Next Flu Pandemic: What to Do Until the Vaccine Arrives?

Most scientists consider another influenza pandemic inevitable, but there is little information on how best to protect the public before a vaccine can be made available

Response to Uzi Rubin’s “Comments on the UCS Report on Countermeasures”

We recently received—via a third party—a critique of our report, Countermeasures. The critique, written by Uzi Rubin and titled “Comments on the UCS Report on Countermeasures,” is dated 18 July 2000. Rubin states that his study was “considerably less exhaustive” than the countermeasures report and was done by “a small team of experienced missile engineers.” Rubin’s critique has not been published, but instead has been distributed informally in the United States. Here we respond to Rubin’s points in the order that he makes them. As we will make clear, Rubin’s criticisms are either technically invalid or based on incorrect characterizations of the assumptions that underlay our work

Toward True Security: A U.S. Nuclear Posture for the Next Decade

This report proposes a nuclear weapons policy for the United States for the next decade that reflects today’s political and strategic realities. By contrast, the official policies and doctrines of both the United States and Russia are mired in Cold War patterns of thought. Eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, both countries still maintain massive nuclear arsenals ready for nearly instant use. Although nuclear war plans differ in size and detail from those drawn up 20 or more years ago, their basic structure remains unchanged. The US nuclear arsenal and doctrine were designed to deter a deliberate large-scale Soviet nuclear attack on the United States and a massive Soviet conventional attack on US European allies, as well as to preserve the option of a disarming first strike against Soviet nuclear forces. This force structure and doctrine are obsolete and jeopardize American national security.Federation of American Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, Union of Concerned Scientist

Tribute (#03) to Hans Bethe by Richard L. Garwin from Celebrating "An Exemplary Life"

This is the tribute to Hans Bethe by Richard L. Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, Physicist, and Bethe arms control collaborator, given on September 18, 2005 at the Statler Auditorium at Cornell University.1_xrkcs6h

The first muon spin rotation experiment

The February 15, 1957 issue of Physical Review Letters shows the first muon precession curve resulting from the stopping of `85 MeV' muons in graphite, and the resulting counting rate in a gate of fixed delay, duration, and orientation, as a function of an applied vertical magnetic field. The purpose of the four-day experiment was to test the conservation of parity in the weak interactions. It involved the sudden recognition that existing muon beams would be polarized if parity were not conserved, together with the appreciation that the angular distribution of decay electrons from the population of stopped muons could be observed (much more reliably and sensitively) by the variation with time or current of the detections in a fixed counter telescope than by the measurement of the decay asymmetry of nominally fixed muon spins. This retrospective paper explains the context, the state of the art at the time, and what we expected as a consequence of this experiment. We went on to study more accurately the magnetic moment of the muon, its gyromagnetic ratio-g-and only to a small extent used mu SR to investigate the environment of the muon in matter. Much of the paper treats the instrumentation of the time - especially that adopted in the early 1950s. The essential tools of nanosecond-range coincidence circuits and adiabatic light pipes for scintillation counters are discussed. The paper closes with some later work of the author and his colleagues - measurements of the magnetic moment of the muon and especially the CERN measurement of muon g-2. An expanded version of this presentation is posted at http:// www.fas.org/RLG. (7 refs)