Title: Lecture: Nuclear weapons, recent accomplishments and new challenges
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: With Keith Krause, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peace building, and Programme Director of the Small Arms Survey.
Date: 2010-05-05
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The unfinished business of arms control is being taken up this week in two separate sets of talks in Geneva. Negotiations resume on the Russia-US Start treaty update and, separately, the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.
Russia and the USA begin negotiations again 22 January to agree on a treaty to replace the 1990s-era Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) which officially expired 5 December 2008.
The aim of the negotiations is to further reduce each country’s nuclear arsenal below levels agreed to in 1991.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, told ABC television in the US that the American government forged and disseminated documents showing that Iran has planned to use uranium deuteride as a nuclear bomb trigger in a test. The report on the document, published 14 December by The Times, UK, is “fundamentally not true”, he told ABC interviewer Diane Sawyer.
Links to other sites: ABC interview with Ahmadinejad, US, BBC, Times, UK
Geneva / Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Iranian Foreign Ministry confirmed Monday that its officials will be in Switzerland Thursday 1 October for a six-party meeting “to discuss ways to end a standoff between the two sides,” according to the official Fars news agency. The Swiss government last week announced that it had accepted a request from Iran and the European Union to host a second meeting between EU High Representative, Javier Solana, and the Iranian chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. Solana represents the world’s major powers in the talks over Iran’s nuclear plans: Germany, France, the UK, China, Russia and the US. The first meeting took place in July 2008 in Geneva. But Iran today said the meeting might take place in Geneva, as the Swiss government announced, or they might agree to meet in Bern, instead.
According to Fars: “Iran is under three rounds of UN Security Council sanctions for turning down West’s illegitimate calls to give up its right of uranium enrichment, saying the western demand is politically tainted and illogical. Tehran has repeatedly stressed that it considers its nuclear case closed after it answered the UN agency’s questions about the history of its nuclear programe.”
Iran tests long-range missiles during two days of tests
Iran drew heavy attention from around the world Monday for testing long range missiles (2,000 km) that can reach Israel and US military bases in the Middle East, with France and the UK promptly expressing their dismay but Russia urging calm.
Links to other sites: Aljazeera, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Sydney Morning Herald, Xinhua
and video, Russia Today
US President Barack Obama chaired a UN Security Council meeting 24 September at which the council unanimously approved a US-drafted resolution calling for concrete steps to be taken towards ridding the world of nuclear weapons. The resolution calls on the declared nuclear powers to cut back their arsenals and to share the peaceful benefits of nuclear power with other nations, while cracking down on proliferation of nuclear materials and know-how.
The US is set to begin new talks with Russia on reducing their nuclear arsenals to replace the 1980s-era Start treaty. Obama says he will ask the Senate to ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty, which the US has signed but not ratified.
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) which is the basis for the peaceful use of nuclear power, comes up for review next year, and may be strengthened. BBC, Miami Herald
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss federal council has agreed to hold back on the destruction of documents related to the St. Gallen family Tinner, allegedly implicated in an international nuclear proliferation network. In an agreement with the Control Commission Delegation (CD), the Swiss parliament’s investigative branch for national security issues, Justice minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, agreed to allow certain of the documents to be made available to the judicial investigation and for the Tinner family defense attorneys.
Bellinzona, Ticino and Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss Federal Council (cabinet) and the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona are in a curious standoff over the Tinner affair, in which a Swiss father and his two sons were involved with an international ring that was sharing plans for making nuclear weapons.
The cabinet says it will destroy some of the files linked to the Tinner affair, while the court says it cannot do so. The cabinet argues, with backing from the Atomic Energy Commission, that some of the files, which detail how to make nuclear weapons, are so sensitive they must be destroyed.
US vice president Joe Biden told ABC television Sunday 5 July that the US could not restrain Israel from taking military action if it felt threatened by a nuclear build-up in Iran. Biden has just returned from a Middle East trip. Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has warned that Israel will not allow Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. The Sunday Times of London reported 5 July that secret talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia raised the possibility that Israel would not be hindered if it flew through Saudi airspace on its way to Iran. BBC, Reuters
The US has published details of a month-long journey from Budapest, Hungary to Russia’s Siberia of enough process uranium to make six nuclear weapons. The move was made to better monitor and safeguard from theft nuclear weapons materials. “The two countries have been working to return the spent fuel from reactors around the world,” since the 1950s, reports CNN.
