Free Republic

With fears rising that the Islamic State is trying to obtain nuclear weapons, resident Obama will convene a global summit in Washington Thursday hampered by no-show Russia, a key target in the U.S. effort to lock down vulnerable atomic materials. ... Pakistan, another nuclear power causing major proliferation concerns for the U.S., is sending a lower-level representative after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif canceled his attendance to grapple with a horrific terrorist attack targeting Christians on Easter Sunday. Iran, which has challenged the U.S. with a string of missile tests in recent months despite inking last year’s deal designed to curb...

The weapons could upgrade India as a nuclear power — and deeply unsettle Pakistan and China. CHALLAKERE, India — When laborers began excavating pastureland in India’s southern Karnataka state early in 2012, members of the nomadic Lambani tribe were startled. For centuries, the scarlet-robed herbalists and herders had freely crisscrossed the undulating meadows there, known as kavals, and this uprooting of their landscape came without warning or explanation. By autumn, Puttaranga Setty, a wiry groundnut farmer from the village of Kallalli, encountered a barbed-wire fence blocking off a well-used trail. His neighbor, a herder, discovered that the road from this...

Defense: President Obama dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Unless testing and maintenance of our nuclear deterrent is resumed, it will be a world without American nuclear weapons.In his Prague speech this spring, the president spoke of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," ignoring the fact that before 1945 we lived in such a world and it was neither peaceful nor secure. We recently observed the anniversaries of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, actions that brought an abrupt end to the carnage of World War II and arguably...

I'd been trying unsuccessfully, in recent weeks, to catch up with Congressman Zach Wamp to see what he thought of the Obama administration's apparent push to move the Nuclear Weapons Complex out of the Dept.of Energy and over to the Dept. of Defense. Few members of Congress are more intimately knowledgeable of the nuclear weapons program than Wamp, and he's been a big supporter, in part because of the Y-12 warhead plant in his home district. On Friday, at an event at Y-12's New Hope Center, I had a few minutes to talk with Wamp, and I asked him for...

The appearance of nuclear weapons materials on the black market is a growing global concern, and it is crucial that the United States reinforce its team of nuclear forensics experts and modernize its forensics tools to prepare for or respond to a possible nuclear terrorist attack. Large quantities of nuclear materials are inadequately secured in several countries, including Russia and Pakistan. Since 1993, there have been more than 1,300 incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear materials, including plutonium and highly enriched uranium, both of which can be used to develop an atomic bomb. And these are only the incidents we...