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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LoLoLoLita who wrote (529)	5/13/1998 9:24:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Youe move signore! David: Thanks, this is certainly a great achievement for the Indian scientists but I kinda feel sick about the whole thing. My question is why do we have to come to this,are we humans so stupid that we have hardly moved an inch after all these years in the evolutionary chain of progression? Why is it that India is forced into this situation by the so called 'super powers'???? So many questions but no answers. Oh well the Indian have made their move,let's us see where the next move is going to be and from whom. The Indians do know how to play chess after all the damn game was invented there but haven't been playing much lately.Funny they used to bet their kingdom and even their wives on a good game. Your move signore whomever you are.. [not you David just rhetorics]

To: LoLoLoLita who wrote (529)	5/15/1998 8:43:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Monitors picked up only 1 out of 5 blasts-says New York Times. David and everyone: Here is a bit of interesting news. What is that all about??? [Source:New York Times- For private use only] By WILLIAM J. BROAD Only one of the five nuclear tests that India announced this week was detected by the thousands of seismometers around the world set up to track earthquakes and atomic blasts, renewing a debate among experts about how effectively a test ban treaty can be monitored. Credit:The New York Times ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Some weapons analysts say the failure to detect four of the tests -- only the largest, on Monday, was registered -- has landed a body blow to the international monitoring system set up as part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Others say the lack of data on the four blasts is insignificant, and that scientists might fill the void in the coming weeks as more information is studied. "It raises very serious questions about the verifiability of this treaty," said Frank Gaffney Jr., a former Pentagon official who directs the Center for Security Policy, a research group in Washington that opposes many of the Clinton administration's arms-control goals. But Dr. Gregory van der Vink, director of planning at Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a scientific consortium in Washington, strongly disagreed. While acknowledging that "we really have only one seismic signature, and that's from Monday's blast," he added: "This is not a failure of the international monitoring system but a recognition that there will always be some level below which we won't have a high certainty of making detections." For generations, arms controllers advocating a global ban on the underground testing of nuclear weapons have said that such a treaty could be policed by seismometers. The Clinton administration has championed not only the test ban treaty, which it signed in 1996, but the construction of a global network of seismometers to achieve the monitoring goal. The system costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build and run. The vivid demonstration of the system's weakness is likely to stir a further debate, in military and diplomatic circles, over the usefulness of a policeman who can catch only one in five offenders, and perhaps of the law giving the policeman such authority. In its announcements this week, India said it conducted a series of nuclear test detonations beneath its northwestern desert, three on Monday and two more on Wednesday. But given the lack of independent evidence, the rest of the world only has India's word about the size and scope of most of the announced blasts, or even whether they took place at all. Certainly India already seems to be exaggerating its achievement. Estimates by Indian seismologists of the explosive energy of Monday's large blast are more than double those of American experts. For the Monday series, India said one was a "thermonuclear device," meaning it had more force than an atomic bomb. And it said the tests on Wednesday were in the "sub-kiloton range," meaning they had a force of less than 1,000 tons of high explosive. A bizarre twist, van der Vink said, given that India and Pakistan are old foes, is that the best seismic data on the Indian blast came from a seismometer in Pakistan, 435 miles from the Indian test site. The seismogram of a Monday blast, van der Vink said, held a hint of what was perhaps another blast signature. The clue is a tiny ripple in the flat line of the tracing before it zigs and zags wildly as energy from the blast was received and recorded. That tiny blip, he said, might have been caused by an earthquake or a small bomb detonated just before the big one. Van der Vink said that the energy of the large blast appeared to be equal to about 25,000 tons of high explosive, or about half of what Indian scientists have claimed. The general aim of test-ban monitoring, he added, is to detect globally any nuclear blast larger than 1,000 tons of high explosive. So the system might be expected to catch three of India's five blasts, the two others being in the sub-kiloton range. Dr. Paul Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., said other detections might be made as analysis progressed and as data came in from remote seismometers inaccessible by phone line. "Lots of seismologists are trying to find signs of these other announced tests," he said. "We may succeed when we look closely at the data."