The specter of plutonium in modern warfare

Abstract

The current global reality of re-emerging of the Cold War, migration of the large segments of the global population, depletion of natural resources, and the ever-increasing need for alternate energy presents existential challenges to geopolitical unresolved crisis, and ultimately, stability of the biosphere. While the strategic nuclear confrontation is an unlikely scenario because of its irreversible consequences, tactical warfare is a realistic probability of the outcomes of regional and geopolitical differences around the globe. The fragile and limited scope of the stratosphere, including the airspace and waters, provides ever-decreasing probabilities of expansion, limited options for sustainable life, and increasing risk to the survival of the environment. The industrial pollution is enhanced by the nuclear age radioactive environment, which is irreversible in light of man-made insults to the biosphere by the nuclear-era civilian and military release of man-made imbalance. Non-proliferation nuclear treaties, to which not all countries are signatories, do not provide a prospect of security for mankind in the current polarized geopolitical realities, enhanced by clandestine use of nuclear-era destructive powers and by settling regional differences in the confrontational rather than compromising manor. Current realities of the instabilities of the Middle and Far East, large segments of Euro-Asia, shifting of the military priorities, and unceasing production of the nuclear arsenals appear a challenge not only to the well-being, but to sustainable homeostasis. Radiation dispersal devices, nuclear terrorism, renewable energy challenges, chemical and radioactive pollution, melting of the polar caps, and global warming present existential challenges to this fragile segment of the galaxy. The advent of transuranic elements, exemplified by plutonium, adds a recent relatively new dimension to the challenges facing the biosphere. This article attempts to objectively assess the role of radioactive pollution by actinides in the current global reality.