Avangard capable of carrying 2-megaton nuclear weapon at 27 times the speed of sound
Russia has deployed its first hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles, with Vladimir Putin boasting that it puts his country in a class of its own.
The president described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite.
Continue reading...Donald Trump said on Sunday North Korean leader Kim Jong-un risks losing “everything” and his country must denuclearize, after the North said it had carried out a “successful test of great significance”.
“Kim Jong-un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way. He signed a strong Denuclearization Agreement with me in Singapore,” Trump said on Twitter, referring to his first summit with Kim in 2018.
Continue reading...US president says potential Democratic rival is ‘somewhat better than that’ and urges North Korean leader to agree nuclear deal
Donald Trump has come to the defence of one of his potential rivals for the presidency, telling North Korea its recent description of Joe Biden as a “rabid dog” that should be “beaten to death” was a little unfair.
Trump’s criticism of Pyongyang – albeit via a half-hearted endorsement of Biden’s character – came amid attempts to resurrect stalled nuclear talks, with Trump imploring North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to “get the deal done”, and the US and South Korea agreeing to postpone an annual air force drill the North routinely condemns as a rehearsal for an invasion.
Continue reading...Decommissioned nuclear silo accessed 40ft staircase leading underground was once home to US’s largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever deployed
One local newspaper described the sales listing, with calculated understatement, as a “mid-century fixer-upper”: an underground bunker built to withstand a nuclear attack, and to house the fire power to retaliate.
The decommissioned nuclear silo in southern Arizona was once home to the Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile deployed by the US Air Force.
Continue reading...US secretary of state accuses Tehran of trying to ‘intimidate’ woman while Iran says tests indicated she possessed ‘suspect’ material
The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has criticised Iran’s treatment of an inspector with the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency as “an outrageous and unwarranted act of intimidation”.
The top US diplomat said that Iran had “detained” the inspector, who the International Atomic Energy Agency said had been briefly prevented from leaving the country.
Continue reading...Kim Jong-un ‘expressed satisfaction’ with the test and congratulated weapons scientists, state media said
North Korea conducted another test of super-large multiple rocket launchers on Thursday afternoon, calling it a success, the state news agency KCNA said on Friday.
The latest test of the “super-large multiple rocket launchers”, following two tests in August and September of the same weapon that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un oversaw, according to KCNA, indicates the progression of North Korea’s weapons development while talks with the US remain in limbo.
Continue reading...State media says test-firing ushers in ‘new phase’ in country’s defence systems, ahead of nuclear talks with US
North Korea says it successfully test-fired a new type of submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) from the sea off its east coast.
“The new-type ballistic missile was fired in vertical mode” in the waters off Wonsan Bay on Wednesday, the North’s KCNA state news agency reported.
Continue reading...Iranian president tells cabinet the country had been ready to accept terms of French UN plan
The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, has told his cabinet that while the country had been ready to end its nuclear stand-off with the US broadly on terms set out by France at the United Nations, Donald Trump was not prepared to make public an apparent private offer to lift sanctions.
Although his account is inherently not impartial, it is the fullest version of behind-the-scenes diplomacy at the UN general assembly provided by the Iranians.
Continue reading...Tokyo says there’s no damage from what appear to be ballistic missiles ahead of US-North Korea talks resuming this weekend
North Korea has launched two projectiles, one of which landed in waters inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, the Japanese government said on Wednesday, after what appears to have been a show of strength by Pyongyang before it resumes nuclear talks with the US at the weekend.
Japan’s government said the projectiles appeared to be ballistic missiles, adding that there were no immediate reports of damage to shipping or aircraft.
Continue reading...Hopes of a deal with Trump quashed as Rouhani accuses US of ‘economic terrorism’
Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, has ruled out negotiations on its nuclear programme with the United States so long as sanctions remained in place and said he was not interested in a “memento photo” with Donald Trump.
“I would like to announce that our response to any negotiation under sanctions is negative,” Rouhani said in an address to the UN general assembly in New York.
Continue reading...Israel’s opposition says prime minister’s claims are an election campaign stunt
Benjamin Netanyahu has unveiled what he claims was a previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear weapons facility and accused Tehran of destroying the site to hide the evidence.
“This is what I have to say to the tyrants of Tehran,” Netanyahu said. “Israel knows what you’re doing, Israel knows when you’re doing it, and Israel knows where you’re doing it.”
Continue reading...Launch comes day after regime called US secretary of state ‘impudent’ and questioned his ability in nuclear talks
North Korea fired two suspected short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on Saturday in the seventh weapons launch in a month, South Korea’s military said, a day after it threatened to remain America’s biggest threat in protest against US-led sanctions on the country.
The North had been expected to halt weapons tests because 10-day joint US-South Korean military exercises ended earlier this week. Pyongyang regards these drills as an invasion rehearsal.
Continue reading...Upcoming review out of Tokyo will reportedly say missile programme poses ‘serious and imminent threat’
Japan’s government will reportedly state that North Korea is capable of miniaturising nuclear warheads in a forthcoming defence report, it has emerged.
Tokyo will upgrade its estimate of the regime’s nuclear capability, having said last year only that the technical feat was a possibility, the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said on Wednesday, without citing sources.
Continue reading...Imagine the uproar if the entire populations of York, Portsmouth or Swindon were suddenly exposed to three times the permissible level of penetrating gamma radiation, or what the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford termed gamma rays. The outpouring of rage and fear would be heard across the world.
That’s what happened to the roughly 200,000 people who live in the similarly sized northern Russian city of Severodvinsk on 8 August, after an explosion at a nearby top-secret missile testing range. Russia’s weather service, Rosgidromet, recorded radiation levels up to 16 times higher than the usual ambient rate.
Continue reading...Regime says Pyongyang and Seoul have nothing to talk about while South Korea continues military drills with US
North Korea has fired at least two unidentified projectiles into the sea off its east coast, shortly after it denounced South Korea’s military drills with the US and declared that inter-Korean talks were over.
The South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] said the North conducted the launch early on Friday from a site near the city of Tongchon. It has conducted six rounds of weapons launches since 25 July, apparently in retaliation for military drills involving South Korean and US forces.
Continue reading...Rosatom says five staff died in accident that caused radiation levels to spike in Arkhangelsk
Russia’s nuclear energy agency has said an explosion that caused radiation levels to spike in the Arkhangelsk region was caused by an accident during a test of an “isotope power source for a liquid-fuelled rocket engine”.
In a statement released late on Friday, Rosatom said five of its employees had died as a result of the accident and three more were being treated for burns.
Continue reading...Pyongyang says US-South Korea military drills are ‘flagrant violation’ of efforts to reach peace
North Korea has fired two unidentified projectiles into the sea from South Hwanghae province, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The launches came as Pyongyang described Washington and Seoul’s war games as a “flagrant violation” of efforts to reach peace on the Korean peninsula which reflected a lack of “political will” to improve relations.
Continue reading...US pulls out of cold war-era INF treaty after Moscow’s ‘secret deployment’ of cruise missiles
A key international nuclear disarmament treaty has formally collapsed amid mutual recriminations between the west and Russia, and with Nato pledging to boost Europe’s military defences.
The alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said Nato countries were facing a threat from previously banned Russian land-based cruise missiles that could “reach EU cities, with only minutes of warning time”.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Bipartisan bill seeks New Start extension– the last formal restraint on the world’s major arsenals
Bipartisan Senate legislation introduced on Wednesday aims to change the administration’s course on nuclear arms control, urging Donald Trump to extend the New Start treaty with Russia or provide justification for allowing it to expire.
Trump has already pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia, which is due to end on Friday.
Continue reading...“This is a dangerous game,” an Iranian foreign ministry official warned on Friday. He was urging the UK to release the Iranian tanker which the British navy helped authorities in Gibraltar to seize last week. But the context, as he made clear, is the intensifying struggle between Washington and Tehran, in which the main players appear overconfident they know the rules and understand the stakes, while minor players fret about outcomes they have limited power to change.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who headed the UN nuclear watchdog in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, has offered one of the sharpest warnings of the potential consequences: “All that I hear basically [brings] to mind the days before the Iraq war,” he told the BBC. The Iranian regime’s record at home and in the region is a grim one. But this crisis was created by the US president’s determination to destroy an international nuclear deal – which Iran was abiding by – and throttle the economy. It cornered Tehran and empowered its hardliners, who seized on the proof that America could never be trusted.
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