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NUCLEAR
Nuclear weapons taboo seen to be weakening
Nuclear Issues in India and Pakistan
India can afford to lose 25 million people
Frantic bid to avert nuclear conflict
At the Brink in Kashmir
These nuclear weapons are preventing a war
Between India and Pakistan, A Changing Role for the U.S.
Iran Nuclear Plant Might Be Inspected, Bush Says
Pakistan presses on with missile tests
Putin: 'Great Progress' in Nuke Talks
Nuclear Nightmares
Backlight
Putin: 'Great Progress' in Nuke Talks
Calvert Seeks Views On Budget Increases
Fuel Rods and Brass Tacks
Feds Say S.C. Can't Stop Plutonium
Debate on Arafat Stalls U.S. Policy, Aides to Bush Say
DC/MD/VA For the Record
MILITARY
Around the World, Hints of Afghanistans to Come
Afghan Leader Expected to Get Extended Term
Group Recovers 150 Bodies in Congo
Bargain Bomb Revolutionizes Warfare
Russia opens military supply line for India
Britain blocks the sale of 60 Hawk jets to India
US plan to strike enemy with Valium
Navy's new carriers are too big for British ports
Chile's Military Spending Spree Incites Clash of Priorities
Colombian Vote's Sinister Side
A Candidate With Many Lives
The U.S. Struggle to Battle Drugs, Just Drugs, in Colombia
Voting starts in Colombia's presidential election
Quietly Fearful
Vajpayee: India Patience Wearing Thin
U.S., allies strive to broker India-Pakistan peace
Iran Confirms Ballistic Missile Test
Israeli Army Re-enters Bethlehem as Tensions Grow in Middle East
Bush Sees Palestinians Weighing Authority Reforms
Issues Facing NATO on Eve of Summit
Russia Seen As Key to NATO Relevancy
Issues Facing NATO on Eve of Summit
NATO - Russia Signing Summit Has History
Russia Seen As Key to NATO Relevancy
Bush Joins Putin in Urging Pakistan to Use Restraint
Musharraf Says Raids In Kashmir Have Ended
Pakistan Tests Another Missile, India Boosts Defense
Pakistan warned to stop militants
Boris and Bill
THE NATION CIA-FBI Feuding Runs Deep
CIA Analysts To Help FBI Shift Focus
Death March Horrors to the Fore
Attacks Spark Interest in Military
Bargain Bomb Revolutionizes Warfare
The Hush on Inquiries
POLICE / PRISONERS
The 'First Rough Draft'
FBI Issues New Alert For Small Airplanes
Agent's Role in Inquiries Is Questioned
Lawmaker to Probe Moussaoui Warrant
Pessimism Lingers With Pittsburgh Cops
Signature of a Suicide Bomb
FBI Warns About Small Planes
OTHER
As Congress Stalls, States Pursue Cloning Debate
Study: Errors May Explain Clone Woes
ACTIVISTS
Reservists Shun Duty in Territories
Australia remembers "stolen" aboriginal children
Thousands Paris Protest Bush in Paris
-------- NUCLEAR
Nuclear weapons taboo seen to be weakening
By Jan Strupczewski
Reuters
Sunday May 26, 2002 1:02 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-107026.html
SIGTUNA, Sweden - International experts said on Saturday they feared that countries could become less inhibited about using nuclear weapons, a chill warning as tensions between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan threaten to erupt into war.
Experts from the Nobel Peace-prize winning Pugwash Committee, who met on arms control and tactical nuclear weapons in the small Swedish town of Sigtuna north of Stockholm, said the end of the Cold War confrontation between Russia and the United States had changed the way nuclear weapons were perceived.
Unlike during the Cold War, the use of nuclear weapons in a possible military conflict between Pakistan and India would not lead to a global nuclear holocaust, weakening the taboo of using them, the experts said.
India and Pakistan, which both have nuclear weapons, have massed a million men on their border, backed by missile batteries, tanks and fighter planes, since a deadly raid on India's parliament in December.
New Delhi says Pakistan-based militants were responsible for the raid. Pakistan denies it backs the guerrillas.
"During the cold war any nuclear use was linked to the general thermonuclear holocaust," said Steve Miller, head of the International Security Programme at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
"But no longer. Three weapons used in Kashmir, which of course would be a horrible tragedy, would probably have no great impact on the daily life of the planet."
And with the stakes in a potential nuclear conflict lowered, the use of such weapons was becoming more tempting.
"The taboos that have been surrounding nuclear weapons in the Cold War may now be weakening," said Professor Gwyn Prins of the European Institute of the London School of Economics.
"We are as close to nuclear use as we have ever been in the nuclear age."
The experts said Friday's agreement between Russia and the United States to cut long-range nuclear warheads by two-thirds was of small military significance, as it was less ambitious than the 1997 agreement between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russia's Boris Yeltsin.
They also pointed to the fact that most of the warheads would be moved from the missile sites into storage rather than destroyed.
-------- india / pakistan
Nuclear Issues in India and Pakistan:
Selected Internet Resources at U.C. Berkeley Library
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/SSEAL/SouthAsia/nuclear.html
----
031
'India can afford to lose 25 million people. But could Pakistan?'
By Julian West in Jammu and Philip Sherwell,
UK Telegraph
26/05/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/05/26/wkash26.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/05/26/ixworld.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=118546
The Indian officer sat back, took a sip of sweet, milky tea and wrinkled his brow when I raised the threat of nuclear conflagration. "How much do our people and politicians know about nuclear weapons?" he muses aloud at his camp near Jammu in Kashmir. "Nothing. All they've seen is a controlled explosion on TV. They think they're just big firecrackers.
"But if it came to it," he adds, a mischievous glint entering his eye, "India could afford to lose, say, 25 million people. The question is, could Pakistan?" He was quick to add: "That's hypothetical, of course."
The fear felt by the rest of the world, but apparently not by many in India and Pakistan, is that the risk of the first nuclear war erupting in the sub-continent is very far from hypothetical.
This cavalier approach to the prospect of the nuclear conflagration is horrifyingly typical on both sides of the border. There is no sign here of the cold logic of so-called "mutually assured destruction" that helped keep the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet bloc and the West unused during the Cold War.
Nearly 1,000 miles away from Jammu, in the broiling Thar desert close to the Pakistan border, an Indian colonel was in expansive mood as he pointed out the dispositions in his sector from the back of his Ambassador staff car. "Tank leaguers here; that's the bulldozer park of the engineers; those tents are a field hospital," he explains. The litany of hardware and regiments, men and material continued mile after mile as his driver bumped along the potholed road.
"We're going to teach those Pakis a bloody good lesson," he adds enthusiastically. But was he not worried that Pakistan's ruling generals would resort to their nuclear weapons if India invaded in retaliation for a series of recent attacks on its portion of Kashmir?
"We were down in Gujarat after the earthquake," the colonel answers. "Nuclear war can't be worse than an earthquake."
A series of terror raids in the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir by Pakistan-based Muslim militants - which have continued despite the pledge of General Pervaiz Musharraf, the Pakistani leader, to crack down on extremists after the bloody raid on New Delhi's parliament last December - have brought the two nuclear rivals to the brink of all-out war.
The bitter Hindu-Muslim conflict over Kashmir dates back to the partition of India and Pakistan at the end of British rule in 1947. The predominantly Muslim territory was handed to India because the ruling maharajah under the British was a Hindu, setting the scene for half a century of tension, two wars and more than a decade of cross-border attacks by radical Islamic factions.
The latest attack, in which more than 30 Indians were killed, including 22 army wives and children, at a barracks near Jammu, turned Indian anger to incandescent rage. Its people, politicians and military are demanding bloody revenge.
Western intelligence has confirmed that powerful elements within Pakistan's military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency are still backing the militants, despite Gen Musharraf's orders to them to cease their support.
The two countries are already trading bellicose threats, pounding each other's villages to rubble in artillery exchanges and mobilising even more troops to reinforce the several hundred thousand already deployed along their 1,500-mile frontline.
Indian military planners have drawn up preparations ranging from targeted air strikes on suspected terror training camps to a major land invasion. Pakistan has said that it will defend itself with all its "strategic assets" (Islamabad's term for nuclear weapons).
India is believed to possess at least 60 nuclear warheads that can be delivered by fighter jet or fitted to long-range missiles; Pakistan is thought to have an arsenal of 25.
What alarms the West - as Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, prepares to fly to Islamabad and Delhi this week, trailed by Richard Armitage, the US Deputy Secretary of State, a few days later - is that neither side seems prepared to rule out the prospect of a nuclear exchange.
Although India has indicated that it is willing to give a short time for Gen Musharraf to deliver "action not words" by cracking down on the militants, American and British officials have been unable to muster much optimism for their forthcoming trips. "It is mission impossible," observes a senior US diplomat.
"Our expectations for the Foreign Secretary's visit are fairly realistic," says a British official. "The priority is to get the two sides to focus on what will happen if things go wrong; to recognise the reality of a nuclear exchange."
Recent remarks have made clear how difficult that will be. An exasperated Western official who handles South Asia told The Telegraph last week: "The impression on the sub-continent is that nuclear bombs are just bigger bombs than other ones. There is no realisation that use of nuclear weapons would take them across a new threshold. There is a bigger gulf between them than ever."
The gung-ho, pro-nuclear mood is just as strong in Pakistan as it is in India and yesterday's test-firing of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles was greeted enthusiastically, with Gen Musharraf the cheer-leader in chief. "God is Great" he repeated three times on the anniversary of the birth of the prophet Mohammed, before telling a gathering of Islamic scholars that the test had been a success.
Earlier, the Vice Chief of Army Staff, General Mohammad Yusuf Khan, told senior officers: "Indians will get the message loud and clear that we also mean business. They must remember that Pakistan is a nuclear state - its people and armed forces are proud of that fact."
According to Lt-Gen Talat Masood, a former secretary of defence production, most Pakistanis think that death in a nuclear war with India would be justified "martyrdom".
Villagers fled their homes on both sides of the border last weeks as military convoys headed towards the frontline. Bhurchak village, just 400 yards inside Pakistan, stood deserted after heavy Indian shelling. Locals who are used to the normal exchanges across the border say the situation is worse than during the wars of 1965 and 1971. "The other day a major came to inspect the damage and then the shelling began and he had to hide in the cowshed," says a man whose home has been reduced to rubble.
On the Indian side, displaced villagers are in no mood for compromise. "We want war," says Sudesh Kumari, who had fled from Mirpur, a village one mile from the border, for the second time that morning after a mortar shell landed on her house while she was outside cooking. "It's better to die once than to do it every day. For the last week, they've been shelling our village morning and evening."
She and her fellow villagers look puzzled when asked about nuclear war. "Nuclear weapons? "We have much better weapons than Pakistan," says Angrez Singh, a 55-year-old farmer. "I've seen three wars and I know it's better to die now than to live like this."
The villagers were delighted when Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Indian Prime Minister, told his troops in Kashmir that "the time has come for a decisive battle". Pakistan responded by calling on civil defence volunteers and placing its bigger cities on a war footing.
What form the battle might take initially is unclear. Indian military specialists have talked about air strikes on militant training camps in Pakistan Kashmir, or supply routes crossing the border; another alternative is a land invasion across the Rajasthan-Sindh border, with the idea of engaging Pakistani troops elsewhere and possibly seizing territory.
Pakistan could respond by targeting Delhi and other Indian cities with long-range conventional missiles - or arm them with nuclear warheads. Unlike Delhi, Islamabad has not ruled out "first use" of nuclear weapons. Dropping a primitive nuclear bomb remains the possibility that horrifies the world.
After a series of telephone calls from President Bush, Gen Musharraf announced last week that he would clamp down on militant training camps in Pakistan Kashmir. India maintains that these are run by Pakistani intelligence as breeding grounds for the "terrorists", who cross the sparsely populated mountains straddling both sides of Kashmir - a claim that Pakistan denies. But India is far from convinced.
In the Jammu headquarters of the Border Security Force, Gabriel Sebastian, the Deputy Inspector General, says that there has been "no reduction" in the number of militants crossing the border since last year. On a map, he indicates the districts of Rajouri and Poonch, two notorious crossing points in the foothills of the Pir Panjal range, which militants use before the snows melt on the high mountains.
He says that they use nomads or villagers, who are offered large sums of money, or coerced at gunpoint, to reconnoitre an area and possibly stash weapons for them before guiding them across the mountains. Recently security forces have found several dead nomads and villagers in the mountains, indicating that the men now crossing were what Insp Sebastian calls "hardened mercenaries".
"In the last fortnight, we've killed 30 militants in encounters here," he says. "In Jammu, there used to be an attack every six months, but now we're getting one in the same number of weeks. It's impossible to cover every inch of landscape - the terrain is too unfriendly. "Everything is masterminded by the ISI," he says. "How do we know? Because whenever these guys cross over, Pakistani troops give them covering fire."
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, described the situation last week, as "dangerous". In an irony familiar to most Indians (who know that despite having nuclear capabilities, India is unable to provide proper telephone lines or electricity to its citizens), he added that he had tried to speak to George Fernandes, his Indian counterpart, but had been unable to get through because of a faulty mobile telephone connection.
On the frontline near Jammu, the Indian army officer drinks the last of his tea. "This is the lull before the storm," he says. "But you can be sure that when there's too much of a lull, something drastic is going to happen."
----
Frantic bid to avert nuclear conflict
Observer Worldview
Jason Burke in London, Rory McCarthy in Islamabad and Luke Harding in Srinagar
Sunday May 26, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,722506,00.html
World leaders yesterday mounted a frantic last-ditch diplomatic effort to defuse the conflict between Pakistan and India and avert the threat of nuclear war in south Asia.
As Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, prepared to fly to the region, the presidents of America and Russia made an unprecedented joint plea for peace, calling on the two countries to attend an emergency summit in Kazakhstan in 10 days.
Yesterday tensions rose further after Pakistan tested a medium-range nuclear-capable missile in a defiant show of strength and the Indians maintained their own belligerent stance. 'We have waited for far too long and our wait is nearing its end,' Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian Prime Minister, told journalists.
Straw is expected to arrive in Islamabad early this week before travelling on to New Delhi. Foreign Office sources yesterday welcomed the Russian offer of hosting talks and said Straw was seeking ways of enabling both sides to back down without losing face.
There are concerns that without outside mediation the crisis could swiftly spiral out of control and that both states may deploy their substantial nuclear arsenals. There are now nearly a million soldiers facing off along the border.
Speaking in St Petersburg yesterday Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin urged General Pervez Musharraf, the military leader of Pakistan, to fulfil his pledge to stop hardline Islamic militants carrying out raids into the Indian-controlled sector of the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir.
'It's very important that President Musharraf... stops the incursions across the border,' Bush said. 'We are making it very clear to both parties that there is no benefit in war. We are deeply concerned about the rhetoric. There is a lot of diplomatic effort going into bringing some calm and reason to the region.'
India accuses Pakistan of funding and arming the Islamic militants responsible for a string of attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, and further afield. Relations between the two powers deteriorated sharply following an assault by Islamic militants on India's parliament in New Delhi last December in which 14 died, including the attackers. The two nuclear powers have fought three wars since independence in 1947, two over Kashmir.
Putin said he would invite both the leaders to one-to-one talks on the sidelines of a regional security summit in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in early June. Neither state has yet formally responded to the invitiation.
However Pakistan promised more missile tests of both Ghauri and longer-range Shaheen missiles over the next three days.
Musharraf gave no hint of compromise yesterday. 'We don't want war, but we are ready for war,' he said.
Pakistan's first major missile test for three years was a success, Musharraf told an assembly of Islamic scholars. 'It showed total accuracy. It hit the target,' the former commando said, before repeating, 'God is great.'
Although Musharraf has tried to lead Pakistan in a more moderate direction since 11 September, diplomats say militants backed by the military intelligence service, the powerful ISI, are still crossing into Kashmir.
----
At the Brink in Kashmir
New York Times
May 26, 2002
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/weekinreview/26FREN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - TO the knotty complications that have helped make the India-Pakistan face-off over Kashmir the world's scariest crisis, the United States' war on terror has become yet one more devilish twist.
Beset with weak governments that have both tried to use the showdown over Kashmir to bolster their own domestic standing, and egged on by strident nationalists who speak in the stark terms of holy war, the two countries are now locked in a brinkmanship where the slightest misstep could produce a nuclear war.
More than just eyeball to eyeball, South Asia's bitter neighbors have also been watching the United States intently, each seeking to assess how Washington's antiterror campaign in Afghanistan affects the other. The danger, as they have done so, is that the perverse readings that each side brings to the subject can inspire the deadly miscalculation.
Since the two countries explicitly became the third world's first nuclear rivals in April 1998, when India and then Pakistan conducted test explosions, there has been much hopeful talk in the region about a new era of stability - its own version of mutually assured destruction would supposedly ensure that neither country would dare start another war.
Such thinking seems to have been misplaced to begin with because, in addition to the irresponsibility of soldiers and politicians, South Asia's instability derives from the asymmetry of its two largest nations. With a billion people, India dwarfs Pakistan in almost every measure, including troops and conventional arms. Under the circumstances, the nuclear option will always be a tempting, if illusory, survival card for Pakistani generals.
In the present crisis, India has packed its portion of the divided Kashmir region with an estimated 700,000 troops, and has spoken in ever more belligerent tones about punishing Pakistan for backing an armed insurgency there. Yet Pakistan's elite has lulled itself until the last few days with the thought that New Delhi would not dare attack because it would upset Washington's antiterror agenda.
"India's relationship with Washington has acquired a real depth, it has become strategic and not just tactical, like Pakistan's," said Mushahid Hussain, a former Pakistani information minister. "Because of that, people felt that India couldn't possibly start a war. They were taken by surprise by India's sudden raising of the temperature, and only now are we awakening from the slumber."
Islamabad's awakening since late last week has brought repeated calls for India to accept a dialogue, increasingly explicit promises not to give military aid to separatists, plus an offer to place international observers for the Kashmiri Line of Control that separates the two countries' armies.
It is worth remembering that Indian-Pakistani relations have always proceeded by crisis. Pressure mounts inexorably, most often around the zero-sum game of divided Kashmir. The countries have fought two wars over this issue and have lived through countless mini-crises. Somehow, in the end, the pressure has always dissipated before the point of catastrophe, and that could happen now too.
Nevertheless, through most of the week India continued to ratchet up the pressure, complaining that Washington was merely trying to keep a lid on things rather than force its traditional client and vital partner in the campaign against Al Qaeda to permanently sever arms supplies and training for Kashmir's Muslim separatists.
President Bush may have dreamed of a world of moral clarity after the terrorist attacks in the United States, but the crisis in South Asia, like the one in the Middle East, has shown how futile it is to expect people to abandon their own deep and bitter animosities and subscribe wholeheartedly to Washington's still rather abstract call to fight evil as America defines it.
For both India and Pakistan, instead, Sept. 11 has provided a historic opportunity to try to redefine relations with Washington. India saw President Bush's stark with-us-or-against-us language about terrorism as a chance to cast Kashmir's deep complexities in simple black and white. For India, the terror tactics of the separatists who attacked the Indian parliament in December and struck again two weeks ago, killing 35 people in Kashmir, is the only serious issue.
Lost amid India's muscular post-Sept. 11 opportunism, critics of India point out, is that many in overwhelmingly Muslim Kashmir strongly resent Indian rule; that India has never allowed a free and fair vote by Kashmiris on self-determination; and that India itself has long engaged in human rights abuses to keep control of Kashmir.
Pakistan's military government, meanwhile, saw in Sept. 11 a chance to arrest the long-term deterioration in its relationship with Washington. Islamabad has repeatedly been subjected to arms embargoes by the United States, suspicion over its sponsorship of terrorism and relationships with radical Islamic causes. By making the painful decision to abandon its longtime client the Taliban, and by allowing the American military access to Pakistani territory to pursue remnants of Al Qaeda, President Pervez Musharraf was calculating that Washington would reward Pakistan on many levels, none more important than a sympathetic hearing on the Kashmir issue.
To critics of his government, Mr. Musharraf's bet looks increasingly like a replay of the wager made during the war in the 1980's against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, when Pakistan became the main conduit for a huge American program of assistance to anti-Soviet guerrilla fighters. Then, too, Islamabad's help failed to win it decisive support from Washington over Kashmir.
Then as now, Pakistan's cause was hurt by its own lack of democracy and its penchant for resorting to violence to achieve its aims in Kashmir.
THAT suspicion and frustrations toward the United States are rife in both countries is not surprising, given the fact that a major realignment of Washington's diplomatic positions in the region has been under way since the end of the cold war.
"Pakistan may be the U.S. ally but India pulls more weight in Washington," wrote Hussain Haqqani, a commentator in The Nation, a Pakistani publication. "With the end of the cold war, American suspicions of a nonaligned India with close ties to the Soviet Union have dissipated. India's economic reforms have moved the country away from its quasi-socialist practices, opening a huge market of one billion potential consumers to U.S. businesses. From the U.S. point of view, Pakistan may be America's wartime ally, but it is India that offers the prospect of long-term friendship."
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[To reply: mailto:letters.online@telegraph.co.uk]
These nuclear weapons are preventing a war
26/05/2002
UK Telegraph Opinion
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;$sessionid$CDWCPDIAACWKDQFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/opinion/2002/05/26/do2601.xml
Each year, when spring comes and the Himalayan snow melts, troops from the armies of India and Pakistan start firing at each other across their common border. Each year television watchers the world over are treated to pictures of this fighting. To the uninitiated observer, and perhaps to the initiated one as well, they often appear to be the same pictures.
The Indo-Pak conflict, as it is sometimes known, has its origins in the partition of the subcontinent after the British withdrawal. In the first 23 years of the two newly independent countries, they fought each other in no fewer than three major wars (in 1947- 48, 1965 and 1971). The second and the third of these were the largest and the most dangerous. They were fought with heavy weapons, including tanks, aircraft, and naval vessels.
In 1965 Pakistan, then under Ayub Khan, launched a full-scale blitzkrieg against India. In 1971 India, then under Indira Gandhi, exploited large-scale unrest in the eastern part of Pakistan that was later to become Bangladesh, to invade and dismember its rival. As the fighting approached its climax, President Nixon considered the situation so dangerous that he sent the nuclear-capable aircraft carrier Enterprise into the Gulf of Bengal. New Delhi immediately took the hint and called off its forces which were poised to overrun Western Pakistan. The conflict ended with each side retreating to the old border.
Thirty one years have passed since that last major conflict, and though India and Pakistan's hatred for each other remains as strong as ever, there has never been another war. There have, of course, been many confrontations like the one we are watching today. The largest and most dangerous was the Kargill War of 1998 when about a thousand Pakistani-supported irregulars moved 150 yards inside Indian territory and had to be ejected. Since then the Indian Army has been doing its best to present that skirmish as a much larger and more dangerous incident than it was in order to get their government to pay for the modernisation their antiquated equipment. That strategy appears to be working, yet even in New Delhi there is a limit to what politicians will believe.
Given this background, it is ridiculous to present the events of 1998, much less the present crisis, as if they constituted a major threat to India's borders. The reason why India and Pakistan have not gone to war since 1971 is, of course, because both sides now have nuclear weapons - India has probably had them since the early 1970s and Pakistan's deterrent has been operational since the late 1970s.
Since nuclear weapons were used for the first time in 1945, they have brought about a remarkable transformation in international politics. First the superpowers were prevented from launching large-scale attacks on one another and were compelled to confine their conflict to threats on the one hand and to limited regional wars by client states on the other.
Next, the close allies of those superpowers became almost as secure against full-scale war as the superpowers themselves and this was as true in Central Europe as it was, from 1950 onwards, in the Korean Peninsula. Nor was this the end of the story. As nuclear weapons proliferated, they also prevented the Soviets and the Chinese, and the Chinese and the Indians from fighting each other in earnest.
Nuclear weapons have made a difference even in the volatile Middle East. Between 1948 and 1973 Israel and the Arab states went to war no fewer than five times. Since then, Israel's possession of nuclear weapons having become a near certainty, there has not even been one. The hostilities between them have been limited to just one day's fighting in 1982 (when Israeli and Syrian forces clashed in Lebanon) and a few missiles launched by Iraq in 1991. What is true in other parts of the world is equally true along the Indian-Pakistani border. Each side may like to bare their teeth at each other but this is partly for internal political reasons. Both have now developed and deployed fighter-bombers and surface-to-surface missiles capable of putting a nuclear warhead on the centres of each other's national power.
Both sides argue that their enemy's nuclear programme is dangerous whereas its own is not. Pakistan claims it needs nuclear weapons to survive against an India that has never reconciled itself to the subcontinent's partition. India claims it needs nuclear weapons to counter Pakistan's aggression as well as its internal political instability. The Indians also argue that they have to consider China as well as Pakistan.
One cannot rule out the possibility that hostilities will escalate and, of course, should both sides resort to using nuclear weapons, the result would be an unprecedented catastrophe. All of Pakistan's main cities would be destroyed, as would New Delhi and other northern and northwestern Indian cities. Radioactive fallout might pollute not just the subcontinent but also parts of the neighbouring countries. This could lead to millions of casualties in the border territories which are among the most densely populated areas in the world.
Fortunately both sides are only too aware of this and their past behavior suggests that, when it comes to nuclear weapons, they are as responsible as anybody else. So far, the logic of deterrence has worked fairly well for the God-loving USA as well as the atheist communists, for Confucians as well as Hindus, for Jews as well as Arab Muslims. We can only hope it works for India and Pakistan as well. If it does, as I firmly believe, then the chances are that the same old pictures will still be running on television in 10 years' time.
Professor Martin van Creveld, of Jerusalem, Israel, is author of Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict.
----
Between India and Pakistan, A Changing Role for the U.S.
By Steve Coll
Sunday, May 26, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10696-2002May25?language=printer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - For more than a decade, America has reacted to hostility between India and Pakistan the way riot police respond to a bottle-breaking brawl between street gangs. Blue lights flash, sirens wail; the diplomatic emphasis is on billy clubs and bullhorns. U.S. envoys are selected for their muscular, intimidating qualities. "Break it up, boys," they growl upon arrival here. And then, with a sharp-clawed grip on the shoulder: "You don't really want to set off a nuclear holocaust, now do you?"
In early June, if shooting doesn't begin first, U.S. deputy secretary of state and thick-necked weight lifter Richard Armitage is set to arrive in New Delhi and Islamabad for his turn at separating the combatants. Like CIA veteran Robert Gates in 1990 and President Clinton in 1999, Armitage may well be able to postpone a war now gathering along the Indo-Pakistani border. But this is not the same old crisis that U.S. diplomats have helped to calm in the past.
September 11 and its aftermath have altered South Asia as profoundly as did the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Among other things, the U.S.-led war on terror provides the dominant language of Indo-Pakistani rivalry. American power -- on display in the thousands of U.S. troops now spread across Central and South Asia -- has become the pivotal factor in war-or-peace decisions in New Delhi and Islamabad.
The role of American mediation also has been recast; Washington's massive new investments in the region have made the United States not just a broker, but a principal. That change, along with the real threat of a fourth war between India and Pakistan, sent high-level Bush administration officials into a frenzy of international phone calling last week as they searched for at least a stand down, if not the beginnings of something more lasting.
The current war scare has already set back the U.S.-led campaign to disrupt al Qaeda and prevent new terrorist attacks on American soil. That fact reveals the stake ordinary Americans have in this mess. Pakistani troops that might otherwise be deployed in Afghan border areas in search of Osama bin Laden's elusive leadership group have been pulled back as a reserve against Indian forces on Pakistan's eastern border. Pakistani intelligence agents who might otherwise be combing Karachi for al Qaeda suicide bombers are instead obsessed by India's threat to strike militants in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. And if an Indo-Pakistani shooting war were to go nuclear, hundreds of recently arrived American soldiers would be at or near ground zero; thousands more would be close enough to inhale the fallout.
The war on terrorism has become infected by the violence in Kashmir, a disputed territory where Pakistani-backed Islamic rebels challenge Indian rule in one of the world's most intractable insurgencies. Kashmir and its connecting threads today form a poisonous spider's web near the center of the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda, disgorging new lines of complication by the day.
Inflamed by their vitriolic dispute, India and Pakistan currently agree on perhaps just one thing: To untangle the crisis, the Bush administration must grapple more deeply with the security threats riling these two intimates. This daunting agenda includes ending Pakistan's covert support for Kashmir's insurgents, curtailing the broader terrorism-laced proxy war that rages between the two countries, stabilizing Kashmir's de facto borders, and yes, even discussing Kashmir's future.
Added to the draining diplomatic demands in the Middle East, South Asia's war threat promises to test the limits of American power and sophistication. In the military arena, it is core doctrine that Pentagon planners must prepare to fight two hot wars simultaneously; the Bush administration will now discover whether it can handle two volatile diplomatic crises at once. Compounding the challenge, Washington's expertise and experience in South Asia is thinner than nearly anywhere else in the world.
Preparations for cataclysm advance daily along the Indo-Pakistani frontier. About 1 million soldiers have crowded to the long border, equipped with missiles, tanks and fighter jets. Artillery duels echo daily across Kashmiri canyons. Assassinations and bombings pockmark the Indian side of the divide. War-fevered politicians in both capitals organize appeals for national unity. They travel to Kashmir and to the vast Rajasthan desert front to inspect their sweltering infantry, applauding in makeshift grandstands as pilots demonstrate bombing prowess. And in the secret military warehouses of both countries, engineers presumably are turning screws on doomsday's reserve force -- two crude but functional nuclear arsenals.
As the war drums pound, India and Pakistan each seek to manipulate the United States. The resulting confusion is amplified by rival American embassies in New Delhi and Islamabad whose daily cables home, insiders say, duel with unusual debate and accusation.
India and Pakistan both accept U.S. engagement, while promoting agendas for U.S. attention that are largely irreconcilable. "The U.S. needs to be a little more forceful," said retired Pakistani Maj. Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani, one of a small group of Indian and Pakistani generals and scholars who have been meeting to develop a security-focused peace track, with support from their two governments. "The stakes are too high. They need to come down harder. They need to evaluate the situation and determine 'Who's at fault?' and 'Why is this happening?' "
Those are complex, treacherous questions that American diplomacy has for years sought to avoid. In some ways, the current structure of Indo-Pakistani emnity makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem hopeful and malleable.
That is partly because international mediation in the Middle East is far more mature than in South Asia. Decades of U.S.-sponsored negotiations may not have resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they have contained it, and they have helped both parties to visualize an appealing if still-elusive final settlement. No such process exists on the subcontinent. On the contrary, the most commonly visualized end game here involves the sprouting of mushroom clouds.
India's old-line foreign policy establishment recognizes that U.S. investments in South Asia since Sept. 11 have implications far beyond the terror war. To them, "it is obvious that in the short and medium terms, a positive equation with the U.S. is the practical option," as former Indian foreign secretary J.N. Dixit puts it. Presumably that approach would not include starting a war that engulfs a key front in the U.S. campaign against terrorism or brings U.S. troops under fire.
But India's Hindu nationalist politicians, supported by deep public anger over terrorist attacks on Indian targets, may not be fully sold. Ailing and in the last hours of a career devoted to remaking India through religious-nationalist fervor, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is writing the conclusion to his political legacy. Two years ago, reaching out to Pakistan for peace talks, Vajpayee styled himself as an Indian Nixon in China. When his attempt failed, he returned to the martial rhetoric of his party's electoral campaigns. On Wednesday, Vajpayee thundered that India's army should prepare for a "decisive battle" and promised "a new chapter of victory" over Pakistan.
For months, with elections looming, India has been using its war cries in an attempt to coerce progress on the ground in Kashmir. The Pakistani-sponsored insurgency has become India's bleeding wound, draining its treasury, tying down its army, soiling its reputation and constraining its global ambitions.
By threatening conventional war after a suicide attack on its parliament building last December, India believed it was raising a hammer against Pakistan's support for Kashmir's radicals and saw U.S. diplomatic pressure in Islamabad as its anvil.
But it hasn't worked out that way. Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's liberal military despot, has cooperated extensively with the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and at times inside Pakistan, impressing American spies and generals with his fortitude and modernizing outlook. Yet by nearly all accounts other than his own, Musharraf also has declined to act decisively against the Pakistani state-sponsored jihadist networks in Kashmir.
Since Musharraf's Jan. 12 speech rejecting jihadism as an instrument of state policy, Pakistan's ruling army has been willing to deactivate its Kashmiri clients to some extent. Yesterday, in an interview with The Post, Musharraf asserted that cross-border infiltration has stopped. But many believe that Pakistan prefers to put its proxy networks into loose storage rather than dismantle them.
Musharraf argues privately to American interlocutors that national pride and domestic politics make it impossible for him to do otherwise under direct Indian military threat. In public, the general and his spokesmen imply that if India insists on launching all-out war to attack Pakistan's support for Kashmiri militants, Pakistan is prepared to go nuclear. This is bluff in reply to bluff, of course, but it contains the potential for miscalculation.
Islamic radicalism remains an element of grand strategy for some Pakistani generals. Anticipating a permanent state of hostility with its more powerful neighbor, the army here sees its jihadist clients as a potent, highly motivated reserve against India's regional ambitions. (The jihadists have a terrible record of promoting Pakistan's welfare, but this somehow escapes analysis.) Some Pakistani generals also foresee a day when the United States finally captures its key al Qaeda enemies and begins to withdraw from South Asia, as it has done after past conflicts. The jihadists then might come in handy again as Pakistan pursues its regional goals.
In New Delhi, the Hindu nationalists' violent, trident-waving radical flanks offer a cultural mirror to Pakistan's Islamic jihadists. India's leaders have yet to make clear that they truly seek a stable, modernizing Pakistan as their neighbor. Caught up in competitive democratic politics, they still demonize Musharraf in ways that preclude rational engagement.
The first challenge facing U.S. negotiators is to convince India to back off from its war threats, while insisting that Musharraf use the breathing space to dismantle the jihadist networks in Kashmir. Such an initiative may require high-level talks, backed by private U.S. guarantees, to help push India and Pakistan away from repetitious border scares and toward sustained political negotiation. It may also require an invocation, whether in public or private, that vital U.S. interests would be jeopardized if either party launches another war.
If Musharraf's pledge yesterday turns out to be the first step in the decisive dismantling of Kashmiri radical networks, India will have to provide him with some cover against domestic criticism that he is selling out a defining national cause. This would mean conducting serious bilateral talks while allowing Pakistan some credit in the search for a resolution in Kashmir. New Delhi would also have to accept, at least in private, that even the most committed government in Islamabad will not be able to eliminate all terrorism inside Indian-held Kashmir. The radicals have enjoyed substantial Pakistani sponsorship, but they also belong to stateless Islamic networks beholden to no capital.
As in the Middle East, the maddening truth about this crisis is that both India and Pakistan understand exactly how to defuse it in ways consistent with their national interests. A constructive negotiating outline has already been embraced publicly by both governments, in between war fevers. Only hate, mistrust, fear, a bloody unfinished history and rampant opportunism stand in the way. Mr. Armitage, as they say around here: You are most welcome.
Steve Coll, managing editor of The Post, served as the newspaper's South Asia correspondent from 1989 to 1992. He is writing a book about U.S. foreign and intelligence policy in Afghanistan.
-------- iran
Iran Nuclear Plant Might Be Inspected, Bush Says
May 26, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-bush-iran.html
PARIS (Reuters) - President Bush said Sunday Russia had proposed international inspections of a nuclear plant it is helping build in Iran to assuage U.S. fears that the facility might help Tehran produce atomic weapons.
U.S.-Russian differences over the nuclear project had clouded an otherwise friendly summit last week between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Bush had warned the plant could come back to haunt Russia if Iran points nuclear-tipped missiles at Moscow. Putin insisted the plant was only being built for electricity generation.
Bush, at a news conference with Putin in Moscow, had offered the tantalizing clue that Putin had given him ``very comforting'' assurances about the plant, but Putin would not outline what these assurances were.
At a news conference with French President Jacques Chirac, Bush was asked what Putin had told him. He said Putin ``is willing to allow for international inspection teams to determine'' whether the facility would lead to the development of weapons of mass destruction.
``We're thinking about what he told us,'' said Bush.
A senior Bush administration official said Putin had held out the possibility of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring the facility.
``This is a work in progress,'' the official said, when asked to elaborate on Bush's comments. ``They are discussing ways ahead to increase everyone's confidence and to address what both presidents agree is a real potential problem.''
The United States is skeptical Iran really wants the plant for electricity, pointing out Tehran possesses rich reserves of oil.
Washington has designated Iran, Iraq and North Korea as part of an ``axis of evil'' bent on developing weapons of mass destruction, and a senior U.S. official last week called Russia's help in building the plant the single biggest proliferation threat that exists today.
The $800 million plant construction contract is a cash cow for the weak Russian economy. The facility is believed to be years from operation.
``We would certainly like to make certain that the Russians are doing nothing that can contribute to Iran's nuclear technologies, giving them, ultimately, military nuclear technologies,'' Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told ``Fox News Sunday.''
U.S. officials said the issue, while troubling, was being worked on in good faith by the U.S. and Russian governments.
``These two leaders have shown they are problem-solvers. This is an issue that they're talking about. We're looking for ways to continue discussion,'' said one U.S. official.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan presses on with missile tests
Sunday, 26 May, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_2008000/2008827.stm
More than a million troops are massed on the border Pakistan has carried out its second test-firing of a ballistic missile in two days.
It ignored widespread international concern over the first test on Saturday, at a time when relations with neighbouring India are extremely tense.
As with the first test, India said it was "not impressed".
But in a speech carried live on television, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee called on the nation to unite to face the treat of terrorism.
US President George Bush has urged the two countries to show restraint, and expressed "strong reservations" about Pakistan's new missile tests.
Urgency to act
Mr Vajpayee repeated that Delhi's patience was running out.
"In this hour of crisis, we should unitedly prepare to defend ourselves," he said after inaugurating a new road tunnel in a pass in the Himalayan foothills.
"The nation should stand shoulder to shoulder against the challenge. We want victory, victory over terrorism."
Click here for the strategic balance between India and Pakistan
India began the initial military build-up along the border after it said Pakistan had supported a bloody attack by militants on the federal parliament in Delhi last December.
In his remarks on Sunday, Mr Vajpayee said India ought to have responded to that attack. He did not elaborate.
Tension between the two nuclear powers rose again in mid-May 2002 after an attack on an army base in Kashmir in which more than 30 people died.
Their armed forces continue to fire at one another across the line of control in the disputed territory of Kashmir, and their international border.
In the latest violence, the authorities in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir said at least five people, including two children, were killed and eight others injured during Pakistani shelling in two border villages.
'Balancing act'
Sunday's test-fire was of a new Pakistani weapon - a short-range surface-to-surface missile, the Ghaznavi.
It has a range of 290 kilometres (176 miles) and is probably capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear warheads.
The first test, on Saturday, involved a medium-range Ghauri missile, which has a range of 1,500 kilometres (900 miles).
Pakistan argues that it has been holding back while India tested new missiles, and this is about achieving a strategic balance in the region.
The BBC's Mike Wooldridge, in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, says India's apparent unwillingness to go in for any kind of retaliatory measure may give some reassurance about the impact of the missile testing on the critical situation on the India-Pakistan border.
But he adds that it is also clear that the latest has added to the urgency of the international efforts to persuade India and Pakistan to take steps to reduce rather than increase the tension.
Delhi has repeatedly insisted it will not enter talks with Islamabad over Kashmir until Pakistan stops backing militants - an accusation Pakistan denies.
General Musharraf, in an interview with the Washington Post, denied that he was backtracking on his commitment to take tough action against the militants.
He also said he did not think he would ever reach the stage of having to decide whether to use nuclear weapons.
-------- russia
Putin: 'Great Progress' in Nuke Talks
By Deborah Seward
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, May 26, 2002; 5:32 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13720-2002May26?language=printer
PUSHKIN, Russia -- Looking both relieved and relaxed, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that he and President Bush made "great progress" toward reducing Cold War nuclear threats during their recent summit.
Putin also said he hoped his talks with Bush would help remove obstacles to further cooperation, such as ratifying the 1996 treaty banning nuclear tests and repealing the 1970s-era Jackson-Vanik law restricting U.S.-Russia trade.
"We have the right to fully consider this visit a success," Putin said.
Putin stressed the importance of the agreement signed in the Kremlin on Friday. It requires each country to cut their nuclear arsenals from current levels of 6,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200.
"That we reached agreement on the key issues and that we signed these documents, this is great progress," said Putin, who insisted on a formal treaty.
Putin said the treaty "gives the right, true signal for the direction of cooperation," including containing threats from nations that aspire to have nuclear weapons.
Putin offered his assessment of the summit at the opulent, 18th-century Tsarskoye Selo palace just outside St. Petersburg, which once was the summer residence for Russia's royals.
Putin spoke moments after Air Force One, carrying Bush, flew above the vast grounds where the Russian president later hosted Finnish President Tarja Halonen. Bush headed to France to meet with French President Jacques Chirac.
Demonstrating that he appears to have greatly improved his English, Putin waved at one of his aides to refrain from translating the treaty question but answered in Russian.
Putin noted that when summit preparations began a year ago Washington and Moscow were at odds over nuclear weapons reductions and other issues.
"On the key issues our positions were either very far apart or were exactly opposite," Putin said.
The agreement to reduce nuclear arsenals formed a good basis for further progress, Putin said.
Turning to economics, Putin expressed disappointment that Congress has not repealed the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which links privileges coveted by Moscow to the right of Jews to emigrate. Bush has urged its repeal.
"Of course, we are not thrilled that this didn't happen," Putin said.
However, Putin said he and Bush did a lot to "create the basis for movement" to remove what Russia considers a serious irritation.
Russia also hopes the United States soon will declare Russia a "market economy," a designation important for its entry into the World Trade Organization, which sets and polices world trade rules, and for attracting investment.
Putin was satisfied the United States was seriously considering Russia's primary concerns. He has been accused by opponents of repeatedly giving far too much to the United States on key issues without getting much in return.
"Our American partners pay attention to our concerns and respect them," Putin said.
-------- terrorism
Nuclear Nightmares
New York Times
May 26, 2002
By BILL KELLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/magazine/26NUKES.html
Not If But When
Everybody who spends much time thinking about nuclear terrorism can give you a scenario, something diabolical and, theoretically, doable. Michael A. Levi, a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists, imagines a homemade nuclear explosive device detonated inside a truck passing through one of the tunnels into Manhattan. The blast would crater portions of the New York skyline, barbecue thousands of people instantly, condemn thousands more to a horrible death from radiation sickness and -- by virtue of being underground -- would vaporize many tons of concrete and dirt and river water into an enduring cloud of lethal fallout. Vladimir Shikalov, a Russian nuclear physicist who helped clean up after the 1986 Chernobyl accident, envisioned for me an attack involving highly radioactive cesium-137 loaded into some kind of homemade spraying device, and a target that sounded particularly unsettling when proposed across a Moscow kitchen table -- Disneyland. In this case, the human toll would be much less ghastly, but the panic that would result from contaminating the Magic Kingdom with a modest amount of cesium -- Shikalov held up his teacup to illustrate how much -- would probably shut the place down for good and constitute a staggering strike at Americans' sense of innocence. Shikalov, a nuclear enthusiast who thinks most people are ridiculously squeamish about radiation, added that personally he would still be happy to visit Disneyland after the terrorists struck, although he would pack his own food and drink and destroy his clothing afterward.
Another Russian, Dmitry Borisov, a former official of his country's atomic energy ministry, conjured a suicidal pilot. (Suicidal pilots, for obvious reasons, figure frequently in these fantasies.) In Borisov's scenario, the hijacker dive-bombs an Aeroflot jetliner into the Kurchatov Institute, an atomic research center in a gentrifying neighborhood of Moscow, which I had just visited the day before our conversation. The facility contains 26 nuclear reactors of various sizes and a huge accumulation of radioactive material. The effect would probably be measured more in property values than in body bags, but some people say the same about Chernobyl.
Maybe it is a way to tame a fearsome subject by Hollywoodizing it, or maybe it is a way to drive home the dreadful stakes in the arid-sounding business of nonproliferation, but in several weeks of talking to specialists here and in Russia about the threats an amateur evildoer might pose to the homeland, I found an unnerving abundance of such morbid creativity. I heard a physicist wonder whether a suicide bomber with a pacemaker would constitute an effective radiation weapon. (I'm a little ashamed to say I checked that one, and the answer is no, since pacemakers powered by plutonium have not been implanted for the past 20 years.) I have had people theorize about whether hijackers who took over a nuclear research laboratory could improvise an actual nuclear explosion on the spot. (Expert opinions differ, but it's very unlikely.) I've been instructed how to disperse plutonium into the ventilation system of an office building.
The realistic threats settle into two broad categories. The less likely but far more devastating is an actual nuclear explosion, a great hole blown in the heart of New York or Washington, followed by a toxic fog of radiation. This could be produced by a black-market nuclear warhead procured from an existing arsenal. Russia is the favorite hypothetical source, although Pakistan, which has a program built on shady middlemen and covert operations, should not be overlooked. Or the explosive could be a homemade device, lower in yield than a factory nuke but still creating great carnage.
The second category is a radiological attack, contaminating a public place with radioactive material by packing it with conventional explosives in a ''dirty bomb'' by dispersing it into the air or water or by sabotaging a nuclear facility. By comparison with the task of creating nuclear fission, some of these schemes would be almost childishly simple, although the consequences would be less horrifying: a panicky evacuation, a gradual increase in cancer rates, a staggeringly expensive cleanup, possibly the need to demolish whole neighborhoods. Al Qaeda has claimed to have access to dirty bombs, which is unverified but entirely plausible, given that the makings are easily gettable.
Nothing is really new about these perils. The means to inflict nuclear harm on America have been available to rogues for a long time. Serious studies of the threat of nuclear terror date back to the 1970's. American programs to keep Russian nuclear ingredients from falling into murderous hands -- one of the subjects high on the agenda in President Bush's meetings in Moscow this weekend -- were hatched soon after the Soviet Union disintegrated a decade ago. When terrorists get around to trying their first nuclear assault, as you can be sure they will, there will be plenty of people entitled to say I told you so.
All Sept. 11 did was turn a theoretical possibility into a felt danger. All it did was supply a credible cast of characters who hate us so much they would thrill to the prospect of actually doing it -- and, most important in rethinking the probabilities, would be happy to die in the effort. All it did was give our nightmares legs.
And of the many nightmares animated by the attacks, this is the one with pride of place in our experience and literature -- and, we know from his own lips, in Osama bin Laden's aspirations. In February, Tom Ridge, the Bush administration's homeland security chief, visited The Times for a conversation, and at the end someone asked, given all the things he had to worry about -- hijacked airliners, anthrax in the mail, smallpox, germs in crop-dusters -- what did he worry about most? He cupped his hands prayerfully and pressed his fingertips to his lips. ''Nuclear,'' he said simply.
My assignment here was to stare at that fear and inventory the possibilities. How afraid should we be, and what of, exactly? I'll tell you at the outset, this was not one of those exercises in which weighing the fears and assigning them probabilities laid them to rest. I'm not evacuating Manhattan, but neither am I sleeping quite as soundly. As I was writing this early one Saturday in April, the floor began to rumble and my desk lamp wobbled precariously. Although I grew up on the San Andreas Fault, the fact that New York was experiencing an earthquake was only my second thought.
The best reason for thinking it won't happen is that it hasn't happened yet, and that is terrible logic. The problem is not so much that we are not doing enough to prevent a terrorist from turning our atomic knowledge against us (although we are not). The problem is that there may be no such thing as ''enough.''
25,000 Warheads, and It Only Takes One My few actual encounters with the Russian nuclear arsenal are all associated with Thomas Cochran. Cochran, a physicist with a Tennessee lilt and a sense of showmanship, is the director of nuclear issues for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which promotes environmental protection and arms control. In 1989, when glasnost was in flower, Cochran persuaded the Soviet Union to open some of its most secret nuclear venues to a roadshow of American scientists and congressmen and invited along a couple of reporters. We visited a Soviet missile cruiser bobbing in the Black Sea and drank vodka with physicists and engineers in the secret city where the Soviets first produced plutonium for weapons.
Not long ago Cochran took me cruising through the Russian nuclear stockpile again, this time digitally. The days of glasnost theatrics are past, and this is now the only way an outsider can get close to the places where Russians store and deploy their nuclear weapons. On his office computer in Washington, Cochran has installed a detailed United States military map of Russia and superimposed upon it high-resolution satellite photographs. We spent part of a morning mouse-clicking from missile-launch site to submarine base, zooming in like voyeurs and contemplating the possibility that a terrorist could figure out how to steal a nuclear warhead from one of these places.
''Here are the bunkers,'' Cochran said, enlarging an area the size of a football stadium holding a half-dozen elongated igloos. We were hovering over a site called Zhukovka, in western Russia. We were pleased to see it did not look ripe for a hijacking.
''You see the bunkers are fenced, and then the whole thing is fenced again,'' Cochran said. ''Just outside you can see barracks and a rifle range for the guards. These would be troops of the 12th Main Directorate. Somebody's not going to walk off the street and get a Russian weapon out of this particular storage area.''
In the popular culture, nuclear terror begins with the theft of a nuclear weapon. Why build one when so many are lying around for the taking? And stealing tends to make better drama than engineering. Thus the stolen nuke has been a staple in the literature at least since 1961, when Ian Fleming published ''Thunderball,'' in which the malevolent Spectre (the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, a strictly mercenary and more technologically sophisticated precursor to al Qaeda) pilfers a pair of atom bombs from a crashed NATO aircraft. In the movie version of Tom Clancy's thriller ''The Sum of All Fears,'' due in theaters this week, neo-Nazis get their hands on a mislaid Israeli nuke, and viewers will get to see Baltimore blasted to oblivion.
Eight countries are known to have nuclear weapons -- the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. David Albright, a nuclear-weapons expert and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, points out that Pakistan's program in particular was built almost entirely through black markets and industrial espionage, aimed at circumventing Western export controls. Defeating the discipline of nuclear nonproliferation is ingrained in the culture. Disaffected individuals in Pakistan (which, remember, was intimate with the Taliban) would have no trouble finding the illicit channels or the rationalization for diverting materials, expertise -- even, conceivably, a warhead.
But the mall of horrors is Russia, because it currently maintains something like 15,000 of the world's (very roughly) 25,000 nuclear warheads, ranging in destructive power from about 500 kilotons, which could kill a million people, down to the one-kiloton land mines that would be enough to make much of Manhattan uninhabitable. Russia is a country with sloppy accounting, a disgruntled military, an audacious black market and indigenous terrorists.
There is anecdotal reason to worry. Gen. Igor Valynkin, commander of the 12th Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Russian military sector in charge of all nuclear weapons outside the Navy, said recently that twice in the past year terrorist groups were caught casing Russian weapons-storage facilities. But it's hard to know how seriously to take this. When I made the rounds of nuclear experts in Russia earlier this year, many were skeptical of these near-miss anecdotes, saying the security forces tend to exaggerate such incidents to dramatize their own prowess (the culprits are always caught) and enhance their budgets. On the whole, Russian and American military experts sound not very alarmed about the vulnerability of Russia's nuclear warheads. They say Russia takes these weapons quite seriously, accounts for them rigorously and guards them carefully. There is no confirmed case of a warhead being lost. Strategic warheads, including the 4,000 or so that President Bush and President Vladimir Putin have agreed to retire from service, tend to be stored in hard-to-reach places, fenced and heavily guarded, and their whereabouts are not advertised. The people who guard them are better paid and more closely vetted than most Russian soldiers.
Eugene E. Habiger, the four-star general who was in charge of American strategic weapons until 1998 and then ran nuclear antiterror programs for the Energy Department, visited several Russian weapons facilities in 1996 and 1997. He may be the only American who has actually entered a Russian bunker and inspected a warhead in situ. Habiger said he found the overall level of security comparable to American sites, although the Russians depend more on people than on technology to protect their nukes.
The image of armed terrorist commandos storming a nuclear bunker is cinematic, but it's far more plausible to think of an inside job. No observer of the unraveling Russian military has much trouble imagining that a group of military officers, disenchanted by the humiliation of serving a spent superpower, embittered by the wretched conditions in which they spend much of their military lives or merely greedy, might find a way to divert a warhead to a terrorist for the right price. (The Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, infamous for such ruthless exploits as taking an entire hospital hostage, once hinted that he had an opportunity to buy a nuclear warhead from the stockpile.) The anecdotal evidence of desperation in the military is plentiful and disquieting. Every year the Russian press provides stories like that of the 19-year-old sailor who went on a rampage aboard an Akula-class nuclear submarine, killing eight people and threatening to blow up the boat and its nuclear reactor; or the five soldiers at Russia's nuclear-weapons test site who killed a guard, took a hostage and tried to hijack an aircraft, or the officers who reportedly stole five assault helicopters, with their weapons pods, and tried to sell them to North Korea.
The Clinton administration found the danger of disgruntled nuclear caretakers worrisome enough that it considered building better housing for some officers in the nuclear rocket corps. Congress, noting that the United States does not build housing for its own officers, rejected the idea out of hand.
If a terrorist did get his hands on a nuclear warhead, he would still face the problem of setting it off. American warheads are rigged with multiple PAL's ( ''permissive action links'') -- codes and self-disabling devices designed to frustrate an unauthorized person from triggering the explosion. General Habiger says that when he examined Russian strategic weapons he found the level of protection comparable to our own. ''You'd have to literally break the weapon apart to get into the gut,'' he told me. ''I would submit that a more likely scenario is that there'd be an attempt to get hold of a warhead and not explode the warhead but extract the plutonium or highly enriched uranium.'' In other words, it's easier to take the fuel and build an entire weapon from scratch than it is to make one of these things go off.
Then again, Habiger is not an expert in physics or weapons design. Then again, the Russians would seem to have no obvious reason for misleading him about something that important. Then again, how many times have computer hackers hacked their way into encrypted computers we were assured were impregnable? Then again, how many computer hackers does al Qaeda have? This subject drives you in circles.
The most troublesome gap in the generally reassuring assessment of Russian weapons security is those tactical nuclear warheads -- smaller, short-range weapons like torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, mines. Although their smaller size and greater number makes them ideal candidates for theft, they have gotten far less attention simply because, unlike all of our long-range weapons, they happen not to be the subject of any formal treaty. The first President Bush reached an informal understanding with President Gorbachev and then with President Yeltsin that both sides would gather and destroy thousands of tactical nukes. But the agreement included no inventories of the stockpiles, no outside monitoring, no verification of any kind. It was one of those trust-me deals that, in the hindsight of Sept. 11, amount to an enormous black hole in our security.
Did I say earlier there are about 15,000 Russian warheads? That number includes, alongside the scrupulously counted strategic warheads in bombers, missiles and submarines, the commonly used estimate of 8,000 tactical warheads. But that figure is at best an educated guess. Other educated guesses of the tactical nukes in Russia go as low as 4,000 and as high as 30,000. We just don't know. We don't even know if the Russians know, since they are famous for doing things off the books. ''They'll tell you they've never lost a weapon,'' said Kenneth Luongo, director of a private antiproliferation group called the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council. ''The fact is, they don't know. And when you're talking about warhead counting, you don't want to miss even one.''
And where are they? Some are stored in reinforced concrete bunkers like the one at Zhukovka. Others are deployed. (When the submarine Kursk sank with its 118 crewmen in August 2000, the Americans' immediate fear was for its nuclear armaments. The standard load out for a submarine of that class includes a couple of nuclear torpedoes and possibly some nuclear depth charges.) Still others are supposed to be in the process of being dismantled under terms of various formal and informal arms-control agreements. Some are in transit. In short, we don't really know.
The other worrying thing about tactical nukes is that their anti-use devices are believed to be less sophisticated, because the weapons were designed to be employed in the battlefield. Some of the older systems are thought to have no permissive action links at all, so that setting one off would be about as complicated as hot-wiring a car.
Efforts to learn more about the state of tactical stockpiles have been frustrated by reluctance on both sides to let visitors in. Viktor Mikhailov, who ran the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy until 1998 with a famous scorn for America's nonproliferation concerns, still insists that the United States programs to protect Russian nuclear weapons and material mask a secret agenda of intelligence-gathering. Americans, in turn, sometimes balk at reciprocal access, on the grounds that we are the ones paying the bills for all these safety upgrades, said the former Senator Sam Nunn, co-author of the main American program for securing Russian nukes, called Nunn-Lugar.
''We have to decide if we want the Russians to be transparent -- I'd call it cradle-to-grave transparency with nuclear material and inventories and so forth,'' Nunn told me. ''Then we have to open up more ourselves. This is a big psychological breakthrough we're talking about here, both for them and for us.''
The Garage Bomb One of the more interesting facts about the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima is that it had never been tested. All of those spectral images of nuclear coronas brightening the desert of New Mexico -- those were to perfect the more complicated plutonium device that was dropped on Nagasaki. ''Little Boy,'' the Hiroshima bomb, was a rudimentary gunlike device that shot one projectile of highly enriched uranium into another, creating a critical mass that exploded. The mechanics were so simple that few doubted it would work, so the first experiment was in the sky over Japan.
The closest thing to a consensus I heard among those who study nuclear terror was this: building a nuclear bomb is easier than you think, probably easier than stealing one. In the rejuvenated effort to prevent a terrorist from striking a nuclear blow, this is where most of the attention and money are focused.
A nuclear explosion of any kind ''is not a sort of high-probability thing,'' said a White House official who follows the subject closely. ''But getting your hands on enough fissile material to build an improvised nuclear device, to my mind, is the least improbable of them all, and particularly if that material is highly enriched uranium in metallic form. Then I'm really worried. That's the one.''
To build a nuclear explosive you need material capable of explosive nuclear fission, you need expertise, you need some equipment, and you need a way to deliver it.
Delivering it to the target is, by most reckoning, the simplest part. People in the field generally scoff at the mythologized suitcase bomb; instead they talk of a ''conex bomb,'' using the name of those shack-size steel containers that bring most cargo into the United States. Two thousand containers enter America every hour, on trucks and trains and especially on ships sailing into more than 300 American ports. Fewer than 2 percent are cracked open for inspection, and the great majority never pass through an X-ray machine. Containers delivered to upriver ports like St. Louis or Chicago pass many miles of potential targets before they even reach customs.
''How do you protect against that?'' mused Habiger, the former chief of our nuclear arsenal. ''You can't. That's scary. That's very, very scary. You set one of those off in Philadelphia, in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and you're going to kill tens of thousands of people, if not more.'' Habiger's view is ''It's not a matter of if; it's a matter of when'' -- which may explain why he now lives in San Antonio.
The Homeland Security office has installed a plan to refocus inspections, making sure the 2 percent of containers that get inspected are those without a clear, verified itinerary. Detectors will be put into place at ports and other checkpoints. This is good, but it hardly represents an ironclad defense. The detection devices are a long way from being reliable. (Inconveniently, the most feared bomb component, uranium, is one of the hardest radioactive substances to detect because it does not emit a lot of radiation prior to fission.) The best way to stop nuclear terror, therefore, is to keep the weapons out of terrorist hands in the first place.
The basic know-how of atom-bomb-building is half a century old, and adequate recipes have cropped up in physics term papers and high school science projects. The simplest design entails taking a lump of highly enriched uranium, about the size of a cantaloupe, and firing it down a big gun barrel into a second lump. Theodore Taylor, the nuclear physicist who designed both the smallest and the largest American nuclear-fission warheads before becoming a remorseful opponent of all things nuclear, told me he recently looked up ''atomic bomb'' in the World Book Encyclopedia in the upstate New York nursing home where he now lives, and he found enough basic information to get a careful reader started. ''It's accessible all over the place,'' he said. ''I don't mean just the basic principles. The sizes, specifications, things that work.''
Most of the people who talk about the ease of assembling a nuclear weapon, of course, have never actually built one. The most authoritative assessment I found was a paper, ''Can Terrorists Build Nuclear Weapons?'' written in 1986 by five experienced nuke-makers from the Los Alamos weapons laboratory. I was relieved to learn that fabricating a nuclear weapon is not something a lone madman -- even a lone genius -- is likely to pull off in his hobby room. The paper explained that it would require a team with knowledge of ''the physical, chemical and metallurgical properties of the various materials to be used, as well as characteristics affecting their fabrication; neutronic properties; radiation effects, both nuclear and biological; technology concerning high explosives and/or chemical propellants; some hydrodynamics; electrical circuitry; and others.'' Many of these skills are more difficult to acquire than, say, the ability to aim a jumbo jet.
The schemers would also need specialized equipment to form the uranium, which is usually in powdered form, into metal, to cast it and machine it to fit the device. That effort would entail months of preparation, increasing the risk of detection, and it would require elaborate safeguards to prevent a mishap that, as the paper dryly put it, would ''bring the operation to a close.''
Still, the experts concluded, the answer to the question posed in the title, while qualified, was ''Yes, they can.''
David Albright, who worked as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, says Saddam Hussein's unsuccessful crash program to build a nuclear weapon in 1990 illustrates how a single bad decision can mean a huge setback. Iraq had extracted highly enriched uranium from research-reactor fuel and had, maybe, barely enough for a bomb. But the manager in charge of casting the metal was so afraid the stuff would spill or get contaminated that he decided to melt it in tiny batches. As a result, so much of the uranium was wasted that he ended up with too little for a bomb.
''You need good managers and organizational people to put the elements together,'' Albright said. ''If you do a straight-line extrapolation, terrorists will all get nuclear weapons. But they make mistakes.''
On the other hand, many experts underestimate the prospect of a do-it-yourself bomb because they are thinking too professionally. All of our experience with these weapons is that the people who make them (states, in other words) want them to be safe, reliable, predictable and efficient. Weapons for the American arsenal are designed to survive a trip around the globe in a missile, to be accident-proof, to produce a precisely specified blast.
But there are many corners you can cut if you are content with a big, ugly, inefficient device that would make a spectacular impression. If your bomb doesn't need to fit in a suitcase (and why should it?) or to endure the stress of a missile launch; if you don't care whether the explosive power realizes its full potential; if you're willing to accept some risk that the thing might go off at the wrong time or might not go off at all, then the job of building it is immeasurably simplified.
''As you get smarter, you realize you can get by with less,'' Albright said. ''You can do it in facilities that look like barns, garages, with simple machine tools. You can do it with 10 to 15 people, not all Ph.D.'s, but some engineers, technicians. Our judgment is that a gun-type device is well within the capability of a terrorist organization.''
All the technological challenges are greatly simplified if terrorists are in league with a country -- a place with an infrastructure. A state is much better suited to hire expertise (like dispirited scientists from decommissioned nuclear installations in the old Soviet Union) or to send its own scientists for M.I.T. degrees.
Thus Tom Cochran said his greatest fear is what you might call a bespoke nuke -- terrorists stealing a quantity of weapons-grade uranium and taking it to Iraq or Iran or Libya, letting the scientists and engineers there fashion it into an elementary weapon and then taking it away for a delivery that would have no return address.
That leaves one big obstacle to the terrorist nuke-maker: the fissile material itself.
To be reasonably sure of a nuclear explosion, allowing for some material being lost in the manufacturing process, you need roughly 50 kilograms -- 110 pounds -- of highly enriched uranium. (For a weapon, more than 90 percent of the material should consist of the very unstable uranium-235 isotope.) Tom Cochran, the master of visual aids, has 15 pounds of depleted uranium that he keeps in a Coke can; an eight-pack would be plenty to build a bomb.
The world is awash in the stuff. Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist and arms-control advocate, has calculated that between 1,300 and 2,100 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium exists -- at the low end, enough for 26,000 rough-hewed bombs. The largest stockpile is in Russia, which Senator Joseph Biden calls ''the candy store of candy stores.''
Until a decade ago, Russian officials say, no one worried much about the safety of this material. Viktor Mikhailov, who ran the atomic energy ministry and now presides over an affiliated research institute, concedes there were glaring lapses.
''The safety of nuclear materials was always on our minds, but the focus was on intruders,'' he said. ''The system had never taken account of the possibility that these carefully screened people in the nuclear sphere could themselves represent a danger. The system was not designed to prevent a danger from within.''
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in the early 90's, a few frightening cases of nuclear materials popping up on the black market.
If you add up all the reported attempts to sell highly enriched uranium or plutonium, even including those that have the scent of security-agency hype and those where the material was of uncertain quality, the total amount of material still falls short of what a bomb-maker would need to construct a single explosive.
But Yuri G. Volodin, the chief of safeguards at Gosatomnadzor, the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, told me his inspectors still discover one or two instances of attempted theft a year, along with dozens of violations of the regulations for storing and securing nuclear material. And as he readily concedes: ''These are the detected cases. We can't talk about the cases we don't know.'' Alexander Pikayev, a former aide to the Defense Committee of the Russian Duma, said: ''The vast majority of installations now have fences. But you know Russians. If you walk along the perimeter, you can see a hole in the fence, because the employees want to come and go freely.''
The bulk of American investment in nuclear safety goes to lock the stuff up at the source. That is clearly the right priority. Other programs are devoted to blending down the highly enriched uranium to a diluted product unsuitable for weapons but good as reactor fuel. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, financed by Ted Turner and led by Nunn, is studying ways to double the rate of this diluting process.
Still, after 10 years of American subsidies, only 41 percent of Russia's weapon-usable material has been secured, according to the United States Department of Energy. Russian officials said they can't even be sure how much exists, in part because the managers of nuclear facilities, like everyone else in the Soviet industrial complex, learned to cook their books. So the barn door is still pretty seriously ajar. We don't know whether any horses have gotten out.
And it is not the only barn. William C. Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and an expert in nuclear security in the former Soviet states, said the American focus on Russia has neglected other locations that could be tempting targets for a terrorist seeking bomb-making material. There is, for example, a bomb's worth of weapons-grade uranium at a site in Belarus, a country with an erratic president and an anti-American orientation. There is enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb or two in Kharkiv, in Ukraine. Outside of Belgrade, in a research reactor at Vinca, sits sufficient material for a bomb -- and there it sat while NATO was bombarding the area.
''We need to avoid the notion that because the most material is in Russia, that's where we should direct all of our effort,'' Potter said. ''It's like assuming the bank robber will target Fort Knox because that's where the most gold is. The bank robber goes where the gold is most accessible.''
Weapons of Mass Disruption The first and, so far, only consummated act of nuclear terrorism took place in Moscow in 1995, and it was scarcely memorable. Chechen rebels obtained a canister of cesium, possibly from a hospital they had commandeered a few months before. They hid it in a Moscow park famed for its weekend flea market and called the press. No one was hurt. Authorities treated the incident discreetly, and a surge of panic quickly passed.
The story came up in virtually every conversation I had in Russia about nuclear terror, usually to illustrate that even without splitting atoms and making mushroom clouds a terrorist could use radioactivity -- and the fear of it -- as a potent weapon.
The idea that you could make a fantastic weapon out of radioactive material without actually producing a nuclear bang has been around since the infancy of nuclear weaponry. During World War II, American scientists in the Manhattan Project worried that the Germans would rain radioactive material on our troops storming the beaches on D-Day. Robert S. Norris, the biographer of the Manhattan Project director, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, told me that the United States took this threat seriously enough to outfit some of the D-Day soldiers with Geiger counters.
No country today includes radiological weapons in its armories. But radiation's limitations as a military tool -- its tendency to drift afield with unplanned consequences, its long-term rather than short-term lethality -- would not necessarily count against it in the mind of a terrorist. If your aim is to instill fear, radiation is anthrax-plus. And unlike the fabrication of a nuclear explosive, this is terror within the means of a soloist.
That is why, if you polled the universe of people paid to worry about weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D., in the jargon), you would find a general agreement that this is probably the first thing we'll see. ''If there is a W.M.D. attack in the next year, it's likely to be a radiological attack,'' said Rose Gottemoeller, who handled Russian nuclear safety in the Clinton administration and now follows the subject for the Carnegie Endowment. The radioactive heart of a dirty bomb could be spent fuel from a nuclear reactor or isotopes separated out in the process of refining nuclear fuel. These materials are many times more abundant and much, much less protected than the high-grade stuff suitable for bombs. Since Sept.11, Russian officials have begun lobbying hard to expand the program of American aid to include protection of these lower-grade materials, and the Bush administration has earmarked a few million dollars to study the problem. But the fact is that radioactive material suitable for terrorist attacks is so widely available that there is little hope of controlling it all.
The guts of a dirty bomb could be cobalt-60, which is readily available in hospitals for use in radiation therapy and in food processing to kill the bacteria in fruits and vegetables. It could be cesium-137, commonly used in medical gauges and radiotherapy machines. It could be americium, an isotope that behaves a lot like plutonium and is used in smoke detectors and in oil prospecting. It could be plutonium, which exists in many research laboratories in America. If you trust the security of those American labs, pause and reflect that the investigation into the great anthrax scare seems to be focused on disaffected American scientists.
Back in 1974, Theodore Taylor and Mason Willrich, in a book on the dangers of nuclear theft, examined things a terrorist might do if he got his hands on 100 grams of plutonium -- a thimble-size amount. They calculated that a killer who dissolved it, made an aerosol and introduced it into the ventilation system of an office building could deliver a lethal dose to the entire floor area of a large skyscraper. But plutonium dispersed outdoors in the open air, they estimated, would be far less effective. It would blow away in a gentle wind.
The Federation of American Scientists recently mapped out for a Congressional hearing the consequences of various homemade dirty bombs detonated in New York or Washington. For example, a bomb made with a single footlong pencil of cobalt from a food irradiation plant and just 10 pounds of TNT and detonated at Union Square in a light wind would send a plume of radiation drifting across three states. Much of Manhattan would be as contaminated as the permanently closed area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Anyone living in Manhattan would have at least a 1-in-100 chance of dying from cancer caused by the radiation. An area reaching deep into the Hudson Valley would, under current Environmental Protection Agency standards, have to be decontaminated or destroyed.
Frank von Hippel, the Princeton physicist, has reviewed the data, and he pointed out that this is a bit less alarming than it sounds. ''Your probability of dying of cancer in your lifetime is already about 20 percent,'' he said. ''This would increase it to 20.1 percent. Would you abandon a city for that? I doubt it.''
Indeed, some large portion of our fear of radiation is irrational. And yet the fact that it's all in your mind is little consolation if it's also in the minds of a large, panicky population. If the actual effect of a radiation bomb is that people clog the bridges out of town, swarm the hospitals and refuse to return to live and work in a contaminated place, then the impact is a good deal more than psychological. To this day, there is bitter debate about the actual health toll from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. There are researchers who claim that the people who evacuated are actually in worse health over all from the trauma of relocation, than those who stayed put and marinated in the residual radiation. But the fact is, large swaths of developed land around the Chernobyl site still lie abandoned, much of it bulldozed down to the subsoil. The Hart Senate Office Building was closed for three months by what was, in hindsight, our society's inclination to err on the side of alarm.
There are measures the government can take to diminish the dangers of a radiological weapon, and many of them are getting more serious consideration. The Bush administration has taken a lively new interest in radiation-detection devices that might catch dirty-bomb materials in transit. A White House official told me the administration's judgment is that protecting the raw materials of radiological terror is worth doing, but not at the expense of more catastrophic threats.
''It's all over,'' he said. ''It's not a winning proposition to say you can just lock all that up. And then, a bomb is pretty darn easy to make. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure about fertilizer and diesel fuel.'' A big fertilizer bomb of the type Timothy McVeigh used to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City, spiced with a dose of cobalt or cesium, would not tax the skills of a determined terrorist.
''It's likely to happen, I think, in our lifetime,'' the official said. ''And it'll be like Oklahoma City plus the Hart Office Building. Which is real bad, but it ain't the World Trade Center.''
The Peril of Power Plants Every eight years or so the security guards at each of the country's 103 nuclear power stations and at national weapons labs can expect to be attacked by federal agents armed with laser-tag rifles. These mock terror exercises are played according to elaborate rules, called the ''design basis threat,'' that in the view of skeptics favor the defense. The attack teams can include no more than three commandos. The largest vehicle they are permitted is an S.U.V. They are allowed to have an accomplice inside the plant, but only one. They are not allowed to improvise. (The mock assailants at one Department of Energy lab were ruled out of order because they commandeered a wheelbarrow to cart off a load of dummy plutonium.) The mock attacks are actually announced in advance. Even playing by these rules, the attackers manage with some regularity to penetrate to the heart of a nuclear plant and damage the core. Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and something of a scourge of the nuclear power industry, has recently identified a number of shortcomings in the safeguards, including, apparently, lax standards for clearing workers hired at power plants.
One of the most glaring lapses, which nuclear regulators concede and have promised to fix, is that the design basis threat does not contemplate the possibility of a hijacker commandeering an airplane and diving it into a reactor. In fact, the protections currently in place don't consider the possibility that the terrorist might be willing, even eager, to die in the act. The government assumes the culprits would be caught while trying to get away.
A nuclear power plant is essentially a great inferno of decaying radioactive material, kept under control by coolant. Turning this device into a terrorist weapon would require cutting off the coolant so the atomic furnace rages out of control and, equally important, getting the radioactive matter to disperse by an explosion or fire. (At Three Mile Island, the coolant was cut off and the reactor core melted down, generating vast quantities of radiation. But the thick walls of the containment building kept the contaminant from being released, so no one died.)
One way to accomplish both goals might be to fly a large jetliner into the fortified building that holds the reactor. Some experts say a jet engine would stand a good chance of bursting the containment vessel, and the sheer force of the crash might disable the cooling system -- rupturing the pipes and cutting off electricity that pumps the water through the core. Before nearby residents had begun to evacuate, you could have a meltdown that would spew a volcano of radioactive isotopes into the air, causing fatal radiation sickness for those exposed to high doses and raising lifetime cancer rates for miles around.
This sort of attack is not as easy, by a long shot, as hitting the World Trade Center. The reactor is a small, low-lying target, often nestled near the conspicuous cooling towers, which could be destroyed without great harm. The reactor is encased in reinforced concrete several feet thick, probably enough, the industry contends, to withstand a crash. The pilot would have to be quite a marksman, and somewhat lucky. A high wind would disperse the fumes before they did great damage.
Invading a plant to produce a meltdown, even given the record of those mock attacks, would be more complicated, because law enforcement from many miles around would be on the place quickly, and because breaching the containment vessel is harder from within. Either invaders or a kamikaze attacker could instead target the more poorly protected cooling ponds, where used plutonium sits, encased in great rods of zirconium alloy. This kind of sabotage would take longer to generate radiation and would be far less lethal.
Discussion of this kind of potential radiological terrorism is colored by passionate disagreements over nuclear power itself. Thus the nuclear industry and its rather tame regulators sometimes sound dismissive about the vulnerability of the plants (although less so since Sept.11), while those who regard nuclear power as inherently evil tend to overstate the risks. It is hard to sort fact from fear-mongering.
Nuclear regulators and the industry grumpily concede that Sept. 11 requires a new estimate of their defenses, and under prodding from Congress they are redrafting the so-called design basis threat, the one plants are required to defend against. A few members of Congress have proposed installing ground-to-air missiles at nuclear plants, which most experts think is a recipe for a disastrous mishap.
''Probably the only way to protect against someone flying an aircraft into a nuclear power plant,'' said Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, ''is to keep hijackers out of cockpits.''
Being Afraid For those who were absorbed by the subject of nuclear terror before it became fashionable, the months since the terror attacks have been, paradoxically, a time of vindication. President Bush, whose first budget cut $100 million from the programs to protect Russian weapons and material (never a popular program among conservative Republicans), has become a convert. The administration has made nuclear terror a priority, and it is getting plenty of goading to keep it one. You can argue with their priorities and their budgets, but it's hard to accuse anyone of indifference. And resistance -- from scientists who don't want security measures to impede their access to nuclear research materials, from generals and counterintelligence officials uneasy about having their bunkers inspected, from nuclear regulators who worry about the cost of nuclear power, from conservatives who don't want to subsidize the Russians to do much of anything -- has become harder to sustain. Intelligence gathering on nuclear material has been abysmal, but it is now being upgraded; it is a hot topic at meetings between American and foreign intelligence services, and we can expect more numerous and more sophisticated sting operations aimed at disrupting the black market for nuclear materials. Putin, too, has taken notice. Just before leaving to meet Bush in Crawford, Tex., in November, he summoned the head of the atomic energy ministry to the Kremlin on a Saturday to discuss nuclear security. The subject is now on the regular agenda when Bush and Putin talk.
These efforts can reduce the danger but they cannot neutralize the fear, particularly after we have been so vividly reminded of the hostility some of the world feels for us, and of our vulnerability.
Fear is personal. My own -- in part, because it's the one I grew up with, the one that made me shiver through the Cuban missile crisis and ''On the Beach'' -- is the horrible magic of nuclear fission. A dirty bomb or an assault on a nuclear power station, ghastly as that would be, feels to me within the range of what we have survived. As the White House official I spoke with said, it's basically Oklahoma City plus the Hart Office Building. A nuclear explosion is in a different realm of fears and would test the country in ways we can scarcely imagine.
As I neared the end of this assignment, I asked Matthew McKinzie, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, to run a computer model of a one-kiloton nuclear explosion in Times Square, half a block from my office, on a nice spring workday. By the standards of serious nuclear weaponry, one kiloton is a junk bomb, hardly worthy of respect, a fifteenth the power of the bomb over Hiroshima.
A couple of days later he e-mailed me the results, which I combined with estimates of office workers and tourist traffic in the area. The blast and searing heat would gut buildings for a block in every direction, incinerating pedestrians and crushing people at their desks. Let's say 20,000 dead in a matter of seconds. Beyond this, to a distance of more than a quarter mile, anyone directly exposed to the fireball would die a gruesome death from radiation sickness within a day -- anyone, that is, who survived the third-degree burns. This larger circle would be populated by about a quarter million people on a workday. Half a mile from the explosion, up at Rockefeller Center and down at Macy's, unshielded onlookers would expect a slower death from radiation. A mushroom cloud of irradiated debris would blossom more than two miles into the air, and then, 40 minutes later, highly lethal fallout would begin drifting back to earth, showering injured survivors and dooming rescue workers. The poison would ride for 5 or 10 miles on the prevailing winds, deep into the Bronx or Queens or New Jersey.
A terrorist who pulls off even such a small-bore nuclear explosion will take us to a whole different territory of dread from Sept. 11. It is the event that preoccupies those who think about this for a living, a category I seem to have joined.
''I think they're going to try,'' said the physicist David Albright. ''I'm an optimist at heart. I think we can catch them in time. If one goes off, I think we will survive. But we won't be the same. It will affect us in a fundamental way. And not for the better.''
Bill Keller is a Times columnist and a senior writer for the magazine.
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Backlight - Secretary of State George C. Marshall, 1947
Sunday, May 26, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2497-2002May24.html
http://a188.g.akamaitech.net/f/188/920/1h/www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I4144-2002May24
For a man who already had extraordinary accomplishments in life, 1947 was proving to be a watershed year for Secretary of State George C. Marshall, center. In June, his remarks to Harvard's graduating class outlined the Marshall Plan -- a model to strengthen Western Europe's economic superstructure. Three months later, Marshall, along with Warren R. Austin, left, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, and Senate President Arthur H. Vandenberg, right, attended a conference of 19 Western Hemisphere nations in Rio de Janeiro. Here, they've just returned to Washington. The next evening, Marshall and Vandenberg took to the radio waves to discuss the inter-American defense treaty that came out of the conference. The treaty stated that an armed attack against any member state would be considered an attack against all member states. Concluding, Marshall called it "one constructive international development in a world sadly in need of such encouragement."
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Putin: 'Great Progress' in Nuke Talks
May 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Putin.html
PUSHKIN, Russia (AP) -- Looking both relieved and relaxed, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that he and President Bush made ``great progress'' toward reducing Cold War nuclear threats during their recent summit.
Putin also said he hoped his talks with Bush would help remove obstacles to further cooperation, such as ratifying the 1996 treaty banning nuclear tests and repealing the 1970s-era Jackson-Vanik law restricting U.S.-Russia trade.
``We have the right to fully consider this visit a success,'' Putin said.
Putin stressed the importance of the agreement signed in the Kremlin on Friday. It requires each country to cut their nuclear arsenals from current levels of 6,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200.
``That we reached agreement on the key issues and that we signed these documents, this is great progress,'' said Putin, who insisted on a formal treaty.
Putin said the treaty ``gives the right, true signal for the direction of cooperation,'' including containing threats from nations that aspire to have nuclear weapons.
Putin offered his assessment of the summit at the opulent, 18th-century Tsarskoye Selo palace just outside St. Petersburg, which once was the summer residence for Russia's royals.
Putin spoke moments after Air Force One, carrying Bush, flew above the vast grounds where the Russian president later hosted Finnish President Tarja Halonen. Bush headed to France to meet with French President Jacques Chirac.
Demonstrating that he appears to have greatly improved his English, Putin waved at one of his aides to refrain from translating the treaty question but answered in Russian.
Putin noted that when summit preparations began a year ago Washington and Moscow were at odds over nuclear weapons reductions and other issues.
``On the key issues our positions were either very far apart or were exactly opposite,'' Putin said.
The agreement to reduce nuclear arsenals formed a good basis for further progress, Putin said.
Turning to economics, Putin expressed disappointment that Congress has not repealed the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which links privileges coveted by Moscow to the right of Jews to emigrate. Bush has urged its repeal.
``Of course, we are not thrilled that this didn't happen,'' Putin said.
However, Putin said he and Bush did a lot to ``create the basis for movement'' to remove what Russia considers a serious irritation.
Russia also hopes the United States soon will declare Russia a ``market economy,'' a designation important for its entry into the World Trade Organization, which sets and polices world trade rules, and for attracting investment.
Putin was satisfied the United States was seriously considering Russia's primary concerns. He has been accused by opponents of repeatedly giving far too much to the United States on key issues without getting much in return.
``Our American partners pay attention to our concerns and respect them,'' Putin said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- maryland
Calvert Seeks Views On Budget Increases
Additions Benefit Pay, Schools, Sheriff
By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 26, 2002; Page SM01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7718-2002May24.html
The Calvert County commissioners will hear this week what the public thinks of their proposed $140.2 million county operating budget for fiscal 2003.
The spending plan, which will cover the 12-month period beginning July 1, does not call for a local tax increase. It will be the subject of a public hearing beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Calvert Pines Senior Center in Prince Frederick....
The county will once again benefit from state reimbursements -- an anticipated $6.1 million -- for revenues lost from its largest taxpayer, Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, because of state deregulation of electric utilities, according to Shannon.
-------- new york
Fuel Rods and Brass Tacks
New York Times
May 26, 2002
By KIRK JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/nyregion/26INDI.html
BUCHANAN, N.Y., May 23 - For many years, the argument over the Indian Point nuclear power plant here in New York City's northern suburbs was one of the great evergreens of Northeastern environmentalism. It could always be counted on and it never really changed. The positions on both sides, repeated by rote for decades, became a liturgy that was sure to inflame passions without much risk of anything actually happening as a result.
One side said that the plant was unsafe because residents could not be easily evacuated in the event of an emergency, and that its owners were incompetent. The other side said that the reactors were vital to the power grid and that opponents were overwrought and emotional. September's terrorist attacks added a new note to the chorus, but left the strident rhetoric largely intact.
That dynamic is changing. Now, a conversation about Indian Point is likely to drift toward the economic fallout from Enron. People who oppose the plant have also begun to lay out specific horse trades they might be willing to make. Some environmentalists say, for instance, that more air pollution and so-called greenhouse gas emissions, neither of which is a big issue in the case of nuclear power, would be a reasonable price if closing Indian Point meant that the region's old oil-burning plants - many considered to be on their last legs - had to keep running. Both sides are grinding out numbers and studies as never before.
Other new variables have entered the picture as well, like the proposed Millennium Pipeline that would carry natural gas into the New York City area. Many residents in this part of New York vehemently oppose the pipeline, which is stalled by environmental and safety concerns. But both sides in the new plant debate concede that if nuclear power were taken out of the region's mix of energy-making fuels, natural gas would become more crucial than ever.
What has happened, energy experts say, is that the members of the Indian Point debate team - supporters and opponents alike - have been forced, in a way, to grow up. Although most environmentalists and industry officials say the odds are still long that the plant will close any time soon, playing "what if" is no longer the purely theoretical parlor game it once was, and that has made all the difference. Ideology and philosophy are out; nuts and bolts and real-world implications are in.
"When you begin to think through the actual closing of a plant, a lot of issues come up," said Robert H. Socolow, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, who studies energy issues. "Some are nightmarish. They're all difficult."
Certainly, security is still the driving force, especially in the last few weeks since the Bush administration issued a warning about a possible terrorist strike this summer on an American nuclear plant. And the shift toward practical terms and arguments does not make the positions any less sharp or passionately held.
But it does alter the terrain. From its once-narrow base as an environmental issue, the question of nuclear power in New York City's backyard has expanded to envelop almost every aspect of how energy is bought, sold and distributed. Any discussion of electricity economics, energy conservation - even the predictions about the length of the recession, which has reduced energy demand since fall - eventually turns to Indian Point's twin brown domes on the banks of the Hudson River, 30 miles north of the George Washington Bridge.
Some of these new questions are huge and profound: do deregulated energy markets really work, and how exactly would they deal with something like the closing of Indian Point? Is there a threshold at which the potentially huge costs of decommissioning the plant would become too high for society, or the region's economy, to bear?
Other questions are small and profound: should the added security costs needed to operate a nuclear plant be borne by the public or the industry? And if high security is a permanent new cost of business, is it still an economically efficient way to make electricity?
"Things are part of the mix now that never were before," said Jim Steets, a spokesman for the Entergy Corporation, the company based in New Orleans that owns and operates Indian Point.
Among the most novel of the arguments in the new Indian Point playbook is that closing the plant might actually fix some things that are wrong with New York's electricity system, most of which have nothing at all to do with terrorist threats.
One big issue in electricity economics right now is a money drought. Since the collapse of Enron last year, investors who are still bullish on power plant investments in New York have become about as hard to find as Manhattan parking spaces. Seven plants have received regulatory approval around the state, but only one is under construction and no one is sure how many will go forward. The answer, some people say, is to close Indian Point.
Removing 2,000 megawatts from the system, plant opponents say - enough to power about two million average homes - would crimp the regional electricity supply and send a signal to Wall Street, which would see an opportunity to make money and so throw open the money spigot. The plants on the drawing board would be built and Indian Point's electricity gap, they say, would be resolved. Case closed.
"The loss of Indian Point Units 2 and 3 would allow market forces to essentially trump any Enron effect," said Alex Matthiessen, the executive director of Riverkeeper Inc., a nonprofit conservation group based in Garrison, N.Y., less than 10 miles from the plant. "It's essentially a supply-and-demand question."
Other experts say that such a mechanism might in fact work, as odd as it sounds, but that it would be a far more wrenching process than Mr. Matthiessen and other advocates suggest because the triggering event would not be the plant's closing, but the higher electricity prices that would result. Closing alone would not be enough.
"Price is the only signal the market understands," said Dr. Rajat K. Deb, the president of LCG Consulting, an energy advisory firm based in Los Altos, Calif. Dr. Deb said that high prices would also have to remain high for a long time to convince investors that they were not just a blip. "But then the question becomes whether that is politically sustainable when it starts hurting the economy and people lose jobs," he said.
Underlying all the possible plans for Indian Point is the question of time. Mr. Steets at Entergy said if the plant were to be shut down tomorrow, at least five years of cooling would be required before the radioactive fuel could be safely moved. During that time - if not longer because of the uncertainties about long-term storage - the plant would contribute no electricity, but might still be just as much of a terrorist target because of the fuel inside, so little would actually be gained, he said.
Plant opponents, on the other hand, say that there is in New York a window of opportunity that might not come again. A year ago, they say, when the news was filled with talk about the possibility of a California-style energy crisis descending on New York, the idea of taking Indian Point off-line would have been unthinkable. Then new emergency supplies were built in the city, and a recession, compounded by the World Trade Center attack, reduced demand. It's that temporary slack period, they argue, that must be seized.
The other trick, people involved in the debate say, is to calculate the risks in the new Indian Point equation - specifically, which factors can be controlled and which cannot. If the air got dirtier from burning more oil or coal, what would that mean?
"There are in fact significant health risks from coal plant emissions - they're chronic in nature, and they're serious, but nowhere near as serious as if Indian Point was attacked," said Daniel Rosenblum, a senior lawyer at the Pace Law School Energy Project, an advocacy group that works for sustainable energy and conservation. "And we can do things about coal plant emissions."
-------- south carolina
Feds Say S.C. Can't Stop Plutonium
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13696-2002May26?language=printer
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Plutonium-Standoff.html
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- Attorneys for the U.S. Energy Department say South Carolina's threats to block federal plutonium shipments to the agency's Savannah River Site facility are unconstitutional.
In response to a lawsuit filed by Gov. Jim Hodges, the attorneys argued in court papers released Friday that the governor's plan to use a blockade to keep the nuclear material out of his state would violate the federal government's right to regulate interstate commerce.
Courtney Owings, a spokeswoman for Hodges, said the governor's attorneys were still looking over the filing and had no immediate response.
In his motion seeking a temporary restraining order against the plutonium shipments, Hodges has argued to U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie that the Energy Department has violated environmental and due-process laws.
Currie is scheduled to hear arguments June 13, two days before the Energy Department could begin making the shipments of weapons-grade surplus plutonium from the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado.
The plutonium is to be shipped to the Savannah River Site, converted and then shipped out of state.
Hodges has sued to stop the shipments until the Energy Department and the state reach an agreement about how the plutonium will be processed and when it will leave the state.
Hodges also questioned the department's safe-transport capabilities. Last week, he asked Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to put any movement plans on hold.
The Energy Department contends that the shipments to South Carolina are essential to meeting its goal of cleaning up and closing the Rocky Flats site by 2006.
-------- us politics
Debate on Arafat Stalls U.S. Policy, Aides to Bush Say
New York Times
May 26, 2002
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/international/middleeast/26ARAF.html
WASHINGTON, May 25 - An intense debate among President Bush and his top advisers over whether to press for the removal of Yasir Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian Authority has effectively frozen the nation's Middle East policy, according to some administration officials.
It has also prompted George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to delay his mission to the region until the policy is worked out.
For more than two weeks, Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have said that Mr. Tenet will go to the Middle East to work to restructure Palestinian security forces after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank. But no date was set, and until now, there was no coherent explanation for the delay.
In the meantime, the White House has decided to send William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, to the region. He is expected to leave early next week for Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Word of the debate in the White House has reached Mr. Arafat's senior advisers, one of whom has been in Washington for two weeks arguing Mr. Arafat's case in the State Department and the Pentagon. In an unusual meeting about a week ago, that adviser, Muhammad Rashid, debated the "centrality" of Mr. Arafat's role with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has been one of the critics of Mr. Arafat in the administration.
President Bush tried to settle the issue of Mr. Arafat's leadership in two meetings of his principal advisers before he left for Moscow on Wednesday, administration officials said, and Mr. Bush took part in the second meeting. But lengthy discussions failed to resolve the question of whether the United States is prepared to accept Mr. Arafat based on his pledge to undertake extensive changes, intended to tighten security, end corruption and broaden the Palestinian leadership.
At the same time, given the current political ferment in the Palestinian territories that has given rise to strong criticism of Mr. Arafat among Palestinians, the delay gives the administration time to assess the political challenges that Mr. Arafat is beginning to face at home, officials said.
"The Americans are watching the situation," said a senior Arab foreign policy adviser whose government has been in close contact with Secretary Powell. "And we do not feel they are off course. The most important thing going on right now is the dialogue among the Palestinians themselves.
"Arafat is admitting mistakes and he is reassessing how to be a better Arafat if he wants to stay," the adviser said.
But one pro-Israeli lobbyist who has been tracking the administration's debate said that Mr. Bush and his advisers "have got themselves tied in a knot."
Mr. Bush is described as being inclined to work with Mr. Arafat, in collaboration with moderate Arab leaders who put pressure on him to make changes. But Mr. Bush has repeatedly spoken of Mr. Arafat's need to fulfill the expectations of Western and moderate Arab leaders.
On Tuesday, before leaving on his trip, Mr. Bush spoke with a number of European reporters and said that Mr. Arafat had "had chance after chance, and by failing to lead, he has really let the Palestinians down." Later he said, "Somebody said, `Has he earned your respect?' I said, `He never had my respect, because he let his people down.' "
The debate in the Bush administration has divided along familiar lines, officials said, with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney pressing for a policy that would undermine Mr. Arafat's control over the Palestinian Authority and pave the way for a change in leadership.
Secretary Powell and Mr. Tenet are said to argue that there is no alternative to Mr. Arafat. They advocate keeping him under pressure to deliver on his pledges of change. According to this view, political and economic reconstruction of the Palestinian Authority would set the stage for statehood and the gradual transition to broader leadership.
The notion of working with Mr. Arafat was implicit in the agreement reached between Mr. Bush and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah at the end of April at the president's ranch in Texas. They discussed a division of labor whereby Arab leaders would bring pressure on Mr. Arafat to undertake fundamental security and political changes, while Mr. Bush would bring pressure on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel to negotiate with an overhauled Palestinian leadership for new security arrangements and the framework to create a Palestinian state.
One Saudi political adviser said that the prince felt he had brought Mr. Arafat around, but that Mr. Bush had yet to bring Mr. Sharon around.
"The crown prince feels that he has delivered his guy, and now the president needs to deliver his guy," the adviser said. "Arafat has made his commitment on political and security reforms, and we want to hold his feet to the fire, but unless the process moves forward, we could lose the momentum and that could spell disaster."
After the meeting in Texas, Mr. Sharon came to Washington seeking to discredit Mr. Arafat with evidence linking him to groups that carried out suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. After Mr. Sharon's departure, a senior Israeli military official came to Washington with the message that Israel saw no "utility" in the Tenet mission because it was intended to rebuild a Palestinian security force under Mr. Arafat.
Palestinian officials said it would be difficult for Mr. Tenet to undertake serious discussions with Mr. Arafat about security changes if the administration remained uncommitted either to working with Mr. Arafat or to pushing forward on negotiations to create a Palestinian state.
One specialist on Middle Eastern affairs in the administration said there was strong concern that during times of indecision, "events move on," especially toward the return of extremist violence. "And events are not going to wait for us to make decisions," this official said.
The State Department has yet to announce the trip of Mr. Burns, the assistant secretary of state, next week to the Middle East. There was little expectation in the government that he would be able to accomplish much while the debate goes on among the Bush advisers.
Mr. Sharon and his supporters in Washington have been pressing the Bush administration to insist on Mr. Arafat's removal or sidelining. Arab leaders have warned of the dangers of any frontal assault on Mr. Arafat. They warn that any steps that would appear as an American effort to orchestrate Mr. Arafat's overthrow could usher in a more radical leadership.
Some Arab leaders, at the same time, are willing to support a gradual political transition that would, through democratic means, effectively move Mr. Arafat out of his central role over time, some Arab diplomatic sources have said.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the debate, which other administration officials spoke of, adding that a number of Arab and Israeli diplomats had been briefed on the administration's failure to reach a decision before Mr. Bush left town.
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