General
Reducing Vulnerability: The Energy Jugular
This chapter of the book, Nuclear Arms: Ethics, Strategy, Politics, details America’s energy security vulnerability. America’s energy system contains multiple causes of energy insecurity: complexity (because the causes of failure are impossible to foresee), control and synchronism, hazardous fuels, inflexibility and interdependence, specialized requirements, and difficulty of repair. There are…
Peddling Nuclear Power: An Explosive U.S. Policy
This piece, originally published in The Los Angeles Times, addresses the nuclear nonproliferation policy of the Reagan administration. The authors argue that the policy had the unintended consequence of spreading nuclear bombs, subverting genuine nonproliferation progress, destabilizing allied governments, raising energy prices, and prolonging dependence on foreign oil. They argue…
Nuclear Power and Nuclear Bombs
In this influential paper from Foreign Affairs, the authors argue that the nuclear proliferation problem is insoluble. At the time, all policies to control proliferation assumed that the rapid worldwide spread of nuclear power is essential to reduce dependence on oil, economically desirable, and inevitable; that efforts to inhibit the…
Nuclear Weapons and Power-Reactor Plutonium
This article, originally published in Nature in 1980, seeks to provide a discreet, selective, but adequate physical basis for understanding the scope for using reactor-grade plutonium in fission bombs at some of the diverse levels of sophistication open to various potential users. With modest design sophistication, high-burn-up plutonium from power…
Thorium Cycles and Proliferation: Response
This article by A. De Volpi responds to an earlier piece by Amory Lovins in which Lovins condemns the use of thorium cycles. De Volpi argues that Lovins’ analysis is factually inaccurate. In this same document, Lovins reponds to De Volpi’s criticism.
