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Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Boot Camp Now Accepting Applications
This year's boot camp will be held June 19-29. Deadline to apply is February 19.
The summer workshop-in-residence at UC San Diego aims to give participants the knowledge and analytic tools to contribute to the debate on future US nuclear policy. The boot camp features lectures, discussions, debates, and policy simulations. Participants attend talks by distinguished researchers, academics, policy officials, and operational specialists from leading universities, the National Laboratories, international organizations, and government agencies dealing with nuclear threats, detection sciences, nonproliferation strategies, energy policy, and other nuclear issues.
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Iran, Terrorism, and Nonproliferation After the Nuclear Deal
Radha Iyengar and Rebecca Friedman Lissner, War on the Rocks
While Tehran may direct some, or even most, of the money toward domestic economic priorities, it is likely that a meaningful sum will be diverted to Iran's efforts to destabilize the region, including its support for terrorism. Indeed, Secretary of State John Kerryindicated last week that "some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists."
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Iran Nuclear Deal: How to Ensure Compliance?
Kalman Robertson,The Conversation
The issue now is how the international community can be confident that Iran is not violating the deal, formally referred to as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. A helpful approach is to ask two questions: - Could Iran collect the nuclear material needed to build a weapon?
- Could the international community discover those efforts before it was too late?
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Nuclear Inspectors Have Snazzy New Tools to Catch Iran Cheating
Elias Groll, Foreign Policy
In short, the agency has more tools than ever to ensure that Iran is living up to its promises, but there's a catch: Iran gets to approve which technologies the IAEA can use. The deal includes a provision that the IAEA be allowed to use "modern technologies," but as with agency inspections in other countries, Iran and the agency will have to work out exactly what technology is deployed where.
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What Would Be Most Likely to Unravel the Iran Nuclear Agreement
Paul Pillar, The National Interest
February 4, 2016
The unfortunate ignorance-enhancing effects of so much of the rhetoric that was aimed against the agreement while it was being negotiated-rhetoric that involved raising every possible basis for doubt about the agreement, and seeing what would stick-extend beyond making approval of the accord a much closer call than it should have been. The effects today include mistaken notions of the most likely reasons the agreement might yet fail.
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Iran's Nuclear Deal Means Diplomacy Works: Zarif
Tasnim News
February 5, 2016
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif underlined that Tehran's July 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers is proof that tough problems of the international community can be resolved through diplomacy.
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Russia is Risking "Lowering the Nuclear Threshold"
Jeremy Bender, Business Insider
February 4, 2016
While the majority of Russia's nuclear modernization is fairly standard, one particular instance of the Kremlin's push is indeed concerning. Desiring to close the gap between itself and NATO, Russia has elevated the use of nonstrategic nuclear weapons in its military strategy.
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Report: The US Is Starting to Think That North Korea Might Actually Have Tested Hydrogen-Bomb Components
Armin Rosen, Business Insider
North Korea's claim that it detonated a hydrogen bomb during an apparent nuclear-weapons test on January 6 were widely dismissed by experts andthe US government as well. But it turns out that Pyongyang might have tested components from a hydrogen bomb after all.
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ARMS CONTROL AND DETERRENCE
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David Santoro and John K. Warden, The National Interest
In extending deterrence to cover allies, the United States also increases its likelihood of being drawn into an unwanted war. As a result, the United States must sometimes deter its allies from undertaking certain actions and, conversely,assure its adversaries that it will behave in a measured manner. Plainly, it must balance assurance and deterrence both among and between its allies and potential adversaries.
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Matt Caylor, War on the Rocks
In late 2010, when the Stuxnet worm was reported to have targeted and disabled nuclear enrichment centrifuges in Iran, a proverbial line in the sand was crossed that linked the rising awareness of cyber threats with that of the existing nuclear world. Though it is believed that Stuxnet was intended to slow the proliferation of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, the questions over nuclear stockpile vulnerability and the future role of nuclear deterrence were inevitable.
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Adam Mount, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Closing small and hypothetical gaps in the US nuclear arsenal isn't worth the expense and won't eliminate risk.
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Stephen Chen, South China Morning Post
China admitted on Wednesday its nuclear emergency response mechanism is "inadequate" for coping with "new situations and challenges" arising from its nuclear power plants.
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Hardy Graupner, Deutsche Welle
China has detailed its plans to build floating nuclear plants amid Beijing's drive to double its atomic energy capacity by the end of this decade. The buoyant power stations will be a first once completed in 2020.
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Physicists in China have announced that their own nuclear fusion machine, called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has produced hydrogen plasma at 49.999 million degrees Celsius, and held onto it for an impressive 102 seconds.
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Dan Stober, Stanford University
The US Department of Energy's longterm plan for dealing with material contaminated with plutonium and heavier elements from America's weapons program is to bury it underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.
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Dan Stober, Stanford University
The US Department of Energy's longterm plan for dealing with material contaminated with plutonium and heavier elements from America's weapons program is to bury it underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.
Related:
Policy: Reassess New Mexico's Nuclear-Waste Repository
Cameron Tracy, Megan Dustin, and Rodney Ewing, Nature
January 13, 2016
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Adrian Cho, Science
January 28, 2016
Since 1978, the United States and other nations have been pushing to eliminate the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU)-the kind of stuff that terrorists or a rogue nation might use to make an atomic bomb-from dozens of civilian research reactors around the world. However, achieving that goal will take far longer than officials had previously hoped, according to a new study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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Patrick Malone, Center for Public Integrity
February 3, 2016
In June 2014, a worker at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee was surprised to find U.S. nuclear secrets inside a trash bag marked for disposal along with standard rubbish. Taking a closer look, the worker found 19 more documents in the bag that were either marked classified or were later determined to contain information that should have been labeled secret.
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