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Science spin-offs

I'’M 427 metres below sea-level, where the oxygen is much denser than I’m used to on the Highveld – and the mid-winter sun is bringing out a sheen of perspiration on my forehead. This is the Dead Sea, where more than half the year you can expect temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius and above.

I’m staying at the Dead Sea Spa Resort Hotel in Jordan, one of a string of upmarket hotels that fringe the sea. I’m here as a guest of the CTBTO Preparatory Commission (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation). The organisation is running a huge integrated field exercise here in which virtually a full test will be simulated over 1 000 km², from early November through to mid-December.

It’s my first time in Jordan, a country I’ve been interested in since I was sent King Abdullah II’s autobiography for review some years ago. Despite being a constitutional monarch with considerable powers, the king and his wife, Queen Rania, are an impressive couple clearly committed to the good of their people. (Under King Abdullah’s reign since 1999, Jordan’s economic growth has doubled – impressive, not so?)

Jordan is an enthusiastic supporter of the CTBTO, and has allowed the organisation to set up its base of operations, a large tented camp, on the hillside just beyond my hotel. After watching a soil sampling exercise up in the hills near Madaba, our group of journalists, mostly from Jordan and the Gulf States, are taken on a tour of the decontamination area, the laboratories and communications set-up at the base by Matjaz Prah, ‎on-site Inspection (OSI) coordinator. (Prah is Croatian, but speaks fluent English, as do many of the highly diverse team. I meet a Chileno, a French doctor, a Brazilian, and many more. The CTBTO’s executive secretary is an impressive scientist from Burkina Faso, Dr Lassina Zerbo.)

The CTBTO’s mission is to ban all nuclear explosions, whether for military or peaceful purposes, and this exercise is crucial to that mission: unless you can test accurately to see if a nuclear explosion has taken place, once the treaty comes into force, your job of monitoring compliance becomes much more difficult.

The treaty has been signed by 183 countries, but some have not ratified it yet (China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and the United States, all nuclear powers) while three countries with nuclear weapons haven’t even signed as yet (North Korea, India and Pakistan). So some difficult diplomacy lies ahead.

But in the interim, the CTBTO has been working on the capacity to monitor compliance.

Africa may not seem like much of a player in the nuclear game – we have one nuclear power in Egypt and another, South Africa, that voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons – but the success of the CTBTO is as important to us as to the rest of the world. Any nuclear incident will have massive domino effects on us; and just imagine the potential for mayhem should one of the less stable African countries acquire any kind of nuclear weaponry.

But we – and the world – have another interest in what the CTBTO does, as I discover while talking to Dr Zerbo: the scientific spin-offs of the process.

The CTBTO has the best seismic data in the world; obviously, it has to be able to detect tremors which are triggered by explosions. So tsunami warning centres have asked the CTBTO to share relevant data because it’s speedier, more reliable and secure than any other data collecting agency, and that means better mitigation of disasters.

Its infrasound stations register and record any events around the world – like the fireball that exploded over Siberia in 2013, for example, or volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

The CTBTO also has to be ace at sensing and tracking radioactivity. Its radio nuclide monitoring stations across the world tracked the radioactivity triggered by Fukushima, for example.

And the organisation has hydro-acoustic sensing capabilities that track sound underwater – this resource has been used by environmentalists to track whales in deep waters. Elements of the CTBTO’s global alarm system have many peacetime uses.

But while I’m in Jordan, I see another possible spin-off which might interest business people: logistics. The CTBTO has to be able to mobilise a full team complete with everything they need to survive and do the necessary science in six days, anywhere in the world – and that, by the nature of the game, is likely to mean the disputed territory in remote Kashmir, Outer Mongolia or somewhere equally far from high-tech resources.

For the integrated field exercise, that meant bringing 150 tonnes of equipment, some of it delicate scientific lab equipment, to the base of operations. Among the equipment is some unique and very expensive stuff, like the only mobile device in the world capable of sampling radioactive noble gases which are a ‘smoking gun’ indicating a nuclear explosion.

They have created a unique modular system which contains all the team’s needs. The containers are designed to fit just about any possible mode of transport: different models of truck, airplane, ship and helicopter, many of which have fittings intended to take only one kind of container. The organisation learnt a lot from its first integrated field exercise in Kazakhstan in 2008 (“Now that was cold!” says Prah) and the results would certainly be of interest to logistics managers in many ways.

Which provides me with proof, once again, that supporting initiatives like this, which engage in science for non-commercial purposes, ultimately proves to be very worthwhile.

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.

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