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PDFThe U.S. Navy’s interception and turning back of a North Korean ship suspected of carrying sophisticated missile technology to Burma is reviving suspicions that the military junta has a secret nuclear program.
The Obama administration has publicly expressed suspicions that Burma’s military is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons technology.
Burmese opposition groups recently commissioned research which suggested that the country’s ruling junta had nuclear ambitions.
“Among the hundreds of thousands who have fled Myanmar and its tyrannical rulers over the years is a military insider who claims he carried a big secret with him: evidence of a hidden nuclear weapons program,” Associated Press reports.
“Defector Sai Thein Win, 35, (right) has provided the most persuasive proof to date of a secret nuclear program,” AP notes. Win, a former army major and mechanical engineer, appeared in a documentary produced by the Democratic Voice of Burma, an exiled dissident group.
Some journalists were not even prepared to entertain the possibility, entertaining Wag-the-Dog conspiracy theories.
But a wide range of circumstantial evidence indicates Burma’s interest in building nuclear warheads, says Jeffrey Lewis of the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies.
“We are making a lot of inferences,” he says. “The primary allegation of a nuclear program concerns equipment seen in workshops… . We have all this data, which I find incredibly suspicious.”
Burma’s military junta has nuclear aspirations? Who knew?
Democratic Voice of Burma is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.
