1/10/17 Show feat. Tamara Patton on Virtual Reality in Nuclear Arms Control and Ingrid Ockert on Arming Mother Nature

Featured image: Dinosaur feather trapped in amber. Ryan McKellar, Royal Saskatchewan Museum

In this week’s installment of These Vibes, we spoke with Tamara Patton, doctoral researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and in the Nuclear Futures Lab, on her work using emergent technologies, specifically virtual reality, in nuclear arms control. She also delves in to the prospect of nuclear proliferation and arms control under the Trump presidency and the upcoming nuclear weapon ban treaty taking place this March at the UN.

For more background on the topic of nuclear weapons, listen to our past shows with Sébastien Phillipe on verification technologies and Julien de Lanversin on nuclear archaeology. In the show, Tamara recommends checking out the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists if you’d like to stay up to speed on this topic.

Science historian Ingrid Ockert begins by mentioning a relevant piece by Alex Wellerstein in the Washington Post describing the very few obstacles to President Donald Trump utilizing the US’s store of nuclear weapons, should he want to. It’s a good read.

Next, Ingrid discussed the book Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism, by Jacob Darwin Hamblin. Ingrid describes how the discovery of climate change and global warming has its root in military weaponization of nature.

Additionally, Ingrid informed us that an award-winning film about nuclear futures, Containment, can currently be found on the PBS website.

 

As usual, at the start of the show we told tale of some science events in the NJ area and science news:

• New studies on the Moon’s formation theory
• Professor Lisa Randall’s piece on why the great Vera Rubin should have won a Nobel Prize
• Dinosaur feathers found in a 99 million year old piece of amber!!
• Finland’s basic income pilot program
• The mystery of astrophysical fast radio bursts

Thank you for listening!

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