Solution: nuclear powered ships. As a bonus, the ships can go really fast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6OHHGrVM3g

(in the middle he says some standard anti-nuclear bullshit, but otherwise it's a great clip)

This is what old, extremely pessimistic reactor accident consequence studies say - for example, they assume that LWR reactor core material can be dispersed as fine dust over a large area, even though there is no known physical process which could do that. The upcoming SOARCA study from the NRC will hopefully be more in line with reality.

The anti-nuclear activists have been quite successful with such an argument.

The Chinese government likes lockdown only as long as they're the ones doing the locking. Once someone else is in control, it interferes with their own power.

Catholic Church is a good example. A variant of it can exist in China on the condition that it dissociates itself from the Pope, so it is not controlled by a foreign entity. Chinese don't like lockdown and censorship, they like a monopoly of power and influence on the public. Once you think about it, that's also what many of the Western leaders want, but don't have the means necessary to get it.

At its root this is not a political question, but a sociological one. For what it's worth, I would describe myself as a liberal socialist.

Reagan was an utter idiot who didn't really understand the stability given by MAD. His SDI program proves it.

First, USA defence budget (which I agree is total lunacy) is an entirely different issue, because the lion's share of it is conventional weaponry. Second, instead of investigating my ideas critically you're trying to bang the tribal drum by branding me as a neocon, which I am not (as mentioned before). No points for you.

Non sequitur. What really matters is not whether you actually have nuclear strike capability, but what others think about your nuclear strike capability. You could indeed replace all of the weapons with decoys, but it does not follow from it that you could publicly announce the dismantling of all of your warheads and the situation wouldn't change.

Which is the whole purpose of the exercise. In a world governed by MAD, all nuclear powers have essentially equal standing.

Mod parent up. Many people detest the idea of MAD but so far it has worked. In practice, nukes are primarily a weapon of influence rather than destruction.

I think the continued existence of United Nations and its various agencies can be attributed in part to nuclear weapons, which made open conflict an existential risk for the superpowers, and created a need for a different way of resolving disputes. At this point, UN could probably survive without nuclear weapons, but its creation would not be possible without them.

I think that regardless of any ideology, nuclear disarmament is very unlikely on the grounds of simple game theory - it's essentially a prisoner's dilemma where the temptation to defect is extremely large (the last remaining nuclear power can blackmail the whole world) and punishment for mutual defection is small (the cost of producing and maintaining the weapons).

This is patently false. Bushehr is a VVER which is a Russian variant of the popular PWR (pressurized water reactor) design. PWRs are useless for plutonium production.

The killer psychopath does not take over the leadership of a nuclear armed country. He goes around killing people with his hands.

The power and control freaks are not psychopaths, and are capable of enough rational thought to realize that upon launching a preemptive nuclear attack they will die along with their country, which will be reduced to dust in massive retaliation.

Additionally, without nuclear weapons, the USSR would have invaded Western Europe in the 60s at the latest. The UN Security Council would have no real power, and wars between superpowers would probably continue.

It's Pu-239. You are confusing with U-235.

That's kind of what they do, and the CANDU is used in China, Romania, South Korea, India and a few other countries.

Little Boy used roughly 90% enriched uranium.
In general, the required isotopic purity is closer to 90% than to 98%.

Centrifuge enrichment does not happen in plasma. It uses uranium hexafluoride, which sublimates above 93*C. It is a regular gas like carbon dioxide or oxygen, only heavier.

There's also an obsolete thermal diffusion process, but it takes roughly 100x more energy (!). The last thermal diffusion facility in Europe, Eurodif, will free up some 3000 MW of power when closed. Its job will be done by a new centrifuge enrichment plant that takes only 50 MW.

Your numbers are far off. U-235 makes up only 0.7% of natural uranium, the rest is U-238 which is not fissile. Furthermore most uranium ores are far less concentrated than 5%. Common ore grades are in the 2000-500 ppm range, or 0.2%-0.05%. To get 1kg of 90% U-235, you need roughly 100 tons of 2000 ppm ore and 167 kg of pure natural uranium (assuming that the tailings contain 0.16% U-235, which is very low but possible; actual tailing concentration is 0.25%-0.3%)

That is true, but has little relevance for modern nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapon states except Pakistan use plutonium weapons, which are less costly and much smaller than high enriched uranium weapons. Plutonium can be produced from natural or low enriched uranium in specially designed reactors, then separated chemically. Some plutonium is produced in LWR reactors, but can't be used in nuclear weapons due to its isotopic composition: weapons plutonium needs 90-93% Pu-239, whereas LWR spent fuel contains ~60%.

Run this in terminal to get the old layout.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

You can also use gconf-editor.
Sadly some idiot at GNOME decided that the "interface" tab in Appearance properties was redundant and removed it, so there's no simple way to do it from the GUI.

OS X spam.

Ubuntu doesn't require tinkering to keep working, unlike Windows. It sometimes requires tinkering at the start, and after major upgrades.

Hardware incompatibility is rarely the problem. In fact, migrating to a new version of Windows would be significantly worse on the hardware compatibility side, because old hardware usually has only 32-bit Windows XP drivers. Meanwhile Linux drivers are cross-platform.

The government PC is going to have a motherboard, CPU, RAM, a hard drive, and maybe a CD drive. Nearly everyone will go with the integrated motherboard components. Nothing fancy is required, and support for components such as disk controllers and Intel graphics chipsets is excellent. The only problematic case is the old i815 graphics, but it's not sold anymore. Hardware is NOT the main problem.