Word: alertness
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...After Lopez-Lizana reported that the uranium was accounted for, the NNSA team had to shift it through a crisis zone to a port on high alert for tsunamis. And their cargo was unstable. HEU must be stored and shipped in certain geometrical configurations - long, flat sheets, for instance - so that it does not spontaneously start a nuclear chain reaction, spewing out heat and radioactive by-products. When it has been used in a nuclear reactor, as some of the Chilean HEU had been, it becomes radioactive. Twelve hours before the earthquake, the NNSA engineers had overseen the fitting...
...thousands of weapons ready to launch at a moment's notice and with both sides retaining the option to "launch on warning" of an incoming attack, Obama said during the presidential campaign that the U.S. was unnecessarily exposing itself to accidental nuclear war, in the event of faulty radar alerts or computer glitches. (Long-range missiles do not have a self-destruct button and cannot be rerouted mid-flight.) While it is highly unlikely that the U.S. and Russia would ever intentionally engage in nuclear war, the NPR does nothing to carry out Obama's pledge to lessen the chance...
...there one that sticks with you? Generose. The FDLR (a Rwandan Hutu militia linked to the 1994 genocide) showed up at Generose's home and demanded money. She gave them everything she had - $120 - but they wanted more. They started beating her husband and Generose cried out to alert her neighbors. As punishment they killed her husband and then cut off Generose's leg, cooked it over the fire, and told the children to eat the leg. Her nine-year old son refused so they killed him. The other children did as they were told. [The militia members] tried...
Paul J. Barreira, director of Behavioral Health and Academic Counseling for University Health Services at Harvard, said that UHS will be making a stronger effort to coordinate with residential life staff and student mental health groups to make sure that every student is "more alert and mindful" in the aftermath of this suicide and the recent Cornell suicides...
...Discussion of such nightmare scenarios may have gone out of fashion with the end of the Cold War, but the fact that Washington and Moscow maintain thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert explains why even the modest successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that was agreed on last week proved so elusive. And it also serves as a reminder of how dauntingly difficult it will be to achieve cuts deep enough to remove what President John F. Kennedy once called "Damocles' sword" hanging over humanity. (See pictures of President Obama in Russia...