Moscow | Nov 12

AFP - Talks between Moscow and Washington to replace a key nuclear disarmament treaty that expires next month have hit a snag over proposed restrictions on Russian missiles, a newspaper said Thursday.

The dispute threatens to derail high-stakes talks on a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which US President Barack Obama's administration hopes to replace before it expires on December 5.

The Kommersant daily, citing an expert familiar with the START talks, said Washington was seeking to keep a provision from the original treaty for monitoring Russia's arsenal of mobile ground-based missiles.

"They are offering to keep and even strengthen control over our mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) such as the Topol," the expert was quoted as saying by Kommersant.

Russia is against the proposal since the United States currently does not have its own mobile ground-based ICBMs and it is therefore of "unilateral character," he said.

The maximum number of "carriers" capable of delivering nuclear warheads remains another sticking point, the newspaper reported.

Andrew E. Kramer | Moscow | Nov 10

NYT - What’s powering your home appliances?

For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.

“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war.

But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn’t secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.

Already nervous about a supply gap, utilities operating America’s 104 nuclear reactors are paying as much attention to President Obama’s efforts to conclude a new arms treaty as the Nobel Peace Prize committee did.

In the last two decades, nuclear disarmament has become an integral part of the electricity industry, little known to most Americans.

Salvaged bomb material now generates about 10 percent of electricity in the United States — by comparison, hydropower generates about 6 percent and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal together account for 3 percent.

Utilities have been loath to publicize the Russian bomb supply line for fear of spooking consumers: the fuel from missiles that may have once been aimed at your home may now be lighting it.

Erich Follath & Holger Stark | Nov 2

Spiegel Online - How Israel Destroyed Syria's Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor

In September 2007, Israeli fighter jets destroyed a mysterious complex in the Syrian desert. The incident could have led to war, but it was hushed up by all sides. Was it a nuclear plant and who gave the orders for the strike?

Seymour Hersh | Nov 16 Issue | New Yorker

Obama did not say so, but current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that his Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis. At the same time, the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities—goals that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the Pakistan Army, has long desired. In June, Congress approved a four-hundred-million-dollar request for what the Administration called the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, providing immediate assistance to the Pakistan Army for equipment, training, and “renovation and construction.”

The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust. Many Pakistanis believe that America’s true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, who view the weapons as symbols of their nation’s status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India. (India’s first nuclear test took place in 1974, Pakistan’s in 1998.)

Seoul | Nov 4

AFP - The United States and North Korea have agreed to hold two rounds of bilateral meetings before the North returns to multilateral nuclear disarmament talks, a US news report said.

The agreement was reached at last month's meetings in New York and San Diego between officials from the two sides, Foreign Policy magazine said on its website, in a report seen Wednesday.

The communist state, putting further pressure on the United States to start direct talks, announced Tuesday it has completed reprocessing spent fuel rods to produce more plutonium for its atomic weapons programme.

The US State Department responded that the plutonium production "runs counter" to the North's disarmament commitments and violates UN Security Council resolutions.

It said it has not decided when and where to hold bilateral talks involving the US special envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth.

THE DEPROLIFERATOR -- Recent statements by its chief representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency suggest that Iran may be backing away from an agreement to ships it low-enriched nuclear fuel to Russia for further enriching. Even, though, after agreeing to the deal, President Ahmadinejad, ever the master of the sweeping gesture, said the West had "moved from confrontation to cooperation."

Among reasons to hope that Iran relents is a fact of which many who proclaim Iran has a right to a nuclear program seem ignorant. Turns out that transubstantiating the fuel used for nuclear energy into nuclear-weapon fuel, far from a miracle, is all too commonplace.

Peter Grier | Washington | Oct 20

CSM - A US intelligence report on concerns about Kazakhstan's nuclear deals is misleading, said the Kazakh government Monday.

A Kazakhstan government official says that, contrary to recent reports, his country is not looking to do nuclear deals with countries that have a mixed record on proliferation.

Roman Vassilenko, chairman of the Committee for International Information at Kazakhstan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says that his country does see itself as a potential nuclear power – but a "peaceful and responsible" one that has no interest in nuclear weapons or nuclear commerce with potential proliferators.

On October 15, The Christian Science Monitor published an article on a US intelligence report that expressed concerns about the geopolitical implications of some of Kazakhstan's nuclear deals.

Both the article and the report "seem utterly misleading", says Mr. Vassilenko.

Kazakhstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union, returned 1,000 nuclear weapons soil to Russia following the dissolution of the USSR. It shut down a former weapons test site where the Soviets detonated 650 nuclear bombs, points out Mr. Vassilenko in an e-mailed response.

"Kazakhstan has clearly seen enough of nuclear horrors to be firmly committed to peaceful nuclear energy," he says.

Aug 29

BBC - A court in Pakistan has lifted the final restrictions on controversial nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, allowing him total freedom of movement.

Dr Khan, whose work helped Pakistan become a nuclear state, spent years under house arrest after he admitted selling off nuclear weapons secrets.

In February 2009 most restrictions on him were lifted, but he still had to notify authorities of his movements.

He subsequently filed a petition arguing for further freedoms.

Dr Khan confessed to transferring nuclear weapons technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran in 2004 but was later pardoned by former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

He has since said that the charges against him were false and that his confession was "forced".

Andrew Rettman | Aug 27

EU Observer - The United States has all-but abandoned plans to house anti-missile bases in Poland and the Czech republic, according to a senior White House lobbyist.

Riki Ellison, the chairman of the 10,000 member-strong Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, said in Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on Thursday (26 August) that the US has changed its mind to avoid a rift with Russia and is now looking at Israel, Turkey, the Balkans or ship-borne facilities instead.

"The signals given by generals from the Pentagon are clear: the current US government is looking for different solutions on the question of missile defence than Poland and the Czech republic," he said.

"The new [US] team is paying more attention to Russian arguments," he added.

"Obama's people believe that many problems in the world can be more easily solved together with Moscow ...It's a question of priorities. For many Democrats, the priority is disarmament and they are capable of sacrificing a lot in order to achieve a new agreement with Russia on the reduction of strategic [nuclear] weapons."

Tel Aviv | July 8

UPI - Despite differences between the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama and Israel over Iran and the Middle East peace process, and human-rights groups' allegations of war crimes against the Palestinians, Washington continues to provide the Jewish state with billions of dollars' worth of arms and equipment every year.

And there's no sign that this will change any time soon.

Indeed, Obama has endorsed a military aid package worth up to $30 billion, without conditions, over the next 10 years that was set up by the administration of President George W. Bush in 2007.

That represents a 25 percent increase in the vast U.S. military and security assistance given to Israel during the Bush administration.

With annual military aid of some $2 billion, Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. largesse in the world.

Arms sales have largely been an important instrument of U.S. foreign policy for many years. But these days there are new dynamics to consider.

CLIFFORD J. LEVY and ELLEN BARRY | Moscow | July 8, 2009

New York Times - MOSCOW — Let other capitals go all weak-kneed when President Obama visits. Moscow has greeted Mr. Obama, who on Tuesday night concluded a two-day Russian-American summit meeting, as if he were just another dignitary passing through.

Crowds did not clamor for a glimpse of him. Headlines offered only glancing or flippant notice of his activities. Television programming was uninterrupted; devotees of the Russian Judge Judy had nothing to fear. Even many students and alumni of the Western-oriented business school where Mr. Obama gave the graduation address on Tuesday seemed merely respectful, but hardly enthralled.

George Jahn | July 3

AP - The 35-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency chose a veteran Japanese diplomat as the agency's next head on Thursday, in a tight vote reflecting stubborn North-South divisions of the U.N. nuclear monitoring organization.
Yukiya Amano collected 23 votes, compared to 11 for Abdul Samad Minty of South Africa, with one abstention, barely giving him the two-thirds majority needed for victory.
Even that tight margin came only after hard-fought preliminary sessions. A March vote between the two men — Amano, backed by the U.S. and like-minded countries, Minty supported by the developing world — was inconclusive, showing the divide separating the two camps.

Ewen MacAskill | Washington | June 19

The Guardian -

Kang Nam vessel suspected of transporting weapons, a violation of UN sanctions imposed last week

Tension was growing in the Pacific today as the US navy prepared to intercept a North Korean cargo ship suspected of carrying weapons in defiance of a United Nations ban.

The US navy has been tracking the Kang Nam since its left a North Korean port on Wednesday.

It would be the first ship to be intercepted since the UN last week imposed sanctions on North Korea as punishment for conducting an underground nuclear test last month. The sanctions ban the import and export of nuclear material, missiles and all other weapons other than small arms.

A USS destroyer, the John McCain (named after the father of the Republican senator, who was an admiral), was awaiting orders to intercept the ship off the Chinese coast.

The UN sanctions only allow the US to hail a North Korean ship and demand to be allowed to conduct a search, but not forcibly board it. North Korea has said a forcible search would be regarded as an act of war.

This has the ability to tremendously backfire

Alan Cowell | Paris | June 17

NYT - Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, said it was his “gut feeling” that Iran’s leaders wanted the technology to build nuclear weapons “to send a message to their neighbors, to the rest of the world: ‘Don’t mess with us.’ ”

He spoke in a BBC interview broadcast Tuesday and Wednesday as protesters took to the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, demanding that last Friday’s disputed election result be overturned and confronting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the leadership’s biggest domestic challenge since the Islamic Revolution three decades ago.

Dr. ElBaradei has made similar points in the past, officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency, of which he is director general, said Wednesday, but his latest remarks were less hedged with diplomatic caveats than previously.

June 12

AFP -

The UN Security Council was expected to adopt tougher sanctions targeting North Korea's atomic and ballistic missile programs in response to the Stalinist state's nuclear defiance.

The 15-member body was to meet at 15:00 GMT for a likely vote on a draft resolution agreed by its five veto-wielding permanent members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - plus Japan and South Korea.

The text calls on UN member states to slap biting sanctions on North Korea.

They include tougher inspections of cargo suspected of containing banned items related to North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile activities, a tighter arms embargo with the exception of light weapons and new financial restrictions.

Passage is a foregone conclusion - nine votes in favor are required with no veto - after more than two weeks of intensive bargaining among the seven sponsors.

The compromise text seeks to punish Pyongyang for its May 25 underground nuclear test and subsequent missile firings in violation of UN resolutions.

_{** S.Korea sends more troops to N.Korea border
** No signs of another N. Korea nuke test -- Seoul''s DM
** US fears third nuclear test in North Korea
** Pyongyang puts squeeze on enemy
** Bosworth Offers Olive Branch to NK}

Washington | June 9

AFP - Indonesia on Monday offered a boost to President Barack Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world, pledging to ratify a treaty banning nuclear tests if the US Senate does so.

Obama said in April said he would ask the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), part of his ambitious goal of eliminating nuclear weapons unveiled in a speech in Prague.

Indonesia is one of nine countries including the United States that need to ratify the treaty, which would ban all nuclear explosions everywhere for any purpose, to come into force.

"We share his vision of a world in which nuclear weapons have been eradicated," Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said on a visit to Washington.

"We trust that he will succeed in getting the CTBT ratified - and we promise that when that happens, Indonesia will immediately follow suit," he said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Spencer S. Hsu | June 8

WaPo - President Obama's contingency plan to help finance production of a swine flu vaccine with funds set aside to develop defenses against biological attacks would weaken the nation's preparedness for terrorism, the leaders of a bipartisan commission on weapons of mass destruction said yesterday.

The White House asked Congress on Tuesday for authority to spend up to $9 billion more for an H1N1 flu vaccine and other preparations against the novel flu strain that first appeared in April.

Of the total, the administration asked Congress to provide $2 billion in "contingent" funding. Another $3 billion could come from the Project BioShield Special Reserve Fund, created in 2004 to field countermeasures against nuclear, biological or chemical threats; $3.1 billion from stimulus funds appropriated to spur economic recovery; and $800 million from the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Using BioShield funds for flu preparedness will severely diminish the nation's efforts to prepare for WMD events and will leave the nation less, not more, prepared," the commission's chairman, former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), and vice chairman, former senator James M. Talent (R-Mo.), wrote to Obama in a letter sent yesterday and in another dated Wednesday to his budget director, Peter Orszag.

Raiding BioShield would weaken the ability of private firms to raise credit and sustain long-term research and development on drugs to respond to bioterror threats, for which there is no private market, industry officials said. The former lawmakers said the H1N1 influenza virus poses a public health threat that merits its own funding.

Arno Mayer

CounterPunch -

Israel is in the grip of a kind of collective schizophrenia. Not only its governors but the majority of its Jewish population have delusions of both grandeur and persecution, making for a distortion of reality and inconsistent behavior. Israeli Jews see and represent themselves as a chosen people and part of a superior Western civilization. They consider themselves more cerebral, reasonable, moral, and dynamic than Arabs and Muslims generally, and Palestinians in particular. At the same time they feel themselves to be the ultimate incarnation of the Jewish people’s unique suffering through the ages, still subject to constant insecurity and defenselessness in the face of ever-threatening extreme and unmerited punishment.

SUMMARY: A/S State EAP nominee Kurt Campbell will have his confirmation hearing before SFRC Asia subc. chair Jim Webb next Tuesday morning, 6/10. Rumors of "issues" are dispelled.

That pesky rumor about N. Korean nuclear assistance to Burma has been around for a couple of years, but lately it's been coming around a lot.

Informed folks can't talk explicitly, but do say they've not been shown evidence of direct NK-Burma nuclear plant activity, such as happened with Syria. Nuclear technology discussion? Ummm...another matter.

So confirmation would add further pressure on China, Russia to really cooperate with "containing" the DPRK nuclear threat, currently defined by the US as proliferation.

But after hearing for the umpteenth time lately that we should check-out what N. Korea is doing in the nuclear arena with the charmers in Burma, we did, asking a senior government official about it just this morning, in fact.

The response, brief and to the point, was that this is an "unsubstantiated rumor".

Now would Sherlock Holmes think he was actually being told it might be true, because, after all, said senior government official didn't reply that the whole thing is balderdash, don't make a fool of yourself?

We will confess to the temptation, but were saved, for today, at least, with an informed source who said that while the facts which HAVE been briefed cannot be discussed, it would be accurate to say that no facts have been briefed on any DPRK nuclear plant (a la Syria) to Burma.

And, the source added, while one would "highly doubt" the DPRK has done that, WERE any such facts to be briefed, that would indeed be a very big deal.

Having carefully led us through the briar patch, however, the source went on to note that it's long been on public record that Burma and N. Korea have extended military ties and sales, including a military cooperation agreement, and, of course, that Russia has supplied Burma with a nuclear power plant.

Accordingly, "it's not hard to imagine North Korean nuclear technology talks with Burma."

Oh oh...wait...what are you trying to tell us?

Sigh...

June 3

BBC - A document providing confidential details of US civilian nuclear sites was accidentally posted on the internet, the government has admitted.

The 266-page document included the precise location of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons, the Obama administration said.

The Government Printing Office website took down the posting on Tuesday after experts expressed concern.

US officials insisted the information detailed was not a security threat.

The document, which lists itself as "sensitive but unclassified", contains maps and information on hundreds of US civilian nuclear sites.

No military installations are included but the document does cover the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia.

An internet site of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington had highlighted the document's existence on Sunday, saying it was "a one-stop shop for information on US nuclear programs".

May 31

VOA News -
_{(The 10-meter-diameter target chamber, installed in June 1999, weighs 287,000 pounds Photo: NIF)}

The world's strongest laser - powerful enough to create conditions as hot as inside the Sun - was unveiled Friday in the western U.S. state of California for an audience of politicians and scientists.

The stadium-sized National Ignition Facility actually houses 192 lasers that all point towards a tiny blob of hydrogen.

When the lasers shoot, scientists expect the hydrogen will fuse into helium, a chemical reaction like what makes stars burn and nuclear bombs explode.

The project began in 1997 and cost the federal government an estimated $3.5 billion. The government says it will allow scientists to study in a lab what happens in a nuclear explosion. They say it will help scientists assess the safety of the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal.

But critics say the laser is unnecessary and costly. Some also worry it could help develop new nuclear weapons.

Also: AFP, AP, The Guardian and Discover Magazine Blog

Howard LaFranchi | May 25

CSM - The Obama administration, anxious to demonstrate America's willingness to deepen relations with reliable partners in the Muslim world before the president's much-heralded speech to that community early next month, has signed a controversial nuclear cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates.

The nuclear accord, negotiated by the Bush administration but left for President Obama's sign-off, is touted by the new administration – as it was by the former – as a model for future civilian nuclear cooperation with Arab countries.

With Obama set to lay out his vision for America's cooperation with Muslim countries from Cairo June 4, the US-UAE accord is also seen as a counterpoint to Iran's nuclear program and its combative relations with the international community.

In endorsing the accord, administration officials highlight the UAE's agreement to forego the production of nuclear fuel, which could eventually be used for production of a nuclear weapon – the issue at the crux of Iran's standoff with the US and other world powers.

But opponents of the accord blast it as a short-sighted plan designed to secure lucrative contracts for US corporations that build nuclear reactors, yet one which may result in a string of plants producing nuclear fuel across a very volatile region.

"The US does not have a strategy to deal with this very real issue of proliferation, all they have is a sale," says Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization that promotes a nuclear-weapons-free world. "We shouldn't be sprinkling the Middle East with nuclear power reactors until we figure out how to stop them from turning out nuclear bombs."

Julian Borger | May 15

The Independent - The number of potential nuclear weapons states could more than double in a few years unless the major powers take radical steps towards disarmament, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog has warned.

In a Guardian interview, Mohamed ElBaradei said the threat of proliferation was particularly grave in the Middle East, a region he described as a "ticking bomb".

ElBaradei, the outgoing director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the current international regime limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was in danger of falling apart under its own inequity. "Any regime … has to have a sense of fairness and equity and it is not there," he said in an interview at his offices in Vienna.

"We still live in a world where if you have nuclear weapons, you are buying power, you are buying insurance against attack. That is not lost on those who do not have nuclear weapons, particularly in [conflict] regions."

He predicted that the next wave of proliferation would involve "virtual nuclear weapons states", who can produce plutonium or highly enriched uranium and possess the knowhow to make warheads, but who stop just short of assembling a weapon. They would therefore remain technically compliant with the NPT while being within a couple of months of deploying and using a nuclear weapon.

Jon Herskovitz | Seoul | Apr 14

Reuters - North Korea said on Tuesday it was no longer bound by an international nuclear disarmament deal and would re-start its plant that makes bomb-grade plutonium after the U.N. chastised it for launching a long-range rocket.

The U.N. Security Council on Monday unanimously condemned North Korea's launch nearly two weeks ago as contravening a U.N. ban, and demanded enforcement of existing sanctions against Pyongyang.

Markets in Seoul and Tokyo were unfazed by the latest news from North Korea seeing it as part of its usual saber rattling.

Alexander G Higgins | Geneva | Mar 20

AP - An Iranian defector told the West that Iran was financing North Korean moves to transform Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli airstrike that destroyed a secret reactor, a report said Thursday.

The report, written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry, details an Iranian connection and fills in gaps about Israel's Sept. 6, 2007, raid that knocked out Syria's nearly completed Al Kibar reactor.

Ali Reza Asghari, a retired general in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, "changed sides" in February 2007 and provided considerable information to the West on Iran's own nuclear program, Ruehle said in his article in the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

"The biggest surprise, however, was his assertion that Iran was financing a secret nuclear project of Syria and North Korea," he said. "No one in the American intelligence scene had heard anything of it. And the Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware."

In Washington, however, a U.S. counterproliferation official denied that Iran funded the Syrian site.

** How IDF troops 'infiltrated alleged Syria nuke site'