Burma is trying to build nuclear weapons and missiles, says US senator

(AP)

The Burmese Government is attempting to build nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, according to a military defector who smuggled photographs and documents of secret nuclear equipment out of the isolated dictatorship.

Evidence presented by the former Burmese officer and weapons engineer suggests that the country is still a long way from creating usable nuclear weapons. But the fact that it has even a nascent nuclear programme will cause international alarm at a time when the West is struggling to contain the ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

Jim Webb, the US senator, who in recent months has become an unofficial US envoy to Burma, yesterday cancelled a planned trip to Naypyidaw, the capital, because of concern about the reports of the defector’s testimony on the Norway-based news website, Democratic Voice of Burma. It comes after Kurt Campbell, the US assistant secretary of state, accused the Burmese junta of violating a UN resolution by allegedly buying arms from North Korea.

“It is unclear whether these allegations have substantive merit,” Mr Webb said in a statement. “However … there are now two unresolved matters related to activities of serious concern between these two countries. Until there is further clarification on these matters, I believe it would be unwise and potentially counterproductive for me to visit Burma.”

The information comes from Sai Thein Win, a former major in the Burmese Army, who is compared in the DVB report to Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower who was abducted and imprisoned by Israel after leaking secrets of its nuclear programme to The Sunday Times. The materials he provided have been scrutinised by Robert Kelley, a former director of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The information brought by Sai suggests that Burma is mining uranium, converting it to uranium compounds for reactors and bombs, and is trying to build a reactor and/or an enrichment plant that could only be useful for a bomb,” he writes on the DVB website. “There is no chance that these activities are directed at a reactor to produce electricity in Burma.

“The information provided by Sai and other reporters from Burma clearly indicates that the regime has the intent to go nuclear and it is trying and expending huge resources along the way.”

Although not a nuclear scientist himself, Mr Sai was ordered to design parts for long-range missiles, and in the course of his work he visited a so-called “nuclear battalion” at Thabeikkyin, north of the central city of Mandalay. He claimed that this battalion is responsible for building a nuclear reactor and nuclear enrichment capabilities, with the ultimate goal of producing nuclear weapons from both enriched plutonium and uranium.

According to Mr Kelley, Mr Sai described accurately and in detail a missile component called a “fuel pump impeller” which he had been ordered to make. He revealed that a German company had unwittingly supplied high quality machine tools which were used for the weapons programme.

He also supplied photographs of a “bomb reactor” used for turning uranium compounds into uranium metal for use either in nuclear fuel or a nuclear bomb. He recounted conversations in which he was told that Burma plans to construct a nuclear reactor to make weapons-grade plutonium.

“These photos or his descriptions could be faked,” Mr Kelley writes, “but they are highly consistent with the uses he suggests.”

Photographs and documents smuggled out of Burma last year revealed that the junta had held secret high-level talks with North Korea, which was helping with the construction of a secret network of tunnels and underground military facilities.