Nuclear problems apparent at home, hidden abroad

[bananas]

1. Pentagon Study Finds Agencies Ill Equipped to Detect Foreign Nuclear Efforts

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/us/politics/us-efforts-to-detect-nuclear-programs-are-inadequate-pentagon-study-finds.html?_r=0

Pentagon Study Finds Agencies Ill Equipped to Detect Foreign Nuclear Efforts
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
JAN. 23, 2014

WASHINGTON — A three-year study by the Pentagon has concluded that American intelligence agencies are “not yet organized or fully equipped” to detect when foreign powers are developing nuclear weapons or ramping up their existing arsenals, and calls for using some of the same techniques that the National Security Agency has developed against terrorists.

The study, a 100-page report by the Defense Science Board, contends that the detection abilities needed in cases like Iran — including finding “undeclared facilities and/or covert operations” — are “either inadequate, or more often, do not exist.”

The report is circulating just two months before President Obama will attend his third nuclear security summit meeting, set for March in The Hague, an effort he began in order to lock down loose nuclear materials and, eventually, reduce the number of countries that could build nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama’s efforts to sweep up the materials have largely been considered a success. But the report concluded that potential new nuclear states are “emerging in numbers not seen since the early days of the Cold War,” and that “monitoring for proliferation should be a top national security objective — but one for which the nation is not yet organized or fully equipped to address.”

The report confirmed what many outside experts have learned anecdotally: While the most famous intelligence failure in the past decade involving nuclear weapons occurred in Iraq, where the C.I.A. and others saw a program that did not exist, the bigger concern may be that major nuclear programs were entirely missed.

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The range of government departments that were interviewed by the Defense Science Board underscores how spread out the effort has become: Officials of several of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies participated, along with four of the Energy Department’s National Laboratories and its National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the White House’s National Security Council.

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