NRC safety policy relaxed for New Year's
by Paul Choinnere, The New London Day (CT), December 12, 1999
From: opt2000@nbn.com (Options 2000)
It's shortly after midnight on Jan. 1 and sections of the nations' power grid are experiencing Y2K problems. Nuclear plants, which are connected to the grid, are having their own added difficulties. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with no time for a detailed evaluation, gives the OK for the plants to keep operating.
The NRC considers such a scenario realistic enough to have approved a special unprecedented policy that allows nuclear plants to keep operating with technical problems that would normally force them to shut down. Critics, however, contend the policy gives operators too much leeway to go outside their plant designs and may set the stage for a nuclear accident.
Under this plan, the NRC is allowing nuclear plants to stray outside their "technical specifications." Among the plants expected to be operating are Millstone 2 and 3 in Waterford.
Though both the agency and the industry say they think all significant Y2K problems have been eliminated, the NRC has the contingency in case they are wrong.
Dick Wessman,, deputy director of engineering at the NRC's office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in Maryland, said the policy would come into play only if the power grid in a region becomes unstable and a blackout is possible. If, at the same time, a nuclear plant were having its own problems, the reactor operators can ask the NRC for permission to continue operations to help keepnelectricity flowing. NRC approval, Wessman said, would be given only if the decrease in safety were small.
NRC TO LET NUCLEAR PLANTS AVOID NORMAL RULES
An example of an allowed problem, Wessman said, might be the loss of one back-up system for cooling the reactor. This is the type of system needed only if multiple primary cooling systems fail.
Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project, said the policy amounts to "a furlough from safety."
"The power grid has become more important to the NRC than its role of protecting the public from the radiation that could result from a nuclear accident," said Gunter, whose organization is part of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C.
Gunter's organization has recommended that the nation's 103 nuclear plants either be placed in a standby mode - the equivalent of a car idling in park - or be shut down entirely for several days, until the Y2K threat passes.
THE BLACKOUT THREAT
Though the power industry has assured Congress it is ready to move into the year 2000, the potential for blackouts cannot be ruled out, both utility industry critics and emergency planners agree. Emergency planners fear blackouts could trigger public panic. A national task force that reviewed the Y2K issue for the NRC warned that the "failure to provide electricity to customers at this critical time may have adverse impact on public health and safety."
The Union of Concerned Scientists had urged the NRC to establish guidelines on how far outside of its technical specifications a plant would be allowed to operate. The agency, Wessman said, opted to decide on a case-by-case basis, because it is impossible to predict what might happen.
Another factor in the NRC's decision to keep plants operating is the possible problem a blackout could cause for the plants themselves. Nuclear plants in this country do not run on their own power; they use electricity coming off the grid. If the grid fails, a condition known as "station blackout" is declared. Back-up batteries must be used to keep all systems running and the reactor cool. Power is then transferred to back-up diesel generators.
David Lochbaum, a safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said 40 percent of all reactor accident scenarios involve loss of off-site power. The NRC task force warned "an unreliable grid can adversely affect nuclear power plant safety."
But, Gunter said, there is possible danger in the NRC trying to keep the grid going.
He described this scenario: The power grid becomes unstable, and one or more reactors are allowed to keep operating with certain technical problems. Then, despite the plants' continued operation, the grid fails.
That, said Gunter, might leave the plants in a dangerous "station blackout" with existing technical problems.
The NRC does not expect that the special exception will be needed anywhere, Wessman said, because nuclear plants and the power grid nationwide should run well through New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.
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Arms Trade Resource Center Updates, December 1999 http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/updates/12999.html
In this update: THE WTO AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE ARMS INDUSTRY THE OSCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN TURKEY MILITARY AID TO COLOMBIA SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS PROTEST
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[Followup on "Bombard the White House" 12/7/99: I checked the new website for White House opinions set up at http://askgov.aol.com/ -- the page says it's for AOL users, but I submitted a question and it went through. I asked if Clinton would support Ed Markey's De-Alert bill, or better yet order all nuclear weapons de-alerted, not only for Y2K, but beyond, citing Bush's precedent in 1990. Hopefully you will also submit questions to this forum; if enough ask about de-alerting, perhaps nuclear weapons will become a topic on the discussion list. et]
Another way to send a message to the President: http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/Mail/html/Mail_President.html
Send a message to the Vice President http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/Mail/html/Mail_Vice_President.html Send a message to the First Lady http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/Mail/html/Mail_First_Lady.html Send a message to Mrs. Gore http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/Mail/html/Mail_Mrs_Gore.html
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[Received a letter from the DoD 12/12/99 in response to letter to President Clinton about depleted uranium, much to my surprise. I sent am e-mail to NucNews group asking for expert opinions. Here is the first in-depth response, from Robin Mills. At the end is the DoD letter. Will keep posting. Et]
From: "Robin Mills" <rmills4@bcpl.net>
Dear Ellen,
Some of what they say is true, but they leave out a lot too. They say they have been studying this for 40 years, but in fact DU has only really been used for a decade. The first combat use was the Gulf War, in Kuwait and Iraq. Thus we don't really know what the long term effects are or will be. We should be operating on the Precautionary Principle, which basically says look before you leap. DU has not been tested on lab rats or other laboratory animals as far as I know, and I would think the military would oppose such testing, because they really don't want to know. DU is not very radioactive. Uranium 238 has a half life of 4.468 billion years, as compared to Uranium 235 which has a half life of 704 million years, so the 238 is less radioactive than 235, but both have a very long half life. Plants have developed through the ages to selectively absorb different nutrients from the soil. Uranium is in the soil planetwide. Plants do not absorb uranium. So while they say uranium has been around forever, which is true, it is not in the plants or animals whoich humans consume. Additionally, that uranium in the soil has stayed in the soil until recently when we started to dig it up and purify it. The soil protected us from the uranium and the radiation it produced.
The effects of uranium are virtually identical to lead poisoning. Lead poisoning is a major cause in learning disabilities, from leaded paint in the inner cities and from leaded gasoline which has been outlawed in this country. In fact, scientists say there is a band of lead contaminated soil on both sides of every highway in the country, which is one major reason why we do not use such strips of land to produce food crops, but instead leave it to grasses and wildflowers. Lead is produced from the radioactive decay chain from uranium, that is when uranium decays, it eventually ends up as lead, after producing radon and radium.
There are big dangers involved in the use of DU that their response totally avoids mentioning. When DU rounds hit a hard target, the DU becomes a zillion small particles. These particles are hot, and bond to oxygen quickly, becoming UO2 or some other oxide of uranium (U2O3 for instance). These microscopic particles can be easily inhaled, which is much worse than ingestion. The white house response downplays the effects, but really we know very little about the effects of inhaling small particles of uranium. Back in the fifties and sixties there were some studies done on the effects of plutonium inhalation. The tests were done on Beagle Dogs, which were picked because they have lungs most similiar to human lungs. Dr. John Gofman has a horrifying account of the tests, which were discontinued when the initial results started to come out, in his book, Radiation and Human Health, 1981, Sierra Club books, page 479. One millionth of an ounce of plutonium oxide killed all the dogs. The toxicity was so high that the researchers could not deposit any amount which did not kill every single dog. The lethal dose was so small that it could not be accurately measured such that it could be administered. Uranium might not be so lethal, but it is still deadly.
The problem is that uranium bioaccumulates. The uranium might be one part per trillion in the soil or water, but when we breathe or drink, our bodies concentrate that uranium such that it becomes one part per billion in our body. But as the white house says, the uranium stays in the kidney. Repeated doses and that uranium will eventually be one part per million. These figures are just examples of bioaccumulation and do not accurately reflect the amount of bioaccumulation accually occurring. One real life example of bioaccumulation that you might have heard of is the bioaccumulation of mercury in swordfish. Swordfish have become so heavily contaminated that swordfish is actually too toxic to eat right now, anywhere on planet earth. And there are suspicions that the mercury has hindered the reproduction of the swordfish such that they will become extinct very soon. Mercury is not uranium, but it is analagous to what might happen in humans with uranium and plutonium.
The White House did not fess up to the fact that uranium (and plutonium) also accumulates in human reproductive organs. I left a copy of the November issue of The Ecologist at the Prop 1 office last week. In that issue is a report about the declining sperm counts being seen worldwide. Their analysis is that all European men will be functionally sterile in 10 years, and all men in the United States in 20 years, based on just extending the current curves for the decline into the near future. I wish I could understand why the media doesn't grab onto that topic, because it seems like it could be a really hot button issue to me. Of course there might be other expalnations, such as lead, dioxin, mercury or stronium 90 and iodine 131, or synthethic estrogens. Problem is that our government and media are not exploring the issue to find out the cause, probably because they either already know or just don't want to know out of fear.
A final point to bring up is the accessability of the uranium particles after they have been dispersed from a hard target hit of DU. Trillions of microscopic hot particles spray out from the target. Those particles do not disappear any time soon. They ramain on the top of the soil and ground, being swirled around by gusts of wind, probably for ever. The areas in Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo where DU was fired will have that DU dust on the top of the soil forever. Every generation of children going to those places and growing up in those plaqces will breathe some of that dust in the wind. The half life is so long that it will essentially never disappear. Some of it might wash into the oceans, but not all, and not even much considering the lack of rainfall in the middle east. And, there is no way to clean it up. The DU is blowing around over thousands of square miles of land. There is no way to separate that small amount of DU from the huge amount of sand and soil which is forever contaminated.
In summary. 1. We do not really know the long term dangers of DU, to either reproduction, cancers and genetic deformities.
2. We do not know how much or how fast uranium will bioaccumulate in certain organs in human bodies, but we do know there is some uranium bioaccumulation in kidneys and reproductive organs.
3. The effects of uranium contamination are like those of lead poisoning, people will be born retarded, have less ability to learn, and have less memory capabilities.
4. DU contamination is essentially forever and can essentially not be cleaned up. Once an area is contaminated, it is irreversable.
5. There are alternatives for the military. Tungsten is just as effective as DU, but the military won't consider changing to using it because it costs more.
6. We should be obeying the Precautionary Principle, but the military refuses to even do the testing required to find out the full effects of DU because, DU is cheap and plentiful, and finding adverse effects could open up litigation against them, so they rather not know. --
[Received 12/12/99 in response to letter to President Clinton about depleted uranium, much to my surprise. Et]
OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ACQUISITION AND TECHNOLOGY 3000 DEFENSE PENTAGON WASHINGTON, DC 20301-3000
7 DEC 1999
Ms. Ellen Thomas Executive Director, Proposition One Committee P.O. Box 27217 Washington, D.C. 20038
Dear Ms. Thomas:
Thank you for your recent e-mail to President Clinton concerning depleted uranium (DU) munitions and armor. You stated your belief that the United States should discontinue the use of DU for military purposes and dispose of the DU material. I have enclosed a fact sheet that provides the following information: (1) what DU is; (2) the DU health concerns; (3) the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) medical evaluation program; (4) the significant military advantages of DU; and (5) our DoD position on DU use. I believe that this information will provide a better understanding of DU and its civilian and military applications. While the use of DU is required to meet our national defense needs, DoD continues to emphasize safety relative to all aspects of DU use and disposition.
Sincerely,
George R. Schneiter Director Strategic and Tactical Systems
Attachment; DU Fact Sheet
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DU Fact Sheet
* What is DU?
DU is uranium that has been depleted of the most radioactive isotopes of uranium. DU has both DoD military applications and private civilian industry applications, such as stabilizers for airplanes and boats.
* DU's hazard potential and health concerns:
Chemically and toxicologically DU is the same as natural uranium. Radiologically, it is 40% less radioactive than the natural uranium found in the air, soil, water, and in food products, everywhere on the Earth People ingest, inhale, and excrete natural uranium, in trace amounts, on a daily basis. Chemically DU is a heavy metal and like other heavy metals (iron, lead, nickel, tungsten, etc.), it is toxic when internalized in large quantities. The major health concerns associated with DU relate to its chemical properties as a heavy metal rather than to its radioactivity, which is very low. As with all heavy metals, the hazard depends mainly on the amount taken into the body. Very high exposure and absorption of uranium can cause kidney (renal) harm. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission License or permit is required for the manufacture, machining, storage, and use of DU, and workplace exposures are governed by applicable Code of Federal Regulations guidelines.
DU emits alpha and beta particles. and gamma rays. Alpha particles, the primary radiation type (more than 99%) produced by DU, travel about two inches and are easily blocked by the outer layer of skin. Beta particles, the secondary emission, are slightly more penetrating, but are blocked by footwear and clothing such as by the boots and battle dress utility uniform typically worn by deployed military personnel. Gloves are mandated for troops actually handling DU rounds. While gamma rays are pure energy and are highly penetrating, the amount of gamma radiation emitted by DU is low. DoD training programs emphasize the principal of limiting exposures to as low as reasonably achievable. Thus, for these reasons, DU does not pose a credible hazard as long as it remains outside the body, especially if basic field safety and hygiene measures are observed.
Existing short-term and prolonged human exposure data indicate that DU exposure, through inhalation, ingestion, or from embedded fragments, poses no significant health risk to military personnel or other persons. While DU can pose a health hazard under specific circumstances, its heavy metal toxicity and mild radioactivity do not pose an unacceptable risk to human health. The slight risk that does exist, moreover, can be prevented or minimized through proper risk management procedures such as hazard awareness programs and personal protective measures. The simple human hygiene measure of cleaning one's hands and face and the food greatly reduces the likelihood of intakes, practically eliminating any attendant risks. The environmental impact of DU, studied comprehensively by a wide range of governmental and independent non-governmental bodies, indicates that the environmental consequences and health risks associated with the battlefield use of DU are minimal. The DoD recently conducted an extensive review of the scientific literature covering more than 160 independent and government studies over the past 40 years and found absolutely no credible scientific evidence to link the military use of DU to health problems.
If DU is taken into the body (internalized) in suffcient quantity, its low-level radiation and heavy metal toxicity can produce adverse health effects, primarily to the kidneys. The intake level (dose received) determines what, if any, health effects might occur. As with lead or other toxicants, "the poison is in the dose." When DU penetrator rods strike a hard target, or "slow cook" in sustained fires, the mass of the solid DU rod is reduced, as particles, oxides, and residues are formed. This "DU dust" can become internalized through inhalation, ingestion, or wound contamination. In addition, troops riding in or on armored vehicles at the time they are struck by DU munitions can receive embedded DU fragments in their bodies. The latter event is virtually the only exposure scenario that can result in DU intakes exceeding regulatory safety levels. In all of these cases, DU's heavy metal toxicity, not its low-level radioactivity, is the primary health concern, with the kidneys being the organ where any damage is most likely to occur.
Research continues into DU's health effects. Useful insights and data have also been gained from "real world" Gulf War exposure events and subsequent monitoring. It should be noted that "exposure" does not automatically equate to "intakes." The vast majority of Gulf War exposures are extremely unlikely to have resulted in exposures exceeding or even approaching regulatory limits The most significant exposures were incurred by an estimated 113 U.S. soldiers who were in or on U.S. armored vehicles at the time these vehicles were struck by DU "sabot" penetrator rounds mistakenly fired from U.S. Abrams tanks. Some survivors of these incidents still retain DU fragments in their bodies, since the risks of removal outweigh the consequences of leaving them in place. Since 1993, a special Department of Veterans Affairs program has been monitoring 33 of these veterans. While some are still experiencing complications from their original traumatic injuries, no adverse health effects attributable to DU's heavy metal toxicity or radioactivity have been observed to date in any of these soldiers. In addition, none of the 17 offspring fathered by the 33 veterans have presented any detectable birth defects. While this cohort is too small to be statistically significant, data gained from the program tends to refute many of the allegations made regarding Gulf War DU exposures and their effects on human health.
* DoD and VA medical evaluation program:
Through programs such as the DU medical follow-up program at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the DoD continues to monitor the health of those individuals most exposed to DU during the Gulf War. In 1998, the DoD and the VA expanded this medical surveillance program. The DoD identified and contacted hundreds of Gulf War veterans who may have been exposed to DU, and encouraged them to enroll in the medical program. In addition, any Gulf War veteran who has concerns about their potential DU exposures may request an evaluation at the nearest DoD or VA medical facility.
The Office of the Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Gulf War Illnesses published an initial report on the health effects of DU during the Gulf War, which is available on the internet (http://www.gulflink.osd.mil). The Office plans to publish an updated DU environmental exposure report in the next year, which will incorporate the latest data, information, and knowledge regarding DU.
* Significant military advantages of DU:
The U.S. military uses DU because of its extraordinary effectiveness in anti-armor munitions as well as its survivability (protective armor) effectiveness. The Gulf War, also known as Operation Desert Storm, was the first conflict to see the widespread use of DU. The new munitions and armor gave U.S. forces a tremendous advantage. Because of the unprecedented range and lethality advantages provided by DU sabot rounds, they played a central role in destroying more than 4,000 Iraqi combat vehicles in some of the most lopsided exchanges in modern military history. Despite being engaged multiple times, often at close ranges by Iraqi tanks and anti-armor weapons, not a single U.S. tank was penetrated by hostile fire. Many U.S. military men and women are alive today because we used DU in their weapons and their equipment.
* DoD position on DU use:
A cardinal principle of munitions programs is to have maximum safety consistent with satisfying the operational (military) requirement. The risk associated with DU material is factored into all decisions about the use of this material for military applications. Until we find suitable alternatives to the DU material to satisfy all our military requirements, DU material will still remain for certain requirements the only viable solution for our National Defense needs in protecting our national security interests Our National Defense needs, and minimizing U.S. casualties while accomplishing our military missions, have always been of paramount importance. To date, DU's unmatched operational effectiveness and survivability benefits far outweigh the manageable hazards posed by its heavy metal and radiological properties. Committing American troops to battle without these advantages is indefensible on military grounds, and unwarranted on medical or scientific grounds particularly when future adversaries are likely to employ DU munitions themselves.
Our policy for use of DU material, from manufacture to disposal is in complete compliance with our U.S. federal regulations and applicable international treaties. This includes training at land ranges and at sea Use in friendly foreign countries is in accordance with both our regulations and those of the foreign country. We continue to emphasize safety for the protection of our U.S. workers and military personnel. We have implemented force-wide DU training and hazard awareness programs that will dramatically improve our Military Service members' readiness and ability to respond safely and appropriately to DU on the battlefield.
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To: DC Peace from <carolmoore@kreative.net>
Subject: Dec.30 Vigil: No Nuke War in 21st Century
After discussions at the recent Washington Action Group meeting and with other local peace activists, it looks like it would be a good idea to do an anti-nuclear (and anti-intervention) Vigil in front of the White House on Thursday, Dec. 30 from 6:00-7:00. We'll probably get press looking for some Year End photos.
Also, fear of accidental nuclear war will be prominent in those last two days. Even Reuters has noted that if Russian communications and electricity go down and there are radiation leaks from nuclear plants, Russian military commanders might follow their usual orders and assume that Russia has been attacked and launch their missiles. So we should have a sign or two saying NO Y2K ACCIDENTAL NUKE WAR.
Other signs might read: NO NUKE WAR IN 21ST CENTURY(a couple) NO NUKE WAR OVER CHECHNYA NO NUKE WAR OVER MONTENEGRO NO NUKE WAR OVER KOSOVO NO NUKE WAR OVER IRAQ NO NUKE WAR OVER TAIWAN (A few!!) NO NUKE WAR OVER KOREA NO NUKE WAR OVER ISRAEL/PALESTINE NO NUKE WAR IN INDIA-PAKISTAN and for all those people who show up at WTO events, but ignore the inevitability of nuclear destruction... NUKE WAR DESTROYS JOBS
We might also have some good visuals/props/skits: * a cardboard bomb or two from the WAG group * Vigil candles and "Y2K" lanterns and flashlights * A couple of suitcases with nuclear symbols on them to represent suitcase nukes (be prepared to open for cops) *Clinton and Yeltsin characters holding signs with pictures of nukes and quoting what they said last week (See below) *Other ideas??
Carol Moore 202-635-3739
-------- china
China Prefers the Sand to the Moles
Experts Say Beijing Mines Open Sources, Digging Out Secrets Grain
Washington Post, December 12, 1999; Page A02 by Grain By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/12/189l-121299-idx.html
Late last week, the FBI arrested Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese American scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, on charges of mishandling nuclear secrets. But the FBI's probe of alleged nuclear espionage is far from over.
Lee, who was once at the center of the investigation, is one of many possible suspects. Although the felony charges against him could carry a life sentence, federal prosecutors concede there is no evidence that he passed secrets to China.
The FBI is now looking elsewhere--at other national laboratories, defense plants and Navy missile contract administrators--for the source of information allegedly stolen by China about the W-88, America's most advanced nuclear warhead. Yet the bureau's former chief analyst for Chinese counterintelligence doubts that its investigators ever will find a master spy.
Why? Because China rarely recruits master spies, according to Paul D. Moore, who spent 20 years following operatives from China's premier intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security.
Moore and other experts believe that China methodically sifts information from open sources and combines it with many small leaks of secret information, typically culled one at a time from American scientists visiting China, a strategy very different from the Cold War model of moles and master spies, smuggled microfilm and secret meetings in the park.
"If you're meeting with someone who is a spy in the park, you might be seen," Moore said. "But if you're a scientist authorized to discuss three things with the Chinese and you discuss four things, how is the government going to know about that?"
Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh told Congress in September that they were beginning a new and much broader inquiry into Chinese espionage after concluding that FBI agents and Department of Energy investigators botched the case three years ago by focusing prematurely on Lee--a Taiwan-born U.S. citizen who worked for nearly 20 years at Los Alamos's top secret X Division--and ignoring other potential leads.
Lee was fired from his job in March for security violations and was identified as the government's prime suspect after he failed a polygraph test. He has admitted that he transferred top-secret information from the classified computer system at Los Alamos to his unsecure desktop computer, but he claims he was just trying to protect the information from computer crashes.
Moore believes the FBI erred, not so much by targeting Lee, but by assuming that there had to be a spy inside the nation's nuclear weapons complex, based on fragments of classified information contained in a document handed over to the CIA by a Chinese "walk-in" agent.
"So far as I can see, most folks are simply asking the wrong question: Who stole what secrets?" Moore said. "That's always an important question, but the really critical one is: How and where were these thefts accomplished?"
Moore believes that China's intelligence agency targets Chinese Americans to the exclusion of others--heavy drinkers, disgruntled employees, ideologues--who might seem to be better targets.
But China usually doesn't try to pry information out of Chinese Americans in the United States in ways that would leave much evidence for investigators to uncover, Moore said. And China almost never tries to obtain large quantities of secrets from one person, the way the KGB once did and the CIA still does, he said.
China's track record with Chinese Americans, Moore said, is extremely poor; most Chinese Americans refuse to cooperate with intelligence agents. But China ultimately succeeds, he said, because it employs "a kind of junk mail approach to intelligence," trying over and over again with Chinese Americans and other official visitors to China. They succeed often enough in forcing "good people to do bad things"--sometimes without fully realizing it--to make Chinese espionage effective, in part because it's so difficult to detect.
The price China pays for this thousand-grains-of-sand approach, Moore said, is that it takes years to assemble the same amount of information a master spy could stash at a dead drop in an hour.
As for the wisdom of the FBI's expanded reinvestigation, Moore said he understands why Freeh ordered his agents back to square one in their search for a Chinese spy. "The cat is out of the bag and people expect you to do certain things," Moore said. "But it doesn't make sense to expect that they're going to come up with this magic answer."
Further complicating the investigation is the so-called walk-in document that triggered the probe. The 74-page document is a classic illustration of China's methodical collection techniques, apparently gathered in bits and pieces from many public and private sources.
It contains dozens of facts about U.S. nuclear warheads, most displayed in a two-page chart. On one side are various Air Force and Navy weapons, including some older bombs as well as the W-80 warhead for cruise missiles, the W-87 for the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile and the W-88 for the Trident II. Along with each warhead in the chart are details on size, weight, explosive yield, reentry vehicle (including a line sketch), range and accuracy.
Some of this information is correct, and some is not, according to a senior administration official. He noted that part of the information included in the chart was publicly available in 1988, when the document purportedly was written.
Scientists at Los Alamos, recently asked by the FBI to look again at the walk-in document, spotted some errors or imprecisions in the W-88's classified dimensions and traced them to the warhead's assemblers, the first evidence suggesting a source outside Los Alamos, where the miniaturized warhead was designed.
Others are now puzzling over the document's additional errors. Can they be traced to a particular source? Or were they included by the Chinese for a reason?
A former senior Pentagon officer said some errors may have resulted because the information was translated from English to Chinese, then translated back again by U.S. intelligence.
Most confounding of all, however, is the CIA's conclusion that the walk-in agent who delivered it in Taiwan was a double agent still under China's control. Early on, the CIA warned Energy Department officials and the FBI, who had already begun to focus on Wen Ho Lee as the alleged source, that the document's contents were questionable.
As a result, the FBI halted its inquiry for several months in late 1996. It resumed, according to one participant, after Notra Trulock, the Energy Department's former director of intelligence, decided that China's source of classified information had to be uncovered, regardless of whether the document had been planted by Chinese intelligence.
Thus, the question remains: Why would China hand U.S. intelligence a document describing what Beijing knew about U.S. nuclear warheads?
Some analysts think the walk-in agent initially delivered genuine materials because he was not, at first, under Beijing's control. The quality changed after the first deliveries, one source said, raising questions about the agent's reliability.
"There is no consensus," one senior administration official said last week.
Recently, an Energy Department official said some intelligence analysts have seen the entire exercise as a "disinformation operation" designed "to test our reactions and throw us off the scent."
Under this scenario, the official said, the Chinese have very accurate information about U.S. weapons, "but they want to have us assume their intelligence is not very good."
A more sinister twist on this approach is that the Chinese have one or more excellent sources of information on the U.S. nuclear program and offered up the document to lead U.S. investigators down a different path. Still another interpretation, voiced by one former Department of Energy official, is far more direct: China delivered the document to Taiwan, the source said, to intimidate Taiwan.
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US Narrows List of China's Secrets
Associated Press DECEMBER 12, 15:02 EST By JOHN SOLOMON
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS719VUNG0
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-China-Espionage.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - Since the political furor over alleged Chinese espionage waned this summer, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have narrowed the list of nuclear secrets that Beijing most likely stole while expanding the pool of potential suspects.
After three years of near-singular focus on the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico and one of its scientist, Wen Ho Lee, officials now acknowledge that the classified information China most likely stole was accessible to hundreds of people at several federal facilities.
The FBI recently refocused its investigation on other facilities outside Los Alamos, in part based on classified information from one of Lee's supervisors at the lab. That supervisor disclosed that as many as 250 workers a year had access to the information China is suspected of stealing.
``The focus of this new initiative is to determine the full universe of both compromised restricted nuclear weapons information and who had access to that information,'' FBI Assistant Director Neil J. Gallagher wrote in a letter to Congress last month.
A primary piece of evidence continues to be a 1988-dated Chinese document that suggests China stole valuable information about nearly every major weapon in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the W-88 miniaturized submarine warhead that is one of America's most sophisticated, officials said.
When a congressional committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., issued a report on China espionage earlier this year, it pointed to that document as evidence of the extent of China's spying at U.S. nuclear labs.
But a more recent assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies has concluded a large portion of the information in that document most likely came from publicly available documents, some of which contained misinformation about American weapons, officials told The Associated Press.
In the case of the W-88, intelligence officials now believe the 1988-dated Chinese document, which U.S. officials obtained in 1995, contains only a couple of pieces of classified information that could only have been stolen from secure facilities.
One administration official, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said the two secrets involved the particular radius measurement of a key component in the W-88 warhead and the overall shape and configuration of the weapon.
``Neither of these restricted pieces of information can be located in any public documents,'' the official said. ``It is our assessment that China could only have obtained these through spying.''
China has steadfastly denied such espionage.
The new intelligence assessments have helped the FBI refocus an investigation that for three years tried unsuccessfully to prove Lee had spied for China.
Lee was charged Friday with 59 felonies alleging he removed a wide array of national secrets from secured computers at Los Alamos in the early 1990s. But the indictment failed to prove that Lee gave any secrets to foreign countries, such as China or Taiwan.
The AP reported Saturday that the FBI began to have doubts more than a year ago that Lee had leaked the W-88 information, but only recently refocused its investigation to other suspects and locations after suspecting that the original evidence again the Los Alamos scientist was flawed.
FBI officials say their refocused investigation is trying to determine exactly who had access to the W-88 secrets that could only have been stolen. Lee remains a possible suspect, but agents have expanded the list, officials said.
But investigators say they are no longer wedded to the theory that information must have been passed to China during the 1980s just because the key document is dated 1988.
FBI investigators have detected various errors in the Chinese document and are examining whether some of the secret information could have been obtained during the 1990s around the time Lee was downloading secrets from the Los Alamos computers, officials said.
-------- japan
U.S. Violated Nuclear Arms Pledge in Japan, Records Show
By JUDITH MILLER New York Times December 12, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/121299japan-us-nukes.html
Newly declassified documents show that while the United States publicly vowed not to keep nuclear weapons in Japan, it secretly stored them not only on Okinawa but also on the islands of Chichi-jima and Iwo Jima and was prepared to do the same at as many as 11 other Japanese sites.
An article describing the documents and what its authors say is the first comprehensive account of the largely secret history of America's use of Japan in its nuclear-war planning is being published in the Jan uary/February issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
"Based on these documents, we now see for the first time a much fuller picture of how Japan was integrated into the U.S. nuclear system," said William M. Arkin, a nuclear-weapons analyst and a co-author of the article.
Despite its stated policy as a nonnuclear nation, Japan stored "an extensive nuclear infrastructure -- at its peak, as large as that of other American allies," the article states.
The article says that between 1956 and 1966, the United States, apparently with Japanese agreement, kept nuclear weapons and in the latter years nuclear bombs without their fissile cores on Chichi-jima, about 500 miles southeast of the Japanese mainland, and on Iwo Jima, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles in World War II, about 670 miles southeast of Tokyo.
It says that the United States also kept nuclear weapons on Okinawa until 1972, and, when the American occupation ended, also stored nuclear bombs without their fissile cores on the island and on some other islands.
Such coreless bombs and other components were also stored on the Japanese mainland at Misawa and Itazuki air bases, and possibly elsewhere, the article maintains. In addition, nuclear-armed Navy ships were stationed in Sasebo and Yokosuka.
Because Chichi-jima, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa were under American occupation at the time and the bombs kept on the mainland did not have their plutonium or uranium centers, the United States was able to maintain that it had honored its agreements with Japan and did not have nuclear weapons "in Japan." But "this elaborate stratagem," the authors assert, showed that the ostensible lack of a nuclear presence in Japan was a mere "technicality."
Nevertheless, a Defense Department spokesman noted that even the article did not accuse Washington of violating any of its legal obligations to Japan. "Our position is that there have been no violations of our obligations under the security treaty and related arrangements," Walter B. Slocombe, under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview.
A State Department spokesman and Slocombe also reiterated the United States' traditional refusal to disclose where, and what kind of nuclear arms the administration stores or deploys overseas in keeping with long-standing American policy.
Both the Pentagon and the State Department spokesmen drew a distinction between the documents and the authors' interpretation of them. "We don't dispute the authenticity of the documents," one official said. "They are what they are. But we're not going to comment on anything about what they say."
Both Pentagon and State Department officials asserted that the United States has always been "very sensitive to the special Japanese concerns about nuclear weapons," a reference to Japan's status as the only nation to have been bombed with atomic weapons.
Arkin and his co-authors say that the "wall of silence" on such nuclear matters serves both sides well. "For the Japanese nation and Japanese political leaders, the elaborate stratagem maintained the illusion of nuclear purity," the article states. "Japanese political leaders could either deny everything or plead ignorance."
The article, which along with the supporting documentation is being posted today on the publication's Web site (www.thebulletin.org), is the second written by the authors in what has been a protracted effort to fill in the large blanks in the history of America's nuclear weapons programs and military strategy.
In October, the authors reported that the United States had stored 12,000 nuclear weapons and components in at least 23 countries and five American territories during the cold war -- including Morocco, Japan, Puerto Rico and Cuba. That article was based on detective work and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as the result of a 16-year effort by the co-authors -- Arkin, assisted by Robert S. Norris, a senior research analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in Washington, and William Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and director of its nuclear-history documentation project.
A State Department spokesman and senior Pentagon officials stressed that nuclear deployment policies have significantly changed in the last decade.
"We've drastically reduced the number of nuclear weapons that are deployed overseas to 10 percent of what they were as recently as 10-15 years ago," a Defense Department official said. And as a matter of policy, the United States has not deployed nuclear weapons aboard surface ships under what the official called "normal conditions" since 1991, though it reserves the right to do so.
---
Report: U.S. Put Nuclear Weapons on Japanese Isles
Reuters Updated 12:53 PM ET December 12, 1999
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/991212/12/news-arms-japan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon kept nuclear weapons on Japanese soil after World War Two despite Tokyo's opposition to the development or presence of such arms, according to a report by a group of American scientists on Sunday.
Citing an unnamed Japanese source, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the United States stored the weapons on Chichi Jima, some 500 miles southeast of the Japanese mainland, and Iwo Jima, 760 miles south-southeast of Tokyo.
"Japan may have had its principles, but the Pentagon had its nuclear war plans and it pushed the envelope as far as it could. 'Non-nuclear Japan' was a sentiment, not a reality," the report said.
First published in December 1945, the Bulletin was founded by the Atomic Scientists of Chicago to promote international cooperation and challenge the notion that more and bigger weapons enhanced national security.
The article, posted on the publication's Web site, said the two islands became nuclear bases in the 1950s and that Chichi Jima continued to house warheads with their nuclear material until 1965.
Actual nuclear weapons were pulled from Iwo Jima at the end of 1959, it said.
The authors of the report said they identified the two islands after having incorrectly named Iceland as a nation where U.S. nuclear bombs were deployed between 1950 and 1977.
They had relied on declassified U.S. documents that included a blacked-out list of locations including one that began with the letter "I" and another with the letter "C."
The United States controlled Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima under a bilateral security agreement until 1968, when they were returned to Japan.
The authors say the caves on Chichi Jima and the Central Air Base on Iwo Jima became "nuclear fallback positions should the Soviet Union invade or destroy the Japanese mainland."
"The islands would serve as secret 'recovery and reload' bases for submarines and bombers, which after withdrawing to the islands, would go on to wage a new offensive," the report said.
It said Japan's anti-nuclear policy was "already fully compromised, in spirit if not in letter" when the then-Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi stated in 1959 that Japan would neither develop nor allow nuclear weapons on its soil.
In addition to the weapons on Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima, there were "an enormous and varied nuclear arsenal on Okinawa, nuclear bombs (sans their fissile cores) stored on the mainland at Misawa and Itazuki airbases ... and nuclear-armed U.S. Navy ships stationed in Sasebo and Yokosuka," the report said.
"The Pentagon never commanded nuclear storage rights on the main islands, and it had to withdraw nuclear weapons from Okinawa in 1972," it added. Report: U.S. Put Nuclear Weapons on Japanese Isles
---
U.S. Violated Nuclear Arms Pledge in Japan, Records Show
New York Times December 12, 1999 By JUDITH MILLER
http://www10.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/121299japan-us-nukes.html
Newly declassified documents show that while the United States publicly vowed not to keep nuclear weapons in Japan, it secretly stored them not only on Okinawa but also on the islands of Chichi-jima and Iwo Jima and was prepared to do the same at as many as 11 other Japanese sites.
An article describing the documents and what its authors say is the first comprehensive account of the largely secret history of America's use of Japan in its nuclear-war planning is being published in the Jan uary/February issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
"Based on these documents, we now see for the first time a much fuller picture of how Japan was integrated into the U.S. nuclear system," said William M. Arkin, a nuclear-weapons analyst and a co-author of the article.
Despite its stated policy as a nonnuclear nation, Japan stored "an extensive nuclear infrastructure -- at its peak, as large as that of other American allies," the article states.
The article says that between 1956 and 1966, the United States, apparently with Japanese agreement, kept nuclear weapons and in the latter years nuclear bombs without their fissile cores on Chichi-jima, about 500 miles southeast of the Japanese mainland, and on Iwo Jima, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles in World War II, about 670 miles southeast of Tokyo.
It says that the United States also kept nuclear weapons on Okinawa until 1972, and, when the American occupation ended, also stored nuclear bombs without their fissile cores on the island and on some other islands.
Such coreless bombs and other components were also stored on the Japanese mainland at Misawa and Itazuki air bases, and possibly elsewhere, the article maintains. In addition, nuclear-armed Navy ships were stationed in Sasebo and Yokosuka.
Because Chichi-jima, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa were under American occupation at the time and the bombs kept on the mainland did not have their plutonium or uranium centers, the United States was able to maintain that it had honored its agreements with Japan and did not have nuclear weapons "in Japan." But "this elaborate stratagem," the authors assert, showed that the ostensible lack of a nuclear presence in Japan was a mere "technicality."
Nevertheless, a Defense Department spokesman noted that even the article did not accuse Washington of violating any of its legal obligations to Japan. "Our position is that there have been no violations of our obligations under the security treaty and related arrangements," Walter B. Slocombe, under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview.
A State Department spokesman and Slocombe also reiterated the United States' traditional refusal to disclose where, and what kind of nuclear arms the administration stores or deploys overseas in keeping with long-standing American policy.
Both the Pentagon and the State Department spokesmen drew a distinction between the documents and the authors' interpretation of them. "We don't dispute the authenticity of the documents," one official said. "They are what they are. But we're not going to comment on anything about what they say."
Both Pentagon and State Department officials asserted that the United States has always been "very sensitive to the special Japanese concerns about nuclear weapons," a reference to Japan's status as the only nation to have been bombed with atomic weapons.
Arkin and his co-authors say that the "wall of silence" on such nuclear matters serves both sides well. "For the Japanese nation and Japanese political leaders, the elaborate stratagem maintained the illusion of nuclear purity," the article states. "Japanese political leaders could either deny everything or plead ignorance."
The article, which along with the supporting documentation is being posted today on the publication's Web site (www.thebulletin.org), is the second written by the authors in what has been a protracted effort to fill in the large blanks in the history of America's nuclear weapons programs and military strategy.
In October, the authors reported that the United States had stored 12,000 nuclear weapons and components in at least 23 countries and five American territories during the cold war -- including Morocco, Japan, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
That article was based on detective work and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as the result of a 16-year effort by the co-authors -- Arkin, assisted by Robert S. Norris, a senior research analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in Washington, and William Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and director of its nuclear-history documentation project.
A State Department spokesman and senior Pentagon officials stressed that nuclear deployment policies have significantly changed in the last decade.
"We've drastically reduced the number of nuclear weapons that are deployed overseas to 10 percent of what they were as recently as 10-15 years ago," a Defense Department official said. And as a matter of policy, the United States has not deployed nuclear weapons aboard surface ships under what the official called "normal conditions" since 1991, though it reserves the right to do so.
---
U.S. Reportedly Hid Nuclear Weapons on 2 Japanese Isles
Washington Post Sunday, December 12, 1999; Page A05 By Walter Pincus
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/12/277l-121299-idx.html
In the 1950s, the United States secretly maintained nuclear weapons on two Japanese islands occupied by American military forces as a result of agreements ending World War II, according to an article in Monday's Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
More than 500 miles away from the Japanese mainland, the islands of Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima were used to store American nuclear bombs and missiles for U.S. submarines and bombers in the event of a nuclear war, the article says.
Although the storage of these weapons on American-occupied islands meant the United States technically abided by Japan's non-nuclear principles, "the non-nuclear status of the country was fundamentally undermined," according to William Arkin, one of the authors.
The new disclosures came as a result of further research by the authors, who in an earlier article mistakenly identified Iceland as the "I" country listed among 15 foreign sites in a declassified Pentagon report that identified where U.S. nuclear weapons were stored during the Cold War.
"That 'I' country turned out to be Iwo Jima," said Robert S. Norris, another of the authors. Chichi Jima was the "C" country that they had earlier not been able to identify, he added.
When U.S. military occupation ended in 1951, the two islands stayed under American control with nuclear weapons remaining until the mid-1960s. The weapons were withdrawn from Iwo Jima in 1959 and Chichi Jima in 1965, according to the article. However, when the islands were returned to Japan, a secret 1968 agreement was in effect that granted the United States the right to store weapons there in a military emergency, according to the authors.
Norris said yesterday he expects the article to be "big news in Japan and raise questions about who in the Japanese government knew and agreed to these programs."
Because the Japanese people have been the only ones to experience the impact of nuclear weapons, the governments there have kept up the facade that no weapons would ever be produced, possessed or introduced on their territory.
Over the years, however, there have been public protests about U.S. Navy ships that carry nuclear weapons making port calls and regular stories about American weapons being stored on Okinawa, another U.S.-occupied, Japanese-owned island.
During this period, and continuing today, the U.S. government policy has been neither to confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at any site. Throughout the Cold War, Japanese leaders, starting with Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, maintained that their country would neither develop nuclear weapons nor permit them on its territory.
-------- korea
S.Korea Defense Ministry Says It's Ready for Y2K
By Reuters December 12, 1999 Filed at 1:37 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-defense-yk.html
SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) - South Korea's defense ministry said Sunday that it has identified hundreds of potential Y2K trouble spots in its computer systems but that it was fully prepared to address them.
The ministry will keep a task force of mostly computer experts on alert around the clock from December 31 to January 4 to cope with any problems that might arise, ministry spokesman Kim Jae-hwan said.
The ministry plans to shut down most computer systems during the date changeover to avoid possible problems.
Kim said the ministry has detected 677 Y2K problems in weapons systems and 482 in information systems.
But he said there was no possibility of accidental missile firing or other such mishap.
The Y2K task force will operate until the end of March 2000, he said.
---
S.Korean: Agent Orange Use Our Fault
By PAUL SHIN Associated Press Writer Sunday December 12 2:15 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/19991212/wl/skorea_agent_orange_1.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korea is solely responsible for spraying toxic defoliant Agent Orange along its border with communist North Korea in the late 1960s, the south's defense chief said Sunday.
But Koreans who fell ill after exposure to the chemical may be able to sue American manufacturers for compensation, Cho Sung-tae said.
``In view of the past settlement of similar cases involving the Vietnam War, it may be necessary that victims exposed along the Korean border sue U.S. manufacturers,'' Cho said.
South Korean officials have said 59,000 gallons of Agent Orange and two other defoliants were spread along the Korean border in 1968-69. At least 50,000 soldiers were involved in manual spraying, they said.
The use of the chemicals along the Korean border was not known until a Seoul television station reported it in November, citing declassified U.S. military documents. A South Korean veterans group has so far received 2,000 cases of complaints from former soldiers who said they suffered health effects from the toxic chemicals.
Cho said the U.S. military recommended the use of Agent Orange and other defoliants to clear undergrowth along the Korean demilitarized zone without knowing their negative health effects. South Korea decided to use them because of North Korea's reliance on dense foliage along the border as cover to infiltrate armed agents, he said on a policy debate show on KBS-TV.
``I think it's inappropriate to hold the U.S. responsible for it, because the South Korean government ultimately decided to use the chemical,'' he said.
The U.S. government has disavowed any legal responsibility, saying the use of the chemicals was South Korea's decision.
Agent Orange contains dioxin, a substance that scientists say causes cancer, deformities and birth defects. A law that compensates Korean veterans who suffered the effects of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War will be revised to compensate those exposed along the Korean border as well, Cho said.
About 320,000 South Koreans fought in the Vietnam War - the largest foreign contingent after Americans. Korean veterans' groups estimate that about 32,000 were exposed to Agent Orange.
In an out-of-court settlement in 1984, Agent Orange manufacturers paid Australian, Canadian and New Zealand veterans, but not South Koreans.
-------- ukraine
Chernobyl Plant Reduces Output
By The Associated Press December 11, 1999 Filed at 6:31 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Ukraine-Chernobyl.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- The Chernobyl nuclear power plant malfunctioned, prompting operators to reduce electrical output by 10 percent on Saturday, a Ukrainian news agency reported. No radiation leakage was reported.
Operators found a mechanical defect in one of the eight safety valves in the sole working reactor and switched it off, the UNIAN news agency said. The device was aimed at preventing the pressure inside the reactor from rising excessively.
No further cuts in production were expected, the report said.
The Chernobyl plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident in 1986, was closed for planned repairs from July 1 until Nov. 26. Since it restarted in November, it has experienced several breakdowns.
Western governments and environmental groups have protested against the plant's operation, demanding its immediate closure.
However, the Ukrainian government has said that due to a lack of funds, it cannot honor its previous pledge to close....
-------- Russia
Russian Sub Offered for Sale in U.S. Via the Net
Sunday December 12 1:22 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991212/wr/usa_submarine_2.html
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (Reuters) - For sale to the highest bidder: one Russian submarine (nuclear missiles and torpedoes not included).
That offer is being made on the Internet for submarine U-484, a Cold War relic designated as a Juliett-type sub by NATO. It was once considered a major threat to the United States, but is now a weaponless tourist attraction tied to a pier in St. Petersburg on Florida's west coast.
The 300-foot diesel submarine was built in 1964 and served in the Soviet and Russian Navy until 1994. It carried four nuclear cruise missiles and 22 torpedoes, had a crew of 82 and was designed for launching Soviet strikes on U.S. east coast cities.
After it was decommissioned, the sub was sold to a Finnish company, Oy-Sub Expo, in 1994 and put on display in Helsinki. In 1997 it was leased to a Canadian company, Russian Submarine B.C., which had it towed across the Atlantic Ocean to become a tourist attraction in St. Petersburg.
The sub was supposed to be located at the city's municipal pier but the water was too shallow and it wound up at an out-of-the-way pier.
The sub still attracted more than 50,000 visitors in a little more than a year, but the Canadian company went bankrupt and the ship has been closed for nearly six months.
St. Petersburg officials want it moved as soon as possible and the owner is offering the sub for sale through a Web site at http://www.subexpo.com.
The Web site said U-484 is the largest non-nuclear submarine available for sale and called the ship, ``a genuine tourist attraction'' with space on board for a restaurant or meeting rooms.
Whoever buys the sub will have to move it and settle claims by St. Petersburg of more than $200,000 in overdue port fees.
--------
Hanford study finds minute levels of strontium
Amount of nuclear fuel byproduct in Columbia River
isn't enough to hurt salmon, report says
Spokesman Review December 12, 1999 Associated Press
http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=121299&ID=s718520&cat=
RICHLAND -- The amount of strontium, a nuclear fuel byproduct, seeping into the Columbia River near a defunct Hanford nuclear reservation reactor is too minute to harm salmon that spawn nearby, Hanford researchers have concluded.
Strontium seeps through groundwater and into the river near the H Reactor at levels about 200,000 times less than those found to harm baby salmon, says the study released Thursday by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Similar strontium concentrations are found along another part of the Columbia's shore on the Benton County side of the river at Hanford, PNNL's study found.
The concentrations are roughly the same as they were in 1990-92, when similar sampling and analysis was done of mulberry trees, reed canary grasses and other vegetation along the shore. PNNL collected new samples in June and October to compare with those earlier figures.
Similar tests were conducted this year by the state Department of Health and by Norm Buske, a maverick scientist who contends Hanford officials are understating the risk to salmon. Buske has studied mulberry leaves in riverside areas of Hanford for years. He works with the Government Accountability Project, a Hanford watchdog group.
Buske says the PNNL underestimated the potential threat to newly hatched salmon in its latest tests.
"The public is getting more bland (false) assurances from PNNL," he said.
Fall Chinook that spawn in the Hanford Reach -- the longest undammed stretch in the river basin above Bonneville Dam -- represent the Columbia's largest remaining wild fall Chinook population.
Last month, the Health Department said its tests detected no dangerous levels of strontium in the fruit of mulberry leaves near the H Reactor.
But while strontium concentrations reaching the river are low now, that does not rule out much higher concentrations of contaminants entering the Columbia in the future, Hanford officials concede.
That's because underground contaminants in central Hanford are much more radioactive than those in riverside locations, and are flowing toward the river in concentrations and speeds that scientists do not really understand.
Strontium is a nuclear fuel byproduct that got into cooling water at the H and KE reactors, and later into the ground. The reactors were built early in the Cold War to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Exposure to strontium can cause bone cancer. The highly toxic element takes 38 years to decay to half its original strength.
---
Nuclear Engineer Charged With Stealing Data
New York Times Week in Review December 5-11
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/121299thisweek-review.html
A federal grand jury in New Mexico indicted a nuclear engineer on 59 counts of stealing highly classified nuclear data from secure computers at the Los Alamos weapons lab where he worked. The engineer, Wen Ho Lee, whose case has been furiously debated within the cloistered worlds of counterintelligence, law enforcement and nuclear energy, was not charged with espionage although investigators have unsuccessfully tried to determine whether he passed secrets to China. The crime Lee is charged with is punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison.
-- By DAVID JOHNSTON
---
Officials Describe Loss of Nuclear Secrets at Los Alamos
New York Times December 12, 1999 By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/121299china-spying.html
WASHINGTON -- When a former scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory was indicted on Friday on charges that he had improperly removed American nuclear secrets from the lab, the government outlined a possible compromise of classified information far greater than previously disclosed.
Although he was not charged with espionage, senior government officials now say that Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos scientist arrested Friday and charged in the case, jeopardized virtually every nuclear warhead in the American arsenal through unauthorized computer transfers of many of the country's most sensitive nuclear secrets.
The officials also said much of the information Lee removed was missing because he had copied the data onto portable computer tapes, many of which the Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot find. The officials said they found the methodical and comprehensive way in which the data had been copied particularly alarming.
Although early accounts of the investigation described nuclear secrets being mishandled on a large scale, never before has the complex case been presented in such detail.
The key to the government's case, and what finally persuaded prosecutors to seek an indictment and arrest Lee, is the evidence developed by F.B.I. computer experts to show that Lee copied thousands of pages of nuclear-related documents onto 10 computer tapes in 1993, 1994 and 1997. Only three of those tapes have been recovered.
Officials said it was the discovery that the tapes were missing and the extraordinary breadth of the secret nuclear details on them, more than the initial discovery of Lee's unauthorized transfers of data, that prompted the government to treat the case so seriously.
A federal grand jury in Albuquerque issued a 59-count indictment against Lee, charging him with violations of the Atomic Energy Act and the Foreign Espionage Act. Some of the most serious offenses are punishable by life in prison.
It was previously known that Lee had, mainly in 1993 and 1994, transferred onto an unsecure computer system computer data used to design nuclear weapons, analyze nuclear test results and evaluate weapons materials and the safety characteristics of America's nuclear warheads. But in the indictment, the government said for the first time that Lee had transferred information in a more determined manner and for a far longer time than investigators initially believed.
The government charged that Lee had copied secret nuclear data onto a tape as recently as 1997. Officials initially believed that Lee's unauthorized computer activities had ended by 1995.
For example, the indictment says that in 1997, Lee copied onto a tape the "complete source code for the current version" of the government's most advanced primary weapon design, which is an atomic bomb that acts as the trigger to explode a hydrogen bomb.
Evidence about the processes Lee used to transfer the material is also being used by the government to argue that his actions were not accidental or intended to protect the information, as he has asserted. According to the indictment and government officials, as Lee moved the material from the classified network to an open system, he deleted classification markings identifying it as secret. After they were in the open system, he copied them onto tapes on the office computer of another employee.
Lee is being held without bail pending a hearing on Monday.
But the government is not saying Lee committed espionage by giving the classified information to another country or person.
In fact, while Lee's arrest was the culmination of an F.B.I. investigation into his computer activities that began in March, the broader espionage inquiry that first brought Lee to the government's attention is continuing at a much slower pace.
The government stumbled onto evidence of Lee's unauthorized computer transfers because he was under investigation in connection with an inquiry into evidence that China may have stolen secret data related to America's most advanced nuclear warhead, the W-88, which was designed at Los Alamos.
That investigation began in early 1995 by the Department of Energy, which owns the national weapons labs, and the F.B.I. The investigation started after American intelligence received sensitive information about a 1992 Chinese test of an advanced nuclear warhead that appeared to be modeled after an American weapon. Subsequently, the Central Intelligence Agency received a Chinese government document that included secret data about the W-88, indicating that the Chinese had obtained classified information from the American nuclear program.
By 1996, when the F.B.I. opened a formal criminal investigation, Lee had emerged as the prime suspect as the source of the leak.
But after the case became public in March, a national furor erupted over the way the government had handled the investigation, leading to a series of reviews of the actions of officials at the F.B.I. and the Energy and Justice departments.
By September, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had determined that the initial administrative inquiry by the Energy Department and the F.B.I. that began the investigation had been flawed and that investigators had prematurely focused on Lee.
Officials determined that the secret data about the W-88 included in the Chinese government document handed over to the C.I.A. in 1995 did not necessarily come from Los Alamos.
The Chinese document was dated 1988, and by that time the classified information on the W-88 included in the document might have been available at other laboratories or federal agencies, or even at defense contractors.
So the F.B.I. went back to square one on the W-88 case this fall, broadening its investigation in an effort to account for how the information about the warhead was disseminated through the government and its contractors. On Friday, a senior government official said that renewed inquiry is continuing on a separate track from the criminal case pending against Lee. He said Lee's indictment "does not answer the original referral from the Department of Energy on the W-88."
The official added that the Chinese intelligence service tends to rely on many sources.
The Lee case "could be one source, or it may have nothing to do with it," he said.
--------us nuc weapons
THEN AND NOW / REFLECTIONS ON THE MILLENNIUM
New Directions in the March of Science
New York Times December 12, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/99/12/12/editorial/12sun3.html
Here at the threshold of a new millennium, the pace of scientific and technological advance seems overwhelming. Computers are obsolescent the moment we buy them. New discoveries at the farthest reaches of the universe leave us awestruck. Scientists are racing to delineate the entire human genome.
Our predecessors felt just as breathless at the end of the last century, with the Industrial Revolution in full throttle. But that was just a warm-up. The hallmark of this century -- from splitting the atom to cracking the genetic code -- has been a faster advance over a wider range of activities than ever before in history. The chief questions now are whether science can continue its forward march or is losing momentum, and whether its products will be harnessed for good or evil.
Over the past 500 years, science has emerged as a dominant intellectual force, displacing religion and philosophy as the chief explanation of the natural world. It radically altered humanity's view of its place in the universe, and brought a cascade of technological marvels, not to mention potential doom.
Its iconic achievements are mileposts of the millennium. They include Copernicus's discovery that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the cosmos; Galileo's invention of the modern scientific method, in which hypotheses are stated and tested by experiment to determine their validity; Newton's discovery that the same force that caused an apple to fall also held the planets in their orbits; and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
In the 20th century, science brought an enormous expansion of scale and theories so esoteric they seem downright freakish. Astronomers were amazed to discover literally billions and billions of galaxies racing apart at high speed in a universe so large it took a Carl Sagan to intone its dimensions. Never had the Earth, once the center of the universe, seemed such an inconspicuous speck.
Physics experienced one major revolution when Einstein described a four-dimensional universe in which gravity was explained as a warping of space-time geometry, then another when quantum mechanics described a strange subatomic world in which measurements are uncertain and electrons take "quantum leaps" from one orbit to another without traversing the space between. At a more human level, the great breakthrough was the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of the structure of DNA, opening the way for the genetic engineering revolution that dominates today's headlines.
Technology -- the production of useful artifacts -- has progressed with equally spectacular rapidity over the past century, propelled in part by the technical demands of the two world wars. For the first time in history, science in the advanced countries became an organized, well-financed function of the state and of giant corporations, medical centers and universities.
Flying machines, which got off the ground with a 120-foot flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, had by the end of the century carried humans to the moon. Medicine was revolutionized by the discovery of antibiotics. Electronic communications leapt from the wireless telegraph to radio to television to the Internet. Agricultural productivity soared with the help of mechanization and chemistry. And on the military front, the power of weaponry became truly stupendous, culminating in nuclear warheads mated to intercontinental missiles with enough destructive power, en masse, to obliterate a nation.
As with any human story, we are in suspense as to the next turn. In a famously wrong pronouncement back in 1899, the head of the United States Patent Office suggested that everything important had already been discovered. Now we are hearing some of the same talk, with such books as "The End of Science" suggesting that the discipline is reaching the point of diminishing returns. The warring metaphors are whether science is like a vast continent whose major outlines and features have already been mapped, with only the details remaining to be filled in, or whether it is more like a river, rushing ever onward. Whichever it is, there will be plenty to do over the next century as scientists look for genetically designed medical treatments and a deeper understanding of how the brain and mind work.
Indeed, if the past century has been the age of physics, the next will probably be the age of biology. One can only hope that the emphasis will be different. The most transforming technology emerging from the atomic era was the thermonuclear bomb, with peaceful applications of nuclear energy a distant second. The challenge for biology will be to reverse the priorities -- to concentrate on human welfare and quell the urge to produce demonic germ weapons.
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Human Guinea Pigs
A journalist chronicles America's secret medical experiments
New York Times December 12, 1999 By MICHAEL SHERRY
http://www10.nytimes.com/books/99/12/12/reviews/991212.12sherryt.html
You must realize,'' one scientist said of an American medical official, that ''some people are patriotic enough to lie.'' In her expansive and valuable account of secret medical experiments in the cold war, Eileen Welsome finds many lies, and much else. From the early 1940's into the 60's, the armed forces, the Atomic Energy Commission and collaborating universities and hospitals administered nuclear experiments to thousands of unsuspecting or poorly informed Americans -- some of them unharmed, others badly damaged and few helped. These experiments included 18 subjects injected with traces of plutonium and several hundred pregnant women given drinks of radioactive iron at a university clinic. And since the nuclear weapons program was -- and is -- in one sense a giant medical and ecological experiment, Welsome's coverage extends to others: servicemen contaminated when ordered aboard warships blasted in nuclear tests or into fresh atomic test sites in Nevada and uranium miners working in unventilated facilities, among others. Experiments of opportunity also arose when a scientist or worker was accidentally contaminated, then treated like a guinea pig.
There was little system to all this; it was more a grab bag of opportunities seized as one agency or another perceived some need, in an era when lavish federal grants ''spawned an orgy of human experimentation in almost every medical field.'' Some officials worried about specific physiological effects of nuclear weapons or of materials and processes that went into them. Others had grander goals: shown pictures of American G.I.'s marching through nuclear test sites, ''the nation's troops and 'Mr. and Mrs. America' would see that their foreboding about nuclear weapons was nonsense.'' Thus many experiments displayed the haphazard, inadvertent quality that often characterizes aggressive American actions -- no one intended harm. For the scientists, doctors and military officials involved, the goodness of their intentions, or at least the demands of national security, absolved them from responsibility, while their immense authority, their genuine hopes for nuclear medicine and their bureaucratic confusion and secrecy all shielded them from scrutiny.
Welsome won't let the experimenters off the hook, although she appreciates the pressures under which they operated. She finds no ''vast conspiracy,'' but something perhaps more insidious -- a culture of ''deception and denial'' accepted by ''scientists and bureaucrats who were inducted into the weapons program at a time of national urgency and never abandoned their belief that nuclear war was imminent.'' She shows they often violated ethical standards prevailing in the 1940's. Even if experimenters rarely intended harm to their subjects, it's clear they rarely intended good either; therapeutic benefits were at best incidental to experiments undertaken for military purposes. Patients' informed consent, though by the 50's a well-understood condition for experimentation, was either ignored or handled perfunctorily. Secrecy and lying proved necessary to keep a lid on it all.
The lid jiggled in the 70's and blew off in the 90's, thanks in part to Welsome's early work as an investigative reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune, which won her a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She celebrates efforts by Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary to halt weapons testing and dismantle the ''culture of secrecy'' in the nuclear establishment, whose defenders despised her. O'Leary's efforts led President Clinton in 1994 to appoint an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which uncovered a rich record but then, to Welsome's frustration, ''declared no one was harmed, no one was to blame and no one needed medical monitoring.'' Clinton, not known for courageous steps, overcame the panel's reticence, declaring some of the experiments ''unethical, not only by today's standards, but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted.'' Even then, victims had to go to court to secure compensation. Despite some tiresome journalistic cliches and a confusing way with chronology, Welsome tells this sprawling, technically complex story in an engaged, jargon-free fashion.
Protesting injustices, she does not measure their relative gravity. She is a journalist uncovering a story, not an ethicist examining comparative injustices. Insofar as radiation experiments were a synecdoche for the American effort in the cold war, does accountability rank higher for them than for other injustices committed in its name? Are the atomic injustices mitigated by the more barbarous practices featured in the Soviet nuclear program? Are 50-year-old injustices more important than continuing ones like bad medical care for many Americans or civilians abroad harmed by American bombing? Should state injustices distract us from corporate malpractice?
Some lawyers, ethicists and political activists will respond that justice is no zero-sum game: its pursuit in one arena stimulates its pursuit in others and vice versa. That expansive view perhaps builds on a model of social change in the 50's and 60's, when the civil rights campaign helped galvanize others. It's doubtful that this model holds in the more cacophonous, decentered and sensationalized culture of the 90's. As Welsome notes, news of the O. J. Simpson murder trial verdict came two hours after -- and eclipsed -- Clinton's public apology for unethical experiments, a fate impossible to imagine for a major presidential announcement before the cold war's end.
Clinton got no reward, and, as with his other challenges to the cold war past -- regarding defense budgets and gays in the military, for example -- he did not pursue this one long. Neither his own caution nor the competitive claims of justice wholly account for his retreat. He inherited the murky American triumphalism that set in after the cold war, in which justice was to be imposed only on losers: scholars rushed to newly opened Soviet archives while politicians shut down the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibition; movies like ''Saving Private Ryan'' asked Americans to remember the stark but comforting moral stakes of World War II, not the cold war's messy complexities. Welsome tells the engrossing story of a partial exception to that pattern. It seems unlikely that a bolder committee report or a delayed O. J. verdict would have made that exception last longer in our political memory.
Michael Sherry, who teaches history at Northwestern University, is the author of ''In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930's.''
---
The Plutonium Files America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
By EILEEN WELSOME Dial Books New York Times EXCERPT
http://www10.nytimes.com/books/first/w/welsome-plutonium.html
The Acid Taste of Plutonium
The accident occurred on August 1, 1944, a morning like any other in Los Alamos: hot, dry, the sky an indigo bowl over the sprawl of wooden buildings and barbed-wire fences that constituted the core of the Manhattan Project. At seven thousand feet, the New Mexico air smelled of sun, pines, a trace of frost. Occasionally the scent of dust spiraled up from the desert, where temperatures hovered around 100 degrees.
In twelve months, two atomic bombs would be dropped on Japan, and the secret work being carried out in the wooden buildings would be revealed to the world. On the morning of the accident, the atomic bomb had progressed far beyond mathematical theories but was still an unproven weapon. Plutonium, a silvery metal discovered about four years earlier, was one of the key elements that would transform the theories into a fireball.
In Room D-119, a cheerful young chemist named Don Mastick was standing over a sink chatting with his laboratory partner, Arthur Wahl, a chemist not much older than himself and one of the four scientists from the University of California at Berkeley who had discovered plutonium. Mastick was just twenty-three years old, a "bushy-tailed kid," as he would later describe himself, with short blond hair and an alert, friendly face. He had been one of Berkeley's most promising chemistry graduates and was just about to enlist in the Navy when J. Robert Oppenheimer approached him and asked if he would like to join the scientific team being assembled in Los Alamos, the most secret site in the vast network of laboratories and factories established to build the bomb.
Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist, was already a legend on the Berkeley campus, and Mastick was thrilled at the idea of working with him. When he arrived in Los Alamos in the spring of 1943, Oppenheimer had designated him the lab's ultra microchemist. Working with amounts of plutonium that were too small to be seen with the naked eye, he studied the chemical reactions of the new material under a microscope. His glass test tubes were no bigger than sewing needles and his measuring instruments looked like a child's toys. Even his laboratory was small: a claustrophobic box at the end of a hallway, ten feet wide and twelve feet long.
In Mastick's hand that day was a small vial containing ten milligrams of plutonium-an amount so small it would have fit on the head of a pin. But it was far more plutonium than Los Alamos had had to work with only a year before. In fact, the radioactive material was still so scarce that a special crew had been assembled whose only job was to recover the material from accidents and completed experiments and then repurify it through chemical processes so it could be used again. The crew developed a flow chart to help separate plutonium from every other element in the Periodic Table. "They were prepared to tear up the floor and extract the plutonium, if necessary. They would even dissolve a bicycle. I mean, plutonium [was] so valuable that they went to great extremes to recover everything," physician Louis Hempelmann recalled decades later.
Inevitably some of the radioactive molecules seeped out into the laboratory, spread by a starched sleeve, the scuff of boots, even the dust that blew in from the desert. Nervous and preoccupied with their efforts to construct a workable bomb, Oppenheimer and his colleagues viewed the spreading contamination with consternation. Their concerns were twofold: They didn't want to lose any material, and they were just beginning to understand its potential hazards. Joseph Kennedy, another member of the Berkeley team who had discovered plutonium, acknowledged that it was "not pleasant" to think that unaccounted-for plutonium was floating around the lab. On the day of this particular accident-which would be the most serious of any thus far-it was not the lost plutonium that would be the problem. It was the plutonium in Mastick's vial.
A purplish-color liquid that gave off an eerie, animallike warmth when concentrated in larger amounts, the plutonium in the vial had undergone an unanticipated transformation overnight. Some of the liquid had been converted into gas and was pushing against the walls of the bottle. Other molecules were tunneling into the sides of the glass itself.
Unaware of the small bomb he was holding, Mastick snapped the slender neck of the vial. It made a small, popping sound in the quiet laboratory. Instantly the material spewed out of the bottle and onto the wall in front of him. Some of the solution ricocheted back into his mouth, flooding his lips and tongue with a metallic taste.
Not overly alarmed, Mastick replaced the vial in its wooden container. Then he trotted across the hard-packed ground of the technical area to knock on the door of Dr. Hempelmann's first-aid station. He had just swallowed a significant amount of the world's supply of plutonium. "I could taste the acid so I knew perfectly well I had a little bit of plutonium in my mouth," he said in an interview in 1995.
Louis Hempelmann's office was just a few minutes' walk from D Building, where Mastick worked. With its "deluge shower baths" and clothes-changing rooms, D Building was one of the most elaborately ventilated and costly structures at Los Alamos. Except for the forest of metal pipes protruding from the roof, it looked no different from the other green clapboard structures in the technical area.
Hempelmann was the medical doctor in charge of protecting technical personnel on the bomb project from "unusual hazards," and he reported directly to J. Robert Oppenheimer. With his long, narrow face and wide jaw, Hempelmann wasn't handsome, but there was something refined and pleasing about his appearance. He was the son and grandson of doctors and a fine physician in his own right, although he was known to grow queasy at the sight of blood. ("Louie did his first sternal puncture on me and he almost fainted. He's one of those doctors that can't stand the sight of blood-he should have been a psychologist or something," said Harold Agnew, one in a line of laboratory directors who succeeded Oppenheimer.)
Taking great pains to keep his long face expressionless, Hempelmann listened to Mastick's account of what had happened and then left the room for a moment in order to make a frantic phone call to Colonel Stafford Warren, the affable medical director of the Manhattan Project. Hempelmann often turned to Warren, who was nearly two decades older, for advice and reassurance. In his late forties when he was commissioned as an Army colonel, Warren was a big man, well over six feet tall, who exuded a breezy confidence. Unlike many of the scientists on the bomb project, who refused to join the armed forces and chafed under military control, Warren loved being in the Army. He liked the rough feel of his starched uniform, the silver eagles on his collar, the .45 revolver tucked in a holster on his belt.
Speaking on a secure telephone line from his office at the Manhattan Project's headquarters in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Warren tried to calm Hempelmann down. He thought about the accident for a moment and then suggested that the young doctor try using a mouthwash and expectorant to remove the plutonium from the chemist's mouth. Hempelmann hung up and hurried back to the examining room where he prepared two mixtures. The first was a sodium citrate solution that would chemically combine with the plutonium in Mastick's mouth to form a soluble liquid; the second was a bicarbonate rinse that would render the material insoluble again.
Mastick swished the solutions around in his mouth and then spit them into a beaker. The first mouthful contained almost one-half microgram of plutonium. A microgram of plutonium, which is a millionth of a gram, was considered in 1945 to be the maximum amount of plutonium that could be retained in the human body without causing harm. Eleven more times at fifteen-minute intervals Mastick swished the two solutions around in his mouth and then spit them into the beaker.
After the accident, Mastick's breath was so hot that he could stand six feet away and blow the needles on the radiation monitors off scale. His urine contained detectable plutonium for many years. In one of several interviews Mastick said that he was undoubtedly still excreting "a few atoms" of plutonium but had suffered no ill effects.
When the mouth washings finally were finished, Hempelmann ordered the young man to lie down on a cot. Then he pumped out his stomach several times. Carefully he transferred the stomach liquids into a tall beaker. The plutonium would have to be chemically separated from the organic matter in Mastick's stomach and mouth so it could be reused in future experiments. No scientist at the lab had ever undertaken such a task.
Hempelmann gave the young chemist a couple of breakfast waffles for his empty stomach and some Sippy alkaline powders to be taken during the day. Then he turned and handed him the four-liter beaker of murky liquid.
Go, he said, retrieve the plutonium.
Mastick returned to his lab with the beaker and opened his textbooks. It took a "little rapid-fire research," as he put it, to figure out how to separate the plutonium from the organic matter. But he didn't flinch from the task, despite the ordeal he had just been through. "Since I was the plutonium chemist at that point, I was the logical choice to recover it." From Mastick's perspective, the mood in which all these events took place was calm, deliberate, and "almost humorous." But other people did not feel nearly so relaxed about what had occurred.
The day after the accident, Hempelmann sat down and wrote Stafford Warren a thank-you note. "I was sorry to bother you but was anxious to have your help and moral support. In retrospect, I think that the chances of the fellow's having swallowed a dangerous amount of material are slight." Hempelmann told Warren that he believed about ten micrograms of plutonium had entered Mastick's mouth. The mouth washings had removed all but one microgram, an infinitesimal but nevertheless hazardous amount. More important, Hempelmann thought the chemist had not inhaled any plutonium. At that time scientists knew that plutonium was extremely hazardous if it was breathed in and deposited in lung tissue. But they also were discovering that the radioactive material was not readily absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract and that it could not penetrate beyond the outer layer of human skin. Thus, most of the microgram of plutonium in Mastick's mouth undoubtedly would have passed through his digestive system and out of his body without being absorbed.
A catastrophe had been avoided, but the accident was a vivid reminder of the invisible dangers that scientists and workers were confronted with at "Site Y," the code name for Los Alamos. The responsibilities seemed overwhelming to Hempelmann, who was only twenty-nine years old and a neophyte when it came to understanding radiation. He had been working with radioactive materials for three years. As for plutonium, he had only about six months of hands-on experience. "There were all sorts of problems," he admitted years later, "which I just couldn't handle because of limited experience."
-------- us nuc other
Silkwood death still a mystery
Bergen Record Sunday, December 12, 1999 By RON JENKINS The Associated Press
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/silkwood199912127.htm
CRESCENT, Okla. -- Karen Silkwood died in a mystery-shrouded car crash 25 years ago last month, a tragic end to events that transformed her into a heroine to anti-nuclear activists and dumbfounded residents of this small town.
"We're country folks and didn't realize all the hullabaloo was going on," recalls 67-year-old Phil Yenzer of the plutonium contamination controversy at the nearby Cimarron Facility, where Silkwood was a lab technician.
Although the Nov. 13 anniversary of Silkwood's death went largely unnoticed in Crescent, many people retain vivid memories of the case and "all the myths that grew up around it," said Police Chief Jack Harris.
"I think her death has been milked for about everything people can get out of it," Harris said recently at the tiny Crescent Police Station.
Yenzer, who now operates a downtown antique store, remembers the slightly built Silkwood shopping in his grocery store.
Like Yenzer, many merchants and townspeople in the town of 1,600, gave little thought at the time to the contamination threat at the now-closed Kerr-McGee Corp. plutonium processing plant.
"We were never scared," Yenzer said. "We were just tickled to death that the plant was there and some people had jobs."
Silkwood, a 28-year-old mother and environment activist, was killed when her car careened into a culvert on a highway south of town on Nov. 13, 1974.
She was on her way to see a New York Times reporter, purportedly carrying documents showing lax security at the plant. No documents were recovered.
Her death was depicted in a movie starring Meryl Streep and has been the subject of several books.
Through the years, reporters and investigators have resurrected Silkwood's memory in this farming and ranching community, but the case isn't the subject of day-to-day conversation.
Service station employee Travis Holliday, 23, grew up in Crescent but knew nothing of Karen Silkwood until he was a teenager and happened to catch the 1983 movie, "Silkwood," on television.
Now, he occasionally hears talk, such as speculation that "somebody became upset with her and ran her off the road. But I don't know anything. It's just talk."
Silkwood had become contaminated by plutonium prior to the accident. Her Edmond apartment also was found to be contaminated.
The woman's union and environmental activism pitted her against Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee Corp., whose subsidiary ran the plutonium processing plant.
Harris worked in Guthrie at the time of the car accident, but the officer who made the initial investigation told him "it was pretty evident that she had gone to sleep."
Official police reports declared it a single-car accident and a medical examiner's autopsy showed a sedative in her body.
But her supporters, attorneys, and various private investigators have contended she was bumped off the road by another vehicle.
"I think the case has been used for different people's agendas," Harris said.
While saying he did not know whether there were security problems at Cimarron, Harris said a friend that worked there resented Silkwood's activities because "it was the beginning of the end of the plant."
Bill Silkwood, father of Karen Silkwood, filed a $71 million lawsuit against Kerr-McGee on behalf of her three small children. A jury found Kerr-McGee had a responsibility in the woman's contamination and awarded a $10.5 million judgment that was eventually reduced to $1.38 million.
Lead attorney Gerald Spence said the case was important in the quest for safety in a nuclear age.
Officials of Kerr-McGee have repeatedly pointed out that the settlement with the Silkwood estate was not connected to her accident and death.
Last week, spokeswoman Debbie Schramm said Kerr-McGee had nothing futher to say about the case.
The Cimarron site is still being decontaminated and cleaned up under supervision of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency.
---
Streep To Sing Tribute to Silkwood
Associated Press December 12, 1999 Filed at 12:48 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/e/AP-Meryl-Streep.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Meryl Streep, singing? On stage?
The movie star known for intense immersion in her on-screen roles is scheduled to sing ``Amazing Grace'' Friday during a 25th anniversary commemoration of the death of Karen Silkwood.
Ms. Streep played the title role in the 1983 movie, ``Silkwood,'' and sang ``Amazing Grace'' in the film.
``Karen Silkwood touched all of our lives,'' said Ms. Streep in a letter to other participants in the tribute. ``She showed incredible bravery against impossible odds, and those of us who knew her through her union work or from the portrayal of her struggle in the film 'Silkwood' will always be moved by her courage.''
Ms. Silkwood worked in a lab at a now-closed Kerr-McGee Corp. plutonium processing plant in Oklahoma. An environmental and union activist, she was on her way to see a New York Times reporter when her car careened off a highway Nov. 13, 1974. She died in the crash.
An autopsy showed she was contaminated with plutonium prior to the accident. Police declared it a single-car accident but her supporters contend she was bumped off the road by another car.
Proceeds from the tribute -- which also features appearances by folk singer Toshi Reagon, the film's director Mike Nichols and Ms. Silkwood's father Bill -- benefit the Just Health Care Campaign, a union-sponsored health-care reform program.
-------- wto activists
Seattle Protesters Shun Consumption
Associated Press December 12, 1999 Filed at 4:06 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Anarchist-Vision.html
EUGENE, Ore. (AP) -- On a quiet street in Eugene's oldest and funkiest neighborhood, a mural on the side of an art gallery expresses the idyllic world vision of many of the anarchists who took part in the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization.
It is a far cry from the scenes of confrontation and violence that included black-clad youths jumping through the broken windows of a Seattle Starbucks.
Instead, the mural reflects a longing for a world where people live in small villages and grow their own food without global corporations running their lives, where the sun rises on a village of small huts and terraced gardens while sunset falls on an abandoned sawmill and a hillside covered with stumps.
In the foreground, a nude woman reclining in a forest uses a quill pen to mark a map of radioactive hazard sites. Another woman, one breast lost to cancer, strings webbing on a snowshoe.
``The goal is a sustainable planet,'' said Tim Ream, a veteran of a 75-day hunger strike to protest logging. ``We have species dying off at the greatest rate since mammals came on Earth, and it's happening because of Western consumption.
``What we need is to spread power back to small communities and individuals.''
The mural shows ``the civilized world being eaten up in a natural way,'' says anarchist Tim Lewis.
Lewis was in the middle of the Seattle melee, which occurred the week after Thanksgiving. He videotaped clashes between demonstrators and police as part of his CopWatch project.
Eugene's anarchists acknowledge that they were in Seattle in force, but point out that only a few of the hundreds arrested actually had Eugene addresses and that anarchists from lots of other places took part.
In fact, the city of 150,000 seems more concerned with the success of the University of Oregon football team and with being politically correct.
Still, while anarchism by its nature is not organized, it has enough of a presence in Eugene to spawn its own institutions in the city's old Whiteaker neighborhood. The Free School offers classes on subjects from anarchy to vegetarian cooking. Cafe Anarchista hands out free coffee and books from a handcart. Food Not Bombs cooks veggan meals for the homeless.
Eugene's anarchists have been branded rabble-rousers since a June 18 protest march in Eugene turned into a riot.
And even before that, local anarchist John Zerzan's books and pamphlets calling for a return to the primitive were being compared to the anti-technology manifesto of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whom Zerzan visited in jail.
A quiet unassuming man, Zerzan, 56, lives in a low-income housing co-op just a short walk from the mural on the side of the Jawbreaker art gallery. He gets around on an old bicycle rather a car.
Despite a master's degree in history, he makes his living baby-sitting, so he can have more time to write -- with pen on paper at a desk made from an old door.
``Classical anarchism, 19th century anarchism, concentrated on the state -- abolish the state, smash the state,'' said Zerzan ``I think there are much more pervasive and deep-seated forms of domination than just government. We are looking at not only capital and how deep that relationship is, but technology and even civilization.
``Look at what is going on. Everybody is on antidepressants. The teen-age suicide rate has tripled in the last 35 years. If things were going along OK, this wouldn't make any sense to start thinking there were some deep-seated stuff that needs to be re-examined. Sadly enough, that isn't it.''
James Johnston, co-director of the Cascadia Wildlands Project, an environmental group and an organizer for the International Workers of the World, sees a lot of similarities between the Eugene anarchists and the Wobblies who rode the rails trying to unionize Northwest logging camps in the early 1900s.
``People feel angry and alienated, unable to achieve change through conventional means,'' Johnston said. ``Peaceful protest just doesn't seem to work. So people are taking the Wild West approach, which is breaking windows, throwing rocks and sabotage.
``The root cause and solution to it is everything is too big and everything needs to be smaller.''
At a coffee house called Out of the Fog, an anarchist hangout where passing trains periodically drown out conversation, Shelley Cater acknowledges that the world anarchists want is a distant hope.
``I don't know if we can go back to the hunter-gatherer awareness with the global awareness we have,'' she said. ``It's really hard to conceive of a world without governments, without corporations.'
---
Washington Post
Late on the final afternoon of the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle, with hope for an agreement slipping away, chief American trade negotiator Charlene Barshefsky asked her Canadian counterpart, Pierre Pettigrew, to take the chair so she could call the White House. As he agreed to run the meeting, Pettigrew recalled later, a colleague said: "Well, you may be like the orchestra conductor on board the Titanic." Sunday, December 12, 1999; Page A40
A Seattle Primer: How Not to Hold WTO Talks By Robert G. Kaiser and John Burgess Washington Post Staff Writers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/12/202l-121299-idx.html
Just eight days before, Barshefsky had made a bold prediction: The Seattle talks would succeed in launching a new round of negotiations to further open global commerce, despite signs of disagreement in the preparatory rounds. "You see, everyone knows that failure is not an option."
But hours after that Titanic quip, an exhausted Barshefsky had to announce that failure in Seattle was a reality. A tumultuous week of protests and tear gas on the streets and all-night negotiations and recriminations at the conference had produced nothing.
The outcome in Seattle was quickly dubbed a fiasco, a debacle, a disaster for free trade--or a stunning victory by the activists who had come to Seattle to frustrate the negotiations. A week later American and foreign officials involved in the negotiations who were interviewed for this article agreed on two explanations for the failure: inadequate planning, and irresolvable political conflict.
The conflicts showed up in Seattle as a kind of systemic overload. As Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, put it, the meeting was a case of "too many plugs and too few outlets"--an overload that the WTO just couldn't handle.
The planning failure was most often blamed on the Clinton administration. "There was a colossal failure to reduce the number of decisions the ministers had to make to a manageable number" before Seattle, said Calman Cohen, director of a business coalition called the Emergency Committee for American Trade. He and others said the gathering of trade ministers should have been postponed until the number of outstanding issues could be reduced.
Secretary of Commerce William Daley seemed to agree, saying in an interview last week that he was pessimistic from the beginning. "The fact that nothing was pre-cooked . . . was quite a signal," he said, referring to the absence of agreements among the key players, especially at a pre-Seattle negotiation in Geneva that had broken down in failure.
Barshefsky, fresh from the Nov. 15 triumph of talks on China's entry into the WTO, had dismissed the breakdown in Geneva: "I'm not in the least bit concerned."
Colleagues say that confidence is typical of Barshefsky, who has a reputation as a first-class trade lawyer and hard-nosed negotiator, but not as an accomplished politician. And according to numerous participants, politics played a critical role in Seattle.
Many foreign delegates cited American politics, particularly Clinton's decision to embrace the addition of labor and environmental standards to world trade rules. "I think President Clinton was playing to his domestic constituency," said Costa Rica's foreign trade minister, Samuel Guzowski.
But other nations had political concerns of their own. The European Union and Japan, for example, had to be seen as protecting their farmers from U.S. demands to eliminate agricultural subsidies. In fact, EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy disappeared for six hours during the crucial last day's discussions, only to return and signal that there could be no deal on agriculture, according to Barshefsky.
A look back at the debacle in Seattle and the events leading to it shows how many strands of history, economics, politics and public opinion converged to create an impasse that caused such embarrassment for Seattle and the Clinton administration.
The mood was still hopeful when trade ministers from 20 nations gathered in late October in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, to plan for Seattle. Gathered in a wood-paneled room of the luxurious Beau-Rivage Palace hotel, they used words such as "flexibility" to describe their approach. But at the end of the meeting, in the words of Sergio Marchi, Canada's ambassador to the WTO, "the flexibility . . . never really arrived."
Some American officials, particularly in the Commerce Department, had shied away from the idea of launching a big new round of trade liberalization negotiations, but the European Union insisted that this was necessary.
The Europeans wanted big negotiations on many issues in hopes of being able to trade concessions on agriculture (the European Union's policy of propping up farmers and agricultural exports is an anathema to free traders) for benefits they could trumpet to sell an overall deal to member governments. The Europeans eventually persuaded the United States to go along.
Though Barshefsky insisted in an interview that numerous understandings had been reached among the participating countries over the past year and a half, other delegations saw it differently. Hidehiro Konno, a senior Japanese trade official, recalled, for instance, "There was no consensus even on the concept of a new round." Yet WTO rules require that all agreements be reached by consensus.
The easy trade issues have already been resolved. Tariffs are already low, world trade is booming, once-closed markets are open. The remaining barriers are often subtle and deeply rooted in local politics.
The Japanese and Europeans, for example, elaborately protect their farmers, in part by denying access to foreign agricultural products. (The United States also gives extensive support to farmers, but rarely with trade restrictions.) The United States protects vulnerable industries, particularly textiles, with politically popular laws designed to prevent foreigners from undercutting American producers in the U.S. market.
After Lausanne the unresolved issues moved back to WTO headquarters in Geneva, where lower-level experts tried to make progress. They failed, and though Barshefsky dismissed this breakdown as insignificant, Lamy, the European trade commissioner, was concerned: "I fear the atmosphere might be such that we will not get to the starting blocks. . . . We might not leave Seattle with a new round."
The Japanese said last week that they thought the early signals were ominous. "It was very odd," said Konno. "The first moment we started to think of the possibility of disaster was very early, when we found out that there was no quad meeting planned by the United States." The "quad"--the United States, Japan, the European Union and Canada--had a history of plotting strategy in advance for big trade meetings, Konno said. Konno expressed surprise that a quad meeting wasn't held just before the talks were scheduled to begin. U.S. officials said other nations had scheduling conflicts.
Another complication was the leadership of the WTO. Michael Moore of New Zealand had been installed as director general in September; his key aides didn't take their places until later in the fall. Moore's selection followed months of haggling that largely paralyzed the organization, according to many officials. The United States played a heavy-handed role in Moore's selection that angered some other countries.
A more telling warning of what was in store in Seattle was probably the 200 passages enclosed in brackets in the draft 32-page text the WTO staff had prepared for the meeting in Lausanne. The brackets indicated language that had not been agreed to.
The first interested parties to reach Seattle were not delegates to the WTO, but the organizers of the protests that became the visible symbol of Seattle. Michael Dolan, coordinator of many of the protesters, set up shop early this year in an office on Fourth Street.
Dolan's operation grew out of a movement born seven years earlier, in Munich at the July 1992 meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized nations. There, a group of international activists including Dolan's boss, Lori Wallach, a trade lawyer, launched an effort to bring "sunshine" to the secretive process of negotiating international trade agreements. Wallach and Dolan work for Public Citizen, a self-described consumer lobby founded by Ralph Nader.
In an interview Wallach described a patient effort to build activist organizations in 40 countries, all motivated by the desire to show public opinion and governments that the global economic order was eroding nations' sovereignty and their citizens' freedoms. The idea was to encourage citizens to hold their trade negotiators accountable in a new way.
To do so, the groups looked for "Achilles' heels," Wallach said, sensitive issues that would create controversy and thus reduce the chances for agreement in new trade talks. For example, the European Union, she said, had such a weak spot on the issue of genetically modified foodstuffs, products that the Americans wanted the WTO to bless, but that European public opinion fervently opposed.
Wallach, Dolan and their allies promised to bring tens of thousands of protesters to Seattle. That prospect had prompted the city to make plans for what would happen outside the WTO, preparations that proved inadequate.
Seattle's political leaders, led by Mayor Paul Schell, had decided to welcome the protesters and encourage vigorous debate on world trade. (Clinton welcomed them also.) The city wasn't opposed to the protesters' plans to disrupt the city by, for example, chaining themselves together peacefully.
According to Sgt. J.D. Miller, a 15-year veteran of the Seattle police force, many members of the force knew they weren't ready. "We knew we would be in trouble" during the WTO meeting, he said in an interview last week. "There was very little doubt, because the intelligence about who was coming, and what they had the potential to do, was well known. It's embarrassing."
But Sgt. Miller said several police officers openly voiced suspicion that those "peaceful" protests could be a distraction. Before the protest, he said that a number of officers had discussed the warnings on several World Wide Web sites linked to self-proclaimed anarchists who also planned to disrupt Seattle that Tuesday would be a kind of D-Day of demonstrations. "The phrase people here kept seeing among those groups on the Internet was, 'Save it for Tuesday.' "
The Seattle police and the mayor's office had conferred beforehand with the FBI and the Secret Service, discussing what were called tabletop scenarios--various contingencies that might arise, and responses to them.
But when the discussion got to possible rioting, according to Thomas J. Pickard, deputy director of the FBI, "they said things like, 'It'll never get to that stage.' "
Delegates who stepped out of their hotels Tuesday morning, the first day of the conference, with freshly issued ID badges around their necks, soon found out otherwise. By 8:30 a.m., throngs of chanting demonstrators had taken control of the streets of downtown Seattle. With arms linked, they formed tight human chains to block all entrances to the convention center where the meeting would take place.
Downtown's usual din of traffic was banished, replaced by the beating of protesters' drums and a lone trombone's wail, by chants and '60s rock tunes at peak volumes. Riot police marched in tight phalanxes, slapping their nightsticks against the sides of their boots. The sound was like massed jackboots on pavement.
Most protesters left property alone. But a cadre of young people, many dressed in black and wearing ski masks or bandanas to hide their faces, had clearly come prepared to commit mayhem. They hurled trash cans through windows and spray-painted militant slogans on marble storefronts. A Starbucks coffee shop fell victim to their vandalism, as did a jewelry store, a park gate and a McDonald's restaurant.
Though more than 20,000 union members marched peacefully in Seattle that day, the world would see and remember the sporadic violence and the clouds of tear gas. By the end of the day, the mayor had declared an emergency, asked the governor to call up the National Guard, and imposed a curfew on downtown.
For Clinton, the Seattle meeting was potentially a big moment. Some had spoken of naming a new round of trade talks the "Clinton Round," and the United States had actively sought to host the Seattle meeting. The president addressed the gathering on Wednesday.
But the speech was overshadowed by an interview he gave to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer en route to Seattle. In it Clinton said he "ultimately" would support sanctions against countries that violate labor standards, which he wanted the WTO to add to its rules.
The interview became a sensation. "Nobody believed their eyes" when they read Clinton's comments, said Anabel Gonzalez, Costa Rica's vice minister of foreign trade. Many developing countries seized on the comments as evidence that the United States planned to impose new protectionist measures in the guise of labor standards that were actually designed to keep the poorer countries poor.
In the early hours of Friday, the Europeans and Americans briefly seemed to find common ground on the thorny agriculture subsidy issue. At 4:30 that morning, recalled Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council and a Seattle negotiator, "you really . . . had goose bumps. This is going to come together! This is going to happen! This is great!"
Lamy was negotiating for the Europeans at that hour. He had to report back to the trade ministers of the EU countries on the progress that had given Sperling goose bumps.
The EU commissioner disappeared for more than six hours, an absence that shocked the Americans, but also helped convince them that they would not succeed in Seattle. They concluded that Lamy had been overridden by the ministers, and the deal would not be reached.
"By 2 or 3 p.m. [Friday] I could see it wasn't going to happen," Barshefsky recounted. "People's positions were hardening. Lamy had left a functionary in his place, who just made Geneva-type speeches. I thought: We need to cut it off before countries say 'I will never do A, B, C . . .' We don't want anyone saying 'never.' "
Moore, the new director-general of the WTO, was not convinced. At first he wanted to push ahead and try to get a final agreement. But after consulting with several envoys from key countries, he decided Barshefsky was right.
At 10:30 p.m. Barshefsky formally announced that the conference would end without a result. "Governments," she said, "were just not willing to take the leap."
The United States had gone into the Seattle meetings without a thorough game plan, hoping, in Sperling's words, "that under the pressure and headlights of a global trade talk, that countries would make the necessary concessions to come to an agreement." This time, it didn't work.
Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, summarized the reasons he saw for the breakdown: The major trading blocs didn't want to compromise on the big issues; the trade ministers don't know how to deal with labor and environmental issues, although, he insisted, they will eventually have to be incorporated into the global system; the protests on the street altered the mood of the meeting and reduced the time available for negotiations.
Like other Americans and foreign delegates, he doubted the demonstrations forced the outcome. Wallach of Public Citizen saw it differently. In her view the new public involvement did make the difference, because public opinion in many countries had stiffened the resolve of their delegates to Seattle not to make compromises for the sake of an easy consensus.
Berger and other officials said they welcomed the participation of the interest groups that have become engaged in trade issues. "Democratization is a good word for it," Berger said. But it would mean further complication of trade negotiations in the future, he agreed.
In this as in other international forums, the overwhelming power of the United States seems to be a complicating factor. American officials point out how the huge trade deficit generated by America's open economy, which imports far more goods than it exports goods and services, has helped stabilize Asia and the world after the 1997 Asian economic crisis. But critical foreign countries, particularly less developed ones, freely accuse the United States of plotting new forms of protectionism.
Given all the complexities, Berger said in his White House office Thursday evening, sipping a huge glass of Diet Coke, "there probably was not as much attention focused on whether to go forward with this round as there should have been."
Berger acknowledged that Seattle was a serious setback. He said he didn't know how bad the damage would prove to be.
Barshefsky saw a silver lining: Breakdowns in earlier trade negotiations, like those with China in April, have been followed "with stronger agreements," she said.
Berger and Sperling defended the administration's efforts to broaden the trade agenda to cover concerns about the environment and labor standards, and rejected the criticisms--commonly made by governments from Tokyo to Brasilia--that U.S. domestic politics provoked those efforts and helped scuttle Seattle.
"You take on something big that has a risk element--that makes the achievement all the more significant," Sperling said, acknowledging that this time the achievement didn't materialize.
"If you don't fail sometimes," Berger said, "your sights aren't high enough."
Staff writers Doug Struck in Tokyo; Stephen Buckley in Rio de Janeiro; Serge Kovaleski in San Jose, Costa Rica; Anne Swardson in Paris; Pamela Constable in New Delhi; Steven Pearlstein in Toronto; Lorraine Adams; Charles Babington; Rene Sanchez; and special correspondent Khiota Thierren in Seattle contributed to this report.
STICKING POINTS
Here are the key issues that helped deadlock talks between trade ministers at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
FARM GOODS
* The United States pushed Europe to commit to an eventual "elimination" of subsidies for farm exports.
* Europe resisted. Europe and Japan also wanted the WTO to acknowledge that "non-trade" factors -- such as protection of the environment and rural communities -- would be considered in setting farm policy.
DUMPING
* Japan and many other countries wanted extensive negotiations about rules against "dumping," the selling of foreign goods at illegally low prices. They contend that the rules as set by the 1986-94 "Uruguay Round" allow the United States and other countries to keep out legitimately priced goods.
* The United States said it would not agree to any talk on dumping, but would probably have settled for discussions on dumping limited to clarification of Uruguay Round rules.
BIOTECHNOLOGY
* The United States sought the formation of a WTO "working group" on genetically altered goods, hoping to establish rules that would protect the trading of these goods.
* Europe resisted, arguing that the safety of the products has not been proved.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
* The United States wanted to extend a moratorium on tariffs on electronic transmissions across borders and further reduce them on high-tech goods.
* General agreement was reached to extend a moratorium. But to the U.S. team's disappointment, negotiators could not agree on launching a further round of talks aimed at expanding an existing agreement that lowers tariffs on high-tech goods.
INVESTMENT & COMPETITION
* Europe wanted negotiations on harmonizing countries' rules on these issues.
* Wary of reopening an old fight, the United States opposed it, saying there was no support. Activist groups say having global rules could infringe on sovereignty by blocking such practices as setting aside contracts for minority-owned firms.
WTO OPENNESS
* The United States and other countries wanted the WTO to make its processes more open to the public.
* Compromise language would have allowed quicker publication of confidential documents, but not opened up the proceedings of WTO panels that judge trade disputes.
LABOR STANDARDS
* United States wanted to create a WTO "working group" to open the question of establishing labor standards for international trade.
* Developing countries, feeling they could not meet the standards, strongly opposed it as likely to create protectionist barriers against their goods. Compromise talk focused on creating some kind of study group outside the WTO framework.
EXTENSIONS
* Developing countries sought more time to implement trade law changes required by the 1986-94 Uruguay Round.
* The industrial world in general fought this request, but was likely to offer extensions to the poorest countries and technical assistance to others.
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From: Matthew Arnison <maffew@physics.usyd.edu.au> Subject: [wtoimc-daily] a temporary web address
hi there,
this is your not-so-daily update on the Seattle Independent Media Centre website, www.indymedia.org
unfortunately, we've had to move our web server computer around, and this has meant that our web address is not useable for a couple of days. sorry about that. please use http://216.254.6.207 instead to get there in the meantime.
when you get there, you'll find:
* a heap of new stories
* a new search button that lets you find things by typing in a word, or look for specific kinds of media (text, pictures, audio, video) or for stories from a particular day
now that the WTO meeting is over, you'll notice i've stopped releasing daily updates. we may however still use this email list occaisionally to send out important information related to the indymedia.org website and the issues behind it. for example, if we get news of any plans for a similar global protest next year.
------- other
Warning Issued for Americans Abroad
State Department Cites 'Credible Information' Of Possible Attacks
Washington Post Sunday, December 12, 1999; Page A01 By Amy Goldstein
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/12/237l-121299-idx.html
The U.S. government yesterday warned all Americans traveling or living abroad to take extra security precautions from now through the first week in January because intelligence officials have obtained "credible information" that terrorists are planning attacks "specifically targeting American citizens."
The global caution, issued by the State Department less than three weeks before people around the world ring in the new millennium, said the intelligence information "indicates that attacks could be planned for locations . . . where large gatherings and celebrations will be taking place."
The advisory did not name specific terrorists who are suspected of making preparations to harm Americans. Administration officials were cautious in discussing terrorist organizations but indicated the group headed by fugitive Saudi businessman Osama bin Laden is the most important organization seeking to undermine U.S. interests.
State Department spokesman James B. Foley said the government had no evidence that Americans who remain in the United States will be in danger, but he said U.S. citizens are among the targets of attacks that could occur anywhere else in the world.
The State Department issues what it calls "worldwide cautions" relatively frequently--whenever it believes that citizens might be in harm's way. Often, such warnings follow specific U.S. military or economic actions that could provoke retaliation by anti-American groups, and sometimes they are restricted to particularly dangerous regions of the globe.
Yesterday's warning, issued in the late afternoon, was the fifth since early October.
But government officials said yesterday's caution signals a heightened degree of government concern. "This means we have specific and credible information that terrorists are planning something," said one senior administration official.
The threat to Americans that prompted yesterday's warning is comparable in magnitude to ones that intelligence officials detected this year during the war in Kosovo or the ones that arose from Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, according to one official in the State Department's bureau of consular affairs.
"This sounds to me fairly larger than many of the ones we've put out," the official said, noting that it comes at a time when "people are already worried because of Y2K. You don't want to over-alarm them, but if we have this information, there's an obligation to tell them."
"There have been a slew of threat reports over the past few weeks, mainly bin Laden related," the Los Angeles Times quoted a government source as saying. "And then one emerged in the past couple of days that seemed much more credible and specific than all the others."
Bin Laden, who is living in Afghanistan under the protection of its ruling Taliban militia, has been indicted by a New York grand jury on charges of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 220 people.
Earlier this year, the Clinton administration banned U.S. trade with and investment in Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to deliver bin Laden for prosecution. In mid-October, the U.N. Security Council gave the regime a month to produce him and said it would face similar sanctions imposed by the United Nations unless it complied.
In late October, a Taliban representative traveled to Washington to discuss the case with the State Department's assistant secretary of South Asian affairs. But the regime ultimately did not expel bin Laden, and last month the United Nations banned international flights to Afghanistan and froze its overseas assets.
The State Department issued its last global caution when the U.N. sanctions took effect.
The new warning says that attacks could occur any time from now through New Year's and the first week in January, when the month-long Muslim holy days of Ramadan end. The warning urges Americans abroad to "avoid large crowds and gatherings, keep a low profile, and vary routes and times of all required travel."
The caution also urges U.S. citizens abroad to stay in touch with U.S. embassies and consulates for further information.
Although federal officials said they have no evidence that Americans are at risk domestically, the advisory did not make entirely clear that the threat exists only on foreign soil.
D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey said yesterday that, with large celebrations planned for the Mall throughout the New Year's weekend, "it is no surprise to anyone that Washington could potentially be viewed as a target." However, Ramsey said, "Quite frankly, I think our biggest problem is going to be traffic control and crowd control because we're looking for a lot of people to come out."
Staff writer Sari Horwitz contributed to this report.