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NUCLEAR
Dutch MPs and SFIR troops not Informed about use of depleted uranium
Here We Go Again... Unintended medical consequences?
War's unintended effects
CNY families worry about those in Iraq
Are American soldiers in Iraq dying due to depleted uranium?
U.N. Nuke Experts Begin Talks With Iran
Iran Closes in on Building Nuke Bomb - Report (Reuters)
Iran's Khamenei to Have Last Say on Nuclear Checks
Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb (LA Times)
US will press Pyongyang at talks
We will start testing nuclear bombs, says defiant N Korea
North Korea bans Bolton from talks
N. Korea Seeks to Exclude U.S. Official From Talks
Pentagon Nuclear Arms Session Worries Critics
Uranium oxide: Yellowcake not all it's cooked up to be
NRC approves restart of South Texas nuke
Report Says Powell to Step Down in 2005
Calling for Candor
MILITARY
Taliban Are Killing Clerics Who Dispute Holy War Call
West Africans set to deploy
First Contingent of African Peacekeepers Arrives in Liberia
Peace Force Set to Land In Liberia 300 From Nigeria Are Expected Today
Israeli firm wins public telephone contract in Iraq
Israeli High Tech Targets U.S. Security Market
Jobs here, there, everywhere
Comparing the US and the EU Constitutions
Mission to Iraq rattles Poles
Meet the New Boss ...
Iraqi president looks forward to exit of Americans
Who will police the police?
With Iraqi Courts Gone, Young Clerics Judge
New Iraq Army Recruits to Begin Training
Iraqi Shiites fighting war 'of the soul'
State proposes cut in Israel loans
Security more important than human rights in marriage law: minister
Israeli Prisoner List Disappoints Palestinians
In Israel, Settlers Resist
Nato to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed: ISAF
Danger begins when guns amnesty runs out
Pakistani Spokesman Blasts U.S. Official
More than 5,000 prisoners in Iraq: US military police
The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded
War casualties overflow Walter Reed hospital
How To Sell a War
Poll: Britons Trust BBC More Than They Trust Blair
Whistleblower on Niger uranium claim accuses White House
Bush's WMD Flimflams
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Republicans Put Immigration Laws Back on Political Agenda
Pentagon rules keep lawyers away from military trials
Illuminating D.C.'s Darkest Corners
Initiatives Aim to Halt Cycle of Felons Returning to Jail
Ashcroft: Al Qaeda Remains a Threat
OTHER
House Democrats Question President's Clear Skies Claims
ACTIVISTS
Get involved now, Ralph Nader tells college activists
I Was Detained by Airport Cops
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Dutch MPs and SFIR troops not Informed about use of depleted uranium in south Iraq
Maarten H.J. van den Berg,
RISQ, 4 August 2003
Electronic Iraq
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1006.shtml
As Dutch peacekeepers are arriving in the Southern province of Al Muthanna to join the UN-backed 'stabilisation force' in Iraq (SFIR), the government has unduly assured MPs that no DU ammunition was used in the area during the recent conflict. If this information comes from US officials, as the Dutch government claims, it has been deceived--and misinformed parliament.
This is the conclusion of a report by RISQ Associate Maarten H.J. van den Berg. Already, the report has led Dutch MPs to pose questions to the Minister of Defence, and a television program in which one of the US soldiers mentioned in the report reaffirms that the use of DU ammunition in the area was "standard procedure". Report Summary:
As the UN-backed 'stabilisation force' in Iraq (SFIR) is taking shape, Dutch marines are arriving in South Iraq. The troops, 1100 in total, will be stationed in the southern province of Al Muthanna. Apart from the Netherlands, other countries that have agreed to participate in SFIR include Poland, Italy and Japan whereas India recently decided not to sent any troops, unless a more explicit UN mandate were to materialize. Of course, the mission is not without risks. As the ongoing assaults on US troops in and around Baghdad and the recent killing of six British troops indicate, post-Saddam Iraq is all but stable and secure. Nonetheless, the Dutch government assured concerned MPs, "the security situation in the South of Iraq may be described as reasonably stable".
Some MPs raised questions about the use of DU (depleted uranium) during the war, and its repercussions for the safety of civilians and army personnel in the area. On this issue, too, the government assured, there was no cause for concern as "no significant fighting has taken place in the province of Al Muthanna". Besides that, according to Minister of Defence, no DU ammunition was used in the area during the recent conflict.
The assertion that no significant fighting took place in the area is so blatantly belied by open sources, that one wonders if any of the Ministers ever reads a newspaper. The capital of the province, As Samawah, is strategically located on the road from Basra to Baghdad, providing access to a bridge over the Euphrates river. Consequently, on its march to Baghdad, the US army anticipated some resistance there. In fact, it would encounter rather fierce resistance both from Iraqi forces, including Saddam Feyadeen paramilitaries and Baath party militias, as well as a group of Syrian volunteers, according to American officers . Reportedly, it took just one day to take the bridge but more than a week before the town and the road were cleared of all 'pockets of resistance' . 112 civilians, most of them inhabitants of As Samawah, were killed in the battle.
Despite such incidents, the Dutch government persists in depicting Al Muthanna as a remote, barely inhabited desert where no noteworthy events have occurred. In fact, as far as recent military activities are concerned, it was part and parcel of the 'theatre of operations'.
For that matter, the assertion that "no DU ammunition was deployed in Al-Muthanna" is also unfounded. If this assertion is based on information it received from US officials, as the Dutch government claims, it has been deceived. On the 12th of March, about a week before his troops set foot on Iraqi soil, Major General "Buff" Buford Blount III, commander of the US army 3rd Infantry Division already conveyed in an interview with Le Monde that "if we receive the order to attack, final preparations will only take a few days. We have already began to unwrap our depleted uranium anti-tank shells." That order came shortly, and as the Division advanced to Baghdad along the Euphrates, its Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles (BFVs) did not leave their unwrapped DU-shells sit idle on the way. On March 26, at CENTCOM Headquarters, General Brooks admitted as much, although he stressed that only "a very small portion of our munitions [contain] depleted uranium".
Be that as it may, it is a fact that DU-ammunition has been widely used during operation "Iraqi Freedom", also in Southern Iraq. Al Muthanna is no exception: the usage of DU-ammunition in and around the capital of the province, As Samawah, has been confirmed by US troops and 'embedded' journalists. In a widely distributed field message, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Cooper reports that the weapon systems used by the 3rd Infantry 7th Cavalry en route to As Samawah and on to Najaf, "are performing well, especially the 25mm DU and 7.62" . In a letter sent home, E. Pennell, crew member on a BFV of the 1st Infantry Battallion, 41st Infantry regiment, describes how his crew fires a 25 mm DU-round as they encounter seven enemy troops in the town of As Samawah: "We fire five rounds. The first one is a depleted uranium due to standard operating procedures". Such reports suggest that DU ammunition was routinely employed in encounters with armoured enemy vehicles, also in urban environments.
Whereas the deployment DU ammunition on the ground may have been subject to some operational restrictions, airborne DU ordnance has been fired less discriminately. The aircraft of choice for close air support to ground battles has been the A-10 "Wharthog" jet, notorious for its anti-tank missiles and its lethal 30 mm cannons that can fire up to 4200 rounds per minute. Accordingly, the aircraft is designed to carry lots of ammunition, both DU as well as 'conventional', high explosive (HE) rounds, typically fed into its guns in a mix of 5/6 or 5/8 (DU/HE) . Data released by the US Air Force recently, establish that the Warthogs have shot 311,597 rounds of 30 mm ordnance during the war , which would suggest that they have delivered at least 194,748 DU rounds. As each cartridge contains just over 300 grams of depleted uranium, this amounts to a minimum release of 58,814 kilograms of DU.
In Southern Iraq the Warthogs have played an important, supporting role in efforts to control strategic locations such as Tallil airbase and the bridges over the Euphrates. In the battle of Samawah, too, Warthogs have been called in to help ground troops mob up resistance and capture the two bridges there. In one of the incidences, vehicles of the 3rd Infantry 7th Cavalry reportedly drew friendly fire from Warthog aircraft, during a strike on a junk yard in town.
Since the US government has so far not disclosed any exact numbers, it is yet unknown just how much DU has been used in the war. The British government has been a bit more forthcoming, admitting that British Challenger tanks expended 1.9 tons of DU (approximately twice as much as in the 1990-91 Gulf Conflict) . On the basis of the available information Dan Fahey, an independent DU expert, estimates that 100-200 tons of DU may have been released during combat . If true, this would be significantly less than the total of approximately 290 tons shot in 1991. However, as Mr Fahey and others note, this time a larger share of the expenditure appears to have occurred in or around urban areas and, thus, increasing the potential for civilian exposure to DU.
Indeed, all over Iraq, the remains of spent DU shells and DU-contaminated debris have been found littering the streets in urban areas. Some wrecked vehicles have been towed away, and the most obvious contaminated sites are marked. However, most locations have not even been identified let alone cleaned, even though there is a widely shared consensus that DU contamination can be a potential health hazard.
After all, DU is a radioactive and toxic heavy metal which, like any other metal, is disposed to corrode and may, therefore, end up in the water supply or food chain . Apart from that, DU ammunition and armour ignites on impact, resulting in a very fine, radioactive and toxic dust that can be inhaled or ingested. Once in the body, DU may cause harm due to the exposure of internal organs to its chemical toxicity, radiation or the combined effects of both.
As of yet, though, little is known about the long-term health effects of exposure to DU contamination. To minimize the risk of exposure, US and UK troops have been instructed to stay away from potentially contaminated areas as much as possible or to wear, at least, respiratory protection and gloves when it is inevitable to enter such sites .
We may assume that Iraqi civilians stand to bear the same health risks as US or UK troops. However, there is no indication that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has properly informed the population about DU contamination. The British Ministry of Defence merely affirms that Iraqi locals have been warned "that they should not go near or touch any debris they find on the battlefield" . Perhaps this would have sufficed, were it not for the fact that quite a few battles have been fought in densely populated areas, where it is virtually impossible for residents to avoid all remnants of war. It is thus indispensable that DU contaminated debris is clearly marked, fenced off or, preferably, cleaned up, and that citizens receive proper safety instructions.
Now, at least the British government has agreed to provide details of UK DU firing locations to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and directly to recognised non-government organisations working on location . It has also assumed some responsibility for clean-up and decontamination . In contrast, the US government has so far denied any responsibility for DU clean-up in Iraq. To date, it has also refused to disclose any information about the quantities and locations of DU expenditure or allow a UNEP Post Conflict Assessment Unit to study the environmental impact of DU contamination.
In fact, if we are to believe the Dutch government, the only specific information that the US authorities have disclosed so far is that no DU-ammunition has been used in the province of Al Muthanna. As we have demonstrated, there is ample evidence to the contrary. Consequently, either the Dutch government has deceived parliament or it has been misinformed by US authorities. Either way, the question remains as to how much DU has been fired and where exactly-both in Al Muthanna as well as Iraq at large. As long as such basic issues are not addressed, it is not possible to assess the health risks of DU contamination, let alone claim that these are negligible.
Of course, the lack of reliable information bears, before all, on concerns about the health and safety of the Iraqi population but it also implicates coalition troops and the newly arriving SFIR units. The main problem is that the troops only know of areas contaminated more than ten years ago, during the Gulf War in 1991. About areas that have been contaminated recently, they have received no information.
----
Here We Go Again...
Agent Orange, Gulf War Illness, and now....?
By Geoff Metcalf
http://www.sierratimes.com/03/08/04/metcalf.htm
http://www.americandaily.com/nucleus/plugins/print/print.php?itemid=1894
Associated Press reports, "The Army is trying to figure out what is causing a rash of serious pneumonia cases, including two fatalities, among soldiers serving in Iraq." A team of specialists has been sent to Iraq to investigate over a dozen cases of pneumonia sufficiently serious to put the soldiers on ventilators to breathe and to be evacuated from the area.
The Army reports that two soldiers have died, nine recovered and three are still hospitalized. Is this normal? The Army Surgeon General says, given the number of troops deployed, 100 cases "do not exceed expectations."
Maybe...But who's expectations and based on what data?
- Are expectations based on forecasting statistics for depleted uranium munitions exposure?
- Or assorted vaccines?
- Are the pneumonia incidents routine?
- Or statistical anomalies?
For at least 72 years our government has engaged in highly questionable (unethical) medical experimentation. The same kind of stuff they make movies out of and that we have vilified the Japanese and Germans for doing, our government has done (and arguably continues to do).
I wrote about this back in January, "The Mushroom Policy: Human Experimentation", but it bears repeating.
It is easy to "pooh-pooh" any "mad scientists" suggestions as mere "conspiracy theory" hogwash. However, a litany of FACTS should disabuse a reasonable person of the conspiratorial fiction line when you review history.
Washington Post Matriarch the Late Katherine Graham once said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
The list is too long to chronicle but here is an incomplete (edited) generational overview:
The 30s:
- Starting in at least 1931 "Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infects human subjects with cancer cells."
- In 1932 there was the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
- Three years later The Pellagra Incident.
The 40s:
- In 1942 Chemical Warfare Services started mustard gas experiments on approximately 4,000 servicemen.
- A few years later "Program F" is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production.
- In 1947 the CIA started to study LSD as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military) are used with and without their knowledge.
The 50s:
- One of the most outrageous experiments was conducted in 1950. The purpose was to determine how susceptible an American city would be to biological attack. To find out, the U.S. Navy sprayed a cloud of bacteria from ships over San Francisco. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.
- A year later the Department of Defense began open-air tests using disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests lasted through 1969.
The 60s:
- In 1960 The Army Assistant Chief-of-Staff for Intelligence authorized field-testing of LSD in Europe and the Far East.
- Five years later prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical component of Agent Orange used in Viet Nam.
The 70s:
- In 1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirmed that 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included
- San Francisco
- Washington, D.C.
- Key West
- Panama City
- Minneapolis
- St. Louis.
The 80s:
A 1986 report to Congress revealed that the U.S. Government's (then) current generation of biological agents included: modified viruses, naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent treatment by all existing vaccines.
The 90s:
- In 1990 over 1500 six-month old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.
- Another report was issued in 1994 by Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances.
- Just six years ago eighty-eight members of Congress signed a letter demanding an investigation into bioweapons use & Gulf War Syndrome.
Benjamin Franklin said, "A nation of well informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights that God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins!"
----
War's unintended effects
Use of depleted uranium weapons lingers as health concern
By LARRY JOHNSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER FOREIGN DESK EDITOR
Monday, August 4, 2003
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/133581_du04.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The ideal legacy of the war in Iraq is a free and democratic society, but a sinister legacy of another kind is possible as well -- cancers and birth defects.
Depleted uranium weapons used by the U.S.-led forces in the war have left battle sites throughout Iraq contaminated with abnormally high levels of radiation.
A war-damaged Iraqi tank near a school in Baghdad
Zoom Dan DeLong / P-I
A war-damaged Iraqi tank rests along the highway next to a school on the outskirts of Baghdad. Depleted uranium weapons were used in populated areas in Iraq.
Although there is no firm consensus, nuclear experts and laymen alike generally agree that depleted uranium, which is toxic as well as radioactive, is at the very least a potential cause of cancers and birth defects. Some Iraqi physicians and others blame depleted uranium weapons used in the 1991 Gulf War for a major increase of cancers and birth defects that occurred a few years later. It is also a prime suspect for the Gulf War Syndrome that has sickened and killed thousands of U.S. veterans.
The Pentagon and United Nations estimate that U.S. and British forces used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium during attacks in Iraq in March and April -- far more than the estimated 375 tons used in the 1991 Gulf War.
U.S. tanks, Bradley fighting machines, A-10 attack jets and Apache helicopters routinely used depleted uranium rounds, but in the recent war, the ammunition was used in and near heavily populated areas, not just in the desert.
There are some studies under way that could shed more light on the effects of depleted uranium, a highly complex and poorly understood subject. Critics say DU shouldn't be used until the studies have been completed, while supporters, primarily the military, say it is critical to success on the battlefield.
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., has introduced legislation requiring the U.S. government to conduct studies of DU's effects on health and the environment, and cleanup of DU contamination in the United States. The bill, co-sponsored by 23 other Democrats, remains in committee.
He said DU may well be associated with increased birth defects.
"We continue to get these sporadic reports of various places where a lot of people are getting sick, and nobody is willing to connect the dots yet," he said. "I'm afraid we're going to have a lot of people get sick before they finally admit that depleted uranium really causes a problem for us (U.S. veterans and their families) as well as for the Iraqis."
After NATO's use of DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, the Council of Europe parliamentarians called for a worldwide ban on the manufacture, testing, use and sale of weapons using depleted uranium, asserting that NATO's use of DU weapons would have "long term effects on health and quality of life in South-East Europe, affecting future generations." The call went unheeded.
An independent policy analyst on the use and effects of DU, in a June 24 report, was critical of both the British and the Americans for not doing more to protect their troops and civilians from DU in Iraq. But the report held criticism for those on all sides of the DU issue.
"What is clear ... is that elements of the U.S. government will manipulate information and even lie about the health of U.S. combat veterans to avoid liability for DU's health and environmental effects," said Dan Fahey, who has testified on DU at a number of congressional hearings. "Equally as clear is the willingness of some anti-DU activists to promote theories as fact, fabricate data and manipulate statistics, and exploit the suffering of people to further political or financial interests."
'A well-established risk'
In June, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer conducted tests at six sites from Basra to Baghdad, and found elevated levels of radiation at all of them. One destroyed tank near Baghdad was 1,500 times more radioactive than normal background radiation. Another was 1,400 times more radioactive than background.
To get additional evidence that DU was used on these tanks, the P-I used swabs of cloth to gather samples of residue from the blackened bullet holes on two tanks on the outskirts of Baghdad, and from the black ash on a tank in Kut.
Bruce Busby, radiation safety officer for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle analyzed the swabs. Although stressing that far more sophisticated equipment and tests are required to positively identify DU and precisely measure contamination levels, he was able to determine that the swabs had elevated levels of radioactive contamination, consistent with DU. Still, Busby is not convinced it is a severe problem in Iraq. " ... Considering all the other hazards those people are exposed to, this is a small risk," he said.
Others were more alarmed by the P-I findings.
"... if you found it (DU), it's possible kids could get it on their hands by playing on tanks, and adults could inhale re-suspended dust if salvaging equipment," Fahey said.
Tedd Weyman, deputy director of the Uranium Medical Centre, an independent research group in Canada and Washington, D.C., was also concerned about DU in Iraq.
"... Alpha emitters -- DU is one -- are carcinogenic and . . . inhalation exposure of low quantities of low-level radioactive material is a well-established risk," Weyman said. "Externally, the radioactivity travels a very short distance -- centimeters -- before fully releasing all its energy and disintegrating, (But) if inhaled and lying adjacent to cells in the body, it is a serious hazard."
Although the Pentagon has said depleted uranium is the material of choice because its density allows it to slice through heavy tank armor, the Army is currently looking at an alternative. A Florida company, Liquidmetal Technologies, says it can get comparable performance from ammunition using an exotic alloy of tungsten, and if the Army decides to switch, the new rounds could be in service within two years.
The Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, saying there have been no known health problems associated with the munition. At the same time, the military acknowledges the hazards in an Army training manual, which requires that anyone who comes within 25 meters of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin protection, and says that "contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption."
According to the Army Environmental Policy Institute, holding a spent DU round would expose a person to about 200 rem per hour. That's a level of radiation equivalent to receiving eight chest X-rays per hour, said to Tom Carpenter, director of the Government Accountability Project's Nuclear Oversight Campaign. That's also twice the annual radiation exposure limit allowed by the Washington state.
The Environmental Protection Agency Web site says, "There is no firm basis for setting a 'safe' level of exposure (to radiation) above background. Most regulatory and advisory bodies around the world (including EPA) assume that any exposure carries some risk and that the risk increases as the exposure increases."
The April issue of New Scientist magazine reported that Alexandra Miller, a radiobiologist with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., has discovered the first direct evidence that radiation from DU can damage chromosomes. "The chromosomes break, and the fragments reform in a way that results in abnormal joins. Both the breaks and the joins are commonly found in tumor cells," the article says. The implication is that it could cause cancer.
Miller's work suggests that the toxic nature of DU, combined with its radioactivity, could produce effects more dire than either of those characteristics acting alone.
"I think that we assumed that we knew everything that we needed to know about uranium. (But) This is something we have to consider now when we think about risk estimates," the article says.
Cancer on the rise
Researchers aren't the only ones concerned.
The U.S. and British use of DU during the latest conflict, also alarms doctors in Iraq. Cancer had already increased dramatically in southern Iraq. In 1988, 34 people died of cancer; in 1998, 450 died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths. The rate of birth defects also had risen sharply, according to doctors in Iraq.
Now, doctors in Iraq say, the number of cancers and birth defects may be "devastating."
"This is the right time for active support to help prevent the catastrophic effects of the bombing," said Dr. Alim Yacoub, on his last day as dean of the Al Mustansiriya Medical School in Baghdad.
"It is the right time for our U.S. friends to alleviate the consequences of depleted uranium and dirty weapons," he said.
"If there isn't a centralized health plan soon, the consequences could be devastating," said Yacoub, the foremost Iraqi authority on the effects of DU. Yacoub has tracked the rise of cancer in Iraq for years, and places the blame squarely on DU.
"For the past 12 years, we have only been able to watch what's going on in this country, now it is time for a comprehensive health plan for cleaning up DU and for treating cancer," he said. Yacoub has carefully preserved his studies and is eager to present them to other researchers.
From the cancer ward at the Mother and Child Hospital in Basra, Dr. Janan Ghalib Hassan has also tracked the rise in cancer in Iraq, primarily in the south, for years. It is a phenomena that she also says is most likely caused by the DU used by U.S. forces in the Gulf War in 1991.
"I worked here in this hospital in 1980 and never saw so much cancer, but after 1991, I started to see many more cancer cases," Hassan said.
She said that because the incubation period for cancer is about five years, the effects of the latest war should start showing up in 2008. "I think the number of cancer cases will be as much as 10 times or more higher," she said. "It is a crime; a crime."
FOR MORE INFORMATION
DEPLETED URANIUM
WHAT IT IS:
Depleted uranium is a highly dense, toxic and radioactive metal that is the byproduct of the process during which fissionable uranium used to make nuclear bombs and reactor fuel is separated from natural uranium. The U.S. uses it for bullets and shells.
WHAT IT DOES:
Depleted uranium contains the highly toxic U-238 isotope, which has a radioactive half-life of about 4.5 billion years. As U-238 breaks down, an ongoing process, it creates protactinium-234, which radiates potent beta particles that may cause cancer as well as mutations in body cells that could lead to birth defects.
HOW IT SPREADS:
When a depleted uranium round hits a hard target, as much as 70 percent of the projectile can burn on impact, creating a firestorm of depleted uranium particles. The toxic residue of this firestorm is an extremely fine insoluble uranium dust that can be spread by the wind, inhaled and absorbed into the human body and absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain. Once in the soil, it can pollute the environment and create up to a hundredfold increase in uranium levels in ground water, according to the U.N. Environmental Program.
Photo: Outside Kut in southern Iraq, two young Iraqi men remove parts from one of the many tanks in the area. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20030804/226DUiraqXX_mentank.jpg
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Dan Fahey report: http://www.antenna.nl/~wise/uranium/dissgw.html#DFIQ03
New Scientist article: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993627
Uranium Medical Research Centre: http://www.umrc.net
U.S. Department of Defense: http://www.defenselink.mil
National Gulf War Resource Center: http://www.ngwrc.org/Dulink/du_link.htm
A P-I special report on Iraq: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/iraq2003
P-I foreign desk editor Larry Johnson can be reached at 206-448-8035 or larryjohnson@seattlepi.com
----
CNY families worry about those in Iraq
August 04, 2003
By Pedro Ramirez III
Syracuse NY Post-Standard Staff writer
Thttp://www.syracuse.com/news/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1059986121202614.xml
Tuesday, Maj. Thomas Downs asked nine recruits if they were ready to be sworn into the United States military.
It's a rite of passage into the nation's Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps that Downs oversees nearly every weekday. On this day he reflected upon another - Oct. 4, 2002 - when he inducted his son in the same second-floor room in downtown Syracuse into the service of the U.S. Army.
Next week, Downs' son, who is in the Army's 22nd Signal Brigade, heads to Iraq.
"They've said the compound that they're on over there does receive mortar fire every other night," Downs said.
His son's orders forced the two to have a talk parents prefer to avoid.
"If you die and your body comes back, what do you want me to do with it?" Downs recalls asking.
"I don't know. I haven't given it much thought," his son replied.
Downs suggested burial at a national cemetery because they don't have a family plot.
"That was probably the most unpleasant conversation I had to have with him," Downs said.
But Downs' faith that his son will survive is as firm as his salute.
"The odds are that he'll be OK," he said. "I got him raised. You send him off into the world, and you let God take care of the rest of it."
Sarah Lamanna remembers Downs. He swore in both her sons.
Spc. Brian Taisey is in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne.
His younger brother, Colin, leaves for training next spring.
"I don't know how much shooting's going on, but it doesn't seem very good," she said.
Her son works at checkpoints, patrols rooftops at night, ensures people don't plant explosive devices, and transports detainees, Lamanna said.
Taisey has helped pick up bodies of American soldiers and others, his father said.
They hear from Taisey about once a month.
"He told us he's doing well and not to worry," he said.
But a foolish child is a mother's grief. So Sarah Lamanna often reminds her son to refrain from foolishness over there.
"Most of my letters have the acronym for 'Don't do anything I'll have to slap you upside the head for,' " she said.
Seven to 10 recruits from Central New York ship out from Syracuse to basic training every weekday.
During the first Gulf War, U.S. forces fired about 320 tons of depleted uranium munitions.
Herman Bieling, of LaFayette, has two sons in the Army. One is safely back in the United States. The other, Staff Sgt. Daniel Bieling, is in Baghdad.
"I'll admit. I'm in denial," he said. "I just really, really couldn't handle it if I thought about it, or worried about it every minute."
Herman Bieling is a self-proclaimed pacifist. He protested the Vietnam War, and he's carried picket signs against this one. But he doesn't burden his son with it.
"I walk a real tightrope because I've got to keep the kid's head up," he said. "I just got to keep his spirits up, keep telling him I love him and appreciate him doing things for the country."
Bieling recently attended a lecture on the harmful effects of depleted uranium munitions. The lecturer told Bieling that when his son comes home he may be sick from exposure to the radioactive material.
"It worries me," Bieling said. "I wonder how much depleted uranium was used in the current conflict."
The United States and its coalition partners have put 30,000 Iraqi policemen on duty.
Nancy Mitchell's husband arrived in Iraq around the time the United States announced the major fighting was coming to an end. Col. Terry Mitchell is helping rebuild postwar Iraq.
"The big bomb-dropping, and all that, may be over," Nancy Mitchell said, "but I think we still need the infantry over there."
Letters from her husband confirm her fears.
"I'm sad to report that our command suffered more casualties yesterday," her husband wrote on July 14.
Two civil affairs soldiers were wounded when an explosive device was thrown at their Humvee, he said. One soldier's leg was so badly mangled from the knee down they couldn't save it.
The soldiers returned fire and killed one attacker, he said.
"The SAW (squad automatic weapon) gunner was a female soldier," he said, "she fired off about 200 rounds at the attackers. . . . The days of women being excluded from combat are gone."
She last spoke to her husband a week ago.
"It was just nice to talk to him, hear his voice and know he's OK," she said.
The Mitchells' two youngest sons live at home and often ask mom if she's heard from dad, especially when they hear news of more casualties.
"They kind of do not want to talk about it too much," she said.
Letters provide some comfort, but not enough, she admits.
"You get a letter and the letter is two to three weeks old," she said. "It's news to you, but still, anything could have happened in that time frame."
Coalition forces on Tuesday conducted 51 raids, 953 day patrols and 737 night patrols.
Tammy Gower, originally of Baldwinsville, keeps the worry demons at bay by staying busy where she lives in Tennessee, near Fort Campbell, Ky.
"I work 40 hours a week. That helps," she said. "You just live day by day."
Her husband, Sgt. Mark Gower, of the 101st Airborne, is in Mosul where Saddam's two sons Odai and Qusai were killed July 22.
Sometimes he goes out in convoys. Tammy Gower signs onto CNN.com a few times a day, so she knows convoys are targets.
"He says . . . where before they'd have 10 trucks, they're now having 20," she said. "I say (to him), 'That makes no sense. You're just giving them a bigger target.'
"He says 'no,' " she said.
Attackers target smaller convoys with fewer troops to shoot back.
That serves as little consolation.
"Just stay in your room. Don't go outside. Don't show your face," she tells him.
The bad news keeps coming: soldier killed in land mine attack; soldier dies in traffic accident; one killed, three wounded in convoy attack; three killed, four wounded in grenade attack.
"Until you've walked a mile in our shoes, you don't know," she said. "You check e-mail . . . which is always great when you hear something bad has happened, and then you get an e-mail from him . . . you know he's OK."
There are nearly 200,000 U.S. and coalition troops still in Iraq.
At least 12 U.S. service members were killed and 16 wounded in Iraq between July 24 and July 31.
Last week brought good news for a change to Karl and Bonnie Novak, of Cicero. Their son, 1st Lt. Jason Novak with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, is coming home.
The Novaks don't know exactly when their son is returning to Fort Stewart, Ga. The Army gave them a window of Aug. 6 to 12.
On July 14 when Jason Novak was in Al Fallujah, Iraq, he e-mailed his mother to let her know he was fine and nobody in his unit had been killed.
"The very next day I turn on the news and a soldier in Al Fallujah had been killed," she said. "It was like, 'Oh, no!' I freaked out."
Throughout this whole ordeal, Bonnie Novak's dread often lasted up to 24 hours.
"They can't release the name until they notify the family," she said. "The scary thought is what if I'm the family?"
So the hours go by. The Army releases a name, and it's not he.
"Then you feel guilty for being relieved," she said. "It's been my cycle ever since it all began in March."
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Are American soldiers in Iraq dying due to depleted uranium?
By James Conachy
4 August 2003
WSWS
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/du-a04.shtml
The office of the US Army Surgeon General informed the media July 31 that teams of medical specialists have been dispatched to both Iraq and the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany to investigate why a pneumonia-like condition is striking down American military personnel who took part in the invasion of Iraq. At least 100 soldiers have been hospitalized with severe respiratory problems since March 1. Fifteen have been so ill they have required ventilator support to stay alive. Two have died, while three reportedly remain under close supervision at Landstuhl.
Three of the critical cases occurred in March, three in April, two in May, three in June and four in July. Fourteen were Army personnel and one was from the Marines. A localized epidemic has been ruled out. The troops who have fallen ill belong to diverse units and were operating in different areas of Iraq and in at least one case in Kuwait. An Army official told reporters: "It is pneumonia. The question is, what is the cause?" According to the Army, there is no evidence that any of the cases have been caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or environmental toxins.
It is not the number of cases that is concerning the military hierarchy. According to the spokesperson of the US Army Surgeon General, there are normally nine cases of pneumonia per 10,000 US soldiers per year that are serious enough to require hospitalization. Based on that statistic, 100 cases of pneumonia in five months among the several hundred thousand army and marine personnel who were involved in the war on Iraq are only slightly higher than average.
The dispatch of the experts therefore raises disturbing questions. There is clearly something about either the nature, or the severity, of the cases the Army Surgeon General feels warrants investigation.
On July 16, the News-Leader site operating out of Springfield, Missouri published a detailed report describing the symptoms of one of the soldiers who has died from the alleged pneumonia. Josh Neusche, a 20-year-old, fit and healthy Missouri National Guardsman, collapsed in Baghdad on July 2. He was evacuated to Landstuhl, Germany. His family was informed he was suffering from pneumonia caused by fluid in his lungs. According to his mother, his liver, kidneys and muscles then began to break down. He was placed on dialysis, but fell into a coma and died on July 12.
For anyone familiar with the research into the medical effects of exposure to depleted uranium, the details of Josh Neusche's death would have to ring alarm bells. The 2001 World Health Organization report into the issue notes: "Brief accidental exposure to high concentrations of uranium hexafluoride has caused acute respiratory illness, which may be fatal." [Full report available at http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/ir_pub/en/]
Scenarios that could cause a "brief, accidental exposure to high concentrations of uranium hexafluoride" definitely would include being in the vicinity of a vehicle or building struck by depleted uranium munitions; traveling in or being in the vicinity of a vehicle that is armored with depleted uranium and sustains damage; or being involved in the cleanup of such a vehicle. The organs most affected by exposure are the lungs and kidneys.
In a July 30 article on US casualties in Iraq, the World Socialist Web Site reported the unconfirmed allegation in the July 17 Saudi newspaper Al-Watan that three US servicemen had been evacuated from Iraq suffering symptoms of depleted uranium exposure.
The WSWS noted that if this proved true, it would not be surprising. Thousands of US troops in Iraq are likely to have been exposed to DU to some degree, absorbing it either by inhaling contaminated dust or ingesting it from contaminated water, food and soil. Initial estimates are that between 100 and 200 tons of DU munitions were used in Iraq and that at least 17 incidents took place during the combat phase that would most likely have resulted in US and British personnel being exposed to high concentrations of DU particles. [See http://www.antenna.nl/~wise/uranium/pdf/duiq03.pdf]
On July 28, as part of the research for the July 30 article, "America's maimed come home from Iraq," this WSWS correspondent submitted a list of questions to the US Department of Defense, addressed to media@defenselink.mil. One of the specific questions we asked of the Department of Defense was: "Have any US military personnel been medically evacuated from Iraq due to the possible side-affects of exposure to depleted uranium?" To date, the WSWS has received no reply.
See Also:
America's maimed come home from Iraq [30 July 2003] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/maim-j30.shtml
Another US war crime: the use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq [29 May 2003] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/depu-m29.shtml
Ongoing consequences of the Gulf War: Casualties increase from use of depleted uranium [8 September 1999] http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/sep1999/gulf-s08.shtml
Depleted uranium weapons used in Balkan War expected to cause thousands of fatal cancers [5 August 1999] http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/aug1999/du-a05.shtml
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail - editor@wsws.org
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U.N. Nuke Experts Begin Talks With Iran
August 4, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Experts from the U.N. nuclear watchdog began talks Monday aimed at getting Tehran to permit unrestricted inspections of its nuclear facilities even as a published report said Iran was moving toward developing a nuclear weapons capability.
The three-member legal team from the International Atomic Energy Agency was meeting Iranian government lawyers, said Saber Zaeimian, spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
The United States has accused Iran of running a clandestine nuclear weapons program and wants the IAEA to declare Tehran in violation of the non-proliferation treaty. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful, electrical power purposes.
But in a report Monday, the Los Angeles Times said Iran ``appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.''
The Times said its three-month investigation found that Iran has been involved in a pattern of activity that has concealed weapons efforts from international inspectors.
The newspaper -- citing sources ranging from previously secret reports, international officials, independent experts and Iranian exiles -- reported that Iran made use of technology and scientists from Russia, North Korea, China and Pakistan to bring it closer to building a bomb than Iraq ever was.
Among its findings, the paper said a confidential French report concluded that ``Iran is surprisingly close to having enriched uranium or plutonium for a bomb.''
The paper also reported that samples of uranium taken by arms inspectors in June tested positive for enrichment levels high enough to be consistent with an attempt to build a nuclear weapon.
Commenting on reports of Iranian nuclear efforts, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the government is ``working with the IAEA to make sure that they do not continue on this course, which is unacceptable.''
Iran has said it would agree to unfettered inspections if it is granted access to advanced nuclear technology as provided for under the treaty. Tehran says Washington is keeping Iran from getting that technology.
In recent weeks, conservatives in Iran's Islamic establishment have said Iran would withdraw from the treaty altogether if the IAEA forces Iran to sign the protocol.
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi has said Iran's withdrawal was out of question.
Monday's talks focus on an additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing open inspections that the IAEA is pressing Tehran to sign, the official Islamic Republic News Agency cited Zaeimian as saying.
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Iran Closes in on Building Nuke Bomb - Report (Reuters)
August 4, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear-report.html
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Iran appears to be in the late stages of building a nuclear bomb and has sought help from scientists in Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.
Citing its own three-month investigation into Iran's clandestine nuclear capacity, the Times said it had strong evidence Iran's commercial program masked a plan to become the world's next nuclear power and it was ``much closer to producing a bomb than Iraq ever was.''
Iran has consistently denied it has plans to build nuclear weapons and has said its program is for peaceful civilian use.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States was working closely with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure there were more thorough inspections of Iran and its weapons program.
``It is a matter that remains a serious concern. We're working with the international community. We're working with the IAEA to make sure that they do not continue on this course, which is unacceptable,'' McClellan told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush was vacationing.
The Times, in the story from Vienna, said it was unclear when Iran might produce its first atomic weapons. Some experts thought two to three years was likely while others believed the Iranian government had probably not given a final go-ahead.
In Vienna, a spokesman for the IAEA declined to comment on the story. ``We do not comment on media reports,'' spokesman Lothar Wedekind told Reuters.
The story cited a confidential report by the French government in May it said concluded Iran was ``surprisingly close'' to having enriched uranium or plutonium for a bomb.
Reuters last month reported that U.N. nuclear inspectors found traces of enriched uranium in environmental samples taken during recent inspections in Iran.
Foreign intelligence officials told the Times the CIA had briefed them on a contingency plan for U.S. air and missile attacks against Iranian nuclear installations.
``It would be foolish not to present the commander-in-chief with all of the options, including that one,'' one of the officials was quoted as saying. The CIA declined comment on such a plan to the paper.
The newspaper said North Korean military scientists were recently monitored entering Iranian nuclear facilities and were assisting in the design of a nuclear warhead.
A Middle Eastern intelligence official was also quoted as saying Pakistan's role in helping Iran develop a nuclear program was ``bigger from the beginning than we thought.''
Russian scientists, sometimes traveling to Iran under false identities and working without their government's approval, were also helping to complete a special reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium, the paper said.
Tehran had also imported 1.8 tons of nuclear material from China in 1991 and processed some of it to manufacture uranium metal, the report said.
Another indicator Iran was in the late stages of weapons development was the fact that Tehran recently approached European companies to buy devices that could manipulate large volumes of radio-active material, technology to forge uranium metal and plutonium and switches that could trigger a nuclear weapon.
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Iran's Khamenei to Have Last Say on Nuclear Checks
August 4, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will have the final say on whether Tehran agrees to tougher U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities, a government spokesman said on Monday.
International pressure has been mounting on Iran to sign an Additional Protocol of the nuclear-Non Proliferation Treaty which would allow more intrusive, short-notice inspections of nuclear sites in the country.
Iran denies any plans to build nuclear weapons and the question of whether to sign the protocol has ignited fierce domestic debate.
``The decision about joining the Additional Protocol will be taken based on (our) national interests,'' government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told a weekly news conference.
``The matter will be discussed in the government. The decision will be made in the Supreme National Security Council and after the (Supreme) Leader's approval it would be implemented,'' he said.
Khamenei, who succeeded the founding father of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, is Iran's most powerful political figure.
Khamenei, who is often viewed as siding mostly with hardline clerics in Iran's internal power struggle between reformers and conservatives, has made no public statements recently about whether Iran should join the Additional Protocol.
Reformists allied to President Mohammad Khatami's government have begun speaking out in favor of tougher inspections.
Reformist MP Hossein Afarideh, the head of parliament's Energy Commission, was quoted on Monday as saying Iran should sign the protocol to ease international pressure on the country.
``If Iran does not join the protocol, then possibly its case will be sent to the United Nations' Security Council and then naturally the country will face more difficulties,'' he told the Seda-ye Edalat newspaper.
Hard-liners oppose signing the protocol and have even suggested Iran should pull out of the NPT altogether rather than cave in to international demands.
``If the West puts more pressure on Iran, we will withdraw from the NPT. This holds no problem for us,'' Mohammad Javad Larijani, international affairs adviser to the hardline judiciary, was quoted in the Resalat newspaper on Sunday.
A team from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency was due in Iran this week to explain to Iranian officials the benefits of signing the Additional Protocol.
Ramazanzadeh said Iran had a ``positive view'' on the talks. Tehran has insisted it should get access to Western nuclear technology to develop atomic energy in return for signing the protocol.
----
Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb (LA Times)
Tehran's reactor program masks strides toward weapons capability, a Times investigation finds. France warns against exports to Islamic Republic.
By Douglas Frantz,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 4, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-nuke4aug04,1,7536926.story?coll=la-home-headlines
VIENNA - After more than a decade of working behind layers of front companies and in hidden laboratories, Iran appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.
Iran insists that like many countries it is only building commercial nuclear reactors to generate electricity for homes and factories. "Iran's efforts in the field of nuclear technology are focused on civilian application and nothing else," President Mohammad Khatami said on state television in February. "This is the legitimate right of the Iranian people."
But a three-mont investigation by The Times - drawing on previously secret reports, international officials, independent experts, Iranian exiles and intelligence sources in Europe and the Middle East - uncovered strong evidence that Iran's commercial program masks a plan to become the world's next nuclear power. The country has been engaged in a pattern of clandestine activity that has concealed weapons work from international inspectors. Technology and scientists from Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan have propelled Iran's nuclear program much closer to producing a bomb than Iraq ever was.
No one is certain when Iran might produce its first atomic weapon. Some experts said two or three years; others believe the government has probably not given a final go-ahead. But it is clear that Iran is moving purposefully and rapidly toward acquiring the capability.
Among the findings:
. A confidential report prepared by the French government in May concluded that Iran is surprisingly close to having enriched uranium or plutonium for a bomb. The French warned other governments to exercise "the most serious vigilance on their exports to Iran and Iranian front companies," according to a copy of the report provided by a foreign intelligence service.
. Samples of uranium taken by U.N. inspectors in Iran in June tested positive for enrichment levels high enough to be consistent with an attempt to build a nuclear weapon, according to a foreign intelligence officer and an American diplomat. The Reuters news service first reported the possibility that the material was weapons-grade last month.
. Iran is concealing several weapons research laboratories and evidence of past activity at a plant disguised as a watch-making factory in a Tehran suburb. In June, U.N. inspectors were refused access to two large rooms and barred from testing samples at the factory, called the Kalaye Electric Co.
. Tehran secretly imported 1.8 tons of nuclear material from China in 1991 and processed some of it to manufacture uranium metal, which would be of no use in Iran's commercial program but would be integral to weapons production.
. As early as 1989, Pakistani generals offered to sell Iran nuclear weapons technology. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear scientist regarded by the United States as a purveyor of nuclear secrets, has helped Iran for years. "Pakistan's role was bigger from the beginning than we thought," said a Middle Eastern intelligence official.
. North Korean military scientists recently were monitored entering Iranian nuclear facilities. They are assisting in the design of a nuclear warhead, according to people inside Iran and foreign intelligence officials. So many North Koreans are working on nuclear and missile projects in Iran that a resort on the Caspian coast is set aside for their exclusive use.
. Russian scientists, sometimes traveling to Iran under false identities and working without their government's approval, are helping to complete a special reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. Moscow insists that it is providing only commercial technology for the civilian reactor under construction near the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr, an assertion disputed by Washington.
. In recent months, Iran has approached European companies to buy devices that can manipulate large volumes of radioactive material, technology to forge uranium metal and plutonium and switches that could trigger a nuclear weapon. European intelligence sources said Tehran's shopping list was a strong indication that Iran has moved to the late stages of weapons development.
Regional Impact
A nuclear-armed Iran would present the United States with a difficult political and military equation. Iran would be the first avowed enemy of Israel to possess a nuclear bomb. It also has been labeled by the Bush administration as a state sponsor of international terrorism.
Iranian nuclear weapons could shift the balance of power in the region, where Washington is trying to establish pro-American governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of those nations border Iran and are places where Tehran wants to exert influence that could conflict with U.S. intentions, particularly in Iraq.
The Bush administration, which partly justified its war against Iraq by stressing concerns that Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear weapons program, calls a nuclear-armed Iran unacceptable. At his news conference Wednesday, President Bush said he hopes international pressure will convince the Iranians that "development of a nuclear weapon is not in their interests," but he added that "all options remain on the table."
Foreign intelligence officials told The Times that the Central Intelligence Agency, which has long contended that Iran is building a bomb, has briefed them on a contingency plan for U.S. air and missile attacks against Iranian nuclear installations. "It would be foolish not to present the commander in chief with all of the options, including that one," said one of the officials.
A CIA spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny that such a plan has been drafted. "We wouldn't talk about anything like that," she said.
There is precedent for such a strike. Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed a French-built nuclear reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 shortly before it was to go online. The attack set back Iraq's nuclear program and drove it underground.
Taking out Iran's nuclear infrastructure would prove tougher, said Israeli military planners and outside analysts. For one thing, the facilities are spread around the country and small installations are still secret. At least one key facility is being built to withstand conventional airstrikes.
Contacts between Washington and Tehran are very limited, and analysts said U.S. decision-making is still dominated by a distrust of Iran rooted in the taking of American hostages during the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and an ideological aversion to negotiating with a regime regarded as extremist.
"The administration does not have a strategy because there is a fight in the administration over whether you should even deal with this government in Iran," said George Perkovich, a nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Inspections' Challenge
For now, the Bush administration is pinning much of its hopes of containing Iranian nuclear ambitions on the same international inspection apparatus that it blames for failing to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So far, the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency, based here in Vienna, has preferred negotiation to confrontation with Iran.
In a June 16 report to the 35 countries represented on the agency's board, its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, criticized Iran for concealing many of its nuclear activities. But he resisted U.S. pressure to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was created in 1968 to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
Inspections are continuing along with Iranian roadblocks to a thorough examination, according to officials monitoring the progress. Still, IAEA officials hope to have a clearer picture of Iran's nuclear program by Sept. 8, when a follow-up report to the board is due.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not respond to telephone requests for interviews or to written questions for this article. Iran said last year that it plans to build six civilian reactors to generate electricity for its fast-growing population of 65 million. Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi has said that allegations that Iran is concealing a weapons program are "poisonous and disdainful rumors" spread by the United States.
Iran's civilian nuclear energy program started in 1974 and was interrupted by the Islamic Revolution. It got back on track in 1995, when Russia signed an $800-million contract to complete the commercial reactor at Bushehr, which is scheduled to come online next year.
Russia also promised to sell Iran the uranium fuel to power the reactor. But Iran maintains that it wants to develop its own nuclear fuel-making capability, a position that has roused international suspicions.
Typically, nations with civilian nuclear programs buy fuel from the countries that export the reactors because the fuel-making process is complicated and expensive. In the most common way to make the fuel, uranium ore is converted to a gas and pumped into centrifuges, where rotors spinning at twice the speed of sound separate isotopes. The process concentrates, or "enriches," the uranium to the point that fission can be sustained in a reactor, which pumps out heat to drive electrical turbines.
The same enrichment process can concentrate fissionable uranium at greater levels to produce material for a bomb.
Countries that try to enrich their own uranium or manufacture plutonium in special reactors are immediately suspected of trying to join the elite nuclear arms club. Israel, India and Pakistan developed their own plants for producing fissile material for bombs under the guise of commercial reactors.
Iran agreed not to produce nuclear weapons when it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, which opened the door for it to acquire civilian reactors. The treaty does not prohibit Iran from producing or possessing enriched uranium but requires it to submit its nuclear facilities to international monitoring to ensure that materials are not diverted to weapons use.
Iran has permitted inspections of its declared commercial nuclear facilities. But last year, an Iranian exile group pinpointed a secret underground enrichment plant outside Natanz, a small mountain town about 200 miles south of Tehran known for its bracing climate and fruit orchards.
In December, the Institute for Science and International Security, a small think tank in Washington, published satellite photos of Natanz from the archives of a commercial firm, DigitalGlobe. The photos showed large-scale construction inside the perimeter of a security fence. Among the buildings were a pilot centrifuge plant and two underground halls big enough for tens of thousands of centrifuges, the institute said.
Pressure mounted to allow international monitors into Natanz, and senior IAEA officials visited the plant in February. They found 160 assembled centrifuges and components for 1,000 more. Moreover, the equipment was to be housed in bunkers 75 feet deep, with walls 8 feet thick.
The level of centrifuge development at Natanz already reflects thousands of hours of testing and advanced technological work, experts said. By comparison, Iraq had tested a single centrifuge for about 100 hours when IAEA inspectors began dismantling Baghdad's nuclear weapons program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"They are way ahead of where Iraq was in 1991," said a U.N. official who is familiar with both programs.
Once it is up and running, Natanz could make enough material for a bomb within a year and eventually enough for three to five bombs a year, experts said.
Nuclear Neighbors
The Iranian exile group also revealed a secret site near Arak, a city of 400,000 in western Iran known as a historic center for weaving fine Persian carpets. Under international pressure, Iran conceded in February that it plans to build a special type of reactor there that will generate plutonium for research. Plutonium is the radioactive material at the heart of some of the most powerful nuclear bombs.
The disclosures cast previous Iranian government statements in a new light.
Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of an influential government council and president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, gave a speech on Dec. 14, 2001, that has been interpreted widely as both a signal that Iran wants nuclear weapons and a threat to use them against Israel. Describing the establishment of the Jewish state as the worst event in history, Rafsanjani warned, "In due time the Islamic world will have a military nuclear device, and then the strategy of the West would reach a dead end, since one bomb is enough to destroy all Israel."
Rafsanjani has since stepped back in his rhetoric, noting in a sermon on Friday that "because of religious and moral beliefs and commitments that the Koran has created for us, we cannot and will not pursue such weapons that destroy humanity."
On July 20, Iran unveiled a missile based on a North Korean design that brings Israel within range and hailed the event as an important step in protecting the Palestinians. Experts said the new missile could be armed with a small nuclear warhead, and Iran is developing a version that will carry a heavier payload.
"Today our people and our armed forces are ready to defend their goals anywhere," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, said in a ceremony unveiling the missile.
Many outside experts as well as Iranians say that even reformers linked to Iranian President Khatami believe that Iran needs a deterrent against its nuclear neighbors - Israel, Russia and Pakistan - and possibly against the United States.
"These weapons would guarantee the territorial integrity and national security of Iran," Nasser Hadian, a professor at Tehran University who is aligned with the reformers, said in a telephone interview from New York, where he is teaching at Columbia University. "We feel that we cannot possibly rely on the world to provide security for us, and this is felt by all the factions."
At a symposium in Rome in early July, ElBaradei told the audience that stopping the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons depends greatly on eliminating the incentives for states to possess them. "It is instructive that the majority of the suspected efforts to acquire WMD are to be found in the Middle East, a hotbed of instability for over half a century," he said.
A senior U.N. official said he is not sure that Iran is developing a bomb. But the different fates of Iraq and North Korea, the other members of what Bush called the "axis of evil," demonstrate why countries out of favor with the United States might want a nuclear weapon, he added.
Iraq did not have a bomb and was easily invaded, he said, while North Korea claims to have a bomb and is trying to use it as a bargaining chip with the U.S. for security assurances and possibly increased aid. "If a regime has the feeling that it is not on the right wavelength with the United States, its position is to have a nuclear weapon," he said.
Iran faces numerous technological obstacles before it can produce a nuclear bomb, according to intelligence officials and independent experts. Once those problems are solved or close to being solved, some experts said they expect Iran to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty, as North Korea did, and close its doors to IAEA inspectors.
"They have made the decision to develop a breakout capability, which will give them the option to leave the treaty in the future and complete a nuclear weapon within six months or a year," said Gary Samore, director of nonproliferation programs at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former Clinton administration security official. "I think the program is probably unstoppable through diplomatic means."
Others disagree.
"I don't believe they have passed the point of no return," said Perkovich, the nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment. "We should try to reverse Iran's direction by providing better, low-cost options to fuel the Bushehr electricity plant and by easing the security concerns that make Iranians, reformers and hard-liners, interested in getting a bomb."
Diplomacy has proved an imperfect solution in the past. The Clinton administration persuaded China not to sell nuclear items to Iran in the mid-1990s. Administration officials later used sanctions and negotiations to convince Russia to curb technology transfers to Iran's civilian program that U.S. intelligence believed were being diverted to weapons work.
But Russia is committed to the Bushehr reactor, which generates 20,000 jobs for its beleaguered nuclear industry. The project also allows hundreds of Iranians to train in Russia, raising concerns within the intelligence community that knowledge and hardware for weapons work will slip through.
Officials in Moscow, outside experts and foreign intelligence officials said economics are driving continuing Russian assistance to the Iranian weapons program and that it is probably occurring without government approval. They said thousands of Russian physicists, mathematicians and other scientists are unemployed or paid a pittance at home, pushing them to sell their expertise elsewhere.
"Russian scientists are freelancing, leading to a leakage of expertise, and you can't control that," said Bobo Lo, a former Australian diplomat and associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. "That's where it gets really messy with the Iranians."
Multiple Sites
"Iran has made tremendous progress during the last two years, and according to our estimates it could reach a technical capability to create a nuclear device by 2006," said Anton Khlopkov, a nuclear expert at Moscow's Center for Policy Studies in Russia. "The problem is neither Russia nor the U.S. nor the IAEA had a clear understanding about real Iranian achievements in the nuclear field."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell echoed the sentiment in March, saying on a CNN program, "It shows you how a determined nation that has the intent to develop a nuclear weapon can keep that development process secret from inspectors and outsiders, if they really are determined to do it."
Plants as large as Natanz are not necessary to build a bomb. Once the technology is developed, as few as 500 centrifuges can enrich enough uranium for a small weapon, experts said. Hiding that number would be easy, said an IAEA official, which is why intelligence officials are concerned about several smaller, still-secret plants throughout Iran.
For example, officers from two foreign intelligence agencies said weapons research is being conducted at a plant outside Kashan. One of the intelligence officials said the plant was involved in nuclear fuel production in two large halls constructed 25 feet underground.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Paris-based exile group that revealed the Natanz and Arak sites, said in July that it had pinpointed two more weapons research locations in a rural area called Hashtgerd about 25 miles northwest of Tehran. The group is the political arm of the Moujahedeen Khalq, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group, but independent experts said its information from inside Iran has often been accurate. IAEA inspectors' requests to visit the Hashtgerd sites have been refused by Iranian authorities.
This spring, after considerable pressure from the IAEA, Iran reluctantly allowed inspectors to visit a nondescript cluster of two warehouses and smaller buildings tucked into an alley in the Tehran suburb of Ab-Ali. The place, called the Kalaye Electric Co., claimed to be a watch factory, but Iran conceded it had been an assembly point for centrifuges.
When the IAEA team arrived in March, they were refused access to the plant. A second trip in May was slightly more successful - inspectors entered the buildings, but two large rooms were declared off limits, according to new information from U.N. officials.
On June 7, inspectors returned to Iran for four days of probes at various sites. This time authorities refused to let them near Kalaye, U.N. officials said. They also were barred from using sophisticated testing equipment the team had brought from Vienna.
Such tests could detect a particle of enriched uranium within a huge radius and determine whether its concentration exceeded the 2%-to-5% level generally used in civilian reactor fuel. One IAEA official compared the ability of a swipe to detect enriched particles to finding a four-leaf clover in a field of clover 6 miles long, 9 miles wide and 150 feet deep.
But during their trip in June, IAEA inspectors took samples from an undisclosed location in Iran that tested positive for enriched uranium at a level that could be used in weapons, according to diplomatic and intelligence sources. IAEA officials refused to comment on the report.
Chinese Uranium Ore
Officials from two foreign intelligence services said Iranian scientists used nuclear material from a secret shipment from China to help enrich uranium at Kalaye and elsewhere.
China had long denied rumors about transferring nuclear materials to Iran. Early this year, U.N. officials said in interviews, the Chinese admitted selling Iran 1.8 tons of uranium ore and chemical forms of uranium used in the enrichment process in 1991.
Faced with a letter describing China's admission, Iranian authorities acknowledged receipt of the material, said the officials. At the same time, Iran said some of the chemicals were used at Tehran's Jabr ibn Hayan laboratory to make uranium metal, which has no use in Iran's commercial program but is a key part of a nuclear weapon.
In addition to China and Russia, Pakistan and North Korea have played central roles in Iran's nuclear program, according to foreign intelligence officers and confidential reports prepared by the French government and a Middle Eastern intelligence service.
North Korean technicians worked for years helping Iran develop the Shahab-3 missile, unveiled last month in Tehran. A foreign intelligence official and a former Iranian intelligence officer said the Koreans are now working on a longer-range Shahab-4 and providing assistance on designs for a nuclear warhead.
The foreign intelligence official said high-ranking North Korean military personnel have been seen at some of Iran's nuclear installations. A hotel is reserved for North Koreans in Tehran and a resort on the Caspian Sea coast northwest of Tehran has been set aside for their use, according to one of the sources and a U.N. official.
The centrifuges seen by IAEA officials at Natanz in February were based on a Pakistani design, according to intelligence officials. The design and other new evidence point to Pakistan as a bigger supplier of nuclear weapons technology to Iran than initially thought, said foreign intelligence officers, Iranian exiles and independent experts.
While U.S. intelligence is aware of Pakistan's help to Iran, the Bush administration has not pushed the issue with Islamabad because of Pakistan's role as an ally in the battle against the Al Qaeda terrorist network and Afghanistan's Taliban, outside experts and foreign intelligence officials said.
Signs of Pakistani Aid The most convincing sign of Pakistan's role in Iran comes from what several people described as the long involvement in Iran of Khan, the scientist regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
The CIA concluded in a top-secret analysis last year that Khan shared critical technology on centrifuges and weapons-test data with North Korea in the late 1990s. The agency tracked at least 13 visits by Khan to North Korea over a span of several years, according to a January article in the New Yorker magazine.
Two former Iranian officials and American and foreign intelligence officials said Khan travels frequently to Tehran to share his expertise. Most recently, two of these people said, he has worked as a troubleshooter to iron out problems with the centrifuges and with weapons design.
Ali Akbar Omid Mehr, who was in charge of Pakistani affairs at Iran's Foreign Ministry in 1989 and 1990, said he came across Khan as he prepared what is known as a "green book" detailing contacts between Tehran and Islamabad.
"I saw that Mr. A. Q. Khan had been given a villa near the Caspian Sea for his help to Iran," Mehr said in an interview in Denmark, where he and his family live under assumed names since he defected in late 1995.
His account of the villa was supported by other Iranian exiles.
Khan might have played a role in a previously undisclosed offer from Pakistani military commanders to sell nuclear weapons technology to Iran in 1989, two former senior Pakistani officials said in separate interviews describing the episode.
According to their accounts, soon after Rafsanjani's election as president of Iran in 1989, he took Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister of Pakistan, aside at a reception in Tehran and told her about the proposal from her generals.
Rafsanjani was commander of Tehran's armed forces at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, and one of his goals as president was to reestablish his country as a regional power. He told Bhutto that the Pakistani generals wanted to transfer the technology secretly, on a military-to-military basis, but he wanted her to approve the transaction, the former Pakistani officials said.
Earlier that year, Bhutto had appeared before the U.S. Congress and promised that Pakistan would not export nuclear technology. Bhutto often bucked the generals, and the two officials said she blocked the transfer - at least until she was ousted in 1996.
Current Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview with The Times that his country never provided nuclear assistance to Iran, before or after he took office in a military coup in October 1999. "Zero," the general insisted. "Never worked - even before - never worked with Iran. This is the first time this has been raised, ever."
Pressured by the United States, Musharraf removed Khan as head of Pakistan's nuclear program nearly two years ago. Since then, Musharraf said, Khan has been retired and his travel is not monitored.
Other intelligence officials and governments disputed Musharraf's denial.
"There are convincing indications about the origin of the technology - it is of Pakistani type - but Iran undoubtedly controls the manufacturing process of centrifuges and seems even able to improve it," said the French government report on Iran's nuclear program, which was delivered in May to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an organization of governments with nuclear programs.
A growing body of evidence suggests that Iran is simultaneously pursuing another way to produce material for a bomb.
This alternative is a heavy-water reactor, which could breed weapons-grade plutonium. In the initial stage of the program, Iran is building a plant to distill heavy water near the Qareh Chay River, about 35 miles from Arak. Heavy water, which is processed to contain elevated concentrations of deuterium, allows the reactor to operate with natural uranium as its fuel and produce plutonium.
This type of reactor is used in some places to generate electricity, but it is better known as a means of producing plutonium for weapons that bypasses uranium enrichment and its many technical obstacles. As a result, the presence of a heavy-water reactor is often regarded as a sign that a country is trying to develop a weapon.
American spy satellites had detected construction at Natanz before its existence was made public last year. But the work near Arak had remained secret because the plant under construction looked like any other distillery or similar factory, according to intelligence officials and U.N. authorities.
After exiles revealed Arak's existence, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the president of Iran's atomic energy organization, informed the IAEA that the planned reactor was strictly meant for research and producing radioisotopes for medical use.
To many experts, however, the project raises another red flag. "For Iran, there is no justification whatsoever to have a heavy-water plant," said Samore of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Echoing him, a senior U.N. official said, "The heavy-water plant sticks out like a sore thumb."
Iran first tried to buy heavy-water reactors as turnkey projects from China and India in the mid-1990s, according to a previously undisclosed dossier prepared by a foreign intelligence agency and provided to The Times. Blocked on that front by the United States, according to former U.S. officials, Iran decided to build its own and turned to two Russian institutes.
The United States learned of the cooperation through telephone intercepts and imposed sanctions on the Russian institutes in 1999. The sanctions remain in effect, but officials with foreign intelligence agencies and the CIA said there is evidence that Russian scientists are still providing expertise for the project.
Khlopkov, the Russian nuclear expert, said he thinks it is unlikely that Russian scientists are helping Iran with any of its weapons programs. Still, he said, the recent disclosures about the Iranian program surprised Moscow and might cause Russia to cancel a second planned reactor unless Iran agrees to stricter international inspections of its nuclear facilities.
'Industrial Scale'
Despite Iran's progress, most experts said it is unlikely to develop a weapon without more outside help, particularly in procuring specialty technology. That is why some said they were alarmed by Iran's recent attempts to buy critical dual-use technology, which has military and civilian applications.
In November, German authorities blocked an attempt by businessmen allegedly working on behalf of Iran to acquire high-voltage switches that could be used for both breaking up kidney stones and triggering a nuclear weapon.
French authorities reported that French firms with nuclear expertise have received a rising number of inquiries from suspected Iranian front companies for goods with military uses.
In a previously undisclosed incident, French authorities recently stopped a French company from selling 28 specialized remote manipulators for nuclear facilities to a company in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that the authorities said was a front for Iran's nuclear program.
Because the manipulators were designed to handle heavy volumes of radioactive material, intelligence authorities suspected they were destined for a plant in which uranium or plutonium would be reprocessed on a large scale.
"Such intent is indicative of a willingness to move from a laboratory scale to an industrial scale," said a European intelligence official who is familiar with details of the attempt.
The pattern of attempted purchases and the discovery of previously secret nuclear installations led the French government to conclude in May that Iran is using its civilian nuclear program to conceal a military program.
"Iran appears ready to develop nuclear weapons within a few years," said the French report to the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
-------- korea
US will press Pyongyang at talks
N. Korea relented Friday to multilateral meetings, and the US plans to push for nuclear inspections.
By Robert Marquand
The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0804/p06s01-woap.html
TOKYO - Seizing on North Korea's agreement to hold six-party talks, the Bush administration is already moving toward a tough position that will stress verification and cessation of the North's nuclear programs through inspections. The US could disengage from the meeting if the North appears to "lack seriousness," say highly placed US officials.
At the same time, six-party talks with Asian neighbors will allow South Korea, Japan, and China to explain in detail a series of "carrots," including energy, access to loans, and normalized relations with Japan, should the North cooperate. The time and place of the negotiations are not yet known.
For months, Kim Jong Il's military dictatorship has engaged in a standoff of threats and provocations. US officials now say those months have been a "test" of US and Asian resolve - that the North hoped the US would buckle and agree to bilateral talks, meanwhile gaining sympathy from key quarters in Russia and China.
"I think the North sees their strategy is going nowhere," says a source intimately familiar with current negotiations. "They've been probing, trying to test how firm the White House is, how firm [South Korean president] Roh is. And there hasn't been much give. Kim thought Russia and China might close with him. But just the opposite took place. Now it is August and they haven't got anywhere to go. They played skillfully. But there are no tricks left."
Underscoring a tough US opening position, Japanese news sources Sunday said US and Japanese officials are discussing nuclear inspection teams, not from the United Nations, but drawn from all five negotiating partners. The North has steadily warned, and did so again Saturday, that any efforts to bring its case to the UN Security Council would be a prelude to war.
The newly proposed inspections teams would enter North Korea to check on the status of plutonium and secret uranium programs. Some experts doubt that Kim Jong Il will allow such teams to enter his closed society, even with participants from erstwhile allies like Russian and Chinese.
For talks to work, the "right atmosphere" must be created for the North, argues Ralph Cossa of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Honolulu branch. That means: "Kim must be persuaded that there are a lot of benefits to dismantling his program, and that nuclear weapons will make a collapse of his regime more likely. Right now, he thinks the opposite."
In the past, North Korea has used talks to buy time. But if upcoming negotiations are seen as a delaying tactic, sources say - stringing along the partners while at the same time moving quickly to develop atomic capability - the US could lobby to shut down talks.
"They can't drag this out," says one source, speaking of the North.
Yet, that's precisely Pyongyang's strategy in going along with talks, argue some experienced Asia and North Korea watchers.
"North Korea very possibly came to the conclusion already that they [must] have nuclear weapons. If they made that decision, why go along with more talks?" asks Robert Einhorn, a Clinton administration negotiator with the North, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Mr. Einhorn offers two reasons. One, to placate China, which provides the lion's share of energy and food to the North. Two, to "prolong the process, ... forestall pressure for sanctions, ... and present the world with a fait accompli" of nuclear capability.
India and Pakistan, which are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, declared nuclear status in 1998. Kim withdrew from the NPT early this year.
China's role in the crisis is being closely watched. Beijing has been central to bringing Kim to multilateral talks. But if talks break down, worries about instability along its border may make China unwilling to take tougher measures, says Einhorn.
"At this point the Chinese would very much like to see a negotiated solution, so they are working very hard to get the parties to the table," Einhorn adds. "We may have convinced the Chinese they have to act more forcefully.... We also want them to be prepared to adopt coercive measures, but that's unlikely. That could lead to instability, and [the Chinese] don't want that."
One knowledgeable source with North Korean negotiating experience was asked by a reporter if Pyongyang would accept international inspectors with clipboards and four-wheel-drives insisting on access to military zones that have not been open to outsiders in decades. The source paused, and said, "I don't know."
It remains unclear what measures could be applied if talks fail. The US has been pursuing a naval "interdiction" strategy designed to stop illicit sources of cash such as drug sales. There are also UN Security Council sanctions; however the White House appears not to be pushing hard along that track.
During the 10-month crisis, which began when the North admitted to having a secret uranium program - in violation of four agreements, including the NPT - the White House has been divided over the wisdom of further negotiations.
Late last week a leading administration hawk, Under Secretary of State John Bolton, delivered a blistering speech in Seoul. He singled out Kim Jong Il as an inhuman tyrant living in luxury while his country is a "hellish nightmare" where some "400,000 people" have died in prisons since 1972.
On Sunday the often-colorful North Korean media called Mr. Bolton "human scum" and a "psychopath," and said that while the North will still join the talks, it will not agree to negotiate with Bolton.
This weekend, in a possible slap to the US, the official North Korean news agency reported its agreement to conduct six-way talks as the last of 15 items on its website. It appeared below an Aug. 1 item detailing Kim's visit to a goat farm that provisions the Korean army.
• Howard LaFranchi contributed to this report.
----
We will start testing nuclear bombs, says defiant N Korea
August 04, 2003
Pakistan Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-7-2003_pg7_5
WASHINGTON: North Korea has raised the stakes dramatically in its confrontation with the United States by privately threatening to conduct its first underground nuclear test, it emerged on Saturday.
A senior official of the hardline Communist regime warned in New York that his country would take counter-measures, "for example, a nuclear test", if the US did not ease pressure on his isolated country.
The warning, by Han Sung Ryol, North Korea's deputy ambassador to the UN, was delivered to an American official earlier this month, according to reports circulating in Tokyo on Saturday.The test would be conducted inside a tunnel dug into a mountain in the run-up to September 9, the anniversary of the republic's foundation, the respected Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported.
Meanwhile North Korea is set to announce that it has become the world's ninth nuclear power, should Washington not offer a non-aggression guarantee in return for abandoning its nuclear programme, say officials in Tokyo close to the Pyongyang regime. -Courtesy ST
----
North Korea bans Bolton from talks
August 04, 2003
By Soo-Jeong Lee
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030804-121425-6611r.htm
SEOUL - Pyongyang, calling a senior American official "human scum" for criticizing North Korea's leader, banned him from U.S.-proposed multilateral talks on its suspected development of nuclear weapons.
North Korea said that it won't deal with U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton because he described communist leader Kim Jong Il as a "tyrannical dictator" and said "life is a hellish nightmare" for many North Koreans.
Mr. Bolton made the remarks during a visit to South Korea last week.
"Such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks," said a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman, according to the North's official KCNA news agency.
"We have decided not to consider him as an official of the U.S. administration any longer nor to deal with him," the unidentified spokesman said.
He said, however, that there was no change in Pyongyang's decision to hold six-country talks on the nuclear issue.
The countries involved are expected to be North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea.
The United States said yesterday it was committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff and was not trying to end Mr. Kim's rule.
In an interview with selected U.S. media outlets, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the six-way talks can allay the North's fears of a U.S. invasion.
"Our policy, the president's policy, is to work diplomatically with our partners and the North Koreans to find a diplomatic political solution," Mr. Powell said in the interview, made public yesterday.
Mr. Powell was asked about a previous comment by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that Mr. Kim's administration was "teetering on the edge of economic collapse." Mr. Wolfowitz said that could be used as "a major point of leverage" against Mr. Kim.
"I don't have a basis for saying there is an imminent collapse," Mr. Powell said.
"Right now there is a government there. It's been there for a lot of decades, and that's what I have to deal with," Mr. Powell said. "What the situation would be following a catastrophic collapse, I don't really know. I don't think it's anything that any of North Korea's neighbors at the moment wish to see."
Mr. Powell said the pending talks could lead to more U.S. help for "the people of North Korea." But he denied that the Bush administration used aid for the impoverished state to lure Mr. Kim into accepting the multilateral format.
Pyongyang agreed to the six-way talks despite saying for months it would only consent to bilateral talks with the United States. The North says it will work on the sidelines of the negotiations to push for one-on-one talks with Washington, which has insisted on multilateral talks because it says the North's nuclear program is a regional concern.
No date has been set for the talks, which are expected to be held in China, and no decision has been made on the level of the officials who will attend.
A Japanese newspaper reported yesterday that Washington and Tokyo have begun talks on forming an inspection team to ensure that North Korea eliminates its nuclear program.
Mr. Bolton discussed details of the plan with senior Japanese officials Friday, after the North had agreed to the multilateral discussions, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
The inspectors would likely come from the five countries expected to participate in the talks with North Korea, the newspaper said. The report could not be immediately confirmed, and there was no word on whether Pyongyang would allow the inspections.
The United States and North Korea last held official talks in April in Beijing. They've since had unofficial discussions in New York via North Korean diplomats at the United Nations.
The nuclear standoff began in October, when U.S. officials said North Korea acknowledged having a uranium-based nuclear weapons program.
----
N. Korea Seeks to Exclude U.S. Official From Talks
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16860-2003Aug3.html
The North Korean government, which last week agreed to hold talks with the United States and four other countries over its nuclear programs, yesterday denounced a senior U.S. official in highly personal and florid terms and said he could not be part of any U.S. delegation to the talks.
John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control, last week delivered a tough speech in Seoul that focused on North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and his grip on the nation. The speech, titled "A Dictatorship at the Crossroads," described life in North Korea as "a hellish nightmare" and called Kim a "tyrannical rogue."
Bolton, an advocate for a tough approach to North Korea who has allies in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office, mentioned Kim by name 40 times and appeared to make the case for government change. Bolton charged that "while he [Kim] lives like royalty in Pyongyang, he keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps with millions more mired in abject poverty."
Yesterday, North Korea fired back.
In a statement attributed to a spokesman for the North Korean foreign ministry, Pyongyang said: "We know that there are several hawks within the present U.S. administration but have not yet found out such rude human scum as Bolton. What he uttered is no more than rubbish which can be let loose only by a beastly man bereft of reason."
The statement said that Bolton's speech makes "one doubt whether he is a man with an elementary faculty of thinking and stature as a man or not" and casts "a doubt as to whether the U.S. truly wants to negotiate with the DPRK [North Korea] or not." The statement said, however, that North Korea was still committed to attend the talks, noting "a caravan is bound to go ahead though dogs bark." But Pyongyang made clear that "such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks." In fact, the statement added that in light of Bolton's "political vulgarity and psychopathological condition," the government has "decided not to consider him as an official of the U.S. administration any longer, nor to deal with him."
In the two previous high-level meetings between U.S. officials and North Korea, the U.S. delegation was led by Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly. But some of Bolton's allies in the past have pressed for him to lead a U.S. delegation meeting with the North Koreans. The next round of talks, expected to take place next month, will also include representatives from China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Pentagon Nuclear Arms Session Worries Critics
August 4, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-usa-nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With the Bush administration pushing to study possible new types of atomic bombs, the Pentagon is set to hold a meeting this week on the U.S. nuclear arsenal as arms control advocates say Washington is only encouraging the global spread of nuclear weapons.
Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Monday roughly 150 senior officials from the Defense Department and other parts of the government will meet in private on Thursday at Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command near Omaha, Nebraska.
Arms control advocates worried that the Pentagon will use the meeting as a key next step toward creating a new generation of atomic bombs and resuming nuclear testing.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said the meeting could produce a formal determination of a military requirement for a new or modified type of nuclear weapon.
``Traditionally, once there has been a stated need by the uniformed military for a new weapon to deal with some contingency or some threat that's out there, that has been the catalyst for design, engineering, development and testing of nuclear weapons,'' Kimball said.
Arguing that new threats such as deeply buried bunkers and enemy chemical and biological weapon stockpiles may require new weapons, the administration has asked Congress to permit research on possible new low-yieldnuclear bombs and on modifying two existing higher-yield ones.
Administration officials, citing concerns about the aging U.S. nuclear stockpile, also have said they can foresee conditions under which they would urge President Bush to resume nuclear testing. America has observed a nuclear test moratorium since 1992.
``Why in the world would we move toward manufacturing small, usable nuclear weapons and show how valuable they are, and then expect that no one will ever try to steal, beg or borrow one and use it against us?'' asked Robert Musil, executive director of the Physicians for Social Responsibility advocacy group.
``It really stirs up proliferation, and that is one of our key concerns,'' Musil said.
Shavers said this week's meeting will be chaired by Pentagon official Michael Wynne. Shavers said others taking part come from the departments of state and energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the White House National Security Council.
``They're going to take a look at the status of the nation's nuclear stockpile, particularly with an eye toward the Moscow Treaty that says we've got to get our stockpile numbers down, and how do we do that in a manner that still allows us to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent,'' Shavers said.
Under this pact, the United States promised to cut the number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads by 2012, down from the current 6,000.
The Pentagon has not released specifics of what will be discussed at the meeting. But a leaked document released by a disarmament group, the Los Alamos Study Group, revealed the minutes of a January planning session.
The document said one panel will discuss ``requirements for low-yield weapons, EPWs (earth-penetrating weapons), enhanced radiation weapons, agent defeat weapons (designed to obliterate enemy stocks of chemical and biological weapons) ... What forms of testing will these new designs require? ... What is the testing strategy for weapons more likely to be used in small strikes?''
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Uranium oxide: Yellowcake not all it's cooked up to be
By Christopher Smith csmith@sltrib.com
August 04, 2003
Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Aug/08042003/utah/81085.asp
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's now-discredited State of the Union claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy 500 metric tons of uranium oxide "yellowcake" to develop nuclear weapons has the nation's capital buzzing like a Geiger counter.
But in the nuclear fuel heartland of the Colorado Plateau, those old enough to remember the uranium mining boom of the 1950s are somewhat bemused.
And their reaction has more to do with physics than politics.
"I really poo-pooed the whole thing because yellowcake isn't worth a damn in terms of nuclear weapons," says Sam Taylor, longtime publisher of the Moab Times-Independent in the southeastern Utah redrock town once dubbed the "Uranium Capitol of the World."
"There's a long expensive process between Uranium 238 [the most commonly occurring isotope of uranium when it is dug out of the ground] and Uranium 235, which is fissionable," says Taylor, 70, who ran uranium drill rigs on the plateau as a young man. "Why should they worry about him buying yellowcake when one of the only places that enriches it into U-235 is a government lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn.?"
July was the month that famed prospector Charlie Steen made Moab an atomic boomtown 51 years ago with his historic uranium strike. This year, it was also the month that "yellowcake" leached into America's political lexicon. The term showed up last month in 10 Washington Post stories, seven New York Times stories and two stories each in USA TODAY and the Los Angeles Times. But that's not to say it's gotten currency as the Beltway tag for the White House's current Iraqi nuclear fuel fiasco.
"Scandals require code words, terms that no one ever used before but suddenly are all over LexisNexis: enemies list, dirty tricks, White House plumbers, cancer on the presidency, Deep Throat, arms for hostages, stained blue dress, etc.," wrote Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post, which is asking readers to submit the best nickname for the Bush brouhaha. "So far this one has produced only 'yellowcake uranium' and 'aluminum tubes,' which don't exactly get the pulse racing."
In the heyday of the nuclear arms race of the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission was paying $40 a pound for yellowcake, so named because it looks like powdery yellow cake mix. The price would climb to $50 by the late 1970s, but today, thanks to international production, yellowcake trades for about $11 a pound.
As the online magazine Slate noted last month, "Despite all the hubbub over Saddam Hussein's efforts to buy yellowcake, the stuff is by no means a rare commodity."
But it was the stuff that founded a handful of communities on the plateau, as Northern Arizona University history professor Richard Amundson recounts in his recent book Yellowcake Towns.
"This is my term for a place that was both economically and psychologically depending on uranium processing," Amundson said in an interview. "In Grants, N.M., you can still walk into the Uranium Cafe and order 'yellowcakes' [pancakes]. In Grand Junction, [Colo.] they used to have the Miss Uranium pageant and the winner got a truckload of uranium ore."
Six months after Steen made his improbable discovery that started the uranium rush in July 1952, he was before a congressional committee discussing plans to open the first nonfederal uranium reduction mill to refine mined ore into yellowcake. Every barrel of yellowcake from the Moab mill was purchased by the federal government to make enriched uranium for nuclear power plants and weapons. Although Uncle Sam initially set the price of yellowcake, Steen made $60 million the first year alone.
While Steen had struck a deep bed of nearly pure uraninite, or what some geologists call "pitch blende," most of the yellowcake reserves stockpiled prior to his Mi Vida mine came from shallow deposits of uranium-bearing yellow carnotite rock in the Colorado Plateau.
Those deposits had drawn Madame Marie Curie, who pioneered the use of radium for cancer treatment, to Moab in the 1920s. Sometimes called fool's gold, yellow carnotite was generally considered worthless before the Manhattan Project heralded the atomic age and made uranium the most sought-after element on earth.
"A company in Salt Lake City refined the carnotite and they put it in watch dials," says Raye Ringholz, author of Uranium Frenzy, Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau. "People would hold their watches next to a Geiger counter and it would start ticking."
The late Calvin Black, a colorful San Juan County commissioner who was the inspiration for "Bishop Love" in Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang, used yellow carnotite rock to decorate the exterior and interior walls of his home near Blanding. Black was also fond of wearing a bolo tie fashioned out of yellow carnotite.
"He later said that's what may have given him the cancer," says Taylor of Moab. "I don't know of any uranium miners from that era that are still alive. As Cal once said, 'When we were mining the high grade ore in White Canyon in unventilated shafts, nobody told us about the radon.' "
In the as-ye-sow-so-shall-ye-reap irony of the nuclear west, the yellowcake shipped out of the Colorado Plateau returned as airborne radioactive fallout during the Cold War tests of atomic bombs in southern Nevada.
"The uranium story of the Colorado Plateau has two faces," says Ringholz. "One is a tremendously colorful period of Charlie Steen and the penny stock rage and the boom times. And the other is very tragic; the downwinders, the uranium miners and the health problems."
Steen's mill, bought by the Atlas Corp. in 1956 and operated until 1984, is now a public health hazard due to the mounds of tailings situated next to the Colorado River. The Department of Energy is studying how and where to relocate the mill tailings.
Steen, who lost much of his fortune to a bitter fight with the IRS and lackluster business ventures, is now 83, living in Longmont, Colo., and suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He lives with his youngest son, Mark, who is writing a detailed history of the Mi Vida era.
"I want to be remembered as the guy who found the biggest uranium deposit in history," Steen told The Salt Lake Tribune in a 1992 interview in Moab. "It's better to have found it and lost it than to have never found it at all."
-------- texas
NRC approves restart of South Texas nuke
REUTERS USA:
August 4, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/21715/story.htm http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2003/2003-08-04-09.asp#anchor4
NEW YORK - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said last week it approved restart of the 1,250 megawatt South Texas 1 nuclear unit, paving the way for the plant's anticipated return to the power grid.
In a statement posted to the agency's Web site, the NRC said it "concluded the plant's operator had taken all the necessary actions with respect to the to bottom-mounted instrumentation penetration leakage issue to support the safe restart" of the plant.
The unit, near Bay City, Texas has been shut since late March when routine refueling turned up tiny boric acid deposits on the bottom of the reactor vessel.
Owners of the plant include CenterPoint Energy's CNP.N Texas Genco Holdings Inc. TGN.N (30.8 percent), Austin Energy the city of Austin (16 percent), AEP's AEP.N AEP Texas Central Co. (25.2 percent) and City Public Service of San Antonio (28 percent).
-------- us politics
Report Says Powell to Step Down in 2005
Secretary of State Colin Powell and his top deputy have reportedly told the White House they will not serve a second term if President Bush is re-elected. (Audio)
Aug 4, 2003
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/POWELL?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Colin Powell and his top deputy have told the White House they will not serve a second term if President Bush is re-elected, The Washington Post reported.
But a State Department spokesman vigorously denied the story on Monday. "There's no basis to the story at all," said Philip T. Reeker. "There was no such conversation."
Meanwhile, at the White House, Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said "the conversation didn't happen."
Citing "sources familiar with the conversation," the paper said in a story for Monday's editions that Powell deputy Richard L. Armitage recently told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that he and Powell will leave on Jan. 21, 2005, the day after the next presidential inauguration.
The Post said Powell has indicated to associates that a promise to his wife, rather than any policy disagreements with others in the administration, is a key factor in his intention to serve only one term. Advertisement
Administration officials with possible knowledge of Powell's plans could not be reached Sunday evening, but it has been widely anticipated that he would serve only one term.
That would follow the pattern of recent administrations. Only George Shultz under President Reagan has served more than one term in recent decades. He took office midway through Reagan's first term and then stayed on for the second.
Powell was widely touted as a potential Republican presidential candidate after retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Clinton administration, but announced he would not run even as polls indicated he had overwhelming popularity with American voters.
Although never publicly confirmed, it was widely reported at the time that Powell was bowing to the wishes of his wife that he not be a candidate.
Powell, who turned 66 in April, has consistently declined to respond to speculation about how long he planned to head the State Department, but has made clear that he has many interests beyond government service, specifically a commitment to improving education opportunities for black Americans.
"I serve at the pleasure of the president," he said last month. "That's the only answer I've ever given to that question, no matter what form it comes in."
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Calling for Candor
Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A14
Editorial
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17026-2003Aug3.html
IT'S MORE CRITICAL than ever that the administration level with lawmakers and the American people about the likely financial costs of U.S. involvement in Iraq. But it's not happening. The evasion has a familiar feel. In the weeks leading up to the war, the administration treated anyone who had the temerity to ask about cost as a boob who failed to comprehend that such figures were, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "not knowable." Then, five days into the fighting, the administration produced a remarkably precise figure for the size of the check it needed Congress to cut -- instantly. At the same time, the administration waved off questions about the costs of postwar reconstruction, pointing confidently to billions in oil revenue and seized assets. As it turns out, the anticipated oil revenue this year will be a relative trickle, and the amount anticipated for 2004 is far less than needed to get Iraq functioning.
All of which only makes the latest go-round that much more galling and ultimately counterproductive. The United States needs to build public support and understanding for a sustained presence in Iraq, and one precondition will be candor. Sustaining the current level of troops, which administration officials acknowledge will be required for the near future, runs close to $4 billion a month. In an interview with CNBC's "Capital Report," L. Paul Bremer pegged the cost of reconstruction in Iraq at "probably well above $50 billion, $60 billion, maybe $100 billion." While some of the requisite funds will come from Iraqi oil revenue or other countries, the United States is inevitably going to foot a big chunk of the bill.
So you might think that the administration would build some costs for Iraq into next year's budget, now moving through Congress. Or at least provide an estimate of what it will request in a supplemental spending bill later. Or a range of likely costs. Instead, administration officials are back to the "not knowable" dodge. The costs can't be stated, White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the other day, "simply because we don't know what they will be."
Mr. Bolten's response provoked an outpouring of frustration -- and not just from Democrats. "I know there are some uncertainties," said Ohio Republican George V. Voinovich. "But I think you can figure out a conservative number and share it with us." Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Mr. Bolten that failing to come up with reasonable estimates "is going to lead, I believe, to a lot of partisan haggling, bad surprises, whoever is president coming up with supplementals, running out of money unexpectedly. It wasn't unexpected. All of this is fully expected. And so while we are all fully expecting, let us say so."
Administration officials argue that to release estimates now would just set them up for criticism when final costs inevitably diverge and that agencies will inflate their needs to spend the full targeted amount. But those risks hardly outweigh the harm of this hide-the-ball budgeting. A successful mission in Iraq requires the administration to enlist partners: among allies, among lawmakers, among the American people. An honest discussion about costs, even if belated, is an essential prerequisite.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Taliban Are Killing Clerics Who Dispute Holy War Call
August 4, 2003
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/international/asia/04AFGH.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 - The assassination, witnesses said, was trademark Taliban: two men on a motorbike, the passenger opening fire with a Kalashnikov rifle, the driver making a quick getaway.
But the choice of victim signaled a new turn for the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic movement that was ousted from power and has been running a campaign of attacks against foreign and Afghan government troops in southern Afghanistan for months. This time, the assassinated person was Maulavi Abdul Manan, known as Maulavi Jenab, a member of the local district religious council, shot as he left his mosque last week. He was the third senior Muslim cleric killed by Taliban assassins here in the last 40 days.
In addition, the head of Kandahar's Ulema-u-Shura, or Clerics' Council, Maulavi Abdul Fayaz, narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded in his mosque as he was leading evening prayers on June 30. Twenty-seven people were wounded, 14 seriously, council members said.
Since then two other clerics, also members of their district religious councils, have been shot to death. One, Maulavi Ahmadullah, was killed two weeks ago in his district of Dand, not far from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. On Wednesday evening, another, Maulavi Jenab, was killed in his district of Panjwai, southwest of Kandahar.
The killings come amid increased Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan. Local officials reported capturing 20 Taliban suspects in the last few days in two operations in Kandahar Province, one against a band of Taliban who killed two government soldiers last week. The authorities also caught a Taliban member trying to plant a mine meant to kill the governor of Oruzgan Province, north of Kandahar.
Maulavi Muhammad Haq Khattib, deputy head of the Kandahar Clerics' Council, said the clerics had undoubtedly been attacked by the Taliban. "According to the villagers and local elders, they had no enemies," he said in an interview in his office in Kandahar. "It was because of their support for the government."
The 15-member Kandahar Ulema-u-Shura and its branches in the districts have been vocal supporters of President Hamid Karzai and have welcomed the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan. Appointed by the governor of Kandahar, the council members are clearly allied with the government, but they are also keepers of the city's most hallowed shrines and are among the most senior tribal and religious figures.
By challenging the Taliban movement at the core of its legitimacy - its claim as a religious authority - the Ulema-u-Shura has drawn direct reprisals against its members. "The Taliban are saying they are religious people, but they are using force to get their aims and are using the cover of Islam," Maulavi Khattib said. "But we say this is not Islam. Islam does not support the use of force, and we are telling people not to fight."
Seven months ago, the council issued a religious edict denouncing the Taliban's call for a jihad, or holy war, against the American-led forces in Afghanistan. Unlike the Soviets, whose intervention here in the 1980's was intended to occupy the country and so justified a jihad, the American-led force had come to expel terrorists and bring peace, and had United Nations support, Maulavi Khattib said.
He gave other reasons that a jihad could not be called. He said that the government had been elected, and that a religious council had no right to call a jihad against a government chosen by the people.
The Ulema-u-Shura edict, signed by dozens of clerics, says of the Taliban: "They are saying that foreign troops have captured our country and they are calling to start a jihad against them. Just by using the name of jihad, they are killing as many people as they want."
"Respected Muslim brothers, you know the situation: you are witnesses that the president of our country is a Muslim, and his vice presidents and all members of the cabinet and government authorities are Muslims," the edict reads. "No one has said you should stop going to the mosque or stop praying, so for what reason is this a place of fighting?"
The Taliban have denounced the Clerics' Council, leaving threatening leaflets in mosques and bazaars, Maulavi Khattib said. "They wrote that people who work with the government would be harshly punished, and religious people would be doubly punished," he said. But none of the clerics who were attacked had received specific threats, he said.
It is not clear who commands the most influence with the people of southern Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Maulavi Khattib, whose family has guarded the Mui Mubarak, the Shrine of the Hair of the Prophet, and his deputy, Maulavi Wali Muhammad - whose family for 200 years has been the keeper of Kandahar's most famous shrine, Karqa Mubarak, the Shrine of the Prophet's Cloak - are well respected. They have support from the district councils and plan to open more offices in southern Afghanistan.
But they admitted in an interview that the Taliban have continuing influence in the districts. "In the rural areas, their propaganda is strong and the people are scared of them," Maulavi Khattib said. "Even if they saw something of the murders, they would say nothing."
-------- africa
West Africans set to deploy
August 04, 2003
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030803-110553-4984r.htm
The expected deployment today of about 1,500 West African peacekeepers to Liberia is tactically and symbolically significant for the continent, for Liberia and for the United States. Regional leaders are proving that they can address troubles in their neighborhood. Their willingness to do so sends a succinct message to other strongmen on the continent. For too long, Liberians have been caught in the crossfire of warring factions.
For the United States, the West African deployment proves that America need not be the cop on every block. This newspaper has been sending this message, while much of the world seems convinced there is a need for U.S. military intervention. There simply has been no clear or stated national interest that could justify why Americans should be put in harm's way. Indeed, U.S. military intervention might undermine the clout of regional African players and undercut opportunities for psychologically important victories for African policy-makers and keepers of the peace.
West African nations were called on to take the lead in quelling the turmoil in Liberia, and they appear ready to meet the challenge. The leaders of the region deserve applause - especially those in Nigeria, who have have offered refuge to Liberian President Charles Taylor. Their leadership will do more to bolster African stability in the long run than a U.S. military deployment could. As we have maintained, the United States should not put boots on the ground in Liberia, since the White House has not stated a national security interest for doing so.
The United States should continue to help financially. It should continue to provide sea- and airlifts for peacekeepers to strategic African destinations in order to facilitate their entry to Liberia. Also, America and Africans should heed some past lessons, since peacekeeping missions of the past led by West Africans have been partly successful. In Liberia, a deployment led by Nigeria prevented Mr. Taylor, who has been indicted for war crimes, from seizing control of Monrovia in 1990, and paved the way for elections in 1997.
Since Nigeria will probably deploy at least some U.S.-trained peacekeepers, it is hoped that human rights abuses committed by peacekeepers in Africa in the past will be avoided. For the past two decades, some West African peacekeeper