Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from May 1998

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from May 1998

A workable policy on Iraq. (tracking its weapons programs)(Column)
May 1, 1998... The United states cannot stop Iraq from acquiring chemical and biological weapons, and it should give up trying. Inspections are not likely to locate all the important laboratories and storage sites. They are easily concealed, while just 60...

"A perfect failure." (internal CIA report criticizes the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1998... In late February, the CIA finally released one of its most tightly held secret documents, the "Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation." A scathing critique of the CIA's performance during the April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, the...

Vanunu sprung from solitary. (Mordechai Vanunu, convicted in Israel on spy and treason charges in 1986, may be released in 1998 after release from solitary confinement)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1998... After years of little to report on the free-Mordechai Vanunu front, the early months of 1998 have been filled with exciting new developments. Twelve years ago, Vanunu told the Sunday Times of London that Israel had built a number of...

DMZ holiday. (description of a tour of the Demilitarized Zone in Korea)
May 1, 1998... It is certainly one of the strangest guided bus tours anywhere. I got up early one morning and stood in line at the tour operator's office in downtown Seoul to have my passport checked, then boarded a northbound bus full of Japanese tourists....

Border skirmish. (US-Mexico relations)
May 1, 1998... In recent years, tensions along the U.S.-Mexican border have been high over a host of issues, ranging from cross-border drug smuggling and gun-running, to Mexican workers crossing the border at night, to U.S. companies exporting low-wage jobs and...

Maybe this year, maybe not. (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty)
May 1, 1998... When President Clinton submitted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the Senate last September, he called the treaty "the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in the history of arms control." That may be an understatement. The arms control...

What did Truman know, and when did he know it? (Pres Harry Truman and the atomic bomb)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1998... The op-ed-style essay on these pages is by Stanley Goldberg, a historian of science, an adviser to the Smithsonian Institution, a frequent contributor to the Bulletin, and a biographer of Gen. Leslie Groves, the man who drove the Manhattan...

Political cleansing in Chiapas. (the Zapatista movement in Mexico)
May 1, 1998... In the March/April issue of the Bulletin, I wrote to a Zapatista/government agreement reached two years about the December 22 massacre of 45 Tzotzil Indians at Acteal in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Although paramilitaries did the killing, they...

Rush to failure. (US missile defense system)
May 1, 1998... Can the U.S. missile-defense scheme be made to work? The program's own review panel says it's "highly unlikely." Despite years of technical failures, bloated budgets and inept management, a national missile defense system is now lurching...

Plane crazy: the Joint Strike Fighter story. (design of air fighter planes)(includes related articles on silence from politicians about the project, funding the project and the inadequacies of the B-1B bomber)(Cover Story)
May 1, 1998... Buried in the defense budget, set to explode around 2010, is a time bomb. The Pentagon built it, Congress knows it's there, and each is daring the other guy to defuse it. The "bomb" is the Pentagon's request for a new generation of...

Doin' the Super Hornet dip. (development of the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter plane continues despite fundamental design flaw)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1998... More than a year after initial production funds were approved for the F/A-18E/F "Super Hornet," the navy is still trying to correct a fundamental flaw in the airplane's design: wing drop, an uncontrollable banking that occurs when the pilot tries...

Boomtown Baku. (Baku, Azerbaijan)
May 1, 1998... Baku, the capital of the newly independent nation of Azerbaijan, was a gracious city in the past and no doubt will be again, when new oil begins to flow. The city's hills rise from the slightly salty waters of the Caspian Sea, and many streets...

Pain and promise: trouble in the Gulf. (effect of sanctions on Iraq; includes related article)
May 1, 1998... The experience with Iraq seems to have exposed both the impotence of economic sanctions and their inhumanity. But are their apparent failings specific to Saddam Hussein's regime? In January the Iraqi government staged an emotional public...

Masters of deception. (Iraq's weapons programs)
May 1, 1998... The January-February Gulf crisis came to a head over U.S. suspicions that Iraq was hiding a biological weapons program, in contravention of U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, which halted the fighting in the 1991 Gulf War. While the latest...

Sofia's choice. (use of nuclear energy in Bulgaria)
May 1, 1998... For many people, no news is good news. But not for me, not since the gloomy spring of 1986 when scanty news of the Chernobyl disaster started coming to Bulgaria. It was the last day of April, a dull and gray day With lowering skies and...

A voice of reason.(opinion about nuclear weapons)(Column)
May 1, 1998... A frank look at how America's top nuclear warrior came to champion abolition. For many people, nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility, of primacy, and of legitimacy that justifies their existence well into the future in some number,...

The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History.
May 1, 1998... By Don Oberdorfer Addison-Wesley, 1998 480 pages; $30.00 Disturbing news about a narrowly avoided war is slowly coming to light, raising serious questions about the kind of hostilities that have come to typify the post--Cold War era--namely,...

Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles.
May 1, 1998... By David Darlington Henry Holt & Co.; 1997 281 pages; $25.00 At the height of the Cold War, Lockheed wanted to find a place where it could test a secret new spy plane it was building at the "Skunk Works," its experimental plant in Palmdale,...

Secret Mesa: Inside Los Alamos National Laboratory.
May 1, 1998... By Jo Ann Shroyer John Wiley & Sons, 1998 230 pages; $24.95 Los Alamos's importance to nuclear culture is grounded in its dual existence. On one level, it is a real organization where billions of federal dollars have flowed to elite scientists...

Soviet nuclear testing, August 29, 1949 - October 24, 1990.
May 1, 1998... Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union much new information has been published about the Soviet nuclear testing program. What follows are some excerpts from a forthcoming report on the history of Soviet testing to be published by the...

Me and World War III. (how a misunderstanding of US policy toward Iraq led to questions about the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq)(Column)
May 1, 1998... Boris Yeltsin's warning about a world war at the height of the Iraq crisis struck many as just another alarming gaffe. Yet Yeltsin did not mince or slur his words, and a flurry of activity broke out in Moscow and Washington the first week of...