Syria has revealed some details of past nuclear experiments to UN inspectors but is still blocking access to a desert site where secret atomic activity may have taken place, a confidential report said on Monday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report said Syria was not allowing follow-up access to a bombed desert site, which US intelligence reports said had been a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor under construction, geared for atomic bomb fuel.
Israel bombed the site to rubble in 2007. Syria allowed the IAEA to inspect the site in June 2008, but has not allowed the agency to revisit it since then.
The agency says it needs to take more samples at the site to remove any doubts about Syria’s past atomic activities. It also repeated a call for access to three military sites, whose appearance was altered by landscaping after the IAEA first asked to check them.
“Such access is essential to enable the agency to establish the facts and make progress in its verification, while protecting military and other information which Syria considers to be sensitive,” IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano wrote.
Syria, an ally of Iran that is under IAEA investigation over nuclear proliferation suspicions, has denied ever having an atom bomb program and says the intelligence suggesting it had is fabricated.
Syria has allowed inspectors to visit a research reactor in Damascus, where they have been checking whether there is a link with the bombed Dair Alzour desert site after discovering unexplained particles of processed uranium at both.
Some analysts say the uranium traces raise the question of whether it used some natural uranium intended for the alleged reactor at Dair Alzour in tests applicable to learning how to separate out bomb-grade plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
On a recent visit to the Damascus reactor, Syria belatedly revealed that it had conducted experiments to irradiate and convert uranium-derived material during 2004, the report said. It also provided the IAEA with information about amounts of previously undisclosed nuclear material.
“These were [experiments] with small quantities in order to learn the processes,” a senior official familiar with the IAEA probe said. “They should have been reported to the IAEA under the safeguards agreement.”
The official said it was not clear if the past work was just experimental, as Syria claimed, or if it could have had other uses. The report said the IAEA was examining further samples.
It urged Syria to cooperate with the agency’s open questions about the work as soon as possible and said it should adopt the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, which permits unfettered inspections beyond declared nuclear sites to hunt out any covert atomic activity.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other