President George W. Bush met with members of his national security team today to discuss the findings of the White House commission on U.S. intelligence capabilities (White House photo/Eric Draper). U.S. Intelligence Agencies Need Reform, Resist Change, Presidential Commission Says By Joe Fiorill Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies were “dead wrong” about Iraq’s WMD programs but harbor staunch resistance to necessary reforms, a blue-ribbon commission reported to President George W. Bush today (see GSN, March 30)...Full Story

EU Reportedly Considering Iran Nuclear Compromise France, Germany and the United Kingdom are considering a compromise proposal by Iran that would allow Tehran to keep some nuclear technology, Reuters reported yesterday (see GSN, March 30)...Full Story

North Korea Wants Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks Seeking recognition that it has nuclear weapons, North Korea announced today that six-party talks about its nuclear program should be considered nuclear arms reduction negotiations (see GSN, March 30)...Full Story

	Thursday, March 31, 2005

“State Sponsors of Terrorism” Pose Reduced Threat to United States, Homeland Security Report States The threat posed by most nations on the U.S. list of “state sponsors of terrorism” has dropped since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a draft report from the Homeland Security Department (see GSN, March 17). “In the post-9/11 environment, countries do not appear to be facilitating or supporting terrorist groups intent on striking the U.S. homeland,” according to the report obtained by the New York Times. The U.S. State Department has identified six nations as supporting terrorists. Five of those countries — North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Libya and Cuba — pose a “diminishing concern,” the report states. Iran is named as a continuing threat, the Times reported. “Only Iran appears to have the possible future motivation to use terrorist groups, in addition to its own state agents, to plot against the U.S. homeland,” states the report. The greatest threats come from “ideologically driven nonstate actors,” with al-Qaeda topping the list, according to the report. Terrorism experts said they agreed with the report’s conclusions, but noted that the Bush administration has regularly identified North Korea and other countries as threats, according to the Times. “The administration has been very reluctant to accept that state sponsorship is a waning phenomenon,” said Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Eric Lipton, New York Times, March 31). Back to top

U.S. Intelligence Agencies Need Reform, Resist Change, Presidential Commission Says By Joe Fiorill Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies were “dead wrong” about Iraq’s WMD programs but harbor staunch resistance to necessary reforms, a blue-ribbon commission reported to President George W. Bush today (see GSN, March 30). The agencies were unable to collect good information about prewar Iraq, made mistakes in analyzing what they did collect and did not communicate well with policy-makers about the lack of evidence to ground their analyses, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction wrote in the unclassified version of a classified report delivered today. “The intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure,” the panel told the president in a letter accompanying the report. The commission was led by retired federal judge Laurence Silberman and former Virginia Governor Charles Robb. “The harm done to American credibility by our all too public intelligence failings in Iraq will take years to undo. If there is good news, it is this:  Without actually suffering a massive nuclear or biological attack, we have learned how badly the intelligence community can fail in struggling to understand the most important threats we face,” the report adds in its summary. After interviewing hundreds of experts inside and outside intelligence agencies, the panel called for better intelligence leadership, including through creation of a National Counterproliferation Center; integration of, and innovation in, intelligence collection; improvement of analysis, and better communication between analysts and policy-makers; and better sharing of information among agencies. Bush welcomed the recommendations in general terms. “The central conclusion is one that I share: America’s intelligence community needs fundamental change to enable us to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century,” he said today, promising that his administration would “review the commission’s findings” and “ensure that concrete action is taken.” The panel called for sweeping changes to bring intelligence agencies up to speed with current biological and nuclear weapons threats. “Most of the traditional intelligence community collection tools are of little or no use in tackling biological weapons,” the panel said, adding that it could not discuss “specific challenges” in the unclassified version of the report. It called on intelligence agencies to reach out to biologists outside government and to make collection of biological weapon intelligence a higher priority. “Many of our intelligence capabilities are inadequate” for learning about the nuclear programs of “terrorist organizations and smaller states,” the panel said. Intelligence agencies “must adapt to the changing threat” illustrated by the existence of insecure nuclear materials and the clandestine nuclear distribution network once led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, it said. “Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or 10 years ago,” the panel said. “As for biological weapons, despite years of presidential concern, the intelligence community has struggled to address this threat.” Commission Urges Bush to Push Changes on Resistant Agencies The panel made 74 recommendations for improving intelligence, highlighting those it said “only you [Bush] can effect.” It said the president should support the national intelligence director (DNI) — a post created under last year’s Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act and for which Bush has nominated longtime diplomat John Negroponte — as the director faces off with the “headstrong” Defense Department and the CIA. The two agencies, according to the panel, will “sooner or later … try to run around — or over — the DNI.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today thanked the panel for its work and said in a prepared statement that he has asked the relevant agency officials to “review the report with care, undertake a systematic review of the commission’s recommendations and make suggestions to me for improvements.” The commission also urged Bush to “order an organizational reform of the [FBI] that pulls all of its intelligence capabilities into one place and subjects them to the coordinating authority of the DNI.”  “The intelligence reform act almost accomplishes this task, but at crucial points it retreats into ambiguity,” the panel said. It said the act gives the director “broad responsibilities but only ambiguous authorities” and that the president should seek to ensure the law is implemented in a way that strengthens the director’s hand. The commission also issued a general call for more official pressure on intelligence agencies to perform well and for more oversight of their findings. “The intelligence community needs to be pushed. It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policy-makers, sometimes to the point of discomfort,” the commission wrote in the letter. “While policy-makers must be prepared to credit intelligence that doesn’t fit their preferences, no important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning that forces the community to explain exactly how it came to that assessment and what alternatives might also be true.” The panel stressed the difficulty that is to be expected in seeking to reform intelligence agencies, which it blasted as deeply resistant to change. “Like government bodies everywhere, intelligence agencies are prone to develop self-reinforcing, risk-averse cultures that take outside advice badly,” the panel said in its report. “While laudable steps were taken to improve our intelligence agencies after Sept. 11, 2001, the agencies have done less in response to the failures over Iraq, and we believe that many within those agencies do not accept the conclusion that we reached after our year of study: that the community needs fundamental change if it is to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century.” “Commission after commission” has made the same case, the panel wrote, but “the intelligence community is a closed world, and many insiders admitted to us that is has an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations.” Panel Does Not Address Officials’ Use of Intelligence The commission said it “found no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” “What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein’s programs was what they believed. They were simply wrong,” the panel wrote to Bush. In its report, however, it added that in Iraq, “intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.” Touching on a frequent criticism leveled by opponents of the decision to invade Iraq, the panel said it was “not authorized to investigate how policy-makers used the intelligence assessments they received from the intelligence community.” Former top U.N. weapon inspector in Iraq Hans Blix said last year in an interview with Global Security Newswire that prewar overestimation of Iraq’s WMD programs resulted not from faulty intelligence but from a failure of “critical thinking” at the highest levels of government (see GSN, March 24, 2004). A much-discussed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report early in 2004 reached similar conclusions, adding that policy-makers appeared to have inappropriately influenced intelligence work (see GSN, Jan. 8, 2004). Carnegie Nonproliferation Director Joseph Cirincione said in an interview today that the commission’s report reflects its allegiance to Bush. “I think the White House got what they carefully designed: a report that sets up the intelligence community as a fall guy,” Cirincione said. “What you find depends on where you look,” he said. “This is a hand-picked commission on a very tight presidential mandate to look only at the intelligence community, not at the administration’s use of the intelligence community’s findings.” “This is sort of classic misdirection,” Cirincione said of the report. “We all know what the real problem is here: Our senior leadership made statements repeatedly and consistently that simply weren’t true, and those statements went way beyond what the intelligence community was saying.” In particular, Cirincione cited Cabinet officials’ prewar statements about Iraq’s alleged efforts to reconstitute its nuclear weapon programs and about the alleged existence in Iraq of hundreds of tons of biological agents. Cirincione said such statements were not supported even by intelligence assessments he said were already tailored to the Bush administration’s goals. Caveats in such assessments, he said, were systematically omitted in administration statements. Cirincione added that the commission’s contention that intelligence was hampered by management shortcomings, not politicization, does not explain why the intelligence flaws the panel highlights appeared to emerge under Bush. “Why did the intelligence get so distorted in 2002? If this was a management problem, why wasn’t this apparent in ‘99 and 2000?” he asked. Back to top       Space Weapons Harm Nonproliferation, Analyst Says By Joe Fiorill Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — A U.S. push for military dominance in space could backfire by damaging international efforts to curb WMD proliferation, a top analyst said here yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 19, 2004). Stimson Center President Emeritus Michael Krepon said the U.S. Defense Department policy of seeking “full spectrum dominance” in space and elsewhere works against unity among countries vital to international nonproliferation work. “If we’re disunited, it’s very hard to stop dangerous proliferation programs,” the former U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency official said at a Council for a Livable World meeting on space weapons. The “next most consequential effects on international security” after those that would be caused by new nuclear weapon testing, Krepon said, would come from testing of space weapons. Krepon and Center for Defense Information Vice President Theresa Hitchens, both of whom attended a meeting organized by China and Russia on space weapons last week in Geneva, argued yesterday that seeking to protect satellites with space-based weapons would be counterproductive. The two analysts said antisatellite weapons would produce orbiting debris that would endanger all satellites, disproportionately harming the United States, which has more satellites in space than any other country. They added that U.S. work on space weapons, which they said may be taking place under ambiguous line items in the federal budget, could also provoke other countries to follow suit. That would negate any initial advantage from the weapons, Krepon and Hitchens said. “If we try to protect the satellites with weapons, we’re going to be worse off,” said Krepon, who has been advocating an international treaty or code of conduct governing countries’ military activities in space. There are presently no devices specifically designed and tested for space warfare, according to Krepon, who advocated a “hedging strategy” of conducting space weapons work behind closed doors without flight-testing or deployment. Hitchens estimated President George W. Bush’s fiscal 2006 budget request contains more than $300 million for space weapons work. However, it is “very unclear” what line items refer to such work, which takes place throughout the Defense Department, she said. The Bush administration “is funding programs that will create ‘facts in orbit.’ These facts — the development and testing of space weapons and the deployment of dual-use systems — will drive U.S. policy toward space weapons without a debate in either Congress or the public,” Hitchens wrote last month in an analysis. “We dominate space already,” she said yesterday. “We have the most to lose.” Kepler Research space programs analyst Lawrence Cooper, who published a commentary this month on the subject in Defense News, said in an interview today that there is a need for a “high-level discussion, not only in Congress but also in international fora, regarding space weapons.” He said, though, that some type of space defense is necessary. “Dialogue is important, but discounting space weapons entirely, I think, borders on irresponsible or glossing over potential threat,” said Cooper, who is working on a doctoral dissertation on space weapons. The Defense Department is reportedly seeking to mitigate the problem of debris, said Cooper, by looking into weapons that would jam or disable satellites without physically destroying them. “The space weapons don’t have to involve destruction,” he said. Cooper added that satellites are “not necessarily defensible from space” but that “space weapons are not just weapons in space” but can include ground-based technology. He termed an international code of conduct “a good start” on the problem. “Research and development is prudent; deploying it is debatable, and that’s where a national and international debate needs to be done,” he said. Back to top       U.S. Tightens Chemical, Biological Export Limits The United States yesterday expanded rules requiring exporters to obtain licenses when sending items that could be used for chemical or biological weapons to any location in the world (see GSN, July 7, 2004). Previously, licenses had been required only for shipments of subject items to “certain countries of concern,” according to a State Department press release. The Commerce Department published the licensing notice yesterday in the Federal Register. Export controls are being increased “for foreign policy reasons,” according to the department’s Industry and Security Bureau. U.S. biological and chemical export controls are consistent with the Australia Group Common Control List, according to the State Department. Items on the list include chemical weapons precursors, dual-use equipment and technology that could be used for chemical weapons, biological agents and animal and plant pathogens (U.S. State Department release, March 30). Back to top

EU Reportedly Considering Iran Nuclear Compromise France, Germany and the United Kingdom are considering a compromise proposal by Iran that would allow Tehran to keep some nuclear technology, Reuters reported yesterday (see GSN, March 30). European negotiators have previously maintained that Iran must dismantle its nuclear program, but are now considering allowing Iran to keep a small uranium enrichment program, diplomats said. “The Iranians have been offering this for a long time. What’s new is that the EU is thinking about it,” a diplomat with access to the negotiations said yesterday. “The ideas they (Iran) came up with were not really acceptable, but we have said we will get back to them,” said a diplomat from one of the three European powers. Under the terms of the deal, Iranian enriched uranium would only be allowed to contain 3.5 percent of the uranium 235 isotope. Nuclear weapons use enrichment levels of 90 percent or higher, according to Reuters. The United States dismissed talks of compromise. “We and the EU three remain united in the view that only a full cessation and dismantling of Iran’s sensitive nuclear fuel cycle pursuits can provide the kind of confidence we’re looking for that Iran has abandoned its nuclear weapons program,” said State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli (Louis Charbonneau, Reuters, March 30). Ereli also dismissed as insignificant the tour taken by reporters yesterday of the Natanz nuclear facility, Agence France-Presse reported. “If Iran were really serious about allaying the concerns of the international community, they would stop denying [the International Atomic Energy Agency] full and unrestricted access to suspicious sites,” he said. The United States remains committed to allowing the European Union to complete its negotiations with Iran, a senior State Department official said. “I would say these talks have not yet produced the end of their program, but the Europeans are continuing to engage and we’ll let them decide when they think they’re no longer useful,” he said (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, March 30). The next round of talks is set to begin on April 10, Mohammad Saaidi, deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said yesterday (Xinhua, March 31). Iran will not give up its right to full-scale uranium enrichment, President Mohammad Khatami reiterated yesterday. “Despite the pressures from every side to deprive it of peaceful nuclear technology, the Islamic republic... is on the verge of producing (nuclear) fuel,” Khatami said. “In the not very distant future, with the help of God and with understanding and interaction with the international community, we will start our legitimate and legal activities in every field and we will complete whatever we have done so far,” he said (Agence France-Presse, March 30). Meanwhile, Iran is boosting its military forces, including its missile program, in anticipation of an attack against its nuclear facilities, the Christian Science Monitor reported. Iran has been upgrading its Shahab 3 missile and reportedly established air defenses around its nuclear facilities. Iran has also confirmed creating underground facilities to protect its nuclear program. In addition, Ukraine has revealed in recent weeks an investigation into sales of X-55 missiles to Iran in 2001, according to the Monitor (see related GSN story, today). U.S. intelligence services have acquired Farsi-language designs and test data, dated from 2001 to 2003, to modify the Shahab 3 missile to carry a “black box” that U.S. experts “believe is almost certainly a nuclear warhead,” the Wall Street Journal Asia reported last week. While U.S. officials at first thought “the find might be disinformation, perhaps by Israel,” they “are now persuaded ... the documents are real,” according to the report. “They see a fight coming, regardless of what they do, so they are getting ready for it,” said a European diplomat in Tehran.  “If I was a student of (Prussian military strategist Karl von) Clausewitz, I would do as the U.S. does: I would talk incentives, and (at the same time) design a theater of war against the enemy,” said Abbas Maleki, a former deputy foreign minister who heads the Institute for Caspian Studies in Tehran. “Iran must be very, very cautious to avoid any attack,” Maleki said. “We have conventional weapons designed for neighboring threats like Saddam Hussein and the Taliban — not to fight a superpower. But we must defend ourselves.” Any U.S. military action against Iran could bolster Tehran’s conservative clerics, according to some analysts. “Iranians are very patriotic, and though there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the regime, they oppose an attack,” said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, a political scientist at Tehran University with close ties to the Khatami government. “It would be like Sept. 11 in the U.S., which brought the neocons into power. A U.S. attack could bring our neocons into power.” “Rather than setting back the nuclear program, (a strike) could accelerate it,” said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution. “That’s actually sinking in with the [Bush] administration” (Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, March 31). Back to top       North Korea Wants Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks Seeking recognition that it has nuclear weapons, North Korea announced today that six-party talks about its nuclear program should be considered nuclear arms reduction negotiations (see GSN, March 30). “From now on, the six-way talks should become a forum to discuss comprehensive measures to realize denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a practical and fair manner,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement. The spokesman said future talks should include discussions about the nuclear threat to the Korean Peninsula from the United States, the South Korean Yonhap news agency reported (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, March 31). Meanwhile, Pyongyang yesterday denied rumors that it used secret payoffs from South Korea to develop nuclear weapons, the Associated Press reported. North Korea’s “development of nukes is based on the powerful independent national economy from A to Z,” the official Korean Central News Agency said. Former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung has admitted giving North Korea $500 million leading up to his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in 2000, according to AP (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, March 30). Back to top       North Korea Nuclear Exports Linked to Libya by Circumstantial Evidence, Officials Say Analysts from the United States and International Atomic Energy Agency are still missing “the knockout piece of evidence” that would prove U.S. allegations that North Korea sold nearly 2 tons of uranium to Libya in 2001, a senior U.S. official said this week (see GSN, March 24). Tripoli last year surrendered financial ledgers to the United States along with its WMD programs and components, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said this week. The documents provide a guide to front companies involved in the underground nuclear network established by former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the New York Times reported.  The statements indicate that one large payment by Tripoli was directed to North Korea, according to U.S. officials. U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the documents, however, said the entry does not prove a direct payment by Tripoli to Pyongyang. One foreign diplomat familiar with the U.S. and International Atomic Energy Agency investigations said the United States was not exaggerating the financial tie to North Korea. “It’s not hyping,” he said, adding, however, that the case was circumstantial. The White House first publicly declared last week that the Libyan uranium originated in North Korea. Analysts said questions, however, remain. “This is clearly within the realm of possibility,” Jon Wolfsthal, a Korea expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said of the alleged transfer from North Korea to Libya. “But there’s a big difference between that and saying it happened.” Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence suggests that North Korea was the source of the uranium, said a European diplomat familiar with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation. “There is a North Korean connection here,” he said. “But what it is exactly is a mystery.” U.S. officials initially began to suspect North Korea was the source partly because traces of plutonium on the outside of a Libyan cask indicated it might have been at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear site. The plutonium traces could indicate that North Korea shipped an empty canister to Pakistan, said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment. “If you look hard at these pillars, there are alternative explanations,” he said. “They don’t disprove the government claims but they raise doubts about their certainty.” U.S. researchers studying the confiscated Libyan uranium at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last year did not have a sample of North Korean uranium for comparison. By process of elimination they were able to rule out Pakistan as the supplier and then concluded that North Korea was the only other logical source, according to the Times. The results of the U.S. study remain classified, officials said (Sanger/Broad, New York Times, March 30). Back to top       Ukraine Blames International Ring for Missile Sales A group of Russian, Ukrainian and Australian nationals were behind the smuggling of 12 X-55 nuclear-capable cruise missiles from Ukraine to China and Iran, a Ukrainian official said yesterday (see GSN, March 23). Ukraine’s Security Service discovered the ring last year and halted its work in the former Soviet republic, according to Dmytro Svystkov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Investigators learned that in early 2000 a Russian and a Ukrainian national used forged documents to sell six X-55 missiles to China. The Ukrainian citizen then received a false document certifying the missiles’ transfer to Russia, according to the UNIAN news agency. In May and June 2001, the Ukrainian national and an Australian citizen smuggled six X-55 missiles to Iran using a similar process. Though designed to deliver nuclear weapons, the transferred missiles were unarmed and could only be deployed from Russian Tu-95 or Tu-160 strategic bombers, Svystkov said. The case against one member of the ring over the arms sale to Iran is now before the Kiev Region court of appeals, according to UNIAN. The Russian national was detained in the Czech Republic in July 2004 on and is being extradited to the Ukraine, UNIAN reported. Two other individuals connected to the case were killed in traffic accidents in 2002 and 2004, Svystkov said (UNIAN/BBC Monitoring, March 30). Back to top       Canada to Assist Russian Reactor Shutdown Canada has agreed to contribute $7 million to assist Moscow and Washington in closing one of the last Russian nuclear reactors producing weapon-grade plutonium, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 25). The United States and Russia have been seeking international support for their effort to replace three plutonium-producing reactors with power plants that burn fossil fuels. Canada’s contribution will go through the U.S. Energy Department’s Elimination of Weapons-Grade Plutonium Production program, according to AFP (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, March 30). Back to top       Switzerland to Allow Extradition of German National in Libya Nuclear Arms Case Switzerland has agreed to return a German national to his home country, where he is accused of assisting Libya’s past nuclear arms effort, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 17, 2004). Gotthard Lerch was arrested in Switzerland in November and has one remaining opportunity to appeal the extradition, according to Folco Galli, spokesman for Switzerland’s Justice Ministry. German authorities say the 61-year-old engineer received up to $4.25 million to assist Libya’s effort to develop uranium enrichment centrifuges between 2001 and 2003 (Associated Press, March 30). Back to top       NRC Approves Building MOX Plant in United States The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday approved plans for building a South Carolina plant to convert weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for nuclear power reactors, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported (see GSN, March 23). The $1 billion facility to produce mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) is being built as part of a U.S.-Russian agreement to eliminate 34 tons of plutonium from each nation’s nuclear arsenal (see related GSN story, today). Preparatory work is expected to begin this year at the Savannah River Site, the Journal-Constitution reported. Full construction should begin next year. The Energy Department also plans two additional buildings at Savannah River to support the conversion effort. One would be used to remove the plutonium from the weapons, while the other would process most of the nuclear waste from the conversion (Charles Seabrook, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 31). Critics of the MOX plant said the NRC decision undermines nuclear nonproliferation efforts and does not ensure that the plutonium disposal program will move forward. “Efforts to create an infrastructure to process and introduce weapons-grade plutonium into commerce will further undermine global efforts to halt proliferation of nuclear materials,” Tom Clements, Greenpeace nuclear campaign senior adviser, said in a statement. “Proceeding with this program sends the wrong nuclear nonproliferation signal to those aspiring to obtain nuclear weapons materials.” The U.S. MOX program is meant to “proceed in parallel” with its Russian counterpart, Clements said. Lack of funding, interest and a liability agreement has stalled the Russian program, meaning the U.S. effort also could not move forward, he argued (Greenpeace, March 31). Meanwhile, two administrative judges in Tennessee have backed an NRC staff decision to allow a company to convert weapon-grade highly enriched uranium into low-enriched fuel, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Feb. 24). Nuclear Fuel Services has already started converting 39 metric tons of the uranium at its Erwin plant for use at the Tennessee Valley Authority Browns Ferry nuclear reactor in Alabama, according to AP. The Sierra Club had sought a complete environmental impact statement for the project. “There is simply no basis in the record at hand for a determination on our part that the staff’s environmental review failed adequately to consider the possibility of the occurrence of an accident with serious environmental consequences,” Judges Alan Rosenthal and Richard Cole wrote in their decision. The Sierra Club can appeal the decision to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Associated Press/MyrtleBeachOnline.com, March 3). Back to top

Pakistan Tests Short-Range Hatf Missile; Pact With India on Test Notification Delayed Pakistan tested a short-range nuclear-capable missile today, the Press Trust of India reported (see GSN, March 21). “All desired technical parameters were validated,” Pakistan announced in a statement following the flight of the Hatf 2. India was informed prior to the test, according to the statement (Press Trust of India/The Hindu, March 31). Progress on Indian-Pakistani negotiations on a missile-launch notification agreement has been delayed due to differences over sharing sensitive information, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri said in an interview with Kyodo published today (see GSN, Feb. 18). “They wanted more information than we are prepared to give,” Kasuri said. At last year’s meeting of experts from the two countries, there were also differences over launch sites and trajectories, Kasuri said (see GSN, Dec. 16, 2004; Press Trust of India/Outlook India, March 31). Back to top

Missile Radar to Head by Sea to Alaska A 2,000-ton radar system for the U.S. missile defense effort will be shipped by sea to Alaska beginning this summer, Reuters reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 16). The Sea-Based X-Band Radar would be used to track long-range ballistic missiles and to distinguish their warheads from decoys intended to misdirect U.S. missile interceptors. The radar is expected to be placed this week on a large platform at Corpus Christi, Texas. The platform will be fully assembled and tested in the Gulf of Mexico and then sent on a trip of up to seven months around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America and north through the Pacific to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. “It will likely leave for its long journey between June and August,” said Richard Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency. The shipping platform carrying the radar is a modified oil drilling rig the size of two football fields, too large to travel through the Panama Canal, Lehner said (Jim Wolf, Reuters, March 30). Back to top

Radiation Scanners Placed on Bridges to Mexico Scanners to detect radioactive and nuclear material are being placed on the four bridges between Brownsville, Texas, and Mexico, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, March 3). Each radiation portal monitor costs about $280,000. They have already been installed in numerous U.S. seaports and border crossings with Mexico, AP reported. “The plan is to deploy them everywhere,” said Barry Morrissey, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “What we’re interested in are basically terror weapons.” Monitors to date have only detected peaceful materials, including bananas, stone tiles and medical equipment, AP reported (Associated Press/WOAI.com, March 30).   Back to top

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