Blowing the Whistle on Bad Science

It's the biggest comeback of the millennium to date: nuclear weapons.


Only this isn't your parents' nuclear winter. It's a whole new one, as is made clear in a classified Pentagon report leaked last week detailing the Bush administration's willingness to significantly lower the threshold for going nuclear. Apparently the bar has now been set at "in the event of surprising military developments." But as recent events in the Shah-i-Kot Valley proved, there are rarely any other kind. So this pretty much means "at the will of the president."


Last week also saw the release of a report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) that details how the Pentagon, two major military contractors, TRW and Boeing, and a team of high-powered MIT scientists fabricated the success of the nation's first missile defense test -- turning an embarrassing failure into a phony triumph.