Syria wants in on nuclear power, too. Why not, after all?
Latest Updates: nuclear power RSS
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aziz
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johnpi
Elite US troops ready to combat Pakistani nuclear hijacks.
The US army is training a crack unit to seal off and snatch back Pakistani nuclear weapons in the event that militants, possibly from inside the country’s security apparatus, get their hands on a nuclear device or materials that could make one.
The specialised unit would be charged with recovering the nuclear materials and securing them.
The move follows growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan’s military, a series of attacks on sensitive installations over the past two years, several of which housed nuclear facilities, and rising tension that has seen a series of official complaints by US authorities to Islamabad in the past fortnight.
“What you have in Pakistan is nuclear weapons mixed with the highest density of extremists in the world, so we have a right to be concerned,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who used to run the US energy department’s intelligence unit.
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johnpi
The five American Muslim youths from Virginia who were arrested in Pakistan on terrorism charges had a Pakistani nuclear power plant site map.
Police reported that the five Americans detained in Sargodha earlier this month had a nuclear power site map in their possession.
It is still being determined whether they had planned to attack a complex that houses nuclear power facilities, DawnNews reported.
Senior police officials have said that the men had a map of the Chashma Barrage, a complex that along with nuclear power facilities houses a water reservoir and other structures.
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johnpi
The case for the Iranian bomb.
Iran should be left alone to develop nuclear weapons without any interference from the West.
The Iranians have every bit as much right of self-defense against genicide and religicide as Israel. Iran is bordered by two unstable countries overtaken with violent mass religious movements that have an eliminationist doctrine toward Shiites, groups that operate in geographical close proximity to Pakistani nuclear weapons and therefore – at least theoretically – are at risk of gaining control of nuclear weapons that could be turned on Iran. Leaders among the loosely federated militant groups have stated that one of their goals is to obtain nuclear weapons.
In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, there have been massacres of Shiites. Were nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of these groups, Iran would be at great risk of attack. A Shiite nation defended with nuclear weapons would be an undesirable target because of the risk of retaliation. The doctrine of MAD, or mutual assured destruction, could be a shield.
Salafi, Wahabbi and Deobandi extremists have shown in their sectarian massacres of defenseless and undefended Shiite civilians that they are provoked by vulnerability, and so a non-nuclear Iran would be a much more likely and attractive target than India.
Iran, in its foreign policy history, has always been a rational actor, and despite bombastic comments coming from Amediniejad to score points with his constituencies, I do not believe based on the historical evidence that Iran would commit national suicide by attempting a nuclear attack on Israel, and so this is not a serious threat.
Some of the anti-nuclear Iran proponents in the West believe in oil imperialism, and would like to keep “all options open” for a US invasion of Iran at some point in the future, a position that all well-meaning people of any nationality should find reprehensible.
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johnpi
Saudi Arabia participates in extraordinary rendition during Hajj, ‘hands missing Iran nuclear scientist to US.’ Scientist was kidnapped while going on Mecca pilgrimage.
An Iranian nuclear scientist who went missing in Saudi Arabia has been “handed over by Riyadh to Washington,” Mehr news agency reported on Tuesday, quoting Tehran’s foreign ministry spokesman.
“Shahram Amiri, Iran’s nuclear scientist who had gone to hajj in Saudi Arabia, was handed over by Riyadh to Washington,” Ramin Mehmanparast told Mehr, referring to umra, a lesser pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest sites.
The spokesman said Amiri was one of 11 Iranian detainees currently held in US jails. His statement was the first acknowledgement by Tehran that Amiri was a nuclear scientist.
Iranian officials have previously said Amiri went missing in Saudi Arabia soon after he landed there as a pilgrim earlier this year.
It sounds like anybody who is significantly involved with the Iranian nuclear program should not go on Hajj or Umrah.
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johnpi
One of Pakistan’s responses to the urban terrorist attacks in its borders has been to raid a Hizb ut-Tahrir ’seminar’ that was being held in Islamabad to, as a HuT spokesman described, “mobilize people against the American raj and Waziristan operations.”
…police arrested dozens of suspected members of the outlawed Sunni Islamist Hizb-ut-Tahrir organisation following raids in an upscale neighbourhood of Islamabad.
“Hizb-ut-Tahrir is a peaceful political party which was holding a seminar at a residence to condemn the South Waziristan operation. We will continue to make our protest,” the group’s chief spokesman, Tehrir Naveed Butt, said in a statement.
Over at HuT’s website, the full Youtube statement by the group’s spokesman has been posted in English.
Interestingly, Hut’s website also has an announcement that a nuclear scientist was among those arrested. His name is Rizwan Aleem, and he is a PhD candidate at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI). I’ve blogged a few times about this illustrious learning institution when the Taliban were about to take over the district where it is located in the Northwest Frontier Province, and made some predictions about how campus life would change, the institution’s reputation would be affected, and how donations might drop off.
Given HuT’s approving comments about al Shabaab-style shariah, Aleem must have disapproved of the campus life (gender mixing) that others seemed so proud to have posted pictures of on GIKI’s Facebook page. Anyway, Aleem’s future is in doubt now: “Sources say the Hizbut Tahrir activists were likely to be handed over to intelligence agencies for further interrogation.”
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johnpi
US spy agencies considering rewriting threat assessment of Iran’s nuclear program.
The original report reversed earlier findings that Iran was pursuing a nuclear-weapons program.
It found with “high confidence” that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and with “moderate confidence” that it hadn’t been restarted as of mid-2007.
So far, intelligence officials are not “ready to declare that invalid,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told the Journal, emphasizing the judgment covered the 2003-2007 time frame only. That leaves room for a reassessment of the period since the December 2007 report was completed, the official suggested.
A new assessment might be useful in racheting up the war effort against Iran.
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thabet
Nuclear power law signed:
Washington has promoted its plan to help the Emirates’ develop peaceful nuclear power as a model of the kind of cooperation it would like to achieve with Iran, which the U.S. and its allies suspect is using a civilian program as a cover to develop an atomic weapons capability.
The United Arab Emirates, which is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, is among those Arab nations wary of Iran’s nuclear work.
Keefie Boy, a former Dubai-based blogger, says of this story:
I can understand his concerns, and, as a commentator at his blog notes, I half expect them to plonk the nuclear reactor on a man-made island!
I am also wondering how closely regulation of the UAE’s nuclear industry will resemble the way its hydrocarbon industry is run…
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johnpi
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johnpi
A new line of anti-Iran propaganda just in case Mousavi wins: He’s as much of a political demon as Ahmadinejad, according to this editorial in Investors Business Daily:
Mousavi, of course, whose candidacy (unlike so many others) got the stamp of approval of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, is no moderate at all.he vowed during the campaign to continue Iran’s nuclear program.
Moreover, as Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman note in their newly published history of nuclear proliferation, “The Nuclear Express,” “Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan first began to transfer uranium enrichment technology to Iran in 1987″ — in the midst of Mousavi’s 1981-89 tenure in power.
Any Obama-Mousavi version of the Camp David Accords would have preserved Iran’s widely dispersed, tough-to-monitor nuclear program in some form, through which it can produce fuel for a bomb.
A few things:
1) Notice how the sole criterion for determining whether someone is a moderate or an extremist is his position on nuclear power.
2) Notice the weight of preference is still for Ahmadinejad: “Any Obama-Mousavi version of the Camp David Accords would have preserved…” as though Mousavi has already lost.
The rest of this editorial is a mess and looks like it was written by an inebriate: At one point it claims the Obama administration was “obviously” hoping Mousavi would win, and at another it claims Obama was “obviously hoping that a newly strengthened Ahmadinejad might come to Camp David.”
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johnpi
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johnpi
