America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable. Nukes are complicated and technical weapons that require scientists and experts to build, maintain, and manage. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) is core to the design and unless all of Iran’s HEU is accounted for the threat of it becoming a nuclear power will linger.

So what would it take to get rid of Iran’s stockpile HEU?

François Diaz-Maurin is on Angry Planet today to answer that question. Diaz-Maurin is editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists where he recently published an article outlining what it would take for US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium.

• How a civil engineer becomes a nuclear journalist
• “You can’t bomb away nuclear material.”
• “Technically, it’s nearly Mission Impossible.”
• How much highly enriched uranium (HEU) was left after last year’s strikes?
• Moving HEU around Iran
• What we can learn from satellite photos and the International Atomic Energy Agency
• Why 60%?
• Managing scuba tanks full of gaseous toxins in a war zone
• Why blowing up the cylinders won’t work
• “Let me throw something weird at you.”
• Downblending versus exporting
• We’re living in the third nuclear age
• Deterrence works and that’s, maybe, not great?

Trump may send US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium. There are no good options

Netanyahu says Iran no longer has uranium enrichment capacity

Iran willing to dilute uranium stockpile as fresh protests erupt

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AI enthusiasts love to say that the technology is as revolutionary and important as nuclear weapons. Even the Trump administration has adopted the metaphor. The President and the Department of Energy have repeatedly referred to the development of AI in the US as “Manhattan Project 2.0.”

But is the buildout of LLMs and machine learning systems really as important as the development of the atom bomb? And what are the lessons from the atomic age that AI scientists should then learn? Do we need an AI Non Proliferation Treaty? An AI International Atomic Energy Agency?

On this episode of Angry Planet, Ankit Panda comes on to talk about the uses and limitations of the “AI as nuclear weapons” metaphor. Panda is an expert in nukes and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s been sharing his extended thoughts on the AI-nuclear connection at his Nukesletter Substack.

• Stanislav Petrov
• AI as nuclear weapons
• Why nuclear weapons resonate with people in the AI field
• The Strategic Air Command story
• That time we spilled nuclear material all over Greenland and Spain
• NNSA and Anthropic
• AI as the next Manhattan Project
• A massive infrastructure project
• Fissile material as silicon
• What’s the AI version of an NPT and IAEA?
• AI and nuclear are both dual use
• On AI winters
• What AI is actually being used for, what it might be used for
• The socialization around AI will change.

AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crisis

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Things have gotten very surreal in the dark corners of the internet. AI-generated prophets are preaching jihad in Facebook groups, Minecraft servers host digital caliphates, and school shooting fandoms gather to study their heroes and plot how to up beat their score. It’s a double bill on this episode of Angry Planet as two experts from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit that studies and works to mitigate violent extremists, discuss the brave new world of online-born violence.

First up is Milo Comerford, the co-author of a study about nihilistic violence. Then we’ve got Moustafa Ayad to talk about how the Islamic State is circumventing bans and pushing its message on social media.

• Staying sane on the internet
• Violence without ideology
• The Comm
• 764
• True Crime Community
• Saints Culture
• When fandom becomes a killing
• An aesthetics driven movement
• Online and offline have merged
• Moderation is impossible
• You don’t have to hand it to ISIS
• Broken text posting
• Copyright strikes and the Islamic State
• Facebook professional as the gold standard
• AI resurrects dead influencers
• Jihad influencers
• Even IS is obsessed with the Epstein files
• Virtual caliphates in Roblox and Minecraft
• “We must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
• Once again, it all comes back to 4chan
• Saying nice things about twitter dot com

Beyond Extremism

‘The Comm’: The Group Linked to a Nationwide Swatting Rampage

How the True Crime Community generates its own killers

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