A rugby ball a surprise? Not at all. It's been predicted. Check out Chandresekhar's "Ellipsoidal Figures of Equilibrium". The *degree* of rugby-ball-isation might be unexpected, but not the fact.
I agree with much of your post, mesocyclone, but it's not "irrational" to conflate nuclear weapons with nuclear power. In "India's Nuclear Bomb", the only scholarly post-'98 study of India's choice of the WMD option, George Perkovich argues that weaponisation was driven by India's atomic research elite, rather than by the military or by nationalist politicians.
Perkovich makes the case - convincingly, I feel - that the researchers felt humiliated by their inability to produce economic quantities of nuclear electricity without foreign assistance. To justify their continued existence, and to show the skills of the new generation of engineers trained since Indira Ghandi's 1974 "Peaceful Nuclear Explosive", a new nuclear program was launched.
Here in Britain: Any in-depth debate about the benefits of the Sellafield reprocessing facility - 60 miles upwind of my hometown - versus it's vulnerability to terrorist attack will include a mention of it's importance in maintaining the British nuclear deterrent.
Edwin Kite Pembroke College Cambridge University Pembroke College
Slashdot Mirror
A rugby ball a surprise? Not at all. It's been predicted. Check out Chandresekhar's "Ellipsoidal Figures of Equilibrium". The *degree* of rugby-ball-isation might be unexpected, but not the fact.
I agree with much of your post, mesocyclone, but it's not "irrational" to conflate nuclear weapons with nuclear power. In "India's Nuclear Bomb", the only scholarly post-'98 study of India's choice of the WMD option, George Perkovich argues that weaponisation was driven by India's atomic research elite, rather than by the military or by nationalist politicians.
Perkovich makes the case - convincingly, I feel - that the researchers felt humiliated by their inability to produce economic quantities of nuclear electricity without foreign assistance. To justify their continued existence, and to show the skills of the new generation of engineers trained since Indira Ghandi's 1974 "Peaceful Nuclear Explosive", a new nuclear program was launched.
Here in Britain: Any in-depth debate about the benefits of the Sellafield reprocessing facility - 60 miles upwind of my hometown - versus it's vulnerability to terrorist attack will include a mention of it's importance in maintaining the British nuclear deterrent.
Edwin Kite
Pembroke College
Cambridge University
Pembroke College