Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from March 2004

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from March 2004

Something must be done.(Editor's Note)
March 1, 2004... LAST AUGUST, WHILE MANY OF US WERE WORRIED ABOUT other matters like wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nuclear proliferation, the president's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was busy putting the final touches on its "Draft Bulletin on Peer...

Another Dover pro.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... JOHN PRADOS, IN "THE PROS FROM Dover" (January/February 2004), does an outstanding job of showing us how Bush's "crack team" of national security experts failed their country. I would have liked to see Secretary of State Colin Powell included...

Success, not hypocrisy.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... IT IS CLEAR IN "BUSH'S NUCLEAR Hypocrisy" (January/February 2004) that Ronald Powaski believes that current U.S. nuclear policies are completely wrong. His argument is that if the United States would just play nice, observe the Nuclear...

More than fire.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... I AGREE WITH LYNN EDEN'S "CITY ON Fire" (January/February 2004) in that emphasizing blast effects and minimizing fire damage from nuclear weapons is, to say the least, misguided. While working in a salvage unit as part of Operation...

Clock change?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... I HAVE HEARD SPECULATION THAT, were there to be another major terrorist attack in the United States, the government could impose martial law. Wouldn't the suspension of democracy be comparable to mass physical destruction? Is seven minutes to...

Not Bulletin material.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... I AM A BIT DISTURBED BY A DEROGATORY term used in the "Editor's Note" of the January/February 2004 issue. I treat the Bulletin as if it is a scientific journal where I can find informative articles based upon fact or at the very least scholarly...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
March 1, 2004... THE CORRECT NAME OF THE PRESIDENT'S education bill, referenced in John Isaacs's "Congress: Democrats Speak Up" (September/October 2003), is No Child Left Behind. The words Leave No Child Behind are a trademark of the Children's Defense Fund...

Plutonium pits on hold.(Update)
March 1, 2004... The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced January 2B that its final environmental impact statement for the planned $4 billion Modern Pit Facility (MPF) would be indefinitely delayed. The statement,...

India's new sea-based asset.(Update)
March 1, 2004... On January 20, India inked a $1.5 billion deal with Russia for the transfer of a refurbished Sovietera aircraft carrier and 28 MiG-29 fighter jets. In a 1999 draft nuclear doctrine, India's National Security Council "called for the...

A view from the balcony.(Bulletins)
March 1, 2004... BY EARLY OCTOBER 1973, Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir--Golda, as she was called by everyone in Israel--knew that the Egyptian and the Syrian armies were amassing on Israel's borders. King Hussein of Jordan had warned her personally that...

What's a century or two?
March 1, 2004... The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) has concluded that it will take at least 300 years for the Defense Department to decontaminate closed U.S. military facilities. GAO reports that Defense has yet to assess 60 percent of its 2,307...

All the news you didn't want to know.
March 1, 2004... Dounreay, the British government's 50-year-old reactor in Caithness, Scotland, has assembled an archive of 10 million pages weighing 230 metric tons. According to the January 20 Glasgow Herald, the files contain everything from bus schedules...

Smoke to the wind.
March 1, 2004... After a government report, published in Suddeutsche Zeitung, described Germany's 18 nuclear power plants as vulnerable to air attack, Germany's ministry of the environment released a statement describing a proposal to disguise the plants with...

Much safer now.
March 1, 2004... Last December a Justice Department inspector general's report concluded that the FBI had become better about sharing information concerning potential terrorist threats with other agencies. But as Steven Aftergood reported on December 30 in...

Bad timing.
March 1, 2004... Prime Minister Tony Blair's 2003 Christmas message to British troops included the claim that "massive evidence" of Iraq's secret weapons laboratories had been found. Almost immediately after the message was aired, Jonathan Dimbleby of ITV asked...

Big brother v. Thomas Edison.
March 1, 2004... Over the past decade, British towns have installed hundreds of closed-circuit cameras allowing police to monitor nighttime activity on public streets. Early data on the use of the cameras suggested that inordinate amounts of police attention...

Know when to hold 'em?
March 1, 2004... In 1991 Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to rein in one of the most dangerous practices their countries had engaged in during the Cold War--carting about easily used tactical nuclear weapons on surface ships and attack...

Did you know ...
March 1, 2004... ... that the European firm Siemens plans to sell a plutonium fuel-fabrication plant to China? (Union of Concerned Scientists press release, December 18, 2003). But will the sale turn out to be helpful or harmful? Why not ask Siemens's home...

True devotion to science.(Bulletins)
March 1, 2004... LAST OCTOBER, POPULAR Science ran its list of the 18 worst jobs in science. From isolation-chamber tester (think three months in a tin can) to flatus odor judge (no explanation necessary), its list detailed the most torturous ways to make a...

Weapons labs good to go.(Bulletins)
March 1, 2004... THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is eager to develop new low-yield nuclear weapons, eager to complete the continuum of weapons (from artillery shell to Peacekeeper missile) at its disposal, eager to reduce collateral damage, and eager to provide a more...

Contractors behaving badly.(Bulletins)
March 1, 2004... IN DECEMBER 2003, PENTAGON investigators revealed that they had found evidence that a Halliburton subsidiary overcharged the government more than $60 million on a contract to deliver gasoline to Iraq (New York Times, December 13, 2002)....

Showdown at Scanzano.(Nuclear Waste)
March 1, 2004... FOR 15 DAYS IN NOVEMBER, the small southern town of Scanzano Jonico, population 7,000, was the most famous place in Italy. On November 13, 2003, the country's center-right coalition government, led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi,...

Mahathir says "get smart".(International Islam)
March 1, 2004... MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER Mahathir Mohammed's controversial remarks at last October's Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)--to the effect that "Jews rule the world"--drew howls of protest from the United States, the European Union, and...

What the dems must do.(Elections)
March 1, 2004... NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES will play a key role in determining the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. In the wake of 9/11 and heightened concern about threats at home and abroad, Democrats will need to address these issues and project a...

Britain: pro-American no more? It is astonishing to see how quickly the Bush administration has squandered British goodwill after 9/11.(Opinion)
March 1, 2004... WHEN THE UNITED STATES DECIDED TO GO TO war in Iraq without the U.N. Security Council's endorsement, Prime Minister Tony Blair took British troops in too, overriding strong domestic and international opposition. Determined to show President...

China: weighing the costs: when the United States abandons arms control, the whole world loses opportunities for greater security and economic growth.(Opinion)
March 1, 2004... WHEN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION, SEEN AS THE greatest rival to U.S. security, disintegrated at the end of the Cold War, the United States suddenly possessed a great surplus of military power and potential. The rational U.S. reaction to this change...

Pakistan: disparities in power: it's easy to discover the limits of power. Just try threatening those who have nothing to lose.
March 1, 2004... A CALAMITOUS ASSUMPTION LIES AT THE ROOT OF the Bush administration's foreign policy. It is clearly stated in the opening line of the National Security Strategy: "The United States possesses unprecedented--and unequaled--strength and influence...

Mexico: worse than you know: if you think the policy of preemption is a recipe for disaster, take a look at how the National Security Strategy plans to fix the world economy.
March 1, 2004... IN 1847, IN A FAMOUS MOMENT OF THE MEXICAN-American War, Brig. Gen. David Twigg, commander of an attacking U.S. force, captured the Mexican garrison in the convent of Churubusco on the outskirts of Mexico City, His first question to the...

Turkey: missing Bill Clinton: Turkey wants an American president who appreciates its strategic importance and recognizes its sovereign rights.
March 1, 2004... TURKS HAVE TRADITIONALLY PREFERRED A REPUBLICAN president in the United States, at least since the establishment of strategic relationships in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Democratic presidents have been received with less...

Germany: losing Europe: the Bush administration has terminated the consensus among democracies that had been uncontested since World War II.
March 1, 2004... THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF JOHN F. KENNEDY'S assassination garnered much attention worldwide. In Germany, Kennedy's famous declaration, "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner"), expressing his solidarity with the half-city en closed by the...

Larger than life: who was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the World War II bomb project? His reputation remains nearly mythic; the man himself, a mystery.
March 1, 2004... THE PERSON WHO HAD THE CLOSEST CONTACT with President Franklin Roosevelt on nuclear matters was an engineer named Vannevar Bush. He had persuaded the president to set up a National Defense Research Committee, which he then headed. In October...

In it for the money.(The Center Spread)
March 1, 2004... THE SECURITY VACUUM CREATED BY THE COLLAPSE OF the Soviet Union, the changing nature of warfare, and the rise in globalization were all integral to the advent of what P. W. Singer calls "privatized military firms" (PMFs), In his book Corporate...

Blair's folly: insistent on gaining support for an unpopular war, Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair put his reputation on the line.
March 1, 2004... BRITISH PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR AND President George W. Bush emerged from meetings at Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch in early April 2002 with a shared vision that would ultimately rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass...

The dew of death: U.S. war planners knew lewisite was not suited for battlefield use, yet vast quantities of the agent were produced, saddling the government with a large, ongoing cleanup.
March 1, 2004... FOR YEARS NOW, THE ARMY Corps of Engineers has been digging up and removing contaminated soil and buried World War I--era poison gas munitions in Spring Valley, a well-to-do Washington, D.C. neighborhood. [See Jonathan Tucker's "Chemical...

The centrifuge connection: after Iran's first story of how it acquired uranium enrichment technology was rejected, evidence of a more complex procurement network began to emerge.
March 1, 2004... IRAN HAS ADMITTED TO THE INTERNATIONAL Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it made secret efforts to procure the wherewithal to make sophisticated gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, But few believe that Iran has told the whole story of its...

The protection paradox: who's kidding who? If you think a missile defense deployment will make the world safer, take a look at how the United States reacted to the Soviet missile defense of Moscow.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2004... THE UNITED STATES PLANS TO begin deployment of a limited ballistic missile defense system at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California by the end of 2004. With 10 silo-based interceptors intended to shoot down long-range...

Privatizing war.
March 1, 2004... Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry By P. W. Singer Cornell University Press, 2003 330 pages; $39.95 P. W. SINGER'S CORPORATE WARRIORS, an analysis of the rise of privatized military companies, is one of those...

Talking to terrorists.
March 1, 2004... Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill By Jessica Stern Ecco/HarperCollins, 2003 368 pages; $27.95 THE DEVASTATING ATTACKS OF 9/11 forced the American public to contemplate terrorism." Who were the attackers, and what had...

Counting casualties.
March 1, 2004... Deaths in Wars and Conflicts Between 1945 and 2000 By Milton Leitenberg Cornell University Peace Studies, Occasional Paper #29, 2003 WAR AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION are the two greatest self-inflicted wounds of mankind. Both are...

Not so bad after all?
March 1, 2004... In Search of Human Nature By Mary E. Clark Routledge, 2002 496 pages; $31.95 IN DISCUSSIONS OF PEACE, DEMOCRACY, cooperation, and conflict resolution, the great conversation stopper is "human nature." Many claim that humans are by nature...

Down the memory hole.(And another thing ...)
March 1, 2004... BEYOND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S DISTORTIONS AND half-truths about Iraq lurks the "Big Lie," the Orwellian memory hole that political leaders rely on to expunge the historical roots of present-day disasters. As the reasons for war with...