Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from January 1996

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from January 1996

On the scale.(Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight)(Editorial)(Cover Story)
January 1, 1996... The year begins with the "Doomsday Clock" being set a little closer to midnight. Cheers! And Happy New Year to you, too. Between 1947 and 1990, the clock's minute hand waggled back and forth 13 times, ranging from two minutes to midnight to 12...

Circles of destruction.(nuclear scientist describes becoming an opponent of nuclear weapons)(Column)
January 1, 1996... A 45-year-old memory haunts me still. It was November 15,1950, and I had been working at Los Alamos on a much more powerful fission weapon than people had previously thought possible, the Super Oralloy Bomb, or S.O.B. But now I was at a bar in...

Roblat Nobel gives hope to Free-Vanunu campaign.(Joseph Rotblat; campaign to free Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu)
January 1, 1996... The award of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize to Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences, of which he is president, has given a lift to the nine-year-old campaign for the release of Mordechai Vanunu, a former nuclear technician serving 18 years in...

Reluctant peacekeeper.(South Africa)
January 1, 1996... As 1995 ends, the nation is divided about the dangers--and costs--of sending peacekeeping troops abroad to try to end long-simmering disputes in other lands. Further, there are painful and rancorous discussions about how best to stem the influx...

Russia ready for START III.(Strategic Arms Limitation Talks)
January 1, 1996... Since the Bush administration, there have been no new initiatives in arms control. It is true that the United States and Russia are working on implementing the START agenda set more than three years ago, when START II was signed in January 1993....

The representation-without-taxation blues.(U.S. and the United Nations)
January 1, 1996... The United Nations celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in October 1995. It should have been a time to celebrate the organization's many accomplishments since its creation in 1945, and to renew its commitment to meet the challenges of the next 50...

Tomorrow, a Eurobomb?(possibility of a European nuclear defense)
January 1, 1996... During an annual meeting of French ambassadors last August 31, President Jacques Chirac announced that France might eventually offer its nuclear weapons to a common European defense. France, said Chirac, "would take an initiative at an...

A tenth inning for Star Wars: the ABM treaty is in danger, says an arms control expert.(Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty)
January 1, 1996... From President Reagan's "Star Wars" speech of 1983 until the fall of 1993, it was the stated policy of the United States to develop and deploy a large-scale strategic anti-ballistic missile system with space-based components. This policy, which...

The treaty is safe, says a top U.S. negotiator.(Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty)(A Tenth Inning for Star Wars)
January 1, 1996... As Jack Mendelsohn's article beginning on the facing page suggests, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty has become the subject of enormous controversy in the United States. Although the parties to the 1972 treaty believe that it continues to...

The verdict: no harm, no foul.(report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments)
January 1, 1996... A national panel says that thousands of men, women, and children were dosed with small amounts of radiation, to little lasting effect. Nonsense, say the critics. After 18 months spent examining the records of 4,000 human radiation experiments...

Strike up the ban: the view from Washington....(prospects for comprehensive nuclear test ban)
January 1, 1996... This will be the year of the comprehensive nuclear test ban--or not. Chances have never seemed better to finally shut the door on nuclear testing, but the window of opportunity is small. If treaty negotiations are not finished by the middle of...

...And the view from Geneva.(prospects for comprehensive nuclear test ban)
January 1, 1996... It is certainly possible--as Tom Zamora Collina suggests on the preceding pages--that a comprehensive test ban (CTB) will be concluded this year, but only if key states concentrate on resolving hard political choices by June. These include the...

Joseph Rotblat: the road less traveled.(founder of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs)
January 1, 1996... In December, Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which Rotblat helped establish, received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1995. The Nobel Committee said that it hoped the award would "encourage world leaders to...

The First Nuclear Era.
January 1, 1996... Alvin M. Weinberg has been a player in the worldwide nuclear power enterprise for more than a half century. For 26 years following World War II, he was a dominant figure at Oak Ridge National Laboratory--as research director, associate director,...

Brasstacks and Beyond: Perception and Management of Crisis in South Asia.
January 1, 1996... India and Pakistan haven't gone to war since 1971. But they have come close on more than half a dozen occasions. Their closest call came in January 1987, when the Indian armed forces held their biggest exercise in history, "Brasstacks." The size,...

U.S. strategic nuclear forces, end of 1995.
January 1, 1996... The number of operational strategic nuclear weapons has increased from this time a year ago, due to the addition of the sixteenth Trident submarine. There are now roughly 8,000 strategic nuclear warheads deployed with U.S. operational forces....

New, and stupid.(program to replace B53 nuclear bombs with modified B61s)(Column)
January 1, 1996... "We have no new weapons, missiles or warheads, on the drawing boards or in design." Adm. Henry G. Chiles, Jr., commander in chief of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), repeated the reassuring mantra of the nuclear custodians on June 7 before the...