"Today, President Park and I are reaffirming that our nations will never accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state." —@POTUS
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 16, 2015
OOPS! A large tremor near North Korea’s nuclear test facilities is suspected to be an explosion, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has reported.
Reuters: Iran will not accept any restrictions on its missile program, the defense minister was quoted as saying by state media on Wednesday, after sanctions monitors said Tehran had violated a U.N. Security Council resolution by test-firing a missile.
Iran has once again tested a mid-range ballistic missile in an apparent breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions forbidding them from doing so, according to Fox News.
“Iran has carried out a new medium-ranged ballistic missile test, and that missile they say, is capable of carrying a nuclear weapon,” Shepherd Smith announced Monday afternoon. “This is a breach of not one but two U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
U.S. officials told the news organization on Sunday the test was held Nov. 21 in the port city of Chabahar near the country’s southern border with Pakistan. The missile test occurred at a well-known site by the Gulf of Oman.
The missile, called the Ghadr-110, has a range up to 1,200 miles and is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium has increased in the past three months even though Tehran is supposed to reduce it significantly under a deal with major powers, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) determined in a confidential report Reuters saw on Wednesday afternoon.
Iran has also started to dismantle uranium enrichment centrifuges at its Natanz and Fordow nuclear facilities, the IAEA report states. Under the deal with major powers reached in July, Iran is supposed to reduce the number of centrifuges it has in operation.
He seems nice:
Dana Durnford is charged with two counts of criminal harassment for online videos attacking researchers Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Jay Cullen of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
In expletive-laden recordings available until recently on the Internet, Durnford rails against the pair and other leading scientists and calls for their deaths.
“Every university, every academic, every nuclear scientist will be hunted down and f—ing murdered,” he declares in one video. “We want you dead.”
Ironically finishing off the job Fukushima never did.
Iran has stopped dismantling centrifuges in two uranium enrichment plants, state media reported on Tuesday, days after conservative lawmakers complained to President Hassan Rouhani that the process was too rushed.
In fact, it’s too big a number to think of, let alone eight of them.
So, some perspective:
| Total Amount of Sewage in litres | 8,000,000,000.00 | |
| No. of flushes at 6 litres / flush | 1,333,333,333.33 | |
| Minutes in a year | 525,600.00 | |
| No. of flushes / minute | 2,536.78 |
In other words, twenty-five hundred people flushing their black-water once every minute for a full year. Yes, that’s real pollution, as opposed to the made-up kind.
Related.
Speaking of Secretary Global Test: Kerry’s Israel trip complicated by U.S. diplomatic flub
Iran opens new frontier in pizza delivery;
Iran successfully test fired a new guided long-range ballistic surface-to-surface missile, state TV reported on Sunday. It was the first such a test since Iran and world powers reach a historical nuclear deal.
[…]
This is the first test of a ballistic surface-to-surface missile by Iran since U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 in July, which endorsed a landmark nuclear deal reached between Iran and world powers. The resolution called on Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. Iran says none of its missiles are designed for that purpose.
It’s probably nothing.
It’s 13 pages long, grab a coffee.
Aegrescit medendo:
No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation — a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise.
But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation — one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant.
Epidemiologists speak of “stochastic deaths,” those they predict will happen in the future because of radiation or some other risk. With no names attached to the numbers, they remain an abstraction.
But these other deaths were immediate and unequivocally real.
“The government basically panicked,” said Dr. Mohan Doss, a medical physicist who spoke at the Tokyo meeting, when I called him at his office at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “When you evacuate a hospital intensive care unit, you cannot take patients to a high school and expect them to survive.”
Iran has discovered an unexpectedly high reserve of uranium and will soon begin extracting the radioactive element at a new mine, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation said on Saturday.
The comments cast doubt on previous assessments from some Western analysts who said the country had a low supply and would sooner or later would need to import uranium, the raw material needed for its nuclear program.
Related: The Iran deal in perspective.
Hope, change, duck, and cover;
When the Cold War ended, people forgot about that stuff, to the point that when I teach Cold War material in my Constitutional Law or National Security Law courses, I find that my law students, except for a few military veterans or emergency-services types, know nothing about basic nuclear weapons facts that almost everyone knew as late as the 1980s. But now it may be time for that knowledge to come back.
Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski announced Wednesday she’s supporting the international agreement with Iran regarding its nuclear capabilities. In doing so, the Maryland Democrat gives the Obama administration a veto override-proof list of 34 Senate supporters, all from the Democratic caucus.
In the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, stories like this were routine.
It was a good 26 years.
The differences in Democrat, Republican, and Iranian negotiating styles
The day we commemorate the nuclear takedown of comedian Jon Stewart.
Secretary Kerry of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz stated that they had not read the text of the side deals with Iran and that Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman “may have” before the Senate Armed Services Committee…
