The nuke detectives – New ways to detect covert nuclear weapons

I find it quite shocking how openly this article boasts about violation of everyones&#x27; privacy regarding &quot;network analysis&quot; (in the section about intelligence gathering, &quot;The latest kit&quot;).<p>Quotes: &quot;thanks to advances in “network analysis” software&quot;, &quot;fed with people’s e-mails, schooling, web surfing, phone calls, banking transactions and purchases, the programs try to work out who might be a terrorist.&quot; ...<p>And while US americans might claim that this is of course only allowed to be used on foreigners (ignoring evidence to the contrary that just abut every countries intelligence services seems to spy on everyone including their own citizens), they explicitly mention someone who traveled abroad, comes back, and then gets his phone records screened.

The thing that scares me is anything which eliminates the fissile isotope production as a step. Everything else is essentially trivial and could probably be done covertly or brazenly by a state or even a well resourced non-state actor.<p>Fission-free fusion is probably not realistic at this point (but, if it were developed, would be terrifying), but I think the technology curve for some form of laser isotope separation is disconnected from &quot;special nuclear stuff&quot; and much more &quot;advances in mainstream science.<p>I&#x27;m completely amazed there hasn&#x27;t been an openly documented theft of either nuclear materials or weapons and subsequent nuclear declaration by a new state or non-state. It seemed self-evident that would happen post-USSR collapse. I suspect some combination of luck and extremely good work by the IC in both Russia and non-Russia had a lot to do with that. Plus, the states most likely to want the weapons already had other pathways, although it&#x27;s always possible something like the Pakistani or NK or Iranian program &quot;launders&quot; stolen material through some other more overt pipeline, using a &quot;completely working, honest&quot; enrichment process to cover for it. But the isotopic mixes are identifiable, so we&#x27;d know once they detonated where material came from.

Most of the damage from a future &#x27;rogue&#x27; nuke may be done by our reaction to it. Like the modern Pearl Harbor&#x27;s fallout around us.<p>Edit: spelling

&gt; Once a country has a nuclear bomb or two, there is not much other governments can do to stop it from making more, says Ilan Goldenberg, a former head of the Iran team at the Pentagon. Plenty of states want such capabilities.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Melian_Dialogue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Melian_Dialogue</a><p>The unstated implication is that weapons and military power are for the US, and its allies. Others can&#x27;t have any.<p>The brazen arrogance of that idea is probably among the chief reasons the US is so vehemently and passionately disliked throughout the world.<p>What precisely is wrong with other states acquiring nuclear weapons, beyond the fact that it threatens US power?

&gt; And on top of that, the United States Air Force runs a detection network that includes satellites that can spot nuclear-weapons tests.<p>Always curious about this, but how do satellites detect the tests? Especially underground&#x2F;water ones?

paywall :&#x2F;