Test launch of the new Russian Bulava missile

First we got the bomb and that was good, ‘cause we love peace and brotherhood.

Then Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK ‘cause the balance of power’s maintained that way.

Who’s next?    From the song “Who’s Next” by musician, satirist, and mathematician Tom Lehrer

An early American nuclear submarine, the USS Scorpion, was actually constructed twice – the first hull was abruptly extended by over 130 feet and the boat was renamed the George Washington. Today we’d say that it was “re-purposed” from a fast attack submarine to become the world’s first ballistic missile submarine. Launched in 1959 the George Washington was one of the nation’s highest-priority projects, forming the least vulnerable leg of the nation’s nuclear triad (the other legs being bombers and missiles). The chief advantage of the ballistic missile boats – boomers is what we called them – was their relative invisibility; unlike bombers and missiles a boomer could simply go quiet and vanish into the depths of the sea. Even we didn’t know exactly where they were, and the later boomers were so quiet that even at close range they simply blended in with the background noise of the ocean. In the fast-attack boats we somewhat derisively said that the boomers’ mission was to “hide with pride” and we made occasional rude comments about them and their crews. But the fact remained that they had a tough job – to remain at sea and undetected for months at a time and, if the need arose, to rise to missile-firing depth to launch an attack against our foes – all the while knowing that they would be the most-sought targets on the planet.

Say a dirty bomb goes off in your city – say contamination is spread over a few billion dollars’ worth of property. Government buildings are contaminated. Parks are contaminated. So are trendy restaurants and gentrifying apartment buildings, subway tracks and cars and busses. Tens of thousands of people are contaminated as well as are many of their pets. At some point – when the smoke clears and the dust settles thoughts are going to turn away from the emergency and towards what needs to be done to get people back home, back to work, and getting the city back in operation. Invariably thoughts will turn towards cleanup standards – to how clean is clean enough. This is the question that the Japanese have been facing for the last year, the question that the neighbors of Chernobyl have been facing for a quarter century, and the question we might someday face if there’s an attack or an accident here. In fact, this could be a trillion-dollar question, depending on the amount and extent of the contamination and the cleanup standards that are decided upon.

Space may be the final frontier, but it’s likely to be the next battleground. At least that was the conclusion I drew from a distinguished panel that spoke to the Fletcher Club of New York a few days ago (May 9). The evening’s topic, the weaponization of space, seemed reasonably innocuous – I’d expected to come away having heard of the evils of taking weapons into orbit and then be reminded that the Outer Space Treaty prohibited weaponizing the high frontier. Instead I heard that space has already been militarized and the question is not “if” but, rather, “to what extent” this militarization will occur. Fantasies of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica aside, I thought the evening was a rather sobering reminder of our propensity for turning technology into weaponry.

A high-activity Sr-90 source from the former Soviet Union

A dirty bomb is not a good way to kill lots of people, but it is a great way to scare the hell out of a population. There are reports that Saddam Hussein investigated the possibility of making an RDD in the 1980s and gave up on the idea because it simply wasn’t deadly enough. On the other hand, people are scared of radiation – even in the absence of a genuine radiological threat a dirty bomb attack can still cause deaths from panic, anxiety, and even traffic accidents as people flee the scene (or the city) unnecessarily. I would suspect that by now most terrorist groups understand the relative lack of medical risk to people. I would also suspect they know full well that they also know that, in spite of the relative lack of medical risk, a dirty bomb attack would be tremendously disruptive and that it would cause an enormous economic impact to whatever city was affected. So this means that we’ve got to be serious about controlling radioactive materials – and we’ve got to take seriously reports of radioactive materials trafficking. Even if the radioactivity itself poses little or no risk to the public, we still have to remember that any dirty bomb attack will likely have a significant impact.

Several months ago I was involved in an interesting conversation about improvised nuclear devices – specifically, the best way to tell the public what had happened. In particular I recall a several-minute discussion on whether or not the public should be told that an attack had taken place. I have to admit I was somewhat incredulous – at one point I asked if anyone really thought that a member of the public, seeing a mushroom cloud rising over downtown, would think that it was a friendly explosion. Of course a nuclear explosion in one of our cities would be an attack – the question is not “what happened” so much as “who did it?” This is where nuclear forensics comes into play.

As the grandson and nephew of dentists I was probably the only kid at school who actually enjoyed going to the dentist. In fact, it wasn’t until I joined the Navy that I understood why my classmates never shared my enthusiasm for practitioners of the dental arts – having my wisdom teeth removed in preparation for submarine duty was my first really unpleasant experience in the dentist’s chair (although not my last). Another surprise was finding out that dental x-rays could be taken quickly – my grandfather’s x-ray machine dated back to the 1940s (maybe even earlier) and seemed to take a few seconds for an exposure.

Enrico Fermi at the blackboard

Nobel prize-winning physicist I.I. Rabi commented once that “In science we can’t let some guy from Podunk have the same vote as (Nobel laureate Enrico) Fermi.” Science has nothing to do with voting – I dislike gravity (especially when I step on a scale) but convincing my fellow citizens to vote against gravity (or to vote for a lower gravitational constant) isn’t going to change the way the universe works. The world is the way that it is and the job of science is to try to tease out the rules that describe its workings. No vote – no matter how overwhelmingly one-sided – will change the rules of nature. So why is it that a recent University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) survey showed that belief in science continues to dwindle in the United States?