Makes one wonder if the Louvre has ever done security drills under realistic conditions. It sits in the heart of a major city—where security is complex. Hard not to think about that as some countries explore putting small modular reactors in dense urban areas.

There are other important lessons for nuclear security: The security system failed. Police were first notified by a cyclist going by, not by the museum. The museum cameras were in poor condition, which led to a delay in response. Classic complacency & weak org culture leading to bad security.

Even if recent remarks on nuclear testing were ambiguous, their impact could be significant. The U.S. has not earned the benefit of the doubt—and even vague suggestions of renewed testing risk fueling alarm and mistrust.

Testing again would also be a domestic political mistake.
With weakened safeguards for public health and the environment, do we want to risk returning to the days of finding strontium-90 in baby teeth?
The people most harmed could be the very voters the administration depends on.

A U.S. nuclear test today would be a show of force at the expense of stability.
It would invite other countries to follow suit and erode confidence in the scientific foundation that keeps the US deterrent credible.

The U.S. does still test its nuclear weapons—by taking them apart, examining components, running experiments, and conducting non-nuclear tests. This is how we maintain confidence in the stockpile without explosions. Resuming explosive testing would undermine this practice.

“Uranium is not that difficult to come by, Jon, but enriching uranium up to the point of a nuclear weapon, that is what the president put a stop to last night.” They are obfuscating the difference between weapons grade and weapons-useable, making the attack seem more successful than it was.

“But what we know, Jon, is they no longer have the capacity to turn that stockpile of highly enriched uranium to weapons-grade uranium, and that was really the goal here.”

The answer is unnerving: “Well, we're going to work in the coming weeks. Yeah, Jon, we're going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel, and that's one of the things that we're going to have conversations with the Iranians about…”
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