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NUCLEAR
U.S. Fears 'Axis' Nations May Go Nuclear
Brazil opens uranium enrichment plant
UK says may dump more n-waste in Irish Sea after '06
Radioactivity is not evidence
U.N. Weapon Inspectors Stymied
U.N. Inspectors Use Hotline to Resolve Snag
Locked Iraqi Rooms Delay U.N. Inspectors
U.S., Russia assess Iraqi arms papers
Iraq Arms Report Has Big Omissions, U.S. Officials Say
U.S. has photos of secret Iran nuclear sites
Iran: Photos Show Building at Nuclear Sites, Group Says
Iran Was Burying Nuclear Facilities, U.S. Says
Iran Denies Having Nuke Arms Plans; U.N. to Inspect
Iran denies secret nuclear program
Iran Says Nuclear Plants Open to Search
North Korea: Remove IAEA Seals From Nuclear Sites, Pyongyang Says
North Korea: Ship interception 'piracy'
N. Korea to restart nuke reactor
South Korea Calls North's Nuclear Plan 'Unacceptable'
North Korea to Reactivate an Idled Nuclear Reactor
U.S. Takes North Korea's Nuclear Plan In Stride
North Korea Knocks
House Expands Inquiry Into Fraud at Lab
Kissinger to Withhold Client List
Kissinger Resigns as Head of Sept. 11 Commission
Bush, Kim Discuss North Korean Nuclear Program
MILITARY
Overblown missile threat
U.S. to Yield G.I. to Seoul
State Officials Question Timetable for Smallpox Vaccines
Plan for Vaccinations Carries Risk of Infecting Other People
Stock Sales Timely for Iran-Contra Figure
Xiong send-off
In Vast Expansion of the European Union, Pluses but Also Perils Lie Ahead
EU Overcomes Protest to NATO Force Plans
Hundreds Flee Fearing Election Results in India
Did Saddam's army test poison gas on missing 5,000?
Oil Deal Canceled, Iraq Tells Russians
Iraq Denies Giving Poison To Extremists
U.S. Sees Showdown Over Iraqi Scientists
Iraq Opposition Is Pursuing Ties With Iranians
U.S. Delay on Proposal for Mideast Irks Allies
U.N. Condemns Terror Acts Against Israel
Some 90,000 US soldiers expected to arrive in Turkey
EPA says Vieques cleanup will be a priority
Japan Rocket Lifts Off From Remote Island
Theodore Shackley Dies; Celebrated CIA Agent
Drones To Serve As Coastal Watchdogs
Today's Army
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Why Innocent People Confess
Lawmaker rips opium-eradication effort
Scientists Criticize Visa Restrictions
Al Qaeda leadership reported disrupted
Al Qaeda Still a Major Threat, Tenet Says
General Sees Scant Evidence of Threat Near in U.S.
ENERGY AND OTHER
Canada ethanol plants need federal help-industry
2 Groups Press Bid to See Cheney Task Force Records
US FERC seeks ways to speed up hydropower licenses
EU agrees sulphur-free fuel phase-in by 2009
Gov't Adds Substances to Cancer List
ACTIVISTS
US activists visit Baghdad to protest war talk
Marion Anderson, 70; Critic of Defense Spending
Paul Vathis
Parents protest U.S. schools irradiated meat plan
-------- NUCLEAR
U.S. Fears 'Axis' Nations May Go Nuclear
December 13, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Axis-of-Evil-Nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The countries dubbed an Axis of Evil by President Bush may be going nuclear, U.S. officials fear.
North Korea said it would resume its nuclear program the same week U.S. officials lent credence to recent reports that Iraq and Iran are actively seeking the fissile material -- enriched uranium or plutonium -- that has until now kept them out of the nuclear club.
Bush placed containment of all three nations at the top of his ``to do'' list last January, when he described an ``Axis of Evil'' in his State of the Union address that posed a ``growing danger'' by developing weapons of mass destruction.
That might have been a self-fulfilling prophesy, said John Wolfsthal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
``While they were proliferating before they were called the Axis of Evil, calling them by that name may have accelerated their programs,'' he said Friday.
Still, the United States is using different approaches to containing each of the three.
Regarding Iran, U.S. officials on Thursday endorsed claims by an Iranian opposition group that the government may be using two construction sites in central Iran to develop nuclear weapons -- one a nuclear fuel production plant and research lab at Natanz and a heavy water production plant at Arak that could be part of a plutonium program. Iran denied the allegations Friday; the United States does not believe Iran has yet made nuclear weapons.
Iran's lack of fissile material is its main obstacle to building nuclear weapons.
Reports of the facilities Iran is constructing ``reinforce our already grave concern that Iran is seeking technology to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear cop, said Friday he would reserve judgment until he visits the sites in February.
Nevertheless, he said, ``It would have been better if we had been informed earlier about the decision to build these facilities.''
As for Iraq, the concern is also about its search for fissile material. The 12,000 pages of documents filed with ElBaradei's agency last weekend fail to address U.S. intelligence reports of a recent purchase of uranium in Africa, and purchases in Western countries of high-tech equipment that could be used in a uranium enrichment program.
``Iraq claims they have not been involved in any proscribed activities in the last four years,'' since the last inspections, ElBaradei said. ``We cannot take that statement at face value.''
Some experts believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein may be scrambling to achieve nuclear weapons capability to cow his neighbors into backing out of support for any U.S.-led action to remove him.
Officials in North Korea, meanwhile, have said they will reactivate nuclear facilities frozen under a 1994 deal with Washington. They blamed the Bush administration's hard line for the policy change. Western officials believe North Korea built one or two plutonium-based nuclear bombs before it froze its nuclear facilities in 1994 -- and could quickly create enough plutonium for several more bombs if the program resumes.
``Whether (North Korea) will refreeze its nuclear facilities or not entirely depends on the attitude of the United States,'' North Korea's state-run news agency, KCNA, said in a commentary Friday.
The United States might be ready to listen. Bush spoke by telephone Friday with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and agreed to seek a ``peaceful resolution'' to the crisis, although both said they could not accept North Korea's resumption of its nuclear weapons program.
Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, sounded optimistic about persuading the North to back down. ``We believe that the situation on the Korean Peninsula lends itself to the possibility of a diplomatic solution,'' he told reporters in Australia.
Wolfsthal shares such optimism, saying North Korea, unlike Iran or Iraq, ultimately seeks the good graces of the United States.
``They see us as the only country able to get them out of their dire diplomatic and economic situation,'' he said.
-------- brazil
Brazil opens uranium enrichment plant
REUTERS BRAZIL:
December 13, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19032/newsDate/13-Dec-2002/story.htm
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Brazil opened a new uranium enrichment plant that allows the country with the world's sixth-largest reserves of the metal to produce fuel for its nuclear power plant or for export.
The Brazilian Nuclear Institute, which represents the nuclear energy lobby, said in a statement the facility would make Latin America's largest nation the world's eighth country possessing the enrichment technology.
"The enrichment used to be done abroad, but with this plant, some 95 percent of all the process will be domestic from next year," added a spokeswoman for the institute. She did not provide the exact date when the output would start next year.
The plant in the town of Resende in Rio de Janeiro state cost some $140 million and should save the country about $13 million a year.
Brazil has two nuclear power reactors, which account for about 6 percent of all power consumed in the country, and the Institute is lobbying to complete the construction of a third reactor. In comparison, France's 58 nuclear power plants produce twice as much power as the whole of Brazil.
The reactors of the Angra nuclear power complex are located on the wooded shore of a picturesque bay between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Environmentalists allege the reactors are not safe enough and condemn the expansion plans.
Some government officials and federal power holding Eletrobras (ELET6.SA), whose Eletronuclear unit is responsible for Angra, say nuclear energy is safe, cheap and should be used more, especially with the new technology now in place.
-------- britain
UK says may dump more n-waste in Irish Sea after '06
REUTERS UK:
December 13, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19019/newsDate/13-Dec-2002/story.htm
LONDON - Britain said this week it might have to dump radioactive pollution stockpiled at its Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant into the Irish Sea after 2006 as tanks storing the waste age and may become unsafe.
Environment Minister Michael Meacher said the government was researching ways to store the waste permanently onland but if this was not successful, then the radioactive liquid technetium-99 kept in offshore tanks may be dumped in the sea.
"If the tanks can't take it beyond 2006, then we might have to look at an alternative solution... to discharge (their contents) into the Irish Sea quickly," Meacher told a news conference.
The tanks, built in the 1950s and 1960s at the Sellafield site in Cumbria in northwest England, do not meet modern standards and have already exceeded their expected lifetimes, said the government.
Ireland and Norway oppose the Sellafield plant and in June Dublin asked an international court in The Hague for access to information about the plant's viability which Britain says is commercially sensitive.
Norway has called on Britain to halt radioactive emissions from Sellafield, traces of which have been found as far away as the Artic Barents Sea.
But in the short term, Meacher said Sellafield, owned by state-run British Nuclear Fuels, will slash technetium-99 emissions into the sea by 2006 in response to complaints from Norway and Ireland about the pollution.
Sellafield is allowed to release up to 90 terabecquerels (TBq) of technetium-99 into the Irish Sea but will have to cut this to 10 TBq by 2006.
"We are accepting the Energy Agency's proposals (to cut the discharges) but we want to go further," Meacher said.
Meacher said the discharge of technetium-99 into the Irish Sea could be halted altogether if research into storing the waste in the tanks permanently onshore is successful.
Sellafield will start in March processing newly produced technetium-99 into glass blocks suitable for long-term storage onland.
This technology cannot be used on waste already stockpiled in Sellafield's tanks which hold about 200 TBq of technetium-99.
Britain first established nuclear facilities at Sellafield, formerly called Windscale, in the 1940s and the world's first commercial nuclear power station was opened there in 1956.
Research has shown lobsters and other shellfish in the North and Irish Seas have traces of technetium-99.
Britain admits the waste has been found in lobsters but says there is no evidence it has accumulated in fish.
-------- depleted uranium
Radioactivity is not evidence
Dec. 13, 2002
Arizona Republic
http://www.arizonarepublic.com/opinions/articles/1213frilet137.html
Regarding the article Wednesday "Lab will know if Baghdad is bluffing":
While I applaud the efforts and intentions of the lab in Austria to detect traces of uranium, what this story fails to consider is that the United States dumped over 300 tons of depleted uranium on Iraq in the last war.
As most people know, such material is toxic, especially when it is gasified and spewed into the air. It will be impossible for the lab to determine the origin of the radioactive material.
The use of depleted uranium in Iraq is not a secret, and one wonders why an Associated Press reporter would fail to point out this obvious flaw?
And why would the story lead readers to this flawed conclusion: that "any discovery of radioactive material found in Iraq is an indication of Iraq's possible possession of nuclear weapons"?
Under the circumstances, detection of radioactive material in Iraq can lead us to no conclusion about Iraq's possession of nuclear weapons or programs. - Richard Scott Scottsdale
-------- inspections
U.N. Weapon Inspectors Stymied
"It is a newly declared site and there was a need for tagging of some of its equipment." Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin U.N-Iraqi Liaison
CBS
Dec. 13, 2002
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/04/attack/main527977.shtml
U.N. weapons inspectors encountered their first significant delays on Friday, when trying to enter certain rooms within a newly declared site - Iraq's Communicable Disease Control Center. The team had to use its hotline to higher Baghdad authorities for the first time since inspections resumed last month.
Team members had to wait two hours for Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, their Iraqi liaison, to arrive.
At that point inspectors and Amin agreed the rooms would be sealed and the U.N. team would return later, perhaps Saturday, to inspect them.
"It is a newly declared site and there was a need for tagging of some of its equipment," Amin, head of the National Monitoring Directorate, told reporters outside the building. "There is no problem."
Another Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the problem was the result of the inspections taking place on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when the keys for the locked rooms were not readily available.
Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration does not account for a number of missing chemical and biological weapons and fails to explain purchases U.S. intelligence believes are related to Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, U.S. officials said.
Iraq used the lengthy document to support its contention - disputed by the United States - that Saddam's regime possesses none of these weapons of mass destruction, the officials said late Thursday.
The tentative U.S. conclusion that the report is lacking sets the stage for a critical set of decisions by President Bush, who views the declaration as Saddam's last chance to come clean, officials said.
Mr. Bush's options include providing American intelligence on suspected weapons programs to U.N. inspectors or helping the world body attempt to prove that Saddam is lying, which was required under a U.S.-backed U.N. resolution that also forced inspectors back into Iraq after a four-year lapse, the officials said, speaking only on condition of anonymity
Mr. Bush could also simply seek more information from Iraq, a route White House officials said earlier Thursday the president would not take.
After a more thorough review of the declaration, the president also could declare that Saddam was in "material breach" of the resolution, and that war was required to disarm him, officials said.
U.S. allies would condemn that step, but administration hard-liners support it.
A new Chicago tribune poll shows half of Americans would support a war - even though most feel Mr. Bush needs to make a stronger case for the use of force.
Under the terms of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, false statements or omissions in the declaration - coupled with a failure to comply with inspections - would be a "material breach" of Iraq's obligations. Newly admitted weapons inspectors have not publicly accused Iraq of obstructing their efforts.
The Iraqi report largely rehashes old declarations and reports and contains little new information, officials said. It has done nothing to alter the U.S. belief that Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons and is pursuing nuclear weapons, officials said.
The report, being analyzed at the CIA and elsewhere, does not account for quantities of chemical and biological agents that were missing when U.N. inspectors were expelled from Iraq in 1998, officials said. Hundreds of mustard gas shells, for example, remain unaccounted for, officials said.
It also does not explain a number of Iraqi acquisitions that the United States suspects are related to Saddam's nuclear program, officials said. This includes the purchase of uranium in Africa, as well as purchases in Western countries of high-tech equipment that could be used in a uranium enrichment program, officials said. Enriched uranium or plutonium is a necessary requirement for a nuclear weapon.
White House and CIA officials refused comment on the assessment, first reported by The New York Times in Friday editions. However, Bush himself told ABC News his gut feeling about Saddam was that "he is a man who deceives, denies."
The United States and Russia turned in their preliminary assessments Thursday to chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and ElBaradei Mohamed of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Three other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - Britain, France and China - are supposed to provide their assessments as well by Friday.
Blix and ElBaradei then will remove sensitive sections of the declaration and distribute copies Monday to the 10 other members of the council.
In a round of inspections in the 1990s, after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, the United Nations destroyed tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
An Iraqi general Thursday refuted intelligence reports that inspectors had discovered banned weapons programs at 10 sites, and also denied a newspaper story that Iraq had sold VX nerve gas to an al Qaeda affiliate.
Lt. Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin called the intelligence reports "just a lie" and the newspaper report "a ridiculous assumption from the American administration."
The White House steered clear of the assertion that Iraq had shipped chemical weapons to the Islamic extremist group.
"Weaponry to al Qaeda ... we know al Qaeda is seeking it. But beyond that, I just don't get into intelligence information," said spokesman Ari Fleischer Thursday.
----
U.N. Inspectors Use Hotline to Resolve Snag
Reuters
Friday, December 13, 2002
By Hassan Hafidh
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50694-2002Dec13?language=printer
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.N. experts called in senior U.N. and Iraqi officials to sort out a snag during an inspection of a disease control center in Baghdad Friday.
It was the first time in the latest round of U.N. weapons inspections that a problem on the ground was known to have prompted senior officials to use their hotline.
"This is a newly declared site and we want to clarify the tagging procedure, that is all," said senior weapons inspector Miroslav Gregoric.
U.N. arms inspectors returned to Iraq last month after a four-year absence to check Baghdad's assertion that it has no nuclear, biological and chemical arms or long-range missiles.
Gregoric, speaking outside the Health Ministry's Communicable Diseases Control Center, said a biological weapons team had requested help during its visit there.
General Hussam Mohammed Amin, the chief Iraqi official liaising with the inspectors, was swiftly on the scene.
"The matter was resolved quickly," Hiro Ueki, spokesman for the inspectors, said in a statement, adding that seals had been placed on several rooms that could not be opened because the keyholder was absent Friday, the Muslim day of rest.
It was the first time the inspectors had worked on a Friday since their return.
Iraq submitted a 12,000-page dossier on its arms programs to the United Nations last Saturday in line with Security Council resolution 1441, which threatens serious consequences if Baghdad does not cooperate with the inspectors.
MISSILE CENTER
A separate U.N. team spent four hours at the Ibn al-Haitham missile center in the northern Baghdad suburb of Kadhimiya.
Ueki said inspectors also visited a pesticide store, checked for radiation in the Baghdad area and taken hydrological samples at three sites on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
"It was a surprise visit. Today is Friday when everybody is at home. I came here by chance," the director of the Ibn al-Haitham facility, Brigadier Owaid Ahmed, told reporters.
"They inspected everything -- rooms, workshops, stores. There was no problem and they did a professional inspection," Ahmed, a French-educated engineer, said in English.
Journalists were allowed into two warehouses after the inspectors left. They contained large aluminum and metal sheets and machines which Ahmed acknowledged were versatile.
"It depends on the worker working on these machines; he can produce parts of a missile or parts of a bicycle," he said.
He said the site had a missile production data center, a test and launch directorate, a missile fuel center, workshops and stores.
He said the site had been heavily bombed by American and British aircraft in 1998. "Some buildings were completely destroyed and abandoned," he said. "Some others were rebuilt and recommissioned."
According to a report by London's International Institute of Strategic Studies, the plant was built in 1992 as a research and design center for the short-range al-Sumoud missile.
U.N. resolutions allow Iraq to have missiles with a range not exceeding 150 km (95 miles).
Ibn al-Haitham had been placed under monitoring by the former U.N. inspection body.
There are now 98 inspectors from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Iraq.
But Richard Perle, head of the Defense Department's Policy Review Board, was quoted Friday as saying there were far too few inspectors in Iraq to find any banned weapons.
-----
Locked Iraqi Rooms Delay U.N. Inspectors
December 13, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Weapons-Inspectors.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.N. teams were held up for two hours on Friday at a newly declared site -- an infectious diseases center -- forcing inspectors to use their hot line to higher Iraqi authorities for the first time since returning to the country last month.
The snag occurred as U.S. officials in Washington said Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration does not account for a number of missing chemical and biological weapons. The officials said it fails to explain attempted purchases of uranium and other items U.S. intelligence believes are related to Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. At the United Nations, Security Council diplomats concurred the voluminous report contained little that was new, raising questions whether Iraq was truly committed to disarmament.
During inspections in Baghdad on Friday, a U.N. team got access to the Communicable Disease Control Center but found several rooms locked and no one with keys. The Iraqis said the rooms were locked because Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, was a day off for doctors and other workers and no one else had keys.
Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, head of the National Monitoring Directorate, arrived two hours later, after being summoned by the hot line call. He and the inspectors agreed the rooms would be sealed for inspection later, perhaps on Saturday.
``I don't see this as being a significant problem,'' said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in New York. ``We have sealed those rooms that the Iraqi officials could not provide keys for and we'll go back to check on them.''
Amin also sought to downplay the incident.
``It is a newly declared site and there was a need for tagging of some of its equipment. There is no problem,'' he told reporters outside the infectious diseases facility.
The site was not visited by U.N. weapons inspectors in the 1990s, after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War, and Amin indicated that his government had recently added it to a list of places with dual-use equipment that should be monitored.
Friday's inspections marked the first time the U.N. teams have been in the field on the Muslim day of prayer since returning to work Nov. 27.
Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, meanwhile, said in an interview broadcast Friday that the U.N. inspectors were doing a ``normal'' job, but he hinted Baghdad would act if they threaten Iraqi national security.
``In a professional description of the inspectors, it is normal ... So far, we have no negative comments,'' he told Al-Jazeera television.
``Of course, when the matter reaches a point that we are unable to prevent them from doing harm involving the security of Iraq, we will have a position,'' Ramadan said in reply to a question over how far Baghdad will go in cooperating with the weapons inspectors.
Also Friday, inspection teams visited three other sites -- one a facility that sells pesticides and two involved with Iraq's ballistic missile program. Details were not released.
Inspectors from the U.N. nuclear control agency took water and soil samples from the watershed of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, south of the 33rd parallel -- the northern limit of the southern no-fly zone patrolled by U.S. aircraft. The zone was instituted after the 1991 Gulf War to protect Shiite Muslims in the region against retribution from Saddam.
The International Atomic Energy Agency team also reported doing a broad gamma radiation survey of the Baghdad area, which it said included the Karama Sumood missile facility.
In Vienna, Austria, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said his inspectors would need ``something like a year'' to prove or disprove Iraq's assertions that it no longer maintains a nuclear weapons program.
The larger inspection team under Hans Blix, chief of the U.N. program, is searching for evidence of chemical or biological weapons and the means to deliver them. It was one of Blix's teams that was required to wait outside locked rooms at the infectious diseases center Friday.
During inspections a decade ago, the United Nations destroyed tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Those inspections ended in 1998 amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes.
Recently published British and U.S. intelligence reports said new construction at old weapons sites and other activities suggest the Iraqis may have resumed making weapons of mass destruction.
The inspections are being conducted in conjunction with economic sanctions imposed on Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Amin has said he hoped the inspectors would be finished and sanctions lifted within eight months. Under U.N. resolutions, the sanctions will only be removed after inspectors report full Iraqi cooperation in their disarmament work.
----
U.S., Russia assess Iraqi arms papers
From combined dispatches
December 13, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021213-71630912.htm
The United States and Russia yesterday concluded their preliminary assessments of Iraq's weapons declaration, focusing on how sensitive technology was acquired and put to use, a U.S. official said.
The assessments were turned in to chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the official told the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
The three other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - Britain, France and China - are supposed to provide their assessments as well by today.
Mr. Blix and Mr. ElBaradei are to remove sensitive sections of the declaration and distribute copies Monday to the 10 other members of the council.
There was no immediate word on what the U.S. and Russian analyses said.
But President Bush said in an interview with ABC News that his gut feeling about Saddam Hussein is that "he is a man who deceives, denies."
Iraq has insisted it has no weapons of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, the Russian company Lukoil said that Iraq has scrapped a $3.7 billion oil-field pact, dealing a blow to Moscow's hopes of keeping a strong economic foothold there after any potential U.S. military action.
A Lukoil spokesman said an Iraqi deputy oil minister had told company President Vagit Alekperov by letter that the contract to develop Iraq's huge West Qurna oil field had been canceled on Dec. 9.
In an angry reaction, spokesman Alexander Vasilenko said Lukoil would challenge the cancellation of the 1997 deal - regarded as the jewel in the crown of Russian contracts in Iraq - in the courts.
Iraqi Oil Minister Amir Mohammed Rasheed, attending an Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting in Vienna, Austria, would say only that contracts were liable to cancellation if companies did not fulfill their drilling obligations.
Australian officials said yesterday that Iraq also has slashed its imports of Australian wheat by almost half, several months after Baghdad threatened such action for Canberra's strong support of a U.S. campaign to overthrow Saddam.
An Australian Wheat Board spokesman said Iraq this week confirmed it would cut its Australian wheat imports to 1 million tons in 2003 from 1.8 million tons this year.
Russia, with a long-standing partnership with Iraq going back to Soviet times, has fought hard to protect its economic contracts and interests there as the prospects of U.S. military action have grown.
Apart from Lukoil's West Qurna deal, Russian oil firms won the majority of the 2001 contracts to lift Iraqi crude under the U.N. "oil-for-food" program.
Moscow wants to recover $8 billion to $12 billion in old Soviet debt from Baghdad.
The future of Iraq's crude reserves, the world's second-largest after Saudi Arabia's, are at the center of a diplomatic tug-of-war between countries hoping to grab a share of Baghdad's oil wealth once U.N. sanctions are lifted.
Anxious that its economic interests could be imperiled by unilateral U.S. military action, Russia pressed hard for changes before backing the U.S.-sponsored U.N. Security Council resolution giving Iraq a last chance to disarm or face a U.S. threat of war.
Late last month, Mr. Bush went out of his way publicly to allay Russian President Vladimir Putin's fears.
He told Russia's NTV television that if there was a change of regime in Baghdad, "We fully realize that Russia has economic interests in Iraq, as do other countries. Of course these interests will be taken into account."
----
REPORT BY IRAQ
Iraq Arms Report Has Big Omissions, U.S. Officials Say
December 13, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER with JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/13/international/middleeast/13WEAP.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - American intelligence agencies have reached a preliminary conclusion that Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of its weapons programs fails to account for chemical and biological agents missing when inspectors left Iraq four years ago, American officials and United Nations diplomats said today.
In addition, Iraq's declaration on its nuclear program, they say, leaves open a host of questions. Among them is why Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in Africa in recent years, as well as high-technology materials that the United States and Britain have said were destined for a program to enrich uranium. The nuclear document is under review both in Washington and at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The omissions themselves pose a new challenge for the Bush administration: it needs to decide whether to declare that Iraq has failed to meet one of the most important requirements set by the United Nations and to whether to try to use that failure as a justification for American military action.
"What's remarkable is how little new there is," said one American official who has access to the Iraqi declaration, "and how little effort there was to try to explain gaps that everyone knew were there since Unscom left." He was using the acronym for the United Nations agency that conducted weapons inspections in Iraq through 1998.
A United Nations diplomat familiar with Iraq's submission said "our preliminary assessment" is that much of the declaration "seems to be recycled."
"They are claiming they have no new weapons of mass destruction," the diplomat said.
A second American official said there were "omissions big enough drive a tank through," citing as examples Iraq's failure to explain what happened to 550 shells filled with mustard gas, and another 150 bombs filled with biological agents, that the United Nations could not account for in the late 1990's.
The Iraqi nuclear declaration includes some revealing details of its nuclear program before 1991. But there are no drawings or descriptions of the gas centrifuges and other equipment for producing highly enriched uranium, senior officials who have reviewed the material said.
Britain said several months ago that Iraq had been buying "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa that could only be used in an enrichment program.
It believes that the nuclear program is still active, but several years from producing a weapon - and probably far behind the efforts of Iran and North Korea.
A top military aide to President Saddam Hussein said Sunday in Baghdad that the program had been abandoned in 1991, when it was close to perfecting a weapon.
Before Iraq submitted the document, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, noted several times that omissions in the declaration would constitute a violation of United Nations Resolution 1441. But now, Mr. Bush and his national security team - which has often been divided on how much support to give United Nations inspectors and whether to build an international coalition to strike Iraq - face what officials describe as three major choices.
The first, which has not been seriously considered in the White House, is to demand that Iraq answer specific questions about specific weapons programs. "We gave them that chance," one senior official said today. "They knew what issues were outstanding in 1998. They blew it."
The second is to continue with the inspections, and to aid inspectors with intelligence that would guide them to suspect locations. But Mr. Fleischer said earlier this week that the inspectors would receive no information that revealed the sources and methods used to collect them.
The third would be to declare, after a final review of the report, that Iraq is in "material breach" of its obligations. But winning that argument in the Security Council, American officials acknowledge, requires "proving a negative" - that is, proving that Iraq has knowledge of weapons materials that it has not accounted for.
Today the United States and Russia recommended to weapons inspectors at the United Nations which material in the Iraqi document should be deleted before the document is shared with the 10 nonpermanent members of the Security Council, Ewen Buchanan, the spokesman for the team, said. All of the 10 are non-nuclear states.
United Nations chemical and biological weapons experts, too, were working to identify material that they would have to filter out of the declaration before it could be distributed more broadly.
But it will be many days - perhaps several weeks - before Mr. Bush and his aides offer a fuller, more public assessment of the Iraqi declaration. They have begun work on a point-by-point comparison of the document with their intelligence about Iraqi sites, focusing chiefly on omissions. Within the administration, a debate has broken out over how much intelligence information to declassify to refute Mr. Hussein's contentions.
"The agency is reluctant," said one senior official, referring to the C.I.A. "And some of the more hawkish among us just want to say that the whole thing is laughable, and it is all the legal justification we need."
Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, co-chiefs of the inspection teams, are scheduled to give their preliminary impressions of the Iraqi declaration to the Security Council on Thursday.
If the administration can successfully argue that the Iraqis have given no accounting of the chemical and biological stores of which the United Nations inspectors found evidence in the 1990's, they will bolster Mr. Bush's contention that Iraq has violated United Nations mandates and could secretly give some of the weapons to terror groups.
Today senior administration officials said terror networks like Al Qaeda had sought to acquire chemical weapons from a number of sources. But they discounted a report in The Washington Post today that the United States had received credible intelligence that Iraq had recently supplied Qaeda-related terrorists with a deadly chemical nerve agent.
In Vienna, analysts at the International Atomic Energy agency were busy combing through the 2,400 pages of documents that make up Iraq's nuclear declaration, which they received on Sunday.
Officials at the agency said 2,100 of the pages appeared very similar, if not identical, to the last declaration the agency received from Iraq, in 1998. The similarities were so clear that agency analysts were going through pages line for line to determine whether there were any changes at all.
Another 300 pages were in Arabic, and were being translated as fast as the agency could manage. The agency has several nuclear arms experts who are Arabic speakers, and they had already begun to examine the contents of those pages.
Agency officials said the declaration appeared to support Baghdad's insistent statements that it has undertaken no nuclear weapons programs since December 1998, the last time inspectors were in Iraq.
Administration officials, citing intelligence data about equipment and materials Iraq has tried to buy overseas, have accused it of reactivating efforts to build a nuclear weapon.
-------- iran
U.S. has photos of secret Iran nuclear sites
From David Ensor
CNN
Friday, December 13, 2002
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/12/12/iran.nuclear/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States has evidence that Iran has secretly been building large nuclear facilities -- sites that could possibly be used to make nuclear weapons, senior U.S. officials tell CNN.
Commercial satellite photographs taken in September show a nuclear facility near the town of Natanz and another one near Arak, the officials said. (View map)
But Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said the country's only nuclear activity is of a peaceful nature, and its facilities have been "regularly and frequently" inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.
"Iran hasn't committed any acts that can be considered against international rules, and will not do so in the future," Hamid Reza Assefi told CNN. "At the same time, no country could, for its own political objectives, prevent Iran from achieving its own goals."
A spokesman at the IAEA in Vienna, Austria confirms the agency is seeking access to the two sites and has so far been put off by Iran.
The vice chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee said the development was "disturbing news."
"We don't need another nuclear power -- not with Iran sponsoring terrorism that it has in the past," said Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican. "The fact that they are seemingly pursuing an avenue to build nuclear weapons should be disturbing to everybody."
Assefi said the United States was trying to start a negative publicity campaign to divert attention from other issues.
"This kind of publicity is not new," Assefi said. "Certain circles within the United States are trying to create tensions and poison the international atmosphere, and to avert international public opinions away from the real regional danger, which is Israel."
Iranian dissidents have long contended that Iran has been working on nuclear capabilities. But the new satellite photographs and the conclusions drawn from them by nuclear experts are the first evidence to support such claims. Heavy Water (D2O) Water in which both hydrogen atoms have been replaced with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen
Allows reactor to operate with natural uranium as its fuel
Used to breed plutonium from natural uranium, entirely bypassing uranium enrichment and related technological infrastructure
Heavy-water-moderated reactors can be used to make tritium, an ingredient of thermonuclear weapons
Source: Federation of American Scientists
Nuclear expert David Albright said the size and secrecy of the program suggest Iran might be working toward building nuclear weapons.
Albright is head of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), which identified the photographs. The non-profit, non-partisan ISIS focuses on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
The satellite picture of the facility near Arak concerns nuclear experts.
Corey Hinderstein, also of ISIS, said the site resembles heavy water plants found in Pakistan and contains a similar Z-shaped structure. The large facility at Natanz appears to U.S. intelligence officials to be a uranium-enrichment plant, and civilian experts, including Hinderstein, agree.
Iran has a declared nuclear program at Bushehr that is designed to produce nuclear power for electricity only, according to the country's U.N. ambassador. Commercial satellite photo of a nuclear facility near Natanz, Iran Commercial satellite photo of a nuclear facility near Natanz, Iran
"I can categorically tell you that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program," Mohammed Javad Zarif said in an interview with CNN. "Any facility we have ... if it is dealing with nuclear technology, it is within the purview of our peaceful nuclear program." (Transcript of interview)
Iranian officials say a visit by senior IAEA officials is expected in February. IAEA officials say they want to visit Arak and Natanz on that trip.
IAEA officials also point out that nothing Iran is known to have done has violated international law.
Bush labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil," along with Iraq and North Korea, in his State of the Union address this year.
----
Iran: Photos Show Building at Nuclear Sites, Group Says
Friday, December 13, 2002
NTI News
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/newswires/2002_12_13.html#5
According to satellite photographs, Iran is working at two sites to construct nuclear facilities that could be used to develop nuclear weapons, the Institute for Science and International Security said in a report released yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 20).
By interpreting satellite imagery, the institute has determined that one of the sites, located near the city of Arak, appears to be a heavy-water production facility under construction, the report says. The existence of such a facility increases concerns that Iran might also be building a nuclear reactor moderated by heavy water, ISIS said, adding that no signs of such a reactor have been located.
The Bushehr nuclear reactor, which Iran is currently building with aid from Russia, does not use heavy water, the report says (see GSN, Oct. 22). Furthermore, Iran's existing research reactors do not use enough heavy water to justify creating a heavy-water plant, it adds.
Meanwhile, the satellite imagery appears to contradict claims made by the Iranian opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran, which has said that Tehran is building a nuclear fuel fabrication facility at a site called Natanz, 25 miles southeast of the city of Kashan, the institute said (see GSN, Aug. 15). Construction at Natanz appears to be for a uranium enrichment plant, possibly employing gas centrifuge technology, the ISIS report says, adding that the facility does not appear to be in operation.
IAEA
Under a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran does not have to open any new nuclear facility to agency inspections until six months before introducing nuclear materials, the ISIS report says (Institute for Science and International Security release, Dec. 12).
The agency learned of the new facilities in August from satellite imagery, according to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, and Iranian officials confirmed their existence in September to ElBaradei. At that time, they invited ElBaradei to visit the sites this week, but that visit was postponed until February, when ElBaradei will visit with a team of technical experts, he said on CNN this morning (Greg Webb, GSN, Dec. 13).
Iranian Response
In an interview with CNN yesterday, Iran's U.N. Ambassador Javad Zarif said that his country is not developing nuclear weapons.
"No. Absolutely not," Zarif said in response to a question on whether Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program. "Iran is a member of the [Nuclear] Nonproliferation Treaty. We have safeguard agreements with the IAEA. Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction do not have a place in our defense doctrine. We have stated that clearly. And we have shown it," he added.
Iran has the right to develop a peaceful civilian nuclear program, Zarif said.
"We do have a right to have nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. And that we have asserted very forcefully," Zarif said. "And we will continue to carry out our research and our activities in the area of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes," he added.
Zarif dismissed suggestions that Iran might be working to develop a clandestine nuclear program.
"There is nothing hidden about it," Zarif said. "Because if we wanted to have sort of a clandestine nuclear program, we wouldn't come out in public and stating it is our right and this is our policy to pursue a nuclear program for peaceful purposes," he added (CNN.com, Dec. 13).
For further information, see:
NPT Text http://www.unog.ch/disarm/distreat/npt.pdf
States Parties to the NPT (U.N.) http://www.un.org/Depts/dda/WMD/nptstatus.html#home
U.N. Background on NPT http://www.un.org/Depts/dda/WMD/NPT/index.html
----
Iran Was Burying Nuclear Facilities, U.S. Says
Reuters
Friday, December 13, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51063-2002Dec13?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iran was trying to hide parts of the nuclear facility it is building near the central town of Natanz by burying some of the buildings underground, the State Department said Friday.
The United States says the Natanz complex and another facility in nearby Arak were part of a secret project to make nuclear weapons in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran said Friday they were for non-military uses.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the plan to hide them was evident from commercial satellite imagery which came to light this week and which cast some doubt on Iran's position that they are for civilian purposes.
"You can tell that portions of the Natanz nuclear facility, the suspect uranium enrichment plant, ultimately will be underground," he told a daily briefing.
"It appears from the imagery that the service roads, several small structures and perhaps three large structures are being built below ground and some of these are already being covered with earth. Iran clearly intended to harden and bury that facility," he added.
This indicated that Iran never intended to declare the facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) but was caught building a plant to make fissile material, he said.
Iran Friday dismissed U.S. accusations that the Arak and Natanz plants could be used to make secret nuclear weapons and said it had already invited U.N. inspectors to visit them.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said it was aware of the new nuclear facilities, had been talking to Iran about them since August and planned to inspect them in February.
But Boucher said Iran had repeatedly rebuffed the agency's request for access to the sites.
"We've always talked about the Bushehr reactor (on the Gulf coast of Iran), which will be subject to IAEA safeguards, but clearly that has been used as a pretext for obtaining sensitive technology for the weapons program," he added.
----
Iran Denies Having Nuke Arms Plans; U.N. to Inspect
Reuters
Friday, December 13, 2002
By Paul Hughes
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50511-2002Dec13?language=printer
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran Friday dismissed U.S. accusations that two nuclear plants it is building could be used to make secret nuclear weapons and said it had already invited U.N. inspectors to visit the sites.
"We don't have any hidden atomic activities. All our nuclear activities are for non-military fields," Iranian government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told reporters on the sidelines of a political conference.
He was responding to remarks by U.S. officials claiming that two nuclear sites near the central Iranian towns of Natanz and Arak, seen in commercial satellite photographs, were of a type which suggested Iran could use them to build a nuclear weapon.
Iranian officials said the comments by the unnamed U.S. officials amounted to "U.S. propaganda" and insisted international bodies were well briefed on its nuclear program.
The Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said it was aware of the facilities being built in Iran and planned to inspect them in February.
"This is not a surprise to us," IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters at IAEA headquarters in Vienna.
The IAEA first raised the issue with Tehran in August, tipped off by satellite pictures of the construction sites, he said.
"Whether the program is for peaceful purposes or not, this is obviously for us to verify...Iran affirmed that all their activities are for a peaceful purpose," ElBaradei said.
PLANNED VISIT
Iran invited IAEA inspectors after informing the agency in September of plans to build nuclear power plants and related fuel facilities over the next 20 years, IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told Reuters.
"The director general, with a team of technical experts, plans to make such a visit in February 2003," Gwozdecky said.
ElBaradei said the inspection visit by himself and IAEA technical experts had originally been planned for this month but was put off at Iran's request.
Ramazanzadeh told Reuters in Tehran by telephone there was no obstacle for an IAEA inspection team to visit the sites.
"We have always said that our activities for peaceful usage of nuclear energy could be inspected," he said.
U.S. officials, who declined to be named, Thursday revealed their concerns about the sites in Iran.
"It is true that there are two suspicious facilities in those locations in Iran. They were first publicly identified by an Iranian opposition group this past summer. They certainly are worth looking into," they said.
But Ramazanzadeh said the plants were not sinister, noting the one near Natanz was to conduct research into radioactivity.
But the disclosure raised a new challenge for President Bush as he tries to head off North Korea's nuclear weapons program as well as what Washington believes is an effort to develop nuclear weapons capability.
U.N. experts are also currently carrying out inspections in Iraq which the United States accuses of developing weapons of mass destruction.
Bush earlier this year labelled Iran, Iraq and North Korea an "axis of evil."
The United States and Iran have been foes since student militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic revolution and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Tehran has been developing a medium-range ballistic missile experts say would be able to hit Israel.
NEGOTIATING WITH RUSSIA
The United States has also been at odds with Russia over its help in building a nuclear power plant at the southwestern port of Bushehr which Tehran expects to come on line next year.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Iranian government official said Iran was negotiating with Russia to build several other nuclear power plants as well as Bushehr.
David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), told Reuters his organization was publishing its findings on the Iranian sites because it wanted the IAEA to inspect them.
ISIS reported on its Web site (www.isis-online.org/) that the complex near Arak appeared to include a plant to produce heavy water, a nuclear product that can be used either in civilian reactors or in the fuel cycle for making weapons.
"There is concern that this effort to obtain a complete fuel cycle is aimed at developing the capability to make separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the two main nuclear explosive materials," it said.
Nuclear experts said even if Iran's two new sites turned out to be heavy water and fuel enrichment plants, that could point to a nuclear power program just as well as to the development of nuclear weapons.
"Even if they are heavy water and enrichment plants, Iran has a right to these. It's just that at a certain point they would have to declare them to the IAEA" for monitoring under a global nuclear non-proliferation pact, one nuclear expert said.
Iran is party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has an agreement with the IAEA to safeguard against the diversion of civilian nuclear material for weapons.
"The IAEA has not detected any diversion of nuclear material (in Iran) declared and placed under our safeguard," the IAEA's Gwozdecky said.
---
Iran denies secret nuclear program
By Modher Amin
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
December 13, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021213-084407-3120r.htm
TEHRAN, Iran, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- Iran on Friday rejected a CNN report that Tehran had been secretly developing facilities that could be used to make nuclear weapons, but U.S. nuclear experts maintained that Tehran possesses nuclear fuel cycle facilities.
"We have no nuclear activities or studies outside the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency," said Iranian government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh.
CNN on Thursday cited unidentified U.S. officials as saying an American DigitalGlobe company commercial satellite in September spotted two sites near the central Iranian towns of Natanz and Arak. The officials suggested they could be used for building nuclear weapons.
The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nuclear watchdog, issued satellite pictures of two such sites in Iran.
ISIS confirmed through photo interpretation that the site near Arak appeared to be a heavy water plant under construction. Heavy water, which is ordinary water enriched with the hydrogen isotope deuterium, is used as a moderator in one type of nuclear reactor.
The site's existence increases suspicions that Iran may be building a heavy-water moderated reactor, but ISIS was unable to locate such a reactor.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group that first released details of the plans in August 2002, said the second site, called Natanz, located about 25 miles southeast of Kashan, had a fuel fabrication facility. ISIS, however, said that was unlikely.
Based on the nature of the buildings, the most likely type of enrichment plant is a gas centrifuge facility, it said. The facility does not appear to be operating.
"The facilities in the two satellite images appear related to the production of enriched uranium and heavy water, two materials that may be used in a civil nuclear program or in the production of nuclear weapons," ISIS said.
Washington has expressed its concern over a nuclear power plant Iran has under construction, with Russian assistance, in the southern port city of Bushehr.
Both Iran and Russia have said they intend to complete the plant, with Moscow announcing in August it intended to build a second plant in Bushehr. ISIS said the power reactor bring built near Bushehr did not use heavy water.
Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has committed to renouncing the possession of nuclear weapons and permitting inspections by the IAEA of all its nuclear activities.
Under NPT safeguards agreement, Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until 6 months before nuclear material is introduced into it. However, under strengthening measures requested by the IAEA in the 1990s, many governments agreed to provide it with information about a new facility 6 months before the start of its construction. So far, Iran has refused to agree to this new measure to take effect.
IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei was scheduled to arrive this week in Iran to discuss safeguards issues, visit these sites, and meet with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. However, the Iranian government canceled his delegation's visit.
Iran stated at the IAEA General Conference in September 2002 in Vienna it was pursuing a "long term plan" to construct "nuclear power plants and the associated technologies such as fuel cycle" facilities.
ISIS said it was concerned this effort was aimed at developing the capability to make separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the two main nuclear explosive materials.
(With reporting by Anwar Iqbal in Washington)
---
Iran Says Nuclear Plants Open to Search
Fri Dec 13,
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=514&ncid=514&e=5&u=/ap/20021213/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_nuclear_3
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran on Friday rejected U.S. claims that it was developing a clandestine nuclear program and said all its nuclear plants were open to international inspection.
"We have no nuclear activity or study without the knowledge of the International Atomic Energy Agency," government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh told reporters Friday. "All our nuclear sites are for peaceful purposes and open to IAEA inspection."
Ramezanzadeh's spoke after U.S. officials on Thursday endorsed claims made by an armed Iranian opposition group this summer that two construction sites in central Iran may be used for a clandestine program to develop nuclear weapons.
U.S. intelligence officials do not believe Iran has made any nuclear weapons.
In August, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political umbrella group of the Iraq-based armed Mujahedeen Khalq said once completed, the two sites will be a nuclear fuel production plant and research lab at Natanz and a heavy water production plant at Arak, both in central Iran.
The Natanz plant also may include a uranium-enrichment facility, U.S officials said. A heavy water plant at Arak would be part of a plutonium program. U.S. officials say Iran's lack of fissile material - either enriched uranium or plutonium - remains a key stumbling block for its nuclear goals.
Iran has not declared either site to international monitors, U.S. officials said.
"IAEA is aware of all of our nuclear activities. Natanz is not under the ground. IAEA is welcome to inspect the site," Ramezanzadeh said.
The Mujahedeen Khalq seeks to overthrow Iran's government and has several guerrilla bases in Iraq.
Meanwhile, IAEA officials said Friday the agency was concerned about Iran's plans to study the possibility of building a second major nuclear power plant.
Melissa Fleming, the agency's spokeswoman, said IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei would visit Tehran at the invitation of the Iranians. That visit originally was planned for this month but was postponed at Iran's request, she said.
A team of IAEA technical experts will accompany ElBaradei, Fleming said. "We have requested to visit these sites and Iran has indicated it would allow such a visit," she said.
Iran's Atomic Energy Council ordered a feasibility study on a second plant as the country's first nuclear power station, built with Russian help at Bushehr in the south prepares to go on line next year, Iranian state-run television reported Thursday.
Both Russia and Iran insist that the plant will be used for civilian purposes only and open to international inspection, but the United States says the Bushehr facility could help advance Iran's alleged weapons program.
It was not clear if Russia will be involved in the construction of the new plant. Russia said in September that it has no other nuclear programs with Iran. The Kremlin has floated preliminary plans to help Iran build five more nuclear reactors over the next 10 years.
However, the Russian news agency Interfax quoted Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev as saying in September that Bushehr is the only actual nuclear program Russia has with Iran.
The Bush administration has offered Russia economic incentives to abandon the Bushehr project, but the Russians have not accepted the offer. Russia has denied consistently it is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons or with its missiles program.
In September, Russia drew up a plan for the return of spent nuclear fuel from Bushehr, seeking to allay U.S. concerns that the fuel could be used by terrorists and others to build weapons of mass destruction.
The Bushehr plant was begun by the West Germans but was interrupted during the 1979 Islamic revolution. It's worth about $800 million to Russia, which has been reluctant to abandon the project both for economic reasons and matters of international prestige.
Meanwhile, Iran's Atomic Energy Council has approved a broad plan to dramatically increase the country's nuclear energy capabilities by 2021, a newspaper reported Thursday.
"The council approved (a plan stipulating) that the share of electricity provided by nuclear energy should reach 6000 megawatts by 2021," the daily Mardom-Salari, or Democracy, reported. It gave no further details. Iranian atomic energy officials were not available for a comment.
-------- korea
North Korea: Remove IAEA Seals From Nuclear Sites, Pyongyang Says
Friday, December 13, 2002
NTI News
http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/newswires/2002_12_13.html#5
North Korea called on the International Atomic Energy Agency yesterday to remove monitoring equipment and seals from all North Korean nuclear facilities - a move one step closer to fully resuming the country's nuclear program (see GSN, Dec. 12).
In a letter to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of North Korea's General Department of Atomic Energy, Ri Je Son, announced that his country would lift a freeze today on its nuclear facilities. Previously, it had agreed to maintain the freeze in exchange for energy assistance under the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States.
"Accordingly, the IAEA is requested to take necessary measures to remove the seals and monitoring cameras on all of our nuclear facilities," Ri wrote in the letter.
"If the IAEA fails to expeditiously take measures to meet our request, we would like to take necessary measures unilaterally," Ri wrote (Mike Nartker, Global Security Newswire, Dec. 12).
ElBaradei yesterday called on North Korea to act with restraint, saying it is "essential" that the seals and monitoring equipment remain in place.
"It is essential that the containment and surveillance measures which are currently in place continue to be maintained, and that the D.P.R.K. not take any steps unilaterally to remove or impede the functioning of such seals or cameras," ElBaradei said. "Any such action would not be in compliance with the requirements of the IAEA-D.P.R.K. Safeguards Agreement," he added.
ElBaradei has asked North Korea to agree to an urgent technical meeting to discuss how Pyongyang's nuclear program would progress to full operation and how the IAEA would continue to fulfill its verification requirements under the safeguards agreement (International Atomic Energy Agency release, Dec. 12).
The IAEA inspectors currently inside North Korea have not yet been asked to leave, ElBaradei said today on CNN television. "I think this is a good sign," he added (CNN, Dec. 13).
The call to remove the IAEA equipment from North Korean nuclear facilities indicates that Pyongyang is pursuing "illicit activities," said L. Gordon Flake, a North Korean expert and director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs.
"The dangerous thing about the request to remove the cameras is, it comes pretty close to a clear admission that they are indeed doing illicit activities," Flake said. "If you're not doing anything wrong ... why do you care about the cameras?" he added (Los Angeles Times, Dec. 13).
U.S. Response
The United States considers the decision to restart nuclear facilities "regrettable," and is calling on Pyongyang to end its suspected nuclear weapons program, U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday.
"We believe that this announcement really flies in the face of international consensus, that the North Korean regime must fulfill all of its commitments, and in particular dismantle its nuclear weapons program," McCormack said (Federal News Service transcript, Dec. 12).
Some U.S. officials said that while they are not surprised by North Korea's decision, it poses a major challenge - albeit one that would be handled after the situation in Iraq had been resolved.
"One rogue state crisis at a time," a senior White House official said, describing U.S. President George W. Bush's strategy (French/Sanger, New York Times, Dec. 13).
Japanese Response
Japan announced today that it would attempt to relaunch stalled talks with North Korea. It is even more important now to restart the talks, which have been stalled since October "to keep this kind of thing from happening," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda said (Agence France-Presse, Dec. 13).
Yongbyon Status
North Korea's 5-megawatt nuclear reactor - which is located 55 miles north of Pyongyang at the Yongbyon complex and cannot generate significant amounts of electricity but can produce weapon-grade nuclear materials - could be started within two months, South Korean sources said.
Other analysts, however, doubted that the reactor is even capable of operating, the Times reported (Los Angeles Times). For example, the three-story crane used to load fuel into the reactor is broken, said Kenneth Quinones, who helped set up the IAEA inspection program in North Korea in 1994. If the crane can be repaired, however, the site could begin operations within six months, he said (Doug Struck, Washington Post, Dec. 13).
Even if the reactor could be started, it is too small to produce the electricity needed to get the country through the winter, according to the Los Angeles Times. "But it can produce plutonium," an IAEA official said.
North Korea also has two nuclear reactors still unfinished since 1994 - a 50-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon and a 200-megawatt reactor at Taechon. It would take two years to finish building those reactors, an IAEA official said.
Possible Negotiation Tactic
Some experts have said that North Korea's decision to restart its nuclear facilities could be a tactic to pressure the United States into entering negotiations.
"Their objective is to get us to negotiate with them," said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. "They know right now that we don't want to think about them more than necessary, and not talk to them for a while. ... And here is their one way of saying ... 'You have to deal with us now,'" he added (Los Angeles Times).
While the United States has indicated its willingness to pursue a dialogue with North Korea, it will not respond to "threats or broken commitments," McCormack said yesterday.
"The United States has always ... been open to dialogue in principle and was prepared for a comprehensive approach to improving U.S.-North Korean relations before the disclosure of North Korea's clandestine uranium enrichment program," McCormack said. "However, we have to make it very clear that the United States will not enter into a dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has already signed," he added (Federal News Service).
Joel Wit, a former U.S. State Department official, said North Korea would not respond favorably to a hard-line U.S. position.
"North Korea is not going to capitulate on issues of vital national security for them," said Wit, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We do have to be tough with them, but we have to use every measure available to us to resolve the situation. That means at some point we are going to have to sit down with them," he added (Los Angeles Times).
For further information, see:
Agreed Framework Text http://www.kedo.org/pdfs/AgreedFramework.pdf
KEDO http://www.kedo.org/
----
North Korea: Ship interception 'piracy'
By Jong-Heon Lee
December 13, 2002
United Press International
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021213-021722-5264r.htm
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- North Korea criticized the United States on Friday for what it said was piracy and a violation of its sovereignty. The comments, by the North Korean Foreign Ministry, concerned the interception of a vessel carrying missile shipments to Yemen.
The Foreign Ministry's comments, in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, came one day after Pyongyang surprised the world by declaring it would restart nuclear facilities that were mothballed under a 1994 accord.
"The U.S. captured the DPRK (North Korea) trading cargo ship So San in broad daylight when the ship was sailing in the open seas off Yemen on Dec. 10," the ministry said. "Soon after it was brought to light that its capture had no legal ground but wantonly violated the routine trade between countries, the United States was compelled to send the ship back.
"This is an unpardonable piracy that wantonly encroached upon the sovereignty of the DPRK."
Earlier this week, Spanish warships seized a North Korean ship carrying at least 15 short- and medium-range Scud missiles in the Arabian Sea. The U.S. military took charge of the ship, but then allowed it to sail on after high-level diplomacy between the United States and Yemen.
The North's statement further increased tensions on the Korean peninsula sparked by Pyongyang's announcement of a decision to "immediately" revive Soviet-designed plutonium facilities suspected of being used to develop nuclear weapons.
North Korea also requested the International Atomic Energy Agency to remove seals and monitoring cameras from all its nuclear facilities. In a letter to the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog, North Korea informed the IAEA of its decision to reactivate the nuclear facilities.
The reactor at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, was frozen in 1994 after a year-long crisis ended with the Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea.
The director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said that year that the CIA estimated North Korea had produced one or two nuclear weapons.
Under the framework, North Korea pledged to freeze its nuclear arms program in return for 500,000 tons a year of heavy fuel oil and construction of two light-water reactors by the KEDO international consortium, comprised of the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union.
Despite Pyongyang's moves, construction of the light water reactors at Kumho, on North Korea's northeastern coast, was progressing normally, a KEDO official here said.
"The light water reactor project, as of now, is being carried on as normal with no disruption," the official told United Press International.
----
N. Korea to restart nuke reactor
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 13, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20021213-852391.htm
North Korea said yesterday that it will restart a small nuclear reactor it shut down eight years ago and resume building two larger reactors, another blow to a 1994 agreement by the communist state to stop making fuel for atom bombs.
The Bush administration called the move "regrettable" and said it would not be dragged to the negotiating table by threats from Pyongyang.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry said the government was reopening a five-megawatt experimental nuclear power plant in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, to compensate for its recent loss of monthly fuel-oil shipments from the United States.
"The prevailing situation compelled the government to lift its measure for nuclear freeze and immediately resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity," said the North Korean statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
The statement said that any decision on whether North Korea "refreezes its nuclear facilities or not hinges upon" the United States.
The U.S.-led Korean Peninsula Development Organization (KEDO) last month suspended the oil shipments - a decision that followed North Korea's admission in early October to having a secret uranium-enrichment program.
Both uranium being made in the newly disclosed program and plutonium, which North Korea has admitted extracting from its old experimental reactor, can be used to make atom bombs.
The oil deliveries were part of a complicated deal between North Korea and the United States, South Korea and Japan to end a crisis that brought the Korean Peninsula dangerously close to war.
Under the deal, known as the Agreed Framework, the oil shipments were to supply the North's energy needs while KEDO built two civilian nuclear power stations.
The North Korean statement yesterday blamed Washington for having "nullified" the framework by not building the new reactors on time and not improving relations with Pyongyang.
"The U.S. cannot escape its responsibility for utterly trampling on the terms and spirit of the Agreed Framework by designating us as an 'axis of evil' and target of pre-emptive nuclear attacks," it said yesterday.
North Korea today accused the United States of piracy in the seizure of a ship carrying missile shipments to Yemen. This week, the U.S. military, assisted by Spanish warships, seized a North Korean ship carrying at least 15 short- and medium-range Scud missiles in the Arabian Sea.
The ship was released a day later and allowed to sail on after high-level diplomacy between the United States and Yemen.
The Bush administration avoided matching North Korea's rhetorical style and kept its comments low-key.
"Not every issue requires a potential military response. There's ways to keep the peace through diplomatic pressure, through alliance and that's what we're doing in the Korean Peninsula," President Bush said in an interview with ABC.
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters, "The announcement flies in the face of international consensus that the North Korean regime must fulfill all its commitments, in particular dismantle its nuclear weapons program."
Mr. Fleischer also said the administration would not enter into dialogue with the North Koreans "in response to threats or broken commitments."
U.S. officials said Washington's response to yesterday's announcement was deliberately "measured," because "anything we say" will affect the ongoing presidential election campaign in South Korea.
"We want to play down the crisis," an official said. South Korea, which votes for president on Thursday, has to choose between a hawk and a dove on policy toward North Korea.
Roh Moo-hyun, from the ruling Millennium Democratic Party of outgoing President Kim Dae-jung, supports Mr. Kim's "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North.
His challenger, Lee Hoi-chang, an advocate of a tougher approach, demands reciprocity from North Korea before granting further concessions to the North.
The U.S. official said the Bush administration wanted to hear how South Korea and Japan, as well as Russia and China, will react to yesterday's news. Moscow and Beijing, Pyongyang's closest friends, called on Kim Jong-il's reclusive regime last week to suspend its latest nuclear weapons program.
"We want to consult with our allies and others in the region and step up pressure on North Korea together," the official said.
South Korea yesterday expressed "strong regret and serious concern" and said it "will be closely monitoring North Korea's actions, while strengthening Korea-U.S.-Japan cooperation and coordination with other concerned countries."
Japan called for a calm response, with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi saying: "If you read the North Korean announcement carefully, their consistent stance is to seek a peaceful resolution."
Earlier this week, the U.S. Navy detained a ship carrying North Korean Scud missiles to Yemen and later released it because the missile sale turned out to be legal.
U.S. officials said Pyongyang is clearly seeking attention at a time when Washington is preoccupied with Iraq.
"They hate being ignored," one administration official said. "But we have a policy of containment and isolation, and we'll let that regime rot with it."
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South Korea Calls North's Nuclear Plan 'Unacceptable'
December 13, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-SKorea-US.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- President Bush told South Korean President Kim Dae-jung on Friday that he won't allow ``business as usual to continue'' with North Korea but still seeks a peaceful resolution after the communist country announced it would reactivate its nuclear program.
``President Kim noted that North Korea's statement on unfreezing its nuclear program is unacceptable,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters in Washington, recounting the telephone conversation, which was first announced by the South Korean government.
Bush called Kim to discuss renewed fears over the communist state's suspected nuclear weapons program. North Korea, accusing the Bush administration of taking a hard-line policy toward its regime, said Thursday it will reactivate nuclear facilities that have been frozen under a 1994 deal with Washington.
``The two heads of state agreed that they cannot accept North Korea's decision to lift its nuclear freeze, and they agreed to urge North Korea to withdraw its decision,'' said Kim's national security adviser, Lim Sung-joon.
But the two leaders also ``agreed to continue their efforts to seek a peaceful resolution,'' he said.
The emphasis on seeking a peaceful solution suggested the two leaders were trying to prevent the situation from escalating into a crisis similar to one in 1994 that nearly led to war on the Korean Peninsula.
Security analysts believe North Korea had built one or two nuclear bombs before it froze its nuclear facilities in 1994. If reactivated, the program can quickly yield enough plutonium for several more bombs, they say.
North Korea says its facilities were built to generate electricity.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, on Friday urged North Korea not to move ahead with its nuclear program.
``We need to continue to look for agreed solutions, a diplomatic solution to the problem,'' ElBaradei said in Vienna. ``If North Korea were to cooperate with the agency ... all the concerned parties are all ready to engage into a dialogue and try to reach a diplomatic solution to the problem.''
In his telephone call, Bush voiced confidence that the nuclear crisis on the divided Korean Peninsula can be resolved peacefully and ``hoped to send a message to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that the United States has no intention to invade his country,'' Lim said during a briefing for South Korean journalists.
President Kim emphasized the importance of cooperation among the United States, Japan and South Korea to handle the crisis, Lim said.
The two leaders also discussed mounting anti-U.S. sentiment in South Korea following the acquittal of two American soldiers whose armored vehicle hit and killed two Korean schoolgirls in June.
Bush conveyed ``deep sadness and regret'' over the deaths, Lim said.
The U.S. president told Kim that the American people cherished the strong alliance with South Korea, and that he instructed the U.S. military to take steps to prevent such tragedies, Lim said.
``I hope that South Korean people will understand the true intent of President Bush,'' Kim was quoted as saying.
The telephone conversation came on the eve of a massive street demonstration scheduled for Saturday that organizers said will attract 100,000 South Korean citizens to protest what they considered preferential treatment to U.S. troops based in South Korea.
Anti-U.S. sentiment rose sharply in South Korea over the acquittals of the two American soldiers in U.S. military courts in November. The verdict triggered large street protests and calls for a retrial of the soldiers in a Korean court.
Protesters also demanded a direct apology from Bush, who had apologized once through his ambassador in Seoul.
There has also been growing public pressure for a revision of the Status of Forces Agreement to give South Korea more jurisdictional power over 37,000 U.S. soldiers based here.
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ASIAN ARENA
North Korea to Reactivate an Idled Nuclear Reactor
December 13, 2002
New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH with DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/13/international/asia/13KORE.html
TOKYO, Dec. 12 - In a challenge to the United States, North Korea said today that it was immediately reactivating a nuclear reactor idled since a 1994 crisis that nearly led to war between the countries.
The reactor at Yongbyon is capable of producing enough plutonium for the country to make one or two nuclear weapons a year, according to American intelligence officials.
North Korea justified the decision - the latest in a sharply downward spiral in relations with Washington - by declaring it the only way to produce electricity to make up for the recent suspension of fuel oil deliveries from the United States, Japan, South Korea and the European Union. The fuel cutoff, in turn, was announced as a punishment for a secret nuclear weapons program, whose existence American diplomats say North Korea first acknowledged during an American visit in early October.
"The prevailing situation compelled the D.P.R.K. government to lift its nuclear freeze adopted on the premise that 500,000 tons of heavy oil would be annually supplied," North Korea's Foreign Ministry announced, using the initials for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name. "Whether the D.P.R.K. refreezes its nuclear facilities or not hinges upon the U.S."
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has monitors at the North Korean plant to make sure it is not reactivated, received a letter today from Ri Je Son, the director general of North Korea's Department of Atomic Energy, asking for the removal of seals and monitoring cameras, officials at the agency's headquarters in Vienna said.
According to a statement today, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the atomic agency, immediately wrote back to urge North Korea to "act with restraint" and "not to take any unilateral action that might further complicate" the agency's program in North Korea.
Mr. ElBaradei said it was "essential that the containment and surveillance measures which are currently in place continue to be maintained," and warned that altering the seals would be a violation of international agreements. He called for an urgent meeting with North Korea to work out new monitoring procedures.
A senior Bush administration official called the North Korean request "a very serious matter," but described no consequences for the North if it insisted on the atomic agency's withdrawal.
Similarly, at the White House today, Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, played down any sense of urgency about North Korea's announcement, which he called "regrettable."
But there was no talk of the options that the Clinton administration discussed in 1994, when North Korea's threat to restart the reactor and "uncan" nuclear waste now in storage prompted a reinforcement of American troops on the Korean Peninsula and discussion of whether it would be possible to bomb the nuclear site.
This time the White House took the reverse approach, reassuring North Korea today that it had no plans to invade. But, Mr. Fleischer said, it also said there was nothing negotiable about the termination of North Korea's nuclear projects - either its recently revealed effort to produce a bomb from highly enriched uranium, or the plutonium production it now threatens to restart.
"The international community has made it clear that North Korea's relations with the outside world hinge on th elimination of its nuclear weapons program," Mr. Fleischer said.
Other American officials said that although they were not surprised by the North Korean announcement, they considered it a major challenge - one that the administration would probably not focus on until the confrontation with Iraq was ended.
"One rogue state crisis at a time," a senior administration official said today, describing President Bush's strategy.
Several American officials noted that the North Korean statement made reference to its willingness to "refreeze" the program if it won the kind of relationships it seeks with the United States. The administration has been divided on the question of whether North Korea is willing to trade away its nuclear program, or determined to hold onto it as a negotiating card with the United States.
In previous statements, North Korea has expressed a willingness to discuss all of its weapons of mass destruction with the United States in exchange for an offer of normalized relations and a guarantee against attack. Mr. Bush's inclusion of North Korea in the "axis of evil" has seriously rattled its government, which seems to believe that it could be attacked after a possible invasion of Iraq. "The U.S. has already listed the D.P.R.K. as part of an `axis of evil' and a target of pre-emptive nuclear attack," today's statement read.
Another corner of the "axis of evil," Iran, also disquieted American officials today, with revelations from commercial photographs apparently taken in September. They were said to show a plant for producing heavy water, which is critical in the process of making a plutonium weapon, and a plant to enrich uranium.
But the more immediate issue was the North Korean announcement, which today prompted an emergency meeting of the South Korean cabinet, which urged its neighbor to "observe all the obligations stipulated in the 1994 Geneva Accord, Inter-Korean Denuclearization Declaration, Nonproliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards," in a statement released by the Foreign Ministry.
In South Korea, which is one week away from presidential elections, the two major candidates have offered sharply different visions of relations with their neighbor. Throughout the campaign, there have also been large anti-American demonstrations, with many protesters condemning the presence of 37,000 American troops in the country and denouncing United States policy toward North Korea.
The North Korean statements have come like a last-minute wild card that could have an unpredictable influence the outcome.
One candidate, Roh Moo Hyun, offers continuing aid for North Korea and other reconciliation efforts, while the other, Lee Hoi Chang, is largely in line with the Bush administration, warning of sanctions if North Korea does not modify its behavior.
Mr. Roh, who according to the latest opinion polls is the narrow front-runner, has the most to lose from a sudden heightening of tensions. He said today in a carefully hedged statement that although "the world is alarmed by North Korea's announced plan to resume the operation of nuclear facilities and its threat to develop nuclear weapons," the United States should pursue dialogue and "cooperate, so that this problem can be resolved peacefully without further building tension on the Korean Peninsula."
Spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor are being kept in a cooling pond under the surveillance of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. Their presence ensures that the rods are not reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium. Expulsion of the inspectors, or removal of the fuel, would heighten the confrontation, but analysts said tonight that the wording of the North Korean statement suggested that North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, had not yet resolved to take such steps.
"We've seen no evidence of any renewed activity around Yongbyon," said one Bush administration official. He noted that restarting the reactor would take time, and that there would be an additional lag before it produced the nuclear waste that would aid the weapons project.
Adhering to a pattern that has held throughout the current crisis, North Korea leavened its defiance with an apparent call for a negotiated solution. "It is the invariable stand of the D.P.R.K. government to find a peaceful solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula," the Foreign Ministry statement read.
In recent weeks, the Bush administration has said there cannot be any negotiations until North Korea takes "clear and verifiable" strides toward dismantling the uranium enrichment program.
By conducting that program in secret, in violation of many agreements, North Korea has strengthened the hand of critics in Washington who have long contended that negotiations are worthless.
"North Korea's traditional negotiating behavior, of pushing up to the brink of a crisis and then climbing down from it can be seen in this statement," said Victor D. Cha, a professor of government at Georgetown University. "It is a combination of threats and olive branch, but when you take the olive branch, the cooperation becomes a sinkhole."
Japanese officials expressed strong dismay tonight over the announcement but played down the immediate threat, saying the statement appeared aimed at bringing the United States to the negotiating table.
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U.S. Takes North Korea's Nuclear Plan In Stride
Consultations Underway, But Focus Remains on Iraq
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 13, 2002; Page A50
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47743-2002Dec12?language=printer
The Bush administration, increasingly focused on the looming confrontation with Iraq, reacted calmly yesterday to North Korea's announcement that it would restart a nuclear power plant shuttered since 1994.
Several officials dismissed North Korea's announcement as the minimum counter move to a decision last month to cut off monthly heavy fuel oil shipments to North Korea. The United States pressed to end the shipments after it said North Korea had admitted to developing a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of previous agreements, part of a strategy to increasingly isolate the communist leadership in Pyongyang. Not only is the administration consulting with Japan and South Korea, two regional allies formally involved in North Korean issues, but U.S. officials are working with Russia and China as well. Russian President Vladimir Putin has privately suggested the creation of a Russia-China-U.S. trilateral group on North Korea, a prospect the administration is actively considering.
A senior administration official declined to say yesterday whether President Bush had any "red lines" that would spark U.S. action if North Korea stepped over them. "We will take a few days here to consult with others," the official said. "We will take our time and we will work through this whole issue. We've got very strong pressure points on North Korea."
The message suggested that the administration's policy on North Korea -- which sparked fierce interagency fights through much of the first two years of Bush's presidency -- has evolved into a single mantra: Make no waves while the focus remains on Iraq.
The consensus in the administration on dealing with North Korea is "remarkable to me," said another official involved in previous interagency fights. "Everyone understands the president doesn't want 15 crises on his plate."
The stance is striking because several administration officials were fierce critics of the deal struck during the Clinton administration that led to the closure, but not the dismantling, of the nuclear plant that the North Korean government says it is restarting. The Clinton administration nearly went to war over the plant, believing it was used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, but conflict was averted by the 1994 agreement.
"We have no intention to invade," the senior official said. "You never take any option off the table [but] we think we have a chance to solve this in a different way. This time around there is a very good chance you can do this through international pressure, a very good chance."
Bush came into office deeply skeptical of North Korea and wary of pursuing further agreements on missile proliferation that were being negotiated with the Clinton administration. But his advisers remained split over how to deal with North Korea, at least until intelligence emerged this summer of Pyongyang's covert nuclear program.
Under the 1994 accord, North Korea agreed to suspend operation of a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade material, stop construction of other two other reactors and place plutonium already produced under international safeguards. In return, the United States agreed, among other things, to supply Pyongyang with regular shipments of fuel oil, totaling 3.3 million barrels a year. Under a separate accord, Japan, South Korea and the United States agreed to construct two light-water reactors to generate electricity.
Since North Korea's admission, U.S. officials have pushed hard to get Japan and South Korea in agreement with a policy to isolate North Korea. Last month, the United States, telling its allies it was cutting off funding for monthly fuel oil shipments to the energy-starved nation, demanded that a ship carrying heavy fuel oil to North Korean ports be turned around midway in its voyage, foreign diplomats and U.S. officials said.
The Japanese and South Koreans insisted the November delivery was necessary, since it would help provide 85 percent of North Korea's heavy fuel oil needs for the coming winter. The United States backed down, permitting the ship to complete its voyage, once the other nations agreed to suspend future deliveries.
Yesterday, the North Korean government announced that in response to the fuel oil cutoff, it would "immediately resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity." It made no mention of removing 8,000 spent fuel rods from canisters -- which would immediately provide the key ingredient for weapons -- or kicking out international inspectors who monitor the rods in North Korea.
U.S. officials played down the announcement, saying it would be impossible for North Korea to be able to use the reactor to generate electricity. "It's all nonsense," one official said. "They can't hook it up to the grid," which he said has all but collapsed across North Korea.
The fuel oil deliveries, which cost the United States as much as $100 million a year, actually are of little more than symbolic value to North Korea, said Peter Hayes, executive director of the Nautilus Institute, a scientific research organization in Berkeley, Calif. He estimated they provide only 2 percent of North Korea's overall energy supply, providing little heat except to some large buildings. While the oil was intended to match the thermal output of the closed reactors, he said that over the years the highly sulfuric oil has corroded boiler tubes in power generators, putting a number of power plants out of commission.
A number of U.S. officials are determined to try to stop construction of the light-water reactors next year, a step they hope will signal to the North Koreans that they have no choice but to comply with U.S. demands to end its weapons programs.
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
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North Korea Knocks
Friday, December 13, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48104-2002Dec12?language=printer
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION would dearly like to postpone any major engagement with North Korea. A hotly contested South Korean presidential election is only days away, and a decision on whether to go to war with Iraq may need to be made within weeks. But North Korea's brutal and isolated dictator, Kim Jong Il, apparently intends to force his way onto Washington's agenda, even if it means bringing his country to the brink of war. Yesterday's announcement by Pyongyang that it would reactivate its closed nuclear reactor and resume construction on two others brings North Korea to the edge of activities that the United States has previously regarded as grounds for military intervention. Bush administration officials said yesterday that the threat won't change their stance of refusing Mr. Kim the political negotiations he craves. The question is whether that tough stance will yield concessions -- or further escalation by a desperate regime.
The strategy of isolating the North, which the administration re-adopted after Pyongyang admitted to a secret uranium enrichment program, has the advantage of allowing the United States to turn its attention elsewhere while waiting for Mr. Kim to give in. Administration officials argue that the policy has been a success, at least in the sense that Japan, South Korea, Russia and China have joined in Washington's demand for an end to the enrichment work. Last month, with the acquiescence of its Asian allies, the administration halted U.S. deliveries of fuel oil to the North under the 1994 pact known as the Agreed Framework, under which North Korea shut down a nuclear complex that was the suspected center of an earlier weapons program. Administration officials say they are determined not to repeat the Clinton administration's course of responding to provocative behavior by Pyongyang with negotiations; this time, it is insisted, Mr. Kim must first change course.
The dictator has instead done what some in the region warned he might: escalate the crisis further, in the hope of forcing the United States to talk to him. Yesterday's announcement was vague but ominous, saying that the North would "immediately resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity." The threat lies in the fact that the reactor generates spent fuel that can readily be processed into bomb-grade plutonium. International inspectors are monitoring some 8,000 spent fuel rods; should North Korea expel the inspectors and make use of these rods, it could produce dozens of nuclear weapons in a matter of months. Mr. Kim's crude calculation is that this prospect will compel the United States to give him the political concessions he wants, including recognition of his murderous regime and a guarantee against a U.S. attack. In exchange Washington would presumably get another promise of a freeze on nuclear weapons development.
The Bush administration is rightly resistant to this attempted blackmail. And yet it cannot be assumed that time and outside pressure will eventually force Mr. Kim to back down; it is just as possible he will escalate still further. For that reason the United States must make clear that some steps by Pyongyang will not be tolerated -- such as removing spent fuel rods from international supervision. It must also find a way to clearly communicate to Mr. Kim what specific steps he must take to end the standoff; the Russian or Chinese governments could serve as intermediaries. This complex and difficult situation would be hard for President Bush to manage even if he did not face a crisis with Iraq. And yet a holding action does not look like a workable option.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
House Expands Inquiry Into Fraud at Lab
December 13, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Los-Alamos-Fraud.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A House committee is expanding its inquiry into allegations of fraud and credit card abuse at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A letter from the committee said abuse appears more widespread than thought.
The committee issued a sweeping demand for new documents, including reports on the alleged irregularities to lab director John C. Browne and a breakdown of whether computers missing from the nuclear lab contained classified information.
Ken Johnson, the committee spokesman, said three investigators were being sent to the lab and will begin work on Monday.
``It is apparent that the amount of fraud and abuse at LANL is much more extensive and includes many more employees than we had originally at first believed,'' said the letter, signed by the committee chairman, Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., and other senior committee members.
The letter to Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, which runs the lab, expressed frustration at ``the apparent failure of the University of California and LANL to sufficiently address these issues over the past several years.''
The letter was sent Tuesday and distributed Friday.
It requested documents regarding the departure of two investigators fired after blowing the whistle on the lab's management practices and also demanded materials from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the lab's auditor.
Johnson said the expanded request for documents was a result of questions raised by papers received from an earlier committee request, press reports and information from Los Alamos employees ``suggesting that the problems are more prevalent than first reported.''
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Washington-based watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, which has worked with Los Alamos whistle-blowers, said the letter was an encouraging sign.
``We think it's a great start. It's obviously a serious investigation,'' she said.
The Los Alamos lab grew out of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II and has been a vital part of the country's nuclear energy and weapons programs since.
The FBI, the Energy Department's inspector general and the Senate Finance Committee also are investigating the allegations of fraud, theft and cover-up at the nuclear weapons lab. Three lab employees are on administrative leave following initial phases of the investigation.
Two investigators, Glenn Walp and Steven Doran, who reported misuse of credit cards and missing equipment -- some from sensitive areas of the lab -- were fired.
Walp submitted a report to Los Alamos authorities in March that listed 263 computers as missing since 1999, many presumed stolen. In all, about $2.7 million worth of equipment is unaccounted for, according to Walp's reports.
On Oct. 31, FBI agents carrying search warrants scoured the homes of Los Alamos employees Peter Bussolini and Scott Alexander and found thousands of dollars worth of goods that may have been acquired by abusing lab purchase orders.
A third employee may have used her government credit card to buy a Ford Mustang with custom equipment.
On the Net:
Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov
House Energy and Commerce Committee: http://www.house.gov/commerce/
-------- us politics
Kissinger to Withhold Client List
Head of 9/11 Panel Seeks to Assure Victims' Kin That No Conflicts of Interest Exist
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 13, 2002; Page A43
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47733-2002Dec12?language=printer
Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, facing pressure from Congress to divulge his client list, yesterday sought to assure families of victims of last year's terror attacks that his business contacts would not interfere with his new role as head of a commission investigating the terror strikes.
But at an introductory meeting with representatives of four victims groups at his offices in New York, Kissinger also made clear that he does not intend to publicly disclose a list of his business clients, according to relatives who attended the meeting.
Stephen Push, a leader of Families of September 11, said Kissinger outlined a plan aimed at assuring the victims' groups privately that his representation of multinational corporations would pose no conflicts of interest with his role as chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. Push declined to provide details, saying that Kissinger had asked that the arrangements remain confidential.
Push, who has expressed skepticism about Kissinger's ability to conduct a thorough investigation, said he was impressed with the efforts to reach out to the families.
"He suggested a plan that would assure us personally that he would have no conflicts," said Push, one of 11 victim relatives who met with Kissinger. "If he does what he says he does, I see the potential of satisfying us. But I won't suggest that that satisfies the law; that's not my place to say."
But Kristen Breitweiser, a member of September 11th Advocates, said she believes Kissinger should abide by the same disclosure rules as the other commission members.
"He needs to follow the law," said Breitweiser, who also met with Kissinger yesterday. "He can't cut a side deal with the families. It's not just the families that need to be satisfied with this commission, it's all of America."
Kissinger's efforts to assuage the concerns of the families comes amid growing disagreement in Washington over the rules that should govern the new commission, which was created to conduct an in-depth investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Senate Democrats argue that Kissinger and the other nine members of the panel must abide by congressional rules on financial disclosure and conflicts of interest. The Congressional Research Service issued a report last week concluding that all the panel's members, including Kissinger, would be required to identify clients who paid them more than $5,000 over the last two years.
The White House, however, told the Senate Select Ethics Committee this week that it believes Kissinger is not required to provide such information because he was appointed by President Bush rather than by Congress, and because he will not receive a salary. Justice Department legal advisers have prepared an opinion supporting the White House position, sources said.
Kissinger did not return a message left at his office in New York. The founder and chairman of Kissinger Associates said earlier this month that he did not believe that any of his clients would pose conflicts of interest with the Sept. 11 commission. He has said that he would sever relationships with any clients involved in the investigation, that he has no Saudi Arabian clients and does not represent any Middle Eastern governments.
Congress created the bipartisan commission to follow up on the work of a House-Senate probe into intelligence failures. The new panel's broader mandate includes transportation, immigration and border issues as well as intelligence matters, with a report due in 18 months.
But the Bush administration's appointment of Kissinger has prompted a series of early troubles for the commission. Kissinger's controversial tenure as secretary of state prompted immediate objections from some Democrats and liberal groups, while the disclosure issue has raised the possibility of a long-term legal battle before the panel is seated.
Democrats have named their five representatives to the commission, including former House International Relations Committee chairman Lee H. Hamilton (Ind.) as vice chairman. Hamilton was appointed Wednesday to replace former senator George J. Mitchell (Maine), who withdrew in part because of suggestions that he might have to sever ties to his law firm.
In addition to Kissinger, Republicans have named former senator Slade Gorton (Wash.). The GOP has until Sunday to name the three other members.
Many of the families of victims are lobbying the Bush administration to name former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) to the panel.
One Democratic member, departing Rep. Timothy J. Roemer (Ind.), declined to comment yesterday on Kissinger's client list. But Roemer, a longtime advocate of an independent probe who helped write the language establishing the panel, said he is confident the commission will overcome any early disagreements.
"Our intention is to set up a very independent commission with a robust and aggressive pursuit of all the facts," Roemer said. "We're very hopeful that we'll be able to achieve both of those objectives."
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Kissinger Resigns as Head of Sept. 11 Commission
Fri December 13, 2002
Reuters
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=1905861
WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stepped down on Friday as chairman of a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House announced.
"It is with regret that I accept Dr. Kissinger's decision to step down as chairman of the National Commission to investigate the events of Sept. 11 2001 and the years that led up to that event," President Bush said in a statement.
Kissinger had been criticized over possible conflicts of interest.
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Bush, Kim Discuss North Korean Nuclear Program
Reuters
Friday, December 13, 2002
By Steve Holland
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51206-2002Dec13?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung on Friday put new pressure on North Korea over its revived nuclear program, with Kim telling Bush the program was "unacceptable" and agreeing there could be no business as usual with the communist state.
The two leaders spoke by telephone the day after North Korea said it would restart a nuclear reactor that has been idled under the 1994 Agreed Framework and which could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
"President Kim noted that North Korea's statement on unfreezing its nuclear program is unacceptable. And then the two leaders agreed to continue seeking a peaceful resolution while not allowing business as usual to continue with North Korea," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The United States, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the European Union have all called on North Korea to give up its nuclear program to little avail so far.
In fact North Korea's public attitude has been decidedly more aggressive since it admitted in October to a nuclear weapons program, in an apparent drive to force Washington to the negotiating table.
On Thursday North Korea said it would restart the idled reactor in order to generate power needed since the United States, Japan and South Korea cut off fuel oil shipments. On Friday Pyongyang demanded a U.S. apology for the U.S. Navy's interception of a North Korean ship earlier this week carrying Scud missiles to Yemen.
Fleischer urged North Korea to reconsider its request that the International Atomic Energy Agency remove cameras and seals put in place to monitor its activities, calling it a "serious matter" of concern.
"But I want to reiterate that we will continue to work with the international community to seek a peaceful resolution to the situation in North Korea. And this is a situation that North Korea has created by pursuing a nuclear weapons program," Fleischer said.
AXIS OF EVIL
While Bush has threatened war against Iraq for suspected weapons of mass destruction, the United States has taken a more low-key approach to dealing with Pyongyang, emphasizing a desire for a peaceful resolution and vowing no invasion of North Korea.
The administration is increasingly focused on Iraq in Bush's drive to disarm President Saddam Hussein. It has, however, also expressed concern about recent evidence that Iran, the third member of what Bush calls an "axis of evil" may be trying to make nuclear weapons.
The White House stressed that the approach to North Korea was different than that toward Iraq. "The situation in Iraq involves somebody who has used force in the past to attack and invade his neighbors. That is not the history of North Korea for the last 50 years. And so, it's not exactly analogous," Fleischer said.
U.S. officials declined to talk about the possibility that North Korea could expel International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, saying only this would be a serious matter.
In his conversation with Kim, Bush conveyed his "deep, personal sadness and regret" over the deaths of two South Korean girls who were accidentally hit during a training exercise by a U.S. military vehicle, Fleischer said.
The incident has generated protests from thousands of South Koreans in Seoul and other major cities, calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.
The accident in June, and the U.S. court martial acquittal last month of the soldiers driving the armored vehicle, have intensified anti-American sentiment in South Korea.
"The president pledged to work closely with the South Korean government to prevent such accidents in the future," Fleischer said. The United States has about 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea.
"President Kim said the South Korean people appreciate the important role played by the U.S. service personnel in maintaining peace and security on the Korean Peninsula, and reiterated that the current circumstances make the U.S.-Korean alliance more important than ever," Fleischer said.
-------- MILITARY
Overblown missile threat
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
December 13, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021213-83984435.htm#2
If the SA-7 surface-to-air missile (SAM) is a significant threat, why did two SA-7s recently fired at an Israeli 757 aircraft fail to explode and/or damage the aircraft? Was it just luck, or were there valid reasons for the terrorists' failed effort? Has a shoulder-fired SAM ever caused the destruction or crash of a large commercial airliner? Where's the evidence?
Shoulder-fired SAMs pose a threat, surely. The degree of that threat is what I question. It is inappropriate to make this threat appear bigger and better than reality, which I believe the media have done. Rather than possessing death-ray characteristics, shoulder-fired SAMs have significant limitations versus a large commercial aircraft. Yesterday's editorial "Airplanes and the terrorist threat" presented the worst-case scenario. Perhaps you should present a more balanced view.
Indeed, a variety of countermeasure systems have been installed on various military aircraft, but that doesn't prove the systems will work effectively on an airliner. Have tests or a cost-benefit analysis been accomplished for countermeasures installed on commercial airliners? I have read nothing but wild estimates for the costs to build and install the systems and nothing but guesses as to their effectiveness.
How long would such a study take to accomplish? Have the systems ever been installed on a commercial airliner, and will they work? Would a countermeasures system pose hazards to the installed aircraft and its passengers? Would the systems pose a threat to people and property on the ground? If systems are built and installed, should we expect the early estimates to significantly underestimate the actual costs and effectiveness? Might we waste millions, even billions, of dollars for systems that do not provide the effective solutions we were promised and expected?
We are much more likely to be killed or injured driving our cars to the airport than killed by an SAM destroying a commercial airliner on which we are flying. Why is it that relatively minor risks that we can't control cause us greater fear than more substantial risks that we can control? The risks posed by shoulder-fired SAMs are real, but overblown. We need a balanced discussion and assessment of the risks before we rush to judgment regarding solutions.
DAVID MARTIN
Former Navy pilot, current commercial pilot
Fairfax, Va.
-------- asia
U.S. to Yield G.I. to Seoul
December 13, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/13/international/asia/13CAPT.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 12 - The United States military command said today that it planned to surrender an American Army sergeant, convicted of severely injuring a woman in a motor vehicle accident, to Korean authorities.
The soldier, Sgt. Ronnie D. Kirby of Chouteau, Okla., was found guilty by a Korean court of driving his vehicle into the woman when he ran a red light. The woman is in a coma.
The command said the Korean authorities had jurisdiction over the case because the accident occurred when the sergeant was off-duty.
Koreans have been protesting the refusal by the command to surrender two army sergeants whose armored vehicle crushed two schoolgirls to death.
-------- biological weapons
State Officials Question Timetable for Smallpox Vaccines
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and WILLIAM J. BROAD
December 13, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/13/health/13SMAL.html
Some state officials and medical authorities said yesterday that they doubted they could carry out the first smallpox vaccination campaign in three decades within the planned time frame called for by President Bush given the major logistical hurdles yet to be surmounted.
The doubts emerged with news that President Bush would call for vaccinating military personnel, health care and emergency workers against smallpox within weeks, and possibly the public in 2004.
But state and local officials said that some hospitals only now are beginning to prepare for vaccinations and that they needed more time to solve issues like educating medical personnel and the public; reducing risk of complications from the vaccine; ensuring that hospital care does not suffer if vaccinated workers feel ill; and determining who would pay for liability claims, lost work or supplies like bandages.
The plan, to be announced today, comes against the backdrop of a possible war against Iraq and fears over whether terrorists or hostile nations might attack with the contagious virus, which kills about one in three unvaccinated people.
The initial phases of the vaccination plan would cover about 500,000 military personnel and 500,000 civilians, mostly health care and emergency workers who would most likely be exposed if someone contracted smallpox, officials said. Eventually as many as 10 million people in law enforcement, health care and emergency response could be offered the vaccine. Defense officials said troop vaccinations could start today.
Yesterday, federal officials said an effort over the last two months to prepare the states for the immunizations had paid off, and that problems in carrying out the large effort would be small.
Dr. Ed Thompson, a liaison with state health departments for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, "We have no illusions of this being an easy task."
For many state health workers, "this will be the biggest challenge of their career," said Dr. Thompson, who recently left his position as state health officer in Mississippi. "There will be some stumbling and they will be learning as they go along." Since the program "is important to protect our citizens, we are going to make it work."
"Some of the things you do best are the ones you are scaredest of when you start," Dr. Thompson said.
Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an adviser to the secretary of health and human services, said the civilian immunizations "will surely challenge state and local health departments. But it's very doable. I don't want to suggest it's going to be a cake walk. But we can do it with minimal interruption of services and activities."
When Dr. Osterholm was Minnesota's state epidemiologist, his team vaccinated 26,000 people against bacterial meningitis in four days, he said.
But smallpox vaccination is more complicated and dangerous because the virus in the vaccine can be transmitted inadvertently to other people, state and infectious disease experts said.
Dr. C. Mack Sewell, New Mexico's epidemiologist, said in an interview that the federal smallpox plan was too ambitious. "We were told you must start and finish in 30 days," he said. "We felt that was not reasonable, and other states feel the same way. We need more time to do this carefully and properly."
In particular, Dr. Sewell and other experts said, doctors need time to build up experience in administering the smallpox vaccine while avoiding danger. People at risk of complications include those whose immune systems have been weakened by cancer, AIDS or other diseases.
"We want to go cautiously to do our absolute best so as to minimize the number of adverse reactions," he said. "We want to make certain we screen properly and get mechanisms in place. If the threat assessment changed, we'd be ready to move more quickly."
The vaccine, made of a live virus closely related to smallpox known as vaccinia, can cause death or injury in susceptible people. They could presumably decline to be vaccinated, but they would remain vulnerable to infection with vaccinia virus shed by those who had taken the vaccine.
Dr. Sewell said New Mexico planned to immunize just 120 people in the first round, gradually expanding to about 12,000, a process that could take six to nine months. The state's plan, he added, had major uncertainties. "As with everybody else, it remains to be seen how many people will volunteer for this," Dr. Sewell said.
A doctor at a major East Coast hospital said the logistics of the vaccinations were incredibly complicated. "It's not down pat," he said of the preparation effort. "We're just getting started."
New York City's health and mental hygiene commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said he planned to move cautiously in vaccinating the the first wave of people. "We want to err on the side of safety," he said.
On Monday, a federal deadline passed for states and large cities to file their proposals on how to immunize health workers against smallpox, the first such plan in 30 years.
Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta announced that it had finished its first review of the state plans, and found them encouraging. The states were responding to documents from the disease control centers asking that they develop 30-day plans