Administration Considers Alternatives for European Missile Defense

Stories we're following today:

U.S. Mulls Alternatives for Missile Shield – The New York Times [link]

• The Obama administration has developed possible alternative plans for a missile defense shield that could drop hotly disputed sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move that would please Russia and Germany but sour relations with American allies in Eastern Europe.
• Among the alternatives are dropping either the Polish or Czech site, or both sites, and instead building launching pads or radar installations in Turkey or the Balkans, while developing land-based versions of the Aegis SM-3, a ship-based anti-missile system, officials said.

Analysis of IAEA Report – Arms Control Association [link]

• According to a report released by the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA), Iran continues to slowly but steadily work to expand its uranium enrichment capacity at Natanz and to complete construction of a heavy-water reactor at Arak.
• The report goes on to note that the information provided about potential past military nuclear activities is credible enough to require serious answers from Iran.
• The Obama administration and the UN Security Council must focus on improving IAEA access to Iran's nuclear facilities, personnel, and plans as much as on halting the production of enriched uranium, the expansion of Iran's uranium enrichment complex, and the construction of the Arak heavy-water reactor.

6 Nations to Hold Meeting on Iran in Germany – Associated Press 

• French Foreign Ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier said the meeting would be in Frankfurt to prepare for a September meeting on the Iran nuclear issue, which will take place on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Geneva Nuclear Arms Talks Fail to Overcome Block - Reuters [link]

• Arms negotiators failed to clear the way on Monday for the start of talks this year on nuclear disarmament as Pakistan said its security interests had not been respected.
• The conference, which is the world's sole multinational forum for negotiating disarmament, broke a 12-year stalemate in May when it agreed a work plan to start negotiations on banning production of fissile material for nuclear bombs.
• Next month's U.N. Security Council summit on nuclear disarmament and the regular discussions on disarmament in the General Assembly's First Committee later this year will provide an opportunity for other powers to find a way to overcome Pakistan's reservations, diplomats said.

Is This the Face of Anti-Nuke Activism? – Campus Progress [link]

• What most people might not know is that President Obama is unfolding the most ambitious anti-nuclear agenda in American presidential history, even if there are few grassroots voices on left to support or push beyond his goals. He is faced with a foreign policy establishment that considers the nuclear deterrent sacrosanct. Without active public support, Obama alone may prove inadequate to the task.
• “If we don’t have [some] kind of activism again we will be unlikely to succeed,” says Joe Cirincione, president of the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, an influential foundation that supports a nuclear-weapon-free world, and former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Not-Quite-Nuclear Nations – Newsweek [link]

• For all the fear that proliferation creates, there are fewer nuclear powers now than in years past. A look at the nations that chased (or even acquired) the bomb but eventually gave it up.

A View from the Dark Side
Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb – Newsweek [link]

• A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer.
• The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear peace: the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's major powers have avoided coming to blows.
• The logic of nuclear peace rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad—conventional war—won't happen.