Word: plutonium
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...buzzed through Washington last week marked another awesome milestone in the onrush of the atomic age. The confirmed facts: in the drab wastes of the Negev desert, tiny, semi-industrialized Israel, with the help of France, is building a 24,000-kw. nuclear reactor with the capacity to produce plutonium, a key ingredient for both a fission and hydrogen bomb. By 1964, estimated some U.S. atom experts, Israel could in theory set off a killingly effective atomic blast...
...popular opinion, an agreement to ban atomic testing might not be a "first step towards disarmament," Rochow asserted. Scientists can determine what a weapon will do through "sub-critical experiments" which do not require detonation. Since these experiments use up less fissionable material, countries such as China, with little plutonium, benefit from "testing" in this...
...after Hiroshima, still without any sort of international control on manufacture of atomic weapons. Unable to agree on anything else, the U.S., Russia, Britain and France have been content to rest their atomic monopoly on the prohibitive cost and inordinate difficulty of building the monster gaseous-diffusion plants and plutonium-yielding reactors in which they carry out large-scale production of fissionable materials. Now the West German scientific breakthrough appears to have smashed that barrier and opened the way to atoms for anybody with the technologists competent to handle them...
...past five years have thermonuclear weapons been tested from airplanes. Intercontinental missiles have been tested only during the past three years. We are now constructing long-range submarines, each autonomous, each able to obliterate more than a dozen cities. In a score of countries, reactors are now producing plutonium, a nuclear explosive. We cannot long entrust our lives to small numbers of men with the means of mass death at their fingertips, men filled with fear and conditioned to accept without question orders to kill tens of millions of individuals...
Died. Martin D. Whitaker, 58, nuclear physicist and president since 1946 of Lehigh University, who during World War II organized and directed the Clinton Laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tenn., which pioneered in the production of plutonium for use in the first atomic bomb; of cancer; in Bethlehem...