Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from July 2002

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from July 2002

The unthinkable, again. (Editor's Note).(Pakistan and India)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... AS I WRITE IN EARLY JUNE, INDIA AND PAKISTAN ARE issuing those disingenuous expressions of the desire for peace that often prove to be the prelude to war. With both countries rattling their new-found nuclear sabers, one can only hope that the...

More hot properties. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... SARAH HOROWITZ'S ARTICLE, "HOT Properties," in the May/June Bulletin, tells some stories about collecting "Vaseline glass"--otherwise known as "uranium glass." In addition to its use in calibrating radioactive counters, as Horowitz...

Curious clusters. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... I FOUND LEROY MOORE'S REPORT ON standards of radiation exposure ("Lowering the Bar," May/June Bulletin) to be very interesting. At Med-act we have been concerned about the possible role of low-dose radiation in causing clusters of acute...

Flying below the clouds. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... JAMES MARQUARDT'S ARTICLE, "OPEN Skies: Not a Moment Too Soon" (January/February 2002 Bulletin), describes very precisely the treaty's history, relevant provisions, and current political issues. Marquardt's major critique with respect to...

Keeping accidents secret. (Update).(bioterrorism)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In "Keeping Track of Anthrax" (May/June 2002), Michael Barletta, et al., outlined various measures the United States and other countries should take to keep dangerous pathogens out of the hands of terrorists. A good first step, wrote the...

Energy's true colors. (Update).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... When Congress voted in October 2000 to compensate workers made sick while building the country's nuclear arsenal, activists, legislators, and workers lauded the Energy Department's role in pushing the legislation ("A Debt Long Overdue,"...

Stopped at the state line. (Bulletins).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... FROM A QUICK SCAN of recent headlines, it might appear that South Carolina and Nevada are the first states to refuse Energy Department shipments of nuclear waste to their states without rational or reasonable plans. But Idaho was first back in...

Wait a minute--whose security?(storage of plutonium)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Although the manufacturers of DT-22 steel drums said their containers would probably not survive crash-testing, the Energy Department decided to use them to ship some of the plutonium it plans to truck along U.S. highways from Rocky Flats to...

Drinking for dollars.(nuclear waste disposal protests)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... As the state of Nevada and concerned citizens raised money to fight the federal government's plan to store nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain, Jerry's Nugget Casino in North Las Vegas did its part by offering a new drink, the "Yucca Mountain...

Not broadminded enough.(Yucca Mountain)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... While Nevada fought the Yucca Mountain waste repository, it was also considering issuing special fund-raising license plates featuring a mushroom cloud (Billings Gazette, April 27). The designer of the plates, Rick Bibbero, said it was...

What's next? Clones in space?(human cloning)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Clonaid, which defines itself as "the largest UFO-related, non-profit organization... working towards the first embassy to welcome people from space," has never been shy about its desire to create the first human clone. In an April 24 press...

Sounds more like a joyride.(Australian Ministry of Defence)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... It turns out that the Australian Ministry of Defence has no more common sense than the U.S. Defense Department when it comes to conducting "training exercises" in or over populated areas. In May, an unsuspecting public in Sydney was treated to...

Forget sit-ins.(protests against building a nuclear power plant in Finland)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Hundreds of Finnish women have signed an Internet petition vowing not to have any children for four years if their government goes ahead with a plan to build a fifth nuclear power plant (Reuters, April 5). Finland's population growth rate is...

An unsuccessful invasion of privacy?(face-recognition technology)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Some months ago the editors of this magazine wondered how face-recognition technology--which works by using a numeric code to match a face in a crowd with a database of photos of known miscreants--could possibly identify terrorists whose...

Greenpeace the enforcer?(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Greenpeace, angered by the nuclear-company sponsorship of France's expected entry in the America's Cup yacht races (nicknamed the "Atomic Warrior" by activists), put a considerable crimp in the French entry's inaugural voyage by running its...

Would Gandhi have got the giggles? (Bulletins).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... FROM TIME TO TIME--especially on Hiroshima Day but on a few other days as well--the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) has held a non-violent protest at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a facility where at least some...

Victor Weisskopf. (Bulletins).(Obituary)
July 1, 2002... VICTOR WEISSKOPF, A noted Manhattan Project scientist and a founding sponsor of the Bulletin, died in April at age 93. Born in Vienna in 1908, he studied physics in pre-war Europe at the University of Gottingen, and did postgraduate work at...

Subs v. the environment. (Trident).
July 1, 2002... THE NAVY HAS HAD ITS HANDS full upgrading its Trident nuclear submarines, a process it began in 2000. First there was a 10-year funding delay, due to the end of the Cold War, for backfitting eight of the subs with larger, heavier, and more...

Uh-oh in Ohio. (Nuclear Safety).
July 1, 2002... ON FEBRUARY 16, THE DAVIS-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio went offline for its thirteenth refueling and maintenance outage. During the shutdown, plant operators were inspecting the top of the vessel that houses the reactor core when they found more...

U.S. weapons, U.S. mess? (Panama).
July 1, 2002... NUEVO EMPERADOR, PANAMA: Jorge Luis Martinez farms the land outside Panama City the same way his grandfather and father always have, by slashing and burning down jungle. On a recent afternoon, a fire smoldered as he cleared his plot...

Ready, aim, fire. (Nuclear Posture).(nuclear weapons policy)
July 1, 2002... ON MAY 24, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush signed a spanking new arms control agreement in Russia. The treaty, which he claimed would "liquidate the legacy of the Cold War," mandates the reduction of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to between 1,700...

Missile defenses, relabeled: those nuclear-tipped defensive "interceptors" would make dandy tools for taking out the other guy's satellites. (Opinions).
July 1, 2002... AFTER DECADES OF FITS AND STARTS, U.S. plans to develop and deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses seem to be taking yet another turn. In April, William Schneider, Jr., chairman of the Defense Science Board, told the Washington Post that the...

[??] Donde esta La Frontera? Millions try each year to slip into the United States through its "soft underbelly"--the U.S.-Mexico border. The solution: move the border south. (Cover Story).
July 1, 2002... IN THE EARLY MORNING OF DECEMBER 3, 2001, Kanu Okany Patel, a 35-year-old undocumented migrant from Gujarat, India, furtively made his way to the bathroom of a government-run detention center in Guatemala City, tied one end of a sturdy cord...

Going it alone. (The Center Spread).(international agreements)
July 1, 2002... International agreements the United States might once have supported have fallen like leaves in the breeze, rejected for one reason or another by the Bush or Clinton ad ministration, and/or by the U.S. Senate. Here's a recap: The...

The need for speed: an alternate plan could eliminate Russian weapons material sooner rather than later.
July 1, 2002... The events of September 11 destroyed any notion of U.S. invulnerability to terrorists bent on mass destruction. Yet as terrible as the attacks were, detonating even the smallest nuclear weapon in a populated area would be many times more...

Making fuel less tempting.
July 1, 2002... Research reactors have been undeniably important in the development of both military and civilian nuclear technologies. Russia's first reactor, the F-1--still in operation at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow--served as a prototype for the...

Letter from Pyongyang.
July 1, 2002... The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has a population of nearly 20 million people, but only two citizens--and one of them is dead. The Soviet Union under Stalin tried hard to erase any vestige of civil society and the important people...

Panama: bombs on the beach.
July 1, 2002... With the news last fall that American phosgene bombs and other chemical weapons had been found on a Panamanian island, one part of World War II's secret chemical testing programs came back to haunt the U.S. government. For years, the...

A tragedy of errors.(2 books on Wen Ho Lee)
July 1, 2002... A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage By Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman Simon & Schuster, 2001 384 pages; $26.00 My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of...

Never enough money.(Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion)
July 1, 2002... Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion By Daniel S. Greenberg The University of Chicago Press, 2001 530 pages; $35.00 THE WORD "SCIENTIST" IS OF RELATIVELY recent origin--it was coined by William Whewell at the...

Britain's bacteria.(Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy, 1930-65)
July 1, 2002... Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy, 1930-65 By Brian Balmer Palgrave, 2001 246 pages; $75.00 IN BRITAIN AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE, Brian Balmer, a lecturer in science and technology at University College London,...

Russian nuclear forces, 2002. (NRDC Nuclear Notebook).(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2002... As OF MID-2002, RUSSIA WAS BELIEVED to have an arsenal of approximately 8,400 operational nuclear warheads: almost 5,000 deployed on strategic nuclear weapons systems, and nearly 3,400 non-strategic and air defense warheads. This reflects a...

Correction.
July 1, 2002... The table in the May/June 2002 NRDC Nuclear Notebook contained an error. It should have said that the U.S. Minuteman III Mk-12A ICBM carries three W78 warheads, with a 335-kiloton yield each.