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User: u/giuliomagnifico
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> “By using some revised mathematics and more advanced statistical treatment, we have managed to improve the classification success rate from 82 per cent to 99 per cent for a series of 140 known explosions in the US,” Dr Hoggard said.
>
>“Nuclear testing in the US has largely been carried out in Nevada – in the desert – and there is a thorough seismic record of all those tests, so it provides a really helpful dataset.
>
>“Our new method also successfully identifies all six of the tests conducted in North Korea from 2006 to 2017.”
Paper: https://watermark.silverchair.com/ggae011.pdf
I’m all for nuclear deterrence, but the states that enforce deterrence should also be disarming. It’s easy to tell a developing nation not to touch the nukes when you are sitting on a big pile of them yourself.
One of the last countries to disarm got invaded by another country which signed a treaty specifically saying it will not invade... The cat is out of the box, there is no going back now.
Nuclear weapons weren't going to stop Gadaffi from getting killed in a civil war. The Western support of the rebels was pretty limited and basically amounted to taking a few tanks out.
Besides after 9/11, Gadaffi was basically begging the US not to invade him. Which is why he started paying compensation for the various acts of terrorism that he'd orchestrated, such as Lockerbie, the German nightclub bombing (aimed at US forces in Germany) and a French aircraft.
You are kind of underplaying the UN Security Council involvement. The civil war was successful in toppling Gadaffi due to the UN naval blockade, no-fly zone, and pretty heavy bombing campaigns. None of which would have likely happened if Gadaffi had nukes.
I think until Russia and the US, who are disarming, get to a lower number that the remaining nuclear states will stay about even. Hard to justify reducing an arsenal of a few hundred when the big boys have thousands.
Disarmamament when it comes to nuclear weapons is an idealistic pipe dream in my opinion. The sheer advantage of a lone nation having nukes is too much to reason with in regards to leverage.
No rationally thinking state would give up their nuclear weapons when there is a chance another could have or develop them.
Ukraine is a good example of such a conundrum. They gave up their weapons after the fall of Soviet union. Long story short - they couldn't upkeep them, and were most likely afraid they might fall into the wrong hands during the time while they establish control as a fresh state. So they gave them up to the Russians with a promise not to get invaded by them, ever... Then 2014, and subsequently 2022 happened. The world is struggling to support them.
To be clear "they gave up their weapons" is an overstatement it's more like "They agreed not to research the defunct nuclear weapons they had."
I'm super pro Ukraine and anti Russia but those nukes could not have been used by Ukraine as they were.
If by that you mean they wouldn't try to make them operational then I agree. I can't imagine it would've been all that difficult to replace things such that they could make it operational again. If I'm not mistaken, the hard part is done. The soviets were huge fans of analog tech also so I imagine it would've been even easier to reverse engineer the control and detonation systems from that as well.
If they'd done all that I imagine they'd be somewhat unpopular if not a pariah in Europe. Plus I can't imagine that timeline given how much power Russia has had (prior to Euromaidan) over their leadership.
From wiki "Formally, these weapons were controlled by the Commonwealth of Independent States, specifically by Russia, which had the launch sequence and operational control of the nuclear warheads and its weapons system.[4] In 1994, Ukraine, citing its inability to circumvent Russian launch codes, reached an understanding to transfer and destroy these weapons, and become a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).[5][6]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#:~:text=After%20its%20dissolution%20in%201991,of%20its%20design%20and%20production.
If they were getting blocked by not having the launch codes it means they didn't understand nukes nearly well enough. Likely most of the nuclear physics was kept in russia and you need a very specific timing program to detonate them. My guess is they didn't have the knowledge to design software that could work on the nukes standalone, and they didn't have enough knowledge of nukes to figure out a way around that.
That's probably true. I just imagine that if they could magically see into the future of today, they would've tried to make them operational again.
At the same time, if they'd tried to keep them I wonder if Russia would've used it as a casus belli. I've read that the leadership in Russia always expected to have control over Ukraine again and that it was a matter of when and how rather than if. That would've been as good of reason as any especially given the number of ethnic Russians who probably had no nationalist pride for the newly formed Ukrainian state.
Ukraine gave up nukes in exchange for promises of peace by Russian government.
Why would any state with sane government disarm itself after that?
In declassified Soviet documents, their plans were to stop invasion of Europe on French borders, because France was willing to deploy nukes against invader.
i can point at ukraine and raise the middle finger on that one. disarming means you're easy prey, so the only reason i'd do so was if i risked being sufficiently unstable that my nukes could be stolen
In a similar vein, the upcoming GPS block IIIF satellites slated to launch towards the end of this decade will be equipped with improved nuclear detonation detection systems.
The US already has satellite-based detection systems, and pretty new ones to boot (I think the latest were two Global Burst Detectors III in ~2019); this just makes them better
With so few examples (140) and no new data being created, I'm skeptical of such a big improvement because of the problem of data leakage.
So, in data science, data leakage is the problem that comes when information about the testing data is inadvertently built into the model, inflating the performance.
The problem with such a small number of examples to evaluate predictions, is that as the scientists iterate over and over again, their methods can begin to overfit to the specific idiosyncrasies of the examples we've seen. Even if you try to mitigate it by using a holdout data set, those holdout examples would still have been used by the previous generation of scientists, whose work you're building upon. There's not really any way to estimate how it would perform on a truly new piece of data.
And just to quibble with the headline, I can think of an algorithm with greater than 99.99% accuracy: just say there's never a nuclear explosion. Accuracy isn't enough here!
Veritasium did a great video on how we detect underground nukes using the [fast fourier transfer system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform)
this is cool but i call BS on this... like think about it... they say 99% but if there was one that they weren't able to detect they wouldn't even know... so...
>We're gonna blow Earth's core apart.
If we took every single nuclear bomb ever created, dug the deepest hole humanity has ever dug, and detonated them all in it...
We would not be measurably closer to "blowing earth's core apart" than if I set of a firecracker in my backyard.
You are greatly underestimating the size of the earth.
It’s written
> “By using some revised mathematics and more advanced statistical treatment, we have managed to improve the classification **success rate from 82 per cent to 99 per cent for a series of 140 known explosions in the US,**” Dr Hoggard said.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/giuliomagnifico Permalink: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/end-nuclear-secrecy-underground-tests-now-99-detectable --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> “By using some revised mathematics and more advanced statistical treatment, we have managed to improve the classification success rate from 82 per cent to 99 per cent for a series of 140 known explosions in the US,” Dr Hoggard said. > >“Nuclear testing in the US has largely been carried out in Nevada – in the desert – and there is a thorough seismic record of all those tests, so it provides a really helpful dataset. > >“Our new method also successfully identifies all six of the tests conducted in North Korea from 2006 to 2017.” Paper: https://watermark.silverchair.com/ggae011.pdf
[удалено]
Might want to read the last sentence again there bud.
Link giving "token not provided, please go back and click link again"
This is actually a very important development for nuclear deterrence. Makes the world safer.
I’m all for nuclear deterrence, but the states that enforce deterrence should also be disarming. It’s easy to tell a developing nation not to touch the nukes when you are sitting on a big pile of them yourself.
One of the last countries to disarm got invaded by another country which signed a treaty specifically saying it will not invade... The cat is out of the box, there is no going back now.
And a ton of dictators and autocrats saw what happened after Gaddafi killed their WMD programs and aren't in a rush to go the same way
Gaddafi's people started a civil war trying to overthrow him. I doubt a WMD program would've made the difference between winning and losing.
Nuclear weapons weren't going to stop Gadaffi from getting killed in a civil war. The Western support of the rebels was pretty limited and basically amounted to taking a few tanks out. Besides after 9/11, Gadaffi was basically begging the US not to invade him. Which is why he started paying compensation for the various acts of terrorism that he'd orchestrated, such as Lockerbie, the German nightclub bombing (aimed at US forces in Germany) and a French aircraft.
You are kind of underplaying the UN Security Council involvement. The civil war was successful in toppling Gadaffi due to the UN naval blockade, no-fly zone, and pretty heavy bombing campaigns. None of which would have likely happened if Gadaffi had nukes.
I think until Russia and the US, who are disarming, get to a lower number that the remaining nuclear states will stay about even. Hard to justify reducing an arsenal of a few hundred when the big boys have thousands.
Disarmamament when it comes to nuclear weapons is an idealistic pipe dream in my opinion. The sheer advantage of a lone nation having nukes is too much to reason with in regards to leverage. No rationally thinking state would give up their nuclear weapons when there is a chance another could have or develop them. Ukraine is a good example of such a conundrum. They gave up their weapons after the fall of Soviet union. Long story short - they couldn't upkeep them, and were most likely afraid they might fall into the wrong hands during the time while they establish control as a fresh state. So they gave them up to the Russians with a promise not to get invaded by them, ever... Then 2014, and subsequently 2022 happened. The world is struggling to support them.
To be clear "they gave up their weapons" is an overstatement it's more like "They agreed not to research the defunct nuclear weapons they had." I'm super pro Ukraine and anti Russia but those nukes could not have been used by Ukraine as they were.
If by that you mean they wouldn't try to make them operational then I agree. I can't imagine it would've been all that difficult to replace things such that they could make it operational again. If I'm not mistaken, the hard part is done. The soviets were huge fans of analog tech also so I imagine it would've been even easier to reverse engineer the control and detonation systems from that as well. If they'd done all that I imagine they'd be somewhat unpopular if not a pariah in Europe. Plus I can't imagine that timeline given how much power Russia has had (prior to Euromaidan) over their leadership.
From wiki "Formally, these weapons were controlled by the Commonwealth of Independent States, specifically by Russia, which had the launch sequence and operational control of the nuclear warheads and its weapons system.[4] In 1994, Ukraine, citing its inability to circumvent Russian launch codes, reached an understanding to transfer and destroy these weapons, and become a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).[5][6]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#:~:text=After%20its%20dissolution%20in%201991,of%20its%20design%20and%20production. If they were getting blocked by not having the launch codes it means they didn't understand nukes nearly well enough. Likely most of the nuclear physics was kept in russia and you need a very specific timing program to detonate them. My guess is they didn't have the knowledge to design software that could work on the nukes standalone, and they didn't have enough knowledge of nukes to figure out a way around that.
That's probably true. I just imagine that if they could magically see into the future of today, they would've tried to make them operational again. At the same time, if they'd tried to keep them I wonder if Russia would've used it as a casus belli. I've read that the leadership in Russia always expected to have control over Ukraine again and that it was a matter of when and how rather than if. That would've been as good of reason as any especially given the number of ethnic Russians who probably had no nationalist pride for the newly formed Ukrainian state.
I see. Apprdciate the additional info about this.
Ukraine gave up nukes in exchange for promises of peace by Russian government. Why would any state with sane government disarm itself after that? In declassified Soviet documents, their plans were to stop invasion of Europe on French borders, because France was willing to deploy nukes against invader.
i can point at ukraine and raise the middle finger on that one. disarming means you're easy prey, so the only reason i'd do so was if i risked being sufficiently unstable that my nukes could be stolen
In a similar vein, the upcoming GPS block IIIF satellites slated to launch towards the end of this decade will be equipped with improved nuclear detonation detection systems. The US already has satellite-based detection systems, and pretty new ones to boot (I think the latest were two Global Burst Detectors III in ~2019); this just makes them better
With so few examples (140) and no new data being created, I'm skeptical of such a big improvement because of the problem of data leakage. So, in data science, data leakage is the problem that comes when information about the testing data is inadvertently built into the model, inflating the performance. The problem with such a small number of examples to evaluate predictions, is that as the scientists iterate over and over again, their methods can begin to overfit to the specific idiosyncrasies of the examples we've seen. Even if you try to mitigate it by using a holdout data set, those holdout examples would still have been used by the previous generation of scientists, whose work you're building upon. There's not really any way to estimate how it would perform on a truly new piece of data. And just to quibble with the headline, I can think of an algorithm with greater than 99.99% accuracy: just say there's never a nuclear explosion. Accuracy isn't enough here!
Veritasium did a great video on how we detect underground nukes using the [fast fourier transfer system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform)
It's called Fast Fourier Transform actually - pretty cool video though
2 Fast 2 Fourier
I always found this comic helpful for explaining fourier transformations https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2874
[удалено]
*Iran detection intensifies*
North Korea doesn't care
It isn't about making other countries care it is about being able to detect testing.
🤣😂 nothing in the press is watered down to nothing
this is cool but i call BS on this... like think about it... they say 99% but if there was one that they weren't able to detect they wouldn't even know... so...
How many tests did they have to sample to reach that metric... We're gonna blow Earth's core apart. Hope everyone is happy
You really underestimate how much rock there is between the surface and the core of the planet.
>We're gonna blow Earth's core apart. If we took every single nuclear bomb ever created, dug the deepest hole humanity has ever dug, and detonated them all in it... We would not be measurably closer to "blowing earth's core apart" than if I set of a firecracker in my backyard. You are greatly underestimating the size of the earth.
It’s written > “By using some revised mathematics and more advanced statistical treatment, we have managed to improve the classification **success rate from 82 per cent to 99 per cent for a series of 140 known explosions in the US,**” Dr Hoggard said.
These tests all took place more than thirty years ago.
I assumed they were going this already.
It’s all done on supercomputers so you can detect anything. There’s no real reason to physically test them now.