Free Republic

Bill Safire’s column today advances the case that UN official Mohamed ElBaradei has attempted to influence an American election by circulating false or misleading information. (Whether he succeeds or not remains to be determined.) Money quote: ElBaradei “has long known about the presence of ‘nuclear trigger’ explosives (evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions?) in one of Iraq's thousands of ammo dumps. But, The Wall Street Journal reports that with exquisite political timing, on Oct. 1 ElBaradei sent a ‘reminder’ to a Baathist science minister renewing the U.N. interest in these particular explosives. That produced a dutiful letter from the Iraqi bureaucrat...

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - The hunt for middlemen who worked with the father of Pakistan's nuclear program to supply rogue regimes with weapons technology has widened to Japan and Africa, diplomats said Thursday. Suspects in Germany and two other European countries are also being investigated in the growing probe of the clandestine black market apparently headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan, they said. Also, Malaysia announced Thursday it would investigate a company controlled by the prime minister's son for its alleged role in supplying components to Libya's nuclear program. The company also has been linked to the international nuclear...

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said on Friday it appeared Pakistani scientists had sold nuclear secrets abroad, but reiterated Islamabad's position that there had been no official involvement. Pakistan says it began questioning its nuclear scientists, including the father of its atomic bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, after the U.N. nuclear agency began investigating possible links between the Pakistani and Iranian nuclear programs. Musharraf told CNN while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the investigation, launched in November, would be finished in "a few weeks." Asked the likely outcome, he replied: "Well, I would not...

<p>The United States intercepted an illegal shipment of thousands of parts of uranium-enrichment equipment bound for Libya in October, leading to Tripoli agreeing to cap its weapons program, U.S. officials confirmed yesterday.</p> <p>Senior State Department official John R. Bolton plans to fly to London today to make plans with Britain for holding Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to his pledge to dismantle his nuclear-weapons program.</p>

VIENNA: The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said on Friday that North Korea has been guilty of nuclear "blackmail" and could not be trusted, though he was encouraged by the six-country talks that took place in Beijing. "I don't think they can be trusted," head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IDEA) Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview on BBC television. "However, we would like to work with them and bring them back to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)." Pyongyang expelled the IAEA's inspectors at the start of the year and then withdrew from the NPT, the global pact...