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Drone technology has already moved a step closer to a fully autonomous state in the form of the X-47B, a super-charged UAV developed by the US Navy that can fly itself, and which last week completed the first takeoff from an aircraft carrier. The drone is billed as a non-combat craft, yet its design includes two weapons bays capable of carrying more than 4,000lbs.Britain is developing its own next generation of drone, known as Taranis, that can be sent to tackle targets at long range and can defend itself from enemy aircraft. Like X-47B it has two in-built weapons bays, though is currently unarmed.

South Korea has set up sentry robots known as SGR-1 along the Demilitarized Zone with North Korea that can detect people entering the zone through heat and motion sensors; though the sentry is currently configured so that it has to be operated by a human, it is reported to have an automatic mode, which, if deployed, would allow it to fire independently on intruders.

the Pentagon is spending about $6bn a year on research and development of unmanned systems, though in a directive adopted last November it said that fully autonomous weapons could only be used "to apply non-lethal, non-kinetic force, such as some forms of electronic attack".

The possibility of "out of the loop" weapons raises a plethora of moral and legal issues, Heyns says. Most worryingly, it could lead to increasing distance between those carrying out the attack and their targets: "In addition to being physically removed from the kinetic action, humans would also become more detached from decisions to kill – and their execution."

The network, called the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BNSS), began transmitting yesterday, after 11 years of development. It consists of 10 satellites, with another six slated for deployment in the coming year. The BNSS is run by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, a state contractor serving the nation's space program and run by the Chinese military.

Like the GPS system, the BNSS would also make its data available for developers.

The only other GPS alternative is Russia's Glonass. The European Union is building its own, called Galileo, also scheduled to go live by 2020.

French engineering giants Areva and EDF are promoting the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), a third-generation reactor design that France considers the most advanced in the world.     But the French firms recently lost out on a 20 billion dollar (14 billion euro) contract to supply four reactors to the United Arab Emirates after South Korean firm Kepco came in with a lower offer.     "Today, the market only ranks designs on the basis of price," Sarkozy complained, calling on the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency to establish a classification system to rate reactor safety.

The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School

Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.

Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.

Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated. “We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.

Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.

A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.

The new models are more advanced than the P1 centrifuge - adapted from a 1970s design, reportedly acquired by Iran on the black market in the 1980s, and prone to breakdowns - in use at the Natanz enrichment facility, in the central province of Isfahan. BBC Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne, who is in London, says nuclear experts point out that the key question is how many of the third-generation centrifuges Iran can produce.

There have already been technical problems with the existing models, so whether it can quickly put the new one into mass production and operation remains to be seen, our correspondent says.

Most of Iran's uranium is enriched to a level of 3.5%, but it requires 20% enriched uranium for its Tehran research reactor, which produces medical isotopes. A bomb would require uranium enriched to at least 90%.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a report in February that Iran had achieved enrichment levels of up to 19.8%, which added to its concerns about the "possible military dimensions" of its nuclear programme.

Experts say the technical leap required to get to 90% enrichment from 20% is relatively straightforward, because it becomes easier at higher levels. Going from the natural state of 0.7% enrichment to 20% takes 90% of the total energy required, they add.

The IAEA report said 8,610 centrifuges had been installed in known enrichment facilities in Iran, of which 3,772 were operating.

Iran says it will eventually install more than 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz, and build 10 more enrichment facilities at protected sites.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Would the traditional deterrence mechanisms no longer function in that case? Janning: They would still function for the "old" nuclear powers. These states are, and will continue to be, capable of striking any location on the Earth's surface with nuclear weapons to the extent that life can no longer exist there any more. That is not, however, the case for the "new" nuclear powers. They can only threaten an attacker with the risk of a retaliatory nuclear strike whose effect is not entirely predictable. This in itself is likely to negatively affect the so-called "extended deterrence" of today's nuclear powers. (Editor's note: Under extended deterrence, a state threatens nuclear retaliation in the event of a nuclear attack on its allies e.g. other NATO members.) In other words, America's allies can no longer be certain that a US security guarantee offers them adequate protection against a nuclear attack by third parties. Washington might, after all, decide that the cost of intervening under these conditions is just too high.

Janning: As a deterrent, the possession of nuclear weapons is certainly effective. But this protective shield has got holes in it. If countries like North Korea can only respond to a limited conventional attack by firing nuclear missiles against targets in the enemy's homeland, then nuclear weapons lose some of their effectiveness, as their use would mean responding to a limited regional conflict with the threat of total mutual destruction. But it's true that as long as states, especially politically isolated regimes, see their security interests at risk, the goal of voluntary renunciation of nuclear military technology will remain virtually unattainable. The effects of sanctions on Iran and North Korea up until now show that the best that can be achieved is only to delay or slow down the weapons programs.