Word: bombe
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...course, making a nuclear bomb is difficult and expensive. The key ingredient for a bomb builder is the fissile material--either highly enriched uranium or plutonium--which is difficult to produce secretly. Nuclear-radiation leaks, even in minute quantities, can be detected. But making a nuclear bomb isn't impossible. Under the apartheid regime--at a time when it was subject to international trade sanctions--South Africa managed to build six of them. (Until the breakup of the Soviet Union, South Africa was the only nation to willingly and verifiably give up its entire nuclear arsenal.) Leaving aside North Korea...
While the declared nuclear powers have wobbled in their commitment to get rid of their arsenals, the rise of a global black market in nuclear expertise and materials has made the Bomb more attainable for everyone else. Despite the bust in 2004 of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who transferred nuclear technology and designs to clients like Libya, Iran and North Korea, intelligence officials around the world believe much of his network is still in business. (Today Khan lives under house arrest in Pakistan, but the U.S. has yet to receive Islamabad's permission to question him.) Meanwhile, Nunn maintains...
...closer upstarts get to going nuclear, the more tempting it may be for established powers to restart the arms race. The Bush Administration is determined not just to modernize its aging arsenal but also to develop a new type of bomb, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator--known as the "bunker buster"--which would be used to blast targets buried deep underground. Both North Korea and Iran are believed to have buried clandestine nuclear facilities. But John Deutch, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, argues that by talking of a new type of bomb, the Administration is undercutting...
...temptation to light up is always there. Having a Bomb gives one bragging rights. Pakistan, for example, is intensely proud of its nuclear arsenal: displayed in every large city is a fiber-glass model of the Chagi Hills, where the 1998 tests took place. Every Pakistani remembers seeing TV films of the hills' shuddering at the jolt from underground, like a camel shaking off a layer of dust. Russia, which has pledged to update its nuclear arsenal, knows that its bombs are what maintain its pretensions to be a great power. Neither Britain nor France will give up its nuclear...
...very existence of the Bomb has made the sort of total war practiced 60 years ago morally unthinkable. For once, humans have not done what they are capable of doing. There have been some 525 nuclear explosions aboveground since Hiroshima; not one of them has been an act of war. We find it hard to celebrate that--we may think, as George Orwell wrote two months after Hiroshima, that the atom bomb ushered into being an indefinite "peace that is no peace"--but we should, perhaps, be thankful for small mercies. Since Aug. 6, 1945, we have lived uneasily with...