Gates Discusses Nuclear Policy with China

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

Stories we're following today: Wednesday January 12, 2011.

Gates, China Discuss Nuclear Strategy - Julian E. Barnes for The Wall Street Journal [link]

• U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Wednesday visited the headquarters of the People's Liberation Army's Second Artillery Corps, which commands China's nuclear missile force. In brief comments to reporters afterward, Mr. Gates said he discussed nuclear strategy with military leaders there and secured an agreement from a senior Chinese general to visit the U.S.
• "I felt it was a pretty wide-ranging conversation and pretty open," Mr. Gates said in Beijing afterward. He said Gen. Jing Zhiyuan, commander of China's nuclear arms, had accepted his invitation to visit U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, which oversees American nuclear weapons. U.S. officials say such visits are important to prevent dangerous misunderstandings.
• Mr. Gates pronounced his trip to China a success, saying he had expected evolutionary progress in building the military-to-military relationship, rather than headline-grabbing breakthroughs.
• Mr. Gates' nuclear talks Wednesday represented an improvement over the silence between the two sides last year, when China's military refused to talk to the U.S. in protest over its weapons sales to Taiwan. But the latest discussions didn't appear to go beyond previous advances the two sides have achieved.
• U.S. officials said Mr. Gates' visit was important as a part of a renewed effort to convince the Chinese military to be more open about its nuclear arsenal. Chinese officials have been reluctant to discuss the subject, potentially because they have been nervous about revealing any new details about the size of their arsenal, U.S. defense officials have said.
  

Analysis: Risk of Strike on Iran Over Nuclear Plans Recedes - Fredrik Dahl for Reuters [link]

• Sanctions and possible sabotage may be slowing Iran's nuclear drive, reducing the risk that Israel might resort to military strikes against the Islamic Republic's atomic sites any time soon.  Technical glitches and other hurdles for Iran's uranium enrichment programme could also provide more time for diplomatic efforts by major powers to persuade it to curb work the West fears is aimed at making bombs, a charge Tehran denies.
• "There is a feeling that the sanctions and also some of the covert action are buying time, more time than many previously expected," a senior Western diplomat said.  
• Israeli intelligence assessments published last week said the Jewish state now believed Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon before 2015 and that a top Israeli official had counseled against pre-emptive military action.  It signaled new confidence in U.S.-led sanctions and other measures designed to discourage or delay Iran's nuclear work.
• "Israel appears no less willing to contemplate military action against Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons," Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said.  "However, there has been a dramatic change recently in statements from Israeli officials about the timeline they project for Iran to achieve a nuclear weapons capability."
• Iran is still amassing refined uranium -- material which can be used to make bombs if enriched much further -- and it is showing no sign of backing down in the long-running international dispute over its atomic ambitions.  
• Western officials say tougher sanctions imposed on Iran since last year are hurting its economy and that this may force it to enter serious nuclear talks with six world powers -- the United States, Russia, Germany, France, Britain and China.  But no substantial progress was made when talks resumed in Geneva last month, for the first time in more than a year, and expectations of a breakthrough are low ahead of a second round in Istanbul next week.

Clinton Asks Arabs to Help Undermine Iran's Nuclear Plans - Joby Warrick for The Washington Post [link]

• Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lobbied Arab governments on Monday to help tighten the screws on their Iranian neighbor, saying that sanctions and other measures are hurting Tehran and undermining its ability to acquire components for its nuclear program.
• Clinton, in the Middle East for four days of talks, also pushed oil-rich Persian Gulf states to do more to back fragile governments in the West Bank and Iraq to create stability in a region that has so frequently veered into war.
• Repeating a theme she has sounded frequently in trips to the region, Clinton warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would trigger an "extremely dangerous" arms race, and she said Arabs should show common cause with Western powers by helping enforce economic sanctions. She said current sanctions already were having a significant effect, echoing claims made by other administration officials in testimony in recent weeks. "Sanctions have been working," Clinton said. "They have made it much more difficult for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions."
• Clinton also brought up Iran in private sessions with the United Arab Emirates' president, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, and with Dubai's ruler, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. She is expected to travel to Oman and Qatar later in the week before returning to Washington.

Treaty Gives Chance for U.S., Russia to Work on Issues - Eloise Ogden in The Minot Daily News [link]

• The new commander of Air Force Global Strike Command says the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty recognizes the nuclear triad and gives the U.S. and Russia the chance to work on the issues.
• "It gives us the opportunity to continue to stay engaged with the Russians as we work these, not only the issues related to the strategic weapons but the larger issues," said Lt. Gen. Jim Kowalski Monday while on a visit to Minot Air Force Base.
• Minot AFB, the only dual wing nuclear-capable base, has two legs of the nuclear triad. The 5th Bomb Wing has the airborne B-52 bombers and the 91st Missile Wing has the land-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles.
• "It is a good thing for our nation, it is a good thing for our relations with the Russians and it's a good thing in the kind of signal it sends to the rest of the world that more weapons are not necessarily better," Kowalski said.

China and Reprocessing: Separating Fact from Fiction - Gregory Kulacki for "All Things Nuclear" [link]

• Last week several U.S. media organizations published reports claiming China made a “breakthrough in spent fuel reprocessing technology.” The original BBC story (it has since been replaced with a less sensational version) described the advance as “a new method of reprocessing irradiated fuel;” the current version says that China has “now perfected a procedure that will allow them to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.”
• The stories suggest that this was a new process that differs from the process used by other countries that reprocess spent fuel...The stories reported that this breakthrough would allow China to produce sufficient amounts of nuclear energy for thousands of years using China’s domestic reserves of uranium, suggesting that this was due to China’s new process.
• This introductory Chinese Central Television (CCTV) report on Chinese reprocessing, which compared spent nuclear fuel to coal ash as a way of explaining the concept of spent fuel to its audience, was nothing out of the ordinary. The statements about thousands of years of nuclear energy were hyperbolic extrapolations based on estimates of China’s proven uranium reserves and the imagined theoretical efficiencies of fast breeder reactors that no country has succeeded in commercializing, despite decades of effort and billions of dollars of government investments.
• While the broadcast described recent progress at the plant using the Chinese word for “major breakthrough” (重大突破) it was clear that it was using this term to describe something that was a first for China, not a breakthrough in reprocessing technology.
• Besides the technical difficulty and high cost of reprocessing and using plutonium to fuel reactors, commercial reprocessing creates large amounts of separated plutonium—which can be used to make nuclear weapons—and therefore increases the risk of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. For this reason, the U.S. government officially abandoned reprocessing in the 1970s.

Note:  "All Things Nuclear" is a blog maintained by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Ploughshares Fund grantee.

Hot Line Connecting Koreas Returns to Service - Mark McDonald in The New York Times [link]

• An important diplomatic hot line connecting North and South Korea went back into service on Wednesday after having been severed for more than seven months.
• An official with the Unification Ministry in Seoul said the two sides spoke briefly using the line, which is located at the so-called truce village of Panmunjom. The line connects a government office on the North Korean side of the border with a corresponding office on the South Korean side.
• Originally started as a way for Red Cross delegations to speak to each other across the border, the line became the principal military and diplomatic communications link between the two Koreas.
• Since May, when the Panmunjom line effectively went off the hook, the Koreas left messages for each other at an unofficial office at the Kaesong Industrial Park, a jointly operated complex in the North where South Korean companies use North Korean workers. It was, essentially, diplomacy conducted through a drop box.