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NUCLEAR
Bush, Kerry spar over how to keep nukes from kooks
Paul Nitze The man who brought us the Cold War.
Discussion centers on U.S. war crimes
Dear Mr. Patriot
Iraqi Catastrophe
Iraq war junk gets dumped in India.
Lithuania will ask EU to operate Soviet-built nuclear plant for longer
France says future is nuclear with new generation of power-plants
U.S. Might Reconsider Sanctions on Indian Scientists
Iran Deals Blow to European Nuclear Plan
Iran reported nearing nuclear capability
PART I: The enemy beyond
Allies against Iran
Iran Not Seen Accepting Nuclear Incentives
S.Korean munitions violated nuclear accord -group
Berlin to Spend Billion on Missile Defense
Committee rejects public consultation on missile defence
Paul H. Nitze, Missile Treaty Negotiator and Cold War Strategist
Paul Henry Nitze, 1907-2004 Architect of Cold War
Delegates ask NRC to hasten VY report
Hanford tests plans for nuclear waste
Scientists complete tests on Hanford tank waste treatment
Report: Yucca Mountain to be at capacity before opening
MILITARY
3,200 Peacekeepers Pledged on Mission to Darfur
India opposes sale of F-16 jets
Indian navy denies submarine deal
About 4.5 million dollars spent on arms buyback in Baghdad: Iraqi PM
Meditations on Okinawa
Burmese generals reinvent dark days
Myanmar power play leaves India smiling
Blair sees battalion for Iraq, not Bush
Britain to Send 850 Troops Toward Baghdad
Britain agrees to send 850 troops into US-controlled zone in Iraq
Defense Work Gives CACI Boost In Earnings
Romania Makes Pitch to Host US Military
US Lifts Haitian Arms Embargo as Tensions Mount
Falluja Chiefs Demand Halt to U.S. Airstrikes
Debate Lingering on Decision to Dissolve the Iraqi Military
Abolishing Iraq Army: the fallout
1000 Al-Qaeda 'warriors' inside Iraq
Rabbis tell troops to disobey orders
In Gaza, Debate Over Pullout Plan Pits Settler Against Settler
Russian military prosecutor blasts rights group report on bullying
"Starfleet Academy" - The Beginning
CIA Refuses to Release "Dynamite" Report on 9/11 Accountability
Pentagon exaggerated risk posed by Iraq: US senator
Tenet: CIA made errors
Iraq rips U.N. help for elections
Iraqi Faults U.N. on Lack of Staff to Aid in Voting
Frederick Gets 8 Years in Iraq Abuse Case
MP Pleads Guilty to Abuses at Iraq Prison
U.S. Soldier in Abu Ghraib Scandal Gets 8 Years in Jail
Commander of Transport Unit Is Relieved of Duties
Commander of supply company relieved of duty
Pentagon Says No Medical Draft Is Needed
Pentagon says 200,000 who started anthrax-shot regimen must continue
The Unknown Soldiers
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Loses Ruling on Monitoring of Detainees
Rights groups back Chile's tribal 'terrorists'
DEA Withdraws Its Support Of Guidelines on Painkillers
House, Senate at impasse on 9/11 overhaul
9/11 Panel Backs Senate Plan for Intelligence Overhaul
FBI Investigates Holes In 3 US Airways Planes
Intelligence Reform Hits a Hurdle
U.S. to Enforce Rules for Mail to Canada
Pentagon probes punishment of whistleblower
Afghan Prisoners Released From U.S. Base
Military to keep freeing prisoners
Warner gives rights back to 1,892 felons
Powell removes Baghdad from terror blacklist
Terrorists in Falluja
POLITICS
Oil-rich countries seen most corrupt
Panel: 248 Companies Received Iraqi Oil
Bush Predicted No Iraq Casualties, Robertson Says
"Soldiers Pay"
Fear of Draft Affecting Election
Bush Predicted No Iraq Casualties, Robertson Says
Bush's True Believers
ENERGY
Experts see solar power competitive in next decade
Solvay joins fuel-cell venture capital fund
BOTTOM LINE with BRIAN GOMEZ
OTHER
Excess Mercury Levels Increasing Survey Shows
Pumpkins Can Clean Up Toxic Soils
ACTIVISTS
Hong Kong democrats say 'no' to power
-------- NUCLEAR
Bush, Kerry spar over how to keep nukes from kooks
By Associated Press
October 21st, 2004
http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=1037693&t=Nation+%2F+World&c=26,1037693
WASHINGTON (AP) President Bush and John Kerry agree the most horrifying threat facing the country is a nuclear weapon in terrorist hands, each man claiming to be best able to prevent it from happening. But securing bomb-grade material in Russia and at labs elsewhere will be a daunting task no matter who is in the White House.
U.S. Sen. Kerry has argued that the administration has not focused adequately on Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear technology and, through inattention, has allowed North Korea to develop a few nuclear warheads.
Bush has countered that multilateral talks, involving China, are making progress and that Kerry's demand for direct bilateral U.S.-North Korean negotiations will only hamper that effort. As for Iran, both candidates have promised to continue to press sanctions to sidetrack that country's uranium enrichment efforts.
But Iran and North Korea are not where terrorists would turn now for a nuclear weapon, antiproliferation experts say. Iran does not yet have any weapons-usable nuclear material, and North Korea in the near term is likely to husband its few nuclear warheads rather than deal one to terrorists.
Instead, terrorists' most likely pathway to the bomb might well be poorly secured nuclear material stockpiled in Russia and highly enriched uranium used at foreign research reactors. How Bush and Kerry intend to deal with that more immediate threat has prompted sharp exchanges between the two camps.
Vice President Dick Cheney this week raised the possibility of terrorists using a nuclear weapon against a U.S. city. The Kerry campaign responded by criticizing the administration's progress in safeguarding nuclear materials in Russia and around the world.
The U.S. government has struggled for 12 years, spending as much as $1 billion annually in recent years to better secure 600 tons of plutonium and weapons-grade uranium in Russia and at 130 foreign research reactors.
"Whoever is elected in November, it will be crucial to match actions to words ... to overcome the obstacles to locking down these stockpiles before terrorists or thieves get to them," Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, nonproliferation experts at Harvard University's Managing the Atom Project, wrote in a critique of Kerry and Bush claims.
During the debates, Kerry promised that within four years he would finish security improvements at the Russian nuclear sites and retrieve reactor uranium now in more than 40 countries. He charged that Bush would take 13 years to get that job done and complained that the president has cut money for the program.
Countered Bush: "We've increased funding for dealing with nuclear proliferation about 35 percent since I've been president."
The Energy Department acknowledges that comprehensive security improvements have been completed for only about a quarter of the plutonium and highly enriched uranium in Russia, although an additional 21 percent have had "quick fixes" such as new fences and locks. Progress has stalled at sites holding more than half of the material mainly because of disputes over access.
But Energy Department officials argue that using the volume of material as a yardstick understates the progress and exaggerates the threat.
Three-fourths of the Russian nuclear sites - including the most vulnerable - already have some upgraded security, says Paul Longsworth, deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the department's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Work on the remaining sites - which are the most sensitive, hold the most weapons-usable material and also are pretty well guarded now - has been held up by an access dispute that is close to being resolved and will be addressed by the end of 2008, Longsworth said in an interview with The Associated Press.
As for Kerry's claim that Bush would take 13 years to finish the job, independent nonproliferation groups say that assumes the access issue will not be resolved and the rate of progress will not improve from the scant 35 tons brought under heightened protection in 2003.
"That's ... just bunk," argues Longsworth, and doesn't take into account that once the access issue is resolved security improvements will be made much more quickly.
Bush's assertion of significantly increased spending on these programs also has come under criticism.
Upon taking office, Bush sought sharp cuts in the nonproliferation programs but reversed course after a year. He budgeted $1.059 billion for international nuclear threat reduction this year, about the same that Congress has been providing all along, and, taking inflation into account, only a little more than President Clinton sought his last year in office.
Most of the 35 percent increase cited by Bush reflects money for dealing with U.S. nuclear material at relatively secure Energy Department sites, according to the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, a private research group.
Even with more money, meeting either the Bush or Kerry timetable could be difficult.
"Technically if the political and bureaucratic obstacles could be swept aside, the job could be done in four years," according to Bunn and Wier.
But Bunn told the AP that success "will require heavy lifting coming out of the White House." Whoever is president will have to press the issue personally with Russian President Vladimir Putin "to sweep aside some of these obstacles," he said.
Among the obstacles are Russia's refusal to give U.S. technicians access to sites holding its largest stockpiles of uranium and plutonium, liability risks faced by U.S. contractors doing nonproliferation work in Russia, and reluctance by operators of foreign research reactors to give up their highly enriched uranium.
"We're taking every step we can to get it done," said Longsworth. "Just saying you're going to do it doesn't make it possible." On the Net
Energy Department: www.energy.gov
Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council http://www.ransac.org
Nuclear Threat Initiative: www.nti.org
--------
Paul Nitze The man who brought us the Cold War.
slate.msn.com
By Fred Kaplan
Oct. 21, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2108510/
When Paul Henry Nitze died at the age of 97 on Oct. 19, an era died with him. If there was one man responsible for America's emergence as a global military power in the mid-20th century, Nitze could lay claim to that credit. If one man was most responsible for the nuclear nightmares that many Americans suffered along the way, Nitze could wear that tag as well.
In the annals of Cold War history, three sets of documents stand out as potent hair-raisers-the kinds of documents that not only gave their readers cold sweats, but also changed the course of American security policy-and Nitze wrote all of them.
The first and most pivotal was a top secret paper, written in April 1950, called "United States Objectives and Programs for National Security," more famously known as NSC-68. In the months leading up to this paper, the Truman administration was split on its policy toward the Soviet Union. Secretary of State Dean Acheson saw the Soviets as a serious threat that needed to be countered through an enormous military buildup. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson sided with fiscal conservatives-and Truman himself-who believed that boosting the annual arms budget beyond $15 billion would wreck the economy. Acheson's powerful policy planning chief, George Kennan, though worried about the Soviets, favored a "containment" policy that stressed bolstering the West more through political and economic means.
At the beginning of 1950, Acheson fired Kennan and put Nitze in his place. Nitze, a former Wall Street banker, had been one of Kennan's deputies, but openly sympathized with Acheson. Nitze's first task: Scare the daylights out of Truman, so he'd raise the military budget. NSC-68 was the vehicle for doing so.
The document (which was declassified in the mid-1970s) warned of the "Kremlin's design for world domination," an urge it posited as intrinsic to Soviet Russia. "The Kremlin is inescapably militant," the paper argued. The Soviet system required "the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition," and so it would inexorably seek to destroy its main opponent, the United States. Moreover, the paper continued, once the Kremlin "calculates that it has a sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us," it might very well launch such an attack "swiftly and with stealth." The Soviets would have this capability as early as 1954-"the year of maximum danger"-unless the United States "substantially increased" its army, navy, air force, nuclear arsenal, and civil defenses immediately.
Years later, in his memoir, Present at the Creation, Acheson admitted that the language was "clearer than truth," as he put it, but justified the hype. "The purpose of NSC-68," he wrote, "was to so bludgeon the mass mind of 'top government' that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out."
Truman received NSC-68 on April 7, 1950. Two weeks later, he called Louis Johnson into his office and told him the economy-in-defense policy was dead. On June 25, the North Korean army spilled over the border. The Korean War forced a reassessment of U.S. policy. NSC-68 may not have been the best fit for the circumstances, but it was there. The National Security Council adopted it on Sept. 30. The defense budget climbed-not just to beat back North Korea, but to tackle communism everywhere-and didn't come down again for decades. From then on, U.S. foreign policy adopted the Manichean worldview that Nitze laid down in NSC-68, viewing every local struggle as reflecting the "underlying conflict" between the "free world" of the West and the "slave society" behind the Iron Curtain.
The next turning point came in 1957, when Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and fiscal tightwad, was president. The Democrats, including Nitze, were out of power. Intelligence estimates were indicating that the USSR would soon outgun the United States in nuclear weaponry. Yet Eisenhower seemed passive in the face of this threat.
Nelson Rockefeller urged Eisenhower to form a panel to examine whether the United States should fund a nationwide program of fallout shelters in case of Soviet attack. Eisenhower appointed a prominent lawyer named Rowan Gaither to head it. Gaither and his staff expanded the mission to look at the nuclear balance generally. Nitze was one of the staff members. When Gaither got sick, Nitze was picked to write the final report.
The result-"Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age," aka the Gaither Report-was another barn-burner. It warned of the "spectacular progress" the Soviets had made in their missile program and the "increasing threat which may become critical in 1959 or early 1960. ... If we fail to act at once, the risk, in our opinion, will be unacceptable."
Eisenhower didn't succumb to the logic of the Gaither Report, so some of Nitze's associates-or perhaps Nitze himself-leaked it to the press. It became the basis of fears about a "missile gap," which would fuel the next round of the U.S.-Soviet arms race, even though-as Eisenhower knew at the time (from top-secret satellite photos) and as John F. Kennedy (who campaigned on the missile gap) learned once he got into office-there was no missile gap, except perhaps in America's favor. The intelligence reports of the mid-to-late '50s, it turned out, were wrong. The Soviets had only a handful of ICBMs. We were way ahead.
Kennedy gave Nitze a job as one of several assistant secretaries of defense. Under Kennedy, Nitze played a key role in building up U.S. conventional forces in Western Europe, which had genuinely dwindled under Eisenhower. But otherwise, he was viewed as too hawkish by many of his associates-especially during the crises over Berlin in '61 and Cuba in '62, when he seemed less averse to taking steps that risked nuclear war-and never became part of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's, much less Kennedy's, inner circle. Lyndon Johnson finally gave him the deputy secretary of defense title he wanted-after a brief stint at secretary of the Navy. But, by that time, the country was embroiled in Vietnam and Nitze made little impact.
Nitze's deepest embitterment came during the Carter administration. He was one of Carter's earliest supporters in the 1976 Democratic primaries. He sent him papers, discussed policy with him, and gave money to his campaign. But when Carter took office, Nitze got nothing. Worse still, Carter gave all the plum national-security jobs to doves, Nitze's rivals. These analysts, such as Paul Warnke, Harold Brown, and Anthony Lake, took a less alarmist view of the Soviet Union than Nitze thought responsible.
In 1975, Nitze had formed a group called the Committee on the Present Danger, designed to ring the alarm bells over a new Soviet nuclear build-up. After the Carter appointments, Nitze put his group on war footing. When Carter and Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II arms-control treaty in June 1979, Nitze declared war. SALT II was a modest treaty. But to Nitze, it was a disaster because it left the Soviets with superiority in missile megatonnage and throw-weight. He warned that the Soviets might use this edge to engage in "nuclear blackmail." It was a bizarrely abstract argument, but Nitze recited it over and over, supporting his views with elaborate charts. He wrote highly influential articles-his third set of scary documents-in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, warning of an impending Soviet first-strike capability. He wrote pamphlets for the Committee on the Present Danger, warning, in terms straight out of NSC-68, that the "Soviet Union has not altered its long-held goal of a world dominated from a single center-Moscow."
Nitze also testified against SALT II before Congress. When one senator asked him if he considered himself to be more patriotic than Warnke, an old friend and colleague of his who was now Carter's arms-control negotiator, Nitze replied: Yes.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he gave jobs to the hawks and made Nitze his arms-control negotiator. Then something strange happened: Paul Nitze became a serious arms controller. During arms talks in Geneva in 1982, he and his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinsky, went for a famous "walk in the woods," and carved out a comprehensive package for eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The deal was so radical for its day that both of their superiors rejected it-though it set the stage for a similar treaty that Reagan would sign with Mikhail Gorbachev five years later.
It's always been a mystery why Nitze took such an unexpected direction. Was it simply the urge to behave like a professional diplomat when entrusted with actual responsibility? Despite his invective against Warnke and Carter's SALT II treaty, Nitze had been the one who negotiated SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty during the Nixon administration.
Maybe so. But a deeper explanation, I think, goes back to an almost-unknown episode in Nitze's life, revolving around a speech he wrote in April 1960 for a national-security conference at Asilomar in Monterey, Calif. This was a nerve-racking time for nuclear strategists. Khrushchev had been threatening to invade West Berlin, a vital Western enclave deep inside East German territory. The United States and NATO could not beat back such an invasion with conventional arms. Would we-should we-use nuclear weapons? Could nukes play any useful military role? If so, what? If not, what were we supposed to do with them?
Nitze was one of several thoughtful people wrestling with these dilemmas. He used the Asilomar speech to offer some answers, and they were very different from what anyone expected. He proposed that the United States should "multilateralize" control over its nuclear weapons, turning the Strategic Air Command into a division of NATO. Then, he added, NATO should "turn over ultimate power of a decision on the use of these systems to the General Assembly of the United Nations," and invite the Soviets to do the same with their weapons. He also suggested that, as part of this new arrangement, the United Nations would not fire the weapons except in retaliation for a direct nuclear attack by an enemy.
In my only interview with Nitze, in 1981, I asked him about the Asilomar speech (a draft of which I had found in the Kennedy Library). He told me he was still proud of that speech, but that all of his friends and colleagues hated it. He seemed bitter recalling their reaction, even 21 years after the fact.
Nitze never made another speech like it. One month after Asilomar, he gave another speech at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Alabama, and took the polar-opposite view-that, given its nuclear dilemmas, the United States should develop a first-strike capability. But it seemed clear to me from my interview with him that Nitze had continued to mull those dilemmas over in his own mind, and that he'd never entirely dismissed the Asilomar option. It may well have been Asilomar he was thinking about during that walk in the woods.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
-------- depleted uranium
Discussion centers on U.S. war crimes
Collegian
Oct. 21, 2004
By Meaghan Haugh
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2004/10/10-21-04tdc/10-21-04dnews-12.asp
About 30 students and community members gathered last night in the Willard Building to discuss the United States' intervention in Iraq.
The event, "A People's Tribunal on U.S. War Crimes in Iraq: Overcoming the Silence," held by members from by the Human Rights Film Series, Streets Project, Penn State Amnesty International and the State College Peace Center, was part of War Crimes Week at Penn State.
Doug Morris, member of the Human Rights Film Series and Streets Project, said the event was held to recognize the United States' violation of the United Nations Charter, which the United States signed and ratified on Oct. 24, 1945.
"Having a small tribunal at Penn State isn't going to have a giant effect on policy, but we have to do something," Morris said.
Morris said the United States is guilty of violating the U.N. Charter and violating the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Iraq. He added the U.N. Charter outlines only two legitimate reasons for attack: as self defense against armed forces and if the security council authorizes that peaceful means have been exhausted.
Morris said Iraq was a defenseless country with no weapons of mass destruction that posed no immediate threat to the United States.
Morris began the tribunal by asking the group if they felt it was unusual to hear the terms "U.S." and "war crimes" linked together.
Jude Simpson, a State College resident and State College Peace Center board member, said many U.S. citizens keep quiet about the harsh realities of U.S. intervention in war because they do not want to seem unpatriotic. However, she said U.S. citizens need to speak out about democracy to be patriotic.
"A lot of people need to hear about the atrocities of war and realize a lot of laws are being broken," she said. "We shouldn't stand for this occupation of another country."
Morris said there are harsh constraints about what is discussed about U.S. interventions in the classroom, creating the mentality that America is the greatest country.
"We grow up on the assumption that we have the right to attack other countries," Morris said.
Paul Simpson, a State College resident, local physician and State College Peace Center member, discussed his research of depleted uranium, which is used in war tanks, missiles, bombs and machine guns during combat. He began researching the effects of the use of depleted uranium after seeing several of his patients deployed from Iraq who were exposed to depleted uranium.
He said when depleted uranium is used in combat, it pierces through armor, explodes and then incinerates everything inside. He said depleted uranium has not only caused birth deflects, cancer and respiratory problems among Iraqi civilians and U.S. military and their offspring, but once uranium is released, it is radioactive forever.
"People are constantly exposed to this stuff," he said. "The entire Middle East has been contaminated with uranium through dust storms."
The tribunal showed slide shows with graphic pictures of injured Iraqi civilians, bombed buildings and open caskets of Iraqi victims, as well as closed U.S. caskets.
"A People's Tribunal on U.S. War Crimes in Iraq" will be held again at 7 p.m. Sunday in 362 Willard.
-----
Dear Mr. Patriot
axisoflogic.com
Oct 21, 2004
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_12815.shtml
American soldiers are dieing like dogs in the desert. The media says 1000 have died, but it's more like 'thousands'. Sixteen dead bodies were recently found in a mass grave in Falluja (see below), and another larger mass grave was found in the province of Ramadi, where the U.S. occupation forces had once located a military base . Fierce unrelenting attacks by Iraqi Resistance forced American troops to vacate Ramadi on the 20th of February, leaving behind the bodies of many of their comrades hastily buried in mass graves. They are not counted as dead, but are considered missing in action.
The Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded in Iraq. The military has actually evacuated 16,765 service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat, according to the U.S. Transportation Command. Most are from Operation Iraqi Freedom. That's a total of 24,010 Americans evacuated with ailments wounds and injuries, but this is nothing compared to the mass murder being carried out against the Iraqi people.
In the past two years the Bush administration has killed over 37,000 innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of Democracy and freedom, with well over 500,000 wounded. America is also using food and water as weapons in Iraq, causing thousands of men, women, and children to starve to death each month.
In the commission of multiple war crimes the Bush administration has compromised every ideal embodied in the American constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 'Conventions Against Torture', the 'Hague Conventions', and the 'Geneva Conventions'. As a result of this wanton killing of innocents, hatred for America is on the rise and terrorism is increasing.
As long as companies like Bechtel and Halliburton and men like Bush and Cheney continue to exploit the Iraqi people and leave them but two choices; to live under occupation and enslavement by America, or die fighting that system which enslaves them, there will be endless war.
Bush has promised to, "export death and violence to the four corners of the earth", but war and killing will only breed hatred and more war and killing. Bush and Chainey's way is the wrong way. It's against Christianity, the U.S. Constitution, humanity, and it's against the earth. Americans must wake up. This path of war and death, which has been chosen for them, can only lead to their own destruction, in the same way it ended for Napoleon's France and Hitler's Germany.
Bush's bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan with over 1000 metric tons of DU weapons, made from the deadly U238-isotope - America's nuclear waste - is probably the most egregious war crime ever committed. According to a UN Sub Commission report, cancer in Iraq has increased 1000%, and deformities 600%, childhood leukemia and spontaneous abortions have become commonplace. Depleted Uranium has rendered Iraqi lands infertile, entered the food chain, and contaminated the ground water. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years the Uranium 238 dropped on Iraq by Bush and his father has left much of the country permanently unfit for human habitation.
This is how Bush intends to bring democracy to the world, by killing tens of thousands if not millions of people and radiating the planet. It's time for Americans, and particularly Bush supporters, to stop the flag waving and wake up from the patriotic fantasies. America will never bring freedom and democracy to Iraq through mass murder and the commission of war crimes.
The Iraq of Bush's creation is a hell on earth, a world of women and children mutilated by bomb fragments, roaring jets and helicopters, screaming artillery shells, and explosions as Iraqi homes are obliterated. Gunfire fills the air. American snipers using Israeli techniques are killing women and children, drowning Iraq in a sea of blood. The survivors of the daily bombings and shootings live in terror. The crying of women and children can be heard everywhere along with the crying of babies who have seen their mothers' bodies ripped apart in the name Democracy.
After more than a year U.S. Armed Forces have been unable to take Fallujah. The Iraqi people are fighting off the American invaders with increasing heroism. Against all odds, against planes, tanks, artillery, and a 150,000-man army, the determined Iraqi patriots are fighting to protect their homeland and their families.
-----
Iraqi Catastrophe
Media Lens
by David Edwards
October 21, 2004
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=6462
On February 16, 2003, Tony Blair responded to the biggest protest march in Britain's history the previous day:
"Yes, there are consequences of war. If we remove Saddam by force, people will die, and some will be innocent. ... But there are also consequences of 'stop the war'. There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule..." (Blair, 'The price of my conviction,' The Observer, February 16, 2003)
Blair was referring to the mass death of children under sanctions reported by the UN, human rights groups and aid agencies. In a Newsnight interview Blair argued, "because of the way he [Saddam] implements those sanctions [they are] actually a pretty brutal policy against the Iraqi people". (BBC2, Newsnight Special, February 6, 2003)
In the late 1980s - before sanctions were imposed in 1990, and before the 1991 Gulf War - the mortality rate for Iraqi children was about 50 per 1,000 live births. By 1994 the rate had nearly doubled, to just under 90. By 1999, it had increased again to nearly 130 - 13% of Iraqi children were dying before their fifth birthday.
In response to this catastrophe, senior UN diplomats in Iraq resigned in protest. UN humanitarian coordinator, Denis Halliday, for example, resigned describing Western sanctions policy as "genocidal".
On October 11, a new global report was published by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Roger Wright, UNICEF's representative for Iraq, said:
"Since 1990, Iraq has experienced a bigger increase in under-five mortality rates than any other country in the world and since the war there are several indications that under-five mortality has continued to rise." ('Little progress on child mortality,' Integrated Regional Information Networks, October 11, 2004 http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/480fa8736b88bbc3c12564f6004c8ad5/a244c1afba0ef201c1256f2a002a8f2c?OpenDocument)
UNICEF estimates that some indications showed improvement in Iraqi child mortality between 1999 and 2002 - the death rate dropped to 125 in 2002 (from 130 in 1999). However, this trend has +reversed+ under the occupation and child mortality is actually worsening as compared to 2002 levels. Wright added:
"Since the war more children in Iraq are malnourished, fewer children are protected from immunisable diseases and there has been an increase in the incidence of diarrhoeal disease." (Email to Media Lens, UNICEF Iraq Information, October 19, 2004)
In other words, the "coalition" is now presiding over levels of Iraqi infant mortality +worse+ than those described by Blair himself as brutal. And this in the context of the "coalition" having spent just $29m of the allotted $18.4bn US tax dollars allocated for Iraq's reconstruction on water, sanitation, health, roads, bridges, and public safety. (Naomi Klein, 'Why is war-torn Iraq giving $190,000 to Toys R Us?', The Guardian, October 16, 2004)
Quoting Iraqi Ministry of Health data, UNICEF reported last month that about three out of 10 children in Iraq are chronically malnourished or stunted. This is a consequence of underlying poverty and the inadequate intake of micronutrients. Acute malnutrition among children has almost doubled since the war began, moving from 4 per cent to 7.7 percent.
On September 3, Iraq's Ministry of Health and other health professionals reported there was still "a chronic shortage of medicines in the country". Intissar al-Abadi, chief pharmacist of Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, told IRIN:
"We had a programme in which cancer and growth hormone drugs were available to patients according to their needs. The ministry used to offer a certain quantity to us every year, so there could be controlled assistance to the patient, but now all that is gone. You cannot imagine what effect the shortage of such drugs has had on patients." ('Medicine shortage continues,' Integrated Regional Information Networks, September 3, 2004, www.reliefweb.int)
The first comprehensive study on the condition of schools in post-conflict Iraq shows that one-third of all primary schools in Iraq lack any water supply and almost half are without any sanitation facilities.
The survey states that since March 2003, over 700 primary schools had been damaged by bombing - a third of those in Baghdad - with more than 200 burned and over 3,000 looted. ('Iraq's schools suffering from neglect and war UN Children's Fund,' October 15, 2004 http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/480fa8736b88bbc3c12564f6004c8ad5/fc340119ab6c95e3c1256f2e0058e358?OpenDocument)
All of these horrors are a direct result of the illegal US-UK invasion, of the "coalition's" incompetence in failing to plan for the occupation, and of the minimal spending on health care and public works. Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times:
"As for the rebuilding of Iraq, forget about it... It's hard to believe that an administration that won't rebuild schools here in America will really go to bat for schoolkids in Iraq." (Herbert, 'A War Without Reason,' The New York Times, October 18, 2004)
The list of horrors goes on. Dr Thikra Najim, a specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics, reports that the number of cases of cancer in Iraq appears to be rising rapidly, especially for breast cancer. Dr Najim said:
"Now we're seeing three or four cases every week. I think the number is increasing. This is disastrous. We have to study it." ('Iraq: Cancer cases increasing, doctors say,' Integrated Regional Information Networks, September 29, 2004)
Doctors are now seeing many more cases of cancer in general. About 4,000 patients per year used to be seen at the radiation hospital in Baghdad. Dr Ahmed Abdul Jabhar, deputy director of the hospital, reports that 7,000 patients have been seen so far this year.
A September 21 Iraqi Ministry of Environment report revealed that Iraq is afflicted by widespread radioactive pollution, especially at Tuwaitha nuclear research site, south of Baghdad. Immediately following the US-UK invasion, residents of the area looted containers holding radioactive materials. The radioactive contents were dumped on the ground at the site and the containers used to carry water, milk and other household materials and foodstuffs. The survey reported:
"This site was polluted by looting and destroying research materials. We found a number of containers which had traces of radiation. We also found it in houses and villages nearby." ('Radioactive material and pollutants widespread,' Integrated Regional Information Networks , September 21, 2004, www.reliefweb.int)
As the occupying power, the "coalition" is accountable under international law for this looting and lawlessness. Former US Proconsul, Paul Bremer, told a conference of insurance agents that Baghdad was already in chaos by the time he arrived:
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. We never had enough troops on the ground." (Thomas Ricks, Robin Wright, The Washington Post, October 5, 2004) http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/index.html#bremer
The Iraq survey also found depleted uranium in large amounts in southern Iraq, including in Hilla, the port city of Basra, and Karbala and Najaf.
Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project, who was tasked by the US department of defence with organising the DU clean-up of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War, is himself ill:
"I am like many people in Southern Iraq. I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. The contamination was right throughout Iraq and Kuwait... What we're seeing now, respiratory problems, kidney problems, cancers, are the direct result of the use of this highly toxic material. The controversy over whether or not it's the cause is a manufactured one; my own ill-health is testament to that." (Quoted, Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, Verso, 2002, p.48)
The Media Response
So what kind of response would we expect from our media to the appalling news that an improving trend in child mortality has reversed under the Iraqi occupation, and that our government is presiding over genocidal levels of child deaths?
We recall, after all, that the Observer's Nick Cohen wrote in March 2002:
"I look forward to seeing how Noam Chomsky and John Pilger manage to oppose a war which would end the sanctions they claim have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of children who otherwise would have had happy, healthy lives in a prison state (don't fret, they'll get there)." (Cohen, 'Blair's just a Bush baby', The Observer, March 10, 2002)
The Sunday Telegraph declared, "it is the neighbourly duty of the West to liberate the Iraqis from their captivity at the hands of Saddam: the war would be just because of the suffering it would end." (Matthew d'Ancona, 'The Pope's disapproval worries Blair more than a million marchers', Sunday Telegraph, February 23, 2003)
A search using the Lexis-Nexis website shows that the UNICEF report received brief mentions in four British newspapers.
The Financial Times reported matter-of-factly:
"In 11 countries, under-five mortality has risen since 1990, the report notes. They include Cambodia, Iraq, Ivory Coast and four southern African nations - Botswana, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe - where Aids has been most rampant." (Frances Williams, 'Unicef warns on child mortality targets,' The Financial Times, October 8, 2004)
That was that! No mention of the tragedy that has befallen Iraq under the British and US occupation. Not a word of comment on the significance of the disaster for the claims that the invasion would relieve the suffering of ordinary Iraqis.
In the Guardian, Rory Carroll wrote:
"Unicef said that even... 'alarmingly slow progress' had bypassed southern Africa, Iraq and countries of the former Soviet Union... In addition to southern Africa, infants were now more likely to die in Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Iraq, Cambodia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan." (Rory Carroll, 'Bucking world trends, Africa's child death rate is rising,' The Guardian, October 8, 2004)
Iraq was presented as just another item on a list. Of the fact that Britain invaded Iraq illegally and is therefore morally responsible for the mass death of children, not a word appeared in the paper.
The Independent's Jeremy Laurance noted of the report:
"It charts the drastic decline in the health of the [Iraqi] population and the catastrophic deterioration in health services during Saddam Hussein's era, one which has accelerated since the war."
Again, no attempt was made to highlight the significance of the fact that the decline in health services "has accelerated since the war".
Laurance continued:
"One third of the health centres and one in eight of the hospitals was looted of furniture, fridges and air conditioners or had equipment destroyed in the immediate aftermath of the war."
Laurance then reviewed child mortality figures in the 1990s, adding:
"Adult death rates have risen and life expectancy has fallen to below 60 for men and women. Overall, Iraq's state of health is now rated on a par with the impoverished countries of the Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan, where once it was ranked alongside Jordan and Kuwait, the report says." (Jeremy Laurance, 'Iraq: the aftermath: Iraq faces soaring toll of deadly disease,' The Independent, October 13, 2004)
Again, no conclusions were drawn on the moral status of the 'liberators' of Iraq.
SUGGESTED ACTION
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Iraq war junk gets dumped in India.
UPI
October 21, 2004
By INDRAJIT BASU, UPI Business Correspondent
http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?StoryId=CqxC0qeidAw5KAweTAxjHCxDHCI1QDw5Rlwy
CALCUTTA, India, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- Sept. 30 was just another day for Santosh Khushwaha and Lal Chand, two metal scrap melting workers at Bhushan Steel, a medium-sized steel products maker near Delhi in India. Till about afternoon that is, after which both their lives changed forever. A loud explosion in the scrap yard they were working knocked them unconscious and when they woke up they found themselves in a hospital with pieces of shrapnel in their bodies. Ten others in the same scrap yard were killed by the explosion with eight dying on the spot, not knowing what hit them. Another 11 sustained injuries, which later proved fatal for two.
Although in a poor country like India such incidents hardly attract the kind of uproar this one did -- because hundreds die every year from similar industrial accidents that go unnoticed -- this incident let lose a wave of panic. That's because the hunt for reason behind this blast led to a startling revelation; the blast was not an ordinary industrial mishap but was caused by an exploding shell while handling a consignment of imported scrap of war junks.
Perennially starved of feed stock, Indian steel mills have found plenty of cheap fodder in Iraqi war junk. But along with mangled pipes and twisted rods, India has also become the favorite dumping ground for dangerous war debris.
Subsequent investigations also revealed the extent of such imports, which is clear from the fact that a dozen projectiles or shells were found dumped by the roadside of a highway near Delhi. Many more were recovered from various other parts of the country, which was a result of illegal importers getting rid of such debris following a police crackdown.
The ammunition in scrap has its roots in the industry's insatiable demand for steel. The Indian steel industry can be divided into two basic categories: integrated big factories and small steel factories. It is the latter that depend heavily on scrap for their feed stock.
Currently, three largest steel plants have a capacity to produce over 20 million tons a year, while 200 odd smaller steel factories command a further 15 million tons. In about 10 years India is projected to build up a steelmaking capacity of about 90 million tons.
Nevertheless, with more than 2 million tons likely to be imported this year alone, India is no stranger to scrap imports -- nor to explosive scrap, for that matter. A cache of explosive scrap from Iraq was confiscated in 1995. Between 1995 and 2001 several other consignments have been detected from countries such as Somalia and Iran.
But over the past year, two things happened that changed the way the scrap business is conducted, making the entire process much more incendiary. One, the price of scrap increased dramatically because of high demand, to $240 to $250 per ton against the $100 level a year ago. Second, the war in Iraq made available a whole lot of junk that could be accessed at much cheaper rates than the skyrocketing prices of conventional junk.
"Loose metal scrap is one-fourth the price of processed scrap and that is why India has emerged as one of the favorite destinations," said Siddarth Kak, of Central Board of Excise Customs.
Which is why, say industry sources, although the provisional authority in Iraq imposed restrictions on scrap exports this year, traders have carried on, taking advantage of the lack of security in India. They add that since such imports are, as a rule, not permitted from war-ravaged countries such as Iraq, imports follow a circuitous route: scrap is first bought in bulk by dealers who take them to dumping yards of Dubai and Iran before exporting them to the country. All it takes is a declaration from the exporter certifying the consignment is fit for "normal factory" use. The scrap is offloaded at Indian ports and then transported onward.
"As the certificates stating the country of origin declare the scrap originated from Iran or Dubai, there isn't much that we can do," said a customs officer.
However, the Bhushan incident has rattled the Indian government sufficiently that officials have vowed to further tighten the scrap-import policy to filter out hazardous material is in the offing.
Authorities have announced that soon imports of metal scrap originating from Iran, Afghanistan and Somalia will be stopped altogether.
The Home Ministry has also ordered a nationwide inspection of iron and steel factories and formed a co-ordination group comprising the Intelligence Bureau, Customs and the Directorate General of Foreign Trade. The Ministry said import of metal scrap originating from war zones will now be subject to "100 percent inspection of unshredded and uncompacted materials" and will also need a certificate from exporters declaring the material is "safe." In addition, Finance Ministry officials have sought the help of forensic experts to probe major import consignments.
But many say such safeguards are hardly a deterrent. And critics add that there is also the worry of depleted uranium shells used by United States aircraft and tanks to attack Iraqi tanks during the war.
"The worrying thought is that these could find their way into scrap exports from Iraq soon," said VP Malik, a defense expert. "The recoveries till date could just be the tip of the iceberg.
-------- europe
Lithuania will ask EU to operate Soviet-built nuclear plant for longer
VILNIUS (AFP)
Oct 21, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041021135126.lrnkwbme.html
Lithuania will ask the European Union to allow it to operate one of two units at a Soviet-built nuclear power plant for a half year longer than agreed, the country's prime minister said Thursday.
"We have decided to ask the European Commission to send its experts to hear our arguments," Algirdas Brazauskas told journalists after a government meeting.
"The operations of the first unit at Ignalina should be extended as we lack energy capacities in the region," he added.
Brazauskas said that the letter to the EU will be sent in the nearest future.
In tough negotiations over membership of the European Union which it joined in May, Lithuania committed itself to close the first unit this year and to shut down the facility completely in 2009.
The EU is worried about the safety of the Ignalina plant, as it operates the same type RBMK reactors as in Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant, which exploded in 1986.
Brazauskas however said that operations of the first unit at Ignalina should be extended until a new power plant in Russia's Kaliningrad region and neighbouring Latvia are built.
The Ignalina plant, which supplies about 70 percent of all energy consumed in the Baltic state, operates two Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors with 1300 Megawatt capacity each and employs some 4,500 people.
Last year Ignalina sold 14.25 billion kilowatthours of energy, almost half of it was sold to neighbouring markets.
The EU has promised to finance the closure of the plant, estimated at 2-3 billion euros (2.5-3.75 billion dollars) over 30 years and has already allocated more than 200 million euros to prepare decomissioning of the first unit.
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France says future is nuclear with new generation of power-plants
AFP
Oct 21, 2004 http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041021/sc_afp/france_nuclear_041021170728
PARIS (AFP) - France staked its claim to remain a world leader in atomic energy by announcing that it will build the first of a new generation of pressurised water nuclear plants at a site on the Normandy coast.
Construction of the EPR (European Pressurised Water Reactor) is due to start in 2007 at Flamanville near Cherbourg on the Cotentin peninsula, with the first electricity being produced five years later, the state-owned generator EDF said in a statement.
Built at a cost of three billion euros (3.8 billion dollars), the reactor will be the first of a so-called "third generation" of nuclear power stations intended to take over from France's existing stock of 19 plants -- including 58 reactors -- over the next two decades.
France currently produces more than 75 percent of its electricity from "second generation" nuclear installations. The earliest at Fassenheim near the German border went into service in 1977, and their life expectancy is around 40 years.
The "first generation" were the prototypes built in the 1950s and 60s.
While the pressurised water technology does not mark a major innovation, the EPR design, conceived over ten years by Siemens of Germany and the French company Areva, is intended to provide electricity more efficiently and more safely than current models.
According to EDF, the reactor should reduce the risk of accident by ten and its double casing be able to withstand the impact of an aircraft flown by terrorists. The design also means that even if there is a disaster, the reactor core will collapse in on itself to contain radiation leaks.
The EPR reactor should also generate 1,600 megawatts of electricity -- compared to 900 for most current reactors -- need less regular re-charging, and have a life span of 60 years.
However opponents of nuclear power say official statements about the safety of EPR are not to be believed. "The EPR reactor offers no greater guarantee against terrorism than any other reactor," said Stephane Lhomme of the Get out of Nuclear collective.
"We are investing three billion euros in a technology that is almost obsolete for political reasons that have no connection with a rational, properly thought-out energy policy," said Greenpeace in a statement.
France's centre-right government took the decision in May to press ahead with the new generation of nuclear reactors, arguing that it is the best response to the likely long-term increase in petrol prices as well as demands for a cleaner environment.
Two other sites, one in northern Normandy and the other in southeast France, had been under consideration for the project.
"On the environmental front the reactor reinforces France's preeminence in the fight against climate change, and economically it will allow us to ensure supply and limit the effects of a rapid increase in oil prices," said Patrick Ollier, chairman of the National Assembly's economic affairs committee.
Development of the EPR is also seen as a crucial way of maintaining France's technological edge in the highly competitive nuclear energy market. Earlier this month President Jacques Chirac was lobbying hard in China for contracts in the country's ambitious nuclear programme.
France also hopes to be chosen as the site for the future International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) which aims to develop the creation of energy through nuclear fusion by mid-century. However the bid from the research station at Cadarache in southern France faces stiff opposition from Japan.
-------- india / pakistan
U.S. Might Reconsider Sanctions on Indian Scientists
(Reuters)
By Carol Giacomo
Oct 21, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6576750&pageNumber=0
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration might reconsider sanctions imposed on two Indian scientists for alleged nuclear cooperation with Iran if New Delhi offers "significant and convincing" proof they were not involved, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.
The sanctions imposed in late September against Y.S.R. Prasad and C. Surendar -- both former chiefs of the state-run Nuclear Power Corporation of India -- have angered New Delhi, which insisted the men were wrongly implicated and the penalties should be removed.
Washington is improving its ties with the world's largest democracy, attracted by its booming technology expertise and commercial market, but India's nuclear weapons capability and ties to Tehran are a serious concern.
The senior U.S. official, who spoke anonymously, cautioned against predicting that the sanctions, which bar the men from doing business with Washington, would be lifted or waived.
He told Reuters: "The Indians are being given a chance now to clarify, rebut, give us any information and we promise we'll consider it."
U.S. officials said the penalties were imposed only after talks with Indian authorities who failed to act.
The issue was to be raised during Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca's visit to New Delhi this week, which focused on expanding a new U.S.-India strategic partnership.
The administration is also considering imposing sanctions on one to three additional Indian "entities" for aiding what Washington insists are Iran's nuclear weapons programs. Some officials said no decisions have been made on these cases.
The State Department did not detail the alleged offenses by the two scientists but officials said it involved aid to Iran's nuclear program during the first half of 2003.
POWER OR WEAPONS?
Experts say the sanctions may relate to India's development of an economic way to produce tritium, a radioactive isotope used in nuclear bombs.
The United States and other countries accuse Iran of using a civilian nuclear energy program as a cover for the development of atomic weapons, which Tehran denies.
The administration waived sanctions on Indian companies four or five times in recent years before citing the scientists.
"This is a hugely sensitive issue for the Indians" who fear being lumped with nuclear rival Pakistan, where Abdul Qadeer Khan was discovered running a nuclear black market that sold to Iran, Libya and North Korea, a U.S. official said.
Officials say they do not believe there is a Khan-like network in India but contend the country's borders are porous and export controls must be strengthened.
Complicating the issue, sanctions were imposed soon after Washington lifted decades-old export curbs on equipment for India's commercial space program and nuclear power facilities.
Henry Sokolski of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Education Center thinktank said sanctions are an "early warning signal" of serious differences over Iran.
"You would think India understands we have so much more to offer them than Iran does. It suggests Iran is more dominant in that region and can manipulate its neighbors more than we can," he said.
Both President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry say keeping nuclear arms from terrorists would be a primary focus if they win the Nov. 2 election.
-------- iran
Iran Deals Blow to European Nuclear Plan
October 21, 2004
By WILLIAM J. KOLE
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Iran vowed anew to continue enriching uranium, dealing a potential setback to a European plan to ease the nuclear standoff with Tehran by offering sales of nuclear fuel and a trade deal as incentives.
Britain, France and Germany were to offer Iranian officials the enticements Thursday in a private meeting in Vienna, hoping to persuade the country to stop enrichment, which can be used both to generate electricity or build a nuclear weapon.
But even before they could make a formal pitch, Iran said Wednesday it had a compromise proposal which would not compromise its right to enrich uranium. The Iranians did not give details, but President Mohammad Khatami made it clear that his government had no intentions of stopping the practice.
"We expect that our legitimate rights be recognized and that Iran not be deprived of nuclear technology," Khatami told reporters Wednesday in Tehran. "The main problem is that they say, `You should ignore your rights,' and that we would never do."
Diplomats involved in Thursday's talks did not immediately react to the Iranians' statements.
By offering the incentives, the three European powers are giving Iran one last chance to avoid the threat of U.N. sanctions. Although Iran insists its nuclear activities are peaceful and geared purely toward generating electric power, the United States has accused it of running a clandestine weapons program.
On Nov. 25, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors will deliver a fresh assessment of Iran's cooperation - or lack of it - with the nuclear watchdog agency. The United States is pressing to report Iran's noncompliance to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions.
The incentives being offered to Iran included the possibility of buying nuclear fuel from the West, along with the promise of lucrative trade, diplomats said on condition of anonymity. They did not confirm reports that a light-water nuclear research reactor was part of the package.
"We will have to see the offer. We have not seen anything yet," an Iranian official told The Associated Press. "And then we will have to take it to our capital. We really have to wait and see."
The foreign ministers of Britain and Germany this week urged Iran to indefinitely suspend its nuclear program. Iran has resumed testing, assembling and making centrifuges used to enrich uranium, heightening U.S. concerns that its sole purpose is to build a bomb.
But the European negotiators are holding out hope that a diplomatic confrontation - and the looming threat of punishing sanctions - can be avoided if Tehran agrees to give up enriching uranium in exchange for peaceful nuclear technology.
If Iran does not accept the incentives, suspend enrichment and agree to IAEA verification that it has done so, the three likely would back the U.S. push to report Tehran's defiance to the Security Council, the diplomats said.
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the nuclear agency was not directly involved in the talks, but that agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei "absolutely" welcomed the initiative.
"Mr. ElBaradei has been calling on the Iranians to fully suspend" uranium enrichment, Fleming said. "He's been supporting dialogue as a way forward in Iran, coupled with a continuation of an intensive inspection process. Any constructive dialogue is welcomed."
Experts say Iran has been building a heavy-water reactor, which would use plutonium that also could be used in a nuclear weapon. A light-water research reactor, by contrast, uses a lower grade of plutonium.
On the Net:
IAEA, www.iaea.org
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Iran reported nearing nuclear capability
(UPI)
October 21, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041021-115857-7429r.htm
Vienna, Austria, Oct. 21 -- Iran reportedly is making steady progress toward producing nuclear fuel and could make a significant amount of enriched uranium within a year.
Mastering enrichment would move Tehran a big step closer to being able to build an atomic bomb, the Los Angeles Times said Thursday.
Iran's closely guarded progress, according to new estimates by diplomats, scientists and intelligence officials, already has intensified its confrontation with the United States and other countries that fear it is trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Iran insists that its goal is to generate electricity.
Its leaders have so far rejected demands by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, the United States and European countries that they freeze enrichment activities.
The United States and its allies, arguing that the threat is imminent, want the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran.
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PART I: The enemy beyond
Asia Times
By Ehsan Ahrari
Oct 21, 2004
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ21Ak03.html
After the US dismantlement of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iran has emerged as a major target of the acrimonious rhetoric of the Bush administration and Israel's threats related to that country's nuclear aspirations. Given the fact that Iran's active nuclear program has been the focus of US concern since the early 1990s, it is likely to acquire a crisis situation in the near future.
Two other realities are also keeping this issue on the front burner from the American vantage point. First, there is a high probability that North Korea will emerge as the next nuclear power. Washington is very much concerned about the precedent-setting nature of that development for Iran. Second, Iran has recently demonstrated much flip-flopping on whether it is enriching uranium, and has lost credibility even among its friends in Europe. What is the nature of Iran's security concerns? What is the nature of domestic debate inside Iran regarding its nuclear future? What are the dynamics of Arab concerns related to this issue? These are key questions that will be addressed.
Iran's security concerns
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, which ousted Mohammad Reza (the Shah) as the ruler of that country, Iran has faced numerous challenges, some of which emanated from the very nature of the regime that captured power, while the others are related to security concerns and reactions of other states of the region to the Islamic revolution.
The radical change of government in Iran created ample consternation in the region, since the then extant politico-economic conditions of the neighboring states were very similar to the ones that prevailed in Iran under the monarchy. (It should be noted that those conditions remain very much the same in the Persian Gulf monarchies even today.) In addition, the very fact that the Islamic government was established as a result of a revolutionary change itself became a major reason for the neighboring Muslim autocrats to fear a potential recurrence of that phenomenon inside their own respective borders. To further intensify their fears, the government of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini threatened the Gulf monarchies about exporting the Islamic revolution. A defensive action deemed warranted from the Arab monarchies.
The Gulf sheikhdoms responded by establishing the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), whose real raison d'etre was security, even though all other declared reasons minimized that particular objective. Autocracies are terrible liars. One can imagine how seriously the US took the Iranian revolution, which was happening when the Soviet Union was also in the process of occupying Afghanistan. America decided to create a major unified command, the Central Command (CENTCOM), whose aim was to deter or ameliorate security-related challenges that were then mushrooming. In the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, Iran saw two major enemies, the US and Iraq. Iran and Iraq were long-term rivals. Despite the fact that Iran is a predominantly Shi'ite state and the majority of Iraq's population is also Shi'ite, Iraq's ruling elite was Sunni. So there were religious and ethnic reasons (Arab versus Persian) for rivalry, or even hatred, between the ruling elites of the two nations. More substantially, Saddam Hussein had his own hegemonic ambitions in the region, which collided with those of Iran's, even during the days of Mohammad Reza.
Iraq proved Iran's fears by invading it in 1981, an event that lasted eight years, causing many thousands of deaths and a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars. Saddam calculated that a weak government and revolutionary turbulence in Iran were ideal reasons for invading it. His purpose was to bring an end to the Islamic Republic and make Iran a supplicant state. The US also convinced Iran of its own ill intentions toward it by supporting Iraq in that war. Washington's official explanation for "tilting" toward Iraq was that it was only supporting the lesser of the two evils, even though it really despised both regimes.
The Iran-Iraq war affected the Iranian psyche so intensely that building an arsenal of ballistic missiles and acquiring chemical warfare capabilities became enduring predilections of the Islamic Republic. It was only a matter of time before Iran was to consider developing its nuclear program. It should be recalled that in the early days of their rule, the ayatollahs were not interested in resuscitating the ambitious nuclear program that Mohammad Reza had initiated. Moreover, Saddam's own quest for nuclear weapons also convinced the Iranian rulers that they must also seek the nuclear know-how, just in case they were to face a nuclear Iraq.
Israel became the third enemy of Iran, largely because of the very nature of its Islamic government. The Khomeini government broke off diplomatic ties with Israel and established such ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization as a legitimate representative of the Palestinians. More important, the Islamic Republic played a crucial role in politicizing the Lebanese Shi'ites. It also supported the Hezbollah - an Islamist party of Lebanon - politically and materially in its ongoing battles with Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon even after withdrawing from portions of it in the aftermath of its military invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Thus, Lebanon emerged as a major battleground between the hegemonic ambitions of Israel and Iran. Israel never forgave Iran for acutely radicalizing the Shi'ites of that country, a development that played a crucial role in the decision of then Israeli prime minister Yehud Barak to withdraw his troops from southern Lebanon in May 2000.
Iran also became one of the foremost members of "the rejectionist front" - Libya, Iraq, Syria and Yemen being the other members - which rejected a negotiated solution of the Palestinian question. Even after the end of the Cold War, when the rejectionist front lost its chief backer, the Soviet Union, Iran and Syria maintained their opposition to a negotiated solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Even when Syria joined the negotiating process initiated by the administration of president George H W Bush, Iran refused to budge from its hardline position of "no negotiations" with Israel. Iran also remained a profound supporter of the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993) as well as the second one (2000-present). As a result of these developments Iran and Israel viewed each other as major adversaries.
Israel's founding father and its first prime minister, Ben Gurion, decided in the 1950s that his country must ensure that its military dominance - both in conventional and nuclear realms - will never be challenged by any Arab or Muslim state. For that reason alone, he initiated a policy of not only purchasing cutting-edge conventional weapons, but also acquired nuclear weapons know-how for the Jewish state. His second objective was that no Arab or regional Muslim state should be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, for it would use them to destroy Israel. That principle has been applied across-the-board to countries that are technically still at war with Israel, but even to Egypt, which has been at peace with the Jewish state since 1979.
Israel has had unqualified support of the US on maintaining its superiority in conventional weapons. Regarding Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, no one in US official circles publicly questioned the legitimacy of that country's possession of nuclear weapons. That issue remained one of the glaring double standards of America's approach to nuclear nonproliferation. In 1981, Israel carried out its much-heralded preemptive raid on Iraq's nuclear reactor in Osirak. As America's resolve about nuclear nonproliferation hardened in the following decades, Israel became increasingly voluble about denying any Middle Eastern states nuclear weapon capabilities.
After the US invasion of Iraq, the only Middle Eastern countries with nuclear aspirations were Iran and Libya. Libya has recently abandoned its nuclear aspirations with much fanfare. Even though Iran has an active nuclear program, it insists that it has no intentions of developing nuclear weapons. Still, when Iran examines its immediate surroundings, it sees US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they are likely to stay for the remainder of this decade. After ridding Iraq as one of the major challenges to its dominance, as Iran scrutinizes America's intentions, developing its own nuclear weapons appear as an option of the last resort, very much like it was viewed by Ben Gurion of Israel in the 1950s and by Kim Jong-il now.
Iran's domestic debates Like all fledgling democracies, Iran has a variety of opinions concerning nuclear weapons. Within the unofficial, but informed circles, one can expect thoughtful discussions regarding whether Iran should develop nuclear weapons. A year or so ago, those who either did not want their country to develop those weapons, or those who wanted Iran to postpone it to a distant future, were vocal about airing their views. Now, as their country has been publicly viewed as being so close to developing weapons capabilities, one hears even from the reformists that Iran has the right to enrich uranium. Still, reformists also insist that enriching their stockpile of uranium does not mean that the government will develop nuclear weapons. Obviously, this group is under a lot of pressure not to give in to international pressure on this issue, especially while it is also fighting uphill political battles to remain in power.
The conservatives (or hardliners), on the contrary, are split into two sub-groups. The first one, while insisting that Iran should not ratify the protocol agreement to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the chairman of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Hasan Rowhani, has negotiated with the European Union-3 (France, Germany and the United Kingdom). Through that protocol, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment as a goodwill gesture. Now, even people like Rowhani are finding themselves being taken over by the momentum related to the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) vote of last month, calling on Iran to suspend all activities related to nuclear development. The hardliners, who control the Iranian majlis (parliament), are currently quite vocal about not ratifying that EU-3 protocol. They would like their country to abandon the NPT a-la North Korea.
The second sub-group of hardliners is the Iranian version of neo-conservatives. These are young conservatives who don't seem to trust even their conservative elders - ie, those who personally participated in the Iranian revolution. According to one source, these "young neo-cons tenaciously believe in the earlier Utopian notions of the revolution; a theocratic and authoritarian state structure; an egalitarian and state-owned economic system; and a messianic foreign policy". In the tradition of the American neo-cons, they want their country to flex its muscles in the region. They have already attracted the backing of the Revolutionary Guards and other conservative groups of that country's national security establishment. Even though the neo-cons have not yet publicly insisted that Iran should develop nuclear weapons, they resolutely support the proposition that their country should abandon the NPT, which would leave their nuclear program beyond the eyes of the IAEA.
The Arab reaction Given the ongoing political turbulence in Iraq and Palestine, Arab attention is not exactly focused on the threatening aspects of Iran's potential surfacing as a nuclear power. It is safe to state that George W Bush, through his decision to invade and occupy Iraq, and Israel, through its freewheeling use of military force to suppress the Palestinian insurgency, have so enraged the Arab and Muslim world that even a potential emergence of a nuclear Iran does not appear as menacing to them. Besides, in the post-September 11 era of unrestricted use of American military power, Arab states have little to fear from a "nuclear" Iran. Currently, the Muslim preference (from the predominantly Sunni Arab countries as well as Shi'ite Iran) is to see an end to the US occupation of Iraq, the resolution of the Palestinian question, and an end to their torment.
As a general saying in that region goes, one must fight the enemy beyond before one worries about differences from within one's family. It is rare to see the emergence of that type of espirit de corps in the world of Islam.
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Allies against Iran
The New York Times
October 21, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2004/10/21/allies_against_iran/
A HIGH-STAKES struggle is being played out between European governments and the Bush administration over the best way to address Iran's apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons capability. Because there is no better way to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons -- certainly no acceptable military option -- Washington ought to cooperate with its British, German, and French allies trying to resolve diplomatically what otherwise could become a dangerous crisis.
At the State Department last week, European envoys sketched their negotiating ideas and were excoriated by the State Department's top arms-control official, John Bolton. As with North Korea's nuclear program, the Bush administration is divided between pragmatists and hard-liners such as Bolton, who don't believe in negotiating with potential proliferators or rewarding rogue regimes for not developing nuclear weapons.
Still, the current US position is to not obstruct the European effort to negotiate a bargain that would indeed reward Iran for halting its drive toward a nuclear weapons capability. The most that can be said for this standoffish attitude is that it does no harm -- provided that Washington consents to cooperate in the event that Tehran does strike a nonproliferation deal and does keep its word.
In the European approach to Tehran, as in most difficult diplomatic challenges, the negotiator has a better chance of success if he comes to the table with credible penalties to impose as well as attractive rewards to bestow. In the matter of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, the plausible penalty that Tehran wants to avoid is to be arraigned before the UN Security Council and face UN sanctions.
The Europeans have been more reluctant than Washington to resort to such sanctions. The director of the Carnegie Endowment's Non-Proliferation Project, Joe Cirincione, believes that the United States should be a party to the European offer to Iran. "The Europeans need to be tougher, and the US needs to be more flexible," Cirincione says.
The offer the Europeans plan to present shortly to Iran foresees a two-phase approach. In phase one, Iran would accept a verifiable suspension of all uranium enrichment activities. In return, Iran would receive trade and investment benefits from Europe. In a second phase, Tehran would accept a permanent cessation of uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing and would be guaranteed a fuel supply for peaceful nuclear power.
Ideally, such a pact should become part of a global arrangement for international control of enrichment facilities. If a global standard of this kind is not created and Iran and North Korea both go nuclear, the world would face what Cirincione calls a "tipping point," driving Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to go nuclear as well. Nothing could be a greater threat to international and US security.
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Iran Not Seen Accepting Nuclear Incentives
Associated Press
By WILLIAM J. KOLE
October 21, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4566876,00.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Iran is unlikely to accept European incentives aimed at getting it to suspend uranium enrichment, diplomats said Thursday, raising the prospect of a showdown next month between Tehran and the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
Envoys from Britain, France and Germany offered civilian nuclear technology and a trade deal to the Iranians in a private meeting at the French mission to international organizations in Vienna. But Western diplomats said they doubt Iran will back down easily.
Iran did not immediately respond to the incentives, which included the promise of lucrative trade, a light-water nuclear research reactor and the chance to buy nuclear fuel from the West.
An Iranian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Thursday's meeting did not involve detailed negotiations, merely the formal presentation of the European offer.
Amir-Hossein Zamaniyan, director-general of international affairs for Iran's Foreign Ministry, would take the proposal back to his government for study, the diplomat said.
The offer came a day after President Mohammad Khatami said Iran would not give up uranium enrichment, which can be used both to generate electricity or build a nuclear weapon.
Iran insists its nuclear activities are peaceful and geared solely toward generating electric power. The United States contends it is running a covert atomic weapons program.
On Nov. 25, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors will deliver a fresh assessment of Iran's cooperation with the nuclear agency. The United States is pressing to report Iran's noncompliance to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions.
Iran is unlikely to cave in quickly to demands that it suspend enrichment, a Western diplomat familiar with the nuclear agency's dealings with Tehran told The Associated Press. The official was not directly involved in Thursday's meeting.
Although the IAEA had no hand in the European offer, agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said he welcomes any attempt to negotiate an end to the standoff - so long as Iran consents to continued comprehensive inspections that can verify it does not pose a nuclear proliferation threat.
The Bush administration - which labeled Iran part of an ``axis of evil'' along with North Korea and Iraq when it was still ruled by Saddam Hussein - said this week it did not endorse the European allies' plan.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the Iranians ``have shown a pattern of not being willing to comply and of not being willing to be transparent and open about their intentions and programs.''
The British and German foreign ministers have urged Iran to suspend its nuclear program indefinitely. Iran has resumed testing, assembling and making centrifuges used to enrich uranium, heightening U.S. concerns that its sole purpose is to build a bomb.
Iran's long-range ballistic missile capabilities, combined with its nuclear know-how, pose a threat not only to Israel but to Europe, Israeli President Moshe Katsav said Thursday in Vienna.
``Why does Iran need rockets with a range of 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles)? Why is Iran investing money in the development of weapons of mass destruction?'' Katsav said during the first visit to Austria by an Israeli head of state.
If Tehran does not accept the European incentives, suspend enrichment and agree to IAEA verification that it has done so, Britain, France and Germany likely would back the U.S. push to report its defiance to the Security Council, diplomats said.
Experts say Iran has been building a heavy-water reactor, which would use plutonium that also could be used in a nuclear weapon. A light-water research reactor, by contrast, uses a lower grade of plutonium.
-------- korea
S.Korean munitions violated nuclear accord -group
Reuters
By Jack Kim
21 Oct 2004
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SEO333035.htm
SEOUL, Oct 21 (Reuters) - South Korea produced anti-tank munitions in the 1980s using depleted uranium imported for non-military use and failed to make required disclosures, a South Korean lawmaker and an environmental group said on Thursday.
A government official said depleted-uranium munitions were produced for five years and the government had told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1987 when the programme was ended.
Depleted uranium is a by-product of nuclear fuel production. It can be used to strengthen ammunition and enable it to penetrate armour.
The disclosure comes at a sensitive time for South Korea, which said in September some of its scientists had enriched a small amount of uranium in 2000 and separated plutonium in 1982.
The government said those tests were conducted by scientists purely out of curiosity, although the IAEA said the failure to disclose them was a matter of serious concern.
South Korea is involved in international efforts to get communist North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions but the North has said it would not resume talks until an investigation of the South's tests was complete.
South Korea made anti-tank munitions with material derived from the conversion of depleted uranium in the mid-1980s, Jo Seoung-soo, a lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Labour Party, and the Green Korea United group told a news conference
Doing so without disclosure broke an agreement with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, they said.
"The use of the material in anti-tank munition requires conversion of depleted uranium and not reporting it is in violation of the safeguards," said Seok Kwang-hoon, spokesman for the Green Korea United environmental group.
Jo and Seok said the munitions-making at government laboratories between 1983 and 1987 was not aimed at producing nuclear weapons.
"But this is a violation of the IAEA safeguard agreement, and the government's failure to disclose it hurts South Korea's credibility," Jo told reporters.
The government official said the IAEA was notified in 1987 when the programme was scrapped.
"No reporting before that had been required," he said.
Another government official said the development of the munitions had "very little to do with the IAEA".
The use of depleted uranium in munitions did not involve conversion of uranium, but a simple reshaping of the material and that process carried no reporting requirement, the second official said.
"This has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear weapons," he said.
The IAEA will report in November on its findings on South Korea's admission to enriching uranium and separating plutonium after inspections in South Korea.
-------- missile defense
Berlin to Spend Billion on Missile Defense
dw-world.de
21.10.2004
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1367828,00.html
Germany reportedly plans to spend over €1 billion ($1.25 billion) on the development of a new transatlantic anti-aircraft system over the next eight years.
According to German press reports Thursday, Bundestag rapporteurs after years of research have finally approved what amounts to the largest current trans-Atlantic defense project.
At a time when Germany is tightening its defense spending and streamlining its military, parliamentary factions agreed to order between 12 and 24 of the MEADS units, under development for the last few years.
MEADS (Medium Extended Air Defense System) is a ground-launched missile system which can destroy aircraft and missiles within a range of up to 1,000 kilometers (621 miles). The newspaper also reported that further development is planned on IRIS-T missiles.
Trans-Atlantic ties
The program is being hailed as a symbol of trans-Atlantic cooperation, with Germany set to contribute some 25 percent of the project's costs, the US shouldering over 50 percent and Italy financing 17 percent.
In an interview with the daily Berliner Zeitung, Hans-Peter Bartels (SPD) revealed that Berlin has earmarked some €1.142 billion until 2012 for the MEADS system development, and said that contracts with EADS (Germany), Alenia Maraconi (Italy) and Lockheed Martin (US) are expected to be signed by the end of 2004.
New defense concerns
According to Bartels, the first MEADS systems will be ready by 2012. The program, which will provide both defense for German airspace and can also be used abroad, will gradually replace Germany's existing Patriot radar guided anti-aircraft missile system.
The new ground-to-air system will also be able to destroy chemical, biological and atomic warheads.
Although the MEADS program was first drawn up in 1987 against a background of Cold War hostilities, experts believe the new defense system is even more relevant in the face of the international terrorist threat.
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Committee rejects public consultation on missile defence
CBC News
21 Oct 2004
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/10/21/missile_defence041021.html
OTTAWA - Liberals and Conservatives voted together in a House of Commons committee on Wednesday to reject cross-country public hearings into the U.S. ballistic missile defence system.
New Democrat Alexa McDonough wanted any vote on Canada's participation in missile defence delayed until the Commons foreign affairs committee could hold public consultations.
"Parliament is not the centre of the universe," she said. "Canadians demand and expect to be consulted on this incredibly important decision."
The government has already agreed to expand the role of NATO to provide the satellite and tracking information the missile defence system would need.
Both Prime Minister Paul Martin and Defence Minister Bill Graham have suggested Canada has little choice but to take part in the new continental defence plans.
This week, the Liberals agreed to hold a non-binding vote in the House of Commons on missile defence. Liberal MP Bernard Patry, who chairs the committee said the panel has no power to delay that vote. "The committee doesn't decide when a vote will take place in the House of Commons. It's irrelevant," he said.
Conservative MP Kevin Sorenson said he has been inundated with hundreds of e-mails demanding public hearings - which he said smells of an orchestrated campaign.
"It seems like it's more a political agenda than really getting to the bottom of the questions we want answered," Sorenson said.
Liberal MP Dan McTeague said public meetings should be held, but in Ottawa so the politicians can hear from experts.
"You can't have public consultation on a matter the public doesn't even understand yet," said McTeague. "So let's get on with it."
Besides, he noted, the Liberal caucus isn't going to let its members leave Ottawa on a cross-country tour while the government holds only a minority in the House.
-------- treaties
Paul H. Nitze, Missile Treaty Negotiator and Cold War Strategist, Dies at 97
October 21, 2004
By MARILYN BERGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/politics/21nitze.html?ei=5094&en=725258faf69b5647&hp=&ex=1098331200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all&position=
Paul H. Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms whose roles as negotiator, diplomat and Washington insider spanned the era from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and helped shape America's cold war relationship with the Soviet Union, died Tuesday night at his home in Washington. He was 97.
The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Elisabeth Scott Porter.
From the beginning of the nuclear age, whether in government or out, Mr. Nitze urged successive American presidents to take measures against what he saw as the Soviet drive to overwhelm the United States through the force of arms. Yet he may be best remembered for his conciliatory role in efforts to achieve two major arms agreements with the Soviet Union.
In one, he was successful in negotiating an agreement that eliminated intermediate-range missiles from Europe. In the other, he hoped to cap his long career with a so-called grand compromise in 1988 that would have severely circumscribed work on President Reagan's cherished strategic missile defense initiative in exchange for deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both superpowers. His efforts foundered when the negotiators ran out of time as the Reagan administration came to an end.
In a now legendary moment of the cold war, Mr. Nitze undertook a bold but unsuccessful personal effort to achieve an earlier arms agreement with the Russians. In 1982, acting on his own and, some say, superseding his instructions, Mr. Nitze took a walk with his Soviet counterpart in the Jura Mountains, where he tried to strike a bargain on a package dealing with intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
In that episode - which later became the subject of the Broadway play "A Walk in the Woods" by Lee Blessing - Mr. Nitze tried to cut through the bureaucratic tangle but was thwarted when both Moscow and Washington repudiated the agreement.
Mr. Nitze (pronounced NITS-uh) refused an appointment in the first Bush administration as ambassador at large emeritus, saying it would leave him with no clear responsibilities. He retired to an office at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University - a school that was named for him in 1989 - where he continued to write articles in a continuing attempt to influence policy.
With that, his long career in government came to an end, a career that began in 1940 with a telegram that said, "Be in Washington Monday, Forrestal."
The summons from James V. Forrestal, then a special assistant at the White House, lured Mr. Nitze from the lucrative confines of Wall Street to the first of many assignments in government that involved him in the supply of the Allies for the war effort, a survey of the impact of the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan, the feeding of the hungry of war-ravaged Europe, the creation of the Marshall Plan and crises in Iran and Berlin.
In the aftermath of World War II, Mr. Nitze became part of the remarkable group of public servants - George F. Kennan, Charles E. Bohlen, Robert A. Lovett, John J. McCloy - that coalesced around Dean Acheson to develop foreign political and military policy as the United States took its place as a major world power.
He was a senior State Department official in the Truman administration, an assistant defense secretary in the Kennedy administration, and Navy secretary and later deputy defense secretary of in the Johnson administration.
By the time he became one of the chief negotiators on strategic weapons, Mr. Nitze had accumulated more experience in national security affairs than anyone else of his time, to the point that his critics began to think that he believed he had a monopoly on understanding the political uses of nuclear weapons.
Postwar Policy Framework
Ever since 1950, when as head of the policy planning staff of the State Department he was the principal author of a study on the Soviet threat, Mr. Nitze took a dark view of Soviet intentions, seeing in the Kremlin a drive for world hegemony.
The study, known as N.S.C.-68, conceived of deterrence in military rather than diplomatic terms, warned against sole reliance on the nuclear deterrent and urged a buildup of conventional forces.
Its precepts became a cornerstone of American policy. In succeeding years, when the United States nuclear monopoly was broken, Mr. Nitze warned regularly that the Soviet Union was trying to achieve preponderant nuclear strength as a tool of blackmail or, in the worst case, to win an all-out war.
Later, when Mr. Nitze took his walk in the woods near Geneva to work out an arms deal, he confounded his critics, who considered him too hard-line because of his pessimistic views of the Russians.
A man of intimidating intellect, Mr. Nitze could be warm and affectionate or cerebral and brittle. He was a formidable bureaucrat with a brilliant mind and a persuasive pen. Out of government- as he was during the Carter administration- he was an equally effective critic, as he showed in the late 1970's as the mastermind of the opposition to the second strategic arms limitation agreement. He used complicated charts and computer printouts to warn that the treaty would lock the United States into permanent strategic inferiority.
Despite that vigorous opposition, once Mr. Nitze was back in government he urged President Reagan to comply with the terms of the treaty, even though it was never ratified, and to try to reach a better agreement with Moscow.
Among his colleagues there were those who said Mr. Nitze was so embittered at being excluded from the Carter administration that he could not assess the treaty dispassionately. He had too often been passed over for the major jobs, always on tap but never on top, as his old neighbor James Reston once wrote.
He always seemed too conservative for the liberal administrations and too liberal for the conservative ones. In an interview in which he looked back at his long career in government, Mr. Nitze acknowledged that it was one of his life's major disappointments that he had never been appointed to a cabinet-level position - as secretary of state or defense, or as director of central intelligence.
"I sometimes think I would have liked to be secretary of agriculture," he said with a rueful chuckle.
While his considerable expertise was in political-military affairs, his little joke was not far off the mark, and in his later years he tried to get the country to deal with environmental problems. For years, in addition to homes in Washington, Northeast Harbor, Me., and Aspen, Colo., he maintained a 1,920- acre working farm in Maryland on the banks of the Potomac, where he kept pigs and cattle and grew corn.
It was there that he rode horses, sailed along the Potomac and practiced the piano in a lifelong endeavor to understand, as one friend said, why Bach sounds like Bach.
A Confirmed Pessimist
For all that good life, Mr. Nitze - handsome with a full head of white hair and still athletic and trim in his later years, well-educated, intelligent and wealthy - remained a confirmed pessimist, having been deeply affected by seeing at first hand the outbreak of the two world wars.
Paul Henry Nitze was born on Jan. 16, 1907, in Amherst, Mass., where his father, one of the world's leading philologists, was a professor of Romance languages. The Nitze family did not live on a professor's salary, though. Mr. Nitze explained that "both my grandparents did very well." During his childhood there were summers in Europe, mainly in Germany, and the family was in the Tyrol in 1914 when World War I broke out.
Mr. Nitze spent much of his boyhood in Chicago. His father taught at the university, and he attended experimental schools before going on to Hotchkiss and Harvard. Generally a good student, he said: "I distinguished myself by getting the lowest mark ever given at Harvard, a zero, in a course on the history of economic thought. The most beautiful girl suggested that I go down to Newport for the weekend on the day of the final exam."
The zero left no permanent economic scar, for Nitze got rich in Wall Street despite the Depression, first at Dillon Read & Company and then in his own firm. He made one fortune from a company he started with other investors, known as the U.S. Vitamin and Pharmaceutical Company. Another fortune came from real estate investments in Aspen. In 1932 he married Phyllis Pratt, whose grandfather was a founder of the Standard Oil Company of New York and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Mrs. Nitze died in June 1987.
In 1993 he married Elisabeth Porter. She survives him, as do his four children: Heidi Nitze and Peter, both of New York; William, of Washington, and Phyllis Anina Nitze Moriarty of Boston; a stepdaughter, Erin Porter, of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia; 11 grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
There will be a memorial service at 11 a.m. Saturday in the National Cathedral in Washington, followed by a reception at the Metropolitan Club, 1700 H Street NW, Washington. Burial will be private.
Earlier this year, in one of his last public appearances, Mr. Nitze was present in Maine at the christening of a Navy guided-missile destroyer bearing his name, only the eighth time the Navy has named a warship for a living person.
Mr. Nitze was called to Washington by Mr. Forrestal - then an assistant to President Roosevelt - who had been president of Dillon Read, where Mr. Nitze had been a vice president.
It was 1940 and Mr. Nitze, who had seen Hitler during a visit to Germany, opposed United States entry into the war. But he quickly became active in the American war effort. He helped draft the Selective Service Act and, in 1942, became chief of the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare.
Subsequently he became director of foreign procurement and development for the Foreign Economic Administration. He was vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a study that years later caused him to question United States bombing strategy in Vietnam. After the war he headed the billion-dollar global relief program.
In 1950, during the Truman administration, he succeeded George F. Kennan as head of the State Department's policy planning staff. It was then that Mr. Nitze started making his mark as a political-military strategist whose dark view of the Russians surpassed those of Mr. Kennan and Mr. Bohlen, the nation's leading experts on the Soviet Union. Mr. Kennan found the language of N.S.C.-68 to be dangerously melodramatic and unhelpful.
Seven years later, although he was out of favor during the Eisenhower administration, Mr. Nitze was appointed to the presidential committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither that called for nationwide fallout shelters and warned of a "missile gap" that eventually proved to be illusory.
Mr. Nitze was a Democrat who changed parties to protest Roosevelt's effort to pack the Supreme Court. He returned to the fold at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration. Squeezed out of office because of his association with Mr. Acheson and discouraged at being on the outside, Mr. Nitze went back to his farm and, at the suggestion of his wife, who wanted to take his mind off his troubles, entered a horse race at the Charles County fair. When he won, he acknowledged, at least to himself, his longing for recognition.
President Kennedy offered Mr. Nitze several jobs and gave him 30 seconds to decide which one he wanted. He chose deputy defense secretary, but did not get the post until seven years later. In the intervening years he was an assistant secretary in the Pentagon and then secretary of the Navy.
When President Nixon appointed Mr. Nitze to the United States delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union, he played an important role in negotiating the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, but he resigned in 1974, charging that the "depressing reality of the traumatic events" related to Watergate was making the administration too eager to cut a deal with the Russians.
As an early supporter of Jimmy Carter, Mr. Nitze expected that he would finally get a major appointment and was bitterly disappointed when he was passed over once again. His views were too hawkish for the liberal foreign policy that President Carter wanted to pursue.
Mr. Nitze mounted a spirited - some called it venomous - opposition to the confirmation of one of his old colleagues, Paul C. Warnke, as Mr. Carter's strategic arms negotiator, incurring the wrath of old friends who labeled him an ideologue.
Critic of Carter Arms Pact
When Mr. Warnke was confirmed and the Carter administration achieved a second strategic arms limitation treaty, Mr. Nitze became its most vocal and effective critic, the intellectual guru for the Committee on the Present Danger in its campaign against the agreement. It was never ratified.
Mr. Nitze's hard line toward Moscow found greater resonance with the next president, Ronald Reagan, who put him in charge of the United States delegation to the talks on intermediate-range nuclear weapons. His mandate was to negotiate the so-called zero-zero option by which the United States would forgo future American deployment of new missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would remove the missiles it had targeted on Western Europe.
The two sides were far apart when Mr. Nitze went on the now famous walk in the woods to draw the Russians into a package deal. When the proposal was rejected by both sides, Mr. Nitze, instead of being reprimanded, was appointed special adviser to the president on arms control matters in 1984.
Though the Soviet Union rejected the zero-zero option, a few years later it accepted a more comprehensive arrangement, the so-called double zero agreement that limited medium-range missiles in Europe and shorter-range missiles as well. That agreement was signed on Dec. 8, 1987.
In November 1985, Mr. Reagan awarded Mr. Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet that same year Mr. Nitze once again seemed to be going out on his own to raise serious questions about Mr. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. While insisting that he favored the program, informally known as Star Wars, he laid down such stringent terms for its acceptability that he seemed to be torpedoing it from the start, in effect handing useful arguments to its opponents.
At the same time, he was seeking to make a deal that would limit the elaborate new antimissile system in exchange for cuts in offensive weapons, a two-pronged ploy that once again provided evidence of his cunning and skill as a negotiator, another example of a talent that contributed to a lifetime of survival in Washington.
"Some people say there are two policies in the executive branch," he said one day as he sat in his office on the seventh floor of the State Department just before his 79th birthday. "One is mine and the other is the president's, which is marginally so. Some of the things I've said are different from what the president has said, but all the things I have said have been approved by the president."
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Paul Henry Nitze, 1907-2004 Architect of Cold War Had Role in Ending It
By Don Oberdorfer and Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 21, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48221-2004Oct20.html
Paul Henry Nitze, author of the basic U.S. strategy against the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War and later a key negotiator of U.S.-Soviet arms accords that helped dismantle the global conflict, died of pneumonia Tuesday at his home in Georgetown. He was 97.
Nitze, whose senior government posts spanned nearly a half-century and eight presidents, from World War II to the end of the Reagan administration, was nearly without parallel for the breadth and depth of his experience in world affairs.
He helped devise U.S. economic warfare policy in World War II, was a major figure in initiating the Marshall Plan to rehabilitate postwar Europe and in the decision to build a hydrogen bomb, advised President John F. Kennedy in the Berlin and Cuban missile crises and had a hand in U.S. military policy in the Vietnam War.
Nitze helped rein in the nuclear arms race through negotiations with the Soviet Union. He assisted in negotiating four major arms control treaties with the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s and was among the leaders of a campaign to reject the SALT II arms control treaty.
An intense, wealthy and well-connected figure who enjoyed operating behind the scenes, Nitze never achieved a Cabinet position, partly because of his prickly personality. He was part of the old Washington establishment, steeped in a Yankee background, educated in elite schools and patrician in his bearing. "My body does what I tell it to do," he once informed a tennis partner, notwithstanding that he was past retirement age. Despite his dominating persona, he was an intellectual egalitarian and hired proteges who would intellectually challenge him.
Nitze was best known for two prominent and contrasting episodes in his long career.
In 1950, he wrote NSC 68, the official National Security Council blueprint for American strategy in the Cold War, which called for "a rapid and sustained buildup of the political, economic and military strength of the free world" to combat the power of the Soviet Union. Nitze, then chief of policy planning at the State Department, wrote that such an unprecedented peacetime mobilization was required "to wrest the initiative from the Soviet Union [and] confront it with convincing evidence of the determination and ability of the free world to frustrate the Kremlin design of a world dominated by its will."
The second celebrated episode was Nitze's attempt -- which he initiated -- to break the deadlock over intermediate-range missiles in Europe in mid-1982 during a "walk in the woods" near Geneva with his negotiating counterpart, Soviet Ambassador Yuli Kvitsinsky. When Nitze's unauthorized compromise became known in Washington, it touched off a fierce protest by conservatives leading to its rejection by President Ronald Reagan, even as Moscow also rejected it.
Nevertheless, the bold effort by an establishment conservative in an out-of-channels initiative with the Soviet Union captured the imagination of politicians and the public. Nitze's exploit became the subject of many articles and speeches and a play that won the American Theatre Critics' drama award in 1988.
Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who relied extensively on Nitze's advice in arms negotiations with Moscow, called Nitze the finest public servant he had ever known. In his 1993 memoir, "Turmoil and Triumph," Shultz described his former aide as an almost legendary statesman who was "a walking history of the Cold War" because of his involvement in nearly every major decision of the confrontation.
Soviet negotiators, who knew Nitze and his record well, treated him with deference in the negotiations of the late 1980s and referred to him respectfully in private as "the old man." At the Reykjavik, Iceland, summit of 1986, Nitze was paired with another trim, white-haired figure of great prestige, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, then chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, in an all-night bargaining session that made unexpected gains. The session paved the way for the first substantial arms reduction agreements of the Cold War.
Such was Nitze's impact that a Navy destroyer was named for him in April, only the eighth time in Navy history a warship was named for a living person. Journalist and author Strobe Talbott said at an Aspen Institute conference honoring Nitze that the ship, like the man, "is lean, it is fast, it's adroit, it's got by far the smartest electronics . . . and even the weapons that it has on board are an exquisite combination of offensive and defensive."
Nitze's outspokenness and his notable shifts of position on arms control issues prompted criticism from both liberals and conservatives domestically. Although he participated in negotiations aimed at achieving the strategic arms accord in the Nixon administration, Nitze led a campaign against the eventual SALT II agreement while out of government during the Carter administration. He bitterly opposed the nomination of Paul C. Warnke, a former colleague, to be Carter's chief arms negotiator, testifying that Warnke's views were "demonstrably unsound," "asinine" and a "screwball, arbitrary, fictitious kind of viewpoint that is not going to help the security of this country." Warnke, also a statesman of stature for many years, got the job over Nitze's objections.
Such activities led Talbott to write in "The Master of the Game," his 1988 biography of Nitze, that "when outside the government, he was part of the problem afflicting arms control, an implacable obstructionist and sometimes even a character assassin of those who were trying to advance the process. When inside the government, he tended to be part of the solution -- a dogged negotiator, an innovative deal maker, a bold infighter, a trusted counselor."
Internal disputes over the Strategic Defense Initiative illustrated Nitze's ability to formulate clear and relatively simple statements of policy about highly complex questions. Nitze's one-paragraph formulation of the desirable relationship between offensive and defensive arms was enshrined as the centerpiece of Reagan's 16 pages of secret instructions to Shultz on the occasion of the resumption of U.S.-Soviet arms bargaining in January 1985.
Nitze was born in Amherst, Mass., on Jan. 16, 1907, the son of a college professor of Romance languages. After graduating from Harvard University, Nitze and a friend, on a dare, canoed from Boston to New York. The young graduate then went to work on Wall Street on the eve of the Great Depression.
Because of good fortune in business and his marriage to Phyllis Pratt, an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune, Nitze became wealthy at an early age. Fascinated by world affairs, he devoted himself primarily to public service from the time he first came to Washington in 1940 at the invitation of his close friend, James V. Forrestal, later the first secretary of defense.
In 1943, Nitze and his relative by marriage, Christian Herter, then a congressman from Massachusetts and later secretary of state, founded the School of Advanced International Studies in Dupont Circle, which in 1950 became affiliated with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1989, Johns Hopkins renamed it the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Nitze maintained his office there as diplomat-in-residence from his retirement from government in 1989 until his death.
During World War II, Nitze was a senior official of the Board of Economic Warfare, which was charged with obtaining and allocating war-related resources. Near the end of the war, Nitze became vice chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey, which studied the impact of the air war against Germany and Japan, including the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Nitze joined the State Department in 1946 and took part in the planning and implementation of the Marshall Plan for European recovery. In 1950, he succeeded George F. Kennan -- the State Department's "wise man" and chief architect of the containment policy -- as director of the policy planning staff. He was a participant in the decision to build the hydrogen bomb and helped design the U.S. position in the Korean armistice negotiations and policy in Iran.
Nitze left government early in the Eisenhower administration but was brought back by Kennedy to be chief of the International Security Affairs office of the Defense Department, often known as the Pentagon's State Department. In that job, Nitze was deeply involved in the 1961 Berlin crisis and other famous episodes.
In his 1989 memoir, "From Hiroshima to Glasnost," Nitze revealed that he suggested at the height of the Berlin crisis that Kennedy consider a strategic nuclear strike against the Soviet Union to forestall a similar Soviet attack. Nitze wrote that in retrospect, the Berlin confrontation of 1961 posed an even greater danger of nuclear war than the more-celebrated Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, when Nitze was part of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council that met daily with Kennedy.
As secretary of the Navy and later deputy secretary of defense in the Johnson administration, Nitze organized the defense of the Pentagon against Vietnam War protesters, participated in bombing strategy in Vietnam and eventually advocated a unilateral bombing halt and a move toward negotiations.
President Richard M. Nixon recruited Nitze as a member of his strategic arms negotiating team with the Soviet Union in 1969. Nitze was among the negotiators of the 1972 SALT I offensive arms accord and the companion Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty on defensive arms. He was an early member of the SALT II negotiating team but resigned in the summer of 1974, shortly before Nixon's resignation.
In 1976, the final year of the Ford administration, Nitze was an influential member of Team B, a controversial group of outsiders who reassessed U.S. intelligence data and concluded that there was a sharply growing danger to the United States from a Soviet drive for nuclear superiority. Many scholars have since disputed its accuracy.
Nitze was an important organizer and member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a group of hard-liners who lobbied against the Carter administration's arms control policies. This put him at odds with a number of friends and former colleagues who were the authors of those policies. Nitze was a Democrat who was never partisan.
Shortly after leaving government in 1989, he was severely injured when a horse fell on him at his farm in Bel Alton, breaking his pelvis and leg. He recovered, but in 1993 colon cancer was diagnosed and he had a heart attack.
He told a Washington Post reporter in 1994 that he had a personal trainer and a wife who took him dancing at the River Club between their extremely active social engagements. Friends called him physically robust until recently and intellectually active.
In the 1940s, Nitze built the first ski lift on Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, Colo., charging a nickel for a ride in an old fishing boat attached to a smelly and unreliable motorized winch, his grandson recalled at the Aspen Institute event. With his sister Elizabeth Paepcke and brother-in-law, Nitze then put together the financing for Aspen Skiing Corp., which founded the winter resort. He was chairman and the largest shareholder until he negotiated a sale of the company to 20th Century Fox in 1978.
He was a trustee of St. Mary's College of Maryland from 1985 to 1996 and was described by President Jane Margaret O'Brien as "instrumental in raising St. Mary's academic profile to a national level."
In 1985, Reagan awarded Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Nitze's wife of 55 years, Phyllis Nitze, died after a long bout with emphysema in 1987.
Survivors include his wife of 11 years, Elisabeth "Leezee" Scott Porter of Washington; four children from his first marriage, Peter Nitze of New York, William Nitze of Washington, Anina Nitze Moriarty of Boston and Heidi Nitze of New York; a stepdaughter, Erin Porter of Salt Spring Island, B.C., Canada; 11 grandchildren; three stepgrandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- vermont
Delegates ask NRC to hasten VY report
Reformer
By Carolyn Lorié
October 21, 2004
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8860~2481856,00.html
BRATTLEBORO -- Vermont's congressional delegation has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to step up the release of the Vermont Yankee engineering inspection report.
The inspection was completed in September and a public exit meeting is tentatively planned for Nov. 9, at which time the report's preliminary findings will be made available to the public. The full report, however, will not be available until 45 days after the meeting.
In their letter, the delegation voiced support for more public and state input for the final report.
"We believe that the State of Vermont and the public should have time to review the independent engineering inspection report before it is made final, and be provided an opportunity to hear from and interact with the inspection team members regarding its contents," wrote Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and James Jeffords, I-Vt., and U.S. Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt.
They also asked that the two parties -- the New England Coalition and the Vermont Department of Public Service -- petitioning to intervene in the Vermont Yankee uprate case have access to the report so that they can amend their petitions, if necessary. Vermont Yankee is seeking to increase its power output by 20 percent.
Petitions to intervene had to be filed by Aug. 30. The state made the deadline after the NRC refused to grant a deadline extension. In its filing, however, the state maintained its right to amend the contentions, depending on the findings in the inspection report.
Amendments to NRC filings must pass very specific criteria and it is unclear if the state will be able to meet those criteria.
Finally, the delegation noted that the public will be barred from speaking during today's oral arguments before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which is part of the NRC. The state, the coalition, Vermont Yankee and NRC officials will present arguments on whether hearings in the uprate case should be granted.
Members of the public can submit comments in writing but will not be allowed to speak or ask questions. The NRC also plans to bar signs larger than 18 inches square and will not permit them to be waved or held up during the proceedings.
The NRC has stated, however, that the public will have opportunities in the future to comment on the uprate, including the exit meeting on the inspection.
"We expect the NRC to adhere to this promise, and ensure that the exit meeting is a participatory public meeting, allowing our constituents to learn about the results of the independent engineering assessment, to make statements, and to ask questions about the independent engineering assessment," wrote Leahy, Jeffords and Sanders.
-------- us nuc waste
Hanford tests plans for nuclear waste
The Associated Press
By SHANNON DININNY
October 21, 2004 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002068773_hanford21m.html
YAKIMA - Scientists have completed another round of tests on a process that would turn nuclear waste stored in underground tanks at the Hanford nuclear reservation into glass for long-term disposal.
About 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production sit in 177 aging underground tanks at Hanford, less than 10 miles from the Columbia River.
Plans call for using a process called vitrification to turn the high-level waste into glass logs for long-term disposal in a nuclear-waste repository. Construction already is under way on a plant to treat the high-level waste.
But the plant was not designed to treat the less-radioactive waste also found in the tanks, and researchers have been studying a similar process called bulk vitrification to treat that material.
The highly radioactive waste would be filtered from the lower-level waste as it flowed into the vitrification plant.
Bulk vitrification requires electric currents to be passed between electrodes in a mixture of soil and tank waste. The aim is for the soil to then capture the waste as it melts into glass.
Using about 2 gallons of liquid waste from one of the Hanford tanks - the largest quantity of actual tank waste to be used in the bulk-vitrification testing to date - scientists completed an engineering-scale test the week of Oct. 11.
CH2M Hill Hanford Group, the contractor hired to handle tank-waste cleanup, termed the test a successful "melt," resulting in a 220-pound slab of radioactive glass.
Detailed tests on the glass remain to be completed to confirm that the mixture meets standards for long-term disposal, said Rick Raymond, director of supplemental treatment for CH2M Hill.
"It's not a done deal, but it looks very promising," Raymond said yesterday. "We need to collect more information before any decision can be made."
The next step would be a full-scale test of the treatment process. Such a test would provide a solid technical foundation for evaluating the viability of the technology, said Roy Schepens, manager of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of River Protection, which manages tank-waste cleanup.
The Energy Department has applied for a permit to build and operate a pilot test facility to treat as much as 200,000 gallons of low-level waste. Public comment already has been accepted on the proposal, but the state Department of Ecology has not yet issued the permit.
For 40 years, the Hanford reservation made plutonium for the nation's nuclear-weapons arsenal. Today, work there centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup, to be finished by 2035.
Much of the cleanup involves retrieving and treating the tank waste, composed of radioactive liquid, sludge and salt cake. Most critical was the liquid waste in 149 tanks that had a single-wall construction, making them more susceptible to leaks as they aged.
An estimated 67 of the tanks leaked radioactive brew into the soil, contaminating the aquifer and threatening the Columbia River.
-----
Scientists complete tests on Hanford tank waste treatment
By Associated Press
Oct 21, 2004
http://www.tdn.com/articles/2004/10/21/area_news/news08.txt
YAKIMA, Wash. -- Scientists have completed another round of tests on a process that would turn nuclear waste stored in underground tanks at the Hanford nuclear site into glass for long-term disposal.
About 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production sit in 177 aging underground tanks at Hanford, less than 10 miles from the Columbia River.
Plans call for using a process called vitrification to turn the high-level waste into glass logs for long-term disposal in a nuclear waste repository. Construction already is under way on a plant to treat the high-level waste.
But the plant was not designed to treat the less-radioactive waste also found in the tanks, and researchers have been studying a similar process called bulk vitrification to treat that material.
The highly radioactive waste would be filtered from the lower-level waste as it flowed into the vitrification plant.
Bulk vitrification requires electric currents to be passed between electrodes in a mixture of soil and tank waste. The aim is for the soil to then capture the waste as it melts into glass.
Using about two gallons of liquid waste from one of the Hanford tanks -- the largest quantity of actual tank waste to be used in the bulk vitrification testing to date -- scientists completed an engineering-scale test the week of Oct. 11.
CH2M Hill Hanf