Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons by Sarah Scoles. Bold Type Books, 2024, 272 pp.
Sarah Scoles’ Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons serves as a research journal, utilizing personal interviews to examine nuclear weapons from both scientific and civilian perspectives while highlighting related advancements in materials, sciences, and nuclear reactions. Scoles is a widely published science journalist and book author recognized for her engaging personal interviews and conversational style. Her last book, They Are Already Here: UFO Cultures and Why We See Saucers (Pegasus, 2020), looks at the UFO community through the first-person experiences of its researchers. Scoles’ writing focuses on the human aspect of the scientific journey. In Countdown, the blend of personal interviews, journalistic investigation, and thought-provoking questions allows her a unique perspective for the nuclear enterprise.
The book’s central focus is to convey the dire need for the modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal. This involves not just a response to aging equipment and scientific advancements but also an introspection of cultural shifts among younger and upcoming generations, including changing perspectives within the private sector and nuclear enterprise as a whole. Scoles provides a neutral and observant perspective on this issue, drawing from not only firsthand interviews but also her personal experiences living temporarily in Los Alamos, New Mexico, one of the few American towns associated with the nuclear enterprise laboratories.
The United States’ equipment is aging, and the National Nuclear Security Administration and laboratories including the Los Angeles National Laboratory, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore face new threats with old mindsets from the last century and technologies born from limited capabilities prescribed by treaties. The current nuclear arsenal is based on Cold-War ideologies, and the scientists who have stewarded the programs are aging out of the workforce. The author interviews new scientists to find that they are primarily motivated by the advancement of science rather than the protection of the homeland, a concept shaped by the geopolitical landscape following the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Aging hardware encompasses not only the computers and equipment within the nuclear enterprise but also components such as the current plutonium pits used in nuclear weapons. The book sheds light on the problematic assumptions about current capabilities and the insight provided by scientific advancements that things are degrading differently than predicted. Part of the investigation covers the Integrated Nuclear Detonation Detection team and how they are leveraging supercomputers to understand reactions within weapons.
As it turns out, assumptions about the interactions of explosives and the computer modeling of these interactions are not always correct. The results remain classified, but the discrepancies highlight the state of nuclear stewardship following the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The crux of the analysis is that despite technological advancements and such modeling, physically testing a nuclear weapon remains the most effective way to validate weapons, their interactions, and their effects.
Scoles highlights the duality of scientific experiments. Scientific advancements have spurred the understanding of materials at the subatomic level, and new computing power has provided better fidelity in experiments. Perhaps the most interesting finding concerns the aging of plutonium pits. Scientists have uncovered that previous assumptions regarding the stability and structure of the cores are incomplete. As summed up by one of the scientists, such a finding “is fascinating and great if you’re a plutonium scientist, but it does color the kind of advice that we should be making to our government” (82).
Interviews provide insight into laboratory cultures, emphasizing the inherent issues and their broader implications for the industry. The book discusses the unethical hiring and work practices of a specific laboratory and their repercussions on national security credibility. What is interesting is how in the military, the general assumption is that people will perform their assigned jobs, largely motivated by purpose-driven ethics; however, privately owned laboratories, although government-sponsored, are money-driven. This incident underscores the significance of the role such private sector organizations play in national security and the importance of messaging from the military. At least the scientists Scoles interviewed appeared to be less focused on the nuclear weapons and creation aspect of the enterprise and more so on the scientific advancement and pursuit of knowledge. By engaging in personal interviews, Scoles encourages scientists to discuss the importance of maintaining nuclear arsenals and to articulate their motivations for joining the field.
The advancements of nuclear weapons and the prospects of a “blinding future” represent a shift from the post-Cold War arms race with Russia into a modern call for rapid reinvigoration of the nuclear enterprise, particularly in the wake of the advancement of nuclear arsenals beyond US systems by new global players. Yet the push to modernize the current stockpile does not provide the whole picture of the present situation. Scoles’ research reveals that while the United States desperately needs to modernize its nuclear weapons, newly developed weapons are not being adequately tested as scientists are having to rely on simulations and data from over 30 years ago.
Scoles also points to the disconnect between those data simulations and data from recent scientific advancements. The scientists claim that because of equipment limitations from when the original data was sourced, the information from current simulations, which rely on that data, is suspect. Through her journalism, Scoles enables scientists to acknowledge their limitations and explain how they are overcoming them by collaborating on projects.
This book is worth reading for a firsthand account of how technological advancements and private sector laboratories are intertwined with the nuclear enterprise. The Quantum Scientific Computing Open User Testbed (QSCOUT), the Advanced Simulation and Computing program, and equipment such as the Z Machine—a radiation source and pulsed power machine—are examples of recent developments that enhance the understanding of nuclear components. Scoles’ interviews with scientists working on the projects provide insight into their neutral attitudes toward nuclear weapons and their passion for science in the pursuit of discovery and technological advancement.
Countdown is not for readers looking for a discussion of the technical and logistical aspects of nuclear modernization. Those readers who will find it most interesting are those who wish to see beyond the use of nuclear weapons, focusing instead on the human and scientific aspects of the US nuclear enterprise.
Major Thomas J. Urbanek, USAF