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The escalation of the crisis in relations between the United States and Soviet Union in October 1962 had a most direct impact on the lives of the staff officers for the Kirov rocket corps, named after the city nearest its bases in the Ural Mountains. On October 23, I received orders to go to one of the two divisions of our corps in which intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) of the 8K64 type -- SS-7 in American terminology -- had recently been put on combat duty.

In 1954, Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, gave a speech in which he famously predicted that "our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." Whether he was talking about fission reactors or a secret fusion project is unclear, but he was wrong in either case. What did turn out to be too cheap to meter, however, was water.

We can thank billiard balls for our modern-day, plastic-filled lives. For most of human history, everyday items such as combs were made from expensive animal parts, like tortoise shells. Then, in the 1860s, billiards became a popular pastime. Unfortunately, elephants had to be killed so that their ivory tusks could be made into billiard balls, and soon elephants were rapidly being hunted to extinction. One enterprising New York billiards supplier even offered $10,000 in gold to anyone who could come up with a good substitute for ivory.

米国の原子力産業は、フクシマ・タイプの事故は米国では起こりそうにないと主張している。米国の原子力発電所で津波の被害に遭いやすいものはほとんどないからだという。しかし、どの原子力発電所も、設計上耐えられることになっている「設計基準事故」より深刻な事象に耐えられると想定することはできない。米国原子力規制委員会（NRC）は、既存および新設の原子力発電所が設計上耐え得るようにすべき事象の範囲を拡げるべきだ。

On March 11 -- just days after the Bulletin's special issue on the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy was published -- I sat in my home office in Washington, DC, listening to NPR, my stomach knotting with each passing hour.

"… At least two nuclear power plants are in trouble, thousands of people have been evacuated from the area near those plants on the coast in Fukushima Prefecture. The situation seems especially bad at one nuclear plant in particular. …"

2011年3月11日に日本を襲った巨大な波は、甚大な人的悲劇と未曾有の原子力発電所の危機をもたらしただけ