Explosive confession

RELEASING the biggest wave of classified nuclear secrets ever to pour out of Washington, US energy secretary Hazel O'Leary admitted that between 1945 and 1990, the country had conducted 204 secret underground nuclear tests and 48 in the Pacific Ocean. These exclude the 826 tests the US had earlier admitted to conducting. O'Leary also promised to release information on the amount of weapons-grade plutonium held by the government and the exposure of humans to plutonium in a series of tests during the Cold War.

Fissures in France

RISKING a split with the Conservative government, French President Francois Mitterrand said in an interview with Austrian media, that France and other atomic powers should refrain from breaking the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. The Conservative government is under strong pressure from its parliamentarians and the defence establishment to reverse the unilateral moratorium imposed in April 1992, on testing in the south Pacific.

Computers decontrolled

US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton announced on September 29, a sweeping liberalisation of export controls on computers and other high-technology products. This indicates a change in attitude from 1989, when the US had banned exports of supercomputers to India fearing they would be used for space or atomic research (Down To Earth, October 15, 1993).

Little to show for crores of rupees spent

MANY OF the nation's premier scientific establishments have utilised government funding poorly and failed to meet their 1991-92 objectives, complains the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). The CAG report, placed before Parliament on May 7, made its complaint on the basis of an audit of the working of 14 institutions under the control of the Union government, some of them in the Prime Minister's direct control.

N - bombs cooled the Earth

The cold war between the superpowers not only left the entire world cold in fear, but perhaps also cooled the Earth, say Russian researchers K Y Kondratyev and G A Nikolsky. Their theory is that the atmospheric nuclear tests of the early 1960s released into the stratosphere vast amounts of nitrogen oxides, which combined with sunlight, expedited ozone depletion. The oxides triggered off ozone-destroying reactions, thus using up a part of the sunlight that would otherwise cross the stratosphere and warm the surface of the Earth.

Vote for peace

JOINING the Russians and the French, the US senate overwhelmingly voted to suspend, and ultimately ban, the testing of nuclear weaponry. Two months back the House of Representatives also voted in favour of the ban. Yet, this concession to the new world order may fail if defense secretary Dick Cheney has his way and obtains a presidential veto.

The mess over neutrino mass

PARTICLE physicists scanning the cosmos for the slippery neutrino, claim once again to have established that it has a mass. Anthony Turkevich of the University of Chicago and his collaborators have published a study claiming to have uncovered "another independent line of evidence pointing towards neutrinos having mass." Predictably, this has aroused the ridicule of physicists who tend to agree with Harvard Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow, who refers contemptuously to the "hullabaloo over neutrinos."