Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from November 1997

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from November 1997

Elasticity.(insincerely US nuclear disarmament policies)(Editorial)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1997... Bill Arkin notes on page 22 that the Clinton administration's "no new nuclear weapons" pledge is "a pretty elastic idea." The no-new-nukes pledge surfaced a few years ago as the United States conducted a vigorous campaign to achieve an...

Time for a peasants' revolt.(nuclear non-proliferation)(Guest Opinion)(Brief Article)(Column)
November 1, 1997... One hundred and eighty states have ratified or acceded to the Nuclear Non-Prolifesation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear weapon states. That treaty, now nearly 30 years old, was never intended to be an indefinite license for a two-tier world of...

Prospect of U.S. sales fuels Latin "jet gap" fears.(Latin American purchases of MiG-29s and F-16s)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1997... After Peru bought 12 Belarussian MiG-29s last year, the State Department expressed concern that the purchase could provoke a Latin American arms race. But as it turned out, the MiGs didn't work. With the Belarussians unable to fix them, and...

U.S., Ukraine, at cross purposes.(former Soviet military marine mammal program)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1997... The end of the Cold War brought the demobilization of millions who once served in superpower militaries. And among those brave -but- no-longer- needed soldiers of the Cold War was a group of 70 dolphins who patrolled the waters of the Black...

Yankee yanked: nuclear power.(Maine Yankee shuts down Wiscasset, Maine nuclear power plant)
November 1, 1997... Minutes after Maine Yakeee's board announced last summer that it would be closing the troubled nuclear power plant in my hometown of Wiscasset, reporters were crawling the three or four main streets of our county, soliciting public reaction for...

Stiffed arms merchant sues.(Jorge Pinhol sues Aerospatiale)
November 1, 1997... "Welcome to London, Mr. Vegar," were the first words that I heard from Jorge Pinhol, who lost no opportunity to demonstrate his interest in James Bond movies. But more than a spy-movie fan, Pinhol was also the key man in a $30-million arms deal...

Spinning to the right.(right-wing media opposition to arms control)
November 1, 1997... On August 28, 1997, the front page of the Washington Times reported that Russia was believed to have exploded a nuclear weapon at its Novaya Zemlya nuclear test site on August 16. The article cited "Clinton administration officials" as its...

A flash from the past.(South Africa - nuclear proliferation)
November 1, 1997... At 3 o'clock in the morning of September 22, 1979, a U.S. Vela satellite detected a brief, intense, double flash of light near the southern tip of South Africa. Did it signal a low-yield nuclear explosion? Will we ever know for sure? The...

Cuba case tests treaty: bioweapons.
November 1, 1997... Cuba's recent claim--that the United States has unleashed a plague of tiny insects that have devoured Cuban potatoes and other crops--points once again to a major problem with the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention: the lack of machinery for...

Fast-track the uranium deal.(US purchases from Russia)
November 1, 1997... The deal in which the United States promised to purchase bomb-grade uranium from Russia is proceeding at a snail's pace, and Russia's effort to eliminate chemical weapons is hampered by lack of money. If the United States accelerates the...

What's "new"?(new US nuclear weapons plans defy antinuclear rhetoric)
November 1, 1997... No new nukes, huh? Despite promises from Clinton, a host of new weapons--warheads, missiles, and more--are in the pipeline. Variations on the U.S. pledge to build "no new nuclear weapons"--a post-Cold War catechism--have now been recited by...

No stopping it now.(nuclear stockpile stewardship confounds arms control efforts)
November 1, 1997... Claiming "national security" to block any and all protests, the multi-billion dollar stockpile stewardship program steamrolls on. Be careful what you wish for, goes the old saying, because you just might get it. For years, arms control...

Child soldiers: in some places, if you're as tall as a rifle, you're old enough to carry one.(Cover Story)
November 1, 1997... Whilr in Sierra Leone a couple of summers ago, I visited Grafton Camp, a facility for recently demobilized child soldiers operated by UNICEF and local partners. Many of the boys, ranging from nine to 16 years of age, had killed people as they...

Forty years of Pugwash.(includes related articles on the history of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs)
November 1, 1997... On August 6, five days into the annual meeting of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in Lillehammer, Norway, Shoji Sawada, a retired Japanese physicist, spoke. Fifty-two years ago, he said, he was 13 years old and living...

Worse than we knew.(US radioactive iodine exposure in the 1950s)
November 1, 1997... Fallout exposed nearly everyone in the United States to radioactive iodine. And the government knew it. On August 1, The National Cancer Institute (NCI) revealed that as a result of U.S. nuclear tests conducted in the atmosphere in Nevada,...

No dose too low: a high-stakes battle over the risks of low-level radiation.
November 1, 1997... Is there a safe level of radiation? Is there some standard below which exposure is harmless? Maybe even "good for you?" Years ago, many radiation scientists believed just that. Very low doses of radiation were harmless to human health, they...

Menachem's Seed.
November 1, 1997... by Carl Djerassi University of Georgia Press, 1997 196 pages; $21.95 In the preface to his newest novel, Carl Djerassi, a distinguished professor of chemistry at Stanford University, says Menachem's Seed is the third of a projected tetralogy of...

We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.
November 1, 1997... By John Lewis Gaddis Oxford University Press, 1997 425 pages; $19.95 As we have come to expect from the preeminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, this book is well researched, well thought out, and well written. It is a fresh rendition...

Defense Addiction: Can America Kick the Habit?
November 1, 1997... by Sanford Gottlieb Westview Press, 1997 213 pages; $19.00 Sanford Gottlieb is but the latest analyst to demonstrate that the expenditure of $4 trillion for defense ($12.8 trillion in 1995 dollars) during the Cold War years of 1947 to 1990...

Global nuclear stockpiles, 1945-1997.(statistics and includes nuclear weapons plans of the US, Russia, UK, France, and China)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1997... THE FIVE ACKNOWLEDGED NUCLEAR POWERS POSSESS about 36,000 nuclear warheads. Many thousands of these warheads, especially in Russia, await dismantlement or are non-operational, but the number still active and operational--an estimated 22,000--is...

The beat goes on.(US strategic command continues its 'Global Guardian' nuclear war games exercises)(The Last Word)(Column)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1997... When the strategic air command (SAC) held its annual "Global Shield" war games during the Cold War, press releases were issued and correspondents were hosted at bomber and missile bases across America. Pride in the deterrent--that is, blowing...