The Bush administration's plan for a "renaissance" in nuclear power may be crimped by tightening world-wide supplies of uranium and a lack of enrichment facilities to turn the uranium into fuel for power plants.
Often overlooked amid the controversy over the legality of the Bush administration's eavesdropping without warrants is a huge increase in recent years in the number of wiretaps conducted with court approval. Smaller telecom companies in particular have sought help from outsiders in order to comply with the court-ordered subpoenas, touching off a scramble among third parties to meet the demand for assistance.
The authors warn that delay in resolving the North Korean nuclear standoff could allow them time to sell nuclear materials to terrorist groups.
An Indian scientist has devised a new way to determine with complete certainty whether a given number is prime, a breakthrough that could obsolete existing internet cryptography protocols.
Governments worldwide are stepping up the search for potentially hazardous asteroids.
Scientists warn that U.S. plans to deploy space based weapons and space based missile defense could create enough space debris to trap humans on earth indefinitely.
Loren B. Thompson defends the U.S. nuclear posture review of pre-emption by arguing that the U.S. is unlikely to act on every tenet of the new policy but it is important for our adversaries to believe that we might.
The successes of unmanned reconnaissance planes in Kosovo and, more recently, in Afghanistan, have given new life to military robots. Now, the Pentagon and military contractors are developing a host of robots that can operate not just in the air, but in other venues as well.
All U.S. missile defense plans will rely on a constellation of low-orbiting satellites known as SBIRS Low that are supposed to resolve what is probably the toughest challenge of missile defense: finding and tracking with pinpoint accuracy complex warheads traveling at 15,000 miles an hour and surrounded by dozens of decoys. However, there is substantial debate over whether defense contractors can come up with the crucial satellite technology -- especially on the timetable that Congress and the Pentagon are demanding.
The U.S. Commerce Department has put together a team of eclectic, low-profile researchers -- among them, a college physics professor, a nuclear engineer and a veteran of the federal government's Y2K preparations -- in a project mischeviously called "Project Matrix". The team is trying to map the government's electronic underbelly to identify the systems and services whose failure or disruption by a hacker or foreign enemy could cripple the U.S. military or economy or threaten public health, and to determine how those systems are linked with, or "cascade" upon, others.