Nuclear reactors were originally designed to make bombs. They still do, in what are called dual-use reactors. These produce plutonium while simultaneously generating electricity. Chernobyl was a dual-use reactor. People often pretend that bomb-making reactors have nothing to do with civilian power plants. Actually, the two are joined at the hip, relying on the same technology and personnel. They share the same infrastructure and produce the same radioactive material. The United States currently uses the civilian reactors of the Tennessee Valley Authority to make tritium for hydrogen bombs.
A medium-sized reactor produces enough plutonium for 20 nuclear weapons per year. A breeder reactor produces enough for 50. The United States, with 93 reactors currently operating, plans to triple its nuclear power capacity by 2050. Zia Man, a research scientist at Princeton, and his colleague Alexander Glaser, in their article on “Duel Use: Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power,” explain how the urge to build civilian reactors is really about building bombs. “There is a long history of how states have inter-woven their civil and military nuclear ambitions and capabilities. UK, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan built their nuclear weapons programs on an infrastructure developed supposedly for nuclear energy. Iraq, North Korea, and Iran, all signatories of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, concealed their nuclear weapons ambitions behind a ‘peaceful’ nuclear program.”
The amount of plutonium unaccounted for or diverted by criminal gangs and rogue states now measures in the tons. Brokers sell plutonium and entire bomb-making factories on the black market. Abdul Quadeer Khan, who furnished nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan, Libya, Iran, and North Korea, advertised his services in a brochure decorated with a mushroom cloud. When Saudi Arabia, endowed with plentiful reserves of oil and gas, scrambles to build nuclear power plants, the country is not meeting its energy needs. It wants to build bombs. Again, to quote Man and Glaser, with the italics in the original, “a nuclear program that is small—or even completely irrelevant—from a commercial perspective is generally large enough to support a substantial nuclear weapons program.”
“No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent,” said French President Charles de Gaulle. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force in 2021. Four nations have voluntarily surrendered their nuclear stockpiles and weapons: South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. As a warning to any nation that might consider following their example, Ukraine was invaded by Russia in 2014 and again in 2022. In the fall of 2024 Russia hit Ukraine with the first ballistic missile fired on European soil[TB6] . Designed to carry nuclear warheads, the Oreshnik missile reaches Berlin in 15 minutes, London in 20. In this case, the missile was armed with conventional explosives. A warning salvo, Russia said.
The world is witnessing a new nuclear arms race. The United States is spending $1.7 trillion to build the next generation of nuclear weapons and missiles. China is tripling its nuclear arsenal. Russia has launched into orbit a satellite capable of destroying the world’s space-based systems with nuclear weapons. As a warning about how close we are to atomic holocaust, the Doomsday Clock stands at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been since its invention in 1947.
After creating the world’s first sustained nuclear chain reaction—prelude to building the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—Enrico Fermi stopped to ponder what he had done. “Where is everybody?” he asked his colleagues at Los Alamos over lunch one day: a question now known as the Fermi Paradox. Given the tremendous size and age of the universe, Fermi expected it to be teeming with extraterrestrial life. Where are the missing civilizations, and why have none been discovered? Along with nuclear fission, Fermi suspected that he may have discovered an iron law of knowledge. Once a civilization learns how to convert mass into energy, it will build atomic weapons and destroy itself. So where is everybody? Blown to smithereens, like exploding stars strewn across the universe.
Our modern geological era, the Anthropocene, is time stamped with nuclear fallout from 1945 to the present. The atomic age has already produced a wide number of nuclear exclusion zones dangerous to humans and depopulated. These include Pacific atolls vaporized in mile-high explosions. Test sites in Nevada’s Great Basin. Hanford’s plutonium-producing reactors along the Columbia River. Disasters at Mayak and other Soviet bomb-making factories. The Red Forest at Chernobyl. The ghost towns around Fukushima, created after three nuclear reactors melted down and fourth reactor exploded in 2011. Learning to live in nuclear exclusion zones might be the one best skill for surviving the Anthropocene.
Thomas Bass, author of eight books and a contributor to The New Yorker, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Smithsonian, American Scholar, and other publications, will be publishing Return to Fukushima in 2025.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own
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