Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists articles from September 2003

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists archives from September 2003

A call for a public hearing.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
September 1, 2003... PERSONAL COURAGE BEING THE HALLMARK OF CURRENT POLICY--makers, on July 24 Vice President Dick Cheney braved an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) audience in an effort to silence critics of the administration's "preventive" attack on Iraq. The...

What about China?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... PAUL WEBSTER'S ACCOUNT OF RUSSIAN nuclear force planning ("Just Like Old Times," July/August Bulletin) presents what may be an unparalleled account of the details emerging from the Ministry of Defense's recent activities. Unfortunately, his...

Right on the mark.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... CONGRATULATIONS TO LINDA ROTHSTEIN on the July/August Editor's Note and the "Calendar of Errors" piece. And to think I once thought we had reached bottom with Nixon. John W. Powell San Francisco, California WHEN" IT CONCERNS...

Choosing Australia.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... JOHN CLEARWATER AND DAVID O'Brien tell an interesting Gold War story about plans for a British nuclear test in Canada ("O Lucky Canada," July/August Bulletin). There was more to Britain's decision not to test in Canada than a disagreeable...

Gassing up.(Update)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... After more than two decades, deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) have resumed at the import terminal at Cove Point, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay. On July 25, the Norwegian tanker Norman Lady delivered more than 22 million gallons of...

A worm in the works.(Bulletins)
September 1, 2003... "BUGBEAR.B," A COMPUTER worm, attacked many of the nonclassified computers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) on June 5. The worm activated each e-mail application's "Send" command, distributing thousands of copies of old messages to...

Ms. Puff, atomic kitty.
September 1, 2003... As the Scottish Daily Record pointed out on July 3, Britain's Food Standards Agency was already busy analyzing rabbit meat from around the Dounreay nuclear plant in northern Scotland, a result of someone having discovered that the local bunnies...

Not your father's Reader's Digest?(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The School of the Americas Watch is an organization devoted to protesting the military training for Latin American officers offered by the U.S. government at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the...

And a missile in every garage.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... A New Zealand Web developer has a somewhat unusual hobby: He's building a cruise missile in his garage (Associated Press, June 3). Bruce Simpson says he has had no difficulty purchasing the necessary high-tech parts over the Internet, and that...

We're sorry we asked.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) proudly announced at a public meeting in early June that it had studied uranium emissions at the Y-12 plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee and found they posed no threat to the...

At least shoot straight.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Oakland police may or may not have felt justified firing so-called nonlethal projectiles (beanbags, wooden dowels, and "sting balls" that spray BB-sized rubber pellets) at a crowd of some 500 anti-war protesters at the Port of Oakland...

Freaks of nature.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Nuclear power plants need cooling systems, and unexpected events can cause unusual problems. For instance, one hot, dry summer several years ago, several nuclear plants in France had to be shut down because the levels of the rivers into which...

Nuclear-powered cars?(Bulletins)
September 1, 2003... PRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush got a lot of credit when be announced a long-term plan to convert the U.S. auto industry from producing gas-guzzling, environmentally damaging cars to manufacturing clean-burning, environmentally friendly cars that use...

High-tech tailoring.(Bulletins)
September 1, 2003... THEY WON'T EXACTLY BE leaping tall buildings in a single bound, but U.S. soldiers may someday be able to beat the world pole vault record--without using a pole. Researchers at the new Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) at the...

Goodness gracious, great balls of power.(Bulletins)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... NOVEL ENERGY SOURCES include solar power, wind power, even wave power. But all those non-fossil fuels--and gas and nuclear, too--may no longer be of much interest to the Japanese, if they can only figure out a way to take advantage of the vast...

Sellafield, salmon, and the Irish Sea.(Britain)
September 1, 2003... IN MAY, BRITAIN'S ENVIRONMENT Agency sent a confidential warning letter to cabinet ministers saying it urgently needed 100 million [pounds sterling] to protect public safety at the Sellafield nuclear site in northwest England, where it says a...

The U.S.-French tug of war.(Arms Sales)
September 1, 2003... LONG BEFORE THE UNITED States and France began their bitter diplomatic row over Iraq, the two had been sparring on a different turf--over international arms sales. The United States is by far the market leader in weapons sales; France is a...

Boxed in.(Kaliningrad)
September 1, 2003... THIS SUMMER I DID SOMETHING that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago: I visited Kaliningrad, Russia's geographically isolated enclave on the Baltic Sea, a place of such strategic importance that in Soviet times no tourists were allowed in...

Democrats speak up.(Congress)
September 1, 2003... AFTER MONTHS OF HESITATION, in July the Democrats finally went on the offensive against President George W. Bush's use of intelligence to lead the United States into war against Iraq. To many rank-and-file Democrats, it seemed about time--one...

Will the real revisionists please stand up?(Opinions)(Editorial)
September 1, 2003... NOT LONG AGO, IN "A NECESSARY WAR?" (May/June Bulletin), I detailed the record of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, showing that the record did not substantiate the extravagant claims then being made by a Bush administration...

Mixing bugs and bombs: siting advanced bioweapons germ research at secretive nuclear labs could be a serious mistake, especially given Energy's poor security, safety, and environmental records.
September 1, 2003... FOR MONTHS, U.S. AND COALITION FORCES have scoured Iraq searching for biological weapons and the labs that might have made them; the possibility of these labs' existence led broadcasts around the world. Meanwhile, in the United States,...

Al Qaeda, two years on: U.S. officials say they have Al Qaeda on the run. Maybe they shouldn't be too sure about that.
September 1, 2003... ON JUNE 24, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf jointly announced at Camp David that the Al Qaeda network had been dismantled and that many of its chief operatives were in prison--after all, both presidents...

Dubious secrets.(The Center Spread)
September 1, 2003... "IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD." THAT'S ONE OF THE GOVERNMENT'S favorite responses when explaining why it won't reveal things it doesn't want you to know. It's what government officials said when, post-September 11, countless documents were removed...

Bankrolling failure: even with U.S. government help, most former Soviet weapons enterprises have produced commercial flops. A willingness to learn from failure could make a powerful difference.
September 1, 2003... THESE DAYS, HAIF A BILLION dollars does not go very far--at least in terms of creating non-weapons-related employment for onetime weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union. Since 1994, the State Department's International Science and...

Between MOX and a hard place: it costs more, it's as dangerous to make as a bomb, and burning MOX creates almost as much plutonium as it gets rid of. Other than that, it's a great idea.
September 1, 2003... IN SEPTEMBER 2000, THE UNITED States and Russia signed an agreement to dispose of 68 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium (34 tons each). The agreement called for 25.5 tons of U.S. plutonium and all of the Russian quantity to be converted...

Iran, player or rogue? The deadline is now. Will Iran come clean about its nuclear doings?
September 1, 2003... IRAN HAS BEEN SECRETLY DEVELOPING the capability to make nuclear weapons--in particular, developing the wherewithal to produce separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU). Since they first learned of Iran's secret activities last...

The NPT: can this treaty be saved?
September 1, 2003... THE 50-YEAR EFFORT TO CONTROL THE SPREAD of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction--and even the concept of nonproliferation itself--are in crisis. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1970, is threatened...

Gone today, here tomorrow?(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 By Elizabeth Anne Fenn Hill and Wang, 2001 370 pages: $25.00 Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox By Jonathan B. Tucker Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001 291 pages: $26.00 The...

Nuclear pursuits.(NRDC Nuclear Notebook)
September 1, 2003... Nuclear pursuits United States U.S.S.R./Russia Warheads Warheads in 7,650 active, 8,200 active, stockpile ~3,000 reserve or ~10,000 reserve (2003) awaiting...

It really is the pits.(And another thing ...)
September 1, 2003... IN THE ENERGY DEPARTMENT'S CROWDED SPECTRUM OF technically challenged, hazardous, usually superfluous, but always costly nuclear projects--in the region where the blinking infrared of bureaucratic dysfunction meets the luminous green of...