Issue Update on Information Security and Privacy in Network Environments

This paper updates and develops some key issues that OTA had identified in its earlier report, in light of recent developments in the private sector and in government

Premeditated Deceit: The Atomic Energy Commission Against Joseph August Sauter

About 130 miles northwest of Minneapolis, lies the farming community of Farwell, Minnesota (pop. 103). This is the case of Joe Sauter, a sheep farmer who in 1958 filed a claim against the Atomic Energy Commission for loss of livestock, damage to trees, and personal injuries that he believed were the result of radioactive fallout. This case will detail the efforts of the AEC to cut short the claim of radiation injury by suppressing key radiological data which would have substantiated Sauter\u27s claim and proved damaging to the AEC. Officials within the AEC knowingly and willfully made false statements and representations, not only to Sauter, but to the agricultural representatives who investigated the sheep deaths on Sauter\u27s farm on behalf of the AEC. Later, Sen. Clinton Anderson (D-MN), chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, chairman of two subcommittees on disarmament and international health, both made specific requests to the AEC for radioactive hotspots in Minnesota and North Dakota. The AEC withheld the information learned on Sauter\u27s farm in order to protect the broader interests of the AEC in producing nuclear warheads and promoting nuclear energy

Lunar impact: A history of Project Ranger

Complete history of the Ranger project is provided as a tool for understanding the evolution and operational form of NASA's continuing progress of unmanned space exploration. Basic management techniques, flight operating procedures and technology for NASA's later unmanned lunar and planetary missions were reviewed. Methods for selecting experiments and integrating them with the spacecraft were also investigated

1995 BRAC Commission

Research; Ethics Memos; Congressional Actions; Federal Register Notices. Box 61, GC-005

Journal of the Senate, session of 1989.

Titles and imprints vary; Some volumes include miscellaneous state documents and reports; Rules of the Senat

Guardians at the Gates of Hell : estimating the risk of nuclear theft and terrorism -- and identifying the highest-priority risks of nuclear theft

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 419-466).Methods are presented to assess the global risk of nuclear theft and nuclear terrorism, to identify the nuclear facilities and transport legs that pose the highest-priority risks of nuclear theft, and to evaluate policy approaches to strengthening security and accounting for nuclear stockpiles worldwide. First, a qualitative assessment outlines the demand for black-market nuclear weapons and materials; the plausibility of terrorist construction of an improvised nuclear device; the global stocks and flows of nuclear weapons, plutonium, and highly enriched uranium (HEU), with the global distribution of facilities where they exist; and the widely varying standards of physical protection, control, and accounting in place to prevent theft. Particular dangers of nuclear theft in Russia, Pakistan, and from HEU-fueled research reactors are highlighted. Second, a mathematical model of the global risk of nuclear terrorism is presented, with detailed assessments of what is known about the values of each of the parameters, and of policies that could change each of the parameters to reduce risk.(cont.) Third, a methodology for identifying the nuclear facilities and transport legs posing the highest risks of nuclear terrorism is presented, combining the security levels for each facility or transport leg, the levels of threat they face, and the quantity and quality of nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material they contain. Fourth, the global nuclear security system is described and assessed as a complex, large-scale, integrated, open system (CLIOS). Based on past experiences with different policy tools from negotiated international standards to on-the-ground technical cooperation to install improved security equipment, options to improve system performance in reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism are assessed. A final chapter offers conclusions and recommendations.by Matthew Bunn.Ph.D

Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal

Originally published in 1996. Although the history of commercial-power nuclear reactors is well known, the story of the government reactors that produce weapons-grade plutonium and tritium has been shrouded in secrecy. Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal looks at the origin and development of these production reactors, Rodney Carlisle and Joan Zenzen describe a fifty-year government effort no less complex, expensive, and technologically demanding than the Polaris or Apollo programs—yet one about which most Americans know virtually nothing. Carlisle and Zenzen describe the evolution of the early reactors, the atomic weapons establishment that surrounded them, and the sometimes bitter struggles between business and political constituencies for their share of "nuclear pork." They show how, since the 1980s, aging production reactors have increased the risk of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere and water table. And they describe how the Department of Energy mounted a massive effort to find the right design for a new generation of reactors, only to abandon that effort with the end of the Cold War. Today, all American production reactors remain closed.Due to short half-life, the nation's supply of tritium, crucial to modern weapons, is rapidly dwindling. As countries like Iraq and North Korea threaten to join the nuclear club, the authors contend, the United States needs to revitalize tritium production capacity in order to maintain a viable nuclear deterrent. Meanwhile, as slowly decaying artifacts of the Cold War, the closed production reactors at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina, loom ominously over the landscape