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The Davy Crockett was one of the smallest nuclear weapons ever made by the United States. Built in the late 1950s, and designed for the battlefields of Europe to stop a possible Warsaw Pact invasion, the warhead looked like a watermelon, being only 30 inches long and weighing about 76 pounds. From a portable tripod launcher, it could be fired at the enemy as close as 1,000 feet or up to 13,000 feet away. It was a weapon for nuclear war at close range.

Today, the Davy Crockett system has long since been retired, and is now a neat museum piece. You can see a casing of the warhead at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque.

But the little nuclear watermelon is a reminder of the big work still to be done in arms control. The just-completed strategic weapons treaty that U.S. President Barack Obama will sign in Prague next week with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev does not cover smaller nuclear warheads in both arsenals that are a legacy of the Cold War — the so-called battlefield, or tactical weapons.

The United States is believed to have about 200 tactical nukes in Europe, all of them B61 free-fall gravity bombs to be used with U.S. and allied tactical aircraft, out of 500 total tactical nukes in the active U.S. arsenal. The Russians are estimated to have about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, several hundred in the European part of the country and the remainder in central storage sites.

These smaller warheads have never been covered by a specific treaty, nor are they subject to the kind of verification that is used to prevent cheating in the agreements covering the long-range or strategic weapons, including the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. What’s more, they are relics of a bygone era, with no military usefulness. There is no longer a Warsaw Pact or a Soviet Union threatening a massive invasion across the Fulda Gap that would have to be stopped with a last-ditch decision to fire off the battlefield nukes.

Obama may dream of a world without nuclear arms, but it is with weapons systems like these, which remain in place years after the Cold War, that his goals meet the unpleasant reality and the unfinished business of the past.

White House officials want everyone to rest assured: They’ll make an effort to deal with tactical nuclear weapons in the next treaty. In fact, they mistakenly thought, a year ago, that the new START agreement would be a snap and they’d be moving on to the bigger challenges by now. But a closer look suggests that tactical nukes are going to be very, very hard to negotiate. That’s why they are still around — it is a tough one.

For years, experts have been warning about the dangers of tactical nukes. They could be a temptation for a terrorist diversion, small enough to be driven away in a truck. While it would be difficult to actually explode one, there was serious concern at the end of the Cold War about the thousands of Soviet-era tactical nuclear weapons. The warheads were vulnerable as Moscow hastily hauled them back into Russia in old train cars which lacked sophisticated alarms or armored blankets to protect the warheads from bullets or shrapnel. Although the warheads were deactivated, the headaches were immense, including a shortage of secure storage space to hold them once they got back into Russia. Eventually, the United States carried out a secret operation in which one of the Soviet model cars was shipped to Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, which designed an upgrade.

Both Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President George H. W. Bush realized the urgency in late 1991 and unilaterally withdrew many of these weapons in the final months before the Soviet collapse. But they never sealed these pullbacks in a mutual arms control treaty, and there is no verification to this day.

Read the rest of the story at: ForeignPolicy.com

The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) is the intelligence agency of the People’s Republic of China. China’s MSS (like the CIA in the US or MI6 in the UK), is probably the country’s largest and most active foreign intelligence agency.

Former MSS agents say that the agency is engaged in counterintelligence and repressing internal dissent within China.  The internal repression includes efforts against religious groups and Tibetan and Taiwanese independence movements as well as censoring the Internet to prevent China’s population from knowing what is going on outside the country.

The actual mission of the MSS is to ensure “the security of the state through effective measures against enemy agents, spies, and counter-revolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China’s socialist system.”  One of the primary missions of the MSS is undoubtedly to gather foreign intelligence from targets in various countries overseas.  Many MSS agents are said to have operated in the Greater China region (Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) and to have integrated themselves into the world’s numerous overseas Chinese communities.  At one point, nearly 120 agents who had been operating under non-official cover in the U.S., Canada, Western and Northern Europe, and Japan as businessmen, bankers, scholars, and journalists were recalled to China, a fact that demonstrates the broad geographical scope of MSS agent coverage.

60 Minutes has obtained an FBI videotape showing a Defense Department employee selling secrets to a Chinese spy that offers a rare glimpse into the secretive world of espionage.

See also: Chinese spy who defected tells all (Washington Times)

See Also: Four Chinese Espionage Investigations (PBS)

According to the Tuesday edition of the French daily Parisian, a confidential military report proves that soldiers were deliberately exposed to nuclear tests that France conducted in Algeria in the 1960s.

Soldiers were deliberately exposed to nuclear tests conducted by France in Algeria during the 1960s to “study the physiological and psychological effects of atomic weaponry on humans,” according to a report exposed by the French daily Le Parisian on Tuesday.

The “confidential report”, entitled “The beginnings of the organization and experimentations in the Sahara” were drafted “by one or several military personnel” and “dated 1998” after the tests had ceased, according to Le Parisien.

An excerpt published in the newspaper refers to the “Gerboise verte”, code name for the test firings of April 25, 1961. It states that the experiment “should allow for a study of the physiological and psychological effects of atomic weaponry on humans, with the goal obtaining the necessary elements to prepare physically and morally for modern combat.”

Defence Minister Hervé Morin said in an interview with Le Parisien that he had no knowledge of this report, saying that he only become aware of it because of information that came to light during a trial in which victims’ families demanded reparations.”

He added, “The (radioactive) dosages received during the tests were very low. Nonetheless, he said, “10 million Euros have been allocated [for indemnities],” he added. “We can increase this figure if necessary.”

France conducted 210 nuclear tests in total, beginning with the one in the Sahara in 1960 and ending as late as 1996 in French Polynesia. Thousands of soldiers believe themselves to have suffered radioactive contamination, and have demanded justice.

Watch Video at: Soldiers deliberately exposed to nuclear tests, says report (France 24)

See also: Parliament approves compensation bill for nuclear test victims (France 24)