Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh (left) speaks with agency head Mohamed ElBaradei last week during the agency’s board meeting in Vienna (Dieter Nagl/Getty Images). Iran Fails to Stop IAEA Rebuff By Greg Webb Global Security Newswire VIENNA — As expected, international diplomats last week rebuffed an Iranian request for technical assistance for a heavy-water nuclear reactor under construction at Arak.  A last-minute Iranian promise to offer nuclear inspectors more information on its nuclear activities failed to derail the move (see GSN, Nov. 22). Following several days of informal talks, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board approved hundreds of technical assistance requests from dozens of nations, but agreed to take no action on the controversial Iranian request for help to ensure the safety of the heavy-water reactor...Full Story

Diplomats Seek to Revive North Korean Nuclear Talks Diplomatic envoys descended on Beijing today to continue efforts to restart the stalled six-party talks over North Korea’s nuclear program, wire services reported (see GSN, Nov. 21)...Full Story

India Successfully Tests Missile Interceptor India today intercepted a ballistic missile in flight during the first successful test of the nation’s indigenous missile defense system, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported (see GSN, Sept. 11, 2003)...Full Story

	Monday, November 27, 2006

Iran Fails to Stop IAEA Rebuff By Greg Webb Global Security Newswire VIENNA — As expected, international diplomats last week rebuffed an Iranian request for technical assistance for a heavy-water nuclear reactor under construction at Arak.  A last-minute Iranian promise to offer nuclear inspectors more information on its nuclear activities failed to derail the move (see GSN, Nov. 22). Following several days of informal talks, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board approved hundreds of technical assistance requests from dozens of nations, but agreed to take no action on the controversial Iranian request for help to ensure the safety of the heavy-water reactor. Iranian officials have claimed that the reactor is intended to replace a smaller, existing research reactor in Tehran and that the new facility would produce radioisotopes for medical and other peaceful uses.  Iran requested a modest amount of assistance to ensure the site’s safety, about $12,000 for the first year. The United States, backed by many other Western nations, has charged that the reactor would be an excellent way for Iran to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons and has asserted that other types of reactors would be better suited to produce isotopes. The board’s lack of action effectively denied funding for the project, but by not specifically rejecting Iran’s request, the board technically left the door open for Tehran to resubmit its request in the future. The board’s technical cooperation committee considers requests every two years, so Iran is unlikely to renew its request before 2008, although the board has the authority to approve projects at any time. That possibility was described as extremely remote by the top U.S. official here. “The Arak project was not deferred.  It was not put on hold.  It was removed entirely from the IAEA program,” said U.S. Ambassador Gregory Schulte. “The removal of Arak — an action taken by consensus — reflects the board’s continued concern about the nature of Iran’s nuclear program and the intentions of its leadership,” he added.  “Neither we nor the board are prepared to help countries build nuclear bombs.” Despite Schulte’s assertion that the prospect of IAEA assistance is dead, agency head Mohamed ElBaradei made clear that the board’s decision could be reversed if the political climate changes. “If matters move in a different direction in the future, the board might revisit that decision. The decision right now is that that project will be put on hold,” he said.  “The decision by the board is very much linked to confidence in the peaceful nature of Iran’s overall program.  If confidence were to be restored, whether the board will take another decision, that’s really up to the board.” ElBaradei urged Iran to build confidence by offering more cooperation, and he praised Iran’s announcement Wednesday that it would allow agency officials to gather more information at two sites, including the operating records of Iran’s centrifuge enrichment facility at Natanz. “These are steps in the right direction,” he said in his statement to the board while encouraging more openness from Tehran. “The earlier Iran takes the remaining transparency measures and addresses the outstanding issues, the earlier the agency would be in a position to provide the needed assurances — assurances that are key to restoring international confidence regarding the scope and nature of Iran’s nuclear program,” he said. Still, ElBaradei did not express much optimism that the nuclear crisis was near resolution. “We are going through a period of standstill in our effort to move forward to clarify the remaining outstanding issues in Iran,” he told reporters after the board meeting.  “These are issues that we need to clarify before we are able to say that there is no undeclared nuclear activity and material in Iran.” For its part, Iran vowed to press on with Arak without agency assistance. “Because of the necessity of producing radioisotopes for hospitals, agriculture and industry, the government and the Atomic Energy Organization is expected to speed up construction of heavy-water reactor in order to fulfill the humanitarian demand,” said Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the leading Iranian official here. Iran Buys Air-Defenses for Nuclear Sites Meanwhile, Russia has delivered an initial set of air-defense systems to Iran as part of $700 million package signed last year, the Associated Press reported Friday. Iran has ordered 29 Tor-M1 missile systems to protect its nuclear installations from air attack, according to the London Telegraph.  The first batch would be deployed at Iran’s nearly completed nuclear power station at Bushehr, a Russian source told the Telegraph. Back to top       Diplomats Seek to Revive North Korean Nuclear Talks Diplomatic envoys descended on Beijing today to continue efforts to restart the stalled six-party talks over North Korea’s nuclear program, wire services reported (see GSN, Nov. 21). Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said as he arrived that he held out hope the negotiations would resume soon, resuming a formal process that has been stalled for more than a year. Hill met in Beijing last week with the Chinese representative in the talks, Wu Dawei.  With his second visit, he joins diplomats from Japan and South Korea already in China, Agence France-Presse reported (Dan Martin, Agence France Press/Today Online, Nov. 27). “The issue for us is to make sure we are extremely well planned and ready for the six-party talks,” Hill told reporters as he arrived, the Associated Press reported.  “We will be talking with the Chinese hosts about a date.” Chun Yung-woo, the South Korean negotiator, and Kenichiro Sasae, the Japanese envoy, are also set to meet with Chinese representative Wu, but it remained unclear if the diplomats would hold other, separated bilateral talks. It was also uncertain if any of the representatives would meet with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan or if Kim even planned to attended the meetings in China (Scott McDonald, The Associated Press/ Yahoo!News, Nov. 27). Russia is the sixth party in the talks. Asked about the possibility of Kim’s attendance, Hill said, “We’ve always said we’re prepared to meet with the DPRK officials in this context of the six-party talks.” Talks between Hill and Kim last month led to North Korea’s agreement to return to the six-party negotiations stalled since last September when North Korean stepped away from an agreement in principle to abandon its nuclear program. Amid the heightened tensions that followed North Korea’s Oct. 9 nuclear test, both U.S. and South Korean officials have said that North Korea needs to return to the table ready to make substantive steps forward. Beijing is urging the North Korean envoy to come to China tomorrow, a Japanese government source told Reuters (Benjamin, Kang Lim, Reuters/Yahoo!News, Nov. 27). Pyongyang agreed to come back to the six-party negotiations after the United States said it was willing to discuss the issue of $24 million of North Korean assets frozen in a Macao bank account. The funds were frozen by the bank after Washington took steps to crack down on North Korea’s alleged counterfeiting and drug trafficking activities. Still, a start date has not been set, and comments from North Korea have cast a shadow on the likelihood of Pyongyang stepping back from its nuclear program. “How can we abandon our nuclear weapons? Do you mean that we conducted a nuclear test to give them up?” a South Korean news agency quoted North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju as saying last week. Back to top       A.Q. Khan Beats Cancer, Doctors Say Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man credited as the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and later disgraced as a nuclear proliferator, has recovered “satisfactorily” from cancer surgery, according to a medical report released by the Pakistani military Saturday (see GSN, Oct. 30). Khan’s doctors described him as in “high spirits” and said his recovery has been “smooth” after surgery for prostate cancer two months ago.  The public relations arm of the Pakistani military released a Nov. 12 medical report as the latest update on Khan’s health, Agence France-Presse reported. Traces of prostate specific antigen had disappeared from Khan’s body and a “most favorable biopsy report” indicated there is no additional need for cancer-related treatment, according to the report. Last month, Khan’s wife reported that her husband was suffering from blood clots in his leg, and doctors called it a “minor complication.”  The deep-vein thrombosis involved only Khan’s left calf and has been resolved, according to the medical report. “As a follow up at six weeks after surgery, the serum prostate specific antigen was found to be undetectable, indicating successful removal of the entire cancer,” the report said (Agence France-Presse/Gulf-Times, Nov, 26). Back to top       Russia Fields Mobile Missile Launchers Russia has experimentally deployed three Topol-M mobile strategic missile launchers, Interfax reported Friday.  The single-warhead ICBM has already been deployed in silos, but Russia envisions fielding mobile versions of the missile to gradually replace its current, land-based nuclear arsenal, according to Interfax (see GSN, April 17). “Vehicles ensuring combat duty and other hardware intended to ensure the functioning of the system were also brought into service with the missile division together with the launchers of the Topol-M system,” said a source with the Strategic Missile Forces (Interfax, Nov. 24). Back to top       U.S. Arms Minuteman ICBMs With New Warheads Beginning in October, U.S. Air Force personnel began swapping out old nuclear warheads on U.S. missiles and replacing them with a more modern design, the W87 (see GSN, Oct. 30). The technicians began installing one warhead a week on an estimated 300 missiles in silos in Montana, Nebraska and Wyoming, Inside Bay Area reported. The newer design, dating from the mid-1980s, replaces a 1960s design known as the W62.  By replacing the oldest design in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the military will save hundreds of millions of dollars it would have otherwise spent maintaining the warheads, according to defense officials.  The move would also allow the number of nuclear warheads deployed on land-based missiles to be cut in half by 2012, according to Inside Bay Area. Switching from the older design only became possible after three years of research at a cost of $250 million. Warheads, highly complex weapons that must withstand extreme conditions and still function at the end of a journey into space and back, were designed to fit on specific missiles, and the W87 was designed to fly on the Peacekeeper/MX missile. In 1993, however, President George H.W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to eliminate the Peacekeeper and the equivalent missile in the Russian arsenal.  More than 500 W87 warheads were sent into storage. Then after presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin drew up new limits on deployed warheads on strategic missiles, research into replacing the older designs with the W87 warheads pushed forward. To switch the warheads, scientist had to ensure that the W87 would still function on the Minuteman III missile under slightly different conditions.  “We want to make sure that there’s absolutely no doubt that it’s going to perform well, that there is high reliability,” said Derek Watman, weapons engineering chief for Livermore. Teams of scientist at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories in Californian put the new warhead and rocket package through a series of computer-based tests to ensure viability. The new configuration also underwent three flight tests that ended in the South Pacific.  Re-entry vehicles were not packed with warheads but rather sensors that recorded flight data and transmitted it back to research stations at the Kwajalein atoll and in California (Ian Hoffman, Inside Bay Area, Nov. 27) Back to top

Watchdog Group Alleges Russian CW Spill A newly opened Russian chemical weapons destruction facility last week experienced an accident in which toxic agents were spilled, a Russian watchdog group charged.  Russian officials, however, have denied the claim (see GSN, Sept. 8). The site at Maradykovsky stores thousands of chemical munitions containing VX, soman, sarin and other lethal substances, the Associated Press reported (Judith Ingram, Associated Press/London Guardian, Nov. 23).  Workers there recounted an incident in which the contents of several bomb casings spilled onto the floor, triggering alarms and forcing workers to evacuate, according to Andrei Taranov, chairman of the Union for Chemical Safety (Kommersant, Nov. 23). Another group official, Lev Fedorov, said such incidents were virtually inevitable because of the technology Russia has elected to use to eliminate the weapons.  Technicians are required to open chemical shells and pour water into them to begin a chemical neutralization process, he said, a process that does not leave room for the liquids to expand if their temperature increases. “When you have 22,000 weapons filled with water lying around, there is the probability that one or the other will explode, and it’s a high probability,” he said (Ingram, Associated Press). Russian authorities, however, denied that any emergency occurred. “I guarantee:  There are no accident situations at the facility,” said Lt. Gen. Valery Kapashin, head of the federal agency responsible for storing and destroying chemical weapons. Another official said redundant systems ensured that all operations were conducted safely. “The region’s government and senior federal structures are following the situation at the chemical weapons’ arsenal constantly,” said Mikhail Manin, chief of the directorate for conventional problems in the Kirov region.  “There is three-fold control at the facility — in the workshop, in the medical-protection zone and in the protective measures zone” (Interfax, Nov. 23). Back to top       Hussein Genocide Trial Resumes in Baghdad Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial resumed today in Baghdad to hear more evidence of his role in a 1988 campaign against Iraqi Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons (see GSN, Nov. 8). Hussein and his six codefendants all face the death penalty if convicted but only the former dictator and his cousin, known as “Chemical Ali,” have been charged with genocide. The trial reopened with a Kurdish witness describing villagers being taken to desert and executed.  “There was a trench there and we were lined up and a soldier was shooting at us,” Agence France-Press reported Taimor Abdallah Rokhazai as saying. “I saw bullets hitting a woman’s head and her brain coming out. I saw pregnant women shot and killed,” recounted the witness, who was a 12-year-old boy at the time. The deaths of 182,000 Kurds, some of whom were killed with chemical gas according to witnesses, were part of a systematic attack on the Kurds in Iraq’s north, prosecutors argue. Hussein and those involved claim the so-called Anfal campaign was a legitimate government response to the activities of Kurdish separatists. Hussein has already been sentenced to death in the Dujail trial.  He and seven other defendants were charged in the deaths of 148 Shiite villagers during the 1980s after an attempt on Hussein’s life originated in the village of Dujail in 1982. That trial has been criticized by independent observers as having been deeply flawed.  “The proceedings in the Dujail trial were fundamentally unfair,” according to the author of a Human Rights Watch report on the proceedings (Jay Deshmukh, Agence France-Presse/The Mail and Guardian, Nov. 27). Back to top

Pakistan to Forgo Long-Range Nuclear Deterrent Pakistan does not plan to produce long-range ballistic missiles and is satisfied that its current missile capabilities are adequate for the nation’s defense, a top military officer indicated last week (see GSN, Nov. 16). “We do not have any such intention, and we also think that there is no such immediate requirement for Pakistan’s security,” Gen. Ehsanul Haq, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, said in a television interview broadcast Thursday. “We have effectively addressed the areas from where we face threats,” Haq said.  “We do not have ambitions that our missiles start reaching out of this region.” “A basic thing which we have kept in mind is that we have to view our capabilities in the regional context because our overall concept is that of minimum deterrence, including nuclear deterrence,” he added (Financial Times, Nov. 24). Back to top

India Successfully Tests Missile Interceptor India today intercepted a ballistic missile in flight during the first successful test of the nation’s indigenous missile defense system, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported (see GSN, Sept. 11, 2003). One minute after launching a short-range Prithvi missile as the target from India’s Integrated Test Range, officials launched an interceptor missile, also a version of the Prithvi, dpa reported (see GSN, Nov. 20). “The target missile was successfully intercepted over the Bay of Bengal, nearly 70 kilometers from the ITR,” a Defense Ministry spokesman said.  “Many technologies relevant to interceptor missiles developed by the country got validated through this successful mission.” Having an antimissile capability would improve the nation’s security, said another Defense Ministry official. “It is a significant milestone in the missile defense system,” he said.  “India has acquired air-defense capability at a time when it faces a threat from nuclear-capable missiles in the neighborhood” (Deutsche Presse-Agentur/Playfuls.com, Nov. 27). Back to top       Australia Mulls Sea-Based Missile Defense System Spurred in part by North Korea’s July missile tests, Australia is looking into the possibility of a sea-based missile defense system, the Australian reported last week (see GSN, Apr. 5). The Australian national Cabinet will soon consider a feasibility study regarding a system that could be based on new warships, Defense Minister Brendan Nelson said last week, according to the Australian. The Cabinet would consider the missile defense platform when it approves the purchase of three destroyers and landing ships, the paper reported. “Any Australian who thinks that our country has no interest in antiballistic missile defense capability just needs to think back to July and watching that Taepodong 2 missile on the North Korean launch pad,” Nelson said.  “They went close to getting it right.” On July 4 and July 5, North Korea launched seven missile tests (see GSN, July 5).  The long-range Taepodong 2 had sparked concerns that it could reach the western coast of the United States, but the test missile crashed into the Sea of Japan less than 40 seconds after it launched. Following the test failure of the long-range missile, Pyongyang launched a series of shorter- and medium-range missiles. Estimating the range of a successful Taepodong 2, Nelson said a two-stage missile could travel nearly 1,900 miles, and a three-stage version flight could deliver a payload more than 7,400 miles away. “In its fully mature state that stage three could get to Australian territory,” he said.  “With the building of the air-warfare destroyers and equipping them with the Aegis combat system, it is a very live option for Australia to have mobile antiballistic missile capability.” The Standard Missile 3 system produced by U.S. company Raytheon, is considered a probable choice if the Australian government approves the plan (see GSN, Sept. 12).  Australian ships are already equipped with the company’s shorter-range Standard Missile 2 antiaircraft missile (The Australian, Nov. 22). Back to top

Democrats in Congress to Slow Development of Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Site Federal efforts to build an underground nuclear waste dump inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain will slow down dramatically, said longtime project opponent Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.; see GSN, Aug. 9). Reid, who is slated to become the Senate majority leader in January, told reporters earlier this month that he would prevent any bill supporting the project from reaching the Senate floor, and he said he would work to cut the program’s funding, the Associated Press reported. Funds “will be cut back significantly, that’s for sure,” Reid said. Reid appears to have support in the U.S. House, where speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has worked to slow Yucca efforts in the past, AP reported. To address the question of how to handle the radioactive spent fuel created by U.S. nuclear power plants, Reid has backed a strategy of keeping the waste on site in dry storage containers, according to AP. The nuclear industry and Energy Department officials have argued that the waste should be consolidated into an environmentally safe and secure facility. “Leaving everything where it is, is not a solution to the problem, said Edward Sproat, director of the department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. He complained that not opening Yucca Mountain would push “the solution off to future generations, which is pretty much what’s been happening with this program up until now” (Erica Werner/Boston Globe, Nov. 25). Back to top

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