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What concerns me the most about nuclear weapons is that the technical barriers to building them are getting lower all the time. They're currently within reach

by beloch 10y ago

What concerns me the most about nuclear weapons is that the technical barriers to building them are getting lower all the time. They're currently within reach of despotic states of below average scientific capacity. All that's required is the will to defy the world (e.g. North Korea). Given how North Korea and Iraq have been treated lately, what despot wouldn't pursue nuclear weapons if he thought he could succeed in building them fast enough to avoid being invaded? In the future, the barrier will be even lower. Nuclear weapons will likely fall within reach of motivated and capable terrorist movements such as ISIL, although I'd be more worried about organizations that haven't carved out territory that's easy to attack. Once that happens, things could get very ugly. There is no such thing as MAD with a distributed terrorist organization. Missile defense systems offer no real answers. They don't work against state of the art missiles (such as Russia has), nor do they work against smuggled bombs or bombs built within the borders of their target nation. The kind of surveillance that would be required to adequately secure a nation against such weapons is the stuff Orwell never even dreamed of. It would require utterly pervasive, invasive, and constant surveillance.

hackuser 10y ago
> What concerns me the most about nuclear weapons is that the technical barriers to building them are getting lower all the time. It's 70 year old technology.
narrator 10y ago
I think this is a test for our species here on planet earth before we level up on technology. We have to be able to have a certain level of self-control or we're going to destroy ourselves and go back to the stone age if we can't handle the power that comes with advanced technology. So far, we've been able to avoid nuclear annihilation, so there's some hope.
adrianN 10y ago
If you don't have territory, it's hard to build enrichment facilities. That is a step that is unlikely to get much easier in the near future. Controlling enriched material seems easier than preventing people from building bombs once they have it.
- Animats 10y ago
  Centrifuge enrichment facilities are large, but comparable to a data center or a WalMart Supercenter. Power consumption is reasonable for the building size. It's not like the old days of gaseous diffusion, where buildings were over a mile long and required gigawatts of power. Nor does a centrifuge facility have to be built that big, if you're willing to wait longer for product. Someone could put an enrichment facility in an industrial park and it wouldn't attract attention.
  - red_admiral 10y ago
    Wouldn't you need a _lot_ of uranium ore to start with?
    - adrianN 10y ago
      The best deposits contain about 20% U3O8. Uranium is about 1% U-235. You need about 50kg to make the Hiroshima bomb. Depending on the efficiency of your enrichment process, it doesn't sound like terribly much ore.
      - graycat 10y ago
        But the Hiroshima bomb was the gun barrel thing, and the gun was heavy and so was the bomb. For a small bomb, would have to test it, and tough to do such tests without being detected. Tough to be doing much with fissionable materials without being noticed. Still, broadly, the OP seems correct -- nukes are dangerous.
        douche 10y ago
        Still, it could be done. I remember reading The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy - tldr; Islamic terrorists stumble onto an Israeli atomic bomb, kidnap a former East German nuclear engineer, build a machine shop in a cave, and rework the bomb into a thermonuclear fusion device. It seemed generally plausible - the science and engineering to produce a nuclear bomb is not exactly unknown, the biggest problem appears to be getting ahold of the right materials.
greggman 10y ago
It's not just nukes. Bio weapons, nano weapons, and autonmous weapons will be easily build-able by any disgruntled teen in the near future
a_imho 10y ago
Conventional weapons are destructive enough, not to mention chemical and bio agents. What concerns me is the most is the last part of your comment. >The kind of surveillance that would be required to adequately secure a nation against such weapons is the stuff Orwell never even dreamed of. It would require utterly pervasive, invasive, and constant surveillance. 1. AFAIK mass surveillance is not very effective in preventing bad actors (e.g. terrorist communicating via sms) yet it is promoted so much we are ready to accept that reasoning right away. 2. It is a symptomatic treatment, however we can go much further in prevention and deescalation to swing those actors a better way. I don't think certain people are born evil.
- jerf 10y ago
  "Conventional weapons are destructive enough" No, they really aren't. Israel has been peppered with hundreds of rockets on the time frame of days or weeks, and at the national scale, they were basically an inconvenience. One nuke, by contrast, can take out an entire city. North Korea currently has at best the capacity to really badly hurt South Korea before they were rendered militarily ineffective, and even then, for all the death and destruction they could cause, most of Seoul would still be there afterwards. If they have nukes, though, most of Seoul could be destroyed in one fell swoop. Or most of anything they can reach, which also includes an awful lot of China. It turns out that if you plot the destructive radius of even very large nuclear bombs, many cities are actually substantially larger than just one. But, still, between fallout concerns and the fact that there is now a total hole in your city's infrastructure, one nuke is still probably enough to kill an entire city, if not necessarily every person in it. There aren't any conventional weapons we can say that about. There also aren't any chemical weapons we can say that about. Their effects are very mean and very nasty and very hideous, but they're also a great deal more limited than the common conception of them. For instance, one of the characteristics that makes mustard gas appealing is that it's heavier than air, which means that it tends to collect in below-ground-level fortifications, forcing the enemy out. This same characteristic renders it useless for destroying a city. As for biological weapons, well, we do tend to speak of them in the same breath as nuclear weapons. However, their big problem is that it's difficult to create a really effective one that is also guaranteed not to kill the user. You've basically got the choice of things like smallpox, which are effective and contagious but you won't be able to stop hitting you (if nothing else, your enemy may well consider medieval warfare a source of inspiration and just start dropping infected bodies on you), or you have things like anthrax which are effective, but being not particularly contagious means that it's actually quite difficult to get them into people at scale. Even now, nukes are a problem.
pdkl95 10y ago
> concerns > getting lower all the time One of my older comments directly addresses this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033
SubiculumCode 10y ago
The ability to destroy outpaces the ability to create and preserve. Destruction is inevitable. When the ability of the rogue group or individual can slaughter millions, pervasive monitoring may be the only path avoiding extinction, without giving up on technological advancement. These are two hypotheses,despite my strong libertarian leanings, that I find difficult to reject.
- hx87 10y ago
  Sousveillance seems to be happy medium: it's more secure than surveillance since the work is crowdsourced and there are no privileged actors (i.e. the watchers) that are free of surveillance. It's less prone to abuse of power because everyone is being watched, and everyone is doing the watching, so abuses will quickly come to light. Security, privacy, freedom: choose two. I'd gladly sacrifice privacy for the others, as long as everyone else does the same.
AJ007 10y ago
The things I've thought about - a) Is it a single use nuclear device or mass use? US-Russia-China will be a mass use scenario and thats a game ender. a1) What is the current chance of an accidental or sabotage internal use by any major country? b) What is the response to a someone like North Korea using a nuclear weapon? c) The probability of something occurring between either Pakistan-India or North Korea-South Korea in the next 20 years exceeds 50%. The Shia-Sunni thing could be a problem area too. d) Offshore rebalancing in the Middle East right now may be a study in removing nuclear-capable states deemed hostile. Any sort of region controlled by Islamist warlords can't build any sort of functional modern industry. The initial shock at capabilities was through looting, which ends when the source of lootable goods ends. e) A big expansion of public surveillance is already well on its way. Sensors get smaller, cheaper, probably expanding exponentially. You can kind of look at what MZ (formally Machine Zone) is publicizing as an example of live knowledge of an urban area. Vehicle delivery of anything illicit will become very difficult. I've mentioned before, it is possible there will be little to no private vehicle ownership within urban cores in the future. f) The barrier to entry for civilization ending nuclear will continue to remain high enough. The move away from nuclear to renewables will make it pretty explicit when a smaller country is trying to develop nuclear weapons. The most dangerous point of "idiot" proliferation was when the Soviet Union fell. g) The chemical and biological stuff is a big future concern with regards to production becoming easier. The most urgent thing is to solve the US-Russia-China issue. Based on the policy makers operating behind the scenes I expect relations will keep degrading. In some respects, as a democracy it is the citizen's fault for ignoring the problem. On the other hand there is total opacity of the strategic policies being implemented, so if they are even debated both sides are debating talking points which actually have zero basis on why certain decisions are being made.
cartoonfoxes 10y ago
You might like this: "Botching the Bomb: The Self-Defeating Behaviors of Proliferant States". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWPGhs5Lm5Q&list=PLvGO_dWo8VfdUS_shFCmhSTNOcEdroPJ5&index=24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWPGhs5Lm5Q&list=PLvGO_dWo8V... This entire lecture series is great, by the way.

by beloch 10y ago

hackuser 10y ago

> What concerns me the most about nuclear weapons is that the technical barriers to building them are getting lower all the time. It's 70 year old technology.

narrator 10y ago

I think this is a test for our species here on planet earth before we level up on technology. We have to be able to have a certain level of self-control or we're going to destroy ourselves and go back to the stone age if we can't handle the power that comes with advanced technology. So far, we've been able to avoid nuclear annihilation, so there's some hope.

adrianN 10y ago

If you don't have territory, it's hard to build enrichment facilities. That is a step that is unlikely to get much easier in the near future. Controlling enriched material seems easier than preventing people from building bombs once they have it.

Animats 10y ago
Centrifuge enrichment facilities are large, but comparable to a data center or a WalMart Supercenter. Power consumption is reasonable for the building size. It's not like the old days of gaseous diffusion, where buildings were over a mile long and required gigawatts of power. Nor does a centrifuge facility have to be built that big, if you're willing to wait longer for product. Someone could put an enrichment facility in an industrial park and it wouldn't attract attention.
- red_admiral 10y ago
  Wouldn't you need a _lot_ of uranium ore to start with?
  - adrianN 10y ago
    The best deposits contain about 20% U3O8. Uranium is about 1% U-235. You need about 50kg to make the Hiroshima bomb. Depending on the efficiency of your enrichment process, it doesn't sound like terribly much ore.
    - graycat 10y ago
      But the Hiroshima bomb was the gun barrel thing, and the gun was heavy and so was the bomb. For a small bomb, would have to test it, and tough to do such tests without being detected. Tough to be doing much with fissionable materials without being noticed. Still, broadly, the OP seems correct -- nukes are dangerous.
      - douche 10y ago
        Still, it could be done. I remember reading The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy - tldr; Islamic terrorists stumble onto an Israeli atomic bomb, kidnap a former East German nuclear engineer, build a machine shop in a cave, and rework the bomb into a thermonuclear fusion device. It seemed generally plausible - the science and engineering to produce a nuclear bomb is not exactly unknown, the biggest problem appears to be getting ahold of the right materials.

greggman 10y ago

It's not just nukes. Bio weapons, nano weapons, and autonmous weapons will be easily build-able by any disgruntled teen in the near future

a_imho 10y ago

Conventional weapons are destructive enough, not to mention chemical and bio agents. What concerns me is the most is the last part of your comment. >The kind of surveillance that would be required to adequately secure a nation against such weapons is the stuff Orwell never even dreamed of. It would require utterly pervasive, invasive, and constant surveillance. 1. AFAIK mass surveillance is not very effective in preventing bad actors (e.g. terrorist communicating via sms) yet it is promoted so much we are ready to accept that reasoning right away. 2. It is a symptomatic treatment, however we can go much further in prevention and deescalation to swing those actors a better way. I don't think certain people are born evil.

jerf 10y ago
"Conventional weapons are destructive enough" No, they really aren't. Israel has been peppered with hundreds of rockets on the time frame of days or weeks, and at the national scale, they were basically an inconvenience. One nuke, by contrast, can take out an entire city. North Korea currently has at best the capacity to really badly hurt South Korea before they were rendered militarily ineffective, and even then, for all the death and destruction they could cause, most of Seoul would still be there afterwards. If they have nukes, though, most of Seoul could be destroyed in one fell swoop. Or most of anything they can reach, which also includes an awful lot of China. It turns out that if you plot the destructive radius of even very large nuclear bombs, many cities are actually substantially larger than just one. But, still, between fallout concerns and the fact that there is now a total hole in your city's infrastructure, one nuke is still probably enough to kill an entire city, if not necessarily every person in it. There aren't any conventional weapons we can say that about. There also aren't any chemical weapons we can say that about. Their effects are very mean and very nasty and very hideous, but they're also a great deal more limited than the common conception of them. For instance, one of the characteristics that makes mustard gas appealing is that it's heavier than air, which means that it tends to collect in below-ground-level fortifications, forcing the enemy out. This same characteristic renders it useless for destroying a city. As for biological weapons, well, we do tend to speak of them in the same breath as nuclear weapons. However, their big problem is that it's difficult to create a really effective one that is also guaranteed not to kill the user. You've basically got the choice of things like smallpox, which are effective and contagious but you won't be able to stop hitting you (if nothing else, your enemy may well consider medieval warfare a source of inspiration and just start dropping infected bodies on you), or you have things like anthrax which are effective, but being not particularly contagious means that it's actually quite difficult to get them into people at scale. Even now, nukes are a problem.

pdkl95 10y ago

> concerns > getting lower all the time One of my older comments directly addresses this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033

SubiculumCode 10y ago

The ability to destroy outpaces the ability to create and preserve. Destruction is inevitable. When the ability of the rogue group or individual can slaughter millions, pervasive monitoring may be the only path avoiding extinction, without giving up on technological advancement. These are two hypotheses,despite my strong libertarian leanings, that I find difficult to reject.

hx87 10y ago
Sousveillance seems to be happy medium: it's more secure than surveillance since the work is crowdsourced and there are no privileged actors (i.e. the watchers) that are free of surveillance. It's less prone to abuse of power because everyone is being watched, and everyone is doing the watching, so abuses will quickly come to light. Security, privacy, freedom: choose two. I'd gladly sacrifice privacy for the others, as long as everyone else does the same.

AJ007 10y ago

The things I've thought about - a) Is it a single use nuclear device or mass use? US-Russia-China will be a mass use scenario and thats a game ender. a1) What is the current chance of an accidental or sabotage internal use by any major country? b) What is the response to a someone like North Korea using a nuclear weapon? c) The probability of something occurring between either Pakistan-India or North Korea-South Korea in the next 20 years exceeds 50%. The Shia-Sunni thing could be a problem area too. d) Offshore rebalancing in the Middle East right now may be a study in removing nuclear-capable states deemed hostile. Any sort of region controlled by Islamist warlords can't build any sort of functional modern industry. The initial shock at capabilities was through looting, which ends when the source of lootable goods ends. e) A big expansion of public surveillance is already well on its way. Sensors get smaller, cheaper, probably expanding exponentially. You can kind of look at what MZ (formally Machine Zone) is publicizing as an example of live knowledge of an urban area. Vehicle delivery of anything illicit will become very difficult. I've mentioned before, it is possible there will be little to no private vehicle ownership within urban cores in the future. f) The barrier to entry for civilization ending nuclear will continue to remain high enough. The move away from nuclear to renewables will make it pretty explicit when a smaller country is trying to develop nuclear weapons. The most dangerous point of "idiot" proliferation was when the Soviet Union fell. g) The chemical and biological stuff is a big future concern with regards to production becoming easier. The most urgent thing is to solve the US-Russia-China issue. Based on the policy makers operating behind the scenes I expect relations will keep degrading. In some respects, as a democracy it is the citizen's fault for ignoring the problem. On the other hand there is total opacity of the strategic policies being implemented, so if they are even debated both sides are debating talking points which actually have zero basis on why certain decisions are being made.

cartoonfoxes 10y ago

You might like this: "Botching the Bomb: The Self-Defeating Behaviors of Proliferant States". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWPGhs5Lm5Q&list=PLvGO_dWo8VfdUS_shFCmhSTNOcEdroPJ5&index=24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWPGhs5Lm5Q&list=PLvGO_dWo8V... This entire lecture series is great, by the way.