Word: plutonium
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According to a small but vocal group of antinuclear activists, however, there's much more to worry about than upset feelings. Like all the deep-space probes that have gone before it, Cassini is powered by radioactive isotopes--in this case about 72 lbs. of plutonium 238. If the spacecraft were destroyed, insist these critics, some of the plutonium could be pulverized and wafted away by the wind. Even worse, Cassini is supposed to swing by Earth in 1999 for a gravity assist that would sling it out toward Saturn. If the probe comes too close, it could re-enter...
...arrested a colonel in the SRF who had been collecting classified information on the missile forces and was planning to try to sell it to someone at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The next such officer might be willing to sell not just secrets but a warhead--or the plutonium to make one. "The missile forces must be fed," says Robert Bykov, a retired colonel of the SRF. "If those who guard Russia's nuclear weapons go hungry, we might face some terrifying consequences...
...State Department was skeptical of Hwang's warning. United Nations inspectors believe North Korea was left with only enough plutonium to fuel about two bombs after it agreed to freeze its nuclear-weapons program in 1994. The Pentagon saw no evidence that Pyongyang was preparing for an attack and did not order the 37,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea to a higher alert level...
...Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Israel became a state in 1948, and for 49 years Palestinian children have gone to sleep to stories of the nakba, the disaster, that destroyed the village, the fig, the olive, the Palestinian Eden from which nakba meant exile. Tribal memory is the plutonium of revenge. The mother shows her son the martyr-father's bloody shirt and sings the song of blood feud: Make them...
...Russian Mars probe is falling! The Russian Mars probe is falling! The prospect of the stricken plutonium-powered spacecraft's raining down on Down Under brought back memories of the U.S. Skylab's shower of pieces over the area in 1979 and threatened to overshadow President Clinton's visit to Australia last week. Fortunately, the probe crashed harmlessly in the South Pacific. But don't stop looking up yet: the earth's skies remain heavily laden with space junk. In the next 60 days, the U.S. Space Command estimates, four orbiting objects possibly large enough to survive re-entry will...