Free Republic

How US put rogue atom scientist out of business By David Blair in Islamabad (Filed: 09/02/2004) America closed down the Pakistani-based "nuclear supermarket" by confronting President Pervaiz Musharraf with "mind boggling" evidence and threatening isolation and economic sanctions, it emerged yesterday. A high-powered American delegation met Gen Musharraf last October and demanded that he deal with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, who has confessed to trading atomic secrets. Gen Musharraf: 'stunned' by the detailed evidence The pressure on Gen Musharraf was comparable to the aftermath of September 11, when America demanded - and received - Pakistan's...

U.S. Data Gave Iraq Key to Making Nuclear Bomb After hunting for days, the Iraqi physicist finally checked a long-locked attic room. There he spotted a box, coated with decades of dust, and opened it. Sure enough, it was full of reams of data - American data - on how to make a nuclear bomb. "In it were the Manhattan Project books and reports," Imad Khadduri recalls, referring to the U.S. program that produced America's first atomic weapons during World War II. With that and other U.S. material, Khadduri and his colleagues in 1987 painstakingly began collecting patent designs for...

Z Produces Fusion Neutrons, Sandia Scientists Confirm; Huge Pulsed Power Machine Enters Fusion Arena PHILADELPHIA, Pa. (April 7, 2003) -- Throwing its hat into the ring of machines that offer the possibility of achieving controlled nuclear fusion, Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine has created a hot dense plasma that produces thermonuclear neutrons, Sandia researchers announced today at a news conference at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia. The neutrons emanate from fusion reactions within a BB-sized deuterium capsule placed within the target of the huge machine. Compressing hot dense plasmas that produce neutrons is an important...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- April 2, 2003 -- In a discovery that is likely to impact fields as diverse as atomic physics, chemistry and nanotechnology, researchers have identified a new physical phenomenon, electrostatic rotation, that, in the absence of friction, leads to spin. Because the electric force is one of the fundamental forces of nature, this leap forward in understanding may help reveal how the smallest building blocks in nature react to form solids, liquids and gases that constitute the material world around us. Scientists Anders Wistrom and Armik Khachatourian of University of California, Riverside first observed the electrostatic rotation in...

Spy chief urged Churchill to threaten Nazis with atom bomb John Ezard Monday December 2, 2002 The Guardian One of Britain's most senior intelligence officers wanted the wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to threaten to drop atomic bombs on Nazi Germany a year before they were first used on Japan. The scheme was seriously intended to be urged on the US president, Franklin Roosevelt, as a retaliation if V2 rockets were fired on British cities. The call came from MI5's chief spycatcher, Guy Liddell, and revealed in his 12-volume private diaries, disclosed today by the public record office under the 60...

Attack of the Clones is classically implausible. © Lucasfilm Perfect clones can't exist, say physicists. They're not doing down the hottest topic in biology, merely pointing out that the laws of classical physics forbid making an exact copy of an object, living or inanimate, just as the laws of quantum physics have been known to do for 20 years. Scientists have created replicas of individual quantum particles such as atoms and photons with properties almost identical to those of the original. Last month, a team at the University of Oxford, UK, even showed that they could clone a photon...

The BigonAlbert Manque is a physicist of the old school. "Fifty years ago physicists could make experiments using material from the hardware store," says Manque, who works at the Centre de l'Etude des Choses Assez Minuscules in Paris. "I too prefer to work on a small scale." His penchant for tabletop research recently paid off. He and a colleague at the center have discovered an extraordinary new fundamental particle. Although the particle exists for just millionths of a second, it is the size of a bowling ball. Its existence, says Manque, could possibly explain a host of mysterious phenomena. Manque...