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Time's Up! -- Sign on to Abolition 2000 Network
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Radioactive documents found at National Archives facility
May 12, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/05/12/radioactive.ap/index.html
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/12/radioactive_documents.htm
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland (AP) -- Researchers who are reclassifying millions of records at the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland, have discovered that some of the documents are radioactive.
Officials say the contamination is limited to a few boxes.
The contaminated documents were found in January when a researcher who was reviewing 50-year-old notes about radiation noticed gray dust and an envelope containing what appeared to be metal fragments.
Tests by the Archive's conservation laboratory identified the substance as uranium.
The facility's 50 employees were doused in a special wash and checked for radioactivity. They now keep a device on hand that can detect radiation.
The radioactive records were among 1.2 billion pieces of paper from laboratories nationwide that are being reviewed as part of President Clinton's 1995 order to declassify documents older than 25 years. The contaminated boxes could have come from any one of several laboratories.
The Energy Department plans to conduct a sweep of the College Park archives by the end of the year. Meanwhile, researchers have been told to look out for anything suspicious.
"We've notified all our reviewers to be careful," said Roger K. Heusser, director of the declassification project for the Department of Energy. "Most of these records are letters and reports in file folders. If you do see a packet of powder, it's pretty evident there is something unusual in there."
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From: LANLaction@aol.com
Here are our suggestions of possible actions people can take in the wake of the terrible and heartbreaking tragedy in Northern New Mexico. Be assured however, that the rally and protest will proceed as scheduled on August 9th in Los Alamos. Please come!
for peace with justice Peggy Prince, Peace Action
May 12, 2000: Peace Action New Mexico is concerned about the sincerity of Los Alamos National Lab because it appears the monitoring of possible toxic or radioactive releases have, so far, been in the form of air quality monitoring. We believe, however, that hazardous or radioactive releases would have been carried in the smoke plumes and are now on the ground as ash. Is testing currently being done on ground samples of ash and outfall from the fires? It would seem that since all LANL operations are currently shut down, monitoring air quality on and around LANL property alone would not be particularly revealing if it is the only type of monitoring being undertaken.
Most importantly, the smoke debris on the ground should be tested in the canyons around Los Alamos, the Pueblos abutting Los Alamos, Espanola, Chimayo and Abiquiu. On Thursday, May 11, the thickest, most acrid of the smoke plume was dropping black material in those areas. These should also be collected and tested professionally. In addition, since in years past toxic and radioactive material was dumped in the canyons around Los Alamos which carried the wild fire, those should be tested carefully for toxic waste.
We are asking the N.M. Environment Dept., the Attorney General and the Federal E.P.A. (Environmental Protection Agency) to proceed immediately and systematically to gather ground samples from all areas affected by the smoke plume and analyze for gamma, beta and alpha radiation as well as hazardous materials like asbestos, pcb's, petroleum byproducts and dioxin.
A major component of the clean-up effort in Los Alamos should be to remove the fire debris so that when the rainy season comes in July, hazardous waste will not be carried into the Rio Grande river, compromising the water quality for downstream communities.
It is also very important that the rubble of the houses destroyed by fire be taken not to a landfill, or dumped over the side of a canyon, but rather taken to a licensed Toxic Waste Dump since much of the debris will be contaminated with pesticides, dioxin, asbestos, lead and petroleum products.
The citizens in Northern New Mexico, a largely agricultural community, should have the best information that NMED can gather to insure that their crops and soil are not contaminated. Elders, children and animals are most at risk.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Call these Agencies and ask for thorough and independent ground and water analysis to be done in and around Los Alamos.
* N.M. Environment Dept. Secretary Pete Maggiore at 827-2855
* Federal Environmental Protection Agency: 800-887-6063 or 214-665-6444
* Attorney General Patricia Madrid: 827-6010 or 827-6000
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NUKES "FOREVER"-- US PLANS REVEALED
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 12, 2000
CONTACTS: Jacqueline Cabasso, Western States Legal Foundation c/o (212) 818 -1861
Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group: (505) 982-7747 John Burroughs, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy (212) 818-1861
From: Jackie Cabasso - wslf@earthlink.net
United Nations Headquarters, New York -- According to United States Department of Energy (DOE) documents just made public for the first time at the United Nations, the US has plans to keep nuclear weapons "forever." This is in spite of the thirty-year agreement signed by the US as part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) under which the US has pledged to end the nuclear arms race and eliminate its nuclear arsenal.
As recently as last week the US renewed what it called an "unequivocal" agreement to the "ultimate" goal of complete nuclear disarmament in a joint statement with the other four major nuclear powers - Russia, Britain, France and China - released at the month-long NPT Review Conference now underway at the United Nations.
The documents revealing plans that would enable the US to keep nuclear weapons "forever" were acquired by the Los Alamos Study Group, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that monitors the US nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos New Mexico. The documents were unveiled at a UN meeting between NPT delegates and NGOs on Wednesday evening by Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director of the California-based Western States Legal Foundation, an NGO that researches and analyzes US nuclear weapons policy and activities.
The documents reveal US plans, presented at a DOE briefing in March this year by A.E. Whiteman of the DOE's Albuquerque New Mexico Office of Technology, as part of a report on restructuring of US nuclear weapons production facilities and technologies. Whiteman outlined what will be required to ensure that US nuclear weapons "remain viable forever" under the so-called "Stockpile Stewardship" program. Requirements, he said, include "replacement and certification of every part of every weapon." A program called "SLEP" (Stockpile Life Extension Program), Whiteman said, "will be the driver for the replacement and certification." According to the documents, Stockpile Stewardship is intended to maintain US nuclear weapons "indefinitely," without underground nuclear testing.
Commenting on the revelations, Cabasso told NGOs and UN delegates that in combing through government statements, her organization has found numerous references to US reliance on nuclear weapons "for the foreseeable future" and even "indefinitely." However, she said, "this is the first official reference we have found confirming US plans for keeping nuclear weapons forever." She added: "Viewed in combination with the shocking US 'talking points' recently obtained by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declaring that both the United States and Russia 'will possess under the terms of any possible future arms reduction agreements, large, diversified, viable arsenals of strategic offensive weapons,' it is has become undeniable that the real US intention is 'nukes forever.'"
According to Greg Mello, Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group: "These documents reveal a resurgent nuclear weapons complex that is completely out of step with the requirements of the NPT. These legal requirements are seldom mentioned in DOE documents and have had no effect whatsoever on US weapons production plans. The DOE's proposal to spend more than $4 billion on new nuclear weapons production facilities and to produce at least 450 plutonium bomb "triggers" per year is outrageous and irrational. We call on the international community to help up put the brakes on all plans for new nuclear weapons design and production facilities. If built the facilities will be used."
John Burroughs, Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy in New York stated: "US plans to modernize its nuclear arsenal and to maintain nuclear arms indefinitely flagrantly violate both provisions of the NPT disarmament obligation - the requirement to end the nuclear arms race and the requirement for good faith negotiations leading to complete nuclear disarmament."
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PLOUGHSHARES ACTIVISTS TO CONFRONT ALDERMASTON
From: "Cat Euler" cat@freewomen.freeserve.co.uk
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 01:32:36 +0100
Just to say that Dr Chris Busby, a physicist and the author of the Wings of Death, an original proponent of the second event theory, and consultant to the Low Level Radiation Campaign (www.llrc.org) has mathematically calculated that the possible air concentrations in some areas of S. Iraq were some six times higher than the permissible U238 releases from Aldermaston. Aldermaston makes regular air releases of U238, as well as regular releases of tritium and some small amounts of plutonium into the River Thames. See info, below, on upcoming peace actions at Aldermaston.
Busby will be speaking at the International Conference Against Depleted Uranium in Manchester, UK, 4-5 November, 2000.
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PLOUGHSHARES ACTIVISTS TO CONFRONT ALDERMASTON
The anti-nuclear campaign Trident Ploughshares will hold a seven day disarmament camp at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, from 18th to 25 May, with a mass blockade of the base on Monday 22nd May.
The campaign has held a number of successful disarmament camps at the Trident bases on the Clyde in Scotland. Although individual affinity groups from the campaign have undertaken disarmament actions at Aldermaston this is the first concerted move against the establishment, where the components for Trident nuclear warheads are made.
The aim of the camp and the blockade is to cause significant disruption to the establishment and its operations. The AWE is currently under considerable pressure from public anxiety about the quality of its management, as well from the pending Judicial Review of the decision of the Environment Agency to grant authorisations for radioactive discharges there.
A Trident Ploughshares spokesperson said:
"In simple, common sense terms, AWE Aldermaston makes the hardware for mass murder. It is an essential part of the Trident nuclear weapon system that is maintained by the UK government in wilful defiance of international law.
The government refuses to shut this appalling place down so it is up to responsible citizens to do whatever they can to prevent its criminal operations. Trident Ploughshares activists are determined to play their part."
Notes: 1. For more information contact on the Judicial Review: Phil Shiner 0121 777 5187 07715 485248 (mobile) or Di McDonald, Nuclear Awareness Group: 02380 554434 07880 557035 (mobile)
2. For general background on Trident Ploughshares see our website on http://www.gn.apc.org/tp2000/
3. For info on previous action at Aldermaston see the website under Press Releases (3rd March- "Midlanders Found Guilty at Newbury")
Contacts: David Mackenzie 01324 880744 (07775711054) Jane Tallents 01436 679194 Campsite contact (from 18th to 25th May) 01189 820774
ENDS David Mackenzie 15 Broomhill Avenue Larbert FK5 3EH 01324 556768 davidmc@enterprise.net
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March locations
USA Today 05/12/00- Updated 08:27 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsfri11.htm
WHAT: The Million Mom March
WHERE: The Mall, Washington, D.C., main activities are near Fourth Street
WHEN: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday
EVENTS:
9 a.m.: Family activities begin (tent)
10 a.m.: Interfaith service (Ninth Street stage)
11 a.m.: Stroller march from Ninth Street stage to the Fourth Street stage
11:30 a.m.: Pre-program
Noon: Main program starts at the Fourth Street stage. Nana Williams, mother of District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams, delivers opening remarks. Antonia Novello, former surgeon general of the United States, delivers keynote speech.
Others speakers and performers include: Martin Luther King III; Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y.; author Anna Quindlen; singer Emmylou Harris; singer Melissa Etheridge.
Family members of gun-violence victims will speak.
Rallies outside Washington
Here is a list of rallies across the country based on information provided by the Million Mom March local and national organizers. (Marches are Sunday unless otherwise specificed. Times are local.)
ALABAMA
Birmingham: Linn Park, Saturday, 9 a.m. to noon
Huntsville: Courthouse, Saturday, 9 a.m. to noon
ARIZONA
Phoenix: Patriots Square Park, 2:30 p.m.
Tucson: Reid Park, 2 p.m to 4 p.m.
ARKANSAS
Little Rock: Riverfront Park, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
CALIFORNIA
Downtown Los Angeles: Union Station at Olvera Street, 1 p.m.
West Los Angeles: Wilshire Federal Building, 10 a.m. to noon
Napa: Veterans Memorial Park, 11 a.m.
Oakland: Lake Merritt Bandstand, 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m.
San Diego: San Diego City School Education Center, 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.
Sacramento: Tower Bridge-Capitol Mall (west steps of Capitol), 2 p.m.
Watsonville: Watsonville Town Plaza, 9 a.m. to noon
COLORADO
Denver: Civic Center Park Amphitheater, 1:30 p.m.
CONNECTICUT
Stratford: Longbrook Park, noon
FLORIDA
Miami: Stephen P. Clark Government Center, Friday, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Pompano Beach: Trade Winds Park on Sample Road, 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Sarasota: Five Point Park, Noon to 2:00 p.m.
Stuart: Roosevelt Bridge, 2 p.m.
Tampa: Friendship Trail-Old Ganby Bridge, 1 p.m.
GEORGIA
Atlanta: Turner Field to Capitol, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.
IDAHO
Boise: Capitol steps, 1 p.m
ILLINOIS
Bradley: Perry farm, Noon
Chicago: Chicago Lake Front, Lake Shore Drive and Randolph Street, 1 p.m.
Champaign-Urbana: March starts at Southside School and ends with a rally at Hessel Park, 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m.
INDIANA
Indianapolis: Market Square Arena, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Kokomo: Highland Park, 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
South Bend: Howard Park, 1 p.m.
KENTUCKY
Louisville: Waterfront Park, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
MAINE
Portland: Congress Square, 10 a.m. to noon
MICHIGAN
Detroit: Belle Isle Park Bandshell, 3 p.m.
Lansing: Lansing Capitol Building, 2 p.m.
MISSISSIPPI
Jackson: South steps of the state Capitol, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
MISSOURI
Kansas City: Mill Creek Park, 11 a.m. Saturday
NEVADA
Las Vegas: Children's Memorial Park, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Concord: State Capitol, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
NEW JERSEY
Verona: Verona Park Bandstand, 1 p.m.
NEW MEXICO
Santa Fe: Roundhouse at Peaseo de Peralta and Old Sante Fe Trail, 10:30 a.m. to noon.
NEW YORK
Buffalo: Delaware Park, Noon to 3 p.m.
Chappaqua: Chappaqua Train Station, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Staten Island: Clove Lake Park, 2 p.m.
OHIO
Cleveland: Church of the Covenant, 4 p.m.
Columbus: Bicentennial Park to City Hall, 2:30 p.m.
Stark County: Courtyard Square to the McKinley Monument, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
OKLAHOMA
Tulsa: 41st Street and Riverside Drive, 1:30 p.m.
OREGON
Eugene: Eweb Plaza, 3:30 p.m.
Portland: 9th and Salmon to Pioneer Courthouse Square, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
PENNSYLVANIA
Erie: Capitol Building to Neighborhood Art House, 10 a.m. to noon
RHODE ISLAND
Providence: Waterplace Park, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
TENNESSEE
Chattanoga: Walnut Street Pedestrian Bridge, today 7 p.m.
Nashville: Legislative Plaza, 2 p.m.
Sewannee: Cumberland Plateau, 3 p.m.
TEXAS
Austin: Governor's Mansion, 1 p.m.
Fort Worth-Dallas: Tarrant County Court House, 2 p.m.
Fort Worth-Dallas: Fort Worth Convention Center, 3 p.m.
Houston: Market Square Downtown, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
San Antonio: San Fernando Cathedral, 3:30 p.m.
UTAH
Salt Lake City: City and County Building, 3 p.m.
VERMONT
Burlington: City Hall Park, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
WASHINGTON
Bellingham: Civic Field Stadium to Bloedel Donovan Park, 1 p.m.
Seattle: Seattle Center to West Lake, noon to 3 p.m. Saturday
Armed Informed Mothers' March
WHAT: Second Amendment Sisters/Armed Informed Mothers' March
WHERE: Northwest quadrant of the Washington Monument.
WHEN: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday
EVENTS: State Rep. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp, R-Texas, is be the keynote speaker. The rally will also feature speeches by Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, and women who have used guns to defend themselves. The event concludes with a march to the Capitol Building.
*OTHER MARCHES: Here is information on other marches that was provided by the organizers. (Marches are Sunday unless otherwise specified. Times are local.)
CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles: Across from Wilshire Federal Building, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Sacramento: Tower Bridge to the south steps of the Capitol. March sponsored by the Northern California Council of Conservative Citizens, 2 p.m.
San Diego: San Diego City School Education Center, Noon to 3 p.m.
CONNECTICUT
Hartford: North steps of the Capitol, 11:30 a.m.
ILLINOIS
Chicago: Lake Shore Path (Randolph Street, off Lakeshore Drive). March sponsored by the Libertarian Party of Chicago, Noon
NEVADA
Las Vegas: Children's Memorial Park at Rainbow and Gowan, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
OKLAHOMA
Tulsa: E. Fred Johnson Park, 12:30 p.m.
RHODE ISLAND
Providence: Waterplace Park, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Source: USA TODAY research by Alison Gerber
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The Health Costs of Low-Level Ionizing Radiation
50+ years of Lethal Deception by what has become the International Nuclear Mafia
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/
This site is dedicated to providing information about the health costs of man-made low-level ionizing radiation.
From: Winston Weeks - wweeks@mail.aros.net Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 13:49:57 -0600 Reply-To: downwinders@egroups.com
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Do marches make a difference?
Critics of mass rallies say there are more effective ways to push for change
USA Today 05/12/00
By Blake Morrison and Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/acovfri.htm
WASHINGTON - When an estimated 200,000 demonstrators gather here Sunday for the Million Mom March, they hope politicians heed their call for tougher handgun restrictions.
But when the speeches end and the crowd disperses, will the message be swept away with the Dixie cups and placards?
In the case of Sunday's event, the answer not only could help determine whether Congress places more restrictions on handgun purchases, but also might influence how tomorrow's social movements develop.
The Million Mom concept (it's really a rally, not a march) was born in a New Jersey mother's living room less than a year ago. "We started out with one mom, then five moms, then 25 moms, then 25,000 moms," says Donna Dees-Thomases, the mother who founded the event.
As the numbers grew, a sophisticated coalition of longtime activists, many with ties to the anti-gun lobby, joined the everyday moms. The activists helped plan the Washington rally and have raised nearly $2 million to finance the events around the nation.
Even so, organizers insist that the movement remains a grass-roots endeavor.
"It's a new group that's coming out," says Mary Leigh Blek, a march organizer. "We're seeing people not only from the suburbs but also from the inner city, and people who had not focused their attention on gun issues before."
On Sunday, at least 60 rallies are planned in 35 states, in cities as large as Los Angeles and towns as small as Rumford, Maine, population 5,400. All told, organizers predict more than a million demonstrators, and they emphasize that participants needn't all be moms.
Foremost, organizers say they hope to persuade Congress to license handgun owners and require them to register their guns. They also want to limit purchases to one handgun a month, make child-proof safety locks standard and require a delay between the time a gun is purchased and when a customer can pick it up.
Based on a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll, some of their proposals enjoy public support. Although the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to bear arms, about 79% of adults surveyed in the national poll favored requiring safety locks for handguns, and 93% favored a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases.
Of course, the efforts of march organizers haven't gone unchallenged. This week, the National Rifle Association launched an ad campaign that pledges $1 million to educate children about gun safety and challenges "a million more moms" to put up a dollar each.
And other mothers, a group called the Second Amendment Sisters, have planned a rally Sunday. They, too, have used the Internet to build support for their gathering, the Armed Informed Mothers' March, to be staged near the Washington Monument. A few thousand participants are expected.
"We wanted to make sure their voice didn't speak for us, that they weren't the only ones heard," says Kim Watson, a Tallahassee, Fla., mother and founder of the Second Amendment Sisters. "There are many women who feel like I do."
"Gun control," she says, "tips the scales in favor of the criminals."
In recent years, observers say, marches on Washington have been more flash than substance. Unlike the Vietnam and civil-rights protests of the 1960s, and even the suffrage marches of the early 20th century, today's events seem more focused on large turnouts than legislative change.
"Short-sighted," the Rev. C. T. Vivian, a longtime civil-rights activist, says of recent gatherings.
"How you feel is more important than what you do," conservative campaigner Ralph Reed says critically.
Groups may waste months, even years, dedicating time to an event that begins and ends in one day, Reed says. As a consequence, says Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the demonstrations prove "a substitute for more effective kinds of action."
After the rally
Organizers of the Million Mom March - and the moms themselves - vow their efforts will be different. "My feeling is that this Mother's Day event will actually be the birth of a movement," says Deborah Louria, a mother of two from North Oakland, Calif., who has helped organize a rally there.
She might have reason to be optimistic. During months of preparation, rally organizers have drawn on the methods of some of the nation's most-effective social lobbying groups, and they hope to emulate at least some of them.
From Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for instance, Million Mom organizers say they learned the value of starting small and local.
And from the NRA, the Million Moms' daunting adversary, organizers have embraced the group's ability to mobilize voters and conduct letter-writing campaigns designed to sway lawmakers.
Perhaps most important, the organizers are creating a massive database of mothers and others interested in gun control, and an Internet site (www.millionmommarch.com) helps them stay organized. "That's the central ingredient of the Million Mom March. If other movements in the future don't notice that, then they have their eyes shut," says Andrew McGuire, chairman of the steering committee and a former member of the MADD board of directors.
Wide-ranging support has been crucial. Donations have come in from around the nation, and grant money also has fueled the effort. McGuire says about $1.8 million has been collected. Companies such as Dannon Yogurt have contributed about $150,000.
Celebrities including host Rosie O'Donnell will participate, and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tipper Gore plan to attend.
"The march, we feel, is simply the first step," McGuire says. "We're going to create a mass movement to keep this thing alive to the election and beyond."
But should Million Mom organizers fail to campaign beyond Sunday's crowd, critics and supporters say, their message might quickly disappear. "My feeling is these big demonstrations are kind of tiresome," says Phyllis Schlafly, a social conservative known for battling the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s. "You get the impression they are there for the media. They show up, the cameras are there, and then they're gone."
Indeed, these days, it seems a protest isn't much of a protest unless it starts with the term "million." From Louis Farrakhan's 1996 Million Man March to this weekend's Million Mom gathering, bold declarations draw attention.
Some try to make certain they'll meet the million mark: At last weekend's Million Mutt March, a gathering to urge pet lovers to adopt mixed-breed dogs, some counted man and his best friend. Only a hundred of each showed.
Turnout vs. cause
Often, the issues can be obscured by the blithe prognostications. After the Million Man March, a rally about black men taking responsibility for their families and communities, organizers feuded with the National Park Service - not about the issues but about the crowd estimates. As a result, the Park Service no longer offers counts, and how many demonstrators attend Sunday's rallies might remain a point of contention.
The Million Mom March doesn't intend to use its turnout to judge success. Rather, it lists specific legislative goals, and that's why activists such as Vivian and Reed say it has a chance to endure -- and succeed. Vivian, who helped spearhead civil-rights marches in Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s, says the success of recent demonstrations in Washington has been more difficult to assess. That's because they've been geared more toward personal causes than political ones.
"The Million Man March wasn't so much about a political agenda as it was about strengthening the relationship between people within the African-American community," says Vivian, who became known for his debates with Alabama politicians and sheriffs over civil rights.
Tracking success
Movements such as the Million Man March can be successful, he says, but victories come subtly. The goal of the march "wasn't to get them to vote on an issue one way or another, but to show them that a million African-American men (can) come together, come to a certain spot, and be heard. They showed politicians the voting power they have. They showed advertisers the buying power they have. They showed a lot of people that there is a lot more unity in the community than people might think. That in itself is success."
Two weeks ago, the Millennium March on Washington for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights drew hundreds of thousands. But the march, the fourth for gay rights since 1979, was divisive within the gay community; some criticized it for being a waste of resources.
Reed, who heads Century Strategies, a conservative political consulting group, says the Million Mom March might have an advantage in that it focuses "on a single legislative point." But he adds that participants should not relent after the demonstration if they want to succeed. "If you don't take that message back to the communities, then the movement won't be a success," he says.
Regardless, scholars say the results of any mass demonstrations might not be known until years later. Even then, they say, it is difficult to point to the protest as the reason for change, legislative or otherwise.
The Vietnam Moratorium Rally of Nov. 15, 1969, for instance - with a crowd of 600,000, perhaps the largest protest in the capital's history - might never have grown so large had it not been for a far more modest demonstration four years before. Then, says Francesca Polletta, a sociology professor at Columbia University, Students for a Democratic Society had expected only a few thousand people. The protest drew between 15,000 and 25,000, and the anti-war movement gained momentum.
And although Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech might have made the civil-rights march of 1963 the most memorable in the capital's history, Polletta contends the more modest marches in the South, particularly in Selma, did more to prompt passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Polletta says mass protests generally accomplish at least one of two goals. First, a large turnout shows politicians that "people who vote" care. Second, the threat of disruption tends to ensure the public's attention. Million Mom marchers aren't trying to shut their cities down. Instead, they say, they want to wake their communities up.
"We're going to keep the momentum up," promises Steve Young, one of the march organizers. "We are encouraging all the million moms to keep active back in their hometowns and states."
Young is certain the impact of the march will extend beyond Sunday. How can he be sure? "I went to ( D.C. in the spring of '71 to protest the war in Vietnam," he recounts. "Nixon came out of the White House and was talking to people, asking them why they came.
"That march was basically the turning point," he says. "That's the kind of energy the Million Mom March has."
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Million Moms, Second Amendment Sisters
Washington Times
EDITORIAL • May 12, 2000
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-house-2000512184837.htm
They won't get the adulatory media coverage of the slick, professionally organized Million Mom March this weekend - but another group of women will be taking to the streets to voice its opinion of firearms and gun control. It won't be one that's simpatico with the message of the Million Mom March.
Second Amendment Sisters, as the group has taken to calling itself, is in fact a grassroots organization of women from disparate walks of life - a stark contrast to the Million Mom March, the politicized progeny of former Democratic Senate staffer and ally of Hillary Clinton, Donna Dees-Thomases. The media, as expected, have neglected to relay to the public the origin of the Million Mom March, or the fact that its leaders have been drawn from the ranks of professional gun-control agitators. Instead, it has been portrayed as a spontaneous uprising of soccer moms alarmed by the misuse of firearms by children.
This does not sit well with the Second Amendment Sisters who really are mostly apolitical mothers and wives, not professional advocates with an ax to grind and an agenda to advance. They are simply women who are concerned about their Second Amendment rights - which they rightly see as threatened by a cynical campaign of distortion and demagoguery that has exploited tragic shootings to scare Americans into surrendering a vital freedom - that of armed self-defense.
For women, the issue is especially acute - because a handgun is the great equalizer that gives a woman a fighting chance to fend off a male attacker. Alone in her home, with her young children present - or walking a lonely city street at night - a woman is at a severe disadvantage when confronted by even an average-size male - unless she is in possession of a firearm. Even a powerfully built 200 pound thug is no match for a 110 pound housewife with a .357 magnum. The organizers of the Million Mom March would deprive ordinary women of this potentially life-saving equalizer - and would do so because of the actions of a relative handful of young toughs and street criminals - not because of any epidemic of homicidal/accidental shootings involving young kids from good homes.
The much-touted - more accurately, much demagogued and distorted - statistic that "every day in America 12 kids are killed by guns," which has been put forth endlessly by both the activists behind the Million Mom March and the president, is illustrative of the deceit which suffuses the gun-control movement. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the figure is actually 1.7 deaths per day. Whence the disparity? Gun-control advocates lump accidental shootings involving kids 14 and under with gun deaths listed as criminal homicides involving older teens aged 14 to 19. Most of these - indeed, the overwhelming majority -are shootings related to gang activity and drug dealing. They have nothing to do with a suburban child finding Dad's loaded .38 in the drawer and shooting himself or a playmate by accident. Once again, don't expect to read anything in the major media outlets - or see anything on the evening news - that breaks down the statistics this way.
As the weekend approaches, it's worth remembering that sometimes the loudest, most visible group is also the least representative. The Million Mom March may bring 150,000 or so (according to estimates) "moms" to Washington to push for more gun control and less freedom for law-abiding Americans. But it's a fair bet there are many more women out there - 1 million of whom are registered members of the National Rifle Association, by the way - who do not wish to be deprived of their right to self-defense, no matter how maliciously gun-control advocates exploit tragedy and gin up hysteria to support their agenda.
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Democrats get producing credit for march of moms
Washington Times
May 12, 2000
By Bill Sammon
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000512231830.htm
Sunday's Million Mom March, billed as a grass-roots gathering of soccer moms devoid of partisan politics, is being denounced by critics as a slickly produced media event bankrolled by Democrats and organized by Dan Rather's ex-publicist.
March founder Donna Dees-Thomases is on temporary leave from CBS News and is the sister-in-law of Susan Thomases - a close friend and political adviser to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The group's Web site gives President Clinton the "Mom's Apple Pie Award" and depicts House Majority Whip Tom DeLay in a dunce cap in the "Time Out Chair."
"Is this march simply an instrument of the elite or does it reflect genuine grass-roots support?" said Jonathan Baron, spokesman for the Texas Republican. "I'll leave it to others to assess the grass-roots nature of the event.
"I mean, from our point of view, this organization gave President Clinton their apple pie award, so we can only take this kind of thing so seriously," he added.
The march, expected to draw hundreds of thousands and closing off two streets that run parallel to the Mall, has prompted controversy since it first emerged.
Mrs. Dees-Thomases, who did not return telephone calls to The Washington Times, is the publicist who persuaded Mrs. Clinton to appear on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman," where the first lady was given an advance peek at answers to a "pop quiz" she aced on the air. Mrs. Dees-Thomases later met again with Mrs. Clinton to thank her for the appearance.
Mrs. Dees-Thomases met Monday with Mr. Clinton at the White House to plot strategy for the march. But White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart downplayed the administration's role.
"This came out of some mothers and groups that wanted to find a way to make a statement on Mother's Day," Mr. Lockhart said. "We have worked with them some this week, finding an appropriate way for the president to participate in the effort.
"But as far as political advice, I don't think they've come looking for that here," he added.
The first lady plans to march, along with Vice President Al Gore's wife Tipper and daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, Attorney General Janet Reno and TV talk show host Rosie O'Donnell.
The group's Web site asserts that guns kill an average of 12 children per day in the United States. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the real number is only half that.
The discrepancy is rooted in the fact that the march organizers count adults, aged 18 and 19, as children, which are legally defined as people 17 and younger.
Critics say most of these adult gun deaths are gang- or drug-related and should not be counted as gun deaths among children.
The Million Mom March listed itself with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization, which has preferential tax status. But IRS documents state that "501(c)(3) organizations may not engage in political activity, including endorsing candidates."
Although march organizers openly lobby for specific gun control laws - primarily the licensing and registration of all handguns -some issue lobbying is allowed under IRS rules, explained agency spokesman Don Roberts.
Mrs. Dees-Thomases has sought to portray the march as a groundswell of ordinary, nonpolitical moms from across the country who are demanding "common sense gun safety laws."
But while the group has openly promoted Democrats who advocate gun control, it has shunned safety advocates affiliated with the firearms industry.
For example, march organizers fired their Colorado state organizer for encouraging Shari LeGate to pass out child safety locks at a booth during the march. The dismissal came after march organizers learned Mrs. LeGate had ties to a gun trade group.
Letting Mrs. LeGate in would have been akin to having Seagrams speak at a rally of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said the new state coordinator, Amy Sodnicar.
But while march organizers are banning Mrs. LeGate, a proponent of gun safety locks, they are welcoming Tamarla Owens, whose 6-year-old boy is accused of using a stolen handgun he found in a crackhouse to kill a 6-year-old girl in Michigan in February. Her son reportedly had been left unattended when he found the gun.
Mike Beard, a member of the steering committee for the march, said he was unaware of Mrs. Owens' plan to march. He called the ban on Mrs. LeGate one of those "internal doctrinal disputes and personnel problems" that always occur "in marches like this."
"There is nothing wrong with gun safety locks, but we had decided the goals of the march would be licensing and registration," Mr. Beard said.
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, doesn't buy claims of a nonpartisan, grass-roots event.
"This isn't moms, it's the tentacles of the Clinton-Gore operation playing politics," Mr. LaPierre told The Washington Times. "It all looks to me like a soft money expenditure for the Clinton-Gore operation, to tell you the truth."
But Mr. Beard, who is also president of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, insisted ordinary mothers provided the impetus for the Washington march and 66 other marches around the country that will also be staged Sunday.
"Talk to a Hispanic mother in New Mexico who's organizing the march there and you realize she's not doing this because somebody who knows Bill Clinton in Washington asked her to do it," Mr. Beard said.
Mr. Beard said the largest march donation was probably the $200,000 that came from billionaire George Soros.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Mr. Soros last year gave $2,000 to two separate campaign funds for Mr. Gore, and has also given campaign cash to Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, a relentless advocate of gun control. He also has given more than $180,000 in "soft money" to various Democratic accounts since 1995.
As the widespread media coverage of the march has neared, congressional Democrats have pushed for sweeping new gun controls that have virtually no chance of passing the Republican-led Congress.
-------- australia
Australia Budgets Millions for Renewable Energy
May 12, 2000 (ENS)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/may2000/2000L-05-12-02.html
CANBERRA, Australia, The Australian government will spend an additional $6.5 million over four years to promote renewable energy, according to the new federal budget introduced this week.
Australian Environment Minister Senator Robert Hill (Photo courtesy government of Australia)
Environment Minister Robert Hill said the funding in the budget builds upon the "already significant funding commitments" from Prime Minister John Howard's Liberal government to address the challenge of climate change.
"The Coalition has committed almost $1 billion to greenhouse gas reduction programs over the next five years," says Senator Hill. "This is one of the largest commitments of government funding to a single issue in such a short time. It is the largest amount of per capita funding for greenhouse of any nation."
The $6.5 million will be allocated over four years to establish an agency to monitor progress toward the mandatory generation of 9,500 gigawatt hours a year by 2010 from renewable energy sources.
That national target is equivalent to the annual residential consumption of a city of four million people.
"To achieve this, wholesale purchasers of electricity will be legally required to source increasing amounts of electricity from renewable energy sources," Senator Hill says. "Legislation is being drafted to allow this measure to begin on January 1 next year."
Achieving the government's target for renewable energy will result in the reduction of 5.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases by 2010.
Solar portable water pumping system - 22 modules mounted on a vintage (1890) hay bailing chassis. Condoblin, New South Wales, Australia (Photo courtesy BP Solarex)
The government's plan guarantees a market for new renewable energy, providing a boost to the developing industry.
A new agency to handle the renewables sector will be a separate statutory authority set up by legislation likely to be introduced to federal Parliament next winter.
The $1 billion allocated to greenhouse gas reduction programs and another $1.5 billion Natural Heritage Trust announced in Tuesday's budget, are the largest environmental funding commitments in Australia's history, the government said.
This is the first full year in which there is funding for the entire suite of greenhouse programs.
Programs which will receive full year funding include greenhouse gas abatement, support of renewable remote power generation and solar photovoltaic systems, and the commercialisation of renewable energy. There will also be funding for the compressed natural gas and propane vehicle conversion programs and a diesel and alternative fuels grants program.
Commenting on the four year, billion dollar, greenhouse program, Australian Conservation Foundation executive director Don Henry said, "These greenhouse initiatives have merit in their own right but any benefits of these limited term programs will be more than wiped away by billions of dollars of subsidies for greenhouse polluting fossil fuels and continuing landclearing across Australia."
The budget picture is not so rosy for other environmental issues either, Henry said. "The Budget papers reveal an imminent collapse in environmental funding and a reduction this year on urgently needed repair work in the Murray Darling and across the country."
Left side of the image shows land in the Murray Darling Basin destroyed by salinity; right side shows land restored through community efforts. (Photo courtesy Murray Catchment Management Committee)
The Budget papers graphically demonstrate a crash in funding for environmental programs from $423.4 million this year to just $27.7 million in 2002. Funding for government flagship programs such as Bushcare and Murray Darling Basin 2001 drop $12.5 million and $6.4 million respectively, Henry pointed out.
"A long term secure commitment to funding is needed to tackle issues such as repairing the Murray Darling Basin, stopping salinity and protecting the Great Barrier Reef. This Budget certainly doesn't give us that. You can't fund the environment on a wing and a prayer with ups and down," said Henry. "A solid effort is needed if we're going to repair damage and protect our great natural assets."
The Environment Budget Statement is available online at: http://www.environment.gov.au/library/pubs/budget/budget2000.html
-------- china
Chinese Military Power Revealed Through Satellite Imagery
When: Friday, May 12, 2000, 9 AM
Where: National Press Club, Zenger Room, Washington, DC
Contact: Charles Ferguson 202-675-1007
The Center for Defense Information (CDI) and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) will reveal new high-resolution satellite images of Chinese airfields facing Taiwan. These images from the Space Imaging IKONOS satellite provide insight into the potential of Chinese air power operations against Taiwan. The public release of these images comes just eight days before the inauguration of Chen Shui-bian as President of Taiwan, with Congressional action on trade relations with China days later. CDI analysts will present a series of military options that might be considered by the People's Republic of China, from a show of force escalating to an invasion by land and sea and will discuss the consequences of these operations for U.S. policies.
The following FAS and CDI representatives will be available for questions during and after the presentation:
· Mr. John Pike, Director of the Space Policy Project, FAS
· Mr. Tim Brown, Security Analyst, Public Eye Project, FAS
· Dr. Charles Ferguson, Director of the Nuclear Policy Project, FAS
· Dr. Bruce Blair, President, CDI
· RADM USN (Ret.) Eugene Carroll, Vice President, CDI
· Dr. Nicholas Berry, Senior Analyst, Asia Forum, CDI
A detailed analysis of Chinese military facilities is available on the website of the Federation of American Scientists at http://www.fas.org/eye/china.htm. The new high resolution satellite imagery will be online Friday morning. News media wishing to reproduce copyrighted imagery for publication or broadcast should contact Mark Brender at SpaceImaging at 703-558-0309 or Amy Opperman at 303-254-2078 to make the necessary licensing arrangements.
For CDI's analysis of Asian security issues, visit its Website at http://www.cdi.org and click on Nicholas Berry's "Asia Forum."
The Federation of American Scientists is a privately-funded policy organization whose Board of Sponsors includes over 50 American Nobel Laureates. FAS was founded in 1945 by members of the Manhattan Project who produced the first atomic bomb. The FAS Public Eye project is acquiring imagery of nuclear and missile facilities around the world. In January, it released imagery of a North Korean missile test facility. In March, it presented imagery of Pakistan's nuclear and missile facilities, and imagery of Area 51 was released in April.
Founded in 1972 as an independent monitor of the military, the Center for Defense Information is a private, non-governmental, research organization. Its directors and staff believe that strong social, political, and military components and a healthy environment contribute equally to the nation's security. CDI seeks realistic and cost effective military spending without excess expenditures for weapons and policies that increase the danger of war.
John Pike - http://www.fas.org/ Federation of American Scientists - 202-675-1023 307 Massachusetts Ave NE - Washington, DC 20002 "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion"
----
New Images Question Chinese Threat
May 12, 2000 Filed at 2:38 p.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-US-China-Taiwan.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- New high-resolution satellite photographs show little evidence of a Chinese military buildup at airfields within striking range of Taiwan, two Washington-based groups that research intelligence matters asserted Friday.
The satellite images, taken from the commercial Ikonos satellite, are likely to figure in the intensifying congressional debate over granting China permanent trade benefits.
The images were made public by the Federation of American Scientists and the Center for Defense Information. Representatives of the organizations suggested the photos undercut assertions by some in Congress and in the U.S. intelligence community of a vast Chinese air superiority over the island.
``There is no crisis in the Taiwan Strait,'' said retired U.S. Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, deputy director of the Center for Defense Information.
Carroll said the photos suggest that the airfields facing Taiwan will accommodate only a fraction of China's military aircraft -- and that China's air superiority over Taiwan is about three-to-one, instead of the ten-to-one frequently cited.
``The air bases themselves are limited in their ability to sustain combat operations against Taiwan,'' Carroll said.
At a news conference, the two pro-arms-control groups projected slides of the recent photographs of various Chinese airfields. The detail in the photographs, made by Colorado-based Space Imaging Inc., approach those taken by spy satellites.
The images can distinguish objects on the ground as small as one square meter, or about 3 feet by 3 feet. The slides clearly showed planes, vehicles, hangers, highways, runways and individual trees. They also showed protective earthen bunkers at some of the airfields protecting clusters of up to three planes.
Several shots suggest that the largest and closest airfield to Taiwan, at Xiamen, was largely used for commercial aircraft.
Officials from the two groups said that the photos, overall, suggested that Chinese airfields -- both military and civilian -- within non-refueling range of Taiwan could hold at most about 1,200 planes, or roughly a third of the Chinese air force.
``The question I was asking myself was, where are the rest of the airplanes?'' said John Pike, space policy director for the federation.
The federation also has been acquiring images of nuclear and missile facilities around the world and making them public.
Pike and others said close examinations of the photos, including comparisons with older unclassified satellite photographs, suggest there has been little in the way of building up the airfields for military use.
Many congressional opponents of granting China permanent trade benefits, headed for a showdown vote in the House in two weeks, have used Beijing's recent belligerent words toward Taiwan, and reports of a military buildup, as arguments against the trade bill.
A House-passed bill to increase U.S. military ties with Taiwan also remains on the Senate calendar.
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, disputed the contention by various speakers at the news conference that members of the American intelligence community had grossly overestimated China's air superiority over Taiwan.
For instance, the CIA has never contended that China maintains a 10-to-1 ratio of air superiority, the official said.
In testimony to a Senate panel in February, CIA Director George Tenet said, ``Beijing today still lacks the air and sealift capability to successfully invade Taiwan.''
However, Tenet added that, ``China has been increasing the size and sophistication of its forces arrayed along the Strait, most notably by deploying short range ballistic missiles.''
The photographs made public on Friday did not purport to show missile locations, only airfields.
Asked about the nuclear missile threat, Nicholas Berry, a senior Asia analyst for Center for Defense Information, said, ``China has a doctrine of no first use. It would be hard for it to be upholding its 'One China' policy if it's nuking its own people.''
On the Net:
Federation of American Scientists: http://www.fas.org/eye/china.htm
Center for Defense Information: http://www.cdi.org
Space Imaging Inc.: http://www.spaceimaging.com
---
China warns US of arms race
Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 12/05/2000
The New York Times
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0005/12/text/world08.html
Beijing: China's chief arms negotiator said the US proposal to build an anti-missile defensive shield posed an unacceptable threat to China's security and could force it to significantly expand its own nuclear forces.
The Chinese refuse to believe US claims that the proposed "national missile defence" is only intended to counter threats from rogue states such as North Korea, the official, Mr Sha Zukang, said.
But whatever the intention, he said, the systems under discussion would destroy China's ability to deter nuclear attack by neutralising its relatively small force of nuclear missiles.
"Your system would be good enough to neutralise whatever offensive capacity we now have," Mr Sha said, leaving China dangerously vulnerable to bullying or attack. If that appears likely, he added, "We will not sit on our hands."
"How can we base our own national security on your assurances of good will?" asked Mr Sha, director-general of arms control in the Foreign Ministry.
He said a "balance of terror" had kept nuclear peace for decades and was the only realistic course until such weapons were phased out. The US missile defence proposal would spark a global arms race and the "nightmare scenario" of weapons proliferation.
President Bill Clinton is under pressure to decide soon whether to embark on a crash program costing tens of billions of dollars to develop and deploy a system of sensors, missiles and futuristic weapons that could destroy a small number of incoming missiles.
The proposal has been vehemently opposed by Russia, which like China fears the system would blunt its power and, like China, wants to avoid a costly arms race.
US officials have sought to convince Russian military officials that the planned defensive system could quickly be overwhelmed by Russia's missile forces. They have not managed to make that argument convincingly to China.
-------- europe
Allies doubtful of U.S. missile defense system
Washington Times
May 12, 2000
By David Sands
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2000512221041.htm
The U.S. drive to build a missile defense against "rogue" enemies is coming under friendly fire from the nation's closest military allies.
European political and defense officials are expressing increasingly vocal doubts about the prospect of the proposed U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) system and its effects on trans-Atlantic ties, relations with Russia and the stability of international arms control pacts.
With President Clinton facing a self-imposed deadline later this year on whether to proceed with the missile defense shield, even experts sympathetic to the idea say the failure to include NATO's European partners earlier in the process has greatly complicated the diplomatic sales job.
"There should have been a lot more private conversations with our allies much, much earlier in the game," said Jeffrey Gedmin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and executive director of the New Atlantic Alliance.
The alliance is a group formed to promote better relations between Western Europe and the United States.
"In Europe, they think we're crazy to even be considering the idea," said Stephen Young, deputy director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers and a deep skeptic of the NMD concept. "They don't see the threat, they don't think it will work, and they don't see why we have to upset the Russians over this."
The rising allied doubts come as U.S. defense officials sound confident they will clear the technological hurdles and successfully intercept a missile in a crucial June test. U.S. defense planners and many in Congress argue the system is needed to protect against a potential missile launch by countries such as North Korea, Iraq or Iran.
Many in Europe worry that a U.S. missile shield will frighten Russia and undermine the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Equally worrisome is the prospect that a successful NMD could leave the United States invulnerable to ballistic missile attack - and thus far less reliant on its defense ties to Europe through NATO.
"It's fair to say there are a mixture of views among our NATO allies," a senior State Department official said at a briefing Thursday on U.S. strategic arms policy.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said European leaders are "broadly hopeful" that U.S. and Russian negotiators can strike a deal on NMD that preserves the ABM treaty.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer walked a fine diplomatic line during a brief Washington visit that concluded earlier this week.
Mr. Fischer was careful to say the United States had to make its own decisions on its defensive needs. But he made clear the reservations remain deep on the other side of the Atlantic.
"It's a very difficult discussion, and for us a key element is whether this will lead to a confrontation between the United States and Russia in the question of arms reduction," he said at the State Department Monday.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, appearing with Mr. Fischer, contended the administration has kept its allies informed in the NMD debate. She pointedly noted that, while no decision has been made on NMD, the United States had to put its own strategic issues first.
"Obviously, talking with our allies is very important . . . but I also think it is very important for the president of the United States, as is true of any leader, to do what is responsible as far as protecting one's people," she said.
European leaders are reluctant to publicly oppose unconditionally a missile defense system with which the United States could proceed unilaterally.
French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, who discussed the NMD idea with Mrs. Albright Thursday at the State Department, diplomatically sidestepped any direct criticism of the U.S. plans.
But he told French reporters in Paris on the eve of his trip that France doesn't share U.S. concerns about the dangers posed by rogue nations.
"Is the U.S. really threatened by two or three little states?" he asked. "We're a bit puzzled by this threat."
-------- france
France Questions US Missile Defense
Associated Press
May 11, 2000 Filed at 5:40 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-US-France.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine questioned Thursday whether the United States faced a threat of missile attack from North Korea and Iran that calls for a new defense.
Vedrine thereby added France's skepticism to that of Germany, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Javier Solana, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, among others.
They have not flatly opposed the program President Clinton is considering. But their public skepticism that there is a need to deploy new launchers and radar could make it harder for Clinton to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin at a Moscow summit June 4-5.
Vedrine discussed France's reservations with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in her office Thursday and also proposed further consultation among the allies.
``The U.S. are the ones who can take the decisions that they believe are appropriate in the context of their national security. That is obvious,'' Vedrine told reporters.
And yet, he said, ``we do have a number of questions to raise about the issue of what you here call threats'' and ``we would like the issues we raise to be taken into account in the who decision-making process.''
Also, the French official said, even if Russia agreed to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to legalize a missile defense ``what we are asking is that the consequences and the effect on the global strategic situation and other disarmament agreements be taken into account.''
Responding, Albright said ``we will be very interested in hearing what you Europeans think about it because, indeed, it is a very important question.''
Russia, China and other critics of a U.S. anti-missile program contend it could touch off a new arms race to develop missiles able to overcome the defense.
Clinton and Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltin, agreed that proposed weapons cutbacks and defense program be considered together.
U.S. and Russian negotiators have begun talks on a treaty to reduce long-range warheads on both sides to 2,000 to 2,500.
A senior U.S. official said Thursday this would mean an 80 percent reduction from top Cold War totals.
The official, who talked to reporters at the State Department under rules that shielded his identity, said an informal Russian proposal to slash stockpiles down to 1,500 went too far.
At the Pentagon, spokesman Kenneth Bacon said ``the discussions that we have had focus primarily on the 2,000 to 2,500 range, and there's been no decision in this administration to change that range.''
-------- imf / world bank
LAST MINUTE CALLS TO HALT PIPELINE PROJECT
By Gumisai Mutume
WASHINGTON, May 12 (IPS) -- As the deadline for approval of the controversial Chad-Cameroon pipeline project approaches, representatives of indigenous communities affected by World Bank projects descended on Washington to lobby for changes in the institution's lending policies.
The Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline has been the subject of a long stand-off between the Bank and non-governmental organizations, and delegates to the "Indigenous Peoples, Forests and the World Bank: Policies and Practice" workshop held here this week met with World Bank officials to try and postpone its launch.
The $3.5 billion project is set for approval by the executive board of the Bank on May 23 despite calls by NGOs for a two-year moratorium on a final decision.
NGOs want the project delayed in order to strengthen the capacity of the two countries to effectively manage the project. They want to see democratic changes in the two countries, and seek assurances that affected communities will be sufficiently compensated and that there are safeguards against environmental destruction.
Activists doubt this, saying that last year, the Europe-based Transparency International rated Cameroon as having the most corrupt government in the world.
The project consists of a 1,100-kilometer pipeline running from the Doba oilfields of Chad to the Atlantic coast in Cameroon. It involves drilling 300 oil wells, and upon completion in four years, will see the production of 225,000 barrels of oil a day.
If approved, the Bank would provide $365 million in loans to Chad and Cameroon to sponsor their share of the project. The rest of the financing will come from private sector investors -- ExxonMobil (the world's biggest oil company), the U.S.-based Chevron and the Malaysian oil company Petronas.
The private sector consortium has said it will not go ahead with the project without World Bank participation because of the risks and complexities involved.
Jacques Ngoun, coordinator for Codebabik, a rights group for the Bagyeli Pygmies in Cameroon, says his community has suffered from a long history of discrimination and the new project will only exacerbate this. He says that while "we do not have the power to stop it, we want our concerns to be taken into consideration."
Ngoun was among a group of representatives of indigenous communities who this week examined nine case studies of World Bank projects in Central Africa, Central and South America, India and the Philippines. Delegates to the indigenous peoples workshop sought to provide views on the effectiveness of the Bank's policy on indigenous peoples and forests.
The workshop was also aimed at facilitating dialogue between indigenous people and the institution and to contribute to the current process of reforming Bank policies, says Marcus Colchester, director of the UK-based Forest People's Program.
The Bank is currently undertaking two policy reviews relevant to indigenous communities. The Bank wants to make its policy on indigenous peoples more rational and flexible and to revamp the Forests Policy of 1991, now considered by the Bank to be outdated.
Marcus says the nine case studies show that World Bank projects "were either failing or worsening the situation" of indigenous communities and that where policies are successful, the consequences of other World Bank policies such as structural adjustment overshadowed these successes.
NGOs here say if the pipeline project gets the go-ahead, it would be a prime example of the many projects approved by the World Bank despite their numerous violations of the organization's own stated environmental and social policies.
A document released on behalf of the NGO community by the Environmental Media Services (EMS) charges that the project is in breech of Bank policies such as the Indigenous People's Policy, the Environmental Assessment Policy and the Economic Evaluation of Investment Operations, among others.
The policy on indigenous peoples requires that a mechanism for the legal recognition of the rights of indigenous people be established and that the government designate an agency to deal with such issues. Neither requirement has yet been met.
A recent study by the Harvard Law School's Human Rights program states that only 4.5 percent of direct revenues will be spent for development purposes in communities and that the project's revenue management plan only covers the first five years of the project.
A leaked copy of the Project Appraisal Document (PAD), which forms the basis of the project, puts net revenues of the project at $9 billion over a 28-year production period. The government benefits for Chad are $1.7 billion while Cameroon is expected to earn $505 million from the project.
Affected communities are expected to earn $600,000 from an endowment fund to be set up under the Indigenous People's Policy. NGOs say this figure is minimal compared to the damage they will suffer.
In Cameroon, the Bakola people who live in the Atlantic Littoral forest will be affected by the project and will lose their traditional territory. An estimated 11,000 people live in the area in Cameroon comprising Pygmies and members of the Bantu ethnic group.
World Bank spokesperson on Africa Robert Calderisi says the Bank has done its best to listen to the concerns of the NGO community, but now needs to move on with a project that has been seven years in the planning. Calderisi says the Bank is participating at the invitation of the governments of the two countries, particularly Chad, which stands to raise its revenues by 40-50 percent as a result of the project.
Chad is an impoverished, landlocked nation that could earn about $100 million annually from the project. Its oil reservoirs were discovered about 30 years ago and, Calderisi says "while the debate has been very useful, the number of remaining issues are highly manageable."
Critics have also raised concerns about possible oil spills in the oil fields, along the pipeline and at the marine terminal. The PAD lacks a detailed General Oil Spills Response Plan, NGOs argue, but Calderisi says Bank environmentalists feel that the plan is detailed enough.
A review by the Dutch Commission for Environmental Impact Assessment, states that the plan's budget for investment in oil spill response equipment for the two countries is $800,000, which does not reflect the needs in terms of equipment, operation and maintenance costs.
On the basis of its assessment of the General Oil Spills Response Plan, the Commission estimates that an investment of $29 million in equipment is necessary in addition to annual operation and maintenance costs of $4.5 million.
-------- india / pakistan
Published in May 12 2000 issue of The Friday Times, Lahore by Pervez Hoodbhoy, From: Harsh Kapoor <aiindex@mnet.fr>
He fought for Kashmiri self-determination in 1948, against French imperialism in Algeria in the early 60's, roused students on American campuses in the early 70's against their government's immoral war in Vietnam, dodged arrest by the CIA in a case trumped up by Richard Nixon's government that accused him of trying to kidnap Henry Kissinger, passionately campaigned against the ethnic cleansing of East Pakistan by the West Pakistani army, and was the trusted lieutenant of the Palestinian leadership. With the passage of years, and his eventual return to Pakistan, his efforts gradually focussed upon healing the wounds of Partition, and diffusing the poison of intolerance and militarism of the post-Zia era. Challenge and adversity left him undaunted- until that fateful day of 11 May 1998, when the ground trembled uncontrollably at Pokharan and the subcontinent was to change forever. Exactly one year later-on 11 May 1999 -Eqbal Ahmad died in an Islamabad hospital. He was 67.
Pokharan left Eqbal, the otherwise indomitable fighter of many struggles, depressed and fearful for the two countries he so deeply loved, Pakistan and India. It was with effort that he roused himself to action once again. Would the new nuclear hysteria drive out all hope of reconciliation and goodwill? Were the two countries now destined to become radioactive wastelands in the decades, or perhaps just years, to come? India's mindless right wing leaders who started it all were to blame, driven by their misguided view of nuclear weapons as a currency of power. "They will soon realize that this is a counterfeit", he wrote, arguing that the religious chauvinism and intolerance of the BJP made it ineligible for guiding India towards becoming a truly great and powerful nation:
"Each historical time has had its own temper. But one factor has been common throughout history to the attainment of progress and greatness. Historians of culture describe this one factor variously as syncretism, openness, pluralism, and a spirit of tolerance. Where ideas do not clash, diverse influences, knowledge, viewpoints, and cultures do not converge, civilization does not thrive and greatness eludes. Nuclearisation of nationalism has further degraded India's environment. The tests have worsened the xenophobia of Hindutva supporters."
Soon the drums started beating on the Pakistani side, the initial wave of fear giving way to shriller and shriller cries for retaliatory tests. India's belligerence was no longer veiled; it was a time when even the thoughtful were puzzled. "What then should Pakistan do?", wrote Eqbal in his weekly column in Dawn on 17th May, "My advice is: do not panic, and do not behave reactively. This translates as: do not listen to people like Qazi Husain Ahmad and Benazir Bhutto who, either out of ignorance, or more likely crass opportunism, are advocating nuclear tests, here and now. The arguments for steadying the jerking knee are compelling. For these reasons and more, it is much better for Islamabad to stay cool, calculating, and utilizing the opportunities Delhi has presented. May reason prevail!"
Astonishingly, difficult though it was, reason did stand a 50-50 chance in the first week after Pokharan. There is considerable evidence that a Pakistani nuclear test could have been avoided. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and some of his close associates in the cabinet, notwithstanding what they were to claim a year later, were not enthusiastic about testing because of the heavy international sanctions that would inevitably follow. This feeling was shared by the Chief of Army Staff, General Jehangir Karamat, and it extended to many others in the government. Some with impeccable hawkish credentials, such as Riaz Khokhar, then Pakistan's ambassador to the US, told me privately that they had campaigned hard against testing. Pragmatism, not pacificism, drove them to this conclusion.
But reason was soon destined to lose. By the second week the Pakistani leadership had capitulated; the Chagai tests came just 17 days after Pokharan. What the decisive factor had been may never be known, but it could be one of several: the warning by L.K. Advani, India's Interior Minister, that Pakistan should note a change in South Asia's "strategic environment", Prime Minister Vajpayee's statement that his government might forcibly take Kashmiri territory under Pakistan's control, the handing over of Kashmir affairs portfolio to the hardline Home Minister who had so enthusiastically overseen the destruction of Babri Mosque, and heating up of a limited but live conflict along the Line of Control. On the domestic front, a pack of opposition leaders, led first by the Jamaat-i-Islami, was soon overtaken by Benazir Bhutto. "She seems to have sensed in this national crisis an opportunity to restore her flagging fortunes. I know of few gestures in the ugly repertoire of Pakistani politics as revolting as her demagogic toss of bracelets at Mr. Nawaz Sharif", wrote Eqbal.
The debate stopped abruptly after Chagai. Eqbal was devastated. "I saw on television a picture more awesome than the familiar mushroom cloud of nuclear explosion. The mountain had turned white. I wondered how much pain had been felt by nature, God's most wondrous creation".
Alas, it was joy, not pain, which made crowds dance that day in the streets of Islamabad and Lahore. Similar orgasmic celebrations had taken place 17 days earlier in Delhi and Bombay. The men of faith were triumphant, although which faith had triumphed was not clear. Grains of holy radioactive sand from Pokhran, blessed by Lord Shiva, had been sprinkled in temples by the Vishnu Hindu Parisad. In Pakistan the Jamaat-I-Islami transported a cardboard "Islamic Bomb" around the country, while right-wing Urdu magazines like Zindagi wrote about the wondrous miracles of Chaghi. They told stories of divine intervention that protected the mard-e-momin from poison-spitting snakes as they prepared the nuclear test-site, of four chickens that sufficed to feast a thousand of the faithful after the tests, and of Prophet Mohammed taking personal charge of protecting the centrifuges of Kahuta.
Now was the time of the Kalams and Khans, the Chidambarams and Mubarikmands. Catapulted into the role of subcontinental heroes, but unknown entities in the world of real science, they basked in adulation pretending to be the Oppenheimers, Tellers, and Bethes. But it was the political leadership that had it even better. As the Sharifs and Vajpayees strutted and preened themselves before roaring crowds, Eqbal had sober words of warning for them:
"I still believe that, notwithstanding Delhi's provocative muscle-flexing, Pakistan's security interests have not been served by matching India show-for-show-plus-one.... The leaders of India and Pakistan have now appropriated to themselves, as others had done before, the power that was God's alone to kill mountains, make the earth quake, bring the sea to boil, and destroy humanity. I hope that when the muscle flexing and cheering is over they will go on a retreat, and reflect on how they should bear this awesome responsibility."
One wonders if in his prison cell, where he now serves a life-sentence for treason, ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif does finally feel the need for reflection. But all those who were then busy stoking the fires of nationalist frenzy had little use for such advice. Drunk with the new-found power to commit mass murder, they blew raucous trumpets and beat drums in macabre, insane, officially sponsored celebrations. It mattered little that that very year Pakistani newspaper had reported cases of 300 people having chosen self immolation and death to living yet another painful day of grinding poverty and deprivation. Uranium there was plenty of, but certainly not enough bread and clean drinking water.
More insidiously, nucleomania was giving birth to a dangerous vision, propagated with the full force of the state media. Commentators and spokesperson daily harangued television audiences that Pakistan had become impregnable, and was now at least India's military equal if not superior. But Eqbal argued that beyond the change in atmospherics, which rarely endure, Pakistan's passage from an ambiguous to an explicit nuclear power had not substantially changed its strategic position. Economically it had become weaker, its domestic situation would grow graver, and the forces of fanaticism yet stronger and more divisive. The illusion of security provided by nuclear weapons would, however, have fearful consequences.
In the months after Chaghai, Eqbal spoke at anti-nuclear meetings throughout the length and breadth of the country. I accompanied him at many such events. He spoke eloquently and passionately, as was his style, frequently drawing upon exemplars drawn from his vast store of experiences and knowledge. He would remind listeners of the Soviet Union, and its satellites such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, which became highly sophisticated arms producers, but whose states and societies grew dis-organically and eventually collapsed. For Pakistan to avoid that fate, it must resist falling into the trap of seeking strategic equivalence with India.
India-Pakistan proxy war, more than anything else, worried Eqbal. Look at the history of the Cold War, he would say. Since nuclear weapons had made direct confrontation impossible, the US and USSR had exported their conflict to the Third World where millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Africans, South Americans, and Afghans had died soundlessly, mere pawns in the great global grab for power. Eqbal feared that bloody times were up ahead for the Kashmiris, who he predicted would be the worst losers of the nuclearized subcontinent. Safely hidden behind their nuclear shields, the leaders of India and Pakistan are perfectly willing to fight their game down to the very last Kashmiri, he said.
It was sometime in early March 1999 when Eqbal telephoned me. His usual good-natured banter was missing today, there was an edge of tension. I went to see him as soon as I finished teaching my class at the university. I had not seen him in such a foul mood for years. Yesterday he had had a long session with a top general-paradoxically one of his many admirers-and had come back greatly disturbed, his fears confirmed. Terrible things were to happen in Kashmir but nuclear weapons would ensure that war would not spill over into Pakistan. Such was the plan. Eqbal did not live to hear about Kargil, but he already knew enough.
Two weeks before the end. When we took him to the hospital he was in an awful state, although we did not yet know that it was an advanced stage of colon cancer. He was vomiting violently and feeling sharp pains in his chest but there were quiet phases when he asked about the world outside. He shook his head in silent disgust as I told him of the official preparations to celebrate Pakistan's anniversary of the nuclear tests. Little badges with mushroom clouds were to be distributed free to children, poetry competitions would extol the greatness of a newly nuclear nation, and missile replicas would be placed at major intersections. "Eqbal, when you get well I'd like you to look at an article I've just written against the celebrations", I said. No, he replied, give it to me now. He carefully adjusted the intravenous drip to take hold of his pen, asked me to crank up his hospital bed into a semi-sitting position, and then went through my article adding his editorial comments- incisive and useful as ever-here and there. It was his last political act, the final affirmation of solidarity.
Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy is professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.
--------
japan Greenpeace in H.K. slams Japan's heavy-handed actions
Kyodo News Service/Associated Press
2000-05-12
http://envirolink.yellowbrix.com/pages/envirolink/Story.nsp?story_id=10462083&ID=envirolink
HONG KONG, May 12 (Kyodo) -- Greenpeace environmental campaigners protested outside Japan's consulate in Hong Kong on Friday, condemning the Japanese government for taking "heavy-handed actions" against their fellow activists in Tokyo.
Twelve representatives of Greenpeace China, dressed as prisoners, chained and handcuffed, slammed the Japanese government for detaining four of their fellow activists following their climb on the world's tallest waste incinerator in Tokyo on Tuesday.
"We are calling for the immediate release of the four Greenpeace climbers who should not have been arrested for a non-violent action to protect the environment," Greenpeace China spokeswoman Luisa Tam said.
"Japan has demonstrated to the world that it is more concerned about suppressing peaceful protesters than protecting the health of its people and the environment," Tam said.
The four detained are from Belgium, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Britain.
They are still behind the bars and expected to be detained for 10 more days pending further investigation by Japanese authorities.
They were detained after climbing up the tower to protest the Japan's compromising environmental and public health by allowing massive dioxin emissions.
The protesters in Hong Kong also condemned Japanese police for raiding the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior, and the Greenpeace Japan office in Tokyo on Thursday.
They said the actions were an "unreasonable attempt to silence peaceful public protest."
Japanese police seized documents and leaflets from the Rainbow Warrior in Tokyo port and the Greenpeace Japan office following their searches.
Greenpeace has criticized Japan for having the highest total emissions of dioxin in the world.
-------- russia
Russia to Allow Nuclear Exports Despite '92 Pact,
Putin Moves to Advance Power-Plant Deals
Washington Post
Friday, May 12, 2000; Page A38
By David Hoffman Washington Post Foreign Service
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-05/12/085l-051200-idx.html
MOSCOW, May 11-President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree allowing Russia to export nuclear material to countries that have not agreed to accept full international safeguards, a move spurred by Russia's plan to build two nuclear reactors in India.
Putin's decision may cause some irritation in the United States because it suggests that Russia is retreating further from the 1992 nuclear suppliers agreement, under which Russia and the other major nuclear-supply states agreed not to sell materials to countries unless they agree to full-scale international monitoring.
India, which tested a nuclear device in 1998, has not agreed to such broad safeguards.
Export sales are a key source of hard currency for Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry, and, over U.S. objections, Russia has contracted to build two 1,000-megawatt nuclear-power stations in southern India, a deal worth an estimated $3 billion.
Russia is obligated under the suppliers agreement to meet international safeguards on the plants, even if the Indian nuclear program as a whole is not subject to inspection.
The Soviet government had signed a deal to build two reactors in India in 1988, but that was put on hold after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
It was revived in 1998, when the Russian atomic energy minister, Yevgeny Adamov, visited India.
Details on Putin's decree were sketchy, but Yuri Bespalko, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Ministry, said the decision "expands Russia's . . . possibilities for exporting nuclear materials."
He said the Putin decision applied to India.
Jon Wolfsthal, an associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said Russia has argued that, because the India agreement was signed in 1988, it is exempt from the 1992 suppliers agreement.
The Interfax news agency reported that Putin had amended a 1992 decree on nuclear exports issued by President Boris Yeltsin. Wolfsthal said Putin's decision may have been an effort to give political support to Adamov as he tries to move ahead with nuclear sales abroad.
The United States has also objected to Russia's construction of a nuclear power plant in Iran. Although Iran has put its facilities under international inspection, the United States maintains that it has a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
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Putin Talks Nuclear Arms With CNN's Ted Turner
Friday, May 12, 2000
MOSCOW TIMES
By Sarah Karush Staff Writer
Turner - who is in Moscow on a private visit - was previously acquainted with Putin from the latter's days as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. In 1994, St. Petersburg hosted the Goodwill Games, which are organized by Turner.
Turner, the founder of CNN and a vice chairman of Time Warner Inc., told journalists that he and Putin discussed the possibility of Russia hosting the games again in the future. Brisbane, Australia, is to host the games next year - the first time they will be held outside Russia or the United States.
Turner said he spoke with Putin about disarmament during the meeting and that he favors the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
"All the major nuclear powers are in peace, what do we need nuclear weapons for?" he said.
Spokeswoman Maura Donlan said Turner had long been interested in the issue of peace and security. "That's the reason the Goodwill Games were started," she said.
Interfax quoted Kremlin officials as saying the main topic of conversation was the development of business ties between the United States and Russia.
Turner Broadcasting Systems helped launch TV6, but withdrew from Russia in 1994.
Interfax reported that Putin received Turner in the Kremlin's less formal Blue Hall, rather than in the office where foreign guests are usually received. Donlan said the meeting lasted about an hour.
On Friday, Turner is to attend the opening of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's library, a project to which he donated money.
"The real reason [for the trip] was Gorbachev, and he wanted to use the opportunity to meet Putin," Donlan said.
CNN Moscow bureau chief Jill Dougherty said Turner also would meet with Mayor Yury Luzhkov and other acquaintances from the Goodwill Games.
The 1994 games in St. Petersburg were widely criticized as being poorly organized.
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Arms Talks Gap Narrowing
MOSCOW TIMES Opinion / Columnists
Friday, May 12, 2000
By Pavel Felgenhauer
The seemingly endless celebrations that traditionally make for 10 days of down time in May are over. But the coming weeks will be a time of important decision-making.
The nation will have a new government, and perhaps President Vladimir Putin will present his long-awaited economic plan. U.S. President Bill Clinton is scheduled to be in Moscow on June 4 and 5. The main topic of discussion is expected to be nuclear arms issues that may determine U.S.-Russian relations for decades to come.
The stakes are high. The U.S. government wants to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to build a limited national missile defense (NMD). Clinton has announced that he will make a decision on NMD deployment in June. The summit in Moscow seems to be the last chance to find a compromise. If there is no agreement, the United States may go ahead with NMD, abrogating the ABM treaty, which could create a long-term schism between Moscow and Washington. Until now, Russian officials have said publicly that consultations on ABM and NMD are deadlocked, that Russia opposes U.S. proposals for amending the ABM treaty, while Washington rejects Russian arguments.
The U.S.-Russian arms control fray has also intensified due to serious disagreements in parallel talks over the terms of the START III arms reduction treaty. The outline of START III Ń a limit of from 2,000 to 2,500 strategic nuclear warheads for each country was agreed to by Clinton and former President Boris Yeltsin in 1997 at a summit in Helsinki. But Russia, unable now to maintain a large nuclear arsenal, wants more drastic reductions: to 1,500 warheads or fewer. Russia also wants to impose some limits on the deployment of U.S. long-range, sea-based cruise missiles, a notion that has been rejected by Washington.
The situation seems to be hopeless, and the coming summit Ń an inevitable disaster. But not all is as bad as it seems. Recent leaks from Washington indicate there might yet be a compromise.
Until recently, the Pentagon was adamant that the United States should have no fewer than 2,500 warheads. But recently there have been rumors that Washington has indicated it could go below 2,000 if Russia compromises on ABM. The Russian and U.S. negotiating positions on a revised START III framework are still some distance apart, but the gap is said to be narrowing.
A compromise on ABM is possible, because the Russian military knows that the proposed U.S. NMD system does not really threaten Russia and that in the coming decades it would technically be impossible to create an ABM system in North America that could fully negate even a reduced Russian nuclear deterrent. From a purely military-technical point of view, the NMD project is very expensive and totally unreliable. The true effectiveness of any ABM shield can only be tested during an actual ballistic attack. Before the opposite is proved, the U.S. government will be forced to assume, in dealing with any unfriendly nation, that in time of war the NMD system will not be able to intercept a single warhead.
But Russian military planners will be forced to assume that a U.S. ABM shield will intercept more than 90 percent of incoming warheads. Such a theoretical threat can only help our generals press for more defense spending, so many in our military actually want the United States to go forward with NMD.
Since 1997, the Defense Ministry has spent the lionŐs share of its small procurement budget to deploy a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Topol-M (SS-27).
The SS-27 was developed in the 1980s as a response to the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative and is specifically designed to negate enemy ABM defenses.
The Russian army began a war in Chechnya in 1999 without modern night-capable equipment, and thousands of servicemen have been killed and wounded because the deployment of the SS-27 "anti-ABM" ICBM sucked up all the money. However, today the only acting ABM system in the world is RussiaŐs own, stationed around Moscow. A rapid deployment of a U.S. NMD could in retrospect rationalize the SS-27 program, while at the same time creating a "threat" that will help buy more ICBMs.
The June summit might be a success, and ground-breaking agreements might be reached that will in the end promote increased defense spending. But if the summit fails, defense spending will increase even more. So whatever the outcome, both the U.S. and Russian military-industrial complexes win.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst based in Moscow.
---
Russian factory starts making radioactive waste containers
Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union - Economic 2000-05-12
http://envirolink.yellowbrix.com/pages/envirolink/Story.nsp?story_id=10460298&ID=envirolink
Text of report by Russian news agency Agentstvo Voyennykh Novostey web site
Severodvinsk, Northern Russia, 11th May: The local Zvezdochka machine-building plant has made the first 1,000 containers for storing and transporting slow-acting solid radioactive waste, a spokesman for the plant administration said on Thursday [11th May].
The containers, with a capacity of 6.5 t each, will be transported to the Northern Fleet in the near future, the spokesman told the Military News Agency. The containers are built in accordance with the Arctic military environmental cooperation (AMEC), a Russian-US- Norwegian programme which envisages, among other issues, the reduction of environmental threats in the Arctic region by means of storing safely and salvaging radioactive waste produced by combat ships of the Northern Fleet. The project is financed by the United States, the spokesman noted.
Zvezdochka, which specializes in repairing nuclear submarines of the Russian Navy, had to win an international tender to receive the order for containers. A US-Norwegian delegation that visited the plant earlier this week confirmed the high quality of its products, the spokesman said. According to foreign experts, the containers built by Zvezdochka fully correspond to the norms of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The AMEC envisages construction of 1,300 containers for slow- acting solid radioactive waste.
----
Russia says huge fire-fighting jets ready to help with Los Alamos fire.
Source: Associated Press
2000-05-12
http://envirolink.yellowbrix.com/pages/envirolink/Story.nsp?story_id=10460824&ID=envirolink
MOSCOW (AP) -- Two giant Il-76 jets capable of dumping 44 tons of water are standing by to help fight the fire in Los Alamos in the United States if needed, Russian officials said Friday.
The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations said it had received an official request from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency for the planes, but was awaiting confirmation before ordering the long flight to the United States.
The planes were "ready to take off at any minute," said ministry official Alexander Zalyotov.
The four-engine Il-76MDP can water-bomb an area 500 meters by 100 meters (500 yards by 100 yards) or drop 40 fully-equipped firefighters by parachute, according to the reference book Jane's All The World's Aircraft.
A forest fire on Thursday swept into Los Alamos, site of the famed nuclear-weapons lab, and 18,000 residents have been evacuated.
-------- spying
Spies roam State posing as journalists, FBI says
Washington Times
May 12, 2000
By Sean Scully
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-20005122305.htm
Foreign intelligence agents working as news reporters retain sweeping unsupervised access to the State Department's central headquarters, despite a security crackdown after several major lapses, department officials and the FBI told Congress Thursday.
"In my opinion, it poses a threat," said Tim Bereznay, section chief of the FBI's National Security Division at a House International Relations hearing.
The department's inspector general, Jacquelyn Williams-Bridgers, said the new policy requiring all visitors to have a security escort at all times "does have a glaring hole in that it allows press members, the media, to have free access to the building."
Undersecretary of State David G. Carpenter, head of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, said he wants tighter controls on the press.
"If it were within my power, I would not have any press in the building," Mr. Carpenter said.
President Clinton Thursday at first made light of the situation to reporters at the White House.
"I would have thought that you might have docile intelligence officers masquerading as hostile reporters," he said.
He quickly added: "The testimony today was the first that I had heard that assertion, and obviously it has to be looked into."
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright also cracked a joke.
"We obviously don't want spies posing as journalists in this room or wandering around the State Department," she told reporters at a press conference. "If any of you are, please identify yourselves."
She said she takes the security charges seriously and will cooperate with the FBI, but counseled caution, saying she has not seen FBI information on agents working as reporters.
"I think we have to be careful here not to go crazy," she said.
"The State Department's job in life is to have diplomatic relations with other countries," she said, "and for those diplomatic relations to be covered by not only the American press but the foreign press."
Under the department's new security policy, instituted in 1999, accredited reporters are given a pass that allows them into the building unescorted. In theory, they are only permitted access to the first two floors, where the press and briefing rooms are located.
But department officials said there is nothing to prevent the reporters from wandering onto upper floors, where senior officials and classified information are housed. There are guards on patrol, but there are not enough to absolutely ensure that the media remains downstairs.
Foreign governments routinely use reporters to gather intelligence or spread propaganda, Mr. Bereznay said. The FBI is aware of many such agents, including some covering the State Department, but the State Department has never requested FBI help in screening accredited reporters.
There are currently 467 State Department press building passes issued to journalists and technicians. Of those, 56 are held by employees of non-U.S. news and media outlets, according to the department.
Members of the International Relations Committee appeared surprised by the obvious hole in the department's new security system - and by the officials' frank discussion of it.
"I think this administration has had a lax view toward national security and security issues from day one," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican.
The State Department has been rocked by a series of security problems in recent years, most recently in January when a laptop computer disappeared from a secure office of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. That computer contained highly classified information on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
It has not been located. The matter remains under investigation by the department and the FBI.
Last year, the department found a listening device in a classified briefing room after police found a Russian diplomat outside monitoring the bug. Shortly thereafter, the department was forced to abandon a new computer program used in posts worldwide after it discovered the software had not been subject to careful security checks even though it was written by programmers from the former Soviet Union.
In 1998, an unidentified man walked into the Secretary of State's suite on the seventh floor and stole classified documents in full view of the staff. He and the documents have never been located.
"The fundamental problem, which has brought the department to the point at which it now finds itself, is not the absence of proper policies and procedures, as those are and have been in place," Mr. Carpenter said. "The problem is simple carelessness."
Mr. Carpenter, who took the job in 1998, tried to institute an escort policy in November of that year, but was quickly overruled by Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering. The policy did not become permanent until August of last year, after the discovery of the Russian bug.
An inspector general's report issued in September of last year found serious systemic failures in the department's security, Mrs. Williams-Bridgers said, but most of the recommendations were not put into effect until too late to prevent the loss of the classified laptop.
Mrs. Williams-Bridgers found a host of problems, including lax enforcement of the escort policy, poor accounting for classified documents, and spotty enforcement of the policy of supervising construction and maintenance workers in the sprawling building.
Many security officers did not even know their responsibilities and powers under the department's regulations.
Mrs. Williams-Bridgers recommended that all security operations be transferred to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which has a well-developed security system. That change did not go into effect until after the laptop disappeared from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
The Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which deals with much of the department's most sensitive information, traditionally handled its own security and was answerable in part to the CIA. But Mrs. Williams-Bridgers concluded that the bureau was "not well structured or well staffed" to protect classified information.
Former Ambassador Stapleton Roy, the current head of the bureau, did not dispute Mrs. Williams-Bridger's devastating conclusions at Thursday's hearing and made little effort to defend his office.
"Regardless of the circumstances, the loss of the laptop is inexcusable," he said. "It should not have happened."
• David R. Sands contributed to this report.
-------- taiwan
Has Taiwan Gone Nuclear?
NewsMax.com Friday, May 12, 2000
http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/5/12/55017
If a report in a prestigious publication dealing with defense issues is correct, Taiwan has joined the nuclear weapons club, and the strategic situation in the Taiwan Straits has changed drastically.
According to a report in the authoritative Defence and Foreign Affairs journal the Taiwanese military have gotten their hands on two nuclear warheads and put them on a pair of medium-range ballistic missiles aimed at the mainland.
The journal, published by the International Strategic Studies Association in Washington reports that the nukes, originally owned by South Africa, were obtained in an under-the-counter deal brokered by a so-called "intermediary Middle Eastern country."
Taiwanese officials strongly denied the report and said they didn't have any "medium-range surface-to-surface missiles" that could carry nuclear warheads and, thanks to restictions on exports of missile technology, couldn't develop their own arsenal of ballistic missiles if they wanted to.
Nevertheless, if the report is true, the entire strategic situation, vis-a-vis the Taiwan-Mainland China standoff, has changed drastically. China has made no secret about their plans to invade Taiwan should the island's government declare independence.
Published reports from official People's Liberation Army have outlined a blitzkrieg-like attack on Taiwan, with hundred of thousands of PLA troops landing on the island and overwhelming Taiwanese defenses. The lightning like invasion would effectively preclude U.S. participation in the early stages of the war, and China bluntly warned the United States that they would not hesitate to use their own nuclear arsenal against the United States, should the United States attempt to use nuclear weapons in retalliation against China.
But, if Taiwan does have even as few as two nuclear missiles aimed at the mainland, they could stop a Chinese invasion dead in its tracks. It could be back-to-the-drawing board for Chinese strategic planners, and a toning down of the war of words Beijing has been waging.
-------- us military
Have any of you had contact or info with this?
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 04:44:24 EDT
From: DSNurse@aol.com
Project Scope More Project Information
Battlefield Radiation Exposure Criteria (BREC)
Project Identification Number: MFUA-H-96-01-A
Responsible Staff Officer: Susan Thaul
Major Unit: Institute of Medicine
Sub Unit: Medical Follow-up Agency
Project Scope:
The Institute of Medicine will conduct, for the U.S. Army Surgeon General, a study to evaluate the appropriateness of the exposure guidelines and control actions recommended by the report of the NATO Team of Experts on Low Level Radiation. The committee will also develop appropriate ethical, scientific, and operational guidelines for use by the Army in formulating policy on exposure of soldiers to radiation in situations that fall in the regulatory gap betweeen global nuclear war and civilian occupational radiation exposure.
Project Duration: 30 months
----
OPERATION CONDOR & THE ARCHIVES OF TERROR
From: "Washington Peace Center" wpc@igc.org
A Film and Discussion Friday May 12, 2000
On Friday May 12, from noon to 2 pm, the Institute for Policy Studies will host a film and discussion on two of the most explosive topics in contemporary Latin American history: Operation Condor and the Paraguayan Archives of Terror. Operation Condor was a coordinated campaign of terror that united the security forces of Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Argentina to exchange intelligence and carry out joint operations against so-called leftist subversives. Condor was responsible for the exchange of prisoners, disappearances, and the assassination of opposition leaders such as the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.
In 1992, Paraguayan lawyer and human rights activist Martín Almada discovered nearly a ton of secret police documents in a warehouse in Paraguay. The documents contained important new information on the activities of Operation Condor and decades of political repression in Paraguay and other countries that participated in Condor. Documents from the Archive were used as evidence in the Spanish case against Augusto Pinochet.
SPEAKERS: *MARTÍN ALMADA: Almada is currently the President of the Paraguayan Ethical Tribunal Against Impunity and the Paraguayan Chapter of the Pan-American Association of Lawyers. He is also the founder of the Paraguayan Commission on Human Rights. He served as a consultant to the UNESCO Program of Educational Development for Latin America in Paris for nearly 14 years before returning to Paraguay in 1992. He has been a candidate for the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize." Almada was imprisoned and tortured in Paraguay for three years after writing a dissertation critical of the Paraguayan educational system. His wife died of a heart attack after security forces called her to play tapes of his screams and sent her his blood-stained clothes.
*JOHN DINGES: Dinges is on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; he worked previously at the Washington Post and National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. He co-authored the book Assassination on Embassy Row, which investigated the murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. In the book, the text of the FBI cable revealing the existence of Operation Condor was revealed for the first time. Dinges is also the author of Our Man in Panama: The Shrewd Rise and Brutal Fall of Manuel Noriega and is currently investigating Operation Condor for a book he is writing on South American military governments.
*J. PATRICE MCSHERRY: McSherry is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University-Brooklyn. She is the author of Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina (St. Martin's Press, 1997) and numerous articles on civil-military relations, human rights, and democratization. She is Associate Editor/Latin America for Journal of Third World Studies and a member of the Editorial Board of NACLA Report on the Americas. She has been investigating Operation Condor for most of the 1990s, visiting the Paraguayan Archives of Terror in 1996, and has published several articles on Condor.
INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES 733 15th St., NW, #1020, Washington, D.C. Friday, May 12, 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm For more information, contact Stacie Jonas at 202-234-9382, ext. 239
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Beijing softies
Notes from the Pentagon.
Inside the Ring
May 12, 2000
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring-200051221445.htm
Several Air Force generals are so upset over recent Air Force-funded China studies that they are thinking of canceling the service's contract with the Rand Corp., a think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif.
Rand's Project Air Force does numerous studies worth millions of dollars annually. We are told the Air Staff was particularly upset by recent Rand reports by Michael Swaine, Rand's resident China expert. Mr. Swaine is a noted soft-liner on China with a reputation for playing down the growing threat from China's military modernization.
What ticked off the Air Force brass was a recent report co-authored by Mr. Swaine titled "Interpreting China's Grand Strategy." The report echoes the pro-Beijing political line of many U.S. China specialists that China will not pose a threat for 30 years.
That view is contrary to numerous classified studies showing China's military buildup is likely to emerge as a threat to U.S. interests in 15 years or sooner. "We paid a million bucks for Chinese propaganda," one general said of the report.
Defense sources told us that Mr. Swaine was summoned to the Air Force's Pacific headquarters in Hawaii and told bluntly that his reports do not reflect any new research on China and are a "rehash" of other work. Pacific Air Force has stopped sponsoring his work.
Mr. Swaine told us he was not criticized in Hawaii but in fact "received a lot of very positive comments" about the study. He also said the report does not dismiss the possibility of a U.S. military confrontation with China over Taiwan before 2030.
One reason the Air Force was so upset with the report: The service is thinking about creating an Air Expeditionary Force - a rapid response team of fighters, bombers and support aircraft -that could be deployed quickly in the Pacific region. Highlighting the growing threat of a Chinese military attack on Taiwan, which could lead to U.S. intervention in support of the island, will boost support for the new mobile force.
Saving Montenegro
NATO is busy at work planning an intervention in Montenegro should Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic attempt to oust the Western-leaning president. Montenegro and Serbia are the only remaining republics in Yugoslavia.
President Milo Djukanovic of Montenegro has raised the possibility of bolting the two-state federation and declaring independence, setting up another confrontation between NATO and Mr. Milosevic's brutal armed forces.
Sources say NATO officials are planning either an uncontested or a forcible intervention, depending on Mr. Milosevic's willingness to take more punishment or acquiesce. A forced entry would involve drawing airborne troops from the United States.
One possible glitch is the topography of the airport in Podgorica, the capital. The only safe pullback route is the ocean.
Good mines
The United Nations remains a bastion of political opposition to land mines, the cause espoused by the late Princess Diana. And most of the U.N. member states, including many NATO allies, stand as vocal critics of the United States for refusing to sign on to the 1997 treaty banning land mines.
The world body now appears to be having second thoughts about the utility of the weapons. U.N. headquarters in New York wants the Pentagon to supply the shattered peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone with 1,200 anti-tank mines for protection against rampaging rebels.
Last week in the West African nation, the rebels captured some 500 Zambian, Kenyan and Indian peacekeepers and took control of 13 armored personnel carriers (APCs), along with weapons and uniforms.
"The U.N. appears to be coming around to understand the importance we attach to protecting our troops in the field with land mines," said a U.S. government official.
The U.N. peacekeeping force is made up of 8,900 troops, including 700 British paratroopers. Some former U.S. Special Forces soldiers also are said to be operating in the country under contract as international military consultants.
What do women want?
The Pentagon's civilian advisory committee on military women recently called on the Navy to begin sexually integrating submarines by putting female officers on missile boats. That's not all that's coveted by the 36-member Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. (DACOWITS) Its draft report to the services lists makes other demands. Among them:
• Allow women to operate the Army's Multiple Launch Rocket System and to fly its special operations helicopters.
• Attract more women to the Marine Corps.
• Put more bunks for women on Navy ships. Women sailors complain they can't get assigned to combat ships for lack of female berthing.
• Do a better job of providing women's uniforms. Female troops complain of problems with "design, durability, fit, cost and availability."
• A review of each service's policy for discharging pregnant women and any information on education programs that discuss men's responsibility for pregnancies.
DACOWITS also complimented the Army for "its recent progress in promoting women into senior career-enhancing assignments."
Intercepts
• In November 1995, as 20,000 U.S. troops prepared for peacekeeping duty in Bosnia, Gen. Ronald Fogleman, the Air Force chief of staff, had this prediction:
"What we really envision is we'll go in, we'll peak at a given strength and then hopefully we won't wait until the one-year point and then everybody packs up on the 365th day," Gen. Fogleman said. "We will start pulling forces out as we see that we do not need them."
Gen. Fogleman was repeating the Clinton administration's promise of a one-year stay. Today, nearly five years later, Gen. Fogleman is retired and U.S. troops remain in Bosnia, with no end to the mission in sight.
• Rep. Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii Democrat, walked back into the House Armed Services Committee hearing room this week just as members completed a vote on a Republican-sponsored amendment.
"Aye," Mr. Abercrombie yelled. As fellow Democrats whispered that he voted the wrong way, the congressman inquired, "Mr. Chairman, can I ask what we're voting on?" He then changed his vote to a "no." The amendment passed.
---
Women in Military Say Silence on Harassment Protects Careers
New York Times
May 12, 2000
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/051200military-harass.html
WASHINGTON, May 11 -- Out of the blue, when they were cooling down after their regular morning jog, a colonel was groped by her male running partner, another colonel who forcefully tried to embrace her, she said.
"We were back at my house and he just sort of pushed himself on me," the woman said. "I pushed him back and said 'no' and that was it."
The woman, who is now one of the military's senior officers and insists that her name not be revealed, said she did not report this unwanted sexual advance when it happened a few years ago. She said she feared that her reputation and her career could have been ruined if she filed an official complaint.
Even with the news this week that the Army inspector general, acting on a formal sexual harassment complaint, found that Lt. Gen. Claudia J. Kennedy had been the victim of inappropriate sexual advances from another Army general, the senior officer who said she was accosted after jogging said she still believed she did the right thing.
"No one's career was hurt, not mine and not his," she said.
The case of General Kennedy, the Army's highest-ranking woman, has revived the question of how pervasive sexual harassment remains in the military and how such cases should be handled. Women in the military are reluctant to file harassment complaints, many female officers said, because they fear opening their personal lives to examination and being blamed for inviting a sexual advance.
"Now, instead of being remembered as the first woman to earn three stars in the Army, she is going to be remembered as that woman with the sex complaint," said the senior officer who, like most of the other 15 senior officers interviewed for this article, spoke only on the condition that she not be identified.
Of those officers, all but three said that they had been the target of sexual harassment in the military.
In interviews, these 13 women all said that to protect their careers they never reported a one-time case of sexual harassment. They marveled that General Kennedy, so close to retirement, would have subjected herself to the backlash and tarnished reputation that would inevitably come from making a sexual harassment charge.
"She could have ignored this," said another officer. "I suspect right now some companies that might have considered her for employment may not now because of the high visibility of this issue."
The women said they generally accepted General Kennedy's account that she made the complaint against Maj. Gen. Larry G. Smith four years after the incident only upon learning that he had been appointed deputy inspector general of the Army, a position that included investigating sexual harassment.
There could be no other reason, they said, to willingly open oneself to the personal scrutiny that would come with reporting an incident.
Under military guidelines, a victim of a one-time incident is advised to handle the problem herself, unless it is a flagrant assault. If the harasser makes a second attempt, that is cause for a complaint. Most of those cases are handled with counseling or letters of reprimand.
In more serious cases, the charge is rarely sexual harassment; it is more likely to be maltreatment of a subordinate or assault and battery.
Women who are senior officers today -- lieutenant colonel or higher in the Army and Air Force, commander or higher in the Navy, and command sergeant majors in the enlisted ranks -- were among the first to integrate their services. They watched as the parade of public sexual scandals in the military mirrored their private stories.
They said that during the 1980's, when they were junior officers, they put up with wolf whistles and cat-calls as well as outright sexual assaults, waiting for the services to change. As they rose in rank and the military began cracking down on inappropriate behavior, the harassment became more subtle, "stealth-like" in the words of more than one woman, like getting nuzzled on the dance floor or having legs massaged under a dinner table.
"It takes so much courage for a woman to come forward with a complaint," said Lt. Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a forensic psychiatrist in the Army who works with women who bring charges of sexual assault, the description that General Kennedy has told friends she believes best describes her encounter.
"What is most likely to happen is a negative effect on your career,"Colonel Ritchie said. The women who bring charges of sexual assault against a man that lead to a trial generally resign from the Army within a year, she said, whether the man was found guilty or innocent.
Often, Colonel Ritchie said, the victims of harassment in the military have the same reaction: "Shame, humiliation and wanting to get out of the service -- they leave within one year."
In recent polls, surveys and reports, incidents of sexual harassment are down in the military. Even the female senior officers said they believed all branches of the military have made progress in combating sexual harassment.
But the legal and medical experts who supervise these cases say the figures are low, because most cases go unreported.
The latest figures from the Department of Defense show a dramatic decrease from 1,599 in 1993 to 558 in 1998. But a top military legal expert in the department said "those numbers are on the low end" because so many incidents are not reported.
"You want to be pretty skeptical of those figures -- they are not going to capture the vast majority of sexual harassment cases," said the senior officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a blizzard of e-mail messages and private conversations over the last month, enlisted women as well as junior and senior officers are questioning the reporting policies of the military and searching for a middle ground that would allow women to make complaints without risking their careers in unwanted publicity.
"I'm angry and getting angrier by the day," wrote one senior officer, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. "What message does this send to young women?"
Without knowing how many cases go unreported, the women said, they are wondering how different the military is from civilian life.
In the last decade, charges of sexual harassment in the civilian workplace have risen by 150 percent, from 6,127 cases in 1990 to 15,222 cases last year, according to figures compiled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The Kennedy case has prompted female senior officers to tell each other and their male colleagues their own stories of sexual harassment to underscore that General Kennedy was not the only senior officer who resisted reporting a sexual advance.
One woman who is now a higher-ranking officer said that over five years ago, when she was still a lieutenant colonel, she asked her boss for advice about advanced training schools. In response, he requested oral sex.
"I went in to talk to my commanding officer, a colonel, about which officer training school I would attend and he said he could get me in anywhere I wanted to go if I would do it for him," she said.
She turned around, walked out of the office without saying a word and spent the next three days asking herself what she had done wrong. She said that she seriously thought about retiring from the military.
"It changed my life," she said. "I feel it just as deeply today as I did then. I was personally and professionally cut to the core."
Air Force Maj. Gen. Susan L. Pamerleau, one of the few officers who agreed to be named, said she had wrestled with the question of reporting sexual harassment and the complicated messages coming out of the Kennedy case. She said that she had done exactly what General Kennedy did four years ago.
"In the past, I've experienced inappropriate behavior and I have personally dealt with it," she said. But, echoing the sentiments of most of the other officers, she said, "the fact that General Kennedy raised the issue and that the military gave it such importance does say we are serious about creating an environment free of harassment and discrimination."
The initial Army inquiry substantiated the accusation of General Kennedy that General Smith grabbed her and tried to kiss her in her office at the Pentagon in 1996, Pentagon officials said. The vice-chief of the Army will now review the case and make his finding. Then General Smith has the right to rebut the finding, which could lead to further investigations, before the vice-chief makes a final judgment.
The inspector general of the Pentagon will then review the case to ensure that there are no procedural problems.
Following the Tailhook scandal in 1991, the Pentagon and the individual services created anti-harassment policies and took steps to crack down on the problem, including special training on sexual harassment for personnel at all ranks.
But in the circumscribed world of the military, where it is hard to tell when the professional day ends and private life begins, women and men are together from early morning exercise to the last beer at the officer's club or barracks. And despite the new policies, sexual harassment remains a problem, particularly for women in the junior ranks.
One woman tapped the work of the military strategist Karl von Clausewitz to describe what it is like to have spent the last 20 to 30 years integrating the military. She pointed to his theory of friction, how the countless small things on a battlefield that a commander cannot control may come together and have a cumulative effect that is devastating.
"It's the same when you are a woman in the military and you put up with the little slights -- the hesitation to salute, soldiers calling you mom instead of ma'am, hearing the old debate about whether we belong in the military and then some event happens to you, real sexual harassment, and that puts you over the top and you are out of here," she said.
---
General plans to challenge charge of sexual harassment
Washington Times
May 12, 2000
By Rowan Scarborough
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000512224427.htm
Army Maj. Gen. Larry G. Smith plans to contest a charge of sexual harassment after the Army inspector general's investigation concluded he inappropriately touched Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy during a Pentagon office visit in 1996.
Military sources said he steadfastly maintains his innocence and is thinking of asking the Defense Department inspector general to reinvestigate the case.
The sources said Gen. Smith insists he merely hugged Gen. Kennedy at the end of a friendly meeting to discuss old times.
Gen. Kennedy said the physical contact went further, accusing him of grabbing and kissing her before she told him to back off.
The Army inspector general's report, now in the hands of the Army vice chief of staff, has concluded that something untoward went on during the October 1996 meeting. A former staffer has told investigators that Gen. Kennedy's demeanor changed markedly afterward -testimony that helps corroborate her charge.
"He felt very close to her professionally and put his arm around her and gave her a hug," said a military source familiar with the case. "He vehemently denies any inappropriate touching or groping. His intent is to take it on the best way he can."
Gen. Smith's fate is now in the hands of Gen. John Keane, the Army vice chief. He has been reviewing the report and conferring with Army lawyers.
If Gen. Keane approves the report's conclusion, he will likely handle punishment administratively by issuing a reprimand, ending Gen. Smith's career. Gen. Smith then would only have two options: retire or ask the Pentagon inspector general to reinvestigate on the grounds that Army investigators presented information in the wrong light or inaccurately.
Legal sources say the case does not rise to the level of a court-martial charge.
Sources said part of Gen. Smith's argument is that he has a spotless record as a soldier and no past charges of sexual harassment.
There are no witnesses to the incident. Gen. Kennedy's office door was open during the visit. She normally holds discussions at a table that is out of the view of her staff.
Gen. Smith, 55, a Vietnam combat veteran who is married and has children, is said to be "devastated" by Gen. Kennedy's charge.
Gen. Kennedy, a 52-year-old divorcee, did not report the incident at the time. But she filed a complaint last fall, after learning that Gen. Smith was about to become the deputy Army inspector general, in charge of all personnel investigations, including sexual harassment cases.
Gen. Kennedy, who is the Army's highest-ranking female officer and deputy chief of staff for intelligence, believed he was unsuited for that post. But her aim was not to ruin his career, sources said.
The two served together at Fort McPherson, Ga., while assigned to Army Forces Command. They were neighbors on the base. Gen. Smith's wife became friends with Gen. Kennedy.
Gen. Kennedy has ties to prominent Democratic Party financial contributors and has been mentioned as a long-shot candidate for vice president as Al Gore's running mate.
She had been mentioned as a possible candidate for several senior intelligence posts before announcing her retirement for this summer.
The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that the Army inspector general had substantiated the charge.
Gen. Smith and Gen. Kennedy have declined to discuss the case publicly. The Army's public affairs office at the Pentagon also has refused comment.
Gen. Smith's career is on hold. He is a special assistant to the commander of Army Materiel Command in Alexandria, Va.
The Army already has had to deal with embarrassing high-profile cases of sexual harassment. Its former top enlisted man challenged charges of sexual misconduct and was acquitted at court-martial of all but an obstruction of justice count.
Retired Gen. David R. Hale, who was the Army's deputy inspector general, pleaded guilty at a court-martial to conducting inappropriate relationships with the wives of three subordinates.
-------- us nuc facilities
ENERGY DEPARTMENT FINDS LITTLE RISK OF NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS
AmeriScan: May 12, 2000
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/may2000/2000L-05-12-09.html
WASHINGTON, DC, May 12, 2000 (ENS) - The Department of Energy (DOE) has released the results of a nuclear safety assessment of key DOE sites around the country. The study concludes that there is no imminent risk of a nuclear accident at the department's nuclear sites but also highlights steps that should be taken to improve nuclear safety programs and the professional expertise of those responsible for implementing nuclear safety precautions. The study was ordered by President Bill Clinton after the September 1999 nuclear accident in Japan. "Safety is job one at all of our nuclear facilities," said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. "I will make sure the Department of Energy takes every step to continually strengthen and improve the ways we ensure the safety of our workers, the public and the environment."
The report, "Nuclear Criticality Safety at Key Department of Energy Facilities," assesses the risk of an unplanned nuclear reaction - or nuclear criticality accident - at major sites in the department's nuclear weapons complex. The study finds that the risk of an accident similar to the one in Japan does not exist in the U.S., primarily because the DOE has adopted and adheres to national standards for operations and training designed to reduce the risk of these types of accidents. The report focuses on the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, now threatened by wildfire; Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site outside Denver, Colorado; Hanford Site in Washington; Savannah River Site in South Carolina; and Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennesee. The report is available at: http://www.eh.doe.gov
----
Congress Wrestles With Compensation
May 12, 2000 Filed at 2:03 a.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Price-of-Health.html
http://www.foxnews.com/health/051200/exposed.sml
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress is wrestling with the Clinton administration's plan to compensate every radiation-exposed, cancer-stricken nuclear weapons factory worker, living and dead.
For lawmakers, it means decisions both financial and moral: What's a fair payment for a shortened life or ruined health? What should determine who gets paid and who doesn't?
``These are people's lives we're talking about. No amount of money can make up for that, but we've got to do as much as we can to help these people,'' said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, whose district includes the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, an Energy Department facility where uranium is processed for nuclear weapons.
The administration's plan offers $100,000 lump sum payments only to those who contracted cancer and beryllium disease, and steers other sick employees to state workers' compensation programs. It would not allow compensated workers to sue the government or government contractors for further damages.
Most of the estimated 3,000 workers who would be in line for federal payments worked at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state; the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee; the Savannah River Site in South Carolina; the Nevada Test Site; the Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site in Colorado; the Pantex Plant in Texas; the Fernald and Mound plants in Ohio; and the gaseous diffusion plants in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.
At all those facilities, the government now acknowledges, secrecy often was more important than safety during the Cold War.
Workers have described being sent into highly radioactive areas without any film in their radiation-measuring film badges; going without lung protection into areas where contaminants created a thick fog; and eating their lunches on the same tabletops where they wiped down leaking chemical containers.
Some spent years trying to get accurate information on their medical conditions but got documents with the identity of what they were exposed to blacked out for security reasons. In some cases, exposure records were altered or destroyed.
Sam Ray, a disabled former employee at the Portsmouth plant, said he and other production workers were never told about plutonium and other contaminants in the uranium they were processing.
``Information was provided based on a 'need to know' basis -- and production imperatives determined what you needed to know,'' he told a recent congressional hearing. ``Even to this day, we don't know what we confronted.''
Ruben Slesinger, a University of Pittsburgh economics professor who frequently testifies in lawsuits, calculating dollar figures to help set damages for injured people, said he could imagine few instances in which the administration's compensation offer would be adequate.
``Anyone who takes the $100,000 is foolish,'' he said. ``They're being hoodwinked.
``Unless someone worked up until the day he died, lost wages alone would probably be more than that. Three years of lost wages is over $100,000,'' he said.
Slesinger said the minimum should be $350,000.
Even the most generous packages being devised on Capitol Hill don't go that far. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., introduced legislation this week to make the minimum payment $200,000.
The lawmakers say they expect some kind of compensation program to pass, but expect long negotiations to determine the price tag and a way to pay for it.
``Congress appropriates billions of dollars annually on things that are not the responsibility of the federal government,'' Voinovich said. ``Here we have a clear instance where our federal government is responsible for the actions it has taken and the negligence it has shown against its own people.
``It is not only a responsibility of this government to provide for these individuals, it is a moral obligation.''
On the Net: Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's compensation announcement: http://www.doe.gov/news/releases00/aprpr/pr00103.htm
The offer's details: http://www.eh.doe.gov/benefits
Text of compensation bills H.R. 4398 and S.B. 2519: http://thomas.loc. gov
-------- maryland
Atomic dust taints records
Radioactive matter found by researchers reclassifying secrets;
Archives at College Park
By Laura Sullivan,
Baltimore Sun
May 12 2000
http://www.sunspot.net/content/cover/story?section=cover&pagename=story&storyid=1150340208044
Researchers from the National Archives, reclassifying millions of records holding some of the nation's most closely guarded nuclear secrets, have made a startling discovery - some of the documents are themselves radioactive.
More than 50 years after the Manhattan Project ushered in the Atomic Age, researchers working for the Department of Energy found a gray dust on a few of the papers that turned out to be uranium, archive and Energy Department officials said.
While the contamination is limited to a few boxes, the Energy Department plans to conduct a sweep of the archives in College Park by the end of the year to check for contamination. Until then, archive and energy officials told the 50 researchers who are reviewing 1.2 billion pieces of paper over the next seven years to keep an eye out for anything that "looks suspicious."
The problem was spotted in January when a researcher, reviewing 50-year- old notes about radiation, noticed the dust and an envelope containing what looked like metal fragments. Archive officials asked their conservation lab, which usually works on ways to stop paper from deteriorating, to find out what it was.
The radiation dose was small and could not be detected outside the box, archive spokeswoman Susan Cooper said.
All 50 employees were doused in a special wash and checked for radioactivity. They now keep on hand a Geiger counter to detect radiation.
"We've notified all our reviewers to be careful," said Roger K. Heusser, director of the declassification project for the Department of Energy. "Most of these records are letters and reports in file folders. If you do see a packet of powder, it's pretty evident there is something unusual in there."
Archive and Department of Energy officials have been hesitant to talk about the matter, saying they did not want to blow out of proportion what they have deemed small incidents.
The contaminated records were among a huge stash that came from dozens of sources, from laboratories across the country to federal agencies in Washington, all a product of President Clinton's order in 1995 to declassify documents more than 25 years old.
In 1998, the Department of Energy commissioned a survey of some records other agencies were turning over to the archives for declassification and found "significant amounts" of sensitive information about the Manhattan Project, the effort to build the first atomic bomb, and nuclear weaponry.
In one instance, officials found in another agency's files complete design plans of several nuclear weapons that had never been marked classified.
Shortly afterward, Congress gave the Energy Department $7.8 million a year to train and hire the 50 reviewers who are sifting through records in the archives' classified stacks and in its public stacks, as well as in storage rooms at other agencies. The project is second in size only to the Department of Defense's initiative to review its classified records.
Energy officials say what has surprised them most about finding the radioactive material is that no one noticed it before sending the boxes off to the archives, suggesting that the originating agencies never opened the boxes to check for classified information.
The Department of Energy reviewers are also pulling a few records out of the archive's public stacks that have been viewed by people visiting the archives and are reclassifying them as "restricted."
Archive officials do not believe those records were contaminated.
"Everybody, including the Department of Energy, has been concerned that their records have been inadvertently turned over to the public," said Jeanne Schauble, director of declassification and processing at the archives. "The Department of Energy has a particular problem because of the continued sensitivity of their records. Nobody wants to give away details of the atomic bomb."
Critics of the effort say that the department is reclassifying too much material and that much information about bombs and nuclear power is commonplace and widely disseminated. They worry that fears about radiation will further slow the process, although department officials said they are on schedule.
"I had to wait many, many years just to get records declassified that I had worked on," said University of Chicago physics professor John A. Simpson, one of the last remaining scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. "By now it is standard industrial technique to make these components. There are no secrets anymore."
"Some of these records that are 60 years old would actually help people to understand better why we want and need to resolve things internationally" rather than militarily, he said.
Uranium, a chemical element, is the foundation for the atomic bomb. In one of its forms, it is highly unstable and bursts open like a bag stuffed too full, Simpson said.
The records from the University of Chicago and laboratories in Los Alamos, N.M., and Washington came into the possession of the Atomic Energy Commission. In the mid-1970s, the AEC's work was turned over to the newly created Department of Energy.
Richard Rhodes, author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and "Dark Sun," said it should come as no surprise that some scientist or bureaucrat 50 years ago included a radioactive substance in a box of files. Scientists had much different perceptions then about radiation and knowledge of elements, he said.
Some argue that people today are paranoid about damaging effects those elements might have in small doses.
"They had a very different sense back then than we do today about some of these elements," Rhodes said. "Whether they were right or we are is an interesting question."
-------- new mexico
On Run From Wildfire, New Mexicans Take Shelter in Santa Fe
Washington Post
Friday, May 12, 2000; Page A21
By Rene Sanchez Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-05/12/090l-051200-idx.html
SANTA FE, N.M., May 11-On the run from a fire that will not quit, hundreds of dazed New Mexico families poured into makeshift shelters here tonight, carrying little but the clothes on their backs and deeply worried that all they left behind has been turned into ashes.
They move, but the wildfire follows. For some, this city about 30 miles from the evacuated and burning community of Los Alamos is the third frantic stop in two days. Those who had stuffed their cars with belongings and fled to nearby White Rock had to pack again this morning and drive here to escape the raging blaze, which began six days ago.
At Santa Fe High School, one of several shelters for victims of the wildfires, the gymnasium and the cafeteria were hastily lined with several hundred cots. Vans carrying food, clothing and toys pulled up through the night. "I got stuffed animals and I got diapers," one man in a vehicle called out to a volunteer.
For the families, it was a time of wandering, waiting, hoping their homes have been spared.
"There's so much anxiety," said Susan Benjamin, a grief counselor volunteering her assistance. "No one is sleeping. They've been up for 24, even 36 hours now, moving in the middle of the night. It's very traumatic."
Jack Roberts, a physicist at the government's nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, spent this evening quietly staring at a computer screen in the school cafeteria as his young daughters played in a room filled with donated games and videos. Other families were studying three other computer screens to see which parts of their towns had taken a direct hit from the fires.
"We got a call at 1 a.m. to evacuate, and we were gone in an hour," Roberts said. "I'm not sure what we even managed to take with us. It's tough. We've had wildfires, but no one here has ever experienced anything like this one before. We're telling the girls that hopefully this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing."
Six televisions that had been scattered around the cafeteria drew tense crowds that fell silent as screens showed images of flame and smoke.
Outside the gymnasium, in a windswept parking lot, a few families leaned on cars and campers as the sun set and watched the grim clouds from the fire smudge the horizon.
John Sanchez, a chemical engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was there with his wife Gloria and their three daughters. They have lived near Los Alamos for the past 25 years and had just finished remodeling their home.
The high school was their third stop since the fire had chased them away two long days ago.
"It just seems to keep getting worse out there," Sanchez said as his daughters sat on the asphalt rubbing teary eyes. "It's so unusual. We've never seen anything like this kind of fire. It looks like they did not take care of it the right way from the very beginning."
They all feared their home was gone. "So many priceless memories," Gloria Sanchez said.
"At least I had time to hose down the roof with water before we left," her husband replied. But that was all the optimism he could muster.
"With a fire this bad," he said, "all you can really do is hope."
---
A-Bomb's Birthplace Burns Forest Fire Sweeps Los Alamos Houses
Washington Post
Friday, May 12, 2000; Page A01
By Rene Sanchez and Paul Duggan Washington Post Staff Writers
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-05/12/213l-051200-idx.html
SANTA FE, N.M., May 11-An out-of-control forest fire, ignited by a routine National Park Service fire prevention effort, raged into Los Alamos and a nearby community today, burning hundreds of homes and reaching the Los Alamos National Laboratory as firefighters struggling to contain the blaze were frustrated by high winds.
By sunset, a thick, gray curtain of smoke draped a large part of the sky between Los Alamos and this city, which was deluged today with thousands of weary, fearful refugees from the raging fire.
"It's unbelievable. I've never seen a fire so huge and so strong moving so fast," said Alison Beckman as she picked up bags of toiletries at a shelter on the outskirts of town. She had fled her neighborhood in the wee hours of this morning. "It really took a lot of people by surprise, and they say the worst winds may be tonight."
In some areas near Los Alamos, wind gusts reaching 60 mph stoked the fire. Authorities said tonight that their course and power were still difficult to predict, but forecasts called for calmer skies on Friday.
In mandatory evacuations that began late Wednesday, everyone in Los Alamos and nearby White Rock--about 18,000 people in all--had fled their homes by this afternoon, many retreating 30 miles southeast to shelters here. Meanwhile, firefighters who have been battling the fast-moving inferno for several days, continued trying to slow it, but with little success.
At the government's Los Alamos nuclear lab--closed by fire for the first time in its history--flames singed a research building but did not ignite it and came within 300 yards of the plutonium facility. Explosives and radioactive material were protected in fireproof facilities, lab officials said.
The first atomic bombs were built in Los Alamos during World War II by the supersecret Manhattan Project.
"We can assure the country and New Mexico that our nuclear materials are safe," said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who visited Los Alamos to monitor the blaze.
Chuck Hagerdon, a U.S. Forest Service ranger near Los Alamos, said gusty winds made fighting the blaze extremely difficult. "Today's been a horrible day," he said. With the blaze roaring into town today, Hagerdon said, "We're ready for the worst--and we're getting it."
The disaster originated last week, while National Park Service workers were burning dead brush in an area about six miles from Los Alamos, officials said. The "controlled burning" went out of control amid "high winds that had not been predicted," Hagerdon said. But angry evacuees said today that high winds are normal during spring in New Mexico and that the park service should have been more cautious.
"That's pretty much what everybody's saying," said Mary Lou Oothoudt, 50, who fled White Rock with her husband and their two teenagers. "Why? Why were they doing it this time of year? Who made the decision? People are very upset, because spring here is always very windy. They should have waited."
President Clinton, answering reporters' questions in the Rose Garden about the park service practice of starting small fires to head off larger ones, said his administration is "examining all that now."
"The Forest Service for a very long time has had these controlled burns, but we have to look in to see what the real facts are and what the responsibility of the government is," Clinton said. "Right now we should be focusing on doing everything we can to minimize the damage of the fire and protect the lab assets, deal with the human problems."
Near Los Alamos, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) said he asked the General Accounting Office for an investigation and said he believes that "the person in charge of the park service here that authorized this is most responsible."
The National Park Service superintendent who took responsibility for the fire--Roy Weaver--was placed on administrative leave with pay late today, an action officials said did not reflect on Weaver's decisions regarding the fire, the Associated Press reported.
Richardson said that measuring devices within the lab compound had not registered any "radiological leakages."
He said the fire burned through an area where high explosives were contained in concrete bunkers. "The fire blew straight through," he said. "It charred the area, but did not harm anything in the bunkers."
As for the plutonium facility, Los Alamos lab director John Browne said it "was designed to withstand the crash of a 747 [jetliner] into it, and so the plutonium is inside in vaults and is secured."
In Santa Fe, the Oothoudt family and others took shelter in motels and a local high school and watched news broadcasts of their neighborhoods being destroyed.
"The whole street across the canyon from me is gone," said Judy Lovejoy, 43, who fled Los Alamos with her son and daughter, ages 8 and 9. "The new development up the road--a half-mile from me--that's gone too. I saw it on TV. The only thing that could have saved our house is the grace of God."
Given short notice by authorities Wednesday that she had to leave her three-bedroom duplex, Lovejoy said, she packed some clothes, photographs and tax records, and piled them in her vehicle. Her son grabbed his Pokemon cards and a game called "Crazy Bones." Her daughter gathered up 30 or 40 of her Beanie Babies.
"That's all we have left," Lovejoy said.
In Los Alamos, a community of 11,000, and White Rock, a community of 7,000, the fire had damaged or destroyed about 400 houses as of late today, officials said. Some of the structures were burned to their foundations. But no injuries had been reported.
The fire originated about six miles southwest of Los Alamos, at the Bandelier National Monument, where the park service on May 4 began what it calls "controlled burning." Workers were burning felled trees and other dry, highly flammable brush an area of about 300 acres, a routine precaution against forest fires.
Hagerdon said the weather conditions--including temperature, relative humidity, wind speeds and other factors--were "within the prescribed parameters" for the activity, until high winds kicked up last Friday and "they lost control of the fire."
After an ember blew into a nearby canyon and ignited dry brush, he said, the fire quickly grew and began its march. By Wednesday morning, it had burned about 4,000 acres of woodland. But fueled by Wednesday's wind gusts of up to 60 mph, the blaze had consumed nearly 20,000 acres of pine forest by day's end, Hagerdon said.
The winds Wednesday and today grounded planes and helicopters that had been dumping water and other fire-retardant substances on the blaze. On the ground, Hagerdon said, firefighters today were working on the flanks of the blaze, clearing the ground of flammable brush, with the goal of encircling the blaze.
"We can keep our fingers crossed, but it just doesn't look good," said Gov. Gary Johnson (R).
Duggan reported from Austin. Staff writer Walter Pincus in Washington contributed to this report.
---
18,000 flee New Mexico blaze
Excite News
Updated 12:00 PM ET May 12, 2000
From Staff Reports Colorado Daily U. Colorado
http://news.excite.com/news/uw/000512/university-81
(U-WIRE) LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- A wildfire has swept into the New Mexico town of Los Alamos, consuming hundreds of homes and posing a continuing threat to nuclear materials stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Firefighters thought they had the fire under control yesterday, but gusting winds carried sparks and flames across fire lines to set off blazes in the town and on the grounds of the laboratory, the nation's largest nuclear weapons facility.
Early Wednesday, Los Alamos fire response spokesman Jim Paxon said firefighters would have difficulty preventing the fire's spread. "If we can hold our lines today, we'll consider it a victory," said Paxon.
By midnight Wednesday, during a press briefing in White Rock, about 10 miles southeast of Los Alamos, Paxon acknowledged that the fire had gotten away. "This fire is going to go where it wants to," he said. "There are embers being thrown a mile ahead of the fireline."
"My worst fears were realized. I didn't think a fire could move that fast," said lab official Dick Buric.
All 11,500 residents of Los Alamos were evacuated Wednesday, and evacuations are underway in the nearby towns of Espanola and White Rock. As many as two thirds of the homes in Los Alamos have been destroyed or damaged.
On Wednesday, President Bill Clinton declared a state of emergency and a federal disaster area in the counties of Los Alamos, Sandoval and Santa Fe.
At a press conference today in New Mexico, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt, U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck and New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson assured the public that every effort is being made to protect nearby towns.
But Governor Johnson noted that those efforts are dependent on wind conditions. "Now we are at the mercy of the weather," Johnson said.
Today's regional forecast calls for continued hot, dry weather, with strong wind gusts reaching up to 60 miles per hour. Wednesday's winds reached a top speed of just 35 miles per hour.
Although flames engulfed one concrete weapons-testing building on Wednesday, lab officials say dangerous materials including plutonium and high explosives are secured in concrete and steel bunkers, and will not be affected by the fire.
"All lab buildings are secure," said Richardson, "All nuclear materials are safe. We're here to address the human tragedy."
Lab officials say plutonium is stored in the lab's northeast corner, across the compound from the fire.
The fire was set Friday in the Bandelier National Monument as a prescribed burn to reduce the amount of small trees and brush that might fuel a runaway forest fire. Chris Judson, spokesperson for the National Park Service, told ENS the fire got away when the wind unexpectedly changed direction.
The U.S. Forest Service said today that 18,000 acres have now been consumed by the fire.
"I share everybody's frustration that this has happened because of a controlled burn," said Governor Johnson. "This entire policy needs to be reviewed."
At the same time, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., called for an investigation to determine why the fire was set a week ago at Bandelier National Monument by the National Park Service to control underbrush.
Sarah Echols, a spokeswoman for Domenici, said details of the investigation are being worked out but it may involve the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
"It's come into question why the park service went ahead with the controlled burn in the first place," she said. "There are very serious drought conditions in New Mexico."
The National Weather Service reportedly warned against setting the fire last Thursday, but the park service said it did not receive the advisory. Prescribed or controlled burns are used to eliminate underbrush that might become fuel for larger fires.
The fire has consumed 18,000 acres of ponderosa pine forests since it broke out of control on May 5.
The fire had consumed only 3,700 acres as of early Wednesday, but the gusty winds that kicked up later in that day fanned the blaze into a river of fire, sending flames leaping hundreds of feet into the air. Pleau said 60 mph winds were forecast Thursday, and if the winds reached that velocity it could spell real trouble again for the 600 firefighters battling to slow down the raging blaze.
"The fire gets in these canyons, and it can whip in any direction," he said.
---
Nuclear lab scorched
Arizona Republic
May 12, 2000
The Associated Press
http://www.azcentral.com/news/0512firelede.shtml
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Driven by swirling winds of up 55 mph, fire rolled from block to block in this abandoned town Thursday, burning scores of homes to their foundations in the community where the atomic bomb was built.
Firefighters rushed to save houses as orange flames and billowing smoke rose over the town. Whole neighborhoods were reduced to ruins, with everything from trailers to mansions going up in smoke in a blaze that had been set by the government to clear away brush in the wilderness but raged out of control during the weekend.
The wildfire first reached Los Alamos on Wednesday, forcing the evacuation of the entire town, and exploded in size from 3,700 acres to 25,000 Thursday, fanned by blowtorch winds so strong they made parked cars sway.
"I can't believe how many homes are gone," said Don Shainin, an Albuquerque fire battalion commander who came to Los Alamos to help.
At the Los Alamos nuclear-weapons laboratory, flames scorched a research building, rolled over concrete bunkers containing high explosives, and came within 300 yards of a plutonium storage facility. But lab officials insisted that dangerous materials were protected in fireproof facilities strong enough to withstand a crash of a 747 jetliner.
"We can assure the country and New Mexico that our nuclear materials are safe," said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, a former New Mexico congressman.
Fire crews with hand tools and bulldozers worked feverishly to protect homes by clearing away vegetation and cutting firebreaks ahead of the flames. Helicopters dropped water on the blaze, while airplanes bombarded it with pink fire retardant.
County Manager Joe King estimated that 100 homes burned. Rep. Tom Udall, whose district includes Los Alamos, said federal officials estimated 300 to 400.
The number of people evacuated grew Thursday to more than 20,000, with residents to the north and northeast of Los Alamos also fleeing the fire.
The fire was set May 4 by the National Park Service to clear brush near Bandelier National Monument, but it burned out of control in the dry, windy weather. A special National Weather Service forecast faxed to the park beforehand said fire-growth conditions were at their highest.
Park Superintendent Roy Weaver has taken responsibility for the fire and was suspended Thursday by the Park Service pending an investigation. Members of Congress demanded an inquiry.
"It should never have happened. That's the only thing I can say unless you want me to curse," said Gail Bolger, who was forced out of her mobile-home park in Los Alamos to a shelter at a Santa Fe high school.
Whoever made the decision for the deliberate fire "should have known better," Bolger said. "This is the windy season. We have it every year, and I think he should have used his head."
Los Alamos, 70 miles north of Albuquerque, is essentially a company town for the weapons laboratory, which employs 7,000 people at buildings scattered throughout the city. The town is on a mesa, altitude 7,600 feet.
The fire came out of the Jemez Mountains to the west and moved northeast, torching the west and north sides of the town.
As the sun rose Thursday, brick fireplaces and chimneys were the only things remaining of some homes. A basketball hoop remained intact on one driveway, its net singed but still hanging outside a destroyed house.
The towering ponderosa pines of the Los Alamos Canyon along the western edge of town could be seen through the scorched shells of homes that had been valued at more than a quarter-million dollars.
About 150 National Guardsmen were called in to keep people out of the evacuated zones and prevent looting.
---
Lab Hazardous Materials Said Safe
New York Times
May 12, 2000 Filed at 12:27 a.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Fires-Laboratory.html
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- With a massive wildfire out of control in Los Alamos, federal officials sought to assure the public Thursday that the storied nuclear laboratory at the heart of the town is safe, with explosives and plutonium stored in fireproof bunkers and vaults.
``This is not an issue about national security or release of radiation. That is not occurring,'' Sen. Jeff Bingaman said. ``The lab is going to survive this in good shape.''
The lab, however, did suffer some fire damage Thursday.
``We've lost a number of transportables,'' lab spokesman John Gustafson said of trailers and portable buildings. ``No major structures have been affected, and certainly none of them lost.''
About 2,000 buildings dot mesas and canyons on the 43-square-mile property. The location, 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, was chosen by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer because of its remoteness and isolation.
This week, for the first time since it was established in 1943, the lab was shut down by fire. Only emergency personnel continued to work. The lab has about 7,000 employees.
All 11,000 people in the town of Los Alamos, an outgrowth of the lab, and another 7,000 in suburban White Rock fled as wildfires swept through the streets.
Lab director John Browne said the blazes spread through an area of the lab property where high explosives are stored in concrete bunkers. And flames also jumped to within 300 yards of the plutonium facility, said Kay Roybal, a spokeswoman for the lab.
She added that firefighters kept the wildfires at bay by burning nearby grasses to eliminate possible fuels, and that by afternoon the flames had shifted.
Gustafson said lab officials are monitoring air emissions for radioactivity.
``They took preliminary measurements ... and all those numbers showed results consistent with background readings from natural sources of radioactivity,'' he said.
John Rhoades, director of the lab's Bradbury Science Museum, said the facilities are safer today than years ago; after a 1996 fire that charred 16,683 acres and reached the perimeter of the lab's property, timber was removed from around structures and firebreaks were constructed.
He feels confident there is no way fire could reach into the bunkers or vaults to ignite explosives or radioactive materials.
``They're designed to withstand for something like four to six hours a fire burning right on top of the building,'' Rhoades said. ``It's like trying to light a steel ballbearing on fire.''
Greg Mello, executive director of the anti-nuclear Los Alamos Study Group, said he does not fear a disaster but claimed firefighters could inhale smoke tainted with chemicals. He said the fire has swept over an area where uranium has been blown up in the past and landed in the soil and trees.
``We do not know whether toxic materials have been burned,'' Mello said. ``It's possible, it's even likely to some extent, but it's not something to be panicked about.''
Los Alamos is one of three government nuclear weapons labs under the Energy Department; it is managed by the University of California. More than half of its $1.26 billion annual budget goes toward nuclear weapons programs, with the rest dedicated to research in environmental cleanup, alternative energy sources and biomedical sciences.
Historically, Los Alamos has been used to design, develop and test America's nuclear warheads. The key defense mission now is to maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile.
Los Alamos also has been the focus of a security and espionage controversy stemming from the apparent loss of nuclear warhead secrets to China in the 1980s. A lab scientist was fired last year after being suspected of mishandling nuclear weapons secrets. He has pleaded innocent to federal charges.
---
N.M. Fire Sends Smoke for Miles
New York Times
May 12, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Fires-Environment.html
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) -- The devastating fire that has charred 28,000 acres in and around Los Alamos draped a chalky haze over northern New Mexico and caused watery eyes, scratchy throats and runny noses for those living in the path of the smoke.
At times this week when high winds stoked the fire, smoke resembled a towering thunderhead, with a dense trail reaching into Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado. The plume had subsided Friday and didn't even reach the New Mexico-Texas line, more than 200 miles from Los Alamos, according to a government satellite photo.
Still, the smoke posed potential health problems for people living immediately downwind of the fire.
``Forest fire smoke contains a lot of really nasty compounds,'' said C. Mack Sewell, state epidemiologist in the New Mexico Department of Health. Among those are carbon monoxide. ``In terms of volume, 28,000 acres of forested land is just overwhelming in terms of pollutants put into the air.''
He advised people to remain indoors with the windows shut if they had respiratory problems such as asthma or if they felt eye and throat irritation.
``You can't go outside. It hurts your throat,'' said Terry Mulert, 36, who lives with his wife and 2-year-old son in Cordova, a tiny community north of Santa Fe, which is about 30 miles from Los Alamos. ``We left town the last couple of nights because it was so bad.''
Because of questions about pollution and health hazards from the fire, the Environmental Protection Agency and state Environment Department were installing air monitoring equipment to measure potential contaminants from the smoke. No results from sampling were expected until the weekend.
The fire invaded the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory property, which covers 43 square miles and 50 technical sites, but government agencies said air monitoring has detected no releases of radioactivity.
The lab, which is part of the federal nuclear weapons complex, permanently operates an air monitoring network on its property and nearby areas. Once the fire began, the lab temporarily placed air sampling devices in outlying towns -- some up to 40 miles away -- to test the smoke plume.
``This is to give that extra comfort level to the public to rest assured their health is not being impacted by radioactivity,'' said Doug Stavert, the lab's air quality group leader.
The lab has maintained that its supplies of radioactive materials and high explosives are safely protected from the fire in reinforced buildings or concrete bunkers.
But there are questions about what's happened to buried dumps on lab property -- some dating to early atomic bomb work in the 1940s -- that contain millions of cubic feet of wastes contaminated with plutonium, uranium and tritium.
Because of the continuing fire threat, the lab hasn't been able to survey the waste sites to determine which ones were burnt, Stavert said.
---
Los Alamos Fire: Park Service Draws Ire as Culprit
New York Times
May 12, 2000
By JAMES STERNGOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/051200nm-alamos.html
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., May 11 -- Fed by winds gusting up to 50 miles per hour, a wildfire resumed its path of devastation today, forcing the evacuation of as many as 25,000 people and destroying at least 260 homes but apparently not causing serious damage at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed.
Officials warned that there was still little chance of bringing the blaze under control until the weather changed. And local and national officials have begun to express anger at the National Park Service, which set what it had hoped would be a controlled fire a week ago before high winds sent it racing across heavily wooded canyons toward the populated areas.
As word spread here that the National Weather Service had warned before the fire was set that high winds were expected, the Interior Department, which operates the Park Service, announced late in the day that Roy Weaver, the superintendent of the Bandelier National Monument, where the fire was set, had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
"I believe someone is responsible," Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, said at a news conference here this morning. "The person in charge at the Park Service who authorized the burn is most responsible." Mr. Domenici said he intended to ask for a federal investigation of the plan.
Although about 20,000 acres have burned and more than 1,000 emergency and fire personnel are fighting the blaze, no injuries have been reported, and the hasty evacuation of the huge number of people was described as orderly.
But Los Alamos presented a disconcerting tableau today. Fire vehicles rushed about its blackened streets, the skies were dark with thick plumes of smoke, and helicopters whirred overhead, carrying huge buckets of water. Most neighborhoods presented an eerie checkerboard of destruction, with houses seemingly selected at random for total destruction alongside other homes left unscathed.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who flew in from a conference in San Diego this morning, said the Los Alamos National Laboratory had suffered some fire damage but was secure. Energy Department officials said the fire had passed over some concrete and earth bunkers where conventional explosives are stored, causing no damage. The officials said that at one point the fire had come within 300 yards of a building where plutonium is stored but that the building is heavily fortified and is safe. Though some nuclear material is stored at the laboratory, there are no nuclear weapons there.
Mr. Richardson said there were no signs that any radiation had been released.
Of the 11,000 people who work at the laboratory, only security guards and one dozen or two dozen people working in the emergency operations center remain, said Kay Roybal, a spokeswoman for the laboratory.
Ms. Roybal would not speculate on how experiments might be affected by the closing of the laboratory but said that scientists each year must plan around a shutdown from Christmas through Jan. 1. "I think there are ways to handle most of that," she said. "Whether people had time to do that this time, I can't say."
Each day of the shutdown costs $3.5 million to $5 million in salaries.
At first, just the 11,000 or so residents of Los Alamos, a town high on a mesa at about 7,200 feet, had been evacuated. But starting last night and then throughout the day today the residents of the nearby towns of White Rock and Abiqui and areas in the Espanola Valley were told to leave. Abiqui is famous for having been the home of the painter Georgia O'Keefe for many years, and much of her work is still kept there.
A local radio station took calls from people all day who recounted having been given just minutes to clear out of their homes. Many said they had had time to do little more than throw some clothes into garbage bags, grab their children and pets and flee, with the smoke and flames visible nearby.
In the streets of Los Alamos, the heat of the fires transformed many houses, cars, utility poles and lawns into cinders. Typical was 49th Street in the western part of the city, where the once tidy homes were razed in twos and threes, while other homes close by were untouched, the grass of their lawns still green.
Viola Stowe, a resident of the city, who had been evacuated to a shelter at a high school in Espanola, said she had watched a house burn on the television news last night, and only when the camera pulled back did she realize it was her own.
"You don't plan for these things," she said. "You don't think it'll happen to you."
President Clinton declared the region a disaster area on Wednesday, making it eligible for federal aid.
Today in Washington, when asked about the government's liability for the fire, the president said, "We have to look in to see what the real facts are and what the responsibility of the government is.
"Right now we should be focusing on doing everything we can to minimize the damage of the fire and protect the lab assets, deal with the human problems," Mr. Clinton said.
Emergency officials flew here today from Washington to help control the fire and to plan relief efforts.
The fire was burning to the north and to the northeast today, away from populated areas. But firefighters were concerned, in part because the flames were spewing burning chunks of wood thousands of feet into the air, where they were blown as far as a mile and starting new fires.
Kevin Purtymun, a Los Alamos police officer, said another concern was that because the fires had left many houses and trees standing, there was still plenty of fuel if the blaze roared across the city again.
"Really, anything can happen now," said Mike Gowey, a Forest Service firefighter. "There are spot fires everywhere. This is nowhere near under control."
The National Park Service defended the practice of setting controlled, or "prescribed," fires, saying the fires are an essential means of heading off devastating accidental fires in forests that have grown overly dense because of fire suppression over the years.
"The purpose of a prescribed burn is to eliminate underbrush to head off catastrophic fires," said Michael Gauldin, the chief spokesman for the Interior Department. He said such burns were conducted over millions of acres every year, by the Forest Service, the Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
The fire was set last Thursday as part of an effort by officials at Bandelier National Monument to thin out some of the dense growth that makes the pine forests in the region among the most combustible in the country.
Park Service officials said they had weighed all the factors before deciding to go ahead with the burn, including the density of the growth, the moisture in the wood, the relative humidity, the temperature and the wind speed.
"The data and the spot weather forecasts met the fire prescription," the Bandelier superintendent, Mr. Weaver, said in an interview before his suspension was announced. "It's not like someone was just picking things out of the air."
Mr. Weaver said the fire team had requested and received weather updates throughout the day, as late as two hours before the flames were ignited at 7:20 p.m. on Thursday. Seeing no reason to call off the plan, the crew set the fire. Then, he said, the winds whipped up unexpectedly, and the flames began spreading toward Los Alamos.
About seven hours before the fire was set, the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque faxed a report, requested by Bandelier, predicting that winds on the ridge tops would increase to 10 to 15 m.p.h.
that evening, gusting to 20 m.p.h. the next day. The report also said relative humidity would not increase as much as it normally does in the evening, a factor that would increase the risk of the fire's spreading.
Dr. Wallace Covington, a professor at Northern Arizona University's School of Forestry in Flagstaff, said that these numbers, while not ideal, would not rule out a burn. If the ground is too wet and the air too still, he said, a burn will not do its job.
Mr. Weaver said his staff had tried a controlled burn in the same area in fall 1992, when the air was more humid and still. "It accomplished nothing," Mr. Weaver said. "We wasted our time and resources."
---
Blaze spreads, so does call for answers
USA Today
05/11/00
By Tom Kenworthy and Patrick O'Driscoll
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndsthu06.htm
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - On April 26, the Los Alamos National Laboratory hosted a conference called "Wildfire 2000: Los Alamos at Risk." Among the speakers was the fire officer at nearby Bandelier National Monument. His talk bore a reassuring message: "Prescribed Burns: Reducing the Wildfire Threat."
That conference now seems a cruel irony. Los Alamos is in flames, hundreds of houses have been destroyed or damaged and more than 18,000 acres of surrounding forest have been charred by a prescribed, or intentional, fire set at Bandelier a week ago.
Begun atop a 10,000-foot ridge May 4, the blaze designed to safely remove brush from 900 acres quickly became a wildfire. It has now roared through parts of Los Alamos and threatens nearby White Rock and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the facility that ushered in the Atomic Age and houses plutonium and other radioactive materials.
Even as almost 1,000 firefighters valiantly fought house-by-house to save residential neighborhoods here and struggled to cut firelines in the Santa Fe National Forest, the question was being loudly raised: Did this wildfire have to happen, or could better planning have prevented it?
A General Accounting Office investigation, requested Thursday by New Mexico's congressional delegation and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will certainly provide answers. But even at this early date, it appears that with better coordination and more caution, the inferno could have been averted.
Just before the fire was set, the National Weather Service faxed a special forecast to Bandelier officials warning of maximum fire-growth potential: increasing winds, rising temperatures and lower than expected nighttime humidity. It also included a "Haines Index" of 6 -- the highest rating on a scale that measures the potential for fire growth.
The U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency most experienced in wildland firefighting, has a phrase describing weather like that. "We call them 'red-flag' burning conditions," the Forest Service's Jim Paxon said.
Angry public officials and residents among the 25,000 sent scurrying from their homes here since Wednesday are already demanding that someone be held responsible.
"Somebody made a mistake," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., after a helicopter tour. "Obviously we have to find out who."
Bandelier Superintendent Roy Weaver said he never saw the forecast and thought conditions were favorable for a prescribed burn to remove flammable fuels and underbrush.
However, he told The Albuquerque Tribune: "We knew this one was going to be pushing the limits a little bit."
Weaver was placed on leave with pay Thursday while his actions are investigated.
"We don't know at this point what happened," said Rick Frost, spokesman for the National Park Service's Inter-Mountain Region.
Federal officials in Arizona were also struggling with an intentional fire gone out of control at an equally high-profile location: Grand Canyon National Park. A prescribed fire set April 25 on the lightly visited North Rim went out of control in high winds Wednesday. Hundreds of employees and a few dozen visitors were stranded there overnight but were able to leave Thursday.
By midafternoon Thursday at Los Alamos, the situation was deteriorating again as high winds pummeled the mesa and mountain country .
Giant plumes of smoke billowed skyward from the sprawling Los Alamos National Laboratory complex. The lab covers 43 square miles with 2,000 structures, some containing high explosives, toxic chemicals, and nuclear materials. At around 4 p.m. MT, authorities ordered everyone remaining in White Rock, southeast of Los Alamos, to leave immediately as fire raced toward that town.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, a former New Mexico congressman, said the lab's plutonium and other radioactive materials were contained in hardened bunkers designed to withstand a direct hit from a passenger jet. The facility's air-monitoring system has picked up no releases of radiation, officials said. A special monitoring team from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque has been brought in as a further precaution.
Even some residents in what is essentially a government company town questioned the wisdom of setting a fire in a region beset by drought and in a season that normally has high winds.
"This is the windy season; you know it's dry," said Paula Sundby, a secretary at the lab and a White Rock resident now temporarily housed at a middle school in the village of Pojoaque. "Why any fire? It was a stupid thing to do."
However, Ray Higgins, an electronics technician at the lab also staying at the school, bears no ill will toward the Park Service. "No matter how much you plan, things can happen," he said.
Contributing: Frank Santiago, Peter Eisler and Traci Watson in Washington.
---
Experts defend controlled fires
USA Today
05/11/00
By Traci Watson
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndsthu07.htm
As incredible as it may seem that the government would deliberately set a fire, it does so routinely as a matter of environmental policy and to reduce fire risk.
The people who manage the USA's public lands, such as the national parks, insist intentional fires are an essential tool in keeping forests and other ecosystems healthy.
Land managers don't defend the setting of the fire that gave rise to the inferno at Los Alamos, N.M., but they do defend the practice.
"As expensive as that fire will end up being, if we keep following this policy of fire exclusion, then we'll continue to have larger and more intense fires and more of them," says Ron Wakimoto, professor of forestry at the University of Montana-Missoula.
Western lands used to burn as often as every seven to nine years, going up in flames from lightning or fires set by Native Americans.
Then, around the turn of the 20th century, Westerners started putting fires out with a vengeance. Decades of extinguishing even the smallest fires have led to buildups of underbrush and small trees in the nation's forests and grasslands. The result, experts agree, is a dry, overgrown landscape that makes the perfect tinder for lightning strikes, cigarette butts or carelessly banked campfires.
When Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, 61, was growing up in the West, "the motto was 'immediate suppression at all times and at any cost,' " he recalls. Babbitt worked on Western fire lines as a young man. "We got pretty successful at it, but the fires started getting bigger and more dangerous."
Since then, scientists have reached a consensus that the way to fight fire is with fire. Over the last decade, the intentional blazes known either as controlled burns or prescribed fires have become increasingly common . The federal government lights roughly 2.5 million acres ablaze every year, and state governments and private landowners also have turned to controlled burns.
Fire crews set flame to Virginia oak forests and Illinois prairies, Arizona pinyon scrub and Florida pine groves. Fire experts say the practice helps:
Clear diseased trees.
Make room for wildlife.
Restore natural conditions, such as tall, widely spaced ponderosa pine groves.
Encourage growth of certain vegetation, such as conifers whose cones need fire to open.
When land managers consider starting a fire, their goal is to keep it within a certain perimeter . There are three considerations: vegetation, topography of the land and weather, says James Agee of the University of Washington.
Federal fire managers are required to write a "burn plan." It includes the fire's goals and the number of firefighters and amount of equipment that must be on hand to control it and, if need be, put it out.
The burn plan also details what the temperature, wind speed, humidity and fuel moisture must be before the fire can be started, says Denny Truesdale, assistant fire and aviation director for the U.S. Forest Service. When those conditions are reached, the fire can be set.
There's one more element that can help make for a successful fire: exactly how it's set. "A lot of times, the real skill and art of prescribed fire is the ignition pattern," Agee says. Fire managers can set fires against the wind to make them burn more slowly or with the wind to make them burn faster.
It is relatively rare for a controlled fire to "escape." The National Park Service estimates that since its controlled burn program began in 1968, only 38 of 3,746 prescribed fires have gone wrong. But it's safer to set controlled fires than to do nothing, officials say.
"There will always be forest fires," Babbitt says. But, he adds, those who take care of the land have realized that fire is "the safest way to fireproof a forest."
---
Some question safety of N.M. nuke lab
USA Today
05/11/00
By Peter Eisler
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndsthu08.htm
Officials at Los Alamos National Laboratory have spent 50 years figuring out ways to protect its caches of nuclear weapons components from everything from saboteurs to missile attacks, but there's no escaping Mother Nature.
The fire that has swept much of the 43-square-mile compound, threatening areas that house weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, isn't the first to singe the cradle of the atomic bomb. And while there's little risk of it reaching the most volatile stores of nuclear material and high explosives housed in fireproof vaults and concrete bunkers, the blaze still raises safety questions.
Thousands of barrels of radioactive waste sit above ground in partial enclosures on lab property and there are large swaths of contaminated ground awaiting cleanup. It is unclear whether the fire posed a risk in those areas.
"There's no evidence of any release of radioactive or hazardous material at the lab due to the fire," said Bernard Pleau, a Department of Energy (DOE) spokesman.
Pleau noted that a wildfire "burned right through the explosives area in 1977 with no ill effects."
Still, he said, the DOE has taken the "precautionary" step of calling in aerial surveillance for any spread of radioactive or toxic material.
Outside experts questioned whether the lab has fully disclosed the fire's potential risks.
They noted that safety assurances from lab officials have focused on the weapons material in Los Alamos' vaults, making little mention of threats from contaminated land and nuclear waste in open areas. In just the past year, the lab has cleared brush from many of those areas.
But the fire's rapid advance over large swaths of lab property is likely to test those measures.
"There's a lot of stuff that isn't in vaults that poses significant risks," said Robert Alvarez, a former top DOE safety adviser. "There's a lot of contaminated land, waste sites, storage buildings with residual high explosives, and there's a real threat that contaminants can be swept up in the fire and (carried) in smoke that can get to populated areas."
It's a serious concern, even in a community used to living with a nuclear weapons lab. Los Alamos was born with the lab, existing first as a closed town supporting the secret Manhattan Project that spawned the lab's creation during World War II.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Thursday that ample security forces remain in the area to safeguard nuclear stockpiles at the site, in some cases moving to higher ground that still allows surveillance of key areas.
But the main risk appeared to be not thieves, but flames.
"The nature of the risk is very difficult to tell - it depends on how hot the fire is, how the winds are blowing, how far sparks are carrying," said Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Studies.
"This raises questions about whether a facility like this should be in this area, such a dry area with these fire risks."
---
Lead Prosecutor in Lee Case Removed
Washington Post
Friday, May 12, 2000; Page A07
Associated Press
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-05/12/081l-051200-idx.html
SANTA FE, N.M., May 11-The federal prosecutor who directed the high-profile investigation and prosecution of a fired Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist has been bumped from the job.
Justice Department officials offered no explanation for the removal of Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Gorence as lead prosecutor in the Wen Ho Lee case.
Lee, 60, faces trial Nov. 6 on 59 counts of breaching lab security. The prosecution contends Lee transferred 19 files from secure to unsecure computers and downloaded some material to computer tapes. Prosecutors have called the top secret material the "crown jewels" of American nuclear science.
Although Lee, who was a nuclear physicist in the weapons section of the lab, has not been charged with espionage, prosecutors contend he planned to forward the data to the Chinese government.
Lee could get life in prison if convicted.
Patricia Chavez, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Albuquerque, told the New York Times that the Justice Department had decided to send a prosecutor from Washington to direct the case but that Gorence would continue to be a "key member of the team."
Gorence's replacement has not been named.
Lee's defense attorneys applauded the move, saying it would give their client a strategic advantage.
"This is good news for Dr. Lee, as Mr. Gorence was an experienced prosecutor," defense attorney Mark Holscher said.
Until March, Gorence was the top-ranking career prosecutor in the Albuquerque U.S. attorney's office. He took charge of the Lee case in early April 1999.
---
Interior, Congress to probe wildfire
Washington Times
May 12, 2000
By Joyce Howard Price
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000512231329.htm
The Interior Department and Congress have initiated investigations to determine how a fire started by the National Park Service spread out of control and swept into Los Alamos, N.M., burning hundreds of homes and forcing the evacuation of more than 20,000 residents.
The Park Service Thursday placed on leave the superintendent who took responsibility for the fire.
What was to have been controlled burning by the National Park Service in the Bandelier National Monument to clear underbrush charred a research building at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. But Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said all nuclear materials and explosives are located in "fire-resistant buildings," and there was no evidence of radiation leakage.
The federal government may "have to take responsibility" to compensate homeowners for damages caused by the Park Service fire, one official admitted Thursday. The blaze could cost taxpayers millions of dollars in such claims.
Before the fire was ignited on May 4, the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, N.M., sent the Park Service a forecast of high winds, high temperatures and decreased humidity in the area in and around Los Alamos. Such conditions are unfavorable for controlling a fire.
"This seems to be common sense out the window. . . . We have a terrible situation on our hands," New Mexico Gov. Gary E. Johnson said Thursday as the fire raged out of control and threatened three communities: Los Alamos, the suburb of White Rock and Espanola, located in a valley 10 miles below Los Alamos.
All 11,000 residents of Los Alamos have been evacuated, and another 7,000 in White Rock fled Thursday. About a third of Espanola's 10,000 residents also were asked to leave their homes. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on evacuation routes from those communities throughout the day.
"Somebody made a mistake. Obviously, we have to find out who. Did someone do something that should not have been done considering the dry conditions and the wind?" asked Sen. Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Republican, who took part in a high-profile news conference Thursday in Los Alamos. The briefing was broadcast on CNN.
Pressed to identify suspects he blames for the disaster, Mr. Domenici told reporters: "The person responsible for the park service here is most responsible for this."
The senator was referring to the park superintendent, Roy Weaver. According to the Associated Press, Mr. Weaver acknowledged his responsibility for the blaze Monday, saying he believed that conditions were ideal for a "prescribed burn."
Mr. Weaver was put on leave with pay Thursday.
"This action is administrative in nature and in no way reflects on Superintendent Roy Weaver's decisions regarding the fire," said Karen Wade, director of the intermountain regional office of the Park Service.
"Prescribed burn" is the term federal land managers use to describe a fire they set deliberately in an effort to prevent catastrophic wildfires.
The fire ignited by the National Park Service to clear brush quickly flared out of control, beyond its 900-acre perimeter. Racing through ponderosa pine, in 50 mph wind gusts, the blaze consumed 14,000 acres on Wednesday alone.
On Wednesday, when the fire spilled into Los Alamos and began damaging or destroying scores of homes, Mr. Weaver told CNN he never saw the negative weather service forecast.
However, Weather Service supervisory meteorologist Charlie Liles said his staff in Albuquerque faxed the forecast to the park at 12:20 p.m. May 4, before the fire was started. He said his office had received a request for it from Bandelier about an hour earlier. AP obtained a copy of the forecast.
In Washington Thursday, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said his department also would thoroughly investigate the disaster, which he called a "human tragedy."
Mr. Domenici said Thursday the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee - at his request - has asked the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to conduct a probe to determine culpability. "I know we'll know by next week," Mr. Domenici said.
"The controlled burning was started by the National Park Service," Mr. Domenici said. "I'm not sure if the Forest Service was conferred with [about the burning] or if it agreed or disagreed [with the plan] . . . but you can see it was very risky."
Investigations of the fire will examine the Park Service's plan for the prescribed fire. Each plan includes a description of the area to be burned, a statement about what land managers are trying to accomplish and a set of size and intensity parameters within which the fire will ideally burn.
Interviewed on CNN, Mr. Babbitt was asked if the government would be liable for the 100 homes destroyed in the fire and another 400 or so that were damaged. "Those are things we'll have to deal with," he said.
Shelter and other emergency short-term relief will be provided first, he said. "Then we'll get on to the longer-term issues," said Mr. Babbitt, who planned to fly to New Mexico Thursday night.
Interior spokesman John F. Wright said he assumes the federal government "would have to take responsibility" for compensating for property losses if it is "found liable" for the fire.
Mr. Johnson, the New Mexico governor, sees the potential for mammoth losses. "Right now, there are approximately 100 homes that have burned down. We hope it doesn't get worse. This may just be the beginning of what may be a real tragedy," he said.
---
60 mph Winds Could Spread New Mexico Blaze; 18,000 Already Evacuated
Fox News
05/12/00
http://www.foxnews.com/national/051100/nm_fires.sml
As flames continued to skirt around the edges of one of the country's premier scientific sites in Los Alamos, N.M., Thursday, firefighters and government officials waited anxiously to see which way expected heavy afternoon winds would blow the inferno.
Forecasters predicted winds up to 60 mph Thursday, which fire officials expect to further fan the flames. Already, the firestorm has overtaken the small community of Los Alamos, just north of Los Alamos National Laboratory. More than 20,000 people were evacuated and at least 400 homes were burned down. Some 18,000 acres have been scorched since the fire started a week ago. Reports Thursday evening indicated the breakout of a second fire in northern New Mexico, that has engulfed at least 200 acres after a small plane crashed. There is no word on injuries or deaths in the crash.
"Basically, the town looks like a ghost town," Fox News Channel correspondent Mike Emanuel said of Los Alamos. "There's thick smoke over a mountainous area next to Los Alamos, and the winds have been gusting heavily, maybe 50 to 60 miles per hour. Particles in the air are making vision difficult — you can feel it in your throat."
Brick fireplaces were all that remained of some homes in Los Alamos. A basketball hoop remained intact on one driveway, its net still hanging but singed. The house was destroyed, the garage door was split in half and crumbled on the driveway.
Rep. Tom Udall, whose district includes Los Alamos, said federal officials estimated that 300 to 400 homes had been damaged, and President Clinton declared New Mexico a major disaster area. "I can't believe how many homes are gone," said Don Shainin, a fire battalion commander from Albuquerque who came to Los Alamos to help.
Approximately 600 firefighters Thursday recovered from a water shortage that forced them to retreat Wednesday. U.S. Forest Service fire specialists and Los Alamos Fire Department firefighters were working side by side to save as many structures as possible in the town of about 10,000, Department of Energy spokesman Bernie Pleau said. There has not been a single injury from the fire so far, he said, and 10 more 20-person fire crews are expected today.
Also evacuated so far: about 7,000 residents from suburban White Rock, and about one-third of the 10,000 residents in western Espanola, in a valley 10 miles below Los Alamos.
Who Is to Blame for Blaze?
The fire is the result of a major miscalculation by the National Park Service, and it could cost the government dearly.
Members of Congress are demanding a federal investigation and suggested the government consider compensating families who lost their homes and belongings. Earlier this week, Bandelier National Park Superintendent Roy Weaver took responsibility for the fire and was placed on "administrative leave" Thursday evening.
The fire began when the Park Service set a "controlled burn" near Bandelier, planning to burn 900 acres to clear brush and reduce the potential for a catastrophic fire, Weaver said. He claims winds became higher than expected and the humidity was lower than anticipated; but the National Weather Service said it faxed over a report warning an out of control blaze could occur.
"Somebody made a mistake and obviously we have to find out who," Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said in Los Alamos. "Did someone do something that should not have been done considering the dry conditions and the wind?"
Even if political pressure fails to deliver money to some of the 18,000 people forced to evacuate because of the fire, the federal courts could: under the federal Tort Claims Act, the government is generally liable for negligent acts by its agencies and employees.
National Laboratory, Nuclear Materials, Safe
For now, Los Alamos National Laboratory itself, just to the south of the residential area, is not in danger, according to the Department of Energy.
A spokesman at White Rock said that fire did encroach on a nuclear-materials site in a northeastern part of the 43-square mile facility. The building, an engineering facility for tritium, did not catch fire, he said, and no other structures were in danger.
"The nuke materials are inside concrete bunkers made to withstand this stuff," he said. "They're safe where they're at."
The Associated Press contributed to this report
---
Los Alamos Fire Shows Enormous Dangers of Nuclear Weapons Production, Says PSR
U.S. Newswire 12 May 16:30
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0512-139.html
To: National Desk, Defense Reporter
Contact: Martin Butcher, 202-898-0150, ext. 220, Tarek Rizk, 202-898-0150, ext. 215, both of Physicians for Social Responsibility; Web site: http://www.psr.org
WASHINGTON, May 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A catastrophe may have been narrowly averted today as the wildfire currently burning around the nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos (N.M.) appeared to have bypassed the most dangerous facilities on the site.
However, while this is cause for relief, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) does not believe it is cause to certify these facilities as safe. Many toxic and radioactive substances including plutonium, tritium and conventional high explosives are stored at the Los Alamos Facility. A deadly scenario might feature the burning of a plutonium store, sending the highly radioactive substance into the atmosphere.
"While there appears to be no contamination as a result of this fire, this dangerous situation demonstrates that worker safety isn't the only thing administrators of our nuclear weapons labs need to address," said Robert K. Musil, Ph.D., executive director and CEO of PSR.
On this occasion there seems to have been no contamination of the environment or local population as a result of this fire -- these toxic substances remain safe in their bunkers. However, a tritium facility and a plutonium store almost burned, and many contaminated portions of the facility may yet release toxins when burned. The Los Alamos community is still under threat of a public health disaster.
The fire has clearly shown the danger of maintaining nuclear weapons development, testing and production infrastructure. "It shows once again that there is simply no way of producing nuclear weapons safely," said Musil. "These facilities, and the toxic and radioactive substances stored there, pose a threat to public health, and will do so until nuclear weapons are abolished."
---
Govt to investigate Los Alamos fire
ABC News
This Bulletin: Fri, 12 May 2000 18:55 AEST
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-12may2000-78.htm
The US Government is investigating how a small fire set a week ago by rangers in New Mexico developed into a wildfire, forcing more than 20,000 people to flee three towns.
The blaze is also surrounding a nuclear laboratory and has destroyed 18,000 acres of forest.
Los Alamos, White Rock and Espanola have all been evacuated.
President Bill Clinton has declared northern New Mexico a "disaster area", and says the probe would determine "what the real facts are and what the responsibility of the Government is".
US Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt says he will be visiting the site of the blaze to investigate and to see what more can be done to bring the wildfire under control.
"I think in the short term, we are going to be ordering a lot more people in," he told CNN.
Park Superintendent Roy Weaver has assumed responsibility for the fire and has been suspended with pay, pending an investigation by the US Park Service.
Despite concern that the wildfire could damage the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which conducts nuclear research, officials said the lethal materials stored in the facility were perfectly safe.
Energy secretary Bill Richardson has described how flames had come within metres of a plutonium store, but insists there was no danger of radiation leakage.
Founded during World War II, the Los Alamos laboratory was home to the Manhattan Project that produced the world's first atomic bomb.
It has played a leading role in building up the US nuclear arsenal and conducting research to modernise and maintain it.
Some 800 firefighters, plus National Guard soldiers, have battled the blaze on the ground aided by helicopters and special aeroplanes which dumped fire retardant on pockets of fire.
Aerial footage showed a raging inferno fanned by high winds swallowing private homes and engulfing huge swaths of land in the Los Alamos area.
Thick clouds of smoke were blown by the wind for hundreds of kilometres around.
--- Fox News
Officials Say Hazardous Materials At Lab Protected From Fire
05/12/00
http://www.foxnews.com/national/051200/nm_fires_lab.sml
With a massive wildfire out of control in Los Alamos, federal officials sought to assure the public Thursday that the storied nuclear laboratory at the heart of the town is safe, with explosives and plutonium stored in fireproof bunkers and vaults.
"This is not an issue about national security or release of radiation. That is not occurring," Sen. Jeff Bingaman said. "The lab is going to survive this in good shape."
The lab, however, did suffer some fire damage Thursday.
"We've lost a number of transportables," lab spokesman John Gustafson said of trailers and portable buildings. "No major structures have been affected, and certainly none of them lost."
About 2,000 buildings dot mesas and canyons on the 43-square-mile property. The location, 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, was chosen by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer because of its remoteness and isolation.
This week, for the first time since it was established in 1943, the lab was shut down by fire. Only emergency personnel continued to work. The lab has about 7,000 employees.
All 11,000 people in the town of Los Alamos, an outgrowth of the lab, and another 7,000 in suburban White Rock fled as wildfires swept through the streets.
Lab director John Browne said the blazes spread through an area of the lab property where high explosives are stored in concrete bunkers. And flames also jumped to within 300 yards of the plutonium facility, said Kay Roybal, a spokeswoman for the lab.
She added that firefighters kept the wildfires at bay by burning nearby grasses to eliminate possible fuels, and that by afternoon the flames had shifted.
Gustafson said lab officials are monitoring air emissions for radioactivity.
"They took preliminary measurements ... and all those numbers showed results consistent with background readings from natural sources of radioactivity," he said.
John Rhoades, director of the lab's Bradbury Science Museum, said the facilities are safer Friday than years ago; after a 1996 fire that charred 16,683 acres and reached the perimeter of the lab's property, timber was removed from around structures and firebreaks were constructed.
He feels confident there is no way fire could reach into the bunkers or vaults to ignite explosives or radioactive materials.
"They're designed to withstand for something like four to six hours a fire burning right on top of the building," Rhoades said. "It's like trying to light a steel ballbearing on fire."
Greg Mello, executive director of the anti-nuclear Los Alamos Study Group, said he does not fear a disaster but claimed firefighters could inhale smoke tainted with chemicals. He said the fire has swept over an area where uranium has been blown up in the past and landed in the soil and trees.
"We do not know whether toxic materials have been burned," Mello said. "It's possible, it's even likely to some extent, but it's not something to be panicked about."
Los Alamos is one of three government nuclear weapons labs under the Energy Department; it is managed by the University of California. More than half of its $1.26 billion annual budget goes toward nuclear weapons programs, with the rest dedicated to research in environmental cleanup, alternative energy sources and biomedical sciences.
Historically, Los Alamos has been used to design, develop and test America's nuclear warheads. The key defense mission now is to maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile.
Los Alamos also has been the focus of a security and espionage controversy stemming from the apparent loss of nuclear warhead secrets to China in the 1980s. A lab scientist was fired last year after being suspected of mishandling nuclear weapons secrets. He has pleaded innocent to federal charges.
---
Some are questioning safety of nuclear lab Officials insist there's no danger
USA Today
05/12/00
By Peter Eisler
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20000512/2256867s.htm
Officials at Los Alamos National Laboratory have spent 50 years figuring out ways to protect its caches of nuclear weapons components from everything from saboteurs to missile attacks, but there's no escaping Mother Nature.
The fire that has swept much of the 43-square-mile compound, threatening areas that house weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, isn't the first to singe the cradle of the atomic bomb. Though there's little risk of it reaching the most volatile stores of nuclear material and high explosives housed in fireproof vaults and concrete bunkers, the blaze still raises safety questions.
Thousands of barrels of radioactive waste sit above ground in partial enclosures on lab property and there are large swaths of contaminated ground awaiting cleanup. It is unclear whether the fire posed a risk in those areas.
''There's no evidence of any release of radioactive or hazardous material at the lab due to the fire,'' said Bernard Pleau, a Department of Energy (DOE) spokesman.
Pleau noted that a wildfire ''burned right through the explosives area in 1977 with no ill effects.''
Still, he said, the DOE has taken the ''precautionary'' step of calling in aerial surveillance for any spread of radioactive or toxic material.
Outside experts questioned whether the lab has fully disclosed the fire's potential risks.
They noted that safety assurances from lab officials have focused on the weapons material in Los Alamos' vaults but have made little mention of threats from contaminated land and nuclear waste in open areas. In just the past year, the lab has cleared brush from many of those areas.
But the fire's rapid advance over large swaths of lab property is likely to test those measures.
''There's a lot of stuff that isn't in vaults that poses significant risks,'' said Robert Alvarez, a former top DOE safety adviser. ''There's a lot of contaminated land, waste sites, storage buildings with residual high explosives, and there's a real threat that contaminants can be swept up in the fire and (carried) in smoke that can get to populated areas.''
It's a serious concern, even in a community used to living with a nuclear weapons lab. Los Alamos was born with the lab, existing first as a closed town supporting the secret Manhattan Project that spawned the lab's creation during World War II.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Thursday that ample security forces remain in the area to safeguard nuclear stockpiles at the site, in some cases moving to higher ground that still allows surveillance of key areas.
However, the main risk appeared to be not thieves, but flames.
''The nature of the risk is very difficult to tell -- it depends on how hot the fire is, how the winds are blowing, how far sparks are carrying,'' said Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Studies.
''This raises questions about whether a facility like this should be in this area, such a dry area with these fire risks.''
---
Officials say nuclear lab is safe from fire
ITN Online
05/12/00
http://www.itn.co.uk/World/world20000512/051211.htm
Officials have repeated their claims that there is no risk of a nuclear catastrophe even if flames from a disastrous brush fire reach America's largest nuclear scientific laboratory at Los Alamos.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the desert state of New Mexico, is the centre of US nuclear weapons research - and where the first atomic bomb was built in 1945.
Plutonium and high explosives are kept on the lab's 43 square miles site, but officials said they were safely stored in steel and concrete bunkers far away from the fire.
The plutonium site is in the facility's northeast corner, miles away from the fire, officials have stated. The lab has been closed since Monday, when the fire reached a highway on the facility's western edge.
Meanwhile, a firestorm has swept through the abandoned streets of Los Alamos burning at least 100 homes while frustrated firefighters ran short of water and were forced to retreat.
At least 18,000 people were evacuated from Los Alamos, including 7,000 in suburban White Rock. President Bill Clinton declared New Mexico a major disaster area.
Smoke from the fire has risen 20,000 feet into the air and firefighters had to pull back from whole neighbourhoods, authorities said, as wind gusts drove the flames through surrounding trees and into the streets.
---
U.S. nuke facilities safe, energy secretary says
Denver Post
05/12/00
By George Lane
http://www.denverpost.com/news/fire0512f.htm
May 12 - There is no "imminent risk" of a nuclear accident at any of the Department of Energy nuclear facilities, according to the results of a study released Thursday by Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson.
"Safety is job one at all of our nuclear facilities," Richardson said. "I will make sure the Department of Energy takes every step to continually strengthen and improve the ways we ensure the safety of our workers, the public and the environment."
The report Richardson released Thursday, "Nuclear Criticality Safety at Key Department of Energy Facilities," resulted from the study called for last fall by President Clinton after a Japanese nuclear accident in late September.
Several were seriously injured in that accident, and scores of others were contaminated by leaking radioactive gas at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, Japan.
The recently completed study found that the type of accident in Japan couldn't happen at any DOE facility in the United States because the energy department has adopted national standards for operations and training specifically designed to reduce the risk.
The study focused on the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site under going cleanup outside Denver; the Hanford Site in Washington; Savannah River Site in South Carolina; and the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Richardson also called for a number of improvements to ensure the continued safety of American nuclear sites. Included in these improvements are:
- Increasing the retention rate of criticality - unplanned nuclear reaction - safety professionals by giving retention allowances and cash awards to experienced, highperforming employees in this specialized field and using all available mechanisms to increase compensation to make DOE competitive in the labor market.
- Finalizing within 30 days the job certification requirements for criticality safety experts by formalizing standards and necessary training.
- Strengthening existing staff by directing field offices to hire more experts and ensuring federal and contractors staff meet the department's qualification standards for criticality safety experts.
A DOE spokeswoman said that there hasn't been an unplanned nuclear reaction at the DOE facility in more than 20 years. That last incident was at the Idaho Chemical Plant in 1978.
The Rocky Mountain Peace Center, an organization historically critical of operations at Rocky Flats and other nuclear sites, was unavailable for comment.
---
Intentional Brush Burning Defended
Associated Press
May 12, 2000 Filed at 5:19 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Prescribed-Fire.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- When officials set a brush fire at Bandelier National Monument last week, the plan was to have a small fire prevent a big one. But the wrong weather patterns can turn such prescribed fires into just the kind of monster infernos they're meant to prevent.
As the New Mexico wildfire set by the National Park Service continued blazing uncontrolled Friday, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman imposed a 30-day moratorium on prescribed fires in the West.
``The federal government's controlled burn policy is out of control,'' said Rep. Joe Skeen, R-N.M., who like many critics favors logging to thin out overgrown forests.
``The National Park Service is acting like children playing with matches,'' said Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, R-Idaho, chairwoman of the House Resources Committee's forests panel. She said her subcommittee would hold a hearing into the decision to conduct the burn.
Prescribed fire experts say the blazes can be an important tool to prevent catastrophic forest fires by clearing away the dead logs and underbrush that fuel the big fires. That fuel has built up in federal forests because for more than a century, natural fires were snuffed out.
``We can conduct a thousand prescribed burns and the public will never know about it. We lose one, and we get all the press, and that's unfortunate,'' said John Fort, director of the National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center in Tallahassee, Fla. ``The people in the business who are very experienced never get any credit. They're trying to do the right thing by the environment and the public and the weather gets them every now and then.''
The National Park Service, for example, says it has set 3,746 prescribed fires since 1968, of which 38 have gotten out of control including two that are still burning: the fire at Bandelier that has burned more than 200 homes in Los Alamos and part of the nearby nuclear laboratory and one that has burned more than 7,000 acres on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
Federal regulations require extensive planning before setting fires. Officials must map out where they want the fire to burn, the weather ideal for the planned fire and contingency plans in case it gets out of control.
Many New Mexico officials and residents have criticized the Park Service for setting the fire when it was warm and dry.
However, Fort said such conditions don't automatically rule out a prescribed fire.
``Some goals and objectives dictate hot and dry conditions, and you can do a controlled fire very well in those conditions,'' said Fort, a 28-year veteran of prescribed fires for three federal agencies.
But Rob Mitchell, director of the Fire Ecology Center at Texas Tech University, said prescribed fires when it is hot, dry and windy are a bad idea. He said he would not set a fire if the humidity were less than 20 percent, the temperature more than 80 degrees, winds were gusting higher than 20 mph or a cold front were moving in.
The humidity was less than 20 percent when the New Mexico fire was set; winds were forecast to be about 10 mph and the high temperature that day was in the 70s. Winds picked up hours after the fire was set, pushing the blaze out of control.
``I'm worried that prescribed burning is going to get a black eye, and we don't need that,'' Mitchell said. ``There are millions of acres in the U.S. that need prescribed burns. It's a dangerous proposition, but it's an environmentally friendly tool.''
Federal officials are investigating the decision to set the New Mexico fire, and have placed the Bandelier superintendent who approved the decision, Roy Weaver, on suspension with pay. Babbitt has already pledged to try to compensate Los Alamos homeowners.
On the Net:
National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center: http://fire.r9.fws.gov/pftc/
Fire Ecology Center at Texas Tech: www.rw.ttu.edu/fec
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Accused Scientist Challenges Gov't
Associated Press
May 11, 2000 Filed at 11:42 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Scientist-Secrets.html
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Defense attorneys have challenged prosecutors to name the foreign nation for which fired Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee sought to secure a benefit, as alleged in federal charges against him.
Lee, 60, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Taiwan, was fired last year by Los Alamos National Laboratory and accused of 59 counts of breaching lab security by transferring files from secure to unsecure computers and to computer tapes.
Lee is not accused of espionage. But for the government to win a conviction on the most serious charges against him, prosecutors must prove he copied weapons secrets to portable data tapes with the intent of injuring the United States or giving a foreign nation an advantage.
In a motion filed Wednesday, defense lawyers asked U.S. District Judge John Conway to make prosecutors name the country for which Lee allegedly meant to secure an advantage.
``Dr. Lee should not have to guess at such a basic element of the charges against him,'' wrote attorneys Mark Holscher and John Cline. ``The prosecution surely knows which 'foreign nation' it will contend that Dr. Lee intended to benefit. It should not be permitted to hide the ball on such a critical point.''
Defense strategy will be affected by which country is alleged to have been Lee's potential benficiary, they said.
If prosecutors contend Lee sought to aid China, Lee's lawyers said the defense would have to produce experts ``to address the minimal value that this country's computer codes would have for (China), given that country's established capability to design and manufacture nuclear weapons.''
U.S. Attorney C. Norman Bay has said federal prosecutors don't have identify which country is the focus of the allegation.
Lee could face life in prison if convicted.
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Oakland Fire Victims Reflect on N.M.
Associated Press
May 12, 2000 Filed at 3:46 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Fire-Memories.html
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Arthur Haskell knows how the people fleeing the New Mexico blazes feel. More importantly, he knows how they're going to feel -- lost, confused and frustrated as the long process of recovering begins.
Haskell's home was among nearly 3,000 dwellings destroyed in the Oct. 20, 1991, Oakland hills fire that killed 25 people. Disaster struck when a brush fire thought to have been extinguished by firefighters the day before rekindled.
``Most people are not prepared for this kind of thing,'' he said Thursday. ``The real problem, I think, for most of us was trying to reassemble our lives and that included, of course, rebuilding and the question of insurance.''
So far, more than 250 homes have been destroyed in Los Alamos, N.M., after a week-old fire set by the government to clear brush raged out of control. The town of 11,000 residents, many of whom work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been evacuated.
Unlike the Los Alamos residents, people in the Oakland hills had little warning.
Haskell left his house on Oct. 20 after his wife, then an Oakland councilwoman, called to warn him the fire had jumped a freeway. He didn't think the distant fire would take his house.
``I just took a change of clothing for going to the office the next day,'' he says ruefully. His stepdaughter had the foresight to pick up photo albums and other mementos.
Chuck McFadden, who also lost his home in the fire, remembers evacuation preparations splitting along a similar gender line.
``The men gathered in the street and we all were looking at the fire up in the hills saying, 'Look at that! Look at that transformer explode!' And the women almost without exception were in the house looking around and starting to pack,'' he said.
Eventually, the McFaddens, like hundreds of others, jumped into their car and made the long, scary trip down narrow, winding roads.
``Occasionally you'd hear this big thump and it was a car exploding,'' he said. ``I remember looking down at the white cement of the sidewalk and it was orange. The sky was orange.''
McFadden has more than memories to link him to the Los Alamos fire. He works for the University of California, which manages the Los Alamos weapons lab. Flames have rolled past concrete bunkers containing high explosives but officials say the nuclear material stored at the lab is safe.
The university put out a statement Thursday pledging to stand by Los Alamos employees.
McFadden and Haskell said banding together to share resources and information -- most likely by way of the Internet, which wasn't an option in 1991 -- is the most important thing Los Alamos fire victims can do.
Many Oakland residents found their houses were woefully underinsured due to real estate booms in prices, setting the stage for tense battles with insurance adjustors.
``I can't emphasize too much the necessity of arming yourself with as much information as possible and making yourself as sophisticated as possible as quickly as possible to start dealing with the insurance companies,'' McFadden said.
Other lessons have been learned, too. City officials changed procedures for quenching fires, beefed up communications and now require homeowners to clear brush.
Nine years after the fire, the burned area has transformed from a blackened moonscape to shorn but green slopes dotted with the light pastels of new homes.
Still, some psychological scars remain.
McFadden said he can still remember coming home to an ordinary street turned into a desert.
``It was so quiet and sad when we wandered through the neighborhood a few days after the fire. Nothing left but the brick chimneys -- chimney after chimney.''
-------- ohio
There's light at end of tunnel in Piketon retirees' long battle
Friday, May 12, 2000
Jonathan Riskind
Columbus Dispatch Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Berlin Wall fell. The presidency shifted hands from Reagan to Bush to Clinton. The Internet and a global economy took hold.
A lot has happened in the 12 years since a group of 45 retirees at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, were denied an extra $3 per year of service in pension benefits by former plant contractor Lockheed Martin.
So much so that the workers -- and in a couple of cases their survivors -- are owed a total of at least $352,000 in back pension benefits, according to U.S. Department of Energy officials and the president of Piketon Local 5-689 of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Union International.
But after more than a decade of legal battles -- and mounting legal bills for taxpayers, Lockheed and the union -- the workers are still waiting for what they say is their due.
Energy Department officials, including Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, earlier this year began pushing to end the fight. They say the move shows a new era is at hand for a department that now acknowledges that Cold War-era working conditions at Piketon, a uranium-enrichment plant, and other nuclear sites nationwide exposed employees to dangerous radiation and chemicals.
"There are a lot of reasons why there's skepticism among workers at the Department of Energy,'' said a senior department official, speaking on condition of anonymity. But "this secretary goes right at it'' to help workers, the official said.
Energy Department officials say a deal in the Piketon pension dispute has been reached, pending approval by the board of directors of Lockheed's pension plan. The workers will get about $352,000 in total back benefits and receive the increased level in the future, but won't get any interest on what they are owed.
However, Lockheed spokeswoman Dianne Knippel said yesterday the parties are "working toward a solution. We're not ready to say here is what it is.''
Knippel said the Energy Department might have given some "helpful hints.'' But she said it is up to Lockheed and the union to reach a conclusion.
Lockheed was the Energy Department's Piketon contractor from 1986 until 1993, when United States Enrichment Corp. took over management of the plant. Lockheed continued to operate Piketon, which has shifted from producing weapons-grade uranium to low-enriched material used for commercial nuclear-power plants, until shortly after USEC was privatized in 1998.
Dan Minter, president of Local 5-689, said the case is part of the reason he's been skeptical of a Clinton administration proposal to compensate Piketon workers and others in the nuclear industry nationwide for Cold War-era exposures, Minter said.
"It's been more than frustrating,'' Minter said. The Energy Department "has been telling folks things have changed and they will take care of the workers. This certainly would be a natural step in doing that.'' The 45 workers in question retired between May 2, 1988, and June 30, 1989. At issue when the dispute began in early 1988 was whether that group of workers was covered by an agreement paying $23.50 per year of service or by an earlier contract granting $20.50.
Walter Stover, a 72-year-old retired chemical operator, said at stake for him is about an extra $100 a month on top of his monthly pension check of $525.29. Stover figures he's owed at least $13,000 in back benefits.
"I could never get anyone to really listen,'' he said. "I'll feel better when I actually get the check.''
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From: "Vina Colley" vcolley@earthlink.net
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 09:04:45 -0700
Just heard from Sen. George Voinovich office about the hearings. You have to call Sen. Michael Dewine. office about signing to speak. His number is 1-202-224-2315 his office will be sending me a fax about the information soon. I was asked if I was from Brush Wellman sounds like they might be talking about the BE problems will know later. Vina
-------- tennessee
Our Views: Metal recycling future demands DOE answers
Oak Ridger
Friday, May 12, 2000
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/051200/opE_0512000043.html
The Department of Energy needs to be clear and unequivocal as to its commitment to recycle radioactively contaminated metals at the Oak Ridge K-25 site.
Clayton Gist, DOE team leader for waste management, told members of the Local Oversight Committee's Citizen Advisory Panel this week that Energy Secretary Richardson is expected to issue a two-year moratorium on the sale to commercial recyclers of metal with surface contamination.
Those discouraging words immediately sent the public relations spinners at DOE into high gear. "The statement made by Clay Gist at the LOC meeting regarding metals recycling issues was inaccurate. It appears that Mr. Gist was misinformed on this issue," said DOE spokesman Steve Wyatt.
But then Helen Hardin, chief of staff in the office of U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-3rd District, confirmed that DOE sources had, in fact, indicated that Secretary Richardson is seriously considering a halt to surface-contaminated metal recycling.
So, just who is misinformed here? Further, the congressman's office calls any halt to surface-contaminated metal recycling "a great threat to reindustrialization."
We would agree. And precisely because the consequences are so potentially serious, the DOE at a minimum owes us some straight talk on the issue.
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Why this waste?
Local efforts to handle DOE waste gain momentum
by Larisa Brass
Oak Ridger
Friday, May 12, 2000
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/051200/new_0512000019.html
It can be found in boxes and drums and tanks and below-ground tombs. Its forms include everything from shirts to sludges, tainted by an unpleasant list of radioisotopes, chemicals and metals. It's waste collected from over 50 years of work and play with atoms.
Oak Ridge stores 40 percent of the Department of Energy's national storehouses of low-level radioactive waste and mixed waste, a combination of radioactive waste and waste tainted by hazardous materials like chemicals or metals. And over 80 percent of DOE's transuranic waste is stored here, contaminated by radioisotopes heavier than uranium with longer half-lives than most civilizations.
All that's not to mention nearly 44 million cubic feet of waste to be produced by DOE's cleanup effort over the next 10 years.
"Waste," said Bob Sleeman, group leader of the environmental services group. "We have a lot."
But that's beginning to change. For local waste operations, it has been a banner year.
"I think we've probably gotten more done in terms of waste disposition than we've gotten in any year," said Clayton Gist, from DOE's waste remediation program. "I feel like we're turning the corner. We haven't exactly turned the corner, but we're getting there."
Gist said DOE has been increasing its shipments of mixed waste to a repository in Utah called Envirocare. Money was saved when officials discovered waste from an old collection pond known as S-3 was benign enough to deposit in the sanitary landfill at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant. And it appears that DOE will be able to double if not triple shipments of waste contaminated with low levels of radioactivity to the Nevada Test Site, which began to accept local waste last month.
DOE officials are also now finalizing plans to build a treatment and shipping center for transuranic waste near Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Construction on the plant is scheduled to begin this fall.
And workers are clearing a spot near Y-12 slated to become a landfill for the casks, building materials and contaminated soils generated by DOE's cleanup, scheduled to begin in earnest in the next couple of years.
The concerted effort to rid itself of this unpleasant legacy began in earnest this year, said Gist, as funding for local waste projects improved. And he said he expects the effort to increase over the next several years as long as funding holds.
How did Oak Ridge end up with all this waste?
In 1987 DOE, prompted by the state, stopped burying the low level and mixed waste in trenches in the ground. Because of the area's high water table and evidence that contamination was spreading off site, DOE began storing the waste above ground, waiting for a permanent solution to be found.
Other sites with better geology, particularly sites in the arid West, have continued to store much of their waste on site, said Sleeman.
Low level waste, both solid and in sludge form, contains relatively small amounts of radioactive contamination, things like uranium from operations at Y-12 and the Oak Ridge K-25 site, and cesium, strontium and other nuclear reactor products from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
All told, DOE has about 50,000 cubic meters of low level waste in storage, generated by activities at the sites since the mid-1980s. This waste began traveling by truck to the Nevada Test Site, a DOE-run disposal area, last month. Shipments of the stored waste will be complete by 2009, said Sleeman.
But also part of DOE's local disposal projects is an enormous quantity of low-level waste currently contained in buildings, trenches and soils from a half-century of nuclear operations in Oak Ridge. The problem will soon be addressed by a more than decade-long cleanup planned by DOE. But, because that waste will be generated by cleanup, it falls under a different law than the other low-level waste and much of it can be stored onsite in a specially engineered landfill with a long and cumbersome name -- the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility.
Construction of the high-tech landfill is scheduled to begin in late August and end in September. Waste disposal will begin in January, according to the current schedule, and end, if filled to its maximum capacity, in 2010.
Mixed waste is a combination of radioactively contaminated and hazardous waste. Much of the mixed waste came from the Y-12 Plant, where radioactive waste went through a treatment process that produced clean water and a sludge contaminated by radioactive elements and metals.
While low-level waste is just beginning to be shipped, mixed waste has been going to a repository in Utah called Envirocare for the past five years, Sleeman said. Oak Ridge still has about 11,000 cubic meters of mixed waste to treat and ship, in solid and sludge form. Officials estimate the shipments of stored waste will continue until about 2003.
Finally, transuranic waste, contaminated with dangerous long-lived radionuclides, will be treated onsite and sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Those shipments are scheduled to begin in 2003 and end in 2007 .
All told, the cost of treating and depositing the waste will total about $591 million. Currently it costs DOE about $14 million a year to store its low-level and mixed wastes.
So far, shipping the low-level and mixed waste has gone according to schedule, said Sleeman. Of course, DOE has regular milestone agreements with the state for shipping mixed waste. And the low-level waste disposal, which has no regulatory drivers, has just begun. And when budgets get cut, projects without legal deadlines are the first to go.
"When you get cuts, you're right, that's the first thing you cut," Sleeman said. "Low-level waste does not have the same clout as, say, mixed waste."
As for the transuranic waste, local officials are crossing their fingers that legal troubles surrounding the opening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project will be resolved by the time waste is ready for shipping in 2003. Otherwise, the process of stashing away the unwanted leftovers of Oak Ridge's nuclear legacy will start all over again.
All of this depends on stable funding and no surprises, said Gist.
"You know there's always a tall pole in the tent," he said.
-------- us nuc weapons
Crazy for Star Wars
Slate
May 12, 2000
By Robert Wright
http://slate.msn.com/Earthling/00-05-12/Earthling.asp
As the United States gets closer and closer to spending $60 billion on a missile-defense system designed to fend off attacks from "rogue states," I would like to get a bit clearer on what a rogue state is. All commentators seem to agree that rogue states exist, and pro-missile-defense commentators believe there is something in roguishness that renders a state impervious to the normal logic of nuclear deterrence. But what is this special something? To find out, I turned to my Random House unabridged dictionary.
I found several definitions of "rogue." A rogue could be a "tramp or a vagabond." That didn't seem to fit. Also, a rogue could be a "playfully mischievous person; scamp." As in: That zany rogue Saddam-he's flinging nuclear warheads at us again! (Where does he get the energy?)
No, I don't think that's what William Safire and George Will have in mind when they fret about rogues. This definition is much closer: "a dishonest, knavish person; scoundrel." In fact, this is roughly what policy wonks who have bothered to define the term say: Rogue states are outlaws, not bound by international norms.
Now, you can certainly argue that the rogue states most commonly cited in the missile-defense debate-Iraq and North Korea-deserve this designation. But what does this designation have to do with missile defense? Missile defense is needed only against leaders who-in contrast to a whole Cold War's worth of Soviet premiers-wouldn't fear the nuclear retaliation that a nuclear strike against America would invite. The question isn't whether there are rogue states, but whether there are crazy states.
The term "crazy state," actually, was in vogue a decade ago, applied to the same kind of nations that are now called rogues. But then people quit using the term. Why? Here's one theory: It's indefensible. Even if you examine the unabridged list of rogue states-Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Lybia, Syria, etc.-you will search in vain for a national leader who aspires to early death.
Muammar Qaddafi, for example, may seem erratic, but look what happened when Ronald Reagan gave him a sanity test. American jets bombed Qaddafi's house as punishment for sponsoring terrorism. The question was: Would Qaddafi a) retaliate, b) not retaliate but maintain a conspicuous association with terrorism, or c) start keeping a lower profile? He chose c) and thus passed the test.
What about Saddam Hussein? He certainly miscalculated before invading Kuwait: He assumed George Bush wouldn't mind. But is he crazy? A few months after the invasion, Secretary of State James Baker gave him the test. Baker warned ominously that devastating force would be the punishment for using chemical weapons against U.S. troops. Saddam kept his chemicals in their canisters, thus passing the sanity test.
Kim Jong Il may seem a bit daffy, wearing that funny suit and launching missiles helter-skelter. And, as George Will notes in supporting his claim that North Korea is a "rogue nation" with a "mysterious government," Kim keeps building missiles even as North Koreans, "by the scores of thousands, die of starvation." Yeah, Stalin was the same way-a bad guy. But whatever you say about someone who manages to stay in power even while his citizenry is starving to death, you can't say he's indifferent to his own survival. In fact, you can't even conclude that he's pursuing his survival irrationally. Kim Jong Il is about to embark on a dialogue with South Korea that may well lead to enough Western aid to feed the masses and thus save his political future. And one reason he'll get so much aid is that he fired those missiles and scared George Will half to death. That isn't crazy. It isn't even "mysterious."
If people want to argue that Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il are literally insane-which is what the pro-missile-defense argument requires-then fine. But in that case, can we at least resurrect the honest term "crazy state"? The term "rogue state" is just too easy: Missile-defense advocates throw it around, vaguely insinuating that the Husseins of the world are beyond reason, without having to actually support that unsupportable claim.
Years ago, William Safire did get explicit on this point. He imagined a scenario in which an Iraqi dictator proves immune to the logic of deterrence. "When the U.S. President warns Iraq of total annihilation, the dictator shrugs it off as his way to Heaven." As Janne Nolan and Mark Strauss pointed out in an article in the Brown Journal of World Affairs, this was an odd scenario to conjure up for a country whose current leader is undeniably secular (notwithstanding the occasional pious pose designed to gin up anti-Western fundamentalism). But Safire's broad-brush rendering of Arab states is consistent with the whole "rogue state" rhetorical strategy: to depict rogues as a breed apart, all of them equally lacking in the sort of rationality possessed by leaders of European heritage.
Which brings us to one last definition of "rogue" that was in the Random House unabridged and may be closer to what the users of "rogue state" actually have in mind. The definition comes from biology: "a usually inferior organism ... varying markedly from the normal."
Dear Saddam: You're dead. Is it possible that some rogue dictator would dismiss the threat of American retaliation not because of an insouciant disregard for continued existence but because he doubted American resolve? That would be ironic. After all, since rogue states are the least entangled with the United States economically and the least likely to have American tourists, exchange students, etc., they are actually the states that are most plausibly subject to American retaliation. (Saddam Hussein may be laboring under a misconception or two, but American reluctance to drop bombs on Iraq isn't one of them.) Still, in the event that the credibility of American retaliation is a problem, I have a solution. The United States is currently prohibited by law from assassinating foreign heads of state. If Congress conspicuously passed a law authorizing the assassination of leaders whose states had launched a nuclear attack, that might help clarify their thinking. You think I'm joking? Hey, it would cost $60 billion less than missile defense and be much more effective.
Fact-check update: In my last rant against missile defense, I highlighted this sentence from a pro-missile-defense column by William Safire: "But many who insist it will never work were doubtful our technology could ever put a man on the moon." I asked readers to e-mail me if they could find even one person who was on record as saying missile defense would never work and as having said the moon shot would never work. So far no one has managed. I'm all ears.
Join The Fray What did you think of this article?
Robert Wright is the author of The Moral Animal and the new book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
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Countering missile threats
Kansas City Star
05/13/00 22:00
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/opinion.pat,opinion/377475c3.512,.html
When President Clinton meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next month, nuclear strategy will be at the top of the agenda. Russia, which can't afford the upkeep on its nuclear stockpile, wants deeper cuts in missiles. Washington wants treaty changes to allow deployment of a defense against missiles launched by rogue states.
The situation may seem strange to many people. Basically, the Clinton White House is seeking Moscow's approval so Washington can defend U.S. territory against a rapidly growing threat.
To put this in perspective, here's a brief review: After a Clinton administration assessment in the mid-1990s concluded that any credible missile threat wouldn't show up for 15 years, Clinton vetoed a missile-defense spending measure. The White House said the legislation called for outlays in excess of need.
Two years later, however, the North Koreans launched a multistage rocket and Iran launched a medium-range missile.
It's worth repeating: No defense exists against such weapons. In a crisis, a president faced with nuclear blackmail would have few cards to play other than threatening to retaliate by annihilating an entire city or cities.
Under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, anti-missile systems are severely limited. For example, missile-defense systems can't be based on ships and interceptors can't be guided by data from space-based sensors.
Such restrictions make it even harder to develop a credible defense. In addition, the feasibility of current U.S. plans is a subject of debate and recent missile-defense tests have had mixed results.
Realistically, it may not be possible to amend the treaty to permit the limited system planned to defend the United States against rogue-state missiles. Instead of making the attempt, Clinton should pass this problem to his successor. Under no circumstances should he negotiate treaty amendments that would narrow the next president's list of options.
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Missiles and U.S. Security
Los Angeles Times
Friday, May 12, 2000
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000512/t000044761.html
* "U.S. Missile Defense May Jeopardize Security" (May 8) accurately describes the security problems we will face if we build an antiballistic missile system. Let's ask our leaders why any country would even consider launching a small-scale nuclear missile attack on the U.S. Would it be easy for foes to overwhelm this ABM system with decoys or additional missiles? Would terrorists be likely to use stealth, or UPS, rather than missiles to deliver nuclear weapons? Why do our allies oppose changing the 1972 ABM treaty? How might Russia, China, Iraq or North Korea react to a U.S. ABM system?
Using nuclear weapons, or threatening to use them, is not a realistic military strategy. Killing millions of civilians is not a valid foreign policy. We can make the world a safer place and enhance our own security if we keep the ABM treaty, repudiate launch-on-warning, de-alert nuclear weapons, reduce numbers of missiles, pledge no first use, ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and promote weapons control in space.
DICK HEISER Los Angeles
* Why should deployment of a missile defense system with a capability that is limited to intercepting a relatively small number of missiles be a threat to Russia, China or any nation? On the contrary, it seems to me that by providing the U.S. with some defense against an accidental or terrorist-initiated missile attack we would lessen the chance of the U.S. mistakenly retaliating against a possibly innocent third party, a benefit to everyone.
Common sense dictates that, given time, someone eventually will use or try to use nuclear weapons. The U.S. must face the reality that sometime, in some way, it will be targeted. I suggest that the experts review the result of one single 1940s-style atomic bomb over Hiroshima and not be overly concerned about damaging relations with our so-called allies.
What security do we have to jeopardize anyway? So far as I know, we have absolutely no way of defending ourselves against one single lonely ICBM.
ROBERT L. RODMAN Studio City
* Re "Putin: a Mixed Picture," editorial, May 9: I am amazed that in an editorial on the inauguration of Vladimir V. Putin as the president of Russia you fail to mention his success in securing passage of START II and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the Duma. Putin is asking to be viewed as a person very much on board with us in terms of containing unbounded strategic warfare.
We should recognize that we present a rather threatening aspect to the world by our own refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. We have an incredible opportunity by virtue of having a willing negotiating partner on the other side, one who does not wish to pour Russia's scarce financial resources down missile silos. Those of us who have been following this history since World War II have reason to be profoundly relieved to finally have a Russia to deal with that is so accommodating on these crucial strategic interests.
SIEGFRIED OTHMER Sherman Oaks
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Physicist Group Says Missile Defense Tests Fall ´Far Short´
New York Times
May 11, 2000
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/051100sci-missile-defense.html
The American Physical Society, the world's largest group of physicists, Wednesday faulted the Pentagon's test program for its anti-missile defense system as "far short" of what the president needs to make an informed decision about whether the proposed weapon can actually shoot down enemy warheads.
The criticism comes as the Pentagon presses ahead with an interception test set for June and President Clinton prepares to decide afterward if the nation should build a limited defense against missile attacks by rogue states. Its cost is estimated at up to $60 billion.
The group zeroed in on what it called meager testing of possible ways an enemy might outwit the proposed weapon system, which would consist initially of 100 ground-based interceptors.
The United States, it said, should make no decision to build a National Missile Defense unless it is shown "to be effective against the types of offensive countermeasures that an attacker could reasonably be expected to deploy with its long-range missiles." Such demonstrations, it said, could be achieved through analysis and interception flight tests.
So far, the group added, the tests that the Pentagon has conducted and plans to carry out in the time before the president's decision "fall far short of those required to provide confidence" in the technical feasibility of the weapon system.
The physics group, based in Washington, in its brief statement made no specific recommendations on what kinds of tests the Pentagon should do prior to a deployment decision. The statement was posted Wednesday on the group's Web site, www.aps.org.
A Pentagon spokesman said the group had ignored "literally a mountain" of anti-missile research.
"We're very confident that our test data will allow the president to make an informed decision," said Lt. Col. Richard Lehner of the Air Force, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
The anti-missile flight test scheduled for June is the fifth in a series bedeviled by delays. Two of the experiments were target flybys, one succeeded in hitting a mock warhead and one failed.
Lehner said 17 more tests are to be performed before 2005, when the proposed system is to be switched on. Data from these experiments, he added, will help designers improve the weapon.
To date, targets in the interception tests have consisted of a single mock warhead and a single decoy balloon. The Pentagon says it plans to increase decoy complexity in future tests.
Last month, a 175-page study by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Security Studies Program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that an enemy could easily fool the anti-missile system with swarms of fake and disguised warheads.
Prominent friends and foes of the proposed anti-missile system have asked the Clinton administration to delay a decision on whether to build it until after the November elections.
The American Physical Society, which represents more than 42,000 physicists, said the anti-missile statement was adopted by its 48-member council on April 29, during its annual meeting.
The statement, it said, does not imply that the group has taken a position on the wisdom of an anti-missile deployment, only its technical viability.
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General Dynamics Buys Saco Defense
Associated Press
May 12, 2000 Filed at 6:36 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/f/AP-Saco-Defense.html
SACO, Maine (AP) -- General Dynamics Corp. said Friday it agreed to purchase machine gun maker Saco Defense for an undisclosed amount of cash.
Saco manufactures light and medium-caliber machine guns and is the U.S. military's sole supplier of the MK-19 automatic grenade launcher. Upon completion of the deal, Saco Defense will become part of General Dynamics Armament Systems, based in Burlington, Vt.
``Their product line is very complementary to ours,'' said Clif Bushey, vice president of strategic planning at General Dynamics Armament Systems. ``This acquisition significantly expands our ability to offer a full range of armament solutions.''
Saco Defense has 225 employees. Bushey said it was too early to say what changes would be implemented as a result of the merger.
General Dynamics, with headquarters in Falls Church, Va., has annual sales of some $10 billion and is a leading supplier of nuclear submarines and destroyers. New Colt Holding Corp., based in West Hartford, Conn., is a supplier of light arms.
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Clinton hits Bush over environment, nukes, abortion
Washington Times
May 12, 2000
By Andrew Cain
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000512232545.htm
President Clinton Thursday criticized Gov. George W. Bush, saying if he is elected president, he would appoint Supreme Court justices bent on repealing abortion rights, turn the environment over to polluters and pursue "troublesome" nuclear-arms policies.
"If Governor Bush gets elected, he'll appoint judges more like the ones appointed by the previous Reagan and Bush administrations," Mr. Clinton told interviewer Diane Rehm of National Public Radio (NPR).
"And if they get two to four appointments on the Supreme Court, I think Roe vs. Wade will be repealed," he said.
Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the president is "moving from his role of commander in chief to his role as campaign manager in chief."
Mr. Clinton's harshest attack to date comes as two new polls showed the Texas governor has erased the "gender gap" and drawn even with Vice President Al Gore among women.
Nationally, Mr. Bush leads Mr. Gore 48 percent to 42 percent in the bipartisan Battleground poll. The poll showed that Mr. Bush leads among women by four points. Mr. Clinton won among women by 16 points in 1996.
In a Los Angeles Times poll, Mr. Bush leads nationally by 51 percent to 43 percent. He leads 48 percent to 46 percent among women and is ahead 14 points among married women.
The Bush campaign responded to the Clinton charge that he would appoint only pro-life supporters to the Supreme Court by saying the governor has no "litmus test." Mr. Bush also does not want to change the anti-abortion plank in the Republican platform, which calls for a constitutional amendment to ban abortions.
"The governor has made it clear he will appoint strict constructionists," people who will interpret the law, but who "will not make law from the bench," Mr. McClellan said.
In his comments on NPR, Mr. Clinton also said if Mr. Bush wins, "he will do what he did in Texas -he will let the people who basically are the primary polluters control environmental policy."
Mr. Clinton said that Mr. Gore, as president, would "try to grow the economy and keep cleaning up the environment."
The Gore campaign claims Texas - home to a concentration of oil refineries and chemical plants -spews more toxic chemicals into the environment than any other state.
Texas ranks fifth among the states in overall toxic emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
But the Bush campaign says Texas ranks second among the states in reducing toxic pollutants since 1992 and cut them by 14 percent between 1995 and 1997. "Texas is leading the nation in reducing toxics and industrial emissions," Mr. McClellan said.
Mr. Clinton also criticized Mr. Bush for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and for the scope of the missile defense system Mr. Bush would back.
"He says that he wants to build a much bigger missile defense system than the evidence warrants right now - it may support it later - no matter what the consequences are to the efforts we're making to reduce the nuclear weapons threat around the world," Mr. Clinton said.
"So I think that that gives me some pause. I think that's troublesome. Because it could cause the country a lot of trouble in the next four or five years."
Mr. Bush's campaign responded by saying the Clinton-Gore administration could learn a few things from the governor.
"It's cause for concern that the president and the vice president do not agree with this high priority. [Mr. Bush] believes it's important to protect our country and our citizens" from missile launches by rogue nations.
On taxes, Mr. Clinton said Mr. Bush would seek "a tax cut much bigger than the one I vetoed before, defense increases bigger than the ones that I proposed, and vouchers for our schools."
If that happens, Mr. Clinton said, "we'll basically be back to the Reagan-Bush economic philosophy, which is cut the revenues of the government, even if it means going back to deficits and higher interest rates. And it will mean that we won't have much money left over to invest in education or the environment or health care."
Mr. Clinton, who plans to write a book about his presidency, sounded a bitter tone in reflecting on the partisan battles of his tenure.
The president charged that he faced "more partisan opposition than at any time in history," and he accused Republicans in Congress of holding a vendetta.
"I think some Republicans thought that the Democratic majority in Congress had been too hard on their presidents, and so they thought it was payback time," Mr. Clinton said.
Mr. Clinton charged that Republicans in Congress "resented the fact that they didn't have the White House. They thought that they owned the White House, and they thought they had found a formula that would always keep Democrats out of the White House.
"They would say we couldn't be trusted on the economy and foreign policy and national defense and welfare and crime, and we were going to tax people to death, and all the things they always said. And when it didn't work, I think they were very angry."
Republicans "decided that they would oppose me at every turn and in every way," Mr. Clinton said. "It was about power."
-------- us uranium
Uranium Samples Found in Md.
Associated Press
May 12, 2000 Filed at 3:53 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Radioactive-Archives.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Small samples of radioactive uranium ore have been discovered in two document boxes containing U.S. Army intelligence records, officials of the National Archives said Friday.
The officials, said the samples of ``native unprocessed ore'' were discovered by U.S. Army personnel after they were transferred from a non-public secured storage area at the Archives at College Park, Md., to an Army center at Ballston, Va. That facility deals with the declassification of documents.
``The materials were immediately tested and ultimately contained and were determined not to present a health or safety hazard to employees,'' the Archives said in a statement.
An Army spokesman was not immediately available.
Susan Cooper, an Archives spokeswoman, said the uranium samples involved ``tiny'' fragments of the mineral and were contained in four envelopes inside the two boxes.
She said no radioactivity was detected in the area in which the documents were being processed or on the outside of the boxes. She said no signs of radioactivity were found on the clothes of any of the people who handled the boxes.
``A very small amount of radiation was detected on direct examination of (the) four envelopes containing ore samples,'' the Archives statement said.
Before their transfer to the Army facility at Ballston on Jan. 24, the two suspect boxes had been stored for nearly five years in a secured area at the Archives. Officials said they were not available to researchers.
No radioactivity was discovered in the Archives storage area, the officials said.
The Archives has asked the Department of Energy to conduct a thorough search of all classified records, the Archives statement said. It said future shipments of newly accessioned materials will be examined as they arrive at the Archives building.
-------- us politics
G.O.P. Will Scrutinize Clinton's National Security Policies
New York Times
May 12, 2000
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/00/05/12/news/world/national-security.html
WASHINGTON, May 11 -- Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, agreed today to create a national security advisory panel of senior Republican experts in an effort to give more credibility to Congressional scrutiny and criticism of President Clinton's foreign policy.
The creation of the panel, which is to be announced next week, coincides with growing alarm and distrust among many Republicans on Capitol Hill over crucial decisions Mr. Clinton will make in the coming weeks on missile defenses, nuclear arms reductions with Russia and other national security issues.
"There's a growing concern that we need to really monitor events on how our national security is safeguarded," said Mr. Lott's spokesman, John Czwartacki.
Mr. Lott and Mr. Hastert, who met privately today on a number of issues, are forming the panel with the knowledge and implicit blessing of top aides to Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Indeed, the panel is likely to be stocked in part with experts who are advising Mr. Bush.
Congressional aides said the panel of perhaps two dozen members would include former secretaries of defense and state, and other experts.
Among those mentioned as leading candidates are Donald H. Rumsfeld, a former secretary of defense, and R. James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence.
The advisers would meet periodically to advise Mr. Lott and Mr. Hastert on national security issues. Their first task is likely to be counseling Republican leaders on Mr. Clinton's coming meeting in Moscow with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
"We have a very qualified pool of experts who hold positions of expertise that fall outside current government channels," Mr. Czwartacki said.
"The idea is to establish a brain trust that can encompass all this talent and inform the opinions and decisions made by the leaders."
One senior House Republican aide said the group would be asked to submit reports on various issues to the Republican leadership with a final, wide-ranging report due in July, possibly for use by the speaker and majority leader on the campaign trail over the summer recess in August.
The House and Senate already have committees intended to provide Mr. Lott and Mr. Hastert with the kind of advice and guidance they now seemingly feel they need from a distinguished group of outside experts.
"There was a sense we needed to have people involved with the arms control issues to really provide counsel on a lot of important decisions," said a top House Republican aide.
One vocal critic of the administration, Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, is thinking along the same lines as the two Republican leaders.
Mr. Weldon said he would introduce a bill next week calling for the creation of a bipartisan national security advisory panel.
Mr. Weldon said it would be modeled on a commission headed by Mr. Rumsfeld that two years ago conducted an assessment of the ballistic-missile threat to the United States.
---
Coelho leadership hit as Gore campaign sags
Washington Times
May 12, 2000
By Donald Lambro
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000512231121.htm
Vice President Al Gore's campaign chairman, Tony Coelho, is the target of at least three federal investigations that are fueling Democratic concern about their impact on Mr. Gore's presidential campaign.
At the same time, some Democrats are privately beginning to question Mr. Coelho's overall handling of the campaign in the past month. Mr. Gore's polls have declined in a half-dozen states, such as Washington, Oregon and West Virginia, that his party normally carries with ease.
Morale on the campaign staff at the vice president's headquarters in Nashville, Tenn., is reportedly falling under Mr. Coelho's blunt, brash management style. And there is grumbling that the campaign has no compelling message and has been too negative.
"Gore is not out there with a positive message telling people why he should be president. His attacks [on Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the probable Republican nominee] are not getting him anywhere right now," said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist who is a political adviser to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.
"There's a risk if you stay in an attack mode too long, you end up looking like a politician and not a leader. The voters are tired of attack-style politics," former Rep. Tim Penny, Minnesota Democrat, said of Mr. Gore's attacks on Mr. Bush.
With Mr. Gore undergoing his third Justice Department investigation into the Clinton-Gore campaign-finance scandal -this time about missing White House e-mail messages related to the scandal - the vice president can ill-afford to be associated with more government probes and yet another scandal.
But Mr. Coelho is not only being investigated simultaneously by the State Department's Office of Inspector General and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about his past business dealings, the probes involve subpoenas, testimony from witnesses and possible grand jury action.
Moreover, the national news media, which had largely steered clear of the Coelho investigations, has begun to focus on them in recent weeks. Two stories on the probes appeared in this week's issues of Time and Newsweek magazines, among other publications.
A headline over the Time article detailing Mr. Coelho's legal battles read: "The Trouble With Tony."
Most Democrats do not think that the investigations will have any impact on Mr. Gore's campaign, unless something new is uncovered.
"There's nothing new in any of these articles that haven't appeared before," a veteran Democratic strategist said Thursday. Why the sudden flurry of articles about Mr. Coelho in the past few weeks? "It's the usual people shooting at Tony from the inside that goes on in every campaign."
Mr. Gore's critics, however, say the charges are serious and growing media interest in them is going to increase pressure on Mr. Gore to address them in a public forum.
"Why would the vice president want someone as his campaign chairman who is under federal investigation? You would think that a scandal-besmirched vice president would want someone who was squeaky clean," said Charles Lewis, who heads the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
"It's true that there's nothing new in these stories, but none of it has been addressed by the vice president. Gore has never answered any substantive questions about the Coelho situation and the ethical cloud around his campaign chairman," Mr. Lewis said.
"Coelho has not responded directly, either. He has stonewalled reporters. That's the Gore campaign's strategy," he said.
Mr. Coelho's attorney, Stanley Brand, said that his client has done nothing illegal and Mr. Gore's advisers say that Mr. Coelho's job is secure.
But outside party strategists and Gore critics fear that continuing news media reports of Mr. Coelho's legal troubles are the last thing that Mr. Gore needs right now after nearly eight years as vice president in a scandal-ridden administration.
"If they continue, it could hurt the campaign," said a well-connected Democratic Party adviser.
The State Department investigation, conducted by its Office of Inspector General, is looking into whether Mr. Coelho abused his position as U.S. commissioner to the 1998 World Exposition in Lisbon, Portugal, to promote his many business dealings and a private foundation. The ongoing investigation has subpoenaed documents and witnesses and the case could be presented to a grand jury.
"He was running a one-man show with Expo as a backdrop. He used all of the cachet and resources of his position to further his business interests," said a senior foreign-service officer in a lengthy investigative article about the case published by the National Journal in March.
An initial, still-confidential audit of the way Mr. Coelho handled the U.S. commissioner's office "detailed numerous financial irregularities, as well as the potential violations of law," the National Journal reported.
---
President blasts Bush candidacy
Bergen Record
Friday, May 12, 2000
By TERENCE HUNT The Associated Press
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/clinton12200005124.htm
WASHINGTON -- President Clinton took on the role of political attacker Thursday, charging that George W. Bush would pursue "troublesome" nuclear-arms policies as president, let polluters regulate the environment, and appoint judges bent on repealing abortion rights.
In his toughest criticism yet of the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Clinton also contended that Bush would bring back budget deficits and higher interest rates by pushing big tax cuts and Pentagon spending increases.
Bush's campaign shot back that Clinton was "continuing his transition from commander in chief into his role as campaign manager in chief" for Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate.
With Gore trailing in the polls, Clinton opened up on Bush in a radio interview with Diane Rehm of National Public Radio. Although Clinton often has professed reluctance to be dragged into the presidential race, he jumped in enthusiastically.
Gore increasingly is turning to surrogates for help in attacking Bush, as some advisers fear that the vice president's own full-throated criticisms are backfiring with voters who say they don't like negative campaigning. Donna Shalala, Health and Human Services secretary, criticized the governor's health care plans Tuesday.
"What the president is pointing out is something that Al Gore has pointed out, other Democrats have pointed out, and other analysts have pointed out," said Gore spokesman Chris Lehane.
Singling out national security policies, Clinton noted Bush's opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate defeated last year.
Moreover, Clinton said Bush "wants to build a much bigger missile defense system than the evidence warrants right now -- it may support it later -- no matter what the consequences are to the efforts we're making to reduce the nuclear weapons threat around the world."
"So I think that that gives me some pause," the president said. "I think that's troublesome, because it could cause the country a lot of trouble in the next four or five years."
Returning fire, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said: "Governor Bush believes it is important to protect America and Americans from rogue missile launches, and he is concerned that the president and vice president do not agree with this urgent priority."
Clinton is to decide later this year whether to deploy a national anti-missile system that the Pentagon estimates would cost $30 billion.
Turning to other areas, Clinton said Gore would help the economy grow and would expand environmental cleanup efforts while Bush would "do what he did in Texas. He will let people who basically are the primary polluters control environmental policy."
To that charge, McClellan said: "Texas is leading the nation in reducing toxics, and industrial emissions are down 11 percent under Governor Bush."
Clinton said the next president would fill two to four seats on the Supreme Court as expected vacancies arise. He said Gore would appoint diverse judges committed to individual liberties and "in the mainstream of American constitutional history." But he said Bush would appoint judges "more like the ones appointed by the previous Reagan and Bush administrations."
"And if they get two to four appointments on the Supreme Court, I think Roe vs. Wade will be repealed and a lot of other things that have been a part of the fabric of our constitutional life will be gone," Clinton said.
Bush says he opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother. He has said he would nominate "strict constructionists" to the court -- taken by some to mean justices open to abortion restrictions. McClellan said it means justices "who will interpret law and not make law from the bench."
-------- us toxic waste
New Map Shows Arsenic In Nation's Ground Water
May 10, 2000,
Daily University Science News
http://unisci.com/stories/20002/0510002.htm
A new U.S. Geological Survey national map shows where and to what extent arsenic occurs in ground water across the nation. Highest concentrations were found in samples analyzed throughout the West and in parts of the Midwest and Northeast. "The widespread occurrence of this naturally occurring and toxic element underscores its importance as a top national priority to address in ensuring safe and livable communities for all our citizens," said USGS Chief Hydrologist Robert Hirsch.
"Arsenic was included in the amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act by Congress in 1996 because of its known prevalence and possible adverse health effects," Hirsch said. "The new map, and the data base from which it was created, have substantially increased our understanding of arsenic occurrence and provides a snapshot view of where ground-water resources are at risk from arsenic contamination."
Concentrations of arsenic in the USGS study were almost always lower than the current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) drinking-water standard of 50 micrograms per liter. The USEPA is in the process of designating a new standard for arsenic.
In a report released last year, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the USEPA issue a lower concentration for the standard.
"The information from the USGS study will help water managers and other users to better understand where and to what extent ground water may have limitations for public supply and other uses because of the concentrations of arsenic that are present," Hirsch said.
In looking at where arsenic concentrations might exceed possible new standards, the USGS chose the international guideline for arsenic in drinking water of 10 micrograms per liter set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Approximately 10 percent of the samples in the USGS study exceed the WHO guideline.
Based on ground water samples collected from wells used for irrigation, industrial purposes and research, and public and private water supply, the new map shows in which counties wells might exceed 10 micrograms per liter and several lower concentrations.
The countywide findings portrayed on the map were calculated from about 18,850 samples of potable ground water (which are not necessarily current sources of drinking water), and do not represent testing of every well or drinking water supply system in a given county.
The map is available at this website.
Arsenic is a naturally occurring element in the environment. Its presence in ground water is largely the result of minerals dissolving naturally over time as rocks and soils weather.
Several types of cancer have been linked to arsenic present in drinking water concentrations higher than observed in U.S. drinking water supplies. In addition, high levels of arsenic have been reported to affect the vascular system in people and have been associated with the development of diabetes.
Public supply systems exceeding the existing USEPA standard are required to either treat the water or find alternative sources of supply. People served by public water supplies can obtain information on the quality of their drinking water, including arsenic concentrations, directly from their water supplier.
Information about public water supplies in your community is also available from the USEPA.
Homeowners with private wells, and other types of small public water supplies, such as highway rest stops, are not regulated. If people are concerned about whether or not arsenic is present in their water, they should have it tested. Public health departments can help in locating laboratories for this purpose.
Data used in this analysis and an accompanying USGS fact sheet, Arsenic in Ground-Water Resources of the United States, are available at this website.
As the nation's largest water, earth and biological science and civilian mapping agency the USGS works in cooperation with more than 2000 organizations across the country to provide reliable, impartial, scientific information to resource managers, planners, and other customers.
This information is gathered in every state by USGS scientists to minimize the loss of life and property from natural disasters, contribute to sound economic and physical development of the nation's natural resources, and enhance the quality of life by monitoring water, biological, energy, and mineral resources.
(Editor's Note: This week, May 7-13, is National Drinking Water Week, sponsored by the American Water Works Association.)
[Contact: Butch Kinerney]
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.