Word: plutonium
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...these two technologies together. In 1989, antinuclear activists, protesting potential "Chernobyls in the skies," organized the first civil-disobedience demonstrations aimed at halting a U.S. space shot. Their target: NASA's Galileo spacecraft, an interplanetary scientific mission that used as its power source two | radioisotope thermoelectric generators fueled by plutonium. In October 1989, the Galileo launch went off without a hitch, despite the protests...
...arms by now if its relentless efforts had not been thwarted. In 1977 the country began installing a French Osirak-model nuclear reactor, ostensibly for research projects, at El-Tuwaitha, 10 1/2 miles southwest of Baghdad. Four years later, convinced that the reactor's real purpose was to produce plutonium to be chemically reprocessed and used for weapons, Israel bombed the facility to rubble...
After the Osirak attack, Iraq tried to realize its ambitions by buying bomb- grade material from underground suppliers. In 1982 Iraqi agents paid $60 million to a team of Italian-based smugglers who claimed to have access to stores of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. According to U.S. officials, the smugglers' offer was a fraud, and the Iraqis walked away from it empty- handed...
Almost certainly, an unintentional blast would detonate only the chemical explosives that, if fired deliberately, would compress the warhead's plutonium cores and touch off an unstoppable atomic chain reaction. Some experts see a slim chance of a nuclear explosion in the case of the W-79 artillery shell, but the far more likely result would be a chemical blast that could release deadly radioactive plutonium or uranium from the cores. The safety problems, disclosed last week by the Washington Post, were promptly confirmed in public congressional hearings. The difficulties seem sure to complicate immensely a review under...
...Some scientists contend that the design of the third stage places too much rocket fuel too close to the warheads. Conceivably the fuel could ignite and detonate chemical explosives in the warhead while the missile was being handled in port, producing a potentially heavy leakage of cancer-causing plutonium dust near Trident bases in Washington State and Georgia. Other experts furiously dispute these findings, which will be examined by a panel of three scientists appointed by Congress with Pentagon acquiescence...