Iran and the P5+1 countries—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—worked past a March 31 deadline to reach a framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Iran agreed to limit its uranium-enrichment program to producing low-enriched uranium with 6,104 older-generation centrifuges at a single site in Natanz. Iran also agreed to give up 97% of its existing stockpile of enriched uranium and to make its heavy-water reactor at Arak unable to produce weapons-grade plutonium. The US and the EU agreed in return to lift sanctions against Iran once they have verified that Iran has taken the steps it has promised. The US State Department said that this framework would increase the “breakout time” it would take Iran to build a nuclear weapon from two to three months to at least a year. But crucial details will still have to be resolved before the parties try to reach a final agreement in June. President Obama said in a statement that the deal would “cut off every pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon”.
The Economist wrote that 25 years after the end of the Cold War, “the world is entering a new nuclear age”. The magazine noted that the world’s nuclear powers are all upgrading their nuclear arsenals. Contemporary nuclear powers may also not be as stable or as happy to maintain the status quo as the US and the USSR were during the Cold War. Because a crisis in any number of areas could lead to a dangerous confrontation, The Economist called for new efforts to limit nuclear proliferation and improve arms control.
Atlantic Council fellow Matthew Kroenig said that NATO needs to “develop new, more tailored nuclear capabilities to provide a credible response to a limited Russian nuclear strike”. Kroenig said that Russia believes it can use its nuclear forces to offset its relative weakness in conventional forces. Kroenig told the US Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces that Russian strategists have considered “de-escalatory” nuclear strikes intended to “force an opponent to sue for peace on terms favorable to Moscow”. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a documentary that aired in March that Russia was prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend Russians in Crimea last year. And Russia recently warned Denmark that it would aim its nuclear missiles at Danish warships if Denmark contributed to NATO’s missile defense system.
Eric Schlosser wrote in The New Yorker that supporters of the pacifist Plowshares Movement have repeatedly been able to break into secure nuclear weapons facilities in the US. They have managed to break in to these facilities even though the US arguably has the best nuclear security systems in the world. Other nuclear powers—like Pakistan and India—are probably less secure and more likely to be targeted by terrorists seeking to acquire weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. The Washington Post reported that the US is particularly concerned about the stockpile of weapons-grade uranium at the South Africa’s Pelindaba research center, where there was a sophisticated break-in attempt in 2007.
Liberia had no Ebola patients for three weeks, raising hopes that the outbreak might be over in the country. But on March 20 a woman in Liberia was diagnosed with the disease. The woman may have contracted Ebola from her boyfriend, who is an Ebola survivor. Survivors are not generally considered contagious, but there is evidence the virus remains in semen after the disease has run its course. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends survivors do not have sex for three months after treatment.
The number of new Ebola infections fell in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The fact that the epidemic is shrinking is great news, but has made it harder to test the Ebola vaccines and drugs that could help prevent another major outbreak from occurring. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) pointed out in a statement that the number of weekly cases of Ebola is still higher than in any previous outbreak, noting that “one case can be enough to reignite the epidemic”.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote in an opinion piece in The New England Journal of Medicine arguing that the Ebola epidemic should be a wake-up call for us to prepare for “future epidemics of diseases that may spread more effectively than Ebola”. Gates said that the world needs “a global warning and response system for outbreaks”. Some experts told NPR that it might be more important to strengthen local preparedness than to improve international response to outbreaks. But Gates noted that the world is not as prepared to respond quickly to dangerous disease outbreaks as it is to respond to international conflicts, even though infectious diseases may pose a comparable global risk. “An epidemic is one of the few catastrophes that could set the world back drastically in the next few decades,” Gates wrote. “By building a global warning and response system, we can prepare for it and prevent millions of deaths.”
The Tulane National Primate Research Center admitted that nearly 200 monkeys that may have been exposed to dangerous Burkholderia pseudomallei bacteria—at least 7 of which later showed evidence of infection—were accidentally returned to outdoor cages before officials were aware the monkeys might have been exposed. B. pseudomallei kills a high percentage of the people it infects, and is highly regulated because of its potential use as a biological weapon. The Tulane center is near wetlands and across from a school, but a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) investigation found no evidence that the bacteria had been released into the surrounding area.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said that global emissions of carbon dioxide from energy production fell in 2014. It was the first time in 40 years of record-keeping that global emissions fell while the global economy was growing. The IEA attributed this “decoupling” of carbon emissions and economic growth to the fact that the major energy consuming countries have started using more power from renewable energy sources. But in spite of the slowdown in emissions, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remains at or near record levels. Brad Plumer noted in Vox that the global economy will have to “decarbonize” much faster than it currently is in order to ensure the average increase in global temperatures is below 2°C (3.6°F).
“Computers are going to take over from humans,” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told The Australian Financial Review. Wozniak said that while he used to dismiss concerns that machine intelligence would soon surpass human intelligence, he now thinks the day might not be far off. “If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,” Wozniak said. “Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be the ants that get stepped on? If I’m going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines… well, I’m going to treat my own pet dog really nice.”
This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary February 2014.
You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
Image credit: US State Department
