The Trouble With the Nuclear-AI Analogy

Christopher David LaRoche and Ankit Panda | Foreign Affairs

If policymakers are to succeed in designing a governance regime for AI, they must both draw the right lessons from the past and innovate in the dark. Those who built the bomb were forced to imagine a framework for an “absolute weapon” for which they had little precedent. They began by reckoning with the bomb as it actually was, often motivated by fear of its consequences. By looking back at the nuclear order’s treaties, organizations, and mechanisms, AI’s titans are inverting this process, starting with the institutions and then surmising how to make the technology fit them. This has obscured those institutions’ failings and fragility—and what makes AI so unique and dangerous.

​Urging Pivot on North Korea, South’s Leader Calls for Easing Sanctions

Choe Sang-Hun | New York Times

Breaking with decades of policy on North Korea, the president of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, is now urging the United States to ease sanctions on Pyongyang in exchange for an agreement that it freeze its weapons programs. “I believe there is significant value in a trade-off between sanctions — which are not particularly effective anyway — and a stop to the development of additional nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile technology,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times.

North Korea's Kim Jong Un lauds apparent hypersonic missile test, calls it "incurable headache" for foes

Anna Coren | CBS News

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watched on Sunday as his country tested a purported new hypersonic weapon designed to evade missile defenses. North Korean state media said Kim had lauded the weapon as an "irresistible force" that would be an "incurable headache" for North Korea's adversaries. The country's state-run KCNA news agency said the "new weapon" tested on Sunday was "of great significance." The type of weapon was not specified by the reports, but photographs released by KCNA showed Kim, with his daughter Kim Ju Ae, inspecting a screen with a label reading, "Hwasongpho-11Ma-1 flight trajectory."

Russia, China end mandate for independent monitoring of UN sanctions on Iran

Michelle Nichols | Reuters

Russia and China ended on Thursday a United Nations Security Council mandate for the independent monitoring of international sanctions on Iran, reviving ​their argument that all UN measures on Tehran had been removed under ‌a nuclear deal with world powers. All UN sanctions on Iran were reimposed a year ago after France, Britain and Germany accused Tehran of violating the 2015 nuclear pact meant to prevent it from developing ​a nuclear weapon. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s nuclear tests have turned this mountain into an earthquake hot spot

Tom Metcalfe | Scientific American

North Korea’s Mount Mantap is being rocked by earthquakes—and the reason appears to be the pariah state’s nuclear tests. It’s been almost 10 years since North Korea last conducted an underground thermonuclear test at the mountain, which is also known as Mantapsan—yet the geology of the site appears to have been critically altered by intense explosions, according to a new study based in part on photographs taken space. “Repeated underground nuclear tests [have] progressively disturbed and damaged the surrounding rock and changed the stresses acting on pre-existing faults,” says seismologist and geophysicist Kwang-Hee Kim of South Korea’s Pusan National University

Nuclear Energy Is the Kremlin’s Latest Leverage Over Washington

Agathe Demarais | Foreign Policy

Today, Russia remains America’s top supplier of enrichment services (the process that turns natural uranium into nuclear fuel). This is odd: Washington banned imports of Russian LEU in August 2024, a move that prompted Moscow to outlaw such exports to the United States three months later. Both bans appear to be theater, and Moscow’s leverage over Washington on uranium supplies could be more powerful than U.S. officials would like to admit. … Decades of reliance on Russia resulted in chronic underinvestment in U.S. uranium enrichment capacity. Paducah, America’s sole domestically owned enrichment plant, ceased operating when Megatons to Megawatts wound down. The only commercial-scale enrichment facility operating in the United States today belongs to Urenco, a British-Dutch-German firm.