This is to make available now for note-taking purposes the topics of major exam questions for the midterm and final. The intent is for students to analyze and present their best judgments and demonstrate the quality of their thinking in their answers.
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Question for the Midterm:
The following is a conception by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1951 based on his address to the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization:
- “Because, therefore, we are defending a way of life, we must be respectful of that way of life as we proceed to the solution of our problem. {Here he was referring to Cold War adversaries the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons capability and China which was soon to acquire nuclear weapons. Both communist adversaries wanted to impose their authoritarian model of the relationship of the individual to the state on the people of America.} We must not violate its principles and precepts, and we must not destroy from within what we are trying to defend from without.”
You will use your own template of meaning to make an informed judgment about the experience of the United States in defending from without from the point of view of whether we violated the “principles and precepts” of the American way of life?
The meaning of the word “principled” is “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or a chain of reasoning.” Similar words according the Oxford Dictionary are:
truth
proposition
concept
idea
theory
postulate
assumptions
basis
The meaning of the word “precepts” is “a general rule intended to regulate behavior or thought.” Similar words according the Oxford Dictionary are:
canon
law
ordinance
regulation
rule
statute
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Question for the Midterm on the Soviet Union/Russia:
Were the actions of the Soviet Union/Russia in the Chelyabinsk region and with the Soviet nuclear fleet in the Arctic during the Cold War and after the moral equivalent of what the United States did at Hanford and Rocky Flats, elsewhere in the United States, and around the world?
The Nightline video on Rocky Flats from 1995 reveals the folly of siting the production area on only 334 acres. At Hanford it is 200 square miles.
At Hanford, the choices made regarding the disastrous Green Run is s key occurrence to discuss. The pollution of groundwater from massive dumping of contaminated water and the constant leaking of high-level storage tanks round out major problems.
Moral Equivalence to Compare the United States with the Soviet Union/Russia
Simple English Wikipedia
The actions of A are morally equivalent of the actions of B, therefore A is just as good or bad as B, regardless of what the actions are.
https://simple.wikipedia.org
Moral Equivalence-The Logical Place
Moral equivalence is a form of equivalence often used in political debates. It seeks to draw comparisons between different, even unrelated things, to make a point that one is just as bad as the other or good as the other.
https://yando.wordpress.com
One Meaning of Moral Equivalence
Moral Equivalence is a term used in political debate, usually to deny that a moral comparison can be made of two sides in s conflict, or in the actions or tactics of two sides. The term had some currency in polemic debates about the Cold War, and currently the Arab-Israelic conflict.
lisbnet.com
Moral Relativism
Moral relativism finds that there is no objective way to establish that a particular morality is the correct morality one and concludes that there is no reason to believe in a singe true morality
lisbnet.com
What Moral Relativists Believe About Morality
“Unlike moral absolutists moral relativists argue that good and bad are relative concepts—whether something is considered right or wrong can change depending on a=opinion, social context, culture or a number of other factors. Moral relativists argue that there is more than one valid system of morality.
lisbnet.com
Morality: “Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”
The quote above is by Lord Acton in England in 1887 in his debate with Bishop Creighton of the Church of England. The issue was the moral problem of writing about the Inquisition. The problem relevant to today is the moral equivalence of responsibility in authoritarian and democratic societies.
The Inquisition, according to History.com, is as follows:
“The Inquisition was a powerful office set up within the Catholic Church to root out and punish heresy throughout Europe and the Americas. Beginning in the 1th2 Century and continuing for hundreds of years, the inquisition is infamous for the severity of its tortures and its persecution of Jews and Muslims. Its worst manifestation was in Spain, where the Spanish Inquisition was a dominant force for more than 200 years, resulting in some 32,000 executions.”
This is the position taken by Lord Action in 1887 on moral responsibility:
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King like other men, with a favorable presumption that they did not wrong. If there is any presumption it is against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. History responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolutes power corrupts absolutely.”
Objective Four – Chelyabinsk
The Chelyabinsk Study Guide summarizes two chapters I wrote for a book from the MIT Press. The first two paragraphs are a summary.
The Soviets dumped the amount of radiation in the Hiroshima bomb into the Techa River, the only water supply for 124,000 people for five years and did not tell them. Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Henry Kendall called this:
“Far and away…the largest and most careless nuclear practice that the human race has ever experienced…It’s an enormous scale of responsibility.”
The second entry under Objective Four is the eight page special section of The Orange County Register, 1993 which focuses on the consequences on residents of Muslyumovo on the Techa River. The remaining entries under Objective Four are slides made from the Register photographer’s pictures.
Objective Five – Soviet Submarine Fleet and Artic Ocean Dumping and the Sinking of the Kursk Submarine in 2000
The class will begin with the Lipse, a ship which was used to dump nuclear waste in the Arctic Ocean. The United States did this 230 times in the North Pacific during the early years of the Cold War. The Lipse is now on the Kola Peninsula filled beyond sensible capacity with high level nuclear wastes. When a fuel rod would not go into where it was to be stored, a worker hit it with a sledgehammer causing it to fracture. It is in danger of capsizing.
The Kola Peninsula has been called a “Chernobyl in slow motion. It had well over 100 submarines for the early Soviet era kept afloat by circulating water where there is no infrastructure to cut out the two nuclear reactors and send them to Chelyabinsk-65 for storage. The U.S does this at Hanford.
ABC Nightline, as it did at Rocky Flats, went to Chelyabinsk. A second video will be excerpted call “Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet.” The U.S. has more high level storage at Hanford than the Soviets/Russians do at Chelyabinsk because after a huge nuclear waste explosion they just dump it in deep wells.
The Kursk submarine disaster is a compelling human tragedy.
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Question for the Midterm on Humanity’s Experience with Nuclear Weapons
Utilizing the insights of Kai Erikson’s New Species of Trouble, John Holdren’s Dynamics of the Nuclear Arms Race and Albert Einstein’s penetrating observations as frameworks, what has humanity’s experience been with nuclear weapons?
Humanity’s Experience with Nuclear Weapons
The purpose of this document is to suggest potential frameworks for the essay. The broad context is that only the United States has used nuclear weapons is anger. This was a decision of new President of the United States Harry S. Truman. Decision makers within Japan were not willing to give up. The war in Europe had ended in May in 1945. Therefore, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing 200,000 people.
Nuclear Weapons Have No Useful Military Value
Famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith said that “not even the most accomplished ideologue can tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.” Nonetheless, China is greatly increasing its number of nuclear weapons. Unstable North Korea has nuclear weapons.
Both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and great conflicts between them
Israel has nuclear weapons. This is a dangerous time in the Middle East. Israel is being attacked by Lebanon and Gaza with rockets. During the Trump administration the U.S. withdrew from the Iran Treaty so Iran is proceeding to enrich uranium without inspections.
The war in Ukraine includes dangerous attacks on Ukraine’s nuclear plants. The Economist for June 4, 2022 indicated that the world is in a “new nuclear era.” The reason is “with its threats to use the bomb, Russia’s president has overturned the nuclear order.”
Another quote from The Economist is “Having exalted Russia’s atomic arsenal and promised Ukraine’s subjugation, Putin threatened countries which attempted to interfere with consequences ‘such as you have never seen in your entire history.’ “
Flawed Nuclear Weapons Delivery Systems
We have covered these is class. B-52 Bombers dropping bombs on North Carolina, Spain and Greenland. Russia’s finest submarine explosion and sinking and the negligence in the death of nineteen submariners.
Protection of Nuclear Workers From Radiation Poison
There was not a law passed by Congress to protect and compensate nuclear workers until 2000 A.D. Both in the former Soviet Union and the United States the race to weaponize the atom led to unnecessary illness and death of nuclear workers.
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Question for the Final
One month before the Chernobyl disaster, The Economist magazine offered advice to the nuclear industry. It was their prescription for success for the industry. The way forward for a somewhat moribund nuclear industry is:
- “…get plenty of nuclear plants built, and then to accumulate year after year, a record of no deaths, no serious accidents–and no dispute that the result is cheaper energy.”
The task (question to answer) is to provide a detailed assessment of how the industry has performed in the three decades since early 1986 in global perspective.
The first element of the answer is to assess the quantity and quality of power plants built and the consequences of when they were built for this time in the 21st century. The second element is to judge the safety record. The third element is to assess the cost factors and what has contributed to the current economics of nuclear power.
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Question for the Final Exam Future of Nuclear Energy
Projection into the future question:
- In this era of unchecked global climate change, what is the future of nuclear energy when global demand for energy will rise by 50 percent by 2040 in global contexts?
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Question for the Final Exam Nuclear Waste
Why is it has been so difficult to solve the nuclear waste disposal problem in the United States. (Except for Finland, the rest of the world has not solved the problem satisfactorily either).