-----------germany

Report: Soviets Had Nuclear Arms Abroad

Washington Post
Sunday, January 16, 2000; Page A30
WORLD IN BRIEF
Compiled from news services
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/16/209l-011600-idx.html

BERLIN--The Soviet Union secretly stationed nuclear missiles in communist East Germany in April 1959, several years before the confrontation with the United States over missiles in Cuba, a magazine reported.

Der Spiegel, citing research by a German historian, said Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the order to send 12 SS-3 missiles to Soviet bases in East Germany.

With a range of 750 miles, the missiles could have hit France and Britain as well as U.S. military bases, the report said. They were withdrawn a few months after their arrival, apparently after the Soviets developed long-range missiles that could hit those targets from Russian territory, Der Spiegel said.

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Russia hid N-missiles in E. Germany during 1959

Deseret News
Sunday, January 16, 2000
Associated Press
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,145019667,00.html?

BERLIN - The Soviet Union secretly stationed nuclear missiles in communist East Germany in 1959, several years before the confrontation with the United States over missiles on Cuba, a magazine reported Saturday.

Der Spiegel, citing new research by a German historian, said Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the order to move 12 SS-3 missiles to Soviet bases in East Germany, keeping its ally in the dark.

With a range of 750 miles, the missiles could have hit France and Britain as well as U.S. military bases, the report said. They were withdrawn a few months after their April 1959 arrival, apparently as the Soviets developed long-range missiles that could hit those targets from Russian territory, Der Spiegel said.

Khrushchev's purpose may have been to find new ways to pressure the Allies to leave West Berlin, a western outpost in East Germany during the Cold War, the magazine said.

Historians had always viewed the 1962 Cuban missile crisis as the first time Moscow stationed nuclear missiles abroad, the report said. Khrushchev withdrew the missiles after a standoff with former President John F. Kennedy widely believed to have brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

The magazine cited research by an unnamed historian at Halle-Wittenberg University in eastern Germany who interviewed witnesses and reviewed newly available documents in Moscow.

-----------india

US Prepares India for Clinton Visit

Associated Press
January 16, 2000 Filed at 12:10 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-India-US.html
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2563358123-dab

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- With a visit by President Clinton in the offing, the United States and India are racing to rebuild political and economic ties and reconcile differences on India's nuclear program.

Visits by U.S. Congress members, a top military commander and Cabinet secretaries are setting the groundwork for improved ties and have put to rest decades of antipathy that existed when India had links to the former Soviet Union.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers will be in New Delhi Monday, on his way to the G-7 meeting of major industrialized nations in Tokyo.

Days before his visit, India lifted trade barriers, which for nearly five decades blocked U.S. products in key Indian markets such as textiles, agriculture, and consumer and manufactured goods.

The United States is India's biggest trade partner with the annual two-way trade exceeding $10 billion.

Also in the coming week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott will meet Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh in London to discuss India's nuclear weapons program.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is expected soon in New Delhi to oversee preparations for Clinton's visit to South Asia, expected some time in March.

Clinton also plans to go on to Bangladesh, but a stop in Pakistan appeared unlikely after a military coup ousted the elected government in October.

Summers will be the highest ranking American to visit India since the government detonated a nuclear device in May 1998. Pakistan followed with a similar test three weeks later. The tests prompted punishing economic sanctions for both South Asian rivals, and derailed warming U.S.-India relations.

After meetings with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha and opposition leader Sonia Gandhi, Summers plans to visit the southern city of Bangalore, the center of India's exploding software industry and fertile ground for U.S. investment.

Admiral Dennis Cultler Blair, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, visited New Delhi last week to revive the yearly joint military exercises which were stopped after the nuclear detonations.

Many see the key to improved relations in the Talbott and Singh talks. The two have met nearly a dozen times since the 1998 tests.

Talbott has tried to persuade India to embrace the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and other international agreements. He also wants strict controls on nuclear technology exports and wants India to define its defense posture.

In a Washington interview with the Hindu newspaper, Talbott said the talks were trying to reconcile U.S. concerns about containing nuclear weapons with Indian security requirements.

The United States is looking for ``more clarity that India's projected path is consistent with what Indian leaders have told us -- India does not seek an open-ended arms race competition, but only the minimum necessary to ensure Indian security,'' Talbott said.

U.S.-Indian relations began to thaw this summer, after intruders from Pakistan seized positions in the Indian Himalayas in Kashmir, igniting an 11-week confrontation that cost more than 1,000 lives on both sides.

India held back from invading Pakistani territory, winning U.S. praise for its restraint, and Clinton persuaded Pakistan to withdraw the fighters and end the conflict.

The United States is India's biggest trade partner with the annual two-way trade exceeding $10 billion.

-----------pakistan

FALLING OUT You've Got the Bomb. So Do I. Now I Dare You to Fight.

New York Times
January 16, 2000
By CELIA W. DUGGER and BARRY BEARAK
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/011600india-pakistan-review.html

Related Articles
India & Pakistan: Nuclear Anxiety
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/index-nuke-india.html

NEW DELHI, India -- Just after New Year's, when most of the world's leaders were welcoming the millennium like a flower about to bloom, the government in New Delhi was denouncing its neighbor, Pakistan, accusing it of masterminding the hijacking of an Indian airliner. Charges and countercharges of assorted evils have since followed as officials of the fledgling nuclear powers busy themselves with what often seems their preoccupation: hating each other.

Relations between predominantly Hindu India and overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan are now near the low point of 1971, when they fought their third all-out war. Things weren't supposed to be this way -- or at least that was India's calculation when it unbottled the nuclear genie in May 1998 by conducting underground nuclear tests.

But Pakistan responded quickly with matching nuclear tests. And rather than making the subcontinent more secure, many experts on the region now agree, India and Pakistan's open possession of the bomb appears to have raised the risk of limited wars that could spiral out of control.

Their poisoned relationship has taken on a perverse dynamic. Smaller, weaker Pakistan has been emboldened to view its nuclear arsenal as a magic shield that will protect it from harm even if it endlessly gores India, the dominant power in South Asia.

This has produced a war of "a thousand cuts" that is enraging India, wearing its patience thin and prompting some Indian officials to threaten stronger retaliation. Pakistan has consistently miscalculated India's determination not to let possession of nuclear weapons deter it from responding militarily. India's defense minister, George Fernandes, recently boasted that "India can beat Pakistan anytime, anywhere."

The stark deterioration in relations between India and Pakistan has been evident in a series of recent events -- most immediately in India's response to the hijacking. But the decline began last summer, when Pakistani forces occupied remote peaks in the Indian state of Kashmir, the Himalayan territory that both countries claim, and India fought to root them out with troops, artillery and fighter planes. Pakistan eventually withdrew, but tensions have only grown.

The Pakistani government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was toppled in a military coup in October. The rise to power of Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf, the army chief whom India holds responsible for Pakistan's ill-advised summer adventure, has driven the two countries further apart. Pakistani-backed guerrilla attacks on Indian security forces in Kashmir are now at their worst level in a decade.

Gen. V.P. Malik, India's army chief, said recently that the restraint that India showed last summer -- specifically its decision not to cross the so-called Line of Control that separates the Indian- and Pakistani-held portions of Kashmir -- "may not be applicable to the next war."

He voiced the belief that the escalation of limited wars could be tightly controlled in part because the nuclear deterrent itself would help prevent them from getting out of hand and in part because cool-headed leaders would exercise discipline. In future wars, he said, "the escalation ladder would be carefully climbed in a carefully controlled ascent by both protagonists."

It is precisely such words that chill nuclear thinkers. Theories of deterrence work only if those who possess the bomb believe that it is dangerous to wage wars because violence may escalate frighteningly and unpredictably. What if India decides to strike militant training camps inside Pakistan next time? How will Pakistan react?

"My fear is that at some point, the Pakistanis will be tempted to up the ante," said George Perkovich, author of "India's Nuclear Bomb" (University of California Press, 1999). "There will be another provocation. Somebody blows up something big and India says, 'That's it,' and takes out targets. Then you're on your way. Who's going to back down?"

India's assumption that unwrapping its nuclear capability would make the subcontinent safer was perhaps best expressed by Jaswant Singh, the nation's chief of foreign affairs, in 1998: "If deterrence works in the West -- it so obviously appears to, since Western nations insist on continuing to possess nuclear weapons -- by what reasoning will it not work in India?"

But that line of logic ignores a critical difference between how the Cold War was fought and how India and Pakistan confront each other: With a notable exception, the Americans and Soviets took care not to place their own armies in direct military confrontation. The exception was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which experts say was the moment when the two sides came closest to stumbling into an all-out nuclear war.

The Indian and Pakistani armies confront each other constantly along the Line of Control in Kashmir. More than 500 Indian soldiers were killed in last summer's fighting, and with them died the trust of India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, for Sharif, then prime minister. Peace talks stopped. Just months earlier, Vajpayee, the Hindu nationalist leader, had gone by bus to Pakistan, where he and Sharif shook hands and agreed that their nations would sort out their differences over a bargaining table.

With President Clinton planning to visit India this spring, U.S. diplomats are trying to get India and Pakistan back to the negotiating table. "The United States has repeatedly said, 'You have to be talking to each other, not shouting at each other, especially when things seem to be at their worst,"' said Richard Celeste, the U.S. ambassador in New Delhi.

But India has other ideas. In order to end the hijacking on New Year's Eve, India traded three imprisoned militants for the hijacked plane's passengers and crew -- a choice that many in India, even some of Vajpayee's allies, have depicted as a humiliating setback for his government. Since then, India has aggressively pushed for the United States and other nations to declare Pakistan a terrorist nation, isolating it as a pariah.

India claims to have evidence of a Pakistani plot for the hijacking, but has yet to produce it. A high-level intelligence official asserted in an interview last week that the conclusive proof lay in the fact that no such proof exists. "This was a very professional operation, and a professional agency leaves no proof," he said, exhibiting a logic common to both countries' military and political elites.

Some U.S. officials worry that they would lose influence over Pakistan if they declared it a terrorist nation, noting that it was President Clinton's intercession last summer that persuaded Pakistan to pull back from Indian-held Kashmir. And the last thing India needs is an imploding Pakistan on its border, with growing numbers of alienated young people flocking to the banners of Islamic fundamentalism and a holy war against India.

"If the United States did put Pakistan on the list, any hope of Pakistan climbing their way out of this economic morass would evaporate," said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, citing Pakistan's huge debts and slim prospects for new capital. "It would be disastrous."

Though relations between India and Pakistan are tense, the champions of India's nuclear blasts still defend the tests. Brajesh Mishra, national security adviser to India's prime minister, says he believes India is more secure for having openly embraced the bomb. Years before the tests, Pakistan was already suggesting that it might use nuclear weapons, Mishra said. The new element added by India's tests was the certainty that India, too, had the weapons, he said, adding that nuclear deterrence had kept the recent conflict in Kashmir from widening.

But the tests do seem to have introduced a new element for both countries: Certainty has replaced doubt about the effectiveness of their bombs. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, said in an interview that the years of deterrence through "nuclear ambiguity" had worked well enough, but that when India tested, Pakistan had no choice but to follow suit. "You're never sure of designs until you test them," she said.

Pakistan certainly seems emboldened. "When that capacity had been proved and the Pakistani military down through the ranks saw the mountain shake, the Pakistanis said, 'We can equal these guys,"' said Perkovich, the expert on India's nuclear program.

For now, at least, it is difficult to see a way out of the bitter cycle of violence over Kashmir that seems to endlessly repeat itself. "Much of India-Pakistan relations has a strong sense of deja vu," said Ms. Lodhi. "We've all been there before. We've had half a century of confrontation. Are we going to spend the next century in conflict, too, or break out of it?"

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

Powering the Cold War A history of the Soviet nuclear industry.

New York Times
January 16, 2000
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www10.nytimes.com/books/00/01/16/reviews/000116.16waldlt.html

Related Link First Chapter: 'Red Atom'
http://www10.nytimes.com/books/first/j/josephson-atom.html

In the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two ideas gave birth to a civilian nuclear industry. One was electricity ''too cheap to meter,'' in the now infamous phrase. The other was expiation through technology, a chance for the scientists who had created horrible weapons to redeem themselves by providing the world with a benefit from their invention.

The Soviets never used nuclear weapons in combat, but they had motivations related to ours; to bring the boon of electricity to a woefully retarded industrial base, and to show the world that a well-organized society and economy could work wonders with a technology that the West had used to work horrors. However, Paul R. Josephson's ''Red Atom,'' based on an extensive review of Soviet-era archives, shows that nonmilitary use of nuclear power was like many areas of cold war competition: an avenue for the participants to go to illogical extremes, especially on the Soviet side.

The American postwar track record was mixed: 250 reactors ordered, but almost half canceled before completion; costs so high that several electric companies dropped dead in the effort; fear and loathing after Three Mile Island and an intractable waste problem. But in the United States, at least, the twin restraints of public opinion and capitalism limited the excursion into nuclear power and its spinoffs.

In the Soviet Union there was far less to hold the designers back, and the whole country became like one of those unfortunate American utilities that committed itself too heavily and could find no way out. The Soviets built and built and built -- graphite reactors, pressurized water reactors, sodium-cooled reactors, submarine reactors, floating reactors, ''portable'' reactors, a giant reactor factory that sank in the mud and on and on.

Josephson, a longtime historian of technology and science and currently a fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, has produced a thorough, if sometimes dense, history of the Soviet effort. In some of its more stunning passages, the book captures the Communist vision of the workers' paradise as it extended to nuclear power. Chernobyl was intended as a ''reactor park,'' Josephson writes, with canals for cooling water that would create ''a 'Venice' of nuclear power, where warm-water effluent in the canals attracts geese and ducks, who winter there rather than completing their southern migration.''

The goal was atomic-powered Communism, ''mighty concrete palaces, energy too cheap to meter, the freeing of citizens from manual labor by wondrous, electrically powered machines, mastery of modern science and technology indicating the superiority of the Socialist system over the capitalist one and the taming of nature to serve the interests of society -- as defined, of course, by the political-scientific leadership.''

But it worked even less than in this country. Costs were higher than anticipated, output was smaller, provisions for handling radioactive waste were worse than in the West and design characteristics and operational controls were, as the world learned from Chernobyl, woefully lacking. So was preparation for an accident.

Josephson's research has turned up an astounding variety of dead ends. There was, for instance, food irradiation. Starting as early as the 1950's, the Soviets had tried irradiating fruits, fish, meat and potatoes as a means of preservation. They also tried irradiating hens, seeds and barnyard breeding stock to increase productivity. ''The image of the mighty atom joining us at the dinner table was no more a reasonable hope than that of other images promoted during the glory days of atomic energy: the atom and nuclear engines, the atom as excavator and the atom and unlimited electric energy.'' None of it worked well; much of it did not work at all.

There was the attempt to use small nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes, to aid in oil and gas drilling, to put out fires in oil and gas wells, to create underground storage space for hazardous wastes and to dig canals, harbors and reservoirs (''correcting the mistakes of nature,'' the Soviets said). And there was Russian imperialism within the Soviet Union, as Moscow exported reactors for research and power to the other republics.

Much was wasted, but, as Josephson explains, his story is also a tale of heroism. Whatever American physicists accomplished, they did it without having to dodge the destruction brought about by the invasion of the Nazis or the purges carried out by Stalin and the K.G.B. The Russians were world leaders in physics. Not for nothing is our term for the machine that allows fusion a Russian one, the tokamak.

Josephson might have done well to note, though, that ''too cheap to meter'' is a term invented here, to describe a fantasy that flourished in both countries, to the benefit of neither. The Soviets hardly had a monopoly on insular decision-making, unrealistic expectations about cost and reliability and institutional momentum that put bad ideas on artificial life support.

But ''Red Atom'' does not distinguish among causes. How much is Red and how much is atom? One longs for Josephson to isolate the factors, to separate the universal human constants here, like the messianic drive of physicists, from the particular dictates of the Soviet system, with its penchant for standardization and megaprojects and the small role it allowed for public input or market analysis. How does this compare, say, with France, a nation that is highly centralized and has a strong political overlay in the energy sector of its economy, or with China, another Communist nuclear power, but one with less interest in reactors? Even the United States, a country that until recently cherished free enterprise in everything but electricity, would be a good point of reference.

And in spots, Josephson seems to share the confusion of the nuclear engineers themselves. He complains, for example, that the reactors operated at low efficiency. That argument made sense when the uranium fuel was scarce and expensive; in fact, it has not been so for years. Still, ''Red Atom'' is impressive in its sweep, and it provides essential details about an industry that has outlived its creators yet, because rickety reactors are still in use and wastes are still accumulating, can make its presence felt around the world at any time.h

Matthew L. Wald is a Washington correspondent of The Times who writes frequently on nuclear power.

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

Westinghouse, Mitsubishi Execute Cross-License Agreements

Excite News
Updated 9:00 PM ET January 16, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/pr/000116/pa-westinghouse-mhi

-- 2 Pacts Encompass Nuclear Steam Supply Systems, Fuel Design, Manufacture -- Strengthen Mutually Beneficial Relationship Dating to 1920s

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Westinghouse Electric Company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. (MHI), and Mitsubishi Nuclear Fuel Company Ltd. (MNF) have executed new cross-license agreements that will ensure continued cooperation between the companies in the international commercial nuclear power industry.

Both 10-year agreements, which became effective January 1, are the latest in a series of evolutionary nuclear relationships that have developed since the late 1950s.

The agreement with MHI covers fuel design and nuclear steam supply system (NSSS) technology and products, excluding those used in the servicing and maintenance of nuclear power plants. NSSS products covered under the agreement include but are not limited to the reactor coolant system, the reactor vessel and internals, core components, steam generators, control rod drive mechanisms, and reactor coolant pumps and piping.

The fuel segment of the MHI agreement and the MNF agreement include but are not limited to uranium fuel assemblies, conversion of uranium from UF6 to UO2, control rods, burnable poisons, neutron source assemblies, plugging and mixing devices, and fuel assembly grids.

Charles W. Pryor, Jr. President and Chief Executive officer of Westinghouse, said continuation of the license agreements reflects a strong business relationship that has withstood the test of time.

"Westinghouse and the Mitsubishi Group have been working together in a mutually beneficial manner since 1923 when Westinghouse and Mitsubishi Electric Company entered into a license agreement that covered transformers and other electrical distribution equipment," he said. "Since then, units of Westinghouse and Mitsubishi have worked together in virtually every market segment that Westinghouse has served."

Westinghouse Electric Company is wholly owned by BNFL. With headquarters in Monroeville, Pa., Westinghouse offers a wide range of nuclear plant products and services to utilities throughout the world, including fuel, spent fuel management, service and maintenance, instrumentation and control, and advanced nuclear plant designs. Westinghouse supplied the world's first commercial nuclear power plant in 1957 and has the world's largest installed base of operating nuclear power plants.

BNFL is a leading specialist in nuclear technology and a global supplier of nuclear fuel, products and services. Currently around a third of BNFL's turnover comes from Westinghouse; a quarter comes from the recycling of UK and overseas customers' fuel; a further quarter of turnover comes from operating the UK's Magnox power stations. The remainder of BNFL's business is in the area of waste management and decommissioning, which is expected to grow significantly in the years ahead.

Contact: Vaughn Gilbert of Westinghouse Electric, 412-374-3896

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

Missile Defense Test Had Problems

Las Vegas Sun
January 16, 2000
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/2000/jan/16/011700644.html?nuclear+OR+plutonium+OR+uranium+OR+radioactiv%3F%3F%3F+OR+missile%3F

WASHINGTON (AP) -- If all goes as planned Tuesday, a 121-pound "smart rock" will steer itself into the path of a mock warhead about 140 miles above the central Pacific Ocean. It will create a celestial collision the military hopes will give its multibillion-dollar national missile defense project a big boost.

Or maybe not.

The "smart rock" -- actually a highly sophisticated missile interceptor -- is still "learning," and Pentagon officials are quick to say that while they hope for a success they will not be surprised if the interceptor misses its target. After all, they say, this is a testing program and setbacks are to be expected.

This is not any run-of-the-mill testing program, however. At stake, in the Pentagon's view, is the nation's ability to defend itself against the kind of long-range missile threats that could emerge in the next decade.

North Korea, for example, is said to be developing a missile with enough range to reach U.S. soil, although it has not tested it in flight and agreed recently to halt missile testing for the time being. No other non-NATO country, other than Russia and China, possesses an intercontinental ballistic missile.

If Tuesday's test from Vandenburg, Air Force Base, Calif., proves successful, it could lead to a decision this summer by President Clinton to officially commit the United States to building a defense against missile attack at a cost of at least $12.7 billion.

If it fails, there will be another chance as soon as April to demonstrate that strategic missile defense is feasible -- just one of several criteria the president has set for deciding whether to deploy it.

Clinton also will take into account the cost at a time when the armed forces are hard-pressed to buy the conventional weapons they say will be needed in the decades ahead. And there's the impact on relations with Russia and China, both of which are strongly opposed to a U.S. national missile defense.

In his 2001 budget, to be unveiled Feb. 7, Clinton is expected to ask Congress for an additional $2.2 billion for the program. That would buy an arsenal of 100 interceptors and pay for more testing and spare parts.

"This is a very high-priority program," chief Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said Friday. "We are working very hard ... to get the president the information he needs from the technical side to make a decision sometime this summer.

"Obviously, if we have a series of tests that are deemed to be failures we couldn't say that this was ready to deploy," Bacon added.

If Clinton gives the go-ahead this summer, a missile defense could be ready to begin operating in 2005, although some Pentagon officials closely involved in the program think that is too ambitious a timetable.

The first flight test of the missile interceptor -- known as a "kill vehicle" or by its Pentagon nickname, "smart rock" -- was last Oct. 2. A third test is scheduled for April or May. The first test using the final version of the interceptor is not scheduled until 2003.

Although the missile used in the October test encountered some glitches en route to its target, it managed to score a hit - prompting the Pentagon to assert that it had demonstrated that a warhead carrying a nuclear or biological weapon can be totally destroyed and neutralized.

Critics are less certain. They doubt the reliability of a national missile defense and fault the Pentagon for planning only three interceptor tests before recommending a deployment decision to Clinton this summer.

"Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming test, it is already clear that the three tests will not provide sufficient basis to determine whether the ... system will work," said Tom Collina of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which opposes deployment.

Pentagon spokesman Bacon said it is not yet clear what degree of success must be achieved in the three tests.

"I can't tell you what will constitute the evidence we need to call this system ready to deploy," he said.

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Park Police Find Burned Body at Former Army Fort in Queens

New York Times
January 16, 2000
By JAYSON BLAIR
http://www.nytimes.com/00/01/16/news/national/regional/ny-body-find.html

The badly burned body of an unidentified man was found yesterday morning on the grounds of a federal wildlife refuge on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, the police said.

The body of the man, believed to be in his late 20's, was found after two United States Park Police officers saw smoke rising above the trees at Fort Tilden, part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, officials said.

"The park police were driving by and saw something burning in the distance," said Officer Chris Cottingham, a spokesman for the New York Police Department.

The officers searched for about 20 minutes before they found the body. Investigators think the victim was shot at another location, then dumped at the park and set on fire, said a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The body was found about 7:50 a.m. about 100 yards off Rockaway Point Boulevard, within a fenced-off part of Fort Tilden, a 317-acre former United States Army base, the official said. The officers called the New York Fire Department and other law enforcement agencies.

The fort is not open to the public. A long fence surrounds it, and razor wire surrounds the silos where nuclear missiles once stood ready for launching during the Cold War. The land now serves primarily as a home to endangered waterfowl, according to the park service.

The base once housed conventional and nuclear-tipped Nike-Hercules missiles and antiaircraft guns to protect the Northeast corridor from New York to Philadelphia from attack. It was a part of the New York Harbor defense system until it was abandoned in 1974 as part of a treaty with the Soviet Union.

Although the body was found on federal property, New York police detectives are taking the lead role in the investigation, officials said.

The park police routinely patrol Fort Tilden, which has become a popular spot among teenagers and among homeless people on the Rockaway Peninsula who seek shelter in its abandoned buildings.

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All Weapons Great and Small

Washington Post
Sunday, January 16, 2000; Page X07
By John Prados
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/16/091l-011600-idx.html

THE COLD WAR A Military History
By David Miller St. Martin's. 480 pp. $27.95

THE BIOLOGY OF DOOM
The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project
By Ed Regis

Henry Holt. 259 pp. $25
Reviewed by John Prados

In what sometimes seems like a trick played by time, a decade has flashed past since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It will not be long until a decade has also gone by since the Soviet Union disintegrated, disappearing into that dustbin of history with which Soviet leaders sometimes threatened their foreign enemies. These events of 1989 and 1991 neatly frame the endgame with which the long Cold War drew to a close. We are at a curious pass today, one sufficiently removed from the intense competition of the Cold War that the whole begins to come into view, yet close enough so that much that happened (or did not) during that conflict remains secret, shrouded in mystery.

Despite the best efforts of custodians of secrecy, the real story is starting to seep out. New pieces of the puzzle appear as initiatives are undertaken such as the one a few years ago at the Department of Energy to release Cold War records or as controversies such as one during Bill Clinton's first administration, over human participation in dangerous experiments, force the release of information. In Russia a trickle of documentation from the former adversary is beginning to put a real face on the Soviet enemy. In both countries, participants in the Cold War, which endured for up to 45 years, depending on how you count them -- the longest sustained conflict in recent memory -- are now willing to come forward. This is fortunate, for history is in danger of losing these memories even as it struggles to access the documentary records. In short, it is time to do the careful empirical spadework necessary to assemble a true history of the Cold War. Our books for today furnish uneven help in that regard.

In the longer sweep of Cold War history, a number of themes will be relevant. The United States and Soviet Union, two superpowers imprisoned by the destructiveness of their nuclear weapons, could not afford to war against each other. Instead they engaged in a furious armed race while organizing alliances to combat the opponent, first in Central Europe, then in the Eurasian peri-phery. Regional conflicts the world over became subsumed in the superpower competition and gained or lost importance as they were perceived to be related to it.

David Miller's The Cold War: A Military History, a long but curiously sparse book, is primarily preoccupied with the arms race and the face-off between the powers in Europe. Miller, a prolific compiler of assorted reference works, presents this book as "an attempt to paint an overall picture of some of the military factors involved." In doing so, his work neglects many of the elements we expect to find in a new history of the Cold War. The result is disappointing.

There is little narrative in this "history," which reads very much like another reference book or indeed the loads of policy studies ground out by think tanks every day of the Cold War. Perhaps the best of what we get here is Miller's capsule account of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's origin and evolution. The 1949-1950 advent of that treaty is taken as the start of the Cold War, however, which leads to slighting all the early post-World War II crises. The Berlin Blockade and airlift, for example, get a total of two paragraphs (following about 250 pages of weapons system surveys), and many other key events are not mentioned at all. The preoccupation with Europe also shows poorly: There is nothing on Africa or regional conflicts, on the numerous covert operations and guerrilla wars conducted by both sides, not even on the Cuban Missile crisis, a hugely important Cold War episode. The only coverage of Vietnam is of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972, and that because it involved B-52 aircraft, regarded as strategic weapons.

Even in the author's main area of concern Miller's coverage is uneven. The Cold War contains extensive discussion of NATO mobilization plans and the recently revealed Warsaw Pact attack options for the European Central Front, but these subjects are treated separately and in isolation. There is no analysis of how ground-force tactical doctrine changed over time (the United States alone had several standard approaches during this period), how this affected the plans or indeed how the two sides' plans might have played out against each other. A major fear of the nuclear age, the danger of war by accident or miscalculation, epitomized by the war scare of 1983, receives no discussion at all. Also passed over, except for a data table in the appendices, are the numerous submarine incidents that could have led to complications, while surface naval and aerial incidents are not treated at all. Meanwhile the effort to discuss all weapons systems of all powers leads to a narrative that is not really a history of the Cold War but one of assorted countries' weapons inventories.

Another element the Miller volume hardly touches upon is chemical and biological weapons. The latter type is the main subject of The Biology of Doom, Ed Regis's engaging expose of the drive to make possible germ warfare -- what some proponents asserted to be a higher form of killing. Regis investigates the origins of the genus, so to speak, tracing claims of the efficacity of biological weapons back to scientific work in the early 1930s actually done to debunk such proposals. Using both declassified documents and people's recollections, he goes on to provide the best account yet of U.S. research and efforts to produce biological weapons.

British and Canadian researchers had significant influence on early American developments, including the design of a standard weapon casing and the provision of production facilities. Japanese World War II programs also helped solidify U.S. determination to proceed, by furnishing the first concrete evidence of the effects of germ weapons on human beings. Regis shows in detail how U.S. operatives collected this intelligence from the Japanese.

The active U.S. biological weapons program began in late 1942, initially at Edgewood Arsenal, then at Camp (later Fort) Detrick, Md. The earliest production plant was nicknamed "Black Maria." The first American germ weapon test to involve human subjects took place in July 1955 at Dugway, Utah. Prior to that, experts used to joke that we had a lot of information about how a city full of monkeys would be affected by these weapons but none about their impact on people. In regard to allegations that the United States used germ weapons in the Korean War, recently revived in a study by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, Regis demonstrates that the first real U.S. tests took place too late to figure in the conflict. He categorically rejects that claim. Although the story trails off in the 1960s, and the author succumbs to the temptation to lump CIA chemical experiments (the misuse of LSD that led to the death of an Army scientist who actually worked on biological weapons) with the germ program, his account remains entertaining and informative. This is a fine first cut at a hitherto shadowy subject.

John Prados is an historian of national security based in Washington. His most recent book is "The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War."

---

Courage carries 'American pope'

USA Today
01/16/00- Updated 11:39 PM ET
By Rick Hampson,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/acovmon.htm

NEW YORK - It was May 1983 when someone burst into the hotel room where a dozen bishops were having a drink before dinner. His news gladdened the gathering: "O'Connor got Scranton!"

The pope had appointed John J. O'Connor, a bishop on the committee drafting the U.S. Catholic bishops' controversial pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, to the relatively obscure post of Scranton, Pa.

O'Connor was an outsider; he had spent most of his career as a Navy chaplain. He was a hawk, "the Pentagon's bishop," some griped. And he was no favorite of the more liberal "peace bishops" with whom he had battled, word by word, over the letter's call for a freeze on nuclear weapons.

Several of these men were in the hotel room in Chicago, where all the American bishops had gathered to vote on the letter. One raised his glass. "Well," he said, "we're finally rid of that son of a ..."

Nine months later, O'Connor was back - as archbishop of New York - "archbishop of the capital of the world," the pope said when he promoted him to cardinal the following year. In the 17 years since that mocking hotel room toast, he has become the American church's most influential, famous and controversial leader. He is the closest thing to an "American pope" since the death of New York Cardinal Francis Spellman a third of a century ago .

But O'Connor turned 80 on Saturday and is still recovering from brain surgery. Again, people are bidding him goodbye, or good riddance.

Speculation has raged about O'Connor's retirement and successor ever since he submitted his resignation at 75, as required by church law. The pope never accepted it, making O'Connor, in the New York Observer's phrase, "a temp in a red hat." He's cardinal for life, but archbishop of New York only as long as the Vatican pleases.

Now, many believe, O'Connor's time is up.

Surgery and radiation treatment for a brain tumor have physically transformed him. His long, lean face has puffed up like a pillow. His hair has fallen out. The man who once bounded up altar steps so fast that his aides jokingly worried about his breaking a leg now moves slowly and sparingly. Instead of looking down from the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral, he gives his sermon from the altar.

A conservative turn

Having turned 80, O'Connor is no longer eligible to vote in a papal election or hold Vatican office. In November, accordingly, he bade farewell to his fellow bishops, writing that it would be "the height of presumptuousness to anticipate continuing in office much longer."

But, he added, "it's been a great ride."

The ride sped up when O'Connor came to New York in 1984.

At his installation, he placed his miter on the head of an unsuspecting altar boy, put on a Yankees cap and asked, in imitation of Mayor Ed Koch, "How'm I doin'?" He also began to hold impromptu news conferences in the nave of St. Patrick's Cathedral to talk to the people through the media.

O'Connor answered reporters' questions promiscuously and quickly. His motto, according to a joke, was "Shoot! Ready! Aim!"

O'Connor became known as the pope's man in America, the embodiment of John Paul's insistence on orthodox theology, a meat-and-potatoes Catholicism more common before the Second Vatican Council liberalized the church in the early '60s.

O'Connor has used his pulpit in what the pope has called "the capital of the world" to denounce birth control, homosexuality and sex outside marriage. He has criticized Catholic politicians who support abortion rights and even raised the possibility of their excommunication. He has, on special occasions, said Mass in Latin, the language of the church before Vatican II. And he has urged a grass-roots revival of meatless Fridays.

He has taken on everyone from Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro, who said Catholics could oppose abortion personally while supporting abortion rights, to Ann Landers, who called the pope a "Polack." He has complained about everything from baseball games on Good Friday to Christians who say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

He incurred the wrath of feminists like Gloria Steinem, who named O'Connor and AIDS the two worst things about New York. When O'Connor opposed the distribution of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, demonstrators chained themselves to the pews of St. Patrick's and spat out communion wafers.

He also alienated some Catholics with his strict adherence to Vatican doctrine. The Rev. Andrew Greeley, the writer and sociologist, called O'Connor "an embarrassment to the church" with little support in the pews. "O'Connor simply can't deliver the vote," Greeley told Vanity Fair in 1990. "He couldn't deliver a flock of half-starved vampires to a blood bank."

O'Connor has real power, however. By virtue of his friendship with the pope and his membership on the Vatican committee that recommends bishops, he has helped make the U.S. Catholic hierarchy more conservative; the sort of liberals who cheered his appointment to Scranton in 1983 have become a distinct minority.

But in this decade, O'Connor shed his image as a predictable conservative. He has condemned U.S. military action in the Gulf War and Kosovo. He has washed the hair and emptied the bedpans of dying AIDS patients. He has preached against the death penalty before a congregation of police officers.

And this season, O'Connor has affected people with his suffering in a way he never could with his preaching.

In 1986, two years after O'Connor came to New York, a young policeman named Steven McDonald was shot in the back while on patrol in Central Park. He was paralyzed. One of his first visitors in the hospital was the cardinal.

"You feel helpless, but you remind me so much of Christ now," O'Connor told him. "He didn't save the world through teaching and preaching and miracles. He made it possible when he was lying motionless on the cross.

"If you unite yourself and your helplessness with Christ on the cross, you are the most powerful man in the world. You'll touch people you never see. I can't reach out and touch them. You can."

Illness 'humanized' him

Now, in his illness, O'Connor himself seems to have tapped the power of powerlessness. With his step slowed and his visage bloated, O'Connor is touching people as he never did as a pastor or a scold.

"A lot of people saw him as a hard-driving man of faith, but they didn't know about his compassion," says Peter Johnson Jr., a prominent attorney and Catholic layman. "This has humanized him."

"I'm no O'Connor fan," says a veteran New York priest. "If the pope said up was down, he'd go along with it. But he's shown me something in his illness. He's shown a lot of courage."

O'Connor's medical crisis began in August, when he underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor. Subsequent radiation therapy weakened him further, and a blood clot developed in his left leg.

When the cardinal returned to church, people were shocked by his appearance. Twice in November he stumbled while stepping from the altar. But, he wrote in the archdiocesan newspaper, "under no circumstances will I give up."

After his second fall he stayed away from St. Patrick's for three Sundays, returning six days before Christmas.

"I'm going to share a secret with you," the cardinal told a congregation that filled the cathedral. "My very close friends and advisers have urged that I not celebrate this Mass today because they say that my speech gets thick and I lose my place.

"But my answer to that is that I cannot not have Mass with you . I love you too much." Applause rang off the old stone walls.

He celebrated Mass at an altar at the rear of the sanctuary so he wouldn't have to walk as far. He kept his sermon short, around 10 minutes, and delivered it sitting down.

Then, on Christmas Eve, he summoned enough strength to say what might have been his last Midnight Mass at St. Patrick's.

He offered a tentative goodbye. "How much time will be granted me here in New York, I don't know. I must use this opportunity to thank every single one of you for the privilege of trying to serve you to the best of my abilities, limited though that has been."

O'Connor has often publicly questioned his own abilities and accomplishments. For years, he has said how uncomfortable it felt to him, a painter's son from a south Philadelphia rowhouse, to live in the baronial 1880 archbishop's mansion behind St. Patrick's.

"I keep waiting for the police to come and evict me as an impostor," he once said.

In fact, only the pope can evict O'Connor. And though O'Connor's age and health would seem to offer a natural occasion to do so, the 79-year-old pope - who has endured dire predictions about his own health and longevity - can do whatever he wants.

There has been much speculation about O'Connor's successor atop the archdiocese of 2.4 million Catholics. Putative candidates include St. Louis Archbishop Justin Rigali, a former Vatican official, and two of O'Connor's former aides: Buffalo Bishop Henry Mansell and Archbishop Edwin O'Brien, head of the diocese for the military.

But the bishop of Scranton was on no one's list to succeed the late Cardinal Terence Cooke in 1984. Only in retrospect is it clear that the pope sent him to Scranton until a larger diocese came open.

Does O'Connor want to keep his job? Acquaintances say they think so; Joe Zwilling, his spokesman, says the cardinal hasn't said: "I don't think he even concerns himself with it. It's out of his hands."

Meanwhile, O'Connor is getting stronger. He is again going to work at his office and is able to stand through much of Sunday Mass.

His sense of humor is also back. At his 80th birthday party Saturday night, which packed the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria and raised more than $5 million for some of the cardinal's causes, O'Connor made fun of his own situation.

"I will soon be evicted. I don't know when it will be," O'Connor told an audience that included Rigali, Mansell and O'Brien. "I will have the distinction of being the first living cardinal to be thrown out."

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

Plan for nuclear waste incinerator inspires protesters in the Rockies

Cleveland Plain Dealer
Sunday, January 16, 2000
By MEAD GRUVER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/w16nuke.ssf

JACKSON, Wyo. - Tatiana Maxwell was once taken by stroller to protest missile silos growing like mushrooms across the prairie.

"We were a fringe family," she recalled. "We were thought of as communists and kooks."

With her own kids now in strollers, Maxwell has a new target: a proposed nuclear waste incinerator that would be built 100 miles upwind from Jackson, the 13,000-foot Tetons and Yellowstone National Park, the nation's oldest.

Maxwell and others fear that toxic particles from the eastern Idaho incinerator will waft into Wyoming and lace the land and water with toxic PCBs and radiation.

"It's mostly mother's instinct that it's not good for children or other living things," said Max well, who is pregnant with her fourth child.

Maxwell, along with Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance and the Sierra Club, have sought an injunction that would block the project near Idaho Falls, Idaho. The project cost is estimated at $876 million to $1.2 billion.

In some respects, this is a tale of two cities: Jackson, a mountain enclave of wealthy transplants and second-home owners that thrives on tourism, and middle-class Idaho Falls, which has lived with radioactive waste nearby for decades.

"I've lived here all my life, I've never seen anything different than anyone else with industry like this," said Ralph Steele, a commissioner for Idaho's Bonneville County. "There've been some accidents, but that's to be expected."

Cal Ozaki, the project's deputy general manager, and many of the plant's supporters who live on its doorstep, say fears like Maxwell's are overblown.

"I have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old, and if I thought that there was anything that could harm their health or the environment, I wouldn't be doing this," he said.

At the core of the controversy is 130,000 cubic yards of waste equivalent to about 31 football fields 3 feet deep being housed at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

Half of the waste is supposed to go to the underground facility outside Carlsbad, N.M., the nation's only long-term storage site for radioactive waste.

The Department of Energy has contracted with British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. to build a facility at the site that will compact up to 90 percent of the storage-bound waste and burn the rest. Burning will be used for waste too laden with PCBs for storage in New Mexico or containing materials too dangerous to ship.

Opponents say the government plans to allow the burning of waste that contains about one metric ton of plutonium "approximately 166 times the amount of plutonium contained in the atomic bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II," according to the lawsuit.

"The plutonium incinerator threatens to dump airborne radioactive and hazardous wastes over Jackson, Wyo., and such national treasures as Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park and Jedediah Smith Wilderness Area," the lawsuit states.

Most Idaho residents have been conspicuously quiet on the issue, except to lash out at warnings that the incinerator could contaminate the potato crop.

"I am confident in technology," said Fred Sica, Idaho Falls Chamber of Commerce director. "What we're really talking about here is that we're providing a service to the rest of the country in a very safe and manageable way."

The anti-incinerator movement was born last summer in the scenic Jackson Hole region of north west Wyoming, where celebrities like Harrison Ford have built second homes.

Opponents have the legal services of Jackson attorney Gerry Spence, a Wyoming native famous for his victory over nuclear giant Kerr-McGee in the Karen Silkwood whistleblower case.

Spence said Idaho residents have made a deal that could cost them their health.

"It's a sad exchange, to exchange jobs and money and profit for the potential danger involved in the case, for lives and sickness and cancer and the loss of property," he said.

While some of the plaintiffs have suggested changing the laws on transporting nuclear waste and burning PCBs, British Nuclear spokeswoman Ann Reidesel said it's not that simple.

"It's important to look at the whole picture and make sure we are not changing laws to make things more lax to solve a current situation, and to keep in mind that the laws were put in place to make things safer," she said.

The opponents claim the government broke several laws in approving the project and failed to adequately notify Wyoming residents who live downwind.

"If in fact this incinerator were to go ahead and people were to realize that there were particles in the air that are extremely hazardous, why would they choose to come here?" asked Berte Hirsch field, president of Keep Yellow stone Nuclear Free. "I think there would be a mass exodus."

-----------us uranium

Indians will get their land back

Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 17/01/2000
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0001/17/text/world4.html

Salt Lake City: In one of the biggest hand-backs of Indian land in United States history, the Government is returning 33,994 hectares to the Northern Ute tribe as part of a deal to clean up millions of tonnes of uranium waste along the Colorado River.

The land, believed to contain oil-rich shale deposits, was given to the Utes in 1882. But in 1916, on the eve of the nation's entry into World War I, the Federal Government took it back to create a reserve supply of oil for the Navy. The reserve was never tapped.

"The land is not needed for national security anymore," the Energy Secretary, Mr Bill Richardson, said. "The right thing to do is turn it back. They're the rightful owners."

The deal, which the Energy Department called the largest return of Indian land in the lower 48 States in a century, is subject to approval by Congress.

Under the agreement, the Indians can open the land to oil and gas drilling, but they will have to pay a percentage of the royalties, expected to be about 8 per cent, to the Government.

That money will, in turn, help the Government cover the $US300 million ($451 million) cost of relocating 10.5 million tonnes of radioactive rock and soil left over from the mining of uranium during the Cold War.

A study by the US Fish and Wildlife Service found that toxins such as arsenic and ammonia were leaching from the pile and contaminating the river.

The company that operated the mine from 1962 to 1984, the Denver-based Atlas Corp, has declared bankruptcy, leaving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to clean up the pile.

Associated Press

-----------spying

We´re Ready for Our Close-Ups Now

New York Times
January 16, 2000
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/011600spy-satellites-review.html

When Jeffrey Harris was head of the National Reconnaissance Office in the mid-1990s, his agency's satellites routinely peered down on the world's hot spots from outer space and photographed them for federal intelligence agencies. It was all supersecret and all dedicated to national security.

Now Harris has a new job and a new agenda. As president of Space Imaging Inc., a private company in Thornton, Colo., he wants to get rich by selling photographs taken by his company's satellite camera -- the first in the world to rival military reconnaissance in accuracy and sharpness.

The spy-satellite business, for decades a secretive monopoly of advanced nations, is trying to go commercial. But the photographs pose questions of practicality, security and privacy: In theory, nosy neighbors can now peer over tall fences.

Space Imaging's satellite, launched in September, is the first of a dozen or so commercial surveillance craft expected to be sent into orbit in the next decade, a wave begun by the Clinton administration's green light in 1994. The new field of close-up space photography is seen as a boon for mining companies, mapmakers, geologists, city planners, ecologists, farmers, hydrologists, road makers, journalists, land managers, disaster-relief officials and others seeking to monitor the planet's changing face. The global market in such imagery is expected to reach as high as $5 billion by 2004.

Space Imaging's photos have already laid bare the devastation of last November's earthquake in Turkey, showing demolished warehouses and shattered residences. The pictures have also revealed the grim aftermath of Venezuela's recent floods and mudslides, as well as smoke curling over the Chechen city of Grozny, which was under Russian attack.

From an orbit 400 miles up, the camera can see objects as small as 3 feet wide. The photos aren't cheap. A minimum order for a North American scene is $1,000, and a foreign image is $2,000. But the company, via its Web site, www.spaceimage.com, also sells $10 snapshots of world landmarks, including the Taj Mahal, Vatican City, Big Ben, the Forbidden City in Beijing and Central Park in New York.

Albert Wheelon, a former CIA official who helped shape the nation's early spy-satellite program, said world governments and their militaries would probably be the top customers for years to come. Civilian inroads, he added, "will take a long time, like computers did."

In fact, Space Imaging's main customer now is the Pentagon. And the company is co-owned by the Lockheed Martin Corp., a military contractor that makes spy satellites, and E-Systems, a division of Raytheon that provides many of their communication links.

But the company is making a technological leap of faith, inspired by the success of the Internet and personal computers. It just got a $1.3 million order from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, which is regularly battered by cyclones and is eager to improve its assessment of damage.

Fenton Carey, associate administrator for innovation, research and education at the Department of Transportation, said his office was investigating the imagery for tracking four million miles of federal highways and for planning future construction.

But thus far Space Imaging has had some of its greatest successes providing military-type surveillance for civilian organizations. Last week, the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington that promotes arms control, released an analysis of Space Imaging photographs that disclosed a secret North Korean missile base, setting off a battle among experts over whether the launching site for long-range missiles is a serious threat or too primitive to be of concern.

John Pike, director of the federation's space program, said such images promise to "increase the amount of fact and decrease the speculation and hype in public debate." Careful study, he said, could provide an independent check on government claims and a competitive analysis for federal intelligence analysts.

Bruce D. Berkowitz, a former CIA analyst and the author of "Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age" (Yale, 1999), said commercial spy satellites were destined to reshape military espionage. "As the commercial sector gets better and better," he said, intelligence agencies are "going to have to push harder at the edge to find their own special niche."

-----------older

Metropolitan Water District Hails Energy Secretary's Move to Protect SoCal's Colorado River Drinking Water

Excite News
Updated 7:03 PM ET January 14, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/bw/000114/ca-metro-water-district

LOS ANGELES (BUSINESS WIRE) - The chairman of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Phillip J. Pace, today lauded an agreement announced by U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson that will protect the safety of Southern Californians' drinking water by moving a leaking uranium waste pile.

"On behalf of the nearly 17 million people in urban Southern California who drink water from the Colorado, we appreciate your actions," Pace said at the event at Moab, Utah.

"Urban Southern California's Colorado River Aqueduct begins about 650 miles downstream of Moab, and, due to dilution, we've seen no appreciable increase in the radioactivity of our source water," Pace noted.

"But Secretary Richardson has heard our concern over possible future effects, and we appreciate his efforts."

The agreement was signed by Secretary Richardson, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Ute Tribal Business Committee Chairman O. Roland McCook Sr., and Utah Governor Michael Leavitt. It provides for the Department of Energy to seek Congressional authority and funding to remove 10.5 million tons of radioactive uranium mill tailings and clean up the site, about three miles from Moab.

Moving and cleanup are estimated at $300 million and would be regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with participation by the state of Utah.

As part of the agreement, a portion of royalties from future energy production on lands being returned to the Ute Tribe would go to a fund for cleaning up the Moab uranium tailings. Pace also praised U.S. Reps. Bob Filner (D-Chula Vista), George Miller (D-Vallejo) and Chris Cannon (R-Utah) for authoring legislation to resolve concerns about the uranium dump, as well as Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Norwalk) for enlisting both Governors Gray Davis of California and Michael Leavitt of Utah in the effort, and for leading a bipartisan House briefing on the issue.

Pace also applauded state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar) for expediting a joint resolution through the Assembly and Senate that called for immediate removal of the tailings and for the Department of Energy to take charge.

The privately owned mill along the river's northern bank three miles outside of Moab processed uranium ore for military and other government uses for 28 years before closing in 1984. Mill tailings were dumped in an unlined pond, and eventually totaled 10.5 million tons. It is estimated the mountain is leaking 28,000 gallons of radioactive fluid into the river each day.

The mill owner, Atlas Corporation, had proposed covering the pile with a clay and rock cap, but the Oak Ridge National Laboratory determined that even if the site were covered, it would continue to seep into the river. Representatives Filner and Miller have introduced legislation calling for moving the tailings away from the river and safely containing them. Rep. Cannon's bill calls for the Department of Energy to assume leadership on the issue from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Atlas Corporation filed for bankruptcy in 1998.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is a consortium composed of 27 cities and water agencies serving nearly 17 million people in six counties. The District imports water from the Colorado River and Northern California to supplement local supplies, and helps its members to develop increased water recycling, desalination, conservation, storage, and other water-management programs.

Contact: Metropolitan Water District Bob Muir, 213/217-6930 (office) 714/879-7478 (home) or Rob Hallwachs, 213/217-6450 (office) 626/398-7697 (home) or Marion MacKenzie Pyle, Portavoz Hispana 213/217-7031 (office) 323/225-2343 (home) or Debra Sass, 213/217-7230 (office) 818/702-8828 (home) or George Rooney, Eastside Reservoir Project/Inland Feeder 909/926-7458 (office) 909/795-1427 (home)

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Water Safety Concerns Spurred Cleanup Plan

Saturday, January 15, 2000
BY JIM WOOLF
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
http://www.sltrib.com/01152000/utah/17864.htm

MOAB -- Utah officials have haggled for years over what to do about the Atlas uranium mill tailings. But it wasn't until the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California got involved that the U.S. Department of Energy was willing to act.

On Friday, DOE Secretary Bill Richardson made his plan for moving the tailings pile official, addressing the fears of Los Angeles water officials that the water supply for millions of Southern Californians would be threatened if the 10.5 million tons of radioactive dirt were left on the flood plain of the Colorado River.

Californians won't be the only ones to benefit from Richardson's plan. The Northern Ute tribe in Utah will receive 84,000 acres in a land exchange to pay for moving the tailings. Richardson said it would be the largest voluntary return of land to American Indians in the lower 48 states in more than a century.

Last year, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) decided to leave the dirt where it is and simply cover it with a protective cap of rock and soil. But water officials in California, Nevada and Arizona disagreed with the decision.

"Sixty-five percent of our water comes from the Colorado River," said Phillip Pace, chairman of the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

NRC studies showed that toxic metals, solvents and radioactive material in the tailings pile would continue to seep into the Colorado. Contamination levels would be extremely low, but downstream users worried about the long-term consequences of drinking the water.

So the water users joined with Utah's political leaders, who also opposed the NRC proposal, to request that the tailings be moved to a disposal site farther from the river. In addition, they asked DOE to do the work since that agency has cleaned up 22 other abandoned uranium mills around the country.

"We're doing this for our children, our grandchildren and generations to come," explained Pace.

Richardson gave them what they wanted Friday. He announced that DOE will request legislative approval to take control of the Atlas site and then request funding to move the waste to a specially constructed disposal site somewhere away from the river. The Grand County Council wants to see the tailings shipped by rail to a previously identified disposal site about 18 miles north of Moab, said Council Chairwoman Kimberly Schappert.

Before arriving in Moab, Richardson met with leaders of the Northern Ute tribe in Fort Duchesne to announce plans to give them 84,000 acres of land in Naval Oil Shale Reserve No. 2, located east of the Green River and adjacent to the existing Uintah and Ouray Reservation.

One stipulation of the transfer is that the tribe will return to DOE about 8 percent of any royalties it receives from oil and gas development on the land. The money will be used to help pay for cleaning up the Atlas site. Another stipulation is that the tribe will cooperate with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to preserve a 75-mile-long section of the Green River through Desolation and Gray canyons. The east side of the popular canyon is owned by the tribe.

"Today we are doing the right thing," said Richardson. "The right thing for the environment, the right thing for the Utes, the right thing for the state of Utah and the right thing for the American people." The land, which is believed to contain oil-rich shale deposits, was given to the Utes in 1882.

He offered special praise for two Utahns: Gov. Mike Leavitt for helping to move the projects along, and actor and filmmaker Robert Redford for inspiring in him an "environmental ethic."

Utah Rep. Chris Cannon predicted that convincing Congress to approve the land transfer to the Utes would be "very simple."

Finishing the Atlas cleanup will be more challenging, he said. While having the Clinton administration's support is "critical," Cannon said, many problems need to be resolved in Congress.

For example, Cannon anticipates opposition from some key lawmakers to allowing DOE to take control of the Atlas cleanup. Some members of Congress don't want to see DOE given any more responsibilities, he said.

Cannon also predicted a long struggle convincing Congress to come up with the estimated $300 million needed to clean up the Atlas site.

Rep. George Miller, senior Democrat on the House Resources Committee and a California resident, issued a statement Friday praising Richardson's decision on the Atlas issue and offering his help at solving the remaining problems.

"I look forward to reviewing the specifics of this proposal and working with the Secretary and my colleagues to ensure that the Department of Energy is given the tools and resources to ensure the safety of drinking water for millions of Americans," said Miller.

Despite the obstacles, Cannon was optimistic the Atlas site will be cleaned up one day. Pointing toward the tailings pile, he predicted: "That won't be there in 10 or 15 years."

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Frank Cahouet Retires From USEC Inc. Board

Excite News
Updated 8:19 AM ET January 14, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/bw/000114/md-usec

BETHESDA, Md. (BUSINESS WIRE) - James R. Mellor, Chairman of the Board of USEC Inc. (NYSE:USU), announced today the retirement of Frank Cahouet as a member of the Board.

Mr. Cahouet has been a member of the USEC Board since the privatization of the company by the federal government in July 1998. His resignation is effective January 15.

In making the announcement, Mr. Mellor said, "Frank has been a valued member of the Board, and all of us join in wishing him well."

Mr. Cahouet recently retired from the posts of President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mellon Bank Corporation.

USEC Inc. is the world leader in the sale of uranium fuel enrichment services for commercial nuclear power plants. A global energy company, USEC has its headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and operates production plants in Kentucky and Ohio.

Contact: USEC, Bethesda Charles B. Yulish, 301/564-3391 Elizabeth Stuckle, 301/564-3399

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U.S. moves to give 84,000 acres back to Indians in Utah The record return of land is part of a deal to clean up tons of uranium waste along the Colorado River.

Philadelphia Inquirer
January 15, 2000
By Robert Gehrke
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/2000/Jan/15/international/TRIBE15.htm

SALT LAKE CITY - In one of the biggest givebacks of Indian land, the government is returning 84,000 acres to the Northern Ute tribe as part of a deal to clean up millions of tons of uranium waste along the Colorado River.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced the agreement yesterday at the tribe's headquarters in Fort Duchesne, about 110 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.

The Energy Department called the deal the largest return of Indian land in the lower 48 states in a century. It is subject to approval by Congress.

The land, which is believed to contain oil-rich shale deposits, was given to the Utes in 1882. But in 1916, on the eve of the nation's entry into World War I, the U.S. government took it back to create a reserve supply of oil for the Navy fleet. The reserve was never tapped.

"The land is not needed for national security anymore," Richardson said. "The right thing to do is turn it back. They're the rightful owners." The land is next to the 4.4-million-acre Ute reservation.

Under the deal, the Indians can open the land to oil and gas drilling. But they will have to pay a percentage of royalties to the government.

That money, in turn, will help the government cover the $300 million cost of relocating 10.5 million tons of radioactive rock and soil left over from the mining of uranium during the Cold War.

"It is actually a moral issue, in that the government has finally returned to us what was taken from us without our consent," the chairman of the tribe's governing body, O. Roland McCook, said. He also said the land "will add to our economic base and our land base."

The Energy Department has estimated that the land holds six trillion cubic feet of natural gas, an amount equivalent to 30 percent of the natural gas used in the United States during 1998. There are no estimates of how much oil is there.

The royalty percentage is being negotiated but is expected to be about 8 percent.

The radioactive waste sits 750 feet from the Colorado River just outside Arches National Park. The pile is about 50 miles south of the land being returned to the Utes.

A study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that toxic elements such as arsenic and ammonia were leaching from the pile, and contaminating the river, threatening endangered species of fish.

Rep. George Miller (D., Calif.) has also raised concern that the river contamination is tainting the drinking water for 25 million people in three states.

Denver-based Atlas Corp., which operated the mine from 1962 to 1984, has declared bankruptcy, leaving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to clean up the pile. However, the cleanup bond that Atlas left behind was woefully inadequate.

The NRC planned to cover the tailings with an earthen cap, and drain 500 million gallons of water from the pile. But state and federal officials and environmentalists argued that that would not stop contamination. They pressed the Energy Department to take control of the pile, and move it 18 miles north of Moab.

"This is a huge breakthrough, and we're very heartened," said Bill Hedden, chairman of the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group that had sued to have the tailings moved.

Still, the possibility of drilling on the land has made environmentalists uneasy. The Sierra Club is pushing to have roughly one-fourth of the parcel protected as wilderness.

As part of the agreement, the Utes pledged to protect a quarter-mile corridor along 75 miles of the Green River.

---

Missile Warning Satellite Launch Rescheduled

Space.Com
posted: 05:50 pm EST 11 January 2000
By Todd Halvorson
Cape Canaveral Bureau Chief
http://www.space.com/space/launches/titan_cleared_000111.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A $700 million mission to launch America's newest missile warning satellite is being rescheduled for early March after extensive inspections revealed the spacecraft suffered no damage during a recent launch pad incident.

Capable of instantaneously detecting missile launches anywhere in the world, the $250 million Pentagon spacecraft now is scheduled to be launched at 2:57 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on March 1.

Its ride into space: An 18-story Air Force Titan 4-B rocket, which is the most powerful expendable launch vehicle made in the United States.

The $432 million Titan 4-B had been scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Station's Launch Complex 40 on January 30. The flight, however, was postponed after oil dripped from an overhead crane at the complex onto a protective nosecone being installed around the spacecraft.

The incident occurred December 22 as workers were attempting to mount the nosecone around the spacecraft to protect it from rain and other inclement weather over the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

Extensive inspections of both the spacecraft and the Titan rocket nosecone were ordered to make certain sensitive infrared sensors on the satellite were not contaminated.

Engineers examined the spacecraft with ultraviolet and white light but found no traces of oil. A protective bag was removed so engineers could inspect the satellite's sensors, which passed all cleanliness tests. Finally, a new bag was installed around the sensors to protect them when technicians install the rocket's nosecone; work now scheduled to begin Thursday.

Small drops of oil initially found on the nosecone were wiped up and the contaminated area was cleaned with solvent. A diaper was fitted on the launch complex crane to contain any additional leaks.

Built by TRW Inc. of Redondo Beach, California, Defense Support Program satellites can instantaneously spot missile and space launches - as well as nuclear detonations -- anywhere in the world.

Operating some 22,300 miles above the planet, the 30-foot-tall spacecraft are outfitted infrared sensors that detect the heat from a missile or rocket exhaust plume against the cooler backdrop of Earth.

The satellites played a key role in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, spotting Iraqi Scud missile launches targeted at coalition forces in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The March 1 mission is considered important because the last Air Force attempt to launch a DSP spacecraft turned out to be a $682 million bust.

A Titan 4-B rocket carried one of the craft aloft last April 9 but the satellite was stranded in a useless orbit after an upper-stage booster failure.

---

REPEAT&CORRECT:
UK Firm Caught In US Nuclear Waste Dispute

Excite News
Updated 8:19 AM ET January 12, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/dj/000112/20000112-003819

JACKSON, Wyoming (AP)--Some people in Jackson, Wyoming have gone to court to try to stop plans for building a nuclear waste incinerator 100 miles away in Idaho.

The U.S. Department of Energy has contracted with British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (U.BNF) to build a facility near Idaho Falls, Idaho at a cost estimated between $876 million and $1.2 billion. The plan calls for compacting much of the nuclear waste being stored at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, so it can be shipped elsewhere. But some of the waste would be burned and that's what has upset a group of residents of Jackson.

They fear toxic particles from the incinerator will be blown into Wyoming and lace the land and water with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs, and radiation. One of those involved, Tatiana Maxwell, along with local conservation groups, have sought an injunction that would block the facility.

"It's mostly mother's instinct that it's not good for children or other living things," said Mrs. Maxwell, who is pregnant with her fourth child.

Others welcome the project.

Cal Ozaki, the project's deputy general manager, and many of the plant's supporters who live on its doorstep, say fears like Mrs. Maxwell's are overblown.

"I have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old, and if I thought that there was anything that could harm their health or the environment, I wouldn't be doing this," Ozaki said.

Half of the waste is supposed to go to an underground facility outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, the only long-term storage site in the U.S. for radioactive waste. But burning is considered necessary because some waste is too dangerous to ship or too laden with toxic PCBs to be stored in Carlsbad.

The opponents say the government plans to allow the burning of waste that contains about one metric ton of plutonium which, according to their lawsuit, is "approximately 166 times the amount of plutonium contained in the atomic bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II."

While some of the plaintiffs have suggested changing the laws on transporting nuclear waste and burning PCBs, British Nuclear spokeswoman Ann Reidesel said it isn't that simple.

"It's important to look at the whole picture and make sure we aren't changing laws to make things more lax to solve a current situation, and to keep in mind that the laws were put in place to make things safer," she said.

According to a 1995 court settlement, the U.S. government must complete the processing plant by December 2002.

(In an item timed around 11:47 a.m. EST, the estimated cost of the facility was misstated. The earlier item also didn't make clear that the plutonium to be burned would be contained in waste.)

-----------

Taiwan Firm Says Libya Missile Link "Ridiculous"

Inside China Today
Jan 11, 2000
http://www.insidechina.com/news.php3?id=124484

TAIPEI, Jan 11, 2000 -- (Reuters) A Taiwan textile firm on Monday denied any connection to a shipment of missile parts destined for Libya that were seized at London's Gatwick airport in November.

"We are an ordinary textile maker. We are not arms sellers," Wang Chuan-cheng, president of Nam Liong Industrial Corp, said by telephone from the firm's base at Yung Kang in southern Taiwan.

Britain's Sunday Times reported that 32 crates of jet propulsion systems and other Scud missile parts disguised as car parts were found at the airport when they arrived on a British Airways flight bound for Tripoli.

Accompanying paperwork indicated that the shipment, which arrived on November 24, was sent to Britain in the name of a company called Hontex, the newspaper said.

"We do have a brand called Hontex and this apparently is why they think we were involved," said Wang, whose small, unlisted firm makes knitted fabrics as well as synthetic fabrics used in the making of wetsuits.

"We don't have that kind of technology to make missiles. It's just ridiculous," he said. Wang called the case clearly one of mistaken identity, though he left open the possibility that arms smugglers had used his company's identity as cover without its knowledge.

"We've checked everything and there is no record of a shipment like this. I don't understand how our company could be involved. They must be mistaking us for someone else," Wang said.

Taiwan authorities said they had launched an investigation but declined to comment further. Taiwan is not believed to possess Scuds, short-range ballistic missiles whose design originated in the Soviet Union and that can carry chemical, biological or nuclear warheads or traditional explosives.

British officials declined to comment on the Sunday Times' conclusion, based on the accompanying paperwork, that other missile part shipments already had reached Libya via Britain.

Britain said on Sunday it would protest to Libya.

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said Libya would not be allowed to evade a European Union arms embargo via Britain, which recently re-established relations with the government of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Cook said Britain had long been concerned about Gaddafi's military ambitions and this was why it did not lift the arms embargo against Libya when it resumed diplomatic ties in 1999 after a lapse of 15 years.

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Earthquake Interrupts Ops At Japan Nuclear Facility

Excite News
Updated 10:38 PM ET January 11, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/dj/000111/20000111-000576

TOKYO (AP)--A moderate earthquake jolted eastern Japan Wednesday, shutting down an experimental nuclear reactor.

The magnitude 4.3 quake took a plant off-line at the Japan Atomic Research Institute in Tokaimura, about 70 miles northeast of Tokyo, spokeswoman Tsuka Kanai said.

The reactor is designed to automatically stop operating when an earthquake strikes, she said.

Kanai said the reactor suffered no damage and resumed operating about 80 minutes after the quake hit.

No damage or injuries were reported elsewhere from the quake, which centered in Ibaraki prefecture, the Meteorological Agency said.

Tokaimura is the site of a uranium processing plant at which Japan's worst nuclear accident occurred late last year.

---

Japanese Man Nabbed for Bomb Plot

Excite News
Updated 7:08 AM ET January 11, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/000111/07/int-japan-nuclear

TOKYO (AP) - An unemployed man was arrested Tuesday for allegedly planting a bomb that was found at the site of Japan's worst nuclear accident, police said.

Tatsufumi Oshiba, 39, was detained on charges of manufacturing and possessing explosives, said Ibaraki prefecture, or state, police spokesman Yasuo Hasuda.

Oshiba, who has no permanent address, said he wanted to blow up the uranium reprocessing plant and then kill himself, Hasuda said.

On Thursday, police found 10 metallic cylinders containing gasoline attached to batteries and wires on a side street of Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo. There was no explosion.

At least 95 people were exposed to radiation last year when workers at the Tokaimura plant set off an uncontrolled nuclear reaction by using too much uranium to make fuel. One worker died from radiation sickness, and two remain in serious condition.

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Russia unveils tougher rules on its security
The new national doctrine reflects a hardened attitude toward the West.
It broadens nuclear-weapons authority.

Philadelphia Inquirer
January 15, 2000
By Deborah Seward
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/2000/Jan/15/international/RUSSIA15.htm

MOSCOW - Russia unveiled its new national security doctrine yesterday, which broadens the Kremlin's authority to use nuclear weapons and accuses the United States of trying to weaken Russia and become the world's dominant power.

The doctrine replaces one adopted in 1997 when political and military partnership with the West were still buzzwords, and many Russians remained optimistic about the country's economic future.

But Russia's attitude toward the West has hardened after the eastward expansion of NATO and NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia, and Russia's economic reform efforts have not been successful.

"The idea of partnership has vanished," a military-affairs writer at the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, Sergei Sokut, said.

Acting President Vladimir V. Putin signed the "Concept of National Security" into law Monday, but the full document was not published in Russian newspapers until yesterday.

The most significant change in the document concerns the use of Russia's nuclear arsenal.

In a section called "Ensuring the National Security of Russia," the new doctrine would allow the country's leaders to use all existing forces, "including nuclear weapons," to oppose any attack - nuclear or conventional - if other efforts failed to repel the aggressor.

The previous doctrine stated that Russia would use nuclear weapons only when its national sovereignty was threatened.

Military experts said the shift was due to the tremendous weakness of Russia's conventional forces, which might not be able to defend the country against attack.

Following publication of the document, the Russian military tried to play down the significance of the nuclear aspect.

"Moscow is interested in expanding cooperation with the West," the deputy chief of the General Staff, Col. Gen. Valery Manilov, told the Interfax news agency.

In Brussels, Belgium, NATO officials who have seen the document described it as having a much more aggressive and confrontational tone than its predecessor. However, security experts pointed out that the stress on nuclear weapons sounds like NATO's own doctrine.

Publication of the new doctrine comes at a time when relations between the United States and Russia have soured, with sharp differences over Washington's desire to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to protect itself from rogue states such as North Korea.

Russia has said that pulling back from the treaty risks upsetting the strategic nuclear balance and could unleash a new arms race, which the new doctrine warns against.

The doctrine identifies two "mutually exclusive" trends in world relations after the end of the Cold War: an attempt to create a multipolar world, and an alleged effort led by the United States to dominate the world.

The doctrine condemns alleged efforts by a series of countries, which are not identified by name, to weaken Russian economically, politically and militarily.

The United States is accused of trying to decide key problems on its own, and to bypass international law. The doctrine urges that the United Nations be strengthened.

The doctrine is frank about Russia's economic weaknesses, calling for efforts to strengthen the economy in order for the country to remain a major power. There is no suggestion that Russia intends to abandon free-market principles.

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OR health study gets public airing in forum
Panel recommends workshops, evaluations

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/41 57.shtml
January 16, 2000
By Hayes Hickman,
News-Sentinel staff writer

<Picture: PHOTO> Jim Phelps, an engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, questions the exclusion of exposure to some hazardous materials in a health study. Phelps was one of many who attended a public forum on the study Saturday in Oak Ridge. Standing to Phelps' left is Glenn Bell, a beryllium machinist for Y-12, who also had questions about the panel's research. Photo by Saul Young/News-Sentinel staff

OAK RIDGE -- A health studies team is hoping the conclusions of its nearly eight-year study to analyze the residential effects of emissions from government nuclear facilities will serve as a strong basis for further studies of health problems associated with Oak Ridge pollution.

At a Saturday public forum, the 11-member Oak Ridge Health Agreement Steering Panel shared its findings that releases of radioactive iodine-131 during the late 1940s and early '50s "probably" caused six to 80 cases of thyroid cancer.

The study speculated that air- and water-borne mercury emissions may have caused brain damage to area infants and also highlighted other radioactive materials as potential causes in a small number of cancer cases.

But any conclusion drawn by the findings is still open to speculation.

"Many of the health problems brought to our attention have no clear correlation to the releases in the study," said study chairman Paul Voilleque.

The panel made several recommendations, including the development of workshops to educate local physicians and health workers on health issues addressed in the study. Development of a formal clinical evaluation was also suggested, as well as soil sampling in residential areas closest to the nuclear facilities and further study of the potential toxic effects of contaminants.

Nearly 60 people attended the meeting, including Powell resident Steve Heiser, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1997 at the age of 45. Heiser said he had suspected the dangers of such contamination, and the study gave some validity to his fears.

Voilleque's presentation explained eight high-risk scenarios for developing health problems, such as thyroid cancer, which included consumption of contaminated cow and goat milk from family farms and eating contaminated fish from the Clinch River and Watts Bar Lake. The possibilities sounded all too familiar to Heiser who, as a child in the 1950s, drank cow's milk and ate chicken eggs from his grandfather's nearby farm, and ate the fish he caught in numerous area lakes.

"I'm one of the people affected by the fallout -- at least I think so," Heiser said. "I think they kind of came out in the open today. They didn't exactly admit anything, but they said it could happen."

Hayes Hickman can be reached at 865-342-6323 or hickman@knews.com.

============== older news

Nuclear material dumped in Irish Sea

By Eamon Timmins -
Irish Times
January 8, 2000

Thousands of tonnes of radioactive material which were dumped in the Irish Sea between 1950 and 1976 pose an extremely low risk to human health and marine life, a Department of the Marine task force has concluded.

The Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources, Dr Woods, said the report allayed genuine public anxiety about past radioactive dumping and was also a critical up-to-date assessment of its effects on public health and the marine environment.

The findings have proved controversial, with strong criticism from the Labour Party and the Greens.

The task force of scientists and marine experts was established in 1997 by Dr Woods, following an admission by the British government that radioactive material had been dumped at six locations in the Irish Sea.

The Green Party TD Mr Trevor Sargent said the report was more of a political face-saving exercise than a scientific report. "This matter cannot be put to rest until a full study of the seabed is carried out, rather than relying on water quality alone," he said.

The Green MEP Ms Patricia McKenna said there was no safe level of radiation and any radioactive discharge constituted a risk, no matter how small. The report's assertion that the dumping did not constitute a health hazard was simply irresponsible on the part of a national government supposed to safeguard the health and well-being of people.

Labour's marine spokesman, Mr Michael Bell, said the finding of no health risk would have to be treated with caution. Repeated independent surveys had shown alarming levels of radioactivity in the Irish Sea. "Only two years ago the Radiological Protection Institute found that some radioactive levels along the east coast were 30 times higher than four years previously," he said.

The report does, however, acknowledge that the possibility of this material resurfacing and being washed ashore could not be discounted.

Archive documentation show ed that material was dumped at sites at the Beaufort Dyke, the Holyhead Deep, Liverpool Bay, Morecambe Bay and in the Firth of Clyde off Garroch Head and the Isle of Arran. The radioactive material ranged from contaminated material from Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, to industrial waste and material dumped by the Ministry of Defence.

On the basis of documentation provided by the British government the task force, assisted by the Radiological Protection Institute and the Department of Experimental Physics at UCD, conducted an assessment of the potential radiological consequences of the dumped material.

It concluded that the dumped material did not pose a health hazard. "The task force is of the view that members of the public have no reason, arising from the likely effects of this dumping, to be concerned about eating fish caught in the Irish Sea or the safety of swimming or participating in other water sports and recreational activities in the Irish Sea, along the Irish coast," the report said.

The findings were almost identical to the results of an assessment by the UK National Radiological Protection Board, published in 1997.

The brief of the task force did not extend to explosives and chemical weapons which were also dumped off the Donegal and Cork coasts. However, it noted that the Beaufort Dyke was a British and Irish munitions dump and acknowledged concerns that radioactive material could become dislodged, just as phosphorous devices dumped in the dyke had washed up on Scottish and Irish coastlines in 1995 and 1998.

The possibility of radioactive material becoming dislodged and resurfacing only existed in relation to material which was packaged and dumped in containers. But the chance of this occurring was very unlikely, given the location and depth at which this material was buried and that most items were dumped in steel containers encased in concrete, and the small number of items involved.

"However, although it appears highly unlikely, the possibility of return of the dumped material cannot be completely discounted," the report said.

The task force did not believe it was necessary or practical to attempt to retrieve the dumped material. Deliberate movement was likely to present a greater hazard than the very low risk that it might resurface.

The report recommended caution in carrying out works near any of the dump sites that may disturb the seabed, and advocated a careful assessment of any potential risks before such works are undertaken. The on-going marine radioactivity monitoring programme undertaken by the RPII was considered adequate and no additional monitoring was needed. But the report recommended that monitoring be maintained at current levels.

As part of its investigation the task force also interviewed a former seaman, Mr Walter Regan, who told The Irish Times in 1998 that from the late 1950s and early 1960s he dumped barrels of toxic and possibly radioactive waste into the sea, 60 miles south of Holyhead, when working for the Limerick Steamship Company. The report noted that, given the bonus payments to sailors, the cargoes might have been toxic, but the task force could not ascertain if they were radioactive.

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Health-risk report to be released ORHASP completes dose reconstruction report

January 14, 2000
by Larisa Brass
Oak Ridger staff
http://www. oakridger.com/stories/011400/new_0114000036.html

In 1991, the state of Tennessee and the Department of Energy signed an agreement that provided for a study of environmental releases from federal plants in Oak Ridge.

Nearly 10 years, $14 million and a truckload of documents later, the final report from the Oak Ridge Health Agreement Steering Panel is being released.

It's a slim volume, slick and user-friendly with sidebars, maps and graphics. And the steering panel, which guided the process of determining the health risks of environmental releases from DOE's three local plants bestowed on the public, will hold a public forum this weekend to present and explain the report.

The meeting will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday at the American Museum of Science and Energy.

It's been a long haul, agreed Paul Voilleque, ORHASP chairman and the main presenter at Saturday's meeting.

"I frankly don't recall what the original schedule for those studies was," he said. "It has certainly taken us a long time to prepare our panel report."

The report examined possible health effects from the release of several toxic and radioactive substances into the environment. The panel focused on radioactive iodine and radionuclide releases from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, mercury from the Y-12 weapons plant, and polycholorinated biphenyls, along with uranium.

The study found that two groups of people are were the most likely to receive health problems from contaminants: Local children who drank "backyard" cow and goat milk in the early 1950s and fetuses carried in the 1950s and early 1960s whose mothers who regularly ate fish from creeks and rivers downstream from Oak Ridge plants.

Despite the time it took to develop the report, which is known as a dose reconstruction study, and the narrow group of people affected by releases, "Frankly, I think it was worth it," said Voilleque.

"It scopes the problem, which I guess is the first step given the uncertainties," he said. "It puts bounds on the size of the effects. It also gives guidance to people who feel they may have been affected.

"People who moved to Oak Ridge, say after 1970, were very unlikely to have been affected by the releases," said Voilleque.

The group encountered some problems in trying to establish what contaminants left the Oak Ridge Reservation and in what volume. First of all, said Voilleque, DOE's environmental monitoring records are scanty for the early years of operation here, when the most releases would have occurred. And, in some cases, science has done little to show the effects of contaminants on health. Of primary concern, he said, is what combinations of chemicals may do to the system.

"For the chemicals it is possible that the effects would be synergistic in some ways," said Voillequé. "There is very little information in the literature about this and that is the reason why we have suggested that those kinds of combined effects should be looked at."

The panel created a list of recommendations for state, federal and local officials to continue the effort begun by ORHASP. ORHASP's recommendations include:

* Conducting public education efforts, such as workshops, to present environmental and occupational health concerns raised by the report, and a public health colloquium should be held to provide more information on the studies as well as future health studies.

* Establishing a public working group including local, state and federal officials to determine the need for follow-up clinical evaluations for those possibly affected by DOE environmental releases.

* A state or federal agency should conduct a soil sampling survey of neighborhoods surrounding the DOE plants.

* DOE should conduct atmospheric dispersion tests with tracer materials at the Y-12 Plant to determine how contaminants would have been carried to neighborhoods nearby, particularly Scarboro and Woodland.

* More research should be conducted to determine the effects of multiple contaminants on the body.

* Documents used to create health-effects studies should be carefully catalogued and adequately stored for preservation.

* DOE should make sure environmental monitoring efforts continue, particularly in two areas: the mercury contamination of East Fork Poplar Creek and the risks it poses to downstream residents; and contamination released from Y-12.

* The state should continue efforts to maintain an accurate cancer registry and continue to fund a birth defects registry, started with ORHASP's work.

The release of ORHASP's report will coincide with a new exhibit at the American Museum of Science and Energy, explaining the results of the report. The presentation will include a question-and-answer period for the members of the panel who will also be present at the meeting.

Copies of the report will be available at the museum during and after the meeting. For more information or a copy of the report, contact the Tennessee Department of Health at 615-741-3111.

=====

Comments From: Magnu96196@aol.com :

This study was the biggest diversion of public attention ever done. It was designed to pull all attention off the huge HF and fluoride emissions from these plants that have not only impacted the workers, but the community and entire region.

The study fails to address the fact that fluorides impact the I-131 studies and make the effects much worse. It fails to present that fluorides make metals absorption worst. All this has been in the literature for decades too.

The panel was dominated by industry minions who took the locals for a ride and wasted 16 million dollars and made themselves rich in the process.

The entire process needs to be criminally investigated for omission of the obvious and failing to do a mass balance accounting on UF-6 and HF releases from these plants.

------

MICHAEL DOWNEY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Thursday, December 2, 1999
http://www.globeandmail.com/

Toronto -- Strontium 90, the atomic-age horror of 40 years ago, is still with us -- deep within us. An element unknown to science until spawned by the first nuclear-weapons tests, Sr90 continues to be found in our very bones. Suddenly, children born 30 years after the last bomb exploded in the atmosphere are exhibiting unexpectedly significant amounts of Sr90.

Back in the 1950s, its presence in baby teeth was blamed for a surge in cancer among children, and public pressure led in 1963 to then U.S. president John F. Kennedy's decision to sign a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union.

A byproduct of nuclear fission, Sr90 is a marker for radiation poisoning that damages DNA much more quickly, even before birth, than any environmental pollutants. Nuclear particles remain lodged -- often for life -- in human tissues, where they continue to give off radiation and result in cancer, birth defects and premature aging.

And to make matters worse, industrial chemicals in water or milk are doubly carcinogenic when in contact with Sr90.

Where all this new radiation comes from is a matter of debate.

For scientists like Dr. Jay Gould of the U.S. Radiation and Public Health Project, there are only two possibilities: accidents of the kind that damaged the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, Pa., in 1976, or radiation escaping from properly functioning facilities. Evidence, he says, comes from data released by the U.S. Department of Energy that shows a decline in the amount of Sr90 in adult bone and diet from 1964 to 1970 -- after above-ground bomb testing ended.

"The amount declined on average by 16 per cent each year," he says. "If this decline had continued, there would be only trace amounts of Sr90 in baby teeth today." Amounts should be barely measurable -- about .3 or .4 picocuries per gram of calcium, he says. This would be in keeping with the half-life of radioactive material. In the case of Sr90 it is 29 years, or the time it takes for half its radioactive matter to decay.

Instead, scientists found levels as high as 2 to 17 picocuries per gram of calcium, he says.

"This could not possibly be attributed to past bomb tests."

Dr. Gould, who served on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board under President Jimmy Carter, also says anyone living within 150 kilometres of a nuclear facility has a greater risk of breast or prostate cancer. Recent studies suggest people stand to suffer 20 times more cell damage than was suspected at the time safety standards were set in the mid-1950s.

On the other hand, Dr. Murray Stewart, president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Association, says any increase in radiation is much more likely to be caused by previous above-ground testing. Radiation released from Canadian plants is "infinitesimally small," he says. "Studies have never shown any link between commercial reactors or commercial uranium to any incidence of cancer."

Two nuclear workers at a research plant in Chalk River, Ont., would disagree -- if they could. In 1981, they received full pensions as a result of getting cancer caused by radiation exposure. One pension went immediately to the widow of one of the workers and other claims soon followed.

Atomic Energy Commission (AECL) spokesman Hal Tracy says the nuclear industry in Canada now accepts the theory that there is no safe threshold limit for radiation exposure. Any dose, no matter how small, has the potential to cause harm and eventually there will be evidence of this harm, he says.

Tell that to the nuclear neighbourhood. Fish near the Pickering nuclear plant on Lake Ontario, and at the Bruce site on Lake Huron, have been found to be radioactive -- likely caused by the tonnes of mildly radioactive water routinely flushed into the lakes. And Ontario Hydro admits that some apples and onions grown near its powerplants are up to 100 times more radioactive than "normal," yet are still well within official "safe" limits.

In all, about 80 radioactive byproducts in some way manage to reach the air, soil, water, where they remain active and eventually enter our food.

Radiation also works its questionable magic on some elements found naturally in the environment. After a brush with radiation, about 300 previously innocent chemicals take on radioactive forms that before 1943 were found only in trace quantities here and there in isolated places. Sr90 itself did not exist in nature prior to the nuclear age. While some radiation existed, only radionuclides or radiated atoms can be created via atomic fission.

If all this is considered normal, then so is the problem of nuclear waste. When removed from the reactor core, it is about a million times more radioactive than when it was loaded. A freshly spent fuel bundle is reckoned to be so deadly that a person standing only a metre away would die of radiation poisoning within an hour.

There is no antidote to its toxicity and never will be. Each year, we produce 100 tonnes of nuclear waste per plant and manage only to isolate the stuff some place where it can be left to decay for 240,000 years, the half-life of plutonium.

The technique could hardly be described as safe. After all, the Egyptian pharaohs were supposed to be entombed forever, too. According to a 1991 AECL workshop, the industry could never simply put waste out of mind. "We cannot think we have done a perfect job, seal it, and forget about it . . . Future generations must be able to repair the facility."

None of this sounds very encouraging to Dr. Gould. His study group, also known as the Tooth Fairy project, has been measuring the presence of Sr90 in the baby teeth of American children born some 20 years ago, and early results show levels to be "100 times higher than we expected."

Some 1,500 teeth have been collected from parents who had kept the teeth as keepsakes. The collection includes 550 teeth from children born between 1979 and 1982. These teeth had the same level of Sr90 as that found in a similar study conducted in 1953, says Dr. Gould.

Colleague Dr. Janet Sherman, a Virginia internal-medicine specialist and toxicologist, says the results are frightening.

"We're finding that Sr90 levels in baby teeth of children born since 1990 are reaching levels that were in existence during the above-ground testing years, which is very scary," she says.

The finding is not entirely unprecedented. Tests on baby teeth in Germany after fallout from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 showed a tenfold increase in Sr-90. Fallout also reached North America, says Dr. Gould. Radiation carried in wind patterns and released in rainfall caused profound effects upon birth weights and auto-immune functions, he says.

For Dr. Gould, who next wants to test the teeth of Canadian children, Chernobyl and other similar accidents all point to responsibility for the continued presence of Sr90.

For the moment, his Tooth Fairy project offers no solutions, only deeply disturbing questions. Long after it should have diminished in potency, Sr90 promises to be a terrifying threat well into the next century. Michael Downey is a Toronto writer specializing in science.

HOW STRONTIUM 90 STRIKES

Strontium 90 and other radioactive material gets into vegetation, including grass and vegetables. If cows eat tainted grass, their milk picks up radioactive material which stays active for years.

"The mother consumes milk, vegetables and cheese and the Sr90 goes up the food chain," says Dr. Janet Sherman of the Tooth Fairy Project. "These kids are getting it in utero [in the womb] . . . So if you're talking about healthy [nuclear] workers, they may not drink much milk. And they're already developed."

Children are vulnerable in a way that adults are not. Radioactive particles can settle in any part of our bodies; but children knit Sr90 into growing bones and teeth when their bodies mistake it for calcium. Dr. Sherman says children who exhibit high levels of Sr90 show a higher-than-normal rate of a rare form of bone cancer. Other effects can be delayed for years or generations.

Radiation takes the form of high-energy rays and particles. Beta rays for example, are fast electrons that lose energy as they pass through our cells. The transferred energy disrupts chemical bonds; the strands of our DNA break. Improper rejoining of these DNA ends causes key sections of DNA to be lost. While some cells die, others -- forever changed -- become altered blueprints for mutated or cancerous cells.

---

WATER CONTAMINATION SPEEDING INTO HIGH PLAINS AQUIFER

Environment News Service (ENS)
December 15, 1999

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma, (ENS) - Nitrate and tritium concentrations in groundwater samples collected this year by the SGS from the High Plains aquifer in western Oklahoma show that water may be seeping from the land surface to the water table within the span of a few decades. The finding could affect water users, irrigated agriculture and livestock operations in the region. Many people had thought that it took hundreds or thousands of years for water and water borne contaminants to seep down to the water table in the High Plains aquifer. Because there is little rainfall, the water table is often more than 200 feet below land surface, and sheltered by layers of naturally cemented sand and gravel. The High Plains aquifer is the sole source of drinking water for most residents in the Oklahoma panhandle.

The USGS sampled 12 domestic wells built in the aquifer in Oklahoma in early 1999. Seven of those water samples had tritium concentrations exceeding 2.5 picocuries per liter, indicating seepage from rainfall that fell since 1953, when atmospheric testing of hydrogen bombs began. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen that is harmless at low concentrations. Water samples collected for the project are being analyzed for ratios of tritium to helium-3 gas or for concentrations of carbon-14 to determine when the ground water fell as rainfall and started seeping toward the water table. This study may modify previous beliefs about the vulnerability of the High Plains aquifer to contamination in western Oklahoma.

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"Oboe 3" Dry Run

Susi Snyder,
SHUNDAHAI NETWORK
Email: shundahai@shundahai.org http://www.shundahai.org

January 18, 2000, the Department of Energy conducted two dry runs in preparation for the next subcritical nuclear weapons test, "Oboe 3". Derek Scammel from DOE public affairs has stated that the shot isn't supposed to go until next month, however he would not indicate when in the month. Our guess is pretty dang quick- early Feb ?

"Oboe 3" would be latest out of 40 planned subcritical nuclear weapons tests series since 1997 at the Nevada Test Site. The U.S. has conducted thousands of nuclear weapons tests between the 1950's- 90's on Newe Sogobia- land whose proper stewards are the Western Shoshone Nation. The DOE is once again trying to hide from the public, Derek Scammel, Public affairs Office for DOE, once again has stated that subcritical nuclear weapons tests are "no longer newsworthy".and that the DOE is not required to give any information untill after the experiment, which he says will be next month (February) Is this the same way that publicizing the real transportation maps in the Yucca Mt DEIS isn't newsworthy? These things are endangering our air, water and Mother Earth. NUCLEAR TESTING CONTINUES the media must be made aware, and let's take action to stop "Oboe 3".

Get letters out to Congress, DOE, DOD, and demand that nuclear weapons test "Oboe 3 "be cancelled and that the U.S. stop participating in the nuclear arm race. Call Derick Scamell DOE public affairs at 702-255-1130 for more info on current series of subcriticals. Oscar Goodman, Mayor of Las Vegas, (702) 229-6241 fax: (702) 385-7960 Harry Reid US Senate- 202-224-3542, 702-474-0041

Call Energy Secretary Richardson's Press Office and demand a press advisory- before the subcritical. Tell them that this is BIG news, and you have just got to know.... 202-586-4940 (ask for Matthew)

Nuclear Weapons = Nuclear Waste

Many agree that these nuclear weapons tests are hypocritical acts.

Recently a tour of several US members of Congress went to India to pressure their government to sign Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, after the US government rejected the CTBT Senator Harry Reid, D-NV, was a part of that trip, it is apalling that nuclear testing continues after we are well aware of their deathly effects on the air, earth, and water.

The connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear waste is deathly apparent. Each one of these "subcritical" nuclear weapons tests creates another unlicensed Yucca Mt. high level waste dump, immediately with out any public process.

Not in my water table. These subcriticals are conducted 980 feet below ground, only 100 feet above the water table.

Want to stop Yucca Mountain, then stop the Subcriticals!

SN is hosting series of actions at the DOE, Fed Bldg, Fremont St, NV Nuclear Test Site Direct Action, we will send more information on the events scheduled as soon as we can.

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Yucca Mountain Environmental Impact Statement Letter

From: Hal Fox <halfox@uswest.net
January 10, 2000

Wendy R. Dixon
Fax 1-800-967-0739
EIS Project Manager, M/S 010
U.S. Department of Energy
P.O. Box 30307
North Las Vegas, NV 89036-0307

Dear EIS Project Manager, Subject: "geologic repository for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste" public hearing.

Regardless of the geological unsuitability of Yucca Mountain area to be used for a dump for radioactive wastes, here is the important issue:

Several articles printed in the peer-reviewed quarterly Journal of New Energy report on the on-site stabilization of radioactive wastes! Laboratory results have shown that over 90% of radioactive materials in a liquid solution were removed by processing with high- density charge clusters.

The latest analytical work by a famous Chinese plasma physicist (Dr. S-X Jin) has shown that this patented technology can be used to provide a positive-ion (protons, for example) accelerator that can provide on-target density of positive ions one million times greater than current technology. As you know, particle accelerators are being proposed for use in transmuting high-level radioactive wastes.

Although these technical developments are new and must be proven in the laboratory, the potential cost savings and the huge reduction in the risk to U.S. citizens should make the further investigation of these new technologies of highest priority to the Department of Energy.

We will be pleased to provide your organization with further information.

Sincerely, Hal Fox, editor, Journal of New Energy Cc: Utah and Nevada members of Congress.

----------

From: Alexei Bykov [mailto:alexbykov@mtu-net.ru]
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2000 12:35 AM
To: jbridgman@peace-action.org
Subject: PC2000

We have honour to inform you that Administration of Saratov city (Russia), Saratov branch of Russian Peace Foundation and Peace on the Planet Foundation

Announce the opening of the International Peace Camp for Youth Saratov-Russia-2000 (IPCY-2000).

The Camp will belocated on the shore of the great Volga River. We invite to participate in the Camp for the Youth all Public and Charitable organizations of the different countries. By the participant Camp for Youth there can be a teenager in the age of 10 to 17 years.

For it Organizing committee of the Camp: -President of organizing committee-Anatoli Sokolov-vice-mayor of the city Saratov;

-Vice-president of organizing committee- Lioudmila Chechina-Chairman, Saratov branches Russian Peace Foundation.

The members of organizing committee: -Olga Gorpinenko ­ vice - president, Saratov Branch Russian Peace Foundation;

-Alexei Bykov ­ President Peace on the Planet Foundation.

Housing the Board: in rooms up to 2-3 indiv, duals, breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper.

The prospective program: The proximate duration of this program 12 days. The excursion program of the city and on Volga on the steam-ship.

Open-July 20 Close-August 3

Estimated cost of the program in Camp is 20 $/day by the individual. For the foreign participants of the Peace Camp for Youth there will be cultural program.

In Moscow and St.Petersburg (cost of the program will depent on a category, Hotel and choosed services).

It is possible to registar by the e-mail.

Our site hppt://www.ppf.hotmail.ru

Do so, please send your information to the following address: alexbykov@mtu-net.ru

Best regards, Alexei mailto:alexbykov@mtu-net.ru

-----------

Official: Feds Hide Risk of Waste Project

Friday, January 14, 2000
BY JIM WOOLF
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

The federal government is trying to conceal the risk of transporting highly radioactive waste through Utah to a proposed underground disposal location at the Nevada Test Site, a Nevada official charged Thursday. Ginger Swartz, from the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the 13-pound draft environmental impact statement (EIS) on the facility omits detailed information on transportation routes and the frequency of waste shipments through Utah, Arizona and other states with highway and railroad links to the Nevada site at Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

"One can only conclude that such an oversight is intentional and designed to suppress public interest in the project and participation in these public hearings," she told officials of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). She spoke in Salt Lake City at a sparsely attended hearing to receive comment on the environmental study.

Nevada officials, who strongly oppose federal plans for the facility, compiled those transportation figures on their own and found Utah would be the state most heavily affected if the waste were shipped by truck. "Depending on the scenarios evaluated in the draft EIS, between 43,000 and 80,000 truck shipments [would] traverse Utah over 24 years," she said. "Under either scenario, an average of 5 to 6 trucks per day would travel through Utah every day for decades." The highway shipments would occur on the major freeways crossing the state: Interstate 80, I-15, I-84 and I-70.

If DOE decides to ship most of the waste by rail, Swartz said eight to nine rail casks filled with radioactive wastes would move through Utah weekly. Eileen M. Supko, a senior consultant for Washington, D.C.-based Energy Resources International, defended the government's decision to provide only general transportation estimates in the environmental study. The document is designed to assess the overall risks and environmental consequences of the project, she said at the the hearing.

If the project is found suitable, then the government can do detailed studies of specific routes and transportation alternatives. R. J. Hoffman, a health physicist who served on the Utah Board of Radiation Control, said the waste will be shipped inside casks specially designed to survive the worst truck or train crash. "There could be a traffic accident," he said. "But it would be the same as a truck carrying gasoline, or toilet paper, or whatever." Steve Erickson, from the Downwinders group, conceded the risk of a major disaster during transportation is small.

"But it only takes one," he stressed. He criticized Utah's elected officials for taking an apparently contradictory positions on the nuclear-waste issue. On one hand they are actively opposing a plan to store high-level nuclear waste on the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute reservation in Tooele County, but raise no objections to federal plans to bury the same waste in Nevada, Erickson said. Leaders of the arid Western states should join together to block these facilities and force the government to reconsider its "failed policies" on nuclear issues, he said.

-----------

Transcripts from Public Meetings
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/benefits/meetings/meetings.html

December 15, 1999 - Public Meeting With Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Energy at Rocky Flats
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/benefits/meetings/991215avarda.pdf

December 8, 1999 - Public Meeting With Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/benefits/meetings/991208ornl.pdf

October 30, 1999 - Public Meeting With Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Energy at Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/benefits/meetings/991030portsmouth.pdf

-----------

Action Alert

Nuclear Information & Resource Service
1424 16th St. NW, Suite 404
Washington, D.C. 20036
Phone (202) 328-0002
Fax (202) 462-2183
e-mail: nirsnet@nirs.org

Your Action Needed Now More Than Ever To Stop Mobile Chernobyl and the Yucca Mountain Dump!

Calls/Letters to Congress and Attendance at Dept. of Energy Public Hearings Needed

For the past several years while I still lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I regularly heard my U.S. Representative Fred Upton -- sponsor of the Mobile Chernobyl bill in the U.S. House -- claim that Yucca Mountain is the perfect place to store high-level nuclear wastes because its bone dry and located in an uninhabited desert wasteland. Well, last week on my tour deep within the tunnels of Yucca Mountain, imagine my surprise to see drips from the ceiling and puddles of water on the floor: an experiment to see what the high temperatures of nuclear waste would do to the rock of Yucca Mountain is forcing out water trapped in pores and fissures; it then forms condensation, drips and puddles. While standing atop the mountain, a Nevada geologist pointed out how rainwater sometimes vanishes instantly into the ground, flowing downward. Looking out to the horizon, I could see Amargosa Valley not far away, a farming community directly downstream that will receive radioactive contamination via the groundwater. Guess Yucca Mountains not a bone dry, uninhabited wasteland after all. Looking out at all the solar powered instruments atop Yucca Mountain (yes, this is the worlds first solar powered nuclear waste dump!) -- seismographs measuring earthquake activity, weather stations recording which way the wind will blow the radioactive gases that will inevitably escape, the global positioning satellite antenna studying how quickly the Earths crust is expanding (which could mean theres a magma pocket beneath), I cant fathom how the nuclear establishment could do anything but disqualify the site from further consideration.

Yet, moves are on within the U.S. Congress and the Department of Energy (DOE) to lock-in the proposed high-level atomic waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada - and thus launch tens of thousands of truck and train shipments through 43 states in the years and decades to come. NIRS has been instrumental in fending off this nuclear madness for 6 years thanks to help from supporters like you, and we need your help again right now.

Because of citizen pressure, DOE has added three last-minute public hearings to its Yucca Mountain Environmental Impact Statement process in major hub cities along atomic waste transport routes. We need to turn out hundreds to speak against the Yucca Mountain dump and Mobile Chernobyl - more info. on the hearings follows further below as well:

Mon., Jan. 24: Lincoln, NE: Ramada Inn - Airport, 1101 West Bond St., 11 am - 2 pm and 6 pm - 9 pm. Fri., Jan. 28: Cleveland, OH: Holiday Inn Lakeside City Ctr., 1111 Lakeside Ave., same times as above. Tues., Feb. 1: Chicago, IL: Hotel Intercontinental, 505 North Michigan Ave., same times as above.

Congress resumes its session immediately after President Clintons State of the Union address on Monday, January 24th. All indications are that the nuclear industry, its lobbyists and its proponents in the Congress plan to hit the ground (or Floor) running. The House version of the Mobile Chernobyl bill, H.R. 45 sponsored by Upton (R-Mich.) passed the Commerce Committee last year. Upton probably has enough votes in the House to override President Clintons promised veto. However, the House bill is held up by the Senate version of Mobile Chernobyl, where the veto override is much less certain.

Senator Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) is Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the nuclear industrys point man in the U.S. Senate. He has publicly announced that his Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2000 is his highest priority in this new session of Congress. Murkowskis bill, S. 1287, would gut environmental standards at Yucca Mountain, doom the underground aquifer to radioactive contamination, condemn 1 in 1,000 exposed downwinders (downstreamers) to fatal cancer, make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rather than the Environmental Protection Agency guardian of public health (talk about the fox guarding the hen house!) and lock-in the site even before its suitability has been officially determined. Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who decides the Senates calendar, has indicated that S. 1287 is high on his list. Rumors in D.C. are that this bill may be one of the first to hit the Senate Floor in the new session, requiring our immediate action. Our job is to make sure that we hold on to the 34 votes in the Senate needed to sustain President Clintons promised veto - or, even better yet, we could head off a vote from happening at all.

Now is the time to contact YOUR Senators and Rep. and urge them to vote NO on S. 1287 and H.R. 45. Tell them about the faults mentioned above, and that these Mobile Chernobyl bills would needlessly endanger over 50 million Americans living within half a mile of high-level atomic waste transport routes by senselessly rushing tens of thousands of tons of atomic wastes to a site that the DOEs own studies show will almost certainly leak. These wastes are so deadly we must be sure that our moving them around actually improves the situation, not make it worse!

Phone calls and simple, concise hand-written letters are most effective. Members of Congress always check their phone log and file of letters received before their votes, so your action now can make a big difference on S. 1287 and H.R. 45.

Phone the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to be patched through to your U.S. Senators and Representative. For addressing letters:

To Your Senators: To Your Representative:

The Honorable [full name] The Honorable [full name] United States Senate United States House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20510 Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Senator (last name): Dear Representative (last name):

Be sure to tell your Members of Congress:

* Vote NO on S. 1287 (Senators)/H.R. 45 (House Rep.) * Support EPA, not NRC, as the standard setter for Yucca Mountain. * NRC is not independent, and would be the fox guarding the hen house. * Protect groundwater at Yucca Mountain and all nuclear sites. * Radiation standards should protect the most vulnerable exposed persons - the unborn children. * 10,000 years compliance is not enough; these wastes remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. * These bills would needlessly endanger over 50 million Americans living within half a mile of atomic waste transport routes.

The more calls and letters the better, of course. Why not consider hosting a letter writing party for family, friends, neighbors and fellow activists? For you football fans, how about a Nuclear-Free Superbowl half-time letter writing party? For a sample letter to a Member of Congress (available Monday), please visit the NIRS website at http://www.nirs.org

Another effective action is sending a letter to the editor of your local paper, for Members of Congress faithfully read these to keep their finger on the pulse of their constituency. Write a hard-hitting letter to the editor and get it out to papers in your area. See our website for a sample op/ed piece (available by Monday) you can use to help write one tailored to your own locality. Remind your community that Yucca Mountain is a local issue - when it comes to nuclear waste transport, we all live in Nevada!

In addition to fending off Congress ill-conceived initiatives, we also need to give the U.S. Department of Energy a well-deserved chastising. The DOEs deadline for public comment on its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the proposed Yucca Mountain dump - and Mobile Chernobyls by the thousands that go hand in hand with it - is fast approaching. Public comments need to be in to DOE by February 9th, 2000.

Because of citizen pressure, DOE has added three more public hearings: Lincoln, Nebraska; Cleveland, Ohio; and Chicago, Illinois. The dates, times and exact locations were given above. If you live close enough to attend one of these hearings in person, please do - and take lots of friends with you. If you know folks who live close to these hearing locations, please notify them to get out and testify. Numbers count, and we need to show DOE that lots of people care, are watching them closely, and wont let them do the wrong thing just to please the nuclear power industry. You can pre-register for a 5 to 10 minute time slot in which to testify by phoning DOE at 1-800-967-3477. Contact Kevin Kamps at NIRS (202-328-0002 or kevin@igc.org) for more info., or to receive NIRS fact sheets to use at the hearings.

DOE has tried to downplay the dangers of high-level radioactive waste transportation by obscuring what routes will be used in its DEIS, and by limiting the number of public hearings along major transport routes outside of Nevada. Another creative response to DOEs roadblocks to public involvement has been the organizing of Peoples Hearings - if DOE wont condescend to hear us where were at on this issue of utmost importance, then well hold our own hearings and submit the recorded testimony as official public comment! Peoples Hearings are scheduled for Chicago on Thurs., Jan. 27th and Kalamazoo, Michigan on Sat., Jan. 29th. Others are coming together in Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Louisiana. Contact Mark Matthias at Public Citizens Critical Mass Energy Project about plugging in to a Peoples Hearing near you, or to organize your own: phone (202) 546-4996, or e-mail matthias@citizen.org

If you're not able to attend hearings, please still submit comments to DOE by Feb. 9th. Even short, to-the-point comments will make a big impact, showing DOE loud and clear the nationwide opposition to the Yucca Mountain dump and Mobile Chernobyl. There are many faults (yes, including earthquake faults) in DOE's DEIS upon which to comment. To help you compose your own personal comments, please refer to NIRS' sample comments covering different aspects of the DOE's DEIS. We will post them at our website, www.nirs.org, as soon as possible. Also visit Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project website at http://www.citizen.org/cmep/ under 'nuclear waste' for more sample comments.

Your comments can be submitted in writing, via the Internet, or by fax. Written comments should be sent to:

Ms. Wendy R. Dixon EIS Program Manager Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management U.S. Department of Energy P.O. Box 30307, M/S 010 North Las Vegas, NV 89036-0307

Written comments can also be faxed to 1-800-967-0739. Be sure to include 'Yucca Mountain Draft EIS' as an identifier on all written comments.

Comments can also be submitted via the Internet at http://www.ymp.gov. Click the 'Environmental Impact Statement' on the left hand side selection bar. Then select 'Submit a Comment on the Draft EIS.'

Thank you for your actions to fend off efforts within Congress and the DOE to launch high-level atomic wastes onto our highways and railways, to dump them in a leaking hole in the ground. Together, we've stopped this nuclear madness for many years, and together we can continue to defend present and future generations against the deadly wastes of the nuclear industry.

If you need any assistance, contact Kevin Kamps at NIRS: ph. 202-328-0002, or kevin@igc.org

Prepared by Kevin Kamps on Thursday, Jan. 20th, 2000.

-----------

Show Transcript, America's Defense Monitor:
Welfare for Weapons Dealers

Produced March 14, 1999
http://www.cdi.org/adm/1227/transcript.html

NARRATOR: As the twentieth century comes to a close, the United States is by far the world's leading exporter of weapons and military equipment. But in the international arms trade, America pays a high price for being number one.

HARTUNG: ... if you consider the fact that there's 140 countries now getting weapons from the United States, more than two-thirds of the countries in the world, not all of them are going to be reliable allies, not all of them are going to be coalition partners.

JOHNSON: ....it has been helpful, particularly with some countries, is helpful to US defense contractors in that you wind up with the government as intermediary and, for one thing, as a guarantor of payment.

NARRATOR: Many foreign governments can't afford to pay the full cost of US weapons, leaving American taxpayers to pick up the tab.

SUCHAN: There have been occasions where during the course of a program, change in an economic circumstance has meant that they haven't been able to follow through on a program to completion. Most obvious example is Thailand during the Asian Financial crisis.

GABELNICK: it ended up costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, because Thailand got in over its head.

ADMIRAL CARROLL: I'm Admiral Eugene Carroll. Federal programs which help provide sophisticated weapons to other countries cost American taxpayers billions of dollars per year, and could lead to even greater risks and costs in the future. In this episode of America's Defense Monitor, we'll take a searching look at our government's role in the international arms trade, and what it is costing you.

NARRATOR: The United States military still holds vast stocks of weapons and equipment left over from the military buildup of the 1970's and 1980's. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Pentagon chose to rely on its existing inventory of high-tech fighter jets... bombers... tanks... and warships. Most major buys of new American weapons were put off until after the year 2000.

As a result, American companies that make weapons and other military equipment have looked overseas for potential customers. In the 1990s, more that 150 billion dollars in arms deals have been struck between the United States and foreign governments.

But many of the arms trade's biggest customers are developing nations facing economic hardship, including our allies in the Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Governments in these regions find it difficult to keep up with the skyrocketing costs of American military equipment.

So what happens when America sells weapons to countries who can't afford to pay for them?

HARTUNG: basically, countries don't have the money to lay out cash for these kinds of systems in the way that they used to. And so increasingly, the contractors are pushing the federal government to fill that gap and that means the taxpayers are on the hook.

NARRATOR: Dr. William Hartung is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, who has authored three major studies on the US government's role in the arms trade. According to Dr. Hartung, government programs and activities that support the arms trade cost American taxpayers more than $7 billion dollars per year. That's more than half of the amount earned from the weapons sales themselves.

HARTUNG: So we're really getting to a point where all this talk about the arms trade as a great earner of income for our country is really a myth. Really what the arms trade is becoming is just another form of government subsidy for Lockheed Martin and Boeing and this money is not going to Poland, it's not going to Israel, it's not going to Egypt.

NARRATOR: Much of the funding which Hartung describes as a subsidy for the weapons industry appears in the United States federal budget under the heading of "Security Assistance." Consuming more than $6 billion dollars per year, Security Assistance accounts for about half of America's total budget for foreign operations. But as Dr. Hartung explains, much of this money never really leaves the United States.

HARTUNG: our tax dollars are used to go into this aid fund and then when a country like Israel, Egypt, Turkey wants to buy U.S. weapons, rather than pay for it themselves out of their own treasury, the money is withdrawn from this foreign military financing fund.... So essentially, our money stops briefly at the Pentagon, then heads direct to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, one of the big military contractors.

JOHNSON: clearly, that form of assistance is useful to our industry just as agricultural loan programs are useful to the agricultural sector.

NARRATOR: Joel Johnson is Vice President for International Programs at the Aerospace Industries Association, a lobby group actively representing America's major defense contractors. Johnson acknowledges the benefits of government support, but objects to Security Assistance programs being singled out as corporate giveaways.

JOHNSON: I would argue that none of it's a subsidy, insofar as the government is allowing an ally to buy equipment. We, whether we provide, it's no different when we provide an F-16 to Egypt with government money than when you provide tractors or bulldozers to a Ghana with foreign assistance money. Those aren't a subsidy to Caterpillar.

NARRATOR: Security Assistance, along with other forms of foreign aid, has declined since the Cold War, but the government has begun to lend its support to the arms trade in other ways.

GABELNICK: The Clinton Administration has become the best salesman of the defense industry.

NARRATOR: Tamar Gabelnick is the Acting Director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

GABELNICK: They have instructed their personnel in overseas missions to actually push for US arms sales. So what better marketing strategy could you have, than to have the US government doing your bidding overseas.

NARRATOR: In 1995, President Clinton issued Decision Directive 34, which outlined his administration's policy on weapons exports. In it he urged Cabinet agencies to consider the economic benefit to American companies when deciding whether to grant a license for a military sale. The profit motive became a valid policy basis for selling weapons, and American diplomats were urged to find new markets for US weapons, just as they would with any other product.

BURNS: "One of the considerations of course, is the impact of our -- industries here in the United States -- or whether or not we're willing to go forward with sales of conventional, or other, weaponry, anyplace in the world. We certainly listen to the defense industry in this country....."

NARRATOR: American embassy personnel, once charged with ensuring that foreign governments did not get their hands on American weapons and military technology, now act as pitchmen for military products.

JOHNSON: In terms of defense equipment, generally where you would look for your, because these tend to be large purchases, highly political, you're really looking for your support at the ambassadorial level. And, from Washington, DC. And, we clearly get some of that.

SUCHAN: security relationships continue to be a very very important part of American diplomacy. And in the past there were a variety of tools that we had, as far as underpinning a security relationship with other countries. And a number of these have declined or essentially gone away since the Cold War.

NARRATOR: Gregory Suchan is Director of the State Department's Office of Export Controls. Mr. Suchan suggests that the diplomatic corps' new hands-on approach to arms transfers is partly the result of budget cuts which have curtailed other kinds of diplomatic activities.

SUCHAN: As a result, and nobody ever intended arms transfers to perform this role, but as a result, arms transfer and a military supply relationship has become relatively more important in our bilateral and regional security relationships.

NARRATOR: A Decade after the Cold War, security assistance stands as one of the largest items in the foreign operations budget. The State Department is not alone in devoting a growing share of its attention, and its budget, to weapons sales.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: "...The era of big government is over..."

NARRATOR: Since President Clinton took office, the size of the federal government has slowly come down. But the number of federal workers engaged in promoting, financing, or otherwise facilitating weapons exports has increased--from about 5,950 employees in 1993 to more than 6,300 in 1997. For defense companies hoping to sell overseas, the list of available government contacts looks like the phone book for a small town. According to the World Policy Institute, the cost of this maintaining this federal workforce is about $410 million dollars per year.

GABELNICK: We're paying the salaries of these people who are then instructed to do the sales of these goods.

NARRATOR: The largest single agency devoted to the arms trade is the Pentagon's Defense Security Assistance Agency or DSAA, where 5,900 personnel in 74 countries administer roughly $12 billion annually in weapons sales. Since DSAA receives most of its funding from a 3% fee charged to all major sales, the agency has a strong incentive to maintain, or even increase, the current level of arms exports.

Even Joel Johnson feels the size of the DSAA could be reduced, since the arms industry and its customers are moving away from deals brokered through the Pentagon in favor of direct commercial sales.

JOHNSON: what you are finding is that the foreign customer is increasingly moving away from buying through the government. And, buying directly from the contractor. Because the governments tends to be expensive. ...the customer, he's beginning to say, but I want my best value for my money, and why am I getting hit with an extra three percent?

NARRATOR: The trend toward commercial sales of American weapons does reduce the need for large government bureaucracies to arrange the deals. But the government has all but stopped collecting the fees it normally charges on weapons sales, so the savings are passed on to the customer, not the taxpayer.

GABELNICK: The U.S. government is giving a lot of money for research and development in those industries. Originally that money was to develop weapons for the US government to purchase. But now foreign governments are benefiting from that initial investment. They benefit from a lower cost. So they are supposed to be paying a recoupment fee that would go back into--for the research and development--that would go back into the US treasury.

HARTUNG: ...there's no more recoupment fees on commercial arms sales licensed by the State Department, and on foreign military sales negotiated by the Pentagon, there's an option for the President to waive the fees. So in any given year... $500 million in recoupment fees basically are waived, allowed to go down the tubes, in the interest of helping promote U.S. arms sales.

NARRATOR: To recap the costs so far: $6.1 billion for security assistance, $410 million for personnel, and $500 million lost in uncollected fees. At just over $7 billion dollars per year, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the price we pay for the arms trade.

MR. JOHNSON: You know, H billion dollars worth of sales is X thousands of jobs. And, I've never known an industry to say, gee, that's enough, we don't need any more of that.

NARRATOR: Proponents of arms transfers are quick to point out the economic benefits of selling weapons overseas, as did Vice President Gore when he announced an agreement to sell 80 F-16 fighters to the United Arab Emirates.

GORE: ...this deal is good news for the American economy - it will mean up to 30-thousand jobs for our workers.

NARRATOR: But the economic benefits of arms exports are all but canceled out when defense companies offer technologies and business opportunities to their customers as part of export agreements.

HARTUNG: U.S. companies offer them offsets, which are basically a form of economic kickback where they say, "Well, in exchange for you purchasing our weapons, we'll generate economic activity in your country."

GABELNICK: That means a direct transfer of the production from the US to that other country, which obviously is not good for US workers. It could mean an investment in another industry, which has nothing to do with the defense industry... and that could be business that's competing with US companies.

JOHNSON: ...What you find is your large customers tend to want a piece of the action, in whatever industry you're looking at.... As to how much do you put off shore, how, what's the minimum you can do to make the customer happy so that you get the sale? If it goes beyond a point the government's comfortable with, we don't get an export license.

SUCHAN: The United States government doesn't give green lights to offset agreements. The US government role is always to be at arms' length with regards to any offset agreement that an American company might conclude with a foreign government in the context of an arms sale.

NARRATOR: It is not unusual to find offsets in international business deals, regardless of what products are being traded. But sometimes the technology and facilities to produce high-tech weapons---technologies originally paid for by American taxpayers---are transferred to other countries along with the weapons themselves.

MR. JOHNSON: who are our chief competitors? France, Germany, the UK. Israel, it's true that we paid for a good bit of that technology development, but that was a government call. A lot of it didn't come from US industry, it came from US revenue to help pay, US taxpayers' dollars to help that industry develop that technology.

HARTUNG: We've got 140 licensing and coproduction agreements around the world where U.S. weapons, everything from M-16 rifles to F-16 fighters are produced in foreign countries using U.S. blueprints, U.S. specifications, U.S. production equipment in some cases.

HARTUNG: So for example, there was a sale to Egypt after the Gulf War of F-16s and Egypt bought those F-16s with U.S. military aid dollars. Now the companies might say, "Well, yeah, but at least it creates jobs in the United States." But in this case, they decided to have most of the weapons produced in Turkey."

NARRATOR: In fact, Turkey is just one of 10 countries which currently produce the Lockheed-Martin F-16. Why would the US government place such sophisticated technology in the hands of other countries? Political and military officials claim that arming friendly governments with American weapons and equipment is beneficial to both sides, allowing the US military to work more effectively with its allies.

GORE: It opens the door to enhanced cooperation in training and operations. This inter-operability will give our forces a tremendous advantage in preserving the security and stability of the Gulf region to which we are firmly committed.

JOHNSON: ...when you buy US defense equipment, you have equipment that's compatible with the US military, that you can train with our guys better, you can do joint ventures, you can do coalition warfare or coalition peacekeeping together. That's the strongest marketing support we get from our government.

HARTUNG: when it comes time to sell U.S. weapons, there's kind of a world view that says we're one big, happy family, everybody's a potential coalition partner, everybody's military needs to be able to operate in conjunction with ours; therefore, it's better that they have our equipment. But when it comes time to fight wars... our weapons end up falling into the hands of hostile forces. So in Panama and Iraq and Somalia and Haiti, even to a small extent in Bosnia, we've seen U.S. weapons end up being used against U.S. forces.

NARRATOR: American troops have already experienced firsthand the danger of providing US weapons to unstable regimes. Many of the American weapons being exported today, especially tactical fighter planes like the F-16, are far more advanced than the ones faced by American troops in those earlier conflicts. In fact they are on par with much of America's own arsenal.

Such exports are justified by stressing the importance of sharing common equipment with other countries' militaries. But at the same time, the US military prefers to stay a step ahead of the rest of the world in military technology.

As Dr. Hartung explains, when it comes time to debate the need for expensive new weapons systems for the US military, the defense lobby's sunny view of the world suddenly changes.

DR. HARTUNG: Well, I think the dirty little secret about U.S. arms sales is that we're running an arms race with ourself around the world. When Lockheed Martin tries to sell the F-22 stealth fighter to the Air Force, they pull out a little chart that says, well, look at all these countries around the world that have dangerous fighter capabilities. But it ends up more than half the countries on their list got their weapons from the United States.

NARRATOR: Of all the consequences of government support for the arms trade, this is easily the most expensive. In order to maintain our military's technological advantage, existing weapons in the American arsenal will be replaced with new systems costing billions of dollars more.

For example, the US military will spend more than $300 billion dollars to replace much of its current tactical fighter fleet with a new generation of warplanes. If the military stuck with currently used models instead, it would cost about half as much to replenish the fleet, a savings of $150 billion dollars.

HARTUNG: We could use the current generation technology for decades to come if we weren't busy handing it out to everybody around the globe.

NARRATOR: For $150 billion dollars, the government could clean up half of the country's toxic waste sites. It could wire three-fourths of the nation's public school classrooms to use advanced telecommunications like the internet. The fact that programs like these may never receive full funding, is just one more of the many costs of the arms trade.

Some lawmakers, like Rep. Cynthia McKinney, believe that as the government cuts social programs in order to balance the budget, subsidizing the arms trade sends the wrong message..

McKINNEY: "I used to represent folks who don't even have running water in their homes... Yet we can give $7.6 billion away to the folks around the globe who know us by our helicopters, missiles, fighter jets, guns, and bullets. And the folks I represent have to conclude that welfare for weapons dealers is more important to the folks in this building than is their own human dignity."

NARRATOR: Support for weapons exports has also come under scrutiny in the business community. From a bottom-line perspective, the meager economic returns from the arms trade don't justify the risk, or the expense.

KLIGERMAN: ... Why are we spending such money to get a bigger share of a shrinking market?

NARRATOR: Alan Kligerman is Chairman of AkPharma, and the inventor of Lactaid and other nutritional aids. He is also a member of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a group which actively opposes excessive spending on the military.

KLIGERMAN: ...you and I, whether we like it or not, are carrying the weapons industry on our backs as if they were paralytics. We don't want this senseless thing to go on any longer. It is wrong in a human sense, and it is an economic disaster...

NARRATOR: But despite the cost, the criticism, and the fact that the global demand for weapons continues to decline, the government keeps working to open new markets to US arms. The ban on high-tech weapons sales to Latin America has been lifted, and the NATO alliance, which requires its members to have state-of-the-art military equipment, is expanding into Eastern Europe.

HARTUNG: Given that these countries are not flush with cash, what we're going to see is that there's going to be more and more subsidies having to come in behind these sales.

NARRATOR: Major weapons contracts can stretch out over a decade or more, and a developing country's economy can undergo fluctuations in that time. The financial risk involved in selling advanced weapons to developing countries was made real just last year, when the government of Thailand had to back out of a contract for Boeing F-18 fighter jets during the Asian financial crisis. Production of the planes was already underway.

SUCHAN: So the United States worked with the Thai government, first to see if there was any way that the deal itself could be salvaged, and when it became clear that it wasn't, we worked with them on restructuring the debt, repaying what could be repaid, and as a result, the US Marine Corps ended up with a bunch of F-18s.

GABELNICK: The US decided to buy them ourselves, and give them to the Marines. Obviously, they weren't planning to make this purchase ahead of time, so they had to get supplemental appropriations and buy this very quickly. And it ended up costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, because Thailand got in over its head.

NARRATOR: Even when a developing nation does manage the costs of American weapons, the armaments do little to help the country's internal stability.

GABELNICK: Again, it's a long-term view that the US government is not taking, by encouraging them , by pushing them to buy expensive US equipment, they are not investing in the things that they really need to be, in their domestic infrastructure, their health systems, their education. And again, what that's doing is taking away other markets or the development of other markets for US products.

SUCHAN: We take it seriously within the United States government. And what's more, the Congress takes it seriously as well.

NARRATOR: Gregory Suchan notes that members of Congress are free to challenge arms sales they view as risky. But holding up a sale supported by both the defense industry and the executive branch can be an intimidating, thankless task.

SUCHAN: ...when a Congressman puts a hold on an arms transfer, 15 people from the State Department and the Defense Department, and probably 100 people from the firm, go up there and explain why this is good for US national security, and good for the country that's going to receive it...

NARRATOR: The world market for American weapons has become unstable, and aborted deals like the one with Thailand may become more common in the near future. Fortunately for the Defense Industry, many orders which poured in after the Gulf War are still being filled, and the Pentagon is set to start replacing much of its equipment in the next few years. Perhaps the US will be less aggressive in trying to conquer a shrinking world arms market. But that won't happen without changes in the government's approach to the arms trade. Bill Hartung explains why.

HARTUNG: there's a much higher profit margin on foreign sales because basically, they're selling a product that's already been researched and developed at taxpayer expense, sometimes at a government-owned facility that they are leasing at very little cost... Even if sales don't grow, there's a great incentive for companies to go for these deals because they are big profit-takers on those kinds of transactions.

JOHNSON: I don't see us walking away from defense markets that exist as long as our government permits us to pursue those markets.

ADMIRAL CARROLL: Government support for weapons exports has helped the defense industry profit in recent years, but you and I are footing the bill for their success. In the coming years, we will be asked to pay for an expensive new generation of weapons, to replace those we are already paying to ship to other countries. This type of aid to the defense industry locks America into an arms race with itself. Manufacturers export our best weapons, and then point to them as a threat which justifies building newer, more expensive ones. This is dangerous, costly, and patently unfair to American taxpayers. For America's Defense Monitor, I'm Admiral Eugene Carroll.

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November 1999
"The Ecologist"
Volume 29, No. 7 from pages 408 to 411.

Copies can be obtained in the USA at:
Phone:510-548-2032,
Fax:510-548-4916

Main Office in UK:
Phone:0171-351-3578,
Fax:0171-351-3617
E-mail: ecologist@gn.apc.org

"VICTIMS OF THE NUCLEAR AGE" Up to 1,300 million people have been killed, maimed or diseased by nuclear power since it's inception. The industry's figures massively underestimate the real cost of nuclear power, in an attempt to hide its victims from the world. Here, the author calculates the real number of victims of the nuclear age. By Dr. Rosalie Bertell

On the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, I was standing at a public meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, listening to the story of one of the firemen employed to clean up the site after the explosion. These workers took huge doses of radiation during this task, and their story is a terrifying one.About 600,000 men were conscripted as Chernobyl 'liquidators' [also called bio-robots']: farmers, factory workers,miners, and soldiers- as well as professionals like the firemen- from all across Russia. Some of these men lifted pieces of radioactive metal with their bare hands. They had to fight more than 300 fires created by the chunks of burning material spewed off by the inferno. They buried trucks, fire engines, cars and all sorts of personal belongings. They felled a forest and completely buried it, removed topsoil, bulldozed houses and filled all available clay-lined trenches with radioactive debris. The minimum conscription time was 180 days, but many stayed for a year. Some were threatened with severe punishment to their families if they failed to stay and do their duty.

These 'liquidators' are now discarded and forgotten, many vainly trying to establish that the ill health most have suffered ever since 1986 is a result of their massive exposure to radiation. At the Centre for Radiation Research outside Kiev, there is an organization of former liquidators. This group reports that by 1995, 13,000 of their members had died- almost 20 percent of which deaths were suicides. About 70,000 members were estimated to be permanently disabled. But the members of this organization are the lucky ones. Because many former liquidators are now scattered throughout Russia, they neither have the benefit of the organization's special hospital, nor of membership of a survivor organization. They are known as the 'living dead.'

The fireman whose story I was listening to seemed to be an exception to this grim litany of illness and death. He was telling the meeting how pleased and excited he was that, for the first time in ten years, his blood test findings were in the normal range. I was standing next to a delegate from the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA]- the organisation charged with promoting the use of atomic energy. On hearing the fireman's story, he leaned over to me and said: "You see! We said these were only transient disorders." A rough translation might read: Chernobyl? What's the problem?

IGNORING THE VICTIMS

The IAEA man's attitude was perfectly in keeping with that of his organization which, along with the International Commission on Radiation Protection [ICRP] exists in practice largely to play down the effects of radiation on human health, and to shield the nuclear industry from compensation claims from the public. The IAEA was set up in the late 1950s by he UN, to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to promote the peaceful use of atomic energy- ironically, two contradictory objectives. The ICRP which evlved from the 1928 International Committee on X-Ray and Radium Protection, was set up in the fifties to explore the health effects of radiation and [theoretically] to protect the public from it. In fact, both organizations have come to serve the industry rather than the public.

The Chernobyl case is a classic example of the IAEA's inadequacy and questionable science. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, not least from the many thousands of victims themselves, the IAEA insists that only 32 people have so far died as a result of Chernobyl- those who died in the radiation ward of Hospital six in Moscow.All other deaths related to the disaster and its aftermath [and there have been many more than 10,000 in Ukraine alone according to the Minister of Health there] are ignored. Belarus had the highest fallout, and yet there is an international blackout among the IAEA and the rest of the "radiation protection community" on the suffering of its people

The essential problem is that both the IAEA and the ICRP are dealing not with science but with politics and administration; not with public health but with maintaining an increasingly dubious industry. It is their interests, and those of the nuclear industry, to play down the health effects of radiation.

RESTRICTIVE DEFINITIONS

The main way in which the "radiation protection industry" has succeeded in hugely underrating the ill-health caused by nuclear power is by insisting on a group of extremely restrictive definitions as to what qualifies as a radiation-caused illness statistic. For example, under IAEA's criteria:

If a radiation-caused cancer is not fatal, it is not counted in the IAEA's figures

If a cancer is initiated by another carcenogen, but accelerated or promoted by exposure to radiation, it is not counted.

If an auto-immune disease or any non-cancer is caused by radiation, it is not counted.

Radiation-damaged embryos or foetuses which result in miscarriage or stillbirth do not count

A congenitally blind, deaf or malformed child whose illnesses are are radiation-related are not included in the figures because this is not genetic damage, but rather is teratogenic, and will not be passed on later to the child's offspring.

Causing the genetic predisposition to breast cancer or heart disease does not count since it is not a "serious genetic disease" in the Mendelian sense.

Even if radiation causes a fatal cancer or serious genetic disease in a live born infant, it is discounted if the estimated radiation dose is below 100 mSv [mSv= millisievert,a measurement of radiation exposure. One hundred millsievert is the equivalent in radiation of about 100 X-Rays].

Even if radiation causes a lung cancer, it does not count if the person smokes- in fact whenever there is a possibility of another cause, radiation cannot be blamed.

If all else fails, it is possible to claim that radiation below some designated dose does not cause cancer, and then average over the whole body the radiation dose which has actually been received by one part of the body or even organ, as for instance when radio-iodine concentrates in the thyroid. This arbitrary dilution of the dose will ensure that the 100 mSv cut-off point is nowhere near reached. It is a technique used to dismiss the sickness of Gulf War veterans who inhaled small particles of ceramic uranium which stayed in their lungs for more than two years, and in their bodies for more than eight years, irradiating and damaging cells in a particular part of the body.

THE REAL VICTIMS

Despite the authorities' attempt at concealment, we can still begin to enumerate the real victims of the nuclear age. Although the calculations and statistics which I have brought to bear below do not include all of the human suffering that has been caused by the nuclear age, a closer look will show that the methodology is adequate for a first estimate of major damage. The magnitude of the harm already caused is startling, and even more so when we realise many types of damage have been omitted from this first estimate.

In my estimate cancer, whether fatal or non-fatal [excluding non-fatal skin cancer], genetic damage and serious congenital malformations and diseases will be included in the figures. Other damage is acknowledged but not estimated. Ultimately, whether or not one cares about the damage caused by radiation exposure is ultimately a human, not a scientific question. Damage is damage, and causing an unwanted attack on someone's person or reproductive capacity is a violation of human rights. Such damage can be rated for importance, but it should not be arbitrarily ignored.

"Statistics are the people with the tears wiped away" stated one of the Rongelap people of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, who 'hosted' the United States Bikini nuclear testing in the 1950s. This is the story of many tears, and of a hard hearted mindset that laid down the degree of suffering and ill-health that would be the 'acceptable' price to pay for the world 'benefitting' from nuclear technology.

RISK ESTIMATES USED IN THIS ANALYSIS

In order to estimate the real victims of the nuclear industry [as oppossed to those figures enumerated by the ICRP, IAEA and other nuclear apologists] I will take the customary risk estimates, indicate their probable range of error, and then extend the definition to cover related events not recognized as 'detriments' by the regulators. For example, while the nuclear regulators only take fatal cancers into consideration as 'detriments' by the regulators, others, especially those who endure a non-fatal cancer, may find their suffering equally worthy of consideration. And limiting genetic effects to live born offspring does not wipe away the tears of a family that has endured a spontaneous miscarriage or stillbirth.

ESTIMATING THE FATAL AND NON-FATAL CANCER RISKS

In 1991, the ICRP concluded that the projected lifetime risk of fatal cancer for members of the population exposed Sievert whole-body radiation at a low dose rate, was between seven and 11 excess fatal cancers, and seven to eight excess fatalities for in the nuclear industry aged 25 to 64 years. We extend these estimates to non-fatal cancers by estimating the total number of cancers which were used by the ICRP in order to obtain the number of fatalities. We therefore estimate 16 fatal and non-fatal cancers if we exclude non-fatal skin cancers] or 36 if we count them.If the estimate of fatal cancers was off by a factor of two then we can double all those numbers.

The estimate I use for cancer 16 per 100 Person Sieverts, but the reader can adjust this estimate to suit other inclusions, exclusions or uncertainties.

ESTIMATING DAMAGE TO AN EMBRYO OR FOETUS

According to the BEIR Committee [Bilogical Effects of Ionizing Radiation] 1990 report, a dose of 150 mSv to human male testes will cause temporary sterility, and a single dose of 3.5 Sv will cause permanent sterility. According to the ICRP in 1991, just 5 mSv to the testes will cause damage to offspring - YET THIS DOSE WAS PERMITTED YEARLY TO MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC, AND TEN TIMES MORE TO NUCLEAR WORKERS, IN ALL COUNTRIES PRIOR TO 1990. It continues today to be permitted yearly for nuclear workers in most countries.

Women carry with them all of the ova from birth which they will ever have. The threshold for permanent female sterilisation decreases with age, but in general about 650 mSv is considered to be the threshold for temporary sterility in women. After the Bravo event- the detonation of a hydrogen bomb at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in March 1954- the women of Rongelap Atoll experienced about five years of sterility. As they regained their sterility, they experienced faulty pregnancies, miscarrigies, stillbirths and damage to their offspring. Since some radionucleides can be retained in bone or fatty tissues, they are able to cross the placenta barrier and disrupt the developing embryo or foetus. Radionucleides in the mother's body can also be transferred in her breast milk.

The official nuclear industry definition of 'detriment' includes only serious genetic disease not judged to be serious, and teratogenic diseases [those which are not passed on to offspring] are not counted. Recently the 1990 BEIR committee made one small concession in recognizing mental retardation in children exposed to radiation during the fifth to 15th weeks of their mother's pregnancy. Radiation kills brain cells, causing both an underdeveloped brain [microcephaly] and mental retardation. For the individual child, BEIR estimates that a dose in utero of 100 to 500 mSv can cause a range of problems from poor school performance to severe mental retardation.

GENETIC DAMAGE

The U.N. Scientific Committee on the effects of Atomic Radiation [UNSCEAR] and BEIR both agree that a population of one million live births exposed to 100 Person Sieverts will result in one to three genetic damage effects to offspring, and so to the human gene pool. The doubling dose for genetic effects [the dose that will cause twice as many genetic effects] is more contentious, with some geneticists claiming that it is 2.5 Sv, and others claiming much greater sensitivity with a 0.12 Sv doubling dose. If the latter is true, then the increase in genetic effects will be 8.3 per cent for every 10mSv and therefore 83 such effects per million live births when the total averaged dose is 100 Person Sieverts rather than the 4 such effects in the first instance. On the conservative side, we have taken 10 genetic effects to be the number for exposed offspring.

ESTIMATE OF TERATOGENIC EFFECTS'

The damage to an embryo from ionizing radiation when in the womb is not considered to be genetic. Such irradiation can lead to some 30 different congenital anomolies including permanent damage to the brain, mental deficiency, skull deformities, cleft palate, spina bifida, club-feet, genital deformities, growth retardation and childhood cancer. A total of all those effects, including mortality, amount to 46, of which 25 are live born.

When we summarise those risk estimates, we get 16 cancers, 10 genetic effects and 25 congenital effects for one million exposed to 100 Person Sieverts.The task now is to apply those numbers for the global population from industrial nuclear activities, including weapons testing in the fifties, sixties and early seventies and electricity production from nuclear power over the past half century. When we do this we find that weapons testing has lead to nearly 376 million cancers, 235 million genetic effects and 587 million teratogenic effects to give A TOTAL OF APPROXIMATELY 1,200 MILLION. Meanwhile, electricity production from nuclear plants between 1943 and 2000 may have lead to another million victims,of which as many one-fifth will have been premature cancer deaths. Although not officially accounted for, about 500 million foetuses would have also been lost as stillbirths during that period from radiation exposure while in the womb.

Another century of nuclear power, and this carnage would continue with more than 10 million victims a year. An industry which has the potential to kill, injure and maim that number of innocent people- and all in the name of 'benefitting' society - is surely wholly unacceptable.

Rosalie Bertell, PhD, GNSH, is President of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health and Editor in Chief of International Perspectives in Public Health and Editor in Chief of International Perspectives in Public Health [IICPH]. Dr. Bertell can be reached via e-mail at: drrbertell@home.com

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Vieques Confrontation Deepens Over Use Of Depleted Uranium Bullets as Navy Denies Danger

http://www.foxnews.com/fn99/national/011300/vieques_broder.sml
January 13, 2000
By Jonathan Broder
Fox News

WASHINGTON + A bitter confrontation between the Clinton administration and the residents of Vieques, a small Caribbean island used as a bombing range by U.S. military, has grown even more poisonous with the Navy's admission that it tested radioactive depleted uranium munitions on the island.

The Navy's acknowledgment last week that Marine warplanes fired 263 rounds of depleted uranium shells at the Vieques firing range during a training exercise last February has prompted accusations the Navy is ignoring health and environmental hazards posed by the munitions.

Activists also charge the Pentagon is covering up other incidents in which the radioactive munitions were fired on the island, and a lawmaker has called for a congressional investigation.

"The use of cancer-inducing depleted uranium on Vieques must be investigated through federal hearings," said Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y.

The Navy owns two-thirds of Vieques, a 52 square-mile U.S. territory just off the coast of Puerto Rico. For more than 50 years, the U.S. military has used a portion of its land as the main weapons firing range for its Atlantic forces. Vieques' 9,400 residents living on the remaining third of the island have long protested the exercises, charging the smoke, chemicals and other residues from the munitions tests have poisoned the island's soil and water and led to increased incidents of cancer and other diseases among the civilian population.

The protests escalated dramatically last April after a misguided bomb killed an islander working as a security guard for the Navy and seriously wounded four other civilians. Enraged, scores of Vieques residents invaded the firing range and set up encampments on the contaminated, shell-pocked landscape, refusing to budge until the Navy agreed to halt all its exercises and leave the island for good.

With all weapons testing at a standstill, negotiations began between Clinton administration officials and the Puerto Rican government, which supports the protesters. Last month, an offer by Clinton to close down the firing range in five years and to use only inert ammunition in the meantime appeared to form the basis for a possible compromise solution.

Then came last week's acknowledgment from the Navy that it had fired depleted uranium rounds on the island. The admission came nearly a year after the fact in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the Military Toxics Project, a Maine-based group that monitors the military's impact on the environment.

The acknowledgement has not only hardened the demands of Vieques residents; it has also drawn in a entirely new battalion of critics + military whistle -blowers and health experts who claim that exposure to areas shot up with depleted uranium munitions during the Persian Gulf War is a major cause of so-called "Gulf War Syndrome" among American veterans. Now, they say, residents of Vieques + all U.S. citizens + may be the newest known victims of the same syndrome.

The Pentagon rejects these accusations, insisting the radioactivity of depleted uranium is low and the expended shells pose little risk to health or the environment.

The Web site of the Pentagon's Special Office for Gulf War Illnesses cites an interview with Dr. Naomi Harley, a professor at New York University's school of Medicine and an expert on radiation physics.

In the interview, Harley says the fine radioactive residue left by expended depleted uranium shells is almost indistinguishable from the uranium that occurs in soil naturally. She also maintains airborne concentrations of depleted uranium in a war zone are too low to cause serious harm.

"You breathe in some uranium, but the risk is so low, it's very hard to calculate," she said in the interview.

But Maj. Doug Rokke, an Army physician and former director of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project, who studied the health and environmental effects of the radioactive munitions in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the Gulf War, says his research has proven the opposite. Exposure to depleted uranium munitions is highly dangerous, he says.

"If you inhale or ingest this stuff, you're going to have health problems right away," he said. "It also contaminates soil and water."

"The Pentagon is not telling the truth about the health and environmental hazards from depleted uranium shells used on Vieques," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of the National Gulf War Research Center, a veterans' organization that has researched the after-effects of the military's use of depleted uranium munitions.

Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran, says the Pentagon is minimizing the hazards surrounding depleted uranium shells because it has found these munitions so effective on the battlefield.

A depleted uranium shell is a solid projectile, made up entirely of uranium-238. Capable of piercing thick armor, the super-heated shell has enormous destructive power, igniting anything in its path as it disintegrates upon impact into fine aerosol particles.

On Vieques, where the prevailing winds blow from the firing range on the eastern side of the island to the populated areas on the western side, incidents of cancer among the residents are 26.7 percent higher than in Puerto Rico, according to a 30-year study released by Puerto Rico's Health Department several years ago. Another Health Department study in 1998 showed there are no significant differences in behavior, such as smoking, between Vieques residents and Puerto Ricans.

"There is no other way to explain this," said Dr. Rafael Rivera Castano, an epidemiologist at the University of Puerto Rico. "In Vieques, there are no factories that contaminate the air. The only explanation is the environmental contamination we've found + lead, arsenic, chromium and now radioactive contamination from depleted uranium + which only comes from the bombing and exercises of the Navy."

Many critics suspect the Navy lied when it claimed its use of depleted uranium munitions was accidental. They note such munitions are tightly monitored and controlled under regulations that require anyone who requests such ammunition to present papers proving he or she is authorized to handle it.

"Those rounds are well marked," said Bob Whistine, an officer at the U.S. Army's Material Command at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, where the safety measures for depleted uranium munitions were developed after the Gulf War.

Some also have strong suspicions that, contrary to the Navy's claim, last February's live-fire exercise with depleted uranium was not a one-time affair.

The Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques, one of several protest groups on the island, filed a Freedom of Information request last June, asking the Pentagon to account for any use of depleted uranium munitions on Vieques from 1985 to the present time by all of the U.S. military branches, along with any private companies and allied countries whose armed forces also utilize Vieques as a weapons testing site. So far, the group has received no reply.

"We're highly suspicious of the excessive delay in providing a substantive response to our request," said Flavio Cumpiano, the group's Washington representative.

Any disclosure of other incidents in which depleted uranium munitions were used on Vieques could weaken the Navy's case for keeping its target range. "The Navy is in the public eye right now, and what they say was a one-time accident could be revealed to have been a pattern," Cumpiano said. "They might be stalling until President Clinton makes a final decision on the future of the Vieques firing range."

Meanwhile, Cmdr. Greg Smith, a Navy spokesman, said in the 2 1/2 months between the February firing incident and the protesters' closure of the Vieques test range in April, Navy experts had retrieved a total of 57 spent bullets. The experts were unable to collect the remaining 206 radioactive shells, he said, because of the presence of the protesters on the firing range.

Though Smith described the firing range as a "hazardous area" and "a place where humans are not meant to be," he noted that further cleanup "is not being currently addressed because there is no requirement to clean up the site at this point."

Rokke calls such decisions "crazy," noting experts could continue to collect spent depleted uranium munitions despite the presence of the protesters. Moreover, Rokke said, such decisions violate Nuclear Regulatory Commission laws that require the military to clean up contaminated test sites.

"The fact that people are there on the firing range with more than 200 DU bullets still unaccounted for is all the more reason to go in there and provide environmental protection," Rokke said.

Sullivan, of the National Gulf War Research Center, said he believes the Pentagon is ignoring the environmental cleanup requirements in Vieques because such action would open the military to similar obligations in other test sites.

"The minute they agree to clean up Vieques and Okinawa, they've got to clean up the test sites in Okinawa, Nevada, Maryland and Indiana, not to mention the live fire sites in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Kosovo." he said. "They don't want to go there."

-----

Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 10:34:45 +0100
To: du-list@egroups.com
From: Peter Diehl <p.diehl@sik.de>

The expiration date of Starmet's export licence XU08643 for the export of 500 t DU metal to Royal Ordnance Specialty Metals Inc. (UK) has been extended from Dec. 31, 1999 to Dec. 31, 2001. The amended licence is available through: <http://www.nrc.gov/NRC/ADAMS/index.html>

N.B. The license text states: "No re-export of the depleted uranium is allowed from the United Kingdom without prior United States Government consent." So, the use of missiles made from this material would not be allowed in Kosovo?!?

------

Aircraft uranium still missing

N-BASE BRIEFING 213
15th January 2000

NENIG, The Quarries, Gruting, Bridge of Walls, Shetland ZE2 9NR 01595 810 266 (Tel and fax)

E-MAIL AND INTERNET ADDRESSES: briefing@n-base.org.uk http://www.n-base.org.uk

Only about half of the depleted uranium carried by the Korean Air Boeing 747 which crashed near Stansted airport just before Christmas has been recovered by accident investigators. Depleted uranium is used in aircraft as counter-weights for tail rudder controls because the high density which gives a heavy weight in only a small size.

Several hundred kilograms of depleted uranium were used in 747 Jumbo Jets until the 1980s when it was replaced tungsten, but the Department of Environment and Transport has said only about half has been recovered by contractors working to clear the site for investigators. It is possible some of the uranium was vaporised in the intense fire when the aircraft crashed and this could have caused health concerns if the crash had been in a heavily populated area. An El Al Boeing 747 crashed in suburbs of Amsterdam and burst into flames in 1992 and poisoning from the depleted uranium has been partly blamed for a number of illnesses which have been suffered by those living near the crash site.

------

Petition : Health risks of nuclear energy : Amending the Agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization (ResWHA12-40, 28.5.59)

Forty years ago, at the onset of the "Atoms for Peace" programme, the severe health and environmental risks of nuclear energy were generally unknown to the public. It was at these times that the World Health Organization (WHO) entered into an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which allowed for considerable IAEA authority over WHO studies and projects on health effects of radiation.

This outdated agreement has prevented WHO from being able to act fully and effectively to protect populations from the risks of nuclear technology.

Since then, specific nuclear disasters including those at Sellafield, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have demonstrated both the health risks of nuclear energy and the shortcomings in this Agreement.

Therefore we request the World Health Assembly to amend the agreement between the IAEA and the WHO to:

i) remove the requirement that any WHO program on the health effects of nuclear energy must first be discussed with and agreed by the IAEA.

ii) amend the provision safeguarding confidential information to allow for nondisclosure of only such information which has no bearing on health or environmental risks of nuclear energy.

We request these changes for the following reasons:

WHO is Unduly Constrained by the Agreement

* Article I of the Agreement between the IAEA and the WHO of 28 May 1959 recognizes that "... the IAEA has the primary responsibility for encouraging, assisting and co-ordinating research on, and development and practical application of atomic energy for peaceful uses throughout the world without prejudice to the right of the WHO to concern itself with promoting, developing, assisting and co-ordinating international health work, including research, in all its aspects."

The right of the WHO to promote, develop, assist and co-ordinate international health work is unduly constrained by the requirement in Article I (3) that "Whenever either organization proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual consent."

* According to the WHO Constitution, the open availability of all information relating to the health risks to a population or populations is crucial to enable WHO to carry out its functions. Article III(2) of the Agreement between the IAEA and the WHO places undue constraints on such availability of information.

The IAEA Has a Conflict of Interest

* Such constraint is most obvious in situations where the work of the IAEA to encourage, assist and coordinate research on the development and practical application of nuclear energy leads or contributes to a serious risk to the health of a population of populations.

The Agreement is Out of Date

* The health and environmental risks of nuclear energy are known and manifest to a much greater degree than when the Agreement between the IAEA and the WHO was made,

Therefore the undersigned request that the World Health Assembly amend the Agreement between the IAEA and the WH0 (Res. WHA12-40 of 28 May 1959)

Name : Organisation/Adress : Signature :

--

Return to : WILPF, 1 rue de Varembé, CP 28, 1211 - Geneva 20, Switzerland

--

AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY AND THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION1

Article I - Co-operation and Consultation

1. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization agree that, with a view to facilitating the effective attainment of the objectives set forth in their respective constitutional instruments, within the general famework established by the Charter of the United Nations, they will act in close co-operation with each other and will consult each other regularly in regard to matters of common interest.

2. In particular, and in accordance with the Constitution of the World Health Organization and the statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and its agreement with the United Nations together with the exchange of letters related thereto, and taking into account the respective co-ordinating responsibilities of both organizations, it is recognized by the World Health Organization that the International Atomic Energy Agency has the primary responsibility for encouraging, assisting and co-ordinating research on, and development and practical application of. atomic energy for peaceful uses throughout the world without prejudice to the right of the World Health Organization to concern itself with promoting, developing, assisting, and coordinating international health work, including research, in all its aspects.

3. Whenever either organization proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a suject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement.

Article II - Reciprocal Representation

1. Representatives of the World Health Organization shall be invited to attend the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency and to participate without vote in the deliberations of that body and of its subsidiary organs (e.g. commissions and committees) with respect to items on their agenda in which the World Health Organization has an interest.

2. Representatives of the International Atomic Eergy Agency shall be invited to attend the World Health Assembly and to participate without vote in the deliberations of that body and of its subsidiary organs (e.g. commissions and committees) with respect to items on their agenda in which the International Atomic Energy Agency has an interest.

3. Representatives of the World Health Organization shall be invited as appropriate to attend meetings of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and to participate without vote in the deliberations of that body and of its commissions and committees with respect to items on their agenda in which the World Health Organization has an interest.

4. Representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency shall be invited as appropriate to attend meetings of the Executive Board of the World Health Organization and to partipate without vote in the deliberations of that body and of its commissions and committees with respect to items on their agenda in which the International Atomic Energy Agency has an interest.

5. Appropriate arrangements shall be made by agreement from time to time for the reciprocal representation of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization at other meetings convened under their respective auspices which consider matters in which the other organization has an interest.

Article III - Exchange of Information and Documents

1. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization recognize that they may find it necessary to apply certain limitations for the safeguarding of confidential information furnished to them. They therefore agree that nothing this agreement shall be construed as requiring either of them to furnish such information as would, in the judgement of the party possessing the information, constitute a violation of the confidence of any of its Members or anyone from whom it has received such information or otherwise interfere with the orderly conduct of its operations.

2. Subject to such arrangements as may be necessary for the safeguarding of confidential material, the Secretariat of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Secretariat of the World Health Organezation shall keep each other fully informed concerning all projected activities and all programmes of work which may be of interest ot both parties.

3. The Director-General of the World Health Organization and the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency or their representatives shall, at the request of either party, arrange for consultations regarding the provision by either party of such special information as may be of interest to the other party.

Article IV - Proposal of Agenda Items

After such preliminary consultations as may be necessary, the World Health Organization shall include on the provisional agenda of its Asepmbly or its Executive Board items proposed to it by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Similarly, the International Atomic Energy Agency shall include on the provisional agenda of its General Conference or its Board of Governors items proposed by the World Health Organization. Items submitted by either party for consideration by the other shall be accompanied by an explanatory memorandum..

Article V - Co-operation between Secretariats

The Secretariat of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Secretariat of the World Health Organization shall maintain a close working relationship in accordance with such arrangements as may have been agreed upon from time to time between the Directors-General of both organizations. In particular, joint committees may be convened when appropriate to consider questions of substantive interest to both parties.

Article VI - Technical and Administrative Co-operation

1. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization agree to consult each other from time to time regarding the most efficient use of personnel and resources and appropriate methods of avoiding the establishment and operation of competitive or overlapping facilities and services.

2. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization agree that the measures to be taken by them, within the famework of any general arrangements for co-operating in regard to personnel matters which are made by the United Nations, will include

(a) measures to avoid competition in the recruitment of their personnel; and

(b) measures to facilitate interchange of personnel on a temporary or permanent basis, in appropriate cases, in order to obtain the maximum benefit from their services, making due provision for the protection of the seniority, pension and other rights of the personnel concerned.

Article VII - Statistical Services

In view of the desirability of maximum co-operation in the statistical field and of minimizing the burden placed on national governments and other organizations from which information may be collected, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization undertake, bearing in mind the general arrangements for statistical co-operation made by the United Nations, to avoid undesirable duplication between them with respect to the collection, compilation and publication of statistics, to consult with each other on the most efficient use of information, resources, and technical personnel in the field of statistics and in regard to all statistical projects dealing with matters of common interest.

Article VIII - Financing of Special Services

If comppliance with a request for assistance made by either organization to the other involves or would involve substantial expenditure for the organization complying with the request, consultation shall take place with a view to determining the most equitable manner of meeting such expanditure.

Article IX - Regional ad Branch Offices

The World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency agree to consult together with a view, where practicable, to entering into co-operative arrangements as to the use by either organization of the premises, staffing and common services of regional and branch offices which the other has already established or may establish later.

Article X - Implementation of the Agreement

The Director-Geeral of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Director-General of the World Health Organization may enter into such arrangements for the implementation of this agreement as may be found desirable in the light of the operating experience of the two organizations.

Article XI - Notification to the United Nations and Filing and Recording

1. In accordance with their respective agreements with the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization will inform the United Nations forthwith of the terms of the present agreement.

2. On the coming-into-force of this agreement it will be sumitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations for filing and recording in accordance with the existing regulations of the United Nations.

Article XII - Revision and Termination

1. This agreement shall be subject to revision by agreement between the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the request of either party.

2. If agreement on the subject of revision cannot be reached, the agreement may be terminated by either party on 31 December of any year by notice given to the other party not later than 30 June of that year.

Article XIII - Entry-into-Force

This agreement shall come into force on its approval by the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency and by the World Health Assembly.

-----

TO: hrex@dis.anl.gov
FROM: pdxavets@aracnet.com
SUBJECT: HREX Historical data

Greetings:

I maintain a website for a group of about 300 veterans who directly participated in the atmospheric weapons testing in the Pacific and at NTS. Thanks to the Openness Iniative and databases such as HREX. They have been very active in reconstructing their unit military histories and recording personal recollections of their experiences and posting them on the Atomic Veterans History Project website.

We have been using the information in the HREX database, relating to the atomic testing as one of our basic tools, for information of the military activities during each of the detonations that these men observed. Being able to download documents related to their individual ships, aircraft, and military activities has been most gratifing for them.

It appears however that the historical information regarding the atomic testing has been removed recently from HREX. I realize the government is expanding rapidly with new data bases and new sources of information, making full use of electronic media these days, but it is very important that this historical information about the military activities during the testing years remains accessable to veterans.

I would appreciate knowing if this information about the military history of the atomic testing has been removed to another site or if anything is amiss with the database or its search features.

Keith Whittle Atomic Veterans History Project National Association of Atomic Veterans http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets pdxavets@aracnet.com

------

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 00:38:42 -0600
From: Chris Kornkven <kornkven@globaldialog.com>

Below is a letter written by Dan Fahey, Gulf War Veteran.

I have provided more comments below Dan's, along with some rather interesting new reports on Depleted Uranium. Dan's and my comments are in response to statements in the Stars and Stripes newspaper attributed to the American Legion stating essentially that there are no health effects from exposure to DU. My comments are not directed at the Legion in general, but at the individual(s) on their Gulf War Task Force that have been in positions to stand up for veterans, yet have spoken against veterans and supported the DoD position in regards to DU exposure.

Chris, please post to the Gulf vets list. Stars and Stripes, please consider printing this rebuttal. MTP, please post this. Dan

In the wake of the "60 Minutes" segment on depleted uranium, the American Legion has voiced its support of the Pentagon's dubious position that DU has been ruled out as a cause of veterans' illnesses. The American Legion states this opinion in an unsigned statement in this week's Stars and Stripes. It wasn't so long ago that the American Legion cared more about Gulf War veterans than placating the Pentagon. Note the following paragraph from a recently released 1994 Army intelligence report on public interest in DU:

"The American Legion is also quite active in DU issues, and believes that the health problems of the veterans is the result of exposure to DU. American Legion President, and Gulf War Veteran, Steve Robertson believes that veterans were exposed to radiation through inhalation of DU particles from "friendly fire," but also because they spent so much time living around equipment containing DU, and were not instructed to use special gloves to handle rounds. American Legion blames the Army for many of the health problems reported by Gulf War veterans, and says many could have been prevented through proper training, and adequate safeguards. The American Legion represents 3.1 million veterans, and is currently involved in testifying before Congress. Robertson says the group is following the same strategy used to bring the Agent Orange issue to the forefront, because 'the strategy worked.'" ["Public Interest Groups and Depleted Uranium," Draft Report, May 26, 1994, US Army Environmental Policy Institute, p. 19].

At a time when the VA is finding more veterans who were wounded by DU fragments, when veterans who inhaled DU dust are testing positive for DU, when we discover Colonel Daxon and the Pentagon refused to comply with a public law requiring them to research the effects of inhaled DU, and when it appears DU contains plutonium and other extremely dangerous toxins, it is almost unbelievable that the nation's largest veterans' organization would summarily dismiss veterans' concerns over DU exposures and health effects.

--

From where I sit, the American Legion looks more like a puppet of the Pentagon than a responsible steward of veterans' interests. That is hardly prudent behavior for an organization whose membership is rapidly declining.

Dan Fahey Military Toxics Project mtpdu@dclink.com

---

From: "Lisa Spahr" LSpahr@Legion.Org
Subject: Response from The American Legion
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 12:14:01 -0500

Natalie, Please post this on my behalf. Lisa

I want to apologize for any misleading information that was contained in the Stars and Stripes Newspaper. The American Legion recognizes and supports, wholeheartedly, a need to explore possible causes of Gulf War veterans' illnesses. At our National Convention in Anaheim, California, September 1999 we passed Resolution 98 which asks, among other things, that the scientific community focus efforts on likely causes of Gulf War veterans' illnesses. We do not name or identify which causes are likely and those that are not, for we are not nor claim to be scientists. We have remained a steadfast leader in helping Gulf War veterans and their families receive compensation and rightful benefits. And, we will continue to rally for more scientific studies that will help us understand why some veterans are ill. The Legion has continued to be open to new scientific evidence that may point the way toward this understanding. We have not considered Depleted Uranium to be a closed door issue.

The information that was printed in Stars and Stripes was not our position on Depleted Uranium. Unfortunately, an article was posted on our website that contained inaccuracies. A part of this post was then used for the Stars and Stripes article. Stars and Stripes did not contact us when writing their piece, to confirm the information on our website or explore the matter further. This issue was misrepresented and I assure you it will not occur again.

Please accept my sincere apology for any confusion this has caused. I would be more than glad to personally affirm our dedication to veterans and the scientific search toward understanding Gulf War veterans illnesses. You can reach me at (202) 861-2700 ext. 1604 or lspahr@legion.org.

Thank you for your time and patience.

Lisa Spahr The American Legion

---

Following is the American Legion's position on depleted uranium, and a response to it by Paul Sullivan, National Gulf War Resource Center. You can send comments about the Legion's position to lspahr@legion.org.

Dan Fahey
January 12, 2000
Ms. Lisa Spahr, Mr. Matt Puglisi, The American Legion

Lisa and Matt,

The following information at the end of my e-mail is from the Legion'swebsite at http://www.legion.org./depleted%5Furanium%5F122799.htm

The NGWRC finds it odd that the Legion would call for research into DU exposures while at the same time ruling out DU as associated with Gulf War illnesses. If the Legion has ruled out DU, then research is not needed. If research is needed, then DU cannot be ruled out. This needs clarification.

As shown by the date of the Legion press release, the Legion's statement was obviously added to the Legion website after December 26, 1999. By that date, the Legion was aware of:

1. the new research findings from AFRRI implicating DU as a serious hazard,

2. the association between lung cancer and DU exposures in the Presidential Advisory Committee Report from 1996

3. the large number of potentially exposed veterans possibly exceeding400,000,

4. the lack of research in general, as cited by numerous panels and studies,

5. the recommendations for new and expanded research into DU by RAND and AFFRI,

6. the confirmation of Plutonium and Neptunium in the DU given by the DoE to the DoD, and

7. the failure of the DoD to comply with the 1993 law ordering research on inhaled and ingested DU exposures.

8. the serious limitations and bias in the RAND report, including the placement of a DoD employee from Rostker's OSAGWI staff on the team to prepare the RAND report and the obvious omission of dozens of important research papers and documents in the RAND report.

9. the recent GAO finding that the exposure models used by the DoD were faulty and needed to be completed again.

10. the failure of the DoD to verify the implementation of Congressionally mandated training.

On behalf of the many ill Gulf War veteran support groups represented by the NGWRC, we ask the Legion to reconsider their position on DU exposures posted to the Legion website.

Finally, the Legion claims the military is 'dependent' upon DU munitions. If the military is dependent upon a weapon that causes long-term health problems, the consequences could be very serious. This is why the NGWRC consistently demands the points mentioned in my earlier e-mail:

1. Awareness and Training,
2. Exposure Assessments,
3. Medical Research,
4. Treatment, and
5. Accountability.

If you have any questions, Dan Fahey or I will be happy to answer them for you or the National Staff. Our offices and files are open to you any time you need them -- just call.

Sincerely,
PAUL SULLIVAN, Executive Director
National Gulf War Resource Center 1224 M Street, NW Washington, DC 20005
(202) 628-2700, ext. 162 hq@ngwrc.org http://www.ngwrc.org/

-----------

1. The Office of the Special asssistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Gulf War Illness will be conducting briefings on 1 - 2 Feb. 2000 in South Texas.

2. The Gulf War Illness briefings last approximatley 2 hours and are available for all active duty, reserves, family members, retirees and civilians.

3. The locations for the briefings are as follows: - Naval Station Ingleside - USO Theater - (Port Aransas, TX.) 1 Feb. 0800hrs to 1000hrs and 1300hrs to 1500hrs

- Naval Air Station Kingsville - Base Club - (Kingsville, TX.) 1 Feb. 0800hrs to 1000hrs and 1300hrs to 1500hrs

- Nas Corpus Christi - Base Theater - (Corpus Christi, TX) 2 Feb. 0800 hrs to 1000hrs and 1300hrs to 1500hrs - Family member brief 1900hrs to 2100hrs -

Point of contact for additional Information:

Juri Koern: 361-961-3831 361-937-1292 Fax:361-961-3831 email:jkoern@ccad.army.mil
or
Charlene Hagar: 361-961-2810 361-242-2003 email:cch1cph@cch10.med.navy.mil
or
Bruce Lane: 817-545-1775 (phone & fax) email: kblane@aol.com

-----------

The following appeared in the November 1999 edition of "The Ecologist," Volume 29, No.7.

For people wanting copies in the USA call: 510-548-2032, Fax:510-548-4916. Main Office [in UK] Call: 0171-351-3578, Fax: 0171-351-3617, e-mail: ecologist@gn.apc.org

By Chris Busby

The nuclear catastrophe that had been long feared by anti-nuclear activists finally occurred in April 1986. The explosion at the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine, and the resulting release of radioactivity, turned a large part of the Soviet Union into a radioactive wasteland. The interdependence of nations became clear, as radioisotopes traveled scross the world and contaminated milk in areas as far away as the USA.

The effects of Chernobyl on the USSR were enormous. Soviet scientists were well aware of the magnitude of the effect, and also how the West would attempt to downplay the problems.In 1995, writing for UNESCO, Academician Savchenko drew attention to the critical need for humanity to use the environmental health data to establish the true health consequences of radioactive releases. He was already too late. The cover-up was already underway. The International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] had seen the danger, and their friends in the World Health Organization [WHO] [with whom they had an agreement dating back to 1957] had swung into action.

Dr. Parkin, in Lyon, funded by the EU, set up a study of Chernobyl related childhood leukemia in Europe, putting all the countries with their different doses into the same bag. Since high doses and low doses are diluted into a large population of varying genetic susceptibility, this confuses any clear onset or trend in leukemia increase which can be ascribed to the accident.This is because part of the dilution effect is due to different lag times between exposure and expression between high and low doses.

Needless to say, he found "no effect" in the worst-affected territories, where the registrars were told that they were not to write down "leukemia" as a cause of death, and victims were told that they were the victims of a new "psychosomatic" disease called "radiophoia," a variant of the increasingly prevalent "Chemophobia." Even the extraordinary and unexpected increases in thyroid cancer were explained away by retrospectively altering the assumed doses of radio-iodine.

In Vienna, in April and May 1996, there were two conferences. An IAEA conference found no evidence of any significant health effects from Chernobyl, apart from thyroid cancer. The other conference, that of the "Permanent Peoples Tribunal" offered a frightening account of cancer increases, malformations, cover ups and torment. Since then we have been sent figures from Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Bulgaria which show clear evidence of a rise in cancer, leukemia, congenital malformations and general ill health. The situation on the ground is reflected by an extract from Vladimir Nestorenko's recent 1998 report CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT: RADIATION PROTECTION OF POPULATION:

"In the period 1988 to 1995, the tumour rate has grown by 2.4 times, the rate of malignant tumours by 13 times, endocrynous systems diseases rate by 4.5 times, illnesses of the nervous system and organs of sense, by 3.5 times, illnesses of blood circulation organs by 4 times etc. was registered."

Whatever the arguments about the ex-Soviet Union, there is now sufficient evidence that the releases also took their toll globally. Using the new "genetic fingerprint" test, it was possible to establish that Chernobyl has caused a doubling of genetic damage. Based on the measured natural mutation rate of 10-5 and the assumption of no genetic effect in the children of Hiroshima survivors, people who received a much higher dose than those near Chernobyl, the doubling of mutations revealed by the "genetic fingerprint" test shows the assumptions of the resent risk model to be in eeror by a minimum factor of 10,000 times!

There was another unexpected effect. Despite the tiny doses, conventionally assessed, infant leukemia from Greece and the US increased among children who were in their mother's womb during the period of peak exposure. We found a statistically significant four-fold increases in infants in Wales and Scotland.

This discovery was valuable since it enabled us retrospectively to use the number of cases as a test of the risk model. The National Radiological Protection Board have measured the Chernobyl radiation and assessed the doses. They provide the Hiroshima model risk factors which predict the number of leukemia cases expected at that dose in the population of Wales and Scotland. Since we observe more than one hundred times the predicted number, we have shown that the eeror in the model is more than 100-fold. The BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL has refused to publish these findings without even referring them to a reviewer.

REFERENCE: Yaroshinskaya, A. Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth, Oxford: John Carpenter [1988].

-----------

Re: SAIC cited for conflict of interest

1-11-00 Oak Ridger (TN)
http://www.oakridger.com/
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 12:23:17 -0800
From: Greg Wingard <gwingard@earthlink.net>
Reply-to: downwinders@onelist.com

What an amazing coincidence. SAIC just happens to be working here in Washington State for our Department of Ecology. They have been "assisting" Ecology in changing our states law for cleaning up waste sites, the Model Toxics Control Act. Wonder if they have been doing any work for polluters in Washington State?

---

Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 23:14:45 -0500
From: jrmichel@icx.net (Janet Michel)

I know this will sound defensive and I don't want it to as I had some very serious problems with SAIC when I worked there from '85-'90, but one thing that often doesn't come through and may not be apparent is the way they are organized. They are like a bunch of small companies under an umbrella that provides the benefits package. The individual "small companies" even compete amongst themselves. They often don't know what the other groups are doing. Where you work and what you do is only as "good" as your immediate supervisor. So, you may have some good folks there actually doing "good" work who know absolutely nothing about the "bad" folks. Although most of their work is for the federal government, many people do very different tasks for the private sector and state and local governments. They are supposed to maintain a "conflict of interest" database to avoid the problems;apparently not everything gets entered. Duh! - Janet

---

Re: Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)

From: PATBNAAV@aol.com Message-ID: <91.f8a845.25b10861@aol.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 18:16:49 EST

Having collected over the years and testified in Congressional hearings regarding the above I have tons of material on this organization, headquartered in San Diego. It seems that up until the present Secretary of Defense the following were either employees of the DOD or Secretaries of Defense:

o Let's start with Bobby Ray Inman (remember him? Nominated by Clinton for the post of DOD secretary, but declined after much of his skullduggery came out--of which I can proudly say I had a part). He was a board member of SAIC for 12 years. A retired Navy Admiral, he headed the National Security Agency under President Jimmy Carter and served as deputy director of the CIA under President Ronald Reagan. (Just what we needed, a spook at the DOD). At SAIC he has chaired the board's executive committee. SAIC is a member-owned firm and is not on the Dow-Jones.

o William J. Perry was a board member of the firm (SAIC) for six years before he was tapped in 1993 to join the Pentagon in the No. 2 slot as deputy secretary of defense. He was considered a candiate for the top job before Clinton chose Inman to succeed Defense Secretary Les Aspin.

o `John M. Deutch was a board member for 13 years but left SAIC to become undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology. In that role he has developed a high public profile for his work researching the causes of the mysterious post-Persian Gulf War maladies reported by men and women who served in the conflict and for renegotiataing the contract for development of the troubled C-17 cargo plane.

o Anita K. Jones, a board member for six years and former professor and chairwoman of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, served as a contracting deputy at the Pentagon under Deutch.

While it remains to be seen what if anything will come of the current (1994) ties between SAIC and the Pentagon, it is unclear whether special connections were any help to company officials two years ago, when the firm was charged with falsifying the results of test samples taken from Superfund hazardous waste sites.

The case, which erupted in 1991 and before the latest company board members went to Washington, became what one prosecutor called "the largest environmental fraud fine we've had here."

Ultimarely, in a settlement agreement in U.S. District Court, the company pleaded guilty to seven counts of making false statements to the Environmental Protection Agency and three counts of making false claims for payment...

...the company was ordered to pay $1.3 million in restitution and penalties. In announcing the heavy fine, federal Judge Rudi M. Brewster called the episode an example of "corporate greed" and said he wanted to make sure the company accepted its share of the blame...

...During the investigation, Melvin R. Laird, another board director and a former secretary of defense, wrote a letter to then-Atty.Gen. Dick Thornburgh, asking him to delay the prosecution...Laird wrote that "there was no wrongdoing on the part of the corporation." He went on to mention that "President [George] Bush recently recognized three of our directors" with appointments to the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, a six-member group that evaluates work by U.S. Intelligence Agencies. The three were Inman , Perry and Deutch.

And what, may you ask, is my concern with SAIC? Well, folks, SAIC is and has been since the inception of NTPR and DNA the prime contractor that does the dose reconstructions for atomic veterans and makes damn sure that none of them exceeds the magic 5R number (even though many of them did not wear or had not been issued badges). As a consequence I have tons more material on SAIC and their shady dealings. I have made it very clear in hearings before the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees that SAIC and DNA are in bed together and are all a bunch of crooks. Out of the 450,000 vets exposed from 1945 to 1962, fewer than 500 awards have been made by the VA, thanks to SAIC and DNA (now DTRA).

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Whistle-blower says Army hid burner flaws
The allegations cast a cloud over plans to incinerate nerve agents at the Umatilla Chemical Depot

http://www.oregonliv e.com/news/00/01/st011402.html
January 14, 2000
By Brent Hunsberger of The Oregonian staff

A former permit coordinator at a Utah chemical weapons incinerator charged this week that the U.S. Army covered up design and safety flaws at the plant, leaving a similar plant under construction in Eastern Oregon vulnerable to failures.

Gary E. Harris, who worked at the Tooele plant in Utah for 11 years, called on the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission to investigate his concerns before it rules on environmentalists' request to halt nerve gas incineration at the Umatilla Chemical Depot, seven miles east of Hermiston.

"Believe me," Harris said Thursday in Portland, "this incinerator you're building in Oregon is still an experiment."

Harris' news conference, his third on a national tour, coincided with a letter U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., sent to Gov. John Kitzhaber asking that the Umatilla incinerator's construction permit be suspended to fully investigate Harris' claims.

"While it is unclear whether similar problems were a part of the permit process in Oregon," DeFazio wrote, "the deceptive practices in Utah should certainly raise a red flag."

The Army is investigating and "is confident Harris' allegations will be proven untrue," spokesman Greg Mahall said earlier this week. A spokesman for Raytheon Demilitarization Co., which is building the Army's incinerator at Umatilla, did not return calls seeking comment.

The Army has scheduled trial burns at Umatilla later this year in preparation for disposing of 6.6 million pounds of chemical munitions beginning in October 2001. Environmentalists want the Army to use alternative disposal methods, but the Army and National Academy of Sciences have said further delays would pose a greater public health risk than incineration.

Harris resigned from the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, southwest of Salt Lake City, in 1996. He renewed his attacks this week, he said, because the Army stopped paying his medical benefits. He sought legal help from the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, which opposes incineration and sponsored Harris' tour this week.

Harris said the Army and its contractor, EG&G Defense Materials Inc.:

• Hid defects in Tooele's incinerators to win operating permits from Utah and Oregon.

• Falsified trial burn reports to regulators.

• Allowed scrap metal laced with the deadly nerve agent sarin to be sent to a Colorado metal recycler.

• Threatened his job if he reported safety problems to regulators.

Harris, who now lives in Sandy, said he moved to Oregon to get medical treatment for memory deficiencies and to remove high levels of metals in his immune system, problems he blames on exposure to nerve agents and other chemicals while working at Tooele.

Harris is the fourth whistle-blower to allege problems at the Utah plant, which began incinerating weapons in 1996. Former plant general manager Gary Millar, former safety chief Steve Jones and hazardous waste manager Trina Allen resigned or were fired after raising safety and environmental concerns. Jones recently was reinstated after a lengthy legal battle.

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Plutonium Instability Discovered

http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/1scitech01-14-00.htm</A>
January 14, 2000
By John Fleck Journal Staff Writer

The chemical form used to store much of the plutonium in the U.S. nuclear-weapons complex might not be as stable as once thought, according to new research by a Los Alamos team being published today in the journal Science.

The finding "calls for new evaluations" of industrial plutonium-handling operations in both civilian and military nuclear operations, according to a French expert who wrote an accompanying analysis in Science.

The finding suggests plutonium in the environment could be more easily dissolved in water and washed away than previously believed, according to Charles Madic of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, the French government's atomic energy commission.

"This new property needs to be considered very carefully, especially in relation with the safety of the industrial operations involving plutonium dioxide," Madic said in an electronic mail interview.

But the discovery is not likely to force any serious changes in the way plutonium is handled in the United States, according to Gregory Choppin, a plutonium chemistry expert at Florida State University.

Plutonium, a radioactive metal not generally found in nature, is made in nuclear reactors and used in atom bombs, as well as in nuclear power plant fuel in Europe.

Plutonium is primarily stored at five U.S. Department of Energy sites -- Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Hanford in eastern Washington and the Rocky Flats plant outside Denver.

The conventional wisdom has long been that plutonium dioxide -- plutonium's equivalent of ordinary rust -- was the most stable form for long-term storage.

But former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist John Haschke and his colleagues found that over time, in the presence of water, a chemical change occurs in some of the plutonium-oxygen molecules.

The change is so subtle scientists working with the material missed it for years, but it does make the plutonium more easily soluble in water, said Haschke, a government consultant in Waco, Texas.

Haschke said that could explain the surprising discovery last year that plutonium left behind from an underground nuclear-weapons test at the federal government's Nevada Test Site had drifted more than a mile in ground water.

A group of Energy Department scientists will gather in Albuquerque later this month to discuss some of the implications of the work for the U.S. plutonium-storage program, Haschke said.

But already, preliminary results from the research have been incorporated into the department's regulations governing the creation of plutonium oxide for storage.

The standard requires the plutonium be heated to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit to bake out the water that is implicated in the chemical reaction Haschke and his colleagues discovered.

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Bacteria feast on nuclear waste
Ground water might be at risk

By Ed Susman
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL,
September 1, 1996

ORLANDO, Fla.-It seemed like a science-fiction scenario: Nuclear scientists announced here that bacteria in salt mines, the storage place of choice for nuclear waste, thrive on radioactive materials.

And these contaminated bacteria are small enough to slip into ground water.

Betty Strietelmeier, a researcher from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said the short-term risk to the population is small.

"However, it's very hard to predict what will happen in 10,000 years, the projected lifetime of the storage facilities. We did our experiments for a month," said Miss Strietelmeier, who presented her work last week at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society in Orlando.

Scientists at Los Alamos are combining microbiology and radiochemistry to investigate what could happen to bacteria that come in contact with radioactive waste in a nuclear waste repository.

Miss Streitelmeier found that exposure to radioactive plutonium, neptunium, uranium, thorium and americium did not kill the halophiles-salt-loving bacteria that abound in salt environments.

"If anything," Miss Streitelmeier said, "the bacteria growth was enhanced." The bacteria adsorb the radioactive material-pull the radioactive substances out of the waste material.

Work of colleagues at Los Alamos, Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., found that most bacteria would be filtered out of ground water, but smaller bacteria-particularly the halophiles-could be carried off by ground water.

Miss Streitelmeier's work was done in a laboratory setting. In a waste storage facility, she said there could be differences in levels of toxicity or in levels of bacteria. "We don't know how long the bacteria would live carrying the radioactive material," she noted.

She said that bacteria would most likely stick to rock, barrels or the waste itself and would not slip into ground water; and if radioactive bacteria did get into ground water, she said the organism would soon die and the radioactive particles would break into smaller and smaller pieces.

But Miss Streitelmeier acknowledged that radioactivity is a potent generator of mutagens that could cause the bacteria to become more efficient transporters of nuclear contamination.

"It could be a scary scenario," she said.

The studies are part of the extensive scientific evidence required to demonstrate that the U.S. Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is safe before the Environmental Protection Agency allows the site near Carlsbad, N.M., to accept waste from the nations nuclear weapons laboratories.

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Can you imagine working at the following Company?

It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics:

* 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
* 7 have been arrested for fraud
* 19 have been accused of writing bad checks
* 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses
* 3 have been arrested for assault
* 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
* 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
* 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
* 21 are current defendants in lawsuits
* In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving

Can you guess which organization this is?
(You know the answer is given below!)
Give up?
You sure you give up?
Okay

It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line and spend money for the greater good. Sort of makesyou think, doesn't it?

------- Letters to NucNews

From: JAR1PUGGY@webtv.net (JOHN RAGSDALE)
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 15:01:44 -0800 (PST)
To: NucNews

Hi Ellen:

I thought your readers might wish to express regret in their own way regarding the flyover at the Rose Parade of the Stealth Bomber. Letters to Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena City Council, or Editors of Local papers are suggested:

My letter to San Bernardino County Sun:

Editor:

The Pasadena Rose Parade was inaugurated by an exciting event. Namely, the flyover of our prestigious billion dollar, nuclear capable Stealth bomber. A breath taking sight that awed onlookers.

An interesting mix of symbolism here....roses and life or roses and death? The number one tor for the last hundred year began with two nuclear bombs on two different cities by and American bomber...and 100,000 plus people disappeared.

Maybe it depends on who or where the viewer sits. Take Japan, might there be some mixed emotions? Roses, charm, and goodwill abounding in the moving beauty through Pasadena, California. A nd highlighting this marvelous start of Y2K...our stunning Stealth, symbolizing pace, or doomsday in out future?

And for those choosing to ignore the juxtapositional symbolism, or lacking the sensitivity to be concerned...pity.

John Ragsdale San Bernardino, Ca.