Pakistan Nuclear News & Discussion

nrupatunga

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Pakistan ready to follow nuclear states in signing NPT
Pakistan is ready to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), along with five other "have" states. However, not signing it wouldn't make a difference to the country's nuclear programme, according to Dr. Ansar Parvez, chairperson, Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC).

Speaking at an international seminar on nuclear non-proliferation organised by the Centre for Pakistan and Gulf Studies (CPGS) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung on Tuesday, Dr. Parvez asked, though India's agreement with the U.S. came with driving force which was commercial, how many plants have been set up in India? He added that you must have a deep relationship with the people with whom you collaborate and they must stick to you in times of need.

Responding to questions, he said that a possible Pakistan-U.S. nuclear deal was more of a foreign office concern but he did not see that coming.

Earlier, there was a heated discussion after Dr. Peter R. Lavoy, former U.S. assistant secretary for defence for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs and Mark Fitzpatrick, author of a new book on Pakistan's nuclear programme, spoke about the perceptions regarding nuclear safety inPakistan. Speakers also felt Pakistan was facing nuclear apartheid and India would change its stand on no first use of nuclear weapons if a Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power. There was also a feeling that India had refused to engage meaningfully with Pakistan on the nuclear issue among other issues.

Mr. Lavoy said it was the right time for a nuclear deal between the U.S. and Pakistan but it would not be easy since the single most troubling concern in the U.S. was Pakistan's nuclear weapons. There were also fears that Pakistan may once again resort to using militant or non-state actors for its foreign policy objectives in India and Afghanistan, apart from fears of proliferation of nuclear material.
 

nrupatunga

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Pakistan begins operating third Khushab plutonium production reactor



Satellite imagery from 2013 suggests that Pakistan has started operating its third plutonium production reactor at the Khushab site. A fourth reactor appears to be still under construction.

Work on the Khushab-III reactor started in 2005 or 2006. Imagery from March 2013 and from December 2013 shows water vapor rising from some of its cooling towers suggesting the reactor was operating. If Khushab-III began operating in early 2013, the first batch of its spent fuel could have been taken out already, cooled and become available to be reprocessed in 2014 or possibly 2015.

Work on the Khushab-I plutonium production reactor started in 1986-87 and it is believed the reactor came on-line in 1998. Construction of the second production reactor (Khushab-II) appears to have started in 2001-2002 and the reactor started operation in late 2009 or early 2010.

Work on the fourth reactor may have started in 2011, and its footprint seems similar to Khushab-II and III. Khushab-IV may be perhaps a year away from completion since the cooling towers had not been completed as of the end of 2013. ISIS has published a more detailed analysis of construction as of the end of 2013 of Khushab-IV.

The three operating reactors are believed to have a power of 40-50 MWt and to be natural-uranium-fueled and heavy-water-moderated. Operating at 50% capacity each of them could produce about 5.7-7.1 kg of weapon-grade plutonium per year, and operating at 80% capacity each of them would produce about 9-11.5 kg of plutonium per year.

As of the end of 2013, IPFM estimates that Pakistan may have accumulated on the order of 170 kg of plutonium, from its Khushab-I and Khushab-II reactors. This would be sufficient for roughly 35-40 nuclear warheads, assuming 4-5 kg of plutonium per warhead
 

nrupatunga

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Nuclear weapons and Pakistan's naval strategy
Since 1998, when India and Pakistan both burst out of the nuclear closet and publicly revealed their formerly recessed nuclear capabilities to the world, scant commentary has been made on the impact that the introduction of sea-based delivery systems would have on the South Asian nuclear equation.

This can be attributed, in part, to the relatively recent nature of naval nuclearisation in South Asia. India launched its first indigenously produced nuclear submarine, the INS Arihant, in 2009, and Pakistan only formalised its ambitions for a functional nuclear triad (via an Inter Services Public press release) in May 2012. However, while public discussions in both countries on complex issues such as nuclear naval strategy still remain somewhat inchoate and have yet to fully mature, India's nuclear submarine program was, in fact, initiated over three decades ago. Furthermore, there are statements by Pakistani leaders and naval commanders referring to the need for Pakistan to acquire a nuclear triad that long precede India's public unveiling of the Arihant.

It is important, first of all, to emphasise that both countries have their own distinct sets of motivations to engage in naval nuclearisation.

All too often outside observers almost mechanically hyphenate the two South Asian nations and reduce the multi-layered complexity of their nuclear interactions to a simple action-reaction dynamic. India, for example, is motivated in part by a desire for prestige and international recognition, but also by a very rational objective to place its nuclear assets at a safer distance from a decapitation strike. This is particularly important in light of China's growing militarisation of the Tibetan plateau and the proliferation of Chinese ballistic-missile silos in strategic high-altitude points along the border. In addition, there are mounting concerns over the reach of Chinese air power, Chinese advances in electronic and cyber warfare, as well as over recent reports that indicate China is developing a navalised variant of its 3000km-range Dong Hai 10 cruise missile.

Pakistan has its own strategic rationale for developing a naval nuclear capability which is at least partly independent of a simple desire to mirror India's advances. But the point that bears most emphasis here is that through its threats to disperse nuclear assets among various components of its fleet, Pakistan can offset India's increasingly overbearing conventional naval advantage in the Indian Ocean. When interviewed, Pakistani commanders mention the precedent set by Israel's alleged decision to place nuclear-tipped cruise missiles aboard conventional submarines and have suggested to me, somewhat provocatively, that Pakistan should follow suit.

Another option, some have argued, would be to station nuclear weaponry aboard surface ships and maritime-patrol aircraft. Not only would this provide the country with greater strategic depth, it would also extend some of the more dysfunctional elements of Indo-Pakistani nuclear interactions from land to sea. By threatening, either directly or indirectly, to employ low-yield nuclear weapons at sea, or against an advancing Indian aircraft carrier strike force, Islamabad can hope to acquire 'escalation dominance' and thus considerably dilute its larger neighbour's coercive naval power, much in the same way that it has managed to dilute India's conventional advantage on land.

In both cases, this has been achieved by a refusal to abide by a No First Use (NFU) policy and, increasingly, through a flirtation with the tactical use of nuclear weapons as warfighting instruments. This has been achieved, in part, through shifting from an earlier generation of enriched uranium nuclear weapons to a newer generation of plutonium weapons, allowing Pakistan to significantly expand its nuclear arsenal (which now appears to have overtaken India's nuclear weapon inventory) and to make progress in the miniaturisation of its nuclear warheads for battlefield use.

To provide a concrete example, most analysts now concur that Pakistan is developing a sea-based version of its Babur missile, a subsonic nuclear-capable missile that bears an uncanny resemblance to the US Tomahawk, albeit with a much shorter range.

The introduction of nuclear weapons will have a major impact on the future of naval warfighting in the Indian Ocean. Fleets caught under a nuclear shadow are compelled to operate under different principles. Most notably, ships must loosen their deployment patterns and adopt more dispersed configurations to better shield themselves from the ripple effects of a nuclear blast. For Pakistani security managers, acquiring nuclear-armed cruise missile submarines could provide an opportunity to skew the existing naval power dynamic, primarily by injecting an even greater degree of uncertainty and ambiguity in India's tactical calculus, but also by preventing the Indian Navy from concentrating the bulk of its power projection platforms in one location.

Such a toxic combination of dual-use platforms and doctrinal opacity could prove highly detrimental for crisis stability. In the event of conflict, there would be no way for India to ascertain whether Pakistani vessels or maritime patrol aircraft are nuclear-armed or not, and a radioactive 'fog of war' would float over combat operations.

A common reading of the movement towards sea-based deterrence is that it provides a greater vector for strategic stability, not only by ensuring the relative sanctuarisation of nation's deterrents and thus reducing first-strike incentives on both sides, but also by displacing the locus of nuclear competition from heavily populated state territories to the wide open waters. This optimistic vision does not hold up to scrutiny, however, when applied to regional nuclear dynamics in the Second Nuclear Age. Indeed, in this particular case, one could argue that it is not so much the process of naval nuclearisation itself which is inherently stabilising or destabilising, but rather the manner in which it is being pursued. Pakistan seems to be taking a dangerous path which combines dual-use systems (nuclear-tipped cruise missiles), cultivated doctrinal ambiguity, and a fair degree of maritime brinkmanship.

There are, no doubt, numerous lessons that could be drawn from the Cold War, whose study unfortunately tends to be neglected or oversimplified in South Asia. During the second half of the Cold War, in particular, theorists warned that within a heavily nuclearised environment, and under conditions of strategic uncertainty, offensive submarine operations or deployments could give birth to dangerously escalatory dynamics. And interestingly, much as in contemporary Pakistan, this argument was countered at the time by a constituency that argued that the diversification — and resulting dispersal — of nuclear assets at sea both strengthened their survivability and buttressed overall deterrence.

For instance, Linton Brooks, who served on the Reagan Administration's National Security Staff, wrote in 1986 that:

Deterrence is enhanced through the deliberate importation of both risk and uncertainty...Sea-based systems, able to attack a wide spectrum of targets from a large number of platforms, over a broad spectrum of attack azimuths, complicate Soviet defense planning immeasurably, thus strengthening deterrence.
Depressingly, however, things may in fact be even more complex and unstable now, in large part because the South Asian maritime environment is so alarmingly unstructured. At least during the second half of the Cold War (from 1972 onwards) the Soviets and Americans enacted the INCSEA, which worked towards limiting critical misinterpretations in times of tension. India and Pakistan have no such regime in place, and Pakistan continues to rely on a policy of maritime brinkmanship to compensate for its conventional inferiority.

There are frequent reports, for instance, of near collisions between Pakistani and Indian surface vessels. And in 1999, a Pakistani maritime patrol aircraft was shot down by an Indian Mig-21 when it strayed into Indian airspace. If Pakistani frigates or maritime patrol aircraft were transporting nuclear weapons and such incidents were to reoccur, the implications could be severe.

The scattering of nuclear assets at sea, particularly aboard surface ships, also heightens the risks of a nuclear weapon being intercepted by a malevolent non-state actor, a perennial concern when discussing Pakistan's growing nuclear arsenal. Another question worth raising is whether the escalation dynamics of nuclear warfare in the maritime theatre are less constrained than those that would attend similar operations on land.

A classic example is the tense situation which unfolded underwater during the Cuban Missile Crisis and which almost led to disaster. We now know that each of the Soviet submarines deployed off Cuba was in fact armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, a fact which was not known by the US Navy at the time. In an attempt to force the Soviet submarines to surface, the US fleet dropped depth charges which were not intended to hit the submarines but rather to coerce them into revealing themselves. The Soviet submarine commanders, however, viewed these actions under a different light, and one harried commander even ordered his men to assemble the nuclear torpedo to battle-readiness.

This incident highlights two disturbing dimensions of naval nuclear interactions: the perennial risks linked to misperception and ill-conceived or designed signaling, and the various challenges linked to command and control. When it comes to contemporary South Asia, even though Pakistan has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons against advancing Indian tank formations on land, one could be forgiven for expressing severe reservations over whether Pakistani commanders would be willing to detonate nuclear weapons on their own soil. Out on the open waters, however, such a question remains uncomfortably open.

Finally, analysts will now need to pay much closer attention to the interaction between conventional and nuclear assets at sea, and how this will impact on each country's strategies, doctrines, and acquisitions. Technology, like geography, can blur the line between defence and offense. For example, whereas previously the question of submarine proliferation in South Asia could be viewed through a purely conventional prism, everything will become a lot more complicated now that nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered assets have been thrown into the mix. Formerly conventional naval warfare capabilities such as anti-ship warfare or anti-submarine warfare can now also be equated with counterforce capabilities, with all the destabilising ramifications such a conceptual shift implies.
 

nrupatunga

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Nuclear weapons and Pakistan's naval strategy
Since 1998, when India and Pakistan both burst out of the nuclear closet and publicly revealed their formerly recessed nuclear capabilities to the world, scant commentary has been made on the impact that the introduction of sea-based delivery systems would have on the South Asian nuclear equation.

This can be attributed, in part, to the relatively recent nature of naval nuclearisation in South Asia. India launched its first indigenously produced nuclear submarine, the INS Arihant, in 2009, and Pakistan only formalised its ambitions for a functional nuclear triad (via an Inter Services Public press release) in May 2012. However, while public discussions in both countries on complex issues such as nuclear naval strategy still remain somewhat inchoate and have yet to fully mature, India's nuclear submarine program was, in fact, initiated over three decades ago. Furthermore, there are statements by Pakistani leaders and naval commanders referring to the need for Pakistan to acquire a nuclear triad that long precede India's public unveiling of the Arihant.

It is important, first of all, to emphasise that both countries have their own distinct sets of motivations to engage in naval nuclearisation.

All too often outside observers almost mechanically hyphenate the two South Asian nations and reduce the multi-layered complexity of their nuclear interactions to a simple action-reaction dynamic. India, for example, is motivated in part by a desire for prestige and international recognition, but also by a very rational objective to place its nuclear assets at a safer distance from a decapitation strike. This is particularly important in light of China's growing militarisation of the Tibetan plateau and the proliferation of Chinese ballistic-missile silos in strategic high-altitude points along the border. In addition, there are mounting concerns over the reach of Chinese air power, Chinese advances in electronic and cyber warfare, as well as over recent reports that indicate China is developing a navalised variant of its 3000km-range Dong Hai 10 cruise missile.

Pakistan has its own strategic rationale for developing a naval nuclear capability which is at least partly independent of a simple desire to mirror India's advances. But the point that bears most emphasis here is that through its threats to disperse nuclear assets among various components of its fleet, Pakistan can offset India's increasingly overbearing conventional naval advantage in the Indian Ocean. When interviewed, Pakistani commanders mention the precedent set by Israel's alleged decision to place nuclear-tipped cruise missiles aboard conventional submarines and have suggested to me, somewhat provocatively, that Pakistan should follow suit.

Another option, some have argued, would be to station nuclear weaponry aboard surface ships and maritime-patrol aircraft. Not only would this provide the country with greater strategic depth, it would also extend some of the more dysfunctional elements of Indo-Pakistani nuclear interactions from land to sea. By threatening, either directly or indirectly, to employ low-yield nuclear weapons at sea, or against an advancing Indian aircraft carrier strike force, Islamabad can hope to acquire 'escalation dominance' and thus considerably dilute its larger neighbour's coercive naval power, much in the same way that it has managed to dilute India's conventional advantage on land.

In both cases, this has been achieved by a refusal to abide by a No First Use (NFU) policy and, increasingly, through a flirtation with the tactical use of nuclear weapons as warfighting instruments. This has been achieved, in part, through shifting from an earlier generation of enriched uranium nuclear weapons to a newer generation of plutonium weapons, allowing Pakistan to significantly expand its nuclear arsenal (which now appears to have overtaken India's nuclear weapon inventory) and to make progress in the miniaturisation of its nuclear warheads for battlefield use.

To provide a concrete example, most analysts now concur that Pakistan is developing a sea-based version of its Babur missile, a subsonic nuclear-capable missile that bears an uncanny resemblance to the US Tomahawk, albeit with a much shorter range.

The introduction of nuclear weapons will have a major impact on the future of naval warfighting in the Indian Ocean. Fleets caught under a nuclear shadow are compelled to operate under different principles. Most notably, ships must loosen their deployment patterns and adopt more dispersed configurations to better shield themselves from the ripple effects of a nuclear blast. For Pakistani security managers, acquiring nuclear-armed cruise missile submarines could provide an opportunity to skew the existing naval power dynamic, primarily by injecting an even greater degree of uncertainty and ambiguity in India's tactical calculus, but also by preventing the Indian Navy from concentrating the bulk of its power projection platforms in one location.

Such a toxic combination of dual-use platforms and doctrinal opacity could prove highly detrimental for crisis stability. In the event of conflict, there would be no way for India to ascertain whether Pakistani vessels or maritime patrol aircraft are nuclear-armed or not, and a radioactive 'fog of war' would float over combat operations.

A common reading of the movement towards sea-based deterrence is that it provides a greater vector for strategic stability, not only by ensuring the relative sanctuarisation of nation's deterrents and thus reducing first-strike incentives on both sides, but also by displacing the locus of nuclear competition from heavily populated state territories to the wide open waters. This optimistic vision does not hold up to scrutiny, however, when applied to regional nuclear dynamics in the Second Nuclear Age. Indeed, in this particular case, one could argue that it is not so much the process of naval nuclearisation itself which is inherently stabilising or destabilising, but rather the manner in which it is being pursued. Pakistan seems to be taking a dangerous path which combines dual-use systems (nuclear-tipped cruise missiles), cultivated doctrinal ambiguity, and a fair degree of maritime brinkmanship.

There are, no doubt, numerous lessons that could be drawn from the Cold War, whose study unfortunately tends to be neglected or oversimplified in South Asia. During the second half of the Cold War, in particular, theorists warned that within a heavily nuclearised environment, and under conditions of strategic uncertainty, offensive submarine operations or deployments could give birth to dangerously escalatory dynamics. And interestingly, much as in contemporary Pakistan, this argument was countered at the time by a constituency that argued that the diversification — and resulting dispersal — of nuclear assets at sea both strengthened their survivability and buttressed overall deterrence.

For instance, Linton Brooks, who served on the Reagan Administration's National Security Staff, wrote in 1986 that:

Deterrence is enhanced through the deliberate importation of both risk and uncertainty...Sea-based systems, able to attack a wide spectrum of targets from a large number of platforms, over a broad spectrum of attack azimuths, complicate Soviet defense planning immeasurably, thus strengthening deterrence.
Depressingly, however, things may in fact be even more complex and unstable now, in large part because the South Asian maritime environment is so alarmingly unstructured. At least during the second half of the Cold War (from 1972 onwards) the Soviets and Americans enacted the INCSEA, which worked towards limiting critical misinterpretations in times of tension. India and Pakistan have no such regime in place, and Pakistan continues to rely on a policy of maritime brinkmanship to compensate for its conventional inferiority.

There are frequent reports, for instance, of near collisions between Pakistani and Indian surface vessels. And in 1999, a Pakistani maritime patrol aircraft was shot down by an Indian Mig-21 when it strayed into Indian airspace. If Pakistani frigates or maritime patrol aircraft were transporting nuclear weapons and such incidents were to reoccur, the implications could be severe.

The scattering of nuclear assets at sea, particularly aboard surface ships, also heightens the risks of a nuclear weapon being intercepted by a malevolent non-state actor, a perennial concern when discussing Pakistan's growing nuclear arsenal. Another question worth raising is whether the escalation dynamics of nuclear warfare in the maritime theatre are less constrained than those that would attend similar operations on land.

A classic example is the tense situation which unfolded underwater during the Cuban Missile Crisis and which almost led to disaster. We now know that each of the Soviet submarines deployed off Cuba was in fact armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, a fact which was not known by the US Navy at the time. In an attempt to force the Soviet submarines to surface, the US fleet dropped depth charges which were not intended to hit the submarines but rather to coerce them into revealing themselves. The Soviet submarine commanders, however, viewed these actions under a different light, and one harried commander even ordered his men to assemble the nuclear torpedo to battle-readiness.

This incident highlights two disturbing dimensions of naval nuclear interactions: the perennial risks linked to misperception and ill-conceived or designed signaling, and the various challenges linked to command and control. When it comes to contemporary South Asia, even though Pakistan has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons against advancing Indian tank formations on land, one could be forgiven for expressing severe reservations over whether Pakistani commanders would be willing to detonate nuclear weapons on their own soil. Out on the open waters, however, such a question remains uncomfortably open.

Finally, analysts will now need to pay much closer attention to the interaction between conventional and nuclear assets at sea, and how this will impact on each country's strategies, doctrines, and acquisitions. Technology, like geography, can blur the line between defence and offense. For example, whereas previously the question of submarine proliferation in South Asia could be viewed through a purely conventional prism, everything will become a lot more complicated now that nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered assets have been thrown into the mix. Formerly conventional naval warfare capabilities such as anti-ship warfare or anti-submarine warfare can now also be equated with counterforce capabilities, with all the destabilising ramifications such a conceptual shift implies.
 

nrupatunga

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Pakistan wants to build more N-power plants
Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) Chairman Dr Ansar Parvez told the annual general conference of the IAEA in Vienna on Thursday that Pakistan was committed to synergising its efforts with those of the agency to harness the vast potential of nuclear technology.

Pakistan had the experience, credentials and potential to become a recipient as well as a supplier of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, Dr Parvez said.

The country wanted to play its part at the international level as a mainstream partner, including as full member of the export control regimes, particularly the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The PAEC chairman said that Pakistan was committed to keeping all its current and future civilian nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards and controls. But as the nuclear power programme expanded, so must the emphasis on safety and security of the installations.

The new plants being acquired for the site in Karachi were generation-III plants, equip-ped with enhanced safety features, he said.

The Fukushima Response Action Plan to assess and upgrade the safety of power plants, he said, was initiated immediately after the Fukushima accident and some immediate and mid-term steps had already been implemented.

Pakistan set up its first nuclear power plant, Kanupp, in 1972 and more than 40 years of its safe operation had provided confidence to the PAEC to pursue further the option of nuclear power plants, he said.

The PAEC chairman said the Chashma Nuclear Power Plant's two units, built with Chinese assistance, were running smoothly.

The performance of the two units had made policymakers realise that the cost of electricity produced by nuclear plants was lower than that from all other means of power generation, except hydropower projects, Dr Parvez said.

Two more units, Chashma-3 and Chashma-4, were currently under construction and were expected to be completed on schedule.

Another two units were being built in Karachi and with the completion of these two units the PAEC would begin to make a sizeable contribution to electricity generation in the country, he said.

He said that Pakistan had firm regulatory infrastructure in place, adding the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority had based its regulations on the IAEA safety standards.
 

nrupatunga

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Pakistan to have 200 nuclear weapons by 2020: US think tank
Pakistan has the fastest growing nuclear weapons programme in the world and by 2020 it could have enough fissile material to produce more than 200 nuclear devices, a top American think tank has said.

"Though many states are downsizing their stockpiles, Asia is witnessing a buildup. Pakistan has the fastest-growing nuclear programme in the world. By 2020, it could have a stockpile of fissile material that, if weaponized, could produce as many as 200 nuclear devices," council on foreign relations has said.

The report 'Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age', authored by George Mason University's Gregory Koblentz, has identified South Asia as the region "most at risk of a breakdown in strategic stability due to an explosive mixture of unresolved territorial disputes, crossborder terrorism, and growing nuclear arsenals."

Pakistan, the report said, has deployed or is developing 11 delivery systems for its nuclear warheads, including aircraft, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.

"Pakistan has not formally declared the conditions under which it would use nuclear weapons but has indicated that it seeks primarily to deter India from threatening its territorial integrity or the ability of its military to defend its territory," the report said.

CFR said while Pakistan is focused predominantly on the threat posed by India, it is reportedly also concerned by the potential for the US to launch a military operation to seize or disarm Pakistani nuclear weapons.

"This concern is based in part on reported contingency planning by the US military to prevent Pakistani nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists," CFR said.

CFR said India is estimated to possess enough fissile material for between 90 and 110 nuclear weapons and is expanding its fissile material production capacity. China, it said, is estimated to have 250 nuclear weapons for delivery by a mix of medium, intermediate, and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles and bombers.

"Though nuclear arsenals are shrinking in the rest of the world, Asia is witnessing a nuclear buildup. Unlike the remaining P5 countries, China is increasing and diversifying its nuclear arsenal," the report said.
 

Redhawk

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When was the last time Pakistan conducted a test of nuclear weapons? 1998? Or have conducted other nuclear tests since then?
 

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