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Archive for the ‘nuclear weapons’ category: Page 2

Jul 5, 2023

Dr. Robert Floyd, Ph.D. — Executive Secretary, Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

Posted by in categories: chemistry, geopolitics, military, nuclear weapons, policy, terrorism, treaties

Dr. Robert Floyd, Ph.D. is Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO — https://www.ctbto.org/), the organization tasked with building up the verification regime of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, a multilateral treaty opened for signature in 1996 by which states agree to ban all nuclear explosions in all environments, for military or civilian purposes.

Prior to joining CTBTO, Dr. Floyd was the Director General of the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO), where he was responsible for Australia’s implementation of and compliance with various international treaties and conventions including the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

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Jun 30, 2023

Tesla, Facebook, OpenAI Account For 24.5% Of ‘AI Incidents,’ Security Company Says

Posted by in categories: existential risks, food, health, law, military, nuclear weapons, robotics/AI

The first “AI incident” almost caused global nuclear war. More recent AI-enabled malfunctions, errors, fraud, and scams include deepfakes used to influence politics, bad health information from chatbots, and self-driving vehicles that are endangering pedestrians.

The worst offenders, according to security company Surfshark, are Tesla, Facebook, and OpenAI, with 24.5% of all known AI incidents so far.

In 1983, an automated system in the Soviet Union thought it detected incoming nuclear missiles from the United States, almost leading to global conflict. That’s the first incident in Surfshark’s report (though it’s debatable whether an automated system from the 1980s counts specifically as artificial intelligence). In the most recent incident, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) was forced to shut down Tessa, its chatbot, after Tessa gave dangerous advice to people seeking help for eating disorders. Other recent incidents include a self-driving Tesla failing to notice a pedestrian and then breaking the law by not yielding to a person in a crosswalk, and a Jefferson Parish resident being wrongfully arrested by Louisiana police after a facial recognition system developed by Clearview AI allegedly mistook him for another individual.

May 15, 2023

French Polynesia nuke tests slightly increased cancer risk: Study

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military, nuclear weapons

Polynesians exposed to fallout from France’s nuclear tests in the South Pacific have a slightly increased risk of developing thyroid cancer, a study suggested on Monday that used declassified military data for the first time.

France carried out 41 atmospheric nuclear weapon tests in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1975, exposing residents to fallout which has been a source of lasting friction between Paris and residents of the Pacific archipelago.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, used risk modeling to estimate that the were associated with between 0.6 percent and 7.7 percent of in French Polynesia.

Feb 21, 2023

Putin not backing down on Ukraine, insists West is at fault

Posted by in categories: geopolitics, military, nuclear weapons, treaties

Quote:

Putin also said that Russia would suspend its participation in a treaty aimed at keeping a lid on nuclear weapons expansion. The so-called New START Treaty was signed by Russia and the U.S. in 2010. It caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads they can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.

Putin said Tuesday in a major address that Russia was not fully withdrawing from the treaty yet. He said Russia must stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the US does so.

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Jan 23, 2023

Military probing whether cancers linked to nuclear silo work

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military, nuclear weapons

Nine military officers who had worked decades ago at a nuclear missile base in Montana have been diagnosed with blood cancer and there are “indications” the disease may be linked to their service, according to military briefing slides obtained by The Associated Press. One of the officers has died.

All of the officers, known as missileers, were assigned as many as 25 years ago to Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to a vast field of 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silos. The nine officers were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to a January briefing by U.S. Space Force Lt. Col. Daniel Sebeck.

Missileers ride caged elevators deep underground into a small operations bunker encased in a thick wall of concrete and steel. They remain there sometimes for days, ready to turn the launch keys if ordered to by the president.

Dec 13, 2022

Crawling robots will survey ageing US nuclear missile silos

Posted by in categories: military, nuclear weapons, robotics/AI

Decades-old US silos holding Minuteman III missiles that have been a key nuclear deterrent since the 1970s will be assessed by robots that can crawl straight up walls.

Dec 8, 2022

New kilonova has astronomers rethinking what we know about gamma-ray bursts

Posted by in categories: cosmology, geopolitics, military, nuclear weapons, satellites, treaties

A year ago, astronomers discovered a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) lasting nearly two minutes, dubbed GRB 211211A. Now, that unusual event is upending the long-standing assumption that longer GRBs are the distinctive signature of a massive star going supernova. Instead, two independent teams of scientists identified the source as a so-called “kilonova,” triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Because neutron star mergers were assumed to only produce short GRBs, the discovery of a hybrid event involving a kilonova with a long GRB is quite surprising.

“This detection breaks our standard idea of gamma-ray bursts,” said co-author Eve Chase, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We can no longer assume that all short-duration bursts come from neutron-star mergers, while long-duration bursts come from supernovae. We now realize that gamma-ray bursts are much harder to classify. This detection pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limits.”

As we’ve reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. The first gamma-ray bursts were observed in the late 1960s, thanks to the launching of the Vela satellites by the US. They were meant to detect telltale gamma-ray signatures of nuclear weapons tests in the wake of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The US feared that the Soviets were conducting secret nuclear tests, violating the treaty. In July 1967, two of those satellites picked up a flash of gamma radiation that was clearly not the signature of a nuclear weapons test.

Dec 1, 2022

China’s nuclear arsenal to triple by 2035? Country to expand nuclear warheads to 1500 | WION

Posted by in categories: military, nuclear weapons

The protests in China have had no impact on Beijing’s ambitions of world domination. On Tuesday, Chinese jets violated South Korea’s Air defence zone. A Pentagon report further claims China will have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035. Priyanka Sharma reports.

#Gravitas #China #Nuclear.

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Nov 20, 2022

Even a small nuclear war could cause global famine — here’s what the data shows

Posted by in categories: climatology, computing, existential risks, geopolitics, military, nuclear weapons, treaties

Nuclear arsenals remain large enough to fundamentally shift the Earth system in the blink of an eye.

The U.S. and Russia have recently agreed to hold talks on the New START Treaty, and the only accord left regulating the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. While this is undoubtedly good news, we must not allow it to lull us into complacency. Global events this year, most notably in Ukraine, have raised fears of a nuclear conflict to levels not seen since the cold war. More than 10,000 nuclear warheads remain in the world, and the Kremlin’s language regarding weapons of mass destruction has become increasingly threatening in 2022.


Global famine and climate breakdown

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Oct 18, 2022

Elon Musk Warns Russia Can Utterly Destroy US, Europe With Nuclear Missiles In Under 30 Minutes And Vice Versa: ‘We Are At The Highest Risk In 60 Years’

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, existential risks, military, nuclear weapons

After floating a peace plan to end the Ukraine war Elon Musk has of late been talking about the possibility of a looming nuclear war. Reasonable…

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