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Iran Says It Is Poised to Exceed Limits on Nuclear Stockpile

IN THIS ISSUE: Iran Says It Is Poised to Exceed Limits on Nuclear Stockpile, Trump Clarifies Nuclear Gulf Between U.S., North Korea, House Appropriators Target Trump’s Nukes, INF Treaty Busting Weapons, Poll: Americans Want to Stay in Nuclear Arms Control Agreements, The U.S. Put Nuclear Waste Under a Dome on a Pacific Island. Now It’s Cracking Open

Published on May 21, 2019

Iran Says It Is Poised to Exceed Limits on Nuclear Stockpile

Laurence Norman and Aresu Eqbali | Wall Street Journal

Iranian officials said Monday that within weeks they could exceed an internationally agreed cap on their stockpile of low-enriched uranium, as tensions between Iran and the U.S. escalated. Iran threatened earlier this month to step up its nuclear program, saying it would initially stop respecting limits set on its stockpiles of enriched uranium and heavy water, both of which can be used in the production of nuclear weapons. Tehran warned that without economic help from Europe to buffer the effect of renewed U.S. sanctions, it would take further steps. Tehran’s move came as the Trump administration deepened already sharp sanctions against Iran and increased the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf. While President Trump has said in recent days that Washington wasn’t seeking war with Iran, on Twitter over the weekend he warned if there is a conflict, “that will be the official end of Iran.”

Trump Clarifies Nuclear Gulf Between U.S., North Korea

Andrew Salmon | Asia Times

U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking to US broadcaster Fox News on Sunday evening, said Washington had sought, during a February summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, to shutter five nuclear sites, but Pyongyang was only willing to close two. Trump’s comments were among the clearest indications yet on why that summit, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, broke up without any agreement being reached. The future of further talks – and indeed, the future of North Korea’s promised denuclearization process – have been uncertain ever since. “When I left Vietnam where we had the summit, I said to Chairman Kim … And I think very importantly I said, ‘Look, you are not ready for a deal because he wanted to get rid of one or two sites,” Trump said in televised comments. “But he has five sites … I said, ‘What about the other three sites?’ That is no good.”

House Appropriators Target Trump’s Nukes, INF Treaty Busting Weapons
Aaron Mehta | Defense News
https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/05/20/house-appropriators-target-trumps-nukes-inf-treaty-busting-weapons/
While the Trump administration has made updating and upgrading America’s nuclear arsenal a priority, a pair of key House appropriations subcommittees are setting up a fight over funding for fiscal year 2020. While both the Defense and Energy and Water subcommittees, the latter of which oversees the National Nuclear Security Administration, will face a full committee markup of their funding plans on Tuesday, the two subcommittees released funding documents Monday. In both documents, key parts of the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review modernization plan take a hit. Democrats, particularly House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, have been vocal critics of the administration’s plan to stand up two new nuclear warheads: the W76-2, a new low-yield variant of the warhead used on the Navy’s Trident ballistic missile, and a future sea-launched nuclear cruise missile.

Poll: Americans Want to Stay in Nuclear Arms Control Agreements

Patrick Tucker | Defense One

As the Pentagon prepares to spend about a half trillion dollars over a decade on new nuclear weapons, a new poll suggests that the public favors a more constrained nuclear posture and is growing more skeptical of weapons that are in the U.S. arsenal already. A majority of respondents also favored restraining the president from launching a nuclear strike before seeking congressional approval. The poll from the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland asked a bipartisan group of 2,264 people for their opinions on a variety of nuclear weapons issues. Eighty percent of the respondents, including 77 percent of Republicans, favor extending the New START Treaty beyond its 2021 expiration. New START limits the number of strategic nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia can deploy and allows for each party to verify the other’s deployed arsenal. Some military leaders have pointed out that the Treaty doesn’t include some of Russia’s newer nuclear weapons; others have argued for replacing it with a new, similar treaty with China.

The U.S. Put Nuclear Waste Under a Dome on a Pacific Island. Now It’s Cracking Open.

Kyle Swenson | Washington Post

At 6:45 a.m. on March 1, 1954, the blue sky stretching over the central Pacific Ocean was split open by an enormous red flash. Within seconds, a mushroom cloud towered 4½ miles high over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The explosion, the U.S. government’s first weaponized hydrogen bomb, was 1,000 times as powerful as the “Little Boy” atomic bomb blast that flattened Hiroshima — and a complete miscalculation. Scientists had underestimated the size of what became known as the “Castle Bravo” test, resulting in an explosion that was 2½ times larger than expected. Radioactive ash dropped more than 7,000 square miles from the bomb site, caking the nearby inhabited islands. “Within hours, the atoll was covered with a fine, white, powder-like substance,” the Marshall Islands health minister would later testify, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “No one knew it was radioactive fallout. The children played in the ‘snow.’ They ate it.”

Nuclear Weapons Are Getting Less Predictable, and More Dangerous

Patrick Tucker | Defense One

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, to discuss, among many things, the prospect of a new, comprehensive nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia and China. At the same time, the Pentagon is developing a new generation of nuclear weapons to keep up with cutting-edge missiles and warheads coming out of Moscow. If the administration fails in its ambitious renegotiation, the world is headed toward a new era of heightened nuclear tension not seen in decades. That’s because these new weapons are eroding the idea of nuclear predictability. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, the concept of the nuclear triad — bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles — created a shared set of expectations around what the start of a nuclear war would look like. If you were in NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado and you saw ICBMs headed toward the United States, you knew that a nuclear first strike was underway. The Soviets had a similar set of expectations, and this shared understanding created the delicate balance of deterrence — a balance that is becoming unsettled.

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