4 ms·

Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not that much information available? I've kin

Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not that much information available? I've kind of tired myself of the technical details of how the weapons work, the modes of delivery, and the (feeble) countermeasures. But the theory about why we have to keep developing them (arms race) is really fascinating (in a macabre way). It's so easy to have a child's view that WMD are terrible (and yes, they are) and therefore should be eliminated. But the fact that they are so terrible is paradoxically why we have to keep advancing them. I want to learn more about that.

treypitt 3y ago
Here is a good realist take on Iranian proliferation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjfBGI7qXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjfBGI7qXg
dist-epoch 3y ago
This might be interesting for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency > Nuclear latency or a nuclear threshold state is the condition of a country possessing the technology to quickly build nuclear weapons, without having actually yet done so. > There are many countries capable of producing nuclear weapons, or at least enriching uranium or manufacturing plutonium. Among the most notable are Japan, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia. > Taiwan and South Korea have both been identified as "insecure" nuclear threshold states—states with the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons and the security motivations to seriously contemplate such an option.
- gosub100 3y ago
  That is interesting. Makes me think about the stories in the past few years that U235 can theoretically be condensed from seawater. Not good for proliferation.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > Not good for proliferation. What do you think it changes about proliferation?
    - gosub100 3y ago
      If it's proved viable wouldn't it allow anyone with access to the sea to obtain uranium? (I know you need concentrated U-235 to make an explosion, but just getting to yellowcake is enough to attract attention, right?).
      - krisoft 3y ago
        It would still require a lot of power and a lot of infrastructure to do it. If a country or organisation would try to go down that route others would see that they spend a lot of effort on slurping seawater through machines they can’t explain with anything else. That is the bottleneck how nuclear non-proliferation is enforced. You can hide your intentions, but you can’t hide that a lot or energy is flowing into a process you don’t have a good explanation for. Because of this detecting a sea water sourced extraction would be even easier than a nuclear program based on mined uranium. (Because you need to enrich from an even weaker starting condition.) What happens after detection is either diplomacy (they ask the country to stop nicely, reminding them of the consequences) or force (bombing the facilities).
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Uranium can be obtained anywhere if cost is no object. If you own a house with a modest sized lawn, the top meter of soil probably contains several kilograms of uranium.
        krisoft 3y ago
        > If you own a house with a modest sized lawn, the top meter of soil probably contains several kilograms of uranium. At first I thought "surely that cannot be right", then did some calculation and it seems you are right? This report[1] states that: "Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive element that is present in nearly all rocks and soils; it has an average concentration in U.S. soils of about 2 pCi/g (3 ppm)." I took the 3ppm figure from this and assumed that means 3g per million gram of soil. (This assumption might be a mistake, but I don't know how better to interpret it.) Then I googled and found 1000 square meter to be a reasonable size of estimate for the lawn size and 1400 kg/cubic meter seems to be a reasonable soil density. Then just multiplied these together "1000 * 1 * 1400 * (3 / 10*6) = 4.2" and found that indeed. As a rough estimation your statement seems to be right! (I mean of course you did know this :D I just wanted to show how I checked in case others are as surprised by the statement as I was.) 1: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp150-c6.pdf https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp150-c6.pdf
cdot2 3y ago
Not youtube videos but I would recommend Henry Kissinger's book Diplomacy which talks about this to some extent (although that is not the primary focus of the book).
krisoft 3y ago
If you are interested in the topic I recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast for on-going non-proliferation news. Or if you are interested in more historical stuff The Reason We're All Still Here or The Deal podcast from the same folks.
jjk166 3y ago
One thing I've been thinking about recently is how lucky humanity was to have developed nuclear weapons precisely when we did. One could imagine a multitude of technologies that potentially pose an existential threat - rogue AI, grey goo, genetically engineered super-viruses, etc. Even mundane technologies like prolonged fossil fuel consumption or CFCs can have disastrous consequences if a society does not realize it is capable of causing its own extinction and thus never stops. While it's possible to anticipate some of the dangers, the roads that lead to these technological endpoints are paved in good intentions - there are so many good reasons to advance computers or genetics, etc. Preventing proliferation of these threats might not even be possible once the technologies advance far enough. Further, all these existentially threatening technologies become possible once a civilization learns the same few principles - if you have the knowledge of physics and chemistry to develop one, you're within a few decades at most of developing any of the others. How fortunate then are we that the first really existentially threatening technology we developed was the atomic bomb? It's a technology that is so obviously destructive, and so distantly related from any useful application, so alien in its method of function, that it's perhaps the only technology in history to be near universally seen as too dangerous to use at scale. It requires both secret knowledge and immense industrial capacity to make even a single device, nonetheless enough devices and delivery systems to actually pose that existential threat, and thus we only need a small handful of large nation states to agree not to use them. It's arguably the very easiest existential threat to handle. Since developing them, we have become cognizant of our civilization's threat to itself, and now every advancement we make is met with the question "does this pose any existential risk?" which our forebears never asked, and which we ourselves might not have asked otherwise. But it's not just that we developed nukes first. The timing down to the month was critical. Our first nuclear weapons were dropped in the last days of the worst war our planet had ever known. We only had a few, and the decision to drop them was made by people who did not witness nor fully comprehend their destructive potential. As it happened, in the peace that came about after the end of the second world war, there was an opportunity to observe the devastation the bombs had wrought, for the hatred that had led to their use to subside, and for the nuclear monopoly to be broken before another major war could start. But imagine if the bomb was developed a bit earlier, say midway through WW2, we might have dropped dozens or even hundreds of bombs, completely normalizing their use and irradiating large sections of continents before anyone really second guessed it. Conversely, if the weapons were developed in peacetime, either before or after the war, then the threat might go completely unrecognized and no one would think twice about opening the next war with an all out nuclear attack, or perhaps without the wartime funding we would just never have developed them at all and never recognize our species' ability to destroy itself. It's very well possible that if we had discovered the neutron a few years earlier, or if the US had not committed so many resources to the Manhattan project, or if Japan had surrendered a little earlier, we might now be extinct.
pvg 3y ago
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Bomb/Fred-Kaplan/9781982107307 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Bomb/Fred-Kaplan/... Is a fun read. Get the audiobook version and think of it as a long youtube video playlist that you play in the background.
michaelt 3y ago
> Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not that much information available? I don't have a youtube video for you, but I do have a book recommendation: Thomas Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict" from 1960. The writing is extremely clear and accessible, by the standards of nobel-prize-winning economists.
- kortex 3y ago
  This is also the work that introduced the idea of the game theoretical focal point, aka Schelling point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
- gosub100 3y ago
  Thank you, I will check out the book. Yes I forgot that it is essentially economics at the core of it. All of the same economic arguments also apply to biological weapons too. Here's to hoping neither is ever used.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    > Here's to hoping neither is ever used. To nitpick: Hope they're never used again. I'd also argue that all of the states that have nuclear weapons have historically used them as a bargaining chip or trump card. Employing them, on the other hand.. To add to more Nuclear War / Strategic Theory info is another RAND fellow, Herman Kahn[0][1], and his book On Thermonuclear War [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Thermonuclear_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Thermonuclear_War
southernplaces7 3y ago
I personally recommend this book quite highly. It focuses on the U.S/Soviet arms race, so slightly out-dated if you want to know about the modern landscape of nuclear arms politics, but many of the same dynamics among the major states (particularly relevant today for Russia and U.S conflict) still apply. It's also an entertainingly written book aside from being very informative. (not an affiliate link, just grabbed it off google quickly) https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy/dp/0307387844 https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy/dp/...

treypitt 3y ago

Here is a good realist take on Iranian proliferation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjfBGI7qXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjfBGI7qXg

dist-epoch 3y ago

This might be interesting for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency > Nuclear latency or a nuclear threshold state is the condition of a country possessing the technology to quickly build nuclear weapons, without having actually yet done so. > There are many countries capable of producing nuclear weapons, or at least enriching uranium or manufacturing plutonium. Among the most notable are Japan, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia. > Taiwan and South Korea have both been identified as "insecure" nuclear threshold states—states with the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons and the security motivations to seriously contemplate such an option.

gosub100 3y ago
That is interesting. Makes me think about the stories in the past few years that U235 can theoretically be condensed from seawater. Not good for proliferation.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > Not good for proliferation. What do you think it changes about proliferation?
  - gosub100 3y ago
    If it's proved viable wouldn't it allow anyone with access to the sea to obtain uranium? (I know you need concentrated U-235 to make an explosion, but just getting to yellowcake is enough to attract attention, right?).
    - krisoft 3y ago
      It would still require a lot of power and a lot of infrastructure to do it. If a country or organisation would try to go down that route others would see that they spend a lot of effort on slurping seawater through machines they can’t explain with anything else. That is the bottleneck how nuclear non-proliferation is enforced. You can hide your intentions, but you can’t hide that a lot or energy is flowing into a process you don’t have a good explanation for. Because of this detecting a sea water sourced extraction would be even easier than a nuclear program based on mined uranium. (Because you need to enrich from an even weaker starting condition.) What happens after detection is either diplomacy (they ask the country to stop nicely, reminding them of the consequences) or force (bombing the facilities).
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Uranium can be obtained anywhere if cost is no object. If you own a house with a modest sized lawn, the top meter of soil probably contains several kilograms of uranium.
      - krisoft 3y ago
        > If you own a house with a modest sized lawn, the top meter of soil probably contains several kilograms of uranium. At first I thought "surely that cannot be right", then did some calculation and it seems you are right? This report[1] states that: "Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive element that is present in nearly all rocks and soils; it has an average concentration in U.S. soils of about 2 pCi/g (3 ppm)." I took the 3ppm figure from this and assumed that means 3g per million gram of soil. (This assumption might be a mistake, but I don't know how better to interpret it.) Then I googled and found 1000 square meter to be a reasonable size of estimate for the lawn size and 1400 kg/cubic meter seems to be a reasonable soil density. Then just multiplied these together "1000 * 1 * 1400 * (3 / 10*6) = 4.2" and found that indeed. As a rough estimation your statement seems to be right! (I mean of course you did know this :D I just wanted to show how I checked in case others are as surprised by the statement as I was.) 1: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp150-c6.pdf https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp150-c6.pdf

cdot2 3y ago

Not youtube videos but I would recommend Henry Kissinger's book Diplomacy which talks about this to some extent (although that is not the primary focus of the book).

krisoft 3y ago

If you are interested in the topic I recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast for on-going non-proliferation news. Or if you are interested in more historical stuff The Reason We're All Still Here or The Deal podcast from the same folks.

jjk166 3y ago

One thing I've been thinking about recently is how lucky humanity was to have developed nuclear weapons precisely when we did. One could imagine a multitude of technologies that potentially pose an existential threat - rogue AI, grey goo, genetically engineered super-viruses, etc. Even mundane technologies like prolonged fossil fuel consumption or CFCs can have disastrous consequences if a society does not realize it is capable of causing its own extinction and thus never stops. While it's possible to anticipate some of the dangers, the roads that lead to these technological endpoints are paved in good intentions - there are so many good reasons to advance computers or genetics, etc. Preventing proliferation of these threats might not even be possible once the technologies advance far enough. Further, all these existentially threatening technologies become possible once a civilization learns the same few principles - if you have the knowledge of physics and chemistry to develop one, you're within a few decades at most of developing any of the others. How fortunate then are we that the first really existentially threatening technology we developed was the atomic bomb? It's a technology that is so obviously destructive, and so distantly related from any useful application, so alien in its method of function, that it's perhaps the only technology in history to be near universally seen as too dangerous to use at scale. It requires both secret knowledge and immense industrial capacity to make even a single device, nonetheless enough devices and delivery systems to actually pose that existential threat, and thus we only need a small handful of large nation states to agree not to use them. It's arguably the very easiest existential threat to handle. Since developing them, we have become cognizant of our civilization's threat to itself, and now every advancement we make is met with the question "does this pose any existential risk?" which our forebears never asked, and which we ourselves might not have asked otherwise. But it's not just that we developed nukes first. The timing down to the month was critical. Our first nuclear weapons were dropped in the last days of the worst war our planet had ever known. We only had a few, and the decision to drop them was made by people who did not witness nor fully comprehend their destructive potential. As it happened, in the peace that came about after the end of the second world war, there was an opportunity to observe the devastation the bombs had wrought, for the hatred that had led to their use to subside, and for the nuclear monopoly to be broken before another major war could start. But imagine if the bomb was developed a bit earlier, say midway through WW2, we might have dropped dozens or even hundreds of bombs, completely normalizing their use and irradiating large sections of continents before anyone really second guessed it. Conversely, if the weapons were developed in peacetime, either before or after the war, then the threat might go completely unrecognized and no one would think twice about opening the next war with an all out nuclear attack, or perhaps without the wartime funding we would just never have developed them at all and never recognize our species' ability to destroy itself. It's very well possible that if we had discovered the neutron a few years earlier, or if the US had not committed so many resources to the Manhattan project, or if Japan had surrendered a little earlier, we might now be extinct.

pvg 3y ago

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Bomb/Fred-Kaplan/9781982107307 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Bomb/Fred-Kaplan/... Is a fun read. Get the audiobook version and think of it as a long youtube video playlist that you play in the background.

michaelt 3y ago

> Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not that much information available? I don't have a youtube video for you, but I do have a book recommendation: Thomas Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict" from 1960. The writing is extremely clear and accessible, by the standards of nobel-prize-winning economists.

kortex 3y ago
This is also the work that introduced the idea of the game theoretical focal point, aka Schelling point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
gosub100 3y ago
Thank you, I will check out the book. Yes I forgot that it is essentially economics at the core of it. All of the same economic arguments also apply to biological weapons too. Here's to hoping neither is ever used.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  > Here's to hoping neither is ever used. To nitpick: Hope they're never used again. I'd also argue that all of the states that have nuclear weapons have historically used them as a bargaining chip or trump card. Employing them, on the other hand.. To add to more Nuclear War / Strategic Theory info is another RAND fellow, Herman Kahn[0][1], and his book On Thermonuclear War [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Thermonuclear_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Thermonuclear_War

southernplaces7 3y ago

I personally recommend this book quite highly. It focuses on the U.S/Soviet arms race, so slightly out-dated if you want to know about the modern landscape of nuclear arms politics, but many of the same dynamics among the major states (particularly relevant today for Russia and U.S conflict) still apply. It's also an entertainingly written book aside from being very informative. (not an affiliate link, just grabbed it off google quickly) https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy/dp/0307387844 https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy/dp/...