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Fake News And Nuclear Weapons Don’t Play Well Together In The South China Sea

This article is more than 4 years old.

Towards the end of last month, a story began flooding the internet about a nuclear detonation in the South China Sea, that China purportedly had exploded one of their new tactical nukes.

Of course, it was nonsense, a bit of fake news from someone described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a former federal convict and white supremacist named Hal Turner. Falsely attributed to military sources, the story appeared on Turner’s website and later on his nighttime AM radio show, and was picked up by others.

The next day, a Pentagon spokesperson called the claim a “silly fiction.” 

Ironically, Putin’s Russia, the King of Fake News, was caught off guard and initially thought it was real.

But fake news doesn’t work that well on nuclear issues. Whether or not there was a nuclear explosion is one of those things that we can determine really easily and really quickly.

We monitor radiation around the world in real time, as well as the pressure waves caused by a nuclear detonation, even in water. And we know when something has happened within seconds of a real event.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CNTBTO) runs the most sophisticated worldwide monitoring system aimed at identifying nuclear explosions. And Russia is part of that system.

We can also detect the radionulcides produced from any detonation in samples of ocean water and air.

So it was strange that Russia would let itself to get punked.

The Russian government agency, Rospotrebnadzor, said it had information that there’d been a radiation incident in the South China Sea:

“According to information received from the Global Network for Environmental Monitoring in the South China Sea, an increase in the level of radiation background in connection with a radiation incident has been recorded.”

Unfortunately, the Russian agency relied on Turner’s nonsense instead of its own government’s access to CNTBTO’s data.

Immediately, cries rang out that fake news could lead to World War III. Hopefully, the world’s nuclear-capable militaries will need more than a conspiracy theory to launch nuclear weapons.

Not that China isn’t in a position to do such a thing. Their nuclear forces are growing quickly. China’s nuclear arsenal includes about 290 warheads, deliverable by ballistic missiles and bombers. This stockpile will grow further over the next ten years, allowing China to surpass France as the world’s third-largest nuclear-armed state.

Still well below Russia and the United States, who together have about 10,000 warheads.

But China would not be doing itself any favors. China is part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty whose central tenet is:

“The NPT non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons and the NPT nuclear-weapon states in exchange agree to share the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology and to pursue nuclear disarmament aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

So China stands to gain quite a bit from its policies of providing nuclear energy technology to many countries in Asia, Africa and South America, individually and as part of its One Belt One Road initiative. That initiative, a 21st century version of the Silk Road, plans to build over a trillion dollars of infrastructure in developing countries, including nuclear power plants, making those countries major commercial partners with, and majorly dependent on, China.

So it would not be in China’s self-interest to start detonating nuclear bombs willy-nilly.

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