Word: atomical
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...year moratorium on the American manufacture of chemical weapons, the Soviet Union acceded to U.S. demands for on-site "challenge inspections" to enforce a treaty. Today the larger obstacle is posed by Third World nations that are reluctant to give up what is known as the "poor man's atom bomb." Poison gases, after all, are cheap and easy to manufacture. "All a terrorist needs is a milk bottle of nerve gas," says a British weapons expert, "and that he can get from a quiet lab in a back street of Tripoli." Thus even if a treaty could be hammered...
...conjuring up concepts that defy common sense. Consider just a few of the far-out notions now accepted by the scientific community: clocks that tick slower when they ride on rockets, black holes with the mass of a million stars compressed into a volume smaller than that of an atom, and subatomic particles whose behavior depends on whether they are being watched...
That is not good enough, however. The same stability that makes CFCs so safe in industrial use makes them extremely long-lived: some of the CFCs released today will still be in the atmosphere a century from now. Moreover, each atom of chlorine liberated from a CFC can break up as many as 100,000 molecules of ozone...
...with the splitting of the atom...
...primary purpose of the $3.6 billion nuclear plant that the U.S. Department of Energy wants to build in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is to help replenish America's dwindling supply of tritium, a vital component in atom bombs. But if approved by Congress, the Idaho facility could play an even more important role in the civilian use of nuclear power. For it is based on what proponents claim is a fail-safe technology, one that virtually eliminates the danger of a meltdown...