TIME One night last spring, Amiran Chaduneli, a flea-market trader in the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, met with two strangers on a bridge at the edge of Kobuleti, a small town on the country’s Black Sea coast. Over the phone, the men had introduced themselves as foreigners—one Turkish, the other Russian—and they were looking for […]
The US and Russia Should Never Have Stopped Cooperating to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism
Defense One Thanks to disputes over Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere, the United States and Russia — the two countries that hold the vast majority of worldwide fissile material — have ceased nearly all cooperation that could thwart a nuclear terror attack. Such a scenario is not farfetched. There is documented evidence that al-Qaeda and other […]
Cutting Funding to the IAEA Is a Horrible Idea
Foreign Policy It’s not hard to start an argument these days in Washington. President Donald Trump’s newly released budget will surely spark thousands of them, as analysts, partisans, Big Bird, and eventually members of Congress debate both sides of every issue. But there are some things to which most reasonable people can and should agree. […]
US-Russian Space Cooperation: a Model for Nuclear Security
Without the town of Korolev, Russia, Houston would have had a problem. That suburb of Moscow, named after the father of the Soviet space program, produces capsules that are now the only way NASA can transport its astronauts to space and back. America also remains dependent on Russia for engines to power rockets that launch […]
How to Use Dark Matter Detectors to Catch a Uranium Thief
WIRED PHYSICISTS THOUGHT THEY had built the detector to rule them all. A mile underground in a former South Dakota gold mine, the Large Underground Xenon detector was the latest, greatest attempt to find dark matter, the elusive material that physicists think makes up a missing 25 percent of the universe’s mass. But last September, […]
