Nuclear promise or nuclear peril?
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Material matters
Nuclear promise or nuclear peril? Siegfried S. Hecker This article is an edited transcript of the plenary presentation delivered by Siegfried S. Hecker of Stanford University at the 2010 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting on April 7, 2010 in San Francisco. Introduction would like to thank MRS officials for inviting me and I extend my congratulations to all of the award recipients. It is a particular pleasure to return to MRS and to talk about the intersection of science and policy, since so much of this session is dedicated to the wonderful work in materials science. While MRS President David Ginley just mentioned that materials is about making “stuff,” my talk is focused on how not to destroy “stuff.” Specifically, I will talk about the intersection of science and policy in the nuclear arena. Nuclear issues are in the news daily: Just yesterday President Obama announced his administration’s new nuclear policy; tomorrow he will go to Prague to sign the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia; and next week he will host a world nuclear security summit, where leaders from 47 nations will join him to discuss ways to deal with nuclear dangers around the world. Nuclear energy can electrify the world, but it can also destroy it, as suggested in the title of my talk “Nuclear promise or nuclear peril?” Let me begin with some examples. Today, we find nuclear dreams everywhere; for example, last December in the United Arab Emirates, the South Korean Korea Electric Power Corporation signed a $20 billion contract to build four nuclear reactors on the Gulf, in Abu Dhabi, to provide electricity for this incredible desert metropolis. Why in the world would they want to produce electricity when they have oil and gas? The answer is quite simple— they can sell oil and gas to the rest of the world, while they obtain electricity from an almost inexhaustible source. Regarding nuclear peril, one need look
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no further than North Korea, where Kim Jung Il is developing nuclear weapons, and I will discuss this in detail later. Nuclear ambition or nuclear nightmare? President Ahmadinejad and Iran’s ayatollahs are exercising their sovereign right to develop nuclear energy, but many around the world are concerned that they may also be developing nuclear weapons, which would make the Gulf a nightmare. A nuclear “Walmart” was developed by A.Q. Khan, shown in Figure 1, a metallurgist by training. After developing an illicit import network to help his native Pakistan build the bomb, Khan ran an export business with the help of greedy European businessmen and other partners around the world. Together they provided the means to make the nuclear materials to build the bomb to countries such as Libya, North Korea, and Iran. How the world has changed. During the Cold War we relied on a policy of mutually assured destruction so as not to annihilate the world as a result of a poten-
Figure 1. A.Q. Khan, called the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and leader of a glob
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