Siddharth Varadarajan

May move amendments to draft in Board meeting

New Delhi: In a four-page letter addressed to Board members of the IAEA, Pakistan has attacked the draft Indian safeguards agreement for envisaging termination conditions and fuel supply arrangements which could allow India to "divert part of [any imported] fuel for weapons purposes.'

At the same time, it said that the Indian model should not be "discriminatory' and should be applied to states such as itself.

Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Ole Danbolt Mj

Raising the pitch on the Indo-US nuclear deal, the BJP on Thursday slammed the Congress-led Government for "deceiving the country' by forwarding the safeguard draft of the nuclear deal to the IAEA members "even before winning a trust vote in Parliament'. "Our misgivings about the Government's approach have come true. A conspiracy is afoot to present the country a fait accompli. What has been done surreptitiously needs to be condemned. This is something that no Government should do, least of all a minority Government,' said senior party leader L K Advani.

P. S. Suryanarayana SINGAPORE: The U.S. on Saturday urged North Korea to "abandon' all its nuclear weapons in a culmination of the process set on course by Friday's demolition of the cooling tower at the Yongbyon complex. The U.S.' call acquires unusual importance because of Japan's comment that the elimination of North Korea's existing stockpile of nuclear weapons is the real issue to address rather than just the dramatic destruction of a cooling tower.

P. S. Suryanarayana The 25-metre cooling tower was built in 1986 Blast for peace: The cooling tower of the nuclear complex being demolished in Yongbyon on Friday. SINGAPORE: The cooling tower at the Yongbyon complex, suspected to be the nerve centre of North Korea's plutonium-based nuclear weapons programme, was on Friday brought down in a controlled dynamite blast. With that televised "implosion,' North Korea demolished one of its "icons' of nuclear empowerment to make a political statement of disarmament.

Iran said on Tuesday it would continue enriching uranium, defying efforts by major powers to pressure Tehran into stopping such work. The EU's top diplomat on Saturday presented Tehran with a package of economic benefits to try and persuade it to stop its nuclear program, which the West fears could lead to a nuclear weapon. "We have repeatedly said that enrichment is our red line and we should enjoy this technology. The work will be continued," deputy foreign minister Alireza Sheikhattar told reporters, according to the state news agency IRNA.

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. The Roadrunner supercomputer costs $133 million and will be used to study nuclear weapons. The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda asked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday to make the

The US Energy Department has applied for a license to operate a long-delayed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman announced on Tuesday. Bodman said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will take about three years to review and decide whether to approve the license request for the Yucca Mountain storage facility, which was supposed to have opened in 1998. The earliest Yucca Mountain could open is 2020, the department said.

For four years, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, has lived in the shadows, confined to his Islamabad home since a tearful televised confession in which he admitted selling nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. On Thursday, the 76-year-old scientist returned to the spotlight with a bold new twist: that he had not meant a word of his earlier admission.