2022 Fall Colloquium Series; F. von Hippel, Ph.D., Princeton University
The continuing risk of nuclear war and how physicists, acting as citizen-scientists, can help reduce it
With the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union,
the public, including most physicists, and Congress, assumed, the
danger of a nuclear war had ended as well. Unfortunately, that has not
been the case. Indeed, the danger of accidental nuclear war may be
increasing. US and Russian strategic missiles remain in a
launch-on-warning posture in an era when hackers have penetrated some of
our supposedly most secure computer systems and China appears to be
moving toward a similar posture. Both Russia and the United States have
committed to hugely costly programs to replace their nuclear weapons
with new systems designed to maintain that status quo for the remainder
of the century. Meanwhile, an offense-defense nuclear arms race is
developing between the US and China, which is building up the number of
its nuclear weapons that can reach the US as the US increases the number
of its ballistic missile interceptors – nominally to defend against
North Korea. In the past, independent physicists have played leading
roles in informing Congress and the world about the dangers and offering
ideas for how to reduce them – both unilaterally and through agreements
with our adversaries. The American Physical Society has supported the
Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction during its first two
years to help renew the engagement of physicists and other physical
scientists and engineers with Congress and the public on nuclear-weapon
issues. Following the colloquium, there will be a discussion of
opportunities to contribute to this effort.
Our colloquium is on every Wednesday 4-5PM US central time. You can see the talk schedule at
https://www.baylor.edu/physics/colloquia. The streaming will start a little before each colloquium talk starts.