Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from September 1994

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from September 1994

No-brainer. (press coverage of the death of North Korea Pres Kim Il Sung) (Editorial)
September 1, 1994... Publishing a solid newspaper day after day or a good news magazine week after week is a stressful and thankless job. If a reporter can't write a reasonably coherent 900-word news story in 15 minutes - on deadline - he or she had better find...

A monstrous idea. (U.S. relations with North Korea) (Column)
September 1, 1994... Since Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, American concern about North Korean nuclear weapons has lurched from crisis to inattention to crisis. There has been only one consistent pattern: no resolution of the problem; no sincere inquiry...

Avner Cohen, meet Franz Kafka. (author's fight to publish book about nuclear weapons programs in the Middle East)
September 1, 1994... He does not look like a threat to the state of Israel. No one has ever noticed Avner Cohen strutting around the neighborhood with an AK-47 slung cunningly over his shoulder. He shaves every day, and his hair is neatly styled. No terrorist he....

Plutonium powder puzzles police.
September 1, 1994... In mid-May, German police raided an empty apartment in the town of Tengen, on the German-Swiss border. They were looking for counterfeit money; instead, they found about 60 grams of a radio-active metallic powder inside a lead container. ...

Tajikistan: times out of joint.
September 1, 1994... Traveling from New York to Moscow is like getting into a time machine and going straight to the nineteenth century. A trip to the part of the former Soviet Union known as Central Asia takes you even farther back - maybe to the sixteenth...

The Mescalero option. (storage of nuclear waste at Mescalero Apache tribe reservation in New Mexico)
September 1, 1994... The troubled state of the nation's nuclear waste program is now more apparent than ever from the heated controversy that has emerged over a proposed joint storage venture between some 30 electric utilities and the Mescalero Apache tribe of New...

Not in my district. (politicians battle budget cuts)
September 1, 1994... One evening in late June, the Senate was debating the merits of producing more B-2 bombers. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, a B-2 supporter, argued that the plane could "deliver a large payroll, precision or carpet." She later corrected...

Atlantic impasse. (nuclear trade relations)
September 1, 1994... Nuclear trade relations between the United States and the European Union are in danger of falling apart. The U.S.-Euratom Cooperation agreements, under which trade in nuclear materials and technology has been conducted since the 1950s, lapse at...

The new new Russians. (Column)
September 1, 1994... In February 1993, I went back to Russia for the first time after 13 years of living in the United States. On my return to the States, people I knew asked me to talk about my impressions of life in the former Soviet Union. They wanted to know if...

Taking orders from Little Havana. (US embargo against Cuba) (Column)
September 1, 1994... Recent visitors to Cuba have been appalled by the shortages and suffering they see. Those who have observed Cuba over the past four decades are seeing the return of the worst aspects of pre-revolutionary days: growing social inequalities,...

Baltic pride, Russian tears: the Baltic nations have a special place in the Russian heart. (Cover Story)
September 1, 1994... During my university years in Moscow it was a treat to take a trip to our West - the Baltics. They weren't like Russia. They were clean and green. Their cities were pockets of European culture, where Soviet film-makers shot their Paris and...

Sweet deals, stolen jobs. (defense industry policy to attract foreign buyers) (includes related article on policy effects on jobs)
September 1, 1994... When weapons manufacturers use "offsets" to attract foreign buyers, arms sales can mean fewer, not more, U.S. jobs. Let's say you sell cars. It's a competitive market. You could try to attract customers by offering the lowest prices and...

Mozambique disarms. (includes related article on country's land mines)
September 1, 1994... Mozambique's 30-year nightmare may at last be over. From 1964 to 1974, Mozambicans waged a struggle to be free of Portuguese domination, followed by a 16-year civil war in which the rebel forces of Renamo (the Mozambican National Resistance)...

The soft-kill fallacy: the idea of "non-lethal weapons" is politically attractive and purposively misleading. (includes related weapons glossary)
September 1, 1994... Details about programs to develop socalled "non-lethal" weapons are slowly emerging from the U.S. government's secret "black budget." The futuristic aura of many non-lethal weapons is seductive, and their advent has been heralded uncritically...

"Non-lethal" weapons may violate treaties.
September 1, 1994... Development of many of the proposed weapons described on these pages has been undertaken by NATO, the United States, and probably other nations as well. Most of the weapons could be considered "pre-lethal" rather than non-lethal. They would...

How much plutonium does North Korea have? (includes related article on storage of nuclear fuels)
September 1, 1994... As July ended and this issue of the Bulletin was sent to the printer, the public was startled by the nuclear allegations of a North Korean defector. Kang Myong Do, who said he was the son-in-law of Kang Sung San, North Korea's prime...

We All Lost the Cold War.
September 1, 1994... Deterrence is one of those elegant and powerful ideas that make for wonderful textbooks and rigorous analyses but dissolve into useless mush when exposed to the real world. With a few more books like We All Lost the Cold War, deterrence may...

The Making of a Soviet Scientist.
September 1, 1994... In 1972, during a lull in the Cold War, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev chose to symbolize detente by promoting a "handshake in space," the Apollo-Soyuz docking project. Roald Sagdeev's Space Research Institute in Moscow was the place where...

Submarine Detection From Space: A Study of Russian Capabilities.
September 1, 1994... Hung P. Nguyen states in his introduction that his purpose is to test "whether Soviet-Russian description of programs to create a system for submarine detection from space and appropriate employment concepts are consistent with, and can be...

Estimated Russian (C.I.S.) nuclear stockpile, September 1994. (Commonwealth of Independent States)
September 1, 1994... Estimating the size and composition of the former Soviet nuclear stockpile remains difficult, even with improved - though at times conflicting and ambiguous - information from the Russian government. The table on page 63 shows our estimate...

Success phobia. (nuclear disarmament policy) (Column)
September 1, 1994... Baghdad's Canal Hotel will likely never appear alongside Reykjavik or Tlatelolco in disarmament geography. Nonetheless, it is the place where one genie is being stuffed back into the bottle. After more than three years of non-stop toil,...