Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

--U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on when the United States and Russia would complete a deal to replace the expired 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

WASHINGTON -- With an eye toward making good on U.S. President Barack Obama's nearly year-old pledge to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security, some of his top lieutenants have begun asserting that technological advances now allow greater reliance on conventional arms for strategic deterrence (see GSN, March 15).

(Mar. 19) - U.S. Representative Michael Turner (R-Ohio). At a hearing this week, the lawmaker questioned assertions that the United States could increasingly rely on the deterrent capabilities of non-nuclear weapons (U.S. Representative Michael Turner photo).

However, the contention is already running into resistance on Capitol Hill and, to some extent, in the U.S. military.

"I'm very concerned [about] the trade-off between conventional and strategic weapons that do not play the same role as a deterrent," Representative Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said this week at a House subcommittee hearing.

Testifying before the panel, the top U.S. combatant commander for nuclear weapons said the nation's formidable Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps play a significant role in deterring attacks on the United States and its allies, but signaled it would be wrong to overemphasize the conventional military's potential to prevent wars.

Gen. Kevin Chilton noted that a strong conventional posture can continue to serve as a deterrent to conflict in hot spots such as the Korean Peninsula. Also, he said, he supports taking U.S. nuclear arms reductions in concert with Russia.

"However, we have to be careful when we start talking about one-for-one substitutions of conventional weapons for nuclear weapons," the Air Force general said. "The nuclear weapon has a deterrent factor that far exceeds a conventional threat."

The Defense Department-led Nuclear Posture Review is expected to address the relationship between nuclear and conventional deterrence, but has been repeatedly delayed. It is now anticipated within the next month (see GSN, March 18).

A central review issue under debate behind the scenes has been whether and how to change the nation's nuclear "declaratory posture," potentially moving to a position in which Washington states that the "sole" or "primary" purpose of its atomic arsenal is to deter nuclear war.

The intended implication would be that, going forward, U.S. conventional forces are sufficient to deter -- or use in response to -- virtually any non-nuclear attack against the nation or its allies.

If embraced, a declaration about the "sole" purpose of nuclear weapons could be seen as a step toward the eventual global elimination of nuclear weapons that Obama discussed in Prague last year. The president might opt, though, for a more modest alternative, namely that countering enemy nuclear threats is the main -- but not only -- purpose of the U.S. atomic arsenal, according to executive branch insiders.

Pending the posture review's release, Obama administration officials appear to be testing out the viability of an argument that conventional deterrence can assume a growing utility relative to nuclear deterrence.

"While nuclear weapons have a clear role, our deterrent extends beyond nuclear weapons," Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher said at a conference last month. "Our improving conventional capabilities make it possible to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons for some targets and missions. As our conventional weapons have become more precise, we do not have to cling to nuclear weapons to accomplish our objectives."

The idea of a military stance that increasingly favors conventional capabilities is nothing new. Over the past two decades, defense technologists have found that smaller amounts of firepower very accurately delivered can effectively substitute for big-but-dumb unguided munitions, to some extent limiting unintended casualties.

Similar logic is now being applied to selected, time-urgent threats that might be regarded as potential nuclear targets, such as al-Qaeda leadership pinpointed along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or a North Korean nuclear missile being readied on a launch pad.

For such scenarios, Obama officials theorize that tailored conventional strikes might be useful alternatives to Cold War-era strategic nuclear deterrence.

At the same time, remarks by Tauscher and others hint that the circumstances under which conventional arms could prove as useful as -- or perhaps more usable than -- nuclear weapons might expand in the coming years, as the atomic arsenal's role gradually fades.

Gen. James Cartwright, Chilton's predecessor as head of U.S. Strategic Command, presaged the new thinking back in 2005, arguing that advanced conventional-weapon technologies could allow the nation to "drastically" reduce its nuclear arsenal. One military authority subsequently estimated that conventional munitions were capable of destroying up to 30 percent of targets in the nuclear combat plan (see GSN, May 28, 2008).

Today, nuclear strategy expert Jeffrey Lewis goes even further.

"The target set of things that we cannot hold at risk with conventional weapons is very small and maybe empty," Lewis, who heads the New America Foundation's Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative, told Global Security Newswire this week. "The unique value provided by nuclear weapons is largely psychological at this point and hardly one of military utility."

Now that this view appears to have gained steam in the White House, Obama is hearing some pushback from the right.

"The wrong way to think about nuclear weapons is target-by-target," Linton Brooks, who oversaw nuclear security during President George W. Bush's administration, said in an interview last month. "Yes, if you take any given target, there are many of them that can be held at risk by conventional weapons. But I think that that does not imply that conventional weapons have the same kind of deterrent effect that nuclear weapons do."

Turner, ranking member of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, sounded a similar alarm.

"We know that the threat of nuclear weapons is actually increasing by the number of countries that are both seeking and-or possessing nuclear weapons technology. That threat does not appear to be decreasing," Turner said this week. "So I'm very concerned as we try to translate what perhaps should be a stated dream into an actual goal or policy that affects both the role and numbers of our strategic deterrent."

Republicans argue that Washington's "extended deterrence" guarantees to its allies in Europe and Northeast Asia continue to require an underlying but unwavering U.S. nuclear threat.

"Will allies who benefit from U.S.-extended deterrence commitments feel equally assured when the U.S. reduces its nuclear deterrent and offers conventional forces as a substitute?" Turner asked at the House panel's hearing on Tuesday.

GOP lawmakers are also raising even more fundamental questions about whether the long-term objective is worth pursuing. A world without nuclear weapons invites more -- not less -- conventional warfare, the argument goes.

"In the nuclear-free world that ended in 1945 there was neither peace nor security," Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration official, wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary last year. "Since then there have indeed been many wars but none has come close to the carnage that occurred regularly before the development of nuclear weapons, and none has pitted nuclear powers against each other."

Global nuclear disarmament is not a realistic objective, Turner suggested this week.

"What is the strategic rationale behind this [Obama] policy?" he asked. "Do we expect others -- like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China -- to give up their nuclear arms once the U.S. reduces theirs?"

Those skeptical about conventional deterrence include some who quibble less with Obama's vision of a world free of nuclear weapons than his emerging investment in futuristic conventional "prompt global strike" arms. Several lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, have argued that these weapons could prove destabilizing in a crisis (see GSN, May 21, 2009).

The anticipated first such weapon, the Air Force Conventional Strike Missile, could slam into a target halfway around the world within an hour of launch. Its high speed and long range -- unprecedented for a conventional munition -- are raising worries about the potential for its hasty use based on inadequate intelligence.

Some also are concerned about the technology's possible application in a disabling strike by Washington against small nuclear forces such as Beijing's, a risk that might trigger dangerous "use or lose" dynamics during a crisis.

"I'm an advocate for having a prompt global strike capability as an additional weapon set," one that could give the president "options in time of crisis today, in which he maybe only has a nuclear option for a timely response," Chilton testified on Tuesday. "But the connective tissue between that [capability] and the one-for-one exchange for a nuclear deterrent, I'm not quite there."

If prompt global strike weapons remain a niche capability -- Chilton envisions only a single missile put on alert, plus two spares -- they also come at a time when Washington is reducing its broader conventional capability to fight major wars against any future "near peer" militaries.

The Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review -- an assessment of conventional forces and strategy released Feb. 1 -- reflects Defense Secretary Robert Gates' emphasis on honing U.S. counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capabilities to combat current threats, deferring fuller military preparedness for larger and more traditional threats out into the future.

Long-standing expectations are for a U.S. conventional military force structure that is, on the whole, smaller and older than any time in recent history.

Some national security thinkers are beginning to ask whether reduced reliance on nuclear deterrence, coupled with diminished conventional-force readiness for major warfare -- such as tank battles and fights over control of air space -- inadvertently invite the rise of near-peer challenges to Washington.

Could ratcheting back on both the nuclear and conventional strategies also increase the incentives for would-be nuclear powers to develop their own arsenals?

"To be walking both [postures] back simultaneously is alarming," Christopher Ford, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said in a March 3 interview. "I would have expected that an administration that came to pare back the nuclear aspects of extended deterrence would be committed to a corresponding strengthening of conventional military alliance relationships around the world."

Lewis sees much more potential for nuclear-to-conventional trade-offs, but emphasized that additional groundwork must be laid on an international level.

The substantial U.S. superiority in conventional armaments makes it difficult to imagine that potential nuclear adversaries would be as inclined as Washington to reduce their own reliance on atomic weapons, he said.

"The growth in our conventional capability makes it easier to give up our nuclear weapons but makes it much harder for the Russians and the Chinese," Lewis said in a phone interview yesterday. "It's not that I think we should restrict the growth in some of these capabilities, but we are probably going to need new concepts of strategic stability in an era of advanced conventional weaponry."

U.S. and Russian negotiators could have more obstacles to overcome before reaching agreement on a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday suggested yesterday (see GSN, March 18).

(Mar. 19) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev climbs into one of his country's nuclear-capable Tu-95 strategic bombers last year. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declined to predict when Moscow and Washington would complete a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Alexander Zemlianichenko/Getty Images).

After meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss progress on a successor to the now-expired Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Clinton was asked when the document might be signed, the Christian Science Monitor reported. She replied: "Don't count your chickens before they hatch."

The sides still hoped to complete the agreement ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama's Global Nuclear Security Summit, slated to begin April 12 in Washington, officials said.

"The work may not be going as fast as expected, but there is a strong commitment on the part of both presidents to get it done" ahead of next month's summit, said Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Russian Federation Council's foreign affairs committee.

"We're already preparing to move toward ratifying the treaty in [Russia's] parliament, after the presidents have signed it," Margelov added.

Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged last July to cut their nations' respective strategic arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 deployed nuclear warheads under the new treaty. Negotiators have reportedly also agreed to reduce each state's arsenal of nuclear delivery vehicles -- missiles, submarines and bombers -- to between 700 and 800, down from the 1,100-vehicle limit set earlier by the leaders (Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, March 18).

“The end of March or the beginning of April are the dates when the delegations will finalize the treaty -- provided they strictly follow the presidents' instructions,” ITAR-Tass quoted Lavrov as saying. “It is up to the presidents to decide where the treaty is to be signed and when” (ITAR-Tass, March 18).

Clinton was expected to discuss the treaty in talks today with Medvedev and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Monitor reported.

The former Cold War rivals probably remain divided over whether to link arms reductions under the pact to limitations on a planned U.S. missile defense shield in Europe, analysts said. Moscow has favored including such language in the agreement, but Washington has opposed the measure.

"The logic of the U.S. position is not to have its hands tied by any restrictions on defensive weapons," said Alexei Pushkov, head of the Institute of Contemporary International Problems in Russia. "We already know that this treaty will not solve the problem that development of offensive and defensive weapons are closely linked. They may have a declaration acknowledging it, but so what? It means we will face this question down the road" (Weir, Christian Science Monitor).

Obama wants to reach an agreement “that moves forward the president’s goal of nuclear security and reducing the amount of nuclear weapons in our world,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday, according to the State Department.

“I think it is safe to say that the president has been more personally involved with these negotiations than you’ve probably seen in 20 or 25 years,” Gibbs said, adding that Obama has committed “an awful lot of his own time working directly with Mr. Medvedev to ensure that we make the progress that we need.”

Clinton and Lavrov also addressed next month's nuclear security summit in their talks yesterday.

“It especially is important for the United States and Russia, who bear the responsibility, to continue the way forward on nonproliferation and to work as partners in the global effort to secure fissile materials and counter the threat of nuclear terrorism,” Clinton said (U.S. State Department release, March 18).

A senior Defense Department official said Russia's new military doctrine appears to increase the country's reliance on nuclear weapons, potentially complicating arsenal reductions, the Financial Times reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 9).

“There are aspects to their nuclear doctrine, their military activities that we find very troubling,” said Defense Undersecretary Michèle Flournoy.

Obama has emphasized “the importance of reducing the role of nuclear weapons," she said. "If you read recent Russian military doctrine they are going in the other direction, they are actually increasing their reliance on nuclear weapons, the role in nuclear weapons in their strategy."

“It was a mistake to bet on getting a quick treaty with the Russians," said Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst with the New America Foundation in Washington. “There was no quick treaty in the offing and it is going to cost all of their political capital to get this treaty through,” he said (Daniel Dombey, Financial Times, March 18).

Russia yesterday said it still supports diplomatic measures aimed at resolving an international dispute over Iran's nuclear program, RIA Novosti reported (see GSN, March 18).

Iran A guard stands outside the reactor building at Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant last month. Russia yesterday defended its work on the site amid U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran over its nuclear program (Behrouz Mehri/Getty Images).

Moscow has expressed support recently for a push by Western powers to adopt a fourth U.N. Security Council resolution against Iran, an initiative aimed at pressuring Tehran to halt nuclear activities that could support weapons development. The Middle Eastern state has insisted its atomic ambitions are strictly peaceful.

"We discussed Iran's nuclear program," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said following talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "We have the same objectives as our American partners -- not to allow violations of the nuclear weapons nonproliferation regime, to eliminate the concerns about Iran's nuclear activity and to provide for full cooperation between Iran and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)."

"I'm sure we have the potential for further joint political and diplomatic efforts in this direction," he said.

China, an opponent of new sanctions on Iran, has called for continued efforts to negotiate a resolution to the nuclear standoff. Moscow and Beijing, which each wield veto authority on the Security Council, have together resisted some past proposals for Iran penalties put forward by the body's other three permanent members: France, the United Kingdom and the United States (RIA Novosti, March 18).

"Certainly, we are worried about Iran's refusal to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but we are trying to be constructive and to search for compromises," Lavrov added in an interview published yesterday.

Moscow and Washington "do not quite see eye-to-eye on the question of methods of preventing Iranian violations of the nuclear nonproliferation regime," Nedelya quoted him as saying, according to Interfax. "In contrast to the United States, Iran is our close neighbor and we have long-standing economic, humanitarian and military-technical relations. Hence, we care about what might happen in Iran and around it," he said (Interfax I, March 18).

Clinton yesterday criticized Russia for announcing plans to finish work on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant this summer, prompting Lavrov to say the facility will begin operating regardless of Washington's position on the matter, the Associated Press reported.

"The project will be completed," he said at a press conference with the top U.S. diplomat. "We are now in the final stage, and this nuclear power plant will be launched. It will be put into operation, it will be functioning, producing power" (Robert Burns, Associated Press/Google News, March 18). The facility is expected to begin work in July, Agence France-Presse quoted Russian nuclear contractor sources as saying (Agence France-Presse I/Yahoo!News, March 18).

Clinton primarily took issue with Russia's schedule for completing the Bushehr plant because it was announced by Vladimir Putin, the nation's prime minister, while she was visiting Moscow, the New York Times quoted State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley as saying.

"It's about the potential for a mixed message, as we are working to put pressure on Iran," Crowley said (Mark Landler, New York Times, March 18).

"As for sanctions [against Iran] that might be discussed in the United Nations Security Council, that discussion has not begun yet," Lavrov added, according to AP.

Addressing how Russia was working to secure China's endorsement of new U.N. penalties against Iran, Lavrov said Beijing has "never given us any grounds to suspect them of insufficient attention to nonproliferation issues" (Burns, AP).

Russia indicated it would not comment on a draft Iran sanctions resolution put forward by Western powers until China offers its own view on the document, the Financial Times reported.

"In the past, the Chinese have hidden behind the Russians on sanctions. This time it's the other way round. The process isn't broken. It's just the usual game," one diplomat said (Harvey Morris, Financial Times, March 19).

Meanwhile, Iran named a new military officer, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, to a top leadership position in its elite Revolutionary Guard, AFP reported yesterday. Earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad established a panel to plan for reducing damage from any potential military strikes on the nation (Agence France-Presse II/Spacewar.com, March 18).

Elsewhere, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Iran has yet to make a convincing case that its nuclear program has strictly civilian aims, Interfax reported (Interfax II, March 18).

France and Japan yesterday voiced "serious concerns" about Iran's nuclear program, AFP reported.

"If Iran were to hold nuclear weapons, the seriousness of the matter is immeasurable," Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said after addressing Iranian nuclear efforts in talks with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. "I said Iran has no more time left. They have to decide now," Okada said (Agence France-Presse III/Yahoo!News, March 18).

In Lebanon, Hezbollah deputy head Sheikh Naim Kassem warned that attacking Iran could have severe consequences, Reuters reported.

"Israel or the United States cannot just bomb Iran and (expect) things to continue normally. Any attack on Iran could ignite the whole region and the assailant will pay a heavy price, whether it's Israel or the United States," he said (Karouny/Bassam, Reuters, March 18).

The United Kingdom appears to have played down a French offer to combine the nuclear deterrence missions of their ballistic missile submarines, the London Guardian reported today (see GSN, Sept. 23, 2009).

"We have talked about the idea of sharing continuity at sea as part of a larger discussion about sharing defense burdens," one French official told the newspaper.

A British government source confirmed the sides had discussed a potential joint mission focused on "continuous at-sea deterrence," but suggested such an initiative would produce domestic "outrage" ahead of British elections.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown this morning described his discussions with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on nuclear weapons, but he did not directly refer to an initiative on sharing nuclear-armed submarine patrols.

"We have agreed a degree of cooperation that is, I think, greater than we have had previously but we will retain, as will France, our independent nuclear deterrent," Brown said.

"We wish, of course, to see multilateral disarmament around the world and we are ready to contribute towards that, but in a world that is so insecure, particularly with other countries trying to acquire nuclear weapons, we do not see the case for us withdrawing the independent nuclear deterrent that we have," he said.

Some sources suggested such an arrangement was possible, but British officials said the nations were not likely to reach a formal agreement on their nuclear deterrents.

After discussing their nuclear arsenals in March 2008, the leaders issued a statement vowing they would "foster our bilateral dialogue on nuclear deterrence" (Julian Borger and Richard Norton-Taylor, London Guardian I, March 19). London indicated they "discussed some issues on the nuclear agenda" last week, but it was uncertain whether they addressed the possibility of combining nuclear submarine missions (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, March 19).

Brown was set to address his nation's nuclear policy in a speech today, but he is not expected to lay out nuclear disarmament proposals for this May's Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference as originally planned, the Guardian reported.

The British prime minister has sought to reduce the strategic role of his nation's nuclear arsenal, but he has faced the argument that the United Kingdom must reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in retaliation to a biological-weapon attack by Iran or another country. British conservatives have also raised concerns about possible political consequences for revising the nation's nuclear strategy.

Alternatively, Brown could recommend adopting a "no first strike" or even broader "no first use" policy, which would limit the likelihood of Britain initiating a nuclear attack.

Brown could also propose reducing the United Kingdom's deployed nuclear arsenal down from 160 warheads and disclosing its number of reserve warheads, believed to fall around 25.

A final option might have Brown stating that the "sole purpose" of the U.K. nuclear arsenal is to deter nuclear threats, similar to a new declaratory policy under consideration at the White House (Julian Borger, London Guardian II, March 18).

A U.S. man pleaded guilty yesterday for gathering information for the extremist organization behind the 2008 three-day siege that killed more than 160 people in the Indian city of Mumbai, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, March 17).

At a federal court hearing in Chicago, David Headley acknowledged providing surveillance for the Paskistani-based extremist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. He also admitted to providing similar scouting work for a never-conducted strike on a Danish newspaper that published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Headley, 49, had pleaded not guilty to 12 federal charges. He changed his plea as part of a brokered agreement prohibiting prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in exchange for his information on extremist groups. He is still eligible for a life term in prison.

"Not only has the criminal justice system achieved a guilty plea in this case, but David Headley is now providing us valuable intelligence about terrorist activities," Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Headley is the son of a U.S. mother and Pakistani father, and in his youth lived in Pakistan. He is believed to have met with terrorist operatives in Pakistan and Europe and to have had multiple contacts with the third-highest member of al-Qaeda, Sheikh Mustafa Abu al-Yazid. Two others have been charged in this case but have not been captured.

"He has provided significant help to the United States and aided other countries," defense attorney Robert Seeder said. He refused to divulge details on Headley's cooperation (Associated Press I/New York Times, March 19).

The Indian government announced today a request to interrogate Headley, AP reported.

The United States has yet to consent to the interview, Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said. "We will continue to press our request for access to interrogate him," he said (Associated Press II/New York Times, March 19).

China could organize a meeting of representatives from six nations participating in stalled North Korean nuclear negotiations in a bid to restart the talks, sources from the international discussions said today (see GSN, March 18).

Under the two-step approach, China, which chairs the talks, would invite Japan, the United States and South Korea to Beijing for a round of meetings before expanding the dialogue several days later to include Russia and North Korea -- the last two members of the six-party group, the sources told Kyodo News.

When all of the senior envoys to the nuclear discussion "happen to be together," Beijing intends to call together an informal session that China wants to see presage a return to formal negotiations, which last occurred in December 2008, said the sources.

The plan's chances of success were unclear, as North Korea has demanded direct negotiations with the United States before returning to multilateral talks.

Pyongyang pulled out of the six-party talks last spring and proceeded to carry out its second nuclear weapons test, for which it was punished with new U.N. Security Council sanctions.

Beijing has reportedly prodded Pyongyang to re-shutter its Yongbyon nuclear site, and China might bring up denuclearization issues at the possible preparatory meeting, according to the sources.

Some parties to the talks have wondered if a serious nuclear disarmament discussion could be held at the preparatory meeting, said the sources (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, March 19).

Meanwhile, military officials said that South Korean and U.S. armed forces concluded their yearly joint military exercise yesterday, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

North Korea responded to the drill with a routine level of hostile rhetoric. The Stalinist state placed its army on high alert, but no major incident occurred.

This year's U.S.-South Korean exercise involved nearly 40,000 soldiers from the two nations. Army specialists tasked with securing the North's WMD stockpile following a crisis took part in the drill for the first time (Xinhua News Agency, March 18).

The U.S. Air Force's preliminary fiscal 2011 spending plan includes a shelved project that sought to develop a next-generation nuclear warhead, Kyodo News reported yesterday (see GSN, March 9).

The Air Force said the reference to the Reliable Replacement Warhead program was accidental and that the project would receive no funding in the budget cycle that begins Oct. 1.

The effort, developed during the Bush administration, was aimed at producing a new line of nuclear warheads that would offer heightened safety and reliability to the U.S. arsenal without requiring test detonations. The Obama administration zeroed funding for the initiative, which had previously been blocked by Congress (see GSN, May 11, 2009).

The budget draft, though, states that the effort would receive support from a funding tranche set aside for nuclear weapons research and development, said Hans Kristensen, who heads the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

The administration is expected to clarify its stance on producing new nuclear warheads in its forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review, Kristensen noted, suggesting the project could resurface as part of another effort to ensure that existing U.S. nuclear weapons remain reliable for longer periods of time (see GSN, March 18).

"Whatever new or modified warheads they plan will not get the name RRW. ... Rather, new or modified warhead will probably emerge as part of the life-extension program" he said (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, March 18).

While Australia is prepared to move forward with an agreement to sell uranium to Russia, a top government official today said Canberra would not consider a similar deal with India, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Nov. 12, 2009).

The Australian government yesterday dismissed the advice of a 2008 report from parliament that recommended against implementing a 2007 uranium trade deal with Moscow. The agreement was inked by then-Prime Minister John Howard and former Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is now his country's prime minister (see GSN, Nov. 25, 2008).

While the report highlighted the threat that the material could be subject to theft or diversion for illicit purposes, the government today expressed confidence in the security infrastructure for any trade agreement.

"We have taken considerable time on our part to ensure we're satisfied, the International Atomic Energy Agency is satisfied, that the strictest of safeguards are in place," Australian Trade Minister Simon Crean told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

The government, though, has said it wouldl not sell uranium to nuclear-armed India as it has yet to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

"The signal to India ... is that this is the way in which they can be recipients of our supply and it's for India to respond to that," Crean said (Rod McGuirk, Associated Press/BusinessWeek, March 19).

Canberra has yet to finalize the Russian uranium trade agreement. The Rudd administration is expected to carry out a more thorough study of the pact before deciding whether to begin exports, the Australian Associated Press reported.

"We've given this very exhaustive consideration," Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said in an interview today with ABC Radio.

"We've come to the conclusion that we can safely export uranium to Russia and it won't be diverted for military purposes," Smith said.

Moscow already has similar pacts in place with Japan and Canada, Crean said.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, however, said nuclear security is not strong in Russia and that the nation's progress on disarmament is very poor.

"Australia would effectively be relinquishing responsibility for supplying the raw ingredient for bomb fuel to a nuclear weapons state with an acknowledged lack of transparency in its civil-military arrangements," campaign spokesman Bill Williams said (Stephen Johnson, Australian Associated Press/Herald Sun, March 19).

Anti-nuclear advocate David Noonan of the Australian Conservation Foundation said that based on the information given to the parliamentary panel that prepared the 2008 report, exported uranium would "simply disappear off the safeguards radar on arrival in Russia," ABC News reported.

"This treaty allows Australian uranium to be used for facilities that are not covered by the International Atomic Energy Agency," he said (Alexandra Kirk, ABC News, March 19).

High-level Pakistani officials plan next week in Washington to press for a bilateral nuclear trade agreement similar to the deal the United States established with Islamabad's nuclear-armed rival India, Canada's Globe and Mail reported (see GSN, March 18).

The likelihood of a U.S.-Pakistani nuclear pact seems low, as Islamabad has been criticized for not moving strongly enough to combat extremism and due to the nuclear smuggling ring that former top nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan operated for years in the South Asian state. U.S. officials have repeatedly rejected such a deal.

Islamabad has some bargaining power, though, as its support is viewed as essential by many to U.S. efforts to stabilize Pakistan's northern neighbor, Afghanistan. Pakistan has also stepped up its efforts to battle militants within its borders.

"My message to Washington is: we’ve been talking a lot. The time has come to walk the talk," according to Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who said a bilateral atomic trade deal would be raised during his trip to Washington. "We’ve done our bit. ... We’ve delivered. (Now you) start delivering."

Beginning Wednesday, Qureshi and Pakistan's army head and spy chief are scheduled to conduct high-level strategic discussions with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other U.S. officials. The two nations have not had such talks in almost two years.

A civilian nuclear pact could be the incentive needed for Islamabad to move to conclusively sever ties with extremist groups, Georgetown University Assistant Professor Christine Fair said.

"We need a big idea for Pakistan, to transform it from a source of insecurity for the region to a country committed to eliminating terrorism and ensuring that nuclear proliferation doesn’t happen again," Fair said. "At the moment, we’re trying to get Pakistan to do things that are in our strategic interests, but not in theirs."

Fair said any U.S. nuclear pact with Pakistan should include stringent requirements on nonproliferation and a pledge to suppress militants.

Many Pakistanis, even senior military and political officials, think that the United States intends to destroy its nuclear arms stockpile. A civilian nuclear pact would go far in addressing those concerns, experts have said.

The U.S. nuclear deal with India is broadly viewed to have significantly improved relations between the two nations, according to the Globe and Mail. More than the atomic power advantages an agreement with the United States would bring, Islamabad badly wants a trade deal because it wants to be on the same nuclear level as India, experts have said.

Moeed Yusuf, who studies Pakistan at the United States Institute of Peace, thinks that Islamabad has not thoroughly weighted the advantages and the disadvantages of such a deal, which would be likely to involve monitoring of nuclear facilities.

"None of that homework has been done," Yusuf said. "It is just seen through an India lens" (Saeed Shah, Globe and Mail, March 19).

Some officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have expressed concern that a Bush administration radiological incident response guide could jeopardize public health as it would permit the drinking of water with high contamination levels, Inside EPA reported Tuesday (see GSN, Dec. 5, 2007).

The Obama administration put off issuing the protective action guide for radiological incidents not long before it was supposed to be published in January 2009. The document is meant to provide advice on dealing with the release of radiation from a terrorist attack or mishap at a nuclear power facility or industrial site.

A draft of the document indicates that the public could drink water that has radiation levels thousands and even hundreds of thousands times greater than what the Environmental Protection Agency typically would permit in crisis situations, Inside EPA found.

Exposure levels allowed in the document for two particular radionuclides "may lead to subchronic (acute) effects ... such as vomiting, fever, etc.," one EPA Superfund office employee stated in a 2007 e-mail message. An official from the agency's General Counsel's Office appeared to concur later.

The head of the agency's Radiation and Indoor Air Office, which produced the guide, disagreed. The office's "health physicists advise that this is not true and that OGC's comment to this effect is ill-founded," according to ORIA Director Tom Kelly. Staffers in Kelly's office, in e-mail messages, also played down the likelihood of contaminated water causing cancer.

Inside EPA obtained the e-mails through the Freedom of Information Act (Inside EPA, March 16).

Scientists at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine have developed a mesh material that could have applications as a countermeasure for combating contamination from weapons of mass destruction, a nonprofit health system, UPMC, announced yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 13, 2009).

The polymer material contains enzymes that eliminate germs and compounds that target the toxins of chemical nerve agents, scientists with McGowan -- an organization overseen by UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh -- detailed recently in Biomaterials.

"Much work has gone into developing ways to thwart either germ or chemical weapons, and now we're combining some of them into one countermeasure," senior team scientist Alan Russell said.

The substance could be useful, as terrorists are not likely to indicate what type of WMD threat they plan on using in a strike, he said.

"This mesh could be developed into sponges, coatings or liquid sprays, and it could be used internally or as a wound dressing that is capable of killing bacteria, viruses and spores," senior McGowan investigator Gabi Amitai said (UPMC release, March 18).