Reuters,Mon Mar 5, 2012
Blast at Brazzaville arms depot kills hundreds
Up to 200 people were killed on Sunday when an arms dump exploded in Brazzaville, ripping apart a nearby neighbourhood in the Congo Republic's capital. Hundreds of others were injured by the blasts which rocked the riverside capital around 8 a.m. (0700 GMT).
A government spokesman said that a short circuit was to blame for the fire that sparked the explosions and promised to move military barracks out of town as a result.
New York Times, 1feb2012
The New York Times asks for readers’ help identifying a weapon found on the battlefields of Libya last year. They have spent considerable time identifying and sometimes tracing the tools of war in several recent conflicts back to their sources. But this time, they are stumped. The items in question are what ordnance professionals call submunitions, but are more widely known among lay readers as cluster bombs.
The photograph shows one found at the ruins of an arms depot a few miles outside of Mizdah, in the desert south of Tripoli.
photo by C. J. Chivers
OSCE PRESS release,18nov2011
Four representatives of Turkmenistan's Presidential Administration and the Ministry of Defence participated in a five-day study visit to the United Kingdom. The visit provided the military and emergency officials with the opportunity to learn new and applied practices for physical security and stockpile management (PSSM) of small arms and light weapons and conventional ammunition (SALW/CA) in the UK.
The participants visited several weapons and ammunition storage and destruction sites, and discussed efficient stockpile management and incidence response, including storage and rotation, registration and issuing procedures, periodic checking routines and responses to incidents such as storage facility intrusion, loss and damage of arms, and fire and explosions at ammunition depots
BBC NEWS Technology, 31jan2012
Self-steering bullet researched by US weapons experts
A self-guiding bullet that can steer itself towards its target is being developed for use by the US military.
The bullet uses tiny fins to correct the course of its flight allowing it to hit laser-illuminated targets.
It is designed to be capable of hitting objects at distances of about 2km (1.24 miles). Work on a prototype suggests that accuracy is best at longer ranges.
Jane's Intelligence Weekly, Date Posted: 03-Nov-2011
Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout was convicted in the United States on 2 November of attempting to supply a terrorist organisation with illegal weapons.
The jury found that Bout had conspired to sell 100 Russian Igla surface-to-air missiles, 20,000 assault rifles and 10 million rounds of ammunition to insurgent group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Bout was arrested in Thailand on 6 March 2008 while trying to set up this deal. However, the presumed FARC buyers who attended the string of meetings held in Curaçao, Copenhagen and Bucharest to arrange the deal were actually undercover agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Read more: 1111 Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout convicted in the USA