A bit overshadowed by the “news of the day”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1991/nk-boots-iaea-again, but I had two questions about the recent North Korean missile launch that I wanted to get down on, um, paper:

1. I have not read every report that there is to read, but no one seems to say that the second two stages of the missile separated. That is interesting, given that the last two stages of the TD-1 that was tested in 1998 also failed to separate. Is North Korea having the same problem with this missile?

2. On the same day in 2006 that North Korea tested the TD-2, Pyongyang also tested “six other missiles.”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_09/NKMissileTest Why just the one this time?

And speaking of “said news”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1991/nk-boots-iaea-again of the day, it’s worth remembering that North Korea tested its nuclear explosive device about three months after the failed July 2006 missile test. Just saying.

*Update:*

Josh and I are really “good”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1991/nk-boots-iaea-again at “coordinating.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1992/nk-can-this-bad-marriage-be-saved

For all the potential safety issues with nuclear power, you didn’t think that it would results in “branding issues”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,571254,00.html for French vintners, did you?

From “Der Spiegel”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,571254,00.html a while back,

France is proud of having the world’s most developed nuclear energy infrastructure, but a series of incidents at the Tricastin nuclear power plant has shaken its self-confidence. Is public sentiment about nuclear power about to shift?

The winegrowers have already made their move. *No longer will they label their product Côteaux du Tricastin. Why? Because the name Tricastin is slowly beginning to stand for something far removed from fine wine.*

The vintners fear that sales might be hurt by a series of recent accidents at a nuclear power plant near Avignon bearing the same name. *”Nuclear energy and food don’t really go so well together in the minds of consumers,”* said Henri Bour, president of the local Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) wine association, in late July. From now on, the wine will likely bear the label of origin “Grignan,” after the place where the association is based.

By now, perhaps you’ve heard about the rather “well”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html “publicized”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102651580 story to appear in “Science”:http://www.sciencemag.org/ tomorrow.

[Update: Here’s the “abstract”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;324/5923/98?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=frisen%2C+j&andorexacttitle=or&andorexacttitleabs=or&andorexactfulltext=or&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&fdate=4/1/2009&tdate=4/30/2009&resourcetype=HWCIT,HWELTR of Bergmann et al., “Evidence for Cardiomyocyte Renewal in Humans.”]

No? It involves cadavers and atmospheric nuclear testing. “For real”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html:

Cell turnover rates can easily be measured in animals by making their cells radioactive and seeing how fast they are replaced. Such an experiment, called pulse-labeling, could not ethically be done in people. But Dr. Frisen realized several years ago that nuclear weapons tested in the atmosphere until 1963 had in fact labeled the cells of the entire world’s population.

The nuclear blasts generated a radioactive form of carbon known as carbon-14. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has gradually diminished since 1963, when above-ground tests were banned, as it has been incorporated into plants and animals or diffused into the oceans.

In the body, carbon-14 in the diet gets into the DNA of new cells and stays unchanged for the life of the cell. Because the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere falls each year, the amount of carbon-14 in the DNA can serve to indicate the cell’s birth date, Dr. Frisen found.

Four years ago he used his new method to assess the turnover rate of various tissues in the body, concluding that the average age of the cells in an adult’s body might be as young as 7 to 10 years. But there is a wide range of ages — from the rapidly turning over cells of the blood and gut to the mostly permanent cells of the brain.

Long story short, they found that the heart muscle actually regenerates slightly over a human lifetime.

Usually, this sort of thing would be called a “natural experiment”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment, but that label doesn’t seem quite appropriate here.

_Unnatural_ experiment?

_Accidental_ experiment?

Sure, it doesn’t make up for excess cancers from atmospheric nuclear testing, but it’s pretty neat anyhow.

Jeff Lewis asked me to distill something from “all”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1949/there-is-no-ballistic-missile-threat “the”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1943/tennis-with-the-net-up “recent”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1942/dome-sweet-dome “TW”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1941/the-pearl-harbor-golf-ball “postage”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1934/undermining-abm-part-deux “on BMD”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1932/olc-on-the-abmt for the ACW crowd.

Highlight:

bq. Strategic ballistic missile defense expresses a worldview in ways most weapons systems do not. It’s unilateralism. Acquiring, testing, and deploying strategic BMD just seem to fit with at-will revision of treaties like peanut butter goes with jelly. And the philosophy of an administration does more to shape BMD’s budgetary footprint than do military requirements as defined by the Armed Services or Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Read the “whole thing”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2232/defensive-transition.

It has a bit of a ring, if you’re as dorky as a guy who runs an arms control blog.

Anyway, NPEC has had “the text”:http://www.npec-web.org/us-uae/20090115-UsUae-Revised123Agreement.pdf up for a while now, but I thought I’d point out two especially interesting features:

1. Article 12 states that the United States has the right to terminate the agreement if the UAE engages in enrichment or reprocessing or obtains ENR facilities.

2. The last paragraph of the Agreed Minute apparently makes the agreement a minimum standard for other 123 agreements with countries in the region, should the US negotiate them. Here’s the key part:

bq. the fields of cooperation, terms and conditions accorded by the United States of America to the United Arab Emirates for cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy shall be no less favorable in scope and effect than those which may be accorded, from time to time, to any other non-nuclear weapon State in the Middle East in a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement.

Hey, the geeks shall inherit the earth…

The GAO has issued a “scathing report”:http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09385.pdf on the management of the Life Extension Program for U.S. nuclear weapons.

Profound observation of the day: this stuff is hard. It does not come easily. Management of anything seriously complex, that is.

Something to think about.

I’ve long thought that Iran may try use its influence over Iraq to extract concessions on its nuclear program. But a “BBC report”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7901101.stm has UN ambassador Sir John Sawers saying that Iran tried to do exactly that before restarting uranium conversion:

“There were various Iranians who would come to London and suggest we had tea in some hotel or other. They’d do the same in Paris, they’d do the same in Berlin, and then we’d compare notes among the three of us,” he told the BBC.

“The Iranians wanted to be able to strike a deal whereby they stopped killing our forces in Iraq in return for them being allowed to carry on with their nuclear programme: *’We stop killing you in Iraq, stop undermining the political process there, you allow us to carry on with our nuclear programme without let or hindrance.’*

Also interesting is this admission from Nicholas Burns:

bq. “We had advocated regime change,” said Mr Burns. “We had a very threatening posture towards Iran for a number of years. It didn’t produce any movement whatsoever.”

The admission is obviously what is of interest, not the information.

A friendly back-and-forth can be found in the comments section of “this post.”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2192/iran-and-syria-reports

After ISIS contended that they had posted the reports first, Jeffrey responded as follows:

Your email to my inbox is time-stamped 10:44 am.

The time stamp on my post is 10:28.

The impressive feat, of course, is that you have actually read the report, which I cannot claim even at 4:20 pm.

“ISIS”:http://www.isisnucleariran.org/assets/pdf/IAEA_Report_Iran_Feb_2009.pdf and the “Wonk”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2192/iran-and-syria-reports have the latest IAEA reports about Iran and Syria. ISIS also has some “analysis”:http://www.isisnucleariran.org/assets/pdf/IAEA_Report_Analysis.pdf of the Iran report.

Just to add to Josh’s “post”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1862/nk-heu-plant, I have been wondering if any better evidence has come to light that North Korea is capable of producing UF6. I haven’t been following North Korea as closely as I used to, but I “once wrote”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_03/NA_NorthKorea that:

North Korea has indigenous supplies of natural uranium, but *whether it can produce uranium hexafluoride is unclear.* A former State Department official familiar with North Korea’s nuclear programs told Arms Control Today Feb. 22 that, as of October 2002, *there was no evidence that North Korea possessed a facility for producing uranium hexafluoride.* North Korea does have a facility for producing uranium tetrafluoride, a uranium compound that is then converted to uranium hexafluoride, that was frozen under the Agreed Framework, the official said.

However, Gary Samore, who headed nonproliferation efforts for the White House during the Clinton administration, said *North Korea could “probably start making hex [uranium hexafluoride] fairly quickly,” Nuclear Fuel reported in September 2003.*

I wish people would focus on uranium conversion more when they talk about uranium enrichment. Without feedstock, a centrifuge facility can’t enrich a damn thing.