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All N Quotes

“Nuclear posture is the incorporation of some number and type of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles state's overall military structure, the rules and procedures governing how those weapons are deployed, when and under what conditions they might be used, against what targets, and who has the authority to make those decisions. Nuclear posture is best thought of as the operational, rather than the declaratory, nuclear doctrine of a country; while the two can overlap, it is the operational doctrine that generates deterrent power against an opponent. To put it bluntly, states care more about what an adversary can credibly do with its nuclear weapons than what it says about them.”

“Nuclear power as a solution to global warming is theoretically possible, but the proliferation problems and accident risks it would create would, I think, be intolerable because you have to build an immense number of nuclear power plants, one large plant a week around the world for the next 40 years, to make a significant dent in the global warming problem.”

“Nuclear power generation has been given a thrust by the use of uranium-based fuel which US is set to supply to India if the deal comes through. However, there would be a requirement for ten-fold increase in nuclear power generation even to attain a reasonable degree of energy self-sufficiency for our country.”

“Nuclear terrorism is still often treated as science fiction. I wish it were. But unfortunately we live in a world of excess hazardous materials and abundant technological know-how, in which some terrorists clearly state their intention to inflict catastrophic casualties. Were such an attack to occur, it would not only cause widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy... [creating] a second death toll throughout the developing world.”

“Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions”