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UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres raised concerns Thursday that a concrete dome built last century to contain waste from atomic bomb tests is leaking radioactive material into the Pacific. Speaking to students in Fiji, Guterres described the structure on Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands as "a kind of coffin" and said it was a legacy of Cold War-era nuclear tests in the Pacific... ...The "coffin" is a concrete dome, built in the late 1970s on Runit island, part of Enewetak atoll, as a dumping ground for waste from the nuclear tests. Radioactive soil and ash from the explosions was...

North Koreans who defected but once lived near a nuclear testing site in the rogue nation now believe they are experiencing the dangerous effects of exposure to harmful radiation — and it's triggered severe health problems, according to a report published Sunday. "So many people died we began calling it 'ghost disease,'" Lee Jeong Hwa, who in 2010 escaped her home in Kilju County where the nuclear testing site Punggye-ri is located, told NBC News. "We thought we were dying because we were poor and we ate badly. Now we know it was the radiation." Lee isn’t the only defector...

It was on this date in 1945 that, for good or ill, the "nuclear age" began, with the explosion of the first experimental atomic bomb, code-named Trinity, in the western desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Trinity, with a yield equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT, was the first spherical implosion bomb, developed at Los Alamos under the auspices of the Manhattan Project during World War II. The weapon designers were so confident of the success of the simpler gun-barrel configuration that the device of that type dropped on Hiroshima only three weeks later had never been tested. The subsequent Nagasaki...

from the whoa dept Okay, here's one that's just crazy. A few weeks ago, lots of folks, including us, covered the story of how the Justice Department claimed to a court that reporter James Rosen was "an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator" in a leak of some State Department info concerning North Korea. He was none of the above. He was a reporter, but the DOJ was abusing its power in order to spy on his email and phone records, to try to find the source of the leak. Soon after that, it came out that the DOJ had been...

A State Department contractor charged with leaking top-secret information about North Korea to Fox News entered a guilty plea Friday and agreed to serve a 13-month prison term.During an 80-minute hearing at U.S. District Court, Stephen Kim pled guilty to a single felony count of disclosing national defense information to an unauthorized person, Fox News reporter James Rosen.Kim admitted providing Rosen with the contents of a top-secret intelligence report on North Korean intentions to carry out nuclear tests. The contractor acknowledged that he and Rosen stepped out of their offices at State Department headquarters for a short meeting nearby on...

Given North Korea’s track record, the Security Council reserved the right to take further significant measures in the event of continued North Korean nuclear tests or launches The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution on March 2nd that imposes tough new sanctions and tightens some of its existing measures against North Korea. Resolution 2270 (2016) was the Security Council’s latest and strongest response to the rogue North Korean regime’s ongoing nuclear and ballistic missile-related test activities in violation of a series of prior Security Council resolutions. Led by the United States, which collaborated extensively with China to reach...

Experts say one of Mount Paekdu's previous eruptions was 'one of the largest explosive events in human history' Seismologists have warned that North Korea's repeated nuclear tests could cause its highest mountain Mount Paekdu to erupt - and they add that one of the volcano's previous eruptions was "one of the largest explosive events in human history". More than 9,000 feet high, the volcano straddles the border between North Korea and China and last erupted in 1903. Experts have warned of increasing seismic activity beneath the peak in recent years, however, including seismic uplift and rising levels of sulphur dioxide,...

Environmental samples have been taken at a sensitive military site in Iran, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog said on Monday, citing "significant progress" in its investigation of Tehran's past activities. Such sampling is usually done by experts of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. But IAEA chief Yukiya Amano says that Iranians carried out that part of the probe at Parchin. The transfer appeared to be part of a confidential draft agreement with the agency that allows Iran to gather its own samples. Inspecting the Parchin military site is a crucial part of the International Atomic Energy Agency's...

Israel conducted a massive controlled explosion to calibrate instruments at seismic monitoring stations worldwide, officials said. Using 100 tons of explosives, The Geophysical Institute of Israel conducted the explosion at a site in the Negev on Wednesday. It registered 2.7 on the Richter scale, and created a mushroom cloud that reached the height of up to 1.78 miles, or three kilometers, Haaretz reported Thursday. Local scientists and scientists from the U.S. and France as well as journalists observed the blast. Dr. Rami Hofstetter, head of seismology at the Geophysical Institute told the newspaper the experiment was important to study how...

Five former student activists arrested on charges of spying for North Korea delivered at least 46 encrypted reports to the North containing highly confidential information about the ruling-party leadership, military and civic organizations, investigators said Sunday. Reports by the alleged spymaster of the group known as Ilsimhoe, Chang Min-ho (44), deal with presidential hopefuls of the opposition Grand National Party and the operation plans of North Korean spies here. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) suspects that North Korea is trying to influence the presidential election next year and is investigating what concrete instructions Pyongyang gave its spies here and its...

Swedish equipment to test North Korea nuclear claim South Korean officials said on Tuesday they believe North Korea's claim of a nuclear test is genuine, but they plan to borrow hi-tech equipment from Sweden to test the atmosphere for radioactive particles. "The government believes North Korea actually conducted a nuclear test," Unification Minister Lee Jong-Seok told a special parliamentary hearing. Lee, who is in charge of North Korean affairs, said the government would not yet recognize Pyongyang as a nuclear power until it was known whether the test was successful. North Korea said Monday it had successfully tested a nuclear...

Bildt: North Korea nuclear test 'extremely serious' Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has described North Korean claims that it has carried out an underground nuclear weapons test as "an extremely serious development." The test would have consequences both for stability in East Asia and for international efforts to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Bildt said in a statement on Monday morning. "While it has been assumed for a long time that North Korea has a few nuclear charges, a test of this kind is a conscious and serious provocation directed at the entire international community," he said, adding that...

BEIJING, May 10 - China on Tuesday ruled out applying economic or political sanctions to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, appearing to undercut a crucial element of the Bush administration's evolving North Korea strategy. The announcement comes just as American intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether North Korea is preparing for a nuclear test. Echoing President Bush's public comments, the Chinese said in a briefing on Tuesday that they still hoped that talks with North Korea would succeed in disarming the country, even though it has boycotted those talks for 11 months. Liu Jianchao, China's...

A High-Risk Nuclear Stakeout The U.S. took too long to act, some experts say, letting a Pakistani scientist sell illicit technology well after it knew of his operation. By Douglas Frantz, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — Nuclear warhead plans that Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan sold to Libya were more complete and detailed than previously disclosed, raising new concerns about the cost of Washington's watch-and-wait policy before Khan and his global black market were shut down last year. Two Western nuclear weapons specialists who have examined the top-secret designs say the hundreds of pages of engineering drawings and handwritten notes...

Dozens of Idaho residents who claim nuclear tests conducted during the 1950s made them sick asked a panel of scientists on Saturday to recommend that the U.S. government compensate them. The group, who call themselves "the downwinders" in reference to the toxic clouds that the wind carried their way from test sites in Nevada, described how radioactive waste coated their farms and towns 50 years ago. They said they believe it caused many of them to get cancer. "My father remembers fallout on the grass like dew. We were exposed to radiation for the national security interests of the United...