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Digest 26, originally sent Tue Feb 16 02:34:12 1999 :
There are 3 messages in this issue.
Topics in today's digest:
1. Treaties Shelved and Senator Helms From: Peace through Reason <prop1@xxxxx.xxxx 2. NucNews (US) 2/15/99 - Taiwan / US Nuc Waste; India / Pakistan nuclear catastrophe From: Peace through Reason <prop1@xxxxx.xxxx 3. NucNews (Int'l) 2/15/99 - Taiwan / US Nuc Waste; India / Pakistan nuclear catastrophe From: Peace through Reason <prop1@xxxxx.xxxx
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Message: 1 Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 05:50:39 -0500 From: Peace through Reason <prop1@xxxxx.xxxx Subject: Treaties Shelved and Senator Helms
[The problem with treaties is, they too often just don't get ratified! That's why the companion bill REQUIRING the government to achieve the goals is important ... citizen action made law. Hope you'll write Congress and U.N. about Eleanor Holmes Norton's "Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act" (http://prop1.org/prop1/hr827ab.htm). et in dc]
Seeking Liberation Of Treaties in Limbo Sen. Helms Wants Bipartisan Deal to Ratify Or Scrap Shelved Accords That Date to 1949
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/15/114l-021599-idx.html
By Thomas W. Lippman Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, February 15, 1999; Page A27
They all probably seemed like good ideas at the time.
Through months and sometimes years of negotiations, through painstaking scrutiny by lawyers, lobbyists and diplomats, they had their supporters. Each of the "protocols," "conventions" and treaties with other countries signed by sober-minded representatives of the U.S. government was carefully crafted to address some burning economic, strategic or legal issue of the day.
But they never went into effect because the Senate never ratified them. There they sit, years and even decades later, still nominally awaiting the Senate's advice and consent but mostly as dead as the Cold War. According to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there are 52 of these treaties--some modest bilateral accords, some sweepingly ambitious international agreements--that have never been ratified. The oldest was signed in 1949--an international labor agreement on protecting the right of workers to organize.
Some of the major treaties on the list stirred controversy and attracted extensive media coverage, such as the 1979 SALT II strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union--pulled back by President Jimmy Carter from likely defeat in the Senate after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan--and the Law of the Sea treaty, rejected by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, amended to meet U.S. objections, signed by President Clinton and sent to the Senate in 1994--and still awaiting action, despite vigorous lobbying for it last year by the Navy.
But most of the agreements are obscure and long forgotten, such as a 1982 consular convention with the minority apartheid government of South Africa and a 1989 treaty with Nigeria on cooperation in criminal matters.
The Senate did not reject them. It just never completed action one way or the other, for reasons as varied as the treaties themselves: changing times, changing administrations, a changing world. Many went into force around the world as other countries ratified them, leaving the United States outside their jurisdiction.
"We have this mechanism by which a treaty can be sent up and put on the calendar and be there forever, never up or down," said Robert E. Dalton, the State Department's assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs.
Dalton said vigorous opposition from any well-organized lobbying group was often sufficient to prevent ratification, especially when "no senator is interested" in pushing an agreement through to approval.
Last month, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) wrote to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright proposing a "bipartisan agreement" to clean out the dead wood. He said his committee hopes to clear some of the pending agreements for action by the full Senate; for the rest, he will seek a resolution to "return these treaties to the administration."
Helms asked Albright to give him a list of treaty priorities. The problem with that, State Department officials said, is that her priorities are not the same as his.
For example, she has repeatedly asked Helms to expedite ratification of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Helms has made clear that's not high on his list.
Albright's first priority is endorsement of the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, banning all nuclear weapons tests. Helms, however, has said he will not move on that treaty until the administration submits to the Senate amendments to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union that were negotiated in 1997--amendments that Helms opposes and hopes to use as a vehicle for scrapping the entire ABM Treaty.
"As I stated publicly last week," Helms said in his Jan. 29 letter, "the Committee will not consider major treaties such as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) until the president has submitted the ABM Treaty [amendments] and the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change." Helms also opposes the Kyoto protocol.
Senior administration officials have said repeatedly that they are far from ready to submit either agreement. They want to hold back the ABM Treaty amendments until after the Russian parliament has ratified the START II arms control treaty--which it has steadfastly refused to do--and they intend to hold back the Kyoto climate change treaty until major developing countries such as Brazil and China are prepared to accept its emissions limitations.
Helms, however, argued in his letter that "the Executive [branch] cannot demand quick action on certain treaties and at the same time hold hostage other treaties fearing their certain rejection by the Senate."
The ABM amendments and the Kyoto treaty do not actually appear on the Foreign Relations Committee list of unratified treaties because they have never been submitted to the Senate. Those that are on the list appear to fall into no pattern. Some fell victim to organized opposition and some were overtaken by events. And some encountered sufficient Senate resistance that it didn't matter which administration was in power, the White House was unable to push them through.
Take, for example, a treaty negotiated through UNESCO in 1979 by which European nations, the United States and Canada agreed to recognize each other's graduate degrees and professional certifications. That may sound reasonable, but it didn't sit well with the American Nurses Association, according to Dalton.
He said the nurses' professional association opposed ratification because it feared that nurses from Europe's poorer countries would flood American hospitals, snapping up jobs and driving down pay scales.
A spokeswoman for the American Nurses Association said the group's archives do not go back that far, but she confirmed that the organization has generally opposed allowing foreign-trained nurses to work in U.S. hospitals.
President Carter, a lame duck after his defeat in the 1980 election, sent the treaty to the Senate on Nov. 13, 1980. "I don't have the sense that any subsequent administration was for it," Dalton said.
Another long-dormant agreement is the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, signed by the United States in April 1970, when Richard M. Nixon was president, and sent to the Senate the following year.
As Dalton recalled it, that treaty fell afoul of legal objections by then-Sen. Clifford P. Case (R-N.J.) and, many years later, by Helms. The treaty basically codifies diplomatic practice that the United States follows anyway--"the accepted rules of treaty-making," Dalton said--so the United States loses little by not being a party to it.
Not as old but also pending is a treaty regulating international adoptions. The United States signed it in 1994, but it took the Clinton administration four years to complete a legal analysis and send it to Helms's committee.
Even for the deadest dead letter, however, it appears that hope springs eternal. Clinton startled Helms's committee last month by asking for ratification of one of the oldest agreements on the list, a 1954 treaty covering the protection of cultural property and works of art in wartime.
"The United States signed the convention on May 14, 1954," the president's transmittal letter said. "Since that time, it has been subject to detailed interagency reviews. Based on these reviews, I have concluded that the United States should now become a party" to the treaty.
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* NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org (et in dc) * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" If you don't want to get daily messages by e-mail, just bookmark - NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999 - for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org Also, daily updates at, http://www.gsenet.org/newsstnd/nucnews.htm --------------------------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml> _____________________________________________________________
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Message: 2 Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 16:50:23 -0500 From: Peace through Reason <prop1@xxxxx.xxxx Subject: NucNews (US) 2/15/99 - Taiwan / US Nuc Waste; India / Pakistan nuclear catastrophe
1. Another `Star Wars' Sequel http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/15park.html
2. Campaign Donor Seeks N.M. Tax Breaks for Plant http://www.abqjournal.com/biz/1biz02-14.htm
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1. Another `Star Wars' Sequel
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/15park.html
By ROBERT L. PARK February 15, 1999 - New York Times
The "Star Wars" debate is beginning all over again -- only this time, the plan in question is called the National Missile Defense. But if we want to name this one, too, after a movie, I'd suggest "Groundhog Day," because we're doomed to keep repeating this exasperating debate until we get it right.
We won't get it right so long as everyone pretends to be arguing about whether we should deploy a missile defense. There is no defense to deploy -- and there may never be.
The United States has spent 16 years and $60 billion trying to develop a system that would stop incoming missiles. A lot has changed since we began that quest. We set out to build a defense against the Soviet Union's huge arsenal of sophisticated nuclear missiles. Now we're down to stopping North Korea's -- a handful of untested, marginally intercontinental missiles, controlled by a nation on the edge of collapse. The proposed defense has been scaled back from futuristic space-based X-ray lasers to a covey of ground-based hit-to-kill interceptors.
And after 16 years, there has still not been one successful test of an antimissile weapon. The uncomfortable truth is that ballistic missiles are a lot easier to build than to stop.
Even Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb and an early proponent of "Star Wars," admitted this four years ago, in a speech to newly elected Republican members of Congress. Dr. Teller spoke almost derisively about the X-ray laser fantasy he helped to sell to President Ronald Reagan: "Lasers may be useful someday, but meanwhile we must destroy missiles as David slew Goliath" -- he meant with space-based hit-to-kill weapons called "brilliant pebbles."
Dr. Teller had a few words for critics of his earlier support for the X-ray laser. "I am," he said, "guilty of the great crime of optimism." He was not only guilty, but also a repeat offender. Work on Brilliant Pebbles ended a year later -- the system had failed every test. So far, the ground-based system currently proposed has done no better.
But while "Star Wars" systems have yet to destroy a single missile, thousands of nuclear weapons once aimed at our cities have been destroyed by a piece of paper. Diplomacy may not provide as much macho satisfaction, but it's cost-effective.
However, the disarmament process set in motion by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is only half finished. And all the muscle-flexing about missile-defense deployment threatens to stall it completely by upsetting the nuclear balance of power.
A bill in the Senate would make it our policy to deploy an "effective" defense against a limited missile attack as soon as "technologically possible." The House version doesn't get all bogged down in details like "possible." One of the shortest pieces of legislation in history, it says in its entirety: "It is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense." That's enough to let members of Congress tell the folks back home that they voted for missile defense, but it won't make our interceptors hit their targets.
The White House -- while making it clear that President Clinton will veto the Senate bill in its present form -- promises a decision on missile-defense deployment within 16 months, saying that the seriousness of the nuclear threat must be balanced against the proposed system's cost and its potential effect on arms control.
But none of that matters if the system is not technologically ready. Under the current testing schedule, readiness will not be known in 16 months, even if a target missile is successfully intercepted. That's because any nation that can launch an intercontinental ballistic missile can also equip it with basic countermeasures, like decoys that create hundreds of false targets.
So unless robust tests are conducted against dummy missiles employing countermeasures, we won't know if the system is effective. The most dangerous thing we could do is deploy a system that won't work.
It is possible that an effective -- and cost-effective -- defense against missile-borne weapons will remain beyond our capability. That shouldn't be a shock. We face the same hard realities in defending against weapons carried in Ryder rental trucks.
Meanwhile, the United States has no choice but to use every diplomatic weapon it can muster to destroy the missiles that already exist, and prevent rogue states from developing new ones.
Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, is the author of a forthcoming book, ``Voodoo Science.''
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2. Campaign Donor Seeks N.M. Tax Breaks for Plant
http://www.abqjournal.com/biz/1biz02-14.htm
Waste Control Specialists hopes a uranium enrichment company will select a Lea County site for its 1,300-employee facility
By Thomas J. Cole, February 14, 1999 Albuquerue Journal
A Texas company last year pumped tens of thousands of dollars into New Mexico politics, believing it might one day need friends in Santa Fe.
That day has come.
Waste Control Specialists of Pasadena, Texas, has proposed selling some of the land it owns in southeast New Mexico to USEC Corp., the world leader in enriching uranium fuel for nuclear power plants.
USEC would then use the 450 acres in Lea County for a $2 billion-plus enrichment plant that would employ about 1,300 workers.
Gov. Gary Johnson has announced his support for Waste Control Specialists' proposal.
Also on board are Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., as well as public officials from Lea County, where fluctuating oil and natural gas prices have created a boom-or-bust economy.
Waste Control Specialists is now lobbying the Legislature on a package of tax breaks and other financial incentives to make the New Mexico site as attractive as possible to USEC.
USEC is considering at least two other possible sites for the plant, in Ohio and Kentucky. The company plans to make a decision sometime this year.
Waste Control Specialists last year contributed $5,000 to Johnson's re-election campaign and at least $17,600 to House and Senate candidates and political committees run by House and Senate leaders.
It also gave $10,000 to the New Mexico Republican Party, $5,000 to the state Democratic Party and $1,200 to the Lea County GOP.
Another $10,000 was donated to the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Massachusetts. The foundation's members include top leaders in the New Mexico Legislature.
Mark Turnbough, a lobbyist and environmental consultant for Waste Control Specialists, said the company made the political donations because of the possibility of doing a project in New Mexico.
"We didn't want to be strangers when we showed up with a request," he said.
Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons controls Waste Control Specialists through a maze of family trusts and other companies, including Contran Corp. Contran contributed $35,000 to Johnson's campaign last year.
Johnson said the political donations by Contran and Waste Control Specialists have nothing to do with his support of the plant site. "You're talking about a multibillion-dollar project that would employ thousands," the governor said.
Waste Control Specialists received help from the administration in preparing the site proposal it submitted to USEC last fall. Such assistance is available to any company seeking to locate a plant in New Mexico, said Lou Gallegos, the governor's chief of staff.
More contributions
Waste Control Specialists owns about 1,500 acres in Lea County and another 14,500 acres in neighboring Andrews County, Texas.
On the Texas property, it operates a facility that has received permits for treatment, storage and disposal of hazardous and toxic waste, as well as treatment and storage of radioactive waste.
Waste Control Specialists is donating some of its New Mexico land to Lea County for use as a landfill. The uranium-enrichment plant would be located nearby.
Turnbough said the company didn't learn until early October that USEC was looking for a plant site. That was after the campaign contributions to Johnson and the others.
As for the contributions from Contran to the governor, Turnbough noted that Simmons donates to politicians nationwide.
Federal Election Commission records show Simmons family members and political committees controlled by Simmons have contributed at least $1.5 million, mostly to GOP candidates and causes, since 1980, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Congresswoman Heather Wilson, R-N.M., last year received $1,000 from the political committee for NL Industries, another Simmons-controlled company.
In Texas last year, Simmons contributed $10,000 to Gov. George W. Bush and $103,000 to Rick Perry in his successful campaign for lieutenant governor, the Dallas Morning News has reported.
Waste Control Specialists also has contributed heavily in Texas, where it is now waging an intense lobbying campaign in the Legislature for the right to dispose of low-level radioactive waste at its Andrews County facility.
The plant that USEC plans to build would use new laser technology to enrich uranium ore -- part of a series of steps in preparing fuel rods for nuclear reactors.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has been working on the technology.
Turnbough said Waste Control Specialists has offered to sell the New Mexico land to USEC for $1. The water for the plant would come from Texas, he said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have to approve the site.
Turnbough said the site is environmentally sound, in part because of hundreds of feet of underlying clay that would serve as a barrier to any migration of dangerous materials.
Indirect benefits
Waste Control Specialists hopes the plant would draw other facilities involved in the uranium-enrichment process to Lea County, Turnbough said.
The USEC plant and any other plants would produce waste that could be handled by the company, he said.
Waste Control Specialists also wants to attract to the area government laboratories, U.S. agencies and others involved in researching and developing waste-treatment technologies.
Waste Control Specialists then could be positioned to implement such technologies, also potential money-makers.
"We don't get a lot out of it (the USEC plant) directly," Turnbough said. "We think we get a lot out of it indirectly. What we need is more technology support."
The goal of Waste Control Specialists is to develop more cost-effective, environmentally sensitive ways of dealing with wastes, he said. For example, technology could be used to reduce the radioactive threat of some wastes prior to burial.
He said locating the plant in New Mexico makes political sense because it would generate goodwill among Lea County residents. Those residents share the risk of having Waste Control Specialists in the area and, therefore, should benefit from the company's business, Turnbough said.
In addition to Turnbough, the lobbyists working the New Mexico Legislature for Waste Control Specialists are former Republican state Sen. Mickey Barnett; Dan Weaks, a former top official with the city of Albuquerque; and Marla Shoats, who once served as an aide to House Speaker Raymond Sanchez, D-Albuquerque.
Waste Control Specialists is lobbying the Legislature to renew tax breaks already available in law to manufacturers. The lobbyists also want lawmakers to continue to fund a program that provides money for in-plant training of New Mexico residents.
The company is backing a proposed law that would exempt manufacturers from paying gross receipts taxes on services, materials and equipment that were purchased for plant construction.
Waste Control Specialists also is backing a proposed change in the in-plant training program that would allow plants to receive money for the training of non-New Mexico residents.
Shoats said money for training of nonresidents would be made available only when a plant is located in an area where there aren't enough New Mexico residents to fill jobs.
If located in Lea County, the USEC plant would be expected to hire some workers from Texas. Those workers would pay income taxes to New Mexico.
Shoats said other New Mexico employers besides USEC would benefit from the legislation being worked on by the lobbyists. She also said representatives of other New Mexico businesses are supporting the continuation of economic-development incentives already in place. _____________________________________________________________
* NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org (et in dc) * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" If you don't want to get daily messages by e-mail, just bookmark - NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999 - for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml> _____________________________________________________________
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Message: 3 Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 16:49:38 -0500 From: Peace through Reason <prop1@xxxxx.xxxx Subject: NucNews (Int'l) 2/15/99 - Taiwan / US Nuc Waste; India / Pakistan nuclear catastrophe
1. Report: Taiwan to send nuclear waste back to U.S. http://cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9902/14/BC-TAIWAN-USA-NUCLEAR.reut/index.html
2. Indian, Pakistani lawmakers urge prevention of 'nuclear catastrophe' http://cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9902/13/india.pakistan/index.html
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1. Report: Taiwan to send nuclear waste back to U.S.
http://cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9902/14/BC-TAIWAN-USA-NUCLEAR.reut/index.html
February 14, 1999
TAIPEI, Taiwan (Reuters) --Taiwan will send highly radioactive nuclear waste back to the United States in June for disposal, a mass-circulation newspaper reported on Sunday.
The waste, formerly nuclear fuel used for research purposes, has been kept at Taiwan's National Tsinghua University and the Nuclear Research Institute for three years, the Taipei-based China Times reported.
The United States recently notified Taiwan's Atomic Energy Council it would accept the highly radioactive waste for disposal by a U.S. handling company, the paper quoted council spokesman Su Ching-sen as saying.
The paper quoted Su as saying that shipment was scheduled for late June.
The paper said the United States had supplied close to 100 nuclear fuel rods to Taiwan for nuclear reactors used in research projects.
Su was not available for comment on Sunday.
The U.S. Energy Department began accepting nuclear waste again in 1997 after winning a legal battle with anti-nuclear activists. Washington is concerned such waste could be used to develop nuclear bombs.
It had suspended nuclear waste reclamation while the case was being tried.
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2. Indian, Pakistani lawmakers urge prevention of 'nuclear catastrophe'
http://cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9902/13/india.pakistan/index.html
February 13, 1999 Web posted at: 10:00 p.m. EST (0300 GMT)
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN)) -- Lawmakers from Pakistan and India, trying to lessen tensions between their countries, concluded a two-day conference Saturday by urging their governments to take steps to avoid a "nuclear catastrophe."
About 35 legislators from India and 60 from Pakistan attended the conference, organized by a Pakistani newspaper. They called for bilateral talks to control a possible nuclear arms race on the Indian subcontinent.
"The governments of India and Pakistan should take all possible steps to lessen the probability of a nuclear catastrophe initiated by accident," they said in a statement.
Both countries have been under increasing pressure to improve their relations since they conducted underground nuclear tests last year. Since their independence from Britain in 1947, the South Asian neighbors have fought three wars.
In an address to conferees, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto urged the two countries to sign the nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and halt production of nuclear materials and ballistic missiles.
She also proposed the formation of a multinational Asian trading market that would include India, Pakistan, five other South Asian countries and Iran, with China joining eventually.
In their post-conference reports, the legislators did not mention the long-standing dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which was the cause of two of the three wars between India and Pakistan.
"All our problems, all our disputes, all our disagreements can be resolved quickly to mutual satisfaction if we address the question" of Kashmir, Bhutto said.