Ambient office  =  73 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 136 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 52 nanosieverts per hour

       Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, has recently been bragging about their new Status-6 Poseidon nuclear armed underwater drone. This new drone torpedo is reported to employ sophisticated stealth systems that will render it invisible to detection. It is supposed to have intercontinental range and carry a one hundred megaton warhead. It will be able to sail undetected into an enemy harbor and detonate, causing a tsunami that will utterly destroy the port and surrounding city.
       Russia recently launched a new submarine named the Belogrod from the Sevmash shipyards in northern Russia. This new submarine will reportedly carry six of the new Poseidon nuclear armed underwater drones. The construction of the Belgogrod began in 1992 as a huge Oscar II-class nuclear submarine. Construction was halted in 1997 because of lack of funds. Construction was restarted in 2010.
       The United Shipbuilding Corporation in Russia first announced that the Belgorod had been redesigned to be a research ship that could carry underwater drones for exploration, search and rescue. Russian defense analysts estimated that the Belgorod would be an elongated version of the Oscar II-class with a length of over six hundred feet. This makes it the biggest submarine ever launched by Russia.
       Construction of the Belgorod will be finished while the vessel is afloat. The nuclear reactor that will power the Belgorod will undergo testing later this year. Sea trials are scheduled for 2020 and, if all goes well, the Belgorod will enter service at the end of 2020. Putin says that Russia is creating these new nuclear weapons in retaliation for the U.S. placing missiles in Europe.
       Some military analysts say that the Poseidon is a “bizarre novelty” and has limited values as a strategic weapon. The Russians claim that the Poseidon can travel at one hundred and fifteen miles per hour at a depth of a kilometer. However, it could take weeks to travel to a distant target. Meanwhile, the Russian arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles can reach any target on Earth in thirty minutes. It would be much cheaper and reliable for Russia to build more ICBMs to overwhelm any U.S. defense than to waste money on a few huge subs that can only carry a few Poseidons each. The U.S. military is using these new Russian weapons systems as a justification for the upgrading of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
       The most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth was created by the Soviet Union. It was called the Tsar and it created a fifty-megaton explosion. This is more than three-thousand times the power of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II. It has been estimated that the detonation of a single ten-megaton nuclear bomb could cause severe weather disturbances all over the world. If that is a case, then the detonation of a 100 megaton nuclear bomb could pose a threat to the future of the human race. Its use would be suicidal for Russia.

Ambient office  =  80 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 107 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 114 nanosieverts per hour

       With the chance of another nuclear accident, a dirty bomb or even a deliberate nuclear detonation increasing, the ability to cheaply and easily measure environmental radiation is becoming more important by the day.
       Vincent Tang is the head of a team at DARPA that has been working to counteract nuclear terrorism for five years. Their project is referred to as Sigma. A year ago, the Tang team started Sigma+ which is an expanded system able to identify chemical, biological and nuclear weapons materials in addition to explosives. The ultimate goal of the Sigma+ project is the creation of a small inexpensive device that can detect all these threatening materials.
      There has recently been a major breakthrough on for the Sigma+ project. The British company Kromek has just released the D3S which is a cheap gadget that can fit in a pocket. Unlike previous systems which were expensive and bulky, the D3S is small enough, cheap enough and simple enough to be carried and used by every police officer, firefighter, EMT and any other emergency-service personnel in a city.
       When combined with a network of larger and more sensitive devices which are both mobile and at fixed places around a city, such a crowdsourced system could be used to prevent or track a chemical, biological, explosive or nuclear attack. Such Sigma+ systems are being tested in several major urban centers around the U.S. The names of the test cities have not been shared due to security concerns.
       The DS3 is about the size of a cell phone, just a little thicker. It contains a one-inch cube of thallium-activated cesium crystal. When a particular isotope hits the crystal, it is absorbed, and the crystal emits a photon. The photon is converted into an electromagnetic signal that is read by the electronics in the DS3.
       The DS3 can be easily paired with any cell phone via blue tooth. When the DS3 detects one of the dangerous substances, it alerts the user with a vibration of the phone. The phone displays which substance has been detected and how much is present.
       With special software installed on a common laptop, the DS3 will pop up on a map of the area it is operating in. A bunch of DS3s can be tracked on the same map which would allow police and first responders to track the spread of dangerous substances.
       The DS3 has been successfully tested with small amounts of Cobalt-60, cesium-137, and radium-226. In testing, the DS3 also reacted to fluorine-18, a common isotope used for medical testing. This is called a false positive and shows that there is still more work to be done on the DS3 design.
       Beyond its use by police and first-responders, the small size and low cost of the DS3 means that it could ultimately be distributed to citizens. This could be very useful as a first line of warning for the distribution of a dangerous substance. It could also help authorities obtain very detailed information about such an event.

Ambient office  =  109 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 61 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 84 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 83 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 65 nanosieverts per hour

       The primary use for nuclear bombs is destruction of an enemy in a conflict. There have been attempts since World War II to find peaceful uses such as digging canals and fracking for natural gas but none of them turned out to practical and safe. There is a new peaceful use of nuclear warheads that has been tossed around for a few decades, but we have not had an opportunity to test such a use.
      Twenty years ago, there was a movie that featured this new use. In the movie, Armageddon, a team flew to an incoming asteroid to plant nuclear warheads which blew the asteroid apart and saved human civilization. While the probability of a major asteroid striking the Earth is low, the consequences could be catastrophic such as the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. Asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit and might strike the Earth are referred to as Near Earth Objects (NEO). 
             In 2013, a meteor hit the ground in Chelyabinsk, Russia. It damaged property and injured more than a thousand people. This event moved asteroid strikes from a subject for science fiction to a real possibility that had to be taken seriously. Major nations such as the U.S. and Russia as wells as groups of nations such as the European Union began spending serious money to detect NEOs and develop possible responses to the threat of an impact.
       The U.N. has created the start of an international institutional infrastructure to detect and divert asteroids. Scientists and government officials have decided that nuclear warheads may be the best hope to divert incoming asteroids. The U.S. and Russia have discussed cooperating on a nuclear planetary defense initiative.
       One problem with developing a nuclear response to asteroid threats has to do with the current treaties governing activities in Earth orbit and outer space. Nuclear non-proliferation is written into space law. Under the current laws, any use of nuclear weapons to divert an incoming asteroid would violate international space laws.
      Article I(1)(a) of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty prohibits the detonation of a nuclear device in space. Any attempt to blow up an approaching asteroid would obviously violate this law. (Not all nations with nuclear weapons and space launch capability are subject this law.)   In Article IV of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, there is a prohibition against stationing nuclear weapons in space. This means that if an asteroid defense system included nuclear warheads in Earth orbit, it would violate this law.
      While it is important for the nations of Earth to abide by treaties and laws that are to the benefit of all, if it is established that an asteroid is headed our way, it is unlikely that these treaties would stand in the way of an attempt to use nuclear warheads to divert the asteroid. Russia has already hinted that if they saw an asteroid headed this way, they would “launch first, litigate second.”
      On the other hand, the excuse that an asteroid might some day threaten the Earth could be used to justify the development of new nuclear weapons and the launch of nuclear warheads into space. Blatant violation of international law would also allow the perpetrator to avoid the safeguards built into the law. In the end, it may be more dangerous to allow nuclear warhead into space than to worry about a possible asteroid strike in the future.
       It would seem that the international treaties about space law need to be updated. There has to be a way for space law to protect us from the use of an asteroid threat to avoid the regulations against the deployment of nuclear weapons in Earth orbit and beyond. In addition, the law does need to provide some sort of exemption for a multilateral nuclear planetary defense should it ever be needed. In such a case, the threat would need to be identified and verified and a nuclear response would need to be chosen by scientists as a best response. A multinational decision-making and oversight body made up of as many nations as possible should be created to deal with these issues.
        This will be very complex, time consuming and expensive to do but if the future of the human race is at stake, it will be worth any effort necessary.