------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Backpack nukes small but deadly
Irish Vow to Force Nuke Plant Shutdown
UK BNFL say to start controversial n-plant in days
Small News: Killing Other People's Children
EU protests over possible US duties on uranium
European Defense Ministers Meet
Turkey - CIA Factbook
Slovenia and Croatia ink accord on nuclear plant
Iraq Special Weapons Facilities
Leak Found at Japan Power Plant
ABM Treaty: Over and Out
Nuclear Strike on Bunkers Assessed
Radiation Bulletin NIF SPECIAL
US FERC won't block Williams LNG plant reopening
Reid Pleading Nevada's Case For Large Anti-Terror Share
Resting Nuclear Plant Is Finally Put to Sleep
Poll of world opinion leaders shows little empathy for U.S.
Anti-Terror Compromise Approved

MILITARY
Navy crew barges onto oil tanker
Norway offers landmine clearers for Afghanistan
Life during Wartime
Security terms get OK from Afghanistan's new rulers
Britain to Lead Peacekeeping Force
Taliban Rank and File Fade Back Into Society
Troops May Scour Caves for Qaeda, U.S. General Says
Rwanda-backed rebels, Congo warriors clash
Reeling From Riots, Argentina Declares a State of Siege
Thailand sees golfing paradise in minefield
Defector tells of hidden weapons sites
U.S. Scientist Questioned
Anthrax Vaccine Plan Sows Confusion
U.S. joins chemical arms audit
Adams, Cuba and IRA
Indian Army Kills 5 Islamic Militants
India Seeks International Support
Iran hits back after US 'attack' on tanker
An Iraqi Defector Tells of Work on at Least 20 Hidden Weapons Sites
Palestinians Win U.N. Approval
Bombing That Killed 5 Children a Mistake, Says Israel
S.Korea presses for peace talks with North
Enemies of the states
Report: Pakistan allows 'hot pursuit'
U.S. military supplies arrive in Philippines
U.S. Police and Intelligence Hit by Spy Network
Struggles Inside the Government Defined Campaign
U.N. Security Council Approves International Force for Kabul

POLICE / PRISONERS
State of Siege Declared in Argentina
Outside probe sought of police shooting
Al-Qaeda 70 per cent intact, says FBI official

ENERGY AND OTHER
NYPA buys 8 fuel cell power plants for NY City
Windmill power -- a breath of fresh air
Nine European Cities to Get Fuel Cell Buses
DOW CHEMICAL FINE WILL FUND GREEN CARS
UK Ofgem sets guidelines for green power tariffs
Regional Electricity Group Gets Approval
Ibuprofen blocks benefits of aspirin
Controversial Professor to Be Fired

ACTIVISTS
It's not extreme to hold all life sacred



-------- NUCLEAR

Backpack nukes small but deadly

UPI Science Writer
12/20/2001 6:55 PM
http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=20122001-055216-3875r

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- Backpack nuclear devices are small, man-portable nuclear weapons with the explosive power of thousands of tons of TNT.

These weapons were designed to be carried by one or two people for use behind enemy lines in the event of a war. With yields of up to 10 kilotons, they are relatively tiny when compared to the 100- to 25,000-kiloton bombs found in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. But they are nevertheless still weapons of mass destruction -- the bomb detonated at Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons in explosive strength. One kiloton is the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT.

The most immediate effects of a nuclear explosion would be an intense flash of ultraviolet light and a fireball tens of millions of degrees hot that would set a large area ablaze. This would be followed seconds later by a shock wave that leveled buildings and turned debris into a torrent of deadly high-speed projectiles.

Ted Postol of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., estimates that even a 1 kiloton bomb would instantaneously leave a swath of destruction a half-mile in radius in which no one could survive the heat and blast. A 5-kiloton bomb and a 10-kiloton bomb would immediately create lethality zones about two miles in diameter.

In addition, the nuclear flash would be much brighter than the sun at noon. The intense light would cause blindness and permanent retinal injuries for anyone looking directly at the explosion in an area up to roughly eight miles from ground zero, assuming clear weather with high visibility.

The explosion of a backpack nuke at ground level would be limited in some ways. The blast would be mitigated to some degree by buildings, especially in an urban area. A ground-level explosion would also not produce an electromagnetic pulse or EMP as would an atomic burst well above ground -- from an incoming missile, for example. An EMP would shut down power grids and knock out unprotected electronics -- effectively cutting telecommunications, destroying computers and knocking out automobile engines.

Nonetheless, even a relatively small nuclear blast at ground level would produce an intense, deadly blanket of gamma ray-emitting radioactive fallout.

"The fireball breaks through the surface of the earth, carrying into the air large amounts of dirt and debris," explained theoretical physicist Robert Nelson at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. "This material has been exposed to the intense neutron flux from the nuclear detonation, which adds to the radioactivity from the fission products."

Predicting radiation levels from early fallout is difficult and extremely dependent on factors such as weather, terrain and bomb design. Postol estimated that even with a 1-kiloton bomb, within an hour or so there would be a swath of fallout 2 1/2 to 3 miles long and maybe a quarter-mile wide. "Anyone who didn't get out of that would be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation," Postol said.

Because of the fallout, relief operations would be highly risky in the immediate aftermath of such an attack. First responders like paramedics and firefighters could be entering areas of very dangerous radiation.

In weapons tests with 5-kiloton bombs, about half of the total radioactivity produced was distributed in the fallout, while the other half was confined to the highly radioactive crater. "A rough estimate would be that as many people would die of fallout as would die from the initial blast, assuming that they couldn't immediately evacuate and be properly decontaminated," Nelson said in an interview with United Press International.

The number of casualties caused directly by the explosion is difficult to predict and dependent on the location of the device, whether there is any warning, as well as the time of day and the number of people at work or home.

Nonetheless, the officials -- who spoke to UPI during a recent briefing in Washington -- estimated that a 1-kiloton nuclear device exploded in Lower Manhattan could inflict between 80,000 and 200,000 casualties. A 10-kiloton device would kill at least twice as many they said.

Moreover, immediate casualties are likely to represent only a proportion of the eventual death toll.

Even if medical centers around the blast zone are still operable, it is likely that they will be overwhelmed, and there not will be enough empty beds for even the most critically injured.

In the days following the attack many of the injured would almost certainly die from lack of any medical care. Victims trapped in collapsed buildings or tunnels might not survive in time for rescue teams to save them. In addition, while early fallout comes down roughly a day after the explosion in an area around the blast site, delayed fallout knocked hundreds of miles into the atmosphere could spread radioactivity around the world for decades.

"A ground burst would have much more fallout than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, because those were high altitude explosions," Nelson said.

-------- britain

Irish Vow to Force Nuke Plant Shutdown

By Shawn Pogatchnik
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, December 20, 2001; 11:46 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6524-2001Dec20?language=printer

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Ireland vowed Thursday to force Britain to shut down its Sellafield nuclear complex, as Irish lawmakers and environmentalists led protests outside a new facility at the plant designed to produce recycled fuel for reactors worldwide.

"We cannot allow this situation to stand. It is an act of supreme arrogance," said Joe Jacob, Ireland's government minister responsible for public safety, who warned of a possible Sept. 11-style terrorist strike on the Irish Sea plant.

Sellafield, Britain's major nuclear facility, has been a sore in Anglo-Irish relations ever since Queen Elizabeth II opened the first reactor there in 1956.

British Nuclear Fuels PLC, which operates the complex in northern England, said it had drastically reduced emissions of radioactive material into the sea since the 1970s. It insisted that the Mixed-Oxide Fuel plant, which opened Thursday after a 5-year delay over safety concerns, would not produce any harmful emissions at all.

"This is wonderful news and is the best Christmas present we could have had," declared Jack Allen, head of operations at Sellafield, where the MOX plant is expected to underwrite at least 1,200 jobs.

Britain says it will have a strong market for the MOX plant's product, particularly in Japan.

The plant - completed in 1996 but delayed partly because of a scandal involving forged security checks at a sister recycling facility - would receive shipments of spent plutonium and uranium from several countries to be converted into new rods of fuel, each equivalent in energy to a ton of coal. The sea shipments in and out would receive armed escort.

Ireland, which has no nuclear energy, has complained for decades of its potential exposure to any accidents at the plant, which lies some 150 miles across the sea. Pressure groups in two coastal towns, Drogheda and Dundalk, claim their communities suffer higher-than-average rates of cancer and birth defects because of Sellafield.

British politicians and scientists, however, insist that recent studies by independent nuclear watchdogs had all found no evidence of dangerous emissions from Sellafield. They suggest Irish ire has more to do with a pending general election in Ireland, where all parties consider opposition to Sellafield a vote-winner.

"We are not aware of any scientific or epidemiological evidence showing any ill effects from Sellafield operations in either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland," said Dr. Michael Clark, editor of Britain's Radiological Protection Bulletin.

As Prime Minister Bertie Ahern's ruling Fianna Fail party promised to pursue every legal and diplomatic channel against Britain, opposition lawmakers traveled to Sellafield to join protesters who handcuffed themselves to the gates of the MOX plant.

The Sept. 11 attacks on the United States have given local lawmakers a particularly fearful new angle of protest.

"If Sellafield goes up in an attack, the prevailing wind will take it right to our country," warned John Gormley, a former mayor of Dublin and a lawmaker from Ireland's Green Party, who took part in Thursday's demonstrations.

Dr. Tom O'Flaherty, chief executive of Ireland's nuclear watchdog, the Radiological Protection Institute, which has not been permitted to visit Sellafield, said radioactive clouds would be released if an aircraft crashed into key storage tanks or reactors. He estimated that, depending on winds, the radiation could produce fatal cancers in 30 out of every 50,000 people in Ireland.

----

UK BNFL say to start controversial n-plant in days

Reuters
December 20, 2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13771/story.htm

LONDON - State-owned British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) said it will start operating a controversial nuclear fuel manufacturing plant within the next few days.

"We expect to put plutonium into the plant on or around December 20," a spokesman for the group said on Tuesday.

BNFL's 472 million pound ($796 million) mixed oxide (MOX) fuel plant has been the focus of several legal challenges to stop it starting up following its completion in 1996.

The lastest legal battle was tied off on Monday when a United Nations court announced that both Britain and Ireland had submitted reports outlining consultations they had been ordered to have.

The Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which ordered the two countries to consult each other about safety and pollution concerns, had earlier this month rejected a request from Ireland for an injunction to prevent the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) from opening.

Ireland says it is worried about safety and pollution from Sellafield because the BNFL's MOX plant will discharge low level radioactive emissions into the Irish Sea.

The plant will mix highly toxic plutonium with uranium oxides to create a fuel that can be burnt in specially adapted nuclear reactors.

Environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, also say that apart from the pollution concerns, the MOX fuel will find few customers because it is more expensive than conventional uranium reactor fuel.

An international furore erupted in 2000 when it was revealed data on a pilot batch of MOX fuel sent to Japan had been falsified.

The ensuing row and cancelled orders led to the UK government shelving plans to part privatise BNFL.

A government commissioned report into SMP published earlier this year said the plant would deliver net financial benefits of 216 million pounds ($364 million) over its lifetime once build costs were excluded.


-------- depleted uranium

Small News: Killing Other People's Children

By Lawrence McGuire,
December 20, 2001
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcguire1.html

The deep craters and pieces of shrapnel indicate that America's weapon of choice in Kabul was the Mark 82 500lb bomb, which is designed to be guided to its target by the pilot, a nearby observation plane or a spotter on the ground. But there was nothing accurate about the 500lb bomb which fell on Bibi Mahru. It killed Gul Ahmad, 40, a Hazara carpet weaver, his second wife Sima, 35, their five daughters and his son by his first wife. Two children living next door were also killed.

Children killed because of war or terrorism is not a subject I like to contemplate. I draw away from it instinctively, perhaps because the unnecessary death of a child represents the horror of our society and I can do so little about it. I prefer to escape this horror by focusing on the enjoyable aspects of my place in modern life: my warm apartment, the food in my refrigerator, books, movies, music, hiking, travel, my work, and most importantly, the personal human relationships which give me love, friendship, security, and a feeling of belonging.

However, thousands of innocent people have died in Afghanistan, and are still dying, and every death is, after all, the death of somebody's child. I know I am in some way related to their death, because first of all I am another human being sharing their world, participating in the creation of that world in my daily life. I'm also connected because I grew up in the country, the U.S.A., whose political system has organized the bombing: the bombs that killed were partially paid by my tax dollars, and the same political system also issued my passport, which gives me privileges most people in the world lack. And in a small way I participate in that political system. So I feel I have some small responsibility to face the fact of these dead children and to talk about them.

The children who died, and are dying, in Afghanistan because of U.S. bombing do not merit much attention in our mass media.

They are small news, other people's children. Perhaps this is even more of a reason for me to talk about them. They seem to me to be an important part of the story. Perhaps the reason that the mass media keep the story small news is to maintain wide support for this war, and the next one. That is certainly a possibility.

But for the mass media the deaths of poor people are usually small news, throughout the year. How many newspapers put this on the front page?

On Sept. 11, more than 35,000 of the world's children died of starvation. A similar number have perished from hunger every day since then in developing countries, according to figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Another reason for the lack of coverage is that we don't want to know about U.S. bombs killing other people's children. It threatens our sense of who we are. We prefer to cast ourselves as the good guys, and good guys don't kill children. This can be seen as proof of our humanity. After all, if we were completely depraved the news of the deaths of children would not disturb us.

On the other hand, when we so willingly and easily allow ourselves to be ignorant of the results of U.S. bombing we are also, perhaps, indicating our level of morality. I'm not sure about this. Measuring the level of morality is hard enough, if not impossible, for myself, so how can I hope to measure the level of my culture's morality? Is morality something that can be measured? If it cannot be, then how does George Bush know we are 'good' and they (Osama bin Laden, the Taleban, etc.,) are 'evil'?

Perhaps my focus on the deaths of children is a result of morbidity. If so, then at least I share some respectful company. For example one of my favorite writers, Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, also is contemplating the deaths of other people's children these days:

Here is the other question that I have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people's children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don't kill any children for my benefit.

I wonder how many children actually died? And what were their names? And what has happened to their families? This brings up another equally horrible fact to contemplate, what is happening right now to the children who have (so far) survived? Some are freezing to death, others are starving:

Farough, an 11-year-old boy whose family of six arrived here from Chaghcharan a month ago, says he spends his days begging for a piece of bread or a sip of clean water or standing in line for hours in the cold in hope of getting a bag of rice.

"My mother is deaf and dumb and my father is very old," he explained. A 2-year-old sister died from the cold a few days ago. "We came because we had nothing to eat at home, but here sometimes I eat and other times nothing. The ground is my mattress and the sky is my roof. We are very miserable."

How many are orphans? How many have wounds that will disfigure and affect them for the rest of their lives? And, yet another addition to the horror, how many will die or be disfigured in the years to come from all the unexploded cluster bombs (the bomblets are yellow, and look very similar to the food packets that were dropped) which the U.S. left behind? The harmful effects of the U.S. bombing will last for years, and we will never know the true human cost to the people of Afghanistan.

In Laos, Cambodia, and Viet Nam people are still dying from the land mines planted by the U.S. military 30 years ago. (Why did we plant these mines in the first place? Anybody know?) The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world to refuse to sign an international treaty to ban land mines.

We do know that as a result of the bombing a country that was dependent upon international aid for survival before September 11, has become an even more desperate place:

The U.S. bombing campaign, while helping to defeat the oppressive Taliban regime, has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis in two ways. First, hundreds of thousands of people, terrified by the bombs, have fled their villages and swelled the ranks of the refugee population. Second, before the Oct. 7 air attack, millions of Afghans were receiving international assistance despite the difficulties of working with the Taliban. But after the bombing began, humanitarian agencies pulled their staff from the country and closed, or severely curtailed, their operations.

The U.S. is currently preventing aid from reaching people by refusing to support an international peacekeeping force to insure the aid gets to the people in need, though it's possible this will change soon:

All of the aid groups I talked to in Afghanistan say that unless an international force is sent in to secure the roads, Afghanistan will be the scene of a humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions. The good news is that England, France, Turkey, Jordan, Bangladesh and Indonesia have all offered troops to carry out this mission. The bad news is that the Pentagon and the Northern Alliance are resisting the introduction of such a force.

When the American terrorist and Gulf War hero Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City he also blew up a day care center. The death of those children was big news in the U.S. They were not other people's children, they were our children. McVeigh called it 'collateral damage', a phrase he learned from the U.S. officials who used it to describe the 200,000 civilians killed by the U.S. bombing of Iraq.

Since our bombing of Iraq in 1991 over a million Iraqis have died because of U.S. imposed trade sanctions. The man who used to be in charge of this 'program', Hans Von Sponeck, says this:

"The fact that today, on average, according to UNICEF, 5,000 children are dying every month because of sanctions, is a violation of human rights. The Convention of the Rights of the Child is violated. The Covenant on Political and Civic Rights is violated. The Hague Convention is violated."

Another UN official who resigned said this:

"We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." Denis Halliday, after resigning as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, The Independent, 15 October 1998

In addition many are dying in Iraq from cancer caused by the depleted uranium in the bombs that were dropped. The U.S. also dropped depleted uranium bombs on Kosovo and Serbia. Here is a recent headline about that subject:

US Wins Defeat of Depleted Uranium Study

McVeigh said he blew up the building because the Federal Government killed a lot of adults and their children in Waco, Texas. He was avenging those deaths, he said, and also he hoped to prevent more deaths in the future, by using terrorism against the Government. From his point of view it seemed like a logical thing to do. To me it seems insane. Perhaps it was insane. But the surviving members of families who lost children in Afghanistan due to U.S. bombing might feel like doing the same thing. It's not unlikely:

Rukia, 39, who like many Afghans uses only one name, lost her family five days ago when she says a United States bomb hit her Kandahar neighborhood. Wounded in the stomach and with her left arm shattered, she had to flee before she could bury her children. She was nearly bombed again, while a relative was driving her to a hospital in Pakistan "They're bombing anything that moves," she said. "It's not true that they bomb civilians by accident. They're targeting the innocent people instead of Osama bin Laden.".. ..Rukia covered her face and started to cry when asked what she wanted to tell the Americans about the loss of her five children. She thought a while before responding: "Destroy, finish, terminate America."

Why disturb ourselves with reading articles about civilian deaths? Isn't it better to console ourselves with the idea that even though children died, it was worth it because the bombing prevented more children from dying in the future? I think many people feel this way.

That is one reason they support what they call war and what I call state terrorism. And maybe they are right. The problem is this: however pleasant the idea that 'bombing is good', there is no evidence that supports it, in reality. How does bombing defenseless civilians prevent terrorism or promote peace? The past two months of bombing have not made our world a safer, more peaceful place to live in. It has helped certain politicians, certain arms manufacturers, and promoted the philosophy of 'might makes right'.

But I don't really believe that people support the bombing because they think it will prevent children's deaths in the future. I think, instead, that people support it because they are able to ignore the deaths of other people's children, and they are afraid.

Perhaps I'm wrong. But there is definitely a strong correlation between refusing to acknowledge the suffering our bombing is causing other people, and support for the bombing. Most people who support the bombing of Afghanistan have no idea how many civilians were killed by the bombing of Iraq, or the bombing of Viet Nam. A Viet Nam war memorial showing the names of every civilian killed by the U.S. in that war would be at least 40 times longer than the one in Washington. But we don't want to know that, it's old small news. That makes it easier for us to support bombing Afghanistan.

There is also an element of moral cowardice. This is a dangerous subject to broach because maybe it represents my own version of self-righteousness. It probably does. However it seems true to me, so I'll say it. I think many people support the bombing because they are afraid to speak out against it. I think it takes moral courage to oppose the government during a war, and to speak out to your friends, family, co-workers, and daily acquaintances. Instead it is so much easier to identify with the government leaders, to allow ourselves to be guided in our opinions by the mass media, and to pretend that we are being brave by supporting the bombing.

Our culture tells us all our lives that the heroes are the men who kill for the good cause. But it takes no heroism to support war, absolutely none. But men in particular like to think of themselves as possible heroes, that if necessary they will also have 'the stomach' to kill. It pleases their self-image to support the war, and to see themselves as 'protecting' someone by killing others. They can easily dismiss those who disagree as 'peaceniks' who just do not understand. A real man, in their view, must not get emotional and worry about the deaths of other people's children. He must be mature and be willing to follow the leader and kill, and support killing with pious logic about 'just war'. This is one way many men conform and support mass murder and pretend to themselves they are being brave by doing so.

I think most women who support the bombing do so because they are able to ignore the deaths it causes, and because they think 'since politics are controlled by men, it's their responsibility'. Women seem to be less inclined to heroic fantasies about the necessity of war, perhaps because women and children are always the one who suffer the most in modern war.

However I think a lot of people, men and women, agree with me, but like me have little clue as to what to do about it. Many people say we should, as citizens, act to restrain the military capacity of our government.

Our government wants to militarize space in order to have complete military hegemony over every other government in the world. That is the plan according to the government document Vision 2020 published during the Clinton Administration. On the front cover it says: 'Dominating the Space Dimension of Military Operations to Protect U.S. Interests and Investment.' This is the meaning of the Missile Shield plan. This is why President Bush is going to tear up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Most governments do not want to militarize space. They have voted against it in numerous United Nations resolutions. But the U.S. wants to do it, and probably will.

This brings me back to my question about measuring the moral level of our culture. If we begin with a moral rule as old as humanity, common to all cultures and religions, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', we can ask ourselves to what degree we are following that moral rule.

But how can we follow this rule (supposing that we even want to) if we refuse to learn just what we are 'doing' unto others? We can first of all ignore the fact that our bombs are killing other people's children. We can also rationalize it by repeating what our leaders say, who describe the deaths as 'unintended consequences' of our bombing. We can also refuse to name it what it is: state terrorism, mass murder. If we ignore that we are 'doing death' unto others, we will surely do nothing to prevent further deaths in the future.

Just how many deaths of other people's children are we willing to ignore, or to rationalize with words like 'unintended consequences'? One million? Two million? If the government tells us it is necessary, and the mass media makes the deaths small news, could we perhaps ignore the deaths of ten million children? Why not? It's certainly possible, given our recent history.

Since WW II the United States has been regularly dropping bombs on civilians, killing lots of people and their children, in Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, and many other places. The U.S. directed and supported Contras killed thousands of other people's children in Nicaraugua:

In 1989 the US invaded Panama to overthrow the former CIA agent, General Manuel Noriega - a man who had now become an enemy; 5,000 civilians were killed by American forces and buried in mass graves. And in 1982 the US began funding the Contra war against the Sandinista governm0ent. Corinto harbor was mined in 1984 and the court of world opinion recognized that the policy of the United States was that of a war criminal. Nicaragua, now the second poorest nation in the western hemisphere, has never recovered from that war. There were 40,000 Nicaraguan dead, the innocent who were categorized as "soft targets".

That's part of the Nicaragua story. The Afghanistan story goes something like this: in 1979 Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State Zbignew Brezinski authorized the training of foreign terrorists to fight in Afghanistan, to draw the Soviet Union into a 'trap'. This was before the Soviet Union invaded the country. After the invasion the CIA continued the massive financial aid and training for these Islamic extremists, most of whom came from Middle East. Among those who answered the CIA's call was Osama Bin Laden. This CIA operation was the biggest in its long history of covert operations. The Soviet Union was successfully driven out of Afghanistan but the country was devastated and the U.S., goal accomplished, did nothing to help rebuild the country. Out of this devastation arose the warlords of the current Northern Alliance and also the Taleban. The Taleban was supported by U.S. allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. itself. The U.S. oil company Unocal negotiated with the Taleban, asking them to assist in the building of pipelines through the country.

However Osama Bin Laden returned, after being driven from Sudan, and his new battle was directed against the U.S., apparently because of the U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, his homeland.

So what is the justification for killing over 3,600 civilians, and putting hundreds of thousands at risk of starvation? This was the news on December 9:

More than seven million people out of an estimated population of 22 million are classified by aid organisations as being at "very high risk".

And from another source, on the same day:

Every night as the temperature dips well below zero, as many as 40 people die from cold and starvation. In the six cemeteries scattered through the camp, many of the piles of stones marking graves are so tiny that it is clear most victims are children and babies.

15 out of 19 of the September 11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. Not a single one was from Afghanistan. Not a single one was a Taleban. The Sept. 11 terrorists have not even been proven to have visited Afghanistan. The Taleban had agreed to negotiate an extradition of Bin Laden, but the U.S. government refused. Perhaps the Taleban were lying, but we will never know. Certainly they were a terrible government, but our government helped create them and helped create the foreign terrorists who were living in Afghanistan, and then it kills innocent civilians trying to destroy what they created, justifying this with the 'war on terrorism'. And now there is no real government in Afghanistan, just a loose assortment of warlords. And the Taleban are still there, they've just switched sides.

All this death, sadness and suffering. President Bush says again and again we are 'good'. He is confident that he knows our level of morality. I'm not so sure.

We are killing other people's children and ignoring their deaths.

In fact we get upset if people bring up the subject. We condemn people who call it 'U.S. terrorism'. For some reason when we kill other people's children it's not terrorism. It's the 'unintended consequences of a just cause'. When 'they' do it, it's 'evil'. If we are willing to do this what is our level of morality? As I said at the beginning, this is a difficult question to answer, and I think it can be only answered as individuals, talking to ourselves.

The U.S. government is currently taking the steps that greatly increase the possibility of nuclear war in the future. The U.S. government wants to be able to wage war on any country on the planet without the risk of counterattack, just like we now can bomb Afghanistan for months with little risk to our aircraft and almost no risk to our own people and territory.

It's very possible that the U.S. Government will soon be able to kill every child on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen, without any reprisal. Many people in the U.S. advocated using nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. What is our level of morality? Are we truly 'good'? How will we use our military power? If we were willing to ignore the deaths of civilians in the past, and if we are willing to ignore the deaths of civilians now, what do you think our behavior will be in the future?

Will civilian deaths in the future also be small news: other people's children?

Lawrence McGuire lives in France. He can be reached at blmcguire@hotmail.com

Source of quotes in text:

1 Published on Saturday, December 1, 2001 in the Guardian of London US Planes Rain Death on the Innocent 'Precision' Raids Kill Residents in Capital City By Rory McCarthy in Kabul

2 December 10, 2001"A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting" by Professor Marc W. Herold Ph.D., M.B.A., B.Sc. Study available here: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/.

3 Published on Wednesday, November 28, 2001 in the Christian Science Monitor Injustice Seen as Fertile Soil for Terrorists by Peter Ford

4 Published in the Winter 2001/2002 issue of YES! Magazine The Failure of War by Wendell Berry

5 NEWARK STAR-LEDGER 11/30/01 For many, home is a blanket and the food is weeds BY FARNAZ FASSIHI

6,7 Published on Sunday, December 16, 2001 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Feeding the Hungry May Be the Prime Task of Peacekeepers by Medea Benjamin

8 December 6, 2001 OPPOSING SANCTIONS ON IRAQ AN INTERVIEW WITH HANS VON SPONECK By Larry Everest Published at http://www.zmag.org

9 Published on Friday, November 30, 2001 by Reuters Going Backwards US Wins Defeat of Depleted Uranium Study by Irwin Arieff

10 Published on Saturday, December 8, 2001 in the Sydney Morning Herald Terminate America: Message From an Afghani Mother in Mourning by Tasgola Karla Bruner in Quetta, Pakistan

11 Published on Saturday, December 8, 2001 in Guardian of London Selective Justice: The US Has Been Sponsoring Terror in My Native Latin America for Decades by Bianca Jagger

12 The Independent on Sunday (London) December 9, 2001 Humanitarian crisis: 'anarchy' leaves 1m without food Conditions are worst in areas firmly under Northern Alliance control By Imre Karacs

13 The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) December 9, 2001 They call this 'the slaughterhouse' Christina Lamb

-------- europe

EU protests over possible US duties on uranium

REUTERS BELGIUM:
December 20, 2001
Story by Adrian Croft
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13779/story.htm

BRUSSELS - The European Union voiced concern on Monday about a U.S. finding that European exports of uranium were subsidized and said it might complain to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The EU said the U.S. Department of Commerce had made a decision on Friday which could lead to the imposition of duties on low-enriched uranium from several European countries.

Enriched uranium is used as a fuel in nuclear power generating plants. EU exports worth around $500 million are at stake, and would be heavily hit by any duties, the EU said.

In a statement, the EU's executive Commission voiced "serious concerns" and disappointment about the way the Department of Commerce reached its decision that the EU exports were dumped and subsidized.

The European Commission questioned the methodology used by the Department of Commerce, saying data and arguments put forward by the EU and the European industry had not been properly taken into account.

"The EU will now carefully examine this decision and reserves its right to take the matter up in the World Trade Organization if this dispute cannot be amicably resolved," EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy said in the statement.

The EU said it regretted that the Department of Commerce had "again demonstrated a very protectionist approach to trade policy," noting that the U.S. International Trade Commission recently proposed imposing high tariffs on steel imports.

The 15-nation EU and the United States often cross swords over trade matters, with uranium joining steel, an EU ban on hormone-treated beef and U.S. tax breaks for exporters as causes of transatlantic friction.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick is due to hold talks with Lamy in Brussels on Tuesday.

URANIUM PROBE

The Commerce Department launched an investigation of two European uranium companies in Dec. 2000 after receiving a complaint from USEC Inc., the only American producer of enriched uranium.

USEC accused its European competitors, Eurodif SA and Urenco Ltd., of unfairly selling uranium in the U.S. market for less than their cost of production and benefiting from government subsidies.

Urenco is a British-Dutch-German consortium, while Eurodif is controlled by the French government.

The European Commission said that if the International Trade Commission found next month that the European imports were harming the U.S. industry, the United States would impose duties of 32.78 percent for uranium exports from France and 2.26 percent for exports from Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.

The EU also said it was concerned about the use of antidumping duties to protect USEC, which it said received generous assistance from the U.S. government.

An executive with Urenco's U.S. subsidiary said last week the company could file a preliminary application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission early next year to build a $1 billion U.S. uranium enrichment facility.

----

European Defense Ministers Meet

By SELCAN HACAOGLU
Associated Press Writer
DECEMBER 20, 08:45 ET
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=WORLD&PACKAGEID=turkey&SLUG=TURKEY-DEFENSE-SUMMIT

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Defense ministers from southeastern Europe met on Thursday to discuss the U.S.-led war on terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and border security.

The countries from Balkans and southeast Europe were expected to issue a statement backing the campaign against terror but it is not clear what new measures they might take. They activated a multinational force in May to conduct peacekeeping missions in the Balkans.

Turkey's Defense Minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu said at the opening of the meeting that border security, the non-profileration of weapons of mass destruction, and the terrorism fight would top the agenda. The annual meeting coincides with increased awareness of terrorist threats following the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

``Compared to the past, regional countries are more eager in preserving the peace and stability in the region,'' Cakmakoglu said. ``This meeting is a sign of this eagerness.''

Turkey, despite fully backing the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign and being the first Muslim country to offer troops for Afghanistan, is deeply concerned over suggestions that the war could spread to its southern neighbor, Iraq. Turkey served as the launching pad for attacks against Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.

U.S. officials have recently accused Iraq of maintaining a germ warfare program.

Meanwhile, Balkan countries are disturbed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld proposal Tuesday during a summit in Brussels that NATO cut its forces in Bosnia by up to a third because their police work there has begun to strain nation's needs to fight terrorism.

Countries such as Macedonia fear that the new U.S. policy could hurt long-term stability in the region. NATO is leading close to 60,000 troops in three separate military operations, in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was scheduled to attend the meeting in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya but he canceled after it coincided with Rumsfeld's trip to Europe.

Instead, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Jack D. Crouch, attended the meeting along with defense ministers or representatives from Turkey, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Ukraine, Italy, Croatia and Slovenia.

Many defense ministers will hold bilateral meetings on the summit sidelines, but there are no scheduled meetings between rivals Turkey and Greece, which are at loggerheads over the use of NATO facilities by the newly created European Union army.

---
[A related earlier story... ]
Turks Train Northern Alliance Guards

NOVEMBER 28, 05:30 ET
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=WORLD&PACKAGEID=turkey&STORYID=APIS7G2BPO80

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkish police are training 13 guards of Afghanistan's northern alliance in Istanbul to help build a stronger police force in Afghanistan.

The guards arrived last week for three weeks of training at the Istanbul Police Department, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday. The ministry oversees police and security. The ministry said the northern alliance leadership requested that Turkey train the 13 guards. He said it was not clear if more guards would arrive for training.

Turkey, NATO's only Muslim member, has strongly supported the U.S.-led campaign against Afghanistan's Islamic Taliban rulers and Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect of Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

It was the first Muslim country to offer troops for combat in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan. a Turkish force of up to 3,000 soldiers is on standby for a possible peacekeeping mission.

Turkey has a long history of training Afghan officials both in Afghanistan and in Turkey since the 1920s. Thousands of Afghan students also have attended Turkish schools.

The country enjoys close links to groups opposed to the ruling Taliban regime and especially to Uzbek Gen. Rashid Dostum of the northern alliance.

---

Turkey - CIA Factbook

12/20/01 excerpt
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/tu.html
Map at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/maps/tu-map.jpg

Transnational Issues

Disputes -

international: complex maritime, air, and territorial disputes with Greece in Aegean Sea; Cyprus question with Greece; dispute with downstream riparian states (Syria and Iraq) over water development plans for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; traditional demands regarding former Armenian lands in Turkey have subsided

Illicit drugs: key transit route for Southwest Asian heroin to Western Europe and - to a far lesser extent the US - via air, land, and sea routes; major Turkish, Iranian, and other international trafficking organizations operate out of Istanbul; laboratories to convert imported morphine base into heroin are in remote regions of Turkey as well as near Istanbul; government maintains strict controls over areas of legal opium poppy cultivation and output of poppy straw concentrate

---

Slovenia and Croatia ink accord on nuclear plant

REUTERS
SLOVENIA: December 20, 2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13775/story.htm

KRSKO, Slovenia - Slovenia and Croatia signed on Wednesday a deal resolving a ten-year old dispute over jointly-owned nuclear power plant Krsko, which will enable it to resume power supplies to Croatia in July next year.

"With this deal Croatia will re-establish its co-ownership and active management in Krsko. Since we are net energy importers, we needed to resume energy supplies from this plant," Croatian Prime Minister Ivica Racan told a news conference.

He added that the Krsko plant, located in Slovenia close to the Croatian border, would deliver a fifth of Croatia's total power needs.

Slovenia and Croatia have had a number of ongoing disputes since they declared independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991.

In addition to the Krsko plant, the two neighbouring states are trying to resolve disputes over their sea and land borders and money owed to Croatians by Slovenia's Ljubljanska Banka.

Slovenia cut Krsko's electricity supply to Croatia in July 1998 after the two countries failed to strike a deal on the future of the plant.

Negotiations on all unresolved issues were resumed by Racan and his Slovenian counterpart Janez Drnovsek this year and led to the signing in July of draft agreements on their borders and the Krsko plant. The Ljubljanska Banka issue remains unresolved.

"I hope the agreement signed today (on Krsko) will stimulate the solution of all remaining questions," Racan said.

Drnovsek had warned in September that Slovenia would not ratify the Krsko agreement if Croatia did not approve the border agreement. However, he said his government had decided to sign the deal anyway to reduce the number of open issues.

"Not signing this agreement would mean our government was reneging on its commitments. Both governments committed to do this, even though we would have liked to see both agreements signed today," Drnovsek said.

-------- iraq

Iraq Special Weapons Facilities

Posted at Federation of American Scientists
December 20, 2001
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/facility/osiraq.htm

Osiraq / Tammuz I 33°12'30"N 44°31'30"E

Iraq established its nuclear program in the late 1960s when it acquired its first nuclear facilites. Later, in the 1970s, Iraq was unsuccessful in negotiations with France to purchase a plutonium production reactor similar to the one used in France's nuclear weapons program. In addition to the reactor, Iraq also wanted to purchase the reporcessing plant needed to recover the plutonium produced in the reactor. Even through these requests were denied, France agreed to build a research reactor along with associated laboratories. Iraq built the Osiraq 40 megawatt light-water nuclear reactor at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Center near Baghdad with French assistance. Approximately 27.5 pounds of 93% U-235 was supplied to Iraq by France for use in the Osiraq research reactor.

The reactor was a type of French reactor named after Osiris, the Egyptian God of the dead. The French renamed the one being built in Iraq, "Osiraq" to blend the name Osiris with that of the recipient state, Iraq. French orthography then made it "Osirak." Iraq called the reactor "Tammuz," after the month in the Arabic calendar when the Ba'th party came to power in a 1968 coup.

Iraq began to expand its nuclear sector in the 1970's, but made little progress in the early 1980's, when most of its energy and attention were focused on the war against Iran. In September 1980, at the onset of the Iran-Iraq War, the Israeli Chief of Army Intelligence urged the Iranians to bomb Osiraq. On 30 September 1980 a a pair of Iranian Phantom jets, part of a larger group of aircraft attacking a conventional electric power plant near Baghdad, also bombed the Osiraq reactor. Minor damage to the reactor was reported. No further Iranian air attacks against Iraqi nuclear facilities were identified during the rest of the seven-year war.

When Israeli intelligence confirmed Iraq's intention of producing weapons at Osiraq, the Israeli government decided to attack. According to some estimates, Iraq in 1981 was still as much as five to ten years away from the ability to build a nuclear weapon. Others estimated at that time that Iraq might get its first such weapon within a year or two. Prime Minister Menachem Begin felt military action was the only remedy. Begin feared that his party would lose the next election, and he feared that the opposition party would not preempt prior to the production of the first Iraqi nuclear bomb.

The raid would have to occur before its first fuel was to be loaded, before the reactor went "hot" so as not to endanger the surrounding community. The target was distant: 1,100 km from Israel. Preparations included building target mock-ups and flying full scale dress-rehearsal missions. The aircrews were selected from the cream of the IAFs fighter corps. The IDF Chief-of-Staff, Lt. Gen. Rafael (Raful) Eitan, briefed the pilots personally. Displaying unusual emotion, he told them: "The alternative is our destruction".

At 15:55 on 07 June 1981, the first F-15 and F-16's roared off the runway from Etzion Air Force Base in the south. Israeli air force planes flew over Jordanian, Saudi, and Iraqi airspace After a tense but uneventful low-level navigation route, the fighters reached their target. They popped up at 17:35 and quickly identified the dome gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight. Iraqi defenses were caught by surprise and opened fire too late. In one minute and twenty seconds, the reactor lay in ruins.

Baghdad reiterated a previous statement that the French atomic reactor was designed for research and for the eventual production of electricity. In a statement issued after the raid, the Israeli government stated that it had discovered from "sources of unquestioned reliability" that Iraq was producing nuclear bombs at the Osiraq plant, and, for this reason, Israel had initiated a preemptive strike.

The attack raised a number of questions of interpretation regarding international legal concepts. Those who approved of the raid argued that the Israelis had engaged in an act of legitimate self-defense justifiable under international law and under Article 51 of the charter of the United Nations (UN). Critics contended that the Israeli claims about Iraq's future capabilities were hasty and ill-considered and asserted that the idea of anticipatory self-defense was rejected by the community of states. In the midst of this controversy, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) came under fire from individuals and from governments who complained that the Vienna-based UN agency had failed to alert the world to developments at Osiraq. IAEA officials denied these charges and reaffirmed their position on the Iraqi reactor, that is, that no weapons had been manufactured at Osiraq and that Iraqi officials had regularly cooperated with agency inspectors. They also pointed out that Iraq was a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (informally called the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT) and that Baghdad had complied with all IAEA guidelines. The Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona, it was pointed out, was not under IAEA safeguards, because Israel had not signed the NPT and had refused to open its facilities to UN inspections.

With the loss of this reactor, Baghdad apparently refocused its nuclear weapons effort on producing highly enriched uranium. Its interest in acquiring plutonium as fissile material for weapons continued, but at a lower priority.

After the raid, Baghdad announced that it planned to rebuild the destroyed facility. Although France agreed in principle to provide technical assistance, no definitive timetable was announced. Ultimately, France decided to forego commercially lucrative opportunities to repair the damaged Osirak reactor.

Project 182, relating to the construction of a research reactor, foresaw the construction of an indigenous research reactor to replace the capability that would have been provided by the Osirak (Tamuz-1) research reactor. This project originated in 1984/85 after the breakdown in Iraq's negotiations with France for the rebuilding of the Osirak reactor. The Project 182 reactor was intended to be a natural uranium - heavy water type, similar to the Canadian NRX reactor. When the project had become more defined, in 1987 and 1988, studies concentrated on the design of the reactor core. As this work progressed it was recognised that considerable IAEC and foreign resources would be needed to bring the project to fruition. In mid-1988, while still in the study phase, the project was allowed to lapse due to lack of available resources - a consequence of the higher priority given to the needs of the EMIS enrichment program.

After invading Kuwait, Iraq attempted to accelerate its program to develop a nuclear weapon by using radioactive fuel from the Osiraq reactor. It made a crash effort in September, 1990 to recover enriched fuel from this supposedly safe-guarded reactor, with the goal of produced a nuclear weapon by April, 1991. The program was only halted after Coalition air raid destroyed key facilities on 17 January 1991.

On the third day of the Desert Storm air campaign, a large conventional daylight strike by 56 F-16s with unguided bombs attacked the nuclear complex, which was one of the three most heavily defended areas in Iraq. The results were assessed as very poor. According to DIA, the nuclear research facility was not fully destroyed following the F-117 strikes on day 6 of the campaign. An additional 48 F-117s were tasked seven more times against the target over the next 32 days, dropping 66 more bombs. Moreover, on day 19 of the campaign, 17 F-111Fs were tasked to strike the site. On 26 February 1991, day 42 of the campaign, DIA concluded that the ability to conduct nuclear research or processing at the site was severely degraded.

Sources and Resources

The Israeli Strike Against OSIRAQ Lucien S. Vandenbroucke Air University Review Sep-Oct 1984
http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1984/sep-oct/vanden.html

IN SUPPORT OF ANTICIPATORY SELF-DEFENSE ISRAEL, OSIRAQ, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW By Prof. Louis Rene Beres & COL. (IDF Res.) Yoash Tsiddon-Chatto
http://freeman.io.com/m_online/jun97/beres1.htm

Major Sites Associated With Iraq's Past WMD Programs UNSCOM 3 December 1997
http://www.fas.org/news/un/iraq/s/971203_sites.htm

-------- japan

Leak Found at Japan Power Plant

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 20, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Nuclear.html

TOKYO (AP) -- A radioactive leak was found in the turbine room of a massive nuclear plant in northern Japan but was quickly contained, a company official said Thursday.

Officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant discovered the leak during a spot check of a radioactive waste disposal area inside reactor No. 5, the official said on condition of anonymity.

More precisely, the leak was detected within a device that analyzes gas formed as a byproduct of the plant's operations. The device is part of the building that houses the turbine.

No one was injured, he said.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa's seven reactors have a combined capacity of 8.2 million kilowatts, making it the world's largest power-generating nuclear facility.

The company official refused to specify what the radioactive substance was, but said that there was no danger of radioactivity escaping outside the building. The reactor was functioning normally, he added.

Katsuyuki Ishii, a spokesman for Niigata state, where the plant is located, said monitors in the area indicated no abnormally high radioactivity levels. It is in the village of Kariwa, 160 miles northwest of Tokyo.

Resource-poor Japan depends on nuclear power for about 30 percent of its electricity needs. A recent spate of accidents and cover-ups, however, have made many Japanese uneasy about nuclear power.

Japan's worst nuclear accident killed two workers and exposed hundreds of others to radiation at Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo, in September 1999.

-------- treaties

ABM Treaty: Over and Out

Thursday, December 20, 2001
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3906-2001Dec19?language=printer

Robert Stayton [letters, Dec. 14] is misinformed about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in arguing that it is illegal for President Bush to order withdrawal from the ABM Treaty). The treaty's specific provisions allow either party to withdraw without reason, given six months' notice. President Bush has done that.

By withdrawing, the United States also releases Russia from its obligation -- if it had any (the treaty was with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists).

He also should note that the Soviet Union illegally built and operated the Krasnoyarsk ABM radar in violation of the ABM Treaty and, as recently revealed documentation has shown, surreptitiously fielded a national ABM system, also in violation of the treaty.

The United States is doing this the proper way by withdrawing in accordance with the terms of the treaty.

LAWRENCE COOPER
Crofton

•Regarding George W. Bush's unilateral executive shredding of the ABM Treaty:

Why is it that, to enact a treaty with another nation, it takes the signature of the president and ratification by a two-thirds majority of Congress, but to obliterate that same treaty, it takes nothing more than a single president's willful decision that he'd rather go off on his own in another direction?

President Bush has a proclivity for writing into law whatever he wants -- again without having to go through the inconvenience of getting the approval of Congress -- through the instrument of executive orders. If you look at these actions, from the creation of military tribunals to the evisceration of laws such as the Freedom of Information Act, you begin to get the picture of a president with little use for Congress, the courts or, when it comes right down to it, the American people, a majority of whom, after all, didn't vote for him in the first place.

MARTY KURZFELD
Santa Cruz, Calif.

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

Nuclear Strike on Bunkers Assessed
Congress Receives Pentagon Study

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 20, 2001; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3935-2001Dec19?language=printer

The Pentagon and the Energy Department have completed initial studies on how nuclear weapons could be modified to attack hardened bunker complexes and buried tunnels that conventional weapons cannot destroy, but no decision has been made to go ahead with such a program, according to a Defense Department report to Congress made public yesterday.

The two departments have also been studying the need for a new, low-yield nuclear weapon to find a military means, conventional or nuclear, to attack and verify destruction of the growing number of such underground facilities that protect the "most valued and strategic capabilities" of such potential enemies as North Korea, Iraq and China, the report said.

The study was completed in July, before U.S. military forces in Afghanistan were faced with trying to bomb and destroy caves where Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network may be holed up.

"Any development and procurement of advanced nuclear capabilities would be considered in the context of nuclear stockpile policy, plans and priorities as well as future [Defense Department] strategic programs," according to the Pentagon report. It was sent to Congress in October and disclosed yesterday by Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, a nonprofit organization concerned with safety, environmental and nonproliferation issues surrounding nuclear weapons.

A decision on whether design work will begin on a new or modified nuclear weapon to go after hardened underground targets is expected to be contained in the long-awaited Bush administration nuclear posture review, which sources said yesterday is at the White House for final review. Under law, it is required to be completed by the end of this month and may be released Dec. 28, according to sources.

Although some Pentagon and nuclear weapons laboratory experts have been pushing for more than a year to have design work begun on such a weapon, as of July, when it was completed, the report said, "There is no current program to design a new or modified [hard target] nuclear weapon."

Nonetheless, the report said, the Defense and Energy departments "continue to consider and assess nuclear concepts" that could result in a requirement for such a weapon, and a planning group is working to define the scope for a design feasibility study.

Although most publicity has been devoted to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's use of underground bunkers, U.S. intelligence "suspects" there are more than 10,000 potential hardened targets "and their numbers will increase over the next 10 years," according to the report.

Such underground facilities are being used to protect not only a country's leadership, but also command, control and communications centers; weapons production facilities; and missile launching sites for chemical, biological and nuclear warheads, the report said.

One advantage nuclear weapons have over conventional weapons when it comes to destroying bunkers containing chemical and biological warfare materials is that they "destroy both agent containers and the CBW agents," the report says.

The "lethality is optimized," the report added, "if the fireball is proximate to the target. This requires high accuracy; for buried targets, it also may require a penetrating weapon system."

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

------- california

Radiation Bulletin NIF SPECIAL

Thu, 20 Dec 2001
To: radbull@southwark.dsl.net
From: Roger Herried <rogerh@energy-net.org>

This is a special on the push to build the National Ignition Facility at the Livermore Labs. There were articles on the NIF in yesterdays bulletin, which is part of an large series by the Albuquerque Tribune.

Ed.

12/20/01 RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL)VOL 9.302

RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE
NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS NIF SPECIAL

1 NIF: 'It will work'
2 'NIF won't do it'
3 Former Livermore scientist says NIF is a lemon
4 Local company Ktech Corp. vies for huge NIF power contract
5 NIF: Need for objectivity
6 Watchdog group: NIF is a blunder; Livermore should be green lab
7 NIF: Meet the opposition

NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES

1 NIF: 'It will work'

Albuquerque Tribune Online
By Lawrence Spohn Tribune Reporter

Associate Livermore Laboratory Director George Miller is confident the lab's massive fusion energy laser will overcome its obstacles and perform as promised

LIVERMORE, Calif. - It may have lost some of its luster, but the controversial National Ignition Facility fusion energy laser still is the star at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Laser-charged feud

The $4.2 billion National Ignition Facility is a complex machine that scientists hope to use to produce tiny blasts of fusion energy, the power source of the sun, stars and nuclear bombs.

What: Fundamentally, the NIF is an enormous laser that uses special chemically-doped glass and unique crystals to generate powerful beams of light energy.

How: That energy is to be focused by 192 individual laser beams into a target chamber and onto a BB-sized pellet containing radioactive hydrogen, which, when super-compressed and heated, is supposed to ignite, yielding fusion energy.

Where: NIF is being built at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with assistance from New Mexico's Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. They are the nation's three nuclear weapons laboratories operated by the Department of Energy.

Why: Government officials say NIF is the core instrument of the nation's multi-billion-dollar nuclear-science-based Stockpile Stewardship and Maintenance Program. Program scientists aim to maintain the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear arsenal without nuclear testing, using the advanced experimental tools of nuclear blast simulators such as NIF and supercomputer simulations of bomb blasts based on past real bomb test data and the new simulations.

Issue: Various critics, including scientists in New Mexico, say NIF is too costly, won't work as promised and can't achieve ignition.

NIF, which is supposed to generate real but very tiny "stars" in the laboratory, is "the biggest single project we have ever done here," says the project's overseer, George Miller, a Livermore Lab associate director who assumed control of the project after it was rattled by severe cost overruns and delays.

The Tribune in a series of interviews - in person, by phone and via e-mail over several months - invited Miller to address questions raised about NIF, including the latest report by government investigators that predicts the project will cost at least double what Congress originally budgeted for it and be six years late. NIF was supposed to open next year at an original budgeted cost of $1.2 billion. Now the Department of Energy, which owns and operates Livermore Lab, estimates NIF will cost $3.5 billion and be completed by 2008. Other estimates, including government investigators', are much higher, even assuming no further fiscal complications or delays.

None are anticipated, says Miller. He is enthusiastic about finally completing construction of the building that will house NIF and the installation inside of the first series of platforms that will hold NIF's special glass and optical components.

The $275 million building dwarfs the rest of the lab, which, except for its tall fences and strict security, resembles a college campus.

Miller insists enthusiastically that the building is virtually complete and that construction now is concentrating on assembling the laser's skeleton, the metal pedestals, boxes and other infrastructure that will support thousands of optical elements, from laser glass to turning mirrors.

"This will show we can do it cleanly, with precision alignment of these clean structures," he says, emphasizing the lab has resolved how to maintain critical cleanliness for the sensitive laser.

While critics continue to hammer NIF as out of control and likely to fail, Miller says he is confident it not only will work as advertised but will achieve its goals - including igniting a small, hydrogen-filled sphere to produce fusion energy. NIF's primary purpose is create, in the laboratory, the conditions of a nuclear bomb explosion on a very small scale, so that scientists can better understand the process without actually blowing up test bombs.

Livermore and DOE say NIF is critical to maintaining the reliability and safety of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal despite critics who say it is not and ultimately will fail.

Miller says a host of problems - from producing costly, defect-free laser glass to maintaining a clean environment to protect laser optical components - have largely been resolved and that the lab deserves credit for some remarkable technical achievements.

The project already has in hand about half of the optical glass of "fused silica" and about 75 percent of the laser glass in hand, he reports.

Most of it is being stored in a Fremont, Calif., warehouse, he says, from which it will be shipped for "finishing and polishing to very tight tolerances."

NIF's building, essentially completed this fall, now is occupied with crews assembling optical platforms and benches.

Miller says "there were major structural issues which the project has managed and organized." The big solution: "Execute the classic aerospace project management technique" and go outside the lab for management expertise, hiring Jacobs Engineering to put the NIF ship back on a even keel and prevent further listing.

"It's big, it's complex," Miller says. He points out that it is a huge experimental laboratory like other DOE projects that have "failed because of management," not because of technical problems.

"We're a research lab, and things this big, the lab can't do itself," he explains, calling it a tough but well-learned lesson. "But we brought the technical talents to bear on the technical issues that were inherent in this project."

And, he says, contrary to others' claims, Livermore scientists have largely resolved them. He disputes critics' claims the problem was fast-tracking the project "on the fly" before technical hurdles were resolved.

"It was the lack of (our) appreciation for the engineering problems in a project of this size," he says. "It was like trying to solve Rubic's Cube.

"The conceptual design was quite good. The step that was missed was how exceedingly difficult it was going to be to put all of this together, to integrate," he says.

Miller acknowledges "there are still remaining technical issues that have not been completely resolved."

Among them, he says, is the damage the laser could do to expensive optical elements "right at the target chamber" as the light is being converted from NIF's main infrared energy to the ultraviolet light needed at the target to ignite it into a fusion energy burst - a tiny thermonuclear blast.

He says the laboratory is working diligently on the problem and believes it has demonstrated a solution in a one-inch-square test glass. The lab plans - between now and the laser's initial operational deadline, in about four years - to do further experiments.

But he says he doesn't worry much about it working, though he is concerned that failure will mean further worries "about what the operational costs will be."

Ultimately, he says, the damage threshold may not be fixable. It may turn out to be an "operational cost issue," meaning the sensitive optics may simply need to be replaced when damaged, but that won't keep NIF from fulfilling its mission.

The cost of each piece at risk, he explains, is "about $10,000, and you need 192 of those."

So he calculates that, in the context of NIF's current operational and management budget projection of $150 million per year, "if we have to change more frequently than we assumed, it costs about $7 million more. That's real money, so we are concerned," he says.

"I have very high confidence we will solve this problem," he says firmly. "This is not something that keeps me up at night."

"The glass impurities (which had caused most of the damage in the past) are out," Miller says. "The raw glass meets - in fact, exceeds - the specifications that we wrote."

Regarding claims that NIF could cost as much as $5 billion or more to build, Miller says, "I totally reject that. That's not a true figure."

He says Congress has authorized a new budget of $2.2 billion for the project and that there are roughly $1.2 billion in associated costs, pegging the lab's and DOE's total cost estimate at about $3.5 billion. Investigators for the Government Accounting Office, however, says NIF will cost at least $4.2 billion.

NIF or `Blatz'

Miller questions whether it's fair to attribute all associated costs to NIF, arguing that, even if NIF didn't exist, DOE would be incurring those costs for some other nuclear weapons blast machine based on a technology other than NIF.

The critics, he contends, "assume that effort will go away if NIF goes away. It won't.

"The stockpile stewardship program (to maintain the nation's nuclear warheads) has a set of requirements to certify the stockpile without testing (nuclear bombs)," he explains. "NIF is a tool to do that. Take it away, and you still have to do it a different way.

"You still need (fusion) targets for the `Blatz' machine, or whatever. You still have to get ignition somehow to certify and warrant the stockpile, whether you like it or not," he says.

In response to suggestions - including at Livermore's sibling labs, Los Alamos and Sandia - that NIF be scaled down and fully tested first, Miller says the technology is proven, and scaling the project down ultimately would just be more costly.

Suggestions range from reducing NIF from its planned and approved 192 beams to 96 beams, 48 beams or even a single eight-beam line demonstration project to prove the technology works before proceeding. Livermore says this not only would be more expensive but also would delay important nuclear stockpile stewardship experiments.

"There is no question it (NIF) will work," Miller says. "We've already showed it will. We did that on Beamlet."

Beamlet was a small, prototype NIF laser on which Livermore conducted experiments to assess potential NIF performance and problems. When Livermore finished with Beamlet, it was disassembled and shipped to Sandia Labs, where it was rebuilt and currently is being used in conjunction with Sandia's much-heralded Z fusion accelerator - considered by some to be a NIF challenger.

Many external critics - including Steve Bodner, a retired Naval Research Laboratory fusion laser expert, and Leo Mascheroni, a Los Alamos fusion physicist - contend that Livermore failed to conduct complete and thorough NIF testing on Beamlet, which would have revealed NIF's fundamental problems and its probabilities for failure.

Miller insists Beamlet testing was complete and that, in any event, building only a fraction of NIF would cause a three- to five-year delay and add in the neighborhood of "$500 million to the cost."

The need for NIF

While even some of Livermore's own nuclear weapons scientists have dismissed NIF as unnecessary, Miller argues that "NIF actually is a subset of the requirements" for maintaining the nation's nuclear arsenal in DOE's Stockpile Stewardship and Maintenance Program at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia labs.

In that program, considered the alternative to maintaining the nuclear arsenal by blowing up test bombs, scientists at the three labs are trying to use nuclear blast simulators and the fastest supercomputers in the world to assess or predict problems with weapons in the arsenal.

Critics argue, however, that much of this program, including NIF, has little relevance to existing weaponry and really is designed to attract young scientists to design the next generation of weapons.

"Some say you don't need it for stockpile stewardship; others say you can only do it with nuclear testing (actually detonating nuclear bombs)," Miller says.

"There is a range of opinions, and it's a matter of judgment. We won't actually know the answer until you do the work."

[http://www.abqtrib.com/print/index.cfm]

The Albuquerque Tribune.

==

2 'NIF won't do it'

Albuquerque Tribune Online
By Lawrence Spohn Tribune Reporter

Some nuclear weapons scientists say NIF might be a good idea, but it will not - can not - be actualized, and the Department of Energy needs to move on to something more dependable and less costly


LOS ALAMOS - For more than three decades, physicists have dreamed of using a powerful laser to instantaneously superheat and compress hydrogen to ignite it into miniature stars on Earth.

In the $4.2 billion National Ignition Facility, a glass laser under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, some expect to see that dream finally come true, with NIF creating controlled thermonuclear burns and fusion energy in the lab.

Los Alamos' Leo Mascheroni is not among them.

In fact, NIF is a dream-shatterer for the fusion physicist, who predicts the project will fail, even as it diverts scarce funds from a far more promising research path with staggering global energy implications.

"Taxpayers are being absolutely robbed by a band of crooks," says Mascheroni, "who are also robbing science and the future, your children and my children, of a path to energy security."

It's a righteous position, but warranted, he says, because the stakes are very high and the deception extreme.

"One of the reasons I came here in the beginning and why I still am fighting is the dream," he explains. "It's a beautiful dream of clean, abundant fusion energy for all mankind. But NIF won't do it."

An independent Los Alamos scientist, Mascheroni is far from alone in criticizing NIF, Livermore Lab or the Department of Energy, which owns both.

NIF is the country's biggest science project and the nation's premier nuclear weapons blast simulator. It has been a lightning rod for DOE's nuclear weapons Stockpile Stewardship and Maintenance Program, in which scientists are attempting to use simulators and supercomputers in place of nuclear bomb tests. But even weaponeers at DOE's three nuclear weapons labs have had little good to say about the giant laser.

Controversial since its start, it was scientifically assailed by weaponeers on the eve of its groundbreaking in 1997. And it has struggled since 1999 with at least $1 billion in cost overruns and a six-year delay.

Scientists familiar with NIF say the laser is:

Underpowered and has little to no chance of reaching fusion energy ignition - its major technical goal. Stephen Bodner, a retired Naval Research Laboratory laser physicist, chides that it should be renamed "The National Illumination Facility" and if allowed to proceed should do so on a basic science mission, not under the ruse of fusion energy ignition for nuclear weapons research.

A highly questionable defense investment, with little, if any, direct benefit to nuclear weapons stewardship - its primary mission. Retired Livermore Lab laser physicist Ray Kidder, Bob Peurifoy, a retired vice president of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, and Los Alamos National Laboratory physicists Chuck Cranfill and George York say NIF is not necessary to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal. "Safety sells," says Peurifoy, who accuses DOE of using scare tactics to sway Congress. "The stockpile is safe, as safe as it's going to be. These expensive toys will not affect safety and reliability of the enduring nuclear weapon stockpile."

Still prone to cost escalations based on the suspicion that Livermore "low-balled" its costs and still has not resolved costly technical issues. Robert Civiak, a physicist and retired analyst for the Office of Management and Budget, cites potential laser-energy induced damage to NIF's special glass and optics as a huge potential problem.

A civilian fusion-energy technology dead-end, because a glass laser is subject to damaging itself and cannot be fired fast enough (the so-called "rep-rate") to generate electrical power.

Mascheroni believes a hydrogen fluoride laser is the only alternative; scientists at Sandia and elsewhere see Sandia's Z accelerator as the most promising NIF challenger.

Six years after NIF was proposed, four years after nuclear weaponeers challenged it and three years after its cost overruns and delays were revealed, Christopher Paine asks "the fundamental question: How did we get here?"

Paine, a senior nuclear weapons analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., says Congress, the White House and taxpayers should want to know how NIF could "be more than double its budgeted cost, 10 times its initial cost estimate and still never have been subjected to an independent scientific review."

And the bargain is getting worse, he charges, because NIF's costs and delays have risen and its overseers have been quietly reducing its requirements. In the simplest terms, he says taxpayers are spending "more money but get less performance."

Mascheroni has been making that case, or versions of it, for more than a decade. NIF's most enduring critic, he snipes scientifically at the giant laser every chance he gets in front of: NIF or laser fusion review panels; DOE officials who will listen; a secretary of Energy; members of the New Mexico Congressional delegation; staff members of key congressional committees; and, of course, the media.

He shares the anti-NIF spotlight now with a vocal, independent and diverse band of scientists and analysts who question the laser's value, its scientific mission and a void of accountability for it.

Livermore and government officials responsible for NIF say the critics are all wrong, that NIF is the right train, and it's back on track after a two-year cascade of mismanagement, budget overruns, delays, investigations and reforms.

In contrast, Mascheroni and company are predicting a train wreck with taxpayers holding the only ticket.

Collectively, they see NIF as:

At best a daydream providing some interesting science but at worst a nightmare, failing its "vital" nuclear weapons mission.

Consuming taxpayer dollars by the billions as an exotic nuclear weapons tool looking for a job.

Threatening funding for far more fundamental nuclear weapons stewardship research at Livermore and sibling nuclear weapons labs, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico.

Undermining the future of the nuclear test moratorium and the nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Compromising future fusion energy research, if not science's own hard-won political credibility.

As NIF has ballooned to more than a billion dollars over budget and a six-year delay, Mascheroni has felt vindicated but unfulfilled. The NIF train, he says, is still rolling.

He and other critics believe that only a full, public, congressional investigation using subpoena powers and a comprehensive, independent scientific review can fully expose NIF. Otherwise, Mascheroni predicts, it will be one of the costliest, most heralded scientific duds in history.

"The politicians are not hearing the truth," he says. "The guys who know - the weaponeers - haven't been included and aren't allowed to talk. That's because they know that the NIF is not going to work and isn't going to help with these stockpile problems."

If the issues were not so grave, the Argentine-born scientist says, NIF would be "a laughing movie, a costly comedy of errors."

Livermore Lab Associate Director George Miller, fending off critics from California to North Carolina, isn't amused.

He says Mascheroni's hydrogen fluoride laser was considered by experts and dismissed. NIF won, he says, and hydrogen fluoride lost.

"Mascheroni certainly has his opinions, but the vast community (of scientists in this field) disagrees with him," says Miller, a nuclear weaponeer who directs the NIF project.

Miller says Mascheroni, as well as Bodner, are at odds not only with Livermore's own NIF analysis and predictions but also with several NIF reviews done over the last decade for DOE.

He cites reviews by the National Academy of Sciences, the DOE Interial Confinement (fusion) Advisory Committee and the Department of Defense's JASONs panel as supporting "NIF because of its importance to the weapons program."

Science on the firing line

DOE owns and operates all three nuclear weapon labs, all of which are contributing to NIF and all of which have received some NIF funding.

But critics in and out of the government say DOE not only has done a miserable job of overseeing the project or honestly evaluating it but has compromised scientific integrity by repressing serious peer review of NIF among the three labs.

Peurifoy slams the lab directors for failing in their duty to be honest about NIF, but he lays most of the blame on DOE.

"Look, people need to know DOE can't spell `peer review'; they have no clue; they couldn't tell night from day," says Peurifoy.

Efforts to obtain DOE comment on NIF over several weeks were unsuccessful. Officials have told Congress that experts believe the project reforms are succeeding and they expect NIF to meet its milestones.

But a federal District Court judge earlier this year prohibited DOE from forwarding to Congress the latest in the series of official and positive NIF reviews.

The judge, responding to a petition by environmental and anti-nuclear groups, echoed a previous federal court ruling in which another NIF review was similarly blocked. The courts concluded that DOE produced the assessments in violation of federal laws that govern the fairness and openness of governmental advisory groups.

"And now even the GAO says NIF has never had an independent scientific analysis," says Mascheroni, referring to two critical Government Accounting Office investigations ordered by Congress on the heels of NIF mismanagement revelations.

In two reports, GAO details serious NIF concerns and shortcomings, including a lack of NIF project consensus among scientists at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia Labs. The reports warn of DOE's failure - even after NIF cost overruns, delays and continuing scientific criticism - to conduct truly independent reviews of the project.

"Persistent DOE oversight problems continue to place the NIF project at risk," the GAO tells Congress. And NIF's caretakers, it charges, are "the same people (who) have performed oversight since 1999 when NIF's cost and schedule grew unnoticed."

Mascheroni is disappointed that Congress has virtually ignored the GAO reports, which he says represent the first official government recognition of his contentions in over a decade.

Peer review reviewed

Officials at New Mexico's two labs, which previously have raised concerns about NIF, declined interviews about the project, saying through media officers that they fear DOE retribution.

Fusion program scientists, even some now outside the program but still subject to DOE, declined comment for fear they would face punitive measures, including loss of their security clearances - a tactic used against Mascheroni, according to a DOE security investigation.

An article in the British science journal Nature last fall by NIF critics Bodner and Paine suggested that NIF's problems aren't just a reflection of poor DOE or Livermore management but of a failed scientific process at the national labs.

The article, "When Peer Review Fails," details how Livermore complaints to DOE, about the only negative DOE review of NIF, resulted in the wholesale dismissal of that committee. DOE then obtained a NIF-sympathetic National Academy of Sciences review panel, they write.

Eleven of its 16 members, according to the article, "had either previously stated positions supporting NIF and/or were consultants or advisers to Livermore or even the NIF program itself." And overall, it charges, "14 members had a personal or institutional connection with the very agency whose program was supposedly undergoing independent review."

While NIF has been endorsed in a so-called "white paper" by all three nuclear weapons lab directors - often cited by NIF proponents and sympathetic politicians, insiders say that document is a farce. They say it had to be substantially watered down before Sandia President Paul Robinson and Los Alamos Director John Browne would sign it, along with Livermore Director C. Bruce Tarter.

In 1997, Robinson addressed swirling rumors that his vocal concerns about NIF had put his job in jeopardy. He denied he had any direct evidence they were true. And the allegations were denied directly by then-DOE Defense Programs Chief Vic Reis, a staunch NIF supporter and the acknowledged architect of the DOE's Stockpile Stewardship Program.

But a former Sandia fusion scientist says Robinson was ordered to fire him, but the Sandia leader refused.

Last year, the NIF lid blew off when Sandia's own internal NIF analysis - favoring a significant reduction in NIF's size and funding - became public. The lab was immediately denounced publicly by then-Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, who within hours of the news report issued a formal statement criticizing Sandia, saying its NIF opinions were not conducive to inter-lab cooperation and would be ignored.

The next day, Robinson apologized for allowing the internal analysis to become public, but he stood by it technically.

In an earlier appearance at a nuclear weapons research conference, Robinson was asked why Sandia was not pressing Congress to fund his lab's highly successful Z accelerator, a technology now considered to be far cheaper than NIF and a direct NIF competitor.

Robinson responded bluntly: "Congress would never believe the second liar."

Mascheroni, Bodner and Paine applaud Robinson's candor - as have other NIF critics. But they say Congress and the public have received an overwhelming and grossly distorted view of NIF from DOE, Livermore and the otherwise silent New Mexico labs.

They charge that an inter-lab NIF alliance, forged and enforced by DOE officials, gives each lab a lucrative piece of the stockpile stewardship program, masks serious scientific disagreements over NIF's potential for success and stifles criticism over NIF's role in weapons stewardship.

Mascheroni sees it as basic intimidation, with which he says he has first-hand experience. He says he lost his Los Alamos Lab job after criticizing the lab's and DOE's laser fusion program and the underlying "short wavelength" laser beam science that favors the NIF path - based largely on experiments performed on NIF's predecessor, the Nova glass laser.

He has argued then and since that trying to create fusion energy, whether for nuclear weapons simulators or for fusion energy potential, would require a much more potent instrument, a brute hydrogen-fluoride laser that produces a long wavelength beam.

He points to an internal Los Alamos review, known as the Canavan Panel, that carefully scrutinized his research and theory, intensely questioned him, and evaluated what then was considered his doomed approach. It was headed by Greg Canavan, the former director of DOE's military fusion program and a close research associate of hydrogen bomb developer and retired Livermore Lab leader Edward Teller.

Staffed with other skeptics who, like Canavan, favored Livermore's short wavelength approach, the Canavan Panel ultimately reversed course. It endorsed the potential validity of Mascheroni's theories. Not only that, it called for more research to evaluate them and actually recommended funding his ideas as an alternative mode.

In a controversial decision by Los Alamos Lab Director Browne - then an associate director responsible for military fusion research - the Canavan Panel's recommendations were dismissed.

At the same time, the lab destroyed its Antares fusion laser, a long wavelength laser which other scientists had used in independent experiments that suggested Mascheroni could be right.

Mascheroni says it was part of a Los Alamos lab effort to focus its research on a short wavelength competitor to Livermore's Nova glass laser. Ultimately, Los Alamos was forced to abandon that research because of unfavorable scientific progress and negative scientific reviews.

Mascheroni contends that many scientists at Los Alamos who tactfully tried to side with him suffered intimidation and eventually gave up, some feeling their jobs were on the line in behind-the-scenes conflict.

Officially, Los Alamos Lab says Mascheroni was laid off as part of a labwide reduction in force and lost his job by the rules, not because of his scientific views. A DOE security agent who examined internal Los Alamos and DOE records found otherwise.

William Risley, asked by DOE officials to independently review Mascheroni's case, later confirmed Mascheroni's claims in a "Special Report to the Inspector General, DOE." He found that Mascheroni had been the victim of trumped-up security violations, before which he had had a good performance work record.

Risley took the unusual step in his report of recommending Mascheroni's research be revived, because the evidence suggested his theories might be right. Mascheroni had been railroaded out of the lab, he concluded, because his unconventional fusion research views clashed with the mainstream laser fusion research path that Los Alamos wanted to follow, to keep pace with Livermore's lead.

DOE and Los Alamos ignored Risley's charges.

Secret experiments

Mascheroni says his case demonstrates the extent to which DOE and lab officials were willing to go to sustain the fusion research momentum toward NIF, even when it clashed with scientific evidence and mounting concerns among weaponeers that NIF wouldn't do them much good.

Mascheroni says they know that, even if NIF works, it might only produce a "hot spot" ignition, not the "volume" ignition produced in actual nuclear weapons detonations that are of the biggest interest and use to weapons scientists.

Mascheroni contends that Los Alamos weaponeers said as much to the GAO investigators, who included the concern in their official NIF report to Congress.

And, he says, NIF reviews have not accounted for actual secret underground nuclear bomb experiments that show the NIF laser is too puny and will fall far short of fusion energy ignition.

Driven by his own analysis of a series of classified underground nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site, Mascheroni is unequivocally convinced that, despite its massive grandeur, NIF is but a nuclear pea-shooter.

Essentially, in these still classified experiments - known as the Halite-Centurion series - Livermore and Los Alamos scientists used focused X-rays produced by detonating nuclear bombs underground to generate fusion ignition, which actually burned small hydrogen-filled targets.

In these sophisticated experiments - the data from which remain secret - several different types and sizes of hydrogen targets were used. Some ignited, yielding fusion energy, while others did not.

Scientists agree that the bomb experiments demonstrated that a focused, directed energy beam, such as a laser, might be used to produce fusion energy ignition in a laboratory setting and possibly even, one day, in a fusion power reactor. Less clear, however - and downright contentious among some - is what kind of laser power, and how big, is needed to drive the fusion reaction.

Mascheroni says the Halite-Centurion experiments were prematurely ended before scientists could answer that question clearly. But based on the data collected from experiments that yielded fusion energy ignition and those that didn't, he contends NIF is doomed.

He charges that its potential is incorrectly calculated, based on the Halite-Centurion data and on a faulty nuclear weapons predictive computer code called LASNEX.

Los Alamos Lab's Chuck Cranfill and George York, intimately familiar with the research, agree and actually went to DOE headquarters last year to make the case against NIF personally and at their own expense.

They, too, unsuccessfully argued that NIF is another giant, risky experiment, York warning that DOE's military fusion program is "literally littered with lasers of failed (fusion ignition) promise" - that is, which were sold, like NIF, as ignition machines.

Mascheroni says: "The successful (Halite-Centurion) experiment showed you need a laser with energy 55 times higher than what NIF is designed to reach," referring to NIF's target output of 1.8 megajoules of energy (about the equivalent of 1.8 million watts).

Mascheroni charges that NIF's certification to Congress earlier this year, by retired Air Force General John Gordon, the new director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, is based on "nonvalidated LASNEX (computer) code calculations.

"These calculations have no credibility and are known to be in error," he says.

Livermore's Miller responded, in a prepared statement: "There has never been any guarantee given that the NIF or earlier systems would achieve ignition.

"Ignition is a grand scientific and technological challenge that requires significant research, development and technology evolution over decades. NIF was designed with our best knowledge of the requirements for ignition. As an example, that is why NIF will have 60 times more energy than the Nova laser.

"Our current knowledge of ignition requirements is better than it has ever been, in part because of the approximately 15,000 experiments conducted on Nova and the seminal experiments during the Halite-Centurion (H/C) series at NTS.

"The H/C series of experiments was used to study the physics of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsules. The results from the H/C experiments demonstrated excellent performance and put to rest fundamental questions about the feasibility of achieving high gain in ICF."

True, says retired Livermore Lab laser physicist Kidder, but that doesn't mean NIF will actually ignite a fusion target or that Mascheroni is wrong in claiming it can't.

He worries that the scientific establishment has placed unwarranted confidence in the NIF predictions and may have erred in refusing to take Mascheroni's analysis seriously.

Because of Mascheroni's constant criticisms, Kidder says he was asked late last decade by then NIF director Mike Campbell to reassess the secret underground bomb fusion experiments.

Kidder says his analysis of the experimental Halite-Centurion data was inconclusive: It does not support NIF proponent's claims, but neither did it prove them wrong.

Kidder says that following intense criticisms from Mascheroni and other scientists - in particular those aired in a 1997 Albuquerque Tribune article - Campbell asked him to explore "the (target) scaling relationships - that is, between the large ones (targets used in underground tests) to small ones (planned for use on NIF)."

Kidder says he looked only at the Livermore experiments to which he had direct access, not at Los Alamos', to which he didn't have access. And he says that many of the experimental capsules didn't work, so, he "was particularly interested in the capsule (target) that worked best."

His conclusion: "You couldn't say that the NIF capsule wouldn't work, but you sure couldn't say, either, that it (underground experiments) showed that it would.

"The capsule (used) in Nevada was enormously more likely to ignite than the corresponding NIF (designed) capsule . . . because there is a scaling of energy here," he says, but gaps in the data make it difficult to say accurately if the scale will hold true for NIF.

He says he proposed declassifying the Halite-Centurion data so he could publish his analysis in a scientific journal that might invite additional analysis of the Halite-Centurion experiments by others. But the data and his analysis remain classified.

"There is a chance that this still might get declassified," says Kidder, noting that he recently learned some Livermore scientists still are pushing to get the data declassified. But he suspects that NIF officials, who remain anxious about NIF funding, might be able to prevent that.

"Look, they shot something (a bomb) in Nevada that was much bigger and that delivered much more energy than NIF could ever deliver," Kidder says.

"And then they used that (experiment) to say, hey, we can do this with NIF," he says, waving a finger like a magic wand and adding, "But, really, it was inconclusive."

Mascheroni insists the data are far more revealing and that they show, in fact, that NIF is too puny to ignite its targets by a factor of 100.

Kidder, a laser expert, says Mascheroni's argument seems reasonable to people who grasp the serious limitations of glass lasers, such as NIF, and the competing power of chemical lasers, such as hydrogen fluoride: "With glass, because of the technical problems and the cost of solving them, you need a lot more energy than you can pay for. Comparatively, hydrogen fluoride gets you more bang for the buck."

"It may be true that you can't get enough energy out of glass, period, to do this job," he says, suggesting that, if so, the country is spending billions of dollars to decide an "academic issue" that should have been sorted out long ago in routine lab experiments.

"Frankly," he says, with a hearty roll of laughter, "I'm curious myself to see if these idiots can make it work."

Scientific deception

Critics such as Mascheroni used to be hard to find.

But today, NIF's scientific bashers can be found from coast to coast, including within the nuclear weapons establishment - some even in Livermore's back yard.

Marion Fulk is an "80-something and counting" physicist who has been retired from Livermore for 15 years and has little use for NIF.

Fulk was a weapons system "trouble shooter." Originally, he worked - in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb - in the University of Chicago lab of Enrico Fermi, the revered Nobel laureate who produced the first nuclear chain reaction.

Fulk, who now volunteers to help the Livermore Lab watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs, uses barnyard humor to describe how useful NIF will be "in solving problems in the primary (the initial reaction in a thermonuclear explosion), which is what the stockpile program would need.

Fulk explains what other experts - York, Cranfill, Mascheroni, Kidder and Peurifoy - have been saying for years: that NIF produces energy regimes that mimic the explosion of the secondary, or hydrogen-boost phase, of a thermonuclear explosion. But that's the least troublesome part.

"Secondaries (driven by the explosion of the vexing plutonium atomic bomb primary) are pretty passive," Fulk explains. Most stockpile issues, he and others say, are in the primary's plutonium core, which NIF is not designed to address.

Looking at NIF in the context of more than 50 years of nuclear weapons research, Fulk says, "Then and now . . . the most stupid, hair-brained things have gotten support.

"They just throw money at it," he says, citing as an example the defunct Plowshares program, in which DOE's predecessor experimented with using nuclear weapons for oil exploration or canal excavations. Two of those detonations, Gnome and Gas Buggy, were conducted in New Mexico.

"You know," Fulk says, referring to the Manhattan Project, "there was less money spent on that whole project (to develop the first atomic bomb) than they're going to spend on the NIF."

"Now, I think the NIF is very interesting to astrophysicists and high-density (energy) physicists, and they could learn a lot from it," such as how stars are born, live and die, he says. "But they're never going to produce (fusion) ignition on it."

"And that's what they've sold it to the public and to Congress as: the National Ignition Facility," he says. "I just don't think they've got enough energy to do it, and I'll bet you right now they don't."

Fulk also says Livermore has a history of scientific exaggeration, which he thinks is indefensible, even under the mantra of national security.

"I object to the false selling of any of these devices," he says. "This business of lying about these things has become standard. But it's wrong."

He says that Americans are entitled to the truth and that, "eventually, taxpayers are going to react," and all science research funding might suffer.

"They need to see some return on their investment, and I don't see what they get for NIF," he says.

Fulk fears the ultimate plans are more sinister, including the eventual use of plutonium in NIF experiments and going "back to (underground nuclear bomb) testing again" when NIF fails.

Serious scrutiny

The Natural Resources Defense Council's Paine, author of a 12-page technical bashing of NIF called "Unlovable Laser," suggests that NIF is a high-tech nuclear weapons tool with no job.

Worse, he says, DOE has persuaded Congress to "buy before you fly," because Livermore has failed to prove it has mastered the essential NIF technologies, let alone fully demonstrate them in a prototype beam line.

He contrasts a series of NIF justifications with "reality checks" and challenges Livermore's and DOE's contentions that NIF is unique and valuable weapons science which, by its very nature, will be costly, uncertain and difficult to predict.

Of all of the "numerous justifications for the project over the last decade, none . . . can withstand serious scrutiny," he contends.

Paine says it isn't only NIF's own "uncertain prospects" of achieving its goals but also its "tangential and speculative relevance to the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons" that place it off the chart in terms of its cost-to-benefit ratio. He argues that canceling it now would save taxpayers about $11.5 billion.

Despite representations by Livermore, DOE and the new National Nuclear Security Administration, he contends that "NIF has nothing to do with the safety (or reliability) of nuclear weapons" and that DOE's "glib presentation of it should be labeled for what it is - a deception."

Paine cites Sandia's Peurifoy and others, who contend the U.S. nuclear arsenal is extremely robust and can remain so for decades without NIF, whereas the claims that NIF will contribute to stockpile stewardship are nebulous at best.

Agreeing with Mascheroni and others about the Halite-Centurion experiments, Paine contends that NIF ignition, if it ever was a real possibility, is "now severely in doubt."

But even if it weren't, he says, it would produce an incomplete or spot fusion ignition "not particularly useful to the weapons program."

He charges that "there are not great lessons to be extracted or directly inferred about the performance of U.S. nuclear weapons from observing NIF ignition experiments."

And because ignition is increasingly being called into question, NIF's basic value should be, as well, he says.

Paine and his collaborator, Bodner, the retired Naval Lab fusion researcher, say DOE within the last year has conveniently provided NIF and Livermore with a fall-back position that significantly lowers the laser's required performance standard.

"They've lowered the bar on the acceptance criteria," says Paine. "Livermore gets a pass, because the tension is building in the program that they just aren't going to be able to achieve the original criteria."

Livermore's Miller says Paine is wrong. He insists that NIF's experimental criteria remain stringent and unchanged and that the laser has a very good chance - 75 percent, in his judgment - of reaching ignition.

None of the critics agree. Scientists offer a range of NIF ignition probabilities from 20 percent to zero. Paine and Bodner say if the new NIF criteria stand, the laser has no chance of reaching ignition.

In a table contrasting NIF requirements set in 1994 and those established at DOE last fall, Paine contends performance mandates have been downgraded between 45 percent and 75 percent in every stage of NIF development - from the first "eight-beam performance bundle" to its final configuration of "192 beams in 24 laser bundles."

In a series of three graphs showing drastic reductions in DOE criteria for NIF energy per beam line, laser pulse duration and the percent of energy focused on a tiny (target) spot, Bodner says NIF expectations have hit the floor.

Because critics have contended for years that even the original NIF outputs would leave NIF well short of ignition, the revised ones suggest the laser "would also be nearly worthless for non-ignition experiments."

Livermore's Miller says that NIF has high value to the physics community even if it fails to reach ignition.

"In spite of Bodner's claims," Miller says, "there are experimental demonstrations reviewed and published in reputable scientific journals that the basic (NIF) system can achieve all three of the critical physics (fusion ignition) parameters simultaneously."

If so, challenge Paine and Bodner, why has DOE felt the need to downgrade NIF's specified acceptance criteria for these parameters? They say it's a pre-emptive strike that will allow Livermore to claim NIF is a success, even if it fails to live up to its original billing, including the one used to name it - fusion energy ignition.

Citing the recent review of the government's Foster Panel on these issues, Mascheroni says the highly regarded group concluded that "NIF without ignition is not worth the investment for stockpile stewardship. We believe that ignition should be the prime goal."

With a decade of NIF analysis in his head and in his home computers, Mascheroni argues that the reduced NIF criteria should be another red flag to Congress that "NIF is a boondoggle, as the GAO, I and others have shown."

He says the laser's construction should be stopped immediately and until Congress can see an independent scientific NIF review. He believes the review should be comprehensive, including DOE's entire military fusion research program, the decisions made in it over the last 15 years and, particularly, scientifically questionable decisions made against NIF's technical competitors.

That history, he says, will show NIF is an impostor.

The Albuquerque Tribune.

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3 Former Livermore scientist says NIF is a lemon

Albuquerque Tribune Online
By Lawrence Spohn Tribune Reporter

PLEASANTON, Calif. - It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize a lemon, says Ray Kidder, a retired physicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he fears the world's biggest fusion energy lemon may be under construction.

Kidder's criticism might be dismissed if he hadn't been the one to start Livermore's impressive military fusion laser program decades ago.

Aptly named and an atypically irreverent scientist, Kidder waves his arms in big circles as he jokes about the troubled $4.2 billion National Ignition Facility being the "biggest everything."

Livermore Lab officials say NIF not only will be the world's biggest laser but also the largest optical instrument ever built and the most massive nuclear weapons blast simulator.

The project is being built in a stadium-sized building in Livermore a few miles east of Kidder's house, where he agreed to be interviewed.

On his patio as the sun sets behind Pleasanton's rolling hills, Kidder is alternately serious and comedic, suggesting NIF's history doesn't instill confidence and can be funny.

"Just getting the laser to work would be very interesting experimentally," he confesses. He hesitates, then adds, "But if it really does turn out to be a lemon, then you're nowhere again. Lemonade. Not fusion. If they flop on their face with the laser, it's curtains. You're stuck with a lot of glass - lavender glass."

The laser's special qualities come from chemically doped, colored glass and specially grown crystals that the lab's top scientists say will crack the fusion energy ignition barrier.

Lab Associate Director George Miller says most of NIF's problems have been resolved, such as how to keep the sensitive instrument clean as it is built in a construction environment. Miller also says NIF is on a new timetable, with challenging, but reachable milestones and that the lab believes it has technical fixes for the remaining problems, the worst being anticipated damage to the laser's sensitive optics.

Kidder buys almost none of that. He doesn't see that Livermore Lab did its homework or has been forthcoming on fixes for NIF.

As an alternative to testing nuclear warheads by actually exploding them, NIF is to be the first machine to ignite a hydrogen pellet into fusion energy, an achievement which, if accomplished, will be laudable, says Kidder.

But he scoffs at lab and government officials' contentions that NIF is critical to the nation's nuclear weapons Stockpile Stewardship and Maintenance Program to maintain the safety and reliability of the nuclear arsenal. He isn't even sure NIF can attract good, young physicists to Livermore.

"Look, the nuclear weapons scientific problem was solved in 1958 . . . and demonstrated in 1962," he says. "The job was done, and you can't get people interested in a problem that was done 40 years ago. It's going to be like trying to get the best and brightest people to work on improving buggy whips and then, to boot, you tell them they can't talk about it to anybody, because it's secret."

"NIF is DOE and Livermore saying: `How do you make lemonade out this, because stockpile stewardship is one big lemon?'" he says. "I think they didn't know about the difficulty of the program they were undertaking or how to resolve the many problems they thought they would be able to resolve. So they ran into a (technical) minefield. They have a string of difficult things yet to solve, and you really need to have those things solved before you run ahead and plunge into the big money."

"They didn't really understand what the technical difficulty of those problems were and still don't," he says. Leaning forward, as if to confide, he adds, "I don't think they have a solution for many of them even today, but they say they do."

Kidder, who is retired but still works at the lab as a visiting scientist, was among nuclear weapons lab scientists at each of the three national labs who openly warned in 1997 that the project was deeply troubled.

That was on the eve of NIF's groundbreaking. Two years later, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson boasted at a NIF ceremony that the project was on time and on budget, only to have to retract those words weeks later, when Livermore acknowledged that NIF actually was over budget and behind schedule.

Kidder laughs today at Livermore and DOE officials who were quick in 1997 to criticize Kidder and other scientists for speaking out.

NIF Program Director David H. Crandall, for one, had called their appraisals published in The Albuquerque Tribune "irresponsible" and damaging to "the future for all us." Crandall cited consistently favorable peer reviews by the Inertial Confinement Fusion Advisory Committee, the highly regarded military JASONs and other groups.

But Kidder agrees with critics that those reviews were engineered by hand-picked, "somewhat arrogant" DOE panels that "pontificate" but have not given NIF the honest scientific review it should have received.

Federal courts have invalidated some of the studies, and Congress' General Accounting Office officially recommended in April that NIF, six years after it was officially proposed and four years after it was started, still lacks an independent scientific review.

"This is a big scandal," says Andreas Toupadakis, a nuclear chemist who formerly worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and who resigned from Livermore last year to protest its continuing nuclear weapons work under the guise of maintaining the nation's warheads.

He agrees with Kidder about NIF's technicals hurdles and is among scientists who fear the worst about NIF has yet to be revealed.

Kidder says the project so far is escaping serious congressional or public scrutiny, because Livermore and DOE have played the national security card.

"Hiding behind that, they can bamboozle anyone," Kidder says. "If anyone challenges them, they can say, `Well, they don't know what they're talking about or they don't know what we're doing.' But when you ask them, they say

`Oh, it's all classified.'"

Retiring from his patio to a well-worn recliner in his den, Kidder delivers his assessments into the night like quips of a stand-up comedian. He belly laughs and nods as if to ask: Get it?

On a wall is a framed 1993 letter of thanks from then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary for Kidder's testimony on behalf of the "future of nuclear weapons and the Comprehensive Test Ban." He explains that it refers to his lab-defying analysis of the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons, based on reams of their own data from nuclear weapons testing and predictions.

His conclusion: "These weapons were damn reliable, very robust." In contrast, he says, the lab directors who wanted to return to testing "put up an absolutely lousy case" against the nuclear test moratorium ordered by President George H.W. Bush and which President Bill Clinton and O'Leary later wanted to maintain.

Among those testifying to the contrary before Congress, Kidder says, was Livermore's Miller.

"He came out second best to me on that one," Kidder muses. "And I think if anybody in Congress would listen, he'd come out second again on NIF."

Based on his warhead reliability study, Kidder says bluntly of NIF: "You could maintain this stockpile forever without it." But, he says, Livermore, DOE and the new National Nuclear Security Administration can be expected to fight any effort to scale back NIF to test its components before continuing NIF.

Their worst nightmare, he says, is "being told to build just eight beam lines" and run exhaustive experiments. "We may find out they're not so good, and then they won't get any more funding. As long as they're delayed anyway, they've adopted a strategy that drags it out, gets full funding and all the beams and then runs them easy to get a few more years out experimentally."

"It's just money," he adds with another hearty laugh. "The country can afford it, and, compared to the new stealth bomber, it's peanuts."

But if Congress were really sharp, Kidder contends, it would realize that Livermore's "track record is not good. Most of these big, high-flying projects they had didn't go anywhere."

Like retired Naval Research Laboratory fusion laser physicist Stephen Bodner, Kidder says that careful examination of Livermore's claims on these projects reveals an optimism that defies scientific reality and credibility.

Marylia Kelly, executive director at Tri-Valley CAREs, the Livermore-based nuclear watchdog group, cites just one, the $450 million Mirror Magnet Fusion Machine.

"Can you believe they held opening and closing ceremonies (for it) on the same day?" she asks.

NIF won't be that bad, Kidder is convinced, explaining that there are a number of valuable and basic astrophysics and high density energy physics experiments NIF should be capable of performing, even in a truncated version of itself.

He believes there also is some legitimacy to the argument "that NIF may attract young kids" to work in the nuclear weapons program, because nuclear weaponry has become an increasingly boring business.

"They need something," he says. "Frankly, once the tests went underground, it wasn't all that much fun.

"Seeing the bang and the flash and that cloud," he says, beaming, "that was sort of the high time. When the stuff went underground, you went from the South Pacific, which was fun, to roasting your ass off in the Nevada desert (at the Nevada Test Site).

"Heck, now they don't even have that," he says. "They may need NIF - just to get kids in the door."

The Albuquerque Tribune.

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4 Local company Ktech Corp. vies for huge NIF power contract

Albuquerque Tribune Online
By Lawrence Spohn

If glass is the heart of what is to be the world's biggest laser, power is its lifeblood and Albuquerque is its connection.

The technical means to condition electrical power for the giant National Ignition Facility glass laser was developed in Albuquerque at Sandia National Laboratories, which also designed NIF's special target chamber and its stadium-sized building.

Also in Albuquerque, a small company, Ktech Corporation, is seizing a "David vs. Goliath" opportunity to compete for a projected $50 million NIF power contract.

"We like our chances," says Steven Downie, Ktech vice president for pulse-power operations at the upstart company's south Albuquerque office near the airport.

The contract winner will supply literally tons of special electrical equipment - in the form of linked chains of huge, steel-encased capacitors in "power conditioning modules" - needed to power NIF. Each of NIF's 192 power modules is slightly bigger than a typical backyard storage shed.

Now under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco, NIF requires the storage and instantaneous release of a vast electrical energy reservoir to power its glass laser for each "shot."

While the laser project has been mired in controversy that includes severe cost and schedule overruns, Downie has promised his company won't contribute to that legacy.

"We will deliver on time, on budget," he says.

Ktech, which has about 130 employees also operates a manufacturing plant in the Renaissance Park in north Albuquerque, where it is building semiconductor processing equipment and one of the first of the 30,500-pound NIF power conditioning modules.

Until recently, the small, 30-year-old business sold primarily technical and operational expertise to the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base and, more importantly, to Sandia's world-renowned and extensive pulse-power operations, also at Kirtland.

Among its Sandia clients (pulse power machines) past and present: Particle Beam Fusion Accelerators I and II; Hermes III and Saturn; and the current world record X-ray producer, the Z accelerator. All were or are nuclear weapons blast simulators, such as NIF.

Now Ktech is locked in a small but potentially lucrative NIF power demonstration contract with the much larger Raytheon Corporation, having already outbid the likes of Lockheed Martin, General Atomics and Titan in the initial competition.

In the final showdown, Raytheon was picked to produce and supply eight of NIF's 192 power modules. Ktech also got a $2.8 million contract to supply another eight NIF modules. The contracts run through next spring, when the Holy Grail of all pulse-power contracts will be awarded to one or the other company.

Whichever does best in the technical performance shootout wins what is expected to be at least a $50 million contract to supply the remaining 176 power modules.

The special modules, designed and tested over a three-year period at Sandia by engineer J. Michael Wilson, will provide the split-second electrical energy pulses needed on each of the beam lines of the NIF glass laser. Like NIF's special glass and crystals, the pulse-power modules are critical to producing the ultimate ultraviolet laser beam that Livermore scientists say will instantly convert a tiny sphere of hydrogen into a nuclear fusion energy blast.

Fully aware of the controversies swirling about the project, Downie says they're political and for someone else to resolve.

"It's not about the technology," he insists. "If you're willing to spend enough money, they can make it work."

Why does the Albuquerque small business think it can win a showdown with a huge corporation like Raytheon?

Because, according to Downie, Ktech is a specialist and holds the aces. For example, he says, "We have Mike Wilson, who originally designed the prototype module system and fully developed it and who we hired away from Sandia."

Wilson now works at Ktech's downtown Livermore office, a short distance from the lab and NIF. But he spends every second or third week back at the Albuquerque plant where, during a recent visit, he suggested the NIF power modules are deceptively clunky.

Actually, they are highly efficient at producing tremendous power. Downie says that, collectively, they will contribute nearly 6 million pounds to NIF's mass, but they are not about steel, wire or cooling oil.

"Electrons," he grunts. "A helluva lot of electrons." In contrast to similar modules that power Sandia's Z accelerator, the NIF modules have "a lot higher energy density," he explains, looking at the ceiling and instantly calculating "about five times more."

Downie, who also used to work at Sandia, says Wilson knows t