Free Republic

Sixty-one years ago on an island in the South Pacific, scientists and military officers, fishermen and Marshall Islands natives observed first-hand what Armageddon would be like. And it almost killed them all. The Atomic Energy Commission code-named the nuclear test Castle Bravo. The March 1, 1954 experiment was the first thermonuclear explosion based on practical technology that would lead to a deliverable H-bomb for the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command—part of the Operation Castle series of tests needed to manufacture the high-yield weapons. Bravo was the worst radiological disaster in American atomic testing history—but the test provided information that led...

Iran has begun enriching uranium deep inside a mountain and sentenced an American to death for spying, angering the West and undermining hopes that diplomacy could avert further sanctions or war. The start of enrichment at the Fordow bunker near the Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Qom was confirmed on Monday by an Iranian official in Tehran and by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran says its nuclear program is purely non-military but the West believes it is designed to produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic's decision to carry out enrichment work deep underground could eventually make it much...

MUMBAI: Nuclear weapons are "weapons of peace" which act as a deterrent, says the former chairman of Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar. When India tested its nuclear bombs in 1974 and 1998, sanctions were imposed by many countries but for "us it became a real opportunity and our research and development today has reached a robust level" in some of the technologies, Kakodkar said at a function on Thursday. "The philosophical aspect of nuclear weapons can be peaceful and they act as a deterrent. So, I call them weapons of peace," he said replying to questions posed by eminent science...

His words are not reassuring in light of the Taliban's military and political gains throughout Pakistan. Our security, and that of friends and allies world-wide, depends critically on preventing more adversaries, especially ones with otherworldly ideologies, from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unless there is swift, decisive action against the Islamic radicals there, Pakistan faces two very worrisome scenarios.

IRAN has once again defied the United Nations by proceeding with enrichment activities, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported yesterday. And yet, simultaneously, Iranian officials have been sending a very different message — one that has gone largely unremarked but merits close attention. After a meeting with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader’s chief foreign policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, declared last week that suspending uranium enrichment is not a red line for the regime — in other words, the mullahs might be ready to agree to some kind of a suspension. Another powerful insider, Ali Akbar Hashemi...

THE North Korean nuclear test — if that indeed is what it was — signals the catastrophic collapse of a dozen years of American policy. Over that period, two of the world’s most dangerous regimes, Pakistan and North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them. Iran, arguably the most dangerous of them all, will surely follow, unless some dramatic action is soon taken. It is, alas, an iron law of modern diplomacy that the failure of any diplomatic process only proves the need for more of the process that has just failed. Thus those who have...

VIENNA, Aug. 31 — The global nuclear monitoring agency deepened suspicions on Thursday about Iran’s nuclear program, reporting that inspectors had discovered new traces of highly enriched uranium at an Iranian facility. Inspectors have found such uranium, which at extreme enrichment levels can fuel bombs, twice in the past. The International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that at least some of those samples came from contaminated equipment that Iran had obtained from Pakistan. But in this case, the nuclear fingerprint of the particles did not match the other samples, an official familiar with the inspections said, raising questions about their origin....

Of all the claims that Iran made last week about its nuclear program, a one-sentence assertion by its president has provoked such surprise and concern among international nuclear inspectors they are planning to confront Tehran about it this week. The assertion involves Iran's claim that even while it begins to enrich small amounts of uranium, it is pursuing a far more sophisticated way of making atomic fuel that American officials and inspectors say could speed Iran's path to developing a nuclear weapon. Iran has consistently maintained that it abandoned work on this advanced technology, called the P-2 centrifuge, three years...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — In March 2004, the science and technology directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency called a secret meeting of hundreds of the government's top experts in nuclear intelligence to address a problem that had bedeviled Washington for decades: how to know, with precision, when a country is about to cross the line and gain the ability to build an atomic bomb. The aim of the two-day conference was to reinvigorate the nation's atomic espionage efforts, not with spies on the ground or satellites in space but with a new generation of advanced technologies meant to detect the...

Fifty-one years ago today, in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, an influentual New York-based think tank, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles outlined what became known as the policy of massive retaliation. He explained to his listeners that the US would no longer allow itself to be drawn into conventional regional conflicts such as the Korean War--or, for that matter, Vietnam--but would reserve the right to respond to Communist aggression with "massive rataliatory poser" applied at places and with means of its own choosing--or, in other words, nuclear weapons might be used directly against the Soviet...

India's vote in favour of the IAEA resolution on Iran nuclear programme was an "encouraging and significant" step which indicated the evolving nature of US-India relationship, a leading US daily on Sunday said, while warning some American officials and lawmakers against creating the appearance of having pressurised New Delhi for its stance. Asking legislators like Congressman Tom Lantos not to "brag" about 'pushing' India and advising American officials to avoid the crude appearance of a quid pro quo of Indian vote for access to US civilian nuclear technology, The Washington Times said India had surprised even the most vigilant observers...

BEIJING, Friday, July 15 - China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the American military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday. "If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," the official, Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, said at an official briefing. General Zhu, considered a hawk, stressed that his comments reflected his personal views and not official policy. Beijing has long insisted that it will not initiate the use of nuclear weapons...

In its 12 Nov 2001 issue, Time ran this brief article on page 31. Hugh Sidey—the magazine's Washington Contributing Editor—has been covering the presidency for Life and Time since 1957. In this snippet, he reveals that JFK told him in 1961 that the Soviet Union has a nuclear bomb in its embassy in Washington, DC. In my book, this counts as a major revelation, yet there are several factors that indicate that this piece was created in a way that minimizes its impact. And that's exactly what happened: minimal impact. A sitting president told a White House reporter that...

In his book "The Ideas That Conquered the World," Michael Mandelbaum tells a story about a young girl who is eating dinner at a friend's house and her friend's mother asks her if she likes brussels sprouts. "Yes, of course," the girl says. "I like brussels sprouts." After dinner, though, the mother notices that the girl hasn't eaten a single sprout. "I thought you liked brussels sprouts," the mother said. "I do," answered the girl, "but not enough to actually eat them." Mr. Mandelbaum, who teaches foreign policy at Johns Hopkins, related that story to me during a conversation about...

Worried that the nation's aging nuclear arsenal is increasingly fragile, American scientists have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives, federal officials and private experts say. The officials say the program could help shrink the arsenal and the high cost of its maintenance. But critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and could possibly ignite a new arms race. So far, the quiet effort involves only $9 million for warhead designers at the nation's three nuclear weapon laboratories,...

DAVOS, Switzerland - The world needs an effort similar to that behind the creation of the atomic bomb to tackle the multi-faceted threat of biowarfare, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday. "We need to do something that even dwarfs the Manhattan project," Frist told the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Manhattan project was the codename for the United States's World War II effort to devise an atomic weapon. "The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat it has the power of panic and paralysis to be global."...

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been given to Kerry from the pro-Iranian lobby, possibly influencing the presidential candidate's startling call to provide Tehran with the nuclear fuel it seeks, according to Iran's Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy chairman Aryo Pirouznia. With top Iranian officials openly calling for the development of nuclear weapons within the next four months and overwhelming intelligence indicating Iran is seeking to create a nuclear arsenal, Kerry has been insisting as president he would provide Tehran with nuclear fuel as long as it is used for peaceful purposes only, a position that has many Middle...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR While the final report from Charles A. Duelfer, the top American inspector of Iraq's covert weapons programs, won't be released for a few weeks, the portions that have already been made public touch on many of the experiences I had while working as the head of Saddam Hussein's nuclear centrifuge program. Now that I am living in the United States, I hope to answer some of the most important questions that remain. What was really going in Iraq before the American invasion last year? Iraq's nuclear weapons program was on the threshold of success before the 1991 invasion...

EMMETT, Idaho, Aug. 31 - In the 1950's and early 1960's, at the height of the cold war, people in this southeastern Idaho town thought what they occasionally saw dusting their fruit orchards and cow pastures was frost - only it was not cold to the touch, several longtime residents said. Others described it as a gray-white powder that seemed to come out of nowhere. The residents of this town of dairy and cattle farmers did not know it then, but half a century ago, northern winds blew radioactive fallout into southeastern Idaho when the federal government set off about...

If a 10-kiloton terrorist nuclear weapon explodes beside the New York Stock Exchange or the U.S. Capitol, or in Times Square, as many nuclear experts believe is likely in the next decade, then the next 9/11 commission will write a devastating critique of how we allowed that to happen. As I wrote in my last column, there is a general conviction among many experts - though, in fairness, not all - that nuclear terrorism has a better-than-even chance of occurring in the next 10 years. Such an attack could kill 500,000 people. Yet U.S. politicians have utterly failed to face...