NUCLEAR
A US-Russian alliance against megaterrorism
Safety Is Fewer Missiles
Analysts Debate Next Weapon in Al Qaeda Arsenal
Abandoned al - Qaida Lab Found in Kabul
Analysts Lukewarm on Nuclear Accord
New Cancer Radiation Therapy Shows Promise
IAEA mission to inspect Czech Temelin n-plant
Slovakia oks EBRD deal to fund nuke plant shutdown
Schroeder Faces Confidence Vote Risks
American caucus
Iraq Rejects Plan by U.N. on Sanctions
Japan reactor leak may have started July-company
Putin Offers Americans Thoughts on NATO, Bin Laden
Rapport, but not an arms deal
Putin Fields Questions From American Public on Talk Radio
Warmth, but No Thaw on Missiles
Closer ties for Russia?
U.S. to Pursue Missile Test Plans
U.S. Testing Goes Ahead; Could Violate ABM Treaty
Missile Impasse: The Shape of the Deal
Before and After Bush and Putin's Banter
Strategic missile test
Salvaged Russia Sub to Be Scrapped
Friendly leaders unable to agree on missile treaty
Missile treaty must remain, Putin tells Bush
Summit Is Important Step to Success
Putin refuses to scrap treaty
US rep. wants anti-radiation drug near nuke plants
Federal Guards for Nuke Plants Sought
Probe Finds Law Firm Had Dual Roles
Oak Ridge guards told they have final offer on labor pact
Nuclear Differences Remain as Summit Ends
U.S. Chamber of Commerce gives backing to Yucca
Probe finds Yucca law firm failed to disclose conflict
MILITARY
Alliance Commander Near Kandahar
Afghans Returning Home, Vindicated and Vengeful
Talks Fail With Taliban Besieged in Kunduz
Warlords Are Vying to Fill Vacuum Left by the Taliban
Man Pleads in $32M Weapons Plot
Major Anthrax Developments
U.S. Opts to Keep Smallpox Stock
U.S. Advises Anthrax Drug for Visitors to a Publisher
Senators Seek $3.2 Billion to Fight Germ Threats
Rumsfeld: N. Korea's Arms a Threat
Breaking the Circle
Cuba Ready for Normal US Relations
White House Urges Senate to Confirm 'Drug Czar'
Israel Eases Travel Restrictions during Ramadan
Peres Calls Palestinian State Israel's 'Best Bet' for Peace
A 2nd Night of Protests by Palestinians Angry at Arafat
Coup rumors
Money for Pakistan
Navy, Marine chiefs seek live-fire Vieques training
Sudan Urges U.N. to Review Sanctions
Rumsfeld: U.S. forces in ground combat
U.S. Special Forces Engaged in Ground Combat
A Travesty of Justice
Justice: One standard Secret military courts are unneeded
ENERGY AND OTHER
German parliament ups subsidies for green energy
Bonds to finance windmill construction
US energy demand to rise by one-third by 2020 - EIA
Did Ken Lay Understand What Was Happening at Enron?
UN environment agency welcomes new trade round
Sierra Protection Plan Upheld
Now, the Battle to Feed the Afghan Nation
TO COMBAT GLOBAL POVERTY
Two Roles for Military: Supplying Guns and Butter
POLICE / PRISONERS
Congress passes aviation security bill
Lawmakers demand hearings on tribunals
Gingrich Disfavors National ID Card
The New USA PATRIOT Act
Arabs Question Justice Dept. Plan
A Travesty of Justice
Inmate Education Is Found to Lower Risk of New Arrest
United Plans to Equip Pilots With Stun Guns
F.B.I. Visits Provoke Waves of Worry in Middle Eastern Men
Inquiries Put Mideast Men In Spotlight
Rumsfeld Offers Assurances About Use of Military Courts
Algerian Charged in LAX Bomb Plot
More Terrorists May Be Hiding in U.S.
Ridge Agrees Taliban Losses May Lead to New Terrorism
ACTIVISTS
War on Terror: False Victory
-------- NUCLEAR
A US-Russian alliance against megaterrorism
Boston Globe
By Graham Allison and Andrei Kokoshin,
11/16/2001
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/320/oped/A_US_Russian_alliance_against_megaterrorism+.shtml
PRESIDENT BUSH has warned the world that Osama bin Laden is ''seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction.'' To meet this threat, the United States and Russia should take the lead in establishing an Alliance Against Megaterrorism. What should have been a crowning achievement of this week's summit was sadly a missed opportunity.
Presidents Putin and Bush are now actively transforming relations between the United States and Russia. Putin was the first international leader to call Bush after the Sept. 11 assault. Recognizing that US forces would go to alert status, Putin cancelled a Russian military exercise to avoid any possible confusion. As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice noted: ''If you think back 25 years ago, this would have been a spiral of alerts between two heavily armed, ideologically opposed camps.'' This was, she said, ''the crystallizing moment for the end of the Cold War.''
As participants in building relations between Russia and the United States, we believe the current crisis presents a historic window of opportunity. In earlier discussions, both presidents searched for a ''new strategic concept'' for their post-Cold War relations. While we applaud the announcement of significant reductions in numbers of operational strategic offensive nuclear arms, that numbers game is a holdover from the Cold War, not the stuff of a ''new relationship for the 21st century.''
Post-Cold War relations should begin with shared vital national interests that require cooperation for their fulfillment. The urgency and importance of one such interest was made vivid by Sept. 11: to minimize dangers of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction terrorism. As the inventors and builders of 99 percent of the world's weapons of mass destruction, Russia and the United States have a special responsibility to exercise leadership in this arena.
The surest way to prevent terrorist assaults with weapons of mass destruction is to prevent terrorists from gaining control of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The readiest source of such weapons and materials are the vast arsenals and stockpiles Russia and America accumulated in the Cold War. America and Russia should act now to assure each other that their own houses are in order: securing and/or neutralizing all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material to agreed international security standards on the fastest timetable technically feasible. An ambitious program of action to achieve this objective should be jointly funded by the United States, Russia, and other members of the international coalition against terrorism.
The starting points for a high priority program of specific actions to this end have already been stated by the two presidents. In his major foreign policy campaign address at the Ronald Reagan Library, then-presidential candidate George W. Bush called for ''Congress to increase substantially our assistance to dismantle as many of Russia's weapons as possible, as quickly as possible.'' In his September 2000 address to the UN's Millennium Summit, Putin proposed, ''The world must find ways to block the spread of nuclear weapons by excluding use of enriched uranium and plutonium in global atomic energy production.'' At his joint press conference with Putin on Tuesday, Bush offered that, ''Our highest priority is to keep terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.''
What the two presidents failed to announce, however, are concrete actions to achieve this objective. A specific program for minimizing the danger of nuclear weapon terrorism has been developed by the bipartisan Baker-Cutler Task Force Report (www.hr.doe.gov/SEAB/rusrpt.pdf). Initiatives should concentrate weapons and materials in the fewest possible sites, secure them by the most technically advanced means, and neutralize highly enriched uranium by blending it down for subsequent use in civilian nuclear power plants. This program could essentially eliminate the risk that nuclear weapons could be stolen, sold to terrorists, and used to attack America or Russia or others.
Further elements of this new alliance must include a US-Russian led international coalition to cause all other nuclear-weapons states - including Pakistan - to secure their weapons and weapons-usable material within their borders. A complementary international effort to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional states should focus on North Korea, Iran, and Iraq through joint political efforts to reinvent a more robust nonproliferation regime of controls on sale and export of weapons of mass destruction and missile technologies.
No one can doubt bin Laden's aspirations to acquire nuclear weapons, which he has called a ''religious duty.'' As the international noose tightens around Al Qaeda's neck, it will become more desperate and audacious. The time to act to prevent nuclear terrorism is now.
Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. Andrei Kokoshin is director of the Institute for International Security Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a former secretary of the Security Council of Russia.
This story ran on page A31 of the Boston Globe on 11/16/2001
---
Safety Is Fewer Missiles
Los Angeles Times
November 16, 2001
EDITORIAL
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-000091681nov16.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Dcomment%2Deditorials
President Bush pulled out all the stops for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The White House meeting, followed by 21/2 days at the Bush ranch in Texas, was supposed to cement the friendship between the two. Mostly, it did. Bush ignored the far right and treated Putin as a partner to be consulted.
The dividends came fast and big--no more negotiators haggling for years about the explosive power of nuclear warheads. Bush and Putin boldly agreed to reduce the stockpile of warheads by about two-thirds over a decade.
Their reasons for wanting to slash missile forces, however, are quite different. Moscow cannot afford to keep maintaining and testing them. The Bush administration, however, wants to move from offensive to defensive weaponry--a national missile defense. It believes that by cutting the missile force, the United States can demonstrate to Russia and China that its actions are purely defensive. Putin wasn't buying, at least not yet. Despite the hopes of the Bush administration, he would not alter the 1972 ABM Treaty, which forbids development of a nationwide antiballistic missile system. Arms control analysts say that Putin won't raise a fuss if the administration skirts the edges of the treaty. The Russians figure that no one knows whether testing will actually lead to anything; they intend to make their real stand if a system can ever be deployed. Meanwhile, the United States would sink billions into what's likely to be a rat hole.
This is fine from the Russian perspective, but not from America's. The United States should not be wasting increasingly scarce resources on the 21st century's version of the Maginot Line. Instead, it should spend a little more to help Russia keep track of and decommission its nuclear stockpile; last month Congress rejected spending an additional $131 million to help accomplish that.
Putin clearly wants to move from a lingering Cold War mentality to alliance with the West. One of the most important changes is a willingness to work with NATO on common policies against terrorism and weapons proliferation. This is an amazing contrast with the threatening noises Russia was making until recently about NATO and its expansion into the Baltic states.
Bush's aim should be to lock in Russian cooperation as quickly as possible so that Putin's successors cannot reverse any changes. Missile defense is a mirage. Effective cooperation with Russia is not.
---
Analysts Debate Next Weapon in Al Qaeda Arsenal
Panel Finds Terrorists More Likely to Possess Radioactive 'Dirty Bombs' Than Nuclear Weapons
By Michael Dobbs and Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 16, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37649-2001Nov15.html
With Osama bin Laden on the run in Afghanistan and the Taliban regime in full retreat, one of the most pressing questions for experts studying bin Laden's terrorist career is whether the Saudi-born dissident has some final cataclysm to unleash on America as an ultimate act of revenge.
Probably not, say U.S. officials and most independent analysts, who are skeptical of claims by bin Laden that he has nuclear weapons or other sophisticated devices capable of causing much greater numbers of casualties than on Sept. 11. They caution, however, that his supporters have dabbled in chemical experiments and shown an interest in acquiring nuclear materials that could be used in conjunction with conventional explosives for a "dirty bomb."
In fact, the nation has more to fear from an attack by terrorists armed with dirty bombs containing radioactive materials packed around an explosive core than from nuclear weapons, a committee of leading radiation scientists has concluded in a report being sent to Congress today. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements said that contamination from such an attack would likely extend to several city blocks and that radiation would be "catastrophic but manageable."
The council's findings, which were the result of a three-year study, are in line with informal assessments by government counterterrorism officials and many independent experts. But there is a dissenting view, expressed most forcefully by Graham Allison of Harvard University, who said it is quite "probable" that bin Laden's al Qaeda network has acquired sufficient quantities of fissile material to create a crude nuclear device.
"I find it well within the realm of the probable that they have fissile material from Russia, which they could fashion into a device that they could put into a minivan," said Allison, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. Another scenario, he said, was to smuggle a nuclear device into the United States through one of the millions of containers that enter the country every year.
In public statements over the last few years, bin Laden has described the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction as "a religious duty" for Muslims waging jihad, or holy war, against the West. "If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so," he told Time magazine in December 1998, shortly after issuing a statement calling for America's destruction under the title "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam."
In his most recent interview, with a Pakistani journalist in a mountain hideout near Kabul this month, bin Laden, 44, said his supporters possessed chemical and nuclear weapons as "a deterrent" against the use of such weapons by the United States. But he refused to say how he had acquired his arsenal.
The Taliban's supreme religious leader, Mohammad Omar, was similarly vague yesterday when he was asked a question about bin Laden's possession of weapons of mass destruction in a rare interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. conducted over satellite phone. "The real matter is the extinction of America and, God willing, it will fall to the ground," predicting that this would happen within "a short period of time."
U.S. officials yesterday dismissed such threats as largely bluff, while not doubting that bin Laden is ruthless enough to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States should he ever acquire them.
"What these statements do is merely to reinforce the need to wipe these guys out," said a U.S. official involved in counterterrorism efforts. "When you have got a group that is clearly going after weapons of mass destruction, you have to assume that they will succeed at some point."
The official described the likelihood of bin Laden possessing a full-scale nuclear weapon as "not credible," given the huge difficulties in acquiring sufficient quantities of plutonium or highly enriched uranium needed to initiate a chain reaction. He said that a crude radiological bomb was much more likely, noting that there are 10,000 sites in the world where nuclear materials of one kind or another are stored.
Regardless of the amount of radiation released, any significant attack with a radioactive weapon would cause "chaos," according to the new report to Congress. Public panic caused by the fear of invisible radiation would be a key weapon for terrorists, the report states.
"It's a great psychological warfare weapon," said council member and Texas A&M University professor Ian Scott Hamilton. "It's great for spreading fear."
Council President Charles R. Meinhold said rescue workers would not necessarily be put at risk by radiation from a "dirty bomb," which might be less than levels acceptable for nuclear plant workers. He said the report's most important finding was that government agencies and medical facilities needed more training and equipment to cope with such attacks.
There is evidence that bin Laden has been trying to acquire nuclear materials since at least 1994. Testifying earlier this year in a trial of al Qaeda members accused of bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, former bin Laden associate Jamal al-Fadal said he had tried to acquire uranium from a Sudanese source in late 1993 or early 1994. He did not know whether the acquisition attempts continued after he left the organization.
U.S. officials have also expressed concern at reports that bin Laden supporters have experimented with various poisonous substances at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Ahmed Ressam, a former member of the al Qaeda terrorist network arrested by U.S. border guards in December 1999, has said his training at the Khalden camp included instruction in how to place cyanide gas near the air intake vents of a building.
In one experiment, Ressam told a New York court in July, an instructor put a dog in a box and poured in some cyanide and sulfuric acid. It took the dog about four minutes to die. "We wanted to know what is the effect of the gas," said Ressam, who is now cooperating with American prosecutors.
Reporters entering Kabul this week in the wake of the headlong Taliban retreat have found some evidence that al Qaeda dabbled in chemical experiments and studied widely known techniques for making nuclear devices. In a front-page report in the Times of London, the paper's correspondent in Kabul, Anthony Lloyd, said he found instructions on how to manufacture the deadly poison ricin in the cellar of an abandoned house used by al Qaeda members.
"A strong dose will be able to kill an adult and a dose equal to seven seeds will kill a child," the instructions said. It was not clear whether al Qaeda members had tried to produce ricin, which was used by the Bulgarian secret police to kill a dissident writer, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978.
Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, said he would like to see much more evidence before concluding that bin Laden has weapons of mass destruction. "People who claim he has such devices are very skimpy about the evidence," he said. "If he had them, he would probably have used them by now. The goal of his movement is not to bargain and negotiate, but to punish."
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Abandoned al - Qaida Lab Found in Kabul
New York Times
November 16, 2001
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghanistan-Abandoned-Laboratory.html?searchpv=aponline
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Materials left behind in a compound used by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network -- including a booklet offering advice on how to survive a nuclear explosion -- suggest the terrorist group may have been trying to develop chemical arms and other unconventional weapons.
Foul-smelling liquids and charred papers covered with chemical formulas littered a makeshift laboratory in one al-Qaida building in the heart of Kabul. Maps, mines and computer manuals were found in others.
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said Thursday that the documents are consistent with bin Laden's statements saying he desired nuclear weaponry.
But papers found detailing how to make a nuclear device were ``taken off the Internet some years ago'' and could've been widely available to people other than the al-Qaida terrorists, he said.
U.S. officials have said that they had no information to suggest bin Laden has succeeded in gaining nuclear weapons.
But ``we have to be prepared for all eventualities including a nuclear threat,'' Ridge said.
The Kabul compound appeared to have taken a direct hit from what northern alliance soldiers said was a U.S. rocket.
The Times of London newspaper reported Thursday that designs for nuclear weapons, bombs and missiles -- written in Arabic, German, Urdu and English -- were among the debris left behind.
``There are descriptions of how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass, sparking a chain reaction, and ultimately a thermonuclear reaction,'' The Times said.
Room after room was filled with papers, formulas and maps, some partially burned, some with handwritten Arabic notations. There was a yellowed page from an old issue of Plane and Pilot magazine -- a story titled ``A Flight to Remember.''
At the rear of the main house, one room contained mountains of papers, some from training manuals showing diagrams of weapons. An English-language book described how to use a recoilless rifle. Small, anti-personnel mines littered the floor of another room.
An alliance soldier in camouflage dress, Mohammed Nisar, walked through three houses pointing out pieces of paper with formulas, handwritten diagrams, pictures of rockets and other weaponry. In the basement of one house was what looked to be a laboratory.
In another house where the al-Qaida men resided, according to Nisar, four different types of land mines were found. Northern alliance troops had emptied two old railway cars parked in the yard that its soldiers said had been packed with arms and ammunition.
``Look, you can see the land mines,'' Nisar said, moving to pick one up. ``It's safe now; we have disarmed it.''
Deep beneath the house were what seemed to be bunkers, with a roof of fresh cement. In one were parts of weapons, with the barrels of anti-aircraft weapons propped up in the corner.
In the yard and in the rooms were more papers and diagrams -- some in Arabic, some in Persian, some in Urdu -- and maps with large circles to mark locations.
Earlier this year, The Associated Press acquired an 11-volume Encyclopedia of Holy War, written in Arabic and dedicated to bin Laden and the Taliban.
Another sprawling al-Qaida compound, built on a former Scud missile base in the hills that surround Kabul's Darulaman Palace, apparently served as training grounds.
``We found lots of books and papers and newspapers,'' said Haji Abdullah, a northern alliance commander. ``We threw most of them out.''
A laminated certificate retrieved from the rubble identified the holder as a ``military training instructor,'' alliance soldier Jan Aga said.
The northern alliance, which now controls the abandoned base, had one Pakistani in custody, Naimad Ullah. Just 17, Ullah could only speak Urdu. He looked terrified.
``I am afraid to say anything, they will take my head off,'' he said in Urdu. The northern alliance soldiers said they had kept him safe for three days and had captured him on the front lines north of Kabul.
Ullah said he was a student at a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan and had come to fight with the Taliban during his school holidays. His captors promised to keep him safe.
A letter left behind by another Pakistani was addressed to a brother in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Twelve days into the air campaign, Mohammed Khaliq had written: ``Don't worry about me. Pray for me five times a day. Our enemy is not strong; we will win. If we die here, there is no greater reward.''
---
Analysts Lukewarm on Nuclear Accord
New York Times
November 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The mutual pledges to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles by President Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia are receiving only lukewarm approval among longtime American analysts.
With the Cold War long over, and the two leaders building a new and friendly relationship, critics are disappointed they did not do more.
Jack Mendelsohn, a former U.S. negotiator now with the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, faults Bush for failing to put the U.S. and Russian cutbacks in a formal treaty.
A treaty would provide a systematic arrangement for doing what Bush promises: scrap about two-thirds of the U.S. strategic warheads stockpile of more than 7,000, Mendelsohn said in an interview. It also would give a way to ensure Bush and Putin follow through on their promises, he said.
At the summit, Putin promised to slash the current Russian long-range arsenal to one-third or less. The Russians are thought to have more than 5,000 warheads.
Mendelsohn said the new levels are still too high, and Bush is talking about spreading the U.S. reduction over 10 years. Questioning why the United States needs 2,000 warheads, the former negotiator said what Bush has done is free the United States from arms control so that U.S. nuclear forces can be increased or decreased.
Alistair Millar, vice president of the Fourth Freedom Forum, a private research group, registered concern that tactical, or short-range, nuclear weapons were not covered at all.
That, he said, is a big problem.
``They are much, much smaller, and they are vulnerable to theft, particularly by potential terrorists. The rise of international terrorism presents a grave and compelling reason to address these weapons,'' Millar said.
Beyond that, he said, ``There are plans in the U.S. and Russia to put more emphasis on development of these weapons for purposes of hitting underground bunkers and targets in the future.''
Neither Russia nor the United States know how many short-range nuclear weapons are in Russia, Millar said. The total could be as few as 4,000 or as many as 20,000, he said.
The United States has about 1,670 tactical nuclear weapons, the private analyst said.
Millar said the United States should take the initiative to encourage Russia ``to get a grip on this at a time when the relationship is closer, while we cooperate to fight terrorism.''
Lee Feinstein, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offered a more positive critique of the summit talks.
Feinstein said an outline for agreement is within reach on anti-missile defenses as well as on offensive weapons reductions.
Still, he said, ``we don't know the details of the Bush reductions. We don't know, for example, if he is going to offer an executive order to cut back independently or whether he is going to wait for President Putin to take reciprocal action.''
``That's an important question,'' said Feinstein, deputy director of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration.
But Feinstein said it was very significant that Bush proposed a lower U.S. ceiling than the United States and Russia had ever negotiated.
``The president has been trying to say he is not looking to negotiate agreements with Moscow,'' Feinstein said. ``But if you look closely, the two of them are engaged in high-profile negotiations that will wind up being an agreement even if Bush does not call it that.''
---
New Cancer Radiation Therapy Shows Promise
New York Times
November 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/16/health/16CANC.html?searchpv=nytToday
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - A specialized molecule containing a single radioactive atom can find and kill cancer cells in laboratory experiments, according to a report appearing on Friday in the journal Science, and researchers hope to test the technique on humans next year.
Dr. David A. Scheinberg of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York said tests of the technique in mice showed that it selectively killed cancer cells and substantially prolonged the life of laboratory animals with tumors.
"You could inject several million of these molecules, and they would circulate around, find their targets' cells, be taken inside and then kill the cells," Dr. Scheinberg said. "These are extraordinarily potent drugs."
Before the technique can become a routine cancer therapy, researchers must find out whether its low radiation will harm normal cells.
In their study, Dr. Scheinberg and his associates put a single atom of actinium-225, a radioactive isotope, inside a cagelike molecule. Attached to the molecule and the radioactive atom was an antibody, a protein that will lock onto a corresponding protein on the surface of a cell.
When the molecule is injected into the body, it travels through the bloodstream until the antibody locks onto a cell and moves inside it. Once inside, particles irradiated from the actinium-225 will kill the cell.
Tests exposing the caged atom to laboratory cultures showed that it could kill a variety of cancers, including cells of leukemia, lymphoma and breast, ovarian and prostate cancer.
The researchers also tested the technique in mice that had been injected with human cancer cells. Mice that did not receive the therapy lived an average of 43 days before dying of cancer.
Treated mice lived up to 300 days, with those receiving the highest radiation dose living the longest. Mice that lived 300 days had no evidence of tumors.
-------- europe
IAEA mission to inspect Czech Temelin n-plant
Reuters:
16/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13328
PRAGUE - A mission of nuclear experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will inspect the controversial Czech nuclear power station at Temelin which has sparked a bitter row with neighbouring Austria, the plant said.
Temelin spokesman Milan Nebesar said yesterday the mission of 11 foreign experts would check the way the new Soviet-designed station has tackled objections from the fiercely anti-nuclear Austria.
Vienna fears an accident at the plant, built just 60 km (37 miles) from its borders. An Austrian observer will take part in the mission, which starts on Sunday and will last one week.
"The November inspection will focus on purely technical issues. It will evaluate the advance of their solution after five years, since a 1996 inspection," Nebesar said in a statement.
"Technical solutions which have been put in doubt by Austria and Germany will also be considered," the statement said.
Temelin is one of the key assets of power company CEZ , which the government aims to sell to a foreign investor by early 2002.
IAEA has carried out 17 missions at the station, which uses Soviet-designed VVER-1,000 reactors and a modified western control system.
Austria, which opposes the usage of nuclear energy as such, has threatened to block the Czech Republic's entry into the European Union, expected in 2004, if the plant is put into full operation. But the EU has said Temelin is not a European issue but rather a bilateral one.
The Czechs claim the plant is safe. Temelin's first of two blocks was launched last year but has gone through a number of minor glitches and has not been put in full operation.
Austrian and domestic opposers have criticised the design of high-pressure steam pipes and relief valves at the plant.
----
Slovakia oks EBRD deal to fund nuke plant shutdown
Reuters:
16/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13326/story.htm
BRATISLAVA - The Slovak government yesterday gave final approval to an agreement with the EBRD to set up a fund financing the shutdown of two reactors in the controversial nuclear power plant Jaslovske Bohunice.
Slovakia has pledged in an agreement with the EU to phase out the Soviet-designed V1 Jaslovske Bohunice reactors by 2006 and 2008.
Jaslovske Bohunice has drawn repeated criticism from Slovakia's nuclear-free neighbour Austria, which has questioned the plant's safety standards.
Under the approved agreement, the EBRD and Slovakia will co-manage a fund providing finances needed to rebuild the plant's infrastructure for a different use in the energy sector and to cover social programmes and retraining for V1 employees.
"The agreement will be signed in London tomorrow," Economy Ministry spokesman Peter Chalmovsky told Reuters.
The EU will contribute 6.5 billion crowns ($133.7 million) to the new fund. Economy Minister Lubomir Harach said in September that the entire cost for the shutdown of the two Bohunice reactors was estimated at 14.8 billion crowns.
The plant in Jaslovske Bohunice is the oldest nuclear power plant in Slovakia, with its first block put into operation in 1978 and the second in 1980.
The blocks, equipped with Soviet-type VVER 440 reactors, are to be taken off line in 2006 and 2008, respectively.
The government's original shut-down plan called for the V1 plant to be preserved for 70-80 years before being demolished.
The third and the fourth blocks of the Jaslovske Bohunice complex - part of the V2 plant - came on line in 1984 and 1985. The country also has two more nuclear reactors equipped with western technology in its more-modern Mochovce plant.
-------- germany
Schroeder Faces Confidence Vote Risks
New York Times
November 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Germany-Politics.html?searchpv=aponline
BERLIN (AP) -- Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was betting his coalition with the Greens party would emerge strengthened from a confidence vote Friday that he tied to a mandate on German deployment in the war against terrorism.
Straw polls of the coalition factions in parliament early Friday indicated Schroeder was likely to win the gamble, which was aimed at underlining his pledge to engage 3,900 troops in the U.S.-led campaign. The Social Democrats closed ranks firmly behind the chancellor, and only four Greens lawmakers continue to oppose the deployment.
Schroeder's coalition needs a majority of all lawmakers in the 666-seat legislature -- 334 votes -- to survive. The deployment, however, would be approved with a simple majority of lawmakers present for the vote. The governing coalition has 341 seats; the opposition 325.
With some pacifists in his coalition stubbornly opposing what would be Germany's largest military foray outside Europe since World War II, Schroeder opted for the confidence vote -- only the fourth in postwar Germany -- rather than accepting approval of the deployment on the strength of opposition support.
In a speech to the full parliament, Schroeder urged lawmakers in his coalition to back the military deployment -- thereby reinforcing the government -- in a signal to the world of Germany's reliability in the international fight against terrorism.
``Today's decision on the military deployment will certainly be a turning point: for the first time soldiers will be readied for armed deployment outside the NATO region,'' Schroeder said. ``For a decision of such consequences, it is absolutely necessary that the chancellor and the government relies on a majority from their own coalition.''
With the military deployment tied to a confidence vote, the opposition has vowed to vote against the measure rather than support the chancellor. They have complained the chancellor's gamble has harmed Germany's image abroad.
``Mr. Chancellor, you are playing thoughtlessly with foreign policy because you cannot manage your domestic policies, in a last-ditch effort to save your government,'' the conservative Christian Democrats' parliamentary leader, Friedrich Merz, said. ``Such a chancellor doesn't deserve trust.''
However, some political analysts believe the chancellor is acting from a position of strength, seeking to consolidate power to keep the three-year-old coalition together until elections scheduled next fall.
Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin's Free University, said Schroeder had calculated the risk -- and was unlikely to expose himself to early election. ``It's more an attempt to assert his leadership,'' Neugebauer said.
With a government majority of just 16, the chancellor left dissenters little room to maneuver.
``It's his decision as chancellor (but) I regret it,'' Greens' co-chairwoman Claudia Roth told Suedwestrundfunk radio. ``We still have colleagues who believe they can't vote yes.''
Stepping up the pressure, Schroeder's Social Democrats say they favor early elections if the confidence vote fails.
``We're not at all afraid,'' party Secretary-General Franz Muentefering said Thursday. But, he stressed, ``we're interested in being able to continue with this coalition.''
The military deployment itself isn't at risk. If it is defeated in Friday's vote, parliament will vote on it again next week, this time with opposition support.
New elections present risks for the opposition Christian Democrats, now engaged in an uncomfortable debate on whether chairwoman Angela Merkel or two rivals should be the next chancellor candidate.
And an early ballot would be dangerous for the Greens, who have lost support in a series of state elections as they made uncomfortable decisions over military operations and the slow phasing out of nuclear power.
The coalition itself has survived repeated bouts of tension over sending German forces to the Balkans in recent years, with the Greens' most prominent member, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, among the most ardent backers of deployments.
A survey by the Wahlen research group for ZDF television, released Thursday, showed 59 percent of Germans favor the military deployment and 36 percent oppose it. The telephone poll of 1,098 voters was carried out between Monday and Wednesday.
-------- india
American caucus
November 16, 2001
Embassy Row, James Morrison
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011116-6586464.htm
Two years ago, Narayan Keshavan began a behind-the-scenes campaign to encourage members of the Indian Parliament to form an America caucus along the lines of the influential India caucus in the U.S. Congress.
Just before the Washington visit of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, lawmakers in New Delhi last week announced the opening of the Indo-American Parliamentary Forum.
Mr. Keshavan, an Indian American who served as director of the Congressional Caucus on India, said the new Indian parliamentary group would help improve relations with the United States by promoting contacts between elected officials of both countries.
"Now U.S.-Indian relations will receive a definitive boost because there will be effective coordination between the elected - and accountable - members of the legislatures of the world's two largest democracies," Mr. Keshavan told Embassy Row.
"Thus far, the destiny of U.S.-India relations was primarily controlled by unelected bureaucrats, especially pinstripes, from both nations.
"Now elected politicians from both nations will get to have a greater say, making the job of the White House and the prime minister's office a little bit easier."
Mr. Keshavan, now director of the Indian-American Republican Council, noted that the two caucuses were of comparable size, with 125 members of Congress and 120 Indian legislators.
In New Delhi, Rajiv Shukla, a member of Parliament, said the new Indian caucus will serve as a "bridge" and "consolidate relations" with the United States.
"The forum will also focus on explosive issues such as terrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, drug trafficking and human rights," he said.
-------- iraq
Iraq Rejects Plan by U.N. on Sanctions
New York Times
November 16, 2001
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/16/international/middleeast/16IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 15 (Agence France-Presse) - Iraq reiterated its rejection of a United Nations resolution that would lift sanctions against the country in return for international weapons monitoring, the official Iraqi News Agency said today.
Foreign Minister Naji Sabri renewed Iraq's rejection of the resolution in talks with the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, during a meeting of the General Assembly in New York last week.
Mr. Sabri told Mr. Annan that Baghdad "refuses to implement Resolution 1294," which was adopted by the Security Council in 1991 following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
The sanctions imposed after the invasion initially included a ban on all trade, embargoes on oil and weapons, a freeze of Iraq's foreign assets and a ban on international flights.
In April 1991, the council said the sanctions would be removed only when it was satisfied that Iraq had eliminated all its weapons of mass destruction.
Since then, it has allowed Iraq to export crude oil under United Nations supervision and to import food and other necessities, including oil industry equipment and spare parts.
Iraq insists that it has already eliminated banned weapons of mass destruction and has refused to allow United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country.
-------- japan
Japan reactor leak may have started July-company
Reuters:
16/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13338
TOKYO - Chubu Electric Power Co Inc said yesterday that a water leak found at a nuclear reactor at its power plant in central Japan late last week may have started in July.
"It is not conclusive, but some facts suggest that it may have been leaking since July," a company spokesman said.
Chubu Electric, Japan's third largest power utility in terms of electricity sales, first found the leak - which contained some radiation - on Friday during an inspection of the 540-megawatt No 1 reactor at the Hamaoka power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture.
The No. 1 reactor was shut down on Wednesday last week after emergency alarms sounded.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, a government agency under Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), has tentatively classified the steam leak accident a "Level one" on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).
The water leak was tentatively designated a "Level zero +" on the scale which runs from zero minus to seven, with seven being the most severe form of accident.
-------- missile defense
Putin Offers Americans Thoughts on NATO, Bin Laden
Yahoo News
Reuters
Friday November 16
By Ron Popeski
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011116/ts/summit_putin_radio_dc_1.html
WACO, Texas (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin told U.S. radio listeners on Thursday that there was nothing Russia could do if more ex-communist countries wanted to join NATO and that he had various blunt ways of describing Osama bin Laden -- but that standards of decency prevented him from uttering them in public.
In a freewheeling 45-minute interview and phone-in on National Public Radio, Putin also offered some insight into his literary preferences and his passion for judo.
Putin told a listener from Seattle that he could neither support nor oppose NATO membership for the three former Soviet Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
``If we change the format of the relationship between Russia and NATO, then I think NATO enlargement will cease to be a relevant issue,'' Putin said in the broadcast, conducted in New York and heard throughout the country at the end of his three-day visit to the United States.
``I am not opposed to it, I just don't think it makes any sense if we are to deal with the issue of increasing national security. We, of course, are not in a position to tell people what to do. We cannot forbid people from making certain choices if they want to increase the security of their nations in a certain way.''
After holding talks with President Bush at his Texas ranch, Putin flew to New York to view the ruins of the World Trade Center, destroyed in the Sept. 11 hijacked airliner attacks, and to express fresh solidarity with the United States in its campaign against terrorism.
Putin in October indicated for the first time that Russia would not oppose further enlargement of NATO if Moscow were involved in the process, and during his U.S. stay he stressed that NATO stood to gain from including Moscow in its decision-making and by treating it as an ally against threats to world security.
REAGAN ``A LITTLE EXTREME''
He issued his new broadside against bin Laden in response to a question from Virginia over how he felt in the 1980s, when he worked for the KGB, about then-President Ronald Reagan's denunciation of the Soviet Union as an ``evil empire.''
``I think he was being a little extreme and that such an attitude was unlikely to accomplish an objective even if his objectives were noble,'' he said ``It was a motto, a slogan of the day rather than a policy pursued by Reagan.''
But Bush's description of bin Laden as ``the evil one,'' he said, was ``very mild as a choice of words. I have other ways of putting it but am restrained by the fact that I am talking to the media and this is hardly appropriate. These terrorists do not treat the rest of humanity as human beings. We are not even enemies as far as they are concerned, just dust.''
Putin made only brief references to the failure during his visit to come to an agreement on U.S. plans to build a missile defense shield and withdraw from parts of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Bush continued to dismiss the pact as outdated, while Putin said Moscow was still in favor of retaining it.
The Kremlin leader raised no objections to a Texan listener's suggestion that the United States and Russia might join forces in creating such a shield.
``The most important thing is to work on a system that rather than generating mutual distrust...engages us in building a system toward the opposite end,'' he said. ``I believe such a scenario is feasible and that's what I feel my partner and colleague President Bush is prepared to do.''
Putin's interview, similar to phone-ins conducted by a Moscow radio station with former President Bill Clinton and other world leaders, also delved into Putin's life outside the Kremlin.
He told listeners he had started taking part in a Russian form of wrestling at 14 and later graduated to judo, which he still practiced regularly, and repeated his feeling that the sport amounted to a ``philosophy.'' He also listed his favorite classic authors as Russians -- Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol.
He discounted any possibility of foreign mediation to settle Russia's conflict with separatists in Chechnya, saying Russia's own territory was at issue. Political means would be used to find a solution, he said, without elaborating and ''terrorists'' and foreign mercenaries would be ``brought to justice or destroyed.''
---
Rapport, but not an arms deal
Talks will continue toward compromise on missile defense
Baltimore Sun
By David L. Greene and Mark Matthews
Sun National Staff Originally
November 16, 2001
http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.summit16nov16.story?coll=bal%2Dnews%2Dnation
CRAWFORD, Texas - Despite signs of a growing personal rapport, President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ended their three-day summit yesterday without an agreement on how the United States can proceed with the development of a missile defense system.
"We have a difference of opinion," said Bush, who took Putin to Crawford High School near his ranch, where they fielded students' questions on issues ranging from Afghanistan to whether Putin enjoyed his Texas barbecue dinner.
"The great thing about our relationship is, our relationship is strong enough to endure this difference of opinion," Bush said. "And that's the positive development."
Both leaders said that talks toward a compromise on missile defense would continue. And they vowed to ensure that their rift over the issue would not mar relations between their nations. Bush hailed Putin as "a man who is going to make a huge difference in making the world more peaceful, by working closely with the United States."
The two presidents found much common ground, agreeing most notably that their countries, former Cold War rivals, would sharply reduce their nuclear arms stockpiles over the next decade. They also committed to continued cooperation in fighting international terrorism and in helping to build a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan free of terrorists and repression.
Bush said he had accepted an invitation from Putin to visit Russia, though he did not say when he would make the trip.
But on the missile defense issue so important to him, Bush failed to achieve what he wanted. He had hoped to reach at least an understanding with Putin that would allow U.S. missile defense testing to proceed aggressively without provisions of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty standing in the way. The treaty bars the development of missile defense systems.
Putin, while signaling that he wants to be flexible on allowing American tests, refused to yield in his insistence that the ABM Treaty remain in force.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, told reporters: "One way or another, the United States is going to have to get out of the constraints of the ABM Treaty so that we can begin to explore in a robust way, rather than in a constrained way, what our options are for missile defenses."
She added: "We're not going to violate treaties, so we're going to have to find a way to get out of those constraints."
But Putin did not gain what he had hoped to take from the summit, either. The Russian leader arrived for his first visit to the United States as president with an expressed desire to secure a concrete deal on strategic arms. He will return home without the formal nuclear arms deal he had sought.
At the same time, the Russian president refused to budge in his position that the ABM Treaty should endure.
Putin said yesterday that he and Bush share a desire to protect the world from "future threats," presumably attacks from rogue states or terrorists. The Russian president said his belief that missile defense systems are not the ideal way to counter such threats means only that he differs with Bush on the "ways and means" to reach "the same objective."
Speaking last night on National Public Radio, Putin said: "We simply cannot fail to understand the importance of the quality of this relationship - no matter how difficult the challenges are, how difficult the problems are, that we are solving, such as the ABM Treaty."
Putin was in a strong position politically at home before the summit and will likely remain so, said Andrew Kuchins of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"I don't think it's ideal [for Putin] that he doesn't come out with a more solid agreement," Kuchins said. Before the summit, he noted, Putin had signaled readiness to compromise on the ABM Treaty and allow more expansive testing.
As long as a formal accord remains elusive, some analysts say, the United States will proceed with tests of an anti-missile system and Moscow will withhold any complaint unless it concludes that the treaty is being violated egregiously.
Rice said the timeline for missile defense testing remains unchanged. But the national security adviser said, perhaps more explicitly than ever, that Bush is open to negotiations on how to allow testing without necessarily scrapping the ABM Treaty.
"We're going to have to move beyond it," she said of the treaty. "What 'move beyond it' actually means - does it mean that there is a new strategic framework in place? That is the nature of these discussions, and those discussions are continuing."
Because the president has vowed not to violate the ABM Treaty, Pentagon officials said, any testing in the near future will be kept within the limits of the accord.
The next test is scheduled to take place between the end of this month and mid-December. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that the test will be altered to make sure it abides by the treaty.
Another test is to be held between January and March. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has raised the possibility that this test - using anti-ballistic missile radars and air-defense radars - would violate the treaty.
Wade Boese, of the independent Arms Control Association, said this test would likely be postponed if Pentagon lawyers conclude that it would violate the treaty.
In any case, Boese said, "I don't think the Russians will raise a big stink. They're not going to do anything that will compel the United States to pull out of the treaty."
Rose Gottemoeller, an arms-control specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that with Bush intent on sustaining and strengthening the anti-terror coalition - in which Putin is a key partner - he is unlikely to announce a withdrawal from the treaty anytime soon.
Russian and U.S. officials gathered in Texas continued trying to hammer out a compromise on another area of disagreement yesterday. Putin has said that he wants to negotiate a formal treaty to ensure that, over the next decade, the nuclear weapons cuts announced this week can be verified.
Bush has said he prefers to treat the weapons cuts simply as unilateral steps by each nation, in response to a safer world today compared with the Cold War.
Putin did not bend on that point yesterday. When a Crawford student asked both men whether they intended to destroy nuclear warheads or simply make them inactive, the Russian leader said the question showed precisely why a formal agreement is necessary.
"What you would do with those arsenals is subject to negotiation," Putin said, "with the result of those negotiations depending on the level of trust between the United States and Russia."
Answering the same question, Bush went further than Putin, saying that "we are talking about reducing and destroying" warheads.
"We need to get beyond the notion that in order to keep the peace, we've got to destroy each other," he said.
Rice said Bush did not want to repeat the drawn-out U.S.-Russian arms talks of the past, and that "we are more than willing to talk with the Russians about various levels of codification of such an arrangement. We have not said 'treaty.' They have said they are interested in a treaty. But this is an open discussion."
As they spoke inside Crawford High, with drenching rain falling and thunder rumbling outside for the second day, Bush and Putin portrayed their personal chemistry as a "historic" improvement over past U.S.-Russian relations.
"When I was in high school, Russia was an enemy," Bush said. "Now, high school students can know Russia as a friend. We're working together to break the old ties, to establish a new spirit of cooperation."
Having held a formal news conference in Washington on Tuesday, Bush and Putin appeared relaxed, even playful, at their appearance yesterday at the high school.
Noting that he and Putin don't agree on every topic, Bush told the students: "You probably don't agree with your mother on every issue, but you still love her, though, don't you?"
Asked how he had enjoyed his barbecue dinner at Bush's ranch, Putin deadpanned: "I had a hard time imagining how a living person could create such a masterpiece of cooking."
Bush said he thought that Putin "really enjoyed himself" in Texas, and that he should come back.
"I told him he was welcome back next August," Bush said, referring to a time when the heat in central Texas often hits 100 degrees.
"He said, 'Fine, and maybe you'd like to go to Siberia in the winter.'"
---
THE WORLD
Putin Fields Questions From American Public on Talk Radio
Los Angeles Times
November 16, 2001
By STEVE CARNEY, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000091587nov16.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Da%5Fsection
WASHINGTON -- During an unprecedented hour of questioning Thursday night, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin plunged into American talk radio--showing off his dry wit and his contempt for terrorists, expressing optimism about the future of democracy in his country, and thanking Texans for the reception he received there.
His appearance on National Public Radio marked the first time a Russian or Soviet leader has taken questions live on the air from ordinary Americans. And moderator Robert Siegel, co-host of NPR's afternoon newsmagazine "All Things Considered," alternated his own questions with those asked by callers and the 2,000 others who e-mailed queries for Putin.
Putin's appearance at NPR's New York studios was delayed by a tour of the wreckage of the World Trade Center, even though he said his trip to New York was not an official part of his U.S. visit. "I could not help but come here," he said, "and pay my respects to those who had suffered in this tragedy." He said he inscribed a memorial poster at the scene, writing, "This great city, and the great people of America, will no doubt prevail."
The interview was a blend of present and past. When asked what he thought about President Reagan calling the Soviet Union "the evil empire," the former KGB colonel said "that assessment was more of a motto, a slogan of the day, than a long-term policy." But when asked about President Bush's calling Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists "the evil ones," Putin said Bush was "being very mild. I have other epithets."
Even though Putin and Bush have not been able to agree on the question of missile reduction and defense, the Russian leader said the ever-warming relationship between them and their countries will lead to an agreement. "I don't have any doubts whatsoever that, no matter which scenario unfolds, our relationship will not deteriorate. We will be able to arrive at a solution that will be acceptable for everyone involved," he said, agreeing to one listener's suggestion that the United States and Russia work on a missile defense system together.
During the 45 minutes that he took questions, Putin talked about his black belt in judo, rejected the idea of the United Nations brokering a peace in Chechnya and said that he never regretted having worked for the KGB or its successor agency.
"I did my duty, I served my country, and I believe that I did a fairly decent job at that," he said. "However, one must not forget that we lived in an entirely different world then, a world that is no longer here.
"As far as I know, though, in the United States, there is a certain amount of experience where ex-intelligence employees became heads of state," he said, jokingly referring to the first President Bush, who was once director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
NPR officials said they scored the exclusive when Russian Embassy officials contacted Martha Wexler, the network's editor for Russian coverage, a few weeks ago.
"When they came to talk to us," said NPR President and Chief Executive Kevin Klose, "I emphasized we have a very big national audience and [that] the listenership across the country is deeply interested in foreign news."
The network reaches about 15 million listeners weekly with its more than 600 affiliates. It also broadcasts overseas via NPR Worldwide and the American Forces Network.
The Russians specifically asked that Putin be able to take questions from American listeners. NPR's Klose said there were no ground rules regarding the questions, and the choice of callers was up to Siegel, who picked them from a computer screen showing their names and topics.
Siegel and Putin were joined by two translators--one provided by NPR, the other by the Russians. They worked in a studio separate from the two principals, said Bruce Drake, NPR vice president of news and information, to avoid the babble of several people speaking at once into open microphones. The translations were a necessity--Putin is just starting to learn English.
Siegel, who has interviewed President Clinton, the Dalai Lama and other world leaders, said earlier in the week of Putin: "He's one of these people who's leading his country at what may be a turning point. It's a bit like interviewing Gorbachev in 1987."
Putin's NPR appearance mirrors a visit Clinton made to Moscow in June 2000, when he took questions from Russians during a program on the independent radio station Echo of Moscow, since taken over by the state-run gas company. The takeover came after Vladimir A. Gusinsky, the media mogul who owned that station, had been charged with embezzlement, an arrest his supporters called retaliation for his government criticism.
"There's not a great record for supporting independent media," said Klose, a former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post. But during Thursday's show, Putin said that the main barrier to a free press in Russia is the immaturity of the country's market economy, which keeps the media beholden to their financial sponsors. But he said that he's confident that the market economy and democracy in Russia are continuing on parallel paths.
"This is an irreversible process. The foundation of the democracy will continue to strengthen, and the market economy will continue to progress," Putin said. "The point of no return is way in the past."
---
Warmth, but No Thaw on Missiles
Los Angeles Times
November 16, 2001 U.S.
By JAMES GERSTENZANG and NORMAN KEMPSTER, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000091586nov16.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Da%5Fsection
CRAWFORD, Texas -- President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin wrapped up their three-day summit Thursday without resolving their disagreement on missile defenses, but they minimized their differences and stressed their readiness to reduce nuclear weapons and fight terrorism together.
"The more I get to know President Putin, the more I get to see his heart and soul, and the more I know we can work together in a positive way," Bush said.
The sessions at the White House and at the president's ranch were their fourth encounter in five months. At least in public, the two men this week displayed a growing chumminess that is rare on the diplomatic stage--particularly when leaders from Moscow and Washington meet. During a joint appearance Thursday at Crawford High School, Bush said in response to a student's question: "There's no doubt, the United States and Russia won't agree on every issue. But you probably don't agree with your mother on every issue."
Putin, abandoning the dour expression he often displays in public, grinned broadly.
Putin invited Bush to visit Russia, and Bush accepted--with the proviso that with the harsh Russian winter approaching the visit be scheduled for a warm time of the year.
In their comments at the high school, each signaled a willingness to work with the other on the missile defense issue.
Bush's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said the Pentagon intends to proceed with its plan to test potential missile defense systems "in a robust way, so we can evaluate [their] potential." But she said the two presidents emerged with the understanding that their differences over such an issue will not stymie the improving relations between nations that were the Cold War's key combatants.
"We have a difference of opinion," Bush said of his goal of building a defense system. But he added: "Our relationship is strong enough to endure this difference of opinion. And that's the positive development. Our disagreements will not divide us."
He also said: "It's one thing for he and me to have a personal relationship. The key is that we establish a relationship between our countries strong enough that will endure beyond our presidencies."
Putin, taking his turn to answer a student's question, said: "Our objective is common both for the United States and for Russia. The objective is to achieve security for our states, for our nations and for the entire world."
He said Moscow and Washington share a concern about the threats posed by missiles, "and here is a common ground for our further discussions."
Whatever solution is reached, he said, "it will not threaten . . . the interests of both our countries and of the world."
The Russian president and his wife, Ludmila, spent the night at Bush's ranch, in a guest house near the president's home on the 1,600-acre spread.
During Putin's visit to the U.S., the two presidents shared four meals together over 53 hours. On at least two occasions, they delved deeply into the war in Afghanistan. After leaving Texas, Putin traveled to New York, where he toured the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
On Tuesday in Washington, each leader announced plans to reduce his nation's arsenal of nuclear arms by about two-thirds. Putin, however, would like to put these pledges into writing, while Bush questioned whether that would be necessary.
Although Bush didn't get the go-ahead from Putin for the U.S. missile defense program, the Russian president didn't say anything to cause the administration to change its plans. The Pentagon is tentatively scheduled to conduct its next test within weeks. And the administration hopes to begin building a command and testing facility in Alaska next spring.
The planned test of an interceptor rocket wouldn't violate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which allows each country to deploy up to 100 such rockets to defend either its capital or an offensive missile facility. Although Bush's plans for a nationwide defense system would violate the treaty, the current round of interceptor tests technically could be explained as an attempt to update rockets for the sort of system that is permitted.
The Bush administration acknowledges, however, that the Alaska facility would violate the treaty because it would be designed to test a system covering the whole country.
Russia believes that the ABM treaty ensures stability in the nuclear era because if neither country maintains a comprehensive defense against nuclear missile attack, each would probably refrain from launching an attack.
Bush argues that his proposed defensive system would not be built to protect the United States from Russia, but from an attack by "rogue states," such as Iraq or North Korea, or by a terrorist organization.
Most arms control experts believe that Bush and Putin have reached a tacit understanding allowing the United States to go ahead with tests, even if some prove technical violations of the treaty. This course would postpone a potential showdown on the missile defense issue until Washington is ready to deploy its system, possibly years away.
The experts say such an understanding would appear to meet the minimum needs of both leaders: Bush can go ahead with development of a missile defense system, and Putin can say he preserved the ABM treaty, at least for the time being. Moreover, from Bush's standpoint, the deal can be done without detailed negotiations.
"The U.S. doesn't have a deployment program--it has only a testing program," said Jack Mendelsohn, vice president of Lawyers Alliance for World Security and a former U.S. arms control negotiator. "The U.S. doesn't know what it will eventually deploy. The Russians are prepared to ease the testing limits, but they do not want to abandon the restrictions on deployment until they know what is headed their way."
Bush has made no secret of his intention to withdraw from the ABM treaty as soon as it starts to restrict his options. Because the pact allows either country to withdraw after giving six months' notice, there is nothing much Putin can do to stop Bush from tearing up the treaty. But by agreeing not to make an issue of testing, Putin can preserve the pact for several more years.
Raymond Garthoff, another former U.S. arms control negotiator, agreed that the summit means that "any serious difficulty over the ABM thing is put off for a while."
Overall, experts said the summit set a favorable tone but was short on accomplishments.
"It is a positive summit, but there is no breakthrough," said Ariel Cohen, an expert on Russia at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. "Expectations were higher before the summit than they are today."
The two presidents used their joint appearance in the gymnasium at Crawford High to end the summit on a light note, joshing each other about the extreme weather one can encounter during a summer in Crawford and a winter in Siberia.
"I think the president really enjoyed himself," Bush said of Putin. "I told him he was welcome to come back next August. . . . He said, fine, maybe you'd like to go to Siberia in the winter."
The Russian president, apparently coached in the folkways of the state, said: "We in Russia have known for a long time that Texas is the most important state in the United States."
Pressuring Bush to hurry up his visit to Russia, Putin called out to the audience: "At the count of three, those who want your president to come to Russia, raise your hands and say, yes."
With that, he counted, in English, "one, two," and the audience shouted "Yes."
The notion of a visit by a Russian president to this town of 700 in conservative central Texas appeared to capture Bush's imagination.
"I bet a lot of folks here, particularly the older folks, never dreamed that an American president would be bringing the Russian president to Crawford, Texas," Bush said. "A lot of people never really dreamed that an American president and a Russian president could have established the friendship that we have."
Gerstenzang reported from Crawford, Kempster from Washington.
---
Closer ties for Russia?
Maybe it's time to make Moscow a closer partner in NATO.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, November 16, 2001
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/11/16/opinion/COMRUBIN16.htm
Back in July, I had a surreal conversation in Moscow with a retired Russian general.
Eduard Vorobiov was a captain in the Soviet army that invaded Prague. He spent nearly 30 more years in the Soviet military as it confronted NATO at the height of the Cold War, then was elected to the Russian Duma.
Now, the ex-general with a grey crew cut and military bearing was telling me he wanted to mobilize Duma members to support Russian membership in NATO, the western military alliance he'd spent his life confronting. He said the pro-NATO bloc numbered 36, the anti-NATO bloc 250.
"Another Don Quixote," I thought. Four months ago, most Russians still resented or ignored NATO while U.S. leaders couldn't imagine Russia as a full military ally. In 1999, U.S. and Russian soldiers nearly fought each other in Kosovo. Many Russian generals still regard NATO expansion to Eastern Europe as a ploy to encircle Russia. Who could imagine absorbing into NATO a Russian behemoth that extends all the way to China?
But after the lovefest between President Bush and Vladimir Putin at the Crawford ranch, and more particularly, after Sept. 11, the idea of NATO membership for Russia doesn't seem quite so loopy. It's becoming a hot topic among Russian and American security experts.
"The big difference between now and pre-Sept. 11 is that the mainstream is considering the issue," says Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's clearly in the realm of the thinkable now."
The new reality goes beyond the warm personal relationship forged between two presidents over southern-fried catfish and poblano chiles. A warm friendship between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin didn't move mountains. But seismic events have changed the facts on the ground in Moscow and Washington.
Since Sept. 11, President Putin has bet his political future on anchoring Russia to the West. Who could have imagined in August that U.S. forces would be setting up air bases, with Russian acquiescence, in Central Asia, not just in Uzbekistan but in Tajikistan, where Russia has thousands of troops?
Both Putin and Bush have recognized that the nature of war has changed beyond recognition. No longer is the enemy a massive Soviet or NATO ground force in Europe. The future threats are terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction - possibly into the hands of terrorists. If the nature of war has changed, doesn't the nature of America's premier military alliance have to change, too?
What the Sept. 11 events revealed is that NATO has already evolved into a different organization. The alliance became more cumbersome after expanding to Central Europe for political rather than military reasons. It is becoming less of a military and more of a political fraternity.
This became evident when NATO reacted to Sept. 11. In the past, the famous Article 5 of NATO's charter was interpreted as pledging all members to come to the aid of any member who was attacked, presumably by the Soviet army. The NATO allies invoked Article 5 for the very first time after the World Trade Center disaster, but only we and Britain sent forces to Afghanistan. In effect, only a coalition of the willing chose to send troops.
"The interpretation of Article 5 during the cold war was that it was automatic," says Kupchan. "After the end of the cold war, Article 5 quietly began to mean something else." NATO has effectively become a club of like-minded democracies, who may or may not help each other - or even be needed - in battles outside Europe.
Says Kupchan, "There is a different NATO now, not the collective defense organization (of cold war days) but a way of keeping members at peace with each other." NATO keeps members Turkey and Greece from fighting each other. East European nations that hope to join have buried old ethnic disputes.
So why not invite Russia to join - if not immediately, then within the decade?
Were Russia a candidate, it would smooth agreement on how to carry out massive bilateral arms cuts and more tests of a U.S. missile defense system. More important, candidacy might persuade Russia to stop exporting weapons to the rogue nations that we fear might one day aim missiles at us. And it would help Moscow - and us - work on securing the Russian nuclear arsenal and preventing nuclear or biological materiél from falling into the hands of terrorists.
Skeptics will argue that Russia lags in democracy and in civilian control of its army. So why not set up a road map that Russia could follow to meet NATO standards? That's what Gen. Vorobiov wants. And the general notes that China would have no choice but to cooperate more with NATO if Russia became a member.
Russia already is associated loosely with NATO. It's time to move toward a closer association. In a rapidly shifting world, NATO has to change with the times.
Trudy Rubin's column appears on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com.
---
U.S. to Pursue Missile Test Plans
Yahoo News
Associated Press
Friday November 16
By SANDRA SOBIERAJ, Associated Press Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011116/ts/us_russia.html
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - The United States will push ahead with aggressive testing of missile defenses, White House officials said after President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin ended their summit without agreement on the disputed program.
``The timeline has not really changed,'' national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters after Bush bid his Russian counterpart a warm farewell Thursday at Bush's central Texas ranch.
``The president continues to believe that he has got to move forward with the testing program in a robust way, so that we can really begin to evaluate the potential for missile defenses,'' Rice said.
Putin, who went to New York, told National Public Radio later Thursday that, since he and Bush have a common goal of ensuring security, ``We will, at the end of the day, be able to arrive at a solution that will be acceptable for everyone.''
His Russian guests gone after three days of talks in Crawford and Washington, Bush and his wife, Laura, settled in for a long, quiet weekend on their remote ranch.
Already, there were active discussions about when Bush would make a reciprocal visit to Russia. Aides expect a springtime trip.
``Given that I'm from Texas and kind of like the warm weather, I was hoping to wait a couple of months,'' Bush joked Thursday at the final joint appearance of Putin's four-day visit to the United States.
Putin reaffirmed his opposition to testing any kind of a weapons system that could intercept missiles aimed at the United States and its allies. Such tests would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as it is currently interpreted.
Putin also said that, no matter what Bush does, ``Under no circumstances could it lead to any tension in the relations between Russia and the United States.''
U.S. officials said they viewed the remark as a signal that Putin won't try to stand in the way of coming missile tests. That understanding, however, fell far short of a formal deal to make the ABM flexible enough to allow testing, which had been Bush's hope for the summit.
Distracted by the war against terrorism, both leaders seemed to push the issue down the road.
``We shall continue our discussions,'' Putin said.
Aides said Bush's trip to Moscow next year might offer a fitting setting to resolve the ABM debate.
A provision in the treaty permits either party to withdraw on six months' notice. Already, the Pentagon, as recently as last month, postponed parts of missile-shield testing that might violate the Cold War-era treaty with the Soviet Union.
The Bush administration, eyeing the schedule for future testing, knows negotiations now are running out of time.
``I think that everybody, including the Russians, understands that we're soon going to run up against certain constraints of the treaty,'' Rice said.
In the meantime, both sides committed to continued talks.
``No particular `kaboom' breakthrough is to be expected at any particular time, but they are continuing to work the issue,'' Rice said.
``And we'll see how long we can go before we have to actually begin the testing and development program.''
On the separate issue of reducing Russian and U.S. strategic nuclear stockpiles, which both presidents promised after their Tuesday meetings at the White House, Putin said Thursday the question of whether warheads should be disarmed or destroyed must be decided in negotiations.
Bush countered: ``We are talking about reducing and destroying the number of warheads.''
Rice later used wording that suggested Bush should not have spoken so definitively. ``We are in the process right now of examining precisely how this drawdown takes place,'' she told reporters.
---
THE ARMS
U.S. Testing Goes Ahead; Could Violate ABM Treaty
New York Times
November 16, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/16/international/16MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - With the failure of President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to reach an agreement on replacing or amending the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans for missile defense testing and construction work that could violate the treaty sometime next year, officials said today.
Pentagon officials said today they have not scheduled any tests for the rest of this year that were likely to conflict with the treaty's strictures. But the Pentagon has also been developing plans to conduct missile- tracking tests and build a communications system in Alaska sometime next spring or summer that could be interpreted as violating the treaty, senior military officials have said.
Asked in an interview on Wednesday whether preparations for those activities were continuing, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld replied, "You bet."
Pentagon officials said their plans did not mean that the Bush administration was prepared to unilaterally abandon the treaty at this point, noting that they could voluntarily constrain testing and construction activities before they violated the treaty next year.
Mr. Rumsfeld said that the military officials who run the missile defense program could live within the pact "for a period," even though it had "inhibited" their work.
Three weeks ago the Bush administration announced that it had postponed three antimissile tracking tests that Mr. Rumsfeld said might be interpreted as violating the treaty. The pact was signed with the Soviet Union in 1972 to prevent development of systems capable of defending the nation against long- range missile attacks.
At the time those tests were postponed, President Bush and President Putin were beginning talks on amending or replacing the treaty to allow the United States to build missile defenses. But today, the two presidents emerged from a meeting in Crawford, Tex., to say that they had failed to reach agreement on how to move beyond the treaty.
Though he said the administration would abide by the ABM Treaty for now, Mr. Rumsfeld left open the possibility that the United States would withdraw from the treaty after giving six month's notice, as is required, if talks with Russia remained stalled. He said that talks with Russia could continue even after a decision to pull out of the treaty, suggesting that such a move might be viewed by some in the administration as a way of pressuring the Russians to reach an agreement.
"It's purpose," Mr. Rumsfeld said of the treaty, "is to keep you from doing what we would like to do. Therefore it's a problem."
Mr. Rumsfeld has been among the administration's strongest advocates of eliminating the treaty and building defenses against what he considers to be the growing threat of missile attacks from terrorists and nations like North Korea or Iraq. But his views have often clashed with others inside the administration who worry that abolishing the treaty would raise nuclear tensions around the world.
Today, advocates of missile defense in Congress said the Pentagon should move ahead briskly with its testing and construction plans regardless of whether they might violate the treaty.
"I urge the president to move ahead with all deliberate speed on missile defense development and testing," said Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. "We should not hesitate to formally withdraw from a treaty which no longer serves our national security interests."
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he did not object to the Pentagon's planning for activities that might violate the treaty, so long as it did not carry them out.
"It will make us less secure to proceed in a unilateral way," he said.
Missile defense critics have argued that under their interpretation the ABM Treaty will not hamper missile testing for years to come. They contend that the postponed missile-tracking tests were scientifically pointless and were concocted by the Pentagon mainly to bolster its complaint that the treaty is constraining.
The Pentagon has denied that and is now moving ahead with plans to conduct similar, though more complex, tests early next year. It also plans to try to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile with a prototype interceptor rocket next month. That test, however, is not expected to violate the treaty, senior Pentagon officials said.
---
NEWS ANALYSIS
Missile Impasse: The Shape of the Deal
New York Times
November 16, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/16/international/16ASSE.html?searchpv=nytToday
CRAWFORD, Tex., Nov. 15 - In the end, neither President Bush, nor President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wanted to pull the plug on the relationship they have built in the short season of summitry they started only last June.
After a three-day summit meeting on the Texas prairie where Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin had their most intimate talks since they first laid eyes on each other in Slovenia this summer, it seemed astonishing that there was no advance on the main issue that divides them - how to structure a new framework for strategic arms that will bind the United States and Russia well beyond their terms of office.
What was increasingly clear is that they are arguing how to put it all on paper and what to call that piece of paper - a treaty or something else.
Mr. Bush came into office clearly determined not to put anything on paper about the future of America's nuclear arsenal. The cold war was over. Russia was not an enemy and, indeed, Mr. Bush said he reserved the option to tear up some paper in the form of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which allows either party, the United States and the former Soviet Union, to withdraw with six months notice.
The president and a number of his top advisers denigrated the era of writing things down about limits on nuclear weapons that produced all of the major arms control treaties of the last 30 years.
His irritation showed this week in Washington when he said, standing next to Mr. Putin, "I looked the man in the eye and shook his hand" on American plans for its nuclear arsenal. "And if we need to write it down on a piece of paper, I'll be glad to do that."
But write down what?
For months, the Russian leadership has been waiting for the Bush administration to complete its review of America's nuclear future and determine how many nuclear weapons does an American president need to protect American security.
Mr. Bush promised last summer to provide the number to Mr. Putin and to link those reductions to how America would then build a missile defense shield over the United States, and perhaps over parts of Europe and Asia, too.
Debates in the Pentagon delayed a decision for months and Mr. Bush only delivered the result this week. He told Mr. Putin in Washington that the United States would reduce the number of operationally deployed nuclear weapons over the next decade to between 1,700 and 2,200, a significant reduction but short of the 1,500-warhead level that Mr. Putin was hoping for.
For Russia, this new strategic accounting was a critical element in how to respond to Mr. Bush's plan for missile defenses, which had been a dominant issue for his presidency until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
Armed with Mr. Bush's plans for reducing the American strategic arsenal, Mr. Putin put his response on the table this week. He told Mr. Bush that the United States and Russia should now codify the levels of offensive and defensive arms in their arsenals in a new arms control treaty.
The reason is straightforward in Mr. Putin's logic. Any country that builds missile defenses can eventually seize a nuclear advantage by protecting its own territory while threatening any adversary with offensive weapons fired from behind a shield. Even among friends, the Russian leader has argued, the nuclear balance should not be left to the vagaries of handshakes.
In Washington this week, Mr. Putin unveiled his strategy. "For the Russian part, we are prepared to present all our agreements in a treaty form, including the issues of verification and control."
He did not bring a draft treaty with him, but Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, indicated that Mr. Putin made an extensive case for a detailed agreement that would require substantial further discussion.
"We are more than willing to talk with the Russians about various levels of codification of such an agreement," she said today. "We have not said, `treaty.' They have said they are interested in a treaty. But this is an open discussion."
She added that Mr. Bush and his advisers are prepared to include in some new agreement part of the old arms-control treaties that insured there was no cheating.
"We have said, both of us, that we are prepared to make this verifiable in some form, perhaps even using some of the verification procedures out of former treaties," she said. "But nothing is off the table in the regard of what this actually looks like in the final analysis."
The breakthrough that had been expected here at Crawford, was based on Russia's strategic shift since Sept. 11 in support of the American campaign against terrorism, and Mr. Putin's statements that he was ready to "stretch" the ABM treaty to allow American missile defense tests.
Mr. Putin himself created the expectation that once he understood the size of the American arsenal over the next decade, he and Mr. Bush could speedily reach an agreement on codifying the reductions in offensive arms while also modifying - or agreeing to ignore for now - the limits the ABM treaty sets on missile defense tests. The Pentagon is preparing for such tests next spring.
If Mr. Bush hoped to do that with a handshake, Mr. Putin showed that he believes that handshakes and trust between leaders is not enough to ensure a stable nuclear order, or address Russia's concerns that an unconstrained American power might someday bring pressure to bear that Moscow would not be able to resist.
Russian officials see a contradiction in Mr. Bush's position because any agreement on nuclear arms that will be executed over a decade will extend beyond Mr. Bush's presidency and, therefore, will be subject to modification by any future president.
"We made great progress," Mr. Bush said today to a gymnasium full of students at Crawford High School, adding: "It's one thing for he and me to have a personal relationship. The key is that we establish a relationship between our countries strong enough that will endure beyond our presidencies."
For now, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin are engaged in a kind of brinkmanship among friends. Mr. Bush is loathe to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty, a step that in the midst of the Afghan campaign would reignite the taunts of "unilateralism" that Mr. Bush was hearing from Europe earlier this year.
Mr. Putin is anxious to build a strong relationship with Mr. Bush and America for all the benefits that accrues to Moscow as it seeks to rebuild a devastated economy.Both powers, meanwhile, are eager to preserve and build on the remarkable rapprochement since Sept. 11.
---
THE RANCH
Before and After Bush and Putin's Banter, No Agreement on Missile Defense
New York Times
November 16, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/16/international/16PREX.html?searchpv=nytToday
CRAWFORD, Tex., Nov. 15 - President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ended their three-day summit meeting today with warm jokes and a pledge to bring stability to Afghanistan, but no discernible progress on amending the treaty that constrains Washington's plans to test an antimissile system.
After 24 hours on Mr. Bush's ranch here, punctuated by hours of private discussions and a barbecue dinner on Tuesday night that included lessons in how to dance the Cotton-Eyed Joe, the two presidents emerged this morning to visit the local high school.
What followed was a remarkable sight. For nearly an hour, the leaders of the two largest nuclear powers answered questions from the students on women's rights, the details of reducing their nuclear arsenals and their sudden race to put together a government in Afghanistan that represents a cross-section of the country's fractious tribes.
The two men were clearly more at ease with each other than Mr. Bush's father ever was with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. At the school today, Mr. Bush recalled facetiously inviting Mr. Putin to return here for a jog in the wilting August heat and Mr. Putin's quick rejoinder that Mr. Bush, whose distaste for cold climates is well known, might enjoy a winter visit to Siberia.
But when one student raised the sensitive subject of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, Mr. Bush turned serious.
"We have a difference of opinion," he said, though he did not elaborate on why a compromise that seemed at hand when Mr. Putin arrived had slipped through their fingers, at least for now. "Our differences will not divide us."
Mr. Putin immediately suggested that he thought that an agreement might be eventually reached that would "not threaten the interests of both our countries and of the world."
For all the light banter and talk of the closeness of their new relationship, Mr. Bush could not paper over the fact that the agreement on missile defenses he wanted to strike did not happen.
Mr. Putin's reassuring tone raised the possibility that the United States was prepared to delay further its testing or that Russia might simply overlook tests that edge toward violations of the ABM treaty.
The timing is problematic. Mr. Bush would have to give six months' notice of his intention to withdraw from the treaty in a few weeks if he wants to move ahead with tests in the late spring, as the Pentagon hopes. The White House did not disclose its testing schedule.
The two men are not widely expected to see each other again this year, although Mr. Bush said today that he had accepted an invitation from Mr. Putin to visit Moscow next year, probably in the spring.
American officials dodged questions about what obstacles remained to an accord on strategic defenses. Mr. Bush has made clear his aversion to signing another formal treaty that could take time to negotiate and would require Senate approval. Mr. Putin insisted this week that he wanted to codify any new framework on both offensive and defensive weapons, so that no future president could reverse course.
As Mr. Putin was leaving this afternoon, Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, told reporters that Mr. Bush was still committed to going ahead with testing an antimissile system, even if an agreement could not be reached.
"The president has made clear that one way or another the U.S. will have to get out of the constraints of the missile defense treaty," Ms. Rice said. "The timeline has not really changed."
She set no deadlines and insisted that the relationship between the two men was so good that their differences over the treaty were less important than than they were earlier this year.
"This is a smaller element of the U.S.-Russia relationship than it was several months ago and certainly than it was before Sept. 11," Ms. Rice said.
The oddity of the leaders' meeting was that the tone was so good, while the specific accomplishments were relatively modest. Mr. Bush opened it by promising to cut America's nuclear arsenal by two-thirds, down to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads, in the next 10 years. That was no surprise. He had promised major cuts in the presidential campaign last year, even though he had not previously announced a number.
Mr. Putin clearly hoped for more. He had talked of cutting Russia's nuclear stockpile, to 1,500 warheads. But on this trip, he did not repeat the 1,500 figure, promising only cuts comparable to what Mr. Bush was promising.
Mr. Putin returns to Moscow with one great prize. Mr. Bush has committed to the cuts before Mr. Putin has agreed to any change of position on testing antimissile weapons. But the Russian is also insisting on a treaty that would establish how the two sides would verify each others' cuts and would define what constitutes a decommissioned missile.
Mr. Putin has some allies on Capitol Hill. Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, warned the Senate today against "fly-by- night arms control" based on handshakes and oral accords.
"I am shocked by the president's view that an agreement on arms reductions need not be on paper," Mr. Byrd said. "We do not need hush- hush agreements with other countries on our nuclear weapons."
Other critics of Mr. Bush's approach suggested that the struggle in the Bush administration over whether to abandon the ABM treaty was still under way. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is continuing to press for swift action to amend or abandon the pact. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is urging patience and reminding administration colleagues that this is no time to add strain on the loose coalition against terrorism.
"There are some who want to create a treaty crisis to push the process and get the tests," said Tom Z. Collina, director of global security for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But the reality is that getting no deal in Crawford probably doesn't interfere with many of the next tests." The tests, Mr. Collina argued, could easily be designed within the confines of the ABM treaty.
The warmth of the meeting in the last two days was evident this morning when the two leaders went to the high school, where students, including 15 or so Russian exchange students temporarily living in Texas, gathered in a large gymnasium.
Mr. Bush mounted the stage in the brown field jacket that he uses for hiking on his ranch. Mr. Putin wore a black golf shirt and a sport coat.
"I bet a lot of folks here, particularly the older folks, never dreamt that an American president would be bringing the Russian president to Crawford," Mr. Bush said. "When I was in high school, Russia was an enemy.
He never mentioned points of conflict with Russia like human rights violations in Chechnya or the crackdown on independent news media.
Mr. Putin played to the Texas crowd with a skill that would have made Lyndon B. Johnson proud. "We in Russia have known for a long time that Texas is the most important state in the United States," he said.
He added that Russians understand the Texas culture better than they understand the rest of the country, "except maybe for Alaska, which we sold to you."
-------- russia
Strategic missile test
Inside the Ring
Notes from the Pentagon
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
November 16, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011116-78905562.htm
The growing friendship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bush, who spent time together in Crawford, Texas, this week, apparently has not altered Moscow's drive to develop new and potentially revolutionary strategic weapons.
U.S. intelligence officials tell us the Nov. 1 flight test of a Russian SS-27 strategic missile had unique characteristics. It was the second time Moscow had carried out what appeared to be a test firing of a new low-trajectory missile. The SS-27 was fired from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome and landed at the Kura test range on Kamchatka Peninsula.
In July, Russian military developers fired the first long-range strategic missile that left the atmosphere and then dropped down to an altitude of about 100,000 feet before impacting at a target range on the far eastern peninsula. The missile is believed to have a "scramjet"-powered last stage that travels at speeds around five times the speed of sound.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Russians are developing the new missile stage to defeat U.S. strategic defenses, which are currently focused on hitting warheads in space.
Russia remains opposed to U.S. plans for a nationwide strategic defense network. Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin were unable to agree on changes to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that would allow the legal deployment of such a system. In response, the United States could pull out of the treaty next month.
----
Salvaged Russia Sub to Be Scrapped
Associated Press
November 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- The Kursk nuclear submarine, salvaged from the sea floor, will be scrapped at the Nerpa plant in the northern Murmansk region, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said Friday.
The plan, which includes cutting out the submarine's reactor, is expected to be approved by the government by the end of the month, Klebanov said in remarks carried by the official Web site for the salvage operation, kursk.strana.ru.
The Kursk will be sent to the plant after prosecutors complete investigations inside its hull, said Klebanov, who is in charge of the operation. Plans for raising the forward section of the submarine will be approved later this month, he added.
Meanwhile, the 56th of 57 bodies retrieved from the hull has been identified, prosecutors said. Twelve other bodies were removed by divers during an operation last year.
The crew member was identified as Ensign Igor Fedorichev, 28, from Kaluga, just south of Moscow.
The Kursk sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, 2000, after two explosions tore through its forward torpedo section, sending a huge fireball through the hull that pulverized much of the 118-man crew.
-------- treaties
Friendly leaders unable to agree on missile treaty
The Independent War on Terrorism: Summit
By Rupert Cornwell
Washington 16 November 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=105203
Despite three days of backslapping and bonhomie in both Washington and Texas, Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin have failed to strike a deal on the future of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the key legal obstacle in the way of Mr Bush's plan to build a national missile defence shield.
Speaking at a meeting of the two leaders with students at Crawford High School near his ranch in central Texas, Mr Bush acknowledged that "we have a difference of opinion". For his part, Mr Putin said the two former superpower rivals were split on the "ways and means" of handling the 1972 pact, which the US regards as an obsolete relic of the Cold War, but which Moscow still contends is the cornerstone of international arms control.
But, Mr Putin told hundreds of students and local people packed into the school gymnasium that discussions would continue ahead of the visit which Mr Bush will pay to Russia next year. By then however the US may have already given the required six months' notice of a unilateral withdrawal from the treaty, which bars the tests and construction work on the missile defence programme which the Pentagon wants to step up.
But both men made clear they would not let disagreement over the ABM treaty spoil a summit which has otherwise sealed a new rapprochement between Washington and Moscow - with promises by both countries to slash existing nuclear arsenals by up to two-thirds, and of unstinting Russian support for the US-led campaign against terrorism.
The growing personal confidence between the two men drew another reference from Mr Bush about peering into President Putin's "heart and soul. The more I get to see them, the more I know we can work together in a positive way."
The clearest sign of friendship however was the President's invitation to Mr Putin to spend a night at the 1,600-acre Bush spread, called "Prairie Chapel". Yesterday Mr Bush drove the Russian leader on a tour of the ranch, before heading off to the school at Crawford, whose normal population of 600 has been more than tripled by the invasion of media, aides and security men.
The previous evening, a thunderstorm had prevented Mr Bush from conducting more than a brief tour of the ranch - but in drought-affected Texas even that was hailed by the President as good news. Nor did the pouring rain get in the way of a traditional Texas barbecue.
"Anytime it rains in Texas it enhances the dinner," Bush said. Then he and the first foreign head of state to visit his ranch dined on mesquite-smoked beef, southern fried catfish and other Texan delicacies, served from a cowboy chuck wagon on the lawn, to the strains of the Texas Ranch Hands and "Drifting Along with the Tumbling Tumbleweed".
---
Missile treaty must remain, Putin tells Bush
Daily Telegraph
By Toby Harnden in Crawford, Texas
16/11/2001
http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/11/16/wus16.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/11/16/ixhome.html
PRESIDENT BUSH has failed to persuade President Putin to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty but he insists that the warm friendship they established at their summit in America makes a deal likely in the future.
"There's no doubt the United States and Russia won't agree on every issue," Mr Bush told a pupil at the high school in Crawford, the president's home town, yesterday. "But you probably don't agree with your mother on every issue. You still love her, though, don't you?
"Well, even though we don't agree on every issue, I still respect him [Mr Putin] and like him as a person." He added: "We have a difference of opinion. Our disagreements will not divide us."
Mr Bush insisted that the 1972 treaty was "outdated" because it was "signed during a period of time when we really hated each other". Under its terms, development of a missile defence system is banned.
But Mr Putin, who sees the treaty as a symbol of Russian prestige, was unmoved.
Having initially said that September 11 made missile defence even more necessary, Mr Bush now appears to have postponed America's intended withdrawal from the ABM Treaty as a result of Mr Putin's growing influence in the new era ushered in by the devastating attacks that day.
The Russian leader said he felt that "the time was not wasted" because the two leaders had a shared aim of making the world safer. "We differ in the ways and means that are suitable for reaching the same objective," he said.
Standing in front of a map of Texas in the school, Mr Bush and Mr Putin swapped jokes and, at one point, put their arms around each other.
"Yesterday, we tasted steak and listened to music, and all of this with a single purpose and objective to increase the level of confidence between the leaders and the peoples," said Mr Putin after staying at Mr Bush's ranch near Waco.
Mr Bush said: "We had a great dinner last night . . . and I think the president really enjoyed himself."
There appeared to be a genuine and surprising rapport between the two men, but they gave different interpretations of what would be done with the nuclear warheads to be removed from missiles under arms reductions they announced on Tuesday.
Mr Bush said: "We're talking about reducing and destroying the number of warheads to get down to . . . significantly lower levels."
But Mr Putin, who appeared to be abiding by Ronald Reagan's maxim of "trust but verify", said: "What we do with those arsenals is subject to negotiations with the result of those negotiations depending on the level of trust between the United States and Russia."
He added: "The president told me that we'll just limit ourselves to generalities, but he was mistaken."
---
Summit Is Important Step to Success
New York Newsday
By Eugene B. Rumer
Eugene B. Rumer is a senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. The views here are his own.
November 16, 2001
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vprum162465882nov16.story?coll=ny%2Dviewpoints%2Dheadlines
WHAT A difference a year makes.
On Nov. 15, 2000, President Bill Clinton held his final bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the margins of the Asia-Pacific forum in Brunei. The meeting was such a non-event that the chief architect of Clinton's Russia policy, Strobe Talbott, didn't even bother to attend.
The presidents agreed to disagree on the fate of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and went home, leaving behind an uncertain bilateral agenda soured by widespread perceptions that the relationship had reached a dead end and that the two countries would be better off going it alone.
That's ancient history now. The atmosphere that reportedly prevailed at the small, intimate dinner party between Putin and President George W. Bush on Nov. 14, 2001, in Crawford, Texas, couldn't have been more different. What's ancient history, too, is the feeling that Russia has fallen from the ranks of great powers and doesn't matter anymore, that the two countries got into a premature partnership and now need a pause in the relationship. Instead, there is a clear and unambiguous change in tone: The two countries need each other and cannot, should not, go it alone. That is the real bottom line on the latest Bush- Putin summit.
Make no mistake. There are many thorny, contentious issues on the U.S.- Russian agenda. For example, the Bush administration can be criticized for not going further in its unilateral commitment to reduce strategic nuclear arms. If the Cold War is really over, why does the United States need to keep between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads operationally deployed? If Russia is not the enemy, who are these thousands of weapons intended to deter? China, with its fewer than two dozen missiles? Iraq or Iran, either of which may, in the worst nightmare scenarios, acquire a handful of weapons?
Then there's the future of the ABM Treaty. There have been four U.S.-Russian presidential meetings in five months, and there's still no deal. And there are other issues as well, including the war in Chechnya and Russian arms sales to China and Iran, to name just a few.
But it turns out that the number of nuclear weapons each side aims at the other doesn't really matter at all. Cold War fears of nuclear winter are well behind us, and very few people on either side of the Atlantic are afraid of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Surprisingly, the ABM Treaty is not that important for bilateral relations, either. Outside the surreal world of nuclear exchange scenarios, nobody in Russia really fears that the United States will acquire a meaningful missile defense capability that will somehow deny Russia the option of a retaliatory strike.
By contrast, there are many in the United States who would like to see treaty constraints on testing done away with, but since Sept. 11 these priorities have been reordered. Nobody in the Bush administration seems prepared to jeopardize the relationship with Russia for the sake of meeting missile defense test schedules.
Certainly, the tragedy of Sept. 11 has helped put a new perspective on the relationship between Russia and the United States. The terrorist attacks did not render nuclear and missile defense issues obsolete, but they sent an important message to the leaders and the people of both countries that they need each other. They stand to gain from working together, and in the meantime, they can agree to disagree without having their differences affect their overall relationship - especially if their differences have more to do with mopping up the legacy of the Cold War than with meeting the challenge of the current war.
The list of documents Presidents Bush and Putin have issued at the summit is impressive and covers a whole range of post-Sept. 11 priorities - from cooperation on bioterrorism to Russian World Trade Organization accession. Some of them speak for themselves. For example, the threat of "loose germs" or nuclear weapons from Russia is what worries many Americans these days. Russian cooperation in securing and eliminating its stockpiles of biological and nuclear weapons will be one of the essential elements of our homeland defense. U.S. assistance to the Russians in this area will be one of theirs.
But why should Americans care about Russian WTO accession? Of course, there are investment opportunities for U.S. companies, most notably in the energy sector, but elsewhere, too, from agriculture to communications and military high technology.
Still, beyond the prospect of millions of dollars, the most important stake the United States has in Russian WTO membership is the promise of Russia's becoming stronger sooner, of its becoming a normal country. WTO membership will give a powerful push to Russian domestic reform. From opening Russian markets to fair trade, to pushing it toward greater rule of law, Russian membership in the WTO will propel Russia that much closer to the First World - and put our fears of its slipping into the Third World that much farther behind us. The closer we are to that goal, the sooner we will be able to stop worrying about loose nukes and germs from Russia.
Most likely, we will find in the months and years to come that the goal of securing Russia's place in the First World will prove far more difficult than cutting a deal on missile defenses or warheads. But if the Bush-Putin summit has moved us closer to this goal - and there is every reason to think that it has - then it was a success.
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Putin refuses to scrap treaty
November 16, 2001
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011116-9756679.htm
CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush yesterday ended his first American summit with Vladimir Putin without convincing the Russian president to withdraw from an arms treaty that is preventing the United States from testing a missile defense shield.
"We have a difference of opinion," Mr. Bush acknowledged during a joint appearance with Mr. Putin at Crawford High School.
"We differ in the ways and means we perceive that are suitable for reaching the same objective," Mr. Putin added during a lengthy question-and-answer session with students.
Although there had been hopes in the administration for some movement on the part of Mr. Putin, the Russian refused to budge from his support of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty during three days of talks in Washington and Crawford.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said the ABM Treaty "continues to be a source of disagreement between the two sides." She said Mr. Putin showed no willingness to join the United States in a simultaneous withdrawal from the pact anytime soon.
"No particular, you know, 'kaboom' breakthrough is to be expected at any particular time," Miss Rice said in response to questions from The Washington Times. "But they are continuing to work the issue and we'll see how long we can go before we have to actually begin the testing."
Since that testing would violate the ABM Treaty, the United States must either convince Russia to jointly withdraw from the treaty or notify Moscow that Washington will unilaterally withdraw after a six-month period prescribed by the document. A senior administration official has said the United States will give its six-month notice if Russia does not agree to a joint withdrawal by the end of the year.
"The Russians understand that we're soon going to run up against certain constraints of the treaty," Miss Rice warned. "One way or another, the United States is going to have to get out of the constraints."
Although Mr. Bush has derided ABM as a relic of the Cold War, Mr. Putin told him yesterday that he continues "to believe that the ABM treaty has a certain importance to the post-Cold War era," Miss Rice said. As for allowing tests for a missile defense shield, Mr. Putin "continues to believe that this ought to be done within the context of the ABM treaty," she added.
Mr. Putin also favors codifying his various arms-control agreements with Mr. Bush in treaty form. Although Mr. Bush had been leery of getting entangled in another formal agreement that might someday become obsolete, he appeared to soften his opposition yesterday.
"We are more than willing to talk with the Russians about various levels of codification of such an arrangement," Miss Rice said. "We are prepared to make this verifiable in some form, perhaps even using some of the verification procedures out of former treaties."
But she added: "We do not believe that it needs to look like the thousands and thousands of pages that attended all the SALT and START treaties."
Back in Washington, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat, expressed outrage at Mr. Bush's reluctance to enter a new formal treaty. "I am shocked by the president's view that an agreement on arms reductions need not be on paper," he said. "Legally and technically, it need not be, but it ought to be."
He added: "What will happen to the agreement when President Bush and President Putin leave office? A written treaty could provide clear answers."
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US rep. wants anti-radiation drug near nuke plants
Reuters:
16/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13330
WASHINGTON - A U.S. lawmaker has proposed a bill that would stockpile anti-radiation medicine near American nuclear power plants in case attackers released dangerous radioactive material into the air.
Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Edward Markey, a longtime critic of the nuclear industry, wants the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to have ready supplies of potassium iodide within 200 miles (320 km) of each of the country's 103 operating nuclear power plants.
The drug has been shown to protect the body's thyroid gland from diseases caused by radiation exposure, Markey said. It must be taken several hours after exposure to be effective.
"Potassium iodide is to radiation exposure what Cipro is to anthrax," he said in a statement.
The bill would also require the government commission to stock potassium iodide at individual homes and public facilities within 50 miles (80 km) of a plant.
In the wake of the deadly Sept. 11 aerial attacks on Washington and New York, Markey has urged lawmakers to pass measures to step up security at nuclear plants, which he views as vulnerable to attack.
"In this new era of terrorism, in which the threat of an intentional release of radioactivity can no longer be ignored, we should waste no more time," Markey said.
Government and private industry officials say all commercial nuclear plants have been on high alert since the September attacks and have adopted stricter security measures.
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Federal Guards for Nuke Plants Sought
Associated Press
November 16, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Guards.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two Democratic senators plan to introduce legislation after the Thanksgiving congressional recess to federalize security guards at the country's nuclear power plants.
``We can no longer leave the security at our nation's nuclear power plants to chance,'' said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who along with Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., were drafting the legislation.
Reid, who is assistant Senate majority leader and chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over nuclear issues, noted that Congress just agreed to federalize passenger and baggage screeners at airports.
``It's time we focus the same energy to improve safety at nuclear power plants,'' said Reid.
GOP conservatives in the House had opposed making the airport workers federal employees, and may also object to federalizing guards at nuclear plants.
Private guards hired by the plant operators now handle security at the 103 nuclear reactors in 31 states. Although they carry weapons, they have no police power.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the private security forces at many of the plants have been augmented by local or state police and in at least seven states by National Guard troops.
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Probe Finds Law Firm Had Dual Roles
By KEN RITTER,
Associated Press Writer,
Friday November 16 9:46 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011116/us/nuclear_waste_1.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) - A law firm hired to help the Energy Department get a license for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada failed to disclose a relationship with a pro-dump lobbying firm, the department's inspector general found.
At least 14 members of the Chicago-based law firm Winston & Strawn working on the $16.5 million government contract also worked for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying firm that supports the Yucca Mountain project, reported DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman, who stopped short of declaring the relationship a conflict of interest.
But Nevada's two U.S. senators, Democrat Harry Reid and Republican John Ensign, said the report documents ``rampant conflict of interest violations'' that contaminated 17 years of study of the Yucca Mountain site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
State officials and the Nevada congressional delegation oppose the proposed dump, which would store radioactive waste from about 100 nuclear sites nationwide.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, based in Washington, D.C., has lobbied to promote the use of nuclear power and favors the Yucca Mountain site. It is the only site under study by the government to dispose of the nation's nuclear waste.
In his report, Friedman said Winston & Strawn denied a conflict of interest and denied it compromised work on the Yucca Mountain project.
James Thompson, Winston & Strawn chairman and former Illinois governor, referred questions to spokesman Chuck Connor at the Dilen Schneider Group in Chicago, who wouldn't comment.
Connor also wouldn't comment on recent allegations that Winston & Strawn leaked to the Energy Department a confidential document outlining the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's standards for approving the project.
Reid called last week for Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell to investigate that allegation. It was not addressed in Friedman's report.
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said Thursday that Winston & Strawn is still working for the Energy Department, and the department would study Friedman's findings.
``It's important to note,'' Davis said, ``that the report found no evidence that the work performed by Winston & Strawn created an improper bias in the department's scientific evaluation of Yucca Mountain.''
The site selection process is in its final weeks, but officials said Friedman's report opens the licensing process to a possible legal challenge.
Photo: http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20011116/capt.1005921729nuclear_wastes_vg801.jpg
Mechanic Sid Dickey welds a piece of a core drilling machine May 9, 2000, at the Yucca Mountain Project on the Nevada Test Site. A law firm hired to help the federal Energy Department gain approval for this national nuclear waste dump in Nevada failed to disclose a close relationship with a pro-dump lobbying firm, the Energy Department's inspector general found. (AP Photo/Laura Rauch, File)
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Oak Ridge guards told they have final offer on labor pact
From: magnu96196@aol.com
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 12:54:08 EST
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/business/article/0,1406,KNS_376_878087,00.html
Oak Ridge guards told they have final offer on labor pact By Frank Munger, News-Sentinel senior writer
OAK RIDGE - The Oak Ridge guards' union says it has authority to call a strike at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant later this month if the management team doesn't return to the bargaining table. The government's security contractor says it has already made a "best-and-final'' offer, which the Y12 guards rejected, and that contingency plans are in place to protect the nuclear facilities if a strike occurs Nov. 29.
Y-12 makes parts for every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, and the Oak Ridge plant is the national repository for bombgrade uranium.
Both sides said Wednesday they want to avert a strike if at all possible, although the route to resolution is not yet clear.
"We have