Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from July 2001

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from July 2001

Powering up.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... ANTICIPATING THE ADMINISTRATION'S BOLD NEW ENERGY plan, Tom McNichol, a wag writing for the May 10 Salon web site, came up with something called "Vice President Dick Cheney's 10 Energy-Saving Tips!" My favorite was number eight, which cautions...

LETTERS.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Clock getting Bushwhacked? FOR DECADES, THE BULLETIN HAS BEEN an unimpeachable source of information on nuclear issues. It's time for somebody to take a strong stand against this lunatic in the White House and his know-nothing policies of...

Iraq's nuclear non-test.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... In the May/June 2001 issue, the Bulletin noted the escalation of nuclear-related claims made by Iraqi defectors ("Umm, About a 6 on the Defector Scale"). Perhaps the most incendiary was a claim by an Iraqi engineer, who said that in 1989 Iraq...

Treaty-phobic?(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Interagency reviewers in the Bush administration have recommended rejecting the draft agreement to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (New York Times, May 20). In the March/April 2001 Bulletin, Eileen Choffnes reported on the need...

Yes, in my backyard.(nuclear waste site in Utah planned)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... THOSE WHO FOLLOW nuclear waste news may have recently experienced a sense of deja vu: A small tribe of Goshute Indians wants to build a storage facility on its reservation in Utah to temporarily house thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel....

Bioterror: the game.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... On May 4 an outbreak of "Pox" was announced at Chicago's newly opened, state-of-the-art 911 emergency facility near the city's downtown Loop. Uniformed "agents" scuttled about with hand-held video devices interlinked through a dedicated radio...

Move over, Superman, I've got X-ray vision too.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... EVERYONE WOULD LIKE to be like Superman. But the police and the military would especially like Superman's X-ray vision, so they could see through walls or pinpoint the exact spot to dig up the dirt. It now appears that stealthy new hi-tech...

Science on center stage.(science in the arts)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with a British daily, the Independent, Michael Frayn, author of Copenhagen, the highly acclaimed drama now playing on Broadway, lamented the fact that most playwrights avoid science. "I can't see why more writers aren't...

Science in action.(chemical weapons field trip)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... In early April, children from the Dugway Elementary School took advantage of a rare opportunity--a field trip to Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, where the army tested biological and chemical weapons. After hands-on demonstrations of high-tech...

End of an era.(British Flying Saucer Bureau closes)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... The British Flying Saucer Bureau, a private group that once claimed 1,500 members worldwide, has closed down. Denis Plunkett, a retired civil servant who, with his father, founded the group in 1953, says he is just as interested in UFOs as...

Try handcuffs next.(spies vctimized by theft)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... British intelligence agents have been losing an average of 51 laptop computers a year since 1997 (Wired News, April 17). Now the Ministry of Defence has announced plans to buy 15,000 thief-proof briefcases to protect the machines, which often...

Politically correct, part 1.(lead ammunition)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... In the interest of a cleaner environment, lead has been removed from paint and de-added from gasoline. But now the army's getting the lead out, too. By 2005, says the army, it will replace all its 5.56 millimeter ammunition, now made of lead,...

Politically correct, part 2.(scientific terminology)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... In a nod to Native American sensitivities, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has decided to stop referring to the bunkers where it conducts criticality experiments as "kivas"--the local Pueblo Indian word for the group's sacred...

Making a splash.(wave-power)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Maybe California coast dwellers could ease their energy crisis by taking a nod from the determined Scots, who have finally developed a wave-power machine that works. Earlier efforts, including the "Osprey," which was installed near Dounreay in...

Trouble in paradise.(Stalin statues)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Controversy has dogged Viliumas Malinaukas, a former collective-farm boss, who has constructed a park in Lithuania known as "Stalin World." The attractions consist mainly of giant statues of former Eastern bloc heroes, including half a dozen...

Noted in passing.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... The air force has given the Energy Department a three-year extension to study Yucca Mountain as the site of a nuclear waste repository. That's four years less than last time--and at least 250,000 years short of the lease it would need if...

Don't know much about history.(missile defense shield)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... FOLLOWING PRESIDENT George W. Bush's May 1 speech outlining his desire to deploy an expansive missile defense system, proponents rushed to his support with a variety of historically inaccurate claims--leaving the rest of us to ask exactly how...

Khan forced out.(Pakistan nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan)
July 1, 2001... STRANGE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN PAKISTAN. TAKE, FOR example, this April 22 headline from The News International (Rawalpindi): "PAEC [Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission] classified budget slashed by 10 percent." Although the commission...

Surveying the nuclear cities.(poor and unhappy Russian nuclear workers)
July 1, 2001... "THE MOST TERRIBLE THING IS THAT no one is waiting for us anywhere, either abroad or in this godforsaken country." So said a scientific worker living in one of Russia's closed nuclear cities when he was interviewed recently by noted sociologist...

Censoring the past.(history of Israel's nuclear armament)
July 1, 2001... ARMED WITH ISRAEL'S DRACONIAN criminal code on security, Yechiel Horev, head of MALMAB, the security arm of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, launched an offensive in March aimed at trying to conceal the country's nuclear history, much of which...

Two steps forward, two steps back.(United States missile defense action)
July 1, 2001... AT THE BEGINNING OF MAY, THE Bush administration's plans for missile defense appeared on fast-forward; by the end of the month, fast-track deployment was less certain. On May 1, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington,...

A Do-It-Yourself SIOP.(Single Integrated Operational Plan computer simulation developed by Natural Resources Defense Council)(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2001... The government's nuclear war plan is top secret. But with NRDC's software, you can run a simulation on a personal computer Information about nuclear weapons is closely guarded, and information about the current U.S. nuclear war plan--the...

The new-nuke chorus tunes up.
July 1, 2001... WITH THE PUBLIC AND MUCH of the news media looking the other way, a small but influential group has been quietly paving the way for a nuclear revival. They want to build a variety of new and improved warheads, including a new generation of...

THREAT V. REALITY.
July 1, 2001... Over the years, the American people have been subjected to dire predictions of evils to come. It's time, yet again, for a little reality check. A SOVIET ATOMIC BOMB [T] On September 20, 1949, a CIA analysis argued that the earliest...

A debt long overdue.(compensation to sick nuclear industry workers)
July 1, 2001... Nuclear weapons work made people sick--at last, workers may be compensated. CLARA HARDING WAS USED TO telling the story of her husband Joe's bitterly slow and painful death from stomach cancer. Since his death in 1980, she had repeated it...

The BURDEN OF PROOF.(nuclear workers' health claims)
July 1, 2001... On October 30, 2000, the United States enacted a complex law providing health care and compensation for nuclear weapons workers, the "Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act," and became the first country to compensate its...

MAKING IT WORK.(compensation for nuclear workers)
July 1, 2001... Will the legislation do the job? ON DECEMBER 6, 2000, A RECEPTION was held on Capitol Hill for Republican and Democratic senators and representatives, labor union leaders, environmentalists, and Clinton administration officials to...

The sites.(Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act of 2000)
July 1, 2001... On January 10 the Energy Department published a list of sites covered by the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act of 2000. The list includes three types of facilities: Atomic Weapons Employers (AWE): privately owned plants...

Eyes in the sky--watching for weapons work.(satellites monitoring nuclear weapons plants)
July 1, 2001... Commercial satellites can be used to pick up many of the telltale signs of fissile material production. Negotiations on an international treaty to end the production of fissile materials for weapons sometimes called the "fissban treaty")...

Australia's Bid for the Atomic Bomb.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Australia's Bid for the Atomic Bomb By Wayne Reynolds Melbourne University Press, 2001 256 pages; $29.95 AUSTRALIA'S AMBITIONS TO BECOME A nuclear weapon state have been shrouded in mystery--the quest was confusingly entwined with larger...

French Nuclear Forces, 2001.
July 1, 2001... IN FEBRUARY 1996, PRESIDENT JACQUES Chirac announced several reforms for France's nuclear forces, including the withdrawal of several obsolete weapons systems and the modernization of others. On September 16, 1996, France's 18 S3D...

Targeting China.(nuclear warfare)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... I WAS HAVING A CONVERSATION WITH A NUCLEAR insider recently, inquiring about an air force proposal to retire B-2 and B-52 bombers from the nuclear triad. "The B-2s are essential for attacking China," the insider told me. "Land-based missiles...