Russia on Thursday made good on a plan to deploy lower-yield nuclear weapons in Belarus, a move President Vladimir Putin announced in an interview with state television on March 25, Reuters and other news outlets reported.
It is the first deployment of Russian nuclear weapons outside the country’s borders since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The U.S. State Department condemned the move but said the U.S. has no need to adjust its nuclear posture in the region.
“We strongly condemn the arrangement. It’s the latest example of irresponsible behavior that we have seen from Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine over a year ago,” a State Department spokesperson said Thursday. “ As we have made clear, the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in this conflict would be met with severe consequences. But in response to this report, I will just add we have seen no reason to adjust our strategic nuclear posture or any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”
In an ongoing effort to keep an eye on operations at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi recently met with the head of Russia’s state nuclear power agency.
Grossi and Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev met this week in Beijing to discuss the situation at the power plant, Europe’s largest. The IAEA tweeted a photo of the two men together in Beijing on Wednesday.
Intense fighting has occurred in the vicinity of the plant, several times cutting external power to the plant’s cooling system. The IAEA has attempted to set up a permanent presence at the plant.
The Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship will receive 39 students – a new class record – for the upcoming term that runs into 2024.
The incoming fellows will attend 25 universities – five of which are new to the program – to learn to use high-performance computing for researching a variety of fields, including computer science, astrophysics, electrical engineering, applied mathematics, and environmental fluid mechanics, according to a DOE news release.
The program, established in 1991 and jointly funded by the DOE Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration, trains top leaders in computational science. More than a third of the new fellows self-identify as women while more than half come from underrepresented groups. The 2023 cohort also includes a U.S. veteran and an active-duty service member.
Luis German has been named chief information officer (CIO) of Amentum, a major player in Department of Energy contracts. In this role, Luis will manage “large and complex technology transformation solutions,” according to a company statement.
Prior to joining Amentum, Luis was at Visteon where he served as CIO overseeing all information technology functions, as well as driving innovations and new approaches to increase efficiency, improve productivity and effectively manage chip shortages. Prior to Visteon, Luis spent almost 20 years at Tenaris, where he served as chief process and information officer.
Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the first test firing of a nuclear cannon, carried out by the U.S. military in 1953 at the Nevada Test Site. Nicknamed “Atomic Annie” the M65 atomic cannon could fire a 280-milimeter conventional or W-9 15-kiloton projectile between seven and 20 miles, according to the Army.
The May 25, 1953 “Grable” Shot,” part of the Upshot-Knothole atomic tests, was the first and only live nuclear test firing of the gun. Twenty M65s were made from the time they entered service in 1956 to the point at which rockets and more advanced missiles made them obsolete in the mid-1960s. Only eight of the cannons remain on display at various museums and installations.