Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from June 1993

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from June 1993

Eating grass. (nuclear weapons) (Editorial)
June 1, 1993... Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's young and ambitious foreign minister, had a lot to brood about in 1965. His nation had gone to war with India over Kashmir. Although the war had been short, it lasted long enough to make it obvious that India...

Treading water. (1994 military budget)
June 1, 1993... Defense Secretary Les Aspin is the most engaging of people. Voluble, frank, and witty, he is not like many pompous politicians who speak as if every word were of the utmost gravity. He is a free-flowing thinker, and often a free-flowing...

Preserving losers' history. (monuments and statues in East Berlin, Germany)
June 1, 1993... A mid last year's cries that the Berlin government was bent on destroying the history of the German Democratic Republic, the city established a "memorials committee" to consider the fate of some 500 monuments, statues, and plaques in East...

ACDA on the line. (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency )
June 1, 1993... The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), created in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, is one of the federal government's smaller agencies. Established to provide the president with independent advice and expertise on arms control issues, the...

Three outrages. (military spending)
June 1, 1993... The end of the Cold War taxes the Pentagon's ingenuity. Military planners must find creative ways to spend their many billions each year now that the country's prime enemy for four and a half decades has disappeared. Moreover, the United...

A curious conversion. (conversion of South Africa's nuclear program)
June 1, 1993... Will South Africa's nuclear program be a model for military conversion? Russia has Chernobyl-contaminated areas too, and many of the residents are fearful; Russia admits it dumped, and will continue to dump nuclear waste at sea Following...

Perceptions of peril. (Chernobyl)
June 1, 1993... It is not unusual to read articles by nuclear scientists or government officials who describe the general population as suffering from "radiophobia" or "radiohysteria." But a recent survey of attitudes in the regions of Russia contaminated by...

Lies and incompetence. (Russian nuclear dumping)
June 1, 1993... At the end of March, a Russian government commission revealed the full extent of the former Soviet Union's practice of dumping radioactive waste into the seas and oceans surrounding its territories. The commission was led by Aleksei Yablokov,...

A proliferation primer. (nuclear proliferation)
June 1, 1993... Some might argue that the devastation of Iraqi society was a fair trade for keeping a nuclear weapon out of a ruthless murderer's hands--especially if it deterred other murderers. Iraq's nuclear potential has often been exaggerated, sometimes...

Russia's "red-brown" hawks.
June 1, 1993... Soviet nuclear specialists rail at vanishing funds and prestige; neo-fascist groups want arms and power--and a new Cold War. Since the beginning of the "Gorbachev years," there has been a remarkable democratization in Russia, but there has...

Europe's leaky borders. (export control and nuclear nonproliferation)
June 1, 1993... Europe is a powerhouse of industrial and technological achievement. It is a continent where integration is coinciding with the disintegration of old systems of control over national policies and economic activities, and where new market...

Europe's nuclear dominoes. (nuclear nonproliferation in Europe)
June 1, 1993... U.S. leadership in NATO is the best protection against nuclear proliferation in Europe. As long as the United States continues to play a leading role in NATO, the incentive for European powers to acquire independent nuclear weapons is...

Asian ambitions, rising tensions. (threats to Japanese security)(includes related information)
June 1, 1993... The superpower arms race may be over, but nuclear ambitions and political instability pose serious threats to Asian security. The role of nuclear weapons was clear, or so it appeared, during 45 years of East-West confrontation. There were...

An equal-opportunity NPT. (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty)
June 1, 1993... There is a way to fit the three de facto nuclear weapons states--Israel, India, and Pakistan--into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The world has gone through a momentous revolution. The Cold War ended with the Paris Conference of...

A sacred matter. (Israel's nuclear project)
June 1, 1993... Israel's nuclear project was not for national glory or prestige. It was perceived as a sacred matter of national survival. In the Middle East, the future of nuclear nonproliferation depends on progress towards the political settlement of...

Myth-building: the "Islamic" bomb.
June 1, 1993... The "Islamic Bomb" is the title of a 1979 BBC television documentary, of a book by Herbert Krosney and Steven Weismann, of another by D. K. Palit and P. K. S. Namboodiri, and it is used often in a hostile context in various discussions and...

American Ground Zero.
June 1, 1993... Carole Gallagher is a professional photographer whose work includes photographs of people downwind from the nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. American Ground Zero is a collection of startling photographs of...

Genius in the Shadows.
June 1, 1993... Genius in the Shadows is a well researched, anecdote-rich biography of Leo Szilard, the inventive Hungarian physicist who pressed Einstein in 1939 to alert President Roosevelt to the possible wartime uses of atomic energy. Withdrawing from...

Between Fear and Hope: A Decade of Peace Activism Compiled from Nuclear Times Magazine, 1982 to Present.
June 1, 1993... Audio buffs have a magazine, horse fanciers have a magazine, snowmobilers have a magazine, and anti-nuclear weapons activists had a magazine. No ordinary hobbyist magazine, Nuclear Times, which died last year, was devoted to education between...

War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.
June 1, 1993... Weapons programmed to kill without reference to human authority are usually considered machines of science fiction and nightmares. Manuel De Landa, a computer programmer, wants us to believe that killer automata are becoming a reality--the...

From Eros to Gaia.(Brief Article)
June 1, 1993... Freeman Dyson is a physicist with interests far beyond the purely scientific. He explains that the title From Eros to Gaia defines the beginning and the end, and that is an analogy for the range of these collected writings, from 1993 to 1990....