Thursday, April 19, 2012

It's time for Obama to give Iran an ultimatum

The Obama administration claims that sanctions against Iran are working. Officials point to the fact that Iran agreed to enter negotiations last week with the so-called p5+1 delegation. In the meantime, officials seem to ignore the findings of their own intelligence officials who say Iran’s nuclear weapons program continues to advance.

The talks, led by the European Union’s policy chief, Catherine Ashton, were held in Istanbul on April 14, 2012. The United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with Germany, sent representatives for negotiations aimed at persuading Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program.
President Obama appears to believe that Iran’s leaders now feel so besieged they will agree to trade their nuclear ambition for ending sanctions and obtaining some carrots for Tehran.

Iran apparently felt so pressured that the talks lasted only one day. Ashton nevertheless described them as “the beginnings of a sustained process.” That is diplomatic speak for making no progress beyond agreeing to talk again.

Still Obama has hailed the decision of Iran to enter negotiations as a victory for his “tough” sanctions policy.
But talking is nothing new for Iran.
Most likely the country's leaders are not weakening from international pressure but simply repeating the successful ploy they used in earlier talks with the Europeans. Those negotiations went on for years and produced no change in Iranian policy while allowing their scientists to use the time to make greater advances toward the bomb.

Instead of insisting on continuous bargaining, the blundering p5+1 agreed to meet again in five weeks.
Now, the Iranians have bought an additional month to continue work on a nuclear device. They have every incentive to drag out the negotiations to ensure the United States and others will refrain from a military strike on the grounds that a diplomatic solution is still possible. If they can prolong the talks a few months or perhaps a year, they are likely to reach the point where they cannot be stopped from building a bomb.

Obama’s own intelligence services also dispute his claim the sanctions are working. The CIA recently released a report showing that Iran has produced more low-grade enriched uranium and increased its stock of uranium enriched to 20 percent. Furthermore, Iran has increased the number of operational centrifuges and continued to work on the development of long-range ballistic missiles.


We still hear some commentators making the ridiculous claim that the Iranians haven’t decided they want to build a bomb.
No, surely ballistic missile development is part of their program for peaceful nuclear energy. Yes, enrichment of uranium continues at levels beyond those needed for energy or medicine. And, surely, nuclear facilities are hidden under ground in bunkers because they are engaged in innocuous research.

Various other analysts have suggested an Iranian nuclear bomb is nothing to worry about since the country would be afraid to use it for fear another nuclear power would annihilate them.
Why then is the p5+1, which have a deterrent, so worried?
Why are the Arabs petrified?
Why did Saudi Arabia call on the U.S. to attack Tehran?

The desperation to prevent any military action against Iran is leading to increasingly nonsensical arguments about the harmlessness of a nuclear Iran.
One of the latest flights of fantasy was an article suggesting that proliferation was nothing to worry about even though the president of Iran said that he was going to share the nuclear technology.
A member of the Saudi royal family announced that if Iran gets the bomb, it will have to do so as well. At least 12 Arab states have signed nuclear cooperation agreements in the years since Iran’s program became public.
Does anyone really believe they all suddenly decided they needed “peaceful” nuclear energy?
Does anyone seriously believe that the Gulf Oil states are convinced that they have an urgent need to seek a nuclear alternative to petroleum when they pay less than $1 for a gallon of gas?

There was one other nugget in the CIA report that was largely ignored by the media. The CIA report noted that the Syrians had been operating a clandestine nuclear program for more than a decade, but we apparently did not learn about it until just before Israel destroyed their reactor. If you add the ignorance about the Syrian program to the long history of CIA failures in the Middle East, it is easy to understand why Israel and other Middle Eastern countries do not want to trust their security to CIA evaluations of Iran’s capability.

If Obama wants to negotiate with Iran, then he needs to immediately demand that Iran take specific, verifiable measures to dismantle its enrichment facilities and cease all nuclear weapons research.
A deadline must be set for these steps to be completed in a matter of weeks – not months or years. And our president must make clear that the consequences of failing to comply will be a military operation that ensures Iran will not get the bomb.
The time for prolonged negotiations and diplomatic niceties and quid pro quos is long past. Now is the time for ultimatums.

Mitchell Bard is a foreign policy analyst. His latest books are "The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East" and "Israel Matters: Understand the Past – Look to the Future."

 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/04/18/it-time-for-obama-to-give-iran-ultimatum/

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Iran's nuclear genie is out of the bottle

After a yearlong round of escalating international economic sanctions and rhetoric, the regime in Iran has finally come around to raising expectations that it will take some constructive steps in reining in its nuclear weapons ambitions. But this cycle of threat and accommodation has played out before, and its outcome should have been predictable.
According to the information provided by Iranian dissidents obtained from their sources inside the regime, as well as the U.N.'s atomic watchdog agency, the nuclear genie is out of the bottle in Iran, and the regime's genius for delay and subterfuge will only give it the time to complete the dash to a workable weapon.
Every major effort by the U.S. to negotiate with Iran since the 1979 revolution has failed. The regime has always received its ransom: weapons from President Ronald Reagan, the listing of the democratic opposition group the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) as a "terrorist" group by President Bill Clinton — by giving a glimmer of hope and then delivering nothing in return.
This cycle continues with the Obama administration. The Iranian nuclear envoy expressed confidence about an offer put on the table by the West in October 2009 as a step toward solving the nuclear issue. Then, after the uprising in Iran was violently suppressed in 2009, Iran announced the nuclear deal was unacceptable. Meanwhile, Iran had enriched uranium to the 20 percent level, a significant scientific leap toward acquiring fissile material for the bomb.

The regime is motivated by fanatical zeal and an outsized sense of importance in the region. The acquisition of nuclear weapons is conflated with these motives, and that is why no amount of political concessions and economic incentives can stop this drive.
Information obtained by the network inside Iran of MEK makes it abundantly clear that Iran has expanded the organization responsible for nuclear weapons development. Their findings reveal a complete, elaborate and highly secret research structure and a network for procurement of the parts and equipment required to build nuclear weapons.
Identities of 60 directors and experts working in various parts of this organization (abbreviated in Farsi as SPND) and 11 institutions and companies affiliated with it have been detailed. The underground nuclear site near the holy city of Qom known as Fordow, which has been involved in enriching uranium to 20 percent (dubbed by Tehran as necessary fuel for its medical research) is actually run by SPND and controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
This information sharply contradicts the assessment by some in the administration that Iran has not yet made the decision to go forward with the weapons program, as well as the observation by others who suggest that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has forbidden the development of a nuclear bomb.
Iran's foreign minister, ahead of nuclear talks, suggested that the negotiations should be used only to build trust, making it clear that the Iranian regime's leaders had already decided to use the talks to buy even more time, without making any concessions.
With each attempt at negotiation with Iran, America has fashioned a lash for its own back. It's time to turn one of those lashes against the regime. As a majority of members of Congress stated, the dissident group, MEK, which exposed key nuclear sites of Iran, was unjustifiably put on the list of terrorist organizations as one of many U.S. efforts to placate Tehran. This is an unarmed, secular group dedicated to a democratic and non-nuclear Iran. The regime rightly fears and hates it and devotes its resources to destroy or demonize it.
President Barack Obama should delist the group immediately, just as a U.S. Court of Appeals has urged him to consider doing on the basis of a lack of evidence against the dissidents. Doing so will call Iran on its bluffing, and it is a reasonable step that falls between insufficient sanctions and unimaginable warfare. Doing so is consistent with U.S. efforts to be on the side of the millions in Iran, who showed the world that they want the ruling theocracy overturned. It is time for America to change course.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is the author of "The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis." He exposed the nuclear sites in Natanz and Arak in 2002, which triggered the International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the Iranian nuclear sites. His email is jafarzadeh@spcwashington.com.

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Deadly Folly of Nuclear Power Overhead

The crash last week of a U.S. drone on the Seychelles Islands-- the second crash of a U.S. drone on Seychelles in four months -- underlines the deadly folly of a plan of U.S. national laboratory scientists and the Northrop Grumman Corp. for nuclear-powered drones.
The use of nuclear power on U.S. drones was "favorably assessed by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Northrop Grumman Corp.," revealed Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists last month.
Sandia's report said that "use of these technologies" could provide "system performance unparalleled by existing technologies." It acknowledged, however, that "current political conditions will not allow use of the results."
Just consider if the drones that crashed on the Seychelles used nuclear power -- and the impacts if the radioactive fuel they contained was released -- or if the drones had crashed elsewhere, in Somalia, for instance, providing nuclear material to those who might want to make a "dirty bomb."
Although the nuclear-powered drone scheme is ostensibly not going anywhere now, other schemes to use nuclear power overhead -- which also threaten nuclear disaster -- are on the planning table and some are moving ahead.
These include:
  • A new U.S. Air Force plan which supports "nuclear powered flight." Titled Energy Horizons, issued in January, it states that "nuclear energy has been demonstrated on several satellite systems" and "this source provides consistent power... at a much higher energy and power density than current technologies." It does admit that "the implementation of such a technology should be weighed heavily against potential catastrophic outcomes." Indeed, the worst accident involving a U.S. space nuclear system occurred with the fall to Earth in 1964 of a satellite powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG, the SNAP-9A. It failed to achieve orbit and fell to Earth, disintegrating upon hitting the atmosphere causing its Plutonium-238 fuel to be dispersed as dust. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, long linked the SNAP-9A accident to a global rise in lung cancer.
  • "A ground-breaking Russian nuclear space travel propulsion system will be ready by 2017 and will power a ship capable of long-haul interplanetary missions by 2025," the Russian state news agency, Ria Novosti, reported last week. The worst accident involving a Soviet or Russian nuclear space system was the fall from orbit in 1978 of the Cosmos 954 satellite powered by a nuclear reactor. It also broke up in the atmosphere spreading radioactive debris which scattered over 77,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories of Canada.
  • The U.S. is moving again to produce Plutonium-238 for space use. RTGs powered by Plutonium-238 had been used by the U.S. as a source of electricity on satellites -- as the Energy Horizons noted. But that was until the SNAP-9A accident which caused a shift to generating electricity with solar photovoltaic panels. However, RTGs using Plutonium-238 have remained a source of on board electricity for space probes.
  • The Department of Energy plans to produce Plutonium-238 at both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratories.
  • The U.S. is also developing nuclear-powered rockets. Ad Astra, headed by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, is working on what it calls a Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket or VASMIR to be powered by a nuclear reactor. It would provide a "faster trip" to Mars, says Chang-Diaz, according to a Voice of America article last year, could be used "for missions to the International Space Station or to retrieve or position satellites in Earth orbit."
Challenging what is going on is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power
in Space. Bruce Gagnon, its coordinator, comments: "Who can deny that the nuclear power industry isn't working overtime to spread its deadly product onto every possible military application? The recent disclosure that the Pentagon has been strongly considering sticking nuclear engines on-board drones is dangerously 'more of the same.'"
"Nuclear-powered devices flying around on drones or on-board rockets that frequently blow up on launch is pure insanity," says Gagnon. "The people need to push back hard."
What is happening has deep roots. A key rationale by Sandia and Northrop Grumman for nuclear-powered drones was, as the British newspaper, The Guardian, reported last week, long -- very long -- flight times. The same rationale, noted Gagnon, was behind the U.S. development in the 1940s and '50s of nuclear-propelled bombers. The strategy was for these nuclear-powered bombers to stay up in the air for extensive periods of time.
A subsequent program linking nuclear power and weapons was "Star Wars" under President Reagan. It was "predicated," as Gagnon notes, "on nuclear power in space." Reactors were to provide the energy on orbiting battle platforms for lasers, hypervelocity guns and particle beam weapons.
In my book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, and TV documentary, Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens, I noted the 1988 declaration of Lt. General James Abramson, first head of the Strategic Defense Initiative, that "without reactors in orbit [there is] going to be a long, long light cord that goes down to the surface of Earth" bringing up power. He stated: "Failure to develop nuclear power in space could cripple efforts to deploy anti-missile sensors and weapons in orbit."
As to nuclear-propelled rockets, the U.S. has a long history of seeking to build them. Meanwhile, nuclear power above our heads has been shown as unnecessary.
NASA has persisted in using Plutonium-238-powered RTGs on space probes claiming there was no choice. But last year it launched the Juno space probe which is now on its way to Jupiter-- getting all its on-board electricity from solar photovoltaic panels. Likewise, the European Space Agency in 2004 launched a space probe it calls Rosetta, also using solar energy rather than nuclear power for on-board electricity. It is to rendezvous with a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
As to propulsion in space, a highly promising energy source are the ionized particles in space that can be utilized in the frictionless environment with what are being called solar sails.
In May 2010, the Japan Exploration Agency launched a spacecraft, Ikaros, that seven months later reached Venus -- propelled only by its solar sail. The Planetary Society is readying a similar mission using a spacecraft named LightSail-1 and is planning for two more ambitious solar sail flights of LightSail-2 and LightSail-3.
These missions don't present threats to life on Earth -- unlike the use of nuclear power overhead. Also, the production of nuclear fuel on Earth for use in space -- or in the atmosphere for drones -- constitutes danger, too. Facilities used earlier by the U.S. to produce Plutonium-238 ended up as hotspots for worker contamination and radioactive pollution.
James Powell, executive director of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, which has been opposing Plutonium-238 production at nearby Idaho National Laboratory, comments:
Aside from the looming danger of nuclear-powered crafts above Earth, we should also realize that the nuclear material is to be produced in our backyards with 1960s era nuclear reactors and then transported back and forth from [Oak Ridge National Laboratory in] Tennessee to Idaho. Every single part of this process deeply concerns us.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/the-deadly-folly-of-nucle_b_1417149.html

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Nuclear Power's Death Somewhat Exaggerated

NUCLEAR energy is going through an odd patch. It refuses to die, but it does not prosper.
Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency
The Vogtle site near Augusta, Ga., won approval for two nuclear reactors.
Green
A blog about energy and the environment.
This is how modest the nuclear industry’s prospects now look: Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who has called for building 100 reactors in the next few years, told a conference of industry specialists in late March that the long-ballyhooed “nuclear renaissance” did not really exist anymore. Now, he said, it is an “awakening to the awareness of nuclear.”
But it is an awakening with a price of $30 billion or more. Mr. Alexander was speaking to a conference convened on the 33rd anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident, a few weeks after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave permission to build a power reactor for the first time in more than 30 years, for the twin Vogtle reactors near Augusta, Ga.
Those will cost $14 billion, if all goes well, and more if it does not. A few days after he spoke, the commission approved a license for another pair of reactors in South Carolina, which will cost about the same. Several other companies are laying out hundreds of millions of dollars in planning for reactors that may or may not get to the groundbreaking stage.
The industry’s three great recent stumbling blocks, the Fukushima accident of March 2011, the exceptionally low price of natural gas and a recession that has stunted demand for power, mock the idea that dozens of new reactors are waiting in the wings. But in an era of worry over global warming, support is plentiful for at least keeping a toe in the water.
“Even if global warming science was not explicitly invented by the nuclear lobby, the science could hardly suit the lobby better,” complained a book published last month, “The Doomsday Machine,” a polemic on the evils of splitting the atom. In fact, the industry continues to argue that in the United States it is by far the largest source of zero-carbon energy, and recently began a campaign of upbeat ads to improve its image.
According to the authors of “The Doomsday Machine,” Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop, “In almost every country — usually for reasons completely unrelated to its ability to deliver electricity — there is almost universal political support for nuclear power.”
That is probably an exaggeration, with Japan leaving almost all of its 54 reactors idle at the moment because of the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown, and Germany promising to close its fleet. But China and India, two countries with enormous demand for electricity and not much hand-wringing over global warming, are planning huge reactor construction projects.
And even the Japanese catastrophe plays in some quarters as a reason to build new reactors. For example, the reactors being built in Georgia and South Carolina are the AP1000 model, with the letters standing for “advanced passive,” because emergency cooling relies on natural forces like gravity, evaporation and convection, not power-operated pumps and valves that require a supply of electricity, the force that Fukushima simply did not have.
At the same conference that Senator Alexander addressed, Jim Ferland, then the president and chief executive of Westinghouse Electric, insisted, “If an AP1000 had been there, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today; that plant would be back on line.” General Electric, which designed the reactors used by Tokyo Electric Power at Fukushima, has made similar claims for its new “passively safe” design.
If the nation’s 104 reactors, all but one finished by the 1980s, were eventually replaced, it would be with equipment that has fewer moving parts and fewer ways to get into accidents. But they may not be replaced because the competition from other sources of electricity is strong.
In the United States, nuclear power is stumbling forward because of an energy policy of limited diversity — what President Obama refers to as his “all of the above” strategy. That means loan guarantees and production tax credits for new reactors, created in the George W. Bush administration, are viewed favorably in the Obama White House. But “all of the above” also means support for solar and wind, as well as support for oil and natural gas production, especially hydraulic fracturing for gas in shale rock.
Fracking, as it is known, has turned gas into a formidable competitor. Gas is priced in a unit called a million B.T.U.’s, a quantity that will produce about 150 kilowatt-hours, about as much as a small house uses in a week.
When gas was $14 per million B.T.U.’s, it cost 9 cents per kilowatt-hour just for the fuel. Today, with natural gas priced at about $3 per million B.T.U.’s, the fuel cost to make a kilowatt-hour is about 2 cents. That does not count the cost of building the plant to burn the gas, but it does make almost anything else, including zero-carbon sources like solar, wind and nuclear, much less attractive.
In the wings are other competitors, including the possibility of a better reactor. The Energy Department recently said it might spend $450 million on “small modular reactors” that could be built in a factory and trucked to sites to replace old coal plants or power small communities. The government, though, researches far more types of reactors than ever achieve commercial life.
And the Fukushima meltdowns did not help. “It seems like every time something happens, you always get these prognostications this is the end, the nuclear industry has come to a halt,” said William D. Magwood IV, one of the five members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former assistant secretary of energy in charge of promoting nuclear power.
Fukushima, said Bart Gordon, a former Democratic representative from Tennessee and former chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, was “undermining some of the environmental converts, so the political issue is more difficult.”
Fukushima certainly did not help the South Texas Project expansion, one of the four selected by the Energy Department as prime candidates for loan guarantees. That project was in trouble before March 2011, because an important municipal partner had dropped out.
One of the replacement partners was the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which is now hardly in a position to invest in new reactors abroad. Another candidate for a loan guarantee, now probably dead, was the Calvert Cliffs 3 project, about 40 miles south of Washington, which was supposed to be built in a competitive marketplace, where the price of power was set by natural gas. That made even the Energy Department rather skeptical about its prospects.
Mr. Magwood argues that the situation is not so dire, though, because the “renaissance” was never as big as some people assumed. He said he calculated in 2008 that of the 23 or so projects that were under discussion, only 12 were actually under development, and of those, only 10 faced no real licensing or technical hurdles. But only five of those had clear sources of financing. He assumed three would be in the first wave; now it is two. The industry insists that even its small-scale rebirth is a step forward. Those two pairs of reactors could lay the groundwork for more.
Mr. Ferland said that AP1000s in this country would be easier to build because of the experience of construction in China. For example, he said, technicians there had misrigged one heavy component at a plant, bending it slightly and causing a two-week delay. That will not happen in Georgia or South Carolina, he said. Smaller lessons, like how to lay out cable trays so they do not occupy space later needed for other components, were accumulating rapidly, he said.
Simply breaking ground on a reactor and finishing it, something this country has not done for 30 years, would be a step forward.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/business/energy-environment/nuclear-powers-death-somewhat-exaggerated.html&ct=ga&cad=CAcQAhgAIAAoATAAOABA_42T_ARIAVAAWABiBWVuLVVT&cd=4F2YSQ1KpkA&usg=AFQjCNHHC_7ZgbWuL9CNKqVTm6VHGdKDRQ

Sunday, April 1, 2012

U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Doesn’t Need Tests to Deter Enemies

Nuclear Arsenal
Illustration by Bloomberg View
It’s horrifying even to imagine the U.S. finding itself in a position where it must use an atomic bomb against an enemy. However, in the event such a crisis occurs, we must be certain the weapon will work.
Equally important, the main purpose of the U.S. nuclear- weapons program today is to provide a deterrent against potential threats, and that can only be achieved if we are confident in our stockpile and aware of the risks we face around the world.
Fortunately, as a report from the National Academy of Sciences last week helped make clear, there is a way to improve security on both fronts: ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The CTBT, which bans all tests of nuclear weapons, was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996, and President Bill Clinton was the first world leader to sign it. It was shelved, however, by the Republican-held Senate in 1999, over some legitimate concerns: that computer modeling alone might not ensure the integrity of the U.S. stockpile, and that global monitoring systems were not up to the task of detecting explosions around the globe.
But the world has changed. Seismic science has advanced tremendously -- North Korea’s very low-yield underground tests in 2006 and 2009, for example, were picked up by South Korean, American and other detection systems. The CTBT calls for an international web of 321 monitoring stations and 16 radionuclide laboratories, which is about 75 percent complete.
As for maintaining our arsenal, the U.S. has not seen the need to conduct a test since 1992. Last week’s report stated that the U.S. is “now in a better position than at any time in the past to maintain a safe and effective nuclear weapons stockpile without testing and to monitor clandestine nuclear testing abroad.”
It’s simply hard to see how ratifying the treaty and pushing for its global adoption would harm U.S. interests. And, if it did, the treaty has an opt-out clause in cases of “supreme national interest.”
The more pertinent objection is that it would do little to curb the behavior of rogue states, which are unlikely to join the treaty or to abide by it if they did. (In fact, as written, the pact cannot even go into full force unless Iran and North Korea, among others, ratify it.) Nonetheless, the U.S. signing on would further isolate bad actors in world opinion and engender goodwill for the increasingly promising American effort to curb Iran’s nuclear efforts. Also, China has indicated it will follow the U.S.’s lead on the issue, and Senate ratification might help tame the arms race (and accusations of U.S. hypocrisy) among other budding nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan, neither of which has signed the CTBT.
How could the Barack Obama administration gather the necessary 67 Senate votes? First, by pointing out that such Republican luminaries as former Secretary of State George Shultz, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have all said that approving the treaty now makes sense. Second, it could commit to several crucial recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences report -- improving U.S. global monitoring systems, maintaining a strategic computing capability and pledging to finance nonexplosive testing in hydrodynamics, radiography and fusion technology.
The White House could also make some deals. One option is making military’s new F-35 fighter capable of carrying a nuclear payload. (Although we would like to see the now-scaled-back F-35 program killed for budgetary reasons, if it is to be produced, it should become a factor in our deterrent strategy.) Another is to resume the now-shelved Reliable Replacement Warhead project, which would create a simpler, next-generation warhead without resuming nuclear testing.
Ratifying the CTBT, further diversifying the U.S. nuclear program and developing a more reliable warhead would not just make America more secure, they would be part of a broader strategic goal we have endorsed: shifting our deterrent capacity away from Cold-War-legacy ballistic missiles and toward a smaller, smarter tactical arsenal adapted to the threats we face in the 21st century.
Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View.
Today’s highlights: The View editors on why the U.S. should ratify the nuclear-test ban and regulate money-market funds. William D. Cohan on the government hiding public information on banks. Albert R. Hunt on murder in New Orleans. Charles Dumas on why the euro should be abandoned, and Charles Wyplosz on why the euro should be kept.
To contact the Bloomberg View editorial board: view@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-01/u-s-nuclear-arsenal-doesn-t-need-tests-to-deter-enemies.html