Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from March 1993

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from March 1993

Hail to the military plenipotentiary. (award-winning essay 'The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012')
March 1, 1993... The year is 2012. The president is dead, the vice president has "retired," and Gen. Thomas E.T. Brutus occupies the White House as "permanent Military Plenipotentiary." A plot for a Hollywood film or a paperback novel? No. A military-coup...

Russian whistleblower faces jail. (Vil Mirzayanov)
March 1, 1993... A new binary nerve gas, more potent than its U.S. counterpart, VX, has been developed by the Moscow Research Institute of Organic Chemistry, according to an article that appeared in the September 20, 1992 issue of the weekly Moscow News. "A...

THORP flap. (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant)
March 1, 1993... The British government is trying to decide whether to allow the biggest nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the world to start operating, to produce yet more plutonium for the world to worry about. A third of a mile long, and ten years in the...

A bouquet for Bush. (George Bush's disarmament accomplishments)
March 1, 1993... George Bush left office on January 20 with his head held high. He did not brood for long over his devastating defeat on November 3. He refused to be immobilized by self-doubt. After a brief period of grieving over a botched election...

The West's moral failure. (lack of action in Bosnia)
March 1, 1993... "Our silence enables this madness to continue," wrote American lawyer Betsy Midden in the International Herald Tribune on January 13, 1993, after visiting Bosnian victims of Serbian violence, deploring that so few people had been willing to...

Ending overkill. (military spending)(includes related information) (Cover Story)
March 1, 1993... By the year 2000, the United States can save hundreds of billions in military expenditures, and still have a world-class defense. Twenty-four hours a day for 30 years without end, one or another of a carefully tended group of specially...

First puzzlement; then action. (nuclear pollution of the Techa River in Central Russia)
March 1, 1993... The faces tell the story. It is May 1992, and these young women from Muslyumovo, a village in the southern Urals of Central Russia, have come to the banks of the Techa river, where they now watch--with puzzlement, skepticism, and a hint of...

Ukraine: stuck with the goods. (nuclear warheads)
March 1, 1993... The United States and Russia want Ukraine to give up its 1,200 Soviet warheads. But it is unreasonable for Ukraine to expect something in return? Ukraine is in a position similar to that of a powerful international terrorist organization...

Our man in Missouri. (Whiteman Air Force Base)
March 1, 1993... Our Ukrainian colleague "penetrates" Whiteman Air Force Base--but in the 1990s, he wins no medal from the KGB. If this were the early 1980s and I were a Soviet spy of the totalitarian Brezhnev era, and a dishonest one at that, I would now...

The VA's sorry, the army's silent. (Dept of Veteran's Affairs and World War II victims of mustard gas)(includes related information)
March 1, 1993... The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says it is ready to make compensation easier to get for the U.S. servicemen who served as human guinea pigs for mustard gas testing during World War II. However, a continuing fog of military secrecy...

Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel.
March 1, 1993... Casual observers were amazed by communism's sudden collapse in East Central Europe; even Western and Soviet bloc politicians were taken by surprise. The communist political elite saw its powers and privileges disappear almost overnight, and...

U.S. weapons secrets revealed. (Nuclear Notebook)
March 1, 1993... Extraordinary details have only recently been revealed about the struggle over the control of early U.S. nuclear weapons and their initial deployments abroad. The information comes from a newly declassified top secret report, part of a larger...

Russian (C.I.S.) strategic forces, end of 1992. (Commonwealth of Independent States)(Nuclear Notebook)
March 1, 1993... Russian (C.I.S.) strategic nuclear forces are approximately the same size as a year ago. The SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICMB) is the only weapon system in production; it continues to be fielded. There are still approximately...