India spurns UNSC efforts on NPT

Press Trust Of India / New York September 25, 2009, 0:53 IST

Rejecting efforts to impose the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on it through the UN Security Council resolution, India has made it clear that it will not sign the pact as a non-weapon state as an atomic arsenal is integral to its security.

India has made it known to the Security Council that it cannot accept the “externally prescribed norms or standards” on issues that are contrary to its national interests or infringe on its sovereignty.

In a letter to UNSC President Susan E Rice of the US, Indian Permanent Representative to the UN, Hardeep Singh Puri, questioned the role of the world body in enforcing treaties like NPT even while he reiterated India’s commitment to no-testing, no-first-use of nuclear weapons and non-discriminatory universal non-proliferation.

“India cannot accept calls for universalisation of NPT,” he said as the UNSC passed a resolution asking all non-NPT nations to sign the treaty which India considers flawed and discriminatory.

Citing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement in Parliament on July 29, Puri said “there is no question of India joining the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state. Nuclear weapons are an integral part of India’s national security and will remain so, pending non-discriminatory and global nuclear disarmament.”

Puri said India “cannot accept externally prescribed norms or standards on matters within the jurisdiction of its Parliament or which are not consistent with India’s constitutional provisions and procedures or are contrary to India’s national interests or infringe on its sovereignty”.

The envoy said India cannot comply with non-proliferation obligations to which it has not given its consent. “We cannot accept any obligations arising from treaties that India has not signed or ratified. This position is consistent with the fundamental principles of international law and the Law of Treaties,” Puri said in the letter dated yesterday which was released here today. “The role of the Security Council would arise if those treaties themselves provide for such a role,” he said. India, which has been maintaining that NPT is discriminatory and flawed, pointed out that it had in 1992 prescribed norms and standards for national or international conduct which the Security Council itself “must scrupulously accept”. “We remain committed to a voluntary, unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. We do not subscribe to any arms race, including a nuclear arms race. We have always tempered the exercise of our strategic autonomy with a sense of global responsibility,” Puri said.

A better report of the story above.

One big step for India, a giant leap for mankind
Srinivas Laxman & Prashanth G N

BANGALORE/MUMBAI: It is a giant leap for India’s space programme and the biggest scientific discovery of the 21st Century. India’s maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-1 has found water, a discovery that scientists say will upend thinking about space and boost research. And, of course, it has helped shake off the failure tag from the Rs 386-crore Chandrayaan-I project that was aborted last month.

The historic development, that TOI in a global newsbreak reported in Wednesday’s edition, took place just prior to the termination of the mission on August 30, 2009. Although water was spotted by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA probe and one of the 11 payloads on the spacecraft, glory shone on ISRO for the discovery that was made after nearly five decades of lunar exploration by Western nations.

“If it weren’t for them (ISRO), we wouldn’t have been able to make this discovery,” Carle Pieters, the Brown University researcher who analyzed the data from the NASA probe.

Pieters, a planetary geologist, has told scientists the discovery “opens a whole new avenue of lunar research but that we have to understand the physics of it to utilize it”. A Brown University statement on Thursday said, “The discovery by M3 promises to reinvigorate studies of the moon and potentially upend thinking of how it originated.”
Water molecules (H20) and hydroxyl ^ a charged molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom ^ were discovered across the surface of the Moon. The M3 had covered almost 97% of the Moon before Chandrayaan-1 was terminated.

Brown University scientists say that while the abundance is not precisely known, “as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil: harvesting one tonne of the top layer of the Moon’s surface would yield as much as 32 ounces of water”.

ISRO chairman Madhavan Nair described it a path-breaking event and Chandrayaan-I project director Mylswamy Annadurai called it one of the greatest examples in international collaboration in space.

Chandrayaan’s surprise find triggered tremendous excitement among Indian space scientists who were disappointed that the mission had to be terminated because of a communication breakdown.

Narendra Bhandari, who is associated with Chandrayaan, told TOI from Ahmedabad: “It is a good observation and after all it was one of the main aims of the Indian Moon programme. According to well-known astrophysicist, S M Chitre, water on the Moon could have been deposited by the comets several billion years ago. “The comets are like water carriers,” he told TOI.

Regarding the significance of the discovery, Chitre said that it will have far reaching consequences with regard to the human colonization of the Moon and future rocket launches from the lunar surface. “The real significance of this mission is that it surveyed the entire moon. Nasa’s Apollo manned missions between 1969 and 1972 did not find any water at all because they surveyed only a bare 25% of the lunar surface,” he said.

President of National Space Society (NSS), Suresh Naik, told TOI finding water will help in making rocket fuel.

“Launching rockets from the Moon definitely have an advantage because the escape velocity is much less than on Earth,” he said. On Earth, the escape velocity, ie, the speed a rocket needs to escape the Earth’s gravity, is 11km per second. With the Moon’s gravity being one-sixth that of the Earth’s, the escape velocity would be much less, he explained. In plain terms, it means less energy is needed to launch rockets from the Moon.

The US, Russia and China are exploring the possibility of building human habitats on the Moon after 2020. Space experts said that in this race, India cannot lag behind and Isro officials also have not ruled this out.

Pieters said findings from M3 reveal new questions about “where the water molecules come from and where they
may be going”. Scientists have for long speculated that water molecules may migrate from non-polar regions of the Moon to the poles, where they are stored as ice in ultra-frigid pockets of craters that never receive sunlight. If, indeed, the water molecules are mobile, there is then the possibility of getting water to the permanently shadowed craters.

She said: “When we say water on the Moon, we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the Moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the Moon’s surface,” she explained.

The M3 team found water molecules and hydroxyl at diverse areas of the sunlit region of the Moon’s surface as well as at the Moon’s higher latitudes where it seemed more definitive in presence. The M3 discovery has been confirmed by data from two NASA spacecrafts ^ the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) ^ on the Cassini spacecraft and High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on the EPOXI spacecraft.

The M3 is a joint project of Nasa’s Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Brown University.

Navy wants its buildings taken off protected list

MUMBAI: The Indian Navy has requested state-appointed heritage committee to take several of its colonial buildings, including barracks and office buildings constructed in neo-classical style, off the list of protected
structures.

In a letter to the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC), the Navy has requested structures in Colaba’s naval area be de-notified as it does not make sense to approach MHCC to take permission for every renovation, restoration and repair work. “A permanent `blanket cover’ to carry out repairs in and around heritage structures would mean the Navy may not need to approach us on a case by case basis. According to them, such a permission will help in efficient maintenance of heritage buildings,” said a member of MHCC.

In 1999, the Navy had commissioned a systematic inventory of all heritage buildings it owned in Mumbai. But heightened security measures over the years have ensured public access to some of Mumbai’s oldest colonial buildings remained limited. Many of island city’s listed grade I heritage structures, including Ballard Bunder Gatehouse, Heritage Hall and Portuguese Sundial in Naval Dockyard, are located inside restricted naval areas.

The Ballard Bunder Gatehouse is, in fact, the Navy’s official entry to this year’s UNESCO heritage awards. Conservation architects and experts, who have worked hard with the Navy to bring these colonial structures in public domain, said such a permission, if given, would hit further attempts to conserve Mumbai’s oldest buildings.

“It is surprising that Indian Navy, which takes great pride in the upkeep of these buildings, has sought such a permission,” said historian Sharda Dwivedi, who co-authored a coffee-table book on heritage structures in naval areas. MHCC chairman Dinesh Afzalpurkar said the Navy’s request has to be studied carefully before any decision is taken. “It would be difficult to give such a blanket permission to the Navy,” he said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/mumbai/Navy-wants-its-buildings-taken-off-protected-list/articleshow/5053155.cms

Pro-Qaeda Somali pirates to attack Indian ships, warns NATO

NATO has reportedly warned of possible attacks from pro-Qaeda Somali pirates on Indian sailing vessels and sailors, off the coast of Somalia. The attacks could take place over the next few weeks, as weather off the coast of Somalia and the surrounding the Gulf of Aden improves.

According to media reports, NATO has assured the Indian Navy of its assistance in its anti-piracy drive.

The sea surrounding the Gulf of Aden is patrolled by the navies of NATO, India and other nations, and cooperate closely with each other

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Pro-Qaeda-Somali-pirates-to-attack-Indian-ships-warns-NATO/H1-Article1-457493.aspx

Secondly a lot of countries are now getting used to the Idea that India is a nuclear power.

Sadly only we are unsure about that :(.

Your must test now comments will not be heard 🙂

Hope the other Pilot is safe as well. 🙁

You must really live in some sanitised utopia if you truly believe that rubbish.

I do not and that is not rubbish. Thats the truth. If in my country we decide to give separate states for all those who aspire for it then India would be divided into many small states. Did America allow the Confederates to break apart ? Clearly they did not want to remain part of the Union.

There was a significant outflow of refugees to European nations, some of them NATO members. Some of my friends made it out.

Not enough to warrant an armed conflict or invasion.

A powerful Yugoslavia…LOL,
2 points or facts if you will..1) Yugoslavia had ceased to exist when NATO finally intervened 2) Yugoslavia before the split was a very advanced and pretty much Westernised nation. You Muppet.

It was a non-aligned nation under great leaders like Marshal Tito. It may have been developed but developed does not equal westernized.

Hypocritical to be against avoidable, unnecessary wars or killing if you will? You pompous fool.
At what point did i say wars were not inevitable or sometimes necessary.
You have just proved yourself a fool incapable of basic comprehension.

If you are against war be against all wars. There is no just wars or unjust wars. For both sides in most conflict believe they are fighting for the just cause . Your personal insults are appalling because they are tolerated by the Mods.

You seem to be forgetting that a government is supposed to work for the people and that the people no longer wanted to be together. The government didn’t want to allow it because it would have lost power, it wasn’t acting in the interests of the people.

And yes people in a country decide they want to break away all the time, it has happened hundreds of times throughout the last 100 years and many without the government deciding that.

Not really thats just in a democracy. Revolutions and change has to come from within, not from outside, changes made that way are not sustainable in the long-term.

Majority of Serbians consider the NATO war an invasion into their soverign territory. As obligatory said, history is written by the victors, and the Balkan conflict is still too young for a neutral rivision of history.

Yugoslavia would not have been powerful again, it was tearing itself apart either way, NATO stepped in to save lives and restore order. You’re right, we should do something about Myanmar and North Korea, but they don’t border us, but they do border powerful countries that would react with hostility. In short, we couldn’t do it in an acceptable manner, so we haven’t.

Again you are wrong, it was doing well under Tito, it would have done well under a good leader. Well you don’t do anything about Myanmar and North Korea because you have all to lose and very less to gain from such conflicts.

What are you talking about, Iraq wasn’t even a NATO operation. And if we had the moral high ground we would use it as an open justification, in the West morals are a good reason to act. I have no idea why you seem to think it is bad to act on your beliefs in human rights etc.

Yes Moral right to act is fine. But do so in your soverign territory. Now that is moralistic and good. Bombing Iraq or Serbia is not. Iraq war was however good for America because it gives them more permanent bases there and goes a long way towards securing Iraqs resources.

Bully implies NATO does it for fun or some personal gain. When have they really? Now Russia does like to throw its weight around to establish its still in charge of the area it considers “theirs”. See actions in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Now if we look at some countries within NATO (See USA and UK) have been known to act like bullies outside of NATO actions

It does for personal gain be it strengthening security back home (afghanistan) or breaking up a counterweight in the balkans (Yugoslovia was before it became weak). So does Russia. Actually I mentioned Russia and other powers as well. NATO are not the only bullies.

How did the division of Yugoslavia, a process that began a number of years before the NATO intervention, benefit NATO?
Tell me what NATO actually gained, other than some operational experience?

Actually if NATO did not intervene much of the country would have been together, yes there would have been crimes against humanity, but that is for that country to review and come to terms with in future. Rwandans are doing it now for eg.

A government derives its legitimacy entirely from the consent of the governed. If the consent of the governed is withdrawn, the government is no longer legitimate, & has no authority to make decisions on their behalf.

That is a western POV. I personally believe in that but there are many countries in this world which do not believe.

India can build upto 200 kilton bomb: Kakodkar

Emphasising that India’s hydrogen bomb test Pokhran II was “successful” and had achieved all the desired goals, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar on Thursday said the controversy over the yield was “unnecessary” as the country has deterrence capability of up to 200 kilotons.

“Once again, I would like to re-emphasise that the 1998 nuclear tests were fully successful. We achieved all objectives in toto,” said Kakodkar, who was the director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in 1998.

“It has given us the capability to build deterrence based on both fission and thermonuclear weapon systems from modest to all the way up to 200 kilotons, and possibility of meeting all our security requirements,” he said at a joint press conference with Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government R Chidambaram.

Kakodkar and Chidambaram, the chief architect of Pokhran-II, were speaking on the controversy sparked off by a former Defence Research and Development Organisation scientist and a coordinator of the nuke tests, K Santhanam, who has claimed that the thermonuclear device (H-bomb) test was a failure.

Describing the May 1998 thermonuclear test as “perfectly successful”, Chidambaram said several scientific peer reviews to explain the efficacy and yield were published in the last 11 years.

“We scientists cannot go beyond that as proliferation sensitive information cannot be divulged,” said Chidambaram, also a former AEC Chairman.

Both Kakodkar and Chidambaram termed “unnecessary” the row triggered by the remarks of Santhanam and said “we are perplexed by the controversy”.

“We are saddened that two of our colleagues used heavy rhetoric which is not substitute of good science,” said Chidambaram, who was accompanied by several BARC scientists, including its director S Banerjee.

“Culture of science is to have discussions in the scientific fora or peer reviewed scientific journals and they (Santhanam and former AEC Chairman and India’s top physicist P K Iyengar) should have understood the proliferation (given the) sensitive nature of the information,” he said.

“No one in this business would do that and our BARC scientists are doing progressive work in the strategic area for the past 11 years and we are confident about the design of the device,” Chidambaram said.

Santhanam had also demanded an enquiry by an independent panel of experts into the test results.

Explaining how the two-stage device needed a thorough understanding of advanced seismology and radiochemistry, Chidambaram said, “Our results were so accurate that we disclosed the yield on the same day of the explosion, which no other country has done as science has evolved in the last two decades.”