True Humanitarians

Wednesday, April 12, 2000; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/12/009l-041200-idx.html

Re the March 24 news story "Payment Set for Ex-Slaves of Nazi Regime":

I noticed that the slave laborers who failed to die in the Nazi concentration camps will be paid (up to) a whopping $7,500, while the lawyers who negotiated the settlement will be paid almost $100 million.

Could The Post publish the names of the lawyers and their firms, along with the fees collected by each, so that the world may properly thank them for their tireless humanitarian efforts?

MASON STEWART
Potomac

-------- activists

NPT Briefing Document available on WWW

Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 10:58:52 -0400
From: "Ross Wilcock" rwilcock@execulink.com

A 24 page (420KB) NPT Briefing Document has been produced and is now available on the PGS website - Abolition 2000 menu or at the address www.pgs.ca/pages/a2/npt2000.pdf It can be printed optionally as needed.

PGS is printing copies to be provided to each UN Mission and to NPT Conference participants.

With thanks to PGS, Canada and Abolition Coordinating Committee members for contributions and advice.

Ross Wilcock Rwilcock@web.net

-------- china

Radar Sale Dominates Jiang's Israel Visit

April 12, 2000
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-israel-.html

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - President Jiang Zemin began the first visit to Israel by a Chinese head of state on Wednesday amid strong signs that Israel would sell advanced radar to China despite U.S. opposition.

The Chinese leader's visit showcased Sino-Israeli ties that have burgeoned as Israel has sold tens of millions of dollars worth of military hardware to Beijing.

Upon his arrival, Jiang issued a statement saying that China was interested in playing a role in Middle East peacemaking.

``China stands ready to make unremitting efforts to facilitate this process for further progress and positive results,'' the statement said.

Jiang and Israeli President Ezer Weizman held talks at the president's house in Jerusalem and the two sides signed agreements on technology, agriculture and economic cooperation.

Jiang said his talks with Weizman on the peace process were held in a ``friendly, candid and sincere atmosphere.''

At a joint news conference, neither leader mentioned an Israeli deal to sell Beijing a Russian-made Ilyushin-76 plane modified with an advanced airborne warning and control system (AWACS), which has sounded alarm bells in Washington.

Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy indicated earlier that Israel would go through with the sale over the objections of the United States, its main ally. He said European countries were sure to offer competing systems if Israel kills the deal.

``We will not do anything that will shake or harm our relations with the United States. On the other hand, we cannot tell the Chinese now ... that a signature is not a signature,'' Levy told Israel radio.

The United States is concerned that China could use the AWACS against Taiwanese and U.S. fighters in the event of a military conflict and has pressed Israel to scrap the sale.

``We need (to find) the golden path between the interests of Israel and the United States. It is clear that Israel won't endanger the lives of American soldiers,'' Levy told reporters following the Jiang-Weizman meeting.

CLINTON TELLS BARAK OF U.S. CONCERNS

The sale of the plane, which state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries estimated has a $250 million price tag, came up in talks that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak held with President Clinton at the White House Tuesday.

``The president once again shared our concerns about the sale with the prime minister,'' a U.S. official said. ``(Barak) indicated that he understood our concerns and that we would be discussing that further.''

An Israeli official briefing reporters on Barak's plane from Washington Wednesday said Clinton told Barak the sale concerns members of Congress who have traditionally been friendly to Israel.

Barak told Clinton Israel has an obligation to China, an important country, so ``it's not simple,'' the official said.

Israel says Beijing has indicated it wants to buy at least two more AWACS, capable of logging 60 targets simultaneously and operating in a range of up to 250 miles.

China's military arsenal is based mainly on hardware from the former Soviet Union, and Beijing has looked to the Jewish state for the technology to improve existing weapons.

Israeli arms sales to China began years before the countries established diplomatic relations in 1992.

The Palestinian part of Jiang's trip is limited to a single day in the Palestinian-ruled West Bank town of Bethlehem.

During his visit to Israel, Jiang will spend five days touring sites ranging from Israel's parliament to a collective farm near the Dead Sea.

--------

China to Resume Arms Talks With U.S.

WORLD IN BRIEF
Compiled by Virginia Hamill
Wednesday, April 12, 2000; Page A19 ASIA
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59873-2000Apr11.html

BEIJING--China said yesterday it is ready to resume talks with the United States on nuclear nonproliferation, ending a freeze imposed after U.S. planes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last May.

The announcement came one day after China's expression of strong dissatisfaction with disciplinary actions the CIA took against seven employees involved in the attack and the U.S. conclusion that it was an accident caused by outdated information and human error. The CIA fired one intelligence officer and reprimanded six managers for errors the agency said led to the attack.

China suspended talks over nonproliferation and human rights soon after the May 7 bombing, which killed three Chinese citizens, injured more than 20 others and created a rift in U.S.-China relations. The willingness to restart nonproliferation discussions was seen as a sign that Beijing wants to restore bilateral relations despite its continuing demand for further investigation and explanation of the bombing.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said Chinese officials decided to resume talks after U.S. national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger pushed for a resumption of dialogue during a visit to China two weeks ago. "The Chinese side has already expressed agreement" to Berger's request, Sun said at a news conference. "The two sides are now making preparations through diplomatic channels."

(Cindy Sui)

--------

Chinese Purge Scholars They Accuse of 'Westernization'

By John Pomfret Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 ; A01
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58722-2000Apr11.html

BEIJING, April 11 -- The Internet posting of an essay by one of China's most prominent academics calling for political reform has prompted the Chinese government to undertake an old-fashioned purge of officials believed to support Western liberal values and privatization.

The campaign has so far resulted in the dismissal of four top academics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. And in what looks like a throwback to the political struggles of several decades ago, two attacks have been published against the officials, accusing them, without naming them, of "Westernization" and failure to follow Marxist tenets.

One of the attacks was a speech given April 2 by President Jiang Zemin and subsequently published in the People's Daily newspaper. The second was an editorial on April 3 in the Guangming Daily, which played a key role in the political campaigns of the Cultural Revolution 30 years ago, calling for study of Marxism as the basis for all "economic and other types of work."

The purge seems unusual in the China of 2000. Although authorities strike hard at any hint of political challenge--insisting on control over even such organizations as churches or the Falun Gong spiritual movement--the government itself has set in motion the social loosening and economic reform that targets of the current purge were championing.

But it is an indication of how threatened the Communist Party feels by the breathtaking changes that have occurred in China. Over the last two decades, for instance, 60 percent of industrial production has moved outside state-owned firms. It also is an example of Jiang's attempt to reembrace Marxism as a way to avoid the political reform that many in China feel should be the next step toward modernization.

Chinese sources said the recent campaign was kicked off after an essay by Li Shenzhi was posted anonymously on a Chinese Web site in December. Li, who was the first victim of the purge, is the retired vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the president of the China Society for American Studies and one of China's leading intellectuals. He once worked for the late premier Zhou Enlai.

Li's essay, "50 Years of Panic, Trials and Tribulations: Lonely Nighttime Thoughts on National Day," was a response to the triumphalism of China's Oct. 1 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Communist state. In it, he opined that only North Korea would possibly be envious of the legions of goose-stepping soldiers and cherubic schoolchildren who filed through Tiananmen Square.

Li wrote that he was a young, idealistic Communist Party member of 26 when China held its first National Day, on Oct. 1, 1949. "I recalled being unable to put my feelings into words," Li wrote. "But one man succeeded. He was Hu Feng in a poem published over several days in the People's Daily. It was called 'Time has begun.' "

Li then wrote that a few years later, Hu was jailed for more than 20 years as the alleged chief of an anti-party clique. A few years later, Li was branded a "rightist" and sent to labor camps off and on for years.

Li's essay went through a litany of political campaigns--the anti-rightist campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution--the Communist Party carried out over the years, stressing that its current concern for stability is curious given that the party has been China's leading cause of instability since 1949. But speaking openly about these tragedies is banned, he said.

"So living amidst lies, with no real theories, how are we supposed to reform?" Li asked.

Li's essay appeared on the Internet in December and since then has been sent by e-mail to thousands of Chinese. Sources said Li did not post it.

Chinese sources said that after Li's document appeared, Jiang responded by making a strong speech on Jan. 17, warning that Western powers were seeking to divide China. At Jiang's prompting, a decision was made to dismiss several liberal academics, including Li. Party investigators were told to justify the purge by labeling the group a "branch of opposition within the party," sources said.

In addition to Li, party investigators singled out Liu Junning, a professor at the academy's Political Science Research Institute, as a member of the "liberal political wing" of the group. Chinese sources said Liu was specifically criticized for meeting with Chinese dissidents during a trip to the United States last year. Officials within his research institute wrote reports about his "improper thoughts" to party authorities, sources said.

Liu's books have been both widely popular and routinely banned. In a 1998 essay, since banned, he attacked China's failure to provide its people with a modern political system.

"Perhaps Chinese people are very intelligent and wise, but the sad thing is for many years, very few people have taken this wisdom and intelligence and concentrated it on creation of an intelligent political system," he wrote.

Two of China's most famous economists, Mao Yushi and Fan Gang, were branded as members of the "liberal economic wing" of the group and dismissed from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as well. Mao and Fan, who now run consulting firms, have called on China to speed up economic reforms.

Li and Mao are retired but their dismissal from the academy bars them from publishing and teaching. For Fan and Liu, the sanctions also meant loss of their jobs at the academy.

To some Chinese, the campaign is a sign of what they say is an approaching crisis facing the Communist Party, a signal of its inability to change with the times. "It gives an air of the end of a dynasty," said one prominent intellectual. "We have so many problems-- corruption, strikes, farmer's unrest, education problems, infrastructure issues--and the party is worried about the Western thinking?"

To others it is an incongruous exercise that has so little to do with what is happening on China's streets as to almost be laughable. While Jiang inveighed against "Westernization," they point out, it is fast occurring in cities and towns all over China. Divorce rates are skyrocketing; pirated Hollywood movies are for sale on street corners in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu; bright children dream of studying in the United States, Canada, Australia or Europe.

While Jiang vowed that China will never embrace privatization, private business is by far the most vibrant part of the economy. Collectives, joint ventures with foreign companies and private enterprises produce more than half the country's industrial output. In addition, billions of dollars in state assets have been privatized in cities and towns throughout China.

Jiang also emphasized the importance of studying Marxism, a topic rarely brought up in casual conversation anymore. "Marx?" said a Beijing University student when asked about the campaign. "Yeah, we have to study him a little bit, but everybody reads magazines during that class."

But the purge reflects the party leadership's concern with keeping a tight hold on the political reins. As party elders such as Jiang jockey for influence in the run-up to the next major party congress in 2002, and younger officials seek to succeed them, the theme of political discourse is toughness, domestically and in foreign affairs.

However, the purge also underscores a problem for the Communist Party as it leads China into the 21st century. The party seems to fall back on old tools--purges, editorials and campaigns--to deal with new problems, such as the Internet and the role it is playing in creating space for public debate.

Last year, for instance, Jiang ordered a massive but traditional crackdown on the Falun Gong sect. That campaign, which continues today and has resulted in the jailing of thousands of practitioners, did nothing to deal with the root causes of Falun Gong's widespread popularity: a sense of spiritual vacuum following the collapse of a Communist value system that had been imposed by the state.

-------- columbia

Colombia to use U.S. drug aid to fight rightist guerrillas, too

April 12, 2000
By Ben Barber and Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-2000412221041.htm

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Colombian President Andres Pastrana said yesterday that a proposed $1.6 billion U.S. drug package would fight paramilitary death squads as well as communist guerrillas in the Andean nation.

The U.S. aid, now pending in Congress, would include dozens of Black Hawk helicopters and other military assistance to help Colombia's government win back some of the more than 30 percent of the country held by the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia known by the Spanish acronym FARC.

The regions under FARC control, mostly in southern Colombia, supply most of the cocaine and much of the heroin flowing into the United States.

Mr. Pastrana and Mrs. Albright told reporters at the State Department the aid will also be turned against the rightist paramilitary squads, who also protect the cocaine and heroin trade.

Mr. Pastrana said the U.S. aid would be invested "in the north and the south, the east and the west."

"We don't want to fracture the country." Mrs. Albright concurred. "The paramilitaries are part of the problem, not part of the solution."

For years the Colombian military has allowed paramilitary groups to operate with impunity. So long as they fight guerrillas, authorities tend to look the other way as paramilitaries murder and terrorize suspected rebel sympathizers.

The administration's new military aid package, which the House has passed but is stalled in the Senate, will provide help to anti-drug police and army units that protect police from the heavily armed FARC, Mrs. Albright said.

Those army units must be vetted to be sure they do not include officers who commit human rights abuses - a U.S. legal precondition for American aid.

Separately, the U.S. drug policy chief, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, said yesterday that the paramilitaries have decided to kill Mr. Pastrana in revenge for his efforts to rein in their operations, long believed sanctioned by the Colombian army.

"The paramilitary forces responded with an assassination plot to kill President Pastrana," Gen. McCaffrey told journalists after meeting with the Colombian president.

"There is no question that the so-called paramilitary . . . may be the most vicious and violent group in Colombia today," he said, adding that the rightist fighters had recently stepped up their campaign against leftist guerrillas operating in the country.

They are trying to "regain control of their illegal commerce and also terrorizing innocent civilians," Gen. McCaffrey said.

Gen. McCaffrey said he was assured by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, of Mr. Lott's "absolute support for the [Colombia aid] bill and the purpose of the bill."

Gen. McCaffrey said the proposed $1.6 billion aid package will protect the United States, where drugs "kill 52,000 Americans a year."

"We are calling upon Congress to support this plan, which we now have in front of Congress," he said.

The aid plan will also deal with some root causes of Colombia's political and drug problems, he said.

A senior Colombian official recently told The Washington Times that no health care is provided to much of the rural population.

It is those people who have fallen under the sway of the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, often sensing they owe little allegiance to the government in Bogota, the official said.

Mr. Pastrana said the U.S. aid, along with billions more he hopes to raise in Europe and from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, would go "not just to fight drugs but for health, structural reforms, strengthening institutions, human rights" and other social purposes.

-------- imf

Protests Vs. IMF, World Bank Held

Wednesday April 12 2:26 AM ET
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000412/bs/world_finance_protest_10.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - Protesters with grievances against global capitalism are turning their attacks on one of the top priorities of the Clinton administration, granting China permanent normal trade relations.

The AFL-CIO, which is leading the charge against the China legislation, was hoping to attract 10,000 demonstrators to the U.S. Capitol today for a rally aimed at showing labor's strong opposition to the measure.

``We will tell members of Congress: 'No blank check for China,' a country that has violated every trade agreement it has signed with the United States in the past 10 years and continues its repudiation of human rights in China,'' said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

However, business groups lobbying heavily in support of permanent trade relations, were mounting a counteroffensive with newspaper and radio ads hoping to sway lawmakers to their view that the United States will benefit from greatly increased access to China's huge market if Congress scraps its annual review of China's trade privileges.

``Out ads point out the truth about trade with China. Free trade will bring greater opportunity for American workers and farmers,'' said U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue.

The China protest was one of a weeklong series of events anti-globalization forces are staging around the spring meetings of the 182-nation International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The IMF preliminary sessions were to get under way today with release of the institution's updated world economic outlook.

Acting IMF Managing Director Stanley Fischer told reporters last week that the outlook would depict a world economy that looks ``much stronger than we would have dared predict'' a year ago, as many countries were struggling to pull out of the 1997-98 global currency crisis.

Fischer said IMF would predict in its new forecast that global output will rise by more than 4 percent this year.

The protest activities are being coordinated by a coalition called the Mobilization for Global Justice, composed of many of the same groups that successfully disrupted meetings last December of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, forcing authorities to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard.

The protest groups are hoping to use human chains and other tactics employed in Seattle to block intersections on Sunday and keep finance ministers from attending the opening IMF sessions.

But District of Columbia Police, backed up by federal authorities, have studied tapes of the Seattle demonstrations and hope to avoid the mistakes of authorities there.

Police on Tuesday kept a watchful eye as several dozen demonstrators marched from the U.S. Capitol to the World Bank in an ``Economic Way of Cross'' to demand debt relief for the world's poorest countries.

The demonstrators carried white crosses with the names of countries and the amounts of their foreign debt burden.

Both the IMF and World Bank, under pressure from the United States and other rich donor countries, have instituted programs to forgive a greater portion of the debt of the world's 40 poorest nations, but the demonstrators contend that the effort has so far provided too little in the way of debt relief.

A separate small band of protesters marched from the residence of the Colombian ambassador to the United States to a local office of the giant mutual fund company Fidelity Investments to protest international support for Colombia as the country's president, Andres Pastrana, arrived in Washington for an official visit.

The protesters targeted Fidelity because of its ownership of stock in Occidental Petroleum, which is locked in a standoff with a native Indian tribe in Colombia over oil drilling rights.

Police said there were no arrests made at either protest. Seven demonstrators had been arrested on Monday outside of the World Bank building. Police said five were blocking traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue and two others were arrested trying to scale the building to drape a protest banner.

----

Cops clamp down as protests rise

April 12, 2000
By Clarence Williams
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/default-2000412222915.htm

Metropolitan Police yesterday stepped up security measures as activists stepped up protests against international financial agencies meeting here next week.

Police officers took positions on bridges spanning the Potomac River and at key city buildings, including city hall, where officers carefully checked identification cards.

Meanwhile, about 50 demonstrators yesterday morning marched from their warehouse headquarters on Florida Avenue NW to join 100 others in a protest at the Colombian Embassy.

They accused Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who arrived in Washington this week, of using U.S. aid to augment his army.

Moreover, the activists said U.S. corporations would profit from Colombian oil-drilling rights at the expense of the environment.

"We want our dollars to support the peace process in Colombia," said Stephen Kretzmann of Amazon Watch, one of several groups protesting this week as a part of the Mobilization for Global Justice.

The protesters' so-called "Days of Action" demonstrations will continue this week and culminate Sunday and Monday, when as many as 10,000 activists will use "large-scale, nonviolent direct action" in an attempt to shut down scheduled meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Streets around the World Bank and the IMF - 19th Street NW between G Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and H Street NW between 18th and 20th streets - remained closed yesterday. Police on Tuesday closed the streets until further notice.

Police plan to expand the street closings to 19th and I streets NW and to H and 17th streets NW.

Only pedestrians and authorized vehicles will be allowed in the area. No pedestrians will be allowed in front of the World Bank or IMF buildings. Police yesterday checked the identifications of pedestrians at the buildings.

D.C. police made no arrests yesterday, said Metropolitan Police spokesman Sgt. Joe Gentile.

Yesterday's protests outside the Colombian Embassy focused on a bill before the Senate that would give more than $1 billion in aid to the South American nation.

Mr. Kretzmann said the aid package would benefit only the Colombian military and Occidental Petroleum, a U.S. corporation in a battle for oil-drilling rights against the U'wa indigenous tribe.

"The general theme is human rights, not corporate wrongs," Mr. Kretzmann said, as protesters prepared their march down Florida and Connecticut avenues and 20th and U streets - taking up one lane of traffic, with two-thirds of the District's police cruisers in tow.

Police wearing helmets stood on one side of 20th Street NW near the IMF as a lone officer videotaped the protest. Demonstrators stood across the street holding signs and with bandannas across their faces.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Mr. Pastrana said yesterday the aid package would be used to fight paramilitary death squads as well as communist guerrillas.

The administration's new military aid package, which the House has passed but is stalled in the Senate, will provide help to anti-drug police and army units that protect police from the heavily armed Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said Mrs. Albright.

About 100 activists with Jubilee 2000/USA and other groups peacefully protested in front of the World Bank yesterday afternoon with white crosses.

"We were kneeling and sitting here, and then the metal rails went up," said John Mateyko, regional coordinator for Witness For Peace. "We took that as their answer to our request to talk to the president of the bank."

A rally is planned at midday today at the U.S. Capitol to stop the expansion of the World Trade Organization and to lobby Congress to "Keep China on Probation."

U.S. Capitol Police are expecting about 15,000 to gather at the West Front of the Capitol, which could hinder noon traffic around Capitol Hill.

Several thousand Teamsters with semis will rally against the WTO on the north side of the Capitol today at 11 a.m. At noon, the AFL-CIO will rally to oppose normal trade relations with China on the west side of the Capitol.

Groups opposing the World Bank and IMF represent a variety of causes: the environment, labor, human rights, peace, anti-global capitalism and debt-reduction for poor nations.

Demonstration organizers have met with police officials and assured them their activities will be peaceful, but police are concerned that "fringe groups" may cause disruptions.

Protest targets in Washington include the World Bank and IMF buildings, the White House, Capitol Hill, the State Department and the Treasury Department.

Activists said they would use tactics like human barricades and sit-ins to prevent delegates from reaching the meetings, much like the protests last year in Seattle during WTO meetings. Those protests erupted into violence; more than 580 people were arrested and more than $10 million worth of property was destroyed.

D.C. police officials have said they wouldn't be overwhelmed like Seattle police, who imposed a curfew and broke up protests with clubs, rubber bullets and tear gas. Hundreds of Seattle police, 200 National Guard troops and 600 state troopers were needed to restore order after rioting erupted.

The protests provide a test for local police officials, who said they have learned the lessons of the Seattle riots. Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper resigned in December, taking full responsibility for the violence that disrupted the WTO meeting.

Extra security was in place yesterday at One Judiciary Square, the District's city hall at Third Street and Indiana Avenue NW, with extra police protection and increased security checks of everyone entering the building. Everyone was required to show identification cards before being allowed into the building.

"They were checking everyone's ID and belongings. There were about 30 police cars on Third Street, but there was not a protester in sight," said a D.C. Council staffer. "I don't know if there was a threat or not. Maybe they were afraid someone would throw some goat blood or something."

A police source said they had a rumor the IMF demonstrators were going to protest, but no one showed up.

"Why would they go to the mayor's office? He has nothing to with that," the police source said.

• Ben Barber, Jim Keary and John Drake contributed to this report.

----

The Business of Demonstrators As Protests Begin, Some Batten Down, While Others See Customers Coming

By David Montgomery and Linda Wheeler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 12, 2000; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-04/12/085l-041200-idx.html

A scattering of small, peaceful protests popped up across the city yesterday, while the impact of planned demonstrations against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund was being felt downtown.

Some offices announced plans to close, and some building owners began boarding up windows while Metro rerouted bus lines in Foggy Bottom to skirt streets closed by police. Other establishments figured the demonstrations might be good for business and planned to stay open.

Standing just inside Kinkead's restaurant, at 2000 Pennsylvania Ave., assistant general manager George Ronetz pointed to his left, then his right, saying, "The World Bank is there, the IMF is over there, and we're right in the middle of the battleground." The restaurant plans to close Sunday and Monday.

But Freddi Szilagi, general manager of Tower Records, said: "We're kind of treating it like snow. . . . We're going to see what happens. Barring molotov cocktails thrown at us or windows being smashed, it might be a good business opportunity."

He said the protesters may have a point about global capitalism, but "we're just hoping they don't see us as another corporate leeching organization."

The quiet and sometimes prayerful gatherings at the Capitol, Dupont Circle and outside the World Bank all focused on aspects of the global economy, which protesters say is rigged against poor families and workers. The protesters' busy daily schedule--published on the Internet--also included a noon rally at One Judiciary Square in support of poor D.C. renters facing eviction.

The longest rally wound from the Capitol to the World Bank building. "The message has to be heard," said Sharon Delgado, 51, a United Methodist pastor from Santa Cruz, Calif., who helped lead a group carrying white crosses bearing the names of impoverished countries and the amount of debt they owe Western creditors. "I am prepared to do whatever it takes peacefully."

Acting on advice from police, some Foggy Bottom establishments were battening down as if for a storm.

Workers bolted hard plastic shields outside the windows of George Washington University's law school, across the street from the IMF. The windows of another campus building were plastered with large X's made of silver duct tape to prevent any shattered glass from flying.

The decision by Kinkead's to close Sunday and Monday will cost about $45,000 in sales. But Ronetz said he didn't fear violence by the protesters. Rather, he said, police are strongly urging people to stay away and customers will be deterred.

"I think the demonstrators have a good cause," Ronetz added, though he also praised police precautions. "It's just too bad businesses have to suffer."

Police also have asked businesses to consider shutting down, and thousands of office workers were being told not to come to work Monday. Some will have Friday off as well.

Potomac Electric Power Co. will close its headquarters at Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th Street NW Friday through Monday, idling more than 1,100 employees, except for an undetermined number of essential personnel who will work out of other locations.

Kaiser Permanente will close its eight-story West End clinic in the 2100 block of Pennsylvania Avenue Saturday through Monday. Employees will be reassigned to other clinics. Patients with appointments or those needing urgent care should call the medical appointment desk to be rescheduled or referred to another clinic, said spokeswoman Susan Simon.

"It probably isn't the place you want sick people coming anyway," she said.

Thousands more employees will have days off, including the staff of one of the city's largest private employers, George Washington University, which will be closed Saturday through Monday, as well as employees at the World Bank and IMF not involved in the spring meetings that are the objects of protest.

Then there are numerous small offices, such as that of Howard Osterman, a podiatrist, in the 1700 block of I Street NW, who is closing Monday, a day that he had 30 appointments scheduled. "I love working in D.C., and this goes with the territory: demonstrations and free speech," he said. "It is part of the charm of working in the District."

To encourage caution, if not closure, police and landlords are showing merchants video clips of some of the unruly action during the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in the fall, which inspired the Washington demonstrations. A small faction of Seattle demonstrators resorted to vandalism.

John Faison, general manager of T.G.I. Friday's, said his landlord showed him scenes of demonstrators throwing patio furniture through plate-glass windows. He's planning to bring all his furniture inside by the weekend.

But he isn't closing the restaurant. He pointed to the 50 or 60 police officers having a lunch break yesterday afternoon. He expects a lot of police business for the duration of the protests. "When 50 leave, 60 more come in," he said. "So we feel very secure."

Nearby streets that were closed Monday by police, though, forced Metrobus to reroute six bus lines, including the 80 and S1. Potomac and Rappahannock Transit Commission routes C, D, L and M also were rerouted. The detours are expected to remain in effect at least through Monday, or until the roads are reopened.

Metro plans to keep all subway stations open and is preparing for crowds at the four stations closest to the IMF headquarters: Foggy Bottom, Farragut West, Farragut North and McPherson Square. Transit officials will enforce rules against carrying large items, such as coolers or signs affixed to sticks.

Sunday poses a tricky problem for the Rev. H. Donald Smith, senior pastor of the United Church at 1920 G St. NW, close to the IMF.

Even though it is Palm Sunday, the church will be closed. Services will be held instead at a church on River Road NW.

"It's a little bit inconvenient," he said. "But these are the kinds of issues we like to see surfaced and talked about."

Members of religious groups took part in one of the largest displays yesterday, with the white crosses. About 100 people gathered on the steps of the Capitol at noon and took up the crosses. The group called for the cancellation of debt owed by poor countries to the bank and the IMF.

Leaving the Capitol, the group made 14 stops, fashioned after traditional Roman Catholic stations of the cross, at federal agencies. At each stop, prayers were read referring to the role of the particular agencies.

The procession ended at the bank and the IMF, where some demonstrators had hoped to be able to trespass and be arrested, but they could not draw near because police had blocked surrounding streets.

They also were not allowed to take a statement inside to bank President James D. Wolfensohn, but his assistant came outside and offered to schedule an appointment.

Marie Dennis, a leader of the group, had told those gathered at the Capitol, "We can taste the unending drudgery, and we know that its institutional roots are painfully close to home."

Washington resident Chris Girardi was out for a run yesterday when he ran into protesters walking and praying their way up Pennsylvania Avenue. After pausing to read a handout, he dumped the exercise plan, picked up a 50-pound white cross that was offered him and led the line of marchers for the rest of the day.

Girardi, 21, was on a day off from his clerking job at a Georgetown clothing store. He didn't know there would be a protest yesterday, he said, and when he picked up the cross he was brand-new to protesting.

"I read the Bible, and the Bible talks about righteousness," he said. "This day was the right day for me to do the right thing."

Staff writers Lyndsey Layton, Sylvia Moreno and Arthur Santana contributed to this report.

Security Measures Increase

A number of streets around the World Bank building have been shut down until further notice in response to this week's protests of the bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition, the Postal Service has removed 69 mailboxes from the surrounding area until April 18, to prevent anyone from planting a bomb within blocks of the two buildings.

----

IMF releases report amid D.C. protests

04/12/00
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncswed03.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The world economy, after being staggered by a global financial crisis, regained its footing in 1999 and will grow this year at the fastest pace in more than a decade, the International Monetary Fund forecast Wednesday.

But the IMF also cautioned that a sudden plunge in the U.S. stock market and a ''hard landing'' for the U.S. economy is one of the leading risks to its forecast.

The release of the IMF's economic outlook marked the start of several days of preliminary events leading to the formal opening of the IMF and World Bank's spring meetings Sunday. Thousands of protesters are already moving into Washington to air a variety of complaints against the bank, the IMF and U.S. trade relations with China.

The IMF, which had been forced by the 1997-98 currency crisis to consistently lower its forecasts, said it is now in the pleasant position of boosting its estimates, largely because of the continued unexpected strength in the United States.

The IMF predicted that global output will expand by a strong 4.2% this year, the best showing since 1988, with growth continuing at a still-strong 3.9% in 2001.

The IMF also revised upward its estimate for how much output increased last year, now saying the global economy expanded by 3.3%. That is up sharply from the 2.5% increase of 1998, when the currency crisis that began in Asia was spreading to Russia and Latin America and posing a real risk of a global recession.

''The picture for global growth is a strong and quite positive one for the year 2000 and beyond,'' Michael Mussa, the IMF's chief economist, told reporters at a briefing.

But Mussa said that there are downside risks, particularly that the United States, the world's largest economy, will grow more strongly than expected in coming months, forcing the Federal Reserve to move so aggressively to increase interest rates that it could push the United States into a mild recession starting in 2001.

The IMF also mentioned threats from a sudden plunge in the U.S. stock market that would shake consumer confidence and the country's huge and growing trade deficit.

''There are important risks going forward,'' Mussa told reporters. He stressed that the IMF believes the most likely outcome is not a ''hard landing'' and recession in the United States but a ''soft landing'' in which the Fed, which has already boosted interest rates five times in less than a year is successful in slowing the economy to a more sustainable pace that keeps inflation under control.

Anti-globalization groups, hoping to repeat the success they had in disrupting the World Trade Organization meetings last year in Seattle, are staging their own preliminary events, including a protest rally at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday where the AFL-CIO hoped to attract 10,000 demonstrators against one of the Clinton administration's top priorities, granting China permanent normal trade relations.

Thousands of union members have rallied at the Capitol and lobbied lawmakers to protest a bill that would give permanent normal trade status to China instead of annual reviews.

Teamsters President James P. Hoffa told some 5,000 cheering demonstrators that corporations supporting the deal have lost their ''moral compass,'' and pledged to mobilize union members ''to keep jobs in this country.''

Speakers ranged from Rep. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an independent liberal, to conservative Reform Party presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan. Chinese dissident Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in prison in China, also spoke as did Joylyn Billy, a Teamster whose Mr. Coffee plant in Glenwillow, Ohio, is to close next month with jobs moving to Mexico.

''We will tell members of Congress: 'no blank check for China,' a country that has violated every trade agreement it has signed with the United States in the past 10 years and continues its repudiation of human rights in China,'' said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

Demonstrators have pledged to strike unexpectedly throughout the week to try to make their points against global capitalism. Wednesday, one of the targets was The Washington Post.

At selected newspaper boxes, people got something extra with their daily paper, a one-page parody called The Washington Lost that was wrapped around the regular newspaper. It featured a photo of former IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus getting hit with a pie in the face and headlines such as ''Besieged IMF Plans Meaningless Cosmetic Changes; Ad Campaign, Jingle Unveiled.''

A building near the World Bank-IMF headquarters was evacuated Wednesday because of a car fire in a basement garage. A District of Columbia fire spokesman said it appeared to be accidental. Police were stationed along the bridges bringing traffic from suburban Virginia into the capital to prevent any effort to slow or block the traffic.

The protest activities are being coordinated by a coalition called the Mobilization for Global Justice, composed of many of the same groups that successfully disrupted meetings last December of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, forcing authorities to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard.

The protest groups are hoping to use human chains and other tactics employed in Seattle to block intersections on Sunday and keep finance ministers from attending the opening IMF sessions.

But District of Columbia Police, backed up by federal authorities, have studied tapes of the Seattle demonstrations and hope to avoid the mistakes of authorities there.

--------

Protesters don't want global democracy

04/12/00
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/ncguest1.htm
By Lester C. Thurow

Week-long protests are under way in Washington against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). If all goes well - at least, by the activists' standards - the demonstrations will culminate in a massive protest rally Sunday as world finance ministers gather in downtown Washington for the spring meetings of the two financial institutions.

Now is the right time to think about the forces these demonstrators represent.

Anything radically new always creates fear. In this case the new is globalization.

Better communications and transportation technologies are in the process of dissolving national economies and replacing them with a global economy. This is not occurring because governments or citizens want it to happen. It is happening because business firms can make a lot of money by searching the world for the cheapest places to make their products and the most profitable places to sell their products.

In the rest of the world, globalization is often seen as a dangerous invasion of traditional American culture and business practices. It isn't. It is the creation of a new set of global practices, much of it made in the United States, but just as strange and alienating to many Americans as it is to many of those outside of the United States.

That is why both those Americans who protested against the World Trade Organization (WTO) last year in Seattle and those who are in Washington now are so upset. Decisions that directly affect their lives are being made outside of the United States and without reference to what they would like. Their traditional practices are being uprooted just as much as those in France, which is home to the most vocal objectors to the exportation of those "American" practices.

Globalization is similar to what happened a century ago when electricity and the things that went with it (the telegraph, the telephone, the radio) replaced the local-regional economies that had existed in America with a new national economy. The difference then, of course, is that we already had a democratically elected national government standing by to step in to regulate this new national economy. Today, there is no democratically elected global government ready to regulate this new global economy. Not only does it not exist, but also national governments oppose its creation.

National governments do not want to give up their power to control to some higher authority. But at the same time, they are gradually losing their controlling powers to a global economy. If a company does not like the regulations of some specific country, for example, it simply moves out and services that market from an offshore production base. The largest drug company in the United Kingdom recently promised to do so if the U.K. did not change some of its attitudes regarding genetically modified drugs.

If a global democracy were to be organized, most of the world's citizens would probably vote against it. Very few are willing to live in a world where 6 billion people get to vote and their own ethnic group is just a small minority.

But some regulation is necessary. Global capitalism requires rules about property rights (intellectual and otherwise), the enforcement of contracts, equal access to markets and a host of other issues. Concerns about the environment, human rights and labor standards are so intertwined with global economic rules and regulations that no one can separate them.

It is not possible to say that the WTO should handle global trade while some other agency (usually left unspecified) handles these other legitimate concerns. The WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are not global organizations. They are international organizations, creatures of the national governments that created them. If they want to implement their policies, they have to ask local governments to enforce their rules and regulations. They have no powers independent of those national governments. But today we are using these international organizations to make decisions that logically ought to be made by a democratic global government that could enforce its decisions without reference to national governments.

The situation raises lots of anxiety and fear. Steelworkers don't like the idea that an Asian financial crisis and the IMF's imposed austerity policies can cost them their jobs. For many Americans, something isn't working right when the inflation-corrected wages of the median male full-time full-year worker go down 3% from 1989 to 1998 (the last year for which we now have data) despite a booming American economy.

The WTO makes decisions that make it impossible for those who love dolphins to protect them (Mexican tuna captured in nets that kill dolphins cannot be kept out of the U.S. market). The WTO makes decisions that make it difficult for those who wish to stop child labor or those who wish to enforce labor safety standards to do so. In the WTO's view, those aren't legitimate concerns for negotiations. Yet if safety standards aren't enforced abroad, they cannot be enforced at home without risking American jobs.

Put simply and bluntly, global trade looks as if it is starting a race to the bottom as far as these other issues are concerned.

The fears and anxieties of many Americans aren't imaginary. Yet while the demonstrators in Seattle and Washington talk about democracy, or the lack of democracy, in the decision-making at the WTO, the IMF or the World Bank, they don't really believe in global democracy. The United States has less than 0.3 billion of the 6 billion people in the world. A global democracy would not be an American-dominated democracy. Instead, Americans would be a small minority.

What they want is "stop the world, I want to get off" - but that is the one thing they cannot have.

The tide of globalization is rolling in. Whatever the fears of drowning in the deluge, everyone has to learn to cope with it.

Lester C. Thurow, a professor of economics and former dean of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

-------- April 12, 2000

U.S. Labor on Offensive Against China Trade Deal

By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/12cnd-wto-china.html

WASHINGTON, April 12 -- Worried that doing business with China will crowd American workers out of the global economy, thousands of union men and women flocked to Capitol Hill today to condemn the idea of normal trade relations with Beijing.

"Don't give China a blank check" was one of the more popular slogans of the day, appearing on many signs carried by steelworkers, auto workers, government workers, teachers and others who congregated on a sunny but brisk day.

Full-trade status with China would allow that country's goods to come into the United States as do goods from many other countries: without high tariffs. In return, China would be obliged to open its markets to a multitude of American goods.

But as he rallied his troops, Teamsters President James Hoffa sneered at the notion that China can be trusted.

"As long as they imprison Chinese labor leaders, we say no to this agreement," he said. "Let's keep China on probation. They've got blood on their hands."

Michael Kozikowski, a 48-year-old millwright at a Saturn plant in Wilmington, Del., agreed. "We think it downright stinks," he said.

"They're taking our highly skilled, highly paid jobs and moving them to countries where they can take advantage of a low-skilled, low-paid work force."

But not everyone was concerned about strictly bread-and-butter issues.

"We're worried that we won't be able to impose protection on animals, because it will be considered a trade barrier," said Carrie Reulbach, 25, who was dressed as a sea turtle. "No matter what animal is traded, we can't protect the species the way we want to."

The union leaders and their followers hoped to pressure the very lawmakers who do the people's business in the sprawling complex behind them. Two Democratic members of Congress were scheduled to speak: Representatives David Bonior of Michigan and Nancy Pelosi of California.

"Free traders are traitors," one sign read.

"Hell no W.T.O.," read a T-shirt, a reference to the World Trade Organization, whose meeting in Seattle last year spawned violent protests. China's entry into the W.T.O. is vehemently opposed by the people who protested at the Capitol today.The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two other symbols of the worldwide economy, have also been the targets of protests in Washington this week.

At the Capitol today, the union sympathizers were cheerful and smiling, photographing one another like ordinary tourists, using the gleaming Capitol dome and the Washington Monument as backdrops. Capitol police officers chatted affably with the protesters and had to use their authority only to shoo jaywalkers back to safety or chase picture-takers off perilous perches.

"We're here to help their exercise their First Amendment rights," one sergeant said without sarcasm.

Those rights were invoked today by union leaders and members of the rank-and-file who fear that normalizing trade relations with China, as the Clinton administration would like to do, would cost the United States jobs and self-respect. Among other things, the demonstrators said, the Chinese would flood American markets with cheap goods turned out by prison laborers and exploited workers toiling for next to nothing.

Rally organizers had hoped for a crowd of 15,000. It was difficult to get a good estimate on the vast Capitol grounds as people came and went, chanting union slogans, but there were enough people to fill a small stadium.

For all the anger and anxiety vented today, anyone with a sense of history could find reasons to take heart. The unions' cause drew men and women, young and old, workers of light skin and dark skin -- in other words, people not always united beneath the same banner in years past.

But there was poignancy as well in the chill air, as personified by Mike Orange, a steelworker from Grove City, Pa. A trustee of his union local, Mr. Orange has been making and shaping steel for 44 years.

Now, his working days are winding down, and maybe it's just as well, he said. The plant where he's worked all these years is a lot quieter than it was in the old days, thanks to spin-offs and downsizing and other features of the new economy.

"When I started there, it had about 2,400 workers," he reminisced.

And now? "About 25."

--------

Unions to Hit the Street in Washington

April 12, 2000
By JOSEPH KAHN with STEVEN GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/041200imf-union-rally.html

WASHINGTON, April 11 -- American labor unions, worried that the world economy is destroying many good jobs, are descending on Washington to mount street demonstrations against a China trade bill and to lend support to students, environmentalists and religious groups protesting globalization.

The aggressive effort comes as labor's leadership has hardened its opposition to liberalized trade, and its ties with the Clinton administration have frayed. President Clinton's trade policies have done serious damage to American workers, they argue, adding that all new trade initiatives should be rejected unless they seek to improve working conditions around the world.

Capitalizing on last year's anti-trade demonstrations in Seattle, union leaders have also forged alliances with some environmental and student groups gathered this week in Washington to protest against actions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The "blue-green" alliance is unusual for labor, which until five years ago largely avoided ties with such groups.

The labor campaign kicks off on Wednesday with a rally on Capitol Hill and will continue in Washington and key Congressional districts during the next 10 days.

Labor pressure has also caused problems for Vice President Al Gore, the likely Democratic nominee for president. Mr. Gore, who has long supported free trade initiatives, has tiptoed around the China trade measure because of unexpectedly strong labor opposition. Mr. Gore won an early endorsement for his presidential candidacy from unions this year, and has told union leaders that he would take a different approach to trade than Mr. Clinton.

The Clinton administration is asking Congress to extend permanent trade ties to China, a step that would allow United States companies to benefit fully from market-opening measures China agreed to take as the price of admission to the World Trade Organization. Unlike some other trade deals that labor unions have opposed, this one does not require the United States to open its market wider to foreign-made products.

Many analysts say that the China measure could help close American's gaping trade deficit with that nation by allowing companies to export more goods there, a situation that would presumably be good for American workers. Separately, union officials are opposing another Clinton administration trade initiative that would grant lower tariffs to many of the poorest African countries, a measure that has support from many Democrats.

Union officials insist that they have not become knee-jerk protectionists, a reputation they worked hard to shed in recent years. But they do say that they are now opposed to trade accords unless they raise labor standards in foreign nations. That stance leaves them in opposition to almost all trade liberalization measures around the world these days.

Some union officials now even argue that increased export opportunities are ultimately bad for American workers because multinational companies exploit every market opening to shift union jobs to less heavily regulated nations.

Unions are taking out advertisements this week citing a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a union-oriented policy group, that predicts hundreds of thousands of job losses even if China joins the World Trade Organization and American companies get new export and investment benefits. Clinton administration officials call those predictions baseless.

"Globalization works only for multinationals, not for workers," said George Becker, president of the United Steelworkers of America and one of the most active labor leaders in rallying workers against China trade. "The main reason companies are interested in the China market is the repressed labor and low environmental standards there."

Mr. Becker said that many unions, especially since the Seattle demonstrations, have found common cause with some nongovernment organizations and college students who want to rewrite he rules of globalization to protect the environment, upgrade labor standards and alleviate poverty abroad.

"We are not traditional allies," Mr. Becker said. "But when I saw those kids in Seattle who knew that something was wrong in the world, I knew we should stand together in the trenches."

Mr. Becker, whose union is based in Pittsburgh, said he is staying in Washington through Sunday so that he can speak at an rally against the World Bank and I.M.F. that day. John J. Sweeney, president of A.F.L.-C.I.O. umbrella union, spoke at a rally in favor of forgiving third world debt last Sunday and announced an alliance with the Sierra Club, an environmental group, on Monday.

The United Auto Workers, the International Association of Machinists, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have are also busing in members for the rally and lobbying effort against China trade, which may draw 20,000 protesters. Many say some of their members will stay on through the weekend to join the protest against the financial institutions.

Labor's broad campaign against 1990's-style globalization is deeply worrying for Democrats. Labor is perhaps the party's single most active political constituency. Its heavy lobbying effort against the China trade measure has split the party and hindered its efforts to present a moderate, united front in this year's presidential elections. Especially in seeking money and votes from high-tech workers, Democrats are eager to present an internationalist image, not a protectionist one.

"It puts Democrats in a tough position because they have to break ranks with a key constituency or risk hurting our leadership on an important issue," said Representative Calvin M. Dooley, a California Democrat who is among a minority of his party's caucus in the expected to vote in favor of permanent trade ties for China. "I think labor has demagogued so much on the trade issue that even when we get one that's clearly in the U.S. interest, they can't get comfortable with it."

Thea Lee, an international economist with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said labor's opposition to the China Trade bill is principled, asserting that trade should not be normalized with China because it is known for violating human rights, workers' rights and many past trade agreements that have been signed.

How much political power labor can bring to bear is debatable. But in an era of low voter turnout, many Democrats are persuaded that labor proven get-out-the-vote efforts can make the difference between victory and defeat.

Largely because of labor pressure, no top Democratic leader in the House has publicly supported the China trade bill. Some in the party fear that stance will cost them business donations and possibly hurt their chances of winning back the House this year.

-------- india / pakistan

Dhanush test- fired

http://www.indiaserver.com:80/thehindu/2000/04/12/stories/0112000c.htm

CHANDIPUR-ON-SEA, APRIL 11. An indigenously developed missile Dhanush with a strike range of 150 km Dhanush was today test- fired from a Naval carrier close to the Orissa coast, defence sources said.

With the successful test-firing of Dhanush, India has joined a handful of nations capable of firing ship-to-ship missiles.

-------- israel

Israel Attacks U.S. Over China Arms

April 12, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Israel-China-US.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel will not cancel the sale of a sophisticated early warning plane to China despite a ``steamroller'' of U.S. pressure aimed at edging Israel out of the international arms market, the deputy defense minister said today in an unusually blunt statement.

Shortly after deputy minister Ephraim Sneh spoke, Chinese President Jiang Zemin arrived in Israel for a historic state visit.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was en route back from a 19-hour trip to Washington, was reportedly urged by President Clinton to cancel the deal. The chairman of the House Foreign Aid Committee threatened last week to deduct Israeli earnings from the sale of the planes from U.S. aid to Israel.

Sneh, a retired general, scoffed at arguments that the sale of the PHALCON airborne surveillance system to China could pose a threat to Taiwan, a U.S. ally. He said one early warning plane cannot change the military balance in Asia.

Sneh said that when Washington sold similar early warning, or AWACS, planes to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, it assured Israel that they are purely defensive. Sneh said he did not believe the aircraft had changed its character today.

``Every elected representative, whether he is in the American Congress or in the Israeli Knesset tries to protect the jobs of his voters,'' the deputy minister said.

Sneh said the U.S. presidential campaign was also a factor. Noting that the Israel-China deal was signed three years ago, Sneh said: ``Now, of all times, the issue has become hot, to no small degree because the entire Chinese issue has become a burning issue in domestic American politics.''

Sneh said that in the past the United States has ``brutally thrown Israel out'' of other international arms markets.

``In this market of the defense industries of the world, in this competition, there are no friends,'' he told Israel radio. ``Everyone is competing without mercy against everyone.''

Israel is completing production of one early warning plane for China, and the Chinese have an option on three to seven additional planes.

Sneh also accused the United States of applying one standard to Israel and a different one to other friendly countries, such as Britain and France, which also competed for the Chinese contract, but were beaten by the Israeli bid.

``I'm not sure that Britain, for example, was subjected to the steamroller which is being applied to us today,'' Sneh said. ``They (the Americans) don't have the leverage on Britain which they have on us.''

Sneh said Israel would honor its contract to deliver the first plane to China but would ``take account'' of American sensibilities with regard to additional planes.

---

Israel Welcomes Chinese President

April 12, 2000
By DINA KRAFT, Associated Press Writer
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/ap/000412/18/int-israel-china

JERUSALEM (AP) - Under U.S. pressure to cancel a lucrative arms deal with China, Israel welcomed Chinese President Jiang Zemin on a historic visit Wednesday to the Jewish state, cementing ties first forged in secret nearly two decades ago.

The high-profile recognition of Israel - the visit is the first by a Chinese president - was seen as strong proof here that the days of diplomatic isolation are over for good. However, the new status also brought new problems for Israel, such as juggling the divergent interests of its strongest ally and a powerful new friend.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak welcomed Jiang less than 24 hours after meeting at the White House with President Clinton, who urged the Israeli leader to cancel the planned sale of a sophisticated airborne surveillance system to China.

Clinton expressed deep displeasure and warned that the deal, potentially worth $2 billion, could undermine Israel's standing in the United States, said an Israeli official who attended Tuesday's White House summit. Danny Yatom, Barak's top policy adviser, said the U.S. Congress was "very worried" about the sale.

Israel's deputy defense minister, Ephraim Sneh, said Israel was committed to selling at least one surveillance plane to China, which reportedly has the option to order three to seven more. Israeli officials have suggested that after the first plane is sold, the deal could be frozen indefinitely to appease the United States.

Sneh said that in the competitive international arms market, "there are no friends." Describing U.S. pressure on Israel as a "steamroller," he scoffed at U.S. complaints that the sale could upset the military balance in Asia and pose a threat to Taiwan, a U.S. ally.

Jiang arrived in Israel on Wednesday afternoon for a six-day visit. The countries established diplomatic relations in 1992, but secret ties go back to the early 1980s when Israel began selling arms to China.

His first stop was a reception by Israeli President Ezer Weizman. Describing Israel and China as ancient nations, Jiang said it was important to "strengthen the historical friendship between us ... and to promote friendly and mutually beneficial cooperation in various fields between the two countries."

Israeli and Chinese officials on Wednesday signed agreements on education and industrial technology research and development.

During his visit, Jiang will hold talks with Barak and Israeli lawmakers, visit Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, and tour two communal farms in the Negev Desert to inspect agricultural projects. On Saturday, he will meet Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

A planned visit to Israel Aircraft Industries, which is outfitting a Soviet transport plane with the new PHALCON surveillance system, has reportedly been canceled to avoid drawing more attention to the deal.

Barak faces a difficult dilemma over the sale.

He needs Clinton's goodwill at a critical stage in the peace talks with the Palestinians and a planned Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, due by July.

However, Barak also has to protect Israel's defense industry. About 70 percent of the military equipment produced in Israel is exported, and China has emerged as a major client, said Gerald Steinberg, an expert on the Israeli defense industry.

Sneh told Israel radio that in the past the United States has "brutally thrown Israel out" of other international arms markets.

Sneh said that that when Washington sold similar early warning, or AWACS, planes to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, it assured Israel that they are purely defensive. Sneh said he did not believe the aircraft had changed their character today.

Sneh said the U.S. presidential campaign was a factor in the dispute. Noting that the Israel-China deal was signed three years ago, Sneh said: "Now, of all times, the issue has become hot, to no small degree because the entire Chinese issue has become a burning issue in domestic American politics."

In an apparent admonishment to the United States to stay out of Israeli-Chinese affairs, Jiang said that with the end of the Cold War, super powers no longer controlled world affairs.

"It has become increasingly difficult ... for the very few big powers or blocs of big powers to monopolize international affairs and control the fate of other countries," he said during a state dinner.

Last week, the chairman of the House Foreign Aid Committee threatened to deduct Israeli earnings from the sale of the planes from U.S. aid to Israel.

The U.S. State Department has said cutting aid was not the answer, but has expressed concern about the budding defense relationship between Israel and China.

One Israeli commentator warned that Israel wasn't powerful enough to play one superpower against the other.

"Israel has placed itself in a dubious position - right in the middle of an elephant path used by two superpowers, the United States and China. On a path like that you run the risk of being crushed under the foot of a passing elephant," wrote military expert Zeev Schiff in the respected Haaretz daily.

-----

Israeli Secret Service Under Fire

April 12, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Israel-Torture.html http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/ap/000412/20/int-israel-torture

JERUSALEM (AP) -- A former Israeli attorney general told a newspaper in comments published Wednesday that the Shin Bet security service should be stripped of its right to interrogate suspects because it has inappropriately used force against them.

Michael Ben-Yair said that when he was attorney general from 1993 to 1997, the Shin Bet abused authorization he granted to use mild physical force in specific circumstances.

Instead, he said, the Shin Bet used physical force against Palestinian suspects ``routinely, every day and all the time.'' Ben-Yair confirmed the comments reported in the Israeli Haaretz daily.

He said the Shin Bet should be restricted to gathering intelligence, while interrogation of suspects should be conducted only by the police.

His statements follow a September 1999 Supreme Court decision banning any use of force by secret service interrogators. The Shin Bet had previously been allowed to use ``moderate physical pressure,'' with permission from the attorney general, to extract information from a suspect about an impending attack.

The pressure included sleep deprivation, violent shaking and forcing the prisoner to sit in excruciatingly uncomfortable positions for long periods. Human rights activists maintained that these methods amounted to torture.

Ben-Yair said in 1994, after he granted permission to use mild force to investigate a bus bombing in Tel Aviv, then-Shin Bet chief Carmi Gilon began using force routinely.

Ben-Yair said he turned against any use of force in 1995, when Palestinian suspect Abdel Samad Harizat died after being subjected to violent shaking.

``My feeling was that the Shin Bet had led me by the nose,'' Ben-Yair said.

-------- korea

Fire Shuts S. Korea Nuclear Plant

April 12, 2000
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/ap/000412/09/int-skorea-forest-fires

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Tens of thousands of South Koreans were ordered to evacuate their homes, and factories and schools were shut down Wednesday as forest fires spread along the eastern coast, officials said.

Two people have been killed and four injured in the weeklong fires, which also destroyed about 700 homes. The hardest-hit cities were Kangnung, Tonghae and Samchok, all along the coast.

Thousands of soldiers and government officials were mobilized, but they had difficulty extinguishing the fires amid seasonal dry weather and strong winds, officials said.

A nuclear power plant that was forced to shut down for 13 hours after raging forest fires threatened its power transmission lines was reopened Wednesday.

The French-made plant in Uljin, 155 miles east of Seoul, was able to reopen after firefighters and villagers managed to extinguish the flames. Three other nuclear power plants in the area, all French-made, were unaffected by the fire and stayed open.

South Korea's four major cement factories were forced to suspend operations Wednesday because fire knocked down their power supplies.

Television footage showed old villagers weeping over blackened livestock and smoking debris of what used to be the homes of farmers who cultivated mountain slopes.

-----

Korea Summit Reportedly to Touch on Arms Reduction

April 12, 2000
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-t.html

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean President Kim Dae-jung is expected to propose a mutual arms reduction to North Korea during a planned summit in June, local newspapers reported.

The Korea Times said in its Thursday edition distributed on Wednesday night President Kim and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il would seek a pact highlighting inter-Korean non-aggression and on establishing liaison offices in each other's capital.

``If the two Koreas agreed to arms reduction and spend the money for productive purposes, it will be a great boost to revitalizing the economy both in the South and North,'' the English-language newspaper quoted a presidential aide as saying.

He was also quoted as saying the liaison office would facilitate inter-Korean economic cooperation and the reunion of separated family members.

The two leaders could agree on the formation of a unified team for the Sydney Olympics, to be held this September, and the 2002 World Cup final, the newspaper said.

South and North Korea are due to hold their summit in the North's capital Pyongyang on June 12-14.

In a speech in Berlin in early March, the South's Kim proposed government-to-government assistance, reunions of families separated during the 1950-53 Korean War, dialogues between North and South officials, and reconciliation to end the state of war on the Korean peninsula.

--------

Fire Shuts S. Korea Nuclear Plant

APRIL 12, 09:57 EST
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS73Q81PG0

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Tens of thousands of South Koreans were ordered to evacuate their homes, and factories and schools were shut down Wednesday as forest fires spread along the eastern coast, officials said.

Two people have been killed and four injured in the weeklong fires, which also destroyed about 700 homes. The hardest-hit cities were Kangnung, Tonghae and Samchok, all along the coast.

Thousands of soldiers and government officials were mobilized, but they had difficulty extinguishing the fires amid seasonal dry weather and strong winds, officials said.

A nuclear power plant that was forced to shut down for 13 hours after raging forest fires threatened its power transmission lines was reopened Wednesday.

The French-made plant in Uljin, 155 miles east of Seoul, was able to reopen after firefighters and villagers managed to extinguish the flames. Three other nuclear power plants in the area, all French-made, were unaffected by the fire and stayed open.

South Korea's four major cement factories were forced to suspend operations Wednesday because fire knocked down their power supplies.

Television footage showed old villagers weeping over blackened livestock and smoking debris of what used to be the homes of farmers who cultivated mountain slopes.

--------

GE Seeks N. Korea Protection

APRIL 12, 13:54 EST
By BARRY SCHWEID AP Diplomatic Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=BUSINESS&STORYID=APIS73QBGSG0

WASHINGTON (AP) - The General Electric Co. is asking the U.S. government to pay legal claims in the event of a disaster at civilian nuclear power plants being built in North Korea.

That could cost the government, and ultimately American taxpayers, huge sums of money if there were a nuclear accident of Three Mile Island proportions.

General Electric has a contract of nearly $30 million to provide steam turbines and some other equipment for two light-water reactors. South Korea is paying most of the cost of the project.

Louise Binns, a GE spokeswoman, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that indemnification ``is a normal part of this kind of deal.''

She said the company was asking South Korea to be responsible for liability in the highly unlikely event of a nuclear disaster and that the United States would be the insurer only of last resort.

``It's a normal requirement of projects,'' she said by telephone from Fairfield, Conn.

The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday disclosed the proposed U.S. guarantee in a column by Jim Mann. He began it: ``Warning to American taxpayers: without knowing it you may soon take on responsibility for what could be billions of dollars in liability.''

The reactors are a key element in a 1994 agreement between the United States and North Korea, which froze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for civilian reactors and energy contributions.

This has led to a warming of relations between North Korea and the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Charles Kartman, special envoy for Korea at the State Department, confirmed GE had made a proposal on indemnification for its participation in the project.

GE's proposal is under review, and no decision has been made, Kartman said.

In 1995, North Korea agreed to ensure that a there was a legal and financial way to meet any claims there. Also, North Korea has to secure nuclear liability insurance to protect the contractors against claims from outside the country.

``All along, we have understood there was going to have to be an indemnification scheme in place for the company to participate,'' Kartman told The Associated Press.

He said contractors were asked to participate even while liability arrangements were pending. ``If they are not satisfied later, they will be able to opt out,'' he said.

North Korea has about four years to provide liability protection.

--------

Koreas' Summit Rekindles Hopes For Reunions

By Doug Struck Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 ; A18
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59822-2000Apr11.html

SEOUL, April 11 -- It's odd, said the old woman. She can no longer remember the faces of her parents or recall the voices of her brothers and sisters. The years have hollowed out her memories but left the ache. Half a century later, she still misses them.

"I just want to see their faces--even if it's a picture. I just want to know what happened to them. I want to know if they're dead or alive. I want to know what the end was, before I die."

Park Kun Mook, 70, has not heard from her family since she fled North Korea to the South before the start of the Korean War in 1950. She listened Monday, with the doubt earned through years of disappointment, to the news that the leaders of North and South Korea will hold a summit for the first time. "I don't think it will happen," she said with a scoff. "There's been too many lies, too many times we thought something would happen, and it didn't."

The meeting scheduled for June 12-14 between South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang is likely to focus on people like Park. Uncounted families were split when Korea was torn apart after World War II with the birth of the Cold War. Communists and the "East" took up arms in North Korea, and capitalists and the "West" barricaded the border in South Korea.

The division boiled over into bloody fratricide in the 1950-53 Korean War, and the estrangement has been so total ever since that most separated families have heard no news of their relatives, much less seen them in person.

About 4.5 million people in the South fled the North during or before the war, according to Daein Kang, who has headed one of several reconciliation programs. The countries are split by the world's most heavily armed border. Some families have made their way to China or third countries to be reunited, but such undertakings are difficult, often dangerous and costly. South Korean officials say they hope the summit will result in the start of family reconciliations or at least open a channel between North and South for news of lost relatives.

Kim Dae Jung, even while accepting world plaudits today after the surprise announcement of the summit, cautioned his countrymen not to pin too many hopes on the meeting. "National issues that have been divisive for a half-century cannot be resolved overnight," Kim said. But he pronounced the summit "one big step forward in our national history and in the move toward peace."

His caution seemed designed to dampen expectations and reduce the risk of failure, one member of his party acknowledged today, but it is also grounded in realism: North Korea has a long history of raising and then dashing hopes in negotiations. "The danger of having a summit is that if nothing happens after the meeting, how do you start again? It's a risky business," said H.K. Kim, an expert on the Koreas at American University.

Kim Dae Jung's political opponents continued to assert today that North Korea agreed to the summit to try to influence Thursday's parliamentary elections in the South and that it will raise new demands to forestall the meeting or limit its success. "I think this is all political, and in the end Kim Jong Il will not meet with Kim Dae Jung," said Lee Sa Churl, a leader of the opposition Grand National Party.

But the Seoul government is confident North Korea will go through with the summit because it urgently needs aid. Analysts predict the summit will include a limited agenda that involves food aid and economic assistance sought by North Korea, and family reconciliation sought by the South. Still to be made clear is how much economic assistance North Korea expects. South Korean officials have said they may donate food and fertilizer and embark on an ambitious construction program to rebuild the North's shattered infrastructure.

Much of this is too speculative for Park, who comes daily to an open-air market to sell clothes with another refugee from North Korea, Lee Jung Wook, 69. Both have put their names on various government lists when there has been talk of exchange of family information with North Korea, but nothing has ever come of it. "I tried to find my family, but I couldn't," Park said.

After so many years, she said, it is becoming difficult for her to remember the fear that gripped her in the days after Japanese troops surrendered control of Korea in 1945 and the Soviet occupying forces and Korean Communists became more and more demanding of her family's property. "They started taking away people's land and money. The soldiers came to our house to collect all our goods. I said, 'Just don't kill me, please don't kill me. Take what you want.'

"After they left, my parents said, 'You go first,' and they said they would pack up and follow. But it was too late," said Park. In the chaos, she separated from her two brothers and two sisters and headed south, where she paid a guide to sneak her into South Korea. She was about 19.

"I guess my mother and father are gone by now," she speculated. "With all the famine they've had up north, maybe everyone is gone. Maybe nothing from my past is still there. I just have no idea."

(c) 2000 The Washington Post Company

-------- kosovo

NATO Says Up to 25,000 Serbs May Return Soon to Kosovo

April 12, 2000
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-yugosla.html

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Up to 25,000 Serb civilians who left Kosovo after NATO's bombing campaign drove Serbian forces out last year could return to their homes in the coming months, a NATO official said Wednesday.

He said the figure was an estimate from various NATO sources and could be on the optimistic side. But he said the alliance was keen for Serbs to return to the province and its peacekeeping troops were ready to guarantee their safety.

Up to 200,000 Serbs fled Kosovo from June onwards last year, fearing violent revenge by ethnic Albanians.

The NATO official said some 18,000 more ethnic Albanians were also expected to return home in coming months.

Most of the hundreds of thousands of Albanians forced out by Serb persecution before and during last year's war have already returned. According to Serb groups, Serbs now make up no more than 100,000 of Kosovo's population of around 1.8 million, most of whom are ethnic Albanians.

``Many Serbs left out of justifiable fear of reprisals but many others have nothing to feel guilty about and a lot left without actually experiencing ethnic Albanian intimidation,'' the NATO official told reporters in a briefing.

He added that many Kosovo Serbs had a less than welcome reception in Serbia and would prefer to return to Kosovo ``and put their faith in the international community and the economic liftoff which will eventually happen.''

NATO sources said the alliance would be careful to check which Serbs were seeking to return, on the lookout for bogus returnees or ``people controlled by Belgrade.''

The NATO official conceded that arranging for the smooth return of Serb families to Kosovo communities where ethnic relations remain tense would be difficult.

``It's going to be less than ideal, yes,'' he said. ``But we can't delay this forever or until everything's perfect. We have got to start somewhere.''

Under an agreement concluded between Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and NATO to end the alliance's 78-day bombing campaign, Serbia can return around 1,000 officials to Kosovo to protect monuments and officiate at borders.

Belgrade has pressed for this to go ahead but NATO says the time is not yet right.

----------

Exhumation in Kosovo To Continue

April 12, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-War-Crimes-Kosovo.html

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- War crimes investigators will resume exhumations of some 300 suspected mass grave sites in Kosovo next week after halting operations for the winter, a spokesman said Wednesday.

The U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said witness accounts and intelligence sources indicate that 11,334 people are buried in a total of 529 common graves as a result of the conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbs backed by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

``We have a very ambitious schedule to uncover 300 suspected sites over the coming months,'' said prosecution spokesman Paul Risley.

During five months of investigations last year after a NATO bombing campaign that drove out Serb forces, forensics experts exhumed 2,108 bodies, mostly ethnic Albanians.

NATO has suggested that up to 10,000 victims may be buried in common graves, but retrieving evidence to prove that could be hard due to tampering and the decision by some families to dig up some sites in search of missing relatives.

During the 78 days of NATO bombing, violence between Muslims and Serb forces escalated, triggering the exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

The investigators will mainly gather evidence to support the tribunal's case against Milosevic and four other prominent Serb officials who were indicted last May for war crimes in Kosovo.

-------- russia

Duma appears to accept nuclear accord

April 12, 2000

RUSSIA: Russian deputies appeared set yesterday to ratify the START II nuclear disarmament accord in their first debate on a landmark accord delayed by years of haggling and stonewalling.

But leaders in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, indicated ratification on Friday would be in part tied to respect by the US of a Cold War-era treaty which bans national antimissile defence systems.

Washington wants to build a missile shield to protect against the perceived threat of so-called rogue states but concedes doing so would breach the 1972 AntiBallistic Missile Treaty.

Intense horse-trading animated the Duma's corridors yesterday, with 235 deputies from the proKremlin Unity bloc, People's Deputies, Fatherland-All Russia, Union of Rightist Forces and Yabloko set to back the treaty.

The Communists' 93 deputies vowed to vote against, along with some deputies from the left-wing Agrarian Party.

The ultra-nationalist bloc of Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky has yet to state how it will vote.

"There should be enough votes, both for START II and the protocols for the ABM treaty," said Mr Dmitry Rogozin, chairman of the Duma's international affairs committee, confirming that the first hearing would be held on Friday.

"We should make a political statement along with the ratification of START II, where the position of Russia should be clear in the event that the Americans abandon the accord," he said.

The statement would aim to lock the US into the ABM treaty.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) II, signed in 1993 and ratified by the US Congress three years later, foresees the reduction of the US nuclear arsenal to 3,500 warheads, with 3,000 for Russia.

Left-wing and nationalist deputies complained the treaty would force Russia to give up its multiple warhead missiles and replace them with more expensive single-warhead rockets.

But legislative elections last December weakened parties opposed to the treaty and boosted those allied to President Vladimir Putin.

- (AFP)

----

Russia Communists Oppose Arms Treaty

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV Associated Press Writer
APRIL 12, 17:16 EST
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS73QEF480

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's Communist Party leader said Wednesday that ratifying the START II arms treaty would amount to treason, but his party isn't expected to muster enough support to block the pact when it comes to a vote this week.

With President Vladimir Putin pushing for approval, the State Duma, or lower house, agreed to debate the treaty on cutting nuclear arsenals Friday. Most lawmakers and analysts expect swift passage of the 1993 treaty, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1996.

The upper house, the Federation Council, will discuss the treaty if the Duma ratifies it, said the chairman of the council's foreign affairs committee, Mikhail Prusak, according to the Interfax news agency. The upper house, which must also approve the treaty, has in the past has generally voted in accordance with the government.

The Communists and their hard-line allies, who dominated the old parliament, repeatedly rejected the START II treaty, and the failure to ratify was an irritant in U.S.-Russian relations. But the Communists lost control of the Duma in elections last month. They have about 130 seats in the 450-seat Duma, not enough to block ratification, which requires a simple majority of 226 votes.

Nonetheless, Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov maintained his harsh rhetoric.

``START II wouldn't just tilt the balance, but would completely ruin strategic parity and the national security,'' Zyuganov said.

He called the treaty tantamount to ``national treason'' because it envisages dismantling Russia's most powerful missiles and would force the cash-strapped nation to build new weapons it can't afford.

``They want to fully undress our already tattered country,'' Zyuganov told reporters.

He argued that without its heavy missiles, Russia would have to take orders from the United States.

The treaty's supporters insist that many Russian strategic missiles are past their service lifetime and will have to be scrapped soon anyway. Zyuganov dismissed that argument, saying that the old missiles could be maintained.

He accused Putin of kowtowing to the West and trying to win its approval by ratifying the treaty just weeks after his election.

``Putin is trying to quickly push the treaty through parliament so that lawmakers don't realize what is going on,'' Zyuganov said.

The treaty would halve U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals to 3,000-3,500 warheads each. Officials say ratification would help Russia seize the initiative in arms talks and strengthen its case against the United States' modifying the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The United States wants to amend the ABM Treaty to allow construction of a limited missile-defense system to protect from possible missile attacks from rogue nations, but Russia says the move could trigger a new arms race.

----

Putin: Outlines Russian Space Plan

April 12, 2000
By NICK WADHAMS, Associated Press Writer
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/ap/000412/06/int-russia-space

MOSCOW (AP) - On the 39th anniversary of the Soviet Union's launching the first man into space, President Vladimir Putin said today that Russia will keep up its commitment to the long-delayed International Space Station.

Putin told cosmonauts and space officials that Russia will keep its international commitments but that "national production has to be our priority."

The remark looked like a bit of diplomacy aimed at the supporters of the Mir space station, Russia's aging spacecraft that just received a new crew after eight months of unmanned flight while Russia decided whether to scrap it.

In the end, Putin decided to keep the Mir aloft, adding to skepticism that Russia will be able to meet its obligations for the International Space Station, a multinational project that is months late because of Russia's failure to build key components on time.

Putin also used the occasion to touch on one of his key priorities - restoring Russia's greatness after years of economic and political decline.

"The space sector is not only a prestigious sector which makes our country a great power, but it is also linked to economic and scientific development," Putin said.

It's not clear where Russia will get the money to honor all its space commitments. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia drastically scaled back its space program, and so far the government has only earmarked about $120 million to the program this year.

Putin said the Russian Security Council would meet soon to discuss financing the space program.

On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space. Since then, Russia has celebrated April 12 as Cosmonauts' Day.

Putin accompanied cosmonauts and space officials today to lay flowers at the site on the Kremlin wall where Gagarin's remains are interred.

----

Ranks of Russian Draft Dodgers Swelling

April 12, 2000
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/041200russia-conscripts.html

MOSCOW, April 11 -- The number of young men who have dodged the draft has soared since fighting broke out in Chechnya, leaving the Russian military without enough new conscripts, a senior general said today.

"The number of draft dodgers increased by almost 50 percent last fall," said Col. Gen. Vladislav N. Putilin, the chief of the mobilization department of the Russian General Staff. "For the first time in four years, the armed forces will experience a shortage of manpower."

The Russian military has long had difficulty attracting qualified personnel. Low pay, hazing and service in an institution that is no longer revered by much of the society have prompted many young men to shun the military.

But the war in Chechnya, which has led to the deaths of more than 2,000 Russian soldiers and more than 6,000 wounded, seems to have turned draft avoidance into a semi-legitimate national pastime.

The problem is so severe that the Russian military has relaxed its standards for military service in Chechnya. In September, the government decreed that soldiers had to have served at least a year before they could be dispatched to Chechnya. Now, the requirement is six months.

With so many Russians using student deferments, the educational level of Russian military has also fallen. About 30 percent of Russian draftees have not finished the ninth grade. In contrast, 90 percent of recruits in the United States' all-volunteer military have high-school diplomas. The result seems to be that the soldiers sent to Chechnya may be greener, less literate and more vulnerable.

Former President Boris N. Yeltsin had vowed to create an all-volunteer military by the year 2000. But the government has done virtually nothing to advance that goal. The military needs to draft 192,000 men between the ages of 18 and 27 years this spring to meet its overall quota. So many Russians have claimed deferments that the armed forces will have to process about a million young men to try to meet this target.

Educational deferments are a definite way to avoid Army service. So are health problems. And when all else fails, young men simply refuse to show up when summoned for military service. General Putilin said 49,000 men dodged the draft last fall, just under a fifth of the number were eventually conscripted.

The problem is starkly evident in the Moscow region, where the military expects to draft only 5,500 young men. "I regret to say that our big industrial centers and regions produce more than 60 percent of the draft dodgers," General Putilin said. "These are Moscow, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod and the Krasnoyarsk Territory."

Last year alone, in fact, 88 percent of people eligible in the St. Petersburg region were deferred.

The use of deferments, loopholes and outright bribes to draft board has led to a manifest sense of unfairness. The poor, less-well connected and least educated shoulder an increasingly large share of the burden.

Although a relative lull in the Chechnya war has set in during recent days, the ongoing conflict is still putting heavy pressure on the military to conscript new soldiers. About 90,000 soldiers and Interior Ministry troops are now in Chechnya, and today the military said that many of the troop were busy trying to fortify the borders of the breakaway republic fearing a rebel resurgence as spring approaches.

In an effort to encourage soldiers to join the cause, the military counts every day spent fighting in Chechnya as two days of military service. That means that many soldiers are nearing the end of their tour of duty, prompting the need for more and more conscripts.

--------

Chechens Ambush Russian Patrol

April 12, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Russia-Chechnya.html

NAZRAN, Russia (AP) -- Chechen rebels ambushed a Russian border patrol Wednesday deep in the mountains near the Georgian border in the latest demonstration of their guerrilla skills and determination to fight numerically superior federal forces.

Rebels fired on the patrol in the Argun Gorge, the site of heavy fighting in recent months, the Interfax news agency said, citing federal officials. One soldier was wounded, and the rebels retreated when a helicopter opened fire on the militants.

Fighting has subsided in recent days, and indications have appeared that the Kremlin may be looking for a political solution.

Russia insists that it will not enter negotiations unless the rebels are completely disarmed and their leaders arrested, but a spokesman said Wednesday that Russia had kept in contact with Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov through intermediaries.

Maskhadov ``was informed, among other issues, about Moscow's view on what is to be done in the transition to some political process,'' Sergei Yastrzhembsky, presidential spokesman on Chechnya, said Wednesday, according to Interfax.

Even that admission indicates a change in Russia's position. Previously, Russia had labeled Maskhadov a criminal, while on Wednesday, Yastrzhembsky spoke in softer terms, not equating him with other rebel leaders whom he said should be killed or imprisoned.

Russian jets flew 19 missions in the last 24 hours, the federal command said Wednesday. Attack helicopters flew an additional 40 sorties.

The ongoing low level of fighting has made many Chechen refugees afraid of returning to their homes. Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya to the west, still had 210,000 refugees as of Wednesday, an Ingush government spokesman said.

Also Wednesday, news agencies reported that criminal proceedings had begun against a Russian colonel who allegedly tried to help five Chechen rebels flee the combat zone.

The reports, which identified the colonel only by the last name Savchenko, said the rebels allegedly paid him $25,000 to be taken out of the zone in his car.

The car was stopped at a roadblock for a check and shooting broke out, in which three of the rebels were killed, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. It also said the rebels had paid the colonel in bills that turned out to be counterfeit.

Russia sent ground troops into Chechnya in September. The campaign came after rebels invaded neighboring Dagestan, and the rebels are also blamed in apartment building blasts in Russia that killed about 300 people.

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Russian Parliament Tones Down Chechnya Response

April 12, 2000
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-russia-.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's parliament backed away Wednesday from its initial furious response to the West's most stinging rebuke of Moscow's military campaign to crush separatism in Chechnya.

But fresh criticism was in store over allegations of human rights abuses in Moscow's six-month-old drive in the region.

Russia pressed on with attacks from the air on rebel strongholds despite suggestions the Kremlin might be considering a negotiated end to the conflict.

The State Duma or lower house of parliament, by 384 votes to three, denounced as unacceptable and a ``unilateral diktat'' last week's vote by the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly proposing to suspend Russia's membership of the body.

The text was watered down twice after a lively debate in which senior deputies argued in favor of a moderate reaction.

The final text omitted an initial decision to stay away from further assembly debates in the French city of Strasbourg. It said Russian participation in the assembly could be resumed ''only after it backs down from this discriminatory position.''

It also approved the decision of most members of the Russian delegation to walk out of the session last week.

The Council of Europe, a body concerned with human rights and other issues, wields little power but has considerable moral authority in ex-communist countries.

The Duma's Communist speaker, Gennady Seleznyov, said before the start of Wednesday's debate that the parliamentary assembly ``has to correct all the errors it has committed.''

FORMER PM PRIMAKOV ADVISES MODERATION

But Yevgeny Primakov, former prime minister and foreign minister, said later that moderation was the correct tactic.

``We needn't complicate the situation,'' he told reporters. He said it was apparent from statements by other officials from the Council of Europe and the more influential European Union that there was no broad movement to exclude Russia. Human Rights Activist Sergei Kovalyov, who accused Russia of excesses in a previous 1994-96 Chechnya war, told the Duma he stood by his decision to break ranks with Russia's delegation.

``I believe the decision adopted was fair and most useful,'' he said in remarks shown on television. ``Useful for the world community and above all for my own country.''

Russia's chief spokesman on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, speaking in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, also discounted any suggestion Russia might pull out of the Council of Europe.

Yastrzhembsky had suggested Tuesday that the Kremlin was moving toward a negotiated solution in the region, from which Russia withdrew in 1996 after a two-year war with separatists.

President-elect Vladimir Putin, who built his reputation mainly on a tough stance in Chechnya, has made no suggestion himself that any negotiations are on the cards.

In Geneva, the European Union, whose decisions carry far more weight, submitted a resolution at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights forum calling on Russia to investigate alleged mass killings of civilians and other serious abuses in Chechnya.

But the 15-nation EU left open the door for Russia to join discussions on its resolution, which could be watered down into a ``chairman's statement,'' a milder form of rebuke, according to Western diplomats. Accounts of talks in Luxembourg this week said EU foreign ministers were restrained in criticizing Moscow.

OSCE DELEGATION DUE IN MOSCOW

A new Western delegation, from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was due in Moscow to discuss Chechnya with officials and will later travel to the region.

Military accounts said Russian aircraft had flown 12 missions against rebels in mountains near Nozhai-Yurt in eastern Chechnya and Vedeno, further south. Itar-Tass news agency said up to 4,000 rebel fighters were in the two districts.

Russia said weeks ago it had seized the last rebel stronghold in the mountains, but has suffered high losses in ambushes of convoys and in fighting in distant villages.

Interfax news agency said the headless bodies of two Russian servicemen had been found in Grozny. It also said a senior officer had been arrested on suspicion of offering to transport rebels to safety for large sums of money.

----

Russia Says NATO Meeting Planned For June 9

Apr 12, 2000
Agence France Presse
http://www.russiatoday.com:80/news.php3?id=150537

MOSCOW, The Russian and NATO defense ministers have scheduled a Brussels meeting for June 9, ITAR-TASS reported Wednesday citing a top Russian military source.

"The principal topic of discussion will be Kosovo and UN resolution 1244, but a wide range of problems tied to European security will be included such as NATO's strategic concept and Russia's military doctrine," said the unnamed source.

Russia has accused the alliance of failing to implement resolution 1244, adopted in July 1999 to end the Kosovo conflict, which reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia while calling for substantial autonomy in Kosovo province. It also stipulated the detention of ethnic Albanian separatists threatening Yugoslavia's territorial integrity.

The announcement of the Brussels meeting comes a day after NATO's parliamentary assembly cut all contacts with the Russian lower house of parliament, the State Duma, following what it denounced Tuesday as "unacceptable" remarks by the body's president.

The assembly's permanent committee announced in a statement that it viewed a letter sent by the Duma chief Gennady Seleznyov on the subject of Yugoslavia as "inappropriate and unacceptable."

Seleznyov had declared that a meeting planned for mid-April between the Duma and the NATO assembly was "premature," and that ties between the bodies could not be renewed until the alliance's policy on Yugoslavia "evolves in the right direction," the NATO statement added.

The statement argued that Seleznyov's remarks contradicted those by the Russian government, which agreed to renew ties with the alliance in March.

If NATO and Russia go through with the meeting in June, it will be the second session of the Permanent Joint Council since the resumption of contacts severed during the alliance's air campaign against Yugoslavia last year.

The PJC was created in 1997 as the first act of cooperation between Russia and NATO after nearly half a century of Cold War.

Since last year, cooperation between Russia and NATO has been limited to the two international peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, where 1,350 Russian soldiers are deployed, and Kosovo, where the number of Russian troops is 3,300.

----

Superpower phobia

April 12, 2000
Helle Bering
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2000412185651.htm

As varied as U.S.-Russian relations have been in recent years, what clearly emerged from last week's meeting of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America in Boston is that National Missile Defense remains an area of huge and hurtful difference. It is not the only one. Be the topic peacekeeping, NATO expansion, or missile defense, Russians tend to find an American plot aimed specifically at them - and this though the participants at the meeting from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to historians, politicians and academics, are among those who wish to see Russian relations with the United States improve.

Nothing rankles like missile defense, though, a topic to which the conversation constantly reverts, like the head of Charles II in "David Copperfield." As one American participant put it, "It's nine years after the Cold War ended, and I can't believe we are discussing MIRVed missiles again." That would be Multiple Independently targetable Re-entry Vehicles. A Canadian volunteers that "this could set us back into the Cold War era."

The depth of Russian emotions, rising undoubtedly out of a sense of Russian national humiliation, comes as somewhat of an eye-opener when one is used to discussing missile defense as a rational reaction to a changing world in which nuclear proliferation is moving apace, and in which the threat of terrorism counts as one of the most serious for American national security. If one nation ought to feel singled out for special consideration in this context, it is probably the Chinese, whose missiles threaten Taiwan, an old friend of the United States.

It may even be that the prevailing lack of concern for Russian reactions helps fuel the Russian sense of frustration and neglect. "During the Cold War everybody had their assigned role," says a former Soviet foreign minister. "Today, we don't know what our role is." Precipitating a feeling of crisis is the fact that President Clinton is to set a date for decisions on NMD for sometime this summer or fall. It is a moment many Russians as well as Democrats and moderate Republicans dearly wish to avoid, at least for the time being.

There is currently a movement in Congress, led by Sens. Chuck Hagel, Gordon Smith and Joseph Biden to urge Mr. Clinton to postpone the decision till after the election. You can count Mikhail Gorbachev among those who articulates the wait-and-see approach. "Let's not rush to a decision here. Let's give time to the Russian government to consider it," he says.

Technology is pushing the issue he says, interestingly comparing NMD to the installation of the SS-20s in the Urals in the late late 1970s, a decision made by befuddled Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev who almost inadvertently (in this version of history) gave approval to a major upgrade of old rusty missiles already there. "It started an incredible chain of events," Mr. Gorbachev says, which is true because a new Reagan administration decided to counter this new threat to the capitals of Europe with Pershing II and Cruise missiles.

It appears that the new Russian government has already done some thinking on the subject, which may be a sign of superior coolheadedness on the part of Russian President Vladimir Putin. There is reason to believe that within the next 6-10 weeks, a deal will be announced between the Russian and the American administrations on revisions to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, to allow a very limited American NMD deployment, in return for a better deal for Russia in the upcoming START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) III negotiations.

Mr. Putin has already promised to push the Russian Duma for ratification of START II, much to the delight of the U.S. president who spies an opportunity for an arms-control presidential legacy heaving into view. If the Russian president thinks this is an acceptable idea, in order to prevent the United States from scrapping the treaty altogether, the U.S. Senate will have to read those revisions with a very fine magnifying glass.

The fact is that Russians simply do not believe that Americans are serious when they talk about protecting the continental United States from nuclear terrorism or rogue state attack. In their view, the missile programs of North Korea, Iran and Iraq are no more than a pretext for U.S. nuclear domination. Right now, Russia at least has the distinction of being the only country that can threaten the national existence of the United States. However, an American NMD and a deteriorating Russian nuclear arsenal may soon put an end to that. Rather than a Third World nation with nuclear weapons, Russia will then just be a Third World nation. And at the bottom of it all there is that ever-nagging fear of the world's "sole super power" rising roughshod over the rest.

"For a while it looked to us like no one could stop the United States," says a Russian participant. "Russia, China, India meant nothing. Europe and Asia were told to stay on the sidelines." All of which seems almost unrecognizably distorted when compared to the policy debate here in Washington, where lurking American isolationism rather than rampant global ambitions are what many worry about. Meanwhile, though, we need to get on with the business of protecting Americans against missile attack - even if Russian feelings get hurt.

-------- us military

Macedonia Cops Detain 30 US Troops

April 12, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Macedonia-Americans.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) -- Drunk U.S. soldiers clashed with locals and police early Wednesday, leading Macedonian authorities and NATO military police to detain 30 of them, the Macedonian Interior Ministry said.

NATO and U.S. military officials confirmed disturbances in three separate instances involving American troops in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, but said only five were temporarily detained by Macedonian police, who later turned them over to U.S. military authorities. All the Americans were from Kosovo and were on leave in Skopje, they said.

But later, in a statement released by the public affairs office at Camp Bondsteel -- the headquarters of U.S. forces in Kosovo -- officials said two soldiers had been held by Macedonian authorities.

``U.S. soldiers on a three-day pass were involved in altercations that resulted in two soldiers being detained by ... (Macedonian) police, and four being detained by U.S. military police,'' the statement said, adding that there were no serious injuries.

One U.S. military spokesman suggested that in least two of the cases, the U.S. soldiers did not initiate violence but reacted to being provoked.

Ed Loomis, a public affairs officer at U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, said that in one incident, ``an American soldier was spit on by a Macedonian, the soldier reacted to that and was detained by Macedonian police.'' In another, Loomis said, two American soldiers reacted to foil a Macedonian trying to steal the belongings of one of the soldiers.

In the third incident, ``four soldiers at a restaurant were in some type of verbal altercation with the staff at the restaurant and possibly police,'' he said. All four were detained.

Loomis called the report of 30 soldiers being detained ``a fabrication.''

The Macedonian Interior Ministry statement said the soldiers, members of NATO-led peacekeeping troops stationed in Macedonia, were detained in connection with ``indecent behavior, violation of public order, harassment of citizens and a fight involving a policeman.'' Some were drunk, the statement said.

After a disturbance in a local cafe in downtown Skopje, the soldiers clashed with a group of citizens, injuring a police officer who tried to intervene, the statement said.

In Kosovo, U.S. Maj. Debbie Allen said, ``there were eight U.S. soldiers involved in three minor incidents.'' She said ``there are reports of alcohol being involved, and there were altercations.''

All five were back in Kosovo and were being investigated by military authorities before a decision on whether to file charges, Allen said.

Macedonia serves as a staging ground and a supply route for international peacekeepers in Kosovo. Speaking in Skopje for KFOR, the NATO-led peacekeeping force, Capt. Andreas Reinecke said KFOR ``deeply regrets these incidents.''

``We would like to make this very clear that this kind of behavior does not reflect the attitude that we expect from our personnel,'' Reinecke said.

-------- us politics

Export control mismanagement

April 12, 2000
Frank Gaffney Jr.
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/commentary-2000412183434.htm

Today Sen. Fred Thompson's Governmental Affairs Committee will take a much-needed look at a part of the Clinton legacy that is likely to haunt this country for years to come: The administration's deliberate "take-down" of COCOM (the Coordinating Committee on Export Controls) - and the belated introduction in its place of a Potemkin initiative known as the Wassenaar Arrangement.

It turns out that this one-two punch was more than just an isolated phenomena that resulted in the liquidation of a relatively effective multilateral mechanism for factoring security considerations into decisions about the overseas sales of sensitive "dual-use" technologies - and, for that matter, in the gutting of much of the domestic U.S. export control apparatus, as well. In hindsight, we can now see that the impulses driving these ill-advised actions are but a microcosm of the Clinton-Gore administration's dismal stewardship of the larger foreign policy portfolio.

Consider the following themes underpinning the decisions that destroyed COCOM and the establishment in the Netherlands city of Wassenaar in 1996 of an "arrangement" intended to contribute, in the words of its charter, "to regional and international security and stability, by promoting transparency and a greater responsibility in transfers of conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies":

• "The Cold War is over" and "It's the economy stupid": These cliches have been the leitmotifs of what might loosely be described as the Clinton-Gore administration's guiding philosophy. By the first, the president and his subordinates sought to justify their disdain for and disregard of virtually every traditional instrument and practice of U.S. security. With the fervor of the counterculture activists many of them were at formative stages of their lives, these officials have inflicted grievous harm on the armed forces, the intelligence community, law enforcement, even the rule of law itself.

Arguably none of these instruments was wielded with greater effect during the Cold War - nor suffered more at the hands of the Clinton team - than the multilateral, voluntary organization called COCOM and the U.S. government mechanisms that supported national security-minded export controls. People entrusted with top policy-making responsibilities in this area were appointed by President Clinton despite, if not because of, their records of hostility to such controls and the institutions that promoted and policed them. Not surprisingly, the wrecking operation was most evident at the Defense Department where the senior leadership and Defense Technology Security Administration once represented formidable impediments to ill-advised technology transfers.

The application of the principle that there is no longer any appreciable threat to American security - and its corollary that economic interests should supersede all others - has greatly exacerbated the government's mistakes. Effectively encouraged to "see-no-evil" in a world in which it still abounds, corporate leaders have responded by focusing narrowly and parochially on shareholder concerns about the quarterly bottom line.

• Sacrificing U.S. sovereignty and its ability, where necessary, to exercise influence through unilateral action. The Clinton-Gore administration has seemed to share the hostility others around the world have felt toward American power. Instruments of that power - like COCOM, which once enabled this country effectively to block its allies' ability to export dual-use technologies - were especially resented. In the absence of leadership in Washington determined to adapt but preserve this vital mechanism, its fate was sealed.

Two years after COCOM was formally interred in 1994, the Clinton-Gore administration finally cobbled together a very different sort of "arrangement." Under Wassenaar, "the decision to transfer or deny transfer of any item will be the sole responsibility of each Participating State." Now, if we are lucky, we may be forewarned that a "participating state" is going to effect technology transfers we consider to be unwise. But we have lost - for the moment at least, if not permanently - the ability to interpose definitive objections.

• "The Russians are our strategic partners." The same is often said of China as well, by those who fail to appreciate that neither the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin nor the Forbidden City of Jiang Zemin can be counted upon to see their interests as coincident with ours. To the contrary, the available evidence suggests they perceive a shared interest in acting as each others' strategic partners, at the expense of this country.

In keeping with the Clinton-Gore administration's potentially fatal conceit about the nature of today's world, the Wassenaar Arrangement includes Russia and two other, smaller-scale but problematic nations, Ukraine and the Slovak Republic. Having as members countries that regard as clients those we call "rogue states" assures that this "Arrangement" will be as ineffectual in the future as it has been to date in slowing the hemorrhage of strategic technologies to the cabal of bad actors former Undersecretary of State William Schneider has dubbed "Club Mad."

• Phony security mechanisms are better than none. In the area of export controls, as elsewhere, the Clinton-Gore administration has tried to obscure a dangerous policy failure with a multilateral fig leaf. Unfortunately, as in Wassenaar and various unverifiable arms control agreements, it has promoted to "prohibit" chemical and biological and nuclear weapons tests, such Potemkin exercises can induce a false sense of security. The soporific effect of this illusion is to compound damage done when a relatively effective multinational endeavor like COCOM is replaced with a regimen that was designed to fail.

The stakes associated with this sorry legacy are very high - both in the export control arena and in the larger security policy context of which it is a small, but important, part.

Next week, thoughts about what the nation can do now to try to mitigate the damage inflicted by the Clinton-Gore administration.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times. This column is adapted from testimony he will provide today before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

-------- us nuc

Atomic Veterans Ignored by Compensation Plan

U.S. Newswire
12 Apr 18:49
http://www.usnewswire.com:80/topnews/Current_Releases/0412-152.html

WASHINGTON, April 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The Disabled American Veterans (DAV) is outraged and appalled that veterans exposed to ionizing radiation are being ignored by the federal government which today announced plans to offer compensation to thousands of contract workers for illnesses resulting from exposure to toxic and radioactive substances.

The DAV has long urged Congress to enact legislation to make it easier for veterans exposed to atomic radiation in the service to receive disability benefits and much-needed health care. Only about 50 claims have been approved by the VA out of more than 18,000 claims filed based on exposure to ionizing radiation.

The Clinton Administration plan announced July 15 would provide compensation for illnesses connected to radioactive exposures to contract workers employed at nuclear weapons facilities over the past 50 years. The new compensation plan is modeled after existing compensation programs for federal workers and gives contract workers the right to claim lost wages and medical and rehabilitation costs for illnesses related to exposure.

The DAV said the federal government is clearly treating veterans exposed to ionizing radiation by a different and inequitable standard. Thousands of veterans have been sickened and disabled as a result of exposure to ionizing radiation, but they are denied compensation by a web of bureaucracy that effectively eliminates any chance of restoring their lives.

The Administrations plan is another example of how veterans are callously and inequitably treated by the federal government.

"Veterans exposed to ionizing radiation suffer debilitating illnesses and disabilities but are treated as second-class citizens by the federal government," said DAV National Commander Michael E. Dobmeier. "These veterans deserve no less than equal treatment. It is time for Congress and the Administration to reduce the bureaucracy and time-consuming claims process for these veterans so they may receive just and adequate compensation for their disabilities."

The Disabled American Veterans, which represents 2.3 million disabled veterans, is a non-profit organization founded in 1920 and chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1932. It is dedicated to one, single purpose: building better lives for our nations disabled veterans and their families.

-------- us nuc facilities

Report: USEC will have to shut down Paducah or Portsmouth plant

The Associated Press
April 12, 2000
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/041200/stt_0412000002.html

PADUCAH, Ky. -- A financial analyst's report says the U.S. Enrichment Corp. will have to shut down one of its plants, in either Paducah or Piketon, Ohio, to save money.

However, a USEC spokeswoman on Tuesday said the company has made no decision on a plant closing.

"We're still exactly where we've been all along," said USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle in Bethesda, Md.

The report, written for Bank of New York Capital Markets by analyst Richard Rossi, assumes the financially troubled company will have to close a plant by July 2001 to save $65 million a year in power and labor costs.

The report does not speculate which plant will close. It said the key will be which one gets a multiyear contract to buy electricity.

About 2,000 people work at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon and about 1,700 at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.

USEC incurred a $500 million debt when it sold stock to become publicly traded in July 1998. Plant shutdown is among several assumptions made by BNY Capital in saying that USEC's debt is a good investment for bond buyers.

Other "best-case" assumptions are the completion of 850 announced job cuts at the plants, improved power contracts and a renegotiated deal to save money on enriched uranium bought from Russia.

"It is our understanding that the rating agencies want to see USEC operate as a viable business by lowering production costs, renegotiating the Russian (uranium) agreement and closing a plant," the report said.

According to USEC's privatization agreement, it may close a plant if its long-term credit rating drops below investment grade. Without government intervention, that situation is unlikely to improve during the next year, the report said.

USEC is buying about 92 million units of enriched uranium from Russia in a nuclear disarmament deal worth about $8 billion over 20 years. Blended from material in dismantled nuclear warheads, the uranium equals the approximate production of one of the plants. That means that USEC needs to run each plant at only 25 percent capacity, according to BNY Capital.

But USEC is paying Russia, a competitor, more per unit of enriched uranium than the cost for which Paducah and Portsmouth can enrich it. The flood of uranium will increase USEC's production costs from $93 per unit this year to more than $110 next year, compared with the spot market price of about $80, the report said.

The report said USEC should reach a new contract in 30 to 90 days to buy Russian uranium for less than $80, partly because Russia badly needs the deal to prop up its economy.

USEC has $6.5 billion in long-term contracts to supply enriched uranium to nuclear power plants through 2010. But running two plants "will remain uneconomic" as uranium prices drop because of a glutted worldwide market, the report said.

----

Nuke plant workers to be paid

By The Associated Press
http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200004/12+0069_news.html+20000412

The Clinton administration is ready to offer compensation to workers at uranium enrichment plants sickened by radiation exposure.

Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, met with officials from Vice President Al Gore's office on Tuesday and said afterwards the plan is to treat workers at plants in Ohio and Kentucky the same - offering as much as $100,000 to workers suffering certain types of cancer.

Details were to be announced by the White House today. The plan is expected to cost about $400 million over the first five years, with the price declining in subsequent years as fewer claims are settled.

``The government is done fighting workers and now we're going to help them,'' Energy Secrtetary Bill Richardson told The Washington Post. ``We're reversing the decades-old practice of opposing worker claims and moving forward to do the right thing.''

Until this year, the government had refused to acknowledge workers' health problems might be linked to work at the plants, all of which were part of the U.S. nuclear weapons production effort during the Cold War.

Nearly all of the employees worked for private companies that operated the plants for the government.

Richardson has said previously he is committed to addressing the health and environmental concerns involving the gaseous diffusion plants in Ohio and Kentucky, a former uranium processing plant in Tennessee, and at Energy Department plants that handled beryllium, a metal used in nuclear weapons.

Richardson already has asked Congress to approve a compensation program for a limited number of workers with cancers linked to radiation exposure, and for workers with incurable beryllium disease.

The compensation proposal, which is before Congress, would provide medical benefits, lost-wage reimbursement, optional job retraining or a single $100,000 cash payment to workers suffering illnesses caused by beryllium exposure.

The administration has proposed similar compensation for workers at the Paducah plant.

As with the Paducah plan, the proposal for workers at the Piketon plant in Ohio would cover those who spent at least one year on the job between 1953 and Feb. 1, 1992, who ``were badged or should have been badged'' to measure their radiation exposure and who contracted one of a specific list of diseases, Strickland said.

The diseases include certain types of leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, bone cancer, breast cancer, thyroid cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer and lung cancer, provided the victims were not heavy smokers.

Strickland is working with Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., on another compensation plan that would give medical care and $200,000 to sickened workers at every nuclear weapons plant.

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, also has been working on a compensation plan, but it has not yet been introduced. His spokesman said workers deserve more than what is being offered by the Clinton administration.

----

U.S. Plans To Pay for Ills From Radiation

By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 ; A01
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58498-2000Apr11.html

The Clinton administration, vowing to "right the wrongs of the past," will unveil plans today to compensate thousands of ailing workers who were exposed to radiation while helping to build the nation's nuclear arsenal.

The unprecedented national compensation plan offers payments of $100,000 to workers with certain cancers, in the first tangible acknowledgment of responsibility for decades of unsafe working conditions in dozens of nuclear bomb factories around the country.

Thousands of other workers would receive help in applying for compensation under liberalized policies that reverse decades of government antagonism to workers' medical claims, according to a draft of the plan obtained by The Washington Post. In addition, workers would receive the benefit of the doubt when plant medical records are missing or flawed, the draft states.

"The government is done fighting workers and now we're going to help them," said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, confirming details of the plan crafted by the White House National Economic Council. "We're reversing the decades-old practice of opposing worker claims and moving forward to do the right thing."

The plan would cost the federal government an estimated $400 million over the first five years, officials familiar with the plan said. After that, the cost is expected to decline as cases are settled.

The production of 70,000 nuclear weapons over 50 years employed more than 600,000 men and women at 16 major sites and dozens of smaller ones. Workers have testified in a series of recent hearings that they were frequently exposed to high levels of radiation as well as hazardous chemicals.

In January, the same White House panel concluded--based on the largest-ever review of worker health studies at weapons plants--that workers suffered higher rates of disease from exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals. That decision reversed decades of official denials and began the process of deciding how to compensate workers who became ill.

Under the new proposal, parts of which would require congressional approval, the Energy Department would set up a workers' advocacy office, effective next month, to help current and former employees who believe they suffer from job-related illnesses. Breaking with a long-standing practice of fighting compensation claims in court, the new Occupational Illness Compensation Office would expedite claims, using independent physicians to determine if illnesses are work-related. Once that link is established, the DOE would accept responsibility for the illness.

Under a separate program, workers or survivors of workers who contracted a "radiogenic" cancer after being exposed to radiation on the job could choose between a lump-sum payment of $100,000 or a negotiated compensation package that covers all medical costs as well as lost wages and job retraining. Common radiogenic cancers include leukemias and myelomas as well as cancers of the bone, lung and thyroid. If reliable exposure records are not available, the government "will assume [the workers] were exposed to the highest amount of radiation associated with the tasks they performed," the draft states. While the lump-sum payment would be offered only to workers diagnosed with cancer before the compensation plan is enacted into law, all workers exposed to radiation would be eligible to apply for a compensation package.

Identical coverage would be offered to workers who were exposed to beryllium, a highly toxic metal used in nuclear weapons production.

In recent months, Richardson has announced pilot programs to compensate several relatively small groups, including uranium workers who were exposed to radioactive plutonium at the government's gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Ky.

Government-funded medical surveys since 1960 have shown higher rates of at least one type of cancer--varying from thyroid tumors to leukemia--at most of the major facilities that produced nuclear weapons.

Yet, in part because of the cloak of secrecy that enshrouded weapons production, the federal government never acknowledged a link between the cancers and working conditions in the plants. The White House panel in January found "credible evidence" of increased health risks due to "ionizing radiation and chemical and physical hazards."

In draft remarks prepared for today's announcement, Vice President Gore acknowledged that compensation "cannot undo" the suffering of injured workers. But "today this administration begins the process of compensating workers for their suffering and becoming an advocate for all contract workers no matter where they worked."

Recent revelations about workplace hazards in weapons factories also has spurred calls in Congress for compensation. At a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing last month, Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) termed worker illnesses a "national problem" and urged the administration to be generous in crafting its solution.

"The burden of proof has to be on the government," he said. "If the federal government made mistakes that jeopardized [workers'] health and safety, then we need to do what we can to make it right."

Early reaction to the new proposal was generally positive. Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), who sponsored compensation legislation with Rep. Edward Whitfield (R-Ky.) earlier this year, credited Richardson with fighting for workers despite resistance within the administration. "This is just one step along the way to making this an accomplished fact," Strickland said. "But I can tell you, the workers are terribly concerned about what's going to happen to them if they don't get some help."

-----

Secretary Richardson Announces Proposal to Compensate Thousands of Sick Workers
Administration Addresses Cold War Legacy

NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: April Kaufman, 202/586-5806
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 12, 2000
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/portal/feature/pr00103.htm

Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson today announced a Clinton/Gore Administration initiative that reverses the decades-old government practice of opposing workers' claims that their illnesses resulted from the hazards associated with designing, testing and building nuclear weapons.

"For decades, government ignored mounting evidence that workers who were contributing to our nation's defense were themselves being put at risk," said Vice President Al Gore. "While we cannot undo their suffering, today this administration begins the process of healing by admitting the government's mistakes, designing a process for compensating these workers for their suffering and by becoming an advocate for Department of Energy workers throughout the nuclear weapons complex."

The announcement is the culmination of a series of actions that the Administration has taken over the past 10 months to compensate the men and women who developed illnesses from exposure to dangerous chemicals and radiation while working to build America's nuclear defense.

"We are moving forward to do the right thing by these workers," Secretary Richardson said. "The men and women who served our nation in the nuclear weapons industries of World War II and the Cold War labored under difficult and dangerous conditions with some of the most hazardous materials known to mankind. This is a fair and reasonable program. It will compensate workers and get them the help they have long deserved."

The Administration's proposal, if enacted into law by Congress, would compensate more than 3,000 workers with a broad range of work-related illnesses throughout the Energy Department's nuclear weapons complex. The legislation would give lump sum financial benefits or a package of benefits including lost wages, medical expenses and job retraining to workers with pulmonary diseases caused from breathing particles of beryllium, workers with cancers caused by workplace radiation exposure and specific groups of workers at the department's Paducah, Ky., Portsmouth, Ohio; and Oak Ridge, Tenn., sites.

The initiative expands on legislation introduced by Secretary Richardson in November 1999, in response to President Clinton's July 1999 request. Following its 8-month review, the National Economic Council (NEC) recommended to the President that the 1999 legislative proposal be significantly expanded. The 1999 legislation proposed benefits for workers with beryllium disease, a group of workers at the department's Paducah, Ky., plant and benefits for certain workers at the department's Oak Ridge, Tenn., site.

The administration's enhanced proposal would provide:

for workers with beryllium-related illnesses - compensation comparable to benefits provided by the Federal Employees' Compensation Act (FECA), including medical costs, lost wages and job retraining. All medical expenses would be paid in full by the compensation program, including prescriptions, treatments and travel costs. Workers diagnosed with a beryllium-related pulmonary condition before the legislation passes may choose a $100,000 lump sum benefit or the compensation package. This applies to any past or present worker with chronic beryllium disease - including federal and contractor employees, as well as individuals who worked for companies that manufactured beryllium for the U.S. government;

for workers with radiation-related cancers - the benefits will be the same as those for beryllium affected workers, including full, first dollar medical coverage, lost wages and job retraining. If adequate information about the amount of radiation workers were exposed to is not available, the Department of Energy will assume they were exposed to the highest amount of radiation associated with the tasks they performed. Workers diagnosed with a cancer caused by exposure to certain kinds of radiation before the legislation passes may choose a $100,000 lump sum benefit or the compensation package;

for other groups of sick workers - $100,000 lump sum benefits are available to workers with specific types of cancer at the department's three former gaseous diffusion plants and, upon Secretarial approval, to a group of workers at the department's East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge who have illnesses an independent panel of physicians determines are caused by workplace exposures. These workers might also be eligible for benefits under the program for workers with radiation-related cancers; and

for workers with other occupational illnesses - Secretary Richardson announced that he is establishing a workers' advocacy office to help workers with illnesses not specifically addressed in the legislative proposal obtain state workers' compensation benefits.

Total program costs, including administrative costs and worker benefits, are estimated to be about $120 million annually over the first three years the program is fully operational, declining to about $80 million per year after that as the backlog of claims is reduced.

Most of the workers who would benefit from this proposal have worked at the department's Hanford Reservation (Wash.), Oak Ridge Reservation (Tenn.), Savannah River Site (S.C.), Nevada Test Site, Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site (Colo.), Pantex Plant (Tex.), Mound Plant (Ohio), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Calif.), Los Alamos National Laboratory (N.M.), Fernald Environmental Management Project (Ohio) and the gaseous diffusion plants in Paducah, Ky.; Portsmouth, Ohio; and Oak Ridge, Tenn. All workers with occupational illnesses across the department's nuclear weapons complex will be assisted with state workers' compensation claims by the department's new advocacy office.

As part of the NEC-led review, one panel of government public and occupational health experts examined whether some workers at Energy Department nuclear weapons production facilities were at an increased risk for developing certain illnesses. Their conclusion supporting workers' claims was based on available scientific evidence, worker monitoring programs and other information.

A second panel of experts reviewed how Energy Department contractor employees with occupational illnesses fared in state workers' compensation systems and concluded more could be done to help workers in this arena.

The Department of Energy held several public town hall meetings to hear directly from workers about their illnesses. Approximately 3,000 current and retired workers and family members attended meetings held by Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health, Dr. David Michaels, near the department's major sites in: Paducah, Ky.; Piketon, Ohio; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Rocky Flats, Colo.; Hanford, Wash.; Mercury, Nev; Los Alamos, N.M., and Burlington, Ia.

Further information about the administration's proposal, including benefit summaries, NEC materials and transcripts from public meetings, is available at http://tis.eh.doe.gov/benefits.

---

Clinton announces compensation package

4/12/00-
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncswed07.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Clinton administration, acknowledging that thousands of people became seriously ill, Wednesday unveiled a broad package of compensation for ailing workers who were exposed to radiation at the country's nuclear bomb factories during the Cold War.

''We are moving forward to do the right thing for these workers,'' Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said. ''The government is, for a change, on their side, not against them.''

The plan will offer lump-sum payments of at least $100,000 to workers or their survivors, or allow them to negotiate a package that would cover medical costs, lost wages and job retraining.

While it's unclear how many people would be affected, the Energy Department has estimated that about 3,000 former workers at nuclear weapons plants, or their families, are likely to be eligible because of exposure to radiation in the 1950s and, in some cases into the 1970s.

The department estimated the cost of the program, which must still be approved by Congress, at about $120 million annually for the first three years, declining to $80 million a year after that as the backlog of claims is reduced.

Workers who would be eligible for compensation worked at nuclear weapons plants and facilities in ten states. They are the Hanford Reservation in Washington, Oak Ridge Complex in Tennessee, Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Nevada Test Site, Rocky Flats Complex in Colorado, the Pantex Plant in Texas, the Mound Plant, Fernald Environmental Management Project and Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plants, all in Ohio; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.

The plan represents the first action by the government that would affect long-standing claims by nuclear-weapons workers throughout the government's vast nuclear weapons production complex.

Last January, a White House panel concluded there was credible evidence that many workers at the nuclear weapons plants became ill with lung cancer and other serious illnesses because of exposure to radiation or toxic chemicals. Until then, the government had always denied a direct link between work exposure and later illnesses.

Under the proposal, the government would assume workers were exposed to the highest expected level of radiation associated with their work if actual medical records were not available.

The compensation plan was put together by the White House National Economic Council.

The plan expands an earlier proposal by the Energy Department that would provide compensation to a limited number of workers who have contracted an incurable beryllium disease because of exposure to chemicals and radioactive material at the Kentucky and Ohio uranium enrichment plants.

The findings last January that illnesses were linked to nuclear weapons work was based on a review of dozens of studies and raw medical data covering an estimated 600,000 workers at 14 nuclear weapons sites.

While the panel said the evidence did not in all cases show a direct causal link between workplace exposures and specific illnesses, it found that workers at the plants suffered higher than normal rates of a wide range of cancers and that they clearly were exposed to cancer-causing radiation and chemicals in the workplace.

The studies examined health records and other data covering three decades of the Cold War, and officials emphasized the findings do not relate to working conditions at the plants today.

The report said elevated rates of 22 categories of cancer were found among workers at 14 facilities in the department's atomic weapons complex. They included leukemia, Hodgkin's lymphoma and cancers of the prostate, kidney, salivary gland and lung.

President Clinton ordered the review after the Energy Department concluded the government should compensate workers who had developed an incurable lung disease because of exposure to beryllium, a material used in nuclear weapons production.

Richardson and the White House wanted to determine if other nuclear weapons plant workers likewise should be compensated because of exposure to plutonium, uranium and a variety of radioactive or highly toxic substances. The interagency group reviewed dozens of epidemiological studies, raw health data and other documents, many of which in the past have been dismissed by the government.

---

U.S. To Compensate Nuclear Workers

By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer
APRIL 12, 18:23 EST
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS73QFEH80
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000412/aponline190715_000.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Proclaiming it wants to correct decades of injustice, the Clinton administration on Wednesday unveiled a proposal to compensate thousands of nuclear defense workers who became ill because of exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals.

The compensation plan, which is expected to cost at least $520 million over the first five years, would apply to about 3,000 workers at former nuclear bomb making sites in 10 states, the Energy Department said.

``We are moving forward to do the right thing by these workers,'' said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, calling on Congress to approve the compensation package this year.

Richardson said these workers ``labored under difficult and dangerous conditions'' for much of Cold War, producing nuclear material and bombs. Not only were many of them exposed to cancer and other illnesses from radiation and toxic chemicals, but then the government for decades refused to acknowledge their claims, he said.

``Justice has finally come, the government is for a change on their side and not against them,'' said Richardson at a news conference.

The prospect of congressional action was unclear, although given a better chance since a wide range of workers from all parts of the country have been included.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers from states where the weapons plants are located promised to press for quick action. ``This government for decades turned its back on (these workers') needs,'' said Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., who has fought for compensation for defense workers with beryllium disease.

Many of the workers have claimed for years that their illnesses - leukemia, lung cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma and various other cancers as well as beryllium disease, asbestosis, and other ailments - were the result of being exposed to radiation and chemicals during years of work at the bomb factories in the 1950s through the 1970.

Until recently, the government has fought lawsuits demanding compensation, and argued that there is no proof the illnesses were caused by their work. But last January, a presidentially appointed panel concluded that there was ``credible evidence'' that the illnesses were related to work exposure.

``We're going to try to correct this injustice,'' said Richardson, although acknowledging that many of the workers ``understandably may (still) be suspicious'' that this is another ``empty promise.''

At Richardson's side was Vickie Hatfield of Kingston, Tenn., whose 79-year-old father is severely ill with chronic beryllium disease and asbestosis, as a result of years of work at an Oak Ridge, Tenn., nuclear weapons assembly plant.

``We can't give him back what he's lost,'' said Hatfield, describing her father's difficulties in breathing and everyday activities. But she said the proposed compensation would help defray enormous medical bills.

The Energy Department plan would make a lump-sum payments of at least $100,000 to workers or their survivors, or allow them to negotiate a package that would cover medical costs, lost wages and job retraining.

The department estimated that about 1,500 workers with cancer, 750 workers who suffer from beryllium disease or associated illness, and 750 workers with other illnesses will be eligible. During the Cold War years about 600,000 people worked at the bomb-making and nuclear material plants across the country.

The department estimated the cost of the program will be $120 million annually for the first three years, declining to $80 million a year as the backlog of claims is reduced.

The compensation package applies to people at The Hanford Reservation in Washington, Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Nevada Test Site, the Rocky Flats Complex in Colorado, the Pantex Plant in Texas, the Mound Plant and Fernald Environmental Management Project in Ohio, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and gaseous diffusion plants at Piketon, Ohio, Paducah, Ky., and Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Workers exposed to beryllium need only demonstrate they have chronic beryllium disease or beryllium sensitivity to be eligible for compensation. Other workers with certain cancers as a result of exposure to radiation will have to meet dose-exposure levels.

But David Michaels, the DOE's assistant secretary for health and safety, said when information about exposure dosage is not available - as often will be the case because of poor record keeping - the government will assume exposure at the highest amount for whatever task was performed.

Workers at the three gaseous diffusion plants will be eligible for compensation if they have primary lung or bone cancer or another specific cancer specified by Congress.

----

Compensation announced for U.S. workers exposed to radiation

By H. JOSEF HEBERT,
Associated Press
http://www2.nando.net/noframes/story/0,2107,500191944-500259662-501337318-0,00.html
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/radiation000412.html

WASHINGTON (April 12, 2000 12:09 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - The Clinton administration, acknowledging the thousands of people sickened by radiation, is unveiling a broad package of compensation Wednesday for ailing workers who were exposed to radiation at the country's nuclear bomb factories during the Cold War, government sources said.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson was to announce the compensation program, most of which will still have to be approved by Congress.

The plan would offer lump-sum payments of at least $100,000 to workers or their survivors, or allow them to negotiate a package that would cover medical costs, lost wages and job retraining, according to sources familiar with the proposal.

While it's unclear how many people would be affected, the Energy Department has estimated that about 3,000 former workers at nuclear weapons plants, or their families, are likely to be eligible because of exposure to radiation in the 1950s and, in some cases into the 1970s.

The plan estimates the cost of the program at as much as $400 million a year in the early years, but costs would decline as the number of eligible workers declines, said officials.

The plan represents the first action by the government that would affect long-standing claims by nuclear-weapons workers throughout the government's vast nuclear weapons production complex covering facilities in more than a dozen states.

It was not immediately clear what specific facilities would be covered, although workers at uranium enrichment plants in Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio are among the locations where compensation was expected.

Last January, a White House panel concluded there was credible evidence that many workers at the nuclear weapons plants became ill with lung cancer and other serious illnesses because of exposure to radiation or toxic chemicals. Until then, the government had always denied a direct link between work exposure and later illnesses.

Under the proposal being unveiled Wednesday, the government would assume workers were exposed to the highest expected level of radiation associated with their work if actual medical records were not available, said the sources, who spoke on condition of not being further identified.

The proposed compensation plan, which was put together by the White House National Economic Council, was first reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

The plan expands an earlier proposal by the Energy Department that would provide compensation to a limited number of workers who have contracted an incurable beryllium disease because of exposure to chemicals and radioactive material at the Kentucky and Ohio uranium enrichment plants.

"The government is done fighting workers and now we're going to help them. We're reversing the decades-old practice of opposing worker claims and moving forward to do the right thing," Richardson was quoted as saying by the Post.

The findings last January that illnesses were linked to nuclear weapons work was based on a review of dozens of studies and raw medical data covering an estimated 600,000 workers at 14 nuclear weapons sites.

While the panel said the evidence did not in all cases show a direct causal link between workplace exposures and specific illnesses, it found that workers at the plants suffered higher than normal rates of a wide range of cancers and that they clearly were exposed to cancer-causing radiation and chemicals in the workplace.

The studies examined health records and other data covering three decades of the Cold War, and officials emphasized the findings do not relate to working conditions at the plants Wednesday.

The report said elevated rates of 22 categories of cancer were found among workers at 14 facilities in the department's atomic weapons complex. They included leukemia, Hodgkin's lymphoma and cancers of the prostate, kidney, salivary gland and lung.

President Clinton ordered the review after the Energy Department concluded the government should compensate workers who had developed an incurable lung disease because of exposure to beryllium, a material used in nuclear weapons production.

Richardson and the White House wanted to determine if other nuclear weapons plant workers likewise should be compensated because of exposure to plutonium, uranium and a variety of radioactive or highly toxic substances. The interagency group reviewed dozens of epidemiological studies, raw health data and other documents, many of which in the past have been dismissed by the government.

The report's findings included workers at plutonium production facilities at Savannah River in South Carolina and Hanford in Washington state; the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, where plutonium was molded into weapons components; uranium enrichment and processing plants at the Oak Ridge, Tenn., complex; the Fernald uranium processing plant near Cincinnati; and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories in California and New Mexico, respectively.

----

U.S. Plans to Pay Radiation Claims

April 12, 2000
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/washpol/nuke-help.html

WASHINGTON, April 11 -- The White House will announce a plan on Wednesday for compensating workers who may have been made sick by exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals in the nation's nuclear weapons factories, administration officials said tonight.

The plan, which has been under development for about a year and must still be submitted to Congress, follows the acknowledgment by the Energy Department earlier this year that workers involved in building the nation's nuclear arsenal showed higher-than-normal rates of several different kinds of cancer and other ailments, based on a review of years of scientific studies.

The concession opened the door for compensation.

The plan could cost $400 million over the first five years, administration officials said.

An important part of the plan is "giving workers the benefit of the doubt," an Energy Department official said.

Through the cold war and beyond, the Energy Department and its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, denied that workers had received harmful doses of radiation.

And few if any of the workers qualified for workers' compensation, the standard remedy, because that program was designed for sudden injuries that clearly happened on the job, not ailments developed by chronic exposure.

The Energy Department and its contractors routinely opposed such payments for compensation based on supposed radiation exposure.

Nearly all the affected workers were or are employees of private companies that operated government factories.

Some are employees of subcontractors who worked in private factories.

New details of the plan for compensation were first reported in The Washington Post on Wednesday.

People familiar with the plan also said that it acknowledged that most workers could not document their exposures, because record-keeping was poor, and that even if they could, some were suffering from diseases that were far from unique to people who work with radiation, although they may occur more frequently among that group.

The plan gives the workers the benefit of the doubt in asserting that certain illnesses are occupationally related.

"The government is done fighting the workers and now we're going to help them," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in a statement. "We're reversing the decades-old practice of opposing worker claims."

In advance of Congressional approval, however, the only action that the Clinton administration can take is to acknowledge responsibility, Energy Department officials said.

The plan's prospects in Congress are uncertain, but some members of the House are pushing hard on behalf of workers in their districts, notably uranium enrichment plants, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.

The plan was drafted by the White House National Economic Council, with help from experts from a dozen Federal agencies. It would offer some workers lump-sum payments of $100,000 or allow them to negotiate reimbursement for medical costs and lost wages. It does not contemplate punitive damages.

If the plan is approved, the Energy Department will open a special compensation office to handle the claims.

The weapons complex has employed hundreds of thousands of workers since 1944, many of whom died of the same kinds of illnesses that afflict the rest of the population.

Some, however, suffer from diseases that are unusual outside the weapons complex, notably berylliosis, a condition that comes from exposure to beryllium dust. Beryllium is a metal for which the weapons complex was the only consumer for several decades. The plan also contemplates reimbursement for another lung ailment, silicosis, and for "radiogenic cancers."

Epidemiologic studies of workers around the complex have found that as a whole, they are healthier than the general population but that at 14 plants, there are 22 pockets of "excess cancers" or other unusual diseases.

--------

Trouble With Uranium Processing Co.

APRIL 12, 00:27 EST
By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS73PVM7O0

WASHINGTON (AP) - Less than two years after the government sold its uranium business, the private company it created to take on the job is mired in financial quicksand. The deal is also jeopardizing a crucial nuclear security agreement with Russia, critics say.

USEC Inc.'s first 20 months as a private company have been anything but smooth. Its stock has dropped 70 percent, its credit rating is in junk bond territory, and its earnings have nosedived.

Amid the financial turmoil, lawmakers and others are questioning the sale. A congressional investigation has been under way for a year, with the first public hearings scheduled this week.

While investors have lost millions of dollars, some of the people who pushed hardest for an initial stock offering have profited handsomely.

``A number of lobbyists, company insiders and investment bankers made a killing financially,'' said Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, a private government watchdog.

In all, Wall Street bankers, Washington lawyers and lobbyists - many with close ties to the Clinton administration - earned more than $75 million on the $1.9 billion sale, according to contracts and interviews.

Among those talking up the stock offering in 1998 on Capitol Hill and in the White House were Susan Thomases, a New York lawyer and confidante of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Greg Simon, formerly Vice President Al Gore's domestic policy adviser. The law firm of Skadden Arps, which represented President Clinton in the Paula Jones case, was USEC's lead attorney in the deal.

But no one pushed harder for a USEC sale on Wall Street than William ``Nick'' Timbers, a former investment banker whose 1991 report for the Energy Department touted the idea of privatizing the government's uranium business. Now USEC's chairman, he earns $1.2 million a year and so far has made $151,000 from USEC stock dividends.

Participants and transcripts of private USEC board meetings indicate Timbers argued strongly against selling the government enterprise to private bidders, pressuring instead for an initial public offering of stock. Among the rejected suitors was defense giant Lockheed Martin, which had operated an enrichment plant as a government contractor.

Timbers also touted an experimental laser technology, known as AVLIS, that he predicted would be in operation by 2005 and reduce electricity costs by 95 percent, helping make USEC profitable. But a year after the stock sale, AVLIS was abandoned as too expensive, prompting some stockholders and critics to complain they had been misled - a charge the company denied.

USEC Vice President Charles Yulish, the company's spokesman, said the payments to underwriters and legal advisers were in line with a sale of USEC's size. He dismissed criticism as part of a ``relentless conspiracy theory'' promoted by the domestic uranium mining industry and the union representing plant workers.

Timbers declined repeated requests for an interview. But he and other USEC executives have blamed the company's problems on declining uranium prices, high enrichment costs, increased competition from European enrichment companies and losses from the Russia uranium deal.

The company's problems are not just a matter of finances - they could also affect national security.

The government's enrichment plants - now operated by USEC in Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio - for years provided uranium for weapons and submarines. Now USEC sells enriched uranium for commercial power reactors, accounting for a third of all such sales worldwide and revenue last year of $1.5 billion.

In 1993, while still owned by the government, USEC became the U.S. agent for the Russian uranium deal, a cornerstone of American attempts to get Russia to dispose of some of its huge nuclear weapons material while keeping it out of the hands of terrorists or rogue states.

But the arrangement has been a money loser because the contract requires USEC to pay Russia more for the uranium than the company can sell it for in the depressed market. Last fall, USEC sought $200 million in government help, but was rebuffed.

USEC has recently beefed up its lobbying corps, hiring former White House Counsel Jack Quinn and former Senate Energy Committee Chairman Bennett Johnston, D-La., among others. Critics speculate USEC may be preparing another plea for government assistance if it fails to persuade Russia to cut its prices.

With growing uncertainty about the company's long-term survival, some members of Congress are concerned the government may yet have to step in with a multibillion-dollar bailout. Even Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who co-sponsored the privatization legislation, now refers to it as ``this disaster.''

Ironically, the government was making hefty profits - $1.2 billion between 1994 into 1998 - when it owned USEC. But that was before the uranium market went bust because of declining demand and huge supplies, the company's defenders say. Critics contend USEC contributed to the downward spiral by signaling it would sell a large amount of the natural uranium it inherited from the government to maintain cash flow.

``We sold a thriving government enterprise that isn't so thriving anymore,'' said William Burton, an energy lawyer and a member of the presidentially appointed board that approved the sale. Burton opposed the sale, arguing that its impact on the Russia uranium agreement had not been examined sufficiently.

Since then, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has privately told associates the privatization was a mistake. And last fall, he accused USEC of undercutting the Russia nonproliferation agreement by selling large amounts of its own uranium stockpile.

USEC executives said the $25 million in sales over three months last year reflected several years of contracts. But the company's large uranium holdings - $700 million worth - and its strategy to sell it on the open market are still of concern to nonproliferation experts.

Yulish disputed claims that USEC has sought to undermine the Russia deal, noting that USEC has already accepted 81 tons of weapons-grade uranium - enough for 3,200 nuclear warheads - and is committed to accept 30 tons a year under the agreement.

To reduce Russia's nuclear arsenal, the United States in the early 1990s agreed to help Moscow sell 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from the former Soviet weapons stockpile. Once diluted, the material is no longer suitable for weapons and would be sold as civilian reactor fuel with USEC the middleman.

But the USEC's emergence as an investor-owned company competing for profits on the uranium market suddenly changed the deal's dynamics.

``The privatization left a crucial national security initiative - the purchase of 500 tons of uranium from Russia - to the whim of the private market,'' said Matthew Bunn, a nonproliferation expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. ``It was one of the most egregious national security blunders of the Clinton team.''

Thomas Neff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who conceived of the U.S.-Russia uranium deal and sold it to the government, said the sale of USEC ``privatized national security.'' He predicted the government may eventually have to bail out both USEC and the Russia deal.

But the race to Wall Street in 1998 was moving so fast that on the final day of the USEC board's deliberations on July 22, 1998, ``any questions raised that day were seen as obstacles,'' Burton recalled.

Budget crunchers and former Wall Streeters then running the Treasury Department saw the sale in terms of income for the government, and Gore viewed it as a triumph for government reinvention.

``Budget balancing was one of the factors. The second thing was that USEC was pushing it,'' recalled Joseph Stiglitz, then chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and one of the few senior administration officials who strongly opposed the deal.

``I could see very little benefit and very big risks,'' Stiglitz said in an interview. As a private company, USEC ``would have every incentive ... to bomb the (Russian) deal.''

Neither the national security folks at the White House, nor the State Department shared Stiglitz' concern.

``If this (sale) had been done in the light of day, it never would have happened,'' insisted Richard Miller, a lawyer for the Paper Allied-Industrial Chemical and Energy Workers Union, which represents USEC plant workers.

---

A profile of USEC Inc.:

Headquarters: Bethesda, Md.
http://www.foxnews.com/national/041200/radiation_sidec.sml

History: Government-owned corporation 1993-1998. Sold by the government for $1.9 billion in a public stock offering and began operation at an investor-owned company on July 28, 1998.

Revenue: $1.5 billion. (fiscal 1999)
Profits: $152 million (fiscal 1999)
Employees: 3,900, mostly at two uranium enrichment plants in Piketon, Ohio, and Paducah, Ky.
Stock: Traded on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: USU). Initial offer of 100 million shares at $14.25 a share. Stock value this week at $4.74 a share.

Business: The world's largest supplier of enriched uranium with about 35 percent of the world market for commercial power reactors. Also the U.S. government's agent for sales of Russian uranium under a U.S.-Russian nonproliferation agreement.


------- colorado

Burn plan shelved Rocky Flats buffer zone too green to burn, say Feds

April 12, 2000
By BRIAN HANSEN
Colorado Daily Staff Writer
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2000/nn10594.htm

Federal officials announced on Tuesday that because of rapid spring "greening," they are temporarily suspending plans to continue with the controlled burning program that was launched last week in the 6,000-acre Rocky Flats buffer zone.

Meanwhile, the preliminary results from the air samples taken during last week's 50-acre "test burn" showed a maximum alpha radiation level of 0.2 picoCuries per cubic meter of air sampled, a level only "slightly above" minimum laboratory detection limits and "low" in terms of radiation dosage potentially administered to humans, officials said.

According to officials, the warm and wet spring weather has created conditions that are unsuitable for continuing with the prescribed burning program, which they maintain is necessary to manage the vegetation throughout Rocky Flats' 6,000 acre buffer zone.

"We have said all along that we would only do this if it made sense ecologically," said Paul Golan, acting U.S. Department of Energy manager at Rocky Flats. "We knew we had a short window of opportunity for prescribed burning this season, (and) we have concluded that the window has closed on us."

DOE deputy assistant manager John Rampe echoed Golan's point, explaining that the "early spring greening" of the site's buffer zone would reduce the effectiveness of more prescribed burning.

"With too much green material, we cannot get an effective fire, and we cannot generate enough heat to burn off the thatch, which is the main point of the burn," said Rampe, who added that additional burning would also disrupt the seasonal nesting patterns of migratory birds. "Overall, the best season for burning has ended."

Federal officials had hoped to burn about 500 acres in the Rocky Flats buffer zone this spring. They say they'll begin planning now for another prescribed burn during the next "favorable" season, possibly this fall or next spring.

"Prescribed burning remains a key element to managing the natural assets of the buffer zone," Rampe said. "Rocky Flats contains thousands of acres of some of the last remaining xeric tall grass prairie in the Front Range. DOE has an active responsibility for managing and preserving it."

Federal officials contend that the prescribed burning program is the best management strategy for controlling noxious weeds and otherwise maintaining the "ecological value" of the 6,000-acre Rocky Flats buffer zone. The controlled burning program will also reduce the buildup of fuels in the Rocky Flats grasslands, thus reducing the risk that a catastrophic wildfire would race uncontrolled towards the plant's highly contaminated industrial area, officials maintain.

But critics say that the plan is not protective of public health, noting that plutonium and other radionuclides that may be spread about the site would likely become airborne during the burns.

DOE officials maintain that the buffer zone has been extensively studied, and that the areas slated to be burned lie a safe distance from any areas of known contamination.

Critics aren't convinced. They say that the site has not been adequately characterized for unidentified "hot spots," and that there may be nuclear waste buried in the buffer zone -- as has been alleged in lawsuits filed against the DOE and its contractors.

Those fears prompted a group of Boulder residents to appeal on Tuesday to a high-ranking independent federal investigator, despite the DOE's same-day announcement that it would shelve the prescribed burning program for at least a few months.

Robert Martin, the Hazardous Waste Ombudsman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, agreed on Tuesday to take a look at the controversial Rocky Flats controlled burning program after Boulder resident Jyoti Wind presented him with a stack of petitions signed by more than 1,300 concerned people.

"I'll look into it," said Martin, who spoke Tuesday to CU environmental ethics students. "I'd like to see any primary documents you have."

Martin, who played a key role in exposing the deception associated with the now-remodeled plan to remediate the Shattuck Superfund site in Denver, acknowledged that he knows little about the DOE-backed plan for burning the Rocky Flats buffer zone.

But Martin -- whose 11th-hour intervention halted a controversial plan to incinerate dioxin-contaminated soils in Times Beach, Missouri -- said he'd try to bring himself up to speed on the Rocky Flats case.

"The truth is always there, and can be gotten to if you're willing to search for it," Martin said at the end of his talk. "Nothing is as it seems, but facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

For more information on the DOE's prescribed burning plan at Rocky Flats, log on to www.rfets.gov.

----
Plan would compensate Flats workers

By The Denver Post Staff and Wire Reports
http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0412a.htm

April 12 - Workers and former workers at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant northwest of Denver could benefit from a Clinton administration plan to compensate thousands of people who were exposed to radiation while helping to build the nation's nuclear arsenal.

The Washington Post reported this morning that the plan, which vows to "right the wrongs of the past," will be unveiled today in Washington.

The unprecedented national compensation plan offers payments of $100,000 to workers with certain cancers, in the first tangible acknowledgment of responsibility for decades of unsafe working conditions in dozens of nuclear bomb factories around the country, including the Rocky Flats plant, now know as the Environmental Technology Site.

Thousands of other workers would receive help in applying for compensation under liberalized policies that reverse decades of government antagonism to workers' medical claims, according to a draft of the plan obtained by The Washington Post. In addition, workers would receive the benefit of the doubt when plant medical records are missing or flawed, the draft states.

"It's fantastic news," said David Navarro, vice president of the United Steel Workers of America Local 8031, which represents many workers at Rocky Flats.

Navarro, who was rushing to catch a plane to Washington on Tuesday night to be in the capital for the announcement, estimated there are well over 100 people from Rocky Flats who might get compensation from the plan.

"We have many members who have passed away or are extremely ill right now" from radiation-caused illnesses, he said. "This is another great step forward. We applaud the Clinton administration for doing this. The next step is getting our senators and congresspeople to support this," said Navarro.

Rocky Flats was one of the major plants in the United States' nuclear weapons chain and employed thousands of area residents over the years.

The plant was established in the early 1950s to manufacture nuclear triggers for thermonuclear weapons; it built atomic bombs that would set off hydrogen bombs.

The triggers were made of plutonium, a highly toxic radioactive material that was cast and machined at the plant. Several leaks were admitted over the decades.

"The government is done fighting workers, and now we're going to help them," said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, confirming details of the plan crafted by the White House National Economic Council. "We're reversing the decades-old practice of opposing worker claims and moving forward to do the right thing."

The plan would cost the federal government an estimated $400 million over the first five years, officials familiar with the proposal said. After that, the cost is expected to decline as cases are settled.

The production of 70,000 nuclear weapons over 50 years employed more than 600,000 men and women at 16 major sites and dozens of smaller ones. Workers have testified in a series of recent hearings that they were frequently exposed to high levels of radiation as well as hazardous chemicals.

In January, the same White House panel concluded - based on the largest-ever review of worker health studies at weapons plants - that workers suffered higher rates of disease from exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals. That decision reversed decades of official denials and began the process of deciding how to compensate workers who became ill.

Under the new proposal, parts of which would require congressional approval, the Energy Department would set up a workers' advocacy office, effective next month, to help current and former employees who believe they suffer from jobrelated illnesses.

Breaking with a long-standing practice of fighting compensation claims in court, the new Occupational Illness Compensation Office would expedite claims, using independent physicians to determine if illnesses are work-related. Once that link is established, the DOE would accept responsibility for the illness.

Under a separate program, workers or survivors of workers who contracted a "radiogenic" cancer after being exposed to radiation on the job could choose between a lump-sum payment of $100,000 or a negotiated compensation package that covers all medical costs as well as lost wages and job retraining.

If reliable exposure records are not available, the government "will assume (the workers) were exposed to the highest amount of radiation associated with the tasks they performed," the draft states.

Denver Post staff writer Jim Kirksey contributed to this report.

-------- kentucky

USEC PRIVATIZATION DEBATE FUELED BY 'POWER POLITICS'

Wednesday, April 12, 2000
Byline: Jonathan Riskind
Columbus Dispatch Washington Bureau
http://libpub.dispatch.com/cgi-bin/slwebcli.pl?DBLIST=cd00&D

WASHINGTON -- The privatized federal corporation that runs a southern Ohio uranium-enrichment plant plans to lay off hundreds of workers and acknowledges that its profits and stock price are falling.

USEC is in dire enough financial straits that an analyst with Bank of New York Capital Markets last week concluded that the company may try to close either the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, or a sister facility in Paducah, Ky., by July 2001.

But that doesn't mean USEC can't afford a bunch of lobbyists and consultants to plead its case at a congressional hearing to probe whether the 1998 privatization of USEC was a boondoggle for taxpayers and a threat to national security.

The hearing follows months of a congressional investigation of the $1.9 billion privatization.

The privatization of the former United States Enrichment Corp., which took over the plants in 1993 from the Department of Energy, was handled through a stock offering that yielded some $75 million in fees for Wall Street, attorneys and other consultants.

Vice President Al Gore made the privatization a priority as part of his "reinventing government'' initiative.

But the result is a "poster child'' for how power politics greases Washington wheels and why the system needs an overhaul, said Peter Eisner, managing director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Among the powerful consultants hired by USEC is a former top Energy Department official who still serves on advisory boards. Robert I. Hanfling, a deputy undersecretary of energy in the 1970s and now an international consultant, is a member of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board and an Energy Department task force on Russian non-proliferation issues.

Among the issues the task force advises on is the $8 billion arms-control deal to buy Russian enriched uranium culled from nuclear warheads. USEC is charged with carrying out the agreement.

Last year, USEC sought a $200 million government bailout and threatened to walk away from its role, saying it was losing money on the deal. The company later backed down from its demands.

Hanfling did not return a phone call yesterday seeking comment, but an Energy Department advisory board official said Hanfling had "been up front'' about his work for USEC and had recused himself from any discussions involving USEC or the Russian deal. And she noted that work on the advisory boards is voluntary and unpaid.

USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said the company isn't operating differently than any other large corporation.

"Like any of our competitors, we have professionals to consult with us in meeting our corporate objectives,'' she said.

But Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, a House Commerce Committee member whose district includes the Piketon plant, said USEC is different because it was a federal corporation that pledged as part of privatization to continue to carry out the public interest. He noted that USEC pledged to carry out the Russian deal and keep both plants open until at least 2005.

Hiring Hanfling is a "shameful'' conflict of interest, Strickland charged.

In addition to Hanfling, USEC also includes on its consultant roster Alex Flint, a former top Senate Energy Committee staff member who helped shape the policies and laws that led to privatization several months ago. But Flint now works for former Senate Energy Committee Chairman Bennett Johnston, a Democrat from Louisiana who is now a powerful Washington lobbyist.

Former White House Counsel Jack Quinn and Edward Gillespie, Quinn's Republican business partner and a former top aide to House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey, also have been hired.

USEC says it no longer uses Greg Simon, former domestic policy adviser to Gore, as a consultant, but Democratic power broker Thomas Boggs is still on the payroll.

"This really is all about power politics,'' Eisner said. "Career patrons of Gore are sprinkled throughout the whole business. It's really kind of like a poster child for changing the system, the whole USEC case. It's embarrassing.''

-------- maryland

Appeals Panel Backs Rejection of Nuclear Plant Safety Review

By Todd Shields Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 ; A10
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59799-2000Apr11.html

A federal appeals court panel ruled yesterday that U.S. regulators acted properly in rejecting a bid for a closer review of safety issues surrounding the nation's first license renewal of a commercial nuclear power plant.

The decision leaves unaffected the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's March 23 approval of 20 more years of operating life for the twin reactors at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Southern Maryland, about 40 miles from Washington.

The plant's operator, Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., welcomed the ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

"It confirms the . . . license renewal process provides ample opportunity for public participation," said Robert E. Denton, executive vice president of Constellation Energy Group, BGE's parent corporation.

The National Whistleblower Center, on the losing side of yesterday's ruling, said it would appeal.

"Nuclear safety was the big loser today," said Stephen M. Kohn, an attorney for the Whistleblower Center. "Under the new [NRC] rules, the ability of citizens to challenge the NRC's current rush to relicense old nuclear power plants is completely undermined."

In 1998, Calvert Cliffs filed to renew its operating license. Since then, six more of the nation's 103 operating reactors have filed for license renewals, and 21 more have said they plan to do so by 2003, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group.

Yesterday's decision adopts a stance counter to that taken by a different three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in a Nov. 12 decision. That panel said the NRC unfairly ignored the Whistleblower Center, which had asked for more public hearings and the chance to search for safety hazards at the plant.

However, that initial decision was vacated by the appeals court on Nov. 23. It said it had misread NRC regulations in its haste to rule before one judge taking part in the ruling left the panel.

Last month, the NRC relicensed the Calvert Cliffs plant's two reactors without waiting for the appeals court's decision, saying it would have time to react if the judges found the relicensing process lacking.

At issue was the NRC's streamlined renewal process, put in place to remove uncertainty faced by utilities as they consider whether to extend the lives of expensive and complex nuclear power plants.

Yesterday, the appeals court panel, including both judges remaining from November's rulings, said the NRC was free to adopt the streamlined process in the Calvert Cliffs renewal. The judges also said the NRC was free to rebuff the Whistleblower Center's requests for detailed inquiries that would have slowed the renewal.

The Whistleblower Center says the process left unanswered key safety questions surrounding the reactors, which went into service in the mid-1970s and now are licensed to operate past 2030.

Calvert Cliffs officials say they have continually upgraded equipment and safety procedures at the plant.

NRC officials declined to comment on yesterday's ruling.

-------- nevada

REID HAILS NEW WHITE HOUSE PROPOSAL TO COVER NUCLEAR WEAPONS WORKERS
WILL COMPENSATE NEVADA TEST SITE EMPLOYEES

April 12, 2000
http://www.senate.gov/~reid/press/00/04/2000412D35.html

Washington, D.C. - United States Senator Harry Reid praised a decision by the Clinton Administration today to compensate sick workers from the nation's nuclear defense program who were exposed to radiation and other toxic materials, including employees from the Nevada Test Site.

"These brave men and women helped America win the Cold War, and now it is our turn to repay their sacrifices and to provide compensation to those injured as a result of their work on America's nuclear defense programs," Reid said. "I commend President Clinton and Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson for recognizing this need and for bringing forward a plan which includes coverage for a broad range of workers, including those form my home state who were employed at the Nevada Test Site."

Under the newly proposed program, the Department of Energy (DOE) would establish an Occupational Illness Compensation Office which would help current and former workers with claims related to their jobs in the nuclear defense industry. In a reverse of its earlier practice, the DOE said it will no longer oppose employee health claims and will allow them latitude in cases where medical records are missing or incomplete.

"Portions of this program will need to be authorized by Congress, and as I have already told the President, I am prepared to take the lead in introducing legislation to compensate these workers who contributed so much to our national defense," Reid said.

In March of this year, Reid, The Assistant Democratic Leader, sent a letter to the White House offering to take a lead role in drafting and passing compensation legislation. In his letter, Reid praised the President for his efforts to end years of silence on the issue of health claims for nuclear defense workers.

"Your attempt to lift the deadly veil of secrecy that has prevented compensation of these workers to date represents a heroic step in the right direction."

If the plan is approved by Congress, workers with health problems from exposure to radiation or the toxic metal beryllium would be eligible for a $100,000 lump sum payment or a benefits package that would cover a portion of lost wages due to disability, certain health care costs, retraining and other expenses related to their illness. Reid said he also hopes that Test Site workers who have illnesses related to their work such as silicosis, but were not exposed to radiation or beryllium, would also be covered under a separate category.

The DOE estimates that the compensation program will cost approximately $400 million over the first five years, with the price tag declining as the number of claims decreases.

-------- new mexico

UniTech Wants Legal Fees Paid

Wednesday, April 12, 2000
By Miguel Navrot Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer http://www.abqjournal.com:80/news/5657news04-12-00.htm

SANTA FE - A so-called "nuclear laundry" embroiled in a federal court fight over a Santa Fe sewer law says its legal fees have reached about $1 million - expenses it wants covered by the city.

UniTech Services Group, which washed radioactively contaminated laundry for 30 years in Santa Fe and was previously known as Interstate Nuclear Services, won a summary judgment in January that struck down the 1997 city law concerning nuclear discharge into the sewer. Days after the judgment, representatives for the Massachusetts-based company announced they were seeking $3.5 million in damages in the 11-count civil suit.

On Tuesday, the laundry filed documents in U.S. District Court stating its legal fees have run to about $1 million and asked District Judge Bruce D. Black to have the costs covered by the city, though the case is still pending.

Santa Fe's insurers have paid about $300,000 to the law firm of Hinkle Cox Eaton and Hensley for defending the case, city officials said Tuesday.

"Because (UniTech) has been unambiguously successful, it is entitled to a fee award compensating it for fees incurred in pursuing all related counts," laundry attorney James Rehnquist of Boston wrote in the latest filing. He didn't return messages left late Tuesday seeking comment.

Santa Fe City Attorney Peter Dwyer wouldn't comment on specifics in the case after hearing of the UniTech motion. He did say, though, Santa Fe would oppose paying legal costs to UniTech.

"The city will continue to defend this case and not concede that they're entitled to their fees," Dwyer said of UniTech's motion.

Administration officials are most concerned with any payments to the company exceeding $1 million - the amount Santa Fe is insured for in this lawsuit. Any figure exceeding the insurance coverage might have to paid with taxpayer money and could leave some programs short on funding.

The clash stems from city opposition to the laundry flushing radioactive discharge into the sewer. City lawmakers approved a measure in 1997 regulating such discharge, and the measure was deemed 50 times more stringent than federal and state guidelines.

With the key judgment going in UniTech's favor, City Hall has since backed off its opposition to the laundry and recently invited the company back to Santa Fe to apply to operate here again. UniTech hasn't indicated publicly whether it might come back to Santa Fe. The company operates other laundries throughout the nation.

Defense attorneys and administration officials also have said an appeal of the January decision could be in the works.

Operating on Siler Road for 30 years, the laundry washed contaminated clothing for Los Alamos National Laboratory and other nuclear industries.

-------- ohio

PIKETON IN PAYMENT PLAN
ENERGY DEPARTMENT SAYS OHIO WORKERS ARE DUE COMPENSATION

Wednesday, April 12, 2000
Jonathan Riskind
Columbus Dispatch Washington Bureau
http://libpub.dispatch.com/cgi-bin/slwebcli.pl?DBLIST=cd00&D

WASHINGTON -- The White House today will propose giving up to $100,000 apiece to workers made ill by radiation exposure at a southern Ohio uranium-enrichament plant, Clinton administration and congressional sources said.

The proposal would put workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant on par with those at a sister facility in Kentucky who were offered the same compensation last fall, said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, who yesterday learned of the proposal that could benefit hundreds of Ohio workers.

Today's announcement comes after evidence revealed that workers at the plant in Piketon, 75 miles south of Columbus, were unwittingly exposed to plutonium-laced uranium and other deadly contaminants as they produced highly enriched uranium for the United States' atomic arsenal.

Department of Energy officials initially denied that problems at the Piketon plant, which now produces only commercial- grade uranium for nuclear-power plants, were similar to those uncovered earlier at its Paducah, Ky., sister plant.

The Energy Department's investigation into operations at the Piketon plant continues, with a final report due in May. But the decision to provide compensation shows that the government has concluded that workers were wronged, Strickland said.

When Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson unveiled the compensation package for the Paducah plant, it was the first time the federal government acknowledged that nuclear-plant workers were sickened by exposures.

Strickland said a public hearing in Piketon, which was attended by more than 150 people and featured dozens of dramatic stories about exposure and illness, helped push the administration further into action.

"The people who have worked there who have come forth with their stories, I think their efforts have been vindicated,'' Strickland said. "I feel pleased that the government has taken this step to keep faith with the people.''

Richardson will announce the expansion of the package to include workers at the Piketon plant and those at a now-closed plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., at a news conference this afternoon at the Energy Department.

An aide to Vice President Al Gore confirmed yesterday that the policy will include compensation for workers at the Piketon plant.

"Gore has worked closely with Congressman Strickland to make sure that workers at Portsmouth were covered under the administration's proposal,'' said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Until recently, some in the administration were fighting to exclude workers at the Piketon and Oak Ridge plants from compensation, saying it would open a Pandora's box of claims from tens of thousands of current and former nuclear-plant workers.

The proposal to be unveiled today still excludes nuclear-plant workers outside the uranium-enrichment complex.

Thus, it is almost sure to be revised on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers from states such as Colorado and Nevada, whose nuclear-plant workers aren't included in the proposal, are sure to try to up the ante.

Plus, it isn't clear that workers sickened by exposure to toxic chemicals, something that happened at the Piketon plant at least as much as radiation exposure, are eligible for as many benefits under the proposal.

Strickland and Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, said the payments should be up to $200,000, include compensation for radiation and chemical exposure and pay for lifetime health-care coverage. Both are drafting legislation that would cover workers at every nuclear-plant in the country.

Several weeks ago, Voinovich helped conduct a Senate hearing at which lawmakers said any proposal that didn't include all nuclear-plant workers sickened by exposures would be rejected by Congress.

"We are glad that the administration has listened to our pleas on this subject, and what they're proposing is a step in the right direction,'' said Mike Dawson, spokesman for Voinovich. "However, based on the situation that has occurred at Piketon and other federal facilities, we think that the proposal is inadequate in dealing with the problem.''

----

Washington's offer gets mixed reaction in Ohio

April 12, 2000
BY JOHN NOLAN
Associated Press Writer
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/024897.htm
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/041300/new_0413000024.html

The government's financial reimbursement offer Wednesday to ailing workers exposed to radiation for decades at the nation's nuclear bomb factories is far too late for the workers who died from what they said were job-related illnesses, a worker's widow said.

Still, others said they appreciated the Clinton administration's offer after many years of seeming government indifference to workers who said radiation exposure at the Cold War weapons factories made them ill.

``I really think it's high time somebody did something for those guys,'' said Corrilla Kelly, whose husband, Herbert Kelly, died at 65 of lung cancer in June 1994. He had worked for 27 years at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fernald plant near Cincinnati, which processed uranium for the government's nuclear weapons.

``I think it's good that they're going to do something. I really feel like these workers have almost died in vain,'' Mrs. Kelly said. ``I personally would like to see a memorial set up to those guys.''

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced the plan, which is subject to congressional approval. It would provide lump-sum payments of at least $100,000 to workers or their survivors, or allow them to negotiate a package that would cover medical costs, lost wages and job retraining.

Energy Department officials have estimated that about 3,000 former workers at nuclear weapons plants, or their families, are likely to be eligible.

``It sounds as if the Clinton administration, and particularly Secretary of Energy Richardson, are making a good-faith effort to do the right thing, belated as it is,'' said Gene Branham, vice president of the Fernald Atomic Trades and Labor Council, a 14-union coalition of Fernald's hourly employees. ``We truly appreciate their efforts.''

Branham's council now represents trade workers helping the Energy Department clean up nearly 40 years worth of radioactive wastes at the 1,050-acre Fernald site, where the uranium processing was stopped in 1989 for the cleanup.

Bill Dimit, a 25-year employee of the government's Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a uranium-enriching plant near Piketon, Ohio, said he would rather have medical benefits for life than a payment of up to $100,000.

``One serious illness and that's gone,'' he said from the office of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Local 3-689 in Piketon.

Dimit, 44, of Waverly, Ohio, said his health has been fine but some co-workers have become sick with a variety of cancers. He said workers are just now being made aware of hazards to which they were exposed.

Employees of the Fernald plant sued in Cincinnati federal court in 1990. They eventually won a settlement with the Energy Department which gave them lifetime medical monitoring and payments of $226 for each year of service. The settlement also allowed the Fernald workers to pursue workers' compensation coverage if their illnesses were determined to be work-related.

-------- south carolina

Costs mount for failed SRS plant
Nuclear-weapons site studying new technologies to replace $500 million facility

Wednesday, April 12, 2000
By Brandon Haddock
Morris News Service
http://www.savannahmorningnews.com:80/smn/stories/041200/LOCplant.shtml

AUGUSTA -- Savannah River Site will spend another year -- and up to $50 million -- studying possible replacements for a failed $500 million plant at the federal nuclear-weapons site.

Site officials have decided to delay seeking bids for a replacement of the In-Tank Precipitation Facility, said Dean Campbell, a spokesman for SRS contractor Westinghouse Savannah River Co.

A request for bids was expected this spring. Instead, researchers will spend 12 months evaluating three different technologies, one of which will be used in the In-Tank plant's replacement, Campbell said.

The U.S. Department of Energy invested 15 years and about $500 million in the In-Tank plant at SRS, only to watch it fail because workers could not prevent benzene from collecting in the facility's tanks.

Benzene is highly flammable and is a suspected carcinogen.

The In-Tank plant was supposed to treat about 30 million gallons of a salty, highly radioactive solution now stored in 49 waste tanks at the site. By next spring, SRS researchers will recommend one of three other methods to be used in the In-Tank plant's replacement:

-- Small-tank precipitation -- Essentially the same as the failed In-Tank method, except it uses a smaller, specially built tank instead of existing ones. Engineers say they believe the smaller, temperature-controlled tank will allow them to regulate benzene buildup.

-- Ion exchange -- Similar to water filters some people attach to faucets to remove organisms and contaminants. Using the method, workers would pour the salt solution through a filter to remove cesium, a radioactive material found in the waste.

-- Solvent extraction -- Similar to the ion exchange method, but it uses a liquid solvent to strip cesium from the waste, instead of a solid filter.

Regardless of the method chosen, the new plant could cost as much as $1 billion, Westinghouse executives have said.

Despite the yearlong delay in seeking bids, the new plant should be completed by 2010, Campbell said.

Its completion by that deadline is critical; otherwise, the site would have to close its Defense Waste Processing Facility for a lack of waste to treat.

Some nuclear watchdogs raised concerns about the delay.

"The sooner they open it up, the better," said Ed Lyman, scientific director for the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington. "It's very disappointing. One delay after another is threatening the viability of their ability to do anything."

Lyman also questioned Westinghouse's continuing role in the research-and-development process. Energy Department officials said in June that the contractor would be banned from working on the new plant in light of the In-Tank facility's high-profile failure.

"It seems to me that means that they're looking for other companies to bring in innovative solutions, not just looking for Westinghouse to perform its own analysis again," Lyman said of the Energy Department's decision.

An Energy Department spokesman at SRS said that Westinghouse was authorized to perform research-and-development work on the project. The contractor already operates other high-level waste projects at the site, Bill Taylor said.

"A lot of the areas already established are heavy in Westinghouse people," Taylor said.

The site's budgets for fiscal years 2000 and 2001 have enough money to cover the additional research, Mr. Taylor said. The research is expected to cost from $20 million to $50 million, Mr. Campbell said.

-------- tennessee

PACE Responds to Administration's Proposal
Acknowledging Government Made Workers Sick Who Worked in the Nation's Bomb Factories, Congress Will Need to Build Upon Administration's Proposal

April 12, 2000
Company Press Release
PACE International Union
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/000412/tn_pace_un_1.html

NASHVILLE, Tenn., April 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, PACE Intl. Union released the following news release:

The Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers Union (PACE), which represents workers at 11 DOE nuclear weapons facilities and two beryllium facilities, supports the Administration's call for providing a fair measure of compensation for worker who were placed in harm's way in prosecuting the Cold War and now suffer illnesses, disease or impairments. We also support justice for survivors.

``The Administration has made an historic announcement today by admitting that the DOE and its contractors poisoned workers in the process of building nuclear weapons, and that the government has an obligation to assure these workers receive workers' compensation if they are sick or dying,'' stated PACE Executive Vice President Robert E. Wages. ``Secretary Richardson has listened to the cries and sufferings of those who loyally served their government and then watched as their government spares no resources in defeating requests for workers' compensation -- regardless of merit.''

``The Administration has laid-out the scientific and policy basis for building a legislative remedy for this unique group of 600,000 workers who toiled in an industry that is defined, as a matter of law, as 'ultra- hazardous' under the Atomic Energy Act,'' added PACE Vice President for Governmental Affairs James K. Phillips. ``DOE and its contractors have historically placed production ahead of safety, and because DOE has been self- regulated and operated behind a veil of secrecy, the evidence demonstrates that workers have been forced to pay a high price.''

The Administration proposal will provide a foundation to build a legislative proposal. It will be up to Congress to improve the bill so that it will provide swift and certain justice.

The Administration proposal properly shifts the burden of proof on to the government for radiation related diseases at three sites (Paducah, Portsmouth and Oak Ridge K-25). However, workers at all of the DOE's other nuclear weapons sites -- in states such as Washington, Idaho, New Mexico and Colorado -- the burden of proof would shift to the worker to prove radiation-related illness. This must be corrected.

DOE has declared it will begin advocating on behalf of workers to establish eligibility for claims for illness caused by toxic chemicals, heavy metals or silicosis. DOE proposes to use state workers' compensation programs to pay these claims. This is naive, if not unworkable. DOE has not established its credibility and independence to advocate for workers when they are liable for paying out compensation.

SOURCE: PACE International Union

----

From: Jacksha1@aol.com Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 13:56:46 EDT

Bill Richardson has never told the truth in his entire public career. Why should we believe him on the mox issue? It will just be put on hold for awhile and when all the present hullabaloo has died down the DOE will do what it chooses Jack Shannon Nuclear Physicist/Nuclear Engineer http://www.mindspring.com/~kapl/index.html

----

BNFL joins the fray, decides to audit itself

April 12, 2000
By Frank Munger News-Sentinel staff writer
http://www.knoxnews.com/editorsview/munger/fm04122000.shtml

BNFL Inc., which is undergoing a major audit by the U.S. Department of Energy, has hired an outside firm -- Parallax, based in Germantown, Md. -- to do its own parallel audit.

"It's not because there was any precursor problem, but with DOE doing a national audit, corporate (officials) felt like they should do a review as well," said Jim McAnally, who heads BNFL's Oak Ridge operations.

BNFL holds a $238 million contract to clean up three Oak Ridge facilities once used to enrich uranium for use in atomic bombs and nuclear reactors.

DOE recently confirmed it was conducting a two-month, "top-to-bottom" review of BNFL contract activities in the United States, including Oak Ridge, because of problems identified at the parent operation, British Nuclear Fuels. One of the issues involved falsified quality-control documents at a nuclear operation in Sellafield, England.

In addition, BNFL (the American subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels) is launching its annual audit of environmental, safety and health activities.

That means at least three audits will take place simultaneously.

McAnally said he takes all the attention in stride.

"I've been in this business all my life. If you're in the nuclear business, you're audited and reviewed all the time. I don't mind. I welcome anybody coming."

Meanwhile, McAnally said he doesn't think there'll be any problem renegotiating terms of its Oak Ridge contract with DOE.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, under pressure from the metals industry and other groups, earlier this year put a hold on BNFL's plans to recycle radioactive nickel taken from the Oak Ridge facilities and sell it commercially.

DOE has asked BNFL to come up with alternative plans for disposing of the nickel.

"From our standpoint, we'll do whatever (DOE officials) want with it. We'll be happy to oblige them," McAnally said.

Although plans for selling the nickel were a major part of BNFL's original contract agreement with DOE, McAnally noted, "We haven't spent a great deal of money on (nickel processing) yet."

*NUKES: Managers of DOE's nuclear-waste program in Oak Ridge were ecstatic with the recent decision that allows federal facilities to ship wastes to the Nevada Test Site for disposal.

One Oak Ridge official said he was so happy it took him two days to stop dancing.

Not everyone, however, was doing a joyful jig.

Challis Broughton, a recently retired DOE employee, said he participated in an audit of NTS waste activities a few years ago and didn't like what he saw.

"The oversight program at the Nevada Test Site was the most inadequate I have seen in my many years of assessing organizational management and functional processes," Broughton said in an electronic message.

He added: "I know first-hand that the DOE Nevada Test Site is not operating in a responsible manner to assure protection against environmental contamination, and safety and health of workers."

Broughton said DOE's Oak Ridge office has a responsibility to assure that its waste is disposed of properly, no matter where that takes place.

Bob Sleeman, who heads DOE's environmental services group in Oak Ridge, said he is not concerned about the operations at Nevada.

"I feel that's their responsibility. They have to operate their site," Sleeman said, noting that DOE and its contractors in Nevada have established strict waste-acceptance criteria.

"Our job is to meet those waste criteria," he said.

It is the job of the Nevada office, not Oak Ridge, to deal with regulators and local stakeholder groups regarding environmental issues at the nuclear test site, he said.

*NO RULES: Last week's Oak Ridge meeting hosted by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was unusual, bordering on the bizarre.

There was no moderator and basically no rules, so the speeches ran long and, at times, the tempers ran high.

At one point, there was a virtual screaming match between board chairman John Conway and DOE whistle-blower Joe Carson.

While some observers thought the meeting had high entertainment value and suggested the DNFSB should charge admission to the next show, others were offended by the tense atmosphere and some of the theatrics.

At least a couple of people who attended the meeting later wrote complaint letters to the board.

Glenn Bell, a worker at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, said he particularly objected to Conway's treatment of Carson, which included a lecture on spending more time with his kids.

"I ... feel the board's statements on how one should raise his children to be in poor taste and totally uncalled for," Bell wrote, suggesting an apology was in order.

Frank Munger covers the Department of Energy for the News-Sentinel. He can be reached at 423-482-9213 or at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. This column is also available on the Web at www.knoxnews.com/editorsview/munger/

-------- utah

Another reason to move tailings

Deseret News editorial
April 07, 2000
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,155015972,00.html?

Preliminary results of a new study underscore what needs to be done with the Atlas mill tailings pile in Moab: It must be moved away from the Colorado River before it causes any more harm.

The study by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service indicates that ammonia levels in the water around the mill tailings are several hundred times higher than standards set by the Utah Division of Water Quality.

One test showed 1,500 milligrams of ammonia per one liter of water. The state has determined that anything above 1.3 milligrams of ammonia is lethal to fish. Not surprisingly, every fish that swims into that part of the Colorado River dies.

A bill by Utah Rep. Chris Cannon, which is supported by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and local environmentalists, would move the 10.5 million tons of uranium tailings to a site well away from the Colorado River. While this removal would cost up to $300 million, it is necessary to protect the health of 20 million people downstream who consume water from the river.

Unfortunately, the federal agency that has jurisdiction, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has supported a proposal by the Atlas Corp., which is responsible for the tailings, to leave them where they are. The tailings would be "capped" with sand and rock. While the cost - around $20 million - is considerably less than that of moving the tailings, it wouldn't ensure safety. In the end, who could put a price on the human lives that could be affected?

An environmental watchdog group, Oak Ridge Laboratory, predicts that even with capping, radioactive wastes and toxic material would seep into the Colorado River at the rate of 9,468 gallons of contaminated water a day.

The federal government should not gamble on a cap. Cannon's legislation transfers authority over the site from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the Department of Energy, which seems to have a more sensible approach. To move the tailings away from the river and into a remote site would eliminate the risk of contamination.

The Atlas Corp. waste repository spans 150 acres near the entrance to Arches National Park and just upstream from Canyonlands. It lies on a major fault that makes the potential for the release of radioactive isotopes into the river a risk in the event of an earthquake or flood.

Most other tailings repositories, left over from uranium processing for Cold War nuclear projects, already have been moved from their original sites to remote locations. It makes sense to do the same with the Atlas site.

The cleanup, if approved and funded by Congress, would take about six or seven years, long enough for ammonia levels to continue causing a lot of problems.

-------- us nuc weapons

Missile defense officials dispute report

04/12/2000
By BRETT DAVIS
Huntsville Times Washington Correspondent
http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/Apr2000/12-e23220.html

WASHINGTON - Missile defense officials said the nationwide protection system they're developing won't be overcome by decoys, as a report released Tuesday charged.

''We still maintain that the system we're developing will be successful against the envisioned rogue threat in 2005,'' said Lt. Col. Michael Biddle, a spokesman for the National Missile Defense program.

A report released Tuesday by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the MIT Security Studies Program said relatively simple countermeasures could shield a nuclear warhead or chemical or biological weapons from the National Missile Defense program.

Space & technology news

Biddle said the report assumes a country developing missiles capable of hitting the United States would also be capable of developing what he called sophisticated countermeasures.

''We disagree with that premise,'' Biddle said, although he declined to say any more.

But the report said some of the countermeasures would be relatively simple - or at least easier than developing a long-range missile in the first place.

Biddle said early tests of the National Missile Defense used few decoys - the intercept tests have only used one decoy balloon each - but the level of decoy complexity will rise as the tests continue.

''As with any other complex weapons system, you walk before you run,'' Biddle said.

Eleven scientists worked on the report, including those from MIT and a former Lockheed Martin missile engineer.

One of the scientists, Richard Garwin, also served on the Rumsfeld Commission, which concluded that the country could face a long-range missile threat virtually at any time.

But Garwin has also been critical of the current system, saying it would be too vulnerable to countermeasures. The Union of Concerned Scientists now expands on that criticism.

The union has opposed various missile defense programs for years, including President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, so it is unclear what impact the report will have on the program, which has strong support on Capitol Hill.

The latest report focuses on three types of countermeasures it says could derail the system:

Mylar balloons, which could be used to hide an incoming warhead in a cloud of similar balloons.

''We found that none of the system sensors would be able to distinguish the balloon with the warhead from the others until it was too late for an intercept to take place,'' said Lisbeth Gronlund, a senior scientist with the union.

A cooled missile shroud, which would wrap around the warhead and make it virtually indistinguishable from the cool background of space.

Small ''bomblets'' that would carry biological or chemical weapons. They would be visible to the NMD's missile radar but would overwhelm that system by their sheer numbers.

''Even five missiles could easily carry 500 bomblets - each of which is a lethal weapon,'' Gronlund said. ''Basically, the defense would run out of interceptors.''

The Pentagon plans to start out with a system of 100 interceptors, which it says would be able to defend against a small number of long-range missiles launched by a rogue country like North Korea.

In a briefing last month, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said more decoys will be added to the tests in coming years.

BMDO has included one decoy in the two intercept tests of the NMD system that have been held so far, but the new report says the tests are not realistic and any country that could launch a missile would also include countermeasures.

The report concludes that even a system of 250 interceptors could be overwhelmed by large numbers of Mylar balloons or chemical or biological weapon-carrying bomblets.

----

Anti-missile defense gets poor marks

April 12, 2000
WASHINGTON POST
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/3/news/docs/038089.htm
http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=041200&ID=s790321&cat=

WASHINGTON, A multibillion-dollar system designed to protect the United States against a ballistic missile attack by a ``rogue'' state could be defeated by simple countermeasures and should not be built, a panel of U.S. scientists said Tuesday.

The panel, affiliated with the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the Pentagon's planned anti-missile shield would be unable to cope with a warhead that subdivides into hundreds of bomblets, a likely scenario in a chemical or biological attack.

In addition, the scientists said, an adversary easily could confuse the system's radar by concealing a nuclear warhead inside a mylar balloon and releasing dozens of decoy balloons. Or the adversary could cool the warhead's nose cone with liquid nitrogen to foil the U.S. system's heat sensors, they said.

Mike Biddle, a spokesman for the Pentagon's National Missile Defense Joint Program Office, wasn't impressed. ``We continue to assert that the system we are developing will be effective,'' Biddle said.

President Clinton has said he will decide this summer whether to go ahead with construction of a limited national missile defense system, starting with 100 interceptors in Alaska. The price tag would be at least $12.7 billion over the next six years and $30.2 billion over the next 25 years, according to the latest Pentagon estimates.

---

Energy Department Opts Against Reusing Spent Nuclear Fuel

By Cat Lazaroff,
Environment News Service,
April 12, 2000
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/apr2000/2000L-04-12-06.html

WASHINGTON, DC, April 12, 2000 (ENS) - The Department of Energy has decided that spent nuclear fuel should be melted down for permanent disposal, rather than reprocessed for reuse as fuel or other products. The decision, which environmentalists say will prove safer than reuse of the fuel, is also being hailed as a victory for nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson (All photos courtesy DOE)

The policy was established in a report being issued publicly by the Department of Energy (DOE) this week. The "Savannah River Site Spent Fuel Management Final Environmental Impact Statement" evaluates alternatives for the safe and efficient management of spent nuclear fuel from power plants that is stored at or scheduled to be received by the DOE's Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The DOE had been considering a process in which the spent fuel would be reprocessed, separating the wastes into highly enriched uranium and a large volume of liquid radioactive waste. Critics feared the uranium could be used to build nuclear weapons, hindering U.S. and international moves toward disarmament and nonproliferation. In addition, the disposal of radioactive liquid waste is considered more hazardous and difficult than disposal of solid wastes.

Instead, the DOE is leaning toward melting down the wastes and mixing them with nonreactive substances, forming metal ingots that the agency says can be safely stored in permanent repositories. The process also makes the uranium in the wastes unsuitable for making bombs.

"The melt-and-dilute technology under development at SRS will further our efforts to reduce the danger from weapons of mass destruction," Richardson said in a statement. "Also, it will reduce waste generation and provide a cost effective, long term way to manage aluminum based spent fuel."

The DOE's choice of a new technology which does not reprocess the spent fuel avoids adding to the stockpile of nuclear weapons material, said the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

"Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson deserves congratulations for making sure that this important new policy was actively pursued and approved," said NCI Executive Director Tom Clements. "Now he must act decisively to make sure there is an adequate budget to implement the policy and get the job done."

Spent fuel rods underwater at a receiving basin for off-site fuels at the Savannah River Site

The decision covers highly enriched uranium spent fuels from research reactors in the U.S. and similar wastes imported from other countries for disposal. Other forms of spent fuel covered in the Environmental Impact Statement will be reprocessed, but both NCI and NRDC view the decision on the highly enriched uranium spent fuel as an essential step in hastening the end of reprocessing in the U.S. and an important example for other nations.

"This decision sends a positive non-proliferation signal internationally and is a critical step toward the closing of reprocessing facilities at SRS," said NRDC Staff Attorney David Adelman. "These plants were built as an integral part of fissile material production for weapons during the Cold War, and they are no longer needed. Long term funding for melt-and-dilute must still be assured to keep the shutdown of these plants on track."

Of the 68 tonnes of fuel covered in the Environmental Impact Statement, about 48 tonnes - 60 percent of the mass, 97 percent of the volume of the wastes - would be subjected to the melt and dilute treatment. The processed ingots would be destined for eventual shipment to the planned permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Melt-and-dilute involves the melting in an oven of the aluminum-clad highly enriched uranium research reactor spent fuel assemblies, with conversion of the melted material into low-enriched uranium ingots. In order to demonstrate the new technology, the DOE plans to melt highly enriched uranium spent fuel in an oven soon to be installed in the old L-Reactor building at the Savannah River Site.

The full-scale treatment facility is expected to be operational in the L-Reactor building at Savannah in fiscal year 2008. L-Reactor was permanently closed in the late 1980's after decades of plutonium and tritium production for weapons.

Spent nuclear fuel pools like this hold tons of reactor wastes at Savannah River Site

DOE's Savannah River Site, located near Aiken, South Carolina, currently stores a large quantity of foreign and domestic spent fuel in pools and is scheduled to continue receiving such material from numerous research reactors around the world until 2009. The United States originally supplied the bomb-grade uranium fuel to reactors in over 30 countries and numerous U.S. universities, but after realizing the proliferation risks of such supply began a program to convert the wastes into forms incapable of being used for weapons.

DOE's concerted effort to convert research reactors to low enriched uranium ingots, known as the Reduced Enrichment in Research and Test Reactors (RERTR), has proved to be one of the U.S. government's most successful non-proliferation initiatives. Under the RERTR program, DOE agreed to accept spent highly enriched uranium fuel for disposition in the U.S. in order to reduce risks of its diversion overseas for weapons.

NCI and NRDC praised Secretary Richardson for fulfilling a commitment made in the 1996 by one of his predecessors, Hazel O'Leary, to develop non-reprocessing technologies for management of the returning spent fuel for environmental and non-proliferation reasons.

"We congratulate Secretary Richardson for honoring DOE's earlier commitment to the American people to pursue non-reprocessing disposal options for this bomb-grade spent fuel," said Clements. "As the U.S. moves to treat weapons-grade nuclear material as waste rather than as a valuable commodity to be introduced into commerce, foreign states will be encouraged to do the same."

The H-Canyon corridor at the Savannah River Site - one of the two remaining DOE reprocessing facilities

The U.S. terminated commercial reprocessing of spent fuel in 1972 but has yet to present a firm timetable for closing the two remaining DOE reprocessing facilities, F- and H-Canyons, both located at the Savannah River Site.

"From an environmental perspective, the people of South Carolina and Georgia should welcome this decision by DOE, but they deserve to be presented a timetable for closure of the dirty and dangerous reprocessing facilities," said Clements.

The DOE will issue a record of decision sometime after the end of a 30 day public comment period beginning Friday. The final Environmental Impact Statement will be published in the Federal Register on Friday.

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Superpower phobia

April 12, 2000
Helle Bering
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2000412185651.htm

As varied as U.S.-Russian relations have been in recent years, what clearly emerged from last week's meeting of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America in Boston is that National Missile Defense remains an area of huge and hurtful difference. It is not the only one. Be the topic peacekeeping, NATO expansion, or missile defense, Russians tend to find an American plot aimed specifically at them - and this though the participants at the meeting from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to historians, politicians and academics, are among those who wish to see Russian relations with the United States improve.

Nothing rankles like missile defense, though, a topic to which the conversation constantly reverts, like the head of Charles II in "David Copperfield." As one American participant put it, "It's nine years after the Cold War ended, and I can't believe we are discussing MIRVed missiles again." That would be Multiple Independently targetable Re-entry Vehicles. A Canadian volunteers that "this could set us back into the Cold War era."

The depth of Russian emotions, rising undoubtedly out of a sense of Russian national humiliation, comes as somewhat of an eye-opener when one is used to discussing missile defense as a rational reaction to a changing world in which nuclear proliferation is moving apace, and in which the threat of terrorism counts as one of the most serious for American national security. If one nation ought to feel singled out for special consideration in this context, it is probably the Chinese, whose missiles threaten Taiwan, an old friend of the United States. It may even be that the prevailing lack of concern for Russian reactions helps fuel the Russian sense of frustration and neglect. "During the Cold War everybody had their assigned role," says a former Soviet foreign minister. "Today, we don't know what our role is."

Precipitating a feeling of crisis is the fact that President Clinton is to set a date for decisions on NMD for sometime this summer or fall. It is a moment many Russians as well as Democrats and moderate Republicans dearly wish to avoid, at least for the time being. There is currently a movement in Congress, led by Sens. Chuck Hagel, Gordon Smith and Joseph Biden to urge Mr. Clinton to postpone the decision till after the election.

You can count Mikhail Gorbachev among those who articulates the wait-and-see approach. "Let's not rush to a decision here. Let's give time to the Russian government to consider it," he says. Technology is pushing the issue he says, interestingly comparing NMD to the installation of the SS-20s in the Urals in the late late 1970s, a decision made by befuddled Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev who almost inadvertently (in this version of history) gave approval to a major upgrade of old rusty missiles already there. "It started an incredible chain of events," Mr. Gorbachev says, which is true because a new Reagan administration decided to counter this new threat to the capitals of Europe with Pershing II and Cruise missiles.

It appears that the new Russian government has already done some thinking on the subject, which may be a sign of superior coolheadedness on the part of Russian President Vladimir Putin. There is reason to believe that within the next 6-10 weeks, a deal will be announced between the Russian and the American administrations on revisions to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, to allow a very limited American NMD deployment, in return for a better deal for Russia in the upcoming START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) III negotiations. Mr. Putin has already promised to push the Russian Duma for ratification of START II, much to the delight of the U.S. president who spies an opportunity for an arms-control presidential legacy heaving into view. If the Russian president thinks this is an acceptable idea, in order to prevent the United States from scrapping the treaty altogether, the U.S. Senate will have to read those revisions with a very fine magnifying glass.

The fact is that Russians simply do not believe that Americans are serious when they talk about protecting the continental United States from nuclear terrorism or rogue state attack. In their view, the missile programs of North Korea, Iran and Iraq are no more than a pretext for U.S. nuclear domination. Right now, Russia at least has the distinction of being the only country that can threaten the national existence of the United States. However, an American NMD and a deteriorating Russian nuclear arsenal may soon put an end to that. Rather than a Third World nation with nuclear weapons, Russia will then just be a Third World nation.

And at the bottom of it all there is that ever-nagging fear of the world's "sole super power" rising roughshod over the rest. "For a while it looked to us like no one could stop the United States," says a Russian participant. "Russia, China, India meant nothing. Europe and Asia were told to stay on the sidelines."

All of which seems almost unrecognizably distorted when compared to the policy debate here in Washington, where lurking American isolationism rather than rampant global ambitions are what many worry about. Meanwhile, though, we need to get on with the business of protecting Americans against missile attack - even if Russian feelings get hurt.

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Antimissile System Is Called 'No Defense'

By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 ; A15
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58253-2000Apr11.html

A multibillion-dollar system designed to protect the United States against a ballistic missile attack by a "rogue" state could be defeated by simple countermeasures and should not be built, a panel of prominent U.S. scientists said yesterday.

The panel, affiliated with the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that the Pentagon's planned antimissile shield would be unable to cope with a warhead that subdivides into hundreds of bomblets, a likely scenario in a chemical or biological attack.

In addition, the scientists said, an adversary easily could confuse the system's radar by concealing a nuclear warhead inside a mylar balloon and releasing dozens of decoy balloons. Or, the adversary could cool the warhead's nose cone with liquid nitrogen to foil the U.S. system's heat sensors, they said.

"Any country that can deploy a long-range missile with a nuclear or biological weapon can deploy these countermeasures," said Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist and missile defense expert in MIT's Security Studies Program. "Pentagon claims that the system can deal with countermeasures simply do not stand up to technical scrutiny."

Gronlund said the panel's 175-page study, entitled "Countermeasures," is the first independent, technical evaluation of the current plan for national missile defense. "This is basic physics, and it's airtight," she said. "It's as close to a proof as you can get that the system won't work."

Mike Biddle, a spokesman for the Pentagon's National Missile Defense Joint Program Office, wasn't impressed. "We continue to assert that the system we are developing will be effective against the envisioned rogue [missile] threat of 2005," Biddle said.

President Clinton has said he will decide this summer whether to go ahead with construction of a limited national missile defense system, starting with 100 interceptors in Alaska. The price tag would be at least $12.7 billion over the next six years and $30.2 billion over the next 25 years, according to the latest Pentagon estimates.

In its first flight test last October, the system's "kill vehicle" succeeded in hitting a dummy warhead high over the Pacific Ocean. But the interceptor missed its target in a second test in January. A third test--the final one before Clinton's decision--is now scheduled for late June.

Biddle said at least 17 more tests are planned before Pentagon officials select the kill vehicle's final design in 2003. During those tests, he said, kill vehicles will have to find their targets amongst an array of decoys and countermeasures.

But in the study released yesterday, the scientists concluded that none of the three tests prior to Clinton's deployment decision have been designed to determine whether the system would be effective against countermeasures.

"Since we find that even the full system would be defeated by realistic countermeasures, it makes no sense to begin deployment," said Andrew Sessler, a former director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and past president of the American Physical Society. "A defense that doesn't work is no defense at all."

The scientists noted that U.S. intelligence agencies reported last fall that China already has developed countermeasures and that North Korea, Iraq and Iran could reasonably be expected to do the same.

The scientists also argued that deployment of the national missile defense system could "produce a net decrease in . . . national security" by prodding China to build up its force of intercontinental ballistic missiles--now numbering only about 20--to be sure that it has a credible nuclear deterrent.

Before constructing a national missile defense system, the United States also would have to amend or scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a cornerstone of arms control agreements since 1972. The scientists warned that irritating Russia by forcing changes in the ABM Treaty could jeopardize efforts to secure Russia's nuclear stockpile and prevent an accidental Russian missile launch, which they argued is an even greater risk than a missile attack by a state such as Iran or North Korea.

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Experts Say Missile Defense System Could Be Fooled; Ask Delay

By ELIZABETH BECKER
April 12, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/washpol/missile-defense.html
http://www.seattlep-i.com/national/miss121.shtml

WASHINGTON, April 11 -- The Pentagon's proposed national missile defense system could be fooled by simple decoys or other countermeasures easily within the grasp of any nation able to launch a nuclear warhead at the United States, a team of scientists said today.

The scientists, including several who have served in the past on Defense Department research panels, said that the government should delay any decision on whether to proceed with a missile-defense network, which is expected to cost $30 billion.

"We could see a lot of ways to get around this system and we presumed that if a country was able to mount a missile attack against the United States it was also able to use these well-known countermeasures," said Andrew Sessler of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The study, by 11 physicists and engineers, was done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Union of Concerned Scientists, with calculations based on nonclassified information on the complete missile defense system from the Pentagon and other agencies.

The scientists questioned why the Pentagon is waiting until 2005 to test whether its system would be fooled by realistic countermeasures, since President Clinton has said he will decide this year whether to deploy it.

The initial proposed system of 100 antimissile missiles, ground radar and satellites is meant to protect the nation from a limited nuclear attack or an accidental launching.

In their report, the scientists argued that if the North Koreans were sophisticated enough to build an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States, they were clever enough to use countermeasures like balloon decoys or an aluminum shield that could cool a nuclear warhead and thereby deceive an interceptor.

The Pentagon called the study's findings premature, saying that the system is in early development and that the main focus is hitting a target, not defeating countermeasures.

"It's a prototype and you have to walk before you run," said Mike Biddle, a spokesman for the National Missile Defense Office.

In two preliminary tests of the system, the antimissile missile or kill vehicle was able to hit a mock warhead only once.

As a result, the Pentagon has delayed a third test until June before Mr. Clinton decides whether to approve the system.

"We are arguing to defer the decision until there has been more research and development, and tests of various systems using real world conditions," said Lisbeth Gronlund, of M.I.T.

The panel studied several methods that an enemy might use to defeat the missile shield, including shiny mylar balloons, like the kind sold in grocery stores, which the scientists said could easily fool the system.

A government intelligence report made public last September acknowledged that emerging missile states were capable of using decoys. But Mr. Biddle said that, based on classified intelligence information, the Pentagon is confident that the defense system will work against against any challenges or countermeasures that could be mustered by the year 2005.

The scientists said that a missile defense system might also be confused if an enemy enclosed a warhead in an aluminum shield cooled by liquid nitrogen, foiling the heat-seeking sensors on the antimissile missiles sent to destroy the warhead.

"In this defense system the attacker always has the advantage," said George Lewis a panel member from M.I.T.