NucNews - May 18, 2005



-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- accidents and safety

Adrift 500 Feet Under the Sea, a Minute Was an Eternity

By CHRISTOPHER DREW
May 18, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/national/18crash.html?pagewanted=print

APRA HARBOR, Guam, May 16 - Blood was everywhere. Sailors lay sprawled across the floor, several of them unconscious, others simply dazed. Even the captain was asking, "What just happened?" All anyone knew for sure was that the nuclear-powered attack submarine had slammed head-on into something solid and very large, and that it had to get to the surface fast.

In the control room, a senior enlisted man shoved the "chicken switches," blowing high-pressure air through the ballast tanks to force the vessel upward. Usually, the submarine would respond at once. But as the captain, Cmdr. Kevin G. Mooney, and top officers stared at the depth gauge, the needle refused to budge.

Moments before, they had been slipping quiet and fast through the Pacific. Now, they were stuck, more than 500 feet down.

Ten seconds passed. Then 20, 30.

"I thought I was going to die," Commander Mooney recalled.

It would be close to a minute, but an excruciatingly long minute, before the submarine's mangled nose began to rise, before the entire control room exhaled in relief, before the diving officer, Chief Petty Officer Danny R. Hager, began to read out a succession of shallower depths.

"I don't know how long it was," Chief Hager said, "but it seemed like forever."

Last week, Navy investigators reported that a series of mistakes at sea and onshore caused the 6,900-ton submarine, the San Francisco, to run into an undersea mountain not on its navigational charts. One crewman was killed, 98 others were injured, and the captain and three other officers were relieved of their duties as a result of the Jan. 8 crash, one of the worst on an American submarine since the 1960's.

But what is becoming clear only now, from the first interviews with Commander Mooney and 15 other officers and enlisted men, as well as a review of Navy reports, is how much worse it nearly was, and how close the San Francisco came to being lost.

The submarine crashed at top speed - 33 knots, or roughly 38 miles an hour - about 360 miles southeast of Guam. The impact punched huge holes in the forward ballast tanks, so the air being blown into them was no match for the ocean pouring in. The throttles shut, and the vessel briefly lost propulsion. As the emergency blow caught hold, mainly in the rear tanks, the sub was just drifting in the deep, its bow pointing down.

Luckily, the thick inner hull protecting the nuclear reactor and the crew's quarters held. But within was pandemonium - bodies pinballing, heads striking steel in the warren of lethally sharp surfaces in impossibly tight spaces. There was so much blood on the instruments and on the control-room floor that the place, Chief Hager said, "looked like a slaughterhouse."

Then chaos gave way to improvised heroism and a perilous, and finally futile, effort to rescue the most grievously injured sailor.

The merely battered ministered to the badly hurt, turning the mess hall and the officers' wardroom into instant clinics, ripping off shirts to use as tourniquets and creating splints from cleaning brushes. When they realized that the only hope for the dying man, a young machinist's mate named Joseph A. Ashley, was to get to a hospital, sailors cut off railings and fixtures to thread his stretcher through narrow areas. They then rigged pulleys in an effort to hoist him through the sail, at the top of the submarine, and onto a helicopter hovering just above.

To avoid detection, submarines travel silent and largely blind, relying heavily on charts, and their interpreters, to navigate the undersea landscape. The meeting of this submarine and that mountain beneath the Pacific was in many ways a stroke of hauntingly rare bad luck: everyone relied on the one chart, from a panoply of them, that lacked even a hint of the looming danger. But the submarine's fate was also the result of a confluence of simple shipboard errors.

The Navy has placed the blame on the captain and the crew, and Commander Mooney says, "I accept full responsibility." He acknowledges several critical mistakes, including going too fast, taking insufficient depth soundings and failing to cross-check the route with other charts.

Yet the fact that those errors happened on a boat with a highly rated commander suggests a more nuanced calculus of responsibility, raising questions about the relatively primitive state of undersea charting and the training and support of submariners.

Petty Officer Ashley's father, Daniel L. Ashley, a Navy veteran, refuses to let the Navy off the hook. Sitting in his home outside Akron, Ohio, one recent morning, with a memorial of flags and photographs on the family organ, Mr. Ashley said he had forgiven Commander Mooney and the crew.

"I know what these men have to live with for the rest of their lives," he said. "I feel the same pain."

But if the Navy's systems for supporting submarines had not also broken down, he said, "this would not have happened, and my son would be alive today."

A Normal Saturday

As the San Francisco prepared to shove off in early January, spirits were high. Since taking over in December 2003, Commander Mooney had pushed his 136 sailors through four months of repairs and two intelligence missions. The San Francisco, previously known as a troubled boat, was winning praise in the Navy as a "Cinderella story."

Now the submarine was headed for Brisbane, Australia, and its first liberty stop under the 40-year-old captain, a graduate of Duke University and a submarine officer for 19 years. One thing, though, was bothering him, he recalled: the basic routing instructions seemed to be late. So he told his navigators to call the Seventh Fleet in Japan and hurry them along.

The goal of the routings was to ensure that no other Navy ship would cross the submarine's path, and they laid out a wide track to follow. But some officers had come to view these navigational guides as suggesting a measure of safety. And as the San Francisco left here on Friday, Jan. 7, the team plotting the precise route within that track focused on a single set of charts that, Navy officials agree, usually gave the most detailed view of the seabed.

Since submarines generally do not use active sonar, with its telltale pings, a good picture can be critical in avoiding mountain ranges rising from the seabed. Relying on charts, though, has always been somewhat hit or miss. Only 10 percent of the oceans have been charted by Navy survey ships. Many charts only include obstacles spotted by warships, commercial vessels or even 18th-century explorers like Captain Cook.

One poorly charted area was south of Guam, where the Navy started basing subs in 2002. So by Saturday morning, when the San Francisco entered the Caroline Islands mountain chain, there had been talk of special precautions among some of the men. But to the plotting team, the winding route down to Australia looked wide open.

To the rest of the crew, it was just a normal Saturday, which meant cleaning the boat. Lunch began at 11 a.m. - hamburgers, French fries, baked beans - and at 11:25 Commander Mooney went to the wardroom, where the officers ate. The crew's work shift changed five minutes later, and when a line formed outside the mess, several men, including Petty Officer Ashley, decided to have a smoke first in the vessel's tail.

Sailors said this was typical of Petty Officer Ashley, 24, an unabashed country boy who loved motorcycles, Jeeps and the boat's diesel engine, which he cared for.

His nickname was Cooter, after a mechanic on the old television show "Dukes of Hazzard." He was also known for his wicked Michael Jackson imitation, which one sailor called "moonwalking in cowboy boots."

That afternoon, the plan was to slow down for drills, so with everything humming along, Lt. Cmdr. Bruce L. Carlton, the navigation officer driving the submarine, decided to get ahead of schedule by bumping up to full speed and going deeper.

A sounding taken at 11:30 a.m. confirmed what was on the charts - the ocean was 6,000 feet deep there - and the submarine began to glide down to 500 feet from 400 feet. At 11:38, a decision was made to go to 525 feet, and a junior officer recommended another sounding. But Commander Carlton did not think that was necessary, the Navy reports indicate, and none was made.

Blood and Chaos

Chief Hager, wry and wiry at 39, unbuckled his seat belt and hopped up to jot a note on a card taped to the jet-black control panel. Suddenly - it was just after 11:42 - he felt his grip on a drawer handle tighten as the submarine shuddered.

Then "came the real deal," he said, a thunderous blast and what felt like a warp-speed gale whipping through the submarine as it froze in its tracks.

The force spun his body around - like Spiderman twisting against a wall, he said - and his hand punched through a plexiglass gauge cover. His seat ripped out of its runners and crushed his leg. Then one of the quartermasters, who had been monitoring the charts 15 feet away, came catapulting into view. He ended up knocked out on the floor, blood pouring from his forehead.

A few feet away, three more men were unconscious. One - the junior officer who had just suggested the extra sounding - was bleeding from his head and leg, and could hardly breathe. Commander Carlton, who was still in charge, had been thrown into a passageway, and blood streamed from the right side of his face as he scrambled back to the command center.

In the wardroom, Commander Mooney had been pinned into his seat, while a cook came over his shoulder and crashed into a television screen 10 feet away, cracking it in two places. Within seconds, the captain was rushing up a ladder to the control room, where the effort to blow the submarine to the surface had just begun.

Hundreds of papers that had popped out of binders were streaking dark red on the floor, and the microphones were crackling with injury reports. By 11:44, the submarine had finally broken the surface, with the captain scanning through a periscope. No ships. No wreckage. Nothing.

"I realized at that point that we had survived a collision with the bottom that was just unbelievable," Commander Mooney said. But, he said, he "literally had no idea" what it was doing there.

And no time to figure it out: there were also serious injuries in the crew's mess, the engine rooms and the smoking room - the other relatively open areas where men had gone flying. From the bridge atop the sail, Commander Carlton could see that the bow was damaged, raising fears of flooding.

"We were in shock," Commander Mooney said. But everyone was running on instinct and training. Damage-control parties quickly reported that the inner hull was intact, the torpedoes and cruise missiles unscathed. The captain radioed for help and turned the boat back toward Guam. In the stern, men began bringing the injured forward, toward the wardroom and the mess.

In the smoking room, Petty Officer Ashley had been thrown about 20 feet, fracturing his skull against either metal equipment or a bulkhead doorjamb. Two sailors crouched over him.

"I didn't know what to do," said one of them, Bryan Barnes, a 22-year-old electrician's mate. "So I just held his hand and talked to him until doc came back."

When "doc," the ship's medic, James H. Akin, arrived, he knew instantly that they had to get Petty Officer Ashley off the boat.

Racing to Save a Life

A submarine at sea is a self-contained world in a steel bubble. One thing it does not have, though, is a doctor; the medic, an enlisted man with basic medical training, handles the run of everyday illness and injury. Now, in a full-out emergency, the medic's first job was to get Petty Officer Ashley immobilized on a stretcher so he could be carried to the crew's mess.

There, the chief of the boat, William Cramer, the senior enlisted man, was commanding the cleanup. His men unfurled large rolls of terry cloth to sop up the slippery goo of blood and capsized lunch, and shoved the broken plates and glasses into the galley. In the wardroom, Lt. Craig E. Litty, himself a former medic, quickly set up a triage center, where he helped bandage most of the injured men.

Corpsman Akin, at 6 foot 4 and 280 pounds the largest man onboard, set up his medical supplies on the salad bar in the mess. He stitched up the men with the worst lacerations. And he tried to keep Petty Officer Ashley alive.

The medic says he knew he was probably nursing a dying man. Still, Petty Officer Ashley held on. For 21 hours, Corpsman Akin monitored his vital signs, kept his air passages clear, and gave him oxygen and morphine. Sailors took turns holding his hand. At one point, someone brought in a CD player and put on some Hank Williams Jr.

The first rescue ship, the Coast Guard cutter Galveston Island, arrived at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. But by then, squalls had moved in, and it seemed too dangerous to try to shuttle Petty Officer Ashley over in a small boat.

The alternative seemed hardly less daring: using a helicopter to lift the wounded man and his stretcher out of a hatch on the top of the submarine's sail.

By now, a second ship, the Stockham, had arrived. It carried more doctors and two helicopters. Around 9 a.m., as one of the helicopters hovered 10 to 15 feet above the submarine, it dangled a doctor and a corpsman into the submarine to help prepare Petty Officer Ashley for the move. The pilots had to rely on a spotter in back to keep the copter clear of the pitching submarine.

"He was giving drift calls, saying 'Cut left,' 'Come right,' 'You're getting too close,' " said one of the pilots, Ricke Harris.

Inside the submarine, Chief Cramer ordered a path cleared for the stretcher. Several men unbolted or cut off ladder railings and lockers. By late morning, men were stationed in doorways and stairwells to pass the stretcher along; one even crawled underneath and supported the stretcher on his back through the narrowest spots.

They climbed up one level and under the sail, and then another group took over, heaving on a rope and pulley to lift the stretcher up the 25-foot sail. The first effort failed when Petty Officer Ashley's breathing tube came loose. With his condition deteriorating, a second try made it to the top.

That was when the men had an awful realization: the hatch atop the sail did not quite open the full 90 degrees. No matter how much they tried, angling this way and that, the stretcher would not slip through.

A surgeon, Chris Cook, was then lowered by cable from the copter. But Petty Officer Ashley's heart stopped, and the men began CPR. Half an hour later, at 1:11 p.m., Dr. Cook pronounced him dead. Still, one of the sailors kept pounding.

"I looked at him and said, 'We're sorry,' " Dr. Cook recalled. " 'There's nothing more we can do.' "

Hard Lessons

When the San Francisco pulled into Guam on Jan. 10, its bow slinking low in the water, the flags on other submarines were at half-mast, their crews lining the decks in tribute.

Looking at a picture of that moment, Commander Mooney speaks with pride of the way his crew brought the boat home. But an image discovered on the voyage back also remains seared in his mind, he says, one that helped seal his dismissal and spark broader questions about the Navy's navigational training and support.

That image is a small, light-blue circle on a white background. It signifies a potential hazard two to three miles from where the San Francisco crashed - close enough, Commander Mooney says, that if he had known about it, he would have tried to skirt the area or asked for a new routing. Charting experts now believe that hazard was the mountain, and that its location was imprecisely reported in the days before satellites made navigational fixes more precise.

Commander Mooney said he first heard about the hazard from his boss onshore a few hours after the grounding. It is, in fact, on every chart of the area except for the one that the boat was using - the one that usually provided the most detailed picture of the seabed contours.

That revelation has been embarrassing to the Navy and the Pentagon office that prepares the charts. Moreover, investigators have found that the officer who gave the submarine its basic routing also relied only on that one chart.

Under Navy rules, the captain and his crew are solely responsible for the safety of their ship. After all, in wartime, submarines must operate without help from shore.

The captain acknowledged that he and his crew should have cross-checked the charts. But some of his officers say it was common to grab what seemed the best chart and run down the center of the basic track, as the San Francisco did. They also said they were not alone in believing that the routings were based on more substantial navigation checks. "I look at it as just a lot of really bad luck," said Lt. Cmdr. Rick Boneau, the San Francisco's executive officer.

Commander Boneau, Commander Carlton and an assistant navigator were relieved of their duties, and three enlisted men were reprimanded. Commander Carlton did not respond to requests for comment.

But Navy reports have found that the sea charts are not updated frequently enough and that the routings are often delivered late, limiting the time for onboard navigation checks. The accident has also stirred concerns - dating back to the advent of nuclear submarines under the legendary admiral Hyman G. Rickover - that Navy training places more emphasis on engineering than on skills like navigation.

The approach to keeping the reactor safe is to build in redundant checks and test sailors constantly. But even though inspections had found some navigation deficiencies on the San Francisco in 2004, the reports said, squadron officials in Guam did nothing to make sure the problems had been fixed.

Since the accident, the Navy has briefed hundreds of officers on the lessons to be drawn. Capt. Matt Brown, the spokesman for the Pacific Fleet, said the Navy is also looking at other changes to improve safety.

Some of the younger sailors said they had not realized how close they had come to dying until they saw the San Francisco's mutilated bow at the dry dock here.

"Your jaw just kind of dropped open, and you wondered why you were still alive," said Mr. Barnes, the electrician's mate who held Joseph Ashley's hand right after the collision. As many as 10 sailors have asked not to return to submarine duty.

Commander Mooney is working a desk job until he can retire next year. Last month he visited Petty Officer Ashley's grave in a family plot on a hillside in West Virginia. The captain and the sailor's father said a prayer together as they placed a Navy marker by the grave. They embraced.

Then, the captain left one final offering - his command star, buried in the dirt.


-------- britain

Views sought over nuclear waste
The Harwell reactor site is being turned into a business park

Wednesday, 18 May, 2005 (BBC)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/4555091.stm

Residents living near a decommissioned nuclear reactor in Oxfordshire are being consulted on plans for the disposal of nuclear waste.

Some nuclear waste is currently being stored at the decommissioned reactor at Harwell, near Didcot, the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

The reactor closed in 2002 and the site is to become a business park.

Residents are being invited to have their say on the disposal of waste over the next few decades.

Secret report

A nationwide consultation is being carried out by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) before it gives its recommendations for the long-term disposal of UK nuclear waste to the Department of the Environment in June 2006.

CoRWM is not considering where any potential waste disposal facilities would be situated.

Nirex, a radioactive waste consultancy advising the government, is expected to publish a list of potential sites which were considered in the 1980s but kept secret since.

The list is now being released as part of the new freedom of information legislation.

Nirex says the report is a historical document and it will not be the starting point of any strategy for deciding where waste disposal sites will be placed. 



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

-------- depleted uranium

Rep. McDermott Calls for Depleted Uranium Investigation

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 Democracy Now! Headlines

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/1434246

On Capitol Hill, Congressman Jim McDermott has introduced a bill calling for the government to conduct health and environmental tests on the military's use of depleted uranium. McDermott said "We pretended there was no problem with Agent Orange after Vietnam and later the Pentagon recanted, after untold suffering by veterans. I want to know scientifically if DU poses serious dangers to our soldiers and Iraqi civilians." About 300 metric tons of depleted uranium munitions were fired during the first Gulf War, and about half that amount has been used to date in the ongoing Iraq War. 21 other lawmakers have co-sponsored the bill known as the Depleted Uranium Munitions Study Act.

----

Connecticut Senate OK's bill to study health effects of depleted uranium, toxins

Hartford-AP, May 18, 2005 9:50 PM) 

http://www.wtnh.com/global/story.asp?s=3364322&ClientType=Printable

Connecticut today moved closer to becoming the first state to study the health effects on military personnel of depleted uranium and other toxic substances.

In a 34-to-zero vote, the Senate approved legislation that also establishes a health registry for Connecticut veterans and military personnel returning from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Depleted uranium is a heavy metal used in armor-piercing weapons. There are concerns that some soldiers have become seriously ill after being exposed to the substance.

The bill awaits action in the House. 


-------- europe

French nuclear giant AREVA wins two contracts in China

Wed May 18, 1:28 PM ET Agence France Presse

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050518/ts_afp/francechinaenergy_050518172820&printer=1

French nuclear giant AREVA said it had won two contracts in China for a project to extend the Ling Ao nuclear power plant in Guangdong Province, worth a combined total of nearly 400 million euros (505.4 million dollars).

Under the terms of these contracts, AREVA will supply the primary circuits and instrumentation and control systems for the third and fourth reactors, the group said in a statement.

AREVA board chairwoman Anne Lauvergeon, during her trip to China in April as part of a delegation accompanying French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, had already signed a technical assistance contract with China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corp./Nuclear Power Institute of China (CGNPC/NPIC) for the construction of the two new nuclear islands for the Ling Ao plant, the statement said.

The AREVA group has been present in China for over 20 years. It was the country's reference partner for its nuclear program and currently employs almost 3,500 people there.

On Monday, French energy and engineering group Alstom announced it had won a contract to provide power generation equipment for the extension of the Ling Ao nuclear power plant in southern China.

It was the third nuclear power contract Alstom has won in China in recent years.

China plans to increase its nuclear power generating capacity at least five-fold within the next 15 years.

The ambitious plan is being implemented in an effort to overcome ongoing energy shortages and to build up alternatives to rampant coal use which is causing serious air pollution, acid rain and global warming.


-------- india 

Once Banned, India Seeks Nuclear Help From U.S.

By REUTERS
May 18, 2005
Filed at 10:43 a.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-india-usa-nuclear.html?pagewanted=print

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India, once hit by U.S. sanctions over its atomic weapons program, is now seeking Washington's help to develop its nuclear power industry as a booming economy spurs energy demand.

Chief scientist Rajagopala Chidambaram is in the United States this week to discuss India's case for nuclear power technology, ahead of a visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in July after New Delhi passed its own anti-proliferation legislation.

India, which has not signed the global non-proliferation pact, is anxious to reassure Washington it can be trusted, especially after the discovery of an international nuclear black market linked to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of rival Pakistan's atomic weapons program.

``We see no reason for non-proliferation concerns to be a barrier to high-technology trade and commerce with our country,'' Singh said on Tuesday, adding India's safeguards met the best global standards.

Washington imposed restrictions on sharing nuclear technology after India and Pakistan conducted tit-for-tat test explosions in 1998 -- and as head of Delhi's atomic agency at the time, Chidambaram was banned from the United States.

But sanctions were dropped after Washington sought South Asia's help in its war on terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Last September, it lifted decades-old curbs on equipment for India's nuclear and space programs and recently pledged to help its old Cold War foe in its quest to become a major economic and diplomatic power.

``The diplomatic challenge before India and the United States is no longer about making the case for nuclear energy development,'' Indian strategic affairs analyst C. Raja Mohan wrote in Wednesday's The Indian Express. ``It is about finding practical ways to resolve differences on non-proliferation.''

India is Asia's fourth-largest economy and its largest energy consumer after China and Japan. India's gross domestic product grew 6.9 percent in the year ended March.

Nuclear energy accounts for only three percent of India's power production, but it aims to raise nuclear output to 25 percent of total power generation by 2050 to help offset massive imports of oil and gas.

``Nuclear energy is an imperative for India,'' Uday Bhaskar, of the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyzes told Reuters.

``The Americans have recognized India's nuclear restraint and responsibility. This is in sharp contrast to the A.Q. Khan experience in Pakistan.''

Pakistan is the focus of a probe into a nuclear black market linked to Khan.

But irritants between India and the United States remain.

In September, the United States imposed sanctions on two Indian scientists it accused of co-operating with Iran, which Washington says is secretly developing its own nuclear weapons.

Signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty are meeting in New York this month to examine the strengths and loopholes of the 35-year-old pact to rid the world of atomic weapons.


-------- iran

Ritter, former U. N. weapons inspector, shares his views on Iran's nuclear capabilities

By Tyler Wasson, Reporter
May 18, 2005 Easterner

http://www.easterneronline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/05/18/428c15cca5f8d

Scott Ritter, a former U. N. weapons inspector spoke to a sold-out crowd last Thursday evening at Spokane’s Metropolitan Opera House. The event was co-sponsored by the Spokane group the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane (P.J.A.L.S.).

A critic of the current Bush administration, how the intelligence community operates, and much of the current United States foreign policy, Ritter was involved in over 50 weapons inspection missions of Iraq from 1991 to 1998, 14 of which he was the chief inspector. He quit in 1998 because he felt he was not being allowed to do his job to the best of his ability.

He spoke on current issues including intelligence policy problems, lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program, going so far as to state reasons for George W. Bush’s impeachment over the issue.

Ritter knew his audience was largely liberal, and he addressed the subject in his speech. “You and I are not cut from the same piece of wood,” he said. “I’m a conservative Republican, and you are liberals. You’re pacifists, and I’m a warrior.”

A warrior he is. Ritter was a major in the U.S. Marines during the first Gulf War. Referring to the first Gulf War, he said it was “justified” and “a worthwhile sacrifice.”

Ritter’s main topic appeared not to be the current Iraq war, but instead he gave a sense of importance to the Iran and U.S. standoff over Iran’s nuclear capabilities, stating that military confrontation “has become a political reality that will not go away.” He said that President Bush has given orders to the Pentagon to be ready for a war with Iran as early as June of 2005.

He points out that in 1976 the Ford administration made an agreement with the Shah stating that Iran needed to diversify their energy sources and not only rely on oil for energy. Ritter explained that the Ford administration, included then Chief-of-Staff Dick Cheney and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, said it was alright for Iran to develop nuclear power for energy purposes.

“There is no indication that they are using nuclear weapons in any way other than the U.S. agreed they could. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld say it is wrong now, but in 1976 (they said) it was just.”

Ritter feels that Bush is wrongly putting U.S. soldiers’, lives in jeopardy, “if troops die in Iran it is a travesty,” and Americans reputation is on the line for “another war based on lies.” He said that “what the Bush administration did was not misinterpret the facts but they misrepresented them.”

“There is no Iranian threat, and no intelligence backs up that they do have a weapons program,” Ritter said.

He continued by saying that “when a government official lies in the performance of his duty, it is a felony and that is grounds for impeachment,” much to the delight of the crowd.

In talking about the current Iraq war, Ritter feels completely opposite of how he felt about the first war with Iraq. “When we go to war we must be sure that when we send our boys and girls off to war that all options have been expelled,” he said. “I am unsure that the cause is worthy of the sacrifice.”

Ritter said that from 1993 on, nobody has been able to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the U.S. government believed that there were 200 weapons. When he turned in a report stating that he and his group had found none and that there might not be any W.M.D.s in Iraq, he was then told that there were “12-20 and that number was used again in 2003.”

Ritter’s reasoning for the United States not wanting Iraq to be clear of weapons was because that was not the goal. The United States wanted Saddam Hussein out of power. They figured that it could be done with the sanctions that were in place for only as long as Saddam possessed weapons. If Iraq had complied with the inspectors, the soldiers would have been obligated to leave, and the United States did not want to leave until Saddam was out of power.

The reason the Iraqis stopped us from searching a certain area was not because they were hiding weapons. It was because they could not trust the credibility of the inspectors.

Ritter said that Iraqis believed that CIA operatives were involved in the inspection process “and they were right.” Iraq did not violate international law, the United States did. They didn’t have the integrity to tell the truth to the United States people,” he said.

He ended the evening by saying that the current administration “has committed crimes in the past, they are committing crimes in the present and they are planning to commit crimes in the future. It would be absurd for the people of this country not to stand up and take this country back for themselves.”

----

New bid to break Iran nuke impasse

Wednesday, May 18, 2005 Posted: 0038 GMT (0838 HKT)

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/05/17/iran.nukes/

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and his counterparts from France and Germany will meet an Iranian delegation next week to try to break the impasse over Tehran's nuclear program, Straw said Tuesday.

"I hope, but I can't predict, that the negotiations at the beginning of next week will be fruitful," Straw told reporters at a joint news conference with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"I would hope that the Iranians understand that this is their chance," Rice said.

"They ought to take it and get back on the good side of the international community."

Straw said the talks would most likely take place in Paris, France and would include German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier and a delegation from Iran.

Earlier, Tehran announced it would send Hassan Rowhani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, to the May 23 talks.

Rice said the United States supporteds the "EU-3" negotiations and that all sides had come to a united approach in dealing with Tehran.

She said she hoped Iran would seize the moment and "live up to their international obligations not to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of civilian nuclear power."

"I think we will see what comes next," Rice said. "We've obviously got the (United Nations) Security Council as an option for the international community. We've made that clear."

Straw said he hoped an agreement couldn be reached before that occurs: "The whole purpose of the negotiations with Iran is to try and avoid that circumstance."

Asked what Britain would do if the United States pushed for the Iran matter to go before the U.N. Security Council, Straw said, "Your circumstance is entirely hypothetical, and I'm quite clear it won't arise."

In Tehran, the country's state-run media quoted Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi as saying, "We agreed to hold this round of talks because the Europeans themselves had requested."

"We hope to reach a formula which will guarantee our rights," he said.

Kharrazi added that Iran would pursue what it saw as its right to obtain atomic technology -- which it insists is for peaceful purposes -- and would restart its temporarily frozen plutonium enrichment program if this round of talks failed to produce an agreement.

Europe and the United States fear Iran's nuclear programs will result in nuclear weapons and want Tehran to permanently stop the enrichment programs that can create weapons grade plutonium.

Britain, France and Germany -- representing the European Union -- began talks with Tehran two years ago, and Iran agreed last year to freeze its enrichment activities.

The United States refuses to participate, but has not objected to the European talks.


-------- korea

Seoul Plays Down Expectations On N.Korea Atom Talks

By REUTERS
May 18, 2005
Filed at 9:30 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html?pagewanted=print

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea played down on Thursday expectations that it might get a firm commitment from North Korea to rejoin stalled multilateral talks on Pyonyang's nuclear aims as a rare bilateral meeting entered a fourth day.

Three days of talks between the two Koreas have failed so far to produce a formal agreement. On Monday, the South dangled the prospect of a ``serious'' new proposal if Pyongyang returned to the six-party talks, but the North has so far not taken the bait.

``The top priority for this round of vice ministerial talks is to normalize relations between the South and North,'' Seoul's top delegate to the meeting, Vice Unification Minister Rhee Bong-jo, told reporters before he left Seoul to Kaesong, a North Korean town close to the militarized border bisecting the peninsula.

``We have discussed sufficiently the nuclear issue. We will try our best,'' Rhee said, when asked whether he would try to include it in the joint statement when talks conclude.

Tensions have mounted in recent weeks as some U.S. officials said North Korea may be preparing for a nuclear test. Regional powers have been stepping up diplomatic efforts to restart the six-party talks, stalled for nearly a year.

Seoul had hoped to use the bilateral meeting to persuade the North to return to the negotiating table.

Regional powers believe North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons and possibly more than eight. It declared for the first time in February it possessed atomic arms. This month it said it had extracted spent fuel from a nuclear reactor, a move that could yield more material for weapons.

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday the new proposal would give grounds for a compromise and allow the countries taking part in the talks to make progress.

MARATHON SESSION

Three rounds of the talks by the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia have produced no substantive progress. A fourth round originally planned for September never materialized after Pyongyang demanded Washington first withdraw what it called a hostile policy.

The delegates to the Korean bilateral meeting -- the first high-level contact in 10 months -- have agreed in principle to restore stalled dialogue by resuming ministerial talks in June.

Fourteen rounds of the talks since 2000 have been the forum to discuss political, economic and military matters.

The South also agreed to provide 200,000 tonnes of fertilizer at an early date, something the North urgently wants in the sowing season to help alleviate its chronic food shortage.

But the two sides failed after a marathon meeting that went all night into an unscheduled third day on Wednesday to reach a formal agreement.

Rhee, the South's top delegate, said on Wednesday that he had told the North bilateral reconciliation and cooperation would be impossible as long as the North clung to nuclear arms.

It was not clear how North Korea responded to the comments, but it has argued in the past that its nuclear programs were an subject for discussion with the United States, not the South.

The top U.S. negotiator to the six-way talks, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, suggested on Wednesday time was running out.

``If it's not going to work, we are going to have to look at other options,'' Hill said on Wednesday in Canberra. He declined to elaborate, but the White House has said it would consider referring the crisis to the U.N. Security Council if the talks break down.

----

What to Do About a Country That Has a Nuclear Threat and No Use for Rules

By WILLIAM GRIMES
May 18, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/books/18grim.html?pagewanted=print

ROGUE REGIME
Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea
By Jasper Becker.
300 pp. Oxford University Press. $28.

"Rogue Regime" begins, appropriately enough, with a nightmare. Dozens of American stealth bombers fly over North Korea and bomb the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, the half-finished nuclear reactor at Taechong and chemical factories across the country. By striking quickly and accurately, United States commanders hope to neutralize a Korean nuclear counterattack, but if it should come, a submarine lurking offshore in the Yellow Sea will respond instantly with a barrage of nuclear-tipped missiles.

The catalyst for this fictional doomsday sequence is North Korea's decision to test a nuclear weapon, an event that may take place very shortly in the real, nonfictional world. This month, satellite photographs examined by White House and Pentagon officials seemed to suggest that North Korea was preparing to stage its first nuclear test. Not long after, Mohamed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that North Korea had probably already assembled a half-dozen nuclear weapons.

In other words, Jasper Becker, a veteran foreign correspondent and the author of "Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine," has come up with a very timely book.

"Rogue Regime" is not for the faint-hearted. Mr. Becker takes an unblinking look at a dark regime that has made North Korea an international pariah, has elevated its rulers to the status of gods, and through torture and indoctrination reduced its subjects to virtual slaves, three million of whom, according to some estimates, perished during famines in the late 1980's. Mr. Becker puts it harshly: "North Korea can best be compared to a large concentration camp in which the guards and their Gestapo officers are able to live as before but the inmates are slowly being worked to death."

His arguments might carry more weight if "Rogue State" were not such a slapdash production. It shows every sign of having been thrown together in haste, with a rash of dropped words and verbs that do not agree with their subjects. The same facts, arguments and anecdotes make multiple appearances. But if the history feels thin, the journalism is compelling.

The facts almost defy belief. Years of malnutrition have produced a stunted people. The average North Korean is nearly eight inches shorter than his South Korean counterpart and weighs half as much. Under Kim Jong Il, the son of North Korea's first Communist leader, Kim Il Sung, the country's political prisons and re-education camps have multiplied, and now they contain as many as 300,000 prisoners, some arrested for crimes as petty as singing a South Korean pop song. Mr. Becker estimates that a million or more may have died in these camps under the two Kims.

In a country with a population of about 22 million, the security ministries employ 300,000 full-time officers who enforce discipline on a citizenry grouped, by loyalty, into three classes (core, wavering and hostile) and about 50 subclasses. Food rations, housing and other privileges are doled out according to class rank. What little wealth the economy produces goes straight to the leadership and the military. When famine struck in the late 1980's, ordinary North Koreans were urged to make noodles out of bark, seaweed and corncobs. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il, "possibly the last fat man left in his country," enjoyed his 100 limousines and multiple palaces, staffed by 2,000 doctors, nurses, cooks, dancing troupes and other essential personnel.

From its inception, North Korea has presented, to put it mildly, a diplomatic challenge. The Kim dynasty, whose paranoid, ultranationalist outlook is backed by an enormous military machine, has held fast to the principles that Korea must be reunited and ruled by the North, and that no foreigner will ever dictate terms.

In his later chapters, Mr. Becker goes over the recent history of diplomatic initiatives, and finds a common theme. Again and again, North Korea has encouraged overtures by hostile powers, either by implying that it might behave less aggressively and liberalize its economy, or by playing the military card, as it is doing now. After securing loans, food or industrial investment, it has pocketed its gains and reneged on its agreements.

Often, the North Koreans have redefined the word chutzpah, brazenly violating agreements and then demanding payment to desist. In August 1998, when American intelligence discovered that a large underground facility, capable of housing a nuclear reactor or reprocessing plant, was being built at Kumchangri, officials demanded an inspection, as called for under a 1994 agreement known as the Agreed Framework. The North Koreans agreed only after being promised 600,000 tons of food aid.

Mr. Becker has nothing but contempt for the so-called Sunshine Policy pursued by Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, which urged a nonaggressive, open-handed approach to North Korea, holding out the carrot of investment that would lead to the creation of export-oriented industries, which in turn would bring about deeper social and political change. One of the more bizarre results of this policy was the auto factory built in Nampo by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. North Korea simply took delivery of the first 7,000 cars and never paid for them. The factory closed soon after.

Diplomats have scurried back and forth between constructive engagement, often indistinguishable from bribery, and punishment that would isolate the regime. As Mr. Becker points out, their task has been complicated by their inability to fathom the man they are dealing with, Kim Jong Il, who is, as described by Mr. Becker, either evil but rational, evil and irrational, or a closet reformer struggling to break loose from the control of hard-liners.

Mr. Becker votes for a blend of the first two, which means that right now North Korea is, once again, bluffing, or is not, and is prepared to let fly with nuclear missiles if cornered. This is not consoling. Mr. Becker also argues for giving up on the United Nations as a means of bringing North Korea back within the international fold, and instead creating, along lines proposed by Tony Blair, "a new framework in international law" to deal with rogue states and "a method to enforce these laws through the legitimate use of military force."

That's the plan. Let's see if Kim Jong Il goes along.


-------- pacific

Marshalls to seek new nuclear compensation from US

Wed May 18, 9:28 AM ET [AFP]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050518/pl_afp/marshallsusnuclear_050518132859&printer=1

The tiny central Pacific state of the Marshall Islands will go before a US Congress hearing next week to claim more than three billion dollars compensation for the effects of nuclear testing on their islands half a century ago.

The US House of Representatives will hold the first hearing next week on a nuclear test compensation petition filed nearly five years ago by the government of the Marshall Islands, a string of coral atolls populated by under 60,000 people.

The petition is seeking the extra compensation and health care to deal with the effects of 67 nuclear tests conducted by the US between 1946 and 1958 during the Cold War.

Marshall Islands President Kessai Note said Tuesday that the Marshall Islands will "work tirelessly together to make certain that the nuclear issue is settled in a fair and just manner".

The US government provided 270 million dollars compensation in an agreement that expired in 2001, but islanders say that level is woefully inadequate based on recent US government studies.

In 1954, the US conducted the Bravo hydrogen bomb test -- the largest test with a force equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs -- at Bikini. Unsuspecting islanders living on downwind islands were contaminated with high-level fallout.

The US government maintains only four atolls -- Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utrikwere -- were affected by radiation but Marshall Islands leaders say many other inhabited islands were also affected.

"We're finding people on remote islands with high percentages of cancers," Foreign Minister Gerald Zackios said.

A US National Cancer Institute report issued late last year concludes that US nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands could be expected to directly cause about 530 cancers, more than half of which have yet to appear. This will be raised as a key piece of evidence by Marshall Islands officials.

US House of Representatives Resources Committee chairman Richard Pombo confirmed this week to Marshall Islands government leaders that his committee will hold an oversight hearing on May 25 in Washington.

Senate Energy Committee chairman Senator Pete Domenici has also indicated his plan to hold a hearing soon.

A report to the Congress from US Department Energy and Department of State officials issued in January concluded that there was no legal requirement for the Congress to provide more compensation to the Marshall Islands.

But the earlier compensation agreement leaves the compensation decision to the Congress, allowing the Marshall Islands to make its case provided it can prove there were "changed circumstances" that show the earlier agreement was "manifestly inadequate."


-------- space

Bush Administration Moves Toward the Weaponization of Space

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 Democracy Now! Headlines

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/1434246

The New York Times is reporting that the Air Force is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding weapons in space. The directive - which is expected within weeks - is seen as a substantial shift in U.S. policy. The Times reports that the move would likely be opposed by the international community and that it could create an arms race in space. General Lance Lord -- who leads the Air Force Space Command - recently told Congress "we must establish and maintain space superiority." According to the TImes, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them. Three years ago the Bush administration withdrew from the 30-year-old Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which banned space-based weapons.

----

Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs

By TIM WEINER
May 18, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/business/18space.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0518-02.htm

The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.

The proposed change would be a substantial shift in American policy. It would almost certainly be opposed by many American allies and potential enemies, who have said it may create an arms race in space.

A senior administration official said that a new presidential directive would replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts.

Any deployment of space weapons would face financial, technological, political and diplomatic hurdles, although no treaty or law bans Washington from putting weapons in space, barring weapons of mass destruction.

A presidential directive is expected within weeks, said the senior administration official, who is involved with space policy and insisted that he not be identified because the directive is still under final review and the White House has not disclosed its details.

Air Force officials said yesterday that the directive, which is still in draft form, did not call for militarizing space. "The focus of the process is not putting weapons in space," said Maj. Karen Finn, an Air Force spokeswoman, who said that the White House, not the Air Force, makes national policy. "The focus is having free access in space."

With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them.

"We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space," Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year. "Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities."

In January 2001, a commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, recommended that the military should "ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space."

It said that "explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space."

The effort to develop a new policy directive reflects three years of work prompted by the report. The White House would not say if all the report's recommendations would be adopted.

In 2002, after weighing the report of the Rumsfeld space commission, President Bush withdrew from the 30-year-old Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which banned space-based weapons.

Ever since then, the Air Force has sought a new presidential policy officially ratifying the concept of seeking American space superiority.

The Air Force believes "we must establish and maintain space superiority," Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." Air Force doctrine defines space superiority as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space.

The mission will require new weapons, new space satellites, new ways of doing battle and, by some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars. It faces enormous technological obstacles. And many of the nation's allies object to the idea that space is an American frontier.

Yet "there seems little doubt that space-basing of weapons is an accepted aspect of the Air Force" and its plans for the future, Capt. David C. Hardesty of the Naval War College faculty says in a new study.

A new Air Force strategy, Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. General Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."

Pentagon documents say the weapon, called the common aero vehicle, could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes. "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force," General Lord said.

The Air Force's drive into space has been accelerated by the Pentagon's failure to build a missile defense on earth. After spending 22 years and nearly $100 billion, Pentagon officials say they cannot reliably detect and destroy a threat today.

"Are we out of the woods? No," Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, who directs the Missile Defense Agency, said in an interview. "We've got a long way to go, a lot of testing to do."

While the Missile Defense Agency struggles with new technology for a space-based laser, the Air Force already has a potential weapon in space.

In April, the Air Force launched the XSS-11, an experimental microsatellite with the technical ability to disrupt other nations' military reconnaissance and communications satellites.

Another Air Force space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.

A third program would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world. A fourth seeks to turn radio waves into weapons whose powers could range "from tap on the shoulder to toast," in the words of an Air Force plan.

Captain Hardesty, in the new issue of the Naval War College Review, calls for "a thorough military analysis" of these plans, followed by "a larger public debate."

"To proceed with space-based weapons on any other foundation would be the height of folly," he concludes, warning that other nations not necessarily allies would follow America's lead into space.

Despite objections from members of Congress who thought "space should be sanctified and no weapons ever put in space," Mr. Teets, then the Air Force under secretary, told the space-warfare symposium last June that "that policy needs to be pushed forward."

Last month, Gen. James E. Cartwright, who leads the United States Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services nuclear forces subcommittee that the goal of developing space weaponry was to allow the nation to deliver an attack "very quickly, with very short time lines on the planning and delivery, any place on the face of the earth."

Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who is chairman of the subcommittee, worried that the common aero vehicle might be used in ways that would "be mistaken as some sort of attack on, for example, Russia."

"They might think it would be a launch against them of maybe a nuclear warhead," Senator Sessions said. "We want to be sure that there could be no misunderstanding in that before we authorize going forward with this vehicle."

General Cartwright said that the military would "provide every opportunity to ensure that it's not misunderstood" and that Global Strike simply aimed to "expand the choices that we might be able to offer to the president in crisis."

Senior military and space officials of the European Union, Canada, China and Russia have objected publicly to the notion of American space superiority.

They think that "the United States doesn't own space - nobody owns space," said Teresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a policy analysis group in Washington that tends to be critical of the Pentagon. "Space is a global commons under international treaty and international law."

No nation will "accept the U.S. developing something they see as the death star," Ms. Hitchens told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting last month. "I don't think the United States would find it very comforting if China were to develop a death star, a 24/7 on-orbit weapon that could strike at targets on the ground anywhere in 90 minutes."

International objections aside, Randy Correll, an Air Force veteran and military consultant, told the council, "the big problem now is it's too expensive."

The Air Force does not put a price tag on space superiority. Published studies by leading weapons scientists, physicists and engineers say the cost of a space-based system that could defend the nation against an attack by a handful of missiles could be anywhere from $220 billion to $1 trillion.

Richard Garwin, widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of electric engineering, that "a space-based laser would cost $100 million per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk missile."

"The psychological impact of such a blow might rival that of such devastating attacks as Hiroshima," they wrote. "But just as the unleashing of nuclear weapons had unforeseen consequences, so, too, would the weaponization of space."

Surveillance and reconnaissance satellites are a crucial component of space superiority. But the biggest new spy satellite program, Future Imagery Architecture, has tripled in price to about $25 billion while producing less than promised, military contractors say. A new space technology for detecting enemy launchings has risen to more than $10 billion from a promised $4 billion, Mr. Teets told Congress last month.

But General Lord said such problems should not stand in the way of the Air Force's plans to move into space.

"Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," he told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."

----

'Star Wars' could spark arms race, US warned

Reuters Wednesday, May 18, 2005

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s1371840.htm

US efforts to deploy weapons in space face major technical, budgetary and physical barriers, opponents warned this week, but military planners still have high hopes for the "high ground" of future wars.

Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, said he expected the White House to issue a new space policy next month that would underscore the military's determination to protect its existing space assets and maintain dominance of outer space.

Space was essential to how the US military fights wars, Mr Dolman said, noting that satellites already helped relay communications among troops, provided intelligence and targeting data, and guided bombs to their destinations.

"We've crossed the threshold and we simply cannot step back," Mr Dolman, a proponent of space weapons, told Reuters at a two-day Nuclear Policy Research Institute conference.

Mr Dolman said the critical question was not whether the United States should weaponise space, but whether it could afford to allow other states to get a jump-start in this area.

He said work on several technologies - including work on microsatellites that could be launched to target enemy satellites and satellite-jamming systems - was far enough along that it could be declared operational within 18 months.

Anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott organised the conference about 50 miles outside Washington to discuss what she described as dangerous moves that could spark a new arms race in space, as well as jeopardising weather forecasting, communications satellites and other peaceful uses of space.

She raised concerns about $US130 billion ($172 billion) that had already been spent on missile defence, backed by strong corporate lobbying efforts, and said the outlays for space weapons could be astronomically higher, while health conditions and social programs on earth continued to suffer.

Theresa Hitchens, director of the Centre for Defence Information, warned that further moves by the Pentagon to weaponise space would spur reactions from China and other countries which viewed such efforts as inherently belligerent.

Space weapons would be very risky, expensive and could potentially trigger an accidental nuclear war, she added.

Hui Zhang, a Chinese scholar at Harvard University, said China was already very concerned about US plans in space, and was likely to respond by building more warheads.

Mr Dolman said weapons in space would be the natural progression of efforts to transform the US military, an initiative spearheaded by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But scientists, including Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts of Technology, said the science behind even ground-based missile defence was uncertain.

He said enemy missiles could be hidden in balloons and accompanied by decoys, making it nearly impossible for the kill vehicle to pick out which 'point of light' to target.

Retired Air Force General Chuck Horner, a former head of US Space Command, agreed that the proposed layered missile defence program would "not be as effective as we want it to be."

Two tests of the ground-based missile defence system's interceptors failed recently due to hardware and software glitches, although the agency reported a fifth successful test of the sea-based missile defence system in February.

Mr Dolman said most scientists agreed that ground-based missile defence would not work as currently conceived, but said a future space-based missile defence networked to other sensors could make it easier to find enemy missiles among decoys.

The US Missile Defence Agency in February said it shelved work on lightweight space-based missile interceptors, but Jeffrey Lewis, a University of Maryland researcher, said the 2006 budget still earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for other weapons programs that could be used in space.

There is a UN treaty banning orbiting weapons of mass destruction, but opponents said they believed the United States would not shy from withdrawing from that treaty, if necessary, just as it withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so that it could begin deploying its initial layered missile defence shield.

Then president Ronald Reagan first proposed a space-based missile defence system in a 1983 speech - the system became widely known as "Star Wars", after the popular movie.


-------- treaties

The anomalies killing nonproliferation

Ramesh Thakur International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2005

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/17/opinion/edthakur.php

TOKYO The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is the most successful arms control agreement in history. Yet eminent commentators warn that it is in grave danger of erosion and complete collapse leading to a cascade of proliferation.
 
The diplomats gathered for a month in New York to review the treaty face difficulties rooted in six major anomalies.
 
First, the definition of a nuclear weapons state is chronological - a country that manufactured and exploded a nuclear device before Jan. 1, 1967. India, Pakistan and Israel could test, deploy and even use nuclear weapons, but cannot be described as nuclear powers. In principle, Britain and France could dismantle their nuclear edifice and destroy their nuclear arsenals, but would still count as nuclear powers.
 
This is an Alice in Wonderland approach to affairs of deadly seriousness. But can the treaty definition be opened up for revision through a formal amendment of the 188-member document with all the unpredictable consequences? If not, whither realism?
 
Second, even as the threat from nonstate actors has grown frighteningly real, multilateral treaties like this one can regulate and monitor the activities only of states. Abdul Qadeer Khan's underground nuclear bazaar showed how porous the border is between private and state rogue actors. A robust and credible normative architecture to control the actions of terrorist groups that can acquire nuclear weapons must be developed outside the nonproliferation treaty.
 
Third, the cases of Israel, India, Iran, Libya, Pakistan and North Korea show that decades after a problem arises, we still cannot agree on an appropriate response inside the NPT framework.
 
Significant gaps exist in the legal and institutional framework to combat today's real threats. It is impossible to defang tyrants of their nuclear weapons the day after they acquire and use them. The UN seems incapable of doing so the day before: The Security Council can hardly table the North Korean threat for discussion and resolution.
 
If international institutions cannot cope, states will try to do so themselves, either unilaterally or in concert with like-minded allies. If prevention is strategically necessary and morally justified but legally not permitted, then the existing framework of laws and rules - not the anticipatory military action - is defective.
 
The fourth anomaly is lumping biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in one conceptual and policy basket. They differ in their technical features, in the ease with they can be acquired and developed, and in their capacity to cause mass destruction. Treating them as one weapons category can distort analysis and produce flawed responses.
 
There is the related danger of mission creep. The taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is so strong that it is hard to imagine their employment other than against enemy nuclear weapons. The creeping tendency to redefine their mission to counter all weapons of mass destruction weakens the nuclear taboo and allows the nuclear powers to obfuscate the reality that they are the possessors of the most potent of those weapons. If nuclear weapons are accepted as having a role to counter biochemical warfare, then how can we deny a nuclear-weapons capability to Iran, which has actually suffered chemical weapons attacks?
 
Fifth, the five nuclear powers preach but do not practice nuclear abstinence. It defies history, common sense and logic to believe that a self-selecting group of five countries can keep a permanent monopoly on the world's most destructive weaponry. Not a single country that had nuclear weapons when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed in 1968 has given them up. Their behavior fuels the politics of grievance and resentment.
 
Can the country with the world's most powerful nuclear weapons rightfully use military force to prevent their acquisition by others? The logics of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation are inseparable. Hence the axiom of nonproliferation: As long as any one country has them, others, including terrorist groups, will try their best (or worst) to get them.
 
The final paradox concerns the contradiction between rhetoric and example. It is not possible to convince others of the futility of nuclear weapons when the facts of continued possession and doctrines and threats of use prove their utility for some. Refining and miniaturizing nuclear weapons, developing new doctrines and justifications for their use, and lowering the threshold of their employment weaken the taboo against them and erode the normative barriers to nuclear proliferation.
 
Are these anomalies so few in number and so lightweight that they can be accommodated within auxiliary arrangements inside the nonproliferation treaty ?
 
Or are they such big problems that the treaty will grind to a halt and be replaced? The negotiators in New York have their work cut out for them.
 
(Ramesh Thakur is senior vice rector of the UN University in Tok
 
----

U.N. nonproliferation talks clear another obstacle

18 May 2005 23:32:09 GMT
Source: Reuters

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N18652183.htm

UNITED NATIONS, May 18 (Reuters) - Governments hoping to strengthen a global treaty against the proliferation of nuclear arms cleared a final procedural obstacle on Wednesday enabling them to speed their work after weeks of delay.

Delegates at a month-long conference on improving the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty spent the past week arguing over how to allocate the meeting's workload among various committees. This came after they spent more than a week wrangling over the agenda of the meeting, which began May 2.

Only a week and a half is now left for more than 180 nations attending to come up with a final declaration setting out a path for treaty improvements.

After last week's agreement on the agenda, meeting president Sergio Duarte of Brazil sought agreement from delegates on a plan for allocating the workload.

Egypt raised a series of objections, which were finally addressed to everyone's satisfaction.

At the heart of both disputes was Israel, which is estimated to have about 200 nuclear warheads but neither admits nor denies having the bomb and has never joined the nonproliferation treaty.

The conference has been held against a backdrop of moves by Iran and North Korea that have cast a shadow over the treaty's future.

North Korea declared it had taken spent atomic fuel from a reactor, a process that could give it more material to make nuclear arms, and U.S. officials said it appeared Pyongyang was preparing for a nuclear weapons test.

Iran said it was poised to resume activities related to uranium enrichment, which could enable it to make warheads, although Tehran insists it wants only fuel for power plants.

North Korea pulled out of the nonproliferation pact in 2003 and is not attending the conference, scheduled to end on May 27. Iran remains a member and is attending after Britain, France and Germany persuaded it to suspend enrichment-related activities last year. 

--------

UN Press release on NPT Review - Review Conference allocates Agenda items to Main Committees

From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>
Date: Wed May 18, 2005 10:38pm

This may seem like a trivial thing to press- release - but this
actually does represent progress of a sort, believe it or not.

But now time is getting short - However are they going to come
anywhere close to getting through the agenda?

See also the Reuters item, nuclear talks clear another obstacle.

John Hallam


18/05/2005
Press Release
DC/2966

NPT Review Conference

17th & 18th Meetings (AM & PM)

Review conference for nuclear non-proliferation treaty
allocates agenda items to THREE MAIN committees

Also Establishes Subsidiary Bodies to Consider
Issues of Nuclear Disarmament, Middle East, Withdrawal

Following intensive consultations, the Review Conference on the
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) today
adopted the remaining procedural decisions that will finally allow it
to begin its substantive work in its three Main Committees tomorrow.

The decisions, coming "at the eleventh hour", according to
Committee President Sergio de Queiroz Duarte (Brazil), concerned the
allocation of items to the Main Committees (document
NPT/CONF.2005/CRP.3) and the creation of subsidiary bodies (document
NPT/CONF.2005/CRP.4).

After the adoption of those decisions, Mr. Duarte read a
statement to the effect that it was understood that each of the three
Main Committees would allot time to their subsidiary bodies according
to the proportions of the last Review Conference.

Prior to adoption of those decisions, it continued to hear the
presentation of working papers.

Among the 17 papers introduced was an in-depth consideration of
withdrawal from the Treaty submitted by Australia and New Zealand and
presented by the latter's representative. She said that the
implications of any withdrawal were so grave that the Conference
should attempt to agree on some common understanding, leading to a
prompt and appropriate international response in case of any further
withdrawal.

She said that immediate steps should be taken following
notification of a withdrawal, which would underline the potential
seriousness of such a move for international peace and security. The
issue should immediately and automatically, be referred to the
Security Council. There must be agreed-upon consequences. In
addition, a State that withdrew should remain accountable for any
breach of its obligations while still a party, and technology and
materials intended for peaceful uses must remain under those
obligations.

The representative of the Republic of Korea also stressed that
universal principles should govern withdrawal from the NPT, in
introducing a paper that focussed on the case of the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea. He urged that country to return to
six-party talks without further delay.

Disarmament by nuclear-weapon States was also a focus of some of
the papers presented today, in particular one presented by the New
Agenda Coalition, which had been formed in response to the nuclear
tests of India and Pakistan. Its paper was also introduced by the
representative of New Zealand and outlined conditions necessary to
create real momentum towards elimination of nuclear arsenals.

A nuclear-free zone in the Middle East continued to garner
attention, as the representative of Qatar, on behalf of the Arab
League, introduced a paper proposing steps to be taken towards that
end. In addition, several papers concerned protection of nuclear
materials and technology against illicit trafficking, peaceful uses
of nuclear technology and control of fissile material, among other
topics.

Working papers were also introduced by the representatives of
Norway, China, Cuba, Australia, Canada, Austria, Netherlands and
Luxembourg (on behalf of the European Union).

The 2005 Review Conference on the NPT will meet again at a time
to be announced.

Background

The 2005 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) met this morning to continue hearing
introductions of working papers by States parties.

Introduction of Working Papers

KJETIL PAULSEN (Norway) introduced working paper 23 entitled "NPT
-- a dynamic instrument and core pillar of international security",
which describes the present security environment as "radically
different" from the one existing 35 years ago when the Treaty entered
into force. Indeed, the Treaty was the first line of defence against
the spread of nuclear weapons, and, thus, it was essential to ensure
full compliance with all of its provisions. The paper details
Norway's proposals for: strengthening the non-proliferation regime;
moving forward the disarmament agenda; peaceful use of nuclear
energy; and sustaining the NPT.

On the latter series of proposals, she said that the paper
promoted the further creation of nuclear-weapon-free zones as
important for sustaining the regime. The announced withdrawal of the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea from the Treaty posed a
fundamental challenge, making it essential to further develop
disincentives to withdraw. States parties should formally address
such fundamental challenges by strengthening the Treaty's
institutional machinery.

That meant, among other things, support for the
nuclear-weapon-free zones by nuclear-weapon States through the
signing of relevant protocols for negative security assurances, and
the development of such zones in areas of tension, she said. Also,
nuclear-weapon States should adhere to their unilateral declarations
of 1995 and be ready to enter into negotiations on legally binding
negative security assurances. States parties must be able to deal
with cases of non-compliance, while recognizing the statutory role of
the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) Board of Governors. Special meetings of the States parties
could be held in case of an emergency, unless that was more
appropriately handled by the Council and the IAEA.

HU XIAODI (China) introduced working papers 5, 6, and 7,
respectively, on, nuclear issues in the Middle East, peaceful uses of
nuclear energy, and security assurances. By the first, the Chinese
delegation requested the inclusion of certain elements in the report
of Main Committee II and the Conference's final document. Those
elements included: promotion of Middle East peace, including through
greater support of the Security Council in playing a more active
role; support for a Middle East nuclear-weapon-free zone; and
resolution, through dialogue and within the framework of the IAEA, of
the Iranian nuclear issue.

He said that the paper also noted the great significance of
Libya's decision to abandon its weapons of mass destruction
programmes and accept IAEA inspections, which would consolidate and
strengthen the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.
Israel should accede to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon State and
place all its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards without delay.
The States concerned in the region should sign and ratify
comprehensive safeguards agreements with the Agency and the
Additional Protocol.

Turning to working paper 6, on peaceful use of nuclear energy, he
requested that the following elements, among others, also be included
in the report of Main Committee II and the final document: enhanced
efforts in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy; that
non-proliferation efforts should not undermine the legitimate rights
of countries, especially the developing countries, to the peaceful
uses of nuclear energy; the provision of technical assistance to the
developing countries in that regard; and the assurance of adequate
funds to guarantee the Agency's promotional and technical cooperation
activities. Governments should take primary responsibility for the
physical protection of nuclear material and facilities.

On security assurances, he said the working paper requested
incorporation of the following elements, among others: subject all
nuclear weapons to complete prohibition and destruction, and pending
that, all nuclear-weapon States should undertake not to be the first
to use nuclear weapons and not to use or threaten to use nuclear
weapons against non-nuclear-weapon States or nuclear-weapon-free
zones at any time and under any circumstances; the conclusion of
internationally legally binding security instruments as soon as
possible; and a lowering of the role of nuclear weapons in the
strategies of nuclear-weapon-States. Also, the Conference should
re-establish an ad Hoc committee on negative security assurances and
start substantive work and negotiations without delay, he said.

YURI ARIEL GALA LOPEZ (Cuba) said his country turned in its
national report on article VI of the NPT, though it has not been
published and, hence, had no number. He was also circulating three
working papers, one on transparency and verification (document
NPT/CONF.2005/WP.24), one on peaceful uses of nuclear energy
(document NPT/CONF.2005/WP.25), and one on international law and
non-proliferation (document NPT/CONF.2005/WP.26).

That last paper, he said, contained an analysis of the legal
consequences of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and
Security Council resolution 1540. The PSI, as promoted by the United
States, he said, conflicted with State sovereignty, the law of the
sea, and the multilateral framework of the non-proliferation regimes.
In introducing the other papers, he stressed that questioning the
peaceful uses of nuclear energy of individual States contradicted the
NPT treaty and the principles of national sovereignty.

On behalf of the League of Arab States, Mr. HASSAN AL-NESE
(Qatar) introduced working paper 40 on the Treaty's functioning. At
the 1995 review, States parties had agreed on a resolution on the
creation of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East. In 1995,
the Arab States were not yet parties to the NPT, but they joined the
Treaty in light of the positive results that had been achieved in the
1995 and 2000 reviews, particularly adoption of the Middle East
resolution. Israel remained the only State in the region not party
to the NPT. It also continued to refuse to submit its nuclear
installations to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. The
present Conference was an opportunity to reach agreement on practical
steps towards implementing previously adopted resolutions.

He said that the Arab States were convinced that the only
practical solution to prevent proliferation of mass destruction
weapons was to adopt a regional approach and to rid the Middle East
of those arms. It was imperative for the Conference to make an
unequivocal call on Israel to accede to the Treaty as a
non-nuclear-weapon State. The following measures should be taken,
without delay: establish a subsidiary body within Main Committee II
to discuss implementation of the Middle East resolution; implement
the recommendations on the Middle East, particularly the immediate
accession of Israel to the safeguards regime; the United Nations
should hold an international conference on the elimination of weapons
of mass destruction in the Middle East; the nuclear States should
commit themselves not to transfer any nuclear arms or material to
Israel; those States should also pledge not to help Israel in any way
that would contribute to the manufacture or acquisition of nuclear
weapons.

TIM CAUGHLEY (New Zealand), speaking on behalf of the New Agenda
Coalition, noted obligations for disarmament in article VI of the
NPT. In their working paper (document NPT/CONF.2005/WP.27), a
methodical way forward in disarmament was discussed, he said, as well
as the necessity for all countries to enter into the treaty. He
called on all States, in addition, to reaffirm and respect the
moratorium banning nuclear testing and to close nuclear testing sites
where relevant. He called on the United States to reconsider its
stance on the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and for
China to bring forward its process of ratification.

The Conference on Disarmament, he said, must again serve as a
forum for disarmament and non-proliferation treaties. The
negotiation of a treaty banning the production of fissile material
for non-peaceful uses was its next logical achievement. There had
been little progress in that area.

The starting point for disarmament, he said, was a perceptual
change moving away from the belief that nuclear weapons were needed
to sustain a country's political importance. Linked to that were
measures to reduce the operational status of nuclear-weapon systems.
In that context, he welcomed the Moscow Treaty, saying that its
potential would only be realized if it were supplemented with
provisions for irreversibility, transparency and verification.

In general, he acknowledged that significant reductions in the
numbers of nuclear weapons had been made. Nonetheless, they fell
short of his Coalition's expectations under article VI. If there
were to be real momentum towards fulfilling those obligations, then
the nuclear-weapon States must continue to make systematic and
progressive efforts towards the elimination of their nuclear
arsenals. In all facets of disarmament and non-proliferation, he
demanded processes that were verifiable and said that the papers
presented by the United Kingdom contained a number of useful
proposals in that regard.

IN-KOOKPARK (Republic of Korea) introduced working paper 42.
Reviewing some key elements of the working paper, he said it
suggested principal elements to be included in the Conference's final
document, which concerned the North Korean nuclear issue. The paper
urged the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to return to the
six-party talks without further delay. The paper also included some
comments on withdrawal from, and deficiency of, the NPT, with an
emphasis on universality. On disarmament, the paper urged the
nuclear-weapon States to exercise their moral authority by
undertaking further nuclear disarmament, adhering to the CTBT and
concluding a fissile material cut-off treaty.

On non-proliferation, he said that the paper had focused on
universalization of the IAEA's Additional Protocol as a standard
inspection norm. It also commented on export control issues. On the
peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the paper discussed his country's
perspective on the relationship between the Treaty's rights and
obligations. On fuel cycle issues, the paper made some suggestions
on key criteria, including economic feasibility and energy security,
to be reflected during the process of formulating new approaches to
the fuel cycle question. Hopefully, the paper would contribute to
galvanizing States parties to engage fully in all of the issues and
to better understand his country's positions.

Ms. BRIDGE (New Zealand), on behalf of Australia, submitted
working paper 16 on article X of the treaty, which concerns
withdrawal. The implication of withdrawal from any part of the NPT
was "extremely serious". Because of that, the Treaty strictly
limited the circumstances under which withdrawal was possible. But,
the implications of any withdrawal could be so grave that the
Conference should attempt to agree on some common understanding,
leading to a prompt and appropriate international response in case of
any further withdrawal. She was not suggesting amending article X;
she was suggesting that the NPT parties should not be able to evade
their Treaty obligations and commitments simply by withdrawing from
it.

She said her proposal was simple: any State that withdrew should
remain accountable for any breach of its obligations while still a
party. Some immediate steps should be taken following notification
of a withdrawal, which would underline the potential seriousness of
such a move for international peace and security. The issue,
immediately and automatically, should be referred to the Security
Council. States parties might also call an extraordinary meeting to
emphasize the importance of such a notification for all parties.
Consequences of withdrawal should also be agreed.

Why should a State that acquired nuclear material, equipment or
technology while a party to the NPT, under the obligation to use that
material for peaceful purposes, be allowed to retain the use of such
acquisitions if it withdrew from the Treaty? she asked. Nuclear
equipment, technology and material should be subjected to the
obligation on peaceful use, even if the recipient State withdrew from
the Treaty. The Conference could not and should not turn a blind eye
to the withdrawal issue. States parties should think about how to
tackle that critically important issue.

Mr. MEYER (Canada) introduced his country's working paper
contained in document NPT/CONF.2005/WP.39, achieving permanence with
accountability, civil society. The prep-com process, with its
tendency to kick down the road any substantive problem, was
inadequate. The time had come to make meetings more effective with
an annual review conference on the state of the Treaty's
implementation. He presented a draft text to that effect.

The participation of civil society in the implementation of the
NPT, he said, should also be enhanced. The working paper contained a
text to that effect as well.

Mr. WILKE (Netherlands), on behalf of Belgium, Norway, Lithuania,
Spain, Poland and Turkey, presented a working paper (document
NPT/CONF.2005/WP.35) that sought to cover middle-ground positions to
be included in the final documents of the Conference. It covered
such topics as the preservation of the integrity of the NPT;
safeguards and verification; accountability and transparency; fissile
materials; peaceful uses; the CTBT; negative security assurances;
non-strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament.

CHRISTINE GOSTA (Austria) introduced the second of six working
papers (document NPT/CONF.2005/WP.13) submitted by Australia, Canada,
Denmark Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden
and his country, on "Physical Protection and Illicit Trafficking".
The paper would have the Conference underline the importance of
physical protection of nuclear material and nuclear facilities and to
maintain the highest standards of physical protection.

She said that the Conference should welcome all progress in that
context. It should note with serious concern recent revelations
about illicit trade in nuclear equipment and technology and should
endorse the IAEA's call for full cooperation from all its member
States in identifying supply routes and sources. The Conference
should also note that physical protection and measures to combat
illicit trafficking were parts of a national system of nuclear
security, the existence of which should be made a precondition for
transfers of nuclear material, sensitive equipment or technology.

DIRK JAN KOP (Netherlands) introduced the working paper contained
in document NPT/CONF.2005/WP.11, on cooperation in the peaceful uses
of nuclear energy. He said that the paper confirms the right of
nations to develop such peaceful uses, and also affirms safeguards
agreements and others as preconditions for cooperation. Cooperation
should not be continued with States that were not in compliance with
such preconditions.

The paper, he said, also affirms the central role of the IAEA and
stresses the importance of its mid-term strategy. It recommends that
the agency take into account the needs of the least developed
countries, among others, when planning its future activities. It
urges countries to meet their financial and other obligations to the
technical development fund of the IAEA and other areas.

JAMES CASTERTON (Canada), on behalf of Australia, Austria,
Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and
Sweden, introduced working paper 10 on compliance and verification.
The issues it addressed were of fundamental importance to all, given
the serious challenges shaping the environment in which the parties
were conducting their work. The co-sponsors of the working paper,
collectively and informally known as the "G-10", were of the view
that the Conference should stress the important contribution of the
Treaty to worldwide security and its effectiveness in checking
nuclear proliferation, thereby preventing destabilization caused by
nuclear arms races.

He said that the Conference should also underline the importance
of all States in demonstrating a strong commitment to the Treaty. It
should recognize that the Treaty conferred a set of interrelated and
mutually reinforcing obligations and rights on States parties. In
order to strengthen accountability and transparency, States parties
should also adhere to the strengthened safeguards system. Clearly,
meeting current and potential compliance challenges were key tasks
for the NPT strengthened review process. Those challenges must be
met firmly by upholding the Treaty's integrity and by reinforcing the
authority of the IAEA's safeguards system. Accordingly, the
Conference should reaffirm the fundamental importance of full
compliance, including with relevant safeguards.

The Conference should also reaffirm the statutory role of the
IAEA's Board of Governors and Director General, and underscore both
the importance of the Agency's access to the Security Council and
other relevant United Nations organs. It should note that any State
party that did not comply with its obligations under the Treaty
isolated itself through its own actions from the benefits of
constructive international relationships and from the benefits which
accrued from adherence to the Treaty. While recognizing the value of
comprehensive safeguards, such agreements provided only limited
assurance regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and
activities. It was necessary, therefore, for those agreements to be
supplemented by additional protocols of the IAEA.

Mr. KAYSER (Luxembourg), on behalf of the European Union,
presented working paper 37, on the world partnership to reduce
threats through cooperation. During the Conference's preparations
and general debate, many delegations had highlighted the importance
of the Cooperative Threat Reduction-Global Partnership Initiative and
its relevance to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. That
concept had also been presented to the Conference on Disarmament and
the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security). The
nuclear-arms reduction process developed in the past decades had
brought to light the enormous technological and financial problems
connected with the actual elimination of nuclear weapons. The
ensuing partnership was a multilateral effort aimed at addressing
those problems.

He said that Canada, the European Union -- and many of its member
States on a national basis -- Japan, Russian Federation, Ukraine,
United States and others had worked together under the initiative, in
order to secure and dismantle nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons, materials, carriers and infrastructure. The culmination of
such initiatives took place in Canada in June 2002, when the G-8
announced a global partnership against the spread of mass destruction
weapons. Participants at that summit had pledged to raise up to $20
billion over 10 years to address those threats. At a time when the
nuclear proliferation threat was growing, along with the risk that
terrorists might acquire nuclear weapons or related materials, the
partnership was a significant additional way to accelerate the
nuclear disarmament process.

The nuclear component of the initiative was relevant to the NPT's
review process and that strengthened the Treaty. In particular, the
deactivation of thousands of nuclear warheads under that programme
was an effective measure in the context of cessation of the nuclear
arms race and nuclear disarmament. In addition, the initiative
facilitated cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, as
called for the Treaty's preambular portion. It had also facilitated
accession of a number of countries to the Treaty, thereby
strengthening the regime. The Conference was invited to recognize
the importance of the programmes for the destruction and elimination
of nuclear weapons, among others.


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

Interview with Helen Caldicott: U.S., Russia still face mutual destruction threat

By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published May 18, 2005

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050518-072100-9737r

WASHINGTON -- Helen Caldicott is an Australian physician who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 and is the president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute based in Washington. She spoke with UPI National Security Correspondent Martin Sieff.
    
    Q. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. Air Force is seeking approval from President George W. Bush for new weapons to secure the United States from attack from space. As a prominent opponent to the militarization of space, what is your response to that news?
    
    A. Everything that was predicted at our conference this week on the weaponization of space in Airlie, Virginia, is already coming true. It seems as if the Bush administration and the Air Force are going to go ahead with everything that was said at our conference on the weaponization of space that was most alarming. This issue was under the radar of public opinion for a long time, but it is now coming into view.
    
    Russia and China have both said for some years that if the United States puts weapons into space they will super-saturate any and all U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems and space-based weapons by building thousands more nuclear weapons each to counter any U.S. missile-defense system.
    
    Q. The United States is the dominant space-faring nation with more military satellites in orbit than every other nation combined. How difficult would it be to disrupt or destroy U.S. space-based systems?
    
    A. Any nation. Military satellites are very vulnerable. As we learned at our conference the easiest way to paralyze the entire U.S. space satellite system in low Earth orbit is by detonating a nuclear weapon at that level above the Earth to produce radiation in the belt where the satellites orbit. The satellites built to function for 10 years will then all die a slow death over just a few weeks as they pass through the most irradiated areas.
    
    And if you detonate a single nuclear weapon in the upper atmosphere you will produce an electric magnetic pulse, or EMP. One nuclear weapon detonated in near space would therefore melt down the entire electronic communications network of the United States.
    
    This would of course ruin the U.S. economy and utterly disrupt society across the country. But it would have even more grave consequences. There are 103 nuclear power plants across the United States. They all rely on external electricity supply that powers their water-coolant systems. If these were all knocked out, you would run the risk of more than 100 Chernobyl-scale nuclear core meltdowns across the United States.
    
    All the power plants have their own back-up generators, of course, but they would all need time crank up and too often their testing and maintenance has been neglected because they so seldom, if ever, have had to be used in the past, and some of them don't work when they're supposed to. Therefore there would indeed be a real risk of many Chernobyls all over the place. Thus a single EMP detonation in space aimed against U.S. military space-based assets could produce a truly cataclysmic outcome, and it would be very easy to do.
    
    Q. Does the United States have any plans to put nuclear weapons or nuclear power systems into space?
    
    A. There are also serious plans being discussed to make nuclear reactors that will function in space to eventually power U.S. space ships to other worlds in the Solar System. Already a new plutonium-producing nuclear facility is being set up in Idaho, and the plutonium nuclear fuel that is being produced there is not even the regular plyutonum-239 but the far more toxic plutonium-238.
    
    There are discussions well under way to eventually make a nuclear spaceship called Prometheus that could get people out to planetary destinations like Mars far more quickly.
    
    Q. The Cold War has been over for almost a decade and a half. How serious is the threat of mutually assured destruction between the United States and Russia today?
    
    A. Russia still has 2,500 nuclear weapons and the United States has 5,000. There are only 240 major cities in the entire Northern Hemisphere. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has concluded that 40 nuclear weapons are targeted on New York City alone. There are probably 50 or 60 of them targeted on Washington, D.C. Every city and town in the United States is targeted with at least one H-bomb or thermonuclear weapon. And the Russians build really big H-bombs.
    
    Q. But surely, the Russian radar tracking and space-based surveillance networks keep them informed that the United States is not contemplating any surprise attack upon them?
    
    A. None of the Russian early-warning satellites work. Therefore the Russians are acutely worried that the United States doctrine of pre-emptive war is a real threat to them and it makes them very paranoid, because their satellites to provide them with better warning just do not work.
    
    Most Americans do not realize that the Russian nuclear system is already on hair-trigger alert, and even worse, the Russian early-warning system is in a dangerous state of decay. (Veteran U.S. arms negotiator) Ambassador Thomas Graham has said that we are already in a white-knuckle situation over this. And Professor Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics, told our conference on Tuesday that the thing that scared him the most was that nobody else was scared, and they all ought to be.
    
    Q. Have there been any near misses that ran the risk of triggering all-out nuclear war since the disintegration of the Soviet Union?
    
    A. The United States and the world came far closer to total nuclear catastrophe in 1995 than anyone seems to remember or realize, even though it was documented and reported in The New York Times. Norway launched a missile near a U.S. Trident submarine deployment. The Kremlin had been notified in advance that the missile would be fired, but just forgot the warning. The Russian radar picked up the Norwegian launch and concluded that they were under attack from a U.S. strategic nuclear missile submarine.
    
    For the first time in history, Russian President Boris Yeltsin opened the "football," the suitcase containing the Russian nuclear launch codes, and he had three minutes to decide whether to authorize an all-out Russian nuclear response. Only 10 seconds before the three minutes ran out, the Norwegian missile veered off course and this was reported to Yeltsin. There had even been a general at his elbow urging a full retaliatory strike. America was just 10 seconds from annihilation. This story was reported on the back page of the New York Times when it should have been on the front page.
    
    Q. Was this a freak scenario that could never happen again?
    
    A. This could certainly happen again. A retired senior Russian military officer said to me recently, "Helen, we're so worried we could blow you up by mistake." And there are other dire possibilities. The Russians have to deal with terrorists and extremists who could conceivably seize control of a missile-command center.
    
    Q. What kind of priority should we therefore give reducing potential nuclear tensions between the United States and other nations, especially Russia?
    
    A. This is the most urgent issue facing the human race. If America ever launched its 5,000 nuclear missiles and Russia its 2,500 nuclear missiles it would probably be enough to create a nuclear winter or "dark fall." So much dust, smoke, debris and burned carbon material would be thrown into the atmosphere that plants would be unable to carry out photosynthesis. Most species of life would slowly freeze to death in the dark.
    
    Q. You paint a horrifying scenario. Why do we not see more discussion about this?
    
    A. What alarms me most of all is that nobody is talking any more about all this. The new reports on Wednesday about the latest plans for space militarization will dangerously escalate tensions with Russia and China.
    
    President Bush won re-election by running on what he called the moral issues like banning abortion and gay marriage. But the real moral issue for all people and all religions is whether creation itself will continue to survive, and the possibility that total catastrophe could happen is not low.
    
    Q. Why are U.S., Russian and other leaders not grappling with this issue more seriously?
    
    A. Each side refuses to share its secrets with the other. The thinking of everyone still appears to be in the pre-World War I mode. That was what Einstein warned against. He said the creation of nuclear weapons changed everything. Thus we drift towards the precipice. Indeed, I would say now we are galloping toward it.



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


-------- maine

Maine Yankee Foresees Waste Gone in Decade

By Greg Foster, May 18, 2005 Lincoln County News

http://www.mainelincolncountynews.com/index.cfm?ID=11939

Maine Yankee’s chief nuclear officer foresees that the spent nuclear fuel and other high level waste now housed in 64 concrete canisters at the decommissioned plant site in Wiscasset will be out of town in 10 years.

Mike Meisner made his prediction Tuesday at the first meeting of the company’s newly constituted Community Advisory Panel whose major purpose meanwhile is to offer public input on the operation of the spent fuel storage facility.

“In my opinion there will be a place to ship it in 10 years,” he said. “But if legal hurdles exist, I don’t see how we could prudently move the fuel.”

Meisner was referring to the independent repository that plants such as Maine Yankee are collaborating on in Utah as a prime possibility before the federal government furnishes a location in Nevada it has been promising since the 1990’s.

Lately, however, there have been statements by the federal Dept. of Energy that it would not accept the spent fuel from Utah at the proposed federal Yucca Mountain site after it opens, according to Company President Ted Feigenbaum.

Charles Pray, state nuclear safety advisor, informed officials and the CAP about a recent development in which $10 million has been budgeted for transportation of nuclear waste.

“There always has been money for planning transportation, but this is for interim storage,” he said.

Feigenbaum sees the seed money as a positive thing in light of the lawsuits against the DOE, including Maine Yankee’s own $160 million suit, for default on its promise of provision of a federal repository by 1998. The prospect of one keeps getting pushed back and some observers speculate that it might not be ready before 2020, if then.

“The government’s liability is huge, and they need to get the process moving,” Feigenbaum said.

Maine Yankee’s suit awaits a decision from the federal judge on the damages, which could be forthcoming some time in August, according to Meisner.

Lately there has been an effort in Congress to lobby for legislation to make states keep the nuclear spent fuel where it is, but the state has been working against that kind of move, according to Pray.

In the meantime, the spent fuel in 60 of the concrete storage “silos” and greater than class C nuclear waste in another four casks standing tall at the berm-surrounded installation on the Bailey Point site.

Jim Connell, programs manager for the installation as well as that for Connecticut Yankee and Yankee Rowe, gave a regulatory overview, including a map showing the perimeter around it where there is zero millirems of radiation from there and beyond. The line is slightly in from the shore of the river, which he considers a good thing.

There is also an outer perimeter for security, which is a 300-meter outer circle around the facility. Security measures protecting will continue on as long as the waste is present at the site, according to John Niles, installation manager.

Niles said that Central Maine Power Co. would be able to take advantage of the present security at the site, when asked by CAP member Dan Thompson whether there was any security for CMP’s nearby electric switchyard. The switchyard is a vital part of the New England grid system.

Niles told Thompson that he is unaware of any security measures in place for the CMP property.

There will be some changes to the Maine Yankee site after the company completes its decommissioning work, which Meisner estimated should be finished in June and final reports would then be readied for submission to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) by the end of July.

In his report on the decommissioning effort, Meisner mentioned that the company has recorded over two million safe hours worked since the last lost time injury three years ago. The project dose of radioactivity has been less than half the NRC limit, he said.

Because of inclement weather during the past winter and heavy spring rainfall, the decommissioning project has slowed somewhat. That has moved the completion of site restoration to mid-June.

Currently the last two acres at the plant site are being remediated, and waste soil has been relocated to a site across from the spent fuel storage facility to allow remediation to continue. Project managers have compared the process to backing out of a room that is being painted.

The stockpiled soil will be shipped after decommissioning is finished as a post-site restoration project that Meisner anticipates will be complete mid-August. As of this week, there are 175 rail cars left to ship to the Envirocare low-level nuclear waste dump in Utah.

The recent large influx of cars in the area is due to the 48 recalled cars that are being inspected for moisture content after Envirocare issued a stop order because of leakage discovered from a few cars. Shortly after the company corrected the problem and resumed shipping soil there.

Meisner commended local authorities for the cooperative effort to put to rest any fears about potential radiation hazards from the railcars parked at a siding in Topsham that have since been removed and those parked at the siding in Woolwich.

“It’s unfortunate it happened but fortunate that we had the opportunity to educate the people there is virtually no radiation danger in this operation,” he said.

Meisner expects the NRC to reduce Maine Yankee’s license to the footprint of the storage facility around the end of July and final acceptance of the license termination in early July and termination of non-installation land in August.


-------- nevada

'Yucca is not dead,' head of nuclear energy group says

Industry conference urged to change image of proposed Nevada repository as a 'dump'

By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Wednesday, May 18, 2005 Las Vegas Review-Journal

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/May-18-Wed-2005/news/26544608.html

WASHINGTON -- The new head of the Nuclear Energy Institute called on industry leaders Tuesday to reshape public perception of a Yucca Mountain repository by promoting it as cutting edge science rather than a nuclear waste "dump."

Though it has been delayed, "Yucca is not dead," NEI president Frank "Skip" Bowman, told a conference of about 600 executives in a speech promoting opportunities to expand nuclear power generation.

Although Yucca Mountain remains an industry priority, Bowman said, "it is clear this project requires some adjustments in our approach."

Bowman, a retired Navy admiral, became the trade association's president earlier this year. He said at the NEI-organized conference he did not understand how Yucca Mountain came to be described as a nuclear waste "dump."

"We've allowed that to happen." he said. "This is one of the most complex public works projects in the history of man.

"We need to better explain the plan for Yucca Mountain," Bowman said, pointing to government plans to keep the repository open and monitored for years "in the case we achieve a breakthrough" that would allow waste to be removed and reprocessed.

"Scientists and engineers will remain on the scene to refine and correct the models and predictions," Bowman said. "Thoughtful discussion of the repository concept will boost public confidence. It makes people feel a little better when you talk about the truth."

Repository critics said Bowman was glossing over problems that have caused delays, including a federal court ruling last summer that invalidated a repository safety standard and ongoing investigations of e-mails in which several workers discuss falsifying quality assurance documents.

"He may frame Yucca Mountain in a more evangelical way, but its the same old same old," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said, "NEI can spin all the tales they want, but the truth is out there."

"Despite the NEI's rhetoric, the Yucca Mountain project does call for Nevada to be targeted as the nation's nuclear waste dumping ground," Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said.

In his speech, Bowman said criticism was misguided, saying, "No one wants this project designed and built correctly and operated safely more than the nuclear industry."

Bowman exhorted industry leaders to join him as aggressive promoters of nuclear power, which enjoys Bush administration support of initiatives to encourage construction of new power plants

"It is time to pull the defense off the field and put the offense on the field," Bowman said. "We've got to move more aggressively."

----

Judge Denies Tribal Plea to Halt Nuke Dump

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 18, 2005
Filed at 9:43 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Mountain-Tribe.html?pagewanted=print

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- A federal judge has denied an Indian tribe's plea to block plans for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada based on a claim that the project would violate a 19th century treaty.

U.S. District Court Judge Philip Pro ruled Tuesday that the Western Shoshone National Council could not demonstrate ''immediate and irreparable'' harm because the Yucca Mountain repository has yet to open and a disputed rail line has yet to be built.

Lawyer Robert Hager, representing the tribe, said Wednesday that no decision had been made whether to appeal. He noted that the judge's ruling left open the possibility that the tribe could seek an injunction later.

Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson said the government was gratified by the decision. He said the department filed a motion Monday asking the judge to dismiss the tribe's March 4 lawsuit outright.

In 2002, Congress picked Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the site to entomb 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel now stored in 39 states. The site is at the western edge of the Nevada Test Site, within ancient Shoshone lands.

The tribe claimed the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863 allowed only settlements, mining, ranching, agriculture, railroads, roads and communication routes on Western Shoshone ancestral lands.

The treaty recognized vast stretches in present-day Nevada, California, Utah and Idaho as tribal land. An Indian Claims Commission decided in 1946 that the tribe lost the land through ''gradual encroachment.''

On the Net:

Western Shoshone Defense Project: http://www.wsdp.org/

Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov


-------- ohio

Ohio: Groups seek hearing for Davis-Besse ex-engineer

By TOM HENRY
TOLEDO BLADE STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, May 18, 2005

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050518/NEWS08/505180373

WASHINGTON - Andrew Siemaszko, a former Davis-Besse system engineer banned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month after the agency accused him of withholding information about the plant's old reactor head, has environmental groups in Cleveland and Washington trying to get the action overturned.

Elizabeth Hayden, spokesman for NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., yesterday confirmed the agency had received a request from Ohio Citizen Action and the Union of Concerned Scientists to have Mr. Siemaszko's appeal heard.

David Lochbaum, Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear safety engineer, said in his 21-page filing it is "a miscarriage of justice for the NRC to single out Mr. Siemaszko," and that the former employee's reputation has been damaged by the agency.

"Crafted and announced as such, the NRC provides the public with the totally false perception that Mr. Siemaszko and Mr. Siemaszko alone caused Davis-Besse. Nothing could be farther from the truth and this travesty will in all likelihood be remedied," Mr. Lochbaum wrote.

The groups are appealing an April 21 NRC headquarters announcement in which it proposed a record $5.45 million fine against FirstEnergy Corp. for allowing Davis-Besse's old nuclear reactor head to get so corroded it nearly burst in 2002.

Mr. Siemaszko, who in 2003 had filed a U.S. Department of Labor whistleblower complaint, has called the NRC's allegation an "outrage." His attorney has said he is being made out to be a scapegoat. The NRC had no comment about his request for an appeal, Ms. Hayden said.

In his 2003 complaint, Mr. Siemaszko alleged that FirstEnergy Corp. threatened to fire him if he did not sign a document stating the reactor head was ready to be put back into service while the plant was nearing the end of its two-year refueling outage in 2000. FirstEnergy, which has denied the allegation, won a decision from a labor judge in the summer of 2003.

That case is being appealed.



-------- us nuc waste

House panel votes to boost funds for interim nuclear storage

By Joe Bauman
E-mail: bau@desnews.com
Wednesday, May 18, 2005 Deseret Morning News

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view2/1,4382,600134701,00.html?textfield=nuclear

      A U.S. House subcommittee has voted to increase funding for interim storage of high-level nuclear waste by $10 million, with the group's chairman expressing doubts about the viability of the planned Yucca Mountain permanent storage site.

      Deciding to favor interim storage over permanent could amount to an acknowledgement that Yucca Mountain is far behind schedule.

      The money would go to a U.S. Department of Energy interim facility, so the funding is not aimed at the industry-owned Private Fuel Storage site proposed for Skull Valley, Tooele County. But it doesn't preclude construction of the Tooele plant, raising the possibility of more than one temporary facility.

      In addition, the markup by the House Energy and Water Developments Subcommittee torpedoed funding for developing the controversial "bunker-buster" nuclear weapon. Some Utahns worried that if the bunker buster were built it would be tested at the nearby Nevada Test Site.

      The subcommittee, part of the House Committee on Appropriations, last week approved a $29.7 billion funding bill, to be debated by the full committee today. It would appropriate $661 million for Yucca Mountain.

      A committee press release notes the amount is $84 million above the fiscal 2005 funding and "$10 million over the request" by the Bush administration.

      The Yucca Mountain site is in trouble because of fierce opposition by a top Democrat, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and officials of the state of Nevada. Also, it has recently been slammed by scandal, including claims of falsifications involving scientific studies of the underground site's ability to withstand water erosion through the eons.

      The chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, seemed to question whether Yucca Mountain remains viable. But he supported continuing to spend millions of dollars on the project.

      However, the $10 million extra, according to the committee, would start moving "spent nuclear fuel away from reactor sites to an interim DOE (Department of Energy) storage facility."

      That apparently excludes funding for the Private Fuel Storage site proposed for Skull Valley for the immediate purposes of the bill. PFS, awaiting licensing by the nuclear Regulatory Commission, is a private facility, not a DOE site.

      In comments about the appropriations bill that wereposted on the committee's Web site, Hobson commented that the subcommittee did not fund Yucca Mountain as strongly as he would have liked.

      "I don't like going forward with so little money for Yucca Mountain, but we are playing the hand that we were dealt," he said. Hobson added he remains "hopeful that the administration will come to its senses, or that the Senate will find a creative way to keep Yucca alive."

      John Scofield, spokesman for the appropriations committee, told the Deseret Morning News that the $10 million was added to a like amount already in the bill, for a total of $20 million, "to expedite the storage of special nuclear materials at an interim facility." Special refers to high-level radioactive waste.

      He said the bill does not specify which facility to use for the interim storage.

      The subcommittee markup deleted funding for "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons research. Anti-nuclear activists had feared the weapons would be tested at the Nevada Test Site.

      Vanessa Pierce of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah said the subcommittee trimmed $4 million for bunker-buster research, "which was the total amount that had been requested for it on the nuclear side."

      Pierce added, "That is a huge victory."

      She noted that a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences predicts that bunker-buster weapons used in warfare would kill many people other than those inside the underground fortresses they are designed to penetrate.

      "If we use a bunker buster, there will be thousands to millions of innocent civilian casualties," said Pierce, HEAL's program director. "And that's not a fate we would wish for anyone."

      Closer to home, Pierce said, if the weapon were developed "there's a chance it would be tested, and Utahns would be put at risk for being downwind a second time." By "second time," she was referring to the nuclear bombs detonated above ground at the Nevada Test Site during the 1950s and '60s, dumping radioactive fallout on Utah and other states.

      Although the bunker buster would be designed for underground warfare, Utahns may be nervous because in the past venting has occurred at the Nevada Test Site.

      In 1970, a 10 kiloton nuclear bomb in a test code-named Baneberry exploded 900 feet underground at the Test Site. It vented, with material breaking the surface. Baneberry spewed a cloud of radioactive debris into the atmosphere.


-------- MILITARY 


-------- arms 

Indonesia To Cooperate With China On Producing Missiles: Report

Jakarta (AFP) May 18, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/news/missiles-05zg.html

Indonesia will sign a cooperation agreement with China to develop missiles, a media report quoted Research and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman as saying Wednesday.

An agreement was due to be signed during President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's China visit in June or July along with other agreements on trade and investment, he reportedly told the Republika daily.

The rockets, Kadiman said, would have diameters ranging from 150 to 250 milimeters and a range of between 15 and 30 kilometres.

"We are a maritime country, so our state defence should start from there," Kadiman was quoted as saying. "Long-range missiles, for example, can be launched from small islands or from ships."

He said under the agreement China would provide missiles for Indonesian scientists to dismantle and study, so that by the end of the cooperation term Indonesia could produce its own missiles.

The report gave no further details, and the ministry of research and technology declined immediate comment.

Indonesia is one of the world's largest archipelagos, with more than 17,700 islands.


-------- israel / palestine 

Gaza Violence Threatens Fragile Truce

By IBRAHIM BARZAK
The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 18, 2005; 10:58 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/18/AR2005051800427_pf.html

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- A sharp flare-up of violence Wednesday _ including one Palestinian militant killed, an Israeli airstrike against Hamas and the shelling of Jewish settlements _ jeopardized a fragile truce and threatened to derail efforts to restart Mideast peace talks.

Both Israel and Hamas warned of punishing responses that could degenerate into a resumption of attacks, counterattacks, invasions and bombings.

At nightfall, Palestinian police moved in to try to quell the outbreak in Khan Younis, a poverty-stricken city of 100,000, with a squalid refugee camp of 60,000.

The Palestinian Interior Ministry charged that Hamas militants used civilians as shields, and eight officers were hurt by rocks. "This cannot be accepted and this serious violation will not pass (unanswered)," a ministry statement said.

Such violence has been rare since the cease-fire, declared at a Feb. 8 summit between Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The trouble began just after midnight with Israeli soldiers shooting and killing a 22-year-old Hamas militant on the Gaza-Egypt border. The Israeli military said Palestinians fired rifles and anti-tank grenades at soldiers, who returned the fire.

In apparent retaliation, Palestinians launched more than 20 mortar shells at Jewish settlements across from the refugee camp, slightly wounding an Israeli. For the first time since the truce was declared, Israeli helicopters flew into Palestinian territory and fired a missile, saying the target was "a terrorist cell about to launch further mortars." Two Palestinians were wounded, one critically.

Israel contacted Palestinian officials and demanded that they halt the barrages, said David Baker, an official in Sharon's office. If they do not, he warned, "Israel will take all steps necessary to stop it, whatever that may entail."

Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri called the airstrike the latest in a "series of Israeli escalations. ... The calm declared is a conditional one, and we have the right to respond to any violation."

At nightfall, Palestinian police moved in to the refugee camp to try to stop the rocket and mortar fire, and witnesses saw clashes between police and armed militants. No casualties were reported.

The truce has survived a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in February and a barrage of more than 90 rockets and mortars on Jewish settlements in Gaza on a single day in April after Israeli troops killed three Palestinian teenagers.

The truce is seen as a key part of a chain of events that international mediators hope will lead to resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, frozen during more than four years of bloodshed.

After the death on Nov. 11 of Yasser Arafat, blamed by Israel and the U.S. for encouraging violent Palestinian resistance and attacks on Israelis, Abbas won a Jan. 9 election to succeed him. Abbas has called violence a mistake and has moved to reform his security services.

The Palestinians have had three rounds of local elections and are scheduled to vote for parliament this summer. Simultaneously, Israel is moving ahead with its plan to pull Jewish settlers out of Gaza and part of the West Bank, starting in August.

All this could lead to a calmer atmosphere conducive to peace talks, with the internationally-backed "road map" plan leading to creation of a Palestinian state, accepted in principle by both sides, already on the table.

But a resumption of violence would scuttle any possibility of negotiations.

Israel says it wants to avoid clashes with the Palestinians during its summer pullout from Gaza. At the same time, Israel has pledged harsh retaliation if Jewish settlers or troops are attacked during the operation.

Israel said it had no choice but to hit back. "What do you expect us to do if they are attacking us?" said Raanan Gissin, a Sharon spokesman.

The government has been pressuring Gaza settlers to accept a plan to move them as a group to a coastal area in southern Israel. Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gave settlers seven days Wednesday to accept the offer. She said 426 of the 1,600 families in Gaza settlements have signed up for relocation.

"Someone who joins at the last minute will not get the same things that we can give those who join today," Livni told reporters.

Avner Shimoni, a Gaza settler leader, condemned the ultimatum.

"What are they giving us, what are they offering us?" he told Israel Radio. "We'll just stay in Gush Katif," the largest settlement bloc.

Also Wednesday, the Palestinian legislature approved a new electoral law, but Abbas is expected to veto the legislation, raising fresh doubts about whether a parliament election set for July 17 will be held on time.

Abbas and his Fatah movement, which controls parliament, are wrangling over the method by which the new legislature will be chosen. Abbas wants all lawmakers to be chosen from party slates. However, under the new electoral law passed Wednesday, two-thirds of the legislators would be elected from districts.

Hamas is posing a serious challenge, tapping into voter disaffection with a decade of Fatah rule characterized by corruption and inefficiency.


-------- us

Army trying out new Humvee seatbelts

May 18, 2005 (UPI)

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050518-062421-8397r.htm

Washington, DC, May. 18 -- The U.S. Army is investing in new safety belts and flat-resistant tires for armored Humvees that are sent into war areas, the service said Wednesday.

Soldiers have complained current seatbelts are too short, too difficult to fasten and frequently jam or snag clothing.

The Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center is working with TRW on the project. TRW has three new seat belt designs to try in the Humvees, of which more than 8,000 have been deployed to Iraq.

TARDEC is also working on a new "Zero Pressure Run-Flat Tire" for the Huimvee and Stryker fleet. The tire allows vehicles to drive in all terrains at high speed and long-distances even if damaged by gunfire, land mines or other hazards. It is 25-percent lighter than standard pneumatic tires.

The Army has reported 160 major ground accidents during fiscal 2006 -- not all of them in vehicles -- with 61 occurring on-duty and 99 off-duty. A total of 170 soldiers have died in ground accidents.

----

Military Recruiters Lie About Dangers In Iraq
Army To Suspend Recruiting For Retraining Following Target 5 Investigation

May 18, 2005 ChannelCincinnati.com

http://www.channelcincinnati.com/news/4508233/detail.html

CINCINNATI -- This is the text of WLWT's report exactly as it appeared on the 11 p.m. newscast on May 18, 2005:

Recruiter: "You've got more chance of dying over here than you do over there."

Announcer: "So, why are Tri-state recruits ready to risk their lives not getting honest answers?"

Anchor: "The problem is so bad the military is planning a nationwide stand-down day. That means this Friday the Army won't do any recruiting. Why? ecruiters using outrageous tactics to get your son or daughter to enlist.

"You won't believe how bad the problem is.

"Dave Wagner has the shocking Target 5 investigation."

Dave Wagner: "Each day, thousands of American teenagers consider the merits of military service, young men and women willing to wear a uniform and put their lives on the line. Tonight, a revealing look at what goes on when teenagers go behind closed doors with Tri-state military recruiters. In a startling number of cases, it's high pressure, false statements and 'Conduct Unbecoming.'"

Bill Fisher, retired Army recruiter: "Their job is to call you and try to get your interest sparked."

Recruiter: "I'm not trying to do a sales pitch."

Wagner: "In the world of sale, every pitch has a price."

Fisher: "I think with honesty and integrity you can fill any quota."

Wagner: "In the land of a free-market economy, facts can get in the way of a good prospect."

Recruiter: "You have more chance of dying here in the United States."

Wagner: "Even when the pitchman is in uniform."

Fisher: "It's insane. That's ludicrous. You just don't do that."

Larry Clock: "My name is Larry Clock and I'm a senior."

Wagner: "They are the fresh faces of our future."

Adrienne Morrison. "I'm a senior."

Wagner: "High school seniors in the prime of their lives."

Morrison: "I've received phone calls, letters in the mail."

Wagner: "Kids in the crosshairs of U.S. military recruiters."

Fisher: "In recruiting throughout all the branches, they're looking for the good students, the ones that you consider the good students in high school."

Fisher: "I'm Bill Fisher. I'm a retired master sergeant with the United States Army. I recruited for 13 years. Yea, I'll talk to anybody."

Wagner: "These days, it's a lot easier talking to high school students because military recruiters have easier access to your kids. As part of the No Child Left Behind Act, all schools that receive federal funding, and nearly all of them do, are required to give military recruiters access to your child's name, address and phone number."

Fisher: "From a recruiting standpoint, that's a great thing because a lot of people we couldn't get numbers to actually tell the Army story or the armed forces story we now can."

Recruiter: "I'm not trying to do a sales pitch."

Wagner: "But as Target 5 discovered, those military pitches can turn from fact to fiction in a matter of seconds. Target 5 sent four young men, with hidden cameras, into every Tri-state armed forces recruiting center. The conversations began with talk of job security."

Recruiter: "We guarantee you a job."

Wagner: "Signing bonuses."

Recruiter: "Up to $20,000."

Wagner: "And cash for college."

Recruiter: "Up to $70,000 for college."

Wagner: "But when the questions turn to safety, some Tri-state recruiters make Iraq sound more like a trip to Tahiti than a journey to war."

Recruiter: "You have more chance of dying here in the United States at, what is it, 36-percent die, kill rate here in the United States, people here just dying left and right, you have more chance of dying over here than you do over there."

Wagner: "The U.S. does not have a 36-percent kill rate. If that were true, more than 100 million people, one-third of the U.S. population, would be killed each year."

Fisher: "To just openly not tell the truth, to push it aside, that's just wrong."

Wagner: "Back at the recruiting center."

Recruiter: "The way I am, I'm a no-bull type of guy."

Wagner: "But you'd never know that based upon what he tells our young recruit."

Recruiter: "If you get on the Internet and look up how many deaths are in Columbia, S.C., in the past year, year and a half, and then compare that to how many deaths there are in Iraq, there's more deaths going on in Columbia, S.C., for no reason, none, over a pair of Nikes, over a jacket, people stealing people's wallets, shooting people. There's more deaths going on in Columbia, S.C. -- I know, I just got back from there -- than there was in the whole time when I was in Iraq."

Wagner: "So Target 5 called the Columbia, S.C., police department, and despite the words of our Tri-state recruit, this city is hardly a hotbed for crime."

Sgt. Thomas Thomas of Columbia, S.C., police department: "There were 16 homicides in the city of Columbia in 2004. This year to date we have five in the city."

Wagner: "And if that recruiter thinks Columbia, S.C., listen to what this GI Joe Isuzu says about the danger of driving around Dayton, Ohio."

Recruiter: "Dayton area alone, which is about four or five counties, Dayton area alone, 1,500 people died in two weeks. You know what that was from? Car wrecks. Those numbers that we get, we get from the actual highway patrol. So, I mean, all that stuff's factual. So, you look at that way. We've lost 1,500 soldiers so far over in Iraq. We've been over there for three years. If you add it together, 1,500 people died in five counties alone within two weeks, just from car wrecks."

Wagner: "The truth is, there aren't 1,500 deaths from car wrecks in the entire state of Ohio for an entire year."

Fisher: "Conduct unbecoming a non-commissioned officer is what those statements are. I don't know where he came up with it. It's just insane. Yea, yea, he could be your car salesman of the Isuzu."

Wagner: "The national spokesman for the Army recruiting command at Fort Knox tells Target 5: "I don't know why anybody would even let that phrase even come out of their mouth. For whatever reasons, these recruiters must have found these talking points somewhere on their own. I don't know."

Wagner: "Do you think that in the private conversations they're having with recruits here, that they're thinking, no one will ever check this, no one will ever know?"

Fisher: "I'm sure that anyone who could tell that, I'm sure that's exactly what they're thinking."

Wagner: "Still to come, the pressure to fill quotas, the pressure put on recruits, more tall tales and the immediate action the military has taken in response to our Target 5 investigation.

"Now, more of our Target 5 investigation into Tri-state military recruiters offering big bonuses and tall tales to Tri-state teenagers.

"Since the war began, about 1,500 U.S. servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq. The violence has made military recruiting more difficult, often because parents worry about their kids' safety. But recruiters are tracking down teens when parents aren't around, and the pressure can be immense. As we continue our Target 5 investigation, 'Conduct Unbecoming.'"

Wagner (in Milford High School classroom): "How many of you have been approached by a military recruiter in the past year?"

(Several students raise hands).

Wagner: "In Mr. Jewell's American government class …"

Student: "I think they're really biased."

Wagner: "Students are talking about military recruiters."

Student: "A recruiter called me up and told me they got a new deal going on, $5,000 to enlist now for the Army."

Student: "I was told that if I signed up for the Marines they'd give me a $10,000 signing bonus on the spot. I didn't believe that one."

Wagner: "Signing bonuses and college cash are being used to attract fresh faces to the armed forces. But Army recruiters have missed their quotas for the past three months; the Marines, short of their goal for the past four months. When this high school senior says his parents are concerned about his safety in the military, this recruiter puts on the full-court press."

Recruiter: "Don't hesitate. Don't leave me hanging. Even if they really don't want to talk about it, we can still sit down and talk, all right? Because by you walking in here, that shows that you're interested, and I'd hate for you to be denied this United States Army opportunity. Honestly."

Fisher: "Recruiters are supposed to be at the top of their career field throughout the United States, the best infantry, the best cooks, the best medical technicians, the best, the people you want to represent your service. These are the ones you bring out on recruiting day.

"There are some soldiers who are great soldiers but pitiful salesman."

Recruiter: "Of course, the news media is going to blow it way out of proportion."

Wagner: "While some recruiters blame the media for hyping the danger in Iraq, this recruiter, who served on the front lines, has a more straightforward approach."

Student: "I'm curious about how dangerous it really is over there, because in the news and everything people are dying."

Recruiter: "Yea, it's war, you know?"

Wagner: "This week in the Tri-state the realties of war are tragically clear, another goodbye for two young men who fought and died. early a third of those killed in Iraq are under the age of 22, the vast majority from the Army and Marine Corps, 111 of them from Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. As a country honors their sacrifice, these high school seniors get ready for their military service with a sendoff and straight talk from their local congressman."

Rep. Steve Chabot: "We need to make sure that those kids who are considering a military career get the true facts. They're great young men and women, they're serving their country or will be in the near future, and we ought to be honest with them. We ought to let the kids know the truth and what's really happening. And there's no question, that Iraq can be a dangerous place."

Recruiter: "I was watching the news the other day. In Cincinnati alone, as of April, there were 867 deaths in Cincinnati."

Wagner: "While some recruiters play it loose with the facts."

Recruiter: "Eighty-eight people over there have died from gunshot wounds."

Wagner: "Bill Fisher says it worked for him to play it straight."

Fisher: "We have like the greatest armed forces in the world right now. The kids are just fantastic. And to sit back and say something like this is just silly. You don't need to. You don't have to sway them by innuendos or lies. You just have to search for those who want to join, and there are tons of them."

Recruiter: "I can at least provide you with honest answers. OK? I can be the Honest Abe around the corner."

Wagner: "Tonight the spokesman for the U.S. Army recruiting command at Fort Knox say he believes the recruiters aren't deliberately making false statements.

"This Friday, Army recruiting will be suspended nationwide so recruiters can be retrained, and Target 5 is assured all recruiters will be told to stop making these statements without evidence to back them up."



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


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

House Approves $32 Billion Security Budget

By ERIC LIPTON
May 18, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/politics/18homeland.html?pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, May 17 - The House passed a nearly $32 billion budget on Tuesday for the Department of Homeland Security that includes more than President Bush had requested to curtail the flow of illegal immigrants and enhance efforts to find and deport them.

But reflecting bipartisan frustration with the slow response of the department to requests from Congress for progress reports, the House cut the Bush administration's request for a number of major programs, including one that would replace Coast Guard ships and planes. The legislation was approved 424 to 1, with the "no" vote coming from Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas.

The department's budget for the 2006 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, still requires Senate approval, and the administration has objected to a number of provisions in the $31.9 billion bill, so it will most likely change a fair amount before it becomes law.

But the version passed by the House calls for an overall increase in enacted spending of about 4 percent, and $1.3 billion more than Mr. Bush requested.

"At a time when we are trimming funding for other domestic programs, homeland security remains our top concern," said Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky and the lead author of the bill. "The most important job that Congress has is ensuring the safety of the American people, and this bill reflects that priority."

The increased spending on border patrol and immigration enforcement reflects the rising frustration by members of Congress that the nation is not doing enough to control the flow of illegal immigrants, a concern only heightened by recent reports that Al Qaeda might try to use the porous borders to sneak operatives into the country.

The bill, along with other recent action by Congress, would provide financing for about 1,500 new border patrol officers and 570 new immigration enforcement officers, as well as 3,870 additional beds in detention centers, according to the House Appropriations Committee.

The department would also receive more money for equipment that could detect radioactive materials being smuggled by terrorists, as well as extra financing to examine cargo in foreign ports before it leaves for the United States, expanding the program to about 50 ports worldwide.

Overall, the budget for Customs and Border Protection, a division of the department, would climb to $6.9 billion, up about 9 percent, while the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another division, would go to more than $4 billion, up about 20 percent, according to the Appropriations Committee.

The bill does not include a proposal by the administration to increase aviation security fees by $3 per passenger for a typical flight, raising $1.7 billion in new fees. But it would still allocate more money for the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees aviation security, among other things.

There is $468 million set aside for equipment to detect explosives at airports, 17 percent more than the current budget. But the bill calls for a penalty of $100,000 a day if the department fails to triple the amount of cargo inspected before it is loaded onto passenger aircraft.

That penalty is one of several punitive provisions in the bill.

The single biggest, by far, would cut the Coast Guard program for ship and plane building by $466 million, down from the $966 million Mr. Bush had proposed, because the Coast Guard did not lay out a revised 20-year spending plan. An additional $20 million was withheld from the office of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff until the department submits various reports Congress has requested on the status of programs.

"I have consistently and repeatedly told the department that I would require accountability and cooperation," Mr. Rogers said. "It is a simple equation: no information equals no money."

Brian Roehrkasse, a department spokesman, said the department was trying to comply with the request for status reports.

"We have requested that Congress help us prioritize the over 260 different reports required by the department from last year's appropriation process," Mr. Roehrkasse said.

The House also moved Tuesday to eliminate $100,000 set aside for a Hollywood consultant, the actress Bobbie Faye Ferguson, who was hired last year to advise film and television makers who intend to portray the agency or its employees.

In another amendment, $100 million was added to the bill to help states cover the cost of requirements associated with tougher federal standards related to the issuance of driver's licenses.

Democratic leaders said that despite the overwhelming vote, they remain dissatisfied with parts of the bill, including a reduction in grants to local fire departments and in those for state and local governments to help them prepare for a future attack.

The debate is continuing in Congress over how these grants would be distributed - based either largely on formulas that require distribution in all states or a determination by the department about which cities are at the highest risk of attack.

----

House Scales Back Color - Coded Alert System

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 18, 2005
Filed at 8:21 p.m. ET

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-Homeland-Security.html?pagewanted=print
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/18/AR2005051801717_pf.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Homeland Security Department would be forced to scale back its color-coded alert system for nationwide terror threats and tailor public warnings to specific, targeted locations under a House bill approved Wednesday.

Changes in the threat system were part of a wide-ranging $34 billion bill, approved by a 424-4 vote, that would set Homeland Security priorities for next year. It also would require the hiring of 2,000 border patrol agents -- far above the 210 requested by President Bush -- and bolster efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the United States.

Additionally, the bill directs Homeland Security to give more intelligence about nuclear and biological weapons to state, local and private-sector officials. It also provides $11 million to help research companies to deploy anti-terror technology more quickly without the fear of facing product liability lawsuits.

''We've had to make hard choices and we've had to set priorities,'' said Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.

''As a result, we have not funded every initiative to protect against every conceivable mean by which a terrorist might mount an attack,'' Cox said. ''But what we have done is base our funding decisions on the best intelligence available -- on terrorist capabilities and intentions, and on the actual risk of a terrorist attack.''

The White House issued a statement of tepid support for the legislation, saying it has serious concerns that parts of the bill could ''hinder the department's ability to implement its various missions.''

The Senate is working on its own version of a Homeland Security bill, but a Republican spokeswoman could not offer a deadline for when it might be finished.

The color-coded system, introduced in March 2002, has been widely criticized for being too vague to help the public understand what kind of threat it faces. Under the House legislation, Homeland Security would have to give specific information about an attack's target and how to respond to the threat. It would also make the color system optional.

Ideally, Republican aides said, alerts would be issued to geographic regions or industry, similar to when threat levels were raised to orange, or high risk, at financial sectors in New York City, Washington and northern New Jersey last August.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is considering changes to the system, which could be announced as soon as next month. The national alert level stands at yellow -- meaning elevated risk.

No lawmakers challenged the proposed changes.

''The system has provided more material for late-night comedians than effective information on threats for the public,'' said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

Though Democrats said the bill did not go far enough to shore up vulnerabilities at airports and chemical plants, Thompson called it a ''good start.''

The House plan also changes the so-called ''30-minute rule'' that prohibits airplane passengers to leave their seats within a half-hour flying in or out of Reagan National Airport in Washington. The amendment by Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., would reduce the time to 15 minutes. The ban has been in place since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.


On the Net:

The House Homeland Security Authorization Act of 2006, H.R. 1817, can be found at: http://thomas.loc.gov/



-------- ENERGY 


-------- alternative energy

Minnesota Aims to Be Saudi Arabia of Renewable Fuels

ST. PAUL, Minnesota, May 18, 2005 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2005/2005-05-18-09.asp#anchor5

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has signed into law a measure that will double the amount of ethanol in gasoline in Minnesota. "This bill strengthens our rural economy, improves our air quality and reduces our unhealthy dependence on foreign oil," said Governor Pawlenty, a Republican. "It also puts our state at the leading edge of a very promising industry. We truly are on our way to becoming the Saudi Arabia of renewable fuels."

Currently, a Minnesota law enacted in 1997 requires all gasoline sold within the state to include 10 percent ethanol (E-10).

Under the legislation signed by the Governor last week, a new E-20 mandate would take effect in 2013 unless ethanol has already replaced 20 percent of the state's motor vehicle fuel by 2010.

Increasing to a 20 percent blend could mean an economic impact of $1.58 billion and 6,157 jobs, Minnesota officials said.

"Utilizing homegrown renewable fuels is good for our farmers, it's good for rural economic development, it's good for national security, and it's good for the environment," said Pawlenty. "I would much rather have the fuel in our cars come from the Midwest than from the Middle East."

Pawlenty points out that in Brazil, about 15 percent vehicles use a blend of gasoline that contains nearly 100 percent ethanol. The remaining vehicles use blends of 24 percent ethanol with 76 percent gasoline. "These cars are manufactured by many of the same major automobile companies who manufacture cars for use in the United States," he said.

A research report from the Minnesota Center for Automotive Research at Minnesota State University-Mankato showed that there were no drivability or material compatibility problems experienced by 15 vehicles of various years, makes and models using E-30.

Minnesota has North America's largest network of E-85 gas stations with about 130 stations now online. Some 120,000 Minnesotans now drive flexible fuel cars designed to burn either gasoline or E-85, a blend of 85 percent ethyl alcohol and 15 percent gasoline.

E-85 is produced from the starch in agricultural products, primarily domestically produced corn. Growing corn removes CO2 from the atmosphere so that the total effect of using ethanol made from corn is a reduction in greenhouse emissions when compared to the use of petroleum fuels.

Minnesota already has the highest renewable fuel use per capita in the nation. Minnesota was the first state to require the use of ethanol in gasoline. Other states are beginning to follow suit.

Last year Hawaii enacted a measure similar to Minnesota's mandate. The Governor of Montana signed their new E-10 requirement into law last Friday. Through his leadership as chairman of the Governors' Ethanol Coalition, Pawlenty is encouraging other states to join the movement.

"This legislation is a win for everybody," Minnesota Corn Growers Association President Gene Sandager said. "By increasing demand for ethanol, local farmers now have a larger market for what they produce right here in Minnesota. That's good for the entire state."

The ethanol industry provides jobs for more than 5,300 Minnesotans and pumps $1.3 billion dollars into Minnesota's economy. There are 14 ethanol plants in Minnesota that produce more than 450 million gallons of ethanol every year, with two more plants currently under construction. Minnesota ranks fourth in the nation in production of fuel-grade ethanol, after Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska. Minnesota corn growers send approximately 15 percent of their crop to ethanol plants. 



-------- OTHER


-------- health

Diet as a Treatment for Breast Cancer

May 18, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/opinion/18wed4.html?pagewanted=print

In this supermedicated nation of ours, it is heartening to learn that dietary changes can also have an impact on cancer. People have long suspected that diet plays a role in malignancies, but they lacked definitive proof that changing one's diet could reduce the risk of cancer. Now, for the first time, a large study has shown that breast cancer patients may be able to reduce the chances that their tumors will return by following a stringent low-fat diet. Although some scientists doubt that the findings are robust enough to warrant great confidence, any breast cancer patient who can forgo the pleasures of fatty foods would probably be wise to do so.

The researchers studied some 2,400 postmenopausal women who were healthy after receiving standard treatments for early breast cancer, including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy or hormonal therapy. Some women were counseled to follow a very low-fat diet, and others to eat a balanced diet. After five years, only 9.8 percent of those on a low-fat diet had a recurrence of cancer, compared with 12.4 percent on the balanced diet.

That was a statistically significant difference but barely so, causing some scientists to exult that diet had finally been proved beneficial and others to lament that the proof seemed mighty slim. The greatest effect was found in women whose breast cancers were not fueled by estrogen.

The findings will need to be confirmed by additional studies, but even before any more results are in, it may well make sense for breast cancer patients to follow a low-fat diet. There is little likelihood of harm, and low-fat diets may have health benefits beyond any impact on cancer.


-------- imf / world bank / wto (economics)

Trading down?

May 18, 2005 Washington Times
By Alan Tonelson

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050517-091434-8721r.htm

Time to face facts. The proposed Central America Free Trade Agreement isn't foundering in Congress because labor unions and sugar and textile interests oppose it. It's foundering because CAFTA confirms U.S. trade policy has degenerated from a driver of economic growth to a sick joke. And the voters Congress listens to are no longer laughing.

    The claims and promises made on CAFTA's behalf are so flagrantly inaccurate, so internally contradictory and so transparently absurd even its supporters can't possibly take them seriously. But they keep filling congressional testimony and newspaper editorials anyway.

    For example, CAFTA's champions contend it will create major new export markets for goods and services, and increase U.S. output, employment and wages. Supposedly, this is why the president made it the centerpiece of his trade policy this year.

    But has the CAFTA lobby looked at the five Central American countries in question and the Dominican Republic lately? Their populations together total about 45 million — roughly that of California and New Jersey combined. But about half lives below local poverty lines, and few of the rest fare much better. That's why their economies together total only some $85 billion — about the equivalent of New Haven, Conn.

    Anyone who believes opening trade with these impoverished mini-markets can boost growth in the $12 trillion U.S. economy must have bought an elevator pass in high school.

    CAFTA supporters cite impressive regional import figures nonetheless. Yet the CAFTA 6's biggest imports by far aren't consumed in these countries. They consist of fabric and apparel parts sent down from American mills, sewn together in the region, and re-exported to the United States. Such shipments don't serve new foreign markets and thereby increase total demand for U.S.-made goods. They serve the same old U.S. market — only with super-cheap Central American apparel workers replacing many U.S. counterparts.

    In other words, the CAFTA 6 aren't mainly markets for real U.S. exports at all. They're sweatshops. And because they are too poor to create genuine two-way exchange, CAFTA isn't really a trade agreement at all. It's an outsourcing agreement.

    Yes, American consumers will get slightly cheaper clothing. But legions of the working poor in America will lose their best hope for jobs in industries like apparel that pay decent wages.

    This is a way to raise U.S. living standards? After 15 years of similar trade agreements, no wonder U.S. spending is increasingly financed by massive foreign borrowing, not wages and salaries.

    Even so, the CAFTA lobby insists, the agreement will help the region, U.S. textile companies, and at least some of their American workers compete with Asian rivals — whose garments use little American fabric. Unfortunately, such production-sharing arrangements have long been easily foiled by the Asians' willingness to do whatever it takes to protect and even increase market share — including subsidizing exports and manipulating exchange rates. Nothing about CAFTA will change these practices.

    Worse, CAFTA's numerous loopholes will allow mountains of Asian fabric and garments into the U.S. anyway, unless Central Americans lower their own wages and other costs even further.

    Either way, U.S. apparel, textiles and similar imports will continue soaring and these industries' remaining U.S. workers — often women and minorities — will move from work to welfare or to much lower-paying service-sector jobs. Only multinational apparel companies and mega-retailers like Wal-Mart will benefit.

    American farmers, meanwhile, are being told that with lower Central American tariffs, U.S. agricultural exports will surge under CAFTA. Yet even if these markets contained significant purchasing power, many agricultural tariffs will be phased out over 10, 15, and even 20 years. Budget and tax policy promises made in Washington with 20-year payoffs are all but worthless. Why believe similar tariff promises made by foreign governments?

    Finally, there's the overarching argument CAFTA will increase U.S. net exports to Central America because the CAFTA 6's tariffs overall are much higher than U.S. tariffs.

    Unfortunately, the CAFTA proponents then turn around and insist the agreement will expand Central America's net exports to the United States, and spur its economic development. Both claims, of course, cannot be true simultaneously.

    CAFTA supporters have the nerve to dismiss the critics and a skeptical public as protectionists. But Americans clearly will support serious trade policies that deal effectively with the real challenges posed by globalization. So give them a meaningful response to predatory Chinese trade practices. Give them trade deals with regions where consumers can actually afford American-made products. Give them realistic ideas for reducing skyrocketing U.S. trade deficits and resulting international debts, and for strengthening the scores of major domestic industries losing ground to imports. Just don't waste time on thinly disguised outsourcing shams like CAFTA.

    
    Alan Tonelson, research fellow with the U.S. Business and Industry Council, is a columnist for americaneconomicalert.org Web site and author of "The Race to the Bottom." 



-------- ACTIVISTS

Protesters Gather Outside Halliburton Shareholder Meeting

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 Democracy Now! Headlines

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/1434246

In Houston, protesters are gathering today outside Halliburton's annual shareholder's meeting to protest what they view as the company's war profiteering. In addition the group CorpWatch is publishing an Alternative Annual Report on the company -- which was once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. According to CorpWatch Halliburton has pulled in over $7 billion in revenue for its recent work in Iraq - twice what it made in Iraq in the previous year. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition the Justice Department is investigating Halliburton's work in Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, and the Balkans.