Tyler Huang

Tyler Huang is a 13 year old 8th grader at LREI. His social justice project topic is Nuclear weapons. He is intrested in nuclear weapons because he is aware of the threat of nuclear violence/war.

Global Zero Leader Derek Johnson teaches us About Nuclear Weapons

by Tyler Huang

Derek Johnson is a managing partner of Global Zero which is an orginization that was formed in france which is focused on bringing world leaders together to talk about this issue. Derek was suprised on how we stumbled oppon this topic and was very curious on the reason why we picked this topic out of all of the other topics. He was happy to talk to us because one of their companies goals it to inform the youth about the nuclear crisis.

Overall Derek was verry happy to talk to us. We had a meeting planned with him the week before but he postponed it due to him being sick. We started off the interview by asking about his orginization Global Zero. He said that the orginization was focused on rallying global leaders together to discuss nuclear disarmenment. The goal for their company is to bring the nuclear weapon count to zero.

He told us that many people doubted him and said that it never will happen. They said that there will always be nuclear weapons and the nuclear threat will never go away. He said that his responce to those people was, “What a lot of people don’t realize is that there used to be (30 years ago) there was 70’000 nuclear weapons in the world. Now there’s 13,000. There’s been a loss of 80% of nuclear weapons in thirty years.”

Their company’s plan is to first get the United States and Russia to decrease their nuclear arsenals because they feel that the countries with 500 and less nuclear bombs wont lower their arsenals unless the US and Russia lowers their arsenals. They have a four stage rollout for their plan. During the feildwork I wondered how their orginization was funded and he said that they are mostly donation funded and from countreis without nuclear weapons.

by Tyler Huang

Although this interview was short we learned a lot. Her answers were directly helpful in our project and I feel as though it was one of the most informative interviews we had. Jamie seemed very intrested in our project and how we stumbled apon our topic of nuclear disarmenment. A few days prior we met with another member of the Carnegie Endowment’s Nuclear Policy Program, James Acton, and we were intrested in the different topics they covered in their orginization.

Jamie talked to us about the p5 process which is an agreement with 5 of the countries with nuclear weapons that only they are allowded to posess nuclear weapons and they shall not be used unless its despretly needed. The p5 process sits among the non proliferation agreements, which is one of the largest nuclear agreements. The p5 process was also signed by other countries without nuclear weapons and by signing this agreement they agree that they will never posess a nuclear arsenal. In exchange in these countries signing this treaty they recieve help in their nuclear power programs. Countries like Pakistan and Isreal didn’t sign this treaty so they wouldn’t have to promise that they wont grow their nuclear arsenals and grow their nuclear technology.

She also talked about how nuclear weapons can and do pose a threat to climate change. If a nuclear bomb is detonated on land the nuclear fallout will spread because of the wind. If the bomb is detonated in New York City it could reach as far as Boston! Obviously if a nuclear weapon is used then there will be debris and fires spread out miles away from the blast location and the radiation effects will pose a threat in that specific enviornment.

Jamie Introduced us to this website called NUKEMAP made by Alex Wellerstein. You can choose your nuclear weapon for example you can use the bombs dropped in Japan or up to the size of the Tsar Bomba. You can also pick where you would drop the bomb. The intresting thing about this website is that you can view the casualties and injuries from the nuclear blast wherever you place it. If you place a Tsar Bomba in Bangladesh you can get 17 million deaths.

Jamie Kwong left us with a wonderful quote revolving around young people like us. She said that we need young people involved in these important topics so there can be a change. This quote left us off thinking about what we can do to make a change. We thought about orginizing protests or even our teach in, where we are teaching kids about this important topic. This quote made us realize that our job for the Teach In is to bring awareness to these super important topics therefore making a change in our community.

by Tyler Huang

On Febuary 6th, we orginized an interview with James Acton. Ajev orginized this meeting during our lunch period. He joined a few minutes late and it was no big deal. James Acton is a physict and holds the Jessica T. Mathews Chair and is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

We talked about a wide variety of questions. A question that I thought was helpful for our topic was, how does a question roll out a nuclear ban? He replied saying that countries are disembling nuclear weapons and replacing them all of the time.he also mentiond that dismanteling nuclear weapons is easy and the countries would want some kind of verification or proof that it would change their countries nuclear reputation. However countries would want the reputation of having a nuclear arsenals so it would be less likely for an invasion.

James Acton is a specialist in hypersonic weapons (Missiles that can reach a speed of Mach 5 which is 5 times the speed of sound). He talked about how difficult it can be to intercept a hypersonic missile, but countries are developing next generation missile defence systems to handle these types of weapons.

James ended our chat by saying he doesn’t directly affect the growth of these weapons but his job is to overall make our world a better place without these weapons.

by Tyler Huang

On friday January 1st, we set up a zoom meeting with Lawrence Bullock. He is veteran for the military. He served the United States in the late 70s recently after the Vietnam War. He was locaded in the alps and served in missile silos ready to fight back in the event of a Russian bombing. In these small mountain towns that he worked in he would live outside of the bunker. He shared an experiance from one of the rare times that he served inside of a bunker/silo. He said that they were big with living quarters and gyms! They obviously contained a ton of computers and the missiles.

Lawrence told us some stories from the time he served (25 years). He told us that one day they got an alert that the Russians were attacking them. They used all of ther technology and radars and they found an aircraft approaching them. After all of the panic they found out that the Russians were painting a false picture on the radars to cause panic.

When we interviewed Lawrence he talked about his opinions on Nuclear Weapons. He said that whenever he could he would try to not work in a Nuclear Silo. He also mentioned that not many people realize how massive the damage will be if one of these missiles are launched.

Lawrence was a really intresting guy and he was verry helpful with telling us information and he also had a lot of intresting stories about the time he served. We set up a second interview with him to ask a few more questions and we are looking forward to it.