I commend President Obama for taking the path that I suggested was my preference during his visit to Hiroshima and keeping his eyes fixed on the horizon rather than looking back.
Unfortunately, it is no more possible to abolish nuclear weapons than it would be projectile weapons. They’ve been invented and that can’t be undone.
You’re right that we cannot unintentional them. They do require a tremendous amount of know-how to get them to work right, however, so we can use that to our advantage.
Pebble reactors are relatively safe, and have minimal overlapping technologies with nuclear weapons — we should be assisting countries in building them, so they don’t develop expertise in more overlapping technologies.
But, in the end, technology marches on and the difficult becomes progressively easier, and we will all be killed by some sloppy idiot grad student who is trying to create a new base pair in DNA using some bacteria or something. Mass pandemic, everyone dead, hopefully evolution starts up again and the next dominant species is a little bit dumber or lacks opposable thumbs or something.
Uninvent. Not unintentional. Perhaps autocorrect will be what kills us all.
Read it. I guess it is OK as speeches go. It is hard to disagree with the idea that peace is wonderful and news are dangerous. As I predicted, the right are now calling it an apology.
Steve
Not really. They can be made in any modern machine shop. The problem isn’t the making or “getting them to work right” but the materials. That’s the reason for all of the hyperventilating about “yellow cake” etc. some years back.
So are thorium reactors. What I’d like to see are small scale thorium reactors about the size of a school bus being mass-produced.
At this point it’s possible that India will lead the world in this particular technology.
Creating the compressive sphere required to trigger the explosion and get a decent yield from the explosion is hard. Very hard.
A nuclear weapon that blasts sideways and expends itself almost immediately with a small fraction of the destructive force is relatively easy. This still won’t be a good time for anyone caught in the vicinity, but it’s the difference between vaporizing a complete city and laying waste to a neighborhood.
Gustopher: Creating the compressive sphere required to trigger the explosion and get a decent yield from the explosion is hard. Very hard.
It’s difficult, but not insurmountable. The difficult problem is producing the fissile material.