Powell Says WMD Report Justifies Iraq Invasion

The recently released findings of David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group support the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a Washington Post commentary today (see GSN, Oct. 6).

While Powell acknowledges that the team has not found any weapons of mass destruction, he said the evidence shows that Iraq harbored the desire to build illicit weapons.

“What we now know as result of David Kay’s efforts confirms that [deposed Iraqi President Saddam] Hussein had every intention of continuing his work on banned weapons despite the U.N. inspectors, and that we and our coalition partners were right to eliminate the danger that his regime posed to the world.”

Powell cited the discovery of “strains of organisms” in a scientist’s refrigerator as evidence of hidden efforts to retain a biological weapons capability.  He also said Iraq was developing illicit missiles with a range of 250 kilometers, 100 kilometers further than was allowed under U.N. regulations.

The invasion was justified, Powell said, merely because Kay had discovered personnel, technology and networks that could increase global proliferation.

Powell called the former Iraqi regime “evil” and said it was “in deepening material breach of its Security Council obligations” (Colin Powell, Washington Post, Oct. 7).

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Central Asian States Postpone Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Meeting

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Efforts to create a nuclear weapon-free zone in Central Asia have been delayed once again because of lingering differences among the five countries involved in negotiating the agreement, a senior U.N. disarmament official told Global Security Newswire yesterday (see GSN, July 22).

The five Central Asian nations — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — had been expected to meet in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent last month to develop a joint response to comments on a draft zone treaty previously provided by four of the five declared nuclear weapons states.  The Tashkent meeting has been postponed, however, because the Central Asian countries have been unable to agree on how to respond to the various comments, said Tsutomu Ishiguri, director of the U.N. Regional Center for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific.

The postponement of the September meeting has further delayed a process that had been expected to be completed in October of last year.  The five Central Asian states had also expected to sign the zone treaty in April.  While the five nuclear weapons states cannot prevent the creation of the zone, the Central Asian states have requested that they sign a protocol to the treaty stating that they agree to respect it.

Ishiguri said that a new approach had been proposed to the Central Asian states to help resolve the differences among them regarding the comments proposed by the nuclear weapons states.  Under the new approach, the Central Asian countries would agree to revert back to the draft treaty text, taking into account advice that has been offered by the U.N. Office of Legal Affairs and the International Atomic Energy Agency, if they could not all agree to accept a particular comment, thereby rejecting it, he said.  A meeting is being planned for either late January or February to see if this approach is acceptable to the Central Asian states, Ishiguri said. 

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Bush Hopes Wilson Investigation Will Stop Leaks

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — U.S. President George W. Bush said yesterday that he hoped a current Justice Department investigation into the leak of the identity of a CIA operative would help ward off future leaks of such information (see GSN, Oct. 6).

The department is currently investigating the leak of the identity and CIA status of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had previously criticized some of the evidence offered by the Bush administration to justify Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

During a joint White House press conference with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki yesterday, Bush reiterated his pledge to fully cooperate with the leak investigation.

“I have told my staff I want full cooperation with the Justice Department.  And when they ask for information, we expect the information to be delivered on a timely basis.  I expect it to be delivered on a timely basis.  I want there to be full participation, because … I am most interested in finding out the truth,” Bush said.

USA Today reported today that White House staff members have until 5 p.m. today to turn over materials that might be relevant to the investigation or to sign a statement saying they had no such materials.  The paper quoted White House press secretary Scott McClellan as saying that “several hundred” staffers had already done so by last night. 

McClellan promised again yesterday that whoever was responsible for the leak would be punished.

“I think I made that very clear last week.  The topic came up, and I said that if anyone in this administration was responsible for the leaking of classified information, they would no longer work in this administration,” McClellan said during a White House press briefing.

Congressional Democrats have called for the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the investigation due to possible conflicts of interest between Justice and the White House.  Bush yesterday, however, said he was confident that the department was the proper agency to handle the leak investigation.

“I’ve got all the confidence in the world the Justice Department will do a good, thorough job.  And that’s exactly what I want them to do, is a good, thorough job,” Bush said.

An investigation is also currently being held as to whether the leak of Wilson’s wife’s identity had an impact on national security, McClellan said yesterday.  Bush said that he hoped the Justice investigation into the leak would help prevent further unauthorized releases of sensitive information.

“There’s a lot of leaking in Washington, D.C. It’s a town famous for it,” Bush said.  “This investigation in finding the truth, it will not only hold someone to account who should not have leaked — and this is a serious charge, by the way.  We’re talking about a criminal action, but also hopefully will help set a clear signal we expect other leaks to stop, as well.  And so I look forward to finding the truth,” he added.

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Iran Gives IAEA List of Imported Nuclear Equipment

Tehran has submitted some new information about its imported nuclear equipment to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a senior Iranian official said yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 6).

“We have already given a list of imported parts that were bought through intermediaries, and we are in the process of finishing this list,” said Iranian IAEA representative Ali Akbar Salehi.

IAEA inspectors have discovered traces of enriched uranium on nuclear equipment, but Iran claims the equipment was already tainted when it was brought into the country (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Oct. 6).

A team of IAEA inspectors began a series of inspections Friday, shortly after reaching an agreement with Iranian officials on a list of eligible sites.  The inspectors did not disclose if they were granted access to all the sites they wished to examine (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News II, Oct. 6).

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said today that Iran has no intention of pulling out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, as some hard-line Iranian clerics have advocated.

“We are currently negotiating with the IAEA so that our rights are not held up for ridicule and so that nobody infringes our country’s prestige,” he said.  “We have nothing to fear from inspections.  When one has nothing to hide, one has no reason to worry,” Kharazi added (Stefan Smith, Agence France-Presse, Oct. 7).

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Brazil Announces Uranium Enrichment Plans

Brazil will begin enriching uranium in 2004 for its civilian nuclear energy program and could possibly export uranium in coming years, Brazilian Science and Technology Minister Roberto Amaral said Monday (see GSN, Jan. 14).

The United States and Argentina are likely to be concerned about the Brazilian move and Brasilia’s nuclear program, Reuters reported.

The decision was endorsed by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, according to Amaral.

“This is something that could not be decided against the president’s will,” Amaral said.

If Brazil begins enrichment it could potentially produce a nuclear weapon, but a presidential spokesman said the country’s nuclear research is “solely and exclusively for peaceful purposes.”

In the 1980s, Brazilian officials announced that they had the capability to enrich uranium, but they have not done so to date.  By 2014, Brazil wants to produce enough uranium for the country’s two nuclear power plants and export the surplus, according to Amaral (Reuters/Forbes, Oct. 6).

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North Korea Rejects Japanese Participation in Nuclear Talks

North Korea today said it would not agree to future multilateral talks that include Japan and accused Japanese leaders of exploiting the nuclear crisis negotiations for political or financial gain (see GSN, Oct. 6).

“A spokesman for the D.P.R.K. Foreign Ministry said in a statement today that the D.P.R.K. would not allow Japan to participate in any form of negotiations for the settlement of the nuclear issue in the future,” according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea also accused Japanese officials of harboring “black-hearted intention.”

Pyongyang is reportedly angry that Tokyo wants to discuss the issue of kidnapped Japanese citizens.  North Korea has admitted to kidnapping Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s.

Japan has refused to exclude the issue from the talks.

“The nuclear issue is not a bilateral issue between Japan and North Korea, but is of serious consequence to the region and the international community,” said Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hatsuhisa Takashima.  “We do not accept any notion that a certain country in the six-party talks can be banned by any other party.  The six-party talks are formed with the participation of those countries that are gravely concerned with the issue,” Takashima added (Martin Nesirky, Reuters/Washington Post, Oct. 7).

Pyongyang said Japan is no longer “a trusty dialogue partner.”

Chinese, Japanese and South Korea officials met today at an Indonesian regional forum and agreed to continue to cooperate on the Korean nuclear crisis (BBC.com, Oct. 7).

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Former U.S. Official Alleges Lax Security at Nuclear Weapons Labs

A former U.S. security tester accused the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories of pervasive security lapses, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Sept. 23, 2002).

“Some of the facilities would fail year after year,” said Rich Levernier, who spent six years running war games for the United States and was quoted in a Vanity Fair article.  “In more than 50 percent of our tests at the Los Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn’t fire a shot, because we didn’t encounter any guards,” he added.

National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Anson Franklin denied the allegations yesterday and said that the Energy Department has increased its security measures.

“Allegations of a 50-percent failure rate in security tests are simply untrue,” Franklin said.

The Vanity Fair article also said that Levernier, a 22-year employee at the Energy Department, was stripped of his security clearance in 2001 after raising security concerns.  Franklin also denied these allegations (Associated Press/Washington Post, Oct. 7).

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Pentagon Sold Discount Equipment That Could Produce Biological Warfare Agents

After a U.S. auditors bought biological weapon-capable laboratory equipment from the Defense Department, the department suspended the sale of such items three weeks ago, CNN reported yesterday.

The Pentagon’s Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service had been publicly selling cut-price laboratory equipment that could be used to produce biological warfare agents, according to a draft U.S. General Accounting Office report.

The service sells surplus defense equipment, but it halted the sale of the equipment in question on Sept. 19 after GAO investigators formed a front company to purchase an evaporator, an incubator, centrifuge equipment and 300 to 400 biological protection suits, CNN reported.

“Many items needed to establish a laboratory for making biological warfare agents were being sold on the Internet to the public from DoD’s excess property inventory for pennies on the dollar, making them both easy and economical to obtain,” the draft report says.

The GAO front company spent “a little over $4,000” for equipment that the Pentagon originally purchased for $46,000, according to the report.

The equipment is largely available on the open market, but without the low price, according to CNN (Chris Plante, CNN.com, Oct. 6).

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Consultant Recommends Delaying in Ohio Chemical Disposal Plan

A U.S. Army contractor should not be allowed to dispose of a chemical weapons destruction byproduct in Montgomery County, Ohio, unless the Army resolves some existing quality control problems, an environmental consultant recommended this week (see GSN, Sept. 18).

County commissioners hired Northwestern University environmental engineering professor Bruce Rittmann to study the safety of the disposal project and a public hearing on the findings is scheduled for today.

Rittmann concluded that defense contractor Perma-Fix should resolve its current odor release and air pollution issues before processing a chemical byproduct of the Army’s effort to neutralize its VX nerve gas stockpile in Newport, Ind.  The company plans to treat the byproduct — hydrolysate — and then transfer the resulting material to the county’s wastewater treatment system.

Rittman’s report also recommends that Perma-Fix begin with small amounts of hydrolysate and increase the volume if the effort proceeds safely.  Rittmann wants the early phases of the process to take place at the Army stockpile in Newport, Ind., to decrease the danger to the nearby Dayton community.

“The real test is how they respond to this input and whether they can take a constructive approach,” Rittmann said of defense officials.  “If they think they can’t improve on it, maybe they need (to take) another path,” he added.

The Montgomery County commissioners voted against the Army’s plan in June, but there is a chance the Pentagon could push forward with the disposal work anyway (Jim Debrosse, Dayton Daily News, Oct. 5).

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Agency Web Site Touts Ball Game as Missile Defense Model

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is using a ball game to instruct Web surfers about national missile defense, but agency critics say the game fails as an analogy of a missile interception and is no fun.

The game involves throwing two “synthetic foam (or equivalent) soft-sided balls” at each other ― one designated “the target missile” and the other “the interceptor” ― to illustrate that “missile defense is very difficult to accomplish.”  The instructions feature diagrams illustrating boost-phase, midcourse and terminal-phase interceptions.

The agency posted instructions for playing the game about a year ago as part of a redesign of its Web site, according to MDA spokesman Chris Taylor, “just for the casual Web surfer.”

“We frankly have thought, as we redesign the Web, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to put some things out there for a younger audience and people that surf the Web?’”  Taylor said.

GlobalSecurity.org Director John Pike said the simple game illustrates that the United States has been spending far too much on less cost-effective missile defense activities.

“I’m surprised they didn’t have the video game [Missile Command].  As long as they’re having games, that’s a good one,” Pike added.

The game is “silly,” said Union of Concerned Scientists Global Security Program Co-Director David Wright, because the agency’s analogy with missile defense does not hold up.

“The reason that intercepting in ballistic missile defense is hard is not for the reason this simple experiment is hard,” he said.

The game fails to illustrate key issues faced by missile defense developers, Wright said.  For starters, “there’s no guidance on the [interceptor] ball,” he said.  In addition, the shape and size of target ball are known, the target has no countermeasures and the interceptor does not need to maneuver in difficult atmospheric re-entry conditions, Wright said.

“So the actual missile defense problem is in some ways more difficult … than this problem because of all those things, but it’s a very different set of reasons than what this illustrates.  So it seems to me that this little thing that they’re trying to talk about here just sort of misses the point from a physical point of view,” Wright said.

MDA spokesman Taylor suggested the agency created the game in part to keep up with Web site features produced by other U.S. agencies.

“You look at the NASA Web site, and you look at all the stuff they’ve got, and it’s like, ‘Wow,’” he said.

A five-launch Global Security Newswire test of the game resulted in four misses and one midcourse hit that failed to significantly alter the path of the target.

Said GlobalSecurity.org’s Pike of MDA’s bid to spruce up its site, “They’ve got too much time on their hands.  I mean, it’s not even a good game.”

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Nations Advocate Multilateralism as U.N. Disarmament Committee Opens

By Jim Wurst
Global Security Newswire

UNITED NATIONS — The annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly’s disarmament committee opened yesterday with key non-nuclear weapons states and U.N. officials defending multilateral efforts on disarmament and security despite increasing cases of nations ignoring such instruments. Many nations also said nuclear proliferation can never be halted without progress in nuclear disarmament.

The new undersecretary general for disarmament, Nobuyasu Abe, opened the committee meeting, saying, “Given the urgent concern about the imminent spread of deadly weapons, it would not suffice merely to recite the norms of prohibition. But we need urgently to explore practical ways to strengthen international peace and security through multilateral cooperation.”

“As in any system of law, the various multilateral instruments and institutions in the fields of disarmament, nonproliferation, and arms control depend upon three essential conditions,” he said. The first condition is that instruments must be accepted as legitimate, he said, and second, “there must be compliance with the most vital norms and ways to monitor it.” The third condition is that “there must be some credible means of enforcing such norms if and when they are violated,” he added.

“If any one of these conditions has not been adequately satisfied, we will continue to face difficulties in promoting multilateral cooperation and limiting the resort to unilateralism,” Abe said.

Committee chairman Ambassador Jarmo Sareva of Finland said some of the proliferation problems include more states acquiring nuclear weapons or allegations of states trying to acquire them, the development of new weapons that do not fall under any existing international regime, such as space-based weapons, and nuclear weapons states not eliminating their stocks.

These problems have “both contributed to and been exacerbated by a crisis of confidence in multilateralism and the rule of law in international relations,” he said.

While there is no single solution, said Sareva, it is “a challenge that will require many tools.”

“We must neither turn a blind eye to the very real shortcomings in some existing multilateral approaches to international peace and security, nor — be it out of frustration or out of design — cast aside longstanding multilateral norms and security frameworks simply because a tiny minority of states has chosen to flout them,” he said.

Ambassador Sergio Queiroz Duarte of Brazil, speaking for the New Agenda Coalition, said, “To attain a nuclear weapon free world, it is vital to prevent nuclear proliferation, and at the same time it is imperative to promote nuclear disarmament.”

The New Agenda Coalition is an ad hoc group of seven states — Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, and Sweden — promoting steps toward nuclear disarmament, in terms of commitment made in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Duarte said the coalition was concerned that India, Pakistan and Israel remain outside of the NPT and that North Korea has announced its withdrawl from the treaty. While not criticizing the United States by name, Duarte listed several policy concerns that were clearly directed at Washington.

He said one “disturbing development” is the trend toward creating a “broader role of nuclear weapons as part of security strategies, including the rationalizations for the use and development of new types of weapons.”

The United States is scheduled to address the committee today.

Ambassador Nugroho Wisnumurti of Indonesia said he was concerned about the “declining role” of multilateralism since it is “a guarantor of legitimacy and democracy in tackling the global problems confronting us.” He was also “concerned over a new, untenable doctrine of preemption even against non-nuclear states,” Wisnumurti added.

In contrast, Ambassador Carlo Trezza of Italy, speaking for the European Union, placed much of his emphasis on nonproliferation, especially in the context of the NPT. “The EU regards the [NPT] as the cornerstone of the global nonproliferation regime and the essential foundation for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament.”

He called on India, Pakistan and Israel to adhere to the NPT, urged North Korea to “reconsider its course of action,” and said the Iranian nuclear program “remains a matter of grave concern.”

At a forum later in the day sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations, Duarte said, “The stress on just the nonproliferation aspect of the agenda tends to unbalance the agenda.” The focus on the possibility of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of other states or terrorists is “a challenge to the future, but we also have to recognize that the lack of progress and setbacks we have experienced in the field of disarmament, especially nuclear disarmament, are no less challenging,” he said.

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