Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from May 2002

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from May 2002

Not really alike at all. (Editor's Note).(National Institute of Standards and Technology)(Editorial)
May 1, 2002... YOU MAY REMEMBER THAT WINSTON SMITH, THE hero of George Orwell's novel, 1984, lived in London, which was then in Oceania, one of three super states locked in a formless, endless war. Oceania had fought Eurasia as an ally of Eastasia's, and vice...

Return to incineration island. (Letters).(National Institute of Standards and Technology)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... THE REPORT ABOUT JOHNSTON ISLAND (Monica Casper's "Incineration Island," March/April 2002) reminded me of a blockade action a group of German citizens undertook near Pirmasens, Germany. In 1987, we were told that a large number of barrels of...

Nuclear terrorism. (Letter).(National Institute of Standards and Technology)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2002... "Bin Laden and the Bomb," an interesting article by David Albright et al. (January/February Bulletin), is much welcome for focusing on an issue the importance of which seems to be badly underestimated. The article correctly points out that...

Update.(National Institute of Standards and Technology)
May 1, 2002... Chemical weapons in the `hood In the September/October 2001 Bulletin, Jonathan Tucker reported on a Washington, D.C., neighborhood, Spring Valley, the only residential area in the United States where major chemical weapons cleanup is going...

Hot properties. (Bulletins).(National Institute of Standards and Technology)
May 1, 2002... COLLECTING RADIOACTIVE items may sound more hazardous than a hobby ought to be. But to a handful of aficionados, the click of a Geiger-Mueller counter at a flea market or rock show is as welcome as cold lemonade on a hot summer day. The...

And they want to import 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel? (Bulletins).(National Institute of Standards and Technology)
May 1, 2002... A member of the Russian Duma, two Greenpeace activists, and three NTV camera operators traveled from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, entered the supposedly high-security Krasnoyarsk Mining and Chemical Plant where 3,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are...

150 solutions, one fun contest.(National Institute of Standards and Technology)
May 1, 2002... ICE CUBES THE SIZE OF minivans in Central Park. Fibulas that stretch half a city block. A swirling, mountainous heap rising up from the earth--as though a wayward dog owner has failed to curb his pet. You are not a Lilliputian in the land...

An alien experience.(National Institute of Standards and Technology)
May 1, 2002... Ever hear of the "paradigm clock," which imitates a somewhat more famous iconic clock by periodically moving its hands closer to or farther from midnight? As explained on the Paradigm Research Group's Web site (www.paradigmclock.com), their...

Still a sore point.(National Institute of Standards and Technology)
May 1, 2002... A French team that will race in the next America's Cup yacht race is supported in large part by a consortium of French nuclear companies and the French government. But nuclear industry backing of the ship--nicknamed the "Atomic Warrior"--has...

"Unword" of the year 2001.(National Institute of Standards and Technology)
May 1, 2002... According to This Week in Germany (germany-info.org), the unwort of the year 2001 was Gotteskrieger, which is translated into English as "holy warrior." A jury of German linguists and journalists declared the term an entirely unacceptable...

Put a stickie on it.
May 1, 2002... You may look at that little flashing light on your computer's hard drive as desktop entertainment, but scientists suspect it may be giving away, in a way akin to Morse code, the entire data stream it's processing. According to the March 9 New...

You tell her. Not me, I don't want to tell her.
May 1, 2002... In February, the British government released a series of once-classified documents from the 1960s, showing that Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government had an elaborate nuclear "war book," but in 1965 realized it had omitted the question of...

An honest error?
May 1, 2002... The state government of California has decided to save money by sending items with low-level radioactive contamination to local landfills rather than to radioactive waste disposal sites--a plan similar to efforts over the years by the U.S. and...

Who knew?
May 1, 2002... In early March, a number of congressional Democrats expressed surprise that the Bush administration had not bothered to tell them that a "shadow government" was in hiding in underground bunkers, ready to take over government functions in case...

No nuclear here.
May 1, 2002... Hoping, one supposes, to confuse potential terrorist attackers and anti-nuclear demonstrators alike, Dominion, a Virginia-based energy company that took over the long-troubled Millstone nuclear reactor plant in Connecticut last year, decided to...

The countdown begins.
May 1, 2002... ON OCTOBER 23, 2001, THE Irish Republican Army (IRA) completed what some are calling a turning point in Northern Ireland's troubled history. The IRA poured concrete into bunkers north and south of the border, putting "a quantity of arms...

Congress speaks up.
May 1, 2002... IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States Congress and the nation justifiably rallied around the flag. George W. Bush, who had appeared ill-suited to the presidency, was transformed into a widely...

Nukes you can use: build 'em, test 'em, use 'em--the Bush administration really loves the bomb.
May 1, 2002... READERS OF THE MARCH 9-10 WEEKEND editions of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times must have done a double-take when reading front-page headlines like "U.S. Works Up Plan for Using Nuclear Arms" and "U.S. Nuclear Plan Sees New Targets...

The Bohr letters: no more uncertainty.
May 1, 2002... IN SEPTEMBER 1941, WERNER Heisenberg, Germany's foremost physicist, and his close friend and protege, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, paid a visit to occupied Copenhagen. They gave talks under the aegis of the Nazi cultural propaganda...

Lowering the bar: the government wants to save money by loosening radiation exposure standards--how low will it go?
May 1, 2002... Efforts are under way to relax radiation exposure standards. Under attack is the "linear no-threshold" model and its assumption that radiation at any dose is harmful, an approach generally used by the various bodies that recommend or set...

Plutonium Memorial: design contest.
May 1, 2002... In the May/June 2001 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Editor Linda Rothstein complained that experts' plans for the burial of excess weapons plutonium were "so twentieth century." The material would be hidden away "in the...

Would they if they could? If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, terrorist groups could be drawn to far deadlier weapons.
May 1, 2002... GIVEN THE CONTINUING ESCALATION OF violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how likely is it that one or another of the terrorist groups involved in the struggle will eventually use a weapon of mass destruction (WMD)? By late March,...

Megatons to mega-problems: did USEC ever stand a chance?
May 1, 2002... Before 1980, the Energy Department and its predecessor agencies supplied U.S. commercial reactors with the enriched uranium they needed for nuclear fuel. The power companies were tied to government supply by decades-long contracts, but in the...

Keeping track of anthrax: the case for a biosecurity convention.
May 1, 2002... LAST FALL, FIVE LETTERS CONTAINING A highly lethal preparation of powdered anthrax spores were sent through the U.S. postal system, killing five people, sickening 18 others, and forcing tens of thousands to take powerful antibiotics. The...

A brilliant organizer.
May 1, 2002... Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, The Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man By Robert S. Norris Steerforth Press, 2002 700 pages; $40.00 WHEN HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE STAN Goldberg died after a precipitous illness in 1996, it...

Twinkle, twinkle.
May 1, 2002... Sputnik: The Shock of the Century By Paul Dickson Walker & Company, 2001 310 pages; $28.00 PAUL DICKSON IS THE SORT OF AUTHOR historians love to hate. He's not a professional historian; he's a freelance writer, a man with 42 books under...

Hegemons can't help it.
May 1, 2002... The Tragedy of Great Power Politics John J. Mearsheimer W. W. Norton & Company, 2001 555 pages; $26.95 If you thought the twentieth century was cruel, with upwards of 100 million people killed in warfare, wait until the twenty-first: "This...

U.S. nuclear forces, 2002. (NRDC Nuclear Notebook).
May 1, 2002... AFTER ONE YEAR IN OFFICE, IN JANUARY 2002 the Bush administration completed the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). Although classified, the review was leaked in early March. It outlines the Pentagon's nuclear strategy, force levels, and...

March madness.
May 1, 2002... WHEN THE TRUE CONTENTS OF THE NEW NUCLEAR Posture Review (NPR) were revealed in early March, the Bush administration's official response was as confused and counterproductive as the document itself. The January 2002 review explicitly cites...