by Ashutosh Jogalekar
After World War II ended, there began a running debate between American scientists and the American government about how to properly wield the fearsome nuclear power that America had discovered and unleashed. The government believed that this power could be hoarded and used by the U.S. to play geopolitical games in which they held all the cards. The scientists argued that the power that the government thought it possessed exclusively depended on discovering the basic laws of physics, chemistry and engineering, laws that were accessible to scientists in any country.
The scientists were right. Estimates of when the Soviet Union would get nuclear weapons ranged from three to twenty years, revealing a gulf between the scientists and the political and military establishments, with the latter betting on the longer timelines. As it turned out, the Soviets detonated their first bomb in August 1949, a little more than four years after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1955 they detonated their first thermonuclear bomb. While the Soviet fission bomb was aided by espionage, the discovery of the critical Teller-Ulam mechanism that makes thermonuclear weapons possible was an independent discovery, attesting to the ubiquity of scientific know-how. Britain, China and other countries followed with their own atomic and thermonuclear tests. The Soviet event marked the beginning of an eternal struggle between science and politics in which the government tried to use science for their national interests and the scientists, while sympathetic to this goal, tried to use their expertise to tell the government what was wishful thinking and what wasn’t.
That debate continues to this day and ignores a fundamental truth about science and weaponry that is so deep, fundamental and simple that it seems to be easily misunderstood and misused. That truth is the sheer inevitability of science in enabling the construction of weapons of mass destruction. The latest example of this misunderstanding is the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 21, 2025. The military used 14 “bunker busters” (Massive Ordnance Penetrators) to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. These bombs are designed to destroy targets that are 200 feet deep and were targeted at Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities.The enrichment facilities contain centrifuges that can enrich uranium to both reactor grade (4%) and weapons grade (90%) levels. Read more »
Watching Israel and Iran lob bombs at each other these last few weeks makes me tired. Just when the world seemed completely destabilized and clinically looney, two countries who both trace their religions back to Abraham or Ibrahim decide to make things worse. I know you’re supposed to reach for the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs or parse treaties on nuclear non-proliferation to make sense of this missile orgy, but this latest war might make you reach for your earplugs and blindfold instead.