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'Tis the season to get rid of nukes? In an effort to achieve world peace and lessen the growing threat of nuclear power, a nascent group including the likes of former President Jimmy Carter, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa this week launched a campaign calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The new organization, Global Zero, is planning a grassroots effort to spur world powers to rid the planet of nukes over the next 25 years. Meeting yesterday and Monday in Paris, 100 past and current world leaders signed a declaration imploring the U.S. and Russia to slash their nuclear arsenals and for a system to be created to verify that countries are complying with non-proliferation treaties, according to the Associated Press.
 
The campaign follows media accounts of two new books due out next month about the state of the world's nuclear arsenal 63 years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The good news, according to yesterday's New York Times: nuclear weapons did not proliferate as quickly as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer — scientific director of the World War II-era Manhattan Project between the U.S., the UK and Canada to develop a nuclear bomb — had feared they might.

Nine countries — the U.S., Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — have admitted or are widely believed to have nuclear weapons. There could have been more. Stephen Younger, former head of nukes at Los Alamos, writes in The Bomb: A New History, that "Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina and Brazil all flirted with nuclear programs, and all decided to abandon them," according to the Times.

But the spread wasn’t for lack of trying. The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation asserts that China secretly aided France, Pakistan, Algeria and North Korea in crafting nuclear technology and that France covertly helped Israel make bombs, according to the Times' account of the book. Thomas Reed, a former thermonuclear weapons scientist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and Danny Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, are its authors. (A Times diagram of the relationships explains which countries were helping each other.)

Several nuclear experts contacted by ScientificAmerican.com say some of that information is new or had been rumored. Now, there are details, they say. 

The assertion that China aided France and North Korea is new, though it is well known that China helped Pakistan and Algeria and that France assisted Israel in its quest for nuclear power, says Frank von Hippel, co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. (Algeria has denied that it wants to build nuclear weapons, according to the Times diagram.)

"What has been revealed in those two books reviewed [in the Times] appears to be plausible," says Won-Young Kim, a senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Kim and his colleague, Paul Richards, wrote an article set to appear in the March 2009 issue of Scientific American, arguing that nuclear monitoring is good enough for the U.S. to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bars nuclear explosions on Earth.

China and France refused to sign the 1963 partial test ban treaty, which forbids testing nukes above ground, underwater or in space; Israel has never admitted to testing or harboring a nuclear bomb, but is widely believed to have it. Both China and France in 1992 signed the non-nuclear proliferation treaty — 24 years after it was first negotiated — which forbids them from assisting other states in developing nuclear arms. Their aid to the other countries as described in the Times was decades before they became signatories.

The CTBT may come up for ratification under President-elect Barack Obama. In a Q&A in this month's Arms Control Today (first published online in September), Obama says that he would "reach out to the Senate to secure the ratification of the CTBT at the earliest practical date and will then launch a diplomatic effort to bring onboard other states whose ratifications are required for the treaty to enter into force."

The New Yorker takes a quirkier look at atomic history in this week's issue, profiling a trucker whose 2003 self-published book, Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man, may be more accurate than previous historical accounts of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John Coster-Mullen, who spent more than a decade performing "nuclear archeology," requested — and got — government documents about the bomb, interviewed scientists who worked on it, and by measuring imitations of them at museums, ultimately came up with detailed replicas. Coster-Mullen's account has been praised by the National Resources Defense Council's nuclear historian, Robert Norris, who wrote in a 2004 review in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close to his exacting breakdown of the bomb’s parts."

That Coster-Mullen unearthed secrets that others didn’t, The New Yorker's David Samuels writes, "makes clear that our belief in the secrecy of the bomb is a theological construct, adopted in no small part to shield ourselves from the idea that someone might use an atomic bomb against us."
 
Coster-Mullen told him: "The secret of the atomic bomb is how easy they are to make."

Image of Nagasaki bombing via Wikimedia Commons

7 Comments

1. 1. hotblack 06:33 PM 12/10/08

   Not bloody likely. The US will never disarm until it is brought to its knees. Our society is based on competitiveness and agression, and one look at the kinds of people we elect to represent us shows just how far mankind has come. We're still for the most part, a bunch of primally-motivated, ape-like simpletons. That religion is the main place people claim to get their "morals" only exemplifies this, especially when said morals are pitched with theats of violent damnation.
   
   Meanwhile, the US is digging its kneepads out of storage...

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2. 2. rlbckpck 06:55 PM 12/10/08

   Simply put it will go like this... http://www.butiamletired.com/

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3. 3. agenthucky 08:10 PM 12/10/08

   about 65 years too late. Now that we have used the bomb, we know more than ever how important it is to have one, just for defense reasons.
   
   One we tested the theory and it came out sound, there was no turning back. Do you think countries will have wars and limit their arsenal? Never, the treaty might be all nice and elegant, but it will just make secrecy about this topic even greater.
   
   I doubt the US will even consider disarming.

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4. 4. cutlass66dude 08:23 PM 12/10/08

   So the nations who follow the ban will have no way to deter the nations who don't care a hoot about it (Iran). The same way criminals don't care about gun laws. Not gonna happen!

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5. 5. Iahmad 04:03 AM 12/11/08

   China helped France in Nuke and France helped racist Israel in producing Nuke. Today there is news in nature that France is singling out Iranian Scientists as part of US sponsored and Israel crafted UN sanctions for working on Nuke. One wonders how hypocritic and shameless West and France can get. They were part of a criminal conspiracy to help each other in getting these terror weapons but are help bent to stop Irans legitimate cause. Long live mentally sick, stupid and fascist EU-Israel partnership.

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6. 6. erobertt3 in reply to hotblack 03:14 PM 1/22/09

   i am sorry but i dont agree with you the united states is not an aggresive country and ithink george bush would never disarm the weapons but i think barrack obama will put an end to the making of them and destroy every already made ones

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7. 7. audreyii 12:09 AM 3/12/10

   I think the world needs MORE NUKES..
   People in the United States PRETEND to be a peaceful people.
   However, The United States Kill More people WORLD WIDE AND AT HOME than any "Civilized" Country. The United States CONTINUE to preach "DEMOCRACY" while what they really want is WASP Supremacy. They want to be looked upon as GODS. The United States is the ONLY COUNTRY that has ever used WEPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. (IE) THE ATOM BOMB. They want to disarm the Globe so they can shove their Idiology down the Worlds Throats and sit back like "GODS" and reap the rewards. MORE NUKES, OR NO NUKE, WOULD STOP THIS. But America WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN. So DON'T BE FOOLED. Always remember SMILING FACES TELL LIES. Just look at Americas' History, The American Indians befriended the first settler, healed their sicknesses, taught them to feed themselves and live in the harsh winters of the continent and were repaid by being SLAUGHTERED BY THE HUNDRED OF THOUSANDS.

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