Reply #7: Happy New Year to you too! [View All]

[bananas]

Hopefully, this year you'll learn that not only is nuclear proliferation a serious problem with nuclear energy, but that nuclear weapons are also a serious threat to the environment. And as Martin Hellman points out, given enough time, MAD will fail as a deterrent.

:nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke:

http://nuclearrisk.org/soaring_article.php

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On an annual basis, that makes relying on nuclear weapons a 99% safe maneuver. As with 99.9% safe maneuvers in soaring, that is not as safe as it sounds and is no cause for complacency. If we continue to rely on a strategy with a one percent failure rate per year, that adds up to about 10% in a decade and almost certain destruction within my grandchildren's lifetimes. Because the estimate was only accurate to an order of magnitude, the actual risk could be as much as three times greater or smaller. But even 1/3% per year adds up to roughly a 25% fatality rate for a child born today, and 3% per year would, with high probability, consign that child to an early, nuclear death.

Given the catastrophic consequences of a failure of nuclear deterrence, the usual standards for industrial safety would require the time horizon for a failure to be well over a million years before the risk might be acceptable. Even a 100,000 year time horizon would entail as much risk as a skydiving jump every year, but with the whole world in the parachute harness. And a 100 year time horizon is equivalent to making three parachute jumps a day, every day, with the whole world at risk.

While my preliminary analysis and the above described intuitive approach provide significant evidence that business as usual entails far too much risk, in-depth risk analyses are needed to correct or confirm those indications. A statement endorsed by the following notable individuals:

- Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics
- Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board and Interim CEO, VeriSign Inc.
- Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President's Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board
- Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director National Security Agency and Deputy Director CIA
- Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
- Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of FDA
- Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics

therefore "urgently petitions the international scientific community to undertake in-depth risk analyses of nuclear deterrence and, if the results so indicate, to raise an alarm alerting society to the unacceptable risk it faces as well as initiating a second phase effort to identify potential solutions." (Hellman 2008)

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