Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from March 1999

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from March 1999

Turkey's deterrent.(Turkish troops in Cyprus)
March 1, 1999... Turkey's deterrent On December 29, 1998, Greek Cypriot leader Glafkos Klerides announced that a shipment of Russian-made S-300 air-defense missiles would be shipped to Crete instead of Cyprus. His announcement seems to have cooled the...

Leonard M. Rieser, 1922-1998.
March 1, 1999... LEONARD M. RIESER, 76, who chaired the board of the Bulletin from 1985 to June of last year, died in December of pancreatic cancer. His tenure as chairman spanned a tumultuous era. When Rieser took the chair, the Bulletin's "Doomsday Clock"...

Voting by abstention.(opinion that Russia's distrust of the United States will negate any chance of nuclear disarmament )(Brief Article)
March 1, 1999... Guest Opinion In December at the United Nations, I ran into a Russian friend who is also a scholar of disarmament. "Bill," he said, "you might as well forget about nuclear disarmament now." The United States had just begun its holiday...

Explosive secrets.(it has been widely known that plutonium and enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons, but it also possible to make such a weapon using neptunium and americium )(Brief Article)
March 1, 1999... Costly efforts have been made to stem the possible spread of plutonium and highly enriched uranium--the two materials most often mentioned in fear-of-God stories about the danger that Russia's nukes will get loose, or that Saddam Hussein or...

40 years ago in the Bulletin.
March 1, 1999... In 1959, nuclear scientists from Livermore, Los Alamos, I and Sandia laboratories were saddled with an internationally agreed nuclear testing moratorium. With time on their hands, they huddled with colleagues from Rand, Aerojet-General...

London calling, the NSA listening.(European Parliament accuses U.S. National Security Agency of espionage)(Brief Article)
March 1, 1999... In January 1998, a report commissioned by the European Parliament charged that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)--under a program code-named "Echelon"--had the capacity to intercept and analyze virtually all electronic communications in...

In brief.
March 1, 1999... * One 30-year-old news flash... In August 1968, the United States may have been so torn by the war in Vietnam that Americans scarcely noticed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. But the British were watching (New York Times, January...

Stratcom's Russian connection.
March 1, 1999... On December 24, 1998, a small but intriguing item in the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal Star indicated that the Nebraska Public Power District had reloaded the Cooper Nuclear Power Station (near Brownville, Nebraska) with new fuel rods purchased...

TVA gets the nod.(Tennessee Valley Authority to produce tritium for U.S. nuclear bombs)
March 1, 1999... In an unprecedented decision, energy Secretary Bill Richardson has designated three Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) commercial nuclear reactors--Watts Bar Unit 1 and Sequoyah Units 1 and 2--as the "preferred" facilities to produce tritium for...

An embarrassment of spies.(former Jewish Soviet citizens who spied on Israel)
March 1, 1999... What do biological scientist Marcus Klingberg, businessman Shabtai Kalmanovich, table tennis coach Alexander Radlis, and engineers Anatoly Gendler, Gregory Londin, Samuel Makhti, and Roman Weisfeld have in common? All of them are former...

Troubled Treaties: Is the NPT tottering?(Non Proliferation Treaty)
March 1, 1999... After a failed PrepCom, it's clear that the treaty's indefinite extension has exposed more problems than it cured. The nuclear nonproliferation regime is in deep trouble--but not only because of last year's nuclear tests by India and...

Troubled Treaties: CTBT deadline nears.(Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty)
March 1, 1999... The value of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) can best be measured by the opposition to it. For almost 40 years, nuclear weapon complexes have opposed a test ban with great intensity. A Welcome and rare combination of factors finally...

Mandela's legacy.(Nelson Mandela to retire from Presidency of South Africa)
March 1, 1999... Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela concluded his auto-biography, Long Walk to Freedom: "We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road.... I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view...

Fortifying Fortress America.(America needs to re examine its military spending policy)(Brief Article)
March 1, 1999... Throwing more money at Defense will only postpone a solution to the problems at the Pentagon. In his recent book, Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace, William Greider, national editor of Rolling Stone,...

Turkey's War on the Kurds.
March 1, 1999... Behind army lines in the Turkish province of Siirt, scores of frightened refugees were on the run. They were Kurdish families, fleeing a village that had recently been burned by the Turkish army. When I caught up to them, they were fording the...

Safe or sorry: The "Y2K problem" and nuclear weapons.
March 1, 1999... At 2:25 a.m. on June 3, 1980, warning displays at U.S. nuclear command centers began showing the launch of enemy missiles. Preparations for retaliation against an apparent Soviet attack were quickly instituted: Bomber crews started their...

Musclebound: The limits of U.S. power.(US cannot always succeed in foreign relations)
March 1, 1999... The end of the Cold War left the United States in a position of preponderance unsurpassed since the Roman Empire. It has the world's largest and most advanced economy, and its military forces now dwarf those of any other country. Although the...

Political minefield.(campaign to ban land mines meets with trouble)
March 1, 1999... In the early 1990s, Brig. Gen. Patrick Blagden, then mine clearance chief for the United Nations, was under pressure to come up with estimates of the number of anti-personnel mines that had been laid in various countries. The United Nations and...

Cut North Korea some slack.(isolation may not be the best way for handling the ailing, but militarily aggressive nation)
March 1, 1999... Economic aid and international respect may be the keys to ending the North's ballistic missile program. In the past decade, North Korea has gained a reputation as an "outlaw" state. In the early 1990s, evidence surfaced that North Korea...

Secrecy: The American Experience.(Review)
March 1, 1999... Secrecy: The American Experience Daniel Patrick Moynihan Yale University Press, 1998 262 pages; $22.50 A majority of U.S. citizens believe that the government withholds too much information by classifying it as secret, according to a 1996...

Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces, End of 1998.(impact of decreases in military budgets and resources on military readiness)
March 1, 1999... Russia's strategic forces are suffering from the same declining budgets and lack of resources that afflict the rest of the Russian military. In addition, the military's other deep-seated problems--draft dodging, suicide, alcoholism,...

UNSCOM R.I.P.
March 1, 1999... The Last Word If Iraq said the world was round and unscom said it was flat, I suppose the arms control community and the U.S. government would take the U.N. Special Commission's side. How is it that this eight-year-old institution,...