Washington Post: At least 40 developing countries from the Persian Gulf region to Latin America have recently approached U.N. officials here to signal interest in starting nuclear power programs, a trend that concerned proliferation experts say could provide the building blocks of nuclear arsenals in some of those nations. At least half a dozen countries have also said in the past four years that they are specifically planning to conduct enrichment or reprocessing of nuclear fuel, a prospect that could dramatically expand the global supply of plutonium and enriched uranium, according to U.S. and international nuclear officials and arms-control experts. Much of the new interest is driven by economic considerations, particularly the soaring cost of fossil fuels. But for some Middle Eastern states with ready access to huge stocks of oil or natural gas, such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the investment in nuclear power appears to be linked partly to concerns about a future regional arms race stoked in part by Iran's alleged interest in such an arsenal, the officials said.
New York Times: The world’s major powers agreed in London on Friday to offer Iran modest new incentives to coax it to freeze important nuclear activities. The agreement was reached at a meeting that brought together Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior officials from Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. “We’ve got an agreement on an offer that will be made to the government of Iran,” David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said for the six governments. The offer underscores a growing consensus that the current policy of punishing Iran into submission with sanctions has failed.
New York Times: The sprawling site, known as Natanz, made headlines recently because Iran is testing a new generation of centrifuges there that spin faster and, in theory, can more rapidly turn natural uranium into fuel for reactors or nuclear arms. The new machines are also meant to be more reliable than their forerunners, which often failed catastrophically. On April 8, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the desert site, and Iran released 48 photographs of the tour, providing the first significant look inside the atomic riddle.
Japan Times: Full-fledged reinforcement of the international nuclear nonproliferation framework is of vital importance for facilitating peaceful use of nuclear power and thereby for addressing the pressing global challenges of energy supply and global warming, according to a private policy study group. To attain this goal, all nations, regardless of whether they have nuclear capability, must work on nonproliferation initiatives, such as stepped-up disarmament efforts and reinforcement of nuclear site inspections, according to the Study Group on Nuclear Nonproliferation. The proposal by the 12-member expert group, headed by Shunji Yanai, former ambassador to the U.S., was submitted to Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura last Wednesday
The Guardian: The White House is today set to unveil a video it claims supports allegations that North Korea was helping Syria build a nuclear reactor. The suspected reactor was destroyed by Israeli planes last September, in an attack reminiscent of Israel's 1981 raid on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Little is still known about the raid seven months on, and today's evidence has been keenly anticipated. US media reports say the video images, believed to have been obtained via Israeli intelligence, show Korean faces among the workers at the Syrian plant.
NPR: The Colombian government revealed last month that the country's FARC rebels were seeking to acquire enriched uranium. The rebels may have been more interested in trading the uranium to a terrorist group than in developing it into nuclear arms for their own purposes. A stash subsequently uncovered in Colombia proved to be harmless. But the case shows that the danger of terrorist or insurgent groups acquiring nuclear materials on the black market could be a looming threat. Terrorism experts say it points to a danger that's greater than many people realize.
Washington Post: Pakistan's disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan termed his detention as "irrational" in a newspaper interview published last week, and said he hoped the new government would free him soon. Khan was put under house arrest by President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad after an investigation was launched in late 2003 and he confessed on television in early 2004 to passing nuclear secrets and materials to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
New Scientist: A small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would have wide-scale impact outside of the region by destroying most of the ozone layer, leaving the DNA of humans and other organisms at risk of damage from the Sun's rays, says Michael Mills of the University of Colorado at Boulder, US, and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Their research is based on computer simulations in which each country launches 50 devices of 15 kilotons, roughly half the available warheads each side possesses.
Mills and colleagues found that a regional nuclear war in South Asia would deplete up to 40% of the ozone layer in the mid latitudes and up to 70% in the high northern latitudes.
"The models show this magnitude of ozone loss would persist for five years, and we would see substantial losses continuing for at least another five years," says Mills.
The effect is far greater than was calculated in the 1980s in a study that modelled the effect of global nuclear war. Mills says old models did not take into account the impact of columns of soot that would rise up to 80 kilometres into the atmosphere.
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).
|
|
|
