Word: atomically
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...OPEC countries. Fast development is inevitable in the oil countries, and it will help work off their surpluses by spurring their imports. For their part, OPEC members may lend or invest some of the huge sums of capital that oil importers will need to develop energy supplies from the atom, from shale and sands and, probably many years from now, from the sun and wind...
...portion of the radio spectrum especially important to radio astronomy. SMS-1, for instance, operates near the 18-cm. band, which is the natural wave length of hydroxyl, one of the first molecules discovered in space. It is from the signals of the hydroxyl molecule (which consists of one atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen) that radio astronomers have been learning about star formation and the nature of the clouds of gases between the stars...
These grim warnings closely follow reports by other scientists on the potentially disastrous effects of nitric oxides, which also strip ozone of its third atom and reduce it to ordinary oxygen. Large amounts of nitric oxides are given off by the exhausts of supersonic aircraft, and a recent M.I.T. study (TIME, Sept. 9) indicates that a fleet of 500 SSTs flying regularly in or near the ozone layer would deplete it by 12% within 25 years. In the past few months, scientists have been emphasizing the even greater menace of nuclear explosions, which generate huge amounts of nitric oxides...
Until recently, the greatest deterrent to amateur bombmaking was the scarcity of the key ingredient. Both weapons and nuclear reactors need fissionable material to sustain a chain reaction -the familiar energy-producing process in which tiny, fast-moving neutrons released by the breakup (fission) of one unstable atom smash into the nuclei of neighboring atoms, causing them to split. The common reactor fuel-which was also used in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima-is a fissionable isotope of uranium called U-235. But U-235 accounts for only about one out of every 140 atoms of uranium in nature...
SAFEGUARDS. One of the byproducts of nuclear plants is plutonium, the critical ingredient in nuclear weapons. Several critics led by Theodore Taylor, a onetime atom-bomb designer for the AEC, fear that terrorists may steal the material. An amount the size of a softball, Taylor says, could be used to make a bomb that would be small enough to be carried in a car and powerful enough to kill tens of thousands of people. The AEC has tightened existing security restrictions for the transportation and handling of plutonium-indicating in the process that previous safeguards were less than adequate...