Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from May 2001

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from May 2001

Things change.(missile defense programs online)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... A BRITISH WEB SITE, THE "NOTIONAL MISSILE DEFENCE Initiative" asks visitors for their (tongue-in-cheek) suggestions on how to devise a missile defense that might actually work. According to the February 10 New Scientist, anyone who writes in...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2001... Countering Sokolski Henry D. Sokolski's article "Mission Impossible" (March/April 2001 Bulletin) rightly concludes that, a decade after the introduction of the Counterproliferation Initiative, with which I was privileged to be associated...

Updates.(meat irradiation)(Russian floating nuclear power plant)
May 1, 2001... To irradiate, or not to irradiate In the March/April 2000 issue, the Bulletin reported that after years of debate, the Food & Drug Administration had finally issued regulations allowing the irradiation of red meat ("Ready, Set,...

Behind the bits.(steganography used for subversive activities)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... SOMETIMES THERE'S more to Internet pornography than meets the eye--much more, if U.S. and foreign officials are right. Embedded within explicit photos on some pornographic web sites lurk the dirty little secrets of terrorists associated with...

Precisely off target.(Iraq aerial bombing inaccurate)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... The U.S. Defense Department seems to have a very elastic idea of the meaning of "precision-guided weapon." On February 16, British and U.S. aircraft bombed five Iraqi air defense installations. Unlike the dozens of previous coalition air...

Unidentified flying doughnut.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... MAYBE THE UNITED States can build a flying saucer after all. Despite last issue's "Bulletins" item ("It Came From Ohio") describing unfulfilled military plans to build a flying disk in the 1950s and 1960s, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation has gone...

Hi-tech cattle prod?(directed-energy weapons design)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... MILLIONS OF DOLLARS and many years have been devoted to the idea of directed-energy weapons, and we apparently have a winner. But it is not the missile-busting, outer-space giant killer we were promised in the 1980s. According to the Marine...

In Brief.
May 1, 2001... Don't tell Europe Responding to worries that members of their armed forces might have been exposed, technicians who examined urine samples from 69 Canadian soldiers who had served in areas where depleted uranium may have been used found so...

Self-fulfilling prophecy?(space war games)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... In late January, the U.S. Air Force staged its first ever "space war game" (Washington Post, January 29). The exercise, which was held at the Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado, involved some 250 participants from the...

Four clicks is a crater.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... BILLED AS A "NEW experiment in volunteer science," the Mars Clickworkers study at NASA's Ames Research Center wants to see if regular folks, with no scientific training or background, can advance science by participating in online experiments...

Umm, about a 6 on the defector scale ...(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... In a decade of defections, have ex-nuclear-worker Iraqis told us what they know--or what we wanted to hear? Could their claims, here rated on a scale of one to 10 Saddams, be calibrated to what it takes to get our attention? June 4,...

Lovable leftie.(Sam Day, editor)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
May 1, 2001... SAM DAY, A FORMER EDItor of the Bulletin, died January 26 of a stroke in his home in Madison, Wisconsin. His death was widely noted, locally and nationally--including a longish obituary in the New York Times. Day would have been amused by...

Called to account.
May 1, 2001... AT THE DOOR TO COURTROOM III, A U.N. GUARD HANDS ME A translation headset after asking my language preference and setting the receiver to the appropriate channel. There are a half dozen other visitors already seated in the public gallery...

Independence for West Papua?
May 1, 2001... IN INDONESIA, A PERSON FOUND GUILTY of separatist activities can be put to death. Late last year, five pro-independence West Papuans were arrested and jailed under exactly that charge, taken into custody just days before the thirty-ninth...

Blocking the way.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... NEW ZEALAND, FAMOUS FOR ITS nuclear-free policy, is back in the news, taking a leading role in lobbying for international disarmament. In the 1980s, New Zealand banned nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships from its ports. Now an updated--and...

Radiation on the Tom.(Russian nuclear site in Siberia leaking radiation into river?)
May 1, 2001... SOMETHING IN SIBERIA'S TOM RIVER HAS scientists from Siberia to Washington wondering what's really going on at Seversk--a Russian nuclear site that its Soviet builders once called the "largest and greatest." The problem, according to a...

Back to black.(declassification of space photography)
May 1, 2001... ON FEBRUARY 22, 1995, PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON SIGNED AN EXECUTIVE ORDER DIRECTING THE DECLASSIFICATION of more than 800,000 images produced between 1960 and 1972 by the Corona, Argon, and Lanyard space reconnaissance programs. During the...

An army of its own.
May 1, 2001... THE 15 MEMBER COUNTRIES OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (EU) ARE preparing to fulfill a long-held goal: creating a European army. Last November, the EU voted to create a 60,000-soldier-strong rapid reaction corps to deal with regional conflicts and...

Plutonium, the contest.(radiactive waste disposal)
May 1, 2001... SOMETIMES WHEN YOU TRY TO CORRECT A PROBLEM, YOU end up digging yourself into a deeper hole. When trying to decide how to get rid of the "excess" plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons, that hole is literal as well as figurative. This...

Bush II or Reagan III?
May 1, 2001... IN ITS FIRST MONTHS IN OFFICE, THE NEW BUSH ADMINISTRATION has begun providing clues about its national security policies. While only hints, they portend decisions that won't be formally adopted until the administration completes a series of...

NORTH KOREA On hold ... again.
May 1, 2001... SO MUCH FOR BIPARTISAN FOREIGN POLICY. Just before the November election, North Korea agreed to freeze its medium- and longer-range missile program and end all exports of missiles and related technology. It invited President Bill Clinton to...

RISKY business.(Russia opens nuclear reactors)
May 1, 2001... The last unit at Chernobyl was shut down in December 2000. But Russia has opened three more reactors just like it. ON DECEMBER 15, THE LAST reactor at Chernobyl--the planet's most notorious nuclear power plant--was finally closed for good....

Algeria: BIG DEAL IN THE DESERT?
May 1, 2001... WAS ALGERIA PURSUING A NUCLEAR weapons program in the 1980s? Did it abandon that program? Or might it still be developing a capability to make separated plutonium, a nuclear explosive material? We still do not have the answers to these...

Plutonium disposal, the third way.
May 1, 2001... IF ALL THE "EXCESS" PLUTONIUM FROM DISMANTLED weapons were measured in units of 8 kilograms--the amount the International Atomic Energy Agency considers sufficient to make a Nagasaki-type bomb--then there is enough excess weapons plutonium to...

Meanwhile, in Britain.(plutonium disposal)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... Britain has more than 60 metric tons of plutonium that has been separated from spent reactor fuel. Should reprocessing continue, this stockpile will grow to around 110 tons by the end of the decade. In 1998, however, the Royal Society warned...

JAPAN'S nuclear twilight zone.
May 1, 2001... FOR DECADES, JAPAN'S NUCLEAR ENERGY policy has been based on the idea that it would eventually use plutonium. Now, as plutonium stocks pile up, it is clear that Japan has no way to use it all. Nothing has gone right for Japan's plutonium...

PLUTONIUM: Can Germany swear off?
May 1, 2001... IN MAY 1998, REGULATORS at Germany's Ministry of Environment and Nuclear Safety learned that for more than a decade they had been kept in the dark about the radioactive contamination that nuclear power plant personnel routinely found on...

Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations, 1941-52.(Review)
May 1, 2001... Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations, 1941-52 By Septimus H. Paul Ohio State University Press, 2000 266 pages; $42.50 IN 1961, A BRITISH OFFICIAL WRITING about the complex "dual-key" arrangement for the control of U.S. nuclear...

Planning Armageddon: Britain, the United States, and the Command of Western Nuclear Forces, 1945-64.(Review)
May 1, 2001... Planning Armageddon: Britain, the United States, and the Command of Western Nuclear Forces, 1945-64 By Stephen Twigge & Len Scott Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000 374 pages; $56.00 IN 1961, A BRITISH OFFICIAL WRITING about the complex...

On the Edge of Earth: The Future of American Space Power.(Review)
May 1, 2001... On the Edge of Earth: The Future of American Space Power By Steven Lambakis University Press of Kentucky, 2001 450 pages; $39.95 IN A NOVEMBER 1945 REPORT TO THE secretary of war, H.H. "Hap" Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, wrote...

Hang Separately: Cooperative Security between the United States and Russia, 1985-1994.(Review)
May 1, 2001... Hang Separately: Cooperative Security between the United States and Russia, 1985-1994 By Leon V. Sigal Century Foundation, 2000 397 pages; $24.95 FOR A BRIEF PERIOD, FROM 1985 TO 1991, the world was led by a visionary statesman. As the New...

Gassed: British Chemical Warfare Experiments on Humans at Porton Down.(Review)
May 1, 2001... Gassed: British Chemical Warfare Experiments on Humans at Porton Down By Rob Evans House of Stratus, 2000 364 pages; $33.00 IN THE UNITED STATES, IT IS A DEPRESSINGLY familiar story: Military personnel were subjected to dangerous poison...

Solving the North Korean Nuclear Puzzle.(Review)
May 1, 2001... Solving the North Korean Nuclear Puzzle Edited by David Albright & Kevin O'Neill Institute for Science and International Security, 2000 333 pages; $29.95 SOLVING THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR Puzzle is aptly named. Nearly everything about North...

Correction.(Brief Article)(Correction Notice)
May 1, 2001... As reader Gordon Burck points out, the photo caption accompanying Aluf Benn's article, "Israel's Decision Time," (March/April 2001 Bulletin), stated that Israel signed the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1983. The correct date, as indicated in...

Russian nuclear forces, 2001.(Statistical Data Included)
May 1, 2001... Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Despite limited resources, Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) have performed test launches and added new ICBMs in an attempt to keep deployed ICBMs reliable and ready. Six launches took place...

Nuclear posturing.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... DURING LAST YEAR'S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, CANDIDATE George W. Bush said he would take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert and make unilateral reductions in the arsenal. But the new administration's evolving Nuclear Posture Review (NPR)...