Issues

After spending many frustrating years trying to develop instruments sensitive enough to sniff out the elusive hydroxyl radical in the troposphere, researchers are finally able to send different types of instruments on field studies and to get similar readings from them.

Very stable tunable lasers now make it possible to test Bose statistics to a part in a million. The oxygen nucleus has passed the test.

Researchers using resonant x‐ray scattering to study surface magnetism may be on the verge of technological advances and of a deeper understanding of magnetism.

The Russian nuclear trinity—nuclear designers, spooks and peasants—held its first reunion last May, in the town of Dubna, near Moscow. A lot of skeletons came out to dance in the warm spring sun

The Soviet Union made no announcement after its first atomic bomb test in 1949—but the US did. This is the hitherto untold story of how the secret was extracted from rainwater.

With the opening and discussion of decades‐old archives in Russia, we can reexamine many questions about the history of Soviet thermonuclear weapons development.

It took a decade for scientists in America to develop the first ideas for a ‘Super’ bomb into a device that ignited ‘the first small thermonuclear flame ever to burn on Earth.’

Early Soviet theoretical work on thermonuclear ignition was aided by espionage, but many important ideas were conceived and developed independently.

The Soviet thermonuclear program moved into high gear in 1950. What conclusions can be drawn from the program's successes in 1953 and 1955?