be be verified without physical testing. Then we are back on the nuclear treadmill only this time, advancement can be hidden since there are no testing that friends or foes can detect.
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It has already worked. Not perfectly, and it'll continue to fail in various ways, but the international pressure has prevented a lot of countries from considering it worth the risk.
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If people are going to rapidly down-score things to -1, they ought to at least post a thoughtful argument for doing so. I've never done that to even the most left-wing of posters here.
Maybe you should start.
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Trust and cynics (Score:1)
To those commenting above that they wouldn't believe a word the US says, I share your doubts, but with one BIG proviso. Doesn't the CTBT include inspection regimes that treaty partners sign up to so that everyone can be assured that other signees are following the rules? Seems like a great idea to me.
We got ours (Score:2)
Now that we've done every nuclear weapons test we can imagine to get all the data we might need, it's time to ban this horrible practice.
Great. Just great... (Score:2)
Coming on top of Obama's huge "success" with Iran and nuclear weapons we can expect the following good things to come out of this:
- Iran will be excepted from conditions of the treaty
- China's compliance will be self-monitored and voluntary
- Russia's compliance will be mandatory and supervised by the UN, but they'll ignore the damn thing and do as they please while Obama takes all the credit, and the UN won't give a damn unless they can use global warming to shut down capitalism..