------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Today In History
A Matter of Ethics
China Backs Treaty To Ban Weapons in Space
Too many babies without eyes
Vets were exposed to uranium: study
EU Mulls a New Deal With Turkey
Armies of Europe Failing to Meet Goals, Sapping NATO
NATO Tunes Up for Bush Visit As Macedonia Smolders
HAVEL, NATO, AND RUSSIA
German nuke industry plans to share accident risks
WARMER WORDS ON MISSILE SHIELD
U.S. Will Resume Talks With N. Korea
Bush will renew missile talks with Kim
S. Korea Welcomes U.S. Intervention
U.S. - North Korean Talks Offer Ray of Sunshine
Ministers Announce SFOR Reduction, Mull U.S. Missile Plans
Congress asked to boost funds for anti-missile laser
White House to increase funding for airborne laser
The Economics of European Missile Defense
NATO to Hear Missile Defense Gospel
Rumsfeld Promotes Missile Defense
Duma Approves Plan to Import Nuclear Waste
Russia imports nuclear waste
Worker testifies in injury lawsuit
U.S. feared loss of beryllium
Campbell moving to free up miner's money immediately
U.S. Justice Department may intervene
Limit for Radioactive Leaks Is Set for Nuclear Waste Site
Nevada Nuclear Sites Faces Limits
What Yucca offers...for 10,000 years
Industry sues to stop Yucca radiation limits
Subcommittee to address I-131 releases in meeting
US Holds Up Release of Reagan Papers
White House accepts tougher rules for nuclear-waste site

MILITARY
Central Africans Head Home After Bangui Bloodshed
Former Argentine President Is Arrested
OAS asks Central America minefield effort to continue
China Urges Work to Ban Space Arms
Chinese missile moves near Taiwan worry U.S.
Israeli Claims Iran Arms Smuggling
CIA Chief Begins Meetings With Israel
Weapons amnesty declared in Pakistan
Vieques Protesters Allege Rough Treatment by Navy
'Army of One' campaign a success with young people
Bush Leads Tribute to D-Day Veterans

OTHER
Environmentalists meet Cheney, see some progress
New US coal plants to power 20 million homes
EPA says most US refiners breaking green laws
SWITZERLAND: GYPSIES PLAN TO SUE I.B.M.
ASIA AFGHANISTAN: AID GROUP WARNS TALIBAN
China Says U.S. Spy Plane Row 'Basically' Over

ACTIVISTS
Liberator: Free Vieques
Nuclear Energy Industry: Sooo 20th Century
Utah citizens protest nuclear waste dumping


-------- NUCLEAR

Today In History

The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 7, 2001; 8:00 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010606/aponline200031_000.htm

In 1981, Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons.

-------- australia

A Matter of Ethics
World Wakes Up to Use of Dead Babies in Nuclear Tests in 1950s

By Leela Jacinto,
June 7, 2001
Australian Broadcasting
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/australia010507_sunshine.html

Half a century after secret studies on the effects of radioactive fallout were carried out in the United States and Britain, the world is waking up to the "body snatching" of the 1950s.

Called "Project Sunshine," studies conducted on dead babies sought to measure the amount of radioactive strontium-90 being absorbed by humans due to nuclear testing.

On Tuesday, the Australian Ministry for Health and Aged Care launched an investigation into reports of Australian baby samples being dispatched for Project Sunshine without the parents' permission.

"We need to verify if Australian babies were used in this manner, how many, and from where they came," said a spokesman for Australian Health Minister Michael Wooldridge.

The investigation was launched days after a British newspaper reported that British scientists obtained children's bodies from various hospitals and shipped their bones and other body parts to the United States for classified nuclear experiments.

Oceans away in Hong Kong, a British colony until 1997, the newspaper report set off a furor, prompting authorities to launch an inquiry on Wednesday.

'Serving Their Country'

More than 1,500 cadavers - many of them babies - were gathered from half a dozen countries from Europe to Australia in the 1950s for the studies on the effects of radiation conducted by the now defunct Atomic Energy Commission, according to U.S. government documents.

Project Sunshine, which was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, attempted to study the absorption of strontium-90 in human tissue, primarily bone.

In June 1995, a presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, set up by former President Clinton released classified documents from the Atomic Energy Commission, which showed that scientists working on Project Sunshine were aware of the dubious ethical and legal grounds on which their research was being conducted.

In a transcript of a secret meeting on Jan. 18, 1955, Dr. Willard Libby, a University of Chicago researcher, who went on to win the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, acknowledged that the difficulty in getting human samples was resulting in "great gaps" in the project's findings.

"I don't know how to get them," Libby is quoted as saying. "But I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them and particularly in the young age group. So, human samples are of prime importance and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country."

'Bits and Pieces'

For many unsuspecting parents, the experience was nightmarish.

In a 1995 British documentary, Deadly Experiments, Jean Prichard, a British mother of a stillborn baby whose legs were removed by British hospital doctors in 1957, said she was forbidden to dress her daughter for her funeral to prevent her from finding out what had happened.

"I asked if I could put her christening robe on her, but I wasn't allowed to, and that upset me terribly because she wasn't christened," she said. "No one asked me about doing things like that, taking bits and pieces from her."

Though British and Canadian media have, in the past, reported that cadavers of infants were sent to the United States for Project Sunshine, there have been no official investigations into the murky shipments.

Fifty Years Later

While admitting that British scientists did indeed work on Project Sunshine, Elizabeth Taylor, a spokeswoman for the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority said the organization was only beginning to sift through hundreds of documents, not all of which have been declassified.

"Following the [Observer] report, we started to look at this, it's a mountain of information," said Taylor. "This is about what happened in the 1950s, it's not easy to do this."

Taylor said the organization had so far not been able to trace records of bodies being sent by British scientists to the United States.

The sheer volume of papers and the fact that they were conducted around 50 years ago make investigations a challenging prospect and could explain why governments of countries that participated in Project Sunshine are only recently waking up to their parts in the ghoulish studies.

Wooldridge himself was not aware that Australian babies were allegedly sent to the United States until the British media carried reports earlier this week, said a spokesman.

He said the DOE had not yet been contacted to assist in the investigation though he fully expected the department to cooperate.

When contacted, a spokesman for the DOE confirmed the department had not been contacted: "My understanding is the Australian inquiry is looking at their own records."

ABCNEWS reported details of the program in 1995, including the practice of obtaining cadavers from cities where tracking was lax, particularly in poverty- stricken areas.

ABCNEWS' Andrew Chang contributed to this report.

-------- china

China Backs Treaty To Ban Weapons in Space

By Alexander G. Higgins
Associated Press Writer
07 June 2001
http://www.space.com/spacenews/spacepolicy/china_space_weapons_ban_010607.html

GENEVA (AP) -- China proposed a treaty Thursday to ban weapons in outer space because of the imminent "danger" stemming from U.S. missile defense plans.

Chinese Ambassador Hu Xiaodi made the proposal at the 66-nation Conference on Disarmament, the world's only multinational forum for negotiating arms-control treaties.

"All space-based weapons and all weapons attacking outer space targets from the earth are to be prohibited once and for all," said Hu, who introduced draft wording for the proposed treaty.

There was no immediate U.S. reaction, but Western diplomats said Hu's comments only added detail to China's known position on the issue.

China, a bitter critic of U.S. plans for a National Missile Defense system and the expectation that it would involve deployments in space, has long called for a treaty to prevent an arms race in outer space.

The United States has said it was willing to discuss outer space issues, but that it is too soon to say if a new treaty is needed.

A congressionally appointed U.S. panel in January urged Washington to pay more attention to defending the country's assets in space. Donald H. Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense, was a member of the panel.

The panel said the United States depends on space more than any other country for a range of activities from military surveillance to weather forecasts and communications.

Hu noted the panel urged steps be taken to protect against the danger of a "space Pearl Harbor" and said the report and U.S. plans "clearly demonstrate that the weaponization of outer space is by no means a remote issue."

"The danger is imminent," he said.

Following diplomatic practice Hu never named the United States, but his direct reference to U.S. plans left no doubt that he was talking about the Bush administration.

"Outer space is now faced with the danger of being weaponized, which manifests itself in two aspects, namely the development of the missile defense program and the 'space control' plan," Hu said.

He was referring to the U.S. Air Force's long advocacy of "space control," which could include weapons to deny an enemy the use of space for combat operations against the United States or its allies.

The Bush administration has been trying to allay fears of China, Russia and other countries about the plan to construct a system to defend against limited missile attacks from "rogue" states like Iraq or North Korea.

It has indicated that it hopes the key other countries can be won over to its approach in the long run, but the Chinese speech showed Beijing remains deeply skeptical.

The disarmament conference has been deadlocked over starting any new negotiations since 1996, when it wrote the treaty to ban nuclear test explosions.

Washington has been urging the conference to work on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons by negotiating a treaty to ban the "fissile materials" -- plutonium and highly enriched uranium -- needed for their manufacture.


-------- depleted uranium

Too many babies without eyes

Dutch Journal Medical Science,
26 May, 2001; 145(21), p.1024
From: "Laka Foundation" <laka@antenna.nl>
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001

Mohammed A. Salman, an eye surgeon from Baghdad, is reporting via the internet about the phenomenon anophthalmos: babies who have been born with only one eye or who are missing both eyes. This is a rare anomaly, which normally exists at 1 of the 50 million births. The Iraqi eye doctor, however, is reporting 9 cases in two years; 8 babies are missing both eyes. The Flemish eye doctor Edward De Sutter from the Groeninghe Hospital in Kortrijk picked up the message from internet and started a scientific discussion with Salman per e-mail. On the critical and unbelieving questions from De Sutter, Salman proposed to come and to look by himself. De Sutter accepted the invitation and came to Iraq, together with two other colleague eye doctors. What he saw in Iraq, was horrible, like he writes in the Flemish daily 'De Standaard' (5 May, 2001).

De Sutter examined a number of children by himself which was born without eyes, but also saw some pictures of children with grotesque anomalies, such as the start of one eye in the middle of the face: the so- called cyclops. His colleague Roland Bonneux examined children with an absent crown of the skull who were keeping alive in the incubator. "I am not so much bewildered about the presence of the anomalies as well about the great number out of them", says De Sutter. Out of the 4000 births there are 20 with such anomalies. "Iraq seems to be a scientific curiosity."

The cause is evident according to Salman: from 7 of the 8 anophthalmosic babies who missed both eyes, the fathers have been exposed to U.S. antitank weapons during the attack of the U.S. on Iraq in 1991. At this depleted uranium was used. According to the official point of view from the U.S. the radioactive particles, which released during the use of such weapons, pose no danger for the health, but various groups ­ amongst them participants of the conflicts in Kosovo in 1999 ­ disputing this.

Leaving all political sensitivities aside it has been clear to De Sutter that Salman needs help. Not only concrete aid of medicines and material, but also aid in the field of scientific knowledge and support. On a special web page of the Association of Eye doctors in Flanders (http://www.vvov.be) more is mentioned about the mission of De Sutter to Iraq and the aid program that he and his colleagues want to set up.

Translation by Henk van der Keur

Notes: The web page is Dutch; however also for not Dutch speaking people it is worth to visit. There is a report with pictures.

Contact: Dr.Med.Dr.Sc. Edward De Sutter

Dienst Oogziekten, C.A.Z.K. O.L.V. Groeninghe, Campus Sint-Maarten, B. J. Vercruysselaan 5, B-8500 Kortrijk, Mail to: edward.desutter@azgroeninge.be

The web page on which Dr. De Sutter is referring to is probably: http://www.uruklink.net/iraqnews/echild.htm

----

Vets were exposed to uranium: study

By CP,
June 7, 2001
http://www.canoe.ca/EdmontonNews/es.es-06-07-0051.html</A>

HALIFAX -- New research indicating a possible connection between depleted uranium and illnesses suffered by Gulf War veterans should interest Ottawa to study the issue further, says a researcher in radioactive substances.

"It's frustrating the (Canadian) government doesn't take this more seriously," said Mary Ripley-Guzman, a research co-ordinator with the Uranium Medical Research Centre based in Washington, D.C.

"We've come up with data that show there is depleted uranium in these veterans.

"It's low-level and it's coming out of their urine."

Ripley-Guzman will present the results of the centre's recent study of dozens of Persian Gulf veterans, from several countries, to a Commons Veterans' Affairs committee in Ottawa today.

She will be accompanied by Sue Riordan of Nova Scotia, whose husband Capt. Terry Riordan died in 1999 after a long illness she believes was linked to his service in the Gulf War.

It was the first conflict where weapons coated with a radioactive substance were used.

Ripley-Guzman said while the Canadian government dismisses the research, laboratories in Europe and England are looking into a possible connection.

A series of government-sponsored U.S. studies have failed to explain why thousands of soldiers who fought in the 1990-91 conflict have contracted unexplained illnesses. The theory that depleted uranium weapons might be responsible was boosted when tests on the bones of Capt. Riordon showed high levels of the radioactive substance.

A civilian doctor said Riordan died of Gulf War Syndrome, but it's a conclusion the military refuses to accept.

Last August, a senior Canadian military doctor dismissed the alleged connection between depleted uranium and illnesses after 69 other veterans were tested for the substance.

Col. Ken Scott said there was no evidence Canadians were exposed to this type of coated ammunition and said there was no such diagnosis as Gulf War Syndrome.

-------- europe

EU Mulls a New Deal With Turkey

JUNE 07, 02:06 EST
By JEFFREY ULBRICH
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7CFHJIG0

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - The European Union is considering a new deal with Turkey, a strategic military ally, that would clear the way for the creation of the EU's planned 60,000-man rapid reaction force.

The EU hopes to field the force by 2003 for use in peacekeeping or humanitarian crises in which NATO does not want to get involved.

To avoid duplication and expense, the EU also wants access to NATO's planning facilities and other assets such as intelligence, communications and transport. NATO is willing to do this, but Turkey seeks greater influence over how and when the assets are used.

Turkey is one of six European members of NATO who are not members of the EU; only 11 of the EU's 15 members belong to NATO. The United States and Canada round out the Atlantic alliance.

Turkey, which has one of the largest military forces in NATO, is adamant that it have a strong voice in any EU decision to mount a military operation using NATO assets, or an operation that would affect what Turkey considers its sphere of interest.

Negotiations have been underway since last year. Because NATO operates by consensus, Turkey has an effective veto over any decision on assets. After a final push by Britain and the United States, diplomats hammered out a compromise last week.

Turkey itself has been sending mixed signals about the tentative deal, which one NATO official called a ``non-paper,'' because it carries neither name nor claim of ownership. Some diplomats say that is because Turkey's armed forces have not signed off on it yet.

Officials hope the compromise can be formally approved by the time President Bush attends a NATO summit next Wednesday.

The six-point proposal provides for consultation between the non-EU European NATO allies - Turkey, Norway, Iceland, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - and the EU on any decision affecting their security interests.

One of Turkey's main demands had been the right to participate in the initial decision-making phase of any EU operation, not just operational planning. While allowing the non-EU allies to consult during the decision-making phase, the proposal does not give them a veto. It only promises to consider their views.

EU foreign ministers meet Monday and Tuesday in Luxembourg and will have to decide if they can accept the proposed level of participation of nonmember states in EU business.

Diplomats are anxious to clear this hurdle, which is only one part of a larger agreement that will govern relations between NATO and the emerging military arm of the EU.

----

Armies of Europe Failing to Meet Goals, Sapping NATO

New York Times
June 7, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/07/world/07NATO.html

LONDON, June 6 - Two years after NATO vowed to improve its military forces, the organization is falling well short of its goals, leaving a yawning gap between the United States and its European allies.

An internal NATO review has concluded that if the alliance's current spending plans are carried out, it will fulfill less than half its "force goals" - its 1999 plans to build up its military effectiveness and deal with problems that surfaced during the bombing campaign in Kosovo.

And NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, said in an interview that European members of the alliance are not doing enough to remedy their deficiencies.

As a result, European forces could be overly dependent on the United States if they became involved in a new conflict. And if European nations try to tackle the crisis themselves, they may find they lack the means to do the job.

"For the Europeans there is a clear message," Lord Robertson said. "If a crisis comes along, the capability will not be there."

The sobering assessment comes at a crucial time. The allies' defense ministers are to meet in Brussels on Thursday, and President Bush is to visit NATO's headquarters there next week.

A major topic on the ministers' agenda is NATO's effort to fill the gaps that emerged during its war with Yugoslavia. The conflict demonstrated that European nations have fallen well behind the United States in many areas, including precision- guided weapons, mid-air refueling, airlifting of war matériel, electronic jamming and weapons to knock out enemy air defenses.

European leaders have promised to remedy the shortfalls, both to strengthen their role within NATO and to develop the means to act independently of the United States through a 60,000-member rapid reaction force, which the European Union plans to establish by 2003. But only limited progress has been made.

"We need to do more," Lord Robertson said.

Much of the consternation at NATO headquarters centers on the objectives the alliance set for itself at its summit meeting in Washington in 1999, for NAT0's 50th anniversary.

At the time, it was clear that the United States was carrying the main burden for the air campaign against Yugoslavia. And with much fanfare NATO approved a program to redress the imbalance and improve the alliance's ability to mount multinational operations, a program it calls the Defense Capabilities Initiative.

A series of "force goals" were specified for five areas: logistics, command and control, mobility, the survivability of forces and infrastructure, and "effective engagement," which essentially means the ability to find and strike targets from the air with precision-guided munitions.

A committee, with NATO's deputy secretary general, Sergio Balanzino, as chairman, was set up to monitor progress. But a review overseen by Mr. Balanzino indicates that NATO's current spending plans would enable it to completely fulfill less than half the "force goals."

Nor is it clear whether remaining objectives will be met. The review notes that one-third of these objectives would be only partly reached under current spending plans. Other goals are still under discussion or appear to be effectively abandoned.

According to the review, most of the progress has been in logistics and in the matériel needed to sustain a conflict.

Effective engagement, the term for precision-guided munitions and the systems that support them, is the weakest of the five areas: NATO's spending plans will only enable it to meet 35 percent of its goal, the review states.

One major reason for the meager progress is lagging support in Europe for military spending. NATO's calculations show that only 11 of its 19 members have increased their spending, after inflation is taken into account.

"The constituency for defense spending is weaker now that the threat appears to have gone away," Lord Robertson said.

Spending estimates by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based research center, paint a bleaker picture. The institute notes that European Union nations as a whole spend about 60 percent as much as the United States.

The level of effort varies widely. Britain's military spending, for example, far outstrips that of Germany, whose defense reforms are faltering. Another problem is competition among military programs.

"Rising personnel costs and a wave of systems acquisitions initiated some time ago, as well as the costs of ongoing operations, leave little room for investment to satisfy newly identified requirements," the institute noted in its annual Strategic Survey.

Two items on Thursday's agenda for the defense ministers illustrate the alliance's difficulties.

One is a proposal to acquire the ability to find and track enemy forces using an airborne radar, a program known as aerial ground surveillance. This has been a top priority for NATO's military command since 1991. But the alliance has not agreed on how to proceed, and few members have indicated any enthusiasm for paying for it.

The United States currently has such a system, known as J-Stars. And it would like NATO nations to join Washington in developing a system for the alliance. But Europeans have different programs and ideas for how to go about this.

The other subject is development of weapons to attack enemy air defenses, like missiles fired from warplanes that home in on enemy radars. With the public increasingly loath to accept casualties, such suppression of enemy air defense is important.

But only seven NATO nations have or are acquiring such systems. And of these, few can attack air defenses with real precision. Only the United States has an effective airborne capability to jam enemy communications.

The shortfalls have implications that go beyond NATO. With the encouragement of the United States, NATO has supported the European Union's efforts to develop a rapid reaction force.

NATO's reasoning was that the European Union force might take on tasks that NATO is not eager to handle. Also, casting defense as an exercise in European integration, allied officials argued, could be a useful way to encourage support in European parliaments for military spending, which could end up benefiting NATO.

In return, the organization has offered to give the European Union access to its military planners and, on a case-by-case basis, assets like bases and Awacs battle-management planes.

But Europe's faltering effort raises the question of whether European Union nations are keeping their side of the bargain and whether their rapid reaction force will ever be more than a paper tiger.

"Capabilities is the European side of the bargain," Lord Robertson said. "If we are going to be able to handle a crisis with the E.U. in the lead or NATO in the lead, we need to have a better capability, or the crisis will simply not be tackled."

----

NATO Tunes Up for Bush Visit As Macedonia Smolders

New York Times
June 7, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-nato-dc.html

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO defense ministers met on Thursday to practice marching in step before President Bush makes his first visit to Europe next week.

The 19-member alliance has been stung by media reports -- hotly denied then and since -- of a European policy rebuff for Secretary of State Colin Powell when foreign ministers met last week in Budapest.

Accounts of transatlantic splits in NATO since Bush came to office with a new set of defense and strategic ideas were nonsense, Alliance General George Robertson told ministers at Thursday's opening session.

``I think that this meeting today will bear out the fact that last week's news stories of an alliance divided were in reality pure fiction,'' Robertson said.

His complaint made clear, however, how sensitive NATO is to any whiff of disunity, and how much it wants to avoid any further appearance of discord before the Bush visit, be it over U.S. missile defense plans or Balkan peacekeeping.

But the mounting crisis in Macedonia may spoil the choreography, yanking NATO's attention back to a threat far more imminent than that posed by the missile acquisition plans of ''rogue states'' or even genuine but civilized differences over future risks.

MACEDONIA SMOULDERS

Robertson condemned the ``cowardly and senseless'' killing of five Macedonian soldiers by ethnic Albanian guerrillas on Wednesday, urging the ``men of violence'' to lay down their guns and join the normal political process.

Last month, Robertson denounced the guerrillas as ``murderous thugs'' who would never win a seat at the negotiating table at the point of their guns and should simply disappear.

In contacts which have failed to remain secret, however, NATO and European Union powers are desperately trying to end the conflict by engineering blanket amnesty for the rebels.

But hope of dialogue is literally going up in smoke.

The central Macedonian city of Bitola, home to three of the latest victims, was still smoldering on Thursday after a night of rioting in which Albanian shops and homes were burned.

The widening gulf between Slavs and minority Albanians could lead Macedonia closer to a civil war on the doorstep of Kosovo, scene of NATO's biggest military undertaking in its 52-year history, where 36,000 peacekeepers are on duty.

Robertson said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had given the allies a briefing on a far-reaching U.S. defense review taking in missile defense and nuclear posture.

``It marks an important opportunity to consult about the direction of U.S. thinking before any decisions are made, and we welcome this commitment to consultation in NATO,'' he said.

While America's allies accept that the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction is giving rise to new threats which will need new responses, they are concerned about consigning classic Cold War arms control to the garbage bin.

Rumsfeld told reporters on Wednesday that planned testing of missile defenses technologies could soon collide with the provisions of the U.S-Soviet anti-ballistic missile treaty of 1972, which some see as the ``cornerstone'' on arms control.

Rumsfeld told NATO defense ministers, however, that nothing stays the same and while the United States did not possess a crystal ball to clearly discern future threats, it would be a failure of duty not to try to address them.

He outlined the architecture of a ``layered'' missile defense that might provide protective shields are different altitudes, but there was no precise detail in the presentation and, as one senior diplomat put it, ``no attempt to close the sale.''

--------

HAVEL, NATO, AND RUSSIA

Chronicles Magazine,
by Michael Stenton
Thursday, June 7, 2001
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Stenton/NewsMS060701.htm

President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic has given another very bad speech. Addressing a meeting of the prime ministers of nine former communist countries seeking NATO membership and Croatia in Bratislava on May 11, he presented his justifications for expanding American military power and excluding Russia from Europe.

New NATO has a certain logic that should be plain to everyone. America cannot remain the world's unrivalled superpower unless she leads in Europe. As the European Union hardens this will be increasingly difficult, and it would already have become impossible without a NATO policy in Eastern Europe that could legitimate and conciliate German aspirations without providing motive or opportunity for Russo-German rapprochement. Hence the expansion of NATO. But the costs--ideological overdrive, Balkan adventures and the acquisition and rearmament of a club of anti-Russian states--may have consequences that go far beyond the original motive. American policy-making does not generate long and complex plans, but it has an almost horticultural vigor. It starts with a series of ideological suggestions that, unless weeded out early, congeal as imperatives into a rigid structure which can then function on automatic pilot as a political engine. Vietnam showed how hard it can be to stop. On the Russian front we are well into stage two--with a confrontational political engine in sight as stage three. Furthermore, American policy is not the sum of White House intentions: NATO leaders, media corporations and favored NGOs can all push or, less often, resist. Havel is not just a minor NATO leader, he is still a sort of one-man NGO. As a politician he has lost his sparkle and is no longer inspirational, but a hard-earned reputation such as his is always useful to the very powerful and he is aware of it.

Havel evidently knows the obvious objections to New NATO. But he does not give clarifying answers, he offers myths and pretence. He claims, for example, that NATO is a "truly regional" alliance that will eventually fit into a "future multipolar world order." But he does not say what or where the other pole (or poles!) will be, which is shrewd of him since the signs of this multipolarity are lacking and the present reality is that we have just one military superpower, which Havel wants to strengthen. NATO is about to ungrade Czech airfields to take large U.S. troop transporters. These, Mr. Havel, are transit facilities. Transit to where? Havel does not say. But the moral destination is identity:

The European post-communist countries truly belong to the West--geographically, historically, culturally as well as in terms of their values. Thus they have every right to stress that they were torn out of the Western community by force and that their natural place is within that community.

This seems fair enough for the Czechs, if we can overlook the little local difficulty they were having with their "Western" neighbors 1938-45 when so rudely interrupted by the Asiastic horde. But should we overlook it? The Soviet bloc states were not cut out of the West by the Soviet Union: They were all under Nazi control when the Red Army arrived. Was Nazi Europe "the West"? Was the Soviet tyranny after 1948 more damaging than Nazi occupation or even, to go three centuries further back, the Habsburg clerical tyranny after the battle of the White Mountain in 1620? Or is there some special dispensation for damage inflicted by Germans which does not apply to Stalin's henchmen? Few thought so in 1945. Besides, it would be merely silly to say that Bulgarians and Romanians--even Ukrainians could qualify providing they turn against Moscow and embrace NATO--were "torn out" of the West in 1945. They were never considered "western" before Communism: they were torn out of the Christian West--the Christendom to the west of Asia--long ago. The Mongols destroyed Kiev in 1240, and the Balkan peoples had their national potential shattered by the Ottoman victories at Kosovo in 1389 and Nikopolis in 1392. This laceration was far worse than Soviet control of Czechoslovakia after 1948. (But the heartland Europe is invariably sniffy about the Christian "reconquistas" whether in Spain, Muscovy or the Balkans.) Let us put aside the term "West" for a moment. The 20th-century story is that Russia itself was removed from the community of European nations by the Bolsheviks; Germany by the Nazis in 1933; the Czechs by Nazi occupation in March 1939; and Spain by Franco at the same period. Havel wants them all in NATO, except Russia.

Is Havel again an underground writer using one name as code for another? He offers this on Russia:

Those who lack order in themselves, or at home, try to impose some kind of a substitute concept of order on everybody else. Distrust of oneself and uncertainty about one's own identity necessarily generate a distrust of others, imputation of evil intentions to the rest of the world and, eventually, an aggressiveness that may result in the invasion of other people's territories, or at the least in forcing one's own domination upon those who do not desire it.

This cuts two ways. It sounds like the USA, as the author must know. Even if Havel means to analyze "eternal" Russia, let us apply his formula to the present. Cechnya is Russian territory. It is plain that the Russians were extremely reluctant to fight for it, and did so for the sake of the principle of federation sovereignty. Alexander Lebed's peace policy was surely more intelligent and certainly more humane, and Russia may pay dearly for abandoning it, but the Chechen war was pragmatic. Havel's psychological profile fits NATO-land much better. The United States broke the agreement with Moscow not to expand NATO eastwards. After the seizure of Kosovo, U.S. intentions and justifications are acutely disturbing. Russia went out her way not to impute evil to NATO until events forced a change of judgment. An America ready to conciliate Russia in her time of weakness could have kept her word and achieved a truly civilizing detente. That chance was fully understood in Washington and deliberately thrown away.

Havel's idea of NATO territory--"the one that we call the West extends from Alaska in the west to Tallinn in the east." He is mistaken. NATO command and control does not operate in the United States. This is an important technicality. Europe would not be consulted if the U.S. wanted a nuclear exchange with China. In any case, Havel's 'Euro-Atlantic' alliance is a misnomer. Turkey is not an Atlantic power and is only marginally European. America is most certainly a Pacific power. American power stretches from the Philippines, Taiwan, Okinawa and Korea through the Americas, across Europe, through the Mediterranean and the Middle East and into the Indian Ocean. This is an area of land and sea that is vast beyond all comparison. It is in no sense regional. Like the British Empire it is commercial and strategic: it is not a geographical translation of spiritual sources. Today it stretches not just to Estonia but towards candidate countries that we don't talk about very much but which do receive whispered promises: Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan for example. Havel knows perfectly well that his list of Western values--reader, you know them--are these days widely asserted outside Europe. So he reverts to geography after all. Having boasted that values are even more defining for NATO than geography, he dances back to geography to defend the conclusion he wants: Russians out. For Havel, there must be a river in Eastern Europe--preferably, I suspect, the river Dnieper, but in principle, whichever river the U.S. State Department may care to name--which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean. Pan-Slavism was no doubt unhistorical, but a vast NATO billowing forth on a wave of cliches called values is no improvement.

Havel's Eurokitsch is considerable, but he says nothing to suggest why the European territory of the former Ottoman Empire is the West and Russia is not. Perhaps some Viennese scribbler in 1914 might have dared to called Turkey "Europa" and Russia "Asien," but are we to be reduced to such gibberish? Did we really survive the Cold war to receive new ambitions and geopolitical missions from voices mimicking the Mitteleuropa of yesteryear?

To be fair, Havel does not use this voice. He is as silent about Turkey as an unprovoked German. He admits that European Russia played an important part in European history. (And what a sense of history! Even at the start, Ivan III could warn a Viennese advocate of a papal crown for Russia: "My ancestors were friendly with the Emperors who gave Rome to the popes.") But it seems that Russia with Siberia and the Pacific territories is just too much for him. The vastness of Siberia, however, is not the real Russia. Russia is a European state with a lot of Asian real estate attached. Havel excludes Russia from the NATO "not because it [was] in any way inferior," but simply because we must have "clearly delimited regions" and "historically determined entities" without which "anything could extend anywhere" and "any balance would be disrupted" and all organizations become "absolutely toothless."

This is ludicrous. Can the man not hear his own arguments? The "West" is not a region; it is an intercontinental novelty; and Europe is simply not clearly delimited. USA/NATO is the object that can extend anywhere, and it is NATO that has shattered all semblance of balance. But Havel's crucial term is "toothless." He must have something that can bite Russia. All the rest is flim-flam:

The West has had, in essence, a common political and economic history emanating from the same set of spiritual sources. For many centuries the character of its civilization and its inner ethos equipped it to exert a major influence on all the other regions and to eventually predetermine the shape of the entire planetary civilization of today.

Perhaps. But which spiritual sources? The 12th-century renaissance, or the trained alacrity with which British sailors scampered around their naval guns? Havel knows well enough that the modern easy-approval values were simply not there "for many centuries." He would love to trace membership of a club for today to ancient spiritual sources but he knows he cannot be specific.

It is true the Latin West had more violent disagreement in its Christianity than did Greek Orthodoxy. The product was wild diversity. Free Bohemia, for example, was squashed by the Counter-Reformation. The free-speech liberalism of the English-speaking world was very different from the imperial conformism of the Habsburg Empire. Did this somehow amount to the same thing? There is no common political and economic history of the Latin West. Its unity was fractured centuries ago. The invocation of common "spiritual sources" is cultural kitsch; it is not meant to illuminate serious modern problems. We can concede Prague's claim to have long been at the center of Europe. But to what effect? Was the liberalism of 1848 in central Europe so much superior to the same trends in Russia before 1914? And if both failed, must only the failure in Russia be unforgivable when it comes to modern political maps? The Russians, it may be said, never voted for communism to anything like the extent that the Czechs did.

Havel knows that the imperialist crimes of the West constitute an historic objection to a Western military alliance that is no longer defensive. So he disapproves of imperialism in a phrase, and his disclaimer is hollow. He walks as if hypnotized towards the current reincarnation of imperial arrogance. He has become the leading "Soviet bloc" proponent of this arrogance, as if having embraced NATO he must make its worst actions the best proof of his wisdom. It may be that his natural anti-Soviet bitterness is growing more acute at the end of his life, and it is likely that the Germans, who are helping to satisfy Czech hunger for the fruits of capitalism, told him in no uncertain terms and at an early stage what they wanted; but it is likely that he has another strategic motive. Havel wants to ensure that no future line of political or economic division shall ever separates his people again from German central Europe, but he does not want to be alone with the Germans. Hence the showman's assiduity: his concern to be as conspicuous as possible to Washington. What other motive could he have for suggesting that Mrs. Albright should be his successor? The more America picks up the new Drang nach Osten, the more happy he is about it. Havel says that he abandoned his dream that NATO could fade away at the end of the Cold War in the late 80's, that is just before the "Velvet Revolution." Was there a quid pro quo, a bargain struck when he was identified by Western powers as a figurehead? He says that an alternative "structure" to NATO would have been costly, dangerous and would have created a power vacuum. But was there the least need for a "structure"? The Czechs are in NATO because they were wanted by specific powers and because they wanted to be patronized by the rich again. It had nothing to do, at least when it happened, with "defense." As for the power vacuum: NATO was the only thing generating the pressure to get itself sucked in. There were no other candidates. On this argument the Czechs joined NATO to prevent NATO getting sucked in. One can forgive the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles for wanting security from a Soviet Union that is no longer there. It is perfectly natural. But they should ask in whose interest it is to go on expanding.

Havel is a recognizable figure: a brave man who does not want a brave policy for his people. Edward Benes, the Czechoslovak leader in 1938 and 1948, had even more to be afraid of and he was just as determined to avoid a brave policy. In 1938, Benes surrendered at just the point he knew a British cabinet majority had challenged Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. In 1945, he groveled to the Soviets to give his people long-term protection against Germany. By the first decision he scuppered the chances of German military opposition to Hitler and achieved a disastrous postponement of the war in Europe, by the second decision he threw away what chance there was of Czechoslovakia keeping out of the Soviet zone. Benes was a very clever man solving the wrong problem. An educated blunderer. We must hope President Havel is more fortunate in his foolishness.

Russia is not, as Havel pretends, a vast Eurasian power that will "always" play a major role in the world balance of power. It once seemed so and perhaps Russia will recover the role, but today her future is entirely unclear. It may even become possible to destroy Russia as a major power. Her population is in demographic collapse and her mineral resources will almost certainly attract predators. Russia needs a European economic anchor, and some strategic reassurance, not a rerun of the Cold War in which former satellites exorcize their ghosts by arming themselves for the humanitarian interventions which become attractive as Russia decays. Does Havel want America, Germany or Turkey to feel the temptation? Provided the Czechs are safe, perhaps he does not mind. But his NATO cheerleading might have alarming consequences.

Dr. Stenton, an occasional contributor to Chronicles, is Director of Studies of The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies. He writes from London.

-------- germany

German nuke industry plans to share accident risks

GERMANY: June 7, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11087

FRANKFURT - Germany's four nuclear plant operators plan to share increased liability risks for accidents amongst themselves rather than buying more cover on the market, a spokeswoman for utility RWE said this week.

The scheme was among a number of open discussion points ahead of the planned signing of the operators' nuclear power phase-out programme with the government on June 11, she said.

"The industry in last June's atomic compromise deal was given a choice how to arrange cover for additional risks," the spokeswoman for RWE Power AG, the plant division of leading utility RWE, said from Essen.

"The operators are still in talks to clarify their plan to set up a scheme of mutual risk sharing."

"But they will find a consensus...this will not hold up the signing of the phase-out programme next Monday."

She made the remarks on behalf of the board chairman of RWE Power, Gert Maichel, who is also the current president of the nuclear industry body, German Atomic Forum (DAtF).

Apart from RWE, the nuclear operators are E.ON , HEW , and EnBW .

The spokeswoman said Maichel was responding to a press report claiming the operators were trying to save money on insurance policies by rolling over the risk to the public sector and possible victims.

The phase-out agreement with the German government, which requires the country's 19 plants be closed by the mid-2020s, raises the mandatory accident cover from currently 500 million marks ($216.2 million) to five billion marks ($2.16 billion).

"The (last June's) agreement said the additional risks could be covered through insurance policies or through arrangements of equal value," the spokeswoman said.

"The industry is clear it will bear the additional risk."

-------- japan

JAPAN: WARMER WORDS ON MISSILE SHIELD

New York Times
Calvin Sims
June 7, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/07/world/07BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Japan "understood" American policy on building a missile defense, which he said merited research. Mr. Koizumi's comments, delivered before Parliament, seemed intended to counter criticisms of the Bush administration's missile-shield plans reportedly made recently by his foreign minister. Howard French (NYT)

JAPAN: TREATY TALKS WITH RUSSIA Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka and her Russian counterpart, Igor S. Ivanov, agreed in a telephone conversation to hold talks on signing a long-sought peace treaty that would formally end decades of antagonism between the countries over a group of islands seized by Soviet troops at the end of World War II. The two ministers plan to talk in Italy next month at the annual meeting of the major industrialized nations, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said. (NYT)

-------- korea

U.S. Will Resume Talks With N. Korea
Decision Follows 3-Month Review

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 7, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32852-2001Jun6?language=printer

The Bush administration said yesterday that it will resume negotiations with North Korea aimed at restricting Pyongyang's missile development, halting its missile exports, tightening inspections of its nuclear facilities and easing military tension along its border with South Korea.

Just three months ago, President Bush had cast doubt on the wisdom of holding talks with North Korea, calling its Communist leadership untrustworthy. But in a statement last night, he announced that the United States will restart "serious discussions" on a "broad agenda," and he dangled the prospect of U.S. assistance.

"Our approach will offer North Korea the opportunity to demonstrate the seriousness of its desire for improved relations," Bush said. "If North Korea responds affirmatively and takes appropriate action, we will expand our efforts to help the North Korean people, ease sanctions, and take other political steps."

The decision follows a three-month policy review and opens the way for a resumption of negotiations that had been pursued intensively toward the end of the Clinton administration. Some Clinton administration officials said last year that they had made important progress in those talks, citing North Korea's acceptance of the principle of restricting its missile program and exports.

But when the Bush administration took office, it sought to distance itself from the approach of the previous administration and suspended negotiations while conducting the policy review. A senior administration official said yesterday that Bush officials will emphasize "transparency and verification," two of the most difficult issues in the Clinton administration's negotiations.

A senior Pentagon official added that the Bush administration is not likely to consider a presidential trip to Pyongyang, which Clinton had contemplated, or a trip like the one made by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright in October, when she attended a large rally at a stadium with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

"I don't think you're going to see Secretary [of State Colin L.] Powell carrying on in the Pyongyang stadium anytime soon," the Pentagon official said. "You have to deal with these people, which requires a certain degree of holding your nose, but you should not forget who they are and not let other people forget who they are."

Still, many foreign policy experts said the decision to restart negotiations with North Korea represents a return to the basic Clinton approach.

"You have to discover it yourself," former U.S ambassador to South Korea James Lilley said of the Bush policy review.

"They're more or less right back where they started, with a minor tweak in the language," said a Democratic aide on Capitol Hill.

Some also saw the announcement as a victory for Powell, who said on March 6 that the administration planned to "engage" North Korea and "pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off." The next day, Bush expressed skepticism, saying that "we're not certain as to whether or not they're [North Koreans] keeping all terms of all agreements." Another senior administration official said at that time that North Korea was a "failed regime" and that "you cannot rely on Kim Jong Il's word."

Bush's remarks at that time, made during a visit by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, cast a shadow over Kim's "sunshine policy" of engaging North Korea. Some Korea experts said Bush had undermined and embarrassed the South Korean leader.

Bush's delay in resuming the talks also dealt a setback to Kim's effort to arrange a visit to Seoul by the North Korean leader before June 14, the anniversary of a historic visit to Pyongyang by the South Korean president.

In his statement yesterday, Bush specifically said the United States will "seek to encourage progress toward North-South reconciliation." The senior Pentagon official added: "We've definitely got to be supporting our South Korean allies, who had made some progress on this."

Powell will meet today with South Korea's foreign minister, who arrived in Washington last night.

Bush cited three goals for the talks: "improved implementation of the Agreed Framework relating to North Korea's nuclear activities; verifiable constraints on North Korea's missile programs and a ban on its missile exports; and a less threatening conventional military posture."

The Agreed Framework, negotiated by the Clinton administration in 1994, froze North Korea's nuclear weapons program in return for billions of dollars in fuel assistance and help in building safer, light-water nuclear reactors. Bush administration officials said yesterday that they want to make sure the framework's provisions on International Atomic Energy Agency inspections are implemented quickly. They made no mention of the desire, previously voiced by leading Republicans, to renegotiate the framework in order to replace the nuclear reactors with coal-fired plants.

Over the past three years, the United States has also sought to curb Pyongyang's missile program. After North Korea tested a long-range missile in 1998, that weapons program was cited as a prime example of a "rogue state" threat to the United States and a justification for missile defense. In addition, U.S. officials have accused Pyongyang of selling missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.

Bush's call for changes in North Korea's conventional military posture apparently refers to the hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops stationed along the border it shares with the South, a short distance from Seoul. The United States has 37,000 troops based in the southern half of the divided peninsula.

Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it remains unclear what Bush would be willing to offer North Korea in return for concessions. The president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, last year criticized the Clinton administration's 1994 offer of food, fuel and other aid to North Korea as a "bribe."

"What are we putting on the table? They're not going to lay down their arms because they like us," Manning said. "There's going to have to be some sort of incentive structure, and that's the kind of thing they [the Bush officials] have a hard time with."

----

Bush will renew missile talks with Kim

June 7, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010607-85237934.htm

The Bush administration announced yesterday that it will resume talks with North Korea on its missile program and would also push for discussions on border troop concentrations.

No date was announced for the resumed dialogue, which was suspended soon after President Bush took office. The talks were halted while the new administration began a review of whether the previous administration had been too accommodating to the communist regime in Pyongyang.

"I have directed my national security team to undertake serious discussions with North Korea on a broad agenda," said President Bush in a statement released by the White House.

The talks will include "improved implementation of the agreed framework relating to North Korea´s activities," which was signed by the Clinton administration and North Korea in 1994, the president said.

The U.S. agenda will also include North Korea´s missile programs, a ban on missile exports and "a less threatening conventional military posture" by its million-man army near the border of South Korea, where 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed.

Secretary of State Colin Powell meets today with South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo and will disclose to him the results of a review of U.S. policy toward North Korea, a State Department spokesman said yesterday.

"The meeting tomorrow will provide us with another opportunity to discuss the situation on the peninsula and future policies with our South Korean ally," said spokesman Richard Boucher yesterday.

"We´ll have something to say tomorrow to the South Korean foreign minister."

State Department officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said the review had largely decided to continue the Clinton administration´s policy of engagement with the North and to support the 1994 U.S.-North Korea Framework Accord.

But the Bush administration had sought to mollify severe critics of that policy in Congress who had spent seven years accusing the Clinton administration of appeasement of the North.

Under the Framework Accord, North Korea froze its nuclear program, which was suspected of aiming at weapons production, in return for U.S. fuel oil and twin nuclear power reactors to be provided by South Korea and Japan.

The United States also provided substantial famine relief to North Korea since a series of natural disasters beginning in the mid-1990s.

South Korea´s President Kim Dae-jung used the Clinton opening to North Korea to begin his own "Sunshine Policy" of engagement, trade and diplomacy, which led to a summit meeting in Pyongyang, the North´s capital, last year.

The North´s leader, Kim Jong-il, while retaining absolute, Draconian and totalitarian control over his people, moved to open diplomatic relations with Western countries and openly courted American trade, aid and diplomatic contacts.

Mr. Powell at first said the Bush administration would continue the Clinton policies of engagement with the North.

But, during a visit by the South´s president, Mr. Bush shifted course and pulled the plug on all talks on halting the North´s missile programs and other issues.

Mr. Bush said that the North was not to be trusted, and that verification systems must be in place on any agreements before any further talks would proceed.

The review of policy was then started.

Even though the U.S.-North Korean talks were halted, the North announced to visiting European diplomats recently that it would unilaterally continue its moratorium on long-range missile tests for another two years.

----

S. Korea Welcomes U.S. Intervention

By Paul Shin
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 7, 2001; 8:40 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010607/aponline084051_000.htm

SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea's government said Thursday it hopes that stalled inter-Korea reconciliation efforts will be revived now that the United States has decided to resume talks with communist North Korea.

There was no immediate reaction from the North's reclusive government, but its unofficial spokesman in Japan also welcomed the development.

After months of extensive deliberations, the Bush administration said Wednesday that it is ready to open talks with North Korea on that nation's missile program and its massive deployment of troops close to the border with South Korea.

The U.S. decision was a relief to Seoul. Upset by what it felt was a tough U.S. policy toward it, North Korea had cut off all government exchanges with South Korea and declared that it would not resume inter-Korea dialogue while Washington reviewed its policies toward the North.

That set back efforts to have the North's leader, Kim Jong Il, travel to Seoul to meet with President Kim Dae-jung, something the two leaders had agreed to do during their first-ever summit in Pyongyang last year.

We "hope that North Korea will engage in dialogue with the United States with sincerity and make meaningful progress, thereby bringing peace and stability to the Korean Peninsula," said Park Joon-young, a spokesman for South Korea's presidential Blue House.

There was no immediate reaction from the North Korean government or from its state-run media. However, Kim Myong Chol, an official in Japan who has long been regarded as the North's unofficial spokesman, praised the breakthrough.

"North Korea is ready for talks with the United States. North Korea is ready to discuss the missile issue," Kim said in a telephone interview.

But he added that the North may be less conciliatory on other issues.

Kim said North Korea would be willing to discuss its troop deployment along the Demilitarized Zone that separates the North and South, "but only when the U.S. withdraws its troops from South Korea."

According to U.S. and South Korean officials, two-thirds of North Korea's 1.1-million-member military are deployed close to the border with South Korea. South Korea has a 650,000-member military, assisted by 37,000 U.S. troops. Washington has repeatedly ignored demands by the North that it withdraw its forces from the South.

Kim also said Pyongyang officials would use the talks to remind the United States that it must comply with the nuclear accord that it signed with Pyongyang in 1994.

In return for freezing its development of nuclear technology, the North was promised two nuclear-powered reactors by the United States, Japan and South Korea that would be built in the North by the year 2003.

----

U.S. - North Korean Talks Offer Ray of Sunshine

June 7, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 9:06 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-korea-n.html?searchpv=reuters

SEOUL (Reuters) - President Bush's decision to hold broad negotiations with North Korea may dispel some of the clouds over South Korea's ``sunshine policy'' toward its former enemy, officials and analysts said.

Bush announced Wednesday that the United States would resume talks with North Korea and broaden them to include conventional forces and nuclear issues as well as missiles.

Bush, whose administration halted talks three months ago to conduct a policy review, promised that if North Korea ``responds affirmatively, we will expand our efforts to help the North Korean people, ease sanctions and take other political steps.''

South Korea welcomed the decision, which it said was ``based on the series of recent close discussions and cooperation between South Korea and the United States.''

A statement from Seoul's presidential Blue House urged North Korea to ``take a very sincere attitude'' toward the talks.

South Korea can expect visible changes later this month in its relationship with North Korea, Seoul's semi-official Yonhap News Agency reported, quoting a former official who returned from a visit to Pyongyang.

``A high-ranking North Korean official stressed unfailing actions regarding the opening of rail and highway links and other items,'' said the South's former Agriculture Minister Kim Sung-hoon, identifying the official only as a close aide to the North's leader Kim Jong-il.

The South has hoped to open rail and road links across the heavily armed border by September. But the project has been delayed because the North has stopped talks about military cooperation needed to allow construction through an area littered with land mines.

Ties between the two Koreas -- technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in armed truce -- began to improve markedly in the days following last June's summit in the North's capital Pyongyang.

But the momentum has slowed since Bush took office in January, expressing skepticism about Pyongyang's leadership and announcing the review of North Korean policy.

Bush has also promoted an ambitious and hugely expensive missile shield to deal with threats from ``rogue states'' with long-range missile capabilities such as North Korea, which has reacted bitterly to its pariah status.

RETURN SUMMIT

Washington's resumption of talks with North Korea could clear the way for the North Korean leader's long-awaited return summit in South Korea this year. Kim told a visiting European delegation in May he planned to visit South Korea once the Bush administration completed its policy review and resumed contacts.

``South Korea and North Korea obviously both want to talk with each other, but they have to await the result of a dialogue between the United States and North Korea,'' said Kim Young-yoon, of the state-run Korean Institute for National Unification.

Analysts said North Korea appeared to be trying to signal something by sending cargo ships into South Korean waters in recent days -- the first such incursions since the Korean War.

``With the ship incursions this week, North Korea was trying to say 'I want to have a dialogue with South Korea,''' Kim Young-yoon said. South Korea's said armed force would be used if the incursions continued.

CONVENTIONAL THREAT

Some analysts also saw less than smooth sailing for the talks. Bush's decision to address North Korea's nuclear program and the threat from its conventional forces, much of it arrayed along the world's most heavily fortified frontier, could pose problems for both Koreas, they said.

``The U.S. position on the reduction of conventional weapons is in direct conflict with the South Korean government,'' said Kwak Tae-hwan, former director of Seoul's Institute for Far Eastern Studies and professor at Eastern Kentucky University.

``The South Korean government position is conventional weapons should be handled by both Koreas, not the U.S, and the nuclear and missile issues handled between North Korea and the U.S.''

The administration will not seek to renegotiate a 1994 accord -- signed under the Clinton administration -- that gives Pyongyang nuclear power reactors in exchange for a freeze on its nuclear arms program, U.S. officials said.

But it will insist that North Korea begin now -- rather than at some indefinite future point -- to bring its nuclear program under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and produce evidence of the nature and scope of its now frozen nuclear weapons program, they added.

For its part, North Korea wants compensation for delays in building the reactors, now at least four years behind schedule, and says the 1994 accord stipulated that the IAEA inspection can only take place once most of the work on the reactors is done.

FAMINE AND SHORTAGES

The famine-plagued North relies on international aid to feed its 22 million people and much of its industry has been shuttered because of chronic energy shortages.

Improved ties with the United States could unlock billions of dollars in aid from the World Bank and other agencies.

The decision to reopen talks will be communicated to South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo at a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday.

China, Australia and Japan welcomed Washington's decision.

``We regard the improvement of U.S.-Korea relations as an important accelerating factor,'' China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said.

``We hope they will continue the process of dialogue, and play a positive role in the peace process on the peninsula.''

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told reporters in Canberra: ``In my view it is the only policy that can conceivably lead to a constructive outcome.''

Kazuhiko Koshikawa, spokesman for Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, said the decision was in line with recent talks held in Hawaii between Washington, Tokyo and Seoul which have been coordinating policy on North Korea.

-------- missile defense

NATO: Ministers Announce SFOR Reduction, Mull U.S. Missile Plans

7 June 2001
RFE/RL
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/06/070607120837.asp

Brussels, NATO defense ministers met today in Brussels to discuss issues including U.S. missile defense plans and the situation in the Western Balkans.

After the meeting, NATO's Secretary-General Lord George Robertson said NATO ministers had agreed to a "small reduction" in peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. But Robertson said the cuts would not affect KFOR troops in Kosovo:

"Ministers also approved the six-month reviews for the Stabilization Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Kosovo Force in Kosovo. They concluded that while a small reduction in troop levels in SFOR may be possible, no change will be made in the size and the structure of KFOR."

During the meeting, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also briefed his NATO colleagues on U.S. missile defense plans.

Robertson said Rumsfeld's presentation on dangers of proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons had been "thought-provoking". He also said Rumsfeld had reiterated the U.S. commitment to consulting its European allies on U.S. thinking on the issue.

But some NATO defense ministers expressed skepticism over the U.S. plans. French Defense Minister Alain Richard said security threats could also be solved by "political dialogue".

And German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping said the U.S. missile plans were "sketchy".

The United States also announced it is testing new technologies and assets as part of a new strategy of "layered defense."

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the layered defense strategy focuses on the ability to intercept even small numbers of ballistic missiles "of various ranges in various phases of flight."

He said a layered defense will also create a protective shield against both nuclear weapons and such new threats as cyberwarfare and terrorism.

Rumsfeld said the allies will be consulted on U.S. plans but Washington will not be deterred from its determination to test and deploy the new defenses.

Rumsfeld said the U.S. remains committed to helping maintain European security and arms control, but he also said the new defense system will go beyond the limitations imposed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

For more on the NATO ministers' meeting, please see NATO: Ministers Discuss Missile Defense, Western Balkans.

----

Congress asked to boost funds for anti-missile laser

Jun 07, 2001,
Agence France-Presse
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/010607054732.1qlx2abn.html

WASHINGTON The Bush administration's concept of ballistic missile defense began taking shape when top Air Force officials asked Congress for additional 153 million dollars to finance development of an air-borne laser (ABL) capable of shooting down missiles.

"We think it's a revolutionary capability," Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Ryan told a Senate subcommittee that handles defense appropriations on Wednesday.

"We think to be able to put a high-powered laser, to be able to acquire, track and destroy missiles in their ascent phase, is terribly important to future capabilities in defense and force protection," he added.

The request represents a 65-percent boost for the program that had its ebbs and flows in the 1990s and was initially allocated 234 million dollars in the current financial year.

The plan calls for mounting a laser on a Boeing-747 aircraft, which would patrol near suspected enemy missile launch sites.

It would autonomously detect launches with on-board infrared sensors, track the missile with highly accurate, low-power lasers, and fire its high-energy laser to destroy it by tearing through its metal core and causing it to fall apart under strong in-flight pressures, according to Air Force documents.

"Under this scheme, the warheads and destroyed missile components fall on enemy territory, making the aggressor's nation vulnerable to the effects of whatever warhead they employed," the Air Force said in its 1997 issues book. "As such, the ABL will provide a strong deterrence against the use of weapons of mass destruction."

Ryan, who argued air-borne lasers "will revolutionize some of the ways we wage war," said the Pentagon wanted to test a prototype of the system as early as 2003.

"We certainly want to do that and hold to that schedule, and hence that's the reason that we put more money into it," he explained.

The plane would have to be no farther than 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the target to be effective.

Because of these limitations, military experts believe air-borne lasers could be effective against missiles fired by North Korea and Iraq, provided no-fly zones over Iraq's north and south remain in effect.

However, they could be less effective against Iran, one of the targets of US President George W. Bush's plan to deploy a national missile defense system.

In one of the crucial speeches of his presidency, Bush vowed last to deploy a shield against ballistic missile attacks by states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

----

White House to increase funding for airborne laser
Weapon intended to hit missile miles from Earth

Knight Ridder/tribune
June 7, 2001
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/printedition/bal-te.missile07jun07.story

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has decided to increase spending on an airborne laser capable of destroying missiles in flight as part of its pursuit of ballistic missile defenses.

The laser, mounted on a Boeing 747-400, would destroy a ballistic missile during its fiery ascent. President Bush has proposed adding $153 million this year for the airborne laser program, the first substantial increase in spending for missile defense that he has requested.

The airborne laser is one of eight missile defense programs the administration has been reviewing. Most have not yet been proved to work, and some experts doubt the most complex ones ever will. The administration is trying to determine which ones could be developed into a global system that could detect and destroy ballistic missiles and their warheads at any point of flight.

A senior administration official said the airborne laser is a priority.

"Clearly the airborne laser has been identified as one of the most promising technologies that we are going to pursue," the official said.

The additional funds, part of a $6.1 billion supplemental budget for the Pentagon, would be a 65 percent increase over the airborne laser's 2001 budget of $234 million. It's also $55 million more than what the Air Force asked for in January.

The airborne laser program began in 1994 and is scheduled to be completed in 2008 at an estimated cost of $11 billion for seven Boeing 747-400s armed with the missile- killing lasers. The contractors are the Boeing Co., Lockheed-Martin Corp. and TRW Inc.

A prototype is more than halfway completed at Boeing's plant in Wichita, Kan. It is to be delivered to the Air Force next year and test-fired against a SCUD-like missile over the Pacific in late 2003.

If the airborne laser is proved, built and used, it would work this way: A plane, flying near an enemy's front lines, would detect a ballistic missile launch and then focus its powerful laser, mounted in a nose turret, on the projectile as the missile broke through the clouds at about 35,000 feet.

The beam's heat would buckle or rupture the target's sleek metal skin, causing the missile to be torn apart by the enormous stresses of high-speed flight.

The difficulty in developing such a laser is making it powerful enough to destroy a missile and yet light enough to be carried aloft. The laser also must be able to compensate for atmospheric turbulence that would disrupt its beam.

Because it will have to fire within about 250 miles of its target, the aircraft may be unable to operate against large nations whose missile programs are considered threats by the United States, such as Iran, said Geoffrey Forden, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who has analyzed the program.

The weapons could be effective, however, against Iraq or North Korea because they could hit missiles launched from anywhere within those countries without having to fly too close to their borders, Forden said.

Many U.S. fighter planes would be needed to protect the aircraft armed with the lasers.

Although Bush and the Democrats are divided over deploying a missile defense system to protect the United States, much of the Senate's Democratic leadership supports systems, like the laser, aimed at intercepting missiles just after launch. These would comply with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

----

The Economics of European Missile Defense

Center for Defense Information Briefing Monitor
www.cdi.org - Volume 5, Issue #22 -
June 7, 2001
Tomas Valasek, Senior Analyst, tvalasek@cdi.org

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is meeting NATO officials in Brussels, Belgium on June 7-8. U.S. plans to deploy a homeland missile defense system are expected to be high on the defense ministers' agenda. The meeting comes amidst an intensive series of U.S.-European consultations, which will continue with President Bush's visit to Europe later this month. The European allies' skepticism on the need for a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system protecting U.S. territory is well documented. Less known is the impact of these deliberations on the defense plans of the European countries themselves. The debate about ballistic missile threats to NATO has prompted, at least in some European countries, a search for an alternative to the current reliance on diplomacy and deterrence (see "Europe's Missile Defense Options, CDI Defense Monitor, Issue 3, March 2001). But even as the political will seems to be changing, budgetary realities make the deployment of a European missile defense system a distant goal at best.

Missile defenses are very expensive even by the standards of modern weapons systems. Preliminary estimates of the cost of the U.S. homeland BMD system range from $60 billion to over $100 billion over a period of ten to fifteen years. The U.S. Department of Defense spent $4.2 billion dollars on missile defense development in 2000 alone, which is more than the entire defense budget of 8 of the other 17 European NATO allies.

European BMD prospects face two kinds of budgetary obstacles. The overall amount of military spending as a percentage of total government outlays has been steadily decreasing in most European countries since the end of the Cold War. The absence of an easily identifiable military threat makes substantial defense spending increases difficult to justify. Moreover, defense funds compete with a host of other priorities. European Monetary Union membership imposes indirect constraints on government spending by limiting the amount of budget deficit relative to the country's gross domestic product. The next round of the European Union enlargement, expected to occur around 2005, will bring additional costs. Many current members will likely lose a portion of their subsidies from the EU while their contribution to the Union may have to increase in order to pay for aid to newer, poorer members. Over the long term, the demographic trends in most of Western Europe will put an increasing strain on national pensions systems. These may require higher government subsidies, thus further reducing the amount of funds available for other priorities, including defense.

Most European countries are in the midst of costly transitions from Cold War-era stationary (territorial defense) militaries to more expeditionary-type armed forces better suited to conflicts such as the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. These processes, which generally began in the mid to late 1990s, have tied up budgetary resources at a time when, in virtually all European NATO countries, overall defense spending dropped sharply. In 1996, France unveiled a military reform plan that called for conscription to be abolished, 38 of 129 regiments to be stood down, and overall military personnel to be cut from 500,000 to 350,000. In Great Britain, the 1998 Strategic Defence Review reduced the size of the Territorial Army by around 17,000 and the size of the operational budget by about ten percent. In Germany, the 2000 military reform plan outlined by Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping envisions reductions of the number of military personnel from 310,000 to 285,000. Some 47 military sites and installations will also be closed.

However, a leaner, trimmed-down military does not necessarily guarantee savings, especially not in the short term. While the personnel expenditure - which constitute the largest portion of defense spending in most European countries -- can be expected to decline, these savings will be at least partly offset by increased procurement expenses. For example, the renewed emphasis on mobility necessitated the lease by the United Kingdom of four C-17 military transport aircraft from the United States at the cost of $210 million. The Strategic Defence Review also calls for the Royal Navy to acquire two new aircraft carriers and a number of support vessels.

Moreover, the savings derived from base closures and downsizing may take years to materialize, as the experience with base closures in the United States showed. The U.S. Defense Department shut down hundreds of installations beginning in the early 1990s in a bid to trim excess infrastructure and save money. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) put the savings from base closures in the 1990-1999 period at $16.1 billion. However, during the same period, the Pentagon incurred one-time implementation costs (environmental cleanup, relocation, construction etc.) of almost $16.3 billion. Therefore, during the initial ten years of the process the Pentagon actually lost $189.6 million.

The two components of defense budget that, in general terms, would determine a country's ability to acquire a missile defense system are procurement spending and research and development (R&D) spending. R&D spending is crucial for developing the nascent missile defense technology. U.S. BMD development is being supported by an R&D program which totaled $36.5 billion in 1999. As one expert pointed out, the amount is greater than reliable estimates of the entire defense budget of any other country." In contrast, R&D spending for European NATO members plunged from $11.9 billion in 1995 to an estimated $8.9 billion. This comparison actually exaggerates the European part of the equation because a portion of the investment in Europe is lost due to duplication and lack of coordination of the countries' R&D efforts. The disparity actually prompted worries in the NATO alliance of a two-tiered membership, with Europe unable to keep up with the United States in developing and deploying modern warfighting technology.

Procurement spending dropped sharply across Europe as well. By some accounts, French equipment expenditures decreased by nearly 30 percent between 1990 and 1999. Much like R&D, procurement usually bears the brunt of spending cuts in times of financial crises because it does not require painful personnel cuts or reductions in ongoing operations. Moreover, the impact of the reductions is not felt until later. When Germany's Defense Minister, Rudolf Scharping, concluded in March 2001 that the government's defense allocation would not meet the needs of his department, he responded by ordering cuts of $240 million, a vast majority of it from the military procurement and R&D accounts.

Even countries with relatively robust procurement budgets such as Great Britain will not be in a position to allocate substantial amounts to missile defense in the near future. Britain's multi-year, $30 billion procurement plan is already appropriated for a mix of upgrades and new weapons purchases. London is planning to buy 55 new Eurofighter aircraft, as well as dozens of transport aircraft and attack helicopters. Long-term plans envision a purchase of up to 150 Future Carrier-Borne Aircraft, at a cost of $11 billion. Even without a missile defense system, critics are questioning the country's ability to finance the ambitious procurement program. But the changing nature of NATO's operations as well as EU plans for a Rapid Reaction force will continue to dictate more spending on mobility and sustainability. Even though the new posture also provides an argument for acquisition of a BMD system, it continues to sap most of the financial resources available for the near future.

Missile defense currently figures low on most European governments' list of defense priorities. Typical of the view of many allies, Britain 's 1998 Strategic Defence Review concluded that "technologies in this area are changing rapidly and it would, at this stage, be premature to decide on acquiring such a capability." Similarly, a European military official in Washington, DC told CDI that "there is a feeling [in Europe] that we need not hurry. The technology is not there and the governments have yet to decide on what type of missile defense they want."

But in many regards, the technology argument merely masks a larger budgetary problem. Defense budgets across Europe cannot accommodate the sheer cost of missile defense, at least not in the near future, without sacrifices in other procurement areas. The overall amount of defense spending in Europe is expected to stay flat or even decline. An internal NATO paper leaked to the European press concluded that only six of 16 European members of NATO plan real increases over the next five years, and these countries are all minor players, with the exception of Turkey. Similarly, the UK-based Institute for International Strategic Studies predicts that European defense spending will continue to fall at a rate of nearly 5 percent a year.

Under these circumstances, a sizable investment in missile defense would require cuts in other weapons programs, a step that may not be popular with the European defense establishments. There is "an apprehension about the cost of missile defense and what it might mean for the real investment that the European countries have got to make in the nuts and bolts of defense, like getting their soldiers and their sailors and their air crews much more relevantly trained and organized and configured for the challenges of tomorrow," said NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson.

Unlike the United States, where military spending is geared toward providing the maximum level of security technologically feasible and politically acceptable, fiscal conservatism permeates the thinking of budgeters in Europe. This philosophy is nicely reflected in the British Strategic Defence Review. "We must not skimp on the premium because we will pay a heavy price if we get it wrong. At the same time, we cannot afford the luxury of having additional forces 'just in case'." The European approach ensures fierce competition for defense funds, in which the cost of each new program is measured in terms of very real and painful trade-offs. Assuming that defense budgets in Europe will not increase substantially, European BMD programs face an uncertain future unless they assume a far more central role in the countries' defense plans.

(This article is a portion of an upcoming CDI monograph on ballistic missile defense in Europe).

Massive Problems Prevent a Grand Design for U.S. Foreign Policy Nicholas Berry, Senior Analyst, nberry@cdi.org

Scholars, analysts, and policy makers have tried mightily to create a U.S. foreign policy grand design to replace the Cold War paradigm.

All have failed.

The current State and Defense Department reviews -- now underway for over four months -- are likely to fail as well.

The closest anyone has come to a new design are variations on the globalization theme made popular by Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Foreign Policy magazine proceeded to measure globalization by counting and categorizing the rapidly increasing volume of exchanges between countries. So far, translating descriptions of the new, more interactive globe into a foreign policy design has eluded even the best minds in Washington.

While efforts continue, no one has tried to explain why creating a new foreign policy design has proven elusive.

Ironically, explaining why the task is so elusive also explains why the most obvious design is destined to fail. Once it is proclaimed, the rest of the world would loudly condemn it and reject playing by America's grand design.

A grand U.S. design fully in tune with national interests would have to emerge from answers to three essential questions:

1.How can the world, including rogue states, be integrated into international regimes whose rules would facilitate conflict resolution, economic exchanges, information flows, and human migration that would result in a stable world order?

2.How can the United States create enforcement mechanisms to punish rule breakers?

3.How can the United States mask its global domination to make it acceptable to major and minor powers alike?

All historically dominant powers -- from the Chinese Qin Dynasty, to Greece, Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, and the United States -- have sought ways to create rules to guide international relations so they could stay on top. Dominant powers, of course, like the status quo and intensely dislike challenges to the international system that so rewards them. The last attempt, so very short lived, was Franklin Roosevelt's "Grand Design," which created the Security Council, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund and their rules for establishing a universal, liberal, world order under an American-dominated United Nations. Alas, the Soviet Union would not play by the rules and prevented the United States from consolidating its dominance.

The demise of the bipolar Cold War removed any security challenge to the United States and opened the world to a single system -- hence globalization. This new system has indeed facilitated the growth of international regimes and myriad sets of rules to regularize international relations. Although far from perfect, structuring trade relations via the World Trade Organization, managing regional conflicts via the UN Security Council, stabilizing financial transactions via the IMF, and orchestrating other exchanges through a vast number of other international organizations has made the world the most stable it has been in human history. No international wars of any note exist today (unlike many brutal internal conflicts), and none are on the horizon.

It would seem that all U.S. policy makers would welcome such a global system and build on it. The Clinton administration certainly tried, most notably in successful efforts to integrate Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, and North Korea into various international regimes. There were limits, however. One problem was ancient enemies. Domestic pressure groups working through Congress would not countenance the integration of Cuba, Iran, and Iraq into global systems. Another problem found the far left and far right opposing globalization on a series of nationalist issues ranging from loss of U.S. jobs to hatred of the sovereignty-robbing UN. As a result, U.S. accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the International Criminal Court (ICC), Anti-Personnel Mine Treaty, Kyoto Accord on global warming, and other treaty-based regimes failed.

However, integrating countries into international regimes generally proved easy because virtually all governments (with the exception of Afghanistan and possibly Burma) wanted to join. Despite occasional outbursts that the United States was making too many of the rules (and avoiding the rules it disliked), revisionist blocs hostile to the United States did not emerged. The answer to the first question, therefore, was relatively easy for the Clinton administration. The United States would encourage virtually all governments to join the international community. It wanted an integrated, orderly, and peaceful world.

The second question became much more difficult to answer.

Enforcing the rules of the various regimes faced numerous problems. Any grand design authored and enforced by Washington would bring strong opposition at home and abroad. At home, opposition to "peace operations" emanated from the Pentagon, Congress, and segments of the media. Peacekeeping and peace enforcement (Somalia, Rwanda, Sinai, Bosnia) diverted the military from its combat role, it was argued, and put soldiers in harm's way in conflicts far removed from U.S. interests. An alternative enforcement mechanism, economic sanctions, generated minority opposition from international business groups and humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

But the main opposition to U.S. military operations and sanctions arose abroad. Russia and China had misgivings over U.S.-led operations in the former Yugoslavia. They were joined by France and others in rejecting heavy-handed sanctions against Iran, Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere, arguing that the people, not governing elites, suffered under sanctions and that Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, and other tyrants actually used sanctions to blame the United States for their economic failings and thus remained in power.

No consensus at home or abroad, therefore, favors U.S.- (or UN-) led enforcement of the rules of international regimes. No grand design can be proclaimed. At best, the Bush administration can only suggest that regional groupings, such as the European Union in Bosnia, should bear the burden of enforcement. Letting others be responsible for keeping regional security and economic stability is no grand design.

The third question is truly impossible to answer. Even if the United States could figure out how to permanently structure U.S.-led punitive operations against aggressors, rogue states, weapon proliferators, international terrorists, and human rights violators, it could not mask its unipolar domination. Pax Americana is not an option in the world of sovereign nation states. By definition, a state cannot be under the command of another state (or international organization) and be a state. Certainly China, Russia, France, India, and the rest of the world would demand a role in shaping mutually beneficial international relations and punishing aggressors.

This is not to say that a design, perhaps one far less grand, is impossible.

The formula for international leadership has been and will remain largely based on muting self-interest. The United States provided leadership in World War II and the Cold War by taking the interests of other states into account and defending them. The process was ultimately a diplomatic one. One gave in order to receive. Against known foes, whether the Axis or Soviet Union, Washington built coalitions to overcome the enemies who threatened peace and prosperity. Its military forces and aid were tailored to meet the needs of that coalition, not just to defend the United States. The ability to create winning coalitions was the test of their validity and of American leadership.

That formula has not changed.

What is troubling is the growth of a unilateralist design in Washington that sees defensive capabilities, especially a national missile defense, as the foundation of American security. That is a self-centered design that rejects leadership, avoids diplomacy, and designates enemies.

--

Changing Direction Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.), Chief of Research, dsmith@cdi.org

As undersecretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics between 1997-2001, Jacques Gansler often spoke about the "death spiral." He was referring to a sequence that, from the Pentagon's viewpoint, threatened the ability of the military to perform its missions: the inexorably increasing average age of military weapons in the inventory -- especially tactical aircraft; the resultant high costs of maintaining the systems to ensure the readiness of combat forces; and the subsequent reductions in force modernization accounts which delay the entry of new weapons into the inventory.

Edward Aldridge, the new undersecretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, also likes the "spiral" image. But his is an "evolutionary " -- hence a presumed ascending -- spiral. As reported in the defense trade publication, Aerospace Daily, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Aldridge indicated he would not oppose fielding weapon systems before they had reached their final configuration, thus leaving room for improvements and upgrades.

On its face, following the principle that the perfect is often the enemy of the good, this policy orientation makes sense. It would encourage reductions in costs by not trying to "hang bells and whistles" on every new system, which also prolongs development time (which now can stretch to 15-20 years) and contributes to massive sub-system obsolescence by the time troops get their hands on the item.

But a caution is also in order. While it may be desirable to field systems that have not reached full potential, they must still meet rigorous, minimum performance standards -- and above all must have proven through equally rigorous testing that they are better than the equipment being replaced.

Equally, for a system that provides virtually new capabilities, such as the proposed national missile defense, whatever is operationally deployed must be credible -- to the users of the system, to the American public, and to the leaders of other nations. Deploying a "scarecrow" missile defense system whose reliability would be questionable to these three key audiences -- and which might not be evolutionary -- would be a colossal waste of human talent, resources, and time. Under such conditions, the spiral would simply unwind and collapse.

----

NATO to Hear Missile Defense Gospel

Washington Post
By Jeffrey Ulbrich
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 7, 2001; 1:55 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010607/aponline015540_000.htm

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, armed with fresh evidence of a growing security threat from unpredictable nations, will again preach the anti-ballistic missile defense gospel to the NATO allies.

He faces skeptical allies on Thursday, the first day of a two-day defense ministers meeting at NATO headquarters here. He faces an even more skeptical Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Friday during a meeting of the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council.

It's unlikely Rumsfeld will make any more headway in bringing the allies around to Washington's view than Secretary of State Colin Powell did last week at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Budapest, Hungary. But he vows he'll keep plugging away.

"We're going to keep talking to our allies," Rumsfeld told reporters Wednesday, suggesting no breakthrough is on the horizon. "We're going to talk to our friends. We're going to talk to the People's Republic of China, and we'll keep moving this along."

The allies also will discuss the situation in the Balkans, where NATO leads more than 60,000 troops on peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Bosnia, Macedonia, NATO-Russia relations, and the 19-nation alliance's cooperation with the emerging defense arm of the European Union. But missiles, clearly, will be uppermost on everybody's mind.

Washington wants to develop and deploy a system that will protect the United States and its allies from ballistic missiles fired by what it calls "nations of concern." Exactly what kind of system that might be has yet to be determined.

Many of the allies fail to see a real threat. Many who do believe the solution is political, not military, and others believe that abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty between the United States and Russia would be detrimental to overall European security. The Americans believe the ABM treaty has outlived its usefulness.

Rumsfeld is expected to lay out the threat Washington sees from nations like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, in some cases illustrating actual deployment of missiles capable of reaching allied territory, a senior NATO diplomat said. Rumsfeld also will give the allies details of plans by North Korea and Iran to acquire the capacity for reaching even deeper into alliance territory.

"The technological genie is out of the bottle," the senior diplomat said. "Some of these missiles are in actual service."

Rumsfeld said the United States believes that in addition to having a retaliatory nuclear and conventional strike capability, the allies need to develop missile defenses to dissuade a potential enemy from launching an attack.

"I will be talking about changed circumstances in the world and our recognition that with those changes it's important the United States as well as the NATO alliance adjust to those changes," the defense secretary said. "The Soviet Union is gone. The Cold War is over."

He said the United States intends to press ahead with testing a wide array of missile defense technologies.

The Russians, who strongly oppose the American missile defense ideas, have made a counterproposal, but that proposal, made nearly a year ago, remains vague and lacks any real detail, NATO officials say. Until details are forthcoming, they say, no extensive discussions can start.

Both Rumsfeld and NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson plan to confront the allies with their lagging progress on the program adopted at the NATO summit in Washington two years ago to upgrade and modernize military capability. While all maintain their pledge to do so, few are devoting sufficient resources to the effort.

----

Rumsfeld Promotes Missile Defense

Washington Post
By Jeffrey Ulbrich
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 7, 2001; 9:06 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010607/aponline090659_000.htm

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, armed with graphic aids and fresh evidence of a growing security threat from unpredictable nations, pushed the anti-ballistic missile defense to NATO allies Thursday.

But he faced skepticism on the first day of a two-day defense ministers meeting at the NATO headquarters.

"Our lack of defenses against ballistic missiles creates incentives for missile proliferation which, combined with the development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, give future adversaries the ability to hold our populations hostage to terror and blackmail," Rumsfeld told the allies.

It's unlikely Rumsfeld will make any more headway in bringing the allies around to Washington's view than Secretary of State Colin Powell was able to do last week at a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Budapest, Hungary.

And he faces an even more skeptical Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Friday during a meeting of the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council.

"We're going to keep talking to our allies," Rumsfeld told reporters Wednesday, suggesting no breakthrough is on the horizon. "We're going to talk to our friends. We're going to talk to the People's Republic of China, and we'll keep moving this along."

Lord Robertson, the NATO secretary-general, said the gathering in Brussels was "an important opportunity for allies to consult about the direction of U.S. thinking before any decisions are made."

"Responding to today's challenges means discussing not only new U.S. thinking, but also developing European thinking," he said.

The allies also were discussing the situation in the Balkans, where NATO leads more than 60,000 troops on peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Bosnia, Macedonia, NATO-Russia relations, and the 19-nation alliance's cooperation with the emerging defense arm of the European Union.

But missiles, clearly, will be uppermost on everybody's mind.

Washington wants to develop and deploy a system that will protect the United States and its allies from ballistic missiles fired by what it calls "nations of concern." Exactly what kind of system that might be has yet to be determined.

Many of the allies fail to see a real threat. Many who do believe that the solution is political, not military. Others fear abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty between the United States and Russia would be detrimental to overall European security. The Americans believe the ABM treaty has outlived its usefulness.

"We understand this conclusion is not welcomed by some," Rumsfeld said in his presentation to the allies. "It is simply inescapable."

The secretary laid out the threat Washington sees from nations like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, in some cases illustrating actual deployment of missiles capable of reaching allied territory.

"Rogue states are acquiring ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction," he said. Biotechnology, robotics, and high density energy sources "are putting unprecedented power in the hands of small countries and terrorist groups."

He said the United States believes that besides having a retaliatory nuclear and conventional strike capability, the allies need to develop missile defenses to dissuade a potential enemy from launching an attack.

These defenses will be deployed against "handfuls of missiles, not hundreds," he said, adding that the United States intends to press ahead with testing a wide array of missile defense technologies.

Both Rumsfeld and Robertson plan to confront the allies with their lagging progress on the program adopted at the NATO summit in Washington two years ago to upgrade and modernize military capability.

While all maintain their pledge to do so, few are devoting sufficient resources to the effort.

"Unless the nations around this table develop and maintain the necessary defense capabilities, the ability of our governments to respond to political calls for military action - whether through NATO or indeed through the EU or elsewhere - will be severely limited."

-------- russia

Duma Approves Plan to Import Nuclear Waste

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 7, 2001; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33046-2001Jun6?language=printer

MOSCOW, June 6 -- The lower house of Russia's parliament gave final approval today to a controversial plan to import thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel in exchange for a possible $20 billion cash windfall, voting despite widespread public criticism of an effort that environmental activists say will turn the country into the world's "nuclear waste dump."

Public opinion polls have shown that more than 90 percent of the Russian public is against the plan, and more than 2 million Russians signed petitions for a referendum to block it, which failed. But the State Duma gave easy approval to the measure today in its third and final vote on the matter, 243 to 125.

"There is nothing to be afraid of," said Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznev.

Alexander Rumyantsev, head of the Atomic Energy Ministry, has pushed the plan as a financial boon.

The ministry says it hopes to enter a lucrative world market, bringing in as much as 20,000 tons of used fuel from nuclear reactors in Germany, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, Taiwan, South Korea and China in exchange for hefty payments. The waste would be put in "temporary" storage, according to the ministry, for at least 10 years, then reprocessed into fuel.

Protesters chained themselves to the Duma's doors today in hopes of blocking the vote, but only two reformist factions voted against the measure.

"One hundred million people in Russia are against this decision, and only 500 politicians and bureaucrats in Moscow are pushing it," Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko party, said in an interview after the vote. "This is the best example that we have no real democracy in Russia today."

In a new opposition tactic, environmental groups are lobbying the United States to prevent the imports. More than 90 percent of Russia's potential spent nuclear fuel market reportedly originated at U.S.-designed nuclear reactors, and Washington retains final say over its disposition. The environmental group Greenpeace today called on President Bush to block the Russian plan.

"Without U.S. approval, the whole scheme cannot go forward," said Tobias Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace International. In a State Department meeting last month, Muenchmeyer said he was told the United States has several conditions that Russia is unlikely to accept, including halting nuclear cooperation with Iran and India and prohibiting reprocessing of the spent fuel.

----

Russia imports nuclear waste

BY ANGELA CHARLTON
The Associated Press,
June 7. 2001
http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak07.html

MOSCOW - In a landmark vote, Russian lawmakers defied broad public opposition and passed a law Wednesday allowing nuclear waste to be imported and stored indefinitely. Critics said the move will turn Russia into the world's nuclear waste dump.

Proponents say the measure will create jobs and bring in billions of dollars to needy government coffers. They vow to use some of the riches to clean up radioactive swathes of the world's largest country that have been scarred by decades of Soviet nuclear development.

Opponents question whether the money will be really used as promised, and whether Russia is equipped to safely handle the expected quantities of spent foreign nuclear fuel.

Russia's safety record is spotty at its underfunded nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons facilities. Corruption among officials is rife. And some prominent scientists say the cost of building or upgrading waste reprocessing facilities would outstrip potential profits.

"Our citizens are against turning Russia into an outhouse," Sergei Mitrokhin of the liberal Yabloko faction said during Wednesday's debate in the lower house of parliament, or State Duma.

Nonetheless, the 450-member house approved the three-bill package after a 20-minute debate on votes of 266-117, 243-125, and 250-125. For passage, 226 votes were needed on each bill.

The measure must pass the upper house, the Federation Council, and be signed by President Vladimir Putin in order to become law.

Federation Council speaker Yegor Stroyev said the bill would likely pass the upper house, but only after some "corrections," ITAR-Tass reported. "First, it is necessary to create guarantees that this decision will not cause any trouble for future generations," he said, without elaborating.

Putin did not comment publicly on the bill Wednesday, but its relatively smooth passage in the Duma suggested it had backing from the Kremlin.

While opinion polls show most Russians oppose the idea, there is little sign that the issue will prompt mass public protest in a country where most people are more worried about pocketbooks than ecological woes.

The Atomic Energy Ministry claims it could earn up to $20 billion by importing 22,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel over 10 years.

"I am voting for this bill because I don't want places in my country remaining dead zones, contaminated by radiation," said Deputy Yegor Ligachev, a Communist and a former member of the Soviet Union's ruling Politburo.

Even if there is money to spare for the cleanup, the task is overwhelming.

Russian towns, rivers and permafrost were exposed to radioactive pollution during the secretive development of the Soviet nuclear industry, and environmentalists say they remain dangerously polluted.

Dmitry Ayatskov, a Federation Council member and governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, home of a huge nuclear research center, said he would oppose the bill. "We have our own waste to deal with. I have firsthand knowledge of nuclear safety problems," he said.

The environmental group Greenpeace, which has campaigned intensively against the bill, urged President Bush to veto shipments of spent nuclear fuel to Russia.

The group said 92.5 percent of the radioactive waste produced by Russia's potential client nations is under U.S. control. The United States has built reactors for and exported fuel to countries around the world under deals requiring U.S. approval for any transfer of spent nuclear fuel.

"U.S. permission for the export of spent nuclear fuel to Russia would be a clear contradiction of the most fundamental U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy," Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Tobias Muenchmeyer said.

Without U.S. approval, Muenchmeyer said, potential waste exporters would be China, Eastern Europe and former Soviet states that have Soviet-built nuclear plants. But Russia already accepts spent fuel rods from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary under Soviet-era contracts, and they pay far less than Western nations could.

Norway has expressed concern that the waste could be transported by ship near its Arctic coast. Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Gry Haaheim said Wednesday that Norway plans to work actively to get other countries not to send waste.

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

-------- colorado

Worker testifies in injury lawsuit
Beryllium's danger kept secret, he says

By Stacie Oulton
Denver Post Staff Writer
June 07, 2001 -
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,53%257E43612,00.html

GOLDEN - Ronald Roerish, a 59-year-old Boulder resident whose job once was to cast beryllium most every day at Rocky Flats, said he wished he'd been told that the metal was considered the most deadly element known to mankind.

"I would have had different feelings about working with it," Roerish testified Wednesday in Jefferson County District Court.

Suit alleges conspiracy

Roerish and three other workers from the former nuclear weapons plant west of Denver are suing Brush Wellman, an Ohio-based company that supplied beryllium to Rocky Flats. The four workers have chronic beryllium disease, a lung disease caused by the metal's dust. Roerish was the first of the four to testify.

He never knew that Brush Wellman's own medical director had in 1949 labeled the metal the most deadly element, because the company censored that information from a medical article, and the federal government let Brush do it, according to court records.

The lawsuit alleges that Brush and the government conspired to keep such information secret, even from Rocky Flats managers, to protect the production of beryllium for the nuclear weapons industry. Brush denies that.

Roerish still works at Rocky Flats. He testified with his oxygen tank resting near his shoulder. When asked if he would have taken the casting job if he had been told beryllium caused lung disease, he said yes. He just would have expected the company to fully inform him about what it knew.

"If we would have got all the right information from Brush Wellman, yes," Roerish testified.

He knew beryllium was hazardous and followed the plant's procedures of wearing a respirator any time he worked with the metal, he said. He believed the respirator protected him, although that might not have been the case.

Break room near shop

But the company showed that Roerish and other employees took breaks in a room adjacent to the beryllium shop, where the metal was machined. Workers walked through the machine shop without respirators to reach the break room, where they drank coffee and ate.

Roerish also was present when an oven, which was heating metal items, blew a top. He also testified that the Rocky Flats plant never provided any training on how to safely deal with beryllium until he moved on to other jobs at the plant.

Brush is blaming the workers' illnesses on Dow Chemical Co., Rockwell International and other companies that operated the plant for the government. Those companies failed to protect the workers because they didn't have safety devices such as proper ventilation in place, Brush claims.

----

U.S. feared loss of beryllium
Company drove hard bargain, ex-Brush Wellman exec says

By Ann Imse,
Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
June 7, 2001

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_617067,00.html

The federal government delayed tighter regulation of "the most deadly element of all time" for 20 years, after its sole producer said it would stop making beryllium for nuclear bombs without that protection, according to testimony Wednesday in a Jefferson County courtroom. About 50 people are suing beryllium producer Brush Wellman Inc. of Cleveland for allegedly conspiring with the federal government to hide the metal's dangers.

Retired Brush Wellman vice president Steve Zenczak testified Wednesday that after the only other producer quit the business in 1979, defense and energy department officials called a meeting to make sure that Brush Wellman would continue to mine and process beryllium. Rocky Flats needed beryllium to produce nuclear weapons.

Company officials told the government officials that to continue production, they needed an immediate 35 percent price hike and relief from OSHA efforts to tighten the safety standard, Zenczak testified on videotape.

Zenczak said Brush Wellman told the federal officials it needed help with "OSHA efforts to lower the standard to what was viewed by us as unreasonable, unnecessary and possibly unattainable levels." He said the federal officials promised to talk to OSHA.

In fact, OSHA has not tightened the standard to this day.

The plaintiffs say they were exposed to beryllium while working at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, and they now suffer from chronic beryllium disease, a wasting lung ailment. Plaintiffs also include workers' spouses.

Zenczak said Brush Wellman did not directly threaten to quit producing beryllium if OSHA was not stopped. But "the inference could have been drawn," he said.

Brush Wellman consistently told employees and customers that workers would be protected from chronic beryllium disease if they were exposed to less than 2 micrograms per cubic meter of air, the government standard set in 1949.

The plaintiffs claim Brush Wellman has known for decades that some people suffer chronic beryllium disease after exposure to less than 2 micrograms of the strong, lightweight material.

It was only in 1999, about 20 years after Brush Wellman's warning, that OSHA issued an alert stating that the 2-microgram standard might not be sufficient to protect workers, according to court documents.

Plaintiffs' attorney Allen Stewart also presented to the jury on Wednesday a 50-year-old document signed by Brush Wellman's then-medical director that said an investigative group believed even then that as little as 2.5 micrograms per cubic meter of air could result in beryllium illness.

That level would make beryllium "the most deadly element of all time" on the basis of molecular weight, the letter said.

Even 2 micrograms is an extremely small amount. It is equivalent to a pencil tip crushed and dispersed in the air six feet high over an area the size of a football field, according to court documents.

The jury also heard from a beryllium disease victim, 59-year-old Ronald Roerish, who walked to the witness stand carrying his oxygen bottle.

Roerish testified that Rocky Flats never gave him training in the dangers of beryllium until 1988, after he stopped working in the beryllium foundry.

Roerish testified that he wore a respirator in the foundry, but Brush Wellman attorney Roy Atwood drew testimony from Roerish that he did go into the beryllium machine shop without one.

Contact Ann Imse at (303) 892-5438 or imse@RockyMountainNews.com.

----

Campbell moving to free up miner's money immediately

By GARY HARMON
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel -
June 7, 2001
http://www.gjsentinel.com From: "Lori Goodman" kiyaani@frontier.net

Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell will move to tie $84 million for uranium miners to an expected military funding request, he said Wednesday.

Campbell, a Republican, will try to make the money available immediately, rather than wait until the beginning of a new fiscal year in October.

"It is imperative that we help these seriously ailing miners who contracted terminal illnesses upon serving their country in mining," Campbell said in a news release.

Congress in 1990 recognized uranium miners for their contributions and sacrifices in the nation's Cold War effort and established a program under which miners suffering from radiation-related illnesses would be eligible for $100,000 compassionate payments. Congress in 2000 expanded the act to include more miners and make ill uranium millers and haulers eligible for payments, as well.

The U.S. Justice Department last year began issuing more than 250 IOUs to miners who were found to qualify for the payments. The fund from which the payments were issued had run dry and budget negotiations between President Clinton and Congress failed to replenish the fund.

President Bush has laid out plans to spend $710 million on uranium miners, millers and haulers over the next 10 years beginning in the coming fiscal year. But he declined to seek a supplemental appropriation for the IOU-holding miners this year.

"This amendment will provide much-needed relief and assistance to the many victims of radiation exposure," Campbell said.

U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., also has promised to try to attach $84 million for the miners as the supplemental-spending measure passes through the House Appropriations Committee.

-------- kentucky

U.S. Justice Department may intervene

By Bill Bartleman bbartleman@paducahsun.com,
June 7, 2001
Paducah Sun
From: magnu96196@aol.com

A Washington watchdog group says attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice want to intervene in a whistle-blower lawsuit that claims a former operator of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant falsified environmental records to earn tens of millions of dollars in operating bonuses.

The group Taxpayers Against Fraud also claims in memos distributed to The Paducah Sun that top officials in the U.S. Department of Energy oppose intervention and are trying to convince top Department of Justice officials to reject the recommendation by government lawyers who investigated the allegations.

The final decision is pending in Attorney General John Ashcroft's office, according to Bill Campbell, assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Kentucky and the government's lead attorney in the matter.

Campbell would not comment on the statements of the watchdog group, but said the government could reveal its intentions as early as today. "We have a pleading that most likely will be filed this week," he said, without revealing its contents.

It could range from requesting U.S. District Judge Joseph McKinley to extend Wednesday's deadline for making a decision, to notifying the judge the government wants to become a plaintiff.

Campbell