New START Enters Into Force Saturday

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today: Wednesday February 2, 2011.

New START Goes Into Effect Saturday, FMCT Next - Josh Rogin for "The Cable" [link]

• A host of senior officials and lawmakers are on their way to Munich this weekend, where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will ceremoniously exchange the article of ratification for New START with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, officially bringing the treaty into force.
• "With New START, the United States and Russia have reached another milestone in our bilateral relationship and continue the momentum Presidents Obama and Medvedev created with the ‘reset' nearly two years ago," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in a statement. The official exchange will take place on Saturday, Feb. 5.
• There will be a star studded U.S. lineup at the Munich Security Conference, including form the administration: National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher, NSS Afghanistan-Pakistan coordinator Doug Lute, NSS Senior Director Dan Shapiro, and NSS Director for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Jeff Hovenier.
• So what's next for arms control? Back in 2009, the Obama administration had been planning to follow up New START with a congressional push to ratify the Congressional Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). But after the grueling fight to ratify New START and in the face of staunch and reliable Republican promises that CTBT won't be ratified by this Senate, the new plan is to move forward with the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty next. (FMCT is an agreement that all countries stop producing new fissile material for nuclear weapons.)
• The State Department's lead negotiator for New START, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemeoller, said on Jan. 27 at the conference on disarmament in Geneva that the Obama administration wants to get going on FMCT now.  "Our priority is for a negotiation of a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty to begin here in the Conference on Disarmament, and we are resolved during this CD session to do everything we can to ensure that that goal is achieved," Gottemeoller said.
  

Pakistan’s Growing Nuclear Arsenal - James Lindsay in “The Water’s Edge” a CFR blog [link]

• The news coming out of Egypt has overshadowed another important story, the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. As first reported in yesterday’s Washington Post and now in today’s New York Times, Pakistan looks like it is about to pass Britain to become the world’s fifth largest nuclear power.
• The Pakistani nuclear arsenal is not a direct threat to the United States. Islamabad is worried about New Delhi and not Washington, and Pakistan lacks the missiles or aircraft needed to hit the United States in a traditional form of attack.
• The security of Pakistani nuclear materials is another matter entirely. Experts inside and outside the government worry that more nuclear material means more opportunities for theft and diversion. Washington has spent more than $100 million to help Pakistan secure its nuclear arsenal. But given Pakistan’s track record with A.Q. Kahn and other matters, it’s hard to be confident that its nuclear complex is secure as it needs to be.
• The problem isn’t that Prime Minister Zardari’s government is hostile to the United States. It’s that his government is neither terribly effective nor necessarily in control of all that the military does. So even if Islamabad tells Washington what it wants to hear, there is no guarantee that the pleasant words will be followed by action.
• That is a sobering thought to keep in mind as speculation mounts as to what a democratic government in Egypt might look like.

A Path to Nuclear Disarmament Leadership - Paul Meyer in Embassy Magazine [link]

• On Jan. 25, Canada assumed the presidency of the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, and the Canadian ambassador presided over the first session of the new year in the august Council Chamber at the Palais des Nations.
• This inter-governmental body is meant to be the UN's focus for the negotiation of multilateral arms control and disarmament agreements. But while this may be the conference's raison d'être, it has not produced an agreement since the 1996 Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty was concluded.
• The FMCT, a long-standing goal of the international community, would seek to prohibit the production of fissile material for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Without taking this first step of turning off the tap for producing the essential substance of nuclear weapons, the vision of a nuclear weapons-free world will remain just a mirage.
• A mandate for negotiating an FMCT was devised by a Canadian ambassador (the late Gerry Shannon) back in 1995 and endorsed by the entire Conference on Disarmament. However, as it appeared that an FMCT negotiation might actually get started, the latent opposition of Pakistan became explicit.
• Enter Canada at this critical juncture, wearing the mantle of the Conference on Disarmament presidency (a once-in-a-decade opportunity given that the position rotates alphabetically through the 65-nation membership). As the first president of a new year's session, it is Canada's responsibility to seek approval for a work program to move the conference forward.

Al Qaeda Actively Seeking "Dirty" Bombs - AFP [link]

• Al-Qaeda is attempting to procure nuclear material and recruit rogue scientists in order to build a radioactive "dirty bomb," leaked documents published in Wednesday's Telegraph newspaper revealed.
• The cables, released by the WikiLeaks website, showed that security chiefs told a NATO meeting in January 2009 that Al-Qaeda was planning a programme of "dirty radioactive improvised explosive devices (IEDs)."
• The makeshift nuclear bombs, which could be used against soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, would contaminate the surrounding area for years to come. The leaked documents also revealed that Al-Qaeda papers found in 2007 convinced security officials that "greater advances" had been made in bio-terrorism than was previously feared.
• Also laid bare in the diplomatic cables are the attempts made to smuggle volatile materials as rogue organisations seek to get their hands on weapons-grade fuel. The memos detailed how a freight train on the Kazakhstan-Russia border was found to be carrying weapons-grade material while a "small-time" dealer in Lisbon tried to sell radioactive plates stolen from Chernobyl.

Testing Toxic Cleanups, One Gator at a Time - Peter Eisler and Marisa Kendall forUSA Today [link]

• Behind the barbed-wire fences, amid the hulking buildings where government scientists have spent decades processing plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal, a new generation of researchers now wrestles alligators. They're looking for radiation.
• The alligator on the Savannah River nuclear weapons site serves as the modern-day equivalent of a canary in a coal mine, a measure of federal efforts to manage a legacy of contamination left by a half-century of nuclear weapons production. At this 310-square-mile compound and a half-dozen other sites across the country where secret labs, nuclear reactors and manufacturing plants built the nation's nuclear arsenal, scientists capture and test thousands of animals a year to assess the government's progress in tackling some of the world's most daunting — and costly — environmental cleanups.
• For decades during the Cold War, workers gave little regard to the environmental consequences of the weapons operation, often dumping contaminated waste in unmarked pits with no controls to keep it from spreading into soil and groundwater.
• The Energy Department, which now controls the nuclear weapons program, estimates that cleaning up the pollution across all current and former weapons production sites could take 70 years and cost $300 billion or more. The department spends about $1.5 million a year on wildlife monitoring as part of a broader effort that also examines plants, soil, water and air.

A View From The Dark Side

Bolton: Mubarak’s Downfall Would Mean We Need To Bomb Iran Sooner - Alex Seitz-Wald in Think Progress’ “Global and Domestic Security” blog [link]

• Former Bush Ambassador John Bolton has been one of the few defenders of the Mubarak regime in Egypt after massive anti-government protests broke out there last week. Yesterday on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s radio program, Bolton continued his defense of the authoritarian regime, noting the “substantial economic growth” under Mubarak’s reign, and warned that the dictator’s downfall would “speed” the timetable for what he views as an inevitable war with Iran
• Bolton has long been an advocate of bombing Iran, exploiting any convenient development in international relations as further cause to fuel up the bombers. Of course, any military action against Iran by Israel would likely drag in the U.S. as well, as Bolton himself has pointed out.
• On Friday, a “diverse” panel of experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos strongly warned against an Israeli attack on Iran, agreeing it would spark a “devastating counterattack” with wide-ranging negative consequences.
• El Baradei had a very contentious relationship with Iran while he was tasked with monitoring the country’s nuclear program on behalf of the international community. Nonetheless, Hannity and a host of other right-wing personalities have baselessly smeared El Baradei for “r[unning] cover for the Iranians for all those years that he was with the IAEA.”