NucNews - December 26, 2004 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety Perry nuclear plant has automatic shutdown December 26, 2004 Ohio News Now http://www.onnnews.com/Global/story.asp?S=2732935 NORTH PERRY, Ohio -- An electrical problem slowed the flow of cooling water at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, leading to an automatic shutdown. FirstEnergy Corp. spokesman Todd Schneider said the incident posed no danger and the plant, which shut down late Thursday, will be restarted in a few days. The plant is on the Lake Erie shoreline about 20 miles east of Cleveland. The Perry plant has been under close supervision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since August because of trouble in May with coolant pumps. Schneider said the pumps involved in Thursday's shutdown were different from those with past problems. He said plant officials believe that an electrical problem caused two water pumps to shift speed just before midnight Thursday. When the flow of water slowed, he said, the plant shut down automatically. Information from: The Plain Dealer, http://www.cleveland.com -------- britain Minister challenges nuclear policy By Paul Hutcheon, Scottish Political Editor 26 December 2004 UK Sunday Herald http://www.sundayherald.com/46868 The minister with responsibility for renewable energy has become the first member of Jack McConnell’s administration to break ranks over its opposition to nuclear power. Writing in today’s Sunday Herald, Allan Wilson argues that new nuclear power stations may be inevitable north of the Border because of the unreliability of other energy sources. Wilson, deputy to Liberal Democrat leader Jim Wallace in the enterprise and lifelong learning department, will now be on a collision course with Wallace’s party, who have ensured that the Executive has stuck to a non-nuclear policy. In his article, Wilson questions the merits of phasing out a source of electricity that he believes has served Scotland well. “Does it make sense, at the very time when climate change and greenhouse gas reduction have shot up the political agenda, to be planning the total elimination of nuclear power?” he asks. Wilson’s article will be interpreted as an attempt to kickstart a debate on nuclear power that has lain dormant since devolution. SNP environment spokes man Richard Lochhead called for Wilson to be disciplined. “The Scottish Cabinet must immediately disassociate itself from Allan Wilson, and explain why a junior minister has been allowed to state a view contrary to official Executive policy,’’ Lochhead said. -------- depleted uranium Swords Into Plowshares Iraq Pays Terrible Price For America's Choices By JOSEPH MURRAY Published on 12/26/2004 The Day (Connecticut) http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=85F42006-D885-4BFC-814D-A9E09CFD7C24 Our success in breaking the back of the resistance in Fallujah should not be tarnished by the collateral civilian deaths there — no more than a thousand or so — that some have blamed on our use of cluster and phosphorous bombs. Cluster bombs, of course, release multiple thousands of tiny razor-like steel fragments from hundreds of bomblets. Covering an area of a couple of football fields, they explode in midair and strike with such velocity that they rupture spleen and intestines and shred human limbs like spaghetti. That is what they were designed to do. Unfortunately as many as 30 percent remain unexploded, until kids pick them up thinking they are toys. Although they kill somewhat indiscriminately, they have proven remarkably effective. Phosphorous, like cluster bombs, was used in Vietnam and Laos, and we now have phosphorous in the form of ground ammunition. Like napalm it transforms victims into roaring human torches that cannot be extinguished, slowly melting flesh from bones. The Pentagon assures us, however, that phosphorous, napalm, and other chemical and radioactive ordnance are employed only when the enemy is especially difficult to eliminate. A word about depleted uranium, which is an essential ingredient in much of our ammunition. Critics point to an unusually high number of deformities, leukemia and other cancers found in children whose parents were exposed to depleted uranium in the first Gulf war and in the war in Afghanistan. Veterans from those wars claim that their own children have been similarly stricken. The International Atomic Energy Agency as well as a group of international researchers put the blame squarely on depleted uranium. There is now some concern about current Iraq veterans, whose debilitating illnesses Department of Defense doctors cannot diagnose. Although independent tests performed in Germany on these soldiers reveal high levels of radioactive depleted uranium in the urine, the Pentagon insists that the tests are unreliable, that the IAEA research is flawed, and that depleted uranium is safe. Without conclusive proof we should withhold judgment, so as not to hinder the war effort. Weapons that disperse radioactive dust as well as cluster and phosphorous bombs are accused of being in violation of international law. Although such WMD are indeed banned worldwide, the prohibition legally applies only to a conventional war, not to a war on terrorism, where different rules apply. Thank God civilian deaths in Iraq have been limited to 100,000 or so. Compared with Vietnam this is a cakewalk. Military and political analysts agree that we will remain in Iraq for at least six more years — worst case, 10. Depending on how many other cities will have to be pacified, best estimates put total deaths at no more than a few hundred thousand with perhaps ten times that number of wounded. We should not, however, become distracted by the numbers. Iraqis continue to resist legitimate occupation not only illegally but violently. International law sanctions one country's invasion of another if it is to the long-term benefit both of the occupied (e.g., a new government modeled on the occupier's) as well as of the occupier (e.g, plentiful supplies of cheap oil). Environmentalists suggest that, if we replaced our eight-cylinder SUVs and trucks with four-cylinder conventional cars and hybrids, we could be independent of Mideast oil. What the greeniacs don't realize is that SUVs and trucks are essential to our way of life. The days of whimpie cars are over. It is further argued that, if we also turned down our winter thermostats a few degrees and our summer ones up a few, domestic reserves would actually be 10 percent higher than we need. Iraq would be no more important to us, they say, than Zimbabwe. Liberal propaganda. In the end, Iraq — indeed the whole world — will owe a debt of gratitude to the thousands of Americans who gladly died and the few hundred thousand who accepted their wounds in order to free Iraq from tyranny. ••• That debt will never be paid, and for two reasons. The down payment will have been the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of the innocent along with the silent genocide of an estimated half million more, according to IAEA, who will die in this century due to the radioactive debris we have left behind in Iraq. Second, Saddam's tyranny will have been replaced by a more vicious tyranny, that of unfettered free enterprise American style — exclusively profit driven, blind to injustice, oppressive of the underclass. Third, the true cost of this immoral war has been a renege on our promises to feed millions of the world's hungry. The really bad news is that, one way or another, we will be driven out of Iraq, as the Brits were in the early part of the last century and as we were out of Vietnam. The passion of the occupied for freedom and independence demands the refusal to accept occupation. The will of the freedom fighter to resist to the death is unbreakable. No military might is stronger. The smart generals know this, because they know their history. The politicians — those that bother to read — are not interested in the lessons history has to teach, because they have nothing to learn. The only question then is, how many more barrels of cheap blood (poor white and Latino and Iraqi and African-American) are we willing to see poured out before we face up to our complicity — yours and mine — in these war crimes? Remember, we said Yes to the politics of fear and the candidates of war. We said No to the politics of reason and the candidates of peace. The good news is that it is not too late to change your vote to: No more crimes against humanity, no more blood spilled in my name! But we cannot wait on a craven Congress to act for us. We must organize a national blue-red peace movement and, like the Ukrainians, march by the tens of thousands — no, by the millions — on the White House and the Capitol and the Supreme Court and the Pentagon to demand that we get out of Iraq. Now. Joseph Murray, formerly active in the Howard Dean presidential campaign, is a poet living in Waterford. Photos: Mohammed Uraibi A father comforts his six-year-old daughter who was shot during a firefight between Iraqis and coalition forces in May. http://www.theday.com/_gbl/media/dynamic/lrgimages/IRAQFATHERPERSP122604.jpg Associated Press This 10-year-old Iraqi girl and her two sisters where severely burned during an April firefight between U.S. troops and insugents in Baghdad. http://www.theday.com/_gbl/media/dynamic/lrgimages/IRAQGIRLPERSP122604.jpg -------- europe Fewer loose nukes December 26, 2004 Washington Times Editorial http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041225-104610-8505r.htm The world was made safer last week — by about six kilograms of highly enriched uranium. That was the amount of nuclear material that was secretly spirited away from the Czech Republic and taken into a secure site in Russia as part of a U.S.-Czech-Russian and International Atomic Energy Agency mission. The successful mission puts into focus not only the Bush administration's global nuclear nonproliferation achievements, but also the Kerry campaign's false claims on the issue. Sen. John Kerry made a play at an emotive issue during the campaign, when he claimed the Bush administration was in effect moving at a snail's pace to secure nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. "At the current pace, it will take 13 years to secure potential bomb material in the former Soviet Union. We cannot wait that long," he said in a June 1 speech in Florida. Mr. Kerry was so intent on raising an alarm that he failed to accurately describe the progress made. For starters, the analysis Mr. Kerry depended on did not look at the transfers made in 2004, as Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham noted Tuesday in a meeting with The Washington Times Editorial Board. Also, the analysis failed to consider the work stoppage caused by September 11, and rather than look at the number of sites that had been secured, the analysis looked instead only at metric tons of nuclear material. U.S. nonproliferation strategy, even preceding the Bush administration, has striven to secure the most vulnerable sites first. Those sites often have smaller amounts of material on a metric-ton basis. The two remaining sites that have yet to be secured in Russia have a high volume of material that can be secured quickly, but first access to them must be granted by Russian officials — a substantial problem, about which not much has been publicly said. The work Mr. Kerry referred to is expected to be finished by 2008. The Bush administration has made notable strides in global nuclear nonproliferation. Under Mr. Abraham, the administration has made the first successful shipments of nuclear material from civilian research reactors into secure sites in Russia, as part of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative that more than 100 countries participate in. In addition to the recent shipment from the Czech Republic, a total of 51 kilograms of highly enriched uranium has been repatriated to Russia from Romania, Bulgaria, Libya and Uzbekistan. In August 2002, 48 kg of Russian-origin highly enriched uranium were repatriated from a research reactor near Belgrade, Serbia. Mr. Abraham has expanded the funding and nature of U.S. global nonproliferation efforts, to now include efforts to secure nuclear material that isn't weapons grade, but could still be used in a dirty bomb attack. Also, funding has been ramped up. While U.S. spending to secure nuclear material had hovered around $1 billion, that amount has been raised to about $1.4 billion, said Mr. Abraham. There is still much work to be done to secure material around the world that could potentially be used by terrorists. Despite the claims of Mr. Kerry, though, steady progress is being made. -------- india / pakistan As Nuclear Secrets Emerge in Khan Inquiry, More Are Suspected By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER December 26, 2004 NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/international/asia/26nuke.html http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041226/ZNYT03/412260418 hen experts from the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency came upon blueprints for a 10-kiloton atomic bomb in the files of the Libyan weapons program earlier this year, they found themselves caught between gravity and pettiness. The discovery gave the experts a new appreciation of the audacity of the rogue nuclear network led by A. Q. Khan, a chief architect of Pakistan's bomb. Intelligence officials had watched Dr. Khan for years and suspected that he was trafficking in machinery for enriching uranium to make fuel for warheads. But the detailed design represented a new level of danger, particularly since the Libyans said he had thrown it in as a deal-sweetener when he sold them $100 million in nuclear gear. "This was the first time we had ever seen a loose copy of a bomb design that clearly worked," said one American expert, "and the question was: Who else had it? The Iranians? The Syrians? Al Qaeda?" But that threat was quickly overshadowed by smaller questions. The experts from the United States and the I.A.E.A., the United Nations nuclear watchdog - in a reverberation of their differences over Iraq's unconventional weapons - began quarreling over control of the blueprints. The friction was palpable at Libya's Ministry of Scientific Research, said one participant, when the Americans accused international inspectors of having examined the design before they arrived. After hours of tense negotiation, agreement was reached to keep it in a vault at the Energy Department in Washington, but under I.A.E.A. seal. It was a sign of things to come. Nearly a year after Dr. Khan's arrest, secrets of his nuclear black market continue to uncoil, revealing a vast global enterprise. But the inquiry has been hampered by discord between the Bush administration and the nuclear watchdog, and by Washington's concern that if it pushes too hard for access to Dr. Khan, a national hero in Pakistan, it could destabilize an ally. As a result, much of the urgency has been sapped from the investigation, helping keep hidden the full dimensions of the activities of Dr. Khan and his associates. There is no shortage of tantalizing leads. American intelligence officials and the I.A.E.A., working separately, are still untangling Dr. Khan's travels in the years before his arrest. Investigators said he visited 18 countries, including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, on what they believed were business trips, either to buy materials like uranium ore or sell atomic goods. In Dubai, they have scoured one of the network's front companies, finding traces of radioactive material as well as phone records showing contact with Saudi Arabia. Having tracked the network operations to Malaysia, Europe and the Middle East, investigators recently uncovered an outpost in South Africa, where they seized 11 crates of equipment for enriching uranium. The breadth of the operation was particularly surprising to some American intelligence officials because they had had Dr. Khan under surveillance for nearly three decades, since he began assembling components for Pakistan's bomb, but apparently missed crucial transactions with countries like Iran and North Korea. In fact, officials were so confident they had accurately taken his measure, that twice - once in the late 1970's and again in the 1980's - the Central Intelligence Agency persuaded Dutch intelligence agents not to arrest Dr. Khan because they wanted to follow his trail, according to a senior European diplomat and a former Congressional official who had access to intelligence information. The C.I.A. declined to comment. "We knew a lot," said a nuclear intelligence official, "but we didn't realize the size of his universe." President Bush boasts that the Khan network has been dismantled. But there is evidence that parts of it live on, as do investigations in Washington and Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is based. Cooperation between the United Nations atomic agency and the United States has trickled to a near halt, particularly as the Bush administration tries to unseat the I.A.E.A. director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, who did not support the White House's prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq. The chill from the White House has blown through Vienna. "I can't remember the last time we saw anything of a classified nature from Washington," one of the agency's senior officials said. Experts see it as a missed opportunity because the two sides have complementary strengths - the United States with spy satellites and covert capabilities to intercept or disable nuclear equipment, and the I.A.E.A. with inspectors who have access to some of the world's most secretive atomic facilities that the United States cannot legally enter. In the 11 months since Dr. Khan's partial confession, Pakistan has denied American investigators access to him. They have passed questions through the Pakistanis, but report that there is virtually no new information on critical questions like who else obtained the bomb design. Nor have American investigators been given access to Dr. Khan's chief operating officer, Buhari Sayed Abu Tahir, who is in a Malaysian jail. This disjunction has helped to keep many questions about the network unanswered, including whether the Pakistani military was involved in the black market and what other countries, or nonstate groups, beyond Libya, Iran and North Korea, received what one Bush administration official called Dr. Khan's "nuclear starter kit" - everything from centrifuge designs to raw uranium fuel to the blueprints for the bomb. Privately, investigators say that with so many mysteries unsolved, they have little confidence that the illicit atomic marketplace has actually been shut down. "It may be more like Al Qaeda," said one I.A.E.A. official, "where you cut off the leadership but new elements emerge." A Potential Danger A. Q. Khan may have been unknown to most Americans when he was revealed about a year ago as the mastermind of the largest illicit nuclear proliferation network in history. But for three decades Dr. Khan, a metallurgist, has been well known to British and American intelligence officials. Even so, the United States and its allies passed up opportunities to stop him - and apparently failed to detect that he had begun selling nuclear technology to Iran in the late 1980's. It was the opening transaction for an enterprise that eventually spread to North Korea, Libya and beyond. Dr. Khan studied in Pakistan and Europe. After he secured a job in the Netherlands in the early 1970's at a plant making centrifuges - the devices that purify uranium - Dutch intelligence officials began watching him. By late 1975, they grew so wary, after he was observed at a nuclear trade show in Switzerland asking suspicious questions, that they moved him to a different area of the company to keep him away from uranium enrichment work. "There was an awareness," said Frank Slijper of the Dutch Campaign against Arms Trade, who recently wrote a report on Dr. Khan's early days, "that he was a potential danger." Dr. Khan suddenly left the country that December, called home by his government for its atomic project. Years later, investigators discovered that he had taken blueprints for the centrifuges with him. In Pakistan, Dr. Khan was working to develop a bomb to counter India's, and Washington was intent on stopping the project. It later proved to be the first of several occasions when the United States failed to fully understand what Dr. Khan was up to. Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who has served in several administrations, said American intelligence agencies thought Pakistan would try to make its bomb by producing plutonium - an alternative bomb fuel. Mr. Nye was sent to France to halt the shipment of technology that would have enabled Pakistan to complete a reprocessing plant for the plutonium fuel. "We returned to Washington to celebrate our victory, only to discover that Khan had already stolen the technology for another path to the bomb," Mr. Nye recalled. To gather more atomic gear and skill, Dr. Khan returned to the Netherlands repeatedly. But the United States wanted to watch him, and a European diplomat with wide knowledge of nuclear intelligence cited the two occasions when the C.I.A. persuaded the Dutch authorities not to arrest him. Intelligence officials apparently felt Dr. Khan was more valuable as an unwitting guide to the nuclear underworld. "The Dutch wanted to arrest him," the diplomat said. "But they were told by the American C.I.A., 'Leave him so we can follow his trail.' " A Chinese Connection Dr. Khan quickly led the agents to Beijing. It was there in the early 1980's that Dr. Khan pulled off a coup: obtaining the blueprints for a weapon that China had detonated in its fourth nuclear test, in 1966. The design was notable because it was compact and the first one China had developed that could easily fit atop a missile. American intelligence agencies only learned the full details of the transactions earlier this year when the Libyans handed over two large plastic bags with the names of an Islamabad tailor on one side and a dry-cleaner on other - one of several clues that it had come from the Khan Laboratories. The design inside included drawings of more than 100 parts, all fitting in a sphere about 34 inches in diameter, just the right size for a rocket. Equally remarkable were the handwritten notations in the margins. "They made reference to Chinese ministers, presumably involved in the deal," one official who reviewed it disclosed. And there was also a reference to "Munir," apparently Munir Khan, Dr. Khan's rival who ran the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and was in a contest with Dr. Khan to put together a Pakistani weapon that would match India's. In that race, size was critical, because only a small weapon could be put atop Pakistani missiles. One note in the margin of the design, the official said, was that "Munir's bomb would be bigger." Intelligence experts believe that Dr. Khan traded his centrifuge technology to the Chinese for their bomb design. A certain familiarity developed between Dr. Khan and those watching him. "I remember I was once in Beijing on a nonproliferation mission," said Robert J. Einhorn, a longtime proliferation official in the State Department, "and we knew that Khan was in Beijing, too, and where he was. I had this fantasy of going over to his hotel, calling up to his room, and inviting him down for a cup of coffee." Of course, he never did. But if he had, Dr. Khan might not have been surprised. Simon Henderson, a London-based author who has written about Dr. Khan for more than two decades, said the Pakistani scientist long suspected he was under close surveillance. "Khan once told me, indignantly, 'The British try to recruit members of my team as spies,' " Mr. Henderson recalled. "As far as I'm aware, he was penetrated for a long, long time." Still, for all the surveillance, American officials always seemed a step or two behind. In the 1990's, noted Mr. Einhorn, the assumption was that Iran was getting most of its help from Russia, which was providing the country with reactors and laser-isotope technology. Virtually no attention was paid to its contacts with Dr. Khan. "It was a classic case of being focused in the wrong place," Mr. Einhorn said. "And if Iran gets the bomb in the next few years, it won't be because of the Russians. It will be because of the help they got from A. Q. Khan." Triumph and Mystery As soon as Mr. Bush came to office, his director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, began tutoring him on the dangers of Dr. Khan and disclosing how deeply the agency believed it had penetrated his life and network. "We were inside his residence, inside his facilities, inside his rooms," Mr. Tenet said in a recent speech. "We were everywhere these people were." But acting on the Khan problem meant navigating the sensitivities of a fragile ally important in the effort against terrorism. That has impeded the inquiry ever since. Washington had little leverage to force Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to clamp down on a national hero, especially since Dr. Khan may have had evidence implicating the Pakistani government in some of the transactions. And in interviews, officials said they feared that moving on Dr. Khan too early would hurt their chances to roll up the network. Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, went to Pakistan soon after the Sept. 11 attacks and raised concerns about Dr. Khan, some of whose scientists were said to have met with Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader. But Mr. Hadley did not ask General Musharraf to take action, according to a senior administration official. He returned to Washington complaining that it was unclear whether the Khan Laboratories were operating with the complicity of the Pakistani military, or were controlled by freelancers, motivated by visions of profit or of spreading the bomb to Islamic nations. The Pakistanis insisted they had no evidence of any proliferation at all, a claim American officials said they found laughable. As evidence grew in 2003, Mr. Bush sent Mr. Tenet to New York to meet with General Musharraf. "We were afraid Khan's operation was entering a new, more dangerous phase," said one top official. Still there was little action. But in late October 2003, the United States and its allies seized the BBC China, a freighter bearing centrifuge parts made in Malaysia, along with other products of Dr. Khan's network, all bound for Libya. Confronted with the evidence, Libya finally agreed to surrender all of its nuclear program. Within weeks, tons of equipment was being dismantled and flown to the Energy Department's nuclear weapons lab at Oak Ridge, Tenn. Pressures mounted on General Musharraf. "I said to him, 'We know so much about this that we're going to go public with it,' " Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told journalists last week. " 'And you need to deal with this before you have to deal with it publicly.' " On television, Dr. Khan was forced to confess but he gave no specifics, and General Musharraf pardoned the scientist. American officials pressed to interview him and his chief lieutenant, Mr. Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman living in Dubai and Malaysia, who was eventually arrested by Malaysian authorities. But the Pakistanis balked, insisting that they would pass questions to Dr. Khan and report back. Little information has been conveyed. "Some questions simply were never answered," said one senior intelligence official. "In other cases, you don't know if you were getting Khan's answer, or the answer the government wanted you to hear." Dr. Khan's silence has extended to the question of what countries, other than Libya, received the bomb design. Intelligence experts say they have no evidence any other nation received the design, although they suspect Iran and perhaps North Korea. But that search has been hampered by lack of hard intelligence. "We strongly believe Iran did," said one American official. "But we need the proof." Dr. Khan has also never discussed his ties with North Korea, a critical issue because the United States has alleged - but cannot prove - that North Korea has two nuclear arms programs, one using Khan technology. "It is an unbelievable story, how this administration has given Pakistan a pass on the single worst case of proliferation in the past half century," said Jack Pritchard, who worked for President Clinton and served as the State Department's special envoy to North Korea until he quit last year, partly in protest over Mr. Bush's Korea policy. "We've given them a pass because of Musharraf's agreement to fight terrorism, and now there is some suggestion that the hunt for Osama is waning. And what have we learned from Khan? Nothing." Some Missing Pieces In March, American investigators invited reporters to the giant nuclear complex in Oak Ridge to display the equipment disgorged by the Libyans. They surrounded the site with guards bearing automatic weapons, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham joined the officials in showing off some of the 4,000 centrifuges. "We've had a huge success," he said. But it turned out that the centrifuges were missing their rotors - the high-speed internal device that makes them work. To this day, it is not clear where those parts were coming from. While some officials believe the Libyans were going to make their own, others fear the equipment had been shipped from an unknown location - and that the network, while headless, is still alive. John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, echoed those suspicions, saying the network still had a number of undisclosed customers. "There's more out there than we can discuss publicly," he said in April. Federal and private experts said the suspected list of customers included Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Algeria, Kuwait, Myanmar and Abu Dhabi. Given the urgency of the Libyan and Khan disclosures, many private and governmental experts expected that the Bush administration and the I.A.E.A. would work together. But European diplomats said the administration never turned over valuable information to back up its wider suspicions about other countries. "It doesn't like to share," a senior European diplomat involved in nuclear intelligence said of the United States. "That makes life more difficult. So we're on the learning curve." Federal officials said they were reluctant to give the I.A.E.A. classified information because the agency is too prone to leaks. The agency has 137 member states, and American officials believe some of them may be using the agency to hunt for nuclear secrets. One senior administration official put it this way: "The cops and the crooks all serve on the agency's board together." The result is that two separate, disjointed searches are on for other nuclear rogue states - one by Washington, the other by the I.A.E.A. And there is scant communication between the feuding bureaucracies. That lack of communication with the United Nations agency extends to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a loose organization of countries that produce nuclear equipment. It can stop the export of restricted atomic technology to a suspect customer, but it does not report its actions to the I.A.E.A. Moreover, there is no communication between the I.A.E.A. and the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, which seeks to intercept illicit nuclear trade at sea or in the air. "It's a legitimate question whether we need a very different kind of super-agency that can deal with the new world of A. Q. Khans," said a senior administration official. "Because we sure don't have the system we need now." Dr. ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations agency, says he is plunging ahead, pursuing his own investigation even as the Bush administration attempts to have him replaced when his term expires late next year. In an interview in Vienna, he defended his record, citing the information he has wrung out of Iran, and his agency's discovery of tendrils of Dr. Khan's network in more than 30 countries around the globe. "We're getting an idea of how it works," he said of the Khan network. "And we're still looking" for other suppliers and customers. One method is to investigate the countries Dr. Khan visited before his arrest. Nuclear experts disclosed that the countries were Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. Many of them are Islamic, and several of the African countries are rich in uranium ore. In one of its biggest operations, the agency is hunting for clues in a half dozen of the network's buildings and warehouses in Dubai, which for years were used for assembling and repacking centrifuges. Both in Washington and in Vienna, the most delicate investigations involve important American allies - including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. So far, said European intelligence officials familiar with the agency's inner workings, no hard evidence of clandestine nuclear arms programs has surfaced. Suspicious signs have emerged, however. For instance, experts disclosed that SMB Computers, Mr. Tahir's front company in Dubai for the Khan network, made telephone calls to Saudi Arabia. But the company also engaged in legitimate computer sales, giving it plausible cover. Experts also disclosed that Saudi scientists traveled to Pakistan for some of Dr. Khan's scientific conferences. But the meetings were not secret, or illegal. There is also worry in both Washington and Vienna about Egypt, which has two research reactors near Cairo and a long history of internal debate about whether to pursue nuclear arms. But European intelligence officials said I.A.E.A. inspectors who recently went there found no signs of clandestine nuclear arms and some evidence of shoddy workmanship that bespeaks low atomic expectations. As for Syria, the Bush administration had repeatedly charged that it has secretly tried to acquire nuclear arms. But the I.A.E.A. has so far found no signs of a relationship with Dr. Khan or a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Worried about what is still unknown, the I.A.E.A. is quietly setting up what it calls the Covert Nuclear Trade Analysis Unit, agency officials disclosed. It has about a half dozen specialists looking for evidence of deals by the Khan network or its imitators. "I would not be surprised to discover that some countries pocketed some centrifuges," Dr. ElBaradei said. "They may have considered it a chance of a lifetime to get some equipment and thought, 'Well, maybe it will be good for a rainy day.' " William J. Broad reported from New York for this article, and David E. Sanger from Washington. -------- iran Iran to shoot down ‘flying objects’ near nuclear facilities Sunday, December 26, 2004 (AP) http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_26-12-2004_pg7_44 TEHRAN: Iran’s air force has been ordered to shoot down any unidentified or suspicious flying objects in Iran’s airspace, an air force spokesman said on Saturday, amid state-media reports of sightings of flying objects near Iran’s nuclear installations. “All anti-aircraft units and jet fighters have been ordered to shoot down the flying objects over Iran’s airspace,” spokesman of the Regular Army Air Force Colonel Salman Mahini said. Flying object fever has gripped Iran after dozens of reported sightings in the summer and in recent weeks. State-run media has reported sightings of unidentified objects flying over parts of Iran where nuclear facilities are located. “The unidentified flying objects could be satellites, comets or spying or reconnaissance crafts trying to monitor Iran’s nuclear installations,” Mahini said. “Flights of unknown objects in the country’s airspace have increased in recent weeks ... (they) have been seen over Bushehr and Isfahan provinces,” the Resalat newspaper reported on Saturday. There are nuclear facilities in both provinces. The timing of the reported increase in sightings, which comes as the US is urging allies to confront Iran over its nuclear program, has strengthened Iranian public perceptions that the objects are surveillance or hostile aircrafts monitoring Iran. Iran’s Air Force chief General Karim Ghavami was quoted in Iranian newspapers Saturday as saying that Iran was fully prepared to defend any threat to its nuclear installations. “We have arranged plans to defend nuclear facilities from any threat. Iran’s Air Force is watchful and prepared to carry out its responsibilities,” Ghavami was quoted as saying. The paper had reported that “shining objects” in the sky were seen near Natanz — where Iran’s uranium enrichment plant is located — and one had exploded, causing “concern and panic in the region.” ap -------- missile defense Missile defense revival polarizes Christians By David F. Dawes & Meghan Wood December 26, 2004 CanadianChristianity.com http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/na.cgi?nationalupdates/041222missile WHILE it has not received the same coverage as the cross-border disputes over lumber and beef, the proposed American-sponsored Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system has nevertheless polarized Christians on both sides of the border. The controversy made headlines in Canada during the past month. During U.S. President George W. Bush's first visit to this country December 2, he surprised Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin by bringing the subject up unexpectedly in public. Martin responded that he wanted to "make sure that there is no weaponization of space." The subject also arose in mid-December, when Martin announced that Canada would only consider very limited participation in the American program. BMD involves using sophisticated radar and intercept missiles to create a protective shield around North America. President Ronald Reagan proposed the concept in 1983. It was reviled by the Soviet Union, and widely ridiculed by peace activists -- who derisively labeled it 'Star Wars.' The determination of President Bush to revive Reagan's vision is attracting increasing attention. Critics fear a potential militarization of space, wherein fallible weapons would orbit the earth, primed to shoot down hostile missiles with no consideration of the potential consequences. Supporters, meanwhile, maintain that such a system is both workable and vitally important -- and indeed, is essential to national security in the post-Cold War era, due to terrorist threats. However, progress in developing BMD has been slow. The Missile Defense Agency announced that a planned flight test, costing $85 million, failed December 14 -- after the interceptor missile never launched from its test site. The previous test, held December 2002, also failed when a warhead didn't detach from its booster rocket. While some BMD tests have been successful, a Los Angeles Times editorial recently insisted that: "the only tests that have succeeded were rigged; the missiles being intercepted were equipped with homing devices, something a real attacker probably wouldn't be considerate enough to include." Canadian Christians on both sides of the issue have recently weighed in with strong opinions. The Toronto-based Christian Coalition International Canada (CCIC), which describes itself as "a vibrant majority, proudly Christian," took maverick independent MP Carolyn Parrish to task in a December 23 statement, characterizing her as an "irresponsible loud mouth." CCIC cited a Reuters article about Parrish's notorious reference to American supporters of BMD as "idiots," and responded that the MP "should be asked to resign, or should be subjected to a Parliamentary Ethics disciplinary action for her indiscreet and diplomatically damaging comment." Further, the organization said that Parrish had jeopardized "good relations with Canada's best ally, most significant trading partner and friendly neighbour." Generally, however, official Canadian Christian responses to BMD have been overwhelmingly negative. A recent open letter to Martin from the Canadian branch of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) maintained that BMD "would be futile in relation to attacks such as those struck against the United States on September 11, 2001 . . . There are serious questions as to its technical feasibility, even to intercept limited ballistic missile attacks. Further, it appears to represent a major step away from seeking security through agreements on arms control and disarmament -- an arena in which Canada has long played a strong and effective role -- and turns, instead, toward a greater reliance on military might." The letter added: "The biblical call to seek security by doing justice and caring for the needy -- rather than in 'chariot and sword' -- is profoundly relevant." Richard Schneider, president of the Canadian Council of Churches, also wrote to Martin in late October, stating: "The elimination of nuclear weapons is the only reliable means of protecting Canadians and all humankind from the threat of nuclear annihilation . . . There is no substitute for the moral, legal, and political imperative of nuclear abolition, and . . . strategic ballistic missile defense systems undermine nuclear abolition efforts." Further, he emphasized, "it is a God-ordained imperative that we should strive always to 'beat swords into ploughshares,' and not the reverse." The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada issued a statement November 25, asserting: "As Christians, our hope and trust can never be in a nuclear 'future.' A nuclear 'future' (with either land based nuclear weaponry or space based weaponry) implies that, as a people, we are in favour of obliterating and eliminating thousands -- if not millions -- of people, as well as destroying vast tracts of the planet(s) and surrounding environment that God entrusts to us. A nuclear 'future' implies that our hope is in weaponry and not God." This polarization has also been seen among American Christians, as demonstrated by an exchange that took place in Christianity Today four years ago. BMD supporter Charles Colson maintained that missile defense was preferable to the 'Mutual Assured Destruction' (MAD) approach to arms control which had governed relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Colson wrote: "MAD was a Faustian bargain, but it worked: throughout the half-century of the Cold War, neither side launched a strategic missile, and Soviet imperialism was contained. But today the world has changed dramatically. We are the lone superpower facing new threats from rogue states. And despite some embarrassing test failures, our strategic defense capability has greatly advanced." Colson also cited a Christian intellectual tradition: "The Augustinian 'just-war' formulation, which has historically informed Western thought, holds that the use of force must be in a just cause, ordered by competent authority, and with the right intention. Missile defense protects a civilian population, which is just; the federal government is a competent authority; and the intention in defensive action is right by definition." BMD, he declared, "meets these standards better than MAD," and he insisted that "Cold War relics should no longer deter us from adopting a nonaggressive, more just defense policy." In their response, Darryl and Tricia Gates Brown maintained that Colson was misinterpreting the 'just war' concept, and asserted: "National missile defense [NMD] research has been enthusiastically supported by the Pentagon's top four weapons contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TRW -- all of whom have contributed generously to the 25 most ardent supporters of NMD in the Senate. The bottom line: NMD would earn these solicitors of weapons a very hefty profit." Christians, they contended, "should carefully scrutinize the rhetoric of those who stand to profit, either financially or politically, from the development and deployment of an NMD system." Further, they insisted, "the vocation of every Christian is to model for the world the character of God's kingdom by choosing the way of self-giving service and by putting absolute trust in God's justice and protection rather than in the machinations of man. When measured against this vocation, investing in and trusting in an expensive, unreliable system to blow up incoming missiles in midair appears both ludicrous and idolatrous." "Missile defense is a realistic initiative in light of new threats," said author Alex Moens, professor of international politics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. A Christian, Moens recently released The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush: Values, Strategy and Loyalty. He told CC.com that the president's plan "includes not just the U.S., but North America -- and we should be involved in the protection of our own country and our own people. America is willing to take all the risks and take all the costs, so we have a very good proposal in front of us." Donald DeMarco, a Christian who is professor emeritus of philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Kitchener, Ontario told CC.com that he believes most Canadians are not sufficiently informed on the issue. He dismissed the desire to avoid the weaponization of space as "weird," contending that the concept doesn't have much meaning. "It implies somehow that space is sacred and we don't want to do anything with it," he says. "We live in space. We have to do something with it." CC.com also spoke to Ernie Regehr, director of the Ontario-based Project Ploughshares. In November, the organization presented a brief on BMD to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Regarding the recent failed test, he said: "It's evident that this is, after all, 'rocket science.' And it's one more piece of evidence that [the U.S.] is an awful long way from a functioning system. It doesn't make sense for Canada to be involved in this experimental system." The Pentagon evidently plans to spend an estimated $50 billion over the next five years on BMD. Regehr said he thinks that "the U.S. itself will start to waiver," and contended that Congress would not be in favour of spending that money when there's "nothing to show for it." Bush said during his recent visit that he hopes the U.S. and Canada can "move forward on ballistic missile defense cooperation, to protect the next generation of Canadians and Americans from the threats we know will arise." But Martin replied in mid-December that Canada will only participate if it does not have to contribute funds, if no missiles are based in Canada, and if Canada has a say in how the system is run. Martin "is buying time for political reasons," Moens opined, adding that this approach ignores the urgency of the situation. "I would say it's important that Canada act now . . . It's important that Christians realize that there is the role of the government to protect the country and its people." BMD, he insisted, is "a defensive action, not offensive. Defense is moral, defense is good." But Regehr said he believes that, as a result of BMD, Russia and China will increase their nuclear arsenals -- thus expanding the threat against North America, instead of reducing it. "In reality, [BMD] is counter-productive -- and it's no longer a moral option. No system will work 100 percent of the time." The only credible means of defense, he added, "is preventing [missile] use . . . not defending against them after they've been deployed." -------- terrorism Revealed: the UK's secret terrorism agency By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 26 December 2004 UK Independent http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=596082 Ministers are secretly establishing an "Armageddon agency" to respond to devastating terrorist attacks on Britain, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Neither Parliament nor the public have been told how far the Government has gone to put the service - which will deal with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks - into operation over the course of 2004. The body, called the Government Decontamination and Recovery Service, is such a sensitive topic even within Whitehall that it is deliberately known only by its initials - GDRS. Even then it is hardly mentioned, even in official documents. It is based in Margaret Beckett's Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and, according to a top official, it has been ready to respond to an attack since last April. It has appointed specialist contractors to tackle incidents, has a senior Defra civil servant directing it, and at present has a core staff of about 15 officials. All that MPs and the public have been told is that ministers are "considering" setting up such a body. A single sentence buried in a two-paragraph press release issued on 25 March mentioned that "the Government is actively considering the establishment of a national decontamination and recovery service". The same words were used by Nick Raynsford, a minister in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, in May, and this is still the official position. Nine months ago, Elliot Morley, the environment minister, promised that further details would be released "as soon as practicable". But ministers are only now contemplating a public announcement, sometime in the New Year, that they have decided to go ahead with the agency. A search for the GDRS on the Defra and parliamentary websites last week did not turn up a single mention. Only two references to it could be found in publicly available documents: a solitary line in a Home Office statement referring to a £100,000 contribution to the project, and a single budget line in a balance sheet from the Justice Department of the devolved Scottish Executive recording a contribution of £250,000. One top official admits: "There is not a lot of information about this in the public domain. We are further down the road than it appears publicly at the moment, and have been working on it for longer." He says that the first moves to form the agency were taken a year ago after a secret study identified "gaps" in arrangements across Whitehall and at local authority levels in terrorism response planning. -------- u.s. nuc weapons Ultrafast Supercomputer to Simulate Nuke Explosion By REUTERS Published: December 26, 2004 Filed at 10:04 a.m. ET http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-supercomputer.html LIVERMORE, Calif. (Reuters) - Leading nuclear scientists with top security clearances will gather next summer at a screening room east of San Francisco and witness the results of the greatest effort ever in supercomputing. Using a computer doing 360 trillion calculations a second, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab will simulate the explosion of an aging nuclear bomb in three dimensions. The short, highly detailed video produced by the world's fastest computer will attempt to illustrate how missiles dating back to the Nixon administration would perform today. ``My job ... is to ensure that the nuclear weapons in the stockpile are safe and reliable,'' said Bruce Goodwin, associate director for defense and nuclear technologies. ``Safe means no matter what you do to them they don't go off when they are not supposed to. Reliable means that should the president ever have to use one, it will work exactly as it is supposed to.'' The United States has about 10,000 nuclear warheads as a deterrent against attack. Washington stopped real nuclear tests in 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996. That ban means that a huge windowless room at Livermore is becoming a prime testing ground to make sure nuclear weapons dating back decades have not developed fatal flaws. In a room about half the size of a football field, BlueGene/L is a series of interconnected 6-foot-high racks holding 16 modules, each packed with massive computing power. The first part of BlueGene, built by IBM (IBM.N), became operational in mid-December at 90 trillion calculations a second; the rest should be ready by April. Even at its ultimate 360 trillion calculations a second speed, the simulation will take two to four months, lab officials say. This same calculation would have taken 60,000 years if done on technology available a decade ago. STILL VITAL AFTER THE COLD WAR? Some analysts say as impressive as BlueGene is, test simulations are not as vital in a post-Cold War world. ``Why are we so focused on calculating or knowing the differences in performances of weapons?'' asked Christopher Paine, co-director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. ``Just as long as we knew we were above a certain threshold, wouldn't that be enough to provide deterrence?'' Paine contrasted present U.S. defense needs with those in the Cold War, when planners needed to assure that nuclear weapons would destroy hardened Soviet targets. ``There is less reason to focus on the accuracy of our simulations,'' he said. ``What we need to focus on from a deterrent point of view is just that we have weapons that go off.'' Nuclear physicist Goodwin responds that negotiated cuts in stockpiles in the years to come without newer replacements make the reliability of any one nuclear bomb more vital. ``The question we are asking today is, as the stockpile changes on its own, will it continue to work and be safe?'' he asked. Scientists say there is a lot they do not know about the effects of aging on the components of a nuclear bomb -- plutonium, uranium, high explosives, plastic and gases. For example will a bomb's plutonium last 50, 100 or 1,000 years? ``They are made out of very corrosive materials,'' Goodwin said. ``Yet the charge from the government is that this warhead -- which is made of these materials which are not happy with each other -- should remain perfectly safe and reliable indefinitely.'' Another question is how well the software written to simulate the atomic explosion will perform. Even the world's top software engineers routinely release flaws, and critics say nuclear scientists need more oversight. ``If this were Microsoft Word, you'd have every hacker in the world trying to find the bugs,'' Goodwin said. ``They're doing quality control for Microsoft in a pejorative sense after the fact. Well, you don't want there to be 1,000 places capable of doing nuclear weapons simulations.'' He said Livermore's main check came from the U.S. nuclear weapons research lab at Los Alamos in New Mexico. Engineers also do more conventional tests, including taking apart 11 atomic bombs every year, Goodwin said. When the nuclear scientists see the several-minute-long 3-D simulation from the roughly $100 million computer next summer, will it prove the most expensive animation ever? No, lab officials say, pointing to the current Hollywood film ``Polar Express'' which used computer animation in a production costing $270 million to make and promote. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- alaska Galena opens the door to nuclear project By Tim Bradner Alaska Journal of Commerce Sunday, December 26, 2004 http://www.alaskajournal.com/stories/122604/loc_20041226003.shtml Galena's city council unanimously approved a resolution Dec. 14 tentatively accepting an offer by Japan's Toshiba Corp. to install a small-scale 10 megawatt nuclear power plant in the community as a demonstration project. That is provided Toshiba can secure licensing from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the project, according to Galena city manager Marvin Yoder. Galena is a small community west of Fairbanks, on the Yukon River. The resolution directed Yoder to work with the community's Washington, D.C.-based attorney and Toshiba in developing the application to the NRC. The 4S reactor unit is referred to as a battery because it does not have moving parts, and once installed, its fuel will not need to be replaced as in conventional nuclear reactors. The reactor unit is 50 feet to 60 feet tall and 6 to 8 feet in diameter. It will be built outside of Alaska, installed in the Yukon River community, encased in several tons of concrete and not be opened during its operating life, which is now estimated at 30 years. Licensing will be an involved process that will take several years and substantial funding by Toshiba, Yoder said. It will also include development of a federal environmental impact statement. "It is in the public interest to pursue the siting of a Toshiba 4S nuclear battery in Galena," the resolution said. The council further directed Yoder to "establish a process and timeline leading to evaluations, industrial partners, and financial and contractual arrangements necessary to bring the economic and environmental benefits of the 4S to Galena." Toshiba has offered to install the reactor at Galena free of cost if the licensing is approved as a commercial demonstration of the "nuclear battery" in a remote location. Once the technology is approved for use in the United States, Toshiba believes there will be opportunities for sales worldwide, and elsewhere in rural Alaska, according to Robert Chaney, a researcher with Science Applications International Corp. SAIC coordinated a U.S. Department of Energy study of long-term energy supply options for Galena, including the Toshiba battery. The University of Alaska and Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory worked with SAIC in the study. The study showed the Toshiba battery can supply electricity to the community for about one-fourth of the cost of conventional diesel fuel. Chaney said the DOE study weighed the cost benefits of nuclear against other ways of providing Galena with improved energy, including more efficient diesel generation, a small coal-fired power plant, and wind, solar and hydro-power from the nearby Yukon River. Wind, solar and hydro-power were taken off the list as primary power sources when it was determined that site conditions in Galena did not make those options practical, Chaney told an Alaska Miners Association group in a Dec. 17 briefing on the project. The analysis showed that, presuming the nuclear battery went into operation in 2010, by 2020 it could supply electricity to Galena for 5 to 14 cents a kilowatt hour (kWh), assuming the reactor is a gift from Toshiba and the community pays only operating costs. In comparison, improved diesel generation could provide Galena power for 25 cents to 35 cents per kWh. Coal-fired power comes in as a serious alternative in the study, at 21 cents to 26 cents per kWh, Chaney told the mining group. A small coal-powered plant could use coal extracted from a thick coal seam about 12 miles from the community. The nuclear option looks good even if Galena were to pay for the reactor. In that case the power costs were estimated at 15 cents to 25 cents per kWh in the study, Chaney said. Toshiba has estimated the cost of the 4S reactor at $25 million. Galena's power is now 28 cents per kWh. However, the nuclear costs vary so much because of uncertainty over the number of security guards the federal NRC may require at the site, Chaney said. Toshiba told SAIC that if the NRC's current regulations are followed, 34 security guards would be needed at the Galena site. Chaney said a terrorist attack in a small, isolated rural community like Galena is unlikely because an unknown outsider would quickly be recognized. The 4S unit would be encased under several feet of concrete, "and if people show up with jackhammers, everyone in town will be aware of it." A more appropriate staffing for security might be 4 guards, augmented by a state trooper and Galena city police who are nearby, Chaney said. If the NRC accepts that, the operating costs will be low enough to deliver electricity for 5 cents, according to the study. The 4S unit will supply far more electricity than Galena now uses, but if it is installed there will be ample, inexpensive power available for local residents to convert homes from heating with expensive fuel oil to more affordable electricity. Even then, there will be substantial excess power, enough to operate greenhouses that can grow vegetables and fruit year-around for the community, Chaney said. There are, however, always risks with new technology, according to Ron Johnson, a professor of engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks who is working with engineering aspects of the DOE study. One issue with the Toshiba 4S reactor is the use of liquid sodium as a heat transfer medium, Johnson said. And as with any nuclear power plant, long-term disposal of radioactive waste is always an issue, although the nuclear materials would not be removed from a unit in Alaska. Johnson was also cautious on whether the 4S is a total solution for rural village power needs. "If the technology is successfully deployed in Galena, its economic viability in other Alaska villages and elsewhere depends on the actual life-cycle costs, which are yet to be quantified," he said. Chaney said that if the 10 megawatt design for the 4S is approved and works as expected, Toshiba or other companies should be encouraged to work on smaller versions of it. A 2 megawatt or 4 megawatt version might be sized more appropriately for small, remote communities in Alaska. Alaska miners are interested in the Galena project because if the NRC approves Toshiba's proposal, larger nuclear batteries could provide power to remote mines. Toshiba does have a 50 megawatt version of the 4S design, which would be useful at an operating mine in a remote location. The cost and difficulty of supplying power are currently major obstacles to two large but remote mining projects now being studied - the Donlin Creek gold project near the Kuskokwim River and the Pebble gold-copper prospect on the Alaska Peninsula. -------- new mexico N.M. Lab Facility's Future Uncertain With Move of Nukes December 26, 2004 The Associated Press http://www.abqjournal.com/north/aplab12-26-04.htm?splashtop LOS ALAMOS — Officials are pondering the future of a Los Alamos National Laboratory facility as the Department of Energy clears out its nuclear material and builds another facility in Nevada to take its place. Located at the bottom of a canyon, scientists have used the Los Alamos Critical Experiments Facility to conduct experiments on nuclear criticality — the point at which a nuclear reaction is self-sustaining. But concerns over its vulnerability to terrorist attack prompted the government to start work on a Nevada facility. The Energy Department has been working to move the area's highly enriched uranium and plutonium to the Nevada Test Site, northwest of Las Vegas, and plans to relocate the most sensitive weapons-grade nuclear material by September 2005. The remaining material will be moved by 2008. A couple of shipments have been made so far. Nancy Ambrosiano, a lab spokeswoman, said the future of the area after the nuclear material is gone remains unclear. The "funky, old building with little appeal," as she described it, could be decontaminated and closed or turned into a space for something else, she said. "Tear it down, and clean it up," said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. The area, known as Technical Area 18, is one of the most dangerous places at the lab where maximum radiation exposure to the public from an accident there is estimated at 1,100 rem — more than double a lethal dose — according to an independent federal safety board that advises the Energy Department. TA-18 has also had an important history at the lab. There, Emilio Segre noted the presence of a spontaneous neutron emitter in plutonium — a discovery that set the course for plutonium-based weapons. The national criticality safety program, which defines safety standards for handling, processing and storing special nuclear materials, also originated there. Today, hundreds of inspectors securing nuclear facilities throughout the world also receive training with real nuclear materials there. "TA-18 houses the Western Hemisphere's largest collection of machines for conducting nuclear-safety evaluations and establishing limits for operations," according to an Energy Department document. It is unclear whether the closure of TA-18 will mark the end of criticality experiments at Los Alamos. "I don't know what the final programmatic call will be," said Gerald Schlapper of the DOE's Los Alamos office. "It's my impression that most — if not all — of the criticality safety training will be conducted at the Nevada Test Site." There is no other location at Los Alamos lab where the experiments could be held unless a new facility were built, he said. "And if you're building a new facility at the Nevada Test Site, it doesn't make sense to me to duplicate the effort here," Schlapper said. In the meantime, Gov. Bill Richardson has said he does not want Los Alamos scientists to conduct any criticality experiments until safety concerns are resolved. An independent federal safety board has listed several problems, including a lack of controls, at TA-18. The Energy Department has said the number of planned experiments has been cut back and the experiments should be completed by summer 2005. -------- LANL Disputes DOE Report; Neutron Science Center Faulted By Adam Rankin Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer Sunday, December 26, 2004 http://www.abqjournal.com/north/278876north_news12-26-04.htm?tease Los Alamos National Laboratory officials say they disagree with several key findings in a recent Department of Energy audit that questioned the reliability and useful life of a particle accelerator once considered the "flagship" of the nation's nuclear science effort. Paul Lisowski, division director of LANL's Neutron Science Center, or LANSCE, where the accelerator is located, said several of the DOE Inspector General's findings were either incorrect or told only part of the story. The audit, made public just after DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration released its draft criteria for operating LANL earlier this month, made the University of California, the current manager of LANL, appear to be a poor facility manager. DOE is preparing to accept bids for a new operator of LANL for the first time in the laboratory's 60-plus year history. Outgoing Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham made the decision to put LANL's contract up for bid in April 2003 after a series of security and financial management problems came to light the previous year. The University of California's contract to run LANL expires at the end of September. The audit reported that LANSCE operates on a $90 million annual budget and works only about 77 percent of the time— 8 percent below the national standard for similar machines. In August, the audit notes, the accelerator worked only 44 percent of the time due to equipment failures. The DOE audit also highlighted $42 million in deferred maintenance costs, including $10 million in environmental remediation and the replacement of some safety parts. Lisowski, who said the facility is unique in the nation for its broad applications and critical to LANL's mission of ensuring the safety and viability of the nation's nuclear stockpile, contested each of these assertions from the audit. He said LANSCE actually operates on only $55 million a year, not $90 million, and that DOE had agreed LANSCE would be funded to operate at only 75 percent reliability this past year. By achieving 77 percent reliability, LANL had actually outperformed DOE expectations, he said. "We actually exceeded what we told our sponsors we could meet," Lisowski said, adding that the facility "operates with a very lean budget." The overall reliability of the beam was lower than expected because in August, a fire-prevention system malfunctioned after a lightning strike, forcing a multiday shutdown, he said. If the month of August is excluded from the total, Lisowski said, the beam reliability would have exceeded 82 percent. Lisowski acknowledged the accrual of deferred maintenance, but insisted no repairs to parts or elements critical for safety have ever been deferred. Built in 1972 for $57 million, LANSCE's particle accelerator generates a proton beam with energies of up to 800 million electron volts— at one time, a beam more intense than those from all comparable accelerators in the world combined— speeding particles up to 84 percent of the speed of light. Since it was built, new facilities have been added to the center, making use of the beam, including the most recent addition, the $16.5 million Isotope Production Facility, which uses the accelerator's proton beam to produce medical radioisotopes used in diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. "This is an investment that is worth well over $1 billion now," Lisowski said about the LANSCE facilities that make use of the accelerator beam. Alan Hurd, director of LANSCE's Manuel Lujan Jr. Center, where 13 different experiments run 24 hours a day, seven days a week while the beam is running, said the audit overlooked the value the facility serves as a national destination for advanced science among leading researchers. He said the center hosted more than 300 researchers last year, with many more applying for beam time than could be accepted during its eight-month run. "The neutron scattering program is exploding in terms of user visits," he said, adding that the facility is a major recruitment tool for top scientists. The DOE audit pushed the question of whether LANSCE could continue to provide needed research capabilities into the future and criticized the department's lack of long-term planning detailing mission priorities. Lisowski agreed that planning and funding for the facility is lacking but said LANL and lab director Pete Nanos are committed to maintaining the facility as a core science and weapons research facility. "You want to start funding it now, so it is a good machine for the stockpile mission and science in the future," he said. -------- MILITARY -------- china Reports: Several killed, dozens injured as tens of thousands riot in southern Chinese city Sunday December 26, 1:54 PM Asia-Pacific - AP http://asia.news.yahoo.com/041226/ap/d87754ao0.html Several people were killed and dozens were injured in a riot triggered when police allegedly beat to death a resident in southern China, newspapers reported Sunday. The reports in Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po and Apple Daily newspapers differed widely over the size of the mob and what led to the clash Saturday in Da Lang village in Guangdong province. Wen Wei Po said nearly 50,000 people faced off against hundreds of police officers after security forces beat to death a relative of a student injured in a traffic accident following a dispute over compensation. The rioters set fire to four police cars, the report said. The Apple Daily, meanwhile, said about 1,000 people rioted after security officials beat to death a 15-year-old boy for stealing a bicycle. Police fired tear gas at the rioters and at least several locals were killed and 100 were injured, the Apple Daily said, quoting a Da Lang villager. It said police brought the riot under control in three hours and later arrested about a dozen people. The reason for the difference in crowd estimates in the two papers wasn't clear. Police and government officials refused to comment. "The riot is over," said one government official in Dongguan, a city that includes Da Lang. He refused to say what happened and referred all inquires to the Communist Party propaganda office in Dongguan, where phones rang unanswered Sunday. He wouldn't give his name. Police in Da Lang and Dongguan and also refused to comment. Disputes in China can escalate at an alarming rate because large numbers of bystanders gather quickly. Those involved in the argument often recruit friends and family members to help out. -------- iraq Islamic site shows footage of attack on U.S. base in Mosul 12/26/2004 11:26 AM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-12-26-mosul-footage_x.htm BAGHDAD, Iraq — The radical Islamic group that claimed responsibility for the deadliest attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, released on Sunday dramatic videotape showing three militants describing their plans to carry out the suicide bombing, which killed more than 20 people. The footage also shows what appears to be the attack itself, showing a fireball rising up and a torn white tent. In the Dec. 21 attack, a bomber — probably dressed in an Iraqi military uniform — slipped into a dining tent packed with soldiers eating lunch and set off his explosives at Marez base on the outskirts of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, according to U.S. officials. Ansar al-Sunnah issued a statement soon after saying it carried the attack out. In the new video, which carried a Dec. 20 date on the footage, three guerrillas clad in black, wearing face masks and carrying AK-47 automatic rifles describe their plans. One of the men read a statement saying another of the three — identified as Abu Omar al-Musali — would carry the attack by breaking into the base through the perimeter fence. The man reading the statement later embraced the bomber, who was wearing an explosives-laden vest "He will take advantage of the change of guards. We have been observing their schedule for a long time. This lion will then proceed to his target and we will take advantage of lunch time. He will storm the dining room where the crusaders and their (Iraqi) allies are gathered," said the man. The authenticity of the video, which appeared on an Islamic Web site on the Internet that in the past carried footage of attacks on U.S. troops, could not be independently verified. The man reading the statement indicated with a rifle bayonet to a hand drawn map of the base. He also addressed a warning to President Bush, and prime ministers Tony Blair and Ayad Allawi of Britain and Iraq. "Let Bush, Blair and Allawi know that we are coming and that we will chase them all away, God willing," the masked man said. A later outdoor video image — shot on Tuesday, when the attack occurred — shows a fireball rising from the distance with the accompanying sound of the explosion. A final image — shot from a vehicle driving past the base — shows the torn white tent that served as the base mess hall. The dead included 18 Americans — 13 service members and five U.S. civilian contractors — and three Iraqi guardsmen and one unidentified "non-U.S. person," according to figures released by the U.S. military. Of the 69 wounded, 44 were U.S. military personnel and the remainder American civilians, Iraqi troops, and other foreigners. -------- israel / palestine A Perfect Peace Reviewed by Jack Snyder Sunday, December 26, 2004 Washington Post; Page BW03 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21148-2004Dec22?language=printer THE CASE FOR DEMOCRACY The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror By Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer PublicAffairs. 303 pp. $26.95 In Natan Sharansky's new book, the renowned Soviet dissident turned Israeli cabinet minister makes the tough-love case for Palestinian democracy. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians will prevail, he argues, if and only if the Palestinian Authority is transformed into a truly free society where the Palestinian people's natural inclination toward peace can prevail over the manipulations of their hatemongering leaders. Sharansky does not expect that this paradise will arrive overnight as a result of electing a new head of the Palestinian Authority on Jan. 9, 2005. It will take time to extirpate Yasser Arafat's entrenched legacy of hatred, he writes. Elections should be deferred for at least three years; the whole process of true democratization might take "many years, even decades." In the meantime, Israel should avoid what Sharansky sees as the fatal mistake of the Oslo peace process: making one-sided territorial concessions in the illusory hope of shoring up pseudo-moderate Palestinian leaders who rule by undemocratic means. Skeptics have quipped that Sharansky and his allies are "demanding that Palestine become Sweden before it can become Palestine." Cynics might think that a formula of "no concessions until a free society rises" is a rationalization to justify a policy of "no concessions until hell freezes." The cynic would be wrong, but the skeptic would be right. Sharansky, a former refusenik and Soviet political prisoner, comes off as a man of conviction who brings his own past as a human rights and democracy advocate to today's debates about the Middle East's future. ("The great debate of my youth has returned," he writes.) But for all his sincerity, it is unlikely that Palestine can become a stable, mature democracy with an electorate clamoring for peace anytime soon. This goal will be especially hard to reach if Israel defers making the meaningful concessions on territory and settlements that any democratically elected Palestinian leader will need in order to survive, let alone succeed. Otherwise, it will be impossible to break the iron grip of hatred that Sharansky himself says is choking off the breath of Palestinian freedom. Sharansky bases his case on two central arguments, both of them dubious. The first is that free societies are always peaceful. "Since all democratic societies strive for peace," he writes, "there is no such thing as a belligerent democracy." Open public debate, he continues, provides the average voter with good information about the unnecessary costs of reckless warmongering. In contrast, the leaders of what Sharansky calls "fear societies," such as the Soviet Union and the Palestinian Authority, exaggerate foreign threats to justify repression at home. Outsiders may fall prey to the illusion that the people in "fear societies" (read: Hamas supporters) are more warlike than their leaders (read: Arafat), and therefore conclude that concessions must be made to keep in power the embattled "moderates" who can resist violent demands from their angry "street." In fact, Sharansky contends, the people get whipped into a frenzy only because of the doubletalk of their leaders, and the only antidote is to promote free speech and democracy. The reality is far less tidy. True, no two democracies have ever fought a war against each other, but democracies are hardly pacifist: They are just as likely to fight wars as non-democracies, they often start them, and when they do, they win nine times out of 10. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that fully democratic Israel would stay at peace with a partially democratic Palestine, which is the only kind of democracy Palestine is likely to have in the near future. Partially democratic Iraq held the most extreme rejectionist views in the Arab coalition that went to war to try to prevent Israeli statehood in 1948. Partially democratic Pakistan regularly fights democratic India. Indeed, during the 19th and 20th centuries, states in the process of democratizing have been, by various measures, between four and 15 times more war-prone than other countries. Finally, while autocracies do sometimes fight democracies, they often live side by side in peace; Sharansky, however, chafes at acknowledging even the obvious national security benefits Israel won by signing the 1978 Camp David peace accords with the Egyptian autocrat Anwar Sadat. Sharansky's second core argument is just as shaky as his assertion that democracies are consistently peaceful. Like President Bush, Sharansky insists that any nation can become democratic, even if the lack of favorable preconditions makes it seem a long shot. But in fact, preconditions do matter. Statistical research suggests that transitions to democracy normally fail in countries as poor as Palestine, though the Palestinians' relatively high literacy level may partially counterbalance this. Sharansky denies that Arab culture is inherently anti-democratic, arguing rather that it lacks democratic institutions. This is probably correct, but it does not necessarily make the problem any easier to solve. Sharansky also argues that the vast majority of Arabs, including Palestinians, want to live in freedom. Polls of the Iraqi public suggest that this is also probably correct, but if the 70 percent of the population that wants democracy remains unorganized, the Iraqi experience suggests that the 30 percent who want something else will prevail by default. Sharansky's most egregious blind spot is failing to see how the indignities of occupation and the expansion of Israeli settlements play into the hands of the undemocratic Palestinian hatemongers he abhors. He dwells on Palestinian demagogues' use of double standards in their criticisms of Israel, yet seems unaware that he does much the same thing. Without the slightest sense of either irony or empathy for the Palestinians, he asserts that "If other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish people have a right to live securely in their homeland as well." Even following a successful Palestinian transition to full democracy, Sharansky would not unambiguously recommend an Israeli withdrawal, saying only that the final status of the West Bank "must be determined through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians." President Bush and U.S. neoconservatives have proved a receptive audience for Sharansky's arguments, which dovetail with their hope of countering terrorism by spreading democracy throughout the Middle East. After Sharansky lobbied National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2002, the goal of fostering Palestinian democracy was placed front and center in Bush's major June 24 speech, which laid the groundwork for the so-called road map back to renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks. And as Arafat lay dying, Sharansky, book in hand, pitched his ideas in person to the president. The affinity seems to run deep; Bush's address spoke of letting liberty "blossom in the rocky soil of the West Bank and Gaza," and Sharansky ends his last chapter by echoing the same phrase. But these enthusiasts for spreading democracy have cut corners on their homework, skipping over what political scientists have recently learned about democratizing states. President Bush needs to expand his reading list beyond this book to find a good answer to Israelis' and Palestinians' problems -- let alone those of Iraq and the larger Middle East. • Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia University and author of "From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict." -------- latin america Disarmament Holds Out Hope For Elusive Peace in Colombia Paramilitary Group Could Easily Rise Again, Skeptics Warn By Kevin Sullivan Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page A36 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26003-2004Dec25?language=printer TIBU, Colombia -- After nearly 10 years of fighting anti-government rebels, Julio Cesar Arce strode onto a muddy field one recent day and joined 1,400 fellow paramilitary fighters in a ceremony marking the largest voluntary disarmament in his country's violent history. Handing in guns, smashing radios and tossing tents and uniforms into a roaring bonfire, the men helped destroy their own tools of war at the edge of the dense jungle in far northern Colombia, where they had fought for years. "I couldn't do it anymore. Living with war is the most powerful reason for wanting peace," Arce, 27, a self-confident man with a military haircut and flashy sunglasses, said as he sat outside his nearby home. A father of three, he said he planned to start a new life raising fish, chickens and pigs with 45 comrades who are also laying down their guns. The Dec. 10 ceremony has been widely seen as a sign that Colombia, convulsed for more than four decades by civil conflict that takes some 3,000 lives each year, might finally take a significant step toward peace. The event was part of an agreement in July 2003 between President Alvaro Uribe and the country's main paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials AUC. The group agreed to completely disarm by the time Uribe's term ends in 2006. "This is an historic day," Luis Carlos Restrepo, the government's high commissioner for peace, said during the ceremony after the fighters handed over their weapons. "Today we can say with conviction that the peace of Colombia begins." Despite those hopeful sentiments, however, critics in Colombia's legislature and human rights community warned that the paramilitary forces could still rearm. They said the disarmament did not guarantee that the rebels would fully dismantle their operations or halt the massacres of civilians of which they have been accused. "The government seems pleased just to allow the paramilitaries to make promises," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the top Latin America specialist with Human Rights Watch. "There are more than enough reasons to be skeptical." Even Arce, who said he was tired after years of clandestine combat and two serious bullet wounds, warned that the paramilitary groups could easily rise again if the guerrillas they have been fighting for more than a decade aren't disarmed as well. "I don't want to live that life again," he said, pointing to heavy scars across his stomach and knee. "But if we feel we are forced to, we will." Paramilitary groups formed in the late 1980s to help police and the military battle guerrilla groups, most notably the 18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Although the paramilitary fighters operate outside the law, they were launched with the tacit support of many officials, along with business interests such as wealthy ranchers who have been targeted for years by Marxist forces. In recent years, the government has accused the paramilitary forces of massacring civilians they suspected of cooperating with the guerrillas, as well as murdering politicians, labor leaders and others who crossed them. In addition, Colombian and U.S. law enforcement officials said the paramilitary groups and the guerrillas have become criminal organizations that fund themselves through drug trafficking. Colombia supplies as much as 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. The United States has sent $3.3 billion in aid -- for defense, security and economic and social programs -- to Colombia since 2000. Many Colombian officials said the Bush administration has played a key role in pressuring the paramilitary leaders to negotiate by demanding their extradition to face U.S. drug-trafficking charges. "Extradition has motivated this whole process," said Rafael Pardo, a member of the Colombian Senate and a former defense minister in Bogota, the capital 300 miles south of here. Many paramilitary leaders -- including Salvatore Mancuso, who led off the disarmament ceremony by handing his own Beretta 9mm pistol to Restrepo -- are wanted by U.S. officials on drug charges. In an indictment announced in 2000 by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, Mancuso and two others were charged with exporting 17 tons of cocaine to the United States since 1997. Uribe, who took office in 2002, has extradited at least 170 drug suspects -- far more than any of his predecessors -- to the United States. But extradition has been a powerful anti-crime tool here since 1987, when drug lord Carlos Lehder was extradited. Pablo Escobar, an infamous cocaine cartel leader from the northern city of Medellin, waged a bloody war against the government to avoid being sent to the United States; he died in a shootout with police in 1993. Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, co-founder of the notorious Cali cartel and an extremely powerful trafficker, was flown to Miami to face charges this month. Government officials said paramilitary leaders are so fearful of long prison sentences in the United States that they would prefer to disarm and strike an amnesty deal at home. In tearful remarks during the recent disarmament ceremony, Mancuso appealed to the United States, saying: "With my soul flooded in humility, I ask the pardon of the people of Colombia. I ask forgiveness from the nations of the world, including the United States of America, if by action or omission I offended." The government suspended warrants for Mancuso's arrest and his possible extradition during the disarmament talks, in which he played a leading role. Mancuso was convicted in absentia in a Colombian court and sentenced to 40 years in prison for the massacre of 15 civilians in the late 1990s. In Bogota, Uribe and the legislature disagree about what to do with Arce and the other disarmed paramilitary members. Uribe favors sentencing them to serve three to 10 years under house arrest, while key members of Congress, led by Pardo, insist that they confess to their crimes, serve time in prison and turn over all money and property they acquired through illegal activities. With 3,000 of the 20,000 AUC members now disarmed, even critics said the process has gotten off to an impressive start. Many paramilitary members are former army soldiers, hailed as patriots by their supporters, who assert they served the country by attacking the anti-government guerrillas. Arce said it was "very ironic" that the government wanted to jail paramilitary fighters. If anyone should be punished, he said, it should be the leaders, not troops who were "just following orders." But Vivanco, the specialist with Human Rights Watch, said the fighters were responsible for at least 600 disappearances a year, and that they should be punished. He supports the congressional plan to jail those who committed crimes. "This is not just some irregular armed group," Vivanco said. "We are talking about a very complex criminal enterprise. These people are bandits, gangsters and drug traffickers. They have unlimited resources available to them, and they have a tremendous capacity to regenerate." After the disarmament process began last year, the paramilitary forces seized ranches, land, houses and other property in what was widely seen as an effort to launder the proceeds from drug trafficking and strengthen their grip on certain regions even after laying down their weapons. Shortly after the disarmament ceremony, the government announced that the AUC had returned 105 ranches, 58 houses, 10 boats, 45 mules and a number of businesses including several pool halls. Critics, however, saw that move as a public relations effort to avoid punishment. In Tibu, an area where thick jungles hide vast fields of cocaine-producing coca plants, residents credit the paramilitary groups with driving out the insurgents who used to terrorize the area with killings and kidnappings. Now that the paramilitary fighters have disarmed, some residents said they fear the guerrillas will come back. "Nobody here trusts the police or the army to protect us," said Dilia Gutierrez Carvajal, whose 29-year-old niece was shot to death by guerrillas three years ago; she was found kneeling, her hands clasped in a prayer for mercy. "It's not that we like the paramilitaries," she said, "but we owe them some gratitude." Fabio Rincon, a town official, said the guerrillas faded into the hills when the paramilitary fighters appeared in the late 1990s. Since the disarmament ceremony, he said, guerrillas have opened fire on police and soldiers guarding the road into town. He said the 240 soldiers patrolling the area are not as effective as the paramilitary forces once were. "People were used to them, and they gave us good security," Rincon said. "The people felt more comfortable, because the guerrillas fear the paramilitaries more than they fear the police and the army." -------- spies Master spies and secret wars December 26, 2004 By Joseph C. Goulden Washington Times http://www.washtimes.com/books/20041225-104612-1826r.htm What ails the American newspaper? Statistics show slumps in circulation resembling the flight pattern of a set of falling car keys. Even the lofty Washington Post admitted in print (on Nov. 19) to a 10 percent drop in circulation the last two years. Why is this so? A public disdain for liberal bias? Competition from television? A younger generation that is not print-oriented? Oh, perhaps. But I sense a deeper reason among serious adults, to wit, that despite all the space given to reporting "what" happened, often at tedious length, newspapers in large part fail to put events into context and explain the "why" of what is going on in the world. For the past two or so years, my understanding of foreign affairs has been shaped largely through the reportage of an extraordinary on-line service named www.Stratfor.com, which lays a rightful claim to being "the world's leading private intelligence firm." The fee for its daily service is peanuts; Stratfor makes its real money through detailed private analyses for corporations whose fortunes depend on knowing how events might affect their coffers. As a writer who has read an uncountable number of intelligence briefing papers over the years (the bulk of them in a historical context) what strikes me about Stratfor is the absence of either-or waffling when it comes to drawing conclusions. Stratfor is the creation of George Friedman, a sometime political science professor and consultant to the intelligence community, and the author of America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies (Doubleday, $24.95, 353 pages). As is true of many Americans, my feelings about the Iraq war — Was it necessary? Is it being waged properly? — have vacillated the past month. Mr. Friedman does much to put my mind to rest. In his view, forget the debate over whether weapons of mass destruction ever existed, and whether they were a proper pretext for war. In his view, al Qaeda's goal was to create an uprising in the Islamic world and overthrow secular governments, Saudi Arabia in particular. The invasion ordered by President George W. Bush was intended to isolate and frighten the Saudi government into cracking down on the flow of money to al Qaeda. He succeeded. Further, the invasion created a climate in which it has proven too dangerous for Islamic governments to work with al Qaeda or remain neutral. Which is not to say that Mr. Friedman gives Bush & Company high praise. He faults the administration for failing to put the military and intelligence communities on a wartime immediately after September 11, and charges that "lying about why we were invading Iraq was a massive error." Nonetheless, he feels that Iraq is "manageable, even though violence will continue for years. Like Northern Ireland, it will be a generation before it calms down." And he repeats a forecast first made by Stratfor in December 2003: that the American military eventually must invade northwestern Pakistan to root out the al Qaeda command structure. Most of us perhaps feel satiated by books on Iraq and the Middle East. Mr. Friedman's work warrants the investment of an evening of careful reading. ••• To put it charitably, George Kiesvalter was a mess of a man physically. A closer companion of John Barleycorn than either medical science or common sense would dictate, he seemed in perpetual danger of setting himself aflame with falling cigarette ashes. He often dressed as if he had just stepped out of a rummage sale. But beneath this rumpled exterior (I sometimes wondered if it was deliberate camouflage) lurked one of the more skilled case officers in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. His exploits are now retold through a longtime friend and agency veteran, Clarence Ashley, in CIA Spymaster (Pelican, $26.95, 288 pages, illus.). Many previous spook writers have told of Kiesvalter's seminal role in handling the debriefing of two major in-place Soviet defectors: Pyror Popov, of Red Army intelligence, and Col. Oleg Penkovsky, who has been dubbed "the spy who saved the world" because of information giving insight that helped resolve the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Through Mr. Ashley, Kiesvalter retells these exploits in his own words. Kiesvalter was adept at dealing with Popov and Penkovsky because he was Russian himself, born in St. Petersburg in 1910 into a wealthy and influential family (they fled the Bolsheviks in 1921). After military service and so-so business ventures, Kiesvalter joined CIA in 1951. But his skills as a case officer surpassed linguistic ability. Through charm and sincerity, he convinced Popov and Penkovsky to supply intelligence over a period of years despite the considerable personal risks they ran. (Both were eventually detected and executed.) He also was able to deflect one of Penkovsky's goofier proposals — to smuggle miniature nuclear bombs into Moscow and obliterate the Kremlin and environs. Although the book provides keen insight into what a CIA case officer actually does in the field, Mr. Ashley's prose takes the reader down some irrelevant rabbit holes that would have best been left unexplored. But "hearing" Kiesvalter's story in his own voice is a remarkable memento of a remarkable man. ••• As is well known, President Harry Truman dissolved the Office of Strategic Services within weeks after World War II ended, reacting to pressure from rival agencies. What is not generally known is that persons who worked for OSS continued doing the same work, albeit with different name tags on the office door. OSS/CIA veteran John H. Waller, who died in November, once told me, "For two years after OSS was disbanded, I did the exact same job, although I was not sure who I was working for. But the same checks came in." Another such officer was Richard W. Cutler, who writes of his experiences in Counterspy: Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War (Brassey's, $25.95, 172 pages, illus.). Mr. Cutler tells of how his service in X-2, the counterintelligence arm of OSS, segued neatly into the successor organization, the Strategic Services Unit, or SSU. He served as chief of counterintelligence in the American Zone of Berlin. With textbook clarity, he describes an operation that well illustrates the devilish nature of counterintelligence. He suspected that the Soviets had an agent in the office of Gen. Lucius Clay, head of the Office of Military Government for the United States (OMGUS). Mr. Cutler devised an intricate scheme to plant a secretary in OMGUS as a decoy to attract the Soviet agent's attentions. Now the kicker: If anyone in OMGUS knew of the woman's dual role, her mission might be inadvertently discovered. So Mr. Cutler had to trump up a cover story that would pass scrutiny by the army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) which did security clearances for OMGUS — in essence, to deceive a friendly yet rival intelligence service. The ploy succeeded, and the woman got a high-level secretarial job. But an attempt to entrap the chief Soviet target went awry, for one reason or another, and the woman had to relocate. Mr. Cutler writes that she "later became a first-rate journalist in West Germany," and understandably says no more about her. A fascinating story, even with the unsuccessful outcome. Now a lawyer in Milwaukee, Mr. Cutler ends with a recurring plea that one hears from many Old Boys these days: to rid our intelligence establishment of political correctness, and build a core of competent officers who are not afraid to take risks. Joseph C. Goulden is writing a book on Cold War intelligence. His e-mail is JosephG894@aol.com. -------- un U.N. to mark centennial of Einstein's year of genius Sunday, December 26, 2004 Margie Wylie Newhouse News Service http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1104064237315870.xml If the name Albert Einstein is synonymous with genius, it is mostly because of the work he did in 1905 - the year, as he described it, when "a storm broke loose in my mind." In just seven months, the scientific legend produced theories that still underpin modern physics and that ultimately made possible such developments as the atomic bomb and global positioning technology. To mark the 100th anniversary, the United Nations has declared 2005 the International Year of Physics. Over its course, historians will try to breathe life into an icon who is often reduced to caricature, while scientists struggle to explain his impact on the modern world. In January 1905, Einstein was working as a patent clerk, third class, and living in Bern, Switzer land, with his wife of three years and a newborn son. "He'd published a couple of papers, but nothing you'd associate with greatness," said Michael Shara, lead curator for a traveling exhibit from New York's American Museum of Natural History that draws on letters, manuscripts and other personal effects to portray Einstein and his work. Then, from March through September, he finished his doc toral dissertation and published four papers describing the nature of light, the atomic nature of matter and the relationships between time and space, and mass and energy. The work was "pure magic," said John Rigden, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness," a book due out in January from Harvard University Press. In one paper, Einstein wrote that light, then thought to be a continuous wave, was actually made up of discrete particles, later dubbed photons. The idea enabled the invention of lasers, among other practical applications. Another paper led to the acceptance of atoms as the basic building block of matter. It paved the way for still another, which outlined his most quoted insight: E= mc. That famous equation means that "energy and mass are the same things and there is a conversion factor between the two," Shara said. For an analogy, think of linear measure. Because there are 12 inches in a foot, feet can be converted into inches by multiplying by a conversion factor of 12. Einstein wrote that the conversion factor between mass and energy is "one with 2,100 zeros behind it," Shara said. That's why transforming a few pounds of plutonium into energy can generate a devastating blast. In the same year, Einstein also penned his famous theory of special relativity, which said that time and space are intertwined. The faster an object moves, he posited, the slower time passes. The slower its motion, the faster time. When one factor changes, the other automatically adjusts. The implication that everyone experiences time differently remains mind-boggling, because day-to-day, the effects are so minute as to be undetectable. But an astronaut orbiting the Earth for two years at 18,000 mph actually would age at a slower rate - albeit less than a second - than people on the ground. In 1905, Shara said, "that was a shocking result, to think that time isn't constant." Today, said Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "the fact that we can design satellites and space shuttles that don't come crashing back to Earth is because we take special relativity into account." The theory also makes global positioning systems possible. In 1915, Einstein expanded special relativity. General relativity, as the larger theory was called, explained gravity as the ripples that objects create in space and time. While scientists have observed indirect evidence of such ripples, or gravity waves, none has ever been directly detected, Mavalvala said. She is an investigator at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, one of several exquisitely sensitive and incredibly expensive instruments trying to measure the elusive waves. Influential as they were, nothing in Einstein's theories could have explained the enormous celebrity he acquired, especially after 1933, when he left Germany for the United States after Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He received thousands of letters from around the world asking for everything from love advice to homework help. His face appeared in hundreds of magazines. In fact, he once joked that he was so photographed that he might take up a career modeling. "His persona really magnified the things he did," Rigden said. "He was a complete package and the public really adopted him." But contrary to his popular image as a warm, avuncular, scatter-brained professor, Einstein had many sharp edges. He was an outspoken pacifist and a supporter of the civil rights movement and Israel. He denounced the Communist witch hunts instigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Cold War, earning him the enmity of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In the last few years, researchers have documented his womanizing and his cruel treatment of his first wife, Mileva Maric. There have even been suggestions that Maric, a physicist in the same doctoral program as Einstein, was an uncredited collaborator in his 1905 work. To Rigden, what both endeared him to the public and made him a great physicist was that he started with the same questions many of us do: "What is the universe and what is our place in it?" Einstein himself said he wanted to uncover nothing less than "the thoughts of God." It was an approach that "served him well until about age 40," said Roger Blandford, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University. That's when physicists began to probe the bizarre behavior of subatomic particles, or quanta. At the quantum level, it is impossible to locate matter reliably at any point in space or time. At best, we can express the probability, or the odds, that the matter is here and not there. At the level of everyday objects, this effect is negligible. The odds that your newspaper will disappear and show up on Mars approach zero. But at the quantum level, the only way to find an electron is to calculate the probability that it's where you think it is. -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- police Nazi chasers will also hunt modern-day monsters By Peter Eisler, USA TODAY 12/26/2004 http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-12-26-nazi-hunters_x.htm WASHINGTON — The Justice Department's Nazi hunters, still busy as ever, are about to get a new class of bad guys to chase. The intelligence overhaul law signed Dec. 17 by President Bush includes a provision that directs the department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to root out all manner of war criminals and human rights abusers who try to settle in the USA. Whether they're linked to state-sponsored killings in Chile or Cambodia, or to war crimes in Rwanda or Bosnia, they'll be targets of an operation that has deported scores of people charged with Holocaust crimes. The added responsibility comes at a busy time for the OSI, the agency established within the Justice Department in 1979 to find and bring to justice those who came to the USA after taking part in atrocities before and during World War II. The OSI's small band of prosecutors, historians, researchers and linguists — 28 in all — has been particularly busy recently because the opening of World War II-era archives in former Soviet states has given the OSI troves of new leads. The OSI set a single-year record in 2002 by opening 10 prosecutions aimed at deporting or stripping U.S. citizenship from people who allegedly worked in concentration camps or otherwise played a role in the Holocaust. At the start of 2004, the office had 23 cases in litigation, its most in a decade. Since 1979, the OSI has launched 131 prosecutions to denaturalize or deport people involved in the Holocaust; it has lost only six cases. The office also has provided immigration officials with a "watch list" of nearly 70,000 people who are barred from entering the USA because of links to Japanese war crimes or Holocaust atrocities. On Thanksgiving weekend, officials at Atlanta's international airport denied entry to a convicted Nazi war criminal, Franz Doppelreiter, who did prison time in Austria on a commuted death sentence for abuses at the Mauthausen concentration camp, according to the Justice Department. Doppelreiter was returned to Germany from Atlanta. "Most of our best investigative leads now are coming out of documents we find in (Soviet) archives," said Eli Rosenbaum, who has been the OSI's director since 1995. He conceded that he thought the office would have been closing up by now because its targets are dying off. "But we're just about as busy as we've ever been," he said. On Dec. 17, the Justice Department announced that it had asked an immigration judge to deport John Demjanjuk, 84, a retired autoworker in Ohio. Demjanjuk's citizenship was revoked in 2002 by a federal judge who found that Demjanjuk had worked as an armed guard at three Nazi concentration camps, including one where an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed in gas chambers. It's unclear how the OSI will tackle its new mandate to hunt people who've committed torture and other war crimes in more recent times. With a $5 million annual budget, it's a tiny cog in the U.S. law enforcement apparatus. Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman, said it is too early to discuss whether the OSI will grow. The section in the intelligence bill that broadened the OSI's mandate was sponsored by Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., with bipartisan support. In a House speech, he cited Amnesty International statistics that indicate 800 to 1,000 war criminals and human rights abusers try to come to the United States each year. "For decades, those who have committed some of the most horrific acts against humanity have sought sanctuary here with impunity," Foley said. The new law will make people who have committed torture, murder and other atrocities "inadmissible and removable." Critics of the OSI say the new mission is an excuse to sustain an office that shouldn't exist. "They've never found a Nazi war criminal. All the guards they've found are people who did what you'd call perimeter watch — sentries," says Joseph McGinness, a Cleveland lawyer who has defended people in several cases brought by the OSI. The office is "running out of business. Most of these concentration camp guards aren't alive anymore or are very old. (The OSI's) agenda is to keep themselves going forever." The OSI has been praised by human rights and Jewish groups, including the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, both of which have rated the agency as the world's best Nazi-hunting operation. "The passage of time in no way lessens the gravity of the offenses," Rosenbaum said. "We send a message ... that if you perpetrate crimes against humanity, there's a real chance the civilized world will pursue you for the rest of your life." -------- torture American gulag? Sunday, December 26, 2004 Times Union http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=317690 Detainees, the Bush administration would prefer to call them. It's a quaint word, almost, at least compared to the more ominous sounding prisoner. To be "detained" by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba sounds more like an inconvenience than the brutal incarceration it actually is for some. Government documents released the other day in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, however, reintroduce a much harsher word into the debate over the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror. That word is torture. Details from e-mails and memos from FBI officials, heavily redacted as they were, will make it harder than ever for the White House to maintain that what goes on at Guantanamo Bay meets acceptable standards for holding prisoners, detainees, enemy combatants -- whatever the government that's jailed them prefers to call them. These documents describe prisoners being routinely beaten, choked, tortured with lit cigarettes and chained in uncomfortable positions, without access to bathroom facilities, for hours at a time. The government, in all its rival factions, needs to get its story straight. Some of the highest-ranking public officials of all have some explaining to do to the American people, and to a world that's expected to support a U.S.-led war on terror. Guantanamo Bay sounds precariously like Abu Ghraib, the now infamous Iraqi prison. The use of military dogs to intimidate prisoners, for instance, has been detailed at one and now alleged at another. Yet Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the Guantanamo Bay prison from October 2002 to March 2004, insists there are differences. General Miller acknowledges urging the use dogs in Iraq -- to deter prison violence, he said at the time -- but has denied using dogs for interrogation purposes while he was in command at Guantanamo. The senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, however, swears that General Miller acknowledged doing just that at Guantanamo. Such tactics would mean that the United States was again in violation of the Geneva Conventions protections for military prisoners, despite all prior denials, just as it had been in Iraq. Among the documents released last Monday was a Dec. 5, 2003, memorandum from an FBI agent that said such abusive treatment of prisoners neither produced any intelligence that could help prevent further terrorist attacks nor even helped prosecute anyone. The interrogation tactics were so brutal, the memo says, that any evidence would have to be thrown out of court on the grounds that it was coerced. Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, says these documents mean that "top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers." That might even be an understatement. The quest for the truth about the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay must go on. -------- ACTIVISTS Protesters at BAE appreciate support Bill Maddocks, Merrimack Nashua, NH, Telegraph, Sunday, Dec. 26, 2004 http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041226/OPINION02/41226033/-1/opinion On behalf of all of the peaceful people who gathered in front of BAE Systems corporate offices on Spit Brook Road on Dec. 10, the Chain Reaction Affinity Group would like to thank the many of you who waved, honked, gave us the peace sign and offered words of support during our 30-hour vigil. Our message of peace and the reminder of the many horrible costs of war clearly resonated with so many of you. We also appreciate the assistance of the Nashua police and understand that it was a hardship for you to be away from your families during many hours of cold and rain. The 30-hour protest was not against the thousands of workers who make a living at BAE plants. We know these are talented and dedicated family people, most of whom do not want to be making weapons. We expect many would be outraged if they knew the toll BAE-produced depleted uranium takes on innocent civilians or returning war veterans who were exposed to this deadly substance. We know many would be angered to know that their company is the largest weapons supplier to Saudi Arabia, a repressive monarchy that denies basic human rights to women and where those convicted of robbery have hands dismembered or face execution. In New Hampshire, it is important to be aware of the double-edged sword of weapons production. While we all share in the bounty of military profits in a time of war (salaries, BAE’s philanthropic gifts, contributions to the tax base), we also share responsibility for the misuse of these deadly products around the world. We believe it is time for BAE to be retooled and to convert to a corporation that makes products that help everyone with few negative social consequences. BAE already does this through manufacturing the Orion hybrid fuel bus, which reduces pollution and our reliance on expensive and unsustainable fossil fuels. The vigil at BAE was a step toward a more peaceful world not based on war as a solution to conflict or production of weapons as a means to support our economy. We now urge you to write to our representatives in Congress and request that U.S. troops be removed from Iraq during 2005. Write to BAE and ask them to begin to turn their swords into plowshares. Take an active role in building alternatives to warfare and a world where democracy grows from the will of the people not from the barrel of a gun.