3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
The other kind of entanglement: Nonnuclear technology and nuclear risks
James Acton, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
As the danger of a conventional war between the United States and Russia or China rises, developments in nonnuclear technology are raising the risk that such a conflict might turn nuclear. These developments are increasing the “entanglement” between nuclear and nonnuclear weapons and command-and-control systems. For example, nuclear-armed states are becoming more reliant on command-and-control assets that serve both nuclear and nonnuclear forces and on increasingly accurate missiles that can accommodate a nuclear or nonnuclear warhead. Even if neither of the belligerents in a conventional conflict assessed a nuclear war to be in its interests, entanglement could spark an unintended escalation process that resulted in nuclear use anyway. Physicists have an important role to play in assessing the magnitude of these dangers and the feasibility and effectiveness of risk-reduction proposals.