It is a grim, almost unthinkable scenario: a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, smuggled into the United States, is detonated in a major U.S. city, perhaps even the Bay Area.
Top federal officials and medical experts gathered in Washington on Thursday to consider this nightmare vision. Their conclusion: Cities and states are frightfully ill-prepared for dealing with an [...]

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Just ten months before a deadly earthquake struck Sichuan Province’s Beichuan county on May 12, a scientific study warned that the Chinese region was ripe for a major quake.
“The faults are sufficiently long to sustain a strong ground-shaking earthquake, making them potentially serious sources of regional seismic hazard,” the Chinese, European, and U.S. geoscientists wrote [...]

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Uprooted trees, destroyed houses, disease. Burma is in chaos more than a week after Cyclone Nargis, and the real disaster is happening now. Drugs and aid aren’t reaching the people who desperately need it. But the Burmese are helping each other, and anger at the junta is mounting. By our reporter in Rangoon, Burma more…

‘Like [...]

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Never mind the radiation: British contingency planners worried there would be a dramatic shortage of tea in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, recently declassified documents showed Monday.
The shortfall of the staple British beverage would be “very serious” if the country were to come under attack with atomic and hydrogen bombs, said according to a [...]

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