Another Nuclear Worry: Burma

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about apparently the Burmese have built a secret nuclear reactor:

Two of Asia’s most oppressive regimes may have joined forces to develop a nuclear arsenal, according to strategic experts who have analysed information supplied by a pair of Burmese defectors.

The men, who played key roles in helping the isolated military junta before defecting to Thailand, have provided evidence which suggests Burma has enlisted North Korean help to build its own nuclear bomb within the next five years.

Details supplied by the pair, who were extensively interviewed over the past two years by Professor Desmond Ball of the Australian National University and Thai-based Irish-Australian journalist Phil Thornton, points to Burma building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facility with the assistance of North Korea.

It’s for peaceful purposes, of course. Not to mention the prestige and being able to extend the North Korean and, presumably, Iranian nuclear programs far beyond their borders and away from the prying eyes of pesky IAEA inspectors.

This is the real threat of the sort of nuclear proliferation we’ve been seeing over the period of the last twenty years, first from Pakistan through North Korea and Iran and now Burma. I’m concerned about a sort of nuclear assembly line with the stages separated far enough that no single stage looks like an appreciable threat but the aggregate result is nuclear weapons everywhere.

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Dave Schuler
About Dave Schuler
Over the years Dave Schuler has worked as a martial arts instructor, a handyman, a musician, a cook, and a translator. He's owned his own company for the last thirty years and has a post-graduate degree in his field. He comes from a family of politicians, teachers, and vaudeville entertainers. All-in-all a pretty good preparation for blogging. He has contributed to OTB since November 2006 but mostly writes at his own blog, The Glittering Eye, which he started in March 2004.

Comments

  1. Great, now Burma’s taking Iraq’s old role in the Axis of Evil? This is getting embarrassing. The quality of our enemies is dropping faster than housing prices. What’s next? Turks and Caicos?

    I think your concern is smart, Dave. They can decentralize production. The flip side is they depend on transportation between locations. Much easier to sink a ship and leave no superpower fingerprints than it is to blow hell out of a nuclear plant. Assuming of course you have awfully good intel.