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Digest 115, originally sent Mon Jun 21 04:27:41 1999
There are 11 messages in this issue.
Topics in today's digest:
1. NucNews-0 Brief 6/20/99
2. NucNews-7 6/20/99 - Y2K (4); Spy Lit; Space Weapons
3. NucNews-3 6/20/99 - India- uranium poisoning, navy, Kashmir; Korea
4. NucNews-6 6/20/99 - Spies; Rocky Flats
5. NucNews-4 6/20/99 - Russia/Europe/G7
6. NucNews-5 6/20/99 - US - Wind Power; Green Energy Day; Conversion; EPA/Allard; NineMile 1 Nuc Plant; Nuc Medicine (2); Native Victims (2)
7. NucNews-1 6/20/99 - DU; Plutonium
8. NucNews-9 6/20/99 - Kosovo
9. NucNews-8 6/20/99 - Arms/Military- Israel/Lebanon; Latin America; B-2 Flaws; Truman re.arms sales
10. NucNews-2 6/20/99 - Trident Plowshares; Ukraine/Chernobyl; Australia; Iraq; Japan
11. NucNews-6 6/20/99 - Spies; Rocky Flats
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Message: 1 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:41:11 -0400
Subject: NucNews-0 Brief 6/20/99
[Please address replies to articles to the original publisher (with a copy to prop1@prop1.org and NucNews@onelist.com (Archives)). Your help in refuting false information appreciated!]
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NucNews-1 6/20/99 - DU; Plutonium NucNews-2 6/20/99 - Trident Plowshares; Ukraine/Chernobyl; Australia; Iraq; Japan NucNews-3 6/20/99 - India- uranium poisoning, navy, Kashmir; Korea NucNews-4 6/20/99 - Russia/Europe/G7 NucNews-5 6/20/99 - US - Wind Power; Green Energy Day; Conversion; EPA/Allard; NineMile 1 Nuc Plant; Nuc Medicine (2); Native Victims (2) NucNews-6 6/20/99 - Spies; Rocky Flats NucNews-7 6/20/99 - Y2K (4); Spy Lit; Space Weapons NucNews-8 6/20/99 - Arms/Military- Israel/Lebanon; Latin America; B-2 Flaws; Truman re.arms sales NucNews-9 6/20/99 - Kosovo
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1. DUF6 rail cars derailed U.S. NRC Weekly Information Report Week Ending June 11, 1999 http://www.egroups.com/list/du-list/ Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant On June 2, 1999, two rail cars carrying depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) cylinders onsite derailed while being moved several hundred yards from the cascade tails withdrawal stations to a cool-down area. Three rail cars were being pulled by a diesel track mobile unit.
2. Implications of media coverage of Serb atrocities vs potential Nato DU atrocities Dai Williams, Woking UK <eosuk@btinternet.com> June 19, 1999, DU-List <du-list@egroups.com> Why does this concern the DU debate now? Mainly because the confirmation of Serb atrocities is diverting media, political and aid workers attention away from recognising the full range of post-war environmental hazards - particularly including DU. Mines and unexploded munitions are a recognisable hazard. But most of the civilian and aid worker populations are probably unaware of DU hazards.... By copy of this message to US/UK military analysts who no doubt monitor DU-list I would ask whether any action has been taken....
3. Puerto Ricans Demand That U.S. Military Halt Maneuvers at Vieques Island ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE, June 18, 1999 http://www.sltrib.com/1999/jun/06181999/commenta/2187.htm ... The Navy first occupied Vieques in 1940, evicting 3,000 residents (half of the residents who were living there at the time) in the process. It currently controls 75 percent of the 22-mile island, which is now home to close to 10,000 residents. The uproar is not simply over the April deaths; the Navy also admitted several months ago that it recently fired more than 250 uranium-depleted shells there in violation of federal law. Thus far, only about 60 of the shells have been recovered. If that weren't enough, there's a strong belief that there are nuclear weapons illegally stored on the small island....
4. Plutonium is dangerous Saturday 19 June 1999 Calgary Herald (Canada) http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/stories/990619/2747650.html Letter Re "Plutonium safe to move," Calgary Herald, June 9. To print that plutonium is safe to move is inaccurate. Transport of plutonium-based MOX fuel poses two types of hazards: (1) an unprecedented security risk; and (2) an unusual health risk, due to the toxicity of plutonium when inhaled....
5. TRANSPORT OF JAPANESE WEAPONS-USABLE PLUTONIUM-MOX FROM BELGIUM TO FRANCE IMMINENT: GREENPEACE URGES US TO INTERVENE OVER LAX SECURITY 13 June 1999 EcoNet http://www.econet.apc.org/igc/en/aa/9906171875/aa5.html Brussels -- Greenpeace believes that the delayed transport of weapons-usable plutonium-MOX fuel has been loaded back onto two trucks at the Dessel FBFC MOX fabrication plant in Belgium pending imminent transport to France, where it will be stored prior to transhipment to Japan....
6. The Wrong Stuff - The Space Program's Nuclear Threat To Our Planet By Karl Grossman; Published by: Common Courage Press (800) 497-3207; ISBN number 1-56751-125-2 http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/kg9709tw.htm The Wrong Stuff details NASA's mishaps with plutonium-fueled missions to date and its unrealistic calculations about the probability of a major accident. In concludes with a warning about plans for multiple launches involving plutonium and the connection with the U.S. military's desire to "attain the ultimate high ground" by placing orbiting nuclear power systems to energize weaponry in space. Here's how the book starts out...
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7. Loch Goil disarmers back in court From: Trident Ploughshares 2000 - tp2000@gn.apc.org, plowshares@onelist.com Press Release 17th June 1999 http://www.gn.apc.org/tp2000/ LOCH GOIL DISARMERS FACE £100,000 THEFT AND DAMAGE CHARGE The three women Trident Ploughshares 2000 activists involved in last week's dramatic disarmament action in Loch Goil returned today (17th June) to Dunoon Sheriff Court where the charges against them were more clearly defined, referring to a total damage value of nearly £100,000....
8. Greenpeace Protests in Ukraine By Sergei Shargorodsky, Associated Press, June 17, 1999; 4:53 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990617/V000021-061799-idx.html KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Protesters from the environmental group Greenpeace rallied in front of the German Embassy on Thursday demanding that Germany refuse to finance new nuclear reactors in Ukraine.... -- EBRD makes grant to help close Ukraine's Chernobyl 01:36 p.m Jun 18, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???" KIEV, June 18 (Reuters) - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said on Friday it had awarded the first hardware contract worth 69 million euros ($72 million) to help decommission Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant.... -- G7 to send Schroeder to Kiev on shutting Chernobyl 05:02 p.m Jun 18, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???" COLOGNE, Germany, June 18 (Reuters) - The Group of Seven rich countries welcomed on Friday Ukraine's commitment to shut Chernobyl but withheld money to help shut the disaster-hit nuclear reactor. -- TEXT-G7 statement on nuclear safety, Ukraine 05:51 p.m Jun 18, 1999 Eastern infoseek newswires COLOGNE, Germany, June 18 (Reuters)
9. Call for full-scale uranium mining inquiry Saturday 19 June, 1999 (8:55am CST) http://www.abc.net.au/news/state/nt/archive/metnt-19jun1999-2.htm An environmental group has urged a Senate committee to call for a full-scale inquiry into uranium mining in the Northern Territory's Kakadu region.... -- Australia paying for fast-tracked Jabiluka decision Tuesday 15 June, 1999 (7:41pm CST) http://www.abc.net.au/news/state/nt/archive/metnt-15jun1999-10.htm The Federal Shadow Environment Minister, Nick Bolkus, says the Jabiluka uranium mine should not have been given federal approval before indigenous and environmental issues were resolved....
10. Native Americans In US & Canada Denounce Toxic Legacy By Danielle Knight, EcoNet June 14, 1999 http://www.econet.apc.org/igc/en/hl/9906171519/hl5.html LAGUNA, New Mexico, Jun 14 (IPS) - Native Americans in the United States and Canada have inherited a grim legacy of increased rates of cancer and a ruined environment because of uranium mining on tribal homelands....
11. Iraq rejects British U.N. proposal USA Today (World), June 20, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm 6:44 p.m. EDT June 19, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Iraq-UN.html BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq will not accept a British proposal for a conditional suspension of U.N. sanctions because it does not provide for their "immediate lifting," a senior official of the ruling Baath Party said in remarks published Friday.-- (3)
12. Japan Admits Destroyer Mistake By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Japan-Live-Fire.html TOKYO (AP) -- A Japanese destroyer mistakenly fired live ammunition into a residential area, and commanders waited four months to report it, Defense Agency officials said today.... -- Internet use on the rise in Japan USA Today (World), June 20, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm TOKYO - Internet use and electronic commerce is taking off in Japan, the government said Friday. A total of 11% of Japanese households are online, and electronic commerce doubled in the last fiscal year to more than $1.4 billion....
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13. NUCLEAR FALLOUT An Indian uranium mine is blamed for a spate of horrifying illnesses afflicting local villagers By Soutik Biswas / Calcutta, June 20, 1999 Asia Week http://www.pathfinder.com/asiaweek/current/issue/feat5.html - India Navy on alert, says ready for counter-strike 10:02 a.m. Jun 17, 1999 Eastern By Uday Khandeparkar http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???" -- The World Takes Notice: Kashmir Gets Scarier By STEPHEN KINZER, June 20, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/062099kashmir-review.html Photo: http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/062099kashmir-review.1.jpg
14. HOLGER JENSEN: What is North Korea up to? Scripps Howard News Service http://www2.nando.net/noframes/story/0,2107,60814-96807-691378-0,00.html (June 18, 1999 6:00 a.m. EDT - As NATO forces expand their presence in Kosovo, the Pentagon is keeping a wary eye on another flashpoint that ignited oceans away.... -- North Korea Calls U.S. Antagonists By Edith M. Lederer Associated Press Writer Friday, June 18, 1999; 5:53 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990618/V000886-061899-idx.html -- US, N. Korea to Hold Talks in China By Barry Schweid, AP Diplomatic Writer, June 18, 1999; 3:12 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990618/V000736-061899-idx.html -- U.S. Says Photos Show North Korea Preparing for Missile By ELIZABETH BECKER, June 18, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/061899nkorea-missile.html
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15. Yeltsin, Clinton To Sign Missile Statement-Kremlin Updated 5:38 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990620/05/international-arms-russia COLOGNE, Germany (Reuters) - Russian President Boris and President Clinton are expected to sign a document Sunday covering a long-running dispute over missile defense systems, a Kremlin spokesman said....
16. Annual G7 summit concluding Updated 7:00 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990620/07/international-g7 COLOGNE, Germany, June 20 (UPI) The Group of Seven economic partners concluded their 25th annual summit urging continued action on Russian debt relief and trade liberalization, and calling on all sides in Kosovo to stick to the peace agreement.... The summiteers also included what has become an annual call for continued global efforts to liberalize trade, make structural reforms in the world's financial institutions and assist developing countries. This year's meeting also produced a $70 billion increase in the effort to retire the debt of the poorest nations.
17. Russian PM To Visit Washington In August-Interfax Updated 2:10 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990620/02/politics-russia-usa MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin said Sunday he planned to visit Washington on August 6-8 to meet Vice President Al Gore, Interfax news agency reported.... -- World Leaders Make Up With Russia By Maureen Johnson Associated Press Writer Saturday, June 19, 1999; 2:28 a.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990619/V000134-061999-idx.html -- Western Powers to Help Russia Cut Debts Summit Action Follows Moscow's Acceptance of Role With NATO Peacekeepers By William Drozdiak and Charles Babington, Washington Post, June 20, 1999; Page A24 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/185l-062099-idx.html
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18. U.S. Sets Goal For Wind Power By The Associated Press, June 20, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Wind-Power.html WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States would be able to produce 5 percent of the nation's energy from wind by the year 2020 under a new Energy Department plan, an agency official said Saturday....
19. Consumer Choice Helps Keep Green Energy Affordable; Another Reason to Celebrate "Clean Power Day" June 19 in Golden Gate Park 12:52 p.m. Jun 17, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???" SACRAMENTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 17, 1999--Consumer demand for "Green" energy in California's newly deregulated electric market has created unexpectedly low power costs for a new generation of renewable energy technologies -- such as wind, solar and geothermal power....
20. Business Group Promoting Military Cuts June 20, 1999, Washington Post http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/181l-062099-idx.html As the presidential candidates gear up their campaigns for the Iowa caucuses, so will a group of business executives who are promoting the out-of-fashion idea that $40 billion should be shifted from the Pentagon budget to domestic programs....
21. Allard demands release of EPA's Shattuck files By Berny Morson Denver Rocky Mountain News, June 18, 1999 http://insidedenver.com/news/0618epa5.shtml U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard demanded Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency release all documents regarding the contaminated Shattuck Chemical Co. site in southeast Denver.... 22. Nine Mile 1 Nuclear Plant Returned to Service 09:22 a.m. Jun 17, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???" SYRACUSE, N.Y., June 17 /PRNewswire/ -- The Nine Mile Point Unit 1 nuclear plant returned to service at 4:00 a.m. today, completing a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage, according to officials at Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. (NYSE: NMK). The plant is currently operating at approximately 25 percent power and is expected to reach full power within a few days....
23. Resolution Scientists and Collaborators Present Nine Papers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine 46th Annual Meeting 06:17 p.m Jun 17, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???" MISSISSAUGA, ON, June 17 /CNW-PRN/ - Resolution Pharmaceuticals scientists and collaborators presented nine papers on the company's product pipeline and technology at the Society of Nuclear Medicine 46th Annual Meeting held in Los Angles last week....
24. Study finds Matritech's NMP22(R) '...can effectively screen all men and women older than 50 years for transitional cell cancer of the bladder...' 09:15 a.m. Jun 18, 1999 Eastern infoseek newswires
25. Natives first atomic bomb victims By Brenda Norrell Indian Country Today, June 18, 1999 http://www.indiancountry.com/A2.html LAGUNA PUEBLO, N.M. - They came from South America, Mexico and Alaska. They arrived from Shoshone, Lakota and Hualapai ancestral lands - medicine people of the Columbia River, ore gatherers of the Northwest Territories, and river people of the Amazon....
26. INDIAN COUNTRY Environment Brenda Norrell, Indian Country Today, June 18, 1999 http://www.indiancountry.com/B3.html Surviving spirit: Cindy Kenny-Gilday went home to her village of Deline in the Northwest Territories, to help widows tell their story. The Dene ore carriers of the Northwest Territories carried the money rock that became the death rock - uranium ore for the first atomic bomb. 'Money rock' brings death, creates a village of widows...
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27. Prince of Shadows - ALLEN DULLES Master of Spies [Book] By Jeff Stein Special to The Washington Post Sunday, June 20, 1999; Page X02 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/007l-062099-idx.html Talk about dead white men. They are nearly all gone now, the hard-eyed, tweedy bunch who ran the Central Intelligence Agency in its legendary glory days, when a misjudgment in Berlin could lead to nuclear war, not just the mistaken bombing of a Chinese embassy....
28. Az. Sen. Calls for Energy Overhaul By H. Josef Hebert Associated Press Writer Saturday, June 19, 1999; 11:22 a.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990619/V000270-061999-idx.html WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional Republicans pressed their case Saturday for a reorganization of the Energy Department in response to the continuing controversy over the safeguarding of America's nuclear secrets.... --- Energy Secretary against Kyl's proposal USA Today, June 20, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncssat01.htm -- Nuclear Security Blanket Compromise May Be Near on New Agency to Oversee Atomic Arms By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, June 20, 1999; Page A03 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/229l-062099-idx.html KEY SITES IN THE U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS COMPLEX -- Panel's advice solid on nuclear secrets Thursday, June 17,1999, San Antonio Express-News http://www.expressnews.com/pantheon/editorial/editorials/1804bnuke1ed0618nz. shtml Clinton administration officials would do themselves and the nation good by dropping their resistance to recommendations that call for giving nuclear weapons programs independence from the Energy Department....
29. Removal of Flats waste begins 1st truck begins trek for New Mexico burial, helping set stage for plant's closure in 2006 By Berny Morson Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer June 16, 1999 http://insidedenver.com/news/0616wipp0.shtml
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30. Y2K Nuclear Power Plant Defects in the United States Worst Case Scenario -- Station Blackout http://www.tmia.com/y2k.htm (site accessed June 2, 1999) -- Duke Power: Y2K Ready at Nuclear Plants 01:17 p.m Jun 17, 1999 Eastern infoseek newswires CHARLOTTE, N.C., June 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Duke Power's three nuclear plants are Year 2000, or Y2K, ready six months in advance of the official rollover to the new millennium.... -- Glitch in Y2K Test Causes Spill Of Raw Sewage Into City Park By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 18, 1999; Page A04 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/18/126l-061899-idx.html -- U.S. Tests Military Planes for Y2K By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Y2K-Aircraft.html LAS VEGAS (AP) -- U.S military aircraft will be Y2K compliant and will be able to ``fly, fight and win on Jan. 1 and beyond,'' according to an officer overseeing exercises at Nellis Air Force Base....
31. BACK CHANNELS Getting Scholarly About the Spy Trade By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 18, 1999; Page A39 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/18/132l-061899-idx.html Devotees of John le Carre may think this an inauspicious trend, but a full-fledged academic discipline has grown up around the world of intelligence, spawning a "literature" all its own with titles like "Outsiders and Outside Information: Toward Systematic Assessment" and "Teaching Intelligence: Diagnosing the Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction."...
[And these are the people who want to wage star wars with lasers and brilliant pebbles and brilliant eyes? Is that the "dangerous space junk"?]
32. NASA Discloses Space Station Blunder By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Space-Station.html CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A blunder by flight controllers prevented the new international space station from moving out of the way of dangerous space junk. The rocket debris ended up passing at a safe distance.... -- Federation of American Scientist Space Policy Project - http://www.fas.org/spp/index.html - http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/ - and http://www.fas.org/spp/whatnew.html] -- Special Weapons in Congress June 18, 1999 http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/index.html
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33. Israeli Warplanes Strike South Lebanon Updated 1:25 PM ET June 19, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990619/13/international-lebanon-raid TYRE, Lebanon (Reuters) - Israeli warplanes attacked suspected Iranian-backed Hizbollah positions near Israel's south Lebanon occupation zone, a security source said....
34. Latin America's Armies Are Down, But Not Out By LARRY ROHTER, June 20, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/062099latin-america-review.html
35. Some B-2 Flaws Revealed in Report By The Associated Press, June 19, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-B-2-Flaws.html WASHINGTON (AP) -- The B-2 ``stealth'' bomber touted by the Pentagon as a star performer in Kosovo is tricky to maintain and hobbled by technical flaws, congressional investigators say....
36. 37. Text of Truman Message to Congress Calling for U.S. Arms Assistance Abroad By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 26, 1949 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/072649nato-truman-text.html WASHINGTON, July 25, 1949 -- The text of President Truman's message to Congress today on the foreign arms aid program....
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37. Carter Criticizes Foreign Policy By The Associated Press, June 17, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Carter-Foreign-Policy.html WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former President Carter says the United States' approach to solving conflicts in other nations run by dictators too often hurts the people who live under their leadership....
38. THE REBELS Kosovars Said to Agree to Disband Their Forces By STEVEN LEE MYERS, June 20, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/062099kosovo-nato.html -- Report: KLA agrees to disband Updated 5:25 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990620/05/politics-kla
39. US soldiers act as Kosovo police Updated 7:18 AM ET June 20, 1999, By BETH POTTER http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990620/07/international-usarmy GNJILANE, Kosovo, June 20 (UPI) Two teams of U.S. Army soldiers specializing in civil affairs have been patrolling a Kosovo community in a mission that highlights the complexity of the military's growing role as a peacekeeping force....
40. Leaders Haggle Over Kosovo Program By Maureen Johnson Associated Press Writer Saturday, June 19, 1999; 8:22 a.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990619/V000229-061999-idx.html
41. U.S.-Russia Kosovo Agreement Text By The Associated Press, June 19, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-US-Russia-Agreement.html
42. Senate Bill Could Aid Balkans By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Foreign-Aid.html WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate panel would provide $535 million to Kosovo and other Balkan and Eastern European states next year, but the White House is threatening a veto of a foreign aid bill containing the money....
43. Kosovo mine losses mounting Updated 4:27 AM ET June 18, 1999, By BETH POTTER http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990618/04/international-mines MORINA, Kosovo, June 18 (UPI) Aid workers along the Kosovo-Albania border are worried about refugee children returning to their homes and finding land mines and unexploded rdnance, especially cluster bombs....
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Message: 2 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:41:44 -0400
Subject: NucNews-7 6/20/99 - Y2K (4); Spy Lit; Space Weapons
30. Y2K Nuclear Power Plant Defects in the United States Worst Case Scenario -- Station Blackout
http://www.tmia.com/y2k.htm (site accessed June 2, 1999)
* electrical grid failure causes reactor scram * emergency diesel generators at the nuclear plant fail * electrical grid or diesels are not restored rapidly * batteries which power the control room are depleted * operators lose control of the reactor(s) * spent fuel pools begin to boil dry * radiological releases or meltdowns occur * no sirens to warn the citizens * poor or weakened communications * poor or severe weather conditions (snow or ice * storm) make evacuating difficult * one-hundred-thousand dead and dying * trillions of dollars lost * land unviable for decades
TMI ALERT
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Duke Power: Y2K Ready at Nuclear Plants
01:17 p.m Jun 17, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
CHARLOTTE, N.C., June 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Duke Power's three nuclear plants are Year 2000, or Y2K, ready six months in advance of the official rollover to the new millennium.
In a report filed Wednesday with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the company states it has completed its nuclear Y2K readiness program, addressing systems and devices essential to safe, reliable plant operations. The NRC, which has federal regulatory oversight of the nation's nuclear power plants, is requiring all U.S. nuclear utilities to confirm no later than July 1 that their units are Y2K ready.
"Since 1996, we have had a solid, aggressive program in place to identify and address Y2K issues that could affect the safe operation of our nuclear plants," Michael S. Tuckman, Duke Power's executive vice president, nuclear generation, said. "Even though our readiness program is complete, activities during the remaining months of 1999 will include additional testing and drills to verify these efforts. While it is difficult to predict what may occur on January 1, I am confident that our nuclear facilities will continue to generate electricity as safely and reliably in the new millennium as they do today."
Duke Power operates the McGuire Nuclear Station in North Carolina and the Catawba and Oconee nuclear stations in South Carolina. The company's Y2K readiness program involved identifying components with potential Y2K issues. Assessments were then done to determine if these components were Y2K sensitive and what type of remediation was required. Components were then replaced, repaired or retired, or workarounds were identified. Rigorous testing followed to verify the work.
"Maintaining our good safety record is always a top priority," Tuckman said. "In our analysis, we did not identify Y2K issues that would affect the safe performance of our nuclear power plants."
The NRC recently reviewed Y2K readiness programs at all 103 operating nuclear generating units in the United States to verify the status of each and to determine whether the units will be able to function safely on January 1, 2000. In addition, the NRC conducted special audits of the Y2K contingency plans at six of those plants, including Duke Power's Oconee station. The audits examined in more detail backup measures the utilities have in place to deal with possible Y2K problems that might affect plant operations. The NRC plans to issue a report on its findings later this summer.
"The audit of Oconee's Y2K contingency plans indicate that we are in good shape," said Tuckman. "We expect business as usual on January 1. But if we do experience problems, we'll be ready to respond."
Other areas of Duke Power are on schedule to be Y2K ready by June 30.
Duke Power, a business unit of Duke Energy, is one of the nation's largest electric utilities and provides safe, reliable, competitively priced electricity to nearly two million customers in North Carolina and South Carolina. Duke Power operates three nuclear generating stations, eight coal- fired stations, 31 hydroelectric stations and numerous combustion turbine units. Total system capability is 19,252 megawatts.
Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) is a global energy company with more than $26 billion in assets. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., the company reaches into more than 50 countries, producing energy, transporting energy, marketing energy and providing energy services. In the United States, Duke Energy companies provide electric service in North Carolina and South Carolina; operate interstate pipelines that deliver natural gas to various regions of the country; and are leading marketers of electricity, natural gas and natural gas liquids. Additional information about the company is available on the Internet at: www.duke-energy.com SOURCE Duke Energy Corporation
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Glitch in Y2K Test Causes Spill Of Raw Sewage Into City Park
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 18, 1999; Page A04 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/18/126l-061899-idx.html
A glitch during a year 2000 computer test caused a large Los Angeles water treatment facility to spill 4 million gallons of raw sewage into a city park on Wednesday night.
Although maintenance workers had vacuumed most of the sewage by early yesterday morning, the incident serves as an example of the unforeseen problems that can occur as many organizations run their computer systems through elaborate simulations to prepare for 2000.
The problem began when technicians at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys conducted a drill to see how the facility's computers and other electronic systems would respond to a Y2K-related power failure. An emergency generator kicked in as planned, but a computer failed to open an "effluent gate" that controls the flow of sewage into the plant, said Cora Jackson Fossett, spokeswoman for the city's Public Works Department.
The failure to open the gate, which was not immediately apparent to plant operators, caused sewage to back up and spill out of a manhole near the plant. The waste water flowed into Woodley Avenue and then into nearby Woodley Park.
The Los Angeles Public Health Department yesterday ordered the park closed for two or three days, spokesman Jack Petralia said.
Public works officials are investigating the incident, Fossett said.
Technology specialists said such incidents could become more frequent as businesses and government agencies conduct Y2K drills to ensure that computers that use a two-digit date system will understand the year "00" as 2000 and not 1900. The tests involve not just rolling the computers' clocks forward to Jan. 1, but often include simulating power outages and telephone failures as well as the manual operation of devices.
In March, a critical computer monitoring system at a nuclear power plant in Peach Bottom, Pa., crashed when technicians tried to turn the system's clock forward to Jan. 1, 2000. The glitch caused computer screens in the plant's control room to black out, forcing operators to rely on analog gauges.
Industry experts say it is preferable to identify and fix any problems now, even if they result in disruptions, rather than having them occur all at once on Jan. 1. "If it had to happen, we're glad it was now and not in January," Fossett said.
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U.S. Tests Military Planes for Y2K
By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Y2K-Aircraft.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- U.S military aircraft will be Y2K compliant and will be able to ``fly, fight and win on Jan. 1 and beyond,'' according to an officer overseeing exercises at Nellis Air Force Base.
Lt. Col. Paul Avella, manager of Y2K Flag, said no surprises have been found in the four-day exercise, which ended Thursday. Y2K Flag is a major military exercise intended to assess the Air Force's ability to fight and win in the 21st century.
For three years, the Defense Department has been preparing for any computer glitches that might be encountered at the turn of the century, Avella said Wednesday.
Various aircraft were tested on the sprawling Nellis Air Force Range to determine if their complex computer systems are Y2K compliant.
Avella said no surprises were found in the mix of aircraft tested. U-2 and E-8C ``sensor'' surveillance craft communicated successfully, and B-2, F-117 stealth fighter, F-16 and F-15 aircraft responded to targets during a simiulated change of the calendar from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1.
Assessments also were made in anticipation of potential airstrikes on Feb. 29 during a leap year, which occurs every fourth year and will occur in 2000.
Avella said potential problems include readings of calendar dates on aircraft and pilot communications.
To avoid potential problems on Dec. 31 through Jan. 1 and on Feb. 29, dates can be reprogrammed. In the case of ground-based communications, vital equipment such as what Avella called a mission planning system can be fixed or ``patched'' through computer programming to function properly on those days.
Two F-15s participating in the Y2K Flag were injured, neither seriously, when their planes crashed Tuesday. The cause is under investigation.
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31. BACK CHANNELS Getting Scholarly About the Spy Trade
By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 18, 1999; Page A39 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/18/132l-061899-idx.html
Devotees of John le Carre may think this an inauspicious trend, but a full-fledged academic discipline has grown up around the world of intelligence, spawning a "literature" all its own with titles like "Outsiders and Outside Information: Toward Systematic Assessment" and "Teaching Intelligence: Diagnosing the Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction."
Those are but two of the scholarly papers that will be delivered today in Washington at a conference on "teaching intelligence studies at colleges and universities across the United States and around the world."
The conference is being sponsored, appropriately enough, by what is known as the Harvard of the field, the Joint Military Intelligence College, a little-known institution at Bolling Air Force Base in Southeast D.C. run by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The college grants fully accredited bachelor's and master's degrees in strategic intelligence.
Beyond good grades, students must have a top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS-SCI) clearance to attend, as courses use secret satellite imagery and the latest CIA analysis. The basic undergraduate course on counterintelligence, according to the course catalogue, examines cases involving "moles, espionage, double agents . . . honeytraps, defectors."
But A. Denis Clift, the college's president, makes clear the institution exists to examine intelligence as a tool of foreign policy, not to train spies in running agents and stealing secrets. "We discuss these subjects in our classrooms, but we're not training people in tradecraft," Clift said. "You won't find any costume supply rooms here."
CARDOZO'S TENET: He grew up playing ball in the church league and working at his father's diner in Queens, a kid from Benjamin N. Cardozo High School who went out into the world and made the neighborhood proud. It isn't every day that a lad from Queens grows up and becomes director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Only in America.
Which is pretty much what George J. Tenet said last week when he and his twin brother, William, a cardiologist, were feted at Cardozo as alumni of the year. "There is no place in any other country where kids like you can do whatever you want to do and aspire to be whatever you want to be," Tenet told a packed auditorium. "I promise you, it happens no place else. Love your country. Love your flag."
Tenet acknowledged that he was the last kid anybody would have picked to run the CIA.
"I had the biggest mouth in town," he said. "No one would ever believe I could keep a secret. I want to tell you that I have learned my lessons. I'm very discreet now; I don't say anything to anybody."
He credited his gym teacher and soccer coach, Ed Tatarian, for teaching him "more about how to run a big organization and take care of people, as I look back at it, than anybody ever taught me for the rest of my life."
As for the CIA, Tenet said, "I work with the greatest men and women on the face of the Earth. These are men and women who lay their lives down and put their families at enormous risk to make you safe. We steal secrets, we use satellites to acquire information, we write analysis for the president every day. You only hear about it when we get it wrong. Nine out of 10 times, we get it right. We stop terrorists, we stop drug traffickers, we made Mr. [Slobodan] Milosevic's life pretty miserable in Serbia."
NAMING NAMES: One name that never appears in the report of the House select committee probing Chinese espionage is Wen Ho Lee. He is the nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory whom federal officials publicly identified as an espionage "suspect" and fired in March for security violations, even though Justice Department officials concede they have virtually no hard evidence against him and will probably never charge him as a spy.
"All of this Wen Ho Lee business is not the doing of the select committee," Chairman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) said this week in an interview.
"I think it's a bad thing that his face has been all over television like Richard Jewell," Cox said, referring to a security guard erroneously implicated by federal officials in the bombing of Atlanta's Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics. "I think [Energy] Secretary [Bill] Richardson was absolutely right to discharge him. But having said that he should have been terminated . . . I'm not sure that intentional juxtaposition of the theft of classified information on our nuclear weapons and this one person was a particularly American thing to do."
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[And these are the people who want to wage star wars with lasers and brilliant pebbles and brilliant eyes? Are those the "dangerous space junk"?]
32. NASA Discloses Space Station Blunder
By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Space-Station.html
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A blunder by flight controllers prevented the new international space station from moving out of the way of dangerous space junk. The rocket debris ended up passing at a safe distance.
NASA said the sequence of computer commands sent up by flight controllers to fire the station's engines over the weekend failed because of human error. It disclosed the incident Thursday.
Initially, the U.S. military organization that tracks objects in space predicted the rocket chunk would pass within two-thirds of a mile of the space station on Sunday. It ended up coming no closer than 4 1/2 miles.
The debris was Russian in origin and fairly large, although its exact dimensions were not immediately known. A collision could have destroyed the empty outpost, which has been in orbit for only seven months. The first residents are not due to arrive until next spring.
At last count, the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., was tracking more than 8,700 manmade objects in orbit, most of that junk. With an orbital speed of 17,500 mph, any one of them could do serious damage to the space station, which consists of only two compartments so far.
Measures already have been taken to prevent this from happening again, said Frank Culbertson, NASA deputy program manager for space station operations.
``I'm very glad we learned what we learned at this point in the mission before we have more hardware up there and before we have people up there,'' Culbertson said. But he noted that if astronauts had been aboard, they could have maneuvered the space station more easily than ground controllers.
The maneuvering command, drawn up by both U.S. and Russian engineers, was sent from the Russian control center outside Moscow on Saturday night. But the command contained faulty instructions, and the space station's computers rejected it. The station was left without motion control for an entire orbit.
Flight controllers may not have factored in the changes in the space station's mass and center of gravity since shuttle Discovery delivered 2 tons of gear earlier this month, or else the changes were entered incorrectly.
Culbertson said it wasn't immediately clear whether Americans or Russians were to blame.
By the time flight controllers learned of their mistake, it was too late to send up a corrected command. ``But because the probability was low, we weren't too worried about it,'' Culbertson said.
In any case, the Space Command soon revised the projected distance between the two objects from 0.6 miles to 4 1/2 miles.
It is the second time in less than three months that NASA has reported an erroneous station command. In late April, Russian flight controllers mistakenly ordered a motor to turn on and move the space station's solar wings; onboard computers detected the error and shut off power to the motor.
Federation of American Scientist Space Policy Project - http://www.fas.org/spp/index.html - http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/ - and http://www.fas.org/spp/whatnew.html]
Special Weapons in Congress June 18, 1999 http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/index.html
1999 - Floor Debates - Hearings - Reports http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1999_r/index.html
Congressional Information Sources and Methods http://www.fas.org/news/congress.htm
Congressional News Sources
Military Spending http://www.fas.org/man/congress/index.html
NATO Enlargement http://www.fas.org/man/nato/congress/index.html
Missile Defense and Proliferation http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/index.html
Civil Space http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/congress/index.html
Military Space http://www.fas.org/spp/military/congress/index.html
Intelligence http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/index.html
News Sources
House Calender - http://www.house.gov/1998_House_Calendar.htm
This Week - http://www.house.gov/floor/thisweek.htm
Current Proceedings - http://www.house.gov/floor/current.htm
Today in Committee - http://www.house.gov/comm_sche/todncomm.html
Senate Schedule -
Recess Calender - http://www.senate.gov/activities/recess.html
Pending Business - http://www.senate.gov/activities/lcal-1.html
Legislative Calendar - http://www.senate.gov/activities/legcal.html
Committee Meetings - http://www.senate.gov/activities/hearings.html
Today in Congress from the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/cong2day.htm
Daily Digest of the Senate and House of Representativesfrom GPO
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/digest001.shtml
[yesterday in Congress] FLOOR ACTIVITY IN CONGRESS THIS WEEK http://thomas.loc.gov/home/hot-week.html - links to bills expected to receive floor action and/or debate in Congress during the current week, and bills that received floor action the previous week [from THOMAS].
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.html
For recent Congressional information search the Congressional Record - http://thomas.loc.gov/home/r105query.html - via Thomas using keywords or the names of members. Each day's Congressional Record - http://thomas.loc.gov/r105/r105.html - is online by mid-morning the following day. Thomas also provides text of Congressional Reports.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cp105/cp105query.html
GPO Access - http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces001.html - provides a searchable database - http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html - of a wide variety of government documents, including Reports of the 104th Congress. These are typically delayed four to five days from their hardcopy release.
General Accounting Office http://www.gao.gov/
Congressional Budget Office http://www.cbo.gov/ Congressional Research Service
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Message: 3 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:42:33 -0400
Subject: NucNews-3 6/20/99 - India- uranium poisoning, navy, Kashmir; Korea
13. NUCLEAR FALLOUT An Indian uranium mine is blamed for a spate of horrifying illnesses afflicting local villagers
By Soutik Biswas / Calcutta, June 20, 1999 Asia Week http://www.pathfinder.com/asiaweek/current/issue/feat5.html
SURUMAJHIAN IS A URANIUM miner in Jaduguda, in the northern Indian state of Bihar. He says he has been suffering from body aches and fever for the past six years. Another miner, Mohan Soren, has an eight-year-old daughter whose legs became paralyzed three months after she was born. Laxmi Saman Muran's one-year-old son is suffering from tuberculosis of the brain. And 18-year-old Simoti Majhi struggles through life with a hunched back and a useless right hand.
What is going on at Jaduguda? On the face of it, the 30,000-strong community looks like any cluster of Indian villages, with its fields, ponds and young women gliding here and there with pitchers of water balanced on their heads. But this is no pastoral idyll. In environmental circles, Jaduguda is known as India's Chernobyl, after the Soviet nuclear reactor that malfunctioned in 1986 and spewed radioactive contamination across great swathes of Europe. According to activists and local politicians, waste liquid flowing from the sprawling Jaduguda uranium complex is radioactive, endangering the health and lives of the local population. "There is poison in Jaduguda's air and water," says Shamu Majhi, a miner.
A recent report by Bihar's Legislative Council, composed of the state's elected politicians, says people living within 15 km of the mine have been stricken with cancer and leukemia, with many suffering impotency and deformation of limbs. Some 100 residents of a miners' housing project have died of cancer in the past decade, and almost 90% of those now there have acute arthritis. The council's environment committee has evacuated 46 families, affected by leukemia and other problems, from the mining areas.
Another report, by the militant Jharkhand Organization Against Radiation (JOAR), says 47% of village women have complained of disrupted menstrual cycles, and 18% say they have suffered either miscarriages or given birth to stillborn babies in the past five years. Other reported problems include skin ailments, kidney damage, hypertension, central-nervous-system disorders, insomnia and nausea.
Environmentalists and politicians blame shoddy management at the government-owned Uranium Corporation of India Ltd. (UCIL), whose Jaduguda mine supplies uranium for the country's 10 nuclear power stations. The company is a key player in India's independent - and highly secretive - nuclear-power program. Ore from the mine is processed at Jaduguda into a substance called U308 - commonly known as yellow cake - and then sent to the Nuclear Fuel Complex in the southern city of Hyderabad, where uranium fuel rods are produced.
The principal danger for people living near Jaduguda, say environmentalists, is a 40-hectare "tailing" pond used to hold liquid and solid waste produced in the processing of the ore into yellow cake. JOAR president Ghanasyam Biruli says the incidence of health problems in the area is too high to be explained by natural factors. In his view, the waste material released into the pond is radioactive.
India's Atomic Energy Act states that there should be no habitation within five kilometers of dumping grounds or tailing ponds. Even though Jaduguda has been in operation for more than 30 years, as many as seven villages still stand within one and a half kilometers of the danger zone. One of them, Dungardihi, is just 40 meters away. Another complaint: Liquid waste piped from the plant periodically floods a local road, forcing villagers and cattle to wade through it.
Regulations specify that the tailing pond has to be permanently covered with water. This rule is not always respected, but when it is, children and women often bathe in the water and even carry it back to their homes for use. Locals complain that there is no perimeter fence. When the pond dries up, dust blows through villages and on to fields. Local politician Suresh Handsa says rice production has fallen because padi are contaminated .
The mine operators also dump dry tailings at the site. Occasionally they contain what villagers say is yellow cake - though why so precious and potent a substance should be thrown out has not been explained. Whatever the truth of that, a doctor attached to nearby Jamshedpur's Tata Main Hospital has no doubt about the consequences of the mine's operations. "The whole area has become unfit for habitation," he says. The doctor asked not to be named.
Miners complain that safety standards are ignored in the pits and in the processing unit. Workers are sometimes not supplied with respirators for handling and cleaning the yellow cake. JOAR alleges that in these circumstances, employees could be inhaling uranium dust and radon gas. International guidelines say staff at uranium plants should be issued with protective clothing. But miners and loaders at Jaduguda wear ordinary cotton uniforms provided by the company. They take these uniforms home for washing.
UCIL denies all the charges leveled against it. Its chairman and managing director, J.L. Bhasin, says: "There is no health hazard in and around Jaduguda caused by our uranium mines." Radiation levels are "well within the stipulations" laid down by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, he says. And the guidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency are "strictly followed." However, under the terms of India's Atomic Energy Act, the company does not have to reveal its test results or employees' health records.
Bhasin cites a medical survey of more than 3,000 residents, organized by the Bombay-based Bhabha Atomic Research Center, in December last year. It found that villagers suffering from poor health and deformities showed "congenital anomalies and diseases due to genetic abnormalities, chronic malarial infection, malnutrition and alcohol consumption." Bhasin insists: "The cases examined had no relation to radiation."
The mine boss also denies allegations that the public has access to the tailing pond. "It is well engineered," he says. "No person can take a bath or wash their clothes in the pond water." Some reports have, in fact, suggested that locals cut their way through the perimeter fence. Even so, say environmentalists, the company should take its responsibilities more seriously and ensure that security guards are in place to prevent trespassing.
Local politicians do not accept the company's explanations. They want tighter monitoring of the uranium mine and its operations. If they don't get it, they say they will campaign to have the place closed down. That may be beyond their power. When India exploded five nuclear devices last year, Jaduguda's uranium ore became that much more precious. But somewhere between nuclear ambition and the wellbeing of the villagers living in the shadow of the mine, there has to be a healthy compromise.
--
India Navy on alert, says ready for counter-strike 10:02 a.m. Jun 17, 1999 Eastern By Uday Khandeparkar http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
The World Takes Notice: Kashmir Gets Scarier By STEPHEN KINZER, June 20, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/062099kashmir-review.html Photo: http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/062099kashmir-review.1.jpg
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14. HOLGER JENSEN: What is North Korea up to?
Scripps Howard News Service http://www2.nando.net/noframes/story/0,2107,60814-96807-691378-0,00.html
(June 18, 1999 6:00 a.m. EDT) - As NATO forces expand their presence in Kosovo, the Pentagon is keeping a wary eye on another flashpoint that ignited oceans away.
It has already prompted a deployment of U.S. Navy and Air Force planes to patrol the Yellow Sea following the first naval battle between North and South Korea since their 1950-53 war.
No one knows why North Korea provoked the naval engagement in a crab fishery below the Northern Limit Line demarcated by the United Nations after the Korean War. North Korean fishing boats escorted by naval vessels had crossed the line before, but always left when warned off by the South.
On Tuesday they didn't, prompting a shootout in which one North Korean gunboat was sunk and four badly damaged. Was it really to catch crabs? Was it to find out how thinly stretched American forces really are, given their commitments in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf?
Or was it simply to heap more scorn on South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North, which has persisted despite a rash of North Korean provocations?
A year ago a North Korean submarine was found entangled in fishing nets off South Korea's eastern coast. Nine crew members killed themselves in a group suicide to avoid capture. Three weeks later, a suspected North Korean frogman was found dead on a beach, not far from where the sub was caught.
Last August, North Korea shocked the world by firing a new long-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads over Japan and into the Pacific.
And in December, South Korean air and naval forces sank a North Korean submersible spy vessel and recovered the body of another North Korean frogman.
The secretive regime in Pyongyang has always acted with maddening unpredictability, even now that it has had to abandon its philosophy of "juche," self-reliance, and is dependent on international handouts to feed its 22 million people.
North Korea's economy has shrunk for eight straight years since losing aid and trade with the defunct Soviet Union. Aid workers estimate that 2 million people or more have died of malnutrition and related diseases over the past four years due to successive floods and droughts, compounded by mismanagement of the state-run farm system.
Yet North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, often using them to blackmail its principal enemies - the United States, Japan and South Korea - into providing yet more aid.
In return for North Korea's promise of halting plutonium production at its Yongbon nuclear reactor, the three allies promised to build a new one costing $4.6 billion and give Pyongyang a 10-year supply of free oil until it is online. Despite this agreement and its dire economic plight, the North then began building a new reactor and weapons complex at Keumjongri.
It demanded a $300 million access fee for nuclear inspectors to visit this new site, but settled for super potatoes. In March, the United States agreed to help North Korea increase potato yields as a step "to improve political and economic relations between the two countries."
While this deal was being cut, North Korea demanded U.S. compensation for halting its missile exports to other rogue nations. And it exhorted its citizens to "prepare themselves to be heroes through human bomb attacks and suicidal explosion" against the United States.
This month, even as it asked the West to increase food aid because of another famine expected after this growing season, Pyongyang warned its people against the "Trojan horse" of capitalism, ruling out any economic or political reform in efforts to rebuild its tattered economy.
At the same time, North Korea continues to return the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War, continues negotiations on making the 1953 armistice a permanent peace and continues to encourage economic contacts with South Korea.
Despite this week's naval battle, South Korean tourists are still welcomed at a mountain resort in North Korea that Pyongyang opened to the South last November, one of the few tangible results of Seoul's "sunshine policy."
It's all quite baffling, really.
Holger Jensen is international editors of the Denver Rocky Mountain News.
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North Korea Calls U.S. Antagonists
By Edith M. Lederer Associated Press Writer Friday, June 18, 1999; 5:53 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990618/V000886-061899-idx.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- North Korea accused the United States on Friday of trying to unleash a new war on the Korean peninsula by deploying advanced weapons and provoking South Korea to fire on North Korean naval ships this week.
``The touch-and-go situation is now created in the Korean peninsula where a war may break out any time,'' North Korea's U.N. Ambassador Li Hyong Chol warned in a letter to the U.N. Security Council.
The only reason this week's clash in the Yellow Sea did not escalate into all-out war is ``our great patience and self-control,'' he said in the letter delivered to Gambia's U.N. Ambassador Baboucarr-Blaise Jagne, the current council president.
``If the danger of war is to be averted and durable peace secured, it is indispensable for the U.S. to renounce its hostile policy against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and to put an early end to its dangerous provocations of a new war,'' Li said in the letter.
The ambassador took the unusual step of personally handing a copy of his letter to The Associated Press and going over its key points.
``I think this is to emphasize the level of seriousness of the situation,'' he explained, when asked how close the situation was to war.
``We have been following the situation very carefully recently where the United States and the South Korean side have been preparing for starting another war in the Korean peninsula,'' he said.
North Korea accused South Korea of infiltrating naval warships into its territorial waters daily from June 4, deliberately ``bumping'' vessels, and firing at its patrol boats on Tuesday.
The high-seas shootout sank one northern patrol boat, badly damaged five others, and is believed to have killed 30 North Korean sailors, according to U.S. officials in Washington.
Since the late 1970s, North Korea has been sending fishing boats and naval ships into the zone 20 to 30 times a year. But when challenged by South Korean patrol boats in the past, they usually have withdrawn quickly.
Li said North Korea wanted the Security Council to know ``the truth'' about the naval clash, ``pay serious attention to the Korean peninsula and take proper measures to cease immediately these type of military provocations on the part of the United States and South Korea.''
The United States has appealed for restraint on both sides.
Before the naval incident, U.S. envoy Charles Kartman and Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan had scheduled talks in Beijing next Wednesday, which are expected to go ahead. Kartman is expected to report on the U.S. investigation of a tunnel, which Washington believed might be a nuclear site but turned out to be empty.
An armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War never outlined the maritime border. The U.N. Command unilaterally demarcated the sea frontier in 1953 and created a buffer zone to avoid armed clashes. But tension persisted as the North contested the borderline.
Li stressed in the letter that North Korea has never recognized the ``northern boundary line.''
Li said that the military ``provocation'' in the Yellow Sea was coupled with other activities that have led North Korea to believe the United States and South Korea have been preparing for another war in the Korean peninsula.
The United States is now deploying AC-130 ground attack planes, F-15 and F-18 fighter bombers, and precision-guided bombs in South Korea and has moved warships into the area and put Marines in Okinawa on alert, he noted.
North Korea also accused the United States of walking out of military talks at the border village of Panmunjom on Tuesday which it proposed to discuss the shooting incident.
The U.N. Command said the talks recessed while the North Korean officers conferred with their leaders in Pyongyang, the northern capital.
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US, N. Korea to Hold Talks in China
By Barry Schweid, AP Diplomatic Writer, June 18, 1999; 3:12 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990618/V000736-061899-idx.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States and North Korea have set talks next week in Beijing against a backdrop of tensions involving the sinking of a North Korean warship off the Korean peninsula's western coast.
The talks next Wednesday between U.S. envoy Charles Kartman and Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan were scheduled before the incident. But the sinking of the warship Tuesday after it was bumped by a South Korean vessel and the death of 30 North Korean sailors is likely to come up for discussion.
North Korea and South Korea both claim the area where the ship was sunk. An armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War did not outline the maritime border.
A South Korean ship was trying to nudge the North Korean vessel in a northerly direction when it bumped and sank the vessel. The Pentagon quickly sent two warships and four electronic surveillance planes to the region to monitor the situation.
North Korean warships have not ventured since along the ``northern limit line'' in the Yellow Sea below which North Korean vessels are not supposed to sail.
Kartman will report to Kim on the inspection U.S. experts made last month of a mountainside tunnel at Kumchang-ri. Despite suspicions North Korea was trying to a hide a nuclear plant there, the Americans found the tunnel empty.
Use of the tunnel for nuclear activity would violate a 1994 agreement with the United States, under which North Korea froze its nuclear program in exchange for two safer nuclear reactors worth $4.6 billion.
The United States is bound by the agreement to improve diplomatic relations and lift decades-old economic sanctions against North Korea. The United States fought on South Korea's side in the 1950-53 Korean War.
Meanwhile, North Korea has not responded to a proposal by the Clinton administration that it abandon nuclear and missile development programs in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits.
U.S. experts intend to visit the tunnel site again next year.
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U.S. Says Photos Show North Korea Preparing for Missile
By ELIZABETH BECKER, June 18, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/061899nkorea-missile.html
WASHINGTON -- American intelligence agencies have uncovered evidence that North Korea is making initial preparations to test the launch of a ballistic missile later this summer, Clinton administration officials said Thursday.
Intelligence agencies say aerial photographs show that North Korea is refurbishing its launch pad and that the country is most likely to test its longer-range ballistic missile, the Taepo Dong 2.
Intelligence agency officials said the range of the North Korean Taepo Dong 2 missile test would be significantly longer than last summer's test of the less sophisticated model, which traveled almost 4,000 miles, before it splashed into the ocean. These officials said that once deployed the Taepo Dong 2 would be able to hit Alaska or Hawaii.
The discovery comes as North Korea and South Korea have reached a standoff on the seas where they fought a 30-minute battle early Tuesday at their disputed maritime border. The conflict ended with the sinking of a North Korean ship and the possible deaths of more than 20 sailors. On Wednesday North Korea suspended all contacts with the South.
To better monitor the dispute, the Pentagon dispatched two warships and surveillance combat jets to the area from their bases in Japan. The reports Thursday were optimistic. "It's clear that the North Koreans have moved their ships back, and currently there is a clear separation between the boats of both sides," said a Pentagon spokesman.
Should North Korea test a ballistic missile in a month or more, as intelligence agencies now estimate, it would jeopardize the Clinton administration initiatives to improve relations and reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula.
"This underscores why the most dangerous place on earth is not downtown Pristina but the Korean border," a senior Clinton administration official said.
After North Korea launched a three-stage rocket over Japan last summer, the Clinton administration stepped up proposals to develop regional missile defense systems with Japan and South Korea. The increased range of that missile raised alarms in Congress as well as the administration. The 37,000 American troops based in South Korea and nearly 50,000 others serving in Japan appeared far more vulnerable to the improving North Korean missile system.
This winter Secretary of Defense William Cohen visited Japan to further discussions of a research project with the United States to develop their theater missile defense. At the same time, Japan delayed financing of several nuclear energy reactors for North Korea to show its displeasure over what the Japanese public considered a provocative launch.
Two weeks ago North Korea was reminded by former Secretary of Defense William Perry that Japan and the United States would not tolerate another missile launch. Perry visited Pyongyang to float a proposal that would promise a lifting of United States sanctions against North Korea in return for promises to stop testing missiles and selling missile technology.
Some Republicans and defense analysts, already skeptical of Perry's initiative, said Thursday's news could torpedo that effort.
"Right now, the testing of a missile by North Korea would have a very severe political impact, more even than a military one," said Richard Armitage, a defense analyst and former Reagan administration official. "It will increase the fervor for a theater missile defense system and dampen any enthusiasm for Perry's ideas."
While all officials expressed concern over any new test, several said these initial intelligence findings were not conclusive proof that the North Koreans would launch a missile this summer and should not cut off the continuing diplomatic efforts to lower tensions on the Korean peninsula.
"No one is minimizing the thought that the next launch would be very provocative and very dangerous," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "The missile piece is not a surprise at this point. You just have to make sure another test doesn't happen, and I think this is more reason to keep engaged with North Korea."
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Message: 4 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:41:57 -0400
Subject: NucNews-6 6/20/99 - Spies; Rocky Flats
27. Prince of Shadows
By Jeff Stein Special to The Washington Post Sunday, June 20, 1999; Page X02 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/007l-062099-idx.html
ALLEN DULLES Master of Spies By James Srodes Regnery. 624 pp. $34.95 Reviewed by Jeff Stein
Talk about dead white men. They are nearly all gone now, the hard-eyed, tweedy bunch who ran the Central Intelligence Agency in its legendary glory days, when a misjudgment in Berlin could lead to nuclear war, not just the mistaken bombing of a Chinese embassy.
Allen Dulles was the best of them all, the great white case officer whose World War II spying exploits and family connections (his grandfather was briefly President Benjamin Harrison's secretary of state; his brother John Foster was Eisenhower's) made him the inevitable choice to run the fledgling CIA. A witty, pipe-smoking raconteur -- one part Wilsonian idealist, one part cold-hearted spy -- Dulles was a legend in his own time, a prize catch at Georgetown dinner parties, where once upon a time liberal Democrats thrilled to the presence of a CIA man.
This, in other words, is yet another story of a supposedly sparkling era that is much in vogue with aging yuppies. But it's also one that now has been told many times, unfortunately for James Srodes, a veteran Washington writer and co-author of the bestselling Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. De Lorean.
Yet respect must be paid. Our fathers really did hold the fate of the world in their hands for the middle third of the century, much more than is sometimes realized, as Dulles was wont to say himself. What if the Nazis had invaded Britain instead of getting bogged down in Russia? he'd ask visitors. The unanswerable question is how much the Allies owed to Hitler's blunders, and how much to American resources and brilliance. By almost all realistic accounts, however, the secret agents of the American OSS, or Office of Special Services, no matter how bold or courageous, had little effect on the war's outcome.
Dulles was a first-rate agent handler, as Srodes dutifully recounts. After he was posted to Switzerland, his most important agent was a clerk in the German Foreign Ministry, who showed up after being rebuffed by the British and began feeding Dulles German cables, some 1,200 in all. There was a moral in this tale, Dulles would tell his young charges in later years. Back in 1917, when he was a young diplomat in Switzerland, he'd turned away a young Russian by the name of V.I. Lenin, who promptly persuaded the Germans to send him to Russia. The rest, as they say, is history.
Dulles also conspired in plots to kill Hitler or induce a Nazi surrender, all of which, of course, came to nought. He fared better as President Eisenhower's chief instrument for overthrowing governments or otherwise secretly swaying events around the world. "He had this ability to make cold-blooded assessments while remaining warm and gracious that was quite remarkable," James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who worked as an intelligence analyst under Dulles, told Srodes. Ever the operator, Dulles also never gave up gathering his own information, either from his wide circle of friends outside the government or from young agents just in from the field, whom he'd often summon to his office for a first-hand briefing. Thus, at the White House one day, Dulles passed along his agency's analysis that Poland was firmly in the grip of Moscow, then added, according to Billington, "They may be right, but . . . the people I have talked to recently tell me it is decidedly more volatile than this estimate suggests. Poland could blow up before Hungary." "And it did," Billington said.
Unlike today, the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s was truly a bipartisan affair. Thus Dulles was able to recruit liberals like the journalist Tom Braden to engage left-wing artists, writers, intellectuals and union leaders in the anti-communist cause, especially in Europe. He cut through red tape to get the U-2 spy plane in the air. But the agency was on less firm footing elsewhere in the world. The Korean War caught the CIA by surprise. Despite early successes in overthrowing socialist regimes in Iran and Guatemala in 1954, it failed miserably in Indonesia, Tibet, Vietnam and, of course, Cuba. The CIA was lulled by its easy coup d'etat in Iran, according to Kim Roosevelt, the agent who just about single-handedly pulled it off, into thinking that it could apply covert action like a kit: You have to have the support of the people, he often lectured, to topple a dictator.
The Bay of Pigs was Waterloo for Dulles, "undoubtedly the greatest U.S. professional intelligence officer of his time," in the estimate of a top Eisenhower aide. But like an aging ball player, Dulles had hung on too long. The failed invasion cost him his job. Not even enlisting in plots to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders, which began under Eisenhower, could save him.
"I probably made a mistake in keeping Dulles on," Kennedy rued, according to his biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "Dulles is a legendary figure, and it's hard to operate with legendary figures." It's even harder, we're finding out, when there aren't any legends left at all.
Jeff Stein, a U.S. Army intelligence case officer in Vietnam and author of "A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War," covers national security issues for the online magazine Salon.
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28. Az. Sen. Calls for Energy Overhaul
By H. Josef Hebert Associated Press Writer Saturday, June 19, 1999; 11:22 a.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990619/V000270-061999-idx.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional Republicans pressed their case Saturday for a reorganization of the Energy Department in response to the continuing controversy over the safeguarding of America's nuclear secrets.
Using the weekly GOP radio address, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., accused the Clinton administration of taking ``half measures'' in dealing with security at nuclear weapons laboratories.
Kyl is one of three GOP senators who have proposed putting nuclear weapons programs under a largely autonomous agency within the Energy Department -- an idea also urged this week by a panel of intelligence experts advising the president.
Nevertheless, such a reorganization is being staunchly resisted by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who said he would recommend that the president veto any legislation creating such an agency. It's ``not good logic'' to insulate the nuclear weapons programs within a new ``fiefdom'' in the department, Richardson told reporters.
But Kyl noted that a special panel of the president's own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board this week, after a 90-day review of security at the Energy Department, recommended just such an agency, expressing doubt that without it, long-lasting security reforms would be possible.
The panel, headed by former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, said the department has had a ``cavalier attitude'' about security for decades. It said while Richardson's moves to improve security were in the right direction, the department's ``bureaucracy is quite capable of undoing (these) reforms.''
``We call upon the administration to cooperate with us, not to be satisfied with half measures,'' said Kyl in the Republican Party's weekly radio broadcast. ``Since our proposal is exactly what the president' own panel now has recommended, we hope that he and his secretary of energy will work with us to get our bill passed quickly.''
Richardson argues that creation of a ``new fiefdom'' within the department would hinder the beefed up, more centralized security and counterintelligence programs he has put in place. Earlier in the week he announced appointment of a four-star Air Force general as the department's first ``security czar'' who will reported directly to him.
Questions about security at nuclear weapons facilities erupted in March as details from a congressional investigation began to surface, describing the loss of nuclear secrets to China in the 1980s and into the '90s.
The controversy intensified after Richardson directed the firing of a scientists at the Los Alamos weapons lab in early March after he had been under investigation for possible espionage since 1996.
The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was fired for security violations, but has not been charged with any crime. Through his lawyer he has vehemently denied giving nuclear secrets to anyone. The FBI investigation on the Lee case continues.
And the issue is not likely to go away soon. On Tuesday, four Senate committees will meet in joint session to hear Rudman describe his proposal for Energy Department reorganization. Richardson also is scheduled to testify.
The House Commerce Committee also has planned a hearing on the Rudman report this week. ---
Energy Secretary against Kyl's proposal USA Today, June 20, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncssat01.htm
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Nuclear Security Blanket Compromise May Be Near on New Agency to Oversee Atomic Arms
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, June 20, 1999; Page A03 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/229l-062099-idx.html
In the aftermath of allegations of Chinese espionage, the Department of Energy and its congressional critics are moving toward a compromise: creating a new agency within the department to oversee the production of America's nuclear weapons.
The proposed reorganization is aimed not only at reducing the vulnerability to spying but also at clarifying lines of authority and making more efficient the $6 billion-a-year complex of weapons laboratories, reactors and assembly plants that stretch from coast to coast, employ more than 30,000 people and are vital to the nation's security.
The weapons complex, once part of the now dissolved Atomic Energy Commission, was given to the new Energy Department in 1977 because neither the Carter administration nor Congress wanted nuclear arms production to be controlled by the Pentagon.
But the fit between the highly secretive weapons programs and the rest of the department--which is nonmilitary science aimed at energy and environmental issues--has never been entirely comfortable. Calls for change, which have been growing over the past decade, were given new force since a bipartisan committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) released a three-volume report last month alleging Chinese spies stole information on America's most advanced nuclear warheads from U.S. national laboratories.
Last week, a presidential panel headed by former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) reviewed the evidence and challenged some of the Cox committee's "worst case" assumptions about the extent of Chinese espionage. But the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board also lambasted the Department of Energy for "organizational disarray, managerial neglect and a culture of arrogance" that had "conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to happen." The Rudman panel suggested two possibilities: turning the nuclear complex into a semiautonomous agency inside the Energy Department, or stripping the department of responsibility for nuclear weapons.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson initially resisted both options. First, he attempted to tackle the security concerns by bringing in a former top FBI supervisor, Edward J. Curran, to run the department's counterintelligence operation. Then, he named retired four-star Gen. Eugene E. Habiger to be the department's "security czar."
Last week, however, Richardson acknowledged that his aides were "trying to merge our differences" with Cox, Rudman and other critics. "I don't think we are that far apart," Richardson said in an interview Friday. "We all want accountability, clear lines of authority, centralization and security."
The emerging compromise may be outlined on Tuesday when Rudman is to testify before an unprecedented joint meeting of the Senate committees on commerce, armed services and energy.
"All signs point to reorganization," said Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.). Domenici, whose state is home to two major nuclear weapons laboratories, has joined Sens. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) in proposing to create a Nuclear Security Administration within the Energy Department.
Domenici, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, said he had been working for 12 years to get rid of the cumbersome bureaucratic structure that surrounds the national laboratories.
Reflecting this change in emphasis, Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), vice chairman of the intelligence panel, said that the primary concern on Capitol Hill is shifting "from a potential security problem [at the Energy Department] to how to structure the nuclear weapons program."
Part of what drives the restructuring is the managerial complexity of the nuclear weapons programs. The sites are run by companies and universities. Some of them do work for weapons and nonweapons programs. They report both to regional authorities as well as Energy Department headquarters. And at headquarters the sites report to program authorities as well as environmental, safety and security divisions.
One concern among DOE officials is that if the three main national laboratories--Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia--focus on weapons, it could endanger the other, wide-ranging work that the labs now do. "We could lose nonmilitary funding," said one senior energy official, "and that $100 million support for key pure science could cut the labs' links to universities. That could harm recruitment of scientists and in the end hurt the defense programs."
Along with the three labs, which spend about $1 billion each per year, the complex also contains nuclear weapons facilities at Amarillo, Tex., and Kansas City, Mo.; nuclear materials facilities at Savannah River, S.C., and Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and the Nevada Test Site.
Under a proposal by Rudman that Domenici and his colleagues appear likely to approve, the semiautonomous agency also would include the Energy Department's $700 million nonproliferation and arms control program, which helps to dismantle former Soviet nuclear arms; the $200 million fissile material disposition program, which is cutting back on weapons building materials such as plutonium and enriched uranium; and the $700 million nuclear reactor program for U.S. Navy vessels.
Although the United States no longer produces new nuclear weapons, the complex continues to research and develop new ways to keep operational the country's aging stockpile of nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and the Nevada Test Site support the so-called stockpile stewardship program that assures the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons without testing, which is banned by international treaty. Using supercomputers and subcritical nuclear devices--those that do not produce an explosion--scientists "divide the physics of the explosive sequence into each of its parts and analyze each separately," Victor H. Reis, assistant secretary of energy for defense programs, recently told Congress.
At Los Alamos, the ability to produce primary nuclear weapons explosives is being reestablished, something the complex has not been able to do since the plant at Rocky Flats, Colo., was closed in 1989. The weapons complex is performing major refurbishment of several weapon types, giving extended service to older nuclear bombs and the W-87 warhead, which is used on the MX intercontinental ballistic missile.
The first W-87s were delivered to the Air Force last month.
At Sandia National Laboratories, the complex maintains what Reis called "a robust and world-class microelectronics capability." Sandia works on technologies that would allow for "miniaturizing weapon components and improving their reliability," Reis said.
At the Savannah River Site, preparations are underway to produce tritium, a radioactive gas that will be needed to replace older tritium elements that are slowly deteriorating. Uranium machining, recycling and storage takes place at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant.
At the plant in Amarillo, employees are dismantling old warheads and fabricating new high explosive components for rebuilt ones.
The Kansas city plant produces electrooptical devices, plastic and machined parts for nuclear and nonnuclear weapons, and defense-related equipment. The Kansas City plant also has been qualified to produce tritium gas reservoirs for warheads, and Sandia will soon have a production facility for neutron generators for refurbished warheads.
KEY SITES IN THE U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS COMPLEX:
Site: Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M. Managed by: University of California Employees: 6,900 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.3 billion Major weapons activities: Stockpile stewardship and maintenance, arms control, waste management.
Site: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Calif. Managed by: University of California Employees: 6,400 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.1 billion Major weapons activities: Stockpile stewardship and maintenance, arms control, waste management.
Site: Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque Managed by: Sandia Corp., (Lockheed Martin) Employees: 7,500 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.1 billion Major weapons activities: Weapons design, arms control, waste management.
Site: Kansas City Plant Managed by: Allied Signal Corp. Employees: 3,200 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $291 million
Major weapons activities: Weapons construction. Site: Pantex Plant, Amarillo, Tex. Managed by: Mason Hanger-Silas Mason Co. Employees: 2,900 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $269 million
Major weapons activities: Weapons assembly, dismantling, disposal. Site: Nevada Test Site Las Vegas and Nye County, Nev Managed by: Bechtel Nevada, Inc. Employees: 2,300 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $650 million
Major weapons activities: Stockpile stewardship and maintenance, nuclear testing, disposal. Site: Savannah River Site, Aiken, S.C. Managed by: Westinghouse Savannah River Co. Employees: 1,400 in defense programs Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.5 billion
Major weapons activities: Nuclear materials production. Site: Y-12 Plant, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tenn. Managed by: Lockheed Martin Energy Systems Employees: 5,500 in Y-12 defense programs Fiscal 2000 budget request: $740 million Major weapons activities: Nuclear materials production, arms control, disposal.
SOURCE: Energy Department
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Panel's advice solid on nuclear secrets
Thursday, June 17,1999, San Antonio Express-News http://www.expressnews.com/pantheon/editorial/editorials/1804bnuke1ed0618nz. shtml
Clinton administration officials would do themselves and the nation good by dropping their resistance to recommendations that call for giving nuclear weapons programs independence from the Energy Department.
Headed by former Sen. Warren Rudman, the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board reported that the Energy Department can't handle the job.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson claims the internal changes he is pushing will be enough, but the advisory panel is right. Evidence collected by this group and congressional committees paints a picture of a bureaucracy too slow to react to security threats.
For example, the Washington Post reported that DOE officials sold blueprints for nuclear processing equipment to a salvage dealer without realizing that they could be used by enemies, terrorists or kooks to make weapons.
And one advisory board official anonymously told CNN that so many sources leaked secrets from the nuclear weapons program that Los Alamos laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee, the target of an FBI probe of nuclear secrets given to the Chinese government, will be almost impossible to prosecute.
The advisers recommended that the nuclear weapons program be managed by an autonomous agency within DOE or be placed in an independent agency.
Scientific research on nuclear weapons must be protected, and the bureaucratic maze at the Energy Department has worked against effectively doing that.
A focused agency that would handle nuclear weapons research, and the security to protect it, makes sense.
Richardson is an honorable man who inherited the mess, but he should drop efforts to protect the department's turf and work with congressional reformers on crafting a new method for ensuring that U.S. nuclear secrets are protected.
Too much is at stake to risk leaving this task embedded in the bureaucratic morass that allowed secrets to be stolen prodigiously during three presidential administrations.
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29. Removal of Flats waste begins 1st truck begins trek for New Mexico burial, helping set stage for plant's closure in 2006
By Berny Morson Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer June 16, 1999 http://insidedenver.com/news/0616wipp0.shtml
JEFFERSON COUNTY -- A truck carrying the first shipment of waste from Rocky Flats to a burial site in New Mexico pulled slowly out of the defunct nuclear weapons plant Tuesday evening.
The historic voyage brings the plant that much closer to meeting the goal of shutting down by 2006.
The truck drove onto Colorado 93 amid cries of "shame, shame" from about 75 protesters who say burying the waste poses a hazard to future generations.
But leaders from surrounding towns turned out in support of the shipments, believing the Denver area will be safer.
"This is the day we've been waiting for for 20 years," said Mary Harlow, the Westminster Rocky Flats coordinator.
Rocky Flats assistant manager Joe Legare said getting rid of waste stored at the plant is essential if the plant is to close. About 12,000 barrels are kept in buildings and tents as workers demolish the buildings where America's Cold War arsenal was manufactured.
"If we're unable to ship this waste off site, that means we store it safely on site," Legare said. "That takes away precious resources from the closure mission."
The truck left the plant accompanied by a half-dozen State Patrol cars. But most had peeled off by the time the truck passed through Denver.
The 18-hour journey will end today near Carlsbad.
The 15-ton Kenworth tractor and custom-built flatbed trailer was loaded with 26 barrels containing the graphite molds used to fashion nuclear bomb parts from radioactive plutonium.
As many as 2,000 loads will make the trip to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, near Carlsbad, where the contaminated material will be buried a half-mile beneath the desert in a prehistoric salt bed.
Most shipments will contain items such as contaminated tools and clothing or building rubble. Heavy-duty material, such as pure weapons-grade plutonium, will go to the Energy Department facility in South Carolina.
Shipments will leave for New Mexico at a rate of one a week at first, but will increase to as many as 15 per week in about two years, Legare said.
Earlier in the day, the truck passed a safety check by the Colorado State Patrol.
"The vehicle can have no defects before it is allowed to leave," said State Patrol techician Dave McBride.
Protesters Tuesday said they are not convinced the shipments are safe for people living along the route. But McBride said the nuclear waste trucks are safer than tankers that bring gasoline to filling stations.
WIPP drivers have extensive training, and the waste canisters have been subjected to grueling tests to ensure they will not puncture, he said.
An accident involving a WIPP truck would not close a highway longer than an accident involving other kinds of hazardous material, McBride said.
Two drivers will take turns piloting the truck on a route that takes them down Interstate 25 to a point near Santa Fe, where they will turn onto U.S. 285 for the rest of the trip to Carlsbad.
The team selected for the first run, Michael Verranault and Greg Grimm, both of Carlsbad, have spotless driving records.
Verranault has been driving trucks for more than 30 years. He has never had a ticket while driving commercially, but admits to a "minor moving offense" in his personal vehicle in 1975.
Grimm has been driving trucks for 20 years without a ticket.
They said they're not nervous about hauling nuclear waste.
"We know what we're doing, and we have top-rated equipment," Verranault said.
The drivers will stop every two hours or 100 miles to inspect the truck. They may not travel faster than 65 mph.
The truck must pull over and park in the event of extreme weather.
"If it's not safe, we're not going," Verranault said.
Grimm said public interest in the WIPP shipments will quickly die down.
"After the first couple of shipments, it will just be another truck going down the road," he said.
Staff writer Tillie Fong contributed to this report.
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Message: 5 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:42:23 -0400
Subject: NucNews-4 6/20/99 - Russia/Europe/G7
15. Yeltsin, Clinton To Sign Missile Statement-Kremlin
Updated 5:38 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990620/05/international-arms-russia
COLOGNE, Germany (Reuters) - Russian President Boris and President Clinton are expected to sign a document Sunday covering a long-running dispute over missile defense systems, a Kremlin spokesman said.
"There will be a very important document on disarmament," presidential press secretary Dmitry Yakushkin said on the fringes of the Group of Eight summit in Cologne. He gave no details but made clear the document referred the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
"It is on missile defenses," Yakushkin said. He declined to give further details before talks between Yeltsin and Clinton later Sunday. Russia is concerned that the United States is about to develop "Star Wars"-style missile defense systems that could violate the U.S.-Soviet ABM treaty.
Moscow regards the treaty, limiting deployment of such systems, as a cornerstone of global nuclear disarmament.
U.S. officials accompanying Clinton have not commented so far on plans to sign such a document.
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16. Annual G7 summit concluding
Updated 7:00 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990620/07/international-g7
COLOGNE, Germany, June 20 (UPI) The Group of Seven economic partners concluded their 25th annual summit urging continued action on Russian debt relief and trade liberalization, and calling on all sides in Kosovo to stick to the peace agreement.
The leaders, in their final communique today, called on "all parties to the conflict in Kosovo" to respect the cease-fire and adhere to terms set out in the agreement governing the withdrawal of Serb forces and related U.N. Security Council resolutions.
"We expect all residents of Kosovo to contribute to the creation of a democratic, multi-ethnic Kosovo," the G7 leaders added in the communique.
Release of the nine-page statement closed out the three-day conference that was dominated by discussions of the NATO military campaign in Yugoslavia and the massive reconstruction effort that will be required in the future.
While the leaders agreed that Serbia must embrace democracy before winning long-term reconstruction help, they avoided any specific financial commitments beyond the $30 billion regional "Stability Pact" announced 10 days ago until donors' conferences are held next month and in the fall.
There was no direct mention of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in the final communique, but the leaders stated, "The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia must demonstrate a full commitment to...democratic and economic reforms" to share in the stability pact envisioned for the Balkans.
"We declare our readiness to take strong action to achieve all the objectives of the Stability Pact," they said, without elaborating.
President Clinton and the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy were joined at the morning summit finale by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who was to meet later with Clinton.
Yeltsin was in a conciliatory mood when he arrived, telling reporters at the airport: "Now that the fight is over, we need to be friends again. This is the most important thing."
The communique referred only obliquely to the effort to further assist Russia and its economy, urging creditors "to continue to deal with the problem of the Russian debt arising from Soviet-era obligations." Russia owes roughly $140 billion in foreign debt, about $66 billion of it racked up by the Soviet Union before 1991.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told reporters later that the leaders had agreed to discuss further easing of the debt "to the extent that it is possible."
He said Germany, for one, could not "simply draw a line through it."
The summiteers also included what has become an annual call for continued global efforts to liberalize trade, make structural reforms in the world's financial institutions and assist developing countries. This year's meeting also produced a $70 billion increase in the effort to retire the debt of the poorest nations.
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17. Russian PM To Visit Washington In August-Interfax
Updated 2:10 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990620/02/politics-russia-usa
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin said Sunday he planned to visit Washington on August 6-8 to meet Vice President Al Gore, Interfax news agency reported.
"The visit had been agreed with President Boris Yeltsin," Interfax quoted Stepashin as saying after his return from the summit meeting of the Group of Eight leading nations (G8) in Cologne.
"The aim of the visit is to discuss with Vice President Al Gore the format of bilateral trade and economic cooperation."
A joint commission co-chaired by Gore and Russia's changing prime ministers has been used by top officials from both countries as an important channel to discuss informally the most sensitive issues in relations between Moscow and the West.
In March Russia's previous prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who was heading to Washington for a regular commission session, ordered his plane to return to Moscow after Gore told him that NATO had decided to launch air strikes against Yugoslavia.
Primakov's decision signalled the start of the worst crisis in relations between post-Soviet Russia and the West. Moscow froze relations with NATO and moved to reconsider its defense doctrine to reflect new security concerns.
Russia later played a crucial role in mediating a deal between Yugoslavia and NATO, which allowed the alliance to suspend air strikes and send a strong peacekeeping force to Serbia's region of Kosovo.
It has won a role in the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force in a series of tense talks between Russian and U.S. officials which ended Friday in Helsinki.
Despite the row over Yugoslavia, Moscow badly needs the backing of western governments in its efforts to win vital credits from the International Monetary Fund and reschedule its huge foreign debt.
Yeltsin flew to Cologne Sunday to attend the last day of the G8 summit and meet President Clinton and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
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World Leaders Make Up With Russia
By Maureen Johnson Associated Press Writer Saturday, June 19, 1999; 2:28 a.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990619/V000134-061999-idx.html
COLOGNE, Germany (AP) -- After marking NATO's victory in Kosovo with promises to rebuild the shattered region, world leaders at their annual meeting are also making up with Russia over the crisis that increased Moscow's isolation from the rest of the rich and mainly Western group.
The eight leaders were meeting this morning, the second day of the three-day summit, hours after U.S. and Russian negotiators in Helsinki, Finland, reached agreement on the sensitive issue of deploying Russian troops in NATO's peacekeeping force.
``I feel quite good about this,'' President Clinton declared Friday night during a souvenir shopping spree through cheering Germans in central Cologne. ``I think it will work.''
Clinton and leaders of Russia, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Britain, Italy and Canada were due to consider aid to Moscow itself, hoping to avert fresh disaster to the strapped Russian economy. Since they met a year ago in Birmingham, England, Russia has spiraled into recession, defaulting on billions of dollars of foreign debt, partly because of Asian financial traumas.
An expected joint statement on Kosovo did not materialize Friday night, although it was the prime topic at a dinner at Cologne's Germano-Roman museum.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair emphasized that Europeans must assume most of the reconstruction costs after the United States financed most of the 78-day air war that forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his Serb troops from the province.
``America has provided as enormous help, and indeed the bulk of the help and the costs in terms on the military action,'' Blair told reporters. ``We acknowledge our responsibility in relation to reconstruction.''
Underlining the spirit of reconciliation with Russia, top U.S. officials stressed that Russian troops who occupied Kosovo's Pristina airport before the arrival of NATO forces were simply no longer a problem.
``I think our relationship is basically sound,'' said White House national security adviser Sandy Berger. ``... I think most Russian leaders understand that the future of Russia lies with the West.''
The Helsinki deal provided for about 2,850 Russian troops to work with NATO commanders in the U.S., French and German-controlled sectors of Kosovo while under Russian command, U.S. official said. An additional 750 Russians would be based at the Pristina airport. It was a compromise between NATO reluctance to give Russia a separate zone and Russian refusal to put its troops under the British general in charge of NATO forces in Kosovo.
An agreement on aid to Russia would set the stage nicely for the late arrival Sunday of President Boris Yeltsin, who sent Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin in his place for most of the meeting.
Another issue on Saturday's agenda was a U.S.-backed proposal to help Russia keep control of its nuclear arsenal.
Clinton has asked Congress to provide $4.2 billion over the next five years, and Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi came to Cologne prepared to contribute $200 million to the effort.
On Friday, the leaders approved a program to wipe out up to $100 billion in debt owed by the world's 33 poorest nations. They also endorsed a package of reforms to the global financial system to reduce the threat of the currency crises that battered Asia, Russia and Brazil.
And showbiz people supporting debt relief were to have their moment with the leaders. The Rolling Stones, concluding a ``Bridges to Babylon'' tour, and Bono, frontman of the Irish group U2, planned to wrap a human chain around downtown Cologne.
Bono hoped to deliver a petition to G-8 leaders urging debt forgiveness for poor countries, and aides said Blair would meet the Irish rocker.
In the evening, the leaders scheduled a dinner at Em Kruetzche -- meaning ``At the little cross'' -- a Rhine riverfront restaurant dating to the 12th century where travelers stopped to eat and pray. The evening was to be capped by a concert at Cologne's Philharmonic Hall.
The entertainment reflected attempts by successive summit hosts, including German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, to create as informal an atmosphere as possible despite the security, limousines and legions of bureaucrats.
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Western Powers to Help Russia Cut Debts Summit Action Follows Moscow's Acceptance of Role With NATO Peacekeepers
By William Drozdiak and Charles Babington, Washington Post, June 20, 1999; Page A24 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/185l-062099-idx.html
COLOGNE, Germany, June 19The leaders of the world's seven major industrial democracies pledged today to broaden their partnership with Russia with initiatives designed to help Moscow pay its debts, manage its nuclear arsenal and play a more effective role in the global economy.
A day after NATO agreed to an unprecedented level of military cooperation with Russia in the Kosovo peacekeeping force, the United States and its major allies sought to brush aside differences with Moscow over the bombing of Yugoslavia and to seek new ways to build a stronger relationship.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, host of this year's Group of Seven summit, told Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin that the West would urge the International Monetary Fund to release $4.5 billion in aid and help Russia restructure $69 billion in debt from the Soviet era. The six Western industrial powers and Japan also plan to expand funding to assist Russia in dismantling obsolete nuclear warheads, safely disposing of plutonium stocks and finding long-term employment for scientists who might otherwise be tempted to sell their nuclear expertise to foreign tyrants.
The concerted effort to repair relations with Russia demonstrates the conviction of the United States and its allies that greater attention must be paid to securing Moscow's cooperation on security and economic issues. Such efforts weren't possible, officials said, until the Kosovo war ended and Moscow and the West agreed on Russia's role in the NATO-led peacekeeping force. That agreement was reached Friday after three days of negotiations in Helsinki by the foreign and defense ministers of the United States and Russia. Western leaders hailed it as a positive harbinger for relations with Moscow.
The Yugoslav war had "kind of frozen things," said U.S. national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. "There has been a kind of elephant in the room. . ., which is hard to ignore." With the elephant gone, he said, "I think it's possible to now deal with a series of issues that are extraordinarily important."
While Russia remains dependent on Western help in covering its debts and shoring up its currency, Moscow's leaders have expressed mounting alarm over the impact of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia and its growing sense of insecurity in the face of the alliance's military prowess.
President Boris Yeltsin, who is to join the seven other leaders for a final day of discussions Sunday, warned in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel that Western powers were behaving with reckless arrogance and seemed determined "to drag us back to the stone age."
Yeltsin complained that the NATO airstrikes were "an extremely dangerous precedent for solving conflicts" and that the emerging European security model with NATO as chief protector was imperiling Russia by ignoring its interests.
In response to those fears, President Clinton and the leaders of other NATO powers attending the summit -- Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada -- agreed that they needed to launch an intensive campaign to reassure Russia that they wanted to work closely with it and defuse animosities that arose during the 78-day air war.
"This summit gives us the chance to put our differences behind us and map out a set of common interests for the future," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.
Schroeder, whose country holds about 60 percent of Russia's debt, said every effort would be made to reverse Moscow's economic decline. But so far, Schroeder and the other leaders have made only vague commitments about plowing large sums into a Russian economy that has resisted free market reforms.
Stepashin, who unexpectedly returned to Moscow tonight to brief Yeltsin on his talks, expressed satisfaction with the promises of help. But he also voiced some wariness about whether the other leaders were prepared to put cash on the line. "We want to see these nice words translated into the kind of aid we really need," Stepashin said.
He also complained about the refusal of Western nations to commit any money to Serbia from a planned Balkan reconstruction fund. Clinton and other leaders discussed plans for the reconstruction of Kosovo over dinner Friday night and agreed not to provide any assistance, other than food, medicine and basic humanitarian aid, to Yugoslavia as long as President Slobodan Milosevic remains in power.
But Stepashin said the West was taking a short-sighted attitude in fomenting widespread resentment among Serbs that will make it difficult for them to participate in restoring peaceful relations in the region. "You must not penalize 10 million Serbs for the conduct of one man," Stepashin said.
Guenther Burghardt, a political director at the European Commission, said the European Union was preparing a package of $480 million a year over three years in "humanitarian assistance" covering the immediate needs of refugees returning to Kosovo.
However, that money would pay for rebuilding roads and other items that may be seen as economic and not strictly humanitarian aid, Burghardt said.
Besides offers of debt relief, the United States is asking other industrial powers to contribute more funds to help Russia control its nuclear arsenal.
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Message: 6 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:42:12 -0400
Subject: NucNews-5 6/20/99 - US - Wind Power; Green Energy Day; Conversion; EPA/Allard; NineMile 1 Nuc Plant; Nuc Medicine (2); Native Victims (2)
18. U.S. Sets Goal For Wind Power
By The Associated Press, June 20, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Wind-Power.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States would be able to produce 5 percent of the nation's energy from wind by the year 2020 under a new Energy Department plan, an agency official said Saturday.
``We're going to try to double U.S. wind energy capacity by 2005 and then double it again by 2010,'' said an Energy Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ``By 2020 it would be 5 percent.''
The level at 2010 would be 10,000 megawatts online, enough electricity to fulfill the annual needs of 3 million households, the official said.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson will unveil the so-called Wind Powering America initiative Monday at the annual meeting of the American Wind Energy Association in Burlington, Vt. He also plans to announce $1.2 million in grants for wind turbine-testing projects in 10 states, but the states' identities weren't released.
``We think that wind technology has the most potential of any renewable energy technology right now,'' Richardson told The New York Times in a story for Sunday editions. Other leading renewable contenders are electricity from the sun or from sources like crop wastes. The Times reported that the federal government would try to reach 5 percent of its energy from wind by 2010, a decade ahead of the nation at large.
Energy officials said the department will invest money in research and development, encourage codes that are conducive to wind energy and encourage vocational schools to provide training in the necessary technology.
The DOE official said the department will work to establish new sources of income for farmers, rural landowners and American Indians by involving them in wind power projects.
The cost of wind power has decreased dramatically in the last two decades, according to DOE estimates. In 1980, capturing the wind as an energy source cost about 40 cents per kilowatt-hour, but now it costs about a nickel, the department official said.
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19. Consumer Choice Helps Keep Green Energy Affordable; Another Reason to Celebrate "Clean Power Day" June 19 in Golden Gate Park
12:52 p.m. Jun 17, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
SACRAMENTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 17, 1999--Consumer demand for "Green" energy in California's newly deregulated electric market has created unexpectedly low power costs for a new generation of renewable energy technologies -- such as wind, solar and geothermal power.
"Consumer choice is a powerful vehicle for driving our electric market toward a cleaner more efficient future," said Senator Byron Sher (Palo Alto), author of a recent Senate Resolution declaring June "Clean Power Month." "People are buying clean energy not only because they care about public and environmental health, but because it makes good economic sense."
In response to opportunities in California's newly deregulated market, renewable technology developers have proposed more than 600 megawatts of new state-of-the-art wind, geothermal and landfill gas projects. In Kern and Riverside counties, new wind farms are providing clean power at costs significantly below historic prices and the deregulated Geysers geothermal steam power plant in Lake County is selling electricity at prices equal to or better than fossil fuel and nuclear plants.
"These renewable projects are cheaper and more efficient -- and they can compete with existing dirtier fossil fuel and nuclear plants," said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies (CEERT). "If the price is customers have an added incentive to choose to support clean power providers."
Clean Power Day '99 will kick off with Senator Byron Sher, Assemblyman Kevin Shelley and Mayor Willie Brown during the welcoming ceremony at 11 a.m. Clean Power Day '99 is an all-day fair hosted by the Renewable Energy Marketing Board (REMB) and the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies (CEERT) and is sponsored by Green Mountain Energy, Commonwealth Energy Corporation and Calpine.
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20. Business Group Promoting Military Cuts
June 20, 1999, Washington Post http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/181l-062099-idx.html
As the presidential candidates gear up their campaigns for the Iowa caucuses, so will a group of business executives who are promoting the out-of-fashion idea that $40 billion should be shifted from the Pentagon budget to domestic programs.
Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities was started by Ben Cohen, a co-founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream makers, and claims 500 CEO sponsors. It has launched a grass-roots organizing campaign in Iowa aimed at pressuring the presidential candidates to reexamine the plans many of them have put forward to boost defense spending.
A staff of nine, headed by Peggy Hupper, co-chair of the Polk County (Des Moines) Democrats, is lining up grass-roots activists to question the contenders about the relative merits of an additional nuclear submarine versus repairing rundown schools in Iowa.
Next winter, as caucus time draws nearer, the television and radio ads will increase -- thanks to an $800,000 allocation for Iowa from a national campaign Cohen said is budgeted for $3 million this year and $6 million in 2000. That figure is substantially more than the candidates who accept federal matching funds can legally spend in the state.
Cohen told reporters that "we are pro-defense," but believe that Pentagon spending can be cut 15 percent without risk. So far, he conceded, none of the presidential hopefuls in either party has endorsed that view.
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21. Allard demands release of EPA's Shattuck files
By Berny Morson Denver Rocky Mountain News, June 18, 1999 http://insidedenver.com/news/0618epa5.shtml
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard demanded Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency release all documents regarding the contaminated Shattuck Chemical Co. site in southeast Denver.
Allard, R-Colo., called on the EPA's Denver office to release "all internal memos, e-mails, interdepartmental correspondence, meeting notes and all documents including any documents stored on computer."
Barry Levene, head of Superfund projects at the EPA Denver office, said he's happy to release the material. But it won't be a quick read.
"There's a lot of stuff -- there's file cabinets full," Levene said.
The Shattuck site was contaminated by uranium processing earlier in the century.
The EPA ombudsman is investigating a decision by the local EPA office to cover radioactive soil with a clay and rock cap. Local citizens, backed by state and local elected officials, have questioned whether the cap can keep the contaminated soil out of groundwater.
Allard said all documents on the project should be released now to prevent surprises later.
"In the bureaucracy, we run across this thing where something is revealed 10 or 20 years later, and they ask the agency, well, why didn't this become public?" Allard said. "And their standard comment is, well, nobody asked for it. So we asked for it."
Allard wants copies to go to the EPA ombudsman, Denver city officials and citizen groups.
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22. Nine Mile 1 Nuclear Plant Returned to Service
09:22 a.m. Jun 17, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
SYRACUSE, N.Y., June 17 /PRNewswire/ -- The Nine Mile Point Unit 1 nuclear plant returned to service at 4:00 a.m. today, completing a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage, according to officials at Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. (NYSE: NMK). The plant is currently operating at approximately 25 percent power and is expected to reach full power within a few days.
The plant was taken out of service on April 11.
Niagara Mohawk is the owner and operator of the 614-megawatt plant. The plant is located in Scriba, N.Y., approximately 40 miles north of Syracuse.
Niagara Mohawk is an investor-owned energy services company that provides electricity to more than 1.5 million customers across 24,000 square miles of Upstate New York. The company also delivers natural gas to more than 500,000 customers over 4,500 square miles of eastern, central and northern New York. SOURCE Niagara Mohawk Power Corp.
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23. Resolution Scientists and Collaborators Present Nine Papers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine 46th Annual Meeting
06:17 p.m Jun 17, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
MISSISSAUGA, ON, June 17 /CNW-PRN/ - Resolution Pharmaceuticals scientists and collaborators presented nine papers on the company's product pipeline and technology at the Society of Nuclear Medicine 46th Annual Meeting held in Los Angles last week.
Among these papers, the principal investigator, Professor Axel Bossuyt of AZVUB in Brussels, presented the report of Resolution's Phase II clinical trial of its lead compound RP128. The trial conducted in Belgium showed that RP128 had good sensitivity and specificity when imaging inflammation caused by Rheumatoid Arthritis. This is the second positive trial for this agent. A Canadian study presented at last year's meeting showed equally encouraging results in patients with Crohn's disease.
The company, in collaboration with its partner CIS biointernational (Paris, France), is currently conducting a further Phase II clinical trial to determine efficacy of RP128 in patients with osteomyelitis, including infected prosthesis and soft tissue inflammation.
A second paper, presented in collaboration with the University of Missouri, by Dr. Susan Peers of Resolution, discussed preclinical data on Resolution's second product RP527 which showed specific targetting to tumours having the GRP (gastrin releasing peptide) receptor. The GRP receptor has been found to be upregulated on a number of common cancers. RP527 is currently in clinical trials in patients with prostate, breast and small cell lung cancer.
Three papers were also presented which highlighted different aspects, and the utility of Resolution's unique core technology platform CDMP (Combinatorially Designed Metallo Pharmaceuticals). CDMP generates focussed customized libraries of metallo-compounds rapidly and efficiently, to enable new metal-based pharmaceuticals, radiopharmaceuticals and contrast agents to be brought to the market faster and more cost-effectively than currently possible. CDMP is offered by Resolution as a contract research service to pharmaceutical companies.
Resolution Pharmaceuticals is a privately held Company established to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals. Radiopharmaceuticals are products containing short lived radioisotopes, targeted to specific organs or biochemical functions in the body. SOURCE Resolution Pharmaceuticals Inc.
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24. Study finds Matritech's NMP22(R) '...can effectively screen all men and women older than 50 years for transitional cell cancer of the bladder...'
09:15 a.m. Jun 18, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
NEWTON, Mass., June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Matritech Inc. (Nasdaq: NMPS) announced today that an independent study to be reported in the July 1999 issue of The Journal of Urology suggests that the effectiveness of the Company's NMP22 Test Kit for bladder cancer is enhanced utilizing a new protocol, thus increasing its specificity as a screening and monitoring tool for bladder cancer.
The study, conducted at the Cleveland Clinic analyzed the false-positive data of two urinary tumor markers: Matritech's NMP22 and the BTA stat test. The study included 278 symptomatic patients. When test results were adjusted for six "easily identified" criteria that occur in "any risk population", the specificity and positive predictive value of NMP22 was 95.6 and 87.5 percent, respectively, and in both cases was superior to BTA.
"...we can effectively screen all men and women older than 50 years for transitional cell cancer of the bladder or urothelial tract cancer who have any predisposing history, such as smoking, or any unexplained urinary tract symptoms," the study concluded.
A previous independent study reported in the January 1999 issue of The Journal of Urology validated the efficacy of Matritech's NMP22(R) as a reliable, non-invasive, cost-effective tumor marker for the early detection of early-stage, low-grade bladder cancer and recommended the use of NMP22 for bladder-cancer testing of previously undiagnosed individuals, who present with hematuria (blood in the urine). Currently, NMP22 is approved by the FDA for monitoring patients who have previously been treated for bladder cancer. The use of NMP22 as an early detection or "screening" tool already is approved in Japan. Later this year, Matritech plans to seek FDA approval of NMP22 for purposes of testing symptomatic, but previously undiagnosed patients in the United States.
"This second study to appear in the highly respected peer-reviewed Journal of Urology validates the efficacy of NMP22 as the premier tumor marker for the early detection of bladder cancer and reinforces Matritech's strategy of seeking approval for this use from the FDA this year," said David L. Corbet, President and Chief Operating Officer of Matritech.
Matritech Inc., based in Newton, Mass., is using its proprietary nuclear matrix protein (NMP) technology, discovered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and licensed exclusively to Matritech, to develop and commercialize innovative serum-, cell- and urine-based NMP diagnostics that enable physicians to reliably detect and monitor the presence of bladder, colon, cervical, breast and prostate cancers. Matritech's nuclear matrix protein (NMP) technology platform correlates levels of NMPs in body fluids and tissues to the presence of cancer. Multiple published clinical studies have validated this ability of NMPs to detect early-stage cancerous abnormalities. Matritech has a deep pipeline of NMP-based products in pre-clinical and clinical development.
Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act Any forward looking statements related to the Company's expectations regarding the performance, cost, benefits, market acceptance, future sales and regulatory approvals of the Company's existing and future products are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's control. These include, but are not limited to, risks related to incorrect use of products by customers, unforeseen delays in or denials of FDA and other regulatory approvals, future product demand and pricing, performance of distributors, competitive products and technical developments, health care reform and general business and economic conditions. There can be no assurances that the Company's expectations for its products will be achieved. SOURCE Matritech, Inc.
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25. Natives first atomic bomb victims
By Brenda Norrell Indian Country Today, June 18, 1999 http://www.indiancountry.com/A2.html
LAGUNA PUEBLO, N.M. - They came from South America, Mexico and Alaska. They arrived from Shoshone, Lakota and Hualapai ancestral lands - medicine people of the Columbia River, ore gatherers of the Northwest Territories, and river people of the Amazon.
From throughout the Americas, more than 1,000 Indigenous people and their co-workers gathered in the shadow of Mount Taylor, the southern mountain of the DinŽ Four Sacred Mountains, for the 10th annual Indigenous Environmental Network conference.
Camped above Laguna Pueblo's Jackpile Mine, a Superfund site of desecration, Indigenous people from every corner of the Americas told the same story.
It is a story of exploited trust and criminal negligence; of corporate greed; of the seizure of Native resources during the Cold War and the ongoing race for nationalism and world power. And the story tells how, along the way, some tribal leaders were co-opted.
But, most of all it is the story of death, the death of the wild places and Indigenous peoples of the world.
"What I am now is a bag of bones standing before you," said Dorothy Purley, Laguna Pueblo.
For 10 years, Purley drove a truck and worked as an ore crusher at the Jackpile Mine in Laguna Pueblo.
Today, she is a cancer victim - fighting for her life.
"We say we love Mother Earth. Then, why are these things happening on the reservations? She is your best friend."
Purley miscarried three children. Her brother has cancer and other family members are victims of leukemia and diabetics on dialysis.
"There are so many people that have died, people that I worked with at the mine. There are children who never knew their fathers."
Unable to halt her flow of tears, Purley said, "Look at me. Some of my friends don't even recognize me. But thank the Good Lord and Mother Earth who is helping me stand on her."
Manuel Pino, Acoma Pueblo and a professor at Scottsdale (Ariz.) Community College, said Acomas also worked at the neighboring mine in Laguna Pueblo.
Pino said that at the height of the Cold War, the Grants mineral belt was a nuclear arsenal and today, the United States has enough nuclear power to blow up the world several times over.
"It is our bombs that are used in the name of peace," Pino said.
"Uranium mining has desecrated not only our Earth, but our traditional cultural lifestyles. It has desecrated the lives of our Navajo - DinŽ - and Acoma and Laguna people."
Pino said the Jackpile Mine was the largest of the underground pit mines and it is difficult to say if the Superfund site has restored the land. "Our contention as grass-roots activists is that this is the first attempt at reclaiming uranium mines. It is the first ever. We don't know if it has worked."
What Pino does know is that the people are dying of cancers - leukemia, bone cancer and others. And the struggle to educate tribal leaders has been difficult.
"It is frustrating when your tribal leaders tell you to go get an education and come back. Then when we do that, we get the doors slammed directly in our faces."
Pino, who joins Purley in the Laguna-Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment, said Indian leaders have been co-opted in mining and nuclear destruction with the promise of money, jobs and development.
"But when people die of cancer, they take none of that with them."
Jackpile miner John G. Hampton, Acoma Pueblo, was a surface laborer and station tender in Laguna's underground mine. At 53, he was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer and given a short time to live. Hampton has survived to 64 and says tribal leaders are not listening. Instead, they are seeking their own advantage.
"We are at their mercy. We are at their disposal," Hampton said.
Larry Lente of Paguate village in Laguna Pueblo said while radioactive dust fell on his village, the people were maintaining traditional lifestyles. While they dried meat and vegetables in the sun, they consumed the radioactive dust that fell on their food.
Referring to the leases signed by tribes with promises of jobs and money, Lente said, "The almighty green dollar commands what we do."
Urging reform of federal law, Pino said everyone who worked in the uranium and nuclear industry should be compensated, and not just those that fall into the narrow definitions of the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
"If you were exposed, you were exposed," Pino said.
DinŽ Citizens Against Ruining our Environment was host for the four-day conference, "Lle tsoo (Uraninite) Ten Years of Indigenous Grassroots Organizing - A Return to the Southwest."
Environmental justice in Indigenous lands was the focus of the conference that included a protection and blessing ceremony by the Fort Mojave Bird Singers.
Resistance creates family at Ward Valley Wally Antone, Quechen from Arizona, recalled the occupation at Ward Valley and resistance to the proposed nuclear dump on sacred land. A sacred fire burned for 113 days.
"We had respect for that fire," Antone said.
At the Ward Valley camp, there were Bird Songs to the Creator for protection. Non-Native environmentalists helped maintain the difficult occupation in the Mojave DesertÕs 125-degree temperatures without a local source of water.
Antone said, "I am happy to be a member of the Rainbow Coalition - that means we are all members of the human family. At Ward Valley, we lived like one big family."
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26. INDIAN COUNTRY Environment
Brenda Norrell, Indian Country Today, June 18, 1999 http://www.indiancountry.com/B3.html
Surviving spirit: Cindy Kenny-Gilday went home to her village of Deline in the Northwest Territories, to help widows tell their story. The Dene ore carriers of the Northwest Territories carried the money rock that became the death rock - uranium ore for the first atomic bomb. 'Money rock' brings death, creates a village of widows. Legacy of Dene ore carriers of the Northwest Territories is not forgtotten By Brenda Norrell Today staff
DƒLINE, Northwest Territories - The gentle Dene of the Northwest Territories fished and hunted caribou before the money rock was found at their Great Bear Lake.
It was not until decades later - when the men who carried 100-pound ore bags on their backs began dying of cancer - that they realized that the money rock was a death rock.
"Deline is now a village of widows," said Cindy Kenny-Gilday, daughter of a Dene ore carrier.
Long ago, the Dene had a prophet among them who received a vision. "Under this rock is a matter so powerful no man can survive it," he told the people.
Describing the vision, he said, "This material was put into a big stick on to what looked like a metal bird. It was dropped on people that looked just like us and burned them all."
This prophecy began unfolding in the 1930s, when a Dene man named Beyonnie found the black rock east of Great Bear Lake. Beyonnie gave the rock to a white trapper, who rewarded him with bags of flour, baking powder and lard.
Soon thereafter, the Canadian Crown established the Eldorado Mine at the site. As it dredged for uranium ore, it dumped uranium waste rock and tailings into the lake where the Dene fished and caribou migrated.
The death march began
"They hired all able-bodied Dene men to carry the ore bags to the barges for $5 a day," Kinney-Gilday said. But, it was not just the men who came into contact with the radioactive dust. "This is a tribe that takes the family wherever they go."
The full impact of the ore-carriers' labors, carried out in the 1930s and 1940s, remained dormant until the 1970s. "In the '70s, the men began to die of all kinds of cancers. It was the first time the people of Great Bear Lake ever heard of cancer," Kenny-Gilday said.
The Dene appealed to the Canadian government and submitted a formal resolution, but there was no response. While researching the government role, Dene uncovered documents revealing that the Canadian Ministry of Health knew of the risks and failed to inform Native laborers.
As she carried out her research in Ottawa, Kenny-Gilday said evidence was destroyed. "A lot of documentation was shredded."
Kenny-Gilday returned to her village of DŽline to help the widows tell their story. "The story of the ore carriers was never told until two years ago."
"Now, there are only five survivors."
The Dene of Great Bear Lake were never told that they were transporting a secret weapon - uranium - which the United States would use to produce the first atomic bomb.
Canada confirmed that uranium from Eldorado was used to make the world's first atomic bombs, dropped by warplanes of the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Declassified documents in the United States reveal that both the buyer, the United States government, and Ottawa, then the world's largest supplier, withheld information from Native miners that could have saved their health and their lives.
In all, about 7,000 tons of radioactive material was shipped from the mine at Port Radium, now called Echo Bay. Canadian documents reveal that another 1.7 million tons of uranium waste was either left exposed at the mine site or simply dumped into Great Bear Lake.
Appealing for world peace, Dene elders visited Hiroshima in August, 1998 - the 53rd anniversary of the atomic attack - and expressed their sorrow. They said the Dene are a peaceful people and would never have been involved in production of a weapon of mass destruction, had they been told.
"They urged an end to this nuclear insanity," Kenny-Gilday said.
Recounting 12-hour days of grinding work, 84-year-old Dene ore carrier Paul Baton said, "The dust coated you like flour, it covered our clothes, our heads, our hands. We would sleep on the sacks. No one told us anything about it being dangerous. No one told us about cancer."
Although white miners at Eldorado mine wore protective clothing and were required to shower off the uranium dust after every shift, Native laborers referred to as "coolies," were never told of the dangers.
Kinney-Gilday said, "They never told the Dene. The government knew the dust of the ore would kill the Dene.
"We now have a village of widows.
"Dene in the village no longer have grandfathers to pass down the spiritual practices, nor uncles to slap their wrists when they do something wrong," she said.
And it is not just the story of the Dene of DŽline, but the story of all Aboriginal people who worked along the Saskatchewan transportation route.
Besides lugging the heavy ore bags, Dene swept the radioactive dust from the floor of barges for $3 or $4 a day, and slept on the ore bags.
They died of cancers of the lung, kidney, stomach and colon.
Now, Dene fear that their fish, caribou and moose at Great Bear Lake are contaminated by radioactive waste and tailings.
"They eat fish everyday and the caribou migrate through this area. The Geiger counter just went off scale where the caribou migrate."
And it has not been an easy story for the widows to tell.
"To tell a female story in public is very difficult for my people, but they did. The widows told their story," Kenny-Gilday said.
Apologizing for the fact there is no money to make copies of her reports, Kenny-Gilday admits she sometimes despairs in the struggle. But, she says, the spirit is strong and regenerates itself.
"Our spirits can survive."
Opening her documents, Kenny-Gilday reveals a favorite passage, "There can be no peace or harmony without justice.
"How many ore carriers died?" she is asked.
"The only way to tell is by counting the graves."
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Message: 7 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:42:57 -0400
Subject: NucNews-1 6/20/99 - DU; Plutonium
1. DUF6 rail cars derailed
U.S. NRC Weekly Information Report Week Ending June 11, 1999 http://www.egroups.com/list/du-list/
Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant
On June 2, 1999, two rail cars carrying depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) cylinders onsite derailed while being moved several hundred yards from the cascade tails withdrawal stations to a cool-down area. Three rail cars were being pulled by a diesel track mobile unit. The track mobile unit and the first car in the train did not derail. Each rail car was carrying three 14-ton liquid DUF6 cylinders. Based on preliminary information, a defective rail tie is believed to have caused the derailment of the two rail cars. All the DUF6 cylinders remained in their rail car cradles. Plant staff assessed the derailed rail cars to be horizontally tilted at a 6 degree angle. A center-of-gravity analysis that had been previously done by the plant staff indicates that at a 34 degree horizontal tilt, the cylinders could roll out of the rail car cradles. The plant activated its Emergency Operations Center until it determined that the cylinders were in a safe condition. The plant is conducting a root-cause analysis of the incident. Region III is planning an inspection to review the incident.
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2. Implications of media coverage of Serb atrocities vs potential Nato DU atrocities
Dai Williams, Woking UK <eosuk@btinternet.com> June 19, 1999, DU-List <du-list@egroups.com>
Why does this concern the DU debate now? Mainly because the confirmation of Serb atrocities is diverting media, political and aid workers attention away from recognising the full range of post-war environmental hazards - particularly including DU. Mines and unexploded munitions are a recognisable hazard. But most of the civilian and aid worker populations are probably unaware of DU hazards. Troops may be complacent too because the US government is deliberately dumbing down the hazards of DU in any context. And even UK military sources are lulled into false confidence by saying they didn't use much anyway. But HOW MUCH? and WHERE? are the key questions that the UN and other governments must ask.
One high probability DU combat zone was identified to me yesterday - a major tank action between Pec and Prizren in the first week of June involving significant numbers of Serb armoured vehicles and A10 attacks. The presumption must be than DU shells were used extensively in this location. Aid workers or media in that area should treat it as totally contaminated, including any downstream water supplies.
By copy of this message to US/UK military analysts who no doubt monitor DU-list I would ask whether any action has been taken:
a) to totally isolate this location, including civilian and refugee through traffic.
b) to conduct a thorough environmental assessment of the location
c) to log the exact quantity of DU munitions used, and if possible their target locations.
d) to clean up immediately accessible DU shells and shrapnel.
e) to contain all DU oxide dust within target vehicles for later disposal.
f) to clean up roads and soil.
g) to monitor all potential water run-off from the target area and prevent ANY human or livestock consumption from this watershed down stream.
h) to provide all military personnel with full DU protective equipment. i) to ensure that NO civilian personnel are involved in DU cleanup tasks, except for independent environmental monitoring specialists. This also to apply to all other UN and Nato troops than US (and possibly UK) troops who have been fully trained and equipped to handle DU cleanup situations.
This site is easily accessible to media crews, unless sealed off.
The quality of DU precautions taken by Nato forces at this location will give immediate evidence of the seriousness or not given by Nato forces and especially the US and UK governments to DU hazards in Kosova. If it works well it should be a prototype for DU cleanup in all other Balkan DU combat zones. These concerns and precautions apply as much to potential DU combat zones in Serbia as well as Kosova.
Media coverage is less important if governments acknowledge the full seriousness of DU hazards. Otherwise in their own interest media teams need to report suspected DU locations with as much seriousness as they are applying to Serb atrocities. The Serb atrocities have almost finished (subject to further sabotage attacks).
The US's DU atrocities are only just beginning as unaware troops refugees and other civilians are needlessly exposed to the risk of DU poisoning.
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3. Puerto Ricans Demand That U.S. Military Halt Maneuvers at Vieques Island
ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE, June 18, 1999 http://www.sltrib.com/1999/jun/06181999/commenta/2187.htm
"Yanqui Go Home!''
That's not what's being shouted in the streets of Havana or Bejing or even Kosovo. Rather, it's what Puerto Ricans may soon be shouting in unison if the U.S. Navy does not halt its military maneuvers at Vieques, a small, beautiful island off the coast of Puerto Rico. For the first time in recent memory, Puerto Ricans of all political persuasions on the island and the mainland are seemingly united -- behind that demand.
They are also in unison that the military return all of Vieques back to civilians. These demands were triggered by the April death of Puerto Rican resident David Sanes Rodriguez and the injuring of four others during a mistaken bombing by an F-18 bomber, which dropped two 500-pound bombs 1 1/2 miles off target at Vieques.
But that's the least of the problems. If the residents are not listened to, this could avalanche into an anti-military movement, similar to ones seen around the world in places such as Okinawa and the Philippines, in which the residents will want the U.S. military completely off not only Vieques, but also the larger island of Puerto Rico itself, which is a U.S. commonwealth. This, of course, would pose a serious problem for the U.S. military, which has plans to move its U.S. Southern Command headquarters (currently housed in the Panama Canal Zone) to Puerto Rico. The carrot of jobs in Puerto Rico may not be enough when dealing with the dignity of a people.
The Navy first occupied Vieques in 1940, evicting 3,000 residents (half of the residents who were living there at the time) in the process. It currently controls 75 percent of the 22-mile island, which is now home to close to 10,000 residents. The uproar is not simply over the April deaths; the Navy also admitted several months ago that it recently fired more than 250 uranium-depleted shells there in violation of federal law. Thus far, only about 60 of the shells have been recovered.
If that weren't enough, there's a strong belief that there are nuclear weapons illegally stored on the small island.
The ill will comes not simply from the military maneuvers, but also because the U.S. military has historically been nonresponsive to the island residents. This pompous attitude has greatly contributed to the coalescing of this unprecedented movement that has the three main political parties -- always in bitter opposition to each other -- marching to the same beat.
While Ruben Berrios, Puerto Rican Independence Party president, continues to camp out illegally (over one month) on Navy territory on Vieques in protest -- both Governor Pedro Rossello and Resident Commissioner Carlos Romero Barcelo have taken the diplomatic route. They recently wrote to the president, telling him of their wishes that the Navy halt, not suspend, its live ammunition bombings. President Clinton actually responded earlier this month, with ramblings about Vieques being important to the security of the nation.
Subsequently, U.S. Defense officials named a panel to examine whether live ammunition exercises should continue at Vieques and to study the environmental, health and economic impacts of the military exercises on the island.
The situation in Vieques is not too different from what has happened in Hawaii, the Marshall Islands and other territories that have also been subjected to bombings, nuclear or conventional, to the extreme detriment of the residents.
One of the reasons the panel will not quiet the uproar is because most people already know that commissions and studies are a sure way to stifle protest. At the same time, there's genuine concern that the use of depleted uranium -- which emits highly dangerous radiation and has been linked to the Gulf War Syndrome -- may have been used in the past on the island.
Initially the Navy denied it, but later admitted its use. This is of utmost concern because there are higher incidents of certain cancers on Vieques than on the larger island, and the panel's charge doesn't specifically call for a cancer study.
If the panel is perceived as a whitewash, can anti-American riots be far behind? What an irony. The people of Vieques/Puerto Rico are Americans!
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4. Plutonium is dangerous
Saturday 19 June 1999 Calgary Herald (Canada) http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/stories/990619/2747650.html
Letter Re "Plutonium safe to move," Calgary Herald, June 9.
To print that plutonium is safe to move is inaccurate. Transport of plutonium-based MOX fuel poses two types of hazards: (1) an unprecedented security risk; and (2) an unusual health risk, due to the toxicity of plutonium when inhaled.
On the subject of security, the U.S. Department of Energy states that: "fresh MOX fuel remains a material in the most sensitive safeguards category, because plutonium suitable for use in weapons could be separated from it relatively quickly and easily."
Noting that MOX is regulated as direct weapons-usable material by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the DOE warns that the same "high standards of security" applied to "intact nuclear weapons" should be maintained for fresh MOX fuel shipments as well.
As for health concerns, the Nobel Prize-winning organization International Physicians for Global Survival notes that 27 micrograms of weapons plutonium, inhaled, is enough to give an adult human a fatal lung cancer.
By this reckoning, even the small amount of plutonium to be imported this summer equals 11 million lethal doses. True, it is unlikely that any of it will be released into the environment, but accidents do happen.
Gordon Edward
Montreal, Que.
(Edward is president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.)
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5. TRANSPORT OF JAPANESE WEAPONS-USABLE PLUTONIUM-MOX FROM BELGIUM TO FRANCE IMMINENT: GREENPEACE URGES US TO INTERVENE OVER LAX SECURITY
13 June 1999 EcoNet http://www.econet.apc.org/igc/en/aa/9906171875/aa5.html
Brussels -- Greenpeace believes that the delayed transport of weapons- usable plutonium-MOX fuel has been loaded back onto two trucks at the Dessel FBFC MOX fabrication plant in Belgium pending imminent transport to France, where it will be stored prior to transhipment to Japan.
The transport was originally scheduled to make the twelve- hour journey to the giant La Hague nuclear complex in France on May 25th. However, following a Greenpeace surveillance operation and the publication on its website of the proposed route to La Hague, the transport was postponed.
"Following discussions with the Belgian Interior Ministry, Greenpeace was led to believe that the security arrangements for the transport would be reconsidered. Now, however, it seems that the authorities were simply waiting for the Belgian domestic and European elections to be completed before despatching the deadly plutonium transport," said Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International.
"This should be a matter for the new Belgian Government and European Parliament and should not be permitted to take place during the political hiatus which prevails in the immediate aftermath of elections," said Townsley.
Greenpeace has also written to the US Secretary for Energy, Bill Richardson, requesting that he seek urgent discussion with the European Union's nuclear watchdog EUROTOM over the lax transport arrangements. As the supplier of the original nuclear fuel to Japan, from which the plutonium has been separated, the US maintains significant controls over the material.
In the letter Greenpeace argues: "The apparent lack of adequate physical security at the FBFC facility is shocking. As MOX fuel is classified as "direct use" weapons-usable material, the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials and the International Atomic Agency's guidelines require the MOX be subject to the most stringent physical protection measures. Indeed the US Department of Energy in its domestic plutonium disposition programme, decided to use Safe Secure Transport trucks (SSTs) - the same vehicles that transport nuclear weapons - to ship MOX fuel from fabrication to reactors for irradiation and the DoE has stated that it will apply the "stored weapons standard" - security equal to that used to protect nuclear weapons - to MOX."
It concludes: "The first shipment of MOX fuel from Europe to Japan will establish a precedent for any subsequent shipments. Therefore we believe it is essential that the US insists that the most stringent protection be applied to this dangerous, weapons-usable nuclear material."
The 32 assemblies of plutonium fuel are intended to be loaded at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, operated by the world's largest utility, Tokyo Electric Power Company. However, final approval has still not been granted by the Japanese Government, which is currently reviewing public comments on the use of plutonium in the reactor.
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6. The Wrong Stuff - The Space Program's Nuclear Threat To Our Planet
By Karl Grossman; Published by: Common Courage Press (800) 497-3207; ISBN number 1-56751-125-2 http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/kg9709tw.htm
The Wrong Stuff details NASA's mishaps with plutonium-fueled missions to date and its unrealistic calculations about the probability of a major accident. In concludes with a warning about plans for multiple launches involving plutonium and the connection with the U.S. military's desire to "attain the ultimate high ground" by placing orbiting nuclear power systems to energize weaponry in space.
Here's how the book starts out (Chapter 1, page 1):
Sunday afternoon, November 17, 1996. President Bill Clinton, vacationing in Hawaii, is interrupted by an urgent message from the U.S. Space Command. The Russian Mars 96 space probe -- with a half-pound of deadly plutonium on board -- is falling back to Earth. The rocket's fourth stage mis-fired after launch the previous day from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan. Based on its "tracking data," the U.S. Space Command advises Clinton that it "estimates the spacecraft will reenter the Earth's atmosphere" in a matter of hours "with a predicted impact point in east-central Australia." Clinton calls Australian Prime Minister John Howard -- who, coincidentally, the president plans to visit the very next day on his first stop before an Asia tour -- and promises "assets we have in the Department of Energy" to deal with any radio active contamination. (See Note #1, below)
It is early morning in Australia. [#2] Howard places the Australian government, miltary and Emergency Management Australia on full alert. Preparations are made to implement the Australian Contingecy Plan for Space Re-Entry Debris, acronymed SPRED, developed in 1988 after concerns of a Soviet nuclear-powered satellite, the Cosmos 1900, coming down that year on Australia. At a press conference Howard informs his country that, "I can't tell you where it is going to land. I can't tell you when." [#3] Howard thanks the U.S. president for his phone call while criticizing Russia for failing to provide Australia with any warning about the impending reentry of the car-sized space probe. "It's obviously one of those situations where there is a proper obligation to share that kind of information in the interests of people taking adequate preparation," says Howard. [#4] He warns that Australians should use "extreme caution" if they come in contact with remnants of the plutoniu-bearing Russian probe. [#5]
The White House issues a press release stating:
Russian space authorities believe there is no danger of nuclear contamination. Nevertheless, in what is considered to be the extremely unlikely event that one or more of the [plutonium] batteries break open, the United States is prepared to offer all necessary assistance to any nation to deal with any resulting problems [#6].
In fact, the probe had already landed the day before, very probably over Chile and/or Bolivia!
A sample from page 172, The Circus of History:
Nineteen years before the Challenger blew up, the Columbia Journalism Review did an extensive, two-part series on the lack of vigilant press coverage of the U.S. space program. That came a few months after the fire on a Saturn rocket to be used for an Apollo mission which killed astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee.
"Of the questions raised by the Apollo fire of January 27, 1967, one of the most important, yet least discussed, is whether the American press, print and electronic, performed its traditional 'watchdog' role in covering the space program efore the fire" wrote James A. Skardon. "Did the press demonstrate that it can monitor effectively such a powerful and virtually autonomous multi-billion-dollar governmental complex as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration?"
"The money, the risks, the national prestige, and the scope of scientific and military research involved add up to a public stake great enough to demand full and continuous information about NASA projects," he went on.
Skardon declared: "NASA is required by law to keep the public informed. Yet one of the revelations of the Apollo tragedy was that the public not only knew relatively little about NASA and the true state of Apollo before the fire, but much of what it did know was distorted."
Skardon quoted from a piece in the Nation earlier that year by William Hines, science editor of the Evening Star of Washington, "one of the handful of newsmen who have looked at NASA with a critical eye" who commented "that NASA's initials are jokingly said to stand for 'Never A Straight Answer.'"
The book is full of references. There are over 700 (732, actually) quotes, notes and references, all cited. The above quote was from James Skaron, "The Apollo Story: What the Watchdogs Missed," Columbia Journalism Review, Winter, 1967, p. 34.
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Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 22:47:31 -0600 From: "Bob Kinsey" <bkinsey@peacemission.org>
The below correspondence is a result of my forwarding the material I found on DU in the spate of stuff coming from the bombing in Kosovo and Serbia. What response does anyone have to this in relation to the concerns about DU?
Bob, Here is a response to The New Scientist Report. Written by the Army's DU expert. I have had breakfast with COL Daxon and recieved a weeklong course on DU taught by him among others. I don't know MJR Rokke, but I find COL Daxon to be a man of intgerity and compassion regarding DU and Gulf War Syndrome issues Mike
Here is my letter. In fairness to Army health physicists, of which I am one, Doug Rokke is a Reserve Army major and he does carry Army's specialty designator, but he is by no means reflective of the quality and integrity of the competent health physicists that are in the Army and work for the Army. Contrary to press reports, he has never been the Army's or the Pentagon's expert on depleted uranium. Some very competent health physicists served and are serving in that post. As always these are my personal opinions. __________________________________________________________
8 June 1999
Dear Sir or Madam:
I am writing this letter in response to your 5 Jun 99 article "Too Hot to Handle" by Rob Edwards. These are my opinions and my observations.
Apparently the "New Scientist" is not required to confirm his facts or critically review the information provided before publication nor are they required to present all of the data available on an issue. Here are some specifics that some of which can be found either in the RAND report or in the review of the use of depleted uranium in the Gulf War written by the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses. Both are available at www.gulflink.osd.mil.
The first issue is the urine level quoted in your article for Doug Rokke. I have, as a part of my duties, been investigating this incident. There are three points that need to be included in your article.
First, the Department of Energy did not take the sample because of Doug Rokke's Gulf War experience. The urine sample was taken because Doug Rokke participated as an observer in a depleted uranium test at a DOE test facility in which depleted uranium was aerosolized. The sample was taken to ensure he did not internalize DU from this test.
Second, the uranium measured could have been natural uranium. The analysis was done using a technique (kinetic phosphorescence analysis) that could not distinguish between natural uranium and depleted uranium.
Third, the analysis was never confirmed. Surprisingly, a repeat sample was never taken. This is the first step any competent health physicist would have taken and it would have been the very first thing I as a health physicist would have requested once I learned of the results.
Unmentioned in the article are the numerous bioassays taken by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense in 1993, 994 and subsequent tests conducted on other, more highly exposed Gulf War Veterans. All were negative except for personnel with embedded depleted uranium fragments. The key is these personnel were tested at the same point in time after the Gulf War that Doug Rokke was tested. They were all negative.
Unquestioned in the article was the link between the alleged ailments and depleted uranium exposure. Each of the ailments mentioned occur naturally. Doug Rokke has made these claims in many public forums and to the press on several occasions but has not yet provided proof (real data) linking DU to his ailments. Unreported in the article are the hundreds of articles dating back to the early 1940's detailing what is and what is not a health effect of uranium oxides.
More importantly, there were several studies of workers routine exposed to much higher levels of aerosolized uranium on a daily basis with no reports of the ailments described in the article. These are summarized in the RAND report and a variety of other peer-reviewed scientific reports that are mentioned in the RAND report.
The most flagrant failure to verify was printing, without criticism, critique, or even a common sense test Doug Rokke's allegation that the Kosovars will "_ return to a contaminated environment where the may become ill." What was this allegation based upon? This is certainly not based upon all of the studies of occupational workers done to date nor is it based in common sense. A point to consider, the average concentration of natural occurring uranium in the soil on the earth is such that there is approximately 5 to 10 tons of natural (more radioactive than DU) uranium square kilometer (at a depth of 1 meter). There are some regions of the world where the value is 10 to 20 times higher with no adverse effect. What exactly is the rationale?
I disagree with the last paragraph in the article. The ultimate irony is you will print these statements without doing even the most rudimentary checks of the validity of the position being proposed. Science is sometimes about conflicting viewpoints and theory. However, in my book, true science requires ensuring the validity of both views so that a valid comparison can be made. Your data are flawed.
If this is "New Science," I hope we all stick with just "Science."
Eric G. Daxon, PhD, CHP Colonel, U.S. Army Daxfam@aol.com (210) 221-6612
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- First message - _________________________
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Message: 8 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:41:23 -0400
Subject: NucNews-9 6/20/99 - Kosovo
37. Carter Criticizes Foreign Policy
By The Associated Press, June 17, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Carter-Foreign-Policy.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former President Carter says the United States' approach to solving conflicts in other nations run by dictators too often hurts the people who live under their leadership.
In an address to a group of international fellows Thursday, Carter lamented what he called dwindling U.S. support for foreign aid to assist people in developing nations. Instead, the United States has ended up punishing those people, he said.
``It has become unpopular in our country to talk about even humanitarian aid, and we concentrate maybe too much on resolving conflicts by imposing punishment on people of a nation who already are suffering under an oppressive dictator,'' Carter said.
He cited Cuba as an example, saying U.S. trade sanctions have hurt the people of the island, but have made a hero out of Fidel Castro.
``We have not contributed to democratization or freedom,'' Carter said.
Carter added that even when the United States does appropriate foreign aid, it often ends up in the wrong hands, rather than being directed toward building houses or improving schools.
``A lot of our foreign aid goes to people who would buy weapons from our gun manufacturers,'' Carter said.
The former president did not discuss recent events in Kosovo at great length. He did note that while the United States spends billions of dollars on missiles in Kosovo and other hot spots in the former Yugoslavia, it has ignored crises throughout the continent of Africa that have resulted in a far greater number of deaths.
``The superpowers of the world should be the ones with our great wealth to use our enormous economic and military and political influence for the alleviation of suffering in the third world,'' Carter said.
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38. THE REBELS Kosovars Said to Agree to Disband Their Forces
By STEVEN LEE MYERS, June 20, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/062099kosovo-nato.html
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- With the last Yugoslav forces streaming out of Kosovo ahead of schedule, NATO commanders here have reached a tentative agreement with leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army to disband the rebel force gradually, NATO officials said Saturday.
Under the agreement, which must still be signed by both parties, the rebels will withdraw from fortified positions held during their civil war against Yugoslav forces, turn over their heavy weapons, shed their uniforms and cease any organized military activities within 30 days.
NATO officials led by a British officer, Brig. Gen. Jonathan Bailey, have held meetings at undisclosed locations with various commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has an opaque leadership structure. NATO officials refused to disclose the identities of the rebel commanders, saying they were being withheld at the rebels' request.
While they have reached a tentative agreement, the fractured and sometimes competitive nature of the rebel command has complicated the completion of the accord, NATO officials said. It also raises questions about how smoothly any accord can be carried out.
NATO's commander in Kosovo, Lieut. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson of Britain, is eager to initial the agreement, according to a NATO spokesman, Maj. Jan Joosten. Once that happens, NATO's representatives in Brussels are expected to move quickly to give it final approval.
"It would come into force tomorrow," a NATO official said Saturday.
The tentative agreement came as Yugoslavia's Army and special police continued to withdraw, turning over more and more territory to NATO troops. By Saturday, only 3,000 to 5,000 of the roughly 40,000 Serb-dominated forces deployed in Kosovo during the war remained.
NATO officials here said they expected the last would leave by late Saturday or early Sunday, ahead of the midnight Sunday deadline agreed to by Yugoslav generals on June 9. Their departure will effectively end Serbian control over the province, considered to be Serbia's cultural and historical cradle.
While NATO officials have portrayed the withdrawal as smooth, the task of moving such a large force -- including hundreds of tanks, armored personnel vehicles and all other manner of military vehicles -- proved overwhelming to the Yugoslav commanders. They have left dozens of vehicles and weapons behind, providing NATO with an inventory and asking permission to retrieve them later.
"It was logistically impossible to get them all out," said Major Joosten, the NATO spokesman.
He said the Yugoslav Army would likely return for the vehicles soon, under NATO escort. "We don't want to get stuck guarding them," he said.
NATO troops, now 17,000 strong, have moved into every major city in Kosovo and are slowly expanding their military presence.
Late Friday, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen reached an agreement with Russian officials, including the Defense Minister, Marshall Igor S. Sergeyev, to add 3,600 Russian troops to the peacekeeping force, which will ultimately total more than 50,000.
Russia will deploy troops in the American, German and French sectors in Kosovo and control the grounds of Pristina airport, while leaving air control to NATO forces. The agreement resolved the embarrassing impasse created a week ago when some 200 Russians seized the airport west of Pristina hours before the first NATO troops could arrive.
General Jackson met Saturday with the commander of the Russian forces at the airport, Col. Gen. Viktor Zavarzin, to work out how to integrate the Russian soldiers into the Kosovo peacekeeping force.
NATO's spokesman here, Lieut. Col. Robin Clifford, said he expected the airport to open within days.
With NATO troops massing and the last Yugoslav forces leaving, NATO is now focusing on expanding security. The presence of heavily armed fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army has become as much of a threat to public safety as the retreating Serbs.
Although the rebel's leaders have by and large cooperated with NATO's peacekeepers, the group has taken over what passes for political and civil authority in the battered province.
In virtually every town, including here in the provincial capital, the group's red-and-black flag flies from checkpoints and "official" buildings, guarded by fighters dressed in camouflage or entirely in black.
Their increasingly brash presence has prompted tens of thousands of civilian Serbs to flee Kosovo, despite entreaties from NATO and United Nations officials to remain.
Before NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia began in March, the group agreed to lay down their arms during peace talks in Rambouillet, France, as part of a deal ultimately rejected by President Slobodan Milosevic.
With no agreement in place after the bombing stopped, NATO's interaction with the K.L.A. has been guarded and inconsistent.
In Prizren, German troops quickly established a delicate coexistence with the group that allowed them to keep their weapons, mostly AK-47's and other rifles, but on Friday they arrested 25 fighters involved in beating Serbian civilians and Gypsies and, beginning Saturday, have vowed to confiscate weapons.
Only a few miles to the east, American troops began confiscating the rebels' weapons from the start, disarming an entire company in the village of Zegra on Thursday. A day after that incident, by contrast, French troops allowed a large contingent to march, heavily armed, into Srbica, northwest of here.
In Prizren today, K.L.A. weapons and nearly all the uniforms seen on the streets in the past week disappeared overnight.
Apparently in keeping with the agreement between the regional K.L.A. leader known as Commander Drini and the Germans, the swaggering presence of the victorious rebels evaporated abruptly at midnight.
Prizren seemed to be struggling to return to normal, with young people -- now in civilian clothes -- thronging the square near the old mosque and filling the outdoor tables at cafes. Shopkeepers reopened, many of them busily replacing shattered plate glass windows. Somewhat inexplicably, stores displaying wedding gowns appeared undamaged.
"We had a quiet night and now the situation is quiet," said Sgt. Maj. Johann Fritsch, a German military spokesman. "We are confiscating weapons."
However, there is a long tradition in Kosovo of keeping weapons at home, and Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas may have simply put their guns in safe keeping.
Still, they were not carrying their guns. A few managed to retain a big hunting knife or empty pistol holster, but even the guards at gate of the former Serbian officers' club were unarmed.
At the town's main intersection, German infantrymen maintained a roadblock, stopping cars driven by Albanian men in any remnant of military garb, and searching for weapons. For the most part these exchanges seemed friendly, ending in handshakes and thumbs-up signs.
When something was found -- such as an ammunition vest with pouches of AK-47 assault rifle clips early this afternoon -- a German soldier recorded the find on a list, wrote out a receipt and courteously gave it to the Albanian man.
Asked later what the receipt was for, the German soldier shrugged, threw up his hands and rolled his eyes skyward.
Meantime, the return of Kosovo Albanian refugees continued in huge numbers. On Friday, nearly 25,000 people crossed back over into Kosovo, 14,500 from Albania and about 10,000 from Macedonia, said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency.
Four of the tent cities in Kukes, Albania, which only a week ago were packed with crowds of refugees, have closed down. In all, 75,000 refugees have returned from Albania in the last four days alone, and the pace from Macedonia appears to be picking up.
Aid officials have been trying to slow the influx because of worry about mines or booby traps -- and today the medical charity Doctors Without Borders said it had documented six cases of land mines or booby traps exploding. Near Srbica, one man was seriously injured when he detonated a booby trap by taking laundry off the line.
The latest agreement on disarming the K.L.A. rebels is said by NATO officials to mirror the one signed after much pressure from the West by representatives of Kosovo's Albanians during the peace talks in France in March. It would require the rebels, now thought to number as many as 17,000, to disband within a month and start training to become a police force for the province.
The first phase of the agreement would require that the rebels respect a cease-fire with the retreating Serbs. They would also have to stay more than a mile from main roads and from NATO's peacekeepers.
Within four days, the rebels would withdraw from the fortified positions they held during the conflict. After seven days, the rebels have to begin to turn over their heavy weapons, including those of 12.7-millimeter or larger caliber. By the end of 30 days, they must disband as an organized force, ceasing any operations and shedding their uniforms.
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Report: KLA agrees to disband Updated 5:25 AM ET June 20, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990620/05/politics-kla
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39. US soldiers act as Kosovo police
Updated 7:18 AM ET June 20, 1999, By BETH POTTER http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990620/07/international-usarmy
GNJILANE, Kosovo, June 20 (UPI) Two teams of U.S. Army soldiers specializing in civil affairs have been patrolling a Kosovo community in a mission that highlights the complexity of the military's growing role as a peacekeeping force.
The soldiers pulled a dead body out of a well of Friday. The next day, they arrested a Serb sniper who had shot a Kosovo Liberation Army soldier and a civilian on a downtown street.
The four-man teams act a bit like beat cops in the United States.
Their primary job is to walk the streets and ask questions of the people they meet, many of them refugees making their way home. They also meet with town leaders to find out if the electricity and water work and, if not, find someone who can help them get things running again.
They reassure Serbs and Albanians alike that KFOR troops will be fair and even-handed in helping the province. And, everywhere they go, they are deluged with requests from refugees to clear homes of mines and booby traps, find relatives, and record the discovery of bodies and recent burial sites.
"We're here to help these people, to help this country get back on its feet," said Sgt. Tony Duncan, who was sent to Kosovo after pulling peacekeeping duty in neighboring Bosnia. "We hope we can make their lives just a little bit better."
Making things better isn't always easy, however. While the teams can record war crimes information, they are not official investigators.
The dead body found in the well was buried so it can be examined later by war crimes investigators from The Hague. Waterlogged identification papers will be turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has come to Kosovo to do forensic investigations.
The Serb sniper was detained at an Army post on a hill several miles west of town, with plans to try him in an international court.
Human bones found on the floor of a burned house were left intact. Duncan and his colleague, Peter Gould, asked relatives to leave the evidence untouched so war crimes investigators can record it later.
"I do what I can, then I turn it over to other people," Duncan said. "You have to mentally prepare for it when the day is done, the day is done."
While U.S. Marines here so far have focused mostly on traffic checkpoints and logistical needs as they set up shop in the American sector, the Army's civil affairs soldiers deal more with special situations and crowds. All have Special Forces training and speak a foreign language.
"Things are kind of settling down now," said Maj. Andrew Kowal, commander of the civil affairs unit in Kosovo. "We establish a rapport with the local population. If that means talking to them, we do that. If it means going in and kicking their asses, we can do that, too."
Another 22 members of the civil affairs unit will arrive in Kosovo in the coming weeks to continue establishing rapport, or do whatever else needs to be done.
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40. Leaders Haggle Over Kosovo Program
By Maureen Johnson Associated Press Writer Saturday, June 19, 1999; 8:22 a.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990619/V000229-061999-idx.html
COLOGNE, Germany (AP) -- World leaders today haggled over a promised huge reconstruction program for Kosovo as Russia sought to get Yugoslavia included in the deal even though President Slobodan Milosevic remains in power.
On the second day of their annual summit, leaders of the United States, five other NATO nations and Japan attempted to block diplomatically the latest bid by Russia, German officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Moscow is already smarting over the scale of the allies' victory in their 78-day bombing campaign to oust Serb forces from Kosovo.
``The conduct of one man must not penalize 10 million Serbs,'' Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin told France's President Jacques Chirac in talks Friday night, French officials said.
But President Clinton and other allied leaders were holding firm in their insistence that Milosevic must not benefit from the reconstruction program, aides said in describing today's talks.
``The leaders of the countries that are going to be providing the money are not prepared to provide assistance to an unreformed Serbia,'' a senior U.S. official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity. The official said that any help ``will require real political change in Serbia.''
A British official went so far as to read reporters a key sentence from a draft of the final communique that stipulates Yugoslavia has to ``demonstrate full commitment to all the principles and objectives'' of a Balkans stability pact signed last week by the United States and the other seven nations represented here, including Russia.
``The meaning of that is very, very clear,'' the British official said, speaking on grounds of anonymity. ``So long as Milosevic is there, the money will not be there.''
As the second day of the summit got under today, Clinton and other leaders strolled in brilliant sunshine to the modernistic museum where they are meeting. Bands played their national anthems and excited schoolchildren waved the flags of the foreign VIPs.
Clinton plunged in among the kids, laughing and shaking hands. As he headed off into the building, several dozen children rushed after him, swarming round -- and got some more handshakes.
An expected joint statement on Kosovo did not materialize Friday night because of the dispute over Milosevic benefiting.
While Russian prospects appeared uncertain in the new round of the diplomatic battle over Kosovo, Stepashin expressed confidence of getting a deal to reschedule $69 billion of debt run up under communist governments.
``We more or less successfully are coming to a conclusion on the issue of Soviet debt,'' Stepashin told reporters after breakfast with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
``In principle we reached an agreement ... There are a few wrinkles. But I consider that the result is almost 100 percent,'' added Stepashin.
The other leaders were keen to help, partly to help make up with Russia over the crisis that increased Moscow's isolation from the rest of the rich group.
``This summit gives us the chance to put our differences behind us and map out a set of common interests for the future,'' British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview today.
Russia's Soviet-era debt totals about $69 billion owed to other governments and private banks. Russia balks at paying the Soviet-era debt, which includes money owed by republics that are now independent, in addition to the huge amounts of financial help it has received since communism collapsed in 1991.
Stepashin said Schroeder promised to press the International Monetary Fund to release $4.5 billion of Western aid, blocked after Russian financial markets collapsed last August.
On Friday night, U.S. and Russian negotiators in Helsinki, Finland, reached agreement on the sensitive issue of deploying Russian troops in NATO's peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
The Helsinki deal provided for about 2,850 Russian troops to work with NATO commanders in the U.S., French and German-controlled sectors of Kosovo while under Russian command, U.S. official said. An additional 750 Russians would be based at the Pristina airport.
It was a compromise between NATO reluctance to give Russia a separate zone and Russian refusal to put its troops under the British general in charge of NATO forces in Kosovo.
An agreement on Russian aid would set the stage nicely for the late arrival Sunday of President Boris Yeltsin, who sent Stepashin in his place for most of the meeting.
Another issue on today's agenda was a U.S.-backed proposal to help Russia keep control of its nuclear arsenal.
Clinton has asked Congress to provide $4.2 billion over the next five years, and Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi came to Cologne prepared to contribute $200 million to the effort.
On Friday, the leaders approved a program to wipe out up to $100 billion in debt owed by the world's 33 poorest nations. They also endorsed a package of reforms to the global financial system to reduce the threat of the currency crises that battered Asia, Russia and Brazil.
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41. U.S.-Russia Kosovo Agreement Text
By The Associated Press, June 19, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-US-Russia-Agreement.html
Text of Kosovo peacekeeping agreement between Russia and the United States:
It is agreed by the Secretary of Defense of the United States and the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation:
To accept the Agreed Principles attached as the basis for Russian participation in the international peacekeeping force (KFOR) in full compliance with UNSC (United Nations Security Council) Resolution 1244.
To provide for participation of one to two Russian battalions operating in Kosovoska Kamenica in the U.S. sector according to the attached command and control model. A Russian officer will serve as the representative to the sector commander for Russian forces.
Additionally, the U.S. will recommend that NATO agree that Russian forces also participate in the KFOR forces deployed in the German and French sectors, also according to the command and control model attached, specifically that Russia provide one to two battalions to be part of the KFOR force in the German sector, to operate in the area near Malisevo, and one battalion to the KFOR force in the French sector, to operate in the area near Lausa, both areas as shown on the attached map. A German company and a French company will also operate in the Malisevo and Lausa areas respectively. Russian officers will serve as representatives for Russian forces to the sector commanders in the German and French sectors respectively.
The total Russian deployment in Kosovo will not exceed five battalions with a total strength not exceeding 2850 troops, plus up to 750 troops for the airfield and logistics base operations combined, plus 16 liaison officers. The level of Russian participation will be reduced in proportion to reductions in the overall size of KFOR.
To resolve the Pristina airfield issue on the basis of the allocation of responsibilities described in attachments, all KFOR participants will have access to the airfield, under procedures to be established by KFOR. Details to be determined by Commander, KFOR in consultation with Russian representatives.
That Russia will have the right to establish a logistics base with an appropriate site security force in the vicinity of the town of Kosovo Polje, as agreed with COMKFOR, to support the Russian forces in KFOR.
To send a Russian military representative to SHAPE and to augment his staff and expand his responsibilities to include Russian participation in KFOR, and to establish liaison and planning cells at AFSOUTH and KFOR as rapidly as possible in accordance with attachment.
To convene consultations as soon as possible to develop details for implementation of these agreements.
That these points, including determination on which sector the Russians will participate in, will be confirmed by the NAC for NATO and by the government of the Russian Federation. The scheme of deployment of the Russian contingents of KFOR may be reviewed and adjusted in light of the prevailing circumstances by mutual agreement of the confirming parties, keeping in mind all aspects of a continued, appropriate Russian presence.
All command arrangements will preserve the principle of unity of command. It is understood that the Russian contingent in Kosovo will be under the political and military control of the Russian Command:
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Agreed Principles for Russian Participation in the International Security Force(KFOR) for Kosovo.
Subject to political review and approval by NATO and Russian authorities the following principles are accepted as the basis for Russian participation in a military effective peace enforcement operation in Kosovo.
1. Common Mission/Purpose: Under the mandate of UNSCR 1244 taken under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and according to the principles therein, and within the framework of the Military Technical Agreement between KFOR and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, KFOR will deploy to establish a secure environment for the return of refugees and Internally Dispatched Persons and to monitor, and if necessary, enforce, compliance with the Military Technical Agreement and the demilitarization of the KLA. The participation of all national contingents in KFOR will be based on OPLAN 10413, Operation Joint Guardian.
2. Common Rules of Engagement: All contingents of KFOR will accept and operate under common rules of engagement to be applied impartially in all areas toward all parties without exception.
3. Unity of command: All command arrangements will preserve the principle of unity of command. This presumes that the Russian side exercises full political and military control over the Russian contingent.
4. Single Airspace Management: All contingents if KFOR will operate under KFOR-established airspace and airfield management controls in accordance with agreements.
5. Single Systems of Ground Movement Control: All ground movement will be conducted under the KFOR movement control procedures in accordance with agreements. To this end, a Russian liaison group will be created for communication and coordination, in accordance with the attached Liaison Arrangements fro Russian Forces in KFOR.
6. Intelligence Sharing and Exchange: Conducted as under IFOR and SFOR. Public information messages will be coordinated and public information products exchanged.
7. Coordinated Public Information Process: Conducted as under IFOR and SFOR. Public information messages will be coordinated and public information products exchanged.
8. Single System to Coordinate National Logistics and KFOR Base Support: KFOR may assist in coordinating national logistics operations among national contingents. All contingents of KFOR are responsible for their financial and logistics commitments.
9. KFOR Freedom of Maneuver and Operation: In the case where a sector commander, or the commander of a national contingent within a sector, declines to accept an order from the KFOR commander, COMKFOR will have full authority to order other KFOR forces, from that sector, or any other sector, to carry out the mission, and those other forces will have full freedom of maneuver and operation throughout the sector in question, including the zone of responsibility of the sector commander or national contingent commander, who declined to accept order.
10. Command Structure: The command structure depicted on the attached chart (Russian Participation in KFOR) will be the command structure for Russian participation in KFOR.
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42. Senate Bill Could Aid Balkans
By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Foreign-Aid.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate panel would provide $535 million to Kosovo and other Balkan and Eastern European states next year, but the White House is threatening a veto of a foreign aid bill containing the money.
The Senate Appropriations Committee voted 28-0 Thursday to approve a $12.7 billion foreign aid package. It would provide $1.9 billion less than President Clinton wanted, which drew ominous words from the administration.
``A bill funded at this level would be grossly inadequate to maintain America's leadership around the world,'' White House budget director Jacob Lew said in a letter to Senate leaders that promised he would urge Clinton to veto the measure.
... The foreign aid measure would provide $142 million more than Clinton requested for the Balkans.
It contains no money for Serbia, and would the declare the dominant Yugoslav province a terrorist state. That would make the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic ineligible for future U.S. aid, and allow Kosovo Albanians to use U.S. courts to sue the Serbian government for losses.
The bill would also condition aid to Russia on that country not demanding a zone of control in Kosovo, and on Russian troops there coming under NATO command. Kosovo is now occupied by soldiers from NATO countries, but about 200 Russian troops have moved into the province.
Under the legislation, Kosovo would get $150 million for reconstruction and to help establish an autonomous government and defense forces.
There would be $85 million for Albania, $60 million for Romania, $55 million for Bulgaria, $45 million for Macedonia and $35 million for Montenegro, plus $105 million not specifically allocated.
The legislation says European countries should ``assume primary responsibility for reconstruction and recovery in the Balkans.'' But it also says the United States ``has concrete trade interests in rebuilding the region's economies,'' as well as security interests in restoring stability....
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43. Kosovo mine losses mounting
Updated 4:27 AM ET June 18, 1999, By BETH POTTER http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990618/04/international-mines
MORINA, Kosovo, June 18 (UPI) Aid workers along the Kosovo-Albania border are worried about refugee children returning to their homes and finding land mines and unexploded rdnance, especially cluster bombs.
"It is extremely dangerous at this time," said Ron Redmond, a United Nations High Commission for Refugees spokesman. "We are trying to get refugees to wait."
The Red Cross has recorded 19 mine incidents on the Albanian border in the last three days and more are expected. Several people have been killed and injured.
A huge sign posted at the Morina border crossing warns of the dangers of mines. Taped-off areas warn pedestrians to stay on the road. Square holes in the pavement indicate where mines have already been removed.
Mine removal crews are expected in the region in the next few days, but cleaning the area completely of mines and booby traps could take months.
"We know its dangerous, but what can we do?" asked Leman Gafleshi, one of the refugees at the crossing.
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- Ninth message - _________________________
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Message: 9 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:41:34 -0400
Subject: NucNews-8 6/20/99 - Arms/Military- Israel/Lebanon; Latin America; B-2 Flaws; Truman re.arms sales
33. Israeli Warplanes Strike South Lebanon
Updated 1:25 PM ET June 19, 1999 http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990619/13/international-lebanon-raid
TYRE, Lebanon (Reuters) - Israeli warplanes attacked suspected Iranian-backed Hizbollah positions near Israel's south Lebanon occupation zone, a security source said.
The source said two planes fired a total of eight rockets at a valley near the village of Shouaytiyeh.
There was no immediate report of casualties in the attack, that raised to 94 the number of Israeli air raids on Lebanon since the start of 1999.
In Beirut, the Iranian-backed Hizbollah said in a statement that its guerrillas attacked several Israeli positions in the area just before the raid.
Israel has occupied parts of Lebanon since 1978 but it set up in 1985 a so-called security zone to prevent potential cross-border attacks. Hizbollah (Party of God) guerrillas are waging a war of attrition to oust Israeli troops from the zone.
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34. Latin America's Armies Are Down, But Not Out
By LARRY ROHTER, June 20, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/062099latin-america-review.html
RIO DE JANEIRO -- The generals who once made and deposed presidents are now so marginal a factor in Brazil's daily life that a milestone went almost unremarked this month. When President Fernando Henrique Cardoso signed a bill merging the Army, Air Force and Navy ministries into a single Ministry of Defense headed by a retired senator, Brazil became the last member of Mercosur, the South American customs union composed of former military dictatorships, to place its armed forces under full formal civilian control.
Though the rest of the world still envisions the likes of Pinochet, Péron, Trujillo, Somoza, and Torrijos when it thinks of Latin America, these are trying times for soldiers throughout the region. Government spending is declining even faster than the prestige of a military career. In virtually every country the armed forces confront what Armando Borrero, a Colombian scholar of the military, calls "an existential problem: What is their role now that they are no longer the dominant force in their societies?"
For the whole region, getting soldiers to go back to their barracks has brought indisputable political and economic benefits. When generals were in charge in Argentina and Brazil two decades ago, for instance, troops were deployed on their border, and both were pursuing costly nuclear programs.
But after democratic civilian rule was restored in the mid-1980's, the countries buried their historic grievances and married their fortunes in Mercosur. Trade and other forms of contact have exploded. This month, Mr. Cardoso and Argentina's President, Carlos Menem, even decided to seek a common currency.
Similarly, Argentina and Chile have settled all but one of 23 border disputes, and civilian presidents in Peru and Ecuador just recently laid to rest a boundary conflict that caused several wars in the past 50 years. Perhaps that explains why the Clinton Administration, which lifted longstanding restrictions on United States arms sales to Latin America in 1997, has found so few takers for the wares it wants to sell.
"The military leadership does not want to go back to the old system," said Richard Millett, the author of "Beyond Praetorianism: The Latin American Military at the End of the 20th Century." "They see less to gain from confrontation than in cooperation against the real enemy, like transnational crime groups. They know that the strength of your neighbor is not a menace; it's his weakness that is dangerous."
In March, in fact, the armed forces of Ecuador and Paraguay resisted the temptation to intervene in a crisis. They know that a coup would lead to ostracism, loss of trade benefits and elimination from prestigious and profitable United Nations peacekeeping missions. Mr. Cardoso even warned Paraguay's soldiers that Mercosur is a club for democracies only and that a coup would lead to expulsion.
While the Latin American military may be out, it is not necessarily down. "You do not yet really have true civilian control of the military," Dr. Millett said. "What you have is enhanced civilian influence and reduced military autonomy. The civilian defense ministers in a lot of these countries don't order the generals around, they consult and negotiate with them."
One big question for any civilian government is what to do to keep the idled troops out of mischief. Washington's answer, regarded as a recipe for disaster by every government in the region, has been to press the armies to enlist in the war against drugs.
"Americans tend to think that Latin America spends so much on the military that it might as well get something useful out of them," said Alfred Stepan, author of several books on the Latin American military. "But that is a dangerous way of looking at things. If the military get involved in the anti-drug wars, not only are they not prepared for it, but doing so has a corrupting impact and may contribute to an expansion of their role."
The Central American military offers a different but no less disturbing model. With no more guerrillas left to battle -- or slaughter -- they have been transformed into economic conglomerates that threaten to choke off competition from private enterprise. In a study titled "Soldiers as Businessmen," Arnoldo Brenes and Kevin Casas have documented how Central America's armed forces have taken over banks, hotels, funeral homes, radio stations, advertising agencies, supermarkets and stores through their pension funds.
In general and at a theoretical level, many people are concerned by the fact that the military, which already has the power of arms, may also try to obtain uncontrolled economic power," they write in the book, published last year in Costa Rica by the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress. When the profit motive replaces national defense as the army's mission, the pair warn, "the very reason for the existence of the armed forces is distorted."
Their patron Oscar Arias, a former president of Costa Rica who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, argues that the best way to avoid such problems is to follow his country's example and abolish the armed forces altogether. "What we need in our countries is a good police force with a civilian mentality and some cheap, light arms, not an army that needs to maintain its power with sophisticated weapons," he says. The only other countries to follow that recipe have had second thoughts. Panama is unable to fend off Colombian guerrillas who regularly cross into its territory, and Haiti finds its sovereignty ignored by drug traffickers.
Then there is Venezuela, where the rise of Hugo Chávez, a cashiered colonel who led an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992 and was elected president last December, has meant a more prominent role for the military. But that country, Mr. Arias noted, was spared the last cycle of military rule and abuses, which makes it a special case.
"After the suffering that people in the rest of Latin America have endured, nobody wants the return of the military," he said. "People are not going to forget what the military did to repress and oppress. They know that the litmus test of democracy is the subordination of military power to civilian authority and that is what civil society demands."
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35. Some B-2 Flaws Revealed in Report
By The Associated Press, June 19, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-B-2-Flaws.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The B-2 ``stealth'' bomber touted by the Pentagon as a star performer in Kosovo is tricky to maintain and hobbled by technical flaws, congressional investigators say.
The $2 billion plane has passed most operational tests, but deficiencies were identified ``that will limit, or under some circumstances slow, its pace in flight operations,'' says a report released this week.
General Accounting Office auditors questioned the durability of the special materials that make the B-2 nearly invisible to enemy radar and said cockpit equipment does not perform as advertised, preventing the air crew from determining the enemy's exact location.
The report also found the planning system for missions insufficient and said the aircraft's use is limited by the fact that all the planes are housed and maintained at one Air Force base in Missouri.
The sixth GAO report in five years on the B-2 was completed before the 11-week Balkan air war ended June 9.
President Clinton praised the success rate in Kosovo, calling it a marvel and its crews a testament to American military prowess.
Six B-2s flew 30-hour nonstop missions from Whiteman Air Force Base to Yugoslavia and back. Although the planes flew only about 50 of the more than 30,000 sorties by NATO pilots, its payloads accounted for 11 percent of the bombs dropped -- 1.4 million pounds.
The plane scored near-perfect accuracy in its first combat, Pentagon officials say. Although a B-2 mistakenly dropped bombs on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last month, officials said the fault lay with bad maps and other errors by NATO rather than with the plane or its crew.
``The proof is in the pudding,'' said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., whose district includes the B-2 base. ``The fact that it did so well should cause everybody who is critical to own up to the fact that they were wrong. It was dependable, and it worked.''
The GAO said the Air Force had made progress in correcting planning problems, but little progress had been made in other areas. For example, GAO said, the 10-plane B-2 fleet suffers long down times for repair of its delicate stealth parts.
``These factors diminish the ability of the Air Force to fly the aircraft as frequently as operational requirements stipulated,'' the auditors wrote.
The Air Force spent more than $740 million to develop a network of systems to help B-2 crews detect enemy planes, missiles or other threats in flight, but the equipment ``either incorrectly identified threats or did not provide an accurate location of threats,'' the report said.
George Schneiter, the Pentagon's director of strategic and tactical systems, acknowledged problems in technology that warns crews about threats, but said the trouble is less severe than GAO concluded.
Schneiter said the Air Force is improving the plane's radar-deflecting skin, and is trying to acquire maintenance shelters where the planes can make pit stops.
The bat-wing-shaped plane drew heavy criticism even before its introduction in 1989. Critics often focused on its mechanical reliability and whether its stealth abilities are worth the price. The Pentagon eventually plans to buy 21 B-2s.
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36. Text of Truman Message to Congress Calling for U.S. Arms Assistance Abroad
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, July 26, 1949 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/072649nato-truman-text.html
WASHINGTON, July 25, 1949 -- The text of President Truman's message to Congress today on the foreign arms aid program follows:
To the Congress of the United States:
To continue and strengthen our program for world peace and national security, I recommend that the Congress enact legislation authorizing military aid to free nations to enable them to protect themselves against the threat of aggression and contribute more effectively to the collective defense of world peace.
Such legislation is an essential part of our efforts to crate an international structure capable of maintaining law and order among nations. Our prosperity and security, as well as that of other free nations, depend upon our success in establishing conditions of international order. Increased assurances against the danger of aggression are needed to support our international economic program, and in particular the European Recovery Program, which is so vital to the building of a stable world.
Under the Charter of the United Nations, each member nation is bound to settle international differences by peaceful means and to refrain from the threat, or use, of force against the territory of any country. Thus, in joining the United Nations, the nations have given their assent to the basic principles of international peace and security.
Promise Alone, Not Enough
We have, however, learned the unfortunate truth that this obligation, by itself, is not sufficient at the present time to eliminate the fear of aggression and international violence. The record of world events since 1945 offers us no certainty that all members of the United Nations will uphold these principles of peace in actual practice. Indeed, there is proof to the contrary, proof that in the pursuit of selfish ends some nations have resorted and may again resort to the threat, or use, of force. The fear created by this experience haunts the world and creates conditions of insecurity and instability which stand in the way of economic and social progress.
To reduce this danger and to allay these fears, we have taken additional steps to reinforce the obligations of the Charter. Under the pact of Rio de Janeiro and in the North Atlantic Treaty, we are creating a framework of mutual obligation to prevent international violence in the Western Hemisphere and in the North Atlantic area. These treaties provide support for the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
Furthermore, even in the absence of such compacts, we have refused to tolerate assaults on the integrity of peace-loving nations whose conduct conforms to the principles of the Charter. We have given military, as well as diplomatic, aid directly to nations threatened by aggression. Through our aid to Greece and Turkey, we have recognized the fact that, if the principles of international peace are to prevail, free nations must have the means as well as the will to resist aggression.
So long as the danger of aggression exists, it is necessary to think in terms of the forces required to prevent it. It is unfortunate that this is true. We cannot, however, achieve our goal of permanent peace by ignoring the difficult and unpleasant tasks that lie in the way. We need to show the same firmness and resolution in defending the principles of peace that we have shown in enunciating them. The better prepared the free nations are to resist aggression, the less likelihood there is that they will have to use the forces they have prepared. The policemen in our communities seldom have to use their weapons, but public peace would be greatly endangered if they did not have them.
'Preparation' Aids Peace
The preparation of the military means for keeping the peace is necessary not only to the security of the United States but also to building a safe and prosperous world society.
Helping free nations to acquire the means of defending themselves is an obligation of the leadership we have assumed in world affairs. Within the practical limits of our resources, we must strive to act with foresight and precision, so that our strength and collective strength of the free peoples associated with us will be most effective.
To be effective, the aid which we supply to other nations for defending themselves must be planned ahead. It must not be wasted. It must be carefully allocated to meet the realities of our own security. Above all, it is urgent to initiate a program of aid promptly if we are not to lose the momentum already gained toward recovery and political stability.
These general requirements are given sharp emphasis by consideration of the specific cases where aid is needed. Many anxious Governments have requested our military assistance. Among these requests, there can be no more meaningful appeals than those which have come from the countries of Western Europe. It is entirely logical that these Governments should turn to us and that we should help them. Their defense is our defense and is of deep concern to us. Twice in one generation we have found that we had to join with them in fighting against aggressor nations in order to preserve our freedom and the freedom of other democratic countries.
The principal task of the free nations of Western Europe in the last four years has been to restore their war-shattered economies. The inherent difficulties of this task have been aggravated by the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which has done its utmost to prevent European recovery. Full economic recovery requires peaceful conditions and the assurance that the work of labor, industry and agriculture will not be swept away in an outburst of international violence. In place of these conditions, the Soviet Union, with its violent propaganda, its manipulation of the conspiratorial activities of the world Communist movement, and its maintenance of one of the largest peacetime armies in history, has deliberately created an atmosphere of fear and danger.
Points to Soviet Record
In the face of what has occurred in Greece, and in Berlin, in the face of the threats and pressures to which Iran and Turkey have been exposed, in the light of the suppression of human liberty in countries under Communist control, the nations of Western Europe have not been able to ignore the necessity of a military defense for themselves. They have seen what the Soviet Union has done to nations for which it professed friendship and with which it was recently allied. They have observed how a Communist coup d'Ètat, operating in the shadow of the massed military might of the Soviet Union, can overthrow, at one stroke, the democratic liberties and the political independence of a friendly nation.
As a consequence of that experience, and in the light of the fact that the two most devastating war in history originated in Europe, they realize that they must have a shield against aggression to shelter their political institutions and the rebirth of their own economic life.
The nations of Western Europe have addressed themselves in all seriousness to the task of providing such a shield. In the Treaty of Brussels, five nations of Western Europe established joint measures for their own defense. In support of that treaty, they have coordinated both their defensive strategy and their plans to produce necessary military supplies.
Those five nations, together with Norway, Denmark and Italy, have undertaken annual military expenditures equivalent to about $5,500,000,000. This is the maximum amount they are able to spend without seriously interfering with the civilian production necessary for their economic recovery. The amount is not, however, enough to furnish these nations the protection they need.
Concentrating, as they are, on restoring their economic stability, they are unable to spare the plants and the materials required to bring their defense establishments up to the necessary levels. Furthermore, there are certain items essential for their defense which they are not equipped to provide for themselves. They have, therefore, come to us with urgent requests for assistance in providing the necessary margin of arms and equipment which will make them better able to repel aggression and mitigate the anxieties of their peoples.
I recommend that we supply these countries with assistance of three types: First, a limited amount of dollar aid to enable them to increase their own production of military items without impairing their efforts for economic recovery; second, the direct transfer of certain essential items of military equipment, and third, the assistance of experts in the production and use of military equipment and the training of personnel. Such a program will enable these countries to acquire the elements necessary to their defense without hampering their recovery.
The military assistance which we propose for these countries will be limited to that which is necessary to help them create mobile defensive forces. Our objective is to see to it that these nations are equipped, in the shortest possible time, with compact and effectively trained forces capable of maintaining internal order and resisting the initial phases of external aggression.
At the present time, the military power which is the greatest deterrent to aggression is centered in the United States, 3,000 miles away from Europe. It must be made clear that the United States has no intention, in the event of aggression, of allowing the peoples of Western Europe to be overrun before its own power can be brought to bear. The program of military assistance now proposed is a tangible assurance of our purpose in this regard.
Outside of Western Europe we are already engaged in a program of military assistance to Greece and Turkey. This program has been in effect since May 1947. The Communist effort in Greece, in the form of guerrilla war supported from abroad, has been condemned by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Our aid to Greece has checked this attempt to overthrow the poitical independence of a free nation. It is important that present gains against the guerrillas be maintained and that the operations be pressed to a successful conclusion. Only if this is done, can the economic reconstruction of Greece be accomplished.
In Turkey, our aid has lessened the burden of military preparedness which the threatening pressure of the Soviet Union had imposed on a primarily agrarian economy. Although the Turkish defense system has been improved, additional equipment and maintenance parts are needed for the modernization of certain Turkish defense units.
We are also confronted by the necessity of making military assistance available in other areas of the world outside Europe.
In Iran the use of surpluses of United States military equipment has aided in improving the defensive effectiveness of the Iranian Army and the maintenance of internal order. It is now necessary to provide certain additional items to round out this program, and thereby to strengthen the ability of Iran to defend its independence.
The new Republic of Korea, established as a result of free elections held under the auspices of the United Nations, is menaced by the Communist regime in the northern part of the country. With the advice and assistance of the United States, the Korean Government has established a small force to protect its internal security and defend itself against outside aggression, short of a full scale war. Equipment has been requested from the United States for minimum army and coast guard forces. It is essential to the survival of the Korean Republic that this assistance be made available.
In addition, it is necessary to continue our program of limited aid to the Republic of the Philippines, which was originated under the act of June 26, 1946.
In this hemisphere we have assumed obligations of mutual defense with the other American republics under the Pact of Rio de Janeiro. Our northern neighbor, Canada, is a party with us to the North Atlantic Treaty. It is important under the terms of these two treaties that we should assist Canada and the American republics to establish adequate defenses properly coordinated with our own.
To Limit Hemisphere Aid
In view of our limited resources, it is impossible for us to assist on a grant basis all countries whose defense is related to our own. We can afford to bear the cost of military aid only with respect to those countries vital to our national security where the danger is greatest and where the ability to pay for military equipment is least. With respect to such countries as Canada and the American republics, therefore, I recommend that our assistance be limited to the use of the facilities of our Government to procure defense equipment for them at their own expense.
All these various requirements for military assistance should obviously be handled in a unified program, adaptable in its administration to the operation of our foreign policy.
The sum which will be needed in new appropriations for the fiscal year 1950 for all the grant programs now contemplated, together with a margin for emergencies, is approximately $1,450,000,000. The bulk of the supplies to be procured under these programs will be delivered over the next two years. Of this total, $50,000,000 has recently been requested for the interim continuation of our program of military aid to Greece and Turkey under existing authorizations. New authorization will be required for $1,400,000,000.
The major portion of the total is to be devoted to the needs of the Western European nations. It is not proposed that specific sums be committed in advance to particular countries. Rather, the President should be able to make allocations as circumstances require.
The aid we provide will constitute only a minor fraction of what these countries will spend themselves. Agreements will be executed with the recipients, to provide for mutual assistance and to assure proper use of the equipment furnished. The recipient nations will be required to limit the use of the items supplied to the defense of agreed geographic areas, and will not be permitted to transfer them to other nations without the consent of the United States.
The President should be authorized to terminate our aid at any time. Aid will be terminated in the event that a recipient acts in a manner inconsistent with the policies and purposes of the program or with its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations.
Our Burden Seen Lessened
The recommended program covers the most pressing current needs for military aid. How long it may be necessary to continue military aid depends on many unpredictable factors. Our burden will undoubtedly lessen as our program for peace brings its returns. Advancing economic recovery will enable the free nations to sustain a larger share of the expense of their own defense measures. Progress toward a peaceful settlement of international differences will reduce the threat of violence and lighten the cost of preparedness. Ultimately, when the peaceful principles of the United Nations are fully realized, the protection of the peace may be assigned to the security forces of that organization.
If this program of military aid is to succeed, we must prosecute it promptly and vigorously. Our policies for peace are having the desired effects. We cannot afford to lose the momentum we have already gained.
One need only look back to the situation with which we were confronted two and one- half years ago to be convinced of the rightness of our course of action. At this time the free nations of Europe were not only exposed and defenseless, but they were also caught in an economic impasse which threatened the existence of their democratic forms of Government. Europe, with its great storehouse of skills and its heritage of free institutions, seemed about to disintegrate and to fall, piece by piece, under the sway of totalitarian control.
The fact that such a disaster has been averted should inspire us with confidence in the ultimate triumph of the cause of peace and freedom not only in Europe but elsewhere in the world.
Like the North Atlantic Treaty, this program of military aid is entirely defensive in character. By strengthening the defense establishments of the free nations, it will increase the confidence of the peoples of the world in a peaceful future and protect the growth of world recovery.
I would not suggest that this program alone will bring present international tensions to an end. It will, however, preserve the initiative which the free nations of the world now have, and help to create a world structure so firm economically and militarily as to convince any potential aggressor nation that its own welfare lies in the direction of mutual tolerance and peaceful foreign relations.
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Message: 10 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:42:45 -0400
Subject: NucNews-2 6/20/99 - Trident Plowshares; Ukraine/Chernobyl; Australia; Iraq; Japan
7. Loch Goil disarmers back in court
From: Trident Ploughshares 2000 - tp2000@gn.apc.org, plowshares@onelist.com Press Release 17th June 1999
LOCH GOIL DISARMERS FACE £100,000 THEFT AND DAMAGE CHARGE
The three women Trident Ploughshares 2000 activists involved in last week's dramatic disarmament action in Loch Goil returned today (17th June) to Dunoon Sheriff Court where the charges against them were more clearly defined, referring to a total damage value of nearly £100,000.
Last Tuesday, 8th June, peace activists Ellen Moxley (63), from Dollar, Scotland, Ulla Roder (44) from Denmark and Angie Zelter (49), from Norfolk, England, boarded "Maytime", a floating laboratory which checks the "sonar invisibility" of Trident nuclear submarines, and cleared out the lab, throwing the equipment into the loch. They have now been charged with: · Malicious mischief to a value of £30,000. This appears to refer to damage to a winch, control panels, an aerial antenna and a control room window. · Theft by throwing into the loch to the value of £69,000. This refers to the computers, other electronic equipment, components, manuals and other documentation the women pitched overboard.
One of the conditions for bail was a commitment from the women that they would not re-offend in the interim. They were ready to accept this on the understanding that disarmament activity would not be considered by the court to be a crime. The court refused to agree to this and the women now return to Cornton Vale prison. Although their trial must take place within 110 days no dates have yet been arranged for future hearings.
Commenting on the bail issue Trident Ploughshares 2000 pledger Sian Jones said: "In years to come we will look back at these events and will be amazed that there could ever have been any doubt within the judicial system that Trident is utterly unlawful; or that there could be any question about the legal and moral validity of what these women have done."
Maytime is part of the Floating Laboratory Complex in Loch Goil run by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), a technical arm of the UK Ministry of Defence. Submarine tests are conducted regularly at the facilities in Loch Goil and the latest Trident sub, HMS Vengeance has still to undergo acoustic trials.
TP 2000 Contacts: David Mackenzie on 01324 880744 or mob. 07775711054 Jane Tallents on 01436 679194
Full report from prison by Ellen Moxley, HI-8 footage and stills available
TP 2000 Website: http://www.gn.apc.org/tp2000/
For information on "Maytime" see DERA Website: http://www.dra.hmg.gb/dera.htm
Trident Ploughshares 2000 42-46 Bethel Street, Norwich, Norfolk NR2 1NR, UK tel + 44 (0) 1603 611953 - fax + 44 (0) 1603 666879 http://www.gn.apc.org/tp2000/ - Email : tp2000@gn.apc.org
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8. Greenpeace Protests in Ukraine
By Sergei Shargorodsky, Associated Press, June 17, 1999; 4:53 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990617/V000021-061799-idx.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Protesters from the environmental group Greenpeace rallied in front of the German Embassy on Thursday demanding that Germany refuse to finance new nuclear reactors in Ukraine.
The white-clad demonstrators held aloft a large banner that read, ``Save Energy! Don't build new Chernobyls!'' and distributed light bulbs they described as energy-saving.
It was the second Greenpeace demonstration in as many days in Ukraine. On Wednesday, about a dozen Greenpeace activists blocked a road leading to the Rivne nuclear plant in western Ukraine with buses and chained themselves to the vehicles.
The protests are linked to the upcoming weekend summit of the world's seven largest industrialized countries and Russia in Cologne, Germany, and debates in Germany about aid for Ukraine from those G-8 countries.
The energy-hungry and financially struggling Ukraine has been demanding G-8 loans to compensate for the planned closure of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident in 1986.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government decided he should seek to block the loans when he chairs the summit. Schroeder has committed Germany to phase out its own nuclear plants, and many lawmakers in his coalition oppose nuclear power on principle.
Greenpeace said in a statement that Schroeder may ignore the votes of his own coalition and instead fulfill a 1995 promise by the industrialized nations to supply aid to Ukraine to help it close Chernobyl. The former Soviet republic pledged to shut down the plant by 2000.
But Ukrainian officials later said they could not close the plant before receiving aid to complete new reactors at the Rivne and Khmelnitsky plants.
Anti-nuclear groups such as Greenpeace and environmental organizations in Ukraine say the West should finance energy-efficient systems rather than new nuclear reactors. Greenpeace campaigner Jan Rispens said his group proposes building a steam gas power station in Ukraine.
``Energy-efficient technologies are what Western countries should finance, not the nightmare technology of the past,'' Rispens said.
The two reactors, whose construction was halted after the 1991 Soviet collapse, are more than 80 percent ready and are of a more modern type than the one that exploded at Chernobyl. The cost of completing them has been estimated at $1.2 billion.
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EBRD makes grant to help close Ukraine's Chernobyl
01:36 p.m Jun 18, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
KIEV, June 18 (Reuters) - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said on Friday it had awarded the first hardware contract worth 69 million euros ($72 million) to help decommission Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant.
An EBRD statement faxed to Reuters said the contract was being funded through a grant from the Nuclear Safety Account administered by the bank.
The contract covers construction of an interim spent nuclear fuel facility, allowing storage of 3,000 tonnes of nuclear waste in dry and safe conditions, the statement said.
The French state company Framatom had won the contract, an EBRD official told Reuters.
The statement quoted Joachim Jahnke, EBRD vice-president for nuclear safety, as saying the contract was being funded in line with a memorandum of understanding signed between Ukraine and the Group of Seven leading industrial nations in 1995.
The G7 groups the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada and Italy.
Under the accord, Ukraine promised to close down the Chernobyl station in exchange for financial aid to complete two replacement reactors at Rivne and Khmelnitksa nuclear plants.
One of Chernobyl's four nuclear reactors exploded in April 1986, sending huge clouds of radioactive dust to neighbouring Belarus and Russia and much of Europe in the world's worst civil nuclear accident.
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G7 to send Schroeder to Kiev on shutting Chernobyl
05:02 p.m Jun 18, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
COLOGNE, Germany, June 18 (Reuters) - The Group of Seven rich countries welcomed on Friday Ukraine's commitment to shut Chernobyl but withheld money to help shut the disaster-hit nuclear reactor.
Instead, Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will travel to Kiev to try persuade the government to accept a non-nuclear alternative for its energy needs.
French President Jacques Chirac, an advocate of long-standing plans to replace Chernobyl's capacity by funding two new reactors, said he did not think demands from Schroeder's anti-nuclear coalition partners, the Greens, that Kiev should build gas-fired plants instead were ``realistic.''
He said he believed that after Schroeder's visit on July 7, the G7 would agree that it should stick to the original nuclear plan in order to meet its top priority -- shutting Chernobyl. Ukraine has said it will have to keep the site open if it cannot build two replacement reactors elsewhere.
Chernobyl was the site of the world's worst civil nuclear disaster in April 1986 when one of its four reactors exploded sending massive clouds of radioactive dust to neighbouring Belarus and Russia and much of Europe.
Closing the plant has been a matter of priority for the G7 and in 1995 they signed an agreement with Ukraine in which it promised to shut Chernobyl in exchange for aid to complete two replacement reactors at Rivne and Khmelnitksa nuclear plants.
The Cologne summit was due to agree $1.2 billion funding for the new reactors, but summit host Schroeder has met strong opposition from his Greens coalition partners. Germany was due to come up with around a third of the funds, but Bonn said this week the issue would now be delayed until after German-Ukrainian in Kiev.
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TEXT-G7 statement on nuclear safety, Ukraine
05:51 p.m Jun 18, 1999 Eastern http://www.dogpile.com - infoseek newswires - "nuclear plutonium uranium radioactiv???"
COLOGNE, Germany, June 18 (Reuters) - Following is the text of a statement on nuclear safety and Ukraine's Chernobyl plant by the Group of Seven industrial countries at a summit in Cologne on Friday.
-- We renew our commitment to the successful implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the G7 and Ukraine. We welcome Ukraine's renewed firm commitment to the closure of Chernobyl on schedule by the year 2000. Our overriding goal is the closure of the Chernobyl power plant by the agreed timetable.
-- We note that significant progress has been made in carrying out the Shelter Implementation Plan to secure the environmental safety of the sarcophagus covering the remains of the destroyed Chernobyl reactor. To date, contributions to the Chernobyl Shelter Fund total US$393 million, including US$50 million from Ukraine. We have agreed that the G7 will help ensure the continued financing and the progress in the work under the Shelter Implementation Plan. We call on concerned governments and private-sector donors to join us in this effort. To this end, we plan to hold a pledging conference before the next summit.
-- We reaffirm our commitment to assist Ukraine, within the context of the MoU, in mobilising funds for energy projects to help meet its power needs. To date, projects have been agreed totalling over US$746 million. In addition, in the field of nuclear safety US$485 million have been granted, not including the Shelter Implementation Plan. We look to the Government of Ukraine to accelerate the fundamental reforms in the energy sector, including improvements in cash collection and privatisation, to encourage financially viable investments in power generation and distribution and in energy efficiency. We commend the steady work that has allowed Ukraine, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and EURATOM to enter into the final phase of negotiations on loans to complete two reactors at Rivne and Khmelnitsky (1). We call on the parties to take the necessary steps to provide for an early agreement on loans for safe, cost-effective, and financially and environmentally sound projects.
(1) In this context, we take note of the fact that Chancellor Schroeder, during his visit to Ukraine on 8 and 9 July of this year, intends to consult with President Kuchma on non-nuclear alternatives to these projects.
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9. Call for full-scale uranium mining inquiry
Saturday 19 June, 1999 (8:55am CST) http://www.abc.net.au/news/state/nt/archive/metnt-19jun1999-2.htm
An environmental group has urged a Senate committee to call for a full-scale inquiry into uranium mining in the Northern Territory's Kakadu region.
The Territory Environment Centre was one of several groups to appear before the committee in Darwin this week as part of its inquiry into the approvals process for the Jabiluka mine.
The centre's coordinator, Mark Wakeham, says it is time for the whole issue of uranium mining to be revisited.
"There's been nearly 20 years of experience of a uranium mine in Kakadu," he said.
"There's been environmental impacts, there's been social impacts.
"The wealth which was promised from Ranger has failed to materialise. There's been little benefit from the Australian community at large as a result of Ranger and we've seen a whole approvals process for Jabiluka which has been flawed."
The Senate committee is due to report at the end of this month.
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Australia paying for fast-tracked Jabiluka decision
Tuesday 15 June, 1999 (7:41pm CST) http://www.abc.net.au/news/state/nt/archive/metnt-15jun1999-10.htm
The Federal Shadow Environment Minister, Nick Bolkus, says the Jabiluka uranium mine should not have been given federal approval before indigenous and environmental issues were resolved.
Senator Bolkus is a member of a Senate committee that visited the partially-constructed Jabiluka mine as part of an inquiry into the process that has allowed it to go ahead.
The mining company, Energy Resources of Australia, has almost finished building the mine shaft but it is still trying to get agreement from traditional owners over where the uranium is milled.
Senator Bolkus says the issues surrounding the mine should have been resolved before construction began.
"If the process had been conducted properly before the 1998 election then we wouldn't be playing catch-up with environmental issues now," he said.
"The 1998 decision to grant approval was fast-tracked, it was dodgy, and I think Australia is paying the price for it now both in terms of our scrutiny here but also the rest of the world looking at how we conduct our business."
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10. Native Americans In US & Canada Denounce Toxic Legacy
By Danielle Knight, EcoNet June 14, 1999 http://www.econet.apc.org/igc/en/hl/9906171519/hl5.html
LAGUNA, New Mexico, Jun 14 (IPS) - Native Americans in the United States and Canada have inherited a grim legacy of increased rates of cancer and a ruined environment because of uranium mining on tribal homelands.
Indigenous communities met on the Laguna Indian Rservation here last week for the 10th annual conference of the Indigenous Environment Network against the backdrop of increased mining activities for uranium used for nuclear reactors - and weapons.
While one of the poorest areas in the county, the region surrounding the reservation in the western part of the state of New Mexico is one of the richest in uranium ore deposits.
One of the largest open-pit uranium mines in the world, known as Jackpile operated near a small Laguna town between 1953 and 1982. Originally owned by a small company known as Anaconda, Jackpile is now owned by Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO).
''They said the mine would make us rich but I'm still poor and almost everyone around me is dying of cancer and strange diseases,'' said Dorothy Purley, a woman dying of lymphoma cancer, who worked for Anaconda Jackpile for 10 years.
In the small town of Paguate, where Purley lives, an estimated 50 people who were miners died from cancer-related illnesses. An additional 20 people who lived downwind from the mine also died, she said.
Kathleen Tsosie, secretary of the Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining, an advocacy group based in the north eastern part of the state, told a similar story.
''There are a lot of Navajo widows who live alone,'' she said.
An estimated 350-400 members of the Navajo nations who were underground miners have died from diseases related to exposure to the radioactive uranium, according to Chris Shuey, an environmental health researcher with the Southwest Research and Information Center.
But not all Native Americans at the conference condemned the uranium mining.
''I would like to keep the uranium issue on the positive side,'' said Harry Early, governor of the Laguna Pueblo. ''The Jackpile mine provided employment for 800 people during its 30 years of existence and we don't know if the cancer has really been caused by uranium.''
John Redhouse of the Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum disagreed.
''The social costs and health impacts outweigh any jobs and money the goes to Laguna,'' he said. ''Whatever apparent benefits accrue do not necessarily go to the communities but to the multinational energy companies.''
Jackpile currently is undergoing a 48 million dollar reclamation programme - paid for by ARCO and conducted by the Laguna tribe - aimed at restoring the landscape to resemble the way it appeared before the exploitation began.
Many at the conference said the current reclamation effort was only partially completed and a lot of the uranium from the mine waste already had leached into the soil and water.
''Two tributaries near the mine and the Rio San Jose have already tested positive for radiation contamination,'' according to Manual Pino with the Laguna-Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment. ''It's one of the United States' best kept secrets.''
Purley, who lived less than 1,000 meters from Jackpile said she was not happy with progress of the reclamation project. ''Every time the rain falls there is still this strange smell by the mine.''
Many other abandoned mines also continued to leach contaminants slowly into surrounding areas, Pino added. ''In the state of Arizona alone more than 1,300 uranium mines have not been reclaimed,'' he said.
Cindy Gilday of the Dene tribe from the harsh Northwest Territories of Canada said that uranium mining on their land in the 1940s devastated her hometown of Deline, located near Great Bear Lake - one of the largest on the continent.
During World War II, the Canadian government hired young Dene men to carry uranium in sacks from the mines onto barges. The men had no knowledge of the toxic qualities of their loads.
''Now Deline is a village of widows with most of the men having died in the 1970s and 1980s from cancer,'' said Gilday. ''It was the first time people at Great Bear Lake started to die of lung, bone, stomach, brain and skin cancer.''
The early deaths of men in the community had been especially devastating to Dene culture. ''This is so important because the elder men are the traditional spiritual and moral advisors in the community,'' she said.
''What strikes me is that the stories from New Mexico, Arizona and Canada are so similar...we are all dying of the same diseases.''
In the United States, Congress attempted to amend past wrongs by passing the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act which would pay underground mine workers who suffered negative health impacts. But many participants at the conference said the Act did not go far enough in compensating other types of mine workers or family members.
''Anybody who has suffered through exposure to radioactive uranium should be compensated,'' said Pino.
Lawmakers from south-western states have proposed bills to amend the act and include people who worked above ground in the mines and also those who worked in the uranium processing mills.
But new uranium projects using new technology continued to threaten native communities in the southwestern United States, said Tsosie. In her town of Crownpoint, New Mexico, Hydro Resources Inc. planned to leach uranium from the groundwater in three places in the Northwestern part of the state.
The underground leach mining process is different from traditional open-pit mines since it occurs in the groundwater itself when chemicals are injected into the aquifer to dissolve the ore and is then pumped out.
''How can this not possible threaten our water supply,'' said Tsosie. ''And many of our sacred sites are near these wells.''
Tsosie and others have brought their case to Washington, where in hearings before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they have tried to revoke the company's permit to mine in the area and a ruling was expected next month.
Indigenous groups in other regions of the world, also are fighting proposed mines on their lands. Australian, aboriginal leaders are leading a national campaign against one of the world's largest uranium deposits - known as Jabiluka.
Located on land that is traditionally owned by the Mirrar indigenous people in the Northern Territory region of the country, the mine is surrounded by the country's largest national parklands.
Famous for its biological diversity, Kakadu Park is has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. ''The environment is part of us, so any damage to the land is damage to us,'' said Jacqui Katona, an Australian aboriginal woman, on of the leaders of the fight against the mine. (END/IPS/dk/mk/99).
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11. Iraq rejects British U.N. proposal
USA Today (World), June 20, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq will not accept a British proposal for a conditional suspension of U.N. sanctions because it does not provide for their "immediate lifting," a senior official of the ruling Baath Party said in remarks published Friday. "The circulation by both Britain and America of vicious plans at the (U.N.) Security Council is meant to prolong the unfair embargo on Iraq," Abdulghani Abdulghafur told a delegation of Russian legislators in Baghdad. Britain and the Netherlands have proposed that the sanctions be suspended once Iraq has answered the outstanding questions about its weapons of mass destruction. The proposal would also require Baghdad to adhere to strict financial controls to prevent its re-acquisition of such weapons. The sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
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Iraq Rejects British Sanctions Plan
6:44 p.m. EDT June 19, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Iraq-UN.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq will not accept a proposal for conditional suspension of U.N. sanctions because it wants them lifted immediately, a senior official of the ruling party said in remarks published Friday.
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12. Japan Admits Destroyer Mistake
By The Associated Press, June 18, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Japan-Live-Fire.html
TOKYO (AP) -- A Japanese destroyer mistakenly fired live ammunition into a residential area, and commanders waited four months to report it, Defense Agency officials said today.
A Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer anchored at the port of Maizuru in Kyoto Prefecture, 230 miles southwest of Tokyo, fired the rounds Feb. 18 during a routine equipment test, agency spokesman Shunichi Hatano said.
The shells traveled over a residential area and are believed to have landed in a mountainous area six miles away, Hatano said.
No damage or injuries were reported, and the spent cartridges have not been found, he said.
Hatano said an unidentified 39-year-old officer placed the two live shells among blanks to be fired during the test.
Agency officials are investigating why the officer used live shells, as well as why fleet officials waited until Thursday to report the live firing to senior officers, Hatano said.
The officer told agency officials he did not know how to dispose of the live shells, which were left over from a December drill, Hatano said.
He had earlier told a superior officer that all of the live shells used during the December drill had been fired, he said.
``The delay in the accident report is regretful,'' Defense Agency Director General Hosei Norota was quoted as saying by Kyodo News agency.
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Internet use on the rise in Japan
USA Today (World), June 20, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm TOKYO - Internet use and electronic commerce is taking off in Japan, the government said Friday. A total of 11% of Japanese households are online, and electronic commerce doubled in the last fiscal year to more than $1.4 billion. The Telecommunications Ministry's report found that Internet use was spreading in Japan at a faster rate than the proliferation of computers and cellular phones, taking only five years to reach 10% of the nation's households. It took 13 years for computers and 15 years for cellular phones to reach the same rate, the report said. But the price for connection in Japan is far more than in the U.S. Telephone charges for Internet use in Tokyo are about three times those in New York, the report said.
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Message: 11 Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:41:57 -0400
Subject: NucNews-6 6/20/99 - Spies; Rocky Flats
27. Prince of Shadows
By Jeff Stein Special to The Washington Post Sunday, June 20, 1999; Page X02 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/007l-062099-idx.html
ALLEN DULLES Master of Spies By James Srodes Regnery. 624 pp. $34.95 Reviewed by Jeff Stein
Talk about dead white men. They are nearly all gone now, the hard-eyed, tweedy bunch who ran the Central Intelligence Agency in its legendary glory days, when a misjudgment in Berlin could lead to nuclear war, not just the mistaken bombing of a Chinese embassy.
Allen Dulles was the best of them all, the great white case officer whose World War II spying exploits and family connections (his grandfather was briefly President Benjamin Harrison's secretary of state; his brother John Foster was Eisenhower's) made him the inevitable choice to run the fledgling CIA. A witty, pipe-smoking raconteur -- one part Wilsonian idealist, one part cold-hearted spy -- Dulles was a legend in his own time, a prize catch at Georgetown dinner parties, where once upon a time liberal Democrats thrilled to the presence of a CIA man.
This, in other words, is yet another story of a supposedly sparkling era that is much in vogue with aging yuppies. But it's also one that now has been told many times, unfortunately for James Srodes, a veteran Washington writer and co-author of the bestselling Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. De Lorean.
Yet respect must be paid. Our fathers really did hold the fate of the world in their hands for the middle third of the century, much more than is sometimes realized, as Dulles was wont to say himself. What if the Nazis had invaded Britain instead of getting bogged down in Russia? he'd ask visitors. The unanswerable question is how much the Allies owed to Hitler's blunders, and how much to American resources and brilliance. By almost all realistic accounts, however, the secret agents of the American OSS, or Office of Special Services, no matter how bold or courageous, had little effect on the war's outcome.
Dulles was a first-rate agent handler, as Srodes dutifully recounts. After he was posted to Switzerland, his most important agent was a clerk in the German Foreign Ministry, who showed up after being rebuffed by the British and began feeding Dulles German cables, some 1,200 in all. There was a moral in this tale, Dulles would tell his young charges in later years. Back in 1917, when he was a young diplomat in Switzerland, he'd turned away a young Russian by the name of V.I. Lenin, who promptly persuaded the Germans to send him to Russia. The rest, as they say, is history.
Dulles also conspired in plots to kill Hitler or induce a Nazi surrender, all of which, of course, came to nought. He fared better as President Eisenhower's chief instrument for overthrowing governments or otherwise secretly swaying events around the world. "He had this ability to make cold-blooded assessments while remaining warm and gracious that was quite remarkable," James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who worked as an intelligence analyst under Dulles, told Srodes. Ever the operator, Dulles also never gave up gathering his own information, either from his wide circle of friends outside the government or from young agents just in from the field, whom he'd often summon to his office for a first-hand briefing. Thus, at the White House one day, Dulles passed along his agency's analysis that Poland was firmly in the grip of Moscow, then added, according to Billington, "They may be right, but . . . the people I have talked to recently tell me it is decidedly more volatile than this estimate suggests. Poland could blow up before Hungary." "And it did," Billington said.
Unlike today, the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s was truly a bipartisan affair. Thus Dulles was able to recruit liberals like the journalist Tom Braden to engage left-wing artists, writers, intellectuals and union leaders in the anti-communist cause, especially in Europe. He cut through red tape to get the U-2 spy plane in the air. But the agency was on less firm footing elsewhere in the world. The Korean War caught the CIA by surprise. Despite early successes in overthrowing socialist regimes in Iran and Guatemala in 1954, it failed miserably in Indonesia, Tibet, Vietnam and, of course, Cuba. The CIA was lulled by its easy coup d'etat in Iran, according to Kim Roosevelt, the agent who just about single-handedly pulled it off, into thinking that it could apply covert action like a kit: You have to have the support of the people, he often lectured, to topple a dictator.
The Bay of Pigs was Waterloo for Dulles, "undoubtedly the greatest U.S. professional intelligence officer of his time," in the estimate of a top Eisenhower aide. But like an aging ball player, Dulles had hung on too long. The failed invasion cost him his job. Not even enlisting in plots to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders, which began under Eisenhower, could save him.
"I probably made a mistake in keeping Dulles on," Kennedy rued, according to his biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "Dulles is a legendary figure, and it's hard to operate with legendary figures." It's even harder, we're finding out, when there aren't any legends left at all.
Jeff Stein, a U.S. Army intelligence case officer in Vietnam and author of "A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War," covers national security issues for the online magazine Salon.
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28. Az. Sen. Calls for Energy Overhaul
By H. Josef Hebert Associated Press Writer Saturday, June 19, 1999; 11:22 a.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990619/V000270-061999-idx.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional Republicans pressed their case Saturday for a reorganization of the Energy Department in response to the continuing controversy over the safeguarding of America's nuclear secrets.
Using the weekly GOP radio address, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., accused the Clinton administration of taking ``half measures'' in dealing with security at nuclear weapons laboratories.
Kyl is one of three GOP senators who have proposed putting nuclear weapons programs under a largely autonomous agency within the Energy Department -- an idea also urged this week by a panel of intelligence experts advising the president.
Nevertheless, such a reorganization is being staunchly resisted by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who said he would recommend that the president veto any legislation creating such an agency. It's ``not good logic'' to insulate the nuclear weapons programs within a new ``fiefdom'' in the department, Richardson told reporters.
But Kyl noted that a special panel of the president's own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board this week, after a 90-day review of security at the Energy Department, recommended just such an agency, expressing doubt that without it, long-lasting security reforms would be possible.
The panel, headed by former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, said the department has had a ``cavalier attitude'' about security for decades. It said while Richardson's moves to improve security were in the right direction, the department's ``bureaucracy is quite capable of undoing (these) reforms.''
``We call upon the administration to cooperate with us, not to be satisfied with half measures,'' said Kyl in the Republican Party's weekly radio broadcast. ``Since our proposal is exactly what the president' own panel now has recommended, we hope that he and his secretary of energy will work with us to get our bill passed quickly.''
Richardson argues that creation of a ``new fiefdom'' within the department would hinder the beefed up, more centralized security and counterintelligence programs he has put in place. Earlier in the week he announced appointment of a four-star Air Force general as the department's first ``security czar'' who will reported directly to him.
Questions about security at nuclear weapons facilities erupted in March as details from a congressional investigation began to surface, describing the loss of nuclear secrets to China in the 1980s and into the '90s.
The controversy intensified after Richardson directed the firing of a scientists at the Los Alamos weapons lab in early March after he had been under investigation for possible espionage since 1996.
The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was fired for security violations, but has not been charged with any crime. Through his lawyer he has vehemently denied giving nuclear secrets to anyone. The FBI investigation on the Lee case continues.
And the issue is not likely to go away soon. On Tuesday, four Senate committees will meet in joint session to hear Rudman describe his proposal for Energy Department reorganization. Richardson also is scheduled to testify.
The House Commerce Committee also has planned a hearing on the Rudman report this week.
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Energy Secretary against Kyl's proposal USA Today, June 20, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncssat01.htm
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Nuclear Security Blanket Compromise May Be Near on New Agency to Oversee Atomic Arms
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, June 20, 1999; Page A03 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-06/20/229l-062099-idx.html
In the aftermath of allegations of Chinese espionage, the Department of Energy and its congressional critics are moving toward a compromise: creating a new agency within the department to oversee the production of America's nuclear weapons.
The proposed reorganization is aimed not only at reducing the vulnerability to spying but also at clarifying lines of authority and making more efficient the $6 billion-a-year complex of weapons laboratories, reactors and assembly plants that stretch from coast to coast, employ more than 30,000 people and are vital to the nation's security.
The weapons complex, once part of the now dissolved Atomic Energy Commission, was given to the new Energy Department in 1977 because neither the Carter administration nor Congress wanted nuclear arms production to be controlled by the Pentagon.
But the fit between the highly secretive weapons programs and the rest of the department--which is nonmilitary science aimed at energy and environmental issues--has never been entirely comfortable. Calls for change, which have been growing over the past decade, were given new force since a bipartisan committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) released a three-volume report last month alleging Chinese spies stole information on America's most advanced nuclear warheads from U.S. national laboratories.
Last week, a presidential panel headed by former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) reviewed the evidence and challenged some of the Cox committee's "worst case" assumptions about the extent of Chinese espionage. But the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board also lambasted the Department of Energy for "organizational disarray, managerial neglect and a culture of arrogance" that had "conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to happen." The Rudman panel suggested two possibilities: turning the nuclear complex into a semiautonomous agency inside the Energy Department, or stripping the department of responsibility for nuclear weapons.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson initially resisted both options. First, he attempted to tackle the security concerns by bringing in a former top FBI supervisor, Edward J. Curran, to run the department's counterintelligence operation. Then, he named retired four-star Gen. Eugene E. Habiger to be the department's "security czar."
Last week, however, Richardson acknowledged that his aides were "trying to merge our differences" with Cox, Rudman and other critics. "I don't think we are that far apart," Richardson said in an interview Friday. "We all want accountability, clear lines of authority, centralization and security."
The emerging compromise may be outlined on Tuesday when Rudman is to testify before an unprecedented joint meeting of the Senate committees on commerce, armed services and energy.
"All signs point to reorganization," said Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.). Domenici, whose state is home to two major nuclear weapons laboratories, has joined Sens. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) in proposing to create a Nuclear Security Administration within the Energy Department.
Domenici, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, said he had been working for 12 years to get rid of the cumbersome bureaucratic structure that surrounds the national laboratories.
Reflecting this change in emphasis, Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), vice chairman of the intelligence panel, said that the primary concern on Capitol Hill is shifting "from a potential security problem [at the Energy Department] to how to structure the nuclear weapons program."
Part of what drives the restructuring is the managerial complexity of the nuclear weapons programs. The sites are run by companies and universities. Some of them do work for weapons and nonweapons programs. They report both to regional authorities as well as Energy Department headquarters. And at headquarters the sites report to program authorities as well as environmental, safety and security divisions.
One concern among DOE officials is that if the three main national laboratories--Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia--focus on weapons, it could endanger the other, wide-ranging work that the labs now do. "We could lose nonmilitary funding," said one senior energy official, "and that $100 million support for key pure science could cut the labs' links to universities. That could harm recruitment of scientists and in the end hurt the defense programs."
Along with the three labs, which spend about $1 billion each per year, the complex also contains nuclear weapons facilities at Amarillo, Tex., and Kansas City, Mo.; nuclear materials facilities at Savannah River, S.C., and Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and the Nevada Test Site.
Under a proposal by Rudman that Domenici and his colleagues appear likely to approve, the semiautonomous agency also would include the Energy Department's $700 million nonproliferation and arms control program, which helps to dismantle former Soviet nuclear arms; the $200 million fissile material disposition program, which is cutting back on weapons building materials such as plutonium and enriched uranium; and the $700 million nuclear reactor program for U.S. Navy vessels.
Although the United States no longer produces new nuclear weapons, the complex continues to research and develop new ways to keep operational the country's aging stockpile of nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and the Nevada Test Site support the so-called stockpile stewardship program that assures the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons without testing, which is banned by international treaty. Using supercomputers and subcritical nuclear devices--those that do not produce an explosion--scientists "divide the physics of the explosive sequence into each of its parts and analyze each separately," Victor H. Reis, assistant secretary of energy for defense programs, recently told Congress.
At Los Alamos, the ability to produce primary nuclear weapons explosives is being reestablished, something the complex has not been able to do since the plant at Rocky Flats, Colo., was closed in 1989. The weapons complex is performing major refurbishment of several weapon types, giving extended service to older nuclear bombs and the W-87 warhead, which is used on the MX intercontinental ballistic missile.
The first W-87s were delivered to the Air Force last month.
At Sandia National Laboratories, the complex maintains what Reis called "a robust and world-class microelectronics capability." Sandia works on technologies that would allow for "miniaturizing weapon components and improving their reliability," Reis said.
At the Savannah River Site, preparations are underway to produce tritium, a radioactive gas that will be needed to replace older tritium elements that are slowly deteriorating. Uranium machining, recycling and storage takes place at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant.
At the plant in Amarillo, employees are dismantling old warheads and fabricating new high explosive components for rebuilt ones.
The Kansas city plant produces electrooptical devices, plastic and machined parts for nuclear and nonnuclear weapons, and defense-related equipment. The Kansas City plant also has been qualified to produce tritium gas reservoirs for warheads, and Sandia will soon have a production facility for neutron generators for refurbished warheads.
KEY SITES IN THE U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS COMPLEX:
Site: Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M. Managed by: University of California Employees: 6,900 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.3 billion Major weapons activities: Stockpile stewardship and maintenance, arms control, waste management.
Site: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Calif. Managed by: University of California Employees: 6,400 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.1 billion Major weapons activities: Stockpile stewardship and maintenance, arms control, waste management.
Site: Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque Managed by: Sandia Corp., (Lockheed Martin) Employees: 7,500 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.1 billion Major weapons activities: Weapons design, arms control, waste management.
Site: Kansas City Plant Managed by: Allied Signal Corp. Employees: 3,200 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $291 million
Major weapons activities: Weapons construction. Site: Pantex Plant, Amarillo, Tex. Managed by: Mason Hanger-Silas Mason Co. Employees: 2,900 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $269 million
Major weapons activities: Weapons assembly, dismantling, disposal. Site: Nevada Test Site Las Vegas and Nye County, Nev Managed by: Bechtel Nevada, Inc. Employees: 2,300 Fiscal 2000 budget request: $650 million
Major weapons activities: Stockpile stewardship and maintenance, nuclear testing, disposal. Site: Savannah River Site, Aiken, S.C. Managed by: Westinghouse Savannah River Co. Employees: 1,400 in defense programs Fiscal 2000 budget request: $1.5 billion
Major weapons activities: Nuclear materials production. Site: Y-12 Plant, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tenn. Managed by: Lockheed Martin Energy Systems Employees: 5,500 in Y-12 defense programs Fiscal 2000 budget request: $740 million Major weapons activities: Nuclear materials production, arms control, disposal.
SOURCE: Energy Department
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Panel's advice solid on nuclear secrets
Thursday, June 17,1999, San Antonio Express-News http://www.expressnews.com/pantheon/editorial/editorials/1804bnuke1ed0618nz. shtml
Clinton administration officials would do themselves and the nation good by dropping their resistance to recommendations that call for giving nuclear weapons programs independence from the Energy Department.
Headed by former Sen. Warren Rudman, the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board reported that the Energy Department can't handle the job.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson claims the internal changes he is pushing will be enough, but the advisory panel is right. Evidence collected by this group and congressional committees paints a picture of a bureaucracy too slow to react to security threats.
For example, the Washington Post reported that DOE officials sold blueprints for nuclear processing equipment to a salvage dealer without realizing that they could be used by enemies, terrorists or kooks to make weapons.
And one advisory board official anonymously told CNN that so many sources leaked secrets from the nuclear weapons program that Los Alamos laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee, the target of an FBI probe of nuclear secrets given to the Chinese government, will be almost impossible to prosecute.
The advisers recommended that the nuclear weapons program be managed by an autonomous agency within DOE or be placed in an independent agency.
Scientific research on nuclear weapons must be protected, and the bureaucratic maze at the Energy Department has worked against effectively doing that.
A focused agency that would handle nuclear weapons research, and the security to protect it, makes sense.
Richardson is an honorable man who inherited the mess, but he should drop efforts to protect the department's turf and work with congressional reformers on crafting a new method for ensuring that U.S. nuclear secrets are protected.
Too much is at stake to risk leaving this task embedded in the bureaucratic morass that allowed secrets to be stolen prodigiously during three presidential administrations.
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29. Removal of Flats waste begins 1st truck begins trek for New Mexico burial, helping set stage for plant's closure in 2006
By Berny Morson Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer June 16, 1999 http://insidedenver.com/news/0616wipp0.shtml
JEFFERSON COUNTY -- A truck carrying the first shipment of waste from Rocky Flats to a burial site in New Mexico pulled slowly out of the defunct nuclear weapons plant Tuesday evening.
The historic voyage brings the plant that much closer to meeting the goal of shutting down by 2006.
The truck drove onto Colorado 93 amid cries of "shame, shame" from about 75 protesters who say burying the waste poses a hazard to future generations.
But leaders from surrounding towns turned out in support of the shipments, believing the Denver area will be safer.
"This is the day we've been waiting for for 20 years," said Mary Harlow, the Westminster Rocky Flats coordinator.
Rocky Flats assistant manager Joe Legare said getting rid of waste stored at the plant is essential if the plant is to close. About 12,000 barrels are kept in buildings and tents as workers demolish the buildings where America's Cold War arsenal was manufactured.
"If we're unable to ship this waste off site, that means we store it safely on site," Legare said. "That takes away precious resources from the closure mission."
The truck left the plant accompanied by a half-dozen State Patrol cars. But most had peeled off by the time the truck passed through Denver.
The 18-hour journey will end today near Carlsbad.
The 15-ton Kenworth tractor and custom-built flatbed trailer was loaded with 26 barrels containing the graphite molds used to fashion nuclear bomb parts from radioactive plutonium.
As many as 2,000 loads will make the trip to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, near Carlsbad, where the contaminated material will be buried a half-mile beneath the desert in a prehistoric salt bed.
Most shipments will contain items such as contaminated tools and clothing or building rubble. Heavy-duty material, such as pure weapons-grade plutonium, will go to the Energy Department facility in South Carolina.
Shipments will leave for New Mexico at a rate of one a week at first, but will increase to as many as 15 per week in about two years, Legare said.
Earlier in the day, the truck passed a safety check by the Colorado State Patrol.
"The vehicle can have no defects before it is allowed to leave," said State Patrol techician Dave McBride.
Protesters Tuesday said they are not convinced the shipments are safe for people living along the route. But McBride said the nuclear waste trucks are safer than tankers that bring gasoline to filling stations.
WIPP drivers have extensive training, and the waste canisters have been subjected to grueling tests to ensure they will not puncture, he said.
An accident involving a WIPP truck would not close a highway longer than an accident involving other kinds of hazardous material, McBride said.
Two drivers will take turns piloting the truck on a route that takes them down Interstate 25 to a point near Santa Fe, where they will turn onto U.S. 285 for the rest of the trip to Carlsbad.
The team selected for the first run, Michael Verranault and Greg Grimm, both of Carlsbad, have spotless driving records.
Verranault has been driving trucks for more than 30 years. He has never had a ticket while driving commercially, but admits to a "minor moving offense" in his personal vehicle in 1975.
Grimm has been driving trucks for 20 years without a ticket.
They said they're not nervous about hauling nuclear waste.
"We know what we're doing, and we have top-rated equipment," Verranault said.
The drivers will stop every two hours or 100 miles to inspect the truck. They may not travel faster than 65 mph.
The truck must pull over and park in the event of extreme weather.
"If it's not safe, we're not going," Verranault said.
Grimm said public interest in the WIPP shipments will quickly die down.
"After the first couple of shipments, it will just be another truck going down the road," he said.
Staff writer Tillie Fong contributed to this report.