Created by cbroo1 on Nov 16, 2010
Last updated: 11/16/10 at 08:58 PM
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North Korea tells U.S. officials it has developed a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of the 1994 agreement. December 21 - The IAEA says North Korea has disabled surveillance devices the agency had placed at the five-megawatt Yongbyon research reactor
Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty is signed between the U.S. and Russia. Each nation would be limited to 1,700 to 2,200 strategic nuclear warheads apiece.
Bush and President Yeltsin sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), which reduces their nations' arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons to 3,000-3,500 and eliminates all MIRVed land-based missiles over the next ten years. March - Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk announces that South Africa had successfully developed nuclear weapons, and then voluntarily destroyed them before signing the NPT in 1991.
United States successfully tests a neutron bomb. The primary lethal effects of a neutron bomb, also known as an enhanced-radiation weapon, come from the radiation damage caused by the neutrons it emits.
August 29 - Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb, Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. It is a copy of the Fat Man bomb and has a yield of 21 kilotons. October 30 - General Advisory Committee of the AEC recommends that the more powerful atomic bombs should be built rather than hydrogen bombs.
April - Max Born, James Franck and many other scientists are compelled to leave their posts at German universities because of their "Jewish physics." October - Leo Szilard recollects, "It occurred to me in October, 1933 that a chain reaction might be set up if an element could be found that would emit two neutrons when it swallowed one neutron." This idea becames a classified British patent in 1935 before fission was discovered.
Ernest O. Lawrence conceives idea for the first cyclotron, a device that greatly increased the speed with which protons could be hurled at atomic nuclei. He was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it.
Albert Einstein publishes the general theory of relativity. The theory proposes that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space
The "plum-pudding" is disproved by the gold foil experiment by Ernest Rutherford, when he discovered the nucleus of the atom. Marie Curie receives a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for the isolation of radium and polonium and for her investigation of their chemical properties.
French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel's experiments led to the discovery of radioactivity. He observed that the element uranium can blacken a photographic plate, even though separated from it by glass or black paper. He also observed that the rays that produce the darkening are capable of discharging an electroscope, indicating that the rays possess an electric charge.
Wilhelm Roentgen of Germany, while conducting experiments with cathode rays, accidentally discovers a new and different kind of ray. These rays were so mysterious that Roentgen named them "x-rays." He received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for this discovery.

