Nuclear Disarmament Essay -- Essays Papers

Nuclear Disarmament Since the early 1940’s, two world powers, the U.S. and USSR (currently Russia), have been increasing their nuclear weapons arsenal. In recent years, many other countries, such as: India, Great Britain, France, China, Pakistan, and Israel have begun nuclear stockpiles. Since the Cold War has ended and the USSR collapsed, nuclear weapons have been left unguarded or missing. The effect of this lack of security has raised the world’s awareness on attempting to control nuclear stockpiles. Also, there are concerns of nuclear power plants producing uranium and plutonium as a by-product; the two fuels are used in producing nuclear devices. Although these nuclear power plants were never meant to produce uranium and plutonium, countries have left it available to civilians for research and testing.1 Nuclear bombs can be a result of this experimenting, which is why some form of disarmament and a system of verification on nuclear control needs to be implemented by government officia ls. Nuclear weapons are explosive devices designed to release nuclear energy on a large scale and are used primarily in military applications. The first atomic bomb, which was tested on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico, represented a completely new type of artificial explosives. Nuclear explosions involve energy sources within the core or nucleus, of the atom. The atomic bomb gains its power from the splitting, or fission, of all the atomic nuclei in several kilograms of plutonium. A sphere about the size of a baseball produces an explosion equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. This is a large amount of power for a nuclear weapon. The atomic bomb was developed, constructed, and tested during the Manhattan Project. This massive United States... ...be implemented in order to control the use of nuclear weapons within today’s society because the current systems have not been successful in securing nuclear devices. Until more successful regulations have been made, the problem of controlling nuclear power will not be solved. ENDNOTES 1 â€Å" The Problem.† NCI. http://www.nci.org/nci-pro.htm (1 July 1996). 2 Handbook of Nuclear Technology (New York: Nucleonics, 1980) pg. 115. 3 Handbook of Nuclear Technology, pg. 110 4 Handbook of Nuclear Technology, pg. 112-114. 5 NCI 6 NCI 7 NCI 8 â€Å"Verification.† The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. http://www.dfat.gov.au/cc/cc_report_annexa.html (Jan. 1994). 9 The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons 10 NCI 11 The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons