-------- depleted uranium

Royal Society investigates effects of depleted uranium

Royal Society Press Release

The Royal Society is undertaking an independent study of the effects on human health and the environment of depleted uranium in missiles and shells, it was announced today (24 January 2000).

A working group of six experts has been set up to review the available evidence, and to issue a report later this year. Professor Brian Spratt FRS, the chairman of the working group, said: "There is some public concern about the long-term consequences for military personnel, civilian populations and the environment arising from the use of depleted uranium in military conflicts, such as the Gulf War and Kosovo. The Royal Society wishes to provide the public with an independent opinion of the possible health hazards associated with the use of depleted uranium munitions."

The working group's terms of reference are:

to assess the exposure to depleted uranium and its oxidation products that military personnel are likely to experience by various routes (eg ingested, inhaled or embedded);

to relate these exposures to the known chemical and radioactive toxicities of depleted uranium and its oxidation products;

to assess the likely health effects of these exposures;

to estimate the exposure, doses and possible health effects, for the general population during, and shortly after, the use of depleted uranium munitions;

to estimate the longer term consequences for health of environmental contamination with depleted uranium and its oxidation products; and

to identify areas where research is required to address the consequences for health and the environment of the use of depleted uranium munitions in warfare.

The working group will also consider the possible hazards associated with the use of depleted uranium as ballast on aircraft.

The Royal Society working group on depleted uranium will publish its findings later this year. The group's members are:

Professor Brian Spratt FRS (Chairman; Professor of Biology, Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease, University of Oxford)

Dr Michael Bailey (Head, Dose Assessments Department, National Radiological Protection Board)

Dame Barbara Clayton CBE (Honorary Research Professor in Metabolism, University of Southampton)

Dr Clive Marsh (Director of Physics Research, AWE Aldermaston)

Professor Ian Shanks FRS (Science Advisor, Unilever Research)

Professor Marshall Stoneham FRS (Director, Centre for Materials Research, University College London)

Uranium is a naturally-occurring radioactive element which exists in three forms, called isotopes: uranium-238, uranium-235 and uranium-234. Uranium-238 is less radioactive than uranium-235 or uranium-234. Depleted uranium is a by-product of the processing of uranium for use in nuclear reactors, and is less radioactive than naturally-occurring uranium because it contains a lower percentage of uranium-235 and uranium-234. Depleted uranium is a very hard, dense material that allows the tips of missiles and shells to pierce armour.

NOTES FOR EDITORS

1. The Royal Society is an independent academy promoting the natural and applied sciences. Founded in 1660, the Society has three roles, as the UK academy of science, as a learned Society, and as a funding agency. It responds to individual demand with selection by merit, not by field. The

Society's objectives are to:

recognise excellence in science support leading-edge scientific research and its applications stimulate international interaction further the role of science, engineering and technology in society promote education and the public's understanding of science provide independent authoritative advice on matters relating to science,

engineering and technology encourage research into the history of science For further information, contact:

Carl Smith/Socorro Ponsford Press and Public Relations The Royal Society Tel: 0171 451 2516/2508

or

Professor Brian Spratt Dept of Zoology London University of Oxford Tel: 01865 281301

-------- china

Pentagon, PLA to resume military exchanges today

Washington Times
January 24, 2000
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/nation2-01242000.htm

Meetings between Pentagon officials and a senior Chinese general this week will be the first test of a new law restricting U.S. exchanges with the People's Liberation Army.

A provision of the fiscal 2000 defense authorization signed by President Clinton in October is aimed at preventing Chinese military intelligence from gathering defense technology through the Pentagon's military-to-military program with China.

People's Liberation Army (PLA) Lt. Gen. Xiong Guankai, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, arrives here today to begin three days of meetings in the first military exchanges since Beijing broke off military exchanges after NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last May.

Gen. Xiong is scheduled to meet Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and other senior Pentagon officials, according to defense officials.

A senior Clinton administration official said the talks are not expected to produce dramatic progress in military relations, which in the past have included visits to both countries by officials, ships and aircraft.

Gen. Xiong is expected to criticize U.S. plans to sell advanced weaponry to Taiwan and also will oppose U.S. missile defense efforts. Defense officials say he also will ask for the names and punishment of the CIA officials blamed for giving NATO war planners the incorrect bombing coordinates for the Chinese Embassy.

The general and other visiting PLA military officials also will be honored at private banquets sponsored by the Nixon Center, a think tank, the Pentagon and the Chinese Embassy through Wednesday.Some Pentagon officials hope the talks will open up the Chinese military to a visit to China later this year by Mr. Cohen. The defense secretary had planned to visit China last year, but the embassy bombing forced the trip to be canceled.

"This is part of an effort, obviously, to rebuild our relationship after the mistaken attack," Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told reporters. "It is an effort to rebuild contacts and discussions between the U.S. and the Chinese militaries."

The guidelines limiting military exchanges with China were produced by Sen. Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire Republican, following reports last year that China obtained strategic technology covertly from the United States.

The so-called Smith Guidelines state that Mr. Cohen may not authorize any military exchanges involving force projection operations, nuclear operations, advanced combined arms and joint combat operations, logistics activities, chemical and biological defenses, surveillance and reconnaissance operations.

It also restricts the Pentagon from discussing any activities related to joint war-fighting experiments, military space issues, advanced military capabilities, arms sales and weapons technology. The guidelines also restrict any access by Chinese officials to Pentagon laboratories.

The Pentagon views the military exchanges with China as part of the administration's diplomacy toward Beijing and has said they do not involve technology transfers.

The Chinese regard the exchanges as a way to obtain militarily useful technology. Past exchanges have included Chinese military delegation visits to sensitive facilities, conferences on military logistics and demonstrations of military air traffic control.

A report by the National Counterintelligence Center, an interagency security group located at CIA headquarters, warned in a report that China is continuing efforts to gather technology overseas.

China's official Xinhua news agency in August stated that the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and State Council announced plans to intensify "foreign cooperation" in technology innovation, primarily with the help of ethnic Chinese living or working abroad, the report states.

Mr. Cohen's last visit to China took place in January 1998 when he was permitted to visit an aging air defense site. Some Pentagon officials complained that the Chinese refused to allow the defense secretary to visit more advanced military facilities.

Leading the so-called "defense consultative talks" will be Undersecretary of Defense Walter Slocombe.

"Discussions will cover a wide range of areas. We will compare our strategic assessments of the 21st century," Mr. Bacon said. "We will talk about the geopolitical conditions in the Asia-Pacific, about military modernization programs in the two countries, what sort of military relationship we should have during the year 2000."

The Pentagon is considering the sale of four Aegis destroyers to Taiwan that could be used for missile defenses.

The ships and at least six other weapons systems are on Taiwan's request list made last year.

China is opposing the destroyer sale because of its opposition to missile defenses. Aegis ships will be the heart of the Navy's theater-wide sea-based missile defense and could be used by Taiwan against China's growing force of short-range missiles, many of which are targeted against the island.

---

Abroad at Home: Diplomacy Dueling Invitations for Chinese General's Visit

Washington Post
Monday, January 24, 2000; Page A19
By Steven Mufson Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/24/040l-012400-idx.html

When China's military intelligence chief arrives today to jump-start the stalled exchanges between the American and Chinese militaries, the Clinton administration plans to usher him in to meet senior U.S. diplomats and Pentagon officials.

But Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.) wants a Senate committee to greet China's "chief spy master" with a subpoena to testify instead. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) said that the general is simply the wrong person to build relations. "His business is disinformation," Cox said.

To China's critics in Congress, Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai has become a lightning rod. As the People's Liberation Army (PLA) deputy chief of staff and director of intelligence, Xiong, 60, was in charge of the Chinese officer who allegedly gave $300,000 to then-Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chung to donate illegally to the Clinton reelection effort. Xiong also told a visiting American once that China could threaten to drop a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles to deter the United States from intervening in a conflict involving Taiwan.

Smith says Xiong could shed light on the theft of technology and many "controversial and still unresolved issues between the U.S. and China."

But other analysts point out that Xiong plays a wide role in U.S.-China relations and is a key member of the Chinese Communist Party's "leading group" on foreign policy, Beijing's most important foreign policy-making body.

As a result, Xiong's schedule today and Tuesday includes Undersecretary of Defense Walter B. Slocombe, Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering and other senior national security officials.

The flap over Xiong is part of a broader debate about Sino-American military contacts, which were suspended by Beijing after U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last year during the Kosovo war.

The purposes of the exchanges: getting to know more about China's strategy and modernization, and getting cooperation on such issues as nonproliferation and North Korea.

For most of the past few years, the Clinton administration has tried to build China's confidence in U.S. intentions by showing PLA officers American facilities and weapons systems. Chinese officers have attended exercises showing how the United States might respond to a crisis in the Pacific, and the United States also gave China advice and computer software to help it do its own war games and coordinate different services.

The glimpses of American military were also intended to prevent China from underestimating U.S. power were there a clash over Taiwan. China refuses to renounce force in reunifying the mainland and the self-governing island of Taiwan; Washington wants the dispute settled peacefully.

But some experts say the contacts have backfired, giving China a sense of vulnerability and an incentive to build up its military. Critics say Chinese officers have gained useful intelligence about U.S. equipment, strategy and vulnerabilities.

"We let him fly in our planes and visit our ships," said Larry Wortzel, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former military attache in Beijing, now at the Heritage Foundation.

U.S. military contacts began with intelligence-sharing under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, when both nations were focused on the Soviet threat. President Ronald Reagan sold China military helicopters, radars and torpedoes, and helped modernize Chinese fighter aircraft. But the bloody Chinese army crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 led to the severing of military ties. Those sanctions remain in effect. Military relations resumed under Clinton in late 1993 but grew strained again after China's threatening missile tests near Taiwan in 1996.

Kenneth W. Allen, a former Air Force officer and China expert at the Stimson Center, says exchanges are the best way to learn about China's military and influence future Chinese military leaders.

A senior State Department official said Xiong will discuss plans for military-to-military exchanges over the next year.

Wortzel, who favors limited PLA contacts, said "we've done some silly things." To prevent that, Congress last fall limited the scope of Sino-American military exchanges. Congress blocked PLA contacts regarding force projection, nuclear operations, joint combat operations, advanced logistics, weapons of mass destruction, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, joint war-fighting experiments, military technology transfers and Defense Department laboratories.

Gone is the talk of "strategic partnerships," once cited by Clinton administration officials. The legislation said any Chinese military contact should be weighed as a potential "national security risk."

---

Chinese General in Washington Discussing Fresh Ties

Reuters
January 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-ch.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior Chinese army general met Pentagon and State Department officials on Monday, resuming touchy U.S.-China military ties amid charges that he was a Beijing spymaster.

Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai visited the Defense and State Departments where he held the first high-level defense talks since Beijing angrily suspended military-to-military contacts in May 1999 after U.S. jets bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

The three days of talks are designed to signal thawing relations, but thorny issues on the agenda include continuing Chinese protests against U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and American concern about Chinese spying and arms proliferation.

Xiong, 60, is deputy chief of staff for the People's Liberation Army and among leaders of the Chinese Communist Party's powerful foreign policy group. But a conservative member of the U.S. Congress charged as Xiong arrived that, as head of intelligence for the PLA, he should be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Government Affairs Committee.

A committee spokeswoman told Reuters the panel did not plan to call Xiong in response to a request from Republican Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire for testimony on alleged Chinese nuclear arms spying on the United States and funneling of money from Beijing to President Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign.

Xiong, who did not speak to reporters, had breakfast with Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Holum. Then he met at the Pentagon with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Walter Slocombe and at the State Department with Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering.

A State Department official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters the meetings were useful. ``Both sides agreed on the value of this type of exchange and expressed the hope for further improvement in U.S.-PRC (Chinese) relations,'' he said.

``The discussions covered the current status of the bilateral relationship in general and centered largely around each side's respective regional security concerns, including proliferation issues,'' he added.

Pentagon officials hope this week's meetings will result in exchange visits by Defense Secretary William Cohen and Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian this year to ease tensions and help the two powers confront each other without conflict.

The general also met briefly later in the day with U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Henry Shelton before getting down to detailed talks on Tuesday with Slocombe on military-to-military exchanges during the coming year.

Xiong is to meet Cohen on Wednesday at the end of his talks, defense officials said.

Cohen last visited China in January 1998. He planned to do so again in 1999 but that trip was scrapped after Beijing cut military ties on the heels of the May 7 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by U.S. jets during NATO's air war against Serbia.

U.S. and NATO officials said that was an accident, but China charged it was intentional and the bombing resulted in major anti-U.S. demonstrations in China and a stoning of the American embassy in Beijing.

The United States has said the bombing was a result of the Central Intelligence Agency supplying outdated maps of Belgrade to U.S. mission planners, and Xiong was expected to press for proof that whoever was responsible would be punished, which China demanded.

Among the most controversial issues between the two countries is Taiwan and continuing U.S. arms support for Taipei despite U.S. recognition of Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China.

U.S. officials last week declined to confirm or deny a Washington Times report that Taiwan had asked to buy four sophisticated U.S. Aegis destroyers. Such ships are equipped with the latest high-tech equipment for defense against large numbers of attack aircraft and cruise missiles.

The ships can also be equipped with weapons for use against attacking strategic missiles such as those arrayed by China against Taiwan, but such a sale would be unlikely to include that defense capability.

The State Department official said the Chinese delegation brought up Taiwan. ``Pickering and Holum reiterated longstanding U.S. policy on Taiwan, strongly emphasizing the need for cross-strait dialogue and peaceful resolution of differences, as well as our commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act,'' he said. The act provides for U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

Without giving details, Beijing earlier this month said it was seriously concerned over reports that President Clinton planned large arms sales to Taiwan this year ahead of the November U.S. presidential elections.

The China Times newspaper also reported in Taipei in November 1999 that Taiwan was seeking Aegis destroyers, upgraded Patriot and even more advanced air defense missiles, submarines and long-range early warning radar.

Other reports in Taiwan have said that government was looking for long-range AIM-120 air-to-air missiles.

---

China, U.S. try to restart relationship

USA Today
01/24/00
By Andrea Stone,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsmon05.htm

WASHINGTON -- A top Chinese general met with senior Pentagon officials Monday in the first effort to resume military talks since they were abruptly halted after the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last May.

This week's three-day visit by Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of staff and intelligence director of the People's Liberation Army, isn't expected to nudge either side on divisive issues such as Taiwan and arms proliferation. But the talks could thaw relations enough to pave the way for future high-level exchanges.

If they do, Defense Secretary William Cohen could visit Beijing later this year, with Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian making a reciprocal trip to Washington.

Cohen will meet with Xiong Wednesday. Cohen was to have traveled to China in June, but the trip was canceled after the embassy bombing. He last visited Beijing in January 1998.

A senior White House official said the talks will focus on military relations. Though they will include a broader exchange of views on Asian regional and strategic issues, they aren't aimed at resolving those issues, the official said.

"This meeting symbolizes and marks a step in a process in re-establishing a normal exchange between the United States and China," he said.

Analysts say Xiong is certain to protest U.S. plans for regional and national missile defense systems as well as a possible sale of four Aegis destroyers to Taiwan. U.S. officials are expected to object to China's deployment of new missiles near the Taiwan Strait and to its sale of ballistic missile technology to Iran.

But it isn't clear what the two sides can agree to discuss in future exchanges. Military-to-military contacts with China have been relatively limited compared to contacts with other countries.

Last year, conservatives in Congress pushed through new restrictions on Pentagon contacts with China. The restrictions, added to a defense authorization bill, were prompted by concerns that past visits by Chinese officers to U.S. ships and installations had revealed too much about U.S. strategy and capabilities.

Others critics cited charges of nuclear spying and illegal campaign contributions, which were allegedly funneled to President Clinton's re-election campaign by one of Xiong's officers.

-------- india

SOUTH ASIA
A Bomb is Born

Newsweek
Newsweek International,
January 24, 2000
http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/dept/vu/a43146-2000jan18.htm

Pakistan has two missile programs, which wasn't known until recently. They're racing each other for money and prestige." -George Perkovich

No westerner has come TO know the nuclear frontier in South Asia better than George Perkovich. His new book, "India's Nuclear Bomb," offers startling insights on how and why Nehru, the great peacemaker, and his chief scientist Homi Bhabha began preparing the nuclear option as early as the 1950s. Perkovich is director of the Secure World Program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and debriefed many top Indian officials to shed new light on this top-secret field. He breaks ground on the dueling 1998 nuclear tests in South Asia, and reveals an internal arms race in Pakistan. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Tony Emerson in New York. Excerpts:

EMERSON: You draw a picture of Nehru as much more hardheaded than popularly believed.

PERKOVICH: He was. He made so many speeches where he said, in seemingly categorical terms, we're not going to build the bomb. On the other hand, he was knowingly working with Bhabha, who was developing a capability that could produce a bomb. Nehru was hardheaded and shrewd and did not want to forestall an option they might want down the road.

How did Bhabha become the unchallenged czar of the bomb?

This is very important, and it's a problem to this day. Here was this charismatic, brilliant physicist, educated in Cambridge. He has offers at Princeton and other places. He comes back to India and says, "Look, I'm willing to stay here, but I want to create this grand nuclear establishment and you, the government, have to endow me with the resources." The government was glad to have someone who could put India on the map, technologically. Nehru essentially gave Bhabha carte blanche. Nuclear policy was made between those two over dinner. There were no checks and balances.

And that pattern still holds?

Essentially, yes. If you chart through the '60s, '70s and '80s, the scientists have been on their own. Bhabha was interested in nuclear explosives as a sign of prowess, not as a military instrument.

You argue that it's "supercilious" for India to downplay the threat from Pakistan. Why?

India wants to be seen as an emerging great power, like China. It diminishes India's sense of self-regard to be equated with small and incompetent Pakistan. There's real resistance to U.S. officials who say, "You really have to work on this relationship with Pakistan." The Indians say, "Why do you always equate us with Pakistan? Don't you realize we're vastly superior to Pakistan?" The Americans who know this say, "This is nuts. You just lost hundreds of men [last summer] to Pakistan in Kargil. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and they're aimed at you."

Is Pakistan still ahead in the missile race?

Pakistan today has a greater capacity to put nuclear warheads on missiles and launch them tomorrow than India does. Pakistan has two competing missile programs, which wasn't known until recently. The A.Q. Khan Labs have the Ghauri missile, assisted by North Korea. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Organization has missiles, too, assisted from China. They're racing each other for money and prestige, for the title of the great providers of Pakistan's strategic might. That raises the threat to India, because the Pakistanis are under pressure to go forward.

So is Pakistan the problem?

You've got scientists in Pakistan who are out of control, especially A.Q. Khan. He's kind of a mad scientist. He makes outrageous statements. He's doing business with North Korea, procuring missiles. He's a bad dude. One of the key questions for Musharraf Parvez, the new leader, is whether he can rein this guy in. In India you've got much more sober scientists, but the government is struggling to figure out how you put limits on these guys. They're national heroes.

Is it true that the 1998 tests were weaker than India claimed?

The yield of the 1974 tests was much lower than India claimed, so 1998 must have been lower, because India used '74 as a benchmark. No one doubts India has a bomb, but this is about comparative manhood. Indian scientists are upset that their prowess has been questioned-especially by white scientists in the U.S. whom they perceive to be racially motivated.

Where does the arms race go from here?

In April of '98, India does one missile test. So Pakistan does two. India then tests five nuclear weapons; Pakistan claims they tested six. They didn't really, but claim to. That's the mentality: anything you can do, I can do one better. Leaders in both countries say they don't want an arms race, but they have done nothing to avoid one. You're going to see more missile tests, and there will be leaks at some point that Pakistan has warheads either on its missiles or standing right by the missiles. They're creeping toward a situation like what we and the Soviets had, where you have forces on alert that are ready to go on a moment's notice. That's where it gets real dangerous in South Asia.

-------- iraq

Iraq: IAEA Experts Inspect Uranium Supplies

Radio Free Europe
24 January 2000
By Charles Recknagel
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/01/F.RU.000124125828.html

Prague, International Atomic Energy Agency experts began an inspection of nuclear materials in Iraq on Saturday. The inspection of Iraq's uranium stocks is the first since UN arms monitors left Iraq more than a year ago but is unrelated to UN demands for detailed weapons inspections. RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel reports on what the team will do.

Prague, 24 January 2000 (RFE/RL) -- The team from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is conducting a week-long checkup of Iraq's uranium supplies to assure they have not been diverted to weapons-development programs.

The visit is the first by UN nuclear inspectors to Iraq since all UN arms monitors were pulled out of the country in December 1998.

But both sides have made it clear that the IAEA visit is quite apart from the disputed monitoring of Iraqi weapons programs ordered by the UN following the 1991 Gulf War.

RFE/RL spoke by telephone with Hans Meyer, a spokesman of the Vienna-based IAEA, to learn more about what the agency's inspectors will do.

Meyer says that the key task of the five-person team -- which arrived in Baghdad last Friday and starts work Saturday -- will be to check the whereabouts of Iraq's stockpile of some 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium. It will also verify the whereabouts of several tons of natural and depleted uranium. Those stockpiles are not weapons-grade materials and are distinct from the plutonium and highly enriched uranium removed from Iraq by UN arms inspectors after the Gulf War.

Our correspondent asked Meyer why Iraq maintains the stockpiles of non-weapons grade uranium. He says that the IAEA has never determined Baghdad's precise purpose.

"This is very difficult to answer. They had this material for a long time and it can be used for scientific purposes, it could have been used for further enrichment [for nuclear reactor fuel]. I only can say that the material is there, it came from abroad and we have had it under our inspection all the time."

Iraq prior to the Gulf war had two functioning nuclear reactors. One was Russian-designed and the other was a small French-built facility replacing a larger one destroyed in a 1981 air attack by Israel. But both those nuclear plants were destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War and have never been rebuilt.

The current IAEA visit comes under the framework of an international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), to which Iraq and other countries with nuclear energy programs are signatories. The treaty provides for annual checkups by the IAEA of the countries' nuclear materials to assure they are not enriched for use in making nuclear warheads.

Meyers says that the IAEA inspectors will verify that Iraq's stocks have not been diverted to weapons development during the last 12 months.

"The inspectors have to verify that this material is there and has not been diverted. When our team left in the middle of December 1998, all these drums in which this material is stored had been sealed and also the storage building where this material is stored. So, the first thing our inspectors have to do is inspect and verify that all the seals are not tampered with, that they are unbroken, and that they are there. [The inspectors] have measurement equipment with them to measure also the percentage of enrichment [to confirm] that uranium is there, that the uranium hasn't been replaced by some yellow powder."

The IAEA accounting of Iraq's uranium stocks is particularly important to the international community because Baghdad is known to have sought enriched uranium to secretly develop nuclear weapons. Meyer says IAEA inspectors found evidence of those programs when they uncovered greater amounts of highly enriched uranium in Iraq after the Gulf War than could reasonably be used by its limited nuclear power and research facilities.

"There were some 150 tons of highly enriched uranium which we have, between 1990 and 1994, removed out of the country. Only a very small percentage of it was manufactured, or enriched, in Iraq. Iraq was in 1990 just a the beginning of enriching to a higher percentage of uranium [for generating energy]. Iraq had a completely separate, secret enrichment program and a program to get uranium, highly enriched uranium, for a bomb in a separate, secret way."

Under the NPT, the current IAEA inspection was originally scheduled to take place last month. But Meyer says the schedule is somewhat flexible and the current delay is not considered serious by the agency. He attributes it mainly to the conjunction of Ramadan and Christmas holidays slowing arrangements for the visit.

The current visit will satisfy the agency's basic "safeguarding" requirement under the NPT of assuring Iraq's low-enriched uranium stocks are all accounted for. But the IAEA has yet to be able to resume other functions in Iraq connected with its UN mandate following the Gulf War to assure Baghdad no longer has a nuclear weapons capability.

Meyers says the IAEA already has made great progress in dismantling Iraq's weapons facilities. But its program to detect any start-up of new nuclear weapons programs has been on-hold since UN arms monitors left Iraq 13 months ago.

"Mainly until 1994, we have really destroyed, removed and searched for what was there in the country, what was the infrastructure for an atomic bomb program. From then onwards, we have more and more moved to an ongoing monitoring system and we had at the end of this system, by 1998, we had some 300 sites in Iraq which were almost daily inspected [and] visited."

That system includes sensors placed in Iraq's riverways to monitor any increase in radioactivity that would come from water pollution associated with industrial processes to enrich uranium. Similarly, other sensors monitor Iraq's air quality and take dust samples.

But Meyer says that making that monitoring system operational again now will have to wait a final accord between the UN and Iraq on resuming comprehensive arms. And the prospects for such an accord remain uncertain.

The UN passed a resolution last month offering Baghdad a new arms monitoring regime but Iraq refused to accept it. The offer ties an easing of sanctions to full Iraqi cooperation in completing several outstanding disarmament tasks to be set forth by a new monitoring agency, UNMOVIC.

Analysts say the most pressing disarmament tasks center on Iraq's capabilities to produce biological and chemical weapons. Its capabilities for nuclear weapons are now considered to be severely reduced and to not be a priority for weapons inspectors.

---

U.N. Nuclear Inspectors Say Iraq Cooperating

Reuters
January 24, 2000 Filed at 7:37 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-nu.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The head of the first team of United Nations nuclear inspectors to visit Iraq since 1998 said on Monday Iraq was cooperating with its work.

Five experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors the peaceful use of nuclear energy under a 1968 treaty, arrived here on Friday to carry out routine checks of Iraq's nuclear and research plants.

``The Iraqi side is cooperating...and I hope that it will continue to do so,'' team head Ahmed Abu Zahra told reporters on the third day of inspections.

``The work is continuing and I cannot talk about results yet,'' he said, adding he expected the mission to end within the next two to three days.

The IAEA team has no connection with a suspended U.N. arms verification program in Iraq. The last international arms inspectors left Iraq in December, 1998 shortly before the United States and Britain launched air strikes in retaliation for Baghdad's failure to cooperate.

Baghdad has since refused to allow the arms inspectors to return and last month rejected a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for new arms inspections in return for easing sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Under the terms of a 1991 cease-fire, Iraq must rid itself of nuclear, chemical and biological arms as well as long-range missiles. The U.N. has to ensure that Baghdad is not in a position to acquire or manufacture such arms in the future.

Iraq has consistently denied trying to develop nuclear weapons but admitted carrying out related research.

Earlier this month, Iraq agreed to the annual IAEA inspection, saying it did so under the terms of the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iraq is a signatory.

-------- russia

MINATOM'S SECRET DEAL WITH SLOVAKIAN BANKRUPT FIRM
Russia is again serving as an international dump for nuclear waste

URGENT! PRESS-RELEASE
Anti-Nuclear Campaign, Socio-Ecological Union, http://www.ecoline.ru/antinuclear
Anti-Nuclear Campaign, ECODEFENSE!, http://www.ecodefense.baltnet.ru
Moscow, January 24

For more information, call: Vladimir Slivyak - (095) 278-4642, or (0112) 448443 e-mail: anc@ecoline.ru

Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) and Slovakia have signed a new contract to reprocess nuclear fuel from the Bogunitse nuclear power plant. According to the contract, about ten trainloads of rradiated fuel from the Slovakian plant would be shipped to Russia, to the Mayak facility near helyabinsk, located in the most radioactively contaminated region in the world. The contract is worth 8 billion Slovakian crowns (about $200 million). The amount of nuclear waste "sold" to Russia would be about 300 metric tons. Minatom's representative in the deal is the Tenex company; the Slovakian side is represented by Slovak Electricity Utilities SE.

At the end of 1999, the Slovakian company was declared bankrupt, that is, it cannot pay Minatom or its representative for the deal. SE indirectly demonstrated its inability to pay in its announcement that payment for the contract would be made by writing off a portion of Russia's debt to Slovakia, which is about $1 billion. Since SE is a governmental company, this in fact means that Slovakia does not have money for such a contract in its budget. According to Slovakia's Energy Strategy, approved during the first week of 2000, the total cost of shipping nuclear waste to Russia equals approximately $6 billion, while the alternative option "storage on its own territory" would be only $1.7 billion.

On January 11, Slovakia's Deputy Prime Minister for the Economy, Ivan Miklos, stated that the plan of shipping nuclear waste to Russia was harmful. Only the timely intervention of the Ministry of Economics was able to halt fulfillment of the contract. (TASR, BBC) It is only thanks to this announcement that the existence of the contract came to light. As yet, information about its signing and further details have not been made public.

Waste transport will not benefit either Russia or Slovakia. At the same time, it creates the risk of new accidents during transport: according to Minatom's own statistics, 43% of all accidents in the nuclear complex occur during transport. In addition, nuclear fuel reprocessing is one of the most dangerous parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. The most serious accident in the history of the Soviet nuclear industry occurred at Mayak's reprocessing plant, to which the Slovakian spent fuel would be sent. In 1957, an explosion at Mayak caused radioactive releases to the environment that were, by various estimates, 2.5 to 10 times those of Chernobyl.

"The plan to import nuclear waste into Russia is economically and environmentally dangerous. In Slovakia they understand this, but not yet in Russia," said Vladimir Sliviak, coordinator of the Anti-Nuclear Campaign of the Socio-Ecological Union (the largest environmental organization in Eurasia, bring together about 300 community-based groups). "The government should stop Minatom, which has reached a state of insanity, turning itself into the world's nuclear dustbin."

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Russia moots joint missile defence system with China

The Hindu
01/24/00
By Vladimir Radyuhin
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/01/24/stories/03240006.htm

MOSCOW, JAN. 23. Russia may go for a joint missile defence system with China and allow it to use a Russian space-based navigation system for military purposes.

The two proposals, which would extend defence cooperation between the two nations to outer space, were discussed during a visit to Russia by China's Defence Minister, Mr. Chi Haotian, last week.

The development of a joint regional missile shield is ``one of several possible counter-measures we can take in case the United States violates the ABM treaty,'' a senior officer at Russia's Defence Ministry told the Moscow Times daily.

The 1972 U.S.-Soviet Union treaty bans deployment of a national missile defence by either of the two nuclear powers, allowing each side one limited system protecting one site. Washington has been pressing Moscow to have the treaty amended to allow the U.S. military to expand its anti-ballistic missile system so it could shoot down lone missiles fired by ``rogue states'' such as North Korea.

Russia fears that the U.S. is, in fact, seeking to deprive it of the capability to deliver massive retaliation. Moscow says it will abandon both START I and II nuclear arms reduction treaties if the U.S. violates the ABM accord. The threat has not impressed Washington, which thinks Russia will have to scrap much of its aging nuclear missile arsenal anyway and does not have money to replace them with new missiles. Washington has a far better reason to feel concerned over Russia's initiative to build a joint missile defence system with China and share with it its advanced space-based navigation system, GLONASS.

GLONASS, or Global Navigation Satellite System, like its U.S. equivalent NAVSTAR, enables ships, planes and ground vehicles to pinpoint their location anywhere in the world. The difference between civilian and military applications is in the degree of accuracy. The military uses satellite navigation to guide missiles and rockets to their targets.

Russia's Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the military-defence complex, Mr. Ilya Klebanov, said he had offered the visiting Chinese defence chief the use of GLONASS for civilian purposes. But according to the Izvestia daily, the two sides discussed ``possible joint use of GLONASS in the interests of the defence agencies of the two countries.''

Access to Russia's ABM technologies and global satellite navigation could dramatically enhance China's defence capability. This would be a far more worrying development for the U.S. than Russia's sales to China of the S-300 anti-aircraft system or the SU-27 and SU-30 fighter jets.

However, analysts said Moscow was probably using its new offers to China as a bargaining chip in its talks with the West over Chechnya, economic aid and debt restructuring. Russia made new defence offers to China a week after vowing to resume ``military- technical cooperation'' with Iran suspended under U.S. pressure four years ago.

``(The acting President, Mr. Vladimir) Putin is a pragmatic politician and he may be ready for a trade-off with the West,'' said Mr. Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

Moscow is anxious to keep the West from introducing economic sanctions against Russia over its military campaign in Chechnya, to persuade the IMF and World Bank to unfreeze their suspended loans and to get Western creditors to write off or restructure Russia's $ 160-billion debt.

Mr. Pukhov says the West appears to be responding to signals from the Kremlin, making conciliatory statements and sending a string of envoys to Moscow. The U.S. Secretary of State, Mrs. Madeleine Albright, set the tone last week by describing Mr. Putin as a ``model'' Russian President ``determined to move reform forward.'' Mrs. Albright will meet Mr. Putin later this week, hot on the heels of the Italian and German Foreign Ministers who were in Moscow last week.

The NATO Secretary-General, Mr. George Robertson, is also expected in Moscow next month. After visiting Chechnya last week, a fact-finding delegation from the Council of Europe backed away from demanding an immediate suspension of Russia from the Council.

Moscow insists no formal agreement was reached with the Chinese Defence Minister, Mr. Chi Haotian, during his visit to Moscow last week on a joint ABM system and joint use of GLONASS. The Russian proposals are likely to be further discussed in Beijing, where the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Klebanov, is scheduled to go in February. Moscow gives the West a choice: either ignore Chechnya and revert to normal economic and political interaction or face the threat of Russia supplying China, Iran and other Third World countries with more arms and high-end defence technologies.

``Unlike India, China is a recognised nuclear power and there're many nuclear and missile technologies that Russia could hand over to Beijing,'' Mr. Pukhov of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said.

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Reformers to continue protest of Putin's deal

Washington Times
January 24, 2000
By Jamie Dettmer
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/world1-01242000.htm

MOSCOW - Dismayed reformers vowed on the weekend to continue their boycott of the lower house of parliament, or State Duma, denouncing a deal between the Communists and the party most loyal to acting President Vladimir Putin as a "shameless sellout."

They also said last week's Kremlin-engineered deal that left a Communist as Duma speaker might prompt an electoral alliance between the only two credible Putin rivals for the March 26 presidential election.

Mr. Putin has generally avoided comment on the deal, which left Gennady Seleznyov as speaker and split the top committee chairmanships between the Communists and the pro-Kremlin Unity party.

In his first public statement yesterday, the acting president maintained he had not tried to influence the parties making the deal. "I do not think it is a crisis," he said on Russia's RTR television. "There is nothing dramatic in this."

But behind the scenes Mr. Putin has been negotiating to head off any resulting electoral alliance between the center-left Fatherland-All Russia bloc of former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and the social democratic Yabloko party. Among others, he met on the weekend with former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, now a deputy allied to Yabloko.

Yabloko's leader, economist Grigory Yavlinsky, has already announced he will challenge Mr. Putin for president.

Mr. Primakov had until the weekend seemed reluctant to take on Mr. Putin, the odds-on favorite to win the March election. But that may change, especially if the reform-minded Union of Right Wing Forces now withdraws its support from the acting president.

Kremlin sources say that in his meeting with Mr. Stepashin, Mr. Putin emphasized that the deal with the Communists would not halt economic reform but was forged only to provide the Kremlin with substantial tactical control of the lower house.

Unity's leader in the Duma, Boris Gryzlov, has publicly pressed that message too. "The interests of Unity and Communists coincided," Mr. Gryzlov told Interfax news service. "There is no long-term alliance with the Communists."

Apart from giving Mr. Putin majority control in the Duma, the deal had two other aims, say Kremlin sources.

Mr. Putin was determined to deny his archenemy Mr. Primakov the speakership, a position he could have used either as a platform for an election effort or later to boost his political influence during a Putin presidency.

Also, the Kremlin wanted to end any chance of the Communists, the largest party in the Duma, backing Mr. Primakov for president. Until last week, Mr. Primakov and the Communists had been holding intense discussions about Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov ending his presidential run and supporting Mr. Primakov.

The Kremlin seems surprised, however, to find that as a result of the deal it has three former prime ministers - Mr. Primakov, Mr. Stepashin and the youthful Union of Right Wing Forces leader Sergei Kiriyenko - ranged against Mr. Putin.

One puzzling aspect of the deal is why the Union, which has been staunch in its support of Mr. Putin, was left out in the cold. A handful of committee posts would probably have bought its compliance and persuaded their leader to remain in the government fold.

One theory circulating here is that Boris Berezovsky, the shady tycoon and Kremlin insider, wanted them excluded.

Mr. Berezovsky, who is credited with having dreamed up the hastily assembled Unity bloc to undermine Mr. Primakov's party, may see Mr. Kiriyenko and his backer, reformer Anatoly Chubais, as rivals for power within the Kremlin.

Mr. Kiriyenko certainly believes this, which would suggest that Mr. Berezovsky remains a powerful force within Mr. Putin's Kremlin. That could be bad news for serious economic reform and for an opening of the economy to real competition.

The entire deal with the Communists has exposed Mr. Putin to charges that he represents a "false center" and that he is ready to engage in the kind of back-room deals that undermined reform in the past.

"I want to see how this alliance votes on START II," the treaty to reduce strategic arms, said Mr. Kiriyenko. "I want to see how this alliance votes on tax laws. I want to see how it votes on property issues."

Both the Union of Right Wing Forces and Yabloko remain defiant about the Duma boycott despite the Kremlin's weekend efforts to break it up.

"Our position regarding the boycott of sessions remains the same," said the Union's Boris Nemtsov.

"Everything remains the same - there are no changes in our position. We are awaiting proposals from the so-called 'big factions,' " said Yabloko's Mr. Yavlinsky.

The three boycotting parties, representing about one-third of the seats in the chamber, are conferring daily but remain divided on numerous issues and have spoken only informally about whether to nominate a common presidential candidate.

If they can agree on a single candidate, Mr. Putin would remain the clear favorite but would have a fight on his hands.

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Decommissisoned But Dangerous?
The nuclear industry starts a difficult new chapter.

Washington Post
Monday, January 24, 2000; Page A21
By Arjun Makhijani
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/24/010l-012400-idx.html

A significant number of older nuclear power plants are approaching the end of their useful lives and must be decommissioned, a process with profound environmental consequences, because the innards of reactors become radioactive during decades of operation. The central questions in decommissioning involve how clean the sites are going to be and how to dispose of the radioactive waste.

Tens of billions of dollars are at stake, because the standards apply to some 70 nuclear power plant and waste disposal sites. Under present rules, some decommissioning funds that utilities have been required by law to put in anticipatory escrow over the years may be adequate or have some surpluses. Others may fall far short. Under more lax standards, plant owners could pocket hundreds of millions of these saved funds were regulators to allow it.

It is therefore no accident that we have heard the champions of the nuclear industry pooh-poohing the dangers of low levels of radiation, saying that a little bit of radiation doesn't hurt people or that one would get a larger dose by moving from Washington to Denver (because of the higher altitude) than by living next to a nuclear dump, etc. In this view, the public has an irrational phobia about radiation that could cost society billions in needless expenditures.

Electricity deregulation is adding to the pressure for looser standards. The prospect of deregulation has led some utilities to opt out of nuclear power. Power plants that cost a billion dollars or more to build are being sold for about $100 million or less. The plants come complete with decommissioning funds of hundreds of millions of dollars. Lax standards could result in a handsome return on investment.

The Department of Energy (DOE), which owns the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, also has an interest in easing standards to minimize cleanup costs. In 1996 the DOE undermined the process to create national cleanup standards; then it proposed to leave 40 times more plutonium in the soil after cleanup at its Rocky Flats plant near Denver than its own guidelines allowed for areas in the Marshall Islands contaminated by nuclear testing. (It backed down under intense public pressure.)

Current radiation protection standards are not too strict. Indeed, studies show that radiation may be more dangerous than assumed in present regulations. Further, current rules are made for "standard man"--a 154-pound male--and therefore are not as protective of, say, children or developing fetuses for some kinds of water contamination.

Some studies do show no damage at low radiation doses. They provide the basis for the view that present standards should be relaxed.

For several reasons, science has so far been unable to resolve the controversy. First, cancer is a common disease, with a variety of causative and contributory factors, such as genetic vulnerability, diet, smoking and exposure to natural and artificial radioactivity and toxins. It is often impossible to extricate the effects of any particular exposure from this complex mix.

In 1990 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), after reviewing a large number of human and animal studies, recommended models according to which every new exposure, no matter how small, creates some increase in cancer risk.

Industry talk brushes this aside as outdated. The NAS is undertaking a new review, due to be completed in three years. It is becoming one of the arenas for the controversy.

Second, many radiation exposure records are deeply flawed, vitiating risk studies and making it difficult to separate the good studies from the bad.

Third, the government and its nuclear weapons contractors have, under the guise of national security, sometimes covered up and even lied about radiation exposure, as The Post's recent reporting on the Paducah, Ky., uranium-enrichment plant has shown. Paducah is not a solitary case. Obtaining the best extant data in the face of such behavior generally has not been feasible. This makes some independent studies less reliable than they might otherwise be.

Public fears of radiation are not irrational. Rather, they are a reasonable response of people who, in the face of notoriously inexact science, have chosen not to trust those who have egregiously and frequently betrayed them. Before considering a relaxation of radiation protection standards, policymakers should discuss how they might restore public trust.

The writer is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

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New thinking on missile defense

Washington Times
January 24, 2000
By James Hackett
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/comment1-01242000.htm

So you thought the Cold War was over? You would never know it. Since mid-October Russia has carried out a flurry of missile flight tests and satellite launches, even while fighting a ground war in Chechnya.

First came the flight test of an SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), followed by a test of one of the 100 missile interceptors that form a defensive anti-ballistic missile ring around Moscow, then the test of an SS-21 theater ballistic missile, and finally the launch of two SS-N-20 strategic missiles from a Typhoon submarine in the Barents Sea north of Murmansk.

Not done yet, on Dec. 14 Moscow conducted a flight test of its new mobile ICBM, the Topol-M, with Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the launch. Mr. Putin, referring to Western opposition to Russian attacks on Chechnya, told the missile troops a dangerous trend has emerged as some countries, under the mantle of international organizations, try to interfere in the internal affairs of others. Moscow television reported Russia's new leader as saying "we will not tolerate this," and then adding that Russia has military levers at its disposal.

Those levers include the new Topol-M nuclear missile, the second regiment of which Moscow deployed in December (the U.S. has not deployed an ICBM since 1988). Russia also is building a large new ABM radar in the adjoining republic of Belarus, and has made it a "top priority" to extend the service life of enough nuclear weapons to keep six warheads on each existing multiple warhead missile, and to add more warheads to the new Topol-M missiles if a decision is made to do so.

Also in December, the commander of Strategic Missile Forces proudly announced that Moscow had completed its 1999 satellite program, launching 35 satellites into orbit. Russia then proceeded to launch two more, a naval intelligence satellite to monitor surface ships and submarines down to 180 feet, and an Oko early warning spacecraft to join three others watching for U.S. missile launches. Col. Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev also revealed that Russia has adopted a new nuclear strategy that allows a nuclear first strike if Russian forces are attacked with chemical or biological weapons, or if they are outnumbered.

Commenting on this significant change in Russia's nuclear policy, Vladimir Sokirko, writing in the paper Moskovsky Komsomolets, noted that the new Topol-M is "not just a deterrent, but also a massive nuclear stick to frighten the whole world." It is, he added, "enough to make people treat us like a great power." Even in Russia, nuclear missiles are mainly to gain respect and intimidate others.

Frozen in Cold War thinking, the Kremlin seems determined to spend its scarce resources on modernizing its strategic nuclear missiles, maintaining large numbers of nuclear warheads, and producing satellites to keep an eye on the United States.

The concept of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is alive and well in Moscow today. But the attitude of the Clinton administration, clinging to a policy of mutual terror and a defenseless America under the ABM treaty, is not much better.

New thinking is badly needed. The military news of the past decade is the growing importance of satellites and space systems, and the emergence of "smart" bombs and missiles that can achieve pinpoint accuracy with the aid of satellite navigation. Pinpoint accuracy with conventional weapons can substitute for nuclear weapons. It replaces a blunderbuss with a rifle equipped with a telescopic lens. What's more, smart weapons can actually be used, while nuclear weapons almost certainly cannot.

Opponents of missile defense invariably claim that if a missile lands in America "we will nuke them." But not if it is an accident or an unauthorized launch. Not if it is unclear what group launched it. And what if it means the death of millions of innocent civilians? The president deserves better alternatives. Advancing technology is providing them. Threats now can be contained and countered with a synergistic combination of missile defenses, highly accurate smart weapons, and a small nuclear deterrent in reserve.

The recent missed intercept in the missile defense program does not reduce the need. Misses are part of the normal development process, which must continue. The deployment of a national missile defense combined with a robust non-nuclear force armed with smart weapons could allow the U.S. to safely make deep reductions in nuclear forces. It is time to bury the Cold War, abandon the illusory "stability" of nuclear terror, and move toward a combination of defenses and mainly non-nuclear offenses.

The administration should pursue such a course and drag Moscow along with it. It will make the world a safer place.

James T. Hackett is a contributing writer to The Washington Times based in San Diego.

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Highlights of Budget Proposal

Associated Press
January 23, 2000 Filed at 12:48 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Budget-List.html

Highlights of already released details of President Clinton's final budget proposal, going to Congress on Feb. 7:

HEALTH: Spend $110 billion over 10 years in the biggest federal increase in health coverage since the creation of Medicare in 1965. Clinton would provide health insurance to at least 5 million of the 44 million Americans not now covered, create a $3,000 tax credit for families providing long-term care and allow workers as young as 55 buy into Medicare.

TAX CUTS: Provide relief to millions of middle-class taxpayers now required to pay the alternative minimum tax, enacted in 1969 to ensure that the wealthy do not escape paying income tax. Clinton also will reintroduce a proposal from last year to create universal savings accounts to encourage retirement savings by low and middle-income workers.

POVERTY ASSISTANCE: Spend $21 billion over 10 years to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides annual payments to 19 million working families at or near the poverty line. Clinton wants to increase the maximum credit for families with three or more children by $500 to $4,491 annually. He also wants to issue 120,000 new housing vouchers, expanding a program now used by 1.4 million low-income tenants, and to use tax incentives to draw businesses to poor neighborhoods.

COLLEGE: Spend $31 billion over 10 years to provide a new tax cut that would allow families to claim either a tax deduction or a tax credit on up to $10,000 in tuition and fees yearly to pay for college, graduate school or training programs.

SCHOOLS: Spend $1.3 billion for loans and grants to help finance 8,300 school-renovation projects and resubmit a proposal to provide $3.7 billion over five years and help generate $24.8 billion in tax-credit bonds to modernize up to 6,000 schools.

MILITARY: Add $5 billion over the next five years for housing allowances to military members who live off-base, with the goal of paying the entire cost of off-base housing within five years. Clinton also will ask for authority to close more bases starting in 2003 and increase spending on a national missile defense system by $2.2 billion in 2001.

GUN ENFORCEMENT: Spend $280 million in the 2001 budget to begin a program to boost gun safety and enforcement, including grants to state and local governments for 1,000 new prosecutors to focus on gun crime.

FARM: Increase by $1.3 billion federal spending on farm conservation, including $600 million in payments to farmers who act to prevent erosion.

---

Once upon a time

Washington Times
January 24, 2000
Inside the Beltway
John McCaslin
http://www.washtimes.com/national/beltway-01242000.htm

Overwhelmed briefly by politics, we ducked into the children's section of Borders bookstore on 18th Street NW to reread "Green Eggs and Ham."

What is America coming to?

In the way of Dr. Seuss was the life story of Bill Bradley, former New Jersey senator and 2000 presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. The small book's print was so large it resembled the type of story parents read to their children at bedtime.

Except in this sleepy-time tale, there's no green ham, Cat in the Hat, Yertle the Turtle, or our Seuss favorite, "You're Only Old Once."

Official position

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin, asked to remark last week about the deadline for the latest round of Israeli and Palestinian peace talks, replied: "It's certainly our view that mid-February is fast approaching."

Greyber's government

Maryland has a rather unusual candidate for the Republican nomination for the Senate.

Howard David Greyber, a U.S. Navy officer in wartime, is a Ph.D. physicist who helped design our thermonuclear weapons at Livermore National Laboratory in the 1950s.

Later, the Potomac resident was involved in space research, and during the 1980s, with the Defense Intelligence Agency specializing on foreign nuclear-weapons research, prepared intelligence briefings for Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger.

Mr. Greyber graduated from a unique science high school, Stuyvesant in New York City, which requires passing an exam to enter. That challenged him, he tells this column, and forever changed his life.

"There are very few such public high schools in this nation of 275 million people," says the physicist, who also worked on the Viking Mars project. "Stuyvesant produced three Nobel Prize winners, and its sister school, Bronx High School of Science, produced five."

Which leads us to Mr. Greyber's political platform, if one can call it that. He proposes the federal government, over the next seven years, fund and build 435 public high schools of science, like Stuyvesant. There would be one in each congressional district - "locally controlled," he stresses.

"At a time of budget surpluses, the cost is reasonable," he says. "Building 63 such schools per year, at a cost of $3.8 billion per year, would cost less than $27 billion over seven years, about half the cost of the Apollo Space Project when corrected for inflation."

Mr. Greyber says Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, liked his idea, although the latter expressed concern about possible meddling by federal bureaucrats.

He feels the science schools would "exert a strong positive influence on all public education" as parents in feeder elementary and middle schools demand courses be improved so their children have a reasonable chance to pass the entrance exam.

"Thus, revolutionizing American public school education," the physicist explains. Mr. Greyber's own three children hold M.D., M.B.A. and M.A. academic degrees.

"President John Adams wrote, 'The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of the rich men in the country.'

"For our own national security in the 21st century, the minds of our poor children, of all skin colors, are far too valuable to waste," he says.

He credits President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration, more than any other in recent years, for boldly passing the far-reaching National Defense Education Act, creating NASA, and establishing the post of presidential science adviser.

All sorts of fellows

The "Judicial Fellows" held their first annual meeting in the Powerscourt of the Phoenix Park Hotel last Friday.

Founded by then-Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in 1973, the program provides fellows an opportunity to study firsthand both the administrative machinery of the federal judiciary and the dynamics of inter-branch relations.

The Judicial Fellows program draws outstanding individuals from diverse professions and academic backgrounds, including law, the social and behavioral sciences, public and business administration, systems research and analysis, communications and the humanities.

C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel to President Bush, is a Judicial Fellows alumnus.

Beltway, anybody?

Thanks to our readers for the several hundred additional definitions we never requested for "GOP" (explained historically in Friday's column).

"GOP stands for 'Gutless Old Prostitutes,' at least for this current crop in Congress," gripes Gene Burch of Temecula, Calif.

"I thought GOP stood for 'God's Only Party!' " says a far kinder Kerry Burrough.

While Pat Pyfrom of PLP Associates in Santa Monica, Calif., requests: "Now that you have explained 'GOP,' can you explain 'Beltway'? "

John McCaslin can be reached at 202/636-3284 or by e-mail at mccasl@twtmail.com.

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One Last Year at 1600

New York Times
January 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/00/01/24/editorial/24mon1.html

As he commented on the end of his seventh year in office last week, President Clinton professed to be "feeling good and grateful" about his time in the White House, and he spoke about his eagerness "to milk every last moment of every day." For all that, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seems to radiate an aura of isolation and missed opportunities these days. Presidential friends speak of his "lonely voice" on the telephone. Mr. Clinton's two closest political associates -- Vice President Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton -- do not want him hovering as they launch their new careers. The image of a home-alone presidency was reinforced when Mr. Clinton was asked if he felt mournful about starting his final year in the White House. "When I go in a room in the White House now I look around more carefully to make sure . . . that I've actually noticed something that I may not have seen." He added, "I wish I didn't have to sleep at all for a year."

Like all retiring presidents, Mr. Clinton will experience a cruelly abrupt loss of power at this time next year. But the winding down of this presidency -- a 12-month process that began Thursday -- has its own special poignancy. Mr. Clinton entered office on a wave of generational optimism that was tamped down by incrementalism, triangulation, partisanship and the devastating X-factor of his own indiscipline. Nothing he said in his first Inaugural Address about breaking the hold of special interests in Washington will be quoted as often as "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Friends and political allies speak with increasing openness about how he disappointed them. Historians are beginning to categorize Mr. Clinton as a politician of splendid natural talent and some significant accomplishments who nonetheless missed the greatness that once seemed within his grasp. All this contributes to the wistful aura at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and to the president's obsessive determination to continue work on his legacy.

Mr. Clinton himself recently joked that given people's fondness for alliteration, "It's just one small step from legacy to lame duck." Yet he does not need Congress to add positive checkmarks to his record through executive actions on the environment and through international diplomacy. A lasting Middle East peace would be an indisputable accomplishment. Congressional Republicans will clearly resist the ambitious domestic agenda that Mr. Clinton is expected to lay out Thursday in his final State of the Union address. But by pushing for broader health-insurance coverage, expansion of the earned-income tax credit, Medicare drug benefits, a patients' bill of rights and a higher minimum wage, Mr. Clinton can keep himself in the thick of the political game for most of the campaign year. Some supporters would like to see him use the political freedom of this last roundup to take another crack at truly tough issues like gays in the military, gun control, campaign finance or a revival of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

The prospect of one more State of the Union address seems to have brightened the president's mood. He has promised some surprises beyond the items that have already been revealed. A graceful final year and the choice of a dignified post-presidential career could partially restore the respect Mr. Clinton squandered. Nothing that happens in the next 12 months, however, seems likely to alter the enduring puzzle of his life and a political career that aimed to bring fundamental change to Washington.

Why did the Arkansas boy who shook Jack Kennedy's hand and then achieved the dream inspired by that moment not do more with his hard-won opportunity? History will give him due credit for preserving peace, for presiding over prosperous times, for balancing the budget, ushering in welfare reform and pushing free trade. But Mr. Clinton, who aspired to be a social-legislation pioneer, has not so far achieved his transforming victory on health care. With seven years gone, he seems to have no guaranteed hold on the affections of the American people. He has not established a trademark leadership style that other presidential aspirants are eager to embrace. He will, to be sure, be remembered for stirring speeches and good intentions. But the betting today would have to be that the rooms and hallways that Mr. Clinton says he is trying to fix in his memory will always be haunted by sad questions about what might have been.

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U.S. Probes Remote Accessing of Los Alamos Computer

Washington Post
Monday, January 24, 2000; Page A02
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/24/047l-012400-idx.html

On numerous occasions in 1994, someone on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles used Wen Ho Lee's password to enter Los Alamos National Laboratory's computer system via the Internet.

Lee's attorneys say it was his daughter, Alberta, playing a computer game. But federal prosecutors, who are continuing to investigate the log-ins, are not so sure. They are trying to determine whether someone else at UCLA may have gained access to the U.S. nuclear secrets that Lee transferred from the classified, highly secure computer network at Los Alamos to a less secure, unclassified network.

Over a period of a year, Lee's password was used about 70 times to log in to the unclassified Los Alamos network from the UCLA campus. Investigators are examining whether it was merely a coincidence that three of those sessions took place within hours after Lee downloaded fresh batches of secrets to the unclassified computer.

Lee, a 60-year-old Taiwanese American physicist, is being held without bail at a federal prison in New Mexico on charges of mishandling classified information, a felony that could bring a life sentence. Prosecutors allege that in addition to putting secret files on the unclassified computer network, he copied the data onto portable tapes, seven of which are missing.

The government, however, has not charged Lee with passing secrets to any foreign country, and one of the major uncertainties of the case is whether Lee's actions harmed U.S. national security.

Lee's daughter, Alberta, who was a mathematics major at UCLA, has testified before a grand jury that she often used her father's password in 1993 and 1994 to get into a supercomputer at Los Alamos to play Dungeons and Dragons, a complicated computer game, according to her father's attorneys.

Investigators have questioned why a college student would need one of the world's most powerful supercomputers to play a game that was at the time accessible on UCLA's computers via the Internet. Lee's attorneys say that she wanted faster access provided by the Los Alamos computer to a Web site in Switzerland that brings together players from around the world. She was also set up to go through a computer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they added.

This portion of the government's case is "a red herring," one source close to the family said yesterday, pointing out that after six months of investigation there is still no evidence that any of the classified files were "hacked into" from an outside source.

At Lee's bail hearing in New Mexico last month, prosecutor Paula Burnett called Alberta Lee's explanation an "optional theory," noting that "there is no record of exactly what occurred at that point, so theories may abound."

Cheryl Wampler, a computer expert at Los Alamos, testified that on three days in 1994, just hours after Lee transferred secret files to the lab's unclassified network, someone used Lee's password and personal ID to get into that network via the Internet from various computers at UCLA. Two of the computers were in the university's math department, and the third was in a student activities building, a UCLA spokesman said.

Scott O. Bradner, a professor of computer science at Harvard University, said in an interview that using a supercomputer to play fantasy games might have offered several advantages over UCLA's system.

At the time Lee's daughter said she was using her father's system, college computer resources were often stretched, slowing system responses and making the games frustrating to play, Bradner said. At many schools, game playing was also "relegated to off hours." The Energy Department computer would have been much faster: "It's real hard to slow down a supercomputer."

Besides, he added, "using Daddy's big, bad supercomputer" was also "probably a big status thing."

According to government officials, the FBI has been trying since last June to determine whether anyone other than Lee's children was involved. "These were machines that were collectively used by many different people," Wampler testified.

Scott Larson, the FBI agent who supervised the computer investigation, testified that the Los Alamos computers in 1994 tracked all log-ins, but did not keep any record of what users did once they were inside the system. Without so-called gateway monitoring, he said, there is no record of what, if anything, might have been extracted via the Internet. However, he noted, "Anyone . . . having Dr. Lee's log-in ID and password . . . would be able to access and download" the nuclear material he had placed on the computer.

Larson said that Alberta Lee and her brother, Chung, had their father's password, but that there is no evidence that either of them accessed their father's secret files or gave the password to anyone else.

According to Larson, the security provisions in the Los Alamos computer system in 1993 and 1994 were so poor that "any file out on the unclassified network, whether it be on the supercomputer . . . or on work stations, was potentially vulnerable for capture."

By December 1998, when Lee logged on with his password from a computer in Taiwan, the security system had changed, and the FBI was able to track exactly which files he opened and what he did with them.

Larson testified that because of the repeated sessions over the Internet from UCLA and Taiwan, it is likely that some foreign intelligence agency stole Lee's password. "I have suspicion that his log-in and password has been captured," Larson said. "Whether it's been used or not, I don't know."

During the bail hearing, it also emerged that the FBI found two notebooks in which Lee wrote down his password; step-by-step instructions on how to make a tape on an unclassified workstation at Los Alamos; a list of the classified and unclassified files he had downloaded; and a summary of what was on each of the portable tapes he made.

He kept one of the notebooks at his office and the other at his home. Investigators would like to know why. But Lee so far has not explained many of his actions, including his file transfers and the making of his tapes, which he says he later destroyed.

Staff writer John Schwartz contributed to this report.

--------us nuc waste

Congress Returns to Work

Associated Press
January 24, 2000 Filed at 10:44 a.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Congress-Returns.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress is returning for a session in which patients' rights, prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries, gun control and tax cuts will be debated against a background of election-year politicking.

Both the House and Senate were convening today for the second half of the 106th Congress, although there will be little action until President Clinton delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session Thursday night.

The Senate has its first vote Wednesday, on whether to cut off debate on legislation -- pending from the end of the last session -- that would make it tougher for people to erase their debts in bankruptcy court.

The House has no votes scheduled this week. But there is a possibility that it could take up proposals to grant citizenship or U.S. residency to Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy at the center of a custody battle between U.S. and Cuban relatives, said John Feehery, spokesman for Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

John Czwartacki, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said the issue of the Cuban boy could also come before the Senate as early as Wednesday, depending on the outcome of the bankruptcy vote.

Feehery said the first items the House will take up beginning next week are GOP-backed plans to cut taxes, led off by a bill that would reduce the penalty paid by some two-earner married couples filing jointly. Other tax plans expected to see early action are one that would give tax credits to parents saving for their children's education and a proposal, supported by the White House, to give tax breaks for investments in the nation's neediest communities.

Also up for early House consideration is a measure, opposed by the administration, that would strengthen U.S.-Taiwanese security ties. The Senate may also return to legislation to establish a temporary storage site for nuclear power plant waste.

The Senate Banking Committee meets Wednesday to consider the renomination of Alan Greenspan to a fourth term as Federal Reserve chairman, and the Senate health committee will hear testimony on how to reduce medical errors and on Labor Department regulations governing people who work from their homes.

The new session opened with the defection of Rep. Virgil Goode, a second-term conservative Democrat from Virginia. His office said Goode, whose departure from the party was not a surprise, intends to become an independent.

He would join the House's only current independent, Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a liberal who usually votes with the Democrats. The House alignment would become 222 Republicans, 211 Democrats and two independents. Republicans hold a 55-45 majority in the Senate.

--------terrorism

A Million Protesters in Spain Denounce Terrorism's Return

New York Times
January 24, 2000
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/012400spain-bomb-protest.html

MADRID, Jan. 23 -- A million people marched here today in a protest against the Basque separatist group E.T.A., government officials said, two days after the government blamed the rebels for a bombing that killed an army officer and appeared to reignite separatist violence after a lull of 18 months.

Prime Minister José María Aznar and three former prime ministers led the long march that capped a weekend of demonstrations nationwide after two car bombings on Friday in Madrid. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The weekend protests almost uniformly scorned the rebels, underscoring the popular anger and fear touched off by the resumption of terrorism, apparently by the Basque group. But a pro-rebel march attracted 10,000 people on Saturday in the Basque city of Pamplona.

The government blames the rebels for causing 800 deaths in their 31-year struggle for Basque independence. Mr. Aznar said today that the fight against the rebels "will be difficult, tough and long."

But, he added, "although we'll suffer, we'll end up winning."

The government and rebels have blamed each other for failing to negotiate a lasting peace during the rebels' 14-month unilateral cease-fire. The Basque group called off the cease-fire late last year, raising fears of renewed violence.

A poll published today in the Madrid newspaper Diario 16 found that half of the 400 people surveyed wanted new peace talks, while 29 percent said that the police alone could defeat terrorism.

The march in Madrid, behind a banner that read "For Peace and Liberty. No to Terrorism," was the largest in the capital since July 1997, when an estimated 1.5 million people demanded an end to violence after the rebels killed a Basque town councilman.

E.T.A., whose initials in the Basque language stand for Basque Homeland and Freedom, had not made a fatal attack since June 1998.

The first of the two car bombs last Friday killed a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish army, Pedro Antonio Blanco García, 47.

The Interior Ministry today distributed photographs of two suspected rebels -- young men with close-cropped black hair -- who were reportedly seen at the site of the bombings.

Speaking in St. Peter's Square in Rome today, Pope John Paul II said, "I wish to express my deep pain over the news of the recent terrorist attack," in Spain, news agencies reported. The Vatican has previously condemned Basque violence.

Mr. Aznar marched today next to his opponent in the March 12 general elections, the Socialist opposition leader, Joaquín Almunia. They said little to each other, but they have agreed that stopping separatist violence should transcend party politics.

But the political fallout from the bombs on Friday continued in the northern Basque region, where the leader of the moderate Basque Nationalist Party, Xabier Arzalluz, accused the Madrid-based national parties of unfairly blaming him for the fatal attack.

"It seems as if we ourselves placed the bomb," Mr. Arzalluz complained, after his party was sharply criticized for merely suspending on Friday, and not fully breaking, its parliamentary deal for the support of a leftist Basque coalition, Euskal Herritarrok, that is widely considered to be the political wing of the rebels.

The march in central Madrid was so long that thousands of protesters reached the official destination in the Puerta del Sol square more than an hour after the political leaders had already left, after issuing a statement condemning the rebels.

"I'm not discouraged," said Esther Fernández, 25, a Madrid lawyer who has been to many protests against the rebels. "You have to have the desire and hope that this violence will end."

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Airborne Laser aircraft arrives at Wichita

AIR FORCE NEWS
Released: 24 Jan 2000
by Rich Garcia
Air Force Research Laboratory Public Affairs
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" globalnet@mindspring.com

WICHITA, Kan. (AFPN) -- A wide-bodied aircraft, which will soon be the world's first laser-armed aircraft, arrived here from Seattle to begin major modifications.

Over the next 18 months, this Airborne Laser -- a Boeing 747-400 freighter aircraft -- will undergo changes at the Boeing facility here. The most noticeable difference will be installation of a turret in the aircraft nose, from which a beam of laser light will emanate to destroy Scud-like missiles hundreds of miles away.

Additionally, the aircraft will be modified to accept a multi-megawatt-class chemical laser, specialized optics, and the computerized equipment that will allow the aircraft to spot a theater ballistic missile shortly after launch, to lock onto and to destroy it.

Designated the YAL-1A Attack Laser, it rolled off the Boeing assembly line in December. Under the current plan, testing in this phase of the program culminates in 2003, with the planned destruction of several theater ballistic missiles.

A seven-plane operational fleet could exist as early as 2009. The Airborne Laser System Program office is responsible for producing the YAL-1A. The office formed in 1993 at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., and is a major unit of Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles AFB, Calif.

Several key contractors are working under a $1.3 billion contract, and are instrumental in producing the YAL-1A. The initial cost-plus contract was awarded by the Air Force in November 1996, to Boeing Defense Group of Seattle.

Boeing will build the aircraft, manage systems integration, aircraft modifications, and develop battle management systems -- computers and software coupled to communications, intelligence and weapons-related instrumentation to detect, to engage and to defeat the attacking missiles.

Working with Boeing are two other contractors: TRW Space and Electronics Group of Redondo Beach, Calif., is developing the laser, and Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space of Sunnyvale, Calif., is in charge of beam- and fire-control development.

Another key organization is Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, also at Kirtland. For more than 20 years, the laboratory has been conducting research into technologies needed to make a defensive laser-carrying aircraft a reality. This includes invention of chemical oxygen-iodine laser that will be used on the YAL-1A and development of technologies to increase the distance laser light can travel through the atmosphere to destroy attacking missiles.

The $1.3 billion award, termed the Airborne Laser Program Definition and Risk Reduction contract, culminated a two-year concept definition phase in which Boeing competed with Rockwell International. Under contracts for $22 million each, the two companies defined their concepts for a high-energy airborne laser system.

A key element in success of the aircraft is the system's ability to sense and compensate for distorting atmosphere effects. To determine the impact of atmospheric effects, a series of experiments were conducted in 1994 and 1995. These tests involved a laser being fired from one plane to another. Specialized instrumentation received and measured the laser beam, identifying what the atmosphere would do to that beam traveling in a level (horizontal) path.

Additional testing has been at the North Oscura Peak site in the northern portion of White Sands Missile Range, N.M. This testing involved ranges and conditions that closely reflect operational situations.

In addition to understanding what the atmosphere could do to a laser beam, technologies were needed that could correct for those atmospheric distortions. Scientists at AFRL and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory worked out of astronomical facilities at Starfire Optical Range in the southeastern corner of Kirtland.

These researchers developed a system that uses lasers and computers to determine where distortions are. The computers then manage deformable optics: a mirror whose face can be altered hundreds of times per second to help compensate for distortions in the atmosphere.

For the Attack Laser, this technology offers a way to increase range of the laser beam through the air to destroy theater ballistic missiles. In actual battle, an airborne laser fleet could arrive on the scene within hours, ready to take defensive positions.

Two Attack Lasers would be flying around the clock, orbiting at about 40,000 feet, providing defense against attacking missiles. If the enemy were to launch a theater ballistic missile, Attack Laser would detect the booster while it is still powered as it emerges through the clouds. The Attack Laser would then destroy the missile, with resulting debris falling back on enemy territory. (Courtesy of Air Force Materiel Command News Service)

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WHAT THE MILITARY LEFT BEHIND

U.S. News & World Report,
January 24, 2000
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/000124/alliance.b.htm

ANGELES CITY, PHILIPPINES When the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo buried the region in volcanic ash and hastened the departure of United States forces from Clark Air Base, some 20,000 homeless Filipino families were relocated onto the sprawling installation. The new residents dug wells, planted crops, and settled unaware that the ground water they drank and bathed in, the soil their rice and sweet potatoes grew in, and the creeks and ponds they fished in were contaminated by toxic substances dumped during a half century of U.S. tenure.

Within a few years, health workers began tracking a rise in spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and birth defects; kidney, skin, and nervous system disorders; cancers, and other conditions that can be caused or exacerbated by exposure to chemical toxicants. Between May and July of 1995, for example, five infants were born suffering from the same central-nervous-system disorder. From that congenital birth defect cluster, only Abraham Taruc survives today, a stunted, 4-year-old human rag doll unable to speak or walk, barely able to move or swallow.

Pollution blamed. Philippine doctors and government officials supported by independent studies by Western health and pollution experts believe that Abraham and hundreds of others were poisoned by heavy metals like lead and mercury; degreasing solvents, used oil, pesticides, acids, asbestos, and old munitions. The rising incidence of serious health conditions and premature deaths suggests causes beyond poverty and poor medical care.

When the Air Force departed Clark, it conducted a hasty removal of waste containers but refused Philippine government requests for data on toxic dumping. Today, the Pentagon acknowledges polluting major overseas bases but insists that the United States isn't obligated to clean them up. "Our laws do not permit us to spend funds for the purposes you have requested," wrote U.S. Defense Deputy Under Secretary Sherri Goodman last June to a Philippine senator seeking help. That hardly satisfies critics such as Myrla Baldonado of the Manila-based People's Task Force For Bases Cleanup: "The U.S. may have a legal loophole, but what about the moral obligation? People are sick, dying, or dead."

This year, the DOD will spend $2 billion on cleaning up at installations in the United States and its territories but only $18.6 million total at bases in Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and South Korea. The Philippines gets nothing. Meanwhile, with no alternative housing, some 4,000 families remain at Clark, drinking the same mercury-laced water and growing vegetables in the same poisoned soil. -M.S.

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Under a desolate North Dakota prairie, a different kind of nuclear destruction. Swords into plowshares: Missile silos being blasted

Philadelphia Inquirer Front Page
Monday, January 24, 2000
By Raad Cawthon
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

NEKOMA, N.D. - Inside the steel pod 60 feet underground, you cannot hear the wind whistling across the North Dakota prairie, or feel the outside temperature plunging to 18 degrees below zero.

Here, in a self-contained world surrounded by 7 feet of concrete and behind a massive door designed to withstand a nuclear blast, all is quiet but for the continual sound of running water and the almost imperceptible hum of the neon lights.

"You're inside a big tomb here," said Loren Nishek, the man in charge of destroying it all.

This is one of 15 launch-control centers for 150 nuclear missiles that were scattered across eastern North Dakota in the 1960s. It was designed to protect a two-man crew whose job was to be prepared to fire up to 10 missiles, each one carrying multiple nuclear warheads.

In all, these lonesome missile sites reached from eastern Montana to North Dakota's Red River Valley, and from a scant few miles south of the Canadian border to Missouri. The 165 silos and launch centers in eastern North Dakota, each burrowed into an acre of prairie and surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, are being destroyed to comply with the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the United States and Russia. The "missile field" around Minot Air Force Base in western North Dakota remains operational, as do hundreds of other silos elsewhere in the Midwest.

When all of North Dakota's 300 missile silos were operational, each containing a Minuteman III missile, that state had the heaviest concentration of nuclear weapons of any place on earth.

"I grew up here, and I remember the old saying about how, if North Dakota ever seceded from the union, it would be the third-largest nuclear power in the world," Nishek said.

For more than three decades, each of the 150 silos in eastern North Dakota contained a missile aimed across the North Pole at Russia or China. The system was once part of America's "nuclear triad," along with submarine-based missiles and land-based bombers.

Those silos and the 15 launch centers in eastern North Dakota, some of the most secure ever built by the U.S. military, are being imploded, salvaged and buried. A 20-foot-deep hole will be dug into each site - the destruction will resume with spring weather - and left open for 90 days so Russian spy satellites can verify the silo's destruction. All are to be destroyed by November 2001.

Then, after everything has been salvaged and the concrete of the silo walls fractured, the hole will be filled with the rubble and smoothed, leaving a gravel pad and the telltale fence.

Farmers, some of the same ones who saw their land taken in the 1960s so the silos could be built, will have first dibs on buying the land back.

The ending of the nuclear era in this part of North Dakota has been, at best, a mixed blessing. Though the missile sites and the round-the-clock military patrols in armored vehicles might have been a constant reminder of the threat of nuclear annihilation, the missiles also brought jobs and money to a place which previously had little of either.

The last missile left in 1998 - some were moved elsewhere, some were destroyed - and last year, when the unit providing crews for the launch-control facilities was disbanded at Grand Forks Air Force Base, 1,700 jobs were cut.

Through the years, as farmers planted their crops right up to the fences surrounding the facilities, they came to take them for granted.

People here, in one of the least populated, most conservative areas of the country, generally believed the government when it told them this peppering of missiles across the prairie was an unavoidable necessity.

"The silos were just part of the landscape," said Bernie Goodman, a local farmer. "You got where you didn't think anything about them."

Bill Verwey, a former Nekoma mayor, said he always thought of the missiles as protection rather than a threat.

"We were in the very best place in case anything ever happened," he said.

Now some here hope that a proposed new missile system, which could be built in Alaska, will instead be built along this windswept stretch of North Dakota.

Don Speulda, now with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, once was in charge of maintaining the missiles within these silos.

One of the few people who routinely entered this cloistered world, Speulda recalls the pods being staffed around the clock by two airmen at a time. Each team worked a 24-hour stint down in the launch control center, then had 24 hours off. When not on duty, they lived with security guards, cooks and other support personnel in a nondescript house above the buried pod.

After seven days at the isolated outpost, the airmen and their support staff rotated out and were replaced by a fresh staff from Grand Forks Air Force Base.

"It was very much like being on an oil rig," he said.

Deep in the pod, each missileman wore around his neck a key that, when turned in unison in locks that were 10 feet apart, would begin the countdown to the missiles being fired.

"There were constant drills," Speulda said. "I'm sure if you talked to all the people who served here, they could tell you some stories about close calls. But I never really thought about firing the missiles. They were designed as a deterrent. The fact they were here meant, in a sense, that they could never be used."

The abandoned, soon-to-be-destroyed silos have an eerie feel.

An industrial elevator, capable, so a stenciled sign says, of carrying nine tons, slowly descends the 60 feet. It stops at a vestibule where one turn leads to an equipment room - generators, huge storage batteries, and air-purification equipment - protected by a massive door.

"The doors were designed to withstand a nuclear blast, but would move with 10 pounds of pressure," Speulda said.

A pull on the 2-foot thick, 10-foot high door shows that it still moves easily on its massive metal hinges, although maintenance on the facility ended two years ago.

In the opposite direction from the elevator is a 5-foot-high passageway that necessitates a head-saving duck to enter. Once inside, the crew could shut a blast-proof door that could be locked and opened only from the inside.

"To get in from the outside once it was locked, you have to disassemble the door," Speulda said. "That takes eight to 10 hours, plenty long enough for whoever was inside to accomplish their task."

Within the pod, which was lowered into a 60-foot deep hole and then had tons of concrete poured around it, the paint is peeling and any vital equipment has long been stripped away. There is a bunk for napping, a small toilet, and the vestiges of a microwave-equipped kitchen.

In the business end of the pod sit two identical control desks. They are within easy voice range of one another, but too far apart for one person to reach. It was at these desks that the crew members, many of whom signed the walls on their last tour of duty late in 1997, sat while computers spat out the codes for launching the missiles in silos scattered over a 10-mile radius.

"The amazing thing is these were built in the 1960s, and the technology we had back then is still used today," Speulda said. "Of course, everything in here could be run off a laptop [computer] now."

On the metal wall above the portal leading back to the vestibule, the missilemen painted a logo.

A different logo is painted on the wall in each of the 15 launch-control pods, and the North Dakota Historical Society plans to photograph each for its archives before the pods' doors are sealed and rubble fills the 60-foot elevator shafts.

Following that, the pods will sit, perhaps forever. Most likely the rooms will eventually fill with water, but otherwise they will remain dark and undisturbed within their impervious concrete cocoons.

In this pod, the logo is the theatrical masks representing comedy and tragedy. To one side, in a black-painted night sky, a fiery comet passes and arcs away from the Big Dipper. Directly above the door glows the North Star, the celestial landmark used to aim the missiles.

Above ground, the wind blows and the sun is wintry pale. Snow drifts against the foundation of the deserted launch facility. The windows are boarded up, and the gate remains chained and locked. A forlorn basketball backboard, the rim and net gone, stands as a lonely sentry in the yard.

Nishek, ice starting to form in his mustache, looked out across the barren, frigid landscape. There were lines of trees planted as windbreaks and a sole, distant farmhouse with smoke rising from the chimney.

"It looks like Siberia," he said. "This really is the middle of nowhere. I guess nobody cared all that much about what would happen to North Dakota."