Some views on the mistakes of the Nuclear (Non-Proliferation) Summit held in Washington this week (12.April+, 2010)
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010Hoopla, hoopla, yada-yada and a lot of the same old talk. So the USA and Russia are going to cut back numbers and dismantle a bunch of weapons that are outmoded, obsolete, dysfunctional, unreliable, and needing to be disassembled anyway. So there is all this hand-clapping and smiling about reducing (hiding away, that is, unless some politico has suddenly discovered the secret of easy transmutation of transuranic elements!) several metric tons of Plutonium, “enough to make 17,000 weapons.”
Well, I have one simple comment, and it is the same that was made in my presence by the late Edward Teller at a small meeting over 15 years ago.
We should take our nuclear weapons, and a lot of our weapons-grade nuclear materials, to deep, deep, very deep space, and build bases for storing them not in perpetuity to be out of the way but for definite future use - not as weapons against nations and people, but as weapons of planetary defense against asteroids that can come and will come and present collision risks that we cannot escape through simpler methods such as the ASTRIC program (http://tetradyn.com/astric if you want to learn more).
Situated in L5 perpetual-orbit locations, or much further out, on a lunar base, we should have a huge arsenal of different nuclear weapon devices for “surgical” use in diverting NEO threats to Earth. We do Not have time to lose.
And yes, we need to have a manned space program, and it is a big mistake to be cutting Everything all at once. This is not just about the USA as a nation-state. We need to pump money into Space - in the USA, in Russia, France, Great Britain, Germany, China, Japan, India, and everywhere. As much as possible, as soon as possible.
Our future really does depend upon expansion off the planet.
