Thanks a lot for your thoughtful response, Zog. I'll think about what you said and respond with more detail in a couple days.
I think what's important to keep in mind with someone like Snyder is that he is a physicist in the policy area now (I know him pretty well, and he is now mostly working behind the scenes) and so any technical research that someone like him publishes could be used to advance a nuclear weapons program. He is up front about this and admits that this is certainly true. There's no way around this with almost anything technical. He comes from a pretty elite policy program at Princeton University full of physicists, where everyone freely admits this is true. Even if it's something related to verification, it could still be used to advance nuclear weapons development or hinder compliance with a treaty or agreement because it could provide someone with ideas on how to avoid detection.
I think the question is what is the proper balance and to what extent should vulnerabilities be publicly discussed? I think Snyder comes at this from a broader American foreign policy perspective, where he believes that the United States has not conducted itself very wisely in several areas since the end of the Cold War and that certain unique American mindsets related to maintaining primacy and pressure are likely to lead to more mistakes. Remember that concerns about Iraq having nuclear weapons led the US to attack them. So his Silex paper was intended primarily as a political statement for foreign policy elites in Washington to suggest that we can't control this technology very well and that it will be impossible to utilize various forms of American pressure (economic, military, etc...) to stop countries from building nuclear weapons. He is more interested in getting the geopolitical framework right that the United States is operating within because without that, nothing else matters. I say this because Snyder's perspective is that the United States probably needs to become pretty scared that something bad could happen so that its attitude is forced to adjust. You can see that in the US, the debate about Iran's nuclear program becomes either stuck in improving monitoring provisions and scaling back enrichment capacity on the one hand, or applying American pressure as Iran continues to gain in nuclear capability on the other. Snyder knows this framing is likely to lead to disaster. Certainly centrifuges are a problem, too, but if Silex is even worse (and someday it is easy to imagine that it might become so) then US attitudes are currently not prepared to handle this in a reasonable way. A focus on whether or not it gets commercialized has been the focus, and ire is directed at the US nonproliferation lobby for trying to stop it, but it's also somewhat beside the point. It's not beside the point for people on this forum obviously, but it is for people who are concerned with where the United States may be headed more broadly in its national security policy.
What I'm saying is that the US nonproliferation lobby has focused on the technology controls, and myself and Snyder don't believe this can work much longer. We don't think Silex should be commercialized, but the technology looks so impressive that we believe it will and there is no way to stop it. It will likely dominate the uranium enrichment market someday. Even if the US put the brakes on it and tried to stop it (and the Biden administration may be doing this now, tough to tell–they may just be more broadly anti-nuclear power), it won't work over the long term.
I say all of this just to point out that there is a broader strategic perspective that is not necessarily directly opposed to what people on this forum want with regard to Silex's commercial success. And while it's not necessarily orthogonal to it either, there is a perspective that the risks of Silex can be used to argue for a change in American attitudes with how foreign policy is conducted. Understanding how this Silex technology really works could help advance this argument if it really could become a more accessible route to nuclear weapons. This is not how people on this forum think, but it is useful to keep in mind that Silex's success could be useful for the world (even aside from less dependence on Russian uranium or enrichment services or climate change mitigation) because of the possible change in attitude that could accompany it.
I apologize for this somewhat lengthy post. I just thought it was important to point out what my interest was in the expertise available on this forum and that there are people who are trying to use the risks that this technology may pose in a beneficial way that people on this forum may not be aware of.
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