Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from July 1996

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from July 1996

An unassuming people.(U.S., Japanese hegemony over Okinawa)(Editorial)
July 1, 1996... On April 1, 1945, a U.S. invasion force larger than D-Day's landed on Okinawa, with light casualties. Shortly afterward, Ernie Pyle, America's favorite war correspondent, wrote: "You could come from a dozen parts of America and still find scenery...

Letting defeatism defeat disarmament.(Clinton Administration policy)(Guest Opinion)(Column)
July 1, 1996... The April Moscow Summit on nuclear safety and security, as well as the related Bill Clinton-Boris Yeltsin meeting, failed to address nuclear arms control. A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable. The failure was more than an opportunity...

Hey, army, welcome to our world.(billions spent on computerizing battlefield weaponry)
July 1, 1996... Software "patches" and upgrades. Hard-drive failure. Cross-platform incompatibility. SCSI ("scuzzy") problems. Every computer quirk that torments the humble home computer user is about to confront the average Joe fighting a war on the new digital...

Wanted: wee weaponeers.(Sandia National Labs plans to educate new nuclear weapons designers)
July 1, 1996... When most of us look at kindergarteners, we see squealing, squawking five-year-olds--budding doctors and lawyers, future computer programmers and sales clerks, teachers and farmers, fire-fighters and cops, wage slaves and CEOs. But when C. Paul...

Search for reality.(politics of U.S. Global POsitioning system (GPS))
July 1, 1996... Everyone loves the global Positioning System (GPS). The 24-satellite network, built by the U.S. military (at a cost of more than $10 billion to U.S. taxpayers), makes it possible for any lost soul with a small hand-held GPS receiver to figure out...

Alexander Langsdorf.(Manhattan Project and Argonne National Labs physicist; founder of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; died May 24, 1996 at age 83)(Obituary)(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... In August 1945, a prayer service was held at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among those who attended were Alexander Langsdorf, a Manhattan Project physicist who had worked closely with...

Africa bans the bomb.(Treaty of Pelindaba signed)
July 1, 1996... Last year, South Africa helped to broker an agreement making the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty permanent. Now the African nations, inspired by the long-term leadership of Egypt and South Africa's newly anti-nuclear spirit (South Africa...

Debatable, but not debated: military spending.(U.S. 1997 defense budget)
July 1, 1996... This year's fight over the level of military spending was lost before it began. President Bill Clinton's $254.4 billion request continued the downward trend in military spending, but Defense Secretary William Perry couldn't resist adding new...

Cheery words, little action.(Nuclear Safety and Security Summit, Moscow, April 1996)
July 1, 1996... The goals of the Nuclear Safety and Security Summit held in Moscow April 19 and 20 were modest. Unlike many Cold War-era summits, when the fate of the world seemed to hang in the balance and major arms control concepts were on the table, the...

When a forest falls, splinters fly: no matter who wins the presidential elections, Russia will turn inward.
July 1, 1996... There are times I am overwhelmed with a sense of well-being as a new citizen of the United States; I feel that my interests are protected and my future relatively secure. Then I think of my homeland, and I know that the vast majority of Russians...

China is no threat.(military policy)
July 1, 1996... A few Western analysts have expressed great concern about "the China threat," especially last spring when tensions over the Taiwan issue peaked. These analysts argue that as China grows more powerful, economically and militarily, it will adopt a...

Go-banken-sama, go home!(needless U.S. military presence in Okinawa, Japan)(Cover Story)
July 1, 1996... The Cold War in Europe ended in 1989 when the people of Berlin defied their overlords and began to dismantle the wall that divided their city. The Cold War in East Asia began to end six years later, on September 4, 1995, when three American...

"I refuse."(Japanese protest needless U.S. military presence in Okinawa, Japan)(Cover Story)
July 1, 1996... Why did the rape of a 12-year-old student ignite the largest Japanese protest against U.S. bases since the 1960s? Many women in Okinawa point to the September 1995 Women's Conference in Beijing, which 71 Okinawan women attended. In Beijing,...

An overrated nightmare: there are a lot of dangers out there, but terrorists wielding nuclear bombs probably isn't one of them.
July 1, 1996... Are we entering an "age of superterrorism," as a 1994 report commissioned by the U.S. Defense Department predicts? And how real is the prospect of nuclear terrorism? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Western security experts have...

A time of testing?(India and Pakistan's nuclear development)(The Nuclear Subcontinent)
July 1, 1996... If there were to be a version of the Bulletin's nuclear clock specifically for South Asia, events in the past eight months would have seen it tick a little closer to midnight. After the opening moves in the early 1970s, when Pakistan and India...

The tritium solution: a simple pact could short-circuit a possible nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.(The Nuclear Subcontinent)
July 1, 1996... Those who wish for an improvement in Indian-Pakistani nuclear relations do not have much to feel cheery about these days. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party that in the past has vowed to revitalize India's nuclear-weapons...

Kazakh power play: rich in oil and gas, Kazakhstan nonetheless wants nuclear power and prestige.
July 1, 1996... Kazakhstan, a newly independent former Soviet republic, expects eventually to benefit from the exploitation of its vast reserves of oil and gas in the Caspian region. Meanwhile, this largest republic in Central Asia is making plans to build three...

Armenia's choice.(restarts its troubled Medzamor Unit 2 nuclear power plant)
July 1, 1996... For six years Armenians lived in the semi-darkness of the Middle Ages. Beginning in 1989, these 3.7 million people in the southern Caucasus survived Without adequate heat, transportation, or medical care. There were only endless candlelit...

Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics.
July 1, 1996... By Ruth Lewin Sime University of California Press, 1996 526 pages; $34.95 Ruth Sime has written a superb biography of Lise Meitner, a physicist born and raised in Vienna, who lived and worked in Berlin between 1907 and 1938, and who spent the...

A Farewell to Arms? Russia's Struggles with Defense Conversion.
July 1, 1996... By Kevin P. O'Prey Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995 143 pages; $9.95 Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has reduced its armed forces, slashed weapons acquisitions, and trimmed its defense industrial base. Soviet military troop strength...

When the Pentagon Was for Sale.
July 1, 1996... By Andy Pasztor Scribner, 1995 416 pages; $25.00 Andy Pasztor, a Wall Street Journal reporter who spent many years covering the Defense Department, points out that Caspar Weinberger was known as "Cap the Knife" when he served as Richard...

U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, July 1996.
July 1, 1996... Little change occurred over the year Lin the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, though we have new understandings of its future direction and composition. Regardless of whether START II is fully implemented, the total number of warheads in all...

Nuking Libya.(Libya's Tarhunah chemical weapons facility)(The Last Word)(Column)
July 1, 1996... When President Bill Clinton made a short stopover at Aviano Air Base on his way to Bosnia in January, nuking Libya was almost surely on his mind. An underground chemical weapons facility ai Tarhunah, 50 miles southeast of Tripoli, had just been...