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-------- NUCLEAR (by country)
OFF THE SHELF TECHNOLOGY DETECTS NERVE GAS
August 22, 2000 ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/aug2000/2000L-08-22-09.html
WASHINGTON, DC, Using a silicon chip and parts from an inexpensive compact disc (CD) player, chemists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have developed a portable nerve gas sensor capable of detecting "G-type" nerve agents, such as sarin, soman and GF. The breakthrough should permit the development of large numbers of small, inexpensive sensors to detect the presence of nerve agents and track the movements of the toxic plumes. The innovative silicon sensor was constructed by a team including Michael Sailor, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD, William Trogler, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and postdoctoral associates Sonia Letant and Honglae Sohn.
The pocket sized, battery powered nerve gas sensor invented by chemists at the University of California, San Diego (Photo courtesy UCSD)
The sensor detects compounds with a phosphorus-fluorine chemical bond, such as sarin, at very low concentrations. The compounds react with a silicon interferometer - a wafer similar to a computer chip - coated with a catalyst that breaks the nerve gases down to produce hydrogen fluoride gas. The rainbow colored optical coating changes color when molecules of hydrogen fluoride hit its surface. "These silicon interferometers can detect very, very small changes in color," says Sailor. A small laser, similar to that found in CD players, measures the small changes in intensity of light reflecting from the optical coating on the surface of the silicon chip. "It turns out that if you take a laser that's at the right frequency that matches the properties of that layer, you can measure very small amounts of chemicals as they enter the coating," says Sailor. The researchers scavenged their first sensors from five inexpensive CD players they bought at an electronics discounter. "Our program manager at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, which sponsored our research, raised an eyebrow when I told him that story," says Sailor. "But for 24 bucks, we got an interferometer that was sensitive enough to detect chemicals in the parts per billion range."
-------- business
Radioactive uranium goes on sale on the Internet
Story by Chris Reese
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
August 22, 2000
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=7871 http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000821/wr/online_uranium_dc_1.html
NEW YORK - Add radioactive uranium to the list of items you can buy and sell with the click of a computer mouse, and it might seem like a nuclear bomb-maker's dream come true.
"An (Internet) auction for uranium seems far out, but it's really quite straightforward. It's like any other commodity," said Becky Battle, director of marketing for New York Nuclear Corp. which owns and operates the uranium trading web site UraniumOnLine.com.
Through the New York-based web site, nuclear power plants now can purchase uranium fuel needed to make electricity through an Internet auction process.
But Battle and others in the uranium production industry are quick to caution that it would be nearly impossible for terrorists to acquire the material online.
"There is no additional risk at all as a result of online trading," said Charles Scorer, chief executive officer of Nufcor International Ltd, a London-based uranium production and trading company.
Nufcor, equally owned by South African mining giant AngloGold Ltd. and South African banking to insurance group FirstRand, bought 120,000 pounds of uranium oxide via UraniumOnLine.com's first Internet auction in July.
"Any physical movement of uranium must be from a licensed producer to a licensed trader or buyer," Scorer said, adding that the international community of uranium traders is relatively small and any new bidders would quickly be recognised as such.
Also, auctions on UraniumOnLine.com are private, and participants must be invited by New York Nuclear Corp.
The uranium is used as nuclear fuel in about 430 power plants worldwide to supply about 20 percent of the planet's electricity needs, Battle said.
"The general public may have a difficult time separating what they think of as defensive (weapons grade) uranium and commercial uranium," Battle said, "But the content (of nuclear fuel) is very much different from bomb grade. We are talking apples and oranges here."
Bomb-grade uranium must go through a much more extensive and complex refining and enhancement process than uranium used for nuclear fuel. The process requires sophisticated and generally unavailable enhancement technology closely monitored by government agencies, industry sources said.
The online auction is seen as a step forward because it should allow for a more open-market, free trade of uranium by giving utilities and producers a more transparent uranium price and allowing the application of financial derivatives, such as futures contracts and hedging.
"With the deregulation of the electricity industry, the fuel procurement process will be more open," Nufcor's Scorer said.
"It's more efficient than the traditional system."
Traditionally, most power plant operators buy uranium under long-term contracts with producers, with the price per pound kept secret.
"Naturally and organically, the market will become more liquid (with time), and people will use more of these online services as (they) develop," Scorer said.
At an online auction on Friday, the third one held on UraniumOnLine.com, an undisclosed buyer picked up 56,320 kilograms (124,160 pounds) of uranium for $23.05 per kilogram ($10.46 per pound).
This compares with a current average market price reached through traditional trading of $23.28 a kilo ($10.56 per pound), Battle said.
Friday's round attracted a "handful" of active bidders and "at least two dozen" more observers who are studying the mechanics of the process for possible future participation, she said.
-------- china
Washington Post
Tuesday, August 22, 2000; Page A10
In GOP, a Simmering Struggle on China Policy Factions Divided Over Potential Arms Threat And Support of Taiwan By Steven Mufson Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/22/093l-082200-idx.html
When it comes to China, Vice President Gore and Gov. George W. Bush have a lot in common. Both men favor permanent normal trade relations, support the one-China policy of the past three decades, and insist upon a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan issue. Yet Republicans have been battling to push their candidate to take a tougher line toward Beijing and show more overt support for Taiwan.
That backstage struggle broke into the open during the Republican Party platform drafting. It continues to strain relations between different Republican factions and could spill into the next administration if Bush wins the election.
One group of Republicans fought during the drafting of the platform to remove any reference to the one-China policy, a formulation from the 1970s under which the United States severed formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan and established them with Beijing. Former representative Bob Livingston (La.), a member of the platform committee, led a push to change the first draft of the Republican platform.
"There is a sloppy tendency in policy to say that our policy in Asia is based on the one-China policy," said Bruce Jackson, chairman of the Republican platform subcommittee on foreign policy and a District delegate at the Republican convention. "Nonsense. Our policy in Asia is based on freedom, democracy and the peaceful resolution of disputes."
But aides close to Bush back a more moderate view. "The United States has a very big interest in continuing the policy that has served everyone well: No one changes the status quo," said Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Council staffer under former president George Bush who is the Republican nominee's top foreign policy coordinator.
Led by Rice and Robert D. Blackwill, a lecturer at Harvard University and former State Department official, the Republican candidate's campaign forged a compromise that acknowledged the existence of the one-China policy without endorsing it.
The tiff is just the tip of a wider dispute within each party over U.S. policy toward China. Members of the "blue team," a loose group of people who see China as the biggest future security threat to the United States, want to stop all modernization of the Chinese military. "I don't see why Beijing needs anything more than a lightly armed police force and a coast guard," said one Republican congressional aide.
But others, including Rice and Blackwill, accept that China will be a major nuclear-armed force in Asia and are seeking to defuse any threat through diplomacy.
"China is a changing power in Asia and I think it's going to modernize its forces," Rice said in an interview during the convention. "I don't think China is going to modernize enough--if we keep our nuke secrets to ourselves--to be a threat to our deterrent capabilities. It can modernize enough to threaten our missile defenses, but I'm not putting China in a category of states that would try to blackmail the United States."
In an earlier meeting with journalists in Washington, Rice said she could envision China expanding its nuclear missile arsenal beyond its current level of about two dozen to more than 100 without fundamentally changing U.S. nuclear strategy.
Republican infighting also has a personal dimension. Many of those favoring a tougher line toward Beijing take a dim view of Blackwill, who has been running an exchange program that has brought People's Liberation Army officers to Harvard. Blackwill has run a similar program for Russian officers. The China program has been funded by Nina Kung, a Hong Kong businesswoman who has given $7 million to Harvard. Kung heads Chinachem, which is one of China's largest importers of plastics, petrochemicals, rubber and animal feed.
Differing views of China's intentions and capabilities also shade Republican views on national missile defense. Many in the Bush camp support a boost-phase missile defense system, which would catch intercontinental ballistic missiles on their way up. That would enable the United States to deploy sea-based defense systems capable of stopping missiles from North Korea or Iraq, without threatening the nuclear forces--or nuclear deterrents--of Russia and China. Many boost-phase advocates see that as a virtue because it would avoid diplomatic strains with Moscow and Beijing.
But other Republicans believe that a missile defense should guard against China. They fear China might try to blackmail the United States to block U.S. aid for Taiwan in the event of a confrontation there.
China, which sees Taiwan as part of its own territory, has not ruled out the use of force against the self-governing island. The United States says it favors a peaceful resolution of differences between Beijing and Taipei.
The struggle within the Republican Party over China policy isn't new. For years, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many conservative Republicans have favored stronger support for Taiwan and expressed growing anxiety about China as a threat to the United States rather than as a useful counterweight to Moscow.
They have been aligned against Republican business interests favoring warmer ties and expanded trade, as well as foreign policy experts such as former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, who established ties with Beijing, and former secretary of state Alexander M. Haig, who also favors good relations.
Republicans have united over some aspects of China policy. Led by Bush adviser Paul Wolfowitz, a former senior State and Defense Department official, Republicans have blasted President Clinton for paying too much attention to China and insufficient attention to Japan. But sometimes, as during the Republican platform spat, differences come to the surface. An early draft of the party's platform said that "America's commitment to a one-China policy is based on the principle that there must be no use of force by China against Taiwan." The final version read: "America has acknowledged the view that there is one China. Our policy is based on the principle that there must be no use of force by China against Taiwan."
Jackson said, "What we wrote is that America acknowledges that there is a view that there is one China. That is China's view."
The platform also erodes the "strategic ambiguity" the United States has used to leave unclear what circumstances would bring its intervention in a Taiwan Straits crisis. If China attacks Taiwan, the Republican document bluntly states, "America will help Taiwan defend itself." Jackson said, "What we say is that it should be resolved peacefully. We were correcting the imprecision that has been creeping in."
-------- germany
E.On Plans Plant Closures, Job Cuts
Associated Press
August 22, 2000 Filed at 9:03 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/f/AP-Germany-Utility-Cuts.html
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Germany's largest energy company, E.On AG, said Tuesday it was planning to close several non-nuclear power plants in a cost cutting step that will eliminate 2,600 jobs, or about 13 percent of its work force. ``We have a liberalized market across Europe with too much capacity and we have to cut costs by pulling some plants off the energy grid,'' spokeswoman Petra Uhlmann said.
Uhlmann could not say how many plants would be closed or when they would shut their doors.
The job cuts, prescribed last year when utility rivals Veba AG and Viag AG merged to form E.On, will mostly come through a hiring freeze as people retire, she said. The comopany has about 20,000 employees.
E.On is Europe's largest conventional power generator. Of its combined 26,300 megawatt capacity in Germany, 18,000 megawatts are churned out by plants burning coal, gas or oil. The remainder is nuclear.
A committee is currently examining which plants will be closed. But Uhlmann denied a report in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung which said the company would shut down plants generating power for more than 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour.
``None of our plants produce power cheaper than that,'' she said.
E.On was formed as part of a trend of rapid consolidation in the European energy industry, and it has said it wants to expand as a pan-European player.
The company is reportedly planning to meet this week with French utilities group Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux to discuss another merger that would create Europe's second-largest electricity company behind Electricite de France.
-------- iraq
A Nightmare Scenario - Saddam With the Bomb
NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2000
http://www.NewsMax.com/articles/?a=2000/8/21/214855
Saddam Hussein may have lost the Gulf War, but he's still around and with a nuclear weapons program in place may be a greater threat than ever.
Experts familiar with Saddam's attempts to build nuclear weapons fear he may be on the verge of success, and some warn that he might just be getting ready to loose a nuclear-armed missile in observance of the 10th anniversary of his defeat at the hands of a U.S.-led coalition. (see: Iraq Plans 'To Deal with the Zionist Entity' from NewsMax.com, July 19)
http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/7/19/141634
"I think he's very close," Shyam Bhatia, a former Iraq correspondent for Britain's Guardian newspaper and co-author of "Brighter Than the Baghdad Sun," told CBN News (report available at cbn.org/newsstand).
"If you can think of the nuclear bomb as a gun and a bullet, then Saddam has assembled the gun, right?" he said. "He's tested the barrel; he's pressed the trigger; he has even used dummy bullets. Everything works. The only thing he lacks is the live ammunition. And if he gets that live ammunition, another word for plutonium or weapons-grade uranium, he will have the bomb."
Stephen Dolley agrees. The research director at the Nuclear Control Institute told CBN News: "There's good reason to believe Saddam has all the actual components he needs for one of three nuclear weapons."
"It takes very little of this material to make a nuclear weapon effective," he explained.
"An amount of plutonium the size of a small grapefruit would be enough to make a nuclear weapon, and you don't need that much more highly enriched uranium. I mean, someone could literally put it in a large briefcase and carry it over the border.
"The time frame for Saddam to get a nuclear weapon depends on what he has to do to get the fissile material," Dolley added. "Once the plutonium or HEU is in hand, assuming they already have the components, and there's reason to believe they do, it could be done in a matter of weeks or maybe even days."
According to Ambassador Richard Butler, former chairman of the United Nations weapons inspection program in Iraq and author of "The Greatest Threat," his group was never able to penetrate the wall of secrecy Saddam erected around his nuclear weapons program.
"We faced massive resistance," he said. "We tried to fight it, and we failed."
"He deeply believes that the Arab world needs a leader, and he obviously thinks he's the prime candidate for that," Butler said. "For that purpose, he believes he needs to be the most muscular guy on the block."
Some observers think Saddam might already have a nuclear bomb hidden, just waiting until he has a dependable missile to carry it to its target. CBN News reports that last month it was discovered that he has speeded up his missile development program. According to the London Times, Iraq is secretly negotiating with Russian companies to build a factory to make navigational components for long-range ballistic missiles.
Although the U.N. is preparing to send weapons inspectors back to Baghdad to check on Saddam's progress in building nuclear weapons, nobody knows if he will allow them in.
"When it comes to the point where the U.N. inspectors ask, under the resolution passed last December, to go back into Iraq and hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein will most likely say, 'You and what army?'" Dolley said.
"There's no army to back that up. There is really no support for military action on the Security Council. Three out of five of the permanent members, France, Russia and China, not only would (not) support military action, but they want the sanctions lifted now."
Butler warns that Saddam cannot be dismissed as a has-been - that he's someone the United States is going to have to face again.
"The existence of a person like Saddam, with his addiction to these weapons, means that as long as they're there, they will be used, either by a terrorist group or some other way," Butler said.
"No one should sleep easily in their beds at night."
---
Clinton Administration Squanders Iraq Liberation Money
NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2000
UPI
http://www.NewsMax.com/articles/?a=2000/8/21/200446
WASHINGTON - The Clinton administration has been spending the money Congress appropriated to overthrow Saddam Hussein on contractors and consultants while withholding arms from the Iraqi opposition, experts said.
The latest example is a workshop proposed by the Conflict Management Group, a nonprofit offshoot of Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School. The subcontractor group describes its objective in turbid academic jargon: "To identify, diagnose, and enhance the ability of the Iraqi opposition parties, and the individuals within the parties, to discuss, design, and facilitate intra- and inter-organization dialogue, cooperation, and problem solving."
Translation: Pull Iraqi resistance fighters out of the field, bring them to Harvard, and teach them how to get along.
"They couldn't find Iraq on a map," said Francis Brooke, the Washington representative of the main opposition group.
"It's ludicrous what they're proposing. Somehow, theoretically, they're going to grab all the Iraqi opposition parties they know nothing about and bring them together in a Harvard seminar, where they're going to teach them how to get in touch with their inner selves."
Brooke said he had talked on the phone with Ahmed Chalabi, head of Iraqi National Congress (INC), the London umbrella organization for the Iraqi opposition. The group had e-mailed Chalabi, asking for his help in obtaining "a list of opposition parties and contact information."
"What a great waste of money," Brooke said Chalabi had told him, "Raise hell about it."
That the fractious Iraqi opposition needs cohesion to prevail against Saddam Hussein is not in dispute, but is the Harvard workshop an effective way of going about it?
A congressional staffer familiar with Iraq said, "It came as a surprise to me that anyone would think that this kind of expenditure would be a useful contribution to the effort."
He was asked why the administration would rather spend money on consultants than on weapons and ammunition. He met that question with a long pause.
Politics as Usual
"I think if you survey the last three years of policy toward Iraq, the only conclusion you can draw is that the administration has politicized this policy to an unconscionable degree," he said finally.
"When the president was in political trouble - with grand jury investigations, and impeachment, and Monica Lewinsky - suddenly he was rattling the saber, and the chemical weapons and the biological weapons and the missile threat from Iraq were 'absolutely intolerable.' So he resorted to military action, and along the way destroyed the U.N. inspections regime that had been in place until that time.
"The moment he got past impeachment, then the priority was to make this issue go away. Suddenly the things we were told we had to worry about, we were told we didn't have to worry about.
"During the current phase on the political calendar, I think (the Clinton team's) strong desire is to keep Iraq out of the news. It's not convenient to the administration to have much attention drawn to this, which significant support to the opposition would do. Bringing in social workers to counsel the opposition is a way of spending money that is certainly not going to cause much alarm in Baghdad.
"And I think Congress has demonstrated that they it wants a more sustained approach to the problem," he said.
But other, less political, interpretations are possible. Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of U.S. military forces throughout the Middle East, has been a vocal opponent of giving lethal assistance to the scattered Iraqi opposition.
In testimony before both houses of Congress, he said the administration had identified about 90 opposition groups but that "they have little, if any, viability." (In 1999, the administration identified seven dissident groups that could be eligible for a share of the $97 million.)
"Even if we had Saddam gone, we could end up with 15, 20, or 90 groups competing for power," the general said.
A State Department official contacted for this story shared Zinni's views. Aid to the opposition is limited only by its ability to absorb it," he said. "We don't want to supply weapons that will be used in internecine warfare."
The official said he was unaware of any actual fighting between opposition forces and the Iraqi army. The United States is supplying the opposition only with non-lethal aid, he said. This applies to the $8 million administration funds and the $97 million Pentagon drawdown. He denied that the administration is shortchanging the rebels, saying that some $3 million was spent on them in the past year.
The United States pays for the Iraqi National Congress' London office, travel, meetings and its appearance at the United Nations, he said, and it supports schools where members of the Iraqi opposition are trained in such matters as field medicine and communications.
"We've committed the monies," the official said. "We've focused on the effort that raises the INC's stature and promotes the internal cohesion that will let them do more in the future.
"They tell us they want to do more. We welcome that. But we have to make sure that they're able to absorb this money and use it effectively, and use it for the objectives we've all set without falling into the trap of internecine rivalry."
The congressional staffer disputed the State Department official's statement about the absence of fighting within Iraq. "If he's saying there is not armed resistance to Saddam Hussein's forces inside Iraq, that's plainly wrong," he said.
"Saddam's army is quite aggressive in trying to put down the revolt. There's huge swaths of Northern Iraq where Saddam's army doesn't operate, because their forces don't control the ground."
Congress did not restrict the $97 million for non-lethal aid only, he said. "We have quite a track record on Capitol Hill for urging the administration to be more proactive in using that authority, including to provide lethal assistance, both training and weapons."
The staffer was asked who decides what gets spent, and on what?
"The president," he replied, "and in the real world they would have an interagency process involved. Because with drawdown, you're sort of crossing jurisdictional lines. Drawdown authority basically is the ability of the State Department to provide Defense Department resources as something akin to foreign aid. But obviously, the Defense Department has an interest in what's becoming of its resources.
"So in the real world, a lot of consultation goes on between those two departments.
'A Ludicrous Offer'
"Under drawdown, what they've received is some training. I think there was an offer to give them some computers and desks, which is ludicrous on its face, because to equip an office in London they were going to give them desks here in Virginia.
"If I were to set up an office in London, I think I would buy a desk in London. That was just so foolish, it wasn't worth pursuing. We didn't pass a $97 million authority to provide Defense Department desks and fax machines to people in London.
"That's the only equipment that I'm aware having been offered under the drawdown, and it was a ludicrous offer."
"Until very recently, no funds were given to the INC," the staffer said, but occasionally money was spent on its behalf.
"For instance, there was a big conference in New York. Prior to that, there had been one in Windsor, outside of London, where the U.S. government essentially underwrote the cost of the conferences: the travel and associated expenses.
"But it did so not by giving it to the INC but by hiring an outside contractor to do all the logistics: make hotel and airline reservations, give people their tickets, buy them their meals, provide the support staff for the meetings. Which, I will tell you, certainly didn't prove to be a cost-effective way of staging the meetings.
Shovel Money out the Door
"What the State Department got out of it was a high degree of accountability," he said. "When the auditors come through, there's no question where the money went. But they seem to have exalted accountability over common sense, because they end up spending far more money than you would ordinarily have to pay for those kind of events.
"And, quite honestly, I get the sense that this suits the administration just fine, because in a lot of ways, they're more interested in shoveling this money out the door and claiming they've done something than they are in actually doing something."
Of the $1.14 million obligated to "Activities Inside Iraq" in fiscal year 1998-1999, the biggest chunk, $553,000, went to Columbia University "to establish an institutional framework for constructive interaction with Iraqi Kurdish leaders and other parties," according the government's description.
"Giving money to Columbia University is not what Congress really had in mind," the staffer said.
Harvard's Conflict Management Group is coordinating its program with Columbia's. The CMG's Michael DeKoster was unsuccessful in his attempt to provide further information to United Press International. He said that Harvard had been discussed as a venue for the workshop, but in any event it would be held in a "neutral place."
---
Will Iraq Be Clinton's 'October Surprise'?
NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2000
http://www.NewsMax.com/articles/?a=2000/8/22/93623
The United Nations is preparing renewed Iraqi arms inspections, setting the stage for President Clinton to make a dramatic pre-election military move if he wishes.
Would the president consider such an "October surprise"?
The opportunity, if not the temptation, would be there should it appear during the coming two months that the presidential campaign of Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, is failing against the Republican nominee, George W. Bush.
The Clinton-Gore administration is not unaware of the powerful argument that an incumbent political party can make: "Don't change horses in the middle of an international military crisis."
And a few Washington observers, possibly without foundation, suspect Clinton is not above finding a pretext to declare an extraordinary national emergency and perhaps even try to suspend the November presidential election, thus continuing his occupancy of the Oval Office, at the expense of a constitutional crisis.
Here is the background, as reported Tuesday in the New York Times:
Nine months after saying it would resume arms inspections in Iraq, the U.N. Security Council is ready to put a fresh arms-inspection team on the ground in Iraq.
An entirely new inspection organization - officially known as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission - is headed by Dr. Hans Blix, a Swedish arms-control expert who was once director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
This new organization, with members from 19 countries, is more accountable to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, with the inspection team staff working directly for the United Nations rather than for their own countries as before.
It has been more than two years since American and British aircraft bombed Iraq after President Saddam Hussein cut off all cooperation with a previous group of inspectors.
Since then, Saddam has said Iraq will not cooperate with any new inspections.
If Saddam refuses to let the inspectors do their job, that leaves the United Nations with two options: Continue the present sanctions against Iraq or resort once again to military force.
Both George W. Bush's father, President George Bush, and Clinton have taken military action against Saddam.
If Iraq defies the United Nations again, it could happen right in the middle of the 2000 presidential campaign.
The Clinton-Gore administration would then be under political pressure to act forcefully.
If the Iraqi leader were to yield to U.N. arms inspections, Clinton's successor - Bush or Gore - could be confronted with the politically difficult decision of whether to go along with a suspension of sanctions.
Both presidential candidates would be on the spot to take a position during the heat of the campaign.
One unnamed "senior administration official" refused to rule out the possibility of an "October surprise" of American military action at the height of the presidential campaign, "should the Iraqis provoke it."
In the two years since U.N. arms inspectors were in his country, Saddam has had ample opportunity to begin rebuilding his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Earlier this month, Congress received a Central Intelligence Agency report that Iraq has already rebuilt its missile and chemical weapons factories since the 1998 air strikes.
That could be the basis for a dramatic surprise move against Iraq by Clinton before Election Day.
---
New U.N. Weapons Inspection Team Is Prepared to Go to Iraq
Washington Post
Tuesday, August 22, 2000; Page A20
By Colum Lynch Special to The Washington Post
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/22/122l-082200-idx.html
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 21-More than 1 1/2 years after United Nations weapons experts departed Iraq on the eve of a U.S.-British air bombardment, a new team of U.N. inspectors has been prepared to return to Iraq to restart the process of disarming that nation's weapons of mass destruction, according to senior U.N. diplomats.
Hans Blix, the chairman of a U.N. inspection agency established by the Security Council nine months ago to complete the disarmament of Iraq, has concluded in a report to the Security Council that an advance team of weapons inspectors is ready to go to Iraq, according to a U.N. diplomat.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has stated repeatedly that his nation has no intention of permitting U.N. arms inspectors back into Iraq. And the United States and Britain appear disinclined to threaten the use of force to compel Iraq to accept the inspectors, so it seems unlikely they will enter the country soon.
Iraq, meanwhile, has pressed its allies on the Security Council, principally Russia, to seek an end to economic sanctions. Following a meeting in Moscow between Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and President Vladimir Putin, Russian officials in New York said they had little hope that Iraq would agree to allow the U.N. inspectors back without clearer assurances that sanctions would be lifted.
U.S. officials have expressed concern that Iraq may have reconstituted its prohibited weapons programs in the absence of U.N. inspectors. And the United States and Britain are expected to cite the report's findings in urging the council's other key members, including Russia, China and France, to use their influence to persuade Iraq to submit to new inspections. Under the terms of a 1991 cease-fire agreement ending the Persian Gulf War, Iraq is obliged to provide full access to U.N. inspectors charged with ridding the country of long- and medium-range missiles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In exchange for compliance, the council has pledged to provide Baghdad relief from a decade of economic sanctions.
The task of disarmament was carried out by the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) until December 1998, when the inspectors were ordered to leave by the commission's chief, Richard Butler, as the United States and Britain prepared to launch the air campaign against Iraq.
Iraq has refused to let inspectors return, citing reports that the United States used the inspection agency to spy on Iraq. Earlier this year, the Security Council created a successor agency, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, to complete the job of disarming Iraq. Unlike UNSCOM, which relied primarily on personnel loaned by governments, the new agency's arms experts will be employed by the United Nations.
Blix is scheduled to discuss his findings with a panel of international arms experts, known as the college of commissioners, later this week.
He will then report to the Security Council that the inspectors are prepared to begin their work. The decision comes as a team of U.N. inspectors completed its final round of training in Maryland.
---
U.N. Readies Team to Check Weapons Held by the Iraqis
New York Times
August 22, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE and STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/082200iraq-un.html
The United Nations has assembled a new team of arms inspectors that is ready to enter Iraq within weeks, raising the prospect of another confrontation with President Saddam Hussein over his weapons programs.
The creation of the new team comes more than two years after Mr. Hussein halted cooperation with a previous group of inspectors, provoking a diplomatic crisis that culminated in four nights of American and British airstrikes in December 1998.
Iraq has repeatedly said it will not cooperate with the new weapons commission, which the Security Council ordered nine months ago in the hope that it would resolve some objections the Iraqis, as well as the Russians and French, had about the previous commission.
One of the chief Iraqi complaints about the previous commission, headed by Richard Butler, an Australian arms control expert, was that there were too many inspectors from the United States and Britain, who the Iraqis asserted were really spies.
The new team, with members from 19 countries, is meant to be more accountable to the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan. All the members work directly for the United Nations, not for their own countries as before.
This week, Hans Blix, the leader of the new team, is to discuss the need for access to Iraq with a panel of international weapons experts who serve as the commission's directors. By Sept. 1 he is expected to report to the Security Council that the inspectors are ready to begin work and, barring a change in Iraq's position, to report that the Iraqis continued to reject new inspections.
But it remains far from clear what the United States or other members of the Security Council will do if Iraq refuses to cooperate.
It is also not clear how forcefully the council will push the new inspections, especially since its 15 members are sharply divided over Iraq and the broad economic sanctions imposed on it. Their positions are not likely to become clear until debates in the council begin sometime in September.
The sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. They are to remain in place until Iraq is certified as free of prohibited weapons -- chemical, biological and nuclear arms as well as long-range missiles. Last December the Security Council said it would suspend the sanctions if Iraq cooperated with the new team of arms inspectors.
Refusal by Mr. Hussein would leave the council no alternative to keeping the sanctions in place. It is unlikely that the council would call for the use of force, but in previous confrontations the United States and Britain have argued that existing resolutions authorize military action.
A confrontation would focus new attention on the Clinton administration's policy toward Iraq in the middle of the presidential election. That policy has come under sharp attack from Republicans and even some Democrats in Washington, who complain that President Clinton has not acted forcefully enough to force Mr. Hussein's government to accept the inspections.
If Mr. Hussein refuses to cooperate, the administration will be under political pressure to act forcefully. If the Iraqi leader reverses course, Mr. Clinton's successor could be confronted with the politically difficult decision of whether to go along with a suspension of sanctions.
Diplomats and other officials at the United Nations said they believed that during this year's election campaign, the Clinton administration is not likely to press for strong action, even if Iraq remains defiant.
But a senior administration official said the Iraqis or anyone else would be foolish to assume that. Although the administration has not indicated how it would answer new Iraqi defiance, the official refused to rule out the possibility of an "October surprise" of American military action at the height of a campaign, should the Iraqis provoke it.
"They will be making a severe mistake if they think an election campaign will affect how we carry out our foreign policy," the official said.
In Washington, administration officials said they would insist that Iraq comply with the resolution that created Dr. Blix's team or face an indefinite extension of sanctions.
"It's a mandatory resolution," Thomas R. Pickering, an under secretary of state, said in a telephone interview. "If the Iraqis don't comply, the sanctions will stay in place."
Under the resolution that created Dr. Blix's team, those sanctions can be suspended six months after the Iraqis fulfill a list of key requirements set by the inspectors and, ultimately, be lifted once the inspectors conclude that Iraq has come clean and dismantled its prohibited weapons programs.
The previous commission had a more comprehensive standard for declaring Iraq free of weapons before sanctions could be lifted, offering no interim steps like a suspension.
The new inspection organization is officially known as the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Dr. Blix, a Swedish arms control expert, previously served as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
This month, he completed recruiting and training the 44 inspectors from countries friendly and not so friendly to the Iraqis.
Dr. Blix said his first step would be to find out what had happened to several hundred sites inspected by the last commission in 1998, a process that could take at least several months.
The Iraqis have said they believe that the United States would never agree to a suspension of sanctions but would instead find another reason to keep them in place, making cooperation, in their view, fruitless.
Administration officials have long argued that resuming inspections in Iraq -- rather than resorting to force -- is the most effective way to combat Mr. Hussein's efforts to hold on to nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles that could deliver them.
But within the Pentagon and the American intelligence agencies, there is growing concern that Mr. Hussein has used the prolonged absence of inspectors to continue those efforts. The Central Intelligence Agency sent a report to Congress this month warning that Iraq had already rebuilt missile and chemical weapons factories since the airstrikes in 1998.
The issue of inspections is only one area in which the international standoff with Mr. Hussein appears headed for a new period of confrontation, a decade after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait led to the Persian Gulf war.
In recent weeks Mr. Hussein has taken steps to ease his diplomatic isolation, receiving a visit from President Hugo Chαvez of Venezuela. A thriving black market is reportedly eroding the sanctions, while Russia, supported by China, is challenging the American and British patrols of the "no flight" zones in northern and southern Iraq, which were established to protect Kurds and Shiite Muslims from Mr. Hussein's government.
In the face of these challenges, diplomats at the United Nations and even some American officials say, the administration's policy has been left to drift. The American ambassador to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, has not involved himself in the issue. Mr. Holbrooke says he has been too busy on other matters.
"There's no doubt things are on autopilot," said one official in Washington. "And it might be an autopilot with a 10-degree downward tilt."
Several diplomats, including some from nations on the Security Council, said the administration had undermined its influence by openly calling for the removal of Mr. Hussein from power. That has given the Iraqis an excuse for dismissing the council's pledge to suspend sanctions if Mr. Hussein cooperates with new inspectors, the diplomats said.
The administration may find itself even further isolated on the council, since three countries supportive of the United States and Britain -- Argentina, Canada and the Netherlands -- will be among the five countries relinquishing their rotating council seats.
Administration officials say they have succeeded in containing Iraq by enforcing the sanctions and continuing to enforce the "no flight" zones despite repeated Iraqi provocations that have resulted in hundreds of limited retaliatory airstrikes since 1998.
When American and British warplanes and missiles launched a much larger attack 20 months ago, administration officials acknowledged that the attack would make it difficult to resume weapons inspections. But they argued that with Mr. Hussein refusing to cooperate, there was no other way to prevent Iraq from acquiring chemical or biological weapons.
"Mark my words," President Clinton said of Mr. Hussein at the time, "he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them. Because we're acting today, it is less likely that we will face these dangers in the future."
At the time, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and others also warned that the United States was prepared to use force again if there was evidence that Iraq had resumed its chemical or biological weapons programs -- or if Iraq threatened its neighbors or attacked the Kurds in the north.
James M. Bodner, the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy and a longtime aide to Mr. Cohen, said in an interview that the United States remained ready to respond if Iraq crossed any of those "red lines."
Administration officials said they had no concrete evidence that Iraq had restarted its weapons programs. But in addition to repairing the damage done in 1998, Iraq has resumed testing its shorter-range missiles. Officials fear that those tests, while not prohibited under the United Nations resolutions, have allowed Iraq to perfect longer-range missiles.
Despite that, the administration's warnings about Iraq's weapons have lost much of their urgency. In the fall of 1997, Mr. Cohen held up a bag of sugar on television and ominously warned that an equivalent amount of anthrax bacteria, which Iraq is believed to possess, could destroy half the population of Washington.
In recent months administration officials have made no such dire warnings, even though there have been no effective inspections in two years. At the same time, Americans have done little publicly to press Dr. Blix to accelerate the formation of his inspection team, which has proceeded slowly.
He began interviewing weapons experts in May, and those selected have completed a four-week training program. Dr. Blix said there are signs that Iraq is thinking over its next moves.
The Iraqis recently presented a legalistic analysis of the new inspection plan to governments of Islamic nations meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The memorandum suggests that the Iraqis still nurture hopes that the resolution creating the inspection commission can be rewritten. Russia has already called for changes, but United Nations and American officials have adamantly ruled that out.
Some diplomats say that Iraq may have calculated that it can bide its time, hoping for a better deal. Others say Mr. Hussein will stop short of any actions that would invite American retaliation, while trying to build support for an unconditional lifting of the sanctions.
"Right now, he thinks things are going his way," a Defense Department official said. "He's outlasted the Clinton administration. He outlasted the Bush administration. I think his perception is he can outlast them all."
-------- japan
Japan approves first nuke plant since worst mishap
August 22, 2000
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=7874
TOKYO - A Japanese government panel yesterday approved the construction of a nuclear plant for the first time since the nation's worst nuclear accident.
Approval for the 1.373-gigawatt plant in western Japan is the first since an accident at a uranium processing plant north of Tokyo last September, in which two workers died.
That prompted the government to say in March it would review its nuclear policy and scrap its target of 16-20 new reactors operating by 2010, without forming a revised target.
Chugoku Electric Power Co Inc won approval from a panel including Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori to build a third plant in the Shimane area some 600 km (375 miles) west of Tokyo.
Mori has the final say but is expected to rubber-stamp the plan within two weeks.
Construction is due to begin in March 2003, with the plant to be operational in 2010.
It was one of 13 new reactors planned by the major utilities over the next 11 years.
Japan has 51 commercial nuclear reactors which supply about one-third of its electricity, with four more of those 13 already under construction.
But a series of accidents has led to growing public distrust of the industry and a rising aversion among communities to have a nuclear power plant built on their doorsteps.
Utilities say the scaled-down plans reflect slower growth in demand, not public objections.
But in February, Chubu Electric Power Co Inc ditched a plan to build a reactor due to local opposition.
----
Farmers cannot live with U.S. bombs
Tue, 22 Aug 2000
JPS <jpspress@twics.com>
JPS 08-079
TOKYO AUG 22 JPS -- Residents of a small rural district of 62 households of Misawa City in Aomori Prefecture call the district a "Bomb Village." They are forced to live side by side with the U.S. Misawa firing and bombing range. F-16 fighters from U.S. Misawa Air Base, helicopters of the U.S. forces in South Korea, and aircraft from an aircraft carrier at U.S. Yokosuka Naval base near Tokyo converge on this training range to carry out low flying bombing exercises almost every day.
These exercises are seriously disturbing villagers' lives.
A villager said, "Taken aback by sonic booms, I fell down and hit my head against thee floor. I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance." Shock waves are so strong that ceramic rice bowls drop from the cupboard and break into pieces. A closet door came out of its groove, and bathroom walls had cracks," he said. Sometimes mock bombs are dropped by mistake on farms, rice paddies, and houses.
"I thought I couldn't live here anymore," said Takashi Harita, Amagamori Neighborhood Association chair. He decided to abandon the village when U.S. helicopters from South Korea carried out firing exercises at night right above his house.
Feeling compelled to move out of the village as a group to another place, Amagamori villagers made representations to Misawa City Office in May, and Aomori Prefectural Government and the Defense Agency in July, and their request has not been accepted so far.
Harita said, "It is very hard to decide to abandon the native village. We can get small shell fish in the river, mushrooms and wild herbs in a forest. If only U.S. Forces are not here, we can live comfortably in peace. But what we want to protect most is our lives".
Due to U.S. aircraft sonic booms and the danger of crashes and other accidents, 251 households in the Yokawame district of the city near the U.S. Misawa Air Base in 1996 together moved to the Otsu district, two kilometers away from Yokawame.
Naotoshi Ando, Otsu Neighborhood Association chair, said, "I was really angry at the U.S. Forces when I had to have my house demolished. I wanted U.S. military aircraft to end flying".
Yuji Sato, Akita Prefectural Peace Committee chair, said:
"F-16 fighters of U.S. Misawa Base are being sent to Iraq for 'policing.' Helicopters from a U.S. Base in South Korea carried out nighttime training at Amagamori because they couldn't use their training field in South Korea owing to Korean people's protest. What they are doing is nothing to do with the defense of Japan. Japan's government allows the U.S. forces to do whatever they want. Such an attitude of Japan's government must be completely changed." (end item)
-------- russia
Russian sub presents radiation risk
Washington Times
August 22, 2000
By David Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-2000822222553.htm
Russia's leading environmental activist warned that the doomed Kursk nuclear submarine poses a major risk of a radiation leak in the Barents Sea, and said his country lacks the resources to salvage the vessel on its own.
Activist Aleksandr Nikitin, a nuclear engineer and former Russian naval officer facing treason charges in Moscow over his environmental exposes, made the prediction at a briefing here as Russian officials confirmed the grim news yesterday morning that all 118 crewmen aboard the 500-foot attack submarine had perished.
"Our worst expectations are confirmed," Mikhail Motsak, Russia's naval chief of staff, told reporters in Murmansk yesterday. "All sections of the sub are totally flooded and not a single member of the crew remains alive."
Even the confirmation of the deaths provided a fresh humiliation to Russia's military and the government of President Vladimir Putin, for which the days after the explosion that rocked the Kursk Aug. 12 have been an unrelieved public-relations disaster.
Norwegian divers, called in belatedly by Russian officials to help in the rescue effort, were able to break through a rear escape hatch in 36 hours - something Russian rescue teams had been unable to do in more than a week.
Mr. Nikitin, who incurred the government's wrath for his investigative reports on the nuclear risks posed by Russia's aging nuclear submarine fleet, said he believed the Kursk's reactors were shut down as the explosion rocked the vessel.
But the still-hot cores of the two reactors and the corrosive effect of the frigid sea water flooding the vessel make it likely that the protective barriers encasing the reactors won't hold much longer than a month, he maintained.
"These reactors aren't the size of a power plant such as Chernobyl, but you would be looking at significant danger here nonetheless," Mr. Nikitin said at a briefing organized by the American Chemical Society. Many U.S. military experts, however, say the Kursk's reactors may remain safe for far longer, citing U.S. and Russian submarine losses where no radiation leaks have been detected even decades after they were lost.
"It really all depends on what damage occurred to the systems at the time of the accident, which is something we can't really know at this time," said A.D. Baker II, a U.S. naval expert and editor of "Combat Fleets of the World."
"In past incidents of this kind, even in much deeper water than the Kursk, the systems have shut down and no major leaks have been detected," he said.
Norwegian divers yesterday said they had not detected any radioactive leaks so far from the Kursk, which is lying on the seabed off the coast of Norway in about 350 feet of water.
The divers reported that even the sub's rear compartments had been flooded with water, ending any chances that survivors could have fled from the explosion that destroyed the Kursk's forward sections.
"There is no hope for survivors. It has been determined it is time to terminate the rescue operation," said Lt. Col. John Espen Lien, a spokesman for the Norwegian armed forces.
But Russia still faces a massive technical task in either salvaging the sub or encasing its two nuclear reactors in an undersea "sarcophagus" to guard against future nuclear leaks.
And Mr. Putin and his government face domestic and international questions over their handling of the crisis, from the inconsistent early response to the accident, to the delays in seeking international help, to the president's own refusal to break off his Black Sea vacation to direct the rescue efforts.
Mr. Nikitin blamed Mr. Putin for not being more active in the early days of the crisis, saying the "Russian military mentality" all but forbade seeking international help in the rescue effort without the president's approval.
In a live televised address from the deck of a cruiser in the Barents Sea, fleet commander Adm. Vyacheslav Popov yesterday asked for forgiveness for not rescuing the sailors.
"We lost the best submarine crew in the Northern Fleet," Adm. Popov said, his voice quivering with emotion. "Forgive the children. Forgive your sons. And forgive me for not bringing back your boys."
Speaking on Russia's state-controlled ORT television network yesterday, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev conceded that the rescue operation may have been botched, blaming in part recent budget cuts that left the navy short of divers and sophisticated rescue vessels.
Ilya Klebanov, Russia's deputy prime minister, said yesterday the country would seek international help in recovering the victims' bodies and raising the sub from the sea floor.
"It will be an international effort," Mr. Klebanov told reporters yesterday. "No one can do it alone."
The Russian press, opposition leaders in parliament, and the families of the sailors gathered in Murmansk were all harshly critical of the government's actions the past 10 days.
"They have killed the boys, that's all," said Yekaterina Dyachkova, a retiree in Murmansk, headquarters of the Northern Fleet, struggling to hold back tears. "The [navy] should have called for help immediately, but they waited for so many days."
Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the opposition Union of Right Forces party in the State Duma, said Mr. Putin's decision to stay at his Black Sea vacation cabin during the first week of the crisis was "amoral." His party and the liberal Yabloko faction called for an independent parliamentary inquiry into the disaster.
A poll of 500 Muscovites, conducted over the weekend, found that more than two-thirds disapproved of the government's tardy appeal for international aid, with only 17 percent supporting the government.
Mr. Putin remains personally popular, but fully 28 percent of those polled said they had a lower opinion of him because of the Kursk disaster. Asked who bore the most blame, 35 percent blamed the military leadership, 23 percent blamed Mr. Putin, and just 9 percent blamed the sub's commander.
This article is based in part on wire service reports.
---
Loss of Sub Crew Devastates Russia
NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2000
UPI
http://www.NewsMax.com/articles/?a=2000/8/21/220010
MOSCOW - The commander of Russia's Northern Fleet, Adm. Vyacheslav Popov, made an emotional televised address late Monday from the site of the Kursk submarine accident, apologizing for failing to rescue the vessel's 118-man crew.
"We lost the best submarine crew in the Northern Fleet," he said. "Forgive the children. Forgive your sons. And forgive me for not bringing back your boys," Popov said, then took off his hat and walked away.
It was an emotional end to the day's events, as the navy officially confirmed that the entire crew of the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk had died after the Aug. 12 accident in the Barents Sea.
Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, the chief of staff of the Northern Fleet, said: "Our worst expectations are confirmed. All sections of the submarine are totally flooded. Not a single member of the crew is alive."
As the news that no survivors had been found reached the relatives, there were heartbreaking scenes of anguish in the small submariners' town of Vidyayevo, where 400 relatives of the crew had gathered, hoping and praying for a miraculous rescue of their loved ones.
Russian television networks reported that as soon as the final statement was made, several women passed out, and a number of ambulances carried women with heart problems to the hospital.
The navy, which had not contacted most of the relatives while the rescue operation was continuing, chartered a plane from Moscow to Murmansk to bring 106 relatives to the northern port city, near the sub's base.
While it was unclear how the operation would continue, the state-owned RTR television network said the first corpse of a crew member had been found by a remote-controlled video camera lowered into the flooded ninth compartment of the submarine.
RTR said the body would be retrieved from the sub's wreck and lifted to the surface using a special robot arm.
Earlier Monday, Norwegian deep-sea divers opened the outer and inner escape hatches on the Kursk, finding the ninth compartment of the vessel flooded and concluding that all 118 members of the submarine's crew had died.
Norwegian spokesmen Lt. Col. John Espen Lien and Capt. Rune Fredheim said the Norwegian rescue team was calling off the rescue effort as there was no point in continuing.
"We believe there is no chance of finding any survivors in the submarine," the spokesmen said after the divers reported that the entire vessel was apparently flooded.
Russia has asked Norway to help recover the bodies of the sub's crew. A spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry said the request was being considered, but there had been no reply to Moscow's request so far.
The Norwegian defense attache in Moscow said Norway had agreements with many countries covering rescue work, but such an agreement had unfortunately not yet been signed between Oslo and Moscow.
Just hours earlier, Russian officials said they wanted to continue the rescue operation as there might still be air in the seventh and eighth compartments of the Kursk, but Motsak's statement means Russia has come to terms with the fact that the entire submarine is flooded, leaving no chance for any crew member to survive.
The last sign of life from inside the sub was made Aug. 14, more than 48 hours after the submarine crashed to the bottom of the Barents Sea.
The Northern Fleet's spokesman Vladimir Navrotsky said a remote-controlled video camera was being used to film the inside of the ninth compartment, where rescue teams earlier had hoped to find a group of sailors.
The rescue operation had earlier hoped to use a unique British LR5 mini-submarine to rescue any survivors from the Kursk, but the LR5 was never used because the landing area around the hatch had been damaged.
The Norwegian divers, working in shifts, manually opened the inside hatch.
They had hoped to find survivors, as there were bubbles of air rising from the inside hatch as they opened the lid into the exit chamber from the ninth compartment, but these hopes were quickly dashed.
As the rescue operation prepared to shift into a salvage mission, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who heads the government's commission into the disaster, said Russia would probably ask for international help in raising the submarine.
"We shall approach countries which have funds; not a single country can handle such an operation on its own," Klebanov told the state-owned RTR television network.
The submarine, which sank more than a week ago in the Barents Sea at a depth of 355 feet (108 meters), is 500 feet (155 meters) long and is now estimated to weigh 28,000 tons as it is full of water.
The submarine is equipped with two nuclear reactors, and their condition is unclear, raising serious environmental concerns.
Russia insists the reactors shut down automatically as soon as the accident occurred, but there are fears the reactors were damaged when the submarine smashed into the seabed, or that they may be damaged during a salvage operation as attempts are made to lift the sub.
Norwegian divers say they have so far found no sign of radiation leaks inside the submarine.
There is still no clear answer as to what may have caused such extensive damage to Russia's most modern submarine, sinking it within two minutes and killing most of its crew instantaneously as tons of water flooded the front six compartments.
Russian experts have voiced several theories, including a collision with a giant commercial ship or a foreign submarine, an explosion of a torpedo or a collision with a World War II mine.
The accident occurred Aug. 12, but, repeating the Soviet practice of delaying announcements of disasters, Russia did not reveal the accident until Aug. 14, calling it a minor technical problem, and took a further two days of futile rescue attempts before accepting international aid that had been offered as soon as the scale of the accident was clear.
Government Under Fire
The Russian navy and the government have come under strong criticism for delaying the announcement of the accident, for the way the rescue operation was handled and particularly for the delay in accepting foreign help.
Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, in an interview with Russia's ORT television network Monday night, tried to defend the military's handling of the rescue operation.
Facing mounting anger over the military's decision to stall in accepting international aid, and even calls for his resignation, Sergeyev said: "We can't rule out that some mistakes were made, but ... fundamental mistakes were not made."
Perhaps attempting to deflect the public's anger from the military, Sergeyev also latched on to a Russian theory that the submarine was sunk after a collision with another submarine.
Sergheyev told ORT the accident involved Kursk's collision with an "underwater object." He said Russia had not yet been able to identify the object, but had made a request to NATO for information on the presence of foreign submarines in the area at the time of the accident.
Last week, the British navy and the Pentagon said their submarines were not in the immediate area of the accident at the time, but Sergeyev pointed out Monday that "they told us if (their submarine had been there) they would never acknowledge it."
Earlier Monday, Britain's Defense Ministry swiftly responded to the implied accusation that a British submarine was involved in the Kursk accident, dismissing the latest report that a fragment of railing from a foreign submarine's conning tower was found on the seabed 1,100 feet from the Kursk's wreck in "categorical terms" and challenging Russia to produce proof that any part allegedly found on the seabed near the sunken Russian sub belongs to a British submarine.
---
Putin declares national day of mourning for Kursk crew
CBC News
WebPosted Tue Aug 22
http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/08/22/kursk000822
MURMANSK, RUSSIA - Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday will be a national day of mourning for the 118 sailors who died in the submarine Kursk. Putin will visit the Northern Fleet base of Severomorsk to meet with the families of the dead sailors.
On Monday, the news came that all 118 sailors on board the nuclear sub were dead. It sank after a catastrophic explosion on Aug. 12.
Several hundred family members are at the naval base where the doomed Kursk began its last mission.
They want to go to the site where the sub went down during a training exercise.
Criticism of Putin and the Russian navy has been strong both within Russia and in the international community.
Many are angry Putin stayed on vacation during most of the crisis and cannot understand why it took so long for the Russians to ask for foreign help.
In the Vremya MN newspaper, one headline read, "The reputation of the Russian leadership is lying on the bottom of the Barents Sea."
The Novye Izvestia headline reads, "Nine days of national shame."
Repeated attempts by the Russian navy to reach the submarine failed. Finally, on the weekend, Norwegian deep sea divers made it to the crumpled wreck and discovered the escape hatch in the hull was intact.
On Monday they forced their way into the hatch but it was too late - there were no signs any of the 118 men had survived beyond a couple of days. Most probably died in the initial explosion.
For the Russian nation, which had closely watched developments over the past week, it was a bitter discovery.
"Forgive me for not saving your sailors," the commander of the Northern Fleet, Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, said in a statement broadcast on Russian TV. The crew of the Kursk he said, was not to blame for the accident.
Prime Minister Chretien has sent Canada's condolences to the families of the crew members. Canadians, he said, "are deeply saddened at the news none of the crew is left alive."
The Norwegian navy has been asked to help retrieve the bodies of the sailors. Norwegian officials said they were considering the request.
An investigation is now under way to try to discover what happened to send the Kursk, one of the Russian fleet's most advanced submarines, and her crew to their deaths.
---
Sub aftermath igniting Russians The ability of foreign teams to achieve what the military couldn't adds to public ire.
Christian Science Monitor
TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2000
Fred Weir (fweir@online.ru) Special to The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/08/22/fp1s1-csm.shtml
MOSCOW, Among military and government officials, all the old defensive habits came back. But the tragedy of the submarine Kursk has exposed a new Russian political culture, one where public opinion - nudged by an increasingly independent media - is emerging as a potent political force. Moreover, the culture is gaining so much momentum that it is likely here to stay.
The burning question on the streets of Moscow now, for example, is why Norwegian divers were able to pry open a hatch of the sunken submarine in one day, when Russia couldn't do it in a week.
Until last week, the story out of Russia depicted a vigorous, telegenic young President Vladimir Putin adroitly manipulating his public image and successfully muting media criticism. But that began to change with bewildering speed after the Kursk, a giant nuclear attack submarine with 118 sailors on board, sank in the Barents Sea 10 days ago. All of the crew is now confirmed dead.
The huge public backlash, prodded by reports on the Internet and radio, forced the government to change its position. For the first time ever, the Northern Fleet held a "live" press conference. The government relented and accepted help from the West. And Mr. Putin finally cut short his vacation and returned to Moscow.
"Crisis is, by definition, an abnormal situation that brings out hidden qualities in people," says Jean Toschenko, chief editor of the Journal of Sociological Research, a publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences based in Moscow. "The authorities initially neglected public opinion as a factor, which is what they have always done. But within days, they suddenly found themselves sharply at odds with an aroused public that was no longer willing to readily believe what they were told," Mr. Toschenko adds.
In Soviet times, all information was controlled from above and the media's role was solely to convey the official viewpoint to the people, says Toschenko. Though some Soviet citizens may have had access to alternative information through the social grapevine or by listening to foreign shortwave-radio broadcasts, there was no feedback mechanism by which informed public opinion could influence the country's political leaders.
That seemed to change after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the media became at least partly independent. "Actually there has been little change, due to the financial dependence, corruption, and habitual subservience of the Russian press," says Alexei Simonov, director of the Glasnost Foundation, a private media watchdog group in Moscow. "But under conditions of cataclysm, suddenly the people are no longer passive. They demand information, and journalists remember their role is to provide it."
Public demands action
As the crisis began, the old habits of Russian officialdom were on full parade. "It's as if we were back in 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded," says Mr. Simonov. "They delayed reporting the news for days, then they told piles of lies. They blamed the weather, foreign submarines, everything but themselves for the bungled rescue operation. For five days they refused to accept any foreign assistance at all."
But this time something was different. A groundswell of public anger at the Navy's refusal to accept foreign aid in the race to reach the trapped Kursk was breaking through all barriers by mid-week.
TOP STORY: Soldiers read about the Kursk in a Moscow tabloid. MIKHAIL METZEL/AP
Some first appeared from directions that are totally new for Russia, such as the Internet and snap telephone opinion polls.
"I cannot comprehend our government's refusal to accept help from outside," wrote a woman named Yevgenia on a much-frequented Russian Web site last week, one of hundreds of similar comments. "Who cares about the military secrets, when the lives of people are at stake?"
A telephone poll conducted by the independent Ekho Moskvi radio station last Tuesday night found that 85 percent of respondents thought it was wrong to turn down foreign help. On Wednesday, the Russian government reversed itself and invited British and Norwegian rescue teams to the disaster site.
By week's end the mainstream media, which had begun by tamely relaying official statements, was loudly reflecting public dissatisfaction with the Navy's handling of the rescue operation.
And the authorities were starting to listen.
Igor Zhivilyuk is a military expert with Polyarnaya Pravda, a leading paper in Murmansk, the Russian city closest to the disaster zone. Mr. Zhivilyuk heads the paper's team of journalists working on the Kursk situation today, but recalls that he covered the Barents Sea sinking of another Soviet nuclear submarine, the Komsomolets, 11 years ago.
"In 1989, we were not allowed to write a single word about the catastrophe that was not passed through censors," he says. "Several days after the fact we published a bare announcement, with no details, and considered that very advanced journalism at the time."
When the Kursk went down, officials of the Russian Northern Fleet reacted exactly the same way, he says. "But then things changed. I'm pleased to tell you that last Friday the Northern Fleet held its first press conference in history. The admirals didn't look happy to do it, but it's clear that they were forced. Somehow the voices of the families, of concerned Russians, got through to them. It may be only temporary, but it's a big victory."
Historic broadcast
The Northern Fleet also was compelled to accept a single television crew - from the state-owned RTR network - to broadcast live reports on the unfolding rescue effort from the deck of the Peter the Great, the fleet's flagship. "That's another historic first," says Zhivilyuk.
The media has taken up the public case on another issue related to the disaster: President Putin's failure to break off his vacation at a subtropical Black Sea resort to handle the crisis.
"People at first didn't blame the president," says Toschenko.
"But they began to wonder why Putin wasn't showing the same anxiety and concern as all other Russians. They wondered why he wasn't coming on TV to inform about the situation. And for the first time, their anger started to be reflected in the press."
By yesterday, some newspapers were going beyond all previous limits to attack the president. "If the Kursk had sunk in the Black Sea, where would Putin have spent his vacation?" ran a headline in Moskovsky Komsomolets, Moscow's most popular daily.
"Now people are even talking about impeaching Putin," says Vladimir Petukhov, an analyst with the Institute of Social and National Problems, an independent Moscow think tank. "Although we have no scientific opinion surveys yet, I'm sure the Kursk affair has destroyed Putin's ratings. I'm not sure this sudden shift is good or healthy for society, but it is undeniably a reaction to the past."
Is the new dynamic here to stay? "I believe things have changed in the makeup of our society over the past 10 years, and these changes asserted themselves in this painful situation," says Zhivilyuk. "The authorities know they no longer have the option of remaining silent. And although they don't quite tell the truth, we actually have a dialogue with them. We must build on this, and try to make it permanent."
The URL for this page is: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/08/22/fp1s1-csm.shtml
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Raising the Kursk Divers say it's too dangerous to enter the Kursk
BBC
Tuesday, 22 August, 2000
By BBC News Online
Kate Goldberg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_891000/891156.stm
Russia must now decide what to do with the ruins of its devastated nuclear submarine, the Kursk, lying at the bottom of the Barents Sea.
The options are costly and complicated. It could take two to three weeks just to plan the operation, and is likely to cost in excess of $100m.
If they proceed too hastily, it could go disastrously wrong, leaking radioactive material into the sea.
The bodies of the 118 crew have not yet been recovered, and Norwegian divers say it is too dangerous to go into the submarine.
Appeal for help
Options for salvaging the vessel - and recovering the bodies - include dragging the submarine to shallower waters, refloating it, or sealing it off to prevent radioactive leaks.
Moscow is seeking international help in funding the operation.
"No single country on its own can handle such an operation," said Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who has been put in charge of the vessel's future.
With winter fast approaching, some experts say the vessel must be moved within the next month, before bad weather sets in.
However, others argue that it would be better to wait until next summer, when more information is available.
It normally takes at least three months for a submarine's nuclear reactors to cool down, and attempts to move the vessel too early could crack the hull, releasing radioactive matter, according to Nils Bohmer of the Bellona Foundation.
"It's vital to ascertain the condition of the reactors first," he told BBC News Online.
"I'm very afraid of any decision being taken to move the vessel when so little information is available."
The options
The Rubin research centre in Saint Petersburg, which developed the Kursk, is already studying ways of salvaging the submarine.
Refloat: The 155-metre vessel could be lifted with the help of cables attached to platforms or by giant air cushions, and then towed back to base, according to Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov.
Another radical option being considered is to strap balloons made of a special hi-tech fibre along the hull, and pump them with enough air to raise the estimated 25,000 tonne vessel to the surface.
The relatively shallow depths - of just over 100 meters - at which the Kursk is lying make the option of refloating the submarine fairly feasible, according to Paul Beaver of Jane's Information Group.
Chop up: If the Kursk is too damaged to stay intact, experts say the wreckage could be sawn into pieces to be hoisted individually. Or the reactor compartment alone could be lifted out - although this would again require special, very expensive, equipment.
Move to shallow waters: Alternatively, it could be dragged to shallower waters. This may be a short-term option used to recover the bodies before winter. However, the journey could still be dangerous.
Seal off reactors and leave: Some experts are saying that the safest option would be to hermetically seal the submarine, preventing radioactive leakage. The wreckage could then be left at the bottom of the sea.
The Russians have developed a special biological gel, which was used when the Soviet submarine, the Komsomolets, sank in 1989. The gel is said to block all cracks, and has the advantage of being lighter than conventional materials. Russian specialists claim that this material works effectively for 500 years. However, it is also very expensive.
Marine graves
The Kursk is the sixth nuclear submarine to sink since the 1960s.
Two of the sunken submarines have been American, the other three Russian - buried at depths of up to 4,800 metres.
Most of them have been left on the seabed because of the huge expense of lifting them.
---
Putin pays tribute to sub crew Britain's Commodore David Russell remembers the dead
BBC
Tuesday, 22 August, 2000, 16:01 GMT 17:01 UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_891000/891509.stm
Russian President Vladimir Putin is visiting the headquarters of the Northern Fleet at Severomorsk to pay tribute to the 118 sailors who died on the sunken Kursk submarine.
He is expected to meet some of the bereaved families and visit the scene of the accident to lay a wreath on the waves of the Barents Sea.
Mr Putin has already decreed Wednesday a day of national mourning for the crew of the Kursk.
On Monday, the government acknowledged that all 118 crew members on board the submarine, which sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea on 12 August, were dead.
Russian and Norwegian experts have now begun a thorough examination of the wreck.
The troubled nine-day rescue operation ended after Norwegian-led divers forced open the submarine's rear escape hatch and found that the whole of the vessel was flooded.
Angry families Correspondents say President Putin can expect an angry reception if he meets the families of the crew.
More than 500 people mourning the loss of their sons, husbands and friends have travelled from all over Russia to Severomorsk and the naval base of Vidyayevo.
In Murmansk, a group of relatives speaking to the BBC attacked Mr Putin's handling of the crisis, and threatened to tear Mr Putin to shreds if they saw him.
Announcing the day of mourning, Mr Putin's decree spoke of his grief over the loss of the submarine's crew and offered condolences to their families and relatives.
The Russian flag is to be flown at half-mast throughout the country, while television and radio stations have been asked to drop entertainment shows from their schedules.
Correspondents say the announcement could be a move by the Russian president to divert some of the public criticism he and his government are facing.
Mr Putin has come under fire from the press for remaining on holiday as the disaster unfolded, while Russians blame the country's leadership for being too slow to seek international help to save the men.
His deputy Prime Minister, Ilya Klebanov, has hit back at the Russian media for its attacks on the way the disaster was handled.
He said the navy had done all it could to save the crew, adding it was shocking that some journalists had tried to make cheap sensationalism out of the tragedy.
Scouring the seabed
A Norwegian-led team of divers is helping with the Kursk inquiry, which will initially focus on examining the seabed around the wreck.
A small robot will help collect samples from inside the vessel which will be tested for any signs of radioactivity leaking from the sub's reactors.
The team has also been asked to help recover the bodies of the crew, but the company supplying the team says such an operation would be dangerous and could take weeks.
One possibility being discussed is to drag the sub into shallower waters.
The cause of the disaster is still unclear.
But Norway's military has rejected Russian suggestions that there had been a collision.
"There may have been an explosion in one of the weapons systems aboard, for example a torpedo, which then triggered a bigger explosion two minutes later," armed forces spokesman Brigadier Kjell Grandhagen said.
---
Rescuers find no survivors on sub Norwegian and British divers say the Kursk is completely flooded, and Moscow admits it can't handle salvage efforts
Oregon Live
Tuesday, August 22, 2000
By Richard Boudreaux and Robyn Dixon of the LA Times
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/news/oregonian/00/08/wr_32subma22.frame
MOSCOW -- Russia gave up its 10-day search for survivors in a sunken submarine Monday after divers found the vessel flooded.
The disaster left the government chastened by charges of ineptitude as it turned to the tasks of retrieving 118 seamen's bodies and the warship's twin nuclear reactors.
"Our worst fears are confirmed," Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of Russia's Northern Fleet, announced to a nation still stunned by its deadliest peacetime naval disaster. "All compartments of the submarine are flooded with water. None of the crew is still alive."
"Mothers, forgive me for not bringing back your sons," Adm. Vyacheslav Popov, the fleet commander, said in an emotion-choked voice on national television from a missile cruiser in the Barents Sea.
Three hundred fifty feet below, Norwegian and British divers had pried open and entered the rear escape hatch of the Kursk at 7:45 a.m., achieving in 24 hours what the Russians navy had failed to do in the week after a mysterious explosion ripped the submarine open Aug. 12.
After hearing the divers' confirmation of stem-to-stern flooding, Russia asked Norway to take charge of extracting the bodies from their Arctic tomb. The Russian navy has neither the diving equipment nor the expertise to do so.
Russian officials also said they would seek foreign funds to help raise the mangled 500-foot Oscar II-class sub, which went down during Northern Fleet maneuvers with some of the navy's most advanced weapons and equipment on board.
Marshal Igor Sergeyev, Russia's defense minister, defended the military's failure to rescue the crew by saying the armed forces of the once powerful Soviet empire had been "robbed and stripped" in the last decade and were operating on half the budget they required.
He said he did not exclude the possibility that the military might have made some mistakes in the rescue drama. But "no principle mistakes were made," he insisted, and he argued that foreign assistance might not have helped to save the crew.
Russians, especially victims' relatives, have been anguished over sluggish rescue work, repeated lies by officials about the effort, inadequate rescue equipment, and President Vladimir Putin's slowness to interrupt his vacation or call for foreign help.
The speaker of Parliament's upper house called Monday for a parliamentary investigation into the disaster and the state of Russia's armed forces.
"The fog that was built up around this tragedy must be dissolved," said Sergei Ivanenko, another member of Parliament. "Society should know the answer to the one question that stands before it: 'Was everything done to save people?' "
Putin ordered his government to triple the amount of aid given to each dead sailor's family, to the equivalent of $450. He also ordered teams of psychologists to offer grief counseling.
And his defense minister, Igor D. Sergeyev, went on television to defend efforts by 3,000 Russian sailors to save the crew while acknowledging some unspecified mistakes.
Entering the vessel will become an exercise to salvage bodies, avoid nuclear contamination of the sea and perhaps clear up the mystery of what sent it to the bottom.
Amid an emotional debate on the wisdom of diving for the bodies, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov asked Norwegian officials Monday to organize such an attempt.
The Norwegian government said it would bear the multimillion-dollar cost -- as long as Stolt Offshore, the Norwegian oil company whose British and Norwegian rescue divers reached the sub, accepts the task. Julian Thompson, a company spokesman, said the request was being studied.
"Safety is our overriding consideration," Thompson said. "There would be a lot of debris in the sub from the explosions, along with nuclear reactors and ammunition about which we have no detail. It would take weeks of planning to make a recovery mission safe."
Russian officials have suggested a precarious alternative -- lifting the submarine with giant pontoons and dragging it with surface ships to shallower waters for easier access.
Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov gave no target figure; some specialists say the task would cost at least $100 million.
One risk of raising the sub would be damage to the twin nuclear reactors that powered the vessel and, according to the navy, shut down automatically when the accident occurred. One risk of not raising the sub would be corrosion of pipes in the reactors' cooling mechanisms, which might set off a radiation leak.
Various theories have been offered about the cause of the sinking.
The official armed forces newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda speculated on its Web site Friday that a liquid fuel cartridge may have exploded when the sub's crew tried to fire a torpedo.
The paper said the Kursk's torpedo bay may have been carrying a new model of liquid fuel apparatus that sailors have criticized as dangerous to store and handle.
A team led by Klebanov announced Saturday that the Kursk apparently hit an object near the surface -- possibly a mine or a ship weighing 8,000 tons or more, and then plunged to the bottom and exploded.
He said the object could have been a foreign submarine, either British or American. Two U.S. subs and a British one were monitoring the Russian naval exercise from an undisclosed distance when the Kursk sank.
---
Submarine Mission Shifts to Retrieving Bodies
Yahoo News
Tuesday, August 22, 2000
COMBINED NEWS SERVICES
http://www.sltrib.com/08222000/nation_w/14744.htm
MOSCOW -- Russia gave up its ill-fated 10-day search for survivors in a sunken submarine Monday after divers found the vessel flooded. The tragedy left the government chastened by charges of ineptitude as it turned to the task of retrieving 118 seamen's bodies and the warship's twin nuclear reactors.
"Our worst fears are confirmed," Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of Russia's Northern Fleet, announced to a nation still stunned by its deadliest peacetime naval disaster. "All compartments of the submarine are flooded with water. None of the crew is still alive."
"Mothers, forgive me for not bringing back your sons," Adm. Vyacheslav Popov, the fleet commander, said in an emotion-choked voice on national television from a missile cruiser in the Barents Sea.
Expert divers from Norway, a NATO member, accomplished Monday what Russian rescue teams could not. Within 24 hours of starting work, they pried open an escape hatch. They then peered into one of the three compartments where Russian officials had hoped survivors might be hanging on against the longest of odds.
The divers found water instead. They found a body. And they found an end to a vigil that Russia had endured since word came of an Aug. 12 accident aboard the Kursk.
After hearing the divers' confirmation of stem-to-stern flooding, Russia asked Norway to take charge of extracting the bodies from their Arctic tomb 350 feet below the surface. The Russian navy has neither the diving equipment nor the expertise to do so.
Russian officials also said they would seek foreign funds to help raise the mangled 500-foot Oscar II-class sub, which went down during Northern Fleet maneuvers with some of the navy's most advanced weapons and equipment on board.
Russians -- especially victims' relatives -- have been in anguish over sluggish rescue work, repeated lies by officials about the effort, inadequate rescue equipment and President Vladimir Putin's slowness to interrupt his vacation or call for foreign help.
The relative speed with which the Norwegians gained access to the Kursk deepened the Russian people's bitterness about their own rescue mission.
"The Norwegians have done in a matter of hours what Russian rescue teams could not do in a week," a television correspondent in Murmansk said in opening his national news broadcast.
The speaker of Parliament's upper house called Monday for a parliamentary investigation into the disaster and the state of Russia's impoverished armed forces.
"The fog that was built up around this tragedy must be dissolved," said Sergei Ivanenko, another member of Parliament. "Society should know the answer to the one question that stands before it: 'Was everything done to save people?'"
Putin ordered his government to triple the amount of aid given to each dead sailor's family, to the equivalent of $450. He also ordered up teams of psychologists to offer grief counseling.
And his defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, went on television to defend efforts by 3,000 Russian sailors to save the crew, while acknowledging some unspecified mistakes.
Entering the vessel will now become an imperative exercise to salvage bodies, avoid nuclear contamination of the sea and perhaps clear up the mysteries of what sent it to the bottom. Moscow is seeking international help in funding the operation, expected to cost at least $100 million.
Amid an emotional debate on the wisdom of diving for the bodies, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov asked Norwegian officials Monday to organize such an attempt.
Julian Thompson, a spokesman for the Norwegian oil company whose British and Norwegian rescue divers reached the sub, said the request was being studied.
"Safety is our overriding consideration," Thompson said. "There would be a lot of debris in the sub from the explosions, along with nuclear reactors and ammunition about which we have no detail. It would take weeks of planning to make a recovery mission safe."
Russian officials have suggested a precarious alternative -- lifting the submarine with giant pontoons and dragging it with surface ships to shallower waters for easier access.
One risk of raising the sub would be damage to the twin nuclear reactors that powered the vessel and, according to the navy, shut down automatically when the accident occurred. One risk of not raising the sub would be corrosion of pipes in the reactors' cooling mechanisms, which might set off a radiation leak.
Various theories have been offered about the cause of the sinking.
The official armed forces newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda speculated on its Web site Friday that a liquid fuel cartridge may have exploded when the sub's crew tried to fire a torpedo. The paper said the Kursk's torpedo bay may have been carrying a new model of liquid fuel apparatus that sailors have criticized as dangerous to store and handle.
A team led by Klebanov announced Saturday that the Kursk apparently hit an object near the surface -- possibly a mine or a ship weighing 8,000 tons or more, and then plunged to the bottom and exploded.
He said the object could have been a foreign submarine, either British or American. Two U.S. subs and a British one were monitoring the Russian naval exercise from an undisclosed distance when the Kursk sank.
---
Russians Suspicious of US in Sub
Yahoo News
Tuesday August 22 1:50 PM ET updated 6:59 AM ET Aug 23
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000822/wl/submarine_suspicions_1.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - Russia's initial suspicion of a sinister American role in the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk is rooted in distrust of U.S. motives - distrust so firmly held that Russian officials still press for answers in the sinking of a Soviet sub in 1968.
Russian officials long have suspected that the Soviet sub K-129 was struck by an American submarine, the USS Swordfish. But the U.S. Navy says the Soviet vessel, armed with nuclear missiles and with a crew of 98, suffered a catastrophic internal explosion when it sank in the central Pacific on March 11, 1968.
As recently as last fall, Russian government officials complained that Washington was covering up its involvement. One accused the Americans of acting like a ``criminal that had been caught and now claimed that guilt must be proved,'' according to the notes of a U.S. participant in a November 1999 meeting on the topic.
The case is so sensitive that at least two CIA directors - Robert Gates and James Woolsey - met with Boris Yeltsin while he was the Russian president to review what the American spy agency knew about the sub loss.
In the case of the Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12 during a Russian naval exercise, the Pentagon insists that no American ships were involved, although U.S. officials have acknowledged that two U.S. submarines were close enough to record the sound of enormous explosions aboard the Kursk.
While presenting no hard evidence, the Russian military command has insisted from the start that the most likely reason for the loss of the Kursk and its 118-man crew was a collision with an American or British submarine that survived and escaped. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev went on television to air the theory, and Russian officers claimed fragments of a foreign submarine were found near the Kursk.
``The military still sees the West as the Cold War enemy,'' said Alexander Pikayev, a military analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Noting the lingering suspicions, Defense Secretary William Cohen felt compelled Monday to say ``there were no American ships involved'' in the tragedy.
That is what the Pentagon and the CIA have told the Russians repeatedly regarding the 1968 submarine sinking in the Pacific, but Moscow continues to insist that Washington is hiding its involvement.
When the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POWs and missing servicemen met last November, a senior Russian representative said more than 90 families of the lost crew of the sunken sub - known in Russia as the K-129 but classified by NATO as a Golf II - are waiting for information on their loved ones' remains.
The Russians believe not only that a U.S. submarine - the USS Swordfish, based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii - collided with the K-129, causing it to sink, but also that secret U.S. salvage operations in 1968 and 1974 removed remains of crew members and highly sensitive equipment that went down with the sub - possibly including nuclear warheads.
Russian suspicions about the Swordfish are based on records indicating it underwent nighttime repair of a bent periscope at Yokosuka, Japan, on March 17 - six days after the K-129 sank. The U.S. explanation is that the Swordfish collided with an ice pack and was 2,000 miles away from the Russian sub when it sank.
Moscow has requested the Swordfish's deck logs, to trace its movements, but the Pentagon has refused. The Swordfish apparently had a hand in some highly sensitive operations before and after the K-129 incident. Navy records show that in 1965 it was awarded a Navy Unit Commendation for ``special operations'' conducted in the western Pacific in the fall of 1963 and 1964 and the spring and summer of 1965.
The United States denies any involvement in the K-129 sinking, although it has acknowledged that it salvaged some parts of the sunken sub. U.S. officials provided the Russian government with a videotape of a burial-at-sea ceremony for six crew members whose remains were recovered when the CIA-financed Glomar Explorer salvage ship recovered parts of the submarine in 1974.
Norman Kass, the executive director of the U.S. side of the joint commission, said Tuesday that all recovered personal effects of the Russian crew have already been provided, and nothing more can be done.
``We're at an impasse,'' he said.
---
Anger Over Sub Turns Toward Gov't
Yahoo News
Tuesday August 22 2:16 PM ET updated 6:59 AM ET Aug 23
By ANGELA CHARLTON, Associated Press Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000822/ts/russia_nuclear_submarine_131.html
MOSCOW (AP) - President Vladimir Putin flew to an Arctic naval base Tuesday to console the families of 118 sailors killed in a submarine accident, but the gesture barely alleviated the nation's crushing grief and anger at the bungled rescue effort.
Former submariners wept in the streets as Russia mourned with striking openness over the loss of the Kursk, which suffered a massive explosion and sank to the Barents Sea floor Aug. 12. Candles were lit in Russian Orthodox churches, and condolences poured in from around the world.
Putin, dressed all in black, was greeted in Murmansk by somber, exhausted navy officials, then visited a nearby area where 400 relatives of the sailors are quartered. The families heard almost no official information about the rescue operation, relying on television for even the most basic news - including the announcement Monday that their sons and husbands were dead.
Putin - who has been sharply criticized for taking so long to show concern for the crew - was expected to go later to the ship that led the rescue effort and throw a wreath into the sea where the sailors are entombed in their wrecked submarine, 350 feet below.
Dazed relatives demanded to be taken the site, too. The navy was considering the plea.
Emma Yevdokimova, whose son Oleg was a cook on the Kursk, wept uncontrollably as she recalled how he helped her prepare the holiday dinner last New Year's Eve.
``When they offered him to join the Kursk, he was so glad,'' she said on Russia's RTR television. ``He was so good. He still is,'' she said, collapsing into tears as she added, ``I still don't believe that he drowned.''
Russians have assailed Putin for not canceling a vacation more quickly when the sub sank and the military for resisting foreign help.
Trying to divert the public anger, the besieged military has tried to lay blame on its former Cold War enemies - claiming the Kursk collided with a Western sub. The United States and Britain have denied having any vessels nearby and Norwegian divers who saw the wreck said there was no sign of a collision.
The top brass has a lot to explain. The media has blasted them for trying to hush up the disaster, then lying about it. Public anger increased when Norwegian divers quickly succeeded in opening the hatch Monday, after days of failed attempts by Russian rescue capsules to reach the submarine. It was the Norwegians who determined there were no survivors.
The world joined in Russia's grieving. British sailors and rescuers who had come to help in the operation but were never needed held a brief memorial service for the crew, throwing a small bouquet of flowers into the sea as they left the site of the tragedy.
``It is very sad. I think that is the feeling of the entire crew,'' said Commodore David Russell, commander of the British rescue team. ``Our mission was to help the Russians save lives, but I think it proved to be beyond everyone's capabilities.''
The Norwegian divers left the region later Tuesday. The Russian Navy was negotiating with the Norwegian diving company for help lifting the submarine and retrieving the bodies.
The flooded submarine weighs about 25,000 tons, and any operation to move it would take weeks or months and be extremely expensive. Removing the bodies would also be difficult, as many are probably badly damaged and would be difficult to pull through the ship's narrow hatches.
A former commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Eduard Baltin, said Tuesday that engineers wouldn't raise the boat until next spring because the weather in the region is too harsh by September.
There is also concern about the ship's two nuclear reactors. The Norwegians recorded normal radiation levels around the submarine, though it was unclear whether the reactors had suffered any damage.
Putin declared Wednesday a national day of mourning. Television stations repeatedly displayed the names of the dead crewmen and showed old footage of the Kursk sailing out of port, its crew at attention on the deck. Film was accompanied by classical music and mournful folk ballads.
Russian newspapers said everything the government did was too late.
``It's time for questions,'' the daily Izvestia wrote in a lead editorial. ``What if? What if they hadn't lied to us? What if they'd invited foreigners without waiting for five days? What if we'd had the proper technology? It's too late.''
It remained unclear what caused the explosion in the torpedo compartment in the front of the submarine that crumpled the ship. The government's collision theory is that the Kursk ran into a Western sub, probably U.S. or British, that survived and escaped.
Analysts said finger-pointing at the West showed a mindset from Soviet times that remains in the military's upper echelons, where top commanders are now fighting to save their jobs.
``It's entirely a propaganda effort,'' said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst. The top brass ``want to get out of the line of fire and direct it at their old enemy.''
Putin said that he wasn't going to dismiss top commanders over the Kursk, but the rising tide of public criticism could push him to order shakeups.
``Putin will only be able to prevent erosion of his own popularity by telling the truth and finding real culprits among the military,'' said Alexander Pikayev, a military analyst with the Carnegie Endowment.
---
Russia admits errors in deadly sub crisis
Shake-up likely for the military
Miami Herald
Tuesday, August 22, 2000, in the Miami Herald
BY DAVE MONTGOMERY AND BRIAN BONNER Herald World Staff
http://www.herald.com/content/today/news/world/digdocs/059441.htm
MOSCOW -- As Russia grimly accepted the fact that all 118 crew members of the nuclear submarine Kursk are dead, military officials admitted Monday that their rescue attempt had been flawed.
``Forgive me for not saving your sailors,'' the commander of the Northern Fleet, Adm. Vyacheslav Popov, said to victims' wives and mothers in a televised statement. He said the crew was not to blame for the Kursk's sinking.
A dejected and emotional Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev expressed condolences to the sailors' families in a Monday night interview on Russia's largest network, ORT.
``It's possible that we made mistakes,'' Sergeyev said, while complaining that meager funding had left the navy short of divers and modern rescue equipment.
``Our country has been robbed and shredded for the past several years, and the armed forces receive less than 50 percent of what the budget promises,'' he said.
HELP RESISTED
The Russian government resisted international help for days, even as its rescue capsules repeatedly failed to open the Kursk's damaged escape hatch.
The tragedy could erode President Vladimir Putin's political stature and shake up the top levels of Russia's navy.
The loss has provoked the biggest outpouring of anger in years as Russians assailed their leadership with recriminations that would have been unthinkable during the Soviet era.
Putin, who recently fired six top generals, is expected to try to deflect some of the wrath against him by ordering a shake-up of the navy. Military analysts believe that Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, chief of the navy and a friend of Putin's, and Popov are in danger of losing their jobs.
The Kursk affair also could hasten the ouster of Sergeyev, who has reportedly fallen out of favor with Putin in an internal military dispute over whether Russia's nuclear or conventional forces should get priority in the budget.
NINE-DAY SAGA
After capturing the world's attention, the nine-day saga of the stricken submarine ended officially Monday as Norwegian divers pried open an inner hatch and concluded that the submarine was filled with water and that all its crew members were dead. They also discovered the body of one of the sailors.
``Our worst expectations are confirmed,'' said Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of Russia's Northern Fleet. ``All sections of the submarine are totally flooded and not a single member of the crew remains alive.''
The 505-foot-long vessel, one of the newest subs in the Russian navy, sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea during naval exercises on Aug. 12.
ON SEA BOTTOM
The Russian Navy has asked Norway's help in removing the bodies and raising the sub, now lying 351 feet below the surface. A British LR5 mini-sub which arrived Saturday never participated in the rescue effort.
Norway environmental experts said there has been no radiation leakage but warned that raising the sub could risk damaging its two large nuclear reactors. ``A crack could expose the nuclear core'' and dump radiation into one of the world's most pristine fishing areas, said Thomas Nilsen of the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental group.
---
Grieving Russians turn gaze to Putin
San Jose Mercury News
Tuesday, August 22, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News
BY DAVE MONTGOMERY AND BRIAN BONNER Mercury News Moscow Bureau
http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/front/docs/russ-sub22.htm
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/4/news/docs/030261.htm
MOSCOW -- Russia on Monday grimly accepted the fact that all 118 crew members of the nuclear missile submarine Kursk are dead in a tragedy that could erode President Vladimir Putin's political stature and shake up the top levels of Russia's navy.
After capturing the world's attention, the nine-day saga of the stricken submarine ended officially Monday as Norwegian divers pried open an inner hatch and concluded that the submarine was filled with water and all its crew members were dead. They also discovered the body of one of the sailors.
It was the world's second-worst nuclear sub disaster and the biggest peacetime catastrophe in the history of the Russian navy. In 1963, all 129 crew members died aboard the USS Thresher, which went down near Boston.
``Our worst expectations are confirmed,'' said Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of Russia's Northern Fleet. ``All sections of the submarine are totally flooded, and not a single member of the crew remains alive.''
``Forgive the children. Forgive your sons. And forgive me for not bringing back your boys,'' said the Northern Fleet commander, Adm. Vyacheslav Popov.
Russia is a nation in mourning. Grieving families gathered in Murmansk to be near the sub's home port for the final vigil as television screens across the country displayed the names of the dead, a roster that ranged from teenage draftees to career officers.
The loss has provoked the biggest outpouring of anger in years as Russians assailed their leadership with recriminations that would have been unthinkable during the Soviet era. Putin, who before the incident had soaring popularity ratings, now is widely vilified for his response to the disaster.
``By all means, the main blame for most people will ultimately come to rest on Putin's shoulders,'' said Alan Rousso, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center.
``The country can understand -- though not excuse -- a bunch of junior and senior officers for staring at their feet when there was trouble . . . but ultimately they'll hold Putin responsible for the way this happened.''
Behavior questioned
Putin has drawn stinging criticism for staying on vacation at the Black Sea for several days during the disaster and waiting four days to call in foreign assistance after Russian rescue efforts failed.
Although the navy's reports indicated that most of the crew apparently died during the opening minutes of the disaster, the delay in seeking foreign help seemed to many Russians a callous display of pride at the expense of the crew members. It also widely was assumed that Russia didn't want prying foreign eyes to see the Kursk's technology.
Putin responded to the criticism by returning to Moscow to supervise the handling of the disaster and by offering public condolences to the families.
But Rousso and other analysts say Putin has sustained lasting political damage that could ultimately weaken his control over parliament and make him more vulnerable to adversaries.
``It's very clear that his popularity is fading,'' said Yegeny Volk, the Moscow analyst for the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
``His image of strength is challenged now and it will be very difficult for him to restore his high rating in the polls.''
Putin, who recently fired six top generals, is expected to try to deflect some of the wrath against him by ordering a shake-up of the navy. Military analysts believe that Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, chief of the navy and a friend of Putin's, and Popov, the Northern Fleet commander, are in danger of losing their jobs.
The Kursk affair also could hasten the ouster of Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, who has reportedly fallen out of favor with Putin in an internal military dispute over whether Russia's nuclear or conventional forces should get priority in the budget.
The government's response throughout the ordeal was riddled with conflicting reports that struck many Russians as an old-fashioned Soviet-style disinformation campaign. It also was widely compared to the secrecy that shrouded the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Ukraine, under then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
``Ninety percent of Russians are in shock,'' said State Duma chairman Gennady Seleznyov.
``Everybody would like to know the whole truth, and the state of the armed forces must be looked into.''
The navy said the sub sustained an explosion at a depth of about 50 feet Aug. 12 and then crashed to the sea floor, igniting a much larger blast that registered the force of a small earthquake.
At least three and possibly more of the sub's 24 torpedoes exploded on impact, the navy said, ripping a gash in the double-thick hull and flooding the sub with seawater.
Report of foreign sub
Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov has said the initial explosion may have been caused by a collision with a foreign submarine. And Interfax, quoting a Moscow military source, reported Monday that a barrier from the tower of a foreign sub was found on the seafloor about a 1,000 feet from the Kursk.
The submarine was ``most likely British,'' the news agency reported, but the British military emphatically denied that a British submarine was in the area.
The 505-foot-long Kursk, one of the largest and newest subs in the Russian navy, sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea during naval exercises.
After repeated unsuccessful rescue operations in the storm-tossed Arctic waters, naval officials acknowledged Saturday that there was virtually no hope of finding survivors.
The Russian navy has asked Norway's help in removing the bodies and in raising the sub, now 350 feet below the surface.
Klebanov said the government would seek foreign funding to raise the Kursk and draw up plans within weeks. He gave no target figure; some specialists say the task would cost at least $100 million.
A British LR5 mini-sub that arrived Saturday never participated in the rescue effort and was sent home.
Norway environmental experts said there has been no radiation leakage from the nuclear sub but warned that raising it could damage its two large nuclear reactors.
``A crack could expose the nuclear core'' and dump radiation into one of the world's most pristine fishing areas, said Thomas Nilsen of the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental group.
Five other nuclear submarines, two American and three Russian, have sunk since 1963, and all were left on the seafloor.
Nilsen said regular monitoring of those submarines has shown no dangerous radiation leakage, but the long-term consequences over decades are difficult to predict.
``It depends on the damage to the sub and the corrosion process,'' he said.
Russia has given no indication of how it would raise the sub.
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Why? Why? Relatives of Sub Crewmen Ask
Washington Post
Tuesday , August 22, 2000 ; A14
By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64842-2000Aug21.html
MURMANSK, Russia, Aug. 21 -- Flight 54 arrived here from Moscow today carrying 100 relatives of the crewmen who died in the sunken submarine Kursk. The trip had been mostly quiet until the aircraft landed at this Arctic city near the sub's base and taxied to waiting buses.
Then one passenger, a middle-aged woman in a flowered dress, said loudly that no one had prepared the group for the terrible conclusion to the nine-day crisis, which ended today with confirmation that all 118 men aboard the Kursk had died while official focus shifted to salvaging the vessel and the bodies aboard from the bottom of the Barents Sea.
"No one told us anything all week, and now we are here. Why?" the woman asked, her voice filling the plane. No one looked her way. Her daughter told her to calm down.
"Quiet? We are always quiet," she said more loudly. "We were quiet when our children were dying in Afghanistan, and now we are quiet here. I'm tired of being quiet."
She and the other relatives flew to Murmansk on a chartered plane to wait--maybe for the bodies of their sons and husbands and fathers, maybe just for information. They had heard, before they left Moscow, that all aboard the sunken sub were presumed dead.
In the anguished days since the sub went down following an explosion while it was on training maneuvers, the families have waited, gazing at television, listening to the whipsaw assessments of government officials about the fate of the crew.
One day, there were survivors, it was said. The next day, officials said oxygen and power lines had been connected to the Kursk. A day later, it turned out that report was false. The crew had oxygen for two more days, a top admiral said. Twenty-four hours later he said they had a three-day supply. A Russian admiral visiting NATO headquarters in Brussels was even more optimistic, saying the crew had a two-week supply.
Russia didn't need outside help to rescue survivors, President Vladimir Putin was told. Russia had better equipment than the Americans, a deputy prime minister said, but the navy actually did not bring its best rescue sub into action until the last days of the crisis. Six days into it, the government invited Norway and Britain to help.
Angry questions dominated the in-flight conversations. "How did such a thing happen? That's all I want to find out," said Anatoly Pavlov, whose son, Andrei, was a senior lieutenant aboard the Kursk. "I could try to be patient for a while," he added. "I had to show a strong face to the family."
But his daughter-in-law Irina, Andrei's wife--now widow--was enraged. "Why did they say all those things?"
As the plane took off from Moscow, a woman fainted. Helpers from the Emergencies Ministry took her pulse and gave her water. The plane had been chartered by the Sovneft Oil Co., which offered free seats to the families. Hard-up relatives in all parts of Russia had been begging for money to make the trip to Murmansk; navy pay is low, and regular flights were full.
"You know, my son liked the service," Pavlov said. "He said the Kursk was the best there was. There was a lot of trash in the navy, but not the Kursk. Why? Why?"
Two women sitting in front of Pavlov, including the one who spoke out when the plane arrived here, began to talk. The outspoken one made a throat-slitting gesture. The other said, "Yes, I think they killed our boys. Why?"
The plane landed and pulled up to buses that would take the families to Vidyaevo, a residential community attached to the Kursk's home base, Severomorsk. Anatoly Pavlov winced as the flight attendant ended her arrival announcement with the airborne cliche: "Have a nice stay."
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Norway Says Russian Sub Sunk by Explosion, Not Collision
New York Times
August 22, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/00/08/22/late/22cnd-russian-sub.html
OSLO, Aug 22 -- Norway's military said on Tuesday that the explosion of a torpedo or another Russian weapon probably sank the Kursk nuclear submarine 10 days ago, rejecting Russian suggestions that there had been a collision.
"We have no indication there was a collision with another vessel," armed forces spokesman Brigadier Kjell Grandhagen said. Norwegian divers had opened a hatch on the Kursk and found it flooded on Monday, confirming that all 118 members of its crew were dead.
"There may have been an explosion in one of the weapons systems aboard, for example a torpedo, which then triggered a bigger explosion two minutes later," Grandhagen said.
Russian officials have said that the Kursk might have collided with a foreign vessel. Grandhagen said it was impossible to rule out a mine as a possible cause of the first blast.
"This is domestic Russian propaganda," Rear Admiral Einar Skorgen, heading the Norwegian team of divers, told the daily Dagbladet of Russia's collision theory.
Norway's intelligence-gathering Marjata vessel, which had been in the Barents Sea 10 days ago to monitor a military exercise involving the Kursk, registered two explosions at the site of the sunken submarine on August 12 at about 0730 GMT.
An international array of seismic monitors coordinated from Norway also registered two explosions, the second equivalent to up to two tonnes of TNT, at that time.
ROBOT CAMERA FILMS INSIDE
A Norwegian-led team of divers was preparing to leave the Barents Sea for Norway on Tuesday after experts sent a remote-controlled video camera into the Kursk to film inside the flooded submarine overnight.
"The Seaway Eagle lowered a camera into the submarine. The results have been given to the Russians," armed forces spokesman Captain Erland Raanes said. None of the divers went inside the wreck after finding it flooded.
The film could help later efforts to raise bodies or salvage the wreck. A British team, which provided a mini-submarine for the operation, was leaving for Norway on Tuesday.
The divers, who worked on the seabed 108 metres (354 ft) down, were to start a five-day decompression in a special chamber aboard the Seaway Eagle before their bodies would be able to breathe normal air at normal pressures again.
The vessel's owner, Stolt Offshore (SCS.OL), has expressed willingness to accept a Russian request to help recover bodies from the submarine.
Divers say it would be too dangerous to squeeze into the Kursk via the existing narrow hatch.
"We've not yet received a formal request from Russia but we will treat it seriously when it comes," said Bente Baerheim, spokeswoman for Stolt. "It would take several weeks to organise."
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Putin to Fly to Navy Base to Mourn Sub Crew
New York Times
August 22, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/00/08/22/late/22cnd-putin-sub.html
MOSCOW, Aug. 22 -- Russian President Vladimir Putin will fly to the Northern Fleet base of Severomorsk on Tuesday to pay tribute to 118 sailors who died in a nuclear submarine accident, the Kremlin said.
A Kremlin spokesman said by telephone he could not say when exactly Putin would fly to the base.
Russian news agencies quoted Northern Fleet sources as saying Putin was expected to meet members of the dead sailors' families.
Around 500 relatives of the crew are seeking to visit the site of the disaster, which took place on August 12.
Putin has been strongly criticised at home and abroad for not breaking his holiday after the crisis broke and for being too slow in requesting foreign aid.
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British Minisub Heads Home as Hope Dies
New York Times
August 22, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/082200british-minisub-rts.html
LONDON, Tuesday, Aug. 22 -- A British rescue minisubmarine sent to help Russia's stricken Kursk nuclear submarine is on its way home after all hope of saving the 118 crew was abandoned, the Defense Ministry said today.
A ministry spokeswoman said the LR5 minisubmarine was being taken to Norway on board the Normand Pioneer ship and would be back in Britain toward the end of the month.
The state-of-the-art LR5 was part of a joint British and Norwegian mission which tried to help the Russians rescue the 118 crew members of the Kursk that sank more than a week ago in the Barents Sea.
But the LR5 was not needed after Norwegian divers found the Kursk had been completely flooded and that there were no survivors.
The British deputy prime minister, John Prescott, sent a message of thanks to the British team.
"The whole country is very impressed by the speed and professionalism with which you managed to get the specialist equipment to the rescue site," Mr. Prescott said.
Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, has been castigated at home and abroad for not immediately accepting the offers of foreign help that poured in as soon as Russia announced the Kursk was in trouble.
The British team was put on standby on Monday last week, ready to head to Russia at a moment's notice. However, it was not until last Wednesday that Russia acknowledged that it needed foreign help.
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Oil Divers Reach Russian Submarine
Associated Press
August 22, 2000 Filed at 2:20 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Submarine-The-Divers.html
OSLO, Norway (AP) -- For the divers who plunged to the ocean floor looking for Russia's stricken nuclear submarine, it was not unlike an ordinary day on the job.
Except that on ordinary days, they serve the oil industry, finding, fixing or modifying just about anything that lies deep under the water.
A lot of the time, technological advances are driven by military needs, and only later find a civilian application. This time it was the other way round.
In roughly 30 hours, the team of four Norwegian and eight British divers managed what Russia's Northern Fleet had failed to do in a week. They dived to the Kursk nuclear submarine, opened one of its hatches and confirmed what had been suspected for days: that all 118 crewmen inside had to be dead.
Except for the tragic denouement, ``it really wasn't much different from what they do at the oil fields,'' said Julian Thomson, a spokesman for the company that employs them, Stolt Offshore.
The Kursk had been stranded under 350 feet of water in the Barents Sea since it sank more than a week ago. The Russian navy tried for more than a week to open its emergency escape hatch with one of its own miniature rescue submarine.
While the Russian navy complains of having no cash for rescue equipment, Norway, the world's second larg