Opinion in 1990

The British Government, which has several problems on its mind, does not need new environmental legislation. Its Secretary of State for the Environment has probably ensured that the embarrassment can be postponed.

The present halcyon state of UN members' minds is an opportunity for administrative reform.

The use of a single number to assess the potential damage done by greenhouse gases is premature.

The United States may have something to learn from Britain's different handling of the economy, but the effects of Britain's entry into the European Monetary System will not be known for some time.

Global gloom about the financial outlook, not misplaced, will be relieved only slowly and by a collective will to make interdependence work.

Pugwash has survived the cold war and its ending, but there is a lot remaining for it to do.

Confidentiality will complicate attempts to sequence the human genome in ways that should be faced.

Once again, a review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has ended in disarray. But this time, the consequences could be serious.

The British Treasury, habitually parsimonious, sacrifices sovereignty in getting its pound of flesh from Brussels.

The Academy of Sciences of the USSR has suddenly been declared free from external influence. This is a welcome development, but one full of danger.

The joke that budgets for fusion research are inversely correlated with oil prices (see page 114) is not funny.

Last week's meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at Stockholm seems to have done a useful job, the disappointments of some of its well-wishers notwithstanding.

New Zealand should battle imaginatively against the ill-luck of malevolent geography.

Will the Japanese science bureaucracy's drive to end oriental inscrutability serve simply to whet Western appetites for more information?

Berlin's Hahn-Meitner Institute is in danger. West German researchers could be doing more to save it.

A new section of Nature is not a vehicle for the publication of half-baked ideas.

Science has a fighting chance of survival in the eastern part of Germany. But will it seize the moment?

No amount of resolution by the United Nations can hide the truth that even a quick resolution of the problems created in Kuwait by Iraq (which seems unlikely) will not restore stability to the Middle East.

The British Medical Research Council will have to be more open about its research policy.

The National Academy of Sciences finds China too much of a puzzle.