NucNews - May 6, 2005



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-------- britain

The depravity of nuclear exterminism

May 06 2005 UK Herald

http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/38700-print.shtml

HARRY Reid's characteristically intelligent and lucid article, Seriously, why are we so petty? (May 3), says what needs to be said. It is a pity it is marred by use of the tendentious weasel-word "deterrent". This is a self-vindicating euphemism – the use of the word implicitly justifies the object it denotes.

When he was asked how order and morality could be created in the state, Confucius answered: "By correct names." By this he meant calling each thing by its true name. The depravity of nuclear exterminism is revealed in the uniquely debased and meretricious jargon its apologists use to mask reality. "Deterrent" is head of the list.

What is in the Foden trucks that regularly trundle along Loch Lomondside to Coulport is not a deterrent, or a capability, or a device, or any other abstraction. Far less is it the dreaded nuclear umbrella under which we are all allegedly sheltering. No, these are nuclear bombs. But in truth the words nuclear weapon or WMD are also totally inadequate for conveying the reality of these machines for mass burning, blasting and irradiation. I know of no adequate word.

This is more than semantics, as is demonstrated by Harry Reid going on to ask if nuclear weapons are needed "when the Cold War is over". This implies that they were "needed" in the past – that is, that they were indeed a "deterrent". But the implication that there was a Soviet compulsion to invade and occupy western Europe and Britain and that the only thing stopping this was British nuclear bombs, is dubious in the extreme.

And if there was indeed a time when these weapons were "needed", we are condemned to live with them forever, because such a situation might occur again. This applies not only to us, but to every other country as well. They also need to have a nuclear "deterrent" – and forever.

Harry Reid asks: "What have we become as a people?" An anguished cri de coeur I have many times silently uttered. This is what we have become:

A people that drive past the biggest arsenal of criminal WMD in Europe with unseeing eyes, as if Faslane were a yachting club or a marina.

A people that meekly tolerate their land being blasted with bombs at Durness – and float the idea of making this a tourist attraction, complete with viewing area where visitors can enjoy watching 1000lb bombs being dropped.

A people that allow their seas to be polluted with depleted uranium shells fired at Dundrennan – more than 6000 of these, with only four being (accidentally) recovered.

A people that live in craven subservience to the insatiable demands of the British (ultimately, US) military that plague our skies with ultra-low flying, degrade our land with bases, and pollute our seas with poisonous waste.

The first victims of our militarism and nuclearism are ourselves. Only a cowed and servile people would accept the abject role we play. And the only escape from this is freedom from the British state that imposes this role on us. Can we get off our knees?

Brian Quail, 2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.
 
HARRY Reid is right to highlight the importance of nuclear weapons. The new MPs will decide whether or not Britain will replace the weapons of mass destruction based at Faslane. This week the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty conference in New York has opened with calls, not just to stop the spread of nuclear arms, but also for existing nuclear states to disarm.

This illustrates the opportunity that presents itself to our next prime minister. He can cling to the past and build a replacement for Trident, or he can be remembered as the forward-thinking leader who brought an end to the madness of British nuclear weapons.

John Ainslie, co-ordinator, Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 15 Barrland Street, Glasgow.



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

-------- depleted uranium

Antiwar activists say depleted uranium has led to 11,000 American deaths

News Target Network Friday, May 06, 2005 

http://www.newstarget.com/007172.html

Original news summary: (http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/du_death_toll.html)

Arthur Bernklau, an advocate with the Veterans for Constitutional Law, an antiwar group, says that depleted uranium weapons used in the first Gulf War have caused the deaths of 11,000 soldiers. Bernklau says that 584,000 soldiers served in Gulf War I and 11,000 of them are now dead. 325,000 are on permanent medical disability.

Bernklau stated that the long-term effect of depleted uranium weapons are a "virtual death sentence", and that the departure of Anthony Principi as secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department was triggered by the scandal of the deaths. Bernklau says that over half of those who served in Gulf War I have permanent medical problems.

The death toll from the highly toxic weapons component known as depleted uranium (DU) has reached 11,000 soldiers and the growing scandal may be the reason behind Anthony Principi's departure as secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department.

This view was expressed by Arthur Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter.

"The real reason for Mr. Principi's departure was really never given," Bernklau said.

"However, a special report published by eminent scientist Leuren Moret naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of 'Gulf War Syndrome' has fed a growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the U.S. military."

Of the 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are now dead, he said.

The disability rate for veterans of the world wars of the last century was 5 percent, rising to 10 percent in Vietnam.

"He and the Bush administration have been hiding these facts, but now, thanks to Moret's report, it is far too big to hide or to cover up."

Terry Johnson, public affairs specialist at the VA, recently reported that veterans of both Persian Gulf wars now on disability total 518,739, Bernklau said.

"The long-term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence," Bernklau said.

"Marion Fulk, a nuclear chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved in the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers [from the second war] as 'spectacular'---and a matter of concern.'

While this important story appeared in a Washington newspaper and the wire services, it did not receive national exposure---a compelling sign that the American public is being kept in the dark about the terrible effects of this toxic weapon.

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Iraqi Women Under US Occupation

Ghali Hassan, www.globalresearch.ca
6 May 2005

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HAS505A.html

"Respect for women… can triumph in the Middle East and beyond!" President George Bush at the UN, September 2002.

Under the US Occupation, the situation of Iraqi women has continued to deteriorate. In addition to torture, sexual violence and rape by U.S. Occupation forces, a great number of Iraqi women and girls are kept locked up in their homes by a very real fear of abduction and criminal abuse. Since the invasion of Iraq, Iraqi women have been denied their human right, including the right to health, education and employment.

Prior to the 1991 U.S. war and the 13 years of the genocidal sanctions, Iraqi women enjoyed unquestionable quality rights to education and health. Iraqi women had the most progressive human rights in the region and Iraqi women were the first Arab women to hold high positions in academia, law, medicine and government. Before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraqi women made up 40 per cent of the public-sector work force. Men and women received equal pay for work, education and health care were free at all levels.

In addition, Iraq’s Constitution with regard to women's rights s was the most advanced in the Middle East, if not of the Muslim World. Women rights were enshrined in the Constitution, which was dissolved (together with Iraqi Police and Security) by the U.S. Occupation and replaced by a U.S-crafted "Interim Constitution" that deprives Iraqi women of their rights and dignity. In today’s Iraq, crimes and abuse against women are back to the levels before independence from colonial Britain in 1958. The crime of rape was capital offence under Iraq’s Constitution.

Since the beginning of the U.S. Occupation, there has been a dramatic increase in sexual assaults and violations of women’s rights by U.S. forces in Iraq. Many women have been taken hostage, tortured, and sexually abused. The sexual abuse, rape and torture against Iraqi women is not confined to the Abu Ghraib prison, parroted by the Western media, is "happening all across Iraq", said Amal Kadhim Swadi, an Iraqi lawyers representing women detainees at Abu Ghraib. "Sexualized violence and abuse committed by U.S. troops goes far beyond a few isolated cases", she added.

Crimes of sexual violence, rape and torture by U.S. forces against Iraqi men, women and children were kept secret from the public until Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine published photographs alongside extracts from the damning report of General Antonio Taguba. The U.S. administration blamed the crimes on a few black sheep. Of course this is not true. Orders come from the top of U.S. military and civilian leaderships. Unfortunately there has been no public outrage in the U.S. or in Europe to condemn these appalling practices against Iraqi women. Is it because of the European-American "shared values"?

There is credible evidence that the highest echelons of the Pentagon and the civilian Bush administration approved the carrying out of these brutal acts against the Iraqi people.

According to ‘The Torture Papers’, edited by Karen Greenberg, director of the Centre on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, the U.S. government is guilty of a "systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms". "It is ironic that a person such as [Lynndie England, who pleaded guilty], with little education, no authority, and zero training as a prison guard, becomes the poster child for our depravity, while the authors of the American policy toward Iraqi detainees remain virtually untouched by the scandal", reported Paul Vitello of Newsday. The U.S. Justice Department essentially immunized military and intelligence officials from liability for physical torture. "In fact, some officials who either knew of the abuse or should have known about it have been retained or promoted", reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on April 30, 2005. Systematic torture and sexual abuse were used to interrogate prisoners in U.S-run prisons in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and elsewhere.

Several documents released on 07 March 2005 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show 13 cases of rape and abuse of female detainees. The documents revealed that no action was taken against any soldier or civilian official as a result. "We have to start to ask the question of whether there is a whole layer of abuse out there that we are not seeing because the evidence of abuse has been covered up", said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. The documents also provide further evidence that U.S. troops have destroyed evidence of abuse and torture in order to avoid a repetition of last year's Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old U.S. Army reservist with the 320th Military Police Company told Bob Herbert of the New York Times recently, that he "had witnessed an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old". After he was deployed to Abu Ghraib Prison, Mr. Delgado told Herbert: "The violence [in Abu Ghraib] was sickening, some inmates were beaten nearly to death". In one of the many detainees’ protests at Abu Ghraib, the "Army authorized lethal force. Four [unarmed] detainees were shot to death", said Delgado.

An eyewitness female detainee at Abu Ghraib, who identified herself as ‘Noor’, told Al-Jazeera that ‘U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison raped women and, in many occasions, forced them to strip naked in public’. She admitted seeing ‘many female detainees got pregnant’. Iraqi lawyer Iman Khamas, of International Occupation Watch Centre, said; "One former detainee had recounted the alleged rape of her cell mate in Abu Ghraib." "[The detainee] had been raped 17 times in one day", said Khamas.

Professor Huda Shaker Al-Nuaimi, of Baghdad University Political Science Department, told Luke Harding of the Guardian on 12 May 2004, that; ‘U.S. soldiers in Iraq have raped, sexually humiliated and abused several Iraqi female detainees in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison’. Al-Nuaimi told Harding that she knows of ‘Noor's’ case and other Iraqi females that were arrested, taken to Abu Ghraib prison and raped by the US Military Police. ‘Iraqi women here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects’, she added. Crimes of rape were very rare before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rape is shameful crimes, and was introduced to the Muslim World by Western colonialists as a tool of coercion and intimidation.

The U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoners abuse by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (the Taguba Report) confirmed these accounts, including ‘Noor's’ account and said that U.S. guards sexually abused female detainees at Abu Ghraib. The report found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" constituting "systematic and illegal abuse of [Iraqi] detainees" at Abu Ghraib.

In addition to sexual violence, rape and physical torture, a new comprehensive report documents the use of psychological torture on Iraqi men, women and children by U.S. forces released on May 01, 2005 by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a British independent organization. The report shows that "psychological torture has been at the centre of treatment and interrogation of detainees [in Iraq and elsewhere]". The most inhumane and damaging "[t]echniques of psychological torture used have included sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, the use of military working dogs to instill fear, cultural and sexual humiliation, mock executions, and the threat of violence or death toward detainees or their loved ones", reveals the report.

Moreover, Iraqi women and their children are being taken hostages by U.S. forces and used as ‘bargaining chips’. On 11 April 2005, the Guardian reported, that U.S. forces were accused of violating international law by taking Iraqi women hostages to force their male relatives to surrender. After taking the women (mother and daughter) from their home in Baghdad, U.S. soldiers left a note on the gate: "Be a man Muhammad Mukhlif and give yourself up and then we will release your sisters. Otherwise they will spend a long time in detention". One wonders who is the one to "be a man", U.S. soldiers who are abusing defenceless women or Mr. Muhammad, who is only defending his country against foreign invaders?

Iraqi women are arrested, detained, abused and tortured not because of anything they have done, but to force their close relatives (spouses, sons and brothers) to collaborate with the Occupation and to inform against the Resistance. Contrary to the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that no one can "be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed". The practices, which have been condemned by the UN and human rights organisations, are widely used by the Israeli Army against Palestinian men, women and children in occupied Palestine.

The Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, of the Italian daily Il Manifesto, reported that, as usual U.S. Occupation forces raided the home of Mithal Al-Hassan, a 55 years old engineer, and arrested both her husband and son. "The soldiers later ransacked the apartment and stole their saving. Denounced as part of a vendetta, Mithal was condemned without trial to eighty days of horror in the company of other women prisoners who, like her, were subjected to abuse and torture. She has since spotted her tormentors on the internet". The courage and clarity of Mithal substantiate the ongoing U.S. brutality against the Iraqi women.

In another interview, Mithal added; "After that, they took me to a detention centre [near Baghdad International Airport]. There, I heard a young woman crying out from her cell, telling an American soldier to leave her alone. She said, ‘I am a Muslim woman’. Her voice was high-pitched and shaky. Her husband, who was in a cell down the hall, called out, ‘She is my wife. She has nothing to do with this’. He hit the bars of his cell with his fists until he fainted. The Americans poured water over his face and made him wake up. When her screams became louder, the soldiers played music over the speakers. Finally, they took her to another room. I couldn't hear anything more", Ms. Mithal told Tara McKelvey of American Prospect. The courage and clarity of Mithal substantiate the ongoing U.S. brutality against the Iraqi women.

Nicole Choueiry, of Amnesty International, said: "I do not think it is the first time. It is against international law to take civilians and use them as bargaining chips". U.S. officials do not admit to any female inmates, but evidence shows that women imprisoned in U.S-run prisons including Abu Ghraib and were subjected to abuses including evidence of sexual misconduct, rape and psychological torture against women.

"Overall, 90 women have been held in various detention facilities in Iraq since August 2003", Barry Johnson, a public-affairs officer for detainee operations with the U.S. told McKelvey. "More women may be in captivity", he added, "[U.S. Army] units can capture and keep them up to 14 days". In addition, "approximately 60 children, or ‘juveniles’, are being held", noted Tara McKelvey.

There were nearly 625 women prisoners in Al-Rusafah and 750 women prisoners in Al-Kazimiyah alone, including girls of twelve and women in their sixties. Besides, Iman Kamas head of the Occupation Watch Centre affirms that there are five unknown U.S-run prisons in Iraq apart from the well known ten, which include Abu-Ghraib, Al-Kazimiyah, and Al-Rusafah prisons in Baghdad and Um-Qasir and Al-Nasiriyah prisons. The number of innocent Iraqi prisoners and detainees are increasing every day, together with dramatic increase in the abuse, torture and rape of Iraqi men, women and children.

According to Amnesty International, there are new reports of torture carried out by U.S. soldiers and the new U.S-trained Iraqi security forces, or the ‘Occupation dogs’ as Iraqis call them. As usual, the crimes against the Iraqi people continue because as Ignacio Ramonet, editor of the French monthly, Le Monde Diplomatique, rightly wrote; "The characteristics of colonial war are usually arrogance on the part of the occupiers, who believe that they belong to a superior race (more civilised, more advanced), are contemptuous of the colonised and sometimes refuse to admit that the colonised are even human". Reports from Iraq show that racism by U.S. soldiers fuel their violence against the Iraqi people. It is just the Western mainstream media complicity in the crimes prevents reporting them. It should be borne in mind that, Western mainstream media is the second front of the war on Iraq.

Western mainstream media, led by the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and CNN in the U.S. and the BBC in Britain, not only fail to report the horrific crimes against Iraqi women, but also continue to publish fake stories depicting the rape crimes as "hoax" or "conspiracies" which led many people in the West to accept torture as an established policy. With hundreds of newspapers subscribing to these "News Services", the distortions become replicated and amplified throughout the U.S. and the world.

Moreover, stories of cultural differences were deliberately distorted to put cloud on the crimes of U.S. soldiers committed against defenceless Iraqi women and girls. Western mainstream media, American in particular, is full of misleading stories such as; "Arab-Muslim patriarchy" culture with its "honour killings" is worse than rape". Although it is very rare and unheard of in Iraq, "honour killings" is amplified and used to justify the abuse and rape of Iraqi women and girls by U.S. soldiers. The media provides ‘a diversion and an attempt to blame the victims by finding the locus of the problem in the victim’, to use Ward Churchill analysis. In other words, the media and politicians are deliberately shifting the blame on the victims with increasing sophistication.

The new wave of so-called "true stories" of "honour killings" has been proven to be fraudulent. The trends of dehumanising the ‘others’ are aimed at a receptive (Western) audience, who shares the perpetrators frame of reference, to exploit an overarching climate of fear and prejudice, and in the process encourage more racism and Islamophobia. For example, "Burned Alive" and "Forbidden Love", to mention just recent two, were proved to be fabricated lies and removed from sale. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done to an already victimised Muslim community. The sad thing is that the perpetrators have been rewarded handsomely. They were not only escaped criminal libels; they became celebrities within the anti-Muslim publishing industry in the West.

Meanwhile, violent crimes against women are increasing in the Western World and hardly published. "It should be not forgotten that in America, not in the Muslim world, between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of women killed, are killed by their husbands and boyfriends, but such murders of course are no longer even called ‘passion’ crimes, much less ‘honour’ crimes", wrote Professor Joseph Mossad of Columbia University. "For European women aged 16-44 violence in the home is the primary cause of injury and death, more lethal than road accidents and cancer…. Between 25%-50% of women are victims of this violence", wrote Mr. Ignacio Ramonet.

It is this Islamophobic trait of imperial American-Western culture and its anti-Muslim racism, prpagated both by the media and the governments, not to mention several prominent intellectuals, that propels the abuse and torture of innocent Iraqi men, women and children in U.S-run prisons in Iraq. The obsession of Western society with sex and sexual exploitation of women as sex objects, further substantiate the crimes of sexual abuse and rape against women in Iraq.

We know now that "Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg", said Reed Brody, special counsel for the U.S-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), because Abu Ghraib is not the only prison in Iraq, and there are hundreds more. The "crimes at Abu Ghraib are part of a larger pattern of abuses against Muslim detainees around the world", added Mr. Brody.

The number of prisoners in Iraq today is far greater that that under the former regime of Saddam. The level of sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners and detainees by the former regime was just a fraction in today’s Iraq. Prior to 2003, Western human rights organisations were very vocal and continued to monitor and report the situation in Iraq under the former regime. Iraq was portrayed as a pariah state. But since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, they follow the U.S. orders and stop their human rights work.

When asked about investigating U.S. crimes against Iraqi civilians, Hania Mufti, an investigator with HRW told Phillip Adams of Australia’s Radio National on Tuesday 26 April 2005, that: "The Agency is not concerns to investigate U.S. crime against the Iraqi people, because U.S. crimes against Iraqis are happening now in front of our eyes. The Agency is more concerns to investigate crimes committed by the previous regime which took place in 1990s so we can pursue the ‘genocide’ charges". Her allegations against officials of the previous regime are supported by "evidence" collected from refugees in Jordan, Iran, Turkey, and Britain. The refugees were enticed to make allegations. She also admitted that U.S. forces in Iraq and Iraqi expatriates are assisting the agency in making a case of genocide against the former Iraqi officials.

The most disturbing and misleading allegations of Hania Mufti’s is; "The majority of Iraqis welcomed the invasion". Of course this is a falsehood. Most Iraqis (92-98 per cent) opposed the invasion and occupation of their country. The immediate uprising of Iraqi Resistance against the Occupation was a guide. According to Iraqi pollster Saadoun Al-Dulaimi of the Iraqi Institute of Strategic Studies, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis (+85%), favours the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. A U.S-sponsored poll in May 2004 shows that 92 per cent of Iraqis viewed the invaders as "occupiers" rather than "liberators", 85 per cent wanted them to leave immediately, and only 2 per cent (2%) of Iraqis viewed the U.S. as "liberators". The Washington Post survey revealed that; "Public opinion polls show 80 per cent [of Iraqis] want the Americans out of their country. In the election campaign, one common theme among candidates was the withdrawal of occupying forces". The Iraqi people have rejected this U.S-imposed form of colonial dictatorship.

The miseries of the Iraqi people have more than doubled in the last two years, and Iraqis viewed the Occupation as the cause of their miseries. In addition to the crimes of sexual abuse, torture and rape committed by U.S. soldiers against Iraqi women, all other aspects of Iraqi women’s rights have also deteriorated. Women health and women education have fallen significantly. Unemployment, prostitution and malnutrition, have increased dramatically, and are now widespread among Iraqi women today.

A report by Women for Women International reveals that 57 per cent of Iraqi women and their families do not have adequate healthcare, and that the maternal mortality rate have tripled when compare to the period between 1989 to 2002. Iraq’s infrastructure has been reduced to rubble. The health care services and the education system are on the brink of total collapse. Iraq had one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East’ prior to U.S. war and sanctions. Under U.S. Occupation at least 200 children are dying every day. They are dying from malnutrition, a lack of clean water and a lack of medical equipment and drugs to cure easily treatable diseases. This traumatic situation has significant psychological effects on the health and welfare of the children’s mothers. Electricity blackout is as long as 15 hours a day, much longer than that of pre-war level.

As a result of the U.S. dismantling of the Iraqi state, many women lost their jobs. Unemployment among Iraqi women is more than 70 per cent and rising. The dismantling of the Iraqi Security and Police led to increase in violence and crimes against women. Women are no longer leaving their homes unaccompanied by relatives. The Bush administration’s promotion of religious fundamentalism and sectarianism mean the worst for Iraqi women rights. U.S. foreign policy preys on religious fundamentalism.

Iraqi women have also suffered great loss in lives. U.S. aerial bombing and destruction caused the death of great numbers of women and children. In November 2004, the reputable British medical journal, the Lancet, reported that from March 2003 to October 2004, U.S. forces have killed more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. The number of Iraqis killed is increasing daily. The Lancet authors acknowledge that most of the victims were innocent women and children killed by U.S. bombing of population centres.

To increase the atrocity, the U.S. provides its soldiers with "self-immunity" from prosecution making it very easy for them to kill Iraqis with institutionalised impunity, as if Iraqis were not human beings. In addition, evidence shows that the U.S-British forces use banned weapons such as napalm and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which contaminated and polluted Iraq’s environment, and caused health hazards.

Doctors in Iraq have reported a significant increase in deformities among newborn babies that could be due to radiation passed through mothers following U.S. wars of 1991-2003. ‘After studying family history of couples with deformed babies, they concluded that radiation and pollution [caused by ‘depleted’ uranium dust, DU] were the main causes of the deformity’, Dr Lamia'a Amran, a paediatrician at the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) hospital in Baghdad, told IRIN News. "Since 1991 the number of children born with birth deformities has quadrupled", said Dr Janan Hassan, who runs a children clinic in Basra in southern Iraq. If DU is the cause of the cancers, which is most likely, the crisis could become infinitely worse for women and children in Iraq.

"The depleted uranium left by the U.S. bombing campaign has turned Iraq into a cancer-infested country. For hundreds of years to come, the effects of the uranium will continue to wreak havoc on Iraq and its surrounding areas", said Iraqi artist and author of ‘Baghdad Diaries’, Nuha Al-Radi before she died of leukaemia on August 13, 2004.

The U.S-Britain used thousands of tonnes of DU in their wars on Iraq and over a wide range of areas. It took three to five years for the cancers to begin manifesting after the first Gulf crisis. Iraqi women and their newborn babies expecting bleak future as a result of the U.S-Britain use of WMD.

The pretexts for the war were proved to be just lies. Iraq had no WMD and Iraq had no relations with terrorism. The war on Iraq was an illegal act of aggression, designed to increase the threat of terrorism and violence, in order to exert control. The continuing Occupation of Iraq is to rob Iraq of its oil resources, and enhance U.S. imperialist doctrine.

So, as news of the appalling miseries of Iraqi women has piled up, where are Western feminists? Aren’t women rights a universal demand? Are Western feminists allowing George Bush to steal their rhetoric to occupy Iraq and torture Iraqi women? Where is this international women solidarity? The setting up of an international war crimes tribunal to investigate and prosecute those who committed these crimes against Iraqi women should be the aim of the world community to. It will enhance human rights and democracy worldwide.

George Bush "colonial feminism" and his use of women status in the Middle East is merely to denigrate Islam and Islamic culture, and serving U.S. imperial doctrine. The best way to redress U.S. crimes against Iraqi women and end the suffering is the immediate and full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. This will allow Iraq to progress toward full sovereignty and national independence.

The Occupation has had both immediate and long-term negative implications for the safety of Iraqi women and for their participation in post-war life in Iraq. The end of the Occupation will stop the chain reactions of violence, and may allow the victim’s wounds to heal.

Global Research Contributing Editor Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.

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AVIGOLFE re Depleted uranium 

Secrétariat Avigolfe <avigolfe@tiscali.fr>
Date: Sun May 6, 2005 10:45pm

AVIGOLFE
Association Française des victimes civiles et militaires des guerres du Golfe et des Balkans
49 avenue Bontemps
95750 CHARS ( FRANCE )
tél : +33 6 85 20 06 99
avigolfe@tiscali.fr <mailto:avigolfe@tiscali.fr>

http://avigolfe.ifrance.com <http://avigolfe.ifrance.com/>

Dear Sir, madam

My name is Alain ACARIES and I am the general secretary of
AVIGOLFE - the French association for military and civil
victims of the Gulf and Balkans wars, the chairman is M.
Herve DESPLAT, an ex-military person and veteran of the
First Gulf war.

I am also the father of Ludovic, sent to the Balkans during
his military service for six months with FORPRONU - and who
died of a serious illness in 1997. I would like to inform
you , that due to the lack of recognition by both military
and civil authorities of the connection between the military
service and the death of my son, I asked for a scientific
analysis of one of his lymph glands that had been conserved
by the civil hospital where he had been treated in the first
instance. This examination was done in the NANODIAGNOSTICS
laboratory (Via E.Fermi 41057 San Vito, Modena , Italy)
Dr. Gatti, biologist and physician, examined the lymph
ganglion, that I personally took to her in January 2005.

A new technique has been developped using an ambient
electron microscope, with funding by the EEC ( Projet QLRT -
2002 - 147 NANOPATHOLOGY) . This method, for the moment
unique, reveals inorganic micro and nano particles in the
tissues. For more information on their research you can
connect to : http:/avigolfe.ifrance.com - click on the
flower on the title page and you have access to all the
rubric - select Nanopathologie 2. The documents are in
both English and French or if you wish I can forward
further information to you, in French or English, about this
method.

As in all the cases of victims of the "Balkans Syndrome"
studied by this laboratory, the sample of the lymph gland of
Ludovic Acaries was found to contain a concentration of
metallic micro and nano particles ( Ag. Cr. Au. Si. Al. Mg.
Mo.) and non metallic ( P, S, I, Cl ). Such a mass is not
found in the normal composition of human tissues, and these
alloys do not exist in a natural state or in the
metallurgical industry. It has already been proven that
normal cellular defense mechanisms are ineffective when
confronted with extremely small particles. Once these
fragments have entered the human body, they can penetrate
the cellular nucleus and lead to very serious consequences,
a number of them are listed as poisonous chemicals.

These particles produced during the impact of the weakened
uranium or tungsten munitions on the target and owing to
the extremely high temperature ( +3000° ) can remain
suspended in the atmosphere for a very long time after their
formation, and they can persist in high concentration in
enclosed areas (cars or rooms ). The vehicles used by the
French of FORPRONU in the Balkans , had not long returned
from the Gulf war and NO research or specific treatment was
carried out before they were re-used in the Balkans .
(Confirmation by the defense ministry)

An important detail is that Ludovic was in the Balkans from
March 1993 to October 1993 and NATO declared to have used
weakened uranium weapons as from August 1994 But we have
proof that tungsten munitions were found in the Balkans in 1993.

In Ludovic's case, who was a lorry driver - and who ate and
slept in his lorry when on supplies mission to troops in
Sarajevo, and frequently having to stop due to close
fighting, the origin was confirmed to be caused by
vaccinations and radioactivity , but not necessarily both.
For more information, you can read "Les Vaccins" on our
internet site.

A complaint is being registered by the French judge in
charge of the investigations ... But here , at AVIGOLFE, we
would like to take these sanitary problems associated with
modern wars to a European level as our governments refuse
to listen to reason and give pensions to the victims or to
their families. We would like the veterans of each
European country who took part in these conflicts, alert the
press again with the information I'm sending you, so that
ALL persons concerned are informed and that each one write
to one or more European deputies in Strasbourg asking for
the creation of a European Inquiry Committee, and also that
the scientists involved be heard.
I'm sure I can count on you to distribute this letter as
far as possible to all yours European friends and other
people. Avigolfe has already written to French European
parliamentaries - but that it must do it in other Europeans
countries.

I would very much appreciate acknowledgement of this
letter - and, if possible , the actions you intend to take.

Very sincerely
yours,

Alain Acaries

Antonietta Morena Gatti is a physicist and bioengineer, and
is the founder and the director of the Laboratory of
Biomaterials of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
(Italy). She is the discoverer of the presence of micro-
and nano-particles in biological tissues and of their
pathological effects. The European Community appointed her
Coordinator of the international group in charge of the
nanopathology study.

Stefano Montanari is a pharmacist and a scientific
consultant. He has collaborated with Dr Gatti for about 25
years.


THE SO-CALLED "BALKAN-SYNDROME": A BIO-ENGINEERING APPROACH

Dr Antonietta M. Gatti - Dr Stefano Montanari

It is a well-known fact, widely reported by media, that a
non-negligible number of veterans of the Gulf War (1990-91)
showed what according to medicine are mutually unrelated
symptoms. Some of those can be attributed to stress:
headache, for example, or sleep disturbance, or
forgetfulness, or an impaired concentration. Other symptoms
like fatigue, muscle and joint pain, and shortness of breath
are somewhat harder to classify, but cancers, various and,
in some cases, extremely unusual diseases of the
genitourinary system, an increased incidence of birth
defects among veterans' children and disorders of the blood
and the haemopoietic organs must be due to causes that
cannot be legitimately ascribed to stress. Other pathologies
Gulf War veterans are suffering from, like sudden death and
Lou Gehrig's disease are under investigation as to their
meaningfulness.

But the problem is unfortunately wider and not limited to
that group of military population. Very similar symptoms
are being displayed by soldiers who served in the former
Yugoslavian territory during the so-called Balkan War, made
worse by an unusually high incidence of Hodgkin's and
non-Hodgkin's lymphomas. Staffers of humanitarian missions
and Yugoslavian residents as well are suffering from the
same diseases.

Professor Edo Hasanbegovic, chief of the Paediatric Clinic
of Sarajevo, denounced how leukaemia is on the increase in
children throughout the Yugoslavian Federation, but mainly
in children coming from Velika, Kladusa and Buzim, towns
located close to the Croatian borderline.

An explanation to all that was offered when in March 2000
NATO revealed that Depleted Uranium (DU) shells had been
employed in the Balkans and in 2001 traces of radioactivity
were detected by the United Nations Environment Protection
agency not far from Sarajevo, in a barracks at Han Pijesak
and in two places inside a factory in Hadzici.

It is a frequently observed fact that radioactivity is a
triggering factor to cancer, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki
tought a painful lesson about that. So, uranium was
immediately seen as the obvious scapegoat to blame.

For a better understanding, it is necessary to know that DU
was used to make a component of some shells used in that
war, but radioactivity played no role in that choice. High
density and hardness are the features that made those
projectiles, called kinetic penetrators, particularly fit
for piercing even very thick armours. DU is what is left
over when most of the highly radioactive isotopes of uranium
are removed for use as nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons.

The DU used in armour-piercing munitions is also used in
civilian industry, primarily as ballast, for stabilizers in
airplanes and boats.

As a matter of fact, uranium is a mixture of three isotopes:
U235, U234, and U238. When the content of U235 is below
0.711%, uranium is classified as "depleted", and the blend
used in the Balkans contained less than 0.2% of that isotope.

DU is approximately 40 percent less radioactive than natural
uranium and emits alpha and beta particles, and gamma rays.
Alpha particles can hardly pass through the skin, while beta
particles are blocked by most garments, and the amount of
gamma rays, a form of highly penetrating energy, emitted by
DU is very low.

The radioactivity produced by those weapons is certainly not
healthy, but its full responsibility for such an unusual
health situation looks at least doubtful if observed from a
scientific standpoint. In addition to that, another piece of
evidence is raising a further doubt about the radioactive
origin of the pathologies: A higher-than-expected quantity
of lymphomas and symptoms identical to those suffered from
by the Balkan War's veterans was observed in Italian
soldiers who had never served in any theatre of war nor had
ever come near to radioactive weapons. The condition all
those soldiers shared was serving in firing grounds.

In the meantime, someone tried to blame the multiple
vaccinations soldiers underwent during the so-called
Operation Desert Storm, but without being able to give any
scientific demonstration to that thesis.

As a matter of fact, in addition to the usual vaccines
against tetanus-diphtheria, hepatitis B, poliovirus,
meningococcal, typhoid and yellow fever, the American troops
were treated with Botulinum Pentavalent, unlicensed in the
United States, intended to counteract botulism. Then they
were treated with a vaccine against anthrax, a drug proven
to be teratogenic. In fact, women receiving it are warned
not to have children for at least three years.

Finally troops received Pyridostigmine bromide, not a
vaccine, but a pre-treatment against nerve agents. That
drug, normally used for myasthenia gravis, is not approved
by the Food and Drug Administration as a nerve gas antidote
and its side effects are potentially very dangerous. But
those medicines were administered to US troops only, while
the Gulf War Syndrome affected also civilians and soldiers
of other nationalities.

Thus, no answer was given to the question: why do people
living in theatres of war and soldiers working under
particular conditions contract those diseases with such an
alarming frequency? Our Laboratory of Biomaterials of the
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) is engaged in
checking bioptic and autoptic samples coming from patients
belonging in the classes described above. It is an
indisputable fact that all samples contain inorganic micro-
and nano-particles, while it may be interesting to observe
that none of them show any trace of uranium. From the
technical point of view, those very small fragments can be
detected by using an innovative technique of electronic
microscopy we developed and that has been already described
in literature.

What we found were very small bits, sometimes agglomerated,
of simple or combined metals: Fe-Si, Cu-Cl-Zn, Si-Ti-Fe-Al,
Si-Bi, Si-Pb, Fe-Cu-Zn, Cr-Fe-Ni, Fe-Mn and, but just once,
Zr alone. The spherical shape, hollow in the larger sizes,
of many particles proves their formation under a very high
temperature, a condition compatible with that of the
explosion of a DU shell. DU projectiles hit very different
targets, but specially buildings and armaments like, for
example, tanks, and when they do, the temperature in the
core of the explosion exceeds 3,000°C, which is more than
enough to have all solid matter sublime and, in some cases,
form new metal alloys. That gas expands over a large volume
of atmosphere, then, rapidly, the matter becomes solid
again taking the shape of very small spheres (down to 10-8 m
diameter), stays suspended in the air and is carried away
over distances depending on atmospheric conditions like
wind, rain, snow and pressure. This phenomenon was studied
in 1977-78 at the US Air Force base of Leglin (Fla). After
some time, all the air-borne particles fall slowly down and
settle on grass, vegetables, fruit or expanses of water
where they become inevitably a guest of food and drink to
animals and men alike. Even if that unwanted presence is
known in advance - but very often it is utterly ignored -
getting rid completely of inorganic particles can be very
difficult. A good wash eliminates a great quantity of debris
from fruit or vegetables, but cauliflowers, for example,
cannot be cleaned thoroughly because of their rough surface,
while those particles that settle in the tissues of animals
that ate contaminated grass and men eat as meat can't be
taken away at all.

Keeping in mind the well-known, even if never widely
publicized, phenomenon studied at Leglin and the new science
of nano-pathology, an explanation to the unanswered question
becomes easy.

People present in firing grounds and in the theatres of war,
and being a soldier or a civilian makes no difference,
breathe in micro- and nano-particles while they are
suspended in the air as an aerosol, then eat and drink them
along with vegetables and water.

We have amply demonstrated with our researches that once
debris that size (10-9 - 10-5 m) enter the body, be it via
the digestive or the respiratory system, they can easily
negotiate the luminal tissues and either be captured by the
tissue itself which acts the way a filter does, or be
transported by the blood or the lymph until they end their
travel in some organ (for instance the kidneys and the
liver). Lymph nodes, for example, are the organs where
lymphomas start and develop and where, in all pathological
cases checked, we found the presence of inorganic particles.
But also all the other pathologic specimens we had the
possibility to observe show clearly and without any single
exception the presence of debris.

It is important to underline that none of the particles we
found is biodegradable. Just to give a further confirmation
about the applicability of the theory according to which the
so-called Balkan Syndrome has an environmental,
nanopathological origin, particles found in the diseased
tissues of soldiers and civilians, and particles found in
the ground of the territories where the pathologies were
contracted are mutually compatible.

If no uranium was ever detected, that does not necessarily
mean there is none somewhere in the tissues of the patients.
The fact is likely to be due to its quantity, which is
extremely scarce when compared with the huge masses of the
targets that sublime and that contain no such element. It is
also possible that uranium particles had been captured by
tissues but, probably because they did not reach a critical
threshold, did not trigger any disease and, as a
consequence, we did not have the chance to receive and study
the samples.

In conclusion, DU's responsibility is only indirect, and it
is not its radioactivity to blame, but the very high
temperature that uranium produces once the shells of which
it is a component hit the mark.

It is then possible that the Balkan Syndrome has a
multi-factorial origin including radioactivity and
vaccinations, but the main cause is without any doubt a
nanopathological one.


-------- europe

German defense minister to take up US nuclear withdrawal at NATO

RAMSTEIN, Germany (AFP) May 06, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050506124733.3aemhv95.html

German Defense Minister Peter Struck said Friday he planned to broach the subject of a withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from German soil at NATO.

"I agree with Foreign Minister (Joschka) Fischer that we should take up this issue in NATO committees," Struck said during a visit to the US air base Ramstein in western Germany.

When asked whether he backed calls by members of the ruling coalition for a total withdrawal of the US weapons, Struck said: "We will have to discuss that with the other European allies that also still have nuclear weapons stationed."

During an international conference in New York this week to review the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), Fischer said that calls from his Greens party and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats for a removal of all US nuclear weapons stationed in Germany were "a reasonable initiative".

Struck noted that "95 percent of the nuclear weapons stationed in Europe were withdrawn after the fall of the Berlin Wall" in 1989.

The only US nuclear weapons remaining in Europe are those that can be transported by aircraft. US short-range missiles, cruise missiles and nuclear submarines have been withdrawn, according to German sources.

An estimated 150 atomic weapons are stationed on German soil out of a total of about 480 in Europe. In a case of self-defense after a nuclear attack, they would be carried by German Tornado jets under current pacts.

Proponents of a removal of the weapons argue that they are a Cold War relic and undermine the international non-proliferation process.

----

Support Growing for Removing U.S. Nuclear Weapons From Europe

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MAY 6, 2005 1:38 PM
CONTACT: Natural Resources Defense Council
Hans M. Kristensen, 202-513-6249
Elliott Negin, 202-289-2405

http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0506-09.htm

WASHINGTON -- May 6 -- Representatives from the more than 180 countries that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty are now meeting at the United Nations in New York City to review the treaty's status. During the month-long conference, many member countries will call for reducing or eliminating tactical (short-range) nuclear weapons, including U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.

Earlier this year, the Natural Resources Defense Council published the report "U.S. Nuclear Weapons In Europe" which revealed that the United States still has approximately 480 nuclear bombs deployed in Europe.

The study was first reported by the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (for the story, click here). The papers reported that even the top U.S. military commander in Europe, General James Jones, supports withdrawing U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe.

Since the report came out and the initial press coverage, there have been a number of developments on this issue. Below is a timeline.

NRDC Briefs Members of European Parliaments

In late February and early March, the NRDC study's author, Hans M. Kristensen, briefed members of the parliamentary foreign policy committees in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands on U.S. nuclear deployments in their respective countries. The German Foreign Ministry showed an interest in the weapons being removed. The German briefing is available here. The Belgian/Dutch briefing is available here.

Belgium Senate Calls for Removing U.S. Nukes

On March 22, the Belgian Senate foreign affairs committee adopted a resolution calling for (among other things) the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Belgium and Europe. The resolution was approved unanimously by the full Senate on April 21. An unofficial translation of the resolution is available here.

German Liberal Party Calls for Removing U.S. Nukes

On April 14, the German Liberal Party (FDP) proposed a resolution calling for the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Germany. The parliament referred the resolution to the foreign affairs committee for further debate. A copy of the proposed resolution is available here.

Top Norwegian Parliament Member Calls for Removing U.S. Nukes

On April 26, during a debate in the Norwegian parliament, Foreign Affairs Committee member Lars Rise of the Christian Democratic Party (Kristelig Folkeparti, part of the ruling government coalition) stated: "It is a problem that NATO countries themselves use nuclear weapons as a deterrent. We want the United States to remove its tactical nuclear weapons from the territory of other NATO countries."

Large Majority of Germans Want U.S. Nukes Removed

On May 2, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a public opinion poll that showed overwhelming support (76 percent) for removing U.S. nuclear weapons from Germany. The results of the poll are available here.

Top German Politicians Call for Removing U.S. Nukes

The developments cited above helped trigger a national debate in Germany. The German media quoted a number of prominent elected officials, including foreign and defense spokespeople from the Greens and Social Democrats, supporting a withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons. For some of these media reports, click here.

German Foreign Minister Calls for Eliminating Nukes Worldwide

On May 2, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer stated in his address to the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in New York City that Germany favored reducing and eliminating all tactical nuclear weapons worldwide. Fischer's speech is available here.

U.S. Diplomat Rejects Removing U.S. Nukes from Europe

On May 3, an unidentified U.S. diplomat told the International Herald Tribune that the United States will not withdraw its nuclear weapons from Europe. "The nuclear weapons will be maintained at a minimum level to preserve peace and stability. It is something all the NATO allies have agreed on. They are the essential military and political link between the United States and Europe." For the story, click here.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, nonprofit organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists dedicated to protecting public health and the environment. Founded in 1970, NRDC has more than 1 million members and online activists nationwide, served from offices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

----

US urges Japan, EU to conclude negotiations on nuclear project's site

WASHINGTON (AFP) May 06, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050506212815.17j90bt2.html

The United States on Friday urged Japan and the European Union to conclude negotiations on a site for a pioneering nuclear reactor.

"We are encouraging them to come to a conclusion," said Energy Department spokesman Jeff Sherwood, who reiterated Washington's support for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) to be built in Japan instead of France.

"We have been encouraging them to reach solutions and an agreement, but the US still supports the Japanese site," Sherwood said.

European sources in Washington, however, said Washington would accept the outcome of European-Japanese negotiations.

Japan said Friday it had not given up on its bid to host ITER despite news reports that France has won the site.

Japan and France are both vying to play host to the 10-billion euro (13-billion dollar) ITER, a revolutionary nuclear reactor which would emulate the sun's nuclear fusion process.

The United States and South Korea support Japan's offer to build ITER in Rokkasho-mura, northern Japan, while the European Union, China and Russia back France's bid for the project in Cadarache.

At a meeting in Geneva Thursday, Japanese and EU officials struck a deal that maps out future cooperation over ITER, the French government said, paving the way for a long-awaited decision on where the nuclear reactor will be built.

Under the deal, the winner would pay 50 percent of ITER construction costs estimated to total 570 billion yen (5.5 billion dollars) with the losing nation covering 10 percent of the costs, Japan's top-selling daily Yomiuri Shimbun said in its evening edition Friday.



-------- iran

Tehran ready to accelerate nuclear activities: Iranian official

Fri May 6, 9:25 AM ET (AFP)

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050506/wl_mideast_afp/irannucleareu_050506132529

TEHRAN - Iran is ready to accelerate its nuclear activities if agreement is not reached quickly with the European Union over the Islamic republic's controversial nuclear programme, a chief negotiator warned.

"A long-term suspension or an end (to uranium enrichment) is stupid, bad and irrational," Syrus Nasseri was quoted as saying by student news agecy ISNA.

Iran has suspended uranium enrichment, a process which makes fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but also the explosive material for atom bombs, as a goodwill measure but has repeatedly said it will resume the process if an agreement is not reached with the European Union.

If negotiators from Britain, France and Germany "use threats, the response in terms of threats is perfectly ready", Nasseri said Friday.

"If we see that an agreement with the European three is not possible, we will accelerate our (nuclear) activities."

The EU is calling on Iran, in talks which opened in December, to abandon all nuclear fuel activities in order to guarantee it will not make atomic weapons. The United States charges that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.

"If the Europeans don't do anything, we will go to the next stage in little time," he said, referring to Tehran's plan to resume enrichment activities at its Ispahan plant.

"We won't be the first to make threats," he said. "There is a solution on the table and we are ready to resolve the problem ... but we do not have much time to give to the Europeans."

Iran has made a proposal that would allow it build up in phases from enrichment with 3,000 centrifuges, still enough to make one atomic bomb a year, to an industrial level of enrichment with 54,000 centrifuges.

EU negotiators refused at a meeting in London last week to accept a written timetable from the Iranians for the first phase of their enrichment project, diplomats told AFP.

The United States has been sceptical of European efforts to talk Iran out of its nuclear ambitions while promising economic and security incentives but has backed the initiative since March.

US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has indicated she was giving the EU-3 talks until the summer before considering whether to seek to take Iran to the UN Security Council, which could impose punishing international sanctions on the Islamic Republic.



-------- japan

Japan's Nuclear Dream Could Be World's Nightmare

Suvendrini Kakuchi, May 6, 2005 (IPS)

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=28581

TOKYO - As Japan debates on how to meet its gargantuan energy needs in the 21st century, and whether nuclear power should be in the energy mix, plans to revive its controversial plutonium reprocessing plant at the remote village of Rokkasho-mura in Japan's northern Aomori prefecture has alarmed the global anti-nuclear movement.

At the sidelines of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference at the United Nations, a group of international academics, former officials and scientists, including four Nobel physics laureates, issued a statement calling on Japan to indefinitely postpone operating the plant.

The declaration on Thursday warns that Japan's plan to separate and stockpile up to eight metric tons of plutonium annually, enough to make 1,000 nuclear bombs, calls into question Japan's commitment to strengthening the NPT.

''At a time when the non-proliferation regime is facing its greatest challenge, Japan should not proceed with its current plans for the start-up of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant,'' the statement said.

Initial tests at Rokkasho using irradiated nuclear fuel are scheduled for December 2005, with full-scale operations slated for 2007, the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists said in a report on its website.

''With Rokkasho operational, by 2020 Japan's domestic stock of plutonium could equal the U.S. stockpile of plutonium for weapons,'' said Frank von Hippel, physicist and professor at the Science and Global Security Programme at the U.S.-based Princeton University.

Anti-nuclear lobbyists are worried that the safeguards at Rokkasho would be inadequate to prevent the deliberate diversion or theft of large quantities of plutonium.

‘’Separated plutonium poses a risk of theft, and such large stocks would be destabilising,'' Von Hippel said in the report.

There are valid concerns for such fears.

Such a facility will not be operating in a political vacuum, but rather in one of the most unstable regions in the world, North-east Asia. All countries in the region - Japan, North and South Korea, Taiwan and China, as well as Russia, and the U.S. military presence, make this a region of high tension.

''All of them have nuclear programmes at various stages of development from the on- going modernisation of U.S. and Chinese nuclear weapons, to the opaque nuclear weapons programme in North Korea, as well as the continuing interest in acquiring plutonium by the nuclear establishments in Taiwan and South Korea,'' said the environmental group Greenpeace.

''However, Japan is alone in the region in moving ahead with the stockpiling of large quantities of plutonium for which it has no practical, peaceful use,'' it warned.

Nonetheless, at the heart of the matter is the continuing debate over Japan's growing energy needs.

Proponents of nuclear power have always argued that Japan is a resource-poor country and if it continues to rely on fossil fuel imports from the Middle East, it would mean attempting to secure a finite resource from a politically unstable part of the world.

They stress that nuclear power offers Japan a cheap, inexpensive and reliable energy source. Also since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, the pronuclear lobby has also rushed to add that nuclear power is needed by Japan to meet its commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2004, Japan had 53 nuclear power reactors (52 were in operation), which made it third in terms of number of plants after the United States (103) and France (57).

Over the past quarter century, as many other nations attempt to find alternate energy sources, nuclear power has gone from 17 percent of Japan's total electricity supply in 1990 to 34.6 percent of total supply in 2004.

Five more nuclear power plants are currently being built, and there are plans to increase the 34.6 figure to 40 percent by 2010.

''Following a series of harrowing accidents, nuclear power development was in cold storage till recently. The changing picture poses risks for both the environment and Japan's pacifist leanings,'' said Yuko Fujita, a professor of environmental science at Keio University.

Fujita told IPS nuclear power reactors that operate and produce dangerous radioactive fuel pose a serious threat to the health of workers and an accident can result in thousands of fatalities.

''Apart from the risk of contamination to people and the environment, high-level nuclear power development produces the capabilities to produce nuclear weapons. The industry is criminal offence,'' he argued.

Since 1999 a spate of accidents, scandals and cover-ups have shaken public confidence. On Sep. 30 that year, at Tokaimura near Tokyo, two workers at a nuclear plant died when they disregarded safety procedures and dumped a large quantity of uranium into a settling basin. The uranium reached critical mass, causing an explosion. Tens of thousands of people in the area were quarantined and checked for radiation.

Japan's worst nuclear accident occurred last August when five workers were killed and six injured at the No. 3 nuclear reactor at Kansai Electric's Mihima Nuclear Power Station in Fukui Prefecture, central Japan, when hot steam leaked from a ruptured secondary coolant water pipe.

After the nuclear plant accident, Kansai Electric said in October it had found 14 additional cases of falsified inspection records on its thermal power plants, after revealing in June 87 cases of data falsification.

Besides the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, of particular concern also is Japan's determination to go ahead with a fast-breeder reactor programme (FBR).

'' FBR programmes were in operation in both the U.S. and Europe in the 1970s, at a time when many experts predicted the world's supply of uranium would soon be depleted,'' said Eric Johnston, the author of 'Japan's Nuclear Nightmare; Power to the People?'

''But that proved not to be the case and this realisation, combined with public unease over handling the world's most dangerous substance, led the U.S. to abandon the FBR program by the early 1980s. European countries began to follow shortly afterwards,'' added Johnston.

But not Japan.

It is forging ahead with an experimental FBR called Monju in Fukui Prefecture, and there seems to be mainstream support for it.

The 'Yomuiri Shimbun' newspaper, in an editorial this January, argues that Monju has been developed at huge costs to the taxpayer, and so ''must be respected as the next- generation reactor that produces more nuclear fuel than it consumes''.

''It is a dream for Japan that lacks fossil fuel and uranium resources,'' added the mass- circulation daily.

----

Call for Japan not to run new plutonium processing plant

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) May 06, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050506002806.qm58k1kc.html

A total of 27 academics, former officials and scientists, including four Nobel physics laureates, issued a statement Thursday calling on Japan to indefinitely postpone operating a controversial plutonium reprocessing plant at Rokkasho-mura.

The declaration warns that Japan's plan to separate and stockpile up to eight metric tons of plutonium annually, enough to make 1,000 nuclear bombs, calls into question Japan's commitment to strengthening the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The statement, issued on the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that "Japan is about to join several nuclear-weapons states as a producer of separated plutonium on an industrial scale."

"At a time when the non-proliferation regime is facing its greatest challenge, Japan should not proceed with its current plans for the start-up of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant," the statement said.

It said that the operation of such a reprocessing plant "in a country not possessing nuclear weapons ... could also undermine international efforts to discourage other countries, including Iran and North Korea, from building their own reprocessing and enrichment facilities."

Diplomats have said that Iran, which the UN nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is investigating on US charges that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons, could actually be going for the so-called Japanese solution. This is to have a fully developed nuclear fuel cycle capability which while peaceful represents having the ability to make atomic weapons.

The statement, issued on the sidelines on an NPT review conference at the United Nations, said: "Japan has shown great wisdom in not joining the 'club' of nuclear-weapon states.

"We urge it to show equal leadership in deciding not to add to the accumulation of excess stocks of civilian plutonium."

The signers of the statement included, besides the physics laureates, former US Defense Secretary William Perry and Herbert York, director emeritus of the US nuclear weapons research center the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the statement said.

Initial tests at Rokkasho using irradiated nuclear fuel are scheduled for December 2005, with full-scale operations slated for 2007, the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a report on its website.

"With Rokkasho operational, by 2020 Japan's domestic stock of plutonium could equal the US stockpile of plutonium for weapons," said Frank von Hippel, physicist and professor at the Science and Global Security Program at Princeton.

"Separated plutonium poses a risk of theft, and such large stocks would be destabilizing," Von Hippel said in the report.



-------- korea

Pyongyang's Bomb

By David Ignatius
Washington Post
Friday, May 6, 2005; A23

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR2005050501681_pf.html

Here's a chilling scenario from the CIA's former top Asia hand: Within a year, North Korea is likely to test a nuclear weapon, probably in a cave or mine shaft somewhere in the barren northeast of the country.

A small amount of radioactive fallout will leak from the test site and drift toward Japan. Financial markets in Tokyo and Seoul will be rocked by the news. Foreign companies in South Korea will weigh whether to pull out dependents or reduce their operations. And Washington will debate whether to impose a blockade or other tough measures to contain the North Korean nuclear breakout.

That's the essence of a briefing being given to some major U.S. companies by Arthur Brown, who retired in December as chief of the East Asia division of the CIA's clandestine service. He's now a senior vice president for the consulting firm Control Risks Group. He says the briefing is based entirely on unclassified material. It mirrors concerns in intelligence circles.

Brown argues that the North Korean test is the next step in a nuclear weapons program that has been underway for nearly 50 years. The country is already a "declared" nuclear state after announcing this year that it has weapons. It wants to become a "recognized" nuclear state, like China, India or Pakistan. But to achieve that status, it must first make itself a "demonstrated" power by conducting a nuclear test. Or so goes Brown's analysis.

Pyongyang's nuclear efforts began in 1956, just three years after the end of the Korean War, when the country signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to train nuclear scientists; the Soviets helped build North Korea's first reactor in 1965. In 1974 the North Koreans added a nuclear training agreement with China. They built a second small reactor in 1986 at Yongbyon, and the United States detected a third, larger reactor there in 1989; these reactors could enrich plutonium fuel rods to the levels necessary to make a bomb. The North Koreans agreed to freeze their plutonium program in 1994, and they put 8,000 fuel rods at Yongbyon under seal. But they continued covertly along another bomb-making route, using highly enriched uranium created in special centrifuges apparently obtained from Pakistan.

What convinces Brown that North Korea will soon test a weapon is that the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, has been increasingly open about his goal of joining the nuclear club. When the United States found evidence of the covert uranium enrichment program in 2002, the North made no effort to deny it -- and promptly resumed reprocessing the plutonium fuel rods as well. In October 2003 North Korea warned that it was "willing to physically display nuclear capability," its code phrase for testing. Last year a senior official said his country "needs nuclear weapons for self-defense." And in February the North Koreans announced that they "have manufactured nuclear weapons and will retain them under any circumstances."

A model for the coming nuclear test, says Brown, was North Korea's 1998 test-firing of a three-stage Taepodong-1 missile over Japan and into the Pacific. That test was announced by the North Korean news agency, just as Brown expects the coming nuclear test will be. And North Korea hasn't made any effort to deny last week's statement by Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, that it now has the technology to produce an actual warhead that could fit atop missiles which, by U.S. intelligence estimates, could reach parts of the United States.

Kim Jong Il is often seen as a reckless madman, as in President Bush's description of him last week as a "tyrant" and "dangerous person" who "starves his own people" and has "huge concentration camps." But Brown argues that however brutal Kim's policies are, he has pursued what in his context is a rational course. "Kim sees only two options -- Baghdad or Islamabad," says Brown. In other words, he can wait for an American attack or he can move quickly to show his nuclear cards -- hoping he can then bargain for a deal that ensures his regime's survival. In Brown's view, "the chance that Kim Jong Il will negotiate away his nuclear option is close to zero."

The only perverse benefit of a North Korean nuclear test is that it would force neighboring states -- such as China and South Korea -- to end their denial and face reality. A nuclear North Korea poses a deadly and destabilizing threat for Asia. Dealing with that threat will require more active cooperation between the United States and its Asian friends. A nuclear test is one hell of a wake-up call, but in this case maybe it's a necessary one.

davidignatius@washpost.com

----

U.S. photos may show Korea nuke test

By REUTERS
May 6, 2005
Filed at 9:32 a.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-korea-us.html?pagewanted=print

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. government officials are monitoring recent satellite photographs of North Korea that appear to show extensive preparations for a nuclear weapons test, according to a report in the New York Times, citing officials who have been briefed on the matter.

The accounts of the suspicious activity come from American officials who reviewed either the photographs or intelligence reports interpreting them. They were confirmed by two foreign officials who were briefed by the Americans, but who had no independent way of interpreting the data, the report said.

When asked about the burst of activity at a suspected test site in the northeastern part of the country, White House officials cautioned that satellites could not determine the intentions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

Still, American officials were taking the matter seriously enough that they have extensively briefed their Japanese and South Korean allies, the Times reported on Friday.

Several officials said they had never before seen Korean preparations as advanced as those detected in recent days, including the digging of a tunnel that resembles the one used in Pakistan for nuclear tests in 1998.

The satellite photos also revealed the construction of a reviewing stand, presumably for dignitaries.

But an American intelligence expert quoted in the article said that intelligence agencies had not seen signs of electronic equipment often used to monitor the size and success of a nuclear test, leading to ``some debate about whether this is the real deal.''

----


World must pressure N.Korea not to test nuke

By REUTERS
May 6, 2005
Filed at 1:28 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-arms.html?pagewanted=print

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - World leaders should be pressuring North Korea not to stage a nuclear weapons test as the political and environmental consequences could be disastrous, the U.N. atomic watchdog said on Friday.

Asked what the effect of a North Korean nuclear test would be, Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters: ``There will be disastrous political repercussions in Asia and the rest of the world. I think there could be major environmental fallout, which could lead into dissemination of radioactivity in the region.''

``I hope every leader who has contact with North Korea is on the phone today with North Korean authorities to dissuade from test,'' he said.

----

Japan may call for deadline for N Korea to attend nuclear talks

WASHINGTON (AFP) May 06, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050506022740.y4sl5ijt.html

Japan is expected to propose a deadline for North Korea to attend nuclear talks or face action at the United Nations Security Council, a senior official of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's political party said Thursday.

Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura might discuss this proposal with his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing while attending the Asia-Europe Meeting this weekend at the Japanese ancient city of Kyoto.

Machimura indicated at a parliamentary meeting recently that he might raise this issue with the Chinese foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party told AFP in Washington, where he held talks on the whaling issue.

Hayashi is a member of Japan's House of Councillors in which he heads a special panel on foreign affairs and defense. He is also deputy director of the Upper House policy council.

"We asked this question at our committee and I definitely think that he might take it up (with the Chinese foreign minister)," he said.

Six-party negotiations designed to end Pyongyang's nuclear arms programs -- which group the two Koreas, Russia, China, Japan and the United States -- have been stalled for nearly a year since a third round of talks last June.

The North has boycotted the China-hosted nuclear disarmament talks since it failed to show up at a fourth round scheduled last September, citing "hostile" US policy toward the communist state.

Meanwhile Pyongyang has publicly announced that it has nuclear weapons and that it could manufacture more of them.

Hayashi said the five parties should give North Korea a deadline to enter negotiations and if it failed to attend the talks, it should be referred to the United Nations Security Council.

"The important aspect of the five party talks is that among them, China, Russia and the United States are members of the UN Security Council and if they give a deadline, it will send a clear signal to North Korea," he said.

"There is no other way to end the deadlock but to impose a deadline to North Korea," he said.

US President George W. Bush is considering the possibility of taking North Korea to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions if Pyongyang does not return to the negotiations, US officials say.

But the US president indicated in a press conference last week that shifting away from the talks and towards a more muscular diplomatic approach would require agreement from Washington's four partners.

----

China defends diplomacy on NKorea, urges others to do more

KYOTO, Japan (AFP) May 06, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050506021906.rw6pus6s.html

China on Friday rebuffed criticism that it is not putting enough pressure North Korea to resume talks on its nuclear program and urged other countries to do more.

The United States, Japan and South Korea have all called on China to intervene further with Pyongyang, which relies on Beijing as its main ally, after the Stalinist state suspended talks indefinitely and boasted of a nuclear deterrent.

"China has done a very good job. But China alone is not enough," Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told reporters at a meeting of Asian and European top diplomats in Kyoto, Japan.

"We should work with other countries and the international community to push for achieving the goal of a non-nuclearized Korean peninsula and for peace and stability on the Korean peninsula," he said after talks with his South Korean counterpart Ban Ki-Moon.

China, a key aid donor to North Korea, has hosted six-nation nuclear disarmament talks which include the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States. But the talks have been stalled since the last round in June 2004.

"We will continue to work hard to maintain contact and step up cooperation to push for the resumption of six-party talks at an early date," Li said.

"Only this will be beneficial to all parties and will be beneficial to achieving the goal of a non-nuclearized Korean peninsula," he said.

Ban, before leaving South Korea for the Asia-Europe Meeting here, said he "will call on China to play a more active role" in the North Korean crisis.

On Monday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura jointly called on China to do more.

On Sunday, North Korea test-fired a short-range missile off its east coast, a day before the opening of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in New York.

----

North Korean nuclear test would have disastrous consequences - UN nuclear chief

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) May 06, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050506175318.4i8ye4x5.html

North Korea's testing of an atomic bomb would be "nuclear blackmail" and world leaders should get on the phone to dissuade Pyongyang from going ahead with it, UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Friday.

ElBaradei, whose International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were kicked out of North Korea in December 2002, said in an interview with AFP and another news agency that Pyongyang's escalation by possibly testing an atomic bomb was "nuclear blackmail".

ElBaradei said North Korea needs "to understand that the international community has zero tolerance for any new country to go for a nuclear weapon."

"I hope they will not test. I hope every leader who has contact with North Korea is on the phone today with North Korean authorities to dissuade them from testing," ElBaradei said on the sidelines of a non-proliferation conference at United Nations headquarters in New York.

ElBaradei said a North Korean nuclear test would have "disastrous political repercussions in Asia and the rest of the world."

He said "there could be a major environmental fallout which again could lead to dissemination of radioactivity in the region."

"So enough rituals. Now the time has come after 12 years since we reported North Korea in non-compliance to the (UN) Security Council ... (for all the concerned parties) urgently to bite the bullet and find a comprehensive solution and avoid this escalating nuclear danger," ElBaradei said.

US officials familiar with satellite and intelligence data said the North Koreans are building a reviewing stand and filling in a tunnel, both signs that an underground nuclear test could come soon, The New York Times said Friday.

Media reports have said the North has been preparing an underground nuclear test since March and might conduct one as early as June.

North Korea said in February that it was pulling out of six-nation talks on its nuclear drive and was already nuclear-armed.

ElBaradei said it was not too late for the talks to work.

"There is no time ever when people cannot talk. Things could get worse but people today, tomorrow, after tomorrow, they would have to understand that there is no other solution to the North Korean issue rather than sitting around the table reaching a comprehensive settlement, a settlement that is perceived by everybody to be fair and equitable.

"The earlier we do that, the better for everybody," ElBaradei said.

He said "everybody knows what needs to be done," namely "to give North Korea security assurances" and "to respond to (their) economic and humanitarian needs" while Pyongyang must give up on trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

The intelligence community is not unanimous in its interpretation of the intelligence data on North Korea, with some saying "we're seeing ... everything you need to test," while others stress that the telltale signs of electronic equipment often needed to monitor a nuclear test has not been detected so far.

One official said there was "some debate about whether this is the real deal."

North Korea is believed to have one or two crude nuclear bombs, according to US intelligence reports.

International jitters were heightened on Sunday when North Korea test-fired a short-range missile, although US, South Korean and Japanese officials refused to link the incident to Pyongyang's drive for nuclear arms.


-------- russia

Russian Munitions Not Secure, Report Says

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 6, 2005; A14

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR2005050501726_pf.html

Efforts by Washington and Moscow to prevent Russian nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists remain slowed by bureaucratic red tape and a lack of urgency, according to a new report released yesterday by a research group affiliated with Harvard University.

In fiscal year 2004, U.S.-funded work to secure and account for Russian material that could be used in nuclear weapons was completed for only 4 percent of it, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which was founded by Ted Turner and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and is sponsored by Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. That raised the total secured to 26 percent, the group said.

Despite some heightened security procedures, many Russian nuclear research sites still frequently have doors propped open for convenience, intrusion sensors turned off because of false alarms and guards patrolling with unloaded weapons, the report said.

"On-the-ground progress in securing, consolidating and eliminating nuclear stockpiles in the last year remained slow, when compared to the urgency of the threat," according to the report. "Action from the highest levels [of the U.S. and Russian governments] is needed because difficult bureaucratic and political impediments persist."

Many terrorism experts say al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have focused for years on lightly secured nuclear facilities in Russia and other states in the former Soviet Union as potential sources for equipment and material needed to assemble an atomic weapon. The commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks recommended that U.S. officials undertake a "maximum effort" to place Russian nuclear equipment off-limits to terrorists.

The threat initiative study noted that considerable progress is being made in Russia. Starting with President Vladimir Putin, many Russian leaders now see the extraordinary danger posed by inadequately secured nuclear materials and weapons, it said.

But serious problems persist, according to the report. In March, the commander of Interior Ministry troops for Moscow said that seven key facilities there had functioning security equipment, while 39 had "serious shortcomings." He added that half the perimeters of these restricted sites lacked fences, the report said.

It also said that Russian security agencies must redouble security at nuclear sites in light of the ferocity of some recent terrorist attacks in Russia, such as the assault on a school in Beslan that killed at least 330 people, many of them children. The 32 Chechen attackers had obtained their weapons in an earlier attack on an Interior Ministry arms depot that involved 200 assailants dressed in military uniforms. A few months later, 47 men seized control of a nonnuclear military site north of Moscow filled with secret documents before troops expelled them.

The report also cited the case of a Russian businessman who in 2003 offered $750,000 to employees at a top Russian nuclear arms laboratory in exchange for stolen weapons-grade plutonium intended for a foreign buyer.

"We have no basis for confidence that there are people in the Russian [nuclear] system who wouldn't be tempted by $750,000," said Matthew Bunn, co-author of the report.

The study released yesterday was the latest of the group's examinations of global efforts to keep nuclear weapons and materials out of the hands of terrorists and criminal groups. The initiative recently cited official U.S. government data to show that Russian nuclear security upgrades in the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks were about the same as in the two years afterward.

The report noted several encouraging developments in global nuclear security, including U.N. action that would legally obligate nations to account for atomic stockpiles; stepped-up attention to the effort by the U.S. Energy Department; and a summit in Slovakia in February where President Bush and Putin agreed to extend cooperation on this front.

The Bush administration is proposing to spend $982 million to secure nuclear materials around the world, a 22 percent increase over the previous year's budget.

"The good news is that we are making progress," said Nunn, the threat initiative's co-chairman. "The bad news is that we're doing too little and moving much too slowly. . . . The job of securing dangerous materials in Russia itself is about one-half done."

----

Russian Officials Meet With Ex-Minister

By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER
The Associated Press
Friday, May 6, 2005; 8:14 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050601341_pf.html

GENEVA -- Russian officials met Friday with Moscow's ex-nuclear energy minister, who has been detained in Switzerland on a U.S. warrant accusing him of diverting up to $9 million from funds intended to improve Russian nuclear security.

Yevgeny Adamov, who is in jail in Bern, was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Thursday on charges including conspiracy to transfer stolen money and securities, conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering and tax evasion.

"He says he is not guilty and that the arrest was a provocation," Igor Petrov, spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, told The Associated Press by telephone. "He's in good condition and physically in good shape. We will be seeing him again in the coming days."

Adamov's lawyer in Switzerland, Stefan Wehrenberg, said his client was surprised he was arrested but is cooperating with Swiss authorities.

If Adamov rejects an easy extradition, the U.S. government will have 40 days to file a formal extradition request, starting a process that could take many months before a final decision is reached on sending him to the United States.

Adamov had come to Switzerland to see his daughter and to help her regain access to blocked accounts in Swiss banks, said Petrov.

The allegations cover periods before, during and after Adamov's time as energy minister, a position he held from March 1998 to March 2001. When not in government, Adamov worked in the private sector.

Adamov, 66, worked specifically with Chernobyl-style reactors and sales of nuclear technology to Iran. He was arrested earlier this week at the request of U.S. authorities.



-------- terrorism

 Experts: Much Nuclear Safety Work Remains

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 6, 2005
Filed at 12:53 a.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Insecurity.html?pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even as the government warns of al-Qaida's determination to obtain nuclear weapons, programs funded by the United States secured less Russian nuclear material in 2004 than the year before, according to a report Thursday by private nuclear analysts.

The study on global nuclear threat reduction programs came the day after U.S. and Pakistani officials announced the arrest of al-Qaida's No. 3 operative, Abu Farraj al-Libbi. The Pakistani government believes al-Libbi may have allies in its military's senior rungs, and U.S. experts say those officers may play a role in guarding Pakistani nuclear sites.

''The danger of nuclear theft is a global problem. It is not just a Russia problem,'' said Matthew Bunn, a co-author of the report from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

''We need to forge a common nuclear standard for the world because terrorists are going to get nuclear material wherever it is easiest,'' Bunn added. ''Nuclear security is only as strong as its weakest link.''

U.S. intelligence officials have warned for some time about al-Qaida's interest in launching a nuclear attack, although the group is not believed to possess a nuclear device. Obtaining the weapon is believed to be harder than getting radiological material, which could be used in a dirty bomb.

Nevertheless, in 2003, Osama bin Laden sought -- and received -- a religious edict from a radical Saudi cleric that permitted using a nuclear bomb against U.S. civilians.

The new study looks at the terrorist threat and provides a detailed assessment of Russia, where most of the world's vulnerable stockpiles lie.

Since 1991, the United States has paid for programs to secure nuclear material developed by the former Soviet government. The report finds that such work in Russia is half done.

It said comprehensive security upgrades were completed in 2004 on 4 percent of Russia's nuclear material -- its highly enriched uranium or plutonium -- down from 6 percent in 2003. At the end of last year, 26 percent had been secured.

Safeguards include ensuring nuclear sites have undergone full vulnerability assessments and received a full complement of intrusion detectors and other modern security equipment.

Yet the report found some room for optimism. The authors said the Energy Department has predicted a substantial increase in progress this year, perhaps a tripling of the 2004 pace.

''The good news is that we are making progress,'' said former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., a chief architect of the legislation that created the U.S. programs supporting Russian nuclear security. ''The bad news is that we are doing too little and moving too slowly.''

Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, disputed the report's pessimistic findings and its focus on amount of material secured instead of the number of facilities. He set the figure of secured nuclear material at 46 percent instead of only 26 percent. He also said more than 75 percent of Russian facilities have been secured, with negotiations progressing on access to two major facilities that hold most of the remaining material.

''We are working hard and the budget has doubled in the last four years for this type of work,'' Wilkes said. ''It's easy for critics to throw rocks and say not enough is being done, but we're actually the ones doing the work on the ground and we're getting quite a lot done.''

The U.S.-backed programs in Russia have been riddled with issues, including disputes over who is liable if someone gets hurt while securing the material. The Russians also want access to sensitive U.S. nuclear sites, comparable to what the U.S. government is asking of them.

Nunn and the reports' authors urged the White House to maintain pressure on U.S. and Russian bureaucracies to get the work done. They also want more support from U.S. allies, noting that a nuclear 9/11 would be a world-changing event, shaking the global economy.

On the Net:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

Nuclear Threat Initiative: http://www.nti.org

National Nuclear Security Administration: http://www.nnsa.doe.gov



-------- treaties

Landmark UN nuclear non-proliferation conference faltering

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) May 06, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050506215558.bo4y93np.html

A landmark UN conference on non-proliferation was still unable Friday to adopt an agenda, a week into a month-long meeting that will grapple with the new era of stateless terrorism and "rogue" states developing nuclear weapons, diplomats said.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN watchdog which verifies compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), said in an interview with AFP and another news agency: "I find it very unhealthy that they spent a week not able to agree on an agenda at a time when we are talking about our very survival," referring to the fight to master the spread of nuclear weapons.

Sergio Duarte, the Brazilian chairman of the conference, adjourned the meeting's plenary session until next Tuesday but said there would be closed-door negotiations over the weekend.

The stall in agreeing on an agenda for the NPT review meeting that began Monday reflects a basic divide between nuclear-weapons haves and have-nots among the 188 treaty states, analysts and diplomats said.

William Peden, disarmament expert for the Greenpeace ecological group, told AFP: "the NPT is truly in crisis."

He blamed the deadlock over US and French intransigeance on the disarmament issue, with US President George W. Bush's administration not willing to be bound by promises made before it came to office and France feeling it has already done more than its share in reducing its nuclear arsenal and anxious "to save its force de frappe."

The NPT's five nuclear-weapons states, led by the United States, see this review, the seventh since the treaty went into effect in 1970, as a chance to crack down on proliferation in the new era that opened with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Ken Brill, a former US ambassador to ElBaradei's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) watchdog agency, said in an article this week in the Paris-based International Herald Tribune that the focus must be on nonproliferation.

He said this was true in the wake of North Korea's pulling out of the NPT in order to make nuclear weapons, of the IAEA's continuing investigation of Iran on US charges that it is hiding nuclear weapons development and of the discovery of an international smuggling network that supplied North Korea, Iran and Libya with sensitive atomic technology and materials.

But many of the 183 other NPT countries are pushing for nuclear disarmament promises made both in the treaty and in previous review conferences in 1995 and 2000 to be honored.

The agenda conflict reflects this with the United States demanding that there be no obligation for this conference to follow up on the 13-step disarmament program outlined in 2000.

Egypt, however, was insisting on wording saying "the review will be conducted taking account of the decision and the outcomes of previous conferences," as they include a mention of alleged nuclear-weapons-state Israel as not party to the NPT.

Meanwhile, non-aligned countries such as Malaysia and Algeria want the nuclear-weapons states to give assurances that they will not use their arms to attack other nations but the United States refuses to make such promises.

Duarte told NPT members to move towards a consensus.

"We have to start substantive work. So far we have been doing consultations on procedure," Duarte said, according to a copy of his comments obtained by

ElBaradei said: "I'm not pessimistic that they will not agree eventually on an agenda. What I'm concerned about is that we are wasting so many days of the conference, valuable time that we need to be using discussing substance."

"We need to continue to keep our eyes on the ball and the ball is to combat nuclear terrorism, to combat the spread of nuclear weapons," ElBaradei said.

The United States is calling for the IAEA's inspection powers to be strengthened by making universal an additional protocol to the treaty on inspections.

There is also much talk about clarifying the NPT's Article IV provision that states have a right to peaceful nuclear technology.

French disarmament ambassador Francois Rivasseau said this right should only be extended to states which have a legitimate financial need for such technology and which are not in violation of IAEA safeguards.

Iran was this week, however, already rallying non-aligned and developing nations against that argument, saying it is a Western ploy to deprive other states of sensitive technology.

----

Egypt Bogs Down U.N. Nuclear Conference

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 06, 2005

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/may/06/050603854.html

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Delegates from scores of nations agreed Friday on an overdue agenda for the conference reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but a last-minute objection by Egypt stalled the crucial meeting once more, at a time of rising nuclear tensions in the world.

The Egyptians were seeking a greater agenda focus on assessing how well the nuclear weapons powers have done in meeting commitments made at the 2000 conference - to take specific steps toward nuclear disarmament, as mandated by the 1970 nonproliferation treaty.

Many nonweapons states complain that the Bush administration has taken steps contrary to that commitment, such as rejecting the nuclear test-ban treaty.

After first thanking delegations "for their spirit of cooperation" in reaching consensus, the conference president, Brazilian diplomat Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, had to return to the conference podium, hear the Egyptian objection and acknowledge he still did not have an agenda in the conference's fifth day.

"We have to start work, and we have to start substantive work," a frustrated Duarte said.

The details of the disputed agenda language were not immediately available.

Iranian-U.S. antagonisms during the first four days of the monthlong conference had stalled adoption of the agenda.

A prolonged delay might keep the twice-a-decade global gathering from dealing with the most contentious issues surrounding the 1970 nonproliferation treaty, under which nations without nuclear weapons pledge not to pursue them, in exchange for a commitment by five nuclear-weapons states - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.

A third "pillar" of the treaty guarantees access to peaceful nuclear technology for nonweapons states. Citing that treaty article, Iran has developed uranium-enrichment facilities, which can produce fuel for nuclear power plants and, if the process is extended, material for nuclear bombs.

Washington contends Tehran is using the program as cover for plans to build weapons, a charge the Iranians deny.

The dispute was reflected in the agenda battle here.

Conference organizers said Iran had been balking at a proposed agenda focus on "developments" relevant to treaty implementation - a word understood by all as diplomatic code for Iran's current flirtation with sensitive nuclear technology.

But other delegations, including Egypt, had complained that proposed agenda language did not focus enough on the nuclear powers' disarmament obligations. They want the current conference to assess recent U.S. actions that run contrary to earlier arms-control commitments, such as the United States' rejection of the nuclear test-ban treaty.

The agenda agreement would allow conference committees to begin their work of debating and formulating positions on ways to strengthen the treaty. The conference will not amend the treaty, but its final consensus documents are considered politically binding, giving a boost to nonproliferation initiatives.

On Iran and the nuclear-fuel issue, for example, proposals have been made for international guarantees or controls over fuel production, to keep enrichment technology out of more hands. For their part, nonweapons states here want to promote such disarmament steps as the test-ban treaty and a treaty to end production everywhere of fissile material for nuclear bombs.

Tehran has been negotiating over its nuclear program with the European Union, which wants the Iranians to shut the enrichment facilities down in exchange for economic and other incentives.

The conference also may take up the issue of North Korea, if only indirectly. The North Koreans have announced their withdrawal from the nonproliferation agreement and said they have built nuclear weapons, all without international sanction under the treaty.

The United States and others in six-party talks with Pyongyang have been trying to draw it back into the treaty and end its weapons program, but those talks have been suspended. The U.N. conference may discuss making treaty withdrawal more difficult and subject to penalties. 

----

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: U.S. should acknowledge treaty cuts both ways
Do as we say

05/06/2005 12:00:51 AM

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_2714414

The United States accuses Iran and North Korea of violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the United States isn't keeping its part of the bargain, either. Until it does, it will be harder to convince other nations to forgo nuclear weapons.

   The central bargain of the NPT is simple. The world's acknowledged nuclear weapons powers (United States, Russia, Britain, France, China) agree not to help the non-weapons nations acquire the bomb. (Israel, India and Pakistan, which have nuclear weapons, are not parties to the treaty.) The non-weapons nations agree to give up efforts to build one. But in exchange, the weapons nations are supposed to work toward eliminating their own nuclear arsenals.

   The non-weapons nations retain the right to use the atom for peaceful purposes. The International Atomic Energy Agency is supposed to conduct inspections to make sure the non-weapons states aren't using nuclear technology to build weapons.

   That's where things get dicey. Iran claims that its nuclear program   is only enriching uranium to use in reactors to generate electricity. However, if uranium is enriched further, it can be used in a bomb. The United States claims that is Iran's intent, and it demands that Iran give up uranium enrichment. However, under the treaty, Iran is not required to.

   North Korea is a slightly different case. It has extracted plutonium for weapons from spent fuel from its reactors. As it was doing that, it withdrew from the NPT, which it was allowed to do with 90 days notice. The

   United States doesn't want something similar to happen in Iran, and it wants North Korea to give up its weapons.

   Meanwhile, the United States continues to maintain about 10,000 nuclear warheads. It has agreed with Russia to reduce that number to 2,200 deployed weapons by 2012, but reserves the right to keep thousands of others in storage. That's a far cry from the nuclear disarmament envisioned by the NPT. While we believe that the United States should retain a nuclear deterrent, a few hundred warheads would   be enough.

   Because Iran sees the U.S. Army on two of its borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is not surprising that it would pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American invasion. It also is locked in a proxy war with Israel, a clandestine nuclear weapons power with hundreds of nukes.

   President Bush is right to work with other nations in diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from getting the bomb and to persuade North Korea to give its up. But the United States might get farther if it acknowledged that the   NPT cuts both ways and acted accordingly. 

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NPT Withdrawal: Time for the Security Council to Step In

By George Bunn and John B. Rhinelander
Arms Control Today   May 2005

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_05/Bunn_Rhinelander.asp

The nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) provides that a state-party intending to withdraw from the treaty must give the UN Security Council three months’ notice of its intention and provide the Security Council with its reasons for withdrawal. This provision was intended to give the Security Council an opportunity to deal with any withdrawal that might produce a threat to international peace and security.

More than two years ago, North Korea renewed its 1993 notice of withdrawal from the NPT, a notice that had been suspended a decade earlier during negotiations with the United States. That announcement left the Security Council with only a single day before North Korea would become the first country to withdraw from the NPT.

The Security Council did nothing. Indeed, it has continued to ignore North Korea’s action even as Pyongyang has repeatedly stated its intention to produce nuclear weapons, sending a dangerous message to other states considering withdrawal. The once-every-five-years NPT review conference that will meet in New York this month provides a valuable opportunity to address the North Korea case and prod the Security Council to address similar cases that may emerge.

North Korea’s Actions and Security Council Inaction
Article X of the NPT provides a “right” to withdraw from the treaty if the withdrawing party “decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this [t]reaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.” It also requires that a withdrawing state-party give three months’ notice.

In January 2003, North Korea cited this provision, announcing its intention to withdraw from the NPT after U.S. officials said that Pyongyang had admitted to efforts to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Soon thereafter, North Korea kicked out International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who had been monitoring its nuclear reactors and associated fuel-cycle facilities in Yongbyon to ensure that plutonium was not diverted to weapons purposes. Pyongyang has since claimed on several occasions that it is making nuclear weapons from the plutonium, and U.S. officials continue to accuse North Korea of enriching uranium for additional nuclear weapons.

The episode was in many ways a repeat of a similar standoff a decade earlier. In March 1993, North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the NPT after questions were raised about whether it was covertly reprocessing plutonium for nuclear weapons. The IAEA a month later referred the case to the Security Council. Later, as the United States was preparing for an attack on North Korea’s reactor and plutonium separation site, former President Jimmy Carter met with then-North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Carter reported to then-President Bill Clinton that North Korea was prepared to negotiate with the United States.[1]

Carter’s intervention led to U.S.-North Korean talks, to the pulling back by North Korea of its 1993 notice of withdrawal a day before it would have become effective, and to the eventual negotiation of the 1994 Agreed Framework between the two countries. That agreement froze Pyongyang’s plutonium-based nuclear program for nearly a decade, although U.S. officials claim it did not block parallel uranium-enrichment efforts for some of that period.[2] In both cases, however, North Korea pushed its NPT rights beyond their limits. It took advantage of information and technology gained from other countries that may well have relied on its promises to use them for peaceful uses.

The NPT has usually been interpreted as permitting its non-nuclear-weapon members to produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) so long as these materials are not later used to make nuclear weapons.[3] Plutonium and enriched uranium can be used to power nuclear reactors but also to provide the explosive material for nuclear weapons. To assure that nuclear materials and facilities are not used to make nuclear weapons, the NPT and associated bilateral NPT safeguards agreements require disclosures of nuclear activities by states-parties and authorize inspections by the IAEA. Significant violations of such agreements are supposed to be referred to the IAEA Board of Governors and ultimately to the Security Council.

Yet, confronted by North Korea’s string of broken promises, the Security Council has dodged this difficult case. In particular, it has not decided whether Pyongyang should be permitted to withdraw from the NPT and have the ability to use its known plutonium-separation facility and a possible uranium-enrichment facility to make plutonium and HEU for nuclear weapons.

In 1993, after North Korea gave its notice of withdrawal from the NPT and after the IAEA had referred Pyongyang’s noncompliance to the Security Council, China refused to endorse steps, such as the use of force, to restrain North Korea from withdrawing. The other permanent members of the Security Council (France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and a majority of the nonpermanent members appeared ready to adopt a resolution demanding that North Korea not make nuclear weapons or withdraw from the NPT. Because of China’s opposition, however, the resolution was limited to calling on, but not requiring, North Korea to permit IAEA inspections, a step North Korea refused to take.[4]

In early 2003, North Korea again gave notice of withdrawal, this time taking the position that it was only resurrecting its prior notice so that only one day of notice was required. Again, China stood as an obstacle to Security Council action, insisting instead on negotiations with Pyongyang. Thus, Beijing blocked the Security Council from even requiring that North Korea continue complying with the NPT while North Korea’s grounds for withdrawal were being considered. Instead, beginning in April 2003, China played host to a series of negotiations, which in addition to North Korea and the United States also included North Korean neighbors China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. The six-party talks have made little progress to date.

The Security Council Role
China has twice blocked an action or decision on North Korea or even a debate on how the treaty’s provisions on withdrawal should be interpreted in North Korea’s case. Still, at some point, the Security Council is likely to be forced to consider what role it should play in cases where the withdrawal from the NPT of a state threatens international peace and security.

After all, there is not only the outstanding case of North Korea but also the potential case of Iran. Tehran has been under investigation by the IAEA for more than two years largely because of its efforts to enrich uranium. In its negotiations with Europe over its uranium-enrichment program, the Iranians have sometimes suggested that, if pressed too hard, they would follow in North Korea’s footsteps and withdraw from the NPT. As reluctant as some Security Council permanent members seem to be to confront this issue, it is likely that NPT states-parties and the Security Council will sooner or later have to address the council’s power to enforce the NPT prohibition against acquisition of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear-weapon parties.

Under the UN Charter, the Security Council is empowered to take action against threats to international peace and security, and many countries would probably regard the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea or Iran as such a threat.[5] Likewise, it appears that significant violations of the NPT and its safeguards agreements should be reported to the Security Council, as some may be seen as threats to international peace and security. The IAEA’s statute directs it to report significant incidents of noncompliance to the Security Council, the “organ bearing the main responsibility for maintenance of international peace and security.”[6]

The IAEA board did report North Korea’s noncompliance to the Security Council, although the council failed to command North Korea to take any specific action. In the case of Iran, the United States has repeatedly asked the IAEA board to make a report of Iran’s noncompliance but to no avail. Instead, the board has chosen to await the outcome of wider inspections by the IAEA, most of which Iran has accepted, as well as negotiations between three European nations and Iran aimed at addressing concerns about Tehran’s uranium-enrichment program.

Further, while Article X provides a “right” to withdraw from the treaty, this right is not free from conditions. In addition to providing three months’ notice of its intention to withdraw, the state-party must also provide the Security Council and the other countries with a statement of the “extraordinary events” it regards as having “jeopardized” its “supreme interests.”[7]

A purpose of this requirement is to provide the Security Council with information it needs to review the withdrawal. Presumably the withdrawing party will make its best arguments for withdrawal in this notice. The NPT withdrawal clause thus gives the consent of the parties, including the withdrawing party, to council action to deal with withdrawal. If the withdrawal could produce a “threat to the peace,” the Security Council can take action to deal with it.[8] The “right” to withdraw is thus qualified, and the Security Council may limit its exercise. Moreover, the expiration of the three-month NPT notice-of-withdrawal period does not end the power of the Security Council to take action pursuant to the UN Charter, its basic source of authority, to deal with threats to the peace such as North Korea’s actions.

In its announcement of withdrawal in early 1993, North Korea gave reasons for withdrawal that appeared inadequate to the United States and most other members of the Security Council. North Korea’s notice said that it faced a “grave situation” created by two events: a U.S.-South Korean military exercise in South Korea and an IAEA board decision calling for special inspections by IAEA inspectors at locations in North Korea that had not been inspected previously. The IAEA board had questioned whether North Korea had violated its safeguards agreement at sites where inspections had not been permitted by North Korea, but North Korea’s 1993 notice argued that this board request was made “on the basis of the intelligence information fabricated by the United States.”[9]

North Korea’s one-day notice of withdrawal in 2003 was perhaps intended to avoid IAEA demands to inspect its efforts to produce nuclear weapons. In 2003, Pyongyang apparently did not feel compelled to provide any reasons for its withdrawal because it considered its action only an end to its 1993 withdrawal suspension.

Limits on the Right to Withdraw: Negotiating History
Much of the NPT withdrawal clause was modeled after a similar clause in the Limited Test Ban Treaty. That treaty resulted from 1963 U.S.-British-Soviet negotiations and prohibits nuclear-weapon testing everywhere but underground. The test ban’s withdrawal provision, however, was clearly intended to give the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as others who were expected to join the treaty later, unconditional rights to withdraw from the treaty by simply giving notice to the other parties of the “extraordinary events” the withdrawing party regarded as having “jeopardized their supreme interests.”[10] In that treaty, no notice to the Security Council of intended withdrawal and no reasons for withdrawal were required.

The NPT is different. In crafting the NPT withdrawal clause in 1967, U.S. and Soviet negotiators followed much of the test ban treaty’s language, but they added new language showing a clear change of meaning. In particular, the new language added the Security Council as a required recipient of the notice of and the reasons for withdrawal. It also added the requirement of “a statement of the extraordinary events [the withdrawing party] regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.”[11]

At the NPT negotiations in the 1960s, these two NPT additions to the test ban treaty language were questioned by Brazil, a participant in the formal negotiating conference. Brazil complained that the NPT additions would limit the right to withdrawal beyond the simple requirement of notice that appeared in the Limited Test Ban Treaty. In his response, the Soviet representative who had agreed with the U.S. delegation on the withdrawal language, agreed with Brazil that there would be new limitations in the NPT. He justified these by explaining that “observance of the nonproliferation treaty and its effectiveness are bound to be related to the powers of the Security Council, which according to [UN] Charter, Article 24, has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”[12] This explanation was accepted by the United States and, eventually, by most of the other members of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The NPT language was not changed from the U.S.-Soviet draft.

This language was clearly intended to require notice of withdrawal to the Security Council for a purpose: to enable the Security Council to consider a party’s withdrawal immediately and to take action, including the use of force if necessary, to maintain international peace and security under the powers of Chapter VII of the UN Charter.[13] The negotiating history shows that the right to withdrawal is not absolute; it can be conditioned by the Security Council, and its exercise can be prohibited by the Security Council. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested that notice to the council of an NPT withdrawal “should prompt an automatic review” by the council.[14]

What are the Security Council’s legal powers to act in such a case? If the council finds that the withdrawal might foreshadow a threat to the peace, it has authority to take action, including the use of force, to require a delay in withdrawal, to prevent withdrawal, or to direct other action by the withdrawing party as a condition of withdrawal. A withdrawal from the NPT that might produce a threat to the peace would clearly give the Security Council jurisdiction to prohibit or condition the withdrawal. It would even permit the council to order the use of force to prevent a state from carrying out actions that would have been in violation of the NPT if the state had not withdrawn from the treaty.[15]

Conditioning Withdrawal
Assuming the Security Council permits withdrawal, what conditions could it impose? A high-level panel of former ministers and former presidents appointed by the UN secretary-general from 19 countries, including Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the first President Bush, concluded recently that a notice to the Security Council of withdrawal from the NPT “should prompt immediate verification of [the withdrawing NPT party’s] compliance with the [t]reaty, if necessary, mandated by the Security Council.”[16] This would mean that it, for example, could command a withdrawing party such as North Korea to permit effective inspections of its nuclear activities to see that there had been no violations of the NPT constituting a threat to international peace before the withdrawal was to take effect.

Nuclear experts from 26 countries, including the United States, convened later by ElBaradei also agreed that the Security Council should consider taking action in the event of a notice of withdrawal. They said that the council, “as the international organ bearing the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, should be prepared to respond to such action [for example, withdrawing from the NPT to operate an enrichment or reprocessing facility without international inspection], insofar as withdrawal from the NPT could be seen as a threat to international peace and security.”[17]

What else might be considered by the Security Council? At a meeting of NPT states-parties in 2004 to prepare for the 2005 NPT Review Conference, France argued that withdrawing NPT states-parties should remain responsible for violations of the NPT they had committed while members even if they withdrew. It said that the Security Council could prohibit a withdrawing NPT party from using nuclear materials, facilities, or technologies acquired from others while it was an NPT party. It added that these should be returned to the states that provided them.[18]

It is not clear what North Korea might be required to give up under this proposal. North Korea received nuclear assistance from the Soviet Union starting in the 1950s before it joined the NPT. It was the Soviet Union that helped train North Korean scientists in nuclear technology, that provided an experimental reactor for training and research, and that pressed North Korea to join the NPT. The burned fuel rods from which North Korea has made plutonium came from an operating reactor in Yongbyon copied after one in the United Kingdom, the design for which had been made public. The natural uranium used to fuel this reactor probably came largely from North Korea’s own mines.[19]

At the same 2004 NPT preparatory committee for the 2005 NPT Review Conference, Germany suggested that all “nuclear equipment, technology, and know-how” obtained because of membership in the NPT should remain forever restricted to peaceful uses under IAEA safeguards even if an NPT party withdrew from the treaty. If implemented by the Security Council, this proposal would have an effect on what North Korea could use for making weapons. Germany also called on the 2005 NPT Review Conference to produce an agreement “that the right of withdrawal cannot be exercised in cases where the state in question is…in noncompliance with the NPT,” as North Korea was when it withdrew.[20]

These proposals by France and Germany would apply to the withdrawing party, but they might also provide a means for preventing the countries that supplied the withdrawing party with nuclear materials and technology from unintentionally violating the NPT’s strictures. Otherwise, those countries might also be considered to have violated the treaty if the recipient later leaves the treaty and develops nuclear weapons with the materials and technology. After all, nuclear exports that would “assist” a non-nuclear-weapon country to make nuclear weapons are prohibited by the NPT unless the nuclear facilities that result are to be under IAEA safeguards.[21] A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests that the Security Council adopt a resolution stating that, as a matter of principle, an NPT party that withdraws from the treaty remains responsible for violations committed while it was a party to the treaty.[22]

Proposals for the NPT Review Conference
A group of nuclear experts organized by Stanford and Princeton Universities concluded that countries such as North Korea that withdrew from the NPT should not be permitted to “use fissile materials or production facilities acquired while they were parties to the treaty to make nuclear weapons.” In their view, to make clear that this would not be permitted:

    [T]he Security Council should state that the withdrawal of a country from the NPT in this fashion would constitute “a threat to the peace” under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and it should be prepared to authorize an escalating series of measures against any country that does so.…In this manner, the Council could make clear that all nuclear materials, facilities, and related equipment in a country’s possession at the time it leaves the NPT must remain under IAEA safeguards.[23]

In 1992 the national leaders of the members of the Security Council issued a statement that the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction constituted a “threat to international peace and security” within the meaning of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which authorizes the council to take action against such threats.[24] Given this precedent and the major emerging threats to the nuclear nonproliferation regime that the world faces today, the Security Council should take similar action to demonstrate that it will examine any NPT withdrawal, including that of North Korea, to see whether the withdrawal could produce a future threat to international peace. The NPT review conference could ask the Security Council to announce that it will examine any future NPT withdrawal cases to determine whether the withdrawal is for the purpose of making nuclear weapons. If it is judged to be so, the council could determine whether this would constitute a threat to international peace and security and what would need to be done to prevent the withdrawing state from making nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the 2005 NPT Review Conference should recommend to the Security Council that it accept Germany’s proposal that NPT withdrawal not be permitted when the NPT party withdrawing is in noncompliance with the NPT. It should also recommend adoption by the Security Council or its members of the Stanford-Princeton proposal that any party withdrawing from the NPT be prohibited from using fissile materials or their production facilities that it acquired while it was a member of the NPT.

In addition, the NPT review conference should review North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT and the future threats to international peace and security that such a withdrawal presents. The conference should be able to agree that withdrawals from the NPT can threaten at least the neighbors and rivals of the withdrawing party and could well constitute long-term threats to international peace and security in other parts of the world.

North Korea’s withdrawal is the first withdrawal from the NPT. If there are no serious consequences for North Korea, its withdrawal could open the door for withdrawals by other states. If there are no sanctions on withdrawal even when withdrawal threatens international peace and security, what is to deter other states from following in North Korea’s footsteps? The success of the NPT and, indirectly, efforts by the Europeans and the IAEA to head off a similar crisis with Iran depends upon it.

The conference should consider these various options and recommend to the Security Council that it adopt a resolution incorporating conclusions such as those we have suggested. A useful precedent is Resolution 1540, adopted last year to deal with the dangers of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and other nonstate actors, something with which the NPT and the Biological Weapons Convention and its chemical weapons counterpart did not address adequately. A new resolution or statement to announce Security Council policies and procedures for dealing with NPT withdrawals could be useful in inhibiting withdrawals from the NPT.

ENDNOTES

1. Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense (Brookings Institution, 1999), pp. 128-133.

2. Ibid.

3. See “Multilateral Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Expert Group Report to the Director General of the IAEA,” IAEA Information Circular no. 640, February 22, 2005, para. 28.

4. See George Bunn, “A Brief History of the DPRK’s Nuclear Weapons-Related Efforts,” in Verifying the Agreed Framework, eds. Michael May et al. (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research and Center for International Security and Cooperation, 2001), pp. 16-17.

5. UN Charter Articles 39, 41, and 42. In 1992 the members of the Security Council agreed that nuclear proliferation constituted a threat to international peace.

6. See Statute of the IAEA, as amended, arts. III.B.4 and XII.C.

7. NPT, art. X.1.

8. See UN Charter arts. 39, 41, and 42.

9. Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), pp. 250-253.

10. See George Bunn, Arms Control by Committee (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 38.

11. The withdrawal clause for the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972 between the Soviet Union and the United States followed the NPT pattern with a fundamental exception. It made no reference to the Security Council and instead established a bilateral consultative commission that would conduct its business in secret. The United States, in exercising this six-month withdrawal right, acted lawfully under the terms of the ABM Treaty and international law. See John B. Rhinelander, “The ABM Treaty: Past, Present and Future (Part II),” Journal of Conflict Resolution and Security Law 6, no. 2, December 2001, pp. 234-236.

12. Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Conference, Provisional Verbatim 377, March 12, 1968, paras. 24-31; Mohammed Shaker, The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (New York: Oceana Publications 1980), p. 895.

13. See UN Charter chap. VII.

14. Mohamed ElBaradei, “Saving Ourselves From Self Destruction,” The New York Times, February 12, 2004.

15. See UN Charter chap. VII, arts. 39, 41, and 42.

16. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,” A/59/565, December 2, 2004, p. 43, para. 134.

17. See “Multilateral Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle,” para. 329.

18. See Claire Applegarth and Rhianna Tyson, “Major Proposals to Strengthen the Nuclear NPT: A Resource Guide,” April 2005, p. 31.

19. See Bunn, “A Brief History of DPRK’s Nuclear Weapons-Related Efforts,” pp. 15-16.

20. Preparatory Committee for the 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, “Strengthening the NPT Against Withdrawal and Non-Compliance: Suggestions for the Establishment of Procedures and Mechanisms,” NPT/CONF.2005/PC.III/WP.15, April 29, 2004, available at http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/legal/npt/prepcom04/papers/GermanyWP15.pdf.

21. See NPT arts. I, II, III, and IV.

22. George Perkovich et al., Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2005).

23. Center for International Security and Cooperation and Program on Science and Global Security, “Preventing Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Terrorism,” April 2005, chap. 2, pp. 5-6.

24. Richard Dean Burns, ed., Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament (New York: Scribners 1993), p. 460.

George Bunn, the first general counsel for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, helped negotiate the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and later became U.S. ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament Conference. John B. Rhinelander is senior counsel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. He served as deputy legal adviser at the Department of State and legal adviser to the ABM Treaty/SALT I delegation.



-------- u.n.

U.N.'s ElBaradei warns of nuclear apocalypse

06 May 2005 22:14:22 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Louis Charbonneau

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N06383739.htm

UNITED NATIONS, May 6 (Reuters) - If the world does not take steps to limit access to technology for making nuclear bomb fuel, we could be headed for a nuclear apocalypse, the head of the United Nations atomic watchdog said on Friday.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, has proposed a 5-year moratorium on the enrichment of uranium and production of plutonium, but many countries have balked at the idea.

Speaking to reporters at a U.N.-sponsored conference on nuclear disarmament, ElBaradei said if more and more countries get hold of the technology to make bomb-grade uranium and plutonium, there will be many "virtual nuclear weapon states" that could quickly put together a bomb at any time.

"That means in the next 10 to 20 years we'll have many countries who are not officially nuclear weapons states (becoming) virtual nuclear weapon states. That is a good recipe for our self-destruction," he said.

Ironically, the United States and Iran are partners in opposing ElBaradei's proposed moratorium on enrichment, a process of purifying uranium to fuel power plants or weapons.

Washington accuses Tehran of developing a uranium enrichment program to produce fuel for atomic weapons. Iran says it only wants to produce low-grade enriched fuel for nuclear power plants.

Other countries that oppose the proposal include France, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Japan and the Netherlands -- all of which feel it would limit their future nuclear fuel options.

Despite the initial opposition to his plan, ElBaradei said countries had begun to recognize the need.

"I can see a gradual, certain shift in looking more and more positively towards a moratorium," he said. "It might not be five years, it might be a shorter period of time. It might not be called a moratorium but some sort of self-imposed restraint."

GLOBAL BLACK MARKET

Another idea ElBaradei has proposed is making all uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities multinational consortia that are not controlled by a single country. Many countries have expressed support for this idea.

He said the urgency of the matter was made clear after the discovery of a global black market linked to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, that supplied Iran, Libya and possibly North Korea with technology used to make fuel for nuclear power plants or atomic weapons.

ElBaradei expressed disappointment at the failure of a meeting of the 188 signatories of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to agree on an agenda for discussing ways of repairing loopholes in the 35-year-old pact.

"We are talking about our very survival. To continue to quibble about an agenda is not the way I would like this conference to proceed. I would like them to focus on the big picture," ElBaradei said.

The conference, which runs until May 27, has been deadlocked all week on a plan for the meeting, with the Americans and French opposing any official call for the weapon states to disarm. U.S. officials deny blocking the agenda.

Egypt and other non-aligned countries are fighting this and also trying to guarantee that developing countries will not be denied access to nuclear technology due to what they see as unfounded proliferation fears, U.N. diplomats said. 

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Nuclear Chief Foresees Curbs on Fuel

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, Associated Press Writer Fri May 6, 4:03 PM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050506/ap_on_re_us/un_elbaradei_1

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. nuclear chief said Friday he expects to win global support to begin planning ways to bring uranium and plutonium technology under stricter, possibly international control, keeping nuclear bomb-making gear out of more hands.

Such a sweeping change, a reaction to the alarm over Iran's nuclear program, would be "fraught with political and economic implications," Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview. But "we cannot just sit still, stand still — because we are facing a threat."

"Everybody understands that if we continue in that fashion, in the next 10, 20 years we'll have 20, 30 countries that I would call virtual nuclear-weapons states, meaning countries that could move within months into converting their civilian capacity or capability into a weapons program," said ElBaradei, director-general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

ElBaradei met with The Associated Press on the fifth day of a monthlong conference to review the workings of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. He has been consulting with treaty members here about possible steps to restrict access to sensitive nuclear-fuel technology.

Iran's development of uranium-enrichment technology, centrifuges that can produce fuel for either nuclear power plants or nuclear bombs, is a major issue at the treaty review. Tehran says the program is meant only for peaceful purposes of civilian energy; Washington contends it is a cover for eventual bomb-building.

Under the 1970 nonproliferation treaty, states like Iran without nuclear weapons renounce them forever in exchange for a commitment by nuclear-weapons states to move toward disarmament. Access to peaceful technology is guaranteed under the treaty, but ElBaradei said the spread of such capabilities is a "serious problem."

The tighter controls he envisions "would be a real sea change in the way we have been managing nuclear energy," the IAEA chief said.

He has asked the current treaty conference to consider several possible approaches suggested by an IAEA expert group in February. They range from simply tightening controls on current commercial sales of such dual-use equipment, to turning all enrichment and plutonium reprocessing operations — another potential bomb-making process — over to multilateral control, by region or continent.

ElBaradei himself has proposed a five-year moratorium on new nuclear fuel facilities anywhere while the world's nations negotiate over new controls. Addressing the U.N. conference Monday, he offered to investigate ways to guarantee international supplies of fuel for those who need them.

In subsequent consultations with treaty nations, he has found a "mixed reaction" to the moratorium idea, ElBaradei said, since Iran is not the only country with plans for new uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing facilities.

But he said he hopes the IAEA will be formally mandated by the treaty conference or his agency's member nations to explore legal, institutional, financial and other aspects of possible new controls.

"I'm pretty confident that I will be asked by either the nonproliferation treaty parties or our IAEA member states to continue that work," he said.

The Americans have demanded that Iran dismantle its enrichment equipment. 

President Bush has proposed simply banning sales of enrichment and reprocessing technology to nations other than the dozen or so who already have it and ensuring that any who want fuel can buy it "at reasonable cost."

Asked about this idea, ElBaradei said it "has merit" but also has two problems.

He said one is that many countries already can develop the sensitive technology on their own, and the other is that it raises questions of "different standards" — that is, double standards for those allowed to have fuel technology and those denied it.

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NPT Withdrawal: Time for the Security Council to Step In

By George Bunn and John B. Rhinelander
Arms Control Today   May 2005

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_05/Bunn_Rhinelander.asp

The nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) provides that a state-party intending to withdraw from the treaty must give the UN Security Council three months’ notice of its intention and provide the Security Council with its reasons for withdrawal. This provision was intended to give the Security Council an opportunity to deal with any withdrawal that might produce a threat to international peace and security.

More than two years ago, North Korea renewed its 1993 notice of withdrawal from the NPT, a notice that had been suspended a decade earlier during negotiations with the United States. That announcement left the Security Council with only a single day before North Korea would become the first country to withdraw from the NPT.

The Security Council did nothing. Indeed, it has continued to ignore North Korea’s action even as Pyongyang has repeatedly stated its intention to produce nuclear weapons, sending a dangerous message to other states considering withdrawal. The once-every-five-years NPT review conference that will meet in New York this month provides a valuable opportunity to address the North Korea case and prod the Security Council to address similar cases that may emerge.

North Korea’s Actions and Security Council Inaction
Article X of the NPT provides a “right” to withdraw from the treaty if the withdrawing party “decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this [t]reaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.” It also requires that a withdrawing state-party give three months’ notice.

In January 2003, North Korea cited this provision, announcing its intention to withdraw from the NPT after U.S. officials said that Pyongyang had admitted to efforts to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Soon thereafter, North Korea kicked out International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who had been monitoring its nuclear reactors and associated fuel-cycle facilities in Yongbyon to ensure that plutonium was not diverted to weapons purposes. Pyongyang has since claimed on several occasions that it is making nuclear weapons from the plutonium, and U.S. officials continue to accuse North Korea of enriching uranium for additional nuclear weapons.

The episode was in many ways a repeat of a similar standoff a decade earlier. In March 1993, North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the NPT after questions were raised about whether it was covertly reprocessing plutonium for nuclear weapons. The IAEA a month later referred the case to the Security Council. Later, as the United States was preparing for an attack on North Korea’s reactor and plutonium separation site, former President Jimmy Carter met with then-North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Carter reported to then-President Bill Clinton that North Korea was prepared to negotiate with the United States.[1]

Carter’s intervention led to U.S.-North Korean talks, to the pulling back by North Korea of its 1993 notice of withdrawal a day before it would have become effective, and to the eventual negotiation of the 1994 Agreed Framework between the two countries. That agreement froze Pyongyang’s plutonium-based nuclear program for nearly a decade, although U.S. officials claim it did not block parallel uranium-enrichment efforts for some of that period.[2] In both cases, however, North Korea pushed its NPT rights beyond their limits. It took advantage of information and technology gained from other countries that may well have relied on its promises to use them for peaceful uses.

The NPT has usually been interpreted as permitting its non-nuclear-weapon members to produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) so long as these materials are not later used to make nuclear weapons.[3] Plutonium and enriched uranium can be used to power nuclear reactors but also to provide the explosive material for nuclear weapons. To assure that nuclear materials and facilities are not used to make nuclear weapons, the NPT and associated bilateral NPT safeguards agreements require disclosures of nuclear activities by states-parties and authorize inspections by the IAEA. Significant violations of such agreements are supposed to be referred to the IAEA Board of Governors and ultimately to the Security Council.

Yet, confronted by North Korea’s string of broken promises, the Security Council has dodged this difficult case. In particular, it has not decided whether Pyongyang should be permitted to withdraw from the NPT and have the ability to use its known plutonium-separation facility and a possible uranium-enrichment facility to make plutonium and HEU for nuclear weapons.

In 1993, after North Korea gave its notice of withdrawal from the NPT and after the IAEA had referred Pyongyang’s noncompliance to the Security Council, China refused to endorse steps, such as the use of force, to restrain North Korea from withdrawing. The other permanent members of the Security Council (France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and a majority of the nonpermanent members appeared ready to adopt a resolution demanding that North Korea not make nuclear weapons or withdraw from the NPT. Because of China’s opposition, however, the resolution was limited to calling on, but not requiring, North Korea to permit IAEA inspections, a step North Korea refused to take.[4]

In early 2003, North Korea again gave notice of withdrawal, this time taking the position that it was only resurrecting its prior notice so that only one day of notice was required. Again, China stood as an obstacle to Security Council action, insisting instead on negotiations with Pyongyang. Thus, Beijing blocked the Security Council from even requiring that North Korea continue complying with the NPT while North Korea’s grounds for withdrawal were being considered. Instead, beginning in April 2003, China played host to a series of negotiations, which in addition to North Korea and the United States also included North Korean neighbors China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. The six-party talks have made little progress to date.

The Security Council Role
China has twice blocked an action or decision on North Korea or even a debate on how the treaty’s provisions on withdrawal should be interpreted in North Korea’s case. Still, at some point, the Security Council is likely to be forced to consider what role it should play in cases where the withdrawal from the NPT of a state threatens international peace and security.

After all, there is not only the outstanding case of North Korea but also the potential case of Iran. Tehran has been under investigation by the IAEA for more than two years largely because of its efforts to enrich uranium. In its negotiations with Europe over its uranium-enrichment program, the Iranians have sometimes suggested that, if pressed too hard, they would follow in North Korea’s footsteps and withdraw from the NPT. As reluctant as some Security Council permanent members seem to be to confront this issue, it is likely that NPT states-parties and the Security Council will sooner or later have to address the council’s power to enforce the NPT prohibition against acquisition of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear-weapon parties.

Under the UN Charter, the Security Council is empowered to take action against threats to international peace and security, and many countries would probably regard the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea or Iran as such a threat.[5] Likewise, it appears that significant violations of the NPT and its safeguards agreements should be reported to the Security Council, as some may be seen as threats to international peace and security. The IAEA’s statute directs it to report significant incidents of noncompliance to the Security Council, the “organ bearing the main responsibility for maintenance of international peace and security.”[6]

The IAEA board did report North Korea’s noncompliance to the Security Council, although the council failed to command North Korea to take any specific action. In the case of Iran, the United States has repeatedly asked the IAEA board to make a report of Iran’s noncompliance but to no avail. Instead, the board has chosen to await the outcome of wider inspections by the IAEA, most of which Iran has accepted, as well as negotiations between three European nations and Iran aimed at addressing concerns about Tehran’s uranium-enrichment program.

Further, while Article X provides a “right” to withdraw from the treaty, this right is not free from conditions. In addition to providing three months’ notice of its intention to withdraw, the state-party must also provide the Security Council and the other countries with a statement of the “extraordinary events” it regards as having “jeopardized” its “supreme interests.”[7]

A purpose of this requirement is to provide the Security Council with information it needs to review the withdrawal. Presumably the withdrawing party will make its best arguments for withdrawal in this notice. The NPT withdrawal clause thus gives the consent of the parties, including the withdrawing party, to council action to deal with withdrawal. If the withdrawal could produce a “threat to the peace,” the Security Council can take action to deal with it.[8] The “right” to withdraw is thus qualified, and the Security Council may limit its exercise. Moreover, the expiration of the three-month NPT notice-of-withdrawal period does not end the power of the Security Council to take action pursuant to the UN Charter, its basic source of authority, to deal with threats to the peace such as North Korea’s actions.

In its announcement of withdrawal in early 1993, North Korea gave reasons for withdrawal that appeared inadequate to the United States and most other members of the Security Council. North Korea’s notice said that it faced a “grave situation” created by two events: a U.S.-South Korean military exercise in South Korea and an IAEA board decision calling for special inspections by IAEA inspectors at locations in North Korea that had not been inspected previously. The IAEA board had questioned whether North Korea had violated its safeguards agreement at sites where inspections had not been permitted by North Korea, but North Korea’s 1993 notice argued that this board request was made “on the basis of the intelligence information fabricated by the United States.”[9]

North Korea’s one-day notice of withdrawal in 2003 was perhaps intended to avoid IAEA demands to inspect its efforts to produce nuclear weapons. In 2003, Pyongyang apparently did not feel compelled to provide any reasons for its withdrawal because it considered its action only an end to its 1993 withdrawal suspension.

Limits on the Right to Withdraw: Negotiating History
Much of the NPT withdrawal clause was modeled after a similar clause in the Limited Test Ban Treaty. That treaty resulted from 1963 U.S.-British-Soviet negotiations and prohibits nuclear-weapon testing everywhere but underground. The test ban’s withdrawal provision, however, was clearly intended to give the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as others who were expected to join the treaty later, unconditional rights to withdraw from the treaty by simply giving notice to the other parties of the “extraordinary events” the withdrawing party regarded as having “jeopardized their supreme interests.”[10] In that treaty, no notice to the Security Council of intended withdrawal and no reasons for withdrawal were required.

The NPT is different. In crafting the NPT withdrawal clause in 1967, U.S. and Soviet negotiators followed much of the test ban treaty’s language, but they added new language showing a clear change of meaning. In particular, the new language added the Security Council as a required recipient of the notice of and the reasons for withdrawal. It also added the requirement of “a statement of the extraordinary events [the withdrawing party] regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.”[11]

At the NPT negotiations in the 1960s, these two NPT additions to the test ban treaty language were questioned by Brazil, a participant in the formal negotiating conference. Brazil complained that the NPT additions would limit the right to withdrawal beyond the simple requirement of notice that appeared in the Limited Test Ban Treaty. In his response, the Soviet representative who had agreed with the U.S. delegation on the withdrawal language, agreed with Brazil that there would be new limitations in the NPT. He justified these by explaining that “observance of the nonproliferation treaty and its effectiveness are bound to be related to the powers of the Security Council, which according to [UN] Charter, Article 24, has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”[12] This explanation was accepted by the United States and, eventually, by most of the other members of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The NPT language was not changed from the U.S.-Soviet draft.

This language was clearly intended to require notice of withdrawal to the Security Council for a purpose: to enable the Security Council to consider a party’s withdrawal immediately and to take action, including the use of force if necessary, to maintain international peace and security under the powers of Chapter VII of the UN Charter.[13] The negotiating history shows that the right to withdrawal is not absolute; it can be conditioned by the Security Council, and its exercise can be prohibited by the Security Council. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested that notice to the council of an NPT withdrawal “should prompt an automatic review” by the council.[14]

What are the Security Council’s legal powers to act in such a case? If the council finds that the withdrawal might foreshadow a threat to the peace, it has authority to take action, including the use of force, to require a delay in withdrawal, to prevent withdrawal, or to direct other action by the withdrawing party as a condition of withdrawal. A withdrawal from the NPT that might produce a threat to the peace would clearly give the Security Council jurisdiction to prohibit or condition the withdrawal. It would even permit the council to order the use of force to prevent a state from carrying out actions that would have been in violation of the NPT if the state had not withdrawn from the treaty.[15]

Conditioning Withdrawal
Assuming the Security Council permits withdrawal, what conditions could it impose? A high-level panel of former ministers and former presidents appointed by the UN secretary-general from 19 countries, including Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the first President Bush, concluded recently that a notice to the Security Council of withdrawal from the NPT “should prompt immediate verification of [the withdrawing NPT party’s] compliance with the [t]reaty, if necessary, mandated by the Security Council.”[16] This would mean that it, for example, could command a withdrawing party such as North Korea to permit effective inspections of its nuclear activities to see that there had been no violations of the NPT constituting a threat to international peace before the withdrawal was to take effect.

Nuclear experts from 26 countries, including the United States, convened later by ElBaradei also agreed that the Security Council should consider taking action in the event of a notice of withdrawal. They said that the council, “as the international organ bearing the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, should be prepared to respond to such action [for example, withdrawing from the NPT to operate an enrichment or reprocessing facility without international inspection], insofar as withdrawal from the NPT could be seen as a threat to international peace and security.”[17]

What else might be considered by the Security Council? At a meeting of NPT states-parties in 2004 to prepare for the 2005 NPT Review Conference, France argued that withdrawing NPT states-parties should remain responsible for violations of the NPT they had committed while members even if they withdrew. It said that the Security Council could prohibit a withdrawing NPT party from using nuclear materials, facilities, or technologies acquired from others while it was an NPT party. It added that these should be returned to the states that provided them.[18]

It is not clear what North Korea might be required to give up under this proposal. North Korea received nuclear assistance from the Soviet Union starting in the 1950s before it joined the NPT. It was the Soviet Union that helped train North Korean scientists in nuclear technology, that provided an experimental reactor for training and research, and that pressed North Korea to join the NPT. The burned fuel rods from which North Korea has made plutonium came from an operating reactor in Yongbyon copied after one in the United Kingdom, the design for which had been made public. The natural uranium used to fuel this reactor probably came largely from North Korea’s own mines.[19]

At the same 2004 NPT preparatory committee for the 2005 NPT Review Conference, Germany suggested that all “nuclear equipment, technology, and know-how” obtained because of membership in the NPT should remain forever restricted to peaceful uses under IAEA safeguards even if an NPT party withdrew from the treaty. If implemented by the Security Council, this proposal would have an effect on what North Korea could use for making weapons. Germany also called on the 2005 NPT Review Conference to produce an agreement “that the right of withdrawal cannot be exercised in cases where the state in question is…in noncompliance with the NPT,” as North Korea was when it withdrew.[20]

These proposals by France and Germany would apply to the withdrawing party, but they might also provide a means for preventing the countries that supplied the withdrawing party with nuclear materials and technology from unintentionally violating the NPT’s strictures. Otherwise, those countries might also be considered to have violated the treaty if the recipient later leaves the treaty and develops nuclear weapons with the materials and technology. After all, nuclear exports that would “assist” a non-nuclear-weapon country to make nuclear weapons are prohibited by the NPT unless the nuclear facilities that result are to be under IAEA safeguards.[21] A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests that the Security Council adopt a resolution stating that, as a matter of principle, an NPT party that withdraws from the treaty remains responsible for violations committed while it was a party to the treaty.[22]

Proposals for the NPT Review Conference
A group of nuclear experts organized by Stanford and Princeton Universities concluded that countries such as North Korea that withdrew from the NPT should not be permitted to “use fissile materials or production facilities acquired while they were parties to the treaty to make nuclear weapons.” In their view, to make clear that this would not be permitted:

    [T]he Security Council should state that the withdrawal of a country from the NPT in this fashion would constitute “a threat to the peace” under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and it should be prepared to authorize an escalating series of measures against any country that does so.…In this manner, the Council could make clear that all nuclear materials, facilities, and related equipment in a country’s possession at the time it leaves the NPT must remain under IAEA safeguards.[23]

In 1992 the national leaders of the members of the Security Council issued a statement that the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction constituted a “threat to international peace and security” within the meaning of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which authorizes the council to take action against such threats.[24] Given this precedent and the major emerging threats to the nuclear nonproliferation regime that the world faces today, the Security Council should take similar action to demonstrate that it will examine any NPT withdrawal, including that of North Korea, to see whether the withdrawal could produce a future threat to international peace. The NPT review conference could ask the Security Council to announce that it will examine any future NPT withdrawal cases to determine whether the withdrawal is for the purpose of making nuclear weapons. If it is judged to be so, the council could determine whether this would constitute a threat to international peace and security and what would need to be done to prevent the withdrawing state from making nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the 2005 NPT Review Conference should recommend to the Security Council that it accept Germany’s proposal that NPT withdrawal not be permitted when the NPT party withdrawing is in noncompliance with the NPT. It should also recommend adoption by the Security Council or its members of the Stanford-Princeton proposal that any party withdrawing from the NPT be prohibited from using fissile materials or their production facilities that it acquired while it was a member of the NPT.

In addition, the NPT review conference should review North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT and the future threats to international peace and security that such a withdrawal presents. The conference should be able to agree that withdrawals from the NPT can threaten at least the neighbors and rivals of the withdrawing party and could well constitute long-term threats to international peace and security in other parts of the world.

North Korea’s withdrawal is the first withdrawal from the NPT. If there are no serious consequences for North Korea, its withdrawal could open the door for withdrawals by other states. If there are no sanctions on withdrawal even when withdrawal threatens international peace and security, what is to deter other states from following in North Korea’s footsteps? The success of the NPT and, indirectly, efforts by the Europeans and the IAEA to head off a similar crisis with Iran depends upon it.

The conference should consider these various options and recommend to the Security Council that it adopt a resolution incorporating conclusions such as those we have suggested. A useful precedent is Resolution 1540, adopted last year to deal with the dangers of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and other nonstate actors, something with which the NPT and the Biological Weapons Convention and its chemical weapons counterpart did not address adequately. A new resolution or statement to announce Security Council policies and procedures for dealing with NPT withdrawals could be useful in inhibiting withdrawals from the NPT.

ENDNOTES

1. Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense (Brookings Institution, 1999), pp. 128-133.

2. Ibid.

3. See “Multilateral Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Expert Group Report to the Director General of the IAEA,” IAEA Information Circular no. 640, February 22, 2005, para. 28.

4. See George Bunn, “A Brief History of the DPRK’s Nuclear Weapons-Related Efforts,” in Verifying the Agreed Framework, eds. Michael May et al. (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research and Center for International Security and Cooperation, 2001), pp. 16-17.

5. UN Charter Articles 39, 41, and 42. In 1992 the members of the Security Council agreed that nuclear proliferation constituted a threat to international peace.

6. See Statute of the IAEA, as amended, arts. III.B.4 and XII.C.

7. NPT, art. X.1.

8. See UN Charter arts. 39, 41, and 42.

9. Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), pp. 250-253.

10. See George Bunn, Arms Control by Committee (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 38.

11. The withdrawal clause for the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972 between the Soviet Union and the United States followed the NPT pattern with a fundamental exception. It made no reference to the Security Council and instead established a bilateral consultative commission that would conduct its business in secret. The United States, in exercising this six-month withdrawal right, acted lawfully under the terms of the ABM Treaty and international law. See John B. Rhinelander, “The ABM Treaty: Past, Present and Future (Part II),” Journal of Conflict Resolution and Security Law 6, no. 2, December 2001, pp. 234-236.

12. Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Conference, Provisional Verbatim 377, March 12, 1968, paras. 24-31; Mohammed Shaker, The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (New York: Oceana Publications 1980), p. 895.

13. See UN Charter chap. VII.

14. Mohamed ElBaradei, “Saving Ourselves From Self Destruction,” The New York Times, February 12, 2004.

15. See UN Charter chap. VII, arts. 39, 41, and 42.

16. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,” A/59/565, December 2, 2004, p. 43, para. 134.

17. See “Multilateral Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle,” para. 329.

18. See Claire Applegarth and Rhianna Tyson, “Major Proposals to Strengthen the Nuclear NPT: A Resource Guide,” April 2005, p. 31.

19. See Bunn, “A Brief History of DPRK’s Nuclear Weapons-Related Efforts,” pp. 15-16.

20. Preparatory Committee for the 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, “Strengthening the NPT Against Withdrawal and Non-Compliance: Suggestions for the Establishment of Procedures and Mechanisms,” NPT/CONF.2005/PC.III/WP.15, April 29, 2004, available at http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/legal/npt/prepcom04/papers/GermanyWP15.pdf.

21. See NPT arts. I, II, III, and IV.

22. George Perkovich et al., Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2005).

23. Center for International Security and Cooperation and Program on Science and Global Security, “Preventing Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Terrorism,” April 2005, chap. 2, pp. 5-6.

24. Richard Dean Burns, ed., Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament (New York: Scribners 1993), p. 460.

George Bunn, the first general counsel for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, helped negotiate the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and later became U.S. ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament Conference. John B. Rhinelander is senior counsel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. He served as deputy legal adviser at the Department of State and legal adviser to the ABM Treaty/SALT I delegation.



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


-------- idaho

Idaho Nuclear Lab Can't Explain Lost Items

The Associated Press
Friday, May 6, 2005; 7:22 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050601258_pf.html

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho _ A nuclear reactor research lab in Idaho cannot account for more than 200 missing computers and disk drives that may have contained sensitive information, the Energy Department's inspector general says.

The computers were among 998 items costing $2.2 million dollars that came up missing over the past three years at the federal Idaho National Laboratory, according to a new report.

Lab officials told investigators that none of the 269 missing computers and disk drives had been authorized to process classified information. But they acknowledged there was a possibility the devices contained "export controlled" information _ data about nuclear technologies applicable to both civilian and military use that federal laws prohibit being released to foreign nationals.

The audit of property control procedures for sensitive equipment at the nuclear research compound near Idaho Falls is one of a series of internal investigations being conducted by the Energy Department following high-profile security lapses at nuclear weapons labs. Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was shut down from July 2004 to February 2005 following reports that two computer disks containing top-secret information had disappeared. A subsequent investigation determined the disks never existed.

Since 2003, the Department of Energy's internal auditors have issued reports scrutinizing security procedures used to access and dispose of computer equipment at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Savannah River complex in South Carolina.

The Idaho nuclear complex, which is the size of Rhode Island, has eight major research facilities and has been used for nuclear reactor research, reprocessing irradiated reactor fuel, naval nuclear and weapons development and storage of radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production.

Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Boise-based nuclear watchdog group the Snake River Alliance, said it is difficult to draw conclusions on how serious the security lapses are at the lab based on the report.

"It's hard to assess if this is an institutional problem or just a screw-up," he said Friday. "INL employees generally do a pretty good job but this is an issue that goes to complex-wide cultural problems within DOE."


-------- nevada

Nuke industry says falsified data should not kill Yucca

By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Las Vegas SUN
May 06, 2005

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/may/06/518717678.html

WASHINGTON -- Allegations that falsified scientific data was used to support the creation of a nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain should not kill the project, the Nuclear Energy Institute says.

The reaction from the nuclear industry trade group to the documentation controversy came in an April 29 letter to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. It is the group's first public statement on the matter since the Energy Department announced March 16 that it had discovered e-mails by U.S. Geological Survey employees that suggest they altered scientific data while working on the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In the letter, Marvin Fertel, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a major supporter of the Yucca repository, said the department should handle the problems but also continue to prepare the project's license application.

"The recent disclosure of quality assurance non-compliance issues by three U. S. Geological Survey scientists, while egregious on their face, is not a basis for questioning the long-term viability of the Yucca Mountain site," Fertel wrote in the letter.

Fertel wrote that more than 3,000 scientists from five national laboratories, 12 universities, two federal agencies and two local governments did the work necessary to keep the project going while protecting the public and the environment.

"This extensive body of scientific and engineering work was specifically designed to ensure that the site suitability determination at Yucca Mountain is not dependent on any one scientist's work," Fertel wrote.

Ongoing investigations continue into the possibly falsified data. The Interior and Energy department's Inspector General Offices, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI are looking at whether crimes were committed, and the Energy Department is to review the scientific work involved.

Nevada has called for an independent investigation into the matter and Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., who is chairman of the House Federal Workforce and Agency Organization Subcommittee, is hiring a full-time investigator to work with the subcommittee's staff.

Porter said the institute's letter "is insulting and hypocritical. For example, the letter states that the Yucca Mountain Project was based on science from thousands of scientists and should not be dependent on one scientist's work. However, as any scientist knows, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It's obvious that the nuclear industry realizes the severity of the issues plaguing the Yucca Mountain Project."

----

Lawmakers slash Yucca fight funds

Guinn's $2 million allocation cut in half

By Cy Ryan
<cy@lasvegassun.com>
CAPITAL BUREAU Las Vegas SUN
May 06, 2005

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/may/06/518717996.html

CARSON CITY -- Gov. Kenny Guinn's allocation of $2 million for the legal fight against Yucca Mountain was slashed by a joint meeting of Senate and Assembly budget committees this morning.

In the first meeting this session, the Senate Finance Committee and the Assembly Ways and Means Committee agreed to spend $1 million over the next two years rather than the $2 million.

Guinn had recommended $1 million each year in the coming biennium to hire lawyers to push Nevada's case against the nuclear dump site.

The two committees meet jointly to iron out their differences. In this case the Finance Committee had recommended the reduction of $1 million and the Assembly Ways and Means agreed.

But the two committees agreed to spend $75,000 more for support of the Governor's Advisory Council on Education on the Holocaust. Guinn had proposed $75,000 but the two committees agreed it should be $150,000.

In this case the Assembly Ways and Means Committee wanted the higher figure and the Senate committee agreed.

The committees of the Senate and Assembly must get together to has out the two houses' differences regarding the 2005-2007 state budget.

Meanwhile a Senate-Assembly budget subcommittee on human resoures later deadlocked whether to provide more money for the growing number of patients with AIDS.

There are currently 881 AIDS infected persons receiving money for their medication. The state is now spending an estimated $845 per client per month.

The state Health Division had estimated that the number of people eligible for state aid will grow by 9 percent in each of the next two years. It asked for an additional $1.7 million over the next two years to provide drugs for these patients and to make sure there was no waiting list.

The Assembly members of the subcommittee endorsed a modified increase of $742,332 above what the governor recommended. That would allow the division to serve an additional 38 clients next year and 65 the following year.

But the Senate balked at that proposal. Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, said the health division should be allowed to come back to the Interim Finance Committee for more money if these increases occur above the budget.

Raggio and Sen. Barbara Cegavske, R-Reno, agreed. The two Senate Democrats on the subcommittee -- Dina Titus of Las Vegas and Bernice Mathews of Reno -- agreed that the extra $746,332 be provided for the program over the next two years.

Guinn's budget calls for $12.4 million each year to pay for the medication of those with AIDS. Of that $10.8 million comes from the federal government. State funding for the program under the governor's budget was $1.5 million for each year.

Since the Senate and Assembly disagreed, this will have to be resolved when the two full Senate and Assembly committees meet.

----

Yucca Mountain is safe

To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com

May 06, 2005 Washington Times Letters

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050505-095402-3960r.htm

    Joseph Strolin's letter in response to my Op-Ed column (?The Yucca Mountain scandal,? April 22) on the proposed geologic nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada amounts to so much hand-waving to distract readers from the glaring contradiction in the position of the anti-nuclear environmentalists and Nevada politicians who have joined forces to stop the site.

    Quite simply, they would have us believe that burying our nation's nuclear waste under 1,000 feet of rock in an isolated desert mountain poses unacceptable risks, while continuing to store it as we do now, above ground in sites located in cities and towns across the country, does not.

    Mr. Strolin writes from the governor's office in Nevada to say that water will move "very rapidly" through the rock some 1,000 feet above and below the repository and that the containers holding the waste "won't last long." Compared to what, continental drift?

     He doesn't give any time frame, but two decades of study by the U.S. government have determined that it would take thousands of years for water to carry radionuclides from the repository to the "accessible environment" in the nearby, sparsely populated Armagosa Desert. (There is no risk to Las Vegas or any other large city).

    This could only happen after a breach in the containers holding the waste, the degradation of the waste itself (some of it, contra Mr. Strolin, vitrified into glass, all of it in solid form) and failure of all the other engineered barriers, which Mr. Strolin neglects to mention.

    The government estimates the highly corrosion-resistant containers to be good for 10,000 years. Peak exposure in the Armagosa Desert, some hundreds of thousands of years in the future, would still be less than the natural background radiation in many parts of the United States today.

    In addition, present plans allow for the repository to be monitored for up to 300 years before it is sealed. If the natural and engineered safeguards are indeed prone to the kind of systemic breakdown Mr. Strolin seems to be suggesting, we would have three centuries to identify the problem and remove the waste.

    Nevada's proposed alternative to the Yucca repository is to continue to store our nuclear waste in some 131 locations in 39 states across the country, where it is kept in shallow pools or above ground in lead, steel and concrete containers.

    Some 161 million Americans live within 75 miles of one of these sites, which are often in densely populated areas and almost always next to rivers or large bodies of water. The idea that this "solution" is safer than storing our waste 1,000 feet below rock, near the Nuclear Emergency Support Team at Nellis Air Force Base, simply doesn't pass the guffaw test.

    For that reason, Mr. Strolin writes as if a small number of questionable e-mails by a few scientists working on Yucca constitute a full-blown conspiracy that compromises decades of work by hundreds of highly credentialed scientists and professionals.

    As stated in my original Op-Ed column, those e-mails are being investigated and should be, as it is vital that people have confidence in the integrity of the process. Short of any major revelations, the government case for Yucca is solid, the national interest in perusing a deep geologic repository for our nuclear waste is vital, and the project should go forward.
    
    JOSHUA GILDER
    Bethesda 


-------- new mexico

Los Alamos National Lab Director to Quit

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 6, 2005
Filed at 10:12 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Los-Alamos-Nanos.html?pagewanted=print
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/may/06/050603809.html

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- The director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab announced his departure Friday after two tumultuous years during which he made enemies with his hard-nosed efforts to stop financial abuses and security lapses.

Pete Nanos will be replaced May 16 by an interim director who will oversee the lab until the University of California's management contract with the government expires in September.

Nanos did not specify why he was leaving. His tenure was the shortest since the lab was created during World War II to build the atomic bomb.

''While there have been many challenges, I believe there have been many more successes, not so much because of what I may have done, but because of the men and women who care so much about this great institution,'' he said in a statement.

Nanos' boss, University of California President Robert C. Dynes, said that Nanos did a ''remarkable job under extraordinary pressures and circumstances'' and that Los Alamos was a ''stronger, safer and better-managed laboratory today.''

Some lab workers celebrated news of Nanos' departure at a restaurant.

''Every table is packed, and the beer is flowing,'' said Todd Kauppila, who was fired for his role in the case of two classified computer disks that were mistakenly thought to be missing -- an incident that infuriated some lab employees.

Nanos, a former Navy vice admiral, had inherited a host of problems at Los Alamos, including credit card fraud and equipment theft. He took office vowing to ''drain the swamp'' and restore public confidence.

Nanos replaced top managers, instituted new purchasing rules and took inventory of lab property -- moves that garnered high marks from the state's congressional delegation and Gov. Bill Richardson, who is a former energy secretary.

Last summer, when the two classified disks supposedly vanished, Nanos shut down all classified work and blamed ''cowboys'' who disobeyed rules on the handling of sensitive material.

''I don't care how many people I have to fire to make it stop,'' he said at the time. ''If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble.''

It was finally determined that the disks were not missing at all; there was an inventory error. The Energy Department said the seven-month work suspension cost up to $367 million. Lab officials put the loss figure much lower.

The shutdown intensified criticism of Nanos, and some scientists posted complaints to a Web blog.

Lab critic Peter Stockton of the Project on Government Oversight in Washington said that from a safety standpoint, Los Alamos under Nanos was ''a mess.'' ''He didn't listen to his own people even though he claimed he had an open door,'' Stockton said Friday.

The new interim director, Robert Kuckuck, has been with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for 35 years. He said he will initiate an open-door policy with lab employees.

''I'm coming in at a time of stress for these folks,'' he said. ''They are operating under a microscope down there.''

The university has not decided whether to bid to keep operating the lab. Among other potential bidders are Lockheed Martin Corp., which runs Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, and defense contractor Northrop Grumman.

On the Net:

Lab: http://www.lanl.gov



-------- MILITARY 


-------- arms 

Colombia Returns US soldiers Accused of Weapons Trafficking

Friday, May 6th, 2005 Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/06/141206

This news from Colombia. Over the objections of several lawmakers, the Colombian government has handed over to Washington two US soldiers suspected of trafficking weapons to paramilitaries. Colombian authorities said they found more than 30,000 rounds of ammunition when they arrested the two men at an apartment near Bogota on Tuesday. Hundreds of US soldiers are in Colombia allegedly to help in the fight against drug trafficking. The US refused to identify the two soldiers. The men are expected to be flown to the US in the next few days. A senior Colombian official tried to have their deportation delayed, and asked for further examination of a treaty granting them immunity in Colombia. This is the second such incident in a month.


-------- business

Leading Lockheed's mission

May 06, 2005
By Stephen Manning
ASSOCIATED PRESS

http://www.washtimes.com/business/20050505-105349-1659r.htm

Since it was formed in a 1995 merger, Lockheed Martin Corp. has been led mostly by engineers — men who helped build the jet fighters and missiles that made Lockheed the nation's largest defense contractor.

    But Lockheed took a different course with its latest chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, who also became Lockheed's board chairman last week. He is a manager, more experienced at steering projects than drawing up jet fighters.

    "I probably wouldn't want to fly in an airplane where he designed the turbine," said Norman Augustine, who led Lockheed in the 1990s. "But I would be happy flying in an airplane where he was responsible for overseeing the design of the turbine."

    Those management skills will be tested in the next few years. With increases forecast in the federal deficit, major Lockheed programs could be vulnerable as lawmakers look for ways to trim defense programs to save money. Some — like the F/A-22 jet and the C-130J transport plane — already are slated for deep reductions in defense budget proposals.

    Lockheed profits have risen steadily, with defense budgets growing after the September 11 attacks, including the 27 percent increase in the first quarter of 2005. Lockheed also said it expects the rest of the year to be strong based mostly on expected increases in its space business and income from recent mergers.

    But analysts say that if the ers.

    But analysts say that if the appetite in Washington for expensive weapons programs wanes with bigger federal deficits, Lockheed's profits likely will flatten. It's a trend that Mr. Stevens, who became chief executive officer in August, may not be able to control.

    "He should be able to do the job," said Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense consulting firm. "But he's not a man on a white horse."

    A veteran of several defense contractors, Mr. Stevens is credited by many investors for righting Lockheed after the company reorganized in 1999. Saddled with heavy debt, Mr. Stevens, then the chief financial officer, centralized Lockheed's operations and trimmed 2,800 jobs, saving about $200 million.

    Paul Nisbet, a defense analyst with the investment firm JSA Research, credits Mr. Stevens with helping to eliminate an old-boy network at Lockheed, where financial decisions were spread among the company's different business units with limited central control.

    Under Mr. Stevens, "it was much tighter control over the company's finances then had ever been the case before," he said.

    Investors applauded the greater discipline, and Lockheed's debt dwindled from a high of $12.6 billion to $5.1 billion last year. Lockheed's stock grew from about $20 per share in late 1999 to its current level of about $60.

    A former Marine, Mr. Stevens, 53, still has the lean body of a recruit. His hair is cut short and a shadow of a thin mustache hugs his top lip. His polished style is considered by many to be more forceful than that of his predecessor, Vance Coffman. He stays on the corporate message when he talks, sprinkling his speech with phrases like "delivering value to the customer."

    In Lockheed's case, the customer is usually the federal government. Lockheed had $35 billion in sales last year, about 80 percent of which came from defense contracts and other federal agencies.

    The company has boosted its homeland security business, training airport screeners and outfitting ships for the Coast Guard. Lockheed builds satellites and rockets for NASA and helps the Social Security Administration cut checks. The U.S. Postal Service uses Lockheed systems to sort mail, and the company created an air-traffic-control system for the Department of Transportation.

    Mr. Stevens attributes much of Lockheed's success, such as its contract to build the next helicopter to carry the president, to an intimate knowledge of the needs of the government.

    "We understand our customers' mission as carefully and as well as is humanly possible," he said in an interview. "There is a special relationship here." 


-------- russia / chechnya

Russia Objects to Bush Visit to Neighbors

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
May 6, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/06/politics/06prexy.html?pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, May 5 - Shortly after the White House announced that President Bush would expand his trip to Moscow on Monday with stops to promote democracy in the former Soviet republics of Latvia and Georgia, the Russian foreign minister took the unusual step of sending a letter of protest to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Americans who have seen the letter describe it as an audacious objection by Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov to the itinerary of the president of the United States. Ms. Rice promptly shot back, in effect, that Mr. Bush could visit whatever countries he wished.

"Rice doesn't scare worth a damn," said a senior Bush administration official who insisted on anonymity because he did not want to be identified as taunting Moscow.

But the letter, the talk of Russia experts here, sets the tone for a difficult presidential trip that has to balance attending a celebration in Red Square of the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat without endorsing the subsequent Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. As one administration official put it, "If Bush gets out of this, he'll be Houdini."

The quarreling has only intensified as Mr. Bush's scheduled departure on Friday morning has neared and as administration officials have acknowledged that the president's stops in Latvia and Georgia were deliberately planned to send a message that he does not condone Russian repression, either in the aftermath of World War II or now.

For their part, the Russians are angry at what they see as the expansion of American influence on countries on their border.

Mr. Bush tried to strike a balance in interviews with news organizations from the region at the White House on Thursday, when he first told a group of newspaper reporters that "a respectful relationship with a leader of a great country like Russia is important to maintain."

But later he told the Lithuanian state television network that he had reminded President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia when they last met in February that the leaders of the Baltic countries - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - "don't view the end of World War II as a great moment of celebration," because of their annexation by the Soviet Union, and that "hopefully" he would cooperate with them, because it was "in Russia's interests to have free countries and democracies on her border."

On Wednesday the president of a Moscow research organization, Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, told the Interfax news agency that Mr. Bush's side trips to Latvia and Georgia were "a kind of slap in Russia's face." Mr. Nikonov, of the Politika Foundation, added that Mr. Bush's visits there would be comparable to Mr. Putin's visiting Washington between stops in Havana and North Korea.

"Look, it's a tricky world out there," said Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, when asked in a briefing on Wednesday if Mr. Bush was going on a "diplomatically tricky" trip that could offend Mr. Putin and also the Baltic leaders, two of whom are boycotting Mr. Putin's invitation to the celebration in Red Square on Monday.

Mr. Hadley added that Mr. Bush was going "with a vision and a set of principles" that would "provide the framework by which various issues of the day can be resolved."

Despite such optimistic words, administration officials make no secret of their frustrations with Russia and especially Mr. Putin, whose relationship with Mr. Bush has deteriorated since their first meeting in June 2001, when Mr. Bush said he had looked the Russian leader in the eye and gotten a sense of his soul.

"Whatever euphoria might have been there has long since dissipated, and it's now a businesslike relationship," said Coit Blacker, the director of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, a former Russia specialist for the Clinton administration's National Security Council and a friend of Ms. Rice.

Although Mr. Hadley said Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin had a "rapport" and brushed off a suggestion that the relationship was strained, other administration officials trace problems back to the fall of 2003, when Mr. Putin jailed the founder of Russia's biggest oil company and Ms. Rice, a Russia specialist who was then the national security adviser, told Mr. Bush that she had concerns about the Russian leader he called his friend.

The main substance of Mr. Bush's five-day trip, which includes a brief overnight stop to speak at an American World War II cemetery in the Netherlands, will occur in a meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin at the Russian presidential dacha outside Moscow.

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush was likely to press Mr. Putin again about what Washington considers Russian retreats on the road to democracy, but that he was not expected to do so publicly - as he did during an awkward news conference with Mr. Putin in February in Slovakia that the White House does not want to repeat.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin are likely to discuss the status of European efforts to persuade Iran to dismantle its any nuclear weapons program it has, as well as Mr. Putin's recent trip to the Middle East, which included the first visit of a top Kremlin leader to Israel.

While Mr. Bush is in the Russian capital on Sunday and Monday, Ms. Rice will lead a meeting in Moscow of representatives from the United States, Europe, the United Nations and Russia - the so-called quartet working for Middle East peace - to discuss the plans for Israel to withdraw this summer from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

Administration officials are counting on Mr. Putin to support their efforts in the Middle East, Iran and North Korea, but say they are going into this tense trip with open eyes.

Stephen R. Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who was a Russia specialist in the Clinton administration, said some of the same issues plagued Mr. Clinton when he went to Moscow a decade ago for the 50th anniversary of the Nazis' defeat. But contrasting Mr. Putin with his predecessor, Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Sestanovich termed Mr. Bush's trip even more difficult.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Moscow for this article.


-------- spies
 
CIA Plans to Shift Work to Denver
Domestic Division Would Be Moved

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 6, 2005; A21

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR2005050501860_pf.html

The CIA has plans to relocate the headquarters of its domestic division, which is responsible for operations and recruitment in the United States, from the CIA's Langley headquarters to Denver, a move designed to promote innovation, according to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.

About $20 million has been tentatively budgeted to relocate employees of the CIA's National Resources Division, officials said. A U.S. intelligence official said the planned move, confirmed by three other government officials, was being undertaken "for operational reasons."

A CIA spokesman declined to comment. Other current and former intelligence officials said the Denver relocation reflects the desire of CIA Director Porter J. Goss to develop new ways to operate under cover, including setting up more front corporations and working closer with established international firms.

Associates of Goss said yesterday that the move was also in keeping with his desire to stop the growth of CIA headquarters and headquarters-based group-think, something he criticized frequently when he was chairman of the House intelligence committee.

Other CIA veterans said such a relocation would make no sense, given Denver's relative distance from major corporate centers. "Why would you go so far away?" one asked. "They will get disconnected."

The main function of the domestic division, which has stations in many major U.S. cities, is to conduct voluntary debriefings of U.S. citizens who travel overseas for work or to visit relatives, and to recruit foreign students, diplomats and businesspeople to become CIA assets when they return to their countries. It was unclear how many CIA employees would relocate to Denver under the plan.

Although collecting information on U.S. citizens under suspicion for terrorist links is primarily an FBI function, the CIA may also collect information on citizens under limited circumstances, according to a 1981 executive order. The exact guidelines for those operations are spelled out in a classified document signed by the CIA director and approved by the attorney general.

The Denver move, which is tentatively scheduled for next year but has not been finalized, coincides with several other developments related to the CIA's domestic intelligence work.

Last week, the CIA and FBI agreed to a new "memorandum of understanding" on domestic and foreign operations, the first change in decades. The negotiations surrounding the memo were highly contentious, with the FBI saying that it should control and approve the CIA's domestic activities, including its pool of U.S.-based assets that have been invaluable in the past to understanding the intentions of foreign nations and groups.

But the FBI is having significant problems developing its own domestic intelligence branch and the CIA is generally viewed across the intelligence community as more experienced and skilled at handling foreign informants who eventually return abroad, where the CIA has the lead in intelligence gathering and operations.

Both the CIA and FBI are trying to deepen their outreach to U.S. research and academic institutions and to private subcontractors working on major government contracts abroad.

Originally, the FBI also pressed to have the bureau disseminate all intelligence reports from sources -- foreigners or U.S. citizens -- living in the United States. It was undercut, however, by the fact that the bureau routinely falls behind in issuing counterterrorism reports and, at the time of the most heated negotiations, in December, the FBI had a backlog of more than 100 reports it had not distributed.

In response to questions this week about the new agreement, the FBI and CIA issued a joint statement to The Washington Post. "The FBI and CIA are committed to effective, joint operations to safeguard our nation," it says. "To that end, we are completing work on a memorandum of understanding that will codify our joint operating principals. We are pleased with both the process and the outcome and we recognize that our joint efforts will enhance national security."

Under the agreement, the CIA must coordinate its operations with the FBI. The CIA's domestic division has agreed to provide the FBI with more information about its operations and debriefings. One goal of updating the memo was to ensure that the two agencies were not working at cross purposes and were aware if one or the other had already recruited or debriefed someone.

It is unclear how a move to Denver would increase the effectiveness of the domestic division's operations, said several former intelligence officials.

Colorado has become a major intelligence hub since Sept. 11, 2001.

The Denver suburb of Aurora is home to the little-known Aerospace Data Facility. Located inside Buckley Air Force Base, it has become the major U.S.-based technical downlink for intelligence satellites operated by the military, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, according to military and government documents obtained by William Arkin, author of "Code Names," a book about secret military plans and programs.

About 70 miles away, the U.S. Northern Command, based at Peterson Air Force Base, in Colorado Springs, is tasked with homeland defense and has been increasing its domestic intelligence work.

It could not be learned whether the CIA's Denver plans are linked to the presence of either facility.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE



-------- homeland security / national intelligence

FAQ: How Real ID will affect you

Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 6, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1028_3-5697111.html?pagewanted=print

What's all the fuss with the Real ID Act about?
President Bush is expected to sign an $82 billion military spending bill soon that will, in part, create electronically readable, federally approved ID cards for Americans. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the package--which includes the Real ID Act--on Thursday.

What does that mean for me?
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.

The Real ID Act hands the Department of Homeland Security the power to set these standards and determine whether state drivers' licenses and other ID cards pass muster. Only ID cards approved by Homeland Security can be accepted "for any official purpose" by the feds.

How will I get one of these new ID cards?
You'll still get one through your state motor vehicle agency, and it will likely take the place of your drivers' license. But the identification process will be more rigorous.

For instance, you'll need to bring a "photo identity document," document your birth date and address, and show that your Social Security number is what you had claimed it to be. U.S. citizens will have to prove that status, and foreigners will have to show a valid visa.

State DMVs will have to verify that these identity documents are legitimate, digitize them and store them permanently. In addition, Social Security numbers must be verified with the Social Security Administration.

What's going to be stored on this ID card?
At a minimum: name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address, and a "common machine-readable technology" that Homeland Security will decide on. The card must also sport "physical security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication of the document for fraudulent purposes."

Homeland Security is permitted to add additional requirements--such as a fingerprint or retinal scan--on top of those. We won't know for a while what these additional requirements will be.

Why did these ID requirements get attached to an "emergency" military spending bill?
Because it's difficult for politicians to vote against money that will go to the troops in Iraq and tsunami relief. The funds cover ammunition, weapons, tracked combat vehicles, aircraft, troop housing, death benefits, and so on.

The House already approved a standalone version of the Real ID Act in February, but by a relatively close margin of 261-161. It was expected to run into some trouble in the Senate. Now that it's part of an Iraq spending bill, senators won't want to vote against it.

What's the justification for this legislation anyway?
Its supporters say that the Real ID Act is necessary to hinder terrorists, and to follow the ID card recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made last year.

It will "hamper the ability of terrorist and criminal aliens to move freely throughout our society by requiring that all states require proof of lawful presence in the U.S. for their drivers' licenses to be accepted as identification for federal purposes such as boarding a commercial airplane, entering a federal building, or a nuclear power plant," Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, said during the debate Thursday.

You said the ID card will be electronically readable. What does that mean?
The Real ID Act says federally accepted ID cards must be "machine readable," and lets Homeland Security determine the details. That could end up being a magnetic strip, enhanced bar code, or radio frequency identification (RFID) chips.

In the past, Homeland Security has indicated it likes the concept of RFID chips. The State Department is already going to be embedding RFID devices in passports, and Homeland Security wants to issue RFID-outfitted IDs to foreign visitors who enter the country at the Mexican and Canadian borders. The agency plans to start a yearlong test of the technology in July at checkpoints in Arizona, New York and Washington state.

Will state DMVs share this information?
Yes. In exchange for federal cash, states must agree to link up their databases. Specifically, the Real ID Act says it hopes to "provide electronic access by a state to information contained in the motor vehicle databases of all other states."

Is this legislation a done deal?
Pretty much. The House of Representatives approved the package on Thursday by a vote of 368-58. Only three of the "nay" votes were Republicans; the rest were Democrats. The Senate is scheduled to vote on it next week and is expected to approve it as well.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan has told reporters "the president supports" the standalone Real ID Act, and the Bush administration has come out with an official endorsement. As far back as July 2002, the Bush administration has been talking about assisting "the states in crafting solutions to curtail the future abuse of drivers' licenses by terrorist organizations."

Who were the three Republicans who voted against it?
Reps. Howard Coble of North Carolina, John Duncan of Tennessee, and Ron Paul of Texas.

Paul has warned that the Real ID Act "establishes a national ID card" and "gives authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to unilaterally add requirements as he sees fit."

Is this a national ID card?
It depends on whom you ask. Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, says: "It's going to result in everyone, from the 7-Eleven store to the bank and airlines, demanding to see the ID card. They're going to scan it in. They're going to have all the data on it from the front of the card...It's going to be not just a national ID card but a national database."

At the moment, state driver's licenses aren't easy for bars, banks, airlines and so on to swipe through card readers because they're not uniform; some may have barcodes but no magnetic stripes, for instance, and some may lack both. Steinhardt predicts the federalized IDs will be a gold mine for government agencies and marketers. Also, he notes that the Supreme Court ruled last year that police can demand to see ID from law-abiding U.S. citizens.

Will it be challenged in court?
Maybe. "We're exploring whether there are any litigation possibilities here," says the ACLU's Steinhardt.

One possible legal argument would challenge any requirement for a photograph on the ID card as a violation of religious freedom. A second would argue that the legislation imposes costs on states without properly reimbursing them.

When does it take effect?
The Real ID Act takes effect "three years after the date of the enactment" of the legislation. So if the Senate and Bush give it the thumbs-up this month, its effective date would be sometime in May 2008.


-------- prisons / prisoners

Prison Predators

Washington Post
Friday, May 6, 2005; A22

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR2005050501518_pf.html

THE NUMBER of federal prison inmates has exploded over the past three decades, increasing by 7 1/2 times between 1980 and 2004. The duty to keep those inmates safe makes a new report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine essential reading. The report focuses on sexual abuse of prisoners by prison staff. The inspector general's office sees a lot of these cases, though presumably only a tiny fraction of the ones that take place. From the experience of hundreds of these cases, Mr. Fine has concluded that federal law is inadequate. Congress must respond promptly.

Staff sex with inmates, even consensual sex, is illegal for good reasons. Prison staffers are positioned to extort sex from inmates over whom they have considerable power. Staff-inmate sexual relationships tend to corrupt prison institutions, making staffers vulnerable to blackmail by inmates and leading to staff smuggling of contraband, including weapons and drugs. Yet in the federal system, Mr. Fine contends, prosecutors are often unable or reluctant to bring criminal cases. While prison rape is a felony, staff sex with inmates is only a misdemeanor, in contrast with laws in 43 states.

What's more, even that weak law does not cover prisoners held in privately run prisons, so 27,000 inmates held in contract facilities have no protection in federal criminal law. Such cases have to be referred to state prosecutors who are understandably more concerned with their own facilities.

The result is a considerable number of unprosecuted instances of sexual abuse of inmates. Even when prosecutors do obtain convictions, sentences tend to be light. Seventy-three percent of those convicted of abuse of inmates between 2000 and 2004 got probation; only 8 percent got more than a year in prison. Even a Bureau of Prisons psychiatrist convicted of seven counts of having sex with patients got only a year's incarceration.

The prevalence of rape and sexual violence in prisons is a national scandal, and keeping staffers from even ostensibly consensual sexual contact with inmates is one key component of stopping it. Congress passed an important bill in 2003 to get prison rape under control. In light of Mr. Fine's report, another step is needed.



-------- ACTIVISTS

Julia Ward Howe: The Woman Behind Mother's Day

Friday, May 6th, 2005 Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/06/142226

We take a look at the woman behind Mother's Day, Julia Ward Howe. The author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, she began advocating for a mother's day for peace in 1870. [includes rush transcript] As we approach Mother's Day this Sunday, we take a look at the woman behind Mother's Day, Julia Ward Howe. Yes, she is the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic but after seeing some of the devastating effects of the Civil War- death, disease, famine and poverty - she began advocating for a mother"s day for peace in 1870.

    * Valarie Ziegler, Professor of Religious Studies, DePauw University.
    * Mother's Day Proclamation, written by Julia Ward Howe and read by Democracy Now producer Yoruba Richen.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined in the studio by Professor Valarie Ziegler. She wrote a biography of Julia Ward Howe called Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe. Valarie Ziegler is a Professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University here in Indiana. Thank you for driving over to Indiana University. Tell us about Julia Ward Howe. I didn't know about Mother's Day being Peace Day.

VALARIE ZIEGLER: Yes. Howe was very interested by the time she got to the 1870s in the Women's Movement, the Women’s Suffrage Movement, in particular, and the Franco-Prussian War – it’s not a war that most Americans or probably even most Europeans think too much about. But in 1870, she looked at this war and she began asking herself, you know, why is it that nations do this to one another, and in particular, she began thinking about what might be possible for women to do on behalf of humanity. And women in this day and age were supposed to be confined to the home. They weren't supposed to be out making speeches or working for political change. And Howe really wanted to find a way for women to express what she thought was an innate nature of love for God and love for humans. She thought that being a mother really was a powerful experience and that after having been a mother, no one could willingly see their sons go off to war to be slaughtered, so she began to organize on behalf of women for peace, basically. And again, her theory was men just seem to be innately aggressive, and the only hope for civilization is for women to speak a different kind of voice. So, she held peace conferences both in the United States and in Britain, and by 1872, she began proclaiming that June 2 every year would be a Mother's Day for Peace. And so, Mother's Day originally was not a day when dad cooked and you went to church, and the ladies got applause and everything. It was really a day for women to come together and to call men and the world to see the necessity for living in peace, rather than giving into the ravages and aggressions of war. So, yeah, Mother's Day is really a day of activism.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did she get it adopted?

VALARIE ZIEGLER: Well, it was informally adopted really early on. By 1873 there were at least 18 cities in the United States, plus Rome and Constantinople, that were observing it. But she never was successful at getting it adopted at a congressional level or a presidential level. So, actually, it continued to be celebrated through the 19-teens at least in some parts of the country, especially in Pennsylvania. But the Mother's Day that we know today actually came from a woman named Anna Jarvis, who knew about Howe's work, and she was a West Virginian, and in 1907, persuaded her home church to celebrate a Mother's Day, and it sort of caught on. By 1912, Congress had declared Mother's Day sort of an official holiday.

AMY GOODMAN: How did Julia Ward Howe reconcile “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which she wrote with this international drive for a day for peace?

VALARIE ZIEGLER: Yeah, I think it shows the incredible difficulties involved in working for justice, basically. I mean, she was absolutely committed to the Civil War. She wrote “The Battle Hymn” -- I mean, it's an incredible theological document, but it's also a call for arms that's incredibly stirring. And you will remember the lines, “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." I mean, she is using Christian images. And she's, you know, asking people to devote themselves even to the last measure to get rid of slavery. So slavery was an important cause for her. Peace and women's rights was also an important cause, and I mean, she clearly changed methods.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Ziegler, we only have ten seconds before we play Julia Ward Howe's proclamation.

VALARIE ZIEGLER: Great.

AMY GOODMAN: But can you give us a little context for this?

VALARIE ZIEGLER: She wrote the proclamation in 1870 as a call for women around the world -- men, too, of course -- to listen to a public voice and then answer it themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to play it right now. Dr. Ziegler, thanks so much for being with us, author of Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe. And we thank our own producer, Yoruba Richen for reading the words of Julia Ward Howe.

      JULIA WARD HOWE: [read by Yoruba Richen] Arise, then, women of this day. Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears. Say firmly, we will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us wreaking with carnage for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken to us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes out with our own. It says, disarm. Disarm. The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first as women to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other, as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

AMY GOODMAN: The the words of Julia Ward Howe, her Mother's Day Proclamation, written in 1870, read by Democracy Now! producer, Yoruba Richen.