GOOGLE NEWS: Spy agencies believe NKorea has nuke warheads

SEOUL (AFP) — Intelligence agencies have information that North Korea has assembled several nuclear warheads for its medium-range Rodong missiles capable of targeting Japan, an analyst said Tuesday.

Daniel Pinkston, senior analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said the agencies believe that probably five to eight warheads have been assembled.

"Intelligence agencies believe the North Koreans have assembled nuclear warheads for Rodong missiles, which are stored at underground facilities near the Rodong missile bases," Pinkston told AFP.

"It might be right, it might be wrong -- but if others believe it is true, it has implications for the psychological aspects of deterrence," he said, describing the assessment as "quite significant."

YAHOO/AFP: Medvedev orders large-scale Russian rearmament

MOSCOW (AFP) – President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday announced a "large-scale" rearmament and renewal of Russia's nuclear arsenal, accusing NATO of pushing ahead with expansion near Russian borders.

Meeting defence chiefs in Moscow, Medvedev said he was determined to implement reforms to streamline Russia's bloated military and stressed Moscow continued to face several security threats needing robust defense capacity.

"From 2011, a large-scale rearmament of the army and navy will begin," Medvedev said.

NTA: Plutonium From Manhatten Project Discovered In Landfill - Hanford Site

One of the most dangerous substances known to man has been found unguarded — in a garbage dump.

Workers cleaning up the Hanford Site, a huge decommissioned nuclear research facility in southeastern Washington state, came across an old safe buried in a pit.

Cracking it open, they found a glass bottle — which turned out to contain plutonium made for the Manhattan Project in 1945.

Plutonium is extremely radioactive, and even a tiny amount could cause lung cancer in a human who breathed it in. But this wasn’t just any plutonium — this was an extremely pure sample of the fissile isotope plutonium-239, used to make atomic bombs such as the one dropped on Nagasaki.

In fact, it now turns out that except for a tiny sample stored at the Smithsonian, the 400 milliliters from the bottle is the oldest batch of plutonium-239 in existence. It’s not enough to make a nuclear weapon, but it’d be plenty for terrorist to manufacture a “dirty bomb” with.

All the other sizable samples of plutonium-239 from 1945 went into the Nagasaki bomb or the Trinity nuclear-test bomb that preceded it. It’s not clear why this batch was left out — or how it came to end up in a sealed safe abandoned in a landfill.

NY TIMES: North Korea Says It Has ‘Weaponized’ Plutonium

The North Korean military declared an “all-out confrontational posture” against South Korea on Saturday as an American scholar said North Korean officials told him they had “weaponized” enough plutonium for roughly four or five nuclear bombs.