Nuclear weapon

• Russia is reported to have deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, a step that was much telegraphed earlier this year and recently confirmed by Poland.
• Russia reportedly has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, with (as of 2023) 5,889 nuclear warheads compared to 5,244 deployed by the US.
• That said, the rhetoric from the Russian leadership since the invasion of Ukraine has regularly raised the threat of Russia’s nuclear stockpile.

Different classes of nuclear weapons

• This idea of mutually assured destruction is linked to strategic nuclear weapons – which can be used to strike big targets – such as cities – more than 3,500km away and carry huge payloads.
• But the weapons reportedly being stationed in Belarus by Russia are tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs).
• In 2018, then US defense secretary Jim Mattis, said: “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer”.

Russia’s nuclear policy

• Current Russian nuclear doctrine, outlines four cases in which it would use its nuclear weapons.
• The first three cases are currently largely inapplicable given no one is attacking or threatening Russia with ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons.
• This essentially means that a key part of Russia’s nuclear doctrine holds that to de-escalate a non-nuclear (conventional) conflict, Russia would have to escalate it first through the threat of a limited or tactical nuclear strike.
• Russia’s nuclear forces have been on “high alert” since February 2022, days after the invasion began.
• They looked at me like when I said I worry about Putin using tactical nuclear weapons.

• It initiated a global arms race that threatens the survival of humanity and the planet as we know it.
• It also led to widespread public health and environmental damage from nuclear weapons production and testing.
• As a researcher examining communication in science, technology, energy and environmental contexts, I’ve studied these legacies of nuclear weapons production.
• Total cleanup costs are projected to reach up to US$640 billion, and the job won’t be completed for decades, if ever.

Victims of nuclear tests

• Nuclear weapons production and testing have harmed public health and the environment in multiple ways.
• So far, they have not been included in the federal program to compensate uranium miners and “downwinders” who developed radiation-linked illnesses after exposure to later atmospheric nuclear tests.
• The largest above-ground U.S. tests, along with tests conducted underwater, took place in the Pacific islands.
• Estimating how many people have suffered health effects from these tests is notoriously difficult.

Polluted soil and water

• Starting in 1944, workers at the remote site in eastern Washington state irradiated uranium fuel in reactors and then dissolved it in acid to extract its plutonium content.
• Hanford’s nine reactors, located along the Columbia River to provide a source of cooling water, discharged water contaminated with radioactive and hazardous chemicals into the river through 1987, when the last operating reactor was shut down.
• Extracting plutonium from the irradiated fuel, an activity called reprocessing, generated 56 million gallons of liquid waste laced with radioactive and chemical poisons.
• The wastes were stored in underground tanks designed to last 25 years, based on an assumption that a disposal solution would be developed later.

A culture of secrecy

• As the movie “Oppenheimer” shows, government secrecy has shrouded nuclear weapons activities from their inception.
• But as I’ve argued previously, the principle of secrecy quickly expanded more broadly.
• Initially, strict secrecy – reinforced by the region’s economic dependence on the Hanford site – made it hard for concerned citizens to get information.

Cautionary legacies

• As Nolan’s film recounts, J. Robert Oppenheimer and many other Manhattan Project scientists had deep concerns about how their work might create unprecedented dangers.
• Looking at the legacies of the Trinity test, I wonder whether any of them imagined the scale and scope of those outcomes.

• But the meeting also highlighted an evolving alliance that recently expanded to include Finland, with Sweden expected to join in the coming months.
• It is worthwhile considering this direction, succinctly outlined by the official communiqué issued at the summit’s conclusion, and what it will mean for New Zealand.

Ukraine told ‘not now’

• Read more:
  Nato: Vilnius summit will reflect fresh sense of purpose over Ukraine war – but hard questions remain over membership issues

  NATO’s decision not to give Ukraine a pathway to membership was also key.

• To invite Ukraine now would have created a direct route to global conflict.
• Despite this disappointment for Ukraine, NATO will increase the cooperation and assistance given to the country.

Threads of connection winding us tighter to NATO

• But New Zealand has become a “partner”, making up an Indo-Pacific cohort that includes Australia, Japan and the Republic of Korea – known as IP4.
• Read more:
  Why is NATO expanding its reach to the Asia-Pacific region?
• It’s important to note the IP4 shared security obligations stem from bilateral treaties and not any one collective agreement.

China continues to loom large

• Since late 2020, the IP4 cohort has been galvanised around the shift in the global balance of power and the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
• While remaining “open to constructive engagement with the PRC”, NATO’s latest communiqué warned China against giving support to Russia and took aim at China’s efforts to undermine global stability.

The 2% target

• The original goal was that each NATO country spend 2% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the military.
• Military spending makes up just 1.5% of our GDP.

The nuclear umbrella

• Via the communiqué, NATO said it was “ready and able to deter aggression and manage escalation risks in a crisis that has a nuclear dimension”.
• NATO also announced intentions to strengthen “training and exercises that simulate conventional and […] a nuclear dimension of a crisis or conflict”.
• The alliance emphasised the importance of “the United States’ nuclear weapons forward-deployed in Europe” and reaffirmed “the imperative to ensure the broadest possible participation by allies concerned in NATO’s nuclear burden-sharing arrangements to demonstrate alliance unity and resolve”.

• The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI.
• Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I.
• And, in its most extreme version, this argument morphs into explicit anxieties about AIs enslaving or destroying the human race.

Actual harm

• Yes, AI’s ability to create convincing deep-fake video and audio is frightening, and it can be abused by people with bad intent.
• In fact, that is already happening: Russian operatives likely attempted to embarrass Kremlin critic Bill Browder by ensnaring him in a conversation with an avatar for former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
• Cybercriminals have been using AI voice cloning for a variety of crimes – from high-tech heists to ordinary scams.

Not in the same league

• The statement from the Center for AI Safety lumped AI in with pandemics and nuclear weapons as a major risk to civilization.
• COVID-19 resulted in almost 7 million deaths worldwide, brought on a massive and continuing mental health crisis and created economic challenges, including chronic supply chain shortages and runaway inflation.
• They have also changed the calculations of national leaders on how to respond to international aggression, as currently playing out with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What it means to be human

• AI in its current form can alter the way people view themselves.
• It can degrade abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human.
• But the role of algorithmic recommendation engines is to reduce that kind of serendipity and replace it with planning and prediction.
• If it does, educators will lose a key tool for teaching students how to think critically.

Not dead but diminished

• But the increasingly uncritical embrace of it, in a variety of narrow contexts, means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills.
• Algorithms are already undermining people’s capacity to make judgments, enjoy serendipitous encounters and hone critical thinking.
• The fantastic anxieties around the coming AI cataclysm, singularity, Skynet, or however you might think of it, obscure these more subtle costs.