Nuclear Weapons United States

The thousands of processors that make up one of the world's two fastest computers fill a 10,000-square-foot building at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the mountains of New Mexico, and they are finally beginning to hum. When it is finished, the giant computer called Blue Mountain will amount to one small step in a mission some say is impossible.

Kaz Suyeishi will never forget the quiet peace of that cloudless August morning in 1945. The 18-year-old was in the front garden of her Hiroshima home, chatting with a friend, when a gleam of silver in the sky caught her attention. "It looked like an angel," she said. "It was the most beautiful airplane. It looked like heaven and peace." The plane was the Enola Gay, dropping the world's first atomic bomb over the Japanese city. That morning, the B-29 released the weapon known as "Little Boy."

The U.S. agency managing the nation's nuclear weapon stockpile is testing its most critical computers, after Pentagon inspectors discovered nobody had verified whether key systems could withstand year 2000 problems. The Pentagon's Inspector General's Office found only 25% of the agency's "mission critical" defense computer systems had been tested before being certified as Y2K compliant.

There was no shortage of inspiration Thursday when Susan Masuoka took an audience on the East Coast back in time to the dawn of the Nuclear Age. There was no shortage of help, either. Masuoka is a Los Angeles native who runs the main exhibit center at Tufts University near Boston. That's where her latest exhibition Thursday night began taking an unusual look at the lingering effects of the atomic bomb.

Some social impacts of modern technology--such as threats to personal privacy--can be scary. Others are terrifying. Take the ongoing, vexing interplay between computer security and nuclear weapons. Over the last three weeks, a new group of computer hackers that calls itself Masters of Downloading has released information to back up its claim to have penetrated sensitive Pentagon computer systems.

The U.S. plan to resume production of nuclear bombs by the year 2003, a cornerstone of national security policy in the post-Cold War era, appears headed for serious trouble, according to one of the nation's top nuclear weapons managers. President Clinton's administration is not providing enough money for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to outfit a new bomb-manufacturing plant and train skilled technicians to meet the 2003 deadline, Paul T.

The United States could wind up aiming its nuclear weapons at huge civilian populations instead of military installations if the nation continues to cut its strategic nuclear force, a chief steward of the U.S. stockpile warned Thursday. With a large nuclear force, the United States in the past has been confident that it could deter aggression by aiming its thousands of warheads at noncivilian targets, such as bases, missile silos and military headquarters, said C.

One of the Pentagon's top scientists said Tuesday that if the United States wants to destroy a suspected chemical weapons plant in Libya, as it has threatened, it will have to use nuclear weapons because ordinary bombs cannot penetrate the underground site. Harold P. Smith Jr., an assistant to Defense Secretary William J.

It was the fall of 1944, and Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets was looking for the perfect airfield for the job--"an isolated location, the farther from civilization the better." When he got to Wendover, he knew he had found it. "I liked what I saw," he wrote years later. "It was remote in the truest sense. Except for the nearby village, with a population of little more than 100, that part of Utah was virtually uninhabited. Surrounding the field were miles and miles of salt flats."

Showtime's "Hiroshima" has President Harry S. Truman joyously proclaiming about dropping the first atomic bomb that instantly killed at least 70,000 Japanese, most of them civilians: "This is the greatest thing in history!" Coming near the end of this ambitious depiction, Truman's line speaks to today's enduring ambivalence over his decision to hit Hiroshima with the bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, and over the U.S. obliterating Nagasaki with a second A-bomb three days later.