Abdul Khan describes how he started the Pakistani nuclear program

This is a report by an interview on Pakistani TV conducted with Dr. Abdul Khan who is the father of the Pakistani nuclear program.

It was started because of the Indian nuclear weapons test and because Pakistan was especially concerned about their security after East Pakistan revolted in 1971 and became Bangladesh. It was sped up because Pakistan was supporting the military activities of the Americans in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet takeover.Khan also discusses the relationship between Pakistan and both North Korea and Iran. He would not discuss nuclear technology transfer to either of those countries, however.

The existence of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program is a major reason why the American military is currently in Afghanistan.

Dr. Khan's interview is quite illuminating. It's only about 10 pages.

The Kahn nuclear proliferation ring may not be shut down.

The Washington Post today has this disturbing story.

The nuclear smuggling ring headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan possessed a broader range of secret nuclear designs than was previously known and shared them electronically among members of the network, a U.N. watchdog group said yesterday.

A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency also acknowledged large gaps in investigators' understanding of the smuggling ring, raising concerns that Khan's nuclear black market may have had additional customers whose identities remain unknown.

"Much of the sensitive information coming from the network existed in electronic form, enabling easier use and dissemination," the Vienna-based agency stated in an internal report, copies of which were obtained by several news outlets and nonprofit groups. Among the key documents, the report said, were instructions for making enriched uranium, and "more disturbingly, information related to nuclear weapons design." U.S. and U.N. officials have previously confirmed that blueprints for at least two types of nuclear weapons were found on computers owned by Swiss businessmen associated with Khan.

So there are very possibly other countries and organizations out there who are working on nuclear weapons that we do not know about.

That's a big problem. I wonder who McCain thinks we should invade to stop the problem.

I also wonder if Cheney and Libby had not outed the CIA agent Valerie Plame and destroyed her networks for their internal conservative political purposes if she could have made more headway on the nonproliferation problem. What they did was Treason against America.

Bush lies; Podhoretz exhibits symptoms of paranoia

The Director of National Intelligence, is a surprise move over the weekend, released the declassified National Intelligence Estimate that reported

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program1; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium
enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.
• We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.
• We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.)
• We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
• We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.
• Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.

This completely reverses the conclusions of the NIE released in 2005 which stated that Iran had an active nuclear program and was working to obtain nuclear weapons. This NIE has been ready for over a year, but as Gareth Porter has reported,

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (IPS) - A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

So the White House has been threatening to attack Iran. Bush has gone so far as to warn the American public that the danger of Iran getting nuclear weapons is so great that such an attack on Iran will be needed to prevent WW III . So the question now is how long has Bush and the senior White House officials known that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapon program in 2003?

From AP News through TPM:"Bush said Tuesday that he only learned of the new intelligence assessment last week." But is that true? [*]

It is contradicted by the Washington Post which reports that

... when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president's top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

Why did the White House not believe earlier Intelligence stating that the Iranians had shut down their nuclear weapon program? Why has President Bush been threatening the American public and the nation of Iran with information that his senior advisers have been told by Intelligence professionals is not true? A close adviser of Dick Cheney and a key member of the group called NeoCons is Norman Podhoretz. Here is what he has to say:

I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

Podhoretz' response is clear paranoia. He doesn't trust the Iranians, and he thinks that the senior American Intelligence professionals favor Iran over George Bush. Podhoretz is a man who has the ear of Dick Cheney (who has himself provided indications of the same paranoid thought), who firmly believed that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program and, since he did not believe the reports from the inspectors in Iraq, that only an invasion of Iraq could stop him.

Podhoretz is also a key foreign policy adviser to Rudolph Giuliani who seems to have a similar desire for war against .... well, right now against someone who is Muslim. But give him some other enemy. I'm sure that both Giuliani and Podhoretz will be happy to start a war with them also, whoever they might be.

The horribly botched invasion of Iraq was based on lies from these paranoids, and they are all actively pushing for an attack on Iran now. The White House is populated by paranoids who don't trust anyone, and when told their stories are wrong, continue to tell those stories to the public while working to prevent people from learning of any evidence that contradicts those stories - stories which are lies.

So what we see is a case in which qualified Intelligence professionals are telling Bush and the White House that the Iranians no longer have an active nuclear program, but he and his White House subordinates don't believe them because they assume that those professionals are out to get the President. The result is either than no one is telling Bush that the stories and speeches written for him by his apparently equally paranoid speechwriters are lies or Bush simply doesn't have the ability to discern truth from a lie and simply goes with whatever the paranoids around him tell him to say.

Fourteen more months until Bush leaves office. No President in America's history has been more destructive to the American nation. How much more damage will they do in the next fourteen months?

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Addendum 5:08 PM CST
[*] Greg Sargent points out how the Washington Post editors let Bush skate on his lie about when he learned that the Iranians had closed down their effort to obtain nuclear weapons in 2003.

Has Bush every told the truth anytime since he was appointed President? Excluding simple administrative matters, such as "I am standing here right now" of course. Though it wouldn't surprise me to find him lying about stuff like that, either.

The unknown Syrian target Israel attacked is becoming known

The most puzzling recent event in the Middle East has been the air attack September 6 by Israel on a target in Syria. What was the target, and why was it worth attacking? No one has been talking about that. As the New York Times point out:

In Washington and Israel, information about the raid has been wrapped in extraordinary secrecy and restricted to just a handful of officials, while the Israeli press has been prohibited from publishing information about the attack. [Snip]

In his only public comment on the raid, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, acknowledged this month that Israeli jets dropped bombs on a building that he said was “related to the military” but which he insisted was “not used.”

Now, almost six weeks later, the New York Times breaks through the silence.

Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The technology appears to be North Korean.

The partly constructed Syrian reactor was detected earlier this year by satellite photographs, according to American officials. They suggested that the facility had been brought to American attention by the Israelis, but would not discuss why American spy agencies seemed to have missed the early phases of construction.

North Korea has long provided assistance to Syria on a ballistic missile program, but any assistance toward the construction of the reactor would have been the first clear evidence of ties between the two countries on a nuclear program. North Korea has successfully used its five-megawatt reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex [Link added by editor of WTF-o] to reprocess nuclear fuel into bomb-grade material, a model that some American and Israeli officials believe Syria may have been trying to replicate.

So Israel is striking a blow to tell its neighbors that they will remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East. This is, among other things, clearly a message to Iran. Since the source of the nuclear technology used in Syria appears to be North Korea, this is also a message to that nation. The recent agreement of the North Koreans to dismantle their own nuclear reactor at yongbon could well release people and assets which other nations might want for the development of nuclear weapons. But this is an issue for the future and has little direct connection to the September 6th Israeli attack on Syrian facility.

The effort towards nuclear proliferation recognizes two different types of nuclear reactor. One produces electricity, while the other produces both electricity and throws off the type of highly enriched uranium that can be used in nuclear bombs. The distinction between the two types appears to be as much international inspection as anything else, since the development of uranium of sufficient purity to build weapons is a process that is long, expensive, and requires a lot of very obvious equipment and facilities which is not required for production of electricity.

There is a second process. The plutonium used in nuclear reactors can be reprocessed and concentrated to create nuclear weapons. Both processes require the time, facilities and obvious effort so extensive to produce such plutonium or highly enriched uranium that it becomes easily obvious to inspectors.

It appears to me (at least) that the differences between producing purely peaceful nuclear power and producing nuclear weapons is in the cost and extensiveness of the effort. The two technologies are of different and easily discernibly different levels of magnitude. The result is that the differences in technology between electricity production and weapons production means that close international inspection can allow the production of nuclear-based electric power while preventing the production of nuclear weapons. Whether or not this is true is beyond my capacity to determine, but the experts seem to agree that it is, in fact, true.

Syria shares an economic disability with its Middle Eastern neighbor Israel. Neither sit on top of pools of oil. [The Israelis blame Moses who chose the location. The religious Israelis blame God for directing him there. I don't know who the Syrians blame.] Syria is on a per capita basis one of the poorest nations in the Middle East. Nuclear electric power would be a major boost to the Syrian economy. Syrian President Bashar al-ASAD is clearly driven by economics to try to obtain nuclear electric power.

Were the Syrians to build such a facility under inspections by Mohamed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, they could probably have such a power source. My guess is that the history of war with Israel (in 1973 the Israelis are reputed to have had aircraft armed with nuclear weapons sitting on the runway) means that national pride and Syrian security considerations prevent them from permitting the UN inspections that would allow them to possess an "approved" nuclear power facility. [This is my speculation, as I have no direct or extensive knowledge of Syria.]

But the Syrians clearly observed the Libyans and Pakistanis who were able to evade inspections and obtain nuclear weapon producing facilities [from North Korea.] The Syrians may have seen a "window of opportunity" and hoped to slip through it, without realizing that it was closing on them. Since Syria is run by the military, security considerations will normally trump all other political considerations internally.

It appears that the refusal of all the Middle Eastern nations, including Syria, to complain about the Israeli attack suggest that almost everyone thinks that the Syrians stepped over an invisible boundary of good sense when they tried to set up a Middle Eastern nuclear facility in secret. If there is any good news out of this incident, that would seem to me to be it.

There is a political mechanism at work here. It seems that there is no nation who wants their neighbors to get nuclear weapons. So if someone stops the efforts of their neighbors, great! The change in relative power relations will be generally resisted. That's a pretty strong consensus in favor of nuclear non-proliferation.

Within each nation, however, there are hardliners who want freedom from international limitations, and they are pushing towards developing nuclear weapons. That's a strong pressure for each nation to obtain those weapons, a pressure that is especially strong in nations currently in active conflict with their neighbors.

That political mechanism suggests that nonproliferation cannot be brought about with the power of the gun or with armies. Such efforts are short term at best, and counter-productive in the long term.

In the long term, nonproliferation requires eliminating the armed conflicts between nations. General conflicts between nations cannot be eliminated, but those which must be resolved by the use of armed force can be. [I'm sure that this is no surprise to those who have studied the subject at length. I have only just come to consideration of nonproliferation, and this is what jumps out at me as the obvious mechanism.] Seen in these terms, the attack by Israel on the (apparent) nuclear facility in Syria is another piece of fallout from the still unresolved Yom Kipper War of 1973.

There will be more fallout from the Israeli attack on the apparent nuclear facility in Syria. [Prediction, with effort at humor - Ed. I ask no forgiveness.] Good diplomacy will use this event to defuse military tensions in the area surrounding Syria.

I don't expect any good diplomacy out of the Bush administration or the Rice State Department. There is no history of success there. Both the UN and the European Union are more likely to do something positive with this event.

Reagan WH knowingly aided Pakistan to build nukes

A news report published today by the Raw Story describes how the Reagan White House avoided the law and helped the sale of nuclear components to Pakistan. Then they lied to Congress about what had been done, and ignored when Pakistan passed nuclear plans and components to North Korea.

In 1988, Pakistan would detonate its first atomic bomb.

Former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has said that the CIA was monitoring Khan from the beginning. He asserts that the US turned down offers to detain Khan in 1975 and 1986 because they wanted to “gain more information” about the scientist’s activities.

Intelligence information later showed that the US and its allies allowed Pakistan to clandestinely acquire most of the technology for its nuclear program from abroad, unwittingly facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya over the past several decades. [Snip]

In 1985—following the arrest of a Pakistani agent in the US who attempted to procure specialized switches for nuclear detonators—Congress took steps to prevent Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons, passing bills that would cut off economic and military aid to Pakistan if it were found to be involved in nuclear activities.

One amendment declared that all overt aid to Pakistan—which came to over $4 billion in 1986—must cease unless the President certified annually that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device. Another prohibited aid to any “non-nuclear” nation found to be illegally exporting nuclear materials from the US.

Given Pakistan's proliferation activities, this meant the ongoing aid to Pakistan was illegal. However, President Reagan wanted military and economic aid to continue flowing to Pakistan to ensure its ongoing support of his covert war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

The Reagan White House cold warriors wanted Pakistan's cooperation in the clandestine war the U.S. was fighting against the USSR in Afghanistan at any cost. The non-proliferation forces took a longer view and considered the proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable third-world nations too high a price to pay to keep Pakistan totally supporting Charlie Wilson's War.

More important, in my opinion, is that the (mostly) Republican super-hawks, who had never accepted the idea that Nixon did anything to cause his resignation in the face of almost certain impeachment, were reinforced in their belief that Congress was a major barrier in the way of their efforts to "defend" America from its enemies. That justified their efforts to avoid Congressional control - at "any cost."

This same group, many even the same individuals, were utterly shocked that somehow the Democratic hick from Arkansas got elected President in 1992, setting off the perpetual war to remove him. Again, this was worth "any cost." When the impeachment failed, they got George W. Bush to run for President in 2000 and eliminated any other candidate - again at "any cost." Ask Sen. McCain.

That set of attitudes, together with the combination of voter suppression and an extra-Constitutional Florida election decision by the Supreme Court has given us the current Bush White House.

This story is one more building block in the sad structure of failures that characterizes the last six years of the Bush/Cheney regime.

ABC News and why the press is not to be trusted.

Glenn Greenwald describes the shoddy and unsupported news report from ABC News claiming that Iran might have a nuke by 2009. The news report makes an unsupported assertion that

Iran has more than tripled its ability to produce enriched uranium in the last three months, adding some 1,000 centrifuges which are used to separate radioactive particles from the raw material.

The development means Iran could have enough material for a nuclear bomb by 2009, sources familiar with the dramatic upgrade tell ABC News.

Note that these assertions were from an anonymous source and are not accompanied by any hint that the source had any real knowledge on the subject. I've heard more reliable gossip from a drunk who I did not know who was sitting at a hotel bar.

Yet, as Glenn goes on to point out, this was quickly picked up by the liar-in-chief at one of his press conferences and used to try to rachet American fear of the Iranians up to the point of war, just as he did with Iraq.

This is shoddy news reporting. I wonder if it originated from a Bush partisan?