Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You've Never Heard Of

Trouble viewing? View in your browser. View all Scientific American publications.

    

November 14, 2023

This week, Scientific American is releasing a special report about a $1.5 trillion U.S. program to refurbish and reinvent our arsenal of nuclear weapons. Read about how factories build these missiles; listen to the stories of the communities that will be most affected by them; and see a chilling map of the geographic regions that would be most at risk of catastrophic damage and life-threatening nuclear fallout if U.S. nuclear missile silos were targeted by a well-armed adversary.

Sophie Bushwick, Associate Editor, Technology

Defense Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You've Never Heard Of A road trip through the communities shouldering the U.S.'s nuclear missile revival By Abe Streep

Defense Who Would Take the Brunt of an Attack on U.S. Nuclear Missile Silos? These fallout maps show the toll of a potential nuclear attack on missile silos in the U.S. heartland By Sébastien Philippe

Defense What Radioactive Fallout Tells Us about Our Nuclear Future The U.S. has embarked on the largest and most expensive nuclear build-out ever. The U.S. military says it is necessary to replace an aging nuclear arsenal. But critics fear the risks. By Duy Linh Tu,Nina Berman,Sebastian Tuinder,Dominic Smith,Joseph Polidoro,Jeffery DelViscio

Defense Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs The U.S. is ramping up construction of new "plutonium pits" for nuclear weapons By Sarah Scoles

Defense How Did Nuclear Weapons Get on My Reservation? A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation digs into a decades-long mystery: how 15 intercontinental ballistic missiles came to be siloed on her ancestral lands. By Ella Weber,Sébastien Philippe,Tulika Bose,Jeffery DelViscio | 18:37

Energy Dyslexia, Dark Energy and a New Arms Race The risks of a $1.5-trillion plan to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal By Laura Helmuth

Defense The U.S.'s Plans to Modernize Nuclear Weapons Are Dangerous and Unnecessary The U.S. should back away from updating its obsolescent nuclear weapons, in particular silo-launched missiles that needlessly risk catastrophe By The Editors

Education To Educate Students about AI, Make Them Use It A college professor and his students explain what they learned from bringing ChatGPT into the classroom By C.W. Howell,Cal Baker,Fayrah Stylianopoulos

Psychology Machine Learning Creates a Massive Map of Smelly Molecules Scientists can finally predict a chemical's odor without having a human sniff it By Simon Makin

Behavior It's Not All in Your Head--You Do Focus Differently on Zoom Virtual meetings and video calls don't quite stack up to in-person interaction—and a new study proves it By Lauren Leffer

Policy We Need Product Safety Regulations for Social Media As social media more frequently exposes people to brutality and untruths, we need to treat it like a consumer product, and that means product safety regulations By Laura Edelson

Language 'ChatGPT Detector' Catches AI-Generated Papers with Unprecedented Accuracy A new tool based on machine learning uses features of writing style to distinguish between human and AI authors By McKenzie Prillaman,Nature magazine

Evolution Our Evolutionary Past Can Teach Us about AI's Future Evolutionary biology offers warnings, and tips, for surviving the advent of artificial intelligence By Eliot Bush

Climate Change Electric Vehicles Might Not Yet Have Replaced as Much Car Mileage as Hoped Without policies to promote electric vehicle purchases and build up charging infrastructure, such vehicles might produce fewer emissions reductions than hoped By Mike Lee,E&E News

Artificial Intelligence Drones and AI Could Locate Land Mines in Ukraine An AI model could speed up laborious and dangerous demining efforts By Lori Youmshajekian

QUOTE OF THE DAY "In a striking number of the wrongful arrests that have been documented, the [facial-recognition] searches represented virtually the entire investigation." Eyal Press, The New Yorker

FROM THE ARCHIVE 'Limited' Tactical Nuclear Weapons Would Be Catastrophic Russia's invasion of Ukraine shows the limits of nuclear deterrence By Nina Tannenwald | March 2022

LATEST ISSUES

Questions?   Comments?

Download the Scientific American App

To view this email as a web page, go here. You received this email because you opted-in to receive email from Scientific American. To ensure delivery please add newsletters@scientificamerican.com to your address book. Unsubscribe     Manage Email Preferences     Privacy Policy     Contact Us

Scientific American

1 New York Plaza, FDR Dr, Floor 46, New York, NY 10004

Unsubscribe - Unsubscribe Preferences