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Current Nuclear Threat Worse Than During Cold War
Washington (RIA Novosti) Jul 20, 2007 The risks of an accidental nuclear war have increased since the Cold War as Russia's early warning capability has deteriorated, a former U.S. defense official said. William J. Perry, who is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-Director of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford University, said in congressional testimony Wednesday that "the danger of nuclear war occurring by accident" still existed. "Both American and Russian missiles remain in a launch-on-warning mode," Perry, who served as U.S. defense secretary in 1994-97, said. "And the inherent danger of this status is aggravated by the fact that the Russian warning system has deteriorated since the ending of the Cold War." After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Russia has heavily depended on its radars located abroad, particularly the Daryal facility in Azerbaijan and two Dnepr stations in Ukraine, near Sebastopol and Mukachevo. Some reports said the outdated radar facilities that Moscow is renting on the territories of former Soviet republics were in poor conditions, and Russia had developed "holes" in its early-warning missile threat coverage. In the same testimony, Perry blasted the Bush administration for concentrating its efforts on building defenses to protect the U.S. from a potential ballistic missile threat, while downplaying the danger of nuclear terrorism. "The centerpiece of our government's strategy for dealing with a nuclear attack is the National Missile Defense system now being installed in Alaska," he said. "But the greatest danger today is that a terror group will detonate a nuclear bomb in one of our cities," the expert said. "Terrorists would not use a ballistic missile to deliver their bomb, they would use a truck or a freighter," Perry said, adding that a missile shield alone would not reduce the nuclear threat to the country.
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Korean Nuke Talks End Without Deadline But Skeletons Remain
Beijing (AFP) July 19, 2007Current talks on North Korean disarmament will end without a crucial deadline for the hermit nation to declare and close all its nuclear facilities, US chief envoy Christopher Hill said Thursday. But the US envoy remained confident over the "clarity" of the tasks ahead and said a deadline could be set at the next round of six party talks on denuclearising North Korea, possibly as early as late August. |
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