The United States intervened to block South Korea from developing nuclear weapons in the 1970s, according to newly declassified Korean government documents.
South Korea was seeking to acquire nuclear reactors from Canada and nuclear reprocessing technology from France in support of a weapons program, but U.S. pressure led to cancellation of the latter purchase.
See “Park Sought to Develop Nuclear Weapons,” Korea Times, January 15.
Meanwhile, the island nation of Barbados this week ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban. A total of 142 countries have now ratified the treaty, which prohibits all nuclear explosions.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.