U.S.: Independent Kosovo wasn't goal
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY, 8/24/99- Updated 11:41 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/index/kosovo/koso1091.htm
ASPEN, Colo. - Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott fiercely defended on Tuesday the moral and strategic reasons for NATO's military action in Yugoslavia, but he strongly emphasized the administration's position that the Balkan region is not yet ready for a fully independent Kosovo.
Talbott, in a speech to The Aspen Institute that administration officials have pointed to for weeks as an important update on the aftermath of the 78-day air war, said NATO's action was not an example of the West acting as a global policeman but of the West as a safeguard against any regime that threatens to destabilize an entire region.
The idea of "making the world safe for democracy" does not mean "that Uncle Sam dons a suit of armor, grabs a lance and sallies forth to slay every anti-democratic dragon in sight," Talbott said in remarks prepared for delivery.
"But here's what it does mean: It means we have, at certain key times and places, been willing and able to oppose, deter and, if necessary, defeat anti-democratic regimes when they have threatened other states that were trying to establish themselves on the principles of liberal democracy."
Talbott said progress has been made in Kosovo since airstrikes ended June 10, but much progress remains to be made.
"Kosovo is a ward of the international community; it goes about the business of rebuilding itself under the day-in, day-out protection and supervision by a consortium of global and regional organizations," he said.
And he stated in unusually clear terms the administration's conviction that full independence for Kosovo would be harmful at the current time, as it could lead to a "greater Albania - a single state stretching across the Balkan peninsula from Albania proper to northwestern Macedonia."
Talbott said particular concern should be given to the fate of Macedonia under a scenario of an independent Kosovo.
"If Kosovo were to become a catalyst for Albanian nationalism throughout the region, Macedonia would probably disappear from the map, and violently so," he said.
The Aspen Institute is an international nonprofit organization that sponsors nonpartisan seminars and policy programs.
In Kosovo on Tuesday, ethnic Albanians in Orahovac refused to lift their blockade against Russian peacekeepers. They warned that Moscow's forces would destabilize the situation.
Using trucks, tractors and trailers to block twisting mountain roads into the divided town, the ethnic Albanians blocked Russian peacekeepers from replacing Dutch soldiers who are to withdraw in a few weeks.
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NATO's Accounting
Wednesday, August 25, 1999; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/25/010l-082599-idx.html
Kel Britvec [letters, Aug. 9] takes William Lind to task for claiming that during the Kosovo war "the military information coming out of Belgrade was generally more accurate than that coming from [NATO]" [letters, July 24]. He defies Mr. Lind "to find the more than 50 planes that Belgrade claimed NATO lost."
It's interesting that The Post reported on June 17 the little-known fact that U.S. forces lost at least nine unmanned aerial vehicles in Kosovo. Better known is that NATO lost five manned aircraft in battle and accidents, for a total of at least 14 losses. Thus, Belgrade's claims of 76 losses represent only about a five-fold exaggeration.
By contrast, NATO reported on June 10 that it had destroyed 122 tanks, 222 armored personnel carriers and 454 artillery and mortar pieces. Subsequent on-site inspection revealed, according to the July 12 U.S. News and World Report, that "NATO jets may have destroyed fewer than 20 Serbian tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, and fewer than 10 armored personnel carriers." Thus, NATO's original claims represent up to a twenty-fold exaggeration.
While Belgrade clearly lied about its brutality in Kosovo, Mr. Lind's characterization of the relative accuracy of its reporting appears to hold up.
ALAN J. KUPERMAN
Research Fellow
Brookings Institution
Washington
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UN SAYS SERBS USED POISON GAS ON KOSOVO REBELS
Reuters August 25, 1999 - Chicago Tribune
http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,SAV-9908250313,FF.html
LONDON -- A United Nations scientific adviser said Tuesday that Yugoslav forces used chemical weapons to attack the Kosovo Liberation Army during fighting in the Serbian province earlier this year.
Professor Aubin Heyndrickx of the International Reference University Laboratories in Ghent, Belgium, said he had examined 20 KLA fighters who had been overcome by poison gas in Serbian shelling attacks.
Heyndrickx, a toxicological expert who has done work for the UN since 1984, had been invited to Tirana, Albania, by the KLA in May to examine allegations of chemical weapons use, according to Jane's Defence Weekly.
Heyndrickx said he had not been able to identify exactly the gas used by the Serbs.
He said the gas was an incapacitating agent that was a derivative of atropine. It worked on the central nervous system and drove victims "totally crazy."
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Holbrooke Back To The Balkans
Updated 5:57 PM ET August 24, 1999
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990824/17/international-yugoslavia-holbrooke
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Diplomatic trouble-shooter Richard Holbrooke starts his job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Wednesday and one of his first missions will be on an old tramping ground -- back in the Balkans.
Holbrooke, who helped mediate the Dayton peace agreement for Bosnia in 1995, will take an oath of office at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York, filling a vacancy left empty for more than a year.
By the weekend he will be on a tour of Pristina, Tirana, Skopje and Sarajevo, the State Department said Tuesday.
He will meet U.N. and NATO officials and local representatives in Kosovo and look into the issues of refugee resettlement, reconstruction and war crimes, it added.
President Clinton nominated Holbrooke for the job in June 1998 but the confirmation languished for months while the Justice Department investigated his finances.
A Senate vote was then delayed by senators who linked it to other unrelated appointments, much to the annoyance of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who said the United States needed a strong presence in New York.
Peter Burleigh, a 32-year foreign service veteran, has been keeping the shop at the United Nations but he does not have Holbrooke's global reputation or Washington connections.
"She regards him as a major diplomatic asset of the United States and of herself personally. I have no doubt that she will not hesitate to deploy Ambassador Holbrooke in appropriate circumstances as our diplomatic needs require," State Department spokesman James Foley said Tuesday.
"The Secretary thought it would be very worthwhile for him to go to the region, update himself on the current conditions and circumstances surrounding peace implementation, so that he's in the best position when he returns to New York to be the forceful advocate we expect him to be," he added.
Holbrooke will have a more formal swearing-in ceremony in Washington, probably in September, Foley said.
At the United Nations, one of Holbrooke's toughest tasks will be to maintain U.S. influence at a time when U.S. arrears to the organization amount to more than $1 billion.
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U.N. Challenges Await Holbrooke
By The Associated Press, August 25, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Holbrooke-UN.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Richard Holbrooke is beginning his job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations by doing what he's always done energetically: a burst of on-the-go diplomacy. But when he settles in, he may find his past globe-trotting negotiations were the easy part.
The celebrated diplomatic troubleshooter must make peace with the U.N. bureaucracy, explain why the United States remains over $1 billion in arrears with its U.N. dues, help end a Security Council standoff on Iraq and assert authority on peacekeeping in Kosovo.
Confirmed by the Senate 81-16 on Aug. 5, Holbrooke was being sworn in today in a low-key ceremony at the U.S. mission in New York. A more elaborate one at U.N. headquarters, where he will formally present his credentials to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, is planned for after Labor Day.
After two days of ``getting to know the building,'' as one Holbrooke associate put it, he'll leave Friday for a whirlwind tour of Kosovo, Bosnia, Albania and Macedonia.
The Balkans kickoff holds much symbolism for the diplomat who engineered the 1995 Bosnia peace accord and later served as President Clinton's special envoy to Yugoslavia on Kosovo.
Holbrooke and Secretary or State Madeleine Albright both believe ``that Kosovo and peace implementation in Kosovo and throughout the Balkans ... is a major test case for the United Nations,'' said State Department spokesman James Foley.
While Holbrooke may be laying down his mark as a traveling U.N. ambassador, he's still got a lot of fences to mend in New York. The U.S. seat has been vacant for nearly a year.
Resentment toward the United Nations and its policies by conservatives in Congress has grown; and some of it has been returned.
Adding to the tensions: recent criticism of the slow U.N. start in assuming civil administration responsibilities in Kosovo from NATO. And it hasn't just come from congressional Republicans.
Such criticism also was expressed last month by Defense Secretary William Cohen and Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in congressional testimony, although Albright --during a trip to Kosovo late last month -- said she was satisfied with the pace.
Holbrooke will also have to deal with criticism from Russia and France on the Security Council over the continued U.S. airstrikes against Iraq. And the issue of U.S. back payments continues to fester.
Congressional conservatives have long held up the back payments, which have swollen to over $1.2 billion by U.S. tally and to a whopping $1.6 billion by U.N. count.
Even though arch U.N.-critic Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., cut a deal with the administration for repaying the bulk of the arrearage, the funds are far from in the bank.
The Senate passed a State Department spending bill in June providing for $926 million in arrears, but the House version passed in July provides no arrearages money at all.
That will put the burden for coming up with the funds on Helms and other Senate negotiators in September when the two sides meet to produce a compromise bill.
And Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., is threatening to attach unrelated anti-abortion language. Such a move, if successful, could draw another Clinton veto like the one that torpedoed funds for the United Nations two years ago.
As part of his tortured confirmation process, Holbrooke agreed to support a Senate demand that the U.S. share of the regular U.N. budget be reduced from the present 25 percent to 20 percent; and that its share of peacekeeping operations be reduced from 31 percent to 25 percent.
``Budgetary discipline will be my watchword,'' Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also supporting other cost-cutting changes.
These words could come back to haunt him.
Other U.N. members are likely to scoff at the U.S. budget ``cuts,'' since any reduction in U.S. payments would have to be approved by the U.N. General Assembly.
And unless the United States pays at least $350 million of its arrears by Dec. 31, it could be in the embarrassing position of losing its General Assembly seat -- although its Security Council slot is secure.
It all adds up to a lot of negotiating for the Clinton administration's most celebrated negotiator.
To satisfy the administration, Congress and the United Nations, Holbrooke ``will have to thread the eye of the needle, and it won't be easy,'' said Chris Madison, a spokesman for Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
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UN Council Pressed To Protect Children In War
Updated 5:32 AM ET August 25, 1999, By Evelyn Leopold
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990825/05/international-un-children
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - For the second consecutive year, the U.N. Security Council Wednesday debates how to protect 300,000 child soldiers and countless other young victims of armed conflicts around the world.
"The sheer magnitude of this problem is something new, is unprecedented," said Olara Otunnu, the U.N. special representative for children and armed conflict. "It is a worldwide trend, it has spread across the globe."
Otunnu hopes that this year's day-long debate will produce a binding Security Council resolution that would condemn recruiting child soldiers, pledge to include the welfare of children in any peace negotiations and give priority to the needs of youngsters at the end of a conflict.
He also wants all peacekeeping operations to feature special training for the protection of children and for the council to keep the rights of the child on its agenda, making it a condition for any assistance.
Otunnu told reporters Tuesday that the council had until recently considered its role "very much confined to high politics, military aggression, and perhaps less in relation to the softer humanitarian, human rights issues."
"To go from there, to have an actual resolution on a thematic issue that concerns children across the board in situation in conflict, would be tremendous for us," he said.
Some 300,000 boys and girls under 18 years of age, most of them under 15 and some as young as 7, are serving as regular soldiers, guerrilla fighters, porters, cooks, sexual slaves, and suicide commandos in most of the 50 countries marked by armed conflicts.
Over the last decade, wars have killed 2 million children, left 6 million maimed, created 1 million orphans and 12 million refugees. The heavy toll is mostly the result of civil wars that have escalated since the end of the Cold War in such places as Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, Sudan, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Colombia and Afghanistan.
The simplicity and proliferation of lightweight automatic weapons has made it possible for very young children to bear and use arms, Otunnu said.
"We are talking about an abomination being committed against children," he said.
Excluded from any resolution, however, will be a plea to governments to stop using children under 18 as soldiers. The United States, which recruits high school graduates, opposes the 18-year-old minimum age standard Otunnu advocates.
Despite a growing body of international law governments have signed to protect children, the abuses are increasing, with children being used both as victims and perpetrators.
In many cases rebel forces have "tossed aside" any rules of warfare toward the civilian population, Otunnu said.
But he insisted that in his trips around the world, from Sri Lanka to Colombia, no rebel leader had ever told him "to jump into the East River" when he quoted from the Geneva conventions on protecting civilians in warfare or the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The main points of the treaties "have become a common pool of international norms" that even the worst abusers know they are violating, Otunnu said.
"Children are especially innocent, especially vulnerable. They tend to suffer disproportionately from the excesses of war. They are the least equipped to cope and adjust," he said.
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Tuesday's Canada News Briefs
By The Associated Press, August 24, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Canada-Briefs.html
HAMILTON, Nova Scotia (AP) -- An American psychologist who spent 25 years teaching soldiers how to kill says violent video games may be turning a whole generation of young people into killers.
In a chilling warning to Canada's police chiefs Tuesday, retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman said the games have the same desensitizing effect as military killing simulators, which ingrain soldiers with a homicidal reflex.
``We're providing military quality training at a young age,'' he said. ``Children see human death and suffering and learn to associate it with pleasure.''
Grossman, author of the soon to be released Teaching our Kids to Kill, has uncovered unsettling links between military conditioning and video games.
Killing, he says, does not come naturally. Soldiers are prepared for combat by firing at human-shaped targets that pop into view. Only with constant repetition, does this become a conditioned response.
In combat, and even in soldiers who become frozen with fear, conditioning takes over.
Children, Grossman says, inadvertently learn the same type of reflex through video games. Grossman says this may explain why some student killers often keep firing even after they have shot the person that initially made them angry.
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Lawmakers Fear Nuke Secrets Slipping
By Deb Riechmann Associated Press Writer Wednesday, August
25, 1999; 1:23 a.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990825/V000903-082599-idx.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Government-Secrets.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- To shine light on America's secret past, government record keepers have worked the past three years to declassify 600 million pages of documents -- some as thin as onion skin, others yellow with age.
Now, because Washington fears that nuclear weapons information has slipped inadvertently from the government's attic, the bleary-eyed declassifiers might have to do it again.
Legislation headed for approval in Congress would require all these documents to be re-examined to make sure they don't contain sensitive details about the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
``I support efforts to release government information to the public, but in doing so we have to be careful not to continue to accidentally release sensitive nuclear weapons design data that countries like Iran and Iraq could use to advance their own nuclear weapons programs,'' said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.
Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said Congress is overreacting.
``This is all part of the frenzy about Chinese espionage that is driving Washington crazy,'' Aftergood said. ``The idea that they're going to reread material that's already been declassified is preposterous. It will basically cripple the declassification program by driving it in circles.''
Present efforts to lift the veil of government secrecy are driven by an executive order President Clinton signed in 1995. The order instructs federal agencies to open by next April classified records that contain historical material and are more than 25 years old. Exceptions are narrowly defined.
In the past three years, more than 600 million pages have been declassified.
Subjects range from the Cold War to Vietnam, POWs to UFOs. Researchers are rewriting history with new information about the U.S.-Soviet arms race, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a 1973 coup in Chile, covert action around the globe.
The public already can access 400 million pages that have been unsealed. An additional 200 million pages are declassified, but are not yet on public shelves. Nearly 1 billion more pages still must be reviewed.
Declassification was moving at a fast clip until last year when some lawmakers worried that nuclear secrets still classified under the Atomic Energy Act weren't being properly protected. Sens. Kyl; Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee; and Bob Smith, I-N.H., wrote to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger saying that ``in a frenzied attempt'' to meet the April 2000 deadline, documents containing sensitive nuclear weapons information may have been released or were in danger of being released.
The prospect prompted Congress to pass a law last year that required declassifiers to come up with a plan to scan documents, page-by-page, looking for nuclear material -- unless the records were ``highly unlikely'' to contain such information.
This year, after a government scientist suspected of giving nuclear secrets to China was fired in March for alleged security violations at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, lawmakers sought even tougher scrutiny.
Buried in the defense authorization act for fiscal 2000 is a provision that would make last year's law retroactive. It would require record keepers to reinspect documents declassified since the executive order took effect about three years ago.
``In a recent 140-page study of improperly released nuclear weapons data, the administration detailed numerous examples of key design information that was not intended to be released, but, in fact, was released,'' Kyl said.
Already approved by a House-Senate conference committee, Congress is to vote on the bill after its summer recess.
National Security Council spokesman David Leavy would not disclose the administration's reaction to the provision, except to say: ``We have to be reasonable while balancing national security concerns.'' He also would not speculate on whether Clinton would sign the bill.
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Gov't Denies Forcing Out Employee
By H. Josef Hebert Associated Press Writer Tuesday, August
24, 1999; 9:05 p.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990824/V000763-082499-idx.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-US-China-Spying.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A former intelligence officer who triggered an investigation into alleged Chinese nuclear spying, then resigned this week, ``in no sense was forced out'' of the Energy Department, the department said Tuesday.
Undersecretary Ernest Moniz acknowledged that the officer, Notra Trulock, no longer was involved in the three-year espionage investigation the Los Alamos, N.M., weapons laboratory when he resigned Monday. But Moniz said as the acting deputy chief of the intelligence office, Trulock normally would not have been still involved.
A career civil servant, Trulock resigned Monday and within 24 hours was working for a private contractor. He told several newspapers he left the Energy Department because he was being squeezed out of the Los Alamos investigation that involves Taiwan-born scientist Wen Ho Lee.
Under a presidential directive issued in early 1998, the department created a separate office for counterintelligence, headed by a veteran FBI official who reporting directly to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, to deal with investigations such as the Los Alamos case. The intelligence office, where Trulock worked, had other duties, Moniz said.
``He certainly was in no sense forced out of the Department of Energy,'' said Moniz. He said Trulock was ``given every opportunity'' to continue as deputy chief in the intelligence office but did not want the No. 2 spot.
Trulock was demoted from chief to acting deputy chief when Richardson came into the department late last year. Richardson named as the office's head Larry Sanchez, a CIA officer who worked with him at the United Nations. Moniz said Sanchez tried to keep Trulock on as his deputy, but Trulock said no.
Trulock did not return several telephone calls Tuesday.
The department said in a statement that Trulock provided ``a most valuable service'' in his persistent pursuit of the spy issue, and Richardson was disappointed by his departure. Richardson gave Trulock a $10,000 achievement award this year.
Cited by some members of Congress as a hero for pressing as early as 1995 his suspicions that nuclear secrets had been stolen, Trulock also has come under criticism in recent months.
Trulock was rebuked sharply in June by former Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire when he complained about the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board report on security at the department. The panel, headed by Rudman, recommended among other things that Trulock's office be abolished in a restructuring of the department.
More recently, the former intelligence chief at Los Alamos, himself the target of criticism, accused Trulock and others of focusing for three years on Los Alamos scientist Lee largely because of his Chinese heritage.
Trulock has denied singling out Lee because he was Chinese-American.
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Nimble Security Juggler: Sandy Berger, the Strategist and Politician
By R. W. APPLE Jr., August 25, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/082599berger-profile.html
WASHINGTON -- When President Clinton made a televised address to the nation about Kosovo last March 24, he uttered a sentence for which he was belabored that day and every day for the next 10 weeks, until he finally declared victory on June 10: "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war."
On May 18, with the outcome of the bombing campaign still in serious doubt, the President sharply altered course with the comment, "I don't think we or our allies should take any options off the table, and that has been my position from the beginning," which of course it had not.
It was Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, known as Sandy, who wrote the initial offending sentence. Both he and his boss saw fairly quickly that it was a mistake, because they realized that having plunged into the conflict with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, there was no acceptable alternative to a NATO victory. If ground troops were needed to get the Serbian tanks out of Kosovo, then ground troops it would have to be.
Milosevic may well have held out longer than he otherwise would have because he believed that he faced no danger of land combat, and he certainly gained time to savage ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and drive them out.
Berger told a friend as early as April that he should have put in something about leaving all options on the table.
He did not do so, Berger said a few days after the bombing had stopped, because "the American people would not have supported the war without European participation, and we never could have gotten all 19 allies on board at the outset if they thought we had any plan to use ground forces." In keeping with that view, Clinton cut his rhetorical cloth to fit the politics of both NATO and the United States.
The explosion of criticism crossed party and ideological lines.
In an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, accused the Administration of indulging in "a new technological racism" based on the premise that the life of "one American serviceman was not worth risking in order to save the lives of thousands of Kosovars." The Economist headlined an editorial, "A Bungled War." Michael Kelly, a columnist, suggested that a ham and cheese sandwich could run foreign policy better than Berger and his colleagues.
Berger's place at the nexus of Kosovo strategy was no surprise, nor was his concentration on the political aspects of the matter. Widely regarded as the President's closest foreign-policy aide, perhaps the most influential national security adviser since Henry A. Kissinger, he is at bottom a political rather than strategic figure.
Unlike the professors, diplomats and military officers who have for the most part preceded him in his job, he made his way to the White House by way of the salons and back rooms of Democratic politics while pursuing a public career as a trade lawyer.
"He has the lawyer's inherent caution," said John Dyson, a New York investor and political operative who has known Berger since college.
"The craft is a tactical craft. You focus on the downside, always worrying about avoiding negative results."
... The bonds of friendship between Clinton and Berger -- one of the few who has served the entire two terms at the White House under four chiefs of staff -- have held, even in bad times, such as the town meeting on Iraq in Columbus, Ohio, in May of last year, conceived in Berger's office, which ended with Cohen and Ms. Albright being shouted down.
Berger himself describes the event as "a complete fiasco."
Nor is there any sign that Berger's standing with the President has slipped because of the Administration's difficulties with China, the country with which he is most closely identified.
It is the country whose development, he once said, "will have the biggest impact on our children."
To shape that development, Berger has championed a policy of engagement, in which the United States has tried to bind China to the United States through economic and security arrangements.
But a lot of things have gone wrong lately, from illicit Chinese campaign contributions to the Democrats to the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
Berger's biggest setback on the China front came when he was unable to persuade President Clinton in April to sign a trade deal during Prime Minister Zhu Rongji's visit to the White House.
Despite his clout with Clinton, he was outflanked on this occasion by John S. Podesta, the White House chief of staff.
Podesta had the foresight to win the backing of a man even more influential than Berger, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and they persuaded the President to hold out for more concessions to placate Congress.
Despite efforts to regroup, no treaty has been signed yet.
Even worse for Berger personally were charges that he reacted too passively when told about the suspected Chinese theft of nuclear secrets.
He insists that he acted properly when told of the charges, even though he briefed Clinton only very tardily, after March of this year, on detailed charges that Berger had learned of in July, 1997. Asked if he felt that he had dropped the ball in any way, either in terms of substance or in terms of appearances, he replied, cold-eyed, "No."
Berger's cherished reputation on the Hill has nonetheless taken a hit, with several influential members of Congress calling for his resignation.
These calls have subsided, but he remains "very exposed and very vulnerable on this," according to a government China specialist who admires him.
"He is the best link we have with China," the specialist said.
"But he is viewed by our critics as someone who cares more about China than the United States, and that limits his ability to take initiatives with China. You need to explain the bombing, but you can't send Sandy to Beijing."
There is also an inescapable sense that the Administration makes policy on the fly.
Michael McCurry, a former White House press secretary, concedes that "we don't have a new definition of the U. S. role in the world yet." In some moods, Berger sounds as if that's fine with him.
In 1991, he said during a panel discussion that most "grand strategies" were after-the-fact rationales developed to explain successful ad hoc decisions.
He said in a recent conversation that he prefers to "worry about today today and tomorrow tomorrow."
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Reusable Spacecraft in the Works
By The Associated Press, August 25, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Spacecraft-Tests.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Flight tests will begin next year on a new generation of reusable spacecraft that will be less expensive to operate than current rocket launchers, officials say.
Officials of NASA and its aerospace industry partners said Tuesday that three types of experimental craft were poised to begin flight testing starting in the summer of 2000.
The X-33 craft, being built by the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, Calif., will undergo suborbital flights next summer. Another craft, called the X-34 and being built by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., will undergo engine and structural tests in 2000, leading up to a series of flights.
A third craft, called the X-37, is in an earlier development stage by the Boeing Co., but is scheduled for two test flights from the space shuttle starting in 2002.
Gary Payton, deputy associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the goal of the technology development program was to ``bring down the cost of space access by a factor of 10.''
Putting a pound into orbit using current rockets or the space shuttle costs $5,000 to $20,000 a pound, he said, and there is no way to improve those costs with the present U.S. launch systems. Most current rockets are expendable -- used one time and thrown away -- and take weeks to prepare for launch.
The new generation of space launchers could reduce the cost of space access to about $1,000 a pound, officials said.
Payton said the program also would develop spacecraft that could be launched more often and by fewer people. It now takes hundreds of engineers who spend weeks in preparation to launch a single payload.
With the new generation of spacecraft, he said, ``five flights in 21 days will be routine.''
Lockheed's X-33 is designed to be launched as a single stage to orbit, in contrast to current systems that use several rockets to reach space. It is a 69-foot-long, wedge-shaped craft that is launched vertically and then lands like an airplane after a gliding descent from orbit.
Cleon Lacefield said a goal of the X-33 program was to build a spacecraft that could be launched every seven days by as few as 50 people from simple spaceports that could be located virtually anywhere.
The X-33 will start a series of 15 test flights next summer. The first will be a suborbital flight from Edwards Air Force Base in California to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The craft is expected to reach an altitude of 31 miles and accelerate to 11 times the speed of sound.
The X-34 is designed as the ``workhorse'' test vehicle for the program, said Bob Lindberg of Orbital Sciences. Orbital is building three models of the X-34, with each one being used for different phases of testing new technologies and materials that could be used in later spacecraft. It will make 27 flight tests.
Lindberg said the X-34 is a robot rocket that will be launched at high altitude from a converted airliner. Some tests will involve unpowered drops to a landing, but later the X-34 will rocket up to 250,000 feet at eight times the speed of sound before returning to Earth.
The X-37, being built by Boeing, will be carried into orbit by the space shuttle, fly to higher orbits and then land like an airplane. More than three dozen technologies will be tested in two flights by the craft starting in 2002.
Part of the cost of the development programs is being paid by private industry. For the X-33, NASA has invested $941 million and industry has contributed $287 million. Boeing and NASA are splitting the $173 million cost of the X-37. Orbital is building and testing the X-34 under a $85.7 million NASA contract.