Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from January 1999

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from January 1999

Letters.
January 1, 1999... The cheating factor A description of my article, "Verification: The Ways and Means," which appeared on the November/December 1998 table of contents page, was misleading. I did not claim that "The U.S. and international monitoring systems...

Kashmir: Wilting rose.(problem of Kashmir relations with India and Pakistan)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... Each time Indian and Pakistani officials emerge from a round of talks, their stony expressions revealing nothing, one feels a sense of despair. Whether the talks are about a permanently snow-bound and inaccessible area like the Siachen glacier,...

Smaller and smaller ...(miniature military devices)
January 1, 1999... Machines are getting both smaller and smarter all the time, as reported in a number of articles in Science and New Scientist last fall. And sometimes, it seems, all of those little machines belong to the military. For instance, a series of...

The do-it-yourself reactor.(man builds his own nuclear reactor )(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... David Hahn wanted to be an Eagle Scout, but he was not interested in typical merit-badge projects. Instead of astronomy, backpacking, or business, Hahn was interested in producing energy. He set out to build his very own breeder reactor in his...

Endless detente.(various claims on Antarctic regions)
January 1, 1999... The ship was to leave for Antartica on a Thursday, but a formidable storm in the Drake Passage had delayed her previous cruise. She'd taken a pounding from 40-foot swells--and from the 50-knot winds that orbit the Earth unimpeded by land masses...

Nuclear but needy.(Pakistan is economically depressed)
January 1, 1999... When Pakistan conducted its own nuclear tests last May in response to India's tests, the domestic and international fallout sent the country into free fall. Pakistan's already fragile political system and economy were crumbling even before...

Accommodation, not confrontation.(US mediation between India and Pakistan on nuclear nonproliferation )
January 1, 1999... Following the may nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, the United States imposed wide-ranging sanctions mandated by the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act on both nations. By early November the sanctions regime had been partly lifted so...

Pragmatism over principle.(the Omnibus Appropriations bill)
January 1, 1999... In the last frantic days of the 105th congress, President Bill Clinton used the negotiations over the Omnibus Appropriations bill--the $520 billion catch-all bill that encompassed numerous unpassed appropriations bills--to press far funding of...

The Kalashnikov Age.(impact of the AK-47 and other assault weapons on modern warfare; includes excerpts from Aug. 27, 1997 UN disarmament report on small weapons)
January 1, 1999... When Charles Taylor invaded Liberia, he unleashed the most deadly combat system of the current epoch--the adolescent human male equipped with an AK-47 assault rifle. On Christmas Eve 1989, Charles Taylor marched into Liberia with a ragtag...

Arms Control Orphans.(proliferation of small arms and usage by legal and illegal entities)
January 1, 1999... Millions of the assault rifles now in the hands of the world's killers started out as legal weapons. Smith & Wesson, a Connecticut-based handgun manufacturer, used an exhibit of its wares at an April 1867 Paris exhibition to jump-start its...

The leader of the pack.(weapons industry of the US)
January 1, 1999... The United States leads the world in weapon sales and giveaways. Madeleine Albright does not like "the uncontrolled flow of arms, ammunition, and explosives into tense areas of the world." Twice recently--in September before a special U.N....

Hearts of darkness.(how arms traffickers thrive in Africa due to the numbers of internal and regional conflicts)
January 1, 1999... I nestled into my side corner seat in the cockpit, comfortably assured that I was not far from the evidence of illicit weapons in the back of the aircraft. As the plane--an old Britannia, a precursor to the modern jet--took off from the...

Working in the shadows.(how the middlemen arms dealers operate globally)
January 1, 1999... Arms merchants--dealers, middlemen, politicians, and military officers--engage in deals that operate on a number of levels--legal, quasi-legal, and nowhere-near-legal. The story was reported in the British press in the late 1980s: a cargo...

The Wild West Bank.(the illegal weapons trading in Palestine)
January 1, 1999... Disarming terrorists will be as hard for the Palestinian authorities as it is for Israeli forces. On October 23, 1998, the Clinton administration helped revive the nearly expired Israeli-Palestinian peace process by brokering the Wye River...

Drugs and guns.(trafficking of arms)
January 1, 1999... The money to buy weapons often comes from the sale of drugs. Organized crime is frequently involved in more than one stage of an arms transaction. Gangs may be the initial suppliers of weapons obtained through theft or diversion; they may...

NGOS TAKE AIM.(nongovernmental organzations (NGOS) plan to control small arms trafficking)
January 1, 1999... Fresh from victory in the struggle to ban land mines, NGOs now want to control small arms. The signing of the Ottawa Convention in December 1997 was a public triumph for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. The Convention on the...

Wheeling and dealing.(the world-wide weapons trade industry)
January 1, 1999... Enlightened politicians and officials are awakening to the fact that hundreds of millions of small arms and light weapons are in circulation, accumulated through decades of irresponsible trade and Cold War giveaways. A new climate of...

Damage control.(analysis of illegal arms trading)
January 1, 1999... By tackling illicit arms sales, the United States hopes to defuse the light arms campaign and protect the legal trade. A global campaign to constrain or ban trade in small arms and light weapons is not the stuff of headlines, nor does it...

The U.N. gears up.(disarmament of small weapons)
January 1, 1999... U.N. efforts show development is as important as disarmament. The United Nations has been attempting to define its role in controlling the spread and use of small arms since former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali first...

THE NRA GOES GLOBAL.(National Rifle Association lobbies against international gun control)(Abstract)
January 1, 1999... It's scary, sometimes, how civilized the conversations can be. Last fall, at a Belgian government sponsored meeting on the links between disarmament and development, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association (NRA) asked me about my children...

Uncertain prognosis.(international arms trade)(includes related information on fighting arms trade)(Abstract)
January 1, 1999... There is no easy way to prevent small shipments of small arms. The year 1998 witnessed two events, modest in and of themselves, with little direct effect on global peace and security. Their importance, rather, lay in what they showed about...

Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA By Anne Hessing Cahn Penn State Press, 1998 232 pages; $17.95 Killing Detente is a highly readable account of an ill-considered and maladroit exercise in intelligence reassessment that delayed--but...

Inside Terrorism.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Inside Terrorism By Bruce Hoffman Victor Gollancz, 1998 278 pages; $24.95 The Bulletin clock has moved backwards a bit since the worst of the Cold War years, as the risks of nuclear armageddon have declined. But there is growing concern...

America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack.(Review)
January 1, 1999... America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack By Richard Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer MIT Press, 1998 350 pages; $22.50 The Bulletin clock has moved backwards a bit since the...

Israel and the Bomb.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Israel and the Bomb By Avner Cohen Columbia University Press 470 pages; $27. 50 Avner Cohen: Smart, tenacious, obsessive. I first met him in 1993 at a conference in Chicago. Cohen said he was working on a history of Israel's nuclear...

Reason Enough to Hope: America and the World of the Twenty-first Century.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Reason Enough to Hope: America and the World of the Twenty-first Century By Philip Morrison and Kosta Tsipis MIT Press, 1998 288 pages; $25.00 Kosta Tsipis and Philip Morrison, physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces End of 1998.(Abstract)
January 1, 1999... Perhaps the most important development of 1998 occurred on October 1, when a new Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP-99)--the U.S. nuclear war plan--went into effect. SIOP-99 resulted from Presidential Decision Directive 60, which was...

The Last World.(nuclear arms control)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... Little fanfare accompanies the sixth anniversary of the signing of the START II Treaty this month. And since it is doubtful that the Russian Duma will ratify it any time soon, even the Pentagon is beginning to suggest unilateral cuts to save...