Here's how much deadlier today's nukes are compared to WWII atomic bombs. With so much at stake, it's important to understand what these things are capable of.
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Villagers in India are worried that recent deadly floods are the result of plutonium hidden in the Himalayas.
The CIA lost the plutonium after a secret mission to monitor China’s nuclear program.
Although unlikely, it’s an example of how fearful people are of nuclear materials.
Villagers are blaming a long-abandoned cache of plutonium for deadly floods in India’s Himalaya mountains.
The plutonium, which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) abandoned in the 1960s, was meant to power sensors designed to monitor Chinese nuclear tests. While villagers in the vicinity blame the plutonium for floods that have killed scores of people, the missing radioactive material most likely isn’t the cause.
ITER is a huge, internationally enmeshed nuclear fusion project. After spending billions of dollars over decades, the reactor is scheduled to switch on for its first productive (“ignited”) fusion in 2035. Until then, teams will work around the clock on construction and testing. That means assembling the gigantic, donut-shaped tokamak reactor, where nuclear fuel will be turned into sun-hot plasma and circulated in a magnetic field.
The magic fuel mix combines tritium and deuterium. There are just 20 kilograms of tritium, a fragile isotope of hydrogen with an extremely short half life, in the entire world. Deuterium, meanwhile, is stable and the secondmost abundant stable isotope of hydrogen because there are only two stable isotopes. ITER plans to use a 50/50 mix of both fuels beginning in 2035, which means the reactor must be able to withstand a special beating from swirling tritium neutrons that will bombard the exterior of the fusion chamber.
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New START caps the number of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia can deploy at any given time.
The Trump Administration was not in favor of recommitting to the treaty.
President Joe Biden s administration has signaled that the United States is willing to extend a critical arms control treaty with Russia. If Russia agrees, the move would grant a five-year extension to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which issues strict limits on the number of nuclear weapons either country can deploy on land, air, and sea.
Arms control advocates feared a collapse of the treaty could lead to a dramatic increase in the number of nuclear weapons that both sides are ready to use.