Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from November 1999

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from November 1999

Johnson got it wrong.
November 1, 1999... Chalmers Johnson ("In Search of a New Cold War," September/October Bulletin) has resurrected Joseph McCarthy--not only by invoking his name, but by adopting the infamous senator's unethical tactics. Johnson is entitled to his rebarbative...

Squaring the circle.(draft Indian nuclear doctrine)(Brief Article)(Column)
November 1, 1999... Guest Opinion THE DRAFT INDIAN NUCLEAR DOCTRINE ISSUED in August--for "public debate"--is unprecedented. In the 54 years of the Nuclear Age, no nuclear weapon state has ever released a preliminary doctrine in a manner expressly designed to...

BRC: here we go again.
November 1, 1999... Reduce, recycle, reuse may be a mantra for the green 1990s, but there's one aspect to the recycling craze that's being hotly contested: how, or if, to recycle slightly radioactive metals coming out of decommissioned nuclear facilities. But...

In brief.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... * Things are perking up Drinking a cup of coffee in the morning may make you feel a little perkier, but apparently this is especially true if the day happens to be the one when the bombs fall. Scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research...

Major Tom to prize control.(prizes offered for affordable spaceships)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... It used to be that a trip to the Amazon, Antarctica, or Katmandu qualified as an exotic vacation. No more. Terrestrial adventures seem passe to baby boomers who grew up dreaming of more celestial excursions. Space is tourism's "final frontier."...

Oh no, not another weapon of mass destruction.(agroterrorism of stem rust, root rot or corn smut)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... If contemplating the usual poison gases or deadly plagues doesn't send you into a proper tizzy, maybe you need your anxiety level boosted by dark words about other dangers--stem rust, maybe, or root rot or corn smut. Yes--it's time to worry...

WEB Watch.(satellite usage)(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... www.fourmilab.to/earthview Each year humans launch more hardware into space. Other than plain old spying, satellites peer into the cosmos, watch weather patterns, and transfer calls from one side of the globe to the other. Until now,...

The Kafkaesque case of Hua Di.
November 1, 1999... HUA DI IS A RESEARCH ASSOCIATE AT Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Cooperation, commonly called CISAC. While reading his five-paragraph bio on the CISAC web site, it is easy to imagine that Hua leads the...

Low probability, high consequence.(biological terrorism)
November 1, 1999... THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S decision early this year to spend $1.4 billion during fiscal year 2000 to combat chemical and biological terrorism provoked a rash of criticism from skeptical observers who argued that the massive increase in...

War without rules.(Western rules and methods of war)
November 1, 1999... IF CHINA SHOULD ENGAGE IN WARFARE sometime in the future, should it employ Western methods of war and should it be bound by Western "rules of war"? The highly provocative answer from two Chinese military officers is "no." In the 1990s,...

Angst on the East River.(United Nations)
November 1, 1999... IT HAS BEEN A DIFFICULT CENTURY FOR organizations seeking world peace. Statesmen scurried across continents forging two such institutions. When they failed to get it right the first time, the price was World War II and the collapse of the...

Test ban fizzles.(Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty)
November 1, 1999... A HALF CENTURY AGO, PRESIDENT EISENHOWER TOLD the American people: "I am convinced that a cessation of nuclear weapons tests, if it is to alleviate rather than merely to conceal the threat of nuclear war, should be undertaken as part of a...

Needed: More intelligent intelligence.
November 1, 1999... ON MAY 7, AT THE PEAK OF the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, U.S. B-2 bombers hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists, injuring 20 staff members, and wrecking the embassy. The Chinese government charged that...

Where they were.
November 1, 1999... Between 1945 and 1977, the United States based thousands of nuclear weapons abroad. The weapons' hosts did not always know they were there. GIVEN THE ENORMOUS ATTENTION PAID to nuclear weapons, it may come as a surprise to most people that...

Los Alamos: Summer under Siege.
November 1, 1999... THE SUMMER OF 1999 MAY GO DOWN AS the worst in history for Los Alamos, home to the laboratory that created the bomb and continues to watch over it. A small town with the densest concentration of Ph.D.s and one of the highest median incomes in...

After the dust settles.(uranium munitions)
November 1, 1999... THE NATO AIR WAR AGAINST Yugoslavia last spring led to fresh outcries about the use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions, long a controversial practice. It "adds a new dimension to the crime NATO is perpetrating against the Yugoslav...

Tangled up with Taiwan.(China, Taiwan and the United States)
November 1, 1999... ON JULY 9, DURING A RADIO INTERVIEW in Germany with Deutsehe Welle, President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan characterized relations between China and Taiwan as a "special state-to-state relationship." Beijing interpreted that as a unilateral--if...

In the comfort of secrecy.
November 1, 1999... ON MARCH 26, A TEAM OF NUCLEAR engineers was busy testing a special device in the second unit of the Madras Atomic Power Station at Kalpakkam in southern India. The device, called BARCCIS (short for Bhabha Atomic Research Center Channel...

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments During the Cold War.(Review)
November 1, 1999... The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments During the Cold War By Eileen Welsome Delacorte Press, 1999 592 pages; $26.95 From April 1945 to July 1947, 18 men, women, and children were injected with plutonium by doctors...

Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans.(Review)
November 1, 1999... Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans By Jonathan D. Moreno W. H. Freeman, 1999 347 pages; $24.95 A compendium of state-sponsored experiments carried out on unwitting human subjects, Undue Risk chronicles the history of unethical...

Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism.(Review)
November 1, 1999... Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism By Steven Kull and I. M. Destler Brookings Institution Press, 1999 312 pages; $18.95 Many politicians and policy-makers like to claim that the American public has turned isolationist...

NRDC NUCLEAR NOTEBOOK.
November 1, 1999... As AUTHORS ROBERT S. NORRIS, WILLIAM M. ARKIN, AND William Burr explain in "Where They Were," beginning on page 26, Appendix B is a remarkable document. It comes at the end of the History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July...

Politically depleted munitions.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1999... The Last Word WE THINK THAT IN THE KOSOVO CONFLICT, As a result of [the use of depleted uranium by NATO forces], that there will be some 10,000 deaths from cancer," Roger Coghill, a biologist in Britain, said early in the air war. I...