India-Japan proliferation: delinquency or a crime? By Mobeen Tariq

The ongoing India-Japan negotiations on a civil nuclear agreement were the hallmark of Indian Premier Modi’s recent visit to Japan.

Modi could not achieve the breakthrough on the much sought after civil nuclear deal. There are issues in the prospective Japan-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement that can have multiple, deplorable implications. India possesses nuclear weapons and has tested these several times. It is not a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). If nonproliferation norms and Japanese traditional championing of these were to be followed, Tokyo cannot enter into nuclear trade with New Delhi.

Nuclear technology is the key to Japan’s energy sector and affects its industrial output. Overblown safety fears after the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011 affected the public’s sentiment against nuclear energy but the economic realities have changed the government’s and public’s behaviour. Japan is one of the major traders of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) that was founded in 1975 after India tested a nuclear weapons device using fissile material diverted from fuel provided for nuclear power generation.

India claims to have a huge energy deficit and not having enough uranium to fuel its existing and upcoming nuclear power plants that will add millions of volts to its impoverished energy mix. New Delhi boasts a fat purse and exerts sufficient political influence to woo some nuclear supplier states in foregoing their domestic and international nonproliferation commitments to trade with India. That is why the US arm-twisted the members of the NSG in giving India an exceptional waiver to trade with that country. Japan was also part of that Faustian bargain but Tokyo could not be charmed into becoming the 12th capital with which India could trade in nuclear materials. Giving a NSG waiver was delinquency but nuclear trading or allowing New Delhi to become a member of the group would be a crime. That is perhaps why Japan has demurred from signing a nuclear deal with India.

For its own sake, Japan is gearing up to start a massive nuclear fuel reprocessing plant that can produce nine tonnes of weapons usable plutonium annually, enough for 2,000 atomic bombs!

For its own sake, Japan is gearing up to start a massive nuclear fuel reprocessing plant that can produce nine tonnes of weapons usable plutonium annually, enough for 2,000 atomic bombs! This is in spite of the fact that 150,000 of its people remain homeless and that the nuclear disaster has cost almost $ 100 billion. Japan is a rational state and has reverted to nuclear energy because it is considered a safe and inexhaustible source of energy and a panacea against its dependence on hydrocarbon imports from the Middle East and elsewhere. The South China Sea is gradually becoming a powder keg due to US and Chinese competition, forcing Japan to hedge its bets on safer energy production alternatives to fossil fuels.

Indian negotiations for a civil nuclear deal with Japan started in Tokyo in June 2010. Two consecutive rounds followed in October 2010 and November 2010 in New Delhi and Tokyo. However, India slowed the pace of negotiations in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. The last round of talks was held in November 2013. Japanese companies such as specialist reactor vessel manufacturer JSW are keen on signing a nuclear deal but the government has insisted that India agree to more stringent inspections than those required under nuclear cooperation pacts with other countries. In the longer run, Japan will have to make a choice between its trade and geopolitical interests against non-proliferation commitments.

Another hold up in the nuclear deal has been India’s refusal to accept limited liability for commercial operators who supply equipment. The Indian Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010 is only acceptable to states where their governments provide a financial cushion to the nuclear industry in taking the huge liability enforced by India. The prospective Japan-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement would be a de facto legitimisation of India’s nuclear weapons status. Every gram of nuclear fuel that India would import from Japan would allow its indigenous uranium to be used for nuclear weapons production. If Japan enters a deal with India it joins a dozen others in effectively participating in New Delhi’s burgeoning nuclear weapons production.

India has invested heavily in nuclear technology for prestige and power. In his recent book The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India, Ramana explains how India’s Department of Aatomic Energy first acquired its present political clout, and how the Atomic Energy Commission, which reports directly to the Prime Minister, achieved its immunity to public scrutiny despite repeated failures to meet India’s nuclear energy needs. This domestic dynamic complements Indian global power ambition and some states happily let this happen for their short-term economic and geopolitical interests. It is just a matter of time that Faust will do what he is best at: having bought souls, he will ultimately challenge his hosts.

The writer is a freelance columnist

 

 

© 2014

Years of Living Dangerously - Premiere Full Episode

Years of Living Dangerously Premiere Full Episode

Published on Apr 6, 2014 • Hollywood celebrities and respected journalists span the globe to explore the issues of climate change and cover intimate stories of human triumph and tragedy. Watch new episodes Mondays at 8PM ET/ PT, only on SHOWTIME.

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It's the biggest story of our time. Hollywood's brightest stars and today's most respected journalists explore the issues of climate change and bring you intimate accounts of triumph and tragedy. YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY takes you directly to the heart of the matter in this awe-inspiring and cinematic documentary series event from Executive

Producers James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

© 2014

Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't

“Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century,” reads the headline of an October 2013 story in an online trade publication. This fantastic promise is just one part of a modern boomlet in enthusiasm about the energy potential of thorium, a radioactive element that is far more abundant than uranium.

Thorium promoters consistently extol its supposed advantages over uranium. News outlets periodically foresee the possibility of "a cheaper, more efficient, and safer form of nuclear power that produces less nuclear waste than today's uranium-based technology."

Actually, though, the United States has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for some 50 years and is still struggling to deal with the legacy of those attempts. In addition to the billions of dollars it spent, mostly fruitlessly, to develop thorium fuels, the US government will have to spend billions more, at numerous federal nuclear sites, to deal with the wastes produced by those efforts. And America’s energy-from-thorium quest now faces an ignominious conclusion: The US Energy Department appears to have lost track of 96 kilograms of uranium 233, a fissile material made from thorium that can be fashioned into a bomb, and is battling the state of Nevada over the proposed dumping of nearly a ton of left-over fissile materials in a government landfill, in apparent violation of international standards.

Early thorium optimism. The energy potential of the element thorium was discovered in 1940 at the University of California at Berkeley, during the very early days of the US nuclear weapons program. Although thorium atoms do not split, researchers found that they will absorb neutrons when irradiated. After that a small fraction of the thorium then transmutes into a fissionable material—uranium 233—that does undergo fission and can therefore be used in a reactor or bomb.

By the early 1960’s, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had established a major thorium fuel research and development program, spurring utilities to build thorium-fueled reactors. Back then, the AEC was projecting that some 1,000 nuclear power reactors would dot the American landscape by the end of the 20th century, with a similar nuclear capacity abroad. As a result, the official reasoning held, world uranium supplies would be rapidly exhausted, and reactors that ran on the more-plentiful thorium would be needed.

With the strong endorsement of a congressionally created body, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the United States began a major effort in the early 1960s to fund a two-track research and development effort for a new generation of reactors that would make any uranium shortage irrelevant by producing more fissile material fuel than they consumed.

The first track was development of plutonium-fueled “breeder” reactors, which held the promise of producing electricity and 30 percent more fuel than they consumed. This effort collapsed in the United States in the early 1980’s because of cost and proliferation concerns and technological problems. (The plutonium “fast” reactor program has been able to stay alive and still receives hefty sums as part of the Energy Department's nuclear research and development portfolio.)

The second track—now largely forgotten—was based on thorium-fueled reactors. This option was attractive because thorium is far more abundant than uranium and holds the potential for producing an even larger amount of uranium 233 in reactors designed specifically for that purpose. In pursuing this track, the government produced a large amount of uranium 233, mainly at weapons production reactors. Approximately two tons of uranium 233 was produced, at an estimated total cost of $5.5 to $11 billion (2012 dollars), including associated cleanup costs.

The federal government established research and development projects to demonstrate the viability of uranium 233 breeder reactors in Minnesota, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. By 1977, however, the government abandoned pursuit of the thorium fuel cycle in favor of plutonium-fueled breeders, leading to dissent in the ranks of the AEC. Alvin Weinberg, the long-time director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was, in large part, fired because of his support of thorium over plutonium fuel.

By the late 1980’s, after several failed attempts to use it commercially, the US nuclear power industry also walked away from thorium. The first commercial nuclear plant to use thorium was Indian Point Unit I, a pressurized water reactor near New York City that began operation in 1962. Attempts to recover uranium 233 from its irradiated thorium fuel were described, however, as a “financial disaster.” The last serious attempt to use thorium in a commercial reactor was at the Fort St. Vrain plant in Colorado, which closed in 1989 after 10 years and hundreds of equipment failures, leaks, and fuel failures. There were four failed commercial thorium ventures; prior agreement makes the US government responsible for their wastes.

Where is the missing uranium 233? As it turned out, of course, the Atomic Energy Commission’s prediction of future nuclear capacity was off by an order of magnitude—the US nuclear fleet topped out at about 100, rather than 1,000 reactors—and the predicted uranium shortage never occurred. America’s experience with thorium fuels faded from public memory until 1996. Then, an Energy Department safety investigation found a national repository for uranium 233 in a building constructed in 1943 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The repository was in dreadful condition; investigators reported an environmental release from a large fraction of the 1,100 containers “could be expected to occur within the next five years in that some of the packages are approaching 30 years of age and have not been regularly inspected.” The Energy Department later concluded that the building had “deteriorated beyond cost-effective repair. Significant annual costs would be incurred to satisfy current DOE storage standards, and to provide continued protection against potential nuclear criticality accidents or theft of the material.” More

 

© 2014

Why Saudi Arabia and the U.S. don’t see eye to eye in the Middle East

Give credit to Vladimir Putin and his New York Times op-ed on Syria for sparking a new tactic for foreign leaders hoping to influence American public opinion. In recent weeks, Saudi Arabian political elites have followed Putin’s lead, using American outlets to express their distaste with the West’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to Syria and Iran.

In comments to the Wall Street Journal, prominent Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal decried the United States for cutting a preliminary deal with Iran on its nuclear program without giving the Saudis a seat at the table, and for Washington’s unwillingness to oppose Assad in the wake of the atrocities he’s committed. Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain followed with an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Saudi Arabia Will Go It Alone.” The Saudis are clearly upholding the vow made by intelligence chief Bandar bin Sultan back in October to undergo a “major shift” away from the United States.

In light of the recent actions of the Obama administration, many allies are also frustrated and confused, and even hedging their bets in reaction to the United States’ increasingly unpredictable foreign policy. But of all the disappointed countries, none is more so than Saudi Arabia — and with good reason. That’s because the two countries have shared interests historically — but not core values — and those interests have recently diverged.

First, America’s track record in the Middle East in recent years has sowed distrust. The relationship began to deteriorate with the United States’ initial response to the Arab Spring, where its perceived pro-democratic stance stood at odds with the Saudi ruling elite. After Washington stood behind the elections that installed a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and then spoke out against the Egyptian army’s attempt to remove President Mohammad Morsi, the Saudi royals were left to wonder where Washington would stand if similar unrest broke out on their soil.

Ian Bremmer

Second, while the oil trade has historically aligned U.S.-Saudi interests, the unconventional energy breakthrough in North America is calling this into question. The United States and Canada are utilizing hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques, leading to a surge in domestic energy production. That development leaves America significantly less dependent on oil from the Middle East, and contributes to the U.S.’ shifting interests and increasing disengagement in the region. Not only does Saudi Arabia lose influence in Washington — many of the top American executives in the oil industry were their best conduits — but it also puts the Saudis on the wrong end of this long-term trend toward increasing global energy supply.

To say that oil is an integral part of Saudi Arabia’s economy is a gross understatement. Oil still accounts for 45 percent of Saudi GDP, 80 percent of budget revenue, and 90 percent of exports. In the months ahead, new oil supply is expected to outstrip new demand, largely on the back of improvements in output in Iraq and Libya. By the end of the first quarter of 2014, Saudi Arabia will likely have to reduce production to keep prices stable. And the trend toward more supply doesn’t take into account the potential for a comprehensive Iranian nuclear deal that would begin to ease sanctions and allow more Iranian crude to reach global markets.

It is this ongoing nuclear negotiation with Iran that poses the principal threat to an aligned United States and Saudi Arabia. An Iranian deal would undercut Saudi Arabia’s leadership over fellow Gulf States, as other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members like Kuwait and the UAE would welcome resurgent trade with Iran. At the same time, Iran would emerge over the longer term as the chief competitor for influence across the broader region, serving as the nexus of Shi’ite power. The Saudis would find themselves most directly threatened by this Shi’ite resurgence within neighboring Bahrain, a majority Shi’ite state ruled by a Sunni regime that is backstopped by the Saudi royals.

The bottom line: the Saudis are actively competing with Iran for influence throughout the Middle East. That’s why the Saudis have the most at stake from any easing of sanctions on Iran, any normalization of relations with the West, or any nuclear breakthrough that gives Iran the ultimate security bargaining chip. The Saudis have reaped the benefits of an economically weak Iran — and they are not prepared to relinquish that advantage. Ultimately, any deal that exchanges Iranian economic security for delays in Iran’s nuclear program is a fundamental problem for Saudi Arabia — as is any failed deal that allows sanctions to unravel.

For all of these reasons, even though the United States will be buying Saudi oil for years to come and will still sell the Saudis weapons, American policy in the Middle East has now made the United States more hostile to Saudi interests than any other major country outside the region. That’s why the Saudis have been so vocal about the United States’ perceived policy failures.

But to say Obama has messed up the Middle East is a serious overstatement. What he has tried to do is avoid getting too involved in a messed up Middle East. Obama ended the war in Iraq. In Libya, he did everything possible to remain on the sidelines, not engaging until the GCC and Arab League beseeched him to — and even then, only in a role of “leading from behind” the French and the British.

Call the Obama policy “engaging to disengage.” In Syria, Obama did everything possible to stay out despite the damage to his international credibility. When the prospect for a chemical weapons agreement arose, he leapt at the chance to point to a tangible achievement that could justify the U.S. remaining a spectator to the broader civil war. In Iran, a key goal of Obama’s diplomatic engagement will be to avoid the use of military force down the road. It hasn’t always been pretty, but Obama has at least been trying to act in the best interests of the United States — interests that are diverging from Saudi Arabia’s. More

 

Lest We Forget - 24 Hours After Hiroshima

 

US Air Force once dropped live hydrogen bomb on North Carolina - report

The US Air Force inadvertently dropped an atomic bomb over North Carolina in 1961. If a simple safety switch had not prevented the explosive from detonating, millions of lives across the northeast would have been at risk, a new document has revealed.

The revelation offers the first conclusive evidence after decades of speculation that the US military narrowly avoided a self-inflicted disaster. The incident is explained in detail in a recently declassified document written by Parker F. Jones, supervisor of the nuclear weapons safety department at Sandia National Laboratories.

The document - written in 1969 and titled “How I Learned to Mistrust the H-bomb,” a play on the Stanley Kubrick film title “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” - was disclosed to the Guardian by journalist Eric Schlosser.

Three days after President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, a B-52 bomber carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs departed from Goldsboro, North Carolina on a routine flight along the East Coast. The plane soon went into a tailspin, throwing the bombs from the B-52 into the air within striking distance of multiple major metropolitan centers.

Each of the explosives carried a payload of 4 megatons - roughly the same as four million tons of TNT explosive - which could have triggered a blast 260 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

One of the bombs performed in the same way as those dropped over Japan less than 20 years before - by opening its parachute and engaging its trigger mechanisms. The only thing that prevented untold thousands, or perhaps millions, from being killed was a simple low voltage switch that failed to flip.

That hydrogen bomb, known as MK 39 Mod 2, descended onto tree branches in Faro, North Carolina, while the second explosive landed peacefully off Big Daddy’s Road in Pikeville. Jones determined that three of the four switches designed to prevent unintended detonation on MK 39 Mod 2 failed to work properly, and when a final firing signal was triggered that fourth switch was the only safeguard that worked.

That hydrogen bomb, known as MK 39 Mod 2, descended onto tree branches in Faro, North Carolina, while the second explosive landed peacefully off Big Daddy’s Road in Pikeville. Jones determined that three of the four switches designed to prevent unintended detonation on MK 39 Mod 2 failed to work properly, and when a final firing signal was triggered that fourth switch was the only safeguard that worked.

Nuclear fallout from a detonation could have risked millions of lives in Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York City, and the areas in between.

“The MK Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52,” Jones wrote in his 1969 assessment. He determined “one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe…It would have been bad news – in spades.”

Before Schlosser brought the document to light through a Freedom of Information Act request, the US government long denied that any such event ever took place.

“The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy,” he told the Guardian. “We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here’s one that very nearly did.”

In “Command and Control,” Schlosser’s new book on the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union, the journalist writes that he discovered a minimum of 700 “significant” accidents involving nuclear weapons in the years between 1950 and 1968. More

 

Nuclear Winter of Our Discontent

Always interesting when the Army starts poking around the nation’s nuclear stockpile – seeing as the service is no longer a big player in the atomic realm – to see if atomic weapons still make sense.

Ward Wilson isn’t a soldier – he’s a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at theMonterey Institute of International Studies – but his musing on the topic appears in the latest issue of Parameters, the Army’s professional journal.

By re-studying the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan that ended World War II in 1945, and the brush with World War III that 1962’s Cuban missile crisis represented, Wilson tries to revamp our understanding of the utility of nuclear weapons.

What this new scholarship reveals is that the failure rate of nuclear deterrence is potentially higher than theory admits.

Nuclear deterrence has to be perfect, or close to perfect. A catastrophic all-out nuclear war could result from any failure of nuclear deterrence, so there is little margin for error. One could say for nuclear deterrence, failure is not an option. Yet these documented cases of nuclear deterrence failure raise the possibility that we have been far luckier, and have run far greater risks, than we imagined. If nuclear deterrence has a high rate of failure, continuing to rely on it for the safety and security of the United States would seem to guarantee its eventual catastrophic failure.

One of the great strengths of the military mind is its insistence on experience-based thinking. In the case of nuclear weapons, there has historically been plenty of theory, but not as much sensible, pragmatic thinking. It is time for a little more pragmatic analysis.

Sobering stuff. Full thing here.

 

Who would use chemical weapons?

The combatants in Syria are pointing fingers at each other. Syrian officials claim that the rebels used chemical weapons in a March 19th attack against Khan al-Assal, a town near Aleppo; the rebels say the Syrian government was the culprit.

Whichever is the case, at least 25 people died and many others were wounded in the assault. The UN has decided to investigate: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom, a former weapons monitor for the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), to lead the investigation.

The renewed specter of chemical weapons raises the question of why any leader would use them. This class of weapons not only kills and maims but can also cause birth defects, dooming subsequent generations to permanently disrupted lives. Strategically, these weapons produce lasting enemies and make the perpetrator a pariah, losing both domestic and international support. Chemical weapons are banned by an international treaty with 188 member nations. So why use them? Paranoia? Fanaticism? Desperation? And more practically, can we use our knowledge of a leader's mental health to assess his likelihood of using chemical weapons?

Leaders who have used chemical weapons in the post-World War II era have certain traits in common. Consider Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq. Jerrold Post, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University, told the New Yorker in 2002 that he found Hussein to be sane -- that is, in touch with reality -- but a psychopath, meaning he had a severe antisocial personality disorder causing a lack of empathy for others. Hussein's father and older brother died before he was born, causing his depressed mother to reject him and send him away to live with relatives for several years. She remarried; his new stepfather despised and abused him. With his self-esteem permanently damaged, Saddam Hussein compensated by developing "malignant narcissism," Post said, becoming prone to exaggerated retribution for perceived insults or slights. In addition, he was probably paranoid, as he displayed anobsession with conspiracies against his regime that may not have existed.

A leader who feels no empathy and is revenge-prone would theoretically be predisposed to using chemical weapons. And indeed, Hussein did so extensively. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, he used chemical weapons, including mustard gas and nerve agents, that caused an estimated 10,000 casualties. In March 1988, he attacked his own citizens with chemical weapons, killing and maiming thousands of civilians in the Kurdish town of Halabja. The town was in rebellion against his regime, fighting for an independent Kurdistan; Hussein's chemical weapons attack was his brutal retribution. In 2006, the Iraqi High Tribunal hung Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity.

Other despots with caches of chemical weapons included late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi and late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. In 1987 Qaddafi used chemical weaponsin a war against neighboring Chad. Post characterized him on Public Radio International as having a "borderline personality disorder." People with borderline personality disorders typically have severely distorted self-images and are prone to anger, frequent mood swings, and impulsive behavior. Causes for this condition: genetic predisposition, childhood neglect, and abuse.

Unfortunately, not much is known about Qaddafi's early years except that his parents were nomads, and that he dropped out of Benghazi University to join the army. As leader he had many bizarre habits, including wearing flamboyant clothes and, while traveling abroad, sleeping in a Bedouin tent guarded by dozens of armed female virgins. He also kidnapped and raped teenagers, as French journalist Annick Cojean has documented.

North Korea's belligerent late leader Kim Jong-il had several thousand tons of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, sarin, and other nerve agents, at his disposal. Post categorized him as having malignant narcissism based on his grandiose self-image and his lack of empathy for others. His father, dictator Kim Il-sung, surrounded his son with luxury and privilege, but the boy may have been scarred for life after his mother died when he was seven and his younger brother drowned. Whatever the effects, these tragedies did not give him empathy for others' pain; he had no difficulty torturing his own people, and North Korean defectors have revealed that he gassed people in concentration camps. If current Korean leader Kim Jong-un inherited his father's malignant narcissism, then we should be concerned that he may use chemical weapons.

Bashar al-Assad has been President of Syria since 2000, when he inherited the position from his father, Hafez al-Assad. He wasn't supposed to have become leader of Syria. His extroverted and flashy older brother Bassel was the heir apparent but died in a car crash. Trained as an ophthalmologist, Bashar al-Assad is a shy and retiring introvert whose personality doesn't match those of the dictators previously discussed. When his brother died, Bashar was called to assume a role he neither wanted nor had prepared for.

Many Syrians had hoped that Bashar, who had briefly lived in London, would be an open-minded and liberal leader, but their hopes were unrealistic. Bashar had to prove to his father's inner circle that he was capable of leading. In addition, his aggressive younger brother, Maher, was put in charge of the Republican Guard, the powerful domestic security service. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Bashar insisted that he didn't "own" Syria's security forces, distancing himself from his brother's actions. As president, he said, he didn't own the country. Bashar al-Assad doesn't appear to have malignant narcissism or a borderline personality disorder. Instead, he appears to be a weak leader hiding behind his brother's back. More

 

The Dogs of War Are Barking - The Urge to Bomb Iran

It’s the consensus among the pundits: foreign policy doesn’t matter in this presidential election. They point to the ways Republican candidate Mitt Romney has more or less parroted President Barack Obama on just about everything other than military spending and tough talk about another “American century.”

The consensus is wrong. There is an issue that matters: Iran.

Don’t be fooled. It’s not just campaign season braggadocio when Romney claims that he would be far tougher on Iran than the president by threatening “a credible military option.” He certainly is trying to appear tougher and stronger than Obama -- he of the drone wars, the “kill list,” and Bin Laden’s offing -- but it’s no hollow threat.

The Republican nominee has surrounded himself with advisors who are committed to military action and regime change against Iran, the same people who brought us the Global War on Terror and the Iraq War. Along with their colleagues in hawkish think tanks, they have spent years priming the public to believe that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program, making ludicrous claims about “crazy” mullahs nuking Israel and the United States, pooh-poohing diplomacy -- and getting ever shriller each time credible officials and analysts disagree.

Unlike with Iraq in 2002 and 2003, they have it easier today. Then, they and their mentors had to go on a sales roadshow, painting pictures of phantom WMDs to build up support for an invasion. Today, a large majority of Americans already believe that Iran is building nuclear weapons.

President Obama has helped push that snowball up the hill with sanctions toundermine the regime, covert and cyber warfare, and a huge naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Iran has ratcheted up tensions via posturing militarymaneuvers, while we have held joint U.S.-Israeli exercises and "the largest-ever multinational minesweeping exercise" there. Our navies are facing off in a dangerous dance.

Obama has essentially loaded the gun and cocked it. But he has kept his finger off the trigger, pursuing diplomacy with the so-called P5+1 talks andrumored future direct talks with the Iranians. The problem is: Romney’s guyswant to shoot.

Unlike Iraq, Iran Would Be an Easy Sell

Remember those innocent days of 2002 and 2003, when the war in Afghanistan was still new and the Bush administration was trying to sell an invasion of Iraq? I do. I was a Republican then, but I never quite bought the pitch. I never felt the urgency, saw the al-Qaeda connection, or worried about phantom WMDs. It just didn’t feel right. But Iran today? If I were still a Republican hawk, it would be “game on,” and I’d know I was not alone for three reasons.

First, even armchair strategists know that Iran has a lot of oil that is largely closed off to us. It reputedly has the fourth largest reserves on the planet. It also has a long coastline on the Persian Gulf, and it has the ability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, which would pinch off one of the world’s major energy arteries.

Then there is the fact that Iran has a special place in American consciousness. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the mullahs who run it have been a cultural enemy ever since revolutionary students toppled our puppet regime there and stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.1 The country is a theocracy run by angry-looking men with long beards and funny outfits. It has funded Hezbollah and Hamas. Its crowds call us the “Great Satan.” Its president denies the Holocaust and says stuff about wiping Israel off the map. Talk about a ready-made enemy.

Finally, well, nukes.

The public appears to be primed. A large majority of Americans believe that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program, 71% in 2010 and 84% this March. Some surveys even indicate that a majority of Americans would support military action to stop Iran from developing nukes. More

Note: Iran has apparently been a 'cultrual enemy' of the United States and the United Kingdom since the 19th August 1953.

Mohammad Mosaddegh or Mosaddeq (Persian: مُحَمَد مُصَدِق, IPA: [mohæmˈmæd(-e) mosædˈdeɣ] ( listen)*), also Mossadegh, Mossadeq, Mosadeck, or Musaddiq (16 June 1882 – 5 March 1967), was the democratically appointed ^[1][2][3] Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953 when his government was overthrown in a coup d'état orchestrated by the British MI5 and the CIA.

Mohammad Mosaddegh

An author, administrator, lawyer, prominent parliamentarian, he became the prime minister of Iran in 1951. His administration introduced a wide range of progressive social and political reforms such as social security, rent control, and land reforms.^[4] His government's most notable policy, however, was the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been under British control since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC) (later British Petroleum or BP).^[5]

Mosaddegh was removed from power in a coup on 19 August 1953, organised and carried out by the CIA at the request of the British MI6 which chose Iranian General Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Mosaddegh.^[6]

While the coup is commonly referred to as Operation Ajax^[7] after its CIA cryptonym, in Iran it is referred to as the 28 Mordad 1332 coup, after its date on the Iranian calendar.^[8] Mosaddegh was imprisoned for three years, then put under house arrest until his death. More

 

EU nuclear reactors need 10-25 bln euros of safety spending

BRUSSELS, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Europe's nuclear reactor fleet needs investment of 10 billion to 25 billion euros, a draft Commission report said, following a safety review designed to ensure there is never a repeat of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The report is expected to be finalised by Thursday and debated by EU ministers later this month.

After that, the Commission intends in 2013 to propose new laws, including on insurance and liability to "improve the situation of potential victims in the event of a nuclear accident", the draft seen by Reuters said.

Of the 134 EU nuclear reactors grouped across 68 sites, 111 have more than 100,000 inhabitants living within a circle of 30 kilometres.

Safety regimes vary greatly and the amount that needs to be spent to improve them is estimated at anywhere between 30 million euros and 200 million euros per reactor unit - or a total of 10-25 billion across the fleet.

The lesson of Fukushima was that two natural disasters could hit at the same time and knock out the electrical supply system of a plant completely, so it could not be cooled down.

The stress test findings include that four reactors, located in two different nations, have less than one hour available to restore safety functions if electrical power is lost. More

 

Nuclear reactor safety in the post-Fukushima world

Since the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011, there have been calls for increasing safety levels in nuclear plants worldwide. The incident in Japan was the fourth significant accident in the 55-year history of nuclear reactor operation.

The first occurred in 1957 at the Windscale reactor in the UK. Two decades later, in 1979, a reactor at Three Mile Island in the USA was severely damaged, though radioactive material releases were slight. The third incident is well-known: the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, Ukraine, where the destruction of a reactor by steam explosion, fire and core disruption had significant health and environmental consequences, mainly due to fission product release and dispersion, as well as a human death toll at the site itself.

But throughout the nuclear age, countries and international bodies have, of course, been developing a variety of approaches and systems to promote safety and minimize the risk of accidents. In the UK and US, for example, nuclear reactor safety has, since the latter part of the twentieth century, been based on a comprehensive risk assessment approach in which experts, at the design stage, identify what could go wrong—based on a detailed knowledge of the components, materials, energy flows and core neutronics.

The experts then identify the various paths that an accident might follow, taking into account the plant design and its safety features such as emergency shutdown control rods, emergency core cooling and pressure vessel strength. They also calculate probabilities for each scenario (how often in ten thousand years a given accident might happen). For each hypothetical accident, they calculate the likely release of radioactive materials and model what the consequences would be for human life, health and the environment. Once all the above is complete, the so-called ‘envelope of risks’ for the planned reactor can be examined. If any part of this represents a risk above that which is judged to be tolerable, improvements can be made.

A landmark event in the UK was the Public Enquiry into the construction of a pressurised water reactor at the existing nuclear site at Sizewell. This enquiry revealed that neither the operators nor the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate had a numerical basis for comparing the tolerability of risks from nuclear reactors to such things as deaths from earthquakes, aircraft crashes and lightning strikes. The Sizewell enquiry was adjourned until these things were developed and approved. The result was two seminal documents: ‘The Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations HSE, London 1988 (revised 1992)’; and ‘Safety Assessment Principles for Nuclear Facilities (revised as 2006 Edition, Revision 1, HSE, Bootle, UK).

The US has also engaged in studying these issues. The latest document is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses, which analyzed the potential consequences of severe accidents at the Surry Power Station, Virginia, and the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania as real examples of nuclear reactors. The project combined up-to-date information about the plants’ layout and operations with local population data and emergency preparedness plans. This information was then analyzed using computer codes that incorporate decades of research into reactor accidents. More

 

International Experts' Meeting to Discuss Protecting Nuclear Power Plants from Natural Hazards

The importance of protecting nuclear power plants (NPPs) from extreme natural hazards remains a priority for the nuclear power industry. In this light, the International Experts' Meeting (IEM) on Protection Against Extreme Earthquakes and Tsunamis in the Light of the Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is being convened by the IAEA under the framework of the IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety.

This meeting will take place in Vienna, Austria from 4 to 7 September 2012. More than 120 experts and government officials from 37 countries, from regulatory bodies, utilities, technical support organizations, academic institutions, vendors and research and development organizations will participate in the meeting.

The IEM will discuss technical developments and research programmes in site evaluation and nuclear plant safety, particularly as they relate to extreme natural hazards such as earthquake and tsunamis.

The IEM will provide an opportunity to share lessons learned from recent extreme natural events, including the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 11 March 2011. This earthquake and associated tsunami affected the Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushima Daini, Tokai and Onagawa NPPs in Japan and triggered the accident at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

This was the first NPP accident to arise from the combined hazards of ground motion and flooding. It highlighted the importance of preparing not only for a single external hazard, but also the combined effect of multiple external hazards, in the safety assessment of NPPs, and the measures for defence in depth. More

I must admit I find it strange that it has taken this long to convene this meeting. I raised the issue at a panel discussion last March at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. Granted the official Japanese report was only released eight weeks ago but.... Editor

Negotiating Nuclear Cooperation Agreements- Mark Hibbs

The United States is currently negotiating bilateral agreements for peaceful nuclear cooperation under Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act—so-called 123 agreements—with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Vietnam. At some point—thus far no decision has been taken when—the United States will begin a fifth such negotiation, with Taiwan.

The negotiations with South Korea and Taiwan are to renew agreements set to expire in 2014, while the others are new. All five states want to deploy nuclear power reactors for electricity generation in the coming years and they seek benefits that would accrue from a formal legal framework for conducting its nuclear trade and diplomacy with the United States.

Although the Atomic Energy Act establishes criteria that 123 agreements must meet in order to conform to U.S. law without special Congressional consideration, for all of these negotiations to succeed the language and terms written into the five agreements will have to differ quite significantly. Why? Because the interest calculus and leverage balance of the two parties in each case won’t be the same.

Progress in negotiating these agreements has been held up because of a contentious two-year interagency debate in the United States over how to proceed in trying to limit the spread of uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing (so-called ENR) capabilities worldwide. In 2009, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) concluded a 123 agreement that said it would not “engage in activities within its territory” for ENR. The UAE agreement also indicated that the no-ENR provision was to be included in future 123 agreements for countries in the Middle East.

Some administration officials, supported by lawmakers, sought to universalize the UAE no-ENR provision as a “gold standard” for all future agreements, but others preferred instead to apply it on a limited case-by-case basis. More