nuclear-news

Suspicion that South Korea has nuclear weapons

Does South Korea have nuclear weapons? Stephen Collins Prophecy Log 8 Jan 2010 In another very important story not covered by the establishment American media, the Asia Times reported that South Korea has been “carrying out covert uranium conversion and enrichment activities and plutonium experiments for more than two decades (emphasis added).” The link reports that South Korea has admitted its nuclear activities and that South Korea was “actually making something close to bomb-grade [fissionable material].” If South Korea has been working with uranium enrichment for over 20 years, it is not hard to visualize that that nation may already secretly have several nuclear bombs in its inventory.

It is not hard to figure out why South Korea would have a strong motivation to have a clandestine nuclear weapons program. South Korea has known that North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons for many years, and South Korea urgently needs its own nuclear weapons to deter North Korea from nuclear aggression or blackmail against South Korea. Of course, nuclear deterrence is only useful if your enemy knows (or thinks you might have) nuclear weapons, so it is possible that South Korea itself leaked this story to the Asia Times. ………………
The revelation that South Korea either already has (or soon could have) nuclear weapons begs the obvious question: How many other nations have also been secretly working on nuclear weapons technology without telling the world about it?

.DOE Gives Nuclear Labs One Heck of a Long Winter Vacation

Project on Government Oversight 7 Jan 2010 If your kid accidentally blew apart a building, would you give them less supervision?

This hands-off approach is exactly what the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is doing by giving the contractors who manage the nation’s eight nuclear weapons sites (Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Nevada Test Site, Sandia National Laboratory, Savannah River Site, Pantex, Y-12, and the Kansas City Plant) a six-month break from many regularly scheduled oversight reviews.

On December 18, 2009–two days after researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) accidentally blew apart a building, causing an initial estimate of $3 million in damage–NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino signed a directive “placing a six-month moratorium on NNSA-initiated functional assessments, reviews, evaluations and inspections.” POGO saw this directive coming, as DOE and NNSA have initiated reforms to put contractors in charge of their own oversight, “Reforming the Nuclear Security Enterprise.” POGO is not convinced that this moratorium is so temporary, and is interested to know what NNSA is going to do with all of the federal full time employees at the site offices and headquarters it no longer needs as a result of this directive. Getting a hiatus from regular reviews are many of the areas that have had recent serious problems—security, nuclear safety, cyber security, Material Control and Accountability (MC&A), contractor assurance systems that relate to contract oversight, property accountability, and nuclear weapons quality……………NNSA’s new approach to federal safety and security oversight is irresponsible—stopping it in its entirety for six months. POGO would instead like to see NNSA make a New Year’s resolution to conduct smarter, more rigorous oversight of its labs……http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2010/01/doe-gives-nuclear-labs-one-heck-of-a-long-winter-vacation.html

January 8, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | South Korea, weapons and war | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, nuclear weapons