From his years at Los Alamos and the Nevada Test Site to his meetings with nuclear arms experts in Moscow, former weapons designer Stephen Younger has witnessed firsthand the making of nuclear policy. In this presentation he will guide us from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War and into the present day. He will describe some of the myths and realities about nuclear weapons and how they fit into our globalized, war-plagued world. Does the United States genuinely need a massive stockpile in an era of precision bombs and missile defense? Under what circumstances might we need nuclear weapons in the future? How does the proliferation of weapons in the hands of other nations affect our own nuclear policy? Dr. Younger is a former member of the NIST Atomic Physics Division. His book, The Bomb: A New History, will be available for review and purchase after the lecture. Anyone outside NIST wishing to attend must be sponsored by a NIST employee and receive a visitor badge. For more information, call Kum J. Ham at 301-975-4203. Colloquia are videotaped and available in the NIST Research Library. |
||||||||
