Tragedy

   It's a word not heard much these days, that of tragedy.  It's a word almost diminished in its meaning as if almost now relegated back to the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans when plays were comedies or tragedies; hearing one say "that's tragic" in today's world makes the word seem to have lost some of its impact, its meaning.  But the weeks that led up to the start of the new year brought to mind that word with governments partially shutting down (although federal workers so affected are required to keep working without pay, even as their insurance lapses and goes unpaid; Congress meanwhile, which sets it own increases in pay, continues to get paid regardless of whether the government is operating or not*); market economies continue to roil up and down and the future may be once again looking recessionary (the Bank of England issued its worst case scenario for the upcoming Brexit with predictions of the pound falling below the dollar and housing prices dropping by 35%)...but those global events, while affecting many, also bypass many others much as boulder would roll down a mountain and crush only those in its path.  But perhaps simply because of our age group, tragic events unfolded for my wife and I in a more personal fashion.  Within those same two weeks, two people unexpectedly tripped and fell, one just in playing touch football with his grandchildren; while unrelated, both falls caused them to hit their heads on the ground, and both died within a day from the injuries.  And while another of our friends watched her house burn to the ground in the so-named Camp Fire in California, another friend called to tell us that an old circuit-breaker had sparked and started a fire inside the walls of his home, a home in which he had just finished a year's work of remodeling; firefighters had to cut away a portion of his roof in order to get to the fire (nobody was injured but the house was ruined for the most part); his fire happened the day before New Year's eve.  Then came letters from other friends, responses to my annual Christmas letter, each letting me know that their mother/husband/spouse had passed away just weeks earlier.  Two of them were letters that gave me that prescient feeling of not wanting to open them, as if I already knew what was written inside.  And even with all of that, the word tragedy failed to fully encompass the shock and numbness of the news.  The loss of one's home, the loss of one's retirement, the loss of one's mobility, the loss of one's loved one, the loss of one's control...all are indeed tragedies.

   The movie 2036 Origin Unknown brings up the issue of nuclear attacks, a subject that seems to fluctuate as wildly in the news as the financial markets. In my day the Cold War drill was to "duck and cover," dive under your school desk and cover your head; we all did it as children even if we didn't understand what it was about (try having your 7-year old child do that drill and see if it makes sense to him or her).  But those days of public shelters and school drills for a nuclear bomb are long gone; but stop and picture your own scenario if you witnessed a nearby mushroom cloud forming in the distance...what would you do?  Said a piece in Politico: “I would say that the United States is probably less prepared for any kind of nuclear detonation than it has been at any time since the Cold War,” says Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and technology at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.  “And that is a dangerous place to be’’...Former Secretary of Defense William Perry says he has “mixed feelings” about civil defense...Perry was one of the participants in the Preventive Defense Project, a group of leading federal government civilian and military officials, scientists and policy experts who convened in Washington in 2007, five years after the 9/11 attacks, to answer the then much more urgent question, “On the day after a nuclear weapon goes off in a U.S. city, what will we wish we have done to prevent it?”  Perry co-authored the report that came out of the meeting.  Entitled “The Day After: Action Following a Nuclear Blast in a U.S. City,” the bluntly expressed document called the federal government to account for not yet coming up with a realistic contingency plan for dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear terrorist incident, or “informing the American public of its particulars.”  “Remarkably such a plan does not yet exist,” wrote the authors, who also included future Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, “although,” they added hopefully, “it is being drafted.”

   The creation of hypersonic missiles** by both Russia and China (the U.S. is working on it) has possibly reignited the possibility for another Cold War, especially with the "last adult" leaving the current U.S. administration and the President tweeting remarks such as this from a year ago: North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works! Ah yes, the button, the codes, the football or whatever one would care to term it (it's officially termed NC3), the President does indeed have access to unleashing a full-on nuclear assault as detailed in the recent Nuclear Posture Review.  Part of that report from the Pentagon states: Russia has demonstrated its willingness to use force to alter the map of Europe and impose its will on its neighbors, backed by implicit and  explicit  nuclear  first-use...China has continued to undertake assertive military initiatives to create “facts on the ground” in support of its territorial claims over features in the East and South China Seas.  Russia and China are pursuing asymmetric ways and means to counter U.S. conventional capabilities, thereby increasing the risk of miscalculation and the potential for military confrontation with the United States, its allies, and partners.  Russia and the U.S. have nearly 93% of the world's nuclear weapons (both with about 7000 each), but catching up quickly are France (300), China (270), the U.K. (215), Pakistan (140), India (130) and Israel (80)...none of this accounts for the chemical weapons being developed (a majority of nations have re-signed an existing treaty banning the use and development of such weapons but countries still refusing to sign such an agreement include Israel, North Korea, Egypt and South Sudan).  In March of this year, Russia unveiled its RS-28, a "first-strike" missile designed to add-to and eventually replace its earlier RS-26 (which NATO had dubbed the "Satan missile") which could carry 3x more nuclear warheads than any U.S. missile.

   Making a nuclear device is quite complicated, as described in an earlier piece in Discover.  And as the article states, "Plutonium doesn't exist in nature."  Summarized by Alex Wellerstein (mentioned above and who also writes a blog titled Nuclear Secrecy), the reaction is created in this manner: Nuclear warheads are like avocados.  They’re similarly shaped with an inner core, called a pit.  The bomb’s typically grapefruit-sized pit is often hollow and lined with plutonium.  Instead of delicious green fruit surrounding it, the warhead has high explosives aimed inward, to create an implosion.  This squeezes the plutonium pit until it’s so dense that particles start smashing into plutonium nuclei, literally splitting atoms and unleashing their incredible energy.  That simple design worked for Fat Man, detonated in Nagasaki in 1945.  But today’s stockpiled warheads are thermonuclear devices, commonly called H-bombs because they use hydrogen.  These have a secondary stage -- like a second pit next to the plutonium pit.  As the first pit erupts in a nuclear explosion, its radiation bounces off the hardened shell of the second pit and reflects back inward.  The first blast ignites nuclear fusion within the secondary pit, making the blast much bigger and more powerful.  In a different piece from the London Review of Books, the complexity is "simply" explained in another fashion: ...uranium-235 and plutonium-239 were not the only isotopes needed for a bomb: in order to initiate the explosion, neutrons had to be introduced at exactly the moment the fissionable material achieved critical mass.  This was achieved by bringing together the isotopes polonium-210 and beryllium-9.  Polonium-210 occurs in nature only in minute amounts, so it is created by irradiating bismuth in a reactor...But over the next twenty years it (has) ceased to be used in nuclear weapons (neutrons are now supplied by tritium guns).  What???

   Okay, all of this leads us back to the end result of radiation and fallout.  The good news is that all-out nuclear annihilation is recognized as possible (and a lose-lose) by many countries and so has been revised as "limited" nuclear war, precision strikes on designated targets in both space and on the ground (the Discover article shows a theoretical "small" strike on Los Angeles).   But add to all those weapons the number of nuclear power plants and their own production and storage of "spent" fuel, currently at 80,000 tons in the U.S. alone (stored at 70 locations above ground).  Said a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek "With each passing year, the U.S. produces an additional 2,000 tons of nuclear waste" and notes that such an amount is already more than the earlier-proposed site of Yucca Mountain was meant to hold ($40 billion had been spent in building it yet it remains unfinished and now unfunded).  The Atlantic visually previewed the near-completion of the world's first permanent nuclear waste depository in Finland: ...something to last as long as the spent fuel from nuclear-power plants remains dangerous --between 100,000 and 1 million years.  Considering that the pyramids are a mere 4,500 years old, this is an essentially unimaginable span.  And while countries such as France and Germany begin to shutter their existing nuclear-power plants, others such as China and Russia are continuing to construct them (the U.S. has reduced its own construction to just 4 new nuclear plants while China is planning on 19 while Russia is going ahead with 13).  Once completed, over 500 nuclear-power plants will continue to be operating and producing spent fuel (this is not counting the 162 nuclear power plants planned for retirement), said Scientific American.

   In a shockingly-descriptive article on a book by Serhii Plokhy on what happened at Chernobyl, reviewer Mike Jay wrote in the LRB that in a brief 36 seconds, the reactor went from a test stage to "out of control."  Having struggled to get above 200 MW for so long, the power output of the reactor now shot up to 30,000 MW in seconds.  A hugely inflated proportion of water in the reactor turned to steam, which had, as Plokhy writes, ‘nowhere to go’.  The workers in the control room heard a ‘sudden roar…of a completely unfamiliar kind, very low in tone, like a human moan’.  Then there was a blast, and then, a few seconds later, another.  Even at this point nobody grasped what had happened.  As Plokhy says: ‘No textbook they had ever read suggested that reactors could explode.’  The first explosion had been caused by the excess steam in the core escaping into the external cooling system, destroying the casing of the reactor.  The 200 tonne concrete lid on the reactor --its ‘biological shield’-- was blown through the roof of the building, then landed again, off-centre, so that radiation was now being spat into the atmosphere.  The second, bigger blast destroyed much of the building and threw chunks of burning radioactive graphite into the air, which scattered across the surrounding area...The following day, radiation levels in Kiev were five times the norm.  In such tragedies, human potential and compassion and sacrifice emerge.  In Chernobyl, after an attempt to cover the structure with an aluminum copula failed, it was decided to encase the structure in concrete.  Continues the article: 200,000 workers had been used to build the 400,000-tonne structure.  They had worked in shifts to minimize their exposure to radiation, but no one was under any illusions: the ‘liquidators’, as they were known, had accepted a sacrificial role in the cause of damage limitation.  Many approached it as they had their service in the Red Army, as a moral and patriotic duty, though the authorities undermined their sense of heroism by rewarding conspicuous risk with financial bonuses.  One of the divers who released contaminated water from the underground chambers at the plant, when publicly presented with an envelope of cash, crumpled it up in embarrassment.  ‘He found it inconvenient to refuse the money,’ but had taken on the risks ‘not thinking of any incentives’.  He was dead within weeks. 

   How to describe the word tragedy?  Nuclear war is something unthinkable; but a tragedy such as what happened in Chernobyl and the tsunami in Japan is equally frightening.  Understanding radiation and its effects is often way beyond anyone but the engineers and physicists who make that their job...for the rest of us, just thinking of the possibilities of what could go wrong or what could happen with nuclear power is in itself quite frightening.  We can't predict or even stop the future.  We could fall or watch our house burn down, or lose a cherished spouse or friend; any and all would be true tragedies.  So sometimes we need to look in another direction, such as this opening from Natalie Merchant's 2010 album, Leave Your Sleep (the new practice of streaming prevents seeing such liner notes, something which was often a way for the artist to express his or her thoughts behind the music, much as a director's comments in a film or the author's forward in a book): This collection of songs represents parts of a long conversation I've had with my daughter during the first six years of her life.  It documents our word-of-mouth tradition in the poems, stories, and songs that I found to delight and teach her.  I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems off their flat, yellowed pages and brought them to life for her,  I willed into being this parade of witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese princess and a janitor's boy, and so many others.  I tried to show her that speech could be the most delightful toy in her possession and that her mother tongue is rich with musical rhythms and rhymes.  I gave her parables with lessons in human nature and bits of nonsense to challenge the natural order of things and sharpen her wit.  These poems speak of so many things: longings and sadness, joy and beauty, hope and disillusionment.  Grave or absurd, these are the things that make a childhood, that time when we wake up to the great wonders and small terrors of this beautiful-horrible world of ours.  May we all continue to remain children in our hearts...


*An interesting view of the order and process of what agencies and what people are affected by the government shut down (including farmers now in mid-harvest and needing to apply for next year's loans, loans which have an application deadline of January 31st) appeared in PBS online...

**As a quick definition of the new hypersonic missles, Barron's explained it this way: Cruise missiles can be guided during flight and delivered to precise targets, but typically fly close to, but not over, the speed of sound, or Mach 1, which is about 770 miles an hour.  A typical Tomahawk missile, for example, flies at 550 mph.  Last year, the U.S. launched 59 Tomahawks targeting a Syrian airfield in response to a chemical attack on civilians by that country’s government.  Ballistic missiles can fly much faster, but mainly follow a gravity-defined path, like a baseball thrown from center field to home.  These include intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, which exit and re-enter the atmosphere.  Among them: the Trident II, which can deliver nuclear warheads anywhere on Earth from U.S. submarines, and can reach a terminal velocity of Mach 24.  Hypersonics promise ballistic-like speed with cruise-like maneuverability, plus the ability to fly at low altitudes.  The result is a weapon that can penetrate any of today’s missile defense systems, and keep its target unknown until minutes before impact.  Like other missiles, hypersonics can theoretically be equipped with a variety of warheads, but they can also do profound damage with no warheads at all, due to their high kinetic energy.  A 500-kilogram projectile that hits a target at Mach 8 delivers the destructive power of three metric tons of TNT.  Put differently, a hunk of metal moving that fast can be as deadly as six Tomahawks.  That raises the possibility that these weapons can one day be deployed cheaply to counter the world’s most expensive military assets.  “Imagine a $500,000 Chinese missile that can neutralize a $20 billion U.S. carrier group,” says James Cross, a portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton Investments, who specializes in aerospace and defense.