Nuclear Tests

Scientists exploded a powerful nuclear weapon Friday deep beneath the Nevada Test Site in the third announced nuclear test of the year. The blast, which had been delayed twice previously, had a yield of up to 150 kilotons, the largest allowed under existing treaties with the Soviet Union. The explosion registered 5.0 on the Richter scale at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo. "It was pretty good sized, but some register as much as 6.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said Friday that security problems created by rival Pakistan forced his government to order nuclear tests in 1998. "It was not our intention to conduct nuclear tests.... But our neighbor creating security problems wasn't acceptable to us," the Press Trust of India news agency quoted Vajpayee as saying at a political rally in a southern city. India carried out a series of nuclear tests in 1998. Pakistan responded with its own tests within weeks.

A seismic study found evidence of 71 small, previously secret nuclear bomb tests in Nevada, suggesting U.S. and Soviet officials could detect any cheating if the two nations agree to a test ban treaty, an environmental group said in Las Vegas. "The study does offer evidence (that) it is difficult to hide a militarily significant testing program," said Thomas Cochran, a senior staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. The NRDC's compilation of U.S.

The nuclear tests in Nevada are an outrage. They serve no useful purpose whatsoever except to jack up our President's fantasies of obliterating the Commies. They are detrimental to the environment. They engender hostility. The argument that we have to set off nuclear bombs is rather specious in face of the fact that the Soviets have halted testing, and I haven't heard any other argument or excuse for this unconscious behavior emanating from the White House. I can only conclude that our country has fallen into the hands of fascists whose primary concern is military superiority.

The Soviet Union, bowing to extraordinary political pressure from its citizens, has decided to end underground nuclear explosions at its principal test site in South-Central Asia within three years and move a sharply reduced atomic testing program to a remote island within the Arctic circle, according to Soviet and U.S. sources.

The United States and the Soviet Union both conducted underground nuclear tests Saturday, the two governments announced. The American test was conducted 1,030 feet beneath the surface of Rainier Mesa at the Nevada Test Site, a Department of Energy spokesman said. The 9 a.m. blast, code-named Mission Ghost, was a weapons-effect test with a yield of less than 20 kilotons (equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT), spokesman Jim Boyer said.

Carbon-14 fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s is embedded in tooth enamel, allowing scientists to estimate age to within 1.6 years, Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm reported this week in the journal Nature. Tooth enamel contains 0.4% carbon. Concentrations in teeth thus reflect the amount in the atmosphere when the enamel was formed. It does not work for individuals born before 1943 because their teeth formed before nuclear tests began.

China conducted a nuclear test today but promised it would start a moratorium on further tests beginning Tuesday. The state-run New China News Agency said the test was conducted "successfully." It gave no details. China is the only acknowledged nuclear power still conducting nuclear tests and has been criticized worldwide for doing so. The announcement of the test came only hours before the resumption of negotiations in Geneva for a nuclear test-ban treaty.

China said Saturday that it maintains a "very restrained attitude" toward nuclear tests but didn't deny U.S. allegations it was planning one. U.S. officials have suggested China is preparing to detonate a nuclear weapon at its remote testing site in the northwestern Xinjiang province. President Clinton urged Beijing on Friday to drop the reported plans.