The Nuclear Princeton Research Team will be sharing their work on an upcoming animated film called "Titration" at a virtual seminar hosted by the Program on Science and Global Security (SGS). This film will examine the impacts of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation, how those impacts continued to be felt today, and the role of Princeton Univeristy as a site of knowledge production that has consequences on Native and Indigenous communities....
Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt was part of a study that investigated the wreckage of the Trinity Test, the first atomic bomb test. The study found that the incredible heat and pressure created by the bomb's detonation formed a rare type of crystal, a quasicrystal. These types of matter are deemed "impossible" and violate our current rules that are currently used to define crystalline materials. Former...
"A team led by Alexander Glaser, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and international affairs, recently hit upon an innovative way to help inspectors count mobile nuclear missile launchers to allow more effective monitoring for movable weapons. The researchers worked with NJ Transit to use the local commuter train as a tool for the team’s...
This article in the Daily Princetonian highlights Princeton's lack of support for Native students and how this project, Nuclear Princeton, is working to combat this injustice and empower Native students.
Sharon Weiner, former Princeton Program on Science and Global Security postdoc and award winning national security scholar led an international team that conceptualized and designed a virtual reality (VR) experience which simulates presidential decision-making in a nuclear weapons crisis. It offers first-hand experience to participants on how the decision to launch nuclear weapons could unfold following current U.S. nuclear strategy and protocols. Participants have 15 minutes in which they have the opportunity to interact with advisors, ask questions, ...
Princeton Science and Global Security (SGS) developed a simulation of a possible nuclear war between the United States and Russia. This simulation, presented in video format, estimates more than 90 million casualties within the first few hours of the war. Due to the nature of nuclear weapons, slow violence fatalities from the ongoing effects of nuclear fallout would result in many more deaths. The simulation is based on data from NUKEMAP and aims to demonstrate how deadly and catastrophic a nuclear war between the US and Russia...
Russia, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty founder, technology supplier, trading partner and neighbor to both Iran and North Korea, has played an important role for many years in international diplomatic efforts to manage the crises surrounding the nuclear programs in these two countries. Moscow remains a party to the JCPOA agreed with Iran despite US withdrawal from the deal in May 2018, and it continues to work on the project to expand the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran. At the same time, Russia, is ramping up the...
Siting nuclear waste repositories – high- or low-level – is a difficult task. Many countries try and fail and try again. Australia is no exception to this rule. It has been seeking a nuclear waste site for its low- and intermediate-level waste since the late 1970s. Countries that have successfully sited these facilities have found that the affected communities must support the waste repository. These communities can take an active part in the siting process and experience benefits from the waste facility. Australia has taken a somewhat unique approach to siting, in allowing landowners to...
Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation... Read more about Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl
For nuclear weapon states and their close allies, modeling nuclear conflict plays a central role in military planning and the implementation of nuclear deterrence. Outside this sphere such research prioritizes a greater understanding of the humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear war. This talk will look at the properties of current nuclear arsenals, scenarios of nuclear conflict, and calculations of the effects of nuclear explosions. It is part of a larger project led by Alan Robock (Rutgers University) and Owen Brian Toon (University of Colorado) that is an...
More nuclear bombs have been dropped on or have exploded in or above American soil than that of any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National Security Test Site was the primary location for these activities, withstanding more than a thousand nuclear tests that left swaths of the American Southwest resembling the moon. Gowin remains the only photographer granted official and sustained access to the Nevada Test Site. For this project, he has revisited his original negatives, made in 1996 and 1997. These images, most of them never published before, show...
While for some decades since the end of the Cold War debates about nuclear weapons policy receded in the public discourse, the debate has been renewed by a number of controversial steps by the Trump administration as well its challenging long-standing doctrines in the Nuclear Posture Review.
This seminar will present the findings of an in-depth survey of over 2,000 American voters exploring their response to these debates. These include:
How Americans view the general challenge to the value of arms control treaties, and more particularly whether the US...
