------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Basement Motives
Nuclear fuel train derails in Scotland
Bulgaria sacks head of nuclear watchdog
Expert calls for halt to firing of DU shells
Workers evacuated in French nuclear plant alert
Sick French try to prove Chernobyl caused ailments
Learning to live with a nuclear Iraq
South Korea's Kim to Visit United States
Pentagon expert says U.S. missile tests too simple
Dutch police arrest 16 at two nuclear waste protests
OUR FAKE ENERGY CRISIS:
Attack subs face a changing world
Calculus of terror
Cheney softens demand for Iraqi inspections
It Ain't Yellowstone, But It's Home
Envirocare Warns of Employment Freeze

MILITARY
Ostrich and bison, anyone?
Hits and misses in Iraq
Marines Develop a New Weapon
21 DIE IN NATIONAL GUARD PLANE CRASH

OTHER
Greens accuse rich countries of double talk on fuel
Iberdrola wind-power jv signs 913.5 mln euro loan
UK budget boost sought for "real" green road fuels
It Ain't Yellowstone, But It's Home
Beef prices soaring after tough winter, drought
The FBI
Judge orders accused spy be held in jail
Spy suspect ordered held in jail
DID HANSSEN TIP SOVIETS ABOUT SPY TUNNEL?
Basement Motives

ACTIVISTS
Stop Harrassment of Dr. VIneeta Gupta
FTAA Organizing Resource offered by Jobs With Justice
Students from 56 Universities Launch Fast for Free Burma
Globalization foes, police clash after World Economic Forum
Energy Protest Wednesday!
"The Future Is Ours to Create"


-------- NUCLEAR

Basement Motives

Mon, 05 Mar 2001
Slate Magazine
by Scott Shuger

USAT leads with today's start of the U.S. Navy's formal inquiry into the Greeneville accident. The paper says that at stake are not just the sub's skipper's career, but also those of the two officers immediately above him in the chain of command, one of whom was also on board.

The USAT lead says that prior to the emergency surfacing maneuver that ended in the collision with that Japanese trawler, a sonar technician had tracked the vessel as being as close as 2,000 yards away, but didn't report this after the sub's captain said he saw nothing through his periscope. An inside WP effort says the technician concluded therefore that he'd been wrong about the surface ship's proximity. Oddly disappeared from the sub coverage is the allegation (first published by Navy Times) that USAT led with recently: that the Greeneville surfaced outside the designated sub operating area that transiting surface ships are warned about on ocean charts.

-------- britain

Nuclear fuel train derails in Scotland

March 5, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9981

EDINBURGH - A freight train carrying empty spent nuclear fuel flasks jumped the tracks near Edinburgh on Friday although no one was hurt in the low-speed derailment, British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) said.

"No one has been injured and there has been absolutely no damage to any of the flasks which have remained upright," BNFL said in a statement.

Two freight wagons derailed in the accident which happened near the Torness Power Station around 20 miles (30 km) east of the Scottish capital. Only one of them was carrying the heavily protected nuclear fuel casks.

BNFL, the state-owned operator of Britain's nuclear power stations, said it had put emergency procedures into place purely as a precautionary measure.

Emergency services at the scene were also monitoring radiation levels.

The derailment came two days after a head-on collision on the same Scotland to London east coast main line between a coal train and a passenger express at Great Heck in northern England, which left at least 13 dead and 70 injured.

The north Yorkshire crash appeared to be a freak accident, caused by a Land Rover and trailer which slid off a motorway onto the tracks.

Rail network operator Railtrack said the Torness derailment had reduced mainline rail services to just one track, but should only cause minor disruption as the freight train appeared to be turning into a railway siding at the time.

-------- bulgaria

Bulgaria sacks head of nuclear watchdog

March 5, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9982

SOFIA - Bulgaria's government said last week it had sacked Georgi Kaschiev, the head of the country's nuclear watchdog for impeding the operations of the Kozloduy nuclear power plant.

Other reasons included interference in the work of the Bulgarian Atomic Energy Committee's (BAEC) inspection for safe usage of atomic energy, the government said in a statement.

The deputy chairman of BAEC Robert Popits was appointed to replace Kaschiev.

In September, environment minister Evdokia Maneva demanded Kaschiev's resignation over what she called wrong information of increased radiation after an incident at a 440-megawatt reactor at Kozloduy.

Maneva said the national system, monitoring the territory of the whole country and the plant's territory, had not shown increased radiation.

Kaschiev stuck to his statement and refused to resign.

In an interview with a local newspaper Kaschiev said after the incident that radiation near the reactor was up 70-80 times above the normal level and two workers had been affected.

-------- depleted uranium

Expert calls for halt to firing of DU shells

Monday, 5th March 2001
The Scotsman
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=52161&keyword=the

ONE of the world's leading nuclear safety experts has called for an immediate halt on the firing of depleted uranium shells into the Solway Firth until health worries can be satisfied. Dr John Large accused the MoD of "arrogance and incompetence" over last month's resumption of test firing at the Dundrennan range.

He also said the ministry had fired nearly 30 tonnes of depleted uranium into the Solway Firth which broke radioactive dumping at sea legislation - but had managed to avoid the law by claiming "Crown exemption".

Dr Large called upon the Scottish parliament and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) to regulate any future firings. It is known that SEPA wants to take control.

Contamination from the armour-piercing warheads is claimed to have caused the deaths of six Italian soldiers who served in the Balkans. Troops who served in the Balkans and the Gulf War have claimed their health has suffered because of the radioactive ammunition.

The MoD has found only one of the 6,900 shells fired since 1982 - and that was dragged up by a fishing boat four years ago.

Dr Large said: "These firings should be regulated by the Scottish Parliament and SEPA because the MoD has been so incompetent and arrogant over people's health. These firings should not have gone ahead without a justification, recovery plan and radioactive impact assessment."

"They are clearly breaking the Radioactive Substances Act of 1993 which bans the dumping of radioactive material at sea. The MoD has cocked its nose at the legislation by claiming crown exemption. It is outrageous and these firings should stop immediately.

"At the very least the MoD is putting a highly toxic material which attacks the nervous system into the environment without any justification. It never seemed to cross anybody's mind in the MoD that they were dumping radioactive material." In the current tests, Challenger tanks fire shells at soft targets, usually canvas, before the fall into the sea.

Some shells have fallen short and hit land and others fragmented in flight. The MoD claims all contamination was cleaned-up immediately.

Dr Large said: "Until everybody is satisfied that the health risk is acceptable the firings should stop. "It is no good the MoD saying there is no risk. They should demonstrate there is no risk. It seems everybody except the MoD knows that uranium is highly toxic."

Environmentalists have also called on the MoD to remove the artillery shells, which have been linked to Gulf War Syndrome.

The government's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, which monitors the range, has announced that new experiments are to be carried out to "determine the rate and nature of the corrosion process of DU both in soil and on the sea bed."

Dr Large, who advises governments around the world on nuclear issues said the shells normally released radioactive particles on impact causing potential health risks.

"These particles are either wind borne or fall into the sea and could enter the food chain through fish or lower organisms," said Dr Large, who is currently advising the Gibraltar government over repairs to the nuclear submarine HMS Tireless.

But DERA said the firing of the DU shells was under strictly controlled conditions. A spokesman said: "The purpose of the firing is to research and develop and prove DU ammunition for use by the UK armed forces in times of conflict."

-------- france

Workers evacuated in French nuclear plant alert

March 5, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9977

PARIS - More than 130 workers at a French nuclear power plant were evacuated after a radioactivity alert on Friday, but none of the people nor the surrounding area were contaminated, the state-owned EdF power company said.

"It's nothing serious. It's not an incident that goes into the...international register of nuclear risks," a spokeswoman at the company, Electricite de France, said. "Everything gets back to normal tomorrow."

The incident took place at a reactor during maintenance at the Cattenom nuclear plant outside the northeastern town of Thionville, near the borders with Germany and Luxembourg.

"At 1050 this morning (0950 GMT) the radioactivity counters sounded off," the spokeswoman said. "We immediately evacuated the 131 people who were working there. At 1430 we measured radioactivity levels again and there was no longer anything.

"There's no trace of contamination," she said.

----

Sick French try to prove Chernobyl caused ailments

March 5, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9984

PARIS - A group of French people with thyroid ailments began legal moves on Thursday to try to prove they fell ill because France failed to warn citizens of the radioactive fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The 53 plaintiffs, backed by two pressure groups, lodged a complaint against persons unknown at the Palace of Justice in Paris on grounds of alleged poisoning and associated counts.

The technical step under French law means a judge must now examine the complaint, though the judge is not bound to order a criminal investigation.

A similar attempt by a sole plaintiff failed last year on grounds that the person could not demonstrate a scientific link between the Chernobyl accident and the illness.

The Chernobyl complex in Ukraine was the site of the world's worst nuclear accident in April 1986, when a reactor exploded and radiation spewed from its burning shell. The plant shut down for good in December.

The plaintiffs allege that French authorities did nothing to alert citizens to the potential dangers from a cloud of radioactivity that drifted west from Chernobyl.

"Too many things have been hidden. We were always told that the cloud had stopped at the border. We want the truth," said one of the plaintiffs, 50-year-old Jean-Claude Foures.

The lawyer for the group, Christian Curtil, acknowledged that there was no absolute scientific link between the accident and his clients' illnesses, but said there was sufficient circumstantial evidence to warrant opening an investigation.

-------- iraq

Learning to live with a nuclear Iraq
If the Germans are correct, there's not much time left to draft a new Iraq policy

March 5, 2001
By Reuven Pedatzur
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=3/5/01&id=112301

Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) published an assessment over a week ago on Iraq's continuing development of weapons of mass destruction. It emphasizes how important it is for Israel to prepare itself for a vastly different Middle East. There is nothing substantially new in the German view that within three years, Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein will have nuclear weapons - and by 2005, he will also have ballistic missiles with a range of 3,000 kilometers that will be able to hit targets in Europe. Similar assessments of the Iraqi nuclear timetable have been published before.

What is new about the German intelligence agency's evaluation is the inclusion of technical details, such as Iraq's success in manufacturing ammonium percholorate, one of the three components needed to produce solid fuel for ballistic missiles, and the revelation that forbidden materials have been smuggled into Iraq (through Dubai and Malaysia).

Iraq's stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction has once again begun to concern the international community following the entry of George W. Bush into the White House. One of Bush's first decisions led to an aerial attack on Iraqi military installations near Baghdad. Furthermore, the new American president's declarations and those of the senior members of his cabinet are cogent evidence of Washington's fears of Iraq becoming a nuclear power capable of threatening, within a relatively short period of time, America's European allies.

On the surface of things, a substantive change seems to have taken place in American policy. It appears the recently installed Bush administration is determined to put an end to Iraq's plans for developing weapons of mass destruction. However, it seems more likely the Americans will soon realize they have really missed the boat as far as stopping Iraq from arming itself with ultra-lethal weapons is concerned.

Since December 1998, when the last United Nations inspectors left Iraqi soil, no one in the West knows for certain what has been going on in Iraq regarding weapons of mass destruction. But it seems obvious to all those who monitor Iraq's activities that, the moment the last inspector departed from that country, Baghdad renewed and stepped up its programs for developing such weapons.

For example, the BND assessment has called attention to the extensive activities observed at Al-Kaim, which, according to Western experts, is the hub of the research and development work connected with Iraq's nuclear program.

The assessment in the West is that the key factor that will enable Iraq to complete its development of a nuclear bomb would be the acquisition of fissionable weapons-grade materials. Apparently, the known quantities of uranium in Iraqi hands would be enough for the production of four to five nuclear bombs. According to nuclear experts, the quantity of low-grade uranium that Iraq currently possesses (1,700 kg) is enough for the creation of 45 kg. of uranium that would be of sufficiently high quality to enable the production of a bomb.

In addition to these materials, Iraq has 13 tons of natural uranium, which the International Atomic Energy Commission allowed to remain in Iraqi hands for peaceful applications in the future. This amount of natural uranium would be sufficient for the production of 70 kg. of weapons-grade uranium. If one factors in the fear that additional fissionable materials have been smuggled into Iraqi over the past two years or will be smuggled in within the near future, it seems clear that Saddam's determination to manufacture nuclear arms will lead to the production of an Iraqi atom bomb.

When the various options available to the Bush administration are weighed, the only conclusion is that, without Saddam's cooperation, there is no rational way of putting an end to Iraq's nuclear program. It is difficult to imagine the American administration being able to once more forge a coalition of countries supporting genuine international monitoring of Saddam. The Iraqi leader himself has already made it crystal clear that he has no intention of letting arms inspectors roam freely in his country. The reaction of France, Russia and China to this statement indicates that these three nations have learned how to live with the fact that arms monitoring of Iraq can never be renewed.

The only other military option the United States could adopt would be the launching of a unilateral American operation. However, it seems highly unlikely an American president would order that sections of Iraq be captured in order to permit the destruction of that country's nuclear installations. Even aerial bombing, in the absence of precise intelligence reports, is out of the question.

The sad but inevitable conclusion is that Iraq will have nuclear weapons within a few short years. Israel's policy-makers must base their decisions on the acceptance of this fact of life. The question, of course, is how should Israel prepare itself to meet this threat.

The same reasons that discourage America from any use of military action to terminate the Iraqi nuclear program will also prevent those who once managed to destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor from repeating such a move. Thus, the only realistic option left for Israel is to formulate policies that will effectively cope with this new nuclear threat.

Those policies will have to be based on the formation of a credible deterrent capability that could provide an effective response to a surprise Iraqi attack. At the same time, channels of communication must be developed between Iraq and Israel to formalize the rapid exchange of messages that is vitally needed to prevent one of the parties, in possession of such doomsday weaponry, from making wrong decisions based on a misinterpretation of the enemy's actions and on a lack of understanding of the enemy's vital interests.

This kind of dialogue, which appears today to be in the realm of science fiction, would also serve vital Iraqi interests. Saddam is well aware of the kind of damage a highly lethal weapon could inflict on his country and he will therefore do everything possible to prevent such a scenario becoming reality. In the new Middle East, Iraq will undoubtedly be a dangerous enemy but will, at the same time, also be a partner in a strategic dialogue.

If the German intelligence agency's assessments concerning Iraq are correct, Israel's policy-makers do not have much time left in order to formulate a policy that can effectively meet this challenge.

-------- korea

South Korea's Kim to Visit United States

March 5, 2001
Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-korea-u.html?searchpv=reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's visit to Washington which starts on Tuesday will be full of smiles and congratulations but will also hold a warning on North Korea: ``Don't rock this boat or we could both end up in the sea.''

The question of the week is whether that message will resonate with enough people in this new U.S. administration, and if it does, how fast they can act on it.

Washington's negotiations with Pyongyang, stalled by the transition to George W. Bush from his predecessor Bill Clinton, are crucial to the progress of South Korea's own efforts to improve relations on the Korean peninsula, divided at the end of World War II.

Kim, whose ``Sunshine Policy'' of rapprochement won him both the Nobel Peace Prize and a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il last year, has raced to meet Bush in hopes of influencing the administration's policy early in the game. The two leaders meet on Wednesday.

After years of parallel efforts by South Korea, the United States and Japan, with Russia and China playing roles on the sidelines, a Republican president and Congress -- never fully supportive of Clinton's North Korea policy to start with -- has potential to upset Kim's grand plan.

KIM HELD IN HIGH REGARD IN U.S.

Working in his favor, however, is the extremely high regard in which Kim is held by both Republicans and Democrats and indeed, by the American people, political analysts said.

``I think probably as much as any other single factor, it was the regard, the high regard that the Clinton people ... had for Kim Dae-jung which was a major factor influencing their policy,'' said Don Oberdorfer, author of ``The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History.''

``I believe he will also have a very big impact on the Bush administration,'' he said at a briefing.

The crucial issues in North Korea-U.S. relations are the status of the 1994 Agreed Framework that persuaded Pyongyang to halt a suspected nuclear weapons program and an agreement in 1999 under which North Korea suspended a long-range missile program while the two countries continued discussions.

The Clinton administration had brought relations to the point where Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went to Pyongyang and a state visit by President Clinton himself was being contemplated if the details in a permanent solution to the missile dispute could be agreed beforehand.

The South Korean government position is that the Bush administration should pick up where Clinton left off.

Former ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg said Bush and Kim may discuss working even more closely together on North Korea, using ``jointly calibrated yardsticks'' of progress.

``Our two agendas have never been closely coordinated,'' Gregg, now president of The Korea Society, told Reuters.

HARDEST SELL MAY BE ON CAPITOL HILL

Kim may find his hardest sell on Capitol Hill, which he will visit on Thursday. He leaves Washington on Friday.

Last week the new Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations Henry Hyde and two other congressmen sent a letter to Bush asking him to ``avoid making any commitments to foreign governments that would prejudice your ability to refine U.S. policy toward North Korea.''

In particular they asked Bush to take into account their concerns on the workability of the Agreed Framework, by which Pyongyang agreed to mothball a heavy-water nuclear reactor suspected to be a part of a weapons development program in exchange for two safe, light-water reactors and free fuel oil.

The problem is construction of the light-water reactors has been delayed for a variety of reasons and is at least four years behind its scheduled 2003 date to come on stream.

Even if Bush does continue the policy started by Clinton, analysts point out that as with any new administration, it will take a good long time formulating a policy.

``It's quite possible that the administration will come up with a very good policy toward North Korea over time, but I think the key words here are 'over time','' said Joel Wit, guest scholar at The Brookings Institution thinktank.

Kim will not pressure Bush directly to stay the course on North Korea but will effort to show how Pyongyang is changing and is sincere, said Gregg.

``He'll say, 'They want to work with you','' Gregg said. ``I think he's going to put things in the positive.''

The timing of this trip has not only been determined by the U.S. transition but also by the state of affairs facing Kim back home. Flagging domestic support for his Sunshine Policy means Kim needs U.S. backing more than ever.

The United States fought on South Korea's side during the 1950-53 Korean War, still stations 37,000 troops in the country and is its greatest trading partner and staunchest ally in defense and diplomacy. On North Korea's part, Washington is the only country that can give it what it most craves, recognition on the world stage.

-------- missile defense

Pentagon expert says U.S. missile tests too simple

Monday March 5,
Yahoo News
By Jim Wolf
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/010305/n05610267_2.html

WASHINGTON, March 5 (Reuters) - Tests of a proposed multibillion-dollar U.S. missile shield are too simplistic to make decisions about moving from research to deployment, the Pentagon's testing and evaluation office said on Monday.

The test program is ``not aggressive enough to match the pace of acquisition to support deployment and the test content does not yet address important operational questions,'' wrote Philip Coyle, the former director, before resigning in January.

In his annual report to Congress, Coyle said more aggressive testing would be necessary ``to adequately stress design limits and achieve an effective initial operational capability by the latter half of this decade.''

President George W. Bush has committed to fielding a shield as soon as technically feasible to defend at least the United States and possibly allies against a limited strike of ballistic missiles from a ``rogue state.''

A national missile defense (NMD) -- linking radar stations, space sensors and rockets -- is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to cost at least $60 billion.

Bush has left open the possibility of a layered approach, adding ship- and space-based systems, that would cost tens of billions more. Raytheon Co based in Lexington, Massachusetts, would have a role in three of the four main systems under review. The other big players are Lockheed Martin Corp (NYSE:LMT - news), Boeing Co (NYSE:BA - news), General Dynamics, Litton Industries and TRW Inc.

Former President Bill Clinton said on Sept. 1 that based on the testing data available to him he lacked enough confidence in the technology and operational effectiveness of the system to start building. He acted after the interceptor failed in two of three tests. China, Russia and many U.S. allies strongly oppose NMD on the grounds it would upset the strategic balance and trigger new arms races.

TESTS SHOWED 'BASIC FUNCTIONALITY'

Coyle said the flight test program had demonstrated ``a very basic functionality of NMD surrogates and prototypes.''

The initial deployment of 20 interceptors, which could be ready by 2006 if Bush signs on in coming months, is meant to defend against ``tens'' of missiles with a residual capability against small-scale unauthorized or accidental launches by the major declared nuclear powers.

Coyle said the established nuclear powers already use decoys and other countermeasures with their missiles that go beyond the level of sophistication projected in current U.S. tests.

``The test program needs to broaden the scope of countermeasure testing if it is to quantify not only the 'residual' capability that is part of the NMD operational requirements, but also assess the design margin and growth potential of the system design,'' Coyle wrote.

A spokesman for the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization defended the current countermeasure test mix as representative of ``an unsophisticated threat'' of the type projected to come from North Korea or Iran.

``The system we're developing now is designed to meet what we believe is the threat from rogue nations ... and not China or Russia,'' said Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, the spokesman.

But he said the Pentagon office in charge of the program had already integrated a number of Coyle's earlier suggestions for upgrading the testing and was still mulling others.

``We find his reports to be very good,'' Lehner said.

Steve Hildreth, a missile defense expert at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, said Coyle's latest report provided ammunition to both NMD boosters and detractors.

But on balance, it showed the United States has ``a long way to go'' before it can deploy an effective system, he said.

-------- netherlands

Dutch police arrest 16 at two nuclear waste protests

March 5, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9976

OOST-VLISSINGEN, Netherlands - Dutch police arrested 16 environmentalists on Thursday at two separate anti-nuclear protests which delayed waste shipments to processing plants in France and Britain.

Nine people from the activist group Omkruit were arrested after blocking railway tracks and delaying the departure of a train carrying spent nuclear fuel from the Borssele nuclear plant to a French processing plant at Le Havre.

The protesters had climbed inside oil barrels on the tracks and used specially designed devices to lock their arms together.

"We have a special unit to deal with that, and they succeeded (in removing the protesters) in less than an hour," Zeeland police spokesman Jan van Mourick said.

Seven Greenpeace members were arrested at a separate protest when they attempted to block a road to prevent a truck carrying spent nuclear fuel rods from the defunct Dodewaard plant from reaching the port at Vlissingen.

That truck reached the port after the protesters were cleared from the road, police said. The fuel was destined for the British Nuclear Fuel processing centre at Sellafield.

In January, Greenpeace protesters delayed train shipments of spent nuclear fuel from Borssele to Le Havre. Greenpeace did not take part in Thursday's railtrack occupation because a court ruled last month it had no legal right to block shipments to France, it said.

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

OUR FAKE ENERGY CRISIS:
What REALLY Happened in California

Mon, 5 Mar 2001
By Harvey Wasserman

Hiding behind the rhetoric of free enterprise, major campaign donors to George W. Bush have reaped billions of dollars from the president's refusal to cap wholesale electricity prices during California's deregulation crisis. They stand to make billions more at the expense of consumers and the environment if the crisis is used as a pretext to pass upcoming federal legislation promoting fossil and nuclear fuels.

Indeed, based on fears generated by the power crisis in California, energy bills now barreling toward Congress would drill the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, lift environmental regulations on burning fossil fuels, promote new nuclear power plants and hand still more consumer and taxpayer billions to the producers of electricity.

But there's something dreadfully wrong with this picture.

Namely: the electricity crisis in California has been a contrived, corporate-driven epic that has socked ratepayers and taxpayers with a staggering double-whammy, destabilizing a huge energy delivery system that had functioned reliably for nearly a century.

The disaster's primary driving force was a botched 1996 deregulatory scheme that forced ratepayers to hand more than $20 billion in "stranded cost" bailouts to the very utilities now crying uncle. Those companies have still not fully accounted for what happened to that money.

Once that deregulatory scheme was enacted, beginning in 1998, critical miscalculations caught those utilities in a vice of their own making that allowed billions more to flow to a select few power generators, many of them key Bush supporters. Those energy barons are, in turn, are using the crisis as a pretext to demand pro-fossil/nuclear legislation that will yield them still more billions, again at the expense of the public and the environment.

At both the state and national level, corporate campaign donations have helped fuel the disaster. And now an increasingly angry California populace is demanding both answers and solutions.

As early as 1996, this catastrophic, immensely complex failure was predicted by consumer and environmental activists who vehemently protested the flawed deregulatory scheme that made it happen. Among other things, they now point out the crisis has nothing to do with the available supply of electricity, which is more than ample to meet California's current needs.

In other words, California's deregulatory disaster has been a predictable political event---a "failure by design" as one critic calls it---not one prompted by a real shortage.

The solutions, both for California and the nation, are to be found not in misguided producer-driven legislation, but in proper enforcement of existing federal regulations---especially in enforcing caps on wholesale electricity prices.

And in the example of municipal-owned utilities in Sacramento, Los Angeles and other California communities that wisely chose to forgo deregulation---models that are gaining critical new mainstream support as the state moves to dig itself out.

There was much joy and hardly a sign of dissent in Sacramento's official halls of power on the day in 1996 California's deregulation bill was signed by Governor Pete Wilson, who at the time had presidential ambitions.

The legislature had unanimously voted for the bill. The utilities and their lobbyists were gushing, as had their campaign coffers in the months leading up to the vote. This is "a great day for us," cheered John Bryson, president of Southern California Edison, the bill's chief architect. "We believe this plan is the best way to facilitate a smooth, timely transition to a competitive electricity market and maximize value for our shareholders and customers." It was "a large achievement and a sound achievement for the state in terms of giving customers choice."

With abundant infusions of utility cash, AB1890 was promoted by the state's major utilities as a way to save customer money through the magic of marketplace. In 1995, Bryson trumpeted deregulation as "the best, soundest way to move to a desirable competitive market that will benefit all customers, large and small." SoCalEd, he said, was "committed to a 25% rate reduction effective January 1, 2000. As near as we're able to tell, this is consistent with our goal." The utilities spent more than $3.6 million lobbying to win the bill in 1996, and another $4.1 million to promote it in 1997.

But Bryson - who at the time was paid over a million dollars a year to head the utility giant - could hardly have been more wildly wrong, as he recently admitted. SoCalEd and its counterpart PG&E are billions in debt to their suppliers. Blackouts and threats of blackouts have rolled across the California landscape. The state is hemorrhaging $50 million per day for a service that, before Bryson's big plan, was cheap and reliable. Politicians are committing Golden State residents to $10 billion and more in bailout costs, with no end in sight. And the worst has yet to come: annual energy demand peaks not during the winter but during California's sultry summer, when the air conditioners run at full blast.

Fortunately for Bryson and the legion of MBAs that helped him make those predictions, an army of mainstream pundits and corporate think tankers have joined forces exonerate him by selling the false notion that the crisis couldn't have been predicted. It was instead, they say, due to the unfortunate convergence of increasing demand, bad weather, random power plan outages, grid problems and, most of all, "not enough deregulation." Even now, The Wall Street Journal and a battalion of pro-business heavyweights blame the crisis not on the utilities who drafted the legislation, but on a public that barely knew of its passage, and is now being forced to foot the bill.

Totally ignored is the fact that a broad coalition of consumer and environmental groups saw this coming, right from the start. They bitterly opposed the original AB1890 deregulation bill. In 1998, as deregulation was taking effect, they gathered 700,000 signatures to put on a fall ballot initiative that would have nipped the crisis in the bud.

But they ran into a hugely funded utility attack that would not be denied. Still intoxicated by the promises of deregulation, William Hauck, Chairman Concerned Stockholders of California, a SoCalEd lobby group, spoke for the industry when he warned that returning to public regulation would dismantle "the competitive electricity market and customer choice, and will actually result in higher electric rates." Big energy steam-rolled the campaign with a $40 million counteroffensive. The advocates had only $1 million. Repeal was buried, 73-27. (A parallel Massachusetts campaign was crushed on the same day, by a similar margin, with similar expenditures.)

It was a grim day for consumer advocates like Eugene Coyle, one of the state's most respected energy analysts; Nancy Rader of Public Citizen; Herbert Chao Gunther of the San Francisco-based Public Media Center; Harvey Rosenfield of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights; Ed Maschke of the California Public Interest Research Group; Paul Fenn of the Oakland-based American Local Power Project, and a host of other green activists who had fought hard to avoid what's now happened. They had never trusted the deregulation gamble. They argued that the electric power industry was a natural monopoly that could never sustain true competition and demanded public control. They predicted disaster all along.

One such prophet was Dan Berman, an energy expert working to win public utility ownership for his hometown of Davis, California. With Boston-based activist John O'Connor, Berman wrote in their 1976 book Who Owns the Sun:

"Today deregulation, cheap electricity, and natural gas are all the rage. But few people are paying attention to what will happen when the price of natural gas and oil go up, as they most surely will, after falling by 75 percent in the last decade. What will happen when the new, unrelated 'independent power producers' of cheap electric power fired by combined-cycle gas turbines pass on whopping rate increases to the public as the price of natural gas soars? Will big industry come weeping to the public, hat in hand, as the savings-and-loan investors did? Are the energy corporations crippling American industry by reinforcing an addiction to cheap fossil fuels and electricity. Will there be a massive ratepayers' revolt when utilities try to stick consumers with doubled and even quadrupled utility bills?"

AB1890 did include measures that appeared to benefit ratepayers. A 10 percent rate cut was frozen for as many as four years. But the cut was financed by an elaborate bonding scheme that would force consumers to pay huge sums of long-term interest. "In effect, the small customers are borrowing to give themselves this rate cut, which is like borrowing money to 20 give yourself a raise," said Coyle at the time. This is a "hidden tax that Californians will have to pay to private utility owners." "Beyond 2002,"added Ed Maschke of California PIRG. AB1890 "adds hurdles that customers just jump before leaving the monopoly, making it likely that only a few will benefit even then."

Through the early 1990s, Southern California Edison had stymied the construction of new generating facilities, which they feared would compete with ones they already owned. Now AB1890 made it still harder for startups to lure new customers away from the established giants. And harder still for cities, towns and counties to "aggregate" their demand and buy power as a unit, a measure consumer groups wanted as a counter-balance to utility domination.

When deregulation came, a small number of Californians did leave their established utilities for competitors promising cheaper or "green" renewable-based power. But those competitors could never get a foothold against the entrenched utilities. As the idea of a free market in electricity rapidly collapsed, so did the competition. As Fenn predicted, with unfortunate accuracy: "Unless residents and small businesses can buy power in aggregate through their local governments, 'consumer choice' will mean little more than paying higher rates to a middleman or to your current utility."

There were also some incentives for conservation and renewables written into AB1890. But the utilities have long fought mandated programs for increased efficiency and conservation, many of which have proven highly effective. With deregulation, the utilities are once more in the business of selling as much electricity as they can, and programs demanding the opposite have become marginal at best.

At the root of the problem---and of the critics' opposition---were "stranded cost" arrangements that the mainstream media continues to all but ignore. AB1890's driving force was an elaborate compensation program to deliver up to $28.5 billion to the utilities as an off-set for investments in nuclear power once billed as "too cheap to meter," but in 1996 branded by them as "uncompetitive."

Taken as a whole, warned Coyle at an August, 1996 press conference, deregulation and the torrent of cash it would generate for the utilities "will not build infrastructure in California. PG&E and Edison will likely invest it overseas, in places like Indonesia and Australia where both companies are already active. In fact, the entire [bailout] is a liquidation of California assets, with almost all of this ratepayer and taxpayer money likely to flow to foreign investments."

Today, those same critics are more livid than satisfied that they were right. In their view, the state's once reliable power grid has been sacrificed for a risky attempt at financial alchemy. Service has plummeted and chaos emerged throughout the grid. But in fact, they say, the crisis itself is not real: it's been fabricated by out of state power generators, the "profiteers" that Gray Davis excoriated in his state of the state address, who are withholding energy to drive prices up.

Unfortunately, Davis himself has been compromised by large campaign donations he has taken from SoCalEd and the other in-state utilities. He has helped spread the widely held myth that California simply doesn't have access to adequate power. In fact, it has more than 45,000 megawatts, while peak demand during the blackouts this winter hovered below 30,000, according to the state. In part because SoCalEd fought so successfully against building new power plants inside the state, the stability of the grid now rests on little more than private companies' willingness to sell on the daily spot market. The blackouts, consumer advocates contend, merely show that unregulated companies find it more lucrative to sell less power at a higher price than to sell more power at a lower price.

Moreover, the activists---and a growing segment of the public---now suspect the utilities of exaggerating their losses by as much as $6 billion, through an elaborate shell game: one branch of the company profits lavishly from high prices for energy that it sells to the other branch, while that second branch clamors for a government bailout. Since 1997, for example, the PG&E utility has shifted at least $4.69 billion to its parent corporation. While theutility was hiring bankruptcy lawyers last summer, its top executives were dumping shares of the parent corporation's stock.

Looming behind it all is the $20 billion in stranded cost payouts consumer and environmental advocates so bitterly opposed in 1996. "What happened to all that money?" asks Fenn.

Watchdogs like TURN contend the utilities continue to collect billions more than they actually owe on those investments. This windfall, a TURN report says, has been transferred to parent companies, where it's been dispersed as stockholder dividends and shielded by complex accounting firewalls. Thus in the years since deregulation, as Coyle and others predicted, billions have been transferred from the public to the electric utilities to the parent corporations, where it has not been accounted for.

The Public Media Center's Gunther says the companies have spent much of this "rogue cash" as if they were "drunken sailors." Pacific Gas & Electric's parent company, the National Energy Group, has made huge investments in power supply networks in New England and New York, and is actively trying to build a string of natural gas generators along the Hudson. SoCalEd's parent, Mission Energy, has been deeply immersed in controversial speculations in Indonesia during the regime of the deposed dictator Suharto, a shady involvement exposed in depth by the Wall Street Journal. "The money has not gone to help things in California, that's for sure," says Gunther. "But where is it?"

PART TWO

In the name of "free market competition," California's AB1890 electric deregulation bill of 1996 suggested that the utilities divest their power plants. There was a widespread belief that they would become pure distribution companies that would allegedly battle one another for the business of small customers.

The transmission wires that delivered the power would remain as regulated monopolies.

And then the generating facilities would, in theory, be bought by dozens of small, entrepreneurial power companies. With the three key functions of the electric power industry thus separated, the "magic of the marketplace" would drive prices down and service up.

While blaming the public for this crisis, the pundits continue to overlook that the key to the utilities' deregulation scheme was the assumption wholesale electric prices would stay low. SoCalEd and PG&E had devised the cap on consumer prices based on the idea that they could dominate supply.

In fact, according to Fenn, the utilities divested themselves only of about half their power plants. But a substantial percentage of the state's power supply---about 30% by some estimates---remains in the hands of independent producers, many of them based out of state. In the midst of the transition, the big utilities failed to negotiate long-term supply contracts. They now blame that failure on consumer advocates. But the failure instead was a complex, nuanced matter. As Paul Krugman of the New York Times has pointed out, the independent producers were opposed, as they stood to profit immensely by keeping the state dependent on short-term markets they could dominate. Consumer groups were in fact supportive. In general, so were regulators. As Gene Coyle puts it, "when the utilities petitioned to be able to sign long-term contracts the CPUC approved that but didn't give a blanket 'prudency' approval ahead of time. In other words the CPUC said -- in effect -- go ahead, but we'll look at them to make sure you aren't doing sweetheart deals. Without that approval, the utilities did NOT take advantage of the new rules."

However it happened, the utilities were left dependent on a spot market where short-term prices could soar without notice. That, in turn, left the public at the mercy of a handful of out-of-state energy speculators, most notably Duke Power of North Carolina, and Dynergy, Reliant and Enron, all of Texas. These are very big players, who more closely resemble the OPEC cartel than feisty Silicon Valley-type competitors that free marketeers envisioned.

Based in Houston, Enron is the nation's largest natural gas supplier---and one of George W. Bush's key supporters and closest advisors. Its president, Kenneth Lay, gave him $500,000, his largest single contribution for the 2000 election. James Baker III, George Bush Senior's former Secretary of State, is a principal at Reliant. According to Public Citizen, Enron, Dynergy and Reliant gave in excess of $1.5 million to Bush's campaign and inauguration committee, and to the Republican National Committee. In all, Public Citizen says nine power companies and a trade association with substantial interests in the California energy market gave more than $4 million to Republican candidates and party committees in the 2000 campaign. Bush's new Secretary of Energy, Spencer Abraham, was the energy industry's largest single campaign recipient during his failed US Senate re-election bid in Michigan.

When added to the big contributions the California utilities gave Gov. Gray Davis and much of the state legislature, one wonders if the public ever really had a chance. "A handful of people who were really smart figured out how to make a ton of money by selling the same product in essentially the same market conditions as before at ten times the price," says Michael Kahn, co-author of a state-sponsored study on the crisis.

By and large those "people who were very smart" were vastly rewarded by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's refusal to cap the prices at which they were selling power to California during a crisis many now believe they created for just that purpose. Wholesale electric prices were deregulated in the early 1990s. But the FERC retained the power to step in and cap those prices when they ceased being "reasonable." It recently did just that during a recent power crunch in the northeast.

But in California, FERC just stood by, helping foster the widespread belief that the power producers withheld supply at key moments to help escalate the price---and got away with it. That has not yet been officially confirmed by any governmental study. But Public Citizen reports that Enron showed a 42 percent increase in profits last year, Reliant a 55 percent jump and Dynergy at 210 percent rise, all thanks to the feds' refusal to cap wholesale prices. As energy analyst Eugene Coyle puts it: "We've been FERCed."

Indeed, during the hot summer of 2000, with Bill Clinton still in the White House, FERC did not intervene while wholesale prices soared. When San Diego Gas & Electric (having collected its final stranded cost money) was allowed by the Public Utilities Commission to unfreeze its consumer prices, the first shockwave of the dereg disaster hit southern California consumers. SDG&E doubled and tripled their bills.

Consumer rates for SoCalEd and PG&E, however, were still capped. As wholesale prices soared, they claim to have lost more than $12 billion. Then, in the midst of the crisis, Jim Hoecker, the widely respected, Clinton-appointed FERC Chairman, resigned without explanation.

When the utilities---and Gov. Davis---appealed to President Bush to take charge of the situation and re-cap wholesale rates, Bush refused, yielding spectacular profits for his benefactors at Enron and the other independent power producers, not to mention SoCalEd and PG&E's parent companies, Mission Energy and the National Energy Group. Meanwhile, on February 13, a federal court refused to lift the cap on consumer rates that the utilities themselves had devised for AB1890.

It is this vice that has prompted the huge wave of media spin that says the problem in California is not a failure of deregulation, but rather that there simply hasn't been enough. The utilities are desperate to end the rate freeze for consumers they themselves invented to, but whose existence they---and the free market pundits---falsely blame on the public.

In the breach, they want the state to buy power for them at huge cost to the taxpayer, thus circumventing the freeze on consumer rates that was the core of the original bargain that allowed them to collect more than $20 billion in the stranded cost cash bailout.

While refusing to account for where that stranded cost money went, they simultaneously claim they're short of cash. And they've thus created doubt among independent producers like Enron about their willingness or ability to pay. The producers, in turn, want the taxpayers to guarantee the purchase of power at rates that appear to fluctuate wildly based not on supply, but on the willingness of the independent producers to sell it.

In the midst of this convoluted crisis, President Bush wants to further advance the agenda of his vastly enriched supporters on yet another front. He says environmental restrictions should be lifted so more power plants can be built. Alaska should be drilled. There's even a GOP bill afoot to promote the construction of more nuclear power plants.

Oil from Alaska won't make any difference, as the amount of electric power generated by oil in California is marginal. At the federal level, Senators Frank Murkowski and Trent Lott propose the most Sisyphean solution. Building more nukes would, of course, take years. And environmentalists will rightly point out that it was bailouts for atomic reactors the utilities themselves branded "uncompetitive" that led to this mess in the first place.

The proposal to lift environmental restrictions to promote the drilling and burning of natural gas will also create a host of problems. "It's not about supply," says Fenn. "There's plenty of capacity around. It's a problem of who CONTROLS the supply, and the money that pays for it."

Indeed, says Fenn, the state's electricity demand has peaked at 33,000 mgw, but there is 40,000 mgw of in-state capacity. "As in the oil crisis of the 1970s, this shortage is political, not physical. It is being caused not by a physical lack of energy supply, but by politically-conceived market structures written into AB1890 that prevent non-utility-controlled power from reaching consumers, much as the local telephone monopolies have prevented competition in spite of the law for years.

"That's why local control of electricity supply is critical to real solutions. And why the idea of gutting environmental laws under the auspices of energy relief is such a horribly impotent gesture."

Equally futile, say the critics, is bailing out the utilities that created this mess, and whose parent corporations are profiting from it as never before. "We're so afraid to let these companies go bankrupt," complains Fenn. "But when all is said and done, the public would be better off letting them go bankrupt and using eminent domain to buy their assets. At least then we'll have gotten something tangible out of the deal.

A trip to bankruptcy court, some argue, might also force the utilities to account for where all that stranded cost and other bailout money has gone.

Thus far, the cautious, utility-friendly Gov. Davis has been unwilling to lead that charge. A bill now being hotly debated, sponsored by the powerful Senate Democrat, John Burton, would require the utilities to surrender ownership of the statewide transmission network as a price for staying solvent.

The utilities complain that they are not asking for a bailout, only for the high cost of wholesale power to be passed on to consumers.

But critics sense a shifting political climate. "People are angry," says Burton. Even the staid Gov. Daivs is calling for "a buyout" rather than "a bailout," though how far he is willing to go remains to be seen.

The advocates now argue that while a takeover of the transmission system might be a good first step, it is already regulated, and may need some very expensive upgrades. And it's worth far less than the $13 billion or more the utilities are demanding. The taxpayers, they say, should get more for their money---most specifically, ownership of the actual generating capacity, and thus control of the supply system that's now driving the crisis.

One corrective that has already emerged, and is being given a fair chance to become law, is a strong bill giving greater power for cities, towns and counties to aggregate their demand and buy in groups, a feature consumer advocates very much wanted in the original AB1890.

But the real crux of the debate now comes down one thing----ownership of the actual generating capacity, and thus control of the supply system that's now driving the crisis. The people of the state, say the advocates, should get what they are paying for: permanent protection from private manipulations of their electricity supply.

A broad cross-section, including many of the original AB1890 opponents, are not eager to have the state run a single public-owned utility. "We want a more local-based solution," says Fenn, one embodied by California's two largest public-owned municipals, which have not only weathered the storm, they've thrived in it.

That radical point of view has just gotten powerful backing from James McClatchy, publisher of the powerful Sacramento Bee. Beyond the state's taking over the transmission lines, wrote McClatchy in a February 18 editorial, "the next step would be for the state to buy the associated generating facilities." Any final solution," said McClatchy, "would have to include public ownership of the generating plants that PG&E and Southern California Edison sold to speculators, as well as the facilities they still own."

The way to deliver the power, McClatchy added, would be through "existing locally owned and managed utility districts," as well as through ones newly organized to handle the job. "With public ownership of these systems," he said, "would come increased public transparency on all aspects of the operations---where there is little now---and thus less opportunity for sweetheart deals with friendly financiers or broker," leaving less room for "the rapaciousness of speculators and selfish political partisanship."

Among others, McClatchy points to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District have both kept rates stable for their customers while reaping substantial profits selling power into the grid. S. David Freeman now runs the LA utility, but guided Sacramento into its major transition to renewables and efficiency.

In June of 1989, Sacramento voted shut the district's one nuclear reactor, at Rancho Seco. Freeman, who previously ran the Tennessee Valley Authority, led SMUD into an era powered increasingly---though modestly---by wind and solar generating facilities, including enough rooftop panels for some 6,000 families. SMUD also inaugurated an unprecedented campaign for increased efficiency. It offered its customers $100 rebates for retiring wasteful old refrigerators (refrigerators account for 20% of the average household's electricity consumption). It distributed energy-efficient light bulbs. It promoted roof-top solar water heaters and photovoltaics, which convert sunlight to electricity. And it's planted thousands of shade trees to slash summer air conditioning demand.

Most advocates see municipal ownership as inseparable from a strong push away from fossil and nuclear fuels, which can be too easily manipulated, and toward renewables, most immediately wind. Since natural gas prices have skyrocketed, industrial-sized windmills have become the cheapest and quickest-to-build source of new generation. By December, a massive 450-megawatt wind farm now under construction along the Oregon-Washington border is expected to be pumping out juice at 3-5 cents/kwh, putting it at the cutting edge.

Such green developments, the advocates say, will remain marginal as long as the grid is dominated by a few huge corporations heavily invested in centralized technologies. Electricity is a service, not a commodity, says Gene Coyle. "It can never be subjected to true competition. It needs to be controlled by the public."

"Deregulation of the electricity monopoly is a failure," adds Bee Publisher McClatchy. "The monopoly should be returned to the tax-paying consumers who support it and depend on it."

But given the wall of "free market" media spin and the fossil-nuclear orientation of the Bush regime, such lessons will not come easily into the mainstream. The powerful fossil-nuclear interests close to the administration are about to push a federal energy bill headed exactly in the opposite direction, interpreting the California crisis from which they have profited so hugely as a mandate for precisely the technologies that helped created -endit-

---

Attack subs face a changing world
Warship serves as lightning rod in debate over high-tech navy

01/03/05
MSNBC
THE WASHINGTON POST
By Guy Gugliotta
http://www.msnbc.com/news/539495.asp?cp1=1

TONGUE OF THE OCEAN, Bahamas, March 5 - Conceived in the onrush of Cold War creativity, nuclear fast-attack submarines were the ultimate conventional weapon, designed to stalk and kill Soviet counterparts with technology and expertise unmatched in the history of undersea warfare.

'Nuclear subs finally have the chance to reach their full potential.' - JOHN J. GROSSENBACHER Vice admiral, Atlantic Fleet

BUT THE COLD War and the Soviet Union are gone, and chances of deadly face-offs in the abyss had faded even before the ignominious sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk last summer underscored the deteriorating fortunes of a once formidable enemy.

Now attack boats are once again in the news, this time because of the collision last month off the Hawaii coast of the surfacing Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Greeneville with the Japanese trawler Ehime Maru. The Navy is opening a formal inquiry into the incident today.

The Greeneville affair has refocused attention on a type of warship that for the past 10 years has served as a lightning rod in the debate over the future of naval technology: Are attack boats the modern Navy's indispensable jacks-of-all-trades, as adept at mapping the Arctic seafloor as they are at putting a Tomahawk cruise missile in downtown Belgrade? Or are they multibillion-dollar Cold War luxuries the nation no longer needs to afford?

Here, in a deep-water sound off the coast of the Bahamas' Andros Island, the USS Connecticut is undergoing tests to prepare for its first full-scale deployment next year. It is a Seawolf submarine - faster, quieter and more versatile than the Los Angeles subs - and the newest attack boat in the U.S. Navy.

UNDERSEA DUELIST

The basic science of nuclear submarines is well-known. A self-contained nuclear reactor provides heat for a turbine that drives the ship and for all the accompanying systems. The boat makes and maintains its own atmosphere and cruises beneath the sea at speeds inconceivable during the diesel days of World War II. The only constraint on how long the sub can remain submerged is the amount of food the boat can carry.

Rated on these criteria, the Connecticut is probably the finest submarine ever built: 353 feet long and weighing 9,000 tons, it can travel in excess of 25 knots at depths greater than 800 feet, and can remain submerged for at least four months. It cost $2.4 billion.

But like the Los Angeles subs before it, the Connecticut was designed as an undersea duelist, a job description that has virtually disappeared. As a result, the Navy emphasizes that in the post-Cold War world, attack boats are unique machines capable of multiple tasks - mapping, carrying and firing cruise missiles, inserting special warfare troops into hot spots, tailing high-speed drug traffickers, spying electronically in a variety of ways.

"The perception was that the only thing subs were good for was ASW (anti-submarine warfare)," said Vice Adm. John J. Grossenbacher, the Atlantic Fleet's submarine commander. "Nuclear subs finally have the chance to reach their full potential."

But this argument has challengers.

Like space technology, much of what attack submarines have does not translate into real-world applications. There is little demand for a cutting-edge hydraulic system that can load torpedoes while sea pressures are squeezing a ship's hull to throw clearances out of kilter.

There is also a suspicion that many tasks that attack submarines perform can be done by other means, and much more cheaply. "We still have to go up to the Arctic to watch the Russians, and we still have to move subs at high speed for long distances in an emergency," said naval analyst and author Norman Polgar. "Do we need high-tech subs? Yes. Do we need an entire force of them? No."

AWESTRUCK CREW

Indeed, there is little argument that the Connecticut is a spectacular weapon. Most of the 135 men aboard have served on other submarines - earlier attack boats or the larger but less versatile ballistic missile subs - and they remain awestruck by the new ship's capabilities.

"The sensitivity is far greater than" previous submarines, said Chief Petty Officer Don Parker, the Connecticut's leading sonarman, as he listened to a combination of sounds that included a ship's propeller, a whistling dolphin and the click-click from a school of "snapping shrimp." "We're detecting contacts further than 50,000 to 60,000 yards (25 to 30 miles)," farther than ever before.

In the two-deck torpedo room, Senior Chief Machinist's Mate Pete Hoffacker was demonstrating machinery that can fire up to eight cruise missiles or torpedoes in 53 seconds. "I can do things with this system that nobody else has ever done," he said.

"It's faster, dives deeper, runs quieter and stealthier, and carries more weapons" than earlier submarines, said Cmdr. Fritz Roegge, the Connecticut's captain. "If I train my guys right, we should be able to operate with impunity anywhere in the world."

But is it cost-effective? "So much of the intelligence stuff is classified," Rand Corp. analyst David Mosher said, "you can't get to enough" information to figure out whether it's worth the price.

And "we can get more (cruise missiles) on a surface ship," Polgar said. "But once you start shooting Tomahawks from a sub, you know there's a sub. There's no more secrecy."

Ironically, the one mission area in which nuclear submarines are unquestionably the best and the only alternative has nothing to do with warfare: "Nothing compares, when you want to explore the ocean," said Dennis Conlon, leader of the Office of Naval Research's High Latitude Dynamics Program. "There is nothing like a submarine."

THE SCIENTIFIC SIDE

Between 1995 and 1999, the Navy and the National Science Foundation used a nuclear submarine for "Science Ice Exercises" in the high Arctic beneath the North Pole, cruising under the ice for weeks at a time to take water temperatures and salinity readings and map the sea bottom. The endeavor was impossible to accomplish by any other means.

Scientists during the nuclear age have established that the thickness of the polar ice cap has diminished by 40 percent in the last 25 years, to approximately six feet today, Conlon said. The Ice Exercises also detected a growing spike of warm Atlantic seawater flowing beneath the ice cap and protruding farther and farther into the North Pacific.

Whether these phenomena are indications of human-caused global warming or simply manifestations of long-term cyclical climate change is not known. Scientists acknowledge, though, that most of the data could not have become available without the help of nuclear submarines.

Just last month, scientists reported in the journal Nature that they discovered two young underwater volcanoes while mapping the Arctic with side-scan sonar mounted on the USS Hawkbill during the 1999 Ice Exercise.

The exercises are over today, and no new ones are planned. They are casualties in a decade of downsizing during which the attack boat fleet has shrunk from about 100 to fewer than 60. The remainder of what Grossenbacher calls "the most complicated machines that mankind has ever built" must focus on what they were designed to do.

"Would we like to contribute more to fundamental research? Of course we would," Grossenbacher said. "But these are warships."

---

Calculus of terror

March 5, 2001
Excite News
By Pavel Molchanov
The Chronicle Duke U.
http://news.excite.com/news/uw/010305/university-76

(U-WIRE) DURHAM, N.C. -- "No sane citizen, political leader or nation wants thermonuclear war. But merely not wanting it is not enough," said Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense, in 1967.

Right now, more than at any time since these words were spoken, an attack upon the United States that utilizes nuclear, chemical or biological weapons seems if not probable, then at least distinctly possible. The threat of nonconventional arms to the national security of this country is much more real than most Americans believe. The federal government, even its traditionally paranoid intelligence sector, simply has not made this threat a priority.

The potential consequences of this deeply misguided policy are unimaginably horrific. It is a fact, for example, that a relatively small tactical bomb with a nuclear trigger, if detonated during the day in a downtown area of a mid-sized city, would immediately result in upwards of several hundred thousand dead, in addition to thousands who would perish within days from radioactive exposure. It is also a fact that to acquire such a device and transport it into the United States is far easier than one would imagine.

We do not live in a safe or stable world. In fact, it has become significantly less safe since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Two developments are chiefly to blame for this: nuclear proliferation and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The days when all members of the nuclear club were permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are over. Eleven countries possess atomic arms, and four others -- including several that are suspected of promoting international terrorism -- are strongly believed to have a nuclear development program. Thus, control over strategic weaponry is no longer limited to prominent -- though not necessarily democratic -- leaders in the forefront of global governance. Some of the world's worst dictators -- Saddam Hussein, among others -- have their button on the trigger.

When the Communist bloc disintegrated, so did the tight control that Moscow had over nuclear programs in Soviet client states, such as Iraq and North Korea. These countries have lost their lucrative subsidies, but they now have complete control over their strategic arms.

The Soviet Union, though not known for its respect for human rights, would never allow its puppet states to use nuclear weapons for nonmilitary (i.e., terrorist) purposes. The principle of bipolarity, enunciated by President John F. Kennedy, meant that the USSR, not just the actual perpetrator, would face retaliation for an attack against the Western allies.

It is not hard to see how somebody with the motive and the required financial resources would have an opportunity to carry out an attack against the people of this country. It is not easy by any means, but it can be done. It is, unfortunately, a matter of time, until at least an attempt to do so will be made. However, Washington can take a number of steps to reduce the risk of this happening, or if the tragedy does occur, then at least minimize the harm done to people and property.

First, the United States should strengthen its border protection significantly, which includes, of course, a sizable budget increase.

The demilitarized Canadian frontier, while a historical milestone and an important economic advantage, allows individuals to enter the country with very little, if any, hindrance. Checkpoints at airports, seaports and U.S. installations abroad should also be expanded and enhanced.

Second, it is necessary for the nation's military to assume a role in protecting internal security. This requires a statutory modification of the ancient principle of posse comitatus.

Coordination between the armed services and both local and federal law enforcement agencies should be expanded, and in case of a national security emergency, the resources of the Department of Defense must be used to ensure a speedy and appropriate response to the crisis.

Third, American diplomats should play a larger role in promoting America's security. A two-pronged approach is needed here. It must be made clear that a nonconventional attack against U.S. interests would result in proportional retaliation against the aggressor. Weakness and uncertainty are the surest ways to invite war, and a posture of strength-backed by adequate resources-is the best deterrent. On the other hand, foreign aid funds should be liberally used to strengthen fledgling democracies and regimes that are taking their first steps toward an open society.

America's position of global leadership will not last unless the above steps are taken immediately.

-------- us nuc politics

Cheney softens demand for Iraqi inspections

March 5, 2001
THE WASHINGTON TIMES,
By Bill Sammon
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200135224734.htm

The United States has softened its long-held demand for Iraqi weapons inspections in order to restore the U.S.-led coalition against Baghdad, Vice President Richard B. Cheney said in an interview.

In a conversation over lunch with editors and reporters of The Washington Times, Mr. Cheney took pains to emphasize that the United States eventually wants to resume inspections for weapons of mass destruction, which were halted following the U.S. bombing of Iraq on the eve of the House vote to impeach President Clinton.

But the vice president, who served as defense secretary during the Gulf war, made it clear that revitalizing the moribund sanctions regime against Iraq is a more pressing priority and the weapons inspections are not as important as the United States once said they were.

"I think we'd like to see the inspectors back in there," the vice president said during an hourlong interview in his ceremonial office in the Old Executive Office Building, where Vice President Al Gore conceded the 2000 election to George W. Bush in mid-December. "I don't think we want to hinge our policy just to the question of whether or not the inspectors go back in there," he said.

Asked whether the inspections program is now considered less crucial than in the past, Mr. Cheney said: "It may not be as crucial if you've got other measures in place and you've got a [sanctions] regime that people are willing to support. So we'll have to see."

Senior officials in Mr. Cheney's office called The Times late Friday to clarify his remarks, to say that the vice president does not believe weapons inspections have become unimportant.

"We expect the Iraqis to live up to all U.N. resolutions, including getting inspectors back in," said Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

However, Mr. Libby acknowledged that the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq is not imminent.

Mr. Cheney's remarks followed just days after Secretary of State Colin Powell, on a visit to Israel and the Arab countries, said sanctions against Iraq should be eased on civilian commodities, even civilian commodities that could be converted to military use, and tightened on military-related items. Several members of Congress said afterward that the changed policy amounts to the United States backing down in the face of Iraqi intransigence.

This contradicts Mr. Powell's earlier assertion, just before he departed for the Middle East, that sanctions would not be lifted until the inspectors are allowed in again. Members of Congress questioned the secretary's willingness to ease sanctions so soon after his confirmation hearing, in which he promised to reinvigorate the sanctions regime.

"Let the inspectors in, and we can get beyond this," Mr. Powell said before leaving for the Middle East. "Until [Saddam] does that, I think we have to be firm. We have to be vigilant and I will be carrying this message to my friends in the region."

Mr. Cheney, a key foreign policy adviser in the Bush administration, expressed frustration on several occasions during the interview with the policies of the Clinton White House, including:

• The Middle East - ". . . I think you've got to look at the situation we inherited in the Middle East and, frankly, it's a mess. . . ."

"One of the things that's happened is that, to a greater extent than ever before, the peace process, the situation between Israel and Palestine, now oftentimes comes up in your conversations with the Gulf states. It used to be when you traveled to the Gulf they were interested in U.S. relations, they were interested in the military situation in the Gulf, they were interested in economic and military cooperation with the United States. They almost never talked about Israel. . . . That's the challenge for diplomacy, and that's one of the reasons you need to be able to go back and sort of refocus the whole program."

• China - "I think we want good relations with China, but they've got to be based upon a realistic assessment of what our mutual interests are. You can't sort of ratchet it up and ratchet it down on an emotional basis. We do need to be consistent over time. . . ."

"I always felt, for example, that Bill Clinton's nine-day sojourn in China a couple years ago was a mistake. It's one thing to go and visit China. . . . It's a mistake to let them dictate to the president of the United States how many days he has to stay or that he can't stop and see Japan on the way coming and going."

• Missile defense - "I think that the program that the Clinton administration was pursuing is probably inadequate, was unduly constrained by the provisions of the ABM Treaty."

The de-emphasis of inspections signals the Bush administration's willingness to reorder priorities if that's what it takes to resurrect the multinational coalition that stood firmly in opposition to Iraq at the conclusion of the Gulf War 10 years ago. The coalition's resolve crumbled during the Clinton era as an international consensus emerged that economic sanctions have hurt Iraqi civilians while allowing President Saddam Hussein to remain in power and live in luxury.

The Bush administration appears close to settling on a revised set of priorities for reining in Saddam, whose influence in the Arab world has been growing in recent years. But Mr. Cheney was cagey about disclosing specifics of the new strategy.

"There are questions, such as -well, I'm trying to think here of what's public and what isn't," the vice president said. "That's the challenge for diplomacy and that's one of the reasons you need to be able to go back and sort of refocus the whole program."

He said that Arab nations have shown growing impatience with the sanctions. Mr. Powell visited those nations last week and returned with a report that the Arab nations that were allied with the West in the Gulf War want to ease the sanctions.

"That's all part of the process of trying to reassemble the coalition around a policy that we've got a consensus on and that people are willing to live with and support," Mr. Cheney said. "The regime that had been put in place some years ago has clearly been allowed to atrophy, and it's broken down."

Arab sympathy for Iraqi civilians suffering under sanctions has been exacerbated by a growing sense that the Clinton administration botched the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

"That, in effect, blew up, I think, over the course of the last year," Mr. Cheney said. "The Camp David talks . . . went haywire, putting Jerusalem front and center as sort of the be-all and end-all of negotiations before it really was ripe for solution."

The ensuing months of violence between Israelis and Palestinians only served to exacerbate Arab impatience with U.S. sanctions against Iraq.

"The breakdown, if you will, in the peace process has slopped over now and clearly has had an impact again on the publics in those [Arab] states and created added political problems, if you will, for our friends in the region," Mr. Cheney said. "That's the situation we've inherited. Now what we've got to do is try to construct a policy out there that can be sustained over a long period of time."

He said: "You've got to be able to regroup and refocus so that we do in fact once again have the support of the front line states out there, as well as the other major members of the coalition, to figure out how you move forward."

Such a regrouping evidently does not include making weapons inspections an immediate priority.

An Iraqi delegation at the United Nations vowed last week, after Secretary Powell's hints that sanctions would be modified, that inspectors would not be allowed back under any conditions. Several U.N. officials think the Iraqis may be less belligerent than their public demeanor suggests.

Meanwhile, conservatives on Capitol Hill remain staunchly opposed to any signal suggesting the softening of the long-held U.S. position that inspectors must be allowed to return to Iraq immediately.

The sanctions regime, which once blocked nearly all non-medical aid to Iraq, now fails to stem a torrent of goods and services that flows across Iraq's borders. Even military equipment has poured in.

"The Chinese have been in there with fiber-optic cables for the air defense network," Mr. Cheney said.

Last month, President Bush publicly showed his displeasure with the Chinese and vowed to send them a message. On Friday, Mr. Cheney indicated that the president's public scolding was the penalty for China's violation.

"We've already done it, in effect, by pointing out that they appear to have been operating there in violation of the sanctions by installing that capability for the Iraqis," he said. "There have been some reports since then that they've taken that on board and are considering our position."

On another topic, the vice president said a missile defense shield will be aggressively pursued. "We'd like to make it clear that the ABM Treaty should not stand in the way of doing an effective job of research and ultimate deployment of limited defenses, and that we're prepared to move as aggressively as we can to develop a ballistic missile defense," Mr. Cheney said.

"We also are concerned that the system do more than just cover the continental United States, that we be able to offer our allies and friends around the world some protection as well." Asked whether that includes Taiwan, Mr. Cheney said: "I'll leave it right where I've left it."

-------- us nuc waste

It Ain't Yellowstone, But It's Home

February 2 - 8, 2001
LA Weekly
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/01/11/offbeat.shtml

ROCKETDYNE'S RADIOACTIVE ROCK & ROLL

Protesters gathered last week at the gates of Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory as trucks rolled out, hauling 14,000 tons of radioactivity-contaminated soil from the military contractor's site above the San Fernando Valley to a dump in Kern County. Over residents' objections, the Department of Health Services had approved dumping the hot soil at a landfill near Buttonwillow, a town heavily populated by migrant workers. Two years ago, Health Services objected when Buttonwillow received radioactive waste from an old Manhattan Project bomb facility in New York state, saying the gunk should go to a licensed facility. Now the department has reversed position, declaring that radioactive waste can go anywhere - a municipal trash dump, a chemical-waste facility - as long as its radiation dosage is calculated at less than 25 millirem per year, the equivalent of 170 additional chest X-rays over a lifetime. That level is estimated to increase the cancer risk to one death for every 1,000 people exposed - a standard about 1,000 times more lax than is permitted for other carcinogens, the nuclear-watchdog group Committee To Bridge the Gap says. The Kettleman city dump refused the Rocketdyne shipment, but Buttonwillow let it through.

Rocketdyne's own tests showed that seven out of eight radionuclides in the Rocketdyne soil emitted radiation above normal background levels. One radionuclide, plutonium 238, was measured at 13.5 times the background level. Health officials and Rocketdyne portrayed the radiation as negligible.

"We live, whether we like it or not, in a sea of radiation," Health Services official Robert Gregor said.

The soil also contains PCBs, dioxin, mercury and the highly toxic rocket-fuel oxidizer perchlorate. The dumping is expected to continue for up to five months.

"The trucks have started rolling out of Rocketdyne, creating the precedent for free release of radioactive material throughout the state," said Dan Hirsch, president of Committee To Bridge the Gap. "If you thought deregulation of electricity hurt California, just wait until you see the consequences of deregulating radioactive waste." -Michael Collins

---

Envirocare Warns of Employment Freeze

Monday, March 5, 2001
Salt Lake Tribune
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/03052001/utah/76766.htm

Envirocare is facing employment cutbacks because of a new state tax on low-level radioactive waste, the company's president said in an internal memo.

In the March 1 memo, Envirocare President Charles Judd says the tax, the result of a negotiated compromise between his firm and legislators, will slash his company's profits and cut yet-to-be-filled jobs at the company.

Judd said he doesn't expect any current employees to lose their jobs, although he said the company will re-evaluate the situation in the future.

The Legislature approved the tax on Wednesday, the last day of the 2001 session. The measure is awaiting Gov. Mike Leavitt's signature.

The bill levies a tax of 5 percent to 12 percent on disposal contracts, depending on the type of low-level radioactive waste the Tooele County-based dump accepts. It also affects International Uranium Corp., which has a uranium-processing mill in San Juan County.

As a direct result of the new tax, Judd wrote in the memo, "we will now need to cut back on our numbers here at Envirocare. As of today, there are 266 positions at Envirocare with 28 open positions.

For the time being, we will take our cutbacks in the open positions and not in laying off current employees."

Neither Judd nor lawmakers knew exactly how much revenue would be generated by the tax, since it only affects new contracts and not those already held by Envirocare.

However, the bill's sponsor, Rep. Jeff Alexander, R-Orem, has said the tax was primarily intended to make a statement, not to make money for the state.

"What we are really trying to do is send a message: If people want to dump their waste in Utah, they should pay a fee," Alexander said.

Envirocare executives hammered out an agreement with Alexander and other legislators in the last week of the session. Alexander's original bill would have netted $34 million in state taxes.

-------- MILITARY

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

Ostrich and bison, anyone?
New meats attract attention at food show with some strong organic undertones

Monday 5 March 2001
Montreal Gazette
MONIQUE BEAUDIN
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010305/5041390.html

With almost daily reminders of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease affecting livestock in Europe, you wouldn't expect people to show much interest in the Richelieu Meats stand at an international food show taking place in Montreal this week.

But the company's display case full of meat was attracting a lot of attention at the Palais des Congres yesterday.

Richelieu produces bison, horse, ostrich and hormone-free beef, and they've seen demand for their product skyrocket.

"Meat consumption is going down - beef alone has dropped 40 per cent over the past 35 years," said company spokesman Rene Poire. "People are reading the newspapers and they're turning toward chicken, pork, ostrich and equine meats."

In Europe, especially, Richelieu Meat's business is booming, he added. "We can't meet the demand there," Poire said. "For bison and horse, it's just phenomenal."

While his company is one of the few Canadian beef producers to raise meat without controversial growth hormones, they have no plans to sell it in Canada.

"The demand just isn't there yet," said Alain Bouvy. "There's just not enough volume."

All This and Mango Slush

Richelieu Meats was one of more than 700 companies at the International Exhibition of Food, Beverages, Wines and Spirits yesterday. The three-day trade show gives about 12,000 food professionals and buyers a chance to make contacts and business deals.

The show, which is open only to people in the food and hotel industry, was a food-lover's dream come true.

There was penne in a tomato sauce, nice and al dente, melt-in-your-mouth smoked salmon on crackers, mango slush and lots of wine. You could try a dozen different cheesecakes, munch on popcorn shrimp and sip organic juices.

Lester's was serving up smoked meat, Corona was offering beer to throng of people and Captain Highliner, sporting a blue cap, smiled at passers-by. A woman wearing wooden shoes handed out samples of Dutch cheeses and two women dressed as bees gave out honey.

The kiosks run by wine distributors and dessert makers were inundated with visitors.

"Ladies, don't be afraid now," a representative of Atkins Elegant Desserts of Indiana told more than a dozen people eyeing his company's free samples of

Mississippi Mud cake, Black Forest cake and White Chocolate Eclair cheesecake.

And there, right in the middle of the French chocolate truffles and maple-syrup sweets, was a truly unusual offering - a little brown reindeer called the "super duper reindeer pooper" that "poops" out brown jelly beans.

It's the first time the international food show has been held in North America, and Canadian companies made up the majority of exhibitors at the show.

Linda Commandant is the marketing director for

Iroquois Cranberry Growers, an Indian-run Ontario company that has only seven full-time employees and a couple of dozen more at harvest time. But she had no qualms about competing against St. Hubert barbecue, Kraft and other large companies for attention yesterday.

"We've been called the best-kept secret in Indian country," she said, as a fountain of pure cranberry juice bubbled besides her. "We've been getting really good feedback here."

'Green' Chocolate

Montreal-based Danish trade commissioner Morten Winther said he spent more than a year persuading Danish companies to take part in the food show.

"This is very important for newcomers to the market," Winther said. "This is a great way to open doors."

There are nine Danish companies at the food show, including one that makes several flavours of pickled garlic and another that makes chocolate milk. One of the Danish companies attracting attention yesterday produces organic chocolates -- life is too short to eat bad chocolate, the company's publicity says.

Denmark is in the vanguard of organic food production, Winther said, and companies there want to export. Canadian companies like Loblaw's, which have included natural-food sections in their grocery stores, have created a demand for organic products, he said.

"That was a really important step that the retail line has taken," Winther said. "Now importers are focusing on organic."

The demand for organic products is growing so rapidly that producers can't meet it, said Paula Travado, marketing manager for Organic Meadows products. The organic farmers' co-operative, based in Brampton, Ont., produces milk, eggs, cheese, frozen vegetables and other products. Part of its mission is to encourage farmers to switch from traditional to organic farming.

"There's been a huge push for organics," Travado said. "With all the food scares in Europe, Canadians are starting to question the safety of our food."

---

Hits and misses in Iraq
Why did a costly new missile come up short?

3/5/01
US News & World Report
By Richard J. Newman
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010305/bombs.htm

If at first you don't succeed, should you try again? That's the question the Pentagon is mulling over after learning that airstrikes against Iraq on February 16-President Bush's first military operation as commander in chief-failed to get the job done.

The raid-involving about two dozen attack jets, and nearly 30 tankers and other support aircraft-relied heavily on a snazzy new $300,000 missile called the Joint Standoff Weapon, or JSOW. Unlike laser-guided bombs, which require a pilot to fly close to the target while training a laser beam on it, JSOWs use the global positioning system to home in on targets from up to 40 miles away. Pilots can therefore launch their weapons farther away from the surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft guns that protect valuable targets.

Snafu. That part worked. But as the JSOWs approached their targets near Baghdad, something went wrong. About half of the nearly two dozen missiles sailed wide of the mark. Most of those missed by about 100 feet, leading Pentagon officials to believe that a common malfunction-perhaps an error in targeting data-led the missiles awry. Isolating the snafu could take a couple of weeks.

More apparent from satellite photos and other tools used in "bomb damage assessment" was the fact that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein got lucky. The target set had included about 20 powerful radar towers used to detect and track coalition jets entering Iraqi airspace to enforce the northern and southern no-fly zones, and about a half-dozen command-and-control nodes that process air-defense data. Pentagon officials say the processing sites-attacked by TV-guided AGM-130 bombs or other long-range missiles-were all heavily damaged or destroyed. But JSOWs aimed at the radar towers missed about half of them. The missiles, which were configured as "area weapons" releasing dozens of smaller bomblets, may have damaged the radars from a distance. Military analysts don't yet know for sure.

What they do know is that the problem has not been completely taken care of. War planners chose the radar and command-and-control targets because Iraqi air-defense gunners have been coming increasingly close to hitting U.S. jets in recent months. That's partly because the Iraqis have been building a sophisticated network of radar, missiles, and other components that make it much easier to track and target aircraft. "We probably significantly disrupted his ability to do that," says a Pentagon official.

Yet the cat-and-mouse contest started up again last week, when Iraqi gunners fired on U.S. jets patrolling the northern no-fly zone, inviting attacks on several air-defense sites near Mosul. With air defenses relatively easy to rebuild, Iraq seems to be signaling it intends to get right back in the game. So how long till the next big attack? Says the Pentagon official: "Still to be determined."

---

Marines Develop a New Weapon
The People Zapper This new secret weapon doesn't kill, but it sure does burn

Mon, 05 Mar 2001
[radtimes] # 173
By C. Mark Brinkley, Times Staff Writer
Marine Corps Times

The Marine Corps is on the verge of unveiling perhaps the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb: a nonlethal weapon that fires directed energy at human targets. The weapon, named the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System, focuses energy into a beam of micromillimeter waves designed to stop an individual in his tracks, said Marine Col. George Fenton, director of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, in an exclusive interview with Marine Corps Times on Feb. 23.

The energy, which falls near microwaves on the electromagnetic spectrum, causes the moisture in a person's skin to heat up rapidly, creating a burning sensation similar to a hot light bulb pressed against one's flesh. When used as directed - that is, briefly - the weapon causes no long-term problems, Fenton said. The amount of time the weapon must be trained on an individual to cause permanent damage or death is classified.

The directorate in Quantico, Va., was planning to unveil the technology in April after briefing Marine Commandant Gen. James Jones, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan and senior Defense Department civilians, still not appointed. But plans were accelerated and much of the program declassified after Marine Corps Times learned of the story. Plans now call for an unveiling and demonstration for military and congressional leaders in March at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. The Marine Corps leads the directorate, but the VMADS project is co-sponsored by the Air Force, which has conducted much of the research and development.

The technology could move into the acquisition phase of making a prototype as soon as this summer, when the project would be taken over by the Air Force's Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., near Boston.

Changing world

The need for a nonlethal means for stopping an aggressor is a direct response to today's world of unknown enemies, terrorist threats, peacekeeping and other-than-war operations, where small numbers of troops find themselves facing off against large crowds of civilians. "How do you deal with that?" Fenton said. "You see commanders saying, 'Give me some other type of tool.'"

Not since the advent of gunpowder and the splitting of the atom have armies seen such a leap in technology. Weapons that fire lasers, electricity and sound waves have been in development for years. But the VMADS system is the first nonlethal, directed-energy weapon designed specifically for use against humans.

Marine officials said the initial plans include mounting it atop a Humvee and using it for peacekeeping operations. An aircraft-mounted version is also on the drawing boards.

Possible applications include crowd control, perimeter defense of expeditionary encampments or airfields, ship self-defense to prevent attacks like that on the USS Cole in October 2000 and other disruption of enemy activities.

The weapon's range remains classified, but project officials expect it will exceed 750 meters, putting Marines operating the weapon beyond the reach of traditional small-arms fire. Marines could then engage a crowd from afar, directing two-second bursts of energy without risk of being overcome by the mob. When the beam is waved over the group, individuals would immediately experience intense pain, causing confusion and driving the crowd to disperse.

Safety matters

Of paramount concern to military officials and political leaders will be whether or not this weapon poses long-term health risks. Some less-than-lethal weapon developments have been scuttled because of criticism by human-rights groups that the concepts posed potentially deadly or cruel hazards, such as blindness. A few programs were stopped dead in their tracks by such complaints, including certain "dazzling" lasers that posed the risk of permanent eye damage, Fenton said. "It was OK to kill someone, but not OK to blind them. That was considered cruel and unusual," said John Pike, a longtime space and military policy analyst and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to international peace and security.

Initial studies of long-term effects on the VMADS system have been completed, but the findings have not been released publicly. Advanced studies on the effects of the weapon are ongoing.

How it works

By utilizing certain portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, the VMADS weapon penetrates the victim's skin - but only to a depth of about one-sixty-fourth of an inch, Fenton said. The waves, whose exact length, frequency and amplitude are classified, cause water molecules in the skin cells to vibrate. That rapidly produces heat and causes discomfort. The invisible waves can pass through clothing but somehow do not penetrate beneath the skin layer, Fenton said. The result is that the heat irritates nerve sensors in the skin but does not damage internal or reproductive organs. Fenton said the weapon's beam has no effect on electrical equipment, such as pacemakers or computers.

Project officials said the human body begins to feel pain at about 113 degrees Fahrenheit, about the temperature of a hot light bulb. The VMADS system could heat a target's skin up to about 130 degrees Fahrenheit in about two seconds, Fenton said. The beam moves at the speed of light, said Maj. Noel D. Montgomery, chief of health-effects assessments at the directorate and a certified health physicist. A target could then be acquired and zapped in seconds.

Humans have been exposed more than 6,000 times in testing, all inside the laboratory, Fenton said. No long-term effects have been detected.

The dangers of electromagnetic waves for humans have been studied for years, and federal laws are in place to protect the public from being blasted by radio towers, television stations and the like.

The health threat varies according to body type and length of exposure, according to the Kansas-based Radiofrequency Safety International Corp., which helps civilian companies comply with the federal rules. Certain waves are virtually harmless to the human body, such as visible light, while microwaves are now used to cook food.

A team of scientists from across the country is being pulled together by Penn State University to study the technology and the human effects of research conducted by the directorate, Montgomery said.

Exceeding specs

According to unclassified briefing documents obtained by Marine Corps Times, many of the components used to develop a demonstrator for the weapon exceeded the specifications of the design. Details, however, were classified.

The weapon is powered by electricity and ultimately would be powered by the modified Humvee on which it would be mounted. Keeping the weapon "loaded" would be as simple as filling the truck up with gas.

Demonstrator production began in 1998 but slipped behind in 2000 after the superconducting magnet at its core was delivered late and an output window on the radio frequency source was broken, according to the documents. The program was thrown off by eight to 10 months.

Now, a demonstration model is out of the lab and into the New Mexico desert, mounted above a standard shipping container and being calibrated for a series of public tests in March. The success of those tests could determine whether the program survives.

Fenton said the Corps could have a Humvee-mounted prototype within two years.

The Defense Department has spent nearly $40 million over 10 years to develop the technology. Budget predictions from last year obtained by Marine Corps Times show another $26 million could be needed for development over the next five years.

The primary contractor for the project is Raytheon Missile Systems, with an award of nearly $16 million spread across several years for system integration on the demonstrator and prototypes, according to budget documents. Raytheon officials declined to comment until a public announcement is made by the Marine Corps, which the company expected to be Feb. 26.

What critics might say

Pike, the space and military policy analyst, said new weapon technologies are likely to face skepticism when they're unveiled before the public. The burden will be on the Pentagon to prove it's safe, he said. "The tricky part is coming up with something that is annoying enough that people will skedaddle, but not so annoying that you would kill them," said Pike, who tracked space and military policies for more than 20 years at the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists before launching his Web site. "That is a pervasive problem with all crowd-control devices....Is it simultaneously effective and nonlethal?"

Some critics are likely to suggest that the new technology could be adopted or adapted by civilian police forces. An Internet search for "RF weapon" yields a host of Web sites saying the government is already experimenting on humans with the technology and that the government's ultimate aim is to use it as a way to control its own people. "It does have a kind of science fiction, phasers-set-to-stun ring to it," Pike said of the new technology. "It sure sounds like that, right?" "There's certainly a sub-population of people who believe the government is using microwaves for mind control. I get calls from them about once a week."

Fenton said he personally had been exposed to the beam - so he knows how much it can hurt, he said - and added that his directorate's legal team has been exploring the human-rights implications of the new weapon even as scientists have been exploring its human effects. "I have nothing to hide," Fenton said. "This is a good news story. Our American public needs to understand that we have done our homework. "We are really into the 21st-century way of doing business, and we are asking the right questions because we have learned from our past and we are making sure that we are moving forward."

---

21 DIE IN NATIONAL GUARD PLANE CRASH

Monday, March 5, 2001
Morrock News,
http://morrock.com

Twenty-one members of the National Guard died when a small military plane crashed in Georgia on Saturday; 18 of the victims were from the 203rd Red Horse Flight, returning to their base in Virginia Beach, Va., following an assignment to Florida. The C-23 Sherpa turboprop, manufactured in Belfast, Northern Ireland, went down nose-first into a muddy field, under heavy clouds and wet conditions.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Greens accuse rich countries of double talk on fuel

March 5, 2001
by Robin Pomeroy
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9988

TRIESTE, Italy - Developed countries are giving polluting fuels like coal, oil and nuclear energy at least 10 times as much subsidy as they put into renewables like wind and solar energy, green groups said on Saturday.

Environmental campaigners issued a blistering attack on G8 countries, meeting in Italy this weekend, accusing them of propping up polluting industries and failing to help new, clean technologies.

According to data gathered by Greenpeace, the European Union ploughed $10 billion into fossil fuels and $5 billion into nuclear energy in 1997, compared with just $1.5 billion on renewables.

In the United States, renewable energies receive an even smaller share of government energy funding, the groups said.

In the 50 years to 1998, fossil fuels and nuclear energy received $111.5 billion in federal subsidies. Renewables, excluding large hydro projects which have their own environmental disadvantages, took just $5 billion, a Friends of the Earth survey found.

"Governments need to put their money where their mouths are," World Wild Fund for Nature's Jennifer Morgan told Reuters. "There really is no excuse for G8 governments not to have a significant proportion of their energy generated from renewables."

CLIMATE CHANGE

U.N. scientists say gases from energy use are contributing to a projected increase in average temperatures of up to six degrees Celsius over the next 100 years. Such global warming would have disastrous consequences on humans and wildlife.

As G8 environment ministers met behind closed doors to discuss how to fight climate change, green groups said a switch of funds to renewables, which do not produce emissions, was key.

"Without enhanced support in G8 and other industrialised country markets, renewables will not be able to reach the production levels necessary to drive costs to an affordable level for mass markets in the south," the groups said in a statement.

The G8 countries should take the lead and promise to convert at least 20 percent of their energy consumption to renewables by 2010, the groups said.

By contrast, the EU gets about six percent of its energy from renewables and plans to double this by 2010, EU figures show.

Such a move would make economic as well as environmental sense, Greenpeace campaigner Steve Sawyer said.

"If governments lead the way by shifting subsidies away from fossil fuels to renewables it would happen very quickly and a lot of people would make a lot of money and more new jobs would be created than by opening up new oil fields in the Amazon or Alaska," Sawyer told Reuters.

CHALLENGE TO WORLD BANK

The industrialised world also needed to radically alter the finance available to energy projects in developing countries through institutions like export credit agencies and the World Bank to ensure they switch away from traditional schemes into renewables, they said.

The World Bank spends 25 times more on fossil fuels than it does on clean energies, Friends of the Earth said.

The G8 has set up a task force of senior business people to look at ways of boosting renewable energies. The group will report to a G8 summit in Genoa in July.

----

Iberdrola wind-power jv signs 913.5 mln euro loan

March 5, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9980

MADRID - Spanish wind-power firm Energias Eolicas Europeas (EEE) said on Friday it had signed a 913.5 million-euro ($849.8 million) syndicated loan to build 31 wind parks in central Spain.

EEE, in which Spain's second-biggest power utility Iberdrola has a 50 percent stake, signed the 15-year loan with five banks to build the parks in the region of Castille La Mancha.

The parks will have installed capacity of 1,173 megawatts of renewable energy and will come onstream by the end of 2000. They added to EEE's current capacity of 420 megawatts.

EEC is also 50-percent owned by Energia Hidroelectrica de Navarra (EHN).

Spanish banks Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria , Banesto and Ahorro Corporacion, as well as Credit Agricole Indosuez and Westdeutsche Landezsbank Girozentrale will underwrite the loan.

EEE had already planned to invest more than 100 billion pesetas ($558.7 million) on renewable energy products this year.

----

UK budget boost sought for "real" green road fuels

March 5, 2001
REUTERS
by Andrew Callus
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9978

LONDON - Britain should champion serious pollution-cutting transport fuels rather than just cut tax on the latest low-sulphur and unleaded offerings, a coalition of green, motoring and health groups said on Friday.

"Biodiesel and road-fuel gases, both less polluting than petrol and diesel, can immediately benefit from tax cuts," the coalition said in a letter to the UK's finance minister Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown ahead of his annual tax-and-spend budget speech next week.

In the letter the environmental pressure group Greenpeace, the National Asthma Campaign and the Royal Automobile Club motorists' organisation also asked Brown to invest directly in hydrogen as a transport fuel.

Production of hydrogen requires power in itself, but it is a zero-emissions fuel at the point of use, and net emissions can be much lower. For the time being, however, the fuel-cell vehicles that use hydrogen most effectively are still in the development stage, and there is no refuelling infrastructure in place. "We therefore urge you to use this budget to annouce funding for demonstration projects using hydrogen fuel-cell buses in at least three cities that currently suffer from poor air quality," said the letter, calling for a 50 million pound ($74 million) government injection over the next two years.

The letter was delivered earlier Friday just as a set of industrial and Icelandic government partners launched a project in Reykjavik to run a fleet of three fuel-cell buses and build a hydrogen filling station.

Brown promised budget action on green fuels in his pre-budget statement in November.

The government later launched a consultation on alternative fuels called The Green Fuels Challenge which acknowledged that despite improvements in fuel design, road transport produces about one-fifth of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.

Gas fuels that should benefit from extra tax incentives include Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), but not Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), which is not significantly less polluting than petrol and diesel, a Greenpeace spokeswoman said.

Biodiesel is made from crops and is zero-rated for tax in France and Germany, but carries the same tax as petro-diesel in the UK.

-------- environment

It Ain't Yellowstone, But It's Home

February 2 - 8, 2001
LA Weekly
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/01/11/offbeat.shtml

Standing at what will soon be his living-room window, park ranger Luke McJimpson surveys the rolling hills, streams and winding paths he has sworn to maintain and protect. But McJimpson isn't in some mountain aerie, contemplating fires to quash or brush to clear. He is in South-Central Los Angeles, organizing nature trips for kids and teaching them about wild animals and bugs.

"Some of these kids haven't seen anything outside of a dog," said McJimpson.

McJimpson, his wife and two kids will move next month into a two-bedroom apartment located on the periphery of the new 8.5-acre Augustus F. Hawkins Natural Park. He's there at the request of residents, who wanted high security at their first-ever nature park. An 8-foot fence protects the 30-foot oak trees, transplanted from Ramona, California, and the 3,000 cubic yards of dirt, imported from Malibu. The former Department of Water and Power storage yard, named for the retired Los Angeles congressman, also has a stand of pecans and walnuts, a large avocado tree, an orange, tangerine and lemon orchard, and a 100-year-old cereus cactus.

"The community wanted it fenced," said Joseph Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which developed the $5 million project. "It was a requirement. They wanted it to be a safe park."

McJimpson was raised on 69th Street at Broadway Avenue, which makes him a good pick for the first park ranger assigned to the conservancy's maiden foray into urban parks.

"Guns weren't a big issue back then," McJimpson recalled. "If someone wanted to start something, they used their fists. Nowadays, you have to watch out for bullets." Slauson Recreation Center two blocks away is a hub for nighttime gang activity, he noted.

McJimpson prefers to focus on the good side of his job.

"It is nice to actually see the difference you are making in the community," said McJimpson. Dozens of children from the neighborhood lined up Saturday for the weekly bus trip to the Santa Monica Mountains. "We had to turn kids away," he smiled. -Christine Pelisek

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Beef prices soaring after tough winter, drought

03/05/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-05-beef.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Retail beef prices are soaring - reaching a record $3.21 a pound for USDA-choice cuts in January - because of a harsh Plains winter that has been tough on cattle.

Prices are likely to dip by the summer, but then rebound because of tight cattle supplies. Producers are only starting to rebuild herds that they thinned because of drought and low prices in the late 1990s.

The winter has been so cold and damp that cattle are taking several months longer than usual to fatten up. In bad weather, cattle in feedlots don't eat as much and use up energy staying warm.

"We have basically had one of the harshest winters that we have seen in a very long time," said Chuck Levitt, a meat analyst with Chicago-based Alaron Trading Corp. "The last time we had a winter this severe across the major cattle feeding areas was in 1993."

The previous record for retail prices was in September, at $3.13 a pound. In the late 1990s, they were averaging about $2.80.

Live cattle are selling for 82 cents a pound, up from 78 cents last month and about 68 cents in February 2000.

"We've definitely seen the beef prices go up big time," said Rickey Figueroa, executive chef of Atlanta's Chops Steakhouse.

The price the upscale restaurant is paying for beef tenderloin has gone from $15 to $20 a pound in recent weeks. So far, the restaurant isn't changing its menu prices, in hopes of negotiating better deals with another supplier, Figueroa said.

Americans have rediscovered a taste for beef at the same time that U.S. meat exports are up and many producers have been sending all of their calves to slaughter, rather than holding females back for breeding.

Experts say it's too early to assess the impact on U.S. prices and supplies from outbreaks of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth diseases in Europe.

Beef sales plummeted in the European Union after an upsurge of mad cow cases in several countries last year. Since October, beef prices in Europe have fallen by about 27%.

The European Union doesn't buy most U.S. beef because the cattle are treated with growth hormones.

In the United States, "The prices are up because the stock of cattle in the country is way down," said Mark McLaughlin, who ranches near Sweetwater, Texas, in a region that has been through several years of drought. "I bet in this area of Texas we've gotten down to 30%" of normal herd sizes.

McLaughlin sent 450 calves to feedlots this winter so they could be fattened for slaughter. That's about half the cattle he was selling a few years ago when his herds were larger. Last fall, however, he kept some female calves so he could start rebuilding his herd over the next two years to take advantage of the higher prices.

U.S. cattle supplies are down 1% this year and 6% from a peak in 1996.

Beef consumption, meanwhile, reached 99.5 pounds per person last year, up from 98.7 per person the year before and 95.6 pounds in 1997. U.S. beef sales to Japan and other export markets rose 11% in 1999 and another 4% last year.

"Demand is holding up very strongly," said Agriculture Department analyst Ron Gustafson.

Retail prices will likely moderate as the weather warms and more cattle head to slaughter, but then cattle supplies will tighten over the next two years as ranchers retain their female calves, rather than send them for slaughter, he said.

-------- spying

The FBI

MARCH 5, 2001
Time
BY JOHANNA MCGEARY
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,1101010305,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C100559%2C00.html

"Eventually I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)" --"B," November 1985

Those who betray must always fear betrayal. It happened to Robert Philip Hanssen a little after 8 p.m. on a Sunday night, just five weeks shy of his planned retirement from the spy game. Ten armed FBI agents shivered in the cold as they watched Hanssen walk up to a "dead drop" code-named Ellis, a spot under a bridge in a quiet suburban Virginia park where he hid a plastic garbage bag full of secret U.S. documents. As he emerged from the woods of Foxstone Park, the agents, guns drawn, surrounded fellow FBI spy catcher Bob Hanssen, clapped handcuffs on his wrist and began reading him his Miranda rights. Some FBI men plunged into the darkness, backtracking along Hanssen's path to recover the bag. Not far away, in nearby Arlington, another team of agents was covertly watching a second drop site called Lewis, to see if Russian intelligence officers showed up to reclaim a package Hanssen had not picked up. It contained $50,000 in $100 bills that the FBI believed was the payment for Hanssen's purloined material. When the Russians didn't show, the agents collected the cash as evidence.

Hanssen seemed thoroughly shocked and surprised by his arrest. But he was not nearly as shocked as the FBI. When Hanssen's arrest was revealed last Tuesday, FBI Director Louis Freeh called his alleged double dealing the "most traitorous actions imaginable" against the U.S. and warned that the damage could prove "exceptionally grave." It was one of the worst failures of American intelligence ever and a brutal humiliation for the FBI, which had not caught on to Hanssen for 15 years. Says an investigator inside the case: "This guy almost committed the perfect crime."

The intelligence community has launched a deep probe into exactly what Hanssen may have turned over to Moscow during those years, but a colleague believes he "gave the whole bleeping thing away." Hanssen had extraordinary access to precious U.S. secrets invaluable to the intelligence services of first the Soviet Union and now Russia and delivered upwards of 6,000 pages of classified stuff into their hands. In the process, analysts believe he compromised every important human and electronic penetration of Russia for the past 15 years. A blue-ribbon panel has been set up to undertake a postmortem of the FBI, to determine how to thwart other moles. As Freeh admitted frankly, "We don't say, at this stage, that we have a system that can prevent this type of conduct."

Everyone who knows the dour-faced Hanssen professed astonishment that he could be one of the great spies of the age. What, we want to understand, makes a man betray, and how did he get away with it for so long? Here, from the 100-page affidavit filed by prosecutors and from Time's own sources, is the story behind the alleged case against Hanssen.

The Spy Who Loved Spying

A good spy needs a good cover, and Hanssen had one of the best. He looked the quintessential suburban dad, devoted to his wife and six kids, working a government job to pay for a four-bedroom split-level house on a cul-de-sac in a modest Virginia neighborhood, Catholic school and college for the kids, and three aging cars. Neighbors often saw him walking through a neighborhood park at night, letting his dog romp, though he rarely stopped to chat. He piled the family into a van every Sunday for Mass at the same church FBI boss Louis Freeh attended. He and his wife Bonnie belong to the church's conservative Opus Dei society. Bonnie is a devout, spiritual woman, much admired among her neighbors for her sunny optimism and her skill at child rearing. If the reserved, aloof Hanssen was less popular, he was still regarded by those who knew him as a good father, good husband, good professional. And a good son. "He has always been very honest and upright," said his mother Vivian Hanssen, 88, reached by Time at her home in Venice, Fla. "I don't understand how he could be leading a double life. I hope there are extenuating circumstances."

Yet Hanssen was in the perfect position to spy on his country. For 25 years, he rose through the ranks of counterintelligence agents who toiled on the FBI's "Dark Side," as insiders call the highly secretive National Security Division. In 1978, when Hanssen was posted to the big New York field division, most rookie agents required to work counterintelligence hated the job. The hot career path lay in the dramatic bank robberies and Cosa Nostra cases of the criminal division. Intelligence surveillances took years, decades even, and seldom if ever resulted in actual indictments.

But Hanssen actually seemed to like the slow, intricate building of counterintelligence cases and was well suited to it. If criminal agents called the other realm "Sleepy Hollow," the NSD boys scoffed at their rivals as "knuckle draggers." As an agent who worked with Hanssen in the Soviet unit put it, "The counterintelligence agents read the New York Times, and the criminal agents read the Daily News. Espionage cases are the best cases in the world because they're very cerebral." So was Hanssen. He read voraciously, everything from spy novels to Marxist tomes to the richly detailed logs filed by surveillance squads overnight. "He really wanted to do counterintelligence work," says the agent.

In one of the many letters he allegedly sent to Moscow, Hanssen claimed that what he really wanted was to be a double agent, like the British intellectual turned mole Kim Philby. "I'd decided on this course when I was 14. I'd read Philby's book," he wrote (although Philby's autobiography was not published until 1968, when Hanssen was 24) in a rambling discourse last March to the SVR, Russia's foreign-arm successor to the Soviet-era KGB. "My only hesitations were my security concerns under uncertainty. I hate uncertainty."

Hanssen got something of a late start in the spy business. He was born April 18, 1944, in Chicago to a veteran cop engaged for nearly 30 years in local anticommunist intelligence work. H