Tag: Nukes

A Good Question, Or Betteridge’s Law?

There is a fine discussion about A.I., over on Barry’s blog. But this is a different sort of use.

Anthropic Has a Plan to Keep Its AI From Building a Nuclear Weapon. Will It Work?

Anthropic partnered with the US government to create a filter meant to block Claude from helping someone build a nuke. Experts are divided on whether its a necessary protection—or a protection at all.

At the end of August, the AI company Anthropic announced that its chatbot Claude wouldn’t help anyone build a nuclear weapon. According to Anthropic, it had partnered with the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to make sure Claude wouldn’t spill nuclear secrets.

The manufacture of nuclear weapons is both a precise science and a solved problem. A lot of the information about America’s most advanced nuclear weapons is Top Secret, but the original nuclear science is 80 years old. North Korea proved that a dedicated country with an interest in acquiring the bomb can do it, and it didn’t need a chatbot’s help.

How, exactly, did the US government work with an AI company to make sure a chatbot wasn’t spilling sensitive nuclear secrets? And also: Was there ever a danger of a chatbot helping someone build a nuke in the first place?

The answer to the first question is that it used Amazon. The answer to the second question is complicated.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Top Secret cloud services to government clients where they can store sensitive and classified information. The DOE already had several of these servers when it started to work with Anthropic. (snip-MORE on the page. It’s good-read it!)

Peace & Justice History for 12/2

December 2, 1914
 
Karl Liebnecht
Karl Liebknecht was the only member of German Parliament to vote against war with France and Britain. He was arrested shortly thereafter and conscripted into the German Army. Refusing to fight, Liebknecht served on the Eastern Front burying the dead.
More about Karl Liebnecht
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December 2, 1942
Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born Nobel Prize-winning physicist, directed and controlled the first self-sustaining fission reaction in his laboratory beneath the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.The result of this experiment made the atomic bomb possible and ushered in the nuclear age. Upon successful completion of the experiment, a coded message was transmitted to President Roosevelt: “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.”

More on Fermi and the bomb 
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December 2, 1954
The U.S. Senate voted 65 to 22 to censure Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”The condemnation, with all the Democrats and about half the Republicans voting against him, was related to McCarthy’s controversial, abusive and indiscriminate investigation of suspected communists in the U.S. government, military, and civilian society. The House of Representatives and many states continued their own investigations.

Senator Joseph P. McCarthy with chief counsel Roy Cohn (L)
See a video clip of McCarthy reacting to the censure 
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December 2, 1961
 
Fidel Castro
Following a year of severely strained relations with the United States and his country, Cuban leader Fidel Castro openly declared that he was a Marxist-Leninist.
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December 2, 1964
Thousands who were part of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement gathered on the steps of Sproul Hall, the administration building at that University of California campus, to protest four students being disciplined for distributing political literature; Joan Baez performed in support. The next day, police arrested 773 who began a sit-in at Sproul Hall. 10,000 more students then went on strike and shut down the school.
photo: © Ron Enfield
The Free Speech Movement had begun in October, when three thousand students surrounded a police car for 36 hours. Inside the car was a civil rights worker, Jack Weinberg, who had been arrested for distributing political literature on the UC-Berkeley campus.
 
Jack Weinberg in police car.
What was the Free Speech Movement?  
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December 2, 1977
A demonstration erupted outside a South African court after a magistrate ruled that security police were to be exonerated in the death of black consciousness leader Steve Biko, who died while in their custody.
The demonstrators chanted, “They have killed Steve Biko. What have we done? Our sin is that we are black?”
Biko’s funeral

His funeral had been attended by more than 15,000 mourners, not including the thousands who were turned away by the police. He had been arrested for writing inflammatory pamphlets and “inciting unrest” among the black community.
Steve Biko

The news story
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December 2, 1980
Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sr. Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Marie Donovan were raped, murdered, buried outside San Salvador, and unearthed shortly thereafter.


American Nuns Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Marie Donovan- killed in El Salvador in 1980.

U.S.-trained and -supported Salvadoran national guardsmen, widely known to act as death squads, were suspected.The Reagan administration, taking office seven weeks later, and relying in part on the Salvadoran military to rid Central America of communism, denied the National Guard’s involvement. General Alexander Haig, the president’s secretary of state, explained the churchwomen’s deaths to Congress as an accident caused by nervous soldiers who “misread the mere traveling down the road (of the nuns’ van) as an effort to run a roadblock.” The FBI and CIA later reported this as a total fabrication, and five national guardsmen were later convicted of murder.
More about the Maryknoll Sisters 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december2

Peace & Justice History for 10/31:

October 31, 1929
George Henry Evans, an English-born printer and journalist, published the first issue of the Working Man’s Advocate, “edited by a Mechanic” for the “useful and industrious classes” of New York City. Evan covered the Workingmen’s Party (which he helped found) and the early trade union movement.
In his Prospectus, Evans focused on the inequities between the “portion of society living in luxury and idleness” and those “groaning under the oppressions and miseries imposed on them.” He advocated “a system of education which shall be equally open to all, as in a real republic it should be” and opposed “every thing which savors of a union of church and state.”
Evans became a U.S. citizen one week later.
October 31, 1950

Earl Lloyd became the first of three African Americans who began to play in the National Basketball Association (NBA) when he started with the Washington Capitols. He and Jim Tucker went on to become the first African Americans to play on a championship team in 1955 as members of the Syracuse Nationals, which is now the Philadelphia 76ers.

After retiring as a player, Lloyd was a Detroit Pistons assistant coach for two seasons, and a scout for five.
October 31, 1952
The U.S. successfully detonated “Mike,” the world’s first hydrogen (or fusion) bomb, in the atmosphere at the Eniwetok Proving Grounds on the Elugelab Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the southern Pacific.
The 10.4-megaton device was the first thermonuclear device built upon the Teller-Ulam principles of staged radiation implosion.
Mike’s Mushroom cloud

The incredible explosive force of Mike was apparent from the sheer magnitude of its mushroom cloud – within 90 seconds the mushroom cloud climbed to 57,000 feet and entered the stratosphere at a rate of 400 mph. One minute later it reached 108,000 feet, eventually stabilizing at a ceiling of 120,000 feet. Half an hour after the test, the mushroom stretched sixty miles across, with the base of the head joining the stem at 45,000 feet.The explosion wiped Elugelab off the face of the planet, leaving a crater more than 50 meters (175 feet) deep, and destroyed life on the surrounding islands.
The details and the results 
Early U.S.nuclear tests 
October 31, 1958
The U.S., the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics aka Soviet Union) and Great Britain began negotiations in Geneva on whether to let the nuclear testing moratorium become a permanent test ban. General Secretary Nikita Kruschev had unilaterally declared a moratorium on Soviet testing earlier in the year, President Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold MacMillan following suit in August.
There had been growing concern over the health effects of radioactive fallout in the atmosphere from the nuclear explosions. Nonetheless, all three nations did further last-minute tests before the moratorium took effect.
October 31, 1972
20-POINT POSITION PAPER

PREAMBLE
AN INDIAN MANIFESTO FOR RESTITUTION, REPARATIONS, RESTORATION OF LANDS FOR A RECONSTRUCTION OF AN INDIAN FUTURE IN AMERICA
THE TRAIL OF BROKEN TREATIES:

“We need not give another recitation of past complaints nor engage in redundant dialogue of discontent.  Our conditions and their cause for being should perhaps be best known by those who have written the record of America’s action against Indian people.  In 1832, Black Hawk correctly observed: You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it.
The government of the United States knows the reasons for our going to its capital city.  Unfortunately, they don’t know how to greet us. We go because America has been only too ready to express shame, and suffer none from the expression – while remaining wholly unwilling to change to allow life for Indian people.
We seek a new American majority – a majority that is not content merely to confirm itself by superiority in numbers, but which by conscience is committed toward prevailing upon the public will in ceasing wrongs and in doing right.  For our part, in words and deeds of coming days, we propose to produce a rational, reasoned manifesto for construction of an Indian future in America.  If America has maintained faith with its original spirit, or may recognize it now, we should not be denied.”
October 31, 1978
30,000 Iranian oil workers went on strike against the repressive rule of the U.S.-installed Shah and for democracy, civil and human rights.
Striking Iranian oil workers. Photo: December 1978 issue of Resistance. A publication of the Iranian Students Association in the U.S. (ISAUS)
Read more 
October 31, 1984
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot to death by two Sikh members of her own security guard while walking in the garden of her New Delhi home. Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, a member of parliament and a leader in the Congress-I Party, was sworn in as Prime Minister following the assassination.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october31

Peace & Justice History for 10/16:

It is World Food Day. (Among other things; this is a busy date!)

October 16, 1649
The British colony of Maine granted religious freedom to all citizens the same year that King Charles I was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church.
October 16, 1859
Abolitionist John Brown led a group of 21 other men, five black and sixteen white, in a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
They had hoped to set off a slave revolt — throughout the south — with the weapons they had planned to seize.
 John Brown
Virtually all his compatriots were killed or captured by General Robert E. Lee’s troops; Brown was wounded and arrested, and hanged for treason within two months.
Read more
  
The Tragic Prelude (John Brown)mural by John Steuart Curry (1937-1942)
Former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said of Brown that he was a white man “in sympathy a black man, as deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
October 16, 1901
President Theodore Roosevelt
President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the most prominent African American of his time, to a meeting in the White House. The meeting went long and the president asked Washington to stay for dinner, the first black person ever to do so. Newspapers in the both the South and North were critical, but the South with more venom. The Memphis “Scimiter” said that it was “the most damnable outrage that has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” Roosevelt claimed he had invited a friend to dinner with his family and it was no one else’s business.
Booker T. Washington
October 16, 1934
Dick Sheppard, who volunteered and joined the Army as a chaplain in World War I, started the Peace Pledge Union in England. In a letter published in The Guardian newspaper and elsewhere, Sheppard, a well-known priest in the Church of England, invited those who would be willing to join a public demonstration against war to send him a postcard. Within a few weeks he had received 30,000 replies. Members of the Peace Pledge Union vowed to “renounce war and never again to support another.”

Reverend Sheppard had been the first ever to broadcast religious services on the radio and, when Vicar of St. Martin-in-the Fields, Trafalgar Square, he had opened the building to the homeless of London.“Up to now the peace movement has received its main support from women, but it seems high time now that men should throw their weight into the scales against war.” -Dick Sheppard
Read more about the Peace Pledge Union 
October 16, 1964
China detonated its first atomic bomb, becoming the fifth nuclear-armed nation. The 20-kiloton fission device (equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT) was detonated in the vicinity of Lop Nor, a lake in a remote region of the Central Asian province of Sinkiang.
” To defend oneself is the inalienable right of every sovereign State. And to safeguard world peace is the common task of all peace-loving countries. China cannot remain idle and do nothing in the face of the ever-increasing nuclear threat posed by the United States.China is forced to conduct nuclear tests and develop nuclear weapons . . . In developing nuclear weapons, China’s aim is to break the nuclear monopoly of the nuclear Powers and to eliminate nuclear weapons.”
Chou En-lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, sent messages to all heads of government for a world summit conference on nuclear disarmament. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a news conference that the United States did not regard Communist China’s proposal “as having any practical value.”Deng Jiaxian. The father of the chinese bomb.
TRINITY AND BEYOND™ (The Atomic Bomb Movie), a documentary by Peter Kuran
October 16, 1967

Joan Baez the day after the arrest
Folksinger Joan Baez was arrested in a peace demonstration as rallies took place across America during “Stop the Draft Week.” 1158 young men returned their draft cards in eighteen U.S. cities. Baez was among 122 anti-draft protesters arrested for sitting down at the entrance of the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California; she was sentenced to 10 days in prison.
Read more 
October 16, 1968
During medal presentations at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, winning sprinters Tommie Smith (Gold) and John Carlos (Bronze) raised their black-gloved fists while the U.S. national anthem was played. They were suspended from the team at the insistence of the International Olympic Committee, and expelled from the Games two days later.
Smith later told the media that he raised his right fist in the air to represent black power in America while Carlos’s left fist represented unity in black America.
They were wearing just socks to represent
world poverty.

Peter Norman (silver medalist, left) from Australia also wears an OPHR (Olympic Project for Human Rights) badge in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. He was castigated upon return to Australia and throughout his life for his support of these two brave athletes.
Read more 
October 16, 1973
Henry Kissinger
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, though accused of war crimes by some for the massive bombing of Laos and Cambodia, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (who refused the honor) for the cease-fire agreement they had negotiated. This occurred just a month after the bloody military coup, fully supported by the Nixon administration and aided by the CIA, that overturned the democratically elected government of Chile, and installed General Augusto Pinochet as military dictator for the next 17 years.
October 16, 1984

Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of South Africa, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in fighting apartheid. He has gone on to be a relentless advocate for justice around the world.
Desmond Tutu – Nobel peace prize recipient 
October 16, 1998
In a human rights and international law breakthrough, British authorities, after receiving an extradition request from Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, placed former Chilean dictator, and senator-for-life, General Augusto Pinochet under arrest for “crimes of genocide and terrorism that include murder.”
Augusto Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher
Chronology of Pinochet’s rule 
October 16th every year
United Nations’ World Food Day is recognized every year.
About the annual day of hunger awareness

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october16

Peace & Justice History for 10/8:

October 8, 1945
President Harry S. Truman announced that the secret of the atomic bomb would be shared only with Great Britain and Canada.
October 8, 1982
The Polish Parliament overwhelmingly approved a law banning Solidarnos´c´ (Solidarity), the independent trade union that had captured the imagination and allegiance of nearly 10 million Poles.
Solidarnosc leader Lech Walesa, 1982
The law abolished all existing labor organizations, including Solidarity, whose 15 months of existence brought hope to people in Poland and around the world but drew the anger of the Soviet and other Eastern-bloc (Warsaw Pact) governments.
The parliament created a new set of unions with severely restricted rights.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october8