Proliferation
News: 3 March 2005
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
For past stories and further proliferation resources, visit:
www.CarnegieEndowment.org/npp
Thursday, March 3
Listen to audio of
the official release of Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear
Security. The final report from the Carnegie Endowment
reflects input
from experts and officials in the United States and twenty countries
across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the former Soviet states and
Russia.
Thursday, March 3
President Bush and his closest foreign policy advisors convene today to
grapple with an important shift in U.S. policy toward Iran: how best to
support a European diplomatic initiative to prevent the Middle East
nation from becoming a nuclear weapons state.
The discussions follow a working lunch Wednesday at the White House
that included Vice President Dick Cheney, national security advisor
Stephen J. Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during which
the Europeans' strategy to offer economic incentives was discussed,
U.S. officials said.
The issue is potentially divisive, with the more conservative members
of the administration opposed in principle to any contact with Iran,
arguing that it would only strengthen what they view as an illegitimate
and oppressive regime.
Thursday, March 3
A senior Iranian security official on Thursday accused the
International Atomic Energy Authority of lying and leaking information
from inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities.
Speaking on Iranian television, the normally mild Hossein Mousavian,
foreign policy head of the Supreme National Security Council, also
warned Britain, France and Germany that Iran would leave talks with
them about its nuclear programme unless there was "tangible progress".
Mohamed ElBaradei, IAEA director general, told the agency's board this
week that Iran should go out of its way to be transparent about its
nuclear programme, which Tehran says is peaceful, to overcome
suspicions arising from the fact that it had been kept secret for
almost two decades.
Thursday, March 3
North Korea has threatened to resume long-range missile testing and
demanded that the United States apologise for calling the reclusive
country "an outpost of tyranny", official media reported.
The threat follows a Feb. 10 announcement in which North Korea
officially said for the first time it had nuclear arms and was pulling
out six-way disarmament talks with the United States, China, Russia,
Japan and South Korea.
The Korean-language version of a Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)
report late on Wednesday quoted a Foreign Ministry statement saying
North Korea had a right to test-fire missiles, despite a moratorium
that has been in place for six years.
Spring 2005
The most disturbing aspect of the international nuclear smuggling
network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, widely viewed as the father of
Pakistan's nuclear weapons, is how poorly the nuclear nonproliferation
regime fared in exposing and stopping the network's operation. Khan,
with the help of associates on four continents, managed to buy and sell
key nuclear weapons capabilities for more than two decades while
eluding the world's best intelligence agencies and nonproliferation
institutions and organizations. Despite a wide range of hints and
leads, the United States and its allies failed to thwart this network
throughout the 1980s and 1990s as it sold the equipment and expertise
needed to produce nuclear weapons to major U.S. enemies including Iran,
Libya, and North Korea.
Thursday, March 3
A nuclear weapon modified for earth-penetration that the Bush
administration is seeking funding to study would not burrow far enough
into the earth to contain its blast, a senior Energy Department
official said yesterday.
Nor is it intended to, National Nuclear Security Administration head
Linton Brooks said, adding that the administration was "imprecise" if
it had conveyed that impression.
The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator's (RNEP) hardened shell, which the
White House hopes to field test next year, is intended to provide a few
meters of deeper penetration in order to project its force deeper for
striking enemy facilities far underground, Brooks told a House Armed
Services subcommittee.
Thursday, March 3
The Liberal Party government of Prime Minister Paul Martin in Canada
told the Bush administration last week that it will not endorse the US
plan for national missile defense.
Many are viewing this as a slap in the face from Ottawa to Washington,
and a change in the position Canada seemed to be taking a year ago.
They expect it to poison relations between the two neighbors -
ensuring, among other things, that next month's three-way summit with
Mexican President Vicente Fox will fail to make progress in broadening
NAFTA. It would seem that the knee-jerk liberal Canadians just could
not get over their nostalgia for the ABM Treaty, as well as their
visceral dislike of missile-defense systems.
This interpretation is badly mistaken. The Bush administration made
major diplomatic errors in handling this topic with Canada. It asked
for blanket endorsement of an open-ended US missile defense program,
rather than for specific help with specific technical challenges and
defensive weapons. This was a fundamental mistake, and the US has
mostly itself to blame for the resulting fallout.
