Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from July 1993

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from July 1993

Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara.
July 1, 1993... Deborah Shapley has written a highly readable and comprehensive study of the life of Robert McNamara, who rose to the presidency of the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s, ran the Pentagon from 1961-1968, and headed the World Bank until 1981, when...

World Inventory of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1992.
July 1, 1993... Public fears are easily aroused by the claim that a Third World country is secretly developing nuclear weapons or stockpiling the fissile material needed for those weapons. For instance, it was only after President George Bush invoked the...

Felony murder. (responsibility for wounds and deaths caused by land mines) (Editorial)
July 1, 1993... While working as a newspaper reporter many years ago in Chicago, I covered crime news, including trials. A trial sometimes would involve "felony murder," a curious phrase in that murder was, by definition, a felony. A common scenario for...

A billion-dollar bonanza. (Department of Defense financing)
July 1, 1993... In late May--only weeks after Congress had rejected the president's economic stimulus package because it would add to the federal deficit--the House of Representatives generously tossed an extra $1.2 billion to the Pentagon. Members had a...

Slow but steady. (nuclear arms development by South Africa)
July 1, 1993... Bit by bit, Armscor, South Africa's armaments corporation that built primitive nuclear devices in the 1980s, has revealed more about that country's nuclear program. In answer to my queries, Armscor said it had planned to "replace the seven...

"Sonya" explains. (ex-Soviet agent Ruth Werner) (Interview)
July 1, 1993... A grandmother and ex-Soviet agent looks back; Orbiting nuclear reactor shot down--for now--by astronomers Until the age of 42, Ruth Werner was an agent of the Soviet espionage service. Moscow-trained as a clandestine radio operator, she...

Twinkle, twinkle little Topaz. (satellite)
July 1, 1993... A nasty dispute between the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) and the space-science community was narrowly averted early this year when SDI officials backed down on a planned launch of a satellite with a Russian-built nuclear...

Ten million tragedies, one step at a time. (victims of land mines) (includes related articles) (Cover Story)
July 1, 1993... Like debris left on the beach by the receding tide, tens of millions of land mines lie in wait from El Salvador to Kuwait, Angola to Cambodia. As the Cold War and its proxy hot wars recede into history, these small, cheap weapons remain--the...

Nuclear junkies: those lovable little bombs. (miniature nuclear weapons) (includes related article on nuclear carrying capabilities of military jets)
July 1, 1993... Support for building new and smaller nuclear weapons has spread like a virus, infecting the labs, the air force--and the Clinton administration? When former Los Alamos scientist and noted nuclear weapons adviser Richard Garwin met with...

Nuclear junkies: testing, testing, 1, 2, 3 - forever.
July 1, 1993... A bogus ban would suit the nuclear lobby just fine. Like Count Dracula, nuclear testing is hard to kill, even though the East-West arms race, which drove the testing juggernaut for four decades, is long gone. Last year, Congress, in a deft...

Woolsey and the CIA: the CIA's new leader says the world is more dangerous than ever. (R. James Woolsey) (includes related article)
July 1, 1993... At the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, three coarse concrete slabs of the Berlin Wall lie encased--part of a monument to the Cold War. The monument was dedicated quietly last December; the majority of...

Dribbling aid to Russia. (denuclearization of Russia) (includes related article on the Nunn-Lugar funds)
July 1, 1993... Trying to spend the $800 million set aside to help the former Soviet Union denuclearize has been like trying to force round dollars into square holes. "We're not spending the Nunn-Lugar money on anything [and] that really bothers me,"...

Ticking time bombs: East bloc reactors. (nuclear reactors)
July 1, 1993... Alexei Yablokov, Boris Yeltsin's environmental adviser, said of Soviet-style reactor safety in 1992: "It's impossible to deliver [our] power stations by missile to some other country, but in reality, they are no less dangerous than nuclear...