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His words are not reassuring in light of the Taliban's military and political gains throughout Pakistan. Our security, and that of friends and allies world-wide, depends critically on preventing more adversaries, especially ones with otherworldly ideologies, from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unless there is swift, decisive action against the Islamic radicals there, Pakistan faces two very worrisome scenarios.

IRAN has once again defied the United Nations by proceeding with enrichment activities, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported yesterday. And yet, simultaneously, Iranian officials have been sending a very different message — one that has gone largely unremarked but merits close attention. After a meeting with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader’s chief foreign policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, declared last week that suspending uranium enrichment is not a red line for the regime — in other words, the mullahs might be ready to agree to some kind of a suspension. Another powerful insider, Ali Akbar Hashemi...

THE North Korean nuclear test — if that indeed is what it was — signals the catastrophic collapse of a dozen years of American policy. Over that period, two of the world’s most dangerous regimes, Pakistan and North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them. Iran, arguably the most dangerous of them all, will surely follow, unless some dramatic action is soon taken. It is, alas, an iron law of modern diplomacy that the failure of any diplomatic process only proves the need for more of the process that has just failed. Thus those who have...

VIENNA, Aug. 31 — The global nuclear monitoring agency deepened suspicions on Thursday about Iran’s nuclear program, reporting that inspectors had discovered new traces of highly enriched uranium at an Iranian facility. Inspectors have found such uranium, which at extreme enrichment levels can fuel bombs, twice in the past. The International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that at least some of those samples came from contaminated equipment that Iran had obtained from Pakistan. But in this case, the nuclear fingerprint of the particles did not match the other samples, an official familiar with the inspections said, raising questions about their origin....

Of all the claims that Iran made last week about its nuclear program, a one-sentence assertion by its president has provoked such surprise and concern among international nuclear inspectors they are planning to confront Tehran about it this week. The assertion involves Iran's claim that even while it begins to enrich small amounts of uranium, it is pursuing a far more sophisticated way of making atomic fuel that American officials and inspectors say could speed Iran's path to developing a nuclear weapon. Iran has consistently maintained that it abandoned work on this advanced technology, called the P-2 centrifuge, three years...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — In March 2004, the science and technology directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency called a secret meeting of hundreds of the government's top experts in nuclear intelligence to address a problem that had bedeviled Washington for decades: how to know, with precision, when a country is about to cross the line and gain the ability to build an atomic bomb. The aim of the two-day conference was to reinvigorate the nation's atomic espionage efforts, not with spies on the ground or satellites in space but with a new generation of advanced technologies meant to detect the...

Fifty-one years ago today, in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, an influentual New York-based think tank, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles outlined what became known as the policy of massive retaliation. He explained to his listeners that the US would no longer allow itself to be drawn into conventional regional conflicts such as the Korean War--or, for that matter, Vietnam--but would reserve the right to respond to Communist aggression with "massive rataliatory poser" applied at places and with means of its own choosing--or, in other words, nuclear weapons might be used directly against the Soviet...

India's vote in favour of the IAEA resolution on Iran nuclear programme was an "encouraging and significant" step which indicated the evolving nature of US-India relationship, a leading US daily on Sunday said, while warning some American officials and lawmakers against creating the appearance of having pressurised New Delhi for its stance. Asking legislators like Congressman Tom Lantos not to "brag" about 'pushing' India and advising American officials to avoid the crude appearance of a quid pro quo of Indian vote for access to US civilian nuclear technology, The Washington Times said India had surprised even the most vigilant observers...

BEIJING, Friday, July 15 - China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the American military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday. "If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," the official, Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, said at an official briefing. General Zhu, considered a hawk, stressed that his comments reflected his personal views and not official policy. Beijing has long insisted that it will not initiate the use of nuclear weapons...

In its 12 Nov 2001 issue, Time ran this brief article on page 31. Hugh Sidey—the magazine's Washington Contributing Editor—has been covering the presidency for Life and Time since 1957. In this snippet, he reveals that JFK told him in 1961 that the Soviet Union has a nuclear bomb in its embassy in Washington, DC. In my book, this counts as a major revelation, yet there are several factors that indicate that this piece was created in a way that minimizes its impact. And that's exactly what happened: minimal impact. A sitting president told a White House reporter that...

In his book "The Ideas That Conquered the World," Michael Mandelbaum tells a story about a young girl who is eating dinner at a friend's house and her friend's mother asks her if she likes brussels sprouts. "Yes, of course," the girl says. "I like brussels sprouts." After dinner, though, the mother notices that the girl hasn't eaten a single sprout. "I thought you liked brussels sprouts," the mother said. "I do," answered the girl, "but not enough to actually eat them." Mr. Mandelbaum, who teaches foreign policy at Johns Hopkins, related that story to me during a conversation about...

Worried that the nation's aging nuclear arsenal is increasingly fragile, American scientists have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives, federal officials and private experts say. The officials say the program could help shrink the arsenal and the high cost of its maintenance. But critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and could possibly ignite a new arms race. So far, the quiet effort involves only $9 million for warhead designers at the nation's three nuclear weapon laboratories,...

DAVOS, Switzerland - The world needs an effort similar to that behind the creation of the atomic bomb to tackle the multi-faceted threat of biowarfare, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday. "We need to do something that even dwarfs the Manhattan project," Frist told the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Manhattan project was the codename for the United States's World War II effort to devise an atomic weapon. "The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat it has the power of panic and paralysis to be global."...

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been given to Kerry from the pro-Iranian lobby, possibly influencing the presidential candidate's startling call to provide Tehran with the nuclear fuel it seeks, according to Iran's Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy chairman Aryo Pirouznia. With top Iranian officials openly calling for the development of nuclear weapons within the next four months and overwhelming intelligence indicating Iran is seeking to create a nuclear arsenal, Kerry has been insisting as president he would provide Tehran with nuclear fuel as long as it is used for peaceful purposes only, a position that has many Middle...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR While the final report from Charles A. Duelfer, the top American inspector of Iraq's covert weapons programs, won't be released for a few weeks, the portions that have already been made public touch on many of the experiences I had while working as the head of Saddam Hussein's nuclear centrifuge program. Now that I am living in the United States, I hope to answer some of the most important questions that remain. What was really going in Iraq before the American invasion last year? Iraq's nuclear weapons program was on the threshold of success before the 1991 invasion...

EMMETT, Idaho, Aug. 31 - In the 1950's and early 1960's, at the height of the cold war, people in this southeastern Idaho town thought what they occasionally saw dusting their fruit orchards and cow pastures was frost - only it was not cold to the touch, several longtime residents said. Others described it as a gray-white powder that seemed to come out of nowhere. The residents of this town of dairy and cattle farmers did not know it then, but half a century ago, northern winds blew radioactive fallout into southeastern Idaho when the federal government set off about...

If a 10-kiloton terrorist nuclear weapon explodes beside the New York Stock Exchange or the U.S. Capitol, or in Times Square, as many nuclear experts believe is likely in the next decade, then the next 9/11 commission will write a devastating critique of how we allowed that to happen. As I wrote in my last column, there is a general conviction among many experts - though, in fairness, not all - that nuclear terrorism has a better-than-even chance of occurring in the next 10 years. Such an attack could kill 500,000 people. Yet U.S. politicians have utterly failed to face...

WASHINGTON, May 23 - The discovery that North Korea may have supplied uranium to Libya poses an immediate challenge to the White House: while President Bush is preoccupied on the other side of the world, an economically desperate nation may be engaging in exactly the kind of nuclear proliferation that the president says he went to war in Iraq to halt. Yet to listen to many in the White House, concern about North Korea's nuclear program brings little of the urgency that surrounded the decision 14 months ago to oust Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush has been asked about North...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 — North Korea will be offered economic aid in return for a pledge to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities, according to senior Asian and American officials. But they said the offer was expected to be presented by South Korea, not the United States, in talks beginning on Wednesday in Beijing. The informal agreement between Washington and its Asian partners on how to approach North Korea represents a partial retreat by the Bush administration, which has long insisted that it would not reward the North for simply freezing its nuclear weapons program. Administration officials argue...

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Feb. 20 -- The Sri Lankan businessman who was an associate of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has told Malaysian police how Khan shipped components to Libya and Iran for their nuclear weapons programs and received two briefcases with a $3 million payment from Iran, a Malaysian police report disclosed Friday. In an insider's account of Khan's operation, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir said that Khan asked him to send two shipping containers of used centrifuges -- sophisticated equipment for enriching uranium -- to Iran from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, aboard a merchant vessel owned by an...

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran hid designs for centrifuges capable of producing material for nuclear bombs from the U.N. atomic watchdog, diplomats said on Thursday. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said it was clear what Tehran was up to. "There's no doubt in our mind that Iran continues to pursue a nuclear weapons program," said Bolton, described by diplomats in Vienna as one of Washington's hardest hard-liners. But Russia defied U.S. pressure to sever nuclear ties with the Islamic Republic as Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev said Moscow would sign a deal with Iran next month to ship nuclear...

The father of Pakistan's atomic weapons programme last night admitted on national television that he had illegally traded nuclear secrets to other countries. Contradicting reports from recent days, Abdul Qadeer Khan also claimed that he had done so without the knowledge of the government. Speculation is now mounting that Dr Khan may not be prosecuted. A former army chief, Mirza Aslam Beg, an ally of Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, yesterday told the Guardian he believed Dr Khan would have to be kept out of court "because he knows too much". Mr Beg added: "If [Dr] Khan had appeared in a...

Iran, Libya Aided Via Black Market, Investigation Finds KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan. 27 -- Pakistani investigators have concluded that two senior nuclear scientists used a network of middlemen operating a black market to supply nuclear weapons technology to Iran and Libya, according to three senior Pakistani intelligence officials. Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, and Mohammed Farooq provided the help -- including blueprints for equipment used to enrich uranium -- both directly and through a black market based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, the officials said. The middlemen, from South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, Sri...

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 23 — The head of the United Nations' watchdog agency on atomic weapons said today that the global black market of nuclear-related material and equipment had grown to the point that it amounted to "a Wal-Mart" for weapons-seeking countries. Mohamed M. ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he was taken aback during a recent trip to Libya by the scale and complexity of the illicit trafficking through which it obtained material and blueprints for nuclear weapons designs. "All of that was obtained abroad," he said in an interview during the World Economic Forum...

<p>Pakistan is the weak link in the war on terror.</p> <p>In the war on terror, the world's weakest link is undoubtedly Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. The general's close-call survival of two assassination attempts in two weeks suggests the Bush Administration needs a strategy that looks beyond his strongman rule.</p>

VIENNA - "Obviously, the smaller the country is, the more concerned it will be," says Daniela Rozgonova, who is responsible for external and media relations at the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). Her office is in the Vienna International Center, a high-rise compound that looks out over the Danube and is home to the head offices of several UN-affiliated organizations. Although her words may be interpreted as an implied criticism of Israel, they are primarily directed at a description of the facts: the treaty, which bans nuclear testing at sea, in the atmosphere, on...

BBC Anti-Semitic? Israeli Government Lashes Out at Controversial Report June 30, 2003 By Toby Westerman Copyright 2003 International News Analysis Today www.inatoday.com A British Broadcasting Corporation report is drawing the wrath of the Israeli government, which hurled charges of anti-Semitism and threats of retribution against the British broadcaster, according to a report from the online version of the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel.

Los Alamos National Laboratory on Friday formally dedicated a new supercomputer called "Q," billed as the next step in the U.S. Department of Energy's efforts to maintain the nation's nuclear-weapons stockpile. The $215 million computer, complete with its own $93-million building, is only partially installed, but lab officials say the machine should have a peak capacity of more than 30 trillion operations per second once it is fully operational later this year. Compaq - recently acquired by Hewlett-Packard - is building the machine. Officials said Q would be the second-fastest supercomputer in the world because Japan recently unveiled a...