NucNews - December 31, 1999

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----------- accidents

Crash kills two, spills waste

December 24, 1999
BY DEE DRUMMOND
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Toledo Blade
http://www.toledoblade.com/editorial/news/9l24radi.htm

TIFFIN - Two people were killed yesterday when a truck carrying low-level radioactive hospital waste collided with another truck at a rural intersection northwest of this city.

Firefighters arrived just after 7:35 a.m. to find the two vehicles fully engulfed in flames, said Dan Stahl, a Seneca County volunteer firefighter.

"You could tell it was a major crash by the condition of the two cars,'' Mr. Stahl said. "It was a really bad scene.''

John Pope, 43, of Waterville was westbound on County Road 35 when he failed to yield for a southbound truck on State Rt. 635, the Ohio Highway Patrol said.

The trucks collided and then struck a tree on the side of the road before bursting into flames.

Emergency crews work to free the body of one of the victims of a fiery crash on State Rt. 635 near Bascom.

(Toledo Blade photo by Lori King)

Mr. Pope, an employee of the Holland-based Syncor International Corp., was killed in the crash.

The Howell, Mich., man who was driving a delivery truck carrying cookies and crackers was identified as Karl Pervinkler, 36. It is not known whether the men died from the crash or the fire.

Firefighters were trying to extinguish the blaze when they noticed metal canisters with the warning "Radiation - Biohazard,'' said Mr. Stahl, who is the public safety administrator for Seneca County.

"We immediately got our radiation detection equipment and started checking the scene,'' Mr. Stahl said. " You could see the containers lying right on the ground. One broke open.''

After a syringe on the ground tested positive for radioactivity, workers blocked roads while they waited for officials from the Ohio Department of Health and the state Environmental Protection Agency to arrive.

"We isolated everything that was in a zone out to where we thought it was safe,'' said Gene Kinn, a volunteer firefighter for nearby Bascom. "We were all concerned about what we were dealing with.''

Mr. Pope, a Syncor employee for nine years, was in between hospital stops at the time of the accident. Syncor operates 130 nuclear pharmacies, delivering radioactive pharmaceuticals to hospitals, said manager Stacy Petot.

About 15 metal canisters containing small amounts of radioactive pharmaceuticals - biohazardous waste, such as syringes used to inject radioactive dyes - tumbled out of the Syncor truck. "Everything that was in that container was low-level,'' said Lynne Barst, an EPA spokeswoman. "It was not of a great concern.''

---------

[Lest we forget...]

Radioactive element found in U.S. baby teeth

USA: October 22, 1999
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=4304

NEW YORK - Higher-than-expected levels of a man-made, cancer-causing element first introduced as a by-product of nuclear bomb tests has been found in baby teeth collected near nuclear power plants in three states, U.S. researchers said yesterday.

Directors of the non-profit Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) said at a news conference that levels of the element, radioisotope Strontium (Sr-90), should have dropped to almost zero once all global aboveground nuclear bomb testing ended in 1980.

Most of the 515 teeth analysed were from the 1979-1992 period and had similar concentrations of Strontium-90 as those found in children in the mid-1950s when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were still doing atmospheric nuclear bomb tests, according to initial findings of a RPHP study.

"There is cancer-causing Strontium-90 in children's teeth. It shouldn't be there," Dr Ernest Sternglass, Professor Emeritus of Radiological Physics at the University of Pittsburgh said in releasing the initial findings of independent laboratory analysis conducted on 515 baby teeth from New York, New Jersey and Florida.

RPHP said the chemical structure of Strontium-90 is similar to calcium and the body is deceived by it and deposits Sr-90 in bones and teeth where it remains, emitting cancer-causing radiation.

RPHP directors attributed some of the radioactivity to accidents such as the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Chernobyl reactor disaster in 1986. They said state and federal records showed a large amount of airborne emissions in the early 1980s from four nuclear reactors located near Suffolk County, New York.

"If it is not underground testing or aboveground testing, clearly the prime suspects are nuclear reactors or nuclear reactor accidents," Sternglass said. "The world has become too small for nuclear accidents to affect only the 10-mile zone of evacuation."

RPHP is calling for a national study by the U.S. government. It said a private foundation is supporting RPHP's plans to collect and analyse 5,000 baby teeth from across the country in "nuclear" and "non-nuclear" counties.

The teeth for the RPHP study were collected as part of the "Tooth Fairy Project," an appeal to parents by actor Alec Baldwin to send in baby teeth they put under their children's pillows for the "Tooth Fairy" after they fell out. Baldwin, a resident of Suffolk County on Long Island where RPHP focused part of its study, said he sent out 15,000 letters to parents in February 1999.

"The initial findings are disturbing," Baldwin said at the news conference. He added that "the same results (as in the mid-50s) should merit the same level of concern."

Strontium-90 was linked to childhood cancer during the 1950s, causing health concerns that led to President John F. Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1963 banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. France and China continued aboveground testing until 1980.

----------- depleted uranium

Was Toxic Plutonium Dust On Gulf War Battlefield?

The Hartford Courant
December 24, 1999
By THOMAS D. WILLIAMS
http://www.ctnow.com/scripts/editorial.dll?render=y&eetype=Article&eeid=1278489&ck=&userid=146094473&userpw=.&uh=146094473,2,&ver=hb1.2.20

A Persian Gulf War veterans' advocacy group says the Pentagon probably used plutonium in ammunition and tank coatings that during wartime explosions emitted toxic smoke and dust, sickening many of those exposed.

``The Pentagon appears to have known that plutonium and neptunium were in the depleted uranium used in ammunition and armor during the gulf war and in the conflict in Bosnia,'' said Paul Sullivan, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center Inc. in Washington, D.C.

His stance is based on an October report by the U.S. Department of Energy, which reveals that during the process of making fuel for nuclear reactors and elements for nuclear weapons, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, KY., created depleted uranium ``potentially containing neptunium and plutonium.''

The report was initiated by U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O'Leary in August in response to complaints about environmental, safety and health concerns of plant workers and residents around the plant.

The Washington Post interviewed workers and their families at the plant about what they consider abnormal cancer rates among those exposed to highly radioactive plutonium and neptunium on the job.

Sullivan said his group is concerned about the possibility of munitions manufactured for the military containing the more dangerous metals.

If plutonium and neptunium were in the munitions made at Paducah, it could put an entirely different light on the military's use of depleted uranium, said Rosalie Bertel, an epidemiologist for the International Institute for Public Health in Toronto.

It would mean the Pentagon should have tested the urine of veterans for the presence of plutonium and neptunium, she said. Plutonium and neptunium can cause cancer and fibrosis of the lungs and can create lung, liver, spleen and kidney problems, Bertel said.

The U.S. first used the low-level radioactive metal during the gulf war as an armor-piercing ammunition, as well as a protective coating for armored vehicles.

Since the gulf war ended in 1991, U.S. veterans and the Pentagon have been fighting over whether exposure to depleted uranium is responsible for sicknesses experienced by thousands of veterans.

When targets struck by DU-coated munitions catch fire and create smoke, radioactive uranium oxide and dust can travel for miles, causing air and water pollution. If inhaled or ingested in large enough quantities, scientists say, the smoke and dust can cause cancer and serious kidney damage.

Maj. William Bigelow, a spokesman for the Army, said, ``Our current position is that we stand by the Rand report.''

That report, commissioned by the Pentagon, suggested there is no evidence to show veterans became seriously ill from exposures to depleted uranium. But it said more studies on the subject are needed.

Sullivan said the Rand report did not address the hazards of plutonium or neptunium in depleted uranium.

For now, it remains unclear whether depleted uranium produced at Paducah and used to produce munitions elsewhere might have been fired in ammunition during the gulf war or in more recent conflicts such as Serbia or Kosovo. Munitions coated with DU also are being used in simulated military operations in Puerto Rico and the United States.

Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md., has studied the environmental problems at Paducah.

``It would not be proper of the Defense Department to deny that there is plutonium and neptunium in their depleted uranium shells without a thorough independent investigation,'' he said. ``And from what I know they have not done that.''

----------- china

Inside the Ring
Notes from the Pentagon

Washington Times
December 24, 1999
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/ring-19991224.htm

Taiwan HARM

The government of Taiwan secretly asked the Clinton administration last month to sell it High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, or HARMs, as part of its annual request for defensive arms, we are told.

Disclosure of the request for the air-launched missiles, which home in on radar beacons used to track aircraft, comes amid disclosure in this newspaper on Wednesday that China is building a new air-defense missile site near Taiwan.

A fight is under way inside the administration over the request for HARMs, which have been star weapons used in the Balkans and Iraq in recent months to knock out anti-aircraft batteries.

Pro-Beijing officials at the State Department are opposing U.S. sales of HARMs, arguing the missiles could be used to knock out the surface-to-air missile sites like the one being built at Zhangzhou on China's coast, thus would be considered offensive weapons because the site is on the mainland.

Pentagon officials in favor of the sale deem them necessary to maintain a balance of forces. They point out that the HARMs are defensive missiles allowed under the Taiwan Relations Act governing U.S. arms sales to the island. Officials told us the HARMs would be very effective against China's two new Sovremenny-class guided-missile destroyers, which come equipped with ample radar for HARMs to attack - and are not on the mainland.

Russia will turn over the first new destroyer to China Saturday in St. Petersburg. The ship is the first of two equipped with supersonic SS-N-22 cruise missiles to be based in Shanghai, conveniently close to Taiwan.

Keep watching the sky

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, will use its formidable satellite and ground radar tracking systems for the 44th year in a row to monitor the transit of a sleigh and nine - not eight - tiny reindeer from the North Pole Friday.

Santa Claus' journey will be picked up first by Defense Support Satellites - those that would spot a Chinese or Russian intercontinental ballistic missile launch, says a smiling NORAD spokesman, Master Sgt. Larry Lincoln.

"We can pick up the heat from Rudolph's nose," Sgt. Lincoln said of the ninth reindeer pulling Santa's present-filled sleigh.

The monitoring is intended to "keep the magic alive for children around the world," he said.

About 100 Air Force and other volunteers will staff phone lines inside NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain complex in Colorado Springs for children to call in their Christmas wishes or get an update on Santa's travel. A World Wide Web site will provide animation showing Santa's annual Christmas Eve journey. (719/474-3980 and www.noradsant a.org.)

Last year 80 million people visited the Web site and about 20,000 people called to find out the latest Santa update.

Bill Gertz can be reached at 202/636-3274 or by e-mail at gertz@twtmail.com. Rowan Scarborough can be reached at 202/636-3208 or by e-mail at scarbo@twtmail.com

----------- europe

Swiss find serious faults in British nuclear fuel

By Steve Connor,
Science Editor
23 December 1999
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/Environment/nuclear231299.shtml

The nuclear safety authority in Switzerland confirmed yesterday that it had discovered serious faults with controversial mixed plutonium-uranium oxide (Mox) fuel supplied by British Nuclear Fuels.

The revelation that grave problems were found with BNFL's Mox fuel after it was loaded into a Swiss reactor is another blow to the credibility of its main product. Last week BNFL apologised to the Japanese government after it emerged that the company had made false assurances on the quality of its Mox fuel.

The Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate said that three Mox fuel assemblies supplied by BNFL in 1996 were found to be damaged a year after they were loaded into the Beznau 1 reactor. A further nine rods had to be removed forchecks two years earlier than had been planned.

Sources in BNFL have told The Independent that the Mox fuel sent to Beznau was checked at the Sellafield plant in Cumbria by the same three BNFL employees who were sacked for allegedly falsifying quality data.

Serge Pretre, director of the Swiss inspectorate, confirmed that an examination of one damaged fuel rod revealed that it had a manufacturing fault, although he believed this was unconnected with the issue of falsification of quality-control data.

"From what I know of the damage it doesn't seem to be a quality-assurance problem," Dr Pretre said. "We are aware of the problems and have asked the authorities in London to get more information on this case."

The operator of Beznau 1, Switzerland's north-eastern electricity utility NOK, had run a check on the fuel and reloaded it into the reactor before the Mox falsification scandal came to light in September.

Dr Pretre said he had been in touch with Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) to try to find out more about the quality-control checks on the Beznau 1 fuel. "We were trying to know if [the fuel] was affected by this falsification." No clear answer has yet been received, he said.

However, a spokesman for the NII said last night that an investigation had revealed that some of the quality assurance data relating to the Mox fuel sent to Beznau was questionable. He said the inspectorate had contacted the Swiss regulators and informed them that suspect data should not affect the safe operation of the fuel.

BNFL said last night that the difficulties at Beznau were not connected with the Mox fuel pellets, but with the fuel pins into which they are loaded. "Nuclear reactors each contain many thousands of fuel pins and the nature of the Beznau problem is a fairly common occurrence with no safety implications," a spokesman said.

Government ministers are irritated with BNFL's repeated reassurances that its acknowledged falsification problems at Sellafield did not affect the first Mox fuel shipment to Japan, which arrived earlier this month.

Helen Liddell, the energy minister, has apologised in person to Japan's ambassador in London for BNFL's mistakes. She is also sending a senior civil servant to Japan in January to show that the Government is taking the matter seriously.

Shaun Bernie of Greenpeace International said that BNFL had again been shown to produce poor-quality, dangerous nuclear fuel. "There are clearly no limits to the extent of BNFL mismanagement when plutonium is involved. All plutonium Mox fuel production should be cancelled," he said.

------- india

No to War, no to Nuclear Bomb": Movie directors

India Today
December 1999
http://www.india-today.com/moviemasala/spice.html

Jamshedpur: A ten-day International Film Festival, featuring 57 movies from 11 countries, on the theme "No to War, No to Nuclear Bomb" began on December 11.

Film-maker Asoke Viswanathan, while inaugurating the festival said that modern cine directors are not making merely entertaining films but also realistic ones with social concerns. A retrospective of Israeli cinema will be showcased during the festival and a delegation from that country would attend it.

Movies of young and debutant Indian filmmakers will be the highlight of the festival and films by Vijay Ketan Misra, Susanta Misra, Santana Bordoloi, Rituporno Ghosh, Deepa Mehta, Gautam Ghosh, Rajen Khosla and Kaizad Gustad will be screened.

An exhibition of rare photographs on the nuclear bomb devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also opened.

---------------

Safety in Indian nuclear plants: Assurance is not enough

Bengali Daily
2 November 1999
BY PRADIP DATTA, ANANDA BAZAR PATRIKA (Bengali daily), Calcutta,
From: Harsh Kapoor - aiindex@mnet.fr

A. Gopalakrishnan, a former chief of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), disclosed recently that in 1995, the AERB had prepared a list of 130 flaws in different nuclear installations in the country. Some of them were nuclear enrichment plants. He said that safety standards at the older nuclear plants were so low that severe accidents like the one occurring at the Tokaimura uranium plant in Japan could occur here too.

According to Gopalakrishnan, the excessive secrecy in the functioning of the department of atomic energy (DAE) and the the constraints on the independent functioning of the AERB were responsible for the situation.The AERB works under the DAE, which can suppress any incident or information on the pretext of national security under the Official Secrets Act.

In spite of the pressure of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, the DAE had suppressed the AERB report r recommending, among other things, changes in the core coolant system essential for avoiding core meltdown at a reactor.

Some time back, the DAE itself conducted a survey on the possibilities of human errors at Indian reactors. This report was also not published.

As soon as Gopalakrishnan's statement came out, R. Chidambaram, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, told journalists that Indian nuclear installations had enough safety arrangements to prevent an accident like Tokaimura occuring here in the next 150 years.

There is little ground to be assured by Chidambaram's words. Two reactor disasters have been behind the global ebbing of enthusiasm over nuclear energy. First, the Three Mile Island accident in the USA in 1979, and second, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the USSR.

America had 47 reactor accidents of various proportions in the decade preceeding the Three Mile Island disaster. Those were also kept under wraps. People came to know about them after the Three Mile Island accident. Before that, the US experts used to claim that it was impossible for an accident to happen at TMI. Immediately after the disaster, the US Congress said it could be repeated any time.

Similarly, it became known after the Chernobyl disaster that a number of people knew about the serious flaws in reactor concerned earlier. The top Soviet nuclear scientists just lied about safety. Only a few days ago the Japanese authorities, too, used to boast about their safety standards. Now we know that workers at JCO Corporation, Tokaimura, had little idea of these standards and did not even wear radiation measuring badges to work.

One should ask Chidambaram whether the reactors and their safety arrangements in India are more developed than those in the USA, Russia, Japan, France or Germany. India generates slightly more than one per cent of its electricity (1,086 MW) from nuclear power plants. It sends its technologists to acquire skills to these countries and buys technology from them.

-------------- russia

U.S.-Russia missile talks yield no deal

Philadelphia Inquirer
12/23/99
By David Hoffman
WASHINGTON POST
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Dec/23/international/RUSSIA23.htm

MOSCOW - Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin discussed arms control yesterday, but both sides apparently failed to make headway in the disagreement over changes to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Interfax news agency reported that no progress was made in bridging the opposing views. The United States wants to change the treaty to allow the construction of a limited ballistic missile defense system, while Russia adamantly rejects any major modifications. Russia has said that if the United States unilaterally breaks out of the treaty it will destroy 20 years of arms-control agreements.

Talbott, after meeting with Foreign Ministry officials, asked for and got a meeting with Putin. The prime minister continues to enjoy a surge in his political standing as reflected in Sunday's parliamentary election in which a new, centrist party backed by him placed second.

It was not clear what, if anything, Talbott said about the war in Chechnya, but some Russian media speculated that a deal was in the works - if the United States will not pressure Russia on the war, then Moscow will once again attempt to get the START II nuclear arms-limitation treaty ratified. The treaty, signed in 1993, has languished in the Russian parliament, but the lower house, the State Duma, is soon to undergo major changes in composition as a result of Sunday's elections. The Communists who opposed the treaty have lost strength, and a pro-Western party will enter the chamber as well.

------------

Yeltsin Quits, Is Granted Immunity

By Barry Renfrew
Associated Press Writer
Friday, Dec. 31, 1999; 6:17 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline181731_000.htm

MOSCOW -- Pleading for forgiveness, Boris Yeltsin resigned Friday as president, clearing the way for his hand-picked successor to take Russia into a new age and fix the mistakes he admitted having made through eight chaotic years.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the country's most popular politician, took control of the government and will serve as acting president until elections are held in 90 days. The change came just two weeks after Putin's supporters scored a surprise triumph in parliamentary elections.

One of Putin's first acts was to sign a grant of immunity to Yeltsin, inviting speculation that a deal had been made to entice Yeltsin into early retirement.

Looking grim and emotional, Yeltsin said he was stepping down immediately to give Putin the best chance of winning the presidential elections. Putin, already the top candidate to replace Yeltsin, now has a huge advantage that his rivals probably won't be able to counter.

"I am stepping down ahead of term," Yeltsin said during an address on state television, speaking in front of a gaily decorated New Year's tree and a blue, red and white Russian flag with a golden Russian eagle.

"I understand that I must do it, and Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with new intelligent, strong, energetic people, and we who have been in power for many years must go," he said, making a surprise announcement during what was supposed to be a New Year's address.

Yeltsin, who has ruled Russia with a strong hand since 1991 and was due to step down in June, said he deeply regretted not meeting people's expectations in the post-Soviet period.

"I want to beg forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. And also I would like to beg forgiveness for not having justified your hopes," said Yeltsin, who rarely admits errors. "I beg your forgiveness for having failed to jump in one leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past to the light, rich and civilized future."

Putin, a former KGB officer, quickly assumed control of the government and said he would continue as prime minister. Yeltsin turned over to Putin the so-called nuclear suitcase controlling Russia's nuclear arsenal and the pen he used to sign key measures.

The transition of power is likely to be smooth, with no destabilizing effects. Russia has a decade of democratic elections under its belt, and political parties were already preparing for the presidential vote.

In Washington, President Clinton paid tribute to Yeltsin for dismantling the communist system and putting a democratic structure in place.

"I liked him because he was always forthright with me," Clinton said. "He always did exactly what he said he would do. And he was willing to take chances to try to improve our relationship."

Putin quickly signed a decree giving Yeltsin immunity from criminal prosecution, a lifetime pension and a government country home, bodyguards and medical care for him and his family.

But while the immunity will be seen by some as a key reason for Yeltsin's decision, the deal did not include his family, which has been linked to corruption allegations in recent months. Previous prime ministers, who also had their eye on the presidency, had talked of such a deal for Yeltsin, who is also concerned about Communist efforts to jail him for breaking up the Soviet Union.

The timing of Yeltsin's resignation probably had more to do with parliamentary elections less than two weeks ago, in which pro-Putin centrist parties did unexpectedly well in parliamentary elections. With the backing of the state media and showing strength in public opinion polls, Putin has a huge advantage in the presidential election, expected to be held on March 26.

Putin's confident handling of the war in Chechnya and no-nonsense manner appeals to many Russians, who want take-charge leadership to tackle the nation's enormous economic, political and social problems.

Putin said Friday there would be no change in government policies, including foreign relations. But he said efforts to modernize and strengthen the weakened military would continue and the state would ensure stability.

"The freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom of the press, the freedom of property rights - these fundamentals of civilized society - will be reliably protected by the state," Putin said in a New Year's address to the nation.

Many in the West view Putin's rise with concern, and domestic critics claim he wants to restore authoritarian controls because of his KGB past. He makes no secret of wanting to revive Russia as a great power, but has also sought to preserve the ties Yeltsin cultivated with the West.

Yeltsin's resignation shocked ordinary Russians, but caused little commotion. Most people were busy with preparations for New Year's Eve, the country's most important holiday. The news dominated Russian newscasts, but with few exceptions television stations did not interrupt their holiday programs for detailed coverage.

The Russian stock market jumped to a 15-month high on the news, with dealers saying hopes of strong new leadership would boost the economy.

"To be honest, I didn't think anything of Yeltsin lately," said 27-year-old teacher Lena Matrosova. "He was doing nothing as president. There was just this person we had, but he did not mean anything."

Yeltsin's political opponents welcomed the president's resignation.

"The Yeltsin party of power has fallen," said Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who came in second in 1996 presidential elections.

Plagued for years by heart and other health problems, Yeltsin was often ill and out of sight during his second term. But he continued to dominate Russian politics nonetheless. He easily defeated a Communist-led effort in May to impeach him and had dismissed four prime ministers in the last two years.

Yeltsin said he saw no point in staying in power for the last six months of his term because Putin was well-suited to take over. He said he was confident Russia would not return to its authoritarian past.

"I shouldn't be in the way of the natural course of history," Yeltsin said. "To cling to power for another six months when the country has a strong person worthy of becoming president - why should I stand in his way? Why should I wait? It's simply not in my character."

-----------

Nuclear Launch Authority Handed Over to Putin

December 31, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/99/12/31/late/31russia-nuke.html

Related Article
Yeltsin Resigns, Turns Over Powers to Prime Minister Putin (Dec. 31, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/31russia-yeltsin.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline085441_000.htm

Clinton Hails Yeltsin, Looks Forward to Putin
http://www.nytimes.com/99/12/31/late/31russia-us.html

Clinton Pays Tribute to Yeltsin
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-US-Yeltsin.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline074436_000.htm

Russia's Acting President a Tough Ex-Spy
http://www.nytimes.com/99/12/31/late/31russia-putin.html

World Leaders Stunned by Yeltsin's Resignation
http://www.nytimes.com/99/12/31/late/31russia-reax.html

Forum
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?13@@.f056025

MOSCOW -- After announcing his resignation on Friday, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to his acting successor one of the most important symbols of power in Russia: the briefcase with codes to launch nuclear missiles.

Yeltsin received the briefcase from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who resigned on Christmas Day in 1991. Yeltsin parted from it only once during his term in office -- in 1996, when he underwent heart surgery and turned over his powers briefly to then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

"The nuclear button is an effective mechanism to control Russian nuclear forces and also a symbol of the presidency," former Yeltsin press secretary Sergei Yastrzhembsky said when asked to describe the device.

The briefcase is carried behind Yeltsin by an officer dressed in a distinctive black navy uniform which makes it easy for the president to single him out in a crowd. But all information about it has been classified until lately.

A senior parliament member, Alexei Arbatov, has described the nuclear button as the first link in a chain of commands ending in onboard cruise computers of nuclear missiles.

"The nuclear button...transmits presidential sanction for the use of nuclear weapons to command centres where general staff officers are on duty around the clock," said Arbatov, an expert on national security with close ties to the Kremlin.

"On receiving a coded signal, officers...using appropriate codes, determine that it was the president who sent it, rather than someone else."

When the authenticity of the presidential message is confirmed, duty officers open safes containing their own codes and send them to missile launch pads and nuclear submarines.

"Then the codes are installed (in onboard cruise computers), launch keys are turned and the missiles blast off," he said.

Russia, which inherited the nuclear forces of the former Soviet Union, has some 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads, enough to destroy life on earth several times over, as well as stocks of medium- and short-range weapons.

Yeltsin himself reminded the world of this just weeks ago on a visit to China, when he confronted Western criticism of Russia's military action in Chechnya by saying U.S. President Bill Clinton had forgotten Russia was a nuclear power.

According to NTV commercial television, some 30 people are involved in handling the nuclear button network, run jointly by the Defence Ministry and the secret services.

Arbatov has said the defence minister has a similar nuclear button but the president did not need to coordinate his orders with the military chief.

"The first order (from the president) does not need a confirmation by the second," Arbatov said. He did not make clear whether the defence minister would need the president's authorisation to use his nuclear button. REUTERS Reut07:00 12-31-99

---

Putin rocked Russians with ruthlessness

MOSCOW, Dec 31 1999
Agence France Presse
http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/headlines/991231/world/afp/Putin_rocked_Russians_with_ruthlessness.html

Vladimir Putin, the poker-faced ex-KGB spy, once tried to westernize a crumbling Soviet Union but has since galvanized a new Russia and is vowing to annihilate the rebels of Chechnya.

"We'll get them anywhere -- if we find terrorists sitting in the outhouse, then we will piss on them there. That's it. The matter is settled," barked Putin shortly after Russia launched its Chechen war in September.

Such talk could have cost his predecessors their job. But it boosted Putin's career.

He became acting president Friday when Boris Yeltsin suddenly announced he was stepping down, and is likely to retain the Kremlin hot seat for years to come.

Yeltsin, ailing and being edged out of power by his closest advisers, named the then virtually unknown security chief as prime minister last August.

He had been running the secretive but omnipotent Security Council.

He has since turned into one of the most admired figures Russia has seen this decade, even his opponents singing his praises.

"Putin has enchanted Russia," wrote Vyacheslav Kostikov, a former Kremlin spokesman and current board member of a Media-MOST empire that has campaigned heavily against the government.

"I honestly believe that Putin is capable of heroic deeds in the name of our humiliated Russia," Kostikov said.

Yet the 47-year-old prime minister and acting president remains a political enigma.

He helped found a new party, Unity, which rode into the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) on the back of his popularity in December 19 elections.

The party is described as "centrist." But the respected Moscow Times said in an editorial: "There is no particular reason to believe that Unity is 'centrist,' unless 'centrist' is another word for 'unknown.'"

The English-language newspaper added: "But what seems clear is that the Kremlin has been dealt a winning hand -- or the Kremlin has dealt itself a winning hand, depending on one's point of view."

What can be gleamed from Putin's bare biography suggests that he is intelligent and cunning, trusted enough by peers to be handed some of the most sensitive assignments.

Putin "was shaped by the single greatest mission in the history of the KGB," wrote the US-based private global intelligence firm Stratfor.

That mission was the "systematic restructuring of the Soviet economy, Soviet society and Soviet relations with the West in the hope of preserving the state and the regime."

Putin spent the 1980s in Berlin, where intelligence observers believe he slipped into West Germany to learn trade secrets of such companies as US computer giant IBM.

Observers believe KGB officers knew the Soviet Union was in ruins and could be preserved only by revolutionising its lagging technology and attracting investors from the West.

It remains unclear how successful Putin was. But he became the chief liaison for foreign investors after joining the pro-reform team of Saint Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sabchak in 1994.

Local journalists report that it was impossible to make foreign investments in Russia's second city without first contacting Putin.

He then also became a trusted ally of economics chief Anatoly Chubais, who brought Putin to Moscow in 1996 and made him responsible for monitoring regional leaders who were seeking greater independence from Moscow.

One political analyst reported that Putin was told to collect so-called "compromising material" on governors which could then be used as an "incentive" for them to toe the Kremlin line.

Analysts suggest the Kremlin is now repaying Putin by making him the star of a well orchestrated media public relations campaign, one which has put his presidential rating at an unheralded 46 percent.

The latest Public Opinion Foundation poll said Russians were three times as likely to vote for Putin in presidential election due in June than his nearest rival, Communist Party boss Gennady Zyuganov.

"Russia was and will remain a great country," Putin wrote in a 14-page essay entitled "Russia on the Threshold of a New Millenium" published this week on the government's Internet web site.

The message, at once an outline of policy objectives and a philosophical expose, was striking both in its relaxed tone and a novel content that mixed Western democratic and market ideals with traditional Russian mores.

"Russia is never going to be another USA or England, where liberal values have deep historic roots," Putin asserted.

"It is a fact that in Russia the attraction to a collective way of life has always been stronger than the desire for individualism."

At the same time, though, the country and its people understand better than many the dangers that a government -- particularly an executive branch -- endowed with excessive power can pose to people's freedom, he said.

"The global experience prompts the conclusion that the main threat to human rights and freedoms, to democracy as such, emanates from the executive authority," Putin wrote.

"The state must be where and as needed; freedom must be where and as required."

---

West watches, worries as Putin takes power

Friday, 31 December 1999 10:35 (GMT)
By Martin Sieff,
UPI National Security Editor
http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=55485

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- King Log has been succeeded by King Stork.

A corrupt but relatively democratic and pro-Western leader of Russia has been replaced by one who has given every indication he is likely to prove anything but.

Vladimir Putin, the 47-year-old, dour, ruthless former secret police chief who has just succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia, will make no move to ideologically reimpose communism in Russia.

In the West, we might very well come to wish that he would.

Instead, Putin is a striking expression of the gangster values, pervading cynicism, anti-Western nationalist sentiments and utterly ruthless implementation of policies that pervades modern Russia.

He is the embodiment of the new criminal-syndicalist state, a system where big business has been forced to adopt the literal practices of gangsters to survive, because the structures and procedures of the rule of law are virtually non-existent.

Putin has made clear that he will retain the basic, freewheeling free market structure of Russia.

But in foreign policy, he looks set to confront the United States and the West far more vigorously -- and ruthlessly -- than any leader in the past 16 years since the death of his own personal hero Yuri Andropov, who masterminded a wave of murderous international terrorism against the West.

He has not even pretended to have any "personal chemistry" with U.S. President Bill Clinton.

When Putin met Clinton in Oslo in early November, he was confrontational and -- deliberately -- charmless. Clinton and his press spokesmen were so taken aback that in their descriptions of the meeting, they omitted all the usual rhetorical boiler plate about "the chemistry was good" and "friendships remained strong" even if there was disagreement on every issue.

Putin is no "phony tough." He really is tough.

He reflects the obsession by the brutal and ferociously anti-Western wave of new nationalists in Russia with implementing the principle of U.S. President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt - "Talk softly and carry a big stick and you will go far." As prime minister, Putin already publicly threw his weight behind rapidly rebuilding Russia's mighty Strategic Rocket Forces, which even through the collapse of Soviet and Russian power have remained the most deadly nuclear strike force in the world.

He has approved confrontational stunts by the Russian armed forces such as plans to fly Tupolev Tu-22 Backfire bombers armed with nuclear cruise missiles to Cuba or Vietnam next year.

He won the warm support of the Russian army's top general staff command for giving them the green light to crush the secessionist Chechens, regardless of the thousands of Chechen civilians who would die.

Domestically, he may well unleash a repressionist terror that would have enormous public support.

Tsars Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century and Peter the Great in the 17th century both became popular figures by crushing and humiliating the boyars, the detested corrupt wealthy merchant class of their times.

Putin would enjoy similar overwhelming public support if he took such actions against the billionaire oligarchs who have amassed enormous financial, energy and media empires over the past decade while the living standard of ordinary Russians has collapsed into impoverishment.

Putin already has a powerful political coalition behind him.

The pro-government Unity bloc won a stunning 23 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections just 12 days ago.

The Union of Right Wing Forces led by his old political mentor, former Kremlin chief of staff Anatoly Chubais, won nearly 9 percent in the same election. Chubais, in the words of analyst Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, ran a shamelessly strident xenophobic and anti-Western campaign, supporting Putin's policies in Chechnya.

Since then, Putin has openly signaled his warm approval of Chubais.

Ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who scraped back into parliament with 6 percent of the vote, will also support Putin. He has little choice.

Zhirinovsky, who has threatened to obliterate Western cities with nuclear weapons if he should ever win power, cynically supported Yeltsin in every key parliamentary vote and was rewarded by having the pro-government television networks shower favorable publicity on him in the parliamentary election campaign.

He will not hesitate to applaud any and all confrontational, anti-Western moves that Putin makes.

Even the majority Communists will rally behind Putin on key issues, although they loathe his free market policies.

But they already support him on Chechnya and on confronting the West.

And they will cheer any moves he takes against the oligarchs.

The once-feared Fatherland-All Russia bloc will give Putin no real problem.

It is already falling apart.

Former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov is a veteran government insider with no stomach for being on the receiving end of the abusive media propaganda that Putin's supporters showered on him and his allies in the election campaign.

Also, it was Primakov who masterminded the anti-Western foreign policy strategy, forging close strategic ties to China, that Putin has energetically implemented.

But Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Lebed will have a joyless and worried time this New Year's Eve.

In ability, power base, ambition and their own relative youthfulness, they are the nearest things Putin has to challengers and rivals. And therefore they are bound to be his first political targets.

In his first weeks in office, Putin will concentrate on his election campaign. He may well present a moderate reassuring image to the West.

But once he is elected as president in his own right? Watch out.

------------

Experts see continuity in China-Russia ties

Deseret News
Friday, December 31, 1999
By Reuters News Service
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,145015603,00.html

BEIJING, Dec 31 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin's shock resignation on Friday is unlikely to disturb warming China-Russian ties, Western diplomats said.

But one Chinese expert fretted over uncertainty in future relations if Yeltsin's chosen successor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin fails to marshal political support and loses elections scheduled for late March.

China has made no official comment on Yeltsin's resignation. A foreign ministry official said Beijing would issue an official reaction within hours.

"I don't think the transition will be any great shock to the Chinese," said a Western diplomat in Beijing. "I think they'll be comfortable with Putin."

Putin was handed presidential powers, including control of Russsia's massive nuclear arsenal, on Friday following Yeltsin's resignation earlier in the day.

As Russia's first democratically elected president, Yeltsin has built on a thaw in ties begun by Mikhail Gorbachev, forging what he and Chinese President Jiang Zemin have termed a "strategic partnership."

The trend has accelerated in recent months, bolstered by the two countries' abhorrence of NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, and shared opposition to U.S.-dominance in global affairs. They have blasted U.S. plans for a ballistic missile defence shield.

Jiang has also been the only major leader to back Russia's military campaign in Chechnya - a campaign which has drawn fierce criticism from Western governments.

China faces separatist threats of its own, particularly in Moslem Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as from Nationalist-ruled Taiwan.

Just days after being treated for pneumonia, Yeltsin visited Beijing earlier in December for a 26-hour visit filled with comradely bearhugs with Jiang.

"I think the Chinese had in mind that this was sort of a goodbye visit," the Western diplomat said.

"They wanted to give him a nice send-off."

The diplomat said Jiang had met Putin on several occasions in earlier stages of their political careers, and that a plan had been in the works for Putin to visit Beijing early next year.

But Li Fan, a political analyst from private think-tank the World and China Institute, said uncertainty about Putin's own political strength left a question mark over the future of ties with Moscow.

Putin is currently riding a massive wave of popular support in Russia for his forceful handling of Chechnya, viewed as punishment for terrorist bombings.

But without the support of Yeltsin, Putin's political fortunes could shift once Chechnya subsides as an issue.

"With Yeltsin's step-down, it will affect Putin's chances of being president and Russia's internal politics will be uncertain," Li said.

---

Yeltsin Catches World by Surprise

The Associated Press
Friday, Dec. 31, 1999; 10:32 a.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline103246_000.htm

LONDON -- Foreign leaders praised Boris Yeltsin today for leading Russia away from communism but also expressed hope that a new leader may improve Russia's strained relations with the West.

"Boris Yeltsin has played a crucial role in the history of Russia," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a short statement after Yeltsin announced his resignation as Russia's president today.

"He has steered his country through a most difficult and painful transition from communism to democracy ... We now look forward to the presidential elections when the Russian people will decide on Boris Yeltsin's successor and take a further step towards embedding the democratic process."

Appearing live on Russian television, Yeltsin apologized to the nation for failing to fulfill their dreams during his eight years of power, a period in which his health deteriorated and his leadership became increasingly bogged down by corruption and scandal. He said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who enjoys great popularity, would take control until presidential elections in March.

In a statement released in Washington, President Clinton said Yeltsin's succession by Putin is evidence of the Russian leader's constitutional achievements.

"We have had our differences, such as on Chechnya, but President Yeltsin and my starting point has always been how Russia and the United States could work together to advance common interests," Clinton said.

He cited as "genuine progress" the dismantling of thousands of U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear weapons and Russian peacekeeping troops in the Balkans.

While many leaders said they looked ahead eagerly to the presidential elections, they also offered congratulations and praise to Putin, who is the strong favorite to win in March.

French President Jacques Chirac addressed his congratulations solely to Putin, without mentioning Yeltsin.

"I am convinced in this period of transition that is so important for the Russian people that you will be able to act in favor of a return to peace, to the deepening of democracy and the pursuit of indispensable reforms," Chirac said in a statement.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced years of economic decline and millions live in poverty. Efforts to build a market economy have had little effect on most people's lives and millions of pensioners and workers go months without being paid.

In Japan, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi said Yeltsin had helped improve relations between the two countries, and he expressed his regret that the Russian leader had decided to step down.

"I hope that Yeltsin's successor will continue the current reforms in politics and the economy," he said, adding that Putin struck him as "a fearless and aggressive leader."

Yeltsin's relations with the West have also soured recently over Russia's military offensive in Chechnya and NATO's attack on Serbia earlier this year.

Portugal, which takes over the six-month rotating presidency of the 15-nation European Union on Saturday, expressed hope that Putin would improve his country's handling of foreign affairs. He said he hopes Putin "is able to listen to and interpret the voice of the international community in problems like Chechnya, which require more constructive attitudes by Russia."

In Denmark, Foreign Minister Helveg Petersen warned that Yeltsin's departure doesn't solve Russia's problems.

"Russia still is tormented by two huge problems: the war in Chechnya, and the lack of economical and social reform," Petersen said.

Leaders of former Soviet bloc countries noted Yeltsin's "historical significance" and expressed hope that Russia would proceed on the road of democracy.

While most foreign governments were caught off guard by Yeltsin's announcement, many officials said they did not find it entirely unexpected.

In Washington a White House spokesman, James Fallin, said "while there is an element of surprise it was not a complete one." He cited speculative reports in the Russian press for several months about the 68-year-old Yeltsin's health problems.

As for the dramatic way in which he resigned, many said that was vintage Yeltsin. Yeltsin's sudden departure was "an expression of the dramatic person he is," Petersen told reporters in Denmark.

---------

U.S., Russia Monitor Missiles

December 31, 1999 Filed at 12:46 p.m. EST
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Y2K-Nuclear-Watch.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline034801_000.htm

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (AP) -- Side by side, Russian and American military officers monitored the skies today to ensure that the millennium doesn't begin with a nuclear missile launch accidentally sent because of the Y2K bug. The verdict in the first hours: Everything's going fine.

The cooperation was a long way from decades of Cold War paranoia and movies such as ``Fail-Safe,'' in which a technical problem with communications leads to a mistaken nuclear attack on Moscow and the destruction of New York by the United States' own bombers.

In real life, the former enemies created the joint unit at Peterson to make sure there were no accidental missile launches. They wanted to ensure, for example, that their systems didn't mistake a radar failure as a threat, or misidentify a commercial aircraft as a bomber. They also wanted to be on guard in case a terrorist tried to manipulate their computers.

Reporters were briefly allowed in the monitoring room just after clocks in Petropavlovsk, in the easternmost Russian time zone, struck 12:01 a.m. It was 5:01 a.m. local time.

The atmosphere in the monitoring room was anything but tense. The crews frequently broke into laughter. And more than an hour after extreme eastern Russia had entered the New Year, no problems had been detected.

``So far it's what we thought it would be, pretty dull,'' said U.S. Lt. Col. Greg Boyette.

The team was agreed upon by President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Early today, Yeltsin announced he was resigning and turning power over to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The resignation ``caught us a little off guard but kept the crew members awake because there was something to talk about,'' said Boyette. And Col. Sergey Kaplin, head of the Russian military team, said it showed ``the Russian Federation is ready to meet the New Year.''

Through mid-January, six-person crews -- two Russians, two Americans and two translators -- will be working eight-hour shifts around the clock, watching computer screens in a 1,200-square-foot, $4.5 million center in Building 1040.

The building is adjacent to U.S. Space Command, which controls all military space programs, and a few miles across Colorado Springs from the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint U.S. and Canadian operation that monitors manmade objects in space from deep inside Cheyenne Mountain.

Senior U.S. commanders planned to be on duty at Cheyenne Mountain throughout the period, as were their Russian counterparts, thousands of miles away.

No U.S. officers were allowed in the Russian missile center, and the Russians will not be permitted in the NORAD facilities. Data from Cheyenne Mountain was passed on to the Y2K Strategic Stability Center at Peterson to be shared with the Russians.

---

First Russian Nuclear Reactor Passes Y2K Test

December 31, 1999
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-nuclear-russia.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The first Russian nuclear reactor to cross into the new millennium survived the Y2K computer bug test, Russia's atomic power company said in Moscow on Friday half an hour after the plant entered the New Year.

``At 3:00 p.m. Moscow time (1200 GMT) the staff of the Bilibinsk nuclear power plant met the New Year. In connection with the change of date no shutdown in the work of the equipment was observed,'' the Rosenergoatom firm, which manages eight of nine civilian nuclear power plants in Russia said in a press release at 1230 GMT.

Itar-Tass news agency said radiation levels at the plant remained within normal bounds.

The reactor, in Russia's far eastern Chukotka province opposite Alaska, was the first to cross into the New Year, just three hours after President Boris Yeltsin resigned in Moscow at noon on Friday.

An Emergencies Ministry duty officer in Moscow said there were no problems due to the Y2K computer bug as of 15 minutes after midnight in Chukotka.

------------

Christian Science Monitor
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999

NEWS IN BRIEF

A Russian court acquitted a retired naval officer charged with treason for writing about unsafe storage of nuclear waste. Alexander Nikitin was charged with revealing state secrets after writing a 1996 report in a Norwegian journal and discussing 52 nuclear submarines abandoned in a shipyard near Russia's border with Norway. The subs allegedly hold spent nuclear fuel that is susceptible to leakage, overheating, and explosion. Environmental groups expressed outrage when prosecutors demanded that Nikitin be sentenced to 12 years in a labor colony.<P>

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Nuke Reactor Enters 2000 Unscathed

December 31, 1999
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Y2K-US-Russian-Nukes.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline120352_000.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The first Russian nuclear plant to pass into 2000 did so without incident -- cause for optimism, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said today. ``But we have barely scratched the surface'' in terms of time zones, he added.

Four units at the Bilibino Nuclear Heat and Power Plant in northeast Siberia above the Arctic Circle were functioning normally after the rollover to 2000, Richardson said, and early reports indicate that Russia's other energy systems made the Jan. 1 switch without glitches.

``So far, international signs are encouraging but we have barely scratched the surface with the early time zones,'' Richardson said.

The Bilibino plant provides energy for the mining industry and the seaport of Pevask, which is connected to the plant by a 300-mile transmission line.

The first unit began operating in January, 1974 and the last one started up in December 1976, according to the Soviet Plant Source Book, published by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based trade association for the nuclear industry.

The units are targeted for closure in 2002 and 2006.

A 1996 visit by U.S. and international energy officials found safety and maintenance problems at the site in part of because of the high turnover of personnel.

------------

Clinton and Yeltsin Remain Friendly

The Associated Press
Friday, Dec. 31, 1999; 5:28 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline172809_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- For seven years, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin hugged, laughed and disagreed with each other so regularly they seemed more like fraternity brothers than heads of state.

When the two presidents said goodbye over the phone Friday, they were on the outs over Russia's crackdown on Chechnya and hadn't spoken in more than a month. Still, Yeltsin offered to stay in touch.

"I am very glad that I was your friend," Yeltsin told the man he ebulliently called "Beel." "I will continue to be your friend."

"I liked him because he was always very forthright with me," Clinton told reporters afterward. "He always did exactly what he said he would do."

If they were an improbable pair, their separate struggles bonded them as friends and mutual defenders.

Clinton would declare the sickly Yeltsin robust, even when his health was clearly in decline. Yeltsin would wrap Clinton in bear hugs, as if to cheer up a president laid low by impeachment.

"We had our arguments, we had our fights, we had our genuine disagreement about our national interests from time to time," Clinton said. "But I think that the Russian people were well-served to have a leader who honestly believes that their votes ought to determine who was running the show in Russia."

Between mood swings, Clinton and Yeltsin could find each other hilarious. Once, they met at Franklin Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park, N.Y., in October 1995. Until then, Clinton and Yeltsin had talked mostly on the fringes of economic summits, and there had been speculation that the session would be a disaster.

When they emerged from their talks, Yeltsin stood before reporters and bellowed: "Now, for the first time, I can tell you that YOU'RE a disaster."

Clinton, standing beside him, turned red as a beet and laughed until tears ran from his eyes.

Letters and phone calls often flew between the two men. In September, with Yeltsin in the midst of a money-laundering scandal, it was the much-investigated Clinton who talked to him by phone for an hour, encouraging him to cooperate with investigators.

As Clinton grappled with the NATO bombing mission in Yugoslavia earlier in the year, it was Yeltsin who dispatched former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to serve as a diplomatic intermediary, even though Yeltsin was a virulent critic of the NATO campaign.

Yeltsin sent a congratulatory note for Clinton's 50th birthday three years ago. But Yeltsin also chewed Clinton out for ordering air strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for U.S. embassy bombings in 1998.

"I am indignant," Yeltsin said. "I didn't know that this strike would be carried out, and that means the whole world was unaware of that. And this makes the strike even more indecent."

A month ago, it was Clinton's turn to do the chewing out, this time over Russia's military crackdown on rebels in Chechnya. Yeltsin seemed sore over growing international objections to Russia's actions, saying other countries were meddling in an internal Russian affair.

During a meeting at a multinational summit in Turkey, Clinton reminded Yeltsin that not too long ago, the Russian himself was a rebel who climbed atop a tank to make the case for freedom, and who enjoyed the support of the very nations he was now telling to butt out.

"Your standing there on that tank said to those people, 'You can do this, but you'll have to kill me first,'" Clinton said. "If they had put you in jail instead of electing you president, I would hope that every leader of every country around this table would have stood up for you and for freedom in Russia and not said, 'Well, that is an internal Russian affair that we cannot be a part of.'"

The remarks only rankled Yeltsin even more - so much so that he said: "Mr. Clinton has forgotten Russia is a great power that possesses a nuclear arsenal."

But their conversation Friday bore no traces of that chilly exchange. Clinton told Yeltsin he believed historians would label him "someone who guided Russia to the point of democracy, where power is transferred by constitutional and civil means," said White House spokesman Joe Lockhart.

Yeltsin promised that he was leaving Russia in the hands of "a strong, intelligent, capable man" in Vladimir Putin, Lockhart said, and immediately Clinton said he would support Yeltsin's successor.

Then Clinton fell back into his usual mode as Yeltsin's defender.

"The president did say he was glad to hear him sounding so strong and vigorous," Lockhart said. "I believe the word was 'chipper.'"

------------

Clinton Statements on Yeltsin Text

December 31, 1999
Filed at 4:35 p.m. EST
By The Associated Press

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Clinton-Yeltsin-Text.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline163550_000.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline081609_000.htm

President Clinton's statement and later comments outside the Oval Office Friday on Russian President Boris Yeltsin's resignation, as transcribed by the Federal Document Clearing House:

Today, President Yeltsin ends his historic tenure as Russia's first democratically elected president.

Under his leadership since 1991, the Russian people have faced the unprecedented challenge of creating new institutions and building a new life after decades of corrosive communist rule.

His lasting achievement has been dismantling that communist system and building new political institutions under democratically elected leaders within a constitutional framework. The fact that Prime Minister Putin assumes responsibility today as acting president in accordance with the constitution is but the latest example of this achievement.

The relationship between the United States and Russia under President Yeltsin has produced genuine progress for both our people. Five thousand strategic nuclear have been dismantled, and our nuclear weapons no longer are targeted at each other.

We have worked together to eliminate nuclear weapons from the other states of the former Soviet Union. Russia has withdrawn its troops from the Baltic nations.

Now its troops are serving alongside Americans to maintain the peace in the Balkans, and Russia was instrumental in achieving peace in Kosovo.

We have also had our differences, such as on Chechnya, but President Yeltsin and my starting point has always been how Russia and America can work together to advance common interests.

In this spirit I look forward to working with Acting President Putin as the Russian people begin the process of making the transition from one democratically elected president to another.

To President Yeltsin, let me convey my appreciation for the work we have done together. Hillary and I extend our warmest wishes to you and your family.

------

Not long ago I had about a 20 minute phone conversation with President Boris Yeltsin, who today ends his historic tenure as Russia's democratically elected president.

Under his leadership, since 1991, the Russian people have faced the unprecedented challenge of building a new democracy and a new life, after decades of corrosive communist rule. His lasting achievement has been dismantling the communist system and creating a vital democratic process within a constitutional framework. The fact that Prime Minister Putin assumes responsibility today as acting president, in accordance with the constitution, is the latest example of President Yeltsin's achievement.

The relationship between the United States and Russia under President Yeltsin has produced genuine progress for both our people. Five thousand strategic nuclear weapons have been dismantled. Our nuclear weapons are no longer targeted at each other. We have worked together to eliminate nuclear weapons from the other states of the former Soviet Union. Russia has withdrawn its troops from the Baltic nations. And now its troops are serving alongside Americans to maintain peace in the Balkans. In fact, Russia was instrumental in achieving the peace agreement in Kosovo.

Of course, we have also had our differences. But the starting point for our relationship has always been how Russia and America can work together to advance our common interests. In that spirit, I look forward to working with acting President Putin as the Russian people begin the process of making the transition from one democratically elected president to another.

To President Yeltsin, let me convey my appreciation again for the work we have done together. Hillary and I extend our warmest wishes to him, Naina and their family.

QUESTION: Mr. President, are you going to Moscow in February at the invitation of Prime Minister...

CLINTON: I have made no plans to do that, yet.

QUESTION: Mr. President, can you share some of your personal recollections of Boris Yeltsin? You seemed to have a warm, personal relationship with him. What did you admire? What are you thoughts about him as a person?

CLINTON: Well, I liked him because he was always very forthright with me, he always did exactly what he said he would do, and he was willing to take chances to try to improve our relationship, to try to improve democracy in Russia.

He took the Russian troops out of the Balkans. He recently agreed to take them out of Moldova and Georgia.

We got rid of all those nuclear weapons in the other states of the former Soviet Union. We got rid of thousands of nuclear weapons. He's committed to START II, and I hope it will be ratified by the Russian Duma so we can quickly move to START III and reduce our nuclear arsenals even further.

I liked him because I think he genuinely deplored communism. He lived with it, he saw it, and he believed that democracy was the best system. I think it was in every fiber of his being.

And we had our arguments, we had our fights, we had our genuine disagreement about our national interests from time to time, but I think that the Russian people were well-served to have a leader who honestly believes that their votes ought to determine who was running the show in Russia and what the future direction of the country should be.

-------------

Yeltsin Hands Putin Russia's 'Nuclear Briefcase'

Russia Today
Dec 31, 1999
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=122141

MOSCOW, -- (Reuters) After announcing his resignation on Friday, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to his acting successor one of the most important symbols of power in Russia: the briefcase with codes to launch nuclear missiles.

Yeltsin received the briefcase from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who resigned on Christmas Day in 1991. Yeltsin parted from it only once during his term in office - in 1996, when he underwent heart surgery and turned over his powers briefly to then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

A senior parliament member, Alexei Arbatov, has described the nuclear button as the first link in a chain of commands ending in onboard cruise computers of nuclear missiles.

"The nuclear button...transmits presidential sanction for the use of nuclear weapons to command centers where general staff officers are on duty around the clock," said Arbatov, an expert on national security with close ties to the Kremlin.

"On receiving a coded signal, officers...using appropriate codes, determine that it was the president who sent it, rather than someone else."

When the authenticity of the presidential message is confirmed, duty officers open safes containing their own codes and send them to missile launch pads and nuclear submarines.

"Then the codes are installed (in onboard cruise computers), launch keys are turned and the missiles blast off," he said.

According to NTV commercial television, some 30 people are involved in handling the nuclear button network, run jointly by the Defense Ministry and the secret services.

Arbatov has said the defense minister has a similar nuclear button but the president did not need to coordinate his orders with the military chief.

"The first order (from the president) does not need a confirmation by the second," Arbatov said. He did not make clear whether the defense minister would need the president's authorization to use his nuclear button.

---

Facts about Russia's nuclear briefcase

Deseret News
Friday, December 31, 1999
By Reuters News Service
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,145015595,00.html

MOSCOW, Dec 31 (Reuters) - After announcing his resignation on Friday, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to his acting successor one of the most important symbols of power in Russia: the briefcase with codes to launch nuclear missiles.

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Yakushkin was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying Yeltsin handed over the "nuclear briefcase" to Acting President Vladimir Putin shortly before finally leaving his Kremlin office at 1100 GMT. Yeltsin received the briefcase from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who resigned on Christmas Day in 1991. Yeltsin parted from it only once during his term in office-in 1996, when he underwent heart surgery and turned over his powers briefly to then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

A senior parliament member, Alexei Arbatov, has described the nuclear button as the first link in a chain of commands ending in onboard cruise computers of nuclear missiles.

"On receiving a coded signal, officers...using appropriate codes, determine that it was the president who sent it, rather than someone else."

When the authenticity of the presidential message is confirmed, duty officers open safes containing their own codes and send them to missile launch pads and nuclear submarines.

"Then the codes are installed (in onboard cruise computers), launch keys are turned and the missiles blast off," he said.

According to NTV commercial television, some 30 people are involved in handling the nuclear button network, run jointly by the Defence Ministry and the secret services.

Arbatov has said the defence minister has a similar nuclear button but the president did not need to coordinate his orders with the military chief.

--------

DIVE! Re-creating the Cold War

Orange County Weekly
Dec 31 - Jan 6, 2000
MILLENNIUM ISSUE
by Nick Schou
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/00/17/lede21.shtml

Lurking in the Port of Long Beach, half-submerged in what's either the shadow of the Queen Mary or water permanently dirtied by the downside of the bustling harbor, is a stark reminder of the last chapter of the Cold War.

You remember the Cold War. It was supposedly the last great hostile hurrah of the second millennium. It ended back in 1989-the year the Berlin Wall came tumbling down-with America emerging victorious and Russia barely surviving as a hollow shell of its former self.

Something like that hollow shell is tethered to a pier in Long Beach: it's a Soviet sub, for more than two decades a mystical killing machine that represented the deep-water, nuclear-tipped-missile threat of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and for the past year a struggling tourist attraction.

No question this diesel-powered, Foxtrot-class, underwater weapon is an excellent illustration of the vast change in U.S.-Russia relations. The submarine used to be known as Podvodnaya Lodka, a name so polysyllabically sinister that the tourist brochure doesn't even bother to translate it. Now it's called the Scorpion, which really doesn't mean much, either, but is almost as scary and so much easier to say and market. And having been auctioned off along with the rest of the former Soviet Union's outdated war chest, the sub is an almost pathetic presence. There it sits, lashed to the pier for the curiosity, amusement and satisfaction of (hopefully) paying passersby, as humiliated as if in the public stocks, serving about the same victor-vs.-vanquished purpose as a head on a pike.

Meanwhile, of course, the post-Cold War "cooperation" that exists between Russia and America has become increasingly tenuous. The Russians still have imperial illusions, just as we do; in reaction to America's bombing of Serbia, the Russians recently invaded next-door neighbor Chechnya; in a tit for tat straight out of the Brezhnev era, each country recently arrested alleged spies for the other. With the future shaping up to be as tense as the past, there may be no better time to take the entire family on a tour of a big, bad, old Russian submarine. Indeed, next thing we know, they may try to reactivate it.

The Scorpion once traveled all the way from Leningrad, where it was built in 1972, to Cam Ranh Bay, the former South Vietnamese U.S. Navy base that opened its doors to the Russian fleet in 1975. It spent the next two decades dodging American anti-submarine craft and is rumored to have conducted surveillance along America's Pacific Coast before being decommissioned five years ago.

First sold by the Russians to an Australian museum, the Scorpion is now scheduled to spend the next few years sitting somewhat neglected in Long Beach. According to the exhibit brochure, "its displays will promote friendly relations with Russia and give Americans a unique opportunity to experience a part of Russia's maritime history."

What that means is that, for $15, you can take the self-guided tour of the ship. As long as you don't knock yourself unconscious trying to crawl through the trash-can-lid-sized holes that connect one compartment to the next, the tour will take you only about 20 minutes.

Anyone hoping for a glimpse of life inside Red October is likely to be deeply disappointed, however. The boat is tiny and old. Its operating systems feature no computers. Rather, weird knobs and gauges abound. Mostly, the sub seems to rely on technology lifted from a German U-boat. The biggest room in the ship is the officer's mess, a dinner-table-sized room with just enough space for eight officers to munch their lunch.

The tour itself isn't any more sophisticated. It revolves around the heavily accented voice of an invisible narrator whose explanations and observations are piped throughout the Scorpion. Think Yakov Smirnoff, except a little funny. Bottom line, the narrator's tone and pronunciation work to perpetuate America's Cold War stereotype about slow-minded Slavs. "The food on Scorpion eez quite good," Captain Smirnoff announces. "Or zo they tell us. They zay good food is good for men-Duh!" Despite his apparent wit and sense of humor, Captain Smirnoff sounds like he'd be a tough guy to live with underwater, and you can't help but feel sorry for the 78 crewmen who used to be packed into the boat like caviar.

Speaking of oily fish, halfway through the tour, the imaginary captain brags that there are only two washrooms on Scorpion. "I allow only one-minute shower ewery tree days," he says. Deeper into the sub, the rooms get more and more crowded-with pipes, knobs and shafts of various kinds. You learn that crewmates used to sleep in the torpedo room. The bunks are tiny, but with the exception of the captain and the first political officer, they were each shared by two men.

As you walk along, imagining the horror of being stuck in Smirnoff's tiny "wessel," his nagging voice never relents. If you linger too long in one area of the ship, the tape for that section of the tour starts over, finally ending a few minutes-and several dozen "jokes"-later with the inevitable invitation: "Come now, let us see rest of Scorpion," or "Please be following me into next compartment."

When your self-guided tour ends with a hearty dasvadanya from Smirnoff, you realize just how lucky you are that you were never a sailor on a Russian submarine like the Scorpion. On the other hand, Russian sailors didn't have to endure the museum gift shop. I counted exactly 13 mementos available at the store: "Russian Scorpion" shot glasses of various sizes, coffee mugs, beer steins, sweatshirts, baseball caps, golf hats, sailor caps, "Made in Russia" fur hats, denim shirts, tie clips, belt buckles, sugar spoons and tote bags.

Each product boasts the ominous hammer-and-sickle insignia of the former Red fleet below the words "Russian Scorpion." Then, lest anyone forget the fact that Russia and America are now supposed to be the best of friends, "Queen Mary Long Beach." It's still a cold, cold war.

----------------

Scuds Said Launched at Chechnya

The Associated Press
Friday, Dec. 31, 1999; 5:12 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991231/aponline171231_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- Russia launched three short-range scud missiles into Chechnya on Friday, the Pentagon said.

The short-range missiles were monitored as part of the U.S.-Russia joint surveillance of any activity that might be related to the year 2000 computer glitch.

Thomas Pickering, undersecretary of state, said the launches were not related to any Y2K problems, however.

"We have confirmed with the Defense Department that this incident was not Y2K related, that the missiles were not strategic but short-range - that is, under the 500-kilometer-range definition for strategic," Pickering told reporters at Washington's Y2K command center.

Under a binational agreement setting up the joint monitoring, any launchings of 500 kilometers or more would be considered a "reportable event," with all details to be made public.

---------us nuc power faciliies

Few Report Y2K Glitches So Far

Las Vegas Sun
December 31, 1999
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/1999/dec/31/123100055.html?nuclear+OR+plutonium+OR+uranium+OR+radioactiv%3F%3F%3F+OR+missile%3F

Computers silently switched to 2000 in country after anxious country Saturday, but the dreaded Y2K bug's first bite was barely felt.

Japan reported the failure of a computer linked to radiation monitoring devices at a nuclear plant, but said it wasn't considered serious enough to shut the plant. Experts said many Year 2000 computer troubles still might take days or weeks to develop.

Yet there was little if any immediate impact of the new millenium's arrival on a computer-dependent world, where engineers and goverment leaders awaited the event in control bunkers in a state of high alert.

Cash machines kept working in New Zealand, one of the first nations where computers were put to the test by the date change from 1999 to 2000. The lights stayed on in India, planes landed safely in China and telephones still rang across the Middle East.

As Europe began the new year, aging nuclear power plants ran without a hitch in Russia and Ukraine, which in 1986 suffered the world's worst nuclear disaster with a meltdown in Chernobyl. The only troublesome bug reported in Yugoslavia was a nasty flu virus. No disruptions were seen in Angola, Uganda and Kenya, where the telephone system was said to be functioning as erratically as usual.

"Literally, you can count the number of Y2K-related calls we've received around the world on one hand," said Don Jones, head of Y2K troubleshooting for Microsoft.

Some small glitches were reported: Ticketing machines on some buses in Australia briefly jammed. A weather forecasting map in France showed the new year as "19100."

But as the new year rolled smoothly around the globe, a sense of anti-climax about Y2K spread right along with it.

"I feel like I should be reporting something dramatic, but I'm afraid I can't," said Ian Macfarlane, governor of Australia's central bank. He was almost apologetic as he announced no problems with his country's financial system.

Governments and industry spent an estimated $500 billion worldwide bug-proofing their computer systems, to avoid electronic confusion when '99 became '00. Some people stockpiled food, cash, gasoline and other essentials, anticipating the crash of an increasingly computerized world.

To be safe, many countries were shutting down vital systems for the midnight hour: Airports in several countries cancelled flights. Subways in Cairo and Istanbul were closed. Large ships were banned from the Bosporus strait. ATMs in Beijing were shut. Indonesia cut oil production.

The experts who long had warned of Y2K woes said it wasn't time yet to totally drop your guard.

"We do expect to see glitches, headaches, hiccups in the systems that support business, some of the accounting and billing systems, so these will create inconveniences next week," Bruce McConnell, director of the International Y2K Cooperation Center, said in Washington.

But for the moment, "things are going as well as can be expected and maybe even better," McConnell said.

The experts said it was still too early to assess the eventual impact of Y2K. Bruce Webster, co-chair of the Washington-based Year 2000 Group, said he expects the biggest system failures to occur gradually, over a period of days and weeks.

"Most Y2K errors are pretty dull," Webster said in an interview. "A program stops working or it makes a bad calculation. None of this means planes falling out of the sky or nuclear meltdowns."

He said much of the credit for the easy transition so far should go to computer repairs done in advance of the date change, and perhaps to quick repairs being done right now.

"Whatever problems that might show up, I'm sure are being handled swiftly and by and large quietly," he said.

As officials were doing in many parts of the United States, where the new year was arriving many hours later, Y2K authorities in the first countries to greet 2000 had gathered at control centers and in bunkers, ready for the worst.

The island of Guam, a U.S. territory selected by the Department of the Interior as one of the main stages for its Y2K-monitoring project, entered the new year at 9 a.m. EST Friday. Dozens of emergency management officials spent the evening in a civil defense compound, relaxing only when the first hours of the new day passed trouble-free.

While they had worried, New Year's Eve partiers danced at the island's tourism center.

"I think everyone was getting too paranoid," said Lourdes Rivera, an 18-year-old reveler who was Miss Guam 1999.

In country after country, as the new year arrived, telecommunications, transport, defense and power systems were all reported functioning normally.

Japan, South Korea and several other countries did note a brief overloading of phone circuits, blamed not on Y2K but on the surge of midnight calls by people to family and friends.

At just 10 minutes after midnight, Japanese officials detected the failure of a computer that receives monitoring information from the Shika Nuclear Power Station, 170 miles northwest of Tokyo. Officials said the problem was Y2K-related, but the plant would remain open while they tried to fix it. The actual monitoring devices were still working, they said.

A similar failure, also just after midnight, occurred in a computer receiving monitoring data from the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station, 190 miles northeast of Tokyo. Power officials said it was quickly fixed and insisted it was not linked to Y2K.

It was the first significant Y2K glitch to be reported and, while not considered dangerous, was unnerving to a country where a serious accident at a uranium-processing plant occurred Sept. 30.

In Russia, much of which still runs on clumsy Soviet-era technology, officials said the transition to 2,000 was going smoothly. They reported no first-hour problems at nuclear weapons sites or at any of the country's 29 nuclear reactors.

"The energy systems have entered the New Year without any disruptions whatsoever," Anatoly Chubais, head of the national power monopoly UES, was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax.

No immediate reports of trouble came from other republics of the former Soviet Union.

Fears of severe disruptions in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were so high that the U.S. embassies sent hundreds of workers and dependents out of the countries.

At the French weather service, forecasting maps initially displayed the New Year Day date as "01/01/19100."

Philippe Courtier, deputy director general of the weather service in Paris, called the glitch "a minor labelling problem" that wasn't affecting operations.

In the Australian cities of Adelaide and Hobart, bus ticket machines stopped working, a problem authorities said was Y2K-related and was also quickly fixed.

A provincial court in South Korea reported that it had issued automated summons to 170 people to appear for trial on Jan. 4, 1900 instead of Jan. 4, 2000.

---------- us nuc weapons facilities

Search Panel Set for New Weapons Agency Chief

Associated Press
Friday, December 31, 1999; Page A29
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/31/136l-123199-idx.html

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson named a high-level search committee yesterday to recommend candidates to head the department's new nuclear weapons agency.

Richardson said he hopes to have the new chief in place by March, when the agency, created by Congress during the uproar over alleged Chinese espionage, must begin operation.

The search committee will be chaired by Charles Curtis, former deputy energy secretary, and includes retired Adm. James Watkins, who was energy secretary in the Bush administration.

Congress created the National Nuclear Security Administration despite strong objections from Richardson, who said it gave too much independence to the agency.

Republicans in Congress said a new agency was needed to ensure that security and counterespionage programs are improved at the DOE's weapons labs.

But President Clinton, in signing the law that created the agency, triggered an uproar among some Republican lawmakers when he said that because of shortcomings in the law, Richardson would head the agency. Congressional critics accused Clinton of trying to sidestep the law.

Richardson said yesterday he formed the search panel after receiving an assurance from Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) that the senator would support legislation next year that ensures that the energy secretary will have clear authority over the new agency.

Domenici said he would pursue the change sought by Richardson. He called the naming of the search committee "a very positive step" toward resolving disagreements over the nuclear agency.

---------------

N.M. Scientist Case To Be Reviewed

06:40 PM ET 12/24/99
By RICHARD BENKE
Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2562819092-4c0

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) _ A federal judge on Monday will reconsider a ruling holding scientist Wen Ho Lee without bail until his trial _ likely more than a year away _ on charges that he stole nuclear secrets while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

U.S. Magistrate Don Svet ruled Dec. 13 that releasing Lee on bail would pose a ``clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.''

Lee's attorneys appealed, and a hearing is scheduled Monday before U.S. District Judge James Parker to review the detention order, U.S. Attorney John Kelly said Friday.

Prosecutors say a year's wait in jail before trial is not unlikely and the complexities of studying a mountain of classified evidence could delay the trial an additional 10 to 12 months.

Lee was fired in March and indicted Dec. 10. He was charged with transferring nuclear secrets to his desktop computer and portable data tapes and could face life in prison if convicted. The indictment doesn't accuse him of passing classified information to a foreign government.

Lee has said he is innocent.

Kelly and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Gorence, in court documents filed Thursday, argued that the 60-year-old Taiwan-born computer expert is a risk to flee the United States with stolen secrets if released on bail.

``Lee stole America's nuclear secrets sufficient to build a functional thermonuclear weapon. Lee absconded with that information on computer tapes, seven of which are still missing. Those missing tapes, in the hands of an unauthorized possessor, pose a mortal danger to every American,'' they wrote.

Although Lee's attorneys contend the tapes were destroyed, prosecutors said there is no evidence to prove it.

Other Los Alamos scientists and Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, have said Lee's actions are comparable to what other researchers and government officials do _ transfer classified material from one work station to another, not always mindful of security.

``We know of no one (else) who was ever charged with committing a crime for that,'' lab computer specialist Betty Gunther told The Albuquerque Tribune. In the Tribune article Thursday, Los Alamos astrophysicist Stirling Colgate described the prosecution of Lee as ``a real American tragedy.''

Dershowitz likened the magnitude of each of 59 counts against Lee to ``jaywalking.''

---

China rebuttal

Washington Times
December 24, 1999
http://www.washtimes.com/national/ring-19991224.htm

Some members of the special Cox committee on Chinese spying are irate at the bashing they took in a report by a Stanford University think tank.

The report, which received prominent play in liberal news outlets who take a benign view of Chinese global aims, castigated the bipartisan Cox team for purportedly jumping to wild conclusions. The Cox panel, named after Rep. Christopher Cox, the chairman and California Republican, concluded that Chinese spies stole design information for the most advanced thermonuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. The report was based on the most secret information in the U.S. intelligence community.

Now, an ally of Mr. Cox's has drafted a rebuttal to the Stanford critics. We obtained a copy of "50 Factual Errors in the Four [Stanford] Essays." The counterattack was authored by Nicholas Rostow, staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who worked for the Cox panel.

Pulling no punches, Mr. Rostow begins: "The publisher of the essays, Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, is the direct successor of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, an organization whose conclusions on Soviet intentions and compliance with arms-control treaties were notoriously wrong."

Mr. Rostow then proceeds to uncover what he termed 50 "factual errors disclosed in a cursory review of the four essays."

Some examples:

c "According to [one Stanford essay], the committee report 'maintains that PRC penetration of U.S. labs commenced in the late 1970s.' No such statement is made in the report."

c "[One essay] refers to the W-88 thermonuclear warhead as 'old' technology. It is, in fact, the most modern nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, and until it was compromised, no other nation in the world possessed such a weapon. . . . Since the W-88 is America's most modern nuclear weapon, [the essay's] description of it as 'old' trivializes a very important national security loss."

c One essay "states that 'no evidence is given in any of the reports that the design of the [new, smaller PRC nuclear warhead] was derived from U.S. information.' That the specific evidence is not given merely reflects the fact that it is classified. The conclusion has been stated, not only in the committee report but also in the public versions of the two intelligence community reports on this subject to Congress during 1999."

----------- us nuc waste

Nuke panel explores entombing reactors

Las Vegas Sun
December 14, 1999
By Mary Manning - manning@lasvegassun.com
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/1999/dec/14/509591620.html

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was expected today to release a report that explores entombing commercial nuclear reactors on site, rather than shipping thousands of tons of contaminated metals to a proposed Yucca Mountain repository.

If the commission decides to entomb a reactor on site once it is shut permanently, radioactive steel vessels, pipes and other components would be filled with concrete or grout, sealing the contaminated parts where they stand for up to 130 years, until radiation drops to a safe level.

Radiation from cesium-137, cobalt-60, technetium-99, niobium-94 and nickel-59 poses a risk to workers dismantling the reactors if the metals have to be moved to a central repository.

While entombment might present an alternative to packing Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, with thousands of tons of contaminated metal, commission staff noted that difficult technical and legal issues face such a scheme.

The plan also would not derail the utility industry's efforts to ship thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel to Nevada for storage at Yucca Mountain.

Yucca Mountain is the only site under study by the Department of Energy to contain the nation's estimated 77,000 tons of highly radioactive reactor waste and Defense Department rubble from 44 years of nuclear weapons building.

The former Soviet Union entombed the crippled Chernobyl Unit 4 reactor in a sarcophagus after a nuclear meltdown in April 1986 to shield the environment from radiation after 135,000 people in an 18-mile radius were evacuated. Cracks have already appeared in that container.

The commission's staff noted that although all of the radioactive waste and reactor scraps could one day go to Yucca Mountain, the site has not been approved and the DOE has not agreed to accept contaminated reactor parts. Lawsuits, technical delays and other hurdles could delay the opening for decades.

If Yucca Mountain is approved, it is not expected to receive nuclear waste for another 15 years, the report says.

With entombment on site, Yucca Mountain would receive only spent nuclear fuel, not every scrap of contaminated reactor metal as well.

Just under 30 nuclear power plants in the U.S. have been shut down and require some kind of plan to protect the public and the environment from the radioactive remains.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided to look at an entombment option because of the high costs of disposing of the contaminated guts of nuclear power plants.

It could cost $251 million for immediate cleanup and burial of reactor parts, plus monitoring and security of a site for 121 years, the commission's report says.

If a reactor site could be encased in steel, concrete, sand, grout and other barriers with remote monitoring and periodic radiation testing, the expenses would drop to $121.9 million.

DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory began the study in 1997 leading to today's workshop at the commission's headquarters in Rockville, Md. The laboratory discovered a precedent for burying reactors at the site.

Three U.S. nuclear reactors, built by the DOE's predecessor the Atomic Energy Commission, have been buried on site since 1954. They include:

The Hallam nuclear power facility, a federal demonstration plant located in Hallem, Neb. Operated from 1963 to 1966, the reactor was buried in 1969. All nuclear waste was removed from the reactor, but remaining radioactive materials were sealed in underground vaults of the plant. The reactor was sealed underneath two steel plates welded into place, plus plastic film, tar and earth covering the entire structure. The minimum life of the tomb is 100 years. No surface radiation or ground water contamination has been detected.

The Piqua nuclear power facility was another federal demonstration plant located in Piqua, Ohio. Operated from 1963 to 1966, its on-site disposal was completed in 1969. As in Nebraska, the nuclear waste was removed from the reactor, and it was sealed. After decontamination, the reactor building became a warehouse. There have been no detectable radiation releases.

The Boiling Nuclear Superheater Power Station (BONUS) was a demonstration plant operating from 1964 to 1967 in Rincon, Puerto Rico. On-site disposal was completed in 1970. Areas outside the reactor tomb have been designated as a museum and are accessible to the public. Again, the nuclear waste from operation was removed, and the reactor was sealed within a concrete slab. The structure was built to withstand a severe earthquake (above a 7 magnitude) followed by a tsunami. However, the basement of the entombed reactor was flooded in 1993 after an exhaust fan failed, allowing rainwater in. A few spots of surface contamination were found "that potentially exceeded guideline values," the report said, but no further information was included.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also concerned about handling the DOE's most contaminated site, Hanford, Wash., which once made plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Tanks filled with liquid nuclear waste and eight reactors that operated from 1944 to 1971 are under watch at Hanford. Entombment is possible and would be cheaper than removing the reactors.

The report said that historical evidence shows that concrete structures covered with soil have remained intact for thousands of years. With modern materials and techniques, most structures would remain intact and resistant to water for 500 years or more, plenty of time for the radiation to fall to safe levels.

Barriers to entombment include sites with high water tables, nuclear reactors near rivers and populated areas, and reactors near saltwater, which increases corrosion of contaminated steel and concrete structures.

---

DOE says more nuke waste heading to NTS

LAS VEGAS SUN
December 10, 1999
By Mary Manning - manning@lasvegassun.com
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/1999/dec/10/509577145.html

Low-level radioactive waste from more than 40 years of building nuclear weapons will end up at Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state and the Nevada Test Site, U.S. Department of Energy officials announced on Thursday.

Hanford produced plutonium to boost the bang in nuclear weapons and is considered one of the most contaminated sites in the nation with liquid wastes stored in giant, aging steel vats.

The Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was considered the DOE's outdoor laboratory where scientists exploded nuclear weapons above and below ground until those experiments ended in 1992 under a moratorium still in effect today.

The DOE's emphasis shifted from building nuclear bombs to cleaning up the messes left at more than 20 of its sites across the country.

The Test Site has received low-level radioactive waste shipments for more than 30 years, DOE spokesman Darwin Morgan said. The latest effort will distribute the DOE's radioactive wastes within specific regions, but will not increase Nevada's burden, he said.

From 1994 through 1997 the Test Site received 677,350 cubic feet of low-level nuclear waste. Over the next 20-year period, the DOE expects 684,045 cubic feet of the low-level wastes to arrive at the Test Site.

Most important, the DOE has to keep the Test Site ready to resume full-scale nuclear weapons tests by presidential order, Morgan said. That is its primary mission in Nevada.

Under DOE's guidelines, the Test Site does not accept radioactive liquids or gases, Morgan said. While the DOE is responsible for ensuring that containers are intact and the wastes are solid, Nevada has stricter environmental rules for discarded items contaminated with both radiation and toxic chemicals, called mixed wastes.

Two areas along the eastern edge of the Test Site have received low-level nuclear waste shipments from DOE sites scattered across the country for decades. Anything from contaminated clothing to pieces of radioactive equipment have been buried there.

Nevada and Clark County officials have been working through the 1990s with the DOE to avoid shipping low-level radioactive wastes through the Las Vegas Valley or across Hoover Dam, but no decision has been made on routing.

---

ATW TECHNOLOGY FOR NUCLEAR WASTE GENERATES HEAT

Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 11:49:18 -0500
From E&E Publishing, LLC,
www.eenews.net

A new chapter is being added to the decades-long debate over disposal of high-level nuclear waste with the Department of Energy's serious consideration of accelerator transmutation of waste (ATW) technology, a method involving reprocessing and reuse of the waste.

The ATW proposal that is estimated to cost close to $280 billion to treat 87,000 tons of nuclear waste, however, has all the elements to explode into a controversy. In fact, ATW seems to have the potential to generate as much heat, if not more, as the current proposal to dispose high-level nuclear waste at a underground facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev., if reactions of public interest and environmental groups to DOE's report on ATW are any indication. They say ATW is not a viable solution to the nation's nuclear waste problem, charging that it would only pose additional health and safety risks to the public by tripling transportation requirements.

The industry, on the other hand, views the ATW technology, the implementation of which would require reversal of the current policy of proscribing nuclear waste reprocessing, as an "over the horizon technology" and it remains focused on getting the current policy of disposing the waste at the proposed Yucca Mountain site executed.

Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee, can be credited with giving ATW a high profile by advocating the use of the technology instead of permanently burying the nation's problematic nuclear waste. As the chairman of the subcommittee deciding the funding for DOE, Domenici provided $4 million in fiscal year 1999 to prepare a roadmap for implementing ATW technology and then followed it up with $9 million for the current year for additional research.

Domenici was also instrumental in attaching an amendment to the controversial legislation, S. 1287, setting up an Office of Nuclear Spent Fuel Research to study treatment, recycling and disposal of waste. The amendment also requires study of reprocessing and transmutation with international participation. Approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, S. 1287, which attempts to resolve the nuclear waste issue, is now awaiting floor action.

As required, DOE submitted to Congress in October a report "Roadmap for Developing Accelerator Transmutation of Waste Technology" outlining the research, development and funding that would be necessary to implement an ATW program. The energy agency then followed up with a Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee meeting earlier this month to discuss the ATW program.

In the report, DOE details that $280 billion would be needed over 117 years to implement the program, the first eights years of which would focus on researching and developing the transmutation technology. For the next 27 years, DOE will test out a demonstration project and the full-scale implementation of the program will be carried out in the remaining 90 years. The report also notes that eight ATW facilities would have to be built to implement the program in full.

DOE concedes that "such a large upfront expenditure commitment will be a major challenge." The agency notes that over the life-time of ATW plant operation, much of the capital, operational, and development and demonstration costs may be offset by electricity sales. However, when the time value of the money is considered, this offset may be small, according DOE.

The ATW program has public interest and environmental groups up in arms. They say the ATW program not only raises environmental and health risks, it has serious proliferation implications as well. According to environmental groups, the ATW program will not require the abandonment of the Yucca Mountain project. Instead, an underground facility would be necessary to store the high-level nuclear waste until such time as the ATW program is up and running, they say.

Amy Shollenberger, senior policy analyst of the public interest group Public Citizen, says the DOE report maps out a scheme that would involve transporting highly radioactive materials from nuclear utilities to the proposed underground facility, storing it there temporarily and then transporting it to the ATW facilities. The transportation does not end there. Some amount of high-level nuclear waste that would remain after the ATW process will then have to be shipped back to the underground facility, Shollenberger points out. Experts have said that ATW will not totally eliminate high-level nuclear waste. Also, it will leave behind a high stream of low-level radioactive waste.

Asserting that the DOE plan is unacceptable, Shollenberger in her comments to the DOE advisory committee, said, "ATW is not an alternative to a geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste. Instead, it will increase the danger to the public and the environment by requiring that spent nuclear fuel be transported not only to the repository, but also from the repository to the ATW facilities."

In addition, proliferation concerns have also been voiced. The ATW process puts the radioactive waste one step closer to weapons usable material, says Shollenberger.

The roadmap itself acknowledges that "the societal decision to proceed with deployment [of ATW] would require resolving a number of issues," including "interpretation of the U.S. policy concerning reprocessing as applied to ATW," points out Edwin Lyman, scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute, which has urged DOE for a nonproliferation impacts assessment.

According to Lyman, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's reference to ATW while putting forward his proposal for dealing with high-level nuclear waste earlier this year has given the process more attention than it deserves.

The ATW roadmap calls for a six-year research program costing $281 million to further develop the concept, which Shollenberger criticizes for being carried out at the taxpayer expense.

To the nuclear industry, ATW is a long-term proposition and it not too engaged with the issue as it is with ensuring the construction of a centralized storage facility for the waste. Steve Unglesbee, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the policy organization of the nuclear industry, is quick to point out that the roadmap doesn't argue against building a geological repository, which the industry has been fighting to get for several years.

Unglesbee said the challenge is to have the current policy of building a underground facility for storing nuclear waste implemented. The proposed ATW program does not conflict with the plan to keep the proposed Yucca Mountain repository open and the nuclear waste retrievable for a hundred plus years, he said. Unglesbee sees merits in keeping the nuclear waste retrievable, saying "those isotopes are going to be valuable in the future" to be put to several uses, including treatment of cancer.

---

[In case you missed it --]
Fear in the fields: Part 1 How hazardous wastes become fertilizer

1997 The Seattle Times Company
Thursday, July 3, 1997
by Duff Wilson
Seattle Times staff reporter
http://www.seattletimes.com/extra/browse/html97/fert_070397.html

When you're mayor of a town the size of Quincy, Wash., you hear just about everything.

So it was only natural that Patty Martin would catch some farmers in her Central Washington hamlet wondering aloud why their wheat yields were lousy, their corn crops thin, their cows sickly.

Some blamed the weather. Some blamed themselves. But only after Mayor Martin led them in weeks of investigation did they identify a possible new culprit: fertilizer.

They don't have proof that the stuff they put on their land to feed it actually was killing it. But they discovered something they found shocking and that they think other American farmers and consumers ought to know:

Manufacturing industries are disposing of hazardous wastes by turning them into fertilizer to spread around farms. And they're doing it legally.

"It's really unbelievable what's happening, but it's true," Martin said. "They just call dangerous waste a product, and it's no longer a dangerous waste. It's a fertilizer."

Across the Columbia River basin in Moxee City is visual testimony to Martin's assertion. A dark powder from two Oregon steel mills is poured from rail cars into the top of silos attached to Bay Zinc Co. under a federal permit to store hazardous waste.

The powder, a toxic byproduct of the steel-making process, is taken out of the bottom of the silos as a raw material for fertilizer.

"When it goes into our silo, it's a hazardous waste," said Bay Zinc President Dick Camp. "When it comes out of the silo, it's no longer regulated. The exact same material. Don't ask me why. That's the wisdom of the EPA."

What's happening in Washington is happening around the United States. The use of industrial toxic waste as a fertilizer ingredient is a growing national phenomenon, an investigation by The Seattle Times has found.

The Times found examples of wastes laden with heavy metals being recycled into fertilizer to be spread across crop fields.

Legally.

In Gore, Okla., a uranium-processing plant is getting rid of low-level radioactive waste by licensing it as a liquid fertilizer and spraying it over 9,000 acres of grazing land.

In Tifton County, Ga., more than 1,000 acres of peanut crops were wiped out by a brew of hazardous waste and limestone sold to unsuspecting farmers.

And in Camas, Clark County, highly corrosive, lead-laced waste from a pulp mill is hauled to Southwest Washington farms and spread over crops grown for livestock consumption.

Recycling said to have benefits

Any material that has fertilizing qualities can be labeled and used as a fertilizer, even if it contains dangerous chemicals and heavy metals.

The wastes come from iron, zinc and aluminum smelting, mining, cement kilns, the burning of medical and municipal wastes, wood-product slurries and a variety of other heavy industries.

Federal and state governments encourage the practice in the name of recycling and, in fact, it has some benefits: Recycling waste as fertilizer saves companies money and conserves precious space in hazardous-waste landfills. And, mixed and handled correctly, the material can help crops grow.

"It's a situation where we are facing an overabundance of these materials in landfills and, of course, landfills are getting full," said Ali Kashani, who directs fertilizer regulation in Washington state. "So they (waste producers) are constantly looking for ways to recycle when they have beneficial materials."

The problem is that the "beneficial materials" in industrial waste, such as nitrogen and magnesium to help crops grow, often are accompanied by dangerous heavy metals such as cadmium and lead.

"Nowhere in the country has a law that says if certain levels of heavy metals are exceeded, it can't be a fertilizer," Kashani said. "That would be nice to have."

Instead, officials rely on fertilizer producers to document that their products are safe, and never check back for toxic components. There is not even a requirement that toxics be listed on ingredient labels.

The Times also found that:

-- There is no national regulation of fertilizers in this country, unlike many other industrialized nations. The laws in most states, including Washington, are far from stringent. The lack of national regulation makes it virtually impossible to measure the volume of fertilizers produced by recycling hazardous wastes.

-- Some industries dispose of tons of toxic waste by giving it free to fertilizer manufacturers, or even paying them to take it.

-- One major producer, Monsanto, has stopped recycling waste into fertilizer on its own because of concerns about health and liability. For years, it sold 6,000 tons a year of ashy, black waste from its Soda Springs, Idaho, phosphorus plant to nearby fertilizer companies.

The waste contained cadmium, a heavy metal that studies show can cause cancer, kidney disease, neurological dysfunction, diminished fertility, immune-system changes and birth defects at certain levels of consumption. Company scientists are trying to determine whether the material is safe to be used as fertilizer, even though the federal government allows it.

"What really is a concern is product liability," said Robert Geddes, a Monsanto official and Idaho state senator. "Is somebody going to sue Monsanto because we allowed it to be made as a fertilizer?"

-- Among the substances found in some recycled fertilizers are cadmium, lead, arsenic, radionuclides and dioxins, at levels some scientists say may pose a threat to human health. Although the health effects are widely disputed, there is undisputed evidence the substances enter plant roots.

Just as there are no conclusive data to prove a danger, there are none to prove the safety of the practice.

In other nations, including Canada, that lack of certainty has led to strict regulation. There, the approach is to limit toxic wastes in fertilizer until the practice is proven safe. Here, the approach is to allow it until it's proven unsafe.

Although experts disagree as to whether these fertilizers are a health threat, most say further study is needed. Yet, little is under way.

Few farmers, and probably even fewer consumers, know about the practice.

"This is a definite problem," said Richard Loeppert, a soil scientist at Texas A&M University and author of several published papers on toxic elements in fertilizers. "The public needs to know."

Some remember the Alar scare

Patty Martin is not a popular politician in parts of Grant County these days.

Since she began raising the alarm about the use of toxic waste as fertilizer, she has been threatened with a lawsuit by a local farmer, been verbally attacked in town meetings and seen the City Council - led by a son-in-law of the local manager of the Cenex fertilizer company - pressure her to shut up or quit.

Many farmers in and around Quincy, a town of 4,030, say they're doing very well, thank you, with the fertilizer and the help and advice they've received from Cenex Supply and Marketing, which sells expertise, financing and farm supplies in the West and Midwest.

They call Martin a troublemaker and fear she's fomenting a scare akin to the Alar alarm that nearly ruined Washington's apple industry in 1989.

In that case, the CBS television show "60 Minutes" reported that a substance sprayed on Washington apples to preserve them in packing was dangerous to consumers. CBS later admitted it had made some mistakes in the story, and the Washington apple growers sued the network. But the suit was dismissed, and in the end, Alar was classified by EPA as a carcinogen and banned for all food uses.

"We had a woman starting that one, too, and a lot of people got hurt by it," Bill Weber, an apple and potato farmer, said at one council meeting, bringing nods and laughter.

"We don't see a problem," said Greg Richardson, Quincy-based president of the Potato Growers of Washington and a staunch defender of recycling wastes into fertilizer.

Richardson wrote Martin a letter telling her to make "a statement of your trust in the appropriate government agencies and their ability to deal with . . . the waste in fertilizer issue."

Martin is standing firm, and a dozen or so Quincy-area farmers are standing at her side. They insist they, their families and their fields have suffered from bad fertilizer.

State environmental, agriculture and health officials have looked at the situation in Quincy. The environmental and agriculture officials, who encourage recycling waste into fertilizer, say that as far as they can tell, there's no danger to crops or people.

But some admit they wish they knew more. Kashani wants standards for heavy metals in fertilizer. Absent that, he said, he has to apply a general standard that recycled products cannot "pose a threat to public health or the environment."

Regulators in California have been studying the issue for years and still cannot say what constitutes a safe level for lead, cadmium and arsenic in fertilizer.

Mayor Martin's husband works for a potato processor, and when she feels under the harshest attack, he tells her she's doing the right thing.

"I just have the unfortunate distinction of having stumbled across this question and asking questions of the regulatory agencies," she said. "I didn't get the answers."

Trouble was brewed in pond

How Martin and her supporters stumbled upon the discovery of the recycling of toxic waste into fertilizer begins at a man-made, concrete pond across the street from Quincy High School. The pond, 36 feet wide, 54 feet long and 5 feet deep, was built in 1986 and used by Cenex to rinse fertilizer from farm equipment.

State investigators later found that the company also illegally used the pond to dump pesticides.

Cenex closed the pond in 1990. By then, it contained about 38,000 gallons of toxic goo, with heavy metals, suspected carcinogens, even some radioactive materials. State investigators couldn't determine how all this toxic material ended up there.

Cenex memos show how the company got rid of the sludge. John Williams, the Quincy branch manager, wrote his boss to say the "product," as he called it, would cost $170,000 to ship and store at the Arlington, Ore., hazardous-waste site, as required by federal law.

So Cenex decided to save money by spreading it on a rented plot of cornfield and let nature take its course. The land would act as a natural filter for the hazardous wastes.

Cenex struck a deal with lessee farmer Larry Schaapman. He was paid more than $10,000 to let Cenex put the material, which the company claimed had fertilizer value, on his 100 acres.

It killed the land.

The corn crop failed there in 1990, even though Schaapman and Cenex applied extra water to try to wash the toxics through the soil. Hardly anything grew there the next year, either.

The land belonged to Dennis DeYoung, whose family had farmed it since the early 1950s before he leased it to Schaapman. Since the land was poisoned, DeYoung couldn't make his payments, and the company that financed him foreclosed on a $100,000 debt. DeYoung also owed Cenex money for fertilizer and seed.

Soon after, Cenex bought the land from the financing company.

"They run a farmer out of business, then they get his land," DeYoung said. "Now isn't that something."

DeYoung sued Cenex for damages for ruining the soil, lost in summary judgment but won a reversal in the State Court of Appeals earlier this year. He's preparing for a new trial.

He also managed to stir up an investigation by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates pesticide use. In a plea bargain, Cenex and its manager were given one year of probation for illegal disposal of a pesticide in the "product" spread on DeYoung's land.

The company never had to explain how the heavy metals - enough cadmium, beryllium and chromium to qualify as a Superfund site - got into the rinse pond in town.

That's where Martin and her supporters come in.

Farmers began comparing notes

Tom Witte is a 53-year-old farmer with 200 acres and about 100 cows a few miles east of Quincy. His father purchased the farm in 1956.

Witte had a disastrous year in 1991. His red spring wheat, silage corn and grain corn all yielded about one-third the normal levels.

"You always blame yourself, you know," Witte said. "You always think you screwed up. But then it wasn't just the crops. Then I started having all these weird problems with the cows."

Six of his cows got sick and died. The veterinarian found cancer in the three that were tested.

When Dennis DeYoung told Witte about his problems, Witte got to wondering about the effects of fertilizer on his fields. Although he hadn't used material from the rinse pond, he had used products from Cenex.