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by mdhb
490 days ago
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I’m actually in agreement with you here. I think it’s probably reasonable to assume that through some kind of combination of home grown talent and their prolific IP theft programs that they are going to end up with that capability at some point the only thing in debate here is the timeline. As I understand things (I’m not actually a professional here) the current thinking has up to this point been something akin to a containment strategy largely based on lessons learned from years of nuclear non-proliferation work. But things are developing at such a crazy pace and there are some major differences between this and nuclear technology that it’s not really a straightforward copy and paste strategy at all. For example this time around a huge amount of the research comes from the commercial sector completely independently of defense and is also open source. Also thanks for that anecdote I hadn’t heard of that before. This is a bit of a long shot but maybe you might know, I was trying to think of some research that came out maybe 2-3 years ago that basically had the ability to remotely detect if anything in a room had been moved (I might be misremembering this slightly) and it was said to be potentially a big breakthrough for nuclear arms control. I can’t remember what the hell it was called or anything else about it, do you happen to know? |
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Sadly, I don't think this is actually helpful for nuclear arms control. I suppose you could imagine a case where a country is known to have enough nuclear material for exactly X warheads, hasn't acquired more, and it could prove to an inspector that all of the material is still inside the same devices it was in at the last inspection. But most weapons development happens by building new bombs, not repurposing old ones, and most countries don't have exactly X bombs, they have either 0 or so many the armed forces can't reliably count them.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13457