 Yes, thank you very much. Well, this is the beginning of the talk because as you all know comic zons makes hard things funny And Since nuclear weapons is a pretty tough topic. I thought we should start off on a lighter note I guess But the first thing that I want you all to notice is if we move from jokes about nuclear weapons to real things It doesn't get any less bizarre Now if you consider this photo This is Yes, yes This is a general of the United States military who at the conclusion of the first Testing series of nuclear weapons after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1946 Celebrates the great outcome of the operation by slicing into this wonderful mushroom cloud cake together with his wife and some other military guy So there you have it. It doesn't get any less bizarre just one Serious disclaimer before we start now I'm going to be talking a lot about different countries because nuclear weapons is a problem that really applies worldwide And what I've learned I went to the University of Hamburg. I learned peace studies I'm a physicist is of course shaped by where I live and What I've heard and also I use sources accessible to me, especially language-wise that means Mostly in English and German. I can't really read Russian sources. I can't use Chinese sources or anything So what I want to say is when I talk about the motivations and the history of different countries I'm going to be talking about countries with a very detailed history and very intricate history like Pakistan India and Israel I Will of course not be able to accurately and completely represent the history and the motivations and the context of all The actions of these countries in such a short time So if you find that my perspective is biased that I'm speaking, you know from the western Point of view or anything Then I'm sorry because I don't really want to do that and I will be happy to you know talk about that afterwards Okay, so let's get into things now. I'm going to spoiler myself With the topic of the talk what did happen to nuclear weapons? I mean the Cold War is over, right? That was when all the nuclear weapons were like a big problem But that with the end of the 80s that went away. Well, no no no The nuclear weapons are still there and that is the problem that is the problem because it didn't diminish, you know They didn't just magically disappear and they didn't get any less deadly just because that part Which we call the Cold War of the 20th century sort of passed. So the main questions One particular fact which is by itself kind of funny is that in the world by international treaties five countries are allowed Legally to have nuclear weapons now that number Has gone up to 13 during the course of the 20th century and has by today gone down by nine Okay, so how did that happen? You know why five why isn't it five? What's going on there? That's one thing we're going to be talking about We're going to be talking about a lot of abbreviations and complicated topics And I hope that by the end of the talk at least each one of those abbreviations you should have seen And know what it it's about and of course, what can you do? So that means if you're interested in helping solve the problem of nuclear weapons or want to know more About what's going on in all this context, then I'll be providing you with a few tips towards the end of the talk Okay Now nuclear weapons are made of some stuff and there are some special materials that have to be used in order for a nuclear weapon to work One of these is uranium, which is a heavy metal element that is naturally found in the earth in minerals but in order for it to be useful for Constructing nuclear weapons. You need to make a process called enrichment work with it and that means that the the ratio of the isotope so let's say the different parts of different Types of uranium that you find when you take it out of the earth You have to change that and you have to change it dramatically like you see in the natural Uranium I just see that I think I got the numbers wrong on the left one. Didn't I oh Well, okay, the enrichment means that of one particular isotope You need to make the ratio much bigger. Yeah on the left that should say that should be reversed No, no, no, it should okay, I'll just move to the next slide I guess What I want to say is this enrichment process is extremely complicated and extremely expensive So if you are thinking of getting nuclear weapons, well, this is one way of doing it But it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to cost a lot The alternative that you have is plutonium, which is another element But it's not found naturally in nature because it decays relatively quickly when I say quickly I mean tens of thousands of years as opposed to the millions of years for uranium Now this little bulk of plutonium which weighs something between 10 and 15 kilograms is actually a critical mass So it could explode in a nuclear Runaway-efficient reaction if it had a different shape, which is why they were able to take a picture of it If this was a ball if it was a ball, it would be a critical mass and it would explode But in the shape of a ring, it's not dangerous. So this small Well, it is dangerous. I'm sorry And this you get out of nuclear reactors the ones you use for electricity generation You just run your nuclear reactor and you power your light bulbs and computers and blinkin lights And what naturally sort of comes out from this process is plutonium now you can speed that up You can put in some extra uranium to get out some extra plutonium, but basically you just need a normal Nuclear reactor and that in comparison to the uranium enrichment is something which is relatively easy to do as we're going to be seen Okay, so these are the two materials and then you put them together into a nuclear weapon by the way these pictures They're all from Wikipedia. I mean there used to be jokes about how you know how to build a bomb and now they're coming after you Well, everything I'm going to show has been out there for years. So I'm not a target. I'm not a target So the most basic design is called the gun type which is where you have two subcritical masses So that means bulks of the nuclear material that are too little to explode by themselves and you put them together Normally, this is illustrated as hemispheres which are pushed together. Well hemispheres don't really work What you have is a tube or sort of rings that you shoot onto a stick And this works with uranium and this is sort of the the simplest way in which a nuclear bomb can be assembled This doesn't work with plutonium For complicated nuclear physics kinds of reasons the fission reaction starts too early because of too many prompt neutrons But anyway, this only works with uranium now The other way of doing it is what's called an implosion type device and there you have a hollow sphere So that means you have plutonium not not in a compressed ball But a ball with a hole in the middle if you will And there is a very very intricate and complicated set of explosives around it and at the moment of ignition These explosives compress the ball into a hard sphere into a smaller sphere and that then is a critical mass And this initiates the runaway reaction, which makes the bomb explode You can make these kinds of setups smaller and lighter Which is why practically all the nuclear weapon states have gone to this implosion type device as opposed to the gun type device You can put tritium or deuterium or a mixture of both inside and this calls boosting So you have the same nuclear weapon that would explode as it is And it would make some big explosion But then you can put tritium or deuterium in it and the explosion will be even bigger, which is why these Actually pretty harmless isotopes of hydrogen that are deuterium and tritium Are actually relevant to the proliferation of nuclear weapons because it's a material that you can use for boosting To show you how far this development can go You see here the Davy Crockett, which is a nuclear device a nuclear bomb that was developed by the US military and stationed here in Germany even and This is as bad an idea as it looks The ratio so meaning how far this thing can fly is somewhere between two and four kilometers Yeah and The radius at which it will give you a lethal a deadly dose of radiation is about one kilometer So you have to be a very good shot and very good very sure of the wind direction and everything in it Well, it wasn't never used in the field luckily of course like many other weapons But yeah, they also had this Then we come to what's called the hydrogen bomb or a thermonuclear device Or in technical terms the teller Ulam design this all means basically the same thing Which is that you take the normal nuclear weapon as if it weren't bad enough as it is and you smack on a sort of fusion assembly is what it's called and this Ordinary nuclear bomb then ignites the fusion part of it, which makes for a much much bigger explosion And to illustrate how much bigger this explosion can get now I have scaled these icons which you see there the little speck between the gun type and the 15 kiloton This scales by area of the icon with the explosive yield So the size and the destructive force of the explosion of the other types that I'm going to add now Which is the boosted implosion type which is sort of the biggest The biggest conventional type nuclear weapon that you can build without any fusion involved And then we have the biggest fusion weapons that have ever been invented and this of course I think many will recognize is a photograph of the Tsar Bomba explosion Which was a about 60 megaton explosion that the Soviet Union did in 1961 After deciding that they wouldn't go for the 100 megaton which they had actually designed it for because Didn't really know what it might do to the earth's atmosphere or anything So that was the biggest explosion that ever happened actually the sound wave You know the shock if you're standing anywhere in the next 100 kilometers of this you will hear a big noise this shock sound wave traveled around the earth Three times and they measured it in Norway and in Australia and everywhere after this one explosion So that was a very big one, but for now I would like to go back and focus on these small explosions Because sadly enough these are the only types of explosions that have well no Sad as it is they have been used in war and this was the explosion that was caused by it By which I mean the attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki In 1945 so these were bombs one of the very simple gun type a uranium assembly and one of the Implosion type with plutonium that had been tested before in the Trinity test of 1944 Which was the first nuclear explosion that ever happened on earth? With the gun type assembly that I've told you you shoot a ring onto a stick This assembly was so simple that they did not test it before the first time this type of explosion ever happened Was when it destroyed a city Okay, so that was where it was used in war and when this happens The effects of the bomb are actually manifold. It's not just one Thing blows it all away The explosive blast that means the air that is pushed That is about a little less than half of all the energy the total energy that is released the heat radiation makes for another about half and only 5% you may say Goes into radiation, but of course given how big the explosion is this can still do substantive damage, especially to living beings and With a device called a neutron bomb, which is actually just a regular Regular nuclear bomb with some materials and some different radioactive metals added to Increase the output of radioactivity in this explosion It can go up to about 20 to 30 percent of the total energy released in the form of radiation Now the effects of course are well known This is a before and after picture of the city of Hiroshima and well Yes, it's a river and yes, there are buildings between it and then there aren't And this is what the city scape looked like after the explosion and this as I said was just about under half of the total Destructive energy that went into, you know flattening these buildings now the other almost half Went into heat radiation that can instantly and with the speed of light literally set things on fire at a distance Now the thing that you see on the left is the shadow of this Ring kind of device that you see there So the bomb exploded to the left and front of the picture and where the heat radiation hit the wall between it Well created some sort of ash I would guess and made the wall lighter but where it hit the metal this didn't happen and so it leaves a shadow and Similar thing happened to the woman who is photographed on the right The burn marks on her back. This is going to be the only picture of injured people. I'm sorry I will show this but it's very illustrative The burn marks on her back Match the pattern of color that was on her clothing and where the clothing was darker There was more heat radiation absorbed and this meant that the skin was burned Worse than in other places where the garment was not as light or was not touching Her skin at the moment of the explosion Now the third thing of course the radiation causes radiation poisoning it destroys the DNA in human cells and this leads to Reproductive errors which leads to a very ugly sickness and I chose not to put any pictures of it in it. Um now this sickness Usually has a time of several days. It takes before the really bad effects set in so most of the people were sort of walking around Well, yeah, some of them were walking around the day after the explosion Wondering what happened and then many of them Additionally had to go and find medical help because then only they realized that they Contracted some sort of sickness as an after effect of the explosion, which of course was not known They thought there was some sort of Incredibly powerful bomb and now the city is gone. But hey, I'm alive But then this after effect of radioactivity and radiation poisoning set in which was not known So people didn't know what was happening to them. This was made especially worse because rain falling through the ash the radioactive ash of the fallout from the burning of the city the water rain falling washed out this ash and Got into people's systems because they were drinking the water because obviously there was no other form of water supply available at the time So it's a pretty pretty bad weapon Now to get back on a lighter note Let's see what would happen if this happened with a modern bomb on a modern city and let's say the United States chose to bomb this Congress With a 10 megaton bomb, which is the biggest device that they have invented Why well something about snow and then the NSA and you know, there's probably lots of reasons Now this may sound funny, but think about it with drone strikes. This is about the way it works, right? There's some guy and there's some people next to him, but I bombed them anyway. So what would happen? we see here a map of the city of Hamburg and This is a wonderful tool called nuke map. I've put the address there and you can calculate You just give it some location on a map and it knows about population densities and stuff You can even simulate wind direction fallout everything So if they chose with this large weapon to bomb Congress, then the city of Hamburg would be pretty much gone At least half the population would be dead There would be a crater two kilometers in diameter and pretty much all the populated areas of the city would have their buildings flattened So that is what would happen now think about the destructive power of just one of these weapons and now observe how many there are and You will see that the United States and Russia what used to be the Soviet Union have the largest number of these nuclear weapons and then there's small numbers in Small numbers of nuclear weapons in just a handful of other countries and the terms that we use to describe these situations is Vertical proliferation for the number of nuclear weapons that are in some place Now this tells us that for vertical proliferation the USA and Russia are the biggest well the biggest problems And for horizontal proliferation We might find it interesting to find out how we can prevent more countries from getting nuclear weapons or even Reducing the number of countries so that we can focus better on disarming those that are there Now for vertical proliferation, this is a time chart of how many weapons How many nuclear warheads the United States and the Soviet Union or Russia had at different points in time and we can see that it was basically growing In a bit different, you know in distinct fashions This is all to do with economies and then politics of the Cold War. I'm not going to get very much into that But one interesting feature we can see Is that at the beginning of the 90s there was this rapid decline in the arsenals of both states And this was due to contracts that these two countries Negotiated that would say okay the prospective destruction if one of us too chose to attack the other is bad enough as it is We might as well, you know limit the number of nuclear warheads just to have some sort of Calculability there was this notion that You could really plan and then you could control the idea of nuclear war if it had broken out And well these number games of reducing the number of weapons that you have they were a big tool as you can see for almost Yeah, for most of the decades there have been different Treaties in effect and as it now stands both of these countries will should not have More than a couple of thousand nuclear warheads and active duty But verification is a big problem. I'm going to Present this at the end a little bit Verification means that well, okay now they agree. They've signed a contract. Okay, you get rid of some of your weapons and you get rid of some of your weapons Now prove it. Well, this is extremely difficult because obviously Russia is not going to let United States nuclear engineers just walk into their building, you know bomb building building And start to take them apart or look at the construction plans or anything Ah, you have to involve other countries. You have to involve technical methods. There's things called information barriers and it gets really really complicated Okay, so that much for the vertical proliferation, which as we've seen leaves us with a large enough number we have at the moment Oh, yeah, this was one funny treaty that the United States and Russia signed in 1994 This was the detargeting treaty which in which both parties Assured the other okay We're not pointing our missiles at you anymore If there was a missile that could be set to some target We would set it the target to undefined or if it's a rocket that absolutely needs a target to operate We will set it into the ocean. This is the Minuteman 3 rocket that is still deployed in the United States But how difficult do you think it would be and how much time do you think it would take to actually load a new set of targets right into the 1960s mode. Well, no not at all. This was a symbolic treaty, but that doesn't mean it was useless You know, it was a gesture that defined much of the atmosphere of the early and mid 90s And the negotiations for disarmament of these weapons and other sorts of weapons Is what's called a trust-building measures now to get into the mindset of the 1960s Which was when one of the most important treaties of nuclear disarmament was signed like to present you with a very short song Written and sung by Tom Lehrer an American political comedian that only had a very short career Of absolutely brilliant political satire in the United States in the 60s We're going to be listening to him to get a feeling of what people were thinking about nuclear proliferation in the 1960s First we got the bomb and that was good because we love peace and motherhood Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay because the balance of powers maintained that way. Who's next? France got the bomb, but don't you grieve because they're on our side. I believe China got the bomb But have no fears they can't wipe us out for at least five years So I just pause here for a second. He's asking who's next and The things that he he's describing without the mention of the United Kingdom which apparently didn't matter much at all to him Five nations had managed to develop nuclear weapons by themselves and tested them successfully and even developed fusion devices Which you see on the bottom timeline France he says is on our side I believe by which he means that France developed even though it's a sort of a member of NATO It developed the nuclear force explicitly to be separate from NATO So a different from the United Kingdom which has its nuclear arsenal integrated into NATO France wanted this as a tool for You know to maintain and guarantee their sovereignty Okay, now we're going to be listening to Tom Lara. What he thinks is going to happen after that Then Indonesia claimed that they were going to get one any day South Africa wants to that's right One for the black and one for the white who's next? It's gonna get one Just to use on you know So Israel's getting tense once one in self defense the Lord is our shepherd says the psalm But just in case we better get a bomb Oh Luxembourg is next to go and who knows maybe Monaco will try to stay serene and calm So that was that apparently yes, thank you Tom Now luckily Luxembourg and Monaco did not happen And I've been unable to find out I bet someone of you could tell me if there are actually nuclear weapons stationed in the state of Alabama in the United States as Tom Lara indicates that might be a cause for concern So what did happen next right he mentioned Indonesia not going to be talking about that much anymore because it didn't turn out to be an important player But Israel obviously And so let's see what happened. So in this climate in 1968 the International Atomic Agency was founded and had brokered this nuclear Nuclear nonproliferation treaty that was meant to prevent a larger number of states getting nuclear weapons and the deal is there The deal is five states can ever have nuclear weapons And that is the USA Russia the UK France and China which had managed to do so by that point Everyone else can never have nuclear weapons, but they can get nuclear reactors You know for power generation and the economy and everything And there will be safeguards, which means that the IAEA will maintain a presence and will make inspections in order to watch that There is no nuclear material, you know Made push to the side for nuclear weapons construction, which in the end did happen though Which is why I've outlined that point in red non nuclear weapon states do get nuclear energy technology And that is a problem for nuclear weapons proliferation. It's just a fact Okay, as you see the big five and a large number of other states actually find this a great deal Five states in the world currently do not and we're going to be looking at who these five states are and what happened there So first is Israel which already in the 1960s managed to as it is thought managed to develop nuclear weapons now The technology technological help from France and Germany has been pretty well documented But it's every everything is very secret and Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons It's sort of an open secret in the community It gets very very awkward at diplomatic meetings because there will be like okay the nuclear weapons states and everybody looks at Israel Is I was like what? There their official policy is that they would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East That's the most you know explicit thing anyone's ever gotten them to say Okay, the next state now. We're talking about ten years later is India which managed by means of very you know industrious work and some brilliant nuclear physicists like Baba Managed to develop nuclear weapons of their own and the first nuclear test that they conducted was in 1974 it was called the smiling Buddha test and they declared it a peaceful explosion Okay, this led because they were in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty actually to a nuclear embargo That should mean that no other state in the world that has signed the treaty could sell any nuclear power technology to India But in the course of the decades it turned out that India is too interesting a market for power companies to actually be bound by things like international contracts and so now United States and other Companies and economic actors are happily selling nuclear technology to India India is very explicit in saying that the non-proliferation Treaty is unfair because some states get to have nuclear weapons and other states can never have nuclear weapons And it would join the contract if they were awarded the status of the sixth nuclear power in the world Okay, Pakistan They were motivated by conflict and by the breakup of their country which ended in the in the founding of Bangladesh and very Very troublesome history. They also managed with some ingenuity of their own especially by this gentleman a metallurgist and nuclear Physicist called Abdul Qadir Khan to develop nuclear weapons, but he had big help from a Urenco, which is a company that makes you know nuclear power technology in the Netherlands Where he worked legally and looked at some documents and took some documents home And maybe shipped some materials home and in the end Pakistan was in possession of a nuclear bomb through totally You know peaceful nuclear power which where he had managed to circumvent the safeguards or where they had been lacks or even know safeguards in place The funny thing is Abdul Qadir Khan has been suspected of having helped other countries You know try and implement a nuclear weapons program of their own Iraq Libya North Korea and so by some countries He is considered to be you know a criminal because he has been proliferating nuclear weapons throughout the world in Pakistan Though he is considered an honored citizen and he has received high honors because they had see it as an essential tool of Maintaining and and securing the sovereignty of their state Now North Korea has also managed as the last country in historically To develop nuclear weapons they are guided by their Ideology of self-reliance, you know of never relying on anybody or any actor other than themselves And this of course means that to have very powerful weapons under your control is a useful thing again here Abdul Qadir Khan was implicated in having helped nuclear Development in North Korea the first Nuclear test that North Korea conducted was in 2006 and that was actually the first test that had happened then in eight years We're going to be seeing that that Actually was a big deal so here's the updated conversation about the nuclear non-proliferation treaty Where you see what the countries are thinking of all this India doesn't like it Pakistan agrees with India the only thing where they do South Sudan They have nothing to do with nuclear weapons at all. They're just so new they haven't gotten around to signing it Okay, so this was the yeah and historically there have been other cases South Africa was also mentioned in the song by Tom Lara and they actually were seeking to develop nuclear weapons They were motivated more by you know securing a strategic political position, which is also manifested in the fact that they developed these bulky Gun-type devices with uranium uranium which they had acquired by agreements with Israel And they have been no known. There's a small caveat, which you're going to see later There have been no nuclear tests conducted by South Africa as far as we know And luckily the political shift that set in in South Africa At the end of the apartheid regime at the beginning of the 90s led to them abandoning their nuclear ambitions Submitting to IAEA safeguards joining the non-proliferation treaty and ending You know their nuclear episode and they're the first in only country to really have done so in this way so far So that's good. Go South Africa Okay, these three states the Ukraine Kazakhstan and Belarus became nuclear states overnight In a cold winter night in 1991 and you may guess how that happened Well The state that had formerly possessed the nuclear weapons just wasn't there anymore and they suddenly found that okay We're a new state now. Oh, we have nukes Now the control that they exerted was limited because the weapons were placed on their territory But they didn't have really operational control. They didn't have all the codes They didn't necessarily have officers of their own who knew how to operate everything So it was more of a bargaining chip, but it was very Yeah, it was very valuable to them and in an enormous act of negotiation It was managed to to convince them to give up these nuclear weapons to ship them back to Russia in exchange for money and guarantees of security Meaning for example that Russia as the former hegemony power of the Soviet Union would never invade any of these states That was 20 years ago and Ukraine is not amused okay some other cases The nuclear the non-proliferation treaty just took, you know a point in time to define For whom it is okay to have nuclear weapons and for whom it isn't and other states that might you know technologically have been Able to develop nuclear weapons of their own You can find some lists where some names are floating around Sweden Surprisingly is mentioned a couple of times Germany Japan, but then they had political incentives not to do that But some states do think it is unfair that just at some point in time it was okay to develop nuclear weapons and now it isn't for anyone else They've even had military force used against them on the right. We see satellite pictures The upper one is from the 1980s in Iraq and the lower one is from 2006 in Syria where the Israeli military bombed These these installations for fear of there being a production of nuclear weapons ongoing And other states that have listed here, you know have had political pressure put on them and Prevented them from becoming nuclear states which in the long run I think is a good idea because the less nuclear states we have the better, but especially Looking at the countries that did succeed even though they were in breach of the non-proliferation treaty like India Pakistan This leads to a lot of resentment between certain groups of countries, especially between some Arab countries and Israel okay, so This is one big fuck-up of the West now of Europe Sharing is caring as we know and the United States is sharing their nuclear weapons with us in a program called nuclear sharing United States nuclear weapons are stationed in five countries in Europe Germany Italy Turkey Belgium and the Netherlands now they're stationed there the nukes are inside Non-nuclear weapons states under the non-proliferation treaty Isn't that sort of breaching the non-proliferation treaty? Well, I think yes and most sensible people think that this is a breach of the treaty and the United States and NATO should not be doing that They have a position on this if you ask them How can you be stationed in nuclear weapons in Germany and they say well? They're only stationed, you know, we didn't give them away. They're under our control But German pilots are trained on fighter jets if they work To throw these nuclear weapons there is training going on to train German military pilots to throw a nuclear bomb the United States say nah And you know they're just looking out for them and this is a this is a real screamer The the NATO and the United States say the non-proliferation treaty is meant to keep the peace If nuclear war breaks out, then there's no peace anymore. So it's okay if we give away the weapons Even in peacetime because they're meant for war. Yes, there's no better explanation Okay, so we might ask ourselves is the non-proliferation treaty working, you know Are we preventing states from getting nuclear weapons? Or is it just one big unfair fuck-up of treaties? Well, you can I'd like to look at it this way at the middle of the 20th century It was relatively hard to develop nuclear weapons and five states did so over the course of 20 years And they were well developed nations with large scientific resources After that after the nuclear non-proliferation treaty had been signed in 50 years only four other countries have joined the ranks of these unofficially even though nuclear power and reactor technology has become much more widely available and In terms of the spread of knowledge about all these systems and the weapons It has actually become easier to attain nuclear weapons. So I guess we can say That the non-proliferation treaty is sort of working for most of us Let's get to another topic, which is nuclear testing you take a bomb that you have developed and you're so proud of the bomb You want to show everybody how well it works and you explode it somewhere and you take data and you being all sciency about it And some states have gotten some really horrible ideas about that. This was a picture of the US military They used to do this kind of thing in the 1950s But other states have also had some some very bad ideas about nuclear testing like France take a nice holiday paradise Pacific at all and decide to bomb the shit out of it That poor thing Okay, so nuclear testing is obviously destructive disruptive and we're going to be looking about looking at what it does Worldwide nuclear testing this is the chart of how many nuclear test explosions have been done by what country Over the course of the century and there's two main features I think of this graph that we can focus at and try to find out what's happening there Again, we see that the United States and the Soviet Union or Russia make up most of the problem most of the testing And then we see this gap at the end of the 50s. What happened there? There was practically no nuclear tests in 1958 and 59 and then they sort of end at the beginning of the 90s You know, there is some tests but compared to 10 or 20 years before nuclear testing has all but stopped And we're going to be looking at why this happened now two treaties have been crucial in shaping this set of affairs that is the partial test ban treaty of 1963 and the comprehensive test ban treaty of 1996 in very different situations, of course one during the hate of the Cold War and the other after it ended Now the partial test ban treaty Prohibits nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere in the open air in outer space. They did that and under water Which kind of looked nicer, I guess or something So this is not allowed anymore and most of the states and most of the important players signed this treaty France and China have never signed it and they have conducted Atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests after the 1960s, but they mostly stopped in the 80s and 90s France was the last actually the last of the five Nuclear weapons states the five allowed nuclear weapons states to make tests and that was in 1998 North Korea has also not signed But overall it was a pretty effective treaty. Why did they sign this treaty? Well? Isotopes that means types of nuclear atoms That are formed in nuclear explosions and only in nuclear explosions Have been released into the atmosphere in large numbers because there was a lot of testing going on and This released nuclear materials into the atmosphere and of course by currents and rain and everything They managed to spread all around the world and to have were especially important that a cesium one thirty seven and Strontium 90 and they were found actually in children's teeth and in milk and This happened in the 50s and 60s in the United States They asked school children to send in their milk teeth the first teeth that fell out You know when they were growing up and send them in for science in order to find out if nuclear testing actually affected them And the result was yes. Yes Children that lived in states where nuclear testing was happening or was nearby Had higher levels of these isotopes in their system and I want to point you to The article you can find it there. It's a publication called the appendix dear science. It says my name is Kathy That's just that's just so sweet Okay, but it's my car, of course, they were asked to send in, you know parts of their bodies to see how radioactive they were Okay, this is levels now of these isotopes in the in the atmosphere and you can see in the left graph that the levels were steadily rising the the green curve is in Austria, so it's the northern hemisphere and the southern The red curve is the southern hemisphere where it took a little bit longer to To spread around the globe because much of the testing was done on the northern hemisphere So we can see that well, okay, the axis is actually not very fairly put you can see that this is the natural level of about Of about 100 what do we have there actually mega curies? Yeah, it's a unit for radioactivity And it rose to almost double the natural levels on the northern hemisphere in the 1960s in this concerned politicians And concerned the public and so there was talk of you know stopping nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and that was what happened Now I'd like to point you to the graph on the right Which you will notice is marked in French and this is a very for a very good reason There also we see levels of radioactivity rising over the course of time and peaking in the 1960s Before then falling off over a longer period of time now. What is this data? Well a French nuclear research institution in Bordeaux put bottles of red wine in a gamma Spectrometer and they look for lines of cesium 137 the signature of This isotope now this specific isotope as I said is not natural does not naturally occur on earth But only when nuclear explosions happen So they actually devised a way to find out for some Bottle of wine if it could credibly come from before the 50s or not because if there's any trace of cesium 137 in it it must have been you know closed in the 50s or later And so they did that and this of course affected this is useful for art history You know finding out when a picture was sealed or something for many kinds of things you can just You can just look at stuff in terms of did it happen before or after the start of nuclear testing Now the comprehensive test ban treaty is a treaty with a very simple purpose and it's rather short and it says Don't cause nuclear explosions. Don't call them peaceful like India did don't try to hide it. Just don't and the comprehensive test ban treaty organization is Supposed to look over this treaty and its operation is being prepared by a preparatory commission Which leads to this kind of bulky name of the comprehensive test ban treaty organization preparatory commission I've had the chance to practice So they are setting up a Network to see where nuclear explosions happen And they have a big campaign going on of raising awareness for nuclear testing and the problem that it poses because as I said Nuclear testing has not happened much in the world over the last 20 years There's not as big a sense of that being a problem You know of nuclear testing being an actual problem and a danger as there was for example in the 1960s and though they sponsored a video That is called 1945 to 98 by an artist named Isau Hashimoto And it's got this sort of video game, you know of visuals and it shows all the nuclear explosions that happened over the course of these years And it's got eerie sound effects It's about 15 minutes long and it's very Depressing and eerie to watch now. Of course, we don't have the time for that and I found out I Don't know if this will be funny or horribly inappropriate, but we'll see If you speed this up real fast and give it funny music, then okay, let's look at it Okay Mr. Hashimoto, I'm very sorry So you may have wondered about the explosions going on in Africa that was France because they didn't want nuclear explosions in their own country They had Algeria for that Okay, so the CTBTO prepcom is an organization that is supposed to find out when a nuclear test is happening And this is not as easy as it seems They had a big big field exercise going on in Jordan just a couple of weeks ago Where hundreds or even thousands of you know officers and technicians Went to Jordan and had a big exercise of what it would look like to actually inspect somewhere Where they suspect that a nuclear explosion might have taken place They will collect air samples. They will collect ground samples. They will collect witness testimony And then try to find out if in some state that is being inspected there has been a nuclear explosion Why is this hard? Well, we have a case study which we can look at and that is the Vella incident Which describes something that happened on a on a day in 1979 in the southern Indian Ocean the United States had for a large amount of money and over a long time Developed a specialized set of satellites to look for nuclear explosions They were equipped with cameras and with radiation detectors and they were sent You know all around the world to look for nuclear explosions and then something happened But they can't really say if it was a nuclear explosion. This is the definition of you had one job and failed But much of it is classified so we can't really know There is a theory you could almost call it conspiracy theory. Nothing is confirmed That it may have been a joint operation by South Africa and Israel Which would be if this were true and there is nothing to support that I want to stress this The only test that South Africa or Israel had ever conducted But the satellites were not useless after all they at one time found that Radiation was coming from the wrong direction from outer space and this led to the discovery of gamma rapers and other galaxies Which was a big deal for astrophysics, so All right. Thank you Vella program Okay, so the CTBTO is setting up this Setting up this measurement network and it's a very intricate and large network We see at the top left an infrasound station in some barren part of Norway in the top right We see a radio-nucleid a radioactivity measurement station in China in Peking at the bottom left there is an There is a what's it called a seismic measurement station in Niger in Africa and to the bottom right There is a hydroacoustic so a sound traveling through water measurement station near the South Pole and they have set up I think it is more than a thousand stations by now that span all around the globe And they started only about 15 years ago So that's a job well done and now if something like the Vella incident were to happen again They had a good chance of finding out if it was a nuclear explosion or not The only chance that they had of trying out the system of sensors and everything was for the North Korean nuclear test of 2006 and the subsequent two tests that North Korea has done now Nobody will ever admit that they might have been happy that nuclear that North Korea conducted a nuclear test because there's nothing to be Happy about but it was a test for this network that they set up where they couldn't really do much of simulation So it was a real-world test. That was at least interesting And they managed to confirm that there that actually was a nuclear test there What's the problem so the cdbt sounds pretty nice, okay testing has almost stopped We've got this measurement set up network set up. We've got the ctbt-o working on it all spreading awareness Well the treaty is not in effect. It's just you know Bunch of people have signed work has started, but it's not an effective treaty. It's not binding yet and this is because the treaty has sort of a Self-limiting provision that only if certain states sign and ratify the treaty it will become effective And the signatures and ratifications that are missing. I've laid out there the USA By our Obama when he ran for his first presidential term promised that he would really go for it and try to push Congress to Ratify the ctbt, but then nothing happened Of course, it doesn't have much control over Congress and they just don't want to do it because they say that for the safety of the United States It is essential to retain at least the possibility of starting nuclear tests again Even if they haven't done so for almost 25 years now So that's a problem But we can see again as well as with the non proliferation treaty It's sort of an awkward position of things half working and half not working because nuclear tests have de facto almost stopped When the treaty was signed in 1996 only a couple of tests by India Pakistan France. Oh, I did wrong by France I said their last test was in 98 was in 96 So very few tests happened And it's almost working even though the treaty as I said is not in effect. So okay We I guess we should push for more ratification now to the part of me telling you what you can do and what everyone can do and what I Would like, you know people to get involved in and think about when it comes to nuclear weapons hackers That is what this conference is about it by a large part You can look up a talk by Muritz Kutt Where he does a great summary of the technological problems of nuclear disarmament you can find it on the media CCC repository And there he will say that as I said there's things like information barriers and stuff like that And there's a lot of hard work to be done And if you look at Muritz talk, then you can find out where you could help if you're a coder or you know You're into hardware and stuff Okay, this slide I've been looking forward to for months since I thought of that talk If you are a citizen of some specific country then this might help you You know choose a path where you'd like to push your government to do something I'm very interested. Is there someone from Pakistan or India in the audience? Okay, pity. I don't see anybody but if you're listening in You could use you know your democratic pressure to To push for CTBT signature. No, of course. Yeah, North Korea. This is a bit awkward I wouldn't want them to push their government for anything And I actually I don't even want to joke about it, so Okay, but even citizens, you know of these countries here in Europe We should get rid of the nuclear sharing program of NATO and And it would be a big help if the CTBT actually went into effect finally now what everyone can do regardless of where they live Or where they work What needs to be done? We need to find a concept that sort of replaces the nuclear non-proliferation treaty because it's unfair as certain countries think and it Doesn't really fit into the times anymore The CTBTO this wonderful organization helping to set up this network needs help Especially with publicity because they're not very well known, but they're doing great work You can do that. You can find them on Twitter. They put out a lot of great stuff And we need to solve the problem of proliferation through nuclear power because where there are nuclear reactors There is a chance of someone developing weapons and this needs to be solved somehow we could devise better reactors We could get rid of nuclear power. There's different ways, but we just have to find one or in In the end what we all might do is just do away with goddamn nuclear weapons This may be a long way off, but I hope we'll get there and thank you very much for your attention Thank you for the great talk We now have about 10 minutes of Q&A if you absolutely insist on leaving now Please be very very quiet to not disturb the Q&A and if you can just stay until the end of the talk It's only 10 more minutes. We have six mics. There's one two three four five and six in the back So just line up after the microphone so we so I can see who has to who wants to ask a question Also, if you're in the chat, there's the ISC and we have a human computer interface here to read them out So please microphone number one Yeah, hi Michael Nuclear physics and medical physics got something to remark at first right now We are seeing China deploying these days the first Submarinal submersal nuclear missile crisis So they are joining the submarine force with nuclear rockets for second strike capability capability right now and Of course it is possible to build a nuclear arm of Natural uranium it will only weight 30 tons so you can't deploy it, but it works and The hollow shell loads have the advantage of producing more power because you don't need the metal shell to increase the combustion So as you produce the pressure to the inside you keep the stuff together so so more Could you please come to the point? is done so my Question is where did you got to get the data from? Pollution in Japan after the nuclear strikes That wasn't data about pollution in Japan. So you mentioned it in the sheet But this is a this to the left. This is a NOAA model. This just no no no referring on World War two Excuse me referring on what World War two? So there is oh well those are estimates of course those are estimates of course they were no There were no real good measurement methods, and if they were then then no data was ever published Oh, yes, okay, could you please and carry on the discussion after the talk we have only a few minutes of Q&A Internet, please go ahead Internet is slow today. Yeah, sorry Does the comprehensive test been applied to private persons No, I don't think so, but it's it's geared towards state actors, you know, it's not a bad question But most of the countries have laws that say you can't cause a nuclear explosion You can look this up in the German Strafgesetzbuch where it says das her beiführen einer nuklearen Explosion wird mit einer freiheit strafe von nicht weniger als fünf Jahren bestraft For English speaking listeners that means that you have to go to jail for five years if you cause a nuclear explosion Microphone number three, please Hello in the 2600 magazine recently there was an article stating that the Minuteman missile is locally controlled and After a town countdown expires it can be controlled remotely It also stated that the Minuteman cruise had turned this into a game Where they would allow the countdown to get as close to zero as possible before resetting it Have you heard about this? Can you state on its accuracy and have any other countries done anything similar? I'm not aware of this report, but there has been a report that was widely publicized as John Oliver's You know television show where they talked about bad things happening in the United States Nuclear force that was cheating going on and during safety tests and things like this. So It wouldn't surprise me very much there During the Cold War that developed this mindset of you know, it's it's all just big numbers You cannot imagine a million dead people if you push one button So you just kind of go crazy and think it's a game or something. That's what happens Number four, please Yes, I have a rather short question. Don't you think we need nuclear weapons now to deter Vladimir Putin from doing nasty things Well, no because Russia and the United States are both nuclear powers and There is not much sense in threatening someone with the use of nuclear force ever especially if they have theirs of their own Putin does Well, yes, but so do many others and I don't want the war escalating. So let's not threaten anyone with that Internet In Hashimoto is south video. You can see month-long pauses of no nuclear tests at all Only when someone starts again other countries immediately immediately react by tests of their own There are some kind of ping-pong going on Good question. I guess well, some of this maybe you know the inaccuracy of the records of when exactly the test It happened though that is actually pretty well documented No, I would say the testing mostly happened in in campaigns They would do a shot of five nuclear tests over let's say a week and then there would be a pause of several Of several weeks or months before the next campaign started So I would I would say that during the 60s, which was where we saw the video from this was mostly coincidence But of course in 1998 in the case of India and Pakistan that was not a coincidence India conducted a nuclear test and within a week after that Pakistan conducted a nuclear test And that was clearly a reaction Mike number one, please. Yes. Thank you for this excellent talk I want to add a little detail when it comes to the comprehensive test and treaty So basically one of the backgrounds that the US pushed in the 90s for the for this treaty was that the nuclear weapons Community deemed their simulation capacities good enough not to conduct any real tests anymore so the Clinton administrative sort of forged a diplomatic initiative out of it and basically went ahead and pushed other countries to sign this because they were confident that they can test the weapons virtually and Apparently they gave some codes to China and French sort of did this test to recalibrate their models in 96 and Now basically the time That in the 90s they thought they need or that that they could guarantee this Has run out. So basically I said 20 years out. This which is now is What we can guarantee all weapons to to work This is called the nuclear Stockpile stewardship program and they do verification in the functionality of the weapons and guarantee the military commanders that they work So my question now is do you expect new tests to happen? In the coming years because all those designs from the 70s 80s are not verified anymore or will they continue to rely on Computer simulations in this. Well, the simulation capabilities, of course have become much much better since the 90s And so actually there is a bigger chance of you know making successful tests With simulations only but it is true that nuclear weapons degrade over time after some decades You can't say for sure how the materials have changed so you're not sure if they work Well, I just hope that the political pressure and the worldwide political situation is such that a renewed nuclear test by one of the big actors like Russia or the United States would carry such a public outrage That they dare not just make another test again It may be legal if they wanted to do that But I hope that the public outcry that they fear would be so bad. They're not going to try Mike number two and make it quick, please quick heads up officially, Alabama does not store or produce nuclear weapons and A question. Maybe you know are there any movements against semi nuclear weapons or Weapons that don't actually try to cause a chain reaction, but use Nuclear shit stored inside them to produce heat in order to explode Like tank engines and stuff like that like the end uses in Afghanistan. Well, you have You have depleted uranium ammunition, of course where they use uranium just because it's a very hard metal And that causes radiological problems for the population. There's rises in cases of cancer and I meant if they tried to conceal that in any way conceal like no to If there are any movements against these types of ammunition because they also leave follow Well, there is the idea of a fissile material cut-off treaty that would mean that all the nuclear Weapons capable material like uranium and plutonium in the world have to be controlled and you have to really write down How much you have and where it is and have safeguards in place? So I guess that would encompass this type of material so that it couldn't get into the wrong hands and be made into weapons So let's hope also beside the CTBT being ratified that the fissile material cut-off treaty can really happen Okay, we are out of time. Please once again, thank Michael