------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Germany Studies Possible Nuclear Theft
India Welcomes Musharraf
For the Newest Nuclear Powers, a Little Chat
US rebellion over missile shield
Interceptor Scores a Direct Hit On Missile
Pentagon: Missile Test a Success
Pentagon Officials Report Hit in Missile Defense Test
Russia Upset by U.S. Missile Test
Divers Arrive at Russian Sub Disaster
Russia: U.S. Test Threatens Treaties
Nuclear Arms Chief Questions Cut in Warheads
Nuclear Arms Still Keep the Peace
U.S. Promised Subs to Taiwan It Doesn't Have

MILITARY
Chinese Leader Arrives in Moscow to Meet With Putin
Croatian Government Faces Vote
Iraq: A Dark Spot on Putin's Soul
Iraq Accuses U.S. of Detaining Ship
Saddam Invites Kurds to Make Peace with Baghdad
From New York to Hollywood, Vieques Has Issues for Everyone
Navy Preparing to Raise Trawler Hit by Sub

OTHER
Opinions on Death Penalty Spoken but Not Heard
Odd mix of activists stands together against cloning
Feds: Mentally Ill Convicts Untreated

ACTIVISTS
Anti-nuclear groups condemn US missile tests
Being John Cusack
Demonstrators at U.N. Accuse Priests of Abusing Nuns In Africa
Floridans Protest Street Cameras


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- germany

Germany Studies Possible Nuclear Theft

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Nuclear-Theft.html?searchpv=aponline

BERLIN (AP) -- Germany's environment minister ordered an inquiry Sunday into reports that radioactive material was stolen by an employee of a nuclear reprocessing facility near the western city of Karlsruhe.

Police declined to comment on media reports that the man, under investigation since last Monday, has been arrested and questioned about the alleged theft, and that a stash of radioactive material was found at a disused airfield nearby.

Prosecutors are to make a statement Monday.

If true, the allegations of theft indicate ``scandalous security failures'' at the plant, Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said. He ordered officials in the Baden-Wuerttemberg plant to report to him by Monday on what went wrong.

Routine tests in recent weeks on the 49-year-old man and in his apartment had found unusually high levels of radiation. The man's partner and her daughter reportedly were also found to have been exposed. Their names and the quantity of material allegedly stolen have not been released.

German radio reported Sunday that investigators are examining suspicious material found in a small tube near Landau, close to the French border. SWR radio said the man had told investigators where the tube was hidden at the former airfield, which was once used by French military forces.

About 200 tons of spent fuel from German nuclear power plants was reprocessed at the research plant in Karlsruhe between 1971 and 1990. Work to dismantle the plant has been going on since 1996.

-------- india / pakistan

India Welcomes Musharraf
Pakistani Leader Arrives for Historic Summit With 'Open Mind'

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 15, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63381-2001Jul14?language=printer

NEW DELHI, July 14 -- India extended an elaborate welcome today to the president of its neighboring arch-rival Pakistan, greeting him with a 21-gun salute, a luncheon with Indian movie stars and a warm reception by residents of the modest neighborhood where he was born 57 years ago.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who arrived for an extraordinary summit to be held Sunday with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, returned the cordial gesture, sprinkling rose petals at the memorial to Mohandas K. Gandhi, India's beloved independence leader, and saying he had come "with an open mind" in hopes of "establishing peaceful, tension-free and cooperative relations" between India and Pakistan.

The green Pakistani flag and the Indian tricolor waved side by side in a courtyard where Musharraf reviewed a military honor guard at a formal welcoming ceremony. It was a powerful symbol of mutual respect, and of hope for friendship, between two nations that have been bitter enemies since 1947, when Muslim Pakistan was carved out of Hindu-dominated India.

Many issues divide the world's two newest nuclear powers, most notably the 53-year dispute over Kashmir, the violence-wracked Himalayan border region claimed by both countries. Musharraf has said repeatedly that Kashmir must be the "core issue" discussed at the summit, while India wants to treat it as only one among a variety of bilateral problems. Substantive talks will not begin until Sunday, when Musharraf and Vajpayee meet in Agra, site of the Taj Mahal.

Musharraf is mistrusted by many Indians because, as Pakistani army chief, he orchestrated a paramilitary incursion into the Kargil mountains in India's portion of Kashmir two years ago. Today he pointedly wore civilian clothes, from a formal white tunic for the official welcome ceremony to a sport shirt and khaki pants for the visit to his boyhood home.

The shabby compound in the working-class Daryaganj area was completely renovated for the brief homecoming by the general, who spent his infancy there before his family migrated to Pakistan in 1946, as several million Muslims did at the approach of India's independence and partition. Residents of his old neighborhood offered him homemade snacks, and one elderly woman who said she had known his family greeted him fondly.

At a state dinner tonight hosted by Vajpayee, Musharraf said: "My visit brings to an end a more than two-year hiatus which I believe has not served the broader interests of either side. We need to bridge the gulf that divides us." The last Indo-Pakistani summit was held in March 1999, and attempts to strengthen relations collapsed within weeks over the Kargil conflict.

Although Musharraf and Vajpayee do not begin their negotiations until Sunday, the Pakistani leader did hold introductory private meetings today with senior Indian officials. Indian and Pakistani officials said the tone of the meetings had been "positive," although the Indians broached a number of awkward topics, complaining about Pakistan's support for "cross-border terrorism" in Indian Kashmir and demanding the extradition of a notorious Indian underworld boss who is a fugitive in Pakistan.

Despite efforts on both sides to set an upbeat tone for Sunday's summit, there were several signs of the suspicion and distaste many Indians feel toward Pakistan, 53 years after its traumatic and violent partition from India, and toward its military ruler, who seized power from an elected prime minister in October 1999.

A controversial diplomatic reception held by Musharraf this evening was boycotted by politicians from parties in India's coalition government, which had objected to his inviting leaders of the political separatist movement in Indian Kashmir. In fact, the sparsely attended party turned into a virtual news conference for the Kashmiri leaders, who told journalists that Musharraf had reassured them he would keep the wishes of Kashmiri Muslims in mind during his talks with Vajpayee.

"He was very sincere and open with us, and he said Pakistan wants what the people of Kashmir want," said Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, a Kashmiri religious and separatist leader who was at the meeting. "We support the summit and we don't want to complicate issues. We want to give India and Pakistan a chance to put things right for Kashmir."

Analysts here say a serious breakthrough on Kashmir is unlikely. But it appeared today that both sides may be inclined to compromise on other, related issues that could improve the atmosphere for future talks on Kashmir.

Unconfirmed reports circulated tonight that Indian and Pakistani officials had discussed a possible agreement to substantially reduce the number of troops on both sides of the military Line of Control separating the two portions of Kashmir, as well as the border dividing the high-altitude Siachen Glacier farther east.

However, Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir exchanged light-arms fire across the Line of Control Friday night and this morning, ceasing a few hours before Musharraf's arrival, news services reported. It was the first reported exchange this year.

The key to a successful summit, many observers say, will be the personal chemistry that develops between Musharraf and Vajpayee over the next 48 hours, during what commentators here are calling a blind date between ill-matched strangers who head adversarial governments and nuclear states.

The two men could not be more different: Musharraf is a 57-year-old professional soldier, outgoing and cosmopolitan but precise and blunt. Vajpayee is a professional politician two decades his senior, slow to speak and in poor health.

When they met today for the first time, Musharraf and Vajpayee shook hands at length, then repeated the gesture for TV cameras, but they stood stiffly and did not display any personal warmth. Ironically, Musharraf looked more relaxed in TV footage of his private meeting today with L.K. Advani, India's home minister and an outspoken hard-liner on Pakistan.

Despite the historical gulf and the contemporary hostilities that divide the two leaders, analysts said Vajpayee and Musharraf are committed to making concrete progress on Kashmir and other issues -- if each can find a way to compromise without provoking accusations at home that he has sold out to the enemy.

"Paradoxically, both sides have a vested interest in the non-failure of the other," said Jaggat Mehta, a former Indian foreign secretary. "The question is how to find a minimum compromise position that will not embarrass them domestically but will allow the other man to sell it at home as a non-failure."

Musharraf, who originally planned to travel with a large delegation of officials from various ministries, pared his entourage to 19 in a signal that he wanted to concentrate the summit on Kashmir.

He was also accompanied by his wife, Sehba, who was a smiling presence at numerous public events today and gave a speech on women's issues to an Indian women's group.

Another ice-breaking phenomenon at work was the swarm of 100-plus Pakistani journalists who arrived with Musharraf, many traveling to India for the first time. Some appeared on Indian talk shows today, exchanging easy repartee with their Indian counterparts as if they were regular guests.

"The broad goodwill gestures are there," said Ayaz Amir, Pakistan's premier newspaper columnist, in his maiden appearance on India's Star TV. "Now they must be translated into specific progress."

----

For the Newest Nuclear Powers, a Little Chat

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By BARRY BEARAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/weekinreview/15BEAR.html?searchpv=nytToday

NEW DELHI - UNTIL another nation tests the tools of apocalypse, India and Pakistan will remain known as the world's two newest nuclear powers. In May 1998, these hostile neighbors set off tit-for- tat underground explosions. Given their bloody history - having fought three all-out wars and then sustaining a lethal ritual of cross-border artillery fire - they immediately seemed the nuclear gunslingers with the planet's itchiest trigger fingers. The world again thought the unthinkable.

This weekend, the leaders of both countries are meeting in New Delhi and then Agra, site of the Taj Mahal, for the first official talks between the adversaries in nearly two and a half years. There is no formal agenda, but whatever the drift of the conversation, the nuclear genie will undoubtedly hover above the proceedings.

As youthful nuclear competitors, India and Pakistan are going through a phase considered by most analysts as especially dangerous, a time when an arms race is on and neither side knows whether it is falling fatefully behind. Because smaller arsenals are more vulnerable than bigger ones, nerves are more easily rattled.

Michael Krepon, president emeritus of the Henry L. Stimson Center, which studies security matters, likens the present circumstances to the early cold war years - and thinks today is even more precarious.

Berlin and Korea may have been divided territory, he said, but there was no constant artillery fire across the lines between nuclear powers as there is in Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan region that lies between India and Pakistan. "U.S. and Soviet military planning was not predicated on daily, violent interactions," Mr. Krepon said.

Also, proximity is an added peril. Kent L. Biringer, of Sandia National Laboratories, which does national security work for the United States Department of Energy, points out that a missile can span the distance between the Indian and Pakistani capitals in less than five minutes - not enough time to determine the authenticity of an attack.

"In 1995, Russian officials misinterpreted a missile launch conducted as a joint Norwegian-American rocket study of the Northern Lights," he wrote recently. "Despite prior notification, Russian authorities did not get word and used their internal hot line link to discuss a possible retaliatory strike."

How would New Delhi or Islamabad react in such an occurrence?

The Indians and Pakistanis are not unmindful of the dangers. Indeed, in February 1999, just nine months after their paired thunderclaps, there seemed an aftershock of prudence. India's aging Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, rode a bus across the fertile plains of the Punjab to ceremoniously embrace his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif.

The two men proceeded from a border checkpoint to the historic city of Lahore, where they declared a shared vision of "harmonious relations and friendly cooperation." They signed a "memorandum of understanding," pledging to work out the technical details for reducing the risks of a nuclear exchange. The customary nuke- think phraseology was employed: confidence-building measures, advance notification of ballistic missile flight tests, moratoriums on conducting further explosions.

But in the following spring, with India still brightened by the afterglow of Lahore and the world resting a bit easier, Pakistan's leaders somehow decided that a betrayal was in their strategic interests and ordered troops across the "line of control" into the Indian side of Kashmir. These soldiers, described then as Muslim holy warriors, assumed perches in some of the world's highest peaks above a vital Indian supply route.

A PERVERSE dynamic may have been at work, many observers now conclude. Rather than fearing a nuclear exchange, smaller, weaker Pakistan - the loser in each previous war - might well have been emboldened by the newly-tested weaponry, perhaps assuming that India would blunt its response rather than risk an apocalyptic confrontation. Indeed, while the Indians eventually triumphed in the campaign that came to be called "Kargil," they did so without counterattacking across the "line," a measure of restraint that won them plaudits as good global citizens.

Much remains to be known about this mini-war in the mountains; one of the more intriguing questions is how close it came to going nuclear. The Indian journalist Raj Chengappa, author of "Weapons of Peace" (Harper Collins Publishers India, 2000), writes that the Indians moved to their Readiness State 3, "meaning that some nuclear bombs would be ready to be mated with the delivery vehicle on short notice."

A missile capable of launching a nuclear warhead was moved to a state nearer to Pakistan, according to Mr. Chengappa's account: "A trajectory was worked out so that the two stages that are detached after burn out did not fall on Indian territory and hurt anyone. Pakistan is learnt to have kept its nuclear weapons in an advanced state of readiness."

After Kargil, there seemed little hope of Mr. Vajpayee again spending political capital on a grand gesture of peace. This seemed especially so after October 1999, when Mr. Sharif was overthrown in a military coup that left Gen. Pervez Musharraf at Pakistan's helm. The general had been the army chief of staff during the mountaintop fighting and was then - and is now - considered in India as "the architect of Kargil."

But two months ago, after the long drought in discussions, Mr. Vajpayee issued a surprise invitation for talks. By happenstance - or perhaps quite purposefully - on the same day India released a 135-page report about national security concerns. The volume, written by a high-level advisory panel, portrays India's archenemy as an irrational foe.

"Pakistan believes that nuclear weapons can compensate for conventional inferiority; its leaders have not concealed their desire to use nuclear weapons against India," reads the document.

If that assessment is correct, India and Pakistan may well be facing a calamitous nuclear childhood. They have a good deal to talk about.

-------- missile defense

US rebellion over missile shield
Special report: George Bush's America

Ed Vulliamy in New York
Sunday July 15, 2001
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4222010,00.html

As the United States prepared the trial launch of a rocket system due to form part of the controversial Son of Star Wars defence screen last night, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld - master of the plan - was facing a rebellion among his own military chiefs and in the US Congress.

Rumsfeld's senior generals and Republican party leaders are angry that he and a politically-appointed clique are taking decisions over the National Missile Defence screen and other reforms.

Pentagon sources report that senior military commanders, cut out of the decision-making loop, met recently to raise questions about Rumsfeld's strategy.

General Gordon Sullivan, former chief of staff of the Army last month called the direction of Rumsfeld's reforms 'imprudent'.

Most critics of the missile defence project say the US arsenal should be offensive not defensive. Others point to what they claim are insurmountable technological difficulties. But in the Pentagon, objections concern control over the next generation of weapons.

To secure his reforms, say officials, Rumsfeld has taken the helm with little or no consultation with traditional military figures.

He has employed a corps of right-wing strategic thinkers headed by Andrew Marshall, chief of an obscure Office of Net Assessment, who has been charged with an 'immediate, comprehensive review of our military'.

To oversee this shift, Rumsfeld is to set up a Crisis Co-ordination Centre overseen by his own office and with little input from the military. It will be answerable to him and his old friend and protégé Vice President Dick Cheney.

One signpost of the new direction was the directive that the US military should no longer measure its capacity by the traditional yardstick of being able to fight two simultaneous theatre conflicts.

The directive is unpopular not only with Army generals who fear losing up to 10 entire divisions, but with Senators and Congressmen whose vote base relies on employment in defence-based industries. Among those is the Republican leader in the upper house, Trent Lott, whose fiefdom of Mississippi contains some of the Navy's largest shipyards and old-style 'pork' contracts. An aide in Senator Lott's office says that he feels left 'in the dark' by defence reviews.

The defence industry is itself unhappy, say Ullman and Donnelly, because the kind of research that Rumsfeld urges is expensive, requiring vast capital investment, rather than the production line and 'brink-of-deployment' hardware that brings quicker business and profits.

----

Interceptor Scores a Direct Hit On Missile
Successful Test a Boost To Bush's Shield Plan

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64032-2001Jul15?language=printer

A projectile launched from a prototype missile defense system on the Marshall Islands successfully intercepted a dummy warhead last night high above the Pacific Ocean, scoring an important victory for the Bush administration's ambitious new missile defense plan.

After two straight failures in similar tests, the projectile's sensors, computer and thrusters identified and destroyed the mock warhead, which had been launched 29 minutes earlier from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The direct hit -- compared by scientists to "a bullet hitting a bullet" -- took place 144 miles in space at 11:09 p.m. At impact, the projectile, also known as the "kill vehicle," and the dummy warhead were traveling at 4.5 miles per second -- five to 10 times faster than a tank round.

A video of the intercept, broadcast at the Pentagon, showed a blinding flash of light in space before the screen went black.

Military personnel and dozens of scientists from Boeing and other defense contractors erupted in applause at mission control on an island in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

"We believe we have a successful test in all aspects at this time," Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish told reporters at the Pentagon early this morning. "We hit pretty accurately, based on the telemetry. The kill intercept was confirmed by all our sensors."

Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said early indications are that the kill vehicle's infrared and visible light sensors were able to distinguish the dummy warhead from a mylar balloon decoy, which deployed successfully.

A balloon in an earlier test had failed.

But Kadish said that full results from the test won't be know for two months. He also cautioned against reading too much into last night's successful intercept.

"No one test makes a difference in anything that we're doing here," Kadish said. "This test is just one step on a journey."

While Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials have sought to play down the significance of the test, the stakes were enormous.

Missile defense experts inside and outside of government say the successful interceptor will provide badly needed momentum to the government's efforts at erecting a prototype missile shield just as the Bush administration begins lobbying for its initiative.

The Bush plan calls for $8 billion in funding for missile defense in fiscal 2002, a 57 percent increase. About half of $3 billion in proposed new spending would go toward the system that accomplished last night's intercept.

"To hit a ballistic missile with an interceptor under any circumstances is a very impressive technological feat," Robert Sherman, director of the Federation of American Scientists' strategic security project, said in an interview shortly after completion of the test.

"But the question is how are they moving on the path to be able to protect the American people against a ballistic missile attack," Sherman said. "They've got a very, very long way to go."

In unveiling a missile defense plan that goes well beyond the ground-based system at Kwajalein to include sea-launched missiles and airborne laser interceptors, administration officials said their activities could violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty "within months."

The treaty was negotiated by President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1972 to prohibit nationwide defenses against long-range missiles and, thereby, curb each side's efforts to build more and more missiles to overwhelm those defenses.

The treaty permits missile defense testing of ground-based system, like the one at Kwajalein. The Clinton administration confined its testing activities to stay within the bounds of the treaty, which has formed the cornerstone of arms control between the United States and Russia since it was negotiated.

But the Bush administration's missile defense plans calls for numerous activities that are clearly prohibited by the ABM treaty, including deployment of a missile shield within four years an on "emergency" basis.

President Bush has described the treaty as a relic of the Cold War that keeps the nation from deploying missiles defenses against rogue nations like North Korea, Iraq and Iran at a time when missile technology is proliferating rapidly.

Bush's missile defense plan drew sharp criticism last week from Russian officials, who say they do not want to abandon the ABM treaty under any circumstances. High-ranking Russian officials are on record as saying that they would consider placing multiple warheads on existing intercontinental ballistic missiles if the administration proceeds with its missile defense plans.

On Capitol Hill, leading Senate Democrats criticized the plan last week, saying it stands to ignite a new arms race without protecting Americans from the most pressing threat, which they contend is a truck carrying a terrorist bomb, not a ballistic missile.

Arms control advocates also question whether missile defenses can ever fully succeed at protecting the nation against a missile attack, which would likely involve multiple warheads and dozens of decoys.

Minutes before the dummy warhead was initially scheduled to be launched from Vandenberg at 10 p.m., two divers from the environmental group Greenpeace swam ashore within a security zone at the air base, forcing a hold on the count down, Greenpeace spokeswoman Carol Gregory said.

Gregory also said in a telephone interview from the front gate of Vandenberg that Greenpeace had three inflatable boats in the security zone that were still being pursued by authorities late last night.

Kadish said that the test, although basic, is "operationally realistic in the sense that we've got these things in flight" and the kill vehicle must discriminate between them.

Tom Collina, director of global security for the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the test "rudimentary" as a simulation of real threat conditions and questioned whether it really tests the kill vehicle's ability to discriminate between objects.

The kill vehicle's computers, Collina said, have been programmed in advance with the infrared signatures of both the dummy warhead and the decoy -- signatures it would not know in a real attack.

"They're simply testing the ability of the seeker to say, 'I'm looking for an object with this characteristic. It's not this one, so I'll go after that one,' " Collina said.

Collina said it is important to understand what the test actually represents so it can be put in perspective. "This may be a fine test for early development, but you can't have it both ways," Collina said. "It's fine for what it is. But it's not telling you what will work in the real world."

Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said the kill vehicle's computer system "needs to know what it is going after."

But he said its ability to discriminate one object from another in space is far more complex than simply having been programmed with the infrared signatures of what it is looking for. "This [kill vehicle], with its infrared sensor and its visible light sensor and its computer," Lehner said, "knows how to discriminate" between objects using highly sophisticated -- and highly classified -- computer algorithms.

----

Pentagon: Missile Test a Success

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Missile-Defense-Test.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A missile interceptor soared into the skies over a tiny Pacific isle Saturday and destroyed its target, a mock nuclear warhead traveling through space, the Pentagon said.

It was the Bush administration's first test of the ``hit-to-kill'' technology it hopes will become a key element of a missile defense network.

At 11:09 p.m. EDT, exactly the scheduled moment of collision between the interceptor and the warhead, an enormous white flash appeared at the planned impact point 144 miles above the earth's surface.

Military officials said minutes later that their tracking data showed a direct hit.

Reporters monitoring the test from a video-teleconference room in the Pentagon could see the white flash. The video then switched to the mission control room on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific, where military and civilians officials who were running the test broke into a loud cheer, clapped hands and punched fists into the air.

The interceptor missile was launched from Kwajalein 21 minutes after its target, a modified Minuteman II intercontinental-range missile equipped with a mock warhead, roared toward the heavens from a launch pad 4,800 miles away at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

Navigating by the stars and by information transmitted from a ground station on Kwajalein, the interceptor's weapon, known as a ``kill vehicle,'' was to ram the mock warhead 144 miles above the earth's surface. The force of impact would obliterate the warhead, thus the term ``hit-to-kill,'' as distinct from other approaches such as detonating an explosive in the flight path of the target.

The test schedule called for the ``kill vehicle,'' a 120-pound device with its own propulsion, communications, infrared seeker and guidance and control systems, to reach the planned impact point in space about eight minutes after the launch from Kwajalein.

The Coast Guard and Air Force arrested two Greenpeace environmental activists after they swam to shore from an inflatable raft moored off the central California coast, said Air Force Sgt. Rebecca Bonilla. The arrests delayed the launch by two minutes, she said.

The swimmers were among a small group of Greenpeace who tried unsuccessfully to stop the launch, said Carol Gregory, a spokeswoman for the group.

Less was riding on the outcome of Saturday's test than a year ago, when a failed intercept sealed President Clinton's decision to put off initial steps toward deploying a national missile defense.

Bush has made clear he would proceed with an accelerated testing program regardless of the outcome Saturday.

The successful intercept provides a political boost for a project that some congressional Democrats believe risks upsetting relations with Russia and China, and has the potential to create a new arms race.

Failure would not have derailed the effort. It was just the first in a series of tests the administration hopes will produce at least a rudimentary defense against long-range missiles by 2004.

``We expect successes and we expect failures in this high technology that we're using,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said Friday.

He said Saturday's test would ``either give us more confidence in our approach ... or we're going to learn more from it if we fail because it'll be an unexpected reason why we fail and we'll go try to fix it.''

Bush has asked Congress for $8.3 billion to finance missile defense research and testing in 2002, a $3 billion increase over this year. Saturday's test was to cost about $100 million, Kadish said.

The last such missile intercept test, on July 8, 2000, was a stunning failure. The interceptor launched from Kwajalein but the kill vehicle failed to separate from its rocket booster. As a result, the kill vehicle never saw the target.

An October 1999 effort succeeded while a January 2000 test failed.

Kadish said the Pentagon has mapped out a more frequent schedule of tests, including four to six over the next 18 months.

The expanded testing program, described in detail to Congress by Pentagon officials for the first time last week, drew strong criticism from missile defense skeptics at home and abroad.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Friday that if the administration goes ahead with plans to build underground silos next year at Fort Greely, Alaska, for missile interceptors, it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bars national missile defenses. That, in turn, could spark a new arms race, he said.

``If those plans were realized in practice, they would seriously complicate negotiations and would signify the United States' exit from the ABM treaty,'' Ivanov said Friday in Moscow.

The administration wants Russia to agree to amend or replace the treaty with an arrangement permitting testing and deployment of defenses against long-range missiles.

On the Net:

Ballistic Missile Defense Organization: http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/bmdolink.html

----

Pentagon Officials Report Hit in Missile Defense Test

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/national/15MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, July 14 - The Pentagon said its first attempt in a year to shoot down an intercontinental missile succeeded late tonight when a prototype interceptor crashed into a mock warhead 140 miles above the Pacific, providing a political lift to the costly missile defense program.

"We believe we had a successful test, in all aspects, right now," said Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

But General Kadish offered few immediate details about the results of the $100 million test, in which an interceptor fired from the Marshall Islands collided with a mock warhead launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, 4,800 miles away. He noted that even in successful tests, the Pentagon has uncovered problems following more detailed analysis of data.

The test was almost identical in design to one conducted last July, which ended in failure after a $25 million, 130-pound "kill vehicle" did not separate from the booster rocket that had carried it skyward.

A test in January 2000 also failed.

The event provided a boost to the Pentagon as it was starting to push for a $3 billion increase in missile defense spending and as President Bush was preparing to meet in Europe with allied leaders and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who opposes the missile defense program.

The feat was also certain to encourage Congressional supporters who contend that the United States should rapidly construct missile defenses to protect itself and its allies from countries like Iraq and North Korea, which officials say are attempting to develop long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.

Tonight's test was not viewed as a make-or-break point, because President Bush has expressed unwavering commitment to building a system as quickly as possible.

The test came just days after senior Pentagon officials outlined to Congress the most detailed vision yet of the Bush administration's plans to accelerate testing on an array of anti-missile technologies, including land-based missiles, sea-launched interceptors and airborne lasers.

That aggressive schedule is likely to come into conflict with the strictures of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty within months, the officials told senators.

Under that plan, the Pentagon says it intends to conduct as many as 17 flight tests involving ground- and sea-launched missiles over the coming 18 months.

At 10:40 p.m., a Minuteman II intercontinental missile carrying a mock warhead and a decoy balloon lifted off from Vandenberg and arced westward across the Pacific.

The launch was delayed by 40 minutes as the military police cleared Greenpeace protesters who had come near the missile launch site.

Twenty-one minutes later, an interceptor rocket shouldering the kill vehicle blasted off from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The kill vehicle contained no explosives and was designed to destroy the warhead with the sheer force of a collision at 16,200 miles per hour.

Monitors at the Pentagon showed Boeing and Pentagon officials in a control room cheering, shaking hands and patting each other on the back moments after the intercept at 11:09 p.m.

----

Russia Upset by U.S. Missile Test

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/arms-missile-russia.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW, July 15 - Russia's Foreign Ministry denounced on Sunday the U.S. missile defence test in the Pacific Ocean, saying it threatened the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the international order on disarmament.

``A logical question again arises -- why take matters to the point of placing under threat the entire internationally agreed structure of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, including its core, the 1972 ABM treaty?'' Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement.

``Russia stands by its position that it is vital to maintain and strengthen the ABM treaty and is prepared to discuss all problems in full accordance with its obligations on this cornerstone treaty.''

The U.S. Defence Department said it had shot down a mock warhead over the Pacific Ocean late on Saturday in a successful test of an anti-ballistic missile defence.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation, said it was ``one step on a journey'' toward building a shield against missiles that could be tipped with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.

Russia's criticism of U.S. plans to develop an anti-missile shield has moderated in recent months as the United States has declared its willingness to discuss the system, aimed at countering missile strikes by ``rogue states.''

Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush agreed at their summit last month in Slovenia to proceed with discussions on the system.

Putin has since said Russia might be willing to alter the ABM treaty, defended by the Kremlin as the foundation of three decades of disarmament.

But he also made clear that if ABM were no longer valid, other international arms treaties, like START-1 and START-2, would also cease to function. He said Russia could respond by placing multiple warheads on its intercontinental missiles.

In his statement, Yakovenko said Russia was open to dialogue with the United States on issues concerning ABM and the START treaties ``and other Russian-American actions on the basis of understandings'' reached at the Slovenia talks.

The U.S. test was conducted ahead of the arrival later in Moscow on Sunday of Chinese President Jiang Zemin, also a fierce opponent of the U.S. anti-missile shield.

-------- russia

Divers Arrive at Russian Sub Disaster

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- A Norwegian dive support ship arrived at the site of the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine Sunday, and divers prepared to start an operation to raise the wrecked vessel, news reports said.

The Kursk sank after an explosion blew its bow apart during a training exercise off northwestern Russia last August, killing all 118 crewmen. Russia plans to raise the submarine in a salvage operation starting this month and lasting through mid-September.

The submarine, which has nuclear reactors and unexploded torpedoes aboard, lies on the sea floor under 356 feet of water.

Divers will examine the hull in the first phase of the operation, the Interfax news agency reported. Afterward, the divers will start clearing away silt beneath the hulking craft.

The Norwegian ship, the Mayo, was met at the sea border between Russia and Norway by a Russian navy missile ship, the Aisberg, and escorted to the Barents Sea wreck site, the ITAR-Tass news agency said.

The salvage operation will include drilling holes in the submarine's hull, attaching lifting wires and cutting away the vessel's damaged bow so it can be raised separately.

Salvagers then plan to lift he 14,000-ton wreck with cables from a giant barge on the surface and then tow the Kursk to the Arctic port of Murmansk.

Russian officials say the submarine's two nuclear reactors are safe and won't jeopardize the salvage operation.

They hope raising the Kursk will enable them to learn more about the cause of the explosions and recover the remains of more of the crewmen. Only 12 were recovered during a salvage operation last fall.

Officials said the disaster was triggered by a practice torpedo, but that they remain unsure whether it had been caused by a malfunction -- the theory favored by most outside experts -- or a collision.

-------- treaties

Russia: U.S. Test Threatens Treaties

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- The U.S. test of a missile interceptor threatens the entire structure of nuclear disarmament treaties, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official said Sunday.

The comment, which came after a successful U.S. test, was the latest Kremlin warning that the Bush administration's missile defense plans will hurt global security rather than boosting it.

An interceptor fired from a Pacific island destroyed its target Saturday in a successful test of the ``hit-to-kill'' technology the administration hopes will become a key element of a missile defense network, the Pentagon said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said the test created a situation ``which threatens all international treaties in the sphere of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation which are based on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Russia ``confirms its position of principle on the need to preserve and consolidate the ABM treaty and is prepared to discuss all emerging problems in full compliance with its obligations under this centerpiece agreement,'' Yakovenko said in a statement.

Moscow and other proponents of the ABM treaty contend that it has been and must remain the cornerstone of international strategic stability.

The U.S.-Soviet pact was based on the assumption that a ban on nationwide missile defense systems would discourage both sides from launching a first strike out of fear of retaliation.

The Bush administration wants Russia to agree to amend or replace the treaty with an arrangement permitting testing and deployment of defenses against long-range missiles.

Washington wants a missile defense system to fend off potential threats from unpredictable and antagonistic states and says it wouldn't be able to deal with the kind of massive strike Russia is capable of launching. But Russia, China and other nations have strongly opposed the U.S. plans.

President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to hold consultations on the treaty during their summit in Ljubljana, Slovenia last month, and they are expected to discuss the issue when they meet next Sunday at the G-8 summit of industrialized nations in Genoa, Italy.

Yakovenko said Russia was ``open to the earliest start of the dialogue with the United States of America on the issues of the START and ABM treaties and other questions of Russian-American strategic cooperation on the basis of understandings reached by Vladimir Putin and George Bush in Ljubljana."

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

Nuclear Arms Chief Questions Cut in Warheads

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2001; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63120-2001Jul14?language=printer

The commander of U.S. strategic nuclear forces has forcefully, though indirectly, challenged President Bush's plan to slash the number of warheads and take intercontinental ballistic missiles off "hair-trigger" alert.

Bush has said repeatedly -- most recently in a May 4 speech at the National Defense University -- that he would like to move quickly to reduce U.S. nuclear forces, unilaterally if necessary.

Adm. Richard W. Mies, chief of the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday that it is "naive and mistaken" to believe "that the 'nuclear danger' is directly proportional to the number of nuclear weapons and, accordingly, lower is inevitably better."

There is "a tyranny in very deep numerical reductions that inhibits flexibility and induces instability in certain circumstances," Mies said at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces. "Stability is the most important criterion as we assess further initiatives to reduce our strategic forces to the lowest levels consistent with national security."

Although Mies did not directly criticize the president's position, his remarks indicated that there is deep resistance in at least some parts of the military to reductions below 2,500 to 3,000 warheads, the level proposed during the Clinton administration for a possible third strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia. The United States now has about 7,000 warheads.

As the head of the Strategic Command, the admiral carries great weight inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has recently made two visits to Omaha to talk with Mies and other officers there as part of a review of strategic deterrence. Completion of that review, originally scheduled for this month, has been delayed until fall.

Rumsfeld told Congress in June that Bush's plan to reduce strategic nuclear forces had turned out to be more complicated than it originally appeared.

One problem may be the Strategic Command's reluctance to support deep reductions. "Mies and others have been dragging their heels," said a senior congressional expert on defense, "and [Rumsfeld] can't go forward without them."

Mies told the senators that the Rumsfeld study should follow the advice of a national security adviser from the Clinton administration, whom he did not name. "Rather than spending our energies on radical cuts in our respective nuclear arsenals, we should be concentrating our efforts on strengthening the security and safety of Russian weapons," Mies quoted the adviser as saying.

The admiral also said a nuclear posture review by the Clinton administration in 1997 had "reaffirmed the wisdom" of the current triad of land-based missiles, submarine-launched missiles and strategic bombers. "I am confident our ongoing strategic reviews will come to similar conclusions," he said.

"Mies has drawn a line in the sand," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "He is laying down a challenge to the administration."

Cirincione pointed out that the Bush White House has proposed to cut funding in fiscal 2002, which starts Oct. 1, for the cooperative threat reduction program in Russia that Mies supports.

Mies did accept Bush's argument that deterrence in the post-Cold War world needed to include defensive as well as offensive weapons. But, the admiral added, "missile defense would not be a replacement for an assured response" to a nuclear attack, "but rather an added dimension" and "an insurance policy against a small-scale ballistic missile attack."

Another presidential goal, which Bush described as recently as May 24, is that the United States should "remove as many weapons as possible from high alert, hair-trigger status." Without referring directly to Bush's statement, Mies told the senators that it is "inaccurate" to say that U.S. nuclear forces are on "hair-trigger" alert. "Our trigger is built so we can always wait . . . to guard against accidental or inadvertent launch."

-------- us nuc politics

Nuclear Arms Still Keep the Peace

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By ROBERT S. McNAMARA and THOMAS GRAHAM Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/opinion/15MCNA.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON - In recent statements, Bush administration officials have called for the United States to cast aside so-called relics of the cold war. On Thursday, for example, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Senate committee that the administration's missile-defense program will "inevitably bump up against" the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty "in months." Even the concept of nuclear deterrence is not immune to this desire to clean house. In mid- June President Bush stated his intention to move away from the logic of mutually assured destruction - "the capacity of each of us, each country, to blow each other up," as he said - in favor of a new framework based on some combination of strategic offensive and defensive systems.

But deterrence, and the agreements that frame it, must continue to be a factor in American-Russian relations for the foreseeable future. Neither the United States nor Russia has committed to the near elimination of strategic nuclear arsenals, which would be required to move away from mutual deterrence. Indeed, both sides seem intent on maintaining large nuclear arsenals in perpetuity. So far, in calling for consultations among the five nuclear powers aimed at cutting American and Russian arsenals to 1,500 warheads each, Moscow has proposed the steepest cuts.

But while such cuts would represent a significant reduction from current levels, the remaining American and Russian arsenals would still be more than enough to obliterate each side. The sense, and reality, of mutually assured destruction will not be altered at all.

Nuclear deterrence cannot simply be mandated, legislated or wished away. It is a function of the relationship between two states that are potential adversaries, each equipped with large numbers of nuclear weapons.

In the case of the United States and Russia, for deterrence to become truly obsolete a relationship similar to that between the United States and Great Britain would need to emerge - which can only happen over the course of many decades, at a minimum.

For the foreseeable future Moscow and Washington will remain at least potential adversaries, as evidenced by the nature of Russian objections to American missile-defense plans. President Vladimir Putin has already said that a Bush-led breakdown in the ABM Treaty would provoke Russia to increase its nuclear capability, a point echoed by Vladimir Rushailo, secretary of Russia's Security Council, in reacting to Mr. Wolfowitz's recent Senate testimony.

As long as the potential for an adversarial relationship between the two nations persists, the United States can do one of two things to prevent a nuclear attack from Russia. One is to deploy a national missile defense capable of thwarting any Russian nuclear attack, no matter how many missiles are involved, thereby removing the incentive for such an attack. But even the most stalwart proponent of missile defense will readily admit that it will be many decades before such a thoroughgoing defense is possible.

The only other option is to preserve the ability to inflict unacceptable damage in response to a Russian nuclear assault. This means mutual deterrence, a reality that Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged in remarks made last month.

Given the inevitability of maintaining mutual deterrence, how can this best be done? Like it or not, maintaining mutual deterrence means preserving the international agreements that establish its framework. Mutual deterrence without treaties - without, in particular, the ability to verify the other side's nuclear capability - is merely a less reliable, considerably more anxious version of the deterrence policy that has kept the peace now for many years.

It may very well be the case that the United States and Russia will unilaterally reduce their respective arsenals to 1,500 warheads, or even lower, and agree to amend the ABM Treaty in order to permit limited missile defense. Though its impact on strategic stability - above all, on relations with China - must be considered, this new framework may well be worth exploring. But whatever happens, it should not be mistaken for an alternative to deterrence.Robert S. McNamara is a former United States secretary of defense. Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., president of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, was President Clinton's special representative for arms control from 1994 to 1997.

----

U.S. Promised Subs to Taiwan It Doesn't Have

Foreign policy
July 15, 2001
L.A. Times,
by Jim Mann

Military balance with China teeters as the White House tries to fulfill its pledge to help the island nation defend itself.

WASHINGTON -- Barely three months after taking office, President Bush reversed three decades of American foreign policy in Asia by opening the way for Taiwan to buy eight diesel submarines.

It was an impressive action, the centerpiece of a huge package of new arms supplies that appeared to make good on Bush's campaign promise to help Taiwan defend itself.

There was one catch: There are no submarines to sell Taiwan. When the White House made the announcement, the Bush administration had little or no idea how it could carry through on its promise. Some of the information on which the administration relied turns out to have been wrong.

And ever since then, U.S. officials have been struggling to figure out where Taiwan's submarines will come from.

"I don't get any sense at all that in making this decision the administration gamed it out in advance," said Jonathan Pollack, chairman of strategic research at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

At stake are not only billions of dollars in defense contracts but also the military balance between China and Taiwan. If Taiwan doesn't get new submarines, the United States may have to come up with some other way of helping the island nation to offset China's growing naval power--or else face the prospect that China might be able to impose a blockade on Taiwan's ports.

"The Department of Defense is looking at several different options" for helping Taiwan obtain its submarines, Mary Ellen Countryman, the White House spokeswoman for national security affairs, said Friday.

The story behind the nonexistent submarines shows what can happen when major foreign policy decisions are made in a crisis atmosphere and without careful planning.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: The United States hasn't manufactured diesel submarines for decades--not since the 1950s, when the Navy, under the prodding of Adm. Hyman Rickover, decided to rely exclusively on nuclear submarines.

The United States produces nuclear subs but doesn't export them; the Navy doesn't want U.S. technology spread around the world.

But the two countries that are the world's principal exporters of diesel submarines, Germany and the Netherlands, refuse to build submarines or even sell sub designs that will go to Taiwan. They are unwilling to offend China, which considers Taiwan part of its own territory.

The Bush administration did not check with either the Germans or the Dutch before its decision.

"We read about it in the newspapers," said Henrik Schuwer, deputy chief of mission at the Dutch Embassy in Washington. "We went in [to the administration] and said, 'What is this?' "

Hans Dieter Lucas, a spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington, confirms that his government was left in the dark too. "There were no talks whatsoever."

In the weeks since Bush's decision, his administration has been exploring several scenarios to get Taiwan submarines, all of them problematic:

* Persuade the Europeans. In theory, at least, the German or Dutch government might reverse course and allow Taiwan to obtain their submarines, perhaps under pressure from the Bush administration. Yet that would require a major diplomatic campaign by the United States, one with a high risk of failure.

* All-American Sub. The United States might design and build a new diesel sub for Taiwan. But an American-designed sub would be considerably more expensive and take longer to build than obtaining the off-the-shelf European versions. Taiwan may balk at this more costly option.

* No Questions Asked. The U.S. government might simply contract with an American defense company to build the submarines and leave it up to the private company to obtain German or Dutch designs under the table. But doing that could be illegal if the European governments don't want the designs to go to Taiwan.

"My sense is that they [the Bush administration] thought that there was a chance the Dutch or the Germans might go along," said former U.S. Ambassador to China James Lilley, who served in the first Bush administration. "Or that maybe we could do it on our own. Or if that didn't work, maybe the problem would disappear."

"I have my doubts those submarines will ever be delivered," said Damon Bristow, an Asian defense specialist at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

The following account is based in part upon interviews with seven U.S. government officials who participated in the Bush administration's meetings regarding the submarines. The officials spoke to a reporter on condition they would not be identified by name.

Clandestine Submarines

In January, Bush and his new foreign policy team took office knowing that they confronted a major decision within months about arms sales to Taiwan.

Once a year, Taiwan military officials come to Washington with a shopping list of defense items, and each April, the U.S. government decides which weapons Taiwan will be allowed to buy. The United States is Taiwan's leading supporter and its most dependable arms supplier.

Taiwan's shopping list has included submarines since the 1970s. Year after year, the requests were rejected on grounds that submarines were offensive weapons and could fuel an arms race between Taiwan and China.

But after China launched military exercises and fired ballistic missiles into the waters near Taiwan on the eve of Taiwan's 1996 presidential election, the climate in Washington began to shift.

For the first time in decades, the Pentagon was forced to take seriously the prospect that it might have to help protect Taiwan against Chinese attack. Military leaders began to reexamine the old assumptions that China had neither the intent nor the ability to invade Taiwan.

A year ago, the Pentagon sent a survey team to study Taiwan's maritime defenses. The team concluded that Taiwan could use considerable help--including submarines.

Early this year, Chinese leaders seemed obsessed with the possibility that the new administration might sell destroyers equipped with the sophisticated Aegis radar system to Taiwan, a possible first step toward including Taiwan in an American missile defense system.

The issue of submarines largely escaped China's notice, to the relief of some Pentagon officials, who were eager to arrange for the sale of subs "in a clandestine manner, so as not to alert Beijing that this was an option," a Pentagon source said.

Then on April 1, just weeks before a decision on Taiwan's annual weapon request, China downed a U.S. reconnaissance plane, setting off Bush's first foreign policy crisis.

Amid the furor over the spy plane, approving the Aegis radar for Taiwan was sure to inflame America's tense relations with Beijing. But the administration also needed to show it was not caving in to China either. Increasingly, U.S. officials spoke of the need for a "robust" package of arms for Taiwan.

And so the administration settled on submarines as a middle ground. The Pentagon had said Taiwan needed them, and China hadn't raised the red flag about the subs as it had with the Aegis.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that Bush had approved the submarines and other weapon systems because of "the threat that is posed to Taiwan by China."

As it turned out, it would have been easier for the U.S. to deliver on a promise to provide the high-tech Aegis systems than to provide a handful of diesel submarines.

The Aegis technology is owned by American companies. Not so with the diesel submarines. How would the United States arrange for Taiwan to obtain these eight submarines? The Bush administration didn't have a plan when the arms offer was presented to Taiwan in April. And it has no plan today.

Bad Information

The first and most obvious solution was to have Taiwan buy the submarines from Germany or the Netherlands.

But that approach has a stormy history. In 1981, Taiwan purchased two diesel submarines from the Netherlands. They remain, to this day, the only modern submarines Taiwan owns.

Furious, China retaliated by downgrading its diplomatic relations with the Netherlands. In 1984, the Dutch relented and signed a communique in which the government promised not to sell Taiwan any more weaponry. Germany now has a similar policy in effect.

Nonetheless, Bush administration officials still harbored hopes. They had been told by U.S. defense contractors that the German or Dutch companies might be able to turn around their governments.

According to one account that circulated through the administration, Dutch firms were claiming in Washington that the Dutch government couldn't control what they did.

Such claims were questionable. Schuwer, a senior Dutch diplomat, points out that RDM Holding Inc., Holland's main submarine builder, is 50% owned by the Dutch government.

"We [the Dutch government] are part-owner of the plant," Schuwer asserted in a recent interview. "So RDM can never give or sell the [submarine] plans to the United States because the Dutch government would have to give its consent, and the government won't do that."

Within days after Bush's decision, Germany and the Netherlands both reaffirmed in public that they would not permit their companies to build Taiwan's submarines.

Buy American

The second possible solution was to have Taiwan's submarines built in the United States.

Such an approach has weighty political support--above all from Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, both Republicans, whose state includes the Litton Ingalls Shipbuilding yards in Pascagoula.

"Ingalls is one of the best [shipbuilding firms] in the country," Cochran said. ". . . I think we can build [submarines] for Taiwan if they need them. I hope if they choose to buy some ships, I hope they'll buy them from us."

However, this option faces two obstacles: the resistance of the U.S. Navy and the lack of U.S. submarine blueprints.

In the past, the Navy has been a powerful adversary blocking any attempt to produce diesel submarines in the United States, even for export.

Navy representatives argued that if diesel subs were exported, important secrets--such as the quieting technology that makes U.S. subs hard to detect--might be leaked and become available around the world.

But critics say the Navy has historically been motivated by another factor too: an unwillingness to let American leaders compare diesel subs, which cost about $300 million apiece, with the nuclear submarines the Navy buys for about $2 billion each.

Nuclear submarines can travel farther and stay under water longer than diesel subs. For that reason, diesel submarines are useful primarily for coastal defense and other short-range tasks. The Navy no longer operates any diesel submarines; its last one, stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines, was taken out of service two decades ago.

"Their [the Navy's] real fear is that a member of Congress will go aboard one of these diesel submarines and say, 'Hey, this costs only $300 million, we should have a couple of these' " instead of a pricier nuclear vessel, said Norman Polmar, an independent submarine analyst. "They are afraid Congress will force the Navy to buy some diesel submarines and take the money out of the nuclear program."

Any attempt to build a new all-American diesel sub would mean either pulling out old blueprints that date to the 1950s or, more probably, coming up with a new U.S. design.

"It would be more costly," said retired Adm. Michael McDevitt of the Center for Naval Analyses. "God knows, we know how to build submarines. We just haven't built that kind."

An American-designed submarine also would take much longer to produce. By the administration's estimates, Taiwan would have to wait eight to 10 years to get a submarine newly designed in the United States. Taiwan could get submarines in as little as five years if existing Dutch or German blueprints are used.

And so administration officials have increasingly concentrated on this hybrid possibility: that a U.S. company could build Taiwan's submarines with designs licensed from the Germans or Dutch.

Recently, the United States arranged for two diesel submarines to be built at the Pascagoula shipyard using a Dutch design. But these subs are for Egypt, a country that doesn't carry nearly as much diplomatic baggage as Taiwan. Neither Germany nor the Netherlands will allow its sub designs to be used to build vessels for Taiwan.

"Any applications for issuing licenses to allow submarine sales to Taiwan will be rejected based upon Holland's 'one China' policy," Dutch Foreign Minister Jozias van Aartsen told the Dutch parliament May 29. Van Aartsen said this policy applies to either "direct or indirect" submarine sales to Taiwan.

License to Steal?

That raises the third possible solution--that somehow an American company can find a roundabout way to build a diesel submarine based on the Dutch or German designs, even though these European governments haven't licensed the plans for use in Taiwan.

In other words, the U.S. government might simply ask an American company to build Taiwan a submarine and not ask any questions about where the design came from.

Getting Taiwan a submarine "is going to involve some sleight of hand," said Larry M. Wortzel, director of the Asian studies center at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

This option has been under serious consideration within the U.S. government.

"Maybe industry could just do this. We could leave it in their hands, and Berlin and Amsterdam wouldn't be involved at all," said a U.S. official who has taken part in the intragovernment discussions.

Under this scenario, an American company might get blueprints from a third country--that is, one of the many other nations that have bought German or Dutch diesel submarines.

In such a transaction, whoever gives those designs to the United States might not even know that the submarines would go to Taiwan. That way, said one U.S. official, the Germans or Dutch and the third country "would have plausible deniability."

Such an arrangement could prove to be of questionable legality.

In cases involving blueprints or other proprietary technology, "the options are that you own it, you license it or you steal it--and we have laws against stealing," noted Lucinda Low, a Washington lawyer who is a former chairman of the American Bar Assn.'s section on international law.

There are two U.S. companies likely to be involved in building submarines for Taiwan.

One is Northrop Grumman Corp., which recently purchased the Litton Ingalls shipyards in Pascagoula. The other is Lockheed Martin Corp., which sells advanced electronics systems used on submarines.

Both companies make clear they would be eager to work on submarines for Taiwan. Spokesmen for both companies emphasize, though, that the decision is in the hands of the Bush administration.

"Lockheed Martin would certainly welcome the opportunity to be the systems integrator for any diesel-powered submarine the Taiwan government may decide to buy," said Tom Jurkowsky, the company's vice president for communications.

"We stand prepared to help in any way we can," said Randy Belote, a spokesman for Northrop Grumman.

In a statement about the possibility of a Taiwan sale, Northrop Grumman pointedly noted that its Litton Ingalls shipyard "has, in the past, had business relationships with both the Dutch and German submarine designers."

When reminded that the Dutch and Germans have said again this year they will not let their designs be used for Taiwan, Northrop Grumman's Belote questioned whether the European opposition is the final word. "They [the Dutch and Germans] have said that," Belote answered. "But how serious is that?"

The Bush administration consulted with Northrop Grumman executives in the weeks leading up to its submarine decision, Belote said.

Asked whether Northrop Grumman might go along with a scenario in which the Dutch or German designs might be used without any license, Belote sidestepped the question: "I really don't know. . . . I can't imagine the U.S. government would get involved in a situation where it would bypass the will of another government."

Jurkowsky said this licensing issue won't arise with Lockheed Martin because it won't serve as the prime American contractor for Taiwan's submarines. It will merely supply the electronics systems put on submarines that some other company will build.

Some within the U.S. government make it clear they would be eager to help out American industry and to please Mississippi's two powerful senators, if they can.

"Whatever option [for building Taiwan's submarines] is decided upon, something's going to happen in Mississippi--I feel certain about that," quipped a Pentagon official.

Slow Going

Bush's decision has so far had one tangible result.

Bowing to the Bush administration's desire to help Taiwan and to the political and commercial pressures, the Navy has shifted ground. In public statements, the Navy now says it is willing to countenance the possibility that diesel submarines will be made in this country for export.

"While the U.S. Navy does not have a requirement for diesel submarines, we do not object to U.S. industry participation in the diesel submarine market," said Lt. Cmdr. Cate Mueller, a Navy spokeswoman.

The change is not just one of public relations. Inside the U.S. government too, the Navy has changed its tune.

"The Navy is on board now," asserted one surprised U.S. official a few weeks after Bush's announcement. "It seems a decision has been made to be supportive."

During the nearly three months since Bush approved the submarine sale, his administration has held a flurry of meetings to work out where and how they will be produced. But there is no solution yet.

"This is going very slowly," admitted one administration participant. "I can tell you the ball hasn't moved very far since April."

Already, there are signs Taiwan and some of its Washington supporters are becoming impatient.

"It seems apparent that while the offer [of submarines] was made in April, there's been insufficient follow-through," said Gerald Warburg, a lobbyist for Taiwan from Cassidy & Associates Inc.

The obstacles remain so formidable that some skeptics have wondered whether Bush's April announcement was a political ploy--an action that would dramatize American support for Taiwan but would never be put into effect.

"I hope this was not a cynical operation [by the Bush administration]. It's not clear how this whole thing is going to happen," said William S. Triplett, a conservative Republican Senate aide who identifies himself as a member of a "blue team" of congressional staff members who favor tougher policies toward China.

Those who favor a strong U.S. relationship with Beijing similarly voice doubt about the prospects for Taiwan's submarines.

"I just right now don't see how that's going to occur," said former U.S. Ambassador to China Joseph Prueher, who resigned in April.

"What we did was to please both Taipei and Beijing," asserted Eric McVadon, a former U.S. military attache in China. "We promised the submarines to Taipei, and Beijing knows they will never be built."

The Bush administration insists that such claims are off base--that Taiwan's submarines will eventually be delivered.

"We didn't intend for this to be a cosmic joke," said one State Department official. "We intend for this to happen--but how, that hasn't been decided yet."

-------- MILITARY

-------- asia

Chinese Leader Arrives in Moscow to Meet With Putin

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-China.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- China's President Jiang Zemin arrived in Russia on Sunday to cement the ``strategic partnership'' between former Communist rivals with a pivotal friendship treaty -- the first in more than 50 years.

The treaty Jiang and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to sign after talks in the Kremlin on Monday will be the first such document since 1950, when Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung forged a Chinese-Soviet alliance that later soured into rivalry.

``The friendship and cooperation treaty which I am going to sign with President Putin has a historic importance,'' Jiang said in statement distributed after his arrival on the four-day visit. ``It will lay a firm foundation for long-term, healthy and stable development of Chinese-Russian relations in the new century.''

Jiang's visit follows the International Olympic Committee's decision Friday to give Beijing the 2008 Olympic Games -- seen by China as a nod of recognition for its status as a world power. The Chinese president's first stop in Moscow was to be a visit with outgoing IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose successor will be named by an IOC vote in Moscow on Monday.

Putin had already sent Jiang a telegram of congratulation. ``It's symbolic that such an important decision was made in Moscow just before the historic visit,'' the Russian president said.

The Cold War-era rivalry between the two Communist giants began to ease in the late 1980s under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and gave way to what the two countries described as a ``strategic partnership'' in the 1990s.

Russia and China have found common ground in countering alleged U.S. global domination, and they both strongly oppose Washington's plans to develop a nationwide defense against ballistic missiles. Coming after a successful test Saturday of a U.S. interceptor missile, the summit will be closely watched for the two leaders' reaction to Washington's missile defense plans.

Both Russia and China warn that the proposed American missile shield would upset the strategic balance and trigger a new global arms race. Chinese concerns are even stronger, because its nuclear arsenal is tiny compared to Russia's and even a limited missile defense could erode its deterrent value.

So far, Russia and China have emphasized that their ``partnership'' is not an alliance against the United States or any other country. But analysts say Russia is in a position to help Beijing speed its military building by providing even more sophisticated weaponry.

China has already bought billions of dollars worth of Russian jets, submarines, missiles and destroyers during the 1990s, becoming the biggest customer of Russia's ailing military industrial complex. Analysts say China will soon own more top-of-the line Russian fighters than will the cash-strapped Russian air force.

While arms accounted for almost half of Russian exports to China last year, both countries admitted that other trade was lagging behind. Overall trade totaled $8 billion last year, compared to $115 billion between China and the United States. Russia is China's ninth largest trading partner, while China is Russia's sixth biggest.

Russia is helping build two nuclear reactors in China, but long-discussed plans to build an oil pipeline from Russia to China have remained on paper and Russian energy companies and civilian aircraft makers are losing ground in the Chinese market to their Western competitors.

With all the official talk of friendship, there has been some public concern in Russia that China, whose economic output is three times that of Russia, may again turn from friend to foe. When China and the Soviet Union were rivals, China claimed vast areas in the Russian Far East and Siberia, saying that Russia seized them in the last century.

After the Soviet collapse, waves of Chinese migrants have flooded the scarcely populated Far East, where concern was growing that the region and its 4 million people may soon be overrun by China, whose neighboring province has a population of about 140 million.

``China poses a clear military threat to Russia, but this is a taboo in our country,'' Russian military analyst Alexander Sharavin wrote in an article published in the daily Izvestia over the weekend.

-------- balkans

Croatian Government Faces Vote

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Croatia-War-Crimes.html

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- Croatia's prime minister told legislators considering whether to oust his government that he was determined to extradite two generals to the U.N. war crimes tribunal despite opposition.

``This is not a question of the fate of this government, but of the fate of all citizens of Croatia,'' Prime Minister Ivica Racan said Sunday during a parliamentary debate on a confidence motion over his government.

He said failure to cooperate with the court in The Hague, Netherlands, would bring international isolation and possibly sanctions. But he said his government would challenge some ``unacceptable'' aspects of the indictments against the two suspects.

The decision last week to hand over two wartime commanders charged by the Hague court with atrocities against Serbs triggered fierce protests from the veterans of Croatia's 1991 war for independence and the nationalist party of the late president, Franjo Tudjman.

Members of Tudjman's party walked out before Racan took the podium, insisting that parliament should have debated their demands to halt extradition and reduce cooperation with The Hague before dealing with the no-confidence vote.

Racan appeared likely to win the confidence vote he requested to ensure the support of his 18-month-old government. Debate continued late into the evening, and it was unclear whether voting would be postponed past Sunday.

Racan needs 76 deputies in the 151-seat chamber to survive the vote. He can count on 69 votes, and some smaller parties are also expected to back him. Tudjman's party and other Racan opponents hold about a third of the seats.

If the government loses the vote, early elections would be called.

Racan said some parts of the Hague indictments, which remain sealed until the men are brought before the court, are ``unacceptable.''

Government sources earlier said the indictments stem from country's 1993 and 1995 offensives to regain lands seized by the Serb rebels. More than 150,000 Serbs fled the 1995 offensive and hundreds of those that stayed were killed.

Racan said his government would challenge suggestions by the court that Croat troops planned or encouraged purges of Serbs -- a concept widely rejected by Croats, who see the action as the final liberation of their country.

``But we can only defend our truth ... in the courtroom, not in conflict, in isolation,'' he said.

One of the suspects, Gen. Rahim Ademi, agreed to surrender voluntarily and is to fly to The Hague next week.

An arrest warrant was issued Friday against the other suspect, widely believed to be retired Gen. Ante Gotovina, a local commander during the 1995 offensive. His whereabouts remain unknown.

-------- iraq

Iraq: A Dark Spot on Putin's Soul

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, July 15, 2001; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60715-2001Jul13?language=printer

What does one world leader see when he looks into the soul of another? Not everything, if President Bush's self-proclaimed peering into Vladimir Putin's spiritual makeup last month is any guide.

Hidden away in one corner of Putin's soul was the intention to derail Bush's diplomatic offensive to streamline U.N. sanctions on Iraq. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell were blindsided by Russia on Iraq before and after the Bush-Putin meeting in Slovenia.

Were Bush and Powell misled, or was Putin misread? Either way, the outcome of the first important practical test of Russian-American cooperation under Bush is no cause for confidence as the American and Russian presidents gear up for their second encounter, which occurs in Genoa, Italy, this week.

Bush now must decide if he will hold Putin accountable for the clear thwarting of Powell's first important diplomatic effort, or extend the charm offensive the two presidents waged on each other at Brdo Castle in mid-June.

As a candidate last year, Bush made a cogent case that the Clinton administration had repeatedly failed to draw a clear line around important U.S. goals abroad and to deal forcefully with nations that challenged those goals. His Genoa meeting with Putin, on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit, tests Bush against his own campaign standard.

This is the larger issue that emerges from Russia's determined and transparent campaign earlier this month to block Powell's "smart sanctions" plan in the U.N. Security Council. The repercussions in and between Washington and Moscow outweigh any fallout in Baghdad from this diplomatic dispute. Credibility -- of Putin, Bush and Powell -- is at risk.

Saddam Hussein and the neighboring states that he has bought off with oil exports were never going to cooperate with Powell's essentially unworkable sanctions plan, which was strongly debated inside the administration. The White House offered only tepid support, and Powell has been left to cope with the stigma of its failure on his own.

In a series of prickly responses to adroit questioning on Iraq from Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" on June 3, Powell blasted "critics" for not understanding that he had already secured agreement from Russia and other Security Council members that a new system of smart sanctions would go into effect on July 4.

But the U.N. resolution he cited did not support that unequivocal statement. And diplomatic sources aware of the Security Council negotiations disputed Powell's interpretation as well when I asked them. Russia was still backing Saddam's objections to the plan, in private as well as in public.

Richard Boucher, Powell's spokesman, reiterated to me on June 4 that the United States had obtained commitments from the "highest levels" that Moscow would vote with the United States for the new system in early July.

"This distances the Russians and the French from the Iraqis," Boucher said when I expressed continued skepticism. "We are united on this, and pointed in the right direction." Equally positive administration statements continued after the Bush-Putin meeting.

Those statements and Bush's lavish praise for Putin in Slovenia counted for naught when the vote came on July 3. Russia threatened to use its veto. The United States folded and accepted a five-month continuation of the sanctions system Powell had denounced and set out so vigorously to sweep aside.

"We are still working on the Russians," Boucher said last week. "We do have the support of four of the five permanent members of the council and still want to get a new sanctions resolution passed." He declined further comment.

Diplomats and politicians constantly play word games with each other, the press and the public. It is part of their trade and their mission. I cannot exclude that misunderstandings, willful or otherwise, played a role in this case.

And presidents must put in perspective other nations' snubs, unexpected reversals or betrayals. I do not mean to suggest that at Genoa Bush should forgo cooperation with Putin on Macedonia, ballistic missile threats or other issues because Powell was stiffed by the Russians on smart sanctions.

But the president, Powell and their aides should reexamine the factors that led them to ignore the public statements and easily obtained private warnings from serious diplomats that they were misreading Moscow. There seemed to be an element of rushing past indicators that contradicted what Bush and Powell said they wanted to happen.

Putin seems to have read Bush at their first meeting as a man whose forgiving nature, bolstered by a strong desire for a deal on missile defense, gives the Russians room to maneuver on Iraq, and perhaps elsewhere. Putin goes into the Genoa meeting with momentum, and more firmly in Saddam's corner than ever. That's a dark spot that should jump out on any X-ray of any soul.

----

Iraq Accuses U.S. of Detaining Ship

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-US.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq accused the U.S. Navy on Sunday of detaining a ship loaded with sugar imported by Iraq under the oil-for-food program, the official news agency reported.

An unidentified Trade Ministry source told the Iraqi News Agency that the ship, carrying 13,125 tons of sugar, has been held since July 2, 2001.

In Bahrain, Cmdr. Jeff Gradeck, spokesman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, which enforces sanctions in the Persian Gulf, could not immediately confirm the Iraqi claim.

The Iraqi source did not mention the ship's nationality and said only that it was detained in the Gulf.

The oil-for-food program was created in 1996 as an exemption to economic sanctions imposed on Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The program allows Baghdad to export unlimited amounts of oil to purchase food, medicine and other essentials and to pay war reparations.

--------

Saddam Invites Kurds to Make Peace with Baghdad

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-sa.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invited Kurdish rebel foes on Sunday to open dialogue with Baghdad, Iraqi state-run television said.

``We want any solution with as few losses as possible, when the solution is among our people,'' the television quoted Saddam as saying.

The remote mountainous enclave of northern Iraq, controlled by two rival Iraqi Kurdish groups, has been outside Baghdad's control since the end of the 1991 Gulf War to end its occupation of Kuwait.

U.S. and British jets patrol no-fly zones set up after the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait to protect Kurd dissidents in northern Iraq from attack by Baghdad forces.

The Iraqi president said Baghdad had left the northern area alone until now to allow the Kurds to deal with their own problems and that fear of intervention by Baghdad has kept the two rival Kurdish factions from harming the Kurdish people.

``We wanted our people in Kurdistan region...to deal with the events and circumstances, good and bad in details to reach a satisfaction of their own choice,'' Saddam said, during a ceremony to award him the sash and shield of al-Jihad (holy war).

Baghdad has severed all ties with Kurds in the north, who have aligned themselves with other Iraqi opposition groups and have publicly vowed to topple the government in Baghdad.

The two sides held inconclusive talks in 1991. In 1992 the Kurds held elections for a parliament and established a regional government in which the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan share power.

-------- puerto rico

From New York to Hollywood, Vieques Has Issues for Everyone

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/nyregion/15VIEQ.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, July 14 - A small island off the coast of Puerto Rico has captured the national, if not global, stage and provoked a surprising degree of activism. Remember when most people couldn't even pronounce Vieques, much less point it out on a map?

The fate of this island's inhabitants - the Navy, as most people know by now, practices dropping its bombs there - has sucked in a hodgepodge of big names from the political, environmental and entertainment worlds, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mario M. Cuomo to the actor Benicio Del Toro and the singer Ricky Martin.

Protests are held almost daily, to the flashes of cameras. The movement even has its own pint-size version of the Chicago Seven: the so-called Vieques Four, four prominent New Yorkers who were carted off to jail for trespassing on Camp Garcia, the military's bombing range on the island.

The extraordinary thing is that the situation in Vieques is nothing new: the Navy has been conducting bombing runs there for the past half-century or so. More than that, the military conducts similar bombing exercises outside nearly 30 communities in the continental United States, almost all of them at a closer range to residents.

Even those who have taken up the cause of Vieques are astonished by all the attention this obscure little island is generating. "Three months ago, if you had told me that Vieques would get worldwide attention, I'd have said you were nuts," said Ken Sunshine, a media consultant and political operative for opponents of the bombing. "Who would have thought?"

The question, then, is why Vieques and why now?

Its liberal supporters lend Vieques an element of "radical chic," the social phenomenon that Tom Wolfe sneeringly identified more than a quarter-century ago: there's a privileged class taking up the cause of a more downtrodden one. But there's more to it than that.

Vieques, simply, is an activist's dream, offering something for everyone. It has the destruction of an ecological system, along with claims that the people are being exposed to toxic chemicals, which environmentalists are seizing upon. It has the specter of American colonialism that human rights advocates and Puerto Rican nationalists are pointing to. It has the suggestion of racism that civil rights activists and Hispanic leaders are up in arms over.

The cause has even been embraced by some more conservative politicians, like Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, a Republican.

To top it all off, the issue has an ideal boogeyman in the United States military, which has been relatively quiet about making its case for the bombing exercises.

Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history and the director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, says the military is making matters worse for itself by appearing to dismiss a seemingly reasonable request that it find somewhere else to drop its bombs.

"The intransigence of the U.S. military comes off as arrogance," he said. "They're flipping off an entire hemisphere in Monroe Doctrine fashion."

To further complicate matters for the military, its supporters have made some incendiary comments that have heightened suspicion and resentment on the other side.

"I come down to the idea where I don't see where Puerto Rico should get any favorite treatment over the rest of these people," Representative James V. Hansen, a Republican from Utah, said recently. "What have they done to get it? They sit down there on welfare and very few of them paying taxes, got a sweetheart deal. I just don't really see the equity in it, but maybe I don't understand it."

The comments of Mr. Hansen, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, may be the most extreme that have been uttered. But even President Bush, who tried to broker a compromise on the bombing issue, aroused deep hostility when he referred to Puerto Rico as the United States' "friend and neighbor." The island's residents and their supporters quickly pointed out that Puerto Ricans are, in fact, citizens of the United States.

The center of the Vieques movement is, of course, on the island itself. But some of the loudest protests are coming from New York City, with its large concentration of Puerto Rican residents and its long tradition of liberal activism.

New York produced the Vieques Four: Adolfo Carrión Jr., a City Councilman; Roberto Ramirez, the Bronx County Democratic chairman; José Rivera, a state assemblyman; and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Perhaps most important, there is a mayoral race under way in the city and a gubernatorial race looming statewide, prompting politicians of all stripes to court New York's sizable Puerto Rican population.

But what has been most surprising is the degree of interest the rest of the nation has shown in this issue, from the president on down. No doubt part of the interest has been heightened by reports of protesters being roughed up and hauled off to jail.

Passions are running so high that the protesters are resorting to 1960's- style imagery. One of their Web sites features slogans like "We Shall Not Forget the Political Prisoners of Vieques" and "Urgent Call for Civil Disobedience." The site also includes photos of a Puerto Rican child hurling a rock at the military installation on Vieques.

The oratory is no less blistering. "We ask the court to recall that our nation was conceived in the civil disobedience that preceded the Revolutionary War," Mr. Cuomo told a judge this month in his role as a defense lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dennis Rivera, the labor leader, both arrested during protests on the island.

Jacqueline Jackson, the wife of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, made a similar plea before she was sentenced to 10 days in jail for her role in a recent protest at Camp Garcia.

"When I fight for civil rights, social justice and world peace, I am acting out the American dream," Mrs. Jackson told a judge. "As both a mother and a political prisoner," she added, "I ask you to restore my rights as a citizen."

The political furor shows no signs of abating. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York traveled to Puerto Rico today to meet with two of the imprisoned protesters, Mr. Kennedy and Dennis Rivera.

Even Governor Pataki, a politician who is usually stiffly reserved, has gotten into the act. "No mas bombas," he recently protested during a speech in Spanish Harlem.

One of the more remarkable developments to come out of all this is the solidarity that seems to have arisen among Hispanics, who are a notably splintered group. Vieques has helped galvanize Hispanics of all sorts, not just Puerto Ricans.

United States Representative Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey who is of Cuban descent, attributes this to the condescension shown by the military and some of its supporters toward the protesters. It smacks of the colonialist attitude that the United States has long been accused of displaying toward Latin America, he said.

Mr. Menendez said the Navy's behavior "ignited a firestorm that is much bigger than the Puerto Rican community" and led many Hispanics to conclude, "that could be me next." The issue "is about respect," he added. "It is about dignity. It is about recognizing the contributions of Hispanics to this country."

As with all political causes, Vieques has its share of facts and distortions. One major claim being made by the protesters is that noise from the shelling is causing heart problems among Vieques residents. But a recent report prepared by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health cast serious doubt on that claim.

Another claim is that residents of Vieques have a higher incidence of cancer than normal. But a report compiled by the Navy using government data shows that the cancer rate on Vieques from 1973 to the mid- 1990's was about the same as the cancer rate for the rest of Puerto Rico during that period. Not only that, the incidence of cancer on Vieques was roughly half the average rate in the rest of the United States during that period.

One thing lost in the furor is the fact that the Navy actually has a case worth considering. It says the island is an irreplaceable training ground for several reasons. First, the air space above it is free from commercial airline traffic, meaning that Navy pilots can simulate bombing runs and dogfights at the altitude and speed that would be used in combat. Second, the waters immediately around the island are not used for commercial ships and are deep enough for Navy submarines and ships to navigate. Third, the island's topography is ideal for amphibious landings and parachute exercises.

Finally, the Navy points out, the military conducts bombing exercises much closer to other communities within the United States with little or no protest. For example, where the bombing range in Vieques is 9.5 miles from the nearest community, the Navy says, an Army artillery range in Lawton, Okla., is within 1.5 miles of nearby residents.

"One of our frustrations has been the distortion of facts," one senior Navy official said. "It has unnecessarily alarmed the people of Vieques."

It remains to be seen whether Vieques fades into the background the way other recent popular causes, like protecting the rain forest or saving the whales, have. But neither side seems willing to give in any time soon, even though the Bush administration has said it would stop the bombings by 2003. The opponents of the bombings have vowed to step up the protests until the Navy pulls out, while the Navy's supporters claim that suspension of the exercises would undermine military readiness. As long as that standoff persists, people are likely to be engaged.

"It has all the elements," said Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

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

Navy Preparing to Raise Trawler Hit by Sub

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/national/15SUBM.html

HONOLULU, July 14 - The Navy is preparing to begin raising the Ehime Maru, a 750-ton Japanese fishing vessel, in an effort to retrieve the bodies of nine people killed after a submarine accidentally rammed and sank it.

As the Ocean Hercules, the first of two ships involved in the $40 million recovery effort, arrived in Hawaii on Friday, Navy officials said there was no guarantee that the 190-foot trawler or the bodies could be retrieved.

"It's a very difficult task," Rear Adm. William R. Klemm, the officer in charge of the project, said. "The technology we are going to use has been employed elsewhere but not for this purpose. We know we may not be successful."

The Ehime Maru, a trawler used to teach Japanese high school students about the fishing industry, was about nine miles off Oahu on Feb. 9 when the Greeneville rammed it during an emergency surfacing drill. The trawler sank in about 2,000 feet of water. Twenty-six people aboard the trawler were rescued, but nine were missing and presumed to have gone down with the vessel.

No bodies were recovered, and some are believed to be aboard the Ehime Maru, which sank in minutes.

The collision strained relations between the United States and Japan, particularly after it was disclosed that the surfacing drill was conducted largely for the benefit of civilian visitors on board the Greeneville.

The Greeneville's captain, Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle, was reprimanded and resigned after a Navy court of inquiry in April found him guilty of dereliction of duty and operating the attack sub in an unsafe manner.

Navy leaders have vowed to do all they can to recover any remains, though the depths are too great for divers and such a heavy vessel has never been raised from that depth.

The Navy plan calls for ships to raise the Ehime Maru to about 100 feet below the surface and then tow it to shallow waters, where divers can enter and search for bodies. Four teenagers were among those presumed to have died in the sinking.

By early August, the Rockwater 2, a ship owned by Halliburton Company will arrive. The vessel can lift heavy objects and stay in one spot.

Using cables and the lifting plates to create a giant sling, Rockwater 2 will raise the Ehime Maru off the ocean floor, slowly move 14 nautical miles north and set it down in a shallow location. The move is expected to occur in late August and to take three days.

Once the Ehime Maru is settled at its new location, divers will try to enter and negotiate the vessel's tiny passages. The job could take most of September, Navy officials have said.

"When it is stabilized at a depth of about 115 feet, divers will search all safely accessible areas to recover missing crew members, personal effects and the ship's nameplate and anchors, for a possible memorial," said Jon Yoshishige, a spokesman for the Pacific Fleet.

Admiral Klemm said bad weather or unexpected problems could end the operation at any point if the divers were endangered.

"The one thing we cannot tolerate in this is to take this haphazardly," Admiral Klemm said. "We have already had one tragedy, and we don't want to leave anyone else on the bottom."

-------- OTHER

-------- death penalty

Opinions on Death Penalty Spoken but Not Heard

New York Times
July 15, 2001
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/international/15TERR.html

When Judith Mwila testified last month in the death-penalty hearing for a terrorist convicted in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Tanzania, she described how hard her life had been since the death of her husband. He was an embassy guard, the family breadwinner, and one of 11 people killed in the attack.

But there was one question neither the government nor the defense was permitted to ask her: Should the terrorist, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 27, be executed?

Under the law, victims and other witnesses may testify in death-penalty hearings about the impact of the crime, but they may not be asked whether a defendant should be put to death. The prohibition stems from concern that they might make an emotional plea for execution that could prejudice the jury.

The jury in this case became deadlocked last week on the question of the death penalty, which means that Mr. Mohamed will be sentenced to life imprisonment.

But it turns out that of the nine witnesses from East Africa who testified for the government, five, including Mrs. Mwila, gave videotaped statements to the defense opposing the death penalty for Mr. Mohamed.

"He should be imprisoned for life," Mrs. Mwila said, according to a transcript of her statement. "I can't kill because my husband was killed."

Mr. Mohamed's lawyers, David A. Ruhnke and David Stern, said they took videotaped statements from Mrs. Mwila and more than a dozen other victims and family members while investigating the case in Tanzania. Five of the witnesses with whom they spoke ended up being called by prosecutors to testify. The prosecutors introduced the testimony in support of one of their arguments in favor of execution: that the blast had caused enormous emotional and financial hardships for victims and families.

But when Mr. Ruhnke and Mr. Stern realized they had tapes of the five government witnesses saying their client should be spared execution, they wanted to play the videotapes before the jury.

"If people who have suffered this kind of loss can find it in their hearts to either forgive or not call for vengeance," Mr. Ruhnke said, "then surely that's something a jury should consider before it imposes the ultimate penalty."

In the end, though, the tapes were not played. Mr. Ruhnke would not say why, noting that many of the court's rulings remained under seal.

But in one open proceeding, the judge, Leonard B. Sand, agreed to instruct the jury about the law forbidding witnesses from expressing their views on capital punishment. He also instructed the jury to "draw no inference either way from the fact that no witnesses have testified as to their views on this subject."

Prosecutors would not comment on the statements. Transcripts were provided to The New York Times by Mr. Ruhnke after the case ended.

They show that Mrs. Mwila also said that Mr. Mohamed should "get life in prison because he will meet his death there at some point anyway."

"But I can't say he should be put to death," she added.

Shabani Mtulia's wife was also a guard who died in the blast. Executing Mr. Mohamed would not bring his "beloved one" back, he said. Hanuni Ndange, who lost her husband, said that life imprisonment was "penalty enough" for the terrorist.

Another witness, Grace Paul, said on the tape that if Mr. Mohamed were kept alive, he might be able to help build the case against the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.

"I still think he should get life in prison and be available for identifying others," she said. "In the future when they catch others, like bin Laden, he can be a witness." Long-Distance Planning

The defense won a novel argument in the bombings case when Judge Sand agreed to allow the jury to hear about a decision by the highest court in South Africa. The court ruled that Mr. Mohamed, who had been arrested in Cape Town in 1999 after the bombing, should never have been sent to the United States to face charges in the bomb plot without the American government's first giving assurances that he would not face the death penalty.

What is not widely known is that the South African legal challenge was the brainchild of Mr. Mohamed's American lawyers, Mr. Stern and Mr. Ruhnke, and was started after Mr. Stern visited South Africa and linked up with a group of local lawyers, who agreed to file a challenge on Mr. Mohamed's behalf.

Departures in Waiting

With the trial over, an era in New York law may be coming to an end.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the lead prosecutor in the bombings trial, has been recommended as the next United States attorney in Chicago. Michael J. Garcia, who helped prosecute the first World Trade Center bombing trial and participated in the embassy bombings case, has been nominated to be assistant secretary of commerce for export enforcement in Washington.

And United States Attorney Mary Jo White, a Clinton appointee who, since taking office in 1993, has supervised the big terrorism trials - on the World Trade Center bombing, the conspiracy to blow up the United Nations and other city landmarks, a plot to blow up American airplanes over the Pacific, and the embassy bombings - is widely believed to be in her final year in the job.

So when another terrorism trial is held in Federal Court in Manhattan, there will likely be new faces.

But one thing is unlikely to change: Courtroom 318, where the big terrorism trials are held in New York. The courtroom resembled a theater gone dark last week, empty of its actors and audience after a six- month run.

-------- genetics

Odd mix of activists stands together against cloning

07/15/2001 - Updated 10:46 PM ET
By Richard Willing,
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/july01/2001-07-16-cloning.htm

WASHINGTON - Activists on both sides of the abortion issue are joining forces this week to push for a total ban on human cloning.

The unusual coalition is lobbying for a bill that would impose a 10-year prison sentence and $1 million fine on scientists who practice cloning for reproduction or research.

That bill's chief sponsor is Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla, who opposes abortion. The measure is expected to be taken up as early as Thursday and move swiftly through the House Judiciary Committee.

A rival bill that would ban cloning to create human babies but permit cloning for research use has attracted less support. Its sponsor, Rep. James Greenwood, R-Pa., says the two bills seem destined to collide.

Cloning works by placing the nucleus of an adult cell into an egg cell from which the center has been removed, producing an embryo that is a genetic copy of the adult.

Cloning has been attempted with other mammals. In 1997, a cloned baby sheep was produced in Scotland from a cell taken from an adult animal. It was delivered by a surrogate mother.

The debate intensified last week when a Worcester, Mass., company announced that it was performing experiments aimed at cloning human embryos for research.

"This issue is way below the radar screens," says Richard Hayes, a former Sierra Club official and supporter of abortion rights who is lobbying for a cloning ban. "The only ones who have been paying attention are the religious right and the biotech industry ... (But) eugenics (genetic engineering) cuts through and renders invalid so many ideologies."

Each part of the anti-cloning coalition has its own reasons for supporting the ban. Anti-abortionists say creating clones, a new form of human life, is immoral, as is using them for research purposes.

"This is an entirely new form of human life, life that's not created by the union of sperm and egg," said Mary Cannon of the Bioethics Project, an anti-cloning group. "There's a 'yuck' factor here."

Others cite safety issues - experiments with other mammals have led to clones with multiple defects - and the possibility that cloning could lead to gene manipulation and "designer babies."

Judy Norsigian, a feminist who co-wrote the women's health book Our Bodies, Ourselves, says cloning requires women to take potentially dangerous drugs to stimulate egg production. "It's not a women's issue alone, but that is a piece of it," says Norsigian, director of Boston Women's Health Book Collective.

Opponents of the ban say it would cut off potentially critical avenues of research into areas such as regenerating replacement tissues and organs for transplantation. Transplants from clones, they say, are unlikely to be rejected by a body because both would contain the same genetic makeup.

"Simply put, enactment of the (ban) bill will stop critical therapeutic research in its tracks," says Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of Geron Corp. in Menlo Park, Calif., which is currently performing cloning experiments.

The cloning debate comes as President Bush ponders whether to permit federal funding for research on stem cells derived from human embryos.

-------- police / prisoners

Feds: Mentally Ill Convicts Untreated

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Prisons-Mental-Health.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- About one-fifth of the estimated 191,000 inmates in state prisons who were identified as mentally ill were not getting therapy or counseling, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

A study based on 2000 data also showed that only 70 percent of state prison facilities screen inmates for mental illness as a matter of policy.

``This is a modest survey,'' said lead researcher Alan Beck of the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

``We didn't assess what types of mental illness inmates were suffering from. The numbers support that mental illness is a significant problem for state prisons. How inmates are diagnosed and how easily they can receive treatment is a subject worthy of attention,'' he said.

Mentally ill inmates account for 16 percent of the state prison population, and 79 percent of those identified as mentally ill were receiving therapy or counseling, the report said.

Female inmates are treated for mental illness at a higher rate than male prisoners. One in four women gets therapy and one in five takes medication for mental illness. Only 10 percent of male inmates receive any treatment.

``There may be several factors, including that women may be more likely to admit or acknowledge mental illness than men,'' Beck said. ``There may also be an issue of how men perceive or understand mental illness.''

Some mental health experts said the statistics seemed too low to be accurate.

``There is no way to produce an accurate picture of mental illness in prisons,'' said Roger Paine, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico.

``Asking the prisons results in numbers that are pure fiction. They don't have good measures for determining who has a mental illness or not. We need competent diagnosis as a first step to assessing the problem.''

The study also addressed what becomes of inmates who are diagnosed with mental illness.

About 10 percent, or 18,900, of mentally ill state inmates were housed in a 24-hour mental health unit. About two-thirds of all state inmates who were in therapy or receiving medications were in facilities that did not specialize in mental health services.

Three states -- North Dakota, Rhode Island and Wyoming -- had no special psychiatric facilities for prisoners, the study showed. Those states put prisoners needing to be separated from the general population into state hospitals, prison infirmaries or special-needs areas of the prison.

About 66 percent of prisons help released prisoners obtain community mental health services, the study showed.

States with the most inmates receiving psychiatric help were Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska and Wyoming. In those states, at least one in four inmates were in therapy.

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Anti-nuclear groups condemn US missile tests

Sun, 15 Jul 2001 23:02
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-15jul2001-48.htm

A coalition of five Australian-based anti-nuclear groups have described the latest test of the US' proposed missile defence system as a failure for the world.

Unlike the two of the three previous tests, a mock warhead has been shot down over the Pacific Ocean by a US interceptor missile.

The target missile was launched from California and the interceptor was fired from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

Representing five disarmament and environment groups in Sydney, the Friends of the Earth's John Hallam says the world does not need a missile defence system.

"Every successful test on this sort of technology beings us, brings the world closer to a violation or withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty by the US," he said.

"That in turn potentially brings us closer to a renewed round of global nuclear weapons racing which obviously will do the planet no good at all."

Russia has also condemned the test.

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[Potential? et]

Being John Cusack
The Young Actor Will Say Anything in an Interview. No Matter. His Work Speaks for Itself.

By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2001; Page G01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58795-2001Jul13?language=printer

... "Hmm. What can I say that's worthy of The Washington Post?"

How about slamming a Republican?

"I've done that already. I have an honest difference of opinion with them. I think they're dishonest," says Cusack, whose parents' liberal politics remain an obvious influence on his life.

"'There's no conclusive science on the Kyoto accord.' That means they paid some scientist to say there's no global warming," he rants. "But there is no science that says the missile defense shield can work. We can spend billions on that, but scrimp on education and the environment." ...

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Demonstrators at U.N. Accuse Priests of Abusing Nuns In Africa

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By STEPHANIE FLANDERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/international/15DEMO.html

About 70 demonstrators gathered outside the United Nations yesterday to call for greater efforts by the Vatican and Pope John Paul II to combat the sexual abuse of nuns by priests in Africa and around the world.

The protesters, representing a range of religious and feminist groups from the United States and overseas and including several nuns, said that the Vatican had known for several years about many cases in which priests had sexually abused nuns, but that it had done nothing to combat the problem.

"We think the fact that in 23 countries, religious women are being exploited and raped by priests is an important international issue," said Frances Kissling, the president of Catholics for a Free Choice and an organizer of the rally.

The Vatican publicly acknowledged the problem of sexual abuse against nuns in March when confidential reports, compiled by senior members of religious orders for women, appeared in the news media.

An article about the reports first appeared in The National Catholic Reporter and contained detailed accounts of nuns being forced to have sex with priests and, in some cases, forced to have abortions after becoming pregnant.

Most of the abuse had occurred in Africa, where, according to the confidential reports, priests had demanded sexual favors from nuns as a way to avoid contracting H.I.V./AIDS.

About 115 million of the world's billion Catholics are estimated to live in Africa, including about 51,000 nuns and 26,000 priests or bishops.

In a statement issued shortly after the reports came to light, the pope's official spokesman, Joaquin Navarro Valls, said: "The problem is known and involves a restricted geographical area. Certain negative situations must not overshadow the often heroic faith of the overwhelming majority of religious nuns and priests."

Yesterday, Msgr. James Reinert, a Vatican attaché at the U.N., said that the mission had nothing to add to previous Vatican statements on the issue.

Yesterday's marchers presented a petition to the Vatican's Permanent Observer Mission at the U.N., demanding that the church reveal what it has done to combat sexual abuse of nuns, and work with civil authorities so that priests accused of abuse can be tried in the courts of the countries where the abuse took place. Normally when such accusations are made, a priest is transferred out of the country. The protesters also want the church to reinstate nuns who were dismissed because they became pregnant and to provide financial support for children fathered by priests.

Yvonne Maes, a former nun from Canada who spoke at the event, said that she had been raped by her supervisor in April 1985 during a religious retreat in Durban, South Africa. At the time she had been a nun for 24 years. She said that her superiors told her to keep quiet about the assault. Although Ms. Maes said her attacker admitted privately to her what he had done, it was 10 years before he was forced to answer charges before a church jury in England. Though the jury upheld her accusation, the man was never punished and continues to work as a priest in England.

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Floridans Protest Street Cameras

New York Times
July 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Ybor-Surveillance.html

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Wearing masks and making obscene gestures at police cameras, about 100 people protested a new security system that scans faces in the city's crime-ridden nightlife district to search for wanted persons.

``Being watched on a public street is just plain wrong,'' said May Becker, wearing a bar code sticker on her forehead.

Becker joined demonstrators in the Ybor City district Saturday night, wearing a sign reading: ``We're under house arrest in the land of the free.''

One protester walked by a camera, gestured obscenely and shouted, ``Digitize this!''

Others wore gas masks, Groucho Marx glasses and other items to protest the FaceIt scanning system police are using in a neighborhood that attracts 75,000 to 150,000 people on weekend nights.

The video cameras snap pictures of faces in the crowd and compare them to a database of 30,000 people that includes runaway teens and wanted criminals. It works by analyzing 80 facial points between the nose, cheekbones and eyes.

Tampa is the only American city where police use the face-recognition technology for routine surveillance, but Virginia Beach, Va., is seeking a $150,000 state grant for a similar system.

So far, police say the system has not led to any arrests although it has been used in Ybor the past two weekends.


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