Is Burma Going Nuclear?

Now a spokesman for the self-styled Burmese government-in-exile, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, says that according to sources working with the dissident movement inside the Burma army, there are two heavily guarded buildings under construction "to hold nuclear reactors" in central Burma.

Villagers in the area have been displaced, said spokesman Zinn Lin.

Andrew Selth of Australia's Griffith University, who has monitored Burma's possible nuclear moves for a decade, says none of these reports has been substantiated and calls the issue an "information black hole."

He also says Western governments are cautious in their assessments, remembering the intelligence blunders regarding suspected weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

A US State Department official, speaking on customary rules of anonymity, said he would not comment on intelligence-related matters such as nuclear proliferation.

"I don't want that to be seen as confirmation one way or the other. Obviously, any time that a country does business with North Korea we're going to watch to see what that is," the official said.

Alarm bells about Burma's aspirations have rung before. In 2007, Russia signed an agreement to establish a nuclear studies center in Burma, build a 10-megawatt nuclear research reactor for peaceful purposes and train several hundred technicians in its operation.

However, Russia's atomic agency Rosatom told The Associated Press recently that "there has been no movement whatsoever on this agreement with Burma ever since."

Even earlier, before the military seized power, Burma sought to develop nuclear energy, sending physicists to the United States and Britain for studies in the 1950s. The military government established a Department of Atomic Energy in 2001 under U Thaung, a known proponent of nuclear technology who currently heads the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Burma is a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and under a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, it is obligated to let the UN watchdog know at least six months in advance of operating a nuclear facility, agency spokesman Ayhan Evrensel said.

Evrensel said the Vienna-based IAEA has asked Burma to sign a so-called "additional protocol" that would allow agency experts to carry out unannounced inspections and lead to a broader flow of information about Burma's nuclear activities.

The regime has remained silent on whatever its plans may be. A Burmese regime spokesman did not respond to an e-mail asking about Russian and North Korean involvement in nuclear development.

In a rare comment from inside Burma, Chan Tun, former ambassador to North Korea turned democracy activist, told the Thailand-based The Irrawaddy magazine, "To put it plainly: Burma wants to get the technology to develop a nuclear bomb.

"However, I have to say that it is childish of the Burmese generals to dream about acquiring nuclear technology since they can't even provide regular electricity in Burma," the Burmese exile publication quoted him last month as saying.

Some experts think the generals may be bluffing.

"I would think that it's quite possible Yangon [Rangoon] would like to scare other countries or may feel that talking about developing nuclear technologies will give them more bargaining clout," said Cristina-Astrid Hansell at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "This is not unreasonable, given the payoffs North Korea has gotten for its nuclear program."

Associated Press writers Kwang-tae Kim in Seoul, Pauline Jellinek and Matt Lee in Washington, Caroline Stauffer in Bangkok, George Jahn and William Kole in Vienna and Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed to this report.