YINGDALA REMOVES NUCLEAR WARHEADS
Tian’an, September 11, 5102: Prime Minister Wang Xin – Yi has ordered the nuclear warheads removed from the thirty missiles with nuclear warheads Yingdala Zhou currently possesses after Grand Chancellor Jian increased the weapons with nuclear warheads by twenty.
Asked by the Beacon if either the pacifists at home and abroad or the militarists at home were likely to be happy with this action, Wang responded:
No, of course not. And if the voters are upset they can easily bring in new leadership to deal with what to do. What we are doing is removing the warheads and initiating disassembly to the point of removing the trigger. The material and rods obviously must also be contained and stored. Let us be blunt, if circumstances change we could reassemble the nuclear weapons. And of course, we still have the knowledge and technical capacity to produce more.
But then so do at least five other nations. And our intelligence indicates two others either have the capacity or are very close while another claimed to do so but probably did not. So fair to say the people of Terra hope circumstances do not change.
There is a well documented scientific test employed by several nations which will let us see if platforms are either destroyed or warheads removed. Warheads themselves can be tested to see if they are disarmed. Neutrons are beamed into the warhead to establish certain facts about what is within using an isotopic filter that encrypts physically the information in the measured data. Plutonium isotope arrangement and type can indicate if it is still operative. A device can send a signal beam to a lithium glass detector where the signature of the data is recorded. We could even allow other nations or the World Congress to use the necessary device because it can determine if a warhead is harmless without giving users the possibility of reverse engineering the weapon.
We will also have to monitor the weapons for degradation. Although plutonium and uranium take quite a while to begin, eventually there is degradation of warheads. We would not really expect it for the first fifty years but would certainly expect it at one hundred years. When tritonium is involved it can easily be a shorter period. So when we come to have a degraded warhead as we eventually will, what do we do?
First, we have to continue to dismantle in reverse order what was assembled. While it would be very dangerous to guess how a nuclear warhead was assembled by another nation, the existing engineering blueprints for our warheads will show what to do with ours. Mistakes are unlikely to lead to detonation but electrocution and release of toxic or radioactive material are possible consequences if mistakes are made.
Once it is disassembled we must deal with the uranium and plutonium. The most environmentally sound approach is to dilute it considerably and use it in nuclear power plants to produce electricity. Unfortunately, it is less expensive for power plants to purchase less enriched material so often other solutions are considered such as simply putting it in storage facilities. The material will contain different isotopes of different atomic weights so that the radioactivity decays at different rates.
The highly radioactive isotopes will decay rapidly and produce a lot of heat. The rods will need to cool in pools of water for about 5 years. That being done there is a lot of low radioactivity material which however will take a very long time to decay, millions of years. They have to be put in dry casks or two layers of welded shut steel encased in concrete.
So at this point, we have partial disassembly and safe and monitored storage of components. Since we have some nuclear facilities, some of the fissionable material eventually could go to the nuclear power plants for generating electricity. Over time a great deal will be cooled and stored however.
Once we acquired nuclear warheads we were going to have deal with avoiding nuclear war and nuclear accidents, and with the environmental, safety and health concerns that will come with degradation.
