------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Action Behind the Scenes Oct. 28-Nov.3
Nuclear Experts' Nightmare: Terrorists Steal a Warhead
Pak does not trust US with its nukes
U.S. Worries About Pakistan Nuclear Arms
U.S. Wants to Eye Pakistan Nukes
India to build Russian-aided nuclear power plant
Russian Agrees ABM Pact Is 'Relic of the Cold War'
Reactors and Their Fuel
FAA Prohibits Flights Over Calvert Cliffs Plant
Missouri governor says DOE broke agreements
Old poisons, new worries
Many issues face delayed action
Bush seeks support in week full of meetings

MILITARY
Pentagon Weapons at a Glance
Pentagon Uses Weapons Mix in Assault
A look at recent conflicts as they developed
History Confirms War a Futile Business
Winter's cold may help military track Taliban
Bin Laden Arabs buy husbands for their women
Air Controllers Play Role in Bombing
Rumsfeld Says Taliban Government Greatly Weakened
America's pipe dream
N. Korea Criticizes Japan Terror Law
Milosevic Hears the Charges
U.S. authorities ready to fumigate Senate
CDC preps for possible smallpox scare
U.S. Sets Up Plan to Fight Smallpox in Case of Attack
A Muscular Lobby Tries to Shape Nation's Bioterror Plan
MoD takes military campaign to schools
Teachers told not to preach against the war
Marijuana Crackdown
Marijuana Misjudgment
Palestinian Kills 2 and Injures More Than 40 in Jerusalem Ambush
Israel Destroys Palestinian Factories
A New Alliance Could Nudge Aside the Old
Massacre in Nigeria
US soldiers turn on Pentagon over war tactics
New Army surgical teams are 'right over the hill'
U.S. Special Forces Soldier Is Rescued From Afghanistan
A Vigorous Debate on U.S. War Tactics
Rebels Say They Launched a Major Offensive on Taliban City
The Coalition Is Broad, But Can It Hold?

OTHER
Refugees who make it find Pakistan can be hell
Chinese media see attack on U.S. as price for bullying
Bush relies on advertising experts to win over Muslims

POLICE / PRISONERS
Terrorist hunt gives secret court more power
A Deliberate Strategy of Disruption
"Citizen, Can I See Your ID"
Disputes Erupt on Ridge's Needs for His Job
Sentencing of spy may be postponed
Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI
The Spy Puzzle
Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11
Torture, treachery and spies - covert war in Afghanistan
Guns Won't Win the Afghan War
Echoes of Sept. 11 on the Rio Grande
More and More, War Is Viewed as America's
TERROR BY THE BOOK
Anthrax jokes could bring life term in prison

ACTIVISTS
Oden a Victim of Dirty Politics
Alternatives to War
Just War or Criminal Bombing? The Rule of Lawlessness



-------- NUCLEAR

Action Behind the Scenes Oct. 28-Nov.3

November 4, 2001,
David E. Sanger
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/weekinreview/04WEEK.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=print

Publicly, the White House says to expect no great breakthroughs when Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrives in Washington this week. Privately, each country is maneuvering as fast as it can. Mr. Bush thinks the Russians are willing to allow him to go ahead with antimissile tests, even if they violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. In return, the Russians think America will deeply cut its nuclear arsenal (something the Russians want to do also, to save money), usher Russia into the World Trade Organization and begin to integrate the country into Europe.

----

Nuclear Experts' Nightmare: Terrorists Steal a Warhead
But Specialists Disagree on Whether They Could Fashion Atomic Weapon From Uranium or Plutonium

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36150-2001Nov3?language=printer

Nuclear weapons experts say the greatest threat posed by terrorist groups seeking nuclear weapons comes from their stealing a warhead or obtaining highly enriched uranium or plutonium from which they could fashion a nuclear device.

"We have been worrying about this kind of threat emerging for years," Roger L. Hagengruber, senior vice president for national security and arms control at Sandia National Laboratories, said Friday. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, "my worry index has gone up substantially," Hagengruber said, adding that the skills shown by the al Qaeda terrorist network putting together that operation demonstrate "the potential is there."

Hagengruber said the first threat of terrorists like Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, acquiring a nuclear capability comes from their stealing a weapon. That is "the most devastating scenario," according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

But Hagengruber noted that U.S. weapons have built-in locks to prevent their being exploded, a secure system that he said would take outside scientists years to break.

Hagengruber added that, having worked with the Russians on security for their weapons, "I just don't think Russians are missing weapons, they care about this . . . they care about safety and security about theirs as we do about ours."

Bin Laden or others obtaining highly enriched uranium is the second greatest threat, according to the IAEA and other experts.

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said on Monday that "while we cannot exclude the possibility that terrorists could get hold of some nuclear material, it is highly unlikely they could use it to manufacture and successfully detonate a nuclear bomb."

Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a research and advocacy center on nuclear proliferation and terrorism, disagreed. He said a team of five former U.S. weapons designers "found that terrorists indeed would be capable of making an effective, first-generation nuclear weapon if they could obtain enough reactor-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium."

But those designers said terrorists working with the material would have to be trained in physical, chemical and metallurgical properties of nuclear materials, the characteristics of their fabrication, high explosives, chemical propellants, hydrodynamics and electrical circuitry.

"It is exceedingly unlikely that any single individual, even after years of assiduous preparation, could equip himself to proceed confidently in each part of the diverse range of necessary knowledge and skills," the panel wrote in a 1997 paper. It concluded that at least three specialists would be required.

Hagengruber said that if an aspiring bomb builder had enough pure, highly enriched uranium, and had some fundamental understanding of nuclear weapons design, he "could create a situation with a 10 percent chance of having a sizable explosive yield."

But obtaining the roughly 30 kilograms -- or 65 pounds -- of highly enriched uranium required for such a result is a difficult task, according to counterterrorism experts.

Much less plutonium is needed for a nuclear explosion, but it is far more dangerous to handle and much more difficult to treat in a manner that would cause a nuclear explosion.

If a terrorist group succeeded in obtaining enough fissile material, it would need a place where it could work "uninterrupted for a significant period of time," according to David Albright and his colleagues at the Institute for Science and Security. "The necessary weaponization facilities can be small," Albright wrote in September, noting that South Africa's "initial nuclear weapons effort in the 1970s used small, rudimentary facilities that were extremely difficult to detect by overseas intelligence agencies."

One other consideration is what is known as a dirty bomb, a device containing radioactive materials and explosive chemicals that is detonated to contaminate a selected area.

The potential impact from such a device can be measured using the experience recorded in 1987 in the Brazilian city of Goiania. There, some scrap scavengers broke into an abandoned radiological clinic and stole a capsule containing a little more than an ounce of highly radioactive cesium 137. The capsule was cut into more than 100 pieces, which were passed along to family members and friends around the city.

"Fourteen people were overexposed to radiation out of 249 contaminated," according to the IAEA. "Four subsequently died and more than 110,000 had to be continuously monitored. To decontaminate the area, 125,000 drums and 1,470 boxes were filled with contaminated clothing, furniture, dirt and other materials; 85 houses had to be destroyed."

-------- india / pakistan

Pak does not trust US with its nukes

TONY ALLEN-MILLS
The Sunday Times
Sunday, November 4, 2001
http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1648795793

WASHINGTON: Fears of fundamentalist upheaval in Pakistan have aroused concerns in Washington that part or all of Islamabad's arsenal of nuclear weapons may have to be moved to China for safekeeping from foreign attack. The prospect that loose warheads might be loaded onto helicopters or moved around a region foaming with fundamentalist turmoil is adding to fears in Washington that the war in Afghanistan might provoke a nuclear crisis.

The threat to weapons widely regarded as the Pakistan military's "crown jewels" has forced Islamabad to consider what one American expert described as the "ultimate worst-case scenario" of removing warheads to China, Pakistan's closest strategic ally in the region.

China's nuclear relations with Pakistan have long been the focus of controversy. Chinese scientists are believed to have played a key role in developing Pakistan's nuclear programme in the early 1980s. The two countries share a mistrust of India, which has also developed nuclear weapons.

In the 1990s relations between Beijing and Washington were strained when American officials discovered that China had supplied Islamabad with magnetic components for a centrifuge used in enriching uranium, a material used in warheads. US experts believe that Pakistan possesses between 30 and 50 warheads. Islamabad has also developed facilities for making weapons-grade plutonium.

The precise locations of Pakistan's nuclear weapons are highly secret. Several Washington sources said last week that senior Pakistani officers had been forced to consider a range of scenarios, from thefts of weapon materials to US bombing raids on nuclear facilities. The arrest in Pakistan of three nuclear scientists with alleged Taliban sympathies heightened concern that bomb-making secrets may have leaked to Afghanistan.

But even under extreme duress, several US sources said, many elements of the Pakistani military would resist surrendering custody of their warheads to China. The risks of any deal with China are obvious. China is certain to be deeply wary of being linked to fundamentalist conflict. Yet American experts believe that Beijing represents the only haven that Pakistan would dare to trust.

In a bid to defuse concern, US officials are understood to have offered Pakistan high-tech assistance to improve the security of missile vaults and update both command and control communications, and the multiple-code custody arrangements that theoretically prevent rogue missile launches.

The issue was discussed by General Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, during his recent visit to Pakistan. A State Department official said last week Washington was "confident that Pakistan is taking steps to assure the safety of these (nuclear) assets". But other American sources said Pakistan was reluctant to accept US technology for fear that it might be bugged by the CIA in order to establish the whereabouts of warheads. The threat that Osama Bin Laden may acquire nuclear bomb-making materials is weighing heavily on American officials. "Nobody in the Bush administration wants to be held responsible if Al-Qaida gets a nuke," said George Perkovich, an Asian nuclear programme expert, who has urged the State Department to include China in talks on Pakistan's nuclear problems. "They are working their asses off on this," he said.

Pakistan's military establishment was said last week to have been shaken by reports that America, India or Israel might be planning pre-emptive strikes on nuclear sites to prevent weapons falling into fundamentalist hands. "The generals are panic-stricken," said one Pakistani source.

Abdul Sattar, the Pakistani foreign minister, insisted last week the arsenal was secure. But Washington officials have expressed mounting alarm that any coup attempt against General Pervez Musharraf, the military president, might put Pakistan's nuclear arsenal at risk.

Pakistani generals were appalled by one authoritative American report last week that an elite Pentagon undercover unit, trained to disarm nuclear weapons, was exploring plans for a mission inside Pakistan. "Every paranoid fear they have had over the past 20 years about people coming to get our missiles is suddenly coming to the fore," said Zia Mian, a Pakistani physicist and authority on the nuclear programme.

----

U.S. Worries About Pakistan Nuclear Arms
Officials Try to Guard Against Arsenal, Radioactive Material Going to Terrorists

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36075-2001Nov3?language=printer

About two weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a group of medium-level Bush administration officials met with experts on South Asia for a discussion of whether war in Afghanistan might detonate a series of bigger problems in Pakistan -- including the loss of control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

That arsenal holds about 30 nuclear weapons and perhaps as many as 50, according to experts on Pakistan's nuclear program. There has been mounting concern in the United States that those weapons, their plans or some of the radioactive materials could fall into the hands of terrorists or their allies should the Pakistani government fall as a result of its decision to support the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

"If domestic instability leads to the downfall of the current Pakistani government, nuclear weapons and the means to make them could fall into the hands of a government hostile to the United States and its allies," said David Albright, a South Asia expert at the Institute for Science and International Security.

Those fears were fanned a week ago when Pakistan detained two retired nuclear scientists, including Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former chief designer and director of the country's Khoshab Atomic Reactor who for the past three years has run a relief organization and traveled frequently to Afghanistan.

Mahmood was a pioneer in Pakistan's efforts to enrich uranium, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons, and held a patent on a technique for stopping leaks of heavy water from enrichment plants. Later he helped manage the construction of a reactor that produces plutonium, also used in nuclear weapons.

Mahmood has made no secret of his political views. After Pakistan exploded a nuclear device in May 1998, Mahmood said the country should not give in to international pressure to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Instead, he said, Pakistan should enhance its capability to "at least match our enemy," India, "in order to safeguard our independence."

The other detained nuclear scientist, Abdul Jajid, worked in Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission.

Pakistan has asserted that its nuclear arsenal is safe. Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said in a statement Friday that "Pakistan has an impeccable record of custodial safety and security free of any incident of theft or leakage of nuclear material, equipment or technology."

Though the United States usually supports civilian control of nuclear weapons around the world, it has endorsed continued military control of the weapons in Pakistan because the military is seen as more professional and stable than other elements of Pakistani society. Experts say the military chain of command appears intact despite turmoil and reshuffling at the top of the government, and most of the sympathizers of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia in the government are believed to be in the intelligence service.

But Bush officials remain anxious. John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, without singling out Pakistan, said Thursday that since Sept. 11 "my concern about nuclear weapons everywhere has gone up." He said he worried that a hostile state, or nonstate organization, might acquire such a weapon and that the attacks in New York showed they would be willing to use them.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that the United States had "certain knowledge" that the al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden "had an appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction of various types, including nuclear materials."

A recent article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour Hirsch alleged that the U.S. military had a secret plan to destroy Pakistan's nuclear weapons, and that a special team had trained with Israeli advice and assistance. The State Department and Pentagon have denied the report.

Experts doubt such plans could succeed in any case. Because of Pakistan's long-standing fear that Israel, India or the United States might seek to destroy its nuclear weapons program, Pakistan's weapons are probably spread among several sites, making it difficult for any foreign special operations force to destroy or defuse. Experts say Pakistan might keep its warheads separate from missiles, for safer storage.

"People talk about getting the nuclear weapons. I don't know how you would do that," Albright said. "I think it would be very dangerous right now. The Pakistanis are very paranoid about what U.S. intentions are right now."

Administration officials are eager to increase the safety of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. But they want to do so in a way that would not give Pakistan greater confidence to deploy the weapons or fan fears in Islamabad that the United States simply wants to collect information about the weapons so they could be destroyed.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week that he had discussed the issue with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf during his visit to Islamabad last month. "He knows that if he needs any technical assistance on how to improve that security level, we'd be more than willing to help in any way that we can," Powell said.

Some administration officials have raised among themselves the possible transfer of "permissive action links," devices that would prevent warheads from being armed unless a number of people punched in codes. But many experts worry that such devices would encourage Pakistan to deploy weapons now kept in pieces for safekeeping.

Robert Einhorn, the Clinton administration's top nonproliferation official, said the United States should limit aid to improvements in the physical security around nuclear weapons sites through better surveillance equipment.

"We should pursue a program of cooperation that does not contribute to the operational capability of Pakistan's nuclear force," said Einhorn, a fellow at the Center of Strategic and International Studies.

That, however, might not help if the government falls. "The real threat is not that some guys with beards are going to run through and capture these things but that, with a change in government, control will change hands. That's not something better fences is going to solve," said George Perkovich, author of a book on Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

Most experts say the greatest terrorist danger comes from the possible theft of nuclear material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium. They said the theft of a nuclear weapon would be more difficult and more easily detected by Pakistani authorities.

That fissile material could be given to Iraq, which has sought to make its own nuclear weapons.

Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project said an even greater danger would be that a terrorist could obtain nuclear waste from a Pakistani plant and use it in a conventional explosion to spread hazardous radioactive material. Though the explosion would kill more people, at least initially, than the radioactive waste, it would have a "terror effect," Milhollin said.

---

U.S. Wants to Eye Pakistan Nukes

By Greg Myre,
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline095057_000.htm

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Concerned that Osama bin Laden is seeking to get his hands on nuclear weapons, the United States has dropped its punitive measures against Pakistan's nuclear program and is now offering to advise the country on securing its stockpile.

The Americans spent a decade sanctioning Pakistan for building nuclear weapons, but that policy effectively changed with the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.

The United States now views Pakistan as an essential ally in the war against terrorism. The Americans want to cooperate with Pakistan on nuclear issues to ensure that no nuclear material leaks to bin Laden's al-Qaida network or comes under the control of Islamic fundamentalists inside Pakistan.

President Bush lifted economic sanctions originally imposed in 1990 by his father. And when Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived last month, he went a step further, proposing that the United States provide training for Pakistan's nuclear facilities.

"During his visit, Colin Powell offered us that kind of support, to train Pakistanis in America on the safeguarding of nuclear installations," said Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar.

Asked if Pakistan had accepted, Sattar responded, "who would refuse?"

Neither Pakistan nor the United States has released details. But the offer is believed to include training on everything from preventing accidents at civilian power plants to guarding against the theft of weapons-grade uranium, said Rifaat Hussain, head of the department of defense and strategic studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

Powell, speaking Wednesday in Washington, said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf "understands the importance of ensuring that all elements of his nuclear program are safe and secure."

Musharraf "knows that if he needs any technical assistance in how to improve that security level, we would be more than willing to help in any way that we can," Powell added.

The shift in U.S. policy does not mean American concerns about Pakistan's nuclear program have eased. If anything, the United States may more worried than ever about an arsenal that includes an estimated 20 to 30 warheads. Pakistan has never said how many weapons it has.

The Americans have three big concerns about Pakistani nuclear weapons: the spread of nuclear material to terrorist groups, the prospect of Islamic fundamentalists taking power in Pakistan, and the fear of a nuclear war between Pakistan and archrival India.

How serious is each threat?

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday that bin Laden's network has been trying for years to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Rumsfeld named no countries. However, speculation has focused on Pakistan, which until the Sept. 11 attack had backed Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, which in turn has harbored bin Laden.

There's also a widespread belief that the former Soviet Union, with its widely scattered nuclear program, impoverished scientists and soldiers and often lax security, would be the best place to look for a stolen nuke.

Yossef Bodansky, a former consultant to the U.S. State and Defense Departments and author of "Bin Laden, the Man who Declared War on America," wrote that bin Laden has tried but failed to acquire weapons of mass destruction in several parts of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, Kazakstan, Ukraine and Chechnya.

Politics are turbulent in Pakistan, but the country has kept a tight lid on nuclear materials and technology since it launched the program in the mid-1970s, noted Hussain, the analyst.

He said Pakistan is proud of being the only Islamic country to build nuclear bombs, and has rebuffed efforts by other Islamic countries, including Iran and Libya, to acquire technology and material.

Last week, Pakistan arrested two retired nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mehmood and Abdul Majid. But the government insisted they were being questioned about alleged pro-Taliban sympathies, not about passing on nuclear secrets. Both were released, but a presidential spokesman said they were called in again Saturday for questioning.

- Pakistan's history of military coups has raised fears that Islamic fundamentalists in the officer corps could someday seize power, thereby gaining control over Pakistan's nukes.

Musharraf, who came to power in his own coup two years ago, recently purged the senior military ranks of officers viewed as Islamic fundamentalists. Five of the top 14 officers were moved to lesser positions.

"This threat has receded," said Hussain. "Anyone harboring these kinds of ideas has been sidelined."

Islamic parties have been staging noisy street protests against Musharraf's decision to abandon the Taliban and side with the United States.

However, the parties have never fared well in elections, and throughout Pakistan's 54-year history, its leaders have sought close ties with the United States and the West.

- Nuclear tension between Pakistan and India has created several crises in the past decade and many believe it remains the greatest threat to the region.

The countries conducted back-to-back nuclear tests in 1998, and a year later were fighting yet again over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Both countries have nuclear weapons that could be delivered by warplanes or missiles. However, neither has the "push-button" capability to launch, according to Aslam Beg, a Pakistani retired army chief.

Pakistan keeps its nuclear warheads separate from the other components of the weapon, Beg said, adding that the bomb would first have to be assembled, and then launched from either from a missile or a plane.

"There would be a gap of hours, or even days before it could be put together," said Beg.

Pakistan and India remain archenemies, exchanging artillery fire almost daily across the disputed frontier in Kashmir. However, they have agreed not to target each other's nuclear facilities, and even hard-liners such as Beg believe the existing tensions aren't an insurmountable obstacle to progress on the nuclear issue.

Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, normally a harsh critic of Pakistan, even had a kind word to say this week about Pakistan's handling of its nuclear program.

"Politics apart, I must give (the Pakistanis) credit. They are responsible people and will not allow people to walk away with nuclear weapons," said Fernandes.

--------

India to build Russian-aided nuclear power plant

Reuters
Sunday, November 4, 2001
http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/041101/dLNAT01.asp

New Delhi - India will build a 2,000-megawatt nuclear power plant with technical and financial assistance from Russia, a government statement said late on Saturday. The plant was approved by a cabinet panel a day before Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee begins a trip to Russia, the United States and Britain to promote New Delhi's interests in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Vajpayee is due to meet President Vladimir Putin during his November 4 to 7 visit in Russia.

"The project will open a new window for the country in the high technology area of advanced Light Water Reactor technology and wide-ranging scientific and technological cooperation...in the vital field of atomic energy," the statement said.

The Cabinet Committee for Economic Affairs approved spending of 131.7 billion rupees for the power project.

India would spend 67.55 billion rupees and the rest would be funded by soft credit from Russia, India's friend during the Cold War era.

Construction would begin next May on the nuclear power station, to be built at Kudankulam in the Tirunelvelli district of Tamil Nadu.

The first unit of 1,000 MW will start generating power in 2007 and the second unit will begin a year later, it said.

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-------- russia

Russian Agrees ABM Pact Is 'Relic of the Cold War'

Sunday, November 4, 2001
BY DAVE MONTGOMERY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
http://www.sltrib.com/11042001/nation_w/145940.htm

MOSCOW -- Russia displayed flexibility toward the United States' position on missile defense Saturday as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov acknowledged that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a "relic of the Cold War."

Ivanov's statement after a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raised U.S. hopes that Russia is receptive to a compromise on missile defense and strategic arms cuts. But the Pentagon chief left hours later with no concrete signs of a breakthrough.

Rumsfeld met with Ivanov and President Vladimir Putin in back-to-back meetings to prepare for a mid-November summit between Putin and President Bush in the United States. The two presidents made progress in missile defense talks last month in Shanghai.

Bush has pressed for a U.S. missile defense system to protect the United States from "rogue nations," contending that the Sept. 11 attacks underscore the nation's vulnerability to all forms of terrorism.

The 1972 ABM treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union bans missile defense systems on the theory that neither side will attack the other if it is unable to defend itself.

Rumsfeld and the Russian officials said they were not ready to announce a pre-summit agreement. But Ivanov said for the first time that Russia finds some common ground with the United States in viewing the treaty as obsolete.

"We often hear that the treaty is hopelessly outdated, a relic of the Cold War. Partially -- I stress partially -- I agree," Ivanov said. "All the fundamental Russian or Soviet-U.S. accords are relics, to some extent."

Ivanov also said NATO is "in many ways, a relic."

"Russia and the United States now have mutual understanding and the desire to look to the future together," he said.

But he added the two countries must "create something different" before scrapping the ABM treaty. Russia has maintained the treaty is the cornerstone of nuclear stability.

"Since we are no longer enemies but partners, we should trust each other," Ivanov said. "There are good prospects -- we can move forward faster in such issues as the struggle against terrorism and the reduction of weapons of mass destruction."

The two sides are believed to be close to a deal allowing the United States to proceed with missile defense testing without pulling out of the treaty. Each country would agree to cut the number of nuclear warheads by two-thirds, down to 1,750 to 2,250 on each side from about 6,000 each.

Putin has insisted on deep cuts in nuclear arsenals as a condition for any agreement on missile defense. The presidents agreed to link discussions on missile defense and arms cuts when they met for the first time in Slovenia in June.

Rumsfeld declined to say when or if the United States would withdraw from the ABM treaty. "I'll leave it to the president of the United States," he told reporters.

Arms talks are expected to dominate the agenda of the Nov. 13-15 summit. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who met with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier this week in Washington, told reporters it is unlikely that the summit will produce a formal agreement.

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

Reactors and Their Fuel Are Among the Flanks U.S. Needs to Shore Up

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 - As they survey the industrial landscape for objects that terrorists could turn into weapons, members of Congress, governors and others are showing growing anxiety about the vulnerability of nuclear reactors, and especially their spent fuel.

The Coast Guard and the National Guard are already patrolling many plants, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says improvements have been made since Sept. 11 to make reactors less susceptible to sabotage. The industry emphasizes that many design features intended to protect plants against accident result in "robust" structures that are also resistant to military attack.

But studies that were available until recently on the Internet are being cited by a variety of others as reason to worry. One, done 20 years ago for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, raises the possibility of an airplane crashing into a containment dome or some less-hardened part of a reactor and causing a meltdown. Another, dated September 2000, suggests that breaching a cask used to store spent fuel would create a lethal radiation dose in an area many times larger than that caused by a 10- kiloton nuclear weapon.

Other experts note that the spent fuel pools can contain 20 to 30 times as much radioactive material as the reactor core does. And the pools are in buildings not nearly as strong as those that house the reactors.

"I'm not so worried about the core; I'm worried about the spent fuel pool," said Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, who has asked for the establishment of a permanent five- mile no-flight zone around the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in the southeastern corner of his state. "There's basically no protection there," he said in a telephone interview.

Experts disagree about the extent of the vulnerability, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry say there is no cause for alarm. But the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted Thursday to require the commission to review the potential for attacks on nuclear plants , specifically to identify a new "design basis threat," or threat around which the plant's defenses are geared. The commission had opposed the amendment.

The provision's author, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, is a longtime opponent of the industry. Still, he won the near-unanimous agreement of his colleagues. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is refusing to take up the question at all," Mr. Markey said. "We're mandating that they take it up."

His amendment would also guarantee the continued existence of the office within the N.R.C. that evaluates physical protection at reactors. Before Sept. 11, the agency had a plan to turn that function over to an industry group, which it said could run tests more frequently.

The details of the design basis threat against which the plants are tested are classified, but the threat is known to be a commando-type attack. Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a nonproliferation group, suggested today that the basis should be "19 suicidal terrorists, technically sophisticated, coming at you from different directions." That would describe the groups that hijacked four airliners on Sept. 11.

Some arguments are revised versions of the case that opponents have made against nuclear power for years. "We've never heard of a terrorist taking aim at a wind turbine," said Anna Aurelio, legislative director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which favors ending the use of nuclear power.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's chairman, Richard Meserve, said that various improvements had been made since Sept. 11, but he added that reactors were smaller than either the World Trade Center towers or the Pentagon and, thus, more difficult to crash into. "It would not be a trivial thing to have a kamikaze attack," Mr. Meserve said. "It's a lot harder to hit than the World Trade Center."

"We have all kinds of infrastructure in this country that is vulnerable to aircraft," he added. "You think about dams, chemical plants, refineries, skyscrapers, pipelines, any number of things.

"I don't particularly lose any sleep over collisions with spent fuel pools, as compared to those other things."

But threats to the nation's nuclear power industry have new resonance with some elected officials since the hijackings. "The risk assessment that existed prior to Sept. 11 is clearly inadequate," Representative Peter Deutsch, a Florida Democrat who is another member of the Energy and Commerce committee, said at the committee's meeting on Thursday. He said that a reassessment was urgently needed because some threats were clearly beyond what a private company could defend against and would require government action. In a telephone interview, he added that it was clear that the reactor containment would not be the only possible target.

While the most obvious area of concern at a nuclear plant is the reactor, which operates under high temperatures and pressures and could vent radioactive steam in an accident, the bulk of the radioactive material at most plants is in the spent fuel pool.

The radioisotopes, like cesium and strontium, are created in the reactor by splitting uranium. Since the fuel is moved from the reactor after about three years, it begins to accumulate in the spent fuel pool. While there, it sits under about 25 feet of water, which shields the radiation and carries off the heat that continues to emanate from the fuel.

The industry estimates that even if all cooling stopped, the water would not begin boiling for 20 to 40 hours, and that even if it boiled, all that would be needed to end the problem is to add more water through something as simple as a fire hose. "These are huge structures, with a lot of inertia," said Lynnette Hendricks, director of licensing at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association.

Critics say that if the fuel were allowed to get too hot, it could ignite the cladding - a metal called zirconium - that holds the uranium fuel in place. The metal was selected primarily because it can be easily penetrated by neutrons, the sub- atomic particles that sustain a chain reaction.

But a petition filed earlier this week with the N.R.C. by a nuclear safety group argued that the zirconium could provide the chemical energy to fuel a fire that would disperse the radioactive materials. The group was seeking to prevent the owners of the Millstone nuclear plant, in Waterford, Conn., from storing more fuel in a pool there.

Until recently, the commission's staff said that zirconium would not burn once the fuel was a few years old, and its heat production was reduced as some of the radiation died off. But earlier this year, the staff retreated from that position.

Still, Ms. Hendricks said that to set up a situation in which such a fire could occur, "you need to hook up a lot of `what-ifs.' "

The other way to store fuel is to put it in dry casks, massive concrete and steel boxes filled with inert gas. Before Sept. 11, safety advocates and nuclear engineers described this as safer, at least for older fuel, because it used no water for fuel to leak into and no pumps to fail.

But the casks sit outside the plant buildings, sometimes in sight from roads or nearby hillsides. They have been tested for transit accidents, but their security against attack with an antitank weapon or other armament is less certain.

A draft study by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements discussed the risk of shipping spent fuel and calculated that breaching a cask could produce a lethal radiation dose in an area of 2,700 square kilometers. In comparison, the study said, a 10-kiloton nuclear blast would produce those doses in 47 square kilometers.

Government officials note, though, that creating a hole in a cask is not the same as dispersing its contents; dispersion would depend on the size of the breach and the energy available to break up the fuel.

The federal government was supposed to take responsibility for disposing of civilian reactor fuel in 1998, but the plan is now more than 10 years behind schedule. The Energy Department is trying to demonstrate that Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, is a suitable spot for deep burial, but has encountered a variety of problems.

So the spent fuel risk, however great it turns out to be, will stay with the plants for years to come. In Wiscasset, Maine, where the Maine Yankee nuclear plant used to operate, the state is demanding the fuel be hauled out. Otherwise, the site could become, in the words of Paula Craighead, the state's nuclear safety adviser, "Yucca Mountain without the mountain."

-------- maryland

FAA Prohibits Flights Over Calvert Cliffs Plant

By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page SM03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33094-2001Nov2?language=printer

The airspace above Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant and other such facilities throughout the nation has been placed off-limits to general aviation flights for at least a week amid continued concerns about terrorist threats.

The Federal Aviation Administration's order issued Tuesday covers 86 nuclear sites and prohibits flying within a radius of 10 nautical miles and below 18,000 feet. The ban was to remain in effect at least until midnight Eastern time this Tuesday.

The ban doesn't apply to medical, police, firefighting and rescue aircraft authorized by air traffic control, according to the FAA.

The list of affected sites was given to the FAA by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has also advised nuclear power plants to take additional precautions beyond those already in effect, according to Sue Gagner, an NRC spokeswoman.

"We issued an advisory to the nuclear facilities that they should strengthen perimeter security . . . with site security staff and urging them to request augmentation of their security patrols . . . with local law enforcement, state police and/or National Guard, if needed."

Calvert Cliffs officials would not comment specifically about their response to the NRC request, except to say that the National Guard has not been called to the site.

"We did get that message," said Karl Neddenien, a plant spokesman. "We did take appropriate action.

"We figure one of the key elements of a security program is to not discuss how the program operates."

The facility, however, is trying to alert the public to a regularly scheduled annual test of the emergency sirens within 10 miles of the plant, set for noon tomorrow. The routine test is required by the NRC, Neddenien said.

He said that within the 10-mile radius there are 72 sirens, primarily in Calvert County but also in St. Mary's County, as well as Dorchester County across the Chesapeake Bay. Each will sound for three minutes.

"The purpose of the siren system is to alert the public to turn to one of the radio stations that will be broadcasting information," Neddenien said.

Neddenien acknowledged that the drill's timing is very unfortunate, with residents already jittery over warnings about possible terrorists attacks, but the plant has tried "to do all we can to avoid alarming our neighbors."

"For nearly a month now, the local radio station . . . has been running public service announcements," he said, as have local newspapers, all "with a shared goal of avoiding any kind of needless concern by the public when the sirens sound on Monday."

Staff writer Michael Amon contributed to this report.

-------- missouri

Missouri governor says DOE broke agreements on shipment of nuclear waste

The Associated Press
Saturday, Nov. 3, 2001; 10:48 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011103/aponline224821_000.htm

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Gov. Bob Holden accused the U.S. Energy Department of breaking agreements on the shipment of nuclear waste through Missouri earlier this year and raised security concerns in light of Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Holden asked the department to rethink shipping radioactive waste through Missouri, specifically through densely populated areas.

"In light of the recent terrorist attacks on our nation, I think it only appropriate for the Department of Energy to revisit the practice of shipping spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste through densely populated areas," Holden said in the letter.

He accused the department of failing to avoid rush-hour traffic and major public events on June 28 when the shipments passed through Missouri.

When the convoy carrying the waste arrived at the outskirts of St. Louis around 2:30 p.m., Holden sought to delay it. The trucks were allowed to proceed shortly after 7 p.m. and made their way along Interstate 70 across the state.

In its official notice, the Energy Department had written that the waste would go through Iowa, not Missouri.

Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said federal officials worked with Missouri for months leading up to the shipment and went beyond what the state was requiring for security. "We only seem to run into problems in Missouri," he said.

-------- washington

Old poisons, new worries:
At Northwest sites storing the weapons of world wars, soldiers on alert

By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter
Sunday, November 04, 2001
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=umahanford04m&date=20011104

On the Oregon side of the state line, near where the Columbia River bends west instead of south, military troops watch over deteriorating rockets packed with enough nerve gas to annihilate a small country.

Forty-five miles north, armed security forces outside Richland safeguard a working nuclear-power plant fueled by 154 tons of radioactive uranium. Nearby, four tons of plutonium are under equally heavy guard at the 560-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

While there's been no terrorist threat at any of these locations, the federal government has acknowledged what may be each site's vulnerability - the crash of a jumbo jet.

Experts say isolation makes the Umatilla Chemical Depot, the nuclear reactor and Hanford itself unattractive - and unlikely - targets. Potential invaders would be more likely to try to steal, rather than destroy, the sites' most dangerous stuff. All are housed in structures designed to protect against everything from bombs to lightning.

But the events of Sept. 11 focus new attention on security issues that may have seemed less significant a few months ago:

• Four decades after chemical weapons began arriving in the Oregon desert for storage, the depot and its neighbors are still ironing out glitches in elaborate disaster-response systems.

• The nuclear-power industry is facing new pressure to show it can defend itself against terrorism - an area some even within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) contend has been flawed for decades.

In nearly half its own top-secret mock-terrorist attacks on the nation's 103 nuclear plants, NRC investigators found "significant weaknesses," according to a 1998 internal memo.

• After suicide bombers turned commercial jets into missiles in New York and near Washington, D.C., the NRC admitted it had no information on whether such nuclear-power plants - including the 1,200 megawatt facility near the Tri-Cities - could withstand a crash by a Boeing 757 or 767.

"The (engineering) calculations for Columbia Generating Station being hit by an airliner have not been done," said power-plant spokeswoman Laura Dovey. When the plant was built 20 years ago, the risk was deemed too remote to warrant consideration.

"Terrorists weren't flying planes into buildings at that time."

• At the weapons depot outside Hermiston, Ore., where the U.S. Army is making plans to destroy 3,717 tons of stockpiled sarin, VX and mustard-gas munitions, officials detailed risks years ago.

In a 1996 report, the Army described one of its potential worst-case disasters: a crash by a large plane followed by a fire, which could kill up to 10,300 people. On a breezy day, people could die 77 miles downwind.

"We've kind of got it all here," said Deanna Davis, with Benton County Emergency Services. All the facilities are either neighboring or in Benton County.

In recent weeks, the Army, the two states and county authorities have stepped up security at the sites, creating checkpoints, restricting public access, beefing up armed personnel and conducting more rigorous drills. At least 10 states have National Guard troops defending reactors, but Washington is not among them.

"No National Guard troops have been requested," said Dana Middleton, spokeswoman for Gov. Gary Locke. "I can tell you though: You can't get anywhere near there."

The Federal Aviation Administration has sealed off airspace for three miles above each area and emergency authorities who have trained for years say they are prepared to handle anything - and expect nothing at all.

"You'd win the lottery several times before something would happen," said Brian Calvert, with Benton County Emergency Services.

Risks at nuclear reactor

Ten years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission quietly began mock sabotage attacks on the nation's nuclear plants to test their strength against terrorism.

Led by David Orrik, an NRC staff member and ex-Navy SEAL, a small band of intruders approaches a plant and tries to gain control of the site and its nuclear material. They test equipment, attempt to beat alarms and try to sneak through barriers by jumping, crawling and climbing.

While not made public, the attacks aren't secret among the industry. Sometimes they're scheduled six months in advance.

Still, from 1991 to 1998, the pretend terrorists were successful in 26 of 55 attempts, Orrik wrote in a memo to his superiors in 1998. In all but two of those cases, the power plants' security forces were defeated even as they followed their own security plans.

Security at nuclear-power plants has been a point of controversy within the industry for years.

In 1995, an FBI agent testified that Islamic militants linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had discussed targeting nuclear-power plants. Yet in 1998, the NRC disbanded its anti-terrorism exercises as too expensive, sparking internal disputes until the Clinton administration reinstated them. Before Sept. 11, the NRC was considering giving nuclear plants greater latitude to test themselves.

The risk is not a nuclear explosion; power plants can't physically explode. At issue is the release of radiation. Power plants are designed to withstand earthquakes and fires and are among the strongest structures anywhere, built with multiple layers of steel and concrete. Any accidental release would require simultaneous damage to fuel cells and a rupture of containment facilities.

"The building is pretty robust, heavily fortified, and primary containment is several feet thick with concrete," Dovey, with Washington's nuclear plant, said.

Given the right wind conditions during a release, emergency planners acknowledge potentially harmful radiation could blanket small communities just outside the reservation's boundaries. But county officials are so confident in their response plans - and the miles between the reactor and population centers - they worry less about a radiation release than a panicked exodus by an uniformed public.

And, as Dovey pointed out, the Columbia Generating Station's last mock attack was in 1998. Unlike some of its counterparts, its performance was "excellent." According to an internal memo filed to an NRC safety chief: "It demonstrated that the security-response force could provide a protected, safe environment for the operators to operate and control the reactor within their normal training and qualification."

While the most obvious area of concern at a nuclear plant is the reactor, radioactive material at most nuclear-power plants includes spent fuel.

The federal government was supposed to take responsibility for disposing of civilian reactor fuel in 1998, but the plan is now behind schedule.

NRC Chairman Richard Meserve said various improvements had been made since Sept. 11, but he added that reactors were smaller than the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and, thus, more difficult to crash into. "It would not be a trivial thing to have a kamikaze attack," Meserve said. A reactor is "a lot harder to hit than the World Trade Center."

"We have all kinds of infrastructure in this country that is vulnerable to aircraft," he added. "You think about dams, chemical plants, refineries, skyscrapers, pipelines, any number of things. I don't particularly lose any sleep over collisions with spent-fuel pools, as compared to those other things."

Umatilla up close

On Dec. 30, 1999, sirens mounted on 50-foot poles began to howl over Eastern Oregon, across the Columbia River from the tiny Washington towns of Plymouth and Paterson.

Loudspeakers issued verbal commands - some places only in Spanish - telling residents of a toxic release at the 19,000-acre Umatilla chemical-weapons depot. Roadside reader boards broadcast the same caution.

"Some people sheltered in place," recalled Army spokesman Jim Hackett, meaning residents quickly sealed their homes using government-supplied emergency kits that include plastic and duct tape. The urgency was clear. One-tenth of a drop of sarin gas inhaled is enough to block all the nerve receptors that allow muscles to relax. VX is even more potent.

"Your muscles contract and keep getting tighter and tighter and tighter until you can't breath and you die," said Donald Smythe, chemical-operations director at the weapons depot.

The depot houses nearly 106,000 rockets each packed with roughly nine pounds of such gas. There's also nerve gas stuffed into land mines, projectiles and bombs - outdated munitions from the Cold and World wars.

There are old spray tanks, designed to sprinkle VX over enemy battlefields. There are more than 2,600 partially filled one-ton containers of mustard gas, a corrosive blistering agent that scorches the flesh.

The armaments were brought in undercover from 1962 to 1969, packed in rail cars with rabbits that monitored for leaks like canaries in a coal mine. The weapons are stored in 89 of 1,001 concrete mole-hill igloos at the 60-year-old depot.

Davis, stockpile-preparedness coordinator for the Benton County emergency program, said between 1,000 and 3,000 people live and work in Washington's "immediate response zone."

Under normal winds, Washington residents would have an hour or more before a dangerous chemical plume arrived. Stronger winds could disperse it in a less-hazardous fashion.

"Given the nature of our distance, we have time on our side, so we would evacuate," Davis said.

Since 1984, 126 of the stored weapons have leaked inside their storage bunkers - eight of them twice. But the Army declares no chemical release has ever escaped the compound.

That day late in 1999 was no different. There was no chemical mishap. Emergency dispatchers were trying to turn on a highway sign to warn of snow and ice but had computer trouble.

Disaster officials have since worked through that kink, but Army officials are still smoothing out others. Chief among pressures is public safety when the military begins incinerating the aging weapons on site.

The Army has trained and retrained for any type of disaster.

"They look at everything from a forklift accident when trying to remove a pallet, and it blocks the door it can't be closed, and one or two rockets automatically take off and explode - that sort of thing," said Wayne Thomas, with Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality.

In the wake of the 1999 incident, the governor created a special safety board. The Army must prove proficiency in 16 safety measures before the panel recommends approval for the incineration program.

During its last exercise this spring, "they successfully passed half of those measures," Thomas said. "They didn't pass the other half."

The Army will try again in 2002.

Seattle Times researcher Vince Kueter contributed to this story. Information from The New York Times is included in this report. Craig Welch can be reached at 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com.

-------- us nuc politics

Many issues face delayed action

USA Today
11/04/2001 - Updated 09:26 PM ET
By Richard Benedetto
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/04/agenda.htm

WASHINGTON - Nearly 2 months after its agenda was completely changed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress is heading toward adjournment with fading hopes of acting on issues that once seemed likely to become law.

High-priority issues such as improving public schools, increasing energy production and giving President Bush broader trade powers have been replaced by emergency needs: financing the war on terrorism, strengthening counter-terrorism laws, making airlines and airports more secure, and shoring up a weakened economy.

As a result, issues with no connection to Sept. 11 are likely to wait until next year:

Education overhaul. Both houses passed bills last spring that would require states to test students in reading and math from grades 3 through 8.

But House-Senate negotiations since July have failed to resolve key disputes, such as how much money should be spent to aid needy schools and enforce higher standards. Both sides say they can reach agreement, but prospects are dimming.

Energy supplies. Bush and Republican leaders want to boost energy production to reduce reliance on Mideast oil.

But most Democrats in the Senate oppose an administration provision that would allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Trade powers. Bush wants authority to negotiate trade agreements that Congress could not amend.

But House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., says Democrats are unlikely to give the president broad negotiating power unless trade partners are required to meet labor, environmental and human rights standards.

Farm aid. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has asked to postpone action on a 10-year program capping or phasing out government payments to large farms. Even if lawmakers attempt to move the bill, the subsidy caps likely are too controversial to resolve.

Patients' rights. Both houses have passed separate versions of legislation giving patients in managed-care plans new protections. But negotiations about when and where those patients could sue their health plans over denial of care never got started.

Campaign finance reform. House proponents of a Senate-passed bill to overhaul the way elections are financed are within a few signatures of forcing GOP leaders to schedule action. But they admit the issue is dead for this year.

Stem cell research. Lawmakers last week dropped an effort to ease the restrictions President Bush has clamped on stem cell research. In return, lawmakers who oppose the research put off Senate action on legislation that would ban human cloning and further restrict research.

Contributing: Jessica Lee

---

Bush seeks support in week full of meetings

USA Today
11/04/2001
By Judy Keen, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/05/bush.htm

In individual meetings with eight world leaders at the White House, Bush will try to shore up the international coalition he quickly assembled after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The sessions mark a new diplomatic phase as the administration tries to quell doubts about the pace and progress of the military campaign in Afghanistan.

And in a speech Thursday, the president will try to fortify Americans' patience with the investigation into anthrax attacks in the United States. The speech will likely be delivered in the evening to give him the widest possible TV audience.

On Saturday, Bush will travel to the United Nations in New York to confer with more heads of state and give another speech outlining progress in the war. Aides say Bush intends to scold allies who haven't fulfilled pledges to find and remove terrorists in their countries.

"The president will remind the international coalition of our common responsibilities in disrupting and defeating terror wherever it exists," Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said Sunday.

Tuesday marks 8 weeks since the attacks Sept. 11, and administration officials want to maintain momentum in the war on terrorism. This week's events are designed to allay public concerns about the administration's handling of bioterrorism, as well as possible erosion of support at home and abroad for military strikes in Afghanistan.

Bush will also welcome the leaders of Algeria, France, Kuwait, Morocco, Great Britain, Brazil, Ireland and India to the White House. The Friday meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee is particularly important, because Bush wants to limit tensions between India and Pakistan. Bush will meet at the United Nations with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Bush speaks Tuesday via satellite to a conference on combating terrorism that's meeting in Warsaw. In those remarks, he's expected to note the ways women are oppressed by the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruling regime. Women in Afghanistan have little access to education or health care.

White House officials say Muslim women, including leaders from around the world, will be asked to emphasize the Taliban's repression in the coming weeks.

Bush expects to deliver some good news on Wednesday, when he'll announce new amounts of terrorists' assets that have been seized or frozen since Sept. 11.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's visit to the White House, also Wednesday, will let Bush showcase the kind of support he expects from other allies. Blair, a steadfast partner in the war, has traveled around the world recruiting partners for the coalition.


-------- MILITARY

Pentagon Weapons at a Glance

The Associated Press
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001; 1:55 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline135522_000.htm

Facts and figures about some of the weapons being used in the war on terrorism:

USS KITTY HAWK, aircraft carrier:
Length: 1,0621/2 feet
Flight deck width: 252 feet
Beam: 130 feet
Displacement: About 80,800 tons with a full load
Speed: More than 30 knots
Aircraft: 85
Crew: Ship's company: 3,150, Air wing: 2,480
Weapons: Sea Sparrow launchers, three 20mm Phalanx CIWS mounts
Date Deployed: April 29, 1961

TOMAHAWK CRUISE MISSILE:

A long-range, jet-powered cruise missile launched from Navy ships and submarines. First used in the 1991-1992 Persian Gulf War, the missile has since been used in several other conflicts, including 1998 attacks on Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

Length: 20 feet, 6 inches with booster, or 18 feet, 3 inches without
Diameter: 20.4 inches
Wingspan: 8 feet, 9 inches
Weight: 2,900 pounds, 3,000 pounds with booster
Cost: $600,000
Range: 1,000 miles
Speed: About 550 mph
Deployed: 1986

B-52:

The Air Force's workhorse bomber, able to drop or fire a wide variety of bombs and missiles. B-52s dropped 40 percent of the ordnance on Iraq during the Gulf War. With airborne refueling, the planes can fly around the world. During the Gulf War, for instance, B-52s took off from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., fired missiles at Iraq, and returned home in a marathon 35-hour mission.

Length: 159 feet, 4 inches
Wingspan: 185 feet
Speed: 650 mph
Range: 8,800 miles without refueling
Weapons: 70,000 pounds of ordnance, which can include bombs, mines and missiles
Crew: Five (aircraft commander, pilot, radar navigator, navigator and electronic warfare officer)
First deployed: 1955
Cost: $74 million

AC-130H/U GUNSHIPS:

A low-flying, loud aircraft - used as much for its deadly accuracy as its psychological impact - the AC-130 is capable of unloading withering fire from side-mounted guns.

Sensors on board the aircraft give it night-operation capability. It has infrared target-seeking equipment, a low-light-level television camera and laser target designators.

The latest versions are outfitted with radar to detect targets at long range, as well as satellite-guided navigation systems.

Primary Function: Close air support, air interdiction and force protection
Thrust: 4,910 shaft horsepower per engine
Length: 97 feet, 9 inches
Height: 38 feet, 6 inches
Wingspan: 132 feet, 7 inches
Speed: 300 mph
Range: Approximately 1,300 nautical miles; unlimited with air refueling.
Ceiling: 25,000 feet
Maximum Takeoff Weight: 155,000 pounds
Armament: AC-130H/U: 40mm cannon and 105mm cannon; AC-130U: 25mm gun
Crew: AC-130U - Five officers (pilot, co-pilot, navigator, fire control officer, electronic warfare officer) and eight enlisted (flight engineer, TV operator, infrared detection set operator, loadmaster, four aerial gunners)
First Deployed: AC-130H, 1972; AC-130U, 1995
Unit Cost: AC-130H, $132.4 million; AC-130U, $190 million

B-2 SPIRIT:

A multi-role bomber capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear bombs.

Many aspects of the stealth process remain classified; however, the B-2's composite materials, special coatings and flying-wing design all contribute.

Length: 69 feet
Wingspan: 172 feet
Speed: high subsonic
Range: Intercontinental, unrefueled
Weapons: Conventional or nuclear weapons
First deployed: 1993
Crew: two
Cost: $1.3 billion

GLOBAL HAWK:

An unmanned spy plane capable of high altitudes and long endurance, while providing near-real-time imagery of a target area. While not fully tested, the aircraft will be capable of surveying an area equivalent to the state of Illinois - or 40,000 nautical miles - during missions that can last more than 35 hours in the air.

Wingspan: 116 feet
Length: 44 feet
Ceiling: 65,000 feet

PREDATOR:

An unmanned spy aircraft, flown remotely by pilots in a van at their base. The video images relayed by the aircraft can potentially be viewed by not only the pilots but others around the world. The Predator can stay in the air for about 40 hours.

Ceiling: 25,000 feet
Wingspan: 48 feet
Length: 26 feet
Weight: 1,500 pounds
Speed: about 90 mph

HELLFIRE MISSILE:

An anti-armor, laser guided, air-to-ground weapon, capable of knocking out tanks. It weighs about 100 pounds, and comes in various models for more specific needs.

E-8C JOINT STARS:

A modified Boeing 707, the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System is an airborne battle management and command center. With a jam-resistant system, it surveys the movement of both friendly and enemy forces on the ground and relays the data in near-real-time to ground stations. It is capable of detecting targets up to 820,248 feet from the aircraft.

Primary Function: Airborne battle management
Thrust: 19,200 pounds per engine
Length: 152 feet, 11 inches
Height: 42 feet, 6 inches
Wingspan: 145 feet, 9 inches
Speed: 390 - 510 knots
Ceiling: 42,000 feet
Maximum Takeoff Weight: 331,000 pounds
Range: 8 hours (unrefueled)
Cost: about $270 million
Crew: Flight crew of four plus mission crew of 15 from the Air Force and three Army specialists
First Deployed: 1996

GBU-28

"Bunker buster" bombs are 5,000-pound, laser-guided bombs used to uproot underground targets, like caves or buried command centers. Developed during the Gulf War in 1991, they are being used against al-Qaida hide-outs and the Taliban, often dropped by the B-2.

----

Pentagon Uses Weapons Mix in Assault

By Robert Burns
AP Military Writer
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001; 1:53 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline135320_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. fight in Afghanistan is relying on an odd mix of weapons - from the past, present and future - for a military that before Sept. 11 already was making the transition from arming for the Cold War to tooling for new threats.

B-52s of Vietnam War vintage - some older than the Air Force pilots flying them - lumber hundreds of miles from an island in the Indian Ocean to drop tons of "dumb" bombs on Taliban trenches.

Million-dollar Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from Navy ships and submarines are aimed at turning terrorist camps into dust clouds.

Army helicopters and Air Force AC-130 gunships watch warily for Stingers, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that the CIA provided to Afghan rebels in their 1980s war against the Soviet Union.

Billion-dollar B-2 bombers, built to evade the Soviets' sophisticated radar networks, fly 44-hour missions from Missouri to drop the latest version of a "bunker buster" bomb first used in the Gulf War.

Aircraft carriers, derided by some as irrelevant relics ready for retirement, launch dozens of fighter-bombers daily from the Arabian Sea, their sights set on decrepit but still dangerous Taliban air defenses and other targets.

One carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk, left most of its usual complement of Navy strike aircraft at their home base in Japan. The Kitty Hawk is loaded with Army special operations helicopters, some of which launched commando raids on Afghanistan on Oct. 20.

The Afghan war also is providing a glimpse of the future for U.S. weaponry.

The Global Hawk, a high-altitude spy plane that flies without a pilot, has been ordered into action over Afghanistan even though it is still in development, yet to be fully tested. Unmanned aerial vehicles, as the Pentagon calls this type of high-tech aircraft, do the job without risking pilots' lives.

Also at work are unmanned Predator aircraft, which fly much lower than the Global Hawk and provide real-time video images of ground targets. An armed version of the Predator, capable of firing Hellfire anti-armor missiles, reportedly has been flown over Afghanistan.

With the Taliban's air defenses largely disabled and winter weather approaching, the Pentagon also is sending into action the E-8 Joint STARS, a modified Boeing 707 jet with radar that can find and track vehicles on the ground at a distance of more than 124 miles, in any weather.

The original idea, of course, was to track tanks and other armor on a traditional battlefield. In Afghanistan, a war that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says is being fought unlike any other, the vehicles to be tracked by Joint STARS include sport utility vehicles and pickups used by the Taliban.

A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, emphasized that Joint STARS can track vehicles in all weather.

"That will be helpful when you're looking for trucks or SUVs or others that are moving around," he said.

The war on the homefront - "homeland security," as the Pentagon calls it - also features a mix of past and future.

Air Force fighters are flying armed missions 24 hours a day over New York and Washington and over other parts of the country from time to time, a domestic air defense effort not seen even during the Cold War.

At the Pentagon and other federal installations in Washington the Army has stationed machines that monitor the air for signs of biological or chemical agents - a new capability that heretofore had been intended for use on a foreign battlefield.

---

A look at recent conflicts as they developed

November 4, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011104-2400360.htm

A month into the Afghanistan campaign, Americans are fighting their way into winter. A month into the Kosovo campaign, they were fighting into spring.

In the Persian Gulf war, it was just plain hot.

The United States attacked Afghanistan in response to terrorists who killed Americans at home. It went to war against Iraq to free Kuwait and protect the region and its supply of oil.

Kosovo was about ethnic killing and regional instability.

These major military campaigns over a decade that also took Americans into harm's way in places such as Bosnia and Somalia, are different in their motivations, goals, size, terrain and much more.

But there are some similarities, too - the stateside goodbyes to sailors and soldiers, the knowledge each day's choreography of military machinery will bring danger, the certainty that innocents abroad will die.

Also common at least to the Afghanistan and Kosovo conflicts is that, about a month into each one, nagging questions arose about whether all that bombing was doing much good.

NATO planes bombed through several weeks of severe weather before they could target Serbian troops and their artillery. Even during the air war that proceeded swiftly against Iraq after months of buildup, fears existed that allies would die in great numbers in the coming ground war.

A look at elements of three wars, in their first month, by the numbers:

• The bombing: The number of combat and bombing flights over Afghanistan, increasing lately, has averaged just over 60 a day. Allies flew 500 missions a day over Yugoslavia and 1,500 a day during the Gulf war.

• The other side: U.S. forces are up against 45,000 to 50,000 Taliban fighters. The United States and its allies faced about 40,000 armed Serbs in Kosovo and roughly 500,000 Iraqi soldiers.

• U.S. casualties: About a month into the Gulf war, U.S. officials said 16 Americans had been killed in combat and 33 in noncombat operations. Thirty were missing in action and eight were prisoners of war. No Americans died in that period over Kosovo; three were taken prisoner. No U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan but two Army Rangers supporting a commando raid died in a helicopter crash in Pakistan and a third soldier was killed in a forklift accident in the Persian Gulf.

• Civilian casualties: Reliable numbers are impossible in the midst of fighting. More than 400 civilian deaths from NATO air strikes were confirmed independently a month into the Kosovo campaign, which was fought to stop the killing and dislocation of civilians by Serbian forces. Iraq claimed 1,600 civilians dead at this point of the Gulf war. The United States, which lost more than 4,600 people in the terrorist attacks, has acknowledged mistaken bombings of some civilian areas while disputing Taliban claims of 1,500 civilian dead.

•U.S. losses: About a month into the Gulf war, 17 aircraft. In the Yugoslavia campaign, Americans lost one stealth bomber, one Apache helicopter and one unmanned reconnaissance plane in that time. In the Afghan war, America lost a helicopter and an unmanned Predator spy plane Friday - bad weather was blamed - as well as the helicopter that crashed in Pakistan, and an additional unmanned aircraft that went down before airstrikes started.

• Opposing losses: A month into the Gulf war, allies had destroyed 72 Iraqi planes and damaged or sunk as many ships, taken more than 1,200 prisoners and prompted 142 Iraqi planes to flee to Iran. Serbian officials said they had lost 2,000 troops, and suffered damage to their military equipment and petroleum supplies. In this conflict, the Pentagon claimed control of the Afghan sky within days but has refused to estimate Taliban troops killed or the range of targets damaged or destroyed.

--------

History Confirms War a Futile Business

Common Dreams
Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Toronto Star
by Dalton Camp
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1024-06.htm

While our allied air forces continue the redistribution of the rubble in Kabul, the objectives and purposes of this "new war" become, like the dust rising from that battered city, more difficult to comprehend.

Historically, there have been necessary wars and wars fought whether necessary or not. But it is a futile business, as history will confirm.

According to one political scientist, who counted the wars of the great powers, from 1495 to 1975, one or another of them has been at war 75 per cent of the time. Astonishingly, one of the more peaceful centuries was the 20th, although it has been, thus far, the bloodiest, as a result of its two world wars.

We have been, if you're counting, marching off to battle much of our time, and here we are, marching off again. There must be something to the view of man as a natural hunter and natural killer.

Still, one would think that man would run out of wars to make or nations to invade or, that at some epiphanous time, nations would conspire to stop the killing, that war would become not the last resort but simply an unthinkable one.

But here we find ourselves at war again, against half the world in general and no one in particular, pulverizing ruins and inflicting "collateral damage" - a euphemism for killing - on people we know nothing of, in a land we have nothing against, hope never to see, in a cause so rhetorical and clothed so much in hyperbole as to be unattainable.

I have been reading of late about the Allied bombing of the German city of Hamburg, in World War II, during July, 1944. At that time we (the Allies) had achieved air superiority. We had also developed superior aircraft and bigger bombs, as well as a means of deceiving the enemy's radar defenses.

On July 25, nearly 800 bombers attacked Hamburg, a nearly helpless city, dropping their loads of 400- and 800- and 1,000-pound bombs and incendiaries. The city was soon ablaze, and without water to fight the fires; in this cauldron, the temperatures would exceed 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. In one week, the number of killed was put at 50,000 - just 1,000 short of those British civilians killed by German attacks in the first four years of the war.

Of course, we "won" the war against infinitely greater and more menacing evil than that of terrorism. But more to the point, subsequent study by professional appraisers has concluded not even all the slaughter of civilians, not the collateral damage wrecked upon Hamburg, Dresden, Essen and the rest made any significant difference either to the result or the war's duration. It did, however, make a difference to those killed in the exercise, including those of our own.

War is an exercise in excess. We emerge from battle choking on the blood of innocents. Self-deception is always helpful to those of delicate sensibility. Hence, we do try to limit collateral damage and imagine ourselves fighting for democracy, justice and - heaven help us - peace. Should one be a refugee, a bombed-out peasant or a child crippled by a mine, a just war is a true oxymoron, at least for those accompanied by a translator.

I have come to be wary of Pentagon briefers. These films of direct hits on arbitrarily defined "objectives" remind one of the underlying irony of this "new war." Bombing has become a kind of elliptical expression of military frustration. When in doubt, bomb. It is to politics what paving used to be to policy.

What is new about this "new war," at ground level where all wars are finally settled, is that the terrorists in our midst - or in their caves - have found the equalizer to war as an exercise in technology. Terror is an extension of war by other means, including stealth, deception and disguise. It is not new that it is a war waged upon innocents; the graveyards of Europe are crowded with those who perished in their kitchens, in their sleep, in their unknowing. What is new is that the oceans no longer protect us from the risks and perils of war because the new enemy has new weapons of an original design and unfamiliar ruthlessness.

Still, when it is finally over, when the struggle is exhausted, when we achieve another peace between another war, we can band together in reunion and, in common folly and arrogance, be reborn in our usual ways, boasting of our superior means and inexhaustible bounty and, while the world will not be the same, can never be so, we will hardly know the difference.

We should not, then, excessively fret over our present condition but view it, as much as we can, as a passing inconvenience. After all, were it a truly serious crisis, we would not, in our considerable genius, be acting like fools and behaving with such compulsive, ruinous mindlessness.

The most dangerous man alive these days is the one who justifies our present folly by asking, "Well, what would you do?" Those who ask the question have no memory and even less imagination. Perhaps, someone will awaken to other Canadian options and possibilities before John Manley does.

Dalton Camp is a political commentator. His column appears in the Toronto Star on Wednesday and Sunday.

-------- afghanistan

Winter's cold may help military track Taliban

11/04/2001
By Dave Moniz,
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/05/winter-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - Conventional wisdom says Afghanistan's harsh winter weather will hamper U.S. military operations. But the Pentagon sees it as an opportunity. U.S. forces plan to use an array of high-tech heat sensors to locate and rout Taliban troops from their hideouts during the cold weather. "It's my judgment that there will be ample opportunity to use a variety of the advantages we have," says Bill Nash, a retired Army general who commanded troops in Bosnia. Nash says one advantage is the ability to locate heat sources on the ground.

The military plans to use thermal sensing devices on fighter jets and helicopters to track the heat coming from cave openings, military vehicles and even groups of soldiers. Officials say that under the right conditions, heat-sensing technologies are more effective in cold climates.

Two years ago, the Air Force began employing a sophisticated computer program known as Target Acquisition Weather Software, which uses climate models and other variables to track differences in heat. One Air Force general says the software can be used effectively in cold weather because of the contrast between heat-emitting objects and the air around them.

The Army uses thermal sensors in tanks to pinpoint targets. Nash says that's why Army tank crews often score higher on nighttime gunnery drills. In the cooler nighttime air, a hot tank engine will appear more clearly on a thermal sensor that it might during the daytime.

A senior military official knowledgeable about thermal sensors says U.S. forces will need to combine on-the-ground intelligence, satellite photographs and airborne thermal technologies to locate Taliban caves and bunkers. He saysthe process is difficult but doable.

The Pentagon has prepared a detailed analysis of winter temperatures in Afghanistan, which vary widely from the lower altitudes of the desert-like southwest to mountains as high as 24,000 feet in the northeast.

According to a senior military official familiar with plans to use thermal sensors, the Pentagon is counting on the fact that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders are "going to have to have some heat source" wherever they hide.

Dave Rockwell, a military analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., says it's unclear whether the Taliban has attempted to modify caves, tunnels or other underground buildings to mask heat. "We don't know what level their sophistication is in camouflaging the thermal signatures," he says.

Rockwell says that depending on the depth of the hideouts, sensors may only be able to pick up heat escaping from the mouths of caves. Even so, senior military officials say, that might be enough to locate and destroy some of the hideouts.

Rockwell says the Pentagon will need accurate intelligence on the ground, so that when they detect heat sources in caves, "you know it's not just a shepherd and a bunch of sheep in there."

The U.S. military used thermal detection to its advantage during the 1991 Gulf War. Using night sensors, Air Force fighter jets were able to pick out and destroy thousands of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles from their engine heat.

---

Bin Laden Arabs buy husbands for their women

BY Christina Lamb, Diplomatic Correspondent
04/11/2001
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$BJFNFAIAAFXITQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=%2Fnews%2F2001%2F11%2F04%2Fwwed04.xml

OSAMA BIN LADEN's Arab bodyguards have begun marrying off their daughters and sisters to Afghan men around Kandahar in the first sign that they do not expect to survive the war.

The secret weddings took place last week in various suburbs and villages around Kandahar and involved hundreds of Arab women being married to locals who agreed to look after them in return for large sums of money.

"The Arabs came at night bringing large numbers of women and suitcases of money," said Abdul Razza, a teacher from Kandahar who witnessed some of the negotiations. "They asked that the people look after their womenfolk and protect them in the war."

The women were completely covered but Mr Razza believes some were as young as 12 and that they brought their mothers with them. Local mullahs carried out the quick marriage ceremonies.

An estimated 2,000 Arabs from Sudan, Egypt, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates among other countries, lived in the Taliban spiritual capital of Kandahar before the war but fled last month before the start of the American bombing campaign. Some managed to escape the country but many are thought to be in Uruzgan, a mountainous province with a network of caves that is the home province of Mullah Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader.

According to Mr Razza, however, there was no shortage of men agreeing to take the Arab women as wives. "Normally we have to pay for women so they were happy to get brides who came with their own money particularly at the moment with so many shortages and high prices for food and fuel. They also believe it is their Islamic duty to protect these guests." Many of the Kandahari bridegrooms were already married but Islamic law allows a man to have four wives, a custom that dates specifically from times of war when men had gone off to fight leaving many women with no one to look after them.

Many of the Arabs marrying off their women to Kandaharis are believed to be from bin Laden's elite 055 Brigade, a crack squad of 500 Arabs set up five years ago, who have vowed to fight to the death, in addition to his own personal bodyguards. Over the past two weeks the Americans have stepped up the bombing of caves and tunnels where bin Laden and his guards are thought to be hiding.

"The fact that the Arabs feel they can no longer protect the women is the first sign that they believe the war is not going their way," said a Western diplomat.

----

Air Controllers Play Role in Bombing

By Chris Tomlinson
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001; 11:56 a.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline115629_000.htm

ABOARD THE USS PELELIU -- Hidden in the mountains of Afghanistan, armed with rifles and laser beams to mark targets, U.S. special forces have taken on a key role in the war against the Taliban in recent weeks.

As U.S. fighter jets run out of fixed targets, pilots have become more dependent on U.S. ground troops to locate and identify troops and tanks, said Rear Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt battle group.

Working undetected in Afghanistan's rugged terrain, sometimes miles from friendly forces, the specially trained troops - known as forward air controllers - have an especially difficult job.

U.S. special forces teams already are helping anti-Taliban rebels with training and are directing American warplanes to Taliban targets. So far, special forces with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the USS Peleliu remain on standby.

If Marines from the USS Peleliu are ordered to land in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Capt. Howard Gordon will be involved in planning every aspect of the air operation, and then head for the front lines.

Though he has not yet seen combat, Gordon has specialized training in directing precision airstrikes in urban areas, a skill that may be needed as the Taliban are reported to be hiding in residential areas to avoid airstrikes.

He said controllers can call in airstrikes precise enough to send missiles fired from Harrier jump jets through specific windows, without destroying the entire building.

In training "we called in the Harriers to drop bombs in that mock city; it was just a blast to see what they can do," Gordon said.

Forward air controllers have to combine the skills of battlefield tactician, pilot and infantryman, Gordon said.

"I help coordinate how the planes are going to come in and drop their bombs, where they are going to drop their bombs and also coordinate the troops coming in and out of the field by helicopter or C-130 aircraft," Gordon said.

On the battlefield, controllers also help determine what type of aircraft and bombs are needed to destroy a target.

Gordon, a 32-year-old from Milwaukee, said he takes between six and 120 infantrymen with him when he goes into the field, depending on how far they have to go and how long they have to stay. His men are trained to get within eyesight of the enemy without being detected, he said.

"We all strive to sneak in without anyone seeing us," Gordon, who has not yet seen combat, said. "It is hard to do, but it's your goal."

Once he has identified a target to be bombed, Gordon has a variety of ways he can point it out to pilots. During daylight, he can use a radio to talk to the pilot and describe landmarks to pinpoint the target, lob a smoke or luminescent grenade next to it or even use a mirror to reflect sunlight on to it.

Controllers also have high-tech ways of indicating a target. Controllers carry a laser that allows them to point an invisible beam on the target. Laser-guided bombs dropped from attack jets will home in on whatever the laser is shining on with pinpoint accuracy, Gordon said.

Controllers also carry infrared pointers that can be seen with night vision goggles worn by pilots.

The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit is the primary amphibious combat unit in the Arabian Sea, based on the USS Peleliu. Two or three expeditionary units are at sea at any one time, usually accompanying aircraft carrier battle groups.

The Peleliu Amphibious Ready Group - which consists of three ships based in San Diego, Calif. - carries a total of 2,200 Marines and 1,900 sailors.

--------

IN PAKISTAN
Rumsfeld Says Taliban Government Greatly Weakened

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Rumsfeld.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Four weeks of U.S. bombing has greatly weakened the Taliban's ability to operate as a government in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday.

``The Taliban (are) not really functioning as a government,'' Rumsfeld said after arriving in Pakistan, the latest stop on a trip which has taken him to Russia and a pair of Central Asian states bordering Afghanistan.

Militarily, the Taliban are ``using their power in enclaves throughout the country to impose their will on the Afghan people,'' Rumsfeld said. But he added, ``they are not making major military moves. They are pretty much in static positions.''

Rumsfeld said the Taliban were trying to prevent U.S. strikes on their military targets by using mosques as military command centers and for storing ammunition and placing tanks near hospitals and schools. The Taliban are ``actively lying about civilian casualties,'' he added.

Rumsfeld, who arrived from Uzbekistan, spoke after talks with Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has called for a break in the bombing during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan which begins around Nov. 17.

President Bush already has said the bombing was likely to continue through Ramadan. Rumsfeld gave no indication that stand had changed.

``The reality is that the threat of additional terrorist acts is there,'' he said. The United States will be sensitive to the views in the region, he added, but he declined to outline military plans.

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar, who appeared with Rumsfeld at a news conference, said his country wanted the military campaign to be as brief as possible -- but it also needed to achieve its objectives.

At his earlier stop in Uzbekistan, Rumsfeld told reporters that the anti-terrorist campaign was ``proceeding at a pace that is showing measurable progress.''

Rumsfeld's stopovers in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- two nations on Afghanistan's northern border -- came at a time when Washington is looking to send more troops into Afghanistan to scout out targets and train opposition fighters. Uzbekistan in particular has been pointed to by many experts as a possible staging ground for Afghan operations.

But Rumsfeld's visit did not bring any announcements of any change in either country's level of cooperation with the campaign against Afghanistan.

But while Rumsfeld said he ``appreciated'' Uzbekistan's help, he and the Uzbek defense minister said they had not discussed expanding the U.S. presence in this former Soviet republic. Rumsfeld said the United States needed all kinds of assistance in the war against terror, but firmly insisted that he would not detail the contributions of any country.

The United States already has some 1,000 troops in Uzbekistan. Although Uzbekistan has balked at allowing the United States to carry out strikes from its bases, it has agreed that soldiers for search-and-rescue and humanitarian missions can be based on its territory.

Rumsfeld met with Uzbek President Islam Karimov and Defense Minister Qobir Ghulomov on Sunday on his second visit to this Central Asian nation in a month.

During his brief visit to Tajikistan -- which shares a long and volatile border with Afghanistan -- Rumsfeld said he reached no deals on military cooperation, though he said Tajikistan and the United States would form an ``assessment team'' to look into ways in which the country could assist in the military.

Tajikistan currently allows flights carrying U.S. aid to cross its airspace. Foreign Minister Talbak Nazarov said assistance could be expanded to allow overflights of military planes or the use of Tajikistan's air fields.

---

America's pipe dream
A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil

The Guardian
George Monbiot
Tuesday October 23, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,579174,00.html

"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here," Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the first world war ended, "that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.

The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the US government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naοve to believe that this is all it is doing.

www.monbiot.com

-------- asia

N. Korea Criticizes Japan Terror Law

NOVEMBER 04, 05:13 EST
http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=NKOREA%2dJAPAN

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea on Sunday criticized Japan's legislation of a new law that allows its troops to be sent overseas, calling it a dangerous step forward for overseas aggression.

Last week, Japanese lawmakers passed a law allowing its military to join the U.S.-led campaign against Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The law limits Japan to a non-combat role such as transporting supplies, conducting search-and-rescue missions and dispatching medical teams.

But the North interpreted the law as a sign of resurgent militarism.

``Japan is taking the road of overseas aggression again instead of drawing lessons from its defeat in the second world war,'' said Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North's ruling communist party.

The Rodong article was carried by the North's official news agency, KCNA, which was monitored in Seoul.

After its World War II defeat, Japan adopted a pacifist constitution that bans the use of force as a means of settling international conflicts, and prohibits the country from sending troops overseas.

North Korea has said that it ``may be a right option'' for countries to participate in the international campaign against terrorism, but has expressed its opposition to Japan's participation.

Japan ruled the Korean peninsula as a colony for 35 years until its World War II defeat.

-------- balkans

Milosevic Hears the Charges

New York Times
November 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/weekinreview/04WEEK.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=print

The international war crimes tribunal in The Hague usually waives the recitation of indictments. But for one defiant defendant, who has refused to accept legal representation that would ordinarily review the charges, the tribunal made an exception. Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, was forced to listen to the full text, delivered in his own language, of two indictments. The reading of the charges - including murder, torture, plunder and rape in Croatia in 1991 and in Kosovo in 1999 lasted almost four hours.

-------- biological weapons

U.S. authorities ready to fumigate Senate building to kill anthrax spores

Canadian Press
Sunday, November 04, 2001
Montral Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={F8F205E0-27FC-4B7C-8C92-DAF976221DBF}

WASHINGTON (AP) - Authorities were set to order the release of powerful chemicals in a U.S. Senate office building in hopes of killing any lingering anthrax spores. A suspicious letter sent to the Treasury Department was getting a careful look.

One month after the first anthrax case was confirmed, President George W. Bush on Saturday called the anthrax threat "a second wave of terrorist attacks upon our country." He said in his weekly radio address that the government is working to swiftly test post offices and other sites for spores.

On Capitol Hill, environmental experts planned to announce Sunday their plans for decontaminating the Hart Senate Office Building, where an anthrax-filled letter to Majority Leader Tom Daschle was opened.

They planned to fill the nine-story building with bacteria-killing chlorine dioxide gas, but the final approval was being left to a panel of experts.

Officials at the Treasury Department isolated a suspicious letter and sent it for testing. The letter bore the same Trenton, N.J., postmark as anthrax-laced mail delivered in New York and Washington. Officials said the address was also handwritten.

Anthrax testing was under way at 259 postal facilities, mostly on the East Coast. Officials awaited results from 21 post offices where testing was complete.

To date, the biological attack has killed four people and infected 13 others. Concentrated along the East Coast, anthrax also has been found in Kansas City, Mo., and Indianapolis.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention sent a team of epidemiologists to Arizona, where the World Series was concluding, a precaution often taken when large crowds are expected. CDC officials considered a public service campaign to educate Americans about anthrax.

The New York Times reported in Sunday editions that the CDC also has vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiologic teams that can be dispatched on short notice to examine a suspected case of smallpox anywhere in the country.

Unlike anthrax, smallpox is easily spread from person to person and federal officials are rushing to stockpile enough vaccine to inoculate millions of Americans if necessary.

Health authorities, who now believe that a New Jersey accountant was infected through the mail, said postal customers should keep an eye out for symptoms of anthrax. The skin form resembles a spider bite at first; the more serious inhalation anthrax, thought unable to be transmitted through regular mail, looks like flu.

In his radio address, Bush said the odds of receiving a piece of tainted mail are "very low."

In New York, investigators have not determined how Kathy T. Nguyen contracted inhalation anthrax. Nguyen, who died last week, was never able to tell them where she had been or who she had seen.

Initial testing for anthrax at her Bronx apartment and at the Manhattan hospital where she worked have come back negative.

But CDC officials said they were beginning another round in the most promising sites and expanding to other places where she might have been.

---

CDC preps for possible smallpox scare

USA Today
11/04/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/04/smallpox-vaccinations.htm

ATLANTA (AP) - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has vaccinated some of its health workers against smallpox as a precaution in case they need to investigate a terrorist attack involving the deadly virus, a spokesman said Sunday.

While the CDC has no evidence that anyone is readying a terrorist attack using smallpox, which was eradicated outside laboratories 21 years ago, officials of the federal agency say the virus is so dangerous that it is important they be prepared.

"We are putting together several teams that could be quickly dispatched to the field if we did see a suspected case of smallpox," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Sunday.

The agency expects a number of false alarms as doctors heighten their suspicion of anthrax, smallpox and other diseases, said Jeffrey Koplan, the CDC director.

Last week, the CDC vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiological teams that can be sent at a moment's notice to examine suspected cases of smallpox.

This week, the CDC will begin a series of training courses on smallpox for some employees and state and local health workers.

The contagious virus is known to survive only in laboratories in the United States and Russia. However, germ warfare experts suspect that other countries, including North Korea and Iraq, may have secretly obtained stocks.

Health experts worry about smallpox because it can spread quickly from person to person and has a high death rate. The infection is characterized by a rash and a fever of at least 102 degrees.

Many Americans are susceptible to smallpox because they were never vaccinated, or were vaccinated but have decreased protection because the vaccine has worn off. The United States stopped smallpox immunizations in 1972.

Skinner said the CDC is not calling for public vaccinations now.

Since smallpox was eradicated, the CDC has sent epidemiologists to investigate suspect illnesses a few times a year.

Smallpox experts were sent to evaluate specific cases three times last month, said James Hughes, who directs the agency's center for infectious diseases. None of the patients had smallpox.

---

U.S. Sets Up Plan to Fight Smallpox in Case of Attack

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04CDC.html

ATLANTA, Nov. 3 - The government has begun taking steps to cope with the possibility of a terrorist attack involving smallpox by training doctors to recognize the disease and by vaccinating small teams of experts who would rush to any part of the country to contain and treat a suspected outbreak.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is taking the steps, say they have no evidence that anyone is readying a terrorist attack using smallpox, a disease that was eradicated worldwide 21 years ago. But they say smallpox is so deadly that it is important to prepare for any attack.

The smallpox virus is known to exist only in laboratories in the United States and Russia. But germ warfare experts suspect that other countries, including North Korea and Iraq, may have secretly obtained stocks. It is greatly feared as a weapon because it is contagious and has a high death rate. And much of the world's population is susceptible.

Last week, the disease centers vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiologic teams that can be summoned at a moment's notice to examine a suspected case anywhere in the country.

This week, the centers will begin a series of training courses in smallpox for certain of its own employees and state and local health workers. Additional courses will be held over the next several weeks at the federal agency's headquarters here.

The vaccinations and course are part of a broader effort by health officials to respond quickly to any new bioterrorism threats that might follow the recent deliberate spread of anthrax through the mail.

"Our concerns are not limited to anthrax," said Dr. James M. Hughes, who directs the agency's center for infectious diseases. Those concerns include diseases like botulism, plague, tularemia and smallpox.

Smallpox is of particular concern because it can spread quickly. In a military exercise last summer called Dark Winter, researchers simulated a smallpox attack on Oklahoma City. The epidemic quickly soared out of control, spreading to 25 states and millions of people.

Tens of millions of Americans younger than 30 are susceptible to smallpox because they were never vaccinated; the United States stopped smallpox immunizations in 1972. Tens of millions of people vaccinated decades ago are thought to have decreased protection because the vaccine may have worn off.

Another concern is that generations of American doctors have never seen a case of smallpox. The only doctors who have are a few hundred who participated in the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication program decades ago.

Smallpox patients are usually quite sick. The infection is characterized by a rash and a fever of at least 102 degrees.

The rash and symptoms begin to develop 11 or 12 days after a person is exposed to the virus. The characteristic lesions can occur anywhere on the body, but they usually appear on the face first, and they tend to appear more on the arms and legs and less on the chest, abdomen and back. Palms and soles are favorite areas. The earliest lesions tend to appear as raised bumps that often contain fluid.

Over a period that can last as long as 19 days, the lesions become firm, filled with pus, and form scabs. The illness can scar and blind its victims.

Smallpox can be confused with chickenpox. In making the diagnosis, a doctor touches the skin. Smallpox lesions tend to feel as if they are deep in the skin, in contrast to the lesions of chickenpox, which feel superficial. Chickenpox itches; smallpox lesions can be very painful.

But because the earliest stage of smallpox can resemble rashes caused by many other diseases besides chickenpox, identification can be difficult without laboratory tests.

Since smallpox was eradicated, the centers have sent epidemiologists to investigate suspect illnesses a few times a year. Dr. Hughes said that the centers had already dispatched smallpox experts on short notice three times in the last month to evaluate specific cases.

None of the patients had smallpox. Instead, they had problems like allergic rashes or shingles, an illness in adults that is caused by the same virus that caused chickenpox early in life.

Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, the director of the disease centers, said that his agency expected a number of false alarms as a necessary part of the efforts to encourage doctors to heighten their suspicion of anthrax, smallpox and other so-called exotic diseases.

Dr. Koplan likened the extra caution to programs that encourage patients with chest pain to seek medical attention to determine if they are having heart attacks. Many patients admitted to coronary care units turn out not to have had heart attacks.

Even doctors who have seen smallpox cases have been wrong. Doctors at the disease centers misdiagnosed a case of chickenpox as smallpox in Washington in the mid-1960's. And earlier this year, epidemiologists at the centers responded to a call from health officials in a Central American country where a missionary doctor who had seen smallpox became suspicious about several cases of rash and fever in a remote village. But the rash turned out to be from something else.

Dr. Stanley O. Foster and Dr. J. Michael Lane, two former disease centers employees who are smallpox experts, are helping with the centers's course on the disease. They said in interviews that they would show course participants pictures of smallpox lesions at various stages of development.

The course leaders are also trying to find ways to put photographs of smallpox lesions on the Internet so that doctors anywhere will recognize it if they see a real or suspected case.

Participants will also learn how to use the special two-pronged needle required to administer smallpox vaccine.

But disease centers officials are not planning mass smallpox vaccinations at this time. One reason is that not enough vaccine exists. Another is that the risks of mass vaccination could outweigh any benefits, particularly if no smallpox case ever appears.

Smallpox vaccine, made from a different virus, has risks that are difficult to quantify for today's population. Among the 5.5 million Americans who received their first smallpox vaccination in 1968, Dr. Lane said, eight died as a result. About two people per million who were vaccinated had an often fatal reaction known as vaccinia necrosum, which destroyed flesh and muscle. About four per million developed encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain.

Today, a particular concern is the hundreds of thousands of Americans with weakened immune systems from H.I.V. and other viruses, as well as drugs used to treat cancer and prevent rejection of organ transplants. The danger is that such people can become ill from the vaccine itself, and transmit the vaccine virus to other people, including those with impaired immune systems.

The standard epidemiologic response to smallpox is to identify the disease, isolate cases, vaccinate everyone known to have had direct contact with infected people since the first week of symptoms and then monitor their state of health.

Mass vaccination is not considered the appropriate medical response to an outbreak of smallpox. But if epidemiologic information determines that the virus was introduced widely through the air - at a public gathering, for instance - then mass vaccination might be required.

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DRUG INDUSTRY
A Muscular Lobby Tries to Shape Nation's Bioterror Plan

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By LESLIE WAYNE and MELODY PETERSEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/business/04PHAR.html

With anthrax spores turning up all over Washington, plenty of people are heading out of town.

Not those in the drug industry.

Executives of the major pharmaceutical companies have been hopping trains and planes to the nation's capital, where they are staging an enormous lobbying campaign, at the highest levels of government, to help shape the nation's bioterrorist plan - and beyond.

So far, they have had some remarkable victories. While the government has struggled to make sure the nation will have enough drugs to treat biological weapons that were largely hypothetical a few months ago, drug companies have managed to stave off many actions that would harm them, like violating patents or forcing them to supply free drugs.

As that success shows, the pharmaceutical lobby, which represents the nation's biggest drug makers, from Eli Lilly to Pfizer to Merck, is both large and politically adroit and, if anything, more sophisticated than when it gained fame in the early 1990's for helping to defeat the Clinton administration health plan.

It has more lobbyists than there are members of Congress - 625 who are registered. It had a combined lobbying and campaign contribution budget in 1999 and 2000 of $197 million, larger than any other industry. Now it is harnessing those resources to influence major policy decisions being made by the Bush administration that may well influence public health issues and industry profitability for years to come - much to the dismay of many consumer groups and others.

"When you've got this access to high places, it will encourage these guys to coordinate instead of compete," said Jack Calfee, a health care expert at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research group. "It's more likely to forestall getting good products than to encourage it."

Because of the anthrax scare, and all the attention given to Cipro, the anti-anthrax drug of choice, that access has been enormous. In recent weeks, the chief executives and other top executives of Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb (news/quote), Bayer, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson (news/quote ), along with trade association officials, have been meeting regularly with Bush cabinet members. On one occasion, with executives from other industries, pharmaceutical executives met with President Bush in New York to discuss the administration's response to terrorism. Drug company executives have offered to send scores of industry scientists, now on their payrolls, to work in government agencies in what the industry calls a gift to the nation, but critics say it is both a conflict of interest and a way for the industry to get a toehold in government.

In return, at these top-level meetings, industry executives and lobbyists are seeking exemption from antitrust regulations, reduction of the timetable for getting new drugs to market for treating the ills of biological warfare, and immunity from lawsuits for any vaccines they develop to combat bioterrorism. The administration, those in the meeting say, has offered other help, asking the pharmaceutical executives to identify the regulatory barriers they would like to see eliminated for this fight.

Last Wednesday, for instance, a dozen industry lobbyists and executives, among them Peter R. Dolan, chief executive of Bristol-Myers, and Raymond V. Gilmartin, chief executive of Merck, met for an hour and a half in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security. According to one person at the meeting, Mr. Ridge was so impressed with what the industry executives said that he responded: "I'm grateful for your offers of assistance. I accept."

That, according to the meeting's participant, reflected "a true partnership between the federal government and America's pharmaceutical companies."

Industry executives say they are just trying to help. "We are part of the nation's defense system," said Mr. Dolan, who has met with President Bush in New York and with Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, and Mr. Ridge in Washington. "As an industry, there is a real opportunity for us to give our resources in a time of great need."

But that partnership is troubling to some industry watchdog groups. They say the cozy relationship threatens to compromise regulatory standards on new applications of medicines at a time when millions of Americans may be seeking new drugs and vaccines. They worry that the industry's efforts to present its proposals as patriotic gestures mask an effort to increase its power in Washington and to improve its image while still protecting its financial interests. Critics also say consumer groups and executives from generic drug companies, which make cheaper copies of well-known drugs, have been conspicuously absent from any administration meetings.

"I am concerned that the industry is trying to subvert the normal regulatory process," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the health research group of Public Citizen, a Washington research organization. "These meetings have no transparency, no openness nor any involvement of the public. It's a dangerous precedent."

The pharmaceutical industry, of course, has not always had its way. Some of its efforts to speed federal drug approval have failed. Federal regulators are actively investigating several companies' attempts to keep generic drugs off the market and are taking a harsh look at some marketing practices.

There is no lobby in Washington as large, as powerful or as well-financed as the pharmaceutical lobby. Battle-honed over a number of health care initiatives that began with the creation of the Medicare program in the 1960's, the industry spent $177 million on lobbying in 1999 and 2000 - a good $50 million more than its nearest rivals, the insurance and telecommunications industries.

Thanks to Washington's well-oiled revolving door between government and business, the industry is able to claim friends in especially high places. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the former chief executive of the drug maker G. D. Searle, for example, and Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the White House budget director, is a former Eli Lilly executive.

Even more important, more than half the drug industry's 625 registered lobbyists are either former members of Congress or former Congressional staff members and gove