Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from March 1995

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from March 1995

Make it so. (efforts to maintain global peace)(Editorial)
March 1, 1995... These are not joyful times for the United Nations, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Champagne corks ought to be popping in the glass box on the East River. But if they are popping, one cannot hear them over the shrapnel pounding...

Outlaw binding: weapons intended to blind soldiers on the battlefield must, like chemical and biological weapons, be banned.
March 1, 1995... A few high-tech military forces use lasers in rangefinders, target designators, radar, and the like. As adjuncts to weapons, they can increase the accuracy of the principal weapon, making the weapon more discriminate. Another military...

Los Alamo's little war with peace.
March 1, 1995... Los Alamos, the center of the Manhattan Project 50 years ago, may soon become the site for a peace garden designed by children. But this symbol of peace won't come without controversy. Some local residents and officials have objected to placing...

Walter J. Blum. (nuclear scientist) (Obituary)
March 1, 1995... On October 21, Walter J. Blum, who had been connected with the Bulletin informally and then formally since its founding in 1945, was dying of cancer. Although he was the Board's legal counsel, he lacked the energy to attend that day's semiannual...

No miracles. (lies by the Russian government about the civil war in Chechnya)(Column)
March 1, 1995... When they look back on the last decade of this century, Russian historians may well call it the decade of local wars. The former Communist empire is ringed by bloody ethnic conflicts. Armenians are fighting Azerbaijanis, Georgians are fighting...

Egypt needles Israel. (strained relations caused by presence of nuclear weapons)
March 1, 1995... There was a time when Egypt conducted "nuclear diplomacy" out of the limelight. But Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Musa has bid a final farewell to this policy and said what many Israelis did not wish to hear. In a candid interview printed in the...

Czechs seize migrating uranium.
March 1, 1995... The largest amount of smuggled nuclear-weapon usable material discovered to date was found in mid-December in a dark blue Volvo limousine parked on the street in Prague. The police, tipped off by Interpol that the material had been at large for...

Hawks on the wing. (reducing defense spending)
March 1, 1995... The struggle will be fierce. Three congressional factions are zealously clinging to their positions and are disinclined to compromise. The conflict will rage for months, both between the Senate and House, and within the budget, armed services,...

Cutoff talks delayed. (relations between Pakistan and India strained over nuclear materials production)
March 1, 1995... When President Clinton proposed an international ban on the production of nuclear weapon material in a September 1993 speech to the United Nations, the idea was widely applauded. Two months later, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously endorsed...

Let's make a deal: NATO and CFE. (expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe)
March 1, 1995... The first two years of the Clinton presidency have been disastrous for U.S. relations with its European allies. West Europeans have made plenty of mistakes too, of course, especially in dealing with the wars in the former Yugoslavia. But, insofar...

U.N. peacekeeping, a glass half empty, half full. (United Nations)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... The term "peacekeeping" does not appear in the United Nations Charter. Nevertheless, it has become the tail that wags the dog, the most visible and controversial activity the United Nations engages in and the one by which the organization's...

Phantom forces, diminished dreams.(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... The sharpest weapon in the United Nations' arsenal - the ability to make peace by waging war - has been sheathed for the foreseeable future. It may, in fact, be the one weapon which is beyond the world body's ability to wield and control. Two...

Back to the drawing board. (international peacekeeping efforts)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... The United Nations was established to maintain international peace and security. But there has been little peace in the first 49 years of the United Nations, most of it shadowed by the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet...

Cambodia: a $3 billion boondoggle. (international peacekeeping mission)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... The United Nations propaganda machine likes to tout Cambodia as its great peacekeeping success. Undoubtedly, the families of Kellie Wilkinson, her boyfriend Dominic Chappell, their pal Tina Dominy, and three adventurous young backpackers named...

"We are dying of your protection." (peacekeeping mission in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... In January 1993, Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister Hakija Turajlic was assassinated by a Serb soldier while under U.N. protection. At least seven shots were fired at Turajlic as he was returning from the Sarajevo airport in a French armored carrier...

A stronger U.N. strengthens America.(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... Over the past two years, an increasingly cautious Clinton administration has adopted a national security strategy that makes multilateral peacekeeping operations acts of charity to be indulged in from time to time when humanitarian considerations...

Pay-more-later-plan. (United Nations peacekeeping costs)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... In an interview on Meet the Press in December 1994, Newt Gingrich launched an attack on U.N. peacekeeping. Comfortably ignoring the U.N.'s successes - helping to run elections in El Salvador, policing the Kuwaiti border, and saving hundreds of...

Misreading the public mood. (peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... In December 1992, U.S. military forces entered Somalia as part of a U.N.-mandated operation to deliver food and medicine to desperately hungry people and to create a secure environment in a country that had been ravaged by civil war. Almost...

What happened to humanitarian intervention?(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... The continuing violence in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda in 1994 and into 1995 revealed the limits of the newly "muscular" United Nations. The U.N. doctrine of "humanitarian intervention," formulated after the demolition of the Iron Curtain, seems...

Flawed, but vital. (United Nations peacekeeping efforts)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1995... Five years ago, in the first flush of excitement over the Cold War's demise, many of us believed that the United Nations had finally come into its own, and would now assume a vital peacemaking role in the new, post-superpower era. For a while,...

James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age.
March 1, 1995... Any Harvard University graduate recognizes the name of James B. Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 through 1952. Harvard has al ways been the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the United States. Its president - by virtue...

And Weapons For All.
March 1, 1995... During World War II, the United States was the "arsenal of democracy. "That seemed natural and proper. The Axis powers had to be stopped. But today, the United States is not so much the arsenal of democracy as simply the world's chief arms...

The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed.
March 1, 1995... The Communist Party unveiled a glorious new concept in 1961: the Soviet welfare state. It would dramatically improve incomes, social welfare, and security, said Nikita Khrushchev, and distribute wealth more equally. It would realize the promise...

Russian (C.I.S.) strategic nuclear forces end of 1994. (Commonwealth of Independent States)(Nuclear Notebook)
March 1, 1995... Strategic nuclear forces in the former Soviet republics have decreased by about 500 warheads over the past year. Highlights of 1994 included Ukraine's adoption of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the entry into force of the START I...

A tale of two Franks: each in his own way is determined to protect the nuclear enterprise from public scrutiny or the popular will. (Frank Gaffney, Jr., Frank Miller)(Column)
March 1, 1995... Bill Clinton's conservative makeover won't mollify the hardliners in and around the new Congress. Their national security agenda includes still higher defense spending, preserving nuclear might, reviving Star Wars, and antipathy toward arms...