Posted on Dec. 29th (Reuters) – North Korea likely is closer to mounting nuclear warheads on its ballistic missiles than generally reported, possibly only one or two years away, the U.S. Congress’s former top expert on the issue has concluded. Larry Niksch, who tracked North Korea for the nonpartisan U.S. Congressional Research Service for 43 [...]

Posted on Dec 21st SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea test-fired a short-range missile off its east coast on Dec. 19, the same day it announced the death of leader Kim Jong-Il, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said. The agency quoted an unnamed government official as saying the missile launch was unrelated to the announcement [...]

Posted on Dec 8th It’s no secret that North Korea has been providing missile technology to Syria, to Iran and to other countries, typically in the form of local assembly, although several of Pyongyang’s former missile customers have stopped their business. The issue of nuclear co-operation is quite a bit less clear. With regard to [...]

Posted on Nov 30th North Korea said yesterday that uranium enrichment and construction of a nuclear power-plant was “progressing apace”, increasing concerns that the country is working to build an atomic weapon. A foreign ministry statement added that North Korea had a sovereign right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy and that “neither concession nor compromise [...]

Posted on Nov 28th North Korea has supplied Syria and Iran with a special kind of steel used to upgrading missiles and building centrifuges for Uranium enrichment, the German newspaper Die Welt reported over the weekend. The material, called maraging steel, appears on the monitoring list of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Missile Technology [...]

Posted on Nov 17th UNITED NATIONS – Greek authorities seized almost 14,000 anti-chemical weapons suits from a North Korean ship possibly headed for Syria but did not disclose the find for nearly two years, diplomats said Nov. 16. The seizure was reported to the U.N. Security Council, which discussed the monitoring of nuclear sanctions against [...]

Posted on Nov 10th The Australian Government is courting disaster with its approach to this country’s largest-ever defense program, the purchase of new submarines. The government seems determined to spend over $30 billion designing and building in Australia 12 new submarines that will almost certainly have serious flaws, will be delivered late, will be unnecessarily [...]

Posted on Nov 9th ISLAMABAD – Pakistan on Nov. 6 angrily rejected a report that it had been moving its nuclear weapons in unsafe conditions, saying nobody should underestimate its capability to defend itself. Two U.S. magazines reported that Pakistan has begun moving its nuclear weapons in low-security vans on congested roads to hide them from [...]

Posted on Nov 3rd The world’s nuclear powers are planning to spend hundreds of billions of pounds modernising and upgrading weapons warheads and delivery systems over the next decade, according to an authoritative report published on Monday. Despite government budget pressures and international rhetoric about disarmament, evidence points to a new and dangerous “era of nuclear [...]

Posted on Nov 2nd BRUSSELS - The world is heading for “a new era of global nuclear force modernisation and growth” despite anti-proliferation rhetoric in the US and EU, a new study says. The survey by the London and Washington-based think-tank, the British American Security Information Council (Basic), notes that every one of the world’s nine nuclear [...]