Al Qaeda Increasing Effort to Acquire Dirty Bomb

There is no question in my mind Al Qaeda will strike American soil during an Obama regime. No question.

London—MI6 has issued a global priority warning to all security services that Islamic terrorists are now closer to obtaining material to create a “dirty bomb” to launch against Western targets.

Osama bin Laden has long made this a priority and reinforced it with regular messages from his mountain redoubt in the north-west province of Pakistan. He has repeatedly said every “true Muslim must make it his duty to assist in all ways possible to find the next powerful weapon to destroy our enemies”.

Groups such as the newly formed Pakistan Taliban have proclaimed it is focussing on creating a “dirty bomb”.

MI6 agents based in Islamabad fear the mounting instability in Pakistan will make it easier for them to do so.

While Pakistan is the only Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal, it has in the past provided its expertise to Iran.

A senior U.S. security official in Islamabad said: “Our concern is the sudden rise in intelligence which strongly indicates that al-Qaeda has renewed plans to gain access to nuclear material that could form a primitive nuclear device, one perhaps that a suicide truck bomber could use”.

U.S. General Sounds the Nuclear Alarm

There's what this General says, and then there's what Obama plans to do.

Gen. Kevin Chilton, a former command astronaut, is no stranger to cutting-edge technology. But these days the man responsible for the command and control of U.S. nuclear forces finds himself talking more often about '57 Chevys than the space shuttle. On a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal he wheeled out the Chevy analogy to describe the nation's aging arsenal of nuclear warheads. The message he's carrying to the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, the press and anyone else who will listen is: Modernize, modernize, modernize.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has suffered from neglect. Warheads are old. There's been no new warhead design since the 1980s, and the last time one was tested was 1992, when the U.S. unilaterally stopped testing. Gen. Chilton, who heads U.S. Strategic Command, has been sounding the alarm, as has Defense Secretary Robert Gates. So far few seem to be listening.

The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. "We're the only ones who aren't," Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy's Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that.

The general stresses the need to "revitalize" the infrastructure for producing nuclear weapons. The U.S. hasn't built a nuclear weapon in more than two decades and the manufacturing infrastructure has disappeared. The U.S. today "has no nuclear weapon production capacity," he says flatly. "We can produce a handful of weapons in a laboratory but we've taken down the manufacturing capability." At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. produced 3,000 weapons a year.

Couple that view, with Obama's view:

Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of nuclear terrorism, aides say.

I'd say we're heading towards a real big problem.

RUSSIA REJECTS CHARGES THAT NUKES ARE MISSING

This can't be good for anybody:

Russia's Foreign Ministry is rejecting U.S. allegations that some Russian nuclear weapons are unaccounted for.

The ministry says in a Friday statement that allegations made by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates are no more than "insinuations." It insists that no nuclear weapons have disappeared from Russian arsenals.

The ministry says all nuclear weapons in Russia have been under reliable protection since the 1991 Soviet collapse despite the nation's economic turmoil.

Gates spoke earlier this week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

He expressed worries about what he called the "tens of thousands of old nuclear mines, nuclear artillery shells and so on," left over from the old Soviet arsenal.

IRAN REJECTS NUCLEAR INSPECTIONS UNLESS ISRAEL ALLOWS THEM

Sure Iran. When Israel starts stating its goal to obliterate your kind from the earth, we'll make a big push for inspections in Israel...

An Iranian envoy said Monday his government will not submit to extensive nuclear inspections while Israel stays outside the global treaty to curb the spread of atomic weapons.

"The existing double standard shall not be tolerated anymore by non-nuclear-weapon states," Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told a meeting of the 190 countries that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Israel, which does not discuss whether it has atomic weapons, did not sign the nonproliferation treaty, which requires all signatories except the major powers to refrain from obtaining nuclear arms. India and Pakistan, which have developed nuclear weapons, also are not signatories.

IRANIAN NUCLEAR THREAT MORE ADVANCED THAN WESTERN WORLD KNOWS

The Sunday Times - The Iranian Nuclear Threat Far More Advanced Than Western World Estimates.