Homeland Security Focus Areas

Weapons of Mass Destruction

S. Korea: N. Korea submits nuclear list to China

By Associated Press

5:45 AM CDT, June 26, 2008

SEOUL, South Korea

North Korea submitted its long-awaited declaration detailing its nuclear weapons activities on Thursday, South Korea's foreign minister said, paving the way for Pyongyang to receive economic aid.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan told reporters that the North had submitted its declaration to Chinese officials in Beijing. The North was set to blow up the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear complex Friday, he said.

That would happen after the U.S. moves to take the North off a list of state sponsors of terrorism and another sanctions blacklist.

The North missed a deadline at the end of last year to submit the declaration, leading to months of haggling with Washington over what it would include. The list was not expected to provide details on nuclear weapons that the North may have produced.

U.S. officials who earlier insisted North Korea's declaration should be "complete and correct" have repeatedly scaled back expectations for the document in the wake of resistance from Pyongyang.

The declaration was not expected to include details of the North's alleged attempts to enrich uranium -- the dispute that sparked the nuclear standoff in late 2002. The list also will not describe how the North allegedly helped Syria build a nuclear plant.

The North is expected in the declaration to say how much plutonium it has produced at its main reactor facility. The next step in the disarmament talks will be to verify that claim, through procedures that Hill said would be set up within 45 days.

The main U.S. envoy to nuclear talks with North Korea affirmed this week that the communist nation's bombs also will not make the cut for the declaration. Instead, details on the bombs will be left to the next stage of the talks, when Pyongyang is supposed to abandon and dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

Washington said earlier this week it will start to remove North Korea from terrorism and sanctions blacklists after the declaration is handed over.

North Korea was to hand over the declaration to China because China is host of the six-party talks, which also include the South Korea, Russia and Japan. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei gave few details and took no questions during a short briefing on Thursday.

Shortly after Wu spoke, the car belonging to the North Korean ambassador was seen driving into the Chinese Foreign Ministry, presumably to deliver the declaration documents, but that could not be confirmed.

NYTimes.com

June 15, 2008 

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Design

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.

The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon that was built by Pakistan and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.

In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington over the past year, officials have said that the weapons design was far more sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. Those blueprints were for a Chinese nuclear weapon that dated to the mid-1960s, and investigators found that Libya had obtained them from the Khan network.

But the latest design found on Khan network computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic form, they said, making it easy to copy — and they have no idea how many copies of it are now in circulation.

Investigators said the evidence that the Khan network was trafficking in a tested, compact and efficient bomb design was particularly alarming, because if a country or group obtained the bomb design, the technological information would significantly shorten the time needed to build a weapon. Among the missiles that could carry the smaller weapon, according to some weapons experts, is the Iranian Shahab III, which is based on a North Korean design.

However, in recent days top American intelligence officials, who declined to speak about the discovery on the record because the information is classified, said that they had been unable to determine whether Iran or other countries had obtained the weapons design. Pakistan has refused to allow American investigators to directly interview Dr. Khan, who is considered a hero there as the father of its nuclear program. In recent weeks the only communications about him between the United States and Pakistan’s new government have been warnings from Washington not to allow him to be released.

Dr. Khan’s illicit nuclear network was broken up in early 2004; President Bush declared that shattering the operation was a major intelligence coup for the United States. Since then, evidence has emerged that the network sold uranium enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, and investigators are still pursing leads that he may have done business with other countries as well.

While Libya gave up its nuclear program, North Korea and Iran have not, despite intense international pressure, sanctions, and repeated offers of incentives to do so.

On Sunday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said that the administration remained concerned about the possibility that additional plans have been disseminated, but he did not address any of the latest revelations about the Khan network.

“We’re very concerned about the A.Q. Khan network, both in terms of what they were doing by purveying enrichment technology and also the possibility that there would be weapons-related technology associated with it,” he told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush from Paris to London on Sunday.

“That was a concern. That’s one of the reasons we rolled up the network here three years or so ago, and fairly successfully. And part of that rolling up was to roll up the network and part of it was to pursue what kind of relationship the A.Q. Khan network had to individual countries with which they are dealing.”

The existence of the compact bomb design began to become public in recent weeks after Switzerland announced that it had destroyed a huge stockpile of documents, including a weapons design, that were found in the computers of a family in Switzerland, the Tinners, who over the years played critical roles in Khan’s operation.

In May, Switzerland’s president, Pascal Couchepin, announced that more than 30,000 documents had been shredded, saying the government acted to keep them from “getting into the hands of a terrorist organization or an unauthorized state,” according to Swiss news accounts.

But American and I.A.E.A. officials say that destroying one copy of an electronic file was more satisfying to the Swiss than it was reassuring to them. It is unclear whether the Swiss knew that some of the same material had been found in other countries by I.A.E.A. investigators.

Some details of the Swiss action and the bomb design have appeared recently in Swiss newspapers and The Guardian of London and in The Washington Post on Sunday.

The Swiss have provided little information about exactly what they destroyed, but I.A.E.A. inspectors watched the destruction and American intelligence officials were deeply involved. “We were very happy they were destroyed,” one senior intelligence official said Friday. But he added that “what else is out there” remains a mystery. The Swiss destruction of the equipment came in response in the case of Urs Tinner, who has been in custody for more than four years but has not yet stood trial.

Two former Bush administration officials said they believed Mr. Tinner had provided information to the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still working for Dr. Khan, including some of the information that helped American and British officials intercept shipments of centrifuges on their way to Libya in 2003.

When news of that interception became public and Libya turned its $100 million program over to American and I.A.E.A. officials, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan forced Dr. Khan to issue a vague confession and then placed him under house arrest. Dr. Khan has since renounced that confession in Pakistani and Western media, saying he made it only to save Pakistan greater embarrassment.

It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.

“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani. “It was plain where this came from,” one senior official of the I.A.E.A. said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little.”

In public statements, Pakistani officials have insisted that the Khan “incident,” as the call it, is now history, and they publicly declared nearly two years ago that their investigations are over.

A senior Pakistani official, interviewed in Islamabad in April, said that the information provided by the I.A.E.A. was “vague and incomplete,” and he insisted that because Dr. Khan’s laboratories specialized in the manufacture of the equipment needed to enrich uranium, “he was not involved in weapons designs.”

But investigators have no doubt that he was the source of the digitized bomb design. “Clearly, someone had tried to modernize it, to improve the electronics,” one said. “There were handwritten references to the electronics, and the question is, who was working on this?”

The officials said that parts of the design were coded so that they could be transferred quickly to an automated manufacturing system for the production of parts.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from London.

NYTimes.com

June 13, 2008 

Gates Presses NATO on Missile Defense

By THOM SHANKER

BRUSSELS — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates joined NATO defense ministers here Thursday in an effort to push forward a design for missile defenses that will protect all alliance nations from a potential Iranian ballistic missile attack.

Over their scheduled two days of talks, the defense ministers also will discuss additional fighting forces and military trainers for the NATO-led stability mission in Afghanistan, as well as security issues arising from insurgents hiding across the border in neighboring Pakistan.

The future status of a NATO training mission in Kosovo, which adopts its constitution on June 15 but whose independence is not yet recognized by all alliance members, also is on the agenda.

Senior alliance officials said that no major decisions were expected out of the talks.

A senior Defense Department official traveling with Mr. Gates said the United States would press alliance members to agree on options for a defensive system against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.

That future NATO missile defense system would cover territory across the southeastern rim of the alliance Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Turkey.

Portions of those nations — including almost all of Turkey — would not be covered by the longer-range missile defense system the United States hopes to install in Poland and the Czech Republic, and NATO is committed to extending the protection to all 26 alliance nations and their populations.

The final architecture for the NATO missile defense system is due by an alliance summit meeting next year.

American plans to place 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a tracking and targeting radar in the Czech Republic have prompted virulent opposition in Russia, whose defense minister is set to meet with NATO counterparts here on Friday.

Alliance defense ministers are again expected to discuss shortfalls in NATO troop commitments for Afghanistan, as well as the risks posed by cross-border attacks from Taliban troops finding safe haven in Pakistan.

On Kosovo, the former province of Serbia seceded in February but not all NATO nations have recognized its sovereignty. Those legal differences have cast doubt on an alliance security training mission.

NATO’s goal is to create a modest Kosovo Security Force of 2,500 personnel, officials said. A European Union police mission set for Kosovo is months behind schedule.

Bush, E.U. Consider Iran Sanctions

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 10, 2008; 7:57 AM

KRANJ, Slovenia, June 10-- President Bush and European Union leaders began meeting here today to consider possible new financial sanctions on Iran in an attempt to halt its feared pursuit of nuclear weapons.

A draft statement from the annual U.S.-European Union summit, which was obtained by the Associated Press, showed that Bush and E.U. leaders were poised to impose further financial sanctions on Iran unless it suspends uranium enrichment.

The draft statement says that "Iran banks cannot abuse the international banking system to support proliferation and terrorism" and that "we are ready to supplement" United Nations sanctions with "additional measures."

Such an agreement would mark a significant accomplishment for Bush and other administration officials, who had indicated prior to today's summit that they did not expect to reach an accord on Iran or any of the other major issues facing the transatlantic alliance.

Iran is under criticism for defying United Nations Security Council sanctions by continuing to enrich uranium, which can be used for fuel or for weapons. Iran says it is pursuing nuclear research only for civilian purposes.

Bush and other E.U. leaders are scheduled to hold a joint press conference following their meeting this afternoon.

Today's summit in Slovenia kicks of a weeklong farewell journey for Bush in Europe, including a stop later today in Berlin and travel to Rome, Paris and London.

Bush had a series of meetings earlier in the day with E.U. and Slovenian leaders. The trip was Bush's second to this tiny alpine nation, which joined the E.U. and NATO in 2004. Bush noted during one media appearance that Slovenia was part of his first and last European trip as U.S. president.

Father of Pakistan's nukes stands defiant

Speaking out from house arrest, Khan says officials had role in proliferation

By Candace Rondeaux

The Washington Post

updated 5:07 a.m. ET, Thurs., June. 5, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The garden is in full bloom at Abdul Qadeer Khan's house. A lazy summer haze has settled over his manse, and at the small police substation across the way, several men chitchatted amiably on a recent day, barely glancing at the upscale villa that for the past four years has been part prison, part palatial refuge for the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.

Until very recently, Khan has been virtually cut off from the world — banished to house arrest by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf after admitting in a national television broadcast in 2004 to selling nuclear weapons-making technology and know-how to Iran, North Korea and Libya. But as Pakistan marked the 10th anniversary of its first nuclear bomb test last week, Khan, 72, publicly disavowed his confession, telling reporters that it was coerced.

"The people who were advising me to do this said, 'No one will believe it. This statement has no legal value. Everyone knows you are a national hero,' " Khan said this week in a telephone interview with The Washington Post.

Pakistan has been under pressure for years to give the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency access to Khan. So far, the government has refused, saying Pakistan has already conducted its own investigation into Khan's nuclear dealings. Yet more recently, as Musharraf's power here has waned, so too, it seems, has American interest in Khan, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Nuclear ringleader
"I'm sure we would oppose his release, but you know, as time goes on, I suppose his information gets less and less valuable," the official said. "No one has sort of thought about Mr. A.Q. Khan in a while."

Reviled in the West as the ringleader of an illicit international nuclear-arms bazaar, Khan remains a much respected figure in Pakistan for building the bomb. In the interview, Khan struck a defiant tone about his role in the development of nuclear technology, denying any wrongdoing and saying he would never talk to U.S. or IAEA officials about his work.

"Why should I talk to them? Pakistan is a sovereign nation. We are not a colony. I did whatever my government wanted me to do. I gave them whatever they wanted. We have not violated any laws," Khan said, noting that Pakistan is not part of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Khan, who was born in Bhopal, India, 11 years before the violent partition that led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, began his career as a student of metallurgy in Europe in the early 1960s. After completing his PhD in electrical engineering and metallurgy in Belgium in 1971, he went to work in the Netherlands for FDO, a Dutch company that was a subcontractor to Urenco, a British, German and Dutch consortium tasked with developing nuclear fuel.

His career in nuclear espionage began shortly after he was hired, three years after Pakistan was routed in a war with India over what is now Bangladesh in 1971. In the interview, he said it was his country's humiliating defeat that had sparked his desire to help Pakistan build the bomb. He said the creation of a nuclear weapons program was a proud achievement that has kept the two longtime rivals from going to war.

"My work to support Pakistan was that we showed that we could not be overrun by India, that we should not find ourselves in the position we found ourselves in in '71 with East Pakistan," he said.

Notoriety
Yet, it was his work to create an international underground network of nuclear technology sales that gained him the most notoriety in recent years. Dutch officials have said that the CIA was alerted as early as 1975 that Khan was stealing plans to build centrifuges to enrich uranium — a key component for nuclear weapons — from his Dutch employer.

In time, Khan returned to Pakistan, where under the government of then-Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, he led the nation's nuclear development program and began cultivating ties that helped Pakistan acquire the necessary knowledge and equipment from China, Europe and North Korea.

In May 1998, Pakistan conducted five underground nuclear bomb tests. It was around that time that the outlines of Khan's shadowy dealings with nations such as Libya and North Korea began to emerge. Musharraf, in his 2006 autobiography, said he received information that North Korean nuclear scientists had visited Khan's research lab in 1999. "There could be no doubt that it was he [Khan] who had been peddling our technology," Musharraf wrote of a CIA briefing he later received about Khan's activities in 2003.

Pardoned
Musharraf pardoned Khan days after his confession was broadcast four years ago. The government has since insisted that neither it nor the Pakistani military was aware of Khan's secret network.

Khan, in the interview, said he would not speak in detail about his work or identify his associates, but said others in the military and in Musharraf's government were culpable in the proliferation of nuclear technology. "The truth will come out about how they are treated, who is responsible. Those facts will come out," Khan said.

Early this week, allegations surfaced in a book by Indian journalist Shyam Bhatia that Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister slain in December, secretly carried CDs containing information about uranium enrichment to North Korea in 1993 in exchange for missile technology information. Asked whether the allegations were true, Khan said there was no way of establishing their "authenticity."

But Khan went on to say that he had regularly briefed Bhutto about Pakistan's nuclear program. "She knew the whole thing was going on," he said. "She was the prime minister."

Khan said Pakistani scientists had been hunting for a long-range missile to deliver the bomb and first turned to China for help. But China refused to share information about its longer-range missiles, he said. The goal, Khan said, was to build a nuclear weapon that could reach Pakistan's "only adversary" — India.

'Only option was N. Korea'
"China had the missiles, but they were very restricted. They were becoming a world power and they wanted to show they could act responsibly," Khan said. "The only option was North Korea."

Khan said he is hopeful that Pakistan's newly elected government will further lift restrictions on his movements. "A lot of people are already pressing very hard for all the restrictions to go," he said. "This new government is busy with other things. They've been left almost with a dying patient. It will take some time to get their house in order, and I don't want to create problems."

Khan, who has been in poor health in recent years, said he decided to speak out now because he was worried that his legacy was in jeopardy. "I didn't want to leave behind the stigma for my family that their father or husband is a traitor or a bad man," he said.

Syria to Meet With Weapons Inspectors About Site Bombed by Israel

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 3, 2008; A10

Nine months after Israel bombed an alleged Syrian nuclear site, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has agreed to hold talks in Damascus with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency about the remote desert compound, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced yesterday, ending a long deadlock over access to the location.

Syria will allow international access to the al-Kibar site on the Euphrates River, but has turned down the IAEA's request to go to at least three other facilities that U.S. intelligence says may be connected to a reactor and a clandestine nuclear weapons program, said Western diplomats familiar with the talks, which are scheduled for June 22-24. The other sites include possible reprocessing facilities, which are essential for production of fissile material.

"They will only go to the bombed site," said a diplomat close to the IAEA. "They did request to go to other places. It's the first visit. There will be other visits, to be sure, and you take one step at a time."

Syria's envoy to Washington criticized the Bush administration for allegations about additional sites.

"Why should they be going anywhere else? It's an endless story," said Ambassador Imad Moustapha. "Whenever Israel wants inspectors to go visit Syria, it only has to claim it's a nuclear site. Every analyst knows it's not a nuclear site. We're not going to become slaves to the whimsical desires of this administration and Israel. When the truth is known, this administration will be ashamed."

Diplomats in Vienna said the breakthrough appears in large part tied to the first photographic evidence of the alleged nuclear site, revealed in April during Bush administration briefings to the IAEA, Congress and the news media. "It was difficult for the IAEA to request access before it had been given any information, and only recently this information came out from the U.S.," said a diplomat in Vienna close to the IAEA. "The IAEA had earlier told Syria it would be in its interest to show this site, but it had no real grounds until recently."

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei criticized the United States and Israel yesterday for a "deeply regrettable" delay in providing intelligence, and for Israel's use of force before the IAEA had an opportunity to "establish the facts."

Weapons proliferation experts question whether the brief visit will be sufficient to address the volume of issues surrounding the alleged site, which Israel attacked in a late- night airstrike on Sept. 6 but still refuses to discuss publicly. Subsequent satellite images indicate that Syria leveled what was left on the site and rebuilt a new facility that it says is for military use.

The IAEA inspectors "probably won't get much done," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former U.N. weapons inspector.

"They'll want to use ground-penetrating radar to look for evidence of certain particles associated with this kind of reactor," he said. "They'll look at water pipes from the river. But it's not something you do in a couple hours. They will have to work it out with Syria, because it's not like Iraq, where [U.N. inspectors] showed up and could demand to see things. Syria has to agree to it. It could be that they just look around and have talks about what happens next."

The Bush administration called on Damascus to allow the IAEA inspection team to have access to all sites and any people who may have worked on the reactor, which Washington says was not configured to provide electricity.

Iran raps UN report on nuclear program

Tehran warns it might limit cooperation

By Reuters  |  June 2, 2008

TEHRAN - Iran said yesterday it might have to limit its cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog, criticizing the agency's report that said Tehran's alleged research into nuclear warheads was a matter of serious concern.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a May 26 report, also said Tehran should provide more information on its missile-related work.

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tehran believed the UN agency could have submitted a better report had it not been for the "continuing pressures of one or two known countries," in a clear reference to Tehran's Western foes.

The United States accuses the Islamic republic of seeking to develop nuclear arms. Iran disputes the charge but its refusal to suspend sensitive nuclear work has prompted three rounds of UN sanctions since 2006.

"In regard to this report, we of course had more expectations from the agency," spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a news conference, a day before the IAEA's board of governors begin a June 2-6 meeting in Vienna.

He added: "The trend of cooperation . . . should continue in a way that, as Dr. Larijani pointed out, the parliament and the Islamic Republic of Iran would not be compelled to review the going trend of the cooperation and adopt new limitations."

Hosseini was referring to Iran's new Parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, who on Wednesday said the current levels of cooperation with the IAEA were in jeopardy if major powers continued to "kick around" Iran's disputed nuclear case.

Hosseini did not elaborate under what circumstances and in what way Iran might limit cooperation with the IAEA.

Iran in 2006 ended voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol to the Non-proliferation Treaty that allowed for short notice IAEA inspections of its nuclear sites, after being referred to the UN Security Council.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday Iran had much to explain about the latest IAEA report.

But Larijani, in comments after he was elected speaker of Parliament yesterday, accused US and Israeli intelligence services of misleading the IAEA and said this could force Iran to "choose a different path", state television reported.

Earlier yesterday in Singapore, Defense Minister Herve Morin of France said Iran should open its nuclear installations to international scrutiny to clear suspicions about its ambitions.

The IAEA has been pressing Tehran to provide answers to Western intelligence accusations that it covertly studied how to design atomic bombs. Iran has rejected the intelligence as baseless, forged, or irrelevant.

World powers have prepared an enhanced package of economic and other incentives for Iran if it suspends its most sensitive nuclear work, something Tehran has consistently failed to do. 

NYTimes.com

May 16, 2008 

Western Experts Monitor China’s Nuclear Sites for Signs of Earthquake Damage

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

China’s main centers for designing, making and storing nuclear arms lie in the shattered earthquake zone, leading Western experts to look for signs of any damage that might allow radioactivity to escape.

A senior federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue, said the United States was using spy satellites and other means to try to monitor the sprawling nuclear plants. “There appear to be no immediate concerns,” the official said.

Nonetheless, “it’s potentially a serious issue,” Hans M. Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, said in an interview. “Radioactive materials could be released if there’s damage.”

China began building the plants in the 1960s, calculating that their remote locations would make them less vulnerable to enemy attack.

China’s main complex for making nuclear warhead fuel, codenamed Plant 821, is beside a river in a hilly, forested part of the earthquake zone. It is some 15 miles northwest of Guangyuan in Sichuan Province. The vast site holds China’s largest production reactor and factories that mine its spent fuel for plutonium — the main ingredient for modern nuclear arms.

Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington, said the military buildings that make up Plant 821 were probably unusually strong compared with civilian structures.

“I’d rather have been in the reactor building than a grade school” on Monday when the quake struck, he said. The site’s various plants “were built as military facilities, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if, by and large, they came through pretty well,” he added.

Plutonium is a radioactive toxin that can be made into compact nuclear arms that are relatively easy to deliver. For a given size of nuclear blast, plutonium weapons are smaller and lighter than those made of uranium, the other main material used as fuel for nuclear warheads.

It is unclear if the plutonium-production reactor at Plant 821 has operated recently. Mr. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists said China was expanding its nuclear forces to 240 warheads in its overall stockpile from around 200.

Reactors are usually rigged to shut down in an earthquake, and it is unclear if the Plant 821 reactor could undergo the same kind of disaster that struck the Chernobyl reactor in 1986. It spewed radioactivity across large parts of Russia and Europe.

“From what I know, they’re a really brilliant people and I think they do things the right way,” said Danny B. Stillman, a former director of intelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an expert on the Chinese nuclear program because of extensive travels in the 1990s to its secretive sites and bases.

Closer to the epicenter of the quake that struck Monday is Mianyang, a science city whose outskirts house the primary laboratory for the design of Chinese nuclear arms. It is considered the Chinese equal to Los Alamos. Known as the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, it too, Mr. Stillman said, houses a reactor, though a smaller one meant for research.

In China, the academy leads in the research, development and testing of nuclear weapons and has centers throughout Sichuan Province.

“I think this is not a no-cost moment for their labs but is not necessarily a human health risk,” Dr. Lewis of the New America Foundation, who visited Mianyang last summer, said of the academy’s main facilities. “We should keep in mind that there is certainly stuff out in the hills that might have been more seriously damaged.”

North of the city, for example, is a plant that shapes plutonium into the compact spheres that ignite nuclear weapons.

Nuclear experts said that closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, in rugged hills a two-hour drive west of Mianyang, China runs a highly secretive center that houses a prompt-burst reactor. It mimics the rush of speeding subatomic particles that an exploding atom bomb spews out in its first microseconds.

North in an even more rugged and inaccessible region, nuclear experts said, China maintains a hidden complex of large tunnels in the side of a mountain where it stores nuclear arms.

“It’s very close to the epicenter,” said one specialist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because, to the best of his knowledge, the exact location of the secret complex had never been publicly disclosed.

Dr. Stillman, the former intelligence chief at Los Alamos, said he had immense regard for the Chinese weapons scientists and assumed that many of their nuclear plants had been built to ride out the pounding of an earthquake or other disasters, natural or man-made.

“All the Chinese I met in the program were really brilliant,” he said. “So I think they do it the right way. I hope.”

May 14, 2008

North Korea Documents Make Debut, at a Distance

By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — The State Department, seeking to ward off criticism, kicked off a public-relations offensive on Tuesday by offering reporters a view — from a distance — of nuclear documents that senior officials said appeared to represent a complete accounting of North Korea’s plutonium production.

Officials brought documents received last week into a briefing room and put them on a table where they could be photographed, but not touched, which might have been tantalizing were it not for the fact that the reports had not been translated.

The 18,000 pages, turned over by North Korea last week, were hailed as a vital step toward the completion of a denuclearization agreement. The administration wants to complete the pact, which could be viewed as a rare foreign policy victory, before President Bush leaves office.

Conservatives have complained that the United States is not getting enough out of North Korea as the two sides try to complete the agreement.

Sung Kim, the director of the State Department’s Korea office, said North Korea may have slowed down the pace of its compliance with one part of the deal, which requires the dismantlement of a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

“We’d like to see it sped up,” Mr. Kim said. North Korean officials have indicated that they want to make sure that the United States delivers the fuel oil it has promised to the North before the dismantlement is completed.

Mr. Kim, who was in North Korea last week, said his North Korean counterparts had also reiterated their desire to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a step the Bush administration has promised if the nuclear deal is completed.

But the documents provided by North Korea do not include any information about two other topics on which it promised to be forthcoming: a uranium program that some officials in the Bush administration regard as another track toward weapons development and North Korea’s involvement in the proliferation of nuclear material.

The nuclear pact requires North Korea to disclose all of its nuclear activities, but it remains unclear whether the administration will get much explicit disclosure on uranium and proliferation.

The House on Tuesday debated a bill that is intended to force the administration to hold North Korea to a more stringent standard, requiring it to show that it has stopped providing nuclear assistance to other countries before it is removed from the list.

The White House opposes the bill and administration officials have indicated that the United States might try to finesse the issues, by getting North Korea to acknowledge American concerns without admitting anything. The United States would then try to verify that North Korea had stopped its weapons program by sending inspectors to all of North Korea’s nuclear facilities, administration officials said.

Mr. Kim said it would take weeks to go through the seven boxes of documents, which relate to North Korea’s plutonium program and go back to 1987. They contain information about North Korea’s three major campaigns to reprocess plutonium for nuclear weapons, administration officials say.

Also on Tuesday, the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said the United States was looking for ways to get 500,000 tons of food aid to North Korea, perhaps through nongovernmental organizations or the United Nations.

Ms. Perino said that such a step would not be linked to the nuclear pact.

April 30, 2008

Bush Says Syria Nuclear Disclosure Intended to Prod North Korea and Iran

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

NYTImes.com

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Tuesday that last week’s disclosure of what senior American officials called evidence of a nearly completed nuclear reactor in Syria was intended to warn North Korea and Iran about the dangers of spreading nuclear weapons.

Mr. Bush also defended his administration’s decision to keep that evidence secret for more than seven months after Israeli bombers destroyed the Syrian building on Sept. 6.

The International Atomic Energy Agency last week criticized the United States for withholding information about the site and Israel for destroying it, saying both actions undermined efforts to verify whether it was a nuclear reactor being built with the assistance of North Korea.

Making the first remarks in public about the Israeli attack by any American official, Mr. Bush said that his administration maintained a cloak of secrecy to avoid the risk of further military conflict in the region, including possible Syrian retaliation against Israel. He said that risk of conflict “was reduced” now.

Mr. Bush did not explain why exactly the administration disclosed the information at this point, but the timing coincided with renewed efforts to persuade North Korea to abide by last year’s agreement to acknowledge all of its nuclear activities. The North Korean activities include what administration officials assert are a still undisclosed program to enrich uranium and the sale of nuclear technology to countries like Syria.

“We also wanted to advance certain policy objectives through the disclosures, and one would be to the North Koreans to make it abundantly clear that we, we may know more about you than you think,” Mr. Bush said at a White House news conference.

Senior officials have signaled that the administration may accept a less-than-full disclosure, allowing North Korea, for example, not to explain its nuclear cooperation with Syria in the kind of detail that American officials have now done.

In his remarks on Tuesday and at Camp David on April 19, the president appeared to back off such a compromise. He restated his demand that North Korea make “a complete disclosure” about its proliferation and enrichment activities.

Senior officials showed videos and photographs last week documenting what they said was evidence of North Korean aid in the design and construction of a plutonium reactor in eastern Syria.

The officials offered the most extensive information about the Israeli military operation, revealing that Israeli bombs had badly damaged the building, but that the Syrians worked feverishly for more than a month to dismantle the ruins to conceal evidence of nuclear activity. Israeli officials have never discussed the strike publicly.

Even as senior officials were making their case, a State Department delegation held a new round of talks with the North Koreans last week, but the talks failed to make progress in getting a declaration, which is now four months overdue.

Mr. Bush said that the disclosure of a covert Syrian reactor, which Syria has denied, should persuade other countries to support United Nations Security Council resolutions intended to keep Iran and other countries from developing nuclear arms.

“We have an interest in sending a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing a nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East,” he said.

Mr. Bush also criticized the militant Islamic group Hamas as an obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but he passed up a chance to criticize former President Jimmy Carter, as his aides have, for meeting with Hamas leaders last week.

“Foreign policy and peace is undermined by Hamas in the Middle East,” he said when asked whether Mr. Carter’s meetings had undercut his efforts. “They’re the ones who are undermining peace. They’re the ones whose foreign policy objective is the destruction of Israel. They’re the ones who are trying to create enough violence to stop the advance of the two-party state solution.”

Asked about the political crisis in Zimbabwe, Mr. Bush sharply criticized President Robert Mugabe, saying he had “failed the country.”

He also made it clear that he was disappointed with other countries in the region for not doing more to support the opposition in Zimbabwe. That was an indirect but clear reference to South Africa, whose president, Thabo Mbeki, has called the dispute over last month’s elections an internal matter.

“It’s really incumbent upon the nations in the neighborhood to step up and lead,” Mr. Bush said, “and recognize that the will of the people must be respected and recognize that that will come about because they’re tired of failed leadership.”

Russia Wants Officers at Missile Sites

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

Associated Press Writer

1:10 PM CDT, April 8, 2008

MOSCOW

Moscow wants Russian military officers permanently stationed at planned U.S. missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic to make sure the facilities are not targeting Russia, the foreign minister said Tuesday.

Sergey Lavrov warned that Polish and Czech resistance to the idea could "devaluate" U.S. proposals intended to assuage Russian concerns about the missile shield.

His statement signaled that prospects for settling the U.S.-Russian rift over missile defense are low despite recent American attempts to soothe tensions.

Lavrov also warned that a U.S. failure to respond to Moscow's concerns on missile defense would prompt Russia to deploy weapons capable of piercing the missile shield in order to protect its security.

"Russia would respond with military-technical measures," Lavrov said.

He said that Moscow wants to make sure that the battery of 10 U.S. missile interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic are not directed at Russia.

"We are mostly interested in two things: a permanent presence of our officers and a reliable means of technical control," Lavrov said.

The United States has said it would be willing to allow periodic Russian inspections of the two proposed sites, if the Czech and Polish governments approved.

But Warsaw and Prague have opposed any permanent Russian presence, a highly contentious notion for two nations that endured Moscow's control and the presence of Soviet troops during the Cold War.

Poland's top missile defense negotiator, Witold Waszczykowski, called the Russian demand "too far-fetched."

"The installation could be accessible to visitors or inspectors, but we don't think there is any need for a permanent presence of Russian inspectors there," Waszczykowski told the PAP news agency from Moscow after consultations Tuesday that failed to narrow differences.

Lavrov acknowledged that Polish and Czech officials "don't even want to hear about a permanent Russian presence."

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and President Bush failed to overcome differences over the system during a weekend meeting at the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The Czech Republic has agreed to host the radar base, while Poland is still in negotiations with the U.S. on the matter. Warsaw essentially favors the deal, but is attempting to win military concessions in exchange from Washington.

Bush, Putin can't agree on missile defense

U.S. plan a threat to Iran, not Russia, president hints

Monday,  April 7, 2008 3:14 AM

By Matthew Lee

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SOCHI, Russia -- President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to resolve their differences over a U.S. missile-defense system in Europe at a farewell meeting yesterday.

Bush said the system is not aimed at Russia but at regimes that "could try to hold us hostage."

Bush also met Putin's chosen successor and pronounced him "a straightforward fellow."

He did not give President-elect Dmitry Medvedev the kind of unvarnished embrace he gave Putin seven years ago, but he told reporters after meeting Medvedev: "You can write down, I was 'impressed and look forward to working with him.'  "

At a joint news conference at Putin's Black Sea vacation home, Putin was asked whether he or his protege will be in charge of Russia's foreign policy when Putin steps down as president and becomes prime minister in early May.

Putin said that Medvedev will, and will represent Russia at the Group of Eight meeting of industrial democracies in July in Tokyo. "Mr. Medvedev has been one of the co-authors of Russia's foreign policy," Putin said. "He's completely on top of things."

At their final meeting as presidents of their respective countries, Bush and Putin complimented each other lavishly but acknowledged that they remain at odds on some major issues, principally missile defense and NATO's eastward expansion.

Putin called the U.S. missile plan -- which envisions basing tracking radar sites in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland -- the most contentious of U.S.-Russian differences and the one hardest to reconcile. "Our fundamental attitude toward the American plan has not changed," he said.

But, he said, "the best thing is to work jointly" on such a system.

"We've got a lot of way to go," Bush acknowledged.

Bush said he views the U.S. plan as "defense, not offense. And, obviously, we've got a lot of work to convince the experts this defense system is not aimed at Russia."

Bush also said the system is designed to deal with "regimes that could try to hold us hostage," a clear reference to Iran. "The system is not designed to deal with Russia's capacity to launch multiple rockets," he said.

The president blamed lingering Cold War thinking by some in both Russia and the United States for making it harder to reach agreement on missile defense. "We spent a lot of time in our relationship trying to get rid of the Cold War," he said. "It's over. It ended."

Both said they agreed to cooperate and keep discussing the missile-defense system.

On another military issue, the sides agreed to develop a legally binding arrangement after the strategic arms limitation treaty expires in December 2009. Their joint declaration noted the "substantial reductions already carried out" under the pact known as START, which they said was an important step in reducing the number of deployed nuclear warheads.

Fallout over error

Inventory of nuclear arsenal ordered

Friday,  March 28, 2008 2:56 AM

By Josh White

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a complete inventory of the nation's nuclear arsenal and all associated components after the discovery last week that four secret nuclear-missile parts had been mistakenly sent to Taiwan, an error that went unnoticed for more than 18 months.

Gates already had ordered a high-level investigation into how the four nose-cone fuse assemblies for U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles were shipped overseas in place of common helicopter batteries -- the military's second major nuclear-related incident in less than a year.

In August, the Air Force unknowingly flew nuclear warheads between North Dakota and Louisiana, losing track of them for 36 hours.

Senior Pentagon officials have called the more recent episode "extremely embarrassing," and it has strained relations with China and called into question the U.S. military's ability to maintain its arsenal of catastrophic weapons.

Gates has ordered the Air Force, the Navy and the Defense Logistics Agency to take inventory of and assess control measures for all nuclear weapons and their associated parts within 60 days, "to verify positive control and accountability of all such materials," according to a memo released yesterday.

Taiwan received the four ballistic missile fuses from the Defense Logistics Agency in August 2006, instead of the helicopter batteries that it was supposed to get as part of billions of dollars in U.S. military sales to the country. Taiwanese officials had been contacting the United States over the past year about what to do with the items; U.S. officials at one point instructed their disposal, U.S. authorities told The Washington Post this week.

Early indications are that the nose cones' outer packaging was mislabeled.  

NYTimes.com

March 27, 2008

World Briefing | United Nations

Iran Asks for Apology on Sanctions

By WARREN HOGE

Iran said the United States, Britain, France and Germany should apologize to the country’s leaders and scientists for damaging their reputations through United Nations Security Council sanctions resolutions against the country’s nuclear program and said it might seek compensation and pursue unspecified legal actions.

In a 20-page letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, above, challenged the most recent of three sanctions resolutions, adopted March 3, and said that people identified as subject to the trade, travel and financial sanctions included “national heroes of Iran.” The letter also reiterated Iran’s refusal to heed the Council’s demand for a suspension of uranium enrichment that Iran says is for peaceful purposes but the West argues is for building a bomb.

NYTimes.com

March 26, 2008 

China Concerned Over Missile Parts Mistake in Taiwan

By REUTERS

Filed at 6:41 a.m. ET

BEIJING (Reuters) - China expressed concern and dissatisfaction with the United States on Wednesday after the Pentagon said it mistakenly shipped four fuses for nuclear missiles to Taiwan in 2006.

Beijing had urged the United States to thoroughly investigate and report the details promptly to China so as to "eliminate the negative effect and severe consequences," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang was quoted on a ministry Web site as saying.

"We express our serious concern and strong dissatisfaction with this and have made solemn representations to the American side," he said.

Beijing believes self-ruled Taiwan, which held a presidential election on Saturday, is part of China and has declined to renounce the use of force as a means to reunite the island with the mainland.

The U.S. military was supposed to ship h