Nuclear File

No official data has been released so far on the explosions conducted in Chaghai district of southwestern Baluchistan province.

The newspaper said five shafts in which the tests were conducted were from 800 to 835 meters in length, with a two metre diameter. They were drilled deep into a mountain range.

The paper said the largest explosion was of 45 kilotons, more than double the total yield of the two nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

In Canberra, the Australian Geological Survey Organisation measured the Pakistani blasts as comparable to those of India this month and similar in size to the US atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

It estimated the yield of the blasts as between five and 20 kilotonnes.

quot;Islamic bomb aimed at Israelquot;

WASHINGTON:Pakistan8217;s nuclear tests mean that Israel could be threatened by an quot;Islamic bombquot;, US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said on Thursday.

quot;Now you have the Islamic bomb and it will inevitably be pointed at the Middle East,quot; Moynihan, a former Ambassador to India, said at a news conference.

In an earlier speech to the state Democratic convention in Washington, he warned that the testing of nuclear devices by India and now Pakistan have brought the world to quot;the edge of nuclear warquot;.

quot;You see the pattern. We8217;ve been there before,quot; Moynihan said. Many Muslims say an quot;Islamic bombquot; is a strategic counterweight to Israel8217;s own nuclear arsenal.

Asked if he had any advice for Israel, Moynihan demurred. quot;People have been giving an awful lot of free advice to Israel at the moment, so maybe I should desist,quot; the veteran Senator said.

Fighting pests, the nuclear way

KUALA LUMPUR: Asian countries should use nuclear technology in a war against pests that destroy crops worth billions of dollars each year,a UN expert has said.

quot;Nuclear science was the cleanest way of controlling pests, avoiding the health and environmental concerns associated with chemical pesticides,quot; said Patrick Gomes. A member of a group in the International Atomic Energy Agency and Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO, he was among 285 Government and private experts from 86 countries who began a conference on pest control yesterday in the Malaysian city of Penang.

The nuclear method involves releasing laboratory-reared males of a species made sterile by gamma ray radiation so that they compete with natural fertile males in mating. The number of offspring are then quickly reduced and finally the species is eradicated over a few years. Nuclear technology has helped rid the US of the new world screw worm, Latin America of the fruit fly and more recently, in 1997, Zanzibar of the tsetse fly, which kills humans and livestock.