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Homeland Defense Could See Tighter Controls On University Education
The Bush administration could prevent foreign nationals from studying certain subjects that could bear on the development of weapons of mass destruction, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The daily reported that a team working in the office of Homeland Security directed by Tom Ridge was weighing this and other potential limitations to be placed on student visas, as part of a ramping up of government oversight on foreign student programs. A spokesman told the daily that the restrictions program was only in the planning stage, and was just one of the suggestions being bandied about. One of the 19 presumed hijackers involved in the attacks September 11 had entered the United States on a student visa, and two others were granted student visas after the attacks, which elicited a rebuke from US President George W. Bush last month. Some educators were cited by the daily as expressing concern that foreign students would be restricted from taking courses in fields such as nuclear technology and biotechnology, though Ridge's spokesman Gordon Johndroe denied that was an option. Last week, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service announced new restrictions on its student visa program -- which granted an estimated 659,000 in 2001. Foreign nationals will no longer be allowed to begin a course of study without an approved student visa, and will no longer be allowed to even apply for a student visa while in the United States on a tourist visa -- unless the desire to do so was expressed prior to arriving on US soil. The number of foreign nationals studying in the United States exceeds two million, the INS has said. However, the difficulty of keeping the nuclear genie back in the bottle was highlighted when declassified documents from the UK ministry of defence can be consulted by any terrorist for an explaination on how to make an atomic bomb, the Daily Telegraph reported earluer this month in London. The documents, which came into the public domain over the past five years, give details of the making of Britain's first nuclear bomb, called "Blue Danube", at the end of the 1940s and start of the 1950s, the daily said. They give a list of the ingredients for such a weapon, including the amount of plutonium and how to spark off a chain reaction. A former engineer who worked on Britain's military nuclear programme said the instructions could enable a terrorist to construct a rudimentary atomic bomb. The main difficulty would be to get the plutonium, but several "outlaw" states like Iraq might have some and terror organizations like al-Qaeda have tried to obtain some, the Telegraph said. "These documents should never have been declassified and since the events of September 11 there is a case for removing them from public access," the engineer, Brian Burnell, was quoted as saying. Opposition Conservative party defence spokesman Bernard Jenkin immediately called for explanations from the Labour government, calling the documents "a monstrous free gift to terrorists," the Telegraph said. All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse. Related Links SpaceDaily Search SpaceDaily Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express 
CIA Chief Cites Russia, China, North Korea As Proliferators
Washington (AFP) Mar 19, 2002Russia has emerged as the top-of-the-line supplier of advanced technology and training to countries seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, CIA director George Tenet said Tuesday. Tenet also singled out China and North Korea as proliferators of missile technology in wide-ranging testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on threats facing the United States.
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