Nuclear Diner

My colleague at Balloon Juice, Tom Levenson, has written another book. Tom is a popular-science writer and has written a number of books on various aspects of science – climate, Newton, Einstein are a few.

So Very Small is particularly relevant to our time. It traces the development of germ theory while also giving an account of how science develops. Tom is on Bluesky, and his comments there suggested to me that the book would be a relative of Microbe Hunters, by Paul de Kruif, a book that was formative for me.

Microbe Hunters, as I recall from decades back, is a series of vignettes about the various scientists who found particular microbes and successfully associated them with disease, sometimes finding a cure or prevention. As a child, I had no trouble imagining myself as one of the scientists: Robert Koch and anthrax, Louis Pasteur’s swan-necked flasks, those who used mercury as a harsh cure for many things, including syphilis.

Levenson uses many of the stories of Microbe Hunters in a different way. Imagine watching your children or neighbors get sick and die and not know why. There are patterns but they do not point clearly to a cause. Some commonality – dead bodies and bad odors suggest that perhaps a malign miasma wafts its way toward the unfortunate. Or they may have been weak to begin with, and something went wrong inside their bodies. Or, of course, God’s inscrutable will.

I have a number of questions about the overhead photos of the bombing at Fordo. I haven’t done a detailed photo analysis like this in a long time – probably back to the photos of what turned out to be a Syrian reactor under construction in 2007. And I’m not up to date on how the MOP bombs work, so these may be dumb questions. But I haven’t seen them asked or answered.

At the very least, perhaps this analysis will help people to understand how it’s done.

A number of news outlets report that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has assessed that the damage at Fordo was not extensive, not the obliteration that Donald Trump claims. Trump has been at odds with the intelligence agencies on a number of issues around the attack he ordered on Iran’s nuclear sites. I choose to believe the intelligence agencies over Trump’s vibes. But it is an early assessment and can change.

The Ukrainian drone attack hit two components of the Russian nuclear force. The primary purpose of the attack was to destroy the planes that launch cruise missiles at Ukraine. Some of those planes are also the types that carry nuclear weapons. There also were hits at Severomorsk, the headquarters of the Northern Fleet and Russia’s ballistic missile submarines. We have much less information about the hits at Severomorsk, so I won’t say more about it in this post. I want to make clear that from what we know, no nuclear weapons were involved in today’s action. The primary nuclear bomber bases were not targeted.

As much as a third of Russia’s nuclear bomber fleet was destroyed. No new bombers have been produced for some time, and there are no facilities to produce them. This has serious implications for the nuclear balance between Russia and the United States.

Last week I saw an obituary in the New Mexican of someone who made a difference in my life. We were professional colleagues, never close friends. But that difference was consequential beyond me, and I had questions I wanted to ask him. I didn’t realize he had been in town all this time.

In the 1990s, the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) was launched by the United States, the European Union, Norway, and Japan. Its purpose was to find work for weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union, so that they would not feel it necessary to sell their nuclear weapons expertise. The countries that had been part of the Soviet Union were unable to pay those scientists. The scientists were asked to propose work to the ISTC, which would then evaluate and, if appropriate, fund the proposals. This also served to help the scientists adjust to the international ways of proposals and funding, which was different from what they were accustomed to.

Steven (Steve) Gitomer was the Los Alamos National Laboratory liaison to the ISTC. He distributed information about the current proposals to those of us who were interested. Many of the proposals were physics-related, studies of semiconductors and stars. But in one group was a proposal from Kazakhstan’s Institute of Nuclear Physics to survey radioactive contamination at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS). It sounded a great deal like what I was doing at Los Alamos, so I asked Steve to send me the proposal.