Freestanding Courses

Freestanding courses are courses that can be taken without being enrolled in a programme.

Undergraduate course: Nuclear Weapons and Disarmament

The course is offered by the Department of Peace and Conflict Research and aims to engage students in key issues surrounding nuclear weapons and disarmament. Examples of questions covered in the course are: What are the basic principles of nuclear physics and what can help us understand what nuclear weapons are and how they can be detected? How have current non-proliferation and disarmament treaties developed historically? How are such treaties negotiated and what does successful monitoring of treaties entail? The course has an interdisciplinary approach and contains interactive seminars and simulation games. The course awards 7.5 credits and is offered in the evenings during the spring term 2024 and daytime during the autumn term 2024.

PhD course: Verification of nuclear test explosions

The course is offered by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University in collaboration with the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) during the autumn 2024.

The aims of the course were for participants to be able to:

• Account for treaties and verification regimes governing nuclear weapons;
• Identify remote signatures from nuclear explosions and account for techniques used to detect such signatures;
• Perform basic analysis of seismic events in order to discriminate explosions from earthquakes;
• Account for processes that give rise to atmospheric radioactivity and techniques used to measure it;
• Analyse data of atmospheric radioactivity in order to discriminate between natural sources, contributions from civil nuclear power and nuclear test explosions;
• Perform calculations of particle diffusions in the atmosphere using dedicated software tools; and
• Perform a cross-disciplinary analysis of a nuclear test explosion scenario, where incoming information is analysed and evaluated using statistical analysis.

The call for applications to the course is now open. More information can be found in this PDF. Pdf, 181 kB. Deadline for applications is 1 August 2024.