-------- good news

January 31, 2000

NTS workers may get compensation
Draft report on nuclear illnesses may aid case

By Mary Manning manning@lasvegassun.com
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2000/jan/31/509784418.html

A draft report linking nuclear weapons production to workers' illnesses that reversed decades of government denial may include compensation for some Nevada Test Site employees.

The Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is not included in the draft, but Energy Department spokeswoman Nancy Harkess said it could be included by the time the final report is approved, making some Nevada workers eligible for compensation.

Test Site workers have volunteered for medical screening for the last two years. Doctors have discovered lung scars that may be caused by exposure to beryllium, a metal dust, or to silica from dust in the Test Site's tunnels where underground nuclear experiments were conducted from 1963 to 1992.

If the lung spots are related to beryllium or silica exposure while workers were employed at the Test Site, the workers could be eligible for compensation, Harkess said Sunday. She noted that no radiation link had been discovered in Test Site workers.

The preliminary study by the White House National Economic Council reviewed scientific evidence of unusual illnesses among more than 600,000 people who worked at 14 nuclear weapons sites since the mid-1940s.

The draft report, dated Jan. 14, said the records are spotty. Some studies of those with the highest exposures to radiation indicate no increase in cancers. However, the panel said there is enough evidence of increased health risks from radiation, chemical and physical hazards to warrant a fresh look at compensation.

Some epidemiological studies from the 1960s to 1992 when nuclear weapons experiments stopped noted elevated cancer rates among workers exposed to radiation. The report said 288 deaths per 100,000 exposed persons -- an excess of 1 percent to 3 percent -- could be related to DOE work.

Chemical exposures are not well documented, the report said. The council discovered 40,000 possible toxins, including solvents and degreasers used as sites across the country.

In July President Clinton ordered a review of the evidence after former workers complained of illnesses ranging from lung cancer and leukemia to heart disease.

The final report is due in March. Then it could serve as the beginning of a national compensation program benefiting ailing nuclear workers, experts said.

The draft report does not define the compensation or what diseases it might cover.

But after the draft report appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post over the weekend, critics said it did not go far enough.

Pat Broudy of California, whose husband, Charles, died after radiation exposures in Nagasaki, Japan, where the second atomic bomb was dropped, and at the Nevada Test Site in 1957, said she was pleased, but objected to those omitted from the report.

As a life member and spokeswoman for the National Association of Atomic Veterans, Broudy said she has been tracking thousands of documents that indicate the government knew about human radiation hazards as early as 1946.

The report, in addition to ignoring Test Site workers, failed to include those living in the path of radioactive fallout from the Test Site and the military personnel who marched to within three miles of nuclear blasts, she said.

Robert Campbell, president of the Atomic Veterans Radiation Research Institute, Inc. of Maine, said that he had 200 death certificates of Test Site workers showing half from cancer. "The average age at death is 60 years," Campbell said.

None of the death certificates contain information about an individual's radiation exposure or how long they worked at the Test Site, Campbell said. Most of the deaths were the result of lung cancer or leukemia, records show.

"This is an area, which needs much investigation," Campbell said. The nuclear workers spent far longer periods of time at the Test Site and may have passed genetic defects on to their children, he added.

"Too many have suffered and been denied medical care, to say nothing of just compensation," Campbell said. "Now is the time to put things right."

In 1994 a lawsuit by six former Test Site workers was dismissed in federal court.

Keith Prescott, Joe Carter, Harry Geisler, Eugene Haynes, Hugh Moseley and Calvin Tuck filed the suit in 1979. Carter and Moseley did not have a history of smoking, but the government blamed the men's cancers on their lifestyles, not exposure to radiation at their Test Site jobs.

The six workers were part of a class-action lawsuit that included more than 200 others.

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

DEPLETED URANIUM MUNITIONS AND DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURES

January 31, 2000
Doug Rokke,
Ph.D. Department of Physical and Earth Sciences
Jacksonville State University
From: Magnu96196@aol.com

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:42:54 EST

The United States and Great Britain deliberately used depleted uranium (DU) munitions causing a health and environmental disaster in Iraq and Kuwait with anticipated similar effects in Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia, Puerto Rico, and Okinawa. Consequently warriors and non-combatants have been exposed to uranium and possible contamaints such as plutoniun and neptunium which may have been introduced during uranium enrichment at United States Department of Energy facilities.

Depleted uranium (DU) or uranium-238 is made from uranium hexaflouride which is the non-fissionable by-product of the uranium enrichment process used to obtain uranium-235 for reactor fuel and nuclear bombs. A surprising annoucement by U.S. Department of Energy officials on January 29, 2000 acknowledged after many years of denial that employees of their facilities had significantly higher incident rates for leukemia; Hodgin's lymphoma; and cancers of the prostrate, kidney, liver, salivary glands, and lungs. Previous annoucements acknowledged respiratory problems at the Puducah, Kentucky facility and other facilities. These revelations and acknowedgements reinforce the suspected health and environmental hazards of depleted uranium which is manfactured from the main byproduct, uranium hexaflouride, of each of these facilites. It is even more disturbing that in a memorandum dated October 30, 1943 senior scientists assigned to the Manhatten Project suggested to General Leslie Groves that uranium could be used as an air and terrain contaminant because of it's significant respiratory, gastro-intestinal based on contaminated food and water consumption, blood stream, and tissue adverse health effects. Today that recommendation has been implemented with eternal health and environmental effects.

Therefore, each day reveals more evidence that the United States' and Great Britain's willfull distribution of over 310 tons of uranium contamination in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia and over 10 tons in Kosovo, and unknown quanities in Puerto Rico, Okinawa, Serbia, and other locations poses serious risks. Although it is difficult to verify that health effects were caused by DU exposure accumulating evidence indicates that health effects include: reactive airway disease, neurological abnormalities, kidney stones, chronic kidney pain, rashes, vision degradation, night vision losses, gum tissue problems, lymphoma, leukemia, other cancers, neuro-psychological disorders, uranium in semen, sexual disfunction, and birth defects in offspring.

Responsibility for DU exposures will be elusive while U.S. and British officials are permitted to willfully deny or delay medical treatment to all individuals who inhaled, ingested, or have wound contamination. Exposures will continue until removal of all DU contamination is completed. Still United States and British officials continue to deny any responsibility for this travesty of environmental justice. Therefore, the citizens of the world must insist that:

1. All individuals who may have inhaled, ingested, or had wound contamination must receive medical assessment and treatment for adverse health effects.

2. All depleted uranium penetrator fragments, contaminated equipment, and oxide contamination must be removed and disposed of to prevent further adverse health and environmental effects.

3. The use of depleted uranium munitions must be banned.

Author information: Dr. Rokke is the former ODS DU Team health physicist and medic, the former U.S. Army DU Project Director, and currently teaches environmental science and engineering at Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, Alabama. Dr. Rokke was assigned by name to clean up the DU mess in a message sent to the theater commander from HQDA during February 1991. The comments contained in this article which are based on existing documents and personal experience contradict official U.S. and British policies and press releases. >>

---

Congress Asked to Double Cleanup Funds for Gaseous Diffusion Plants

By Cat Lazaroff,
January 31, 2000,
Environment News Service
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan2000/2000L-01-31-06.html

PADUCAH, Kentucky, January 31, 2000 (ENS) - Energy Secretary Bill Richardson pledged $222.7 million Saturday in cleanup, waste management and worker health initiatives for two of the nation's uranium enrichment plants. The proposed funding includes more than $120 million in new spending to hasten work at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky and the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson (Photo courtesy Department of Energy)

The funding proposal is the first Department of Energy (DOE) budget initiative for fiscal year 2001. It would double funding for Paducah and increase spending at Portsmouth by 83 percent.

Richardson and the political leaders who accompanied him on his weekend visits to Paducah and Portsmouth promised to pressure Congress to approve full funding for Richardson's initiative.

"Our budget request to Congress puts our word into actions - we're investing dollars to clean up our gaseous diffusion plants, protect worker's health and create new jobs," Secretary Richardson said to employees at both plants. "The Clinton/Gore Administration and this country have the resources and the will to make this happen."

Richardson also announced that the department is sending a request to Congress for $26 million for additional cleanup and health activities this year - of which each plant would get more than $11 million. The supplemental request includes $3.3 million at both the Paducah and Portsmouth plants as well as a third gaseous diffusion plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to fund expanded medical monitoring of workers and the ongoing environment, safety and health investigations at the plants.

The plants were originally designed to handle only uranium. After World War II, the gaseous diffusion facilities were used in a government experiment to recycle leftover uranium from nuclear reactors that made plutonium for bombs. Through an enrichment process, uranium dust contaminated with neptunium and plutonium was turned back into nuclear fuel.

Radioactive dust and contaminated metal parts still litter the sites. Many workers at the facilities received potentially deadly doses of radiation during decades of nuclear fuel production.

Since August 1999, when the "Washington Post" broke stories detailing radioactive hazards and worker illnesses at the two plants, the DOE has launched investigations, apologized to workers and pledged compensation for those who developed diseases linked to radiation exposure.

"We believe there is a link," Richardson said Saturday. DOE and independent studies point to higher cancer rates in nuclear weapons workers than in similar populations that were not exposed to radioactive contamination.

Richardson has lobbied the White House to study whether to extend worker compensation to other sites that produced nuclear weapons materials. In March, a White House panel is scheduled to decide whether workers and their families at all DOE sites should be compensated for illnesses and deaths.

"The work that took place here, and the men and women who performed it, helped bring down an iron curtain 5,000 miles from here," Richardson said during a speech to Paducah employees. "Now, you help us ensure a lasting peace."

At Paducah, the 2001 budget request would provide:

$78 million for cleanup activities $23.9 million for the uranium hexafluoride conversion and cylinder management programs $4.3 million for environmental health and safety studies and health monitoring $3 million for worker transition activities

The DOE will use the cleanup funds to remove a pile of drums containing scrap metal known as Drum Mountain and begin to characterize the ground underneath it. Richardson pledged to make Drum Mountain disappear by the end of this year.

With the new funding workers could continue removing more than 50,000 tons of contaminated scrap in eight outside storage areas to reduce contamination in creeks and characterize the ground beneath.

They could dispose of 5,000 drums of low level radioactive waste, and ship more than 2,000 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste to an offsite facility.

The current cleanup budget for Paducah is $54.2 million. The fiscal year 2000 supplemental cleanup budget request of $8 million will speed up work already planned to characterize and clean up areas of radioactive contamination, dispose of waste and stabilize shut down facilities.

Contaminated equipment would be removed from two shut down facilities, a metals reduction plant and a feed plant, this year, at least a year earlier than previously planned.

At Portsmouth, the 2001 budget proposes:

$76.2 million for cleanup work $27 million for the uranium hexafluoride conversion and cylinder management programs $4.3 million for environmental health and safety studies and health monitoring $6 million for worker transition programs

The money would help complete cleanup of contaminated groundwater plumes at the south side of the site. The DOE would also design and implement cleanup plans for contaminated soil and a groundwater plume on the northeast side of the site.

The current budget for cleanup at Portsmouth is $46.1 million. Supplemental funds of $8 million would be used to dispose of more than 1,000 boxes of contaminated sludge and soil. Some 18,000 containers of mixed, low level waste will be characterized so they can meet criteria for disposal facilities.

The waste to be disposed of includes personal protective equipment, sampling equipment, floor sweepings and other miscellaneous debris contaminated with low levels of radioactive material. Closure of a waste storage area would be completed this year, at least a year earlier than previously planned.

Photos:

Depleted uranium storage cylinders (Photo courtesy Environmental Assessment Division of Argonne National Laboratory )
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/pics6/uraniumtanks.jpg

The Paducah plant feeds uranium hexafluoride UF6 into its enrichment process at two feed facilities. Here, large containment autoclaves are used to heat the cylinders, converting the solid UF 6 to a liquid and then to a gas. (Photo courtesy U.S. Enrichment Corporation)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/pics6/paducahfeed.jpg

Rail cars delivering enriched uranium hexafluoride to the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio (Photo courtesy Portsmouth GDP)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/pics8/portsmouthtanks.jpg

Trucks deliver cylinders full of natural assay uranium hexafluoride to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky (Photo courtesy Paducah GDP)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/pics8/paducahcylinders.jpg

--------

From: Peter Diehl <p.diehl@sik.de>

U.S. Federal Register: January 31, 2000 (Volume 65, Number 20) p. 4604-4605

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2000_register&docid=fr31ja00-20

SUMMARY: The St. Louis District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), in consultation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), propose to clean up contaminants resulting from the extrusion of uranium metal at the Madison Site. [...]

--------china

Seeing red

Washington Times
January 31, 2000
Inside the Beltway
John McCaslin
http://208.246.212.80/national/inbeltway.htm

We're told Sen. Fred Thompson, Tennessee Republican, informed colleagues in a closed-door conference late last week that he won't allow the Chinese proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to go unnoticed when the Senate reconvenes.

Recent concern centers around the Beijing government's eagerness to join the World Trade Organization and the apparent use of U.S. capital markets to modernize its military.

Mr. Thompson earlier singled out several Chinese companies with U.S. dollar investments, including China Resources, which he labeled "an agent of espionage - economic, military, and political - for China."

The Tennessee state pension fund, in Mr. Thompson's - and Vice President Al Gore's - own back yard, is reported to be among several U.S. stockholders in the Chinese company.

It was Mr. Thompson, as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee investigating campaign-finance abuses during the 1996 election, who charged the Chinese government with attempting to "subvert our election process" by making illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic Party.

---

Opposition Candidate in Taiwan Won't Push China on Independence Issue

New York Times
January 31, 2000
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Related Article
Taiwan Candidate Eases on China Policy (Jan. 21)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/013100taiwan-china.html

BEIJING, Jan. 30 -- Taiwan's main opposition candidate said today that if elected president, he would not push for Taiwan's formal independence from China or try to enshrine Taiwan's separate status in an amendment to its Constitution.

The statements by Chen Shui-bian, the Democratic Progressive Party's candidate, marked his strongest effort yet to assure nervous voters in Taiwan that his election would not provoke a crisis with China. And his remarks came after new warnings on the issue from the mainland.

China considers Taiwan, the headquarters of the Nationalists since their defeat in the civil war in 1949, to be an errant province and has repeatedly threatened a military attack if it moves toward formal independence.

Mr. Chen announced his policy on relations with China at a news conference in Taipei. He is one of three main presidential candidates in the March elections that will be closely watched in Beijing and Washington.

'"Taiwan is already a sovereign and independent state," Mr. Chen said today. "There is no need to declare independence or change the state name." The island is officially known as the Republic of China.

Seeking formal independence as the "Republic of Taiwan" was a prime goal of the Democratic Progressive Party when it emerged in the 1980's in opposition to the long-governing Nationalists. But in the last few years, and especially as Mr. Chen, a popular former mayor of Taipei, prepared to run for president, the party has tried to appeal to the political center.

Prosperous and democratic, Taiwan increasingly has its own identity. But a large majority of voters say they prefer the status quo -- in which Taiwan functions as a separate country but keeps open the possibility of rejoining the mainland -- to declaring independence or other steps that could trigger a missile attack or blockade by Beijing.

With Mr. Chen's statements today, his position on relations with China appears to be converging with those of his main opponents, Vice President Lien Chan of the Nationalist Party and James Soong, a longtime Nationalist leader who broke away last year for an independent run, largely on personal grounds.

If the traditional supporters of the rich, powerful Nationalist Party remain divided, then Mr. Chen, who is seen as a crusader against corruption and cronyism, may have a good chance of winning.

The Nationalists are officially committed to reunification, but President Lee Teng-hui, who was Taiwan's first directly elected president and will step down this year, has often said that Taiwan is sovereign and cannot rejoin the mainland until China is more democratic.

Mr. Lee's remarks last summer that negotiations could only proceed on a "state-to-state" basis angered Beijing, leading it to cancel planned talks. Mr. Lien and Mr. Soong decline to use that offending phrase, but like Mr. Lee and Mr. Chen, they say that Taiwan is sovereign in practice.

Mr. Chen also said today that unless the mainland attacked Taiwan, he would not call for a national referendum on independence, which his party has long sought but which China considers objectionable.

Leaders from the Nationalist Party and Mr. Soong's camp criticized Mr. Chen's position today as a hypocritical ploy to gain votes. His party's founding statement of principles, some noted, still calls for eventual independence.

--------iraq

An Inspector for Iraq

Washington Post
Monday, January 31, 2000; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/31/000l-013100-idx.html

NEARLY NINE years ago, the Security Council of the United Nations demanded, as a condition of cease-fire in Iraq's war against Kuwait, that Iraq rid itself of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and of the means to deliver such weapons. That goal remains unfulfilled--stymied first by Clinton administration inconstancy, then by French and Russian shortsightedness and throughout by Saddam Hussein's deceit. For more than a year, the United Nations has been without inspectors or monitors in Iraq; soothing administration assurances to the contrary, no one outside Iraq can be sure how the dictator's arsenal may have progressed.

Now the Security Council at least has settled on a candidate to be the next chief weapons inspector. The U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan, deserves some credit for this. The United Nations' leading member states spent weeks failing to agree upon a candidate, in particular because France, Russia and China were reluctant to accept anyone who might offend Saddam Hussein; he has skillfully played on their anti-American resentments and their commercial hopes. Mr. Annan embarrassed Iraq's sympathizers by suggesting an admirably tough candidate; they rejected him but felt pressured to come up with an alternative.

The alternative candidate whom France and Russia have accepted is Hans Blix, a Swede who used to head the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Mr. Blix is respected by people who have worked with him; they say that the IAEA's weak efforts to monitor Iraq in the past reflected the institution's inadequacies, not those of Mr. Blix.

But the United Nations remains a long way from finding, or even looking for, weapons in Iraq. In order to be effective, Mr. Blix needs the freedom to hire the best inspectors available. That means he must be allowed to recruit veterans of the last U.N. inspection outfit, which was expelled from Iraq at the end of 1998. Iraq is likely to object to such veterans and to refuse them visas. If so, the U.N. Security Council must make it clear to Iraq's regime that international sanctions will be maintained indefinitely.

That message can be communicated clearly only if the Security Council's permanent five members show more unity than they have recently. So long as France and Russia quarrel openly with the United States and Britain (with China tending to the French-Russian side), Iraq will see a chance to split the international community and will not submit to inspections. Iraq's reaction to Mr. Blix's appointment was hardly encouraging. It declared that he would not be allowed into the country.

-------- japan

Japan Says 439 People Exposed in Nuclear Accident

January 31 11:12 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20000131/wl/japan_nuclear_1.html

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan raised its estimate of how many people were exposed to radiation in the country's worst nuclear accident to 439 from 70, officials said Tuesday.

September's accident, which killed one person, was triggered when workers put nearly eight times the proper amount of condensed uranium into a mixing tank at a processing plant in Tokaimura, about 90 miles northeast of Tokyo.

An official of the Science and Technology Agency, which released the figures, said the calculation took into account local residents as well as plant workers who were not equipped with radiation monitoring devices at the time of the accident.

``This makes the number look bigger than the initial figures we reported,'' he said.

Of those affected, 207 were local people who lived and worked within a 1,148 ft radius of the plant. The rest were workers at the plant or those involved in the rescue mission.

Only three had been exposed to levels of radiation sufficient to cause after-effects and one of the three has already died.

Police last month inspected the site of the accident, continuing a criminal investigation into the plant's operators and its parent company.

Police have already raided the offices of plant operator JCO and parent Sumitomo Metal Mining Co to investigate possible legal violations, but had been unable to inspect the plant because radiation levels were still too high.

JCO officials have said the company illegally revised a government-approved manual to allow its workers to use buckets instead of a pump to transfer uranium solution into the mixing tank..

Police hope to complete their investigations and bring the case before prosecutors by the end of March, local media have reported.

-------- korea

U.S.-North Korea Talks on Missile Program Set for March

New York Times
January 31, 2000
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/013100nkorea-us.html

MOSCOW, Monday, Jan. 31 -- North Korea has agreed to send a high-level delegation to the United States in March, opening the way for talks on North Korea's missile program, the spread of nuclear weapons and terrorism, the State Department said today.

The announcement on North Korea was made by the State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, who arrived here this morning with with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright for three days of talks.

Mr. Rubin described the North Korean delegation's visit as an "important step forward" in improving the hostile relations between the two countries. The announcement came at the end of seven days of meetings in Berlin between the United States and North Korea.

The Clinton administration's hope is that the visit in March would lead to a permanent agreement under which North Korea would agree to stop flight tests of its ballistic missiles for good, Mr. Rubin said.

North Korea agreed late last year not to continue these tests while talks on improvements in relations between the two governments continued. At the same time, Washington agreed to take steps to lift some economic sanctions against North Korea.

In 1998, North Korea fired an a long-range missile and appeared to be in the final stages of another launching last fall when the tentative agreement was reached between Washington and Pyongyang to halt the tests.

The threat of ballistic missiles from North Korea capable of hitting the United States has been the prime reason behind the Clinton administration's proposal for the deployment of a limited national missile defense system.

Dr. Albright is scheduled to meet here on Wednesday with Russia's acting president, Vladimir V. Putin, and Washington's plans for national missile defense are high on the agenda. So far, Moscow has been resistant to the administration's proposals.

The visit by the North Koreans in March would provide the "best opportunity" to make progress on issues that are "central to peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region," Mr. Rubin said.

North Korea, which is governed by a harsh Communist leadership, had been offered no concessions on its designation by the United States as a sponsor of terrorism, Mr. Rubin said. In order to be removed from that list, North Korea had to meet "objective criteria," and had so far not done so, he said.

As part of Washington's effort to bring North Korea out of its isolation, a high-level delegation of American officials led by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry visited North Korea last March. The Clinton administration has been trying for many months to persuade senior North Korean officials to reciprocate with a visit to Washington.

At the Berlin talks, North Korea's vice foreign minister, Kim Gye Gwan, officially accepted the invitation, although a definite agenda for the Washington visit still needs to be decided, Mr. Rubin said. The North Koreans have not yet said who will lead their delegation, but he would be of similar seniority to Mr. Perry, who is President Clinton's special envoy to North Korea.

The American delegation in Berlin was led by a special envoy, Ambassador Charles Kartman, and Mr. Rubin said the two sides "exchanged views on issues of common concern in a constructive, businesslike environment."

---

N.Korea May Suspend Japan Talks

Associated Press
January 31, 2000 Filed at 1:44 p.m. EST
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-North-Korea-Japan.html

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea on Monday warned it might suspend planned talks with Japan on opening diplomatic ties, accusing Tokyo of a smear campaign.

High-ranking Japanese and North Korean officials held talks in Beijing last month -- their first meeting in two years. They agreed to continue discussions on establishing diplomatic ties early this year.

But on Monday, North Korea took issue with allegations that North Korean agents kidnapped at least 10 Japanese citizens to train as spies.

"Japan should know well the unabated anti-North Korea smear campaign over the `issue of kidnapping' may block the channel of dialogue arranged with so much effort,'' Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party, said in a commentary. ``This is nothing but their ulterior political intrigue to isolate and stifle North Korea.''

Tokyo suspended talks after North Korea test-fired a rocket that flew over Japan in August 1998. It agreed to resume talks after the United States persuaded North Korea to stop testing missiles.

North Korea and Japan never had diplomatic relations. Talks on normalizing ties began in 1991, but broke down in 1992 over the alleged kidnappings.

Also Monday, a Japanese government-affiliated bank signed an agreement to loan a U.S.-led international consortium $1.09 billion to build two nuclear reactors in North Korea.

Japan is providing about a fifth of the funding for the $4.6 billion project, planned under a 1994 accord that committed North Korea to halt its nuclear power program amid suspicions it was using it to develop weapons.

The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, a consortium that also includes South Korea and Japan, plans to build two U.S.-designed reactors in a rural village in the northeastern part of North Korea.

The light-water reactors will replace Soviet-designed graphite-moderated reactors, which experts say produce greater amounts of weapons-grade plutonium.

Barring delays, the first reactor will be built by 2007, four years behind schedule. The second reactor will be completed a year later.

---

U.S., N.Korea Plan Top-Level Talks

Associated Press
January 31, 2000 Filed at 7:00 a.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-US-North-Korea.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Steps to formally end the Korean War and U.S. concerns about nuclear missiles will be on the agenda when North Korea dispatches a senior official to Washington for top-level talks with the Clinton administration.

The two sides are to work out the details next month in New York, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said. The meeting was announced Sunday as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright flew from Switzerland to Russia.

The visit, set for March, is to match talks former Defense Secretary William Perry held in Pyongyang last year as a special Clinton administration emissary.

North Korea's deputy foreign minister, Kim Gye Gwan, and U.S. Envoy Charles Kartman reached agreement for the North Korean visit during talks in Berlin that ended Friday.

Administration officials said there was no decision yet on who the North Korean government would send. They see the agreement as another step in U.S. efforts to coax North Korea out of its isolation and to neutralize its nuclear weapons program.

In 1994, North Korea agreed to shelve its nuclear weapons program in exchange for energy supplies from the United States, Japan and South Korea, and has agreed to stop missile tests so long as discussions on a better relationship continue.

The United States reciprocated by suspending some economic sanctions, but North Korea is still listed by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism. This has the effect of prohibiting virtually all but humanitarian aid to Pyongyang.

Likely topics of discussion at the March talks are ongoing diplomatic efforts to officially end the Korean war, missile arsenals and terrorism.

North Korea has taken some steps in the right direction, Rubin said. But they must do more to be removed from the State Department's list of terrorism sponsors, he said.

``We have made no promise,'' he said.

---

Election Dispute Mars Mozambique
Democratic Image Hurt by Treatment of Voting Irregularities

Washington Post
Monday, January 31, 2000; Page A15
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/31/105l-013100-idx.html

Just last month, U.S. diplomats were holding up Mozambique as a model of African democracy and reconciliation.

"Look to your other neighbor, Mozambique, where the U.N. oversaw a cease-fire and transition process that also led to democracy," Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, urged a South African audience in December. "The people of Mozambique are making history as we speak, with their second multiparty elections."

But the Mozambican democratic miracle is suddenly looking tarnished. After the peaceful casting of votes in December, the counting of the ballots was marred by allegations that the election commission, after locking out observers from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, tossed out tens of thousands of opposition ballots in order to inflate the margin of victory for the ruling Frelimo party candidate, incumbent President Joaquim Chissano.

"The lines of people standing under the sun [to vote] were inspiring," said a U.S. official in Mozambique. "Then the lid came down. The vote counting was messy, and . . . in a lot of people's minds, a cloud remains."

The State Department has glossed over the irregularities, some Africa analysts say, because the candidate preferred by the United States won. The State Department hailed the peaceful voting, and after the Mozambican Supreme Court unanimously rejected the opposition's protests, the United States seemed eager to put the controversy to rest.

"All Mozambicans can be proud of the continuing strength demonstrated by their multiparty democracy," the State Department said after the court ruling. "The election results were very close. In recognition of this fact, we hope the opposition in the assembly will fulfill its democratic responsibilities and contribute fully and constructively to governing the country and consolidating a strong, sustainable democracy."

It remains unclear whether opposition candidate Afonso Dhlakama, a former guerrilla leader, plans to play the role of parliamentarian or seek a more disruptive form of opposition. Members of his Renamo party took 117 seats in the country's 250-seat parliament, but Dhlakama boycotted the presidential inauguration on Jan. 15 and last week moved some of Renamo's offices out of the capital, Maputo, to his traditional stronghold in Beira.

"Clearly the State Department is aware that electoral fraud took place," said a senior State Department official. "And it's saying to Renamo . . . 'Take it like a man.' "

Though it is a country of only 19 million, Mozambique has been one of the few bright spots for democracy in Africa, and the State Department has long emphasized the southeast African nation's progress.

In 1994, the United States and other European donors spent $60 million, or about $11 per voter, on elections in Mozambique. Last year, they gave about $40 million, including $2 million from the United States to support election observers and voter education programs. Mozambique is also one of the largest recipients of U.S. developmental assistance in sub-Saharan Africa.

After a long civil war in which the apartheid government of South Africa backed Renamo, the warring Frelimo and Renamo factions made peace and the country went to the ballot box in 1994. Chissano's Frelimo party won by a comfortable margin; Dhlakama's party was the biggest opposition group. Including his time in office before the civil war ended, Chissano has been president for 13 years.

Voting took place again from Dec. 3 through Dec. 5, 1999. By all accounts, it was peaceful and orderly. International observers were there, including a 50-person delegation led by former president Jimmy Carter and Botswana's former president, Ketumile Masire.

According to David Carroll, a member of Carter's delegation, "It was clear that the race would be very close." But as the results were tabulated over the next two weeks, he said, a large number of ballots--many filled out by uneducated people from rural areas--required interpretation by the national election commission because the preferences intended were unclear.

The Carter Center delegates and election observers from South Africa offered to help the election commission examine the contested ballots, but the commission rejected the offers. The U.S. ambassador to Mozambique, Dean Curran, lobbied unsuccessfully for the commission to allow Carter Center officials to be present.

The election commission invalidated tally sheets from several hundred polling stations--about 7 percent of the total number of voting places--mostly in provinces where Dhlakama's support was strong.

"We regret that the access granted was not consistent nor adequate for our observers to verify the accuracy of these processes," the Carter Center said, noting that disagreements had "created some doubts about the transparency of the process."

Renamo appealed to the Mozambican Supreme Court, whose members have been appointed by Chissano. The court decided unanimously against Renamo. "It is not enough to claim there is fraud or illegality. It is necessary, as the law says, to present elements of proof," the court said.

While acknowledging some irregularities, the court ruled that they did not change the outcome. It calculated that Dhlakama would have needed 77 percent of the disputed ballots to win, a bigger margin than he carried in any province.

Even if Dhlakama accepts the election results, the tabulation procedures have soured many experts and U.S. officials about Mozambique's ruling party, which already owns most of the country's media. The New York-based organization Human Rights Watch had expressed concern earlier about "heavy-handed policing and the manipulation of the electoral process." Now, even though Renamo won majorities in six of the country's 11 provinces, Chissano is widely expected to install Frelimo governors in every province.

"What does Renamo have to show for this great democratic experiment?" a senior U.S. diplomat asked rhetorically.

The opposition party "feels entitled to some recognition, and I think they are," said Curran, the U.S. ambassador. "I think the [Mozambican] government should take note and be more inclusive."

But Curran still praised the elections' peacefulness and Renamo's willingness to press its case "in the courts and not in the streets." Mozambique, he said, still "deserves to be on the model pedestal--even though it's not perfect."

--------russia

Burton Hunts for Russian Links in the Desert

Washington Post
Monday, January 31, 2000; Page A17
By Al Kamen Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/31/091l-013100-idx.html

House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) showed no signs of strain from his four days of golf at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in Palm Springs as he vigorously presided last Monday over a hearing about alleged Russian weapons caches in this country.

Ranking Democrat Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) had criticized spending thousands of dollars to fly people to California for the sparsely attended hearing--an estimated 30 people, including executive branch folks, reporters and such. Thirteen congressional people were there, including Burton and GOP Reps. Curt Weldon (Pa.), Joe Scarborough (Fla.) and Tom Campbell, who's running for the Senate in California, and two Capitol Police officers to "sweep" the room.

But how often these days do hearings have witnesses led in with black bags over their heads? Stanislav Lunev, a former Soviet spy, not only had the bag but also a screen to shield him from the audience as he repeated allegations from his 1998 book that he scouted for "drop sites" in this country for weapons caches, though he has no idea if any were actually planted. (Before the hearing, Lunev apparently felt safe enough not to wear the bag while he was out in the hall.)

And how often do lawmakers, in this case Weldon, hold up briefcases and announce: "I have a small atomic demolition device I'd like to bring up to you." Burton quickly assured the hearing that it was a "mock-up" created by the CIA. Or it might have been created by a Weldon staffer, who also testified at the hearing. (Staffers are not permitted to ask questions and answer them, which can save time.)

Burton was upset that the State Department sent no one there--the FBI and the CIA apparently did--and won't even respond to questions about weapons caches.

State says the senior Russia types Burton wanted were unavailable to schlep to California and, in any event, they don't do such investigations.

The hearing produced no evidence of buried commie weapons anywhere. But Roll Call, noting Burton's avid interest in playing the big golf tournaments, suggested Burton hold more hearings as he continues to search: the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am and the Tucson Open in February; The Doral-Ryder Open in Miami in March; the Masters in Augusta, Ga., in April; and, closer to home and a most likely site, the Kemper Open in Potomac in June.

Watch for the sand traps.

---

Moscow summit to discuss new 'Star Wars'

ITN Online
00/01/31
http://www.itn.co.uk/World/world20000131/013104w.htm

America's new anti-ballistic missile system, designed to shoot down incoming nuclear warheads, is among several contentious issues to be discussed at a high-level summit in Moscow.

The US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, is meeting Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov for three days of talks which will also include discussions on the war in Chechnya.

The talks precede a multilateral conference jointly hosted by Russia and the US aimed at consolidating the Middle East peace process.

Russia is deeply unhappy about U.S. plans to develop the defensive anti-rocket system which it believes violates the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

The United States, meanwhile, has strongly criticised the Chechen campaign as excessively brutal. Interfax news agency said Albright and Ivanov began their meeting on a one-to-one level but were expected to bring in aides after the first 30 minutes of discussions.

Albright, who flew in to Moscow in the early hours of Monday, will with Ivanov jointly chair Tuesday's Middle East multilateral talks, the first for more than three years. The talks, held at foreign minister level, will focus on cross-border issues like the environment, economic cooperation, arms control, water and refugees.

During her stay in Moscow Albright is also expected to meet Acting President Vladimir Putin, who took the helm after Boris Yeltsin's sudden resignation on New Year's Eve.

---

Albright says Russia making big mistake

Lincoln Journal Star
Monday, Jan. 31, 2000
http://www.journalstar.com/archives/013100/nat/sto8

MOSCOW (AP) -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Sunday that Russia's acting president is "riding a tiger" by pushing a military offensive against rebels in Chechnya.

"There is no question the war is popular," Albright told reporters as she flew here to size up Vladimir Putin and push arms control.

Albright noted that casualties are mounting and said Russia faces more isolation in the international arena as the war drags on. "They have to hear over and over again that this is not working for them," Albright said.

She said he was "hoping to have a meaty session" with Putin when they get together this week.

Persistent U.S. appeals to Russian leaders to end the conflict and negotiate with the Chechnya separatists have failed. Albright did not predict success this time, either, and she ruled out U.S. economic sanctions if persuasion does not work.

Still, Albright said, "It is very clear to me that Russia is hurting itself because of Chechnya." In what could turn out to be a tradeoff, Albright was ready to discuss sharp cuts in U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear arsenals while urging Putin to approve "modest adjustments" in a ban on missile defenses.

Just before landing in Moscow, she said talk of such a tradeoff is "hypothetical." A deal would make it easier for the Clinton administration to go forward with a $6.6 billion plan for a defense against missiles fired from Iran, North Korea or other countries the United States considers rogue states.

Before taking off, Albright warned in a speech to the World Economic Forum that "economic anxieties" in countries with democratically elected governments were prompting the people to turn to authoritarianism and other failed remedies.

She said life in parts of the former Soviet Union often is tougher for ordinary people than when Communists ruled.

"A majority of citizens in these countries have come to equate democracy with inequality, insecurity and the unraveling of the social fabric," she said. "We are concerned that in many countries, the arrival of electoral democracy has been accompanied by economic expectations that are, as yet, unfulfilled." Her scheduled meeting with Putin will be the first by a top-ranked U.S. official since Boris Yeltsin quit as president New Year's Eve and named the former KGB domestic intelligence chief as his successor. Elections are due in three months.

Albright "wants to get a firsthand assessment of how he intends to operate now that he's the acting president, which brings additional responsibilities," the State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said last week.

Albright has described him as a leading reformer, but also said the administration was not "starry-eyed" about Russia's future.

Russia has registered its opposition to missile defense systems as potentially fueling a race to develop more powerful nuclear weapons to overcome them.

A 1972 U.S.-Russia treaty bans missile defenses, but the Clinton administration wants to make changes in it to go ahead with its program.

At the same time, Russia wants to go further than the United States has proposed in cutting nuclear missile stockpiles.

Albright intends to renew a U.S. pitch that the Russian parliament ratify the 1993 START II treaty, which calls for reducing the U.S. and Russian arsenals of long-range nuclear warheads to 3,000 to 3,500 apiece.

But even Yeltsin's endorsement failed to convince nationalists in the parliament to approve the agreement. It also did not persuade some Russian military chiefs who object to the treaty partly because it eliminates Russia's edge in some weapons and would require large outlays to build allowable weapons in other categories.

The Clinton administration has proposed a follow-up START III treaty, setting a ceiling for both Russia and the United States of 2,000 to 2,500 warheads. Russia wants even deeper cutbacks, possibly to 1,500 strategic warheads on each side.

That could ease the economic strain of building up to allowable ceilings in some weapons categories.

Rubin said these approaches have been under discussion with Russia for several months, and the talks will continue during Albright's visit.

At the same time, he said, Albright would like to see Russia agree to "modest adjustments" in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that banned national missile defenses on the theory that the prospect of devastating retaliation would forestall a nuclear attack.

"Any recognition by Russia that amendments to the ABM treaty can be accomplished without undermining the fundamental purpose of the ABM treaty would be a welcome step in the right direction, because it would mean that they have understood that there are dangers," Rubin said.

Albright also is bound again to register strong U.S. condemnation of the Russian military assault on Chechnya, even while supporting Russia's authority to counter terrorism and secession in the rebellious republic.

On Monday, she is to have three meetings with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and to see Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy and Prince Saud, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister. They will be in Moscow for a meeting Tuesday of Arab and Israeli officials on ways to promote economic development of the region.

King Abdullah of Jordan said at the economic conference on Sunday that economic cooperation is "the way of the future" in the Middle East.

---

Russia: Albright And Ivanov Begin Talks

Radio Free Europe
31 January 2000

Moscow, (RFE/RL) - U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov are meeting in Moscow on issues ranging from Chechnya to nuclear disarmament. Albright said earlier she will reiterate U.S. concerns over Russia's four-month military campaign in Chechnya.

Albright and other officials are in the Russian capital for the start of multilateral peace talks on the Mideast. Later this week, Albright is expected to meet with Russian acting President Vladimir Putin.

With fighting continuing to rage in Chechnya, Albright is expected to again urge Moscow to end the conflict and negotiate with Chechen separatists. Speaking to reporters on her flight to Moscow, Albright noted that Russian casualties are rising and said Moscow faces more international isolation as the war drags on. But she ruled out the U.S. imposing economic sanctions over the conflict.

Albright said she also intends to discuss in Moscow further cuts in the U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear arsenals and a U.S. plan to build a national missile defense, which Russia opposes.

--------us nuc weapons

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Washington Times
January 31, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/letters-20000131.htm

Column's 'new thinking' about missiles is on target

James Hackett scored a direct hit, pun intended, with his Jan. 24 column ("New thinking on missile defense," Commentary). While America dithers over costs and effectiveness and the relevance of treaties, Russia wastes no time in taking steps to protect itself and attempting to intimidate its neighbors.

And added to Russia's "Cold War thinking" and missile deployments is its instability, perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Russian nuclear arsenal.

The Russian government cannot guarantee the control of the 6,000 or so nuclear weapons it has now -another reason for America to take missile defense seriously. Should those warheads end up in the hands of a rogue state or a terrorist organization - well within the realm of possibility in the cash-strapped Russian economy - the United States becomes susceptible to attack by a regime or group unencumbered by treaties or morals.

That kind of "new thinking" is more than a necessity; it's already a reality in today's world.

PHILLIP THOMPSON
Senior fellow Lexington Institute Arlington

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

Radiation report angers some ex-Hanford workers

Seattle Post_Intelligencer
Monday, January 31, 2000
By ANGELA GALLOWAY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER CAPITOL CORRESPONDENT
http://www.seattlep-i.com/local/hanf31.shtml

RICHLAND -- H.P. Smith was furious when the federal government conceded Friday that its mistakes mean he and other nuclear weapons plant workers may have a greater chance of getting cancer and other illnesses.

But Smith is not angry with the government. Like many other former and current Hanford Nuclear Reservation workers, he is angry with those who have pushed for the acknowledgment and those who seek compensation.

"It's a bunch of baloney," said Smith, who worked in Hanford nuclear reactors from 1943 to 1969.

"They're trying to rip off the government. . . . So many people are trying to get something for nothing."

After decades of denial from the federal government, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson conceded Friday that workers in 14 nuclear weapons plants, including Hanford, were exposed to harmful levels of radioactive and chemical contamination (see graphic). The admission, in a draft review of health studies, may open the door to compensating workers with cancer and other illnesses.

While stunning news to some, the government's admission caused hardly a ripple in this nuclear community.

Smith grew up on an Arkansas farm and jokes the "H.P." stands for "Horsepower" -- but most folks call him "Smitty." He is a small, quiet man with soft blue eyes who yanks up on his worn-out white belt as he tells "dumb blonde" jokes and tries to hide his witty charm under a layer of crustiness. But Smith gets downright stern when it comes to people complaining about working conditions at Hanford.

"It was a good job and I'm 84 years old, and I've had some (health) difficulties, but nothing that kept me down or hindered me," he said. "Frankly, we had a job to do, and why should we gripe about it now?"

Smith says he has a detached retina, but he doubts it is related to peering down at uranium rods in metal canisters.

"If it is, it's nothing to complain about," Smith said. "I can still put worms on my fishing pole, so what do I have to cry about?"

The 560-square-mile Hanford reservation was built to make the plutonium used in World War II's ultra-secret Manhattan Project, including material used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. For decades, it was a staple of the United States' Cold War arsenal. The plant stopped producing weapons materials more than a decade ago, and is now the world's largest environmental cleanup.

Richland grew up with Hanford, and people here still celebrate their nuclear heritage. Streets here have names like Nuclear Court, Proton Court and Curie Street. The sign at Richland High School, home of the Bombers, has a picture of a mushroom cloud. Locals shop at Atomic Foods, work out at the Atomic Health Center and take their dinged-up cars to the Atomic Body Shop.

So important is Hanford to the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick that the site still accounts for about 13,000 of the 70,000 or so jobs here.

Over the years, those who live here have weathered many real or perceived bombshells about Hanford. For many, last week's announcement was just another step in the painstaking, often controversial process of reconciling with history and cleaning up an environmental mess of historic proportions.

"It's nothing that we didn't know," said Jim Watts, a representative of Hanford's largest nuclear workers union. "It's just a recognition of what has happened here in the past.

"One of the significant features of recognition, of course, is that extra precautionary measures are taken," he added. "These types of things generally end up with a safer work place."

Watts said he appreciated Richardson's acknowledgment, though he can understand why Smith and many others dispute the report.

"Most of them weren't (hurt). This isn't a huge thing. But contaminations did occur," said Watts, who has never worked at Hanford himself. "People who have had long-term exposure effects will be taken care of."

But Del Ballard, a Hanford engineer from 1951 to 1995, thinks the whole thing has been blown out of proportion.

"I don't think they were exposed to anything that warrants this," Ballard said.

Over recent decades, Ballard has watched public perception of national defense industries turn from pride to contempt.

"I felt proud of myself for working for a program that was part of the national defense and helped end the war," he said, holding a blue baseball cap that identifies him as a volunteer for the Hanford B-Reactor Museum Association, a group hoping to make an exhibit of the reservation's oldest plant.

The nation was proud of their work, he said, "up until they started getting the anti-nuke (activists) riding down their backs."

Ballard, whose wife also worked at Hanford for many years, figures the announcement was made to pacify those activists.

And Jim Boak, who worked at Hanford from 1947 to 1987, said it is mostly renegade workers and outsiders who claim Hanford sickened its employees.

"We didn't have the attitude about it that the rest of the country seems to have," Boak said.

"I'm going on 75, and I can out-work most of my friends that are 50," Boak added. "The only doctor I know is the one who lives next door to me."

Leon Swenson, a Hanford engineer who retired six years ago, said those views are common in the community around the reservation.

"You're going to find some skepticism that perhaps the government is caving into some pressure (from activists)," said Swenson, a citizen member of the Hanford Advisory Board.

Frustration felt by Boak and Ballard is attributable in part to resentment of complaints by Hanford's neighbors, especially those who lived downwind of the plant. While thousands of "downwinders" sued over illnesses they blame on atmospheric release of radiation from Hanford, only a few of those who worked at the site make similar accusations.

Gai Oglesbee, who has lived in the Tri-Cities for four decades, is among the few. Oglesbee said a Hanford subcontractor paid her "significant" damages for medical problems she has faced since working in a reactor's office from 1987 to 1993. Oglesbee, 60, has had skin cancer and suffers heart, nerve and thyroid problems, she said. She has about 40 stomach polyps and a burned esophagus.

Oglesbee considers herself an advocate for both workers and downwinders, and has a mixed reaction to Richardson's statements.

"It's probably going to make a really positive step toward monitoring," she said.

But she battles ahead.

"Lawsuits are going to pile up," said Oglesbee, who is a plaintiff in one downwinder class-action lawsuit. "I think people are just waiting for something like this."

Tim Takaro, a University of Washington researcher, said he has examined scores of former workers hurt by Hanford. He writes off the skeptics as "Hanford boosters."

"It's a pretty natural reaction," he said.

For some, he said, Hanford provided a job. Others feel patriotic pride in their part in national defense. Former workers, he said, feel forced to ask, "Was your lifework good, or was your lifework evil?"

Thus this company town is forced to deal further with its own feelings of pride or shame.

"It's going to hurt big time," said Oglesbee. ". . . A lot of people are going to ask questions now."

More lawsuits may come, but Harold Heacock, a Tri-Cities economic development council consultant, played down the effect.

"There's lawsuits all the time, and life goes on," said Heacock, a Hanford engineer from 1950 to 1994. "I don't think people pay much attention."

Heacock said none of the former Hanford employees he knows suffers ailments from the plant, but he welcomes the prospect of resolution.

"Whether they did or didn't (suffer injury), if people think they did, they have to react to it," Heacock said. "I think what the (Energy) Department is doing is probably a reasonable effort to clear things up."

But Mike Fox, who managed a plutonium lab during his 1974-96 Hanford tenure, worries Richardson's announcement will lead to rampant speculation before the data is even disclosed.

"We've seen 30 years of this," said an outraged Fox.

Fox said he is tired of seeing the government cave in to political winds, and he is tired of his fellow scientists declining to speak out. Mostly, he is tired of the media.

"People are intentionally misrepresenting this community. (And) its people, its values," said Fox, a member of the Eastern Division of the American Nuclear Society, which occasionally meets at the popular Atomic Ale Brewpub.

Smith, the former reactor worker, wishes all Hanford documents had been kept secret so do-gooders would stay out of it. He left the Tri-Cities briefly to develop real estate near Seattle in 1969 and came to understand how people West of the mountains think.

"If they dropped a little cup of tea out there (at Hanford), people would make a big issue over it," Smith said. "They thought this place was poison. All you could think was, 'You just don't know.'"

After all, he said, his job at Hanford was safer than logging or fishing the ocean, and less taxing than hoeing cotton.

"Ninety percent of the people out there thought that this was the best job they ever had," he said.

P-I reporter Angela Galloway can be reached at 360-943-3990 or angelagalloway@seattle-pi.com

---

Nuclear-illness report vindicates Richland activist, mother

by Florangela Davila
Seattle Times staff reporter
January 31, 2000
http://www.seattletimes.com/news/local/html98/nuke_20000131.html

RICHLAND - In Richland, where it seems almost everyone has some link to the Hanford nuclear reservation, there is not much support for those who speak ill of the Manhattan Project plant, where reactors produced plutonium for nuclear bombs.

And so for the Hanford whistle-blowers, the longtime activists and those like Beulah "Boots" McCulley, 65 - who considers herself just a concerned mother fighting for the well-being of her eldest son - there is newfound optimism that more people will now join their fight.

A White House draft report that reviewed health studies of workers at 14 nuclear-weapons sites, including Hanford, concludes there is "credible evidence" that exposure to radiation and chemicals increased workers' risk of illness. Higher rates of illness were found among the 600,000 people who have worked at nuclear facilities since 1943, according to the initial findings.

The protests against Hanford by McCulley and other more well-known opponents have as much to do with winning compensation for plant workers and those who lived "downwind" as they have to do with pressuring Congress to protect workers cleaning up the site.

"Right now workers have no place to turn to," said Tom Carpenter, a staunch Hanford activist who directs the Seattle offices of the Government Accountability Project.

"These are complicated issues involving radiation exposure," he said. So the Department of Energy's admission that DOE workers may have been put at risk "is significant."

Mother, former Hanford worker

McCulley, a former Hanford worker, had a lot to say yesterday about the government's acknowledging that workers at bomb-making plants had indeed contracted cancer and other illnesses.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer at 49, and now suspects Hanford might have had something to do with it. But her anger, and the agitating it inspired, didn't surface until her son got hurt.

McCulley has lived in this town of 32,000 for more than 50 years. When she was a teenager, she vowed to one day leave the place - too arid and windy and not at all like greener, wetter Portland, in which she had lived as a young child. It was, she thought at the time, "like living at the end of the Earth."

But when she graduated from Richland High, she went to work at Hanford as a secretary in the metallurgy group, where she watched engineers test metals and handled paperwork stamped "secret."

She never feared the place, though. Once, she had to remove her clothing and be decontaminated because she had walked through a hallway in which there had been some sort of spill.

She didn't have a college education, she wasn't a scientist, and she trusted nothing was wrong.

McCulley quit her job at Hanford to raise a family with her husband, Winston. Her six children swam in the Columbia River, and she was unconcerned about the radiation testing that went on at their school.

Later, selling real estate, she'd assure potential homebuyers that this was a safe community.

"I could eat my words now," she says.

`There's a mentality here'

McCulley explains that longtime residents share a belief that one shouldn't criticize something that has been so much a part of people's lives.

The high-school team is called the Bombers. Many people live in government-built houses put up more than a half-century ago for the workers who constructed the reservation. And in this post-Cold War era, more people are employed cleaning up the 560-square-mile site than were working at the height of weapons production in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

And yet people don't talk about Hanford much, McCulley said.

"You can't see it. You can't smell it. You can't hear it," she says of the radiation and chemical hazards in producing nuclear weapons. "You know they made bombs there. You know they're cleaning it up. Most of the time all you hear about is that the cleanup is going great and that they (the government) need more money to do it.

"There's a mentality here that you just forget about it."

McCulley can't explain why, for so many decades, she was so accepting of Hanford. Even in the late 1980s, when the DOE released scores of classified documents that told of widespread contamination, she didn't pay much attention.

But then her son Winston McCulley Jr. returned to Richland from Chicago and got a job "out in the area." He supervised electrical workers who, in May 1997, were at a defunct plutonium-finishing plant when a tank exploded, releasing chemicals and a small amount of radiation.

Her son, she said, suffers from ringing in his ears and has numbness in his arms, hands and legs. He has trouble remembering things. In her eyes, "he is disintegrating."

Because he has filed suit, Winston McCulley Jr. doesn't want to talk to reporters.

Report offers vindication

Being an activist - speaking at public hearings, writing letters to DOE officials - has taken its toll on Boots McCulley. There is whispering and negative remarks. Friendships have ruptured. It got so bad, she quit going to her church.

In a way, this new report has given her a bit of credibility. Over the years, she says, it hasn't been easy to convince her neighbors that she wasn't paranoid or crazy for speaking out.

But it has been frustrating, she acknowledges. And over the years, she's gotten angry, so angry that it started eating at her.

"But I will never back away. When there's something I can do, I talk about it.

"Over the years, I used to think those whistle-blowers, that they were all a bunch of nonsense. That they were just out for the money. But I think they deserve whatever they can get."

Florangela Davila's phone message number is 206-464-2916.

-------- us nuclear business

Approaching Critical Mass?
Privatized Uranium Processor USEC Has Disappointed Both Shareholders and Capitol Hill

By Martha M. Hamilton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 31, 2000; Page F08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/31/024l-013100-idx.html

Did USEC Inc.'s shareholders end up with a lemon?

In the less than two years since the federal government sold its sprawling uranium processing organization--then known as the U.S. Enrichment Corp.--for $1.9 billion raised through a stock offering supplemented by borrowing, USEC has stumbled badly. The company has disappointed investors, run afoul of Congress, angered the Energy Department and other administration officials and ditched a technology that company executives once held out as the key to its future.

For some critics, USEC's faltering has called into question the wisdom of one of the most ambitious federal privatizations of the past decade.

But there's an added dimension. The company is a major player in the country's national security and a linchpin of global nuclear nonproliferation. USEC's shareholders may have taken USEC off the government's hands, but the government's involvement in USEC is far from over.

USEC may not be "too big to fail"--the rationale behind well-known federal bailouts such as those of Chrysler and Continental Illinois. But it may be too critical to fail.

A Key Role

The chief executive of USEC, William H. "Nick" Timbers Jr., played a key role in the company from its beginning. As a consultant to the federal government he wrote a report and testified in favor of privatization. Appointed by President Clinton, Timbers then managed the transition to the private sector and has been at the helm ever since, adding board member to his other corporate titles after privatization.

More than any other individual, Timbers is the architect of USEC. "One of the appeals of the job when I was recruited in 1993 was to create it from a white piece of paper," he said last week. "I was able to create a company from scratch."

Sitting at a long, glossy dark wood conference table at USEC headquarters on the fourth floor of a Bethesda office building, Timbers stretched his left arm out drawing an imaginary graph against his white sleeve with his right forefinger.

"Here's the revenue line," he said, tracing a line that goes down. "Here's the cost line," he said, tracing a line that goes up, crosses the revenue line and keeps on going.

"And we cannot respond," he said, laying the blame on restrictions put on USEC when the company was privatized. "The whole concept was to allow us to act as a private enterprise in a very competitive environment." The problem, he said, is that the environment turned out to be even more competitive than anticipated.

USEC processes uranium, turning it into fuel for nuclear power plants. Its existence dates back to the height of the Cold War, the 1950s, when the core of its operations was created to manufacture enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and submarines.

Now it has gone from being an agent of the Cold War to being part of post-communist plans to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Under an agreement negotiated in 1994, USEC buys processed uranium from Russia, which blends down highly enriched uranium from nuclear warheads and sells it to USEC for resale to power plants. "Megatons to megawatts" is the catch-phrase for the deal that last year converted the equivalent of approximately 1,232 nuclear weapons to peaceful use. During the life of the agreement, USEC has purchased uranium equivalent to more than 3,000 nuclear warheads.

In 1993, it was chartered as a wholly owned government corporation. In 1996, Congress passed the USEC privatization act with bipartisan backing and support from the Clinton-Gore administration, which embraced the idea as part of reinventing government.

But both the administration and the Congress had concerns about the privatization--partly because of the company's key role in national security and partly for political reasons, such as protecting jobs in congressional districts in Ohio and Kentucky where the company operates its two massive uranium processing plants. And those concerns led to conditions.

Among the conditions Timbers says hamstring USEC are these: USEC has a statutory obligation to protect the public health and national security as well as retain an adequate enrichment capacity for the U.S. electric industry.

On top of that, the Treasury Department drew up a list of conditions to which the company agreed before the Clinton administration gave the go-ahead. That list included a three-year prohibition on the sale of more than 10 percent of the voting stock to any one entity, providing protection against takeover; a commitment not to lay off more than 500 workers in the first two fiscal years; and a commitment to keep its two Ohio Valley plants operating until at least Jan. 1, 2005.

The Lure of Technology

According to a review of government and USEC documents, the manner in which USEC became a public company, including representations company officials made to the government at the time of its sale, minimized concerns about privatization that have since been borne out.

In June of 1998, the board of USEC--all federal appointees--had narrowed the options for privatizing the organization to two. The first option was a sale to an investment group that included Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Carlyle Group. Lockheed was operating the plants under contract, and Carlyle is a merchant bank peopled with various former high-ranking Republican administration officials that has bought up billions worth of industrial assets in recent years. The Lockheed/Carlyle group offered $1.9 billion.

The other option was a public offering of stock. Timbers, as president and chief executive of the government-owned company, was one of the primary advocates for a public offering, which would leave him at the helm.

More than 800 pages of recorded closed-door board deliberations made public as a result of a lawsuit by the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers Union, which represents USEC workers, portray a lengthy, thoughtful deliberation by board members, relying heavily on financial and legal advisers who had been working closely with USEC management.

The record indicates that a key factor in the board's decision to go with the IPO (by three votes in favor, one against and one abstention) was management's apparent commitment to a new laser-based enrichment technology called AVLIS that the board felt would help ensure the company's viability. The Carlyle Group said it wanted to develop AVLIS, but would have spent less money on it and developed it more conservatively.

Not everyone believed in AVLIS. The joke among critics of AVLIS and of privatization was that "you'll see Elvis before you see AVLIS."

But the AVLIS technology addressed a critical issue for USEC's future: electricity use. AVLIS promised to dramatically reduce USEC's electricity costs, a key component of its competitiveness as a private company. DOE gave USEC patents for the commercialization of AVLIS, which was being worked on in the government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Though some doubted AVLIS's promise, USEC management did not. Timbers made a strong pitch to the board, which was trying to decide between a merger and acquisition of an IPO on June 3, 1998, noting that the IPO management would be investing about $1 billion in AVLIS during the years when the Carlyle Group would be spending a similar amount of money to pay interest. Just over a year later, AVLIS was dead.

On June 9, 1999, the now-private USEC announced that it would scrap the AVLIS technology in which it had been investing approximately $120 million a year. Timbers said, "(W)e have reexamined the AVLIS technology. . . . We now have enough data to conclude that the returns are not sufficient to outweigh the risks and ongoing capital expenditures necessary to develop and construct an AVLIS plant."

Although the company announced on the same day that it would buy back up to 10 million shares of its stock over the next 24 months, it stock price generally has been headed downhill since the AVLIS announcement. At the time it made the announcement, the share price was a little over $11. At Friday's close, it was $5.75.

Major Problems

The AVLIS question aside, USEC is facing major problems in its core business.

Timbers said the company is operating in "significantly changed market conditions" from those envisioned at privatization. The commercial market for USEC's services has declined 15 percent and the market for uranium has declined 12 percent since privatization.

Coupled with the lower prices for its product, Timbers said the company did not anticipate the rate of increase in the price of electricity, which accounts for more than half of its costs.

So far, the impact of higher costs and lower prices has been softened by the fact that USEC still has contracts signed years back that require utilities to pay the higher prices of days gone by. But, according to one analysis produced for the Energy Department, the company's average sales price will fall below its break-even cost late in 2003.

Timbers's view is that the problem could be fixed if the company had the tools--if it weren't limited by the privatization act and the Treasury agreement. When other companies get squeezed by rising costs and falling prices, "they all make the proper adjustment," he said. "They respond to the realities of the marketplace."

"You can bring in the greatest chain saw operator or slash-and-burn artist" and he couldn't turn things around under similar circumstances, Timbers said. "If we're operating under those rules, how can the shareholders be pissed at me? Are they pissed at the rules or that we haven't responded properly?"

Herbert A. Denton, president of Providence Capital Inc. in New York, the only shareholder who would speak for the record about the company, said he doesn't have a view "on Timbers per se, but I do have a view at least preliminarily that the company is too small to be independent." But he added, "I have heard from some of the shareholders who are very disappointed in Mr. Timbers."

Denton said he thinks the solution for USEC may be to be "folded into" a larger company such as Lockheed Martin.

A 60 Percent Drop

One fact puts all this into perspective. Since going public at $14.25 a share, USEC has lost nearly 60 percent in value.

"The stock price is telling you the investors don't feel things are going too well," said Kit Konolige, an analyst who follows USEC for Merrill Lynch Global Securities.

"The company needs to rebuild confidence among the investment community," Denton said. Denton, who said Providence has approximately 100,000 shares of USEC that were recently acquired, is one of several shareholders who have been talking about organizing to help turn around the situation at USEC. Denton said he hopes USEC, which is down one board member as a result of a retirement, will "seek out amongst shareholders a candidate that the shareholders know and would support and who would be supportive of management as this company examines its strategic direction."

Denton and Konolige said they believe that management should consider buying back more stock.

The price per share that USEC paid to buy back 10 million shares last fall averaged $10.35, according to the company. As of Friday, it was trading for $5.75 a share. "If they had waited, it would have been a better bargain," said Konolige.

USEC ran into criticism on the Hill last fall when it lobbied for $200 million in aid when it was spending almost an identical amount on its stock buyback and dividends. But Wall Street doesn't see things from the same perspective as Capitol Hill. For USEC's shareholders, its huge dividend is crucial.

"USEC must, in the near term, concentrate on building the confidence of yield-oriented investors in the sustainability of the dividend," Jarius L. DeWalt of M.R. Beal & Co. wrote in a report on the company last month. At the most recent stock price, the annual dividend of $1.10 per share represents a yield of nearly 20 percent--compared with an average yield in the historically high-yield utility industry of 4.9 percent a few months ago.

One beneficiary of the dividend is Timbers. With 126,105 shares of restricted stock--most of which he was awarded by the board "to align his interests with shareholders"--he stands to receive $138,715.50 a year in dividends. Last year the board voted to pay Timbers a $600,000 annual salary and $617,625 in cash and stock bonuses.

Subsidy Showdown

In retrospect, said Timbers, he would have handled things differently last fall in seeking $200 million in subsidies. "We probably all make mistakes. I did not want things to get where they did," he said. Where they got was pretty confrontational.

In the middle of the showdown, one high-level Clinton administration official involved in the discussions who asked not to be named fumed, "These guys are trying to jam the administration, and it's not going to happen."

USEC's argument for federal funds was based on its assertion that it loses money under the nuclear nonproliferation deal with Russia. But USEC's handling of the problem--threatening to resign as the government's executive agent--didn't play well. The administration's response was to begin talks with other firms that might be interested in taking over the job--betting that USEC needed at least part of the uranium it buys from Russia to fulfill its contracts. "If USEC threatens to bail out on the uranium deal, we'll find other avenues," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said then. "That's not a threat that will go very far with me."

Lawmakers from both parties responded by raising the possibility of revoking USEC's protection from a takeover.

On Dec. 1, USEC backed down, with its board voting to continue as the executive agent for the deal.

Now USEC is hoping that DOE will join it in developing centrifuge technology as a possible solution to the problem of declining prices and higher costs. USEC also hopes to negotiate a better deal with the Russians when the contract expires at the end of 2001 and could benefit from administration support in that effort.

On Jan. 5, Timbers and two of his board members met with Richardson at DOE to discuss that prospect. "CEO Timbers was in a very conciliatory and reaching-out mood, which I think was important," Richardson said last week. "We understand his position better, but, nonetheless, our concerns have not abated."

A Question of Viability

Last week, USEC's board met to discuss how to keep the company viable. According to one news report, those discussions included the possibility of shutting down one of its plants, something that USEC can do under its privatization agreement only under restrictive circumstances, such as in the event of a disaster or some major downturn in its financial outlook.

One trigger that would allow a plant shutdown is "if the long-term corporate credit rating of USEC is, or is reasonably expected in the next 12 months to be, downgraded below an investment grade rating." USEC's debt is rated investment grade, though rating agency Standard & Poor's on June 10 put the debt on credit watch with negative implications.

The board recessed last week and will resume meeting this week. The company also postponed releasing its most recent earnings until this week.

Whatever it does will be scrutinized thoroughly by the Energy Department and on Capitol Hill. "Congress required the administration to privatize USEC in a manner that preserved national security and the viability of the domestic uranium industry," said Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.), chairman of the House Commerce Committee, who has kept a close eye on USEC. "Just two years later, both appear to be in jeopardy."

Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) and Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), whose district includes the Portsmouth plant, wrote Timbers last week expressing concerns about a possible shutdown. The letter cited assurances that were given at the time of privatization about the continuing operation of the plants, and raised concerns about both the Russian agreement and the need for a reliable domestic supply of uranium enrichment.

The letter said the three have been "forced to question" whether USEC entered into the agreement with Treasury "in good faith."

Timbers said management "is doing everything we can to put the company back in a right-sized position so we can stabilize the company and grow it."

Shareholders' frustration, he said, results from the fact that "this is a complex business. Perhaps more difficult than we were first perceived when we did the IPO."

--------spying

By Stephen S. Rosenfeld

Washington Post
Monday, January 31, 2000; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/31/016l-013100-idx.html

The last big story of the Cold War finally is being told. The story is the adventurous clandestine effort by the United States right after World War II to reverse communism in Soviet-conquered East Europe and in the Soviet Union too. It's laid out in the forthcoming "Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain" by Peter Grose, respected biographer of Eisenhower spy chief Allen Dulles.

The book rounds out a grim episode heretofore known only in incomplete bits and pieces and is full of fresh diggings from archival and human sources. But none of its tales of operational derring-do and political and bureaucratic conflict in Washington match the impact of its revelations about George F. Kennan, renowned historian, diplomat and architect of the postwar American policy of "containing" Soviet power. His name got put on containment by leaks of the period. Not until now--Kennan is in his nineties--has his name been put on Operation Rollback, of which he was both conceptualizer and diligent champion.

Kennan is best known as an apostle of moderation, restraint and the application of nonmilitary pressure. But at a certain time and place he was an enthusiastic closet Cold Warrior. Soviet-American wartime cooperation was yielding to intense confrontation. The fundamental illegitimacy and unfairness of replacing Nazi rule with Soviet-Communist rule in East Europe was felt widely. In the DP (displaced persons) camps and elsewhere, the manpower was at hand. The risks seemed dim next to the prospects of preventing Stalin from locking in his wartime gains.

Later on, the austere intellectual Kennan complained that others had militarized his policy of containment. He was right in believing that the superpowers had recklessly (30,000 nuclear warheads apiece!) built up arms, even as he himself came under criticism for his perceived hesitation to apply the levers of power to his political designs.

But early on, the ostensibly conservative defensive strategist proposed a radical program of "political warfare." He defined it as "the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace . . . employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war. . . ." The specifics included a school to provide Americans and "extracted" foreigners with "training in air support, communications, local security, counter-intelligence, foraging, sabotage, guerrilla tactics, field medicine and propaganda." By such proactive offensive encouragement, local populations were meant to rise up and take back their freedom, or at least to make their Soviet masters bleed.

All this was supposed to happen in total official secrecy. This is where "plausible deniability" was born. The other side, which was scooping up the tiny bands of airborne and shipborne infiltrators, knew well what was going on and complained diplomatically and propagandistically about it. But the leaks and disclosures never stirred any important congressional or public challenge to executive policy--aside from ungrateful charges from the ethnic and ideological right that Truman and then Eisenhower lacked ardor for the "captive nations."

Operation Rollback eventually spawned what Grose estimates to be "many dozens" of infiltration missions into Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe and even into the Soviet Union itself. Most infiltrators were brave, patriotic, fiercely anti-communist--and doomed; some had been wartime comrades of invading Nazis. None of these missions seems to have accomplished the slightest of its military purposes. The betrayal of some by Brits spying for the Kremlin turned rollback into roll-up and was the saddest chapter.

Like other insiders, Kennan came to sour on Rollback. "The greatest mistake I ever made," he confessed at one point. "It did not work out at all the way I had conceived it." The radios that were part of it, broadcasting to the Soviet Union and East Europe, had value. But the political costs of the infiltrator missions were too high and the benefits too low to survive repeated failures. Stalin's death early in 1953 opened up a more promising vista. Rollback tapered off. It finally fell to a mere CIA duty officer, on his own, to deny military support to Hungary's pleading revolutionaries of 1956.

Nonetheless, in much-altered circumstances, Rollback returned 30-odd years later as what came to be called the Reagan Doctrine. That policy meant to provide more open and consequential military support to democratic and nationalist challengers of selected lesser Marxist regimes, including Nicaragua, Cambodia, Angola and Afghanistan.

At the time I was skeptical of the Reagan Doctrine's possibilities, but it had undeniable effects both on the ground and on the Kremlin's self-confidence. Bill Clinton has drawn on the same Rollback legacy in the regime-removal aspects of his policy toward Iraq and Serbia. Such is the enduring moral and strategic appeal to Americans of the idea of liberation that it would be foolish to deny it a considered role.

The writer is the former editor of The Post's editorial page.

--------us military

U.S.-Philippine War Games Protested

Associated Press
January 31, 2000 Filed at 11:09 a.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Philippines-US-Military.html

MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- About 30 demonstrators burned women's underwear in front of the U.S. Embassy in Manila on Monday to protest the start of large-scale U.S. military exercises, which they claim will cause an increase in prostitution.

The first major joint exercises in five years began Monday with a five-day seminar and planning conference involving 67 U.S. officers at the former Clark air force base in Angeles city, north of Manila.

The protesters, mostly women, burned panties labeled ``AIDS,'' ``prostitution'' and ``orphaned Amerasians'' by lighting them from a burning cardboard drawing of an American soldier carrying a rifle and a nuclear missile.

Flores Esparas, a protest leader, said the arrival of thousands of U.S. troops will cause a resurgence of problems associated with the former U.S. military bases in the Philippines.

``We do not want to experience the same nightmare ... prostitution, AIDS, drugs, orphaned Amerasians, toxic waste contamination,'' Esparas said.

The United States ruled the Philippines as a colony for nearly 50 years until 1946 and maintained a strong military presence until 1992, when the last U.S. base was closed by the Philippine government.

Riot police guarding the embassy made no arrests during the brief protest, one of several planned nationwide by religious and left-wing groups against the staging of the exercises at Clark and at least four other locations.

At Clark, about 50 miles north of Manila, about 300 activists burned a U.S. flag in a noisy rally that prompted guards to temporarily close the gates of Clark to the public.

U.S. military officials have promised American troops will behave. Curfews will be imposed and alcohol intake limited when U.S. soldiers are on liberty, they said.

``We are here as peacekeepers and ambassadors of goodwill of the U.S. government,'' said Brig. Gen. Jack Holbein, a U.S. Air Force special operations commander leading the U.S. contingent in the seminar in Clark.

More than 2,300 American soldiers are joining the exercises, called Balikatan or ``shoulder to shoulder.'' The land, air and sea exercises end March 3.

The United States suspended major military exercises in the Philippines in 1996 after Manila closed a loophole shielding U.S. military personnel from prosecution for crimes committed in the country. The last major joint exercises were held in 1995.

Last May, the Philippine Senate approved the resumption of large-scale joint exercises by passing a Visiting Forces Agreement that generally grants the United States jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. personnel while on duty in the Philippines.