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Monday, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reacted to the Axios report that President Donald Trump has suggested multiple times using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States. Scarborough warned Trump has had an “itchy finger” since his candidacy when it comes to nukes, while Brzezinski said Trump just wants a way to use nuclear weapons. “Mika, remember when we had warned everybody in I think it was July or August of the election year, 2016, that foreign policy people had gone in to talk to then-candidate Trump, and his solution to Iran was...

Planned evacuation follows contradictory statements by Russian authorities that have sparked more questions than answers over the deadly accident Russia’s atomic energy monopoly, and of the Defense Ministry, have raised suspicions over the severity of the accident and whether officials are covering up details. ...spokeswoman said the evacuation was due to an unspecified “event” The missile has been tested without its atomic components successfully, said a person close to the Defense Ministry. But the results of testing with the radio-isotope generator have been mixed, the person said.

fghans were startled to hear President Trump’s remarks that he could end the war in Afghanistan “in a week” but that it would cause the deaths of millions of people. The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Tuesday immediately asked for “clarification” about Trump’s statement “via diplomatic means and channels.” “If I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth,” Trump said Monday. “It would be over in literally, in 10 days.” He did not elaborate on how that would be done. Trump made the comments during a White House meeting with...

IANS -- The slow-moving US plans to set up six nuclear power plants in India have received a boost as the two nations reiterated their commitment to strengthening security and civil nuclear cooperation during the 9th India-US Strategic Security Dialogue. A joint statement issued on Wednesday after the dialogue, where the Indian side was headed by Foreign Secretary Vijay K. Gokhale, said that Washington "reaffirmed its strong support of India's early membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group". "They committed to strengthening bilateral security and civil nuclear cooperation, including the establishment of six US nuclear power plants in India," it added....

Delenda Carthago Est, Cato the Elder used to urge the Roman Senate. "Carthage must be destroyed." In 146BC, the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus razed Carthage to the ground and sold its entire population into slavery. Carthaginians were never again to trouble Rome again. The hour has come for India to echo Cato the Elder's clarity. Pakistan must be destroyed. India's post-partition relations with Pakistan should have been as benign as they are with Iran, Afghanistan, and later Bangladesh, but they are not. Pakistan has waged war on India and driven devastating murderous religious wars in India continuously ever since it...

The National Nuclear Security Administration has canceled its previous plan to refurbish a warhead for use on the Air Force’s future land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as on the Navy’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles, according to a December 2018 NNSA report to Congress that Air Force Magazine viewed Jan. 29. “[NNSA] is no longer planning for an interoperable warhead program as previously conceived,” the report states. “NNSA has no plans to pursue a W78 life-extension program using the existing aeroshell.” Instead, NNSA will pursue a safer but slightly more expensive warhead for the future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, the W87-1, which...

Works of fiction that purport to be collections of documents—let’s call them “assemblage novels”—are hard to pull off. The Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet succeeded in 2015—and ended up on the Booker Prize shortlist—with His Bloody Project, a novel that was supposedly a collection of documents relating to a 19th-century murder. Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide, a clever fake manual for enduring the zombie apocalypse, is another recent entry in the genre. Now comes Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a prolific tweeter (he’s @armscontrolwonk), and his 2020 Commission Report on the...

Chongsu Nuclear-Grade Graphite Production Plant? North Korea may be proliferating controlled nuclear goods by David Albright April 20, 2018 During the last few years, North Korea has raised nuclear proliferation concerns by distributing abroad a commercial, English-language color handout that offered to sell nuclear-grade graphite, an internationally controlled nuclear dual-use material. This handout was distributed on a limited basis prior to January 2018 and could not be found on the internet, but Institute staff learned of the handout from someone who had access to one of them. Nuclear-grade, high-purity graphite, is controlled because it can be used in nuclear reactors....

Summary: Suspect Kangsong Enrichment Plant • We have learned of a suspect gas centrifuge site, in addition to the one at the Yongbyon Nuclear Center, that has the name of Kangsong. It may have other names as well. • We have not located this site, although we received a description of the building from more than two independent governmental sources. Its operation allegedly started several years ago. • If it is a centrifuge plant, we are unaware of any information on how well it has operated. • The original information about this site came from a defector several years ago...

North Korea designates Chagang Province as special zone, possibly to conceal nuclear weapons Lee Sang Yong | 2018-05-23 11:01 The North Korean government has named Chagang Province a “Special Songun (military-first) Revolutionary Zone” and has reportedly created plans to designate the province a strategic region for the military. The region is mountainous, and harbors ideal terrain in which to conceal the country’s nuclear weapons. North Korea has widely publicized its intent to shut down the country’s nuclear program as demanded by the international community. This intent has been exemplified by an event scheduled for May 23 to close its nuclear...

North Korea takes aim at John Bolton as it threatens to scrap Trump summit over nuclear demands By Ben Riley-Smith, US Editor and Nicola Smith, Asia correspondent 16 May 2018 • 5:57am Donald Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong-un has been thrown into uncertainty as North Korea warned it could be cancelled over US military exercises and if Washington presses ahead with its demand for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arsenal. Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea's deputy foreign minister, warned on Wednesday that Pyongyang was not interested in talks that would pressure the rogue state to "unilaterally" give up its...

How Talks with North Korea Convinced Trump to Scrap the Iran Deal By BRIAN BENNETT 5:22 PM EDT Moments after he declared the U.S. was pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, President Trump seemed to abruptly switch topics to announce that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on his way to North Korea to prepare for Trump’s meeting with the nuclear-armed despot Kim Jong Un. What seemed to be a jarring aside was actually part of Trump’s decision to reimpose U.S. sanctions against Iran. Over the past two months, Trump has come to see his policy toward North Korea...

Interview: ‘Kim Jong Un is Thinking About How to Keep His Nuclear Assets’ 2018-05-04 Thae Yong-ho, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, defected with his family to South Korea in 2016. Following last week’s historic summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Thae told RFA’s Korean Service that he believes the North will never agree to end its weapons program through a “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” (CVID) process. Instead, he said, Pyongyang will likely seek a way to maintain its current nuclear status, while “denuclearizing the Korean peninsula,” as...

(News Focus) N. Korea's WMD test moratorium deja vu raises cautious summit expectations 2018/04/21 11:54 By Lee Chi-dong SEOUL, April 21 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's announcement of a moratorium on most of its nuclear and missile activities is the highlight of the unpredictable communist nation's recent peace overture and a potential prelude to a breakthrough deal in the upcoming round of summit diplomacy. The Kim Jong-un regime said Saturday it will immediately suspend nuclear and missile tests and shut down the nuclear test site in Punggye-ri, where it conducted six experiments. It was summarizing the results of a key Workers'...

Abe pushes Trump's focus to N. Korea missiles, U.S. military presence By Ko Hirano, KYODO NEWS - Apr 20, 2018 - 15:25 | All, World Despite U.S. President Donald Trump's reassurance that Japan and the United States are "very unified" on North Korea, concerns persist that Pyongyang may refuse to rid itself of medium-range missiles and that Washington might agree to wind back its military presence on the Korean Peninsula at the behest of the North's leader Kim Jong Un. During two-day talks through Wednesday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump pledged to continue levying...

Ex-N.Korean Diplomat Says Pyongyang Will Drag Talks out By Kim Myong-song April 17, 2018 10:03 The former No. 2 man in the North Korean Embassy in London and now a vocal critic of the regime, has predicted Pyongyang will drag out talks about its nuclear program as long as possible while extracting concessions. Thae Yong-ho was quoted on Monday as saying that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un "will drag on for two to three years" without dismantling his nuclear weapons "while waiting for the U.S. president to be replaced." He was giving a lecture at the Mulmangcho Foundation, an organization...

Iranian leaders are threatening to restart the country's contested nuclear enrichment program in just a matter of days as the Trump administration and European allies scramble to address a range of flaws in the landmark nuclear accord ahead of a May deadline that could see the United States walk away from the accord, according to regional reports and administration insiders. The head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization disclosed on Sunday that the Islamic Republic has maintained the ability to restart the full-scale enrichment of uranium—the key component in a nuclear weapon that was supposed to be removed from Iran as...

Some might say it’s paranoid to think about an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping us out. But the history of life on Earth shows at least 5 major extinctions. And at least one of them, about 65 million years ago, was caused by an asteroid. Preparing for an asteroid strike, or rather preparing to prevent one, is rational thinking at its finest. Especially now that we can see all the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) out there. The chances of any single asteroid striking Earth may be small, but collectively, with over 15,000 NEAs catalogued by NASA, it may be only...

North Korean nukes 'existential threat' to US: intel chief 13 February 2018 North Korea's nuclear program poses a potential "existential threat" to the United States, US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said Tuesday. "The decision time is becoming ever closer in terms of how we respond to this," Coats said in remarks to the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Our goal is a peaceful settlement," he added. "We're using maximum pressure on North Korea in various ways." Asked about Pyongyang's nuclear program, Coats said "this is an existential threat, potentially to the United States, but also to North Korea." North Korean...