Hawks Replaying Iraq Sanctions Debacle With Iran

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today: Tuesday, August 9, 2011.

Hawks Push for Iraq-Style Sanctions on Iran - Eli Clifton in Think Progress [link]

• [Washington Post journalist Jennifer] Rubin and [Foundation for Defense of Democracies executive director Mark] Dubowitz now warn that Iraq-like sanctions … are the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and avoiding a military confrontation, but just last week they were declaring the sanctions strategy dead.
• It’s worth remembering that while these calls for extreme sanctions against Iran are posited as a way to avoid military confrontation, the same coterie of neoconservative hawks never let up calling for military action against Iraq despite the draconian sanctions put in place.

Plutonium Fuel Supplier Shuts Down in Wake of Fukushima Disaster - Edwin Cartlidge in Scientific American [link]

• Britain's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) announced that it will close a troubled Sellafield facility that is one of only two commercial plants in the world producing mixed oxide nuclear fuel (MOX), after reactor shutdowns in Japan eliminated its only customers for the plutonium-containing fuel.
• Sellafield has now lost its customers. In the wake of the nuclear disaster, only 17 of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors are currently operational...
• Areva is currently building the United States' first MOX plant, to recycle unwanted plutonium from nuclear weapons, at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina ... the facility is hugely over budget, and will produce fuel that will cost about five times as much as conventional nuclear fuel.

Mossad’s Miracle Weapon: Stuxnet Virus Opens New Era of Cyber War - Holger Stark in Der Spiegel [link]

• The Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, attacked the Iranian nuclear program with a highly sophisticated computer virus called Stuxnet.
• The first digital weapon of geopolitical importance, it could change the way wars are fought -- and it will not be the last attack of its kind.

U.S., Russia to Continue Missile Defense Talks in St. Petersburg - RIA Novosti [link]

• ... on August 11-12 in St. Petersburg … Ellen Tauscher, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, will meet with chief Russian negotiator on the issue [of a proposed European missile shield], Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.
• Russia and NATO have agreed at a Russia-NATO summit in Lisbon in November 2010 to work on the missile shield but NATO wants it to be based on two independent systems that exchange information, while Russia favors a joint system with full-scale interoperability.
• The European missile shield issue is widely considered a tester for the future of Russian-U.S. relations, especially in light with the upcoming general and presidential elections in both countries.

Time to Think Safety-Security - Igor Khripunov and Duyeon Kim in the Korea Times [link]

• A terrorist version of Fukushima is plausible ― with all the human suffering, economic dislocation and national humiliation the March 2011 cataclysm entailed … Both safety and security must be enhanced at nuclear installations around the world.
• ... but safety and security aren't the same thing. Security is about defending against deliberate acts. Safety is about responding to equipment malfunctions that may compromise operational effectiveness … The challenge is that for safety the guiding principle is transparency and across-the-board involvement, while for security it’s about intelligence gathering and confidentiality, including post-event investigation.
• Fukushima has demonstrated that technical fixes are not enough, though vitally important. The human factor is the critical factor in endeavors such as nuclear security and safety … Unless we learn lessons from past failures, we may soon repeat them on a far larger scale.