All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

North and South Korea declared a ceasefire back in 1953, but relations have been anything but peaceful during the past 56 years.

Today, the rhetoric is heating up as North Korea threatens to attack South Korean ships if they get too close.

Needless to say, it's been a bad week for the Korean peninsula.

Kim Jong Il's regime flaunted a test fire of a supposed nuclear bomb on Monday, and has tested several missiles since. It's a pyrotechnic display that no one finds entertaining.

But the question is: How will the U.S. and the U.N. punish North Korea? More sanctions? More invitations to six-party talks? We've all seen that movie before.

The Obama administration and its international partners face a daunting challenge. They have to make it clear that this behavior will not be tolerated while trying to cool the red-hot tempers in the Yellow Sea before a test fire escalates into the real thing.

That's a page from my notebook.

David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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Will there be a strike – either by the U.S., Israel or both – against Iran's nuclear complex? And will it happen before the Bush administration leaves office? I doubt leaders in either country know the answers to those questions.

Israel is putting the pressure on, telling the Bush administration in every way possible: "if you don't do it, we will." That's a threat designed to be heard not just in Washington but in every capital of the world – including Tehran. Israel wants the Iranians to know that it really will strike if uranium enrichment continues and it wants the rest of the world to know that the only way to stave off military action is with much more draconian economic and diplomatic sanctions that will persuade Teheran to change its mind.

Everyone agrees on two things: 1) Iran with a bomb would be a disaster and 2) bombing Iran would be a disaster. The only argument is over which would be the greater disaster.

One school of thought says that Iran would be like any other country that has the bomb – afraid to use it for fear of retaliation. But even those who believe that Iran would play by the same rules of deterrence that every other nuclear state plays by acknowledge that at the very least an Iranian bomb would cause other oil rich states to get a bomb of their own and nobody thinks a nuclear arms race in the Middle East can have a good outcome. It's really a moot point because Israel is certain that Iran with a bomb would be a greater disaster and Israel will do whatever it takes to prevent it.

The real question is: "what is Israel's red line? What will it take to trigger a strike?"

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CBS News White House correspondent Bill Plante is traveling with the president today in Ukraine and Romania. But before he met up with the White House press corps, Bill and his crew visited the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for a report on a new plan to contain radioactive material at the site with a massive steel arch. More web-exclusive video from that excursion is available here.

Bill also visited Pripyat, the abandoned city just about a mile away from the nuclear plant, where the plant's workers lived. When disaster struck in 1986, the town's residents were given 36 hours to evacuate. They never came back, leaving behind an eerie, overgrown landscape of deserted buildings.

Just click the monitor below to check out Bill's Web-exclusive report:

Sharyl Attkisson is investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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There are not many good excuses for sleeping on the job. Even fewer if you happen to be a tactically-trained security guards; the first responders if a terrorist breaks into a nuclear facility. Public lives are quite literally in their hands.

Yet according to the security forces themselves, there is routine sleeping on the job at more than one of the nation's nuclear power plants.

The case of the napping guards at Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania is the topic of our story tonight on the CBS Evening News. It might have never amounted to a story at all, but for a tenacious guard who, after being rebuffed by his own supervisors and feeling rebuffed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that's supposed to care, recorded his fellow sleeping guards over a period of months.

If not for the video evidence ... the video embarrassment ... the NRC, the plant's owner and the security company, Wackenhut, would likely have all just written off the claims as unsubstantiated. After all, according to three sources we spoke to, sleeping is part of an accepted culture at Wackenhut: nobody is really looking to catch anyone in the act.

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Bob Orr is a correspondent for CBS News based in Washington.

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Let me just say upfront this is a tough story to do, and we’ll probably be criticized for hyping a threat that many people feel is improbable, if not impossible.

However, if the FBI is worried and the Russian government is worried, then I’m worried.

As far as we know, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have never gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon, but that’s not for lack of trying. In 1998, bin Laden said acquiring nukes “for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty.” And we know al Qaeda tried on at least one occasion to buy nuclear material from a bogus dealer who was more interested in stealing the terrorists’ money.

Now, the FBI has called together security officials from 28 countries to discuss the nuclear threat and to map strategies for sharing information and cutting off the supply of materials on the black market.

Tonight on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric we’ll talk one-on-one with FBI chief Robert Mueller, who warns in stark terms that the destruction of 9/11 could pale in comparison that caused by a nuclear strike against an American city.

We’ll also take you inside the New York Police Department to show you what cops and technology are doing on the home front -- the last lines of defense.

While we don’t want to exaggerate the threat, we can’t ignore it either. The 9/11 Commission called the government’s missteps leading up to 9/11 “a failure of imagination”. Taking that lesson, no conceivable threat should be off the table for security officials or out of bounds for public discussion.

I can’t tell how many times I’ve taken the Long Island Expressway – known as the L.I.E. around N.Y.C. – and never noticed the sign at Exit 68 for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Today I got an inside look at the sprawling government site as part of my “Loose Nukes” piece for the Evening News. The purpose of my visit was to interview Dr. Ralph James, the man in charge of Brookhaven’s high-tech attempt to detect the movement of nuclear materials smuggled into the United States.

As Barb Turner will attest (she helped me pass the class) science was never my strong suit. But I do have a pretty good Geiger counter when it comes to terror, and just in the short time the I-team has been working this story, it’s clear the issue of rogue states with a long history of being a major player in the weapons market (can you say North Korea) must be handled on two fronts: As former Senator Sam Nunn, an expert on nuclear proliferation told us, sensitive nuclear material or equipment MUST be secured overseas FIRST because once it gets here it’s hard to find and harder to control. “It’s the needle in the haystack,” Nunn told I-team producer Laura Strickler. “If you can get the haystack – you’re much better off.”

Dr. James agrees wholeheartedly but he’s principally in the business of finding the needle these days. In a 90-minute tour and interview in one of his labs, he calmly and carefully explained the ever-evolving search for more sensitive equipment that can differentiate between gamma rays emitted by the 11 MILLION people every year who undergo some sort of nuclear medical procedure – yes, 11 MILLION – and a dirty bomb packed into the back of a truck.

The biggest challenges, he said, is the range of the current equipment and the unacceptable number of false positive triggered by the vast array of detectors he had laid out during a show-and-tell. Some light enough to hold in your hand; others occupying the lion’s share of space, costing 100K or more, too bulky and expensive as yet to make it into mainstream use.

As we were winding down I asked Dr. James this question: “Given the news from North Korea – are we in the race against time to find these dirty bombs, to detect nuclear material in the U.S. and around the world?”

“I think one thing is certain,” he said. “If the materials were available and they could deliver them to the U.S., there’s a good chance they would. So that really defines where we need to go in developing technology. We need to develop better radiation detectors.”

And given my visit to Brookhaven, my sense is there’s little doubt they will. Even less doubt they will need to.

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