NUCLEAR
How to Deal With Iraq
Despite Shutdown, Chernobyl Dangers Remain
Countdown to Collision
Clinton Offers Benefits For Ill Nuclear Workers
Time is running out to compensate hundreds of Cold War uranium miners
DOE on right track with incineration alternative
Notable dates in Ingalls Shipbuilding history
Wen Ho Lee Tapes May Be Found
Russia, Bush And the Arms Race
Tribe Pushes for Nuclear Dump Despite Opposition
2 Charged in Plot to Export Jet Parts

MILITARY
19 Drug Arrests at Lennon Vigil
States
Friction Over French Plan to Reform the European Union
Space Shuttle Departs Space Station After Installing Solar Wings
Shuttle heads for home
A U.N. Aide Says Taliban Is Reducing Poppy Crop
U.N. workers kidnapped in Georgia
Protecting America's Sailors

OTHER
Delegates Agree on Chemicals Ban
A Mystery in a Refuge: 600 Dead Geese
States
Police Identify Unarmed Man Shot to Death by Officers
South African Policeman Murders Wife, Relatives
New Jersey
Cox joins call for end to police violence
American convicted as spy
Russian President to Free American Imprisoned as Spy

ACTIVISTS
Activist priest no stranger to prison
Santas protest Nicaraguan conditions
Wolfensohn arrives amid Left protests


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- iraq

How to Deal With Iraq

New York Times
December 10, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/opinion/L10IRA.html

To the Editor:

Re "A Smoldering Fire in Baghdad" (editorial, Dec. 4):

Your prescription for dealing with Iraq's nefarious aspirations differs little from the failed formula in place now for more than a decade and that is at present falling apart. The threat and application of sanctions and bombings, which are responsible for the deaths and deprivation of countless Iraqi civilians, have done nothing to open the country to a new arms inspection team.

Between the "carrot and stick" there must be a renewed international dialogue with Iraq. Recent overtures by the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, to Saddam Hussein's regime present the best and most recent hope that a creative search for discussion might be found and real progress might be made.

EDWARD J. VON KLOBERG Washington, Dec. 4, 2000 The writer was a lobbyist for Iraq from 1984 to 1987.

-------- ukraine

Despite Shutdown, Chernobyl Dangers Remain

Salt Lake Tribune
Sunday, December 10, 2000
BY EFREM LUKATSKY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/12102000/nation_w/52469.htm

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- Yaryna has never been to Chernobyl, but it has had a bigger impact on her young life than any place she has managed to visit. Yaryna, who is 21, suffers from thyroid cancer that doctors say is an after-effect of the 1986 explosion and fire at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl.

There is no need to travel to Chernobyl, 90 miles north of Kiev, to suffer from it. More than 14 years after the disaster, people living on the land that was swept by a cloud of radioactive fallout are Chernobyl's hostages.

Every day, Ukrainians worry about the air they breathe, the water they drink, the food they eat -- and how it will affect not only them, but those who come after them.

The April 26, 1986, explosion that ripped through Chernobyl's reactor No. 4 spewed a huge radioactive cloud over Europe. The then-Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus were the most affected, and they continue to bear the deepest scars.

For millions of Ukrainians, the Chernobyl catastrophe has become a part of everyday life. And as the radiation claims more victims among friends, the tragedy isn't fading -- it is getting ever closer.

Statistics tell part of the story. In Ukraine alone, at least 4,365 people have died of radiation-related diseases contracted after taking part in the cleanup effort organized by the Soviet government after the explosion. That is just a fraction of the overall toll among an estimated 650,000 "liquidators" who came from all over the Soviet Union.

In all, about 3.4 million of Ukraine's 50 million people, including nearly 1.3 million children, were exposed to radiation from the disaster.

Thyroid glands attract radiation, and thyroid cancer is gradually claiming victims. While no cases were registered in Ukraine in 1981-85, 1,217 people who, like Yaryna, were children or adolescents at the time of the explosion were operated on for thyroid cancer in 1986-99.

According to Ukrainian government figures, 70,000 people in Ukraine alone have been disabled by radiation.

The no-entry zone around the Chernobyl plant covers 1,040 square miles of the most poisoned land on Earth. About 120,000 people used to live in the 90 villages within the then-flourishing region. Now it is a high-security zone behind coiled razor wire, protected by some 800 guards. No one can enter without special permission.

The biggest town in the zone is Pripyat, which once housed the Chernobyl workers. In 1986, it had a population of 48,000 -- mostly young families who had come from all over the Soviet Union.

The fire could be seen clearly from the windows of the town's apartment towers, but Soviet authorities didn't bother to alert residents to the danger hanging in the air. As the fire burned three miles away, people went about their preparations for the May Day holiday -- a Soviet-era occasion for picnics and long meals punctuated by toasts over vodka.

Pripyat was evacuated 36 hours after the explosion, three days before May Day. People left in a hurry.

Today, yellowed newspapers with May Day slogans still blow about the town. Limbless dolls and other discarded toys litter the cots where children in day-care centers used to take their daily naps. Someone left behind gas masks.

The surrounding district was once one of the most picturesque regions in Ukraine, and the beauty can still be seen in the rich pine and birch forests, full of berries and mushrooms. Wolves, boars and elk prowl the woods, while huge catfish swim the rivers -- doomed by the plutonium and cesium that are lodged in their organs.

Scientists have found unusual mutations in mice in the area. Pine saplings have sprouted sickly brown branches, a sign of morphological change resulting from radiation.

Several spots inside the exclusion zone are particularly dangerous: the Geiger counter emits high-pitched whines and shows a radiation level dozens of times higher than the safe upper limit.

Among them is a sprawling graveyard for abandoned equipment -- 1,350 vehicles that were irradiated during the cleanup operation. There is row upon row of red-starred military helicopters, armored vehicles, tanks, trucks, bulldozers, fire engines and ambulances.

Some of the people working on those vehicles spent only about 20 minutes shoveling radioactive debris. All the same, many have died of radiation poisoning.

The most dangerous spot is the huge, gray sarcophagus that entombs the ruined No. 4 reactor. Slapped together hastily after the explosion, it is a monstrous construction: 700,000 metric tons of rust-streaked steel and 400,000 tons of concrete that cover an unknown amount of nuclear fuel.

The radiation level inside is so high that plant employees, most of whom are prohibited from entering the structure, joke that it is the biggest microwave in the world.

Only a handful of journalists had ever been inside, and there has been very little information on what is going on inside the structure. The final operating reactor at the plant is scheduled to be shut down for good soon.

At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, Soviet engineers began testing a rapid-intervention safety system. They threw a power switch, and the explosion followed immediately. The switch they used has disappeared, as have numerous other buttons. Souvenir-hunters have stolen them.

The danger Chernobyl poses to humanity is the reason Western governments and environmentalists pressured Ukraine for years to close the power plant, and the government finally agreed.

That won't put the danger to rest. The zone will be off-limits for ages because of its contamination.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Countdown to Collision

Washington Post
Sunday, December 10, 2000
By Bradley Graham
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32640-2000Dec6?language=printer

The countdown was proceeding toward the most expensive 30 minutes in the military testing business. In the middle of the Pacific, on a fly speck of an island in the Kwajalein Atoll, a team of contractors and military officers had gathered in a windowless concrete control center to fire off one of the most complex weapons systems ever proposed. Back at an Air Force base a few hours' drive northwest of Los Angeles, another crew had gathered to launch a dummy warhead, complete with decoy, out over the ocean. Nearly 22 minutes later, the Kwajalein team would fire a rocket propelling a "kill vehicle"-a 120-pound package of sensors, computers and thrusters designed to home in on the warhead and pulverize it with the sheer force of a high-speed collision.

After weeks of rehearsals and readiness reviews, the top testers in the national missile defense program thought they had uncovered and fixed every conceivable thing that could go wrong. And after mixed results in two previous tests, they were more confident that this time they would succeed.

Like the others, this test drew on the efforts of nearly 600 people; it involved the biggest names in the defense industry; and it would cost about $90 million. The Pentagon's chief weapons tester had flown out from Washington to be in the control room. Other senior defense officials, including the head of the agency that was developing the weapon, were watching a video feed at the Pentagon. U.S. authorities had taken extra security measures, beefing up a force on Kwajalein and running air sweeps over the surrounding lagoon.

About two hours before liftoff, a security camera trained on the kill vehicle picked something up: a fiberglass skiff racing across the lagoon. Inside the control room, incredulous officials stopped their preparations to watch on a giant video monitor. The skiff hit the beach; a man and a woman got out; they started walking up a road toward the launching pad. They carried a banner reading, "Stop Star Wars, Greenpeace."

Two program supervisors bolted from the control room and gave chase in a golf cart, overtaking the protesters short of their target.

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THAT TEST, conducted July 8, the security lapse represented by the Greenpeace invasion went largely unpublicized and unexplained. But then, there was so much else to explain-most notably, why the kill vehicle never got close to its target, and what that failure would mean to the development of a national missile defense system.

No one had ever said hitting a missile with a missile would be easy. In fact, ever since the Clinton administration embarked early last year on a revised program to try to build such a weapon by 2005, military and scientific experts had warned that the Pentagon was taking on a mission impossible. The technology wasn't advanced enough, they said; the architecture was ill-conceived; the timetable was much too compressed.

But Republican legislators had championed the project, convinced that more money and greater political commitment would overcome the technical challenges. Then a North Korean missile launch in August 1998 had startled U.S. officials with the suggestion that the threat of attack from hostile Third World states was closer to reality than American intelligence agencies had predicted. Finally, President Clinton put forward a tentative deployment plan and funding for it. The hope had been that by last summer, initial tests would have yielded two or three successes, demonstrating that a new defensive system was within reach.

Instead, the tests intensified debate over the feasibility, cost and diplomatic ramifications of deploying weapons to guard against long-range missile attack.

Similar debates have erupted twice before, in the late 1960s and the 1980s, when the U.S. military's principal anxiety was a massive Soviet attack. Under President Richard Nixon, the government actually decided to deploy a missile defense system, called Safeguard. But the number of proposed interceptor sites got whittled down to just one, in North Dakota, to protect nuclear missile silos; that site operated for only five months before shutting down in early 1976 because of cost and reliability problems. The 1980s debate centered on President Ronald Reagan's proposal for a phalanx of space-based interceptors-the proposal derisively nicknamed "Star Wars"-which died of its own weight. The technology wasn't there, and even if it had been, the sheer scale of such a project would have made it prohibitively expensive.

Now, the perceived threat is different. It comes less from Russia than from North Korea, or Iran, or some other potentially hostile Third World country. These nations, once labeled "rogues" by the State Department but now more diplomatically known as "states of concern," may soon have missiles capable of reaching the United States, although they won't have nearly as many as the Soviet Union did. The current view within the U.S. defense establishment is that an attack would therefore consist of relatively few warheads, rather than the waves that had been envisioned coming from the Soviet Union.

At the same time, the sensors and computers used to discriminate warheads from decoys in space have advanced considerably. The idea of using a ground-launched interceptor to shoot an enemy missile out of the sky seems more achievable than it was just a decade or so ago.

These circumstances brought the Clinton administration around, in its final two years in office, to taking the idea of missile defense more seriously and acceding to long-standing Republican pressure. Under the architecture proposed by the administration last year, the first deployment phase would include 100 kill vehicles based near Fairbanks, Alaska, plus a high-resolution X-band radar on the Aleutian island of Shemya to provide precise detection and tracking capabilities, combined with a handful of upgraded early-warning radars spread across the United States, Greenland and Britain. A second phase foreseesabout 250 interceptors and more radars, plus a new satellite system for warning and tracking.

All these components, while under development separately for much of the 1990s, remain unproven as an integrated system in real-life conditions. And so the Pentagon scheduled 19 intercept tests through 2005. In the first, in October 1999, the kill vehicle scored a hit, discriminating between a warhead and a Mylar balloon decoy. In the second, last January, the kill vehicle's cooling system malfunctioned and it missed its target by about 200 feet. Because of various delays, and renewed skepticism in some quarters, the stakes were growing as July 8 approached.

The Pentagon had hoped that the program's future would not rest on a single test. In fact, one of the truisms in the defense-acquisitions business is never to let a program get into such a position. Originally, plans called for four flight tests by last summer. But the testing schedule slipped, while political considerations kept the Clinton administration locked into a self-imposed deadline for making a deployment decision this year. So, with only one hit and one miss going into the summer, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon agency responsible for developing the antimissile weapon, took to referring despairingly to the July test as a "binary event": If it succeeded, President Clinton would be more likely to authorize preparations to build the radar on Shemya, and if it failed, he likely would not, which in effect would postpone deployment at least until 2006.

After it failed, Clinton effectively dropped the 2005 deployment deadline. Expressing doubts about the technical feasibility of the Pentagon's approach, he announced in September that he was deferring a decision on the program's future to his successor. The president concluded that taking a chance on the system was not worth rupturing relations with Russia, China or NATO governments, all of which had warned against a unilateral U.S. move to erect an antimissile shield and alter the strategic nuclear balance of the past half-century.

Clinton's action hardly buried the project-it merely postponed the day of political reckoning. During the campaign for the presidency, both Vice President Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush expressed interest in pursuing the issue if elected. With Republicans nominally in control of Congress, there may be continuing pressure on the White House to deploy some kind of antimissile system.

But the testing process itself also is likely now to receive a new hard look. The tightly controlled nature of the tests has given rise to allegations in the scientific community of rigging or dumbing down to increase chances of success. Even the Defense Department's chief weapons tester, Philip Coyle, contends that the first three intercept tests have revealed little about the ultimate viability of the planned system. Similar critiques have come from outside review groups, including one requested by the Pentagon and another by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Still, the two generals overseeing the program, Kadish and Army Maj. Gen. Willie Nance, insist that the early tests have been about as difficult as they should be at this stage. The basic purpose, they say, has been simply to demonstrate the principle of using a missile to obliterate another missile, not the complete operational effectiveness of this "hit-to-kill" technology. Achieving intercept even under these limited and controlled circumstances, the generals argue, has been no small feat.

Frustrated by what they regard as unrealistic expectations about the testing effort so far, Kadish and Nance granted me unusual access to July's test in the Pacific, starting a week before the launch. Normally, the island is off-limits to journalists during tests, because it is so small and housing is so limited and the testers want to avoid distractions. They granted me an exception because I'm researching a book on missile defense.

From the outside, the run-up to the launch appeared routine, with no glitches. But from inside, the preflight planning looked considerably more frenetic and fretful. Even after all the rehearsals and readiness reviews, after the energetic engagement of all those hundreds of technicians, mission controllers, range safety authorities and other contractors, there still were surprises. And the landing of a pair of banner-carrying protesters was not the last of them.

THE MARSHALL ISLANDS consist of a double chain of 34 atolls that poke out of the Pacific between Hawaii and Guam. One link in that chain is the Kwajalein Atoll, which consists of about 100 small islands and forms the world's largest lagoon-a crescent loop of coral reef enclosing 1,100 square miles. The largest of those 100 islands, also named Kwajalein, is half a mile wide and three miles long. An island-hopping flight from Honolulu takes more than seven hours.

American forces wrested control of the islands from Japan during World War II, and since then the United States has stationed some of its most advanced radar installations on various Marshall Island outcroppings and taken advantage of the chain's isolation to test nuclear missiles and various antimissile systems. On Kwajalein, an old hulking missile control structure stands as a reminder of earlier missile defense programs, with names like Nike/Zeus, Sentinel/Safeguard, HOE and ERIS.

The Marshall Islands have been self-governing since 1979, but the United States has Kwajalein under lease. The island has, in fact, become a distant American outpost, replete with paved roads, TV sports and a general store dubbed Macy's. Over the years, armies of defense contractors have come and gone, pushing the island's population to more than 5,000 at times. Today, about 2,500 live there, all but a few dozen of them civilians working for the Army or for defense contractors and often housed with their families. For a test, the population can swell by several hundred more.

Early last summer, launch crews began returning to the island of Kwajalein. Courtesy Ballistic Missile Defense Organization Early last summer, launch crews began returning to Kwajalein with a rebuilt kill vehicle for the July launch. Nearly half a year had passed since the previous test; the January failure prompted a three-month delay as review boards pored over what went wrong. Investigators determined that some kind of obstruction-ice or debris-had choked the flow of the krypton gas that is used, along with nitrogen gas, to cool the infrared sensors that serve as the kill vehicle's eyes. To avoid another plumbing problem, Raytheon Co., which produces the kill vehicle, replaced pipes and valves, modified fittings and revised assembly procedures.

On June 3, a day after the vehicle was filled with krypton and nitrogen gases, measurements revealed another leak.

This time, it was nitrogen. Raytheon officials were incredulous; so were their Pentagon clients. Compounding matters, Raytheon's crew couldn't pinpoint the source of the leak. Without knowing the location or shape of the leak hole, officials could not determine the chances that moisture might be seeping into the system-moisture that might freeze and obstruct the flow of gas in flight.

Concern about the leak continued to shadow launch preparations when, on July 2, senior test managers gathered for a review in Building 1009, a plain, one-story office structure beside the Kwajalein runway that serves as local headquarters for the national missile defense group. With six days to go, they were reviewing all the problems that had surfaced in preparation for this test.

Leading the team was Nance. Unassuming and soft-spoken, the two-star general had earned his reputation as one of the Army's most skilled acquisitions officers by showing an energetic attention to detail and ability to manage complexity. "He even can remember the serial numbers of parts," said one awestruck aide. A believer in the hands-on approach, Nance tended to spend much more of his time visiting contractors and their production facilities than in his Washington office.

Apart from a handful of colonels, each responsible for a specific part of the system, most of the contingent on Kwajalein under Nance's command was civilian. In 1998, the Pentagon had contracted with Boeing Co. to bring together the system's main components-radars, kill vehicle, booster and battle management computers. The subcontractors included Raytheon on radars and the kill vehicle, TRW on the battle management network and Lockheed Martin on the booster (for the early tests at least, while other firms are designing a new booster for the final system).

The top civilian manager was John Peller, the Boeing team leader. A tall, lanky aerospace engineer with long experience in the Minuteman missile and space shuttle programs, Peller had worked tirelessly on molding what had been a piecemeal Pentagon research and development effort into a single major acquisition program. But Kadish and Nance were holding him and Boeing ultimately responsible for some of the delays, notably in the new booster design, which was a year behind schedule, and in the delivery of a computer simulation system for running ground tests.

Several dozen problems had arisen in recent weeks, and each one had been written up in a test incident report. Before the launch could proceed, each TIR needed to be certified as resolved or inconsequential. Only a few appeared to be of any lingering significance to test officials. Most of them involved software glitches that were being addressed. Even the nitrogen leak seemed less menacing than it had in June. Based on various structural analyses, Raytheon officials had assured Nance and Peller that the probability of the leak worsening in flight was minuscule.

"The chance of any of these things happening is one in a million," said Dan Testerman, Boeing's deputy director for test evaluation, as the review droned on to cover the most esoteric of issues. But Nance wanted no irregularity left unexamined. A new problem had emerged that very morning, when a Lockheed Martin crew working on the booster discovered a loose power cable on the nozzle control unit.

The cable would have to be replaced, but the spare was in Hawaii. And the Air National Guard C-141 plane that ferries cargo to Kwajalein several times a week had broken down. That night, Nance asked the pilots of a surveillance plane that was in Kwajalein just for the test to spend the next day fetching the spare.

ANOTHER DAY, another review: On July 3, the launch team traveled by large catamaran to Meck Island, over on the eastern rim of the lagoon. Meck is just large enough to host a launch site on a man-made hill at one end, a small dock and short runway at the other, and, in the middle, an aging, five-story, windowless concrete structure that houses a control room and support offices. The building was erected for tests of the Safeguard system in the 1970s, when a computer would occupy an entire room and bear gold-plated circuit boards.

Nance began the review by noting the particular importance of this test, an implicit reference to the decision President Clinton would be making. As the review proceeded, he invited comment from anyone who wished to offer a thought. This open approach was typical of Nance, to the mild annoyance of some associates, because it sometimes resulted in uninformed comments and meandering meetings. But the general did not want to overlook anything that could help the mission.

Between mid-morning and late afternoon, the review covered everything from the condition of the kill vehicle to the weather forecast for launch day. One new problem intruded: A critical communications facility for sending target information to the interceptor while in flight had suffered a power outage during maintenance the night before. The facility, known as IFICS, was making its debut with this test.

A troubleshooting team that morning had concluded that the outage was caused by humid air passing through open panels in the small IFICS facility and blowing across hot computer equipment. Nance ordered that greater care be taken during maintenance; from now on, he instructed, no one would touch anything without a procedure.

Nance had been wrestling with how to get the best handle on all the issues that had come up and their status ahead of launch. Now, he directed staff members to devise charts that would lay out all the critical test events, so they could spot potential glitches in the sequence in which they could emerge. Will the target launch? Will the radars pick it up? Will the interceptor fire? Will the kill vehicle identify the mock warhead and intercept it?

"What we're trying to get to," he explained to his team, "is whether we have any weak links with single-point failures"-failures that would be caused by any element that lacked a backup or was of overwhelming significance in itself.

On the walk back to the pier for the return catamaran ride to Kwajalein, Peller mused that just scoring a hit was hard enough, but these early tests were even more demanding. There were data to be collected and test-range safety to be maintained. And in real life, the United States would be able to fire a salvo of interceptors against an incoming warhead; in these tests, only one interceptor was being shot. "Testing," Peller lamented, "is actually a lot harder than operating a system."

Senior test team members spent the next day, July 4, compiling the charts that Nance had ordered. The general would use them later in the week in a final video-conference briefing to high-level Pentagon officials. That night, Boeing hosted a beachside party with free-flowing margaritas and a view of fireworks shot from a barge.

With three days to go, it was time for the final full-scale simulation. Tradition called for corporate team photos on the launch hill in front of the interceptor. The photo shoot went smoothly, but sorting out another tradition-the positioning of corporate decals on the booster-wasn't so easy. There just wasn't room enough for all dozen or so decals to go on the missile's "front" side, the one that faces the cameras on launch day. Nance regarded the decal-placement decision as one of the most politically sensitive he had to make. He appointed a group to make a recommendation, then issued his verdict: Put Boeing, TRW, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin on the front, and post the others on the back.

Despite the glitches that had popped up, Nance and Peller were giving this intercept test better odds than they had the first two. Peller put the chances of success at greater than 50-50. Nance pegged them at about 80 percent. But the simulation that day turned out to be more eventful than expected.

About 15 minutes before target launch, a fire alarm went off in the building housing the control room on Meck Island. A 240-amp circuit breaker had burned out, apparently from old age, causing an air compressor to shut down. This in turn allowed humid air to waft into the ductwork and trip the alarm. "A 25-cent circuit breaker is threatening to foil a $100 million flight test," said Jim Ussery, a Pentagon test analyst. With less than five minutes to go, a new problem arose. Range safety officials declared a "red" condition, halting the countdown, because a UHF transmitter used to send a destruct signal in the event of a misfire had gone down due to a faulty amplifier. Finally, the simulation was run.

With team members in the seats they would occupy on launch day, computers generated mock launches of the target and the interceptor. Mission directors recited in-flight progress reports as if the events were real. A video screen at the front of the control room showed the trajectories of the simulated vehicles converging and, ultimately, colliding.

IN A VIDEO conference call with the Pentagon on July 6, Nance and Peller briefed Kadish and the Defense Department's head of defense research and engineering, Hans Mark. Nance and Peller knew it was Mark who needed the most convincing. Mark was especially proud of his own record-more than 30 spacecraft launches over 40 years, including 14 NASA space shuttle flights, and no failures.

An inveterate memo writer, Mark had kept some of his Defense Department colleagues abreast of his concerns about the national missile defense program. Just before the January flight test, he had issued a memo critical of Nance and Peller for appearing overly confident-"too slick." As the July launch approached, Mark had worried particularly about the nitrogen leak.

During the briefing, Raytheon provided assurances that the leak was under control and likely would pose no threat to the flight. Peller showed the charts listing the critical functions, from launch to intercept, that had to go right for the test to succeed. About 30 potential problems were cited, along with what had been done to address them. Most were given a "low probability" of occurring in flight.

Mark asked what "low probability" meant.

About one chance in 100, Peller replied.

Using a standard probability equation, Mark quickly calculated an overall probability of success of about 70 percent. "If you were selling lottery tickets, I'd buy one," he cracked.

But buying a lottery ticket and recommending an important launch were two different things for Mark. He still had reservations about proceeding with the test, although Nance and Peller came away from the briefing with the impression that Mark had no objection to launching on July 8. Mark knew that the probability calculation he had done was very sensitive to the guesses that were made about the probability of each event occurring, and people had widely different estimates in some cases. He could not put his finger on any single item that would warrant scrubbing the July 8 launch date.

Weeks later, he would say he had continued to worry about the many little anomalies that had cropped up. "You can do all the calculations you want, but you have to depend on your gut," Mark explained. "It can't all be calculation. It has to be to some extent a feeling about whether something might go wrong. I canceled shuttle flights for no good reason other than I didn't feel right that day about a flight." He knew it was all too common in the testing business for judgments to be clouded by an eagerness to get on with any given test. Testers had a term for it: "They had launch fever," Mark said. "I've seen that. And you know what should happen when you have launch fever? You stop, you don't launch. Never mind the calculations."

But that retrospective assessment struck Nance and other senior program officials as gratuitous. In post-flight interviews, they disputed the notion of having been in the grip of any fever. They felt they had been as thorough, deliberate and extensive in their pre-flight checks as they knew how to be.

Even Mark was blindsided by the outcome. During the July 6 review, Mark along with everyone else had glossed over one chart that officials would later wish they had questioned. "Will the kill vehicle separate from the payload launch vehicle?" it read across the top. Only two words appeared on the page below: "No issues."

THE SAFEGUARD missile program conducted 165 flight tests, the Polaris program 125 tests, and the Minuteman program 101 tests. The national missile defense program has scheduled only 19 intercept trials so far. Of course, rocket science has progressed in the past three or four decades, allowing contractors to accomplish much more in a single test. And ground tests and computer simulations have come to play a bigger role in verifying a new system's readiness. Little wonder, too, given the sky-high price of a flight test.

Hit or miss, each test of the national missile defense system now burns about $90 million, according to the latest figures from the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. The kill vehicle itself costs $24.1 million. The booster-a refurbished Minuteman rocket-runs $11.4 million. What BMDO refers to as "checkout, execution and post-test analysis" of the mated booster and kill vehicle totals $17 million. The target missile, which includes a mock warhead and decoy packed in a dispersing container, or "bus," comes to $19.1 million. There also are rental charges for use of Kwajalein and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California ($3.2 million) and payments for "radar and battle management support" ($9.6 million). Finally, $4.7 million goes for "system-level planning, analysis and reporting," which covers preflight mission scenarios and post-flight studies.

Given the price, what goes into a test counts for even more than it used to.

Which is where Phil Coyle comes in. Studious and methodical, Coyle has served as the Pentagon's director of operational testing and evaluation for six years, assessing the adequacy of test programs. No stranger to missile defense since his days as test director at the Nevada Test Site in the early 1970s and an associate director at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the 1980s, he has emerged as an influential counterpoint to those in the Pentagon pushing for an early-deployment decision. In recent months he has pointedly argued that there is insufficient information to make any judgment about the system's operational readiness, and he contends the testing program itself is flawed.

Coyle was the only senior Pentagon civilian to make the two-day journey from Washington to Kwajalein for the July test. Two weeks earlier, he had sent a memo to Jacques Gansler, the Pentagon's top acquisitions official, saying the test, while the "most significant" so far, contained "significant limitations to operational realism."

Coyle was particularly critical of the use of a large Mylar balloon as the decoy. He described it as "not especially stressing" to the kill vehicle and "not a true decoy" since it could, in fact, help rather than confuse the interceptor by alerting it to the presence of the real target nearby. This happened during the October test, when the kill vehicle got off course and fixed on the balloon at first, without seeing the dummy warhead. Coyle said continued use of the balloon "only invites further criticism from the academic community." Because the kill vehicle had already demonstrated that it could tell a warhead from a balloon in the first test, he observed, it was time for "progressively more challenging countermeasures."

He noted that all major components of the system were still represented in the test by surrogates or prototypes, and the final versions would in some cases differ significantly from these stand-ins. The ultimate booster, for instance, would travel several times faster-and shake more violently-than the refurbished Minuteman missile being used to power the kill vehicle into space in these early intercept tests. Moreover, Coyle pointed out that the test was using the same flight geometry each time-the familiar Vandenberg-Kwajalein scenario. He wanted launches from more operationally representative locations-out of Alaska, for instance-and intercepts at higher altitudes and involving multiple interceptors.

Coyle knew, of course, that early developmental tests were often limited and somewhat artificial. This test program had never been structured to produce operationally realistic test results this early. But that was Coyle's basic point: Even if they succeeded, these tests could not realistically support a deployment decision now.

Coyle had written the memo out of concern that some Pentagon and White House officials didn't fully understand the significance of the tests. He considered it quite unfortunate that the Pentagon had scheduled what it was calling a "deployment readiness review" last summer. It was too early, he thought, to make any assessment of deployment readiness, let alone for the president to make any deployment decision.

At the same time, Coyle thought the tests already had demonstrated considerable progress. They had shown that many of the system's core elements, which weren't even available a decade ago-such as the kill vehicle's infrared sensors or the battle management computers that process data from the sensors and produce a target map for the interceptor-were working. What remained in question for Coyle was whether these elements could work reliably in an integrated system.

Also troubling Coyle-and scientific critics outside the Pentagon-was whether the proposed system could ever adequately discriminate between warheads and decoys. Pentagon officials had insisted that their discrimination technologies-in the kill vehicle and the ground-based X-band radar-would be capable of picking out the right targets by measuring subtle differences in heat, motion and other physical characteristics among objects in space. But the technical wizardry supporting this assertion is classified, and officials had declined to get very specific in public.

Coyle had come to Kwajalein to get better, more precise answers to some questions. "You just get a different story from the guys here than you do in Washington about the way the system is supposed to work," he explained, standing in the control room on launch day. "I don't mean anyone has been trying to mislead us. It's just that they don't have the same detailed information at their fingertips."

Nance welcomed Coyle's presence. The general was troubled by the persistent doubts that Coyle and outside critics had continued to raise about the value of the tests, and looked forward to the opportunity to dispel them. Part of the problem, he felt, was that people were expecting too much too soon. "The first problem is, we're being graded against what the expectation would be for an end-of-the-development cycle, full-operational test," Nance said in an interview later. "This system will go through that, but not until 2004 and 2005. We're not there yet. We're still in the front part of the test program. Our objective is to learn as much as possible about the elements of the system, then move to the next phase and add a little more rigor."

He couldn't disagree with Coyle's argument that the initial tests were not operationally representative. They weren't supposed to be. But he took deep offense at suggestions by others that the tests had been simplified to ensure success. "My disappointment is that we don't put the test in its right context," Nance said. "The message that you get in the media is that this is a rigged test. It's not. We may know where the target is going to launch from and what is in the target array, but it's pretty damn hard to rig a test to ensure we're going to intercept when the test range is nearly 5,000 miles long and the speed is greater than 15,000 mph and we're trying to hit something as small as this target."

ON JULY 8, people started moving into position very early. The launch wasn't scheduled until 2 p.m. local time, but the first ferry to Meck left at 4:30 a.m. The next-and last-left two hours later.

Pre-launch rituals abounded: After arriving on Meck, Nance held to his custom of walking up to the launch site and looking around. The mission control director took his customary launch-day bike ride along a lagoon-side path to the ferry. A Boeing flight test manager rubbed the heads of some guys who worked on the battle management system. A Lockheed Martin marketing specialist kissed the kill vehicle. A Raytheon manager swallowed a few Tums. An adviser to Nance skipped breakfast altogether. Jerry Cornell, Boeing's Kwajalein site manager, brought a palm-size stone engraved with an Indian thunderbird image and a knife that had belonged to J.B. Coleman, a sergeant in the 2nd Texas Cavalry during the Civil War. "He went through several battles-Antietam, Gettysburg-and died of old age in 1910," said Cornell, who has had the knife for 22 years. "He kind of represents the soldier, the user."

Then there were the team shirts. The kill vehicle crowd wore white with blue trim; the battle management team showed up in green with white stripes; the X-band radar group favored black; the Lockheed Martin booster contingent had bright blue shirts with an island motif of billowy clouds and palm trees. As for the Boeing group, it went loudly against convention-and superstition-by donning bold red shirts. "Historically, red has been a no-no on the range," said Jim Hill, the Meck site manager. "Red means stop, abort. On Kwajalein, it used to be that if anyone wore a red shirt on mission day, he'd not be allowed in the building and would have to go home to change it. Maybe Boeing is trying to do a reverse on us." The Boeing test official responsible for shirt acquisition said red was the only color sufficiently stocked at the Boeing Co. store in Huntsville, Ala.

By mid-morning, about four hours before launch, everyone was settling in for the wait when Vandenberg reported a voltage drop in a battery on the target missile. The battery powered a transponder used to track the container that carries the warhead and decoy. Vandenberg officials quickly determined that the battery still had enough voltage to do the mission, but they decided, without consulting Nance, and to his later annoyance, to recharge it anyway. The action delayed the flight two hours.

The countdown resumed just past noon. Shortly before 2 p.m., the security camera picked up the Greenpeace protesters' skiff. Despite warnings that Greenpeace would try to disrupt the launch, and reports of protest activity in California, no one had anticipated an assault on Meck. Upon getting word of approaching intruders, the handful of blue-suited civilian guards on Meck fanned out to check the shoreline instead of rushing up the hill to protect the missile. The launch site was unfenced.

So there the activists were, closing in on the interceptor, their path unblocked.

Army Col. Earl Sutton, Nance's test director, dashed out of the control room. Michael Bright, wearing a lei with his palm-trees-and-billowy-clouds shirt-he was Lockheed's manager for the booster-ran after him. They were the ones who commandeered the golf cart and caught up with the protesters about 100 feet shy of the launching pad.

"You need to stop right there," Bright recalled saying afterward. They stopped. Sutton was uncertain of his powers of arrest. His basic aim was to avoid a struggle. The protesters-James Roof of Missoula, Mont., and Meike Huelsman of Hamburg, Germany-refused to move at first, saying they wanted to exercise their right to protest. But eventually they were escorted peaceably down the hill, where they were held until after the launch and turned over to Marshallese authorities. They spent nearly three days in jail, then were released and fined $100 each for trespassing.

At the Pentagon, Kadish intently watched the Greenpeace intrusion on a video feed. In the Meck control room, it did not go unnoted that if it had not been for the delay caused by Vandenberg's battery problem, the protesters would have thwarted the launch. They had appeared on Meck at precisely the original start time of the test. "This," Bright announced to the control room, "is probably the only time when a battery problem saved the mission."

At 2:18 p.m., the countdown resumed with two hours remaining. Nance opened a fortune cookie that the battle management computer team had given him earlier in the day. The fortune read, "Time is a wise counsel."

AT 4:18, the target missile lifted off from Vandenberg. The second and third stages ignited, then burned out on schedule. Four minutes into the flight, Vandenberg reported "trajectory nominal," meaning on course. The dummy warhead was confirmed deployed about two minutes after that.

Nance peered at the large video screen at the front of the control room, which traced the target's trajectory over the Pacific. A mission control checklist was on the table in front of him, showing the minute-by-minute callouts for a normal test run.

About eight minutes into the flight, right on schedule, a radar in Hawaii reported picking up the target. But a confirmation that the balloon decoy had deployed did not come.

About 14 minutes in, the unit that monitors the target data being relayed to the interceptor advised, "You will not see large decoy in the target object map." In other words, the balloon wouldn't be in play in this test. It had failed to inflate.

About 18 minutes in, word came that Altair, one of the giant range radars, had reported "a non-nominal complex, a few extra pieces." Evidently, some debris had broken loose from the container that carried the dummy warhead and decoy into space; so even without the balloon, the kill vehicle would be encountering more than just the dummy warhead.

About 20 minutes in, attention switched to conditions on the launch pad at Meck. Safety radars were reported "green," meaning ready to track the interceptor. Then came a general alert: "All stations, stand by for terminal count. For go for launch. We are armed."

The 15-second mark was called out, then the final 10-9-8-7 . . .

The Meck control room began to rumble slightly, and a muffled roar penetrated the concrete walls. A few hundred yards away, the interceptor's booster was firing, shooting off into partly cloudy skies. Bright's hopes soared with the rocket. Nance jabbed his fist into the air, and applause burst out around him.

"Sensor cooldown commanded," intoned the voice of mission control, indicating coolant gases had begun to flow around the infrared sensors, preparing them for their space hunt.

Bright stood in his customary spot in a back corner of the control room. From there he could observe the rush of data streaming into computer consoles. He also could overhear the chatter of technicians monitoring the interceptor's performance.

After about two minutes, the talk suddenly turned worrisome. Transmissions from the missile had become "noisy" with static interference.

"Where's the cover eject?" someone called out anxiously. "We didn't get cover eject." The cover-a giant aluminum clamshell-like device-protects the infrared sensors on the kill vehicle until reaching space. Nor did a signal arrive confirming that the booster's second stage had stopped burning. This signal was necessary before the kill vehicle could separate from the booster and home in on the target.

"We're not going to separate," someone blurted.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the flight, the mission control network crackled with word again from Altair, confirming the technician's gloomy forecast. "Altair reports no separation of KV from PLV"-the kill vehicle was still attached to the payload launch vehicle. Instead of maneuvering toward its target, it would likely tumble back toward Earth.

The control room fell silent. An overwhelming sense of failure struck Bright, a huge deflation, like the air rushing out of a balloon. Second-guesses were streaming into his mind. What had gone wrong? Where did we make mistakes? What more could we have done? He just shook his head and walked away.

Nance folded his arms across his chest and stared at the screen, which still showed the target and the kill vehicle arcing toward each other. Perhaps Altair's report was a miscall, Nance thought at first. What if Altair had been fooled, its view obscured because the kill vehicle had separated and somehow gotten behind the booster? Or perhaps the electronic signal that the kill vehicle must receive from the booster before cutting itself loose had been delayed and would still come through? Or maybe the connector between the kill vehicle and booster had been jammed and the kill vehicle would muscle free on its own when its thrusters fired?

For the next five minutes, as a wall-mounted digital clock clicked down to the scheduled moment of intercept, many in the control room simply sat silently, their eyes on the tracking picture. But it was clear that the flight had flopped. No one heard the reports normally broadcast on the mission control network when the kill vehicle closes in on a target. A telemetry indicator on the video screen that signals "valid" when the kill vehicle separates never switched on.

Finally, Nance swiveled around in his chair to address the room. "You've got to take this in context," the general said. "This is the most complex mission that the Defense Department has had since the Manhattan Project or some early strategic system programs, and it is not going to come without flight-test failures. Our job is to evaluate the results of this, learn from what happened today and apply it to the next tests. You've got to remember that our mission hasn't changed. Our mission is to design and develop-and test-a capability to defend the nation against ballistic missile attack. And it doesn't change tomorrow just because of this test."

Staff members, as if welcoming any activity to stave off depression, quickly turned to reviewing the telemetry still pouring in from flight monitors.

IN THE WEEKS that followed, the most likely culprit was judged to be a defective part in the booster's avionics processor, a 10-year-old device with an excellent track record. Some missiles have backup processors; this one didn't. Some senior defense officials wondered whether more attention should have been paid to checking the booster.

Advocates of the system took heart that the malfunction occurred during the routine procedure of launching a payload, not in the much more innovative technology required to knock down a warhead. Moreover, several important elements of the missile defense system had functioned as planned, including the IFICS link and a prototype of the X-band radar designed to help the interceptor find the target.

A week after the president's decision to delay construction of the Shemya radar, Kadish appeared before the national security subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform. "In general, there are basically two ways to look at the program to date, and they could be termed the glass-half-full and the glass-half-empty views," he said. "My assessment at the moment is that it is half full. I say this because we have made remarkable and substantial technical progress despite two high-profile test failures."

But given all the controversy generated by the effort so far, the new administration is expected to spend some time now reconsidering just what missile defense design, if any, the United States ought to be pursuing. Should the interceptors be based on land, as the Clinton administration proposed, or fired from ships at sea, as some Republicans have urged? Instead of hitting enemy missiles in their "midcourse phase," as currently planned, is it feasible to go after them earlier, while they still are ascending in their "boost phase"? And anyway, with both North Korea and Iran showing signs of moderation, what's the rush to build a shield?

Even if the decision ends up being to stick with the current approach, missile defense officials recognize the need for some changes. Reflecting concerns about lagging development, the Pentagon prompted Boeing to shake up its management team. Peller was removed as program manager after the July test, and so were several of his deputies. Kadish and Nance, meanwhile, have begun considering ways of overhauling the testing program to add the kinds of targets, decoys and flight geometries that some critics have advocated. Among the proposed changes is a testing approach that would "fly through failure"-meaning no delay in test flights should flops occur. But such a plan would cost more money.

Missile defense officials worry as well about keeping up morale while the future remains in question. And with some reason.

Boarding the first commercial flight out of Kwajalein after the July test, many launch team members looked weary and sounded glum. They reached Honolulu at 3 a.m., only to find a shortage of taxis at the airport. One Raytheon employee cracked, "I can't help but think that if the test had succeeded, there'd be limos here waiting for us."

Bradley Graham covered the Pentagon for The Post for six years before going on leave last spring. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

Clinton Offers Benefits For Ill Nuclear Workers

Salt Lake Tribune
Sunday, December 10 2000
By MARY MANNING LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.sltrib.com/12102000/utah/52350.htm

LAS VEGAS -- President Clinton signed an executive order Thursday that offers broad-based compensation to nuclear workers with job-related illnesses at Department of Energy facilities, including the Nevada Test Site.

The first payments of $150,000 and medical benefits for up to 4,000 eligible workers could be awarded by the end of next year after workers or their families file claims when the forms become available after July 31.

Clinton's order covers thousands of people who were exposed to radiation or hazardous chemicals while building the nation's nuclear arsenal. About 600,000 people have worked on nuclear weapons in DOE facilities such as the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, since the 1940s. More than 1,000 nuclear-weapons experiments exploded above and below Nevada's desert from 1951 -1992.

The order may extend benefits to DOE contract workers, those exposed to beryllium and silica and uranium miners, but those decisions will be handled by the next administration.

Workers who mined tunnels at the Test Site were exposed to silica from the dust during drilling.

In October, Congress appropriated a quarter of the estimated $1 billion the program could cost in its first five years. The congressional version of the compensation program is weaker than the president's directive. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and other Republicans objected to the costs and other issues such as which workers would be covered.

Clinton's order details many concerns.

A special unit in the Department of Labor, which has experience operating compensation programs, will determine the eligibility of those seeking claims and will adjudicate claims.

---

Time is running out to compensate hundreds of Cold War uranium miners

Denver Rocky Mountain News
December 10, 2000
By Gary Harmon Cox News Service
http://insidedenver.com/news/1210gj6.shtml

GRAND JUNCTION - Hundreds of Cold War uranium miners have waited months for $100,000 payments from the federal government as they suffer from cancers and other radiation-related diseases.

Some have succumbed to their illnesses; others have died accidentally. More are likely to die as the wait for the promised money stretches out over the months.

Quentin Hurst of St. George, Utah, said he needs his award to come through quickly. He received a letter Oct. 1 promising payment and hoped for the money by Christmas. He's praying for it because his wife's medical insurance will increase by $175 per month next year, more than the couple can afford.

"My life is in the balance come the first of the year," said Marian Hurst, who relies on the insurance for treatment of diabetes.

One political hurdle still unresolved is a tussle between President Clinton and Congress over the appropriations bill for the Justice Department that includes money for the payments. Clinton has threatened to veto the bill if it fails to provide amnesty for as many as 2 million illegal immigrants.

Even if Clinton were to accept the appropriations bill as written, it still falls short of providing enough money to pay off the government's obligations to the men who worked the "dog holes" and big company mines of the desert Southwest.

Also affected are "downwinders," Westerners exposed to fallout from nuclear testing.

The Justice Department has approved but not funded claims from former miners or their families. Some have been waiting since May for their $100,000 payments, which Congress has since raised to $150,000.

The payments are to be made under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990. Congress has recognized the miners' contribution to victory in the Cold War and apologized for failing to warn them of the dangers of mining uranium in small, unventilated mines filled with cancer-causing radon gas.

The dispute, said Stewart Udall, who served the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as Interior secretary, "is Clinton and Congress having a long-winded fight" that's denying the miners help.

As of Oct. 2, the Justice Department had approved 1,692 miners' claims worth about $168.6 million and denied 1,555 miners' claims.

Budget squabbles aren't the only complication for the miners, however.

The appropriations bill contains $10.8 million for awards of claims as of June 1, 2000, according to a conference committee report. But the House and Senate say that is not enough to provide full payment to the miners.

"That makes me sick," said Becky Rockwell, a Durango investigator who has helped hundreds of miners file claims.

Another complication looms. President Clinton has issued an executive order requiring the government to notify miners who have received $100,000 payments that they are eligible for the additional $50,000 each, as well as medical benefits for their illnesses.

The advancement of legislation in Congress and the executive order have fanned false hopes, said Keith Killian, a Grand Junction attorney who handles radiation-exposure cases.

"I think there are going to be a number of problems that have yet to be addressed, and in the meantime, people are going to be expecting something and not getting it," Killian said.

For instance, Rockwell and others worry that the miners again will be left in the cold for medical care, pointing out that the executive order offers coverage only to miners who have received their $100,000 payments.

The U.S. Labor Department will have primary responsibility to administer the program, according to the executive order.

Killian said he had misgivings about bringing another department into the mix, noting that Justice still will be responsible to maintain the records.

While the Clinton administration struggles to administer the 1990 act and its 2000 amendments, the lives of the people it affects are constantly changing. Frequently, they are ending.

"I think this statistic is phenomenal," Killian said. "We have 12 claims that have been approved and we should have received payment on, and only one of the miners is alive" to receive the money he sought.

That miner, Harry Love, 62, eventually became a state mine inspector. Only two of an original 15 men who went together into the mines are still alive, he said.

Now living in Arizona, Love said his right lung has collapsed four times, his left lung once.

"It takes about $400 in medication a month just to keep my lungs open so I can breathe," he said. "If they don't hurry up (with the medical benefit), they're gonna wipe me out."

-------- idaho

DOE on right track with incineration alternative

Environmental News Network
Sunday, December 10, 2000
By Jennifer Langston, Post Register, Idaho Falls, Idaho
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2000/12/12102000/krt_incinerator_40688.asp

Only 15 people, from river guides to nurses to mothers of newborn babies, showed up in Jackson, Wyoming, this week to comment on the final report of the panel charged with finding alternatives to incineration.

That's a sharp contrast to a public hearing earlier this year when 800 residents of the resort town - some wearing gas masks and sporting "plutonium-free powder" bumper stickers - packed a local gymnasium to convey vivid fears about a proposed incinerator at the INEEL.

It's a sign that people in the community, which raised a half million dollars and filed a lawsuit to block the incinerator, are more comfortable with the Department of Energy's current direction, said town councilman Scott Anderson, who thanked the panel for its work.

"You get great attendance when you're doing something wrong and sparse attendance when you're on the right track," he told the panel.

The nine-member panel, created by the DOE to settle the lawsuit with Jackson, Wyo. residents and other activists, concluded there are other ways of destroying dangerous chemicals in nuclear waste and some give off considerably less pollution.

No single technology may work on all the types of waste the DOE will need to handle over the next decades, and the newer treatment methods will require more research and testing.

But the panel believes it will be possible to treat the INEEL's waste and meet state cleanup agreements without incineration, said chairman Ralph Cavanagh.

"The panel has concluded there are promising alternatives to incineration. They all require extensive R&D. They all require substantial increases in DOE budgets," said Cavanagh, a San Francisco attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental group.

The panel recommended the Department of Energy spend $90 million over the next four years to enhance its research and testing of alternatives to incineration on radioactive waste.

That's about a $15 million increase over what's planned. The panel wants Congress to appropriate new money, rather than stealing it from other cleanup budgets.

The panel's recommendations, which still have to be approved by a larger advisory board before going to the Secretary of Energy this month, are not binding. But Cavanagh said he believes the agency is seriously interested in finding technologies that don't inspire the same degree of fear, anger and opposition among the general public.

"I think they see the handwriting on the wall," he said. "I think they're committed to finding something else."

The panel, which has met over the last six months, reviewed more than a dozen technologies that could potentially destroy hazardous chemicals in nuclear waste. That's a necessary step before the waste can be shipped to a permanent dump, since the chemicals could cause drums to explode or catch on fire.

Other chemicals, like PCBs, are so toxic and pose such a health hazard that regulatory agencies won't allow them to be buried except in minute concentrations.

Some technologies to break down those chemicals are relatively developed, although they may not have been tested on radioactive material. Others are in the infantile stages of research.

The panel concluded that four treatment methods - steam reforming, DC-arc melters, plasma torches and thermal desorption - were the most promising.

Those technologies essentially use heat from varying sources to separate the hazardous chemicals. Other processes break them down into less dangerous molecules.

They don't use an open flame like incinerators, and generally produce a significantly smaller volume of air emissions - the main concern among members of the public.

The panel looked at a range of other technologies, like ones that use a chemical bath to break down the chemicals, but concluded they were more problematic.

Nevertheless, the panel recommended the Department of Energy also invest in basic scientific research that might improve the other technologies.

It also recommended the agency hold a national conference on alternatives to incineration next year, bringing together interested members of the public from across the country to learn about and discuss different options.

Erik Ringelberg, director of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free in Jackson, Wyo., said the group that formed to spearhead the incinerator lawsuit hadn't weighed in on any of the specific technologies because there are still too many unanswered questions.

"The alternatives require development and we feel it's too early to say yay or nay," he said. "But I think people are comfortable with the results of the panel. We're their filter and we haven't raised any alarm flags."

He also said now that an advisory group to the Secretary of Energy has gone on record saying there are other alternatives, no community should ever have to fight such a difficult battle to stop an incinerator in the future.

The next steps are to see how the Department of Energy funds and implements its research plan, and then to look at how well the different technologies work, he said.

Tatiana Maxwell, a Jackson mother of 4 and party to the lawsuit, said she thought the panel did an admirable job in a short time. But she wants the steering committee planning the national conference to include members of the public, not just DOE officials.

It's admittedly difficult for a regular person to study the tradeoffs of the different technologies, since it requires expertise in engineering and chemistry to understand how they work.

But she would like to see more meaningful public involvement as the process moves forward, beyond being allowed to give testimony at meetings where people get two minutes to speak.

John Tanner, a representative for Coalition 21, a group of nuclear engineers and scientists in Idaho Falls, pointed out that even the emerging technologies also produce emissions or liquid waste streams that will need to be treated.

That group believes that's possible to do safely, but the by-products could be just as objectionable to critics as the emissions from incinerators, he said.

"It's hard to know the psychology of the people making the criticisms, but that certainly is a strong possibility," he said.

The group also said the panel's report was biased against incineration by largely leaving it out of the discussion.

Coalition 21 suggested the panel needed to offer more detailed comparisons between the new technologies and the more tried-and-true method of incineratio• - in terms of efficiency, cost, safety, pollution and ability to treat a wide variety of wastes. That's the only way to judge whether the new technologies offer real advantages.

"You almost get the feeling that what these critics are really afraid of is flame," he said. "That's what's driving the panel - how to find some method that they don't have to call incineration even though that's what it amounts to."

-------- mississippi

Notable dates in Ingalls Shipbuilding history

Sun Herald
12/10/00
http://vh60009.vh6.infi.net/news/docs/timeline121000.htm

November 1938
Ingalls Shipbuilding is incorporated.

February 1939
Ground is broken on the shipyard. Because there are no manufacturing facilities in the shipyard at first, pieces of ships are built in Birmingham, Ala., and trucked to Pascagoula for assembly.

October 1940
Ingalls delivers first ship, the SS Exchequer. The cargo ship is the first vessel built with an all-welded hull.

May 1943
Vera Anderson, 19, becomes one of the first female welders at Ingalls. She wins several welding competitions against women from shipyards in Oregon and California, earning the title of "Champion Woman Welder of the World" and a trip to White House to have tea with Eleanor Roosevelt.

December 1945
A ceremony is held to mark the launch of the 100th ship built at Ingalls. Carrol Elaine Wright, the 18-year-old daughter of Mississippi Gov. Fielding Wright, is the guest of honor.

May 1953
Ingalls diverts some of its resources from commercial shipbuilding and delivers the USS Vernon County, the first of five tank-landing ships.

May 1959
The destroyer USS Morton is delivered, a ship type that would become a mainstay of Ingalls' business base.

May 1961
The USS Sculpin, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, is delivered. This is the first of 12 nuclear-powered submarines the shipyard would build for the Navy.

December 1961
Litton Industries buys Ingalls.

August 1964
The SS Mormacargo, the first fully automated U.S.-built merchant ship, is delivered. The crew can control the ship's engines directly from the bridge.

January 1968
Ground is broken for the 611-acre West Bank facility, known as the "Shipyard of the Future."

June 1970
Ingalls lands one of the country's biggest military contracts, which calls for construction and design of 30 Spruance-class destroyers.

September 1972
The SS Austral Envoy, a commercial cargo container ship, is delivered. The ship is the first built at Ingalls using modular production - an assembly line for seagoing vessels.

August 1975-June 1980
Ingalls delivers 30 Spruance-class destroyers and five amphibious assault ships to the U.S. Navy, setting peacetime production records.

September 1978
Ingalls is selected as the lead shipbuilder for the Aegis guided missile cruiser program. The shipyard is later awarded contracts to build 19 of the 27 ships in the program.

August 1988 The shipyard completes repairs on the USS Stark, which is damaged by a missile attack from the Iraqis. Thirty sailors die on the Stark.

May 1989
The USS Wasp, the lead ship in the Navy/Marine Corps latest class of amphibious assault ships, is delivered. Ingalls goes on to build six similar ships and has a contract for a seventh.

May 1994
The INS Eilat, a warship built for the Israeli navy, is delivered. This is the first combat ship Ingalls built for the international naval market and the first ship totally designed with 3-D computer assistance.

January-February 1997
The shipyard prepares two U.S. Navy guided missile frigates for international fleets. The former USS Gallery is converted to the ENS Taba for the Egyptian navy, and the former USS Jack Williams becomes BANS Sabha for the Bahrain Defense Force.

December 1997
Ingalls signs a $315 million contract with the Venezuelan government to overhaul and modernize two frigates.

March 1999
Ingalls signs a contract with American Classic Voyages to build two cruise ships, with an option for a third, a contract with a potential value of $1.4 billion. These are the first cruise ships built in the United States in more than 40 years.

December 2000
The USS Cole returns to Ingalls for repairs after the destroyer was damaged by a terrorist attack. Repairs should be completed in a year. - COMPILED BY TIMOTHY BOONE

-------- us nuc politics

Russia, Bush And the Arms Race

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, December 10, 2000; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46833-2000Dec9?language=printer

National security and foreign policy have dominated George W. Bush's tentative preparations to move into the White House. The global view of Bush II is taking shape in Austin even as legal challenges echo across Florida.

This is partly a matter of necessity. By showcasing Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as his almost-certain choices for secretary of state and national security adviser now, Bush informs the rest of the world that there will be no delay, no early vacuum of power, in his administration.

This course is only prudent, as another Bush might say. But it is also personal. The Texas governor intends to make his mark in foreign affairs as well as education, even though he talked much more about the latter during the presidential campaign.

If he does prevail in Florida and is sworn in on Jan. 20, Bush will bring with him to the White House the beginnings of a strategic dialogue with Russia that will center on missile defense and deep cuts in each nation's nuclear arsenals.

The dialogue started tentatively in April when Rice arranged for Bush to meet Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Washington. The two men said little about their talk afterward to avoid entangling it in the U.S. campaign.

But its key points have become known as Moscow shapes its approach to Bush II. The conversation began convivially with Bush speaking a few sentences in Spanish to the Russian diplomat, who was long posted in Madrid.

Bush quickly moved on to deliver a blunt assessment to Ivanov: The United States would soon build a national missile defense to protect its territory from rogue states or accidental launches. This was a political fact of life that Russia and other nations had to absorb.

The system might be built faster and more robustly if he became president, Bush hinted. But it would happen in any event. Congress would mandate it. The sense left by Bush's careful words was that this could mean U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Moscow, Beijing and other capitals describe as the foundation of international arms control.

This assessment deepened Russian concern about Bush's public campaign declarations suggesting that the era of formal arms control agreements to reduce nuclear arsenals may be over.

The Republican nominee emphasized instead the possibility of unilateral reductions by each nation. This would leave the United States free to develop a defensive shield and adapt offensive forces to it. It might also lessen international pressure on the United States to match nuclear reductions Russia must make for budgetary reasons.

Neither outcome is desirable for Russia. On Nov. 13, President Vladimir Putin issued a public declaration emphasizing the importance of the ABM treaty and Russia's willingness to proceed quickly with the next administration on new arms control talks to limit each nation to fewer than 1,500 warheads.

Ivanov then dispatched his top U.S. expert, Georgy Mamedov, to Washington for a final round of talks with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on strategic stability.

But Mamedov's main message was intended for the next administration, be it Gore or Bush. The message, according to a senior Russian official, was an appeal "to keep talking. Don't create an artificial pause. Don't abandon channels that have worked. Explore seriously the proposals we are making, as seriously as we explored the proposals for national missile defense" that the Clintonites put forward.

Moscow and Washington could not agree on modifications to the ABM treaty that would have permitted deployment of a limited missile defense, and Clinton left that decision for his successor. Russia clearly fears that Bush will move quickly toward a unilateralist nuclear strategy.

"We are prepared to work together or in parallel," the official said. The formulation was intended to open the door for talks with the Bush team on nuclear reductions that could be coordinated (rather than formally negotiated) and jointly verified. "The important first step is to engage."

Arms control remains an important component of Russian-U.S. relations, he added: "It is still a central issue. If you believe the other side is up to destroying or blackmailing you, you cannot work together. Arms control is about good governance, and about saving money."

As Americans emerge from their absorption with Florida circuit courts and county canvassing boards, they will find the world waiting to get back to business. Russia's hope is that it will be business as usual on arms control. But even Moscow recognizes that a new day is dawning on the old theories of the nuclear balance of terror.

-------- us nuc waste

Tribe Pushes for Nuclear Dump Despite Opposition
Utah: Goshutes' neighbors include a magnesium plant, bombing range and nerve gas test center. But some say storing radioactive waste would be going too far.

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, December 10, 2000
By HANNAH WOLFSON,
Associated Press
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20001210/t000118251.html

SKULL VALLEY INDIAN RESERVATION, Utah--It's easy to find the West Desert on a map of the United States: Pick out the Great Salt Lake and head south.

There are jack rabbits and mule deer, ranchers and their sheep. There are tiny mining towns turning to dust and a little city--Tooele--that gets bigger every day. And there's the Tooele Hazardous Industry Zone, home to some of the most toxic operations in the country.

Now a tiny band of Indians wants to turn the tribe's reservation into one of the country's largest nuclear waste dumps. Opponents say there may be no way to stop it.

"We are doing this to the whole Great Basin. You can't graze cattle, the minerals are gone, the water's not suitable for human inhabitation. We've made it profitable the only way we know how," said Chip Ward, author of "Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West."

"If you can turn the Great Plains into the breadbasket of the nation, you can turn the Great Basin into the nation's wastebasket."

Leon Bear knows the boundaries of his tribe's land by heart.

From the reservoir that provides water to his tiny village, Bear sweeps his arm across the parched valley, pointing out the fences and smokestacks that ring the last remnant of his tribe's traditional lands.

To the north, a magnesium plant sits on the shore of the Great Salt Lake; to the south, the Army tests equipment for exposure to nerve gas on a stretch of desert as large as Rhode Island. A bombing range and hazardous waste incinerator lie just over the crest of the Cedar Mountains to the west; to the east sits a stockpile of chemical weapons and the incinerator plant that's destroying them.

"I could throw up my hands," said Bear, the Goshutes' tribal chairman and the project's main supporter. "They made that an industrial waste zone out there. Nobody asked the Goshutes, 'Do you mind if we do this out here on your traditional territory?' Nobody said, 'Hey, it could be dangerous for you guys to be out here.' When a neighbor does that to you, you don't want to be like them. So we gave our neighbor, the state of Utah, an opportunity to be a part of this, and the first reaction was, 'Over my dead body.'"

Opponents, including other members of the tribe, say the plan could endanger the wildlife of the West Desert, human health, the region's economy and even national security.

But that hasn't stopped Bear from pressing forward with the project, which he says could be the only way to save his dying tribe.

If Bear gets his way, about a square mile of the reservation will be fenced off for nuclear waste, and 450 acres will be built up with concrete pads. On top will sit 16-foot-tall concrete-and-steel casks filled with radioactive rods--as many as 4,000 of them holding 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear reactor fuel.

The fuel will come from Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of eight power companies from California, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida and Alabama. Neither PFS nor the Goshutes will say what the deal is costing.

PFS also has promised to build a cultural center on the reservation to revive the tribe's fading language and crafts, Bear says, and has pledged to give Goshutes and other tribes the first shot at jobs at the storage site.

"More jobs, more money, and a better future for your children," says a PFS brochure touting the project.

The money is sorely needed. Most of the estimated 150 Goshutes have fled the 17,000-acre reservation for Nevada, Tooele and Salt Lake City. Fewer than 30 remain, most living in a tiny cluster of rundown trailers and dirt roads. Jobs are virtually nonexistent except for the cashier position at the Pony Express, a sparsely stocked convenience store and gas station opened a few years ago.

It's not that the tribe hasn't tried. At the village's entrance, the last few examples of one failed project--portable toilets and showers built for the military--sit unused in an empty corral. Down the road, three huge metal sheds built to test rocket engines are empty.

There were only two real options left: nuclear waste and gambling. Bear says a casino is part of the Goshutes' long-term plan, but he's nervous about borrowing money or sinking capital into another risky project. With the PFS lease, he says, the tribe still has control if the project turns sour.

"How can you blame Leon?" said Ward, who is one of the project's main opponents. "What's he going to do? Grow food? No one's going to buy a tomato off this land."

But some Goshutes say the plan is tearing the tribe apart.

"The split is with the native traditions," said Margene Bullcreek, who grew up on the reservation and lives there now. "We believe in our reservation as Mother Earth, and we're allowing our Mother Earth to be contaminated if we bring this waste onto our reservation."

It's a far cry from the old days, when thousands of Goshutes roamed the Utah and Nevada desert, gathering native plants and taking down the occasional deer.

That changed in the 19th century, when the first Mormon settlers arrived. They pushed the Goshutes west into the dry, desolate Skull Valley--once just a pass-through area for the tribe.

But the West Desert was not left untouched. As World War II began, Tooele County's vast salt flat and uninhabited terrain drew the military's attention.

In 1940, 1.8 million acres were turned into the Wendover Army Air Base. It's where B-29 crews honed their skills at a new technique: how to drop an atomic bomb without being destroyed by the resulting shock wave.

Today the West Desert includes the Utah Test and Training Range, where the Air Force tests F-16 fighters and cruise missiles; Dugway Proving Grounds, a test center for chemical and biological weapons; Deseret Chemical Depot, which holds the Army's stockpile of nerve and blistering agents; and the Tooele Chemical Demilitarization Facility, where those chemicals are being destroyed.

Other industries followed on the military's heels. They include Safety Kleen, which runs a hazardous waste dump and incinerator; and Envirocare of Utah, which stores low-level radioactive waste and wants to take higher-level radioactive materials left over from dismantled nuclear power plants.

And then there's Magnesium Corp. of America, which regularly tops a federal list of the nation's biggest air polluters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the plant released 57 million pounds of toxic air pollutants in 1998, mostly chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid.

MagCorp is cleaning up. This fall, the company agreed to start controlling dioxin, furans and hexachlorobenzene, all suspected carcinogens.

If the nation's spent nuclear fuel ends up in the West Desert, it would be in keeping with the region's toxic past.

"There is certainly a history of getting on bended knee out here for these types of projects," said Steve Erickson of Downwinders, one of the groups opposing the Goshute project. "The Great Basin has often been perceived as a vast, useless wasteland. We've opened the door for these kinds of projects, and we're finding it's getting pretty hard to close it."

Tooele County's government has helped keep the door open by signing a contract with PFS. The consortium of private power companies says it will guarantee payments of up to $300 million for the county's support and services.

County planner Nicole Cline said the county is only protecting itself.

"It's not that Tooele County wants or will ever want to be the nation's dumping ground. We oppose that concept," she said. "Hey, we're going to be a watchdog on this thing, and if we see a truck being mishandled, we're going to be the first ones to scream because it's in our backyard."

Tooele Mayor Charlie Roberts said residents seem unconcerned.

"I see an occasional letter to the editor in the local paper, but it's not the issue you'd think it would be," Roberts said.

Earlier this month, pro-PFS County Commissioner Gary Griffith was voted out of office in favor of Democrat Gene White, who campaigned on his opposition to the proposal.

There is also plenty of opposition outside Tooele County.

Leading the charge is Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who first said the project would go through "over my dead body" and even tried to take control of the roads around the reservation to block any progress.

He has support from Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and others who think transporting the waste on Utah's rail lines could lead to a catastrophe. They're joined by California, which argues that such a disaster could shut down Interstate 80 and hurt the state's exports.

PFS disagrees, saying that there have been no major accidents reported in more than 30 years and more than 3,000 fuel shipments. "This is truly a passive, environmentally benign facility," said Scott Northard, a PFS project manager. "There's nothing relative to ground water, and there will be nothing left behind when the fuel is eventually moved to a permanent area."

Environmentalists say because there's no guarantee that a permanent nuclear waste repository planned for Yucca Mountain, Nev., will open in the near future, the Goshute storage could be permanent. They also argue that PFS should leave the spent fuel where it is, at nuclear plants scattered across the country, and shut down the plants when they run out of storage space.

"You need to understand that there are cumulative effects here. You can't always see it, you can't always smell it, you can't always taste it," said Jason Goenwald of Families Against Incinerator Risk.

Even Rep. James V. Hansen (R-Utah), a traditional foe of environmentalists, has come out against the project and may have the most potent argument of all. Because the land lies under airspace used for the Utah Test and Training Range, he says, the casks could be hit by a wayward cruise missile or F-16. Or it could force the Air Force to limit use of the range, exposing nearby Hill Air Force Base to a shutdown.

Despite the protests, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already approved the safety measures for the project, and Bear says it's time for outsiders to admit they can't stop the project.

"They want us to be self-determined and they want us to be self-governed, and yet when we make these judgments, they don't like it," Bear said. "All Indians, all nations, we're all at a crossroads right now. We're going to have to support our people. We don't expect the state of Utah to do it. We don't expect the federal government to do it anymore, like we used to. We want to do it ourselves, and that's what we're trying to do now."

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

2 Charged in Plot to Export Jet Parts

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 10, 2000 ; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49022-2000Dec9?language=printer

The U.S. Customs Service has charged two foreign nationals in California with conspiring to illegally export aircraft parts for the F-14 Tomcat to the Iranian air force, which has embarked on an ambitious program to modernize the American-made fighter jet.

Saeed Homayouni, a naturalized Canadian from Iran, and Yew Leng Fung, a Malaysian citizen, were arrested Thursday at an apartment in Bakersfield, Calif., from which they allegedly brokered the export of parts for the F-14, the F-5 Tiger and the F-4 Phantom without required licenses, according to a complaint filed by the Customs Service.

The document did not indicate where the F-5 and F-4 parts were destined for export.

Homayouni pleaded not guilty Friday. Fung's arraignment was postponed until Monday so that a Cantonese interpreter could be present in court.

They were arrested by Customs agents after a 20-month federal investigation that began when an aircraft parts vendor in San Diego alerted Customs officials that a firm called Multicore Ltd., operating out of the Bakersfield apartment where Homayouni and Fung lived, had requested price information for air intake seals used only on the F-14.

The F-14, a multi-role fighter manufactured by Northrop Grumman Corp., is flown only by the U.S. and Iranian air forces. Iran acquired 99 F-14s from the United States in the 1970s, before the country's Islamic revolution. It is believed to have about 25 of the aircraft in service.

The commander of Iran's air force said last year that the country had become self-sufficient in maintaining its F-14s, although Jane's Defense Weekly reported last year that Iran is capable of manufacturing only about 70 percent of the components needed to keep the aircraft operational.

At least one arms broker, Parviz Lavi, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran, has been convicted of trying to smuggle F-14 parts to Iran. Lavi, based in New York, pleaded guilty to violating the Arms Export Control Act in 1998. He was fined $125,000 and sentenced to five years in jail.

In arresting Homayouni and Fung last week in California, the Customs Service said their activities show that Iran still needs F-14 parts that its domestic manufacturers cannot produce. A 21-page complaint filed by Customs agents also illustrates the illusive nature of international arms smuggling.

Although operating out of Homayouni's Bakersfield apartment, the complaint said, Multicore Ltd. is headquartered in London and has incoming telephone calls automatically forwarded to the United Kingdom. The firm has been the subject of seven Customs investigations, the complaint said. Its owner, identified in the complaint as Soroosh Homayouni, was convicted in 1987 of violating the Arms Export Control Act.

In signing for the delivery of F-14 parts at his apartment, Saeed Homayouni allegedly used the name "Sid Hamilton," the complaint said. On another occasion, Homayouni used the alias "Joe Barry" to ship aircraft parts to Singapore on behalf of a fictitious company, the complaint said. Its address on shipping documents was actually that of an answering service in Vista, Calif.

"Singapore is a known transshipment point for items destined to Iran and other countries facing United States trade sanctions," the complaint said.

Bank records subpoenaed by the Customs Service showed that Multicore Ltd. had made 399 payments totaling $2.26 million to military parts brokers since 1995 and had received deposits of $2.21 million, the complaint said.

Subpoenaed telephone records showed outgoing calls from Multicore to the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Switzerland and Iran, and subpoenaed records from the United Parcel Service showed 99 deliveries to Homayouni's apartment in a year, the complaint said.

Customs officials say the smuggling of military parts and high-technology components used in weapons systems is a thriving industry in the United States.

Ten days ago, a federal judge in Los Angeles acquitted Jeffrey Jhyfang Lo, a U.S. citizen, of smuggling charges involving an infrared camera used in military guidance systems. The judge found that an undercover FBI agent posing as a defense contractor encouraged Lo to put the camera in his luggage before boarding a flight in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Earlier in November, a federal judge in Boston sentenced Collin Xu, a Canadian citizen, to 30 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to trying to ship gyroscopes used in missile guidance systems out of the country without the necessary licenses.

In September, Jonathan Reynolds, a British citizen, pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston to violating the Arms Export Control Act by trying to ship night-vision goggles and helicopter parts to Pakistan.

-------- drug war

19 Drug Arrests at Lennon Vigil

New York Times
December 10, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/nyregion/10BUST.html

The police arrested 19 people on charges of smoking marijuana at the day-and-night vigil to commemorate the life of John Lennon on the 20th anniversary of his slaying, officials said yesterday.

Officers, both in plain clothes and in uniform, policed the peaceful vigil, which attracted more than 1,000 people. The officers were overseen by the department's third-ranking official, Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito.

The police said that the arrests in and around Central Park's Strawberry Fields, opposite the Dakota, the apartment building where Mr. Lennon lived, began Friday afternoon and continued until early yesterday. Officers also arrested one person for selling marijuana and issued summonses to two others, one for drinking alcohol from an open container and one for marijuana possession, the police said.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who denied a request from organizers of the vigil to waive the park's 1 a.m. curfew, citing public safety concerns, defended the arrests. "It is illegal in the United States of America to sell or smoke marijuana," he said. "The police were doing what they should be doing."

Norman Siegel, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the arrests and Chief Esposito's presence were a disproportionate level of enforcement. "It raises serious questions about the judgment of the Giuliani administration and the N.Y.P.D.," he said.

---

USA Today
12/10/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Nevada

Carson City - Twenty-two people were jailed with more arrests expected in a multistate methamphetamine bust, police said. Seventeen people were arrested in Nevada and five, including the suspected ringleader, are being held in Montana. The suspects allegedly manufactured and distributed up to 60 pounds.

Washington

Olympia - Shortening prison terms for some drug offenders could save taxpayers $26 million in the next two-year budget. The Corrections Department made the suggestion in response to Gov. Locke's request for agencies to identify possible budget cuts. The department said a money could also be saved by eliminating drug treatment and job training programs in prison.

-------- europe

Friction Over French Plan to Reform the European Union

New York Times
December 10, 2000
By SUZANNE DALEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/world/10EURO.html

NICE, France, Dec. 9 - Trying to break a deadlock over how to reform the decision-making structures of the 15-nation European Union, the French today put forward a compromise proposal that apparently only stoked hard feelings over the issue.

Ireland's prime minister, Bertie Ahern, told reporters they could describe his reaction to the document as "ballistic" and officials from other countries also expressed their dismay over its contents saying the proposals were unacceptable.

The three-page draft document was delivered to the members at dawn today. It was drawn up by the French after leaders of each of the 14 other nations in the union met on Friday with French President Jacques Chirac to describe their concerns and desires.

As president of France, Mr. Chirac currently holds the six-month rotating presidency of the union.

Finding a way to streamline its decision-making is considered crucial to the union's ability to function when it begins to accept the 13 countries that are waiting to become members. Already the union is struggling with systems that were designed when it had only six member countries.

But within hours this morning, it was clear that a spirit of cooperation that had been carefully cultivated in the last two days of the meeting here was not holding up.

"I think this is going to take longer than what even the most pessimistic of us thought, " a high-level European Commission official said. "There were some strong reactions to the document."

By the early afternoon, France agreed to propose a new blueprint for discussion later in the day.

Member countries said they were eager to see what the French would come up with. "We really can not subscribe to the first version of the French proposals," said Portugal's foreign minister, Jaime Gama. "Let's hope the next one reflects the objections and suggestions they heard this morning."

The union is discussing three major areas of revision: how far to extend majority voting, which means abandoning some of the national vetoes that now exist; how to adjust the weighting of votes among member countries; and how to limit the size of the European Commission, the Brussels-based body that initiates European Union policy.

Each of these adjustments, however, means that some members will have to relinquish a measure of their power. So far, negotiations have only highlighted the difficulties that individual nations have in doing so.

The French hoped that the draft document they put forward this morning would offer something for everyone. But few countries apparently saw it that way. At a brief news conference in the afternoon, French officials defended the document, but acknowledged that it had been poorly received.

"We are still being cautiously optimistic," said Pierre Moscovici, the French minister for Europe. "But there is still a long road to walk and a difficult one."

The French suggested, as they have in the past, that the commission's size eventually be capped at 20 and that member countries go without a commissioner on a rotating basis. This proposal elicited fury among some of the smaller countries who fear that they are going to be overwhelmed by the big members and are therefore adamant about having a representative on the commission.

The French also proposed a new weighting system that made many members angry. It does nothing to increase the votes of Germany, which has a population of almost 80 million, about 20 million more people than Britain, France, Italy or Spain. At the same time, under the French proposal, some smaller countries would lose a great deal of clout, and some countries of about the same size got different numbers of votes.

The prime minister of Denmark, Poul Nyrop Rasmussen, called the proposals unacceptable and said he was not alone in that view.

"There is too much imbalance between the large and the small states," Mr. Rasmussen said. "The negotiations are going to be very hard. But we will fight on to the end."

The French also proposed a gradual shift to majority voting on fighting tax fraud, social security provisions for Europeans working in other member states, asylum and immigration, trade in financial services and aid to the poorer regions in the European Union.

The union could also bring in majority voting on certain aspects of indirect and company taxation but only after a unanimous vote and a five-year transition period.

However, several countries insist that they retain their veto power on some of those issues. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has said that he will not concede any ground on his tax veto - if he did so, he would almost certainly lose ground with voters in Britain.

France's only concession would be to give up a veto on financial services and other areas of trade in services. Its plan proposed that it keep a veto on multilateral investment negotiations and trade in cultural goods, broadcasting and Internet content services to the public.

Several countries said that was unacceptable and France had failed to make sufficient concessions.

In the French draft proposals, the union would also commit itself to hold a fresh round of reform talks on the broader division of powers between Brussels and member states.

-------- space

Space Shuttle Departs Space Station After Installing Solar Wings

New York Times
December 10, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/science/10SHUT.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 9 (AP) - The space shuttle Endeavour flew away from the International Space Station today, leaving behind powerful solar wings that already have improved life on the orbiting outpost.

The station's three residents watched as the Endeavour and its crew of five undocked more than 230 miles above central Asia. The station's crew will next have visitors in late January, when another shuttle is scheduled to arrive.

The farewell, after just one day together, included hearty handshakes and hugs. The two spacecraft were linked for one week, but the hatches between them had remained sealed until Friday.

The Endeavour's astronauts had spent almost all of last week installing new electricity-generating solar wings on the space station and working on wing repairs.

Before the wings were installed, a spacious module in the station had been closed because there was not enough power to heat it. There also was not enough power to run all the station equipment all the time.

The Endeavour is scheduled to land on Monday.

---

Shuttle heads for home

USA Today
12/10/00- Updated 02:05 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/ndssun02.htm

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - Astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour continued their trip home Sunday after leaving the International Space Station.

Meanwhile, NASA officials are still beaming from the shuttle crew's successful installation of the space station's new electricity-producing solar wings.

''It's probably the most difficult, most complicated integrated job to date relative to what we do in human space flight operations,'' said Milt Heflin, deputy chief flight director.

Early forecasts predict favorable weather conditions for the shuttle's landing Monday evening at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Endeavour's crew was to have a fairly sedate Sunday as it planned to do a routine checkout of the shuttle's rockets and control systems in preparation for its return to Earth.

Endeavour undocked from space station Alpha on Saturday, one day after its crews had finally met. The two spacecraft were linked for one week, but a difference in air pressure between them forced their hatches to remain sealed until shuttle astronauts completed three spacewalks to install Alpha's new solar wings.

Before the shuttle astronauts left, space station commander Bill Shepherd thanked them ''for bringing us great new capability on board station Alpha.'' ''Job well done,'' he said.

Shepherd and his Russian crewmates, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, have been aboard Alpha since Nov. 2. They will remain there through late February.

Their lives are now less cramped with the installation of the $600 million solar wings, which stretch 240 feet from tip to tip. One of Alpha's three rooms was previously closed off because there wasn't enough power to heat it. There also wasn't enough power to run all the station equipment all the time.

Endeavour's astronauts beamed down pictures of Alpha and its giant, gleaming, gold-colored solar wings as the shuttle made a wide lap around the station.

''Best of luck, Shep, Yuri and Sergei,'' Jett said.

-------- u.n.

A U.N. Aide Says Taliban Is Reducing Poppy Crop

New York Times
December 10, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/world/10NATI.html

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 8 - The United Nations' top antinarcotics official said today that the Taliban government in Afghanistan appears to be succeeding in slowing significantly the cultivation of opium poppies for the first time since the radical Islamic movement seized power four years ago.

Pino Arlacchi, the leader of the United Nations Drug Control Program, said in an interview that initial surveys of Afghanistan in the midst of the annual opium-planting season show that a July edict against its cultivation seems to be taking effect across the country, the world's largest producer of opium.

At the same time, Mr. Arlacchi said, his agency has now amassed strong evidence that local drug lords along the northern border with Tajikistan have stockpiled a supply of opium - and its derivatives, morphine and heroin - adequate to supply Europe and the United States for up to three years.

Those dealers, he said, know no factional allegiance. They may be merchants, local officials, even mullahs. They operate in territories controlled by the Taliban or their enemies, the remnants of the former government now known as the Northern Alliance - or by nobody.

"We have detailed evidence of the existence of a huge system of stockpiles and deposits and laboratories in Afghanistan, particularly in the northern part along the border," said Mr. Arlacchi, an Italian narcotics expert who helped bring down the Sicilian Mafia a decade ago.

"We know of 40 deposits, whose turnover reaches around 100 tons of heroin every year," he said, speaking from Rome, where he is preparing to open an international conference on transnational crime on Tuesday in Palermo. "Just to give you an idea what this means, 100 tons is the annual demand of all European addicts, plus addicts in the U.S. And we believe there are other stockpiles in other parts of the country."

Mr. Arlacchi, who is still under a Mafia death threat - in the Afghan context he calls it a "Sicilian fatwa" - said that using information from the ground and aerial surveillance "we are able to locate stockpiles within two meters of the location."

"We also know the criminals who control them," he said. "Each of these deposits is protected by a group of heavily armed people - it could be 20 people but it could also be 100 or 150 people - under the control of these criminal leaders, who sometimes are traders, sometimes local fighters, sometimes local authorities; for instance, the chief of the customs office in the area, the mayor of the village. We have satellite evidence of this."

"No credible policy to eliminate or reduce cultivation can work in Afghanistan if there is not parallel destruction of these stockpiles," he added.

In the next month, Mr. Arlacchi hopes to send about 70 drug control agents, many of them Afghan-born agronomists, into the countryside to survey crops. By the end of January or early February, opium poppies will be in bloom and easy to detect.

"But even if we have a sharp reduction in production in Afghanistan, this will not have any significant immediate consequence for the supply of heroin to Western markets," he said. "Reduction of cultivation is not enough."

Mr. Arlacchi said the July decision of the Taliban's supreme religious leader, Mullah Omar, to ban all opium cultivation risked sending countless Afghan farmers into destitution and perhaps creating political problems. But a better military position and popular support has helped strengthen the hand of the Taliban leadership, he said.

The Taliban appear to be creating a grassroots system to back the edict, he said, sometimes involving local religious leaders, authorities and elders. "In a couple of cases we have heard also of groups of farmers put in jail for two or three weeks for having not complied with the ban," he said.

Mr. Arlacchi added that it would take time to convince Western nations to help the drug-control program in Afghanistan, as long as the country is under Taliban control.

In the short term, he said, he is confident that emergency relief through the United Nations will be available to help farmers who give up poppy cultivation. But in the long run, the Taliban will have to build international credibility, he said.

They have already learned that in narcotics control, they cannot win outside assistance simply by using promises or threats. "The Taliban realized that this strategy does not work," he said.

---

U.N. workers kidnapped in Georgia

USA Today
12/10/00- Updated 01:10 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm

TBILISI, Georgia - Two members of a U.N. observer mission were kidnapped Sunday in a breakaway province of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, officials said. The men, one Polish and one Greek, were patrolling the Kodor Gorge in Abkhazia province when they lost contact with the mission office, and later, when their jeep was found abandoned near a broken-down bridge, and police determined that they had been kidnapped, said a U.N. official.

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

Protecting America's Sailors

New York Times
December 10, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/opinion/10SUN2.html

The vulnerability of United States Navy ships in foreign ports became painfully evident when terrorists blasted a large hole in the U.S.S. Cole while the destroyer was refueling in Yemen in October, killing 17 American sailors. With inquiries into the attack now nearing completion, the Navy's top admiral, Vern Clark, has outlined elements of a promising new approach to reducing the risks associated with such foreign port calls.

The Navy proposes to place primary responsibility for protecting naval vessels in the hands of America's regional military commanders, reducing the role of ship captains in setting security measures, an area where they have limited resources and experience. A Navy inquiry now being reviewed by senior admirals has found that the Cole's captain, Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, failed to follow appropriate procedures in Aden. Washington also hopes to reach new agreements with host governments to ensure that American commanders can carry out protective measures in foreign territorial waters.

Ships at sea have been considered relatively safer from terrorist attack. But when they enter potentially dangerous harbors like that of Aden in Yemen, special security precautions are supposed to be taken. The Navy makes use of more than a dozen ports in the Middle East for the roughly 60 American warships that operate in the region over the course of a year.

It was the decision of a former regional commander, Gen. Anthony Zinni, to use Aden as a refueling port. In retrospect, it is clear that General Zinni and his successor, Gen. Tommy Franks, put insufficient emphasis on overall harbor security, while leaving security in the waters immediately around visiting ships to their captains. This divided system left no one clearly in charge. It makes sense to concentrate responsibility with the regional commanders. When warranted, the commanders could order ships like the Cole surrounded with armed escort vessels during port calls to keep unknown craft at a safe distance. Since such displays of American force risk antagonizing local residents, it is important that security safeguards be established under authority agreed to by the host government. No security system against terrorism can be airtight. But America owes its sailors the best protection Washington can possibly provide.

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Delegates Agree on Chemicals Ban

Associated Press
December 10, 2000 Filed at 3:31 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-UN-Dirty-Dozen.html

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Proud, but pale and red-eyed after a week of negotiations culminating in all-night talks, U.N. officials announced Sunday that 122 countries have agreed on a treaty banning 12 highly toxic chemicals.

Greenpeace called the agreement the ``beginning of the end of toxic pollution,'' and World Wildlife Fund official Clifton Curtis described it as ``a real solid foundation for the future.''

Despite disagreements that kept negotiators awake most of Friday and Saturday nights, all welcomed the final text, said John Buccini, chairman of the summit organized by the U.N. Environment Program.

``The treaty enjoyed the broadest possible support,'' he said. ``People not only felt that we have a treaty, but that we have a good treaty.''

PCBs, dioxins and other chemicals on the ``dirty dozen'' list are known as persistent organic pollutants or POPs. They break down slowly, travel easily in the environment, and have been linked to cancer, birth defects and other genetic abnormalities. Breast-feeding mothers transmit the poison to their infants.

Production and use of nine of the 12 chemicals will be banned as soon as the treaty takes effect, likely four to five years after the signing ceremony, set for May in Stockholm, Sweden.

About 25 countries, including South Africa, would be allowed to use one of the 12 chemicals -- DDT -- to combat malaria in accordance with World Health Organization guidelines pending development of safer solutions.

The treaty calls for reducing releases of dioxins and furans -- toxic byproducts of waste burning and industrial production -- ``with the goal of their continuing minimization and, where feasible, ultimate elimination,'' it said.

Using electrical equipment containing PCBs would be allowed until 2025, as long as the equipment doesn't leak the chemical, which can cause cancer and harm the immune and reproductive systems.

The most contentious issues were provisions for expanding the treaty to include other chemicals and a way for industrialized nations to transfer some $150 million a year to developing countries to offset the costs of using cleaner alternatives.

The donor countries wanted to use an existing Global Environment Fund for the transfer, under which they would retain more control over how the money is used. Developing countries wanted a new mechanism likely to give them more control.

Eventually, the treaty assigned the GEF as a temporary mechanism, but added conditions as to how the fund must improve its work. No amount has been specified, but James Willis, a U.N. Environment Program chemical expert, estimated it would be about $150 million a year.

The European Union wanted ``precautionary'' language -- specifying how the treaty can be expanded to include other chemicals -- to be included throughout the document. The United States wanted it only in the preamble and called for stricter scientific criteria than those preferred by the EU, which argued that lack of scientific proof should not exclude chemicals from being considered for the treaty.

According to the treaty, international scientists will put each chemical under consideration for inclusion in the ban through ``a rigorous science assessment,'' Buccini said.

``If they decide that this one is just too close to call, maybe it's a POP, maybe it's not; it's sitting on the borderline, then the policy in the convention states that the committee should push this forward'' to a higher level, he said.

``There's three or four or five different places in this treaty where you can see that we've tried to construct a legal instrument which tends to err on the side of safety.''

Brooks Yeager, head of the U.S. delegation, said the final precautionary language included a ``scientific flavor,'' thereby fulfilling his country's wishes. EU officials weren't available for comment. Curtis said the treaty's precautionary language was stronger than the WWF had expected.

Most of the chemicals have been banned in industrialized countries, and there are alternatives to most of them, Buccini said. The treaty will mean that countries disposing of garbage by open-air burning and some factories will have to find new techniques, he said. That could lead to higher costs, but when the impact on the environment is factored in, the balance would be more fair to all, he said.

The treaty must be ratified by 50 countries to take effect. Yeager said he expected the ban to be ratified by the U.S. Congress.

``Our environmental NGOs like the treaty. The industry can work with it, and our people from the Great Lakes to Alaska need it,'' he said.

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A Mystery in a Refuge: 600 Dead Geese

New York Times
December 10, 2000
By ROBERT HANLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/nyregion/10GEES.html

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, N.J., Dec. 5 - From Wildlife Drive, the federal bird refuge is a pastorale of nature's silent beauty. Buff-colored marsh grass stretches for acres, sliced by channels, ponds, coves and mud flats. On this day, flocks of wheeling sandpipers glistened in the sun. Hundreds of pure white snow geese huddled on a stretch of ice. Ducks sat on the icy smooth bay, blacks specks against the gray silhouette of the Atlantic City skyline on the southern horizon.

For all its serenity, the refuge is also a tableau this fall of death and deep environmental mystery.

Nearly 600 Atlantic brants, small migratory, maritime geese, have been found dead or dying since Nov. 14 in or near two freshwater ponds at the 24,000-acre preserve, the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. About 200 more dead brants have been recovered from small coastal bays elsewhere in southern Atlantic County and northern Cape May County, said Steve Atzert, the refuge manager.

What killed the brants is unknown. Stunned refuge officials and New Jersey wildlife biologists said they could not recall such a large waterfowl die-off here in the refuge or elsewhere in the state.

Forsythe is the biggest winter nesting grounds for brants on the Atlantic flyway. Each winter, an estimated 120,000 of the little geese stay here, flourishing on the sea lettuce and eel grass at the bottom of its shallow salt-water bays and in the shelter of its two freshwater ponds, now watery dying grounds.

Die-offs of brants are not uncommon in the New York region. Between 1979 and 1996, about 800 of the birds died on Long Island after eating a pesticide, diazinon, on golf courses in Nassau County, federal wildlife officials said.

But three weeks of tests and culturing in state and federal labs have not identified the disease fatal to the brant in Forsythe. Diazinon and other pesticides were not found.

Recently thousands of waterfowl, including common loons, died in the Buffalo region of avian botulism. That has been ruled out here.

No symptoms of West Nile virus have been detected, said Douglas Roscoe, a New Jersey wildlife pathologist heading the state's inquiry. Poisons and other toxins have also been eliminated as causes, as has avian cholera, Dr. Roscoe said.

Both he and Kimberli Miller, a veterinarian at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., which is leading the federal phase of the inquiry, said experts believed that some type of virus was responsible. But tissue cultures have not yet found one.

"If we're particularly unlucky, we may not be able to detect the cause," Dr. Roscoe said.

While the experts hope and wait for definitive answers, some residents of the homes scattered around the fringes of the refuge have become a bit jittery.

Galloway Township is a sprawling, once-secluded boat-manufacturing hub of just under 100 square miles. Route 9, a busy shoreline highway, cuts through the town. For years, bird-watchers, nature lovers and waterfowl hunters alike have flocked to Forsythe. In the last 20 years, Atlantic City's casinos, about five miles away, have helped push Galloway's population to about 27,000, from 12,000 in 1980.

Bill Smallwood, 41, whose home is about 100 yards from a section of the refuge's salt marsh, said, "Hopefully, this isn't anything to worry about, human-wise.

"We're keeping the kids away from the marshes until we find out what's happening."

Dr. Roscoe said he doubted the disease would affect people, primarily because no predatory birds or other animals had been found dead or stricken in the refuge.

Examinations of about a dozen dead brants have found some common signs of disease, most commonly hemorrhaging on the surfaces of the heart, its blood vessels and the stomach, Dr. Roscoe and Dr. Miller said. In addition, white spots have been found on the livers of a few of the brants. Others have lesions on their livers and spleens. Mr. Atzert said there had been some talk about the possibility of goose hepatitis, a viral disease of the liver. But Dr. Miller said nothing definite on hepatitis had been found.

Rangers began finding the dead and dying birds in the two freshwater ponds on Nov. 14. At first, they thought the brants had been shot and wounded by hunters and not retrieved. But then, in the week before Thanksgiving, dozens turned up dead each day.

Tracy Casselman deputy manager of the refuge, said the dying brants had been disoriented, weak and isolated from flocks. Normally, Mr. Casselman said, resting waterfowl face into the wind so breezes flatten their feathers. "With this, you'd see sick birds oriented to the wind sideways or backward, just sitting there waiting to die," he said. "You'd see some with their breasts up against the shoreline, paddling their feet and going nowhere. One tried to fly and just flopped over on its back."

Officials said they were encouraged that the deaths had declined since mid-November. They said that the number of dead brants found each day had dwindled from dozens earlier to five or fewer lately. And they pointed out that the dead birds represented a small percentage of the estimated 120,000 brants, natives of the Canadian Arctic, that fly south thousands of miles to spend the winter in and near the refuge.

Mr. Atzert, the manager, said he was satisfied that whatever was killing the birds posed no danger to refuge visitors. The preserve was closed from Nov. 17 to Dec. 1 because of concerns about the possible presence of pathogens. Officials have reopened Wildlife Drive, an eight-mile gravel road that circles the salt marsh, ponds and bogs and offers bird-watching observatories.

But while early anxieties have eased some, the state environmental agency has not lifted its precautionary advisory, issued Nov. 22, urging hunters not to shoot, handle or eat any brants. And, while refuge officials awaited answers from the labs, they said they were puzzled by other facets of the deaths, particularly that they were limited to the areas of Atlantic and Cape May Counties. Wildlife officials who monitor migrating birds along the Atlantic flyway on Long Island and in Maryland and Delaware said they had not seen any similar die-offs of brants or other waterfowl. In addition, refuge officials said they were a bit surprised that the fatal ailment had not spread to other geese, including Canada geese and snow geese, which are both common in the refuge.

Dr. Roscoe, the New Jersey wildlife pathologist, said there were not always absolute explanations for a disease's restriction to a single species. The ailing birds may not have interacted with healthy birds to spread the disease, he said. Or, he added, a species may have been exposed to a d