From Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge, this absolutely riveting post:

Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories - now that the environmental theme is rather popular, the following video by Isao Hashimoto shows all the nuclear "tests" conducted by the world in the period between 1945 and 1998.

Based on public data, the world's peaceful countries have already nuked themselves at least 2,054 times, with the US nuking the state of Nevada and its immediate neighbors about one thousand times. And keep in mind - the fallout does not just miraculously "disappear." Feel free to consider that next time you look at bargain properties on the strip.

Anyway, as Idealist asks, "How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?" One thing is certain - Congress would be stunned and appalled, and the disgraced CEO of Nukes R Us, Inc., who previously gave trillions in campaign contributions to every Congressional critter, would be facing a very unpleasant and theatrically televised day.

If anyone doubts the insanity of the right, this should convince you. Eric Cantor gives a speech to the Heritage Foundation bashing the Obama administration's record on national security, particularly the nonproliferation strategy and ends to a rousing chorus of booes and disapproval.

Cantor went wild over the White House’s nonproliferation agenda, vowing to “turn back harmful treaties like START.” What I'm sure Cantor doesn't realize is that eliminating a pillar of the nonproliferation regime would be tantamount to turning over what has historically been a major conservative rallying cry, led by none other than President Reagan himself (whom Cantor reverently invokes in the preamble of this speech). As Reagan’s own Secretary of State, George Schultz recently said, “[President Obama] is doing an excellent job. He has put the vision out there and keeps it out there. The nuclear posture review shows he is being careful about American national security at every step. The conference of world leaders on securing fissile material is the right thing to do. Who is going to disagree with that?” Eric Cantor, apparently. Read more...

After Cantor stirred these neocons into a froth over nukes, Iran, Muslim-hate and the kitchen sink, the Q&A session was spirited.

Steve Benen:

The seriousness of Cantor's event at the Heritage Foundation was captured nicely by an exchange during the Q&A. An attendee asked why the president should not be considered a "domestic enemy," to the delight of the assembled far-right crowd.

Cantor smiled, but responded that "no one thinks the President is a domestic enemy." The comment generated boos from the Heritage audience.

I'd like to thank Eric Cantor, the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife for confirmation that they have all lost their minds. The problem, of course, is that they want to take a good chunk of the electorate with them and will stop at virtually nothing in this 2010 cycle to do exactly that.

The Koch PAC, defense PACs, health, pharma and financial PACs are smoking with the smell of big bucks being spread over Republican PACs. They like insanity. It puts them in control, or so they think. They will stoop as low as they need to and stop at nothing to defeat our current President. But "domestic enemy"? Give me a break.

Hat tip - Noah at Danger Room

When Iraq launched a three-stage rudimentary satellite booster into space in December 1989, probably based upon the Argentinian "Condor" ballistic missile, hawks in the West went crazy, declaiming that this proved Iraq was after an intercontinental WMD ability. We all know how that turned out.

Today it's "deja vu all over again" as Iran becomes the eleventh nation to prove it can launch a satellite into orbit - something it stated it would do as long ago as January 2004. It's stated aim is to grab a slice of the lucrative satellite launch industry - alongside major players like Russia, the US, China and Europe but also alongside nations like Brazil, Israel, Japan and India - as well as launch its own satellites for telecommunications, weather and earthquake monitoring and security (spy-sat) purposes. It already has one satellite in orbit, which it paid Russia hard currency to launch.

In the Guardian, Julian Borger looks at how the launch is seen differently in Iran and the West.

For the Iranian government it is an important milestone along the road to reclaiming Persia's ancient claim to major power status, which it feels the jealous west is trying to deny it.

It is also enormously significant in Iranian internal politics. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got elected promising economic benefits for the common man and modernisation. He has made a complete mess of the first part of that mission. Delivering the second is important for his prospects of re-election in June, in the eyes of both the average voter and – even more importantly, given the controlled nature of Iranian democracy – the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

From Washington, London and some other western capitals, the launch is seen primarily through the prism of Iran's nuclear project. The capacity to put an object into space, together with the feared capability to build a nuclear device, spells – for some at least – the eventual threat of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could reach the US.

"There are dual applications for satellite launching technology in Iran's ballistic missile programme. As a result we think this sends the wrong signal to the international community, which has already passed five successive UN security council resolutions on Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes," Bill Rammell, the minister of state at the [British] Foreign Office, said today.

Iranian assertions that their staging experiments were always aimed at getting into the lucrative satelite launching business, rather than at ICBMs, go forgotten...when Iran proves to prospective customers that it can launch a satellite. Amazing.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a matter of national pride and foreign currency income doesn't have a more sinister agenda behind it. Mohammed El-Baradei reminded the WaPo on Monday that neither the IAEA nor the US intelligence community has any evidence of a current Iranian nuclear weapons program. It's become fashionable of late to just ignore that - President Obama being one keynote offender - but eventually the hawks will have to confront the lack of evidence, if they can.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Whitehouse.gov has a summary of the Obama/Biden administration's foreign policy platform up. There are no radical departures from the campaign, but of course now the policy prescriptions there are on the official White House website as official presidential policy. They include a refocus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, holding Pakistan more accountable, supporting Israel come what may, adding America's weight to "the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty and hunger around the world in half by 2015", de-politicizing the intelligence community and repairing America's tattered diplomatic initiatives.

But Julian Borger at the UK's Guardian makes special note of two elements of Obama's campaign platform that are now official US policy and are sure to make rightwing heads explode:

The new Obama administration is willing to talk to Iran "without preconditions" and will work towards the abolition of nuclear weapons, the White House said today.

The Obama foreign policy agenda that appeared on the White House website said: "Barack Obama supports tough and direct diplomacy with Iran without preconditions," the policy outline said. The Bush administration made direct talks between the US and Iran conditional on Iranian suspension of its uranium enrichment programme. This step breaks that conditionality, as part of a fundamental shift in diplomatic approach. The Obama agenda said the new administration will "talk to our foes and friends" and not set preconditions.

However, talks with Iran will be "tough and direct", and will put on the table the same deal that the international community has been trying to get Tehran to accept for the past four years: extensive economic and diplomatic help if uranium enrichment is suspended, further economic pressure and diplomatic isolation if it does not. Iran has resisted this carrot-and-stick approach so far, despite four sets of UN sanctions, but western diplomats hope that direct engagement by Washington will help break the impasse. "In carrying out this diplomacy, we will coordinate closely with our allies and proceed with careful preparation," the White House said. "Seeking this kind of comprehensive settlement with Iran is our best way to make progress."

The other notable shift in US foreign policy announced today was a strategic decision to move towards a "nuclear free world", through bilateral and multilateral disarmament. "Obama and [Vice President Joe] Biden will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons, and pursue it," according to the agenda. It is a long term goal. The US will maintain a "strong deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist", but begin to take steps on the "long road towards eliminating nuclear weapons".

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A year ago this month, armed raiders broke into the Pelindaba nuclear research facility in South Africa, where that nation stores its weapons-grade nuclear material, in circumstances that strongly suggest inside knowledge and even insider complicity in the raid. They shot an employee in the chest and made a clean escape from the supposedly high security facility, and still know one knows who they were and there aren't even any worthwhile leads to tracking them down.

Tonight, 60 Minutes talks to Anton Gerber, the shot employee, who only deepens the mystery.

The raiders had detailled knowledge of the security and layout of the plant.

They had breached and shut off a 10,000-volt barbed-wire fence and eluded security cameras and guards at one of the country’s most secure facilities.

As the attackers approached the door, Gerber called security and said they were under attack. "It shouldn't have taken more than three minutes to get there," says Gerber. He says it took 24 minutes to respond to his call. Gerber has filed suit against the Pelindaba facility for damages. Another fact he finds suspicious is that the police never questioned him until 60 Minutes began investigating the story. "It is strange," Gerber tells Pelley.

Theories have included a raid by terrorists, criminals and some kind of highly organised "lover's triangle" revenge attack on Gerber himself. But there have been no arrests, no suspects named, no clues. And what the 60 Minutes piece doesn't reveal is that the raiders almost got what they came for. The NYT, last year, reported:

when four gunmen burst into the room. Mr. Gerber pushed his fiancée under a desk. The attackers shot him in the chest, grabbed a computer and fled, but abandoned their booty as they came under assault by guards.

At no point did the raiders attempt to seize nuclear material - but that computer seems to have been important to their plans. They went right to it, grabbed it and ran. Perhaps it contained details of how South Africa built its nuclear weapons, perhaps incriminating details of their suspected partners in that bomb-building project.

But whatever the real motives and real identities of the raiders, Pelindaba underscored the harsh reality that in facilities across the globe nuclear material is secured, but not all that strongly. Plants in the former Soviet Union, in Pakistan and in South America are judged as especially vulnerable, and could hand a non-state actor - a terrorist group - the knowledge and materials for bomb making. It's a threat that the Nunn-Lugar Act of 1991 and the subsequent Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, focused on the former Soviet states, has tried to address even as the Bush administration has tried to underfund it and to use it as a bargaining piece in posturing over Georgia. It's a subject we know is close to Barrack Obama's heart, as he's seen for himself how loose the security at such facilities can be.

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The IAEA has produced its latest report on Iran and there are few surprises therein, certainly no "smoking gun".

"To date, the results of the environmental samples taken at FEP and PFEP2, and the operating records for FEP3, indicate that the plants have been operating as declared (i.e. less than 5.0% U-235 enrichment). Since March 2007, twenty unannounced inspections have been conducted at FEP"...."The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran."

Most importantly, the IAEA guarantees that all known activities are under Agency seal and surveillance, and cannot be used to produce a weapon without Agency knowledge.

That doesn't stop the New York Times publishing a wonderful bit of hyperventilation involving (as is usual) the fine journalism of David "Judy Miller In Drag" Sanger and Bill Broad.

Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.

The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz. The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium

But the really important part, underplayed by that lede and the headline "Iran Said to Have Nuclear Fuel for One Weapon", is that there's no sign of a "breakout"- kicking out the inspectors, breaking seals and switching of cameras - which would be a dead giveaway. It would take months thereafter (about half the time it took to enrich the stuff to LEU) to enrich that LEU to weapons grade, and that's to say nothing of actually building a bomb with it afterwards. A minimum timeframe is in the order of a year and a half, in which the West could decide what to do next.

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Add Mohammed el-Baradei to the list of those welcoming Obama's statements that he'd talk to Iran.

"If there is a direct dialogue between the United States and Iran, I think Iran will be more forthcoming with the agency," IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said.

"(A) political opening will also convince Iran to work with us to solve remaining technical issues," he told a news conference in Prague after meeting Czech Foreign Affairs Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

"That political component of the (Iran) issue requires in my view a direct dialogue with Iran and that's why I am very encouraged by President-elect Obama's statement that he is ready to engage Iran in a direct dialogue without preconditions.

El-Baradei, who was one of those that said plainly that Iraq had no extant WMD and was thanked for being right by a Bush administration push to replace him, also underlined that, to date, there is no proof Iran is seeking nuclear weapons either.

We are able to verify all their declared activities, we are able to verify their enrichment programme, which is a good thing. But we are still not able to move forward on clarifying some of the outstanding issues related to alleged studies that could have some linkage to a possible military dimension."

Iran says its nuclear plans are to make electricity so it can export more oil and gas.

"There is a lot of concern about Iran, not today but about Iran in future... whether once they develop the technology, what are they going to use it for, whether they will go for nuclear weapons," said ElBaradei.

"That is the concern shared by the Security Council." [Emphaisis Mine - C]

There's a lot in that snippet to unpack.

First of all, there's the unequivocal statement that everything the IAEA has so far checked has come up clean - a civilian program only and one that cannot now be re-directed to military uses without IAEA foreknowledge...

That warning period would be at least six months and possibly a whole year long, so why is anyone still talking about keeping military options on the table? Saber rattling is counter-productive in such a circumstance - there's plenty of time to put talk of such options back in process if Iran ever makes a move to re-enrich to bomb-grade but for now there is no such program.

Secondly - the "alleged" studies el-Baradei refers to are all from 2003 and earlier, from a time when US intelligence says Iran did have a nuke program, in a very early stage, which has since been shut down. Notice all those conditionals?

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Most folks missed it, because the vote came just before the bailout bill, but on Wednesday the US Senate voted 86-13 to approve the India 123 bill, giving India access to US nuclear know-how and materials for the first time since India conducted a nuclear weapons test three decades ago. Both presidential candidates voted for the bill and the House had already passed it 298 to 117. The roll call for the Senate vote shows that Boxer, Byrd, Feingold, Leahy and Sanders were among the few "Nay" votes.

Arms control experts aren't at all happy with the deal:

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, blasted the deal as a "nonproliferation disaster." India, along with Pakistan and Israel, has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. India conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998, despite international outrage, and continues to produce fissile material. Kimball said the deal "does not bring India into the nonproliferation mainstream" because it "creates a country-specific exemption from core nonproliferation standards that the United States has spent decades to establish."

But Bush is:

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The International Atomic Energy Agency's head, Mohammed el-Baradei, has warned that the Agency faces an increasingly uphill struggle in its essential non-proliferation role due to a measly budget.

Opening the IAEA's annual assembly, Mohamed ElBaradei called for urgent steps to increase funding of the U.N. watchdog, modernise equipment and enhance its legal authority to verify the nature of nuclear programmes in suspect countries.
"We have really reached a turning point. Years of zero (real) growth budgets have left us with a failing infrastructure and a troubling dependence on voluntary support which invariably has conditions attached," he said.

"This is not just about money. We do not work in a political vacuum. Political commitment to the goals of the agency needs to be renewed at the highest level," ElBaradei told the IAEA's General Conference at its Vienna headquarters.

"It would be a tragedy of epic proportions if we fail to act (for lack of resources) until after a nuclear conflagration, accident or terrorist attack that could have been prevented."

The IAEA's budget, which at present stands at only 340 million euros ($490 million), must stretch to cover investigations of places like Iran, Syria (and soon maybe Israel -it's on the Agency's agenda finally), inspections in dozens of countries, testing, education programs and safeguard monitoring. El Baradei says that the Agency's work is presently "seriously compromised" by the lack of money.

Yet this might be OK with some nations, who apparently want the Agency hamstrung because they are consistently late in sending their contributions. Last July, the Agency warned that if some member nations didn't pay up quickly, it would be broke by September. In 2006, the Bush administration still owed the IAEA over a third of it's contribution, over $14 million. Enough money always does eventually come in to keep it operating, but there are suspicions that the money comes with strings attached, forwarding those nation's agendas in return.

Everyone says the IAEA is essential, but no-one wants to put their money where their mouth is. Maybe Obama should. It would be a good contrast to Republican zeal for bypassing arms control agreements and waving sabers at every opportunity.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has disagreed fundamentally with John McCain's saber-rattling against Russia and at the same time put himself in opposition to all of the civilian leadership of the Bush administration except perhaps his boss, Bob Gates.

"I believe we've got to have a relationship with Russia," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Los Angeles.

"I don't believe we should discontinue engagement on the military side because that relationship is going to be very important in the future," Mullen said.

..."We need to approach this in a measured way and do it in a way that recognizes we have mutual interests with Russia," he told a gathering organized Town Hall Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that sponsors debates on topical issues.

Mullen's measured remarks chimed with comments last week by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who said Russia did not pose a threat on a par with the Soviet Union.

They stand in contrast to harsher rhetoric from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and particularly Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who has said Russia would face severe consequences for its actions in Georgia.

One of the areas where Mullen said the US and Russia must continue co-operation is nuclear non-proliferation, including safeguarding loose nuclear materials which might fall into the hands of terrorists.

However, the Bush administration doesn't think that's as important as tough talk for domestic consumption.

Some high-level meetings have been postponed indefinitely, including a trip to Russia by John Rood, the acting undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, to discuss various security issues and to negotiate a new pact to replace the existing Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START.

And the congressionally appointed Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism has been asked to not go on its upcoming fact-finding visit to Moscow.

Hat tip to Cheryl Rofer at WhirledView, who notes that START I is due to expire at the end of 2009. It provides the only means by which the Moscow Treaty, which limits the number of nuclear warheads Russia and the U.S. can posses, can be verified. But the neocons wanted an excuse to dump START - they hate treaties - and this hasty excuse of the Georgia conflict is just more convenient than outright abrogating it with no cause.

Then there's that Congressional factfinding trip. That's just as outrageous as the Commission was set up "to build on the work of the 9/11 Commission ... to assess our nation’s progress in preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism."

The Bush administration (and John McCain) need to be asked which they think is more important: petty diplomatic posturing- when even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs thinks Russia/US co-operation is crucial to US national security - or the threat of unsecured nuclear material falling into terrorist hands.

Crossposted from Newshoggers