NucNews - December 15, 2004



-------- NUCLEAR 

Uranium puts different gloss on WMC valuation

The Sydney Morning Herald.

By Elizabeth Knight

December 15, 2004

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Elizabeth-Knight/Uranium-puts-different-gloss-on-WMC-valuation/2004/12/14/1102787085189.html?oneclick=true

During the 1990s, when nuclear weapons were being decommissioned, the demand for uranium hit a low point and the reserves that had been stockpiled by miners were more than enough to supply the nuclear energy needs around the globe.

But 18 months ago these stockpiles had become seriously depleted and energy users started to look for fresh supplies.

Over this period the price of uranium oxide has leapt to new highs and there appears to be some recognition that supply and demand are now out of balance - and in favour of suppliers.

Some of the traditional exporters, like Russia, are holding on to their reserves and further curtailing supply.

And who is one of the largest producers of uranium in the world? WMC Resources. The same company that seems to have hidden its light under a bushel until a unwelcome bunch of Swiss upstarts, fresh from gorging themselves on MIM, pitched a cheekily timed and opportunistically priced bid for the Melbourne establishment resources group.
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All of a sudden the outlook for the uranium price has been highlighted, having moved from $US12 ($15.80) a pound to $US25/lb and that as a long-term sustainable price too.

WMC has 8 per cent of wordwide production but 38 per cent of known resources. It's also got political stability.

Led by the Chinese, Korean and a herd of US utilities wondering where to source medium-term supplies of uranium, there is plenty of long-term demand, albeit not growing at great speed.

WMC has got some long-term contracts in place at $US11-$US13 which will need to be phased out over the next four years so it won't get a real kick from the upturn in the uranium price until 2008.

If one could factor this in tomorrow a $US1/lb improvement in the uranium price would equate to an additional $32 million in cash flow to WMC. And that's only if the current production rates are assumed.

If they pull more stuff out of the ground and ramp up production - which is the plan - then the cash flow implications are a multiple of this amount.

But even at the current rate of production, an increase of, let's say, $US5/lb would increase the net present value of the uranium reserves by $1.6 billion.

These are big numbers but let's also remember that they are still a long way off.

Long enough for Xstrata to pretty much ignore them for the purposes of its valuations.

Based on all this, plus WMC's announcement last week of a $1 billion capital return (give or take a couple of hundred million previously announced) plus an upgraded production report from Olympic Dam a few weeks ago, why is it that the WMC share price has done nothing?

(Oops, almost forgot the steak knives: a small profit upgrade also announced last week.)

The reason is that, while facing a bid, WMC is not being priced on fundamentals but on the likelihood of rival offer being placed on the table.

To date WMC's board has done everything in its power to ignore or discourage the overtures from Xstrata.

Its strategy is not so much to find an alternative bidder as to get rid of the underpriced offer from Xstrata and be left independent.

WMC chief executive Andrew Michelmore is aware that when his target statement hits the market in early January, it will provide the trigger for others to enter the bidding war.

I maintain the belief that, despite murmurs to the contrary from the likes of Rio and BHP Billiton, one of the other majors will put some money up to buy WMC.

It has a world-quality resource in Olympic Dam and it is easy pickings for the big boys.

But until there is anything new on the takeover front it is unlikely that all this good news out of WMC will do much to stimulate the share price.

But whether it's ultimately Xstrata with a higher bid or some other mining giant, the fact is that this undeveloped upside in WMC will probably end up in the hands of someone else and not the current WMC shareholders.

This company set itself up for a bid a couple of years ago when it undertook the demerger of its aluminium business.

It did so to ward off a different but, what it considered to be, undervalued bid. And it was only ever a matter of time before this exposed WMC Resources to predators.



-------- britain

Britain to bury other countries' nuclear waste: report

LONDON (AFP)

Dec 15, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041215152441.d29tgt83.html

The British government has decided to bury nuclear waste from Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland in Britain to raise money to pay for its own nuclear waste disposal, a newspaper said Wednesday.

The decision taken by Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt overturns a 30-year-old policy that Britain would not become a dumping ground for other countries' nuclear waste, the Guardian daily reported.

The move was announced Monday in a written statement by Hewitt to the House of Commons.

Hewitt was quoted as saying that the extra income of up to 680 million pounds (1.3 billion dollars, 984 million euros) would be used "for nuclear clean-up which will result in savings for the UK taxpayer over the longer term".

Environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, warned that it would leave Britain with thousands of tonnes of waste for which there is currently no form of disposal.

Both Conservative and Labour governments have previously said that waste arising as a result of lucrative nuclear fuel reprocessing contracts at Sellafield in Cumbria should be returned to the country of origin.

The opposition Liberal Democrats criticized the government for a "deeply irresponsible environmental decision".

The party's environment spokesman Norman Baker called it a "terrible attempt to offload some of the 48-billion-pound cost of cleaning up nuclear sites."

He recalled that Britain does not yet have a depository for its own nuclear waste.

"The Energy Act was supposed to help Britain clean up, but in order to pay for it we are becoming a nuclear dumpsite," he said

-----

'Nuclear dumpsite' plan attacked

bbc 15 December, 2004

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4097935.stm

Plans to allow foreign nuclear waste to be permanently stored in the UK have been branded "deeply irresponsible" by the Liberal Democrats.

The government has confirmed intermediate level waste (ILW) that was to have been shipped back to its home countries will now be stored in the UK.

The cash raised will go towards the UK's nuclear clean-up programme.

But Lib Dem Norman Baker accused ministers of turning Britain into a "nuclear dumpsite".

Waste shipments

Under current contracts, British Nuclear Fuels should return all but low level waste, but none has ever been sent back.

In future, only highly-radioactive waste will be sent back to its country of origin, normally Germany or Japan, under armed guard.

Intermediate waste from countries such as Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden will be stored permanently in the UK.

At the moment, this waste is stored at Sellafield, in Cumbria, in the form of glass bricks, untreated liquid waste or solid material in drums.

In a statement, the Department of Trade and Industry said the new policy meant there would be a "sixfold reduction in the number of waste shipments to overseas countries".

And it said highly-radioactive waste would be returned to its home country sooner, ensuring there would be no overall increase in radioactivity.

'Environmental millstone'

Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt said the new arrangements, revealed in a Commons written statement, would raise up to £680m for Britain's nuclear clean-up programme, under the new Nuclear Decommissioning Agency.

But the move has been criticised by environmental groups and the Liberal Democrats.

Mr Baker, the Lib Dem environment spokesman, said: "I have been warning for months that this would happen and raised it with government several times. But now our worst fears have been confirmed.

"Once again Britain's environmental and health needs are being ignored in policies driven by the Treasury and DTI.

"This is a terrible attempt to offload some of the £48bn cost of cleaning up nuclear sites.

"The Energy Act was supposed to help Britain clean up, but in order to pay for it we are becoming a nuclear dumpsite.

"The nuclear industry is an economic, social and environmental millstone that hangs around Britain's neck."  



<a name="du"></a>

-------- depleted uranium

How Good Is Good Enough?
Chapter 5: The best test

BY BOB EVANS
247-4758
HAMPTON ROADS, VA. Daily Press
December 15, 2004

http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du5,0,4881579.story?coll=dp-breaking-news

The world's most accurate test for depleted uranium exposure is now available - but only in Britain and Germany. The Pentagon says U.S. vets don't need it.

ABOUT DU

What is it?

It's a byproduct of making "enriched uranium" for nuclear weapons and fuel. "Enriched uranium" is somewhat misleading because processors take uranium with natural levels of radioactive isotopes, primarily Uranium 238 and Uranium 235, and remove as much of the U-235 as possible. Weapons makers and nuclear plant owners want almost-pure, highly radioactive U-235. What's left behind is primarily U-238 (other isotopes remain, in very small quantities). That substance has about 40 percent less radioactivity than natural uranium and is "depleted uranium."

What makes it so important?

It's proven to be the most effective tank-killing weapon ever. A round of depleted uranium no bigger than your little finger can stop a top-of-the line tank without depleted uranium armor. The weapons get sharper as they hit and plow through thick steel. They also create fireballs of thousands of degrees, a potent combination.

What is the controversy?

As they strike, the weapons get sharper by peeling off millions of shards of burning depleted uranium. Those burning pieces become microscopic dust that can be inhaled. Depleted uranium is a mildly radioactive, toxic substance that can cause damage to live tissue and cells once inside the body.

In Great Britain, veterans of the 1991 Gulf War are signing up to take the world's most precise test for determining exposure to depleted uranium.

The U.S. government advertises a test for its veterans of that war too. But the test that it offers can't detect uranium in low amounts, has a high error rate and uses equipment that's less sensitive and accurate than the machines the British are using. U.S. vets and soldiers who've had this test say they've been told they weren't exposed when, in fact, the tests were simply incapable of detecting whether depleted uranium was present.

Members of Congress have asked the Pentagon to look into testing programs in other countries. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to do that in April. But after that promise was made, the officer in charge of U.S. testing said he had no reason to gather such data because his test was good enough.

"Our labs would easily detect depleted uranium levels approaching U.S. peacetime safety standards," says Lt. Col. Mark Melanson, who runs the health physics program at the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.

One of those labs handles all depleted uranium testing for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Randall Parrish, a scientist who played a big role in developing the British test, says he can't understand why the United States is satisfied with an inferior test.

"It is incorrect to assume that a low concentration of uranium in urine means there is no contamination," he says, because there's no good data to support that conclusion.

The U.S. government's refusal to adopt a state-of-the art test also prevents researchers from finding out why tens of thousands of veterans of the Gulf War have debilitating illnesses, says Mohamad B. Abou-Donia, a researcher at Duke University.

Abou-Donia has conducted many significant experiments into the causes of illnesses suffered by Gulf War vets. He also recently published a study that reviewed available scientific work on the health effects of depleted uranium.

Knowing which veterans were definitely exposed to depleted uranium - not just those who might have been exposed to huge doses - would fill a huge gap in the research, he says.

But until a better test is adopted and used on a larger number of vets, that data isn't available, he says.

So there's no certainty about who was exposed and who was not. Until scientists can reliably determine who was exposed and who was not, they can't prove or disprove links between depleted uranium and individual veterans' health problems, Abou-Donia says.

Veterans and scientists have questioned for several years whether the use of depleted uranium weapons in the Gulf War is one of the reasons that so many veterans of that war came home weak and full of pain.

The weapons provided a decisive edge in tank warfare in the 1991 and 2003 battles in the Persian Gulf region. They also left behind millions and millions of pieces of easily inhalable black dust that's toxic and mildly radioactive. The dust is a necessary result of using the weapons to hit and destroy hard targets.

In recent years, researchers have shown that laboratory animals that inhaled depleted uranium dust developed cancerous tumors. They've also found that a single particle of depleted uranium can alter the genetic structure of nearby cells in ways consistent with widely held scientific beliefs about the way cancer starts in the human body. And they've found evidence that once depleted uranium gets in the body, it migrates through the bloodstream to the brain, testicles, lungs, kidneys and bones, where it can reside for years.

But all that research constitutes preliminary steps toward figuring out how big a problem the dust from depleted uranium weapons might be, researchers say. Meanwhile, the military plans to significantly reduce its investigations into possible health effects resulting from depleted uranium, as well as other possible causes of Gulf War-related illnesses.

IN BRITAIN, SAME COMPLAINTS PROMPTED DIFFERENT RESPONSE

The government's attitude toward critics of the weapon isn't much different in Britain. British and U.S. troops are among the few who actually used depleted uranium weapons in battles. A large number of British vets have also been complaining about health problems similar to those experienced by U.S. armed forces from that war.

Parrish says his government paid to develop the more accurate tests for veterans in part because of political pressure and in part because of medical experts' suspicions that existing tests yielded inconclusive and inadequate evidence of exposure.

Those tests were being used to dismiss the veterans' benefits claims. Some British veterans went to independent labs and received results that proved depleted uranium was in their urine. Analysis of 24 hours' worth of urine is the commonly accepted method of determining whether someone has been exposed to uranium of any kind.

The British veterans' pleas for a better depleted uranium test also got support from the British Royal Society, an invitation-only group of prominent scientists. The Royal Society carries clout in Britain: It dates to 1660, and its members are readily acknowledged as among the best scientific minds in the country. Society members decided to tackle the problem of Gulf War illnesses independent of the government, and after several years, they issued a series of findings.

While those findings didn't contradict the government's official viewpoint in many ways, the society did call for a testing program that could more accurately detect whether someone had depleted uranium in their body. That, coupled with activism by veterans groups, left the government little political choice.

It took about two years to develop the highly accurate tests, says Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester.

In addition to his teaching, he runs a laboratory at the British Geological Survey supported by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council. The council is independent of the government and is similar to the National Science Foundation in the United States, Parrish says.

Parrish and David Coggon, a scientist and chairman of the board that runs the testing program, say there are only four labs (three in England, the other in Germany) that have adopted the more rigorous testing regimen so far.

Part of the difficulty of testing for depleted uranium in someone's body is that you can't cut up a person and look for the uranium like you would if it were in a rock, soil sample or lab rat. That's why scientists look for it in urine. While not a perfect source, it's the best available right now, Parrish and others say. Even the U.S. military agrees.

Finding depleted uranium in the body gets complicated. Natural uranium is in everyone's body because it's in the food and water we ingest. Therefore, there's natural uranium in everyone's urine. It's difficult to accurately identify the depleted uranium as opposed to the natural uranium, in part because the amounts of both are so small.

Once obtained, the uranium in a 24-hour urine sample is typically measured in nanograms. A nanogram is one-billionth of a gram or one billion times lighter than a dollar bill. If a total of 1 nanogram of natural and depleted uranium are involved, the quantities of each are even lower. It takes extremely sophisticated machines to help find and identify the microscopic bits of depleted uranium.

The British and U.S. governments have been giving veterans and soldiers urine tests for depleted uranium for years. But unless the soldiers had relatively large quantities of uranium in their bodies, the tests couldn't detect depleted uranium apart from natural uranium without a high margin of error, Parrish and other scientists say.

LIMITATIONS ON TESTS CREATE QUESTIONABLE RESULTS

U.S. military testing officials say that unless a sample has a relatively high total uranium level, no attempt is made to determine how much uranium is natural and how much is depleted uranium. The level is deemed safe, and there's no need to tell the difference, they say.

As a result, U.S. and British veterans have been told for years that they tested negative for depleted uranium, Parrish and others say. Instead, all that had been demonstrated was that the methods used in testing were incapable of detecting depleted uranium in such small quantities.

Painstakingly careful methods to collect the urine and separate the uranium from the liquid and other chemicals in the sample are important, Parrish says.

Axel Gerdes, a German scientist who worked with Parrish to develop the tests, says a crucial difference involves the methods used to concentrate the uranium in urine before it's analyzed.

He says the labs used by the U.S. Army dilute the urine with water, which makes it easier to examine, and take other shortcuts that reduce the time and manpower to do the tests. That comes at the cost of losing the ability to detect small quantities with accuracy, he says, by a factor of about 1,000.

SUPERIOR SPECTROMETER USED BY BRITISH LABORATORIES

The British testing program also calls for using superior hardware to aid the analysis, Gerdes and Parrish say.

Several machines are employed for that task, they say, including a multicollector ICP mass spectrometer. A mass spectrometer is a machine used to determine the contents of an unknown substance. A multicollector ICP mass spectrometer is an even more sophisticated version that's specially equipped to accurately measure minute quantities of radioactive substances, including the various forms of an element known as isotopes. The way that scientists tell the difference between natural uranium and depleted uranium in a sample is by counting these isotopes, a process that at times involves tiny amounts of an element.

Scientists using the procedures and hardware developed for the British test are now able to reliably identify the difference between depleted uranium and regular uranium in samples with as little as 0.1 nanogram of total uranium per liter of urine, Parrish says. That's 10 billion times lighter than a dollar bill. All this is done with a margin of error of less than 1 percent, making it a very accurate test.

Lt. Col. Melanson, who oversees much of the Pentagon's scientific research into the health hazards of depleted uranium, says the most exacting lab test used on U.S. veterans and active-duty military personnel must have at least 3 nanograms of total uranium to examine per liter of urine. That's 30 times more than the minimum for the new British test.

The most sophisticated U.S. testing labs use a quadruple ICP mass spectrometer, Melanson says. Parrish and other experts in using mass spectrometry to identify materials say that's a much less capable machine than the multicollector type that the British are using, a machine that's been available for about 10 years.

Gerdes now works at a university in Germany and does testing there for privately financed groups. He has an even more sensitive version of the machine than the British labs do. He says it enables his lab to accurately detect even smaller quantities of depleted uranium.

Earlier this year, nine soldiers from a New York-based National Guard unit who had health problems after serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom had their urine tested at Gerdes' lab at the University of Frankfurt.

Gerdes says the nine veterans had anywhere from 1.6 to 5.7 nanograms per liter of uranium in their urine. Of those, five had little or no depleted uranium in their samples, while the others' samples contained 1.2 percent to 8.2 percent depleted uranium.

After publicity about the tests in the New York Daily News, those veterans were tested by the labs used by the U.S. military, says Michael J. Kilpatrick, deputy director for the Pentagon's office of health protection for deployed troops. None had enough total uranium in their urine to be concerned about, Kilpatrick says, and the U.S. labs didn't find any depleted uranium. The cause of the soldiers' illnesses remain undiagnosed.

Gerdes says the use of total uranium as a guide to the level of depleted uranium in someone's body is a mistake because there's often no correlation between how much total uranium is in a sample and what percentage of it was depleted uranium. That's an important point that the U.S. military seems to overlook, he says. The U.S. military says the only difference is that depleted uranium is less radioactive and therefore less harmful.

After initial reports about the results from Gerdes' lab involving the New York veterans, several members of Congress questioned whether the U.S. military should be looking at more rigorous testing. They directed the questions to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a congressional hearing April 20.

They specifically asked about tests being developed in other countries, in light of the different results involving the New York National Guard unit.

JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN SAID STAFF WOULD LOOK INTO TESTS

Myers told them he didn't know about the other countries' testing but that he would look into the matter.

Coggon, head of the board that oversees the British testing, says he's not aware of any effort from the United States to get information about the processes or procedures developed there. Melanson, the U.S. military official deemed the most knowledgeable about depleted uranium testing, says he's not familiar with the British program and sees no need to inquire.

The tests available in the United States are good enough, he says, and are capable of determining the presence of depleted uranium at levels nearly 1,000 times lower than the health safety standards established in the United States.

When U.S. troops or veterans are tested, they're usually told that their results didn't contain uranium outside the normal background levels of uranium intake and therefore aren't considered a health risk.

That standard is set by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is based on a representative sample of 1,006 people given urine tests collected and analyzed by another federal agency. But the NRC attaches a warning to those standards, noting it's "unknown" whether the levels of uranium in the survey "represent cause for health concern." It's merely a level of uranium in urine for a cross section of the population 6 years and older and says nothing of how healthy or unhealthy they are or will be, the NRC says.

The NRC further cautions that "more research is needed" to determine what the healthy level is.

In the draft of a 2002 report outlining the issues involved in using urine testing for soldiers' exposure to depleted uranium, Melanson's own staff pointed out those same limitations and warnings.

One thing everyone agrees on is that no one has been able to credibly determine how much depleted uranium is in someone based on the level of depleted uranium in their urine.

Research shows pretty clearly that when any uranium is swallowed, it passes through the intestines and is excreted quickly. Particles created by the use of depleted uranium weapons, when inhaled, stay in the body much longer, Pentagon research shows.

The tiny bits of depleted uranium created when the weapons hit hard targets tend to be what chemists call ceramic, which means they don't easily break down in liquid. Various forms of uranium have a wide range of solubility, Parrish says. The effect of the high heat from the explosions and other factors make this particular kind of uranium a big unknown regarding how much and how fast it breaks down in the body and enters the blood and urine.

DUST IN LUNGS DOESN'T DISSOLVE QUICKLY, STUDY FINDS

The Army's recently completed five-year $6 million Capstone study of those tiny pieces of depleted uranium concluded that there's "a significant source of uncertainty" regarding how fast inhaled particles would dissolve in simulated lung fluid. Still, the study concluded, there was no significant health risk from inhaling particles of depleted uranium that result from use of the weapons in combat.

The Capstone study said the vast majority of the particles created from use of the weapons and small enough to be inhaled took 100 days or more before dissolving halfway in simulated lung fluid. Generalizations were not easy, it said, but the smallest particles tended to be the least soluble. That means that pieces more likely to get more deeply into the lungs last longer.

Anywhere from less than 1 percent to 35 percent of the inhalable-sized pieces tested in Capstone dissolved halfway in 10 days or less, the study found, while 58 percent to 99 percent took more than 100 days to dissolve half their mass. Dissolution of half of the mass of a contaminant is the government's standard measure of how long it might take to clear something from the lungs after occupational exposures.

That data indicates that even the smallest particles could stay in the lungs for several years, Melanson says, though he doubts that they would pose any significant health risk.

So far, the British have tested only about 30 troops as part of making sure that their procedures are accurate. None of those people had depleted uranium in their samples.

Parrish says it's possible that by now, all the inhaled depleted uranium that will ever dissolve in these soldiers' lungs has dissolved and the rest will remain inside without a way to detect it. He also says it's possible that all the uranium is dissolved.

That's one reason why the testing program is so important, he says - to find out, instead of speculating.

U.S. government scientists still find evidence of depleted uranium in the urine of troops with shrapnel wounds. But those larger particles tend to be more soluble than the dust that's inhaled, the Capstone study says.

Some researchers say the relatively lower solubility of depleted uranium dust could spell even more trouble for the veterans than thought. If those little pieces in the lungs and nearby lymph nodes aren't dissolving quickly and getting flushed out of the body through the blood and urinary tract, then they're sitting next to live tissue and blood cells, emitting DNA-altering alpha particles for years.

Under this theory, it would be extremely important to know how much of the uranium in someone's body is natural uranium, as opposed to depleted uranium, even if there are small quantities involved. That's because the level of natural uranium in someone's body is mostly swallowed, and more than 90 percent of it is flushed from the body within a day or two through excretory systems. The swallowed uranium therefore doesn't stay in one place to irradiate tissue or blood for hundreds of days.

Richard J. Albertini, a cancer researcher at the University of Vermont, says those pieces of radioactive dust in the lungs, as opposed to the digestive system, are important for another reason.

LOCATION OF THE METAL MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE

Research indicates that inhaled depleted uranium can cause genetic mutations in blood, he says. Those mutations signal what very well might be the first step toward cancer. Because all of a person's blood passes through the lungs to pick up oxygen to be distributed throughout the body, large quantities of blood are subject to mutations from exposure to depleted uranium. In contrast, he says, veterans with shrapnel in isolated parts of the body aren't irradiating as much of their blood because their wounds are rarely in places where most blood circulates.

Kilpatrick dismisses these arguments, in part because natural uranium is even more radioactive than depleted uranium. He also dismisses a possible link between inhaling depleted uranium and the neurological problems that seem to form the bulk of complaints by Gulf War veterans.

None of the neurological problems associated with those vets has been noted in the 50 years of research involving workers in the uranium industry, he says. So if the quantities of either form of uranium are lower than the Pentagon testing program shows, there shouldn't be a problem, he says.

The British Royal Society's final report on the hazards of depleted uranium basically agreed with the Pentagon's views of the health risks. But it called for better testing to help scientists get a better understanding of the relationship between intake and risks, as well as help figure out what might be ailing individual veterans.

Abou-Donia, the Duke University scientist who recently published a survey of available research on depleted uranium, says data from better tests - such as the ones being done in Britain - could prove very helpful. "Absolutely. Any monitoring of this chemical would be helpful," he says.

Abou-Donia has been conducting experiments and other studies on various possible causes of Gulf War veterans' illnesses for several years. One of the biggest problems that scientists have in that field is a lack of fundamental data, he says.

If thousands of veterans in the United States got the new tests, the lack of data regarding depleted uranium might be eased, he says.

Scientists might be able to tell, for example, whether veterans who definitely have depleted uranium inside them also have a type of brain abnormality thought to be characteristic of the neurological symptoms among Gulf War veterans, he says.

But until now, no one has had a test considered reliable enough to detect small enough quantities to determine who was probably exposed and who wasn't.

Scientists don't know what causes the brain abnormalities in those vets, Abou-Donia says. But unlike other chemicals and causes under suspicion, the depleted uranium in urine is measurable and might still be in the body.

The level of exposure to chemical weapons, bug spray and other suggested causes of the veterans' illnesses isn't detectable at this late date because those toxins are long gone from the body and no one kept accurate records of doses and other information on the 1991 battlefield, Abou-Donia says. Those toxins have done their damage and are gone. That's one reason that finding the cause of the veterans' complaints has been so difficult.

ACTUAL BENEFITS OF NEW TESTS NOT DETERMINED YET

Gerdes, an environmental geochemist, says he questions whether there's a link between depleted uranium exposure and the illnesses suffered by veterans. But doing the science and the testing is an important step toward understanding the problem. "There is simply a need to do further research in this topic," he says.

Parrish says he's not sure what the testing is going to find. He notes that though the British government agreed to finance use of the new tests for veterans of the Persian Gulf War and peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, veterans of the continuing war in Iraq are tested with the less precise measurement.

A British Ministry of Defense spokesman says the new testing is considered important for veterans of the other wars because of the long period that's elapsed since the exposure and therefore the need to identify what might be smaller quantities.

He says the military is satisfied with the less-exact testing for veterans of the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, though some will be given the more sophisticated tests as an expedience.

The new testing program for the British veterans is just starting. Advertisements and notices directed at veterans started in late September, and about 300 people have signed up so far, Coggon says. About 1,500 are expected to sign up, says Charles Williams, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense.

Williams and Parrish say it will probably take six months to a year before enough tests are concluded to get an accurate picture of how many vets have been exposed and at what level.

Parrish says that as long as Britain and the United States refuse to let outside independent laboratories handle the testing, there will be suspicions that the truth about exposures and possible problems are being concealed.

The two labs in Britain performing the tests are considered independent.

He says he and other lab workers do the testing and analysis, but they don't know whether they're working on "dummy" samples or actual veterans' urine. That's one of the many levels of exactitude they've built into the process to help ensure accuracy. Some dummy samples might be "spiked" with known quantities of uranium and depleted uranium in another lab and sent out with the vets' samples, but others are taken from people known to have no depleted uranium in their urine. That keeps the labs on their toes, Parrish says.

In the United States, the most precise testing that the Pentagon does is handled at a national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory, Melanson says.

When that federal agency does testing for the military, it won't release any information about the tests conducted there and won't even answer questions about the procedures, error rates or scientific standards for the tests, says Kathy Harben of the disease control agency.

She referred all questions about the agency's testing for the military to the Pentagon.

VETS SAY U.S. DOESN'T WANT TO PAY FOR BETTER TESTING

Steve Robinson, executive director of the Gulf War Resource Center Inc., a veterans rights group, says he suspects there are two reasons that the United States uses the less sophisticated testing method.

First, he says, is the cost.

Pentagon officials say their tests cost $200 to $400 a sample, depending on whether there's enough total uranium in the urine sample for the government to attempt to determine whether it contains depleted uranium.

Melanson initially refused to divulge the cost of this testing, saying it wasn't a factor in his decision-making.

Parrish says his test costs about $1,000 each.

Robinson and other veterans advocates say the second reason that the U.S. government doesn't want to use the more sophisticated tests is they're afraid the tests might help show possible links between the highly valued depleted uranium weapons and veterans' health problems.

"These are very effective weapons, and they want to keep them," says Steve Smithson, assistant director of the American Legion's Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Division.

Kilpatrick says the critics are wrong.

He and Melanson say there's no need to identify the low levels of depleted uranium that the British can find because the tests that the United States uses can detect depleted uranium 1,000 times less than what's dangerous to health.

They cite World Health Organization, or WHO, and U.S. Institute of Medicine reports as authorities, based on 50 years of health research involving uranium miners, millers and processors. The Institute of Medicine is part of the National Science Foundation and is considered the country's best impartial health research organization. Kilpatrick and Melanson also cite the recently completed Capstone study. It involved measurements of inhalable-sized particles of depleted uranium that resulted from test-range firing of the weapons into a real tank, the hulls and turrets of tanks, and other combat vehicles.

Kilpatrick and Melanson say the Capstone research got its title because officials think that it provides the last pieces of data necessary to determine the health effects of depleted uranium.

Scientists who have been working outside the Pentagon to answer that question say there are still some important pieces missing before drawing such final conclusions.

Carolyn Fulco is one of the authors of the Institute of Medicine's reports on Gulf War illnesses. She says it would not be accurate to say her organization was as conclusive as the Pentagon officials when it comes to how much depleted uranium can harm someone.

"There was almost no literature on depleted uranium," she says. Nearly all of it was on uranium before it became depleted and in circumstances very different from the possible exposure resulting from use of the weapons, she says.

As a result, the institute recommended additional study into nearly all the health questions raised by the use of depleted uranium in warfare. The WHO report says the same.

Beate Ritz is an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in how internal radiation sources cause cancer. She's also the primary author of several of the most recent studies of the health effects of working with uranium.

SCIENTISTS SAY SAFE LEVEL OF EXPOSURE ISN'T REALLY KNOWN

When the Institute of Medicine needed an expert to review the report that Melanson cited to support his view that the U.S. testing program is adequate, it turned to her for approval. That's because she's one of the few people in the world qualified to pass judgments of that type, Fulco says.

Ritz now sits on an advisory panel for the institute's continuing review of possible causes of the illnesses suffered by Gulf War vets.

She says no one knows what the safe level of depleted uranium is inside someone's body when it comes to cancer and risk from radiation.

The field is rife with errors and misclassifications because actual testing to settle the matter with scientific assurance is almost impossible, she says.

"When you're looking at humans, you need large numbers of subjects," to make sure that you have accurate results, she says. "But you can't cage humans and feed them uranium and count the exposure for 20 years."

The next best thing is to pick an animal - and hope that you've picked the right one, she says.

Even then, rats, mice and monkeys often have genetic and other differences that can't tell you whether a human will react the same way, she says.

So to be sure, you have to try things out on humans. Or see what happens to them after exposure.

Lots of them.

Kilpatrick, Melanson and others say 50 years of experience watching the health and health problems of people who have worked as uranium miners, millers and processors during the Nuclear Age give them the number of people and the confidence to say that enough research has been done. They point out that they add in a large margin of error to make sure they're right.

They also dismiss the idea that depleted uranium exposures resulting from combat can be a serious radiation or cancer risk.

Ritz and Alexandra Miller, a researcher at the Armed Forces Radiobiological Research Institute, say that isn't a justified conclusion, as far as science goes.

"I don't see the data that supports that at all," Miller says.

The studies on people who worked in the uranium industry are often flawed and don't involve the same issues and exposures as soldiers on the battlefield, Miller says. The Institute of Medicine's report says the same thing, and so does the Department of Veterans Affairs' educational program for physicians and other health care workers.

Using uranium industry workers' health experiences as a benchmark might not be a good measure either, say critics of the military's dismissal of the health threat from depleted uranium.

Several studies by Congress' Government Accountability Office, or GAO, note that getting an accurate picture of nuclear workers' health is difficult. That's in part because for years, the government encouraged its contractors and managers to refuse to acknowledge work-related diseases and health problems. This helped mask the true death and illness rate to researchers.

As for whether the health standards are adequate, there's also a great deal of debate. The GAO says the government will probably need to spend more than $1 billion this decade to compensate nuclear workers for health problems - a higher cost than estimated because the number of workers with legitimate claims keeps rising.

In addition, the GAO says, there's little or no scientific agreement on what constitutes an acceptable radiation risk, even among U.S. government agencies.

SCIENTIFIC MODELS NEED TESTING TO PROVE ACCURACY

Kilpatrick and Melanson say the Capstone study's data-gathering enabled them to determine how much depleted uranium dust would be inhaled in the worst of battle circumstances. They say the calculations on that volume of dust, using mathematical and other models of human health adopted by government occupational and safety agencies, prove little or no adverse health effect from use of the weapons.

Those calculations create a new standard for discussing the issue, Kilpatrick says.

Ritz and Miller say the Capstone work doesn't change the fact that there has been insufficient experimentation on animals to prove or disprove the assertions of safety.

The calculations and models that the Pentagon points to are nothing more than theory waiting to be tested, they and other scientists say.

"You know the problem with models, don't you?" Ritz asks. "You get out of them what you put in."

The type of models that the Capstone study relies on for its conclusions are frequently shown to be flawed, she says. That's much of what health science is all about - testing the models and showing whether they work.

A recent example of how these models can be flawed occurred with the chemical paraquat, Ritz says.

For decades, the U.S. government had been using it - and giving it to other countries - to eradicate marijuana and other plants used to make drugs. Critics questioned the wisdom of those programs, noting that the possible effects of ingesting the drugs were not known.

Government officials dismissed the caution warnings.

For one thing, they noted that long-established scientific models said paraquat couldn't cause brain damage because its chemical composition kept it from penetrating through a layer of cells that protect the brain from impurities in the blood.

The layer of cells is called the "blood-brain" barrier.

"All that was true," Ritz says. But just a few years ago, one of her colleagues found that paraquat could get into the brain anyway.

Like other parts of the body, the brain needs amino acids to make proteins to keep going.

The brain has special nerves to directly transfer those acids to the brain, bypassing the brain-blood barrier. Paraquat is made of molecules that look like amino acids.

So the brain sucks up the paraquat molecules, thinking that they're amino acids, she says. "And it can cause brain damage when it happens."

That's one of many examples where the models aren't good enough.

And it's why sufficient research involving human cells and animals should be done to test the models thoroughly before declaring something safe, she and Miller say.

Vernon Walker, a cancer biologist at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in New Mexico, conducted a study that found that when rats inhaled depleted uranium, they developed genetic mutations indicative of cancer.

He says the government exposure standards and scientific models used to determine workplace safety - the barometers of safety used in the Capstone study - don't include the potential for developing cancer in the way that his experiments showed is likely.

The military has drugs, developed in the World War II era for troops exposed to radiation, that can reduce those mutations to safer levels, he says.

Experiments are being conducted to see whether they have the same effect on depleted uranium inhaled from the battlefield, as well as from shrapnel.

He says that based on his experiments and what he's seen from other science on the subject, he'd be taking those drugs if he were a soldier in Iraq and was exposed - especially if he were hit by depleted uranium shrapnel.

"I'd be taking the pills for the rest of my life," Walker says.

Miller says her research has found that a single particle of depleted uranium can deform cells and DNA, the basic building block of life, in ways thought to lead to cancer.

Others have shown that uranium in the body and inhaled uranium can make its way to the brain.

Those findings haven't solved the riddle of Gulf War vets' illnesses, but they're far from comforting about how safe the black dust from the explosions must be, Miller says.

Someone practicing good science shouldn't be closing the book on the subject and declaring a particular level of exposure safe under those under-researched circumstances, she says.

TOO FEW PEOPLE HAVE BEEN STUDIED TO KNOW THE TRUTH

Ritz says the same thing about the possibility that cancer risks might increase after inhalation of depleted uranium.

"Our human research, as valuable as it is, has a lot of severe limitations," she says.

At most, she says, it proves that we've been unable to detect anything, not that there's no risk.

There might be 6,000 people involved in the studies that the government is relying on, she says.

Perhaps that's enough to figure out whether something's toxic, she says, but it's far from enough to determine whether it's carcinogenic.

For cancer, if you had a million people and followed them for 50 years, you might be able to determine a safe level of exposure with confidence, she says.

But no study has ever attempted to follow uranium workers on that large a scale, not to mention people exposed to depleted uranium, she says.

After the Pentagon tested the New York reservists and announced that the soldiers tested negative for depleted uranium, a news briefing was called.

William Winkenwerder Jr., a physician who is assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, told reporters that 10 years of health studies found that "low levels of depleted uranium that our troops would be exposed to are neither a radiological or chemical health threat to our service members."

He also said there was no evidence linking depleted uranium to radiation-induced illnesses such as leukemia and cancers.

But Ritz says the failure to find a link to cancer at this point isn't surprising at all.

It will take about 30 more years before soldiers from the Persian Gulf War could reasonably be expected to start showing evidence of most cancers spawned as recently as 1991, she says.

Lung cancer - which many researchers say is the most likely form that might result from inhaling depleted uranium - would take a few years longer to show up, she says.

Some forms of leukemia and lymphomas might have started showing up in the past year or two, she says.

Those forms of cancer have also been identified as possible problems because lymph nodes are vulnerable when particles are inhaled.

Even if an outbreak of leukemia and lymphomas has begun among veterans of the Gulf War, it's unlikely that the data to prove it would have been collected and that anyone would know about it, the GAO says.

No one is comparing a list of cancer deaths in the 50 states with the names or Social Security numbers of veterans from the Gulf War, the GAO says.

And no one is likely to begin doing it anytime soon because the money has not been made available, the agency says.

NO MONEY TO TRACK VETS' CANCER RATE ANYWAY

In the past 13 years, only two studies have been financed to determine cancer incidence among Gulf War veterans, the GAO says, and both of them had limited ability to study the problem.

The studies' access to data is being curtailed as a result of financial and legal issues, the report says. Veterans in only a few states were included.

VA officials say they're studying ways to fill this gap in the data.

In the meantime, Ritz says, the best that we can do is guess what a safe level of exposure to depleted uranium might be.

Depleted uranium isn't alone in this respect.

Of all known carcinogens, "none of those in the carcinogenic fields have accepted a threshold level," where safe and unsafe can be identified with a measurable number, Ritz says.

Threshold levels are set by government agencies, not scientists, Ritz says.

"These are all policy decisions about what is acceptable," not to be confused with scientific proof, she says.

There are many critics of the military's approach to establishing safety levels and standards, but there are also many scientists who agree with how Kilpatrick, Melanson and others have handled the problem that they're faced with.

Terry C. Pellmar - who works at the same lab as Miller - co-authored the first research paper citing that depleted uranium from pellets embedded in the bodies of rats might migrate to their brains.

Still, she says, she doubts that depleted uranium is responsible for the neurological problems suffered by veterans of the Persian Gulf War. And she doubts that the government is making a mistake in the policies it's established regarding the safety of depleted uranium on the battlefield.

"As a scientist, I'm not sure of anything" that could be deemed absolutely safe, she says.

"As an individual, I would have no personal concerns."

Knowing the science as well as she does, she thinks that a soldier can trust the Pentagon's assessment of the risks.

If she were a soldier on a battlefield, she says, she would feel safe, as far as the danger from inhaling depleted uranium dust.

"We all live in a world that's filled with things that increase the chances of getting cancer," Pellmar says.

Even if Miller's research shows that a single particle of inhaled depleted uranium might increase the risk of cancer, that degree of increased risk is accepted by people all the time in everyday life. There's an increased risk of cancer if you spend time in smoky bars, she says. "Yet, we all walk into smoky bars."

Similarly, she says, there's increased risk from living in Colorado, for instance, because there's more uranium in the environment there naturally, compared with most states.

Yet thousands of people have been moving to Colorado for years.

So given the battlefield advantages that depleted uranium gives soldiers, she says, taking that little extra risk might be a good bet.



-------- india / pakistan

Pakistan recognizes China as market economy, nuclear plant deal signed

AFP  Dec 15, 2004
	
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041215/wl_sthasia_afp/chinaeconomypakistan_041215192115

BEIJING (AFP) - Pakistan recognized China as a market economy Wednesday and Beijing promised visiting Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz 150 million dollars in aid to build a nuclear power plant.

The state Xinhua news agency cited diplomatic sources quoting Aziz as saying Pakistan "recognizes China's full market economy status."

Details of the announcement were not given but the move is expected to help China strengthen its defences against anti-dumping charges.

China is actively seeking recognition from its trading partners as an economy that operates on market forces based on supply and demand, rather than on factors determined by the government.

Following a meeting between Aziz and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, officials from the two countries signed several agreements including an agreement to study the establishment of a free trade area (FTA) and one on preferential trade arrangements.

Wen said the two sides should speed up the FTA study and focus on cooperation in the fields of energy, natural resources and agriculture.

They also exchanged letters on the utilisation of 150 million dollars of the "preferential export credit" provided by China for construction of the second unit of a nuclear power plant at Chashma in Pakistan's central Punjab province.

China agreed to build the 700 million dollar, 300 megawatt power plant last year and both sides have insisted it is for civilian use only. The plant is next to an existing nuclear power plant also built with Chinese assistance.

Terrorism and extremism also topped the agenda. Wen said both sides should strengthen cooperation on tackling the two problems, which he said were directly endangering the security of both countries.

While trade and economic ties were booming, Aziz said, there was still "great potential" for growth.

He said he hopes more Chinese capital will flow into Pakistan, noting that Pakistan's economy had undergone profound changes in the past five years and offered huge opportunities for foreign companies including Chinese firms.

Xinhua said China's current contracted investment in Pakistan reached four billion dollars, according to Pakistani statistics.

Pakistan can serve as a base for Chinese companies to increase sales to the Middle East and Africa, Aziz said.

He said Pakistan is fully committed to opening up to the outside and will not create any obstacles for foreign investment, adding that his government is considering establishing duty-free zones nationwide to attract investors.

Aziz is on a three-day official visit to China, his first to the country's traditional ally since assuming office in August. 

-----

Pakistan and India to start nuclear hotline, no deal on missile tests

(AFP) Dec 15, 2004
	
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041215/wl_sthasia_afp/pakistanindianuclear_041215173745

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistan and India agreed to push forward plans for a nuclear hotline after two days of talks but failed to reach a deal on advance warning of ballistic missile tests, officials said.

The South Asian rivals said they would "operationalize... as soon as possible" the hotline between their foreign secretaries, which had been agreed on in principle at earlier talks in June.

However, the meetings on so-called confidence-building measures did not produce an accord on giving each other prior notification of missile test-fires, officials said.

Both sides insisted they had made progress during the meetings between senior officials in Islamabad, which are the latest stage in a step-by-step peace process begun in January.

"We have agreed to operationalize it as soon as possible," Tariq Osman Hyder, additional secretary at Pakistan's foreign ministry, who led Pakistan's delegation told reporters when asked about the hotline.

The results of the talks would be submitted to the Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries, who are scheduled to meet on 27-28 December, according to a joint statement issued by the two parties.

When pressed why the talks had failed to produce both agreements as had been predicted by officials earlier, the two sides blamed the "complex" issues involved.

India and Pakistan have a long history of bad blood since their independence from Britain in 1947 and have fought three wars, two of them over the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir (news - web sites).

"These agreements are extremely complex. They raise many legal issues," said Hyder. "When we want to go forward on them we have to examine them carefully and I think both sides understand the concerns of the other side."

Pakistan and India held back-to-back nuclear detonations in May 1998 and have twice come close to war since then over disputed Kashmir, which is divided between the two and claimed by both in full.

The two countries hold frequent missile tests although they have an informal arrangement to give each other prior notification. They had been expected to formalize the agreement in a sign that the peace process was on track.

However Hyder added: "South Asia is no longer a nuclear flashpoint."

The head of the Indian delegation at the talks, Meera Shankar, said the two sides were trying to resolve the issue in a "mutually acceptable" way and would continue discussions at a later date.

"I would not characterise these as hurdles but agreements of this nature are complex and raise many questions," she told reporters after the talks.

The joint statement said the hotline was intended to "prevent misunderstanding and reduce risks relevant to nuclear issues."

The two sides also agreed to upgrade an existing hotline between India and Pakistan's senior military officers.

Earlier Pakistani and Indian officials held the first talks on conventional weapons under the current peace dialogue.

"The two sides held discussions on conventional arms to understand each others' perspective. It was a get-to-know meeting," foreign ministry spokesman Masood Khan said after the meeting.

India has a clear edge in conventional military strength over Pakistan, and Islamabad wants a balance for regional stability. 



-------- iran

Iran Tells Russia to Expand Nuclear Ties

By Maria Golovnina

Dec 15, 2004 Reuters
	
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041215/wl_nm/nuclear_russia_iran_dc_1

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Iran told nuclear partner Russia on Wednesday it would have to show "readiness" to expand nuclear ties with Tehran to secure a solid share of Iran's atomic market in face of growing competition from Europe.

Moscow has built a $1 billion nuclear reactor in Iran in defiance of strong criticism from the United States, which believes Tehran can use the facility to make atomic bombs.

But Russia's stance on Iran toughened since President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites)'s re-election in March gave more priority to ties with Washington, with both softening their criticism of each others' military operations in Iraq (news - web sites) and Chechnya (news - web sites).

Gholamreza Shafei, Iran's ambassador to Moscow, said further nuclear cooperation with Russia depended "on how much such ties will correspond with our national interests and also how much there is willingness from Russia to cooperate with ... Iran to broaden ties in peaceful nuclear energy use."

In written answers to Reuters questions, he also said: "Our ties with Russia depend on how much the Russian side is effectively ready to cooperate with us."

Russia has enjoyed a near-monopoly status on Iran's nuclear market since the early 1990s when the two agreed to build a 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant near the port of Bushehr.

Seeking to remove Bushehr as a irritant in relations with the United States, Russia has maintained Iran's nuclear program is peaceful.

But diplomats in Moscow have hinted Iran is unhappy with the way Russia has dragged its feet on Bushehr, delaying construction schedules at times of political sensitivity.

Russia is now worried it might lose a key nuclear market in the Middle East after the European Union (news - web sites)'s "Big Three" offered last month to help Iran with peaceful atomic technology if it abandons its nuclear fuel production capabilities.

Britain, France and Germany are currently in talks with Iran aimed at brokering a long-term agreement on Tehran's nuclear activities. Iran says its nuclear facilities will only be used to generate electricity, and Russia agrees.

ENEMIES BECOME RIVALS

Shafei's remarks only confirmed Russian worries. But he repeated Moscow would still be able to play a big role in Iran.

"Under such circumstances, the previous enemies of nuclear cooperation between Russia and Iran will turn into 'new rivals' and 'Iran's partners'," he said.

"It's true that under such circumstances Russia will face competitors on the Iranian market but at the same time the Iranian market will stop being closed and limited.

"Russia will be able to play an active role at least in half of this big market, and it will be definitely bigger than the previously narrow market," he said.

Russia's foreign ministry was not available for comment.

A high-ranking Russian official familiar with the Iranian situation said Tehran could be simply trying to use the EU offer as a bargaining chip to get the best deal out of Russia.

"We are ready to expand cooperation with Iran, but it's not easy. Iranians could be difficult too. When European nuclear companies enter the Iranian market, we'll deal with it. But it's too early to talk about this yet," the official said.

Western diplomats in Vienna said leading nuclear firms in the EU would be loathe to offer any nuclear technology to Iran for fear of jeopardising lucrative U.S. business. (additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in Vienna) 

-----

Iran unconcerned about ElBaradei's fate at IAEA

(Reuters) Dec 15, 2004

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7098630
	
TEHRAN  - Iran does not care whether Mohamed ElBaradei remains head of the U.N. atomic watchdog, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator said on Wednesday following reports that Washington was trying to oust him.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that U.S. officials were sifting through intercepted phone conversations between ElBaradei and Iranian officials looking for evidence that he was helping Tehran rebuff U.S. accusations it is seeking atomic bombs.

ElBaradei has said he plans to stand for re-election next year for a third term as secretary-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is engaged in a probe of Iran's nuclear activities.

Some U.S. and other officials have privately complained that ElBaradei has been too soft on Iran, which denies seeking nuclear arms.

But Iran's Supreme National Security Council secretary Hassan Rohani, asked whether ElBaradei's re-election would affect Iran's nuclear case, said:

"We are not cooperating with the people of the IAEA but rather we are cooperating with an international agency.

"It does not matter to us who the secretary-general is," the ISNA students news agency quoted him as saying.

Rohani added that Tehran was impatient for results from talks with the European Union, which is hoping to persuade Iran to scrap potentially weapons-related nuclear activities in return for economic, technological and security cooperation.

"One of our new red lines is that this round of negotiations should not be long. It will be unacceptable to us if we feel negotiations are a waste of time," he said.

Iran has frozen key nuclear activities such as uranium enrichment while the EU talks continue. But Iran says it will resume atomic work within three to six months.

"We are committed to the agreement and, as long as Europe respects its commitments, carries them out carefully, the negotiations move forward and our goals in these negotiations are achieved, we will remain committed," Rohani said. 



-------- korea

U.S. plays down division with South Korea on North Korea

Wed Dec 15, 2004 06:22 PM ET (Reuters)
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=ZQVQ5QU3B0BWWCRBAE0CFEY?type=topNews&storyID=7106945

WASHINGTON - Washington on Wednesday played down differences with South Korea over Seoul's more accommodating approach to communist North Korea but said the two allies must avoid sending conflicting signals.

Chris Hill, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, was responding to concerns of a possibly widening rift with Seoul over how to confront the impoverished but well-armed North Koreans over their nuclear weapons ambitions.

He acknowledged there were differences of approach, but told a program sponsored by the Asia Society and the Woodrow Wilson Center, "Despite what people think ... we are in sync with the Koreans on how we address this (nuclear) issue."

He said the two countries were both committed to six-party talks to defuse the North Korean threat and that critical comments by South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun during recent speeches in Los Angeles and Europe were not worrisome.

Roh appeared to support the long-standing North Korean argument for its arms policy and challenged any country, including the United States, that might consider using force against the North.

Hill played down the significance of the speech, but said: "We have to work with them (South Koreans) and make sure the North Koreans are not getting conflicting signals."

The United States, after decades of sanctions on Pyongyang, is keen to keep the pressure on the government there, and has mounted naval exercises in the area and taken steps to crack down on hard currency flows that underwrite the government.

IN THE FIRING LINE

But South Korea, on the firing line of the North's artillery batteries, fears a possible flood of refugees and has been providing aid to the North, including the first major joint venture since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Touching on the difference of approach, Hill said the United States "often associates instability with opportunity" while the South associates instability with "tragedy" and hence "operates carefully and on that basis."

Despite a diplomatic flurry aimed at scheduling a new round of six-party negotiations, North Korea has hardened its resistance and some analysts say it was encouraged in its tough line by Roh's statements.

The last round of talks -- also including China, Russia and Japan -- took place in June.

Hill acknowledged it was hard for the United States and its partners in the talks to asses the extent of Pyongyang's highly enriched uranium program, which could be used to produce bomb fuel. But all five partners agree the program exists, he said.

Hill said the United States must respect South Koreans' close proximity to North Korea, their "right to look for efforts to engage their northern neighbors" and the fact that they sometimes will take a different approach from Washington.



-------- missile defense

Canada won't fund missile shield: PM
 
Windsor Star December 15, 2004

http://www.canada.com/fortstjohn/story.html?id=f02a4367-b138-4f32-ae17-32da81fb4a02

Prime Minister Paul Martin said Tuesday he does not believe the U.S. ballistic missile shield will succeed in shooting down incoming rockets, as he threw up new roadblocks to counter President George W. Bush's strong appeal for Canada to join his continental defence plan.

Canada will not put any money into building the missile shield and it will not allow Washington to station rockets on Canadian soil as the price of participation in the multibillion-dollar program, Martin told Global National in a year-end interview.

In another issue that could cause friction with Bush, Martin said Canada was prepared to accept U.S. citizens who do not want to serve in the war in Iraq.

"In terms of immigration, we are a country of immigrants and we will take immigrants from around the world. I'm not going to discriminate," said Martin, when reminded that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau opened Canada's doors to draft dodgers and deserters during the Vietnam War.

'AN ILLEGAL WAR'

When asked whether the prime minister was referring to ongoing attempts by Jeremy Hinzman, a 26-year-old U.S. deserter, to gain asylum in Canada after refusing to serve in what he calls "an illegal war," Martin spokesman Scott Reid said the prime minister "was not commenting on any individual case and certainly was not sending a signal to the immigration board."

Canada will not put any money into building the missile shield and it will not allow Washington to station rockets on Canadian soil as the price of participation in the multibillion-dollar program, Martin told Global National in a year-end interview.

In another issue that could cause friction with Bush, Martin said Canada was prepared to accept U.S. citizens who do not want to serve in the war in Iraq.

"In terms of immigration, we are a country of immigrants and we will take immigrants from around the world. I'm not going to discriminate," said Martin, when reminded that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau opened Canada's doors to draft dodgers and deserters during the Vietnam War.

'AN ILLEGAL WAR'

When asked whether the prime minister was referring to ongoing attempts by Jeremy Hinzman, a 26-year-old U.S. deserter, to gain asylum in Canada after refusing to serve in what he calls "an illegal war," Martin spokesman Scott Reid said the prime minister "was not commenting on any individual case and certainly was not sending a signal to the immigration board."

Martin was emphatic Canada's participation in the missile defence program would depend on a key decision-making role in the U.S. command and control structure that operates the shield.

"The decision as to whether or not we participate in the ballistic missile defence system is going to depend on whether, in fact, Canada can have a voice in the structure," Martin said in the interview, to be broadcast Christmas Day.

"I'm not going to put money into it. I'm going to put money into our priorities ... Having missiles on our territory is not one of those priorities."

The conditions laid out by Martin are the clearest indication to date the Liberal government is increasingly disinterested in the missile defence program despite Bush's public appeal during his visit to Canada on Dec. 1.

Martin has been under heavy pressure from the Liberal caucus and the party's grassroots to reject the defence shield, which he admitted may not even work to knock down incoming missiles from rogue states or global terrorists.

"Do I believe it could work tomorrow? I suspect there are very few people out there who testify that it could. Do I believe eventually technology could bring it to that point, in all likelihood, but I'm not a rocket expert," he said in another TV interview.

Martin said Canada is not even close to negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. on missile defence, but added any document must include guarantees that it would not lead to the weaponization of space.

Canada would immediately pull out of the defence shield if it were to join and the U.S. subsequently put missile weapon systems in space.

"I don't believe space belongs to any country," Martin said. "We will not engage in the weaponization of space."

Martin acknowledged for the first time that next year's budget will pump money into Canada's hard-pressed military, including funds to allow the Armed Forces to recruit 5,000 more troops over the next five years.

Martin admitted he struggled over his personal belief in the traditional marriage but finally decided same-sex weddings were a right entitled to all citizens regardless of their sexual orientation.

Martin was emphatic Canada's participation in the missile defence program would depend on a key decision-making role in the U.S. command and control structure that operates the shield.

"The decision as to whether or not we participate in the ballistic missile defence system is going to depend on whether, in fact, Canada can have a voice in the structure," Martin said in the interview, to be broadcast Christmas Day.

"I'm not going to put money into it. I'm going to put money into our priorities ... Having missiles on our territory is not one of those priorities."

The conditions laid out by Martin are the clearest indication to date the Liberal government is increasingly disinterested in the missile defence program despite Bush's public appeal during his visit to Canada on Dec. 1.

Martin has been under heavy pressure from the Liberal caucus and the party's grassroots to reject the defence shield, which he admitted may not even work to knock down incoming missiles from rogue states or global terrorists.

"Do I believe it could work tomorrow? I suspect there are very few people out there who testify that it could. Do I believe eventually technology could bring it to that point, in all likelihood, but I'm not a rocket expert," he said in another TV interview.

Martin said Canada is not even close to negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. on missile defence, but added any document must include guarantees that it would not lead to the weaponization of space.

Canada would immediately pull out of the defence shield if it were to join and the U.S. subsequently put missile weapon systems in space.

"I don't believe space belongs to any country," Martin said. "We will not engage in the weaponization of space."

Martin acknowledged for the first time that next year's budget will pump money into Canada's hard-pressed military, including funds to allow the Armed Forces to recruit 5,000 more troops over the next five years.

Martin admitted he struggled over his personal belief in the traditional marriage but finally decided same-sex weddings were a right entitled to all citizens regardless of their sexual orientation.

--------

Important Test for Missile-Defense System Ends in Failure

By DAVID STOUT
Published: December 15, 2004
NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/politics/15cnd-miss.html?ei=5094&en=6fc01398c045bf2b&hp=&ex=1103173200&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1103146232-s73Xstu91Z1uyyVsXkcr7g

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - An important test of the
United States' emerging missile-defense system
ended in an $85 million failure early today as an
interceptor rocket failed to launch as scheduled
from the Marshall Islands, the Pentagon said.

A target rocket carrying a mock warhead was
successfully launched from Kodiak, Alaska. But the
interceptor, which was to have gone aloft 16
minutes later and picked off the target 100 miles
over the earth, automatically shut down instead
because of "an unknown anomaly," the Defense
Department's Missile Defense Agency said.

Despite the disappointment, today's event was not
a total failure, said Richard A. Lehner, an agency
spokesman. He said "quite a bit" had been learned
from the aborted test, which he called "a very
good training exercise." He noted that the rocket
that failed to rise can be used later. The target
rocket landed in the ocean some 3,000 miles from
Kodiak, he said.

Mr. Lehner said he could not predict when the
cause of the shutdown might be determined. No
future tests have been scheduled.

The missile agency had attempted a test several
times this month, but weather and other factors
caused postponements. Today's test was to have
been the most advanced so far, Mr. Lehner said.
The interceptor was equipped with the same type of
booster rocket that the defense system is to use
when it is fully operational.

The test was also to have been the first for the
multibillion-dollar program since Dec. 12, 2002.
That test was also a failure; the interceptor did
not separate from its booster rocket, missed its
target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the
atmosphere.

Before today's test, the Pentagon agency had
conducted eight tests with interceptor vehicles,
scoring hits in five. Some critics of the Missile
Defense Agency, which has spent more than $80
billion since 1985, say the entire program is
unrealistic, and that the tests have been
scripted.

On the contrary, the agency says. It says the
tests are designed to answer specific questions
and "to build confidence in the system that we are
working to design." Although individual tests are
expensive, Mr. Lehner said fewer are necessary
than with missiles of years past because of
advanced modeling and simulation techniques.

The missile system under development is a
scaled-down version of the "Star Wars" defense
envisioned by President Ronald Reagan two decades
ago against a rain of missiles from the Soviet
Union. But the end of the cold war made President
Reagan's original vision outdated. The system now
contemplated would guard the United States against
attack from smaller "rogue nations."

The administration of President Bill Clinton
explored a much less advanced system. Then George
Bush pledged during the 2000 campaign to push for
a scaled-down version of the Reagan plan.

It was not immediately clear how long today's
failure might delay deployment of the system. In
December 2002, President Bush said he hoped the
system would be operational by the end of 2004.


-------- terrorism

Dirty Bombs Waiting To Happen?

Dec. 15, 2004 CBS 60 Minutes

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/14/60II/printable660982.shtml

One of the dirty little secrets about international terrorism is that it doesn't take much radioactive material to make a dirty bomb.

And there’s plenty of that material in Georgia – the Georgia that used to be part of the Soviet Union.

During a year-long investigation, 60 Minutes Wednesday found that radioactive material just keeps turning up in Georgia – on military bases, in the woods, outside apartment buildings.

It’s not difficult to find, and as Correspondent Dan Rather reports, it's not difficult to transport, either. Georgia, now an independent country, was known for decades as a lawless, corrupt place. And now, terrorism has become a major challenge for Mikhail Saakashvili, the smart, energetic, new president of the country.

"Terrorism is a valid concern from everybody," says Saakashvili, who was educated in the United States.

Is he concerned about the possibility of terrorists getting hold of some of these radioactive materials? "We still have certain signs that we should be concerned," says Saakashvili. "Because terrorists are getting more sophisticated. And sometimes, they could be more sophisticated than the state."

Listen to Tamaz's story, and you'll realize that in Georgia, terrorists don't have to be very sophisticated to find and transport enough radioactive material to make a dirty bomb. Tamaz has been driving his beat-up taxi in the capital of Tblisi for more than 30 years. Last year, he says two customers told him to drive to the train station. Then, they asked him to make a detour and go up a hill.

Tamaz says he wondered where they were taking him. He was asked to stop and load some very heavy boxes into his trunk. On the way back down the hill, the police pulled him over, but only because the cab was so weighted down in the back.

Tamaz said he got out of the car and showed the officer his license. Then he was asked to open the trunk and says he almost fainted when he saw what was inside.

Pictures taken after Tamaz was stopped showed what was in his trunk: heavy boxes lined with lead and stamped with radiation symbols. Inside were two kinds of radioactive material, Cesium 137 and Strontium 90, and some poisonous gas. There are reports the materials were being transported to the Turkish border.

"Concern is that this stuff might end up in the hands of terrorists," says Gela Bezhuashvili, Georgia’s national security adviser. "This is a real threat that they, any terrorist group, can find the stuff, take it and then explode it either in Georgia or anywhere else." Long before Sept. 11, mountainous Georgia was known as a place where terrorists could easily hide. Georgia has a rich, centuries-old culture and heritage, but it’s in a dangerous part of the world. Chechnya is just across the border.

Russia has dumped or left all kinds of dangerous materials in Georgia that are difficult to keep secure. And it's not just radioactive materials. A director of one research facility showed 60 Minutes Wednesday in Tblisi a small room with several refrigerators packed with deadly pathogens and diseases.

One refrigerator has a collection of anthrax; another has plague; another tularemia; and another botulism.

The anthrax, plague and botulism -- and lots of radioactive materials -- were all left behind when the Russians departed in the '90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russians abandoned the materials at about 150 military bases without telling or warning anybody. And they didn't leave a clean-up fund.

"We didn’t get much cooperation on those issues from the Russians," says Saakashvili. "Unfortunately, old Russian military bases, they left the country without proper agreement on how those things should have been handled. It was rather chaotic process."

In fact, it was so chaotic that no one had any idea what the Russians had dumped there until 1997. That’s when a dozen Georgian soldiers accidentally picked up capsules of Cesium 137 at a military base. Most of them received severe radioactive burns.

In 1998 and 1999, radioactive Strontium 90, used by the Russians in an airline navigation system, were found in a remote mountain village. With no biohazard suits available, Georgian authorities did their best to remove the material safely. Then, near an apartment building in Tblisi, more Cesium 137 was found just lying on the ground. In the winter of 2002, more Strontium was removed from a village called Lia. Three woodcutters were severely injured.

Georgia has also been a pipeline for the international transport of dangerous materials. In December 2001, an Armenian man was arrested carrying uranium that apparently had come from a nuclear power plant in Armenia. He told a television reporter that "I wanted to sell each container for $7,000."

During 60 Minutes Wednesday's year-long investigation in Tblisi, they were told someone could buy enough Cesium to make a dirty bomb for $10,000.

Georgia’s former environmental minister, Nino Chkhobadze, has also heard reports that Cesium is for sale. She says she’s concerned because it would take only a small amount to make a dirty bomb. She said that most of the radioactive material from Soviet days has been recovered, but she also knows that some is still missing.

"Everything that was recovered can be used to create dirty bombs. Terrorism has no borders and it is practically impossible to fight against it if the country is not organized," says Chkhobadze.

The Georgian government insists it has safely stored all the Cesium it’s found, but 60 Minutes Wednesday learned that security is rather lax. There are 200 canisters stored at one undisclosed facility. The canisters were sealed, but the radiation level was 80 times higher than outside the building.

In front of the building, there was just one guard with an automatic weapon. There were no guards behind the facility; just a wall, a wire fence and no security cameras. Sasha Gurevich, a former Georgian TV journalist, showed 60 Minutes Wednesday that the crumbling wall is not secure enough to keep out intruders.

"I went over the wall, walked up a little hill, looked around. There was no security so I felt safe. Continued going. I saw the facility it is about 150 meters from the wall. I walked right to it," says Gurevich.

"It was about 10 meters away from me. There was no security around. Nobody was walking around. There was only one rusty lock on the gate, and there was a huge sign of radioactivity on the gate turned around came back, crawled through the wall."

"The government tells us that police should be here in case of trespassing within two or three minutes," adds Gurevich. "Nobody is here. I am standing here for the last 10 minutes now. There is no big gate. There is one little gate and one lock on the gate."

Saakashvili said he needs more money to upgrade security at facilities like this one. And the United States is trying to help. American money will pay for a new building to store Russian radioactive material at a military base near Tblisi.

The American military is also trying to help by training the soldiers at an army base near the capital. From what we saw, they need a few more lessons.

U.S. military assistance to Georgia is expected to keep increasing. Georgia, in fact, has been getting so much help from the United States that some hard-line Russians have been calling President Saakashvili an American spy. He says it's nonsense, but when we talked in New York, he did not hide his affection for the United States.

"I sometimes miss the United States. I miss New York. I love New York. And when I come here, it is very, you know, sentimental and nostalgic for me," says Saakashvili, who lived in New York, and graduated from Columbia Law School in 1994. Back then, his plan was to be a big-time lawyer in New York.

How did he get to where he is now? "I had a choice to make, and the choice was to become a lawyer at Manhattan law firm," he says. "But the point was that I came from the country where, at the time, there was still war. It was ravaged by poverty. It was ravaged by despair."

He says corrupt politicians and Mafia-style gangsters ran the country: "They stole Georgia’s natural riches. They stole our taxes. They stole the foreign assistance that came to Georgia."

Saakashvili decided to return to Georgia, start a reform party, and run against the corrupt regime of former President Eduard Shevardnadze. After a contested election, Saakashvili took over and almost immediately began cracking down on corruption. He fired the hated traffic police, who had hassled and shaken down drivers for years, making more in bribes than wages. And he hired a brand new force.

"We basically manage to crack down on corruption and to basically eliminate the issue of corruption," says Saakashvili. "To tackle the issue of corruption in our security service. And this was very important."

But the president knows it’s only a first step.

"I think our security is much more efficient at this point, but of course, there still could be something out there that's not fully under control," says Saakashvili.

"I think we are getting there, but we are not there yet. Because we need to have much more efficient system that nothing like this could happen."



-------- u.s. nuc weapons

NRC tightening security on accessing classified information

Washington (Platts) -- 15 Dec 2004

http://www.platts.com/Nuclear/News/2044732.xml

Access to classified information will be tightened for those involved in
licensing or other regulatory work for high-level waste repository and new
reactor activities. NRC published a notice today in the Federal Register
stating that it expects to issue a direct final rule Jan. 14, unless it
receives significant opposition, to widen the circle of individuals who need
to get security clearance before accessing certain information. As part of the
rulemaking, NRC is broadening the scope of regulations governing access
authorization. The current regulations do not specifically reference
construction licenses and licenses for high-level waste disposal in
repositories, in general, or at the potential facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

--------

Pragmatic genius a key figure behind atomic bomb

The Australian

December 15, 2004

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11691617%255E30417,00.html

Robert Bacher
Physicist. Born Loudonville, Ohio, August 31, 1905.
Died Santa Barbara, California, November 18, aged 99.

PHYSICIST Robert Bacher was a key member of the Manhattan Project, the team that developed the atom bomb during World War II. He directed the experimental physics division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a division known as the G division (G being for gadgets). When the operation reached the bomb production stage, he became head of the bomb physics division.

After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1926, Bacher moved to the physics department of Cornell University in 1935, where he became professor of physics and director of the laboratory of nuclear studies. When the war started he worked on radar before joining the Manhattan Project in 1943.

He urged Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project, not to place the enterprise under military control in order to increase secrecy and security. At the time, the Los Alamos laboratory was officially classified as a military establishment, but Bacher believed that, to be effective as scientists, the team needed to be able to think independently.

Bacher was a member of the team that assembled the weapon for the first nuclear explosion, on July 15, 1945, in the New Mexico desert. The test was for a weapon of the design that would destroy Nagasaki on August 9 that year.

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, used highly enriched uranium instead of plutonium. The uranium design was so straightforward that the scientists were confident that it would work without testing.

The plutonium bomb was much more complex, so a test was scheduled.

By early July 1945, the Manhattan scientists had produced enough plutonium for only two weapons and sufficient highly enriched uranium for one. It was, therefore, possible to test a plutonium weapon and have just enough fissile material left over for the weapons dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

When the extent of the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki became clear, Bacher was concerned about the huge power of such weapons. He believed it would have been better if the threat of nuclear attack could have been used to persuade the Japanese to end the war without the destruction of the two cities.

Bacher was a close friend of Oppenheimer, who had considered resigning from the project when difficulties arose over the production of plutonium. Bacher persuaded him to stay, knowing the project would be seriously delayed if he quit.

Oppenheimer's loyalty was questioned during the anti-communist witch hunts, with a trial beginning in April 1954 in Washington. This episode began in November 1953 when a former director of a congressional committee wrote to J. Edgar Hoover accusing Oppenheimer of being an agent of the Soviet Union. Given Oppenheimer's role as the father of the atomic bomb, it is hardly surprising that the accusation was taken seriously.

Bacher testified in his colleague's defence, saying that, in his opinion, Oppenheimer was not a security risk. This was a brave move during the hysterical days of the McCarthy inquisition. The verdict went against Oppenheimer.

Bacher became one of the first members of the US Atomic Energy Commission. After an investigation at Los Alamos, Bacher was surprised and shocked at how few nuclear weapons were in the arsenal.

In 1945, six weapons were produced and three were used. During 1946, five more were produced. American nuclear weapon production increased soon afterwards as a result of technical improvements in the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. At the end of 1950, the arsenal contained more than 360 nuclear weapons.

In 1949, Bacher became professor of physics at California Institute of Technology, a university for research and teaching in science and engineering that has become a world leader in scientific research and education. Bacher considerably expanded teaching and research activities.

Bacher headed Caltech's division of physics, mathematics and astronomy. He rebuilt the physics department, starting with high-energy particle physics, a rapidly expanding field of study. He oversaw the construction and use of a new electron synchrotron that enabled Caltech physicists to produce their own high-energy particles.

His first recruit was theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. He also recruited Murray Gell-Mann, another brilliant physicist who received the Nobel prize in physics in 1969. Caltech operated a large telescope at its observatory on Palomar Mountain, then the world's most powerful optical telescope. Bacher also established radioastronomy.

He retired as professor emeritus in 1976. Bacher was president of the American Physical Society in 1946 and president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1969 to 1972.

A son and daughter survive him.


-------- u.s. nuc facilities


-------- connecticut

NRC Denies Appeals Of License Renewals For Millstone

TheDay.com	

By PATRICIA DADDONA

12/15/2004

http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=751CAE22-DD15-47D2-A36B-F09E9C2FC7DF

Waterford — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has denied appeals filed by the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone in its quest for a hearing challenging proposed license renewals at Millstone Power Station.

In January, Millstone owner Dominion Nuclear Connecticut proposed extending licenses for two reactors, Millstone 2 and Millstone 3, by 20 years each, to 2035 and 2045 respectively.

This summer, Nancy Burton, then the attorney for the coalition, petitioned the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, a division of the NRC, to grant a hearing on health and safety issues. The petition alleged that there are cancer clusters near the power plants, insufficient protection of the site against would-be terrorists, and other issues.

When the panel denied the petition and Burton's request that they reconsider it, Burton appealed to the NRC each time.

In a sternly worded decision from NRC Secretary Annette L. Vietti-Cook, the commission found that the ASLB acted appropriately and that Burton either failed to link her group's concerns with issues concerning the aging of the plants, as required; or simply failed to support her claims factually. She also failed to show where the panel erred in its denials and raised issues that were beyond the scope of license renewal, Vietti-Cook wrote.

The NRC chastised Burton for her “consistent disregard for our practices and procedures” and informed her the agency would reprimand her if that disregard persisted. The coalition, a grass-roots anti-nuclear group, and any legal counsel remain “welcome” at NRC proceedings as long as they follow the rules, the decision states.

Burton did not return calls seeking comment.

p.daddona@theday.com 


-------- new jersey

NRC, PSEG Nuclear to meet Friday

Wednesday, December 15, 2004 NJ Sunbeam

http://www.nj.com/news/sunbeam/local/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1103102413323540.xml

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will meet with the operators of the Hope Creek nuclear reactor Friday to discuss the condition of a key pump at the power plant in Lower Alloways Creek Township.

The meeting -- the first of two expected before the Hope Creek reactor is restarted -- will be held at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md. The session begins at 10 a.m. and is expected to conclude by 3 p.m.

NRC Spokesman Neil Sheehan said the main focus will be the condition of one of two large recirculation pumps at the Hope Creek reactor which moves water through the nuclear reactor to keep it cool. The pump in question, recirculation pump B, vibrates when in operation.

The NRC wants to hear how PSEG Nuclear, the plant's operator, will ensure the pump doesn't affect the plant's safe operation.

PSEG announced last month it would not replace the pump during the current refueling outage, but would wait until the next outage -- about 18 months away -- to put in a new pump.

The utility maintains despite the vibrations, the pump is safe to operate.

Nuclear watchdog groups are lobbying for replacement of the pump now.

Sheehan said there will be an exchange of information between the federal
agency and the utility about the pump's safety.

Also Friday, other issues at Hope Creek are expected to be discussed,
specifically the plant's high-pressure coolant injection system.

On Oct. 10 a steam pipe broke in the plant's turbine building. When that occurred, operators manually shut down the reactor, but encountered complications" -- problems with controlling water levels in the reactor.

The meeting will be held in Room T7A1 of the agency's Two White Flint North Building, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md.

The public is invited to observe the meeting and will have an opportunity to talk with NRC staff after the business portion, but before the meeting is adjourned. Those interest in participating by telephone can call 1-888-455-0045. The pass code for the teleconference is "Hope Creek" and several dozen phone lines have been reserved for the meeting by the NRC.

Another meeting on Hope Creek is to be held before the reactor is restarted. During that session, preliminary results from the NRC's special investigation at the plant after the Oct. 10 shutdown are expected to be reviewed.

A date for that meeting has not yet been scheduled, but it may come before the end of the year.

The meeting will be held closer to this area.



-------- MILITARY 


-------- afghanistan

Chemical 'warfare' angers Afghans

By Sudha Ramachandran,  Dec 15, 2004 Asia Times 

http://atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FL15Ag02.html

BANGALORE - With poppy cultivation in Afghanistan touching new highs in 2004, eradication measures to stamp out the cultivation of the crop are expected to turn more aggressive in the coming months. However, the deep rage and resentment generated by recent incidents of aerial spraying of chemicals on poppy crops in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan indicates that the Afghan government, and the US and Britain - the two countries that are at the forefront of the international effort to combat the Afghan narcotics trade - might need to move more cautiously.

According to the UN Afghanistan Opium Survey 2004, opium cultivation in Afghanistan this year has shown a 64% increase in comparison with 2003. However, because of bad weather and disease, the 2004 opium yield per hectare had been lowered by almost 30%, resulting in a total output of 4,200 tons. While this is lower than the 1999 output of 4,600 tons, the 2004 output is 17% higher than in 2003. Today Afghanistan accounts for 87% of the world's opium cultivation and this year earned an estimated US$2.8 billion. A tenth of the Afghan population is involved in the production and trade of opium.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in perhaps his strongest remarks on the topic, has urged Afghans to wage jihad - or holy war - against drugs, much as they did against the Soviet army in the 1980s. Karzai, Afghanistan's first popularly elected president, called poppy farming a national disgrace.

Drawing attention to the seriousness of the problem, Antonio Maria Costa, director of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, said, "In Afghanistan, drugs are now a clear and present danger. The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is becoming a reality," he warned.

The 2004 survey reveals that opium cultivation has spread to all of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, with 56% of total cultivation taking place in only three provinces - Badakhshan, Nangarhar and Helmand.

It was over the poppy fields in Nangarhar province, in villages abutting the Tora Bora mountains, that aerial spraying of chemicals kicked up a controversy recently. According to reports in the media, unidentified aircraft flew back and forth over poppy fields in Nangarhar spraying "a snow-like substance" - chemicals - on the crops. The chemicals have not only destroyed the poppy crop, but also ruined fruit and vegetables that were being cultivated there, besides affecting the health of villagers and their livestock. Hundreds of villagers have reportedly shown up at hospitals with skin ailments and breathing problems.

Not surprisingly, the dusting of the poppy crops with herbicide has triggered off immense anger among the villagers, who see the destruction of the poppy crops - their only source of income - as destruction of their livelihood. The poorer farmers now face economic ruin. Who is behind the chemical spraying of the crops is still unclear. The Karzai government insists that it is opposed to "aerial spraying as an instrument of eradication" of the poppy crop and "has not authorized any foreign entity, any foreign government, any foreign company, or anyone else to carry out aerial spraying".

Most Afghans point an accusing finger at the Americans or the British, but both countries have denied involvement in the spraying. The US Embassy in Kabul insists that the US government has "not conducted any aerial eradication [of the poppy crop], nor has it contracted or subcontracted anyone to do it on its behalf". It also denies knowing who carried out the spraying.

However, few in Afghanistan appear to be convinced by the US denial. After all, as pointed out by Hajji Din Muhammad, the governor of Nangarhar, "The Americans control the airspace of Afghanistan, and not even a bird can fly without them knowing."

Afghan officials have also pointed out that the Americans have been arguing for many months now in favor of chemical eradication of Afghanistan's poppy crops. This is a strategy they have used to tackle coca cultivation in Colombia, despite the anger it has triggered among the coca farmers, and they are keen to adopt that strategy in Afghanistan.

Anti-narcotics officials in Kabul argue that the recent chemical spraying appears to have been carried out not so much with the intention of eradicating the poppy crop - the plants are too young at this juncture for spraying to take real effect, they point out - as it is to stir anger among the farmers. According to these officials, therefore, the chemical spraying was the work of major players in the Afghan drug trade, who are seeking to build up mass opposition to the "real" eradication efforts planned for the next few months.

Whatever the motivation of those behind the chemical spraying, it is clear from the recent episode in Nangarhar province that adopting tactics such as crop-dusting raids as part of a new robust and aggressive policy to fight the Afghan drug trade could prove counter-productive. It could alienate the very people - the Afghan peasants - whose support the US-backed government is trying to win over.

Critics of the US-British approach have pointed out that in order to check the supply of narcotics to their countries they are targeting desperately poor farmers, while avoiding the political price that comes with taking stern action to tackle demand for drugs in their countries. Some have suggested action against those higher up in the narcotics trade chain. But this the Americans and the British have failed to do. Those who languish in Afghan jails for narcotics-related offences are the small-time peddlers, not the big players in the business. US forces have also ignored warlords' involvement in the opium trade in exchange for their help in fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Analysts have also argued that Washington has exaggerated the links between al-Qaeda and the drug trade. In an article in Terrorism Monitor, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy draws attention to "the minimal role this [the drug economy] plays in al-Qaeda's finances". He points out that "a few cases have been highlighted by the media as evidence of al-Qaeda tapping into the opium economy of Afghanistan, even though the claims in themselves do not constitute an argument for the existence of any organized form of 'narco-terrorism'."

He cites the findings of the 9-11 Commission, according to which there is "no substantial evidence that al-Qaeda played a major role in the drug trade or relied on it as an important source of revenue either before or after" September 11, 2001, and that "intelligence collection efforts have failed to corroborate rumors of current narcotic trafficking. In fact, there is compelling evidence the al-Qaeda leadership does not like or trust those who today control the drug trade in Southwest Asia, and has encouraged its members not to get involved."

Chouvy points out, "Recent efforts to link the narcotics economy to terrorism really aim at linking the war on drugs to the war on terrorism, and vice-versa. While drugs and terrorism are not necessarily the two faces of the same coin in Afghanistan, the war on drugs and the war on terrorism may serve the same political agenda. A clear example is the current efforts of the US Southern Command to guarantee the prolongation of its enhanced funding by raising the threat of 'narco-terrorism' in Latin America, where US military aid and training, which previously were focused on counter-narcotics operations, have now been re-tasked as counter-terrorism responsibilities."

That Afghanistan's booming opium trade poses a threat to stability and security within the country and outside cannot be denied. Washington's anxiety to tackle the problem is therefore understandable. The problem lies with its approach to fight the problem. Some in the administration of US President George W Bush have called for direct US military action against traffickers in Afghanistan. But others have argued that battling Afghanistan's drug trade is primarily a law-enforcement problem, not a military one, and must be led by local Afghan forces. Drawing US troops into drug fights, they have cautioned, would alienate Afghan peasants and undermine the core US military mission in Afghanistan of fighting the insurgents.

Alienation of Afghans is just what might happen under the new US plan, which among other things calls for destruction of poppy fields covering an area five to seven times larger than that eradicated this year. The destruction is to be offset by more than $100 million in aid to Afghan farmers to plant substitute crops and for other rural economic development projects.

The anger that was generated by the recent "mysterious" chemical spraying in Nangarhar signals that Washington's war on poppy cultivators in Afghanistan could go very wrong. Washington will have to take on the big players in the opium trade, but that it appears reluctant to do, as some of them are its allies. Besides, it is reluctant to open up new fronts to fight in Afghanistan.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.



-------- arms 

South Africa set to become first overseas client for Airbus military plane

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) Dec 15, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041215152409.mey8kho2.html

The South African government committed Wednesday to acquire a number of A400M military transport aircraft developed by Airbus Industrie in a deal worth at least 750 million euros (one billion dollars), Airbus said in a statement.

But a group spokesman was unable to say how many planes might be ordered.

Airbus Military, an Airbus subsidiary, said a "declaration of intent" had been signed earlier in the day in Pretoria, marking the first commitment of interest in the A400M from a government outside the seven countries that launched the project.

The South African Transport Department last Thursday said the government was prepared to sign a multi-million-euro deal to buy between eight to 14 Airbus A400M military transport aircraft in exchange for investment, technological knowledge and jobs.

A South African Defence Ministry spokesman told AFP in Johannesburg on Wednesday that "as things stand currently, we are going to acquire a minimum of eight aircraft and a maximum of 14."

In return for buying the aircraft in a deal valued from 837 million euros (1.1 billion dollars) between 2010 and 2014, South Africa would also participate in the A400M design and manufacturing program, the department said.

"This is not a defence deal, what is involved in being part of this is a whole boost to the industrialisation of the country, particularly the aerospace industry," Vuyo Zambodla told AFP.

Exact details were not yet available, but local Transport Ministry spokesman Ian Phillips said earlier it included "guaranteed work packages to meet global standards that will be in place for the next 17 years."

"Being in at the beginning also gives our industry a strong chance to bid successfully in the maintenance and upgrade work in the future," Phillips added.

The A400M troop and light armoured vehicle carrier is the most ambitious project ever launched by the European military industrial sector, carrying an estimated cost of 20 billion euros.

To date 180 planes have been ordered: 60 from Germany, 50 from France, 27 from Spain, 25 from Britain, 10 from Turkey, seven from Belgium and one from Luxembourg.

Airbus Military hopes to sell at least 200 in the next 15 to 20 years.

The first flight is scheduled for 2006, with initial deliveries planned for

South Africa's existing fleet of a dozen upgraded C130 medium transports and a few smaller Spanish-built CASA 212 light transports would not be able to meet future airlift requirements, including a greater focus on peacekeeping activities on the African continent, officials have said.

----

Poland to sell military hardware to Iraq

WARSAW (AFP)

Dec 15, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041215162310.2bd79lcd.html

Poland will provide the Iraqi army with weapons and equipment worth 236 million dollars, including helicopters and small arms, and train Iraqis to use them, officials said Wednesday.

Polish Deputy Defence Minister Janusz Zemke said some of the helicopters and other equipment currently in Iraq would be handed over to the Iraqis when the Polish troop contingent in the country is cut by a third in February.

His Iraqi counterpart Ziad Catan said 20 Polish-built Sokol and 24 Soviet-designed Mi-17 transport helicopters would be included in the sale.

Under contracts signed Wednesday Poland's Bumar group would deliver water and fuel cisterns, ambulances, grenades and sub-machine-guns next year, its president Tadeusz Baczynski said.

Zamke said Warsaw had also agreed to train 10 Iraqi helicopter pilots and 20 engineers.

Catan said other deals were still being negotiated, including the modernisation of Iraqi tanks and the sale of communications and radar systems.

The deals were agreed as three Polish soldiers were killed in Iraq Wednesday and four injured when their Sokol helicopter made an emergency landing south of Baghdad.

Catan said after arriving in Poland Monday with Iraqi military chief General Babekr al-Zibari that he hoped Poland would become Iraq's main arms supplier.

Poland has 2,500 troops in Poland as part of a Polish-commanded multinational force of 6,000 fighting alongside US forces against insurgents.



-------- britain

UK to keep foreign nuclear waste

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Wednesday December 15, 2004
The Guardian

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,9061,1373965,00.html

The government has decided to bury Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss and Swedish nuclear waste in Britain as a money-making venture to help pay for the UK's own unresolved nuclear waste problems.

The decision, announced in a written Commons statement, has been taken by the trade secretary Patricia Hewitt despite the fact that Britain as yet has no depository for the waste. It overturns a 30-year-old policy that the UK would not become a dumping ground for other countries' nuclear waste.

Previously both Conservative and Labour governments have said waste arising as a result of lucrative nuclear fuel reprocessing contracts at Sellafield in Cumbria should be returned to the country of origin.

Successive governments had intended to return all highly dangerous waste contaminated with plutonium to its country of origin - a total of 225 nuclear shipments. This week's decision means keeping and disposing of the bulk of that toxic waste in Britain.

Mrs Hewitt said: "The benefits are both environmental and economic."

She said the additional income - up to £680m - would be "used for nuclear clean-up which will result in savings for the UK taxpayer over the longer term".

Environmental groups warn that it will leave Britain with thousands of tonnes of waste for which there is currently no form of disposal.

Jean McSorley, nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace, said: "The government is trying to encourage Japanese utilities, and others, to sign more reprocessing contracts at Sellafield knowing that they will not have to have their nuclear waste returned."

The government has set up a committee to find a way of disposing of high- and intermediate-level nuclear waste safely. It considered 20 options, including burying the waste in the Antarctic and firing it at the sun. No preferred method has been established, but it is likely to be either storage above ground or disposal below ground in deep rock caverns.

British Nuclear Fuels, which currently stores the foreign waste at Sellafield, said it was delighted by the decision. A spokesman said it would mean up to 3,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste would now not need to be shipped back to its place of origin, saving tens of thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases in ship fuel.

As a result of this week's decision, the foreign waste that will remain in Britain will be exchanged for much smaller quantities of waste of a higher radioactivity produced from British reactors - up to 38 shipments. The government says this trade amounts to an equal quantity of radioactivity.

Critics though raise the prospect of the British waste being hijacked by terrorists. Llew Smith, Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent, last night asked a written question of Ms Hewitt about her assessment of any increased terrorist threat. "Intermediate level waste is bulky and difficult to handle but shipments of high level waste in smaller cannisters might be an attractive terrorist target," he said.

The policy would mean very long-lived, high-activity radioactive waste from Sellafield being shipped to Japan. To European continental customers it will be carried on ferries and trains to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden and Italy.

The government says using armed police and transports mounted with guns to escort the high level waste minimises the risk.

Currently overseas nuclear waste is stored at Sellafield either in the form of glass blocks, untreated liquid waste, or in drums of solid waste. It is mixed up together with UK waste but British Nuclear Fuels keeps a log of how much radioactivity had been allocated to each country.

Gordon MacKerron, head of the government's committee on radioactive waste management, said: "Of course the volumes of nuclear waste we will have to deal with in Britain will be substantially greater... but overall because of the large existing volume of UK waste it will not make a big difference in percentage terms.

"In practical terms it does not make a lot of difference to our overall nuclear waste problem."



-------- business

U.N. Board Cites U.S. Contractor in Iraq
Pentagon Audits Found Halliburton Subsidiary 'Overstated Costs,' Report Says

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page A27

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64784-2004Dec14?language=printer

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 15 -- Pentagon auditors concluded that Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., charged "unsupported" and "overstated costs" in more than $800 million in U.S.-administered projects financed by Iraqi oil revenue, according to a report issued Tuesday by a U.N.-appointed financial oversight board.

The chairman of the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, said that it was impossible to determine the extent of alleged overcharges because the figures had been redacted from a series of five Pentagon audits presented to the board last month. But he said that he had agreed to a U.S. proposal to appoint an independent auditor to conduct a "special audit" of all contracts awarded to Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) and other companies without competitive bidding.

The international board was created by the U.N. Security Council in May 2003 to monitor the U.S.-led coalition's management of Iraq's oil revenue. It had been pressing the Pentagon for months to release the audits of KBR as part of a broad effort to ensure that Iraq's oil revenue has been properly spent. The U.S. company had been awarded at least $1.4 billion from Iraqi revenue to repair the country's oil facilities and to import fuel for domestic uses, according to Halbwachs.

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Rose-Ann L. Lynch, declined to release an estimate of the overcharges cited in the audit, calling the information "proprietary in nature." She said that the United States and KBR both approved the redacted versions of the audits presented to the IAMB.

Lynch said that the KBR contracts had been administered by the Army Corps of Engineers and noted that the Government Accountability Office stated in a June report that the Army Corps had "properly awarded" a sole source contract to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure. Iraq's oil revenue "will continue to be used in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people," she said.

Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall declined to discuss the conclusions of the Pentagon audit. But she wrote in an e-mail that the company has addressed the auditors' assertions "directly with the Army, and we will continue to work with our customer to prove that KBR is delivering services at the best value at a time when few other companies could or would."

The U.N. report issued Tuesday comes as the United Nations, which monitored Iraq's oil exports before the U.S.-led invasion, confronts allegations of corruption and mismanagement in that oil-for-food program. Some U.S. lawmakers have called for the resignation of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as a result of the allegations, but Bush administration officials have said they do not seek Annan's ouster and are working well with him. Annan plans to meet Thursday in Washington with Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice, officials said.

The IAMB first raised concerns in March that contracts financed by Iraqi revenue had been awarded to KBR without competitive bidding. The Pentagon's initial refusal to release internal audits on the contracts fueled criticism among Democratic lawmakers about the U.S.-led coalition's management of Iraq's oil revenue.

The board, which includes representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has sharply criticized the U.S.-led coalition's handling of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenue. It has also drawn attention to lax financial controls of Iraqi ministries, citing poor bookkeeping and duplicate payments to government workers.

A series of audits commissioned by the board, covering May 2003 to June 2004, found that the deposits and disbursements of billions of dollars in oil sales were accounted for by the U.S. led-coalition. But the audits, which were carried out by the accounting firm KPMG, have noted that the "financial controls" were insufficient to ensure the money was properly spent.

"There were a number of weaknesses in the overall financial management system that are of concern," the IAMB report stated. "There was an absence of control over oil extraction . . . the execution of the accounting function was often inadequate . . . proper contracting procedures were not always adhered to, in particular the use of single-source contracting."


-------- iraq

Roadside bombs slow US operations in Iraq: general

WASHINGTON (AFP)
Dec 15, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041215191939.4gntygmr.html

Increasing use of roadside bombs by insurgents has slowed US military operations in Iraq, forcing changes in tactics and a greater reliance on aircraft to move supplies, a senior commander acknowledged Wednesday.

Lieutenant General Lance Smith, deputy commander of the US Central Command, said new technologies have been used with varying success to thwart improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, but there are "no silver bullets."

Senior army officials said they are spending 4.1 billion dollars through 2005 to armor nearly all Humvees and trucks in Iraq -- an issue which has brought public complaints from US troops in recent days.

And the air force chief on Tuesday said commanders are to step up the use of cargo planes to move supplies to ease the pressure on truck convoys.

Asked whether insurgent bombings have slowed military operations in Iraq, Smith said, "They are."

"They cause us to reroute vehicles. They cause us to have to employ tactics. Although the tactics have been generally successful, we have had to introduce speed and maneuverability and protection of vehicles and (it's) caused us to have to convoy," he said.

Insurgents shifted to IEDs in August and September 2003 after recognizing that they were no match for US forces in direct attacks, military officials said.

"So they had a growing understanding that where they can affect us is in the logistics part. and so they have learned, as we have, and they have moved the fight in many cases back to the rear areas," Smith said.

"There are areas where they can do that effectively, and there are areas where we find it difficult to maintain constant (control) -- like cities and the like," he said.

US forces find or neutralize about half the bombs before they go off, driving convoys fast to outrace explosions or using devices to jam remotely controlled bombs, he said.

"And that's been effective. But it's effective for a short time. The enemy is very smart and thinking," he said.

Smith said he was meeting with a joint task force that is trying to provide technological solutions to the problem.

"We've had a number of technologies that we've tried out in the theater, some more successful than others, but no silver bullet," he said. "I don't know that we'll ever find a silver bullet."

He said several hundred truckloads of supplies are being moved by air and planners are rethinking the distribution system closer to their destination, shortening the distances trucks have to travel with supplies.

The IED threat and its impact on the force -- though not new -- has drawn renewed attention since US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a soldier in Kuwait last week why soldiers were having to dig through landfill for scrap metal to protect their vehicles.

General John Jumper, the air force chief of staff, said Tuesday that 350 trucks worth of cargo a day are now moving by air in Iraq, and the goal is to increase that number to at least 1,500 truckloads a day.

Army officials said Wednesday that they have reached an agreement with Armored Holdings Inc, its exclusive supplier of armored Humvees, to step up production from 450 to 550 vehicles a month by March in order to accelerate deliveries to Iraq.

Brigadier General Jeff Sorenson, and army procurement officer, said the army plans to have nearly all Humvees in Iraq and its heavy truck fleet armored by March. By June, 32,288 Humvees and medium and heavy trucks in Iraq -- almost the entire fleet of vehicles -- are to have some level of armored protection, the officials said.

Still, the need for armor has increased at a faster pace than the army has been able to produce it.

Currently, 80 percent of the Humvees are armored. Smaller percentages of trucks have armor on them now.

Meeting the growing requirement for armored protection "is a very, very expensive proposition," said Major General Stephen Speakes, the army's director of force development.

"As you look at our forecast, both of what we've already spent and what we're immediately forecasting to spend here over the next six or eight months or so, it's several billion dollars, as you can see: 4.1 billion dollars to be specific," he said.

"And so this is an enormously expensive program but, very frankly, the communication from the secretary of defense has been real clear, which when it involves a soldier's life, we're not into the money business," he said.


-------- israel / palestine 

Abbas calls for no arms against Israel

December 15, 2004
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041215-120033-4535r.htm

LONDON — Mahmoud Abbas, the prohibitive favorite to succeed Yasser Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority, called yesterday for an end to the use of deadly weapons against Israel so as to create a suitable climate for negotiations.

    Mr. Abbas had previously said the use of arms against Israelis had hurt Palestinian interests — a remark he repeated yesterday — but had not so explicitly demanded an end to their use.

    It was not immediately clear how the comment in an interview with a London-based Arabic newspaper would affect his campaign for the Palestinians' Jan. 9 presidential election, but it was liable to anger militants.

    In the interview with the newspaper Asharq Al Awsat, Mr. Abbas said the intifada should continue, but that it should return to the use of tactics employed in the first such uprising from 1987 to 1993.

    "The use of live weaponry has harmed the intifada and it should stop," he was quoted as saying.

    "The intifada is our legitimate right of the Palestinian people, and its purpose is to give expression to our opposition to conquest by popular and social means — as happened in the first intifada," Mr. Abbas continued.

    "We, at this stage, are against the militarization of the intifada because we want to negotiate. And because we want to negotiate, the atmosphere should be calm in preparation for political action," he said.

    Mr. Abbas also told the newspaper that Palestinian security services must be rapidly consolidated and reorganized, a demand that previously has been made by Israel and the United States.

    Delays in consolidating 12 often-rival security groups have complicated previous efforts to exercise control over armed militants.

    In the first uprising, which lasted seven years, Israel calculates that 236 of its citizens were killed in shootings, lynchings, knife attacks and stonings. But the Palestinians, whose death toll was far higher, portray it as a David-and-Goliath struggle pitting stone-throwing youths against Israeli tanks and live bullets.

    The interview contrasted with strong praise in the Palestinian Authority's official media for an armed attack on an Israeli border post in the Gaza Strip on Sunday. Five Israeli soldiers were killed by subterranean bombs before Palestinian gunmen raked Israeli rescuers of a trapped soldier.

    The Israeli government has not yet reacted to Mr. Abbas' reported comments. However, a senior Likud party lawmaker expressed doubt in a telephone interview about Mr. Abbas' ability to end armed attacks on Israelis.

    "It's better than saying he supports more armed violence," said Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset's Security and Foreign Relations Committee. "But he has not shown us any sign that he has the ability or desire to take concrete steps against those wielding the weapons."

    Mr. Abbas has already held talks in Gaza City and Damascus with radical opponents of the Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority. However, he has declined to say whether he called on these groups to stop all armed activity, let alone to disarm. Israel has demanded both steps as conditions for a resumption of the "road map" peace process.

    Mr. Steinitz acknowledged that Mr. Abbas has in the past opposed armed violence, but maintained that this was because he found it counterproductive, rather than immoral.

    "OK, it's better than encouraging it," he said. "He might try to stop it, but to do so he has to dismantle Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad. Maybe he will try. We don't know what would happen once he meets resistance."

    Mr. Steinitz remained worried by Mr. Abbas' insistence, reflected in numerous public statements, that descendants of Palestinian refugees must be allowed to repopulate Israel.

    "What he is really telling us is that he is not prepared for two states. He wants not a Palestinian state and a Jewish state, but he wants us to give up part of our homeland while they can return to our part. ...

    "He is not ready to recognize that part of this land will be for Jews and not for Palestinians," Mr. Steinitz said.

    Palestinian observers said Mr. Abbas had been carrying out a complex balancing act with considerable aplomb.

    To ensure a smooth election, he has had to dampen violence against Israeli targets from Hamas and other Islamic radicals, as well as from hard-liners within his own Fatah movement. On the other hand, being seen to appease Israeli and American concerns is considered a vote-loser.

    He may have become emboldened, these observers said, by the findings of the last independent Palestinian opinion poll, which showed that popular support for suicide bombings against Israelis had dropped below 50 percent for the first time in several years.

    The withdrawal last weekend of his main rival in the upcoming election, jailed Fatah West Bank leader Marwan Barghouti, may also have made Mr. Abbas feel more comfortable in making the sort of statements needed to move the peace process forward, analysts said. 


-------- nato

Poland vows to back Georgia's EU, NATO aspirations

WARSAW (AFP) Dec 15, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041215181903.2ifudhb0.html

Poland will support Georgia's aspirations to become a part of NATO and the European Union, Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz said on Wednesday following talks with his Georgian counterpart.

Warsaw will "not only give political backing to Georgia's aspirations, but will also share Poland's own experiences of integrating the EU," Cimoszewicz was quoted as saying by the PAP news agency.

Georgian Foreign Minister Salome Zurabishvili, in Warsaw for an official visit, said both countries shared a "common objective which is to encourage the spread of democracy in Europe".

Zurabishvili notably referred to the situation in Ukraine, where the Western-leaning opposition has managed to secure a re-run of a fraudulent presidential election following several weeks of mass protests.

The turbulence in Ukraine came exactly one year after Georgia peacefully ousted its communist-era leadership,