Word: plutonium
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That bit of morbid humor refers to possible resentment by the Kerr-McGee Corp., a major energy conglomerate, over testimony Smith has given in a bitter trial. It is the celebrated $11.5 million negligence suit brought by the heirs of Karen Silkwood, a former employee at a Kerr-McGee plutonium-processing facility in nearby Crescent (pop. 1,568). She accused the company of being cavalier about worker safety, and then died at 28 in a still mysterious car accident in 1974. The trial, however, focuses on charges that Kerr-McGee was negligent in a series of plutonium contaminations that took...
...lights another. At 47, a short, broad-shouldered man in tan dungarees, he has the look of someone who could have spent his life punching in at an automobile plant or a paint factory. But Smith is a celebrity because the assembly lines he manned produced goods made of plutonium, a radioactive element so deadly that even microscopic doses can be lethal...
...knowledge of how to make a nuclear bomb, atomic or hydrogen--we must control the fissionable materials needed to do so. If we don't want to live in "a nuclear armed crowd" (as one commentator has put it), we will have to stop blithely spreading uranium and plutonium around the globe under the guise of the "peaceful atom...
...classic English recipe beginning "First catch two dozen trout," the principal challenge to the do-it-yourself bombmaker is the snaring of radioactive material. In Z Warning, by Dan Oran and Lonn Hoklin (Ballantine; 336 pages; $8.95), the snatch-80 kilos of plutonium dioxide-is executed with lethal efficiency. The gang that pulls the job has its fusion in a Western mental hospital. There the principals-a deranged young Texas millionaire, a female Japanese physicist suffering from Nagasaki syndrome and a dishonorably discharged black Vietvet -first pool their malignant talents. The group's nuclear capability is channeled...
...Graham Lancaster's The Nuclear Letters (Atheneum; 233 pages; $8.95), a comparable quantity of hot material (plutonium-239) is lifted in 1972 from the Government's vast storage center in Washington State. Thereafter, a series of warnings descends on Western heads of state. Each communique threatens retaliation with four implosion devices if the respective addressees intervene in the affairs of states ranging from Uganda to Zaïre. Where do the letters come from? What nation or individual has the bombs? In what cause...