With the week interrupted by both the Fourth of July and a heat wave it seems a good time to serve up a few light snacks rather than a full-blown posting. So here are a few stories in the news recently – none have received a lot of attention yet; we’ll have to see what [...]
I am a professor at Stanford University, best known for my invention of public key cryptography — the technology that protects your credit card. But, for almost 30 years, my primary interest has been how fallible human beings can survive possessing nuclear weapons, where even one mistake could be catastrophic. I’ve created a series of [...]
I was at an international conference in Madrid, Spain in the summer of 2004 when I was accosted by a member of the delegation from the Philippines. She told me of a Filipino physician who had set up a cancer therapy clinic and who obtained a used radiation therapy source from a hospital in the [...]
I’ve never had the experience of having a gun pointed at me but I’m guessing that it would make me wish mightily for a gun of my own to help even the odds. I do know that whenever my submarine ventured near the Soviet Union we knew that their ships were armed and we took [...]
So what would you think about using nuclear weapons to blast a new canal across Central America? Or to dredge a new harbor? How about lighting off a nuke deep underground to fracture rock and increase natural gas production – and we thought that fracking was controversial! Nutty? Well…today they sure seem that way, but [...]
Let’s use this week’s post to speculate a little bit. Let’s think about a world in which cancer is no longer feared. This is not necessarily a world without cancer – but at least one in which cancer is routinely prevented or treated, so that it is more like pneumonia or (at worst) diabetes. This [...]
As an undergraduate student at Ohio State (I studied Geology) I was intrigued to find that hydrogeologists were indirect fans of the era of nuclear weapons testing. By “indirect” I mean that they didn’t really approve of the testing itself, but they loved the fact that the radioactivity put into the environment could be quite [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]