Nuclear dangers rise with oil costs

Countries rush to atomic power

David R. Sands (Contact)
Tuesday, June 17, 2008

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jun/17/nuclear-dangers-rise-with-oil-costs/

The rush of countries seeking to obtain nuclear power as the price of oil soars is going to make U.S. efforts to contain nuclear proliferation and keep terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction even harder, the Energy Department's top intelligence chief warned Monday.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former top CIA analyst who heads the Energy Department's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, said the coming global boom in nuclear power is forcing the U.S. government to rethink old proliferation strategies and take a hard look at the countries joining the nuclear club.

"The power of the atom has become one of the most highly sought-after prizes of 21st-century technological advancement," Mr. Mowatt-Larssen said in a rare public address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"States want to harness its power for energy, weapons, deterrence and prestige. Sub-state actors desire it for the asymmetric power of becoming a state, at least in terms of the influence they are able to wield."

Nearly 280 small-scale nuclear research reactors can be found in 56 countries, he said.

The dangers of nuclear proliferation were underscored with revelations over the weekend that plans for a small nuclear device were found on laptop computers traced to the nuclear smuggling operation run by disgraced Pakistani researcher A.Q. Khan, whose international network was thought to have been shut down four years ago.

Officials say they are still trying to determine who might have seen the weapons blueprints.

Mr. Mowatt-Larssen did not directly address the new charges against the Pakistani scientist, but said the task for intelligence agents had grown more difficult with the nuclear boom.

Countries across the Middle East and Asia have announced plans in recent months to establish domestic nuclear programs, for both economic and strategic reasons.

A study by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies found that virtually every Middle Eastern nation save Iraq had expressed interest in nuclear power, in part, analysts said, because of the fear that Iran was pursuing a nuclear bomb.

"If Tehran's nuclear program is unchecked, there is reason for concern that it could in time prompt a regional cascade of proliferation among Iran's neighbors," the report said.

Much of President Bush's weeklong European trip that ended Monday focused on rallying international opinion against Iran's nuclear programs. Tehran claims its nuclear programs are for peaceful civilian uses.

"For each new country that develops a civil nuclear program, we should re-evaluate that country's leadership intent, its technology base, security practices, economic and social standing, and tradition of law and order and then reformulate our own nuclear, economic, technology, political and deterrence policies in response," Mr. Mowatt-Larssen said.

The old narrow focus on keeping nuclear materials and know-how out of the hands of known terrorists is not enough, said Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, who added that the new nonproliferation strategy must focus on what he called "all things nuclear."

"We must make a strategic shift from our traditional views of terrorism, proliferation, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy as being separate entities and instead view them as parts of a single framework of all things nuclear," he said.

Report on Pakistani Smugglers Fuels Nuke Worries

by Tom Gjelten

For NPR

Morning Edition, June 17, 2008 · A top weapons expert says blueprints for a sophisticated nuclear bomb may have been passed in recent years to Iran or North Korea — or even to terrorist groups. Publish Post

David Albright, a former United Nations arms inspector, released a report Monday on a smuggling ring headed by A.Q. Khan, the engineer who once presided over Pakistan's nuclear program. Khan and his partners are said to have obtained detailed designs for a small but powerful nuclear weapon, apparently with the idea of selling the plans on the black market.

The bomb blueprints were discovered in 2006, but their existence has only now been made public. They were found on computers belonging to three Swiss businessmen under investigation for their ties to the smuggling ring directed by Khan, who is under house arrest for having sold nuclear secrets to Libya and other countries.

Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, has been following the Khan case for several years. It originally appeared that Khan was peddling only an outdated Chinese bomb. But when investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency examined the computer files, according to Albright, they found plans matching a nuclear weapon developed by Pakistan in the late 1990s.

"They figured that Khan took something from his own country's nuclear arsenal — which is treason, under anybody's laws — and was willing to sell it to other countries or other persons," Albright says.

The Pakistani government claims it shut down Khan's smuggling network in 2004. But U.S. officials have hinted recently that elements of the network may still be active. Albright says the files found on the Swiss computers suggest that the black market activity that originated with Khan went on even after Khan was put under house arrest.

"You see a collection of 50 people involved in this, and these are people who are in the — for many of them, they're in the business of buying and selling. They're middlemen, they're traders," Albright says. "They work in secret often, and so you have to worry that many of these people that really have not been the subject of investigations or public attention just continued, waited a while and then continued. There's no sense that this whole operation really shut down."

The big question raised by the discovery of the bomb blueprints is whether Iran got the plans. The U.S. intelligence community reported in December that Iran apparently suspended research into the design of a nuclear warhead five years ago. Albright says if Iran at that point had the blueprints for a sophisticated device, it may have felt it could afford to hold off on further weaponization research.

But Albright emphasizes that there's no evidence that Iran actually acquired those bomb blueprints. Investigators for the IAEA have been studying documents on an Iranian laptop recovered by the CIA. But Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told the IAEA board last month that not much had been found on that laptop: only a document suggesting that the Iranians were working on a uranium metal design, possibly for a nuclear weapon.

"The agency currently has no information, apart from the Iranian metal document, on the actual design or manufacture by Iran of nuclear material components or of other key components of a nuclear weapon," ElBaradei said.

It's also conceivable that the bomb blueprints found on the Swiss computers were sold to terrorists — or to anyone with the cash to buy them. Albright notes that the bomb design was in electronic form and therefore could have been reproduced many times.

"You're left with a very unsettled feeling that they may have hidden some, others may have gotten it and have it now, and you have in the black market electronic detailed nuclear weapon designs that could be of interest to a lot of people," he says.

In a speech Monday in Washington, D.C., the intelligence chief for the U.S. Department of Energy, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, declined to comment on the Khan case. But he warned that the United States and its allies "have not done enough to keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists."

Ring may have shared nuclear weapon plans

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/15/nuclear.ring.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An international smuggling ring may have secretly shared blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon with Iran, North Korea and other rogue countries, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

The smuggling ring was led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The now-defunct ring led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan is previously known to have sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

A draft report by former top U.N. arms inspector David Albright says the smugglers also acquired designs for building a more sophisticated compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and other developing countries, according to the Post.

The drawings were discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen; they were recently destroyed by the Swiss government under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to keep them out of terrorists' hands. But U.N. officials said they couldn't rule out that the material had already been shared.

"These advanced nuclear weapons designs may have long ago been sold off to some of the most treacherous regimes in the world," Albright wrote in the draft report, which was expected to be published later this week, the Post reported.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, Nadeem Kiani, did not rebut the report's findings.

"The government of Pakistan has adequately investigated allegations of nuclear proliferation by A.Q. Khan and shared the information with" the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, Kiani told the Post. "It considers the A.Q. Khan affair to be over."

In Vienna, a senior diplomat said the IAEA had knowledge of the existence of a sophisticated nuclear weapons design being peddled electronically by the black-market ring as far back as 2005. The diplomat, who is familiar with the investigations into the A.Q. Khan network, spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the issue.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei had made it public knowledge back then and had expressed concern about who potentially had come in possession of the information.

The diplomat referred a reporter to a transcript of a panel discussion on November 7, 2005, where ElBaradei spoke of at least one weapons design being copied by the Khan network onto a CD-ROM "that went somewhere that we haven't seen" and added, "That gives you an indication of ... how much the technology had [been] disseminated."