Matt Bunn’s comments in “this post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2168/taking-eurodif-to-the-cleaners#comment provide some weedy details on NNSA’s “HEU Transparency Program.”:http://www.ead.anl.gov/project/dsp_topicdetail.cfm?topicid=42
Riffing on Anya’s “comment”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2091/who-speaks-for-russia#comment, I would agree that Andy Grotto’s “admonition”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2091/who-speaks-for-russia applies only to the numerous advocates of naive diplomacy for achieving Utopian ends.
A submarine-wonk-colleague and I were just speculating this morning that yesterday’s “Russian sub accident that took the lives of 20 people”:http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jfn6BiK-75B0F4qtfZgNe12N18jw occured on one of the “Project 971/Akula class”:http://www.nti.org/db/submarines/russia/index.html boats.
And indeed. Though the Russians are yet to release additional information on the incident, the Indian press seems certain that it was the “Akula boat meant for India”:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Accident_on_Russian_submarine_meant_for_India_kills_20/articleshow/3690965.cms. I wrote about “that boat, the INS Chakra,”:http://www.wmdinsights.com/I21/I21_SA1_QuestionsPersist.htm some time ago.
Just thought I’d remind that Russia’s international uranium enrichment center at “Angarsk”:http://www.aecc.ru/eng/index.php is still alive and kicking. The center, which was legally incorporated in Sep 2007, is a joint venture (90:10) between Russia’s Tenex and Kazakhstan’s Kazatomprom. (For a recap of how this is supposed to work, see “INFCIRC/708”:http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2007/infcirc708.pdf, a “Tenex perspective”:http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull481/htmls/nuclear_fuel_cycle.html, and “this presentation”:http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2006/pdf/kirienkoppt.pdf by Rosatom’s Sergey Kiriyenko.)
In early 2008, Russia had reportedly secured buy-in from another country — “Armenia”:http://www.rosatom.com/en/news/8276_06.02.2008. According to a Feb 25 issue of _NuclearFuel_, Moscow promised to invest an additional $3 million into uranium prospecting in Armenia. The Armenian uranium would be enriched at the center in Angarsk, “RIA Novosti”:http://en.rian.ru/world/20080306/100851195.html reported. While Armenia’s share (which will come from Tenex’s 90 percent) is not yet known, Yerevan’s commitment finally gives the center a much needed third participant.
Rosatom is still struggling to get “Ukraine”:http://www.rosatom.com/en/news/8377_13.02.2008 to commit to the project, while discussions with other reportedly interested countries — Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and South Korea — don’t seem to have advanced too far. Russia has also pitched an Angarsk “investment option”:http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2007/11/20/stories/2007112052621000.htm to India, conditioning it on NSG exemption.
Russia very much wants Angarsk to be safeguarded for purposes of transparency. However, I haven’t seen any updates on whether Rosatom’s negotiations with the IAEA on the type of safeguards to be applied at Angarsk have concluded. (In Dec 2007, Rosatom’s Nikolay Spassky indicated that the target time frame for an agreement was “early 2008”:http://www.rosatom.com/en/news/7469_12.12.2007.) Moreover, costs of safeguards implementation at the Angarsk facility present an additional issue. (As Andreas Persbo blogged “here”:http://verificationthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/10/full-house-russia-ratifies-additional.html complete with a mishka picture.) Oh, yeah, here is the link to newly updated text of Russia’s “INFCIRC/327”:https://161.5.1.75/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2008/infcirc327a1.pdf.
Finally, the PIR Center also has a useful “Angarsk chronology”:http://pircenter.org/index.php?id=1976&PHPSESSID=b261d51f64a50c270f17c0bb0d6cb69e.
*Update:* Just to clarify, early on in the project Russia had indicated that it wanted the LEU product and possibly some facilities of the international uranium enrichment center to be under IAEA safeguards. As I wrote above, there is no agreement in place yet, but it appears that facility safeguards are likely to be prohibitive (because of costs, manpower, etc). *Fred McGoldrick wrote in to say that based on his understanding of the present situation, the IAEA safeguards will end up applying only to the LEU product.*
The Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) recently released a new issue of the “Moscow Defense Brief”:http://mdb.cast.ru/ — a one-stop shop for Russian defense industry and arms trade junkies.
This issue of MDB provides an insight into “developments in the Russian defense sector in 2007”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_4/article_1/, which included restructuring of Russia’s arms trade monopolist “Rosoboronexport”:http://www.roe.ru/ into Russian Technologies corporation and the continuation of Russia’s obsession with consolidation of defense enterprises into state-owned holdings. In addition, an article on “preliminary arms trade results”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_3/article_2/ mentions that Russia may transfer the S-300 air-defense system to Iran after all (see a “RIA Novosti backgrounder”:http://en.rian.ru/russia/20071228/94513968.html). I’ve worked with the guys at CAST and I really like them, but I am a little skeptical that this transfer is actually pending. Finally, the MDB provides summaries of “major contracts”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_5/article_1/ and “major deliveries”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_5/article_2/ of Russian weapons systems in 2007.
Speaking of the S-300, Turkey apparently still “can’t make up its mind”:http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=136740 on whether it prefers the Russian air-defense system to the U.S. Patriot. Hopefully, it will choose soon — so that it can make the awesome tables in the “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations”:http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL34187.pdf come fall.
I came across this a couple of days ago and thought that the readers that speak some Russian might enjoy it. (The non-Russian speakers should either enjoy the graphics or find someone to translate. Trust me, it’s worth it!) 🙂
Russia’s RosEnergoAtom recently launched a very funky educational website for school-age children titled “Nuclear Energy for Students and Schoolchildren”:http://education.rosenergoatom.ru/school.html. It features tutorial sections that answer questions such as “What is nuclear energy,” “Why nuclear energy,” as well as a quiz. The quiz is actually not that easy unless one completes the tutorials first. (It goes from questions such as “What does VVER stand for?” to trivia statistics on how many nuclear power plants operate worldwide.) This website definitely builds on the success of the rather famous “The [Russian] President to School Age Citizens”:http://www.uznai-prezidenta.ru/ website, which was actually recently updated with some election-themed trivia. Check it out!
Important discussions on issues of strategic stability aside, below is a silly exchange from a press briefing Bob and Condi gave in Moscow on Monday, March 17. When the two trained Kremlinologists were asked to provide their opinion on the leadership potential of Russia’s President-elect Medvedev, Gates noted that he didn’t expect “big changes in policy direction,” but then the conversation took a slightly unexpected turn…
SECRETARY GATES: My first — my first experience in dealing with (inaudible) in this country was Leonid Brezhnev.
SECRETARY RICE: Bob, you shouldn’t tell people that. (Laughter.)
SECRETARY GATES: I’m really old. I found him thoughtful.
SECRETARY RICE: Brezhnev or – (Laughter.)
SECRETARY GATES: I found Medvedev thoughtful, articulate. As Condi said, he was clearly on top of his brief. Foreign policy and national security issues have not been his thing before, but he discussed them very, very well this afternoon. I was impressed.
QUESTION: *How did you find Brezhnev? (Laughter.)*
SECRETARY GATES: *You don’t want to go there. (Laughter.)*
QUESTION: Did you —
SECRETARY GATES: *That’s when I knew we’d win. (Laughter.)*
I am not even going to attempt to analyze this one. SecDef must really miss the gerontocracy and the “eyebrows”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/10/newsid_2516000/2516417.stm. Full text of the briefing is “here”:http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/03/102315.htm.
*Update:* Some snapshots of Medvedev’s eyebrows are available “here”:http://www.rost.ru/medvedev/photos.html.
In all of the recent discussion about the Gabala radar (the one that Russia leases in Azerbaijan), one bit of news crept out a little while back that I think is worth highlighting.
Apparently a Russian TV crew was allowed to film at the radar station. According to the 10 June broadcast, the station used to track Iranian and Iraqi missile launches back in the day:
bq. The station proved its efficiency back in the time of the Iran-Iraq war. *The Soviet intelligence service received live data on the two warring sides’ missile strikes: the missiles would still be in the air, but the Soviet Union would already know where they were flying, at what speed, and whether they were going to hit the target.*
The radar, it seems, still does this.
According to Sergey Starostin, the Qabala radar station commander,
bq. In January 2007, *a test launch of a Shihab-3 operational-tactical missile from the territory of Iran to the Arabian Sea was spotted.*
According to the announcer, the missile had “*a range of no more than 2,000 km.*”
This is, I think, the first official source I’ve seen which independently confirms that Iran has flight-tested a missile with such a range. The reporting on the subject that I’ve seen cites what the Iranians _say_ about the missile.
For example, I wrote in a “recent _ACT_ article”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_01-02/IranNK.asp that
bq. During a Nov. 12 television interview, Major General Yahya Rahim-Safavi, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps indicated that Iran tested a Shahab-3 capable of traveling 2,000 kilometers. Tehran has previously claimed to possess a missile with such a range.
The “2006 NASIC report”:http://www.nukestrat.com/us/afn/NASIC2006.pdf says that Iran has a missile with a range of about 2,000 km. But that estimate is itself based on “statements by Iranian officials.”
Please do something less dorky now, if you can.
While listening to a great panel at the Carnegie conference about the US and Russian nuclear options, I was reminded of a great quote from Ed Ifft illustrating the value of legally-binding arms control agreements.
During a recent “ACA event,”:http://www.armscontrol.org/events/20070611_USRussiaTranscript.asp Ifft argued that such agreements help nations avoid defense planning based on worst-case scenarios. He did so by illustrating the absurdity of current US-Russian tensions over the Bush administration’s missile defense plans for Europe:
bq. If you think about it, *the Americans are trying to build a system to counter an Iranian ICBM which does not exist. The Russians are developing systems to penetrate a U.S. ABM system which does not exist.* There’s a certain parallel there. The point is that this is *one of the great virtues of legally binding arms control agreements is that people then do not have to make worst-case assumptions about what the world will look like ten or fifteen years in the future.*
FYI, Jeffrey had a “good post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1551/frickin-extend-start-already about the event that you should also read.
Marc Schanz “is a bad man.”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1535/waiting-for-vlad