Tick Tock:  Scientists Say World Is Closer to Armageddon By Jon Fox Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — It fell to famed physicist Stephen Hawking to offer the sober announcement yesterday:  the world has inched two minutes closer to annihilation.  ..Full Story

IAEA Freezes Some Aid to Iran The International Atomic Energy Agency has suspended some of its technical assistance programs in Iran, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 17)...Full Story

U.S. Hints at Normalized Relations with North Korea The United States hopes someday to establish normalized relations with North Korea, but only after the Stalinist state follows through on its 2005 pledge to eliminate its nuclear weapons program, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 17)...Full Story

	Thursday, January 18, 2007

TSA Head Questions Full Plane Cargo Inspections Legislation to require inspections of all passenger airplane cargo would create “a very small, incremental benefit for security” while possibly creating vulnerabilities in other sectors of airport protection, the head of the Transportation Security Administration said yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 10). Focusing airport personnel on cargo checks might mean less emphasis on screening airport employees, checking passenger documents and monitoring potentially suspicious travelers, said TSA chief Kim Hawley. “If you spend all your resources opening boxes and not applying your resources more generally, that opens up vulnerability,” he told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Aviation Subcommittee.  “The adaptive terrorist will go there.” A small percentage of the 6 billion tons of cargo now carried annually on passenger planes undergoes inspection by bomb-detecting technology or dogs, USA Today reported.  The House of Representatives last week approved a homeland security bill that calls for cargo to undergo the same full inspections given to passenger luggage by October 2009.  It is not clear in the bill if the responsibility would fall on the agency or airlines. Senate legislation is expected to be less demanding.  Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he believes the agency should have flexibility in handling cargo security improvements, a spokeswoman told USA Today. The agency has already added dog teams for cargo inspection and requires that packages brought to airports for shipping to go through bomb detection machines, Hawley said.  It also sets security requirements on firms that use passenger flights to move goods (Thomas Frank, USA Today, Jan. 18). Back to top

Tick Tock:  Scientists Say World Is Closer to Armageddon By Jon Fox Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — It fell to famed physicist Stephen Hawking to offer the sober announcement yesterday:  the world has inched two minutes closer to annihilation.  “It is now five minutes to midnight,” he said, speaking through his electronic voice synthesizer.  Hawking appeared from London, his image splayed across a large screen here during a joint, trans-Atlantic press conference (see GSN, Jan. 16). Hawking, the theoretical physicist incapacitated by Lou Gehrig’s disease, was one of the scientists consulted by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists before it pushed its Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to Armageddon.  Meant to symbolize humankind’s flirty relationship with an apocalyptic end, the movement of the clock’s minute hand closer to midnight indicates the continued threat of nuclear weapons and the growing concerns posed by global climate change, said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin (see GSN, June 6, 2002). “But for good luck we would all be dead,” Hawking said. The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project physicists concerned about the destructive power of nuclear weapons.  Two years later, the magazine gave birth to the clock, setting the minute hand at seven minutes to midnight to illustrate the danger of a nuclear-armed age. Since then, the magazine’s board of directors in consultation with its board of sponsors has pushed the minute hand back and forth 17 times. The bulletin’s symbolic clock was pushed closest to midnight in 1953 when the minute hand was stopped at 11:58.  The United States and the Soviet Union had both tested hydrogen bombs within nine months of each other. The last shift occurred in February 2002.  The clock then went from nine minutes to seven minutes to midnight, reflecting the threat of nuclear terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This week’s adjustment reflects the coming of a “second nuclear age” characterized by the spread of potentially dangerous dual-use nuclear technologies and expertise, according to a Bulletin statement. The scientists also considered unchecked climate change in their decision to advance the clock.  “This change reflects global failures to address the threat of nuclear weapons and the effects of global climate change,” Benedict said. While the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange that hung over the globe for 40 years has greatly diminished with the end of the Cold War, danger remains in a different form. “At any time during the Cold War the super powers could have stumbled toward Armageddon through muddle or miscalculation,” said Martin Rees, an astrophysics professor at Cambridge University who sits on the magazine’s board of sponsors. As the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War era drew to a close the clock was adjusted to read 17 minutes to midnight.  “But there is now more chance than ever of a few nuclear weapons going off in a localized conflict,” Rees said. He pointed to threats of nuclear proliferation posed by North Korea and Iran and the possibility that terrorists could kill “tens of thousands” by detonating a nuclear device in an urban center. Through climate change “humans are collectively endangering our planet,” and galloping advances in technology, including bio- and nanotechnology, are presenting new threats “more diverse and less tractable” than nuclear weapons, Rees said. “If anything the unthinkable seems closer now in some ways that it ever was,” said Lawrence Krauss, a physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and a Bulletin sponsor.  “We live in dangerous times.” Krauss warned against increased nuclear proliferation across national borders and what seems to be an erosion of psychological barriers against the first use of nuclear weapons. In its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the United States stated that nuclear weapons provide a credible deterrence to a “wide range of threats,” including “surprising military developments.” “This is a loophole large enough to start a nuclear war,” he cautioned, noting the United States has no policy prohibiting the first use of nuclear weapons. Krauss also suggested that a U.S. plan to rebuild its aging nuclear arsenal through the Reliable Replacement Warhead program could make it even harder to persuade Iran and North Korea to abandon nuclear pursuits.  The program would also almost certainly result in a return to nuclear testing, he said. “Despite assurances to the contrary these warheads will have to be tested,” Krauss said.  “It is folly to deploy any new system without first testing it.” A U.S. return to testing could prompt China, Russia, India and Pakistan to conduct nuclear blasts, he said. Thomas Pickering, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a member of the Bulletin’s board of directors, urged a push for diplomacy rather than military action when possible.  He made a similar plea before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, calling for negotiations with an intransigent Iran (see GSN, Jan. 12). “Diplomacy ought to be our first resort, especially when there is time to deal with the situation through diplomatic means,” he said. Pickering also called for a no-first-use nuclear policy to be adopted in the United States and eliminating as quickly as possible the U.S. arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. Asked why barriers to the use of nuclear weapons might be eroding, Krauss said there are few people alive who witnessed the devastating power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, small weapons by today’s nuclear standards. “I think that time unfortunately plays a role,” he said.  “People have to be reminded.” The announcement was designed to bring attention dangers posed by nuclear weapons and climate change, and to nudge the issues onto policy-makers’ agendas, according to the Bulletin. “Scientists should not shirk from being the bearers of bad tidings,” Krauss said.  “To do anything less would simply be negligent.” Back to top       IAEA Freezes Some Aid to Iran The International Atomic Energy Agency has suspended some of its technical assistance programs in Iran, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 17). The decision follows last month’s unanimous U.N. Security Council decision to bar any international trade or assistance that could help Iran’s nuclear fuel production facilities. The agency’s governing board is due to review the temporary freeze in March, diplomats said. An agency review of its assistance programs grouped them in three categories:  programs in which the council ban clearly applied, ones in which it clearly did not and a “gray list” of projects requiring further examination, according to another diplomat. “Whatever is absolutely clearly banned by the resolution is now on hold,” the diplomat said, adding that the resolution was “a clear prohibition by the Security Council, specifically applying to enrichment, reprocessing and heavy-water (production)” (George Jahn, Associated Press I/San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 17). Speaking in Paris, agency head Mohamed ElBaradei expressed concern today that the diplomatic standoff over Iran’s nuclear ambitions could worsen. “My worry right now is that each side is sticking to its guns,” he said.  “We need someone to reach out.” The Security Council actions could cause further tension. “Sanctions in my view could lead to escalation on both sides,” ElBaradei said (Associated Press II/International Herald Tribune, Jan. 18). The cohesive council action probably surprised Iran, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said yesterday. “The government of Iran assumed that the international community would not remain united.  It didn’t think we could get the resolution on sanctions before Christmas,” she said.  “But we have — and we got it with unanimity.  I think that reality is beginning to be recognized.” She urged Iran to suspend its nuclear programs and return to the negotiating table. “At present the government in Tehran continues to say that it will not do so,” she said.  “So far they have regarded this as a cost-free option — and it isn’t” (Sophie Walker, Reuters, Jan. 17). Political opponents to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have recently expressed similar sentiments, AP reported today (see GSN, Jan. 16). “That all 15 members of the Security Council unanimously voted, against the claim of our diplomatic apparatus that there was no unanimity against Iran, shows the weakness of our diplomatic apparatus,” said reformist lawmaker Noureddin Pirmoazzen. “Resisting the U.N. Security Council resolution will put us in a more isolated position,” said a statement from the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the nation’s largest reform party (Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press III/Washington Times, Jan. 18). Back to top       U.S. Hints at Normalized Relations with North Korea The United States hopes someday to establish normalized relations with North Korea, but only after the Stalinist state follows through on its 2005 pledge to eliminate its nuclear weapons program, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 17). “Obviously this is via a bilateral process, which will take a long time,” he said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said ties between the two countries must first develop through the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, the New York Times reported.  Washington is not going to back off its demand that Pyongyang completely and verifiably eliminate its nuclear program, Rice said. The 2005 agreement — in which North Korea pledged in principle to eliminate its nuclear weapons efforts in return for aid and security guarantees from the other negotiating nations — “envisioned that the denuclearization of the North Korea Peninsula would lead to … a normalization of relations between the United States and the D.P.R.K.,” Rice said. Hill met again yesterday in Berlin with lead North Korean nuclear negotiator Kim Kye Gwan. “It was a substantive discussion,” Hill said.  “The proof of the pudding will be when we all sit down together in the six-party negotiations.” The meetings Tuesday and yesterday “should help to prepare the way for a more favorable atmosphere at the time of the resumption of the six-party talks, which we would hope would be soon,” Rice said. Hill indicated that a lessening of financial pressure on North Korea is not in the offing.  During the last round of multilateral negotiations in December, Pyongyang used U.S. financial sanctions as a justification for avoiding serious talks on disarmament. “We’ve had to make it clear to the North Koreans that as long as they are involved in nuclear weapons production, their international financing will come under scrutiny,” Hill said (Landler/Shanker, New York Times, Jan. 18). Back to top       Computer Model Could Detect Nuclear Smuggling A U.S. researcher has developed a computer program that uses reports of illicit nuclear trafficking to try to identify larger smuggling networks, Science Daily reported today (see GSN, Jan. 3). Sandia National Laboratories researcher David York said his model has described the network headed by former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan (see GSN, Nov. 27, 2006). “By using a cluster analysis algorithm coded into a program,” York said, “I evaluated those traffic patterns and routes in which thefts, seizures and other destinations of materials were reported.  Data from these examinations were enough to allow me to retrospectively depict the A.Q. Khan network before it was uncovered.” Using his model could help detect smuggling efforts that continue today. “The number of incidents and the quantity and quality of material seized is disturbing,” York said, “particularly because this may represent a small percentage of the actual amount of material being trafficked” (Science Daily, Jan. 18). Back to top

Newspaper Finds Lax Chemical Plant, Train Security A reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review easily bypassed security to gain access to chemical plants and freight lines that carry the toxic materials in several states, the newspaper reported Sunday (see GSN, Dec. 22, 2006). Using Federal Railroad Administration reports on rail and plant security weaknesses as a guide, the reporter “penetrated” 48 facilities and freight lines in areas of Seattle, Tacoma, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, the Bay Area and the suburbs of New Jersey.  He was also able to enter port facilities in Oregon and Washington. The release of a deadly gas such as chlorine by terrorists could have devastating effects on a nearby community.  A Homeland Security planning scenario indicates that such an event could kill 17,500 people, injure another 10,000 and force evacuations of 70,000 residents.  Other scenarios imagine even greater effects, according to the Tribune-Review. “What you uncovered in a criminal tragedy, and it’s a criminal tragedy that’s just waiting to happen.  It’s also criminal what we haven’t done about this,” said Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.). More cameras, gates and police are needed at rail yards, Biden said.  Less dangerous chemicals should be used and moved by rail, and significantly dangerous materials should not be transported through major urban areas, he said. “I can walk into a freight yard right now, and I can put plastique explosive on a rail car and detonate it,” Biden said.  “This is a distant concern to many people in Washington, D.C., but I see and I hear about it every day and we have to do something about it.” Improvements have been made to freight security since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but additional work remains, according to the Association of American Railroads. “You’ve got to remember the open architecture of railroads,” said Nancy Wilson, association vice president and security director.  “We’re not static facilities.  We cannot protect every rail car, every rail yard or every customer’s facility all the time.” Among the Tribune-Review’s findings: — The reporter was able to access hazardous materials shipments or locomotives operated by 12 rail firms.  No one questioned him while he climbed on to trains, took photographs of derailing levers or checked signaling boxes. — The reporter was able to reach 11 tankers containing acids or toxic gases inside plants or on the rails in Las Vegas.  He gained access to dangerous materials at 12 rail and chemical sites in Atlanta, and to 90 tons of chlorine gas abandoned in Tacoma, Wash. — Police never stopped the reporter.  A New Jersey Transit Police officer took no action while the reporter hung out near hazardous materials cars for an hour (Carl Prine, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I, Jan. 14). A proposed Homeland Security Department rule designed to prevent rail cars carrying chemicals or radioactive materials from becoming weapons of terrorism is not likely to provide sufficient protection, observers told the Tribune-Review (see GSN, Dec. 18, 2006). “Security has always been light years away from where it should be,” said John Tolman, legislative director for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.  “I’m worried that it will take a 9/11 type of disaster before we wake up to what we need to do.” Homeland Security ultimately hopes to have the capability to monitor trains carrying dangerous materials through 46 “High Threat Urban Areas” that could be used by terrorists as ambush spots (Carl Prine, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I I, Jan. 15). Close to 12 cities that prepared bans on rail traffic of hazardous chemicals are waiting to see if Washington, D.C.’s ban will stand a court challenge, the newspaper reported. “It’s only going to take one attack, just one attack and one of this will be an issue,” said Fred Millar, who helped develop the plan to reroute dangerous train traffic around the nation’s capital.  “If you want to avoid a disaster in your city, tell the railroads to reroute the chemicals around it.” The Association of American Railroads counters that rerouting hazardous materials shipments around Washington adds distance to every trip, increasing the chances for an accident in another community. Railroads for months have been compiling data for months that could be used to determine the best routes for dangerous materials. “It’s not to say, ‘Rerouting is bad.’  But to reroute just to reroute doesn’t make sense,” said AAR President Ed Hamberger (Carl Prine, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review III, Jan. 15). Back to top

Fylingdales Radar Upgrades to be Finished This Year Upgrades to an U.S. early warning radar at the British Fylingdales air station are expected to be completed by the end of this year, the head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said last week (see GSN, Aug. 3, 2006). “By the end of the year, we’ll have the Fylingdales radar in the U.K. and that will give us the first capability to defend ourselves against that Middle Eastern threat,” Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said, according to Inside Missile Defense. The project is already nearly a year behind schedule. Once work is finished, the improved radar at the Royal Air Force base would give the U.S. Ground-based Midcourse Defense system “fire control access and increased early warning capability for potential threat objects launched from north and east” of the continental United States, according to the Missile Defense Agency (John Liang, Inside Missile Defense, Jan. 17). Back to top       U.S. Contractor Opens Laser Production Site A major defense contractor this week opened the first U.S. production facility for manufacturing solid-state, high-energy military lasers, Reuters reported yesterday (see GSN, May 7, 2004). Northrop Grumman said the Redondo Beach, Calif., facility would allow the company to meet growing military demands. “Powerful military lasers, with their speed-of-light targeting capabilities and cost-effective operation, have the potential to transform the way we equip our armed forces defending our country abroad and protecting it at home against terrorist threats,” said Alexis Livanos, president of Northrop’s space technology sector, in a prepared statement. Northrop plans to demonstrate a 100-kilowatt laser by the end of next year, said Mike McVey, president of the company’s directed energy systems business.  Such a laser could destroy enemy rockets, artillery or mortars in flight, Reuters reported. The company also has plans to develop a laser defense system to protect airports and other sites from rockets and ballistic missiles, according to Reuters (Andrea Shalal-Esa, Reuters/InformationWeek, Jan. 17). Back to top

Radiation Scanners to be Deployed at U.K. Ports By the end of next month, the British Home Office plans to deploy 10 mobile scanners for detecting radioactive materials at ports around the United Kingdom, The Scotsman reported today (see GSN, Feb. 22, 2006). Each scanner deployed under Program Cyclamen costs nearly $700,000.  Each could be used at multiple ports, where they would be driven by suspicious cargo entering the country to check for materials that could be used in a radiological “dirty bomb.” Three of the scanners are to cover the primary ports in Scotland and northern England.  A fixed radiation monitor is also expected to be installed at the Rosyth port in Fife, the Scotsman reported. Sources in the Home Office expressed concern that three mobile scanners would not be enough to safeguard Scotland’s 148 ports and 6,000 miles of coastline.  Adequate staffing is also necessary, they said. “The ports and airports lack cover and they need a permanent customs presence,” a source said.  “You need 24-hour manning, otherwise there’s no point in having this type of equipment.” “The number of places of entry across Scotland’s coastline is vast,” said Frank Campbell, senior national officer for the union that represents British customs officers.  “People turn the boat away when they find out there’s going to be a crackdown at a particular port.  The mobile scanners are a step in the right direction but you need a physical presence to act as a deterrent” (Tanya Thompson, The Scotsman, Jan. 18). Back to top

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