-------- NUCLEAR (by country)

-------- britain

Dangerous work

From New Scientist magazine,
08 July 2000.
by Rob Edwards
From: Debbie Katz <can@shaysnet.com>

WORKERS exposed to radiation in uranium processing plants may run an increased risk of developing lung cancer two decades later, according to a study commissioned by British Nuclear Fuels.

Although there is some evidence that uranium miners can contract lung cancer from the dust they inhale, there is scant evidence that workers in facilities where the radioactive metal is processed are at risk. But now David McGeoghegan from Westlakes Scientific Consulting in Cumbria has found a link between radiation and lung cancers at the Springfields uranium fuel fabrication plant near Preston in Lancashire.

He analysed the health records of 19 500 people employed at the plant between 1946 and 1995 and discovered that workers exposed to higher levels of radiation suffered more lung cancers. In all, 225 people were diagnosed with the disease. Of those, only two had received cumulative radiation doses during their time at Springfields of more than 200 millisieverts. The recommended annual safety limit for workers is 20 millisieverts.

The association between dose and disease only becomes statistically significant 20 years after the dose was received, McGeoghegan says. He thinks it's possible that radiation caused some of the cancers, but points out that the doses recorded are based solely on measurements of radiation OUTSIDE THE BODY [MY CAPS]. He now plans to analyse radioactivity levels within the workers' lungs, which could be more directly related to the cancers.

The connection between lung cancer and radiation dose is potentially important, says Michael Clark from Britain's National Radiological Protection Board. "There is no proof that the association is causal, but it would be sensible to investigate further."

Source: Journal of Radiological Protection (vol 20, p 111)

-------- china

US and China to continue arms control dialogue

ABC News
Sat, 8 Jul 2000 4:01 AEST
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-8jul2000-7.htm

Negotiators from China and the United States have resumed arms control talks in Beijing, 14 months after they were suspended when NATO planes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

The talks are expected to focus on US plans to test a prototype missile interceptor system, which China is extremely concerned about.

The United States says the national missile system is designed to defend the US from a missile attack by North Korea, but China clearly feels it is the real target.

China has a very small nuclear arsenal of only 20 long range missiles.

If the US goes ahead with its missile defence system, China will almost certainly respond by dramatically increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal.

The US wants China to stop supplying missile technology to other countries, in particular to Pakistan.

---

China Again Opposes U.S. Missile Shield for Taiwan

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 11:46 PM ET
By Bill Savadove
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/pl/china_usa_dc_6.html

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has again voiced strong opposition to the United States over including Taiwan under a proposed missile defense shield, state media quoted Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi on Sunday as saying.

``China has again voiced its firm opposition to arms sales to Taiwan by any country, including providing Taiwan with TMD-related assistance and a TMD shield,'' Sun said, referring to the U.S.-proposed Theater Missile Defense scheme for Asia.

Beijing considers Taiwan part of its sovereign territory and has threatened to use military force if the island seeks independence.

The remarks followed the end of the first arms control talks in more than a year between the United States and China and the failed U.S. test of a proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) system that has united China and Russia in opposition.

In comments carried by major newspapers, Sun said China expressed ``serious concerns'' to the United States about the missile defense schemes during the talks, which ended on Saturday in Beijing.

A senior U.S. arms negotiator said on Saturday that the United States has not ruled out Taiwan's protection under an Asian missile defense umbrella.

``We don't rule out the possibility that some time in the future Taiwan may have TMD capabilities,'' senior U.S. arms control adviser John Holum told reporters.

Holum spoke hours after a ``hit-to-kill'' weapon fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific failed to destroy a target warhead in space in a $100 million test of the NMD system.

Differences Remain

Sun said the talks between Holum and Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Guangya were frank and comprehensive, but differences remained.

``Both sides agreed that the two countries have a number of common stances and interests in the areas of arms control and anti-proliferation, and at the same time some disagreement,'' he said, but gave no details.

China, which has found common cause with Russia in opposition to the NMD, has said it may have to add to its strategic missile arsenal if the U.S. project goes ahead.

Holum said the two sides also failed to bridge gaps over alleged Chinese sales of missile technology to Pakistan.

The New York Times said last week China had stepped up shipment of special steels, guidance systems and technical expertise to Pakistan. China and Pakistan have publicly denied the accusations.

During the talks, China and the United States agreed to continue similar ``consultations'' in the future, Sun said.

Previous cooperation had helped maintain both global and regional stability and promoted the development of Sino-U.S. relations, he said.

---

China, U.S. End Arms Control Talks As Test Fails

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 6:53 AM ET
By Paul Eckert
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/ts/arms_china_dc_1.html

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States has not ruled out bringing Taiwan under an Asian missile defense umbrella bitterly opposed by China, a senior U.S. arms negotiator said in Beijing Saturday.

``We don't rule out the possibility that some time in the future Taiwan may have TMD capabilities,'' senior U.S. arms control adviser John Holum told reporters, referring to the U.S.-proposed Theater Missile Defense scheme for Asia.

The United States and China wrapped up their first arms control talks in more than a year in the wake of a failed U.S. test of a proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) system that has united China and Russia in opposition.

He spoke hours after a ``hit-to-kill'' weapon fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific failed to destroy a target warhead in space in a $100 million test of the NMD system.

``We didn't plan to have the talks on the day of the test,'' Holum said.

Holum said his Chinese hosts stressed Beijing's opposition to NMD as well as TMD, two of the many disputes which hung over the resumption of arms control talks which China broke off last May after NATO bombed its embassy in Yugoslavia.

``They were clear, as they have been publicly, on their position on National Missile Defense. They don't like the idea,'' he said.

Taiwan ``Dominant'' Worry Of China

China, which has found common cause with Russia in opposition to the NMD, has said it may have to add to its strategic missile arsenal if the U.S. project goes ahead.

Washington hoped to use the renewed arms control dialogue to reassure Beijing.

``We do not see and are not designing this system to be deployed against the Chinese (and) that we are satisfied with the stable deterrent relationship with China,'' Holum said of NMD.

He said China's ``dominant concern'' was that TMD, intended to defend U.S. troops and Asian allies against perceived missile threats from North Korea, would be used to shelter Taiwan and stiffen its resolve against reunification overtures from China.

Washington had made no decision on TMD other than to use it to defend U.S. troops based in the region once the technology becomes available in about 2007, Holum added.

He urged China to pursue dialogue with Taiwan and not start a ``missile competition'' with the island.

``The extent to which we and, in turn, Taiwan consider they need defense depends on Chinese deployments of offensive capabilities across the (Taiwan) Strait,'' Holum said.

Dispute Over Pakistan

The two sides failed to bridge gaps over alleged Chinese sales of missile technology to Pakistan, Holum said.

``We made progress, but the issue remains unresolved,''

China has not joined the 31-nation Missile Technology Control Regime (MCTR), but in 1994 vowed to uphold its ban of the export of missiles whose range exceeds 190 miles (300 km).

Holum said Washington believed Beijing had kept its pledge on the delivery of complete missiles but the two sides differed on whether China's pledge covered the transfer of missile technology.

``There is a dispute over the extent to which China agreed to limits on technology associated with the Missile Technology Control Regime,'' he said.

Holum arrived in Beijing this week in the wake of a New York Times report citing U.S. intelligence that China had stepped up the shipment of special steels, guidance systems and technical expertise to Pakistan.

Holum declined to say whether the Chinese acknowledged such transfers to Pakistan during talks in Beijing. China and its old ally Pakistan have publicly denied the accusations.

The U.S. envoy said the two sides agreed to hold expert-level talks soon to try to resolve the Pakistan impasse.

---

China, U.S. Fail To Resolve Dispute

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 9:41 AM ET
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) - China and the United States failed to put to rest a dispute over Chinese aid to Pakistan's missile program during talks that restarted dialogue on arms control after a 19-month interruption.

``We made progress, but the issue remains unresolved,'' John Holum, Washington's chief arms control negotiator, told a news conference Saturday after two days of discussions with Chinese officials.

The sides agreed to hold further expert-level discussions in the near future, he said.

Holum said he also explained Washington's arguments in favor of a national anti-missile defense shield, a system China and Russia adamantly oppose, and defended U.S. sales of defensive weapons to Taiwan.

China, led in the talks by Vice Foreign Minister Wang Guangya, raised ``strong concerns,'' over Taiwan arms sales and restated its opposition to the inclusion of the island it considers a breakaway province within any regional missile shield, Holum said.

Holum's visit marks a resumption of arms control dialogue that China broke off after U.S. planes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, six months after their last formal session. Washington has long sought to hold regular talks on missile proliferation, a matter that has repeatedly bedeviled relations between the sides.

A U.S. intelligence report last year claimed China sent longtime ally Pakistan nuclear-capable M-11 missiles in the early 1990s, which could force the United States to apply sanctions against China under anti-missile proliferation rules. President Clinton's administration is trying to avoid imposing sanctions.

Pressure, though, is growing in Congress for Clinton to wring concessions from Beijing. Proposed legislation in the Senate calls for monitoring of China's weapons proliferation and possible sanctions. Holum called the pending law unnecessary.

China has pledged not to export whole missile systems and denies selling them to Pakistan. But it has declined to sign the international Missile Technology Control Regime or abide by its ban on sales of missile components.

Holum said he told the Chinese side that no decision has been made on whether to include Taiwan under a missile shield. He said he tried to assuage China's suspicions that such a system is aimed at containing the threat from China's missiles.

``We've made clear to China that we take their concerns seriously and we intend to address them,'' Holum said.

A test of a key component of the U.S. missile defense program failed Saturday, when an interceptor failed to stop a dummy missile fired over the Pacific. Holum said the test's being held while he was in Beijing was an unintended coincidence.

---

China, U.S. End Arms Control Talks As Test Fails

Reuters
July 8, 2000 Filed at 6:36 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-us.html

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States has not ruled out bringing Taiwan under an Asian missile defense umbrella bitterly opposed by China, a senior U.S. arms negotiator said in Beijing on Saturday.

``We don't rule out the possibility that some time in the future Taiwan may have TMD capabilities,'' senior U.S. arms control adviser John Holum told reporters, referring to the U.S.-proposed Theater Missile Defense scheme for Asia.

The United States and China wrapped up their first arms control talks in more than a year in the wake of a failed U.S. test of a proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) system that has united China and Russia in opposition.

He spoke hours after a ``hit-to-kill'' weapon fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific failed to destroy a target warhead in space in a $100 million test of the NMD system.

``We didn't plan to have the talks on the day of the test,'' Holum said.

Holum said his Chinese hosts stressed Beijing's opposition to NMD as well as TMD, two of the many disputes which hung over the resumption of arms control talks which China broke off last May after NATO bombed its embassy in Yugoslavia.

``They were clear, as they have been publicly, on their position on National Missile Defense. They don't like the idea,'' he said.

TAIWAN ``DOMINANT'' WORRY OF CHINA

China, which has found common cause with Russia in opposition to the NMD, has said it may have to add to its strategic missile arsenal if the U.S. project goes ahead.

Washington hoped to use the renewed arms control dialogue to reassure Beijing.

``We do not see and are not designing this system to be deployed against the Chinese (and) that we are satisfied with the stable deterrent relationship with China,'' Holum said of NMD.

He said China's ``dominant concern'' was that TMD, intended to defend U.S. troops and Asian allies against perceived missile threats from North Korea, would be used to shelter Taiwan and stiffen its resolve against reunification overtures from China.

Washington had made no decision on TMD other than to use it to defend U.S. troops based in the region once the technology becomes available in about 2007, Holum added.

He urged China to pursue dialogue with Taiwan and not start a ``missile competition'' with the island.

``The extent to which we and, in turn, Taiwan consider they need defense depends on Chinese deployments of offensive capabilities across the (Taiwan) Strait,'' Holum said.

DISPUTE OVER PAKISTAN

The two sides failed to bridge gaps over alleged Chinese sales of missile technology to Pakistan, Holum said.

``We made progress, but the issue remains unresolved,''

China has not joined the 31-nation Missile Technology Control Regime (MCTR), but in 1994 vowed to uphold its ban of the export of missiles whose range exceeds 190 miles (300 km).

Holum said Washington believed Beijing had kept its pledge on the delivery of complete missiles but the two sides differed on whether China's pledge covered the transfer of missile technology.

``There is a dispute over the extent to which China agreed to limits on technology associated with the Missile Technology Control Regime,'' he said.

Holum arrived in Beijing this week in the wake of a New York Times report citing U.S. intelligence that China had stepped up the shipment of special steels, guidance systems and technical expertise to Pakistan.

Holum declined to say whether the Chinese acknowledged such transfers to Pakistan during talks in Beijing. China and its old ally Pakistan have publicly denied the accusations.

The U.S. envoy said the two sides agreed to hold expert-level talks soon to try to resolve the Pakistan impasse.

-------- korea

SOUTH KOREA: MISSILE PROGRAM ON AGENDA

New York Times
July 8, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/00/07/08/news/world/world-briefing.html

The assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, Robert Einhorn, will visit South Korea next week to discuss Seoul's attempt to build longer-range missiles, officials said. The United States and South Korea have held a series of talks over the last two years about Seoul's wish to increase the range of its missiles, now set at 112 miles under a 1979 agreement.

Samuel Len (NYT)

-------- russia

Russian commander warns on US missile tests

Irish Times
Saturday, July 8, 2000
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2000/0708/wor10.htm

THE US: The third US test of the National Missile Defence (NMD) system, due to take place over the Pacific early this morning, may prompt countries to abandon existing nuclear arms treaties, a Russian commander warned yesterday.

"These tests mark the first step toward global nuclear instability," said Gen Vladimir Yakov lev, head of Russia's strategic missile defences. The tests are "an outrageous breach of the 1972 ABM agreement", Gen Yakovlev said.

Meanwhile, the US arms control negotiator, Mr John Holum, Under-Secretary of State for Security and Arms Control, reopened non-proliferation talks with China yesterday, signalling an end to a moratorium prompted by the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade more than a year ago.

The talks are designed to pave the way for a visit to China by the US Defence Secretary, Mr William Cohen. - (AFP)

---

KEY MISSILE DEFENSE TEST A FAILURE

Chicago Tribune
July 8, 2000
Washington Bureau
http://chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/article/0,2669,SAV-0007080240,FF.html

WASHINGTON -- A potentially crucial flight test of a national missile-defense system ended in failure late Friday as a prototype missile interceptor missed an incoming dummy warhead over the Pacific Ocean.

Pentagon officials said it would be days, or even weeks, before they will know precisely why the interceptor, or "kill vehicle," failed to hit and destroy its target.

With Friday's miss, the Pentagon has failed to reach a benchmark it set for itself of conducting two successful test intercepts before President Clinton gives the go-ahead for construction of a radar critical to the missile shield.

"We failed to achieve an intercept," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

The failure comes amid strong political pressure in Congress to build a missile shield. The administration's goal is to have at least a limited defensive system in place by 2005. That's the year that, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, North Korea could be in a position to field a missile capable of reaching the United States.

Friday's miss is particularly embarrassing because critics of the defensive plan charge that the tests are rigged to succeed. Only one inflatable decoy was deployed along with the dummy warhead in the test. Critics say any adversary capable of building a long-range missile will be able to field multiple decoys that could overwhelm the U.S. interceptors.

But the Pentagon has downplayed the significance of the test, saying it was only one milestone in a long effort to perfect the technology of, in effect, hitting a bullet with a bullet.

"This program is what we call high-risk," said Defense Secretary William Cohen as the test approached. "I am not interested in trying to accelerate a program so that it simply fails."

The stakes in the test, which costs $100 million to conduct, are enormous. While the key decisions will likely be made by the next president, approval by Clinton to go forward could rock U.S. relations with Russia and China and call into question the continued viability of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The test was delayed for several hours when technicians discovered a problem with a telemetry battery in the target rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., about two hours before the launch window opened at 9 p.m. CDT.Telemetry is the in-flight information sent back to mission control about how well a rocket's systems are working.

The Pentagon has conducted five previous tests, two of which involved an attempted missile intercept. Of those two, one last fall was a hit--though the Pentagon later acknowledged that the close proximity of a single balloon decoy to the dummy warhead helped bring about the intercept.

In the most recent test on Jan. 18, the missile interceptor missed its target warhead after heat-sensing devices on the interceptor failed because of a cooling problem.

The latest test was designed to unfold along the same lines as the previous two intercept attempts:

-The target rocket launches from Vandenberg.

- Five minutes into flight the rocket deploys a cone-shaped dummy warhead, along with the Mylar balloon decoy.

- Satellites pick up the plume of launch and a variety of radars begin to track the rocket flight and send information to a command center at Colorado Springs.

- Twenty minutes after the target launch, an interceptor rocket takes off from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 4,840 miles from Vandenberg. It deploys a "kill vehicle," a complex device about the size of a microwave oven that receives tracking information on the incoming warhead and carries its own infrared sensing devices.

- About 10 minutes after its launch aboard the interceptor rocket, the kill vehicle homes in on the incoming warhead in space about 145 miles above the Pacific at closing speeds exceeding 15,000 m.p.h. If its sensing and course-alteration equipment work properly, it collides with the dummy warhead. There are no explosives involved. The sheer force of impact totally destroys both the interceptor and the warhead.

As the countdown to the test neared, various participants in an increasingly vocal debate over a system that could cost $60 billion were downplaying its significance.

"If it's successful, it doesn't necessarily follow that I will recommend that we proceed with it," Cohen said. "Nor if it fails would I automatically reject going forward."

Supporters of building a system that could defend the United States against a relatively limited missile attack said a miss simply means the Pentagon must work harder to solve technical problems. Opponents say that a hit does not necessarily prove that the system is ready to be deployed.

Dan Goure of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, is one of a growing number of advocates of national missile defense who argue that the Clinton plan is too limited and vulnerable to succeed.

"There is a very real danger that a rush to deploy this year will leave the United States stuck with a system that has neither the inherent capability to meet the current threat nor growth potential to meet an improved threat," Goure said. "It is clear that the United States requires missile defenses considerably more robust than those provided for by the administration's current plans."

John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World, an arms-control advocacy group, complained that the Pentagon is on the verge of making critical, irreversible decisions on national missile defense after only three of 19 flight tests. "You wouldn't build a new car after only three of 19 tests," Isaacs said.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has been fending off persistent criticism that the test is rigged for success because the target warhead deploys only a single decoy, an inflatable Mylar balloon that tumbles through the vacuum of space at the same speed as the warhead.

"This test is as easy as the $100 question on `Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,'" said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

A growing group of advocates, including Republican lawmakers who have led the charge for missile defense, now argues for a slower development path toward a more robust defensive shield.

The missile defense debate is unfolding in a volatile political environment.

North Korea, seen as the main near-term threat to develop a long-range missile capable of reaching the United States, has extended a moratorium on testing its missiles and has opened historic talks with longtime adversary and U.S. ally South Korea. Russia rejected Clinton's entreaties for deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals, complaining that the planned missile shield will undermine the viability of its nuclear deterrent.

And the United States now suspects that China is restarting trade with Pakistan in missile technology that could destabilize the military balance in Asia.

Earlier this week, China, Russia and three other Central Asian nations signed a joint declaration stressing "the absolute necessity of maintaining and observing closely the ABM Treaty."

Both leading presidential candidates, Vice President Gore and Texas Gov. George Bush, have advocated a national missile defense, though Bush wants a larger one.

---

Russia Cites US Missile Test Failure

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 8:12 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000708/wl/russia_us_missile_defense_1.html

MOSCOW (AP) - The failure of a U.S. missile interceptor in a test proves that a proposed national missile defense system for the United States is unworkable, two top Russian generals said Saturday.

The interceptor that was launched Friday from a Pacific island missed its intended target - a dummy warhead gliding through space. Officials blamed a technical failure of the booster rocket that was supposed to release a warhead-busting device.

Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, commander of Russia's strategic forces, told the ITAR-Tass news agency that the failed test showed that a missile defense system will not protect the United States.

``In its present technical design, the tested national missile defense will not be able to secure protection of the U.S. territory, and attempts to deploy such a system will be an empty waste of money,'' Yakovlev said.

Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, chief of the Defense Ministry's department of international cooperation, told the Interfax news agency that the failure of the Pentagon's test showed that a defense system would not work. ``Both Russian and American professionals in the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) sphere are perfectly aware that it is impossible to create a system of absolute protection,'' Ivashov said.

``Russia will always be able to defeat any U.S. ABM system,'' Ivashov said. ``The only question is whether it is worth investing such significant amounts of money in this scheme while it could be resolved by political means.''

Russia strongly opposes the American missile defense project, which is designed to protect all 50 U.S. states against attack by long-range missiles.

---

Russians See No Surprise in U.S. Test Failure

Reuters
July 8, 2000 Filed at 8:05 a.m. ET
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-russia-.html
http://www.foxnews.com/world/070800/missileflop_russianreax.sml

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian officials said on Saturday the failed test of a U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) system showed that the creation of the anti-missile shield was illogical and technically impossible.

``Experts in anti-missile defense, both Russian and American, are pretty well aware it is impossible to create an absolutely safe system,'' Interfax news agency quoted Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, the head of the Defense Ministry's international department, as saying.

A U.S. ``hit-to-kill'' weapon fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific failed to hit a target launched earlier from a U.S. air force base. It was the second failure of three tests of the new system.

``Russia will always have the means to counteract any U.S. anti-missile system,'' Ivashov said. ``The question is whether it is worth investing huge sums into the project while the problem could be solved through political means.''

Fresh tests are to be carried out on the NMD system, which is expected to cost between $30 billion and $60 billion. Saturday's failed test cost $100 million.

Russia and China bitterly oppose U.S. plans to set up a national anti-missile system, which Washington says is aimed at possible nuclear attacks from rogue states rather than the nuclear arsenals of Moscow and Beijing.

The Chinese and Russians say such a system would ruin the existing nuclear balance. One Russian general said Friday the United States could lead the world into ``nuclear anarchy.''

``Even failed as it was, the NMD test is a challenge to the international community cast by the American military,'' Itar-Tass news agency quoted the head of Russia's strategic missile forces, General Vladimir Yakovlev, as saying.

President Vladimir Putin's chief foreign policy adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, reiterated Russia's doubts that modern technologies allowed any nation to create an effective national anti-missile system.

``We have said many times that such a system is faulty both as a concept and from the technical point of view,'' Tass quoted Prikohdko as saying.

The Russian officials did not hide their satisfaction with the failure of the test, the second mishap in the three tests of the system already carried out

``God favored justice and us,'' Tass quoted Ivashov as saying.

---

Russia Tells U.S. to Drop Missile Shield

Washington Post
Sunday, July 9, 2000; A14
By David Hoffman and William Drozdiak Washington Post Foreign Service
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6799-2000Jul8.html

MOSCOW, July 8 -- Russian military leaders seized on today's failure of a U.S. missile defense flight test to urge Washington to abandon the program, while Washington's European allies breathed a sigh of relief and quietly expressed hope that the misfire would delay the controversial U.S. effort.

The reactions underlined foreign powers' strong concerns over the Clinton administration's plan to deploy a limited National Missile Defense system. The U.S. president is to decide by mid-November whether to proceed with the first phase of such a system.

In response to reports of the failed test flight early today, the leading Russian military spokesman on the topic rushed to take advantage of the news.

"In its current technical form, the National Missile Defense system, which is being tested, cannot guarantee protection of U.S. territory, and attempts to deploy such a system will be a waste of U.S. taxpayers' money," declared Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, head of Russia's strategic rocket forces.

Other top Russian military officials said Moscow would be able to deploy enough extra nuclear missiles to overcome any U.S. defense system.

Russia has warned that a decision to deploy even a limited missile defense system could break the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and endanger other arms agreements. Russian generals have threatened in recent months to return to the Cold War practice of building multiple-warhead missiles and intermediate-range rockets that could hit Europe if Washington goes ahead with a missile defense system.

But Moscow has sent mixed signals. While the military establishment has been firmly against missile defense, President Vladimir Putin took a different tack when Clinton visited Moscow last month.

Putin proposed joint work on a missile defense system, although apparently on a less ambitious scale than the United States favors. Putin also acknowledged the emergence of a new missile threat; the United States has said it wants a missile defense system to protect against new threats from countries such as North Korea and Iran. The Russian generals have since contradicted Putin, saying the threat is not imminent.

The European allies fear that a U.S. missile defense system would create lopsided security zones, making them more vulnerable to missile attack than the United States. The allies also are concerned that U.S. construction of a National Missile Defense system would alienate Russia and undermine other arms control agreements. They have been reluctant to voice their worries too strongly, partly for fear of triggering a backlash in the United States.

"If this [test failure] leads to postponing the missile defense system indefinitely, it will be good news for the entire alliance," said a senior German official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Even Britain, Washington's staunchest supporter regarding the need to take measures against potential missile threats posed by terrorist groups or radical states, has expressed qualms about breaking the ABM Treaty and the danger of provoking a new arms race.

Germany, which along with France is most firmly opposed to the idea, is worried about damaging long-term relations with Russia just when Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder believes he has established a good personal rapport with Putin.

The Germans are also troubled by the prospect of triggering an arms race in Asia if China retaliated by bolstering its offensive nuclear arsenal, which is now limited to between 15 and 20 nuclear-tipped missiles. That could provoke India and in turn, Pakistan, to increase nuclear weapons stockpiles.

German officials say Schroeder had no doubt after meeting Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji last week in Berlin that China would not hesitate to boost its nuclear arsenal to 100 missiles or more in response to a U.S. missile defense network.

In hopes of deterring the U.S. program, China has carried out aggressive diplomacy toward North Korea, one of the countries Washington has deemed a threat.

China played a key role in facilitating the summit in Pyongyang between North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. The summit allowed Beijing to challenge Washington's notion that North Korea is a "rogue" state, said Li Yihu, an influential professor of international relations at Beijing University.

"Do 'rogue' states engage in summits and express such hopes for peace and unification?" he asked. "On this issue, I believe, China made a very clear point."

Drozdiak reported from Berlin. Correspondent John Pomfret in Beijing contributed to this report.

---

Russia Cites US Missile Test Failure

Associated Press
July 8, 2000 Filed at 2:59 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Russia-US-Missile-Defense.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian generals welcomed the failure of a missile interceptor test Saturday, saying it proves that the national missile defense proposed by the United States is unworkable.

An interceptor launched from a Pacific island missed its intended target -- a dummy warhead gliding through space. Officials blamed a glitch in the booster rocket, which didn't release a warhead-destroying ``kill vehicle.''

Russian officials strongly oppose a U.S. national missile defense system, saying it could spark a new arms race as countries seek ways to penetrate defenses.

Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, commander of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces, was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying that the failed test showed that a defense system will not protect the United States.

``In its present technical design, the tested national missile defense will not be able to secure protection of U.S. territory, and attempts to deploy such a system will be an empty waste of money,'' Yakovlev said.

Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, chief of the Defense Ministry's department of international cooperation, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that the failure showed that such defenses were unworkable.

``Both Russian and American professionals in the anti-ballistic missile sphere are perfectly aware that it is impossible to create a system of absolute protection,'' Ivashov said.

``Russia will always be able to defeat any U.S. missile-defense system,'' Ivashov said. ``The only question is whether it is worth investing such significant amounts of money in this scheme when it could be resolved by political means.''

Gen. Valery Manilov, deputy head of the army general staff, said missile defense was ``politically dangerous and strategically wrong.''

``There will always be the possibility of creating more perfect offensive systems and this can pose a new threat,'' ITAR-Tass quoted Manilov as saying.

U.S. officials are trying to get Russia to agree to changes in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty by offering cuts in nuclear warheads under a proposed START III treaty. But Russia has threatened to tear up all arms control agreements if the United States deploys a national missile defense.

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Dangerous work

New Scientist
08 July 2000
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_224638.html

WORKERS exposed to radiation in uranium processing plants may run an increased risk of developing lung cancer two decades later, according to a study commissioned by British Nuclear Fuels.

Although there is some evidence that uranium miners can contract lung cancer from the dust they inhale, there is scant evidence that workers in facilities where the radioactive metal is processed are at risk. But now David McGeoghegan from Westlakes Scientific Consulting in Cumbria has found a link between radiation and lung cancers at the Springfields uranium fuel fabrication plant near Preston in Lancashire.

He analysed the health records of 19 500 people employed at the plant between 1946 and 1995 and discovered that workers exposed to higher levels of radiation suffered more lung cancers. In all, 225 people were diagnosed with the disease. Of those, only two had received cumulative radiation doses during their time at Springfields of more than 200 millisieverts. The recommended annual safety limit for workers is 20 millisieverts.

The association between dose and disease only becomes statistically significant 20 years after the dose was received, McGeoghegan says. He thinks it's possible that radiation caused some of the cancers, but points out that the doses recorded are based solely on measurements of radiation outside the body. He now plans to analyse radioactivity levels within the workers' lungs, which could be more directly related to the cancers.

The connection between lung cancer and radiation dose is potentially important, says Michael Clark from Britain's National Radiological Protection Board. "There is no proof that the association is causal, but it would be sensible to investigate further."

Source: Journal of Radiological Protection (vol 20, p 111)
Rob Edwards
From New Scientist magazine, 08 July 2000.
Sign up for our free newsletter
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WIPP to Accept Nuke Waste From Washington

Albuquerque Journal
Saturday, July 8, 2000
By Tania Soussan Journal Staff Writer
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/74299news07-08-00.htm

The first shipment of radioactive waste from a Washington nuclear reservation will be on its way to New Mexico within weeks.

About 80,000 55-gallon barrels of contaminated material and radioactive sludge is to be shipped from Hanford to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, officials estimate.

The first shipment of 33 barrels will begin as soon as the New Mexico Environment Department gives its OK, Hanford spokesman Erik Olds said.

"We hope to be able to ship that really soon," he said.

The 1,808-mile journey will take about 45 hours, Olds said.

Hanford had hoped to send the first shipment in mid-June but didn't have the needed approval from the state.

The Environment Department signed off on an audit report from Hanford on June 23. But the department must review additional information, and that process could take another five to seven weeks, said Paul Ritzma, deputy environment secretary.

The initial shipment from Hanford will include "transuranic" waste - tools, clothing and other items contaminated by exposure to radioactivity - similar to material shipped to WIPP from other sites.

A second shipment of similar materials would follow about a month later, Olds said.

"We would like to do about one shipment per month," he said.

Eventually, Hanford also wants to ship more hazardous material - leftover sludge from two large pools of spent nuclear fuel.

WIPP critic Don Hancock, of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, said he is concerned about Hanford getting approval to ship some waste that was analyzed and labeled before the state permit was approved.

"It wants to be able to use old, pre-permit data, which we don't think is appropriate," he said.

Hanford is a 560-square-mile Department of Energy site near Yakima, Wash., where plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal was made for four decades.

WIPP, which opened in March 1999, has accepted shipments from three locations in the nation's nuclear weapons complex: Los Alamos National Laboratory, the closed Rocky Flats nuclear plant near Denver and the Idaho Engineering and Environmental Laboratory near Idaho Falls.

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Pentagon Missile Defense Test Fails

Space.com
08 July 2000
By Jim Banke Senior Producer, Cape Canaveral Bureau
mailto:jbanke@space.com http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/missile_launch_fails_000708.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A key demonstration of new missile defense technology never got a chance to prove itself thanks to the apparent failure of a booster rocket supporting the early Saturday morning test over the Pacific Ocean.

But military analysts say the Pentagon should take little comfort blaming the failure on something other than the experimental "star wars" technology the exercise was designed to test.

"If this was a real war we would have just lost Chicago," John Pike, director of space policy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington D.C., said after the test. "Aunt Minnie and the rest of the city would be ashes in the stratosphere right now."

Pentagon officials were hoping a successful test would clear the way for President Clinton to decide by this fall whether to deploy the estimated $60 billion National Missile Defense (NMD) program before 2005, a year by which some theorize the United States could be threatened by new nations packing nuclear missiles.

Instead, the results of Saturday's $100 million test marked the second failure in a row for the missile-defense system and gave critics of the effort new ammunition in their claims that the NMD is wasteful, not necessary and ineffective in its ability to protect Americans from missile attacks.

Look here to see a video of a similar missile defense test flown on Jan. 18, 2000.

javascript:launch_mmplayer_video('e1_000620_missiledefensetest_000118')

Clearly disappointed in the events as they unfolded overnight, Pentagon managers speaking to news media emphasized their resolve to determine what happened, correct the trouble and continue testing the technology.

"What it tells me is we have more engineering work to do," said Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. "This is rocket science, and things do happen on this stuff that is not expected."

The test

Saturday's test began at 12:18 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (04:18 GMT) with the launch of a modified Minuteman 2 missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

During this test, the Minuteman 2 played the role of an "enemy" missile bearing down on an unsuspecting country. As part of the test, the Minuteman 2 was to deploy an inflated mylar balloon that would act as decoy for the "kill vehicle" being sent to destroy the missile.

Launch of the target vehicle was delayed more than two hours because of a battery problem with the Minuteman 2 rocket that was solved by taking the time to recharge the battery.

Although Greenpeace activists said they intended to delay the test by positioning a boat in the launch danger zone off the California coast, no such activity was reported as a concern by the Air Force and the Minuteman 2 lifted off without incident.

Once the solid-fueled missile cleared its launch silo, a suite of ground-based radars and space-based satellites quickly identified the missile as a potential "threat" and began providing the information necessary to put the "kill vehicle" on a collision course with the Minuteman 2.

At 12:40 a.m. EDT (04:20 GMT) another rocket took off, this time from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Its job would be to smash into the Minuteman 2 at a combined speed of some 15,000 m.p.h. (24,140 kilometers per hour), instantly destroying the target vehicle and preventing "mass destruction."

As the time for the interception passed by, mission controllers looked in vain at TV monitors tracking the progress of the kill vehicle and target and did not see the telltale sign of a bright flash on the screens.

About an hour after the initial Minuteman 2 launch, Pentagon officials confirmed the test had failed and began pointing fingers at the kill vehicle's booster rocket, which according to an initial look at information radioed to the ground from the interceptor spacecraft revealed the kill vehicle had not separated from the rocket's second stage.

"The failure was in the boost phase," Kadish said.

Apparently still attached to the spent second stage, the interceptor continued radioing information to mission controllers as it fell toward the Pacific Ocean and eventually smashed into the water.

Officials still were unsure why the spacecraft had not separated from the booster stage, noting that this particular rocket configuration -- based on Minuteman hardware -- had worked perfectly during four previous flights and is scheduled to be used three more times.

After that, the booster will be replaced during tests by the same type of rocket the Pentagon intends to use if the National Missile Defense system is deployed across North America.

The only other trouble noted from the failed test was with the Minuteman 2's mylar balloon decoy, which did not inflate as it was supposed to.

A chorus of criticism

The high-stakes demonstration came amid a rising chorus of criticism over the $60 billion program that is designed to protect the United States from an attack by "rogue" nations like North Korea and Iran.

Critics say if President Clinton decides to deploy the NMD, it would violate terms of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and provoke a new arms race with China and Russia, both of whom consider a U.S. missile "umbrella" to be a threat to their own national defenses.

In addition, the critics contend that the missile tests, even if they do work, do not accurately reflect the real-life conditions that would be faced if the United States were attacked.

"From a technical standpoint, this is another test of hit-to-kill. But it doesn't get at the issue of whether it can deal with realistic countermeasures from another country," said Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"The single decoy that you have on this test is really nothing like what we think another country might do if it were to launch missiles at us," she said.

Writing the President

In a letter sent to Clinton Thursday, a group of 50 Nobel laureates called the NMD a waste of money and harmful to U.S. interests.

The group, organized by the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., said that independent scientists contend foes could easily fool or overwhelm any such defensive missile system.

The Nobel laureates also noted that North Korea recently has taken steps to improve its relations with U.S. ally South Korea, further weakening the threat of a future nuclear attack from that nation.

SPACE.com's Washington Bureau Chief Paul Hoversten and Cape Canaveral Bureau Chief Todd Halvorson contributed to this report.

---

Missile test countdown underway

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
This Bulletin: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 7:52 AEST
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-8jul2000-12.htm

United States defence officials are counting down to the test of a controversial new missile interceptor system.

A Minuteman II missile will be launched today towards the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, where an interceptor missile is poised to destroy it.

Both China and Russia strongly oppose the plan, saying it will begin a new arms race.

Greenpeace has also sent a ship to the area in an effort to stop the test.

The US Air Force says it will go ahead anyway, but John Sprange from Greenpeace says there is no way they will back down.

"It's going to unknit the whole of the arms control regime over the last 30 years," he said.

"It'll probably unleash further development in nuclear weapons which we just got over over the last 10 years, since the end of the cold war."

---

Missile launch delayed by glitch

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
This Bulletin: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 12:12 AEST
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-8jul2000-34.htm

A glitch discovered in a target missile has caused a delay of several hours in a crucial national missile defence test being carried out by the United States.

The exercise involves the firing of a target missile from California, which will be intercepted by a second missile fired from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

Its outcome will determine whether President Bill Clinton goes ahead with the system, which critics say could spark a new arms race.

Greenpeace have sent a ship to the area in an effort to stop the test, but the US Air Force says it will go ahead anyway.

Stephen Young, from the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Disasters says America's claims that it is defending itself from North Korea are overblown.

---

Defense Missile Fails in Crucial Test Military: Interceptor misses mock warhead in last trial before key Pentagon report. Foes say system is expensive and unworkable.

Los Angeles Times
Saturday, July 8, 2000
By PAUL RICHTER, BETTINA BOXALL, Times Staff Writers
http://www.latimes.com/print/20000708/t000064163.html

WASHINGTON--A missile interceptor streaking through the heavens over the central Pacific failed to strike a dummy warhead in a long-awaited flight test Friday night, dealing a new setback to the Clinton administration's controversial national missile defense program.

In a $100-million experiment that has drawn intense interest around the world, the "kill vehicle" fired into the sky from the Marshall Islands failed to strike the mock warhead launched into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base for reasons that were not immediately known.

"We failed to achieve an intercept this evening," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman announced in Washington at 10:15 p.m. PDT.

The intercept should have occurred about 9:49 p.m. PDT. Officials monitoring a telescopic display had expected to see a bright white flash upon collision, as they did in a test flight in October. Instead, they saw only the dark void of outer space.

Pentagon officials said there could be a number of possible explanations for the mishap, including the inability of the kill vehicle to separate properly from its booster rocket.

The Pentagon is expected to decide whether it considers its prototype missile defense system "technically viable" in a few weeks.

A favorable judgment could increase pressure on President Clinton to authorize initial steps toward construction of a land-based missile defense system. But Friday night's failure could give Clinton more latitude, particularly if he is inclined to slow development of a national missile shield.

Anticipating that possibility, senior defense officials, including technology chief Jacques Gansler, have insisted in recent days that the technology could be deemed adequate even if the interceptor failed to strike its target.

Still, the miss is certain to complicate their plans and is likely to bring a new outburst of complaints from critics who view the system as expensive and unworkable.

The flight test began at 9:19 p.m. PDT, when a Minuteman II missile blasted off from its pad at Vandenberg, soaring into the starry evening sky with a majestic roar, its contrail creating a graceful arc over the Pacific.

The test was initially scheduled to begin shortly after 7 p.m. PDT. But it was delayed for more than two hours by a mechanical malfunction involving the telemetry system on the Minuteman missile preparing for takeoff at Vandenberg.

The experiment, closely watched around the world, was designed to test whether an interceptor fired from the central Pacific could locate and destroy a mock warhead lofted into the heavens from Southern California.

Clinton administration officials are stressing that the next administration will make the pivotal decisions on deployment of a missile defense system. Still, the outcome of Friday night's test will be an important element in the system's limited performance record, which has become the focus of a vigorous debate.

Foes of the proposal maintain that it never will work effectively against enemy missiles and countermeasures, while advocates say that a growing missile threat from countries such as North Korea and Iran makes construction of a system ever more urgent.

The proposal has stirred strong opposition abroad, from allies who fear that it would disrupt treaties and alliances and from governments such as Russia and China that fear it would render their own nuclear arsenals useless.

Pentagon officials announced the mechanical problem at Vandenberg about an hour before the scheduled liftoff.

They said it involved a battery that supplies power to the Minuteman's telemetry system, which generates a stream of data on the location and flight path of the missile. The system also enables scientists to determine after the test exactly where the interceptor collided with the dummy warhead.

As the scientists at Vandenberg prepared for the launch, a small number of protesters maintained a quiet vigil outside the main gate.

Officials of the Greenpeace anti-nuclear organization said that several of its members had entered base grounds Thursday night in hopes of reaching the launch area and delaying or stopping the test.

With the same goal, the 160-foot Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sun was sailing into an off-limits hazard area off the coast.

"We're trying to send a message to Bill Clinton to take his finger off the 'Star Wars' button and make the world a safer place," said Steve Shallhorn, campaign director for Greenpeace USA.

Air Force Maj. John Cherry, a base spokesman, said that the base was on heightened security alert and that no protesters were in the launch area.

One trespasser was arrested Thursday night just inside base boundaries, and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department apprehended seven people crossing private ranch land north of the base Wednesday night and Thursday evening.

Cherry said that Coast Guard and Navy boats were patrolling the off-limits waters.

Inside the base, about 200 off-duty Air Force personnel and family members gathered at a designated observation site to await the launch. The atmosphere was festive, and some brought picnic dinners and their pets with them.

The flight test was a carefully choreographed search-and-destroy mission executed by a complex array of advanced aerospace technology.

The target missile's nose contained a conical mock warhead, about 5 feet high, as well as an uninflated 6-foot-diameter Mylar balloon that was to be released with the warhead to duplicate the kind of simple decoy an enemy attacker might use to throw off an interceptor.

About five minutes after launch, the dummy warhead and decoy were released from the target rocket. After 15 more minutes, the surrogate interceptor rocket was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 4,300 miles from Vandenberg.

A satellite 22,000 miles in space was supposed to track the Vandenberg missile with infrared sensors and relay that information to a "battle management" center in Colorado. The information was to be passed by radar in Hawaii and Kwajalein to the electronic brain of the interceptor rocket, to help it plot its course.

Once in space, the 130-pound kill vehicle atop the interceptor rocket was supposed to break free from the booster and, using sensors and tiny thruster rockets, maneuver its way into the path of the target.

It was the third of 19 planned flight tests. The first test in October was deemed a partial success. In the second, in January, the interceptor missed its target.

Wary governments abroad and missile defense skeptics at home have watched the tests with increasing alarm. As the designated launch time neared Friday, they issued a new round of dire warnings and technological critiques.

In Moscow, the commander of the Russian Strategic Rocket Force warned Friday that the test would lead to instability and a new arms race.

"These steps represent the first steps toward global nuclear instability," Col. Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev told the Interfax news agency. "They will lead directly to nuclear anarchy."

In Washington, organizations critical of the program denounced it as a wasteful exercise that jeopardizes international arms control agreements, which they say provide a better path to national security.

Jack Mendelson, a former U.S. arms control official with the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, predicted that Clinton would order preparatory work on the system to begin.

But he said that, since the next president would make the key decisions, Clinton's order would be only a "busywork decision" intended to "flameproof" Vice President Al Gore from Republican charges that the administration has been weak on defense.

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, meanwhile, sought to rebut criticism that the missile test had been "dumbed down" to the point that it could not be used to judge the proposal's technical viability.

He said that the first two flight tests had been criticized as overly complex by the system's independent reviewer, retired Air Force Gen. Larry Welch. As a consequence, he said, the tests were greatly simplified.

"We are responding . . . to the independent review that says we should 'walk before we run,' " he said in an interview with National Public Radio. "Then to be criticized for doing that, it seems to me, is rather ironic."

At the White House, a spokesman cautioned that it will be some time before it is clear whether the test is a true success or failure.

"I think there will be a great temptation to do some instantaneous analysis after the test tonight," said spokesman P.J. Crowley. "I would say a hit doesn't automatically suggest success, nor does a failure automatically come with a miss tonight.

"So I think everyone needs to understand that this is going to be a process that unfolds over many weeks, both in terms of analyzing what tonight's test shows [and] how that feeds into the Pentagon's recommendation to the president."

* Richter reported from Washington and Boxall from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

---

Key missile system test is a failure 'Kill vehicle' fired over Pacific misses mock enemy target; Setback for Clinton plan; System is intended to defend U.S. from attack by rogue state

Baltimore Sun
Originally published on Jul 8 2000
By Tom Bowman Sun National Staff
http://www.sunspot.net/content/news/story?section=news&pagename=story&storyid=1150360206581

WASHINGTON - A key test of a national missile defense system failed this morning when a 4 1/2-foot "kill vehicle" missed a mock enemy warhead more than 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean - setting back chances for an umbrella system advocated by President Clinton.

"We failed to achieve intercept," said Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman.

The mock warhead roared into space at 12:19 a.m. Eastern time atop a missile fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, accompanied by a decoy balloon.

Twenty minutes later, the "kill vehicle" was launched from Kwajalein Atoll, in the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific.

The test was essentially a tie-breaker between a successful one last fall and a failure in January, when a coolant system in the kill vehicle malfunctioned.

Now, the contentious issue of a national shield to protect all 50 states from intercontinental ballistic missiles, which has wide implications for presidential politics, foreign affairs and Pentagon spending, is in the hands of Defense Secretary William S. Cohen.

He will advise President Clinton in the coming weeks whether the system is technically feasible to construct. Clinton has said he would make a decision this fall on whether to build the system.

Cohen and other top officials hade already said that a failed test this morning would not necessarily mean the system is unworkable, saying they have learned a great deal even from malfunctions.

The defense secretary said recently that he might still approve the system if a failure was "minor in nature." Pentagon officials said it could be a week or more before they have more information about the most recent test.

The current plan is a distant and diminutive cousin of President Ronald Reagan's proposal for a space-based anti-missile shield that critics labeled "Star Wars."

The latest plan calls for 100 interceptor missiles to be constructed in central Alaska, along with a powerful radar on Shemya Island in the Aleutian chain. The system is designed, Pentagon officials said, to shoot down up to two dozen missiles fired by a rogue state, such as North Korea, Iraq, Iran or other countries believed to be working on intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach America.

If the Pentagon can sign building contracts by the fall, 20 of the U.S. interceptor missiles could begin operating by 2005, by which time, intelligence officials say, North Korea could have a missile capable of reaching the continental United States.

The entire U.S. system is expected to cost $60 billion to build and operate through 2026.

Critics of missile defense, including some of the nation's top scientists and former senior government officials, argue that the proposed system is either unworkable or that more testing is needed before any construction decision is made.

Earlier this week, 50 Nobel laureates sent a letter to Clinton saying the system would offer "little protection" and would damage relations with Russia and China, which are vehemently opposed to the national missile shield.

Moreover, America's European allies are wary of America's missile defense plan, since it would leave them out of the protective umbrella.

Though the system could do nothing to defeat an attack by thousands of Russian missiles, Russian leaders argue that the plan would violate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which bans national missile defense systems.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has refused to support amending the treaty to pave the way for a U.S. missile shield.

China says America's proposed interceptor missiles could negate its force of ballistic missiles, which includes only about 20 that could reach the United States. Leaders of both countries say a decision by Clinton to deploy the system could set off a new nuclear arms race.

Meanwhile, the American Physical Society, the world's largest group of physicists, has called on Clinton to delay a deployment decision until there is more testing, as have former Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat and defense expert, and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry.

Theodore A. Postol, an MIT professor and former Pentagon adviser on missile defense, has asserted that the Pentagon rigged its past tests to try to guarantee success and argues that the planned system is unable to distinguish between an enemy warhead and a decoy.

"There's no way to select the right object," he said.

This week even the Pentagon's top weapons tester, Philip Coyle, questioned the value of this morning's test, given that Kadish and his staff knew the launch time, location, speed and trajectory of the mock enemy warhead - information that would not be available if a rogue state struck with a flurry of missiles.

Pentagon officials strenuously deny that any tests were rigged and say Postol's assertions are misplaced because they deal with a type of "kill vehicle" that has been replaced by a more sophisticated one that can distinguish between an enemy warhead and a decoy.

Kadish and other officials have said they are confident the technology is workable.

They also point out there will be 16 more tests of the interceptors over the next three years, tests that will become increasingly complex and include more decoys than the single one used in this morning's test and in the previous two attempts.

"We're trying to take this step by step because this is very difficult technology," Cohen said yesterday, brushing aside critics who said the missile defense effort is unworkable.

The defense secretary noted that an independent review team headed by retired Air Force Gen. Larry Welch found "there was no technological reason why we couldn't achieve that capability."

Cohen said the decision whether to build the system in Alaska would be based on four criteria: technological feasibility, cost, the threat from rogue states and the effect on arms control and the allies.

Though he supports the system based on the cost and the threat, Cohen said, he has not reached a decision on the viability of the technology.

"If it's successful, it doesn't necessarily follow that I will recommend that we proceed with it," Cohen said. "Nor if it fails would I automatically reject going forward."

Still, missile defense proponents on Capitol Hill say they believe the technology is sufficient to proceed with construction of the Alaskan interceptor missiles.

Last year, Congress pushed through a measure with bipartisan support that called for the deployment of a missile defense system as soon as technically feasible. That measure was signed into law by the president.

Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of the leading proponents of missile defense in Congress, contends that should the Pentagon conclude this fall that the system is feasible, Clinton would be bound by the law to proceed with deployment.

"The president has no decision to make," Weldon said. "We already made that decision."

But Quigley said: "I don't think the president feels any locks on his judgment in the future."

---

All set for U.S. missile-defence test Reuters

The Hindu
Saturday, July 08, 2000
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/07/08/stories/01080002.htm

WASHINGTON, JULY 7. The defence department said all systems were ready today for the crucial $ 100 million third test of a planned United States National Missile Defence (NMD) system that is bitterly opposed by Russia and China.

Despite an attempt by the anti-nuclear group, Greenpeace, to disrupt the test in California, Pentagon officials said the countdown was moving toward a four-hour launch `window' beginning at 7 p.m. California time today (0730 hrs IST) on Saturday) for a 30-minute attempt to shoot down a missile with a missile over the Pacific Ocean.

A `Minuteman' intercontinental missile with a dummy warhead on top is scheduled to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, toward the Pacific Marshall Islands sometime during a four-hour window beginning at 7 p.m. California time today. A U.S. ``hit-to-kill' weapon will be fired atop its own rocket from Kwajalein Atoll 6,919 km away about 20 minutes after the Vandenberg launch in an attempt to manoeuvre, intercept and smash into the `enemy' warhead 231 km above the earth. If the small weapon pulverises the target into space dust at 24,135 kmph, it would be a major step toward Mr. Clinton's decision on whether to begin building the yet-unproved system. The test plan is bitterly opposed by Moscow and Beijing and has sparked deep concern in Europe. One previous U.S. anti-missile test succeeded and another failed. The U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, is expected to decide within the next few months whether to start building an `NMD' in Alaska next year for deployment in 2005.

A Los Angeles report said the environmental group, Greenpeace, seeking to disrupt the test, has sent a Dutch ship, `Arctic Sunrise', towards a danger zone declared off-limits. The 164-foot ship, with 23 passengers, was 100 miles off Long Beach, California, on Thursday afternoon.

A Greenpeace spokeswoman in a statement urged Mr. Clinton to cancel the missile test and the entire `Star Wars' programme.

---

Test crucial to missile defense system's future

Bergen Record
Saturday, July 8, 2000
By ROBERT BURNS The Associated Press
http://www.bergen.com/news/missile08200007087.htm

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon's rocket scientists stood ready Friday to light the fuse on a $100 million missile defense test which, if successful, could move the United States a step closer to building a nationwide antimissile shield. Congress says it is urgently needed; critics decry it as unworkable.

At stake is the future of a multibillion-dollar project that has upset Russia and China and caused many of America's closest European allies to wince at the prospect of a U.S.-only defense against missile attack.

Although President Clinton says he will decide soon on keeping the project moving toward an anticipated deployment in 2005, it will be up to his successor to make the final steps to build and deploy it. It is the fast-approaching decision deadline for Clinton that gave Friday's test extra attention.

The plan was for an interceptor rocket to launch from an Army missile range on Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific 20 minutes after a target missile flies aloft from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The intent was for a small, maneuverable "kill vehicle" carried into space by the Kwajalein rocket to guide itself into the path of the target missile, pulverizing both in a collision at 16,000 mph.

If it works, Defense Secretary William Cohen is likely to recommend to Clinton that he take the first steps in a phased building plan that would have the missile defense system ready to use by December 2005.

If it fails, Cohen could still recommend going ahead, but it would appear more likely that he would favor another option such as stretching out the timetable to allow for more flight tests. The Pentagon's independent advisers have said the 2005 timetable may be overly ambitious.

Friday's test of the proposed missile defense system was the fifth in the series of intercepts. The first two were "fly by" tests, meaning the interceptor was launched and gathered technical data in flight, but there was no attempt to intercept a target.

The first attempted intercept in October succeeded. Some critics contend it was a lucky hit.

The second attempt, in January, failed. The Pentagon asserts the test validated many of its technologies other than the intercept rocket.

The anti-nuclear activist group Greenpeace hoped to halt Friday's test by placing a ship in the Pacific where a rocket stage is expected to splash down about 110 miles offshore from Vandenberg, said Steve Shallhorn, the group's campaign director.

The Air Force has asked pilots and sailors to avoid the area offshore from Vandenberg during the test or risk damage or injury.

At the White House before Friday's test, spokesman P.J. Crowley said that even if the missile hit its target there would be weeks of detailed analysis before the Pentagon could verify that everything worked properly.

The Pentagon is still working on an estimate, but its most recent estimate last spring put the tally at $36 billion for a system with 100 missile interceptors at a single site, in Alaska.

The figure covers the building and operating of the system for its expected life of 20 years.

The General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress, estimates it will cost $60 billion if -- as many missile defense proponents urge -- the system is expanded to two interceptor sites, each with 100 interceptors.

By law, the Pentagon must deploy a national missile defense as soon as it is technologically feasible.

Feasibility and cost are two of four factors Clinton has said he will take into account in deciding whether to give the Pentagon the go-ahead to begin preparing a construction site on Shemya Island in the Aleutians. A high-powered "X-band" radar would be built there to track a missile in flight toward the United States.

The other two factors Clinton will consider are the urgency of the missile threat against the United States and the implications of building a missile defense for U.S. foreign relations.

Clinton needs to decide soon because construction on Shemya cannot begin before the spring, leaving barely enough time to complete the radar and get the rest of the project done by the 2005 target date.

---

Missile defense BACKGROUND

Spokane Spokesman Review
July 8, 2000
http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=070800&ID=s823958&cat=

Friday's test was to be the fifth one. The first two were "fly bys," meaning the interceptor was launched and gathered technical data in flight, but there was no attempt to hit a target.

The first attempted intercept, last October, succeeded. Some critics contend it was a lucky hit.

Some experts accuse missile defense program officials of fraud, saying they are rigging the tests by making the challenge unrealistically simple. The Pentagon denies the allegations.

The second attempt, in January, failed.

Greenpeace at both ends

The anti-nuclear activist group Greenpeace hoped to halt Friday's test by placing a ship in the Pacific where a rocket stage is expected to splash down about 110 miles offshore from Vandenberg. The group also set up camp outside Vandenberg's main gate, and a group of protesters, said not to be affiliated with Greenpeace, threatened to delay the launch by breaking into the base.

Cost is a moving target

The Pentagon is still working on an estimate, but its most recent figures last spring put the tally at $36 billion for a system with 100 missile interceptors at a single site, in Alaska.

The congressional General Accounting Office estimates it will cost $60 billion if -- as many missile defense proponents urge -- the system is expanded to two interceptor sites.

---

Missile 'killer' fizzles
Pentagon's test of `Star Wars' missile shield goes awry

Spokane Spokesman Review
July 8, 2000
From wire reports
http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=070800&ID=s823950&cat=

WASHINGTON _ A U.S. missile interceptor launched in a $100 million burst of flame early today from a Pacific island missed its intended target -- a dummy warhead gliding through space, the Pentagon said.

Officials blamed a technical failure of the booster rocket which was supposed to release a warhead-busting device called a "kill vehicle."

Because the kill vehicle did not detach from the booster, it never activated the on-board sensors and other high-tech devices that it would use to intercept the warhead, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish said.

Kadish said the kill vehicle -- a small, maneuverable device that destroys its target by ramming into it -- apparently did not separate from the booster rocket because it did not receive a necessary electronic signal.

If the test had succeeded, it could have moved the United States a step closer to building a national missile defense that Congress says is urgently needed, but that critics decry as unworkable.

The target rocket -- a modified Minuteman ICBM carrying a dummy warhead, was launched toward the central Pacific at 9:19 p.m. PDT, after a delay of two hours because of a battery problem. The interceptor missile was hurled skyward 21 minutes later from the Kwajalein Atoll.

Republicans, including presidential candidate George W. Bush, are calling for a system of space-, sea- and land-based components even larger than that being weighed by President Clinton.

Clinton's plan would build a 100-interceptor site in Alaska by 2005 and, later, a second site of up to 150 interceptors in North Dakota.

Russia and China vehemently oppose the plan, fearing that it could neutralize their nuclear arsenals and end any restraint on U.S. global power. Both are threatening to deploy enough new intercontinental ballistic missiles to overwhelm any missile defense system the U.S. decides to build.

U.S. officials insist the system is not a threat and is only intended as protection from limited attacks by nuclear, biological and chemical warheads.

---

U.S. Missile Defense Test Fails

Yahoo News Saturday July 8 5:53 PM ET
By Charles Aldinger
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/ts/arms_usa_dc.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States' attempt to intercept and destroy a target warhead in space failed on Saturday, leaving the Pentagon to wonder what went wrong and the White House whether to proceed with the controversial National Missile Defense System.

``We did not intercept the warhead tonight. We are disappointed,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the missile defense effort, told reporters early on Saturday after the weapon failed a $100 million test to separate from its booster rocket and intercept the dummy warhead over the Pacific Ocean.

It was the second failure in three tries for the system. The miss could weigh heavily in a decision planned by President Clinton later this year on whether to begin building a new radar in Alaska for a limited missile defense next year over objections from Russia and China.

At the White House, National Security Council spokesman P.J. Crowley said the test failure will be evaluated by the Pentagon ``and it will have to be taken into account as we make a judgement on technical feasibility.''

Asked if the test doomed the missile system, Crowley said: ''We have a process of evaluating the maturity of the technology and clearly this is relevant to that analysis.''

Moscow said the anti-missile shield was illogical and technically impossible and wondered if it was worth investing huge sums of money to resolve a problem it believed could be solved through political means. Beijing reiterated its opposition to the defense system.

Weapon Failed To Separate

Kadish told a Pentagon press conference that the ''hit-to-kill'' weapon fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific at 12:40 a.m. EDT (0440 GMT) did not separate from the second stage of its liftoff rocket.

The weapon had no chance of intercepting a warhead launched about 20 minutes earlier from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, 4,300 miles (7,000 km) away.

``It tells me we have more engineering work to do,'' Kadish said. ``We had good confidence in this. ... This is rocket science -- things do happen.''

Undersecretary of Defense Jacques Gansler told reporters he felt the design of the planned NMD system ``is pretty solid,'' but declined to say what recommendation Defense Secretary William Cohen might make to Clinton in coming weeks on whether the system can be deployed by 2005. The weapon, with a successful intercept last October and a test failure in January of this year, was supposed to intercept and smash into the warhead at a speed of 15,000 mph about 10 minutes after it was launched.

The failure was a disappointment for Boeing Co., which is coordinating the intricate ``NMD'' system of weapons, radars and communications, and for Raytheon Corp., which builds the prototype 121-pound (55 kg) ``hit-to-kill'' projectile.

Moscow, China Object

Clinton is caught between opposition from Moscow and Beijing, which fear that a mature and successful U.S. anti-missile system could neutralize their nuclear arsenals, and pressure from conservatives in the U.S. Congress for quick deployment of limited protection against threats from such states as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Officials in Moscow said Saturday's failure showed the creation of the anti-missile shield was illogical and technically impossible.

``Experts in anti-missile defense, both Russian and American, are pretty well aware it is impossible to create an absolutely safe system,'' Interfax news agency quoted Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, the head of the Defense Ministry's international department, as saying.

``Russia will always have the means to counteract any U.S. anti-missile system,'' Ivashov added. ``The question is whether it is worth investing huge sums into the project, while the problem could be solved through political means.''

A U.S. official in China for arms control talks on Saturday said after the test failure that Beijing reiterated its opposition to NMD.

``They were clear, as they have been publicly, on their position on National Missile Defense. They don't like the idea,'' said senior U.S. arms control adviser John Holum.

Europe fears that nuclear arms control could unravel and a new arms race begin if the United States breaks the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty by building a limited system.

Prominent scientists and former U.S. government officials have warned the president that the technology is so immature that it would be folly to begin building a system that could cost anywhere from $30 billion to $60 billion.

Joe Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment called Saturday's failure ``humiliating,'' adding that it ought to prevent the Defense Department from proceeding with the project.

Ted Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert in the field, said, ``There are problems with this program in every dimension you can imagine'' including management shortcomings and a shaky scientific basis.

Tests Planned

Although the latest test result will affect Clinton's decision whether to begin building a base in Alaska next year, it was not a life-or-death event for NMD. Another 16 ''hit-to-kill'' tests are scheduled in the next five years, each more demanding on the high-tech equipment.

After detailed technical data from Saturday's test is analyzed by the Pentagon, Boeing and Raytheon, Cohen is scheduled to relay a recommendation to Clinton in coming weeks on NMD's immediate future.

The Cohen report will be based chiefly on the state of current technology and projected cost of a system of 20 interceptors in Alaska in 2005, swelling to 100 interceptors in later years.

Clinton says his decision will also consider a pending detailed intelligence analysis of the threat from emerging potential enemies such as North Korea as well as U.S. ties with its European allies, China and Russia.

At the minimum, critics said Clinton should defer the decision to his successor rather than go ahead with an unproven system.

``I think this failure takes this issue out of the presidential campaign,'' said Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment. ``It's not the system (presumptive Republican nominee) George W. Bush (news - web sites) wants to build and it's no longer a system (expected Democratic nominee Vice President) Al Gore (news - web sites) wants to defend.''

Alistair Millar of the Fourth Freedom Foundation said there was consensus among critics that it would be best to delay a decision. ``I don't think anybody wants to deploy something that doesn't work,'' said Bill Hartung of the World Policy Institute.

---

Failed Missile Test Raises Doubts

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 2:20 PM ET
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000708/ts/missile_defense_55.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - The latest setback for the Pentagon's missile defense project - its second failed intercept in three tries - raised new doubt Saturday whether President Clinton will approve a quick push for a national anti-missile system.

Clinton has said he will decide in several weeks whether to stick with the current Pentagon timetable of building a missile defense for use as early as December 2005.

``This is something we will have to take into account as we look at the technical feasibility of this program,'' said P.J. Crowley, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House.

``The president awaits the secretary's analysis and recommendation and will make a decision on deployment later this year,'' he said Saturday.

The failure early Saturday suggests to some analysts that the Pentagon needs more time.

``Logically, you do regroup after something like this and you don't go forward with the existing schedule,'' said Anthony Cordesman, a defense specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The rocket took off as scheduled from Kwajalein Atoll at 12:40 a.m. EDT Saturday, about 21 minutes after the target missile was launched 4,300 miles to the east at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. But the warhead-busting ``kill vehicle'' never separated from the booster rocket, so it never activated the sensors it uses to hunt down its target.

The interceptor passed harmlessly by the target, and few of the critical technologies of missile defense got put to the test.

The reason for the failure was so unexpected that the three-star Air Force general in charge of the project told reporters minutes afterward that it was ``not even on my list'' of potential malfunctions.

The blame was placed on the booster rocket, made by Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space. It was supposed to release the kill vehicle from atop its second stage exactly 2 minutes and 37 seconds into flight.

The $100 million test was the third attempt at an intercept and the second to fail. The first failure, in January, was blamed on moisture inside the kill vehicle that prevented it from using heat-seeking devices to ``see'' its target.

In addition, the Mylar polyester balloon sent aloft with the target missile from Vandenberg to act as a decoy never inflated, Kadish said. That alone would have diminished the value of the test, even if the kill vehicle had worked properly.

The decoy was meant to simulate the kind of evasive measures an attacking country like North Korea might use to fool a U.S. missile defense system.

The test was plagued with problems from the start. The launch from Vandenberg was delayed by two hours because engineers discovered weak batteries powering the electronic signals that are sent from the missile to ground controllers to pinpoint where the anticipated intercept occurred.

Despite the problems, supporters of missile defense are expected to view the outcome as evidence the Pentagon needs more money for a project already expected to cost at least $36 billion over the coming 20 years.

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said in an interview Friday that Congress has made its intent clear by making it law that a national missile defense system be deployed as soon as technologically feasible.

``The deployment decision should be positive,'' Cochran said. ``We should make a decision to deploy.''

Cochran said he had no doubt that Congress would approve spending what it takes to build the system.

Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites), the presumed Democratic nominee, favors Clinton's approach of pursuing a limited defensive system that would protect only the 50 U.S. states. His expected GOP rival, George W. Bush (news - web sites), supports a broader, more ambitious system designed protect the United States as well as its allies.

The first phase of construction, if approved by Clinton, would be for a high-powered ``X-band'' radar on Shemya Island in the Aleutians. It would be the most powerful tracking and detection radar in the world.

An initial set of 20 missile interceptors - to expand by 100 by 2007 - would be based near Fairbanks, Alaska, with the command and control center at Colorado Springs, Colo.

Besides the questions of cost and technical feasibility, a U.S. president will have to decide yet another sticky question: whether to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which explicitly bans national missile defenses. That choice likely will be left to Clinton's successor.

The Clinton administration has tried to get Russia to agree to amend the treaty to allow missile defenses. So far, the Russians have refused. China also strongly opposes the U.S. missile defense plan.

In Russia, top generals said the failure showed that the system does not work and would never completely protect the United States.

``Attempts to deploy such a system will be an empty waste of money,'' Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, commander of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces, was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Gen. Valery Manilov, deputy head of the army general staff, said the proposed defense was ``politically dangerous and strategically wrong.''

``There will always be the possibility of creating more perfect offensive systems and this can pose a new threat,'' he was quoted as saying.

---

Antimissile System Fails Over Pacific, Pentagon Reports

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/070800missile-test.html

WASHINGTON, Saturday, July 8 -- In a major setback for the Clinton administration's plan to build a missile shield to protect American soil from enemy attack, a missile fired from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific failed to hit a mock warhead launched 4,300 miles away in California.

"We failed to achieve an intercept this evening," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

The last test, conducted in January, also ended in failure. In that case, the kill vehicle missed the mock warhead by between 300 to 400 feet after a cooling line clogged and shut down its heat-seeking sensors.

At 12:19 a.m. today, a 37-year-old remodeled Minuteman rocket containing a mock warhead and a decoy balloon thundered aloft over the Pacific Ocean from a tightly guarded launching pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 125 miles north of Los Angeles.

Twenty-one minutes after that, a 54-inch, 130-pound "exoatmospheric kill vehicle" was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of guiding itself to a collision with the incoming mock warhead in midflight, it missed.

In a press briefing, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, the director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, explained that the problem occurred when the kill vehicle did not separate from its booster in the second stage.

"The kill vehicle failed to do its job," he said.

An aditional malfunction, although one that did not affect the test result, was that the decoy balloon accompanying the mock warhead did not inflate as it was supposed to.

Today's test was counted on to determine whether President Clinton proceeds with a plan to begin development of a $60 billion national missile defense that administration officials contend is crucial to defend against missile attacks from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq. But opponents charge that such a system is technically unsound, unnecessary and a waste of money.

Even though some senior Pentagon officials said a decision to move forward was possible even if the test failed, today's miss will make it politically more difficult for Mr. Clinton to move forward with even the most basic decision to issue contracts for pouring concrete for a radar guidance system in the Aleutian Islands. That move is under consideration even though many arms control experts insist that it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Because of harsh winter conditions in that area of Alaska, barges must begin ferrying equipment by next spring if the radar is to be completed by 2005, the date when the administration has concluded North Korea could have a ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States.

The test failure is certain to reinforce calls in Congress that the decision on whether to move forward with a national missile defense program should be left to the next president.

The final analysis of what went wrong in today's test will take about three to four weeks.

In October, the Pentagon initially hailed its first intercept test as a complete success. But it later was forced to acknowledge that the kill vehicle initially had drifted off course and picked out the large bright decoy balloon instead of the mock warhead.

In the second, more complicated intercept test, in January, the kill vehicle missed the mock warhead by between 300 to 400 feet after a cooling line clogged and shut down its heat-seeking sensors.

Not since 1983, when President Reagan envisioned a defense based in space that would render nuclear weapons obsolete, has an issue of military technology seized the imagination of American policymakers and politicians and alarmed America's friends and foes.

The issue has also entered the presidential campaign, with Vice President Al Gore endorsing a limited version of the plan and Gov. George W. Bush backing a more ambitious system that could be deployed in space.

And it has raised a chorus of criticism from a sizable swath of scientists in the United States, some of whom argue that the proposed $60 billion system is not feasible and that the tests are rigged.

The test had been scheduled to take place during a four-hour window that began late Friday night. But a last-minute technical problem set back the launching by about two hours. The problem was related to electronic signals that keep the ground control informed about the missile's flight.

"Hitting a bullet with a bullet" is how a Pentagon official described the hoped-for collision. "Steel on target," another said.

The three tests held so far are part of a series of 19 planned tests.

After the failure of the test in January. a new communications system was added for today's test that transmits information directly to the kill vehicle about the location of the target after it has lifted off. Called a global-positioning-system transmitter, it used the same technology that helps motorists to avoid getting lost.

Even before the failure today, critics said the new test was a misleading guide because it was taking place under conditions that do not reflect a real attack. They said the decoy was not a true decoy but was more like a lure that attracts the kill vehicle to the real target, and that an adversary would use many decoys, not one.

In three or four weeks, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen is to give Mr. Clinton a formal recommendation of whether building the system is feasible.

Mr. Clinton is expected to decide this fall whether to put America on the road to a national missile defense system by starting construction of the radar in the Aleutian Islands.

Administration lawyers have advised Mr. Clinton that in their view, he could begin building this first phase of the missile defense without violating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, one of the cornerstones of arms control agreements between Washington and Moscow.

But the administration has been hit by a storm of criticism from prominent scientists, arms control experts, former officials and the General Accounting Office over the cost, technology and effect on relations with other nations.

Lawrence J. Korb of the Council on Foreign Relations called the entire system a "shield of dreams" whose supporters believe that "if you build it, it will work."

Even within the administration, a debate is raging among intelligence and Pentagon officials and policy experts over the nature and extent of the potential threat from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq that is the official justification for building a missile shield. Some senior Pentagon officials have warned that the administration's schedule is much too accelerated and therefore risky, because testing would continue even as construction has begun.

Russia and China are adamantly opposed to an American missile defense because they consider it a threat to their ability to defend themselves. European nations are also distressed that the United States would take such a position without regard to Europe's security.

In an attempt to stop the test, Greenpeace, the anti-nuclear organization, said a small team of missile defense opponents entered the grounds of Vandenberg Air Force Base on foot. Equipped with survival gear and supplies for several days, they intended to stay inside the area as long as they could, according to a Greenpeace statement.

In addition, the Dutch vessel Arctic Sunrise threatened to enter one of the hazard zones designated by the Pentagon in the waters off Vandenberg.

An unidentified man was caught entering the base, but a base spokesman, John Cherry, said there was no evidence of intruders in the heavily guarded area around the launching pad.

At a news briefing in Washington on Friday, a group of business leaders and scientists weighed in with 11-hour criticism of both the test and the entire plan.

"Stop this insensate and tortuously rationalized arms race that drains money away from our vital civilian programs," said Alan Kligerman, the chief executive officer of Akpharma Inc., and a board member of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which seeks to cut military spending. He added: "If I would represent my products and sell them with the same shortcomings in the products as regard to what they are supposed to do, I would be indicted. My products would be seized." by the Food and Drug Administration.

Bruce Blair, president of Center for Defense Information, argued at the same briefing that the development of a national missile defense was justifiably seen by Russia as a threat to its nuclear deterrent.

---

Surprise Failure of an Interceptor Dooms Missile Test

New York Times
July 9, 2000
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/070900missile-test.html

WASHINGTON, July 8 -- A crucial test in the Pentagon's program to defend the United States from missile attacks collapsed in failure because the high-speed interceptor that was supposed to destroy a dummy warhead in space never separated from its booster rocket, the Pentagon said today.

The separation failure was an unexpected setback in the Pentagon's quest to demonstrate the workability of a complex defensive system in time for President Clinton to decide whether to proceed with its deployment before he leaves office.

The component that failed appeared not to be one of the sophisticated, untested elements that the Pentagon was hoping to demonstrate: the targeting radar, homing sensors and communications links.

Instead, it was a failure of unknown origin in a well-developed technology that has been used successfully in the rockets that launch satellites and missiles for decades.

It underscored the frailty of any such complex weapon system to function reliably, even in the carefully controlled world of test shots. And in a separate, somewhat paradoxical failure, the target of the interceptor also failed to work when it did not properly inflate a decoy balloon.

The ability of a 54-inch-long, 130-pound "kill vehicle" to shed its booster a few minutes into flight and proceed to its target was a given. When it failed to occur, the important part of the $100 million test -- actually homing in precisely on the collision in space -- was never even attempted.

Asked whether separation of this kill vehicle from its booster was at the bottom of his list of concerns, Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, gave a direct answer. "It wasn't even on my list," he said.

Never activating the sensors that would have let it find its target, the kill vehicle streaked unguided into space, and few of the critical technologies of the missile exercise were actually tested.

General Kadish, who is in charge of the Pentagon's missile defense program, appeared humbled by the chain of events.

"What it tells me is we have more engineering work to do," he said at an early morning news conference.

"And as we've said all along, this is a very difficult, challenging job. This is rocket science, so there's a lot of things that can happen in this process," he added.

Although he expressed confidence that the research program could continue, the test failure complicates the political decision about proceeding with deployment.

"I don't think we should draw conclusions from any one test that are irrevocable," General Kadish said. "No one test tells you everything you need to know. We have a body of tests even before this one that tells us an awful lot. And we have increasing confidence as a result of that."

Even though today's test was only the third in a series of 19 intercept tests planned by the Pentagon, it was supposed to have been the defining test that would have given Defense Secretary William S. Cohen the ability to recommend that Mr. Clinton proceed with a limited missile defense for the United States.

But both General Kadish and Dr. Jacques Gansler, Under Secretary of Defense, Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics, made clear that President Clinton and Mr. Cohen might decide to seek more data before they can judge whether a plan to build a $60 billion defensive shield to ward off incoming missiles is feasible.

"We need more flight tests," Dr. Gansler said. Both men said that the program is on the right track, and that previous tests have left them confident of eventual success.

The next scheduled test will take place in October or November, Dr. Gansler said.

But he noted that if construction is to begin on a radar system on Shemya Island in the Aleutians in the spring, a decision should be made before then.

The Pentagon calculates that construction must begin next spring if a limited missile defense is to be completed by 2005, when Washington says that North Korea will be capable of fielding a long-range missile.

Today's failure could enable Mr. Clinton to delay making a decision at least until after the presidential election.

Both Russia and China adamantly oppose the plan to build a national missile defense because they consider it a threat to their own nuclear deterrent. Even the United States's closest European allies are distressed that the country would take such a dramatic unilateral move to defend its own territory.

Building a missile defense would require a change in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which Russia has refused to accept.

Last October, the Pentagon hailed its first test as a complete success, but later acknowledged that the kill vehicle initially had drifted off course and picked out the large bright decoy balloon instead of the mock warhead.

In a second, more complicated test in January, the kill vehicle missed the mock warhead by 300 to 400 feet after a cooling line clogged and shut down its heat-seeking sensors.

This morning's test was delayed by two hours after a technical problem was discovered in the target missile that was to launch the mock warhead.

After technicians fixed the problem, a gleaming white reconfigured Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile with a dummy warhead atop its second-stage rocket thundered aloft over the Pacific Ocean from Vandenberg Air Force Base, 125 miles north of Los Angeles at 12:19 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Twenty-one minutes later, the rocket containing the kill vehicle lifted off from Kwajalein Atoll about 4,300 miles away in the Pacific Ocean. The kill vehicle was supposed to separate from the second-stage rocket booster two minutes and 37 seconds into flight, then move into the path of the mock warhead for a spectacular, blinding collision at 16,000 mph.

But television monitors showed no bright white flash indicating a collision. About 30 minutes later, officials who monitored the flight test in the Pentagon told reporters that the kill vehicle had sailed by its target.

In his analysis of the failed test, Dr. Gansler said that future tests of a new rocket booster still in development are more important than today's malfunction.

He noted that the advanced radar of the kind that may be built on Shemya is working well so far. It was the test radar, he said, that showed that a decoy balloon which was part of today's test had not inflated properly.

The failure of the interceptor to break free and of the decoy to inflate meant that essentially nothing was learned today about what the engineers call the "terminal phase" of the test, the actual identification of the target and its interception in space.

---

Missile Defense Fails in Key Test

Washington Post
Saturday, July 8, 2000 ; A01
By Roberto Suro Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1497-2000Jul7.html

In a major setback for the Clinton administration's proposed National Missile Defense system, an interceptor failed to hit a target warhead during a flight test 140 miles above the Pacific Ocean early today.

"We failed to achieve intercept," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

The $100 million test was designed by the Pentagon to demonstrate that satellite sensors, radars and powerful computers could guide a "kill vehicle" to knock down an incoming warhead in the dark of space. It was the last practice run before President Clinton is scheduled to decide whether to go forward with the missile shield, and the failed intercept is sure to embolden critics who argue that it is scientifically unproven and will have grave diplomatic consequences.

Under a mandate issued by Congress last year, Clinton must field a missile defense system as soon as it is technically feasible. The administration proposes to place 20 interceptor missiles and a powerful X-band tracking radar in Alaska by 2005, the date by which North Korea and possibly Iran could have the ability to hit the United States with long-range missiles, according to controversial intelligence projections. The system would expand to 100 interceptors by 2007.

That timetable is driving a tight construction schedule that requires Clinton to decide by mid-November whether to begin building the missile shield next year, even though important elements are still in the prototype stage. As a result, today's test--just the third attempted intercept in a series planned by the Pentagon--had taken on unusual significance in judging whether the technology is workable.

The Pentagon did not immediately announce the reasons for the intercept's failure, and defense officials said that data from the test might show that most elements of the missile shield functioned as designed. That was the case in a previous test in January, when the interceptor narrowly missed its target because of a faulty cooling system.

The first of the three intercept tests was a success last fall. Supporters of the program have argued that it should not be judged on just a handful of early efforts. But some prominent scientists have contended that the tests are actually far too easy, because they do not include multiple decoys that the scientists believe would fool the system.

The target for this morning's test lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California shortly after midnight, following a two-hour delay caused by a glitch in a communications system. The exercise called for a surveillance satellite to detect the launch and alert a test base at Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific, where an interceptor missile was set.

According to the plan, the interceptor was to be launched about 20 minutes after the target crossed the California coast. Tracking information was to be fed to the int erceptor from a radar in Hawaii and a prototype X-band radar in Kwajalein. After a 10-minute flight, the kill vehicle was to have separated from its booster and begun to use its own infrared sensors to find the target.

The two objects, each only about five feet long and weighing a couple of hundred pounds, were supposed to collide at a velocity of 4.6 miles per second.

Even a successful intercept would not have guaranteed a decision to build the system. In addition to its technical feasibility, Clinton has said he will assess the system's costs, estimated at $20 billion by the Pentagon and far more according to watchdog agencies; the seriousness of the ballistic missile threat the United States is likely to face; and the missile shield's potential impact on arms control and diplomatic matters.

The failure of today's test, however, may doom the project at least until next year, when a new administration could revive it, Pentagon officials said. Critics of the proposed shield--both those who want a bigger system and those who want none at all--have mounted extensive campaigns in recent months with television advertisements, news conferences and letters-to-the-president. Neither the White House nor senior political appointees at the Pentagon have mounted a significant counterattack.

Asked to respond to reports of disenchantment with the project among senior administration officials, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen yesterday offered considerably less than an enthusiastic endorsement of the plan. "All of us have worked together, and we are proceeding according to plan," Cohen said in an interview with National Public Radio. "That is to conduct the research and development, and then we will see exactly what the results are and make a prudent recommendation to the president."

The diplomatic costs of the proposed shield have escalated rapidly in recent weeks, with muted protests from European allies and louder complaints from China that the United States would upset the world's strategic balance by making itself the one nation safe from a ballistic missile attack. In addition, signs of moderation from both Iran and North Korea have made those states seem less threatening than when the missile defense plan was conceived. Meanwhile, the newly elected government of President Vladmir Putin in Russia has posed unexpected difficulties.

The White House had hoped to win Russia's agreement to modify the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to permit construction of the system. The Russians not only declined to go along but threatened to withdraw from other arms control agreements if the United States unilaterally abrogated the ABM Treaty and built the shield. As an alternative, Putin made a vague proposal for joint work on a different kind of system, one that would shoot down missiles shortly after launch.

"I think they clearly are trying to divide the Europeans and to divide the American people in the suggestions they're making," Cohen said.

To defer a confrontation with the Russians, administration officials have developed a plan to begin construction in Alaska next year without declaring a decision on deployment has been reached. The fate of the program would then be up to the next president.

-------- MILITARY (by country)

-------- colombia

Colombian Army Claims 29 Rebels Killed in Battles

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 9:39 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/wl/colombia_violence_dc_1.html

BOGOTA (Reuters) - A three-day battle in Colombia's ranching and coca-growing Caqueta province left 25 leftist rebels dead this week, and at least four died in other fighting, officials said on Saturday.

The army said that at least 25 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels had been killed in a battle in Caqueta province, according to intercepted radio communications between two presumed rebel leaders.

At least four other rebels died in a separate battle on Saturday in Meta province, the army said, adding that the rebel death toll was likely higher.

In the radio conversation released by the army, the rebels are heard tallying their casualties from the battle near Valparaiso, Caqueta.

``There were 30 dead, right?'' one rebel is heard asking.

``We had 25,'' the other guerrilla answered, adding: ``It was a hard hit.''

The FARC's Switzerland-sized safe haven created in 1998 as a stage for peace talks with the government straddles Caqueta and Meta provinces. Military officials have charged the rebels with using the zone to train guerrillas and launch attacks.

Caqueta, along with Putumayo province, is also one of the main targets in the army's planned ``push into the south'' backed by the United States.

The two provinces hold more than half of all of Colombia's plantations of coca, the raw material used in making cocaine. Colombia is by far the world's largest cocaine producer, supplying 80 percent of the international market.

The U.S. Congress last month approved $1.3 billion dollars in mostly military aid to help Colombia fight drug trafficking in southern Colombia.

Rebels have warned that increased counter-narcotic operations would turn up the heat in their 36-year-old war against the state. The FARC is said to derive some 60 percent of its funding from the drug trade.

---

Earmarked for Colombian Rebels, a Region Asks to Be Left Alone

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/070800colombia-guerillas.html

YONDÓ, Colombia -- For years, the people of this thriving little oil town on the bank of the Magdalena River complained that the authorities back in Bogotá never paid them any attention. But now that they and their neighbors have suddenly become pivotal to a government plan to open peace talks with second-largest guerrilla group here, they want only to be left alone.

When President Andrés Pastrana announced the plan in April, it seemed a simple matter. To lure the Marxist rebels of the Army of National Liberation, or E.L.N., into negotiations, Yondó and two other municipalities north of here were to be turned into a "zone of encounter" under guerrilla control, with all army and police units withdrawn.

There has never been a shortage of armed groups roaming this area. So the government apparently thought that an end of hostilities would be welcome. Left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the military have all sought to control this resource rich and strategic region, the Middle Magdalena. And all have left casualties in their wakes.

What the authorities in Bogotá did not expect, though, was the popular resistance that has emerged. Soon after the announcement, thousands of protesters blocked the Pan American Highway, cutting off most commerce between central and northern Colombia.

"If they really want to talk peace, all they need to negotiate is a table and chairs," said Leonel Uribe Hernández, a municipal official here and a leader of the protest. "They don't need all this territory. If the E.L.N. leaders are worried about their safety, let them talk overseas, in Venezuela or Spain or Germany. But we don't want to be a part of this."

After several weeks, Mr. Pastrana relented and agreed to a "dialogue" with residents. As part of a recent accord, the government has agreed to delay formally establishing the zone until undertaking "popular consultations," a phrase that the government seems to interpret as town meetings and workshops, but that residents take to mean a plebiscite.

"This is a democracy, so let the people vote on this and let their will be respected," Councilman Nixon Arrieta said. "If they say yes, then fine. But I don't think that is likely to happen, because we have nothing to gain from this and everything to lose."

The territory that the government has agreed to hand over is roughly the size of Delaware, or barely one-tenth the size of a separate demilitarized zone granted to the largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But the strategic importance of this area is much greater because it sits astride the country's main waterway and is within striking distance of a railway line and the Pan American Highway.

"I don't know what the president was thinking," a teacher here said. "The E.L.N. has a long history of blowing up oil pipelines, power stations and transmission lines. And he wants to put them right across the river from the biggest oil refinery in the country," which processes the bulk of Colombia's gasoline and is in Barrancabermeja.

Like the more sparsely populated FARC zone to the south, which is larger than Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined, this is cattle country and abounds in fertile pastures. But cows and water buffaloes have to graze alongside oil wells that produce millions of dollars a year in royalties.

Farther north, the mountains of the Serranía de San Lucas have large deposits of gold, emeralds, nickel and mercury. The gold mines have been shut for years because of the violence but could easily reopen after the fighting stops and soon thereafter begin filling the coffers of the E.L.N., which has met with military reverses in recent months.

The biggest and fastest-growing source of wealth in the area, however, is farming coca. The E.L.N. controlled drug trafficking here until 18 months ago, when it was violently supplanted by paramilitaries of the United Peasant Self-Defense force. And the E.L.N. would clearly like to regain the dominance and the revenues that it once enjoyed.

"This is anything but a fight over ideology," said Mayor Danuil Mecera of San Pablo, a town an hour's boat ride north of here that is in the E.L.N. zone. "This is a struggle for economic control and power, pure and simple, between two illegal armed groups that only want to strengthen their position at the expense of the other."

As government negotiations with protesters drag on, disgruntled E.L.N. forces are staying out of the towns and holing up in their mountain stronghold north of here. In a recent television interview, the senior commander, Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, acknowledged that "there is much fear" of a peace zone but attributed that to "the pressure of paramilitary groups."

Residents and local officials say their real concern is that violence may increase after the zone has been set up, because the accord between the government and the rebels excludes paramilitary forces. With the army and the police withdrawn, the critics said, residents would be even more likely to be caught in cross-fire between the rebels and adamant paramilitary units.

"This territory is ours," said the local paramilitary leader, who is known as Comandante Julián. The fundamental problem, he added, is that "there are three states here, that of the guerrillas, the real one of the government and that of the self-defense forces."

Nevertheless, he added, "We will respect what the population decides, and if they accept a zone, we will withdraw our troops."

Hoping to win over the residents, the national government arranged for local officials to visit the FARC zone and talk with their counterparts and other residents there. But that effort backfired when the officials returned home with tales of extortion of businesses, summary executions, forced recruitment of teenagers and other guerrilla abuses.

"We can see for ourselves what happened down there, and we've been contacted by people down there who tell us that we should fight by all means to prevent what happened to them from happening to us," a pharmacist in San Pablo said. "The FARC zone has become an independent country, and we don't want that happening here."

-------- ireland

Bomb Blast Northern Ireland Police Station

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 10:47 PM ET
By Martin Cowley
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/wl/irish_leadall_dc_40.html

BELFAST (Reuters) - A bomb exploded at a police station in Northern Ireland in the early hours of Sunday, as tension mounted ahead of a controversial Protestant march.

``We had a report of an abandoned car and several houses were being evacuated when there was an explosion. We're not aware of any casualties at the moment,'' a police spokesman told Reuters.

Northern Ireland is in the throes of a fragile peace process after truces by the nationalist Irish Republican Army and other pro-Irish and pro-British guerrilla groups.

Sunday's blast was at Stewartstown Royal Ulster Constabulary station, southwest of Belfast.

The bombing follows a week of violence by hard-line Protestants demonstrating against a decision to ban the pro-British Orange Order from marching through a Roman Catholic enclave in the town of Portadown during an annual parade.

Tension over the parade has upset the efforts of the uneasy home-rule coalition administration to restore normality after three decades of communal strife and guerrilla war.

Youths wearing plastic Union Jack masks threw petrol bombs at police and soldiers and tried to tear down barbed wire near the march route on Saturday night.

The Portadown march is due to start at 0900 GMT on Sunday.

Police said they were not aware of any warnings before the bomb exploded and said no one had claimed responsibility for the explosion.

Police Refuse To Speculate On Suspects

A member of the public had alerted the police to an abandoned car outside the RUC station and police moved quickly to evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, police said.

Earlier this week, RUC Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan warned that pro-British ``loyalist'' extremist were planning gun and bomb attacks on his officers as part of a wave of Protestant anger about the banning of the marches.

A motorway near Portadown was closed within an hour of the explosion because of a suspect device.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair appealed on Saturday for calm before the march.

Police said they would not speculate about who carried out the bombing until they had carried out a full investigation.

Irish republican renegades have detonated a number of bombs at British security force bases without causing any injury this year.

A week ago, a bomb exploded on a rail line in the staunchly Republican heartland of South Armagh. A warning telephone call had alerted security forces and no one was hurt.

But Flanagan quickly blamed republican extremists saying he thought that blast was the work of the breakaway Real IRA.

Republican extremists were also prime suspects for a bomb that exploded under Hammersmith Bridge in London last month.

The Real IRA called a cease-fire in the wake of public outrage at its detonation of a car bomb which killed 29 civilians in Omagh town in August 1998.

The militia is among a range of small but violent Republican splinter groups hostile to the province's landmark 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.

-------- rwanda

Report Says U.S. and Others Allowed Rwanda Genocide

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/070800rwanda-genocide.html

UNITED NATIONS, July 7 -- The United States and other nations and institutions that failed to prevent or stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 should pay a "significant level of reparations," an independent panel said today.

The seven-member international panel, assembled by the Organization of African Unity, also singled out France and Belgium as well as the United Nations and the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches as those most guilty of not doing enough to prevent the atrocities that killed up to 800,000 people.

And the group cited Rwanda's Hutu-led government for its complicity or negligence in the killings in which Hutu militias rampaged through the country, massacring ethnic Tutsi and moderate or antigovernment Hutu who defended them.

The panel asked Secretary General Kofi Annan to establish a commission to formally identify the countries that owe Rwanda the money to rebuild the devastated country, and to set an appropriate scale of compensation. It also demanded that Rwanda's international debts be canceled.

In its report, "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," the panel said that the events of 1994 cannot be forgotten, and that Rwanda should no more be assigned to "ancient history" than the Holocaust.

It also noted that the long-term effects of those weeks of horrific bloodshed and brutality continue to be felt throughout the region, especially in Congo. "The 1994 genocide in one small country ultimately triggered a conflict in the heart of Africa that has directly or indirectly touched at least one-third of all the nations on the continent," the report said.

The report reviews the same issues and reaches many of the same conclusions as another independent experts' study commissioned by the secretary general. But it also takes a deeper look at the roots of the ethnic conflict in Rwanda, beginning with 60 years of colonial rule, first by Germany and then Belgium, when ethnic divisions were exacerbated if not manipulated.

It is also far harsher in its criticism of Security Council members, especially France and the United States, saying France could have prevented the genocide and the United States could have stopped it.

"Of course there would have been no genocide if certain Rwandans had not organized and carried it out; there is no denying that fundamental truth," the report said. "But it is equally true that throughout the past century external forces have helped shape Rwanda's destiny and that of its neighbors." The report does not absolve the current Tutsi-led government in Rwanda of sometimes failing to meet challenges it inherited, despite the "resilience and vigor" shown by the survivors now rebuilding the country and their lives.

Rwandans still confront human rights abuses under the Tutsi-led government formed from the Rwanda Patriotic Front, which seized power in the summer of 1994. The country, struggling with refugee resettlement, is still at war in Congo, where ethnic Hutu militias remain a menace, the Rwandan government says.

Those militias instigated the genocide in April 1994, after the president, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed in a plane crash in Kigali that was possibly caused by a missile attack. The report characterizes the four-year period leading up to the outbreak of violence as "the triumph of ethnic radicalism" among the majority Hutu population that set the scene for the nightmare that followed.

At this point, the report said, France had "unrivaled influence at the very highest levels" of the Hutu-led government in Rwanda and chose not to exercise it to derail well-laid plans for the genocide.

At a news conference today, Ambassador Stephen Lewis, a Canadian member of the Organization of African Unity panel and a former deputy executive director of Unicef, said that the new report chose to focus more heavily on the role of the Security Council, especially France and the United States, than the report prepared for Mr. Annan last year. Mr. Lewis said that French behavior was particularly indefensible.

"We repudiate the position of the government of France, the position that asserts they had no responsibility," he said. "They were closer in every way to the Habyarimana regime than any other government. They could have stopped the genocide before it began. They knew exactly what was happening."

Worse, he said, the French peacekeeping mission eventually sent to the region allowed a huge number of Hutu attackers to flee the country to neighboring Congo, then known as Zaire, "thereby ushering in the larger Great Lakes catastrophe."

"There is almost no redemptive feature to the conduct of the government of France," Mr. Lewis said.

As for the United States, which blocked the Security Council from sending peacekeepers to Rwanda once the massacres had begun, Mr. Lewis said the American role was "an almost incomprehensible scar of shame on American foreign policy." Speaking personally, he said, "I don't know how Madeleine Albright lives with it." Secretary of State Albright was then the United States representative at the United Nations.

President Clinton, on a subsequent visit to Africa, apologized to Rwanda for the lack of international response, as has Belgium, the former colonial power. France has never expressed remorse or accepted blame.

The report was very critical of the Roman Catholic Church. "We were shocked by the role of the church," Mr. Lewis said today. Although priests and lay Catholics were among those who tried to save Tutsi, there were other church officials who did not; some helped lure Tutsi to their deaths.

There were "leaders of the church who did not speak out strongly and take stands," Mr. Lewis said. "Since Rwanda is a very Catholic country, we felt we had to say something."

Anglican Church authorities have apologized for ignoring human rights abuses or for acts that encouraged Hutu death squads. The Roman Catholic Church has not, the report said.

In addition to Mr. Lewis, who introduced the report here today, the panel consisted of Sir Ketumile Masire, a former president of Botswana and the panel leader; Amadou Toumani Touré, former president of Mali; Lisbet Palme, a Swedish child psychologist and expert on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child; Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, former finance minister of Liberia; P. N. Bhagwati, former chief justice of India's Supreme Court; and Hocine Djoudi, an Algerian judge and diplomat.

-------- u.s.

Computer Shutdown Hits Defense Security Service
Backlog of Background Checks Grows

By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 8, 2000; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-07/08/158l-070800-idx.html

A $100 million computer system installed two years ago by the Defense Security Service (DSS) has been shut down for more than a week, the latest example of disarray at the agency that conducts background checks for Defense Department security clearances.

Persistent computer problems at the Alexandria-based DSS have contributed to a backlog of almost a million investigations into military and civilian employees of the Pentagon, the armed forces and private defense contractors.

The computer system, hastily installed with little testing in 1998, crashed on June 29 because of what officials called a data overload. It is not expected to go back into operation until Monday, according to retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles J. Cunningham Jr., who took over the DSS a year ago with a mandate to upgrade the computer system, shape up the investigative process and cut the backlog.

Although the computer shutdown "was orderly," Cunningham said, "we lost some files." Restarting the system has been delayed because "it takes a lot of time to load data back into the computer," he added.

The DSS's comptroller, Robert Donnelly, said the agency plans to spend $47.2 million over the next five years to "stabilize" its computers. In addition, it has budgeted $235 million to hire four civilian investigating firms for as much as five years to cut down the number of pending security checks.

Some of the approximately 1 million employees awaiting background checks are seeking new security clearances. But most of the backlog consists of employees who are due for periodic re-investigation of existing clearances. By law, re-investigations are required every five years for a "top secret" clearance, every 10 years for a "secret" clearance and every 15 years for access to "confidential" material.

The DSS conducts background checks but does not actually issue security clearances. Rather, it forwards the results of its investigations to the Office of the Secretary of Defense or the various armed services, which decide whether to grant clearances. Often, the adjudicators ask for additional information.

Last week's computer breakdown, Cunningham said, was caused by increased data coming into the system as the number of completed investigations nearly doubled from earlier this year, to about 1,800 cases a day by mid-June. His goal, he said, had been to reach 2,500 case closures a day by mid-August, a rate that would represent more cases being closed than opened for the first time in years.

The breakdown was not entirely unexpected. Gary L. Denman, president and CEO of GRC International Inc., a DSS computer contractor, warned earlier this year that even with various improvements the system "still chokes" and that he was not sure "whether the software can handle it."

One result of the computer problems and backlog in investigations is that a growing number of Defense Department personnel with access to top-secret information have not been subjected to security checks in more than five years.

The need for periodic re-investigations was highlighted last year when a routine check on Navy Petty Officer Daniel King, who worked at the code-breaking National Security Agency, resulted in an espionage charge. King was arrested in October and charged with mailing the Russian Embassy a computer disk with secret data about U.S. submarine operations.

The Pentagon's security problems, however, have drawn far less congressional interest than the travails of the Department of Energy, which is reeling from allegations of security lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

----

JAPAN: CLAMPDOWN ON MARINES

New York Times
July 8, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/00/07/08/news/world/world-briefing.html

United States Marines in Okinawa will not be allowed to drink alcohol during a summit meeting that President Clinton is scheduled to attend on the island this month. The alcohol ban comes after the arrest on Monday of a drunken Marine who police said entered a private home and molested a 14-year-old girl who was sleeping there. The Marines will also be required to be in uniform at all times during the July 20-24 meeting.

Calvin Sims (NYT)

---

General Seeks to Retire as Charges Are Supported

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/070800army-general.html

WASHINGTON, July 7 -- The two-star general accused of sexually harassing the Army's highest-ranking woman has requested early retirement after military investigators endorsed the charges against him, Pentagon officials said today.

The accused officer, Maj. Gen. Larry G. Smith, has denied any wrongdoing, but he asked to step down after a letter of reprimand was entered into his personnel file, the officials said. He is to retire on Sept. 1.

The Army's inspector general determined that he harassed and assaulted Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy in her Pentagon office in 1996. But officials said there were no plans to reduce his rank or retirement benefits through a Grade Determination Review Board.

General Kennedy, whose high-profile accusations were closely followed throughout the armed services and by advocates of women's rights, released a statement expressing satisfaction at the conclusion of a case she had reluctantly pursued.

"I am satisfied with the Army's action in this case," she said. "As far as I am concerned, this matter is closed."

In a statement released by the Army, General Smith said: "I have always and continue to maintain that I did not commit these allegations and I am deeply disappointed with the decision to substantiate them. However, for the good of my family and the Army, we have elected to put it behind us and move on with our lives."

The action against General Smith, a 55-year-old veteran of three tours in Vietnam, ended the first instance of sexual harassment charges lodged by one Army general against another. The case embarrassed the Army, which has been roiled by a series of sex scandals and has sought to appeal to women by insisting it will not tolerate sexual harassment.

In a heavily edited report that was released today under the Freedom of Information Act, the Army's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Michael Ackerman, concluded that General Kennedy, who is 52, told the truth about the encounter with General Smith even though only the two generals were present.

At the time of the incident, the two were of equal rank, and they both said that they had met in General Kennedy's office and that the encounter ended with a hug, the report said.

Beyond that, they "were in total disagreement as to what happened when they were alone," it said.

General Smith testified that he gave General Kennedy "a hug and possibly a 'cheek kiss,' " the report said, but he "strongly denied any wrongdoing." Before her accusations, General Smith said he had considered General Kennedy a "family friend," it said.

But the inspector general concluded that General Smith's actions amounted to assault and battery and sexual harassment. The evidence did not support a more serious charge of indecent behavior to gratify sexual desires, the investigation found.

"By holding her and kissing her against her will," the report said, General Smith displayed conduct that "was unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman."

The inspector general largely based his conclusions on the strength of General Kennedy's testimony and the belief that she had more to lose than gain by making her charges public.

General Kennedy filed charges against General Smith only last year, three years after the incident. She pressed the case after General Smith was named to become the Army's deputy inspector general, a post that would have given him responsibility for investigating charges of sexual harassment, among other types of misconduct.

"Evaluating the allegations came down to a question of credibility," the report said. "There appeared to be no motive for" General Kennedy "to jeopardize her career and reputation by making false allegations against" General Smith.

"They were not in competition for assignments," the report said. "She did not arrange the office call. There was no apparent incentive for her to ruin his unblemished career and destroy their friendship with false allegations."

The inspector general concluded: "When one weighed all the testimony and considered all the evidence, coupled with the lack of motive to lie, the preponderance or greater weight of the evidence was sufficient to substantiate" General Kennedy's allegations against General Smith.

Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said there was nothing unusual about the inspector general's approach to the sort of dispute frequently dismissed as "he said, she said."

"They found her a credible witness based on her demeanor," Mr. Fidell said. "They decided she's telling the truth and one of the factors that decided it is she doesn't have a motive to lie."

General Smith asserted that he had been treated unfairly. He provided 52 character witnesses in his defense. The inspector general's office interviewed seven of those references and six others before determining that there were no other known reports of prior misconduct by General Smith, whom it called "a highly respected officer."

General Kennedy did not formally pursue the case against General Smith until last year, the inspector general said, but she referred to the incident in 1997, five months after it occurred.

Without providing details, the report noted: "The complainant, in an open forum, cited it as an example of how she had been sexually harassed" by General Smith.

The report said she eventually decided to report the incident "out of loyalty to the Army."

In a ceremony in May honoring her 31 years of military service, General Kennedy, who is scheduled to retire next month, urged women in uniform to report incidents of harassment or "misconduct will continue to harm us."

Speaking at the memorial to Women in Military Service to America at Arlington National Cemetery, she exhorted the crowd of 100 well-wishers to heed the advice of French novelist Emile Zola to "live out loud."

"Living out loud begins by telling a friend and then later by telling people in authority who care," General Kennedy said. "Our army is filled with women and men who care and are in a position to change and improve the conditions in which we serve."

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

MALFORMED AMPHIBIANS TO BE FOCUS OF U. S. STUDY

San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, July 7, 2000
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2000/07/06/national2001EDT0715.DTL

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said yesterday it will survey 43 federal wildlife refuges to gather information on whether pesticides and other pollutants might be causing deformities in frogs.

An increasing number of frogs and toads have been found in recent years to have severe deformities without any clear indication of what might be causing these malformed amphibians.

The new study at the wildlife refuge will focus on what impact pollutants might be having on frogs, with findings to be turned over to an interagency group studying the issue, said Fish and Wildlife Service officials. Scientists will examine malformed frogs, toads and salamanders, as well as amphibian eggs, at 43 refuges in 31 states, the agency said.

----

Environmental Journalist Faces Federal Prosecution for Reporting the News

By Cat Lazaroff
July 7, 2000 (ENS)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jul2000/2000L-07-07-07.html

BOULDER, Colorado, U.S. Congressman Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, has asked the federal Department of Justice to intervene in the prosecution of a Colorado reporter arrested for refusing to leave the scene of an environmental protest. The case points out the problems that journalists sometimes encounter in accessing sites of conflict between government and the people it serves.

Reporter Brian Hansen, kneeling at left, with U.S. Forest Service law-enforcement officer Chuck Dunfee, just before Hansen's arrest (Photo by Mark Slupe, courtesy Colorado Daily)

Brian Hansen, a reporter for the Boulder based "Colorado Daily," was arrested on July 6, 1999, while covering a protest at the Vail ski resort, located on lands leased from the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. Hansen was charged with refusing to leave an area that had been closed for reasons of "public safety," a federal criminal misdemeanor. If convicted, Hansen could be fined $5,000, or sentenced to six months in jail, or both.

Hansen says he was just doing his job - reporting the news. The federal government says Hansen was breaking the law by refusing to leave a federal closure area.

In a letter written Wednesday to Robert Rubin, U.S. Assistant Attorney General, Congressman Udall asks the government to "take a hard look at this case and determine if its continued prosecution is absolutely necessary for justice to be properly served."

Udall stresses that he is not trying to "second guess" the arresting officials or suggest that the U.S. not take legal action to enforce proper federal orders. "But I do think that prosecutors, in considering whether to press a case, should recognize that there is public interest in such events as this protest," Udall writes, "that members of the press are likely to seek to cover them, and that a reporter could inadvertently be arrested because of misunderstandings as to his role and presence at the site."

Hansen's arrest may have stemmed from a series of misunderstandings on Hansen's part and that of the various federal officials involved in the early morning raid that led to the arrest of Hansen and six protesters.

A just-released lynx in the San Juan Mountains west of Creede, Colorado, part of a reintroduction effort (Photo by Michael Seraphin courtesy DOW)

Less than a week earlier, at least 40 activists met on Vail mountain to protest the expansion of the Vail ski resort within White River National Forest. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) approved the Vail construction in 1997. But several groups, including the Coalition to Stop Vail Expansion, the Coalition of Forest Defenders, Colorado Wild and Earth First!, say White River is habitat for endangered lynx, and the construction could lead to the extinction of the Colorado lynx population.

Protesters erected a road block on the main construction road and chained themselves to construction equipment. Activist Joel Lathbury of Earth First! barricaded himself in an overturned car known as a batmobile with his arm chained to a block of reinforced cement, also known as a "road dragon," embedded in the ground beneath the car. The car effectively blocked the only other official road leading to the construction site, called the Category III roadless area.

Other protesters locked themselves to heavy equipment, or to a specially constructed tripod blocking the loggers' passage.

At about 5:00 am July 6, dozens of USFS law enforcement officers, reportedly in full riot gear, stormed the barricades. Some of the officers were brought in from the Pacific Northwest region, where the USFS has had more experience dealing with protesters. Eagle County Sheriff's Department officers were also on the scene.

Firefighters try to extract protester whose arms are locked in sunken concrete on Lime Creek Road near Vail ski area (Three photos courtesy Colorado Daily)

Hansen wanted to remain in the area to monitor official attempts to remove Lathbury and others at the blockade. He was on assignment for the "Colorado Daily," and was displaying his official press credentials.

Federal officials told Hansen he would have to move about a mile down the mountain to an area where a public information officer of the USFS would keep him apprised of developments at the blockade. Hansen refused, pointing out that he would be unable to report adequately on the events from that distance, and asserting his rights as a journalist to report the news from the site.

Hansen did not leave, and was quickly arrested. He was handcuffed and placed on a bus near the blockade. From the bus, he could see other people moving about near where he had been arrested. When he asked why those people were not being arrested, Hansen was told that those people were legally behind the lines of the official federal closure area. The reporter says no one ever told him he was so close to that line - and if they had, he would gladly have moved those few feet to avoid being arrested.

"When I was taken into custody, I had absolutely no idea that the southern boundary of the enclosure was apparently just behind me," Hansen told ENS.

Neither did the two other journalists on the scene - "Colorado Daily" photographer Mark Slupe and "Vail Daily Trail" reporter Robert Kelly Goss.

Firefighters work to free Joel Lathbury from the concrete block to which he had chained himself

"Goss was physically backed down the mountain, and ended up with nothing to report, nothing to see," said Hansen. "Goss is much more familiar with the layout, geography and nomenclature of the roads than I am, but he didn't get it either."

Hansen thinks there is more to his arrest than a simple misunderstanding. Months after his arrest, he learned of a federal law that requires the notification of the U.S. attorney general prior to the filing of any criminal charges against a reporter arrested in the course of covering a story.

On his own behalf, Hansen has sent requests to the attorney general's office and other federal offices looking for evidence that notification had occurred in his case. In response, after several months of delay, Hansen received official word that no such documents can be found.

Along with that response, on May 11 Hansen received a note stating, "for your further information, the decision to arrest and prosecute you was based on the fact that you were a protester not that you were a member of the news media."

Hogwash, says Hansen. "They knew days, even weeks before the raid that I was a reporter. There was absolutely no question why I was there. They knew exactly who I was."

Hansen has covered environmental issues and other topics for the "Colorado Daily" for three years

In fact, Assistant District Attorney Craig Wallace, the attorney charged with prosecuting Hansen's case, told the court in evidentiary hearings that the federal government has no intention of arguing that Hansen was acting as a protester, and said the government knows full well that Hansen was there in his role as a journalist.

The charge against Hansen is just one of violating a federal closure area - a mechanism used increasingly by the federal government and local police to keep protesters away from controversial scenes. At the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle last November, police set up a 50 square block "no protest zone," inside of which members of the public were arrested on little or no provocation. At the meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC this April, hundreds of protesters were arrested after being corralled between police lines during a peaceful protest. Three time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Carol Guzy of the "Washington Post" was among those rounded up.

Just this morning, the USFS began attempting to remove a six week long road blockade at the Eagle timber sales in the Mt. Hood National Forest near Portland, Oregon. The Cascadia Forest Alliance, one of the groups opposing the timber sales, reports that more than 100 law enforcement officers appeared on the scene, some in full riot gear and camouflage, to remove about 20 protesters.

The protesters were blocking access to logging of more than 500 acres of roadless area within a drinking water watershed. "Removal of the road blockades is extremely dangerous, putting the lives of peaceful protesters at risk," said the Alliance in a statement.

Washington DC police came prepared with riot gear, gas masks and plastic handcuffs at the World Bank/IMF meetings in April (Photo (c) Adam Kessel)

The USFS has put a federal "closure" on a large area of public land around the road blockades, making it illegal for members of the public to be present. The courts have sometimes found such closures to be unconstitutional, because they restrict free speech, freedom of the press and the right to assemble.

When Hansen and the six protesters arrested at Vail first appeared in court, an attorney representing Vail Resorts prompted the prosecuting attorney to ask that all seven defendants be barred from returning to Vail until they were acquitted. The judge refused, saying that defendants - presumed innocent until proven guilty - cannot be barred from public lands, including the National Forest lands on which the Vail resort is expanding.

Hansen, still handcuffed, could not take notes at his own first court appearance. Nor were Hansen's attorney, or the editor of the "Colorado Daily," present in the courtroom. Both had been told that Hansen would be held overnight, and would not appear in court until the following day.

Hansen feels his trial is an attempt by the federal government to shore up the legality of federal closure areas. If he is convicted, Hansen's case could set a precedent allowing federal agencies to bar journalists from such areas across the country.

He notes that the federal prosecutor, during evidentiary hearings, repeatedly questioned Hansen's ability to remain unbiased in his continuing coverage of clashes between protesters and federal land managers, including the ongoing investigation of a 1998 firebombing at Vail.

Hansen has covered the ongoing investigation of the October 19, 1998 firebombing that burned the Two Elk Restaurant and seven other sites in Vail, Colorado (Photo by Mark Mobley)

"I strongly reject the notion [that I am biased]," said Hansen. "Even if that was true, and it is not, so what? Doesn't the First Amendment apply to people who have opinions?"

The judge in Hansen's case seemed to agree. During closing arguments in the evidentiary hearings on May 25, Federal Magistrate Judge James Robb interrupted arguments by the federal prosecutor that Hansen was too biased to justify his presence on the basis of journalism alone, and the court "should forget the lofty, high-sounding [First Amendment] principles" that Hansen and his attorney worked to articulate.

"Mr. Wallace, I'm reminded of Thomas Jefferson," said Judge Robb, "who once opined that 'Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the later.'"

Hansen's lawyers have until July 17 to respond to information provided by the federal prosecutor, after which the judge will rule on Hansen's motion to have his case dismissed.

But more conflicts over the federal government's right to close off controversial areas could come as early as next week. On Monday morning, activists at Mt. Hood National Forest plan a massive non-violent civil disobedience protest to defy the closure around the Eagle Creek timber sales.

-------- imf / world bank

Apprentices Meet to Solve the World's Trade Tangles

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By ELIZABETH OLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/070800wto-trade.html

GENEVA, July 7 -- In a world where globalization is often portrayed as a malevolent force, a career as a trade negotiator might not sound appealing. But Oystein Borsum disagrees.

Mr. Borsum, 24, came from his home country, Norway, to make Egypt's case in a student debate over whether the World Trade Organization should be linking trade sanctions to standards that prohibit child labor.

He had done his research, visiting the Egyptian Embassy in Oslo and finding information on the Internet, and he produced a paper that outlined the Egyptian view that punishing violators with trade sanctions would harm its emerging economy.

After hours of negotiations in which students representing other countries, including the United States, argued opposing views, "we were practically unable to agree on anything," Mr. Borsum said.

"When we tried to get from the problem to the solution in the W.T.O. framework, we agreed to disagree," he said.

Welcome to the real world, the adult advisers sighed.

Some 50 students from two dozen countries ran into the same kinds of problems when they tried to find answers to half a dozen of the most sensitive trade issues, including child labor.

The students, sequestered in a conference room in the W.T.O.'s stately building with spectacular views of Lake Geneva, concentrated on long and tough negotiations, oblivious to the perfect sunny weather outside.

Tobias Fauser, 26, of Germany, who argued the American viewpoint, said he felt isolated. "It is pretty hard to represent the United States because all the developing countries oppose linking labor standards to trade, and see this effort as a protectionist measure by Americans," he said.

The debate took on an emotional quality when India, represented by Djana Gnjic of Yugoslavia, accused him of trying to impose American culture and values on other countries.

"This is a solution that will make a poor country even poorer," Ms. Gnjic, 23, said. "Children can't always go to school because their families can't afford it."

She said later that she felt somewhat beaten up. "All the countries had a tough attitude, and no one wanted to let his ideas go," Ms. Gnjic said.

Finally, with the arguments on a child-labor link really heated, the 12 students taking part decided to place a moratorium on even discussing the matter for seven years. Some delegates had wanted a 20-year blackout, but eventually compromised.

The group, mostly business and economics students, did not sport the trappings of political radicals. Having come for the second Model W.T.O. 2000 -- an idea that the trade organization hopes to export to universities worldwide -- they wore jackets, ties and other businesslike attire. This "contributed to the atmosphere and made negotiations more realistic," said Mathieu Regnier of Canada, a Geneva business student.

Selected through competition, and subsidized by foundations, the group gathered in late May for four days of acting as trade negotiators to get the feeling of the real thing.

Professing support for the concept of free trade, they were a far cry from the students who staged a sit-in here last November, chaining themselves to the W.T.O.'s main stairway, strewing confetti and paint, and chanting: "The W.T.O. kills people. Death to the W.T.O."

The mock negotiators were able to spend some time with the World Trade Organization's director general, Mike Moore, who told them they were lucky that they did not have to "go home and sell" their trade proposals to their parliaments.

By the end of the program, Friedericke Hesse of Germany said she had "dropped my nationalistic glasses," adding, "You see that other parts of the world have completely different points of view."

---

World Bank Clears Ex-Aide of Disclosing Secret Data

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/070800bank-russia.html

WASHINGTON, June 7 -- The World Bank said this week that an eight-month investigation found no evidence to support allegations that a former Russian representative at the World Bank passed confidential information to a Russian commercial bank in 1993.

The bank did conclude that the representative, Leonid Grigoriev, had established a business relationship with Inkombank, which is now defunct, and that he received $13,000 for expenses from the bank in 1993. A bank official said that while that relationship did not specifically violate bank rules, it was outside what the bank considers acceptable activity for one of its executive directors.

Mr. Grigoriev's actions were the subject of articles in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other publications in the fall of 1999. Some of the articles, which examined an investigation into how suspect Russian money flowed through the Bank of New York, raised questions about Inkombank's operations.

On Oct. 22, 1999, The Wall Street Journal reported that the World Bank was investigating Mr. Grigoriev's ties to Inkombank. The newspaper cited a memo purportedly written by Mr. Grigoriev to Inkombank officials that discussed ways for the bank to profit from the Russian bond market. It reported that the memo was labeled "strictly confidential" and that it contained sensitive debt-market investment advice.

Lending to Russia by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, its sister agency, was considered crucial to the health of the local bond market at the time.

World Bank officials said that they began investigating Mr. Grigoriev only after The Journal provided them with a copy of the memo.

The Times reported last January that the memo might have been a fake provided to The Journal by Emanuel E. Zeltser, an émigré Russian lawyer who became a source of information about Russian money laundering. The Times report examined Mr. Zeltser's role in spreading allegations about matters that were tangential to the money laundering investigation.

Merrell Tuck, a World Bank spokeswoman, said today that bank officials and an outside law firm hired to lead the bank's investigation were "unable to authenticate" the memo. Therefore it found no evidence that Mr. Grigoriev gave sensitive information to Inkombank while working at the World Bank, she said.

Mr. Grigoriev left the World Bank in 1997. When the World Bank began an investigation into his conduct last fall, he was put on leave from his job as director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a Moscow-based research institute that receives World Bank funds.

The bank said in a statement this week that the payments Mr. Grigoriev received from Inkombank would "prejudice against" any employment he might seek at the bank itself for the next three years.

But it said it now has no objections to Mr. Grigoriev's resuming his post at the research institute.

---

World Bank Rejects China's Proposal to Resettle Farmers

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/070800china-bank.html

WASHINGTON, June 6 -- Under heavy pressure from the United States, the World Bank's board overruled the bank leadership today and denied financing for a sensitive Chinese antipoverty proposal that set off a North-South struggle over aid.

The $160 million plan, part of which would have resettled 58,000 mostly ethnic Chinese farmers in an area that nomadic Tibetan herdsman once dominated, divided leading borrowers from rich nations, including the United States. Rarely has any World Bank project aroused as much internal dissent and outside protest.

China withdrew the project from consideration this morning, when the board made it clear that it would not agree to finance the project and would reconsider the plan only after a lengthy and potentially intrusive study on its environmental and social effects.

The Chinese delegate to the bank, Zhu Xian, attributed the defeat to "enormous political pressures" brought to bear by wealthy nations and pledged that China would use its own money to finance the proposal.

Numerous outside groups campaigned to stop support for the project. Demonstrators gathered outside the bank headquarters here and cheered the decision.

Advocates for Tibet and human rights groups have argued that resettling the farmers in Qinghai Province would reinforce Chinese claims to historically Tibetan lands.

For the 181 member nations of the bank, the struggle was over controlling the tens of billions of dollars that the bank lends to developing nations each year. Led by China, the bank's No. 1 borrower and a nation that has often successfully defended its interests in international organizations like the United Nations, developing nations pushed the board to finance the project and leave its execution in the hands of bank managers, people involved in the debate said.

But the United States and leading industrial nations argued that the bank management had ignored its internal procedures when approving the project. The United States signaled that it believed that the board had to take a more active role in reviewing lending programs.

"We and numerous other shareholders were not prepared to support this project, because we did not believe that it was in compliance with the bank's own policies," a senior Treasury Department official said. "The bank needs to prepare specific proposals to give the shareholders a greater sense of confidence that management has the internal capacity to apply its established internal policies."

An inspection panel commissioned by the board of the bank reported last month that the bank had violated its guidelines when it approved the proposal. Bank officials acknowledged errors, but dismissed the report as an attempt by some board members to exert more control over day-to-day affairs.

People involved in the discussion said that the United States and Japan wanted to kill the project outright and that Britain, Germany and other European nations were prepared to consider the case again after the bank had studied its effects more thoroughly.

But China objected strenuously to to a fresh review. Mr. Zhu said some nations were using the cover of internal guidelines as a way to inject political control over lending. "Compliance policies have been interpreted by some to an extreme and used for political purposes," Mr. Zhu said.

China's decision to withdraw the project is a setback for the bank president, James D. Wolfensohn. He had urged the board to approve the proposal. Mr. Wolfensohn, recently reappointed with President Clinton's support, favored the plan despite United States opposition.

The bank thinks of China as one of its most successful customers. It has loaned China $4 billion for 31 antipoverty projects and helped 200 million Chinese climb out of poverty in the last 20 years, bank officials say.

But the Qinghai project, which is most likely to be the last one eligible for the bank's most-subsidized loan program because average per capita income in China has risen so high, became the most sensitive.

Supporters of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet who was born in eastern Qinghai, have argued that the bank would have contributed to increasing Chinese domination in the Tibetan region by helping to move mostly Han Chinese and some Hui Muslim farmers into a largely unsettled area of Qinghai. Some Tibetans claim that area as part of their homeland.

The resettlement part of the project had been scheduled to cost $40 million.

"It's like moving people from Denver to a native American reservation in Colorado," said John Ackerly, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, which has fought the project. "This is an area where Tibetans have lived for generations."

The bank said those arguments were unjustified. The project would have paid to move farmers who live in arid eastern Qinghai to irrigated lands farther west in the same province. The bank also said Qinghai, part of China before Beijing invaded Tibet in 1951, was already predominantly Han, the dominant Chinese ethnic group.

Nations that opposed the proposal said they did so more because of how the bank had handled it rather than the project itself. Though the board gave initial approval to the plan last year, it ordered an inspection panel to address concerns that the bank had not sufficiently explored all aspects.

The panel's report said the bank had originally classified the project as needing a relatively low level of review when it should have required the highest level. The report added that the bank had failed to explore alternatives and it strongly implied that China had intimidated bank managers to expedite the approval.

The United States and Japan argued that the panel's conclusion should be enough to end discussion of the plan. But several other wealthy nations thought that it still made sense for the bank to be involved, especially because China intended to pursue the project on its own.

Britain issued a statement today calling the outcome a Pyrrhic victory for opponents. "World Bank involvement," the statement said, "would have ensured that high social and environmental standards were adhered to."

-------- spying

Other People's Mail

New York Times
July 9, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/070900this-week-review.html

Is America using a vast surveillance network, known as Echelon, which receives and analyzes satellite communications, to give its corporations a leg up in their business dealings? Washington says no, but a lot of Europeans aren't buying it.

The European Parliament has voted to form a committee to investigate the matter and a French prosecutor has begun a preliminary inquiry. What might become of either inquiry is unclear, but together they testify to Europe's growing wariness of American global power.

"Echelon is used by the National Security Agency for strategic and economic gains," Prosecutor Jean-Pierre Dintilhac said. "You cannot make me believe that the information is not passed on to American companies."

SUZANNE DALEY

---

Swiss Court Suspends Sentence for Israeli Spy in Wiretap Case

New York Times
July 8, 2000
By ELIZABETH OLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/070800swiss-israel.html

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, July 7 -- Switzerland's top court today found an Israeli spy guilty of espionage and gave him a one-year suspended sentence for his part in a botched 1998 wiretap attempt.

The court, the Swiss Federal Tribunal, also barred the man, known only by an alias, Issac Bental, from Switzerland for five years. The sentence means that he will not serve any time in jail and can return to Israel, an outcome welcomed in a statement issued by Prime Minister Ehud Barak's office in Jerusalem.

The wiretapping mission occurred in February 1998, as Swiss officials were in negotiations with American Jewish groups over bank accounts of Holocaust victims that had been languishing in Swiss banks for 50 years.

The discovery of the agent trying to install electronic eavesdropping equipment in the apartment of a Lebanese-born car dealer suspected by the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, of having links to the anti-Israel Hezbollah movement in Lebanon was an embarrassment for Israel and the agency.

Four other people were apprehended with him but were released, the police said, because there was no evidence that they were engaged in illegal activity.

Israel had to pay nearly $2 million in bail to guarantee that the agent would return for trial. In an unheard-of concession, Swiss justice officials allowed him to use an assumed name for trial on grounds that disclosing his real one would endanger his life. The agent, a short man with closely cropped hair, sat undisguised in open court during the four-day trial.

Prosecutors said the agent was spying, conducting illegal activity on behalf of a foreign country and using forged identity papers -- charges the agent admitted were true.

His Swiss lawyers, who also did not know his true identity, urged acquittal because, they said, he was carrying out his assigned duty of preventing terrorist attacks against Israel.

Prosecutors urged a 15-month prison sentence, arguing that there had been no immediate danger to Israel because investigators had found nothing to link the car dealer, Abdallah el-Zein, with militant actions of Hezbollah. Mr. Zein, who runs a center supporting Shiite Muslim beliefs, testified that he had not taken part in any extremist activity against Israel.

The five-judge tribunal convicted the agent on all three charges, with the chief judge calling his actions an intolerable violation of Switzerland's sovereignty. The judge said the punishment was commensurate with that given in other spy cases.

Nonetheless, there was speculation that the Swiss and Israeli authorities had cut a deal for a light sentence to avoid further diplomatic strains. Israeli radio reported that Mossad agents were angry that one from their ranks had to submit to trial in a foreign country.

-------- activists

Disabled Street Vendors Stage Rare Protest in Cuba

Yahoo News
Saturday July 8 7:09 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/wl/cuba_protest_dc_1.html

HAVANA (Reuters) - About a dozen disabled Cuban street vendors, some on crutches or in wheelchairs, others blind or deaf, blocked a Havana street on Saturday to protest against alleged mistreatment by police, witnesses said.

It was a rare public act of defiance in communist-ruled Cuba, where political opposition is banned and anti-government protests are usually swiftly suppressed.

Police cars sealed off roads to the area in downtown Havana where the vendors who sell cigarettes, candy, peanuts and cheap crafts were protesting. Dozens of uniformed officers converged on the scene, and a crowd of several hundred bystanders gathered.

The disabled persons, many accompanied by shouting relatives and friends, angrily complained that a number of them had been roughed up by police.

``The police beat up the disabled people, they poked out the eye of one of them,'' Rafael Gonzalez, who walked with a crutch, told Reuters.

Several other witnesses concurred, saying fighting broke out when police tried to move disabled street vendors and peddlers from the corner of Havana's Reina and Aguila streets, near the El Curita park.

It was not clear what had happened to the injured man although some witnesses said he was taken away by police.

The disabled vendors, surrounded by bystanders, were led by police to a nearby building where local Communist Party officials said they would hear their grievances.

Senior police officers at the scene declined to comment. ``I can't tell you what happened,'' said one, who wore the three white stars of a colonel.

A Reuters reporter at the scene had his notebook snatched from his hand and a uniformed police officer disconnected the sound leads from the back of the camera after a Reuters television camera operator filmed the scene.

Cuba's communist authorities are sensitive about foreign media coverage and often accuse foreign reporters of exaggerating incidents of public disorder or protests by political dissidents.

City authorities in Havana have in the past cracked down on illegal street vendors, moving them from some public sites and relocating them elsewhere.

---

Jackson Marches Against Hanging Deaths of Blacks

Saturday July 8 6:57 PM ET
by Christi Daugherty
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000708/ts/crime_mississippi_dc_3.html

KOKOMO, Miss. (Reuters) - Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and hundreds of protesters, many singing and reciting prayers, marched through this tiny Mississippi town on Saturday to draw attention to the hanging suicides of blacks in the once deeply segregated Southern state.

Jackson, president of the civil rights group Rainbow-Push Coalition, told protesters that the high rate of suicides among blacks in Mississippi jails -- 23 apparently took their own lives between 1987 and 1993 -- and the recent hanging death of a teenager in Kokomo had sent a chill through the black community in the state.

``We want to stop the killings whether in the jails or in the streets,'' Jackson told the crowd during a speech in front of the cinderblock home of 17-year-old Raynard Johnson. He was found hanging from a pecan tree on June 15.

A local coroner found no suspicious marks or injuries on Johnson's body and concluded that the teenager committed suicide. But many blacks in the area suspect that resentful local whites targeted Johnson for dating white girls in Kokomo, located about 150 miles north of New Orleans.

Jackson, who alleged last week that Johnson had been murdered, said physical evidence gathered by police did not support a ruling of suicide.

``We regret these suicide theories,'' Jackson told the crowd, whichincluded several ministers and people from outside Mississippi.

Dozens of local sheriff's deputies and Mississippi State troopers were present during the march. None would comment on speculation that Johnson was murdered. Last week, the Marion County Sheriff's Office, which has been investigating the death, said it was continuing to work with state police and the FBI on the case.

To many blacks, Johnson's death bore similarities to that of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black teenager who was abducted and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Till's name is still cited throughout the South as an example of white hostility toward blacks.

The last recorded lynching in Mississippi occurred 40 years ago when eight masked men dragged a black man from a county prison and hanged him days before he was due to go on trial for allegedly raping a white woman.

``I was raised in Mississippi and to be perfectly honest you won't see me out with a white woman,'' said Stan Thomas, a black man who traveled from nearby Hattiesburg, Mississippi to show his support for Johnson's family.

``Not in Mississippi. Not in the year 2000,'' said Thomas, adding that anybody who engaged in interracial dating in the state ``was asking for trouble.''

Jackson, who has demanded that Mississippi authorities launch an inquiry into the deaths, will lead another march on Sunday to the Marion County courthouse in Columbia, about 15 miles northeast of Kokomo.

The Rainbow-Push Coalition also has posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone who might be responsible for Johnson's death.

---

BRAZIL: ANTI-VIOLENCE DEMONSTRATIONS

New York Times
July 8, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/00/07/08/news/world/world-briefing.html

Several million people in cities across the country marched in the largest citizen protest against violence in this nation of 175 million, wearing white and organizing silent vigils in an effort to pressure the government to take a tougher stance against both criminal gangs and police brutality.

Larry Rohter (NYT)

---

THE CONVENTIONS

New York Times
July 8, 2000
Campaign Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/070800campaign-briefing.html

WORK DISPUTE IN PHILADELPHIA The mayor of Philadelphia has agreed to try to resolve an intensifying dispute between local unions and the network news divisions that is threatening to disrupt preparations for the Republican National Convention, several people with knowledge of the negotiations said. The fight, they said, has to do with whether the locals have jurisdiction in network work spaces at the First Union Center, where the convention will be held. Network officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they had their own employees to do wiring and installation and thus had no need for local workers. Barbara Grant, a spokeswoman for Mayor John F. Street, said, "The mayor was approached to try to step in and sort things out." Tim Fitzpatrick, a convention spokesman, said work had not been delayed so far.

Peter Marks (NYT)

--------

OneList digest:

1. Deformed Frogs To Be Examined
From: magnu96196@aol.com

2. Not Popular among Water Providers
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

3. Fw: Upcoming Hanford to WIPP Shipment
From: "Vina Colley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>

4. Fw: NMD News: 3rd test fails
From: "Vina Colley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>

5. [Fwd: Chernobyl multiplies]
From: Bernd Frieboese <bernd@barseback.de>

6. CNN.com - US - Scientist charged in nuclear secrets case may have been job-hunting instead - July 7 2000
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

7. China answers critics with a book of nuke Web sites
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

8. New Scientist: Dangerous work
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

9. Wayne, at last, gets good news about thorium
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

10. ABQjournal: WIPP to Accept Nuke Waste From Washington
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

11. Rhein-Hunsrück-Zeitung: Radioaktiv beladen?
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

-------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 13:51:28 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com Subject: Deformed Frogs To Be Examined

Deformed Frogs To Be Examined
July 6, 2000
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000706/sc/deformed_frogs_refuges_1.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday it will survey 43 federal wildlife refuges to gather information on whether pesticides and other pollutants might be causing deformities in frogs.

An increasing number of frogs and toads have been found in recent years to have severe deformities without any clear indication of what might be causing these malformed amphibians.

The new study at the wildlife refuges will focus what impact pollutants might have on frogs with the findings to be turned over to an interagency group studying the issue, said Fish and Wildlife Service officials.

``What's happening to these amphibians, and what their plight can tell us about our own environment are some of the questions ... the (agency) plans to find out,'' said Fish And Wildlife Service Director Jamie Rappaport Clark.

Scientists have been studying a variety of possible causes for the decline of the frog population and the large number of reported deformities. Among the possibilities that have been raised are disease, fungal infection and loss of habitat as well as possibly ultraviolet radiation and even the thinning of the atmosphere's ozone layer.

During summer survey, scientists will examine malformed frogs, toads and salamanders, as well as amphibian eggs, at 43 refuges in 31 states, the agency said.

-------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2000 11:49:50 -0700
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>
Subject: Not Popular among Water Providers

Y'all, Here is da cruz of de problem in a nutshell... the Mis/Dis info

"The new standard is based on concern that arsenic in drinking water may cause certain types of cancer, but research has provoked "substantial debate among the scientific community over the interpretation of these data and their application in research assessment," according to an EPA document"

"Studies in Taiwan, Japan, England, Hungary, Mexico, Chile and Argentina show an association between arsenic in drinking water and skin cancer, the document says, and higher death rates from cancers of the liver, bladder, kidney and lung have been reported. Studies in the United States have not produced the same findings, the report says"

Ahhh! Who is funding these studies in da States? and Who is saying a wee little arsenic wont hurt ya? Who is the Arse in arsenic debate, Nuc debate... well you catch me drift.

Later http://www.oklahoman.com/cgi-bin/shart?ID=513524&TP=getarticle .

---------

Message: 3
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 21:02:07 -0700
From: "Vina Colley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>
Subject: Upcoming Hanford to WIPP Shipment

WIPP TO ACCEPT NUKE WASTE FROM WASHINGTON

Albuquerque Journal
Saturday, July 8, 2000
by Tania Soussan

The first shipment of radioactive waste from a Washington nuclear reservation will be on its way to New Mexico within weeks.

About 80,000 55-gallon barrels of contaminated material and radioactive sludge is to be shipped from Hanford to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, officials estimate.

The first shipment of 33 barrels will begin as soon as the New Mexico Environment Department gives its OK, Hanford spokesman Erik Olds said. "We hope to be able to ship that really soon," he said.

The 1,808-mile journey will take about 45 hours, Olds said.

Hanford had hoped to send the first shipment in mid-June but didn't have the needed approval from the state.

The Environment Department signed off on an audit report from Hanford on June 23. But the department must review additional information, and that process could take another five to seven weeks, said Paul Ritzma, deputy environment secretary.

The initial shipment from Hanford will include "transuranic" waste -- tools, clothing and other items contaminated by exposure to radioactivity -- similar to material shipped to WIPP from other sites.

A second shipment of similar materials would follow about a month later, Olds said.

"We would like to do about one shipment per month," he said.

Eventually, Hanford also wants to ship more hazardous material _ leftover sludge from two large pools of spent nuclear fuel.

WIPP critic Don Hancock, of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, said he is concerned about Hanford getting approval to ship some waste that was analyzed and labeled before the state permit was approved.

"It wants to be able to use old, pre-permit data, which we don't think is appropriate," he said.

Hanford is a 560-square-mile Department of Energy site near Yakima, Wash., where plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal was made for four decades.

WIPP, which opened in March 1999, has accepted shipments from three locations in the nation's nuclear weapons complex: Los Alamos National Laboratory, the closed Rocky Flats nuclear plant near Denver and the Idaho Engineering and Environmental Laboratory near Idaho Falls.

-------

Message: 4
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 21:04:59 -0700
From: "Vina Colley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>

July 8, 2000
TO: NMD interested parties FR: Daryl Kimball
RE: 3rd NMD test fails

Between midnight and 1am (EST) this morning the NMD interceptor passed-by the dummy warhead and an uninflated decoy ballon. Another NMD test failure and more evidence that the technology is not reliable and effective under controlled test conditions, let alone real-world conditions against a potential, uncooperative aggressor.

Clearly, this should help President Clinton make the responsible choice: acknowledge that there remain serious, unresolved technical, strategic and political questions about the proposed system that warrant a decision not to deploy or begin construction.

Attached below is some early coverage of the test failure, including:

* "Antimissile System Fails Over Pacific, Pentagon Reports," The New York Times, July 8, 2000

* "Pentagon Says Missile Test Fails," AP, July 8, 2000

* "Russia Cites US Missile Test Failure," AP, July 8, 2000

* DOD News Release, July 8, 2000, "NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE CONDUCTS INTERCEPT TEST"

* DoD News Briefing, Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, Director, BMDO, Saturday, July 8, 2000 - 1:37 a.m. EDT

There will likely be more extensive coverage this evening and in tomorrow morning's papers given that the test occured past most American news deadlines.

For back issues of the Coalition's "NMD News," see <http://www.clw.org/coalition/nmdnews.htm>, and for other NMD analysis see the NMD section of our Web Site <http://www.clw.org/coalition/libbmd.htm>

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Antimissile System Fails Over Pacific, Pentagon Reports

The New York Times,
July 8, 2000
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

WASHINGTON, Saturday, July 8 -- In a major setback for the Clinton administration's plan to build a missile shield to protect American soil from enemy attack, a missile fired from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific failed to hit a mock warhead launched 4,300 miles away in California.

"We failed to achieve an intercept this evening," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

The last test, conducted in January, also ended in failure. In that case, the kill vehicle missed the mock warhead by between 300 to 400 feet after a cooling line clogged and shut down its heat-seeking sensors.

At 12:19 a.m. today, a 37-year-old remodeled Minuteman rocket containing a mock warhead and a decoy balloon thundered aloft over the Pacific Ocean from a tightly guarded launching pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 125 miles north of Los Angeles.

Twenty-one minutes after that, a 54-inch, 130-pound "exoatmospheric kill vehicle" was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of guiding itself to a collision with the incoming mock warhead in midflight, it missed.

In a press briefing, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, the director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, explained that the problem occurred when the kill vehicle did not separate from its booster in the second stage.

"The kill vehicle failed to do its job," he said.

An aditional malfunction, although one that did not affect the test result, was that the decoy balloon accompanying the mock warhead did not inflate as it was supposed to.

Today's test was counted on to determine whether President Clinton proceeds with a plan to begin development of a $60 billion national missile defense that administration officials contend is crucial to defend against missile attacks from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq. But opponents charge that such a system is technically unsound, unnecessary and a waste of money.

Even though some senior Pentagon officials said a decision to move forward was possible even if the test failed, today's miss will make it politically more difficult for Mr. Clinton to move forward with even the most basic decision to issue contracts for pouring concrete for a radar guidance system in the Aleutian Islands. That move is under consideration even though many arms control experts insist that it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Because of harsh winter conditions in that area of Alaska, barges must begin ferrying equipment by next spring if the radar is to be completed by 2005, the date when the administration has concluded North Korea could have a ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States.

The test failure is certain to reinforce calls in Congress that the decision on whether to move forward with a national missile defense program should be left to the next president.

The final analysis of what went wrong in today's test will take about three to four weeks.

In October, the Pentagon initially hailed its first intercept test as a complete success. But it later was forced to acknowledge that the kill vehicle initially had drifted off course and picked out the large bright decoy balloon instead of the mock warhead.

In the second, more complicated intercept test, in January, the kill vehicle missed the mock warhead by between 300 to 400 feet after a cooling line clogged and shut down its heat-seeking sensors.

Not since 1983, when President Reagan envisioned a defense based in space that would render nuclear weapons obsolete, has an issue of military technology seized the imagination of American policymakers and politicians and alarmed America's friends and foes.

The issue has also entered the presidential campaign, with Vice President Al Gore endorsing a limited version of the plan and Gov. George W. Bush backing a more ambitious system that could be deployed in space.

And it has raised a chorus of criticism from a sizable swath of scientists in the United States, some of whom argue that the proposed $60 billion system is not feasible and that the tests are rigged.

The test had been scheduled to take place during a four-hour window that began late Friday night. But a last-minute technical problem set back the launching by about two hours. The problem was related to electronic signals that keep the ground control informed about the missile's flight.

"Hitting a bullet with a bullet" is how a Pentagon official described the hoped-for collision. "Steel on target," another said.

The three tests held so far are part of a series of 19 planned tests.

After the failure of the test in January. a new communications system was added for today's test that transmits information directly to the kill vehicle about the location of the target after it has lifted off. Called a global-positioning-system transmitter, it used the same technology that helps motorists to avoid getting lost.

Even before the failure today, critics said the new test was a misleading guide because it was taking place under conditions that do not reflect a real attack. They said the decoy was not a true decoy but was more like a lure that attracts the kill vehicle to the real target, and that an adversary would use many decoys, not one.

In three or four weeks, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen is to give Mr. Clinton a formal recommendation of whether building the system is feasible.

Mr. Clinton is expected to decide this fall whether to put America on the road to a national missile defense system by starting construction of the radar in the Aleutian Islands.

Administration lawyers have advised Mr. Clinton that in their view, he could begin building this first phase of the missile defense without violating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, one of the cornerstones of arms control agreements between Washington and Moscow.

But the administration has been hit by a storm of criticism from prominent scientists, arms control experts, former officials and the General Accounting Office over the cost, technology and effect on relations with other nations.

Lawrence J. Korb of the Council on Foreign Relations called the entire system a "shield of dreams" whose supporters believe that "if you build it, it will work."

Even within the administration, a debate is raging among intelligence and Pentagon officials and policy experts over the nature and extent of the potential threat from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq that is the official justification for building a missile shield. Some senior Pentagon officials have warned that the administration's schedule is much too accelerated and therefore risky, because testing would continue even as construction has begun.

Russia and China are adamantly opposed to an American missile defense because they consider it a threat to their ability to defend themselves. European nations are also distressed that the United States would take such a position without regard to Europe's security.

In an attempt to stop the test, Greenpeace, the anti-nuclear organization, said a small team of missile defense opponents entered the grounds of Vandenberg Air Force Base on foot. Equipped with survival gear and supplies for several days, they intended to stay inside the area as long as they could, according to a Greenpeace statement.

In addition, the Dutch vessel Arctic Sunrise threatened to enter one of the hazard zones designated by the Pentagon in the waters off Vandenberg.

An unidentified man was caught entering the base, but a base spokesman, John Cherry, said there was no evidence of intruders in the heavily guarded area around the launching pad.

At a news briefing in Washington on Friday, a group of business leaders and scientists weighed in with 11-hour criticism of both the test and the entire plan.

"Stop this insensate and tortuously rationalized arms race that drains money away from our vital civilian programs," said Alan Kligerman, the chief executive officer of Akpharma Inc., and a board member of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which seeks to cut military spending. He added: "If I would represent my products and sell them with the same shortcomings in the products as regard to what they are supposed to do, I would be indicted. My products would be seized." by the Food and Drug Administration.

Bruce Blair, president of Center for Defense Information, argued at the same briefing that the development of a national missile defense was justifiably seen by Russia as a threat to its nuclear deterrent.

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Pentagon Says Missile Test Fails

July 8, 2000
By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The missile interceptor the Pentagon is developing as the key component of a national missile defense not only missed its intended target over the Pacific Ocean early Saturday, it didn't even try to hit it.

In a new twist for the Pentagon's oft-criticized missile defense program, the ``kill vehicle'' that was supposed to guide itself into the path of a dummy warhead in space -- destroying it by the force of impact -- never separated from the booster. So it never activated its sensors to hunt for the approaching target.

The interceptor passed harmlessly by the target, and few of the critical technologies of missile defense were put to the test.

The $100 million test was the third to attempt an intercept, and the second to fail. The first failure, in January, was blamed on moisture inside the ``kill vehicle'' that prevented it from using heat-seeking devices to ``see'' its target.

``We did not intercept the warhead that we expected to have tonight. We're disappointed with that,'' said Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

Kadish said he had never had a concern about the booster properly releasing the ``kill vehicle.''

``It wasn't even on my list'' of potential problems, he said, adding that it had been used successfully on earlier tests. He said the kill vehicle did not separate from the booster because it did not receive the necessary electronic signal. It may take days for officials to understand why the signal was not received, he said.

At an early morning news conference in the Pentagon, Kadish was asked what he learned from the failure.

``What it tells me is we have more engineering work to do,'' he replied.

Anthony Cordesman, a defense strategist at the private Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview after Saturday's test that, logically, the failure should mean a delay in the Pentagon's fast-track timetable for building a national missile defense. The target date is December 2005, but even the Pentagon's own advisers have acknowledged that this may be overly ambitious.

President Clinton is expected to decide by this fall whether to approve sticking to that timetable. The president will base his decision in part on a recommendation from Defense Secretary William Cohen, who told National Public Radio on Friday that he expected to make his recommendation in three or four weeks.

It remained unclear Saturday whether the Pentagon still believed the missile defense project was ready to move toward deployment.

``Logically, you do regroup after something like this and you don't go forward with the existing schedule,'' Cordesman said, although he added that pressure from Congress might compel the Pentagon to go ahead.

The next attempted intercept is scheduled for this fall, but that schedule might now be put back. More than a dozen additional flight tests are scheduled before 2005.

If Saturday's test had succeeded, it could have moved the United States a step closer to building a national missile defense shield that Congress says is urgently needed, but that critics decry as unworkable.

After technicians fixed a last-minute glitch that delayed the start of the test by about two hours, a modified Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile with a dummy warhead atop its second-stage rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., at 12:19 a.m. EDT.

The rocket headed toward the central Pacific.

Twenty-one minutes later, at 12:40 a.m. EDT, an interceptor missile carrying the ``kill vehicle'' launched from Kwajalein Atoll.

The ``kill vehicle'' was supposed to separate from the second-stage rocket booster exactly 2 minutes and 37 seconds into flight, then maneuver itself into the path of the mock warhead. Television monitors showed no flash indicating a collision.

Nearly a half-hour passed before officials who monitored the flight test from a basement office in the Pentagon reported that the interceptor missile had missed its target.

The ``kill vehicle'' was programmed to use target data gathered from ground-based radars to maneuver itself into the path of the dummy warhead 140 miles above the Earth. The goal was a 16,000-mile-an-hour collision that would disintegrate the warhead by sheer force of impact.

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Russia Cites US Missile Test Failure

July 8, 2000
By The Associated Press

MOSCOW (AP) -- The failure of a U.S. missile interceptor in a test proves that a proposed national missile defense system for the United States is unworkable, two top Russian generals said Saturday.

The interceptor that was launched Friday from a Pacific island missed its intended target -- a dummy warhead gliding through space. Officials blamed a technical failure of the booster rocket that was supposed to release a warhead-busting device.

Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, commander of Russia's strategic forces, told the ITAR-Tass news agency that the failed test showed that a missile defense system will not protect the United States.

``In its present technical design, the tested national missile defense will not be able to secure protection of the U.S. territory, and attempts to deploy such a system will be an empty waste of money,'' Yakovlev said.

Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, chief of the Defense Ministry's department of international cooperation, told the Interfax news agency that the failure of the Pentagon's test showed that a defense system would not work.

``Both Russian and American professionals in the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) sphere are perfectly aware that it is impossible to create a system of absolute protection,'' Ivashov said.

``Russia will always be able to defeat any U.S. ABM system,'' Ivashov said. ``The only question is whether it is worth investing such significant amounts of money in this scheme while it could be resolved by political means.''

Russia strongly opposes the American missile defense project, which is designed to protect all 50 U.S. states against attack by ong-range missiles.

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NEWS RELEASE

OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE (PUBLIC AFFAIRS)
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20301

No. 392-00 (703) 695-0192(media)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 8, 2000 (703) 697-5737(public/industry)

NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE CONDUCTS INTERCEPT TEST

The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's (BMDO) National Missile Defense (NMD) Joint Program Office announced today it performed a test today involving a planned intercept of a ballistic missile target over the central Pacific Ocean.

An intercept was not achieved due to an apparent failure of the interceptor's kill vehicle to separate from the interceptor's second stage rocket motor. A modified Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a target warhead was launched from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., at 12:19 a.m. EDT and a prototype interceptor was launched approximately 20 minutes later about 4,300 miles away from Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Government and industry program officials will conduct a review of the test results to determine the reason for not achieving an intercept and any other test objectives that were or were not met. It is likely to be at least several days until a preliminary review is completed.

Point of contact is Air Force Lt. Col Rick Lehner, BMDO External Affairs, at (703) 695-8743 Ext. 6123.

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NEWS BRIEFING

OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE (PUBLIC AFFAIRS)
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20301

DoD News Briefing Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, Director, BMDO Saturday, July 8, 2000 - 1:37 a.m. EDT (Also participating in this briefing was Dr. Jack Gansler, Under Secretary of Defense, Acquisition, Technology and Logistics)

Mr. Bacon: We're going to do this in two parts, and we probably will not be able to answer all your questions. In fact I'm sure we won't be able to answer all your questions.

First, Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, the director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization will describe what happened tonight. Then Jack Gansler, the under secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology will fit this into the context of the broader program, and we'll take a few questions and I think we'll probably be done in about 15 minutes or so. General Kadish?

General Kadish: Good morning. We did not intercept the warhead that we expected to have tonight. We're disappointed with that, but let me explain what I think happened, and I'll have some visual aids here to properly put it in context.

We had the launch of the target out of Vandenberg and that operation appeared to be fairly successful. We had an initial delay to the launch because of some battery problems that we worked out on the target.

We had, as far as I know, only one anomaly with the target launch in that we did not get the decoy balloon to inflate, so it was an uninflated decoy. Everything appeared to be on track with the launch in the battle manager type systems, the integrated part of the system, to work right. We launched the interceptor. But we failed to have the kill vehicle separate from the booster second stage.

All we know based on telemetry now, and of course we will get more data as time goes on, is that the kill vehicle was waiting for a signal that we had second stage separation. We did not receive that signal. Therefore, the timeline shut down and the kill vehicle did not separate, and therefore, we did not attempt or have any activity in the intercept phase.

So we had a failure of the booster kill vehicle separation.

So from that standpoint, if you look at this chart, this is designed to show from the launch of the interceptor all the way through the kill vehicle separation. Then what the kill vehicle does with its star shot, firing the complex for the intercept out here.

So what we know today, or as of this hour, is that we did not get to this point on the flight. So none of this occurred. The failure was in the boost phase here.

I would point out that, as you know, those who have followed the program, that the booster we are using is not the booster we intend to use in the operational system. It is a surrogate. A payload launch vehicle, which is second stage Minuteman booster that we have had high reliability with. So somewhere in this area we failed to get the proper sequence, and therefore the kill vehicle never separated to do its job.

Q: Where was the signal supposed to come from?

Kadish: It came internal to the booster, to the best of my knowledge.

Q: Any idea why the separation did not occur?

Kadish: We do not. You have the extent of my knowledge today. We're in dialogue with the people at Kwajalein. They are intensely investigating this. We'll have some reports four hours, eight hours, and then 48 hours from now that will help us sort through this.

Q: Do you receive the kind of real-time telemetry that will allow you to determine why there was...

Kadish: We watch telemetry all the way to splashdown, to the best of my knowledge.

Q: Will that be able to tell you why it was not...

Kadish: We certainly hope so.

Q: How many minutes into the flight was the separation supposed to have occurred?

Kadish: The EKV separation is about 157 seconds.

Q: I thought you said it didn't separate because it didn't get the signal to separate. Is that what you said earlier?

Kadish: It was looking for a second stage separation signal. It did not get that. So the timeline shut down.

Q: So the question is why you didn't get the signal.

Q: I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. The kill vehicle did not get the signal that it was supposed to separate?

Kadish: That's correct.

Q: Where was that signal supposed to come from?

Kadish: It's a part of the integrated system on the booster/kill vehicle combination. There's a series, and I need to caveat this, is that we are very early, we're only an hour or some minutes away from the event. All I can give you is what we have initially from our look at the telemetry.

There is a lot I might say here that could turn out to be wrong, so please bear with me as we go through our investigation. So I would not like to speculate on a lot of this.

But the way the normal sequence works, as I understand it, is that as the booster separates stages there are signals given to the computers on the kill vehicle and to other computers on board, and all those signals are supposed to line up and as a part of the sequence of events to make things happen.

Q: General, with many experts claiming that this is a possible $60 billion boondoggle, a system that won't work, you now have two failures and one success. Doesn't that weaken your position considerably?

Kadish: What it tells me is we have more engineering work to do. And as we've said all along, this is a very difficult, challenging job. This is rocket science, so there's a lot of things that can happen in this process In this particular case it appears it happened in an area that has little to do with the functionality of the key component of the system that we're testing.

Q: With the Pentagon supposed to make its decision, the review decision in the coming weeks, can they decide at this point to move forward with this?

Kadish: I defer to Dr. Gansler for that.

Dr. Gansler: Let me just make a couple of observations first on this. Having spent about 40 years going through this flight test thing -- what you usually find in trying to answer the question about why you don't know already is you get an instant read in real time, as someone pointed out, about some things like the signal didn't go. It then tends to take you days usually, not hours even, to try to understand by tracing it backwards where that came from and why it didn't go. So we won't have that information likely tonight or the next couple of days. It will take awhile.

When you then find out what it was, then you try to come up with a fix on it.

I should point out that this is only the fifth time that that particular booster which was configured for this particular flight has been used. In other words, we used it on the first four flights. They're standard boosters, but the configuration is different and therefore the staging is somewhat different. It is planned to be used only another three times, and then after that we use the real booster. So it's a special arrangement that was set up in order to have a surrogate early on until we could get the operational booster.

So the focus therefore of the booster portion of it is an important one. We do need to develop the booster. Unfortunately, what we'll learn from this one isn't what's wrong with the operational one and we'll have to go through the normal check out of what one would do on developing a Minuteman or developing an MX or so forth. It's that same kind of a booster development program.

The thing we were hoping to get out of this was much more information on the interceptor portion of it, which is really the part that is unique and different about this particular flight versus, say, a normal booster development or a missile development. This is closer to, say, a development that we've gone through in the past of anti-aircraft missiles, something like that. You want to see what the end game looks like. In that we normally have development problems, and that's the kind of thing that this represents as far as I can see.

Q: But do you still think it's possible for the Pentagon to go ahead with a deployment decision in the coming weeks after what happened tonight?

Gansler: The secretary and then the president are going to be evaluating a variety of things. As the president in fact said, there were four measures that he was going to be using -- important inputs for that decision will be threat information that we'll get from intelligence inputs, also impacts on what it would likely mean in terms of the arms control agreements, other considerations that the Secretary first and then the President will be evaluating. I would say the Secretary certainly over the next month, and the President over the months shortly thereafter, trying to assess, based upon what we've learned from these three flights in terms of design information, what we have on other threat information. He'll have to make an assessment of whether or not it is still critical to try to make the 2005 date. That was the thing that was driving us.

That's the thing that the decision now relative to trying to build a site at Shemya for the X-band radar -- which, by the way, the X-band radar part of it was working. That was something we were able to determine from the X-band radar that the balloon didn't inflate.

Others have said how easy it is to put up decoys, by the way. This is the proof that one decoy we were trying to put up didn't go up.

Q: The Secretary has already said he thinks the threat is there, and he thinks the cost is such that we should go forward. But as far as technical feasibility, do you think that it's still possible to give thumbs up for?

Gansler: That's something we're going to be evaluating. To be honest with you, I think it's fair to say that had we not had a kill in that third flight, that you would probably have very low confidence. The fact that the system, which we tested tonight again, and we tested in the second flight with the battle management system, the thing that was added tonight that was different was the link from the ground up to the intercept vehicle while it was in its boost phase. That was really the only new item. But checking out the whole system...

This is an extremely complex system. So you check out the satellites that detect the boost, that part of it worked. You check out the target vehicle. You're checking out the battle management system. You're checking out the X-band radar link. You're checking out the communication link up to the interceptor booster, and then the final part. The part we didn't get and what we were hoping to get was much more information on the terminal phase.

So the question is whether we have enough information on the terminal phase in order to be able to make an assessment that says we should go ahead and try to build that site at Shemya. That's one that the Secretary and the President are going to have to call, not...

Q: Is there any chance there would be another test before that decision?

Gansler: The next test that's scheduled right now is in the October/November time period. As you remember in the last flight when we had a failure, we spent quite a bit of time trying to analyze and then fix before we go ahead. If this requires major analysis and fix, that even could be delayed. But otherwise it's probably in the October/November time period.

Because of the construction time cycle at Shemya and the fact that we have the engineering work to be done for that site and then the construction to start in the spring, it seems to me that that's trying to push the decision pretty far down. We'd like to have a decision made by November rather than a flight by November.

Q: It seems pretty clear that you didn't get the data from this test that you'd hoped to have and that you needed to have in order to provide that recommendation to go ahead.

Gansler: I would say we didn't get the data we had hoped to have. The question of whether it's an absolute need or not is the one that the Secretary and the President will be deciding.

Q: General Kadish, of all the things that could have gone wrong with this flight, was this at the very bottom of your concern list?

Kadish: It wasn't even on my list. We had good confidence in the reliability of this. It's worked very well before. And to have the kill vehicle not separate was not something we worried about.

Q: You had a glazed look in your eye from the pool coverage when you took the phone call saying it didn't work. You seemed fairly shocked. Is that a good description?

Kadish: I was more disappointed than shocked. I'm never surprised by the things that can happen. This was not -- again, this is rocket science and things do happen on this stuff that are unexpected. But of all the things we worried about and had risks associated with it, this was not something we thought would happen.

Q: Dr. Gansler, you say that the President and the Secretary will have to make a decision based on whether or not, will have to decide whether or not there's enough data, and yet they are not physicists, they are not scientists, they will have to... It's the scientists and the physicists who will have to decide if there's enough data.

As someone who's been testing for a long time, would it be your recommendation, is it your determination that there is enough data or not enough data? And would you go ahead with a project like this based on the data that you've got?

Gansler: The distinction I was making was the fact that the Secretary and President will be deciding not just on technical feasibility, but on other considerations as well.

In terms of the technical feasibility of it, in terms of is this design likely to work under the conditions that we assessed, I would personally say that I gained a great deal of confidence from that intercept that we had successfully in terms of the interceptor portion of it because it did work and it did actually do some discrimination.

On the rest of the system, which you can't just say is the interceptor technically feasible. What about the rest of the system? The rest of the system now has successfully worked twice, the last two flights, although the interceptor didn't. We didn't get to the interceptor on this one, and the prior one we had a failure on it.

So in a sense we've tested the major elements of this system sufficiently to say that the design is probably the one that's pretty solid. That is the same conclusion, by the way, that the Welch committee came to as well in terms of the technical feasibility.

We have always said, and they said they same thing, that in terms of making the schedule it is a high risk program, and you wouldn't like, if you had the time, you wouldn't like to make a go-ahead decision of any sort on the basis of what we've seen so far, just these three flights.

But because of the fact that we have a significant number of additional flights planned before the '03 decision to build the missiles, one could then decide that it's a low enough risk to go ahead and build the radar at Shemya. That's the decision that they're going to be making, not on whether we're ready to release the missiles.

Q: Just a followup. This was a booster that you've used before and you had a high amount of confidence in. The proposed booster, the one that you really want to us is eight months behind schedule already, I believe.

So doesn't that say that as much confidence as you have in a tested booster, you can't certainly have that much confidence at all in a booster that's eight months behind schedule. Doesn't that feed into this decision also?

Gansler: It does. In fact the booster is going to be the gating item for the second decision which is the one in '01, and that's the decision whether you're going to actually deploy and make a commitment to the radars. And you're correct. That is a gating decision and if we don't have some successful booster launches we probably would delay that decision.

The whole schedule is a tight schedule. It has been a tight schedule right from the beginning, and it's been more threat driven in terms... But on the other hand, it's still event driven because if we don't have successful events, then we wouldn't go ahead.

As I said, I wouldn't personally feel, unless we had a successful intercept, that I had a lot of confidence in intercept design. If I didn't have a successful booster test I wouldn't have a lot of confidence in the booster, and so forth.

Q: General Kadish, I'd just like to ask you to respond to the same question. On the basis of the single time that the intercept phase of this system has been exercised, are you confident you have enough data to draw judgment on the feasibility of that part of the system?

Kadish: I don't think we should draw conclusions from any one test that are irrevocable. What we have is a number of tests and legacy tests for all the elements of the system. When added together, it provides us a great body of evidence of the capability of the system.

Certainly on that test that we had the intercept, it gave us all a lot of confidence that the design we have of the kill vehicle, which is the key to the system, worked in a phase that we never had data on. So from that standpoint a key piece of the puzzle was put into place.

But just as we've been saying for a long time, no one test tends to tell you everything you need to know. We have a body of tests even before this one that tells us an awful lot. And we have increasing confidence as a result of that.

Gansler: These flight tests are validations of a lot of the ground and simulation tests. That's a huge body of data that we have. We need more flight tests.

Kadish: We need more flight tests.

Q: Let me put it to you the other way. You've known for some time you would have to make a DRR recommendation on technical feasibility this summer. You now lack data from two tests on the intercept phase.

What does the absence of that data do to your ability to produce this review? And the quality of the review that you're going to produce.

Kadish: I guess the way I would put it is, we will summarize the data and the situation that we face as of the time we need to make that assessment which is in the coming weeks, to the best of our knowledge, and that data... The data that we have and the test data that backs it up will be a high quality evaluation of the situation we face today.

Would we like to have more data? Yes. But we are where we are, and this is a natural course of most programs that I'm associated with. If you go back in history to the ICBM development, to the Safeguard development, there were many successes but also many failures early in the program, and programs have to deal with the data that you have at any given time.

So to answer your question, we will do the best assessment we can given where we are today, after we've concluded the analysis of the...

Q: The bottom line is, despite what happened tonight, early this morning, you can still say this is technically feasible in a review, is that right?

Kadish: General Welch's group said that. We will evaluate what we have and provide our best recommendation through Dr. Gansler to the Secretary.

Q: General Kadish...

Q: Doesn't this test also show that the schedule of 2005 is really unrealistic based on how things are going? You said at the last briefing that that schedule was based on essentially everything working the way you thought. Over the testing process you've had a setback. It just seems that the booster being behind schedule, with other complications...

Kadish: I think what we need to do now, just like we do after every test, whether a success or failure, is evaluate what we need to do from here on out and the viability of our schedules from that point, and see if there are mitigating factors.

Dr. Gansler pointed out there is another flight test we have available to us. Whether we can gather the data for that to effect the types of decision making we want in the fall timeframe is going to be a problem, and we have to decide what to do with that.

Q: On that next test, there's no way that that test could be moved up, it might actually be later than it is now scheduled, but no way it could be moved up?

Kadish: That's something we're going to have to look at. But again, this is tough work, and we've got to make sure that we don't do a very expensive test just to do the test.

Q: It seems to me that the problems you had tonight dealt with parts that were old. Let me qualify that. The PLV, it's my understanding, is based on decommissioned Minuteman II parts, and the decoy balloon that didn't inflate, it's my understanding is from leftover balloons that you had from the mid '80s when you did some testing with the airborne surveillance test bed.

So as the NMD test program progresses, are you getting more concerned about the reliability of some of these older surrogate and other assets that are crucial for you to conduct these tests? And secondly, did the Welch panel have anything to say about this matter?

Kadish: I think we would be better served to think of them as more reliable because we have tested them a lot. Now certainly age is a factor, but we have programs to make sure that these things are still viable.

I'm not ready to say that age was the factor here. I probably would say, I don't know if Dr. Gansler agrees, that reliability is the issue. And reliability is somewhat independent of age if we keep these things up to speed like we think we do.

Gansler: We've got a lot of .999's, and you multiply them together and there's one...

To answer the second half of your question, I don't believe that the Welch panel specifically addressed the aging question, to my recollection.

Kadish: Right.

Press: Thank you very much.

Daryl Kimball, Executive Director
Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers
110 Maryland Avenue NE,
Suite 505 Washington, DC 20002
(ph) 202-546-0795 x136 (fax) 202-546-7970
website <http://www.crnd.org>

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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 04:12:05 +0200
From: Bernd Frieboese <bernd@barseback.de>
Subject: [Fwd: Chernobyl multiplies]

Galina Oleynikova wrote:

Closing down Chernobyl NPP on the 15th of December 2000, the countries of G7 help to start new reactors of "Chernobyl" model

The stop of Chernobyl NPP on the 15th of December 2000 is a historical decision without any exaggerations.

But this reaction on the biggest nuclear explosion in 1986 is, to say mildly, is late, the third part of Europe for 15 years already suffer in one or the other way from the consequences of spreading Chernobyl radiation, though there were not and won't be any more any programs on ecological rehabilitation of these areas. Not much is left from the NPP also. Its first unit was stopped in 1996, the second one is in the stage of stopping the exploitation, the fourth unit, destroyed by the accident of 1986, is under the sarcophagus. About 80 tons of Uranium-235, thousands of tons of radioactive metal, concrete and glass, 35 thousand tons of radioactive dust are there. Only third unit works now, and it's capacity cannot be compared even with the less powerful NPP of the world. Additionally the limit of resource of the unit will be reached in five years.

Why then should we close the Plant that dies without our help?

Indeed, the allocated funds are "small", just $78 million. According to the calculations of the experts of Minatom of Russian Federation, only to stop the plant, to provide environmental security of the "Shelter" object (the most destroyed fourth unit) and employment of the staff one would need about $100 million. But in the "Memorandum about Mutual Understanding...", signed by the presidents of the USA and Ukraine, it's specially stressed, that "for closing down Chernobyl NPP G7 is obliged to finance construction of two new nuclear reactors in Ukraine". It's obvious, that at least the half of the promised funds will be spent on the construction of reactors on the fourth unit of Rovno NPP and second unit of Khmelnitsky NPP.

Thus, with full of feelings speeches about the funeral of "the sleeping Chernobyl" in 150 and 300 km from it we will build two new ones. Ukraine motivates this position by big lack of electric power, and especially important argument for the West, by energy independence from Russia, what ostensibly threatens to Ukraine to lose it's sovereignty. The USA, for them "green" motives stay obviously not on the first place, act in the spirit of famous American pragmatism. Additionally to $78 million they give two more for "raising environmental safety on the other NPPs". Actually, everything could be fine, but the situation is like an anecdote, G7 will not build, but complete in Rovno and Khmelnitsky those "the most dangerous in the world" Soviet nuclear reactors of Chernobyl's type, and one of those has exploded in Chernobyl.

Immediately after Chernobyl accident the USA and EU appealed to ban usage of "Chernobyl" reactors and similar to Chernobyl's one nuclear fuel. But when it was found out, that the whole Eastern Europe and Finland work on them, their enthusiasm has became noticeably less, and its place was taken by desire to earn money on this situation.

Germany was the first, who benefited from the situation. German company "Siemens" on cooperative basis with Minatom ,Russian Federation, learned how to make nuclear fuel, which is now sold to Soviet type reactors in Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, and, by the way, Russia. After it American Company "Westinhaus" made money on the fact, that long-constructed during the social period NPPs in Mahovez (Slovakia) and Temelin (Check Republic) were out of business. Together with French Americans learned how to build same Chernobyl samples, and finally they set in motion Mahovez. But they cannot finish Temelin. The thing is, that Check republic insisted, that Soviet Safety System must be changed on the Western one.

That's why because of economy issues in Bulgaria (NPP in Kosloduy) and in Ukraine (Rovno and Khmelnitsky) western companies finally adopted former Soviet, and now Russian standards of development of nuclear energy, but without Russia's participation. Why? The USA and EU itself will construct NPP for Ukraine and sell fuel here. Chernobyl did its work, sector of nuclear market of Eastern Europe was completely won back from Russia by western competitors. For Russia Ukraine was the last stronghold. Hoping, that Russia will get at least something in modernization of Ukrainian NPPs, Minatom generously let Kiev not to pay for storage of Ukrainian nuclear waste, transported to Krasnoyarsk or Chelyabinsk, or pay in barters. Unfortunately, Russia miscalculated. Russia missed in everything, they were not allowed even participate to tender on closing down Chernobyl. Moreover, as it became known to "Moscow News", Kiev and Washington are negotiating about construction of dry storage for Ukrainian processed nuclear fuel, which makes big end of the dreams of Minatom to get at least something from storage of radioactive waste.

Vladimir Yemelyahehko
"Moscow news" #23 2000.06.13

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Message: 6
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 00:14:33 -0400
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

CNN.com
Scientist charged in nuclear secrets case may have been job-hunting instead
July 7 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/07/07/wen.ho.lee/index.html

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Message: 7
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 00:16:55 -0400
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

China answers critics with a book of nuke Web sites
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/07/07/p7s1.htm

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Message: 8
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 00:20:51 -0400
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

New Scientist
Dangerous work
http://www.newscientist.com:80/news/news_224638.html

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Message: 9
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 00:22:37 -0400
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

Wayne, at last, gets good news about thorium
http://www.bergen.com:80/pcentral/waynejb200007072.htm

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Message: 10
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 00:25:56 -0400
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>

ABQjournal
WIPP to Accept Nuke Waste From Washington
http://www.abqjournal.com:80/news/74299news07-08-00.htm

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Message: 11
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 00:31:10 -0400
From: Denise Nelson <inner.circle@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Rhein-Hunsrück-Zeitung: Radioaktiv beladen?

German Plane grounded in Ukraine because of radioactive metal cargo.
http://home.t-online.de/home/aweirich/xray_rhz.htm