uranium enrichment

147 results back to index

Bomb Scare by Joseph Cirincione

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

The plan sought to establish an International Atomic Development Authority that would own and control all “dangerous” elements of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all uranium mining, processing, conversion, and enrichment facilities. Only “non-dangerous” activities would be allowed on a national level, and even then only with a license granted by the proposed International Authority. Baruch reasoned that this structure would make verification relatively simple since the mere possession of a uranium conversion or enrichment plant by a national authority would be a clear violation. Baruch’s version of the plan also included automatic punishment for violations, which went a step further than the recommendations of Acheson and Lilienthal.2 Since the objective of the Baruch Plan was not only to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons, but also to prevent an arms race and eliminate the bomb altogether, it proposed that once the International Authority could ensure that no other state was able to construct the bomb, the United States would guarantee the elimination of its entire nuclear stockpile.

…

Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto famously remarked, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”39 Pakistan had already started a secret program in 1972, aided by designs and technical information Abdul Qadeer Khan had brought back from his years working in the Netherlands at uranium enrichment facilities operated by the European consortium URENCO (Uranium Enrichment Company). Khan enabled Pakistan to begin production of centrifuges and then of highly enriched uranium. The secret smuggling operations he started to acquire machinery for this effort later formed the basis of his global nuclear black market that provided equipment to Iran, Libya, North Korea and perhaps other nations beginning in the 1980s.

…

-led invasion, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told the UN Security Council, “During the past four years, at the majority of Iraqi sites, industrial capacity has deteriorated substantially.”79 In late 2003, David Kay, who was leading the postwar search for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, commented, “We have been struck in probably 300 interviews with Iraqi scientists, engineers and senior officials how often they refer to the impact of sanctions and the perceived impact of sanctions in terms of regime behavior.”80 Intense scrutiny from the IAEA and the leading nations of the UN Security Council is retarding Iran’s nuclear efforts today. Iran voluntarily agreed to the suspension of all uranium enrichment-related activities for over two years starting in November 2003, and by mid-2006 had still not built a centrifuge cascade large enough to enrich enough uranium for even one bomb, though it did produce a minuscule quality of low-enriched uranium with great fanfare in April 2006. Moreover, Iran has run into problems with uranium conversion, a necessary precursor to uranium enrichment. The gas is reportedly contaminated with heavy metals. Until Iran can reliably convert uranium yellowcake into the gaseous uranium hexafluoride that goes into centrifuges, they will not be able to enrich in any significant quantity.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

This didn’t jibe with the particles the IAEA had collected, however, which ranged from 36 percent to 70 percent enriched.13 Uranium in its natural state contains less than 1 percent of U-235, the isotope needed for reactors and bombs. Most nuclear reactors need uranium enriched to just 3 to 5 percent. Highly enriched uranium is enriched to 20 percent or more. Although 20 percent enrichment can be used for crude nuclear devices, in addition to some types of nuclear reactors, weapons-grade uranium is enriched to 90 percent or above. Iranian officials insisted the highly enriched particles must have come from residue left inside used centrifuges that Iran had purchased—an admission that the centrifuge design wasn’t Iran’s own, as they had previously stated, and that some other nation was helping Iran build its program.

…

The agency’s mandate was to monitor what happened to uranium at the enrichment plant, not keep track of failed equipment. What the inspectors didn’t know was that the answer to their question was right beneath their noses, buried in the bits and memory of the computers in Natanz’s industrial control room. Months earlier, in June 2009, someone had quietly unleashed a destructive digital warhead on computers in Iran, where it had silently slithered its way into critical systems at Natanz, all with a single goal in mind—to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program and prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear bomb.

…

As he took in the news from Jafarzadeh, he was struck by the level of detail it revealed. Heinonen had been waiting for information like this for a while. Like his counterparts at ISIS, he immediately suspected the Natanz facility wasn’t a fuel-manufacturing plant at all but a uranium enrichment plant. Two years earlier, government sources had told the IAEA that Iran tried to secretly purchase parts from Europe in the 1980s to manufacture centrifuges for uranium enrichment.10 Based on this, Heinonen had suspected that Iran had an illicit centrifuge plant hidden somewhere within its borders, but he never knew its location, and the IAEA couldn’t confront the Iranians without exposing the source of the intelligence.

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

Bechtel would be at the forefront of the burgeoning new government-subsidized market, obtaining contracts to build more than half of the thirty-one nuclear plants on the drawing board. In November 1972, the federal government gave tentative approval for a $5.7 billion nuclear fuel plant at Dothan, Alabama—the world’s first privately owned nuclear facility of its kind—to a Bechtel subsidiary called Uranium Enrichment Associates (UEA) in partnership with the mega chemical company Union Carbide. The corporatization of uranium enrichment—which had been the government’s sole province since the Manhattan Project—ushered in what journalist Jonathan Kwitny described as the beginning of “what may be the largest commercial undertaking in history.” Despite fierce lobbying by Bechtel, Congress rejected the plan that would have broken the Atomic Energy Commission’s monopoly on the enrichment of uranium, and would have given UEA a series of subsidies and guarantees to meet the needs of commercial nuclear power plants—with the US government assuming most of the risk.

…

Steel, 87 US War Department, 51 University of California, and management Los Alamos, 251–52, 255, 265 University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Investigative Reporting Program, 307–08 University of California Radiation Laboratory, 251 University of Chicago, 125–26 Unruh, Vincent Paul, 220, 221, 226, 227 Uranium Enrichment Associates (UEA), 104 uranium enrichment facilities, 67–68, 104, 109, 113, 121, 152, 154, 156–57, 162, 258, 271, 272, 295 uranium mining projects, 23, 30, 87, 152, 156, 157 USA Today, 91, 236, 242 USSR. See Soviet Union Utah Construction Company, 23, 30 Utah Corporation, 23 Vallette, Jim, 169 van der Zee, John, 85 Venezuela, 50, 96 venture capital, 95, 135 Vietnam, 84, 209, 236 Vietnam War Bechtel and, 84, 236 Johnson’s policy on, 82 Kennedy’s policy on, 82 Nixon’s policy on, 95, 100 protests against, 84, 126, 267 Village Voice, 170 Viorst, Milton, 300 W.

…

McCone’s unwavering support of this radical strategy against the Soviet Union manifested especially in the atomic warfare theories he embedded in the inchoate air force. Truman had responded to McCone’s recommendations for an atomic buildup by tripling the capacity of the principal nuclear weapons plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and constructing gaseous-diffusion facilities for uranium enrichment in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky. Proud of his influence at the highest levels of government, McCone was even more gratified that his longtime friend Steve Bechtel would be the chief contractor on all three projects. While McCone’s sway within the Truman administration was impressive, it was minor in comparison with the authority he would wield with Eisenhower—his golfing buddy and the commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—who had solicited, and then followed, McCone’s advice about running for the White House on the Republican ticket in 1952.

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima by James Mahaffey

clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, it's over 9,000, loose coupling, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Richard Feynman, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Suez canal 1869, uranium enrichment, wage slave, wikimedia commons

A cylindrical shell made of a stack of uranium rings was blown against a similar stack of smaller rings held stationary in a block of tungsten carbide, using a smooth-bore 6.5-inch gun barrel. The projectile rings, propelled quickly by three bags of burning nitrocellulose, and the smaller cylinder assembled into a larger, complete cylinder of uranium metal, enriched to 86% U-235. The resulting configuration was hypercritical, and it fissioned explosively. To maximize the “shock and awe,” no leaflets were dropped warning Japan of an impending A-bomb attack, and security was so tight on Tinian Island, the base for atomic operations, that most of the Army Air Force personnel could only guess what was going on.27 However, the surprise was not as complete as one might think.

…

Everyone was impressed, particularly Oppenheimer, who was not disappointed by Feynman’s sharp analysis of the problem. It was even worse than Segré had reported. There were storage drums of different sizes stored in dozens of rooms in many buildings on site. Some held 300 gallons, some 600 gallons, and some an eye-opening 3,000 gallons of uranium oxide dissolved in water, in a range of uranium-235 enrichments from raw, natural uranium to nearly critical concentrations. Some were on brick floors, which was fine, but some were on wooden floors. Wood is an organic compound, and it contains hydrogen, which would moderate the speed of leaking neutrons and reflect them back into a drum, enhancing the conditions for fission.

…

Walther Bothe drew nuclear constants measurement, and Georg Stetter was given transuranic elements. Heisenberg was assigned the core problem, to prove the validity of the chain-reaction concept and then use the resulting nuclear reactor as a neutron source for further experimentation and data collection. Oddly, a separate uranium-enrichment task was spun off for Manfred von Ardenne, a German television pioneer, funded by the German Post Office. Truth be known, Heisenberg was a brilliant theorist but not so good as an experimentalist, and his task involved building a nuclear reactor, which was heavy on the experimental side.

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

The minimum mass of a sphere that still can sustain a chain reaction is termed the critical mass of the isotope. There is one crucial problem with all three of our fuels: they are all very difficult to obtain. Uranium-235 is common in nature, but only appears distributed amongst a much larger amount of uranium-238. To make natural uranium usable, we must enrich it to artificially increase the fraction of uranium-235. Plutonium-239 and uranium-233, on the other hand, don’t exist in nature. Instead, they must be bred from uranium-238 and thorium-232, respectively. Both of these options, enrichment and breeding, carry their own set of challenges that we will explore in the next two sections. 10.2.1Uranium enrichment How do we enrich uranium to increase the fraction of U-235?

…

However, since the difference is so slight, this process must be repeated thousands of times to achieve a substantial degree of enrichment. Still, arduous as it is, this was the predominant method employed for enriching the uranium used in the Manhattan Project. Figure 10.7:The process used to convert raw uranium ore into a material suitable for enrichment. Currently, the overwhelming majority of the world’s uranium is enriched using gas centrifuges. A centrifuge is a large, sealed cylinder that rotates about its center at a high rate.17 When hex is injected in, the heavier molecules (i.e. those with a U-238 atom) are pushed outwards more strongly than the lighter molecules (i.e. those with a U-235 atom). The reason for this is the same as why spinning carnival rides require children to sit closer to the center than their parents.

…

The gas that remains near the center (which has a slightly higher fraction of U-235) is then extracted and piped to the next centrifuge. As with gaseous diffusion, this process must be repeated many times to significantly increase the concentration of U-235. Figure 10.8:A centrifuge used for uranium enrichment. When the hex is inserted into the spinning chamber, the heavier gas molecules (i.e. those that contain a U-238 atom) preferentially move to the outside. This causes the concentration of U-235 in the hex near the center to be slightly larger, which can then be extracted and fed into another centrifuge for further enrichment.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Mette's workers were making fuel for Russian nuclear power plants. If they weren't exactly thriving, Weber saw they were not starving either. The entire town seemed to be a "little Russia"--Weber saw no Kazakhs there. Just before leaving, Weber inquired gently about the uranium. "If it is not a secret," he asked, "do you have any highly-enriched uranium?" Highly-enriched uranium could be used for nuclear weapons. Mette was still evasive. The former Soviet Union was brimming with highly-enriched uranium and plutonium. Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian atomic energy minister, revealed in the summer of 1993 that Russia had accumulated much more highly-enriched uranium, up to twelve hundred metric tons, than was previously thought.8 Outside of Russia, in the other former republics, less was known about stockpiles, but much was feared about the Iranians and the Iraqis hunting for material to build nuclear bombs.

…

They couldn't be sure if they could take samples, or photographs, so it had to be someone who could mentally absorb everything, who would know about canisters and metals. The job went to Elwood Gift of the National Security Programs Office at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A chemical-nuclear engineer, Gift had experience in most of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment. Gift arrived in Kazakhstan March 1 amid swirling snowstorms, and for several days holed up at Weber's house. When the weather cleared, they boarded an An-12 turboprop for Ust-Kamenogorsk. The Kazakh government purchased tickets in false names to hide their identity. Fuel was scarce. Just ten minutes after takeoff, they unexpectedly landed again--the tanks were almost empty and the pilot attempted to coax more fuel from a military airfield.

…

When they walked away from the uranium warehouse, Gift, carrying the briefcase, suddenly slipped and fell hard on the ice. Weber and Mette helped him to his feet but looked at each other. "Both of us, our initial reaction was, Oh my God, the samples!" Weber said. Both Gift and the samples were fine. Back in Almaty, they told the ambassador they had verified the uranium was highly enriched. Courtney immediately sent a cable to Washington, noting the ancient padlock on the door. The cable, Weber recalled, "hit Washington like a ton of bricks." Starr, who was in Washington, said the cable "established there was a potentially serious proliferation issue." Weber thought there was only one thing to do.

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short by David Archibald

Bakken shale, carbon tax, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), means of production, Medieval Warm Period, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, peak oil, price discovery process, rising living standards, sceptred isle, South China Sea, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

By 2003, Iran had created an isotope of polonium (Po210) by irradiating bismuth in its Tehran reactor. One of the best-known uses for this isotope is as a neutron initiator in nuclear weapons. It has been estimated that as of November 2012, Iran had 7.6 metric tons of uranium enriched to 3.5 percent U235 and 232 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent U235. Further enriched, the latter quantity is estimated to provide enough uranium for one bomb with a fifty-kilogram core of 90 percent U235. GUARANTEED SECOND STRIKE The U.S.-Russian nuclear standoff gave mankind the most peaceful period in world history.

…

One result of Communism’s collapse was that the former Communists and their fellow travelers in the West found a new ideological home in the environmental movement and moved on to promoting the global warming hoax as a wealth redistribution exercise, via a network of UN agencies. Another unfortunate consequence was that a number of regimes felt much less constrained from developing nuclear weapons. The errant nuclear power of the moment is Iran, which has a large, well-funded uranium-enrichment program and a stated intention of annihilating Israel with nuclear weapons. But whatever the fate of the Iranian bomb-making effort, there is already another nation that is also heading toward failed-state status while still upping the bomb-making rate of its nuclear weapons program. This is Pakistan, “the land of the pure.”

…

A Pakistani-initiated attack on India’s coastal city of Mumbai by terrorists backed by Pakistan’s secret service agency, the ISI, would follow in 2008. The terrorists were members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the same group that had earlier attacked India’s parliament. And in 2011, satellite imagery showed that construction had commenced on a fourth plutonium-producing reactor at Khushab. Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment facilities are thought to be capable of producing 110 kilograms of weapons-grade U235 annually, which is enough for five weapons. On the completion of the fourth Khushab reactor, assuming that these four reactors are each rated at seventy megawatts thermal and operate 70 percent of the time, Pakistan could also produce seventy kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium each year, enough for fourteen weapons.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

According to CIA Director George Tenet, “Mahmood was thought of as something of a madman by many of his former colleagues in the Pakistan nuclear establishment.”17 It is possible to believe that the two scientists “provided detailed responses to bin Laden’s technical questions about the manufacture of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,” as another Washington Post report puts it.18 But the questions do not seem to be very sophisticated, and as the scientists themselves have reportedly insisted, it seems that the discussion was wide-ranging and academic (even rather basic) and that they provided no material or specific plans. Moreover, as the Pakistani officials stressed to Khan and Moore, Mahmood had been involved with uranium enrichment and plutonium production but not bomb building. Therefore he “had neither the knowledge nor the experience to assist in the construction of any type of nuclear weapon,” nor, it seems, were the scientists experts in chemical or biological weapons. Therefore, they likely were incapable of providing truly helpful information, because their expertise was not in bomb design, which might be useful to terrorists, but rather in the processing of fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities of a nonstate group, as discussed in chapter 12.

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Greenhouse gases are emitted during the extraction of uranium for fuel, as well as during uranium processing and enrichment. Greenhouse gases are also emitted in the production of construction materials for nuclear power plants, such as concrete and steel. In addition, there are some minor emissions of greenhouse gases during reactor operations by secondary generators that are required in case of accidents. These generators must be tested on a regular basis, and during the testing they emit carbon dioxide and other gases. Most nuclear power reactors in operation in the world today — those termed light water reactors — require uranium to be enriched in one of its naturally occurring isotopes, uranium-235, for use in fuel.

…

Perhaps the main problem with nuclear power is that some of the associated technologies — reprocessing of spent fuel to separate plutonium and uranium enrichment technologies — pose the highest proliferation threats. Separated plutonium can easily be fashioned into nuclear weapons by knowledgeable people. Highly enriched uranium is arguably even easier to make into nuclear weapons. Thus, for years the world has safeguarded these technologies in non–nuclear weapons states. The problem with a ten-fold expansion in nuclear power is the resulting growth and spread of these technologies. Clearly, they would have to be controlled. Perhaps the best way to do so would be through the use of international uranium enrichment, reprocessing, and reactor production facilities.

…

Thus, its annual operation creates the emission of about as much greenhouse gases as that from three 1,100-megawatt coal plants. Other enrichment technologies, such as centrifuge plants, are less energy intensive than gaseous diffusion; nonetheless, they still use electricity. Unless a system can be made in which all the electricity used in uranium mining, milling, and enrichment comes form nuclear power itself, nuclear-produced electricity will result in the emission of some greenhouse gases. The larger question that we are trying to address is, what is a reasonable expectation for greenhouse-gas-emission reductions from nuclear power? Today’s nuclear power plants save 600 million tonnes of carbon per year from going into the atmosphere from equivalent power-producing coal-fired plants.

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, Stuxnet, traveling salesman, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

They also insisted that the forty-four-year-old professor was only a renowned electro-magnetic expert and not involved with Iran’s nuclear endeavors in any way. But it turned out that Hosseinpour worked at an Isfahan secret installation where raw uranium was converted into gas. This gas was then used for uranium enrichment by a series (“cascades”) of centrifuges in Natanz, a faraway, fortified underground installation. In 2006, Hosseinpour was awarded the highest Iranian prize for science and technology; two years earlier, he had been awarded his country’s highest distinction for military research. The assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists were just one front in a much larger war.

…

If the experiments succeeded, Joklik would try getting more cobalt, which would be placed in the missiles’ warheads and spread deadly radiation on impact. The goal of the second project, Cleopatra, was to produce two atomic bombs. Joklik suggested an ingenious method for manufacturing the bombs: buying uranium enriched to 20 percent in the United States or in Europe; enriching it up to 90 percent by special centrifuges developed in Germany and Holland by the scientists Dr. Wilhelm Groth, Dr. Jacob Kistemaker, and Dr. Gernot Zippe; and building the bomb with the enriched uranium. Joklik flew to the United States and tried to get the enriched uranium there; he also met with several German scientists and invited them to build centrifuges in Egypt.

…

In Jerusalem and Washington, official sources confirmed that Israel and the United States were acting together, but disagreed on a major point: when would Iran have to be stopped by all means necessary—military or other. The American services claimed that this would be the moment when the enrichment of uranium by Iran reached 80 percent, a crucial stage in the development of their nuclear capability. Uranium enriched to that level could be very quickly upgraded to 97 percent, the degree needed for the assembly of an atomic bomb. Israel’s timetable was different, based on reports from the ground and satellite detection. The Mossad had discovered that Iran was engaged in a chaotic race against time, building a large number of underground facilities buried at a depth of hundreds of meters.

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Ten years ago Iran offered to resolve its differences with the United States over nuclear programs, along with all other issues. The Bush administration rejected the offer angrily and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed it. The European Union and Iran then sought an arrangement under which Iran would suspend uranium enrichment while the EU would provide assurances that the U.S. would not attack. As Selig Harrison reported in the FINANCIAL TIMES, “the EU, held back by the U.S. . . . refused to discuss security issues,” and the effort died. In 2010, Iran accepted a proposal by Turkey and Brazil to ship its enriched uranium to Turkey for storage.

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The first was a mysterious attack on a nuclear facility in Iran. Over a period from 2007 to 2009, an advanced computer bug modified the controls of Iranian ultracentrifuges in a plant near the city of Natanz, some 200 miles south of Tehran. First, it caused pressure inside the centrifuges used for uranium enrichment to spike for no apparent reason. Plant technicians who saw it happen were baffled. Why hadn’t their systems signalled a failure? Next, the bug caused hundreds of centrifuges to speed up. One by one, they spun themselves to pieces before the technicians’ horrified eyes. Several Iranian scientists were sacked and it is estimated that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme has been set back years.

…

Back in the 1970s, Pakistani atomic expert Abdul Qadeer Khan came to Holland to study nuclear physics. He worked at a research laboratory in Amsterdam for years, building a life in the Netherlands with his South African wife, making Dutch friends and learning the language. From time to time he also visited the eastern city of Almelo, where a uranium-enrichment facility operated by the British−German−Dutch consortium UCN used a process known as ultracentrifugation. Ultracentrifugation was a unique technology. No other country knew how to do it. Exporting the technology was therefore prohibited and surrounded by tight restrictions, but there were equally persistent attempts to dodge them.

…

Evidently, the man who’d embraced life in the Netherlands had turned against the West, and agencies in the Netherlands were mystified as to how it could have happened. Thanks to Dutch ultracentrifugation expertise, by this time the AIVD and MIVD had decades-long experience with the process and materials used in uranium enrichment. According to my sources, the AIVD kept close tabs on the market, especially freight carriers that sometimes shipped falsely declared goods to countries like Pakistan and Iran. The agency had several partners in this effort, notably the American CIA, German BND, British MI5 and Israeli Mossad.

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

The Agreed Framework slowed down North Korea’s nuclear program, but it did not eliminate it. The agreement’s death throes and the second nuclear crisis began when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted North Korean leaders about their covert uranium enrichment program during his visit there in October 2002. Things went from bad to worse, and the threat of a U.S. attack against North Korea grew, following revelations of both its uranium enrichment program and its ability to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons. That was when North Korea doubled down and became the first country to leave the NPT, in 2003. A few weeks later, North Korean fighter jets intercepted a U.S.

…

The South Korean air force scrambled their F-16 fighter jets and fired artillery; the prospect of a military conflict on the Korean Peninsula seemed inevitable. The United Nations and alarmed leaders from Washington and Beijing cautioned restraint on both sides. Yet at nearly the same time as the island-shelling incident, North Korea revealed a large uranium enrichment plant to visiting U.S. former officials and academics, who were amazed by the modern, advanced facility, which triggered suspicion about the regime’s intention to make highly enriched uranium bomb fuel. As an insurance policy against regime-ending retaliatory acts by the United States or South Korea, and to be better positioned to extract political and economic concessions, Kim Jong Il engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity with North Korea’s biggest patron, Beijing.

…

At the CIA, where I was a lead political analyst at the time, that meant providing the analysis for a seemingly never-ending series of National Security Council policy meetings, producing President’s Daily Briefs—our signature product designed to support the president, the cabinet, and other senior officials—and spending lots of late nights at the office. On leap day in 2012, after two years of bilateral negotiations, North Korea agreed to a deal with the United States that called for a suspension of uranium enrichment, international inspections, and a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests in exchange for 240,000 tons of food aid. A mere two weeks later, the new Kim regime announced its intention to conduct a space launch banned by U.N. sanctions. North Korea had long insisted on its right to peaceful use of outer space and claimed that it wanted to send satellites into orbit to better predict the weather and harvest yields, but international voices argued that this was simply a cover and that the regime intended to test ballistic missile technology.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

As its name implies, it fires a projectile - in this case a piece of H E U - down a gun barrel into another piece of H E U . Each piece of H E U is sub-critical and by itself cannot sustain an explosive chain reaction. Once combined, however, they form a supercritical mass and can create a nuclear explosion. Weapons-grade H E U - uranium enriched to over 90% of the isotope U235 - is the most effective material for a H EU-based device. However, even H E U enriched to less than weapons-grade can lead to an explosive chain reaction. The Hiroshima bomb, for example, used about 60 kg of80% enriched uranium. Terrorists would probably need at least 40 kg of weapons-grade or near weapons-grade H E U to have reasonable confidence that the I N D would work (McPhee, 1 974, pp. 1 89-1 94) . 2 1 As indicated above, the potential for non-state actors to build a nuclear explosive already had been expressed publicly by knowledgeable experts as early as the 1 970s.

…

Aside from the assistance provided by a state sponsor, the most likely means by which a non-state actor is apt to experience a surge in its ability to acquire nuclear explosives is through technological breakthroughs. Today, the two bottlenecks that most constrain non-state entities from fabricating a nuclear weapon are the difficulty of enriching uranium and the technical challenge of correctly designing and building an implosion device. Although almost all experts believe uranium enrichment is beyond the capability of any non-state entity acting on its own today, it is possible that new enrichment technologies, especially involving lasers, may reduce this barrier. Unlike prevailing centrifuge and diffusion enrichment technology, which require massive investments in space, infrastructure, and energy, laser enrichment could theoretically involve smaller facilities, less energy consumption, and a much more rapid enrichment process.

…

This is a distinguishing feature of biological weapons that is obscured by the tendency to include them with nuclear, chemical, and radiological weapons as a 'weapon of mass destruction' (Chyba, 2002) . 20.3 Biological weapons are d istinct from other so-called weapons of mass destruction Producing a nuclear bomb is difficult; it requires expensive and technologically advanced infrastructure and involves uranium enrichment or plutonium production and reprocessing capacity that are difficult to hide. These features render traditional non-proliferation approaches feasible; despite being faced with many obstacles to non-proliferation, the I nternational Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is able to conduct monitoring and verification inspections on a large number (over a thousand) of nuclear facilities throughout the world.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Abbasi and his wife escaped more or less unharmed, but one of his colleagues was killed by a similar attack, as was an Iranian particle physicist in January 2010, an electronics specialist in July 2011, and a manager at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in January 2012. Teheran blamed Tel Aviv and Washington for the assassinations, as well as for the malware viruses known as Flame and Stuxnet, which were discovered in the spring of 2012 infecting Iran’s uranium enrichment computers. Flame is lithe spyware that turns on computer microphones and Skypes the recorded conversations; scans the neighborhood’s Bluetooth gadgets for names and phone numbers; and takes pictures of the computer’s screen every fifteen to sixty seconds. Stuxnet infected Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges and sped them up until they committed suicide.

…

But after FDR’s death, the United States instead forbade the sharing of secret atomic-energy information with any foreign country, including Britain and Canada, on pain of death. It didn’t actually matter for the allies as they had been involved enough to know the fundamentals, but since the USA had a monopoly on uranium enrichment, the British were forced to engineer reactors that used natural uranium metals, moderated by graphite but cooled by gas. France followed Britain’s design in their own burners, and Canada used similar fuels, but moderated with heavy water. In the end, America’s attempts at safeguarding her atomic secrets hurt only her own allies.

…

But a number of physicists and engineers insist that the thorium design will solve all of those problems, with less maintenance, and less waste. Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold are, meanwhile, investing in a “traveling wave reactor” process, a type of breeder reactor fueled by ordinary uranium instead of enriched, which, if it works, won’t require massive Oak Ridge–like industrial plants isolating near-weapons-grade isotopes. Breeder reactors are so interesting that Eagle Scout David Hahn decided that, for his 1994 Atomic Energy merit badge, he should build one in his parents’ suburban Detroit potting shed.

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

The Bush administration was widely praised for having shifted to a more conciliatory stand—namely, by allowing a U.S. diplomat to attend without participating—while Iran was castigated for failing to negotiate seriously. And the powers warned Iran that it would soon face more severe sanctions unless it terminated its uranium-enrichment programs. Meanwhile India was applauded for agreeing to a nuclear pact with the United States that would effectively authorize its development of nuclear weapons outside the bounds of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with U.S. assistance in nuclear programs along with other rewards—in particular, to U.S. firms eager to enter the Indian market for nuclear and weapons development, and ample payoffs to parliamentarians who signed on, a tribute to India’s flourishing democracy.

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The prime suspect, Israel, never took responsibility. The United States was a partner in the secret campaign against Iran. Bush had authorized the cooperation, which continued, and even intensified, under Obama. Their most famous success was Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm that found its way into the operating system of Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges. According to the New York Times, Stuxnet had been developed by a joint American-Israeli team in “Operation Olympic Games” to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.8 Contrary to the “throwing Israel under the bus” narrative pushed by Netanyahu’s people in Jerusalem and Washington, Obama authorized taking the intelligence-sharing and operational coordination between the two countries to unprecedented levels.

…

Obama refused to publicly go beyond his standard formulation—“All options are on the table,” and the United States would “do what is necessary.” The United States was indeed working on operational plans to strike Iran if necessary. For one, it was developing massive bunker-buster bombs capable of taking out the underground uranium enrichment plants. But what Israelis and Iranians heard was a president who had no intention of going to war and who would do whatever it took to prevent Israel from doing so. Bibi with Benzion at age 101. ON APRIL 30, 2012, Benzion Netanyahu passed away at the age of 102. Well into his late nineties, he had soldiered on with his research, spending long periods in the United States, where he often read and wrote in the New York Public Library.

…

“Iran uses diplomatic negotiations as a means to buy time to advance its nuclear program,” Netanyahu said. And “sanctions have not stopped Iran’s nuclear program either.”24 He had even brought a diagram, in the shape of a cartoon bomb, on which he drew with a marker a thick red line, highlighting the 90 percent uranium enrichment threshold. From the red line, “it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb…. The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb. The red line must be drawn on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target.”25 Netanyahu was imploring Obama and the world to stop Iran from crossing the red line.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Using images released by the Iranian government, commercial satellite imagery, and Google Earth, they geo-located the scorched building. On the basis of their nuclear and country expertise, each reached the same conclusion: the Iranians were lying. The shed was actually a nuclear centrifuge assembly building at Natanz, Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility.4 And the fire might have been an act of sabotage.5 Natanz was well known to United Nations weapons inspectors and American intelligence officials. Located about 125 miles south of Tehran, its vast underground facilities housed thousands of nuclear centrifuges, the advanced machines used to enrich uranium for both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.6 For years, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been locked in cat-and-mouse inspections there7 to collect evidence about violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty8 and to monitor Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, which allowed only limited uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes.9 Natanz was also the site of the most sophisticated cyberattack ever conducted.

…

Located about 125 miles south of Tehran, its vast underground facilities housed thousands of nuclear centrifuges, the advanced machines used to enrich uranium for both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.6 For years, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been locked in cat-and-mouse inspections there7 to collect evidence about violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty8 and to monitor Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, which allowed only limited uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes.9 Natanz was also the site of the most sophisticated cyberattack ever conducted. Code-named “Olympic Games,” the joint U.S.-Israeli cyber operation destroyed approximately one thousand10 nuclear centrifuges by secretly injecting malware into their operating computers.11 Experts believed “Olympic Games” slowed Iran’s march to the bomb by a year or more.12 But Albright and Hinz weren’t employees of the IAEA or the U.S.

…

Already, thousands of citizen scientists have successfully sifted through massive quantities of data to help a Cal Tech and UC Santa Cruz team identify several new exoplanets56 and an international team of physicists identify new gravitational lenses.57 In 2016, Melissa Hanham at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies began a nuclear threat crowdsourcing initiative called Geo4Nonpro, which drew several hundred imagery experts together. They discovered the geolocation of North Korea’s clandestine Kangson uranium enrichment facility.58 The New Nuclear Sleuths: Who’s Who and What’s Different All of these developments have given rise to a cottage industry of non-governmental nuclear intelligence collectors and analysts. Academic teams, like my colleagues at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, bring together researchers across disciplines and former government officials.

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright

Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, colonial rule, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, power law, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment

For the next eighteen years, Iran reportedly worked on acquiring pieces and technology for a clandestine program. In 2002, however, it got caught. An exiled opposition group exposed research and development at two sites, Natanz and Arak. The sprawling desert facility in Natanz included preparations for uranium enrichment. Enriched at low levels, uranium can fuel reactors in a peaceful nuclear energy program. At high levels, it can be subverted for bomb-making. The dual-purpose technology presented a special conundrum for the outside world, as Iran definitely had been on a longstanding and legal quest for nuclear energy—a goal dating back to the monarchy.

…

The hard-liners and ideologues dominated the internal debate. And they were far less willing to buckle to the West. Tensions with the outside world quickly began building again. In 2006, Europe and the United States crafted a carrot-and-stick compromise with broad incentives: Iran could keep its energy program, but Russia would control the uranium enrichment fuel cycle to ensure that the key process was not diverted for a weapon. The West would also throw in economic and diplomatic perks, including talks that would bring the United States and Iran to the negotiating table for the first time in decades. The alternative was the threat of increasingly punitive United Nations sanctions.

…

It had happened in 2004, when eight British sailors were held for three days. But Britain claimed global satellite tracking proved its patrol boats were almost two miles inside Iraqi waters. The abduction was interesting in another respect. It came one day before the United Nations voted on a new resolution to impose sanctions on Tehran for failing to suspend uranium enrichment. The sanctions were narrow, targeting banks, institutions, and twenty-eight officials believed to be involved in Iran’s suspected nuclear program. Among the individuals were the top seven Revolutionary Guard commanders of its ground forces, navy, air force, intelligence unit, and Quds Force.

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

This is allowed if due notice is given to the safeguards authorities. In the 1980s vast amounts of depleted uranium (the waste left behind when uranium is enriched) belonging to the UK civil programme were removed from safeguards. Some was used to produce tritium for warheads. The depleted uranium was also used for hardening shells and strengthening tank armour. The investigative journalist John Pilger has highlighted the human cost of the radioactive debris from the use of UK depleted uranium in Iraq. Though depleted uranium is not as radioactive as enriched uranium, a suggestion has been made, which has yet to be experimentally verified, as to why it might be genetically damaging.

…

Fermi had produced the first controlled nuclear fission reaction. In one of the great ironies of science, Fermi achieved in Chicago in 1942 what had erroneously preoccupied his team in Rome in 1934. It is a sobering thought that had they guessed correctly eight years earlier, fascism might have triumphed in the Second World War. Both the uranium enrichment and the plutonium production approaches worked, but too late for the bomb to be used in the war in Europe. Uranium was used in the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Plutonium was used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This practical demonstration of the quantum revolution was infinitely more problematic, complex and more expensive than the discovery of semiconductors, which followed a few years later.

…

I have argued that it would be more appropriate to the needs of developing countries if Western and Chinese manufacturers were to compete in supplying solar factories. Solar technology might then become a tool of political influence, the ‘new nuclear’, with the great advantage that it cannot be used for weapons. In Iran for instance, I suggest that, in return for stopping all uranium enrichment activity, the US and EU should offer to build a solar cell factory and a wind turbine factory, each capable of manufacturing systems producing 1 GW of electrical power a year. This would cost less than a new nuclear reactor. Within ten years Iran could have around 15 GW of new electricity capacity, much more than its nuclear programme will produce in that time.

What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

But the fact is, on the nuclear issue, they are the ones who offered negotiations. They are the ones who said that they would accept the two-state settlement on Israel-Palestine. But the United States is willing to “negotiate” only if Iran concedes the result of the negotiations before the negotiations begin. The negotiations are conditional on Iran stopping uranium enrichment, which it’s legally entitled to do, but which is supposed to be the goal of negotiations.38 So, yes, we’ll negotiate if they first concede in advance. And with a gun pointed at their heads, because we won’t withdraw the threats against Tehran. Washington has made that very clear. We continue the threats, which are a violation of the UN Charter.

…

This morning, the Boston Globe reported something that has been known around here for a long time. In 1974, presumably at U.S. government initiative, MIT made a deal with the shah of Iran to effectively lease the nuclear engineering department, or a large part of it, to Iran, to bring in lots of Iranian nuclear engineers and train them in the development of uranium enrichment and other techniques of nuclear development. In return, the shah, who was one of the most brutal tyrants of the period, with a horrible human rights record, would pay MIT at least half a million dollars. The article also points out that several of the engineers who were trained at MIT are now apparently running the Iranian nuclear programs.26 Those programs were strongly supported by the United States in the mid-1970s.

Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Monroe Doctrine, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, old-boy network, Ralph Nader, Thorstein Veblen, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, éminence grise

Included were “weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency,” the Financial Times reported last month (May 2006). The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed the offer.2 A year later, the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Apparently under U.S. pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes.3 As in the case of the 2003 offers, and others, there is only one way to determine whether Iran’s initiatives are serious: pursue them.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

On this morning, Cheney found a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, titled “Niamey Signed an Agreement to Sell 500 Tons of Uranium a Year to Baghdad.” The report, dated February 12, 2002, caught Cheney’s eye. Niamey was the capital of Niger, an African country with significant uranium deposits. Iraq had no civilian nuclear energy program, and the only reason it could want uranium from Africa was to fuel a bomb. The uranium would have to be enriched, no easy task and not one that Iraq had mastered. But if it were, five hundred tons by one calculation would be enough to make fifty weapons. The report was based on information from a foreign intelligence service, and Cheney asked his briefer to find out what the CIA thought of it. By this point, Cheney was hunting for evidence that Iraq had chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons in violation of its obligations under the UN Security Council resolutions that followed the Gulf War.

…

He concluded his list by noting that “it is possible of course to prepare a similar illustrative list of all the potential problems that need to be considered if there is no regime change in Iraq.” THROUGH ALL OF this, a separate crisis was brewing with another member of the axis of evil. American intelligence agencies had uncovered evidence that North Korea had a secret uranium enrichment program in addition to the plutonium program it had suspended as part of the Agreed Framework negotiated with Bill Clinton. James Kelly, an assistant secretary of state, was instructed to confront the North Koreans during a trip to Pyongyang. When he did, the North Koreans responded in a way that Kelly took as confirmation.

…

The United States would drop its opposition to World Trade Organization membership talks for Iran and allow the sale of spare parts for American-made civilian airplanes. But they represented a sea change from the policy of confrontation Cheney had advocated in the first term. After all the talk of going it alone if necessary, Bush would now be letting the British, Germans, and French take the lead in pressuring Iran to give up uranium enrichment. Unlike with Andijan, this time Rice moved policy without a major clash. As she sat in the Oval Office one day describing her plan, even Cheney went along without protest. “That makes sense,” he said. The emergence of Rice underscored the evolution of Bush’s partnership with Cheney. “There certainly seemed to be a difference in their relationship,” Christine Todd Whitman observed from the outside.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

When a stage was leakproof and otherwise ready it could be operated without further delay, and the first stage of the enormous K-25 cascade was charged with uranium hexafluoride on January 20, 1945. Enrichment by gaseous barrier diffusion in the most advanced automated industrial plant in the world had begun. It would proceed efficiently with only normal maintenance for decades. The pipes in Philip Abelson’s scaled-up thermal-diffusion plant, S-50, leaked so badly they had to be welded, which delayed production, but all twenty-one racks had begun enriching uranium by March. Juggling the different enrichment processes to produce maximum output in minimum time then became a complex mathematical and organizational challenge.

…

Emilio Segrè Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition More than seven decades after its conception under the looming storm front of the Second World War, the Manhattan Project is fading into myth. The massive production reactors and plutonium extraction canyons at Hanford, Washington; the half-mile-long uranium enrichment factory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the several hundred thousand workers who built and operated the vast machinery while managing to keep its purpose secret, disappear from view, leaving behind a bare nucleus of legend: a secret laboratory on a New Mexican mesa, Los Alamos, where the actual bombs were designed and built; a charismatic lab director, the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who rose to international prominence postwar until his enemies brought him low; a lone B-29 bomber incongruently named for the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay; a devastated city, Hiroshima, and poor ruined Nagasaki all but forgotten.

…

Divide a cylinder down its length with such a foil barrier, pump a gas of mixed isotopes into one side of the divided cylinder, and gas would diffuse through the barrier as it flowed from one end of the cylinder to the other. Compared to the gas left behind, the gas that diffused through the barrier would be selectively enriched in lighter isotopes. In the case of uranium hexafluoride the enrichment factor would be slight, 1.0043 under ideal conditions. But with enough repetitions of the process any degree of enrichment was possible, up to nearly 100 percent. The immediate problem, Simon saw, was barrier material. The smaller the holes, the higher the pressures a separation system could sustain, and the higher the pressure, the smaller the equipment could be.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Though some experts called it the most sophisticated malicious computer program ever seen, this weapon did not draw much media attention until experts discovered that among its many features is an ability to send nuclear centrifuges spinning out of control.38 As a result, many analysts now believe it was designed as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli project to disrupt the nuclear program under development in Iran, and senior U.S. and Israeli officials have since reported their belief that Iran’s uranium enrichment program has been significantly delayed. All this amounts to high, if mostly hidden, drama, but it’s just the latest episode in the nearly seven-decade battle to contain one of the world’s most complicated long-term problems. The two bombs that abruptly ended World War II marked the peak of American military dominance, but the U.S. atomic monopoly lasted just four years.

…

Between now and then, Iran will have to cope with a variety of international sanctions on the export of nuclear materials, missiles, and other military matériel; investment in oil, gas, and petrochemicals; and shipping, banking, and insurance transactions. The purpose of these sanctions is not simply to slow or halt Iran’s uranium enrichment program; it’s also to ensure that the next wave of would-be weapons states can see just how dangerous and expensive nuclear development in violation of international agreements can be. But too many governments are interested in Iran’s oil and gas to maintain effective sanctions on its energy trade.

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The two countries also embarked on an effort to identify Iranian purchases of equipment for the project, particularly items that Iran could not manufacture itself, and to stop the shipments from reaching their destination. This continued for years, through the Bush administration and into that of Barack Obama. But the Iranians were tenacious. In June 2009, the Mossad, together with U.S. and French intelligence, discovered that they had built another secret uranium enrichment facility, this one at Qom. Publicly, three months later, President Obama made a dramatic announcement and condemnation, and the economic sanctions were tightened further. Covertly, joint sabotage operations also managed to produce a series of breakdowns in Iranian equipment supplied to the nuclear project—computers stopped working, transformers burned out, centrifuges simply didn’t work properly.

…

Covertly, joint sabotage operations also managed to produce a series of breakdowns in Iranian equipment supplied to the nuclear project—computers stopped working, transformers burned out, centrifuges simply didn’t work properly. In the largest and most important joint operation by the Americans and the Israelis against Iran, dubbed “Olympic Games,” computer viruses, one of which became known as Stuxnet, caused severe damage to the nuclear project’s uranium enrichment machinery. The last component of Dagan’s plan—the targeted killing of scientists—was implemented by the Mossad on its own, since Dagan was aware that the United States would not agree to participate. The Mossad compiled a list of fifteen key researchers, mostly members of the “weapons group” that was responsible for developing a detonation device for the weapons, as targets for elimination.

…

In July 2011, a motorcyclist followed Darioush Rezaeinejad, a doctor of nuclear physics and a senior researcher for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, until he reached a point close to the Imam Ali Camp, one of the most fortified bases of the Revolutionary Guard, which contains an experimental uranium enrichment area. The biker drew a pistol and shot Rezaeinejad dead. In November 2011, a huge explosion occurred in another Revolutionary Guard base, thirty miles west of Tehran. The cloud of smoke was visible from the city, windows rattled, and satellite photos showed that almost the entire base had been obliterated.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

According to some U.S. intelligence analysts, Stuxnet set back the Iranian nuclear program by a year or even two, giving the Obama administration crucial time to bring Iran to the bargaining table, culminating in a nuclear deal in 2015. But in fact, those long-term wins against Natanz’s operation weren’t so definitive. Even in spite of its confusion and mangled centrifuges, the facility actually increased its rate of uranium enrichment over the course of 2010, at times progressing toward bomb-worthy material at a rate 50 percent faster than it had in 2008. Stuxnet might have, if anything, only slowed the acceleration of Ahmadinejad’s program. And what was Stuxnet’s price? Most notably, it exposed to the world for the first time the full prowess and aggression of America’s—and to a lesser extent Israel’s—most elite state hackers.

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

Natural uranium contains too little U235 to sustain a chain reaction with water moderation. To use water to moderate a reactor, the uranium fuel has to be enriched from .07 percent U235 to at least 3 percent U235. Uranium enrichment, which the United States’s Manhattan Project pioneered during World War II, was first used to make nearly pure U235 for the first atomic weapon, the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945. After the war, when the navy developed the first power reactors for nuclear submarines, it used uranium fuel enriched to a level of U235 sufficient to sustain a chain reaction with water moderation. The laboratory at the University of Chicago where Fermi built CP-1 worked during the early years of World War II to develop the technology of breeding plutonium.

…

Even more troublesome, the two isotopes are chemically identical, which means they can’t be separated using chemical means. They’re different physically: U238, with three more neutrons, is slightly heavier. So they can be laboriously separated by taking advantage of their slight difference in mass. Uranium isotope separation, also called enrichment, requires industrial-scale facilities such as factories full of centrifuges. There were no such factories in 1942. As Henry Ford had to build his first automobile in a world without automobile parts, so did Fermi have to work with natural uranium, somehow teasing a chain reaction from its scant content of U235.

…

The natural reactors were like the geysers of Yellowstone National Park, which cycle similarly because water seeps into underground magma chambers where the hot magma heats it to steam, which spouts up through natural channels in the overburden and sprays into the air, emptying the underground chambers and shutting down the geysering. Then water seeps into the magma chambers again, and the cycle repeats. In May 1972 a staff member at the Eurodif uranium-enrichment plant in Pierrelatte, France, first noticed the discrepancy that led to the discovery of the Gabon reactors: analyzing a standard sample prepared from uranium ore, he was surprised to find it slightly depleted in U235. Checking other samples, Eurodif found U235 similarly missing in ore shipments from Gabon going back to 1970.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

The danger is that nuclear weapons technology will proliferate into some of the most unstable regions of the world. During World War II, only the greatest nations on earth had the resources, know-how, and capability to create an atomic bomb. However, in the future, the threshold could be dramatically lowered as the price of uranium enrichment plummets due to the introduction of new technologies. This is the danger we face: newer and cheaper technologies may place the atomic bomb into unstable hands. The key to building the atomic bomb is to secure large quantities of uranium ore and then purify it. This means separating uranium 238 (which makes up 99.3 percent of naturally occurring uranium) from uranium 235, which is suitable for an atomic bomb but makes up only .7 percent.

…

In the 1980s and 1990s, the United States, France, Britain, Germany, South Africa, and Japan attempted to master this difficult technology and were unsuccessful. In the United States, one attempt actually involved 500 scientists and $2 billion. But in 2006, Australian scientists announced that not only have they solved the problem, they intend to commercialize it. Since 30 percent of the cost of uranium fuel comes from the enrichment process, the Australian company Silex thinks there could be a market for this technology. Silex even signed a contract with General Electric to begin commercialization. Eventually, they hope to produce up to one-third of the world’s uranium using this method. In 2008, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy announced plans to build the first commercial laser enrichment plant in Wilmington, North Carolina, by 2012.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

The Syrian government was forced to conduct business in the currencies of its three principal allies—Iranian rials, Russian rubles, and Chinese yuan—because the Syrian pound had practically ceased to function as a medium of exchange. By late 2013, the financial damage in Iran led to an agreement between President Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, which eased U.S. financial attacks in exchange for Iranian concessions on its uranium enrichment programs. Iran had suffered from the sanctions, but it had not collapsed, and now it had met the United States at the negotiating table. In particular, sanctions on gold purchases by Iran were removed, enabling Iran to stockpile gold using the dollar proceeds from oil sales. President Obama made it clear that although sanctions were eased, they could be reimposed if Iran failed to live up to its promises to scale back its nuclear programs.

…

Chinese president Hu Jintao and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev used the occasion of the SCO and BRICS summits to sign a joint Sino-Russian declaration calling for reform of the global financial system and international financial institutions and greater developing economy representation in the IMF. Newly elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani had a kind of international coming-out party at the SCO summit in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, on September 13, 2013. At the summit, Iran received strong support from Russia, China, and the rest of the SCO for noninterference in Iran’s uranium-enrichment efforts. As geopolitics are increasingly played out in the realm of international economics rather than purely military-diplomatic spheres, the SCO’s evolution from a security alliance to a potential monetary zone should be expected. This has already happened covertly through Russian and Chinese banks’ role in facilitating Iranian hard-currency transactions, despite sanctions on Iranian money transfers imposed by the United States and the EU.

The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East by Andrew Scott Cooper

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Boycotts of Israel, energy security, falling living standards, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Kissinger viewed the Shah’s nuclear ambitions, as he did oil prices and arms sales, in purely tactical terms. Shultz’s Iran trip had the dual purpose of following up on the oil talks while selling the Shah on the idea of building a U.S.-based uranium enrichment facility. “Also, at our instigation, approaches have been made by the Bechtel Corporation to Iran to encourage the Shah’s investment (on the order of $300 million) in a private uranium enrichment plant to be built in the United States,” Kissinger was reminded by an aide in December 1974. The administration calculated that if the Shah went ahead and acquired half his nuclear power program from the United States, the equivalent of between six and eight nuclear power plants, the United States stood to earn $6.4 billion in revenues.

…

Three months earlier Iran had entered into a secret pact with South Africa to buy enough uranium to power up to a hundred nuclear power plants at an estimated cost of between $700 million and $1 billion. Under the terms of the deal Iran would help to finance the construction in South Africa of a big new uranium enrichment facility. The South Africans would supply Iran with ore from its occupied territory of Namibia. The Ford administration had agreed to sell Iran eight nuclear power plants but opposed granting Iran the right to reprocess uranium in Iranian-built and managed facilities. The Shah’s South Africa deal directly challenged U.S. domination of the international uranium trade.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Sillamäe, “History: Sillamäe Linn,” accessed December 17, 2014, http://www.sillamae.ee/en/web/eng/history. 3. Sillamäe, “Secret Period: Sillamäe Linn,” accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.sillamae.ee/en/web/eng/secret-period; Olaf Mertelsmann, “The Uranium Enrichment Factory in Sillamäe (Kombinat 7),” Estonica, January 28, 2009, http://www.estonica.org/en/The_Uranium_Enrichment_Factory_in_Sillam%C3%A4e_Kombinat_7/. 4. “Tech Topics: The Leading Edge,” Kemet, September, 2001, Vol 11, No. 1, http://www.kemet.com/Lists/TechnicalArticles/Attachments/143/V11N01%20Nb%20vs%20Ta%20Capacitors.pdf; David O’Brock, interview by David Abraham, Sillamäe, Estonia, January 22, 2013; Sally Lowder, “David Trueman: The Ups and Downs of Minor Metal Investing,” Gold Report, July 5, 2011, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.theaureport.com/pub/na/david-trueman-the-ups-and-downs-of-minor-metal-investing. 5.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Explore 15 years of power outages. http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/data-explore-15-years-of-power-outages/. WNA (World Nuclear Association). 2014. Decommissioning nuclear facilities. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/decommissioning-nuclear-facilities. WNA. 2015a. Uranium enrichment. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Conversion-Enrichment-and-Fabrication/Uranium-Enrichment. WNA. 2015b. World nuclear power reactors & uranium requirements. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Facts-and-Figures/World-Nuclear-Power-Reactors-and-Uranium-Requirements. Wolfe, D. A., and A. Bramwell. 2008. Innovation, creativity and governance: Social dynamics of economic performance in city-regions.

…

Fortunately, the costs of nuclear warhead decommissioning can be much reduced by reusing the recovered fissile material for electricity generation (WNA 2014). Highly enriched uranium (HEU, containing at least 20% and up to 90% U-235) is blended down with depleted uranium (mostly U-238), natural uranium (0.7% U-235), or partially enriched uranium to produce low-enriched uranium (<5% U-235) used for power reactors. According to a 1993 agreement between the United States and Russia (megatons for megawatts), Russia converted 500 t of HEU from its warheads and strategic stockpiles (equivalent to around 20,000 nuclear bombs) to reactor-ready fuel (averaging about 4.4% U-235) and sold it to power the U.S. civilian reactors.

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

In the cyber age, once they hacked a computer, they could prowl the entire network connected to it; and, once inside the network, they could not only read or download scads of information; they could change its content—disrupt, corrupt, or erase it—and mislead or disorient the officials who relied on it. Once the workings of almost everything in life were controlled by or through computers—the guidance systems of smart bombs, the centrifuges in a uranium-enrichment lab, the control valves of a dam, the financial transactions of banks, even the internal mechanics of cars, thermostats, burglary alarms, toasters—hacking into a network gave a spy or cyber warrior the power to control those centrifuges, dams, and transactions: to switch their settings, slow them down, speed them up, or disable, even destroy them.

…

From the outset of his presidency, Obama articulated, and usually followed, a philosophy on the use of force: he was willing to take military action, if national interests demanded it and if the risks were fairly low; but unless vital interests were at stake, he was averse to sending in thousands of American troops, especially given the waste and drain of the two wars he inherited in Afghanistan and Iraq. The two secret programs that Bush pressed him to continue—drone strikes against jihadists and cyber sabotage of a uranium-enrichment plant in Iran—fit Obama’s comfort zone: both served a national interest, and neither risked American lives. Once in the White House, Obama expressed a few qualms about the plan: he wanted assurances that, when the worm infected the Natanz reactor, it wouldn’t also put out the lights in nearby power plants, hospitals, or other civilian facilities.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

It would remove two thirds of the centrifuges, maintain low levels of enrichment for at least fifteen years, reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 98 percent, and allow comprehensive access to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor compliance. A year after the agreement, in May 2016, the IAEA found that Iran had lived up to its commitments. Iran went from over 19,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges to just 5,060. It ended uranium enrichment and removed all nuclear material from its once secret facility at Fordow. It reduced its stockpile of enriched uranium and filled the core of its heavy-water reactor at Arak with concrete, making it permanently inoperable. Together, these terms increased Iran’s “breakout time”—the period to produce enough fissile material for a single nuclear weapon—from about two to three months to at least one year.93 Although critics complained that the deal still allowed Iran to enrich nuclear material, some later acknowledged that it had succeeded in eliminating an imminent threat.

…

Outcasting, after all, is not very effective if carried out by a single state—even one as powerful as the United States. The more states participate, the more effective the sanction. The turning point for Iran came in 2006, when the U.N. Security Council joined the American effort. It demanded that Iran stop uranium enrichment and imposed progressively painful sanctions in response to its continued intransigence.61 As a result, Iran was shut out not only by the United States and a few sympathetic countries but by nearly every nation in the world. But there was another crucial step, as well: an innovation in the technology of outcasting.

Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

On arrival they were absorbed into the Witness Protection Program and assured that for the foreseeable future they would be among the most protected of all American citizens. MEANWHILE, ANALYSTS ON THE IRAN DESK in Vauxhall Cross continued to study Israel’s plans to launch a preemptive strike against Iran’s three prime uranium enrichment facilities: Natanz; a uranium conversion site at Isfahan; and the heavy water reactor at Arak. Low-yield bunker-busting bombs would be used against Natanz, as the facility was buried deep underground. It would be the first time since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nuclear weapons would be used.

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy

company town, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

In the corridors of power, however, the VVER reactors lost in competition with the RBMK, or High Power Channel Reactor, which used graphite to moderate the reaction and water as a coolant. The RBMK reactors had an output of 1,000 megawatts of electrical energy, twice that of the VVERs. And they were not only more powerful but also cheaper to build and operate. Whereas VVER reactors required enriched uranium, RBMK reactors were designed to run on almost natural uranium-238, with an enrichment level of a mere 2 to 3 percent of uranium-235. Last but not least, the RBMK reactors could be constructed on the spot from prefabricated components produced by machine-building plants that did not specialize in the production of high-precision equipment for the nuclear industry. As far as the party leadership in Moscow was concerned, it was a win-win situation.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

In the variety of attacks cited by the senators above, the Citigroup attackers wanted account details about bank customers with an ultimate goal of financial theft. In the attack on RSA, the attackers wanted key business secrets in order to spy on other companies. For Stuxnet (a case we’ll explore further in Part II), the attackers wanted to disrupt industrial control processes involved in uranium enrichment, so as to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. Finally, it is useful to acknowledge when the danger comes from one of your own. As cases like Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden and the NSA scandal illustrate, the “insider threat” is particularly tough because the actor can search for vulnerabilities from within systems designed only to be used by trusted actors.

…

This precision becomes even more important if the attack is to interfere with physical processes. In the case of Stuxnet, for example, many believe that practice was needed to understand how the software would deploy and how altering the industrial controllers would impact the targeted process of uranium enrichment. Reportedly, the new cyberweapon was tested at Israel’s secretive nuclear facility in Dimona. As one source told the New York Times about the test effort, “To check out the worm, you have to know the machines.… The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.” On the defensive side, vulnerability tests and practice exercises are quite valuable for the actors in cyberspace that range from militaries to private companies.

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

In Europe, polls show that Israel is regarded as the leading threat to peace.27 In the MENA countries, that status is shared with the United States, to the extent that in Egypt, on the eve of the Tahrir Square uprising, 80 percent of the population felt that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons.28 The same polls found that only 10 percent of Egyptians regard Iran as a threat—unlike the ruling dictators, who have their own concerns.29 In the United States, before the massive propaganda campaigns of the past few years, a majority of the population agreed with most of the world that, as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to carry out uranium enrichment. Even today, a significant majority favors peaceful means for dealing with Iran. There is even strong opposition to military engagement if Iran and Israel are at war. Only a quarter of Americans regard Iran as an important concern for the United States.30 But it is not unusual for there to be a gap—often a chasm—dividing public opinion and policy.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Brazil has about 5 percent of the world’s known uranium reserves, and all output is used domestically after enrichment overseas. State-owned Industrias Nucleares do Brazil (INB) operates the Lagoa Real/Caetite mine in Bahia state, and a second mine Itataia/Santa Quiteria in Ceara state. Brazil has a significant capability in uranium enrichment and fuel fabrication at Resende in Rio de Janeiro state, and is also working on the development of advanced reactor designs and systems. No private investment in nuclear power is allowed. A secret nuclear weapons program embarked on by Brazil’s military government in the 1970s was abandoned by the civilian administration in the 1980s, and Brazil subsequently renounced any interest in developing nuclear weapons.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Many assert that America’s approach to Iran and North Korea has been that of a reckless gorilla, but if anything it has been too narrow and cautious, focused on containment and isolation rather than on engagement and resolution. Each encounter between American and Iranian officials has been suffused with a significance rivaled only by an extraterrestrial encounter. Demanding that no negotiations would take place until Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program and allowed full inspections wasted three years during which enrichment accelerated. The so-called carrot-and-stick approach to Iran has been a self-serving euphemism for coercion, since the preconditions for negotiation are already too patronizing for the Iranians. As one Iranian scholar put it, “No more carrots and no more sticks—and please no more sticks in the shape of carrots either.”

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

By February, an eighteen-foot statue and a nearly four-hundred-foot rock carving were unveiled on what would have been his seventieth birthday. Then there was a flicker of hope about the possibility of a new round of talks in February. On the twenty-ninth, North Korea even went so far as to announce it was suspending its nuclear-weapon and ballistic-missile tests and uranium enrichment while also granting international inspectors access to its nuclear sites. Like clockwork, it all came undone with a new round of provocations. Just two weeks later, North Korea announced a long-range rocket launch, and Barack Obama, on a visit to Seoul, said, “North Korea will achieve nothing by threats.”

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

It was the first time anyone had seen malware that targeted the customized software that is used to control industrial machineries such as turbines and presses. After months of relentless analysis it became apparent that the code targeting these supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems had a very specific purpose: to disrupt the process of uranium enrichment in nuclear facilities. When the centrifuges connected to the system met certain conditions, the malware would forcibly alter the rotation speed of the motors, ultimately causing the centrifuges to break years before their normal life span. More importantly, the centrifuges would fail to properly enrich the uranium samples.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

One attack crippled the world’s most valuable company, the $10 trillion Saudi oil firm Aramco. Hackers wiped out data on three-quarters of the company’s computers.9 The attack was probably launched by Iran, and it came on a carefully chosen day when the impact would be severe. Stuxnet, the virus that crippled Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges, was probably developed by the United States and Israel.10 The same team that produced Stuxnet probably also produced the viruses Flame and Gauss, all of which have some shared code.11 These more recent viruses have basic data-mining goals, and Gauss seems to be targeting Lebanese banks.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Swan, clean water, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, framing effect, friendly fire, iterative process, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, price anchoring, telemarketer, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment

After initially pointing out the obvious—that he’d happily signed the deal—Disney made the dramatic gesture of sending the star a Picasso painting worth a reported $1 million. The nation of Iran was not so lucky. In recent years, Iran has put up with sanctions that have cost it well over $100 billion in foreign investment and oil revenue in order to defend a uranium-enriching nuclear program that can only meet 2 percent of its energy needs. In other words, like the students who won’t take a free $1 because the offer seems insulting, Iran has screwed itself out of its chief source of income—oil and gas revenue—in order to pursue an energy project with little expected payoff.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

As high-speed, ubiquitous connectivity among all manner of devices binds us more tightly to technology and to the Internet, a crucial and frightening mega-trend for the next two decades is that cyber security will become a more important domestic-security issue. In 2007, the Stuxnet computer worm sent costly and critically important centrifuges spinning wildly out of control at Natanz, a secret uranium-enrichment facility in Iran.2 In a matter of months, American and Israeli security forces were able to remotely destroy 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium. The government program behind the virus, code-named “Olympic Games,” was developed during the Bush and Obama Administrations.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, chief data officer, cloud computing, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, low interest rates, machine readable, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Bannon, tail risk, the new new thing, uranium enrichment

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Iran’s repeated assertion that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes is met with total disbelief by its Arab neighbors. Ahmadinejad has also accelerated the development of missiles, some of which could carry nuclear payloads. The nuclear program entered a new phase in 2006 with the activation of a large number of centrifuges to enrich uranium. Enrichment is the process by which the ratio of the U-235 isotope to the far more common U-238 is increased. A 3 percent to 5 percent U-235 concentration is required to provide the fuel for a civilian nuclear reactor. A 20 percent level is needed for medical purposes. An atomic bomb needs 90 percent. It is much easier, once having reached the 20 percent level, to go from 20 percent to 90 percent than it is to go the initial distance from 3 percent to 20.

…

The light-water reactor is the basis for about 90 percent of the 440 or so nuclear reactors currently operational in the world, and virtually all those presently planned. Whatever the coolant, it is typical to speak of the nuclear-fuel cycle. For the light-water reactor, the cycle begins with the mining of uranium and then moves to enrichment to increase the concentration of the isotope U-235 to a level that will be able to sustain a controlled chain reaction. This more-concentrated fuel is then fabricated into fuel rods that will be inserted into the reactor. The cycle continues through the use of the fuel in the reactor all the way through to the deposition of the spent fuel in some form of storage or possible reuse.

…

Ulam, Stanislaw unemployment in Iraq Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), see Soviet Union unipolar world United Airlines United Arab Emirates (UAE) United Kingdom (UK) see also Great Britain United Nations climate change and Eisenhower’s address at (Dec. 1953) First Gulf War and General Assembly of Iran and JFK’s address to Oil-for-Food Programme established by sanctions program of Security Council of weapons inspectors of United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, see Earth Summit United Nations Development Program United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change United States antitrust in arms buildup of biofuels in blackouts in buildings in cars in Caspian Derby and climate change and coal and cyberattack and deepwater production in demand for oil in demand shock and deregulation in East Coast of economy of elections in electricity in electricity in, completion of electricity in, “unintended hybrid” system of emergency stimulus package in energy efficiency in energy independence and energy security of female voting rights in financial crisis and foreign relations of, see specific countries gasoline prices in global supply chains and Great Depression in Great Game and Great Recession in hostage crisis and Hurricane Katrina in Iraq War and LNG and Malacca Strait and Mid-Atlantic states in Midwest in national security of natural gas of Nigerian oil and 9/11 and Northeast in nuclear accident in nuclear navy of nuclear power in nuclear weapons of oil consumption in oil discoveries in oil exports of oil imports of oil sands and oil shale in peak production predicted for price controls in R&D in renewables in shale gas in Southeast in Southwest in Soviet collapse and in space race stability and Standard Oil Trust in Strait of Hormuz and Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Tengiz oil field and tight oil in total energy consumption of total energy of unipolar world and venture capital in West in in World War II, United States Bureau of Mines United Technologies Unocal Upton, Fred uranium enrichment of urbanization Urengoy field U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) U.S. Windpower Vanguard program Varadi, Peter variable-speed technology Vekselberg, Viktor Velasco Alvarado, Juan Venezuela aggregate disruption and amnesty in Boesi painting and Chávez in China’s relations with coups in economy and economic growth in election of 1998 in general strike in la apertura in nationalization in oil of Pérez reforms in as petro-state population increase in poverty in unconventional oil in U.S. relations with Venter, Craig venture capital, venture-capital investing in cleantech Doriot and photovoltaics and start of energy focus of Western growth of Venus Vermont vertically integrated companies Vestas Vienna Vietnam Villach meeting (1985) Vilsack, Tom Vogtle nuclear power plant Volkswagen Volvo Vostok Voyages dan les Alpes (Sassure) Wagoner, Rick Wall Street Walton, John T.

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

I switched to metallurgy and materials science, because I figured NASA would need people who understood alloys, stresses, and heat as much as they needed electrical engineers. I graduated from college just as the Apollo program was winding down. But happily, NASA was developing a space station—Skylab—and the space shuttle program was well underway. I interviewed with General Electric at its uranium enrichment facility in Wilmington, North Carolina, and in Massachusetts, where the company did its research and development work. But truth be told, I felt like I didn’t know enough when I got my bachelor’s degree. Graduate school seemed like the way to go. I applied to business schools and engineering schools, and got accepted into several of both, including Brown’s engineering school and the University of Pennsylvania.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Energy consumers will continue to turn to America, which has the world’s only global naval presence, to ensure the free flow of oil and gas supplies on which their economic futures depend. The U.S. provision of global public goods will also extend to new military challenges. As Iran masters uranium-enrichment technology, some of its Arab neighbors will rely even more heavily on Washington to guarantee their security and to help them avoid the costs that come with a nuclear arms race. As governments in Eastern Europe worry over threats of Russian expansionism—an anxiety heightened by dependence on Russia’s natural gas, Moscow’s demonstrated willingness to bully its neighbors by turning off the taps, and its conflict with Georgia in August 2008—they will increasingly turn to a U.S.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

To make a call one had to turn a crank on the side of the box. As he sat waiting for the military police to approve his pass, Feynman was running through some calculations for the hypothetical in-between reactor that would be called a water boiler. Instead of blocks of uranium interspersed with graphite, this unit would use a uranium solution in water, uranium enriched with a high concentration of the 235 isotope. The hydrogen in the water would increase the effectiveness many times over. He was trying to figure out how much uranium would be needed. He worked on the water-boiler problem, picking it up and putting it down again over the next weeks, thinking about the detailed geometry of neutrons colliding in hydrogen.

…

Every atom was its own tiny bomb: it split with a jolt of energy and released more neutrons to trigger its neighbors. The neutrons tended to slow, however, dropping below the necessary threshold for further fission. The chain reaction would not sustain itself. However, the rarer isotope, uranium 235, would fission when struck by a slow neutron. If a mass of uranium were enriched with these more volatile atoms, neutrons would find more targets and chain reactions would live longer. Pure uranium 235—though it would not be available in any but microscopic quantities for months—would make an explosive reaction possible. Another way to encourage a chain reaction was to surround the radioactive mass with a shell of metal, a tamper, that would reflect neutrons back toward the center, intensifying their effects as the glass of a greenhouse intensifies its infrared warming.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

In 2001 President George Bush engaged in his own labelling, describing Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’, and claiming that its nuclear energy facilities were a cover for building a nuclear weapons arsenal. Tehran already had missiles capable of reaching targets more than 5,000 kilometres away, so the idea that they might be nuclear-tipped alarmed everyone within range. In 2002 an Iranian dissident group revealed that Tehran was building a uranium-enrichment complex and a heavy-water facility, both of which can be used to make nuclear weapons. The government insisted its nuclear activity was only for peaceful purposes. Few in the international community were convinced, especially after an International Atomic Energy Agency report said that the enrichment process suggested Iran was seeking weapons-grade material.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

Noting the number of uses within the code of the word “crash” and its ability to override key industrial control system processes, researchers at Dragos, a leading industrial control system security company, named it CRASHOVERRIDE. To make CRASHOVERRIDE so powerful, clearly its creators had studied previous attempts at targeting industrial control systems. The most infamous of these attempts was Stuxnet. As Chapter 6 showed, Stuxnet’s architects exhibited a deep understanding of the Iranians’ industrial processes for uranium enrichment. They understood how the centrifuges worked and how illicit computer code could manipulate these processes and cause them to fail. They also understood the importance of testing the code on similar or replica machinery and refining it to have a tailored and well-defined effect against the intended target.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

North Korea went to extraordinary lengths to acquire nuclear weapons and appears to have sold ballistic missiles to and co-developed nuclear technologies with countries like Iran and Syria. China, India, and Pakistan are ramping up arsenals and have opaque safety records. Everyone from Turkey and Saudi Arabia to Japan and South Korea has at least expressed interest in nuclear weapons. Brazil and Argentina even had uranium enrichment programs. To date no terrorist group is known to have acquired either a conventional warhead or sufficient radiological material for a “dirty” bomb. But methods to construct such a device are hardly secret. A rogue insider could credibly produce one. The engineer A. Q. Khan helped Pakistan develop nuclear weapons by stealing centrifuge blueprints and fleeing the Netherlands.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Stuxnet was a military-grade cyberweapon; when dissected, it was found to be aimed specifically at Siemens centrifuges, and designed to go off when it encountered a facility that possessed a particular number of such machines. That number corresponded with one particular facility: the Natanz Nuclear Facility in Iran, the mainstay of the country’s uranium enrichment programme. When activated, the programme would quietly degrade crucial components of the centrifuges, causing them to break down and disrupt the Iranian enrichment programme.42 The attack was apparently partially successful, but the effect on other infected facilities is unknown. To this day, despite obvious suspicions, nobody knows where Stuxnet came from, or who made it.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Recent months have brought the revelation that the United States military, possibly with the Israeli military, has released at least one and perhaps two computer viruses into the world with the intent of crippling Iran’s slow march to nuclear capabilities. The first virus was called Stuxnet, and was targeted at specific kinds of machines that would be in use for uranium enrichment. The second virus is called Flame, and it has not been definitively linked to the United States, although the evidence is strong. These proactive acts of “cyber war,” while significant programming projects, hardly raise the scale of resource-intensive military operations such as designing, building, and maintaining an aircraft carrier.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In 1988, another warning shot was fired when Robert Tappan Morris released the first computer worm into the Internet—an act, he claimed later, that was intended to call attention to the vulnerability of the system and the inadequacy of its security measures.41 A year later, he earned the dubious distinction of being the first person to be indicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.42 He was sentenced to three years of probation, community service, and a small fine. Over the subsequent thirty years, the United States has focused a great deal of its energy on building offensive cyber weapons. In 2009, Stuxnet was launched against the Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Twenty-seven years after the pipeline explosion in Siberia, cyber experts nevertheless described Stuxnet as the world’s first digital weapon.43 The virus took control of the Natanz centrifuges and caused a thousand of them to self-destruct.44 The NSA has developed tool kits that can be used to engineer cyberattacks.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

What happened next was straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster, portrayed many times in films such as Ocean’s Eleven and National Treasure. The attackers simply prerecorded video footage of the casino vault or safe room to be targeted and played it back on the screens of the watchers and security staff. As the uranium enrichment centrifuges spun out of control at Natanz, Stuxnet masterfully intercepted the actual input values from the pressure, rotational, and vibration sensors before they reached the operational control room monitored by the plant’s engineers. Rather than presenting the correct real-time data from the Siemens PLCs, Stuxnet merely replayed the prerecorded information it had taken during phase one of the operation, showing all systems in full working order.

…

Algorithmic hacking could also cause major problems for society and its critical infrastructures because altering just a few lines of code among millions in an intelligent agent’s programming could be nearly impossible to detect but could lead to drastically different outcomes in the algos’ behavior. The attack against the uranium centrifuges at the nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran, is a perfect example of this type of threat, a subtle change that made a big difference and took years to discover. How would we know if our stock trading or navigation algos were off or maliciously subverted? We wouldn’t until it was too late, and that is a serious problem.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

“Could this also be a threat against other installations, U.S. critical infrastructure?” he asked. “Unfortunately, the answer is yes because it can be copied easily. That’s more important than the question of who did it.” He warned of Stuxnet copycat attacks, and criticized governments and companies for their widespread complacence. “Most people think this was to attack a uranium enrichment plant and if I don’t operate that I’m not at risk,” he said. “This is completely wrong. The attack is executed on Siemens controllers and they are general-purpose products. So you will find the same products in a power plant, even in elevators.”42 Skeptics argue that the threat of Stuxnet is overblown.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

“The object of the project,” Serber said, “is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast-neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission.” Summarizing what Oppenheimer’s team had learned from their Berkeley summer sessions, Serber reported that by their calculations an atomic bomb might conceivably produce an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Any such “gadget,” however, would need highly enriched uranium. This core of enriched uranium, approximately the size of a cantaloupe, would weigh about thirty-three pounds. They could also construct a weapon from the even heavier element of plutonium—produced via a neutron-capture process using U-238. A plutonium bomb would need far less critical mass, and the plutonium core might therefore weigh only eleven pounds and appear no larger than an orange.

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

National e-government services as well as the national infrastructure, including power plants, electricity grids, and oil pipelines, use networked control systems to decrease their operational costs. The concentration of information and power in these digital systems creates points of vulnerability that are open to attack by malevolent forces. One example of such an attack is the deployment of the Stuxnet virus, discovered in 2010, which is widely thought to have caused damage to a uranium enrichment plant in Iran. The virus is believed to have been developed for this purpose by experts with detailed knowledge of Iranian systems and with the involvement of at least one government. Another threat to the virtual integrity of the Internet is cybercrime. The notion of cybercrime is used to denote security threats motivated by financial gain (although in many countries acts of cyberaggression are illegal, too).

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, California gold rush, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Garrett Hardin, Golden Gate Park, hacker house, jitney, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The whole idea behind Rampart Dam was to turn Alaska, overnight, into an industrial subcontinent. Five million kilowatts were enough to heat and light Anchorage and ten other cities its size, with power left over for a large aluminum smelter, a large munitions plant, a couple of pulp and paper mills, a refinery, perhaps even a uranium-enrichment facility tucked safely away in the wilderness—and even then, about half of the power would be left over for export. But that was the problem. Export where? The dam made sense only if all of the power could be immediately sold. Realistically speaking, the dam made no sense at all. Neither did Devil’s Canyon Dam.

…

The dams, mostly built during the Depression and the war era with low-interest money and by workers earning a few dollars a day, were the cheapest source of power around, and TVA’s rates were as low as those in the Northwest. As in the Northwest, a complement of energy-intensive industries had moved in—aluminum, uranium enrichment, steel—and now the TVA was afraid they would move right back out if it raised its rates. It was a fear whose end result, rational or not, was the Tellico Dam. In June of 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the injunction against the dam on the basis of the Endangered Species Act, as written. Legally, the Court had little choice, even though, by then, the dam was more than 90 percent built.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

It began in 1994, and currently 10 percent of the electricity Americans use comes from Russian missiles and bombs. The goal is to convert twenty thousand nuclear warheads into fuel by 2013; that’s enough energy to run the whole U.S. nuclear fleet for two years. Two processes are involved. One “downblends” weapons-grade highly enriched (95 percent) uranium to low-enriched (5 percent) uranium for reactor use. The other converts plutonium into a “mixed oxide” (MOX) that also works as a fuel. In the next few years, the United States will supplement Russian efforts by commencing to forge our own nuclear swords into plowshares in Tennessee and at a new facility in South Carolina.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

The traveling wave reactor also reduces nuclear weapons proliferation risks, since its fuel cycle would eliminate the need for numerous uranium processing plants. As Charles W. Forsberg, executive director of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has quipped, the traveling wave fuel cycle “requires only one uranium enrichment plant per planet.” The plutonium burns itself up as it sustains a further chain reaction by transforming depleted uranium into more plutonium. In other words, a traveling wave reactor produces plutonium and uses it up at once, which means that, unlike fuel in conventional reactors, there is very little left over that could be diverted for weapons production.

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

One of the scouts’ dads—an eminent professor of agricultural engineering—obtained, from a lab in his department, a sack of genetically identical corn kernels, carried them across campus, and handed them off to one of the other scouts’ dads: a physicist employed by the Ames Laboratory. This was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. The uranium enriched at Oak Ridge, and used in the first atomic bombs, had been refined from its ore by a process developed at Ames. Dad #2, who had been present at the startup of the world’s first atomic pile in a racquetball court at the University of Chicago, carried the seeds into a hot room buried a couple of stories beneath one of the Ames Lab’s buildings and handed it off to a mechanical arm that carried it behind a thick wall of yellowish lead-laced glass and set it down in the vicinity of something that was radioactive.

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

3D printing, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, coronavirus, country house hotel, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Indoor air pollution, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, mittelstand, remote working, rewilding, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, uranium enrichment, warehouse automation, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Rotork was soon producing motorized valve actuators, engineered and patented by Jeremy, for pipelines in the oil industry. It was an ingenious idea, a form of automation that was compelling to oil companies—with Shell, BP, and Esso as customers—and to the new power industry, too. In 1962, Rotork took an order for a thousand sealed, weatherproof, and explosion-proof actuators for a new French uranium enrichment plant. I still find myself putting into practice at Dyson some of the same things Jeremy said and did when I worked for him half a century ago. As an inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur, he believed in taking on young people with no experience because this way he employed those with curious, unsullied, and open minds—as long as they didn’t sport beards or smoke pipes.

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Small but significant acts illustrated the possibilities. First Iraqi and then Serb air defences were degraded by messing with their software. The Israelis did something similar with Syrian air defences when they took out a nuclear reactor under construction in 2007. The Stuxnet virus, probably a joint US-Israeli project, was designed to set back uranium enrichment in Iran by disabling centrifuges.21 This had some effect but also showed how hard it was to stop these attacks spreading away from the original target. The virus was noticed when non-Iranian systems were hit. Every time national systems were tested to see how well they could defend against interference from others, they were found to be wanting, and for all types of networks, malevolent hacking became regular.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

More recently, in mid-2015, personnel records of 21.5 million current and former employees of the US government, including 5.6 million fingerprint images, were stolen when the Office of Personnel Management was hacked—possibly by a foreign government aiming to recruit informants or identify spies.87 Other highly sophisticated malware initiatives, likely state-sponsored, have likewise penetrated embassies, research institutes and other sensitive targets of governments around the world.88 The rising scale of critical infrastructure connected to the Internet—including defense, chemical, food, transportation, nuclear, water, financial, energy and other systems—means that not just cybercrime, but cyber warfare is now possible. As of 2016, two major cyber attacks causing physical infrastructure damage have been publicly confirmed. In 2010, the Stuxnet worm sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment infrastructure by infecting control systems and causing the uranium centrifuges to tear themselves apart.89 (A similar worm had been aimed at North Korea’s facilities, but failed to reach its target because of the country’s extreme isolation.)90 And in 2014, a German steel mill suffered “massive damage” after cyber attackers gained access to the plant’s control systems and caused critical components to fail.91 Many more such strikes are being attempted.

Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Singularity Sky by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological constant, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Extropian, Future Shock, gravity well, Higgs boson, Kuiper Belt, life extension, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, skinny streets, technological singularity, uranium enrichment

She glanced around at the vacant chairs, the powered-down work-station on the table. "Oh, and one other thing. The Eschaton always wipes out CVDs just before they go live. We figure it knows where to find them because it runs its own CVD. Sort of like preserving a regional nuclear hegemony by attacking anyone who builds a uranium enrichment plant or a nuclear reactor, yes? Anyway. You haven't quite begun to break the law yet. The fleet is assembling, you've located the time capsule, but you haven't actually closed the loop or made use of the oracle in a forbidden context. You might even get away with it if you hop backward but don't try to go any earlier than your own departure point.

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Low had been serving as a trustee to the institute since 1971, and he was intimately familiar with its challenges and opportunities. It was in desperate need of renewal. The institute was at a crossroads, and without radical changes, it would face the real possibility of extinction. He was also approached to be the president of a start-up uranium-enrichment company as part of the Garrett Corporation, an industrial conglomerate based in Los Angeles, California. The high-tech start-up, called TRENCOR, would build and operate a centrifuge enrichment plant in Texas on behalf of the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration. While the Garrett opportunity offered him enticing financial rewards, including rich bonus targets and generous stock grants, the unique opportunity at RPI represented something even more valuable to him—a challenge with a purpose.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

He had been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1934 for discovering deuterium, the isotope of hydrogen that, as you may remember from chapter 3, was used to study the kinetic isotope effect in enzymes and thereby demonstrate that their activity involves quantum tunneling. Urey’s expertise in the purification of isotopes led to his appointment in 1941 as head of the uranium enrichment part of the Manhattan Project, which was attempting to develop the atomic bomb. However, Urey became disillusioned with the Manhattan Project’s aims and the secrecy in which it operated, and later attempted to dissuade the US president, Harry S. Truman, from dropping the bomb on Japan. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Urey wrote an article for the popular Collier’s magazine entitled “I’m a Frightened Man,” warning of the dangers posed by atomic weapons.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The Estonian industrial base changed too, with factories set up all along the north-east coast: Kunda was the site of a huge cement factory and pulp mill; Kohtla-Järve had plentiful oil-shale deposits and became an important source of energy; Sillamäe, once a peaceful resort where Russia’s cultural elite, including Tchaikovsky, had vacationed, was repurposed as a centre for uranium enrichment, the nature of the work so secretive that the town was removed from maps. The economic model, planned from Moscow, was catastrophic for Estonia. Agricultural collectivization was supposed to reduce the number of farms by amalgamating small homesteads into large estates and thus deliver efficiency gains; instead it resulted in agricultural output falling by half.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

For thirteen days, it did nothing but measure the speed of the centrifuge rotors. It was checking to make sure the rotors ran at speeds between 800 and 1100 hertz, the exact frequency range used by Natanz’s centrifuges. (Frequency converters that operate past 1000 hertz are actually bound by U.S. export controls because they are primarily used for uranium enrichment.) Once that thirteen-day waiting period was over, the payload got to work. The code was designed to speed up the rate at which the rotors spun to 1400 hertz for exactly fifteen minutes, before returning to normal for twenty-seven days. After those twenty-seven days were over, it would slow the speed of the rotors to just 2 hertz for fifty minutes, before returning to normal for another twenty-seven days, and repeating the whole process all over again.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, David Brooks, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, invisible hand, low interest rates, oil shock, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Also see Nazila Fathi, “Iran Is Defiant, Vowing to U.N. It Will Continue Nuclear Efforts,” New York Times, December 25, 2006; Ron Kampeas, “The Iran Sanctions Package: Some Assembly Required, Teeth Not Included,” JTA.org, December 25, 2006; Nasser Karimi, “Iran Rebuffs U.N., Vows to Speed Up Uranium Enrichment,” Washington Post, December 25, 2006; and Neil King, “U.S. Bid to Limit Iran Gets Wary Response,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2006. 77. Daniel Bilefsky, “Europe Approves More Sanctions Against Iran,” New York Times, April 24, 2007; Daniel Dombey and Gareth Smyth, “New EU Sanctions Raise Pressure on Iran,” Financial Times, April 23, 2007; Warren Hoge, “U.N.

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

Juanita told me, “If it was so good, why’d they come all the way from Europe to this little Black town in Claiborne Parish? Why wouldn’t they keep it for themselves?” Local folk were worried about Claiborne Pond. Since a third of the houses didn’t have any plumbing, this was all they had for drinking and cooking. Juanita told me, “Not many folk around here know a lot about uranium enrichment.” BNFL counted on that. At a community meeting, the shill for the nuclear operation held up a chunk of what the company called “uranium hexafluoride,” and there was nothing to fear from this handful of dirt. It was an impressive display. However, Forest Grove residents may be Black and poor, but they know when a magic show is jive.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Two years later, deciding the company needed more capital, Mike Brooks took it public, in a stock offering that raised almost $14 million. John Hutchison arrived in the factory in the mid-1990s. He had grown up in the hills outside Nelsonville, with a single mom. His dad, who worked at the uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, seventy-five miles to the southwest, had moved out when he was a toddler; his mother was left in such a bind that she gave their third child, a newborn girl, up for adoption. She eventually remarried a trade-school teacher. Their home was across the line in Hocking County, so John had to go all the way to Logan for high school, an hour-long ride on the bus.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Republican officials in charge of foreign policy, suspicious of the Clinton administration’s efforts to find accommodation with Pyongyang, set out to review U.S. policy. After President Bush’s Axis of Evil speech, there was more to come. In October 2002 U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and other officials visiting Pyongyang surprised their hosts with evidence that North Korea was continuing nuclear weapons development using uranium enrichment, a different and separate process from the plutonium process the country had frozen earlier. The delegation returned to Washington to report that its counterparts had come clean on the uranium project, defiantly insisting there was no reason why the country should not have its own nukes. Washington sought to keep the issue on the back burner while it took on Iraq first.

…

“If that is indeed the case, it could have produced enough fissile material for an additional five or six nuclear weapons,” Kelly said.3 When Pyongyang hinted broadly that it might simply declare itself a nuclear power, China, for one, did not like that idea and cut off North Korea’s oil supplies for several days to enforce a demand for negotiations. By early 2004 Pyongyang had offered to re-freeze its plutonium-based program (evidently realizing its admission had been a tactical error, it now denied it had acknowledged having a uranium enrichment program) while negotiating with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia to see what sort of deal it could get. What it wanted from Washington included a non-aggression pact and diplomatic relations. While the first nuclear crisis had appeared pretty much to halt movement toward economic change, Pyongyang the second time around kept moving on a parallel track—to the extent that quite a few foreign skeptics started to become believers that something major could be happening this time.

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

Boone 163, 164 Pigou, Arthur Cecil 138 Pillsbury 233 Pioneer Hi-Bred 102, 106, 107, 108 Pizza Hut 89 Plant Patent Act 1930 (US) 104 platinum 192–3 Plato: Republic 179 plutonium 42 popcorn 70 population, world 15, 16 n. 11, 23–4, 61 n. 10, 94 portfolios 242–4 Potanin, Vladimir 199 poultry 85–7 Poupard, Cardinal Paul 145 Prebon 260 Precious Woods 149 Project Independence 30 Puranam Ravikkumar 249 Putin, President Vladimir 9, 45 Railpol 182 rapeseed 93–4 Rappaport, Daniel 253, 262 Raymond, Lee 50 Reagan, President Ronald 116, 252 Redford, Robert 265 reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) 150 Refco 231 298 | INDEX Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) 143 Reilly, William 158 renewable energies 34–9 Renewable Fuels Association 80 Reserve Bank of Australia 14 Reuters–CRB Index 240 Rhodes, Cecil 210 Rio Tinto 13, 200, 201, 211, 223 n. 24 Robertson, Julian 236 Robinson, John 105, 106 Rockefeller, John D. 197, 200, 254 Rockefeller, William Goodsell 200 Rogers, Henry 200 Roll, The 241 Romney, Mitt 80 Roogers, Henry H. 197 Roosevelt, President Franklin D. 76, 89, 103 Royal Dutch Shell 260, 261 Rudd, Kevin 171 n. 16 Ryan, John 155, 156, 160 Sahn, Bobby 269 Salad Oil Scandal 245 Samuelson, Paul 238, 239 Sandor, Richard 145–6, 147 Sasol 33 Saudi Aramco 47 Schaeffer, Richard 253, 266, 267, 268, 269 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 37, 38, 130, 144 Secretan, Pierre 200 Secretan Syndicate, The 200 Seed Resource Guide 106 seeds diversity 106–10 GM 104–6, 107 Seven Sisters 251 Seykota, Ed 239 shale oil 50–1, 64 n. 33 Shanghai Futures Exchange 213 Shaw, Robert 265 Shear, Neal 259 Shell 79, 261 Shuff, Thomas 230–1, 233, 238, 270 Silicon Valley 37 Simmons, Matthew 47 Simon, Julian 13, 14, 15 Ultimate Resource 2, The 14 Skilling, Jeffrey 257 Smith, Adam 71 Smith, Captain John 100 Snyder, Pamela 162–3 Societé des Metaux, Le 200 Société Générale 261 Solano Partners 157 solar power 33, 34, 36 Solar Power programme 39 soya bean 68–9, 82, 95, 109, 120 n. 14 Soylent Green 15 n. 4 Spacek, Sissy 114 Spencer, Jonathan 243 sport utility vehicles (SUVs) 64 n. 30 Sprecher, Jeffrey 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263 Squanto 100 Standard and Poor’s 240 Standard Chartered 242 Standard Oil 197, 200, 253, 273 n. 14 Star Wars Programme 55 Starbucks 89 Statoil 153 Steinbeck, John: East of Eden 161–2 Steinhause, Mitchell 266 Stern 134 Stern Review 147 Sting, The 265 Subramanian, Shri 35 sugar 89–94 sulphur dioxide 139, 140 sulphur hexafluoride 131 Sumitomo 215 Sumitomo copper scandal 204, 246 Sundblad, Philip 36, 76, 77, 78, 84, 114, 154, 155 Sun-Microsystems 37 Sustainable Forestry Management 147, 148 Sustainable Land Fund, The 157 Suzlon Energy 35 Swingland, Professor Ian 137, 146, 148 Sygenta 106 Tamminen, Terry 38, 53, 54, 55, 60, 144 tantalum 219 Tanti, Tulsi 35 Tara, Kimberly 149, 159, 184 Tata Motors 49 Telsa Motors 191 temperature, global 61 n. 11 teosinte 97 Tertiary Minerals 219 Tesla 38 Thatcher, Margaret 22 thorium 43–4 INDEX Three Mile Island accident 21 Tiger Fund 236 TimeWarner 13 Total 261 Touradji, Paul 218, 236, 237, 239 Touradji Capital Management 218, 237 Toyota 53, 54, 191, 193 tradable polluting permits 137, 138–9 Trading Places 255 Trafigura 199 Trapp, Goran 259 tree hugging 148–9 Truman, President Harry 8 Tudor Capital 237 Turner, Frederick Jackson 209 Tyson 86 UBS 246 United Nations Climate Change Conference (2007) 29 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 173 n. 28 UNESCO 166 Union Miniere 202 United Fruit Company 239 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 125–6, 140, 150, 169 n. 2 United States Bureau of Reclamation 163 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 73, 74, 90, 95, 109–10 Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) 111 United States Department of Energy 30, 32, 33, 193 United States emissions market 142–4 United States Geological Survey 214 uranium 64 n. 27, 219 highly enriched (HEU) 64 n. 28 uranium-101 41–4 uranium-235 42 uranium hexafluoride (UF6) 42 uranium oxide (U3O8) 42 Vaidhyanathan, Raghuraman 35 Valentine, Billy Ray 256 Vantage Partners 55 Varzi, Mehdi 26, 47 Vatican Climate Forest 145 Vekselberg, Viktor 199 Venter, Craig 38 Verasun 77 | 299 Vice, Charles 258 Viola, Vinnie 253 virtual water 166 Vitol 199 Volcker, Paul 114 voluntary carbon offset schemes 144–5 Vromans, Dr Jaap 58, 59 Walker, Keith 167–8 Wallace, Henry A. 89, 102, 103, 120 n. 14, 122 n. 32 Wallace, Henry C. 103 Wal-Mart 25 Wamsley, John 157 War of the Pacific (1879–83) 198, 207 Wara, Michael 152 Warburg, Paul M. 229 Ward, Dr Richard 262, 263 water 157–68 consumption 158–9 desalination 168 droughts 167 entitlements 167 n. 63 irrigation 159 pollution 110–3 pricing 159–61, 164, 169 rights 162–3, 167, 177 n. 55, 177 n. 58 trading 160, 164–6 virtual 166 Water2water.com 164–5 Waterexchange 165 Webb–Pomerene Act (US) 201 West Texas Intermediate (WTI) 138, 250, 252, 253, 254 Western regional Climate Initiative (WCI) 143 Weston, Guy 147 wetland banking 155–6 Weymar, Helmut 238–9, 247 WFS Water Fund 166 White House Effect 27 Wildlands Inc. 156 wind power 33, 34–5, 36 World Bank 141, 147, 158, 159, 173 n. 28, 217 Global Environment Facility (GEF) 141 World Nuclear Association 41 World Trade Center 255 World Trade Organization (WTO) 94 Doha Round 11, 94 World Water Council 158 WorldCom 257 300 | INDEX Xstrata 211 yellowcake 42 Yeltsin, President Boris 46 Index compiled by Annette Musker Yergin, Daniel 33–4 yield return 242 Zinni, General Anthony (‘Tony’) 168–9

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

Programmed to monitor, control and reprogram very specific industrial processes, the worm then cleverly hid its footprints as it gallivanted through an estimated 100 000 systems worldwide. In particular it appears to have attacked Siemens’ systems in the nuclear power program in Iran where it messed with the centrifuges in that country’s uranium enrichment plants.9 This it apparently did very successfully, when hundreds of centrifuges suddenly stopped producing the materials needed to meet Iran’s nuclear agenda. There is evidence that the Stuxnet worm came from some sort of joint Israeli and American intelligence operation.10,11 Undoubtedly some of the millennium generation of hackers has ended up in jobs like these: on intelligence agency tiger teams working for the American and other governments designing a new sort of weapon.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, climate change refugee, cross-subsidies, decarbonisation, Doomsday Clock, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Gregor Mendel, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Medieval Warm Period, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment, Y2K

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

Moyers went back to the clip of the Cheney performance:CHENEY: It’s now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept to prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge, and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb. Moyers, in the studio, asked Bob Simon of CBS what he thought of Cheney’s actions:MOYERS: Did you see that performance? BOB SIMON: I did. MOYERS: What did you think? SIMON: I thought it was remarkable.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

So too are power plants, dams, train signalling systems and other key bits of our infrastructure. Hacking doesn’t just let an attacker see how these are being used: it can let the attacker take control of those systems themselves – and break them. This was most dramatically unleashed in 2010, in an attack against Iran. Inside their nuclear-enrichment sites – where uranium was being enriched to weapons-grade quality – cylinders on the site began behaving erratically, spinning back and forth rapidly in a particular and deeply destructive pattern. After a short time behaving in this inexplicable way, the cylinders would explode, damaging the site and disrupting the country’s nuclear programme.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

The design was simple and Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists at Los Alamos were so certain it would work that they didn’t feel it was necessary to test it. The rub was that there was a shortage of uranium. Although there were plentiful underground deposits of the naturally occurring substance in the American West and in Canada, exploration for uranium deposits and mining them had hardly begun. The manufacturing process to turn natural uranium into the highly enriched isotope was also so slow that if the scientists relied on U-235 and the gun-type design, the United States would be able to produce only one atomic bomb by 1945. To create more atomic bombs, Los Alamos had to use plutonium as the nuclear core. Plutonium, however, was much more difficult to bring to supercriticality than U-235 because of a phenomenon called spontaneous fission, which resulted from an impurity inherent in the manufacturing process.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

Therefore, the cost of the next unit of production can provide a considerable portion of that plant’s financial requirements. Only 6% of Ontario’s electricity comes from natural gas. A nuclear plant’s major expense is its capital cost and employees. Ontario has CANDU nuclear plants: their fuel is natural uranium, which is far cheaper than enriched uranium. For wind turbines and solar PV, the major expense is capital cost. The marginal energy cost (land rent and maintenance) is low. Ontario has regulations that prohibit the use of coal for electricity production. This is a prerogative of state-level decision-making. Within a state, there is usually no requirement to be “fuel-neutral” about generating sources.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

Bush became President, DCI George Tenet told Congress: ‘Our most serious concern with Saddam Hussein must be the likelihood that he will seek a renewed WMD cap-ability both for credibility and because every other strong power in the region either has it or is pursuing it.’27 The British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) reported a year later: ‘Although there is very little intelligence we continue to judge that Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. We assess the programme to be based on gas centrifuge uranium enrichment . . . ’28 The fact that there was indeed ‘very little intelligence’ on Saddam’s supposed nuclear-weapons programme should have rung alarm bells. But the high quality of SIS intelligence both on Gaddafi’s WMD programmes and on the network run by the former head of the Pakistani nuclear project, Dr A.

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Player One by Douglas Coupland

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, call centre, double helix, Marshall McLuhan, neurotypical, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), uranium enrichment, Y2K

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Eleanor Rigby: A Novel by Douglas Coupland

space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

But all Islamabad needed to do was to request help from China, which supplied Pakistan with much of the technology to develop both nuclear warheads and the missile delivery systems. In addition, Pakistan’s notorious A. Q. Khan, who later became known as the father of the country’s nuclear program, had in the 1970s stolen the blueprints from his Dutch employer that revealed the process by which uranium is enriched into weapons-grade material. By 1987, when India and Pakistan almost came to blows following India’s “Brass Tacks” operation—a large-scale military exercise near the Pakistan border, which India says Pakistan misinterpreted as a prelude to war (Islamabad said its interpretation was reasonable)—both were thought to possess rudimentary nuclear devices.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

Indeed, their accord on the removal and destruction of hundreds of their battlefield nuclear weapons also created a basis for the START II treaty that Yeltsin and Bush would come to sign in January 1993.[19] Taking his cue from Bush, on 8 November 1991 Roh formally proposed the denuclearisation of the whole peninsula. If implemented, South Korea would no longer possess or store nuclear weapons on its soil, although, he stressed, Seoul would remain ultimately protected by the US nuclear umbrella. The denuclearisation declaration would also prohibit Seoul from having nuclear reprocessing or uranium enrichment facilities. In this light Roh called on North Korea to abandon any plans it might harbour to develop and build its own nuclear bomb.[20] The North Korean nuclear programme was, and remains, a tangled story.[21] Since the 1950s Kim had legitimately acquired from the Soviet Union at least two small nuclear reactors for purely research purposes, of which the most recent known example had come on stream in 1987 at the Yongbyon site about ninety kilometres north of Pyongyang.

The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne

Kim Stanley Robinson, medical residency, quantum entanglement, stem cell, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

Ignition by John D. Clark

George Santayana, RAND corporation, uranium enrichment

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, job-hopping, mass affluent, payday loans, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game