Lugar Calls for Worldwide WMD Accounting System

U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) told the U.N. Security Council yesterday that an international system for tracking and safeguarding weapons of mass destruction is needed, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Feb. 2).

“We must perfect a worldwide system of accountability for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,” he said. “In such a system, every nation that currently has weapons and materials of mass destruction must account for what it has, safely secure what it has, and demonstrate that no other nation or cell will be allowed access.”

Lugar said WMD proliferation is “a universal economic and moral threat that will loom over all human activity for generations.”

Under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program started by Lugar and then-Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) in 1991, the United States and Russia have deactivated 6,828, Russian nuclear warheads, destroyed 1,174 ballistic missiles and decommissioned hundreds of strategic bombers, missile silos, submarine missile launchers and cruise missiles.

“No one would have predicted in the 1980s that Americans and Russians would be working side-by-side on the ground in Russia destroying thousands of nuclear weapons systems, as well as biological and chemical weapons,” Lugar said.

“Similarly, from the vantage point of today, few observers would predict that the international community would eventually participate in dismantlement operations in North Korea or, perhaps, Iran. The future is not clear in these states, but if a peaceful outcome is to be secured and weapons of mass destruction are to be eliminated, we should not rule out such extraordinary outcomes,” he added (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Feb. 6).

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Sam Nunn is chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and Richard Lugar serves on the NTI board.  NTI is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by the National Journal Group.]

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President’s Budget Request Includes Increases for U.S. WMD Defenses, Homeland Security

U.S. President George W. Bush’s $2.77 trillion budget request for fiscal 2007 released yesterday contains an 8-percent increase for homeland security and a 6.9-percent increase in Defense Department spending, the Baltimore Sun reported (see GSN, Feb. 6).

Within the Defense Department’s budget is $9.3 billion to develop defenses to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Baltimore Sun, Feb. 7).

Also in the budget request is $250 million for a new initiative to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and an increase in spending on the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada, the Associted Press reported.

Efforts to reprocess nuclear fuel to alleviate proliferation fears do not indicate waning commitment to the nuclear waste site, according to Energy Department officials.

“It is our great desire, and it is in the nation's interest, and it is in the interest of facilitating a nuclear renaissance, which we greatly need, that we get Yucca Mountain licensed and we get it open,” said Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell.

Sell added that the White House would support legislation to hurry construction of Yucca, which has been plagued by lack of funding, questions about manipulated data and the judicial rejection of federal radiation standards. 

The budget submitted by the president yesterday asks for $544 million for Yucca, $100 million more than the 2006 funding approved by Congress but less than the $650 million the White House asked for last year. The 2005 and 2004 budgets for the site were $577 million.

The $250 million set aside for nuclear reprocessing was the Bush administration’s initial step in trying to deal with nuclear fuel from U.S. commercial power plants. The U.S. plan is to conduct research into “more proliferation resistant” forms of reprocessing that would produce a mixture of plutonium and neptunium instead of only plutonium.

The Bush plan is called the Global Nuclear Energy Project and includes strategies to have U.S. companies sell fuel and reactors to developing countries on the condition that the fuel is returned to the United States to be reprocessed.

Some lawmakers have expressed concerns over the reprocessing plan. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Bush proposal would “include plans to import nuclear waste from other countries and reprocess it here, which would involve transporting deadly waste across thousands of miles at a time when we have heightened concerns about nuclear proliferation.”

“The nuclear industry is desperately peddling reprocessing as a solution for dealing with radioactive waste, but at the end of the day, all roads still lead back to Yucca Mountain,” added Representative Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.)

Representative Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) said that while the proposal is “a step in the right direction, I was disappointed that the misguided plan of geologic burial of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain was still included as necessary to address our nuclear waste problem” (Erica Werner, Associated Press, Feb. 6).

The proposed fiscal 2007 budget also includes $216 million for efforts leading to weapons disposal at the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, the Associated Press reported.

The money is allocated to the Army’s Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternative program, according to AP.

Approximately $130 million is included for work at construction at Pueblo, along with research, development and testing on ways to best process weapons. 

“We have worked long and hard to persuade them of the importance of this project,” said Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.).

“The president's commitment of $128.8 million for Pueblo is certainly a significant pledge,” added Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) (Jennifer Talhelm, Associated Press, Feb. 7).

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Experts Say WMD Threat Exaggerated

Experts speaking today in Australia played down the risk that terrorists could use weapons of mass destruction, Reuters reported (see GSN, Oct. 26, 2005).

Some speakers at a one-day conference on WMD threats contended that terrorists were more likely to use conventional weapons.

“The most likely terrorist threat is likely to be more ordinary and familiar, but still deadly in its own way,” said Lawrence Freedman, a professor of war studies at King’s College in London.

Freedman said that finding people with expertise in weapons of mass destruction would make it difficult for terrorists to develop the weapons undetected.

Robert Ayson of the Australian National University agreed with Freedman. He said that the debates on terrorist threats and WMD proliferation should be separate.

“We should be disarming our nightmares,” he said. “In 10 years’ time, we will look back and see the threat as exaggerated.”

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer disagreed.

“Unhappily, the threat of terrorists attempting such attacks is not a hypothetical problem. There is more than enough evidence of both intent and attempts to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

As evidence, Downer claimed that al-Qaeda was attempting to develop biological weapons in 2001 and that Jordanian officials in 2004 foiled a chemical weapons plot by the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terror network (see GSN, Dec. 20, 2005). A basic manual for making chemical and biological weapons was found in 2003 in a safe house in the Philippines used by terrorists, he said.

Acting U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Threat Reduction Donald Mahley said the United States remains concerned about biological weapons and would continue to work to prevent them from being developed and used (Reuters/New York Times, Feb. 7).

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Russia Criticizes G-8 on Disarmament Aid

A top Russian nuclear official last month accused the Group of Eight industrialized nations’ Global Partnership program of failing to assist WMD disarmament and nonproliferation programs in his country to the extent promised, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Dec. 21, 2005).

“The sums actually spent are different from the ones that were promised,” said Sergei Antipov, deputy director of Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency.

“Participants in the Global Partnership program had promised to spend $1.415 billion on disarmament programs” last year in Russia, but “the contracts concluded until the end of September added up to $354 million,” Antipov said.

“There are countries that haven’t yet freed up a cent for Russia,” he said.

Moscow still plans to dismantle all its decommissioned nuclear submarines by 2010, he said.

“We are following the timetable for dismantling our nuclear submarines independent of financing from our partners,” Antipov said (Agence France-Presse, Feb. 2).

Antipov also said Russia may become a Global Partnership donor instead of being its recipient within several years, ITAR-Tass reported on Feb. 2.

“In the future Russia will begin to share its experience in this field with other countries,” he said (ITAR-Tass, Feb. 2).

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Iraqi Recordings Could Provide WMD Information

A congressional intelligence committee is studying audio recordings between deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and other top former regime officials in an attempt to uncover more information about prewar Iraq’s suspected WMD capabilities, the New York Sun reported today (see GSN, Feb. 3).

Former federal prosecutor John Loftus provided a copy of the 12 hours of recordings to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Loftus said he initially acquired the recordings from a former U.S. military intelligence analyst and that they “will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important — and controversial — weapons of mass destruction questions.”

Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) has met with former Iraqi air force Gen. Georges Sada, who has said that civilian aircraft were used to transfer what appeared to be weapons of mass destruction to Syria just before the U.S.-led invasion of his country (see GSN, Jan. 26). 

Hoekstra is now interviewing Iraqis who allegedly took part in the WMD transfer. He has also asked National Intelligence Director John Negroponte to declassify 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents, the Sun reported.

Hoekstra said he is frustrated with the U.S. intelligence community’s lack of interest in the issue.

“I talked to one person relatively high up in [National Intelligence Directorate], and I asked him about [Sada’s claims] and asked are they going to follow up, and he looked at me and said, ‘No we don’t think so,’” Hoekstra said.

“I am trying to find out if our postwar intelligence was as bad as our prewar intelligence,” he added (Eli Lake, New York Sun, Feb. 7).

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Iran Demands Removal of IAEA Surveillance Equipment

Iran has demanded the removal of all International Atomic Energy Agency cameras and seals by the end of next week from the country’s nuclear facilities, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Feb. 6).

In a confidential report to the IAEA board yesterday, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran has also restricted the work of agency inspectors.

A diplomat told AP that Iran has set a date for resuming full-scale uranium enrichment efforts. He would not state the date.

Robert Joseph, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, said yesterday that Iran used negotiations with the European Union to buy time to further its nuclear program.

“I would say that Iran does have the capability to develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them,” he said.

Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran if it fails to obey U.N. resolutions and arms agreements.

“Diplomatic and economic confrontations are preferable to military ones,” he said.

He also cautioned that “in the field of nonproliferation, decisions delayed over the course of months and years may be as harmful as no decisions at all” (George Jahn, Associated Press/Washington Post, Feb. 7).

The White House condemned Tehran’s decision to resume enrichment activities, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday.

“The international community has spelled out very clearly the steps that the regime needs to take, and so far all we see is continued threats and confrontation rather than diplomacy and cooperation,” said spokesman Scott McClellan (Agence France-Presse I/Yahoo!News, Feb. 6).

A top U.S. diplomat said yesterday that Washington would consider sanctions of its own if the United Nations does not take action against Iran, AFP reported.

“We may get to the stage where we would agree in the U.N. on sanctions to apply to Iran,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Kurt Volker.

“If the U.N. doesn’t do that, I think we will face questions about, well, what do we do, because it is a very serious threat,” he said (Agence France-Presse II/Yahoo!News, Feb. 6).

The United States and the European Union plan to seek “targeted sanctions” if the standoff cannot be resolved, experts told AFP yesterday.

“The United States really seems to want to try this idea of first banning the travel of Iranians in the nuclear program and then in the leadership,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security.

One European diplomat confirmed that France, Germany and the United Kingdom had the same idea.

The United States plans to propose a four-stage approach in the Security Council, said one Western diplomat.

It would first push for a statement asking Iran to suspend nuclear fuel work and cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The second stage would involve a resolution “invoking Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter which gives the council the legal authority to require member states to take specific actions,” the diplomat said.

If Iran fails to comply, the third stage would involve sanctions “targeted only on Iran’s nuclear program and the regime’s leadership,” the diplomat said. Top Iranian leaders and nuclear scientists could be barred from leaving their country, while Iran’s atomic energy agency could find its foreign bank accounts frozen.

The fourth stage would consist of “wider economic sanctions on Iran, such as cutting off imports, cutting off all financial transactions,” the diplomat said (Michael Adler, Agence France-Presse/IranMania.com, Feb. 6).

The United States would consider the use of military force against Iran, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“All options, including the military one, are on the table,” Rumsfeld said in an interview published yesterday in the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt, AFP reported.

“Today, biological, chemical and radiological weapons are available which could kill tens of thousands of people,” he said. “There is a genuine possibility that these weapons could fall into the hands of people who behead innocent people and blow up children.”

“The people of the free world must realize that they have been warned,” Rumsfeld said (Agence France-Presse III/Yahoo!News, Feb. 6).

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for renewed talks with Iran, AP reported today.

“It is important not to make guesses about what will happen and even more important not to make threats,” he said (Jahn, Associated Press, Feb. 7).

Experts have said the U.S. military could destroy Iran’s dozen identified nuclear installations fairly quickly, the London Times reported today.

Former U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Sam Gardiner said such an operation could be completed in less than a week, but that Iran could then retaliate against Israel or U.S. military targets in the region.

“Once you have dealt with the nuclear sites you would have to expand the targets,” Gardiner said. “There are another 125 to deal with including chemical plants, missile launchers, airfields and submarines.”

Iran could also retaliate via groups such as Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia militia, and militant Iraqi Shia religious leader Moqtadr al-Sadr, the Times reported.

“An air strike against the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan would inflame Muslim anger, rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular government,” said Joseph Cirincione, nonproliferation director at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“It will have to be diplomats, not F-15s that stop the mullahs,” he said (Richard Beeston, The Times, Feb. 7).

China voted to report Iran to the Security Council in hopes that the move would spur diplomacy, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said today.

“There are severe difficulties and complex circumstances, but nonetheless we still believe there’s still space to appropriately resolve the Iran nuclear issue through negotiations,” he said (Chris Buckley, Reuters, Feb. 7).

Israel’s ambassador to the United States yesterday said that he believed the standoff could still be resolved through diplomatic efforts, Reuters reported.

“This notion that the situation is predestined or cannot be stopped ... it’s not true. They have not crossed the point of no return. ... They don’t have all the know-how and equipment they need,” Daniel Ayalon said.

Ayalon also ruled out the possibility that Israel would sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, thereby opening its atomic facilities to international inspections.

“Israel is still not in the position to give up any of its deterrence ... (or) ambiguity because we are still being challenged by so many countries,” he said (Carol Giacomo, Reuters, Feb. 7).

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North Korea Nuclear Talks Unlikely to Resume This Month, South Korean Official Says

The likelihood that North Korea nuclear disarmament negotiations will resume this month is slim in the wake of U.S. allegations about Pyongyang’s financial crimes, Agence France-Presse reported today (see GSN, Feb. 6).

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said there was no response from Pyongyang to China’s offer to restart the Beijing talks.

“I can’t assure you that the talks will resume this month,” Ban said.

“We find it regrettable that the talks are undergoing difficulties because of the issues that have nothing to do with the [nuclear] agenda,” he added (Agence France-Presse, Feb. 7).

The top Japanese envoy to bilateral talks with North Korea said today that Pyongyang must settle the nuclear dispute before normalizing relations with Tokyo, the Associated Press reported.

“In order to normalize relations between Japan and North Korea, it’s not just the abduction issue but also the nuclear issue and missile issue that need to be solved,” said Tadamichi Yamamoto, referring to Pyongyang’s Cold War-era kidnappings of Japanese nationals.

The talks between the two nations today entered their fourth day in Beijing, according to AP (Audra Ang, Associated Press/Mainichi Daily News, Feb. 7).

A Japanese official said the North Korean delegation, while reaffirming the importance of the six-nation talks, said they had no plans to resume them any time soon, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported today.

“They (North Korean officials) agreed on the importance of the six-party talks but they did not say they would be back to the framework quite soon,” said the Japanese official (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Feb. 7).

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Boston Nuclear Attack Hoax Suspect in U.S. Custody

A Mexican man charged with inventing a story about a terrorist plot to attack Boston with a nuclear weapon has been extradited to the United States from Mexico, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Oct. 18, 2005).

Jose Ernesto Beltran Quinonez was turned over to U.S. law enforcement officials Sunday in Mexico City. Yesterday he pleaded not guilty to federal charges of passing on false information about a terrorist attack and lying to U.S. authorities. If convicted, he could serve up to eight years in prison.

Quinonez’s story led to warnings, an investigation, discussions with the president regarding the matter and a manhunt for Chinese citizens supposedly involved in the plot.

“What a huge waste of resources,” said Dan Dzwilewski, head of the FBI’s San Diego office. “It took hundreds and hundreds of man-hours here and across the country. The threat that he laid out had to be taken seriously until it was validated or discounted.”

Federal authorities maintain that Quinonez on Jan. 17, 2005, told California Highway Patrol dispatchers that nuclear warheads would be smuggled from Mexico to California. He said that he had moved two Iraqis and four Chinese chemists into the United States and that they were heading to Boston.

Quinonez said he would toss documents over the border fence to prove his claims. U.S. authorities found a package with travel documents belonging to Chinese citizens and carrying Beltran’s fingerprints, AP reported (Associated Press/WFSB, Feb. 7).

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Drill to Simulate Chemical Weapons Emergency

The federal Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program and the Pine Bluff Arsenal are expected tomorrow to conduct a drill simulating an emergency with chemical weapons stored at the Arkansas site, the Pine Bluff Commercial reported (see GSN, Jan. 27).

Up to 300 responders, controllers, evaluators and observers from the arsenal, the Arkansas Emergency Management Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state Health and Human Services Department, and the 10 counties involved in the preparedness program are expected to participate.

The simulation “will include the chemical weapons in the chemical storage area,” said Carole Newton, spokeswoman for the preparedness program (Amy Riggin, Pine Bluff Commercial, Feb. 4).

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Iran Reportedly Tests Shahab 4 Missile

Western intelligence services have disclosed that Iran tested a new long-range Shahab 4 missile last month, Germany’s DDP news agency reported yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 20).

The nuclear-capable missile can carry up to three warheads and has a range of about 2,200 kilometers, according to DDP. The test launch is believed to have occurred Jan. 17.

Western intelligence services believe Iran could manufacture a Shahab 5 with a range of 3,000 to 5,000 kilometers as soon as next year, DDP reported (DDP, Feb. 6).

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U.S. to Deploy X-Band Radar in Japan This Year

The United States this year plans to install a mobile X-band radar in Japan to detect potential ballistic missile attacks, the Kyodo News Service reported today (see GSN, Jan. 10).

“We hope to have it in Japan within the next six months,” a senior U.S. Missile Defense Agency official said yesterday. He said the system’s estimated cost is between $250 million and $300 million.

The radar is expected to be deployed at a Japanese air base in Tsugaru, according to Kyodo. The system is meant “not only for the defense of the United States but for the defense of Japan,” the official said (Kyodo News Service/Yahoo!News, Feb. 7).

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