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Category: nuclear weapons

From Ynet News:

Iran’s chief nuclear envoy Ali Larijani said on Friday that Iran is committed to the peaceful use of nuclear technology but warned the situation could change if his country is threatened.” We oppose obtaining nuclear weapons and we will peacefully use nuclear technology under the framework of the Nonproliferation Treaty, but if we are threatened, the situation may change,” He told a news conference after two days of talks in Beijing. Iran’s nuclear chief said his country has produced and stored 250 tons of the gas used as the feedstock for uranium enrichment, state-run television reported Friday.Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who is also the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said Iran has kept the uranium hexaflouride gas, or UF-6, in underground tunnels at a nuclear facility in Isfahan to protect it from any possible attack.“Today, we have produced more than 250 tons of UF-6. Should you visit Isfahan, you will see we have constructed tunnels that are almost unique in the world,” State-run television quoted Aghazadeh as saying.
This is horrible news. Iran’s supreme ruler supposedly issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, but it’s clear that the country wants them. One can only speculate at the chaos that could be caused when Iran threatens Israel or the United States with nuclear weapons.

From Ynet News:

SHARM E-SHEIKH – Is Egypt declaring its intentions to develop nuclear weapons? Thus it appeared in a speech delivered by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Thursday on the occasion of meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Sharm e-Sheikh.

“We don’t want nuclear weapons,” Mubarak stated, “But since they appear highly present in the area, we must defend ourselves.”

Recently Egypt announced that it was striving to attain nuclear capabilities. President Mubarak himself, as well as his son Jamal, were questioned on the issue and declared that their nation needed nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and Egypt’s nuclear program would be aimed at overcoming the deficiency in fuel and natural gas reserves. However, now it appears that if Iran develops nuclear power, Egypt will no longer be satisfied with devoting its nuclear resources to peaceful purposes alone.

Nuclear development is snowballing in the Middle East. People living in the United States and Europe like to think that we won’t be affected, but we will. Even a regional nuclear war could cause worldwide crop failures. If nuclear states collapse during war, their armaments could be stolen and distributed on the black market. And if you’re a non-state actor that can’t use nuclear technology to intimidate others with the knowledge that you have it, then you’re liable to get attention the only other way — actually using the weapon.

From ABC News:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4, 2007 — North Korea appears to have made preparations for another nuclear test, according to U.S. defense officials.

“We think they’ve put everything in place to conduct a test without any notice or warning,” a senior U.S. defense official told ABC News.

The official cautions that the intelligence is inconclusive as to whether North Korea will actually go ahead with another test but said the preparations are similar to the steps taken by Pyongyang before it shocked the world by conducting its first nuclear test last Oct. 9.

Two other senior defense officials confirmed that recent intelligence suggested that the North Koreans appear to be ready to test a nuclear weapon again, but the intelligence community divides over whether another test is likely.

“That would surprise me,” a senior intelligence official said when asked if North Korea is likely to soon conduct another test.

Another official had a different view, predicting North Korea would conduct a test sometime over the next two or three months.

In the weeks before the Oct. 9 test, U.S. spy satellites witnessed the unloading of large cables at a suspected test site in P’onggye, in northeastern North Korea. The more recent activity has been observed in the same area as the Oct. 9 test.

In October, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a resolution that imposed harsh sanctions against North Korea just six days after Kim Jong Il’s regime declared that it conducted an underground nuclear test. The sanctions were designed to coerce North Korea into giving up its nuclear program.

Read the rest at the site. Why is Kim Jong Il so brazenly disobedient of the international community? Because he is power crazy and insane. Just who we need to have the power to kill millions.

From Eurekalert, a warning about the dangers of nuclear war:

Even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could produce as many direct fatalities as all of World War II and disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, with environmental effects that could be devastating for everyone on Earth, university researchers have found.

These powerful conclusions are being presented Dec. 11 during a press conference and a special technical session at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The research also appears in twin papers posted on Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, an online journal.

A team of scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder); and UCLA conducted the rigorous scientific studies reported.

Against the backdrop of growing tensions in the Middle East and nuclear “saber rattling” elsewhere in Asia, the authors point out that even the smallest nuclear powers today and in the near future may have as many as 50 or more Hiroshima-size (15 kiloton) weapons in their arsenals; all told, about 40 countries possess enough plutonium and/or uranium to construct substantial nuclear arsenals.

Owen “Brian” Toon, chair of the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a member of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU-Boulder, oversaw the analysis of potential fatalities based on an assessment of current nuclear weapons inventories and population densities in large urban complexes. His team focused on scenarios of smoke emissions that urban firestorms could produce.

“The results described in one of the new papers represent the first comprehensive quantitative study of the consequences of a nuclear conflict between smaller nuclear states,” said Toon and his co-authors. “A small country is likely to direct its weapons against population centers to maximize damage and achieve the greatest advantage,” Toon said. Fatality estimates for a plausible regional conflict ranged from 2.6 million to 16.7 million per country.

So it does look like global cooling from soot emitted by nuclear firestorms really is a big problem. All countries should suspend any research towards nuclear weapons, and countries like the United States should openly state that they will withhold from using nuclear weapons during specific engagements.