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Seismograph all over the world jumped on May 11, but not on the 13th. INDIA'S NUCLEAR TESTS CAUGHT THE international community off guard. This has caused some commentators to question [...]

IN HIS NEW BOOK, EVERY MAN SHOULD Try, Jeremy Stone accuses a prominent American physicist of being 'Perseus,' a Soviet spy who stole valuable secrets from the Manhattan Project in [...]

THE CHARACTER OF THE ATOMS FOR PEACE program and the political decisions that shaped it have been the subject of numerous books and scholarly papers. But many popular narratives of [...]

Fifty years ago, I was an 11-year-old paperboy for the afternoon Cleveland Press. On the afternoon of August 6, 1945, the bundled papers waiting for me had a banner headline [...]

Recently declassified Royal Air Force papers indicate that in 1958, Britain's 500-kiloton bomb, code-named 'Violet Club,' was rushed into service 'so that Britain could match Russian and American claims of [...]

Deaths in Wars and Conflicts Between 1945 and 2000 By Milton Leitenberg Cornell University Peace Studies, Occasional Paper #29, 2003 WAR AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION are the two greatest self-inflicted wounds [...]

IN HIS ARTICLE 'THE NEW-NUKE Chorus Tunes Up' (July/August Bulletin), Stephen Schwartz cites a Nuclear Watch of New Mexico paper on weapons modifications and possible new designs (available at www. [...]

When we first began preparing the Internet and the Bomb: A Research Guide to Policy and Information About Nuclear Weapons (NRDC, forthcoming), we envisioned a short working paper describing the [...]

IN SEPTEMBER 2002, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush announced his new National Security Strategy. Although this doctrine retains some elements from the past, in some respects it is a bold departure [...]

ON NOVEMBER 2004, THE ENVIronmental group Greenpeace accused the Australian government of condoning nuclear proliferation by supporting the work of a laser uranium enrichment company named Silex Systems Limited. 'If [...]

EUGENE RABINOWITCH, MY FATHER, WAS A world-class scientist and editor, as well as a talented teacher, journalist, and poet. Yet, he was much more than that. His life was forever [...]

AFTER THE ROCKY FLATS NUCLEAR FACILITY cleanup is complete, most of the 6,500-acre site, located 16 miles from downtown Denver, will be handed over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife [...]

THIS YEAR, BEGINNING WITH THE JANUARY/ February 2004 issue, the Bulletin began a series of articles we dubbed 'Rethinking Doomsday.' The effort was in direct response to the remarkable proliferation [...]

SCIENTISTS WHO HAVE GRUMBLED about George W. Bush's unilateral, bellicose, and preemptive foreign policies and dangerous embrace of nuclear weapons but have not worked actively for his defeat might learn [...]

Secrets and Lies: Operation 'Iraqi Freedom' and After By Dilip Hiro Nation Books, 2004 467 pages; $14.95 Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell [...]

MARCH 28 MARKED THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. A series of events near the plant commemorated the [...]

IN THE FALL OF 2003, THE FRENCH MEDIA reported that a major shift in the country's nuclear policy was under way. On October 27, the headline of the daily Liberation [...]

BY JUNE 3, 2003, ACCORDING TO A HARRIS Poll, 35 percent of Americans believed that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been found in Iraq, while 10 percent were not [...]

PRESIDENTS RELY ON THEIR NATIONAL security advisers for a host of services. Although the position of adviser is not specified in the law that created the National Security Council (NSC), [...]

IMAGINE THE FOLLOWING: DESPITE having agreed to additional inspections of its nuclear-related facilities, Iran continues to hide and build its nuclear weapons program. The United States continues to raise objections, [...]

THE PERSON WHO HAD THE CLOSEST CONTACT with President Franklin Roosevelt on nuclear matters was an engineer named Vannevar Bush. He had persuaded the president to set up a National [...]

ON MAY 8, 2002, 31-YEAR-old Brooklyn-born Jose Padilla was arrested by FBI agents at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and held as a witness in connection with the September 11, 2001, [...]

FOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, THE U.S. GOVERNMENT has seriously underestimated damage from nuclear attacks. The earliest schemes to predict damage from atomic bombs, devised in 1947 and 1948, focused [...]

THE AUTHORS OF A HIGHLY REGARDED TEXTBOOK, American Public Opinion, include an aggregate analysis of more than 2,000 'pop quizzes' surveying American political knowledge since the 1930s. Only 13 percent [...]

THERE IS A HILARIOUS SCENE IN THE MOVIE M*A*S*H where two young doctors from a field hospital at the front in the Korean War travel to Japan and proceed to [...]

READING THE CALLS TO WAR with Iraq, one was reminded of Cato the Elder, who spent his retirement urging the Roman generals to remove the thorn of Carthage permanently from [...]

NONE OF THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIOS predicted to follow the invasion of Iraq came to pass. Instead of an Iraqi use of chemical weapons against either concentrated troop formations or Israel, [...]

SOME CONTROVERSIES NEVER DIE; THEY don't even fade. Case in point: Who invented the hydrogen bomb? Was it Edward Teller, the physicist, or Stan Ulam, the mathematician? Having been on [...]

FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY, THE NUCLEAR Regulatory Commission (NRC) kept its dirty little secret: Despite the fact that a successful attack on a U.S. nuclear plant could cause [...]

FOR MONTHS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION treated the world to a series of lurid claims about the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. By far the most expansive description of [...]

AS THE VIETNAM WAR ESCALATED IN SPRING 1966, a high-ranking Pentagon official with access to President Lyndon Johnson was heard by scientist Freeman Dyson to say, 'It might be a [...]

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE George W. Bush administration, with the war on terrorism, the face-off with Iraq, and the confrontation with North Korea, have required it to be concerned [...]

THIRTY-NINE YEARS AGO, IN THE dusty ranch town of Livermore, California, the U.S. government secretly chose three newly minted post-doc physicists, put them off in a corner of a laboratory [...]

IN JUNE 2000, TWO PAKISTANI NUCLEAR SCIENtists, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood and Chaudiri Abdul Majeed, founded Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, 'Reconstruction of the Muslim Ummah,' or 'UTN,' an organization whose purported purpose was [...]

THE COLD WAR BATTLES BETWEEN HAWKS and doves are history. The new fault line in U.S. national security strategy is between 'dominators' and 'conciliators.' Both groups can be easily caricatured. [...]

THE LACK OF PUBLIC DEBATE ON PLANS TO put weapons in space is giving the Pentagon--and its counterparts in certain other militaries abroad--free rein. The Bush administration is pursuing a [...]

IN 1969 PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON Ordered a worldwide nuclear alert--one of the largest secret military operations in U.S. history. Only Nixon, his special adviser for national security affairs Henry Kissinger, [...]

IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, THE UNITED STATES shocked its peers when it rejected the protocol to the bioweapons treaty. Intended to strengthen compliance with the vital but weak Biological [...]

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEptember 11, 2001, and the subsequent 'war on terrorism' launched by the United States and its allies have had a spillover effect on the lives of [...]

YOU'LL FIND THEIR NAMES ON PAGE TWO of every issue of the Bulletin: Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Rudolf Peierls, Leo Szilard, Victor Weisskopf, and James Franck. Besides having served on [...]

IT HAS BEEN ALMOST A YEAR SINCE THE FIRST anthrax letter was mailed last September 18. Since then, FBI agents and scientists have unraveled many of the mysteries surrounding the [...]

THE IDEA BEHIND MISSILE DEFENSES HAS ALWAYS BEEN TO save people from the disastrous consequences of nuclear attack. How ironic it is, then, that some of the defensive systems the [...]

RUSSIA FACES DECADES OF effort and vast expenditures if it is to get a handle on radioactive waste control and cleanup--and the Ministry of Atomic Energy's (Minatom) plans to import [...]

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 [...]

Before 1980, the Energy Department and its predecessor agencies supplied U.S. commercial reactors with the enriched uranium they needed for nuclear fuel. The power companies were tied to government supply [...]

MORE THAN A DOZEN WHISTLE-BLOWERS have given our organization, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), persuasive unclassified evidence that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, with its tons of weapons-grade uranium [...]

For almost three years, representatives from more than 40 nations met in a cavernous chamber of the little-known Palais des Nations in Geneva, negotiating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). [...]

ON AUGUST 3, PETER GOOSEN, THE HEAD of South Africa's delegation to the Geneva talks on a bioweapons treaty verification protocol, let out a sigh. 'Mr. Chairman,' he said, 'I [...]

Missile-defense advocates argue that the Rumsfeld commission's report demonstrates that previous assessments of the ballistic missile threat to the United States were wrong. They also argue that it demonstrates a [...]

The U.S. military is investing billions of dollars in developing and deploying a broad range of new conventional and electronic weapon systems. These systems -- made possible by dramatic advances [...]