What I hear in the news about avoiding the proliferation of nuclear arms and the spread of other things that could encourage their development seems to have a long term goal of putting a genie back in the bottle. That may be hard enough as it is, genies being the way they are. But isn’t it technologically inevitable that nuclear arms will keep getting easier to make, until even small and inconspicuous groups can make them?
Not that this will happen within the next few years. But, you can’t just rule out a section of technology by fiat. Technology is interdependent. Leaving an area underdeveloped just populates the space around it with better and closer art until it becomes trivial. Imagine, for example, that gun technology had been prohibited, but machining and construction explosives and the mass production of little tubing fittings had proceeded for hundreds of years; by now a tinkerer in his basement could have built pistols and ammo. To think otherwise is to deny the obvious and inevitable.
Is there some other long term strategy that deals with this? For example, I dunno, neutrino telescopes that can see radioactive decay miles away even underground, as a stabilizing influence?
You can have all the technology you want, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the material. If you keep your eye on every place where it can be mined and carefully trace where every ounce of it ends up, you’re pretty much doing everything you need to.
OK, according to the Takasaki Radiation Chemistry Research Establishment, as much uranium flows by Japan in seawater in the “Black Current” every year as there is available by mining throughout the entire Earth, and Japan is contemplating recovering it for power generation. How to we carefully trace where every ounce of that ends up?
Because collecting and refining it are both large operations. A dude in a fishing boat isn’t going to be able to gather a ton of material, nor is he going to have a refinery back in his basement. Your assertion that the technology to do this will shrink ignores the fact that it hasn’t. My iPod may be small, but mines and metal smelting factories are just as big as they have always been.
No.
Humans have been making cheese for thousands of years. It still takes us several years to make a good cheddar.
We’ve been boiling water even longer than we’ve been making cheese, and it still takes a minimum of 100 Calories of heat to take 1 gram of water from freezing to boiling.
It still takes a great big pile of hydrgen an oxygen to launch a kg of anything into orbit.
Isotope separation is not going to magically become easy until well after the point where commercial fusion reactors are a reality, and we use them to charge the superbatteries in our personal flying vehicles.