BBC – Japan has confirmed the existence of a secret Cold War deal allowing the transit of nuclear-armed US vessels through its ports. The move by a government-appointed panel ends decades of official denial – although the existence of the pact was an open secret. The government said that the move was aimed at increasing transparency. But it comes at an unsettled time for the US-Japan relationship, amid a row over US military bases in Okinawa. Read article
Washington Post – President Obama’s top national security advisers will within days present him with an agonizing choice on how to guide U.S. nuclear weapons policy for the rest of his term. Does he substantially advance his bold pledge to seek a world free of nuclear weapons by declaring that the “sole purpose” of the U.S. arsenal is to deter other nations from using them? Or does he embrace a more modest option, supported by some senior military officials, that deterrence is the “primary purpose”? The difference may seem semantic, but such words, which will be contained in a document known as the Nuclear Posture Review, have deep meaning and could dramatically shift nuclear policy in the United States and around the world. Read article
Telegraph – The US and Britain are acting in the expectation that any measures agreed by the UN Security Council will be heavily diluted by Russia or China. The supplementary action is being drawn up in consultation with Middle Eastern and Asian countries that have financial or trade ties with the Islamic regime, and a common interest in preventing it developing nuclear weapons. The measures would focus on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the secretive militia force that is suspected of running and financing the country’s covert nuclear programme. Read Article
Reuters – A Western proposal for fresh U.N. sanctions on Iran includes a call for restricting new Iranian banks abroad and urges “vigilance” against the Islamic Republic’s central bank, diplomats said on Friday. Speaking on condition of anonymity, Western diplomats familiar with negotiations on the draft proposal — which Washington worked on with Britain, France and Germany and then shared with Russia and China — said they were no longer pushing for an official U.N. blacklisting of the central bank. Read article
Reuters – The president of the U.N. Security Council said on Tuesday it was ready to tackle proposals for new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, while U.S. diplomats worked to persuade China that action is needed. Gabon’s U.N. Ambassador Emanuel Issoze-Ngondet, president of the Security Council for March, said the Iranian nuclear issue was not on the agenda of the 15-nation panel this month, but council members might still hold a meeting on it. Read article
BBC – Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the US after the Iraq invasion.The city witnessed fierce fighting in 2004 as US forces carried out a major offensive against insurgents. Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe. The US military says it is not aware of any official reports showing an increase in birth defects in the area. Read Article
Ed – To read more about the most commonly used weapon of mass detruction, depleted uranium, CLICK HERE
BBC – Brazil will not bow to pressure from the US to support further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear work, the country’s foreign minister has said. Celso Amorim told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Brazil wanted to see further negotiations on the issue before it would support sanctions. Read article
Reuters – The president of the U.N. Security Council said on Tuesday it was ready to tackle proposals for new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, while U.S. diplomats worked to persuade China that action is needed. Gabon’s U.N. Ambassador Emanuel Issoze-Ngondet, president of the Security Council for March, said the Iranian nuclear issue was not on the agenda of the 15-nation panel this month, but council members might still hold a meeting on it. Read article
Daily Telegraph – Australian aborigines and former servicemen are to sue the British Ministry of Defence over diseases and disabilities that they claim were caused by nuclear testing in the Outback more than 50 years ago. A group of 250 people, including 150 former servicemen, say they have suffered cancer, skin disease and deformities because of the fallout from blasts. Read Article
BBC – US President Barack Obama is planning “dramatic reductions” in the country’s nuclear arsenal, a senior US administration official has said. This would come as part of a sweeping policy review designed to prevent the spread of atomic weapons, he said. He added that the new strategy will point to a greater role for conventional weapons. Read article
Ed – then why is he spending MORE to maintain the current stockpile?
Press TV – Iran’s envoy to the IAEA has objected to the fact that suspicions have been raised about Tehran’s nuclear activities only because it is not implementing voluntary protocols. “We have to be able distinguish between two different issues. One is the Safeguards Agreement… and the other is additional measures, which are voluntary like the additional protocol. They cover more activities,” Ali-Asghar Soltanieh told Press TV on Sunday. Read article
CNN – Seven in 10 Americans believe that Iran currently has nuclear weapons, according to a new national poll. Friday’s release of the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey comes just hours after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the Islamic republic isn’t seeking and doesn’t believe in pursuing nuclear weapons. Khamenei was responding to a draft United Nations report that said that Iran may be working to develop a nuclear weapon. Read article
Reuters – The U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Thursday it fears Iran may be working now to develop a nuclear-armed missile, as Washington warned Tehran of “consequences” for ignoring international demands to stop its atomic program. In unusually blunt language, an International Atomic Energy Agency report for the first time suggested Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons capability, throwing independent weight behind similar Western suspicions. Read article
The Times – Rates of leukaemia in children around the Basra area of Southern Iraq have almost tripled in the last 15 years according to calculations by public health experts. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health documents 698 cases of leukaemia among children under the age of 15 in the period to 2007. There was a peak of 211 cases in 2006. Rates increased from three to almost 8.5 cases of the disease per 100,000 children over the time period. This is more than double the rate of leukaemia in the European Union. Read Article
Reuters – France deliberately exposed its soldiers to nuclear explosions in Algeria in the 1960s to study the effect of radiation on humans, a newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing confidential documents. The French government promised last year to compensate victims of nuclear tests in Algeria, carried out between 1960 and 1966, recognizing a link between the explosions and veterans’ illnesses such as cancer. Read Article
“Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear arms race and the corresponding militarization of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national security state.”
- Richard Rhodes
“Consider what the world might have done with the $5.5 trillion expended by the government to create, store, and deploy nearly 65,000 nuclear weapons held by the USA and USSR during the 19080’s. Imagine the improvements in health, education, environmental protection, transit, technology, sustainable development and foreign aid that might have changed the course of civilisation if these resources had been redirected for the greater good.”
- Prof. John Wargo, Green Intelligence
Associated Press – President Barack Obama is seeking increased funding for nuclear weapons research and security programs next year, even as his administration promotes nonproliferation and has pledged to reduce the world’s stockpile of nuclear arms. The administration on Monday asked Congress for more than $7 billion for activities related to nuclear weapons in the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration, an increase of $624 million from the 2010 fiscal year. Read article
The Times – One of the most extraordinary engineering feats undertaken in postwar America is to lie unused inside a mountain unless someone thinks of a new purpose for it. The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, chosen by Congress in 1987 and opposed by environmentalists ever since, is to be shut before receiving a single barrel of spent fuel, thanks to a line in this week’s budget that eliminates federal funding for the project. The move comes despite President Obama’s backing for new nuclear plants. About $9 billion (£5.6 billion) was spent on the first phase of concrete tunnels and chambers designed to keep waste safe for at least a million years. A 5 mile (8km) U-shaped tunnel was bored into the side of the extinct volcano, which is inside the Nevada nuclear test site. Read Article
Press TV – Iraq’s Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says. Iraq’s Minister of Human Rights, Wijdan Mikhail Salim, told Assabah newspaper that the lawsuit will be launched based on reports from the Iraqi ministries of science and the environment. Read article
Ed – this has to be one the greatest ongoing crimes against humanity perpetrated by the western world. The evidence is overwhelming and every citizen of the world should be outraged at this atrocity.
Times Online – World leaders might have to go to war to stop Iran developing its weapons programme, Tony Blair suggested yesterday. The former Prime Minister, who is now a Middle East peace envoy, said that Tehran’s actions had made him more afraid today that a rogue state could supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorists than he was when he took Britain to war with Iraq in 2003. Read article
Daily Mail – President Obama is planning to increase spending on America’s nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them. In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to maintain the U.S. arsenal – £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year. The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security. Read article
Wall Street Journal – The FBI disproved its main theory about how the spores were weaponized. The investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks ended as far as the public knew on July 29, 2008, with the death of Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. The cause of death was an overdose of the painkiller Tylenol. No autopsy was performed, and there was no suicide note. Read article
Ed – (un)remarkably similar to the ’suicide’ of UK weapons inspector David Kelly, supposedly from an overdose of an analgesic and cutting his wrists with a knife whilst leaving no fingerprints.
Global Arab Network – Continued disturbing revelations about Iran’s nuclear programs escalate the dangers the world faces from nuclear proliferation. The mounting peril threatens to overwhelm President Obama’s quest for a world free of nuclear weapons, a quest he will pursue at a summit on nuclear security in April and at a meeting in May to review the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). While NPT membership is nearly universal, the refusal of India, Pakistan, and Israel to join, North Korea’s proliferation and withdrawal from, and Iran’s violations of, the treaty have placed severe stress on the non-proliferation regime. Read article
Reuters – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Sunday that a deal with the United States on a landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty was “95 percent” agreed, news agencies reported Sunday. Read article
