Events leading up to the outbreak of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War prove little has changed since the end of the Cold War. Distrust has returned to Cold War lows while revisiting threats of nuclear holocaust. Have we fallen exceedingly short of our original post-Cold War expectations for a better & more habitable world? It is not all doom & gloom. According to a Vox article appearing on February 27th, 2022, a three-pronged analysis evaluating risks associated with nuclear war was identified while emphasizing the great progress made in the area of nuclear disarmament post-1991. The total number of nuclear warheads has dropped 80% from an estimated 70,300 in 1986 to 12,700 in 2022. However, 31 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia continues to possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
In 1993, the United States took a great leap of faith in Russia’s commitment to disarm in what showed great promise to evolve into a new era of American-Russian relations. With the vast surplus of nuclear weapons aging in siloes throughout the former Soviet Union, Russia had the foresight to evaluate the costly liabilities associated with maintaining a vast nuclear arsenal designed for a nuclear holocaust that never happened. Arguably, one of the great questions of the 1990s was: how can instruments of death be used as implements of peace? This question required a great deal of alternative thinking by re-imagining alternative uses for nuclear warheads. That same curiosity doubled up as an existential question: how can nuclear arsenals be recycled for peaceful purposes? Enter, the Megatons for Megawatts Program which quietly expired at the end of December of 2013.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Megatons to Megawatts Program was responsible for extracting 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from decommissioned Russian nuclear warheads, & diluted to produce low enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear reactors in the United States. According to the USEIA, the significance of this post-Cold War scientific enterprise was so great that one-third of diluted low enriched uranium was used throughout the wider U.S. nuclear industry from the Megatons to Megawatts Program alone. The United States government established a publicly owned United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) for this project in direct collaboration with the Russian government. The achievements made possible by the Megatons to Megawatts Program demonstrated the re-imagined power of detente through scientific enterprise under concerted dedication to world peace.
Any sane person in the world today cannot resist wondering: what happened since 2013 & why have we failed to continue the work of the Megatons to Megawatts legacy? Stanford University student Nikolas Martelaro reported one nuclear weapon the size of “fat man,” the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, has enough energy to power a major American city like Los Angeles for hours. If 60% of energy released from the “fat man bomb,” defined as 8.4 x 10 13-squared joules, the same nuclear bomb category can supply electricity for the greater Los Angeles metro for 1.1 hours. As of 2017, Martelaro estimated if America’s deployed nuclear arsenal is reclaimed as electricity, the resulting energy would produce a yield of electrical power for 8 consecutive years for the Los Angeles metro.
The Trident II nuclear missile is routinely deployed on American submarines with an estimated 475 kiloton yield compared to the 12-13 kiloton yield of the “little boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 ending World War Two. Imagine a world where the kiloton disparity between both gradations of nuclear bomb are studied for electrical energy yield rather than total destructive power. The only difference separating the world as it is compared to the world as it ought to be is had in our ability to imagine & conceptualize the impossible into practical albeit tangible solutions from the ground up through public citizen advocacy. As a world power, the United States has a responsibility to seek diplomatic solutions that share & ultimately seek geopolitical balances for world peace. Despite damages made to nuclear disarmament from the Trump presidency, we stand dangerously close to World War Three against the backdrop of a revanchist Russia.
The most pressing question of the early 21st century will arguably be this: how can we engage Russia under a restored foreign policy of detente to reactivate the Megatons to Megawatts Program while striking a geopolitical compromise in Ukraine to avoid World War Three?
Turning Nuclear Weapons into Nuclear Fuel
Megatons to Megawatts program will conclude at the end of 2013
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