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.”
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.
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.