I’m starting this article not because of the title subject but what I consider alarming statements made by folks in the US about how the tech used here could be used for clandestine enrichment.
Best cast it’s an attempt to dissuade other countries from adopting the CANDU reactor, or keep Canada buying enriched uranium from the states, and worse case it’s further pretence for annexation.
“The only thing that inhibits Canada is the will to do it, the political decision to do it,” said nuclear weapons expert Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, who served as head of national security and international affairs in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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“All uranium-fuelled reactors produce plutonium. The issue with the CANDU is that it has online refuelling,” explained Ed Lyman, director of nuclear safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. “You’re refuelling continuously, which makes it harder for the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].”
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“Of the countries that have made nuclear weapons with plutonium, many of them have used a heavy water reactor,” he said.
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Canada is also branching out into a new kind of technology that will require enriched uranium: the small modular reactor (SMR). Some of the proposed SMRs would use uranium enriched to a level as high as 20 per cent, known as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
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“And so I worry about this push for advanced reactors, SMRs that use HALEU up near 20 per cent, like the ARC 100 in Canada, that the material itself is in the dangerous band. And if Canada were to pursue a whole fleet of SMRs using HALEU, and especially if they were to build their own enrichment plants to support that, that might give them a threshold capability for bombs, even if they never make highly enriched [over 20 per cent] uranium.”
Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded if they had nukes. Maybe Canada just builds a few, 50 sounds like a reasonable number. You wouldn’t be hearing 51st state bullshit that’s for sure.
I mean, Ukraine gave up their nukes on the promise they would never be invaded…
This is why fascism is constructing the golden dome. The goal is to be able to conquer the world without the threat of MAD.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system)
By the time that’s built they’ll be able to mass produce cheap kamikaze drones that can kill an entire cities inhabitants for less than a billion dollars, all controlled by AI.
Who, the US, or someone targeting the US?
There is no way the USA will allow Canada to have nuclear missiles. See Iran, see the Cuban Missile Crisis.
If you read the article blinded to the publisher, it’d probably be a surprise to see that this is published by a Canadian crown corporation and not a private US-funded outlet
alarming statements made by folks in the US
The author interviewed 3 American scientists with ties to US Gov and heavily quotes them. Also, “Scientists consulted by CBC News said Canada would probably have little economic motive to build its own enrichment facilities.” It’s an under-statement to say that the Canadian voice is under-represented in this article
I hate that the idea of Canada acquiring nukes has become so prevalent. Having nukes does not help anyone, it merely increases the global risk of nuclear war. Every country with nukes is another country that can decide to pull the trigger.
Consider the actual calculus that goes into MAD. If we think we have a nuke heading towards us, we have to act prior to verification. The decision that is effectively to be made is: do we let a potential nuke hit one of our cities and let millions of people die, or do we launch a counter attack and kill millions more people and prompt further response from the enemy? The most likely outcome of this is full scale nuclear war. Even between two countries, this would devastate the planet and result in countless deaths.
Counterintuitively, even if we have nukes, launching a counterattack is the response that would result in the worst possible outcome. But it is also useless to have nukes if you have no possible intent of using them defensively. This is basically entering into the most apocalyptic game of chicken that anyone can play.
I dunno, North Korea gets away with all kinds of shit. It’s more that it definitely does help you, but hurts everyone. Those are two different things.
Counterintuitively, even if we have nukes, launching a counterattack is the response that would result in the worst possible outcome. But it is also useless to have nukes if you have no possible intent of using them defensively.
The term gets used for other things, but in game theory this is called a non-credible threat. A group of perfectly rational agents would be able to use backwards induction on each other, and always call the bluff.
Real humans are capable of irrational spite, though, so MAD has held for decades.
It’s a tragedy of the commons, which is what the prisoners paradox is, which is what MAD is.
Sort of.
Technically, it is more like chicken, which is a different two-player, non-zero-sum game. Wikipedia has a section with a nice gif on the difference between chicken and prisoner’s dilemma. They are closely related, though.
Conventional war and peace is also a game of chicken, but with nukes the severity, certainty and finality of the costs involved seems to lead to a very different equilibrium. Leading over a bombed-out country is a much more palatable option for leaders than being nobody in a radioactive wasteland.
It’s also worth noting that this toy model has simultaneous moves, while a real life nuclear exchange does not, which is what makes the threat of a second strike theoretically non-credible.
Edit: And tragedy of the commons is an n-player version of prisoner’s dilemma.
God the comments are depressing. “The only way to protect from the bad guys with nukes is to give the good guys nukes!”
Right, because the same logic worked with guns in the US. Mel Hurtig is rolling in his grave rn.
Name the number of countries the USA has threatened that have nukes.
Literally North Korea, but way to ignore the point.
All it takes is one maniac or rogue government to come into power and the world is over if they decide to do the unthinkable. We came close to the end of the world because of literal malfunctioning equipment before.
Nobody should have these weapons, the people who saw first hand what they did to the Japanese know that, and despite how often the narrative is that it was a necessary evil to end WWII, their very existence should constitute a war crime seeing that they are indiscriminate in who they kill, to which innocent civilians will be guaranteed to always die seeing that these weapons have only gotten more powerful since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I can’t even trust governments not to drone strike innocent families in the Middle East, why the fuck should I trust them with weapons that can kill millions?
USA has never threatened military action on North Korea since they acquired nukes. You proved my point.
We can hold hands and pretend we can all get along, but countries with nukes don’t get fucked around by the USA. This was heavily discussed by scientists at Los alamos. The reason to use the bombs in Japan was not to end the war in the pacific, it was to scare the world into not trying to start another world war.
If we abolished nukes completely, we would return to invasions with conventional weapons, which also have megatons of destructive force, because we let countries buy them from anyone.
Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton bomb. USA dropped 88 kilotons on Iraq.
Are we forgetting the North Korea crisis?
“Trump warns N Korea that US military is ‘locked and loaded’”
“Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S.”
Putting aside the fact that the war in Iraq should have never happened to begin with, even when you have soldiers deliberately gunning down civilians like they did in Haditha, and bombs hitting civilians, that’s spread out over a larger area that is overall more deliberate in targetting military targets. Conventional warfare for all it’s flaws, is more humane than say, nuking a city of a million people and calling it a day. One of the reasons landmines are considered a war crime is because they’re indiscriminate. Nukes should be classified the exact same way.
France and the UK should trade a few nukes to Canada to keep Mango Mussolini in check
If we were going this direction, hosting foreign nukes would similarly effective, but much less provocative, and proliferation-y. It seems like a no-brainer, if there’s a willing partner.
France has just started loaning them out in Europe, but it’s not clear if they’d be willing to expand to another continent. The UK is an interesting option in that we have the same de jure leader, anyway. But then again, they have a troubled relationship with their nuclear status as it is.
Irsn need to troll canada by saying canada should not be allowed to have nukes
We should’ve had nukes ever since, being Canadian, we’d never want to use them, but as a deterrent.
We don’t need to go scorched earth to bring down the Orange Turd, let him ruin the U.S. on his own, financially.
You might have too much faith in the “Canadians are nice” trope. I believe Canadians are not more nice than people anywhere else, we’re just comparatively less toxic than Americans. We’re not far behind though, and slowly but surely accelerating down the same toxicity slide. We often get compared to Americans since we’re neighbors and I believe that’s the crux of the “Canadians are nice” trope. Canadians are nice… compared to Americans.
This is all just generalization though. I’ve met a ton of super nice Americans over the years. Just like anywhere else, there are great people and there are shitty people. Shitty Americans are just more annoying and arrogant than most in my experience.
All this to say, I’ve no doubt that there are plenty of Canadians that would push the button too.
