------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Dead Trees Standing
Baltics Moving Toward NATO Membership
Why Is Russia Still Peddling This Old Soviet Lie?
Western n-assistance to India, Pak.?
Fatherly Advice to the President on North Korea
Poking holes in missile defense
Mr. Putin, Meet Mr. Bush: Who Needs Treaties?
Reassessing the Reactor For Nuclear Power
Agency sees way to pay IOUs
Reports of blue flash studied
Research confirms IAAP dangers
Dead Trees Standing
ACCELERATED LAYOFFS AT PIKETON PLANT HITTING WORKERS HARD
Big Differences
Bush trusts foreign policy tutor with world
Nuclear nirvana?

MILITARY
Macedonia on brink of war
China test-fires land-attack cruise missile
Israel asks U.S. for $800 million extra aid
Gaza Strip civilians killed by Israeli army nail shells
Germans learn truth about von Braun's 'space research' base
"STAR WARS RETURNS" IS RELEASED
Swiss Vote Over Arming Peacekeepers
Yemen has pledged that it will deny the United States a military base

OTHER
Approval Of Plant Unlikely Fauquier Board Questions Need
Humbled Latin Leaders Facing Justice
China Agrees on Terms to Join WTO
Americans expand top spy base in UK

ACTIVISTS
The health hazards of depleted uranium


-------- NUCLEAR


Dead Trees Standing

By DANIEL B. BOTKIN,
June 10, 2001
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/ads/vendors/parkplaceparis/parissplash.htm

SANTA BARBARA--When Vice President Dick Cheney recently proposed that we look to nuclear power to ease the energy crunch, I thought about a little-known, curious experiment conducted in the 1960s and '70s at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. During the Cold War, the danger of a nuclear war or the accidental release of radioactive materials seemed real. To examine the effects of radiation on natural ecosystems, the federal government sponsored experiments. At Brookhaven, scientists irradiated an entire forest.

I was one of the researchers in this forest of dead trees standing. The forest looked as if it had just burned the day before, though the trees had actually been dead for years. We could work in the forest up to four hours a day because the radiation used, cesium's radioactive isotope 137, was relatively 'clean': Only gamma rays were produced. The laboratory had moved the largest source of cesium 137 that could be safely handled by earth-moving machinery into the forest and mounted it on a vertical, movable pole. The pole had devices that lowered the radioactive material into the ground, where lead shields provided the protection for researchers.

A journey to the center of the forest--that is, the source of radiation--after a decade of exposure was surreal. The forest was enclosed by two chain-link fences with locked gates. Just inside the fences, the woods were typical of those found on Long Island: a dense clutch of small pitch pines, scarlet and white oaks, and small shrubs, mostly blueberry and huckleberry. Many plants were quite fragrant. The sounds of crickets and cicadas filled the air. Ovenbirds called. My walk toward the source began as a pleasant stroll through the woods.

As I moved closer, more and more pine trees had dead branches and needles. Farther on, all the pines were dead, but many were still standing. Some of the fallen pine trunks were beginning to rot--the bacteria and fungi of decay had survived the radiation.

Up ahead, the white oaks looked sick. Soon, they, too, were all dead--and standing. The scarlet oaks proved to be the hardiest of the trees. As I neared the source, I saw some survivors.

It was like walking up a mountain. The higher up you climb, the smaller and fewer the trees. Eventually, the trees drop out completely and you reach a zone of low shrubs, then a tundra zone of smaller ground plants and, finally, if the mountain is high enough, no life at all.

So it was in the irradiated forest. Blueberries and huckleberries survived the trees, growing among grasses and sedges. Closer to the source, only a patchy cover of sedges. Then you came upon perfect triangles of sedges--green, grass-like, flowering plants--growing behind the trunks of standing dead trees. Just as they do with sunlight, the trunks shaded the sedges from the radiation. It was an eerie demonstration of how light rays travel.

Near ground zero, all plants were dead, but they had not decayed. The radiation had killed off the armies of decay: fungus, bacteria, earthworms, etc.

I hunted around for any signs of life. Within about six feet of the source, I found, on the back of a sign warning of the radiation danger, a small green patch of the algae Protococcus. The algae grows on damp soils. The sandy soil encircling the source was tinted gray, the color of the dead leaves and twigs that had not decayed.

From the air, the forest was an eerily beautiful sight of death radiating outward. You could see the tower containing the radiation, surrounded by a lifeless, gray-tan zone. Then came a circular ring of sedges, one of shrubs, another of oaks without pines and then the healthy forest. Rather than the intricate mosaic of life forms that characterizes normal forests, the one at Brookhaven was a series of concentric circles signifying the stages of death by radiation.

The radioactive waste generated at nuclear power plants can create similar landscapes. One idea is to bury it. But the radioactive materials remain dangerous for 10,000 years. A government task force assigned the job of designing a warning system that could be understood by people living 100 centuries from now came up with the idea of constructing solid structures above the waste depository that would emit mournful sounds when the wind blows.

The irradiated forest at Brookhaven National Laboratory is mournful indeed. The forest and the problems associated with the transportation and storage of nuclear wastes are also a mournful prospect, one that should make us pause and think carefully before we move in the direction of greater emphasis on nuclear power rather than on energy sources that are more environmentally benign.

(Daniel B. Botkin, a Research Professor of Biology at Uc Santa Barbara, Is the Author of "No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature.")

-------- europe

[Given the volatility of the region, it's alarming to think of Balkan countries having access to NATO nukes and depleted uranium weapons. et]

EUROPE - Baltics Moving Toward NATO Membership

Washington Post
Sunday, June 10, 2001; Page A22
Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45963-2001Jun9?language=printer

TURKU, Finland - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have made "good progress" toward qualifying for NATO membership, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

In a meeting with his counterparts from the Nordic and Baltic nations, Rumsfeld said that the United States favors adding members to NATO when they are ready. At a news conference afterward, Rumsfeld did not define "ready" or say whether the Baltic countries would be invited to join.

The issue of NATO membership for the three countries is especially sensitive in Moscow because it would mean expanding the alliance for the first time into territory of the former Soviet Union.

---

Why Is Russia Still Peddling This Old Soviet Lie?

By Mark Kramer
Washington Post
Sunday, June 10, 2001; Page B02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43291-2001Jun8?language=printer

The Soviet Union is still dead, but some Soviet fictions live on. The Russian government's recent statements in defense of the Soviet occupation of the Baltics are more than just bewildering or dishonest. They are also causing tensions that -- perhaps sooner rather than later -- will be felt in Washington and Europe as the three Baltic nations press their cases to become members of an expanded NATO.

It was 60 years ago this week, on the night of June 13, 1941,that Soviet troops began deporting tens of thousands of Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians to prison camps in Siberia. Within hours, men, women and children deemed "enemies of the Soviet regime" were rounded up. Many never made it to the gulags. They were executed on the spot.

The brutal operation was intended to consolidate Soviet rule in the Baltic nations, which had been independent until the Soviets sent troops to occupy them in October 1939. Annexation followed, along with puppet governments. The Nazi invasion of the USSR through the Baltics, which took place just a week after the mass deportations, temporarily disrupted the Soviets' hold. But after driving out the Germans in 1944, the Soviet army returned and undertook new rounds of deportations and executions, this time accusing local residents of Nazi collaboration. All told, the Soviet forces shipped off or executed more than 250,000 people, according to the documented evidence.

Nearly 10 years have elapsed since the Soviet Union dissolved and the Baltic nations regained their independence -- time enough for Russia, the successor state, to own up to the past. But at the Russian foreign ministry, earlier acknowledgments have given way to the same old Soviet lie: An official statement -- issued last June after Lithuania sought compensation for the damage done by Soviet occupation -- maintains that Lithuania and the other Baltic republics "voluntarily" joined the Soviet Union in the face of the Nazi threat. "The USSR sent its troops into the Baltic region only after the leaders there requested it," the statement said. "Assertions about the 'occupation' and 'annexation' of Lithuania by the Soviet Union ignore the political, historical, and legal realities and are therefore devoid of merit." Russian deputy foreign minister Ivan Sergeyev reiterated that view in March, provoking indignation in the Baltics.

Anyone seeking to understand why Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are so intent on joining NATO must look back at the events of 60 years ago. Memories of the Soviet era of domination -- and the mass deportations in particular -- are still raw and emotional. In the mid-1990s, the Latvian government compiled a multi-volume record to commemorate the deportations, emulating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The volumes list the names of the deportees along with basic information about them (date of birth, date deported, date of death or release, place of imprisonment). As your eyes scan the stark list of names, it is hard not to be struck by the large percentage who are listed as having died on the way to the gulag or within months of arriving.

The lasting impact of the trauma was evident to me during a recent visit to Riga, the capital of Latvia. I spoke at length with a survivor of the deportations, Sima Feigins, who was a 20-year-old student when Soviet troops wearing blue berets burst into her parents' home in June 1941. She and her mother were taken away separately from her father; Feigins never saw him again and learned that he died of malnutrition and dysentery six months later at a forced-labor camp.

Feigins and her mother were packed into a boxcar with hundreds of other Latvian deportees for the suffocating journey to a Siberian prison camp. Some of them, including Feigins, could speak Russian. But many who spoke Latvian (or, in some cases, German) knew just a smattering of Russian. Feigins recalled how the Soviet guards berated them: "You're all fascists! How dare you not know Russian?!"

Feigins's mother quickly weakened under the strain of the camp, and by February 1942 she was too enervated to stand. When she became severely dehydrated, Feigins begged one of the female guards for some milk, offering her last remaining blouse in trade. The guard snatched the blouse -- leaving Feigins only with the overcoat she was wearing -- and, with a sneer, handed over a thimble-sized glass. Feigins rushed the liquid back to her mother, but it was far too little to help. Her mother died the next day. Feigins later had to exchange food with another prisoner to get herself another blouse.

Feigins spent the next 15 years in the camp, barely surviving a regimen that killed many of her fellow prisoners. When she was released in May 1956, the Soviet government provided no money for her to return to Riga. As a result, she was forced to stay in the camp another year until she managed to contact the man who was her fiancé at the time of her deportation, whom she had not seen since then. He had made it back to Riga from a separate deportation site in Kazakhstan, and he persuaded his mother to sell her wedding ring so he could pay for Feigins's trip back to Riga.

This tragic story of a young woman who was robbed of her parents, her health and the prime years of her life is similar to those of many other survivors I interviewed during my recent trip to Latvia and on previous visits to the Baltic states. I understood why many Baltic officials had hoped that Russia would candidly acknowledge the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime. Instead, they had to suffer the further indignity of Russian troops on their soil until 1994, when the military grudgingly completed its withdrawal.

The Russian government's recent attempts to defend the Soviet annexation have brought forth statements of protest from Baltic leaders and the Baltic Assembly, a joint advisory group set up by the three Baltic governments. The assembly expressed regret that "Moscow has not yet offered a formal apology for the crimes committed by the legal predecessor of the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union, against Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians. . . . Our appeal to Russia about the past is simultaneously an appeal about the future. Without clearing up the past, the future will have no firm foundation."

The Russian government's stance may be motivated in part by a desire to avoid any liability for reparations. The Baltic governments want Moscow to pay for the bloodshed and environmental damage of nearly 50 years of Soviet rule. Under a law adopted last year, the Lithuanian government is obligated to seek reparations of $20 billion. Latvian and Estonian officials have proposed similar amounts, but the Russian government has refused to discuss the matter.

Important though the liability issue may be, it does not wholly explain the recent comments by Russian officials. After all, the Russian government could plausibly argue that post-Soviet Russia should not be held accountable for the crimes of the Soviet regime. The whitewashing of Soviet rule in the Baltics is symptomatic instead of Russia's broader failure to distance itself from the Soviet past. It also reflects a widespread sense in Moscow that the Baltic states are and must remain in Russia's "sphere of influence," a term used earlier this year by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Russian government has vehemently objected to the proposed extension of NATO into the Baltics, but Russia's own actions in misrepresenting the past have exacerbated the problem, giving the Baltic countries greater incentive to seek NATO protection. To be sure, the Baltic governments do not expect Russia to attack their countries or to undertake other malevolent actions in the near future. They are well aware of the difference between today's Russia and the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin.

Nonetheless, memories of what happened in the Baltic states from 1940 to 1991 will not fade anytime soon. Russia's willingness to foment insurgencies and engage in military operations in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan has not inspired confidence. So long as the Russian government fails to acknowledge that the Baltic states were victims of Soviet rule and not voluntary participants in their occupation, suspicions of Moscow's ultimate intentions will persist.

Because the Baltic states are so small, they know they must make strenuous efforts to qualify for NATO membership. All three are now solid democracies and are working toward eventual membership in the European Union. To bring their armies up to NATO standards, they have established a Baltic Defense College in Tartu, Estonia, under the command of a Danish general, a Baltic peacekeeping battalion (part of which has served in Bosnia-Herzegovina), a joint Baltic naval force, and a Baltic air surveillance and control network. Public sentiment in Lithuania about the prospect of joining NATO has been mixed, but any reservations would likely fade if the Western governments held out a realistic chance of entry.

In the West, however, many officials are concerned about antagonizing Russia. These concerns are perfectly legitimate, but there are ways of handling the problem without giving Russia a de facto veto over the process. The United States and its allies should stress that the debate over membership for the Baltic countries is a sign of fundamental changes under way in NATO. Although NATO will remain a military alliance, that role will increasingly be overshadowed by its status as a political community of democratic states -- a community that Russia, too, might someday aspire to join.

If NATO fails to take in the Baltic states, it will create a new dividing line in Europe. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought hope that the divisions of the past could be overcome. A decade later, there is still a chance that this goal can be realized. Although the tragic experiences of 60 years ago cannot be undone, the admission of the Baltic states -- and perhaps eventually Russia -- into NATO will demonstrate that the Western allies will not abandon the new democracies of Europe to an unknown fate.

Mark Kramer is director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies and a senior associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University.

-------- india / pakistan

Western n-assistance to India, Pak.?

By C. Raja Mohan,
Sunday, June 10, 2001
The Hindu
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/06/10/stories/0110000d.htm

LONDON, JUNE 9. Signals from the United States of a possible change in its non-proliferation policy towards the subcontinent have triggered a debate within the Western alliance on the merits of assisting India and Pakistan stabilise their nuclear rivalry.

Until recently the avowed U.S. nuclear objective in South Asia was to constrain and eventually roll back the nuclear and missile capabilities of India and Pakistan through political persuasion, economic coercion and technology denial.

In a departure from this traditional approach, the new national security establishment in Washington may now be ready to acknowledge that a rollback of Indian and Pakistani nuclear capabilities is not feasible.

But the U.S. remains concerned about a potential ``nuclear flashpoint''- the subcontinent. Washington strongly believes there is a real danger of military tensions between India and Pakistan escalating to the nuclear level.

One view is that the U.S. should drop its punitive measures against India and Pakistan and intensify its engagement with both countries to reduce the threat of early, accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons.

The U.S. options could range from sharing ``early warning'' information with New Delhi and Islamabad to transfer of technologies that will allow better control of the nuclear arsenals. The U.S. has a long history of providing ``nuclear stability assistance'' to other nuclear powers. Concerned about the effectiveness of command and control in the Soviet Union, Washington discreetly passed on some nuclear control technologies to Moscow during the 1960s.

The U.S. had certainly assisted its allies - France and Britain - to improve their capacity to handle nuclear arsenals. During the mid-1990s there was some talk in Washington of providing similar assistance to China.

But the idea of ``nuclear stability assistance'' to India and Pakistan is running into resistance from the non- proliferation lobbies within the Western alliance. Over the last decade, the non-proliferation bureaucracy has expanded its clout in Washington and other European capitals.

The guardians of the non-proliferation regime argue that helping India and Pakistan manage their atomic arsenals violates the legal obligations under the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty.

India and Pakistan are considered non-nuclear weapons states under the NPT and are barred from receiving any assistance on the nuclear weapons front. Any transfer of nuclear arms- related technology to India, it is feared, would have a negative impact on the credibility of the global non-proliferation regime.

The realists in the Western chanceries, however, reject the legal hair-splitting and point to the importance of stabilising the nuclear situation in the subcontinent.

Other analysts on both sides of the Atlantic argue that there might be enough flexibility in the language of the NPT that permits the U.S. to undertake measures that will reduce the risk of a nuclear war in the subcontinent.

The debate within the Western alliance, informed sources here suggest, is focussed on two different sets of issues. One relates to the assessment on whether there is a specific problem of effective control over nuclear weapons in the subcontinent. The second grapples with the nature of legal constraints against nuclear stability assistance to India and Pakistan and the possible ways to circumvent them.

As the Bush administration seeks to finalise its policy towards South Asia, the debate within the Western alliance on extending nuclear stability assistance to India and Pakistan is expected to sharpen in the coming weeks.

-------- korea

Fatherly Advice to the President on North Korea

By JANE PERLEZ
June 10, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/10/world/10KORE.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, June 9 - In an effort to influence one of his son's most crucial foreign policy decisions, former President George Bush sent to the president through his aides a memo forcefully arguing the need to reopen negotiations with North Korea, according to people who have seen the document.

The advice in the memo appears to have been largely incorporated into the announcement this week by President Bush that his administration would seek to talk to North Korea about a range of issues, including its missile program.

It was clear that former President Bush, who regards the author of the memo, Donald P. Gregg, as an expert on Asian affairs, wanted his son to adopt a more moderate position instead of going with the advice he was receiving from the Pentagon.

Mr. Gregg was a former ambassador to South Korea, and also advised the senior Mr. Bush on national security issues when he was vice president. The memo was first addressed to former President Bush, who then passed it on to his son.

Whether the former president has been influencing foreign policy at the White House has been a question of considerable curiosity in Washington - and in foreign capitals - with diplomats noting the disparity in knowledge and experience between father and son. The dispatch of the Gregg memo is the first concrete evidence of the elder Bush's hand in a specific policy arena, although at the time of the American spy plane incident in China, it was speculated that former President Bush was offering his son informal counsel.

In both the decision this week to offer talks with North Korea and in the handling of the spy plane that was forced down in China, moderate policy options prevailed.

Ari Fleischer, President Bush's spokesman, said that the Gregg memo was sent to the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who passed "the thoughts in the note" to the president. He described this as one of many useful pieces of information passed to Mr. Bush from former foreign policy advisers like former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who advised President Bill Clinton on Korea.

"The administration highly respects former Ambassador Gregg," Mr. Fleischer said.

He also said that he did not know whether President Bush had spoken to his father about Korea, but said that the president had a policy of keeping all conversations with his father private.

Mr. Gregg is president of the Korea Society, in New York, a position from which he closely follows relations between North and South Korea. He also attended an April seminar on North Korea in which former President Bush was the host at his presidential library at College Station, Tex. It was there that the senior Mr. Bush signaled that he favored re- opening talks with North Korea.

The memo by Mr. Gregg argued, according to those who have seen it, that Washington should re-engage with North Korea because not to do so would seriously undermine the current government in South Korea and hurt United States security interests in North Asia.

Mr. Gregg sent his advice to his former boss just as a contentious policy review on North Korea was under way within the Bush administration. The debate pitted hawkish officials at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, who are skeptical of serious talks with North Korea, against more moderate officials at the State Department and the National Security Council.

Mr. Gregg, a vocal supporter of Kim Dae Jung, the president of South Korea, and his engagement policies toward the North, is known to have been distressed at what was perceived as a rebuff of Mr. Kim when he visited the White House in March.

On that occasion, President Bush said the United States would not resume talks, which had gathered momentum at the end of the Clinton administration, any time soon. He also cast doubt on North Korea's trustworthiness in keeping agreements, a comment that in turn appeared to reflect badly on Mr. Kim's judgment. After his visit to Washington, Mr. Kim returned home to a chorus of criticism.

The announcement by President Bush last week that he would seek talks with North Korea was well received by the South Korean government. In Washington, experts offered mixed interpretations, including a view that the Pentagon and some members of the National Security Council might set such strict terms for the talks that the North Koreans might not respond favorably.

At the seminar at his library, former President Bush made remarks indicating that he believed that his son "would do the right thing," a participant said.

Former President Bush essentially told those at the gathering that the policy review on Korea under way at the White House was not unlike the review he conducted on the Soviet Union when he first came to office, according to several accounts. In 1989, the senior Mr. Bush recalled, his policy review on the Soviet Union led to a decision to hold talks with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and soon afterward the Soviet Union crumbled.

He suggested that a similar pattern could unfold between the two Koreas during his son's presidency, one of the participants said.

In a more public display of his support for reconciliation between the two Koreas, former President Bush has taped remarks for distribution at a meeting in South Korea next week, according to Korean officials.

The gathering on Cheju Island will mark the first anniversary of Kim Dae Jung's visit to North Korea, and is timed to encourage North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, to reciprocate with a trip to Seoul. The former president's taped remarks are bound to be taken seriously because of his standing in Asia - not only as a former president, but also as a former ambassador to the United Nations and as the former leader of the United States liaison office in China.

The South Korean foreign minister, Han Seung Soo, who is in Washington for talks with senior Bush officials, said former President Bush was "genuinely respected by Koreans."

Mr. Han said he was encouraged by the announcement to seek talks with North Korea. "The Bush administration has offered a comprehensive approach," Mr. Han said. "We hope that North Korea will take it at face value and respond in a positive manner."

Of North Korea, Mr. Han said: "The ball is on their side."

He said he was also encouraged by the interest China was taking in promoting stability on the Korean peninsula.

But the danger of deterioration in relations between the United States and China that would adversely affect all of Asia was of some concern, he said.

In a report to be issued on Monday, a task force of Korea experts created by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York will urge the United States to "stand by its commitments" under the 1994 agreement with North Korea, which requires the United States to help provide fuel oil to North Korea to help alleviate its severe energy shortage. But the report notes that in the next two years North Korea will have to comply with a series of nonproliferation steps included in the agreement, and the report suggests that Mr. Bush make it clear "we will not accept any delay" in reaching those goals.

-------- missile defense

Poking holes in missile defense
Critics insist technology doesn't yet work right

By Matt Crenson,
ASSOCIATED PRESS,
June 10, 2001
http://www.msnbc.com/news/585150.asp?0si=-&cp1=1

'I don't think building this point is justified.' - CHAR TOWNES Nobel-winning physicist and Apollo project adviser

June 10 - They compare it to hitting a bullet with a bullet. But knocking a nuclear warhead out of the sky is much harder than that. It's more like picking a real bullet out of a cloud of fakes, then chasing it down at 20 times the speed of sound and nailing it just right.

PRESIDENT BUSH set off world reaction when he proposed developing a missile shield that would have to accomplish such a feat. His administration has offered few details on how the system would work, but enough is known about the available options that scientific critics already have a long list of reasons it won't. Putting a man on the moon was straightforward compared to this, says Nobel prize-winning physicist Charles Townes. As chairman of the Apollo Project's science advisory panel, Townes helped deliver Neil Armstrong to the Sea of Tranquility. He also advised President Reagan's "Star Wars" project and the MX missile program of the 1970s. The Apollo program had a fixed goal with known parameters, Townes said. It was extremely challenging technically, but nobody could change the rules once the effort got under way. With missiles, potential enemies can change the rules at a moment's notice, making a highly expensive weapon system useless. "You've got to solve all conceivable problems, in a sense," said Townes, who won a 1964 Nobel for inventing the laser. "I don't think building anything at this point is justified.

Other critics are harsher. One called the missile shield the Pentagon has been working on for a decade "technically hopeless."

Defenders of the system - which would cost about as much as building and running the international space station for 20 years - say the project has merit. "I would say we're very close to a demonstration of the technical feasibility of the system," said William Davis, former deputy ballistic missile defense program manager with 40 years of experience in missile design. Of course, whether it works is only a small part of the missile defense debate. Overshadowing the science is a political debate over whether the whole idea of a missile shield is a good one. The technical feasibility of the plan often gets buried under the rhetoric. The current plans for a missile shield are far less ambitious than the Star Wars visions of the 1980s. Back then, Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative called for a space-based system that could defeat thousands of incoming Soviet missiles. Now the goal is to fend off a few dozen missiles. In 1999, Congress directed President Clinton to deploy such a system as soon as it became technologically possible. He considered it, but declined to give the go-ahead near his term's end. The current blueprint calls for up to 250 defensive missiles, based in Alaska and maybe North Dakota. If an enemy attacked, these missiles would be launched to intercept the incoming warheads.

A MID-COURSE MUDDLE?

A series of radar stations would guide the interceptors into the right neighborhood. Then each interceptor would release what the Pentagon calls a "kill vehicle" - a 120-pound warhead outfitted with cameras and heat sensors to help it find its target. This approach - the mid-course intercept system - would cost $60 billion and take a little more than a decade to build. "I think it's easy to show that mid-course is a technically hopeless situation," claims physicist Theodore Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and well-known critic of missile defense. He argues that any nation with a weapons program advanced enough to build an ICBM could easily develop counter-measures to outwit the U.S. system. For example, an attacker could scatter decoys around each missile. In the near-vacuum of space, there is no gravity or air resistance.

Light decoys and heavy missiles would behave in the same way. Even giant Mylar balloons could fool the most sophisticated sensors in such an environment. Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, insists that the Pentagon has developed classified means to defeat decoys that Postol and foreign weapons designers don't know about. "It's just a matter of keeping up with what we believe a potential adversary like North Korea or Iran might be able to develop," Lehner said. "We're very confident that we have the ability to deal with the missile threat."

MIXED TEST RESULTS

'We're very confident that we have the ability to deal with the missile threat.'
- LT. COL. RICK LEHNER Ballistic Missile Defense Organization The missile defense did distinguish between a real warhead and a fake during one flight test, in October 1999. But critics have disputed whether that test really demonstrated the system's ability to outwit decoys. In two subsequent tests, mechanical failures occurred before the decoy ever came into play. The Pentagon plans a fourth intercept test this summer. The early test flights have been too compromised to demonstrate the system's feasibility, said Col. Daniel Smith of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based defense think tank. The center's researchers are often critical of missile defense. But while the tests haven't shown the system will work, they also haven't shown it won't work, defenders say. They emphasize that the failures so far have been caused by mechanical problems, not fatal design flaws. "We're improving as we go along, and I think we will demonstrate in the next few tests that we're getting there," Davis said. Defense analyst Baker Spring of the conservative Heritage Foundation points out that the submarine-launched Polaris missile system, a backbone of America's nuclear deterrent during the Cold War, failed all of its first 11 tests. Even so, Pentagon officials are considering an alternative to their current approach. Instead of waiting to attack until a missile is at its apogee high above the atmosphere, a "boost-phase intercept" system would hit it as soon as it took off. The boost-phase system could use either rocket-powered warheads aboard ships or high-powered lasers carried by aircraft. The idea would be to zap enemy missiles out of the sky within a few minutes of launch.

SEARCH FOR AFFORDABLE OPTIONS

A boost-phase missile shield would be very expensive, and potentially dangerous for the aircraft or warships involved. In fact, a joint study in the mid-1990s by the Navy and Air Force concluded that the expense and risk were just too high, at least for defending against shorter-range missiles. Perhaps most daunting, the technology needed to create such an interceptor does not yet exist. A sea-based system would require modifying the Navy's current AEGIS technology. That could take 20 years and cost up to $40 billion. As for using an airborne laser, it would have to shoot through the atmosphere hundreds of miles without being diverted by turbulence, extreme temperatures, dust or anything else. The equipment would have to be powerful enough to shoot down a missile, yet light enough to fly aboard a 747 or similar aircraft. Those obstacles are not insurmountable. But even the best missile defense couldn't stop terrorists from delivering weapons of mass destruction by truck, low-flying airplane or suitcase, defense analyst Smith points out. And any country with a modest nuclear arsenal, such as China, could easily beef up its stockpile to counter the missile shield. "There's nothing really to stop them," Smith said. "The question then comes down to: Is it all worth the money and the effort?"

-------- treaties

Mr. Putin, Meet Mr. Bush: Who Needs Treaties?

By THOM SHANKER
June 10, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/10/weekinreview/10SHAN.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON - TO speak about Russia, it has been said, is to discuss the future of the world. America resumes its historic dialogue with Russia on Saturday when President Bush sits down for his first meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin, and it is a broad future indeed that they will consider.

To the extent that their afternoon discussion marks the formal start of negotiations between the two leaders on missile defense, the meeting holds the prospect of revising, for good or ill, the entire way the world will think about nuclear security for the next generation.

Will it be based on the interwoven series of treaties written during the cold war - treaties that gave Americans and Soviets whatever sense of security they had that nobody would pull a nuclear trigger one night and blow the whole world up? The cold war is dead, and with it the terror in the night, but does that mean the treaties no longer make sense? And if they don't, what replaces them? Are there new understandings that can be reached to prevent the emergence of a new rivalry and a new arms race?

All that will be potentially on the table next weekend in Ljubljana, Slovenia - an interesting place for such a discussion, lying as it does between the old East and West, in a country that didn't even exist during the cold war.

Formally, the discussion will be about the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, from which the Bush dministration has repeatedly said the United States should release itself. The 1972 agreement enshrined vulnerability as a virtue by barring both superpowers from building a credible national defense, and administration officials now say it should have been allowed to fall with the Berlin Wall; it was, after all, based on the notion that the only way to control cold war animosities was to make nuclear war a synonym for mutual suicide.

These days, President Bush is saying a missile defense would also allow America to make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenal, even perhaps unilaterally; this, at least is a goal welcomed by members of the arms control community who don't much like Mr. Bush's pursuit of missile defenses.

But in framing these proposals, the president is asking some remarkably challenging - his critics might say dangerous - questions about nuclear theology. They go far beyond the ABM Treaty, or even the relationship with Russia.

President Bush is imagining, and some of his senior officials are advocating, a new kind of security relationship with Russia, and other countries like China. Built not on a foundation of concrete arms control treaties, it would radically restructure how Washington and Moscow traditionally guaranteed stability and predictability and peace itself.

Arms control pacts, the administration argues, have inherent flaws: they freeze time from the day they are signed - or from the moment negotiations begin. Many of President Bush's senior appointees have negotiated treaties for previous presidents, and believe the process is bulky, slow, prone to problems in the Senate and not responsive to America's current security needs.

These days, the officials say, arms treaties with Russia bring insecurity instead of certainty, because they seem to confirm a reality - the balance of terror - that no longer exists; because they don't let either side take advantage of new technologies to defend against missiles; and because they don't take account of emerging new threats to both signatories.

That's the intellectual's argument, anyway. A brawnier complaint - against allowing virtually any treaties, not just the old cold war ones, to frame America's security architecture - is also heard in administration corridors and in Senate confirmation hearings. It says that in a world of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, and of the means to deliver them great distances, treaties only bind those who intend to keep them and offer legal cover to cheaters.

But critics of the administration's long- term strategy say those comments are disingenuous, that they shift attention from a campaign to create a world in which America is unbound from its line-by-line obligations, free to pursue its self-interests unfettered by treaty law.

These advocates of a treaty-based security regime point to decades in which arms agreements spelled out rights and responsibilities clearly enough to guarantee stable relations. Even if those laws now need updating, this argument goes, living under them is far safer than living in a world without any laws.

When they hear the Bush brief, the Russians and Europeans of course want to know: What would replace this aging arms control architecture? No administration official can say for sure, beyond a promise that it will be the subject of serious consultations in Moscow and NATO's capitals.

The administration, it seems, is imagining not negotiations on discrete arms control treaties, but separate meetings over months and years, bilateral and multilateral, on a range of security issues to lay down broad new rules of international relations.

IN a way, the meeting on Saturday will be the first test of that way of doing things, because a general understanding about missile defenses is the matter at hand.

Knowing how skeptical Europeans (and the Senate's majority Democrats) are, the administration has been drafting incentives for Russian cooperation on missile defense that really could become markers toward a broader relationship with Russia. They don't only focus on managing nuclear arms - perhaps with some aspects of a missile defense built and operated with Russia - but include language on halting proliferation, a grave Russian concern along its southern periphery; on resolving bloody regional disputes that dot Russia's outskirts; and on assuring a steady regimen of economic assistance. Some of the ideas are old. A few are fresh. Nobody expects them to be enough for Russia to dismantle the ABM Treaty, but administration officials say they are just an initial offering.

What begins Saturday, then, is a process of two presidents groping for new terms to define trust - and if not trust, well, at least understanding, and if not understanding at least an agreed vocabulary for clarifying what both sides want and need.

THE language itself is interesting. The administration is consciously stepping back from the tone unilateralism it was using earlier this year. An attempt has begun at conversation with Russia - and Europe - about the trust that can be placed in America's management of the alliance's security relationship with Russia.

At home, the tension between those who cite the stability brought by arms control treaties and those who challenge their usefulness was on display last week as the Senate Armed Services Committee reviewed some of President Bush's appointments to the Department of Defense.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, argued that killing the ABM Treaty without Russian assent could prompt Russia to keep a large arsenal of multiple- warhead missiles. "Would that fact," he asked, "be worthy of consideration by us relative to the question of whether we'd be more or less secure?" He also suggested that China might further expand its nuclear forces. And he challenged Douglas J. Feith, nominated to be under secretary of defense for policy, over writings in which he had argued that the ABM Treaty ceased to exist with the death of the Soviet Union, and that described the Chemical Weapons Convention as "junk arms control."

Mr. Feith responded: "If we make agreements that we can't enforce and that we have good reason to believe are going to be violated and are going to be open to countries that enter them cynically and in bad faith, the overall consequence of that over time is to cheapen the currency that we should really be preserving the value of."

Whatever logic and accuracy are bundled into the Bush arguments, many in Europe and Russia hear the reprise of unilateralism. They fear a world in which the United States, or any nation, can brag of slashing its warheads because the balance of terror is dead - and, therefore, so are the treaties that regulated it. That, they say, is also a world in which that same nation can rebuild its arsenal to any level, anytime it wants.

In any event, another question will also be carried into Saturday's meeting and beyond: whether the Bush and Putin administrations are capable of reaching a new understanding on security - or whether the leaders will talk past each other over the din of shorter-term political considerations.

Is there an incentive for Russia to sign off on anything anytime soon? Not unless America can forge allied consensus on missile defense. Does Mr. Putin risk anything by withholding his answer for too long? Certainly, since missile defense advocates would describe Russian intransigence as the final reason to move ahead, and quickly.

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

Reassessing the Reactor For Nuclear Power, New Emphasis and Old Doubts

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 10, 2001; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45919-2001Jun9?language=printer

At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, a pump malfunction set off an alarm at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear power plant outside Harrisburg, Pa. Within nine seconds, equipment failures and human error caused a dramatic drop in the reactor core water level, setting off the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.

No one was injured, but the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, and the far worse meltdown and explosion at Chernobyl seven years later, left deep scars on the American psyche about the dangers of nuclear power. Not a single plant has been ordered since 1973.

Now, however, the Bush administration's plan to increase energy supplies -- including nuclear generation -- has focused attention on whether the United States might once again turn to the atom to fulfill its electricity needs.

The nuclear power industry thinks it's ready. Since Chernobyl, engineers have designed a new generation of nuclear plants they believe will sharply reduce the risk of another Three Mile Island.

Three simpler -- and therefore cheaper and safer -- versions of the power plants currently in use have been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a crucial vote of confidence for any interested utility.

Moreover, an international consortium has designed a new type of plant that uses hundreds of thousands of billiard-ball-sized "pebbles" of nuclear material instead of a conventional reactor core. It does not have enough radioactive fuel in a confined space to generate the temperatures necessary for the pebbles to explode. In theory, it is meltdown-proof.

But none of these advances has enticed a U.S. utility to order a nuclear plant, and many obstacles persist.

Polls show that public dread endures. About 40,000 tons of radioactive waste from existing reactors are piling up around the country because the Energy Department has not found a permanent repository.

Critics of nuclear power remain skeptical of the new plants' safety. And although the economics are good today, who's to say how long that will last? Even if a utility decided to build a reactor tomorrow, it would take a snag-free minimum of six to 10 years to bring it on line.

"There's renewed interest, but people are still skeptical that the public will allow nuclear [plants] to be built again," said Stephen T. Lee of the Electric Power Research Institute, the utility industry's research and development arm. "Also, the financial risk is quite large. The private investor will always take the lowest-risk, highest-return option, which, for now, is still gas generation."

U.S. utilities in 31 states operate 103 commercial reactors, which provide about 20 percent of the nation's electricity.

All U.S. plants are either "boiling water reactors" or "pressurized water reactors" that use uranium-rich fuel rods in a reactor core to create a controlled nuclear chain reaction. The resulting heat changes water into steam that drives the turbo-generators. "Control rods," usually made of boron, are inserted or withdrawn from the core to regulate the pace of the reaction by soaking up excess neutrons.

As with any boiler, the integrity of a nuclear core depends on the ability of operators and instruments to keep the system from overheating. But while a conventional boiler may blow up in a cloud of fire and soot when it gets too hot, a nuclear core can also spew deadly radioactivity.

The keys to avoiding trouble are many: adequate operator training, fail-safe shutdown measures and careful monitoring of valves, gauges and instruments. This can be difficult, partly because of the machinery's intrinsic complexity, but mostly because U.S. plants are all one-of-a-kind designs with modifications added along the way. Every operating and safety regime had to be tailor-made to the idiosyncrasies of a specific reactor.

In recent years, utilities have markedly improved safety records with better training and by upgrading plant equipment, monitoring procedures and video displays. Between 1987 and 1999, the number of automatic shutdowns per plant dropped from 3.6 per year to 0.6 per year, according to the NRC. The number of safety system failures per plant was cut in half, to 0.8 per year.

In the meantime, the industry prepared three new reactor designs and obtained NRC certification for them. The object was standardization: "Right now there's a lot of highly skilled construction -- it's like airports," said James Lake, president of the American Nuclear Society. "We're looking for a way to change to building airplanes. If you can build in one place on an assembly line, it's much, much cheaper."

The three designs -- one by General Electric and two by Westinghouse -- are based on traditional technology. GE simplified safety systems, reduced the amount of hardware and made the plant easier to operate.

"It's still concrete, steel, welding, pumps and valves," said Steven A. Hucik, GE's general manager for nuclear plant projects. "But when you simplify the design, there's much less of it. You can reduce the size of the building, and that means savings."

GE has built two 1,350-megawatt "advanced boiling water reactors" in Japan and has six under construction: four in Japan and two in Taiwan. The two operating plants took four years and three months to build, and "we're predicting 54 months [4 1/2 years] in the United States," Hucik said.

Neither of Westinghouse's two designs, both pressurized water reactors, has been built. The System 80-plus, also 1,350 megawatts, is projected to be South Korea's next-generation reactor, and existing plants there have incorporated features of the new system.

The Westinghouse 600-megawatt "AP600" departs more from tradition because it incorporates "passive" safety features based on gravity and other natural forces. Many safety devices are activated without human intervention.

Obtaining certification for the passive safety system was "a fundamental issue" for Westinghouse, said Howard Bruschi, the company's chief technology officer, because the system will allow off-site, modular construction that can be finished in three years.

Critics acknowledge that standardization and simplicity make new-generation plants safer, but reactors "are inherently dangerous, so while it's a question of properly managing the risk, you can't make it zero," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The only truly innovative design on the horizon for the U.S. market is the pebble bed reactor. Instead of fuel rods, the pebble bed reactor uses tiny particles of uranium dioxide encased in layers of graphite and silicon carbide and shaped into spheres. These pebbles -- 320,000 of them -- are poured into a 65-foot cylindrical hopper that is lined with graphite bricks and has a hollow column in the middle. The shape, called an annulus, is like an elongated angel food cake mold.

Once in place, the pebbles initiate a chain reaction. But instead of making steam, the plant pumps helium into the top of the hopper and extracts the heated gas at the bottom, where it drives the turbines.

To shut down the reactor, control rods are inserted through conduits in the graphite bricks. Because the rods cannot run straight through the pebble bed, the reactor must be small -- 110 to 130 megawatts, vs. 1,000 megawatts or more for a water reactor. But its proponents see small size as an advantage.

"You can build it in a modular fashion and locate it close to transmission lines where you need generation," said Oliver Kingsley, president and chief nuclear officer of the U.S. utility Exelon Corp.

Also, added nuclear engineer Andrew Kadak, who leads a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team developing a pebble bed reactor, smaller makes sense for utilities reluctant to make monster investments.

"What's best: Spend $3 billion, get the plant in five or six years, or $100 or $200 million and get it in 2 1/2 to three years?" Kadak said. Utilities "want to grow incrementally. Our idea is to build a lot of them quickly and get economies of scale that way."

Finally, small size should make the reactor virtually accident-proof. Computer modeling shows that the plant can't generate enough heat to melt the pebbles -- even if helium flow is stopped and the control rods are withdrawn.

"You can't have a runaway accident, and that's one thing that's very attractive," Lochbaum said. "But the jury's still out. Graphite can catch on fire, like it did at Chernobyl."

A joint venture that includes Exelon, the South African utility Eskom, British Nuclear Fuel and the South African government, is planning to build a prototype in South Africa and will seek NRC authorization to build a plant in the United States. But the company and the NRC agree it could not come on line before 2007.

"It offers a great deal of possibility," Kingsley said, "but it's still on paper."

-------- colorado

Agency sees way to pay IOUs

By GARY HARMON
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel,
June 10, 2001
http://www.gjsentinel.com/auto/feed/news/local/200

The effort to pay IOU-holding uranium miners as soon as possible took a turn Friday when a federal agency voiced a preference to simply make the payments from the general fund.

The Office of Management and Budget, an executive agency, suggested establishing payments under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act as entitlements taken directly from the general fund, according to a statement by U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo.

McInnis already is the House sponsor of a measure introduced in the Senate by Sens. Pete Dominici, R-N.M., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that would free payments from the annual appropriations and budget process.

"I'm delighted by the administration's clear statement of support" for claimants of compassionate payments authorized a decade ago, McInnis said.

Congress approved the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, recognizing uranium miners for fueling the nation's Cold War effort and making them eligible for $100,000 payments if they suffered from radiation-related diseases.

Last year, even as the trust fund ran dry and some holders of more than 250 IOUs died before seeing their money, Congress expanded the act to include more miners, as well as millers and haulers. In separate measures, it added $50,000 each to the compassionate payments and offered to pay medical costs related to radiological illnesses.

"The White House was dismayed by last year's funding shortfall, and they're prepared to throw their considerable weight behind this important effort," McInnis said. "The tragic circumstances surrounding this issue made a real impact on the folks in the Bush administration."

Last year, the Justice Department, which administers the program, began sending IOUs when the trust fund for sick miners ran dry.

McInnis and Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., both have said they support attaching $84 million to a supplemental appropriation for the military.

Spokesmen for McInnis and Campbell said the legislators are still amenable to such an effort.

"We're still fleshing out the precise legislative route we intend to take" McInnis said, "but the important thing now is that we're making real progress toward getting a check in the hands of these miners."

Once a bill to establish payments as entitlements moves through Congress, Josh Penry of McInnis' Washington, D.C., office said checks could be moving in a few weeks.

"We will take whatever steps that are necessary to get that bill through the process," Penry said. "Everybody is committed to moving forward."

Representatives of miners with IOUs were less optimistic.

"Once you start deviating and doing something new, it's going to cause delay," said Becky Rockwell, a Durango investigator who works with claimants.

"Anything McInnis or Campbell can do to make it happen right away is great," said Keith Killian, a Grand Junction attorney, "but this reminds me of a quilt. We've got patches all over."

{M4Gary Harmon can be reached via e-mail at gharmon@gjds.com.

-------- iowa

Reports of blue flash studied
Scientists offer varying theories about what may have caused event.

By Dennis J. Carroll
The Hawk Eye (Burlington, Iowa)
June 10, 2001
http://www.thehawkeye.com/specials/IAAP/breaking/b61000.html

Federal and state regulators are investigating the possibility that a runaway nuclear chain reaction at the Middletown munitions plant in the early 1970s released a large burst of radiation that may have killed two workers and sent large amounts of radiation into the environment.

One regulator, Dan McGhee of the Radiological Bureau of the Iowa Department of Public Health, said there appears to be "a 50-50 chance" that a nuclear "criticality" occurred in which people were killed.

According to Department of Energy reports, a criticality accident occurs when the minimal amount of fissionable material necessary to sustain a nuclear reaction inadvertently comes together, setting off the chain reaction.

There is a sudden release of energy and deadly radiation, but not necessarily an explosion.

Such an event is accompanied by a blue flash of light or a glow that can linger for some time.

It is thought that if such an event did occur at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, it may have occurred in one of the areas used to assemble and disassemble nuclear bombs.

In the entire Atomic Age, there have been only 60 documented criticality events reported worldwide, according to scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and only 21 fatalities reported since 1945.

Such an occurrence at the Middletown plant is not listed among those events, as published in a 2000 update of "A Review of Criticality Accidents" by the Los Alamos lab and Russian nuclear experts.

Investigators, who include the Iowa Department of Public Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, have centered their probe around information contained in recently declassified documents and the accounts of former IAAP workers who said they witnessed or were familiar with the event.

Pinning down a date has been difficult, but the reported flash is believed to have occurred in the summer of 1972 or 1973, according to researchers at the University of Iowa College Public Health who have talked with former nuclear weapons workers who said they saw or knew of the flash.

A report from the university survey team includes the account of a worker who said he witnessed a blue flash in a nuclear assembly room, then helped two injured workers who later died.

However, former workers remain reluctant to say much more --Êassuming they know more --Êand the reported victims have not been identified.

One is said to have died the day after the flash, the other a year later.

Nuclear weapons were assembled and, in later years, disassembled at Middletown in circular reinforced-concrete rooms, about 30 feet wide. The rooms were surrounded by earth and topped with tons of gravel to contain radiation from possible nuclear explosions or other radiation releases.

Daniel Bullen, former director of the nuclear reactor program at Iowa State University, said it is unlikely that a criticality would have occurred during the assembly or disassembly of a nuclear weapon.

"I would be extremely skeptical," he said.

Bullen is not involved in the IAAP investigation.

Other nuclear scientists have said such a glow could have been caused by a chemical fluorescence or phosphorescence or a glow from tritium -- a radioactive material sometimes handled by IAAP nuclear workers.

Scott Marquess, project manager for the EPA Superfund cleanup at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, said his agency is trying to determine whether there are residual signs of such a criticality that would remain nearly 30 years later.

For example, it is considered possible that fission materials from a criticality still might be embedded in nearby glass, and there still could be lingering radiation.

Bill Field, radiation expert with the university's team surveying the health of former IAAP nuclear workers, said the blue flash or glow seen by workers could have been what is known as Cerenkov radiation, in which charged radioactive particles traveling faster than the speed of light from a fission reaction release a blue glow.

That often is observed at nuclear power plants when spent nuclear rods are submerged in water, but that is a controlled environment.

In an April letter to Army officials urging a aerial radiological survey of the plant, Gov. Tom Vilsack cited recently declassified documents that he said refer to plutonium, "ground zero" and "an incident that may have led to contamination" in the early 1970s.

It has not be determined whether that "incident" was the blue flash seen by workers.

The Atomic Energy Commission assembled, test-fired and in later years, disassembled nuclear weapons and their components at IAAP from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s.

----

Research confirms IAAP dangers
Team finds workers were exposed to a variety of hazards.

By Dennis J. Carroll
The Burlington, Iowa Hawk Eye,
Sunday, June 10, 2001
http://www.thehawkeye.com/specials/IAAP/breaking/b261000.html

Findings by a University of Iowa health team support Middletown munition workers' claims that they were exposed to a wide variety of dangerous materials that may have caused long-term illnesses and even deaths.

The team, led by Dr. Laurence Fuortes of the U of I College of Public Health, has issued its first-year report detailing the working conditions and the hazardous materials often encountered by hundreds, if not thousands, of workers at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant.

The Atomic Energy Commission assembled, test-fired and in later years, disassembled nuclear weapons and their components at IAAP from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s.

As many as 40,000 people may have worked at the plant during AEC's tenure. More than 2,500 were identified by the university researchers as AEC workers, but it often was difficult to distinguish between AEC and other weapons workers from available IAAP records.

Fuortes' group, working with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, assembled records and accounts from the plant operators, the Department of Energy, the Army and workers themselves and found that workers handled or came in contact with such hazardous elements as:

· Radioactive materials including uranium isotopes 235 and 238, depleted uranium, plutonium, tritium and X-rays.

· Beryllium. Lighter than aluminum but stronger than steel, beryllium is used in nuclear weapons to boost the nuclear chain reaction.

· Explosives such as RDX, TNT, tetryl and HMX.

"For much of the work force there was considerable potential for (skin) and airborne exposure to (explosive) agents through process of formulation, melting, pouring, packing and extensive machining ...," the report said.

· Numerous chemical solvents and curing agents.

· Asbestos, radon and silica.

The survey noted the miles of asbestos-coated steam pipe and temolite asbestos fiberboard-lined tunnels at the ordnance plant.

"Much of this asbestos insulation or construction material is in relative disrepair ...," the report said.

University researchers also found that even though many employees did not work directly with hazardous materials, they likely were exposed to numerous occupational hazards through secondary contacts.

"These workers include guards on surveillance duty, laundry personnel who handled contaminated clothing, and various delivery and storage personnel," the report said.

It also noted that IAAP workers described "personal or co-worker episodes of extensive (skin) and hair discoloration resulting from high explosives exposures."

The health experts found that the AEC's attempts at monitoring worker radiation exposure was often spotty.

"It is clear that many production workers and others potentially at risk were not monitored," the report said.

It cited examples of security guards who were not given radiation detection badges, even though they worked around radioactive materials.

"Several of the security guards who did not receive dosimetry recall standing by and signing for the radioactive materials when they arrived by rail," the report said.

It also noted that unmonitored workers told of "spending their entire shift in the rooms where the devices containing radioactive materials were partially assembled."

The study also noted reports by workers that some of the women on Line 1 worked late into their pregnancies.

The university study supports findings about poor radiation monitoring discovered in a recent U.S. Department of Health survey of the plant's history.

The federal study cited a 1971 health protection survey at the plant that found problems with the plant's system for monitoring radiation contamination.

"Areas not covered by the monitoring system included the change room (dress out) and cafeteria areas," the federal report said.

The 1971 report noted that workers wearing potentially contaminated contractor-supplied clothing would wear the same clothing to the cafeteria.

The university survey also provides a Line 1 building-by-building account of what AEC operation occurred in each building and the hazardous materials involved.

In their conclusions, researchers said their findings support creation of a medical surveillance program.

"This conclusion is based on the suggestive evidence that a large number of workers had significant exposures to detrimental agents and the strong need expressed by former workers for a credible targeted program of medical surveillance and education."

The study said the screening and protection program should center on workers at risk for bladder cancer, chronic respiratory disease and lung cancer.

Researchers also noted that they are still waiting for records on IAAP workers and operations to be forwarded from the Pantex nuclear weapons site in Texas.

The AEC moved its operations from Middletown to Pantex in the mid-1970s, and many IAAP records apparently are still warehoused there.

Over the past 18 to 24 months, workers who had been sworn to silence as they diligently manufactured the weapons that helped win the Cold War began to tell their stories of lax protection, poor health monitoring and sometimes extremely dangerous working conditions.

The plant's commander, Col. Bruce Elliott, has pledged that the Army will not seek recrimination against those who talk of their experiences, and Congress recently passed legislation designed lift the veil of secrecy surround plant operations.

-------- new york
Dead Trees Standing

Sunday, June 10, 2001,
By DANIEL B. BOTKIN,
L.A. Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20010610/t000048310.html

SANTA BARBARA--When Vice President Dick Cheney recently proposed that we look to nuclear power to ease the energy crunch, I thought about a little-known, curious experiment conducted in the 1960s and '70s at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. During the Cold War, the danger of a nuclear war or the accidental release of radioactive materials seemed real. To examine the effects of radiation on natural ecosystems, the federal government sponsored experiments.

At Brookhaven, scientists irradiated an entire forest. I was one of the researchers in this forest of dead trees standing. The forest looked as if it had just burned the day before, though the trees had actually been dead for years. We could work in the forest up to four hours a day because the radiation used, cesium's radioactive isotope 137, was relatively 'clean': Only gamma rays were produced.

The laboratory had moved the largest source of cesium 137 that could be safely handled by earth-moving machinery into the forest and mounted it on a vertical, movable pole. The pole had devices that lowered the radioactive material into the ground, where lead shields provided the protection for researchers. A journey to the center of the forest--that is, the source of radiation--after a decade of exposure was surreal. The forest was enclosed by two chain-link fences with locked gates. Just inside the fences, the woods were typical of those found on Long Island: a dense clutch of small pitch pines, scarlet and white oaks, and small shrubs, mostly blueberry and huckleberry. Many plants were quite fragrant. The sounds of crickets and cicadas filled the air. Ovenbirds called.

My walk toward the source began as a pleasant stroll through the woods. As I moved closer, more and more pine trees had dead branches and needles. Farther on, all the pines were dead, but many were still standing. Some of the fallen pine trunks were beginning to rot--the bacteria and fungi of decay had survived the radiation. Up ahead, the white oaks looked sick. Soon, they, too, were all dead--and standing. The scarlet oaks proved to be the hardiest of the trees. As I neared the source, I saw some survivors. It was like walking up a mountain. The higher up you climb, the smaller and fewer the trees. Eventually, the trees drop out completely and you reach a zone of low shrubs, then a tundra zone of smaller ground plants and, finally, if the mountain is high enough, no life at all. So it was in the irradiated forest.

Blueberries and huckleberries survived the trees, growing among grasses and sedges. Closer to the source, only a patchy cover of sedges. Then you came upon perfect triangles of sedges--green, grass-like, flowering plants--growing behind the trunks of standing dead trees. Just as they do with sunlight, the trunks shaded the sedges from the radiation. It was an eerie demonstration of how light rays travel.

Near ground zero, all plants were dead, but they had not decayed. The radiation had killed off the armies of decay: fungus, bacteria, earthworms, etc. I hunted around for any signs of life. Within about six feet of the source, I found, on the back of a sign warning of the radiation danger, a small green patch of the algae Protococcus. The algae grows on damp soils. The sandy soil encircling the source was tinted gray, the color of the dead leaves and twigs that had not decayed.

From the air, the forest was an eerily beautiful sight of death radiating outward. You could see the tower containing the radiation, surrounded by a lifeless, gray-tan zone. Then came a circular ring of sedges, one of shrubs, another of oaks without pines and then the healthy forest. Rather than the intricate mosaic of life forms that characterizes normal forests, the one at Brookhaven was a series of concentric circles signifying the stages of death by radiation.

The radioactive waste generated at nuclear power plants can create similar landscapes. One idea is to bury it. But the radioactive materials remain dangerous for 10,000 years. A government task force assigned the job of designing a warning system that could be understood by people living 100 centuries from now came up with the idea of constructing solid structures above the waste depository that would emit mournful sounds when the wind blows.

The irradiated forest at Brookhaven National Laboratory is mournful indeed. The forest and the problems associated with the transportation and storage of nuclear wastes are also a mournful prospect, one that should make us pause and think carefully before we move in the direction of greater emphasis on nuclear power rather than on energy sources that are more environmentally benign. - - -

Daniel B. Botkin, a Research Professor of Biology at Uc Santa Barbara, Is the Author of "No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature."

-------- ohio

ACCELERATED LAYOFFS AT PIKETON PLANT HITTING WORKERS HARD

Sunday, June 10, 2001
NEWS 15A
By Compiled by Columbus Dispatch
Washington Bureau Chief Jonathan Riskind.
http://libpub.dispatch.com/cgi-bin/documentv1?DBLIST=cd01&DOCNUM=25787&TERMV=5378:10:5388:7:5395:9

Long-anticipated layoffs at a southern Ohio uranium-enrichment plant were in full swing last week.

Operations at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon ceased last month after nearly half a century of production, first of weapons-grade material for the nation's atomic-defense program and then of commercial uranium for nuclear-power-plant fuel.

"Sadly, it's hitting home for me,'' said Larry Fout, vice president of Local 5-689 of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union that represents many Piketon hourly employees. "It's not a very good day.''

The plant began as a federal installation but was privatized in 1998 under the control of USEC, formerly a federal corporation called the United States Enrichment Corp.

About 80 hourly employees were let go on Friday, said Angie Duduit, a USEC spokeswoman at the Piketon plant; that adds up to about 180 people laid off.

The figure is to reach about 373, including 200 salaried and 173 hourly employees, by November, with most of the layoffs occurring this summer.

Cincinnati congressman

played role in tax-cut law

The 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut signed into law last week by President Bush included provisions by Rep. Rob Portman, R-Cincinnati.

The new tax law contains retirement-savings provisions based on the Comprehensive Retirement Security and Pension Reform Act that allow more savings in IRAs or 401(k) plans, Portman said.

"Seventy-six million Baby Boomers are nearing retirement and facing an uncertain future because they haven't saved enough,'' he said. "With the enactment of this legislation, millions of American workers and near-retirees will be able to save more for their retirement.''

Among the details are new caps on contributions to IRAs. They had been capped at $2,000 a year; that limit will be raised to $5,000 by 2008 and indexed to inflation thereafter.

jriskind@dispatch.com

-------- utah

Big Differences

Salt Lake Tribune,
Sunday, June 10, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/06102001/public_f/104413.htm

In Lisa Church's coverage of the recent Division of Radiation Control Board meeting held in Moab (Tribune, June 3), there were several comparisons drawn between the current environmental situation at the Atlas tailings site and the environmental protections at the White Mesa Mill. In fact, there are numerous significant differences between the Atlas and the White Mesa sites. The Atlas mill was sited and constructed in the mid-1950s and situated in an "ideal" location based on milling economics; that is, it was situated close to the mines, a water source, a power grid, and a qualified labor pool. Some 20 years later, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's site selection criteria changed significantly. In 1977, when a site was being selected for the White Mesa Mill, environmental issues, and in particular protection of the groundwater, were the key considerations in determining the current location, approximately six miles south of Blanding. Other important differences between the Atlas and White Mesa Mill: The tailings material from the Atlas mill was stored on alluvial soils next to a large river. It had no synthetic liner under the material to control seepage of tailings liquids into and through alluvial soils into the groundwater. In fact, in those days, tailings piles were constructed to allow seepage as a form of water management in tailings. The White Mesa Mill, in contrast, is not near any streams or rivers (the closest river is more than 20 miles away), and all of the White Mesa tailings cells are lined with synthetic liners, which prevent seepage from the tailings. In addition, the nearest aquifer is over 1,300 feet below the land surface at the White Mesa Mill site and is separated from the mill by over 1,200 feet of low-permeability rock. The Atlas Mill's surety was based on its approved reclamation plan, which was updated and approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) after Atlas was in bankruptcy. In contrast, the NRC approved the latest updated reclamation plan for the White Mesa Mill in 2000. In addition, the reclamation board for the White Mesa Mill is reviewed and updated annually to reflect inflationary adjustments and any other cost adjustments as indicated by the current circumstances. There are many other differences between the Atlas and the White Mesa Mill sites and I have attempted to highlight a few of the more significant ones. I should also like to note that there are numerous mill tailings piles that are or have been reclaimed in accordance with the NRC site closure requirements by private entities. The siting, design and operation of the White Mesa Mill takes advantage of all of the lessons learned from the previous history of uranium milling in the United States. Environmental protection was the crucial factor in siting the mill and continues to be our primary consideration.

RON F. HOCHSTEIN International Uranium (USA) Corporation Denver, Colo.

-------- us nuc politics

Bush trusts foreign policy tutor with world

By Barbara Slavin and Judy Keen,
USA TODAY 06/10/2001 - Updated 08:34 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-06-11-rice.htm

WASHINGTON - Perhaps no other U.S. official has faced down both Boris Yeltsin and Ariel Sharon.

As a member of the National Security Council staff in 1989, Condoleezza Rice physically blocked Yeltsin, who was the Soviet opposition leader at the time, from seeing the first President Bush without an appointment. More recently, as national security adviser to the second President Bush, Rice told Israel's new prime minister that his desire to sell early-warning planes to China was a nonstarter. When Sharon persisted, Rice said coolly that if he continued raising the matter, the meeting was over. The old Israeli warrior was left gasping, witnesses say.

No one doubts Rice's toughness. On the eve of the president's first overseas trip, she is much more than a self-described "seamstress" who stitches together the views of Bush's other advisers.

She's an equal to the two veteran heavyweights on Bush's foreign policy team: Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, says Leslie Gelb, head of the independent, nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations. "She chairs the interagency meetings, which they attend, and she's the one who explains most things to President Bush. It's a position of incredible responsibility and influence."

"It's a pretty privileged position," the first female national security adviser acknowledges in an interview. "You're down the hall from the president. You see him every day. You're the last person to see the paper that goes in."

Rice, 46, is with Bush most weekday mornings from 8 until 8:40 and often accompanies him to Camp David or his Texas ranch on weekends. "She was his tutor during the campaign, and so a lot of what he knows comes from her," says Michael McFaul, a Russia expert and former Rice colleague at Stanford University.

A Soviet specialist, Rice was discovered by Republican foreign policy adviser Brent Scowcroft at a dinner in 1986. Rice, "a little slip of a girl," held her own in the company of older, white males, Scowcroft recalls. He asked Rice to join the NSC in 1989, when he became the senior Bush's national security adviser. Later that year, Bush introduced her to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by saying, "This is Condoleezza Rice. She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union."

"Our entire top team had the greatest possible confidence in Condi Rice," the former president says. "She is tough enough and smart enough to have the total confidence and respect of all around her."

In 1995, the elder Bush introduced Rice to his son, who was governor of Texas. Rice and the younger Bush bonded in 1998 as they exercised together at the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine. She was on a treadmill; the soon-to-be presidential candidate rowed. He later named her his foreign affairs adviser.

Rice is one of several influential women in the White House. "The president is very comfortable in the presence of strong women," says Karen Hughes, who is counselor to the president.

Bush "trusts her implicitly," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says. "I've seen them work out together at Camp David. They share a passion for exercise and sports."

They share more than a zeal for sports, says Philip Zelikow, a Rice colleague on the first Bush's NSC. "They have a common philosophical perspective."

Indeed, much of the criticism Bush has received from U.S. allies over his policies can be traced to Rice's influence. She is a big supporter of developing a missile-defense shield, has pushed a tough line toward Russia, opposes the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming and believes U.S. interests can often be better advanced through go-it-alone policies than through international agreements.

Most Europeans aren't buying Bush's rationale for a missile defense: protection from hostile nations such as Iraq. "We don't think it's the only issue ( in dispute) or even the priority issue," French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said in a recent interview. "Global issues such as environment, economic issues, immigration, organized crime are at least as important."

Rice downplays her influence on Bush. "My job is to organize the decision-making for the president, not to impose my own views," she says.

Rather, she says she tries to ensure that the president is aware of opposing positions. For example, she brought in Russia experts to brief Bush before his trip, including former Clinton administration adviser McFaul, who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a liberal think tank.

Rice's expertise is also limited. She has little background in Middle Eastern or Asian affairs and has deferred to Powell's State Department when it comes to Iraq, Arab-Israeli violence and negotiations to free a U.S. surveillance plane crew detained in China.

Appreciable changes

She denies that Bush's policies have changed appreciably since he took office. But just in the past week the administration has:

Softened its rhetoric on Russia. Rice had stressed the country's enormous problems, but as Bush prepares for his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, she calls it a "big and important power." Decided to make some modest proposals today to invest in global warming research, a move intended to appease European critics. She previously called the Kyoto Protocol "dead on arrival." Agreed to drop its reluctance to negotiate with North Korea and resume talks on arms control and better relations. Last year, Rice attacked North Korea as South Korea's "evil twin."

"I don't think anyone has a particularly charitable view of North Korea's regime," she says in the interview. "But it's incumbent to probe and see if it's possible to get to an evolution in relations."

The administration's decision Wednesday to seek talks was welcomed in South Korea and Europe, which are trying to end North Korea's isolation. Vedrine called the policy shift a wise move that could deter North Korea from becoming a global menace.

Although most Europeans are skeptical of the need for a missile defense, Rice appears to be a true believer.

Even if North Korea curbs its missile program, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is ousted and Iran - which just overwhelmingly re-elected its reformist president - becomes less hostile to the United States, Rice says the anti-missile program should go forward.

"Missile defense is a capability. It is not aimed at somebody particularly," Rice says. "Given that ballistic missile technology is now pretty ubiquitous, you never know into whose hands it will fall."

As the most prominent African American in the administration other than Powell, Rice influences Bush on more than foreign affairs. The former Stanford provost says she continues to advise the president on California politics, race relations and education, as she did during the campaign.

A telegenic speaker, Rice recently beat out movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger in a poll of possible Republican candidates for California governor, 24 percent to 18 percent. Some Republicans would like to see her try to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in 2004.

"You should never say you'll never do anything," she says of electoral politics. "But it doesn't even make my radar screen."

"She likes her job more than when she started," Zelikow says. "There have been positive and negative surprises. But she likes the way the shoes fit."

-------- us nuc power

Nuclear nirvana? Hidden costs may render option impractical
New reactor designs promise to hold down costs and ease safety fears.

June 10, 2001
Columbus Dispatch
http://www.dispatch.com/news/editorials01/june01/729431.html

The recent spikes in energy prices for gasoline, natural gas and, in California, electricity have resurrected hopes for nuclear power as a source of clean and abundant energy.

Renewing the licenses for the nation's 103 nuclear-generating stations and building more plants are key proposals in the national energy policy unveiled recently by the Bush administration.

In theory, nuclear energy is a winner. It produces vast amounts of energy from small quantities of fuel without belching pollution. Way, way back in more innocent times, enthusiasts prophesied that nuclear power would produce electricity too cheap to meter. Instead, subsequent experience showed nuclear energy to be too costly to matter.

Nuke-plant cost overruns, shoddy workmanship, financing fiascoes and frequent shutdowns were constantly in the news. In Ohio, the Zimmer power plant in Moscow was intended to be nuclear, but construction problems, regulations and cost overruns induced its builders to convert it to burn coal. The accidents at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and a few years later at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl plant were nightmares come true.

After Three Mile Island in 1979, no nuclear plants were ordered in the United States. Politically and economically, nuclear power appeared to be dead. Those reactors in operation would be allowed to live out their 40-year lives, then would be shut down with no regrets.

But once the crippled industry was out of the headlines, something began to happen to it. Construction problems were solved; huge debts were paid or written off; safety, technology, efficiency and management improved. Today, nuclear plants provide a fifth of the electricity generated in the nation, and many plants do so at a cost lower than those fired by natural gas and competitive with those powered by coal. The second, undamaged, reactor at Three Mile Island is one of the most efficient and profitable in the nation.

In Europe, nuclear power is even bigger, accounting for 40 percent of the electricity generated there, including in France, which derives 80 percent of its electricity from splitting atoms. In Asia, nuclear power long has been embraced in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

New reactor designs promise to hold down costs and ease safety fears. An experimental "pebble-bed'' reactor to be built in South Africa is intended to test the viability of a reactor whose own physics cause it to slow down the heat-producing nuclear reaction whenever the reactor begins to get too hot. Theoretically, this means the reactor is incapable of meltdown.

If the design is commercially viable, it could usher in a nuclear renaissance, based on small, safe and relatively cheap nuclear plants producing electricity at bargain rates.

This design uses thousands of tennis- ball-sized graphite spheres with uranium cores to produce a nuclear chain reaction. But unlike conventional reactors, nuclear engineers say, the pebble-bed cannot melt down because the hotter it gets, the more the nuclear reaction creating the heat is slowed down. This makes the unit self- regulating; the reactor gets so hot, then stops getting hotter, always staying well below the melting points of graphite and uranium.

During the years when the nuclear-power industry was getting its act together, another important factor came into play: the fear of global warming. Conventional gas and coal power plants produce huge quantities of greenhouse gases believed to be causing the Earth to warm. Nuclear energy does not.

And though nuclear energy does produce deadly spent fuel that must be safely stored for thousands of years, the amounts are relatively small: After half a century of nuclear-power generation, there are only 150,000 to 200,000 tons of spent fuel worldwide. By comparison, conventional fossil- fuel plants spew millions of tons of pollutants into the air and water every year.

The industry and the technology have matured, proponents argue, so it's time to start building nuclear plants again.

But the original questions remain: Can plants be built economically, and will they be safe?

Until now, both of these calculations have been difficult. This is because the nuclear-power industry never has been an entirely private-sector affair, where benefits and costs are transparent. From the start, the industry has been heavily subsidized, sheltered and regulated by the government, making true costs difficult to determine.

For example, federal law limits the liability of nuclear plants to $10 billion in the event of an accident. The law was passed because in the early days of nuclear power, no private insurer was willing or able to provide the coverage that would be needed in the event of an accident.

Take away that artificial and unrealistically low cap and nuclear plants would have to pay full freight for liability insurance. Assuming that they even could find private insurers willing to take the risk, the cost would no doubt be substantial, driving up overhead and raising the cost of the electricity the plant produced. At that point, it might be obvious that nuke-generated electricity simply is not competitive with conventional power plants.

And if private insurers flatly were unwilling to indemnify a new nuke plant, this would be a sure sign that significant doubts about nuclear safety remain. No plant should be built if it cannot cope financially with the claims that would result from an accident. The threat of financial accountability for accidents is a powerful incentive for the safe operation of any industrial enterprise. By shielding nuclear plants from full accountability, the government undermines this crucial spur to safety.

A similar problem exists over the question of where to store spent nuclear fuel. Currently, there is no permanent storage site for high-level nuclear waste anywhere in the world. Even finding new sites for containing low-level radioactive wastes, large portions of which come from nuclear-power plants, has become nearly impossible politically.

What are the environmental, social and economic costs of siting a permanent nuclear-storage facility? We know these costs must be substantial, because no community has volunteered to take them on by offering to host such a site.

In this country, the government has proposed to overcome this resistance by fiat, simply imposing the storage place on a geologically suitable site, such as Yucca Mountain, Nev., despite the opposition of nearby residents.

This "solution'' would force these residents to bear a hugely disproportionate share of a burden that ought to be borne by the entire nation. Shouldn't they be compensated for that? Shouldn't the cost of this compensation also be counted as part of the overhead of operating nuclear plants? If so, how do you put a price tag on such costs?

Surely, all these costs should be counted as part of the overhead of nuclear power. But how to calculate them?

One novel proposal from the Libertarian Cato Institute's magazine, Regulation, borrows a leaf from the airline industry.

Airlines routinely overbook their flights, knowing that there will be passengers who fail to show up for the trip. But when the number of overbookings exceeds the number of no-shows, the airline has a problem: not enough seats for all the passengers waiting to board.

In such cases, the airlines hold a reverse auction, offering to compensate anyone willing to forgo the current flight and take a later one. The airline continues to increase the incentive until enough people agree to give up their seats. This compensation is the "cost'' of inconveniencing these passengers.

A similar approach could be used to find a willing site for nuclear-waste storage and to determine the true cost of the burden. The government could make an offer -- cash, tax breaks, free college tuition, etc. -- for any suitable community where the majority of residents are willing to live near the storage center.

If no community accepts the offer, the government could keep raising it until a suitable community decides that the benefit offered outweighs the social, environmental and economic costs of hosting such a site.

If the resulting deal costs the nation, say, $20 billion a year, then that is the cost of the inconvenience of having a nuclear-storage site in your back yard and that is how much should be added to the overhead of the nuclear industry.

If this cost turns out to be prohibitive, this is another indication that nuclear energy is not economically viable and should not be pursued.

Insurance liability and waste storage are not the only areas in which the true costs of nuclear power are hidden. Government intervention and subsidies are in play virtually from the moment the uranium is mined until the first electron arrives to power a consumer's television set or refrigerator. All of these costs are part of the nuclear equation.

When all such hidden costs are calculated, the nation truly can see whether nuclear power is worth the investment. Twenty years ago, the answer clearly was no.


-------- MILITARY

-------- balkans

Macedonia on brink of war

Tom Walker, Diplomatic Correspondent
June 10 2001
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/06/10/stifgneeu01001.html?

EASTERN EUROPE

WESTERN intelligence officers say ethnic Albanian rebels are massing for an imminent civil war in Macedonia.

Military intelligence reports describe forces of about 1,000 men in the north of the fractious republic, commanded by a former French legionnaire who uses the nom de guerre of Hoxha. In the west another 300 freshly trained recruits came across the border from neighbouring Kosovo last week, boosting numbers there to 800 armed and uniformed fighters.

Nato officials keeping an anxious eye on the on-off fighting said the rebels of the so-called National Liberation Army (NLA) were better equipped and more disciplined than their forebears in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which fought Slobodan Milosevic's forces in the southern Serbian province.

The rebels have obtained modern American-made Stinger shoulder-launched missiles, along with more rudimentary Russian-made Sam-7 missiles. Embarrassingly for the alliance, they are making use of maps issued by Nato for the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) which it supervises across the border.

Hundreds of KPC reservists were called up by their Albanian commander, Agim Ceku, in March. They subsequently disappeared to former KLA training camps in Albania and are now re-emerging in Macedonia.

"There's plenty of money around and they've got good weapons," a Nato planner said. "But we're hoping they've got the sense not to start shooting down Macedonian helicopters. If they do there'll be terrible retribution."

Macedonia's coalition government came close to declaring war after five Macedonian soldiers died in an ambush last Tuesday, but President Boris Trajkovski has heeded European Union calls for calm.

Although the rebels have officially called a ceasefire, the Macedonians have continued to pound their positions, hoping to keep the fighting away from the valley floors around Skopje, the capital. Nato is investigating reports that the Macedonian government has used Su-25 fighter-bombers hired from the Yugoslav army in its bombardment of Albanian positions.

Intelligence agents have pinpointed 16 illegal border crossings from Kosovo used by the NLA, whose rebels have infiltrated as far as Aracinovo, just six miles from Skopje. A Macedonian police checkpoint yesterday prevented all but local traffic entering the ethnic Albanian part of the town, where a group of at least 10 heavily armed guerrillas was in control.

Last week the NLA murdered an Albanian accused of working with Macedonian police, a tactic used to intimidate "collaborators" in the Kosovo war.

-------- china

China test-fires land-attack cruise missile

JUNE 10, 2001 SUNDAY
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/asia/story/0,1870,50128,00.html

WASHINGTON - China test-fired a new air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) for the first time last month, according to US intelligence officials.

The weapon, China's first land-attack cruise missile, is Beijing's answer to the ship-launched US Tomahawk.

The ground-hugging, air-to-surface missile was launched from a B-6 bomber and was deemed successful by defence and intelligence agencies, according to officials familiar with the test.

It is assessed to be capable of carrying a 1,100-pound (498-kg) warhead - either high-explosive or nuclear - to an unknown range.

It was the first time China test-fired its land-attack cruise missile, said Washington Times.

Military analysts said China had been working secretly on the cruise missile, which is an extended-range version of the C-802 anti-ship missile.

It is said to be powered by a turbojet engine and is expected to have a range of at least 177 km.

Mr Richard Fisher, a specialist on the Chinese military with the private Jamestown Foundation, said his research has shown that the new ALCM will have 'substantial range' and will be fitted with television-camera precision guidance.

He said the new missile has been dubbed variously the 'Hong Niao' (Red Bird) and 'Chang Feng' (Long Wind). It is said to be a hybrid of three missiles: The Russian Kh-55 cruise missile, the Tomahawk - obtained clandestinely from recent US attacks - and a cruise missile purchased from Israel.

China is said by defence officials to be aggressively developing a land-attack cruise missile capability to match the US Navy's famed Tomahawk and Air Forces' ALCM.

It has been receiving help from Russia, said the Washington Times report.

-------- israel

Israel asks U.S. for $800 million extra aid

Sunday, June 10, 2001
By Natan Guttman
Ha'aretz Correspondent
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=6/10/01&id=121197

Washington - Foreign Minister Shimon Peres requested $800 million in supplementary U.S. aid for Israel in a letter he sent to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell two weeks ago. In the letter, Peres justifies the request by alluding to strategic threats posed by Iran and Iraq.

Though the aid boost was promised a year ago by the Clinton administration to then prime minister Ehud Barak, the new Bush administration decided to review the matter. Peres and Prime Minister Sharon raised the issue during visits to Washington in past months, but Israel did not furnish its official request for the money until two weeks ago.

The rationale underpinning Israel's request has changed. Under Barak's government, Israel asked for more U.S. aid to offset the cost of withdrawing forces from Southern Lebanon. Israeli officials have decided that it is too late to try to claim more U.S. dollars by alluding to security on the northern border, since the Israel Defense Forces pull-out has been completed. The new formulations in Peres' recent letter accord with the strategic preferences and sensitivities of the Bush administration - the need to fend off missile threats posed by Iran and Iraq is likely to be well understood nowadays in Washington, where devising anti-missile systems is a top strategic priority.

The Bush administration began unofficial consultations on Capitol Hill last week about Israel's request for more money.

----

Gaza Strip civilians killed by Israeli army nail shells

Ben Lynfield In al Hadabe, Gaza Strip
Monday, 11th June 2001
The Scotsman
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/text_only.cfm?id=80644

ISRAEL has used a devastating weapon in the Gaza Strip that fatally tore the flesh of three Palestinian civilians, dealing a blow to efforts over the weekend to reduce violence.

Israeli tank shells packed with flechettes, dart-like nails, killed the Palestinians on Saturday night, even as the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, demanded that the Palestinian Authority crack down on the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups, whose suicide bombers use nail bombs against Israeli civilians.

Israel's leading human rights group, B'tselem, last night called on the army to stop using flechette-packed shells and said that firing them in a populated area is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The killings of Nasra Malalha, 65, Samia Malalha, 37, and Hekmat Malalha, 25, at their home in al Hadabe marked the first Palestinian fatalities since the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, declared a unilateral cease fire on 2 June. They came in advance of a US-led meeting with Palestinian and Israeli security chiefs to check violence.

The Israeli army said its troops fired tank shells after shots were fired at a position in the Netzarim Jewish settlement. It added that troops identified two armed Palestinians in an open area and opened fire at them. Local residents said there was no Palestinian fire. They claimed Israeli forces fired four shells.

The Israeli army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz, said an army error might have led to the deaths.

"It's very possible that there was a mistake and they used the wrong range. That is under investigation," Gen Mofaz said. "It is night, it is dark, you are fired upon and it is possible to make a mistake."

Muawiya Hassanein, the doctor in charge of emergency services at Gaza City's Shifa hospital, said of the fatalities: "There were more than a dozen nails in each one. They died because of the nail injuries. All three had nails in the head, chest and abdomen."

Dr Hassanein said it was the fourth time he has treated people with nail wounds from Israeli shells, and the first time, four months ago, was also from a shelling near Netzarim.

A visit to al-Hadabe yesterday was enough to leave one revolted, even by the horrific standards of this conflict. Blood-stained sheets remained in the shack that became a death trap for the Malalhas. Nails had penetrated concrete, were stuck in a stone, in planks, a tree, a television antenna.

Sheikh Sueleiman Abu Abdul-Rahman, a preacher in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, noted that the people of al Hadabe were Bedouin refugees from the 1948 war. More than 600,000 Palestinians were expelled by Jewish forces or fled during Israel's creation at that time. "Where do the Israelis want them to go?" he asked. "Africa, Europe, Australia?"

B'tselem documented cases of the army using flechette tank shells during its occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended a year ago. In Lebanon, more than 10,000 flechettes were packed in a shell and spread in an arc of nearly 100 yards, Lior Yavne, a B'tselem staff member, said. That seemed more than in al Hadabe, but Mr Yavne said he "strongly suspects" the army is using a modified version of the weapon.

The army did not respond last night to queries.

"The laws of war do not explicitly prohibit it, but when it is used in a populated area it is equivalent to indiscriminate firing. And that is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention," Mr Yavne said.

-------- space

Germans at last learn truth about von Braun's 'space research' base

Sunday 10 June 2001
Telegraph (UK),
By Tony Paterson in Peenemunde
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" <globalnet@mindspring.com>

THE Nazi missile base from where the first V1 "doodlebugs" and V2 rockets were launched is being turned into a museum. For the first time, ordinary Germans will be confronted with the evils behind the "wonder weapons" that Adolf Hitler used to attack Britain in the closing stages of the Second World War.

Until now, the Germans have sought to portray the base at Peenemunde - which employed 12,000 people during the war years - as merely the missile research centre run by Wernher von Braun, who later worked on the American space programme. The site has remained a largely deserted wasteland since German reunification in 1990 when the East German army withdrew from the area.

Attempts to develop Peenemunde have been fraught with controversy. A German government-backed project to turn the site into an American-style "space park" failed in the early 1990s because of lack of investment. The scheme was also criticised for almost completely ignoring the fact that the site was used to create the most controversial weapons of the war.

"Wernher von Braun's post-war involvement in the American space programme provided an excuse to glorify Peenemunde as the place where the technology for the Moon landings was developed," Dr Johannes Erichesen, the German historian behind the new £4.6 million museum project said. "The fact that the Nazis used the place to build missiles to win the war was regarded as an unfortunate aberration."

After more than a decade of argument, German regional and central government has begun an investment programme that aims to turn Peenemunde into a museum dedicated to revealing the truth behind Hitler's most ambitious weapons development project.

"We are trying to destroy the myths that have obscured the facts surrounding Peenemunde," said Peter Profe, one of the curators at the new museum. "Previous attempts to develop the site have been about as sensitive as proposing to open a supermarket on the site of a former concentration camp."

Visitors to the completed sections of the exhibition - it will be two-thirds finished by next month - are already left in no doubt about the importance of Peenemunde for the Nazi regime.

The first section of the exhibition is devoted to the inaugural flight of the V2 rocket on October 3, 1942, the first time in history that a missile entered outer space. Original film of the take-off is offset by the voice of the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, glorifying the new "wonder weapon" specifically designed to terrorise Britain.

Wall-sized photographs of the destruction caused in London by the V2 and the earlier V1 flying bomb are coupled with private snapshots of German technicians, officers and their wives enjoying the almost holiday-like atmosphere of the Peenemunde base.

Such images contrast sharply with the horrific conditions experienced by more than 20,000 foreign slave and concentration camp labourers who perished through starvation and maltreatment while constructing the V1 rocket at "Dora", the underground Nazi armaments factory in Thuringia, central Germany.

A Polish slave-labour survivor of the Dora factory recalls how Wernher von Braun visited the works and seemed "completely unperturbed" by the piles of corpses. Further evidence exposes the role played by Heinrich Luebke, the former West German federal president, as one of the organisers of Nazi slave labour at Peenemunde and at Dora. For decades, allegations by Communist East Germany that Luebke was a "war criminal" were dismissed by West Germany as propaganda.

The Peenemunde museum is still working on plans for a further exhibit to explain the background to the RAF's raid on the site in August 1943. Codenamed "Hydra", it was one of the largest single bombing sorties ever carried out by Britain and led to production of the V2 being evacuated to Thuringia.

Organisers of the exhibition have gone to great lengths to underline the ultimate military failure of the V2. More than 3,000 of the rockets were aimed at London, Antwerp and Brussels during the closing stages of the war. Although they killed 2,774 people in Britain their use failed to alter the course of the war as Hitler had hoped.

The V1 flying bomb claimed more than 8,000 lives, but its effect was also of minor military significance. Development of both weapons, however, ultimately accelerated Nazi Germany's defeat. They devoured millions of marks which most historians conclude would have been better spent on improving the German army's tank capability on the Russian Front.

----

"STAR WARS RETURNS" IS RELEASED

From: "Bill Smirnow" smirnowb@ix.netcom.com
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 22:22:02 -0400
For further information call: Karl Grossman (631-725-2858)
TO GET A COPY SEE: http://www.envirovideo.com

"STAR WARS RETURNS," a video documentary exposing how the Bush administration is moving to make space a new arena of warin violation of the intent of international lawhas just been released by EnviroVideo: http://www.envirovideo.com.

The documentary is being distributed in the U.S. and around the world. "STAR WARS RETURNS" is narrated and was written by investigative reporter and journalism Professor Karl Grossman, directed and edited by Emmy Award-winner Steve Jambeck and produced by Joan Flynn.

It presents U.S. military documents setting forth U.S. plans to "control space" and from space "dominate" the earth below. It reveals the multi-billion dollar U.S. development program now underway to produce space-based laser weapons, and that far more than "missile defense" is involved. It also details the international opposition to the U.S. Star Wars program.

"STAR WARS RETURNS" explores the recently issued report of the Space Commission chaired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld which calls for U.S. "power projection in, from and through space" and declares: "In the coming period the U.S. will conduct operations to, from, in and through space in support of its national interests both on earth and in space."

U.S. Senator Bob Smith, who wrote the legislation establishing the Rumsfeld Space Commission, asserts in "STAR WARS RETURNS" about U.S. "control" of space: "It is our manifest destiny. You know we went from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States of America settling the continent and they call that manifest destiny and the next continent if you will, the next frontier, is space and it goes on forever."

Others appearing in ³STAR WARS RETURNS² are Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space; Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll (USN, ret.), vice president of the Center for Defense Information; Congressman Dennis Kucinich; physicist Dr. Vandana Shiva of India; Bill Sulzman, director of Citizens for Peace in Space; Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York; editor Loring Wirbel; and Regina Hagen, a Global Network director.

Also interviewed is Craig Eisendrath who as a U.S. State Department officer was central in drafting the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 -- the intent of which the U.S. is now preparing to violate, charges Eisendrath in "STAR WARS RETURNS." It is the basic international law on space, ratified by most countries of the world, and sets space aside for "peaceful purposes."

EnviroVideo has produced 175 television programs including the award-winning documentary "NUKES IN SPACE: THE NUCLEARIZATION AND WEAPONIZATION OF THE HEAVENS."

Editors: For review copies of "STAR WARS RETURNS" call 718-318-8045.

-------- switzerland

Swiss Vote Over Arming Peacekeepers

New York Times
June 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Switzerland-Peacekeepers.html

BERN, Switzerland (AP) -- Voters appeared deadlocked Sunday whether to arm Swiss troops sent on peacekeeping missions, in a referendum proposal opposed by nationalists who say it will wreck Switzerland's tradition of staying out of world conflicts.

Television projections released after polls closed in Sunday's referendum showed the vote evenly divided, with a slight edge in favor of the government proposal. But the difference was so slight the projections could easily be incorrect, the state-owned Swiss television network said.

A count of the ballots was expected to be completed by late afternoon.

The balloting focused on government plans to arm Swiss peacekeepers serving with international forces and allow joint training with NATO forces.

An opposition coalition of nationalists and pacifists had waged a campaign in recent weeks that eroded a comfortable government majority on the issue, according to pre-election polls.

``Soldiers come back from wars wounded, sick, mutilated or dead,'' said a nationalist poster and brochure campaign that featured images of the battered corpse of an American peacekeeper in Somalia and a cemetery full of white crosses.

``Die for foreign powers?'' asks one poster placed by nationalists, urging rejection of government plans.

Switzerland has never been a member of the United Nations, but its soldiers for decades have taken part in international peacekeeping missions in places such as Korea, Namibia and the Balkans. By law, they have left their guns at home.

Now the Swiss government wants its soldiers to be on an equal footing with other peacekeepers and able to protect themselves.

The government wants an end to arrangements like the one in Kosovo, where a small Swiss force has to rely on a unit from neighboring Austria for protection.

``The military must be able to defend itself,'' a government brochure proclaimed.

Switzerland, which requires all able-bodied men to serve in the military reserves, has shunned alliances since the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 and has relied on its militia to protect the country's borders from within.

It has joined in NATO's Partnership for Peace -- a kind of junior membership in the trans-Atlantic alliance -- as a way of easing the country's isolation in post-Cold War Europe.

The referendum proposes changes that would tighten Switzerland's links to NATO by permitting Swiss troops to train abroad or foreign forces to conduct military exercise with the Swiss in Switzerland.

The referendum was forced by the opponents, who took advantage of a constitutional provision enabling Swiss citizens to veto decisions of parliament.

In a third question on the ballot, the government was seeking to eliminate a constitutional provision requiring government approval for any new Roman Catholic diocese.

The provision, inserted in 1874 after Protestant-Catholic tensions, has never been enforced.

-------- u.s.

Yemen has pledged that it will deny the United States a military base

Middle East Newsline,
June 10, 2001

CAIRO [MENL] -- Yemen has pledged that it will deny the United States a military base along a strategic point in the Red Sea.<p></p>The pledge came amid reports that Sanaa and Washington had been negotiating for the establishment of a U.S. military base in Bab El-Mandeb. The island controls traffic from Asia and Africa through the Red Sea.<p></p>But officials in Sanaa said Yemen will not allow the deployment of foreign military bases in its country. The government was responding to a reports in the Al Wahdawi daily that Yemen intends to allow construction of a U.S. military base in Bab El-Mandeb.<p></p>"Yemeni stance is clear and equivocal and has previously rejected fully any military bases on its territories," an official was quoted as saying in the Yemeni media.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Approval Of Plant Unlikely Fauquier Board Questions Need

By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 10, 2001; Page LZ01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43178-2001Jun8?language=printer

Fauquier County supervisors say they see no need for a second new power plant in the county and are inclined to reject an Old Dominion Electric Co. proposal when it comes up for a vote in the fall.

The proposal for the plant near Remington, a half-mile from the Dominion Virginia Power plant that began operating last summer on Lucky Hill Road, was approved by the Planning Commission last month by a vote of 3 to 2.

But most of the five supervisors "are ambivalent and are leaning against the project," said Supervisor Sharon Grove McCamy (R-Lee), an outspoken critic whose district includes both sites. "They'll follow my lead on it."

Supervisor Joe Winkelmann (R-Center) said the Planning Commission "missed the whole point" and should have explained why the county needs a second plant.

Like the Dominion Virginia Power plant, the proposed structure would be a so-called peaking plant, providing power on only the hottest and coldest days of the year to utilities inside and outside the county. A confluence of power and gas lines, and a relatively sparse population, has made the Remington area attractive to power companies.

Residents unsuccessfully opposed the first plant and turned out in force in March to renew the debate over air quality and aesthetics.

Additional electricity to support growth, local and statewide, is also a controversial issue in Loudoun County, where the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Monday to protest a proposal by Loudoun County Power Co., an affiliate of Houston-based Tractebel Power Inc., to build a plant southwest of Leesburg.

Proponents of the plants argue that they are relatively clean and generate less traffic than commercial or residential uses and contribute more tax revenue than they require in public services. Opponents say adding a second plant in Remington would create two small plants operating under less stringent federal pollution guidelines than are required of a single, larger plant.

The Fauquier supervisors have tentatively scheduled a public hearing on the Old Dominion proposal July 16 but said they might need more time to examine the proposal before hearing from residents.

McCamy said upgrading Route 782, Old Grassdale Road, as the Planning Commission had suggested, to facilitate construction of the Old Dominion plant, would detract from the community's rural character. "As it stands now, there isn't any good access to that plant," she said.

Plant officials and commissioners who voted for approval say the plant, which would generate about $1.2 million annually in property taxes, is needed to accommodate growth.

"But there's never a justification for doing harm just to get tax money," Winkelmann said.

The larger problem, said Supervisor Larry L. Weeks (R-Scott), is that the side-by-side "minor source" plants would each emit 249 tons of acid gas annually, in effect acting as a larger "major source" plant emitting 498 tons annually and requiring stricter regulation.

"How can we ignore that obvious arithmetic?" Weeks asked.

Planning Commissioner Mark Rohrbaugh (Cedar Run) acknowledged that the recommendations "didn't really work everything out." But he added, "Just because we have one fast food restaurant in Warrenton doesn't mean we can't have another."

Rohrbaugh said that if the supervisors reject the plant, Old Dominion officials might build it in nearby Culpeper or Orange counties.

"And that would mean they would get the revenue, and we'd still get the bad air anyway," he said.

-------- human rights

Humbled Latin Leaders Facing Justice
Anti-Corruption Movement Challenges Culture of Impunity, With Results

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 10, 2001; Page A21
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45954-2001Jun9?language=printer

BUENOS AIRES -- Alejandro Qinani, a 31-year-old law clerk in the Argentine federal courts, has not always been proud of the judicial system he works for. Since before he was born, powerful people have routinely ducked the rule of law, buying or pressuring their way out of legal problems with impunity.

But after the stunning arrest Thursday of former president Carlos Menem on arms trafficking charges, Qinani sported a pin emblazoned with a tiny Argentine flag on his shirt and beamed with pride.

"There has always been this sense that the judicial system was the slave to people like Menem," Qinani said. "But when I saw him being taken into custody on television, it seemed to me that justice was finally working for the people. These politicians have always been above the law, but now look at Menem. To me, it symbolized a wall of impunity finally beginning to crumble."

Qinani -- like Argentina itself -- is not alone. The detention of Menem, a freewheeling politician whose 1989-99 administration was plagued by corruption, marks the latest evidence that Latin Americans and their institutions are beginning to face down a long-held culture of impunity for government officials and military leaders involved in corruption.

Latin America's anti-corruption movement, although it still faces enormous hurdles, is taking down heavyweights across the region, including elected leaders from young democracies as well as the dictators of the past. Menem's arrest comes after the dramatic fall from power of Peru's Alberto Fujimori last year in a corruption scandal that sparked an exhaustive judicial probe. Eighteen of Fujimori's former generals and dozens more of his civilian and military officials have been arrested.

Last week, a judge in Paraguay issued an indictment and extradition request for that country's former dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. Stroessner, now living in exile in Brazil and accused of massive corruption as well as human rights abuses, was South America's longest-standing dictator, holding on to power in Paraguay for 35 years until 1989. The move against Stroessner follows the historic indictment of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in his native Chile earlier this year.

Opposition leaders in Brazil's National Congress are pushing for a probe into alleged corruption in the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Cardoso has so far fended off an investigation, but Brazil, Latin America's largest country, is a pioneer in the anti-corruption crusade. In 1992, the Congress impeached President Fernando Collor de Mello on charges that his family and friends accepted massive bribes in exchange for official favors.

At the same time, countries in the region are voting in new politicians who have made rooting out official corruption the prime focus of their campaign platforms. The most visible examples to date have been Mexico's President Vicente Fox, Argentina's President Fernando de la Rua and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who all swept to power on a promise to stamp out corruption and other government abuses.

"Latin American societies, in particular those that have made a transition from military rule, are dealing with a whole set of baggage that comes with that transition, and a part of that baggage has been that people in power are untouchable and enjoy vast impunity from prosecution or investigation," said James Cavallaro, director of Rio de Janeiro-based Global Justice.

"But what you're seeing now is that civil society across Latin America is starting to feel its power," Cavallaro said. "Democracies are awakening and realizing that they can, if the clamor is loud enough, achieve a measure of justice."

There is still a long, tough road ahead. In many Latin American countries such as Brazil, Peru and Chile, merely being elected to official posts grants politicians wide-ranging immunity from prosecution. In Brazil, laws remain so strong that the elected legislators are immune from prosecution even for crimes unrelated to their duties -- from petty theft to murder -- unless their official immunity is removed by a vote in Congress or they are kicked out of office.

Also, with the exception of Fujimori last year, the most powerful anti-corruption movements have been aimed at leaders no longer in power. While some analysts suggest that implies Latin American governments are slowly becoming less corrupt, others argue it simply means those in power still control their judicial systems enough to deflect probes.

But increasingly, the clamor for justice is being heard. And Menem marks the latest example. He was detained -- under house arrest because he is over 70 -- on charges that he headed a conspiracy to illegally sell $100 million worth of Argentine weapons to Croatia and Ecuador.

Menem contends he is innocent, but there have been numerous allegations of corruption against him. Menem maintained a long and still unclear relationship with Argentine mobster Alfredo Yabram, who is said to have killed himself as his house was being surrounded by police in May 1998. The arms case against the flashy former president, however, marks the first time the judiciary has dared take him on directly for official corruption.

Menem's detention caps a widespread anti-corruption sweep into his administration that has already led to the arrest of Victor Alderete, the former head of Argentina's social security and health care system for the elderly, who allegedly bilked it of millions and left it bankrupt. And in February, Aldo Dadone, former head of Argentina's Banco Nacion, was arrested and accused of heading a "criminal organization" that allegedly received $21 million in bribes from International Business Machines Corp. for a large contract to provide computers at 525 bank branches in 1994.

"You can say that the judicial system, which has long been the weakest of the three branches of power, is finally beginning to find its independence," said Ricardo Monner Sans, the Argentine legal activist who first presented the arms smuggling case to the judiciary in 1995. "We might have a long way to go, but we are finally moving in the right direction."

-------- imf / world bank / wto

China Agrees on Terms to Join WTO

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 10, 2001; Page A19
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45964-2001Jun9?language=printer

The United States and China announced yesterday that they agreed on several issues blocking Beijing's entry into the World Trade Organization, paving the way for Chinese membership in the global trade body later this year.

The agreement, reached after five hours of negotiations that ended at 3 a.m. Friday in Shanghai, was a surprise. Not only hadn't there been clear progress on China's WTO status for more than a year, U.S.-China relations have been particularly frosty since the collision April 1 between a U.S. reconnaissance plane and a Chinese jet fighter.

Whether the trade deal signals warmer relations between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen, but the agreement at least underscores that both sides are determined to pursue their trade relationship despite differences over security and other issues.

The deal suggested that elements in Beijing's leadership who were wary of opening markets have been defeated, at least for now, by others who believe that China's economy needs foreign capital, technology and the spur of global competition to raise growth and living standards over the long term.

China still must complete similar deals with the European Union and other trading partners. But the agreement between U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick and his Chinese counterpart, Shi Guangsheng, vastly increases the likelihood that Beijing will meet the requirements for WTO membership in time for a November meeting of trade ministers in Qatar. Beijing can now count on Washington to support its bid for admission to the global trade group at a June 28 meeting of WTO members in Geneva.

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have strongly favored bringing China into the trade organization. That is partly because of opportunities that would be created for U.S. firms in China's potentially vast market, and partly because of the belief that WTO membership would make Beijing more likely to observe the rules followed by other countries in international trade and political interactions.

"This agreement propels China toward WTO membership this year," Zoellick said yesterday after returning to Washington from Shanghai, where he had been attending a regional meeting of trade ministers. "It is a win for American farmers and exporters, and businesses based in China. It's also a win for economic reform and the rule of law in China."

The agreement also improves the chances for a new round of trade talks, Zoellick said. That is because the meeting in Qatar is intended to kick off a new trade round -- the last effort failed in Seattle in 1999 -- and Chinese support is likely to make other developing countries, especially in Asia, less resistant to another round.

China and the United States first agreed on Beijing's WTO membership in 1999. But then reaching an understanding with the European Union on WTO dragged on until May of 2000. And after that, months passed without further progress. Statements from China's leaders during the early months of this year seemed to suggest that they were in no hurry to join the WTO -- and that, in fact, prefered to put off final admission to buy more preparation time for China's inefficient producers.

The big sticking point involved farm subsidies.

With a peasant population of about 900 million, China is anxious to provide government support for farmers, because its cities are already teeming with unemployed people from the countryside seeking work in factories. But agricultural interests in the United States and other farm exporting countries fear that a heavily subsidized Chinese agricultural sector could create problems for them, both in China and in international markets.

China has insisted that it be allowed to join the WTO as a developing nation, which would include the right to provide farm subsidies equal to 10 percent of its agricultural output. For developed countries, the limit is 5 percent.

A senior Bush administration official said the two sides agreed on a percentage figure less than 10 percent, but greater than 5 percent. But more important, the official said, was that China agreed not to provide subsidies that act as incentives to produce certain crops and other farm products.

Staff writer Clay Chandler in Shanghai contributed to this report.

-------- spying

Americans expand top spy base in UK

James Clark,
June 10, 2001,
Sunday Times (UK)
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/06/10/stinwenws02015.html?999

HUNDREDS of staff from America's most secret agency are to move from Germany to turn a Yorkshire radar base into one of the most advanced spy centres in the world.

The staff, from the National Security Agency (NSA), will be transferred from a base in southern Germany to RAF Menwith Hill. Their task will be to intercept personal and military communications in an expansion of the base's capabilities.

The move has added to the anger of civil rights and disarmament campaigners, who claim Tony Blair, the prime minister, and Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, are too willing to bow to America's wishes over plans for its national missile defence (NMD) shield, or "son of star wars", which involves Menwith Hill and other British military bases.

The NSA staff will arrive between March and September next year, after the closure of Bad Aibling in Bavaria. They will be responsible for cracking codes, interception of communications, including e-mail, and other sensitive tasks. The NSA is closely linked to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but is even more secretive.

The move to Menwith Hill comes as the government faces criticism from Europe that its spying co-operation with America is at odds with its commitment to European defence co-operation.

High-security: Menwith Hill listening centre Photograph: Tim Smith

A European parliament report last month into the American-run Echelon eavesdropping network, in which Britain is a partner and whose targets are said to include European Union countries, said: "That a global system for intercepting communications exists . . . is no longer in doubt. They do tap into private, civilian and corporate communications." Britain has always denied the existence of Echelon.

The deal to allow the NSA to move its listening operations, which were the subject of protests in Germany, was struck last year, although no public announcement was made. Senior Ministry of Defence officials hoped the transfer might go unnoticed because there will be no obvious changes to the high-security site at Menwith Hill.

It currently operates as a radar station, giving early warning of missile and other threats, although it carries out some interception work on behalf of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. MI6, MI5 and army intelligence use the base along with their American counterparts.

The NSA move will mean the base greatly expands its monitoring of telephone calls, radio messages, faxes and e-mails. The Americans, like other Nato allies, are scaling back operations in Germany because public opinion has turned against large foreign military bases.

An MoD spokeswoman said the additions to Menwith Hill were not part of the NMD programme, which George W Bush, the American president, is trying to persuade EU nations to back.

Britain has already said it wants to take part in scientific tests of equipment to see if the shield could work, but Blair has so far refused to commit Britain to accepting the plan.

A Washington diplomatic source said last week: "The NSA is the apple of the Washington eye these days. There was an understanding that there would be great pressure put on the Labour government to accept this, but that wasn't needed."

Last week a group of protesters at the site, campaigning against the son of star wars system, were moved on by a court order.

Nick Walsh, chief executive of Harrogate council, said: "We are concerned about star wars II. As a community we don't know the consequences of it. People are worried that Harrogate will be a potential target."

-------- activists

The health hazards of depleted uranium

A public meeting to discuss the recent Royal Society report upcoming on Wednesday, 13 june 2001, 3 - 5 pm

Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001

The health hazards of depleted uranium: A public meeting to discuss the recent Royal Society report. Wednesday 13 june 2001, 3 - 5 pm (refreshments at 2:30 pm) at the British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH.

An independent report on the health hazards posed by the radiation from depleted uranium weapons was published in May 2001 by the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science. The report found that exposure to depleted uranium on the battlefield may cause a doubling of the usual risk of death from lung cancer among a small group of soldiers in extreme circumstances, but the risk of leukaemias and other cancers are likely to be very low for all possible battlefield situations.

A further report, to be published later this year, will address the risks from toxic poisoning and environmental issues, including the risks to civilian population.

The Royal Society is hosting a public meeting to discuss the findings and recommendations from this report. The meeting is open to anyone with an interest in this area, such as members of the armed forces, veterans, policy makers, scientists and any members of the public who are concerned about the health hazards from depleted uranium. Members of the audience will be able to put their questions directly to the panel and to identify areas of concern that could be covered by the Society in its next report.

Admission is by ticket only. Tickets are free and can be obtained by contacting Sarah Dodman, Science Advise Section, Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG, tel. 020 7451 2585; e-mail: science.advice@royalsoc.ac.uk

Copies of the Royal Society 80-page report The health hazards of depleted uranium munitions: Part I can be ordered (price 17.50 pound) from Publications sales at the Royal Society on tel: 020 7451 2645 or e-mail: sales@royalsoc.ac.uk The full report can also be accessed free of charge on the Royal Society wed site at: http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/policy/index.html A free two-page summary of the report can be obtained by sending a stamped self-addressed A4 envelope to Ms. Sarah Dodman at the Since Advice section.

From: http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/events/du_meeting.htm

Professor Malcolm Hooper and Chris Busby will be on the panel.
Kind regards,
Louis Bertholet (SOVB)


------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)

------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!