13 April 2010 The genie refuses to return to the bottle.

13 April 2010 The genie refuses to return to the bottle.


By Jonathan Capehart
April 12, 2010; 6:00 AM ET

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/04/a_nuclear_sword_of_damocles.html

“'nuclear sword of Damocles'



"Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us." --President John F. Kennedy

Lawrence Bender, the Academy Award-winning producer of "An Inconvenient Truth," uses Kennedy's words at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 25, 1961 as the foundation of his new anti-nuclear proliferation documentary "Countdown to Zero." The film doesn't hit theaters nationwide until July 9, but I was able to catch a screening of it last week. My hope is that "Countdown to Zero" will do for nuclear proliferation what "An Inconvenient Truth" did for climate change. Americans, particularly those born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, need to understand how close we've come to and how close we remain to nuclear annihilation.

After seeing the film, I pray that the New START treaty between the United States and Russia gets ratified by the Senate and that the nuclear security summit that kicks off today in Washington leads to meaningful measures to keep materials for weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. In a post-9/11 world, where enemies of the West are actively trying to acquire them, that sword of Damocles is closer to our necks than we want to admit.

"Countdown to Zero" employs Kennedy's "accident," "miscalculation" and "madness" formulation to look at the three separate yet interlocking dangers posed by nuclear weapons. One potential "accident" occurred in August 2007 when a B-52 bomber flew from North Dakota to Louisiana with six warheads on its wing that apparently no one, including the pilots, knew were there.

A frightening potential "miscalculation" happened in 1995 when a U.S.-Norwegian research rocket was detected by Russian early-warning radars and had then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin handling his nation's nuclear football for the first time. Former CIA officer Peter Pry, who wrote about this incident in "War Scare," called it "the single most dangerous moment of the nuclear missile age."

And the film is replete with details on how vulnerable we are to a devastating attack by those hellbent on "madness." What's saved us thus far has been their inability to create or get their hands on highly enriched uranium needed to make a nuclear bomb. But former CIA operations officer Rolff Mowatt-Larssen delivers this bit of disquieting news in the film. "All the black market seizures that I'm aware of were caught by luck," he said.

Let's hope our luck doesn't run out.”



Those of us who are old enough recall Disney’s “Our Friend, the Atom,” as a promise of endless power to run the homes and industries of America. Those who haven’t seen the feature should watch it. Those of us who recall it at all should also.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcdRQkJulAU

Disney was instrumental in trying to convince the public that nuclear power was useful for something besides bomb construction. The analogy they chose, genie in a bottle, was appropriate if overly simplified. The narrating scientist in this segment was apparently one of “our Germans” with a mild accent. Nuclear power for commercial purposes did get a boost from Disney. It is still a viable source for commercial power but must be strongly secured against any attacks and monitored constantly for theft or loss of fissile materials.

Disney also dealt, a bit, with the concept of a “chain reaction”, the process that provides constant and controlled fission in a sustained manner to provide heat for conversion to power. That same process, uncontrolled in a fissile mass of sufficient quantity becomes incredibly dangerous, resulting in a melt down or an explosion.

We should also watch what happens without controls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMWOfbcAbgo

Breeder reactors provide more fissile material for civilian or military use. Enrichment processes increase the ratio of fissile to non-fissile isotopes and are necessary to create weapons-grade isotopes.

The danger from nuclear weapons now does not lie in the militaries of Cold War enemies but in their storage facilities and in the intentions of rogue nations and terrorist groups. The stock pile of fissile material held by Ukraine is now to be removed from Ukraine. Canada and Mexico have also agreed to rid their nations of weapons grade isotopes.

There is every need for all the industrialized nations to work together to prevent the acquisition of such weapons by Iran, which funds terrorism, and which wants the international prestige that possession of nuclear weapons would convey in their region of the world.. There is also need to prevent black market sales of bombs or fissile material to terrorist groups, particularly Islamic fundamentalists. Pakistan is a potential conduit for such transfers to terrorists and is only on coup away from having a fundamentalist Islamic government in place. North Korea is so in need of currency that they will sell anything they can. The former Soviet republics are also potential black market routes for weapons.

The problem we face today is two-fold. We must convince other nations to cooperate with us in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and in preventing their use by other states or by terrorist groups. This will require international cooperation at a level the U.S. has previously been unwilling to practice. And there is the second part of our problem. The GOP is likely to attempt to prevent the ratification of the newest U.S. /Russia nuclear weapons reduction treaty. They will doubtless claim it weakens our defenses and is “socialistic, communistic,” and “Un-American.” They will be less concerned with anything that actually might reduce the risk of terrorists obtaining and using nuclear weapons against us than they will be in trying to prevent anything being accomplished by the Obama administration. In plain words, the GOP would rather see a nuclear weapon used against this nation than to see the U.S. participate in a nuclear weapons reduction treaty and program. Think I’m wrong, watch the vote for ratification of the new START treaty. Believe me, I hope I am wrong.