In a recap: Libya gives up its nuclear weapons program in 2003, afraid that a crusading America would send in 10 divisions and start a merciless air campaign.
Today: Libya's nuclear program is long gone - the merciless, yet seemingly headless, air campaign is underway and the 10 division "hornets' nest poke" hopefully remains in the dreams of little neocons everywhere.
Someone with a bigger microphone than me has come out and admitted that there might be a disincentive for states to give up nuclear weapons. Too bad it came from North Korea...
Now, it would probably be too much of a leap to declare that, for once, the delusional statement in a North Korea - U.S. diplomatic tiff came from not North Korea. However, the statement from that State Department official is definitely not the most insightful or thoughtful of the two.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Serious Business
I had a discussion last night with my roommate, Jackson.
We talked about the situation in Libya and how intervention, no matter how legitimate, is almost as remote to American national interests as the 100,000 troops guarding poppy fields in Afghanistan. Jackson brought up the point about how Qaddafi is getting his just desserts for giving up his nuclear weapons program.
I've previously posted about the practical and tangible benefits of having nuclear weapons (or even just developing nuclear weapons). The U.S. and E.U. are immensely concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and cases like Libya and South Africa are victories in that campaign. Unfortunately, I don't think there are enough policy-makers (or policy critics) that grasp the juicy irony of the mixed message being sent with this Libyan adventure.
Qaddafi, in 2003, embarrassed by the interception of centrifuge parts bound for Libya and undoubtedly afraid of the zealotry employed in the post-9/11 U.S. WMD crusade, gave up his nuclear program. Iran and North Korea did not give up their programs. Today, Iran and North Korea might be pariah or near-pariah states, but they are not the targets of cruise missile barrages and U.N.-sanctioned no-fly-zones. I don't want to entirely downplay the fact that Qaddafi is a deplorable character with a long track record of bad behavior, but injecting ourselves into a civil war (this is not a Rwanda/Sudan/1990s Balkans situation) is sending very dangerous messages to potential proliferators and proliferatees.
I'm not going to dwell anymore on this topic, since I feel I have already done it justice in previous posts. I did want to mention it simply because it serves as a "current events" demonstration of the problems with nonproliferation policy.
One of my favorite webcomics, xkcd, has a blog, blag if you will, that I usually never visit. Over the weekend there was a really cool infographic posted about ionizing radiation doses. It's difficult to hammer down a definite number on ionizing radiation exposure in nuclear explosions. Varying yield, detonation altitude, and warhead design make picking one number impractical. Ground bursts, like those employed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will produce a lot of lingering ionizing radiation from the dust kicked up by the blast whereas high-yield airbursts will unleash high ionizing radiation doses immediately and over a wider area. Neutron bombs are designed to release as much ionizing radiation as possible. Even without a number, its perfect reasonable to assume that nuclear bombs easily match the ionizing radiation released in the Chernobyl disaster.
We talked about the situation in Libya and how intervention, no matter how legitimate, is almost as remote to American national interests as the 100,000 troops guarding poppy fields in Afghanistan. Jackson brought up the point about how Qaddafi is getting his just desserts for giving up his nuclear weapons program.
I've previously posted about the practical and tangible benefits of having nuclear weapons (or even just developing nuclear weapons). The U.S. and E.U. are immensely concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and cases like Libya and South Africa are victories in that campaign. Unfortunately, I don't think there are enough policy-makers (or policy critics) that grasp the juicy irony of the mixed message being sent with this Libyan adventure.
Qaddafi, in 2003, embarrassed by the interception of centrifuge parts bound for Libya and undoubtedly afraid of the zealotry employed in the post-9/11 U.S. WMD crusade, gave up his nuclear program. Iran and North Korea did not give up their programs. Today, Iran and North Korea might be pariah or near-pariah states, but they are not the targets of cruise missile barrages and U.N.-sanctioned no-fly-zones. I don't want to entirely downplay the fact that Qaddafi is a deplorable character with a long track record of bad behavior, but injecting ourselves into a civil war (this is not a Rwanda/Sudan/1990s Balkans situation) is sending very dangerous messages to potential proliferators and proliferatees.
I'm not going to dwell anymore on this topic, since I feel I have already done it justice in previous posts. I did want to mention it simply because it serves as a "current events" demonstration of the problems with nonproliferation policy.
One of my favorite webcomics, xkcd, has a blog, blag if you will, that I usually never visit. Over the weekend there was a really cool infographic posted about ionizing radiation doses. It's difficult to hammer down a definite number on ionizing radiation exposure in nuclear explosions. Varying yield, detonation altitude, and warhead design make picking one number impractical. Ground bursts, like those employed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will produce a lot of lingering ionizing radiation from the dust kicked up by the blast whereas high-yield airbursts will unleash high ionizing radiation doses immediately and over a wider area. Neutron bombs are designed to release as much ionizing radiation as possible. Even without a number, its perfect reasonable to assume that nuclear bombs easily match the ionizing radiation released in the Chernobyl disaster.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Nuclear-Striking Zealots
I might be traipsing across my threshold of partisan political expression that I set for this blog here...
I went to a talk a couple of nights ago at the German Historical Institute on the dangers associated with nuclear weapons. For someone who feels like he has a relatively informed perspective on the issues involved, I regret not speaking up to express some of my thoughts. The one issue that they kept mentioning, but always neatly danced around was the nonproliferation regime. Afterwards, I had a hard time deciding if they simply wanted to avoid the topic or were dismissing it.
To my eyes and ears, the room was filled with mostly older, wonky people who had been sipping the total disarmament Kool-Aid with a little too much zeal. In short, the conversation was heavy on academic musings and light on a discussion of practical policy solutions. The discussion was framed from a historical perspective (with a touch of the counter factual) so I suppose I should not be surprised.
The most surprising comment came from one of the panel members who claimed that when she was visiting a college recently to give a talk on nuclear disarmament, the "kids" didn't know what a "nuclear weapon" was. I can understand if the average person can't tell you which countries have nuclear weapons or how many, but in the post-9/11 era of mushroom cloud smoking guns, I have a hard time believing that story. Honestly, it is also a little insulting.
Panelists and audience members seemed to collectively lament the divorce of policy from nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era while simultaneously bemoaning the Cold War mentality toward nuclear weapons today. On the first point, the divorce of policy from nuclear weapons is merely an illusion caused by the disintegration of the Cold War deterrence paradigm. For all the complexity of a system defined by counterforce, circle error probables, throw weight, assured destruction and second strike capability, Cold War nuclear policy was simple compared to the multi-polar and multidisciplinary contemporary policy.
On the second point, when I read stories like this, I could not agree more. Arms control treaties are always going to be mind-numbingly verbose, but when they are turned into political footballs, we lose perspective. I fail to understand why the world needs tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Until we can solve the problem of nuclear proliferation, I don't think that having no nuclear weapons is a good idea either. I want a pragmatic approach to modern nuclear policy. A cold calculus of deterrence will not solve the dilemma of nuclear weapons - neither will a naive belief that total disarmament will prevent other countries from keeping or maintaining nuclear arsenals.
So where is a good place to start? One place is the pun from the query. The Senate needs to ratify the new START treaty. It is by no means a silver bullet, but it does force significant cuts to the two largest nuclear stockpiles in the world. Since the last arms control treaty expired, there have been no verification inspectors visiting Russian nuclear sites. Until a new treaty is ratified, both countries have zero transparency when it comes to meeting treaty obligations. Furthermore, it serves as a base for tackling trickier issues, like paring down Russia's massive tactical nuclear arsenal. Ratifying the START treaty will also lend some legitimacy to our efforts to stop countries from acquiring nuclear weapons.
That brings me to the last problem I had with the discussion: nuclear weapons provide utility beyond the affirmation of national prestige. The panel members seemed to believe that national prestige was the sole driving force behind the continued maintenance and spread of nuclear weapons. They are wrong.
A good exercise for strategic planning is to put yourself in the other side's shoes. Let's do that for one of the biggest proliferation threats today: Iran. If I was an Iranian leader, why would obtaining nuclear weapons seem like a good idea? Firstly, in the last 10 years, the global hegemon has invaded and occupied the countries on Iran's east and west borders with 100,000+ troops. In the last 30 years, Iran fought a border war with a regional power that had active chemical and nuclear weapons programs. In the last 40 years, the U.S. supported an Iranian regime that suppressed political opponents - this regime was overthrown in a popular uprising. Iran's regional ideological adversary, Israel, clandestinely obtained nuclear weapons during the Cold War and was not heavily sanctioned or ostracized.
For an example that is a little closer to home, in the early decades of the Cold War, NATO faced major shortcomings when it came to contingency plans in Europe. The Soviet Union had clear superiority in conventional terms and a massive conventional assault on western Europe would have ended badly for NATO. The only way NATO could have prevented the Red Army from overrunning West Germany was using tactical nuclear weapons. It is not difficult to see the path of escalation that leads to a strategic nuclear exchange, but that was the simple reality of defending western Europe.
Obtained from The National Security Archive
Prior to the nuclear age, a state that faced a rival from a position of strategic and/or martial inferiority could accept vassalage or form an alliance or risk neutrality. Today, how does China hedge its survival against its conventionally superior strategic rival (the U.S.)? Indeed, how does any nation that draws the ire of or faces the prospect of poor relations with a conventionally superior state insure its survival? Nuclear weapons have immense value beyond the "me too!" factor.
This is a massive problem: how can we de-legitimize nuclear weapons while these weapons still serve as useful hedges against foreign aggression? A show of good faith by ratifying the new START treaty would be a good step.
I went to a talk a couple of nights ago at the German Historical Institute on the dangers associated with nuclear weapons. For someone who feels like he has a relatively informed perspective on the issues involved, I regret not speaking up to express some of my thoughts. The one issue that they kept mentioning, but always neatly danced around was the nonproliferation regime. Afterwards, I had a hard time deciding if they simply wanted to avoid the topic or were dismissing it.
To my eyes and ears, the room was filled with mostly older, wonky people who had been sipping the total disarmament Kool-Aid with a little too much zeal. In short, the conversation was heavy on academic musings and light on a discussion of practical policy solutions. The discussion was framed from a historical perspective (with a touch of the counter factual) so I suppose I should not be surprised.
The most surprising comment came from one of the panel members who claimed that when she was visiting a college recently to give a talk on nuclear disarmament, the "kids" didn't know what a "nuclear weapon" was. I can understand if the average person can't tell you which countries have nuclear weapons or how many, but in the post-9/11 era of mushroom cloud smoking guns, I have a hard time believing that story. Honestly, it is also a little insulting.
Panelists and audience members seemed to collectively lament the divorce of policy from nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era while simultaneously bemoaning the Cold War mentality toward nuclear weapons today. On the first point, the divorce of policy from nuclear weapons is merely an illusion caused by the disintegration of the Cold War deterrence paradigm. For all the complexity of a system defined by counterforce, circle error probables, throw weight, assured destruction and second strike capability, Cold War nuclear policy was simple compared to the multi-polar and multidisciplinary contemporary policy.
On the second point, when I read stories like this, I could not agree more. Arms control treaties are always going to be mind-numbingly verbose, but when they are turned into political footballs, we lose perspective. I fail to understand why the world needs tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Until we can solve the problem of nuclear proliferation, I don't think that having no nuclear weapons is a good idea either. I want a pragmatic approach to modern nuclear policy. A cold calculus of deterrence will not solve the dilemma of nuclear weapons - neither will a naive belief that total disarmament will prevent other countries from keeping or maintaining nuclear arsenals.
So where is a good place to start? One place is the pun from the query. The Senate needs to ratify the new START treaty. It is by no means a silver bullet, but it does force significant cuts to the two largest nuclear stockpiles in the world. Since the last arms control treaty expired, there have been no verification inspectors visiting Russian nuclear sites. Until a new treaty is ratified, both countries have zero transparency when it comes to meeting treaty obligations. Furthermore, it serves as a base for tackling trickier issues, like paring down Russia's massive tactical nuclear arsenal. Ratifying the START treaty will also lend some legitimacy to our efforts to stop countries from acquiring nuclear weapons.
That brings me to the last problem I had with the discussion: nuclear weapons provide utility beyond the affirmation of national prestige. The panel members seemed to believe that national prestige was the sole driving force behind the continued maintenance and spread of nuclear weapons. They are wrong.
A good exercise for strategic planning is to put yourself in the other side's shoes. Let's do that for one of the biggest proliferation threats today: Iran. If I was an Iranian leader, why would obtaining nuclear weapons seem like a good idea? Firstly, in the last 10 years, the global hegemon has invaded and occupied the countries on Iran's east and west borders with 100,000+ troops. In the last 30 years, Iran fought a border war with a regional power that had active chemical and nuclear weapons programs. In the last 40 years, the U.S. supported an Iranian regime that suppressed political opponents - this regime was overthrown in a popular uprising. Iran's regional ideological adversary, Israel, clandestinely obtained nuclear weapons during the Cold War and was not heavily sanctioned or ostracized.
For an example that is a little closer to home, in the early decades of the Cold War, NATO faced major shortcomings when it came to contingency plans in Europe. The Soviet Union had clear superiority in conventional terms and a massive conventional assault on western Europe would have ended badly for NATO. The only way NATO could have prevented the Red Army from overrunning West Germany was using tactical nuclear weapons. It is not difficult to see the path of escalation that leads to a strategic nuclear exchange, but that was the simple reality of defending western Europe.
Obtained from The National Security Archive
Prior to the nuclear age, a state that faced a rival from a position of strategic and/or martial inferiority could accept vassalage or form an alliance or risk neutrality. Today, how does China hedge its survival against its conventionally superior strategic rival (the U.S.)? Indeed, how does any nation that draws the ire of or faces the prospect of poor relations with a conventionally superior state insure its survival? Nuclear weapons have immense value beyond the "me too!" factor.
This is a massive problem: how can we de-legitimize nuclear weapons while these weapons still serve as useful hedges against foreign aggression? A show of good faith by ratifying the new START treaty would be a good step.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Gravity Wins
Though outside the purview of my academic background or professional interests, astronomy and astrophysics have always fascinated me. I find the life cycles of stars to be a particularly entertaining subject (primal id desire for explosions through the veneer of a cultured, intellectual ego).
Gravity in everyday life is an understated necessity - with the exception of the folks who remain convinced that the spoiler on their pick-up truck actually produces down-force. Since we are sitting on a nice stable sphere of rock and metal, gravity is boring. For incandescent balls of gas and plasma, gravity makes things interesting.
To predict the life of a star, all we need to know is the mass of the star and the fact that gravity exists and nuclear fusion is possible. Given a large amount of hydrogen in space, gravity will begin squishing all the hydrogen together until the hydrogen atoms begin fusing with each other. When the outward pressure from the fusion of hydrogen equals the force of gravity, we have a star.
At this point, science documentaries often dumb down this phenomenon to a near-fallacious point. They may say that a battle is fought between the star and gravity. The star desperately attempts to fuse matter in order to counter gravity's onslaught. Though energy generated by fusion in a star's core does prevent gravity from squishing it into oblivion, if one took gravity out of the equation, then no fusion would be possible. Also, stars are not living things and do not get existential.
For featherweight red dwarf stars, this equilibrium of gravity and pressure could go on for trillions of years. These stars eventually just fizzle-out in anticlimactic fashion.
Big stars, on the other hand, live more interesting albeit brief lives. Since there is a lot of matter composing big stars, gravity is much more forceful. As a result, the star fuses hydrogen very fast and runs out within a couple billion years. Gravity compacts the star's core until fusion restarts - this time helium atoms begin fusing. At this point, different stellar masses will produce varying results:
- Stars like our Sun will expand (Goodbye Earth) and start sloughing-off their outer layers until nothing but the core is left over. A final equilibrium is established because gravity cannot compact the star any further. This time, the electrons in the remnant prevent further collapse. Basically, as long as a star has less than 1.38 solar masses (mass of our Sun = 1 solar mass) worth of matter, the pressure generated between the electrons in very dense places maintains equilibrium with gravity.
- Stars that exceed the Chandrasekhar limit (1.38 solar masses as cited above) will form neutron stars once the helium supply is exhausted. The rebound force of the sudden implosion of the core causes a supernova (kablooie!). Picture dropping a basketball with a tennis ball on top: after impact, the tennis ball goes flying much further than it would just by itself.
Once again, a new equilibrium is established. The neutrons (all that is left at this point) prevent further collapse because the Pauli exclusion principle tells us that a neutron can't occupy the same space as another neutron.
- For the true behemoths (ten times more massive than the Sun) of the cosmos, gravity wins in the end. When the helium runs out, these stars are able to start fusing carbon. Sadly, once the carbon runs out, the star is incapable of fusing iron. Once again, we get the "kablooie!" Now we are left with a really big neutron star. The Telman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit says that if the neutron star's mass is greater than 0.7 solar masses (since we lack some of the tools to predict and quantify extremely dense matter, some estimates say 1.5-3 solar masses), gravity collapses the neutron star into a singularity (a point of infinite density) also known as a black hole.
So what are the implications for humanity? Minimal. Since we live in a relatively safe part of the Milky Way, we are out of range of any nearby supernova candidates and any other fates that might befall us (wandering black holes, gamma ray bursts from neutrons stars, etc.) are highly unlikely. The Sun will indeed consume the Earth in about 5 billion years, but it will render the Earth uninhabitable (assuming we don't render it so beforehand) in about 1 billion years due to its increasing luminosity. The clock is ticking nonetheless, and there could be some alternatives for us.
So what are the implications for humanity? Minimal. Since we live in a relatively safe part of the Milky Way, we are out of range of any nearby supernova candidates and any other fates that might befall us (wandering black holes, gamma ray bursts from neutrons stars, etc.) are highly unlikely. The Sun will indeed consume the Earth in about 5 billion years, but it will render the Earth uninhabitable (assuming we don't render it so beforehand) in about 1 billion years due to its increasing luminosity. The clock is ticking nonetheless, and there could be some alternatives for us.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Through the Turnstiles
This blog is a chance for a fresh start.
While trying to come up with the title for this new blog, I came up with two justifications for making a break with the old one:
#1: It was registered under my old email address from the University of Michigan. With Blogger's integration with Google, it made switching between accounts exceptionally annoying.
#2: A friend of mine outside of the U-Mich/Mattawan social circle read the blog and provided some constructive criticism. Then I went and looked at the archive and I wasn't terribly pleased. The only unifying theme behind the old blog was reactionary randomness.
I am keeping my favorite ideas from the old blog, like the wordplay on the title and the more fun ideas like the Battle of Marathon post. I would rather create some new content than join the chorus of bloggers talking about the various topics du jour. At the bare minimum, I want to make a weekly post about something interesting that I learned. Additionally, that "something" cannot include topics like "public figure X is a boob" or "Twitter is dumb."
I can't promise that I will go hardcore with "Battle of Marathon"-esque posts every week, but I really would like to explore more historical battles in a similar fashion. Next weekend, the first substantive post will be about an astronomical phenomenon.
While trying to come up with the title for this new blog, I came up with two justifications for making a break with the old one:
#1: It was registered under my old email address from the University of Michigan. With Blogger's integration with Google, it made switching between accounts exceptionally annoying.
#2: A friend of mine outside of the U-Mich/Mattawan social circle read the blog and provided some constructive criticism. Then I went and looked at the archive and I wasn't terribly pleased. The only unifying theme behind the old blog was reactionary randomness.
I am keeping my favorite ideas from the old blog, like the wordplay on the title and the more fun ideas like the Battle of Marathon post. I would rather create some new content than join the chorus of bloggers talking about the various topics du jour. At the bare minimum, I want to make a weekly post about something interesting that I learned. Additionally, that "something" cannot include topics like "public figure X is a boob" or "Twitter is dumb."
I can't promise that I will go hardcore with "Battle of Marathon"-esque posts every week, but I really would like to explore more historical battles in a similar fashion. Next weekend, the first substantive post will be about an astronomical phenomenon.
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