Alpha Centauri and Southern Cross image courtesy of Claus Madsen/ESO, CC BY 4.0

John Kerry became the first US Secretary of State to visit the site of the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Kerry wrote in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial guest book that the site was “a stark, harsh, compelling reminder not only of our obligation to end the threat of nuclear weapons, but to rededicate all our effort to avoid war itself.” William J. Broad and David E. Sanger wrote in The New York Times that the US, Russia, and China may be on the verge of a new arms race. As part of the modernization of its nuclear forces, the U.S. is developing faster, stealthier, more precise weapons. Such weapons call into question Russia and China’s ability to respond to a pre-emptive strike against their nuclear arsenals. China is developing its own maneuverable “hypersonic glide vehicles” that could carry a nuclear payload past missile defenses. Russia is deploying long-range missiles that carry multiple miniaturized warheads. US Director of Intelligence James R. Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that we could be beginning “another Cold-War-like spiral”.

Russian Su-24 aircraft conducted a series of “simulated attacks” on a US destroyer in the Baltic Sea. Crew of the USS Donald Cook said that the Russian planes flew within thirty feet of the ship. The ship’s commander tried to radio the Russian planes, but received no response. Although Russian planes were “wings clean”—they were carrying no visible bombs—a US official said the maneuver was “more aggressive than anything we’ve seen in some time”. Simulated attacks violate the 1973 Incidents at Sea Agreement designed to keep contact between navies from escalating.

North Korea tested a new liquid-fuel engine derived from the engines in Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). John Schilling wrote that the test showed that by 2020 North Korea may be able to deliver nuclear weapons to targets as far as 13,000 km away, potentially bringing New York or Washington, D.C. within reach. According to 38 North, commercial satellite imagery suggests that North Korea may have begun to reprocess plutonium for nuclear weapons at its Yongbyon nuclear research site. “We can now mount an even more powerful nuclear warhead on a new intercontinental ballistic rocket and put the den of evil in the United States, and all over the world, within our strike range,” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly said.

The UN held a meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) to discuss whether they should be regulated under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic issued a report at the start of the meeting arguing that “mandating meaningful human control of weapons would help protect human dignity in war, ensure compliance with international humanitarian and human rights law, and avoid creating an accountability gap for the unlawful acts of a weapon”. US military guidelines on autonomous weapons do not prohibit LAWS, but do require human decision makers to use “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force”. The Center for New American Security’s Paul Scharre told The New York Times that there is “a broad consensus that, at some level, humans should be involved in lethal force”.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the global temperature average for March was higher than any previous March. It was eleventh straight record warm month—the longest streak of record temperatures in the 137 years data has been collected. The average global temperature for the period from January to March was 1.15°C (2.07°F) over the 20th century average, breaking the previous record for the first three months of the year by 0.27°C (0.50°F).

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the first commercially available test for the Zika virus. The FDA said the test could detect Zika RNA in the blood 4-7 days after the onset of symptoms. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) concluded the Zika virus does cause microcephaly and other fetal abnormalities. The CDC also announced the first US death from Zika after a man in his 70s died in the territory of Puerto Rico. US Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell said that local transmission of the Zika virus is likely in coming months. The Obama administration said that since Congress has yet to act on President Obama’s request for funding to fight Zika, the administration will divert $589 million that had been earmarked for the Ebola response toward responding to the Zika outbreak. “If it’s about shifting from one priority to another, then it’s worrying, because one of the lessons we learned from Ebola [is] that we need to be prepared,” Médecins Sans Frontières US Executive Director Sophie Delaunay told Congress. “It’s going to come back.”

Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Starshot, a plan to send a fleet of miniature space probes to Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our own, but it is still 4.37 light-years away. Starshot would use 100 gigawatt lasers on Earth to accelerate a fleet of “ultra-light nanocraft”—each smaller than an iPhone—to one-fifth the speed of light. Sending many probes should increase the chance that some arrive at their destination. The probes will aim for the habitable zones of the system’s two sun-like stars. Once the probes are launched, it will take them 20 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri and another 4 years before the data they collect to makes it back to our solar system. Hawking said in a statement that “today we commit to the next great leap in the cosmos, because we are human and our nature is to fly,”

This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, Matthijs Maas, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.

For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary March 2016.

You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).