be outstripping the US in numbers of these respective weapons. A scientific furore followed. Some experiments carried out were able to reproduce Derjaguin's findings, while others failed. Several theories were advanced to explain the phenomenon. Some proposed it was the cause for increasing resistance on trans-Atlantic phone cables, while others predicted that if polywater were to contact ordinary water, it would convert that water into polywater, echoing the doomsday scenario in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. By the 1970s, polywater was well known in the general population. During this time, several people questioned the authenticity of what had come to be known in the West as polywater. The main concern was contamination of the water, but the papers went to great lengths to note the care taken to avoid this. Denis Rousseau and Sergio Porto of Bell Labs carried out infrared spectrum analysis, which showed polywater to be mostly chlorine and sodium. Denis Rousseau undertook an experiment with his own sweat after playing a handball game at the lab and found it had identical properties. He then published a paper suggesting polywater was nothing more than water with small amounts of biological impurities. Another wave of research followed, this time more tightly controlled. Invariably, polywater could no longer be made. Chemical analysis found the samples of polywater to be contaminated with other substances (explaining the changes in melting and boiling points due to colligative properties), and examination of polywater by electron microscopy showed it also contained small particles of various solids – from silica to phospholipids, explaining its greater viscosity. When the experiments which had initially produced polywater were repeated with thoroughly cleaned glassware, the anomalous properties of the resulting water vanished, and even the scientists who had originally advanced the case for polywater agreed it did not exist. In August 1973, Derjaguin and N. V. Churaev published a letter in the journal Nature in which they wrote; "these [anomalous] properties should be attributed to impurities rather than to the existence of polymeric water molecules". Denis Rousseau used polywater as a classic example of pathological science and has since written on other examples as well. It has been suggested that polywater should have been dismissed on theoretical grounds. The laws of thermodynamics predicted that, since polywater had a higher boiling point than ordinary water, it meant it was more stable, and thus all of Earth's water should have turned spontaneously