Russia:  Canadian Companies Amend HEU Deal

By Mike Nartker

Global Security Newswire

Cameco Corp. and its two partners signed an amendment Monday to a commercial deal with Russia that commits the three Canadian firms to buying 56,000 metric tons of uranium over the next 12 years.

The amendment is part of an arrangement that Cameco, along with COGEMA and RWE NUKEM Inc., signed with Russia in March 1999 to purchase uranium from Russian nuclear weapons as part of the U.S.-Russia highly enriched uranium deal.  Under that deal, Russia dilutes HEU removed from dismantled nuclear warheads and sells it the the U.S. Enrichment Corp., which blends the uranium down further and fabricates nuclear fuel for power reactors.

The commercial arrangement gives the three companies the option to purchase an annual total of 24 million pounds of uranium from the Russian firm Techsnabexport (Tenex) over the next 12 years—a total of 288 million pounds.  The new amendment commits the companies to purchasing specific amounts. Cameco and COGEMA are to purchase 53 million pounds of uranium and RWE NUEKM is to purchase 18 million, with Tenex retaining the right to sell remaining uranium up to 206 million pounds.

Cameco signed the amendment to the deal because the three companies already had purchased the specified amounts every year and “we didn’t see our behavior changing,” said Cameco Investor and Corporate Relations Director Jamie McIntyre.  The new amendment “gives us a secure source of uranium and the Russians a secure source of income,” McIntyre said.

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CTBT:  Kazakhstan Senate Approves CTBT

The Kazakh Senate has approved the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty .  Kazakhstan signed the treaty in 1996.

Kazakhstan had one of the most modern national monitoring systems to observe the CTBT, including several seismic stations in the country, said Deputy Energy and Natural Resources Minister Bolat Yelemanov.  The CTBT Organization spent about $6 million to establish the system and would spend another $1.6 million to reorganize a nuclear testing ground and operate the seismic stations

Kazakhstan was home to a major Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk (Khabar Television, Nov.1/BBC Worldwide Monitoring, Nov. 28).

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Pakistan:  U.S. Should Offer Technology, Experts Say

The United States should wave export controls and, when necessary, rules in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that prevent exports, to allow the transfer of technology to Pakistan to protect the its nuclear arsenal from theft or unauthorized use (see GSN, Nov. 5), said Mansoor Ijaz of Crescent Investment Management and R. James Woolsey, former CIA director in an editorial in the New York Times yesterday. 

The United States should provide “vaults, sensors, alarms, tamper-proof seals, closed-circuit cameras and labels to identify, track and secure Islamabad’s nuclear materials,” Ijaz and Woolsey wrote.

Access to radioactive materials in Pakistan is the most likely way for al-Qaeda to develop nuclear capability that would threaten the United States, Ijaz and Woolsey said.  Providing security assistance to Pakistan would “dramatically reduce” the possibility that an al-Qaeda supporter could provide stolen uranium or plutonium to terrorists, they said.

The authors suggested the United States implement a program to protect Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal similar to the Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction program in Russia.  They also encouraged Congress to approve financing for the next phase of the Nunn-Lugar program in Russia, which the House leadership is expected to consider this week (Ijaz/Woolsey, New York Times, Nov. 28).

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North Korea:  Rejects Bush Request for Inspections

North Korea has rejected U.S. President George W. Bush’s request on Monday for the country to allow nuclear inspections to resume, CNN reported today.

“The U.S. is unreasonably demanding the DPRK receive an ‘inspection’ just as a thief turns on the master with a club,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement reported by the state-run Korea Central News Agency, according to CNN.

North Korea also stated its objection to U.S. plans to build a missile defense system.  “It is preposterous for the U.S., styling itself a ‘superpower,’ to claim that it should establish the missile defense system for fear of the DPRK’s missile [program] solely meant for self-defense,” the statement said. 

North Korea said U.S. demands concerning terrorism and missile proliferation demonstrate that U.S. statements of interest in establishing a dialogue with North Korea “is nothing but hypocrisy” (CNN, Nov. 29).

Meanwhile, South Korean National Defense Minister Kim Tong-sin said that despite apparently increasingly hard-line U.S. statements, the United States would not “not try to stage an independent war against North Korea” (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo.com, Nov. 29).

South Korean President Kim Dae-jung urged the United States and North Korea to directly discuss their disagreement related to U.S. suspicions that North Korea is developing weapons of mass destruction.  “Both sides have many things to tell each other, so I hope that both sides, U.S. and North Koreans, will be able to sit face-to-face to discuss these issues,” he said in an interview with Reuters this week (Martin Nesirky, Reuters, Nov. 28).

South Korean Unification Minister Hong Sun Yong said Tuesday he believed that North Korea is “capable of cultivating and producing 13 different types of germs, including anthrax and smallpox” (see GSN, Nov. 20).  He refused to say whether North Korea possesses nuclear weapons (Yonhap News Agency/BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, Nov. 28).

North Korean Anti-Terrorism

The United States, Japan and South Korea urged North Korea to increase its cooperation with the international anti-terrorism coalition in a joint statement released yesterday, after Bush called on North Korea to halt development of weapons of mass destruction, according to the Associated Press.

The three countries said North Korea had taken some positive actions in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, including calling the attacks “tragic” and agreeing to two U.N. treaties on terrorism, but criticized the country for not doing more to oppose international terrorism.  North Korea has been “less than forthcoming in supporting the coalition against terrorism,” said U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard (Jae-Suk Yoo, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, Nov. 28).

Hubbard also restated U.S. interest in opening a dialogue with North Korea and expressed disappointment that North-South Korean talks broke down earlier in November (Korea Herald, Nov. 30).

Meanwhile, North Korea agreed to two U.N. anti-terrorism treaties on Nov. 12.  North Korea signed the 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (U.N. release, Nov. 29) and acceded to the 1979 International Convention against the Taking of Hostages (U.N. release, Nov. 29).

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Russia:  Denies Reports of Missile Disposal

Russian military officials Tuesday denied reports that rail-mobile strategic missiles were being moved to disposal sites (see GSN, Nov. 28).  “No missiles are moving anywhere and saying that we have entered the stage of scrapping these complexes would be premature,” said Maj.-Gen. Vitaliy Linnik, strategic missile troops deputy commander. 

Russia plans to begin dismantling its rail-mobile launchers no earlier than 2002, according to Linnik.  Construction of a disposal facility near Bryansk is nearing completion, but, “the facility needs to be tested before being declared ready to use,” Linnik said (Moscow Interfax, Nov. 27, in FBIS-SOV, Nov. 27).

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U.S.-Russia: Codified, Verifiable Nuclear Reductions?

By Greg Webb

Global Security Newswire

The Bush administration last week revealed a possible new willingness to consider nuclear arms control agreements, despite the unilateral nature of the reciprocal nuclear reductions announced two weeks ago by U.S. and Russian Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin (see GSN, Nov. 14).

“The next step is to codify these reductions, to include measures for verification, without the multi-year negotiations that used to be necessary in Cold War days,” wrote U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow in Friday’s Moscow Times.  (Click here to read text.)

In a speech given the same day, Vershbow said the two nations would pursue this next step “in the coming months.”  (Click here to read speech.

Vershbow is the first administration official since the Crawford, Texas, summit to endorse publicly the concept of codified, verifiable reductions.

At that meeting from Nov. 12 to 14, Bush announced that the United States would reduced its “operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads” to between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next 10 years and Putin said Russia would “respond in kind.”

Getting a written agreement, however, remained a bone of contention.  Putin expressed his desire to have a new treaty, including verification measures, but the Bush administration has so far refused to commit to a formal agreement.  Bush himself said he was willing to “write it down on a piece of paper,” but U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has said the administration has not decided what form of written agreement it is willing to sign.

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Russia:  Missile Launchers Moving to Disposal Site

Russia has begun the process of disposing of rail-mobile SS-24 ICBMs under START I, Vladimir Andreyev, general director of Askond research company, said yesterday. A train carrying SS-24s left Plesetsk en route to Bryansk, where the missiles were to be disposed (Nikolai Novichkov, ITAR-Tass/BBC Worldwide Monitoring, Nov. 27).

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Iran: Weapon Program Advancing, Israel Says

An Israeli delegation came to Washington last month to present evidence to U.S. officials that Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons with Russian assistance, according to an article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in this week’s New Yorker.  The Iranian nuclear weapon program is developing quickly, the Israelis said, and they urged the United States to place Russian support for the Iranian program at the top of U.S. foreign policy concerns.

Many U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials have estimated Iran could possess nuclear warheads and delivery systems within three to five years, despite Iranian denials of a nuclear weapon program, according to Hersh.  Officials are not sure whether Iran has developed the capacity to produce the required materials domestically, which would render export controls and efforts to stop suppliers useless.  Iran is “closer to that point than we should be comfortable about,” said a U.S. intelligence officer.

Producing weapons-grade material probably remains a serious hurdle to Iran, although the country could circumvent the problem if it could acquire fissile material on the Russian black market, according to intelligence officials.

According to a former senior Pentagon official, intelligence services have collected evidence that Iran has attempted to construct hidden, underground nuclear facilities—perhaps in an effort to avoid a preemptive strike from Israel, which destroyed a new Iraqi reactor in 1981, Hersh wrote.

Iran’s most important production facilities are scattered around the country at secret sites, not at Bushehr, where Russia has agreed to help Iran construct nuclear power reactors that would be subject to international safeguards (see GSN, Nov. 8), according to intelligence sources. 

U.S. Policy

The United States, which has repeatedly urged Russia to discontinue nuclear assistance to Iran, has reasons not to place the issue of Iranian nuclear development high on its foreign policy agenda, Hersh said.  U.S. officials have expressed hope that relations with Iran could improve, particularly since Iran offered to let the United States stage search-and-rescue operations in Afghanistan from Iranian soil and provided other cooperation in the U.S. war on terrorism. 

Russia has argued that Iran would inevitably build a nuclear bomb even without Russian help—perhaps with North Korean or Chinese assistance—so a U.S. effort to stop Russian assistance might make little difference, according to a former Pentagon official.  Meanwhile, one of the Bush administration’s top priorities is persuading Russia to modify or abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

U.S. policy has also placed greater emphasis on neutralizing the Iraqi threat.  “It’s more important to deal with Iraq than with Iran, because there’s nothing going on in Iraq that’s going to get better,” said a senior Bush administration strategist, referring to changes in Iran the United States views as positive.

The United States has also placed the war on terrorism on the top of its priority list since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and Washington.  The effort the Bush administration could put into stalling the Iranian nuclear program would “depend on how much success you have with Osama bin Laden,” said an Israeli official, adding, “If the terror continues, there is no alternative for the U.S. but to go to Iran for help.” 

“We’ll tell the Pakistanis and the Russians to back off their help for Iran’s bombs, but that’s chapter two, after we put [bin Laden] in a body bag,” said a U.S. general (Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, Dec. 3).

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Russia:  New Submarine to Enter Service

Russia’s new Gepard-class nuclear submarine will enter into service with the Northern Fleet in early December, officials said Thursday.  The Gepard-class submarines are armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and are considered to be among the quietest Russian-made submarines, according to ITAR-Tass (ITAR-Tass, Nov. 22 in FBIS-SOV, Nov. 22).

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United States:  Accused Smuggler Pleads Not Guilty

Richard Kelly Smyth, a fugitive for the past 16 years from charges of smuggling nuclear weapons parts to Israel, pleaded not guilty yesterday.

Smyth was charged in 1985 with exporting 800 devices called krytrons, small glass bulbs that can be used as nuclear triggers, to Heli Trading Corp. in Israel.  He was arrested last July in Spain and extradited to the United States last week (see GSN, Nov. 20).

If convicted, Smyth, who has been charged with 15 violations of the Arms Export Control Act and 15 counts of making false statements to the government, could be sentenced to life in prison.  He could also be charged with fleeing the country, prosecutors in the case said (Reuters/Washington Post, Nov. 27).

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CTBT:  Kuwait Moves to Join Treaty

The Kuwaiti Cabinet approved a bill Sunday giving state approval of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (Kuna News Agency/BBC Monitoring, Nov. 25).  Kuwait signed the treaty in 1996, but has yet to ratify it formally (CTBTO release, Nov. 27).

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Pakistan:  Reports Conflict Over Nuclear Scientists

Reports continued to conflict (see GSN, Oct. 31) last week over the release of Pakistani nuclear scientists who had been questioned about possible involvement with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden (see GSN, Nov. 12) and the depth of U.S. involvement in the investigation.

Several reports said the scientists were released last week.  The Associated Press reported Thursday that Pakistani authorities released Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood and Abdul Majid, although Pakistani government spokesman Gen. Rashid Qureshi did not say when they were released.  Mehmood and Majid had been involved in Pakistan’s nuclear program and had frequently visited Afghanistan after retirement from the nuclear program.  They said their trips to Afghanistan were related to charitable activities and denied providing nuclear assistance to the Taliban or bin Laden (see GSN, Nov. 20).  Pakistani officials said the scientists had met with bin Laden at least twice (Associated Press/Washington Post, Nov. 23).

The London Guardian also reported that the two scientists had been freed, according to a government spokesman (London Guardian, Nov. 23).

The Washington Post, however, reported Friday that Pakistani authorities continued to detain Mehmood and Majid.  “We want to be absolutely sure before giving a clean chit to nuclear scientists who had confessed to having met Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and several al-Qaeda leaders last year,” said a senior Pakistani official.  The Post quoted an intelligence official who said, “We are still not satisfied with their answers,” adding that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had ordered an extensive investigation.

Qureshi said Thursday that he did not think the scientists were in “continuous detention” but did not provide more details on their status, according to the Post. 

U.S. Involvement

Pakistani officials recently briefed a senior U.S. official on the investigation’s status, according to the Post (Glasser/Khan, Washington Post, Nov. 24). 

Meanwhile, Myanmar granted sanctuary to two other Pakistani nuclear scientists, Suleiman Asad and Mohammad Ali Mukhtar, at the Pakistani government’s request, the Press Trust of India reported Friday.  Pakistan said the two scientists had been involved in Pakistan’s nuclear program but had no connections to terrorist activities.  Pakistan said U.S. authorities were looking for Asad and Mukhtar, according to the Press Trust. 

Adding to various previous reports that U.S. officials were involved the investigation of Pakistani scientists (see GSN, Nov. 1), the Press Trust reported that CIA and FBI officials interrogated Mehmood and Majid Tuesday at the American Embassy in Islamabad (Press Trust of India, Nov. 23).

The Lahore High Court in Pakistan called on relatives of seven scientists allegedly detained to appear before the court to determine if the scientists remained in detention, according to Pakistan Newswire Friday.  The court has been dealing with a petition that alleged the United States had demanded the arrest of the scientists and called on Pakistan to turn the scientists over to U.S. authorities.  The petition asked the Pakistani government to refuse such U.S. requests and called for proper treatment of the scientists in accordance with their contributions to Pakistan (Pakistan Newswire, Nov. 23).

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India:  U.S. Nuclear Technology in India?

India and the United States have agreed to discuss ways to streamline procedures for transferring dual-use technology and increase high technology commerce, said Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee last Tuesday, according to the Hindu.

“We agreed to resume and broaden the Bilateral Economic Dialogue and extend our cooperation to energy, environment, health, biotechnology and information technology.  We will soon initiate discussions on cooperation in space programs and civilian nuclear projects,” Vajpayee said, adding that the U.S.-India Defense Policy Group would meet next month. 

Vajpayee’s statement came after his recent visit to the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United Nations (Hindu, Nov. 21).

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CTBT:  Latvia Ratifies Treaty

Latvia ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on Nov. 20 (CTBTO release, Nov. 21).  Eighty-nine states have ratified the treaty (see GSN, Nov. 15), including 31 of the 44 specific nations that must ratify the pact before it can enter into force.

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