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NUCLEAR
Hot uranium prices push Cameco shares past $100 mark
Nuclear shutdown leaves ratepayers on the hook
France pins huge hopes on China's ambitious nuclear energy plans
The war's littlest victim
Vietnam vets are owed an apology
Plutonium shipment reaches France
EU Clears Areva's Stake In Uranium JV With Conditions
Iran Readies Uranium for Enrichment, UN Watching
Iran Moves Toward Nuclear Production
Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat
U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03
Inspector: Iraq had no WMD before invasion
Iraq testimony seen confirming lack of WMDs
Nuclear fuel reprocessing too costly
IAEA Chief Says World Getting Impatient with N. Korea
Powell: Brazil Has No Nuclear Aspirations
Warming to Brazil, Powell Says Its Nuclear Program Isn't a Concern
Going Nuclear The Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Top Nuclear Regulator Says Power Plants Better Guarded
NUCLEAR REPOSITORY: Yucca court challenge alive
Hanford: Transition of FFTF work halted
US nuclear shipment arrives in France
MILITARY
Afghan Race Shaping Up as Battle of the Modern and Traditional
Afghanistan's Drug Boom
NATO Expects Rush of Taliban Attacks in Afghanistan
Japan Plans to Press U.S. on Troops
U.S. to Slow Pullout of Troops From S. Korea
How bad is Iraq report for Blair?
Iran's Missiles Can Now Hit Europe, Ex-Official Says
Funds to Rebuild Iraq Are Drifting Away From Target
Raids Focus on Insurgents South of Baghdad
Car Bomb Kills 10 Iraqis Near Baghdad
Hundreds of Sunken Vessels Block Access
64 percent of Palestinians support resuming peace talks with Israel: poll
Israeli Aide Hints That Gaza Exit Would Freeze Peace Plan
Annan Reports Progress in Action to Combat Landmines
A New C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on a Key Terrorist's Tie to Iraq
U.S. Vetoes U.N. Resolution
Bill to Restore the Draft Is Defeated in the House
House Moves to Protect G.I.'s on Finances
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Pit Stop on the Cocaine Highway
Controversy Over Fort Detrick Expansion
Election Day Anti-Terrorism Plans Draw Criticism
Intelligence Bills Lack Details
Senate Passes Intelligence Bill, but Tough Road Lies Ahead
Partisan Split in the House May Slow a Final 9/11 Bill
Mystery of the Islamic Scholar Who Was Barred by the U.S.
Prison without trial 'justified'
Most at Guantanamo to Be Freed or Sent Home, Officer Says
POLITICS
Ethics Panel Rebukes DeLay Twice in a Week
For the Record
The Web: Iraqi blogs building free speech
Statement by Ralph Nader before the Skull and Bones Headquarters
Indian Health Agency Barred New-Voter Drive
After Debate, Iraq and Weapons Fuel the Campaign Dialogue
Senate Examining (Again) Constitutional Ban on Foreign-Born Presidents
OTHER
Volcano Is Becoming More Active
Volcano Appears to Rest After Letting Off Steam
Wildlife Protection Standards Waived
Nerve Damage Seen from Industrial Solvent
U.S. Backs Off Mont. Gas Drilling
ACTIVISTS
Who are the real terrorists? Look around
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- canada
Hot uranium prices push Cameco shares past $100 mark
Improved prospects have also increased exploration spending in Saskatchewan
The Globe and Mail
By WENDY STUECK
October 6, 2004
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20041006/RCAMECO06/TPBusiness/TopStories
VANCOUVER -- After nearly 20 years in the doldrums, spot uranium prices are soaring, a trend that has seen enthused investors push Cameco Corp. shares over the $100 mark for the first time since they were listed in 1991.
Improved prospects for uranium have also lit a fire under the share prices of several junior resource companies with uranium projects in their portfolio and boosted exploration spending in Saskatchewan, where companies are scouring the Athabasca Basin for new deposits of the mineral.
While uranium prices are notoriously difficult to predict, analysts expect the upward trend to continue for at least the next few years.
"While the recent price move brings a variety of new projects into economic viability, we believe that the time lag necessary to review, permit and construct these projects will result in continued tightness in the market for the next several years," CIBC World Markets Inc. analyst Stephen Bonnyman said in a recent report.
Cameco shares fell 79 cents to close at $103.96 on the Toronto Stock Exchange yesterday. They have risen 39 per cent in the past 12 months.
Cameco, with uranium mines in Canada and the United States, is the world's largest uranium producer. It also provides refining and conversion services that process uranium for use in nuclear reactors, and owns 31.6 per cent of Bruce Power, which runs six nuclear plants in Ontario.
Cameco spokeswoman Alice Wong said current market conditions reflect shifting supply and demand trends. Over the past 20 years, uranium consumption has exceeded mined production, but the difference has been made up from stockpiles coming on the market, including uranium recovered from former nuclear weapons.
Currently, those supplies appear to be dwindling.
"The drawing down of the inventory, which we have been forecasting for many years now, is coming to fruition," Ms. Wong said.
Uranium prices spiked in the 1990s, only to fall back when new supplies came on the market, but analysts say they are not expecting similar surprises this time around.
"If there had been any excess inventories, we would have seen them by now," said Raymond Goldie, an analyst at Salman Partners Inc.
Prices are also being influenced by uncertainty over some sources of supply, Ms. Wong said, such as Rio Tinto PLC's Rossing mine in Namibia. Rossing produces about 6 per cent of the world's uranium.
Rio Tinto is currently assessing whether to keep the mine operating until 2017, or close it earlier.
Even though uranium prices soared in U.S. dollar terms in the past three years, Rossing has not enjoyed the full benefit of higher prices, because its costs are in Namibian dollars, which are pegged to the South African rand, which has appreciated against the U.S. dollar.
The improved outlook for uranium, now trading at about $20 (U.S.) a pound, has boosted exploration spending in the Athabasca Basin, home of the world's biggest and highest-grade uranium deposits.
Gary Delaney, director of the northern geological survey at Saskatchewan's Ministry of Industry and Resources, said companies are expected to spend about $25.9-million (Canadian) on uranium exploration this year, up from $13.3-million last year.
The total mineral exploration spending for the province is expected to exceed $50-million this year, up from $31.3-million last year.
-----
Nuclear shutdown leaves ratepayers on the hook
nb.cbc.ca
Oct 6 2004
http://nb.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=nb_nuclearshutdown20041005
SAINT JOHN - NB Power's nuclear power plant at Point Lepreau will remain closed at least until the weekend, costing ratepayers an estimated $5 million for replacement power.
The utility's vice-president of nuclear power says technicians discovered a new problem shortly after they fixed a piece of equipment that burned out when a circuit failed Saturday.
Rod White says the latest problem is a cracked steam pipe. "We know from other nuclear plants that they've experienced the occasional resistor failing. We did some checks on ours some years back, and at that point we didn't find any issues with these resistors."
White says the pipes in the non-nuclear part of the plant were last refurbished about 10 years ago. The cracked pipe has been fixed, but White says all the pipes in the same section will be checked just to make sure.
When Lepreau is down, NB Power buys power or burns more oil at a cost of up to $800,000 per day. That means by week's end, ratepayers could be on the hook for more than $5 million in extra costs.
-------- china
France pins huge hopes on China's ambitious nuclear energy plans
BEIJING (AFP)
Oct 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041006014247.434fk2d3.html
French companies are well positioned to benefit from China's hugely ambitious drive to boost its nuclear energy capacity, but will face tough competition from US rivals.
Currently, China has only nine nuclear reactors that fulfill less than two percent of the country's energy needs.
But policy makers in Beijing have vowed to increase that to four percent by 2020 to meet the voracious demands of an economy that becomes more industrialized and more urbanized by each passing year.
To this end, a total of 32 reactors with a capacity of at least 1,000 megawatts each will be installed over the next 15 years.
It is estimated that as a result of this vast expansion plan, 80 percent of all new nuclear power plants over the next two decades will be built in China.
While all of China's nuclear generating capacity is currently located in its prosperous coastal areas, more and more local governments in the nation's impoverished central regions are also trying to build their own reactors.
Southwestern Sichuan, which is China's second-most populous province with 87 million inhabitants, organized a seminar in mid-September to pick three sites for future nuclear plants.
In another indication of China's enthusiasm for nuclear power, companies in the French power sector like EDF, Framatome and Alstom have seen a steady flow of Chinese delegations since early this year.
They want to see first-hand "what the French nuclear program is like," said Didier Cordero, top China representative of EDF, France's state-owned power utility.
In Beijing, the level of activity has also picked up markedly, and observers have noticed a slew of important decisions emerging from the National Development and Reform Commission, the top planning body, since this summer.
In late July, China went public with a plan to add two new reactors to the southern site of Ling'ao, which already has two reactors, built in cooperation with Framatome, Alston and EDF.
And last week, the government invited bids for the construction of four third-generation reactors at the sites of Sanmen in eastern China and Yangjiang in the south.
These projects have a combined value of up to nine billion dollars, but winning them could have a much broader significance than that for foreign contractors.
They could set the industrial standard for future projects, determining which national technologies will be favored in the years ahead.
"We want to take part in as many projects as possible for the duration of the Chinese nuclear expansion program," said Herve de Preneuf, chief China representative for French power group Areva.
"But we're aware that the Chinese will strive to play a large role themselves," he said.
Unlike Finland, which recently bought a turn-key reactor from Areva, China is more interested in also acquiring the skills and technology to develop its own nuclear power industry, French insiders said.
"Since this is third-generation and thus very advanced technology, they hope to give overall responsibility to the foreign supplier," said Preneuf.
"But at the same time, they want to make sure that the foreign contractor works with Chinese enterprises to the greatest extent possible," he said.
While France benefits from the experiences of two decades of doing business in China's nuclear industry, Beijing could decide to lean more on American companies partly in order to reduce its trade surplus with the United States.
Paris-based Areva, the world's top maker of nuclear reactors, is competing with a consortium led by US-based Westinghouse, which could also see the participation of Japanese and South Korean companies.
Westinghouse has high-level backers, at it has been promoted by a series of ranking US guests visiting Beijing, including Vice President Dick Cheney during a trip to the Chinese capital in April.
-------- depleted uranium
The war's littlest victim
bellaciao.org
Juan Gonzalez
6th October 2004
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3619
In early September 2003, Army National Guard Spec. Gerard Darren Matthew was sent home from Iraq, stricken by a sudden illness.
One side of Matthew's face would swell up each morning. He had constant migraine headaches, blurred vision, blackouts and a burning sensation whenever he urinated.
The Army transferred him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for further tests, but doctors there could not explain what was wrong.
Shortly after his return, his wife, Janice, became pregnant. On June 29, she gave birth to a baby girl, Victoria Claudette.
The baby was missing three fingers and most of her right hand.
Matthew and his wife believe Victoria's shocking deformity has something to do with her father's illness and the war - especially since there is no history of birth defects in either of their families.
They have seen photos of Iraqi babies born with deformities that are eerily similar.
In June, Matthew contacted the Daily News and asked us to arrange independent laboratory screening for his urine. This was after The News had reported that four of seven soldiers from another National Guard unit, the 442nd Military Police, had tested positive for depleted uranium (DU).
The independent test of Matthew's urine found him positive for DU - low-level radioactive waste produced in nuclear plants during the enrichment of natural uranium.
Because it is twice as heavy as lead, DU has been used by the Pentagon since the Persian Gulf War in certain types of "tank-buster" shells, as well as for armor-plating in Abrams tanks.
Exposure to radioactivity has been associated in some studies with birth defects in the children of exposed parents.
"My husband went to Iraq to fight for his country," Janice Matthew said. "I feel the Army should take responsibility for what's happened."
The couple first learned of the baby's missing fingers during a routine sonogram of the fetus last April at Lenox Hill Hospital.
Matthew was a truck driver in Iraq with the 719th transport unit from Harlem. His unit moved supplies from Army bases in Kuwait to the front lines and as far as Baghdad. On several occasions, he says, he carried shot-up tanks and destroyed vehicle parts on his flat-bed back to Kuwait.
After he learned of his unborn child's deformity, Matthew immediately asked the Army to test his urine for DU. In April, he provided a 24-hour urine sample to doctors at Fort Dix, N.J., where he was waiting to be deactivated.
In May, the Army granted him a 40% disability pension for his migraine headaches and for a condition called idiopathic angioedema - unexplained chronic swelling.
But Matthew never got the results of his Army test for DU. When he called Fort Dix last week, five months after he was tested, he was told there was no record of any urine specimen from him.
Thankfully, Matthew did not rely solely on the Army bureaucracy - he went to The News.
Earlier this year, The News submitted urine samples from Guardsmen of the 442nd to former Army doctor Asaf Durakovic and Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The German lab specializes in testing for minute quantities of uranium, a complicated procedure that costs up to $1,000 per test.
The lab is one of approximately 50 in the world that can detect quantities as tiny as fentograms - one part per quadrillionth.
A few months ago, The News submitted a 24-hour urine sample from Matthew to Gerdes. As a control, we also gave the lab 24-hour urine samples from two Daily News reporters.
The three specimens were marked only with the letters A, B and C, so the lab could not know which sample belonged to the soldier.
After analyzing all three, Gerdes reported that only sample A - Matthew's urine - showed clear signs of DU. It contained a total uranium concentration that was "4 to 8 times higher" than specimens B and C, Gerdes reported.
"Those levels indicate pretty definitively that he's been exposed to the DU," said Leonard Dietz, a retired scientist who invented one of the instruments for measuring uranium isotopes.
According to Army guidelines, the total uranium concentration Gerdes found in Matthew is within acceptable standards for most Americans.
But Gerdes questioned the Army's standards, noting that even minute levels of DU are cause for concern.
"While the levels of DU in Matthew's urine are low," Gerdes said, "the DU we see in his urine could be 1,000 times higher in concentration in the lungs."
DU is not like natural uranium, which occurs in the environment. Natural uranium can be ingested in food and drink but gets expelled from the body within 24 hours.
DU-contaminated dust, however, is typically breathed into the lungs and can remain there for years, emitting constant low-level radiation.
"I'm upset and confused," Matthew said. "I just want answers. Are they [the Army] going to take care of my baby?"
We track soldiers' sickness
For the last five months, Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez has chronicled the plight of soldiers who have returned from Iraq with mysterious illnesses.
His exclusive groundbreaking investigation began with a front-page story on April 4 that suggested depleted uranium contamination was far more widespread than the Pentagon would admit.
- At the request of The News, nine soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq were tested for radiation from depleted uranium shells - and four of the ailing G.I.s tested positive.
- The day after Gonzalez's story appeared, Army officials rushed to test all returning members of the company, the 442nd Military Police, based in Rockland County.
- By week's end, the scandal had reverberated all the way to Albany, as Gov. Pataki joined the list of politicians calling for the Pentagon to do a better job of testing and treating sick soldiers returning from the war.
- Gonzalez's exposé sparked a huge demand for testing. By mid-April, 800 G.I.s had given the Army urine samples, and hundreds more were waiting for appointments.
- Two weeks later, the Pentagon claimed that none of the soldiers from the 442nd had tested positive for depleted uranium. But The News' experts found significant problems with the testing methods.
http://www.nydailynews.com/11-08-2002/news/col/jgonzalez/story/236841p-203326c.html
-----
Vietnam vets are owed an apology
Green Party
6 October 2004
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/PA0410/S00083.htm
Green MP Sue Kedgley today called on the Government to offer a full public apology to veterans of the Vietnam War for the refusal of successive administrations to accept their exposure to Agent Orange and to provide adequate treatment for the illness they and their children had suffered as a result.
"In the face of mounting evidence, successive governments downplayed and denied the health effects of exposure, and took no proactive steps to monitor the health of veterans," said Ms Kedgley, the Green Health spokesperson. "The Government now accepts that the vets were exposed to a toxic environment, and so it should apologise for thirty years of denial.
Ms Kedgley called on the Government to immediately set up a programme to monitor dioxin exposure for veterans and their children.
"Vietnam veterans should undergo genetic testing to assess whether there are inter-generational effects from dioxin contamination," said Ms Kedgley. "Professor Al Rowland is already studying nuclear test veterans, and his research should extend to Vietnam veterans.
"Even if there is only limited or suggestive evidence of an association between exposure to dioxin and a disorder, veterans and their children deserve the benefit of the doubt and should be offered full medical treatment."
Ms Kedgley said the lessons of Vietnam needed to be applied to all New Zealanders who had been exposed to cancer-causing substances like dioxin, particularly the victims of poisoning from the Dow plant in New Plymouth and also the soldiers and support staff who had been exposed to depleted uranium in Iraq.
Ms Kedgley said the Paritutu residents were the New Zealand equivalent of Vietnam veterans. "They too have been exposed to a toxic environment and have been subject to thirty years of denial and procrastination. They should be given the same free medical treatment and specialist assistance that veterans are entitled to.
"Depleted uranium is another ticking time-bomb," Ms Kedgley warned. "Even a tiny particle of uranium dust can have significant health effects.
"The New Zealand engineers who have just returned from Iraq served in an area that was exposed to the highest levels of depleted uranium in the region. This exposes them to the risks of serious long term health effects, including cancer and birth defects.
Ms Kedgley said the government should monitor and treat the engineers to ensure that they do not suffer some of the ongoing horrible effects of depleted uranium, which may take many years to surface.
-------- europe
Plutonium shipment reaches France
Marc Parrad
REUTERS FRANCE:
October 7, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/27557/story.htm
CHERBOURG, France - A shipment of 140 kg (308 lb) of U.S. weapons-grade plutonium has arrived in the French port of Cherbourg, despite protests by anti-nuclear campaigners who fear it is vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
Two boats sailed into the northwestern port with the plutonium at around dawn yesterday after a more than two-week journey from Charleston in the United States. The cargo was expected to be unloaded in the next few hours.
The plutonium shipment is part of a post-Cold War agreement between the United States and Russia to get rid of plutonium from excess nuclear warheads.
Protesters from the environmental group Greenpeace have been barred from going within 100 metres of the shipment, but they watched the vessels from a distance in several small boats. Any protester who goes nearer faces a 75,000-euro (51,720 pound) fine.
The plutonium will be taken under armed guard to a nearby reprocessing plant in the La Hague peninsula in northwestern France and will then be driven nearly 1,000 km (660 miles) to a factory in southeastern France for recycling.
Greenpeace says the transport could be attacked by nuclear terrorists. French state-owned nuclear energy firm Areva, which is being paid to reprocess the plutonium, says it is safe.
Cogema will recycle the plutonium into nuclear fuel at its Cadarache and Marcoule plants in southeastern France and ship it back to the United States which plans to use it in an electricity-generating reactor.
This is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's controversial programme to turn plutonium from the "excess" nuclear warheads into mixed-oxide (MOX) plutonium-uranium enriched fuel.
Greenpeace protesters bolted a heavy truck to the road leading to La Hague this week and chained themselves to the vehicle to try to stop the delivery of the plutonium.
Police used chain cutters to cut free the protesters and dragged them away. They later removed the truck.
----
EU Clears Areva's Stake In Uranium JV With Conditions
(Dow Jones)
October 6, 2004
http://money.iwon.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt.jsp?cat=USMARKET&src=704&feed=dji§ion=news&news_id=dji-00041320041006&date=20041006&alias=/alias/money/cm/nw
BRUSSELS -- The European Union Commission Wednesday cleared, with conditions, French state-owned nuclear energy company Areva's (4524.FR) stake in a joint-venture called Enrichment Technology Co. Ltd.
Enrichment Technology is owned by German-Dutch-U.K. nuclear power company Urenco, which in turn is an affiliate of RWE AG (RWE.XE), E.On AG (EON), Centrifuge Nederland Ltd. and British Nuclear Fuels PLC (BNF.YY).
Regulators approved the deal "after having received guarantees that Areva and Urenco would behave in an independent manner," the E.U. said in a statement.
The E.U. initially opposed the deal due to concerns it would foster a market- dominating position and hamper competition.
The E.U. said both companies agreed to give up their veto over each others' future output.
In addition, the companies agreed to give Euratom - an E.U. agency overseeing nuclear fuel and weapons - enough information to monitor the companies' supplies and prices of enriched uranium.
The probe focused on markets for enrichment equipment and low enriched uranium used in civilian reactors. Enrichment is the most expensive of four stages needed to produce nuclear fuel and represents about 25% of the cost of producing nuclear fuel.
During their investigation, E.U. officials found that Areva's current technology lags behind competitors including Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. (JNFL.YY) and Russia's Tenex.
The regulators said Areva's deal should allow the company to gain access to new, advanced methods for uranium enrichment involving centrifuge technologies.
-By James Kanter, james.kanter@dowjones.com
Dow Jones Newswires;
322-285-0136;
-------- iran
Iran Readies Uranium for Enrichment, UN Watching
By REUTERS
October 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran said on Wednesday it had processed several tons of raw ``yellowcake'' uranium to prepare it for enrichment -- a process that can be used to make atomic weapons -- in defiance of the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Iran's president said Tehran would not give in to foreign pressure aimed at stopping what he said was a peaceful nuclear energy program, but which the United States says is a covert scheme aimed at building bombs.
A spokeswoman for the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the uranium processing was being closely monitored by the IAEA to ensure that nothing would be diverted for weapons purposes.
``The uranium conversion is being conducted under the supervision of the IAEA,'' spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
It was unclear how much processed uranium had been produced so far, though Iran's chief delegate to the IAEA, Hossein Mousavian, indicated the amount was not large.
``It is an experimental process and we have not entered the industrial phase,'' Mousavian told Reuters in Tehran.
``A few tons of the 37 tons of yellowcake have been converted under the full supervision of the IAEA and completely within the framework of (IAEA) safeguards,'' he said.
Iran's uranium conversion plant at Isfahan intends to process a total of 37 tons of yellowcake, which experts say could be enriched into material for up to five atomic weapons.
The IAEA has installed monitoring cameras at Isfahan to oversee the production of uranium hexafluoride, the feed material for centrifuges used in enrichment.
``They (the IAEA) were aware that the production had begun,'' a diplomat close to the IAEA told Reuters. The diplomat said the production began around 10 days ago.
Mousavian said the oversight was intense, with the agency making certain that ``each milligram of the used yellowcakeunder the IAEA's watch and supervision.''
IRAN DEFIES RESOLUTION
The IAEA board of governors passed a resolution last month demanding Iran freeze all activities connected with uranium enrichment, including making feed material for centrifuges.
Tehran had originally promised France, Germany and Britain in October 2003 that it would suspend its entire enrichment program and all related activities. While it has yet to enrich any uranium, Iran never entirely froze the program and recently resumed key parts of it.
If Tehran fails to heed the demands, the board said it would consider possible ``further steps'' when it meets next month. Diplomats on the board said this included possibly referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which can impose sanctions.
Mousavian reiterated that Iran views enrichment as its ``legitimate right.'' On Tuesday, Iranian radio reported that Iran's conservative-dominated parliament has prepared a bill that would force the government to resume uranium enrichment.
President Mohammad Khatami made it clear that Iran had no intention of halting any nuclear activities.
``We will continue our cooperation with the IAEA but at the same time we will not subdue ourselves or our nuclear program because of foreign pressure,'' Khatami told reporters in Khartoum during an official visit to Sudan.
``It is our duty and right to use this nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and I'd like to assure the international community that we will not go to the extent of producing nuclear weapons.''
----
Iran Moves Toward Nuclear Production
October 6, 2004
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran has produced a few tons of the gas needed to enrich uranium, a top nuclear official indicated Wednesday, confirming the country has defied international demands and taken a necessary step toward producing nuclear fuel - or nuclear weapons.
The White House, which has been pressuring its allies to punish Iran for its nuclear ambitions, again accused Tehran of trying to build nuclear weapons and urged it Wednesday to suspend all enrichment activities.
Uranium hexafluoride gas is the material that, in the next stage, is fed into centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Uranium enriched to a low level is used to produce nuclear fuel to generate electricity; enriched further, it can be used to manufacture atomic bombs.
Iran said last month that it has started converting about 40 tons of raw uranium being mined for enrichment - plans the international community specifically said it found alarming. Iran maintains its intentions are peaceful energy purposes.
Hossein Mousavian, Iran's chief delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, would not specify how much hexafluoride gas had been produced, but said a few tons of raw uranium - also known as yellowcake - had been converted. The conversion process yields nearly the same amount of hexafluoride gas.
"We have used part of the raw uranium we had. A few tons of yellowcake has been converted," Mousavian told The Associated Press in an interview.
"We are not in a hurry to do it," Mousavian said. "The amount we've produced is (for) an experimental process, not industrial production."
Iranian and Western nuclear experts agreed that a few tons of yellowcake would produce a few tons of the gas used for enrichment. "When you convert raw uranium, you get more or less the same amount of hexafluoride gas," said Hossein Afarideh, an Iranian lawmaker who holds a doctorate in nuclear energy.
However, hexafluoride gas repeatedly spun in centrifuges yields a far smaller amount of low-grade uranium that can be used for fuel - and even less weapons-grade uranium.
Although Iran says it has no plans to produce weapons-grade uranium and the IAEA has said there is no evidence it is trying to do so, countries that do make nuclear weapons begin with about eight tons of yellowcake to make a typical bomb.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan again accused Iran of trying to build a bomb.
"Iran needs to stop its pursuit of nuclear weapons," he said aboard Air Force One. "They agreed to suspend their enrichment and reprocessing and they need to abide by that."
"The international community is speaking very clearly to Iran: If they continue in the direction they are going we will have to look at what additional action may need to be taken, including looking to the U.N. Security Council," he added.
Mousavian, who also heads the Foreign Policy Committee at Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, said the process was fully under the supervision of the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear agency.
"The agency knows of every milligram of uranium converted," he said.
In Vienna, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming agreed the process was "being done fully under IAEA's watch," but said she could not immediately confirm how far the Iranians had gotten.
"Inspectors are visiting that facility, and we have other verification tools that are providing us with constant information about the operation of that facility," Fleming said.
A diplomat close to the agency told the AP in Vienna that although the conversion does not contradict Iran's obligations, it will be viewed by some countries as a provocation.
Iran has thus far said it is honoring a pledge not to put uranium hexafluoride gas into centrifuges, spin it and make enriched uranium.
Last month, the IAEA's board of governors unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment, including conversion. It specifically expressed alarm at Iran's plans to convert the more than 40 tons of raw uranium into uranium hexafluoride.
The board suggested Iran may have to answer to the U.N. Security Council if it defied the demands. The resolution said the next board meeting, scheduled for Nov. 25, would "decide whether or not further steps are appropriate" in ensuring Iran complies.
A diplomat familiar with Iran's conversion activities told the AP in Vienna last month that Iran had stopped at a precursor of uranium hexafluoride - apparently waiting for a decision from the leadership to finish the process.
Mousavian was clear Wednesday that Iran had produced the actual gas.
He said Iran was ready to guarantee that its nuclear program will not be diverted to a military use and take specific measures to eliminate concerns about Tehran's nuclear program.
"IAEA is the responsible body for nonproliferation. Iran is prepared to consider any IAEA proposal to take specific measures that its nuclear program will not be diverted toward weapons in the future. The specific measures should be defined by IAEA," he said.
Mousavian warned that the international community, not Iran, will suffer if his country is referred to the U.N. Security Council and sanctioned. He reiterated Iranian warnings that Tehran will stop implementing what is known as the additional protocol to Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which allows unfettered IAEA inspections of Iranian facilities.
"Referring Iran to U.N. will not change the nuclear capability we already possess. The victim will be the additional protocol and NPT (nonproliferation treaty), not Iran," he said.
Mousavian noted Iran has allowed international inspections of its facilities, including military sites.
"Up to now, Iran has not rejected a single IAEA request for inspections," he said. "This is the maximum of transparency and cooperation a member state can have with IAEA."
-------- iraq / inspections
Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat
U.S. Inspector Says Hussein Lacked Means
By Mike Allen and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9790-2004Oct5?language=printer
The government's most definitive account of Iraq's arms programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The officials said that the 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speech that Iraq had posed "a gathering threat."
The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former United Nations weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein's weapons-development programs and knowledge base was less advanced in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.
"They have not found anything yet," said one U.S. official who had been briefed on the report.
A senior U.S. government official said that the report includes comments Hussein made to debriefers after his capture that bolster administration assertions, including his statement that his past possession of weapons of mass destruction "was one of the reasons he had survived so long." He also maintained such weapons saved his government by halting Iranian ground offensives during the Iran-Iraq war and deterred coalition forces from pressing on to Baghdad during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the official said.
The official also said that Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group had uncovered Iraqi plans for ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers and for a 1,000-kilometer-range cruise missile, farther than the 150-kilometer range permitted by the United Nations, the senior official said.
The official said Duelfer will tell Congress in the report and in testimony today that Hussein intended to reconstitute weapons of mass destruction programs if he were freed of the U.N. sanctions that prevented him from getting needed materials.
Duelfer's report said Hussein was pursuing an aggressive effort to subvert the international sanctions through illegal financing and procurement efforts, officials said. The official said the report states that Hussein had the intent to resume full-scale weapons of mass destruction efforts after the sanctions were eliminated, and details Hussein's efforts to hinder international inspectors and preserve his weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House intelligence committee, said she had not read Duelfer's report but has been told that it thoroughly undercuts the administration's assertions that Iraq posed a serious threat.
"Intentions do not constitute a growing danger," Harman said. "It's hardly mushroom clouds, hardly stockpiles," she added, a reference to administration rhetoric used in the run-up to the war.
The report's release comes at a point in the presidential campaign when Democratic candidate John F. Kerry is aggressively challenging the Bush administration about its prewar justifications for invading Iraq, which centered largely on the contention that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. People familiar with the report said it is being released today because Duelfer was ready and his schedule permitted him to testify to Congress.
Yesterday, administration officials discussed some of the report's findings publicly, arguing that it showed Hussein was a long-term threat even though no weapons of mass destruction were found.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan called Hussein's effort to evade the U.N. sanctions "very revealing." "We all thought that we would find stockpiles, and that was not the case," McClellan said.
"The fact that he had the intent and capability, and that he was trying to undermine the sanctions that were in place is very disturbing. And I think the report will continue to show that he was a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction."
The report includes page after page of names of individuals and companies -- many from China, Russia and France -- that had traded illegally with Iraq, the senior government official said. The State Department began briefing the named governments on the report yesterday, the official said.
Duelfer's findings follow reports by the Senate intelligence committee and his predecessor, David A. Kay, that criticized the prewar assessment that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Bush has pointed to the Duelfer report as the last word on the state of Iraq's weapons programs. Asked in June if he thought such weapons had existed in Iraq, Bush said he would "wait until Charlie gets back with the final report."
Another government official who was briefed on the report said that many U.S. officials had thought Hussein would "get down to business" in developing weapons when the U.N. inspectors left. "There's no evidence of that," the official said.
The official said that Iraq's nuclear-related activity in particular had been dormant for years before the invasion. "They probably didn't have a program for some period of time, well before we went in there," he said.
The Bush administration has held out the possibility that illicit weapons and their components were secreted by Hussein across the border into Syria. This may still be true, but Duelfer's team did not find any proof to support this notion, the official said. "They have no evidence of this," the official said. "It's an unresolved issue." Syria denies it aided the hiding of illicit materials.
Duelfer replaced Kay in January as the chief U.S. weapons hunter after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In title, he was the CIA's special adviser for strategy regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As head of the Iraq Survey Group, he worked independent of the CIA and his report was not vetted or changed by the agency, said one U.S. government official familiar with Duelfer's work.
The president met with Duelfer at the White House on Feb. 6. Bush said during a prime-time news conference in April that during Duelfer's return to Iraq, he had been "amazed at how deceptive the Iraqis had been" toward U.N. inspectors, as well as "deceptive in hiding things."
The report also includes an investigation of a broad range of subjects that are either loosely or not at all connected to weapons of mass destruction, a foreign intelligence official said. These include Iraq's conventional weapons programs, evidence of corruption and abuse in the U.N.-monitored oil-for-food program, and dual-use equipment -- which could be used for either peaceful or military programs -- that U.N. inspectors may not have been aware of.
Staff writer Dafna Linzer contributed to this report.
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U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03
October 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/middleeast/06CND-INTE.html?hp=&oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - Iraq had essentially destroyed its illicit weapons capability within months after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991, and its capacity to produce such weapons had eroded even further by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector in Iraq said in a report made public today.
The report, by Charles A. Duelfer, said the last Iraqi factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of unconventional weapons was destroyed in 1996. The findings amounted to the starkest portrayal yet of a vast gap between the Bush administration's prewar assertions about Iraqi weapons and what a 15-month postinvasion inquiry by American investigators concluded were the facts on the ground.
At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer concluded, Iraq had not possessed military-scale stockpiles of illicit weapons for a dozen years and was not actively seeking to produce them.
The White House portrayed the war as a bid to disarm Iraq of unconventional weapons, and had invoked images of mushroom clouds, deadly gases and fearsome poisons. But Mr. Duelfer concluded that even if Iraq had sought to restart its weapons programs in 2003, it could not have produced militarily significant quantities of chemical weapons for at least a year, and would have required years to produce a nuclear weapon.
"Saddam Hussein ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the gulf war," Mr. Duelfer said in his report, which added that American inspectors in Iraq had "found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."
Hours before Mr. Duelfer's report was made public, President Bush appeared to try to deflate some the political impact of its core findings.
"After Sept. 11, America had to assess every potential threat in a new light," Mr. Bush said while campaigning in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. "Our nation awakened to an even greater danger: the prospect that terrorists who killed thousands with hijacked airplanes would kill many more with weapons of mass murder."
"We had to take a hard look at every place where terrorists might get those weapons, and one regime stood out," Mr. Bush said. "The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein."
Mr. Duelfer presented his conclusions to Congress beginning with testimony at a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But his findings were described to reporters in advance of the testimony, although only on condition that they not be published until his afternoon appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, when the report was made public.
The three-volume report, totaling more than 900 pages, is viewed as the first authoritative attempt to unravel the mystery posed by Iraq during the crucial years between the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and the American-led war that began in 2003. It adds new weight to what is already a widely accepted view that the most fundamental prewar assertions made by American intelligence agencies about Iraq - that it possessed chemical and biological weapons, and was reconstituting its nuclear program - bore no resemblance to the truth.
Mr. Duelfer concluded that Mr. Hussein had made fundamental decisions, beginning in 1991, to get rid of Iraq's illicit weapons and accept the destruction of its weapons-producing facilities as part of an effort to end United Nations sanctions. But Mr. Duelfer argued that Mr. Hussein was also exploiting avenues opened by the sanctions, including the oil-for-food program, to lay the groundwork for a long-term plan to resume weapons production if sanctions were lifted.
Mr. Hussein "wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted," the report said. But the conclusion that Mr. Hussein had intended to restart his programs, the report acknowledged, was based more on inference than solid evidence. "The regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of W.M.D. after sanctions," it said, using the common abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.
The report was based in part on the interrogation of Mr. Hussein in his prison cell outside of Baghdad. Mr. Duelfer said he had concluded that Mr. Hussein deliberately sought to maintain an ambiguity about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons in a strategy aimed as much at Iran, with whom Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1980's, as at the United States.
Mr. Duelfer's report said that American investigators had found clandestine laboratories in the Baghdad area used by the Iraqi Intelligence Service to conduct research and to test various chemicals and poisons, primarily for secret assassinations rather than to inflict mass casualties. It said those laboratories were active from 1991 to 2003.
Mr. Duelfer said in his report that Mr. Hussein never disclosed in the course of the interrogations what had become of Iraq's illicit weapons. He said that American investigators had appealed to the former Iraqi leader to be candid in order to shape his legacy, but that Mr. Hussein had not been forthcoming.
The report said that interviews with other former top Iraqi leaders had made clear that Mr. Hussein had left many of his top deputies uncertain until the eve of war about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. It said that Mr. Hussein had seemed to be most concerned about a possible new attack by Iran, whose incursions into Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 were fended off by Baghdad only with the use of chemical munitions fired on ballistic missiles.
Mr. Duelfer said in the report that Iraq had made a conscious effort to maintain the knowledge base necessary to restart an illicit weapons program. He said that Iraq had essentially put its biological program "on the shelf" after its last production facility, Al Hakam, was destroyed by United Nations inspectors in 1996, and could have begun to produce biological questions in as little as a month if it had restarted its weapons program in 2003.
But the report said there were "no indications" that Iraq had been pursuing such a course, and it reported "a complete absence of discussion or even interest in biological weapons" at the level of Mr. Hussein and his aides after the mid-1990's.
The report will almost certainly be the last complete assessment by the team led by Mr. Duelfer, which is known as the Iraq Survey Group. But Mr. Duelfer said that he and the 1,200-member team would continue their work in Iraq for the time being. He said the team had not completely ruled out the possibility that some Iraqi weapons might have been smuggled out to a neighboring country, such as Syria.
The report did reverse an earlier judgment by the Central Intelligence Agency, saying the Mr. Duelfer's team had concluded that mysterious trailers found in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003 could not have been used as part of any biological warfare program. The trailers' manufacturers "almost certainly designed and built the equipment exclusively for the generation of hydrogen," upholding claims by Iraqi officials that linked the trailers to weather balloons used for artillery practice.
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Inspector: Iraq had no WMD before invasion
Final report says Saddam had ambitions but no chem or bio arms
Oct. 6, 2004
Associated Press and Reuters
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6190720/
WASHINGTON - Contradicting the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000 U.S. lives, the top U.S. arms inspector reported Wednesday that he had found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991. He also concluded that Saddam Hussein's weapons capability weakened, not grew, during a dozen years of U.N. sanctions before the U.S. invasion last year.
Contrary to prewar statements by President Bush and top administration officials, Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war began and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, said Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.
But Duelfer supported Bush's argument that Saddam remained a threat. Interviews with the toppled leader and other former Iraqi officials made it clear that Saddam had not lost his ambition to pursue weapons of mass destruction and hoped to revive his weapons program if U.N. sanctions were lifted, his report said.
"What is clear is that Saddam retained his notions of use of force and had experiences that demonstrated the utility of WMD," Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Duelfer's findings, included in a report that runs more than 1,000 pages, come less than four weeks before an election in which Bush's handling of Iraq has become the central issue.
The Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, has seized on comments this week by the former U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, that the United States did not have enough troops in Iraq to prevent a breakdown in security after Saddam was toppled.
Report could boost Kerry The report could boost Kerry's contentions that Bush rushed to war based on faulty intelligence and that sanctions and U.N. weapons inspectors should have been given more time.
"It is a very significant commentary on the mistaken case for war presented by this administration," Mike McCurry, a senior adviser to Kerry, told reporters in Colorado. "It is very troubling that they could have been so wrong on something as fundamental as taking America to war."
Duelfer said his report found that aluminum tubes suspected of being used for enriching uranium for use in a nuclear bomb were likely destined for conventional rockets and that there was no evidence that Iraq sought uranium abroad after 1991. Both findings contradict claims made by Bush and other top administration officials before the war.
Duelfer said he also found no evidence of trailers' being used to develop biological weapons, although he said he could not flatly declare that none existed.
Bush: Too big a risk But Bush cited Saddam's "history of using weapons of mass destruction, a long record of aggression and hatred for America" in calling the invasion the right thing to do.
"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said Wednesday in a campaign speech in Wilkes Barre, Pa. "In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, traveling in Africa, said the report showed that U.N. sanctions were "not working," insisting that it backed the U.S.-British decision to go to war. Blair has been trying to defend his justification for joining the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in the face of heavy criticism from some in his own party.
Duelfer found that Saddam, hoping to end U.N. sanctions, gradually began ending prohibited weapons programs starting in 1991. But as Iraq started receiving money through the U.N. oil-for-food program in the late 1990s, and as enforcement of the sanctions weakened, Saddam was able to take steps to rebuild his military, such as acquiring parts for missile systems and restoring domestic chemical production.
However, the erosion of sanctions stopped after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Duelfer found, preventing Saddam from pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
"He was making progress in eroding sanctions - a lot of sanctions," Duelfer told Congress. "And had it not been for the events of 9-11-2001, things would have taken a very different course for the regime."
Fear of Iran Duelfer's team found no written plans by Saddam's regime to pursue banned weapons if U.N. sanctions were lifted. Instead, the inspectors based their findings that Saddam hoped to reconstitute his programs on interviews with Saddam after his capture, as well as talks with other top Iraqi officials.
The inspectors found that Saddam was particularly concerned about the threat posed by Iran, the country's enemy in a 1980-88 war. Saddam said he would meet Iran's threat by any means necessary, which Duelfer understood to mean weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam believed his use of chemical weapons against Iran prevented Iraq's defeat in that war. He also was prepared to use such weapons in 1991 if the U.S.-led coalition had tried to topple him in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The report avoids direct comparisons with prewar claims by the Bush administration on Iraq's weapons systems. But Duelfer largely reinforced the conclusions of his predecessor, David Kay, who said in January that "we were almost all wrong" on Saddam's weapons programs. The White House did not endorse Kay's findings then, noting that Duelfer's team was continuing to search for weapons.
Bush made the case Saddam's government fell in early April 2003 after a lightning U.S.-led invasion in mid-March. He was captured in December. Bush administration officials asserted that Iraq had obtained weapons of mass destruction in the months before ordering the invasion.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech Aug. 26, 2002, 61/2 months before the invasion. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."
The president made similar charges, laying out what he described as Iraq's threat in a speech on Oct. 7, 2002:
- "It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
- "We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas."
- "Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles - far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations - in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. "
Instead, U.S. inspectors found only limited signs of the banned weapons after the active fighting ended. Among the findings:
- A single artillery shell from Saddam's pre-1991 stockpile was filled with two chemicals that, when mixed while the shell was in flight, would have created sarin. U.S. forces learned of it only when insurgents, apparently believing it was filled with conventional explosives, tried to detonate it as a roadside bomb in May in Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers suffered from symptoms of low-level exposure to the nerve agent.
- Another old artillery shell, also rigged as a bomb and found in May, showed signs that it once contained mustard agent.
- Two small rocket warheads, turned over to Polish troops by an informer, showed signs that they once were filled with sarin.
- Centrifuge parts were found buried in a former nuclear scientist's garden in Baghdad. These were part of Saddam's pre-1991 nuclear program, which was dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The scientist also had centrifuge design documents.
- A vial of live botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, was found in another scientist's refrigerator. The scientist said it had been there since 1993.
- Evidence emerged of advanced design work on a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 620 miles. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had been prohibited from having missiles with ranges longer than 93 miles.
The Iraq Survey Group did not deal with whether Saddam's government had contacts with members of al-Qaida, a matter that remains subject to wide debate.
-----
Iraq testimony seen confirming lack of WMDs
October 06, 2004
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041006-125549-3155r.htm
The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to hear testimony today on another round of Iraq Survey Group findings, bolstering earlier reports that no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, a Bush administration official said.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to The Washington Times yesterday, said the findings "certainly will say they found no stockpiles" and will not clear up the mystery of what happened to the weapons touted by the Bush administration as a key reason for toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
However, the official said the report will make clear that Saddam had "every intention" of restarting WMD programs in the event sanctions against Iraq were lifted.
The report was compiled by Charles A. Duelfer, special adviser to the director of central intelligence regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He is expected to testify before the committee with U.S. Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Joseph J. McMenamin, who serves as commander to the Iraq Survey Group.
A spokesman for committee chairman Sen. John W. Warner said members were receiving the report late yesterday, but declined to comment on its contents.
Mr. Warner, Virginia Republican, is "looking forward" to receiving the testimony of Mr. Duelfer, who was named in January by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet to succeed David Kay as the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Warner spokesman John Ullyot said.
"This was the work of the Iraq Survey Group continued under Duelfer as the successor to Kay, and he has had additional time to reach conclusions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs," Mr. Ullyot said.
Mr. Kay made headlines upon the completion of an earlier interim report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction last year, when he said prewar assessments of Iraq having stockpiles of WMDs had been wrong.
The politically charged issue then became the center of a Bush administration decision to create a separate, bipartisan and independent commission to examine U.S. intelligence capabilities regarding weapons of mass destruction.
Headed by former Sen. Charles S. Robb, Virginia Democrat, and appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, the commission has been holding regular meetings since its February inception.
Mr. Bush gave the group until March 2005 to report its findings, and a spokesman has said early meetings included testimony from Mr. Kay and others with the Iraq Survey Group.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, addressed the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or lack of them, during a question-and-answer session Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
"Why the intelligence proved wrong, I'm not in a position to say," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "I simply don't know. But the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail than they were with him in power."
Rowan Scarborough contributed to this report.
-------- japan
Nuclear fuel reprocessing too costly
October 06, 2004
(UPI)
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041006-041809-9259r.htm
Tokyo, Japan, Oct. 6 -- The cost of reprocessing used nuclear fuel from power plants is up to 1.8 times higher than burying it, Japan's Atomic Energy Commission estimates.
According to the estimate, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would cost 1.6 yen (1.4 cents) per kilowatt-hour of output, whereas it costs 0.9 yen (0.8 cents) per kilowatt-hour to dispose of the fuel without reprocessing, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Wednesday.
But the commission observed that if the government did not reprocess the fuel, it would still incur costs from dismantling a reprocessing plant in Rokkashomura, Aomori prefecture, which is scheduled to start operations soon.
The commission will submit its report Thursday to a panel, which will discuss the future direction of the government's nuclear energy policy.
-------- korea
IAEA Chief Says World Getting Impatient with N. Korea
Reuters
Oct 6, 2004
By Paul Eckert
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6428524
SEOUL - North Korea's two-year-old nuclear crisis has taxed the world's patience, the chief United Nations nuclear regulator said on Wednesday, urging communist Pyongyang to return to its disarmament treaty obligations.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), also said there was no comparison between South Korea's recently reported atomic experiments and North Korea's full-fledged reprocessing program and weapons assertions.
"The six-party talks have been going on for quite awhile and the international community is getting impatient to see quick results and to see North Korea turning back to the non-proliferation regime," ElBaradei told reporters.
North Korea has said it would not rejoin six-party nuclear disarmament talks with South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia until the South's recently disclosed atomic experiments were fully dealt with.
South Korea revealed last month that its scientists conducted without government approval or knowledge tests to enrich uranium four years ago and to separate plutonium in 1982.
ElBaradei said South Korean "experiments at laboratory-level" were very different from North Korea's "fully operating reprocessing plant" and Pyongyang's repeated claims to have turned some plutonium into a nuclear deterrent force.
"These are not two situations to be compared," ElBaradei told a news conference on the sidelines of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, a private group of experts and officials discussing disarmament.
"The Republic of Korea has been continuously under verification, under safeguards, while North Korea has moved out of the non-proliferation regime for over two years now," he said.
But Pyongyang's foreign ministry spokesman said on Wednesday that IAEA officials were "downplaying the gravity of the (South Korea's) case," suspecting U.S. influences behind its stance.
"The DPRK cannot but remain vigilant against this, given the precedent in which IAEA had applied double-dealing standards when dealing with the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula in the past, away from the principle of impartiality," the spokesman told the North's official KCNA agency.
It said Seoul now has full access to the nuclear weapons development technology. DPRK is the official name of North Korea.
North Korea expelled IAEA monitors in late 2002 and quit the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in early 2003. The moves followed U.S. statements that North Korean officials had admitted to pursuing a secret uranium enrichment program.
North Korea denies having a uranium-based nuclear program, but has repeated its assertion that it has made weapons-grade plutonium reprocessed from spent fuel rods to deter a U.S. attack.
ElBaradei said the IAEA supported the six-party process and was keen to see diplomacy succeed to enable the U.N. nuclear watchdog to resume work in secretive North Korea.
"If and when we go back to North Korea, we would like to have full-fledged verification to ensure that we are able to see all nuclear and nuclear-relevant activities to assure ourselves that North Korea's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes," he said.
The North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said any discussion on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula must cover the South's nuclear issue.
"It would not be possible for (North Korea) to take part in any effort for a solution to the nuclear issue with confidence unless the nuclear issue of South Korea is settled understandably," the spokesman said.
IAEA inspectors would conduct more tours of South Korean nuclear facilities this month for additional work before the agency reports to its board of governors in November, he said. (Additional reporting by Rhee So-eui)
-------- latinamerica
Powell: Brazil Has No Nuclear Aspirations
By Stan Lehman
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9632-2004Oct5.html
SAO PAULO, Brazil, Oct. 5 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Tuesday he was confident Brazil had no intention of becoming a nuclear power, but he called on the country to work out differences with the U.N. atomic agency over inspections.
"We know for sure that Brazil is not thinking about nuclear weapons in any sense," Powell told a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce at the start of a two-day visit, his first to the country as secretary of state.
Powell arrived less than two weeks before a team of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors is scheduled to visit Brazil. The IAEA wants unimpeded access to a factory that produces nuclear fuel. Brazil has indicated that it wants less-stringent standards of inspection than the IAEA is seeking.
Brazil claims that centrifuges at its plant in Resende, about 80 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, use advanced technology that could be pirated by other countries if the inspectors are allowed to view it.
But analysts say Brazil has probably not developed technology that is radically different from what is used at uranium enrichment plants in other countries and point out that technological advances are traditionally protected with patents.
"The IAEA has worked out these kinds of differences in the past; I expect they will work it out this time with Brazil," Powell told reporters while en route Monday night.
Powell earlier praised the cooperative efforts Brazil is making internationally in a number of areas. He offered no hint of concern about policies under President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula has been seeking greater power and influence for Brazil on the world stage but he is no longer using the harsh rhetoric of two years ago when he was running for office.
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Warming to Brazil, Powell Says Its Nuclear Program Isn't a Concern
October 6, 2004
New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/americas/06diplo.html?pagewanted=all
BRASÍLIA, Oct. 5 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, stepping up the American courtship of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Tuesday that the United States had no concerns that Brazil was planning to develop nuclear weapons despite the country's resistance to allowing international inspectors greater access to one of its nuclear reactors.
After meeting with President da Silva and other Brazilian leaders, Mr. Powell also offered another gesture to Brazilian aspirations, saying that Brazil's contributions to peacekeeping in Haiti and other actions made it was worthy of consideration for permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council.
The United Nations is studying the possibility of increasing the number of permanent seats in response to demands for membership from several countries, including India, Brazil, Germany and Japan. At present, only the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia are permanent members, which carries the right to veto any resolution.
Mr. Powell was noncommittal as to whether the United States would endorse Brazil's addition, saying that Washington was awaiting results of a study by a panel appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan. But he did say that Brazil would be a strong candidate.
On the nuclear issue, Mr. Powell addressed a question about concerns in many countries that Brazil's opposition to unlimited inspections, as sought by the International Atomic Energy Agency, might embolden other nations like Iran and North Korea to reject inspections of their suspected nuclear arms programs.
"I don't have those concerns," Mr. Powell said at a news conference after meeting with Foreign Minister Celso Amorim. "I don't think Brazil can be talked about in the same vein or put in the same category as Iran or North Korea."
He said that Iran and North Korea, for example, had either expelled international inspectors or refused to cooperate with them in disclosing nuclear facilities, and that many experts agreed that those countries were making nuclear weapons. North Korea, he noted, has announced its nuclear arms program as a matter of policy.
"The United States understands that Brazil has no interest in a nuclear weapon, no desire and no plans, no programs, no intention of moving toward a nuclear weapon," Mr. Powell said in an interview on TV Globo. "They have a nuclear power program. We understand that."
In a speech to business leaders, talks with President da Silva and in interviews with local news media, Mr. Powell used his day-and-a-half visit to push the idea that Brazil was emerging as a dominant power in the region and one that the United States - perhaps to its surprise - could do business with on a number of fronts.
Since his election in 2002 as the first president from the leftist Workers Party, Mr. da Silva has been cultivated by the Bush administration in the hope that he would soften his economic policies and serve as a moderating influence in Latin America, despite his alliance with such leftist leaders as Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
American officials say that strategy has worked, and that under Mr. da Silva Brazil has hewed to a pro-capitalist, pro-investment and fiscally conservative line. This year, Mr. da Silva sent Brazilian forces as peacekeepers to Haiti under the aegis of the United Nations to keep order after the forced resignation of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Foreign Minister Amorim said that he expected the dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency over inspectors' access to Brazil's enriched-uranium facilities would be resolved soon by technical experts.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Going Nuclear The Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Counterpunch
By RON JACOBS,
October 6, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs10062004.html
According to John Kerry, the biggest danger that the US faces is nuclear proliferation. His fellow Democrat and media star, Barack Obama, agrees. In fact, Mr. Obama went on record saying he would support surgical missile strikes on Iran if it refused to concede to Washington's demands that it end its nuclear project. As has been made plain in newspaper pages around the world (except for here in the United States), Iran has been cleared time and time again by the IAEA of any plans to use that program to build nuclear weapons. Obama went even further in his interview with the Chicago Tribune, stating that the US should take out Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if and when the current president was removed.
Now, I am near the front of the line when it comes to opposing the proliferation of weapons, nuclear and otherwise, but there's some pretty obvious hypocrisy going on here. The US government is not opposed to nuclear weapons. It is opposed to regimes other than its friends having nuclear weapons. Indeed, Congress recently approved a program that would develop new nuclear weapons for use by the US military. These weapons are known as tactical nuclear weapons, although they have been given new, cuter names today-mini-nukes being the most popular. Fitting these weapons into the US arsenal and, more importantly, making their use acceptable to the US public, has been part of the Pentagon's agenda since the 1950s.
Thanks to widespread opposition, however, they have never been built, except perhaps in the prototype phase. George Bush and company hope to change that. Although research has been ongoing for a few decades on this weaponry, it wasn't until the summer of 2003 that serious discussions at a policymaking level began taking place. According to the BBC and other news sources, these mini-nukes (or "small build" weapons) were a primary topic of discussion at the so-called Stockpile Stewardship Conference that took place in mid-August of 2003. The conference, which took place at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska, featured more than 100 scientists along with top military and other government officials. The intention of the meeting was how to upgrade the already deadly nuclear arsenal of the United States. Primary among the topics discussed were the Star Wars missile shield and these mini-nukes.
Don't let the names fool you. Both of these weapons systems are not only deadly and, to most humans, immoral; they are also ridiculously expensive and unnecessary. The missile-defense shield's fallibilities have been proven again and again. Indeed, various scientists testified to its uselessness and pointlessness this past weekend (October 2-3, 2004) at various conferences across Canada that coincided with nationwide protests against the system and Canada's potential cooperation with its construction. Protestors and scientists alike pointed out the consistent test failures of the missile-defense shield and the fact that this system would, at best, provide minimal security. Most opponents also point to the high cost of the project and to the corporations who stand to profit from it. Of course, it is these same corporations who are taking advantage of US citizens' fears to push this boondoggle through.
What about the mini-nukes? Also known as low-yield weapons, EPW's, enhanced radiation weapons, and agent defeat weapons, their primary use would be on the battlefield and, even more ominously, in fortified areas of cities where military bunkers and other high-profile targets might be. Despite their name of "mini-nukes," these weapons would not be mini by any stretch cc52ee.jpgof the word. They would pack five kilotons of power. According to the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and many other anti-nuclear groups, the blast created by the largest of these weapons would be equivalent to the 15 kiloton bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Because the earth-penetrating version of the mini-nuke would not explode until it was underground, its blast radius would be 1-2 miles wide. Other weapons, depending on their construction, would be even more destructive.
Both Kerry and Bush spoke about preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons during their debate on September 30, 2004. John Kerry even called it the most serious threat facing the United States. Imagine what the rest of the world thinks when it hears that the United States is seriously considering the manufacture of a new generation of nuclear weapons. After all, not only does the US have the world's largest existing nuclear arsenal, it has never stopped building them since it began this deadly dance with the atom. Furthermore, if one looks at the current Department of Energy budget, they will see that the dance is better funded than it has been in years. One item alone-the uranium enrichment fund-has increased from around $320,000,000 to over $500,000,000 just since 2003. Now, if one recalls Washington's objections to Iran's nuclear program, it centers on their uranium enrichment process, since it is this process that is required for nuclear weapons development.
So, why should Washington's current enemies (and possible future enemies) stop their pursuit of nuclear weapons (if, indeed, they have such programs)? After all, if those US policymakers involved in this area are expanding their enrichment program and making statements like the following (found in the foreword to a policy statement entitled "Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century" that is authored by the Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear Weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stephen M. Younger), doesn't it make sense for them to develop their defenses as well?
The time is right for a fundamental rethinking of the role of nuclear weapons in national defense and of the composition of our nuclear forces. The Cold War is over, but it has been replaced by new threats to our national security. The nuclear age is far from over.
Like most documents of this type, the paper goes on to list potential threats to the US, Russia and China being foremost among them, and then attempts to explain how new nuclear technology could be used to thwart those threats. Deterrence is the primary strategy, with actual deployment of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction explained as a secondary potential. Of course, with or without their actual use, this type of thinking demands that the weapons be built, since their mere existence can be used as a deterrent to attack. So, either way, Lockheed Martin, General Electric and the rest of the merchants of death make their obscene profits from taxpayers' money.
In one of his all-too-few moments of clear thought, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware made the following statement opposing the passage of a bill that allotted $9 billion for developing mini-nuke "bunker busters," or Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator as the spiritual progeny of H-Bomb creator Edward Teller like to call these bombs.
These nuclear weapons blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. They begin to make nuclear war more "thinkable" as Herman Kahn might have said. But Herman Kahn's book was "Thinking About the Unthinkable." He understood that nuclear war was unthinkable, even as he demanded that we think about how to fight one if we had to. Looking at the foreign and defense policies of the current administration, I fear that they have failed to understand that vital point. They want to make nuclear war "thinkable."
Building bunker busters and low-yield nuclear weapons is not a path to non-proliferation. Neither is a program to do R&D on such weapons, while Defense Department officials press our scientists to come up with reasons to build them.
Unfortunately, Mr. Biden's sentiments seem to be in short supply in Washington, DC. The men and women running the country speak of collateral damage and war as casually as the Third Reich's inner circle; nuclear weapons development has cost the nation's people more than $6 trillion since 1946 (and that doesn't include the cost to our health and other intangibles); and the current leadership on both sides of the aisle pursue a course of confrontation and conflict as if that will prevent nations that it opposes to give up their nuclear plans when virtually everyone in the world (who isn't a US resident) understands that it is the possibility that those nations have nuclear capability that prevents the US from attacking them now.
In the early 1980s there was a worldwide movement opposed to nuclear proliferation, specifically, the deployment of US nuclear-equipped cruise missiles in Europe. This movement mobilized millions of people around the planet in opposition to nuclear weapons development and the cruise missile deployment. Unfortunately, the movement did not achieve all of its goals and we find ourselves once again at a crossroads. There is an incredibly hawkish mentality in DC now as there was then, and the government is controlled by men and women who profit from war and its tools, yet there is a movement opposed to these designs, too. The antinuclear movement in the 1980s was diverted by well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) activists connected to the Democratic Party-a turn of events that limited its success. The current movement against war and militarism faces a similar fate, as evidenced by the Anybody But Bush phenomenon that personalizes a policy of war and empire that has little to do with personalities and much to do with the needs and desires of the US economic and political system. It is up to that element of the current movement who understands this to get its message out there. The future turns on that ability.
(Thanks to the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) website for links to documents and info. http://www.stopthebombs.org/)
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859841678/counterpunchmaga , which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html . He can be reached at: rjacobs@z... http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs10062004.html
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Top Nuclear Regulator Says Power Plants Better Guarded
October 6, 2004
MIAMI, Florida, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-06-09.asp#anchor5
Security at the 103 nuclear power plants operating in the United States today is better than it was before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Nils Diaz said Tuesday.
Diaz addressed his remarks to industry and government delegates at the Americas Nuclear Energy Symposium, jointly sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the American Nuclear Society.
The chairman of the nation's top nuclear regulatory body said higher federal requirements have been placed on utilities that operate nuclear facilities.
"The NRC has further strengthened security requirements at nuclear power plants and enhanced our coordination with federal, state and local organizations since Sept. 11," Diaz said.
A significant radiological release affecting public health and safety is "unlikely from a terrorist attack, including a large commercial aircraft," he said. "And time is available to protect the public in the unlikely event of a radiation release."
Diaz also said the NRC has a new reactor oversight program that provides a better inspection regime for plants.
He said the NRC objective is to "provide the tools for inspecting and assessing licensee performance in a manner that was more risk-informed, objective, predictable and understandable than the previous oversight processes, and that ensures the agency's performance goals are being met."
The NRC is now providing oversight "in a way that corresponds to the actual, real world risk presented, rather than a theoretical worst case scenario," he said.
Diaz said the NRC has ordered nuclear plant operators to take into account "a more challenging adversarial threat."
There are "tighter access controls and vehicle checks at greater stand-off distances; significantly improved force-on-force exercises to test the capabilities of plant defenders; better readiness by plant security forces; and enhanced liaison with the intelligence community, and federal, state and local authorities responsible for protecting the national critical infrastructure through integrated response training," Diaz claimed.
-------- nevada
NUCLEAR REPOSITORY: Yucca court challenge alive
Justice Department still may ask court to keep disputed radiation rules intact
October 06, 2004
By STEVE TETREAULT
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Oct-06-Wed-2004/news/24927454.html
WASHINGTON -- The White House on Tuesday distanced itself from a Justice Department document suggesting the Bush administration might ask the Supreme Court to keep intact disputed radiation rules for the Yucca Mountain Project.
Despite previous statements from Bush administration officials that there would be no appeal of a July court ruling that set back the nuclear waste project, Justice Department attorneys on Sept. 23 filed a document in federal court stating the U.S. solicitor general has final say over Supreme Court actions.
"At this writing, the solicitor general has not yet made any decision regarding Supreme Court review in this case," the department said.
The document's disclosure aroused Democrats and critics of the Yucca project. They charged President Bush, who appoints the solicitor general, may be angling to prolong legal fights over Yucca Mountain if he is re-elected.
The deadline for filing a Supreme Court appeal in the matter is Nov. 30, according to attorneys for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which already has indicated it will seek court review.
A Justice Department source said it is unlikely that acting solicitor general Paul D. Clement will take Yucca Mountain to the Supreme Court, consistent with the views expressed by the Bush administration.
But with Justice Department officials claiming they have an option, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., charged Bush was violating a statement he made in Nevada on Aug. 12 that he would let the courts rule on the nuclear waste repository.
"My concern once again is that the president on Yucca Mountain is talking out of both sides of his mouth," Reid said.
"This sounds like George Bush wasn't exactly honest when he was out here last time," said Sean Smith, Nevada spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. "He's giving himself the option to push forward. It fits the pattern of him not leveling with the people of Nevada on this issue and other issues."
Attorney General Brian Sandoval, who also is co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Nevada, disagreed. He said federal agencies appear to be in a turf battle over who calls the shots on Supreme Court appeals, and Justice Department officials were claiming their turf.
"I don't think politics has anything to do with this," Sandoval said. "The solicitor is viewing this purely from a legal perspective."
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said Democrats "are trying to take a cheap shot here." He said the Justice Department document was not inconsistent with what Bush told Nevadans in August.
But, Ensign said, "I would love to drive a stake through Yucca Mountain and be done with it."
Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Bush campaign in Nevada, said the criticism of Bush is "disingenuous when Kerry misled the state on his record for months."
Republicans have criticized Kerry on seven specific votes he cast on the project over the course of two decades, including his vote for the "Screw Nevada" bill that singled out Yucca Mountain for study in 1987. Democrats note Kerry opposed the project in key votes in recent years and has promised to kill the program if elected.
The exchange marked a new skirmish over the Yucca Mountain Project, seen as a key wedge issue for the presidential campaigns in Nevada, a battleground state.
It stems from a July 9 ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that ruled in favor of the government on a number of issues but threw the proposed nuclear waste repository into uncertainty by voiding a 10,000 year radiation standard written by the Environmental Protection Agency.
White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said the president's position has been expressed by Energy Department and EPA officials who have said they see little value in prolonging a court case in which the government won most of the arguments.
"My understanding is that the circumstances have not changed," Lisaius said, adding he could not explain the Justice Department court filing.
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said: "We believe that the framework the Court decision requires is workable and that therefore the best way to proceed is not to engage in further litigation but to allow EPA to work to develop an appropriate regulatory response to address the issued raised by the Court."
Justice Department spokesman Blain Rethmeier would not comment on the court filing. He said the department's stance "is in line with the White House."
A Justice Department source indicated that Sandoval's reading of the matter may be closest to correct.
-------- washington
Hanford: Transition of FFTF work halted
Tri-cityherald.com
By Annette Cary
October 6th, 2004
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5638432p-5569566c.html
A protest of the contract award for permanently shutting down Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility has stopped the transition of work from current contractor Fluor Hanford to winning bidder SEC Closure Alliance.
Protests have been filed with the Government Accountability Office, which led to a halt to the transition, and the Small Business Administration.
The two teams of small businesses that were finalists for the contract with winner SEC Closure Alliance are accusing Safety and Ecology Corp. of Knoxville, Tenn., of not qualifying as a small business.
The $235 million contract to shut down, then dismantle, Hanford's research reactor was set aside by DOE as an award to a small business. To qualify, the contract must have at least 51 percent of the work done by companies with no more than 500 employees.
Neither of the contracting teams filing a protest based on small-business qualifications would discuss details of why they believed SEC did not qualify as a small business Tuesday. The FFTF Restoration Co. is headed by Federal Engineers and Constructors and Nuvotec, both of Richland, and the other team is led by Environmental Chemical Corp. of Burlingame, Calif.
The FFTF Restoration Co. also filed a GAO protest related to procedural issues, said Lori Ramonas, vice president of strategic communication for Nuvotec. The protest is related to cost and to environmental safety and health, she said.
DOE announced Sept. 24 that SEC Closure Alliance had won the contract to shut down and dismantle FFTF because its proposal provided the best value to the taxpayer. It was to begin work at Hanford in early January.
The contract awarded was for less than half the amount DOE listed as the upper limit for the contract, $500 million. It also had projected at one time that the work would take until 2018 and cost $600 million. SEC Closure Alliance would complete the work by 2011 under the terms of the contract.
However, the scope of the contract is uncertain because DOE has yet to do an environmental study on the extent of work to dismantle FFTF. It could be entombed or the underground components could be removed to leave a cleaner site.
SEC has been barred from bidding on environmental cleanup work at DOE's Oak Ridge, Tenn., nuclear reservation after it dripped radioactive waste along a state highway in May. SEC expects soon to have issues resolved so it can again bid on work subcontracted by Bechtel Jacobs, which holds the environmental remediation contract at Oak Ridge, SEC said last week.
SEC well understands the requirements for qualifying as a small business and meets those requirements, said Anne Smith, spokeswoman for SEC.
"Because this is the largest of the small-business set-asides, we made sure all were aware of the rules," said Colleen French, spokeswoman for the Richland DOE office. Representatives of the Small Business Administration were available to discuss requirements with bidders, she said.
SEC Closure Alliance is headed by SEC and also includes Los Alamos Technical Associates, Hart Crowser, Parallax, Areva and Resource Consultants.
"We hope the protest does not jeopardize the future of small business procurements," Smith said, quoting Chris Leichtweis, SEC chief executive.
The protests add more cost to the taxpayers for what Leichtweis believes was "a very comprehensive and fair process," she said.
-------- us nuc waste
US nuclear shipment arrives in France
(AFP)
Oct 6, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041006/sc_afp/france_us_nuclear_041006170800
CHERBOURG, France - Police threw a heavy escort around a shipment of plutonium from US weapons arsenals as it was offloaded from a ship and taken by military convoy to a nuclear recycling plant in western France despite protests from environmental activists.
The procession of trucks, accompanied by police vans and motorbike outriders, took the 140 kilogrammes (300 pounds) of radioactive material to the plant in La Hague run by the French state company Areva.
The plutonium was taken off a British vessel docked in the nearby port of Cherbourg earlier in the day without incident, Areva said.
Police said activists from the anti-nuclear group Greenpeace, who have been protesting the operation for days, did not make any effort to stop the offloading, which was carried out while military helicopters flew overhead.
A French court on Tuesday issued an injunction banning the activists from approaching to within less than 100 metres (yards) from the cargo on land, and 300 metres at sea.
The transport vessel left North Carolina, on the eastern seaboard of the United States, on September 20, with another British vessel as escort.
After initial treatment at the plant in La Hague, the plutonium is to be taken by road 1,200 kilometres (720 miles) across France to a reprocessing factory in the southeastern town of Cadarache.
There, it will be transformed into two tonnes of fuel used in civilian power plants known as mixed oxide, or Mox, and returned to the United States.
Authorities had kept the docking date and hour a strict secret, citing security reasons, and forcing protesters to hold all-night vigils at the port.
Greenpeace activists, who have denounced the long transport route as particularly dangerous for such a deadly cargo, on Tuesday blocked for several hours a road along which the nuclear cargo was due to be taken to La Hague.
The two European companies involved in the operation, France's Areva and British Nuclear Fuel Limited, on Tuesday successfully applied to a Cherbourg court for an order preventing Greenpeace activists from approaching the cargo.
The court fined Greenpeace 75,000 euros for blocking the road.
One Greenpeace militant at Tuesday's protest, a German named Thomas Breuer, said the organisation wanted "to focus attention on this very dangerous and completely unnecessary transport."
Greenpeace has said the long distances of road transport involved constituted "considerable" risk, not least because the cargo's containers could easily be cracked open by terrorists using shoulder-launched rockets.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Race Shaping Up as Battle of the Modern and Traditional
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9631-2004Oct5?language=printer
SINZARI, Afghanistan -- More than 1,000 leathery, turbaned men gathered in a cavernous village mosque Friday for a presidential campaign rally. They no longer carried rifles, and some had even brought their small sons. But the assembly of mujaheddin, or former anti-Soviet fighters, crackled with esprit de corps.
The veterans were all ethnic Pashtuns, and the rally was held in Kandahar province, the heartland of Afghan Pashtun culture and the birthplace of President Hamid Karzai, who comes from a prominent Pashtun tribe and has courted Pashtun votes in his bid to be elected president this Saturday.
But these tough ex-fighters had come to show their support for someone else: Yonus Qanooni, the former interior and education minister and an ethnic Tajik, who is Karzai's major challenger. To them, the candidate's ethnicity mattered far less than his credentials as a fellow mujahid and defender of Islam.
"We have all sacrificed a great deal, and we all lost brothers and fathers in the fight for our country," said Asadullah, a farmer in the crowd. "We want a leader who is a true mujahid, so our rights will be protected. We are all one tribe and one nation. We don't like Karzai. We want Qanooni."
With Afghanistan's first-ever presidential election just days away, analysts here predict that Karzai, 47, will garner the most votes. He remains by far the best known of the 18 candidates in the race, he is widely regarded as the American choice, and he has the power and perquisites of incumbency.
But the unexpected inroads made by Qanooni, even on Karzai's home turf in southern Afghanistan, make it increasingly likely that Karzai will not win more than 50 percent of the vote. This would require an expensive runoff election that could take several months to arrange, leaving the country in a state of anxiety and political drift.
The popularity of Qanooni among some Pashtun mujaheddin, moreover, suggests that the race may not break down along ethnic lines, as has been widely predicted, but instead become a contest between two clashing visions of Afghan society: one that is modern and Western-leaning and one that is protective of traditional Islamic values.
In Kandahar city, Karzai's campaign aides seemed confident of his success at the polls. Ahmad Wali Karzai, one of the president's brothers and a wealthy Kandahar resident, has been receiving a steady stream of Pashtun tribal leaders from across the south pledging the support of their communities at the polls.
"Ninety-nine percent of the provincial elders have guaranteed us they will vote for the president," Karzai said. "We don't see any strong challenger in any of the six southern provinces. From every district, they keep coming to volunteer. And the local cable channel has given us two channels free to use 24 hours for campaign messages."
Karzai suggested that any local support for Qanooni was limited to a small number of former militia commanders -- principally from one Pashtun tribe, the Alokozai -- who he said oppose the government program to disarm and demobilize militias nationwide.
"They are against the program, because they want to stay in business with their weapons and troops," he said. He complained that officers under the city police chief, a Qanooni supporter, had taken down thousands of Karzai campaign posters in the city.
There were also reports that militia commanders had removed some heavy weapons from Kandahar last week to avoid turning them over to the authorities. And two new election surveys by international groups found that most Afghans responding, including those in Kandahar, were far more concerned about pressure or abuse from military commanders than about terrorist violence on election day.
But critics of the government, including campaign aides for several other candidates and the local representative of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, complained that regional officials had been actively working for President Karzai's election and pressuring people to vote for him.
In Kandahar city and the surrounding areas, many residents said they supported Karzai, describing him as a fair and honest man and adding that he is a son of the region. Many seemed to know little about the other candidates, including Qanooni, suggesting that Karzai could win merely by being the only familiar name and face on the lengthy ballot.
But familiarity does not necessarily translate into enthusiasm. Last weekend, a rally organized by Ahmad Wali Karzai for students at a park pavilion in Kandahar was a decidedly anemic affair, attended by about 200 young people who listened politely to a series of speeches but rarely bothered to applaud.
At a tiny market on the city outskirts, a baker said he would vote for Karzai because "when he came, war stopped." But a customer who works as a government clerk interrupted eagerly, saying, "I'm for Qanooni. We need a strong leader and a mujahid. Karzai has just been sitting home and doing nothing."
Indeed, while Qanooni, 43, whose home base is the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan, has made campaign trips to Kandahar and the western city of Herat, Karzai remains a prisoner of his tight security bubble. Since the campaign began, he has taken more trips overseas than within Afghanistan, and he meets citizens only under the most restricted conditions.
The president's first campaign trip was aborted when a rocket was fired near his helicopter. A trip to northern Afghanistan, where he inaugurated a new highway, was a public relations disaster.
The visit was tightly controlled by the U.S. military and Karzai's U.S.-contracted bodyguards. When a crowd of invited guests surged forward, the guards shoved them back and slapped one, who turned out to be the minister of transportation.
On Tuesday, Karzai made a brief campaign visit to the town of Ghazni, about 75 miles south of Kabul, the capital. He arrived and departed by helicopter, and he was guarded on the ground by several hundred rifle-armed security men.
The president, who called on the crowd of several thousand to "vote for peace and stability," reportedly rebuked his guards for trying to push well-wishers away.
"Ideally, Mr. Karzai should be able to campaign in Bamiyan" in the north "and Mr. Qanooni should be able to campaign in Kandahar," said Fida Mahmad, Qanooni's campaign chief in Kandahar. "All candidates should be able to travel everywhere. We do not want the country to be divided again by tribalism and war. People are tired of dictatorships. We have a new thing called democracy, and within the framework of Islam, that is what we want."
In Sinzari, a dusty town 15 miles west of Kandahar, soldiers were busy putting up Qanooni posters for the rally last Friday, and convoys of four-wheel-drive vehicles disgorged hundreds of mujaheddin. They proudly recounted the history of that spot on the highway, where Afghan guerrillas blocked and destroyed hundreds of Soviet tanks in the 1980s, then chopped them up to be sold as scrap.
The local military commander, who goes by the single name Habibullah, was busy preparing the rally and ticking off lists of tribes that had sent representatives. He said he had a good official relationship with the central government, but his Pashtun heart was clearly with Qanooni, the Tajik mujahid from Panjshir.
"When I was a boy, I carried a Kalashnikov on my shoulder. I do not want my children to carry a gun," he said, adding that he supported militia disarmament. But he complained that Karzai and many of his aides had lived in exile during the country's most bitter years and still keep foreign passports. "I am a citizen and I have the right to one vote," he said, "and it will not be for Karzai."
--------
Afghanistan's Drug Boom
The opium problem could undo everything that's being done to help the Afghan people.
By Michhle Alliot-Marie
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10000-2004Oct5.html
Afghanistan's presidential election this Saturday will be a key moment in that country's history. For three years the international community has been doing an outstanding job of stabilizing Afghanistan and building a future for its people. During my recent trip there, I had an opportunity to appreciate the essential role played by NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), currently under the command of French Lt. Gen. Jean-Louis Py.
Yet despite the efforts of other nations and the reinforcement of deployed forces as the election approaches, one issue is particularly worthy of attention: the noticeable increase of narcotics production since 2002 and its geographical expansion in Afghanistan. Altogether, 28 of the country's 32 provinces are apparently producing opium, and employing more than 1.7 million people at this work. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, opium production in Afghanistan in 2003 amounted to about 3,600 tons -- that is to say, three-quarters of world production -- over 200,000 acres of cultivated land. More then 90 percent of the heroin arriving in France comes from Afghanistan. An even larger harvest is expected for this year as traffickers stock up to protect themselves against a reaction from the international community. Not only do these narcotics flood the global drug market, with serious consequences for public health, particularly in Europe, but their production is impeding Afghanistan's stabilization. Warlords are taking advantage of trafficking, and they are protecting it. The narcotics-related financial networks are fed by particularly powerful underworld groups that undermine authority and the rule of law.
"No-go" areas that foster crime are developing. At the same time, the money generated by trafficking makes it possible to fund attacks by the Taliban fighters still in the area. In fact, there is little doubt that drug money is funding terrorist activities. And 10 percent of the heroin produced in Central Asia is consumed locally, creating a public health problem for Afghanistan that must be confronted rapidly.
The farming of poppies and drug trafficking in general are damaging the area's economic development. And economic progress is a prerequisite for reestablishing stability in the country. Confronted with this situation, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has made drug production and trafficking illegal. Last January his government created a special force for counternarcotics efforts. Nonetheless, the scale of the problem demands a sizable response that goes beyond local resources and capabilities.
Like the international community, France is concerned about narcotics and is willing to help. We will need to take advantage of the post-election dynamics to act quickly and help Afghanistan combat this problem. A first step will be to reinforce the training programs of the Afghan police, to improve the judiciary system and to strengthen the disarming, demobilizing and reintegrating process. A second will be to encourage measures aimed at closing down and prohibiting poppy-processing laboratories.
But this will not be enough. It will be necessary to establish an international force, other than the ISAF, specifically tasked with counternarcotics operations. And a third axis is necessary, one which would support the development of substitute crops on a local basis. There are many signs that production can be controlled if there is efficient action on the main issue: the poverty of small farmers. Traditional food crops (wheat, corn, etc.) can offer a viable alternative. The U.N. World Food Program has offered to help Afghanistan investigate new markets, such as nuts and grapes. Along with new irrigation systems, several tree nurseries should be renovated to meet the increasing demand for plants. All these initiatives must be encouraged. Moreover, the international community must promise that its members will purchase the crops.
At the same time, we must involve neighboring countries, taking into account the cross-border aspect of the drug scourge.
The international community needs to operate cohesively and to display a fierce determination to succeed. France is committed to help Afghanistan in this political transition phase, beyond the election. The involvement of our forces not only in the ISAF but also in counterterrorism through Operation Enduring Freedom and in the training of Afghan troops remains highly beneficial.
But I also believe that, in Afghanistan as elsewhere, counterterrorism must be global, and this encompasses the links between narcotics, money and terrorism. This is a war that must be fought on all fronts, a war in which France will be involved without reservation.
The writer is France's minister of defense.
--------
NATO Expects Rush of Taliban Attacks in Afghanistan
October 6, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06nato.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - NATO's top general said Tuesday that allied forces were girding for a surge of attacks by Taliban fighters and others in the last days before Afghanistan's presidential elections on Saturday.
"We assume that there will be some attempts to disrupt the elections," the commander, Gen. James L. Jones of the Marine Corps, said in an interview. "We're doing everything we can to find out what that is." He declined to discuss intelligence about specific possible attacks.
To help counter the violence, NATO has nearly doubled its security force in the north in recent weeks, to nearly 10,000 troops, sending a fresh battalion of Italian troops to the area around Kabul, the capital, and a battalion of Spanish forces to Mazar-i-Sharif. Many are patrolling alongside Afghan troops and police officers, General Jones said.
In addition, the Air Force flies about two dozen combat missions a day in case forces on the ground come under attack or need to call in airstrikes. The United States is also flying about a dozen surveillance missions a day, using U-2 spy planes and Global Hawk and Predator remote-controlled aircraft, watching for insurgent activity along the rugged border with Pakistan. There are also more than 17,000 American soldiers and marines throughout the country.
"The more you see international forces, the more stability you'll have, and the more confidence that people will put in the election process," General Jones said. "Right now, things seem to be going pretty much as planned."
But the NATO forces are positioned in the more stable north, and most of the attacks against Afghan soldiers and security forces have come in the south and southeast, the Taliban's traditional base of support. Last week, for instance, 10 Afghan soldiers were killed in two attacks in Zabul Province, in the southeast.
General Jones, who said he visited Afghanistan every five to six weeks, said the expanded forces would stay for an undetermined time after the elections to help maintain order. He said NATO would assess whether to send more troops before parliamentary elections scheduled for next spring.
He added that he had no new information about the location of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, who intelligence analysts believe is still in the Afghan-Pakistani border region.
-------- asia
Japan Plans to Press U.S. on Troops
Foreign Minister Seeking Reduction of 'Burden' on Okinawa
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9634-2004Oct5.html
TOKYO, Oct. 5 -- Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said Tuesday he would press his country's case in Washington this week for reducing what he called "the excessive burden" placed on Okinawa by the presence of U.S. troops. But he said he would urge the Americans to leave adequate forces in Japan to promote security in the region.
"The U.S. is trying to rationally realign its military to respond to the new era," Machimura said in an interview. "As for Japan, we are requesting that the U.S. retain its role of maintaining the security and peace of Japan, the Far East and its surrounding areas."
Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura.
The United States is seeking to redefine the role of its troops in Japan, now numbering about 47,000, as part of a broader strategy to make American forces around the world more geared to small conflicts and more readily deployable .
Machimura will meet with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Thursday afternoon to follow up on discussions between President Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi two weeks ago in New York, where the leaders promised to "make efforts" to reduce the burden of U.S. troops in Japan while maintaining security.
The realignment, sources close to the talks say, is envisioned as far smaller in scope than those planned in South Korea and Germany, where the United States is scheduled to pull out thousands of troops over the next several years. It remains unclear whether Japan would experience a net reduction in forces or merely a shift in personnel and equipment among different bases in the country.
Japan has relied on the United States for security since the end of World War II, but no place in the country has been affected more than Okinawa, where more than half of the U.S. forces in Japan are based.
Sources familiar with the talks say the United States is offering a 10 percent reduction in the 25,500 troops now stationed on Okinawa, where many residents strongly oppose the American presence. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
At the same time, U.S. officials may seek the relocation of the headquarters of the 1st Army from Fort Gillem, Ga., to Camp Zama on the outskirts of Tokyo. Some U.S. units could also be consolidated on Japanese bases.
The United States is also reportedly seeking to expand the mission of its troops stationed in Japan beyond their traditional emphasis on defending the Japanese islands, so they would be on call for deployment to the Middle East and Africa.
But there is staunch opposition among some Japanese to that idea. While the United States is pushing for quick agreement, analysts here said the talks could last months.
Machimura, a former education minister named to his new post by Koizumi last week, declined to discuss numbers or other specifics of the realignment. "Right now, we are at the stage of discussing the issues freely and actively, so naturally, there are disagreements as well as agreements," he said in the interview.
One of the most complicated issues is whether U.S. troops leaving Okinawa would be restationed elsewhere in Japan. Machimura did not rule that out, but said opposition in other parts of country might make such a move difficult. One solution, he said, could be rebasing those troops in the United States or elsewhere in the region.
Machimura's topics in Washington are also likely to include North Korea and the stalled international talks aimed at dismantling the communist state's nuclear weapons programs.
In addition, Machimura said his agenda with Powell would include U.S. insistence that Japan lift a ban it imposed on U.S. beef last December after the first case of mad cow disease was discovered in the United States.
Japan was the world's largest foreign market for U.S. beef before a Canadian-bred cow in the state of Washington was found to have the disease.
Machimura said a decision on resuming imports would have to wait until after a domestic panel studying the issue deemed a resumption to be safe. [News reports in Tokyo Wednesday morning, however, indicated that the panel may relax guidelines for domestic testing of young cows -- a move that could soon open the way for imports of at least some U.S. beef.]
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U.S. to Slow Pullout of Troops From S. Korea
By Anthony Faiola
The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10249-2004Oct5.html
TOKYO, Oct. 6 -- The United States has agreed to withdraw 12,500 troops from South Korea over several years rather than pulling them all out by the end of next year, as was initially planned, the Pentagon and South Korean officials said Wednesday.
The pullout -- unveiled earlier this year as part of the Pentagon's plan to make U.S. troops stationed abroad more mobile for deployment to global hot spots -- marks one of the most significant reductions in U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula in decades. However, South Korean officials, whose military was scheduled to pick up the slack, complained that the massive withdrawal was being planned too quickly and that they needed more time to take over the missions now run by U.S. forces. They also said a rapid withdrawal could generate a "security gap" with North Korea.
After months of negotiations, U.S. and South Korean officials decided to conduct the first phase of the withdrawal this year, with 5,000 U.S. troops leaving South Korea, including the 2nd Brigade Combat Team and associated units, some of which have already been dispatched to Iraq.
During 2005 and 2006, the United States will redeploy a total of 5,000 troops, according to a Pentagon statement. From 2007 to 2008, the redeployment will be completed with the withdrawal of 2,500 troops, primarily support units and personnel.
Under the agreement, South Korean forces will take over security from U.S. troops at the joint security area in the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea -- the world's most heavily militarized border.
"The United States and South Korea fully considered the combined requirement to maintain a robust deterrent and defense capability while increasing combat capacity," the Pentagon said in the statement. "Additionally, consultations considered the Korean public's perceptions regarding a potential security gap."
-------- britain
How bad is Iraq report for Blair?
BBC
By Nick Assinder
6 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3719468.stm
The fact that the Iraq Survey Group has found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is unlikely to provoke gasps of surprise in Britain.
This is, after all, the moment the prime minister has carefully been preparing voters for over the past few months.
His original line had been to urge his critics to let the ISG complete its work before jumping to conclusions.
By last July, however, he had changed tack and told the MPs on the Commons liaison committee that he had to accept the ISG had not found WMD "and may never find them".
By the time of his party conference speech last week, he had gone so far as to accept that the original intelligence on Saddam's supposed WMD had been wrong.
Most importantly, however, he also completed the process of appearing to shift his justification for the war away from WMD to the removal of Saddam Hussein.
UN resolutions
"I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.
"The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power," he told the conference.
What Mr Blair cannot do, however, is suggest regime change was his real motive for the war - that may well have been illegal and, in any case, was not cited at the time.
So he has chosen instead to remind people the precise justification was to uphold UN resolutions which Saddam had defied for 12 years.
He will also now take much comfort from the suggestion by the inspectors that Saddam was certainly attempting to produce a WMD programme and was potentially even more of a threat than had originally been suggested before the war.
None of this, however, will alter the stark fact that claims used by the prime minister to back the war at the time - including the infamous 45 minute from attack suggestion - were wrong.
Not responsible
But that is now almost universally accepted, and any damage to the prime minister as a result has probably already been caused.
Indeed it is even possible that the ISG report's findings on the level of the potential threat posed by Saddam - because it is relatively new - will offer Mr Blair some ammunition to hurl back at his critics.
Critics are unlikely to accept that though. Former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who quit the cabinet over the decision to go to war, said the international community had always known Saddam Hussein had ambitions to have such weapons.
This was why there had been a policy of containment, says Mr Cook.
Indeed, he says, the report's findings that Saddam wanted WMD, but had none, suggested containment was a remarkably successful policy and the war was unnecessary.
Democrats
The most troublesome aspect of the report for Tony Blair could be from its impact in the US.
President Bush or his officials have now accepted that Saddam was not responsible for 11 September (as many Americans had once believed), that there was no link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda before the war and, now, that there were no stockpiles of WMD.
These revelations are bound to be a factor the Presidential election campaign and if Democrat John Kerry defies the odds and wins as a result, that could spell trouble for Tony Blair.
Government advisers who attended the Democrat convention returned in no doubt about the level of anger felt by Kerry - and even President Clinton - at Tony Blair's stance on the war and continuing closeness to George Bush.
President Kerry would, of course, have to put much of that anger to one side in the interests of good diplomatic relations with Britain.
But many believe there would still be a significant cooling in trans-Atlantic relations.
-------- iran
Iran's Missiles Can Now Hit Europe, Ex-Official Says
Reuters
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9630-2004Oct5.html
TEHRAN, Oct. 5 -- Iran has increased the range of its missiles to 1,250 miles, a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying on Tuesday, putting parts of Europe within reach for the first time.
Military analysts had estimated Iran's missile range at 810 miles, which would allow it to strike anywhere in Israel. But Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the country's influential former president and the head of a government oversight body, as saying: "Now we have the power to launch a missile with a 2,000-kilometer range. Iran is determined to improve its military capabilities."
"If the Americans attack Iran, the world will change. . . . They will not dare to make such a mistake," Rafsanjani was quoted as saying in a speech at a national security exhibition.
The United States, which has accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons, expressed "serious concerns about Iran's missile programs."
"We view Iran's efforts to further develop its missile capabilities as a threat to the region and to the United States interests, and all the more so in light of its ongoing nuclear program," a State Department spokesman, J. Adam Ereli, said in Washington.
Ereli declined to say whether the United States believed Rafsanjani's claim, saying he could not discuss intelligence matters.
Iran insists its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity. It says its missiles are for defensive purposes and would be used to counter a possible Israeli