Myanmar’s military regime has collaborated in recent years with North Korea and Russia to develop a reactor capable of producing one nuclear bomb a year by 2014, a news report based on the testimony of two defectors claimed yesterday.
The report, published in the Bangkok Post’s Spectrum magazine yesterday after a similar article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, was the result of a two-year investigation into Myanmar’s nuclear ambitions by Desmond Ball, a regional security expert at the Australian National University, and Phil Thornton, an Australian journalist based on the Thai-Myanmar border.
Basing their report primarily on the testimony of two defectors from the Myanmar regime, including one army officer and a book keeper for a trading company with close links to the military, the report claimed that Myanmar, also called Burma, is excavating uranium in 10 locations and has two uranium plants in operation to refine uranium into “yellowcake,” the fissile material for nuclear weapons.
To have a capacity to make nuclear weapons Myanmar would need to build a plutonium reprocessing plant.
Such a plant is planned in Naung Laing, central Myanmar, where Russian technicians are already “teaching plutonium reprocessing,” the army defector, Moe Jo, an alias, told the investigators.
Myanmar signed a memorandum of understanding with Russia’s atomic energy agency in May, 2007, to build a 10-megawatt light-water reactor using uranium.
The report suggests that Myanmar’s non-military nuclear ambitions are nonsense.
“They say it’s to produce medical isotopes for health purposes in hospitals,” civilian defector Tin Min, a former employee of the junta-connected Htoo Trading Company, told Spectrum.
“How many hospitals in Burma have nuclear science? Burma can barely get electricity up and running. It’s nonsense,” Tin Win, an alias, said.
Htoo Trading, owned by Myanmar business tycoon Tay Za, who has close connections with the military, is handling shipments of yellowcake to both North Korea and Iran, the report claimed.
It speculated that in the future North Korea might provide Myanmar with fissionable plutonium in return for yellowcake.
The report’s two authors urged Myanmar’s neighbors in ASEAN to closely monitor Myanmar’s nuclear program, the subject of much speculation in the past.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised the specter of closer North Korean-Myanmar collaboration in nuclear armaments during her visit to Thailand last month to attend the ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia’s main security event.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of