Lecture Schedule

Introduction
- course overview
- history of nuclear weapons
- DISCUSSION: How did nuclear weapons change our lives and the world?
- history of US nuclear tests
- history of nuclear tests by other countries (group presentations)
- DISCUSSION: Nuclear tests and the cold war
- Quiz #1
Test-Ban Treaties and the CTBT
- Nuclear test-ban treaties (LTB, NPT, CTBT, etc)
- DISCUSSION: The current NPT issues of Iran and North Korea
- Presentations on policy and test-ban treaty positions of nuclear weapon countries
- CTBT and monitoring
- Quiz #2
Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Bombs
- Elements and atoms; Radioactive decay of atoms
- In-Class Exercise: Assignment 4
- Fission and fusion, nuclear energy
- In-Class Exercise: Assignment 5
- Nuclear bomb design
- Nuclear explosion phenomena
- Nuclear fusions inside stars
Mid-term Exam (10/15, 2008)
Basics of Seismology
- Introduction to seismology
- Seismic waves
- In-Class Exercise: Assignment 6 (Problem 1)
- Seismic sources
- In-Class Exercise: Assignment 7 (Problems 2-5)
- In-Class Exercise: Assignment 8 part 1 and part 2
- Quiz #3
Seismic Methods of Discriminating Explosions from Earthquakes
- Nuclear explosion as seismic sources
- Detection thresholds
- Discrimate explosions from earthquakes
- Evasion Methods
- In-Class Exercise: Assignment 9
- A case study, the May 1998 Indian nuclear tests
Seismology as a Forensic Science
- The sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk
- The truck-bomb attack on the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya
- A natural gas pipeline explosion near Carlsbad, NM
- The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centers
Final exam, 8:00-9:50am, Friday, 12/12, 2008.