Things you shouldn’t nuke

By Thomas Gaulkin, August 27, 2019

Donald Trump’s interest in dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes, reported by Axios this week, is hard to fathom. (Even, apparently, for Donald Trump.) Setting aside that even the most powerful nuclear weapons ever tested likely lack the energy to disrupt a hurricane (according to the US government’s own hurricane experts), releasing radioactive fallout into a storm headed toward land seems pretty unwise.

But the tornadic US president is not the first to propose the concept. In fact, as Garret Graff explains at Wired, nuclear explosions were considered for a variety of non-combat purposes throughout the Cold War, from melting the polar ice-caps to nuking the moon. The US Atomic Energy Commission launched Project Plowshare in 1958 to pursue peaceful applications of the technology. Some proposed uses of nuclear blasts: harbor, canal, and dam construction; fracking; railroad cuts; sewage disposal; and even generating steam for geothermal power. The Plowshare program produced some three dozen explosive experiments, but none led to feasible applications.

Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union ran its own effort to turn nukes into mining equipment, and detonated hundreds of devices through the late 1980s. Many were focused on obtaining seismic data. Many of the Soviet explosions were intended to generate seismic data, but some focused on natural gas exploration and other mining operations—including a 200-300 kiloton explosion at an eastern Ukrainian coal mine in 1979 that has been irradiating the region’s water ever since.

The 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty prohibits every signatory state from carrying out “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion,” including those for peaceful purposes. But with the demise of the INF treaty, the impending collapse of New START—one of the last pillars of the arms control regime—and the start of a new arms race, will nuclear states get comfortable again nuking stuff for profit?

Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project”

By Kathleen M. Tucker, Robert Alvarez, July 15, 2019

For the past several years, the controversy over radioactive fallout from the world’s first atomic bomb explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945—code-named Trinity—has intensified. Evidence collected by the New Mexico health department but ignored for some 70 years shows an unusually high rate of infant mortality in New Mexico counties downwind from the explosion and raises a serious question whether or not the first victims of the first atomic explosion might have been American children. Even though the first scientifically credible warnings about the hazards of radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion had been made by 1940, historical records indicate a fallout team was not established until less than a month before the Trinity test, a hasty effort motivated primarily by concern over legal liability.

In October 1947, a local health care provider raised an alarm about infant deaths downwind of the Trinity test, bringing it to the attention of radiation safety experts working for the US nuclear weapons program. Their response misrepresented New Mexico’s then-unpublished data on health effects. Federal and New Mexico data indicate that between 1940 and 1960, infant death rates in the area downwind of the test site steadily declined—except for 1945, when the rate sharply increased, especially in the three months following the Trinity blast. The 21 kiloton explosion occurred on a tower 100 feet from the ground and has been likened to a “dirty bomb” that cast large amounts of heavily contaminated soil and debris—containing 80 percent of the bomb’s plutonium—over thousands of square-miles. (See Figure 1.)

After a nearly half a century of denial, the US Department of Energy concluded in 2006, “the Trinity test also posed the most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project.”[1] Four years later the US Centers for Disease Control gave weight to this assessment by concluding:

“New Mexico residents were neither warned before the 1945 Trinity blast, informed of health hazards afterward, nor evacuated before, during, or after the test. Exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion were measured at levels 10,000- times higher than currently allowed.”[2]

Decision to keep nuclear weapons data classified hurts US national security

By Heather Wuest, June 11, 2019

The Trump administration’s decision to classify the total number of nuclear weapons that the United States possesses and the number of nuclear warheads dismantled in 2018 marks an abrupt change from the recent norm. Every year since 2010, the United States has chosen to declassify its nuclear stockpile and disarmament figures as part of an effort to encourage nuclear diplomacy and openness. But this year when the Federation of American Scientists asked the Pentagon for the figures to check its work in the Nuclear Notebook (a collection of world nuclear stockpile and disarmament information), the administration chose not to declassify.

Hans Kristensen—the director of the Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Information Project and a longtime author of the authoritative Nuclear Notebook column on world nuclear arsenals the Bulletin has published since 1987—is particularly vocal about the classification setback. The decision not to declassify the stockpile and decommissioned numbers, he says, “surrenders any pressure on other nuclear-armed states to be more transparent about the size of their nuclear weapon stockpiles” and is an “unnecessary and counterproductive reversal of nuclear policy.” This decision to classify comes at a time when the Trump administration says it is looking to ramp up talks with Russia and China on arms control, a negotiation that would be easier for United States diplomats if they could go in backed by the official numbers.

In a short conversation with Kristensen, I asked about the future of the Nuclear Notebook and if the Federation of American Scientists would continue to push for declassification. He made it clear how the government’s simple denial of one information request can affect many aspects of an open and honest nuclear debate.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Hans Kristensen is the director of the  Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Information Project

Heather Wuest: Why do you think the government is changing the norm after making these numbers public for so many years?

Hans Kristensen: It was a surprise. When the Obama administration first chose to declassify the nuclear statistics in 2010, it was understood that the decision to keep this information classified would not just automatically be made public from now on but reviewed every year. The nuclear statistics can become declassified in two ways; an official can come out and give the public the numbers, or someone, in this case the Federation of American Scientists, can submit a request for declassification to happen. But, the decision to declassify has happened for seven years in a row. It has become normal for the United States government to make these numbers public.