------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Osama claims he has nukes
Bin Laden says he has nuclear weapons
Al-Qaeda nukes may have reached US shores
White House dismisses bin Laden nuclear threat
Bush Says Nations May Face Nuclear Terror Threat
Muslim Nuclear Plant Worker Sues
Pakistan Seeks Gestures From U.S., Says Musharraf
Musharraf: Nuclear Arsenal Safe
Radiation Leaks at Japan Nuke Plant
Russia's Putin Optimistic on Missile Defense Deal
Putin Confident of ABM Compromise
Rocket in Alaska Launch Destroyed
An Easy Bargain With Russia
U.S. Mulls Russia's Iraq Commitment
Cause of Sub's Sinking Still Unknown
SWITZERLAND: PRACTICING FOR NUCLEAR DISASTER
Stuck in the Cold War
FIRST CHAPTER 'Hit to Kill'
Warren E. Henry, Physicist and Educator, Dead at 92
Officials don't want cleanup delayed
In the War on Terrorism, New Life for Propaganda

MILITARY
Bush Chides Some in Coalition for Inaction
Northern Alliance Reports More Advances
Taliban loses Mazar-e-Sharif
ARGENTINA: NO AMNESTY FOR MILITARY
U.S. Bombs Suspected Bio-Weapons
Loner Likely Sent Anthrax, FBI Says
Anthrax Teamwork Is a Struggle
FBI fleshes out likely anthrax sender
Blair: Coalition Has Momentum
Khatami condemns attacks on U.S. as 'anti-Islamic'
Bush Affirms Commitment to Mideast Peace
KOREAS: NEW TALKS, OLD WORDS
Bush, Musharaff Text
Pakistan Fears Lack of Afghan Political Plan
STAR WARS TEST ROCKET DESTROYED OVER ALASKA
Text of Bush's Speech at U.N.
Bush to tell U.N. 'time for action' is now
Air Force gets use of airfield in Tajikistan
Attacks Alter Course at War College

ENERGY AND OTHER
U.S. Isolated as World Moves on Climate Treaty
Climate treaty set to be ratified
Climate conference reaches deal
Countries Approve Kyoto Rules
BRITAIN: FOOT-AND-MOUTH CONTROLS LIFTED
China officially joins WTO
China admitted to WTO
Trade Ministers Approve China's Entry Into WTO

POLICE / PRISONERS
Spy Plane Crew Member Speaks of Heroes
Why Trade Center Towers Stood, Then Fell
Developments in Terror Investigation
After Asking for Volunteers, Government Tries to Determine What They Will Do

ACTIVISTS
Germans Protest Nuclear Waste
World Briefing



-------- NUCLEAR

Osama claims he has nukes:
If US uses N-arms it will get same response

DAWN
10 November 2001 Saturday 23 Shaban 1422
By Hamid Mir
http://www.dawn.com/2001/11/10/top1.htm

KABUL, Nov 9: Osama bin Laden has said that "we have chemical and nuclear weapons as a deterrent and if America used them against us we reserve the right to use them".

He said this in a special interview with Hamid Mir, the editor of Ausaf, for Dawn and Ausaf, at an undisclosed location near Kabul.

This was the first interview given by Osama to any journalist after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

The correspondent was taken blindfolded in a jeep from Kabul on the night of Nov 7 to a place where it was extremely cold and one could hear the sound of anti-aircraft guns firing away. After a wait of some time, Osama arrived with about a dozen bodyguards and Dr Ayman Al-Zuwahiri and answered questions.

Hamid Mir: After American bombing on Afghanistan on Oct 7, you told the Al-Jazeera TV that the Sept 11 attacks had been carried out by some Muslims. How did you know they were Muslims ?

Osama bin Laden: The Americans themselves released a list of the suspects of the Sept 11 attacks, saying that the persons named were involved in the attacks. They were all Muslims, of whom 15 belonged to Saudi Arabia, two were from the UAE and one from Egypt. According to the information I have, they were all passengers. Fateha was held for them in their homes. But America said they were hijackers.

HM: In your statement of Oct 7, you expressed satisfaction over the Sept 11 attacks, although a large number of innocent people perished in them, hundreds among them were Muslims. Can you justify the killing of innocent men in the light of Islamic teachings?

OBL: This is a major point in jurisprudence. In my view, if an enemy occupies a Muslim territory and uses common people as human shield, then it is permitted to attack that enemy. For instance, if bandits barge into a home and hold a child hostage, then the child's father can attack the bandits and in that attack even the child may get hurt.

America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechenya, Kashmir and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal. The Islamic Shariat says Muslims should not live in the land of the infidel for long. The Sept 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power.

The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) was against killing women and children. When he saw a dead woman during a war, he asked why was she killed? If a child is above 13 and wields a weapon against Muslims, then it is permitted to kill him.

The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president, their government manufactures arms and gives them to Israel and Israel uses them to massacre Palestinians. The American Congress endorses all government measures and this proves that the entire America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims. The entire America, because they elect the Congress.

I ask the American people to force their government to give up anti-Muslim policies. The American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. They must do the same today. The American people should stop the massacre of Muslims by their government.

HM: Can it be said that you are against the American government, not the American people?

OSB: Yes! We are carrying on the mission of our Prophet, Muhammad (peace be upon him). The mission is to spread the word of God, not to indulge massacring people. We ourselves are the target of killings, destruction and atrocities. We are only defending ourselves. This is defensive Jihad. We want to defend our people and our land. That is why I say that if we don't get security, the Americans, too would not get security.

This is a simple formula that even an American child can understand. This is the formula of live and let live.

HM: The head of Egypt's Jamia Al-Azhar has issued a fatwa (edict) against you, saying that the views and beliefs of Osama bin Laden have nothing to do with Islam. What do you have to say about that?

OSB: The fatwa of any official Aalim has no value for me. History is full of such Ulema who justify Riba, who justify the occupation of Palestine by the Jews, who justify the presence of American troops around Harmain Sharifain. These people support the infidels for their personal gain. The true Ulema support the Jihad against America. Tell me if Indian forces invaded Pakistan what would you do? The Israeli forces occupy our land and the American troops are on our territory. We have no other option but to launch Jihad.

HM: Some Western media claim that you are trying to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons. How much truth is there in such reports?

OSB: I heard the speech of American President Bush yesterday (Oct 7). He was scaring the European countries that Osama wanted to attack with weapons of mass destruction. I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent.

HM: Where did you get these weapons from?

OSB: Go to the next question.

HM: Demonstrations are being held in many European countries against American attacks on Afghanistan. Thousands of the protesters were non-Muslims. What is your opinion about those non-Muslim protesters?

OSB: There are many innocent and good-hearted people in the West. American media instigates them against Muslims. However, some good-hearted people are protesting against American attacks because human nature abhors injustice.

The Muslims were massacred under the UN patronage in Bosnia. I am ware that some officers of the State Department had resigned in protest. Many years ago the US ambassador in Egypt had resigned in protest against the policies of President Jimmy Carter. Nice and civilized are everywhere. The Jewish lobby has taken America and the West hostage.

HM: Some people say that war is no solution to any issue. Do you think that some political formula could be found to stop the present war?

OSB: You should put this question to those who have started this war. We are only defending ourselves.

HM: If America got out of Saudi Arabia and the Al-Aqsa mosque was liberated, would you then present yourself for trial in some Muslim country?

OSB: Only Afghanistan is an Islamic country. Pakistan follows the English law. I don't consider Saudi Arabia an Islamic country. If the Americans have charges against me, we too have a charge sheet against them.

HM: Pakistan government decided to cooperate with America after Sept 11, which you don't consider right. What do you think Pakistan should have done but to cooperate with America?

OSB: The government of Pakistan should have the wishes of the people in view. It should not have surrendered to the unjustified demands of America. America does not have solid proof against us. It just has some surmises. It is unjust to start bombing on the basis of those surmises.

HM: Had America decided to attack Pakistan with the help of India and Israel, what would have we done?

OSB: What has America achieved by attacking Afghanistan? We will not leave the Pakistani people and the Pakistani territory at anybody's mercy.

We will defend Pakistan. But we have been disappointed by Gen Pervez Musharraf. He says that the majority is with him. I say the majority is against him.

Bush has used the word crusade. This is a crusade declared by Bush. It is no wisdom to barter off blood of Afghan brethren to improve Pakistan's economy. He will be punished by the Pakistani people and Allah.

Right now a great war of Islamic history is being fought in Afghanistan. All the big powers are united against Muslims. It is 'sawab' to participate in this war.

HM: A French newspaper has claimed that you had kidney problem and had secretly gone to Dubai for treatment last year. Is that correct?

OSB: My kidneys are all right. I did not go to Dubai last year. One British newspaper has published an imaginary interview with Islamabad dateline with one of my sons who lives in Saudi Arabia. All this is false.

HM: Is it correct that a daughter of Mulla Omar is your wife or your daughter is Mulla Omar's wife?

OSB: (Laughs). All my wives are Arabs (and all my daughters are married to Arab Mujahideen). I have spiritual relationship with Mulla Omar. He is a great and brave Muslim of this age. He does not fear anyone but Allah. He is not under any personal relationship or obligation to me. He is only discharging his religious duty. I, too, have not chosen this life out of any personal consideration.

---

Bin Laden says he has nuclear weapons in interview with Pakistani newspaper

Montreal Gazette
CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Canadian Press
Saturday, November 10, 2001
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={4BB7D1C2-A650-4239-8BB6-8E5F032035CF}

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Terror suspect Osama bin Laden says he has nuclear and chemical weapons and will unleash them if the United States uses similar weapons against him. Bin Laden's comments were published Saturday in one of Pakistan's largest newspapers.

"I wish to declare that if America used chemical and nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent," the Dawn newspaper quoted bin Laden as saying in an interview near the Afghan capital Kabul on Wednesday night.

The United States, which is bombing positions of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaida network, says it has no evidence that bin Laden possesses nuclear weapons. Intelligence experts, however, believe his fighters have experimented with crude chemical weapons at a training camp in Afghanistan.

"They're seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons," President Bush said in Washington on Friday. "Given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation and, eventually, to civilization itself."

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States had "no credible evidence at this point of a specific threat of that kind."

In London, a spokesman for the British Foreign Office also said bin Laden has sought chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capability but that Britain does not believe he has it.

Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist sympathetic to the Taliban and a bin Laden biographer, conducted the Dawn interview. He said he asked bin Laden where he allegedly got the weapons. "Go to the next question," bin Laden replied.

Mir said the interview was conducted at an "undisclosed location" near Kabul.

Mir said he was blindfolded and driven in a jeep from Kabul on Wednesday night to a very cold place where he could hear the sound of anti-aircraft fire.

Bin Laden eventually arrived, accompanied by a dozen bodyguards and his deputy, Ayman el-Zawahri.

The Dawn published a photograph of Mir sitting with bin Laden on cushions on the floor against a brown backdrop. Bin Laden wore a white turban and scarf with a camouflage jacket. A Kalashnikov rifle lay at his side.

The story was also published Saturday in Ausaf, a Pakistani Urdu-language newspaper that Mir edits.

In the interview, Bin Laden did not admit responsibility for the attacks in which terrorists steered passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

But he said they were justified because Washington had been arming Israel, and was conducting "atrocities" against Muslims in Iraq, the dispute region of Kashmir and elsewhere.

"The Sept. 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children," bin Laden said. "The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power."

Bin Laden denied reports that he was suffering a kidney illness and praised Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader.

"He is not under any personal relationship or obligation to me," he said. "He is only discharging his religious duty. I, too, have not chosen this life out of any personal consideration."

The United States believes bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 4,500 people. It launched air strikes Oct. 7 against the Taliban after it refused to hand over the suspect.

---

[Here's a chilling thought. Wonder if it's true. et]

Al-Qaeda nukes may have reached US shores
UNGA session possible terror target

Naveed Miraj
11/10/2001
The Frontier Post (Pakistan)
http://frontierpost.com.pk/main.asp?id=3&date1=11/10/2001

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani and American investigators converge that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network may have successfully transported several nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction to the United States, The Frontier Post learnt Friday.

Already on high alert, United States security officials are having sleepless nights that Al Qaeda can strike in New York again on the occasion of United Nations General Assembly session.

Investigators from Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and American FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) are jointly probing into the possibilities of Al Qaeda possessing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

They have reached a conclusion that at least two briefcase nuclear weapons may have reached the US shores, sources close to these investigators revealed to this scribe.

The investigators have been able to identify at least one briefcase weapon acquired by Al Qaeda from Central Asian rogue groups.

The weapon identified is small 8-kilogram device that carries at least 2 kg of fissionable plutonium and uranium.

The device, of Russian make, carries a serial number 9999 and manufacturing date October 1988.

The design of the device is simple.

The radioactive materials consist of Uranium and Plutonium both kept in separate compartments.

At the top of the two compartments is placed the charging mechanism.

The charging mechanism can be activated through a timer or even through a cell phone command.

Besides nuclear devices, a chemical and a biological weapon have also been identified to be in the hands of Al Qaeda activists.

They are said to be in possession of at least 70 capsules, also of Russian origin, containing a very lethal biological agent.

Broken in a crowded place, this capsule can cause deaths on a huge scale.

It melts human body meat to the bone.

Another chemical agent in the hands of Al Qaeda operators is called Vipera Lebentina Venema.

A derivative of snake poisons, this venom developed in USSR attacks through skin.

Most probable way of using this agent is through mail as with Anthrax.

US security agencies are already on high alert and realise that Al Qaeda can strike in New York again on the occasion of UN General Assembly.

Analysis of the recent statements released by Osama bin Laden carried out by US agencies has shown that the terrorist network can pick up an important occasion like the UN General Assembly session to retaliate against US strikes on Afghanistan.


---

White House dismisses bin Laden nuclear threat
Osama bin Laden says he will use nuclear and chemical weapons if attacked by America

CNN
November 10, 2001
Bin Laden
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/11/10/ret.binladen.nuclear/index.html

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Bush administration dismissed claims reported Saturday in a Pakistani English-language newspaper that suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden has nuclear and chemical weapons and will use them against the United States if attacked.

In an interview with bin Laden published in Dawn -- said to have taken place November 7 -- the newspaper quoted bin Laden as saying: "I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent."

While citing "credible indications" bin Laden has sought to obtain such weapons, Bush administration officials said they do not believe the al Qaeda leader has weapons of mass destruction or the means to deliver them.

"He has said for a long time he wants to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we have no choice but to take him seriously," National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said. "And we will do everything we can to prevent his acquiring these weapons or the materials for these weapons."

These remarks came shortly after President Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he discussed the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, America's response and future terrorist threats.

While he did not mention bin Laden by name, Bush said, "These same terrorists are searching for weapons of mass destruction, the tools to turn their hatred into holocaust. They can be expected to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so." Bin Laden: Attacks part of 'defensive Jihad'

The interview, conducted by Pakistani newspaper editor and official bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir, was bin Laden's first since the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Mir wrote that he was blindfolded and taken in a jeep from Kabul "to a place where it was extremely cold and one could hear the sound of anti-aircraft guns firing away." After a time, bin Laden arrived with a dozen bodyguards and Ayman el-Zawahri, his top lieutenant, and began answering questions.

While never explicitly taking or denying responsibility, bin Laden repeats several times that the September 11 attacks were part of a "defensive Jihad." He says Muslims are defending themselves against American attacks on the Muslims around the world, including on Palestinians, Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq, and Bosnia.

"This is a simple formula that even an American child can understand," he says. "This is the formula of live and let live."

Bin Laden also discounts criticism issued by other Muslims against him, saying they hold no meaning for him because true Muslims support the jihad against the United States.

When asked where the nuclear weapons came from, bin Laden retorted, "Go to the next question."

Bush had warned of bin Laden's threats to use weapons of mass destruction earlier in the week, saying, "This is an evil man that we're dealing with, and I wouldn't put it past him to develop evil weapons to try to harm civilization as we know it."

When the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan was asked about nuclear weapons this week, he replied, "We can't even make glass, so how can we make nuclear weapons?"

---

Bush Says Nations May Face Nuclear Terror Threat

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-attack-bush-un.html?searchpv=reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - President Bush on Saturday warned nations that the threat of global terrorism may soon include nuclear weapons and urged them to intensify their support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Bush told the U.N. General Assembly those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States were planning more strikes, which could hit any country. He said they were seeking nuclear, chemical and biological arms and would use them.

``All the world faces the most horrifying prospect of all: these same terrorists are searching for weapons of mass destruction, the tools to turn their hatred into a holocaust. They can be expected to use chemical biological an nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so,'' Bush said.

Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed more than 4,600 people, was quoted in a Pakistani newspaper on Saturday as saying he had nuclear and chemical weapons and reserved the right to use them if the United States did first.

Bush told a news conference on Saturday evening he did not know whether bin Laden already had such weapons. ``The only thing I know certain about him is that he's evil,'' he said.

The U.S. president urged the global leaders to step up their participation in the anti-terrorism war. He called for a ''comprehensive commitment'' to defeat terror.

``Every nation has a stake in this cause. As we meet, the terrorists are planning more murder, perhaps in my country or perhaps in yours,'' Bush told 48 presidents and prime ministers and 114 foreign ministers at the annual gathering in New York.

He spoke with animation and punctuated his comments with a clenched fist. ``In this war of terror, each of us must answer for what we have done or what we have left undone,'' he said

The speech was Bush's first to the U.N. General Assembly. The session was postponed from its original start date after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The attacks triggered a military campaign against Afghanistan's Taliban leadership, which Bush accuses of harboring bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

Civilian deaths in the bombing campaign and the approach of the Muslim observance of Ramadan have caused some members of the international coalition to urge restraint on Washington, and Bush's speech on Saturday capped a week of efforts to rally domestic and international support for the anti-terror effort.

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, also speaking to the General Assembly, said violence could not be justified to counter terrorism. He said a definition of terrorism should include Israeli practices against Palestinians, such as occupying Arab territory, expelling people from their homes and killing civilians.

Musharraf urged a quick end to the bombing. He said at the news conference that Pakistan remained committed to the anti-terrorism campaign, despite concerns expressed to Bush over potential ``fallout'' from instability in Afghanistan.

He and Bush agreed that Afghanistan's Northern Alliance opposition should not seize the capital Kabul. Bush said it was important to the goal of a multiethnic Afghan government that the predominantly Uzbek and Tajik Northern Alliance not seize Kabul, which is traditionally dominated by ethnic Pashtuns.

Musharraf said he feared atrocities if Northern Alliance took the capital.

STEPPING UP FIGHT ON TERROR

Bush said countries helping to fight terrorism must go beyond what he called urgent and binding steps already outlined by a post-attack United Nations resolution, such as cracking down on terrorist financing and sharing intelligence.

He said he appreciated a global outpouring of sympathy for the United States. But he added: ``The time for sympathy has now passed. The time for action has now arrived.''

Battling global terrorism will require effort and, for some nations, ``great courage,'' Bush said. But the price of inaction would be ``a nightmare world, where every city is a potential killing field.''

Countries tolerating terrorists would pay, Bush said. ``Some governments still turn a blind eye to terrorists, hoping the threat will pass them by. They are mistaken.''

He did not identify countries he believed were failing to carry their weight, nor did he go beyond Afghanistan in accusing countries of harboring terrorists.

The coalition must step its efforts by fighting terrorism in any form, he said. ``There is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration nor remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent.''

In the audience while Bush spoke was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom Bush has refused to meet while Israeli-Palestinian violence rages. The two failed to come into contact during the day, despite eating lunch in the same room.

In his speech, however, Bush reiterated his commitment to establishment of a Palestinian state. Arafat described the speech to reporters as important, positive and ``constructive.''

Israeli seats sat empty during the Bush speech. An Israeli spokesman cited observance of the Jewish Sabbath.

``GOOD RIDDANCE' TO TALIBAN

Bush said the United States was seeking to minimize the loss of innocent lives as it bombs the Taliban, which he said was ``virtually indistinguishable'' from al Qaeda.

``I make this promise to all the victims of that regime. The Taliban's days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close,'' he said.

``And when that regime is gone the people of Afghanistan will say with the rest of the world, 'good riddance.'''

Along with the blunt warnings, Bush also sounded subtle notes. He mentioned individuals from Gambia, Mexico and Pakistan who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, reminding his audience of the broad impact of the violence.

He alluded to a common root of Islam and Judeo-Christian faiths in condemning those who commit terrorism in the name of Islam. ``They dare to ask God's blessing as they set out to kill innocent men, women and children. But the God of Isaac and Ishmael would never answer such a prayer,'' he said.

Bush also denounced ``outrageous conspiracy theories,'' an apparent reference to rumors in the Arab world and among some Muslims that blamed the attacks on a global Jewish plot.

-------- canada

Muslim Nuclear Plant Worker Sues

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Canada-Muslim-Suit.html?searchpv=aponline

TORONTO (AP) -- A Muslim man who lost his job at a Canadian nuclear power plant after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States has filed a lawsuit claiming he was unfairly labeled a security risk.

Mohamed Attiah, 54, an Egyptian-born engineer who gained Canadian citizenship in the 1970s, is seeking $3.4 million from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. on grounds of ethnic and religious discrimination.

The lawsuit filed Friday claims Attiah was questioned for 90 minutes by the RCMP and CSIS after being stopped Sept. 20 in the parking lot of the Chalk River, Ontario, nuclear power plant where he worked. The same day, his security pass was revoked and he was escorted out and told he no longer had a job because he was a security risk, the lawsuit claims.

Officials of the RCMP and CSIS would neither confirm nor deny that an interview took place. Atomic Energy of Canada referred calls to the RCMP.

``I just want my job back,'' Attiah told The Toronto Star newspaper in a story published Saturday. ``The fact is that they've destroyed my life and my family's life. They are burying everything under the mark of security and this way, nobody can question them.''

Attiah was working under a contract that was due to expire and says he was told he would receive a permanent position before his dismissal.

Attiah said the federal agents questioned him about his connection with Ali Hindy, the imam of a Toronto mosque.

Hindy was a character reference for Mahmoud Jaballah, a Toronto schoolteacher who is now facing deportation as a national security threat. Canadian authorities say Jaballah was part of the Egyptian al-Jihad terrorist group that merged in 1998 with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. He was arrested in August in a case unrelated to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Attiah said he and Hindy worked together in the 1980s and that his wife once called Hindy to mediate their marital problems.

According to media reports, Attiah also complained that his name made people suspicious that he might be related to Mohamed Atta, identified as one of the suicide hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks.

-------- india / pakistan

Pakistan Seeks Gestures From U.S., Says Musharraf

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-musharraf.html?searchpv=reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pakistan's leader said in an interview published on Saturday that he needs visible U.S. gestures, such as the release of American F-16 fighters sold to his country over a decade ago, to help blunt domestic criticism of his decision to support the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan.

President Pervez Musharraf, in an interview with the New York Times, said he would ask President Bush for such concrete steps when they meet on Saturday. The two leaders are in New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

The Times said Musharraf put a particular emphasis on the release of the F-16s because their arrival would be a strong signal that the United States was restoring Pakistan to the stature of a genuine ally.

Pakistan bought the 28 F-16s in the 1980s, but the U.S. Congress cut off all aid and military sales to Islamabad in 1990 due to Pakistan's secret nuclear weapons development program.

Delivery of the airplanes was blocked, even though they already had been paid for. Musharraf told the Times that Pakistan even had received a bill for the storage of the aircraft while they are being held in Arizona.

Pakistan, which shares a long border with Afghanistan, is a key ally in the United States' war against the al Qaeda network of Islamic militants and its Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden, thought to be behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Afghanistan's Taliban regime has housed bin Laden and the group and refused to hand him over to the United States.

People in Pakistan, a U.S. Cold War ally, feel the United States abandoned the country after 1989, when the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan, he told the paper.

The United States then imposed economic sanctions when Pakistan developed nuclear weapons in response to India's nuclear program and the two countries conducted tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998.

Major debt relief, military assistance and understanding on the subject of Pakistan's nuclear capabilities would go a long way toward alleviating those wrongs, the paper quoted Musharraf as saying.

Pakistan's president also said he was worried that there was no broad-based coalition waiting in the wings in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban, the Times reported.

The Northern Alliance, the leading opposition force now in Afghanistan, is made up largely of non-Pashtuns. Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan.

---

Musharraf: Nuclear Arsenal Safe

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-UN-Pakistan.html?searchpv=aponline

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf assured the world Saturday that his country's nuclear arsenal was in ``safe hands.''

``Pakistan is fully alive to the responsibilities of its nuclear status,'' Musharraf said on the opening day of the annual General Assembly debate.

``Let me assure you all that our strategic assets are well guarded and in safe hands,'' he said.

Musharraf, whose Muslim country shares a long and porous border with Afghanistan, is a key partner in President Bush's campaign to capture Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect behind the Sept. 11 attacks who is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan.

Musharraf, the military chief who seized power in a 1999 coup, was an early backer of the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism. But since the bombing campaign began on Oct. 7, growing protests by Islamic groups have sparked concerns about the stability of Musharraf's government.

International observers also are concerned about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons because of fears that some elements in the military remain sympathetic to the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban.

Musharraf, when asked about bin Laden's claim that he possesses nuclear and chemical weapons, said he did not believe he did.

``I have no such information. Purely on judgment, I can't imagine he could be having nuclear weapons'' and the delivery systems that go with them, Musharraf said.

Last month, two Pakistani scientists questioned about their links with the Taliban regime were released after authorities determined that they were not involved in Afghanistan's weapons program.

Musharraf also said Saturday that he was willing to discuss with neighboring India ways to reduce nuclear tensions in South Asia, which has the world's newest and, according to some experts, riskiest nuclear arsenal. Pakistan conducted unannounced nuclear tests in 1998 following similar tests by India.

``Pakistan is opposed to an arms race in South Asia, be it nuclear or conventional,'' he said.

Musharraf called for more international help for Pakistan, which earlier bore the fallout of the 10-year Muslim holy war against the Soviet forces that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, a war that sent 3 million Afghan refugees to Pakistan.

``Our economy again faces a crisis of a fallout of the operations in Afghanistan,'' Musharraf said.

Later, at a joint news conference with Musharraf, Bush announced a $1 billion aid package for Pakistan, on top of the lifting of sanctions, which were lifted soon after Pakistan joined the U.S.-led campaign.

Musharraf said the European Union also has offered Pakistan greater market access and that he was negotiating with lending agencies to relax debt repayments.

Musharraf also called for an end to what many Muslims see as an unfolding campaign against their beliefs.

``The religion of Islam, and Muslims in various parts of the world, are being held responsible for the trials the world is facing,'' Musharraf said.

Frustration among Muslims was high because of the number of Muslim victims in many of the world's prominent conflicts including, Bosnia, the Middle East and Kashmir.

-------- japan

Radiation Leaks at Japan Nuke Plant

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline

TOKYO (AP) -- For the second time in three days inspectors found a radioactive leak inside a nuclear plant in central Japan, but officials said Saturday that neither posed danger to humans or the environment.

The latest leak was discovered at about 3:30 p.m. Friday as inspectors were looking into Wednesday's incident at Chubu Electric Power Co.'s plant in Hamaoka, 120 miles southwest of Tokyo, said a company spokesman on condition that his name not be used.

A small quantity of radioactive water dripped inside the reactor vessel from a gap between it and a mechanism called the control rod drive, said Koji Yamashita, an official at the Trade Ministry's nuclear disaster prevention division.

The vessel contains nuclear fuel and the control ride drive regulates the reactor's output, Yamashita said.

On Wednesday, a small amount of radioactive steam was found leaking from a pipe that ruptured during a routine test of a pressure injection system during which fire alarms went off, forcing Chubu Electric to shut down the reactor, the company spokesman said. There was no fire, he said.

Neither leak posed any danger to the outside environment or the 32 inspectors who were at the facility at the time, the Chubu Electric spokesman said.

Japanese have become increasingly wary of nuclear power since a radiation leak at a fuel-reprocessing plant in Tokaimura two years ago killed two workers and affected hundreds of others. Tokaimura is 70 miles northeast of Tokyo.

Japan relies on nuclear power to supply 30 percent of its electricity.

-------- missile defense

Russia's Putin Optimistic on Missile Defense Deal

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-russia-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A buoyant President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he was ``very optimistic'' that Moscow could reach a compromise with Washington over U.S. plans for a missile defense shield against ``rogue'' rockets.

``I am very optimistic in this regard,'' the Interfax news agency quoted him as telling U.S. journalists ahead of next week's U.S. summit with President Bush.

Putin also said he believed the two sides were headed in the ``right direction'' on deep cuts in their respective nuclear arsenals, which he said was ``the flip side of the same coin.''

Russia wants to lower the number of deployed warheads to 1,500 each, but U.S. defense planners are reluctant to go below 2,250-1,800.

Russia says international terrorism poses more of a global security threat than rogue missiles, a view it believes the September 11 attacks on the United States vindicated.

In a broad-ranging interview in the Kremlin, Putin said he thought it ``unlikely'' that Osama bin Laden, accused by Washington of masterminding those attacks, had the nuclear bomb or other weapons of mass destruction.

``At any rate, these weapons cannot be Russian or Soviet. I am confident of this,'' Putin was quoted as saying. But threats to use such weapons ``must not be ignored,'' he said.

``We know about Bin Laden's links with certain radical circles in Pakistan, and Pakistan is a nuclear power,'' he said.

A leading Pakistani paper said on Saturday that bin Laden had claimed in a recent interview to possess nuclear and chemical weapons, and might use them to respond to U.S. strikes against Afghanistan, which shelters the Saudi-born militant.

MISSILE DEFENSE DIFFERENCES

Russia and the United States have been jousting over missile defense for years, but the two leaders nudged the dialogue forward in July, when they agreed to link talks on the issue with deep cuts in their respective nuclear missile arsenals.

Bush says the United States needs a missile shield to ward off attacks by so-called rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Libya. Russia says the threat is exaggerated and that missile defense would upset the strategic balance.

It has to date refused to change the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which bans the sort of missile defense envisaged by Bush, but in recent weeks signs of a compromise have emerged.

``The question is, what kind of compromises are they expecting from us? We have to see concrete proposals from our colleagues,'' Putin told U.S. reporters in the Kremlin.

After experts had come up with specific proposals it would be for political leaders to take decisions, he said.

``As for what sort of options could be found, I am optimistic,'' Itar-Tass quoted him as saying.

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Putin spoke warmly of his ``good relations'' with Bush, adding that their main task was to ensure the two countries became reliable, predictable partners.

He renewed a pledge to use Russian forces in search and rescue missions should U.S. troops get into difficulty on the ground in Afghanistan. As the de facto air traffic controller for some former Soviet states in the region, Russian help would be vital in such a situation.

Putin again linked Russia's two-year crackdown in its rebel Chechnya province, once a source of tension between Moscow and Washington, to the global war on terrorism launched by Bush after the September 11 attacks on his country.

Up to 700 fighters from Islamic countries were fighting alongside Chechen rebels, and were drawing up plans to go to Afghanistan ``to kill Americans there,'' Putin said.

He urged the global coalition to learn from Moscow's ill-fated intervention in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Soviet pullout after nine years was not a military defeat but the result of ``unpardonable political mistakes,'' he said.

The Soviet-backed Najibullah government ``did not have support among different ethnic groups and political forces inside Afghanistan. Nor was it supported by the international community.'' The main asset of the anti-terrorist coalition was the absence of the ideological divisions of yesteryear.

---

Putin Confident of ABM Compromise

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Putin.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that he was ``very optimistic'' that a compromise could be found with the United States on missile defense and that he was bringing new proposals to his meetings with President Bush next week.

``We see the capability to negotiate on the U.S. side and we have the same capability, but we want to know what we'll be negotiating about, in military and technological terms,'' Putin told a group of American journalists at an evening interview in the Kremlin.

Putin declined to elaborate on the initiatives he planned to raise at the meetings in Washington and Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, saying he wanted to present them to Bush directly, not through the media. And he praised Bush for agreeing to tie negotiations on missile defense and nuclear weapons cuts.

``We know the president's view that strategic offensive weapons can and must be reduced. This is a compromise in the right direction,'' Putin said.

Russia has proposed new limits on U.S. and Russian stockpiles of no more than 2,000 long-range warheads for each country, down from a current total of about 6,000 each. The Bush administration was said to be considering 1,750 to 2,250 warheads apiece.

Putin said that while Russia was ready to discuss a compromise on U.S. missile defense plans, it must know specifically what in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty stands in the way of Washington's proposed missile shield.

``We are also ready for a compromise. We should see what specific compromise proposals our American partners have,'' Putin said. He said it would be up to experts to set specific parameters for both offensive and defensive weapons.

On the eve of his first trip to the United States, Putin expressed confidence that U.S.-Russian relations had taken an irreversible turn for the better.

He said that Cold War rivalries and the fears they generated were partly to blame for allowing the growth of extremism -- including in Afghanistan, where international terrorist training bases were established. The United States ``did nothing to prevent the creation of the Taliban,'' and the Soviet Union responded by supporting U.S. foes.

``I think we should end this vicious circle, and I feel that together with President Bush, we are in a position to do that,'' Putin said, indicating that Russia would accept a U.S. role in Central Asia, a region it considers its own sphere of influence.

Asked about the claim by Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, that he has nuclear and chemical weapons, Putin said the threat could be a bluff but nevertheless should be taken seriously.

``I wouldn't overestimate the danger but it would also be wrong to downplay it,'' Putin said. ``We know about bin Laden's links with radical circles in Pakistan, and Pakistan is a nuclear power.''

``In that respect, we must support Gen. Musharraf in his efforts to consolidate his country,'' Putin said. He flatly denied that any Russian or former Soviet weapons of mass destruction could get into the hands of terrorists.

Putin said he wasn't looking for any particular payback from the United States in exchange for Russia's support of the U.S.-led action against terror. ``In the first place, we would like our joint struggle against terrorism to lead to positive results, that terrorism not only in Afghanistan but the entire world be destroyed, uprooted, liquidated.''

Gaining the United States as a ``reliable and predictable partner'' is more important, he said, than any quick material advantages.

However, he indicated that Russia was also looking for an end to what it considers discriminatory economic treatment by the United States, and for a more substantive, decision-making role in its partnership with NATO.

If Russia is ``not included in making decisions, it's obvious that Russia will not be as interested in implementing them,'' Putin said.

Putin said he would continue cultivating relations with countries such as North Korea and Iraq that the West considers possible proliferators of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

``The biggest mistake would be to isolate any country from the international community,'' he said.

Speaking about Russian assistance to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Putin said that along with air corridors and ``very valuable intelligence information,'' Russia also had supplied ``tens of millions dollars worth of military-technical assistance'' to Afghan opposition forces fighting the Taliban. Russia has also offered its assistance in search-and-rescue operations to retrieve Americans from Afghanistan.

Putin also claimed that Russia was fighting radical Arab mercenaries in Chechnya who would otherwise go to fight against Americans.

---

Rocket in Alaska Launch Destroyed

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Rocket-Destroyed.html?searchpv=aponline

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- A rocket fired from Alaska's Kodiak Launch Complex had to be destroyed seconds after liftoff Friday when trackers lost communication with it.

It was the first time a rocket used in testing for the missile defense program had to be destroyed after launch, said Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the missile defense program in Washington.

The rocket was launched from the complex, operated by the Alaska Aerospace Development Corp., at 9:12 a.m. It was destroyed 52 seconds later when launch officials lost telemetry data and data transmission, Lehner said.

``It seems to be a telemetry problem and safety rules dictate that, if you lose that type of data transmission, you have to destroy the missile,'' Lehner said.

Despite the loss of data, the rocket remained on course until it was destroyed. Lehner said a board would investigate.

``It could take weeks to figure out what caused the problem,'' he said.

The missile's pieces dropped into the ocean and were spread over an area 17 to 45 miles from the island, Lehner said.

The military had announced Wednesday that it planned to launch the rocket sometime between Friday and Nov. 21, but would not give the exact time and date, citing security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Coast Guard had warned mariners to stay out of the launch clearance area due to the possibility of falling debris, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Douglas Green.

The rocket was launched to learn more about how ground-based radar systems in California would pick up the characteristics of a warhead and decoys in space, Lehner said.

---

An Easy Bargain With Russia

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By BURTON RICHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/opinion/10RICT.html?searchpv=nytToday

STANFORD, Calif. -- When President Bush and Vladimir Putin meet next week, one aim will be to resolve differences about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. With much at stake in the war against terror and in Russia's hopes to be seen as a part of the West, no one wants the developing closeness of the United States and Russia to be held back by the old argument about an American missile shield.

Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration was saying bluntly that the ABM treaty, banning most missile defense, was anachronistic and that the United States might simply break it. Now the need for Russian support in the Afghanistan war makes cooperation more attractive than unilateral pronouncements. But this issue is not as difficult as it seems. The treaty could be modified fairly easily to allow what we need to do.

The emphasis in missile-defense now is on a "hit to kill" system to intercept and destroy hostile missiles; deployment is proposed for Alaska. Early tests have been disappointing, and it may be impossible to cope with the decoys that would accompany any armed incoming missile. The greater threat now appears to be nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists who wouldn't have missiles. But since the administration is determined to pursue the system anyway, it should negotiate a treaty amendment that would let us proceed.

The ABM treaty doesn't completely ban missile defense: it allows each side one ABM site. Many years ago the Russians chose Moscow and built a rudimentary defense, which is probably now in bad shape. We chose the missile field around Grand Forks, N.D., but abandoned construction there as not worth the effort. All we need now is an amendment substituting Alaska for Grand Forks.

The Bush planners also seem to want a new testing range - in another location in Alaska - and this needn't violate the treaty, either. Testing ranges must be declared, but there can be changes by mutual agreement.

The administration is also interested in pursuing a "boost-phase" defense, in which the attacking missile would be destroyed while its launch rocket was still burning. This would solve the decoy problem, since the rocket plume is unmistakable. But because the boost-phase system must respond within a couple of minutes after the enemy missile is launched, it must be automatic and located close to the launch point. The ABM treaty bans systems based at sea, in the air or in space, or moving about on land, so it is impossible to reconcile with a boost-phase system. But here, too, a new agreement is possible.

President Putin has suggested a discussion of a mobile boost-phase system that in a time of tension could be deployed close to the borders of a "state of concern." If the concern were with Iran, for example, the defense would have to be in the territory of the old Soviet Union. President Bush should pursue this idea.

Space-based defense, with hundreds or thousands of interceptors circling the globe, waiting for a satellite signal to launch them, is also being discussed again, though we spent billions in the 1980's and failed to find a way to do it. If we wish to pursue this fantasy again, the treaty allows the research.

What the Russians seem to want most as Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin meet has nothing to do with missile defense. They are arguing for a mutual agreement to reduce the number of long-range nuclear weapons. Russia, which can barely afford to maintain its missiles, suggests that 1,500 per side would be enough. Our military doesn't want to go below 2,500, but since each of today's warheads is more than 10 times as powerful as those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is hard to see why we need so many.

America's enemies have changed, and our nuclear strategies must change, too. We can make a sensible deal with Russia: Lower strategic bomb inventories in return for the amendments in the ABM treaty that would let the Bush administration work toward something it believes we really need - missile defense.

Burton Richter, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976.

-------- russia

U.S. Mulls Russia's Iraq Commitment

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Russia-Iraq.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has surprised and pleased the United States by showing flexibility on several important international security issues. On sanctions against Iraq, however, Putin has dug in his heels.

U.S. officials still hope for a Russian change of heart and expect to learn more about Russian thinking during a series of meetings in the coming days, including next week's three-day summit meeting between Putin and President Bush.

At issue is Secretary of State Colin Powell's effort, begun nine months ago, to orchestrate major revisions in U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

Powell wants to facilitate the flow of consumer goods into Iraq while cracking down on Iraqi importation of illegal military goods and cutting off the smuggling of Iraqi oil.

The Bush administration contends the proposal would benefit the Iraqi people while making it more difficult for Iraq to obtain weapons of mass destruction, which the United Nations has barred for more than a decade. Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, is believed to be working on development of chemical and biological weapons. U.S. officials are less certain about his plans for nuclear weapons.

All permanent members of the U.N. Security Council support the Powell plan except Russia, a steadfast ally of Iraq during the Cold War. Iraqis oppose the plan, presumably because added curbs would make it more difficult to push ahead with banned weapons programs.

Russia has benefited enormously from the status quo. It has earned millions of dollars from the sale to Iraq of equipment for infrastructure development, oil refinery construction and other such goods, which are permitted under sanctions ground rules.

Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraq could turn its back on Russia and take its business elsewhere if Moscow should decide to accept the Powell proposal. Iraq might also refuse to pay the multibillion dollar debt it owes Russia.

An angered Iraq would be a setback for Moscow, but U.S. officials see an upside as well: closer Russian ties with the United States and other industrialized countries and the economic benefits that would mean.

Bush and Putin will meet in Washington on Tuesday, then travel to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, for additional talks. How high on the agenda Iraq sanctions will be is not clear.

The issue is being discussed Saturday when Powell meets with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in New York at the U.N. General Assembly session.

There will be lower-level discussions between the two sides as well.

The issue has festered most of the year and now faces a Dec. 3 deadline. The Security Council could extend the current oil-for-food program for another six months. Alternatively, it could vote on the Powell proposal, with Russia exercising its permanent-member veto prerogative or rethinking its current position and accepting the resolution.

Putin's flexibility on a number of security issues has been a foreign policy high point for the administration this year. He has softened his perception of NATO as a hostile alliance and his opposition to Bush's plan for a missile defense system. He has been a stalwart partner of the administration's global anti-terrorism coalition.

Administration officials point out that Putin was strongly opposed just a year ago to the U.S. desire to establish a presence in former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

That changed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Just how much Russian attitudes have changed was evident last week with the scenes of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wandering around Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and talking about strengthening cooperation in the war in Afghanistan.

The situation, a U.S. official noted, is quite different from last year.

-------

Cause of Sub's Sinking Still Unknown

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Kursks-Mystery.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- A month after the charred and mangled Kursk nuclear submarine was hoisted from an Arctic seabed, investigators still cannot pinpoint the cause of the catastrophe but say new evidence shows the crew struggled for life, donning oxygen masks and unrolling fire hoses to fight a blaze that reached more than 14,000 degrees.

The submarine's hulk was hoisted from the Barents Sea floor Oct. 8 and brought to a dry dock near Murmansk more than a year after it exploded and sank during naval maneuvers, killing all 118 aboard. Investigators have pulled 56 bodies from the vessel since it was raised. Twelve others were removed by divers last year.

Investigators discovered more bodies in the stern sections than expected, indicating some sailors from the forward compartments managed to race backward in the two minutes and 15 seconds that separated two blasts that crippled and sank the Kursk.

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said the second explosion sent a huge fireball through the Kursk's hull, raising the temperature inside to 14,432 degrees and pulverizing all crew in the forward sections.

``What happened inside these compartments was hell,'' Ustinov said.

At least 23 sailors survived the explosions, according to letters found in the wreck, which described their agony in the pitch-dark, near-freezing sections of the stricken craft.

Investigators who retrieved the bodies said some seamen put on oxygen masks and unfolded fire hoses in a desperate attempt to fight the blaze ignited by the explosions.

Ustinov said that within eight hours of the blasts, the entire submarine was flooded by water seeping in through cracks in the hull. However, most men in the stern died earlier of carbon monoxide fumes from the fire.

The main ship log and any notes left by Capt. Gennady Lyachin and other senior officers in the control room disappeared in the fireball.

``We see absolutely nothing new inside the submarine now,'' said Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who is in charge of the Kursk probe in the Russian Cabinet. He said everything inside the submarine was simulated early last year.

Officials have said for months that the Aug. 12, 2000, disaster was triggered by the explosion of a practice torpedo that led to the detonation of combat torpedoes in the bow.

But they are still unable to settle on one of three possible causes of the initial explosion -- an internal flaw in the practice torpedo or perhaps a collision with another vessel or a World War II mine.

``There is no answer today,'' Klebanov said in the interview posted on Russia's official Web site about the Kursk.

The Kursk's twin nuclear reactors have remained safely shut down and no radiation leaks have been reported. Specialists have retrieved 16 of the submarine's 22 Granit supersonic cruise missiles, and the navy is planning to cut out the remaining six.

The disfigured torpedo section, which could contain a key to the cause of the disaster, was sawed off and left on the seabed out of fear it could break off during the salvage operation and destabilize the lifting. The navy plans to raise some of its fragments next year.

Immediately after the disaster, Russian admirals insisted that the most likely cause was a collision with a Western submarine, which allegedly was stalking the Kursk in a Cold War-style cat-and-mouse game. Both the United States and Britain had their submarines in the Barents Sea, but both countries have denied any involvement in the catastrophe.

The collision theory was ridiculed by many specialists, who pointed out that a foreign submarine wouldn't have been able to limp away from a collision with the much heavier, 18,000-ton Kursk, one of the world's largest submarines.

When Russian television first showed the Kursk remains in dock, much attention was focused on a dent clearly visible on its forward part. But prosecutors quickly ruled out that it was a mark left by a collision. Klebanov said it could have been caused by the vacuum effect from explosions inside.

Most experts agree that a torpedo malfunction was the most plausible cause of the disaster. The torpedo was propelled by highly volatile hydrogen peroxide, which in case of a leak could have caused a powerful explosion of the kind that shattered the Kursk.

A leak of hydrogen peroxide from a burst pipe caused the 1955 sinking of the British submarine HMS Sidon, in which 13 men died. Britain stopped using the chemical after the accident, but Russia continued to use it.

-------- switzerland

SWITZERLAND: PRACTICING FOR NUCLEAR DISASTER

New York Times
November 10, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

The government said it would conduct mock exercises next week to test how its civil defense system would cope with a simulated nuclear accident that contaminated a wide area of the country and forced millions of people into bomb shelters. Although the drill has been in preparation for a year, it coincides with new concerns about how the country would respond if confronted with biological, chemical or nuclear terrorism or accidents. Elizabeth Olson (NYT)

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

Stuck in the Cold War

Saturday, November 10, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5323-2001Nov9.html

According to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld [op-ed, Nov. 1], "Instead of focusing on who our next adversary might be or where a war might occur, we must focus on how an adversary might fight -- and develop new capabilities to deter and defeat that adversary.

"We must plan for a world of new and different adversaries who will rely on surprise, deception and asymmetric weapons (such as civilian airliners turned into missiles) to achieve their objectives."

Exactly so.

So why is the biggest item in the defense budget an attempt to counter intercontinental ballistic missiles? These were the primary weapons of the Cold War and the Soviet threat, neither of which now exist.

I hope Mr. Rumsfeld will heed his own counsel and move his department into the real post-Cold War world.

ROBERT SHERMAN
Gaithersburg

The writer is director of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

----

FIRST CHAPTER 'Hit to Kill'

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By BRADLEY GRAHAM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/books/chapters/11-1st-graha.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

In the autumn of 1944, the terror and destruction of German V-2 rockets, traveling faster than the speed of sound and slamming one-ton-explosive loads into British neighborhoods, marked the dawn of the missile age. At the end of the war, the Allies learned of Nazi plans to build a larger, two-stage rocket that might have been able to span the Atlantic Ocean, enabling Germany to make good on its intention of striking the United States. This revelation prompted Americans to question whether they could ever feel secure from missile attack.

Several U.S. military studies recommended the immediate development of an antimissile system, but a General Electric report in 1945 concluded that such a defense was beyond the scope of contemporary technology. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, an early missile defense skeptic, scoffed at the idea of shooting down missiles, comparing the challenge to "hitting a bullet with a bullet." Then, in 1957, the United States observed the test of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. Two months later, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. Together, these events showed that the Soviets could build missiles with enough range to cripple U.S. bomber fleets in a surprise attack. Intelligence estimates at the time predicted that the Soviets would deploy more than five hundred such missiles by the end of 1962.

Antimissile programs then took on a new urgency. The Army seized the lead, developing the Nike-Zeus project as an expansion of its Nike surface-to-air missiles-an anti-aircraft system initiated in 1945. Entirely ground-based, the plan involved dish-type radars for detecting enemy warheads and guiding interceptor missiles to them. The interceptors, armed with atomic devices, were to get close enough to the targets to destroy them in space with nuclear explosions.

No sooner had the Army introduced its concept than others started picking the plan apart, finding technical and operational faults. Some of the concerns were unique to the proposed use of nuclear missiles to shoot at other nuclear missiles. For instance, government review groups argued that nuclear blasts from interceptors could destroy the system's own radars and warned that the Soviets might even choose to explode nuclear weapons high in the atmosphere to blind the radars. Other concerns included doubts about the system's ability to guide the interceptors close enough to destroy their targets and worries that the Soviets could easily overwhelm the system by firing many missiles or confuse it by employing decoys along with active warheads.

Service rivalries came into play as well. While the Army had based its concept on shooting down missiles in their last minutes of flight, providing a point defense of military facilities, the Air Force favored an alternative concept centered on intercepting enemy missiles shortly after launch in their boost phase. The Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was exploring futuristic technologies for just such an approach under a program called BAMBI (Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept). It came up with a number of concepts for defenses in space, one of which involved housing interceptor missiles in large vehicles that would be stationed in orbit over ICBM sites. Critical of the Army's approach, the Air Force urged the Joint Chiefs not to deploy Nike-Zeus because it could be easily deceived, would cost too much, and might create a false sense of security. Besides, the Air Force argued, offensive retaliation-an Air Force mission-was a better defense.

The Army stood alone in its insistence that Nike-Zeus was effective and had growth potential; the reservations and doubts of higher authorities prevented the Army from proceeding with production. Even though funding for research and development continued to flow into work on antimissile systems, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations withheld any decision on deployment.

Subsequent designs modified Nike-Zeus in important ways to correct some of its shortcomings. The follow-on Nike-X system, initiated in 1963, used a layered defense of two missiles to address the risk of being overwhelmed. Under the revised plan, Spartan, an extended-range Zeus missile for interceptions in space, would take the first shots, and Sprint, a short-range missile for low-altitude intercepts, would attack any warheads that had penetrated the first layer.

This system also introduced phased array radar, a new kind of radar that was meant to reduce the vulnerability of earlier radars to direct attack. In contrast to previous mechanically steered, fragile, dish-type radars, the new versions used electronically steered radars housed in structures designed to withstand nuclear blasts. In addition, these radars could scan a much wider area of the sky and handle a larger number of targets than the Nike-Zeus models.

The technical superiority of the Nike-X system strengthened the Army's case for deployment. So did developments in the Soviet Union. In 1964 the United States detected initial construction of an antimissile system around Moscow. The same year the Soviets paraded what they claimed were antimissile interceptors through Red Square during the celebration of the October Revolution.

The intensity of the Soviet antimissile effort helped the U.S. Army rally the other military services to support a U.S. deployment. In 1965 the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara request funds for some initial Nike-X components. But just as the military chiefs appeared to be moving toward embracing missile defense, McNamara and the Pentagon's civilian leadership found themselves moving away from the concept as part of a rethinking of U.S. nuclear strategy. The Pentagon's missile defense efforts thus became enmeshed in an emerging body of thought about strategic nuclear deterrence.

McNamara had initially focused strategic planning on destroying Soviet nuclear forces in the event of war, but by the mid-1960s he had come around to the idea that no attainable level of force was sufficient to strike the Soviets and preclude a devastating retaliatory blow, particularly since the Soviets kept building more weapons. His central concern became finding a way to deter the Soviets from nuclear war. To figure out how much force was enough-and impose some fiscal constraint on service requirements-McNamara adopted a new standard for procurement, based on what he called the capability of "assured destruction." He defined this as the capability to destroy a certain percentage of the enemy's population and industrial capacity. This shift in strategic doctrine drew criticism from conservatives who viewed it as capitulation to the Soviets. But a growing and increasingly vocal group of private experts-mostly scientists and former government officials-also was contending that mutual deterrence could be maintained if each side developed a secure, second-strike force and simply left its population vulnerable to annihilation. Missile defense had no place in such a strategy because, so the reasoning went, it would spark a new arms race as each superpower sought to compensate for the other's defense.

McNamara thus joined the argument against missile defense. But President Lyndon Johnson was being lobbied to support an antimissile system, not only by the Joint Chiefs but also by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Johnson was concerned as well that the Republicans would pound him about an "ABM gap" in the 1968 elections. In December 1966, McNamara offered Johnson a compromise: seek funds for long-lead items on missile defense but delay a deployment decision while querying the Soviets about negotiations to limit such systems.

Johnson spent the first part of 1967 playing for time, hoping to work out a deal with Moscow that might make missile defense unnecessary. But the Soviets were not interested. When Johnson met Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, in June, McNamara took the opportunity to argue that missile defense threatened strategic stability and must therefore be limited. Kosygin disagreed with the notion that missile defense was destabilizing and said to McNamara, "When I have trouble sleeping nights, it's because of your offensive missiles, not your defensive missiles." The Soviets would not agree to further discussions. With a three-to-one disadvantage in strategic offensive arms, the Soviets had little incentive to bargain over missile defense.

At the same time, the Chinese were beginning to loom as a new threat, having fired their first nuclear-armed missile in 1966. A week before the Glassboro summit, they surprised both the United States and the Soviet Union by announcing the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. If the notion of defending against massive Soviet attack still seemed too much of a reach for U.S. technology, the prospect of a limited defense against the small number of Chinese missiles held some promise.

This is the direction McNamara ultimately took. In September 1967, in a speech in San Francisco, the Defense secretary moved the United States for the first time toward deploying a national missile defense. But it was a heavily hedged and ambivalent step. In the speech, McNamara began by actually making an impassioned case against missile defense, emphasizing that attempts to defend against a large-scale Soviet strike would just fuel the arms race. At the end, however, he announced the decision to proceed with a "thin" system called Sentinel to protect U.S. cities not from Soviet attack but from a much smaller Chinese threat.

Sentinel, an outgrowth of the Nike-X program, envisioned a layered defense using the Spartan and Sprint missiles, ground-based radars, and a multiple site command-and-control system. The plan called for deploying seven hundred interceptors to defend a handful of U.S. population centers around the country.

The Sentinel decision represented a political compromise-an attempt to balance conflicting strategic, technical, and diplomatic considerations. With China beginning to test nuclear devices and missiles, the threat was real and clearly a major motivating factor to do something. Experts were convinced that an antimissile weapon could be built to defend against a limited and relatively unsophisticated attack. Congress went along initially with the Pentagon's technical judgments.

But the anti-Chinese rationale was less a coherent strategic approach than an attempt to appease the pro-missile defense forces while minimizing any provocation to the Soviet Union. If McNamara could not prevent missile defense outright, he could at least keep it limited. Johnson too saw in the Sentinel plan a way of mollifying critics with something while still trying to entice the Soviets into an arms control deal.

By the time action had to be taken to implement the Sentinel deployment, public opposition to missile defense was becoming a factor for the first time. Critics were coalescing into an organized movement of academics, scientists, and former government officials, publishing articles in science and foreign policy journals and pressing their arguments at arms control conferences, in the corridors of power, and in the halls of universities and laboratories. Antimissile systems were portrayed as more complex, less reliable, and considerably more expensive than the missiles they were designed to defeat. Even a limited system, it was noted, would have to provide a nearly perfect defense, since penetration by just one warhead would be a disaster. Enhancing America's offensive capabilities, it was argued, would be cheaper than erecting a defense. In a 1962 article in Scientific American, Herbert York, a former Pentagon director of research and engineering, and Jerome Wiesner, President John Kennedy's science adviser, argued that developing defenses would merely spur the Soviets to a new cycle of weapons building and thus intensify the arms race.

The role of scientists is particularly noteworthy. As early as 1964, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a nationwide organization of about twenty-five hundred scientists and engineers concerned about the impact of science on national and international affairs, opposed any missile defense deployment. A 1968 article in Scientific American by Hans Bethe, a Nobel laureate professor of physics at Cornell University and member of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, and Richard Garwin, a research scientist at IBM, outlined in public for the first time the technical vulnerabilities of ballistic missile defenses. Their article cited concerns about high-altitude detonations blinding radars on the ground and the prospect of decoys or multiple warheads overwhelming the system.

Members of Congress began to seek the advice of the scientific community, and by the spring of 1969 scientists opposed to missile defense were testifying before congressional committees. This was a new phenomenon; previously, only administration witnesses had testified on defense matters. It was during this period that the core arguments against missile defense solidified and began to take root throughout the military establishment and on Capitol Hill. But the scientific community was itself split. A number of respected experts also made the case for proceeding with a limited antimissile system-among them, Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study and Alvin Weinberg of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They argued that a strong defense could undercut the value of ICBMs and end the arms race. Even in the absence of a 100 percent effective defense, Dyson wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, some benefit would come from saving most of a population. Another prominent supporter was Albert Wohlstetter, a researcher at the RAND Corporation and the Stanford Research Institute, who insisted that defensive systems were necessary to ensure that enough offensive missiles would survive a Soviet first strike to retaliate. He accused opponents of distorting operations research and data; they responded with accusations of contradictory statements, changing rationales, and selective use of intelligence information by members of the administration.

The technical debate left the impression that for every expert declaring that missile defense would not work, another was ready to argue that it would. What finally aroused the general public, though, was the Army's move in the final year of the Johnson administration to start buying land for the missile defense sites. Opponents warned that cities near defensive missile sites would become "megaton magnets" for the Soviet Union. They also fanned fears by saying that the nuclear warheads of the Spartan and Sprint interceptors might detonate at low altitude during an attack, or accidentally in peacetime, thereby destroying the very cities they were intended to protect. In the face of such heightened public concern, congressional backers began to rethink their commitment. Compounding matters, the Sentinel controversy was occurring against the backdrop of growing opposition to the Vietnam War, which cast clouds of general suspicion across all military programs.

Soon after taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon decided to deploy Sentinel equipment in a new configuration, relocating defensive sites out of metropolitan areas and basing them around offensive U.S. strategic missile silos. He called the reoriented system Safeguard. With this shift from population defense to silo defense, the Nixon administration hoped to dampen public opposition. At the time, U.S. officials were also increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of U.S. missiles to attack as a result of moves by the Soviet Union to put multiple, independently targetable warheads atop its huge SS-9 missiles.

Still, the Safeguard system proved as controversial as its predecessor, and the debate churned on. In August 1969, Congress narrowly approved funding to begin production of Safeguard, with Vice President Spiro Agnew breaking a fifty-fifty tie vote in the Senate. Over the next two years, the program retained its precarious grip on survival on the strength of its perceived value as a bargaining chip in the talks with the Soviet Union on limiting offensive nuclear weapons that began in November 1969. Already by the early 1970s, contemporary chroniclers were referring to national missile defense as "the most costly, complex and controversial weapon system ever developed by the United States."

In 1972, through negotiations known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the United States and Soviet Union agreed to a five-year freeze on strategic launchers and concluded the ABM Treaty restricting each superpower to two antimissile system complexes. In 1974 a protocol was added reducing the number of permitted sites to one each and a maximum of one hundred interceptors. Consistent with their respective antimissile programs at the time, the United States chose to protect a missile base near Grand Forks, North Dakota, while the Soviets retained the Galosh system they had built around Moscow in the 1960s.

The provisions of the ABM Treaty were tailored to prevent either country from deploying a full territorial defense or laying the groundwork for such a defense. To that end, the treaty placed tight restrictions on the development of new types of antimissile weapons, forbidding the testing or deployment of antimissile systems-or even components-that were mobile and land-based, or based in space, at sea, or in the air. The treaty marked a conceptual turning point in the nuclear relationship between the two superpowers. It signified an acknowledgment of deterrence based on mutual vulnerability. By entering into the treaty, the Americans and Soviets seemed to agree that the best way to avoid a massive nuclear attack by the other side was to remain defenseless against one. Understandably, missile defense enthusiasts found such reasoning absurd. Donald Brennan, a Hudson Institute analyst who had been working on missile defense issues, bitterly attacked the notion. He took McNamara's term "assured destruction" and the phrase "mutual deterrence" and combined them into what he called "the concept of mutual assured destruction," thus coining the enduring acronym MAD, which he said appropriately described the official U.S. posture.

It did not take long after the ABM Treaty process reduced the number of allowable sites down to one for even the single U.S. Safeguard facility in North Dakota to start looking expendable. From its inception, Safeguard had faced the same technical criticisms as Sentinel-chiefly that the system was extremely vulnerable to countermeasures and a determined Soviet first strike. Such limitations might have been acceptable in the short term while Safeguard served as a bargaining chip to persuade the Soviets to accept reductions in strategic forces. But after the ABM Treaty and the SALT I accord, there was less justification for keeping Safeguard at all.

Shortly after Safeguard started operating in October 1975, Congress canceled funding for the system, citing its expense and likely ineffectiveness. Operations were halted in February 1976. From start to finish, the program absorbed $5.5 billion, excluding the cost of developing and building the nuclear warheads. By the end, nuclear-tipped interceptors had lost favor as the way to defend against missile attack because of their technical and political liabilities. For one thing, nuclear explosions interfered with the operation of the radar systems that were supposed to control the battle between defending missiles and incoming warheads. For another, the prospect of nuclear blasts even high overhead unnerved populations on the ground.

So the Army shifted its research and development to an alternative approach that avoided explosive devices and relied instead on the kinetic energy of a direct collision to obliterate a target. Such an approach would require significant advances in two main areas. One was optical sensors to overcome the problems that radars had with distinguishing among decoys, boosters, warheads, and debris. The other area was parallel processing by computers at speeds fast enough to interpret the sensor data, incorporate it with radar tracking information, and compute targeting instructions for an interceptor.

By combining the improved capabilities of infrared sensors with small, high-capacity computers, the Army produced interceptors that worked on the principle of kinetic kill. Dubbed "hit-to-kill" vehicles, they represented the first major revolution in ballistic missile defense since the United States began research in the 1940s. This technology was ready for demonstration in 1982, when the Army began what it called its Homing Overlay Experiment, or HOE. In these tests, an experimental vehicle was launched from the Kwajalein missile range in the Marshall Islands using a modified Minuteman rocket. Once in space, the vehicle separated from its booster and homed in on a target missile that had been fired from an Air Force base in California. HOE succeeded in scoring a hit after three failures, but the credibility of the test was called into question years later when investigators at the Congressional General Accounting Office reported that the chances of intercepting the target warhead had been increased by heating it before launch and instructing it to fly sideways, thereby exposing a greater surface area to the interceptor's sensors. In any case, HOE was far too heavy and expensive for operational purposes.

Major advances in the development of lasers also occurred in the 1970s as the Pentagon explored ways of using this technology to shoot down aircraft or missiles. By the early 1980s, these efforts had focused on high-energy lasers based in space in order to overcome the scattering and spread of laser beams caused by the atmosphere. The construction of large mirrors posed a challenge for the evolution of laser systems, as did pointing and tracking with high precision. But of all the technical advances during this period, the promise of directed-energy weapons contributed most to generating renewed interest in deploying an antimissile system.

At the end of the 1970s, a precipitous change in U.S.-Soviet relations resulting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the failure of the United States to ratify a SALT II agreement set the conditions for reigniting the missile defense debate. The election of Ronald Reagan provided the spark. But it did not come immediately. While Reagan wasted little time launching the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, the strategic modernization program that he presented in October 1981 contained no provision for an antimissile system. A Defense Science Board panel had reviewed the status of various missile defense technologies earlier in the year and concluded that none was on the horizon.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from HIT TO KILL by Bradley Graham.

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

Warren E. Henry, Physicist and Educator, Dead at 92

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By WOLFGANG SAXON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/obituaries/10HENR.html?searchpv=nytToday

Dr. Warren Elliott Henry, a scientist who in a long career in government and academia made significant contributions to the fields of radar technology, physical properties of materials and physics education, died on Oct. 31 in Washington.

He was 92 and lived in Washington, where he was an emeritus professor at Howard University.

Born in rural Evergreen, Ala., Dr. Henry graduated in 1931 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, and never lost touch with it or the African-American airmen who trained in town in World War II. He received a master's degree in organic chemistry from Atlanta University in 1937 and a doctorate in physics and physical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1941.

He began his teaching career at Tuskegee, where a physics class for the institute's aspiring pilots was part of his course load.

In 1943, he was recruited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory for a project undertaken for the Navy.

At M.I.T., Dr. Isidor Rabi was preparing the theoretical underpinning for more potent radar systems that would detect and track targets like German submarines. Dr. Henry contributed to the systems' design and construction.

With no other job offers, he returned to teaching, at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and became the acting chairman of the physics department. In 1948, the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington hired him as a physicist and, later, supervisory physicist exploring magnetic properties of materials at extremely low temperatures, a field known as cryomagnetism.

From 1960 to 1969, Dr. Henry worked for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Among other things, he investigated the superconductivity properties of materials for space and aeronautical equipment.

Dr. Henry left Lockheed in 1969 as senior staff engineer and senior staff scientist in the advanced concepts division and joined the faculty at Howard, where he had taught courses in solid state physics. He was credited with strengthening the university's physics department and retired with emeritus status in 1977.

He published more than 100 articles and scientific papers, often presenting his findings at national and international conferences and at meetings of the American Physical Society. He frequently lectured at industrial research laboratories and elsewhere, and he contributed chapters to textbooks.

He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Henry's wife, Jeanne Pearlson Henry, died about 25 years ago. He is survived by a daughter, Eva Ruth Henry, of Florida; and five siblings, Nelson, Emmett and Alfred Henry and Celestine Ruskin, all of Montgomery, Ala., and Mamie Clemons of Pittsburgh.

Over the years, Dr. Henry studied under a number of Nobel Prize winners: Dr. Arthur H. Compton, the 1927 winner in physics, taught him quantum mechanics; Dr. Wolfgang Pauli, the 1945 winner, taught him the theory of nuclear forces; Dr. Robert A. Millikan, the 1923 winner, taught him molecular spectra. In addition, he played tennis with Dr. Enrico Fermi, a 1938 laureate.

In 1997, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory honored Dr. Henry with a W. E. Henry Symposium, "The Importance of Magnetism in Physics and Material Science." Among those present was Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, another Nobelist and the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

-------- washington

Officials don't want cleanup delayed

Hanford News
Sat, Nov 10, 2001
By John Stang Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1110.html

Mid-Columbia government officials tried this week to pop a trial balloon floated a couple of weeks ago about possibly delaying Hanford nuclear waste cleanup.

The issue revolves around local governments trying to predict what impact about 3,000 new Hanford workers would have on Mid-Columbia schools, roads, utilities and public services over the next four years.

Those workers, who are to build Hanford's tank waste glassification complex, would translate to about 7,000 new Tri-City residents. Construction is to be mostly finished in 2006, when the glassification work force would rapidly shrink.

In late October, Pam Brown, Richland's Hanford analyst, attended a national conference in Florida on cleaning up Department of Energy sites. There, Energy Undersecretary Bob Card, DOE's No. 3 leader, told Brown the federal agency had been wondering if it should delay building the glassification complex because it might strain the Mid-Columbia's schools and roads.

Brown told Card Mid-Columbia leaders want the glassification construction to proceed on schedule, and that any studies on community impacts should not stall the project.

On Tuesday, the Hanford Communities sent a letter to Card repeating what Brown told him. Hanford Communities is a Hanford-related coalition of the governments of Richland, Kennewick, Pasco, West Richland, Benton County and the Port of Benton.

The letter said the work on the glassification complex -- Hanford's top priority -- appears to be going well with good contracts in place and adequate funding likely through the end of fiscal 2002. The complex is legally required to convert its first wastes into glass in 2007.

"We want to make it very clear that anticipated municipal impacts should not be used as a reason to slow down this project," the letter said. "The highly radioactive waste in Hanford's tanks has already been there too long. Each day that goes by without tank waste treatment increases the environmental risk to ground water and the Columbia River."

The letter added: "Ultimately our communities will have to accommodate all of the people needed to build the facilities. Slowing down the project will not diminish the impact to the region but could very well have a negative impact on our communities."

On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham took his first tour of Hanford, which included a 40-minute meeting with DOE employees and community leaders. Richland Mayor Bob Thompson, talked briefly with Abraham at that meeting and reiterated the letter's position.

-------- us nuc politics

In the War on Terrorism, New Life for Propaganda
The Bush administration is creating a 21st-century version of the 1940's propaganda war.

Saturday November 10
By ELIZABETH BECKER
The New York Times
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nyt/20011110/ts/in_the_war_on_terrorism_new_life_for_propaganda_1.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 Late last month, Karen P. Hughes, the White House communications director, met with her British counterpart to join forces in what may be the most ambitious wartime communications effort since World War II.

The two officials agreed that there was an urgent need to combat the Taliban's daily denunciations of the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan, vitriol that was going unchallenged across the Islamic world. Soon they had set up a round-the- clock war news bureau in Pakistan and a network of war offices linking Washington, London and Islamabad that help develop a "message of the day."

The highly orchestrated communications effort is a first step in a broader campaign to create a 21st- century version of the muscular propaganda war that the United States waged in the 1940's. Matching old-fashioned patriotism to the frantic pace of modern communications, the Bush administration is trying to persuade audiences here and abroad to support the war. At the same time, it is trying just as hard to reveal as little as possible about it.

To reach foreign audiences, especially in the Islamic world, the State Department brought in Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive, who is using her marketing skills to try to make American values as much a brand name as McDonald's hamburgers or Ivory soap. The department's efforts are also meant to counter the propaganda of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

The foreign message crafted in Ms. Beers's new shop at Foggy Bottom dovetails with the domestic news management led by Ms. Hughes at the White House. From a nerve center set up two weeks ago in the Old Executive Office Building, the top communications directors of the administration including veterans who ran war rooms for presidential campaigns talk every morning to keep one step ahead of the news from the enemy.

"Before the war room it was like spitting in the ocean," said Mary Matalin, chief political adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a participant in the communications effort. "Now we can collect all the utterances, proclamations from around the world that will buttress our arguments this week that the Taliban has hijacked a peaceful religion and get them out, get them noticed in real time."

The effort to cobble together a new global approach is a backhanded acknowledgement that Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban are formidable propaganda foes, having spent years winning the hearts and minds of much of the Muslim world. It is also an acknowledgment that propaganda is back in fashion after the Clinton administration and Congress tried to cash in on the end of the cold war by cutting back public diplomacy overseas, especially government radio broadcasts into former communist countries, to balance the budget.

The other side of this propaganda war is the equally traditional military role of suppressing information while running psychological operations in the war zone.

The Pentagon has imposed a tight lid on sensitive military news, particularly about special operations, trying to walk the fine line of saying enough to reassure the public that the war is on target but keeping the news media at bay.

Veteran communicators of other wars are amazed at the limited information and limited access to the battlefield. Barry Zorthian, the chief spokesman for the American war effort in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, said this conflict is "much tighter than Vietnam."

"Saigon was almost wide open compared to this," Mr. Zorthian said. "We gave out much more information, and we had no real problems with the media giving away information that would harm the troops."

On the battlefield, the military has also heated up its psychological operations. Air Force planes drop propaganda leaflets that describe the United States as a friend of the Afghan people, and then drop food packets to try to drive home the point. Planes act as airborne radio stations, broadcasting warnings to civilians to stay out of the way.

Even aspects of the Pentagon briefings can be part of the psychological warfare. At one briefing, officials showed night-vision video of an Army Ranger raid in Afghanistan, in part to show the Taliban and Mr. bin Laden's terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, that the United States military could land and carry out operations on the ground.

In this new effort to bridge the classic tension between controlling information while promoting the message to a diverse audience, the administration is reaching back to the icons of the "greatest generation" of World War II. The Bush administration is revving up foreign-language radio broadcasts behind the amorphous enemy lines and asking Hollywood to pitch in.

On Sunday, Karl Rove, a senior political adviser to President Bush, will visit Hollywood, where he is expected to receive a warm welcome from producers and directors eager to show their patriotism.

Sean Daniel, a former studio executive and producer of "The Mummy," said he expected Hollywood to help.

"We'll contribute in a modern way what was done in the Second World War," Mr. Daniel said. "There has to be a way for the most popular culture on earth to help spread or help focus on our commonly shared beliefs, like the fact that what we're doing is right."

But the World War II propaganda effort put Hitler front and center, effectively using radio, film and even cartoons to depict the dictator as the personification of the enemy.

The Bush administration, by contrast, has shied away from making Mr. bin Laden the most prominent image in its propaganda war, airbrushing him out, at least for now. Given the pace of propaganda in the 21st century, that may change.

Tools of the Trade Finding a New Life

In the summer of 1994, Karl Rove flew to Prague on a mission to save Radio Free Europe. Then a member of the board overseeing the government stations that once broadcast into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Mr. Rove was fighting both President Bill Clinton, who considered Radio Free Europe a relic of the cold war, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers who wanted to close it down.

"Karl Rove saw for himself how powerful that radio had been, bringing in the news about those communist countries to their own people in their own language, and it made it crystal clear to him that it had to be saved," said Kevin Klose, who was the head of Radio Free Europe then and is now president of National Public Radio.

Radio Free Europe was saved, but only after cutting $125 million from its $200 million budget.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Rove, now the central political adviser to President Bush in today's propaganda campaign, is trying to put foreign language broadcasts back at the center of the war effort.

"It's time to bring back the idea of an Edward R. Murrow in Arabic, modernized of course, using satellites and shortwave, and Karl Rove understands all this perfectly," Mr. Klose said.

Foreign-language broadcasts are just one of the old ideas being dusted off and given a new life in an effort to recreate the kind of propaganda campaigns that were waged against the Axis powers in World War II and against communism in the cold war.

Like the old Office of War Information in World War II, the administration has sought to harmonize the daily message about the progress of the war through the creation of the White House war room. Representatives of various agencies work together there, including officials from the Pentagon, Health and Human Services and the new Office of Homeland Security.

In addition to enlisting the help of Hollywood, another old idea being recast is enlarging the propaganda message overseas through American diplomacy. This was once the domain of the United States Information Agency, but that agency was reduced and folded into the State Department in the Clinton administration.

Ms. Beers became under secretary of state last month to help sell the American war to the Islamic world. She quickly put Christopher Ross, a former ambassador fluent in Arabic, on the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera to counter a videotaped message from Mr. bin Laden, and has put Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Egyptian television to defend the American bombing campaign and Egypt's role in the war on terrorism. Vice President Cheney gave an interview on Friday to the British tabloid newspaper The Sun in that same effort to get the message past the elite.

This week Ms. Beers sent a "catalog of lies" through the State Department to Pakistani newspapers to dispute Taliban allegations, including the claim that the United States was purposefully targeting civilians.

And Ms. Beers has begun addressing groups of foreign journalists in Washington, many from Muslim nations. Those sessions are closed to American journalists.

"We can't give out our propaganda to our own people," said Price Floyd, deputy director of media outreach at the State Department.

This new concerted information campaign, with messages crafted jointly by American and British government communications directors in the war offices, called coalition information centers, in Washington, London and Islamabad, is trying to counter enemy propaganda about civilian casualties and the progress of the war.

Among some people who have played a spokesman's role before, there are doubts about whether journalists here and abroad will accept these new messages.

"I'd tone this down. This is not the Second World War, it's something different," said Frank Mankiewicz, a former Democratic spokesman now with the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton. "It's trying to fit one kind of struggle into another form and it's not working. It's too obvious."

There are also doubts about how well the propaganda campaign is working in the Islamic world. One challenge has been reaching across the cultural divide.

As part of its psychological operations, the military has been dropping leaflets over Afghanistan and broadcasting radio programs from aircraft meant to encourage the defections of Taliban soldiers by showing the cruelty and tyranny of the regime.

Originally, some leaflets were designed with a more direct message telling Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters to surrender or risk certain death. But culture experts working on the military's psychological operations team balked, saying an Afghan soldier would read a demand to surrender as an invitation to become a coward and lose his honor. The wording was changed.

Keeping Tight Control On Information and Expectations

Even before the bombing began on Oct. 7, news organizations had begun pushing for access to information and troops. But in the days and weeks since, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, while paying lip service to Persian Gulf war guidelines for news media coverage of combat, has enforced policies ensuring that journalists have little or no access to independent information about military strategies, successes and failures.

Pentagon correspondents say their usual sources have taken Secretary Rumsfeld's warnings about leaks to heart and are reticent where they had once been forthcoming in giving guidance to reporters.

In addition, after-action access to the troops engaged in bombing or other combat missions has been almost nonexistent. While there are hundreds of reporters in countries like Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states, Uzbekistan and the northern areas of Afghanistan all places where United States troops have been deployed the Central Command has yet to allow reporters to have any contact with troops.

It is not just information that the Pentagon leadership is keeping under tight control. It is also expectations. At a briefing on Thursday, Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, the commander in chief of the Central Command, was asked, "At the end of a month, now, what can we show that says, `Hey, we're winning?' "

General Franks rejected the premise, choosing instead to outline his objectives in the broadest terms: "Our job has to do with terrorist organizations, networks and global reach, and it has to do with the command and control of the Taliban."

The desire to keep information and expectations at a minimum stems directly from the experience of the Vietnam War, longtime military reporters and military historians say. The Johnson administration "oversold greatly the degree of success" of the war before the Tet offensive in 1968, said Don Oberdorfer, a former diplomatic and military correspondent for The Washington Post. The unrealistic expectations turned the Tet battles arguably a United States military victory into a massive public relations defeat.

"A whole generation of military officers grew up believing that the press was the problem, if not the enemy," Mr. Oberdorfer said.

And with public support of the Afghan action and trust of the Bush administration high, news organizations have little leverage. As the Army's senior historian, William Hammond, said, "History tells us that in a very popular war the government doesn't have to justify a whole lot."

Nonetheless, on Oct. 18, Mr. Rumsfeld said he "had no problem" with the nine- year-old "Principles of Coverage" Vice President Cheney agreed to when he was defense secretary. Among other things, the principles state that the military, as quickly as practicable, provide reporters with independent access to combat operations under the stricture that reporting would never compromise missions or endanger troops or intelligence-gathering operations.

But leading journalists say Mr. Rumsfeld's acceptance of the guidelines is in name only. Reporters have been allowed aboard three aircraft carriers and, briefly, on one Marine vessel in the Arabian Sea. But, said Sandy Johnson, the Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press: "Pilots won't tell us where they've been, what they dropped, what their target was. Nothing has changed."

Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, who helped draft the 1992 guidelines, said last week that they "have been accepted but aren't being lived up to." Mr. Hoyt added, "American forces are engaged in combat overseas, and we are basically shut out."

Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Friday that the guidelines had been communicated to commanders in the field as "broad policy guidance," adding, "We leave it to them at the local level to know best how to implement that."

Thus far, news organizations' only response has been increasingly frustrated questioning of the policy in weekly meetings with Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman. No unified challenge has been made by news executives.

Some executives, in fact, are as worried about public opinion as they are about the government's lid on information. Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, recently issued a memorandum saying that reports about civilian casualties in the bombing campaign must be balanced with mention of the Sept. 11 attacks.

An International Audience Grows Increasingly Skeptical

Perhaps the clearest sign of rising German and European skepticism toward the United States' declared war on terrorism is the warning to readers that the Frankfurter Rundschau, a leading liberal newspaper, has run every day since the bombing began.

"Substantial amounts of information about current military actions and their consequences is subject to censorship by parties to the conflict," the warning says. "In many cases, an independent confirmation of such information is not possible."

Germany is one of the United States's strongest supporters in the battle against terrorism. But as in other European countries, the initial outpouring of grief and solidarity is giving way to pointed questions about American strategy and dissatisfaction with many of the answers.

If the United States has a public relations problem among its allies, it boils down to this: many Europeans feel they have precious little information they can trust. They rely on conflicting and equally unverifiable claims from Pentagon briefings and Taliban news conferences, and are increasingly unwilling to believe either side.

"We are experiencing the same problem that we had in the gulf war no pictures," said Ulrich Deppendorf, Berlin bureau chief for Germany's ARD television network. "We have to rely on what the U.S. government claims, or on what the Taliban via Al Jazeera claims, or on information from the Pakistani news agency."

The United States has paid little attention so far to shoring up its message in Europe. The government initially rebuffed offers of military help, but that view has changed sharply in the last week. The British made the case that European involvement might bolster political support and the United States sought and received pledges of military aid from Italy, Germany and Turkey.

But Europeans, especially Germans, have been baffled by the way Americans have made their requests or explained their objectives.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany pushed Parliament to agree to make 3,900 soldiers available for missions in or around Afghanistan potentially the first use of German troops outside Europe since World War II. Germans were then flummoxed when Mr. Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that the United States had never specifically asked for German troops but rather the country's "broad support."

European popular support for the United States's campaign has waned noticeably, while newspapers have given quite prominent play to pictures of bombing damage and accounts of civilian casualties.

British support for military action has declined to about two-thirds from three- quarters, while French support has dropped to about half, from two-thirds shortly after Sept. 11.

"The public sees continuous bombing of buildings and they see pictures from Al Jazeera of small villages that have been destroyed, and that has made things immensely difficult," said Helmut Lippelt, a Green Party legislator who supports continued military action.

But Mr. Lippelt said the United States had hurt its own cause by being too murky about its plans. "The big danger in all this is the impression that bombs will keep up endlessly and that we will be dealing with a 10-year quagmire," he said. "One has to be clear about what this is about, and be clear that one understands those worries."

European news media get most of their information directly from Washington, and it is Washington that is frustrating them.

"Our greatest pressure is that we have no images," said Auberi Edler, a foreign news editor at France 2. "The only interesting images we get are from Al Jazeera. It's bad for everybody."

European journalists have also become suspicious that American news media have been co-opted by the government, or at least swept up by patriotism. "The journalists and the media directors suffer, in my opinion, from a `post Vietnam patriotic syndrome,' " wrote Freimut Duve, a German who heads the office on free speech at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna.

Mr. Duve argued that it was a mistake for the United States to declare a war on "terrorism," and that a clear focus on Osama bin Laden would have made the endgame easier to understand.

Hungry for News, Blanketed in Leaflets

When one nation is bombing another, it is difficult to convince the bombed of the virtue of the bombers. In Afghanistan, this has been America's challenge. Planes have been dropping leaflets as well as explosives.

One flier offers justification: "On September 11th, the United States was the target of terrorist attacks, leaving no choice but to seek justice for these horrible crimes."

Another provides an advisory: "We have no wish to hurt you, the innocent people of Afghanistan. Stay away from military installations, government buildings, terrorist camps, roads, factories or bridges. If you are near these places, then you must move away from them. Seek a safe place, and stay well away from anything that might be a target."

Another is soul-searching: "Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site?"

It is hard to assess the effect of the leafletting. From the testimony of recent refugees, most Afghans are more focused on their own fight for survival than the war against terrorism. As bombs hit the cities, people flee to the villages. As bombs hit the villages, people flee to the borders. They are destitute and frightened and hungry.

People are eager for news but information is scarce. Television has been banned by the Taliban; there are no newspapers to speak of. Radio has been people's primary link to the world. The Taliban's Radio Shariat was quickly silenced by the air raids.

The United States would like to provide its own substitute. Last week, Congress voted to create Radio Free Afghanistan, a station that would beam Afghan versions of entertainment and American versions of the news. In the meantime, a special aircraft occasionally broadcasts from the sky.

Many Afghans are accustomed to listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America, which offer news in the local languages. While the reporting is generally considered unbiased, editorials may not be regarded as similarly so. Recent Voice of America editorials have had much the same tone as the leaflets.

On Wednesday, the Voice of America warned hungry Afghans that food had been stolen from United Nations warehouses and that the Taliban may have poisoned it.

"It is hard to believe that anyone even those as evil as the Taliban leaders would ever poison food intended for starving people," the editorial said. "But then, who believed before Sept. 11 that anyone would hijack civilian airliners and deliberately crash them into buildings to kill thousands of innocent people?"

In Pakistan, the battle for the headlines largely seems to have been won by Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad. Virtually every weekday, he has hosted a news conference from the embassy's veranda, making allegations about American "atrocities" to a huge audience of foreign journalists desperate for news.

A few days ago, the government of Pakistan, America's frontline ally against the Taliban, told Mullah Zaeef that his barrage of vitriol was outside the norms of diplomatic conduct. He was asked to curb his hospitality to the press.

The allies announced their own effort to counter the Taliban spin, opening the war office in Islamabad in an effort to immediately respond to accusations. Islamabad is 10 hours ahead of Washington. By the time the Pentagon has issued its rebuttals, the newspapers in many countries have already gone to press.

A Place for bin Laden In Propaganda History

Turning civilian passenger planes into missiles will not be the only benchmark set by Mr. bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization. In the annals of propaganda, Mr. bin Laden will be remembered, too, for the audacity he showed by leaping onto the television screens of the world only hours after American bombs started falling on Afghanistan.

This was a man wanted by the most powerful nation on earth, a nation whose leader had been assuring the world that, for Mr. bin Laden, there would be nowhere to escape American justice. And there Mr. bin Laden was, suddenly, on videotape, sitting calmly before a rocky outcrop, his only weapon a Kalashnikov rifle. He delivered a statement about Allah having struck America in its highest places, wished the killer pilots godspeed to paradise and vowed that this was just the start of an apocalypse.

"You have to choose your side," he told the world's one billion Muslims, and leaned back contentedly for a sip of water.

With that astonishing videotape, Mr. bin Laden showed, again, that America was at war with a formidable enemy. Just as his zeal to stab America's heart had been underestimated, so too had he been lightly regarded as an ideological foe. By arranging that his address to the Islamic world become available as soon as the bombing began, he showed that he understood that this war, like other modern conflicts, would be fought on the leveling terrain of world opinion as much as on the battlefield.

From that instant the propaganda war was joined, and it is far from clear in the Muslim world that Mr. bin Laden is losing it.

Although American networks have been persuaded not to run Mr. bin Laden's tapes unedited, the Islamic audience he cares about can still see and hear him.

For this audience, there is Al Jazeera, the CNN of the Arab world, chosen as the recipient of his tapes. The text of his latest tape, in which he attacked moderate Arab leaders and the United Nations, was on the front page in newspapers across the Muslim world, and on scores of Arab Internet sites. Beyond that, the message has been broadcast, and rebroadcast, from the pulpits of myriad mosques.

Racks in the bookstores of cities across the Islamic world are filled with books about Mr. bin Laden, and with magazines that carry his photograph on their covers.

The evidence from the Muslim world is that Mr. bin Laden's hatred for America and his call for a holy war has a vast, receptive audience. Opinion polls show it, and anecdotal evidence confirms it.

In Pakistan, America's reluctant partner in the war on terrorism, it is hard to find anybody who does not condemn the Sept. 11 attacks. But in slum sections of Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, people with almost nothing line up to buy bin Laden T-shirts. And in the salons of the elite, it is hard to find anybody who does not find a way of signaling a sneaking admiration, if only because Mr. bin Laden has, many in the Muslim world seem to believe, brought humility to the United States.


-------- MILITARY

THE PRESIDENT
Bush Chides Some in Coalition for Inaction

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10PREX.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - President Bush expressed impatience today with nations that he said had done little in the war against terrorism beyond offering condolences, and said he would use an address to the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday to make the case that "the time for sympathy is over."

Speaking at the White House during a joint news conference with the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Mr. Bush said that "we appreciate the condolences" but that "now is the time for action, now is the time for coalition members to respond in their own way."

A senior administration official said Mr. Bush's speech would be a fleshing out of what the White House calls the Bush Doctrine - the assertion that nations that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves.

Mr. Bush will not name names in the speech, the official said, even though some American officials have singled out Saudi Arabia for what they say is a lack of cooperation in the war against terrorism. But Mr. Bush said almost as much himself at the White House today after calling for active assistance from coalition members.

"The Saudi Arabian government understands that, and they are responding as well," he said.

At the same time, Mr. Bush's news conference and meeting with Mr. Vajpayee opened a delicate new phase of diplomacy in a potentially explosive conflict by reassuring the Indian leader of Washington's long- term commitment, even as the president was preparing for a meeting in New York Saturday with Mr. Vajpayee's bitter rival, Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

"My administration is committed to developing a fundamentally different relationship with India," Mr. Bush declared. He said the United States and India "will fight terrorism together," adding, "India has got a fantastic ability to grow, because her greatest export is intelligence and brain power."

The language of friendship was underscored by the setting of today's event, the Cross Hall on the state floor of the White House, a place that offered the same pageantry bestowed this week on another ally, the British prime minister, Tony Blair.

Mr. Bush brushed aside statements earlier this week by Mr. Vajpayee that the military campaign in Afghanistan was not "fully satisfactory" and that the United States suffered from a lack of intelligence data from the region. In an interview that appeared in The Washington Post today, Mr. Vajpayee also said the opposition Northern Alliance, which is supported by India, had not received enough military support from Washington.

After the talks, Mr. Bush said: "The prime minister and I had a very good discussion about the progress we're making on this particular part of the war on terror." The coalition against terrorism, he said, "has never been stronger."

Mr. Vajpayee, his head down as he read from prepared remarks, said, "We admire the decisive leadership of President Bush."

Underneath the decorous language of diplomacy were serious concerns from India, which remains irritated and nervous about America's sudden wartime alliance with Pakistan.

India and Pakistan have been enemies since they were carved out of the British Empire a half-century ago, and have fought three bitter wars. India now regards Pakistan as the prime sponsor of terrorism in India, chiefly in the disputed northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Pakistan cannot be on one border saying `We are against terrorism' and on the other border saying that `We support terrorism,' " a senior Indian diplomat said. "There cannot be good terrorists and bad terrorists."

Jaswant Singh, the Indian foreign minister, who today called Afghanistan "a factory for terrorists that operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year," said the war there had in one way benefited India, because some terrorist camps that had shifted from Pakistan to Afghanistan had now been destroyed in the bombing. White House officials said that Mr. Bush and Mr. Vajpayee touched on the issue of Kashmir, but would not specifically say that the president urged Mr. Vajpayee to use restraint in that area, where India has amassed 600,000 troops. That point was already made by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during a visit to New Delhi last month.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said after the meeting that "in all the conversations the president has had and that he will have, including tomorrow at the United Nations with President Musharraf, the president will discuss the need for stability in the region and for a peaceful resolution between India and Pakistan over any other disputes."

Nonetheless, Mr. Singh reacted with disdain at a news briefing this afternoon when asked if Mr. Bush had asked India to act with restraint.