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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung

AGA 8: Nuclear Weapons

AGA 8.3: Talk

Friday, March 22, 2024, 11:00–11:30, PTB HS HvHB

What you never wanted to know about the atomic bomb — •Olaf Schumann — Fraunhofer INT, Euskirchen

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons still play a great role in our time: Russian officials openly discuss their use in the Ukrainian war, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that was to prevent an Iranian bomb, has basically failed, Russia has withdrawn from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and in the war between Israel and the Hamas a large-scale escalation with Israel's neighbors might force Israel to use its nuclear weapons as a matter of last resort, just to name some recent examples.

Research on this subject has many facets, like nuclear disarmament, mitigation of nuclear weapons effects, studies on strategic deterrence, prevention of nuclear proliferation, detection of special nuclear material, or the ban of fissile material or complete weapons. In all these areas, varying knowledge about design and functioning of a nuclear weapon itself is needed. This talk will give several examples of open sources, where such information can be found and that may be valuable for other researchers. It will discuss some aspects of nuclear weapons that everybody in the field should be aware of, and it will present some more obscure findings that show how much is known about (mostly US) weapons.

Keywords: nuclear weapons; OSINT