If you are afraid of nuclear war, the thing to fear is a nuclear state's capacity to retaliate being questioned. These supercomputers are the alternative to live tests. Taking them away doesn't poof nuclear weapons, it means you are left with a half-assed deterrent or must resume live tests.
> the abandonment of the course of nuclear disarmament treaty
North Korea, the American interventions in the Middle East and Ukraine set the precedent that nuclear sovereignty is in a separate category from the treaty-enforced kind. Non-proliferation won't be made or broken on the back of aging, degrading weapons.
> repeated talk of a coming war against certain Asian powers
One invites war by refusing to prepare for it.
What are you basing this on?
> it's not like more deadly nuclear weapons would change anything
We haven't been chasing yield in nuclear weapons since the 60s.
Our oldest warheads date from the 60s [1]. For obvious reasons, the experimental track record on half-century old pits is scarce. We don't know if novel physics or chemistry is going on in there, and we don't want to be the second ones to find out.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/news/252468294/C...
> "The Russians are fielding brand new nuclear weapons and bombs," said Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, undersecretary for nuclear security at the DOE. She said "a very large portion of their military is focused on their nuclear weapons complex."
> It's the same for China, which is building new nuclear weapons, Gordon-Hagerty said, "as opposed to the United States, where we are not fielding or designing new nuclear weapons. We are actually extending the life of our current nuclear weapons systems." She made the remarks yesterday in a webcast press conference.
> ...
> Businesses use 3D simulation to design and test new products in high performance computing. That is not a unique capability. But nuclear weapon development, particularly when it involves maintaining older weapons, is extraordinarily complex, Goldstein said.
> The DOE is redesigning both the warhead and nuclear delivery system, which requires researchers to simulate the interaction between the physics of the nuclear system and the engineering features of the delivery system, Goldstein said. He characterized the interaction as a new kind of problem for researchers and said 2D development doesn't go far enough. "We simply can't rely on two-dimensional simulations -- 3D is required," he said.
> Nuclear weapons require investigation of physics and chemistry problems in a multidimensional space, Goldstein said. The work is a very complex statistical problem, and Cray's El Capitan system, which can couple this computation with machine learning, is ideally suited for it, he said.
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This isn't designing new ones. Or blowing things up ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-nuclear/china-m... ) to see if they still work. It is simulating them to have the confidence that they still work - and that the adversaries of the US know that the scientists are confident that they still work without having to blow things up.
I can safely say that nuclear simulations are one of the major drivers for HPC research globally.
It is not the only one (genomics, simulations, fundamental research are also major drivers) but it is a fairly prominent one.
The Armageddon scenario is some nuclear states conduct stockpile stewardship, some don’t, and those who do discover that warheads come with a use-by date.
Think about a baseball-size device able to take out a city block.
Then think about an escadron of drones able to transport those baseballs to very precise city blocks...
That's why nuclear capabilities and capacities are best reduced by universal compact. It is certainly not helping when they are being _enhanced.
Also, I'm worried about the US initiating more than I do about it retaliating.
> North Korea, the American interventions in the Middle East and Ukraine set the precedent that nuclear sovereignty is in a separate category from the treaty-enforced kind.
I don't understand this sentence because I'm not familiar with the combined term "nuclear sovereignty".
Regardless - it is certainly the case that non-proliferation won't be made on the back of aging and degrading weapons; there must a continued commitment to NP in the sense of not developing new weapons.
> One invites war by refusing to prepare for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
Anyway, the US initiates most of its wars, so the "invitation" is irrelevant.