-------- Y2K
The Y2k World Atomic Safety Holiday
Press Briefing by nuclear experts on meltdown risks
C-Span Tuesday --- December 21, 1999
To subscribe to this email service,
go to http://www.c-span.org/guide/alert.htm.
(includes Jim Riccio, Critical Mass Energy Project, Mary Beth Brangan, Y2K WASH, Paul Gunter (Nuclear Information and Resource Service) and a resident of Tokaimura, Japan, who will bring some of the 80,000 signatures gathered in Japan calling for a temporary shutdown of nuclear plants prior to 1/1/2000.
--
Statement of Mary Beth Brangan at Y2K WASH News Conference
National Press Club, Washington, D.C. Tuesday, December 21, 1999
WORLD ATOMIC SAFETY HOLIDAY www.y2kwash.org 415-868-1900 - y2kwash@y2kwash.org
Thank you for being with us here today to talk about what could possibly be the most important decisions relative to Y2K and public safety.
The World Atomic Safety Holiday Campaign is an international alliance of concerned citizens, nuclear experts and over fifty organizations from many countries working together to maximize safety at nuclear facilities which are all threatened by problems with the Y2K bug.
We have realized the unique challenge that the Year 2000 computer problem poses to our vast systems of interconnected infrastructure, such as electricity and telecommunications, transportation and supply lines.
We come together in a spirit of cooperation and mutual concern, with compassion for those in authority and positions of industrial responsibility. For this is a totally unique and unpredictable challenge - its global scope complex beyond calculation due to our interconnectedness in every sector.
We have gathered research from the U.S. General Accounting Office, the U.S. Senate Y2K Committee reports, the hearings by Rep. Stephen Horn, State Dept. reports, Commerce Department reports, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others. We know from the sheer number of embedded chips and systems alone, which have been estimated at between 30 - 75 billion, that even if only a small percentage have problems, the number is still in the millions.
Because many of these are for instance, underwater, as in oil drilling platforms, or underground in piping systems, or deep inside other complex systems of systems and because any repairs, if an aberrant chip is found, must be made to harmonize with the systems with which it interacts, the task of fully "fixing" the problem was never really possible, given the time, the number of qualified technicians, and the resources available.
Also, because of the millions and millions of these potentially vulnerable chips, the probability that malfunctions will occur is much larger than the probability of having no problems.
It is with this understanding that so many sectors are implementing the precautionary principle-the well-respected policy-making tool which holds that, if safety is uncertain, don't proceed - and are temporarily shutting down for the New Year's holiday weekend, when there will be a peak of incidents due to computer malfunctions. However, we know that, as Senator Bennett (R-Utah), Co-Chair of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problems has stated, we can expect the problems to be chronic for an indefinite period to come.
I'm going to list some of the examples of the sectors and industries which are taking a safety holiday - adopting the precautionary principle for the New Year's weekend.
[insert closure list]* (*provided upon request) to y2kwash@y2kwash.org
With all these sectors and industries implementing the precautionary principle, we wonder why is it that the nuclear industry - the most dangerous of all - is not?
On November 18, 1999, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution which joins the World Atomic Safety Holiday Campaign, in our safety recommendations for countries with nuclear facilities.
With only ten days until the rollover to January 1, we are calling on President Clinton to take strong leadership along with those in the nuclear industry, to employ the precautionary principle to nuclear technology, which, when accidents occur, effects are global and deadly consequences are virtually forever.
The World Atomic Safety Holiday Campaign is calling for:
• Take nuclear weapons off high alert
• Shut down nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities for the holiday weekend
• Bolster the back-up power generators and increase the available fuel supply
Finally, I want to extend our gratitude to all in the nuclear industry who are working so hard to prevent accidents during this extra hazardous time. Our blessings and prayers are with you.
---
Re: Y2K Actions Tuesday 12/21, Friday 12/31 in D.C.
To: NucNews <prop1@prop1.org> From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>
Friends of the Earth Australia (all of us) would like to express our solidarity with the event in Lafayette Park, on nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and Y2K.
We wish you every success.
So far, de-alerting of nuclear weapons has been called for by the Canberra Commission in 1996, by the Tokyo Forum, by two resolutions passed by massive majorities in the United Nations General Assembly last year (1998), by the same two resolutions this year, by two resolutions passed unanimously and 'without opposition' in the Australian Senate and by a unanimous resolution in the European Parliament.
The European parliament also called for the same measures concerning reactor safety that were called for by the Y2K- WASH campaign, to be implemented at European and Eastern European nuclear plants.
These measures, both with respect to reactor safety and with respect to the de-alerting of nuclear weapons are nothing more than commonsense.
A monster sign-on letter, launched publicly on Aug 6th in Sydney, Adelaide, Auckland, San Francisco, New York, London, Moscow, Toronto, Tokyo and Costa Rica when it had 271 major world environment organisations and parliamentarians signed on to it, now has about 500 organisations signed on to it, and will be faxed a final time to Yeltsin and Clinton, Cohen and Sergeyev tomorrow and released a final time to media on Thursday.
A global fax campaign is also in progress.
There is no rational reason not to implement the reasonable and commonsense demands of the Y2K-WASH and De-Alert campaigns.
We wish you every success with the rally.
John Hallam
---
EU exective plans millennium bug monitoring centre
Tuesday December 21, 12:21 pm Eastern Time
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/991221/uo.html
BRUSSELS, Dec 21 (Reuters) - The European Commission said on Tuesday it would have experts in nuclear safety, financial markets and telecommunications working over the New Year to monitor any computer-related problems in the European Union arising from the millennium date change.
``This centre will form part of a greater pan-European network monitoring the Y2K situation around the year end,'' Commission spokesman Per Haugaard told the EU executive's daily news briefing.
A handful of officials with expertise in sensitive sectors would staff the centre continuously from 10 a.m. (0900 GMT) on December 31 to 3 a.m. (0200 GMT) on January 5, he said.
With many businesses not planning to open until January 4 to make sure they can cope with any problems, the centre would stay open until close of business on the U.S. West coast that day.
The centre would be an ``early warning point'' for handling potentially critical situations and also allow existing channels of cooperation to be activated in situations where any EU-wide responses were needed.
Haugaard said the centre did not plan to issue regular public information during the New Year period. That was the job of national monitoring centres in the EU, he said.
He noted most EU members planned to provide information via the World Bank-funded international Y2K centre in Washington DC (www.iy2kcc.org).
Haugaard said, however, the EU centre would publish one summary report on its own website (www.ispo.cec.be/y2keuro/year2000.htm) on January 3.
-------- terrorism
Justice blames Canada for terrorist's entry
Washington Times December 21, 1999 By Ben Barber
http://208.246.212.80/world/news3-19991221.htm
U.S. Justice Department officials yesterday said Canada's soft laws on political asylum opened a back door through which suspected terrorist Ahmed Ressam was able to enter the United States last week with bomb-making materials.
U.S. Justice Department officials yesterday said Canada's soft laws on political asylum opened a back door through which suspected terrorist Ahmed Ressam was able to enter the United States last week with bomb-making materials.
"We are concerned by the fact that Canada's laws do facilitate the entry into the United States of individuals who may pose a terrorist threat - even the Canadians recognize that," said a Justice Department official.
"This relates most directly to their refugee and asylum policies and their general policy of not detaining people who ask for refugee status - whereas in the United States they might be detained" said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Ressam is being held in Seattle by federal authorities after he was discovered carrying nitroglycerine, timers and other bomb-making materials in the trunk of a rented car he brought into Port Angeles, Wash., near Seattle, on a ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, last week.
Government officials yesterday told Rep. Norm Dicks, Washington Democrat, they are investigating at least one other border crossing involving an apparently fake identification and other "similar circumstances" to the attempted crossing in Port Angeles, said George Behan, Mr. Dicks' spokesman.
"They briefed [Mr. Dicks] and expressed the concern that the Port Angeles case may not be an isolated incident," Mr. Behan said.
Border Patrol officials yesterday said an Algerian citizen with a falsified Canadian passport along with a woman of unknown nationality were arrested at the northeastern Vermont border town of Beecher's Falls.
Mark Henry, assistant chief of the Border Patrol sector covering Vermont, said he knew of no link between the Washington case and the attempted entry in Vermont.
U.S. officials said Mr. Ressam is linked to the Osama bin Laden terror network, and police in Montreal, where he had been staying the past month, link him to the Armed Islamic Group of Algerian terrorists.
Mr. Ressam, an Algerian, entered Canada in 1994 and applied for asylum, said Hugette Shouldice, spokeswoman for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.
"In 1995, he failed to show up for a hearing and was detained," she said, speaking by telephone from Ottawa. But without knowledge of any terrorist connection, the court let him go free, requiring only that he report for regular monitoring, she said.
In May 1998, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but "we were unable to locate him," she said.
Canada's chief intelligence officer last year said that dozens of international terrorist groups were operating in the country in part because of the nation's lax immigration policies.
Canada's asylum system, which has largely allowed applicants to go free on parole during the average 13 months it takes to complete the application process, was criticized by an auditor general's report in 1997.
"Weaknesses pervade the entire process - a lack of coordination, integration, strategic direction and overall follow-up," the report said.
Ward Elcock, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told a parliamentary committee in June 1998 his agency was investigating 50 terrorist groups in Canada. Some had links to bombings at the World Trade Center in New York, in Israel, Egypt, India and Northern Ireland.
Canada's democratic principles, multiethnic society and policy of welcoming immigrants meant it "can be seen as a haven" for terrorists, Mr. Elcock said.
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Russ Bergeron said yesterday that INS officials posted in Victoria were suspicious of Mr. Ressam even before he boarded the ferry and they alerted authorities who tried to detain him when he landed in the United States.
Mr. Ressam fled on foot but was chased down and tackled six blocks from the ferry customs post.
Ever since the bombing of the World Trade Center by Middle Eastern Islamists, some of whom had been granted political asylum when they entered the United States, U.S. authorities have detained asylum seekers and tightened admittance standards, said Elisa Massimino, director of the Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Refugees.
"Ressam would certainly have been detained in the United States," she said.
The new rules are "Draconian" at times because airport decisions are made by officials with little training or information about people who may be returned to their country to face persecution, she said.
In comparison "Canadian law has been perceived to be generous on the merits granting asylum -they have a higher grant rate than the United States."
She noted that Mr. Ressam was never granted asylum, but that he was allowed to remain at large.
Media reports say Mr. Ressam could be linked with an Algerian crime gang based in Montreal that committed robberies and sold the goods for money sent to terrorist groups overseas.
---
Few Answers About Man Being Held in Bomb Case
New York Times December 21, 1999 By DAVID JOHNSTON http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/canadian-terrorist.html
Related Article
National Security Adviser Warns of Risk of Terrorism (Dec. 20, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/early/122099terror-rdp.html
Peering Into Unknown, U.S. Agents Monitor Millennium Trouble Spots Around World (Dec. 19, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/121999us-terrorism.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 -- Federal authorities have concluded that an Algerian man arrested with bomb components as he tried to enter Washington State last week from Canada represented a serious terrorist threat, but they are far from certain about the purpose or target of any possible attack.
As counterterrorism agents sifted through the background of the suspect, Ahmed Ressam, examining links to known Middle Eastern terror groups, President Clinton's national security adviser said today that there was no specific evidence, beyond the case of Mr. Ressam, that foreign nationals were plotting other terrorist acts in the United States.
The security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, said that Americans should be watchful as they prepared for New Year's activities, but that counterterrorism officials knew of no additional domestic threats. The State Department had previously cautioned Americans traveling overseas to be vigilant.
Separately, on Sunday evening, customs inspectors in Vermont detained a man and woman, one with false documents, who tried to enter from Canada.
The Associated Press reported that a Border Patrol official in Vermont, Mark Henry, said the man was Algerian and would be charged with having a false Canadian passport. Mr. Henry said the woman would be charged with trying to smuggle an illegal immigrant.
But law-enforcement officials in Washington would not confirm that information and said they were uncertain whether the incident in Vermont was in any way related to the arrest of Mr. Ressam.
Investigators are examining whether Mr. Ressam was associated with any known terrorist group, like the Islamic Armed Group. Officials said they did not know whether he belonged to the group or had been trained in improvised explosives.
Still, law-enforcement officials said they had determined that Mr. Ressam could have used the materials to construct a lethal explosive device and, on that basis, decided he was a serious potential threat.
Mr. Ressam, who was caught by a Customs Service inspector on Dec. 14 as he arrived on a car ferry at Port Angeles, Wash., was carrying in his vehicle materials that could be assembled into a crude but powerful bomb. The materials included more than 20 ounces of a nitroglycerin derivative, urea and other chemicals, and digital timing devices that could be used in a detonator.
Mr. Ressam appeared nervous when questioned by an inspector and tried to flee after the ferry arrived. He carried two driver's licenses, one under an apparently assumed name, officials said. He had a hotel reservation in Seattle for one night and a rental car contract with a return date of Dec. 16, indications, the officials said, that he was planning a short stay and might be acting only as an intermediary in a larger plot.
But beyond the potentially suspicious evidence, little is known about his intentions because Mr. Ressam, who is being held in jail, has declined to cooperate with the authorities.
American officials are relying on Canadian law-enforcement agencies to provide insight into Mr. Ressam, who lived in Canada until last week.
Mr. Ressam was believed to have been accompanied on the ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, for part of the trip to the United States by Karim Said Atmani, who Canadian officials say might have shared an apartment with Mr. Ressam in Montreal. Mr. Atmani is believed to have returned to Canada and left Mr. Ressam to complete the journey alone.
While Canadian authorities had said they had extradited Mr. Atmani to France after he allegedly participated in several bombings, including one in Paris in 1996, a French law-enforcement official said today that Mr. Atmani had not been extradited and that there was no information linking him to the bombing. The official said Canada had previously expelled Mr. Atmani to Bosnia.
The French official said Mr. Ressam and Mr. Atmani were both known to French intelligence and were connected to radical groups he described as gangster-terrorist organizations. But he said the French government had no information linking either man to the terrorist operations of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant who is blamed for the bombing of two American Embassies in Africa in August 1998.
A State Department spokesman said it was premature to determine whether Mr. Ressam belonged to a known extremist group.
"Obviously, they're looking into his motivation, his intentions, whether he had accomplices and whether he was part of a wider network and is affiliated with international terrorist groups," said the spokesman, James Foley.
---
As Fears Along Borders Increase, Two Are Arrested in Vermont
New York Times December 21, 1999 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/21border-arrest.html
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- A second Algerian allegedly carrying false identification has been arrested at a U.S. border checkpoint as the federal government tightens security at scores of entry points.
The Border Patrol said Monday that the man used a falsified Canadian passport at the tiny border station in Beecher Falls in Vermont's northeast corner. Also arrested Sunday evening was a Canadian woman, said Mark Henry, assistant chief of the Border Patrol sector covering Vermont.
He gave no details, but a clerk at the U.S. District Court in Burlington today identified the two as Bouabide Chamchi and Lucia Garofalo. The clerk could not provide ages for the two. They were jailed pending a court appearance this afternoon.
Henry said he expected the man to be charged with presenting false papers at a port of entry and the woman to be charged with attempting to smuggle an alien into the country.
"I don't know why they were here. It could be as simple as she's smuggling him into the United States," he said.
The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., reported today that the woman tried to cross from Canada into Pittsburg, N.H., last Wednesday. The woman was denied entrance, Noel Induni, agent in charge of Customs and Immigration in St. Albans, told the newspaper. Authorities today could not immediately say why she was turned down.
Last week, a man was arrested while trying to enter Port Angeles, Wash., on a ferry from Victoria, British Columbia. Authorities said Ahmed Ressam had nitroglycerin and other potential bomb-making materials in his car.
Vincent Illuzzi, the prosecutor for Vermont's Essex County, where the attempted entries were allegedly made, said he had been told there was no clear link between the Washington state and Vermont arrests.
The Customs Service said Monday it has transferred 300 employees to inspection duty to facilitate more frequent and thorough border checks for explosives in light of the incidents in Seattle and Vermont.
Customs spokesman Roger Maier said the additional employees will remain on inspection duty until the new year arrives, but he declined to say to which ports of entry they were sent.
Inspectors are on a "heightened state of awareness," said P.T. Wright, the Customs port director at the town of Nogales, on the Arizona-Mexico border.
"The same factors that key you onto a potential drug smuggler key you onto a potential terrorist: The story that doesn't quite match, the nervousness," Wright said. "They're trained to look for things that just don't fit the norm."
Meanwhile, Kevin Weeks, Michigan's U.S. Customs management director, said authorities there were adding more staff at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.
Farther west, authorities were beefing up security along the U.S.-Canada border from the northeastern tip of Minnesota to Montana. It has 28 land ports of entry, including some of the nation's most remote.
"We are on a state of heightened alert," said Dean Hove, deputy district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. "It's a matter of taking more time."
---
Embassy Row
Embassy fears attack
Washngton Times December 21, 1999 James Morrison
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-19991221.htm
Citing evidence of a planned terrorist attack, the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia has suspended most of its operations and will maintain only a skeletal staff until after the Christmas holidays.
"We have credible evidence indicating there is a terrorist threat to U.S. diplomatic installations, and we are acting on that information seriously and urgently," an embassy official told Agence France-Presse yesterday.
The latest threat comes a month after the embassy cut back its operations out of fear it was being targeted by terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden, whom the United States holds responsible for the 1998 attacks on two American embassies in Africa.
To contact James Morrison, call 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail (morris@twtmail.com)
---
U.S. Airport Security Tightened
AP 07:03 PM ET 12/21/99 By BARRY SCHWEID AP Diplomatic Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id= 2562761172-8e7
WASHINGTON (AP) _ Amid heightened concerns about the possibility of a holiday terrorist attack, security was ordered tightened Tuesday at American airports and the Pentagon said it was taking ``appropriate action'' to protect U.S. forces overseas.
White House spokesman Joe Lockhart reiterated a State Department warning that there was ``credible information'' about potential terrorist threats abroad, and that Americans should stay in touch with U.S. embassies or consulates.
``On the domestic front, we don't have anything specific to report,'' he said.
His comments aside, there was increased anxiety following last week's arrest of an Algerian who crossed into Washington state from Canada in a car carrying bomb-making materials.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said travelers should expect tightened security precautions at airports, including stricter enforcement of parking regulations.
The agency said it would make more use of devices to check airline passengers for small traces of explosives and additional bomb-sniffing dogs and uniformed police would patrol airports as the new year approaches.
At the Pentagon, spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the Defense Department last week sent to U.S. military commanders worldwide two advisories highlighting State Department cautions about terrorist threats against Americans abroad. The messages also provided ``other information'' relevant to the security of U.S. forces. Bacon would not be more specific, although he said no commanders abroad had requested additional equipment or other assets to increase security on their bases.
Asked specifically if the Pentagon had taken any new precautions or put any additional military assets on standby, Bacon said only, ``We're taking appropriate action.''
Also Tuesday, Federal Election Commission employees in Washington were told to evacuate their building shortly after 5 p.m. because of a threat directed against the FBI building across the street, FEC spokeswoman Sharon Snyder said. The FBI denied there was a problem.
The U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, was closed Friday over concern it might be targeted by terrorists, the State Department's deputy spokesman, James B. Foley, said Tuesday.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, CIA Director George Tenet, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and several other senior U.S. officials met for two hours Monday at the White House to consider issuing new public warnings about the potential for yearend terrorist attacks here and abroad.
Various statements were drafted for their review, but none was approved, a senior government official told The Associated Press.
The primary causes of concern are the travel of some suspected terrorists from one country to another, and reports that a terrorist group linked to exiled Saudi militant Osama bin Laden may be planning attacks, said another official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But there is no evidence of a specific threat at this point, he said.
Last week, Jordanian authorities announced the arrest of 13 members of the terrorist group linked to bin Laden and said they were planning attacks against Americans, Israelis and other targets.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, long accused by the United States of supporting terrorism, said Tuesday he had no knowledge of imminent danger to Americans, but added, ``The U.S. government is hated. All the people in the world are against it, therefore there is a threat.''
In an interview from Tripoli on CBS' ``The Early Show,'' Gadhafi said, ``I hope it will not happen in this new year. I have no knowledge about this.''
In response, Foley said that enemies of free and open market democracies ``see in the United States the opposite of what most of the world sees in the United States. They see the U.S. as the beacon of a kind of freedom and respect for human rights that they oppose.''
Meanwhile, U.S. Border Patrol officers said they had arrested two people Sunday at a border station in Beecher Falls, Vt.. One was an Algerian national with a falsified Canadian passport; the other was a Canadian woman. A clerk at the U.S. District Court in Burlington identified them as Bouabide Chamchi and Lucia Garofalo.
Mark Henry, assistant chief of the Border Patrol sector covering Vermont, said he knew of no link between the Washington state incident and the attempted entry in Vermont.
Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly said he was putting an extra 300 inspectors on duty at various points of entry, with particular attention to ``remote ports.''
Some 460 million people enter the United States each year though 301 points of entry.
Carol Jenifer, district director for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Detroit, said more ``secondary inspections'' _ asking a driver to pull off to the side of the road _ would be performed if there were indications a driver may not be qualified to enter the United States.
---
Car May Have Traces of Explosives
05:52 PM ET 12/21/99 By WILSON RING Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2562760375-ccb
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) _ Dogs sniffed out traces of what could be explosives in the car that carried an Algerian man arrested at a tiny border station in Vermont, federal agents said Tuesday. But searches of the car turned up nothing more.
The arrest of the man, days after another Algerian was arrested in Washington state on charges of carrying explosives, came at a time of heightened nationwide alert for terrorist action coinciding with the millennial celebrations.
There was no indication the two men were linked.
Bouabide Chamchi, 20, and a Canadian woman, Lucia Garofalo, 35, were arrested Sunday evening at Beecher Falls. A federal prosecutor said Ms. Garofalo has Algerian and Libyan relatives.
Chamchi and Ms. Garofalo were charged with conspiring to use a false French passport and other immigration violations. A federal magistrate ordered them held until another hearing Thursday.
In court papers released Tuesday, a Border Patrol agent, John Pfeifer, said that two dogs trained to sniff out explosives separately indicated there might be explosives in the right rear fender of Ms. Garofalo's car. One dog was trained to detect plastic explosives, and the other dog was trained to detect black powder explosives.
But after the car was searched, nothing was found, said Noel Induni, agent in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in St. Albans.
The dogs may have smelled traces left from explosives previously transported in the car, or perhaps other materials such as fertilizers or household cleaners, he said.
The search of the car also turned up a fraudulent French passport, authorities said. Earlier reports said inaccurately that Chamchi had been carrying false Canadian papers.
Induni said that last Wednesday, Ms. Garofalo had tried to cross from Canada into New Hampshire with a different man, but they were turned away because the man did not have proper identification and their car held more luggage than was consistent with the story they gave.
Last week, an Algerian man was arrested while trying to enter Port Angeles, Wash., on a ferry from Victoria, British Columbia. Authorities said Ahmed Ressam had nitroglycerin and other potential bomb-making materials in his car and was traveling on a false passport.
Charles Tetzlaff, U.S. attorney for Vermont, said Tuesday that there was no evidence linking the two incidents.
The Customs Service has transferred 300 employees to inspection duty to help check for explosives at border crossings.
---
Cohen: US Bases on Alert Worldwide
Yahoo News 09:45 PM ET 12/21/99 By JEFF ISRAELY Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2562763872-bfc
AVIANO, Italy (AP) _ American military bases worldwide have been alerted about possible terrorist attacks on the eve of the new millennium, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen said Tuesday.
``It's an alert we've put out to all base commanders, and they're watching it closely,'' said Cohen, beginning a three-day trip to visit U.S. troops in Italy and the Balkans.
The defense secretary said military families living on or near bases abroad should take precautions similar to those recommended in a recent State Department safety advisory that warned Americans traveling abroad that they could be targets for terrorism during the holiday season.
``Each of the bases has been advised of the general threat,'' said Cohen, speaking to reporters inside a hangar at the Aviano air base. The base in northeast Italy was used as the staging ground for the NATO air war during the Kosovo conflict.
Last week, Jordanian authorities announced the arrest of 13 members of the terrorist group linked to bin Laden and said they were planning attacks against Americans, Israelis and other targets.
Cohen said that evidence found recently alerted officials that there might be attacks.
Cohen, who is scheduled to travel on to Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo, is making the Christmas rounds with a lineup of celebrities, including supermodel Christie Brinkley, singer Mary Chapin Carpenter, football hall-of-famer Terry Bradshaw and Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken.
The secretary also assured about 1,000 troops gathered for the show that a recently approved pay raise is on the way, as well as possible improvements in military housing and health care.
Cohen returns to Washington Sunday.
-------- france
Chirac and the Bomb
New York Times December 21, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/letters/l21chi.html
Related Articles
With a 'Don't Be Vexed' Air, Chirac Assesses U.S. (Dec. 17, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/121799france-us.html
To the Editor:
Re "With a 'Don't Be Vexed' Air, Chirac Assesses U.S." (news article, Dec. 17):
For President Jacques Chirac of France to speak out critically against the Senate's rejection of a nuclear test ban treaty oozes with hypocrisy.
Whatever the merits of the Senate's action, Mr. Chirac is the least qualified among world leaders to criticize. One of his first actions upon assuming the presidency in 1995 was to initiate a series of nuclear tests in the South Pacific, at a time when there was a de facto hiatus in nuclear testing among the major powers. It was France's irresponsible testing policy that gave countries like India and Pakistan the political and moral capital to test their nuclear arsenals.
RAYMOND J. LEARSY New York, Dec. 17, 1999
-------- india
India Insists on Nuclear Deterrent in U.S. Talks
Reuters Updated 9:39 AM ET December 21, 1999
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991221/09/international-arms-india
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India said Tuesday its marathon arms control dialogue with the United States was based on a firm belief that it must retain a minimum nuclear deterrent.
"Our discussions with our interlocutors in the United States and other partners have been predicated on the fact that India will have credible minimum nuclear deterrent," foreign ministry spokesman Raminder Singh Jassal said.
India declared itself a nuclear weapons state when it carried out a series of underground nuclear explosions last year and said it intended to develop a credible minimum nuclear deterrent.
Since the nuclear tests in the Pokhran desert, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott have held nine rounds of talks to reconcile Indian security interests with U.S. non-proliferation concerns.
Jassal said two foreign ministry officials were in Washington to pave the way for another round of Talbott-Singh talks planned for London in the second half of January.
"These are functional official-level talks, they flow from the larger discussion to harmonize our positions," he said.
Press Trust of India, in a report from Washington on Tuesday, quoted a senior State Department official as saying that the United States understood India's minimum nuclear deterrent could change.
"The U.S. well understands that the level of minimum deterrent will change according to India's own perception of its changing security environment," said the official who was not identified.
The official's comments appeared to be in line with the formula India had given in response to past demands from Washington to spell out its definition of a minimum nuclear deterrent.
OPPOSITION GROUPS DEMAND TIME ON CTBT
The United States, which has led Western efforts to draw India and its nuclear-capable arch-foe Pakistan into the global regime for arms control, is urging New Delhi to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
India has said it is willing to sign the treaty once it has built a domestic consensus on the pact.
Tuesday, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee met leaders of communist parties who said they wanted a parliamentary debate on the controversial treaty.
Last week, Vajpayee called the main Congress opposition party for talks on the CTBT and its leaders also said they needed more time to reflect on the pact.
"Since the issue was so complex, it was not possible for us to give a response without reflecting on the issues raised," a Congress statement quoted party chief Sonia Gandhi as saying at a meeting with party deputies.
Indian political groups joined hands to oppose the CTBT when it opened for signature in 1996 saying it was discriminatory.
Since India's nuclear explosions last year, scientists and military analysts have said India needs no more tests and that joining the test ban regime would not hurt the country's security interests.
The United States, by default, has given India more time to reflect on the pact after the U.S. Senate voted against ratifying the treaty in October.
The treaty cannot go into force without ratification by all 44 nuclear-capable states, so with the Senate vote it now goes into limbo. It could eventually be modified and sent to Congress for a new vote.
All five declared nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China -- have signed the treaty, but only Britain and France have ratified it.
Related Stories
India Test Fires Short Range Missile-PTI (Dec 18 10:21 am ET)
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991221/09/international-arms-india
-------- iraq
Iraq and U.N.: Here We Go Again
The new team has even less of a chance of stopping Saddam Hussein's arms buildup.
Los Angeles TimesmTuesday, December 21, 1999 By RICHARD BUTLER
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/19991221/t000116108.html
Exactly a year ago, arms inspections in Iraq were terminated and Operation Desert Fox was underway. The stated aim of that American and British military action was to "degrade" Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability. Whether it achieved this, it did not end Iraq's resistance to United Nations arms control.
On Friday, the U.N. Security Council adopted a new approach to the problem of Iraq, although France, Russia and China abstained. This new inspection system may work if the United States and Britain keep up the pressure, but the abstentions by the majority of the permanent members may lead to another deadlock down the road.
It is worth recalling what led to these circumstances and asking what might happen in the future.
In August 1998, Iraq declared itself disarmed and terminated all further work by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). Three months later, when it became clear that a bombing of Iraq was being prepared, an urgent meeting of the Security Council took place. Iraq offered written assurances that it would resume "full cooperation" with the arms inspectors and a dramatic last-minute decision to stop the bombing was made.
The Security Council charged me with reporting on whether Iraq had kept its promise. In mid-December, having received detailed reports from all chief inspectors--in the missile, chemical and biological weapons fields--I reported that Iraq had not provided full cooperation and, indeed, had imposed new restrictions. The next day, Operation Desert Fox began.
Security Council action on Iraq was diverted for several months by events in Kosovo. When it resumed work, the predictable draft resolutions were tabled. A British draft sought to pursue remaining disarmament tasks, establish a new monitoring regime and provide for the suspension of sanctions for specific, renewable periods, if Iraq cooperated with the new arrangements. It was an amended version of this draft that was adopted on Friday.
It cannot be known, precisely, what Iraq has done during the last year, but there were clear indications that when UNSCOM was being ejected from Iraq, it was working toward expanding its missile force. Its knowledge in the fields of chemical and biological weapons makes it foolish not to assume that, absent international scrutiny, Iraq had resumed its prohibited activities.
The new resolution reaffirms Iraq's disarmament obligations, but the organization it establishes to replace UNSCOM--UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission)--is different in key respects.
Where UNSCOM had a high degree of operational independence, UNMOVIC will be integrated as part of the U.N. bureaucracy. Its executive head will need to submit all policy decisions for consideration by a group of commissioners. His direct access to the Security Council will be reduced. Staff will no longer be recruited, fundamentally, on the basis of their technical qualifications; nationality will be a factor.
The design of this new organization reflects the success of the propaganda campaign waged by Iraq. The major objectives of that campaign were to destroy the independence of the inspectors, subject them to political control and turn them into bureaucrats, not experts.
Will Iraq accept this new resolution? Although its parliament condemned it on Monday, Baghdad's compliance is required under the U.N. charter. If Iraq sticks to its policy that it will have no further relationship with the Security Council's arms control mechanism unless sanctions are first ended, then all of this effort to craft a solution will come to naught.
If it does cooperate, the critical points to watch in the year ahead will be the practical ones: How, and under what circumstances, will Iraq be disarmed? And will the monitoring system be credible? An indicator of Iraq's stance was given just last week when it refused entry to Iraq of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency trying to conduct a routine inventory check of Iraq's uranium holdings. This breached its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a serious infraction that should have rung all the alarm bells.
It is beyond question that all concerned are thoroughly sick of the problem of Iraq and its ongoing attachment to weapons of mass destruction. Everyone wants a solution, and it is now widely accepted that a solution cannot be found through the recurrent cycle of military attacks on Iraq.
Yet it is equally doubtful that the solution lies in acquiescence. If this were to occur, Saddam Hussein's major challenge to the very authority of the Security Council will have succeeded and the enforceability of arms control treaties on weapons of mass destruction would have been thrown deeply into question. That is hardly an encouraging way to start the 21st century. - - -
Richard Butler Is Diplomat in Residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. he Was Previously Executive Chairman of Unscom
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-------- japan
Japanese Worker Dies From Radition Exposure
First Fatality from Sept. Plant Leak
ABC News 12/21/99
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/japannuclear991221.html
Hisashi Ouchi, a JCO Co. worker who was exposed to massive doses of radiation in Japan's worst nuclear accident, died at a Tokyo hospital. He was 35. (AP Photo)
By Scott Stoddard The Associated Press TO K Y O, Dec. 21 - A worker who was severely injured in Japan's worst nuclear accident died late today, more than two months after being hit with a massive dose of radiation. He was the nation's first fatality from radiation in such an accident.
Hisashi Ouchi, 35, who had been in critical condition since the Sept. 30 accident at a uranium-reprocessing plant, died after suffering various symptoms of radiation sickness, said Tokyo University Hospital spokesman Hisao Yanagisawa.
The accident in Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo, dealt a severe blow to the public's faith in Japan's aggressive nuclear power program, and followed a string of smaller accidents at nuclear plants in the country.
New Safety Measures Promised
The death was likely to heighten fears about nuclear safety in Japan. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi offered condolences to Ouchi's family and promised efforts to prevent the recurrence of nuclear accidents.
"The government has been working so that such an accident will never be repeated," Obuchi was quoted by Kyodo News agency as saying. "We are determined to make further efforts to strengthen steps to ensure safety and prevent accidents."
An investigation into the Tokaimura accident found that workers at the plant, operated by JCO Co., routinely violated safety procedures, including mixing uranium in buckets to get the job done quickly.
Two other workers in addition to Ouchi were severely injured in the accident, which happened when Ouchi and another worker mixed uranium with nitric acid to make fuel and accidentally put too much uranium in the tank, setting off an atomic reaction.
Ouchi's body was devastated by the exposure, which Kyodo said totaled 17 sieverts of radiation, about 17,000 times the maximum amount considered safe for a year in Japan.
After the accident, Ouchi's white blood cell count reportedly plummeted to nearly zero, effectively depriving him of an immune system.
Other Injured Worker Released
The least injured of the other two workers, Yutaka Yokokawa, 55, was released from the hospital Monday, but is still receiving outpatient treatment.
He was in an adjacent room during the accident and was somewhat shielded from the radiation.
The accident also exposed at least 66 other people to less serious doses of radiation. Thousands of people living near the plant were forced indoors or evacuated.
In response to the accident, Japan's parliament recently passed legislation calling for periodic inspection of nuclear-fuel processing facilities and allowing the prime minister to declare a state of emergency and call out the self-defense forces in case of a nuclear accident.
JCO and its parent company, Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. are also under investigation for possible criminal charges. Police raided Sumitomo Metal Mining's headquarters in Tokyo and its technology center outside the city last week to gather evidence.
The JCO president also apologized for Ouchi's death.
"I was praying for his recovery but this is the worst situation. When you lose a precious life you can't mourn enough," Hiroharu Kitani was quoted as saying by Kyodo.
Although accidents have plagued the nuclear power industry here, resource-poor Japan relies on atomic energy for about a third of its electricity.
--------
Japanese Radiation Patient Released
WORLD IN BRIEF Tuesday, December 21, 1999; Page A26 Washington Post
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/21/152l-122199-idx.html
TOKYO--One of three workers exposed to massive radiation in Japan's worst nuclear accident was released from a hospital yesterday, officials said.
Yutaka Yokokawa, 55, was discharged from the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba state, east of Tokyo. In October, he underwent a blood transfusion there after his white blood cell count dropped following the accident, hospital spokesman Saburo Tojo said.
Japan Urged to Resume Aid to N. KoreaTOKYO--Red Cross officials from Japan and North Korea signed a document today urging Tokyo to resume food aid to the famine-stricken communist state, a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
Japanese media said the agreement by the officials, meeting in Beijing, cleared the way for preliminary talks by foreign ministry officials from the two foes on normalizing ties. Japan suspended all food aid to Pyongyang after North Korea fired a missile over Japan's main island in August 1998.
EUROPE
Britain Will Not Prosecute Ex-Spies
LONDON--An 87-year-old woman who has publicly admitted being a Soviet agent and four other people recently identified as spies will not face prosecution, the British government said yesterday. "The reason in each instance is the same, namely that sufficient is known about the case to make it clear that any prosecution would fail," Solicitor General Ross Cranston said in a written statement to the House of Commons.
Melita Norwood was among those identified in "The Mitrokhin Archive," a recently published book based on KGB documents smuggled out of Russia.
Cranston said Norwood's statements to the media, in which she readily admitted passing on details of the British nuclear bomb program, likely would be ruled inadmissible as evidence....
Panamanians Demand U.S. Compensation
PANAMA CITY--Hundreds of people took to the streets to demand the United States pay damages to civilian victims of the 1989 U.S. invasion that ousted Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. Some pelted the U.S. Embassy with rocks and bags of paint.
Participants representing unions, business organizations and other groups took part in the rally to mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion ordered by then-president George Bush to bring Noriega to trial on drug-trafficking and racketeering charges. He is now serving a 30-year term in a Florida jail.
Washington has estimated that about 300 Panamanians died in the invasion, but Panamanian human rights groups say the civilian death toll topped 3,000. Panama City residents who lost homes and businesses in the U.S. attack were paid $11.5 in compensation.
-------- korea
N.Korea, Japan Mull Developing Ties
0:59 PM ET 12/21/99 By ELAINE KURTENBACH Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2562764906-129
BEIJING (AP) _ Japanese and North Korean officials began talks Tuesday aimed at developing diplomatic ties, following an agreement by the countries' Red Cross delegates on food aid for the North and other issues.
The government negotiations, which Japan halted 15 months ago after North Korea test-fired a rocket over Japan, were restarted after the United States and South Korea persuaded the North to stop testing missiles.
At the start of Tuesday's talks, which were held in the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, Koreshige Anami, director general of the Asian Bureau of Japan's Foreign Ministry, shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with O Ui Rok, director general of North Korea's Foreign Ministry.
Earlier Tuesday at North Korea's Embassy, the head of the Japanese Red Cross delegation, Tadateru Konoe, and his North Korean counterpart, Ho Hae Ryong, agreed to try to resume humanitarian aid to North Korea.
The Japanese branch said it would propose the government resume shipments of food aid, also suspended after the August 1998 rocket test.
Konoe told reporters that, assuming details were worked out, the aid could begin as soon as March or April, the time of year when food runs perilously short in the communist country.
North Korea is entering its fifth year of chronic food shortages and desperately needs fuel to revive its decrepit economy.
North Korea agreed to allow a resumption of visits to Japan by Japanese spouses of North Koreans, beginning next year.
The North Korean Red Cross agreed to work with ``relevant authorities'' on a thorough investigation into Japan's allegations that Pyongyang's agents kidnapped Japanese citizens. Japan handed over a list of 10 names of people it believed were abducted and taken to North Korea, Konoe said.
In turn, the Japanese side agreed to look into the cases of North Koreans who disappeared before 1945 while working in Japan or for its military during Tokyo's 50-year occupation of the Korean Peninsula.
The agreement was delayed as North Korean officials sought final approval from their government. North Korea was apparently waiting for an aid agreement before opening talks on normalizing relations.
Still divided by Cold War animosities, Japan and North Korea have never had diplomatic relations. North Korea frequently criticizes Japan for its brutal 50-year occupation of the peninsula and for supporting the United States and rival South Korea.
Talks on normalizing ties began in 1991 but broke down in 1992 over the alleged kidnappings. Plans to resume the talks were canceled following the August 1998 rocket test.
After North Korea agreed to stop testing missiles, the United States lifted trade sanctions and South Korea resumed cultural exchanges.
--------russia
Russian PM Hopeful on START-2 Before Talks
Reuters Updated 11:50 AM ET December 21, 1999 By Michael Steen
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991221/11/international-arms-russia
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday he hoped Russia would soon ratify an important nuclear arms treaty, sending a positive signal just before U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott arrived for arms talks.
The START-2 treaty, outlining big cuts in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, has not been ratified by Russia's parliament although it was signed in 1993. This has stalled talks on a planned START-3 treaty envisaging more cuts.
Putin was quoted by Interfax news agency as telling heads of parties newly elected to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, that the old legislature should sit until its successor took over in 30 days and ratify the pact.
"That means there is a chance to ratify START-2," he said.
But Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, heads of the outgoing Duma's largest faction, threw cold water on Putin's hopes.
"We will not consider this problem in December," Zyuganov told Ekho Moskvy radio. "The outgoing parliament cannot consider this question in a hurry because it's a question of the country's security."
Talbott told Reuters he would welcome any quick approval of the pact, though he was unaware of Putin's comments.
"I'm glad to hear that reactivation of his government's intention and look forward to that being the case," he said after meeting Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov.
A spokesman for Russia's Foreign Ministry expressed hope that work with the next Duma would be more productive, adding that Talbott had already started talks in Moscow on START-3 and proposed revisions to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
"Russia is always for the ratification of the START-2 treaty because we believe it is important for the national interests of Russia," spokesman Vladimir Rakhmanin told reporters.
Talbott meets Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov Thursday.
RUSSIA AT ODDS WITH WASHINGTON
Russia is at odds with Washington over its plans to create a national missile defense, a shield against attacks from what the United States calls rogue states such as North Korea and Iran.
Russia says that would breach the ABM treaty. The pact bans systems designed to shoot enemy missiles on the basis that allowing such defenses would have tempted Cold War-era foes to build up huge arsenals of nuclear arms.
"We are categorically against any attempt to destroy all the systems for the reduction of strategic weapons," said Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, head of the military's foreign affairs department.
The head of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces, Colonel-General Vladimir Yakovlev, said this month he had proposed setting up a joint commission with the United States to study the threat from so-called rogue states.
Talbott said Tuesday he hoped Washington and Moscow could cooperate on ballistic missiles, the issue he described as "part and center" of his talks.
"Let me just say that the spirit of our approach on this whole issue with our Russian partners is to see how much we can do cooperatively," he said.
Relations between the two countries have been further strained by Russia's military campaign in the rebellious Chechnya region, where Washington accuses Moscow of indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force.
Talbott said Chechnya was of "obvious" concern.
The START-2 treaty provides for reduction of U.S. and Russian deployed nuclear warheads by up to two thirds to no more than 3,500 each by 2007.
The missile defense issue, cost concerns, fears that the treaty could favor U.S. strategic forces, disputes over U.S. foreign policy and plain hostility to Yeltsin in the Duma have all contributed to the Russian failure to ratify the pact.
Related Stories
Russia Says No Prospect of Arms Compromise (Dec 22 1:51 pm ET)
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991222/13/international-arms-russia
Russia PM Wants Duma to Ratify START-2 (Dec 21 7:22 am ET)
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991221/07/international-arms-russia
---
Putin hopeful that Russia will ratify START-2
Deseret News Tuesday, December 21, 1999 By Reuters News Service
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,145013099,00.html?
MOSCOW - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday he hoped Russia soon would ratify a key nuclear arms treaty, sending a positive signal before U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott arrived for arms talks.
The START-2 treaty, outlining big cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, has not been ratified by Russia's parliament although it was signed in 1993. This has stalled talks on a planned START-3 treaty seeking more cuts.
Putin was quoted by Interfax news agency as telling heads of parties newly elected to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, that the old legislature should sit until its successor takes over in 30 days and ratify the pact.
"That means there is a chance to ratify START-2," he said.
But Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov quickly threw cold water on Putin's hopes. He said his party, the largest faction in the Duma, would not consider ratification of START-2 this month.
"We will not consider this problem in December," Zyuganov told Ekho Moskvy radio station. "The outgoing parliament cannot consider this question in a hurry because it's a question of the country's security."
A spokesman for Russia's Foreign Ministry expressed hopes that work with the next Duma would be more productive, adding that Talbott already had started talks in Moscow on START-3 and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
"Russia is always for the ratification of the START-2 treaty because we believe it is important for the national interests of Russia," spokesman Vladimir Rakhmanin told reporters. "To promote the process of strategic disarmament would be beneficial to Russia first of all and to the United States."
Russia is at odds with Washington over U.S. plans to create a national missile defense, a shield against attacks from what the United States calls rogue states such as North Korea and Iran.
Russia says the plan would breach the ABM treaty, which bans systems designed to shoot enemy missiles out of the sky, under the logic that they would have tempted Cold War foes to stockpile large arsenals of nuclear arms.
---
Russians Head to U.S. for Millennium Missile Watch
Reuters Updated 12:44 PM ET December 21, 1999
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991221/12/tech-yk-russia
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1009-200-1502174.html?tag=st
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian missile specialists left for the United States Tuesday as part of a millennium operation to ensure none of the two countries' 4,400 nuclear missiles are fired in error at the end of the century.
Russian specialists will join U.S. experts at a staff center in Colorado to watch for any false warnings of missile attacks sparked by the Y2K computer bug, Itar-Tass news agency said.
Both nations have taken steps to ensure that their forces are not hit by the millennium problem, which may cause some computers to mistake 2000 for 1900 and crash.
Tass reported that 18 specialists from Russia's central forces for rocket and space defense were heading to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, home of the missile-tracking U.S. Space Command where the teams will monitor the millennium bug.
"We really do not fear that in Russia there could be an accidental rocket launch, a fault with early-warning systems or any other problems," Tass quoted Anatoly Shishkin, top general staff rocket forces official, as saying.
Russia and the United States have expressed confidence that their missiles will not accidentally launch when the clock ticks midnight on Dec. 31.
"I fully trust Russia's military professionals who will be on duty and who will be prevent the dissemination of false information," Shishkin said.
The teams will start their joint watch on Dec. 27, working shifts around the clock for three weeks as they try to make sure that Russia's 2,000 nuclear-tipped missiles and America's 2,440 that are on permanent alert do not accidentally go off.
The joint monitoring plan was agreed on despite relations between the two countries being at a post-Cold War low.
Russia was angry with the United States for leading NATO's air strike campaign against fellow Slav state Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis and for Washington's plans to alter a key arms control treaty.
The United States has criticized Moscow for its offensive against Muslim rebels in breakaway Chechnya.
---
Russia Says Threshold Lower For Nuclear Weapons
Russia Today Tuesday, Dec 21 at Prague 09:01 am, N.Y. 03:01 am
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=119523
MOSCOW, Dec 18, 1999 -- (Reuters) Russia marked the 40th anniversary of its nuclear forces on Friday with lavish praise and a stark warning that Moscow had been forced to lower the threshold for using atomic weapons.
Russia is no longer a superpower but still has the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal of hundreds of missiles based on land, in prowling submarines and aboard long-range aircraft.
"Today, many thousands of missile troops are successfully carrying out a task of state importance," President Boris Yeltsin said in a message.
In interviews in Krasnaya Zvezda and the weekly Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, missile chief Vladimir Yakovlev made clear Russia's economic crisis and new security threats had prompted a dramatic rethink about the nuclear deterrent.
"Russia, for objective reasons, is forced to lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons, extend the nuclear deterrent to smaller-scale conflicts and openly warn potential opponents about this," he said in Krasnaya Zvezda.
The colonel-general said the reasons behind the shift were Russia's financial crisis - which has meant rocket forces receive about half the funds they need - and the emergence of regional powers armed with missiles and nuclear technology.
Officials have long said Russia is using its nuclear umbrella to let military reforms proceed beneath. But Yakovlev's comments were unusually blunt in setting out that Moscow is prepared to use its nuclear arms if attacked with chemical or biological weapons or outnumbered by conventional forces.
He told Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye Russia would continue to replace old arms with new Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles. Last week, Russia deployed a second batch of 10 and test-fired a silo-based Topol-M.
Defence experts say Russia may test-launch a mobile Topol-M early next year. Yakovlev said further down the line, an aircraft-based cruise version could be developed and more emphasis put on using space technology.
Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexiy II joined Yakovlev and Yeltsin in congratulating the Strategic Rocket Forces, which have an unusually high number of servicewomen - some 20,000, a seventh of the total in the entire armed forces.
"Not everyone can carry the heavy load of true service in the missile forces," the patriarch said in Krasnaya Zvezda, which was devoted to the anniversary and even printed half a page of poetry about nuclear weapons.
In the Soviet era, nuclear forces were a bastion of Communist orthodoxy. Now, Christian icons dedicated to the forces' patron saint, St Barbara, hang in the command center.
"With our shield ready for a fight, we have warded off a war," read a line of the poetry in Krasnaya Zvezda. "We have our hopes and love but Russia's interests go before."
---
Putin Witnesses Test Launch Of New Intercontinental Missile
Russia Today Tuesday, Dec 21 at Prague 09:31 am, N.Y. 03:31 am
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=118344
MOSCOW, Dec 14, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) A new generation intercontinental ballistic missile was successfully launched Tuesday from the Plessetsk cosmodrome with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev watching.
The Topol-M was fired from a launch site in the Archangel region of northwestern Russia at 11:05 a.m. (0805 GMT).
Less than 25 minutes later it hit its target more than 4,500 kilometers (1812 miles) away on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's far east, ITAR-TASS news agency said.
It is the ninth successful test firing of the Topol-M missile, which will form the basis of Russia's strategic defense.
Russia brought 10 Topol-M missiles into service at a military base in the Saratov region as part its program of modernizing its nuclear forces, the chief of missile units Vladimir Yakovlev said Tuesday.
Under the START II treaty signed with the United States in 1993 Russia has undertaken to replace its arsenal of SS-18 missiles which carry multiple warheads with missiles such as the Topol-M which carry only one.
Experts believe Russia will need to equip itself with 1,500 of the new missiles to maintain a balance with the United States, a program which will place enormous strain on its finances.
The Topol-M can be fired from underground silos or from a mobile launcher. It is 22.7 meters (72 feet) long, has a diameter of 1.95 meters and weighs 47.2 metric tons. It has a range of 11,000 kilometers.
Russian military sources claim its electronic equipment allows it to avoid all existing or planned anti-missile systems.
The Russian State Duma postponed ratification of the START II treaty on Monday until after legislative elections on December 19. The treaty, which the US Senate approved in 1996, will now be discussed in the first half of next year.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin bluntly reminded US President Bill Clinton last Thursday that Moscow still has a "full nuclear arsenal" following US criticism of Moscow's military action action against Chechen separatists. ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
-------- kazakhstan
Kazakh president says pipeline deal to create jobs
Reuters Updated 4:47 PM ET December 21, 1999
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991221/16/energy-kazakhstan-usa2
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=120241
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Kazakhstan signed a $440 million deal with the Karachaganak oil and gas group Tuesday to build a pipeline that Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said will help unlock huge reserves and create thousands of jobs.
"This will open the way for $2 billion in investment in the field itself and will create 5,000 jobs in Kazakhstan," Nazarbayev said of the agreement to build the 177-mile pipeline connecting Karachaganak with the Caspian Pipeline Project (CPC) to the Black Sea and bring its vast reserves to international markets.
Nazarbayev, who was in Washington for a meeting with President Clinton and other U.S. officials, attended the signing ceremony. The agreement was signed by the Kazakh government and project partners Agip/ENI, BG, Texaco and LUKOIL.
"We needed to connect up to the pipeline system so we could get our oil out to free markets in the West," said Robert Solberg, president of Texaco International Production. The deal had been under discussion for more than a year, he added.
Karachaganak is one of the largest gas condensate fields in the world with 18 billion barrels of oil equivalent in reserve.
The United States is the biggest source of foreign investment in Kazakhstan and Nazarbayev made clear during his visit that he would like to see investment in his country grow. He said there were 135 U.S. companies operating in Kazakhstan along with 325 joint U.S.-Kazakh companies.
The pipeline deal was one of a number of agreements reached during Nazarbayev's visit to Washington this week.
Kazakhstan also agreed to close and decommission a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor because of concerns about its security.
Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson and Kazakh Minister Vladimir Shkolnik signed an implementing agreement Sunday to permanently close the BN-350 nuclear reactor in Aktau, Western Kazakhstan, located near the Iranian border.
U.S. officials were concerned about the vulnerability of its security system and disposition of weapons-usable plutonium in spent fuel stored at the reactor site. The Department of Energy has already provided basic fire safety equipment to the reactor and Y2K-ready computers for the plant information system.
Speaking at a news conference following his Tuesday morning meeting with Clinton, Nazarbayev said he met with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Michel Camdessus. The IMF, he said, will make available $450 million to support Kazakhstan's economic reforms.
"We don't plan to draw on that money immediately," he said through an interpreter.
He said discussions during his meeting with Clinton and meetings with Vice President Al Gore and other U.S. officials Monday focused on a number of security and economic issues including Kazakhstan's bid to join the World Trade Organization.
"We would like the conditions upon which we enter the WTO no worse than the conditions upon which the other countries have entered," Nazarbayev said
--------
-------- nuc weapons facilities
From Coast to Coast, Fallout From a Probe Wen Ho Lee's Family: 'It's Unfair, It's an Injustice'
Washington Post Tuesday, December 21, 1999; Page A03 By Vernon
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/21/067l-122199-idx.html
The son and daughter of former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Wen Ho Lee said yesterday that a torrent of leaks by federal government officials has destroyed their family's reputation and falsely "branded" their father as a Chinese spy.
"This is wrong, it's unfair, it's an injustice, and it can't be done to just anybody, like it was done to Richard Jewel," said Chung Lee, 27, a medical student, referring to the security guard who was falsely accused of planting a bomb at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
"We believe these leaks," added Alberta Lee, 26, a software engineer, "are the reason my father is being held in jail without bond."
Lee, 59, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Taiwan, was fired from his sensitive post at Los Alamos in March and identified by U.S. officials as the prime suspect in an investigation of Chinese espionage at the lab. Those officials later acknowledged they lack evidence showing Lee spied for China.
But Lee was charged Dec. 12 with 59 felony counts for mishandling classified information downloaded from the lab's classified computer system and has been held without bail in Albuquerque since his arrest.
In Albuquerque, Lee's criminal defense attorneys met yesterday with a federal judge, trying to arrange for a bail review hearing this week. In Washington, standing on the steps of the federal courthouse at Third Street and Independence Avenue, Chung Lee said he wants, more than anything else, to have his father out on bail and home for Christmas.
He and his sister, who made their first public comments on their father's situation yesterday, said members of their family have been allowed to visit Lee in jail for only an hour a week, in the presence of an FBI agent. While both children were raised speaking to their parents in Chinese, they said FBI agents insist that all jail conversations be conducted in English.
"I think he's doing the best he can," Alberta Lee said. "He knows he's innocent. He knows he has done nothing wrong. He has faith in the judicial system, and he's going to wait this out."
The Lee children spoke to reporters after attorneys filed court papers alleging that the FBI and the departments of Energy and Justice unlawfully leaked confidential information to the media about Lee and his wife, Sylvia, 56, a retired Los Alamos secretary and data analyst.
"As a result of the unlawful selective leaks by defendants, [Lee and his wife] became the subject of intense media scrutiny and were portrayed as suspected spies for the People's Republic of China," the lawsuit states.
Brian A. Sun, a former federal prosecutor and the family's lead attorney, declined comment on most aspects of the criminal charges filed against Lee in Albuquerque but said Lee destroyed seven tapes containing downloaded information. Federal prosecutors said in indicting Lee that they could not account for the tapes.
"They were destroyed. They were not destroyed for any sinister motive," said Sun. "We believe this issue has been blown way out of proportion, in part by these unauthorized leaks."
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, beginning a two-day trip to Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, said at a news conference in Albuquerque that Lee's lawsuit "has no foundation."
"We have made a concerted effort to protect the privacy of all individuals in his case," Richardson said. "I believe we have acted responsibly and been very deliberate, especially the Justice Department, in the law enforcement effort."
Background
Nuclear Espionage
MARCH: A Taiwan-born scientist at Los Alamos, Wen Ho Lee, is fired for security violations. He had been under investigation since 1996 in connection with the 1980s theft of W-88 warhead information.
APRIL: After learning that Lee had transferred top-secret nuclear computer codes to his unsecured computer, the Energy Department shuts down computer systems at all its weapons labs because of concerns about possible espionage.
MAY: Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announces an overhaul of security and counterintelligence activities at the Energy Department, including creation of a "security czar."
The House select committee on Chinese technology transfers issues a 700-page report saying China had obtained nuclear secrets about all U.S. warheads through a 20-year campaign of espionage.
DEC. 10: After hearing evidence for several months, a grand jury in Albuquerque, issues a 59-count indictment accusing Lee of removing nuclear secrets from a secured Los Alamos computer. Lee is arrested.
SOURCE: Associated Press
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A Leading Alternative to Nuclear Tests Falters
By JAMES GLANZ New York Times December 21, 1999
-http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/122199sci-laser-facility.html
Since late August, an effort to build the world's largest laser has suffered a series of embarrassments that have tarnished the project's reputation and undermined its role as a leading justification for a ban on nuclear tests.
Now Energy Secretary Bill Richardson says the entire project and its management may have to be restructured, amid soaring cost overruns.
And at least one senator has raised questions about whether tiny nuclear explosions to be triggered by the lasers would violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
In the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., as the project is known, powerful lasers would be used to create conditions similar to those in nuclear weapons, allowing scientists to study the reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile without tests. The lasers, under construction at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, would crush and heat pellets of nuclear fuel with 192 converging beams, generating a rapid release of fusion energy. That release would create conditions similar to those created by nuclear weapons, allowing scientists to study their properties.
Government scientists say that the laser project is a crucial component of the nation's effort to ensure the safety and reliability of its aging nuclear stockpile without actually testing the weapons in nuclear explosions.
Beyond its applications to weapons, moreover, physicists hope that the project will help them understand the behavior of materials under extreme conditions and explore the possibility that nuclear fusion could be used for the peaceful generation of power.
But N.I.F., originally estimated to cost $1.2 billion, has been plagued by scheduling delays, technical problems and cost overruns that could go as high as a third of that figure. Its former director, E. Michael Campbell, took a leave of absence in August after questions arose about his academic credentials, and announced last week that he was resigning from the laboratory.
And even though $800 million has been spent and construction has been under way since 1997, unhappiness with the overruns in Congress means the project faces the threat of cancellation.
In the latest blow, a letter to Secretary Richardson in late October, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, questioned whether such experiments themselves might violate the "zero yield" provision in Article I of the treaty, which would prohibit any nuclear test of any size. Successful N.I.F. experiments would release the energy equivalent of about 15 pounds of TNT in an extremely small fraction of a second within a contained vessel.
"It is troubling that we are planning to ignite thermonuclear explosions at N.I.F. that may violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty's ban on nuclear explosions," Senator Harkin said in a statement, citing the administration's pledge not to test while continuing to seek ratification of the treaty, which he also supports.
Asked about the letter, officials at the State Department and the Energy Department said that laser fusion experiments of lower power have always been granted special exemptions during negotiations for test ban treaties, including the latest one. "I think it's a fair question that deserves an answer," said John D. Holum, senior adviser to the Secretary of State for arms control and international security.
Mr. Holum, who helped negotiate the test ban treaty, added that during negotiations with other parties to the treaty, "we specifically carved out that activity as something we expected to continue under a zero yield treaty."
But the brevity of the Senate's debate on the beleaguered treaty precluded a full discussion of such points, Mr. Holum said. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty in October but the Clinton administration still supports the treaty. While the treaty has little chance of passage next year, it is likely to be a campaign issue.
More serious consequences for the program could emerge from Mr. Richardson's recent finding that cost overruns may have been deliberately hidden from him and from upper management at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
According to Mr. Campbell, whose formal title was associate director for laser programs at Livermore, the cost overruns involve the assembly of the project's multitude of delicate, high-tech parts, a task that turned out to be more challenging than expected.
In an interview last week, Mr. Richardson said preliminary investigations have shown that "there may have been an effort of concealment."
He said Mr. Campbell bore significant responsibility for NIF's troubles.
Mr. Campbell took a leave of absence in late August after it was disclosed that he did not have a Ph.D., as he had led people to believe, and has announced he will leave the laboratory after the completion of reviews of the project expected to be finished soon.
For his part, Mr. Campbell said in an interview that the overruns, whose magnitude is still being estimated, had originally been discovered during a review of the project that had been initiated at his direction.
Mr. Campbell said there had been no delay in reporting the problems and no effort to conceal them.
"I was the guy in charge," he added, "so I accept whatever responsibility the secretary chooses to assign to me. I hope he gets on with the project and encourages the good people who have worked and are still working so hard to make it succeed."
Mr. Richardson, the Secretary of Energy, said he had found that mismanagement of the project went well beyond laboratory officials. In September, he withheld $2 million of a performance fee from the University of California, which manages the laboratory for the Energy Department. And he said that some responsibility was borne by officials at the Energy Department who manage the overall program to ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons without testing, called stockpile stewardship.
Dr. Victor H. Reis, a former Assistant Secretary of Energy, who ran the stockpile stewardship program until last July, responded that strict limits on staffing at the Energy Department had forced it to rely over the years on assessments of the project by Livermore and outside organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences.
"Every one of those reviews stated specifically that the program was on track, both in terms of schedule and cost, and every review reiterated the program's critical importance to the stockpile stewardship program," Dr. Reis said in a statement.
The last of those reviews was completed early this year, before the overruns finally became known.
Dr. John McTague, a former vice president for technical affairs at Ford Motor Company who is leading one of the Energy Department's new reviews of the project, said that the size of the project may have made gauging its ultimate cost and schedule particularly difficult.
"Even if you look at the physical scale, it's colossal," Dr. McTague said. "It's bigger than Ben Hur," he said of the roughly football-stadium-size project.
Dr. McTague agreed that the cost overruns arose mainly because the project plan had underestimated the difficulty of assembling the individual parts of such a complex project. In particular, it turned out to be more difficult than thought to fabricate the long chambers through which the laser beams must travel before reaching the target. Those chambers must be kept ultraclean in order to prevent motes of dust from disrupting the powerful laser beams.
Longtime critics of the project, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group based in Washington, disputed that assessment, saying that it suffered from technical problems as well as mismanagement. Difficulties in producing the laser's optics and fuel pellets, they say, could prevent it from ever operating properly. But Dr. George H. Miller, the associate director for national security at Livermore who now oversees the laboratory, maintained that its problems were more managerial than technical.
"We have shown that the fundamental technical problems are soluble," Dr. Miller said.
He emphasized that the project was also considered to be crucial for the future of Livermore, a weapons laboratory that is struggling to stay afloat after the end of the cold war. Work at the site would also include unclassified research on the use of laser fusion to generate energy for peaceful purposes, like power plants, he said.
Dr. Miller said that the project was also critical to the success of the $4.5 billion stockpile stewardship program, although some scientists and bomb designers have disagreed.
The task now, said Mr. Richardson, will be to restructure the project once a complete report on the cost overruns becomes available in mid-January. Changes, he said, may include extending the construction schedule, increasing managerial accountability and perhaps further personnel moves.
"It's been very, very poorly managed and poorly implemented," Mr. Richardson said, "but it's a sound science project."
---
From Coast to Coast, Fallout From a Probe
At California Lab, Tightened Security Too Much for Some
By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 21, 1999; Page A03
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/21/073l-122199-idx.html
LIVERMORE, Calif.-In the vastness of cyberspace here at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where miles of cable link an array of powerful supercomputers, there is no place to hide anymore.
Every keystroke anyone logs onto this vast unclassified network is recorded. Every outgoing e-mail is searched electronically. All calls coming into the system go through a single "cyberpass," protected by a firewall. And scanners search the network for unauthorized modems and classified files that may have been transferred inadvertently from an even more secure classified system.
There is even a network scanner called "the whacker," developed by scientists at this nuclear weapons lab, that constantly searches servers and directories and shuts down "world access" entry codes to prevent foreign scientists engaged in an array of unclassified research here from gaining blanket access to all types of "sensitive" unclassified technical data.
Call it the world that Wen Ho Lee made, a cyberfortress erected since FBI agents discovered in late March that the former physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, another Energy Department weapons lab, downloaded massive amounts of classified data from the lab's classified network to unsecure magnetic tapes and his own vulnerable desktop computer.
Computer security officials here describe these and other cyber security measures implemented over the past nine months throughout the Department of Energy's national laboratories as the electronic equivalent of SWAT teams, clad in black fatigues and body armor, which are now also guarding Livermore's stockpile of nuclear materials.
Like the cyber security teams, these highly trained commandos recently arrived here at Livermore--and at DOE's other nuclear weapons facilities--as part of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's security and counterintelligence crusade.
The computers, and the stockpiles, appear virtually impenetrable.
But security officials here wonder whether the computer safeguards have been pushed to a point at which they are degrading the scientific environment, especially when coupled with planned polygraph testing for 800 top nuclear scientists and a congressionally mandated moratorium on visits by foreign scientists from sensitive countries.
"We've gone way overboard," said Bing Young, chief security officer at Livermore's computing center. "We're hurting ourselves."
"We're losing people," added Young's boss, David M. Cooper, Livermore's associate director of computation. "At a certain point, they just say, 'It's not worth it, I'm not going to put myself through this.' We've lost, in just this last year, 35 or 40 people. The computer scientists can jump over to Silicon Valley and make a lot more money."
Richardson, at the start of a two-day trip to Los Alamos and Livermore, acknowledged the scientists' complaints. "We've worked hard in a very focused way to improve security," he said yesterday in New Mexico. "We've made a lot of progress, but I'm concerned about reports that I hear about recruitment and morale having suffered during this turbulent year. That's why I'm spending two days at the labs meeting with scientists and engineers to hear first-hand about their concerns and ideas."
Long before the world heard of Wen Ho Lee, who is in jail awaiting trial on 59 felony counts of mishandling top-secret information, Livermore had a system in place that most likely would have prevented anyone from downloading secrets from the lab's classified network, Cooper and Young said. Even six years ago, when Lee first started transferring weapons secrets onto portable magnetic tapes, they said, no information--classified or unclassified--could have been removed from Livermore's top-secret system without the approval of a classification specialist.
Now, Young said, that safeguard has been upgraded to absurd lengths: Not one, but two, classification specialists must approve the removal of unclassified information from the classified network to make sure no classified information is inadvertently removed. And both specialists must be screened by a rigorous Personnel Security Assurance Program that requires psychological examinations and random, periodic drug testing--the same system used to screen SWAT team members who guard plutonium and truck drivers transporting nuclear waste.
The new rules make it so hard to remove even unclassified information from the classified system that they might actually hurt security if scientists who once did all of their computations on their classified machines start doing more of it on the unclassified system just to avoid the hassle, Young said.
Cooper shares his concern. "I think we've approached absurdity in this system," he said. "At a certain point, I think you have to trust people to do the job. They walk out every day with much more in their heads than they could ever carry out in their briefcases"--or on a computer disk.
To make sure that scientists cannot evade the classification specialists by downloading classified information in the privacy of their offices, Cooper and Young said, all disk drives and printers operating on the classified network have been removed from areas that also have unclassified computers, making clandestine transfers impossible.
In another precaution, the lab has been continuously scanning all unclassified files since April for any classified information in them--and found none.
For Americans with top secret nuclear "Q" clearances, Cooper said, access to classified information has been limited this year by tightening compartmentalization so that individual scientists can only get to information they "need to know."
"Very few people at this lab know everything there is to know about a nuclear weapon," Cooper said.
For foreign scientists at the lab--who have no access to classified information and are not allowed to work in the weapons program--the new cyber security measures are even more restrictive. All of them must have individual computer security plans that only give them access to certain parts of Livermore's unclassified network on a "need to know" basis.
Scientists from sensitive countries such as China, Taiwan, Russia, Pakistan, India and Israel are denied all supercomputing privileges, as well as access to most "sensitive" unclassified information. There are now about 60 scientists from sensitive countries doing unclassified research at Livermore.
In a furor earlier this year over China's alleged theft of nuclear warhead secrets, critics on Capitol Hill faulted the national laboratories for endemically lax security and described them as virtual open college campuses. DOE officials, the critics said, had failed for decades to reconcile the desire of scientists at the labs to openly share information with the need to keep nuclear weapons secrets from failing into the hands of the nation's adversaries.
But while both Livermore and Los Alamos have been operated under contract by the University of California since the earliest days of the nation's nuclear weapons program, they seem more like Fort Knox than UC-Berkeley.
At Livermore, officials say security and counterintelligence were tight before Congress's intense focus on Chinese espionage--and now border on the obsessive.
Access to the lab compound, a gated square mile on the outer fringes of the East Bay about a 45-minute drive from San Francisco, is tightly controlled. Access to classified areas requires cleared personnel to swipe a magnetic badge through a scanner and type in a four-digit password. Three failed attempts at a password activate immediate video monitoring--and possibly a confrontation with armed SWAT police.
When reporters escorted by lab personnel visit classified sections at the lab, all classified computers must be shut down and signs are placed in the hallways that say, "Visitor Unclassified Discussions Only."
Two FBI counterintelligence agents are based at Livermore full-time, and the lab's own counterintelligence staff has grown to 13 employees. It is headed by a retired FBI expert on Chinese counterintelligence and includes retired officers from the FBI, CIA and military intelligence.
The staff's newest hire, a retired officer from the supersecret National Security Agency, which intercepts electronic communications, is focusing on counterintelligence issues involving Livermore's classified and unclassified computer networks.
Cooper, who once ran the NASA computer team that helped put a man on the moon, is concerned about the future. The computer upgrades, he said, haven't been all bad. "I think we did a good job [in computer security] before all this hit, but we have strengthened it dramatically in a number of ways," he said.
But just last week, Cooper added, a husband-and-wife team of scientists called it quits. "He was one of the best computer visualization people in the United States," Cooper said. "And he just said, 'We don't need this stuff--computer security, polygraphs, restrictions in travel, nonsense.' "
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The China Spy Scandal That Never Was
Unnoticed report clouds charges of technology thefts.
By ROBERT SCHEER Los Angeles Times Tuesday, December 21, 1999
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/19991221/t000116110.html
For the past year, the news has been punctuated with lurid stories heralding a China spy scandal. Most of that fear-mongering was based on the report of a congressional committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and compiled by a staff that included not a single nuclear weapons expert.
Yet when five of the leading national security experts released a study last week showing that the Cox committee report was riddled with factual errors, its language "inflammatory" and its key conclusions "unwarranted," the media barely noticed.
The report, compiled by a research team at Stanford University's Center for International Security, was coordinated by Michael M. May, director emeritus of the Livermore National Laboratory, where he was a leader in the U.S. nuclear weapons program for 36 years. The Stanford study concludes that "there is no credible evidence presented or instances described of actual theft of U.S. missile technology."
Most of the Cox report--600 of its 900 pages--dealt with that supposed sale or "theft" of missile-launch technology. That was also the claim of stories in the New York Times last year that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize. The paper has not reported on the Stanford report.
However, the congressional and media hysteria did result in legislation that threatens U.S. leadership in the information age. According to the report, "Probably the most damaging consequence for this nation's technology and business leadership in space is the Cox committee's ill-timed and poorly thought out overturn of the existing satellite export-control regime," which has created bureaucratic barriers to satellite launches.
U.S. satellite makers had used the Chinese to launch their products because the U.S. program, which had relied on the success of the space shuttle, was scuttled after the Challenger disaster. As one of Stanford's missile experts, Lewis R. Franklin, notes: "Although the Cox report wanted to portray it otherwise, it was not a bad outcome for the People's Republic of China to have more reliable commercial space launching rockets, as they mostly launch U.S.-built satellites. . . . By taking advantage of the PRC launch capabilities over the 1990-1998 period, one French and eight U.S. satellites were successfully launched . . . resulting in U.S. commercial dominance of the Asian communications satellite market."
The other major concern of the Cox committee centers on the "theft" of nuclear warhead technology. Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, the world-renowned Stanford physicist who has been active in the nuclear weapons program since the first nuclear bomb, offers a blistering dismissal of the Cox committee claim that China stole the W-88 technology. While the Cox committee refers to this as the most modern weapon in the U.S. arsenal, it is actually a design that is more than 30 years old.
Panofsky offers a detailed brief as to why the Chinese did not require advice from the U.S. or the transfer of high-powered computers to develop such a weapon. The W-88 was originally developed with "computers of much lower capacity than high-performance computers now on the open market."
Although the Justice Department has charged former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee with improperly downloading classified files between 1993 and 1997, they do not claim that this has anything to do with China's explosion of a weapon like the W-88, which occurred before that time on Sept. 25, 1992. Also, as Panofsky states, the Chinese weapon "is believed to be larger than the W-88 and is not even remotely a copy or a 'knock-off,' to use Congressman Cox's term, of the W-88."
Nor would the W-88 provide a strategic advantage to the Chinese nuclear force, which consists of 20 antiquated, liquid-fueled missiles hardly capable of challenging the more than 5,000 modern intercontinental weapons possessed by the U.S. They could not even begin this Herculean task of catching up without nuclear testing, which the Chinese stopped in 1995. "New designs," based on purloined data, Panofsky wrote, "without nuclear testing are extremely difficult, if not impossible."
The truth, as the naked eye of holiday shoppers can attest, is that if there is a Chinese threat, it's not in that nation's puny nuclear force but rather the cheaply produced products flooding U.S. stores exported by a country hellbent on attaining economic prosperity rather than nuclear weapon supremacy.
Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. The full Stanford report can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/CISAC/.
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Imprisoned Scientist Sues U.S. Agencies
New York Times December 21, 1999 By NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/122199china-nuke-lawsuit.html
Related Article
Friends Rally Support for Los Alamos Scientist
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/122199china-nuke.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 -- Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear weapons scientist who has been the subject of a complex investigation into possible espionage by China, filed a lawsuit today against the F.B.I. and the Justice and Energy Departments, saying they engaged in a campaign of news leaks that violated his privacy and wrongfully portrayed him as a spy.
The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court here, accuses the three government agencies of violating the Privacy Act and selectively leaking "misleading information designed to convince the public that Dr. Lee had engaged in espionage activities for the People's Republic of China."
Dr. Lee has been at the center of a government investigation into whether and how the Chinese may have made a leap in nuclear weapons technology with information stolen from the American government.
Dr. Lee was indicted this month by a federal grand jury in New Mexico on 59 counts of illegally removing highly classified design, construction and testing data from the Los Alamos weapons laboratory where he was employed. The indictment charged that Dr. Lee had violated the Atomic Energy Act and Foreign Espionage Act by assembling collections of computer files that contained some of the country's most closely held nuclear weapons secrets.
Although the indictment accused Dr. Lee of a serious breach of security, including charges that could send him to prison for life, it did not accuse him of spying or of turning over any secrets to a foreign government.
In a statement that accompanied the civil lawsuit filed today, Dr. Lee's son and daughter said that they were "particularly concerned that the unlawful leaks engaged in by the defendants are continuing and will potentially have prejudicial impact on Dr. Lee's ability to defend himself."
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Dr. Lee and his wife, Sylvia Lee, does not seek any specific monetary damages. But it provides a forum for the Lee family to press the argument that the indictment is an effort by the government to save face and find something with which to charge Dr. Lee after officials failed to find evidence of the espionage they were investigating.
The suit also contends that the leaks were intended to divert attention from sloppy security procedures in the government's national laboratories.
Bill Richardson, the energy secretary, told reporters today at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque that he believed "the lawsuit has no foundation."
"We have made a concerted effort to protect the privacy of all individuals in this case," Mr. Richardson said. "I believe we have acted responsibly and been very deliberate -- especially the Justice Department, in the law enforcement effort."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment and Justice Department officials said they would review the lawsuit.
The suit cited several news accounts as evidence of government leaks, particularly an article that appeared in The New York Times on March 6, 1999. The Times article included specific details that the suit asserted could have come only from the files and records of the F.B.I. and the Justice and Energy Departments.
Among those issues, attributed to "officials," were the employment history of the Lees, the results of a polygraph examination of Dr. Lee and information about personal financial transactions by Dr. Lee. Lawyers for Dr. and Mrs. Lee assert that such disclosures violate the Privacy Act even if they are true.
The lawsuit claims that after the publication of the Times article, the Lees "were forced to undergo severe harassment, threats and 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week F.B.I. surveillance."
The lawsuit also cited other news reports, including one in The Wall Street Journal that attributed information to "a senior law-enforcement official" and another in The Los Angeles Times that relied on a "U.S. official familiar with the evidence."
The government began its investigation of Dr. Lee in connection with what officials believed was China's apparent theft of secret data related to the W-88 warhead, which was designed at Los Alamos. Dr. Lee was fired in March for security violations that were uncovered in connection with that investigation. After he was fired, government investigators said they discovered that he had been transferring and copying vast amounts of information. The suit today challenges the government's actions in the first investigation, which did not result in any charges.
In the indictment, prosecutors said Dr. Lee had transferred secret information from a classified computer network at Los Alamos into an unsecure system, then copied much of the information onto portable, high-volume computer tapes, some of which are missing.
The government said the files included thousands of pages of documents related to the design, construction and testing of America's nuclear weapons arsenal.
Dr. Lee is being held without bail, and his family also expressed concern in a statement today that he would not be able to make collect calls to his family and that "any meetings with his counsel or family members must be conducted in the English language and in the presence of an F.B.I. agent."
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Friends Rally Support for Los Alamos Scientist
New York Times December 21, 1999 By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/122199china-nuke.html
Related Article
Imprisoned Scientist Sues U.S. Agencies
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/122199china-nuke-lawsuit.html
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Dec. 17 -- Jean Marshall has lived next door to Wen Ho Lee for nearly two decades. They raised their children together in a neighborhood of modest homes, just around the corner from the Pinõn elementary school and its playground. In this middle-class town of soccer moms and hydrogen bombs, they were more than neighbors. Mrs. Marshall develops computer codes for the X Division of the nuclear weapons lab here, where Dr. Lee also worked before he was fired in March for security violations.
Last week, after Dr. Lee was indicted on 59 counts of mishandling atomic secrets, Mrs. Marshall traveled with her husband down a winding mountain road to Albuquerque and testified on Dr. Lee's behalf before a crowded federal courtroom.
Mrs. Marshall portrayed Dr. Lee as a devoted father, a kind neighbor and a compassionate man. When federal agents began monitoring his movements around the clock, she said, he told her he did not mind when they followed him to his favorite fishing spots, because it gave them much-needed breaks.
"He never fails to come out and chat," Mrs. Marshall said. "He always brightens my day."
She dismissed the idea that Dr. Lee, an American scientist of Taiwanese birth, might flee the country if released on bail, and frowned as the judge ordered him held behind bars pending trial, which might be as much as a year away. At worst, his alleged wrongdoings are punishable by life in prison.
A chill has descended on Los Alamos and its suburb White Rock, a mountaintop community of 18,000 people whose lives revolve around the weapons lab, the birthplace of the bomb and the main guardian of the nation's nuclear secrets.
Dr. Lee was arrested on Dec. 10 at his home in White Rock after nearly five years of federal investigations concerning Chinese atomic espionage. Whether he is innocent or guilty of mishandling secret data, many people here expressed shock at the implication -- for which there is no formal charge -- that he was a spy. A few, like Mrs. Marshall, are speaking out in support of Dr. Lee.
"People who have worked with him or know him and his family almost uniformly say he could not have been a spy," Dr. Ralph R. Stevens, a scientist at the weapons lab, said in an interview after going to Albuquerque as part of a crowd of Lee supporters. He said his four children grew up with the Lee children, playing and studying together.
"It appears he has violated security rules, and that is a very serious offense," Dr. Stevens said. "But the way that the whole situation was handled, there's been character assassination."
He added, "It's a very unhappy situation."
Federal prosecutors say that Dr. Lee in 1993, 1994 and 1997 downloaded from lab computers a trove of weapons secrets onto 10 tapes, and that 7 of them are missing. If they fell into enemy hands, they could be extremely dangerous to American security.
Dr. Lee has admitted downloading some data, but has said he did so for innocent reasons. His lawyers say that the missing tapes were destroyed. Whatever the truth, the case has thrown turmoil into the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which meanders over more than 43 square miles of mesas and canyons here.
Dr. Jerry B. Wilhelmy, a senior scientist, told a public forum last Tuesday that foreigners are starting to shun the weapons lab, both as a place to visit or to work, threatening to isolate its 10,000 experts from the global scientific community. "They'll say, 'It's a scary place. They're putting people away for life for making some security mistake,' " Dr. Wilhelmy said.
Dr. Stephen M. Younger, head of the nuclear weapons program at the lab, told the federal court that Dr. Lee's downloading of weapon secrets was extremely unusual. American officials have good reason to be wary, he said.
"The country has given us a sacred trust to protect this information and we are concerned that this trust may have been violated," he said. "That worries us a lot."
Beginning nearly five years ago, Dr. Lee became a focus of federal suspicion after intelligence analysts here found clues that China had stolen top American nuclear secrets, including the design of the W-88, the nation's most modern warhead. The analysts reasoned that the theft of the W-88 material took place between 1984 and 1988 -- long before Dr. Lee began the downloading he has acknowledged.
Dr. Lee was never charged with spying and denied all wrongdoing but was fired from Los Alamos in March for security violations centering on his computer usage and failure to report foreign contacts.
This fall, federal investigators said they had erred in focusing too narrowly on Los Alamos and Dr. Lee, and vowed to redo the probe, with some Justice Department officials reportedly arguing that the espionage case against him was too weak to prosecute. But on Dec. 10, Dr. Lee was arrested and charged in Federal District Court in Albuquerque with security violations. A bail hearing was held Monday, Dec. 13.
There, federal prosecutors said Dr. Lee had downloaded vast amounts of data from classified to unclassified parts of lab's computer network, and then loaded the cache onto portable computer tapes. Investigators said they could find no similar actions among lab workers.
Robert Messemer, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the scientist was also a flight risk. After being notified in the early 1990's that he might be laid off from Los Alamos, Dr. Lee, he said, had sought jobs in Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Dr. Lee's lawyers, Mark Holscher of Los Angeles and John Cline of Albuquerque, argued that the defendant was a loyal American who had done nothing untoward. The downloading, Mr. Holscher said, was not selective and sinister. He said it included large amounts of unclassified data mixed in with the weapons secrets. He suggested that other lab employees did likewise when they failed to put secret materials back into safes.
Mr. Holscher repeatedly asked Mr. Messemer if the government had any evidence that the missing data had ever left Los Alamos, or had fallen into unfriendly hands. None was offered.
The missing tapes, Mr. Holscher said, had been destroyed, but he offered no details of when, where or by whom, nor any evidence to back up the claim of destruction.
The judge nonetheless ruled that Dr. Lee's potential access to the missing secrets was a "clear and present danger to the United States." He ordered that the scientist remain in custody awaiting trial, which defense attorneys said might be a year or more away.
After Dr. Lee was led away, a group of Los Alamos neighbors crowded around his wife, Sylvia, and his daughter, Alberta, hugging them and showering them with dinner invitations and other offers of support. Outside the courtroom, Cecilia Chang, a friend of the Lee family who is organizing a legal defense fund, said that Dr. Lee was the victim of selective prosecution.
"Lots of cars go over 60 miles per hour," she said, "but this is like ticketing just one because the driver had a Chinese face."
Later, Ms. Chang announced that a support group for the jailed man had been formed in New Mexico. "It is clear to many of us in New Mexico that Wen Ho Lee is a victim of hysteria and political vengeance," the group's head, Patricia Wolff of Santa Fe, said in a statement. "We will not stand idly by while the government scapegoats and sacrifices Dr. Lee on the altar of nuclear weapons secrecy."
Dr. Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a leading nuclear journal, said that "many other scientists at Los Alamos and elsewhere have routinely violated those regulations," and that if Dr. Lee were charged with a downloading crime "they'd probably have to go out and cite several hundred other people at Los Alamos for the same thing."
Nowadays there is a lot of this kind of talk around the lab. One Los Alamos expert said with a shrug that he knew of at least two people who had admitted to Dr. Lee's type of downloading.
But Dr. Lee's defenders seem likely to have a hard time proving that the crime is widespread, since public admissions of wrongdoing in theory could land a lab worker in jail.
People at the lab, speaking guardedly, said it was not unusual for their colleagues to download secret data to unsecure computers. But none could substantiate claims that the practice was common. . And when pressed in interviews, they became skittish and changed the subject.
"There's other people who know more," Henry N. Fisher, a retired Los Alamos computer expert. But he declined to discuss the sensitive matter.
But prosecutors may face difficulties, too. Lab officials say archival data on the detailed computer usage of employees goes back only a decade or so, blurring the issue of whether Dr. Lee's actions were aberrant or unremarkable over the half century of the lab's existence.
"If you go far enough back in time," said Dr. Richard P. Kendall, the lab's director of computer security, "you can't reconstruct the past." The further back, the fuzzier the reconstruction, he said.
The main way of tracking the computer use of individuals, Dr. Kendall said, is the Network Anomaly Detection and Intrusion Reporter, known as Nadir, which shadows users to make sure they are obeying the rules of the road. He said Los Alamos installed Nadir in 1989, a decade or so after Dr. Lee began working at the weapons lab. But only top security officials have access to the monitoring data, and even the degree to which monitoring occurs is a laboratory secret.
Los Alamos, the city and lab, seem shaken in the wake of the case.
"The influence has been devastating," said Dr. Siegfried S. Hecker, director of the weapons lab from 1986 to 1997, who works here as a senior scientist. "I've never seen anything close to it."
Dr. Hecker, who has been rebuked by federal officials for failing to take more aggressive action in the Lee case when he was director, said a rising tide of overly zealous rules were throwing the lab into a tailspin.
Last month, a federal moratorium went into effect that bars new hiring of scientists from potentially unfriendly countries like China, the rules put in place because of espionage fears.
"We're doing what no foreign nation could to do to us," Dr. Hecker said. "We're crippling ourselves."
---
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Washington Times December 21, 1999
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/letter-19991221.htm
Article misrepresents FBI case against scientist
In the Dec. 20 edition, The Washington Times ran an Associated Press article with the headline "Scientist Lee will retaliate with suit." It would be inappropriate to comment about impending civil litigation, but included in the article is the suggestion that FBI Director Louis Freeh asked Congress not to hold hearings on the Wen Ho Lee prosecution because "hearings . . . could divulge government dissension and doubts in the Chinese espionage investigation. . ."
That is simply wrong and misrepresents both the underlying investigation and the 59-count indictment by a grand jury last week. Here is why.
The FBI for some time has been conducting an investigation into the potential release of classified information about the W-88 nuclear warhead to China. Though the current charges against Wen Ho Lee clearly arose from that broader counterintelligence investigation, the charges in the indictment are distinct.
Second, the issues and "doubts" described in the article also are not connected to any activity alleged in the 59-count indictment. They relate exclusively to activity that may have occurred more than 10 years ago and are the product of our own vigorous self-examination of the prior W-88 investigation, not the current indictment.
Third, in response to congressional requests, Mr. Freeh has given a congressional subcommittee unprecedented access to raw FBI files about possible nuclear espionage, specifically including those matters highlighted in the Associated Press article. Thousands of pages have been disclosed. That process continues unabated.
Mr. Freeh's request on behalf of the Department of Justice is only that a congressional subcommittee not take actions that could, given that an indictment has been returned, interfere with the criminal prosecution process. The subcommittee agreed.
The 59-count indictment follows a massive investigation involving more than 1,000 interviews and the examination of more than 1 million computer files. Our only concern is that both the government and the defendant have a fair opportunity to present their cases in court.
JOHN E. COLLINGWOOD Assistant director Office of Public and Congressional Affairs FBI Washington
-------- us nuc facilities
TMI becomes 2nd U.S. nuke plant to get new owner
Lancaster New Era Tuesday, December 21 By Ad Crable Lancaster New Era
http://www.lancnews.com/newera_news/tmisaled.htm
The Three Mile Island nuclear plant was sold today for $100 million, making it just the second commercial nuclear facility to change hands in the United States.
The completion of the deal, first announced 17 months ago, takes the famous nuclear plant out of the hands of New Jersey-based GPU Inc.
Taking over is AmerGen Energy Co., a partnership between PECO Energy Co. of Philadelphia and British Energy, the United Kingdom's largest power generator.
With the shakeup of utilities nationwide as deregulation takes hold, GPU is getting out of the power generation business to concentrate on distribution and transmission.
AmerGen, on the other hand, hopes to become a worldwide power generator and is snatching up nuclear plants.
The new utility bought a nuclear plant last week in Illinois and has agreed to purchase GPU's other nuclear plant, Oyster Creek, in New Jersey. PECO already owns the Peach Bottom nu-clear plant in York County.
AmerGen paid $23 million for TMI's working Unit 1 reactor, which has set world records for power production. The utility also is paying $77 million for the plant's nuclear fuel.
In addition, AmerGen is responsible for the decommissioning of Unit 1, when it is closed. GPU already has set aside some $320 million for the closing.
Unit 1 is scheduled to close in 2014.
The ownership and decommissioning of the closed Unit 2 reactor, irreparably damaged in the 1979 accident, remains with GPU.
The sale was approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Early on, a nuclear group had threatened to try to block the sale. But AmerGen signed an agreement with Three Mile Island Alert and Eric Epstein.
The new owner promised not to store radioactive fuel from other nuclear plants at TMI and to maintain a radiation monitoring system at the plant.
The purchase of TMI today will help "AmerGen's plan to become the nation's leading power generator," said Jerry Rainey, AmerGen's chief executive officer.
"TMI-1 has an excellent operating and safety record and a fine, experienced staff. It has the potential to remain as one of the nation's top nuclear plants for many years to come."
--------
Y2K and De-Alerting: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons
Date sent: Tue, 21 December 1999 02:08:10 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
A year ago in May, India surprised the CIA -- and nearly everyone else except, perhaps, Pakistan, who seems to have been nearly ready -- by setting off several underground nuclear explosions. Then Pakistan, claiming self-defense, followed suit. But what would actually happen if India and Pakistan had a nuclear exchange?
Most people in India and in Pakistan (and in the U.S.) probably do not know that as many as 9 out of 10 people -- or more -- who die from a nuclear blast, do not die in the explosion itself. Most people probably think that if they die from a nuclear blast, they will simply see a flash and get quickly cooked.
Those within approximately a six square mile area (for a 1 megaton blast) will indeed be close enough to "ground zero" to be killed by the gamma rays emitting from the blast itself. Ghostly shadows of these people will be formed on any concrete or stone that lies behind them, and they will be no more. They literally won't know what hit them, since they will be vaporized before the electrical signals from their sense organs can reach their brains.
Of the many victims of a nuclear war, these are the luckiest ones, of course.
Outside the circle where people will be instantly vaporized from the initial gamma radiation blast, the light from the explosion (which is many times hotter than the sun) is so bright that it will immediately and permanently blind every living thing, including farm animals (including cows, sacred or otherwise), pets, birds while in flight and not to mention peasants, Maharajah's, and Government officials -- and soldiers, of course. Whether their eyes are opened or closed. This will happen for perhaps 10 miles around in every direction (for a 1 megaton bomb) -- further for those who happen to be looking towards the blast at the moment of detonation. Even from fifty miles away, a 1 megaton blast will be many times brighter than the noonday sun. Those looking directly at the blast will have a large spot permanently burned into their retinas, where the light receptor cells will have been destroyed. The huge bright cloud being nearly instantly formed in front of them (made in part from those closer to the blast, who have already "become death"), will be the last clear image these people will see.
Most people who will die from the nuclear explosion will not die in the initial gamma ray burst, nor in the multi-spectral heat blast (mostly X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths) which will come about a tenth of a second after the gamma burst. Nor will the pressure wave which follows over the next few seconds do most of them in, though it will cause bleeding from every orifice. Nor even will most people be killed by the momentary high winds which accompany the pressure wave. These winds will reach velocities of hundreds of miles an hour near the epicenter of the blast, and will reach velocities of 70 miles per hour as far as 6 miles from the blast (for a 1 megaton bomb). The high winds and flying debris will cause shrapnel-type wounds and blunt-trauma injuries.
Together, the pressure wave and the accompanying winds will do in quite a few, and damage most of the rest of the people (and animals, and structures) in a huge circle -- perhaps hundreds of square miles in area.
Later, these people will begin to suffer from vomiting, skin rashes, and an intense unquenchable thirst as their hair falls out in clumps. Their skin will begin to peel off. This is because the internal molecular structure of the living cells within their bodies is breaking down, a result of the disruptive effects of the high radiation dose they received. All the animals will be similarly suffering. Since they have already received the dose, these effects will show up even if the people are immediately evacuated from the area -- hardly likely, since everything around will be destroyed and the country would be at war.
But this will not concern them at this time: Their immediate threat after the gamma blast, heat blast, pressure wave and sudden fierce wind (first going in the direction of the pressure wave -- outwardly from the blast -- then a moment later, a somewhat weaker wind in the opposite direction), will be the firestorm which will quickly follow, with its intense heat and hurricane-force winds, all driving towards the center where the radioactive mushroom-shaped cloud will be rising, feeding it, enlarging it, and pushing it miles up into the sky.
The cloud from a 1 megaton blast will reach nearly 10 miles across and equally high. Soon after forming, it will turn white because of water condensation around it and within it. In an hour or so, it will have largely dissipated, which means that its cargo of death can no longer be tracked visually. People will need to be evacuated from under the fallout, but they will have a hard time knowing where to go. Only for the first day or so will visible pieces of fallout appear on the ground, such as marble-sized chunks of radioactive debris and flea-sized dots of blackened particles. After that the descending debris from the radioactive cloud will become invisible and harder to track; the fallout will only be detectible with geiger counters carried by people in "moon suits". But all the moon suits will already be in use in the known affected area. Probably, no one will be tracking the cloud. One U.S. test in the South Pacific resulted in a cigar-shaped contamination area 340 miles long and up to 60 miles wide. It spread 20 miles *upwind* from the test site, and 320 miles downwind. Where exactly it goes all depends on the winds and the r