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Stories about: nuclear weapons


Iran May Have Launched Its Second Satellite

Media reports in Iran indicate that the country may have just launched its second satellite ever. The spacecraft, designed and built by Iranian scientists, took off aboard a Safir delivery system yesterday, June 15, reports currently making the rounds show. The Iranian government has tasked the Islamic Republic News ...

16 June 2011
04:51 GMT

Nuclear Missiles an Option for Asteroid Defense

According to expert, nuclear missiles and bombs may prove to be a final line of defense if our planet is to defend itself against an incoming asteroid, or other large space rock. A well-aimed strike could either break the threat apart, or nudge it off its course slightly, just enough for it to avoid hitting Earth. Th...

15 December 2010
03:32 GMT

Pinpointing Radiation Sources

A gamma-ray detector that can identify the presence of nuclear materials is nothing new these days, so researchers from the University of Michigan thought to do something even more advanced, and they created a detector that can also pinpoint and give the exact location and type of gamma rays. The device is called Po...

4 November 2010
11:10 GMT

US Nuclear Countermeasures Are Inefficient

A new research paper says that existing nuclear deterrent measures at work in the United States are a danger to national security, and qualifies them as pure fantasy. The document shows that the new strategy, set in place this year, needs immediate revision.The paper appears in the SAGE publication Bulletin of Atomic...

1 November 2010
07:42 GMT

Russians Suggest Using Nuke on the Gulf Oil Spill

A Russian newspaper recently ran a story that proposed a new method of stopping the expanding oil spill currently adorning the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The editors write that the former Soviet Union had good results in such instances when it used targeted, tactical nukes to seal off natural gas or oil leaks. Ex...

13 May 2010
05:48 GMT

CT Scans Can Now Peer Inside Nukes

Aging components inside nuclear missiles and warheads can trigger unfathomable disasters at any moment, therefore analyzing their integrity and function is essential for the nuclear security of all countries with such capabilities. This is also a high priority in the United States, but, up until now, only dismemberin...

21 January 2010
04:42 GMT

Doomsday Clock Set Back

As we were telling you a few days ago, the official ceremony of adjusting the Doomsday Clock took place Thursday, in New York City. Representatives from the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences (BAS), the group that first created the clock in 1947, set back the minute hand on the clock by one minute, and the device now shows ...

15 January 2010
10:08 GMT

Doomsday Clock Gets Update This Week

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock that was created in 1947 by a group of concerned physicists. Its main goal is to provide an alert of how close the world is to a nuclear disaster. Through it, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is trying to make people aware of the possible effects of a nuclear holocaust. It ...

12 January 2010
03:31 GMT

Asteroid Explodes in the Atmosphere

On Friday, the American space agency released a full report, in which it gave details about the asteroid that exploded high in the planet's atmosphere on October 8, in the skies over Indonesia. According to NASA, the asteroid blew up with the strength of 50,000 tons of TNT, an explosion about three times more po...

27 October 2009
03:35 GMT

IAEA Has 'No Evidence' of Nuclear Weapons in Iran

Recently, reports in the press stated that experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had drafted a secret paper, saying that Iran had the necessary expertise required to build a functional atomic bomb. Within a few hours after the report surfaced, officials from the United Nations nuclear watchdog pu...

23 September 2009
03:51 GMT

Global Nuclear-Test Ban 'Now a Possibility'

For the first time ever, it may be that establishing an international ban on the testing of nuclear weapons is within reach, experts say. Plans for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) state that all explosions involving nuclear weapons, be they for civilian or military purposes, are to be banned. The negotiation...

22 September 2009
03:45 GMT

The New Threats of Old Nuclear Missiles

When the Cold War began, the United States and the Russian Federation started stocking up nuclear armament in immense quantities. After it became clear that the two superpowers would not go to war, efforts were made to limit the production of these terrible weapons, and to reduce existing stocks. But the remaining nu...

1 September 2009
18:21 GMT

New IAEA Director General Elected

After an extremely narrow vote, 62-year-old Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano has been appointed as the new Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), succeeding Mohamed ElBaradei as the leader of one of the most important agencies in the world. More than two thirds of the Council voted for Amano...

6 July 2009
01:44 GMT

Weapons-Grade Plutonium Found in US Landfill

The city of Hanford, in Washington State, houses the oldest nuclear processing sites, and is now known as the place where weapons-grade plutonium was found lying around the dump site, enclosed only in a very shaky safe box. The find, besides eliminating a threat, also completes a piece of history, as the sample now c...

21 January 2009
09:10 GMT

IAEA Proposes International Oversight of Nuclear Plants

With many countries in the world, and especially the Middle East, announcing their intentions to build nuclear power plants in the next decade, the risk of more fuel production and reprocessing facilities, capable of creating weapons-grade uranium and plutonium increases sharply. In an attempt to stop this proliferat...

8 January 2009
05:40 GMT

How Uranium Enrichment Works

Uranium enrichment basically refers to the separation process between the uranium-238 and the uranium-235 isotopes. Because only uranium-235 can be used for fission reactions - such as those experienced in nuclear weapons and nuclear powered reactors - and uranium-235 makes up for less than 1 percent of the whole ura...

13 May 2008
06:15 GMT

Antineutrinos to Pose as Alarm Against Plutonium Theft

During nuclear fission reactions nuclear power plants produce a by-product element known as plutonium, which accumulates on the uranium fuel rods. Plutonium cannot occur naturally on Earth and is extremely important for the fabrication of nuclear bombs because it is used in the detonation mechanism initiating the nuc...

9 May 2008
10:10 GMT

Isomer Explosives, not Different from Nuclear Ones

Nuclear weapons generate high explosive energies by either fusing or splitting certain chemical elements. A new type of nuclear explosive developed by the US Department of Defense, on the other hand, uses nuclear reactions in order to determine gamma-ray emissions carrying energies about one thousand times larger tha...

14 April 2008
05:58 GMT

Regional Nuclear War Would Destroy the World

Global or not, a nuclear war would kill us all. And if nuclear weapons didn't do the job, then the Sun would. According to recent studies, a regional global war would cause the ozone layer of the Earth to be destroyed in as little as a decade, all living beings being at the mercy of the Sun's ultraviolet ra...

8 April 2008
03:34 GMT

Future Cellphone Will Be Able to Detect Nuclear Weapons

After 9/11, people finally realized what terrorism is capable of and that terrorists would do anything to accomplish their plans. Correlate that with large amounts of missing nuclear fuel from the ex-soviet countries and you get nuclear terrorism. Most of the radioactive detection systems being currently used are pre...

24 January 2008
05:43 GMT

NIF Hurries to Finalize LASER Installation

Scheduled to start the preliminary experiments in 2008, the technicians at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF for short, double the pace to finalize the installation of the rest of the 192 lasers as the construction completion date is only a year and a half away.Out of the 144 beamlines that are used by NIF to in...

30 November 2007
08:18 GMT


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