Cutting Funding to the IAEA Is a Horrible Idea
Jon Wolfsthal and Laura S.H. Holgate
It’s not hard to start an argument these days in Washington. President Donald Trump’s newly released budget will surely spark thousands of them, as analysts, partisans, Big Bird, and eventually members of Congress debate both sides of every issue. But there are some things to which most reasonable people can and should agree. Chief among these is that the United States has a long-standing and continuing interest in preventing countries and terrorists from building nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the only way to interpret Trump’s proposed budget cuts for the State Department and the international programs they fund is that he couldn’t care less.
Banning Nuclear Testing: Lessons From the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Testing Site
Togzhan Kassenova
In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union rushed to build and test its first nuclear bomb to reach parity with the United States. The Soviet government chose the steppes of Kazakhstan as its first nuclear-testing site. In difficult conditions, weapons program participants built the site and, in 1949, tested the first Soviet nuclear bomb. Shrouded in secrecy, the Soviet military complex continued to conduct nuclear tests in Kazakhstan for forty years while the local population became an unwilling victim of the Soviet nuclear might. Nuclear tests, especially during the earlier years of atmospheric testing, resulted in severe health and environmental consequences for thousands of nearby residents. Mass protests in Kazakhstan against nuclear tests built the momentum that drove the Kazakh government's decision to close down the Semipalatinsk nuclear-testing site in 1989.
United States and Allies Protest U.N. Talks to Ban Nuclear Weapons
Somini Sengupta and Rick Gladstone | New York Times
Saying the time was not right to outlaw nuclear arms, the United States led a group of dozens of United Nations members on Monday that boycotted talks at the global organization for a treaty that would ban the weapons. “There is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons,” Ambassador Nikki R. Haley of the United States told reporters outside the General Assembly as the talks began. “But we have to be realistic. Is there anyone who thinks that North Korea would ban nuclear weapons?”
The Coming Ban on Nuclear Weapons
Zia Mian | Project Syndicate
On March 27, the United Nations will start negotiations on an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons. It will be a milestone marking the beginning of the end of an age of existential peril for humanity. This day was bound to come. From the beginning, even those who set the world on the path to nuclear weapons understood the mortal danger and moral challenge confronting humanity. In April 1945, US Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained to President Harry Truman that the atomic bomb would be “the most terrible weapon ever known in human history.” Stimson warned that “the world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”
North Korea’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site: New Activity at the North Portal
38 North
New commercial satellite imagery of the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site from March 25 shows the continued presence of three to four vehicles or equipment trailers at the entrance to the North Portal. The texture of the ground from the portal entrance past the vehicles or equipment trailers suggests that communications cables may have been laid on the ground. This equipment would likely be used to initiate the test, collect data from the explosion and process the data. Also notable, water is being pumped out of the portal and draining downhill to the east and west, presumably to keep the tunnel dry for monitoring or communications
Rex Tillerson’s ‘New Approach’ to North Korea Sounds a Lot Like the Old Approach
Jeffrey Lewis | Washington Post
When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson showed up in Asia this month, he announced that the United States would take a “new approach” to North Korea. Tillerson avoided any specifics of how he planned to get a different result, but he was well armed with platitudes — he spoke of decades of failed “diplomatic and other efforts,” joined the Japanese foreign minister in calling Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs “totally unacceptable,” and urged the North’s leaders “to change your path.” Shortly after Tillerson departed, North Korea attempted yet another missile launch.