Mutual Annihilation Research Articles

Low cycle fatigue behavior of near-alpha titanium alloys used in deep-driving submersible: Ti-6Al-3 Nb-2Zr-1Mo vs. Ti-6Al-4 V ELI

The low cycle fatigue (LCF) of Ti-6Al-3 Nb-2Zr-1Mo and Ti-6Al-4 V ELI with a bimodal structure were compared at different total strain amplitudes (∆εt/2) from 0.5 % to 1.0 %. Because the Ti-6Al-3 Nb-2Zr-1Mo exhibited a higher tensile elongation, but a lower yield strength than Ti-6Al-4 V ELI, it displayed a slightly longer fatigue life than Ti-6Al-4 V ELI when ∆εt/2 was larger than 0.7 % (plastic deformation predominated), while its fatigue life became shorter when ∆εt/2 was less than 0.7 % (elastic deformation predominated). Both Ti-6Al-3 Nb-2Zr-1Mo and Ti-6Al-4 V ELI showed a continuous cyclic softening behavior due to the rearrangement or mutual annihilation of initial dislocations during cyclic deformation, and the variation of cyclic softening rate depended on ∆εt/2 was consistent with the variation of fatigue life depended on ∆εt/2. In cyclic deformation, the prismatic and basal slips were easier to activate, and the dislocation bands were denser and more homogeneous in the Ti-6Al-3 Nb-2Zr-1Mo than that in the Ti-6Al-4 V ELI due to the actual Al content in former was smaller than that in latter, which was beneficial to reduce local stress concentration and prolong fatigue life.

Nuclear Deterrence and South Asia: Theory and its Pre-Requisites

The article explores the concept of nuclear deterrence and its Pre-Requisites. Deterrence is an abstract phenomenon perceived as a ‘Strategy of Peace’ not a ‘Strategy of War’ and is intended to persuade the adversary, that aggression is the least attractive out of all the options. Deterrence has four types in military terms; deterrence by defeat, deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial, and mutual deterrence. In the context of nuclear deterrence, it means having the means to deliver along with the will to order a castigatory strike. In simple word deterrence is restoration of balance of power between two rival state. This article is the case study of Pak-India Nuclear Deterrence to testify if the Nuclear Deterrence work as strategy of peace. The Purpose of this article is to analyze the assumption of deterrence and nuclear deterrence in theoretical Perspective and try to implement them on peace between India and Pakistan in South Asia. This qualitative research straight forwarded analysis of India and Pakistan Nuclear policies towards each other.

Relations between Russia and the European Union in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in the late 2020, demonstrated that the global community is unable to act effectively in the face of a new enemy, hence the need for a new format of interstate interaction. The present research objective was to explore the impact of the pandemic on the relations between Russia and the European Union, as well as to identify new standards of cooperation in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic. The study revealed the absence of fundamental changes that would improve the political communications between the two parties because no non-politicized dialogue was possible at that stage. The author describes the geopolitical realities that prevented Brussels from building relations with Moscow in the new paradigm. The pandemic did not level the sanctions pressure on Russia. In the context of unilateral restrictive measures against Russia and the geopolitical conjuncture of mutual deterrence, the new formats of interaction included the humanitarian cooperation with Italy and Russia's "vaccine diplomacy" in Hungary and Slovakia. However, the new types of cooperation between individual states in the context of the pandemic can restore a systemic dialogue between Russia and the European Union. Russia’s contribution to the fight against COVID-19 in Europe can hardly be overestimated.

War, Peace, And (In)Justice In The Nuclear Age

Russia’s war against Ukraine has created a watershed moment for Europe. The coming weeks and months will decide what kind of peace and security order will shape the old continent. The prominence of nuclear weapons will likely increase in the years ahead. Mutual deterrence between NATO and Russia will be the military component to what may soon turn out to be a new Cold War dividing Europe. While this is already bad news news, Ukraine’s fate has again exposed the system of nuclear deterrence as highly unjust and precarious. The consequences of that sorry state of affairs might soon create additional injustices on a global scale. A realistic view must come to the conclusion that we do not have the time to fight another Cold War.

Asymmetric phase diagrams, algebraically ordered Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase, and peninsular Potts flow structure in long-range spin glasses.

The Ising spin-glass model on the three-dimensional (d=3) hierarchical lattice with long-range ferromagnetic or spin-glass interactions is studied by the exact renormalization-group solution of the hierarchical lattice. The chaotic characteristics of the spin-glass phases are extracted in the form of our calculated, in this case continuously varying, Lyapunov exponents. Ferromagnetic long-range interactions break the usual symmetry of the spin-glass phase diagram. This phase-diagram symmetry breaking is dramatic, as it is underpinned by renormalization-group peninsular flows of the Potts multicritical type. A Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase with algebraic order and a BKT-spin-glass phase transition with continuously varying critical exponents are seen. Similarly, for spin-glass long-range interactions, the Potts mechanism is also seen, by the mutual annihilation of stable and unstable fixed distributions causing the abrupt change of the phase diagram. On one side of this abrupt change, two distinct spin-glass phases, with finite (chaotic) and infinite (chaotic) coupling asymptotic behaviors are seen with a spin-glass to spin-glass phase transition.

Understanding radiation effects in friction stir welded MA956 using ion irradiation and a rate theory model

An outstanding challenge in the manufacturing and joining of oxide dispersion strengthened steels is retaining the nanofeatures in the alloy throughout the fabrication and welding process. MA956 was friction stir welded with two different sets of welding parameters, resulting in a medium and high heat input. After welding, 5 MeV Fe++ ion irradiations were performed at doses ranging from 50 to 200 dpa in the temperature range of 400 to 500 °C. Post-irradiation characterization was performed with scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy to investigate the Y-Al-O dispersoids, voids, and dislocations. After welding, the dispersoid microstructure coarsened, resulting in fewer and larger dispersoids regardless of heat input. After irradiation, the dispersoid behavior in the welded material was sensitive to temperature, exhibiting growth behavior attributed to Ostwald coarsening at 500 °C but a mixture of nucleation and more muted growth at 400 and 450 °C, attributed to competing mechanisms of radiation-enhanced diffusion and Ostwald coarsening. Void swelling correlated to heat input; being more prevalent in the welded conditions occurring at lower doses and in higher values relative to the base material. The low values of swelling despite microstructure coarsening caused by welding demonstrate the excellent swelling resistance of MA956, even after welding with the highest swelling values of 0.5% noted in the stir zone high heat input condition at 450 °C, 200 dpa. The dislocation behavior was inconsistent: the strongest trend was that network density was higher for welded versus base material, and an increase in loop diameter with temperature was observed. A rate theory model based on the observed microstructure suggests at high temperature interstitial loss to sinks was more likely to be dominant compared to mutual annihilation via point defect recombination, because of an increase of the radiation diffusion coefficient with temperature regardless of initial welded microstructure.

Analysis of the likelihood of quantum computing proliferation

Quantum computing technology has demonstrated the potential to outperform classical computing systems in a variety of different areas. Worldwide, research within the past decade has included the development of quantum computing systems for key national security-related areas such as encryption, machine learning, and simulation. While some pursue quantum computing's potential to unlock the secrets of physics and to facilitate the development of new chemicals to aid all of humanity, it also has demonstrable military uses. Nation states that have access to quantum computing capabilities will have attack and defensive capabilities that states without this capability lack. Moreover, superior quantum computing resources and greater capabilities of those resources can provide possessing states with significant cyberwar fighting benefits. This paper considers how the current situation mirrors the nuclear mutual assured destruction scenario of the cold war and the more recent cybersecurity-related assured deterrence scenarios. Based on this, it discusses how there may be a perceived necessity for quantum computing development that could lead to a proliferation scenario. Herein, the benefits of increased prevalence of quantum computing technology are discussed, as are its potential weaponized uses. The potential risks to nation states of falling behind in quantum computing development are considered, and the implications for state computing development planning, based on the prospective eventuation of a quantum proliferation scenario based on an assured destruction risk, are assessed.

First Strike Hypersonic Weapons: The End of the “MAD” Doctrine and Peace for Our Time?

Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the world's great powers (i.e., the United States, Russia, and China) have been locked in an escalating race to develop the next game‐changing weapon. The pivotal weapon examined in this paper is hypersonics. The desire to master hypersonic weaponry is particularly strong amongst the “lesser powers” or “Davids” (e.g., Iran and North Korea), as they hold the belief that hypersonics are the “Assassin's Mace” that will grant them the critical first strike advantage against the militarily superior great powers. This study examines the intensifying “hypersonics arms race” between these nations and more importantly, the potential of this increasingly contentious rivalry to destabilize the tenuous world peace purportedly effected by the “Mutual Assured Destruction” (“MAD”) doctrine. Even if this “hypersonics arms race” does not lead to another global conflict, it does serve to flame regional tensions in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, ultimately setting the scene for proxy wars, as the great powers could ply their respective allies with hypersonics technology, with the aim of furthering their own strategic agendas.

Three-speed ballistic annihilation: phase transition and universality

We consider ballistic annihilation, a model for chemical reactions first introduced in the 1980’s physics literature. In this particle system, initial locations are given by a renewal process on the line, motions are ballistic—i.e. each particle is assigned a constant velocity, chosen independently and with identical distribution—and collisions between pairs of particles result in mutual annihilation. We focus on the case when the velocities are symmetrically distributed among three values, i.e. particles either remain static (with given probability p) or move at constant velocity uniformly chosen among $$\pm 1$$ ± 1 . We establish that this model goes through a phase transition at $$p_c=1/4$$ p c = 1 / 4 between a subcritical regime where every particle eventually annihilates, and a supercritical regime where a positive density of static particles is never hit, confirming 1990s predictions of Droz et al. (Phys Rev E 51(6):5541–5548, 1995) for the particular case of a Poisson process. Our result encompasses cases where triple collisions can happen; these are resolved by annihilation of one static and one randomly chosen moving particle. Our arguments, of combinatorial nature, show that, although the model is not completely solvable, certain large scale features can be explicitly computed, and are universal, i.e. insensitive to the distribution of the initial point process. In particular, in the critical and subcritical regimes, the asymptotics of the time decay of the densities of each type of particle is universal (among exponentially integrable interdistance distributions) and, in the supercritical regime, the distribution of the “skyline” process, i.e. the process restricted to the last particles to ever visit a location, has a universal description. We also prove that the alternative model introduced in [7], where triple collisions resolve by mutual annihilation of the three particles involved, does not share the same universality as our model, and find numerical bounds on its critical probability.

US Imperial Quests

What kinds of persons, organizations, cultures, or indeed systems←→ideologies speak and use the language of domination, control, self-proclaimed Number One in undefined and immeasurable ways? Prominent transnational neo-lib/con (purple fusion) ideologues, politicians, militarists do not speak of strategic parity or security or defense, but speak of dominance and dominating all other nations and/or non-state actors even daring to challenge their self-somberly-asserted doctrine. They do not speak of strategic dominance in terms of battle spaces (land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, cognito-space, electromagnetic space) but forms of offensive and defensive weapons; influence in strategic global institutions; control over strategic resources, technologies, R&D centers; control of key educational institutions and their curricula. This paper explores some of the contradictions, causes, effects, dynamics, failures of evolving imperial doctrines and institutions governing various declared and undeclared forms, methods, and arenas of global dominance sought now and in the future.

Two-type annihilating systems on the complete and star graph

Red and blue particles are placed in equal proportion throughout either the complete or star graph and iteratively sampled to take simple random walk steps. Mutual annihilation occurs when particles with different colors meet. We compare the time it takes to extinguish every particle to the analogous time in the (simple to analyze) one-type setting. Additionally, we study the effect of asymmetric particle speeds.

Threat Asymmetry and Transition in Deterrence: Technical Assessment of India’s Ballistic Missile Defense Shield

The global change in perception following the Cold War from deterrence by punishment in the form of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to deterrence by denial has multiplied the utility of the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD). India’s willingness to acquire and develop the advanced BMD shield is inspired, especially by Reagan’s Star Wars and the global shift in using it as an instrument of deterrence by denial. But as the application of its offensive-defensive paradox, India is raising a multi-layer air defense system to enhance its freedom of action and to acquire impunity in carrying out what New Delhi believes as its ‘limited war’ strategy against Pakistan. However, despite having a number of air defense systems in place including the recently acquired advanced S-400 air defense system, India is unable to shield itself completely from the counter-force or counter-value strikes by Pakistan as evident by the Balakot debacle. This is not only because India lags behind in BMD technology but also because of its inability to afford a comprehensive pan-national BMD shield. Therefore, the paper argues that, India’s attempt to build a multi-layer air defense system, rather than ensuring balance of power, destabilizes it and the delicate deterrence in place. This is because the threat asymmetry allows Pakistan to develop advanced nuclear capabilities including BMD evading delivery vehicles like MIRV as the offensive firepower to communicate the threat as an effective deterrence. Resultantly, the employment of BMD in South Asia disturbs strategic parity, fractures deterrence, drags down nuclear threshold and hence raises the cost of conflict between Pakistan and India with an elevated threat of annihilation.

Negotiating Nuclear Arms Control with North Korea: Why and How?

Pressure policies to induce North Korea’s unilateral denuclearization failed to achieve measurable progress toward that objective. The consolidation of nuclear and missile capabilities by North Korea points to the need for a new strategy to mitigate the potential for conflict: to pursue progress toward peace and denuclearization simultaneously. The most appropriate mechanism for implementing such a strategy is arms control, defined here as a progressive series of restrictions, limitations and constraints on arms (nuclear and conventional) and associated steps that reduce the risks of conflict and insulate relations against crises and escalation. Detractors of arms control for North Korea argue that it would convey status as a possessor of nuclear weapons, and that it would require accepting some level of mutual deterrence. States would need to consider such criticisms as they weigh the risks and costs of pursuing arms control compared to alternatives such as containment and deterrence. An arms control-oriented roadmap would integrate parallel progress on establishing a durable peace regime and capping and then reducing the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Monitoring and verifying compliance with this type of roadmap would require a hybrid approach drawing on both traditional safeguards-style methods and novel approaches designed to build confidence.

THE DECLINING HEGEMONY OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF CHINA: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON POWER TRANSITION THEORY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The apparent eroding in the hegemonic power of the United States and the sustained growth of China has triggered debate as to whether the rise of China will be peaceful or conflictual. Structural realism posits that the world is characterised by the anarchic ordering principle in which there is no central authority sitting above the states. Therefore, the absence of a “leviathan” on the international system automatically makes every state equal on the system which created an atmosphere of competition for the maximisation of power for survival. On a similar line of reasoning, the Power Transition theory as a variant theory within realism postulates that when the international system is structured based on the principle of hierarchy, peace will reign. It means that when international relations are regulated and influenced by a dominant power, the international system becomes stable. But the emergence of a dissatisfied powerful nation to challenge the hegemon usually ends up in war. Based on this assumption, Power Transition theorists argued that the rise of China to rival the dominance of the United States could not be peaceful. The Power Transition theory has influenced many academics to have the belief that the two nations will end up in “Thucydides’ Trap”. This belief has aggravated the matter beyond the reasonable level and has instilled panic in the mind of foreign policymakers which could jeopardise world peace and international cooperation. Hence, this paper aims to critically evaluate the deficiency of the Power Transition theory in the 21st century in explaining the current United States-China relations and the prospect of peace or war between the two nations using process tracing. Accordingly, in this paper, it is argued that in the 21st century, an armed confrontation between the United States and China is highly unlikely. Because in today’s world, nations (including the United States and China) are intertwined by the forces of globalisation which created inexorable economic interdependence. Additionally, there is rapid advancement in military technology and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction which came with the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Consequently, there is a need to revisit the Power Transition theory to accommodate contemporary factors. The inclusion of the current variables into the Theory will make it applicable and adequately fit in the discourse of international relations and global politics of the 21st-century international system.

Dynamics of topological defects and structural synchronization in a forming periodic tissue

Living organisms form a large variety of hierarchically structured extracellular functional tissues. Remarkably, these materials exhibit regularity and structural coherence across multiple length scales, far beyond the size of a single cell. Here, synchrotron-based nanotomographic imaging in combination with machine-learning-based segmentation is used to reveal the structural synchronization process of nacre forming in the shell of the mollusc Unio pictorum. We show that the emergence of this highly regular layered structure is driven by a disorder-to-order transition achieved through the motion and interaction of screw-like structural dislocations with an opposite topological sign. Using an analogy to similar processes observed in liquid-crystalline systems, we demonstrate that these microstructural faults act as dissipative topological defects coupled by an elastic distortion field surrounding their cores. Their mutual annihilation results in structural synchronization that is simulated using the classical Kuramoto model. The developed experimental, theoretical and numerical framework provides a comprehensive physical view of the formation of biogenic materials. Molluscs assemble layers of material in the shells around them with a high level of control. Here the authors observe the structural evolution of layer formation and propose a mechanism reminiscent of topological defect dynamics in liquid crystals.

Russia-EU political relations: Evolution and prospects

The article is devoted to the analysis of the evolution, nature and content of Russia-EU political relations, formally established by the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) of 1994. The paradigm of building a united Europe and a common European security space in line with overcoming post-bipolar confrontation and the emergence of post-Soviet Russia as well as the European Union, established in 1992, as new actors in international arena became the basis for their cooperative relations, which was built towards strategic partnership. It was strengthened at the turn of the 2000s, including on the basis of mutual strategies of relations, when Russia’s “European choice” was declared and the EU’s “new dynamics” in security and defense dimension were initiated. However, the NATO-centric model of European security and the policy of expanding Euro-Atlantic institutions to the East created a potential for conflict, and Russia-EU cooperation entered a phase of a latent crisis, especially as a result of differing interests in the so-called common neighborhood. Attempts at a new strategic start by the adoption of Russia-EU Roadmaps on the four common spaces and by planning the negotiations on a new basic agreement failed to overcome fundamental disagreements and contradictions. The Ukrainian conflict became the culmination of the Russian-European crisis and fundamentally changed the direction and content of Russia — EU relations. The defining of the future strategy of relations is becoming increasingly acute, which is considered in the article as a challenge of strategic choice for the parties. The author substantiates the prospect of overcoming the “new normality”, which is boils down to maintaining a controlled mutual deterrence, although it does not exclude the option of terminating the Russia-EU legal relations (“breakesit”).

Reduction of threading dislocation density beyond the saturation limit by optimized reverse grading

The threading dislocation density (TDD) in plastically relaxed Ge/Si(001) heteroepitaxial films is commonly observed to decrease progressively with their thickness due to mutual annihilation. However, there exists a saturation limit, known as the geometrical limit, beyond which a further decrease of the TDD in the Ge film is hindered. Here, we show that such a limit can be overcome in SiGe/Ge/Si heterostructures thanks to the beneficial role of the second interface. Indeed, we show that ${\mathrm{Si}}_{0.06}{\mathrm{Ge}}_{0.94}/\mathrm{Ge}/\mathrm{Si}(001)$ films display a TDD remarkably lower than the saturation limit of Ge/Si(001). Such a result is interpreted with the help of dislocation dynamics simulations. The reduction of TDD is attributed to the enhanced mobility acquired by preexisting threading dislocations after bending at the new interface to release the strain in the upper layer. Importantly, we demonstrate that the low TDD achieved in ${\mathrm{Si}}_{0.06}{\mathrm{Ge}}_{0.94}/\mathrm{Ge}/\mathrm{Si}$ layers is preserved also when a second, relaxed Ge layer is subsequently deposited. This makes the present reverse-grading technique of direct interest also for achieving a low TDD in pure-Ge films.

The Ultimate Deterrence: Testing the Four Theories of Peace; will Institutionalism, Economic Interdependence, Common Identity and the Logic of Mutual Assured Destruction Prevent Great Power War in 21st Century?

The Ultimate Deterrence: Testing the Four Theories of Peace; will Institutionalism, Economic Interdependence, Common Identity and the Logic of Mutual Assured Destruction Prevent Great Power War in 21st Century?

A scalar approach to the circulation of virulent affects on the web

ABSTRACT This paper develops a scalar view of affect, with a focus on the intense animosity often found in digital encounters. It argues that affect is an important dimension of sense-making and sustains this standpoint both theoretically and empirically, by resorting to a linguistic-anthropological understanding of scale and by analyzing the hectic transit of texts in viral phenomena on the Internet. As a case in point, it analyses a long-lasting interaction carried out in the comments section of a YouTube music video. Its analytical interest lies in the semiotic-discursive construction of belligerent-gratifying exchanges. Upon scrutinizing how hatred operates (meta)pragmatically and what kind of sociocultural affective repertoire it mobilizes, the analysis detects a specific communicative mode. Interactants engage in a recursive semantic battle characterized by irreflexive loops in which stereotypical and totalizing scales function as weapons for mutual annihilation. Such a process, in spite of its locality, resonates in different social strata, as in the contemporary political communication in many parts of the world.

Is This Completely M.A.D.? Three Views on the Ruling of the German FCC on 5th May 2020

This brief note, on the Bundesverfassungsgericht’s Weiss judgment of 5th May 2020, highlights three implications of the German Federal Constitutional Court’s landmark ruling and its constitutional significance with implications for the wider context of Member States’ cooperation in the EU and European integration as a whole. We explain the relevant background of the judgment and argue that the specific issue created by the judgment might be addressed quickly but that the resulting judicial turmoil for the broader relationship between the law of the EU and the Member States can only be remedied by treaty changes in the longer term in order to avoid the Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.)