Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from July 1999

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from July 1999

Wrongheaded "protection".(the fear over reported Chinese espionage may halt the Clinton administration's declassification of documents)(Brief Article)
July 1, 1999... Guest Opinion THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S REMARKABLE efforts to reduce the scope of government secrecy and promote declassification of Cold War records may be an unfortunate casualty of the Chinese nuclear espionage scandal. In a...

Anthrax hoaxes: Hot new hobby?
July 1, 1999... On April 24, 1997, a petri dish labeled "anthrachs" arrived in a package mailed to the offices of B'nai B'rith in Washington, D.C. The dish contained a red, gelatinous material which, nine hours later, was determined to be harmless. Meanwhile,...

In brief.
July 1, 1999... * The Tucson Air Corps Bill Hartung, writing in the World Policy Journal (Spring 1999), questions the rush to give the Pentagon more money for new weapons--especially for more airplanes. As Hartung points out, the world's second largest...

The crystal ball, crack'd.(political forecasting)(Brief Article)
July 1, 1999... When it comes to predicting the future, pundits and pundettes alike have been so wrong lately that reader-TV viewers must be questioning the concept of expertise itself. Consider that for nearly a year the punditry suggested that by...

Blitzkrieg in the backyard.
July 1, 1999... The U.S. Army apparently thinks that abandoned buildings in America's inner cities are the perfect place to undertake training exercises--never mind what the neighbors think. In May, members of Special Ops descended on two public-housing...

WEB WATCH.(World Wide Web sites dealing with specific scientists, their lives and thoughts)(Brief Article)
July 1, 1999... Great scientists aren't with us forever. But on the Internet, at least, their memories live on--easily accessible from your desktop browser. www.lbl.gov/seaborg Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, a founding member of the Bulletin's...

Steal this!(nuclear weapons database)
July 1, 1999... IN WASHINGTON, THE COX COMMITTEE alleges that the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories have been losing highly classified weapons data to the Chinese like water from a leaky bucket. (See "Call China's Hand".) "The People's Republic of...

The Perseus papers.(Jeremy Stone's book "Every Man Should Try")
July 1, 1999... IN HIS NEW BOOK, EVERY MAN SHOULD Try, Jeremy Stone accuses a prominent American physicist of being "Perseus," a Soviet spy who stole valuable secrets from the Manhattan Project in 1945. Dubbed "Dr. X" in Stone's book, the accused was revealed...

Having your cake.(military spending)
July 1, 1999... REPUBLICANS SEIZED ON PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's mid-April request to fund the war in Kosovo as an opportunity to fatten the Pentagon budget-and what started out as a $6 billion request for Kosovo eventually became a $10.9 billion package of...

Call China's hand.(US-China relations)
July 1, 1999... LAST JUNE, PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON WAS THE TOAST OF China. This year, he is toast. Indeed, the whole U.S. policy of constructive engagement, pioneered by that old liberal Richard Milhous Nixon, is in jeopardy, under attack by xenophobic...

Test ban treaty: Let's finish the job.
July 1, 1999... TIME IS RUNNING OUT FOR THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST Ban Treaty (CTBT). Submitted to the Senate for ratification almost two years ago by the Clinton administration, the treaty has sat on the desk of Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jesse Helms, a...

A new kind of war.
July 1, 1999... RIGHT ON CUE, JUST AS THE MILlennial midnight was about to strike, NATO entered a new legal and strategic world. The battle for Kosovo was both the result of global pressures that have been building for a decade now, and a precedent for a...

Moscow reacts.(Russia's apprehension over the bombings in Yugoslavia)
July 1, 1999... Many Russians interpreted the military campaign in Yugoslavia as a warning of future threats to their own country. ON THE FIRST DAY THAT NATO BOMBED Yugoslavia, Ukraine's parliament adopted, by a substantial margin, a resolution urging its...

NATO throws itself a party.(50th anniversary)
July 1, 1999... I WOKE UP ONE MORNING IN LATE APRIL TO discover that Washington, D.C. had become a police state. It was Friday morning, just before nine--the end of rush hour, when downtown is usually awash in honking cars and scurrying pedestrians, the...

The unasked question.(nuclear weapons in Europe)
July 1, 1999... THE NUCLEAR PARAGRAPHS OF NATO'S LATEST strategic concept are astonishing. Nearly 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, why are tactical nuclear weapons still needed in Europe? About 180 American-made and controlled variable-yield B61...

An unlikely threat.(the perceived threat of chemical or biological weapons attack)
July 1, 1999... Question: Over the past 100 years, how many people have died in chemical or biological terrorist attacks in the United States? Answer: One. IN A JANUARY SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL ACADEMY of Sciences, President Clinton warned that "the...

Islam distorted.
July 1, 1999... ABDUL QUDOOS, WHOM I MET IN the cellar of a qehwa-shop in Peshawar, was unlike the stereotype of a hardened Afghan warrior. No blood in the eyes, no wavy beard--only a stiff mustache. He was nine years old when his family fled to Pakistan...

The day they almost lost Denver.(Denver, Colorado, endangered by plutonium-aided explosion)
July 1, 1999... Len Ackland, the Editor of the Bulletin from 1984 to 1991, has written Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West, which is excerpted below. The book is a highly readable and informative history of the government-owned plant a few...

Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police.(Review)
July 1, 1999... Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police By John O. Koehler Westview Press, 1999 460 Pages; $28.00 It is more than mere linguistics to point out that in German the letters "STA" and "SI" stand for Staats (state) and...

American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War.(Review)
July 1, 1999... American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War By Jessica Wang University of North Carolina, 1999 392 pages; $19.95 Numerous books have dealt with the deleterious effects the post-World War II "red...

Biohazard.(Review)
July 1, 1999... Biohazard By Ken Alibek Random House, 1999 336 pages; $24.95 In recent years, Hollywood movies and pulp fiction have captivated the public with hair-raising tales of microbes run amok. Now comes Biohazard, the autobiography of former Soviet...

French and British Nuclear Forces, 1999.
July 1, 1999... France We estimate that the French operational stockpile, which peaked at almost 550 warheads in 1991-92, now consists of approximately 450 warheads of three types. It is likely to remain at this level for the foreseeable future. The...

In praise of heavy bombers.(bombers in the 1999 NATO-Yugoslavia conflict)(Brief Article)
July 1, 1999... DURING NATO'S BOMBING CAMPAIGN AGAINST Yugoslavia, B-2 stealth bombers undertook daily missions in an operation called "Noble Anvil." Details are sparse--most news coverage described how pilots took off from Whiteman Air Force base, 60 miles...