Christopher Hill, chief U.S. negotiator to the six-party North Korean nuclear talks, speaks with reporters today in Beijing (Getty Images/AFP). U.S. Presents North Korea With Evidence of Alleged Uranium Enrichment Program The United States has for the first time presented North Korea with specific evidence to support its accusations that Pyongyang is pursuing a clandestine uranium enrichment program in addition to its disclosed plutonium reprocessing program, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, July 28)...Full Story

Top U.S. Disease Fighters Warn of New Engineered Pathogens but Call Bioweapons Doomsday Unlikely By Joe Fiorill Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — The top officials charged with protecting the United States against a biological attack yesterday played down concerns that a new agent could exterminate the human race but warned that the threat of new, engineered pathogens remains serious (see GSN, July 13)...Full Story

Energy Bill Would Ease U.S. Uranium Export Controls A provision in the energy bill Congress is expected to approve today would ease export controls on weapon-grade uranium, the Washington Post reported (see GSN, July 25)...Full Story

	Friday, July 29, 2005

U.S. Presents North Korea With Evidence of Alleged Uranium Enrichment Program The United States has for the first time presented North Korea with specific evidence to support its accusations that Pyongyang is pursuing a clandestine uranium enrichment program in addition to its disclosed plutonium reprocessing program, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, July 28). The U.S. delegation to six-nation nuclear talks in Beijing put forth documentation that Pyongyang obtained technology from the underground network of former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. A U.S. official said that, when presented with the evidence, which includes Khan’s testimony, the North Korean officials “argue with us about it.” Today was the fourth day of negotiations. The top U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, said he hoped the parties would soon begin drafting a joint statement of agreed principles. The first two principles should be a commitment to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and a promise by Pyongyang not to transfer nuclear technology to a third party, a U.S. official in Washington told the Times. The U.S. and North Korean negotiators found some “common understanding” during yesterday’s meeting, Hill said, but “a lot of differences” remained. “I want to caution people not to think we are coming to the end of this,” he said. This week’s negotiations have been focused on diplomatic matters such as achieving a definition of denuclearization. “We’re pretty close on that,” Hill said (Sanger/Yardley, New York Times, July 29). “The clear definition of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula we are talking about is unconditionally dismantling nuclear weapons and banning the import of all nuclear materials,” said North Korean Foreign Ministry Director Chung Song Il (Yonhap/BBC Monitoring, July 29). All six top negotiators agreed to meet again tomorrow, said Cho Tae-yong, the second-ranking South Korean delegate. Despite the seeming lack of concrete progress, Cho said today’s meetings “were not lower than my expectation.” Hill today met directly with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan for about 90 minutes, a South Korean official told the Associated Press. The Xinhua news agency reported that Hill and Kim were scheduled to meet again tomorrow. “We’ll just keep at it just as long as it’s useful to keep at it. I’ve got plenty of patience,” Hill said. “We had some of their ideas which we did not feel were usable, but we had some of their ideas that very much correspond to some of the ideas we have,” Hill said of the discussions with the North thus far. “We’ll have to wait and see how it goes” (Bo-Mi Lim, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, July 29). The United States is “prepared to roll up our sleeves and work for as long as necessary to make progress,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Rice told the Public Broadcasting System’s “NewsHour” yesterday (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, July 28). Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said he plans to leave Beijing tomorrow, indicating that talks may be winding down, AP reported (Associated Press, July 29). Meanwhile, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States was unwilling to enter into a bilateral agreement with North Korea. “That approach was tried and it failed,” McClellan said, referring to the Agreed Framework negotiated with Pyongyang by the Clinton administration (Ueno/ Beck, Reuters, July 29). China is preparing bilateral talks between Japan and North Korea in Beijing today, Reuters reported (Reuters/Yahoo!News, July 28). Elsewhere, North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun yesterday praised South Korea’s energy aid offer and said Pyongyang was studying the proposal, AFP reported. “Mr. Paek said that he appreciates the efforts of South Korea and he hoped to develop the proposal further between both sides,” said a South Korean official (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, July 28). Back to top       Energy Bill Would Ease U.S. Uranium Export Controls A provision in the energy bill Congress is expected to approve today would ease export controls on weapon-grade uranium, the Washington Post reported (see GSN, July 25). An amendment sponsored by Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.) would end a 13-year U.S. ban on bomb-grade uranium exports to recipients that have not agreed to convert their reactors to use uranium enriched to a lower level. Supporters of the new measure have argued that eliminating the restriction would ensure a supply of medical isotopes used for treatments for cancer, heart disease, epilepsy and other diseases. Critics, on the other hand, warn that the move would send the wrong nuclear proliferation message at a time the United States is promoting efforts to remove weapon-grade uranium from other parts of the world. Moreover, because the Canadian company MDS Nordion is the world’s leading producer of those isotopes and would have to spend millions of dollars to convert its reactor to use low-enriched uranium, some have criticized the measure for indulging special interests at the expense of security. “To save one Canadian company some money, we’re willing to blow a hole in our nonproliferation policies,” said Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.). The amendment applies only to exports to Canada and four European allies, according to the Post. Nordion produces isotopes for the U.S. market, so pushing the company to convert its reactor could create shortages in the United States of a medical product used to help 14 million Americans annually, said industry officials. “Our industry shares the concern about nonproliferation; we don’t have our heads in the sand,” said Roy Brown, federal affairs director for the Council on Radionuclides and Radiopharmaceuticals. “When the technology is there, we’ll all be willing to switch.” The provision, however, would eliminate the financial incentives to make the change, critics said. “To get something as outrageous as this, that’s skillful lobbying,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists (Michael Grunwald, Washington Post, July 29). Back to top       Iran Allegedly Smuggling Steel for Nuclear Program Iranian front companies are importing extra-durable steel for Tehran’s nuclear program, an exiled Iranian opposition group said yesterday (see GSN, July 28). “At present, maraging steel is being smuggled to Iran illegally from other countries,” said Mohammed Mohaddessin, head of the foreign affairs committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. He said some of the steel came from Malaysia through the United Arab Emirates. Maraging steel, which can withstand extreme temperatures and pressure, is used in uranium enrichment centrifuges, the Associated Press reported. International Atomic Energy Agency experts “will review the claims to see if there’s anything to them,” said agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming. Secretly importing maraging steel — a product subject to nuclear export controls — would indicate that Iran “is still violating its treaty obligations, and that the nuclear black market is alive and well,” said Joseph Cirincione, nonproliferation director for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Sophie Nicholson, Associated Press/IranFocus.com, July 28). The United States yesterday warned Iran not to resume sensitive nuclear work, Reuters reported. “Iran made some commitments to suspend their uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities. We expect them to abide by that commitment,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “If Iran is going to violate their agreements, then we would obviously be looking at discussing with (the) Europeans, who have also committed to doing so, looking at going to the (U.N.) Security Council,” McClellan said (Reuters, July 28). Meanwhile, U.S. officials have discovered no evidence that Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the hostage-takers at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, as some of the former hostages have charged, the New York Times reported today. The conclusion was based on detailed photo analysis by the CIA, officials said. Evidence that Ahmadinejad was one of the crueler captors, as alleged, “would enormously complicate” diplomatic efforts to resolve the nuclear standoff with Tehran, a senior Bush administration official said. However, “it would be more than poor taste to contradict the hostages in public,” a State Department official said. “I think the administration wants this to go away; it’s an embarrassment,” said William Daugherty, one of the former hostages who made the allegations. “I have heard absolutely nothing from the administration, either through the media or personally, about this case,” Daugherty said. He and other former hostages were “surprised and disappointed,” he added (Joel Brinkley, New York Times, July 29). The White House yesterday announced that the investigation was continuing, AP reported. “I don’t think it should surprise anyone given the nature of the regime in Iran that he might have been involved in these kind of activities,” McClellan said. “We know he was a leader of the student movement that organized the attack on the embassy and the taking of the American hostages,” McClellan said. “However, we are still looking into whether or not he was actually one of the hostage-takers. That is something we continue to look in to” (Nedra Pickler, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, July 28). Back to top       India-U.S. Nuclear Pact Will Not Hinder Nuclear Weapons Program, Indian Prime Minister Says The signing of last week’s civil nuclear cooperation agreement between New Delhi and Washington does not compromise Indian national security, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said today (see GSN, July 26). “The basis of this understanding was a clear recognition of India as a responsible nuclear power with [an] impeccable record in nuclear nonproliferation,” Singh said in a statement to the lower house of Parliament. “There is nothing in the joint statement that inhibits or hinders our strategic nuclear weapons program,” he said. “We expect the same rights and responsibilities as other nuclear powers,” said Singh (Indo-Asian News Service, July 29). Back to top       Russia Scraps Entire Division of Missile Launchers Russia yesterday announced the destruction of the sixth and final SS-18 Satan missile launcher operated by a missile division based near Kartaly, ITAR-Tass reported (see GSN, July 1; ITAR-Tass/BBC Monitoring, July 28). Back to top       China Reportedly Building Up Nuclear Arsenal to Counter U.S. Influence in Asia, Elsewhere China is expanding its nuclear arsenal to counter U.S. power in Asia and other regions, the Washington Times reported today (see GSN, July 21). However, the exact composition of China’s nuclear arsenal remains top secret, said Chen Yonglin, a Chinese diplomat who defected to Australia two months ago while stationed in Sydney. “Everything about nuclear weapons is held by a very limited number of people,” he said. “Even sometime vice ministers may not know because it is strictly controlled by the general staff and central party leaders.” China’s Nuclear Energy Co. runs both the country’s civil and military nuclear industries, he added. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping crafted Beijing’s long-term military strategy toward the United States, using the phrase “hide our capabilities; bide our time,” Chen said. “That means don’t draw any attention of the Western world — and especially the United States, to what China is doing,” Chen said (Bill Gertz, Washington Times, July 29). Back to top

Top U.S. Disease Fighters Warn of New Engineered Pathogens but Call Bioweapons Doomsday Unlikely By Joe Fiorill Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — The top officials charged with protecting the United States against a biological attack yesterday played down concerns that a new agent could exterminate the human race but warned that the threat of new, engineered pathogens remains serious (see GSN, July 13). “As the power of biological science and technology continues to grow, it will become increasingly possible that we will face an attack with a pathogen that has been deliberately engineered for increased virulence,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said in prepared testimony to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack. Concern has risen in Washington in recent years that a terrorist group or unfriendly country could employ increasingly available bioengineering know-how to design a new agent to be particularly potent or to resist existing antibiotics. Agents could be made more virulent through “resistance to one or more antibiotic or antiviral drugs, increased infectiousness or pathogenicity or, in the somewhat longer term, a new virulent pathogen made by combining genes from more than one organism,” Fauci said. Development of therapies and vaccines with broad applications and more research into human immune function are under way as part of the effort to counter the threat, he said. Asked by Representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) whether a pathogen could be engineered that would be virulent enough to “wipe out all of humanity,” Fauci and other top officials at the hearing said such an agent was technically feasible but in practice unlikely. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding said a deadly agent could be engineered with relative ease that could spread throughout the world if left unchecked, but that the outbreak would be unlikely to defeat countries’ detection and response systems. “The technical obstacles are really trivial,” Gerberding said. “What’s difficult is the distribution of agents in ways that would bypass our capacity to recognize and intervene effectively.” Fauci said creating an agent whose transmissibility could be sustained on such a scale, even as authorities worked to counter it, would be a daunting task. “Would you end up with a microbe that functionally will … essentially wipe out everyone from the face of the Earth? … It would be very, very difficult to do that,” he said. Officials Outline Work to Implement Bush Plan Speakers at the hearing described a variety of ways in which their agencies were implementing President George W. Bush’s April 2004 Biodefense for the 21st Century initiative, organized around the four “pillars” of awareness, prevention, detection and response. Fauci highlighted his institute’s work on boosting the human innate immune system, a strategy he said could lead to countermeasures that would be useful against a wide variety of different agents. Army Medical Research and Materiel Commander Eric Schoomaker focused on the coming benefits of interagency cooperation at the planned National Interagency Biodefense Campus at Fort Detrick, Md. The Defense, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security departments are participating in the campus project. Subcommittee Chairman John Linder (R-Ga.) called for better coordination between intelligence and disease-fighting agencies. “Science, tools, reagents and technology may be ubiquitous. Scientists, however, are not,” Linder said. “We have to do a better job of keeping track of those individuals with skill sets that are attractive to potential terrorists.” Dicks Questions Pace of Threat Assessments Representative Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) renewed Democratic criticism of the pace at which Homeland Security is assessing threats posed by different biological agents (see GSN, July 12). The Homeland Security assessments determine whether Health and Human Services initiates efforts to develop or acquire countermeasures against various agents. To date, Homeland Security has issued threat determinations for anthrax, smallpox, botulinum toxin and radiological and nuclear devices. Democrats criticized that number as too low, pointing out that the CDC’s list of pathogens that must be reviewed comprises more than 60 agents. “I agree there is a concern and it needs to be moved faster," Fauci said in reply to Dicks. Homeland Security biological-countermeasures chief John Vitko told the Associated Press that the highest-priority threats were addressed first. “These are the ones of major concern,” Vitko told the news agency. In his testimony to the subcommittee, Vitko said “assessments are nearly complete” for plague, tularemia and nerve agents and that an assessment of viral hemorrhagic fevers would begin next month. Back to top       Appeals Court Reinstates Anthrax Libel Suit The federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday reinstated a libel suit against the New York Times, ruling that columns in the newspaper implicating a former Army scientist in the unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks could be considered defamatory, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, May 25). Last year, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that columns written by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in which Steven Hatfill was named reflected the state of the investigation at the time. The appeals court, however, ruled 2-1 that the columns imply Hatfill was behind the attacks and returned the case to the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for trial. “A reasonable reader of Kristof's columns likely would conclude that Hatfill was responsible for the anthrax mailings in 2001,” the court said in the majority opinion (Matthew Barakat, Associated Press/Newsday, July 29). Back to top       Nebraska Post Office Gets Anthrax Detector The U.S. Postal Service processing and distribution center in Omaha, Nebraska, yesterday began using a system capable of detecting anthrax in the mail, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, July 28). The Biohazard Detection System is expected to be installed at three other Nebraska facilities by late September (Associated Press/Lincoln Journal Star, July 28). Back to top

Pentagon Approves New Pueblo Chemical Depot Plan The U.S. Defense Department has approved a plan that calls for building a smaller chemical weapons disposal plant that employs fewer workers than originally planned at the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, the Pueblo Chieftain reported yesterday (see GSN, July 25). The depot now is expected to ship explosive materials and wooden crates and pallets off site for final disposal, but keep wastewater produced by neutralization on site for treatment. Chemical Materials Agency Director Mike Parker met with Defense Undersecretary Kenneth Kreig on July 22 to present the new plan, aimed at keeping Pueblo’s destruction budget below a $1.5 billion ceiling set by the Pentagon.  Design work on the Pueblo neutralization site was frozen last fall when the cost estimate grew to $2.6 billion. Since then, contractor Bechtel devised a plan that calls for using two processing lines instead of three at the facility. Under Bechtel’s new plan, the facility would be half its original size and would employ 900 workers, 300 less than the original plan. Now that the plan has been approved, Bechtel can resume designing the facility, with a Pentagon review scheduled for February 2006. Defense Department officials plan to begin preparing funding requests this fall for fiscal 2007. However, some work can begin using $25 million in contracts being issued for initial work, according to Bechtel Project Manager Joe Nemec. One recently awarded contract is for site surveys another for soil and concrete testing (John Norton, Pueblo Chieftain, July 28). Back to top       Newport to Use Electricity, Heat to Treat VX Tanks The U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency plans to use electrical resistance heating to decontaminate eight large tanks that once contained VX nerve agent at the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana, the agency announced yesterday (see GSN, July 14). Insulators and electrical resistance heaters cover tanks during the decontamination process. The containers are heated for up to 10 hours to 1,000 degrees to force any remaining VX into carbon filters. This process creates no VX vapor and reduces workers’ time in protective equipment, according to the release. The process creates no liquid waste and 3,500 pounds of solid waste. Work is expected to be finished by spring 2006 (U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency release, July 28). Back to top       Sarin Leak Discovered at Pine Bluff Arsenal Tests yesterday detected a leak in a sarin-filled rocket stored at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, July 28). Officials at the facility said the leak was contained within a storage unit and posed no danger to workers or the public. Workers yesterday examined individual rockets to determine the source of the leak, according to arsenal spokeswoman Carole Newton. Newton said local officials were told of the incident immediately after sarin was detected (Associated Press/WKYT, July 29).      Back to top

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