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Alleged Arms Dealer Viktor Bout Extradited
After more than two years in Thai custody, Russian alleged arms dealer Viktor Bout was extradited to the
Although believed to have supplied arms to conflict zones around the world, Bout faces charges related only to an alleged 2008 effort to equip the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which the
At a Nov. 17 press briefing, U.S. District Attorney Preet Bharara outlined the case against Bout, derived from a Thai-U.S. sting operation in March 2008 in which Bout and associate Andrew Smulian offered to equip U.S. agents pretending to be FARC members with an “arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” according to Bharara. (See ACT, April 2008.)
At Bout’s arraignment later that day, he pleaded not guilty; the trial date has not been set.
If convicted on all charges, including conspiracy to kill
Russian officials had pressed the Thai government to release Bout while
Material Secured From Kazakhstani Reactor
An international effort led by the
The plutonium and HEU are contained in 300 metric tons of spent fuel shipped from the BN-350 reactor on the Caspian Sea to a secure storage facility more than 3,000 kilometers away in eastern Kazakhstan, the NNSA said. The material, transported in 12 shipments over the past year, contains enough plutonium and HEU for 775 nuclear weapons, the NNSA said.
In 1997,
The
Parties to Cluster Munitions Pact Adopt Plan
The first meeting of states-parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in
In her Nov. 9 address to the
To date, 108 countries have signed and 48 have ratified the CCM, which entered into force Aug. 1. At least seven countries that have ratified or signed the pact have destroyed their stockpiles, and an additional 11 have initiated this process since the treaty was opened for signature in 2008.
However, 47 states currently known to have cluster munitions stockpiles, including
Nobel Laureates Call for Nuclear Disarmament
Declaring that the use of nuclear weapons “must be regarded as a crime against humanity” and that “[t]he threats posed by nuclear weapons did not disappear with the ending of the Cold War,” a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners on Nov. 14 called for elimination of the weapons and for a treaty banning their use.
“Nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, but they can and must be outlawed, just as chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions have been declared illegal,” said the group’s statement, which was issued at the end of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in
The declaration “welcome[d]” the signing of the U.S.-Russian New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and called on key countries, including the
Tibor Tóth, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, the organization responsible for overseeing the treaty’s verification as well as “promoting [its] universality,” addressed the summit Nov. 13. The CTBT “can be a rallying point on the road to the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Several peace prize winners, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, endorsed the statement.