Proliferation News

Experts fear nuke genie's out of bottle / Arms technology spreading beyond Iran, North Korea is an article from today's San Francisco Chronicle and provides an assessment of the state of nuclear weapons programs worldwide. The gist of the article is: "The concern is that legitimate facilities, built to develop what is called the nuclear fuel cycle, could be used to increase the concentrations of enriched uranium or for processing plutonium to make weapons-grade fuel. Not only is the technology for these processes widely available to countries rich and poor, but some of the equipment needed for the job, such as high-powered computers and precision machine tools, can now be purchased easily, experts say." What to make of this? Is it possible for a new diplomatic initiative or agreement to halt what seems to be a tipping point of proliferation? Will the Bush Administration's Proliferation Security Initiative be able to stop the shipment of nuclear and weapons materials? Sharing intelligence among the member countries of the initiative would seem to be a big stumbling block . . . On another nuke note, yesterday I mentioned the idea of small-yield bunker-busting nukes, and my hope that we are rapidly developing them. My hopes have been dashed. Dumb, dumb, dumb move. [See more on nukes here.]