Free Republic

With the world seemingly unable to stop Iran's nuclear march, other countries in the region are now pushing forward with their own plans to build nuclear power plants. The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan reported on Thursday that the Saudi minister of water and electricity, Abdullah al-Hosain, said the kingdom was working on plans for its first nuclear power plant. The US inked civil nuclear power deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last year.

...So far it doesn't seem as it Obama sees stopping Iran nuclear ambitions as a priority, in fact the State Department has announced it is comfortable appeasing talking to Iran while they are still refining their nuclear fuel. Or as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: "We welcome [the call by the West for dialogue with Iran], but we put forth several proposals to them: We say to you that you yourselves know that you are today in a position of weakness. Your hands are empty, and you can no longer promote your affairs from a position of strength." (MEMRI translation)...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tehran is building new rockets that can carry heavier satellites. Allegedly these are for carrying peaceful satellites into orbit but, of course, they can also carry nuclear devices. He also voted that Iran will make nuclear fuel. Allegedly these are for the peaceful production of nuclear energy though why Iran, a country whose oil and natural gas reserves are almost beyond any others, needs a more costly and risky source of power is also questionable. Of course, this can and will be use for making nuclear weapons. European states, with U.S. encouragement, have for years...

Former U.S. Air Force Secretary Thomas Reed knows nuclear bombs better than most people. For starters, he designed two of them when he worked at the Livermore National Laboratory as a weapons designer. His new book The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, co-written with Danny Stillman, the former director of the technical intelligence division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, rewrites much of the public understanding about how countries with nuclear weapons came to acquire them. All countries that built bombs, including the United States, spied on or were given access to the work of...

WASHINGTON — American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling... --snip-- It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons...

Last update - 07:40 24/09/2005 Arab states seek to condemn Israel in UN over nuclear bombs By Reuters Arab member states of the International Atomic Energy Agency are pushing for it to condemn Israel as a threat to peace in the Middle East for having nuclear weapons. Israel neither denies nor admits having a nuclear arsenal, though experts estimate it has between 100 and 200 atomic bombs. In a letter submitted to the IAEA on behalf of its Arab member states, Oman asked that the agency's annual General Conference of the IAEA's 138 member states in Vienna next week consider...

  If President Bush wants the 51st state to be New Texas on the Moon, he should consider reviving Orion. (credit: Phil Smith courtesy of Sam Dinkin) Revisiting Project Orion by Sam DinkinMonday, January 24, 2005 If you look on Amazon.com for Jeff Bezos’s personal book reviews, the only rocket book you will see is Project Orion. His summary from April 14, 2002 is as follows: For those of us who dream of visiting the outer planets, seeing Saturn’s rings up close without intermediation of telescopes or charge-coupled devices, well, we pretty much *have* to read “Project Orion.” In...

For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal. The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have...

For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal. The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version February 15, 2005, 1:19 p.m. Pyongyang KnockingThe exasperating nuclear bomb issue. The North Korean nuclear bomb issue is as exasperating as any post-Soviet dilemma the U.S. has ever faced. We don't know whether Dear Leader Kim Jong Il actually has the several bombs alleged, but there is no alternative to assuming that he does have them, and we know that he has missiles nimble enough to fly right over Japan. Great-circle-wise, Alaska is cheek by jowl with that part of the world. There is, then,...

It is, as foreign policy expert Yogi Berra would put it, a case of "déjà vu all over again." But this time, the weapons of mass destruction menace is Iran. And the question for the Bush administration, struggling with a difficult and still-unfinished war of preemption against Iraq, is how to get it right the second time around. The best advice I've heard for dealing with Iran comes from former CIA analyst David Kay. He's the man who finally uncovered the truth about Iraq's weapons program -- namely that, contrary to the expectations of nearly every intelligence service, it had...

Seoul, South Korea, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Newly declassified documents revealed the United States planned as recently as 1998 to drop nuclear bombs on North Korea if the country attacked South Korea. As part of "scenario 5027," 24 F15-E bombers flew simulation missions at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina to drop mock nuclear bombs on a firing range between January and June 1998, the Korea Times reported Sunday.

<p>Abdul Qadeer Khan We've not yet seen all the fallout from Pakistan's nuclear proliferation.</p> <p>PARIS--We observed the Abdul Qadeer Khan affair, the incredible story of this Pakistani nuclear scientist who delivered over 15 years--freely and with impunity--his most sensitive secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Then we learned that President Musharraf in person, after an interview from which little or nothing has been divulged, ended up granting Khan his "pardon." Case closed? End of story? That's what the American administration, falling oddly in step with the official Pakistani doctrine, would have us believe. But knowing something of the case--and being the first French observer, to my knowledge, to have tried to alert public opinion to the extreme gravity of the situation--I believe that we are only at the very beginning this story.</p>

Colonel Muammar Gadafy of Libya has been buying complete sets of uranium enrichment centrifuges on the international black market as the central element in his secret nuclear bomb programme, according to United Nations nuclear inspectors. The ease with which the complex bomb-making equipment was acquired has stunned experienced international inspectors. The scale and the sophistication of the networks supplying so-called rogue states seeking nuclear weapons are considerably more extensive than previously believed. The purchase of full centrifuges, either assembled or in parts, marks a radical departure in what is on offer on the black market, sources said. While it is...

U.N. nuke czar to U.S.: Disarm ElBaradei says Washington has double standard on arms policy The head of the United Nations' nuclear-watchdog agency is calling on the U.S. to set an example to the rest of the world by cutting its arsenal of nukes, suggesting Washington is employing a double standard by demanding other nations be prevented from possessing atomic weapons. Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, also told Germany's Stern weekly today President George W. Bush is unjustified in pushing a space-based missile-defense plan, Reuters reported. "The U.S. government demands that other nations not possess nuclear...

Peter Eisler USA TODAYWASHINGTON -- U.S. efforts to help Russia and other nations secure and destroy poorly protected nuclear material and warheads are moving too slowly to address the threat that those stockpiles could be tapped by terrorists or hostile states, a new study says. In Russia, about 37% of ''potentially vulnerable'' nuclear material has gotten U.S.-funded security upgrades, such as new alarm systems, fences and surveillance equipment, the study says. It also notes that many civilian reactors using weapons-usable fuel in former Soviet states and developing countries are ''dangerously insecure.'' The study, done by Harvard University researchers, contends that...

The nuclear bombs issue, as well as the all the other chemical and biological weapons are very confusing dilemma to our world. Nations, and thinkers around the globe are confused with the hypocritical standards. As we currently observing the crisis in Korea, and Iraq. N. Korea attempts to develop nuclear bombs, and its population is starving! It appears that for the sake of the North Korean people that its leaders should devote more resources to economic development, and reduce expenditures on military matters. However, tyrant leaders around the world do not have to be rational, or even care about being...

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX TUE SEPT 17 2002 11:13:02 ET XXXXX ALERT AS NUCLEAR BOMBS GO MISSING[EXPRESS] TWO hundred nuclear warheads have gone missing in a country suspected of selling high tech arms to Iraq, it emerged last night. The terrifying revelation will heighten fears that Saddam Hussein could be just one step away from having all the ingredients of an atomic bomb. He has threatened terrorist attacks if Britain and America confront him. The warheads, which have vanished in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, contain enough highly-radioactive plutonium to destroy every capital in Europe and North America several...

<p>LONDON, England -- Britain's Ministry of Defence has confirmed it has made public information describing in detail the make-up of a nuclear bomb.</p> <p>The plans give complete cross-sections, precise measurements and full details of materials used for all the components, including the plutonium core and the initiator that sets off the chain reaction causing the blast.</p>