Word: plutonium
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Using the power of his incumbency. Ford made news by announcing a new U.S. drive for an international agreement to control the spread of plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons. Since May, Carter has also been calling for controls against the proliferation of nuclear arms...
Given some commonplace materials, a simple lab and a certain amount of fissionable uranium or plutonium, almost any competent physicist can build an atom bomb nowadays. This unfortunate fact of technological life has stirred dire warnings that sophisticated terrorist groups might build such bombs and use them to blackmail the world -a kind of ultimate crime. While the prospect causes a great deal of official worry, it also provides almost any competent thriller writer with a readymade plot that has everything: timeliness, tremendous stakes and, above all, the appalling specter of a mushroom cloud billowing over a peaceful land...
Srouji's ties to the FBI might have gone undetected if she had not been involved in another sensitive matter: the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood (TIME, Jan. 20, 1975). An Oklahoma plutonium worker active in her union, Silkwood was killed in a 1974 auto accident while on the way to tell a reporter about alleged health and nuclear safety violations in the plant where she worked. Just before returning to the Tennessean, Srouji finished writing Critical Mass, a paean to the nuclear industry to be released this summer by Aurora Publishers Inc., a small Nashville concern. The book...
Radioactive Legacy. A major concern is nuclear wastes, one of which, plutonium, has a half-life of over 24,000 years. Safeguarding wastes alone, says Biologist Barry Commoner, would require the creation of a kind of permanent "nuclear priesthood," to watch over the radioactive legacy each generation of Americans handed down to its successors...
...energy in its fuel v. 1% to 2% in today's nukes), and almost alchemic (it actually creates more fuel than it consumes), it would extend nuclear fuel supplies for centuries. But critics are attempting to stop the breeder, arguing that it not only creates hard-to-handle plutonium but also is siphoning enormous amounts of research and development money...