December 10, 1993

A huge experimental reactor embodying the process of hydrogen fusion, which fuels the sun, unleashed a burst of energy tonight that broke all records and appeared to pave the way for eventual exploitation of abundant, cheap fusion energy. The achievement crowned a day of lesser landmarks, in which the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory gradually increased the power of its Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor by mixing increasing proportions of tritium into the machine's fuel.

WHEN the Soviet Union fell, statues of Lenin fell, too, in celebrations symbolic of the overturning of government, celebrations that recalled the upending of the Vendome column in Paris by revolutionaries during the previous century, and the toppling of monuments of King George by American Revolutionaries the century before that. Anyone who traveled the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe recalls the ubiquity of Lenin shrines, which is to say the extent to which the visual arts were conscripted into the service of Communist state authority. Stalin was the one who drafted an army of Socialist Realists, as he called them. Their assignment was to extol, in the most unambiguous visual terms, Soviet industry, the Soviet worker, the Soviet military, the Soviet Union's holy trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and of course Stalin himself.

One curious aspect of Russia's first full-fledged election campaign is that the country's leading political figure, President Boris N. Yeltsin, has ostentatiously stayed aloof from the race, neither forming a party nor endorsing any of the 13 blocs competing for seats in Parliament. When Mr. Yeltsin did finally address the electorate on television this evening, it was to issue an impassioned plea to support his draft constitution, which has come under considerable fire for giving the President too much power. Unless the constitution is adopted, he warned, the new Parliament will collapse into new power struggles and Russia could again come to the brink of civil war. The President seemed almost disdainful of the race for Parliament, and his only advice to voters was to support "responsible and honest" candidates and not those filled with hate.

Reacting both to polls that show Americans ever more fearful of violent crime and to Tuesday night's carnage on the Long Island Rail Road, the Clinton Administration today tentatively embraced a proposal to require all gun owners to be licensed. The plan, the details of which will not be settled for many weeks, was announced by Attorney General Janet Reno, who had been ordered by President Clinton to study the idea only on Wednesday. Other than signing the Brady bill mandating a waiting period for purchases of handguns and supporting a plan to restrict the sale of assault rifles, the President has so far moved cautiously on gun control.

Companies Paramount Communications was unfair to shareholders when it accepted Viacom's takeover offer instead of a higher bid from QVC, the Delaware Supreme Court said. The ruling clears the way for a new round of bidding that could drive the price for Paramount higher. QVC's current bid is $10.7 billion in stock and cash, compared with Viacom's offer of $9.5 billion. [ Page A1. ]