Recently in Arms Control Category

washingtonpost.com: In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Ürümqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, and a blueprint of how to build one say accounts written by the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Khan is currently under house arrest.

The uranium transfer was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Chinese premier Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

US officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese—who denied it—but have never raised the issue in public or sought to impose direct sanctions on China for it.

The transfer also started a chain of proliferation in which Khan's nuclear smuggling network shared related Chinese design information with Libya and possibly Iran.

China's refusal to acknowledge the transfer and the unwillingness of the United States to confront the Chinese publicly demonstrate how difficult it is to counter nuclear proliferation writes the Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick.

Related Link
Pakistani nuclear scientist said to affirm Post article's accuracy

The New Yorker: Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated 80 to 100 warheads, scattered in facilities around the country.

Last month 10 gunmen penetrated the Pakistan army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a 22-hour standoff that left 23 dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed.

The success of the latest attacks raises an obvious question, says the New Yorker's Seymour M. Hersh: Are the bombs safe?

The Guardian: The International Atomic Energy Agency has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, says the Guardian.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and the UK, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the IAEA, Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design.

A two-point implosion device, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than first-generation warheads. It makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.

latimes.com: A big earthquake and resultant fire could trigger potentially deadly releases of radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to "major deficiencies" in the nuclear weapons lab's safety planning, federal safety experts warned Tuesday.

The warning from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was sent to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, urging him to "execute both immediate and long-term actions."

Various: No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico says the New York Times.

...At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb.

They are approaching the job like an archeological dig—only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive...

Cheryl Rofer, a former Los Alamos scientist points out that some of the extra care concerning explosives may be unwarranted. LANL used to blow up old explosives on a frequent basis in the area close to the dump, and Rofer suspects that:

...that the 1970s interview contained a comment by the old-timer that they disposed of explosives out there. The interviewer, accustomed to the practice of burying things in pits, took this to mean that the explosives were buried and wrote that down. The Los Alamos environmental restoration program, and now the New York Times, live with that to this day.

New Scientist: A dirty bomb attack on the US would find the country ill-prepared to clean up the resulting radioactive mess, a government watchdog has warned—and hasty attempts at cleaning up could make things worse

Washingtonpost.com: The end of the cold war arms race owes more to Soviet Premier Gorbachev and physicist Yevgeny Velikhov than to US President Ronald Reagan says David E. Hoffman in the Washington Post.

The Soviet Union had plans to compete with Reagan's "star wars" program that would have taken the arms race into space and provided massive subsidies to the Soviet military industrial complex says Hoffman, whose article is based on his recently published book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.

However, in 1985, Velikhov urged Gorbachev not to do it. Velikhov had concluded, based on earlier research, that Reagan's idea could not work. He proposed that Gorbachev abandon the conventional Cold War approach of matching what Reagan was doing, and argued instead for an "asymmetrical" response, one that would answer Reagan but not be the same.

One asymmetrical option would be to overwhelm any defense system by building more missiles. Inevitably, some Soviet missiles would get through.

The asymmetrical response that Gorbachev favored more was to talk Reagan out of missile defense program that the US did not yet possess and exchange it all for something that both leaders wanted: deep reductions in existing nuclear arms.

The Guardian: The combined cost of replacing the UK's Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping, and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as US$260 billion, far more than the UK government has admitted, says an in-depth study by the political action group Greenpeace.

The discrepancy is because the government's published estimates on Trident do not include the cost of conventional military forces directly assigned to support the nuclear force, nor the cost of new installations that would be required at the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston, or exchange rate fluctuations in equipment and supplies such as the F-35 jet fighter bought from the US.

David Cameron, leader of the conservative party, the main opposition group in the UK Parliament, said that a strategic defence review would be carried out rapidly should the conservatives win the general election. He made it clear that no area of the defense budget was exempt from discussions.

The Labour party, which runs the government, indicated that it might consider scaling back the number of Britain's nuclear missile–carrying submarines from four to three.

There is also widespread opposition replacing Trident among army chiefs, reflected yesterday by Lord Guthrie, chief of defence staff under former prime minister Tony Blair. Britain needed to keep a deterrent to maintain a voice in international nuclear weapons negotiations, he told the Guardian. However, he added: "We must examine ways of delivering a weapon more cheaply."

ReviewJournal.com: Managers of the Nevada Test Site are ready to write a new chapter in the history of the nation's nuclear weapons proving grounds.

They hope the Rhode Island-size test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will become home this fall to a new National Center for Nuclear Security, where experts on treaty verification, counterterrorism and nonproliferation will huddle to chart the nation's course for achieving national goals.

The center "will probably be the biggest thing at the site in many decades," said Stephen M. Younger, president of National Security Technologies, NSTec, the managing and operating contractor at the Nevada Test Site.

Nevada Site Office Manager Stephen Mellington said the center will play a pivotal role in supporting arms reduction treaties and "other nonproliferation activities we're going to be doing with the intelligence communities."

Washington Post: A. Q. Khan, the creator of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program who provided clandestine nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, boasted in a recent television interview that he and other senior Pakistani officials—who were eager to see Iran develop nuclear weapons—years ago guided that country to a proven network of suppliers and helped advance its covert efforts.

Khan told a television interviewer in Karachi, Pakistan, that if Iran succeeds in "acquiring nuclear technology, we will be a strong bloc in the region to counter international pressure. Iran's nuclear capability will neutralize Israel's power."

Although Khan has previously claimed nationalist and religious justifications for helping to spread sensitive technology, several experts said his latest statement was an unusually direct claim of broad, official Pakistani support for an Iranian nuclear weapon.

The Register: In a project described as "the computing equivalent of the raising of the Mary Rose," engineers at Bletchley Park intend to restore a 1950s-era computer—featuring a magnificent 112.5 bytes of memory—to working order.

The machine in question was built at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire. It was designed in 1949 to automate the job of a human calculating team, whose work was apparently so boring that mistakes became unacceptably frequent.

NPR: Iran's leaders say the country's nuclear program exists only for the purpose of generating electricity. Western intelligence agencies say the Islamic republic aims to produce nuclear weapons and intimidate its neighbors. How close is Iran to getting the bomb? How might it be stopped? And what are the implications for the United States and the rest of the world if Iran succeeds? This week, NPR looks at Iran and its suspected nuclear weapons programs in a series.

Related Link
Iran And The Bomb: US Keeps Options Open

The treaty prohibited all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space and underwater. It still allowed underground testing as long as the radioactive debris generated by the detonation was contained within the territorial limits of the testing state. The treaty was seen as much as a means of safeguarding the environment as it was a way of easing Cold War tensions.

By the time the treaty went into force Oct. 10, 1963, 108 nations -- including those with nuclear aspirations of their own -- had affixed their signatures to the document. It would remain the most effective arms control measure on the books until the conclusion of the first SALT treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972.

The Guardian: The UK's nuclear stockpile could be reduced after multilateral talks next year that are likely to flow from a global summit on nuclear weapons, says Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The summit, to be convened by US president Barack Obama, is expected to come up with a new regime to prevent nuclear proliferation and ensure the safe storage of nuclear stockpiles. It is likely to involve up to 30 countries, providing an opportunity for discussion on a more intrusive weapons inspection regime and a chance for nuclear weapons states other than Russia and the US, which between them account for 95% of nuclear weapons, to contribute to the disarmament process.

BBC News: How do you dismantle a nuclear bomb? And how do you verify another country is genuinely disarming without compromising sensitive national security material?

BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera was given access to a unique exercise run by the UK and Norway to find out.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: President Barack Obama recently spoke of the importance of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), as has every president since Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the treaty in 1968.

Yet all presidents to a lesser or greater degree have weakened the treaty, through lax enforcement, by carving out exceptions for certain countries, or by just ignoring it.

We have come to the point now that North Korea, which signed the treaty in 1985, is now mocking it. And in all the discussions over a possible Iranian bomb, no one seems to think the treaty's 90-day withdrawal clause would be much of a hurdle if Tehran decided to leave the NPT.

If President Obama really wants to strengthen the treaty, a good—and necessary—place to start is to make it much more difficult for any of the 189 member states to leave the NPT, say Henry Sokolski and Victor Gilinsky.

It is at odds with the NPT's purpose to allow a country to import or develop technology under the treaty's cover and then walk out to make bombs. At a minimum, before legally exiting the treaty, a country should have to clear its NPT obligations by returning whatever it got from others based on the understanding that it was a good-faith treaty member.

Washington Post: Federal investigators at the GAO say the next generation radiation detectors—that are scheduled to be bought by the Department of Homeland Security—are only marginally better at detecting hidden nuclear material in cargo containers than monitors already at US ports, but would cost more than twice as much.

The monitors now in use can detect the presence of radiation, but they cannot distinguish between threatening and nonthreatening material. Radioactive material can be found naturally in ceramics and kitty litter, but would be of no use in making a bomb, for instance.

The DHS has said the new machines it is developing can distinguish between kitty litter and dangerous radioactive material and produce fewer false alarms than the current ones.

The new one are also better at detecting lightly shielded material. But the machines perform at about the same level when detecting radiological and nuclear materials hidden in a lead box or casing, the most likely way a terrorist would try to sneak the materials into this country.

Los Angeles Times: A decade-long effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads built more than 20-years-ago has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays.

The $200-million-a-year refurbishment program involves a type of warhead known as the W76, which is used on the Navy's Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the US stockpile.

In February, the Energy department's National Nuclear Security Administration announced that the "first refurbished W76 nuclear warhead had been accepted into the US nuclear weapons stockpile by the Navy."

But no delivery was ever made. The warhead is still in pieces at the Energy Department's Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas, according to an engineer at the facility.

The hold-up in deploying the warhead is not connected to any missing expertise regarding how to build a nuclear device, but how to manufacture one of the other warhead components. Delays in the program could extend the refurbishment program by another 10 years.

csmonitor.com: Some of Pervez Hoodbhoy's nuclear physics students will go on to oversee Pakistan's atomic bombs. That gives him pause.

"The student body has become very conservative, very Islamist, their outward appearance has changed," says Professor Hoodbhoy, the chair of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. "It's row after row of these burqa women."

Students avoid talking politics with Hoodbhoy, a cautionary voice on nuclear weapons in a nation that takes boisterous pride in having them. "They think I'm on the wrong side," he says.

International concerns are mounting again about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons as fighting rages with the Taliban. But thanks to safeguards, experts worry much less about the Islamic fighters in the hills making off with a warhead. It's the radicals among the educated – potential insiders – who are in a more realistic position to abscond with nuclear material and know how to use it.

New York Times: The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility, which houses the world's most powerful laser, as well as the largest optical instrument ever built, will be officially opened on Friday.

The project's director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

In February, NIF test fired the192 lasers--made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers--into its target chamber. Inside the chamber a small fleck of hydrogen fuel, smaller than a match head, was pulverized for the first time.

Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

But raising its energies still further to the point of ignition could take a year or more of experimentation and might, officials concede, prove daunting and perhaps impossible.

Physics Today: Herbert Frank York (24 November 1921-19 May 2009), an eminent nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, provided decades of advice to government on science and arms control issues, and founding chancellor of the University of California, San Diego (1961-1964) died on Tuesday at Thornton Hospital in San Diego after a long illness. He was 87.

UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said, "Herb was not only a leader of UC San Diego, he also was a world leader and had a global impact. During his exceptional, long-standing career, he was the 'first' in many of the positions he held. Herb York made this campus and this world a better place. We will forever be grateful for his leadership and vision."

Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense under President Carter and one of York's closest friends, said, "Herb York's life was an unsurpassed record of achievement in science, education and national security. He played the leading role in creating a series of innovative and crucial institutions--a nuclear laboratory, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, a UC campus, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. In the national government, in California, and in international meetings and negotiations, he was dedicated to peace while being realistic about security needs. Beyond the public record, all of us who knew him as a friend appreciated his omnivorous interest in the world around him, dedication to his family, great sense of humor and zest for life; for us, the loss is both intensified and redeemed by our recognition of the model he provided."

"Herb and I have been friends since 1948 and our lives have been intertwined ever since," said Marvin Goldberger, former dean of UC San Diego's Division of Natural Sciences and former president of Caltech. "By the time Herb was only 28 years old, he had been appointed director of the Livermore Laboratory. That was the start of Herb's career of public service at the highest levels of government and academe. He was an effective voice for science within the White House and enormously effective as the first chancellor of UC San Diego."

Mark Thiemens, dean of UC San Diego's Division of Physical Sciences, noted "Herb is one of the most remarkable and influential scientists I have ever met. Whenever I pick up a book on the history of science policy in the United States, a history of the Manhattan Project, or a history of fundamental physics, Herb is featured prominently. He played an integral role in creating our nation's science agencies--the NSF, NASA and the Department of Energy--as well as an integral role in developing UC San Diego into a world renowned university."

Speaking for the family, York's oldest daughter, Rachel, said, "We are so grateful that Dad died in the embrace of the university he loved so very much, and was so very proud of."

UC's long association with York

York first came to the UC system in 1943 when he was recruited to join the staff of the University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL) at Berkeley. Under the auspices of the UCRL, York was dispatched to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project, where a group of scientists designed the first atomic bomb - the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.

In a memoir, York wrote that his contribution to the bomb's development had not been all that profound, but that he still felt triumphant: "Not only did we complete the project, but we ended the war."

Ending the war, or better yet, not starting one, was eventually to become a cause York advocated the better part of his life.

York received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in the same year, at the University of Rochester. At the end of World War II, York returned to UC Berkeley as a graduate student, received a doctorate in physics in 1949, stayed on as research physicist, then joined the physics department in 1951 as an assistant professor. Life in academia was short-lived, as once again he was recruited to a more urgent mission. From July 1952, to March 1958, York initiated and directed the UC Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, overseeing research programs which included development of the hydrogen bomb and other classified programs under the sponsorship of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In March of 1958, York became the first chief scientist of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, Washington, DC In December of that year, President Eisenhower appointed him the first director of Defense Research and Engineering, serving as civilian supervisor of missile and space research.

It was during these duties in the 1950s that York's belief that ending a war was done most effectively by not starting one sharpened, and turned him emphatically to arms control and to a nuclear test ban as a first step. "I was the only senior official who thought it (arms control and nuclear test ban) was a great idea," York later said. "Others were tolerant of it, but the majority thought it was really dumb."

York returned to academia in 1961 when UC established a campus in La Jolla. UC President Clark Kerr turned to York as someone with a solid record of administration and good rapport with the Board of Regents. York was named chancellor 17 February 1961, and assumed office in July that year.

In his slightly more than three years as UCSD chancellor, York worked with faculty committees planning to expand the campus. Though pleased with the tangible progress, York was less than gratified by the bureaucratic system of committee-based decision making and resigned in November of 1964 to return to teaching as a professor of physics, later chairing the Physics Department and serving as dean of graduate studies, 1969-1970.

An interest in arms control

York also was continuing in various capacities for the US government. He served as a member of the first General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, 1962-69; headed the US delegation to a UNESCO conference in 1965 on the application of science and technology; served as a member of the US delegation to Soviet-American Arms Control Talks, 1978-79, and served as US ambassador and chief negotiator for the Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, 1979-81.

Opposition in both the United States and the Soviet Union scuttled the Geneva negotiations, and York later related his disappointment, but not surprise, saying that at that time: "The world situation just wouldn't support it."

In 1969, York started a long association with Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs, by attending his first private meeting with Soviet counterparts to discuss arms control issues. "It is truly no understatement to say that Herb was one of the giants of the American national security and arms control communities," says Pugwash Executive Diretor Jeffrey Boutwell, "and few people embodied as he did the highest standards of intellectual rigor and passionate engagement for seeking what was best for our country and the world community."

Sandy Butcher, the official Pugwash historian, agrees by pointing to a 1971 quote from York, "[O]ur final goal must remain the ideal of general and complete disarmament.... Any reasonable extrapolation of history tells us that if we keep all those weapons around they will be used. While no one can say how to get from the present situation all the way to total nuclear disarmament, it is clear that throwing weapons away heads us in the right direction and building more weapons, be they MIRVs, ABMs, or SS-9s, heads us in the wrong direction. We have fussed too much and too long about fine structure. We must begin to focus on directions rather than details." (A Little Arms Control Can be a Dangerous Thing, War/Peace Report, August/September 1971, pp. 3 - 7).

Presidential Adviser

York also was adviser to six US presidents on arms and armament, and served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and the scientific advisory boards of the Army and the Air Force.

The scholar and university administrator again served as chancellor of UC San Diego on an interim basis from 1970 to 1972. In contrast to his first term as founding chancellor, before the first students had even been accepted, York relished the short interim chancellorship made sweeter by the fact that "we had real students, and it was a real university."

Following the second chancellorship, York taught physics and served as director of the Program in Science, Technology and Public Affairs, 1973-88. In 1983 York founded and directed the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), which conducts research and seminars on conflict resolution and promotes international efforts to avoid war. In 1989 he became director emeritus.

He also served as advisor to the president of UC and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories on the future of the nuclear labs.

Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former UC San Diego Chancellor, said, "Herb played a key role in the development of nuclear weapons and more importantly, in defining the nation's policy on such weapons. As the first chancellor of UC San Diego he set the standard for excellence and the university's subsequent development as a great research university. His contributions at the national level and in San Diego are truly legendary."

Among his numerous awards were:

   * The 2000 Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in higher education, the highest honor bestowed by UC Berkeley's Academic Senate.

   * The 2000 Enrico Fermi Award for his efforts and contributions in nuclear deterrence and arms control agreements, presented by President Clinton in Washington DC The Fermi Award is the government's oldest science and technology award honoring lifetime achievement.

   * The 2000 Vannevar Bush Award for leadership in the arms control movement and work in nuclear energy, presented by the National Science Board, the policymaking arm of the National Science Foundation.

   * Also, the American Physical Society's Leo Szilard Award, 1994; the Federation of American Scientists' Public Service Award, 1993, and the Atomic Energy Commission's Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award, 1962.

York was the author of six books: Arms Control (Readings from Scientific American, 1973); The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and Superbomb (1976); Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (1978); Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to Geneva (1987); A Shield in Space? Technology, Politics and the Strategic Defense Initiative (1988); and Arms and the Physicist (1994).

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Sybil, whom he met at Berkeley, and three children: Rachel York, Dr. Cynthia York, David Winters, and four grandchildren.

Arrangements for a memorial service at UC San Diego are pending.

In lieu of flowers, the York family suggests donations in Herb's memory be made to the "Herb York Memorial Fund. "Donations can be made online at www.givetoucsd.ucsd.edu by indicating in the comment section Herb York Memorial Fund.

Related Links
Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader LA Times
Herbert York, 87, Top Nuclear Physicist Who Was Arms Control Advocate, Dies New York Times

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: For the last four years, a research team from Texas Tech University has studied the degree of radioactive contamination at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center in Iraq.

Al Tuwaitha was the center of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program. The site is in many ways historically unique: It has been used in the development of nuclear weapons; it has been bombed in repeated military campaigns; and it has been looted by civilians who in 2003 inadvertently dispersed radioactive material at and around the research site and in their own homes and villages.

Related Link
Details of Texas Tech University's Iraq research grant

Confirmation of the leaks raises new questions about the MoD's safety record, which has been coming under increasing scrutiny since HMS Vanguard, a British submarine armed with Trident nuclear missiles, collided with a nuclear-armed French submarine, Le Triomphant, under the Atlantic in February.

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

Last week, Obama was mired in the gritty business of trying to coax Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, into a more cooperative relationship and a more determined fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Administration officials did not sound sanguine about the prospects, and the White House meeting might well have left Obama yearning for a more promising long-term strategy to keep the Taliban away from nuclear weapons.

Yet even as the allure of disarmament grows, the obstacles seem as daunting as ever. Going to zero, as the nuclear cognoscenti put it, is a deceptively simple notion; just about everyone who knows nuclear weapons agrees it would be wickedly difficult to achieve.

Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists since he came to the US at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory.

Among Dyson's gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.

Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate.

Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Obama's letter, delivered to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in mid-February, "covered a number of topics" of mutual interest to the two countries, "including the issue of missile defense and how it relates to the Iranian threat," a senior administration official said.

The sample dates to 1944 and is a relic from the infancy of the US nuclear weapons programme.

A team from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used nuclear forensic techniques to date the sample and track down its origins.

Details appear in the latest edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry.

The News, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, decided to dig up the truth, so they went to the best source they could find: Google Earth.

"Iran has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb if it decides to take the drastic steps of violating its international treaty obligations, kicking out inspectors and further refining its supply."

However, as Chemist Cheryl Rofer points out, at 3.49% , the concentration of Iran's 1010 kg of enriched uranium-235 is still too low to make an atomic bomb and would have to be reprocessed for a number of months to reach the necessary enrichment level for military applications. The uranium enrichment facility would also have to be reconfigured to reach higher concentration levels of U-235.

An atomic bomb requires highly enriched uranium-235 at greater than 90% concentration. To produce enough low-enriched uranium fuel for the two nuclear reactors Iran is building it needs at minimum a cascade of 5000 centrifuges. Iran currently has 5600 known centrifuges according to the IAEA report.

The report also states that Iran has slowed down its enrichment program and that as long as the IAEA monitors their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. As IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei recently said in an interview in Süddeutsche Zeitung, "they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight."

Related coverage
Iran holds enough uranium for bomb Financial Times
Iran has enriched enough uranium to make bomb, IAEA says The Guardian
Iran Has More Enriched Uranium Than Thought The New York Times

Related Links
The gas centrifuge and nuclear weapons proliferation Physics Today

The last of the project's 6,206 optics units -- the mostly glass and crystal components that focus the lasers onto a tiny target -- was installed on 26 January.

His new book The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, co-written with Danny Stillman, the former director of the technical intelligence division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, rewrites much of the public understanding about how countries with nuclear weapons came to acquire them. All countries that built bombs, including the United States, spied on or were given access to the work of other nuclear powers. In particular, the book is a scathing indictment of the Chinese government, alleging that it intentionally proliferated nuclear technology to risky regimes, particularly Pakistan.

Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996 by Thomas C. Reed

Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996 by Thomas C. Reed

Neither book endorses J. Robert Oppenheimer’s view that bombs are relatively easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and politicians to divulge state secret

Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996

Wall Street Journal: The Bush administration's landmark nuclear-cooperation agreement with Russia is unlikely to gain passage before President George W. Bush leaves office, the latest sign of how Russia's offensive in Georgia has roiled the international scene.

Various: The FBI has released details about its case against accused researcher Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week after being told he would be prosecuted as the prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. A number of websites have provided some analysis of the FBI's case. The Smoking Gun has collated the highlights to the prosecution's case. Meryl Nass, a noted anthrax researcher, writes on her blog Anthrax Vaccine that “What came out today was another pastiche of innuendo and circumstantial evidence, with an awful lot of holes.”

Nass raises the following main questions:

1. Ivins had just been immunized against anthrax. He was required to have yearly immunizations, and some anthrax scientists have chosen to be vaccinated every six months for safety, since the vaccine’s efficacy is weak — and Ivins had proven its weakness in several animal models. In his career he had probably received about 33 separate anthrax vaccinations.

2. Earlier in the week, anonymous officials at the FBI leaked to the press that the envelopes came from the specific post office he frequented. Today the affidavit states it is "reasonable to conclude" they were purchased in Maryland or Virginia.

3. Choosing a strain that would direct suspicion at Ivins. The perpetrator(s) were tremendously careful to leave no clues vis a vis the envelopes. For example, block lettering was used, which is the hardest to identify with handwriting analysis. Second, stamped envelopes were chosen to avoid using saliva. Third, there were no fingerprints on anything.

Why would the person(s) who took such care select an anthrax strain that would focus suspicion on himself? In 2001, strain analysis was possible. It had been discussed many times as a forensic tool for biowarfare, including in a paper Nass wrote in 1992, which Ivins had read, and in which Nass thanked him for his contributions.

4. Ivins was the “sole custodian” of the strain. But the strain was grown in 1997, and more than 100 people had access to it over that four year period. Having received a sample, or obtained it surreptitiously, they would be “custodians” of it too.

Nass also points out that the FBI report does not explain how the anthrax was weaponized, nor can explain how Ivins created it. The FBI also cannot explain how the letters were mailed from Princeton. "Either Ivins had an alibi or he didn't.... If Ivins cannot be placed in New Jersey on those dates, he is not the attacker, or he did not act alone," says Nass.

Update: 8/19/2008. The FBI release some of the evidence related to their investigation. NPR's David Kestenbaum provides some details of the case, along with New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and Nicholas Wade. Although some of the techniques have been reviewed, the research has yet to be independently verified by experts not associated to the case. Richard O. Spertzel, a retired microbiologist who led the United Nations’ biological weapons inspections of Iraq, told the New York Times that he remained skeptical of the bureau’s argument despite the new evidence. “It’s a pretty tenuous argument,” Spertzel said, adding that he questioned the bureau’s claim that the powder was less than military grade. Nass adds some more questions to the coverage

NPR: Though much was made of the conflagration between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, Michael Dobbs, author of the new book One Minute to Midnight, says that the two leaders were actually of like minds when it came to the threat of nuclear war.

Washington Post: Colleagues and friends of Bruce E. Ivins, the vaccine specialist who committed suicide earlier this week after the FBI indicated they were going to indict him for the 2001 anthrax attacks remained convinced that Ivins was innocent: They contended that he had neither the motive nor the means to create the fine, lethal powder that was sent by mail to news outlets and congressional offices in the late summer and fall of 2001. Mindful of previous FBI mistakes in fingering others in the case, many are deeply skeptical that the bureau has gotten it right this time.

Update: 8/4/2008. The New York Times Scott Shane writes that most of the evidence against Ivins is circumstantial, and that the FBI was several weeks away from indicting the scientist. While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

“What has bothered me is the unscientific, bumbling approach of our investigators,” said Rep Rush D. Holt (D-NJ),a physicist whose New Jersey district includes the contaminated Princeton mailbox.

Mr. Holt said in a recent interview that his first doubts came after anthrax was found in his Congressional office in October 2001 but investigators never returned to conduct systematic testing to trace the path of the anthrax spores.

After that, he said, when contamination at a New Jersey postal processing center indicated that the letters had been mailed on one of a limited number of routes, it took investigators seven months to test several hundred mailboxes and identify the source.

“Within two days they could have dispatched 50 people to wipe all those mailboxes,” Holt said. He wrote to Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, on Friday to ask that he testify to Congress about the investigation as soon as it is closed.

Meryl Nass, a doctor with some background in anthrax, queries whether Ivins could have produced the dry form of anthrax used in the attacks.

Various: Microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins, 62, died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. He was believed to have taken a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine after the FBI told him that he was going to be indicted as part of the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks.

According to the Associated Press, prosecutors were seeking the death penalty as part of the indictment.

Ivin's lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, who has represented Ivins for the past year, issued a statement asserting Ivins' innocence.

"For more than a year, we have been privileged to represent Dr. Bruce Ivins during the investigation of the anthrax deaths of September and October of 2001," Kemp said. "We assert his innocence in these killings, and would have established that at trial."

"The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways on different people, as has already been seen in this investigation. In Dr. Ivins' case, it led to his untimely death. We ask that the media respect the privacy of his family, and allow them to grieve."

Ivins worked for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Ivin's was an expertise on anthrax and has been called on by the FBI to analyze the anthrax spores that were sent through the mail to media organizations and politicians shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The anthrax letters killed 5 people and sickened 17.

In 2003 Ivins received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.

According to the LA Times, which broke the story, Ivins began showing signs of “serious strain” shortly after the government’s $5.8 million settlement with Steven J. Hatfill, who for many years, was the main suspect in the case, a fact that was leaked to the press and damaged his career.

After Ivins had expressed suicidal thoughts to a therapist he was seeing to treat depression, his access to sensitive work at the government labs was curtailed, and he was subsequently hospitalized for depression.

Ivins was released from the hospital on July 24, but he was facing the prospect of forced retirement, according to a colleague, who described him as “emotionally fractured” by the government scrutiny.

USA Today published a story in 2004 on Ivins and his casual nature nature in dealing with suspect anthrax contamination in a colleague's office.

In 2003, Physics Today published some of the research connected to the investigation.

Related Physics Today articles
Technical and Policy Issues of Counterterrorism--A Primer for Physicists May 2003
National Labs Focus on Tools against Terrorism in Wake of Airliner and Anthrax Attacks January 2002

Related News Stories
Anthrax suspect dies in apparent suicide LA Times
Report: Md. Anthrax Scientist Dies in Apparent Suicide Washington Post
Scientist Suspected of Anthrax Attacks Said to Kill Himself Associated Press
Death Of Suspect In Anthrax Attacks Called Suicide NPR

Nature News: The Dutch government has enacted legislation barring Iranian nationals from access to courses and facilities related to nuclear technology.

Under the new law, passed on 4 July, Iranians, including those holding dual citizenship in the Netherlands, will be unable to enrol in graduate-level courses involving nuclear and rocket technologies. These encompass nine subject areas outlined in the legislation, including the technology of reactors for uranium enrichment and the chemistry of rocket fuels. Some students will be allowed to take these courses with a special government waiver, according to Rob Dekker, a spokesman for the Dutch foreign ministry.

The Times: The Home Office has been investigating the use of high-tech pain rays against mobs as an alternative to the water cannon, according to a report by its Scientific Development Branch due to be published next month.

The so-called active denial system (ADS) projects microwave-like radiation for distances of more than 500 yards, creating an excruciating, full-body burning sensation in anyone caught in its beam. The millimetre-wave rays penetrate skin to a depth of about 1/64in but cause no permanent damage, according to Raytheon, the system’s US-based maker.

Washington Post: An international smuggling ring created by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by David Albright, a former UN arms inspector.

The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.

The computer contents -- among more than 1,000 gigabytes of data seized -- were recently destroyed in a controversial decision by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the IAEA.

Related News Picks
What A.Q. Khan Knows
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Pakistan frees aide to disgraced nuclear scientist

Bloomberg: India may be forced to slash its target for new nuclear power stations as the US-India nuclear technology accord falters, prolonging electricity shortages that are constraining economic growth.

``Time is slipping out of our hands,'' Shreyans Kumar Jain, chairman of the Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd., said in an interview in Mumbai yesterday. India's plan to add 25,000 megawatts before 2020 by importing reactors and fuel will be delayed by two decades if the nation has to rely on indigenous designs, he said.

[From Bloomberg.com: Asia]

BBC: The family of disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan say it is not clear whether his de facto house arrest has been permanently relaxed.

On Wednesday Khan was allowed to make a rare trip from his Islamabad home to Pakistan's Academy of Sciences.

His wife, Henny, told the BBC her husband went to pay his respects after the death of a colleague.


Khan was in charge of Pakistani's nuclear weapon program, and publicly admitted to passing nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea in 2004. To many Pakistani's he is still seen as a national hero.

Related Physics Today article
Pakistan Reshuffles Weapons Program (May 2001)

Space Review: Two letters in Space Review debate whether the risks associated with the hydrazine fuel tank were fully understood by the public and the US Defense Department (DoD) before the US Navy shot down a disabled US spy satellite (see Broken spy satellite hit by US missile). The US was concerned that the fuel tank might survive reentry into the atmosphere and contaminate a wide area with the toxic hydrazine fuel.

Andrew Higgins of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests that critics of the decision to shoot down the satellite, have not fully grasped hydrazine's burn rate at the pressure contained in the tank or calculated the tank's reentry survivability.

In independent computer simulations of the reentry of the USA 193 satellite, Geoff Forden of MIT and Higgins, found that the maximum deceleration of the tank would have been about 8 to 10 g’s. "This is similar to the g-loading the fully fueled tank is designed to withstand upon launch," says Higgins. "Thus, it is unlikely that a similar loading would have destroyed the tank on reentry."

Yousaf Butt of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University points out that questions should be raised about the overall quality of the DoD's reentry simulation models, because the DoD did not predict the hydrazine explosion that occurred during the interception.

"It would serve NASA/NRO/DoD well to immediately publicize the unclassified portions of their studies so that the US public can ascertain whether the putative public health concern of the hydrazine surviving reentry was indeed well-founded," says Butt. "As technical details of hydrazine tanks are freely available online, it is difficult to comprehend what is so classified about these studies."

Related links
Broken spy satellite hit by US missile (Physics Today Online)
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris (Physics Today Online)
More doubts surface over Pentagon’s explanation for shooting down spy satellite (Physics Today Online)

BBC: President Nicolas Sarkozy has said France will reduce its number of airborne nuclear weapons by one third.

Sarkozy said the reduction to fewer than 300 missiles would leave France with "half the maximum number of warheads we had during the Cold War".

But he also insisted he was committed to France's nuclear deterrent, saying it was its "life-insurance policy".

Sarkozy appealed for other nations to scale back their nuclear arsenals and called on China and the US to finally ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which they signed in 1996.

He also called for an international treaty banning banning the manufacture of fissile material for nuclear weapons.

NPR: Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry argue the only way to stop nuclear weapons from falling into terrorist hands is to get rid of all of them. This week the former statesmen and their supporters convened in Oslo, Norway, for a conference.

The New York Times: The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Tuesday presented a Russian-Chinese draft treaty banning weapons in space to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, an idea that was quickly rejected by the United States.

Nature: The International Atomic Energy Agency is wrapping up its inquiry into Iran’s nuclear activities and is expected to report its findings on 20 February. Declan Butler analyses how close the state is to nuclear weapons capability.

Reuters: North Korea's refusal to divulge details of its nuclear weapons programme caused it to miss a deadline in a disarmament-for-aid deal it struck with regional powers, a U.S. nuclear envoy said on Tuesday.

The New York Times: North Korea is likely to miss a year-end deadline to declare all of its nuclear activities and disable its main nuclear site, the South Korean foreign minister said on Thursday.

BBC: Iran has welcomed a major US intelligence report that suggests its government is not currently trying to develop nuclear weapons.

The Washington Post: The Bush administration likes to boast that it has dramatically cut the size of the nation's nuclear stockpile. Meanwhile, it's busily trying to shore up congressional support for multibillion-dollar proposals to "modernize" the bristling U.S. arsenal. A world that's skeptical about the last superpower's intentions only gets more so when U.S. officials push unconvincing lines about the world's deadliest weapons. So here are a few myths about the U.S. nuclear posture of which the administration seems particularly fond.

International Herald Tribune: The top U.S. negotiator at talks on North Korea's nuclear programs said Wednesday he is confident the communist country will meet a year-end deadline to disable its main reactor.

International Herald Tribune: A new era in U.S.-India cooperation was unveiled at the White House in July 2005 when President George W. Bush told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that he would work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India, despite over a quarter century of disagreements between the two countries over nuclear issues.

Guardian Unlimited: India and the International Atomic Energy Agency have agreed to start talks meant to give the U.N. watchdog an overview of much of New Delhi's civilian nuclear program, the agency said Wednesday.

Guardian Unlimited: Iran has handed over a nuclear weapons blueprint to the International Atomic Energy Agency, four years after it was requested, diplomats in Vienna said yesterday.

AFP: US experts supervising the disabling of North Korea's nuclear plants have made a good start and the North has been very cooperative, their team leader said Tuesday.

The Register: US defence secretary Robert Gates, seeking to allay Russian concerns, has suggested that European elements of the planned American missile shield might be built but not "activated" unless a threat from Iran developed.

The Christian Science Monitor: Iran's abrupt change of nuclear negotiators spotlights internal power struggles, too.

International Herald Tribune: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il pledged to ensure the success of disarmament talks on stripping his country of nuclear weapons, his South Korean counterpart said Thursday.

NPR: North Korea has agreed to provide a "complete and correct declaration" of its nuclear programs and says it will disable its facilities at its main reactor complex by Dec. 31 under an agreement reached by North Korea and five other countries Wednesday.

Reuters: Russia's military space commander vowed to retaliate with an arms race if any country started putting weapon systems into orbit, he said in remarks published on Wednesday.

Guardian Unlimited: India has kept its efforts to build a nuclear submarine under wraps for more than 30 years, but a top Indian scientist has confirmed that the ongoing project at the Kalpakkam nuclear facility near Chennai to develop a nuclear reactor fuelled by enriched uranium was in fact intended to power the country's first indigenously built submarine.

The Washington Post: After two years of painstaking negotiations, a historic nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India appears to be unraveling as a broad spectrum of political parties calls on the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to scrap the deal, saying it limits the country's sovereignty in energy and foreign policy matters.

Reuters: A historic nuclear energy deal between India and the United States is hanging in the balance due to political opposition in New Delhi, but could still be saved if it reaches the U.S. Congress early next year, analysts said.

ABC News: Iran, IAEA Agree on Nuclear Timetable, but U.S. Criticizes Accord

The Age: There is a case for supplying uranium to India, but only in accordance with a revised globalnon-proliferation regime.

CNET: At Los Alamos National Lab, scientists are working on ways to keep the world safe from weapons of mass destruction

International Herald Tribune: Foreign ministers of the countries involved in talks on North Korea's nuclear program reaffirmed their commitment to resolve the dispute in a meeting with Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, an official said Wednesday.

The Washington Post: U.N. inspectors visited a nuclear reactor Monday being built in central Iran, a facility that has been off-limits since April, state media reported.

Reuters: The United States and India on Tuesday began a high-level effort to conclude a controversial nuclear cooperation agreement that the State Department said was still within reach.

International Herald Tribune: United Nations inspectors have confirmed that North Korea has shut down its weapons-making nuclear reactor, the UN nuclear monitoring agency said Monday. Pyongyang, meanwhile, warned Washington that the real bargaining over its nuclear disarmament had only begun.

Guardian Unlimited: The UN nuclear watchdog said today that Iran had agreed to lift its ban on inspectors visiting a controversial nuclear facility, and was ready to answer questions about its past plutonium experiments.

BBC: Satellite images show that Pakistan is building a nuclear reactor that could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, says the Institute of Science for International Security (Isis).