Free Republic

WASHINGTON, May 23 - The discovery that North Korea may have supplied uranium to Libya poses an immediate challenge to the White House: while President Bush is preoccupied on the other side of the world, an economically desperate nation may be engaging in exactly the kind of nuclear proliferation that the president says he went to war in Iraq to halt. Yet to listen to many in the White House, concern about North Korea's nuclear program brings little of the urgency that surrounded the decision 14 months ago to oust Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush has been asked about North...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 — North Korea will be offered economic aid in return for a pledge to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities, according to senior Asian and American officials. But they said the offer was expected to be presented by South Korea, not the United States, in talks beginning on Wednesday in Beijing. The informal agreement between Washington and its Asian partners on how to approach North Korea represents a partial retreat by the Bush administration, which has long insisted that it would not reward the North for simply freezing its nuclear weapons program. Administration officials argue...

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Feb. 20 -- The Sri Lankan businessman who was an associate of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has told Malaysian police how Khan shipped components to Libya and Iran for their nuclear weapons programs and received two briefcases with a $3 million payment from Iran, a Malaysian police report disclosed Friday. In an insider's account of Khan's operation, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir said that Khan asked him to send two shipping containers of used centrifuges -- sophisticated equipment for enriching uranium -- to Iran from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, aboard a merchant vessel owned by an...

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran hid designs for centrifuges capable of producing material for nuclear bombs from the U.N. atomic watchdog, diplomats said on Thursday. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said it was clear what Tehran was up to. "There's no doubt in our mind that Iran continues to pursue a nuclear weapons program," said Bolton, described by diplomats in Vienna as one of Washington's hardest hard-liners. But Russia defied U.S. pressure to sever nuclear ties with the Islamic Republic as Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev said Moscow would sign a deal with Iran next month to ship nuclear...

The father of Pakistan's atomic weapons programme last night admitted on national television that he had illegally traded nuclear secrets to other countries. Contradicting reports from recent days, Abdul Qadeer Khan also claimed that he had done so without the knowledge of the government. Speculation is now mounting that Dr Khan may not be prosecuted. A former army chief, Mirza Aslam Beg, an ally of Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, yesterday told the Guardian he believed Dr Khan would have to be kept out of court "because he knows too much". Mr Beg added: "If [Dr] Khan had appeared in a...

Iran, Libya Aided Via Black Market, Investigation Finds KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan. 27 -- Pakistani investigators have concluded that two senior nuclear scientists used a network of middlemen operating a black market to supply nuclear weapons technology to Iran and Libya, according to three senior Pakistani intelligence officials. Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, and Mohammed Farooq provided the help -- including blueprints for equipment used to enrich uranium -- both directly and through a black market based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, the officials said. The middlemen, from South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, Sri...

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 23 — The head of the United Nations' watchdog agency on atomic weapons said today that the global black market of nuclear-related material and equipment had grown to the point that it amounted to "a Wal-Mart" for weapons-seeking countries. Mohamed M. ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he was taken aback during a recent trip to Libya by the scale and complexity of the illicit trafficking through which it obtained material and blueprints for nuclear weapons designs. "All of that was obtained abroad," he said in an interview during the World Economic Forum...

<p>Pakistan is the weak link in the war on terror.</p> <p>In the war on terror, the world's weakest link is undoubtedly Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. The general's close-call survival of two assassination attempts in two weeks suggests the Bush Administration needs a strategy that looks beyond his strongman rule.</p>

VIENNA - "Obviously, the smaller the country is, the more concerned it will be," says Daniela Rozgonova, who is responsible for external and media relations at the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). Her office is in the Vienna International Center, a high-rise compound that looks out over the Danube and is home to the head offices of several UN-affiliated organizations. Although her words may be interpreted as an implied criticism of Israel, they are primarily directed at a description of the facts: the treaty, which bans nuclear testing at sea, in the atmosphere, on...

BBC Anti-Semitic? Israeli Government Lashes Out at Controversial Report June 30, 2003 By Toby Westerman Copyright 2003 International News Analysis Today www.inatoday.com A British Broadcasting Corporation report is drawing the wrath of the Israeli government, which hurled charges of anti-Semitism and threats of retribution against the British broadcaster, according to a report from the online version of the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel.

Los Alamos National Laboratory on Friday formally dedicated a new supercomputer called "Q," billed as the next step in the U.S. Department of Energy's efforts to maintain the nation's nuclear-weapons stockpile. The $215 million computer, complete with its own $93-million building, is only partially installed, but lab officials say the machine should have a peak capacity of more than 30 trillion operations per second once it is fully operational later this year. Compaq - recently acquired by Hewlett-Packard - is building the machine. Officials said Q would be the second-fastest supercomputer in the world because Japan recently unveiled a...