Samantha Nutt, Founder and Executive Director of War Child Canada, and author of the book Damned Nations speaks at The Grandest Challenge Symposium.
Tags / weapons
Tagged with “weapons”
(11)
-
Dr. Samantha Nutt talks about the greatest challenges to children in the developing world
-
Stuff You Should Know
Can You Test a Nuclear Weapon Without Fallout? — Over the course of human existence, thousands of nuclear weapons have been exploded on Earth and in space. With all of those tests, one can’t help but wonder how much fallout has been produced. Learn the tricks of the nuke-testing trade in this episode.
Tagged with nuclear weapons nuclear fallout
-
Stuff You Should Know
How the Musketeers Worked — You know and love them as a fluffy chocolate nougat and maybe as a book and a movie, but musketeers were quite real and quite deadly. Visit with Josh and Chuck as they examine the elite special forces of 17th-century France.
Tagged with military history weapons
-
Caustic Soda: Blunt Weapons
Sticks and stones will break your bones, and so will a heck of a lot of other things! Lisa Gemino of tacticalfighting.ca joins Toren, Joe, and Kevin for a look at all kinds of blunt weapons from sticks to maces to truncheons!
-
Beyond Belief 3 (2008): Lawrence Krauss
-
Invisible Hand Episode 8: Interview with James Evan Pilato | Liberty Cap Press / The Invisible Hand
Download Podcast This episode of The Invisible Hand features my recent interview with James Evan Pilato, Editor of Media Monarchy, Food World Orde…
http://www.quintessentialpublications.com/tracyrtwyman/?p=2288
-
Richard Rhodes: Twilight of the Bombs
The evening began with a short version of Isao Ishimoto’s animation of all the world’s atomic explosions in the period 1945 to 1998. The total is shocking to most people—-2,053. Rhodes commented that seeing the bomb tests on a world map over time shows how much they were a strange form of communication between nations. He also noted how the number of tests dropped from decades of intensity to near zero after 1993. In this century only North Korea has tested bombs, and those could be the last explosions.
Most Americans, he’s found, think that we don’t have nuclear weapons any more, and that may reflect a realistic perception that we no longer need them. But our government keeps looking for reasons to keep them, and maintaining the current much reduced arsenal still costs $50 billion a year.
How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix—-all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use—-all of the Cold War players, major and minor, told Rhodes that everyone knew that the bombs must not and could not be used. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear "ahead," even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.
Rhodes noted that people fear the blast and radiation effects of atomic bombs, but it’s really the fires that are most destructive. The fireball ignites everything far beyond the blast effects. As a result, nuclear winter remains a threat. Former researchers of nuclear winter used sophisticated new climate models to assess what would happen if, say, there was an exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs (1.5 kilotons) between India and Pakistan. The smoke clouds would disrupt the weather long enough to collapse some agriculture, leading to starvation of as many as a billion people.
Serious efforts are underway to get the world’s nuclear weapons down toward zero. All weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) is being tallied and secured. Sophisticated, unrestrained inspection systems are gaining ever more access. In some cases, arsenals are being "virtualized"—-nuclear capability substitutes for weapons stockpiles. India and Pakistan, for instance, have disassembled their nuclear weapons into widely separated parts that would take considerable time and deliberation to reassemble.
In the course of his research, Rhodes shifted from opposition to nuclear power for electricity to becoming a strong proponent. Among its benefits is offering a way for the thousands of warheads to be converted into something useful when diluted into large quantities of reactor fuel. Also the international fuel banking proposed for bringing proliferation-free nuclear power to developing nations can help enable more thorough inspections of all fissile material.
At dinner Rhodes reflected that nuclear weapons may come to be seen as a strange fetishistic behavior by nations at a certain period in history. They were insanely expensive and thoroughly useless. Their only function was to keep a bizarre form of score.
-
Caustic Soda: Space Warfare
Watch out, astrophobes! Martin "Sword of the Stars" Cirulis joins the Caustic Soda crew as we venture into the final frontier and fight things we find there! We talk about Reagan’s Star Wars plan to put lenses in front of bombs; Lasers on 747s; Maneuvering fighters in zero G; Mutual Assured Destruction; EMP Tests & the Outer Space Treaty; Satellite "accidents"; the shrapnel zone; X-37 unmanned spaceplane PLUS all related pop culture. Music: "Frogstar" by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets
-
American Scientist: The Evolution of the Human Capacity for Killing at a Distance
Duke University anthropologist Steven Churchill presents his research on the evolutionary origins of projectile weaponry, and how weapon use changed interactions between humans and other species—including, perhaps, the Neandertals. (October 20, 2009)
-
The Strategy of the Global Zero Campaign for Eliminating Nuclear Weapons
Bruce Blair, President of the World Security Institute and expert on U.S. and Russian security policies
Tagged with princeton bruce blair nuclear weapons policies u.s. russia security
Page 1 of 2More