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.
BEYOND WASHINGTON: Although historically the US has been the partner of choice for military exercises, Jakarta has been trying to diversify its partners, an analyst said Indonesia’s first joint military drills with Russia this week signal that new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would seek a bigger role for Jakarta on the world stage as part of a significant foreign policy shift, analysts said. Indonesia has long maintained a neutral foreign policy and refuses to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or US-China rivalry, but Prabowo has called for stronger ties with Moscow despite Western pressure on Jakarta. “It is part of a broader agenda to elevate ties with whomever it may be, regardless of their geopolitical bloc, as long as there is a benefit for Indonesia,” said Pieter
US ELECTION: Polls show that the result is likely to be historically tight. However, a recent Iowa poll showed Harris winning the state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020 US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours. The Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win over the last holdouts with less than 36 hours left until polls open on election day today. Trump predicted a “landslide,” while Harris told a raucous rally in must-win Michigan that “we have momentum — it’s
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
TIGHT CAMPAIGN: Although Harris got a boost from an Iowa poll, neither candidate had a margin greater than three points in any of the US’ seven battleground states US Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the final days before the election, as she and former US president and Republican presidential nominees make a frantic last push to win over voters in a historically close campaign. The first lines Harris spoke as she sat across from Maya Rudolph, their outfits identical, was drowned out by cheers from the audience. “It is nice to see you Kamala,” Harris told Rudolph with a broad grin she kept throughout the sketch. “And I’m just here to remind you, you got this.” In sync, the two said supporters
RSS