NucNews July 22, 2006 -------- NUCLEAR -------- korea US wants nuclear talks without North Korea Saturday, July 22, 2006 News International (Pakistan) http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=16620 WASHINGTON: The United States will hold talks with other members of the six-nation group on North Korea’s nuclear weapons at an Asian security meeting next week even if the unpredictable Stalinist refuses to attend, a top US official said on Friday. North Korea has been invited to the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Kuala Lumpur on July 28, along with representatives from other six-party nations: the United States, Japan, Russia, China and South Korea. Christopher Hill, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, who will be at the meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said that even if North Korea keeps up its boycott of nuclear talks the United States would still seek talks with the other four nations. “We hope to be meeting the six-party partners,” Hill told a meeting with journalists. “At this point I can’t tell you in what format we will meet them and I cannot tell you whether the North Koreans will be a part of a meeting,” he added. “But our purpose is to consult our partners on the way ahead.” North Korea has drawn increased attention following its launch of long-range missiles on July 4, which has been condemned by a UN Security Council resolution. China’s President Hu Jintao used a phone conversation with his South Korean counterpart, Roh Moo-Hyun, on Friday to call for new six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, China’s state media said. Hu urged “calm and restraint” as regional tensions remained high over Pyongyang’s missile launches, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Japan and South Korea have also agreed to use the regional security forum, organised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to press for North Korea’s return to six-nation talks. North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-Sun is due to attend the ARF meeting. But North Korea has showed no sign that it will return to nuclear talks and angrily rejected the UN resolution over its missiles. It has vowed to bolster its defences, blaming the “hostile” policy of the United States for the new emergency. “North Korea is not listening to too many people these days,” said Hill. “One wishes that the North Koreans would put as much energy into the six-party process as they do into their public statements. Their public statements really reflect certain imagination and efforts to let us know what they feel. Alas, they haven’t done that in the six-party process.” Hill said China would play a crucial role in the future of the nuclear talks. He said the China-North Korea relationship was the “key issue” for the talks and added: “I think that relationship have begun to shift.” -------- russia U.S.-Russian Plutonium Deal Founders The Associated Press By H. JOSEF HEBERT July 22, 2006 http://www.topix.net/content/ap/2396425727386334330004079583232770754773 We're both going to get rid of it. They will be burning plutonium before we will Hailed six years ago as a breakthrough in safeguarding Russia's nuclear materials, a U.S.-Russian plan to rid the world of tons of plutonium has foundered and achieved little. Even though the U.S. has spent $1.4 billion, none of the plutonium has been removed from the weapons stockpile, nor is any expected to be destroyed anytime soon. In addition, Moscow recently acted on its own to change the program so it better suits its energy goals. With the Bush administration beginning talks with Russia on broader cooperation on nuclear energy, the troubled plutonium program sheds light on how difficult the negotiations between the countries can become. At the just-concluded summit of world powers, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin promised continued discussions on the program, which calls on each country to eliminate 34 metric tons of plutonium from weapons stockpiles. The program got under way with great fanfare in 2000 as an 'unprecedented' initiative to curb nuclear nonproliferation. The U.S. and Russia would work on parallel tracks to take the plutonium from warheads, blend it with uranium so it can be burned in commercial power-producing light-water reactors. The amount was a fraction of the militaries' plutonium stockpiles. While exact numbers are classified, the United States is believed to have about 100 metric tons and Russia about 145 metric tons. The program was seen as a way to get Russia to start destroying its excess plutonium, removing the possibility of theft in a country with fewer safeguards than the United States. Originally both countries were to build a plant to convert the plutonium to a mixed-oxide fuel _ a blend of plutonium and uranium. That led to a string of problems as Russia didn't want to pay for its plant and there was a long dispute over who would be liable in case of worker injuries. Russian officials said this year they no longer were interested in turning the plutonium into the mixed-oxide fuel, but wanted to burn the plutonium in a type of reactor that, under some conditions, can produce more plutonium than it burns. Meanwhile, the estimated cost of the proposed U.S. conversion plant in South Carolina has jumped from $1 billion to $4.7 billion, and a second plant needed to take apart the plutonium pits removed from warheads has grown to $2 billion, four times what it was projected to cost five years ago, according to a House committee monitoring the program. 'Somebody ought to rethink the idea,' said Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee that this year eliminated money for the program. The full House went along. A Senate committee, however, wants to keep spending on the South Carolina plant _ $335 million next year to start construction. But to reflect its displeasure with Russia, the committee eliminated $35 million that was to go to advance the Russian program. Matthew Bunn, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at Harvard University, says the original program is on the verge of collapse. 'The idea of doing it in parallel, if not dead, is drawing its last breath,' Bunn said. Linking the programs was essential to nonproliferation efforts because it would push the Russians into a commitment to cut its plutonium stocks, he said. 'We've had a lot of diplomatic effort and spent a lot of money and we haven't gotten rid of a gram of plutonium,' Bunn said. Administration officials say the program is moving forward and they want to start building the conversion plant this fall. They have accepted Russia's shift toward using a different kind of reactor, known as a breeder, and believe the Russians can start burning plutonium in four to six years. 'We're both going to get rid of it. They will be burning plutonium before we will,' Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said recently in response to questions about the viability of the program. In a speech last week on nonproliferation, Brooks said the Russians 'told us ... and told the international community that they remain committed to disposing 34 metric tons of plutonium. We expect them to keep this commitment and will work with them to achieve it.' But experts say Russia's small breeder reactor can accommodate less than one-third of a ton of plutonium a year, compared with four tons a year that the mixed-oxide program would have handled. They say Russia really wants financial help from the U.S. and others to build a larger fast-breeder reactor that could burn more plutonium _ and perhaps even produce new plutonium. 'We have feared all along that the Russians would try to leverage the plutonium disposition program to get a new breeder reactor,' said Tom Clements, nuclear nonproliferation adviser to Greenpeace International. Brooks said the United States remains 'opposed to fast reactors that are used as breeders.' He noted that 'fast reactors can be breeders or burners,' depending on their configuration. Hobson said he is convinced that the Russians never were interested in converting plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel to burn in a commercial power reactor. 'The Russians will technically live up to their side of an agreement,' Hobson said in an interview. 'But you need to understand how they view these agreements. They view them differently than we do.' Hobson said the chief of Russia's civilian nuclear program made clear to him in a meeting last April that the Russians would not pay for any of the costs of building a mixed-oxide plant and want to use the breeder reactors _ presumably with help from the West. 'I think the Russians are smarter about this than our people are,' Hobson said. On the Net: National Nuclear Security Administration: http://www.nnsa.doe.gov Institute for Science and International Security: http://www.isis-online.org/ Nuclear Threat Initiative: http://www.nti.org -------- security Outcry as border guards seize British 'dirty bomb' lorry heading for Iran By JASON LEWIS, The UK Daily Mail on Sunday 22:00pm 22nd July 2006 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=397124&in_page_id=1770 Border guards seized a British lorry on its way to make a delivery to the Iranian military - after discovering it was packed with radioactive material that could be used to build a dirty bomb. The lorry set off from Kent on its way to Tehran but was stopped by officials at a checkpoint on Bulgaria's northernborder with Romania after a scanner indicated radiation levels 200 times above normal. The lorry was impounded and the Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NPA) was called out. On board they found ten lead-lined boxes addressed to the Iranian Ministry of Defence. Inside each box was a soil-testing device, containing highly dangerous quantities of radioactive caesium 137 and americium-beryllium. The soil testers had been sent to Iran by a British firm with the apparent export approval of the Department of Trade and Industry. Last night, the head of the Bulgarian NRA, Nikolai Todorov, said he was shocked that devices containing so much nuclear material could be sold so easily. He said: "The devices are highly radioactive - if you had another 90 of them you would be able to make an effective dirty bomb." And a spokesman for the Bulgarian customs office, said: "The documentation listed the shipment as destined for the Ministry of Transport in Tehran, although the final delivery address was the Iranian Ministry of Defence. "According to the documentation they are hand-held soil-testing devices which were sent from a firm in the United Kingdom." A leading British expert last night said the radioactive material could easily be removed and used to construct a dirty bomb. Dr Frank Barnaby from the Oxford Research Group, said: "You would need a few of these devices to harvest sufficient material for a dirty bomb. Americium-beryllium is an extremely effective element for the construction of a dirty bomb as it has a very long half-life, but I would be amazed to find it out on the street. "I don't know how you would come by it as it is mainly found in spent reactor-fuel elements and is not at all easy to get hold of. I find it very hard to believe it is so easily available in this device." Senior Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay called for the Government to tighten up export controls to prevent the Iranian military getting its hands on nuclear material. He said: "The Prime Minister has accused the Iranian Government of sponsoring international terrorism, yet his officials are doing nothing to prevent radioactive material which has an obvious dual use being sold to their military." Little control The discovery will add to fears about the lack of control over the sale of nuclear material to so-called 'rogue states' which the Government claims sponsor international terrorism, particularly as it comes at a time when Iran is ignoring international calls to halt its nuclear programme. The case has echoes of the arms-to-Iraq affair during which the DTI approved exports of apparently innocent civilian equipment to Saddam Hussein that was then used to build weapons. Mr MacKinlay added: "Our export controls are a mess. "The Iranians are resourceful and sophisticated and, just as we saw with Saddam Hussein in the past, this is just the sort of method they would use to get their hands on the equipment they need for their supposedly banned weapons programmes." Andrew Maclean, a director of Kent-based Orient Transport Services, which was paid by another unnamed British firm to transport the radioactive devices to Iran, said the shipment was perfectly legal. He said: "We had a letter from the DTI confirming that no export licence was needed to send these items to the Iranians. "We also alerted customs officials about the goods we were transporting before they left the UK and the truck carried all the appropriate warning symbols to alert officials and the emergency services of what it was carrying." Last night a DTI spokesman confirmed: "Exporters do not need a licence to transport this sort of material to Iran. It is not covered by our export controls." In August last year there was a similar incident when a Turkish truck carrying a ton of zirconium silicate supplied by a British firm was stopped by Bulgarian customs at the Turkish border on its way to Tehran, after travelling from Britain, through Germany and Romania, without being stopped. Zirconium is used in nuclear reactors to stop fuel rods corroding and can also be used as part of a nuclear warhead. The metal can be extracted from zirconium silicate and its trade is usually tightly controlled. -------- MILITARY -------- arms Russia, India to Produce 1,000 BrahMos Cruise Missiles July 22, 2006 :: BBC Worldwide Monitoring :: News http://www.missilethreat.com/news/200607220841.html http://search.ft.com/searchArticle?id=060721005184&query=missile&vsc_appId=totalSearch&offset=10&resultsToShow=10&vsc_subjectConcept=&vsc_companyConcept=&state=More&vsc_publicationGroups=TOPW&searchCat=1 Russia and India plan to manufacture 1,000 BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles over the next 10 years through their joint venture company, reports the Indian news agency PTI. Of these 1,000 missiles, nearly 50 percent will be exported to client states. Russia and India have already invested $300 million in BrahMos Aerospace, which drew upon technological skills and capabilities from both countries to design, develop, and manufacture the missile. The 2,500-kg BrahMos has a strike range of 290 km and a maximum speed of Mach 2.8 (approximately one kilometer per second). -------- business Bomber billions for US July 22, 2006 Australia Herald-Sun http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,19863403-663,00.html THE US Air Force will earmark billions of dollars in its next five-year budget plan to help meet the Pentagon's goal of developing a new long-range bomber by 2018. The timetable was ambitious but achievable, given that the new bomber would probably include technologies already under development by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the US aerospace and defence industry, an official said. The US Air Force has been analysing alternatives for long-range strike capability for the past nine months. In another development, the US Army has been left cash-strapped by its campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Peter Schoomaker, the army chief of staff, said last week that equipment replacement and repair in the two countries had trebled to $13 billion-plus in the past two years. The army has declared a clampdown on spending for travel and the hiring of civilians. AGENCIES -------- israel / palestine Israel Hastily Musters Its Citizen Army Jul 22 2006 By ARON HELLER Associated Press Writer http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/07/22/D8J18KEG0.html JERUSALEM - Roy Bass emerged from the Mediterranean waves at noon Friday for a Popsicle break when, surfboard in hand, he heard his cell phone ringing on the beach. It was a recorded message: "An emergency draft has been activated." Four hours later, the 27-year-old computer programmer was at an army base, in full uniform, preparing to head to Israel's northern border, where troops were massing to take on Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Israel's mighty military is comprised of thousands like Bass _ ordinary civilians who, at a moment's notice, respond to the call to arms. On Friday, several thousand reservists were drafted for immediate, emergency duty. By Friday night, the army chief of staff announced the response was full, plus thousands who volunteered on their own initiative. "The reserves have proven themselves once again," said Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the army chief of staff. The enthusiastic response highlights the intimate relationship Israel has with its army. Nearly every Jewish Israeli has served in the army, and opinion polls consistently show the army to be the country's most trusted institution. Since Israel became independent in 1948, reserves have been the backbone of its military, conditioned to drop everything and be mobilized within a day or two to back up the far smaller core of active duty soldiers. Men from all walks of life _ and increasingly women with special skills _ instantly become soldiers again. Israel's standing army of about 186,500 troops can jump to 631,500 with rapid mobilization, according to figures from the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. The system has proven effective in all of Israel's wars. In 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked en masse on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, thousands of reservists were summoned from their homes and synagogues and rushed to the front lines to push back the offensive. Despite Israel's increasing reliance on technological superiority, military service remains a rite of passage. All 18-year-old men are drafted for three years and will continue to do reserves for about a month a year into their 40s, by which time many will have sons in the army or reserves. Women are drafted for two years. As Israel's military dominance has grown, it has become less reliant on its reserves. The retirement age has been gradually lowered from 51 to 40 in some cases, and the number of reserves called up has steadily dropped, with the army focusing more on those with specialized skills, such as air force pilots and intelligence officers. Some view the task the way Americans view jury duty _ boring and disruptive, especially for college students and the self-employed. Most, however, welcome it as a break from the rigors of daily life, a chance to bond with old comrades in a setting where a backgammon board is often a more important accessory than a rifle. In peacetime, a reserve stint is something to be haggled over with a commanding officer with all sorts of excuses _ a college exam, an overseas vacation, a spell of dental surgery. But when the call-up is an "Order 8," military parlance for an emergency summons, the response is visceral. "All of a sudden it becomes a real war, it changes everything," Bass said by cell phone from his base in northern Israel. Bass serves annually in his armored battalion, but this is his first Order 8. Where once Israelis were drafted to war by air raid sirens, passwords over the radio and recruiters going door to door, today they are summoned by computerized calls to their cell phones. When Bass got his call-up, he sped home and swapped his bathing suit for an army uniform. "There was no dilemma, no doubt in my mind because it is something you grow up with, that this is the most important thing there is," he said. "It's ingrained deep inside you _ if they call you, you go." Even without a war, reservists are as much at risk as regular soldiers. The two soldiers who were kidnapped by Hezbollah on the Lebanon border, triggering the current round of fighting, were reservists. Ephraim Sneh, a lawmaker and former general, said his three parliamentary assistants were drafted for emergency duty. He said those who are called are genuinely needed and, therefore, "whoever serves, serves with joy." "The destiny of Israel is the hands of the few, and we owe our lives to the few," he said. "Those who are on the front lines were always the few, but thanks to these devoted people we are still here." -------- spies C.I.A. Worker Says Message on Torture Got Her Fired By MARK MAZZETTI New York Times July 22, 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/washington/22intel.html http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/nyt7_22_06_3.htm WASHINGTON, July 21 — A contract employee working for the Central Intelligence Agency said she had been fired recently for posting a message on a classified computer server that said an interrogation technique used by the agency against some terror suspects amounted to torture. The employee, Christine Axsmith, kept the “Covert Communications” blog on a top-secret computer network used by American intelligence agencies. Ms. Axsmith was fired on Monday after C.I.A. officials objected to a message that criticized the interrogation technique called “waterboarding,” a particularly harsh practice that the C.I.A. is known to have used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is widely regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. The episode has opened a window into the new world of classified blogging: an experimental effort being carried out in top-secret computer forums where information and ideas are shared across the intelligence community. Intelligence officials said that since last year, more than 1,000 blogs had been set up on classified intelligence servers. Ms. Axsmith, a computer security expert with a law degree, posted the message this month, shortly after the Bush administration decided to grant some protections of the Geneva Conventions to suspected terrorists in American custody. She said that her message began, “Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.” Ms. Axsmith’s firing was earlier reported on several blogs including Wonkette.com on Thursday, and in Friday’s Washington Post. “I wanted an in-house discussion,” Ms. Axsmith said in an interview on Thursday in her home in Washington. “Something where I would be educating people on the background of the Geneva Conventions.” Instead, Ms. Axsmith was fired by her employer, B.A.E. Systems, which has an information technology contract with the C.I.A. Ms. Axsmith said C.I.A. officials had confronted her and told her that the agency’s senior leadership was angry about the blog, which was housed on Intelink, the classified server maintained by the American intelligence community to aid communication among its employees. Besides losing her job, Ms. Axsmith also lost her top-secret security clearance, which she had held since 1993 and used for previous work for the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center. She said she feared that her career in the intelligence world was over. “It was like I was wiped out,” she said. A spokesman for B.A.E. Systems, Bob Hastings, said privacy issues prohibited him from commenting on Ms. Axsmith’s firing. But Mr. Hastings said that company policy prohibited employees from using computers for non-official purposes. Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the blogs were intended to “encourage collaboration” on business issues but that postings “should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the Web site.” The C.I.A. denies that it uses torture to extract information from prisoners, although a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general concluded that some of its interrogation practices appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In waterboarding, the interrogation technique that Ms. Axsmith criticized, a prisoner is strapped to a board and then made to feel as if he is drowning. In March 2005, Porter J. Goss, who was then the C.I.A. director, described waterboarding as a “professional interrogation technique”; American military pilots and commandos are known to have been subjected to it during highly classified training regimes designed to prepare them to live in captivity. The use of the practice, along with the agency’s detention of approximately three dozen “high value detainees” in secret jails, has made some C.I.A. employees uneasy and has prompted a debate within the intelligence community. Ms. Axsmith said she believed that the “vast majority” of people working for the C.I.A. were opposed to torture. And, she said that she believed that the classified blogs could be a critical tool to allow C.I.A. employees — who are often prohibited from discussing their work even with other agency officials — to vent frustrations. “The blogs are a safety valve for people to discuss controversial topics,” she said. “It reduces the chances that people may leak to the press.” In April, the C.I.A. fired Mary O. McCarthy, a longtime employee, for having unauthorized contacts with the news media. Though stripped of her security clearance, Ms. Axsmith still maintains her public, unclassified blog: econo-girl.blogspot.com. On that Web site on Friday, there were several messages supporting her, including postings from anonymous intelligence officials who said that they would miss her “Covert Communications” blog. Ms. Axsmith acknowledges that the posting that got her fired was deliberately provocative, and she said that if she had another chance she might have toned down the language. “I guess I’m just too much of a big mouth for that organization,” she said. -------- -------- un -------- -------- us -------- -------- venezuela -------- war crimes -------- -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- courts / tribunals -------- death penalty -------- drug war -------- homeland security / national intelligence -------- human rights -------- immigration / refugees -------- justice -------- police -------- prisons / prisoners -------- -------- terrorism -------- torture -------- POLITICS -------- budget -------- corruption -------- investigations -------- propaganda wars -------- -------- us politics -------- -------- voting -------- ENERGY -------- alternative energy -------- -------- energy -------- -------- OTHER -------- environment -------- -------- genetics -------- -------- health -------- -------- imf / world bank / wto (economics) -------- poverty -------- ACTIVISTS -------- --------