Colloquium Abstract: Physicists invented nuclear weapons over seventy-five years ago. Today, they still threaten humanity with catastrophe and, recently, this risk has been increasing. The US has over 1,500 deployed nuclear weapons plus thousands more inactive or retired. Current policy calls for maintaining and “modernizing” about 4,000 nuclear warheads and their delivery vehicles, at the cost of […]

Colloquium Abstract  The world is in a precarious place right now and nuclear risk is higher than it has been in decades. The war in Ukraine has brought latent fears about nuclear war back to the surface. In recent years, the US has withdrawn from several arms control agreements that constrained US and Russian arsenals, […]

Title: U.S. Missile Defense Programs: A Case Study in the Interaction of Science, Technology, and Public Policy Abstract During the past 70 years, the United States has spent $400 billion on ballistic missile defense, mostly on systems intended to intercept nuclear-armed intercontinental-range missiles that might be launched against the United States. But would these systems […]

Speaker: Dr. Stewart Prager This talk is part of the Twelve Thousand Bombs seminar series. The series on nuclear weapons included four eminent scholars and public figures speaking at ISU. The series, sponsored by the Office of Research and Graduate Studies, was inaugurated in 2023 and aims to raise awareness of nuclear weapons issues in […]

Abstract In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the resurgent role of nuclear weapons in national security strategies, the threat that they pose to the public, and potential risk mitigation approaches. Recent events, including the U.S. withdrawal from arms control treaties and the pursuit of new nuclear weapons capabilities in the nine […]