Word: reactor
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...Russian space technology, a lingering cold war mentality, especially in the Defense Department, has kept any major deals from going through. Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood and other hard-line officials have argued that it would be a mistake to keep Russia's missile factories and space reactor plants in business. "We don't want to encourage them," Atwood told a congressional panel recently. After all, missiles can be used to launch nuclear warheads as well as satellites, and reactors could power space weapons...
NORTH KOREA. Satellite pictures show that in 1987 the country completed a 30- MW reactor. That is too big for research -- such reactors generally run 10 MW or less -- and too small for electric-power production, which generally requires a reactor producing 200 MW or more. Besides, the satellite pictures show no electric generators or power lines alongside the reactor to carry off the electricity. So the reactor appears designed to do what bombmakers need: begin the process of producing plutonium for use in weapons. Satellite photos also show another and bigger (50-to-200-MW) reactor under construction; analysts...
Outside experts are still unsure what the size of the reactor is. The argument about what Algeria is up to may not be settled even if the country signs the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and opens its facilities to inspection by the IAEA. It might, for example, show the inspectors a reactor that really did have only a 15-MW capacity -- but could be fairly quickly expanded to 50-60 MW. In any case, what worries Western officials is not just that Algeria may develop a bomb for itself but that it may be helping others build nuclear weapons...
...wide variety of fields from astronomy to theoretical physics, computer simulation has replaced laboratory experimentation as a basic tool of scientific research. It is much easier to study the behavior of ionized gases in a computer simulation, for example, than it is to build a full-scale nuclear- fusion reactor. "We've whetted an awful lot of scientific appetites," says Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
...version of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Ja'afer, a Shi'ite Muslim, is an outspoken human-rights advocate who has been jailed for his protests against Saddam Hussein's oppression. Yet he has been honing his country's nuclear capabilities since the early 1960s. He directed operations at the Osirak reactor until an Israeli raid destroyed it in 1981, and he later served as senior technician for the Tarmiya and Sharqat pilot plants, centerpieces of what U.N. investigators say was an advanced nuclear weapons program. U.S. government sources contend that under Ja'afer's supervision, Saddam's nuclear program got sizable...