Nuclear Weapons Watch Thread

[wjfox]

Russia prepares to revoke nuclear treaty after Putin announcement

Monday 9 October 2023 12:34, UK

Russian parliamentary bosses will today discuss revoking ratification of a treaty banning nuclear tests - a development that could trigger a new arms race between major world powers.

Vladimir Putin announced last Thursday that Russia could resume nuclear testing for the first time in more than three decades, after they stopped in the years after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

The Russian president said the country's nuclear doctrine - which dictates the conditions upon which he would press the nuclear button - did not need to change, but that he was not yet ready to say whether Moscow needed to resume nuclear tests.

He said Russia could look at revoking ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as the United States had signed, but not ratified, it.

That prompted Russia's top lawmaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, to say he would discuss the matter at the next meeting of Russia's Duma Council - the key body in the Russian parliament organising its legislative work - which takes place at 2pm UK time today.

https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war- ... t-12541713

[weatheriscool]

Russia is revoking ratification of nuclear test ban treaty - speaker
Source: Reuters

October 17, 2023 3:01 AM EDT

MOSCOW, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Russia is revoking ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty because of the irresponsible attitude of the United States to global security, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament said on Tuesday.

President Vladimir Putin said on Oct. 5 that he was not ready to say whether or not Russia should resume nuclear testing after calls from some Russian security experts and lawmakers to test a nuclear bomb as a warning to the West. "In the interests of ensuring the security of our country, we are withdrawing the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty," Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said ahead of a debate and parliamentary vote on revoking ratification.

Volodin said that while Russia had ratified the 1996 treaty in 2000, Washington had failed to ratify because of its "irresponsible attitude to global security issues". "The Russian Federation will do everything to protect its citizens and to maintain global strategic parity," Volodin said. While Russia is revoking ratification, it would remain a signatory and would continue to cooperate with the test ban treaty organisation and the global monitoring system, which alerts the world to any nuclear test.

Russian officials say that the revocation of ratification does not mean Russia is going to test a nuclear bomb and that it is simply coming into line with the U.S. position, though arms control experts are concerned Russia could be inching towards a resumption of nuclear testing.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ru ... 023-10-17/

[weatheriscool]

[firestar464]

this should be posted to the timeline

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Biden, Xi set to pledge ban on AI in autonomous weapons like drones, nuclear warhead control: sources

– Potential dangers of AI expected to be major focus of Wednesday’s meeting on margins of Apec summit in San Francisco
– Keeping a ‘human in the loop’ in nuclear command and control is essential given the problems seen so far with AI, observer says

11 Nov, 2023

In a landmark agreement set to be announced at Wednesday’s much-awaited bilateral meeting, Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping are poised to pledge a ban on the use of artificial intelligence in autonomous weaponry, such as drones, and in the control and deployment of nuclear warheads, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to the Post.

The potential dangers of AI are expected to be a major focus of the US-China discussions, taking place on the sidelines of this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.

Both Washington and Beijing have expressed concerns over the unregulated use of this technology to fuel conflicts.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/militar ... ol-sources

[erowind]

It's imperative that both Russia and the US ratify the nuclear treaty immediately. There's no excuse to wait, if one country ratifies and the other does not later there is nothing binding the initial ratifying country to the treaty anylonger.

[Powers]

It's imperative that both Russia and the US ratify the nuclear treaty immediately. There's no excuse to wait, if one country ratifies and the other does not later there is nothing binding the initial ratifying country to the treaty anylonger.

Wait until 2025.

[firestar464]

What's so special about that year?

[caltrek]

A Growing Middle Eastern Nightmare
November 19, 2023

Introduction:

(Tom Dispatch) Yes, on a radio show, Israeli Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu insisted that there were “no non-combatants in Gaza” (assumedly including the thousands of young people slaughtered in recent weeks in that “children’s graveyard”). He then added that “one option” for Israel was to consider using a nuclear weapon and so wiping out more or less everyone left in that strip of land hardly bigger than two Washington, D.C.s. (Forget the radioactive fallout that would hit Israel as well.) And yes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly “suspended” him from regular cabinet meetings (even if that, as it turns out, wasn’t the most meaningful of actions).

It’s also true that Israel, one of the planet’s nine nuclear powers, has only — and given the nightmarish impact of such weaponry that has to be italicized — an estimated 90 such weapons, while the United States and Russia each have more than 5,000. Still, consider Eliyahu’s comment a rare admission by an Israeli official that his country is even nuclear armed. As Netanyahu himself typically said years ago, “We have a longstanding policy that we won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”

“Introduce” assumedly meaning to create a Middle Eastern version of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Consider it, in fact, little short of a miracle that, in the 78 years since August 9, 1945, when that second American atomic bomb devastated the Japanese city of Nagasaki, not another one has ever been used, even as such weaponry spread and arsenals grew. And let’s hope that, despite the carnage still underway in Gaza (and Hamas’s threats to launch more October 7ths until Israel is “annihilated”), this remains the case. Sadly enough, though,

As TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, makes all too clear today, nuclear weapons aren’t the only way humanity has to create a hell on Earth.

Read more here: https://tomdispatch.com/the-dangers-only-multiply/