Tag: Nuclear
Gird Your Lions – North Korea Claims Second Successful Nuclear Test
Don’t you feel safe knowing that the Community Organizer in Chief is in power? Maybe all North Korea needs is a good Obama apology.
North Korea announced Monday that it successfully carried out a second underground nuclear test, less than two months after launching a rocket widely believed to be a test of its long-range missile technology.
North Korea, incensed by U.N. Security Council condemnation of its April 5 rocket launch, had warned last month that it would restart it rogue nuclear program, conduct a second atomic test as a follow-up to its first one in 2006, and carry out long-range missile tests.
On Monday, the country’s official Korean Central News Agency said the regime “successfully conducted one more underground nuclear test on May 25 as part of measures to bolster its nuclear deterrent for self-defense.”
The regime boasted that the test was conducted “on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology of its control.”
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak convened an emergency security session. His spokesman, Lee Dong-kwan, confirmed that a North Korean nuclear test was possible.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Andy Laine said: “At this point, we’ve seen the reports and we’re trying to get more information, but we’re not able to confirm at this time.”
Seismologists from the U.S., South Korea and Japan reported activity shortly after 9:50 a.m. in a northeastern area where North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006.
The Japan Meteorological Agency measured the seismic activity at magnitude-5.3. Quake expert Gen Aoki noted that its depth was “very shallow.”
“The area is not active seismically so it is highly possible that it could be an artificial quake,” Aoki said in Tokyo.
In Seoul, the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources reported seismic activity in Kilju in North Hamgyong Province—the same area where North Korea carried out a nuclear test in October 2006.
Seismological measurements back North Korea’s claim that the test was far stronger than in 2006.
At the Chinese border city of Yanji, 130 miles (200 kilometers) northwest from the test site, an emergency siren sounded shortly before 9 a.m. when officials thought an earthquake occurred. A receptionist at Yanji’s International Hotel said she and several hotel guests felt the ground tremble.
An official at Yanji’s government seismological bureau, who declined to give his name, said his agency confirmed that some type of explosion occurred, “but it is hard to say what kind of blast it was.”
North Korea’s 2006 test measured magnitude-3.6, an official at the Korea Meteorological Administration in Seoul said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.
Monday’s test raises the stakes in North Korea’s standoff over its nuclear and missile programs.
North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006, drawing widespread international condemnation and drawing stiff sanctions from the U.N. Security Council.
The Security Council demanded that North Korea eliminate its nuclear weapons and ordered countries to prevent Pyongyang from importing or exporting any material for weapons of mass destruction or ballistic missiles.
The surprise nuclear test prompted five nations to pressure the North to agree to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for energy aid and other concessions—a pact Pyongyang signed in February 2007. North Korea began disablement in November 2007.
That process came to a halt in July 2008.
South Korean troops were on a high alert but there was no sign North Korean troops were amassed along the heavily fortified border dividing the two Koreas, according to an official at the Joint Chiefs of Staff who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing agency policy.
North Korea is believed to have at least a half-dozen atomic bombs. However, experts say North Korean scientists have not yet mastered the miniaturization technology for mounting a nuclear device onto a long-range missile.
Obama Gives Iran More Time To Develop Nukes
The Trojan Horse is giving Iran six more months before deciding if the strategy for engaging with Tehran is working. Does this make any kind of logical sense? What happens after six months? You, I and Iran know… NOTHING!
The question surrounding President Barack Obama’s outreach to Iran since the beginning has always been about the timetable: How long would he let this diplomatic initiative proceed before he switches to a more punitive course?
Among critics and even privately among members of Obama’s own administration, it has been taken almost for granted that using engagement to get Tehran to abandon its nuclear program is a strategy with a short future, a necessary but ultimately fruitless step on the way to something far tougher.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying earlier this year that she doubted Iran would jump at the offer of better ties with Washington. When he talks about Iran, Vice President Joe Biden always emphasizes that no option is off the table, a indirect way of saying that a U.S. military strike remains possible,
But whenever Obama himself has a chance to clarify his own views on this question, he finds a way to put more time on the clock.
He did it Monday after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he vowed wait until the end of the year before deciding if the strategy for engaging with Tehran was working.
India Thinks Pakistan’s Nuclear Sites Are Already In The Hands of Radical Islamic Extremists
Tick… Tick… Tick… Tick… Tick… Tick…
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan’s restive frontier province are “already partly” in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington’s confidence in the security of the troubled nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Claims about the high-level exchange between New Delhi and Washington were made in the Debka, a journal said to have close ties with Israeli intelligence, under the headline “Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost.” The brief story said the Indian prime minister had named Pakistani nuclear sites in the areas which were Taliban-Qaida strongholds and said the sites are already partly in the hands of “Muslim extremists.” A sub-head to the story said “India gets ready for a Taliban-ruled nuclear neighbor.”
There was no official word from either Washington or New Delhi about the exchanges, with India in the throes of an election and US winding down for the weekend. But US experts have been greatly perturbed in recent days about what they say is Washington’s misplaced confidence in, and lackadaisical approach towards, Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The disquiet comes amid reports that Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as the rest of the world is scaling it down.
“It is quite disturbing that the administration is allowing Pakistan to quantitatively and qualitatively step up production of fissile material without as much as a public reproach,” Robert Windrem, a visiting scholar with the Center for Law and Security in New York University and an expert on South Asia nuclear issues told ToI in an interview on Thursday. “Iraq and Iran did not get a similar concessions… and Pakistan has a much worse record of proliferation and security breaches than any other country in the world.”
Windrem, a former producer with NBC whose book “Critical Mass” was among the first to red flag Islamabad’s proliferation record going back to the 1980s, referred to recent reports and satellite images showing Pakistan building two large new plutonium production reactors in Khushab, which experts say could lead to improvements in the quantity and quality of the country’s nuclear arsenal. The reactors had nothing to do with power-production’ they are weapons-specific, and are being built with resources who diversion is enabled by the billions of dollars the US is giving to Pakistan as aid, he said.
Windrem also pointed out that Khushab’s former director, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and offered a nuclear weapons tutorial around an Afghanistan campfire, as attested by the former CIA Director George Tenet in his memoir “At the Center of the Storm.” Yet successive US administrations had adopted an attitude of benign neglect towards Pakistan’s nuclear program and its expansion at a time the country was in growing ferment and under siege within from Islamic extremists.
US officials, going up to the President himself, have repeatedly said in public that they have confidence the Pakistani nuclear arsenal will not fall into the hands of Islamic extremists, and they have Islamabad’s assurances to this effect. But scholars like Windrem fear Pakistan’s nuclear program may already be infected with the virus of radicalism from within, as demonstrated by the Sultan Bashiruddin incident.
Load More