Ex-Astronaut’s Lonely Mission: Save Earth From Asteroid Strike

Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart has already earned his place in the history books by going to the moon with the Apollo 9 mission. However, should an asteroid crash into the Earth anytime soon, killing millions and causing catastrophic damage, he’ll also be remembered as the guy whose warnings we ignored.

Source: Wired.

The Risk Governance of Nanotechnology: Recommendations for Managing a Global Issue

Short Description:
This document reports on the discussions undertaken at the Conference “The Risk Governance of Nanotechnology: Recommendations for Managing a Global Issue” held at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue on the 6th and 7th of July 2006. Stakeholders from industry, government, research and civil society gathered to give feedback on the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC)White Paper1 on Nanotechnology Risk Governance and to explore how its recommendations could be implemented.

From the “Summary of Frame Two NGO Workshop” presented by yours truly (page 49 of paper version, page 51 of PDF):

Military offence applications are particularly concerning because, unlike nuclear arms, verification difficulties mean there is no clear point at which opponents reach stability in the process of escalation and proliferation. Existing arms treaties may not apply to nanotechnology-based weapons, and there are important intellectual property, commercial confidentiality, and national security issues involved in addressing this challenge…

Finally, while current attention is focused on near-term concerns, questions raised by Frame Two nanotechnologies are more difficult, particularly with respect to fourth-generation, atomically-precise manufacturing of macroscale products. The risk governance process must move faster to address longer-term political, military, and civil liberties issues in time.

Source: Swiss Re via Nanowerk via Foresight.

Chinese nuclear sub shows up on Google Earth

Increasingly, tools readily available on the Internet enable independent specialists or even members of the general public to do intelligence work that used to be the monopoly of agencies like the CIA, KGB, or MI6. Playing the role of an armchair James Bond, Hans K. Kristensen, a nuclear weapons specialist at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, D.C., recently drew attention to images on Google Earth of Chinese sites. Kristensen believes that the pictures shed light on China’s deployment of its second-generation of nuclear weapons systems: one appears to be a new ballistic missile submarine [see above image]; others may capture the replacement of liquid-fueled rockets with solid-fuel rockets at sites in north-central China, within range of ICBM fields in southern Russia.

Source: IEEE Spectrum. An excellent example of how open source intelligence outsmart military intelligence.

See also: Nuclear terrorism: the new day after from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. From the article:

Finally, there is the question of whether the U.S. government would behave with rational restraint. This, of course, assumes that there is a government. A terrorist nuclear attack on Washington could easily kill the president, vice president, much of Congress and the Supreme Court. But in a July 12 Washington Post op-ed, Norman Ornstein revealed that the federal government has refused to make contingency plans for its own nuclear decapitation, which means that U.S. nuclear weapons could be in the hands of small, enraged launch control teams with no clear line of authority above them. Assuming that the federal government was still there, however, we can only imagine (using the reaction to the loss of a mere two buildings on 9/11 as a metric of comparison) the public rage at the loss of a city and the intense, perhaps irresistible, pressure on the president to make someone, somewhere pay for this atrocity.

Originally posted on the Lifeboat blog.

ABC: The Last Days on Earth

Via Betterhumans.com

Current nuclear threat worse than during Cold War

WASHINGTON, July 19 (RIA Novosti) - The risks of an accidental nuclear war have increased since the Cold War as Russia’s early warning capability has deteriorated, a former U.S. defense official said.William J. Perry, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-Director of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford University, said in a congressional testimony Wednesday that “the danger of nuclear war occurring by accident” still existed.”Both American and Russian missiles remain in a launch-on-warning mode,” Perry, who served as U.S. defense secretary in 1994-97, said. “And the inherent danger of this status is aggravated by the fact that the Russian warning system has deteriorated since the ending of the Cold War.”Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has heavily depended on its radars located abroad, particularly the Daryal facility in Azerbaijan and two Dnepr stations in Ukraine, near Sebastopol and Mukachevo.

Some reports said the outdated radar facilities that Moscow is renting on the territories of former Soviet republics were in poor condition, and that “holes” had appeared in Russia’s early-warning missile threat coverage.

In the same testimony, Perry blasted the Bush administration for concentrating its efforts on building defenses to protect the U.S. from a potential ballistic missile threat, while downplaying the danger of nuclear terrorism.

“The centerpiece of our government’s strategy for dealing with a nuclear attack is the National Missile Defense system now being installed in Alaska,” he said.

“But the greatest danger today is that a terror group will detonate a nuclear bomb in one of our cities,” the expert said.

“Terrorists would not use a ballistic missile to deliver their bomb, they would use a truck or a freighter,” Perry said, adding that a missile shield alone would not reduce the nuclear threat to the country.

Colonel General Valter Kraskovsky, a former commander of the Soviet Union ballistic missile defense, dismissed Perry’s statement as an element of the information war the U.S. is waging against Russia.

“We should have expected such statements. The U.S. will continue pressing this issue because its main goal is to present Russia as a country owning powerful retaliatory weapons which it is incapable of controlling. They will be striving to disarm us on any possible pretext - for instance that we cannot oversee everything, that we can make a mess of things, or accidentally deliver strikes, and so on,” Kraskovsky said.

He said the Russian warning system properly monitored near-space, but that the situation could change if intergovernmental agreements on Russia using the two radar stations in Ukraine were revoked.

“If the stations stop operating in the interests of our country, the Russian air defense system will have problems,” Kraskovsky said.

Via RIA Novosti. Also ”Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran” via the Guardian. 

Russians threaten to counter US shield

Russia could site cruise missiles in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, if the US goes ahead with plans for a missile defence shield in central Europe, Russia’s first deputy prime minister warned on Wednesday.

Source: Financial Times.

Blessed are the doomsayers

Back in 2000 Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy published his now famous (or is that infamous?) warning cry, ”Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Soon thereafter philosopher Nick Bostrom published his seminal paper on existential risks and Sir Martin Rees released his book, Our Final Hour. Even thinkers like Stephen Hawking and James Lovelock chimed in, warning that human civilization is headed in a bad way.

And it was only recently that the Doomsday Clock was once again moved foward.

Source: IEET.

Russia-NATO: a marriage of convenience?

Read my comprehensive news summary of the missile shield problematique on the Lifeboat Foundation blog (”The Missile Shield and the Race for Space Awareness“).

Despite all the difficulties of cooperation between former rivals, “the impression that the Russia-NATO Council is called upon to be concerned only with Russia is a wrong one. Also wrong is the impression that it [the Council] is winding down,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Berlin in February. Sergei Ivanov, then deputy prime minister and defense minister, said that “Russia and NATO intend to work out a long-term plan to coordinate their efforts for a period of ten years.” The NATO leadership also believes that the fight against terrorism, stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and the settlement of regional conflicts are the foundation of cooperation between Russia and the alliance. The two sides are particularly happy with the success of a series of joint counterterrorist exercises.NATO-Russia cooperation on a theater missile defense system was written into the Rome Declaration as a separate paragraph. A year later, in 2003, NATO’s then Secretary General George Robertson described the program as a “flagship” project. At that time, participants in the Russia-NATO Council meeting agreed on the first phase of a coordination program to develop a non-strategic missile defense system. Since then, the two sides have ignored the other’s moves in this area until the United States this year announced a plan to establish the third positioning region for its national anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Following Russia’s determined objections, the Americans began offering it a role in their anti-missile shield which it was obliged simply to refuse. For example, the Americans offered to use Russian missiles as targets for their anti-missiles or to deploy elements of a U.S. missile defense system in Russia.

Source: RIA Novosti.

See also “US sticks to European missile shield plan” at EPICOS via EUobserver.

Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Biases, and Global Risk

If you have not read “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk“, I recommend reading them. They are excellent book chapters from SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks from Oxford University Press (Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic eds.). If you do not have time to read both, I recommend reading the conclusion of the first, repeated below, and reading the second in its entirety.

Via the SIAI blog.

Iran Vows Large-Scale Retaliation if U.S. Attacks

“The name of the game is simply to saturate strategic targets with missile firepower in order to render the Patriots and other defenses useless,” said Hassan Fahs, a journalist and political analyst based here.
…
In the past few months, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards has shown off new weapons in testing or deployment: ballistic missiles such as Scud variants and the Shihab-3, anti-ship cruise missiles such as the Chinese C-802 and Silkworm, a new high-speed torpedo and spying drones. Guards troops displayed several of the weapons in war games in the past few months, and broadcast on local TV channels and some government-run Web sites what it called UAV-shot footage of the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier.

Source: Defense News