Word: nuclearization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...China is a nuclear power. Without Chinese cooperation, we cannot have an effective policy of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, and will have no leverage at all in trying to prevent the sale of missiles and other destructive weapons to countries in trouble spots like the Middle East...
...curtails cultural, athletic, scientific, and other ties with Pretoria, while Italy and Great Britian continue selling tanks, armored vehicles and missiles to South Africa. Moreover, South Africa receives almost half its crude oil from Saudia Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Egypt, and Iran. Recent allegations of Israeli-South African nuclear ties have been stifled by the October 27 State Department declaration that the U.S. has "no indication of U.S. missile technology transfers from Israel to South Africa...
...minute quantities in raindrops and groundwater. But the radioactive gas took on strategic importance in 1952, when the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb. That explosion demonstrated the destructive force that can be released when tritium fuses with deuterium, another hydrogen isotope, to yield helium and a burst of nuclear energy. Today, tritium is used both to enhance the power of atom bombs and in the trigger mechanism of the far more destructive H-bomb. Because it decays at the rate of 5.5% a year, the gas must be regularly replenished if atomic weapons are to maintain their full explosive...
Until recently, it was the problem of tritium replenishment that concerned most nuclear experts. Last year the DOE was forced to shut down its only source of tritium, the aging Savannah River nuclear weapons plant in South Carolina, when the reactors there developed cracks and other safety problems. The risk that the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal might soon run out of gas provoked long and acrimonious debates in Congress. In the midst of that controversy word came that the DOE had been making millions of dollars a year by selling surplus tritium overseas. Some of the gas, it was revealed...
...tritium in question followed a circuitous route that began at the Savannah River weapons plant. The vast majority of the plant's tritium output ; was purified and stored for use in nuclear warheads. But some 300 grams (10.5 oz.) a year was sent to Oak Ridge, where it was packaged in uranium sponge and sold for commercial use -- primarily as a radioactive marker in biological research or as a source of light in everything from airport runways to luminous watch dials. The apparent losses were discovered when customers complained of discrepancies between the amount of tritium ostensibly exported...