Related papers: The Effects of Nuclear Terrorism: Fizzles
The atomic bomb uses fission of heavy elements to produce a large amount of energy. It was designed and deployed during World War II by the United States military. The first test of an atomic bomb occurred in July of 1945 in New Mexico and…
The September 11 attack on the US has revealed an unprecedented terrorism with worldwide range of destruction. It is argued to result from the first worldwide percolation of passive supporters. They are people sympathetic to the terrorism…
A concise point kinetic model of the explosion of a prompt supercritical sphere driven by a nuclear fission chain reaction is presented. The findings are in good agreement with the data available for Trinity, the first detonation of a…
This paper considers the state of nuclear and radiological security in the UK and abroad and reports on the methods that could be employed by terrorists with radiological or nuclear material to cause destruction. It is shown that despite…
A model for terrorism is presented using the theory of percolation. Terrorism power is related to the spontaneous formation of random backbones of people who are sympathetic to terrorism but without being directly involved in it. They just…
In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use atomic bombs was abating and among physicists another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project…
The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these…
Quantities with right-skewed distributions are ubiquitous in complex social systems, including political conflict, economics and social networks, and these systems sometimes produce extremely large events. For instance, the 9/11 terrorist…
There is a growing realization that neutrinos can be used as a diagnostic tool to better understand the inner workings of a nuclear weapon. Robust estimates demonstrate that an Inverse Beta Decay (IBD) neutrino scintillation detector built…
In this article, I trace the early historical developments that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Even after the completion of weapons, many scientists continued to argue that nuclear armaments were indispensable for…
Experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory will study collisions between gold nuclei at unprecedented energies. The concern has been voiced that ``strangelets''-hypothetical products of these collisions - may trigger the destruction…
Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically…
For over 40 years, physicists have considered possible uses for neutrino detectors in nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and fissile materials security. Neutrinos are an attractive fission signature because they readily pass through…
On July 16, 1945, the Trinity nuclear test exploded in the desert near Alamogordo, NM. A variety of new diagnostic experiments were fielded in an effort to understand the detailed performance of the nuclear device. This article describes a…
Nuclear reactors have served as the antineutrino source for many fundamental physics experiments. The techniques developed by these experiments make it possible to use these very weakly interacting particles for a practical purpose. The…
In this paper, we deal with the subject of piezonuclear reactions, namely nuclear reactions (of new type) triggered by pressure waves. We discuss the experimental evidences obtained in the last two decades, which can be summarized…
Terrorist attacks all across the world have become a major source of concern for almost all national governments. The United States Department of State's Bureau of Counter-Terrorism, maintains a list of 66 terrorist organizations spanning…
In this paper I give an overview of the status of neutrino oscillation experiments performed using nuclear reactors as sources of neutrinos. I review the present generation of experiments (Chooz and Palo Verde) with baselines of about 1 km…
Atomic nuclei are quantum many-body systems of protons and neutrons held together by strong nuclear forces. Under the proper conditions, nuclei can break into two (sometimes three) fragments which will subsequently decay by emitting…
The nucleosynthetic yield from a supernova explosion depends upon a variety of effects: progenitor evolution, explosion process, details of the nuclear network, and nuclear rates. Especially in studies of integrated stellar yields,…