Word: bombs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tension that went with it-more acutely than ever before. We were haunted by the fact that just prior to this meeting, the United States had dared to send its U-2 reconnaissance plane against us. It was as though the Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting, set to go off just as we were about to sit down with them at the negotiating table. What else could we expect from such a country? Could we really expect it to come to a reasonable agreement with us? No! So the conference was doomed before...
...carefully written note contained a message that was frighteningly clear. Unless city officials paid the letter writer $1 million and assured him safe passage out of the country, he would set off an H-bomb in the middle of town. To make matters worse, the note was accompanied by a credible-looking diagram of a thermonuclear weapon. Consulted by city officials, experts at the Atomic Energy Commission refused to say for certain that the would-be bomber was not fully capable of carrying out his threat...
...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, and it takes enormously sophisticated methods to separate even a small amount of the isotope from the more common, nonfissionable uranium...
Easy Hijacking. The first man-made element ever to be manufactured in a quantity large enough to be seen with the naked eye, plutonium was used in the more devastating A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It is also a natural byproduct of the 20th century alchemy that occurs inside all nuclear reactors using uranium. But plutonium is difficult (and thus expensive) to handle; it is so toxic that the inhalation of only a few specks of dust is sufficient to cause cancer...
Easier Than Heroin. Taylor, for one, is convinced that terrorists could actually fashion the stolen material into a bomb in a matter of weeks. To achieve the biggest bang, the bombmakers would probably choose to convert their purloined material into a metal. Plutonium and U-235 can be transported as compounds that do not readily lend themselves to the making of the most efficient weapons, but the techniques for purification are, says Taylor, in some respects no more difficult than refining heroin in an illicit laboratory...