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US Navy helps finance Israeli "rotorless" helicopter The aircraft's developer, Urban Aeronautics, is on the brink of signing a collaboration agreement with US company Bell Helicopter. Amnon Barzilai 20 Jul 06 20:37 Lod-based Urban Aeronautics Ltd. is about to sign a cooperation agreement with Bell Helicopter for the delivery of helicopters to all branches of the US armed forces. At this stage, the company has obtained financing to develop its vertical-take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, a "rotorless" helicopter, for the US Navy. This week, the company unveiled a model of its helicopter at the Farnborough Air Show in the UK...

<p>A key Iraqi scientist recently told the CIA that high-strength aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad weren't meant for nuclear bomb production, as President Bush suggested in his State of the Union address, two experts on Iraq's nuclear program say.</p> <p>Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed a uranium-enrichment unit vital to Iraq's pre-1991 bomb plans, "also said that since '91 they hadn't resurrected a nuclear weapon program," according to ex-Iraq inspector David Albright, an American physicist who acted as go-between for Obeidi to talk to U.S. authorities a few weeks ago.</p>

When experts from the US and the IAEA came upon blueprints for a 10-kiloton atomic bomb in the files of the Libyan weapons program earlier this year, they found themselves caught between gravity and pettiness. The discovery gave the experts a new appreciation of the audacity of the rogue nuclear network led by A. Q. Khan, a chief architect of Pakistan's bomb. Intelligence officials had watched Dr. Khan for years and suspected that he was trafficking in machinery for enriching uranium to make fuel for warheads. But the detailed design represented a new level of danger, particularly since the Libyans...