Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists back issues from July 2002:
The unthinkable, again. (Editor's Note).(Pakistan and India)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002; ... AS I WRITE IN EARLY JUNE, INDIA AND PAKISTAN ARE issuing those disingenuous expressions of the desire for peace that often prove to be the prelude to war. With both countries rattling their new-found nuclear sabers, one can only hope that the annual summer firefight across the Line of ...
More hot properties. (Letters).
Jul 01, 2002; ... SARAH HOROWITZ'S ARTICLE, "HOT Properties," in the May/June Bulletin, tells some stories about collecting "Vaseline glass"--otherwise known as "uranium glass." In addition to its use in calibrating radioactive counters, as Horowitz mentions, uranium glass was also used by ...
Curious clusters. (Letters).
Jul 01, 2002; ... I FOUND LEROY MOORE'S REPORT ON standards of radiation exposure ("Lowering the Bar," May/June Bulletin) to be very interesting. At Med-act we have been concerned about the possible role of low-dose radiation in causing clusters of acute lymphocytic leukemia in children. In Europe, four ...
Flying below the clouds. (Letters).
Jul 01, 2002; ... JAMES MARQUARDT'S ARTICLE, "OPEN Skies: Not a Moment Too Soon" (January/February 2002 Bulletin), describes very precisely the treaty's history, relevant provisions, and current political issues. Marquardt's major critique with respect to the usefulness and efficiency of the ...
Keeping accidents secret. (Update).(bioterrorism)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... In "Keeping Track of Anthrax" (May/June 2002), Michael Barletta, et al., outlined various measures the United States and other countries should take to keep dangerous pathogens out of the hands of terrorists. A good first step, wrote the authors, would be for the U.S. government to develop ...
Energy's true colors. (Update).(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... When Congress voted in October 2000 to compensate workers made sick while building the country's nuclear arsenal, activists, legislators, and workers lauded the Energy Department's role in pushing the legislation ("A Debt Long Overdue," July/August 2001). In May, the Energy Department, now ...
Stopped at the state line. (Bulletins).(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002; ... FROM A QUICK SCAN of recent headlines, it might appear that South Carolina and Nevada are the first states to refuse Energy Department shipments of nuclear waste to their states without rational or reasonable plans. But Idaho was first back in 1986, when Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus returned to ...
Wait a minute--whose security?(storage of plutonium)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... Although the manufacturers of DT-22 steel drums said their containers would probably not survive crash-testing, the Energy Department decided to use them to ship some of the plutonium it plans to truck along U.S. highways from Rocky Flats to South Carolina (Denver Post, May 6) ....
Drinking for dollars.(nuclear waste disposal protests)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... As the state of Nevada and concerned citizens raised money to fight the federal government's plan to store nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain, Jerry's Nugget Casino in North Las Vegas did its part by offering a new drink, the ...
Not broadminded enough.(Yucca Mountain)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... While Nevada fought the Yucca Mountain waste repository, it was also considering issuing special fund-raising license plates featuring a mushroom cloud (Billings Gazette, April 27). The designer of the plates, Rick Bibbero, said it was Nevadans' ...
What's next? Clones in space?(human cloning)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... Clonaid, which defines itself as "the largest UFO-related, non-profit organization ... working towards the first embassy to welcome people from space," has never been shy about its desire to create the first human ...
Sounds more like a joyride.(Australian Ministry of Defence)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... It turns out that the Australian Ministry of Defence has no more common sense than the U.S. Defense Department when it comes to conducting "training exercises" in or over populated areas. In May, an unsuspecting public in Sydney was treated to what looked like a terrorist attack when a ...
Forget sit-ins.(protests against building a nuclear power plant in Finland)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... Hundreds of Finnish women have signed an Internet petition vowing not to have any children for four years if their government goes ...
An unsuccessful invasion of privacy?(face-recognition technology)(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... Some months ago the editors of this magazine wondered how face-recognition technology--which works by using a numeric code to match a face in a crowd with a database of photos of known miscreants--could possibly identify terrorists whose pictures were unlikely to be on file. It turns out, ...
Greenpeace the enforcer?(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002 ... Greenpeace, angered by the nuclear-company sponsorship of France's expected entry in the America's Cup yacht races (nicknamed the "Atomic Warrior" by activists), put a considerable crimp in the French entry's inaugural voyage by running its own boat into the yacht at a marina in Lorient, ...
Would Gandhi have got the giggles? (Bulletins).(Brief Article)
Jul 01, 2002; ... FROM TIME TO TIME--especially on Hiroshima Day but on a few other days as well--the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) has held a non-violent protest at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a facility where at least some components for every bomb in the U.S. nuclear arsenal ...
Victor Weisskopf. (Bulletins).(Obituary)
Jul 01, 2002 ... VICTOR WEISSKOPF, A noted Manhattan Project scientist and a founding sponsor of the Bulletin, died in April at age 93. Born in Vienna in 1908, he studied physics in pre-war Europe at the University of Gottingen, and did postgraduate work at Copenhagen, Cambridge, Berlin, and ...
Subs v. the environment. (Trident).
Jul 01, 2002; ... THE NAVY HAS HAD ITS HANDS full upgrading its Trident nuclear submarines, a process it began in 2000. First there was a 10-year funding delay, due to the end of the Cold War, for backfitting eight of the subs with larger, heavier, and more powerful Trident II (D5) missiles. Next were the ...
Uh-oh in Ohio. (Nuclear Safety).
Jul 01, 2002; ... ON FEBRUARY 16, THE DAVIS-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio went offline for its thirteenth refueling and maintenance outage. During the shutdown, plant operators were inspecting the top of the vessel that houses the reactor core when they found more boric acid accumulation than they expected ....
U.S. weapons, U.S. mess? (Panama).
Jul 01, 2002; ... NUEVO EMPERADOR, PANAMA: Jorge Luis Martinez farms the land outside Panama City the same way his grandfather and father always have, by slashing and burning down jungle. On a recent afternoon, a fire smoldered as he cleared his plot planted with yams, yucca, plantains, beans, ...
Ready, aim, fire. (Nuclear Posture).(nuclear weapons policy)
Jul 01, 2002; ... ON MAY 24, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush signed a spanking new arms control agreement in Russia. The treaty, which he claimed would "liquidate the legacy of the Cold War," mandates the reduction of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade, a reduction ...
Missile defenses, relabeled: those nuclear-tipped defensive "interceptors" would make dandy tools for taking out the other guy's satellites. (Opinions).
Jul 01, 2002; ... AFTER DECADES OF FITS AND STARTS, U.S. plans to develop and deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses seem to be taking yet another turn. In April, William Schneider, Jr., chairman of the Defense Science Board, told the Washington Post that the Bush administration was looking into the ...
[??] Donde esta La Frontera? Millions try each year to slip into the United States through its "soft underbelly"--the U.S.-Mexico border. The solution: move the border south. (Cover Story).
Jul 01, 2002; ... IN THE EARLY MORNING OF DECEMBER 3, 2001, Kanu Okany Patel, a 35-year-old undocumented migrant from Gujarat, India, furtively made his way to the bathroom of a government-run detention center in Guatemala City, tied one end of a sturdy cord he'd secretly stripped from a window curtain ...
Going it alone. (The Center Spread).(international agreements)
Jul 01, 2002 ... International agreements the United States might once have supported have fallen like leaves in the breeze, rejected for one reason or another by the Bush or Clinton ad ministration, and/or by the U.S. Senate. Here's a recap: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty After ...
The need for speed: an alternate plan could eliminate Russian weapons material sooner rather than later.
Jul 01, 2002; ... The events of September 11 destroyed any notion of U.S. invulnerability to terrorists bent on mass destruction. Yet as terrible as the attacks were, detonating even the smallest nuclear weapon in a populated area would be many times more destructive. The easiest way for ...
Making fuel less tempting.
Jul 01, 2002; ... Research reactors have been undeniably important in the development of both military and civilian nuclear technologies. Russia's first reactor, the F-1--still in operation at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow--served as a prototype for the Soviet Union's initial plutonium production ...
Letter from Pyongyang.
Jul 01, 2002 ... The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has a population of nearly 20 million people, but only two citizens--and one of them is dead. The Soviet Union under Stalin tried hard to erase any vestige of civil society and the important people in it, but failed. Russia was known ...
Panama: bombs on the beach.
Jul 01, 2002; ... With the news last fall that American phosgene bombs and other chemical weapons had been found on a Panamanian island, one part of World War II's secret chemical testing programs came back to haunt the U.S. government. For years, the Pentagon maintained, at least publicly, that ...
A tragedy of errors.(2 books on Wen Ho Lee)
Jul 01, 2002; ... A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage By Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman Simon & Schuster, 2001 384 pages; $26.00 My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy By Wen Ho Lee with Helen Zia ...
Never enough money.(Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion)
Jul 01, 2002; ... Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion By Daniel S. Greenberg The University of Chicago Press, 2001 530 pages; $35.00 THE WORD "SCIENTIST" IS OF RELATIVELY recent origin--it was coined by William Whewell at the third meeting of the British ...
Britain's bacteria.(Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy, 1930-65)
Jul 01, 2002; ... Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy, 1930-65 By Brian Balmer Palgrave, 2001 246 pages; $75.00 IN BRITAIN AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE, Brian Balmer, a lecturer in science and technology at University College London, tells the story of the British ...
Russian nuclear forces, 2002. (NRDC Nuclear Notebook).(Statistical Data Included)
Jul 01, 2002; ... As OF MID-2002, RUSSIA WAS BELIEVED to have an arsenal of approximately 8,400 operational nuclear warheads: almost 5,000 deployed on strategic nuclear weapons systems, and nearly 3,400 non-strategic and air defense warheads. This reflects a decrease over the past year of more than 600 ...
Correction.
Jul 01, 2002 ... The table in the May/June 2002 NRDC Nuclear Notebook contained an error. It should have said ...