"It is difficult to believe, but in all the decades of imagining nuclear-emergency scenarios, engineers did not design for an event so human and inevitable as war."
New forensic research techniques could fill in missing details of the progress of Nazi nuclear weapons programs and improve contemporary efforts to enforce nuclear nonproliferation.
American energy policy has utterly failed to even acknowledge the hazards posed by the production of nuclear waste; concern about climate change must not enable a careless expansion of nuclear power.
"Nevertheless, the next ten days demonstrated the value of international medical cooperation in moments of crisis, even when politics might make success seem impossible." writes Yair Reisner, an Israeli doctor whose help was requested by Russian officials after the disaster.
A uranium nucleus could split in half releasing huge amounts of energy. This finding at the dawn of World War II was the start of a scientific and military race to understand and use this new atomic source of power.
