Vela incident (1979)

> The name is derived from the Hindi word "bhang", a locally grown variety of cannabis which is smoked or drunk to induce intoxicating effects, the joke being that one would have to be on drugs to believe the bhangmeter detectors would work properly.

ChatGPT on the other hand claimed something completely different and unrelated to the origin.

> The term “bhangmeter” is the more technically correct and widely used name, stemming from a whimsical contraction of “bang” (referring to the explosion) and “V. F. H. Metzger”, who contributed to its development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency

> Nuclear latency or a nuclear threshold state is the condition of a country possessing the technology to quickly build nuclear weapons, without having actually yet done so.

> There are many countries capable of producing nuclear weapons, or at least enriching uranium or manufacturing plutonium. Among the most notable are Japan, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia.

> Taiwan and South Korea have both been identified as "insecure" nuclear threshold states—states with the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons and the security motivations to seriously contemplate such an option.

How fortunate then are we that the first really existentially threatening technology we developed was the atomic bomb? It's a technology that is so obviously destructive, and so distantly related from any useful application, so alien in its method of function, that it's perhaps the only technology in history to be near universally seen as too dangerous to use at scale. It requires both secret knowledge and immense industrial capacity to make even a single device, nonetheless enough devices and delivery systems to actually pose that existential threat, and thus we only need a small handful of large nation states to agree not to use them. It's arguably the very easiest existential threat to handle. Since developing them, we have become cognizant of our civilization's threat to itself, and now every advancement we make is met with the question "does this pose any existential risk?" which our forebears never asked, and which we ourselves might not have asked otherwise.

But it's not just that we developed nukes first. The timing down to the month was critical. Our first nuclear weapons were dropped in the last days of the worst war our planet had ever known. We only had a few, and the decision to drop them was made by people who did not witness nor fully comprehend their destructive potential. As it happened, in the peace that came about after the end of the second world war, there was an opportunity to observe the devastation the bombs had wrought, for the hatred that had led to their use to subside, and for the nuclear monopoly to be broken before another major war could start. But imagine if the bomb was developed a bit earlier, say midway through WW2, we might have dropped dozens or even hundreds of bombs, completely normalizing their use and irradiating large sections of continents before anyone really second guessed it. Conversely, if the weapons were developed in peacetime, either before or after the war, then the threat might go completely unrecognized and no one would think twice about opening the next war with an all out nuclear attack, or perhaps without the wartime funding we would just never have developed them at all and never recognize our species' ability to destroy itself. It's very well possible that if we had discovered the neutron a few years earlier, or if the US had not committed so many resources to the Manhattan project, or if Japan had surrendered a little earlier, we might now be extinct.

Is a fun read. Get the audiobook version and think of it as a long youtube video playlist that you play in the background.

I don't have a youtube video for you, but I do have a book recommendation: Thomas Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict" from 1960.

The writing is extremely clear and accessible, by the standards of nobel-prize-winning economists.

(not an affiliate link, just grabbed it off google quickly) https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy/dp/...

"The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest Convention Center with US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst others in attendance,[3] prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, "except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations." As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.[4][5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

Though given the talent for engineering we're currently seeing from Ukraine, I'm not sure that Russias nuclear weapons where not developed by Ukrainians.

Anyway, the point is that those three countries gave up weapons develop and produced by the Soviet Union, not internally in those countries solely.

That's not entirely true. AFAIK, nuclear weapons in these countries were tied to control structures in Moscow and required other resources like maintenance and new materials which were placed in other parts of Soviet Union. So when these countries became independent, they couldn't realistically maintain or even use the weapons without a very significant investment.

There is a great book detailing the nuclear program in South Africa: https://www.amazon.com/South-Africas-Weapons-Mass-Destructio...