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Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in India on March 2nd, 2012
IAEA-Questionable Indian Nuclear Safety
By Zaheerul Hassan
On February 28, 2012 an expert committee appointed by the Tamil Nadu government on submitted its report on the safety aspects of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNNP) to Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, marking a crucial stage in the debate over the project. At the same time, the State government invited the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) representatives for talks on next day i.e. Feburary29, 2012.
However, on above mentioned report visible clashes has been noticed between government sponsored scientists and private but straight former scientists who were really worried about the lives of the local living around the project. In this regard M.R. Srinivasan, a former chairman of Indian Atomic Energy commission and member of experts committee while talking to the media reporters said that “Let the government have a cool view of the report,” but “ I have not taken back my words on the issue despite that few government officials are satisfied over the issue.”
He further explained that on February 20, after visiting the nuclear plant and holding talks with PMANE representatives in Tirunelveli, Dr. Srinivasan had said the state-of-the-art safety features incorporated in the reactor had made it a ‘third generation plus’ reactor. S. Iniyan, Director of Centre for Energy Studies, Anna University, D. Arivuoli, Professor, Department of Physics, Anna University and former IAS office L.N. Vijayaraghavan are the other members on the committee.
Meanwhile, Mr. Udayakumar has sent a legal notice to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for insinuating that the anti-Kudankulam protests were funded by United States and the Scandinavian non-government organisations. Advocate M. Radhakrishnan, who sent the notice on behalf of Mr. Udayakumar, said the Prime Minister had made a “false statement with an intention to harm his client’s reputation”.
Notably, security of Indian nuclear programme always remained questionable remained. Number of accidents, theft cases ,killing of scientists and staff through torturing ohave been observed on various Indian nuclear plants . Whereas Pakistan being a responsible atomic power, has adopted strict measures at its nuclear plants so as to save the lives of their employees and the nearby population, yet India’s record of poor nuclear safety has surprised the international community in the era of ongoing nuclear age. In this respect, in the end of November 2009, more than 90 Indian workers suffered radiation due to contamination of drinking water at the Kaiga Atomic Power Station in Karnataka. Indian media got the story when many suffered persons were hospitalised, and it became impossible for New Delhi to conceal the tragedy.
The Nuclear Power Corporation, which runs Kaiga plant, did not reply to the media queries over the nuclear accident, while Indian Atomic Energy Chairman, Anil Kodkar called the mishap at Kaiga an act of sabotage. Afterwards, an internal probe by Nuclear Power Corporation indicated possibility of mischief by an insider who had deliberately added some heavy water containing tritium to the drinking water cooler. So it is most alarming that anyone can cause any mischief at Indian any nuclear facility. This raises more questions regarding the poor safey of Indian all nuclear plants.
In short , Indian nuclear power installations have not been practising the right safety methods along with rigid security measures. The incident at Kaiga Atomic Power Station is not the first one, On July 27, 1991; a similar incident took place at the heavy water plant run by the Department of Atomic Energy at Rawatbhata in Rajasthan. Nuclear radiation had affected and injured many labourers there. Indian past record shows various kinds of security lapses in relation to various nuclear plants and the related sensitive materials. Coupled with other events of nuclear theft, smuggling and killing has become a regular feature of Indian atomic plants and facilities.
In July 1998, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) seized eight Kg. of nuclear material from three engineers in Chennai. It was reported that the uranium was stolen from an atomic research center. The case still remains pending. On November 7, 2000, International Atomic Agency (IAEA) disclosed that Indian police had seized 57 pounds of uranium and arrested two men for illicit trafficking of radioactive material. IAEA had said that Indian civil nuclear facilities were vulnerable to thefts.
On January 26, 2003, CNN pointed out that Indian company, NEC Engineers Private Ltd. shipped 10 consignments to Iraq, containing highly sensitive equipments entailing titanium vessels and centrifugal pumps.
In February 2004, India’s Ambassador to Libya, Dinkar Srivastava revealed that New Delhi was investigating that retired Indian scientists could possibly be engaged in “high technology programs” for financial gains during employment in the Libyan government.
In December 2005, United States imposed sanctions on two Indian firms for selling missile goods and chemical arms material to Iran in violation of India’s commitment to prevent proliferation. In the same year, Indian scientists, Dr. Surendar and Y. S. R Prasad had been blacklisted by Washington due to their involvement in nuclear theft.
In December 2006, a container packed with radioactive material had been stolen from an Indian fortified research atomic facility near Mumbai.
On July 14, 2010 again created panic and sounded alarm in Mumbai when apparently Chlorine Gas leakage occurred at 4 a.m and over 80 people were taken to the hospital in a critical condition. The leakage took placed from a cylinder near the Bombay Port Trust in Sewri area. According to the reports “It’s a huge cylinder down below various other cylinders (from which the gas is leaking). However, the signs of victims’ personals created doubt about the types of the gas in the locals. On the conditions of anonymity some of the renowned locals and businessman gave serious reservations and claimed that in fact the leaked cylinder was part of the consignment that was supposed to be transported to chemical industries which are world over known for production of biological and chemical weapons. The claim of locals could be true since as per page 24 of Section -1 of NBC Proliferation Challenges, Indian has already acknowledged its chemical warfare program in 1997 and stated that related facilities would be open for inspection. India has a sizable chemical industry which could be source of dual-use chemicals for countries of proliferation concern. U.S. Department of Defense, Proliferation has also confirmed the facts in their various reports too.
Unfortunately, in 1984 accident at Bhopal plant also left unforgettable miseries where in Bhopal Union Carbide Pesticide Plant, over 8000 innocent people killed and more than 5000 suffered with serious injuries as a result of gas leakage in 1984. The affected individuals of Bhopal have still not been compensated and keep on crying for their rights in even in the highest courts. The entire discussions confirm that Indian scientists and authorities are lacking expertise in handling sensitive and dangerous material related to nukes and gases.
Nevertheless, the nukes experts always have shown strong concern over Indian poor safety and nuke arrangements on the nuke plants and handlers. In this regard New Delhi never paid heed to IAEA concerns over nukes safety and security. Almost 160 cases of theft, loss and misplacement of radioactive source have been registered in the local police.
I would like to express that Nuke Watchdog IAEA has not yet carried out detailed inspection of Indian Nuclear plants. The opinion of locals, customs officer, businessmen referred reposts in the article and gas leaking incident of Mumbai do confirm that India is preparing chemical and biological weapons. World community should ask India to stop further expansion of their nuclear and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programme. Pakistan should also discuss the matter of nuclear proliferation with Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna in ongoing SAARC Interior Ministers Conference at Islamabad.
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in Pakistan's Hall of Shame on March 2nd, 2012
Commentary
Khurram Shaikh
Pakistan Think Tank, first to Expose Zardari as Traitor, stands vindicated
After, the death of Benazir, Pakistan Think Tank fought against the usurping of power by Zardari and his gang of five, including Haqqani, Rehman Malik, Babar Awan, Ahmed Mukhtar, and Sancho Panza a.k.a PM Gilani. PTT had declared Zardari as a Ghadaar or Traitor. We had declared him as committing treason. The news below, vindicates us. Zardari is a clear and present danger to the survival of Pakistan and its nuclear program. Pakistan Army, Navy, Airforce, Civil Armed Forces, Police, Rangers, ISI, and Mujahid Force, have a duty to protect Pakistan’s Nuclear Program against Zardari’s treachery. He is a long time sleeper agent of a foreign power. He was groomed for this position at the expense of Benazir’s life. Bilawal Zardari is also a sleeper agent, waiting in the wings to take power in Pakistan. PAKISTANIS BEWARE, THE ENEMY IS WITHIN THE PRESIDENCY.Lest we forget Mir Qasim, Mir Jafar, and Abottabad’s Shakil Afridi (خاین), a blot, on the name of Afridi, Paktoons.
Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz on Friday alleged that President Asif Ali Zardari had prior knowledge of the U.S. raid in Abbottabad and had ordered the army not to attack the helicopters that entered Pakistani airspace to take out al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011.
Mr. Ijaz — who authored the ‘memogate’ controversy with his allegations that the former Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, had sought American intervention after the raid to pre-empt a coup in Pakistan — made this charge in London ahead of another round of his deposition via video conference before the Islamabad-based judicial commission from the Pakistan High Commission in London. He refused to come to Pakistan on the premise that his life would be under threat.
However, unlike his earlier contentions that triggered a near head-on between the civilian and military leadership of the country, the Pakistani-American’s allegation that the President had approved what was billed as “breach of Pakistani sovereignty” did not create any furore this time round.
According to Mr. Ijaz, two people knew of the raid before it took place. Mr. Zardari was informed by his American counterpart Barack Obama and he asked Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to “stand the F-16s down” that had been scrambled to take care of the U.S. helicopters entering Pakistani airspace.
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in Pakistan's Hall of Shame on March 1st, 2012
Posted by Dr. Manzer Durrani in Pakistan's Hall of Shame on March 1st, 2012
Commentary on Robert Grenier Rant
With Friends like Al-Jazeera, and Qatar, Pakistan needs no enemies
Al-Jazeera is located in Qatar, a toady and symbiotic leech on western dole and protection. As long as the Sheikhs, or rather Tribal Mafia Dons are ruling this enclave, they will bow towards the South-West and the West. Their first Qibla is the Kaaba, their second Qibla is the West, including the US, Britain, and EU.
“Qatar does not have democracy, and Al Jazeera is not likely to bite the hand that feeds it. Its foray into Egyptian politics may well be seen as a personal insult to Mubarak from the Emir. There is bad blood between the two countries that date back to Qatar’s 1998 accusation that the Egyptian government contributed to a failed coup attempt in Qatar at the end of 1996. Bad blood indeed”( reference )
The rotund hyenas ruling Qatar, call Pakistanis “miskeen,” or beggars. Never realising that if not for Pakistanis, the Qataris, would still be living in huts under palm trees. This vicious anti-Pakistan rhetoric is alive and well in broadcasts of Al-Jazeera, which are all designed to appease their dieties in the West and of course their cousins, the hindus of India. Here is an article showing the undercurrent of bigotry by Al-Jazeera, where they lionize a Ex-CIA Station Chief, by providing him with a anti-Pakistan byline.
The title of the article, “Pakistan: Going rogue,” is slanderous to the Pakistani nation and smacks of bigotry and racism, depicting Pakistanis as duplicitious. And, then they complain, “why do Pakistanis hate us.”So there!
Robert L. Grenier is chairman of ERG Partners, a financial advisory and consulting firm. He retired from the CIA in 2006, following a 27-year career in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. Grenier served as Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Centre (CTC) from 2004 to 2006, coordinated CIA activities in Iraq from 2002 to 2004 as the Iraq Mission Manager, and was the CIA Chief of Station in Islamabad, Pakistan, before and after the 9/11 attacks.
Previously, he was the deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, and also served as the CIA’s chief of operational training. He is credited with founding the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division. Grenier is now a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and speaks and writes frequently on foreign policy issues.
Pakistan: Going rogue
Many Pakistanis are furious after a NATO strike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at border posts in Mohmand [AFP]
The thin, stark white contrails of the American B-52 bomber would otherwise have seemed reassuring as they arched against an impossibly blue sky, bound, as they were, for Taliban or al-Qaeda targets to the north and west. But at the Peiwar Kotal border post, in the shadow of the Safed Koh Mountains just south of Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary at Tora Bora, they suddenly seemed distantly menacing and unpredictable.
With amazing equanimity, the Frontier Corps troops and tribal Khassadars assigned there explained to me and my Pakistani military escorts what had befallen them not 72 hours before. Huge bombs had fallen in the middle of the night, obliterating an abandoned Taliban border post just a few hundred metres up the road. One of the American joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs), however, had struck on the Pakistani side, demolishing a building where normally some of these men would have been sleeping. As luck would have it, no one was inside when the shelter was struck: No harm, no foul. One of the troopers smiled fatalistically as he handed me a large piece of shrapnel, as if to return something I had misplaced.
Pakistan mourns slain soldiers
Ten years on, the results of the latest such incident have not been nearly so benign, nor the reactions to it nearly so calm. US air and helicopter strikes against two Pakistani border posts in Mohmand, launched last weekend during what are described as US-Afghan hostilities against Taliban insurgents along the border, have resulted in some 24 Pakistani troops killed, and another 13 wounded. The political firestorm this incident has unleashed, coming as it does after a series of blows to US-Pakistan relations over the past year, is a measure of just how brittle the relationship between the two countries has become in the decade since 9/11.
It is hard to judge such things from a distance, but the Pakistani reaction this time feels qualitatively different from the crises preceding it over the past few months, from January’s Raymond Davis affair, to May’s Abbottabad raid on bin Laden, to September’s public accusations of Pakistani perfidy from the outgoing US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One has the sense that a political and psychological barrier has been broken, and that even if the outward forms of cooperation and civility are restored, and the border crossings for NATO supplies into Afghanistan are reopened, things will not be the same for a very long time.
Observers far closer to the action than me say there is little chance of an outright break in relations. They are probably right. But while the situation may not become so obviously dramatic, the inner reality of US-Pakistan relations is likely to be so insidiously bitter and caustic as to preclude any real co-operation on anything touching regional security and stability.
We have seen this picture before. During the 1990s, finding itself heavily sanctioned by the Americans for pursuing what it felt were core national security interests in countering a nuclear-capable India, Pakistan came un-tethered from the international security and non-proliferation regime which the US was trying to promote. Denied other means, and believing that the US-led international framework was working against its interests, Pakistan was willing to deal with rogue states to acquire what it felt it needed.
Should Pakistan again feel that it has no core stake in co-operative relations with the US and the West, if it should conclude, in fact, that the US is undermining Pakistan’s national security interests, there is no end of mischief which could arise, both in the immediate South Asian region, and much further afield. Difficulties in Afghanistan would only be the beginning. The notion of Pakistan as a nuclear-weapons state seeking other sources of aid and countervailing strategic alliances to oppose a perceived Washington-Kabul-New Delhi axis is one that should give the US considerable pause.
It is time for the US to get serious. The unintended consequences of its grossly disproportionate engagement in Afghanistan are simply becoming unbearable. With a much smaller presence and a sustainable policy, the United States can protect its core counter-terrorism interests in Afghanistan, and do so without further contributing to the international alienation and domestic unravelling of its far more important neighbour to the east.
The United States has some fundamental choices to make in South Asia, and they will not be easy. The US may be on a glide path to a proportionate and sustainable presence in Afghanistan, but the two years between now and 2014 is longer than anyone can afford to wait. The US is hoping that during those two years it can achieve through a political settlement something close to the maximal goals that force of arms could not, and it expects Pakistan to help deliver it. These are not only vain hopes, but ones whose stubborn pursuit threatens disastrous consequences.
Pakistan is, at best, a maddening and frustrating ally. Its combination of poor leadership and social and political weakness make it far more capable of harming US interests than of constructively contributing to them. But the current course is leading to disaster. In the end, by any objective measure, the US has far more at stake in Pakistan than it does in Afghanistan. This is the central, organising policy principle which Washington must grasp, before it is too late.
Robert L. Grenier is chairman of ERG Partners, a financial advisory and consulting firm. He retired from the CIA in 2006, following a 27-year career in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. Grenier served as Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Centre (CTC) from 2004 to 2006, coordinated CIA activities in Iraq from 2002 to 2004 as the Iraq Mission Manager, and was the CIA Chief of Station in Islamabad, Pakistan, before and after the 9/11 attacks.
Previously, he was the deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, and also served as the CIA’s chief of operational training. He is credited with founding the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division. Grenier is now a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and speaks and writes frequently on foreign policy issues.
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