------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
NATO allies offer little resistance to U.S. plans
A Look at the Canadian - U.S. Agenda
THE IRRITABLE HEART
Uranium scare on Enchanted Island
The chemical effects of DU
Europe, U.S. Struggle Over Defense
U.S. Tries Defusing Allies' Opposition to Missile Defense
Russian Warns US on Missile Defense
The Thwarted Promise of the 13 Days
Russian Security Official Warns of New Arms Race
Russian Warns U.S. on Arms Race
Nev. Town Baffled by Child Cancer
More Smoke & Mirrors on Yucca Mountain
Nevada leaders unite against plans for nuclear waste dump
The Case of Wen Ho Lee
Rumsfeld Defends Missile Shield To Allies in Europe
U.S. defense chief lobbies leaders in Europe
Powell, Rice stress commitment to missile defense
Europe wary of missile defense

MILITARY
The Missile Shield's Tough Sell
U.S. missile plan risks space arms race

OTHER
US dumping toxic substances in India: Environmentalists
Security Increased for Bomb Trial


-------- NUCLEAR

NATO allies offer little resistance to U.S. plans for missile defenses

Sunday, February 4, 2001
Philadelphia Inquirer
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
By Richard Whittle
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/02/04/national/MISSILE04.htm?template=aprint.htm
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/miss04200102045.htm
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/sun/news/docs/040742.htm

MUNICH, Germany - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld encountered no protest and only mild resistance yesterday as he told wary NATO allies the Bush administration was determined to build defenses against ballistic missiles.

"The United States intends to develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack," Rumsfeld declared to the Munich Conference on Security Policy in his first speech abroad as defense secretary. "That is a fact."

"These systems will be a threat to no one," he told the annual gathering of high-level defense officials and other experts. "They should be of concern to no one, save those who would threaten others."

Critics, including European leaders, have warned in the past that U.S. insistence on forging ahead with missile defenses would lead to disputes that could weaken and even unravel NATO.

But European officials at the Munich conference took the Bush administration stance in a spirit of resignation that some experts said might indicate a turning point in the missile-defense debate.

George Robertson of Britain, NATO's secretary-general, said in an interview that "there's a shift in opinion" among Europeans toward acceptance of U.S. plans to build missile defenses.

Europeans still uneasy

Many Europeans remain concerned about the issue, he said. But since President Bush took office, "there is a growing feeling that it is a question of how and when, rather than whether," Robertson said.

Greek Defense Minister Apostolos Tsohatzopoulos said Europeans remained uneasy about the issue, but "they have been very polite to Rumsfeld because they think the U.S. is going to discuss this decision with the Europeans before they are going to implement it.

"In any case, it should be a lot of years before they are going to begin the implementation of the decision," he said.

Richard Perle, a top Pentagon official in the Ronald Reagan administration and a leading advocate of missile defenses, said in an interview that he was gratified by "the feeble European resistance."

"They have some qualms and apprehensions, but in no sense are they rushing to the barricades to try to stop it," Perle said.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said the missile-defense issue "doesn't define the German-American relationship." Schroeder said the allies simply want to discuss the threat that U.S. advocates think justifies building missile defenses, understand the "technological possibilities," and consider the consequences for NATO's relations with Russia.

Acceptance of decision

Antje Vollmer, a leader of Germany's pacifist Greens Party and vice president of the German Bundestag, expressed the general European attitude when she told the conference: "Politically, the decision has already been taken."

Former President Bill Clinton had the Pentagon plan a land-based missile-defense system after the Senate approved a resolution in favor of it, but Robertson said "there may well have been a feeling in the past that it wouldn't happen."

Clinton deferred a decision to start building a radar site needed for the missile-defense system last year, saying tests so far had failed to prove the ability of existing technology to intercept a ballistic missile warhead in flight. Two of three antimissile tests conducted by the Pentagon last year failed.

A Senate aide at the conference, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Europeans were telling U.S. officials in private that they needed more details about the U.S. plans so they could prepare their publics for what would be a momentous shift in nuclear strategy.

Foes of missile defenses contend they would upset the "balance of terror" that deters nuclear war and spark a new arms race. Russia and China have threatened to build more offensive missiles to ensure they could overwhelm any U.S. missile-defense system.

Before Rumsfeld spoke, the chairman of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee, Dimitri Rogozin, told the conference that Russia wanted to preserve a 1972 U.S.-Soviet treaty that bans national missile defenses. Rumsfeld has called the pact "ancient history."

Rumsfeld told the conference that "the deterrence of the Cold War - mutual assured destruction and the concept of massive retaliation - worked reasonably well. . . . But the problems today are different."

-------- canada

A Look at the Canadian - U.S. Agenda

February 4, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Canada-Glance.html

Among matters of interest between Canada and the United States:

Energy: President Bush, dealing with the California power shortage, wants to explore a continental energy policy with Canada and Mexico, both major energy producers.

Oil: Canada opposes oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a priority for Bush. The refuge's coastal plain, where drilling would take place, is a calving ground for caribou that migrate to Canada.

Free trade: Bush and Prime Minister Jean Chretien favor expanding North American free trade to most of the Western Hemisphere. Leaders from the Americas meet in April in Canada to talk about it.

Economy: Changes in U.S. interest rates, government policy and economic performance are deeply felt in the linked Canadian economy.

Missile Defense: In a ``geographic bind'' between the U.S. and Russia via the Arctic, Canada has a stake in Bush's plan for a missile defense program. Ottawa worries it could renew weapons proliferation. But Chretien is awaiting details and declined an appeal by Russian President Vladimir Putin to come out strongly against it.

Quebec separation: U.S. officials have a standard line about Quebec independence: America values a strong and united Canada, but the country's future is for Canadians to decide. President Clinton was seen in Canada as having made an overt pitch for Canadian unity, upsetting separatists. Anything Bush says on the subject will be examined carefully.

Trade disputes: Irritants in the world's largest bilateral trading relationship include a two-decade-old dispute over imports of Canadian softwood lumber. A 1996 provisional agreement that set a ceiling on duty-free shipments is expiring.

-------- depleted uranium

THE IRRITABLE HEART -
The Medical Mystery of the Gulf War.

February 4, 2001
Book Review
New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
By Jeff Wheelwright. http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/04/reviews/010204.04bendert.html

Sequels of War
Persian Gulf veterans are feeling sick in ways hard to define.

Related Link First Chapter: 'The Irritable Heart' http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/wheelwright-heart.html

Though the war in Kuwait ranks among the shorter of America's military ventures, it produced a conflict that has already gone on more than 10 times as long as Desert Shield and Desert Storm combined. The medical and political tangle is now entering its second contentious decade, with veterans and researchers at loggerheads over the nature and source of mysterious illnesses that have plagued thousands who served in the gulf. In an effort to clarify the science and history, Jeff Wheelwright now offers a book in some ways as perplexing as gulf war syndrome itself.

The desert campaign was a war of contradictions. Astoundingly brief, staggeringly successful, dazzlingly high-tech, it nonetheless threatened to expose American and allied forces to primeval perils. Our smart missiles virtually stopped for traffic lights, our bombers could disappear from radar, but our ground troops faced an enemy apparently poised to unleash pestilence, poison and flame. Soldiers went about enveloped in both stifling protective suits and apocalyptic predictions. The Pentagon prepared body bags by the thousands while the troops took pills and injections that purported to protect them from invisible chemical and biological attack.

In ''The Irritable Heart,'' Wheelwright powerfully conveys the menace of that bizarre battle zone. He was there as a journalist when Saddam Hussein turned Kuwait's oil wells and pipelines into weapons. He saw the hellish fields of flaming towers under banks of inky clouds. He inhaled the gritty, acrid air. He walked the beaches black and sodden with petroleum, heard the heavy plopping of the greasy surf, watched the doomed shorebirds floundering toward their deaths. He helps us feel the soldiers' fears of what might have been happening to their bodies.

But the chemical, biological and ecological Armageddon never came, at least so far as Americans could discern, and the allied armies returned home in triumph. Soon, however, veterans began complaining of joint and muscle pain, headaches, dizziness, memory loss, insomnia, diarrhea, fatigue and difficult breathing. And soon after that the wrangling began. Weak and hurting, many veterans surmised that something encountered in the blasted landscape was now making them ill. But instead of being fairly promptly identified as a specific disease or reactions to a particular exposure, their disorders defeated science's standard methods of establishing the identity and etiology of illnesses. Competing theories emerged, including mysterious biological contagions and exposures to smoke, oil, depleted uranium or Iraqi nerve gas. No theory won a widespread medical consensus. Some people began to seek the culprit not in a specific physical insult but in the emotional stress of the desert war.

Many suffering veterans, however, rejected any explanation not tied to Arabian exposures. Their nation, they insisted, owed them an explanation, compensation and a cure. Struggling with inconclusive science and aggrieved patients, federal bureaucracies proved neither agile nor sensitive. As conflicting studies multiplied and veterans' groups fixed on particular hypotheses, the debate became increasingly politicized. Charges of deceit and cover-up only added to the acrimony.

As Wheelwright astutely observes, the answer probably lies not in one or another of the warring theories but in the realm that stretches between them, in the still largely uncharted borderland where the brain, the emotions, the immune system and the endocrine system intersect. In recent years several similar conditions have emerged from that same terrain. Fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity and chronic fatigue syndrome all involve clusters of diffuse but sometimes disabling symptoms that overlap with gulf war syndrome. These disorders also have defeated scientific attempts to identify definite organic causes. They too appear to involve not a specific bodily insult but a cascade of interrelated reactions. That such a condition should emerge from Desert Shield and Storm ought to be no surprise, Wheelwright notes. As far back as the Civil War, veterans have contracted mysterious, previously unknown ailments that in many ways resembled the symptoms that came home from the gulf. Each also afflicted large numbers. None yielded a clear-cut organic cause.

Wheelwright came to his subtle and sophisticated conclusion through a great deal of highly intelligent research. But in writing a book to explain it, he seems to have fallen into the very trap of a forced choice between ''opposing frameworks'' that he spends hundreds of pages deploring. ''Basically there are two approaches to writing about a public health mystery: the personal and the scientific,'' he begins. ''The personal approach cultivates the narrative. . . . The scientific approach prunes the individual from the story and replaces him or her with medical analysis of the group.'' But the best medical writers recognize no such dichotomy. In the hands of the great epidemiologic explicators -- Berton Roueché, to cite just one -- suffering and science are aspects of the common humanity binding the sick and those struggling to help them.

But having laid out this supposed conflict, Wheelwright proceeds to ''reconcile'' it by focusing his story on neither the patients nor the researchers but, astonishingly and self-indulgently, on himself. And then, perhaps to humanize material he considers forbidding, he adopts an irritatingly discursive tone. The reader has to tag along on countless interviews and hospital visits, listen to speculations about Wheelwright's own health and personal life, even watch him worry about his deadlines. The author intrudes everywhere. Introducing a Senate aide who played a crucial role in developing the chemical hypothesis, for example, Wheelwright informs us that, ''like me, Tuite was the oldest of six children. . . . He and I were given the names of our fathers and grandfathers, though I no longer used III after mine.''

It's a shame that Wheelwright made the editorial choices he did. Scattered among the rambling, chatty accounts of his encounters with five sick veterans, the doctors treating them and a variety of researchers and experts are many illuminating ideas and much judiciously gathered information. In extensive source notes he provides crisp, focused discussions of issues that elsewhere appear fuzzy and diffuse. The writer who composed those notes, alas, could have produced a far clearer, more illuminating and altogether better book than this one.

====

Comments:

The illnesses seen in GWS are hardly mysteries, fabricated mysteries perhaps to hide similar effects in the US population and also to protect the medical industry profits.

The basic simple truth is that DU and all these other toxics damage cells and bioconcentrate in the lymphatic system and poison its immune protection cells and diseases are the result. The major long term offenders are things like insoluble oxides of DU and other long retained toxins that linger in bone and fatty tissues. The fluorides toxic effects are lead effects in poisoning the immune protection cells.

There is no mystery to these ills, as they are well known processes ---BUT there is a full scale cover up of the toxic disease mechanisms and a Govt failing to take care of its Vets by providing proper diagnosis. The Govt. is also pulling off a similar scam around its nuke weapons factories, again claiming mysterious ills. All these ills trace back to one prime mechanism that has been very well known at national labs for decades.

The term mystery illness is a fabricated hoax, as the diseases are quite real and there is a simple mechanism involved.

----

Uranium scare on Enchanted Island

4 February 2001
Sunday Herald (UK)
By Matthew Chapman in Vieques
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000118613908976&rtmo=VDwf3w6K&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/01/2/4/wuran04.html

PEOPLE living on an island used as an American bombing range are suing the United States Navy for $100 million in damages, claiming that radiation from depleted-uranium (DU) shells has caused widespread cancer.

Known throughout the Caribbean as the "Enchanted Island" because of its beautiful beaches, Vieques is now called "Cancer Island" by many locals because of a big rise in incidence of the illness. More than a third of the 9,000 inhabitants have been found to be suffering serious health problems which could be linked to DU, says the law firm handling the case. The class-action lawsuit so far involves 3,600 islanders.

Eva Torres, a 52-year-old school administrator who recently underwent a hysterectomy after the discovery of a tumour, said: "Everyone here knows many people who have cancer. Nowadays I always seem to be going to funerals."

The little island is 19 miles long and four miles wide. It is part of the United States dependency of Puerto Rico and has long captured the imagination of film-makers and naturalists. The original version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies was filmed here, while marine scientists like to study a bay full of bioluminescent plankton that make the fish glow at night.

The dominating presence in Vieques, however, is the US Navy, which took over two-thirds of the island in 1941 and uses it for live weapons fire. Every big US military action of the past 50 years, from Korea to Kosovo, has been practised there, and Vieques has been a valuable testing ground for new types of arms. These include the DU shells used in the Balkans, over which an outcry has erupted after the deaths from cancer of 32 soldiers who served there.

US Navy officials insist that there is no evidence to link the use of DU in weaponry to ill-health on Vieques. Commander John Correra said: "Stories of cancers and illness are just part of a campaign of misinformation by those opposed to our presence on the island, We are talking about very small amounts of depleted uranium and we have done our utmost to make sure it is cleared away."

The incidence of breast, uterus and lymphatic cancers among islanders, however, has increased by 300 per cent over the past 20 years, according to Puerto Rican government figures. The island's health service, consisting of a handful of general practitioners, is struggling to cope.

The case has been taken up by a Mississippi-based law firm, John Arthur Eaves, which specialises in class-action suits involving industrial pollution. John Arthur Eaves Jnr said: "I think $100 million [£68 million] may turn out to be at the lower end of what we might get from the navy. His firm has already begun interviewing potential clients in Europe regarding DU contamination. "We're very interested in what's happening there," he added.

One of their clients on the island is Rolando Garcia, 32, a father of two. Test results show him to be contaminated with a range of heavy metals, including uranium. He said: "I'd never heard of uranium before. Now it looks like it might kill me." Every hair on his body has fallen out and he has difficulty in walking. He thinks that he might have been exposed to DU when he worked on the bombing range, maintaining military buildings.

Other islanders showing high levels of uranium in their bodies have never been on the range. They are thought to have picked up heavy metals blown over the island by strong local winds. Campaigners used the US Freedom of Information Act to force the navy to admit that it had fired DU shells onto a range on the eastern tip of Vieques in 1999.

Navy officials said this was done by mistake after the wrong shells were loaded onto a jet, and that they made efforts to recover the shell casings afterwards, although they managed to find only about 50 of them.

Although the navy maintains that several hundred DU shells would not be enough to constitute a health hazard, scientists claim to have found signs of far greater use. Dr Jorge Fernandez, an environmental scientist said: "The Navy say the shells were used on target tanks on one particular spot on the bombing range, but when we made soil samples we found nine separate spots, all over the bombing range, which showed significant levels of uranium."

The navy spent several months test-bombing before the Gulf and Kosovo conflicts. Robert Rabin, of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques said: "I find it hard to believe that they didn't try DU shells out here first. After all, they tried everything else out here first, including napalm during the Vietnam War."

Matthew Chapman is the producer of Shell Shocked to be broadcast on Radio 5 Live at noon today.

-------

UN-BACKED COVER UP
The chemical effects of DU

01/02/04
Le Monde-diplomatique
by JACQUES BRILLOT
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/2001/02/04uraniumeffects

Most commentators are obsessed with the radioactive effects of depleted uranium, ignoring its purely chemical properties. But missiles made from it break up, vaporise and/or ignite on impact, and are dispersed into the atmosphere, sometimes as an aerosol made up of the fine dust of the metal and its oxides. The particles then fall back to earth. If they become airborne again, they can be inhaled or ingested days, weeks, even months or years later. So you do not have to be inside or near a tank when it is hit to be at risk of absorbing these dangerous substances.

The 9th edition (1976) of the Merck Index (1), one of the world's bibles of chemistry, describes uranium and its salts as "extremely toxic", causing dermatitis, renal lesions, acute arterial necrosis, possibly resulting in death (2). Another such bible, the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (3), describes it as "highly toxic, both from chemical and radiological standpoint". It gives the maximum concentration of its insoluble derivatives (oxides, for example) recommended as acceptable in air (based on its chemical toxicity) as 0.25 mg per cubic metre (4). The chapter on human exposure to airborne contaminants gives a figure of 0.20 mg (expressed as pure U) per cubic metre for natural uranium and its soluble and insoluble compounds. The comparable figures for lead arsenate are 0.15 mg or 0.20 mg, phosgene 0.40 mg and arsenic 0.50 mg. These figures were published in 1983 in the Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety (5), which puts the lethal dose for one half of experimental subjects (rats and rabbits) at between 0.55 mg and 1.12 mg per kg body weight. This is similar to the concentration (1 mg/kbw) of hydrogen cyanide (the Zyklon B used in Nazi extermination camps) needed to kill a human.

The same book describes at length the lesions characteristic of chronic poisoning by the metal and its oxides: pulmonary fibrosis and changes to the blood with a reduction in the number of red and white corpuscles (lymphocytes). The nervous system can also be affected. And there is the possibility of nephritis, chronic hepatitis, gastritis and other symptoms.

(1) Published by Merck Research Laboratories, Whitehouse Station, New Jersey.

(2) The most recent edition (1996) merely states that uranium presents both a " toxic " and a radiological hazard and that direct contact with metallic U or its insoluble compounds may cause dermatitis. The word " extremely " and the references to renal lesions, arterial necrosis and death have been removed.

(3) Published by CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.

(4) Or, per kg, the theoretical contamination of around 2 sq km to a height slightly more than that of a man (2m).

(5) Published by the International Labour Office, Geneva.

Translated by Malcolm Greenwood

-------- europe

Europe, U.S. Struggle Over Defense

February 4, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Europe-US-Defense.html

MUNICH, Germany (AP) -- On two critical defense issues, America and Europe appear to be drifting apart.

Despite concerns among its European allies that it will trigger a new arms race, the United States is determined to erect a national missile defense system against terrorist nuclear threats.

And despite U.S. concerns over feasibility, Europe is set on creating its own military corps to respond to European crises, independent of NATO.

That the apparently divergent defense priorities are creating strains between the NATO allies was disguised by polite criticism during an international security conference of defense ministers and experts over the weekend.

Yet it was clear in often-candid remarks that the pursuit of independent defense policies by NATO partners is raising serious questions about the alliance's role.

``The question is, is the Atlantic relationship considered a safety net which puts a floor on the risks under which everyone is free to pursue his own national interests even at the expense of other allies?'' former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asked.

``Or is it an organization that is jointly attempting to pursue common objectives?''

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on his first foreign trip since taking the post two weeks ago, told his European counterparts that the United States would not back down on its plans to erect a national missile defense system.

Rumsfeld chided the Europeans for proliferating Cold War rhetoric by raising concerns that the system would start another arms race, calling the very idea ``an outdated relic.''

``The United States does not fear an attack from Russia. The government does not. The people do not. It is not something people wake up every morning thinking about,'' Rumsfeld said.

But the U.S. delegation also appeared to respond to European fears that the missile defense -- with its emphasis on ``national'' -- would leave them unprotected and create a trans-Atlantic division.

``I think the one thing the American delegation learned this weekend is we have to drop the 'N' from NMD, the national missile defense,'' Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said after the conference, which wrapped up Sunday. ``We are looking truly to develop a GMD, global missile defense, in which all of the world's countries can feel more secure.''

When it comes to the proposed European Strategic Defense Initiative, or ESDI, which would establish a 60,000-strong corps by 2003, Rumsfeld did not mince words: ``I'm brand spanking new, I'm looking at it fresh, and I'm a little worried.''

He received strong support from a bipartisan congressional delegation.

``The establishment of an EU rapid reaction force is a worrisome response to a legitimate concern,'' Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the gathering. ``The European members of NATO should have the means and just importantly the will to react in crisis without the direct involvement of the United States.

``Today, there is little reason for confidence that this will be the outcome.''

The primary reason for U.S. doubts lies in Europe's inability to respond alone to Yugoslav aggression in Kosovo province. The air raids on Serbia were carried out by American bombers -- using American intelligence.

``I can find but one target ever given to us by any nations other than the United States,'' retired NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark said. ``What that means is that all of the rest of the alliance didn't have either the will or the capabilities to look at what was going on down there and participate in the target nomination process.''

Among the issues raised: Would Europe be able to really handle a crisis without U.S. help? And if something went wrong, wouldn't the United States be called in to bail out Europe anyway?

While the United States was increasing military spending in the 1980s, its European allies were scaling back. ``Kosovo taught us some hard lessons, not the least that Europe was not spending enough on defense'' British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon said.

Noting the lessons of Kosovo, European defense budgets started to increase, with total spending approaching $200 billion annually, he said.

Yet from a European point of view, the plans for an independent crisis force are at least partly an answer to U.S. demands that Europeans contribute more to mutual defense. Suggestions that it was a prelude to Europe going its own way visibly agitated German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.

``Do you really believe there would be a chance for a Europe, even far into the future, to have a strategic security without the United States?'' Fischer asked. ``I definitely say no.''

----

U.S. Tries Defusing Allies' Opposition to Missile Defense

February 4, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/world/04EURO.html?pagewanted=all

MUNICH, Feb. 3 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the first senior Bush administration official to visit Europe, tried today to defuse opposition to the administration's antimissile plans by offering to help European nations and other allies to deploy missile defenses.

But while Mr. Rumsfeld assured European allies that the United States would consult with them on its antimissile plan, he did not address in any detail one of the Europeans' principal concerns: how an antimissile defense can be reconciled with strategic arms control and a productive relationship with Moscow.

"The United States intends to develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack, and is prepared to assist friends and allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a speech to a conference of top political officials and defense specialists.

Mr. Rumsfeld underscored that the Bush administration was determined to proceed with an antimissile defense of United States territory even if it could not overcome the objections from the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans. He described a missile defense as nothing less than a moral imperative.

Missile defense was hardly the only sensitive issue today. The European Union's move to develop a 60,000-member rapid reaction force by 2003 has drawn a wary reaction from the Bush administration.

While not opposing the initiative, Mr. Rumsfeld was clearly skeptical, and stressed the need for great care to ensure that the European Union does not detract from NATO.

Mr. Bush's fatigue with the Balkan peacekeeping mission also remains a continuing source of anxiety in Europe. Mr. Rumsfeld said little on the subject today, saying that the matter was under review at the White House. The United States and Europe also have to decide how to proceed with NATO expansion, a topic that greatly worries the Russians.

But as European leaders have challenged the missile defense plan in recent weeks, the issue has risen to the fore. The main European concern is that deployment of an antimissile shield will undermine the framework of nuclear arms control and spoil relations with the Russians. Or as President Jacques Chirac of France put it last month, an American missile defense "cannot fail to relaunch the arms race in the world."

Mr. Chirac has not been the only critic. Rudolf Scharping, the German defense minister, has questioned the technological feasibility of the missile defense plan, and on a recent visit to Moscow urged that arms control agreements be preserved.

The Russians have sought to stoke the Europeans' fears, warning that they may abandon the strategic arms constraints they have negotiated with Washington if the Bush administration abandons the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and deploys an antimissile system.

The head of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Ivanov, is due to address the conference on Sunday, raising the specter of an American-Russian tussle for European opinion.

In his attempts to sway European opinion, Mr. Rumsfeld presented several arguments. He suggested that antimissile defenses could be reconciled with some arms control treaties, avoiding the bluntness of comments he made in Congressional hearings - and even on the plane flying to the conference - that the ABM treaty was an anachronism.

Mr. Rumsfeld also sought to turn long-standing European concerns about American isolationism or military intervention into arguments for missile defenses.

Without a missile shield, he suggested, future American leaders might turn isolationist in a crisis and shrink from confronting a missile- wielding third world aggressor. Alternatively, he warned, America might have to carry out a pre-emptive strike against a rogue nation.

"A system of defense need not be perfect, but the American people must not be left completely defenseless," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It is not so much a technical question as a matter of a president's constitutional responsibility. Indeed, it is, in many respects, a moral issue."

Mr. Rumsfeld's case was helped by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who told the meeting that there was a general consensus in Washington that some sort of missile defense should be deployed. "The question from an American point of view is not whether we will have a national missile defense but when and how," Senator Lieberman said. "This is not a technologically feasible program now. We are some years away."

Senator John McCain and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger also called for missile defenses, adding to the sense of inevitability.

The European response to Mr. Rumsfeld's proposal today was respectful, if restrained. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, appeared to speak for most of his fellow European foreign ministers when he said that European nations were glad that Washington wanted to consult with them on the antimissile plan but that a missile defense must not come at the expense of arms control. That is a difficult balancing act that neither the Americans nor the Europeans were prepared to discuss in detail.

In general, neither European nor American officials seemed inclined to quarrel openly today about missile defense or the European Union's rapid reaction initiative.

"The United States has made it clear it intends to develop a missile defense system," said George Robertson, the NATO secretary general. "We have to take the sincerity and commitment of the United States seriously."

European officials cling to the hope that an American missile defense might be compatible with a modified version of the ABM treaty. Mr. Rumsfeld was careful not to exclude that option, but it may well be put to the test once the scale of the administration's plans are known.

Former President Bill Clinton proposed limited defense, involving 100 interceptors and a battle management radar in Alaska, which he planned to reconcile with an amended ABM treaty. There is no reason to think, however, that the Bush administration will settle for such a limited system, which was still too much for the Russians.

Mr. Rumsfeld, a former American ambassador to NATO, has only been in office for two weeks, and the Bush administration as a whole has not yet had time to develop comprehensive missile defense proposals.

Still, Mr. Rumsfeld's offer to help the Europeans and other allies deploy defenses raised a number of tricky questions, such as which land- based, sea-based or space-based systems might be used. As a result, it is impossible to say how long it would take to develop a system, what it would cost or to what extent it would require modification of the ABM treaty.

Mr. Rumsfeld did not say how much the Europeans would have to pay for antimissile defenses of their territory - no small concern for a continent whose military spending has lagged - and what Washington might contribute.

Mr. Rumsfeld has been something of a hard-liner on arms control. While Bush administration officials have previously talked of making deep, even unilateral cuts in the American nuclear arsenal, he had no specific arms control proposals to offer Moscow today. Yet he insisted that the Russians were mistaken to perceive an antimissile defenses as quest for strategic advantage.

He said a limited American defense could not neutralize the Russian nuclear arsenal, and he suggested that the Russians understood that but were pretending not to understand to build opposition to the American plan in Europe.

"The idea of an arms race between the United States and Russia ought not to be front and center in our thinking," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It is something that is a leftover, a relic in our thinking."

-------- russia

Russian Warns US on Missile Defense

Sunday, February 4, 2001
Associated Press
By Colleen Barry
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24581-2001Feb4?language=printer

MUNICH, Germany -- A top Russian security official sternly warned the new Bush administration Sunday that a planned U.S. national missile defense system would trigger a new arms race that would eventually extend into space.

Sergei Ivanov, secretary of President Vladimir Putin's powerful security council, told an international conference of defense ministers and experts that the system would by definition abolish the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

"And the destruction of the ABM treaty, we are quite confident, will result in the annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race - including one in space," he said.

Bush's new defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, sought to reassure concerned European allies during the conference Saturday that the missile defense system would threaten no one except aggressors. Rumsfeld also said that while the United States would consult with its allies, it would not be dissuaded from the project.

However, Russia and the United States expressed clearly different views on the 1972 ABM treaty during the weekend conference. Ivanov said the importance of the treaty "has not faded."

By contrast, Rumsfeld, who returned to Washington Saturday, called it "ancient history."

Supporting that view, U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman told delegates Sunday that the treaty "is an expression of a bipolar world.

"We are in a multipolar world, and therefore we need new documents that will indeed express what strategic interdependence means today."

The United States wants the missile defense system to defend itself against rogue nuclear threats - and has strenuously countered Russian fears that it is being constructed against Russia.

Ivanov urged in his speech that the rogue threat would be more effectively countered with politics - pointing out progress in the last year in normalizing relations between communist North Korea and South Korea.

Former U.S. Secretary of State William S. Cohen shot back that proliferation of Russian weapons technology to countries like Iran provided impetus to the national missile defense. "One way to deal with the problem is to stop proliferating. Russia must cease and desist in that regard," Cohen said.

Cohen also confronted Ivanov with Russian suggestions of U.S. involvement in the sinking of the Kursk submarine.

"The Kursk was a great tragedy. Many, many Russian sailors were doomed to death. We continue to see accusations, however faint or indirect, that somehow it was caused by a collision with a 6 merican submarine. That again is a complete fabrication. There was no collision with an American submarine."

----

The Thwarted Promise of the 13 Days

February 4, 2001
By SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/opinion/04KHRU.html

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Those participating in or witnessing turning points in world history are generally displeased by the way such crises are depicted in films and plays. So, it was only reluctantly that I went to see the film "Thirteen Days," about President John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in 1962. But I was pleasantly surprised.

The film portrays the psychological drama of a president at the very moment when he must make decisions that may determine the fate of his country, as well as others, with no knowledge of what is happening in the opposing camp.

In times like that one, it's hard to resist the temptation of applying the cudgel of a military "solution" to the problem. Fortunately, in 1962 the world avoided that temptation, and both sides, the White House and the Kremlin, President Kennedy and my father, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, deserve credit for that.

I was particularly struck in the movie by what President Kennedy said to General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - that the blockade of Cuba and announcements of military readiness would serve as signals to the opposing side. And that the future would be determined by how well those signals were understood in the Kremlin. My father had thought along those same lines. In fact, the installation of missiles in Cuba was to serve as a signal to prevent an American attack of Cuba. But Americans misunderstood this signal as a provocation.

The subject of a leader's able and effective behavior in a crisis is particularly close to me. I relived those days while working on my last book, "Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower." It deals at length with the Cuban crisis.

While "Thirteen Days" portrays what was happening in the White House and barely touches on the Soviet side, I described what was going on in Moscow and my father's role. The film and my book are like mirror images reflecting the events of those days. Despite all their differences, Washington and Moscow were united in one conviction: Whatever the cost, the situation must not slip out of their control.

The very first shot fired would mean that their generals - not they, the political leaders - and the logic of war, not the logic of negotiations, would begin to determine the future of the planet.

When the crisis was already over, I remember how American hawks (along with Mao Zedong) vied with each other in taunting my father, accusing him of weakness, of being the first to "blink." At the time my father said to me: "The one who blinks first is not always the weaker one. Sometimes he is the wiser one."

In this case both leaders showed wisdom. This was the first crisis of the cold war in which the leaders began almost immediately to exchange secret messages. And that meant that they had begun to trust each other. During the crises that arose before 1962, the two sides simply resorted to threats, like military maneuvers and angry diatribes on the front pages of newspapers.

A great deal changed after the crisis: A direct communication link between Moscow and Washington was established, nuclear testing (except for underground tests) was banned and the confrontation over Berlin was ended.

But there was much that President Kennedy and my father did not succeed in seeing through to the end. I am convinced that if history had allowed them another six years, they would have brought the cold war to a close before the end of the 1960's. I say this with good reason, because in 1963 my father made an official announcement to a session of the U.S.S.R. Defense Council that he intended to sharply reduce Soviet armed forces from 2.5 million men to half a million and to stop the production of tanks and other offensive weapons.

He thought that 200 to 300 intercontinental nuclear missiles made an attack on the Soviet Union impossible, while the money freed up by reducing the size of the army would be put to better use in agriculture and housing construction.

But fate decreed otherwise, and the window of opportunity, barely cracked open, closed at once. In 1963 President Kennedy was killed, and a year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from power. The cold war continued for another quarter of a century. It has now ended, but the two sides still have a hard time understanding each other. And although mistakes today do not threaten to destroy everything living on earth, in international affairs it is no easier now to adopt the right decision than it was in October 1962.

Sergei Khrushchev is a senior fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

----

Russian Security Official Warns of New Arms Race

February 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/arms-russia.html

MUNICH, Germany, Feb 4 (Reuters) - A senior Russian security official said on Sunday U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile system would undermine world stability and lead to a new arms race in outer space.

Speaking at a defence conference in Munich, Sergei Ivanov, secretary of Russia's security council, offered talks on deep cuts in strategic nuclear arms if the new administration of U.S. President George W. Bush abandons its plans.

``The destruction of the ABM Treaty will result in the annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race, including one in outer space,'' Ivanov said.

Defence analysts say the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the then Soviet Union would be breached by the new U.S. system if it were to come into force.

``Restraining the so-called rogue nations - to use the American terminology - may be carried out more effectively from the point of view of both expense and consequences by means of a common political effort,'' Ivanov said.

``The situation in North Korea is the obvious example because the situation a year ago seemed much worse than today.''

He spoke a day after new U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking at Munich, reiterated Washington's intention to develop a missile shield despite objections from what Ivanov said was 88 countries, including its European allies.

U.S. officials have cited the threat of missile attacks from nations such as North Korea as a reason to deploy a defensive shield.

Ivanov held out the possibility of substantial arms control cuts if Washington dropped its missile defence plans and preserved the ABM Treaty limiting Russia and the United States to a single defensive missile site each.

``If the ABM Treaty is maintained, Russia is ready for radical cuts with the United States of strategic offensive weapons to as low as 1,500 and even lower than this level,'' Ivanov told the conference on international security.

``We are also ready for an immediate start to official talks with the United States on SALT 3.''

The alternative was a dangerous arms race into space, Ivanov said, urging an international conference on preventing the militarisation of outer space.

``The problem is very urgent.''

RUSSIAN ABM SITE STILL WORKING

Since 1975, only Russia has maintained an ABM site, which it deploys around Moscow.

``This system is not destablising in any way because it is not a national system. It does not cover the national territory of Russia but less than one fifth of Russia's territory,'' Ivanov told reporters when asked why Russia still kept an ABM site.

``This is allowed by the 1972 ABM treaty.''

American officials say the ABM treaty is an antiquated relic no longer essential in the post-Cold War world, an argument Russia rejects.

``The treaty created the possibility for predictability in the nuclear sphere and progress on the way towards nuclear disarmament not only for the USSR and the United States, but also the whole world,'' Ivanov said.

The official also said Russia would continue talks with Europe on President Vladimir Putin's alternative suggestion to build a pan-European theatre missile system including Russia that could intercept missiles soon after they were fired.

``It's a matter of further investigation, military cooperation including the exchange of data and technology. It is, by the way, very expensive,'' Ivanov said. ``We are going to follow through if our Western partners are willing.''

---

Russian Warns U.S. on Arms Race

February 4, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Germany-Defense-Conference.html

MUNICH, Germany (AP) -- A top Russian security official sternly warned the new Bush administration Sunday that a planned U.S. national missile defense system would trigger a new arms race that would eventually extend into space.

Sergei Ivanov, secretary of President Vladimir Putin's powerful security council, told an international conference of defense ministers and experts that the system would by definition abolish the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

``And the destruction of the ABM treaty, we are quite confident, will result in the annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race -- including one in space,'' he said.

Bush's new defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, sought to reassure concerned European allies during the conference Saturday that the missile defense system would threaten no one except aggressors. Rumsfeld also said that while the United States would consult with its allies, it would not be dissuaded from the project.

However, Russia and the United States expressed clearly different views on the 1972 ABM treaty during the weekend conference. Ivanov said the importance of the treaty ``has not faded.''

By contrast, Rumsfeld, who returned to Washington Saturday, called it ``ancient history.''

Supporting that view, U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman told delegates Sunday that the treaty ``is an expression of a bipolar world.

``We are in a multipolar world, and therefore we need new documents that will indeed express what strategic interdependence means today.''

The United States wants the missile defense system to defend itself against rogue nuclear threats -- and has strenuously countered Russian fears that it is being constructed against Russia.

Ivanov urged in his speech that the rogue threat would be more effectively countered with politics -- pointing out progress in the last year in normalizing relations between communist North Korea and South Korea.

Former U.S. Secretary of State William S. Cohen shot back that proliferation of Russian weapons technology to countries like Iran provided impetus to the national missile defense. ``One way to deal with the problem is to stop proliferating. Russia must cease and desist in that regard,'' Cohen said.

Cohen also confronted Ivanov with Russian suggestions of U.S. involvement in the sinking of the Kursk submarine.

``The Kursk was a great tragedy. Many, many Russian sailors were doomed to death. We continue to see accusations, however faint or indirect, that somehow it was caused by a collision with an American submarine. That again is a complete fabrication. There was no collision with an American submarine.''

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

-------- nevada

Nev. Town Baffled by Child Cancer

February 4, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-A-Towns-Mystery.html?pagewanted=all

FALLON, Nev. (AP) -- A blur of sagebrush, along what's called the loneliest road in America, leads to this small farming and military town that boasts of its simpler way of life. A barber is giving $9 haircuts and there's talk of the annual Hearts O' Gold Cantaloupe Festival.

But soon, the talk turns to the children. To 11 kids, all stricken with leukemia that some fear might have something to do with living in the self-proclaimed ``Oasis of Nevada.''

For 5-year-old Dustin Gross, it started like the flu. Then came the bruises, and his lips turned translucent.

``You can see it in his eyes,'' Dustin's father says. ``When they really start turning dark.''

Acute lymphocytic leukemia is the most common childhood cancer, but still rare. Just 2,000 new cases are diagnosed annually in the entire United States.

What puzzles people is that 11 of those cases since 1997 have been in and around Fallon, a town of 8,300. Eight cases were diagnosed last year.

This is a cluster, the state health department says. A chance occurrence, perhaps? Or something else that may never be known.

The uncertainty has forced the state to ask for help from national experts. While they look for answers, the residents worry.

Mayor Ken Tedford Jr. has lived in Fallon, 60 miles east of Reno, his whole life. His granddaddy was mayor, and his uncle too.

``We're just kind of a small town,'' the mayor says. ``People worry about each other a lot.''

At the downtown Ideal Barber Shop, which doubles as a motorcycle parts shop, former police officer Lyndell Smiley mentions the water as he talks of the kids.

``Nothing wrong with the water, Smiley,'' barber Joe Rando responds.

Water is a common topic in Fallon: It has arsenic levels 10 times the federal standard, and the city has been ordered to clean it up. Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical that in high concentrations is poisonous. It's sometimes used as an insecticide or to kill weeds, but has never been linked to leukemia.

A byproduct of the area's soil, the arsenic has been around so long that many doubt it would be making people sick now.

Besides, the children drank from different sources -- city water, well water and bottled water.

The arsenic is so accepted that residents don't seem to mind. ``Some more arsenic water?'' a waiter at Angelica's Steakhouse asks a customer. A square dance club calls itself the Arsenic Swingers.

``It's a known fact that the water's not the best around here, but I don't know,'' Mike Story, 50, says at Jerry's Restaurant.

``God knows, he knows the problem.''

Tammi Beardsley has gone over it repeatedly in her mind.

``You relive those days. What did I feed him? Where did we go? That's what you do when you're a mom and you're desperate.''

Her 5-year-old son, Zac, was No. 9, diagnosed in November. He is too sick this day to have visitors or go outside. Too much risk for infection.

Zac was born in Canada, but spends summers and part of each winter in Fallon. He never drank tap water, only bottled.

Of course, Zac's cancer might have nothing to do with what he drank or how he lived. Cancer results from mutant genes. But what causes the mutations? The seeds of Zac's disease could have been there since birth, written into his genetic blueprint.

The survival rate of this type of childhood leukemia is 80 percent. None of the children here has died.

From 1961 to 1982, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated 108 cancer clusters in 29 states and five foreign countries. No clear cause was found. Since the mid-1980s, no CDC staff have been dedicated full-time to investigating cancer clusters.

``At this point, we're not finding things that are strikingly in common,'' state epidemiologist Dr. Randall Todd says. ``We're beginning to look for other sources of information. What has changed in this community?''

Health officials are looking for a link among the children, who were toddlers to age 19 when diagnosed. Each family was asked about their habits and medical history. The only common characteristic: All the children live or have lived in this area.

Is something spreading though the community? Or is it a statistical anomaly -- just a coincidence, like flipping a coin 11 times and having it come up heads each time.

Often the cause of clusters can't be found because science can not yet identify what triggers them, says Dr. Michael Thun, head of epidemiology at the American Cancer Society.

``It is extremely rare in a community to pin down a cause or to exclude chance with confidence,'' Thun says.

The state has asked for help from the CDC, the National Cancer Institute and outside epidemiologists. Legislative hearings and town meetings are planned. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is sending top staffers from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to investigate.

There's concern about nuclear weapons testing near Fallon in the 1950s. Epidemiologists say ionizing radiation is a risk factor to leukemia, but tests for radioactive substances in the water proved negative.

Some residents blame jet fuel dumped by military aircraft at the nearby Naval Air Station. Or agricultural chemicals. Or something from industrial plants. Or, of course, the water.

The American Cancer Society doctor says there have been studies of this cancer and its relation to pesticides and chemical exposures to parents, but nothing is conclusive.

The Navy says it has no reason to believe the base is doing anything to lead to the illnesses.

Some residents don't want to hear any more about it.

``I think it's a bunch o' bull,'' says Madeline Rando, co-owner of the Ideal Barber Shop. ``I think it's just a freak thing.''

But restaurant workers say they've noticed more customers asking for bottled water. Some parents have brought in water jugs for their children's school classrooms so they can avoid city water.

Dustin shows a picture of himself with no hair. ``Leukemia,'' he says.

A softball tournament to raise money for Dustin's medical bills has become the annual ``Dustin Gross Fun Day.''

For now, a community waits. Waits to see if epidemiologists can find a link among the children. Waits to see if any more children will become sick. And waits for its young victims to heal.

Floyd Sands and his daughter moved away from Fallon, but were drawn into this mystery when she was diagnosed with the leukemia in 1999. She was 19 then, and learned of her condition on her son's first birthday.

``It's worse than looking for a needle in a haystack,'' the father says from his home in Mehoopany, Pa. ``First you have to find the haystack.''

----

More Smoke & Mirrors on Yucca Mountain

Sun, 4 Feb 2001
patbnaav@aol.com

The U.S. Government again is playing smoke and mirrors, bait and switch, and using any other possible false information to con the American public into believing Yucca Mountain is a safe place to put high-level radioactive waste--just because Yucca Mountain sounds like Yucca Flat. Besides the word "Yucca" there is no other similarity between Yucca Flat, where many atmospheric and underground U.S. nuclear tests have been safely detonated and Yucca Mountain, a low ridge 35 miles from Yucca Flat and where no nuclear weapons have ever been detonated.

Yucca Flat is a closed water basin, with no surface drainage off the Nevada Test Site. Yucca Mountain is in a public water supply basin that provides well water to homes, farms and businesses, just 11 miles from the proposed high level waste storage location. When Jackass Flats was used from 1959 to 1970 to test nuclear rocket engines NOT NUCLEAR WEAPONS, some of Yucca Mountain was acquired as a buffer zone to protect the public from nuclear rocket testing fallout. Later, additional public land had to be obtained to include all of Yucca Mountain in the buffer zone, again using no part of Yucca Mountain or its surroundings for nuclear weapons testing because Yucca Mountain is in a public water supply basin which drains into Death Valley and Tecopa Hot Spreings, California.

It is probable that radioactive contamination from Yucca Mountain at some time in the future would contaminate well waters and farmland in California as well as Nevada. Yucca Mountain is in a zone prone to earthquakes, volcanic activity, and periodic large fluctuations in water table elevations. This zone is the "Walker Mobile Lane" between Nevada and California. Any dimwit geologist who has studied the area knows that it does not meet the original siting, safety criteria for this Nation's High Level Waste Repository. Yet, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants to change the siting rules JUST FOR YUCCA MOUNTAIN to relax radioactivity standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency, so that government can tinker with the safety rules and allow high level waste to be stored in California and Nevada public water supply basins.

This is the biggest con job ever attempted. Can you imagine successfully convincing U.S. citizens and politicians that Yucca Mountain is as safe as Yucca Flat for storing high-level radioactive wastes?

WILLIAM J. BRADY, retired Principal Health Physicist at the Nevada Test Site after 40 years in nuclear weapons testing.

PAT BROUDY, National Association of Atomic Veterans

----

Nevada leaders unite against plans for nuclear waste dump

February 4, 2001
Health & Science:
Scripps McClatchy Western Service,
Las Vegas Sun
By MARY MANNING
http://www.nandotimes.com)
http://www.nandotimes.com/healthscience/story/0,1080,500306551-500491743-503431460-0,00.html

- A nonprofit corporation will be formed to help Nevada inform the rest of the country on the dangers of nuclear waste, an executive said.

The corporation will spring from a consortium of Las Vegas businesses, which sent about 70 people to Thursday's meeting.

Stephen Cloobeck, president and CEO of Diamond Resorts International, told the gathering he hopes to raise about $10 million for the effort. The money will be used to motivate people across America to oppose burial plans in Nevada, he said.

The Energy Department is preparing a report about whether to build a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Because the DOE is expected to recommend Yucca to Congress, local opposition is mounting.

If the DOE plan goes forward and receives presidential approval, the nuclear industry would send 77,000 tons of nuclear waste to the mountain over the next several decades.

In addition to the $5 million Gov. Kenny Guinn has pledged in the battle against a Yucca Mountain repository, Clark County Commission Chairman Dario Herrera said the county would contribute $1 million to the nonprofit corporation.

Representatives of the Southern Nevada Board of Realtors, public utilities and the Venetian hotel-casino were among those attending Thursday's meeting. Other major resorts have also contacted him, Cloobeck said.

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, for the first time, passed a resolution this week opposing nuclear waste storage in Nevada.

"I'm the glue trying to keep the state, the county and the cities together and make the rest of the country aware of what is going on," Cloobeck said after the meeting at the County Government Center.

Officials representing Gov. Kenny Guinn, Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa, Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., and Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., attended. State Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, Herrera and County Commissioner Myrna Williams also participated.

Citizens not affiliated with major industry or government also pledged their help.

Guinn committed $5 million in state funds to battling nuclear waste, said Bob Loux, director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects. That money won't be available until after July 1, he said. The agency cannot use federal money to lobby against the nuclear dump.

What the new organization can do is help spread the word on the dangers facing communities along the transportation routes leading to a Yucca repository, Loux said. The Department of Energy proposes using federal highways through 43 states. More than 53 million people live within a mile of the routes.

"It's not an ad campaign," Loux said, explaining that the state's money won't go into the hands of an advertising company.

Instead, the funds will be used to distribute information to community and environmental groups across the country on the dangers from shipping the wastes to Yucca Mountain, he said.

Williams said Southern Nevada faces "some real danger" after former Michigan Sen. Spencer Abraham (R) was confirmed as energy secretary.

In 1998, Williams noted, Abraham wrote a letter to then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson in an effort to keep plutonium from nuclear weapons from flying over Michigan. But he favors sending nuclear wastes to Nevada, she said, even before the scientific studies at Yucca Mountain are complete.

County Nuclear Waste Division Director Dennis Bechtel said the DOE has not yet issued a formal transportation plan. But without consulting the county or any of the cities, major transportation routes in Southern Nevada were chosen as part of DOE's environmental impact studies, Bechtel said.

The DOE's inspector general is investigating possible bias in the site selection process. A team of federal agents from Washington has been conducting interviews and going over DOE documents in Las Vegas the past several weeks.

The investigation was requested by Reid in December after the Las Vegas Sun reported it had obtained documents that appeared to show the DOE collaborating with its chief Yucca Mountain contractor to win approval for the Nevada site.

The Sun reported it had obtained a draft of a DOE overview on Yucca Mountain declaring the site suitable for nuclear waste storage, even though scientific studies haven't been completed.

Attached to the draft was a memo suggesting the overview could be used to help the nuclear industry sell Yucca Mountain to Congress. Federal law prohibits the DOE from taking sides in the selection process.

-------- new mexico

The Making of a Suspect: The Case of Wen Ho Lee

February 4, 2001
By MATTHEW PURDY

The crime sounded alarming: China had stolen the design of America's most advanced nuclear weapon. The suspect seemed suspicious enough: Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born scientist at Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, had a history of contact with Chinese scientists and a record of deceiving the authorities on security matters.

After a meandering five-year investigation, Dr. Lee was incarcerated and interrogated, shackled and polygraphed, and all but threatened with execution by a federal agent for not admitting spying. But prosecutors were never able to connect him to espionage. They discovered that he had downloaded a mountain of classified weapons information, but he was freed last September after pleading guilty to one felony count of mishandling secrets. Ultimately, the case of Wen Ho Lee was a spy story in which the most tantalizing mystery was whether the central character ever was a spy.

In the aftermath, the government was roundly criticized for its handling of the case; so was the press, especially The New York Times. In an effort to untangle this convoluted episode, The Times undertook an extensive re-examination of the case, interviewing participants and examining scientific and government documents, many containing secrets never before disclosed.

This review showed how, in constructing a narrative to fit their unnerving suspicions, investigators took fragmentary, often ambiguous evidence about Dr. Lee's behavior and Chinese atomic espionage and wove it into a grander case that eventually collapsed of its own light weight.

Before the criminal investigation began, weapons experts consulted by the government concluded that stolen American secrets had helped China improve its nuclear weapons, according to inside accounts of the experts' meetings. They also said the Chinese wanted to replicate key elements of America's most sophisticated warhead, the W-88, and had obtained some secrets about it. However, most of the experts agreed that those secrets were rudimentary, and that there was no evidence China had built anything like the W- 88.

But in the echo chamber of Washington, that measured scientific finding was distorted and amplified as it bounced from intelligence analysts to criminal investigators to elected officials, most of them ill equipped to deal with the atomic complexities at the heart of the matter. Eventually, the notion that the Chinese had swiped the W-88 design became the accepted wisdom.

Investigators made Dr. Lee their prime suspect in the W-88 case even though they had no evidence he had leaked weapons secrets. Unanswered questions about his contacts with foreign scientists had made him suspect, but as it searched for a spy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignored the urging of a senior agent on the case to look beyond Dr. Lee. As a result, it failed to examine hundreds, if not thousands, of people outside Los Alamos who had access to the stolen information about the W-88.

When the government's case fizzled, Wen Ho Lee went from public enemy No. 1 to public victim No. 1. But the new label seemed no more appropriate than the first. Off and on for two decades, Dr. Lee's behavior was curious, if not criminal.

He had a knack for wandering into circumstances that aroused suspicion. In 1982, he had a walk-on role in a major espionage investigation, when he inexplicably offered to help the suspect, whom he apparently did not even know. In 1994, Dr. Lee surprised laboratory officials when he appeared uninvited at a Los Alamos briefing for visiting Chinese scientists and warmly greeted China's leading bomb designer.

As the investigation unfolded, Dr. Lee, 61, began revealing details of his contacts with Chinese scientists, including one encounter he had improperly hidden from laboratory officials. Dr. Lee, it turned out, had met the bomb designer in a Beijing hotel room years before.

Eventually, Dr. Lee fit perfectly into agents' portrait of a scientist being recruited as a spy by China.

The government's pursuit was as erratic as its quarry. The investigation was so low- key at times that Dr. Lee was allowed to travel overseas unmonitored at least twice. But after the download was discovered, the government imprisoned him for nine months by arguing that his freedom could threaten the global nuclear balance. Prosecutors charged him with crimes that carry potential life sentences, even though they had only circumstantial evidence to support the charges.

The case, like so much in the world of espionage, was a haze of ambiguity, in which everything from intelligence data to Dr. Lee's activities was subject to interpretation. Often what mattered was who the interpreters were, and what perspective they brought.

The case was first framed by Notra Trulock III, a Soviet analyst during the cold war who had become director of intelligence at the Energy Department, which maintains the nation's nuclear arsenal and runs its weapons laboratories. His influence was magnified because much of the government infrastructure that provided nuclear intelligence at the height of the arms race had fallen into disrepair.

As the case passed to the F.B.I., it acquired a classic cold war plot: spy for competing superpower steals blueprints for America's premier bomb. But this was a different, more complex story.

The other country was not Russia but China. And while Washington and Beijing had hardly become allies, their nuclear scientists were meeting regularly and sharing research. That gave China the opportunity to spy the way experts say it prefers to, mining nuggets from countless foreigners bearing secret knowledge rather than relying on a few master spies.

The case of Wen Ho Lee was propelled by the divisive politics of Clinton-era Washington. It languished for several years, only to be revived in 1998 by a confluence of forces - a White House under siege of impeachment, festering accusations of Chinese money funneled to Democratic campaigns and a House panel that saw the W-88 case as only the newest evidence of China's voracious appetite for American technology secrets.

The spying charges gained wide public attention on March 6, 1999, after The Times reported that China possessed "nuclear secrets stolen from an American government laboratory," and that American experts believed Beijing had tested a weapon "configured remarkably like the W-88." Descriptions of the espionage escalated rapidly. Two months later, the chairman of the House panel, Christopher Cox, Republican of California, wrote publicly that the Chinese had a "knockoff version of the world's most sophisticated nuclear design."

Today, the crime, whatever its extent, remains unsolved, the spy, or spies, unidentified. In its long pursuit of Wen Ho Lee, the government was driven by fear that he had given up the nation's deepest atomic secrets. The one secret he most certainly never gave up was himself.

STARTING OUT

Wen Ho Lee arrived at Los Alamos in 1978 and joined the bomb-design unit two years later. It was a time of growing scientific cooperation between China and the United States.

In a tale laced with cross-cultural subtleties, the arcana of atomic science and the feints of the intelligence world, the most indecipherable character is the man at the center.

In part, Wen Ho Lee is an immigrant striver, one of 10 children of poor, uneducated farmers whose roots traced to Fujian province in China, across the strait from Taiwan.

Dr. Lee's childhood was an adventure of swimming and fishing and catching monkeys for pets in bamboo forests. But it was also hard, according to relatives and information Dr. Lee provided through his lawyers. (Dr. Lee declined several requests for interviews.) While Dr. Lee was in high school, his mother committed suicide after years of declining health; his father died after a stroke a few years later.

The Lees lived through the Japanese colonization of Taiwan and the martial law of the Nationalists, who detained intellectuals suspected of subversive activity. Lee Tse- ling, Dr. Lee's nephew and a doctor in Taiwan, said the lesson the family took from these experiences was, "Don't get involved in politics."

Mathematics was Wen Ho Lee's ticket out. He studied mechanical engineering at Cheng Kung University and then came to the United States in 1964, earning a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Texas A & M in 1970. His English was heavily accented, but he embraced things American, from Aggie football to his blue Mustang. In 1974, he became a United States citizen.

Dr. Lee, his wife and two children got to Los Alamos, N.M., in 1978, and two years later he joined X Division, the bomb-design unit. As a specialist in hydrodynamics, he wrote computer codes that model the fluidlike movement of explosions. The codes help scientists design bombs and simulate weapons tests.

Los Alamos is typically suburban, with sizable homes, good schools, low crime. But it is also a place apart, a spectacular mountaintop village anointed as science headquarters of the Manhattan Project in the 1940's. Streets named Trinity Drive and Bikini Road commemorate bomb tests, and a gift shop sells $13.50 pewter key chains of Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs dropped on Japan.

In those early days, Dr. Lee stood out. The local Chinese community was so tiny "everybody knew everybody," recalled Cecilia Chang, a friend who became a vocal supporter of Dr. Lee. The Lees' house in White Rock, just outside Los Alamos, was an ethnic oasis where Dr. Lee offered Chinese meals made from homegrown vegetables and fish he caught.

When Dr. Lee arrived, the laboratory was assuming an important role in the changing relationship between the United States and China. Exchanges between the two countries' nuclear scientists had begun soon after President Jimmy Carter officially recognized China in 1978. They were extraordinary at first, given the secrecy shrouding America's weapons laboratories. But eventually, with the Reagan administration eager to isolate the Soviet Union, hundreds of scientists traveled between the United States and China, and the cooperation expanded to the development of torpedoes, artillery shells and jet fighters.

The exchanges were spying opportunities as well.

"In 1979, we knew virtually nothing" about China's nuclear program, said George A. Keyworth II, who was Ronald Reagan's science adviser. "By 1981, we knew a large fraction of the strategic intelligence, the big questions."

China was spying, too. Shortly after the exchanges started, the F.B.I. began an espionage investigation code-named Tiger Trap, which focused on a Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist at the government's Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California. Agents were wiretapping the scientist's phone, and on Dec. 3, 1982, the tap picked up Wen Ho Lee offering to help find out who had "squealed on" him.

Dr. Lee's first encounter with investigators set a pattern for the future. When confronted, he said he had not known the scientist and had not tried to contact him; he confessed only when presented with evidence of his call, according to government records and Congressional testimony. Then he told investigators that he thought the suspect was in trouble for passing unclassified information. Dr. Lee said he was concerned because he himself had been giving Taiwanese officials unclassified documents that American officials say dealt with nuclear-reactor safety.

According to a secret F.B.I. report recently obtained by The Times, Dr. Lee told agents that he had not informed American government officials, "even though the documents he passed specifically stated they were not for foreign dissemination."

The report continued, "Wen Ho Lee stated that his motive for sending the publications was brought on out of a desire to help in scientific exchange." Dr. Lee also said "he helps other scientists routinely and had no desire to receive any monetary or other type of reward from Taiwan."

Dr. Lee's call could be viewed as a simple overture to a fellow immigrant scientist in trouble. It could also be seen through the eyes of a seasoned spy catcher. "This says this guy wants to be a player," said Paul D. Moore, then the F.B.I.'s chief analyst for Chinese counterintelligence.

But Dr. Lee passed a polygraph test on whether he had divulged classified data and cooperated with F.B.I. agents trying to get incriminating information on the Tiger Trap suspect. The incident was apparently never reported to the Energy Department, and the F.B.I. closed its investigation of Dr. Lee in 1984.

Had the department known, "it would have been enough to remove his security clearance," an agency official said. "The lights should have gone off with somebody."

MAKING FRIENDS

Dr. Lee traveled to Beijing twice in the 1980's. What worried his bosses was what he did not tell them when he got home.

Throughout his career at Los Alamos, Dr. Lee traveled widely, attending scientific meetings and giving papers in places like Venice and Budapest, Britain and Hawaii. In March of 1985, he and other government scientists attended a conference in Hilton Head, S.C. Two scientists from China were also there.

"They sat in the back wearing their Mao jackets and stuck out like a sore thumb," said Robert A. Clark, a scientist who attended the conference. "Wen Ho chatted with them quite a bit." The scientists suggested that Dr. Lee and Dr. Clark attend a conference in Beijing the next year, and, with approval from Los Alamos, they went with their wives.

Dr. Clark, a defender of Dr. Lee, said it was clear in Beijing that his colleague had befriended some Chinese scientists.

"It's obvious they would chat him up with the idea that maybe one day they would get information from him," he said. "You might say he was friendlier than he should have been with these guys." But if it looked suspicious, he said, it was only because of fears of China.

Dr. Lee's wife, Sylvia, a secretary and data-entry clerk at Los Alamos, was making friends, too. She had become an unofficial hostess for visiting Chinese. Correspondence obtained by The Times shows that she served as both tour guide and research contact.

"I am very sorry to hear that Wen Ho is ill and hope he will get better soon," a Chinese scientist wrote her in a telex about a coming trip with a colleague. "Both Chen and I will be very happy if we can learn something in computational hydrodynamics and get some papers."

Mrs. Lee also gave the F.B.I. and C.I.A. information about scientists she met. She had repeated contacts with the F.B.I. in the mid-1980's, government officials and others knowledgeable about the case said. In about a dozen instances, they said, a C.I.A. agent was present and paid for the hotel room where the meetings took place.

In 1988, the Lees attended another conference in Beijing. In post-trip debriefings, American scientists often reported being approached by Chinese scientists seeking classified information, but Dr. Lee reported nothing of the sort. That worried Robert Vrooman, then the chief of counterintelligence at Los Alamos.

Mr. Vrooman says he considered Dr. Lee naïve, not nefarious. Even so, in 1990, he urged laboratory officials to deny Dr. Lee's request to visit China again. Officials decided to end Mrs. Lee's role as a hostess at about the same time.

"I have been concerned for some time that Dr. Lee did not understand the ruthlessness of intelligence agencies in trying to collect information being vital to national survival," Mr. Vrooman said last year in court documents.

BLAST IN THE DESERT

At first, the Chinese bomb test didn't alarm American officials. But how did Dr. Lee know the designer of China's new bomb?

On Sept. 25, 1992, a nuclear blast shook China's western desert near the Silk Road once traveled by Marco Polo.

From spies and electronic surveillance, American intelligence officials determined that the test was a breakthrough in China's long quest to match American technology for smaller, more sophisticated hydrogen bombs.

China had entered the nuclear arena after other big powers and feared its large, stationary missiles were becoming vulnerable to disarming first strikes. Smaller bombs that fit on trucks and submarines would be easier to hide, have greater range and aid China's transformation from a regional to a global nuclear power.

Miniaturization was difficult science, involving complicated physics, computer work and machining. Older bombs use a ball of atomic fuel surrounded by a cumbersome array of conventional explosives that compress the fuel until it reaches critical mass. The secret to the smaller American design was an oval-shaped mass of atomic fuel detonated by just two charges - one at each end of the oval. That step helped cut the width of bomb casings from feet to mere inches.

Shrinking weapons by using "two-point" detonation became China's holy grail. The first American nuclear scientists who went to China in the late 1970's were peppered with questions about miniaturization. When the Tiger Trap suspect was stopped at an airport en route to China in 1981, officials said, he was carrying detailed answers to five weapons questions, including one about two-point detonation. Though officials believed that secrets leaked in the Tiger Trap case, they felt the evidence was too weak to bring criminal charges. The suspect maintained his innocence; he now refuses to discuss the case.

The 1992 test was a leap forward, but it did not initially alarm American nuclear intelligence experts, since countries like Russia and Britain had mastered two-point technology years before. Besides, the diplomatic wind was blowing in a different direction.

With the cold war over, the United States and other countries were trying to defuse the arms race with global cooperation. As a sign of the new openness, the Energy Department began declassifying millions of ideas and documents about nuclear arms, and even encouraged weapons scientists to share unclassified computer codes with their foreign counterparts.

Washington began working with Moscow to secure its plutonium stockpiles. And Beijing agreed to a partnership on arms control and methods of verifying a test-ban treaty - an agreement destined to bring the two nations' nuclear scientists even closer together.

On Feb. 23, 1994, Los Alamos was host to the highest-level group of Chinese weapons officials ever to visit the United States. Leading the delegation was Hu Side (pronounced se-DUH), the new head of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, the nation's bombmakers. American intelligence officials had learned that he was the designer of China's two-point bomb.

One person not on the guest list was Wen Ho Lee. "We had very tight controls on access," a laboratory official said. "The door was closed. The session was not advertised." But that afternoon, Dr. Lee appeared at a briefing and was warmly greeted by Dr. Hu.

"There is a lot of bowing and exchanging cards," another official recalled. He was startled that a midlevel hydrodynamics expert at Los Alamos knew China's top nuclear scientist. And Wen Ho Lee was not simply relatively obscure; just months before, he had learned he might be laid off because of budget cuts.

Then a translator told the official that Dr. Hu was thanking Dr. Lee in Mandarin. "They're thanking him because the computer software and calculations on hydrodynamics that he provided them have helped China a great deal," the translator said.

Laboratory officials informed the F.B.I., which had suspicions of Dr. Lee from Tiger Trap and opened an investigation. Officials did not know what to think. Dr. Lee had never reported meeting Dr. Hu in China. If the two had an improper relationship, why expose it at Los Alamos?

A GREAT LEAP FORWARD

China's new bomb, one expert said, was `like they were driving a Model T' and `suddenly had a Corvette.' Was it espionage?

Tension between security officers and scientists who see their work as apolitical and dependent on open discourse has existed at Los Alamos since the laboratory's founder, J. Robert Oppenheimer, clashed with Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project's top military man, who so mistrusted the scientists that he wanted them to enlist and wear uniforms.

Little surprise, then, that scientific diplomacy was not universally applauded. As the Energy Department's new intelligence director, Notra Trulock, saw it, scientists might "think they're too smart to be bamboozled by some foreign intelligence officer." Periodic leaks and other security breaches, he believed, indicated otherwise.

Mr. Trulock entered the fray not as an expert on China or spy hunting or even bomb building. He had a political science degree from Indiana University and in the Army during the cold war had monitored Warsaw Pact radio transmissions on the German-Czech border. Later, he led a Los Alamos research project on the dangers of post-Communist Russia losing control of its nuclear weapons, a study that won two government awards.

In his new job in Washington, Mr. Trulock said, he figured warnings about Russia would go unheeded given President Bill Clinton's policy of engaging the former enemy. But the risks posed by China might be heard. "We focused on China because we could," he said recently.

Siegfried S. Hecker, the director of Los Alamos from 1986 to 1997, said that, in several discussions, Mr. Trulock had implied that Los Alamos "was infiltrated by Chinese agents." Once, Dr. Hecker added, Mr. Trulock told him that "just the fact that there are five Chinese restaurants here meant that the Chinese government had an interest." Mr. Trulock denies that remark.

Mr. Trulock's focus on China began when Robert M. Henson, a Los Alamos scientist and intelligence analyst, went to him in early 1995 and said his analysis showed that the Chinese had so dramatically shrunk their weapons that they had to have used stolen American secrets. "It's like they were driving a Model T and went around the corner and suddenly had a Corvette," Dr. Henson said.

Now Mr. Trulock turned to John L. Richter, a legendary bomb designer whose specialty was the main bomb component the Chinese had improved - the atomic trigger for a hydrogen bomb, known as a primary. Dr. Richter said the sketchy evidence suggested that China might have significant information about the primary of the W-88.

Dr. Richter, who had overseen the design team for the W-88, calls it "a darling." The W-88 warhead is 30 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima, but the compact design of its primary allows for unusual accuracy. Beginning in 1990, hundreds were affixed to Trident missiles and deployed on submarines.

The question was how much the Chinese had reduced the size of their bomb primaries. Making a smaller weapon was a natural evolution for China, but making one as small and sophisticated as the W-88, and doing so quickly, was a monumental leap of physics and engineering that presumably would have required knowing American bomb secrets. After all, it had taken the United States three decades to go from its first miniaturized hydrogen bomb - a warhead with a primary casing about 20 inches across - to the W-88, with its 9-inch casing.

Mr. Trulock sensed espionage. He likened China's 1992 test to the first clue in other great spy cases, like the unexplained deaths of Russians working for the United States in the Aldrich Ames affair. "In this case," he said, "you had something go boom in the desert."

`THOUSAND-PIECE PUZZLE'

Officials knew the Chinese had stolen some secrets about the W-88. But how much did they know, and what had they done with it?

To probe deeper, Mr. Trulock assembled nearly 20 weapons and intelligence experts who met in the summer of 1995 in a spy- proof room at Energy Department headquarters in Washington, sifting through intercepted signals, purloined Chinese documents, accounts of spies.

But determining the physical size of China's test bombs was nearly impossible. "You get three pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle and try to figure out what it is," one participant said. "People read in their own prejudices."

The pieces they had were hardly clear, intelligence officials said. A spy's vague report spoke of Chinese interest in a primary whose outer casing was the size of a soccer ball - about nine inches, the width of the W-88 casing. And a Chinese scientist visiting Los Alamos had recently bragged about the size of China's new bombs by holding his hands close together.

Still, while there was no question China had built smaller bombs with two-point detonation, most of the experts agreed there was no proof the Chinese had figured out anything about the W-88.

Then, in midsummer, the experts got from the C.I.A. a seven-year-old Chinese document showing that Beijing knew distinctive characteristics of the W-88, including almost the precise width of the primary casing. In spy-speak, it was a "walk-in document" because someone had offered it out of the blue.

The document, which compared China's weapons with those of various countries, was far from a blueprint for the W-88. It contained secret but rudimentary information of value mainly in making missiles that carry bombs. To Dr. Richter, the walk-in confirmed that China knew "the periphery" of the W-88, but not its design. "If you get a map of New York, is that New York?" he said. "No, it's an image."

Michael G. Henderson, a bomb designer who headed the panel of experts, said, "We all agreed there had been some hanky- panky."

But in wrestling with the implications of the espionage, the experts clashed, with their debate breaking into three positions.

The most benign was that China had effectively made all its advances on its own, even if it had done some spying.

The second, that China had benefited from a slow drip of secrets about two-point detonation, was supported by reports of many scientists asked to give up secrets while visiting China, by the files of Tiger Trap and by the walk-in document itself.

The last view was that a cold-war-style superspy had betrayed much more in a single delivery of bomb blueprints than the slow drip ever could. Dr. Henson, who had first sounded alarms about Chinese spying to Mr. Trulock, was virtually alone in arguing angrily that the magnitude of China's advancement implied the existence of a major spy. One participant recalled him "literally cursing, swearing at us," and added, "His face was red."

Having reached an impasse near the end of the summer, the group stopped its formal meetings. Months later, the few remaining experts agreed on a compromise that was spelled out in secret briefing documents, which were recently described by participants and federal officials.

On the one hand, they said, Tiger Trap had likely given the Chinese the two-point concept, and over all, espionage had "been of material assistance" to Beijing's nuclear advances. Further, they believed that China had plans to try to build a "W-88-like aspheric primary."

Even so, the experts said they had no way of knowing how small China's bombs had actually gotten and saw no evidence that Beijing had copied America's premier weapon.

Mr. Trulock remembers it differently. The panel, he said, generally agreed that the 1992 test involved something akin to the W- 88 primary. "Words like `resembled' and `similar to,' were words that were used," he said. He accused the scientists of rewriting history to play down their role in the Lee ordeal.

Dr. Henderson, the panel's chairman, said Mr. Trulock took his own view "and ran with it." He added: "I'm sure he believes in the veracity of what he had. But, unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's true."

SEARCHING FOR SUSPECTS

Though the exact crime was unclear, an espionage investigation settled on Los Alamos, the birthplace of the W-88. Soon, the focus narrowed to Wen Ho Lee.

If Notra Trulock ran with it, he hardly ran alone. He informed his bosses at the Energy Department. Alarmed, they asked the C.I.A. for its assessment. Initially skeptical, the C.I.A. reviewed the evidence and agreed that espionage had probably aided China. The Energy Department gave Mr. Trulock a green light to expand his inquiry and to brief top officials, from the White House, in April 1996, to the Strategic Command in Omaha.

Mr. Trulock called the investigation Kindred Spirit, and from the start, it reflected his belief that the Chinese had come close to replicating the W-88, and that one spy might have given them the blueprints.

In his briefings, he was typically careful not to overstate how much was known about Chinese spying. But he also took the stance of a military analyst in stating the worst- case scenario, people who heard his briefings said. Sometimes, he included images of China's newest missile and the W-88, implying that was where China was headed.

"We thought it best to focus on the W-88 because it was the newest system in our inventory and it was the system within the `walk-in document' for which the most detailed information was provided," Mr. Trulock wrote in an unpublished article. And he said he feared that the secrets in the walk-in document might represent just a sampling of what the Chinese had stolen about the W- 88.

The idea of a theft, without the scientists' caveats, was alarming. "I said, `Holy cow, this is the last thing we need,' " said Daniel J. Bruno, Mr. Trulock's chief investigator on the case. "It's a very serious thing that affects your children, our children, our grandchildren."

In searching for suspects, Energy Department investigators, aided by an F.B.I. agent experienced in Chinese espionage, looked at other weapons laboratories but concentrated on Los Alamos, where the W-88 had been developed.

Since the laboratory had no records showing all contacts between American and Chinese scientists, the investigators gleaned a list of 70 potential suspects from records of laboratory employees who had traveled to China in the mid-1980's, before the walk-in document was written. The Energy Department's final report shows that more than a third were on the list for travel that had nothing to do with the scientific work of the laboratory: "chaperone with Santa Fe High School band's trip to Beijing," "personal vacation cruise to Whangpo."

Investigators also looked at people who had access to W-88 information or had security problems. The list was narrowed to a dozen suspects, half with Chinese surnames. Wen Ho Lee and Sylvia Lee were on top. The Lees had visited China twice. Dr. Lee, whose access to weapons secrets was listed as "moderate," had worked on the W-88 computer code. His appearance in Tiger Trap remained suspicious. And investigators found Mrs. Lee suspect because laboratory supervisors said she had been so eager to play host to Chinese visitors that it conflicted with her job. (The investigators were never told that Mrs. Lee had also been a source for the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.)

"Quite frankly, Wen Ho Lee being a suspect at that point is only natural, since at that time they had been looking at him for 13 years," said Dr. Hecker, then the Los Alamos director. "They would have been derelict not to look at him."

But it may also have been derelict to look only at Dr. Lee, especially since the most concrete evidence of spying was the walk-in document, and its secrets had been distributed to hundreds, if not thousands, of people at military installations and missile contractors.

It is true that Energy Department investigators were legally prohibited from looking for suspects outside their agency. But Mr. Trulock and Mr. Bruno said they told F.B.I. officials that the leak might have come from the other sources. In addition, T. Van Majors, the F.B.I. agent assisting the Energy Department, wrote a memorandum warning against focusing just on Dr. Lee, a law enforcement official said. However, the memorandum was not reflected in the Energy Department's report on the case, and in the subsequent F.B.I. investigation.

"This guy stands out higher than the rest, based on circumstantial issues," Mr. Bruno said.

Defenders of Dr. Lee have said that investigators focused solely on him because of ethnic profiling, a charge government officials deny. Still, ethnicity did play some role in their thinking. Mr. Moore, the F.B.I.'s former China espionage analyst, said that while the Chinese routinely seek information from visiting scientists of all nationalities, they concentrate on ethnic Chinese, including Taiwanese, by appealing to a "perceived obligation to help China."

When Mr. Trulock's office issued its secret report, it said Dr. Lee "appears to have the opportunity, means and motivation" to compromise the W-88. A secret Justice Department review of the case, completed last year, called Mr. Trulock's report "a virtual indictment" of Dr. Lee, a law enforcement official said.

The crime, though, was unclear. The report's damage assessment, never before disclosed, contained a hodgepodge of formulations, from the tentative (the W-88 "may have been compromised") to the certain (the Chinese had "almost a total duplicate of the W-88 warhead").

AN ERRATIC PURSUIT

The F.B.I.'s investigation of Dr. Lee started and stalled as it passed from agent to agent and was overshadowed by higher- profile cases.

Two days after receiving the Energy Department's report in late May of 1996, and still three years before the case became public, the F.B.I. opened an investigation of Wen Ho Lee. The old inquiry, begun after Dr. Lee's encounter with Dr. Hu, was folded in.

Usually, the F.B.I. looks askance at the investigative work of other agencies. But in this case, F.B.I. officials neither interviewed the panel of weapons experts nor searched beyond the Energy Department for suspects. They accepted the Energy Department's finding as confirming their own suspicions about Dr. Lee and shipped it out to the field.

The case fell to David Lieberman, a veteran agent who worked Los Alamos counterintelligence cases part time from an F.B.I. satellite office in Santa Fe. The Lee investigation was added to his lineup of drug cases, bank robberies and crimes on nearby Indian reservations.

Promised help never came. Headquarters sent two agents to assist, but Albuquerque F.B.I. officials assigned them to general crime cases, law enforcement officials said. "It's not the way to handle anything that's a big investigation," a former official involved in the case said. "You don't send it out to the backwater of America and assign it to someone part time."

Neil J. Gallagher, head of the F.B.I.'s national security division, acknowledged that more resources should have been devoted to the case. But he said the investigation was hamstrung because it involved espionage suspected to have occurred a decade earlier.

There were more current national security cases at the time, including the Oklahoma City bombing and the Unabomber. Besides, Chinese espionage had always been a stepchild to Eastern Bloc cases, and in the aftermath of the cold war, F.B.I. resources had shifted to things like terrorism and urban drug gangs.

Still, as the case passed from one agent to another, the F.B.I. seemed to miss one opportunity after another.

For years, F.B.I. agents did not search Dr. Lee's computer because they believed they lacked legal authority. They never looked far enough to find a waiver Dr. Lee had signed in April 1995 stating, "Activities on these systems are monitored and recorded and subject to audit." Agents never used standard investigative tools, like trash searches and stakeouts. F.B.I. officials said it was difficult to operate surreptitiously in the closed society of Los Alamos. But a veteran F.B.I. espionage investigator said agents have worked in more challenging circumstances. "We've run cases inside C.I.A. headquarters," he said.

In 1997, a new agent on the case requested a permit to eavesdrop electronically on the Lees. A secret F.B.I. report prepared to support that application flatly stated that China "seemed to have had a copy of the design" of the W-88.

Allan Kornblum, a Justice Department lawyer who reviewed the permit application, later told a Senate committee, "I was also shocked by the facts, the idea that this guy is making official trips to the P.R.C. to meet with his counterparts in nuclear weapons design."

Still, weaknesses in the Lee case were obvious. Agents had not examined any other suspects on the Energy Department's list. They had not sufficiently demonstrated a link between Dr. Lee and the compromised W-88 information, Mr. Kornblum said. Intriguing elements of the case were old. In short, "we had little to show that they were presently engaged in clandestine intelligence activities," he said, according to a report by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania.

Justice Department officials declined to act on the F.B.I.'s application. That rejection stalled the investigation again. Mr. Kornblum said he told agents in August 1997 how to "flesh out" their application, but they did not respond for nearly 18 months. F.B.I. supervisors in Washington sent Albuquerque a list of 15 investigative tasks, but only 2 were done, a Senate investigation later determined.

With the investigation flagging, the F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh, told Energy Department officials that concerns about exposing the investigation were no longer a reason to keep Dr. Lee in his job.

But the laboratory's top officials were never told. According to internal Energy Department correspondence, Mr. Vrooman, the Los Alamos security chief, decided after consulting with a local F.B.I. agent that it would be better for the investigation if Dr. Lee remained in the laboratory's inner sanctum, X Division.

IN THE ECHO CHAMBER In Washington, anger at the Clinton administration and concern over China brought the W-88 case to a boil.

In Washington, Notra Trulock was pressing his case. By his own estimation, he gave his standard briefing about China, the W-88 and leaks at the national laboratories 60 times from 1995 to 1998.

He was relentless. Unable to get an appointment with a new top official at the Energy Department, Mr. Trulock recalled, he lingered outside her office until he could slip in and hit her with his pitch. Mr. Moore, the former F.B.I. analyst, said Mr. Trulock had figured out that to get heard in Washington: "He had to hype it. He wanted people to get interested in the problem."

Mr. Trulock denies any exaggeration. In fact, there was new evidence to support his anxiety about Chinese espionage. A September 1997 Congressional report found that foreign visitors were streaming into government laboratories without background checks. Los Alamos, for example, had 2,714 visitors in two years from "sensitive" countries, but only 139 were checked. Also in 1997, a scientist named Peter Lee pleaded guilty to charges related to passing American nuclear secrets to the Chinese.

Early the next year, President Clinton issued a directive to improve security at the laboratories. But Mr. Trulock felt that changes were coming too slowly, and that laboratory officials' view of espionage was that "it couldn't happen here."

If Mr. Trulock's warnings about lax security rang true for many officials, his central point - the theft of the W-88 - met with some skepticism.

A 1997 report, prepared for the White House by the C.I.A., found that while spying had aided China's "remarkable progress in advanced nuclear weapons design," it had saved Beijing a mere two years of development. The report went on to judge that China had no W-88 duplicate.

Some experts, hearing Mr. Trulock's classified briefing, questioned whether China would even want to expend the vast resources needed to produce the W-88. Richard L. Garwin, a top federal science adviser, said he dismissed the notion as whimsical. While the highly accurate W-88 was designed for a specific cold war objective - knocking out missile silos - China's nuclear program focuses on the ability to destroy cities.

But suddenly, in 1998, Mr. Trulock found a larger and more receptive audience.

With impeachment as a backdrop, allegations that the Clinton administration was allowing China easy access to American secrets collided with charges that China's military had funneled money into Democratic coffers. The New York Times reported that the daughter of a senior Chinese military officer was giving money to Democrats while also working to acquire sensitive American technology.

Republicans, opening a new front against a beleaguered president, created a House select committee, headed by Representative Cox, to investigate whether the government was compromising technology secrets by letting American companies work too closely with China's rocket industry. With its deadline approaching, the committee stumbled on the W-88 case.

Mr. Trulock became a star witness, and committee members were riveted by his testimony. C.I.A. analysts who testified before the committee agreed there was espionage, people who heard the secret proceedings said, but were more equivocal about its value to China.

As it was completing its work, the panel received a secret report from the National Counterintelligence Center, a federal group that seeks to outwit spies. In a brief reference, the report echoed Mr. Trulock's view that China had stolen "the design information on a current U.S. warhead," the W-88, but offered no evidence to back that finding.

The Cox committee wrote its report in late 1998, but it was not declassified and released until May 1999, after the case had broken into public view. The unanimous report accused China of stealing nuclear secrets - possibly even entire blueprints - for the warheads of "every currently deployed" long-range American missile. While acknowledging that "much is unknown" about the impact of the thefts, it judged that future Chinese designs would "exploit elements" of the W-88, and that the stolen secrets put China's bomb-design information "on a par with our own."

But John M. Spratt Jr., a Democratic representative on the committee, said the panel lacked the time and witnesses with sufficient technical background to fully examine the issues. In retrospect, he said, Mr. Trulock's testimony was more alarming than warranted.

He pointed to a 1999 report by the nation's top intelligence experts, done in response to the Cox panel, that concluded that China's theft of American secrets had "probably accelerated" its weapons development, though more "to inform their own program than to replicate U.S. weapons design."

The Chinese government issued its own response to the Cox committee. Its report, "Facts Speak Louder Than Words and Lies Will Collapse by Themselves," denied any espionage.

And in a recent e-mail response to questions from The Times, Hu Side, China's top bomb designer, said his nation's scientists "can create every advanced technology and glory which they need by their own efforts."

CLOSING INBit by bit, new details of Dr. Lee's activities came tumbling out.

The Cox committee's deliberations built pressure within the government to revive the languishing W-88 investigation.

David V. Kitchen, who became head of the F.B.I.'s Albuquerque office in August 1998, said he first learned details of the case that October, when his assistant brought him the Energy Department's 1996 administrative report.

"We couldn't understand how they came to the conclusion they came to, specifically about how Lee was the main suspect," said Mr. Kitchen, who is now retired from the F.B.I.

Mr. Kitchen wanted to close the investigation. "We worked the case for quite a while, and what did we have to show for it?" he asked. The answer was very little.

But Edward J. Curran, an F.B.I. official working at the Energy Department, had heard a secret Cox committee briefing and was aghast at what he saw as a lack of rigor in the F.B.I. investigation.

In August, the F.B.I. had run a sting operation, with an agent posing as a Chinese intelligence officer trying to lure Dr. Lee to a meeting. Even though Dr. Lee did not take the bait, Mr. Curran was concerned that if Dr. Lee was a spy, that call could have alerted him that the authorities were onto him. In December, investigators knew Dr. Lee was going to Taiwan for three weeks, but did not monitor him. Laboratory officials had not even informed the F.B.I. when Dr. Lee went to Taiwan for six weeks earlier that year to consult at a military institute.

The new energy secretary, Bill Richardson, said he decided that leaving Dr. Lee in X Division "was an unacceptable risk." On Dec. 23, after Dr. Lee returned from Taiwan, the department gave him a lie detector test. Dr. Lee was initially found to have passed the test, which included questions about divulging secrets. But he made one startling revelation.

One night during his 1988 trip to Beijing, a Chinese scientist he knew had called his hotel room and asked to meet alone. Dr. Lee agreed, and the scientist, an official in China's nuclear program, showed up with Hu Side. Dr. Hu, law enforcement officials said, asked Dr. Lee questions about how to make smaller hydrogen bombs using oval-shaped fuel.

China's top bomb designer, then, was pressuring Dr. Lee for information about two-point detonation four years before China achieved that goal. Perhaps that explained why Dr. Hu greeted Dr. Lee so warmly during the briefing at Los Alamos in 1994.

Dr. Lee told investigators that he had not answered Dr. Hu, since the information was secret, but he had never before reported the meeting to security officers, as required. It was precisely the kind of approach Mr. Vrooman, the laboratory security official, was surprised Dr. Lee had not reported in the 1980's.

That day, Los Alamos officials suspended Dr. Lee's access to X Division. F.B.I. agents had heard Dr. Lee's admission about Dr. Hu, but they did not interview him for three weeks, and even then did not grill him about it, a laboratory official who was present said. "They didn't press him to go into details," he said. "It will bother me for years."

Believing that Dr. Lee had passed the polygraph test, Mr. Kitchen asked an agent on the case to write a memorandum proposing ending the investigation, which he forwarded to Washington. But on Feb. 2, the case turned again, this time on the analysis of a polygraph test. F.B.I. analysts reviewed tapes of the December test and decided that Dr. Lee's answers were inconclusive, after all.

Polygraph tests record factors like pulse rate and sweat gland activity to determine if a subject is being truthful. Although results are not admissible in court, law enforcement agencies, particularly the F.B.I., place great stock in their investigative value.

On Feb. 10, bureau officials administered their own test in a hotel room in Los Alamos. Dr. Lee was wired to a machine, and for the first time since he was singled out in 1996, was asked, "Have you ever provided W- 88 information to any unauthorized person?"

"No," he answered.

He also said he had never given nuclear-weapons codes to an unauthorized person.

The polygraph examiner determined that Dr. Lee was deceptive, a Congressional report said.

He also told the examiner that he had helped a Chinese scientist with a mathematical problem that "could easily be used in developing nuclear weapons," Mr. Freeh later told Congress.

That evening, Dr. Lee told one of his bosses, Richard A. Krajcik, that he had failed the test, and acknowledged that "he may have accidentally passed" secrets to a foreign country, Dr. Krajcik testified in court. Dr. Lee's lawyers say he never made such a statement.

The investigation that was nearly closed weeks before was reaching a boil. After having gone on in secret for years, it was also leaking.

Back in January, The Wall Street Journal had run a news article under the headline "China Got Secret Data on U.S. Warhead - Chief Suspect Is a Scientist at Weapons Laboratory of Energy Department." The article said the Chinese had obtained information on the W-88 from Los Alamos, but investigators said they had no sign the article had alerted Dr. Lee.

Two months later, when the authorities were informed that The New York Times was preparing a major article on the W-88 case, they realized time was running out to get a confession from Dr. Lee.

Federal officials asked The Times to delay publication for several weeks, saying they were preparing to confront their suspect. Although The Times did not know the identity of the chief suspect, F.B.I. officials said they feared he would recognize himself from details in the article. The Times withheld publication for one day and said it would consider a further delay if asked personally by Mr. Freeh, the F.B.I. director. He never called.

The F.B.I. interviewed Dr. Lee on March 5, and he consented to a search of his office. The next day, a Saturday, The Times published its article, "China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, U.S. Aides Say." The article said American officials believed "Beijing was testing a smaller and more lethal nuclear device configured remarkably like the W-88." And it reflected criticism of the White House and the F.B.I. for not dealing swiftly with the Los Alamos case. It included Paul Redmond, the C.I.A.'s former chief spy hunter, saying that "this is going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs."

The Times article prompted a flood of press attention and upended the F.B.I.'s strategy, forcing agents to rush into a confrontation interview with Dr. Lee before they were ready, Mr. Freeh told Congress.

The F.B.I lured Dr. Lee to Santa Fe that Sunday and subjected him to a harsh interrogation. An F.B.I. agent thrust a copy of The Times at him. "Basically that is indicating that there is a person at the laboratory that's committed espionage, and that points to you," she said, according to a transcript.

"But do they have any proof, evidence?" Dr. Lee asked.

The F.B.I. had only suspicion, and the agent, who has been identified by several government officials and in court testimony as Carol Covert, laid it out in the interrogation. The Lees went to China in 1986 and "they were good to you," she said. "They took care of your family. They took you to the Great Wall. They had dinners for you. Everything. And then in 1988 you go back and they do the same thing and, you know, you feel some sort of obligation to people to, to talk to them and answer their questions."

She focused on Dr. Lee's 1988 hotel room encounter with Dr. Hu. "Something had to have happened when they came to your room," Ms. Covert said. "We know how the Chinese operate."

Dr. Lee said he had "a rule in my mind" about what was secret and what he could reveal. "You may think," he told the agents, "when people, when the Chinese people do me a favor, and I will end up with tell them some secret, but that's not the case, O.K.?"

They threatened him with losing his job, with being handcuffed, with being thrown in jail. In preparing for the interview, Mr. Kitchen said he had suggested to Ms. Covert that she bring up the Rosenbergs because of the reference in the Times article.

"Do you know who the Rosenbergs are?" Ms. Covert asked.

"I heard them, yeah, I heard them mention," Dr. Lee said.

"The Rosenbergs are the only people that never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case," she said. "You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho."

When the transcript was made public, F.B.I. officials denounced the Rosenberg reference. "She carried that a bit further than we expected her to," Mr. Kitchen said.

But Dr. Lee did not crack. Always polite, he thanked the F.B.I. agents as he left. "I hope you have good health," he said. He added: "If they want to put me in jail, whatever. I will, I will take it."

Driving up the mountain to Los Alamos from Santa Fe that afternoon with his friend Bob Clark, Dr. Lee was distraught. "They kept saying I had to say that I did this thing I didn't do," Dr. Clark recalls him saying.

Mr. Richardson announced Dr. Lee's dismissal the next day, based on a failure to report contacts with people from a "sensitive country" and mishandled classified documents found on Dr. Lee's desk.

But the F.B.I. was no closer to knowing if Dr. Lee was the suspected W-88 thief. They just had a more detailed, if more frustrating, picture of him.

"It seemed like the more times you hit him upside the head, the more truth comes out," Mr. Kitchen said. "It's like a little kid."

Tomorrow: The prosecution unravels.

-------- us nuc politics

Rumsfeld Defends Missile Shield To Apprehensive Allies in Europe

Sunday, February 4, 2001
Washington Post
By Thomas E. Ricks
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23175-2001Feb3?language=printer

MUNICH, Feb. 3 -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making the first overseas trip by a member of the Bush cabinet, received a worried welcome today from European allies concerned about the new administration's stated determination to deploy a national missile defense system.

Rumsfeld reiterated that the United States intended to develop and deploy a system designed to defend against a limited missile attack, and twice said at a conference here on security issues that "these systems will be a threat to no one." He insisted that such a system "should be of concern to no one, save those who would threaten others."

But a parade of European officials from the German chancellor to the chairman of the Russian State Duma's foreign affairs committee thought otherwise. In speech after speech, they expressed concern that the United States was too eager to build a sophisticated anti-missile system that could touch off a new and dangerous arms race.

Rumsfeld spent most of his day holding one-on-one meetings to introduce himself to his counterparts from eight countries, ranging from Britain to Singapore.

According to a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld told British Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon that he doesn't expect any decisions on U.S. troop levels in the Balkans to be made until this summer. He said that the U.S. contribution to Balkans peacekeeping would be considered as part of a regularly scheduled multinational review of forces in the region.

Hoon urged that the United States "stay the course" in containing Iraq, and Rumsfeld appeared to agree with him, the Pentagon official said.

Officials also said they expected the White House to announce as early as Monday that former Pentagon official Paul D. Wolfowitz would be nominated to become deputy defense secretary and that another former Pentagon official, Richard L. Armitage, would be nominated for the No. 2 job at the State Department.

But the main subject of the day at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy was the Bush administration's determination to deploy a missile defense system.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder set the tone of the conference in a keynote speech that warned the United States against "overly hasty and early determinations" about deploying missile defenses.

Karl Lamers, the foreign policy spokesman for Germany's conservative opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union, charged that the U.S. anti-missile plan was the sort of project dreamed up by people who want to be "invulnerable" so they can be "masters of the world."

When Rumsfeld spoke this afternoon he shared the stage with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. The German official said he understood U.S. concerns, especially about Asia, but warned three times against taking ill-considered steps that might spur a new international arms competition. "A new arms race in Asia or space . . . would create less, rather than more, security," Fischer said.

Fischer said he was not speaking just for Germany, but that his reservations were "by and large the European understanding of this discussion."

Rumsfeld responded by cordially but emphatically rejecting the assertions about an arms race as outdated rhetoric. "The phrase 'arms race' has been mentioned two or three times today," he said with some understatement. "I really think that's kind of left over from the Cold War. I think it's a phraseology and context less relevant today than it was then."

He also said that the United States is prepared to help its allies develop their own missile defenses. "The United States intends to develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack, and is prepared to assist friends and allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses," he said.

Richard Burt, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, characterized the day as an exchange of "polite complaints," with the Europeans worrying about missile defense and the Americans equally concerned about whether the European plan to establish a rapid reaction force would undercut NATO.

Another member of the American delegation argued that Rumsfeld's task was to emphasize to the Europeans that the United States considers missile defense to be a reality, not a possibility. "Rumsfeld has to take a hard line," said Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, a research and strategic planning organization based in Washington and Cambridge, Mass. "If he doesn't, the Europeans will perceive less than a full commitment, and . . . the allies will be more opposed."

Rumsfeld said at his confirmation hearings last month that he believed the Russian government would find a way to live with a U.S. missile defense system, once it was clear that Washington intended to build it.

Some foreign policy analysts calculate that Russian accommodation will undercut European opposition.

But Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) detected a broader concern among Europeans at the conference about the dominant American position in the post-Cold War world. "There's no question we are the superpower, and there's a certain uneasiness over here with our strength," he said.

Trying to bridge the gap between the U.S. and European perspectives, NATO Secretary General George Robertson said at the end of the day's speeches that "we all know that there is a security problem out there" from missile proliferation. The task, he said, is to "get on with addressing this problem with maturity and realism."

The Bush administration was expected to be criticized at the conference even more emphatically Sunday, when Russian and Chinese officials were scheduled to speak. But Rumsfeld won't be present to hear those remarks. He left tonight to meet U.S. troops based in Germany and then fly back to Washington.

--------

U.S. defense chief lobbies leaders in Europe on anti-missile plan

Sunday, Feb. 4, 2001
San Jose Mercury News
New York Times
BY MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/cgi-bin/edtools/printpage/printpage_ba.cgi

MUNICH, Germany -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the first senior Bush administration official to visit Europe, tried Saturday to defuse opposition to the administration's anti-missile plans by offering to help European nations and other allies to deploy missile defenses.

But while Rumsfeld assured European allies that the United States would consult with them on its anti-missile plan, he did not address in any detail one of the Europeans' principal concerns: how an anti-missile defense can be reconciled with strategic arms control and a productive relationship with Moscow.

``The United States intends to develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack, and is prepared to assist friends and allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses,'' Rumsfeld said in a speech to a conference of top political officials and defense specialists.

Rumsfeld underscored that the Bush administration was determined to proceed with an anti-missile defense of U.S. territory even if it could not overcome the objections from the Russians, Chinese and Europeans. He described a missile defense as nothing less than a moral imperative.

Missile defense was hardly the only sensitive issue Saturday. The European Union's move to develop a 60,000-strong rapid-reaction force by 2003 has drawn a wary reaction from the Bush administration.

While not opposing the initiative, Rumsfeld was clearly skeptical, and stressed the need for great care to ensure that the European Union does not detract from NATO.

President Bush's fatigue with the Balkan peacekeeping mission also remains a continuing source of anxiety in Europe. Rumsfeld said little on the subject Saturday, saying that the matter was under review at the White House. The United States and Europe also have to decide how to proceed with NATO expansion, a topic that greatly worries the Russians.

But as European leaders have challenged the missile-defense plan in recent weeks, the issue has risen to the fore. The main European concern is that deployment of an anti-missile shield will undermine the framework of nuclear arms control and spoil relations with the Russians.

Or, as the French president, Jacques Chirac, said in January, a U.S. missile defense ``cannot fail to relaunch the arms race in the world.''

The Russians have sought to stoke the Europeans' fears, warning that they may abandon the strategic arms constraints they have negotiated with Washington if the Bush administration abandons the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and deploys an anti-missile system.

The head of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Ivanov, is due to address the conference today, raising the specter of a U.S.-Russian tussle for European opinion.

In his attempts to sway European opinion, Rumsfeld presented several arguments. He insisted that anti-missile defenses could be reconciled with arms control, shying away from comments he made in congressional hearings and even on the airplane flying to the conference that the ABM treaty was an anachronism.

Rumsfeld also sought to turn longstanding European concerns about U.S. isolationism or military intervention into arguments for missile defenses.

Without a missile shield, he suggested future U.S. leaders might turn isolationist in a crisis and shrink from confronting a missile-wielding Third World aggressor. Alternatively, he warned, a U.S. leader might be forced to carry out a pre-emptive strike against a rogue nation.

``A system of defense need not be perfect; but the American people must not be left completely defenseless,'' Rumsfeld said. ``It is not so much a technical question as a matter of a president's constitutional responsibility. Indeed, it is, in many respects, a moral issue.''

Rumsfeld's case was helped by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who told the meeting that there was a general consensus in Washington that some sort of missile defense should be deployed.

``The question from an American point of view is not whether we will have a national missile defense but when and how,'' said Lieberman. ``This is not a technologically feasible program now. We are some years away.''

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also joined the call for missile defenses, adding to the sense of inevitability.

The European response to Rumsfeld's proposal Saturday was respectful, if restrained. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, appeared to speak for most of his fellow European foreign ministers when he said that European nations were glad that Washington wanted to consult them on the anti-missile plan but that a missile defense must not come at the expense of arms control. That is a difficult balancing act that neither the Americans nor the Europeans were prepared to discuss in detail.

--------

Powell, Rice stress commitment to missile defense

February 4, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/stories/02/04/missile.defense/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday the Bush administration remains committed to pursuing a national missile defense system, even if it means scrapping a long-standing treaty with Russia.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/maps/usa.washington.jpg

President Bush made developing such a system a priority on the campaign trail, despite criticism from Democrats and international leaders that it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.

Speaking on ABC's This Week, Powell made clear that such concerns wouldn't deter the White House from "pursuing a deliberate course of action with respect to missile defense," which he described as a matter of national interest.

"At some point, we will bump up against the limits of the ABM treaty, "Powell said. "At that time, we will have to negotiate with the Russians, what modifications might be appropriate, and we have to hold out the possibility that it may be necessary to leave that treaty if it is no longer serving our purpose."

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice echoed those comments on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." She said much had changed in nearly 30 years and, as such, the development of a missile defense systems was justified.

"The president is committed to restructuring the nuclear relationship and making defenses against limited threats from rogue states or accidental launch a part of the new, restructured relationship," Rice said.

"We understand that there's a lot of work to do with the allies and the Russians, but we believe that, with the proper context and with the chance to do the diplomacy, we can make this work."

Powell said the development of a missile defense system was not imminent.

"It's not something that's going to happen tomorrow and it's not something that's going to happen without full consultation with our friends and allies," Powell said.

---

Europe wary of missile defense
The U.S. offers to help allies bolster defensive capabilities, but Russia seeks to sway the opinions of Europeans.

February 4, 2001
St. Petersburg Times
http://www.sptimes.com/News/020401/Worldandnation/Europe_wary_of_missil.shtml

MUNICH, Germany -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the first senior Bush administration official to visit Europe, tried Saturday to defuse opposition to the administration's anti-missile plans by offering to help European nations and other allies to deploy missile defenses.

But while Rumsfeld assured European allies that the United States would consult with them on its anti-missile plan, he did not address in detail one of the Europeans' principal concerns: how an anti-missile defense can be reconciled with strategic arms control and a productive relationship with Moscow.

"The United States intends to develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack, and is prepared to assist friends and allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses," Rumsfeld said in a speech to a conference of top political officials and defense specialists.

Rumsfeld underscored that the Bush administration was determined to proceed with an anti-missile defense of U.S. territory even if it could not overcome the objections from the Russians, Chinese and Europeans. He described a missile defense as nothing less than a moral imperative.

Missile defense was hardly the only sensitive issue Saturday. The European Union's move to develop a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force by 2003 has drawn a wary reaction from the Bush administration.

While not opposing the initiative, Rumsfeld was clearly skeptical, and stressed the need for great care to ensure that the European Union does not detract from NATO.

President Bush's fatigue with the Balkan peacekeeping mission also remains a continuing source of anxiety in Europe. Rumsfeld said little on the subject Saturday, saying that the matter was under review at the White House. The United States and Europe also have to decide how to proceed with NATO expansion, a topic that greatly worries the Russians.

But as European leaders have challenged the missile defense plan in recent weeks, the issue has risen to the fore. The main European concern is that deployment of an anti-missile shield will undermine the framework of nuclear arms control and spoil relations with the Russians.

Or, as the French President Jacques Chirac put it last month, a U.S. missile defense "cannot fail to relaunch the arms race in the world."

The Russians have sought to stoke the Europeans' fears, warning that they may abandon the strategic arms constraints they have negotiated with Washington if the Bush administration abandons the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and deploys an anti-missile system.

The head of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Ivanov, is to address the conference today, raising the specter of a U.S.-Russian tussle for European opinion.

In his attempts to sway European opinion, Rumsfeld presented several arguments. He insisted that anti-missile defenses could be reconciled with arms control, shying away from comments he made in congressional hearings and on the airplane flying to the conference that the ABM treaty was an anachronism.

Rumsfeld also sought to turn long-standing European concerns about U.S. isolationism or military intervention into arguments for missile defenses.

Without a missile shield, he suggested future U.S. leaders might turn isolationist in a crisis and shrink from confronting a missile-wielding Third World aggressor. Alternatively, he warned, a U.S. leader might be forced to carry out a pre-emptive strike. "It is not so much a technical question as a matter of a president's constitutional responsibility. Indeed, it is, in many respects, a moral issue." -- Donald Rumsfeld, Defense secretary, on a missile defense system against a rogue nation.

"A system of defense need not be perfect; but the American people must not be left completely defenseless," Rumsfeld said. "It is not so much a technical question as a matter of a president's constitutional responsibility. Indeed, it is, in many respects, a moral issue."

Rumsfeld's case was helped by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who told the meeting that there was a general consensus in Washington that some sort of missile defense should be deployed.

"The question from an American point of view is not whether we will have a national missile defense but when and how," Lieberman said. "This is not a technologically feasible program now. We are some years away."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also joined the call for missile defenses, adding to the sense of inevitability.

The European response to Rumsfeld's proposal on Saturday was respectful, if restrained. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, appeared to speak for most of his fellow European foreign ministers when he said that European nations were glad that Washington wanted to consult them on the anti-missile plan but that missile defense must not come at the expense of arms control. That is a difficult balancing act that neither the Americans nor the Europeans were prepared to discuss in detail.

Rumsfeld, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, has been in office for two weeks. He also is the only political appointee to take up his post at the Pentagon, a situation that no doubt makes it hard to develop comprehensive missile defense proposals. And the rest of the Bush administration also is in its infancy.

Still, Rumsfeld's offer to help the Europeans and other allies deploy defenses raised a number of tricky questions.

The Bush administration has yet to explain which land-based, sea-based or space-based systems it would use. As a result, it is impossible to say how long it would take to develop a system, what it would cost or to what extent it would require modification of the ABM treaty.

Rumsfeld did not say how much the Europeans would have to pay for anti-missile defenses of their territory -- no small concern for a continent whose military spending has lagged -- and what Washington might contribute.

Nor is it clear just which "friends" would qualify for a U.S.-designed and developed anti-missile system. NATO nations are clearly covered in the offer. But would the Bush administration provide Taiwan, which faces a Chinese missile threat, with anti-missile systems? No mention was made of the possibility of cooperation with the Russians.

Rumsfeld has been something of a hard-liner on arms control. While Bush administration officials have talked of making cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, he had no specific arms control proposals to offer Moscow on Saturday. Yet he insisted the Russians were mistaken to perceive anti-missile defenses as a quest for strategic advantage.

He said that a limited U.S. defense could not neutralize the sizable Russian nuclear arsenal, and he suggested that the Russians understood this and were simply pretending not to understand in order to build opposition to the U.S. plan in Europe.

"The phrase 'arms race' has been mentioned two or three times today," Rumsfeld said. "I really think that is kind of a leftover from the Cold War. It is a phraseology in a context that is less relevant today than it was then. The United States does not fear an attack from Russia. The government does not and the people don't. The idea of an arms race between the United States and Russia ought not to be front and center in our thinking. It is something that is a leftover, a relic in our thinking."


-------- MILITARY

The Missile Shield's Tough Sell

February 4, 2001
THE WORLD
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/weekinreview/04TYLE.html?pagewanted=all

MOSCOW - The legendary medicine man of the Oglala Sioux, Black Elk, believed that power in the world "always works in circles." And so, apparently, does President Bush.

The president's foreign policy advisers said last week that he would engage the world in a series of "concentric circles," first meeting with America's neighbors Mexico and Canada, then allies in Europe and Japan. Only then would he be ready to powwow with the leaders of Russia and China on the tough issues of global security that lie ahead.

That agenda is not going to be easy. Ten years after the end of the cold war, not only are some of the most fundamental issues of global security unresolved, especially where nuclear weapons and the defenses against them are concerned, there is also no global forum in which these most profound security questions are being debated by all the nations who have a stake in the outcome.

Of course the United States talks one-on-one with dozens of nations about nuclear weapons. It carries on arms control negotiations with Russia and takes part in the Geneva Disarmament Conference and other discussions aimed at controlling nuclear proliferation, ballistic missiles and nuclear testing.

But the most searing security question for the coming decade is how to manage profound reductions in the number of terror weapons on the planet while parrying the question of missile defenses - especially the question of who gets left outside the umbrella. And where is the hall for this debate?

Former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger points out that while America and its NATO allies have a forum in Brussels to talk to Russia about the big issues of NATO expansion and America's plans to erect a national antimissile shield, neither Japan nor China is included in these discussions.

JAPAN is interested in missile defenses against North Korea. Taiwan wants to protect itself from rockets that might come from the mainland. Beijing fears that any American missile defense will render China's small intercontinental deterrent force ineffective, and has threatened to build up its nuclear arsenal in response. If it does, the Central Intelligence Agency predicts that India, fearing China, will not be far behind. And Pakistan, fearing India, will join the race, too. And so on.

For all its promise, Mr. Schlesinger notes, the United Nations Security Council has never proved to be "a satisfactory forum" for debate or negotiation of the complex issues of global security and nuclear weapons. For one thing, a number of aspiring nuclear powers (Iran and Iraq, for example) are simply not represented there, though each has specific security concerns - or ambitions - that have caused them to reach for nuclear weapons, as Israel did at an earlier time.

And in the end, "if there is disagreement among the major powers, the Security Council can't do a damned thing," Mr. Schlesinger points out. That is, perhaps, as it should be. Yet it is still surprising that the international system has failed to stumble upon a forum that could be the unambiguous site for airing the issues of post-cold war security and global arms control.

Since nuclear weapons were invented more than a half-century ago, the history of arms control has been the story of Moscow and Washington, and 30 years of acronyms: SALT, Start and the like. But as the former Russian national security adviser Andrei A. Kokoshin notes, the "second nuclear age" - with its proliferation of aspiring nuclear powers and new technologies - is rapidly ungluing the conventions of arms control.

The American response has been to try to set the agenda by its own orchestration of diplomacy and power politics, and Mr. Bush's concentric rings are the latest manifestation. Russia has responded with its own counterorchestration. And as China rails from the sidelines, each player maneuvers for advantage in a competition reminiscent of the cold war, which hardly seems adequate - or safe - in this age.

A new forum - or a reinvigorated old one - could allow modern leaders to sit in regular summit to discuss security in the new nuclear age. Bring heads of state together and they will talk about what is on their minds. Consider the Group of 8 meetings of large industrial nations, where security questions occasionally intervene. The same has been true at summits of Asian Pacific leaders. A forum that regularly brings heads of state together becomes a decision-forcing mechanism that mobilizes bureaucracies for problem solving, innovation and compromise. In the view of many analysts, this is what the nuclear age needs too.

The Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, speaking in Geneva on Thursday, lamented the fact that the Disarmament Conference, a United Nations forum of 66 countries, was still a diplomatic backwater for sterile posturing at the ambassador level and that heads of state pursued national strategies elsewhere. Arms control, he said, "cannot and must not be the privilege of a narrow group of nuclear powers or states with the largest military potentials."

Truth be told, Mr. Ivanov's government has done little to broaden the web of included countries. But the Bush administration also seems mistrustful of multilateralism in discussing global security. In committing his administration to deploy, at the earliest date, a national missile defense system - banned by the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty - Mr. Bush appears headed for pre-emption, not consultation or negotiation. Russia has replied that if one treaty falls, so will others, like dominoes, because their interconnecting principle of deterrence - that the best defense is a stable, balanced offense - will be undermined.

IN going it alone to sell his idea, Mr. Bush's diplomacy of concentric circles is in danger of becoming an exercise of gauging the opposition of neighbors, allies and potential adversaries before unilaterally junking the 1972 treaty and deploying an anti-missile system. But without the trust that comes from a stable edifice of arms control consultation and agreement, the American shield risks becoming just a target for adversaries to penetrate, inciting further escalation.

And trust is rapidly dissipating.

An early test of Mr. Bush's approach will be his meeting tomorrow with the Canadian prime minister, Jean Chrétien. In a December meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Chrétien publicly identified with the Russian position that the 1972 treaty "is a cornerstone of strategic stability."

Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin spoke Wednesday on the telephone, but no one could say whether they had narrowed the arc of their differences.

-------

U.S. missile plan risks space arms race

Sunday, February 4, 2001
Environmental News Network
By Adam Tanner
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/02/02042001/reu_space_41814.asp

A senior Russian security official said on Sunday that U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile system would undermine world stability and lead to a new arms race in outer space.

Speaking at a defense conference in Munich, Sergei Ivanov, secretary of Russia's security council, offered talks on deep cuts in strategic nuclear arms if Washington abandons its plans.

"The destruction of the ABM Treaty will result in the annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race, including one in outer space," Ivanov said in remarks clearly aimed at the new administration of U.S President George Bush.

Defense analysts say the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the then Soviet Union would be breached by the new U.S. system if it were to come into force.

"Restraining the so-called rogue nations - to use the American terminology - may be carried out more effectively from the point of view of both expense and consequences by means of a common political effort," Ivanov said.

"The situation in North Korea is the obvious example because the situation a year ago seemed much worse than today."

He spoke a day after new U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking at Munich, reiterated Washington's intention of developing a missile shield despite objections from its European allies, Russia and other nations.

U.S. officials have cited the threat of missile attacks from nations such as North Korea as a reason to deploy a defensive shield.

Ivanov held out the possibility of substantial arms control cuts if Washington drops its missile defense plans and preserves the ABM Treaty limiting Russia and the United States to a single defensive missile site each.

Since the 1970s, only Russia has maintained such a site, which it deploys around Moscow.

"If the ABM Treaty is maintained, Russia is ready for radical cuts with the United States of strategic offensive weapons to as low as 1,500 and even lower than this level," Ivanov told the conference on international security.

"We are also ready for an immediate start to official talks with the United States on SALT 3."

The alternative was a dangerous arms race into space, Ivanov said, urging an international conference on preventing the militarization of outer space.

"Such a conference is to give a new impetus of countries' efforts to keep outer space free of weapons of any kind," he said. "The problem is very urgent."

American officials say the ABM treaty is an antiquated relic no longer essential in the post-Cold War world, an argument Russia rejects.

"The cornerstone of strategic stability is the 1972 ABM Treaty," Ivanov said. "The treaty created the possibility for predictability in the nuclear sphere and progress on the way towards nuclear disarmament not only for the USSR and the United States, but also the whole world."


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

US dumping toxic substances in India: Environmentalists

Sunday, February 4, 2001
EXPRESSindia.com,
http://www.expressindia.com/news/daily/20010204/00401101.htm

WASHINGTON: Shipping of highly toxic products like mercury to the under-developed countries including India is causing concern among the environmentalists in America.

They suspect that 20 tonne mercury cargo removed from a polluting chemical plant in orrington is meant for a thermometer manufacturing unit in Tamil Nadu.

A newspaper report from Portland (Maine), quoting environmentalists said the likely destination is the Cheseborough Ponds in the hill resort town of Kodaikanal, which operates the largest thermometer plant in the world.

The company, a subsidiary of the United Kingdom's Unilever, produces 35 per cent of the thermometers sold in the United States.

The environmentalists said this was yet another instance of the United States dumping toxic materials in the under-developed countries. At a time when the use of mercury was being phased out in the advanced countries, Washington continued to export the toxic metal to the Third World countries like India, which has little or no environmental enforcement.

-------- terrorism

Security Increased for Bomb Trial

February 4, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nyregion/AP-Embassy-Bombings-Security.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- Steel barricades that can rise into place to stop up to 7 1/2 tons of speeding truck and cameras capable of reading a newspaper a block away are just some of the new measures protecting federal court buildings for the city's fifth major terrorism trial in a decade.

Construction crews worked through freezing weather in the past several week to finish strengthening security in time for Monday's opening statements in United States vs. Osama bin Laden.

The Saudi millionaire accused of leading a global terrorism empire is a fugitive believed to be hiding in Afghanistan. But four of his alleged followers are on trial on conspiracy charges in the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 224 people, 12 of them Americans.

The bombings exposed security weaknesses at many U.S. government locations.

The new security improvements around two adjacent federal court buildings in lower Manhattan are ``important substantially and symbolically,'' said Ray Kelly, whose tenure as New York City police commissioner encompassed the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center.

``I'm confident there are no specific threats out there, but given the developments over the last few years, this is a smart move. It acts as a major deterrent,'' he said.

The security measures involve the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse and the historic old U.S. Courthouse, which sit in the Foley Square area packed with federal, state and city court and government buildings.

Among the security work:

-- Two of the world's largest custom-made hydraulically operated barricades block the ends of a street which runs between the two courthouses. The barricades -- thick steel plates that can be lowered to let traffic pass or swiftly raised out of the ground at the press of a button -- are designed to stop a truck loaded to 15,000 pounds and moving at up to 80 mph.

Delta Scientific Vice President David G. Dickinson Sr. said his company has erected barriers protecting 200 embassies worldwide, 50 federal courthouses and 85 nuclear power plants. Among the buildings it protects are the Pentagon, State Department headquarters and the U.S. Supreme Court.

-- A line of thick, steel posts known as bollards, set four feet into the ground and rising four feet above ground, stand in front of the columned U.S. Courthouse. Delta Scientific says they will stop a truck loaded to 15,000 pounds and traveling at up to 50 mph.

-- Heavily armed guards, some stationed in newly installed steel-encased booths with bulletproof windows.

-- Cameras hidden within light fixtures or attached to nearby buildings, providing a view of the courthouses with lenses so strong they can read a newspaper from a block away.

The cameras, equipped for night vision, also allow monitoring of the nearby Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal lockup that has housed several dozen accused terrorists since the Feb. 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others. Six men were convicted after that attack.

Inside the courtroom, video cameras placed near the ceiling allow marshals outside to keep watch. Each morning, dogs trained to detect explosives sniff around the courtroom. Everyone entering is screened by a metal detector.

The defendants' feet are shackled in the courtroom. The shackles were ordered after defendant Wadih El-Hage leaped past U.S. marshals and charged toward the judge during a pre-trial hearing.

In November, defendant Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, 41, bin Laden's former finance chief, allegedly stabbed a guard in the eye with a sharpened comb. Salim was accused of attempting to escape, among other charges, and his trial was delayed.

``Terrorism is at our doorstep on U.S. soil,'' said Shirley Pierini, director of corporate risk for Kroll Associates, a corporation specializing in white collar crime investigation and security.

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