We've seen the rot in political and economic reporting. But science and technology are also key to public policy, and not everyone can see that they screw this up, too.
The NYT online today tells us about nuclear weapons -- or tries to, but not very hard.
(Disclosure: A contributer to this article recently misrepresented me in the NYT, so I'm pissed.)
Let's see how they do with simple, non-controversial, non-political details:
To Repair or to Replace? Debate as Cold War's Bombs Decay
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: April 3, 2005
For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal.
A good start, but keep an eye on the term "nuclear".
As warheads age, the risk of internal rusting, material degradation, corrosion, decay and the embrittling of critical parts increases.
How's that again? Rusting, corrosion, decay, and embrittling all are
kinds of material degradation, and rusting is a
kind of corrosion (of iron, which I doubt the warhead contains). And is this "decay" radioactive decay, or does the warhead contain, say, rotting meat? This like reporting that people are subject to "breast cancer, disease, cancer, decay, and AIDS", except that fewer people will recognize the stupidity.
It was a hydrogen warhead - known as thermonuclear because a small atom bomb at its core worked like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel.
Ooops. Part of a
nuclear weapon has become an "atom bomb" (folkbum would say "atomic"). Oh goody -- let's confuse the public into thinking that "atomic clocks" are nuclear something-or-others, and maybe radioactive. A nucleus is about 1/100,000 the diameter of an atom, and that nuclear reactions yield about 1,000,000 times as much energy as atomic reactions, but what's a factor of a million among friends? Oh -- and that part isn't a bomb, it's a trigger for the bomb. Better call it a "nuclear explosive", or (to keep the grammar stupid) a "nucleus explosive".
...the weapon's so-called radiation case. In usual fashion, it was to be made of uranium, which is nearly twice as heavy as lead.
Heavy? Try "dense". High school teachers have been working on that one for ages.
The case had to hang together for microseconds as the exploding atom bomb generated temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun...
There's that "atom bomb" again.
Even with their seeming success, arms designers continued to do underground tests to determine how cases would behave in the first milliseconds after the atomic blast.
Milliseconds? Ooops, off by a factor of a thousand. They got it right the first time: It's microseconds. After milliseconds, the case is long gone, part of a fireball.
...fuses, electronics, batteries, cables, valves and the conventional high explosives that light the atomic match.
Atomic, atomic. How retro. It would be less misleading to use "nukular".
...how radiation cases act in the first microseconds of a nuclear blast...
Ah, very good! Back to microseconds. Those factors of a thousand... Let's see, is a million larger or smaller than a billion...? They keep track of these things in the financial pages.
Sandra Blakeslee and Kenneth Chang contributed reporting for this article.
Does that mean that they share the blame?
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Why does this matter?
Sound public policy often depends on sound information about science and technology. The screwups above are politically neutral, but suggest that the writers don't know what they're talking about, and don't much care. I know from experience that they don't check with their sources to correct this stuff before feeding it the public. If they're this sloppy with the simple stuff, why think that they get the rest right?
One more thing to fix. Maybe public embarrassment will help.