×
NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS. Brad Plumer links to a harrowing story about a narrowly avoided nuclear accident:
The Project on Government Oversight says it has been told by knowledgeable experts that the warhead nearly detonated in 2005 because an unsafe amount of pressure was applied while it was being disassembled ...An investigator for Project on Government Oversight says the weapon involved was a W-56 warhead with 100 times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.As Scott Sagan argued in Limits of Safety, accidents like this are essentially inevitable. Good safety procedures reduce the chances of such an accident, but can never bring the probability to zero. This also serves as an answer to the question "Why are more nukes a bad thing?" Even if we accept that nuclear weapons deter conflict and assume that two nuclear powers will never intentionally launch against one another (and these assumptions depend a lot on force structure, decision-making procedures, and the survivability of second strike capability), growth in the number of nuclear weapons and especially in the number of nuclear powers increases the likelihood of an accident. The chance of an accident really goes up in new nuclear powers, since they lack experience with and procedures to deal with these kinds of devices.None of this implies that the U.S. ought to go to war to prevent other countries from developing nukes, but it does suggest that there's something very sensible about non-proliferation, and that maintaining norms and incentives that limit nuclear proliferation is a good idea. Speaking of which...
The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country�s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades.
--Robert Farley
