Guardian of Lies

After the crisis, the world was told that all of the Russian nuclear weapons were removed from Cuba by Christmas Day, December 25, 1962. But we now know that that was not true because many of the tactical nuclear weapons remained, at least for a while. We also now know that these battlefield weapons were a major point of contention between Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator, and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. Castro wanted the tactical nuclear weapons to remain on the island in hopes that they might ultimately be placed under Cuban control. Castro saw these as the ultimate guarantee that there would be no further attempts by the United States to invade Cuba. However, Khrushchev was concerned because during the missile crisis, Castro had urged the Russians to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States, believing the wi

At the conclusion of the crisis, Ke

However, U.S. officials never knew about the tactical battlefield weapons. So when the large long-range missiles and their warheads, packed into nuclear storage vans, were identified on board ships on their way back to the Soviet Union, they assumed that all weapons of mass destruction were removed from the island. We know now that this was not true.

In November 1963, Ke

Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

The term “tickling the dragon’s tail” was in fact coined by physicist Richard Feynman at Los Alamos in the early days of experimentation following development of the first successful nuclear devices. At the time, physicists were involved in “criticality testing” to determine the precise mass of fissile materials (highly enriched uranium) required to reach near-critical levels in order to trigger a chain reaction. These tests (that were somewhat crude and later determined to be far too dangerous to continue in the same ma

In fact during two incidents, one in August 1945 and the other in May 1946, two scientists, Harry Daghlian Jr. and Louis Slotin, were irradiated with lethal doses of radiation poisoning. In each of those cases the same core of 6.2 kilograms (roughly 14 pounds) of plutonium, later dubbed the “demon core,” was used in the experiments. All further testing of this kind was scrubbed as a result of these accidents.

The Slotin accident reports state that Slotin was engaged in testing the commencement of a fission reaction by bringing two metal hemispheres of highly reactive, beryllium-coated plutonium into close proximity without allowing them to touch. On the date in question, May 21, 1946, after successfully conducting the experiment on numerous occasions, the metal screwdriver used to separate the two hemispheres slipped and allowed contact. Observers reported “a blue glow and a wave of heat that swept through the room” as the air itself became ionized. The heat was unbearable, and the brilliant flash of blue was reported to be brighter than the sunshine of a spring day. A prickling metallic taste was experienced on the tongue of those in the room. Slotin is reputed to have shielded others with his own body. He died nine days later and was buried in Wi

The blue glow is known as cerenkov radiation and is the result of highly charged particles, such as electrons, traveling through transparent material at a speed greater than the local speed of light. There is some debate among scientists as to whether the blue flash actually occurs or is merely the result of ionization of the moisture in the eyeballs of those witnessing the chain reaction.

The Threat of the Drug Cartels

Today the dangers emanating from the Mexican drug cartels, chiefly in Tijuana, Juárez, and Sinaloa, ca

Since then, with the death of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and the disruption of the Cali and Medellín cartels, the organized violence of the drug underworld has only moved closer to the southern border of the United States. In recent years it has intensified and is reputed to have corrupted large segments of Mexico ’s government and law enforcement in the same way that it did in Colombia two decades earlier. To believe that we in this country are immune to such corrupting influences is foolishness.

The cartels are now centered in cities such as Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, and Juárez, where scores of people are murdered daily in ongoing turf wars over who will control the drug trade. That these cartels have links to Middle Eastern terror groups should come as no surprise, since Al Qaeda and others generate much of their revenue for terrorist opera tions from poppy fields in Afghanistan and elsewhere and are believed to be well co

It is also well known that the cartels and those smuggling illicit drugs into the United States have in the past used tu