NucNews January 5, 2006 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety After Environmental Accidents, Public Deserves Full Candor The Scientist 1991, 5(8):11 Author: LEE A. KIMBALL, p. 11 Published 15 April 1991 Posted Online January 5, 2006 http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/10734/ When the Robert E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant near Rochester, N.Y., released radioactive steam into the atmosphere in 1982, utility representatives and government officials were quick to call it a "problem" or an "occurrence," rather than an "accident," which--in nuclear power-generation terms--is far more serious. Nor did they frame the situation as a "risk" story. Nobody disputes the importance of Antarctic research to understanding the earth's global cycles and systems. But increasing public concern about strengthening Antarctica's environmental protection has raised fear among scientists that overregulation will impede their investigations. They point out that any adverse impacts from scientific research carried out in Antarctica are at worst quite localized and that much of the public mistakenly assumes that such research causes global environmental damage. An example is the ozone hole, which many people believe results from activities in Antarctica even though it actually stems from those occurring outside the region. Still, Antarctic research--and, particularly, associated transport and supply operations--is not impact-free. The near-pristine nature of Antarctica is one of the things that makes it such a valuable research laboratory. In a land where traces of natural and human events are frozen in virtual perpetuity, even localized contamination can distort research results. A recent accident proves the point. In early 1989, the Bahia Paraiso, used both as a tour ship and a supply boat in the Argentine research program, ran aground off the Antarctic Peninsula, spilling its cargo of fuel oil bound for Argentine research stations. Although the spill's effects are still under study, long-term research on Antarctic species--including investigations of how increased ultraviolet radiation penetrating through the Antarctic ozone hole affects marine life--has apparently been compromised. Obviously, the goal of Antarctic research should be to minimize harmful effects without curtailing significant scientific activities that contribute to global understanding and well-being. But who draws the line? And what criteria should be used? What ground rules make the most sense? First, we need to strengthen the environmental impact assessment procedure for scientific research and associated logistics operations in Antarctica. Focused not only on potential adverse impacts, but also on feasible alternatives, a review should reveal whether the research in question can be carried out as effectively and with less impact by other means outside of Antarctica. Key here is making this procedure subject to open and widespread review. Second, to make sure that the research carried out in Antarctica remains environmentally benign and complies with all applicable regulations, follow-up evaluation and oversight must be provided for. Third, we need well-defined principles for determining whether research proposals would extend the range of human knowledge and understanding as well as satisfy accepted performance standards. Essentially guidelines for international peer review, these principles could help weed out poorly designed or unnecessarily duplicative research. Next week, when parties to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty meet in Madrid, they will focus on a draft protocol dealing with comprehensive environmental protection of Antarctica. The draft's provisions on environmental impact assessment would create new opportunities for widespread review and comment before final decisions are made on proposed activities. The protocol would also strengthen institutional mechanisms for ongoing evaluation and oversight of the adequacy of these protective measures, including establishment and maintenance of a regional data base. Means to increase international cooperation in avoiding ad- verse environmental impacts-- whether through increased sharing of information on appropriate procedures and technologies or the establishment of shared research and logistics facilities to avoid concentrating research stations and programs in specific regions--will also be considered at the meeting. The physical isolation of Antarctica has fostered a collaborative spirit among investigators perhaps unequaled here in the world. That a scientific organization--the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR)--has grown up around the broad range of Antarctic science issues, rather than in accordance with the normal breakdown along scientific disciplines, helps perpetuate that spirit. Contacts made at SCAR meetings form the basis of frequent, year-round communications. In 1987, SCAR collaborated in a seminar on the Southern Ocean with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations family of organizations. More recently, SCAR developed a report on global change research in Antarctica--its contribution to planning for the worldwide International Geosphere/Biosphere Program (IGBP), a far-reaching effort to describe and understand the interactive physical, chemical, and biological processes that regulate the earth's systems and human effects on them. Antarctic scientists are beginning to emphasize the importance of designing top-notch monitoring protocols that would make such global process studies easier to conduct. One idea on the table is to let SCAR take the lead in producing these protocols, drawing on its long-standing interdisciplinary composition. Specifically, SCAR could identify information needs and gaps, agree on baselines for monitoring, and define the kind, location, and frequency of indicators to be monitored. In turn, these indicators could be incorporated into widely accepted monitoring protocols that reflect global aims and priorities and draw on models developed by the world meteorological community. Equally important is the question of integrated data management. Whether for Antarctica alone or as part of global scientific investigations, data collection and management programs need to be better integrated so that all findings can be compared and shared--already a high priority within Antarctic circles, including SCAR. By allowing nations to merge research objectives and split total program costs, international cooperation can also help secure funding for long-term initiatives in global monitoring. Following the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources model, the scientific committee meets annually to evaluate five-year projected research plans, to define priorities, and to coordinate national research efforts to achieve them. Although each nation ultimately sets its own research agenda and level of funding, endorsements by the decision-making commission can sway national decisions. In a more formal arrangement, the 1984 Long-Term Financing of the Cooperative Program for Monitoring and Evaluation of the Long-Range Transmission of Air Pollutants in Europe, a protocol to the 1979 Economic Commission for Europe's Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, establishes a monitoring program that its parties collectively agree to fund. As the Antarctic component of IGBP is elaborated, similar funding commitments might be sought. Lee Kimball is a senior associate at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., and the author of Southern Exposure: Deciding Antarctica's Future (Washington, D.C., World Resources Institute, 1990), from which this essay is adapted. By framing the story as they did, most discussions of the event--and the subsequent news coverage--focused primarily on the "relatively minor problem" and what caused it, and not on the short-term and long-term risks to nearby residents from exposure to radiation. Unfortunately, the Ginna case is not an exception to the rule. Politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate managers regularly insist that information about environmental risks and crises be channeled through them so they can screen the news before it is funneled through the media to the public. The news allegedly is screened to protect the public from itself. In reality, it is frequently screened to protect government agencies and corporations that have acted irresponsibly, or to avoid a damaging public opinion shift against an industry. Scientists have several reasons for remaining silent when all of the relevant facts they have generated are not disseminated. Some may actually buy into the arguments that the public must be protected against itself, or that an industry or agency must be protected. Other scientists may be paid by the government and corporate officials who insist that they go through the "proper" channels in releasing information. One can be fired for insisting upon something (full disclosure) the boss doesn't want to do. Another reason is that scientists usually see themselves strictly as makers of scientific decisions, and not as the appropriate makers of political decisions about what is and what is not good for the public to know. Generally, scientists also view themselves as seekers, not disseminators, of truth. They are accustomed to seeing information held back because that is the essence of science: Facts are not disseminated until they are "validated" through the referee process. Some scientists may see parallels between that process and the process through which political decisions are "validated" by government and corporate leaders. Moreover, the culture of science certainly does not encourage scientists to get involved in politics. Since the release of risk-assessment information is essentially a political process, scientists tend to avoid it. Despite these many reasons for remaining silent in the face of potential environmental dangers, scientists must insist on the timely release of information because people have a right to know when their lives or the lives of their children are in danger. Also, the media will produce stories regardless of whether credible sources of scientific information--that is, scientists--cooperate with them. The major reason that these stories are frequently quite weak and misleading is that such sources have not cooperated. A National Aeronautic and Space Administration scientist recently complained about media coverage of one of NASA's secret missions for the United States Army. "They got everything wrong," he said. Of course they did; they had to do a story and nobody would talk. Scientists are uniquely qualified to argue for full disclosure of all information surrounding environmental crises. They are trained observers who have a better feel for risk assessment data than government and corporate officials do. Scientists also are less likely to let self-interest dictate that certain information not be released. Furthermore, many scientists, unlike many government and corporate officials, recognize the importance of the news media in conveying risk information. Research clearly shows that people rely on the media for information about risks of all kinds, and they can be influenced by that information. Given the media's importance in conveying risk information, it is critical that scientists be allowed to work with reporters to ensure that the public gets information as it becomes available. Even if the picture of a crisis is incomplete, as was the case with the recent oil spill in the Persian Gulf, scientists must work with journalists to make risk information available as soon as possible. Scientists not only must argue for full disclosure, but also must have an important say in how a story is "framed," which means deciding what a story means, what the appropriate context is, and how it is presented to the media. Typically, government and corporate officials frame stories in ways that will minimize political or economic damage. A study of magazine and newspaper coverage of the 1982 Ginna accident suggests that utility and government officials did not wish to report information until they had the "complete picture," and then they tried to frame the story as a "relatively minor problem." Newsweek (Feb. 8, 1982, page 65) quoted a Rochester Gas & Electric Co. spokesman as saying, "This accident didn't come within a country mile of Three Mile Island." And a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman was quoted by the Los Angeles Times (Jan. 26, 1982, page 5) as saying, "I couldn't even try to compare it to Three Mile Island. You would not really say this is an accident. It is a `problem' and an `occurrence.'" The lack of information and the inappropriate framing of the Ginna accident were misleading at best. Residents should have had immediately the information they needed to decide whether to leave the area. When information is not made available immediately, corporate and government officials are, in effect, making the decision (usually to stay) for residents. Would scientists have framed the story differently? Probably so. They presumably would have been more honest about calling the accident an accident, and they probably would have presented specific risk assessments. In playing a more proactive role in the reporting of environmental crises, scientists must avoid two pitfalls into which many government and corporate officials have fallen. First, they must not make judgments about how the public will accept information because they then will inevitably worry that certain information is "dangerous" to publicize. That is the short road to censorship. Second, scientists should not underestimate the intelligence of the public. Many corporate and government officials are reluctant to discuss risk assessments because they fear journalists and the public cannot understand them. However, risk assessments must be discussed and journalists must report them. In the coverage of the Ginna accident, slightly more than one-half of the stories we studied reported risk data. Articles that did not report risk data were primarily "second day" stories. Writers and editors covering the Ginna accident apparently assumed it was enough to report the risk assessments one time and then move on to other aspects of the story. That is unsound for two reasons. First, many readers need reassurance that their chances of suffering harm have not increased since the "first day" story was published. Second, journalists covering a breaking story about a hazard should continue to seek risk information from a variety of sources, including the source from whom an initial risk assessment was obtained. Even when scientists and journalists work together to enlighten the public about environmental dangers, the task is difficult--primarily because it is so hard to explain how risk assessments are developed and what they mean. For example, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Rochester Gas & Electric Co. said that about 3 millirem of radiation were released at the Ginna plant boundary and that the risk to the human body was minimal. Where did that number come from? And how many millirem are required to harm the human body? Some journalists ignore specific numerical estimates (only 12 percent of the articles about Ginna reported quantitative risk data, for instance), but it is far better to report the numerical estimates and then use translating strategies--definitions, anal- ogies, comparisons, examples, and testimonials--to make them understandable. The Associated Press, for example, tried to place the 3 millirem number in perspective by pointing out that a dose of 600,000 millirem is considered lethal. The Los Angeles Times said 3 millirem is less than the amount of radiation one would get after flying from New York to London and back (Jan. 26, 1982, page 5). Scientist sources can and should help journalists think of translating strategies that will help media audiences understand complex risk assessments. That, in turn, will help audiences understand the magnitude of an environmental crisis. Many scientists are convinced this is not their job, but they must understand that it is, indeed, their job to help the public understand science--specifically, risk assessments. One problem with making the public understand is that reporters don't always understand complex scientific issues themselves. Editors, of course, can help ensure the dissemination of accurate, clear, precise, and timely information by assigning to crises journalists who are well-educated about science and whose beats are science-related. In the Ginna case, overall media coverage was weak because, acting on the best information furnished to them by government and corporate officials who characterized the event as a "problem," the media did not approach the event as a "risk story." When editors think they are covering a "risk story," they send their specialized science reporters on an overt hunt for details about the level of risk and tell them to seek explanatory information. In most other cases, they send general assignment reporters and tell them to focus on what happened, rather than on the level of risk presented by the accident. For their part, scientists must learn to recognize when they are dealing with scientifically illiterate reporters. They may well have to take some time to teach them about science and risk assessment. In the end, it is scientists--rather than corporate or government officials or representatives of the media--who must define "responsible" coverage of environmental risk and crisis. After they do so, it is also up to scientists to help insure the immediate dissemination of the best information available by working with journalists to explain clearly the risks associated with environmental events, regardless of whether such events are cast by others as mere problems or occurrences. Sharon Dunwoody is a professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Michael Ryan is a professor at the University of Houston's School of Communication. James Tankard is a professor in the Department of Journalism at the University of Texas-Austin. -------- africa Clandestine nuclear deals traced to Sudan Ian Traynor and Ian Cobain Thursday January 5, 2006 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,14658,1678336,00.html International investigators and western intelligence have for the first time named Sudan as a major conduit for sophisticated engineering equipment that could be used in nuclear weapons programmes. Hundreds of millions of pounds of equipment was imported into the African country over a three-year period before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 and has since disappeared, according to Guardian sources. Western governments, UN detectives and international analysts trying to stem the illicit trade in weapons of mass destruction technology are alarmed by the black market trade. A European intelligence assessment obtained by the Guardian says Sudan has been using front companies and third countries to import machine tools, gauges and hi-tech processing equipment from western Europe for its military industries in recent years. But it says that Sudan is also being used as a conduit, as much of the equipment is too sophisticated for use in the country itself. "The suspicion arises that at least some of the machinery was not destined for or not only destined for Sudan," the assessment says. "Among the equipment purchased by Sudan there are dual-use goods whose use in Sudan appears implausible because of their high technological standard." Western analysts and intelligence agencies suspect the equipment has been or is being traded by the nuclear proliferation racket headed by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who admitted nuclear trading two years ago and is under house arrest in Islamabad. Khan is known to have visited Sudan at least once between 1998 and 2002, and the suspicion is he may have used the country as a warehouse for the hi-tech engineering equipment he was selling to Libya, Iran and North Korea for the assembly of centrifuges for enriching uranium, the most common way of building a nuclear bomb. Sudan has been ravaged by internal conflicts for decades, and has until recently been governed by an Islamist regime. Analysts point out that a "failing state" such as Sudan is an ideal candidate for the illicit trading. David Albright, who is investigating the various players in the Khan network and tracks nuclear proliferation for the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said about £20m worth of dual-use engineering equipment was imported by Sudan between 1999 and 2001. The purchases were denominated in German marks (before the introduction of the euro), suggesting that at least some of the equipment came from Germany. Investigators say the machinery has not been found in Sudan. Nor has it been found in Libya, since Tripoli gave up its secret nuclear bomb project in December 2003. Given Osama bin Laden's long relationship with Sudan, where he lived before moving to Afghanistan, there had been suspicions of al-Qaida involvement. But the goods have not been found in Afghanistan either. "A huge amount of dual-use equipment was bought by Sudan and people don't know where it went to," Mr Albright said. "It's a big mystery. The equipment has not been found anywhere." A senior international investigator confirmed that Sudan had been importing the material and that the transports had ceased in 2001. "No one now seems to be buying to that extent," he said. "Perhaps the activity stopped because they got all that they needed." While the Khan operation is a main suspect, Iran is also suspected of being behind the Sudanese dealings. "There is the Khan network and then there is a much bigger network in this, and that is the Iranian network," the investigator said. Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the same European intelligence assessment - which draws on material gathered by British, French, German and Belgian agencies - concluded that the Iranian government had been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to build a nuclear bomb. Western intelligence and Mr Albright identified a state-owned firm in Khartoum as a "pivotal organisation" in Sudan's procurement of weapons and dual-use technology in eastern and western Europe and Russia. The named company has offices in Tehran, Moscow, Sofia, Istanbul and Beijing. According to the European intelligence assessment, the company "is cooperating intensively with Iran". "It is striking," says the document, "that [the company's] partners are enterprises subordinate to Iran's Defence Industries Organisation. Technology transfer between these two states and links between their programmes cannot be ruled out." While the machinery was dual-use, meaning that it could be used in civil or military applications, Mr Albright said he understood the equipment was "nuclear-related". "For the people following this, the interest is whether it's nuclear. The assumption is it is." The likelihood that the machinery was for Sudan is slim, say experts and investigators. "The idea that Sudan could buy and make use of extremely sophisticated nuclear technology is obviously a question mark," said Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear proliferation expert at Washington's Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Sudan is known to have a small civilian nuclear programme, researching nuclear medicine, radiological safety and food irradiation techniques. Never before has it been suspected of involvement in nuclear weapons research, however. It signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 2004. -------- britain FALLOUT OVER ENERGY ADVISER’S STRONG ANTI-SELLAFIELD STANCE Published in Whitehaven News on Thursday, January 5th 2006 UK Business Gazette http://www.businessgazette.co.uk/viewarticle.asp?id=317504 THE new Conservative Party leader David Cameron has taken on an energy adviser with strong anti-nuclear views. Zac Goldsmith, recently appointed by the Conservatives to draw up a new environmental policy, said he firmly opposes nuclear power. “If nuclear was the only option we’d have to accept it, but it isn’t. If we go the nuclear route it will be because we have failed to exploit the alternatives.” He said he opposed new nuclear power plants on economic as well as environmental grounds. “Nuclear comes with nasty baggage. It’s incredibly dangerous, and more so in an era of suicide terrorists. It is dirty at every level. “We face a £50 billion nuclear waste clean-up bill in the UK, a figure which is set to mushroom even if we build nothing new. And it is by far the most expensive form of energy even if you exclude the price tag the hidden costs like waste and security. “Nuclear power should be our last resort.” Copeland MP Jamie Reed says he is “saddened and amazed” by the key Tory anti-Sellafield appointment But Copeland conservatives have been quick to point out Labour has its own hidden “anti-nuclear” factions. Copeland’s Labour MP has criticised the appointment of Mr Goldsmith as vice-chair of David Cameron’s environment policy group. The multimillionaire and Conservative parliamentary candidate is the son of the late Sir James Goldsmith – founder of the Referendum Party and the man who funded the protestors against the opening of Sellafield’s Thorp facility during the public inquiry into the operation of the plant. Mr Cameron has founded a Quality of Life Policy Group, chaired by former Environment Secretary John Gummer, who will be backed up by Mr Goldsmith, the editor of the Ecologist magazine. Mr Goldsmith has recently told national newspapers that cancer rates around Sellafield are “eleven times higher than the national average”. Jamie Reed said: “I’m saddened and amazed by this appointment. Only weeks after the efforts of myself and others to get nuclear generation back on the policy agenda yielded success with the Prime Minister’s announcement of an energy review, the new Tory leader seems determined to wreck any consensus necessary for Britain’s future energy needs to be progressed. “Particularly though I am very concerned by the inaccurate scare-mongering relating to cancer rates around Sellafield. “Not only have numerous, detailed scientific studies proved that there is no link between Sellafield and instances of leukaemia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma in the area, but these comments demonise West Cumbria in a frankly brutal, aggressive and misleading way. “False claims such as this cause widespread pain and also hamper the efforts of community leaders and Government to illustrate the benefits of West Cumbria to potential investors -I’m saddened that the Tory leadership has absolutely no regard for this whatsoever. “This quite clearly signals an alarming policy trend within the Conservative Party and I would expect local conservatives to publicly condemn this.” The News asked a spokesman for Mr Goldsmith where the claim of cancer rates being 11 times the average came from. Layla Daya said: “It was based on a BMA article about the child cancer cluster a few years ago.” Mike Graham, former leader of the Copeland Conservatives said: “Our relatively new Labour MP says he is ‘saddened and amazed’ by this appointment. I am saddened and frankly amazed at the sheer hypocrisy of statements that Mr Reed is starting to churn out. “He fails to remember that in January 2001 his Labour Party appointed Peter Hain to the DTI. This was the same Mr Hain, member of CND, who in February 1986 was quoted in The Guardian saying ‘it is vital that Labour come out strongly against the nuclear energy programme’. “No mention of that appointment then or now from our new MP.” Mr Graham added: “There must be new nuclear build and all of us in Copeland, irrespective of political party, must fight to ensure that Sellafield is number one choice for such a new plant.” -------- business Norway pulls investments in seven multinationals over ethical concerns Groups producing nuclear arms components OSLO (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105124532.fv9cov1k.html Norway has withdrawn investments of more than 500 million dollars (413.6 million euros) from seven multinational corporations, including Boeing and Honeywell of the US, due to ethical concerns over the groups' production of nuclear arms components, the government said on Thursday. The five other companies are BAE Systems of Britain, Safran of France, Finmeccanica of Italy, and US groups Northrop Grumman and United Technologies. The withdrawal follows a recommendation from Norway's Advisory Council on Ethics, which is tasked with monitoring the ethics of companies in which Norway places its massive state Pension Fund, formerly known as the Oil Fund. Norway's finance minister asked the central bank, which manages the fund, to sell the holdings, worth 3.3 billion kroner (416.2 million euros, 502 million dollars). They were sold last year, Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen told reporters on Thursday. "This does not mean that there won't be other companies (excluded)... Our work will continue," she stressed. Norway, however, did not withdraw its stake in French oil group Total, in line with the Advisory Council's recommendation. Total has been criticised by several humanitarian aid groups for its controversial business dealings in Myanmar, formerly Burma, which is run by a military junta. "The Advisory Council... considers it likely that Total was aware of the human rights violations that were committed and directly linked to the construction of a gas pipeline between 1995 and 1998," Halvorsen said. "However, it's not the history of a company but its current situation and future that forms the basis of a recommendation" on whether to withdraw funds, she added. The Advisory Council said it saw "no direct link today between the human rights violations committed by the Myanmar regime and Total's activities in this country." The Norwegian Burma Committee said it was "very disappointed" by the decision. According to the most recent statistics available, the Norwegian state holds 0.679 percent of Total. Norway's state Pension Fund, into which the state deposits its massive oil and gas revenues, is one of the richest funds in the world. At the end of September 2005, it was worth 1,281.1 billion kroner (161.4 billion euros, 195.2 billion dollars). The sheer size of the fund enables Norway to exert pressure on companies to ensure that their operations are ethical. Norway is the world's third-largest oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. The Scandinavian country has already withdrawn its stakes in 10 other companies, including Thales of France, European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, and US groups General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. They are accused of helping manufacture cluster bombs, devices which are particularly lethal for civilian populations. ---- Teledyne Awarded $7.9 Million Washington Contract 1/5/2006 San Diego/Orange County Tech News http://www.freshnews.com/cgi-bin/jsj_news/viewnews.cgi?action=one&cat=20&article_ID=29063 LOS ANGELES, CA -- Teledyne Technologies Incorporated (NYSE:TDY) today announced that Teledyne Brown Engineering, Inc., a producer of nuclear-quality containers since 2000, has been awarded a $7.9 million subcontract by Washington Savannah River Company (WSRC) to deliver an additional 1,056 containers over the next four years. There is also an option for a one-year extension valued at $2 million. The canisters built by Teledyne Brown will be used to contain vitrified high-level nuclear waste for permanent storage and disposal. Vitrification is a technique where the waste is mixed with glass-forming chemicals that solidify and lock in the dangerous chemicals. Waste can be stored in that form for very long periods of time. "We are pleased to be able to continue manufacturing and delivering quality canisters to Savannah River," said Robert Mehrabian, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Teledyne Technologies. "Teledyne Brown has demonstrated its expertise in being able to meet the specialized demands of the nuclear industry." WSRC is supporting Department of Energy's Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) Canister Program. In March, Teledyne Brown received recertification from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). This certification, which is valid for three more years, means that Teledyne Brown's nuclear quality assurance program and nuclear design and manufacturing operations have met the strict standards of the nuclear industry. The canisters will be manufactured at Teledyne Brown's facility in Huntsville. No nuclear waste will be processed or stored in them at the Huntsville facility. Teledyne Technologies is a leading provider of sophisticated electronic components, instruments and communication products, systems engineering solutions, aerospace engines and components and on-site gas and power generation systems. Teledyne Technologies has operations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Canada. For more information, visit Teledyne Technologies' website at www.teledyne.com. -------- depleted uranium Army collected depleted uranium ammunition at Schofield Gina Mangieri January 5, 2006 KHON, Hawaii http://khon.com/khon/displayStory.cfm?storyID=10312 The Army says it has collected and secured radioactive ammunition that was found during excavations at Schofield Barracks. They say it dates back to training rounds fired in the 1960s. Several activist groups want more information and action. They're concerned about community and environmental health, and the health of soldiers using it in the gulf. The Army says the items found represent no danger. They're weapons of mass destruction the Army said weren't used in Hawaii -- until now. Armor piercing munitions made of depleted uranium. It's toxic and radioactive. "These kinds of activities are a death sentence to our land and our resources," says Vicky Holt Takamine, Ilioulaokalani Coalition. "It's getting into our water system. We're all gonna be drinking this water, you and I." Depleted uranium was found during excavation at Schofield Barracks. That's revealed in an Army communication in September between ordnance experts, and confirmed by the Army in Hawaii. But just one month before, the Army told Hawaii Senator Dan Inouye that depleted uranium wasn't used in Hawaii. "These recent revelations then indicate the Army is either unaware of its D.U. and chemical weapons use or has intentionally misled the public. Both possibilities are deeply troubling," says Kyle Kajihiro, DMZ Hawaii. http://www.dmzhawaii.org/ Today the army told KHON, "The Army has never intentionally misled the public concerning the presence of D.U. on Army installations in Hawaii." When fired, the substance can be inhaled. It can also be lodged in the body as shrapnel, or contaminate soil or water. "It can cause bone cancer, leukemia, lymphoma. Also D.U. is a heavy metal, similar to lead, and it can be toxic, particularly to the kidneys," says Dr. Fred Dodge, Waianae physician. Depleted uranium has been used in both gulf wars. It has been linked to Gulf-War Syndrome. The Army disagrees it causes health problems. "The Hawaii National Guard, the Army Reserves, and the active duty people in the military need to be tested to find out if they've been exposed to this," says Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve veteran. A bill in the Hawaii legislature would have all vets tested for exposure. The Navy says it has long stored depleted uranium at its Lualualei facility in leeward Oahu. It accidentally fired such ammunition from Pearl Harbor into the mountains above Aiea in 1994. No injuries to people or property were reported at the time, but the rounds weren't found. -------- europe France to develop fourth-generation nuclear reactor: Chirac PARIS (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105133554.lxe2m0ii.html http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105180943.r9bk6iq9.html French President Jacques Chirac announced on Thursday plans to build a prototype fourth-generation nuclear reactor, reinforcing France's determination to remain a world leader in atomic energy. In a New Year address to business leaders and unions, Chirac said he had "decided to immediately launch work by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) on a prototype fourth-generation reactor, to go into service in 2020". He said that "we will join forces with the industrial or international partners who wish to commit" to the project. Chirac said that France needed to "stay ahead in nuclear energy", as he outlined elements of the country's long-term energy strategy. He stressed that France was a key partner in both the third-generation EPR reactor and in ITER, an international experimental fusion reactor to be based in southern France. One French industrialist indicated a link between the statement and disruption last weekend to gas supplies from Russia to several European countries over a pricing dispute betrween Russia and Ukraine. The European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR), a Franco-German project being developed in northern France, is set to be operational by 2012. But Chirac emphasised that the seven-country International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was an experimental, long-term project, and that France also needed to focus on meeting its medium-term energy needs. "What is at stake (through the ITER project) is the ability to harness the energy of the sun by the end of the century," he said. "Until then, we need to take new initiatives," Chirac said, adding that the fourth generation of reactors, "those of the 2030s and 2040s, will produce less waste and make better use of resources." Most reactors currently in service in the world are generally referred to as second- or third-generation reactors. France is one of 10 countries in the Generation IV International Forum, which was launched four years ago following a US initiative and is conducting research into new types of nuclear reactor. There are currently six design models for the reactors of the future, which aim to improve safety and minimise waste and cut construction and operating costs. Chirac did not specify which type of reactor, using different cooling methods ranging from gas to sodium or lead, France would seek to develop. Business leaders in the French energy sector welcomed the announcement, saying they were mobilised to help develop the next generation of reactors. At Areva, the world's largest civilian nuclear-power group, chief executive Anne Lauvergeon said that Chirac's announcement "is absolutely in line with our own plans". The chairman of the utilities group Suez, Gerard Mestrallet, said he was "glad to see France making the most of its assets". He said that "for Europe, nuclear energy is a response to the gas crisis", drawing a link with the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute which has fuelled debate about energy dependency. Pierre Gadonneix, the chairman of Electricite de France which manages 58 nuclear power plants across the country, also welcomed the news. "France's nuclear programme has earned the respect and admiration of the United States and the entire world," he said. EDF, which produces 74.0 percent of its electricity from nuclear power stations, generates about a quarter of all Europe's electricity. A number of countries in Europe have rejected nuclear energy or have backed away from their own nuclear generation. The president also pledged to improve transparency through the creation of an independent nuclear safety agency and the adoption by parliament this year of a new law on the storage of radioactive waste. --- France announces launch of G4 nuclear reactor 2006-01-05 21:53:30 (Xinhuanet) http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-01/05/content_4014672.htm PARIS, Jan. 5 -- French President Jacques Chirac on Thursday announced the launch of a prototype of fourth-generation nuclear reactor, which is expected to come into service in 2020. In a New Year's address to unions and business leaders, Chirac said "We need to stay ahead in nuclear energy." Chirac said that France was a key partner in both the third-generation EPR reactor, a Franco-German project being developed in northern France to come into service in 2012, and in ITER, an international experimental fusion reactor to be based in southern France. Chirac said that the seven-country International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was an experimental, long-term project, and that France also needed to focus on meeting its medium-term energy needs. "What is at stake is the ability to harness the energy of the sun by the end of the century," he said. "Until then, we need to take new initiatives," he said, adding that the fourth generation of reactors, "those of the 2030s and 2040s, will produce less waste and make better use of resources." He also announced the creation in France of an independent nuclear safety agency. France is one of the 10 countries in the Generation IV International Forum, which was launched four years ago following a US initiative and is conducting research into new types of nuclear reactor. There are currently six design models for the reactors of the future, which aim to improve safety, resistance to proliferation, minimise waste and the use of natural resources as well as cut construction and operating costs. As to stocking radioactive waste, Chirac said a bill is in discussion now and is expected to be adopted by the end of the year. He also announced his intention to make France's public transport network to give up oil for alternative fuels with the next 20 years. ---- Germany stands by decision to phase out nuclear power: minister BERLIN (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105143853.yc3655nn.html Germany will not go back on its decision to phase out nuclear power even if the recent dispute between Russia and the Ukraine over gas supplies has highlighted concerns over Germany's dependance on imported fossil fuels, Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Thursday. As a source of secure energy in the future, nuclear power was unsuitable because uranium was probably the fuel with the most limited availability and Germany would very quickly become completely dependent on imports, Gabriel told a news conference here. The Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute has reignited the debate about the future of nuclear energy in Germany, with members of the conservative CSU party suggesting that the decision by the previous administration under Gerhard Schroeder to phase out nuclear energy and close down nuclear power stations should be postponed or set back. Economy Minister Michael Glos, a top CSU politician, suggested that Germany should focus on sources of energy that were readily available within its own borders, explicitly mentioning nuclear energy. But Gabriel was dismissive of suggestions that nuclear power was a viable and secure source of energy in the long term. "No one wanting to draw up sensible energy policy could imagine investing billions of euros (dollars) in an energy source that will be exhausted within a generation," he said. And Gabriel pointed out that nuclear power could be used to generate only electricity and not heat as well. -------- india Controversy over India’s CIRUS reactor heats up By Khalid Hasan Thursday, January 05, 2006 Pakistan Daily Times http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\01\05\story_5-1-2006_pg7_7 WASHINGTON: Canadian government files do not specify that the CIRUS reactor, which helped India detonate its first nuclear bomb in 1974 was intended for civilian use only, it has been claimed. According to Prof Ashok Kapur, an Indian-Canadian academic who has published extensively on nuclear issues, CIRUS “was in fact a gift to India given under the Colombo Plan, and it was meant to be for (a) dual purpose”. He said the nuclear agreement between the two countries talks about “cooperation in the area of nuclear safety” which, asserted the academic, “has nothing to do with declaring CIRUS a civilian reactor nuclear facility”. According to him, Homi Bhaba, the founder of India’s nuclear programme, had at the time of the original negotiations made clear to officials in Ottawa that “at some point he will have to go the military way. So there was no deception when India conducted its first test in 1974”, Kapur added. This is the first time such an assertion has been made, the overwhelming view both in Canada and the US being that CIRUS was only meant for peaceful not military use. When it was pointed out to Kapur by India Abroad, in which his remarks appear, that Canada had been asked by India to declare CIRUS a civilian reactor, he claimed that there is an active anti-India lobby in Ottawa, which is emboldened by the controversy in the US over the nuclear deal signed between President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in July 2005. He charged that the “anti-India lobby” in the Canadian capital is also unhappy with another agreement signed between the two countries recently under which Canada agreed to sell nuclear-related dual-use items to India and India agreed to separate its nuclear facilities for civilian and military uses, with the former being open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Kapur said, “Those who are lobbying against India had nothing to say when China was supplying nuclear technology to Pakistan.” Kapur said were CIRUS to be declared a civilian reactor, it would have serious implications, because it would then become subject to international inspection and its dual purpose would end immediately. He said, “India will never make the mistake of declaring CIRUS a civilian reactor, and then opening it up to international inspection. (The) demand that CIRUS should be declared a civilian reactor, the demand that is backed by some US senators, is a trap for India. Indian policy from day one has been to promote dual-use technology. CIRUS was a dual-use reactor which included peaceful uses, as well as built-in defence uses.” -------- iran Iran Declares Its Nuclear Plan Nonnegotiable By ELAINE SCIOLINO January 5, 2006 NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/05/international/middleeast/05iran.html?pagewanted=print PARIS, Jan. 4 - Iran vowed Wednesday to proceed with a plan to restart nuclear research next week, though the government has yet to explain to the United Nations' nuclear monitoring agency what activities it intends to carry out. Ali Larijani, the senior official in charge of nuclear issues, was quoted on Iranian state television on Wednesday as saying the decision to resume nuclear research was "nonnegotiable." Responding to criticism that the decision would violate Iran's formal agreement with Europe to suspend all uranium conversion and enrichment activities, he said: "Research has its own definition. It is not related to industrial production. Hence, it was never part of the negotiations." Late Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took a similar hard line. "We will not take a step back on our path," he was quoted by state television as saying. The Iranian news agency ISNA further quoted Mr. Ahmadinejad as saying Western countries "are so rude that if we allow them, they will tell us to shut down all our universities, whereas research has no restrictions or red lines." Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in writing on Tuesday that it planned to resume nuclear fuel research and development next Monday and asked the agency to make the necessary preparations to monitor the activities. Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency's director, pressed Iran's ambassador to the I.A.E.A., Muhammad Mehdi Akhondzadeh, for an explanation of Iran's intentions and warned him that Iran should not proceed, according to officials from two European nations briefed on the meeting. Dr. ElBaradei told the ambassador that the decision to restart nuclear research on its fuel cycle was a regrettable development, adding that Iran must consider the potential consequences, the officials said. The ambassador responded that Iran was not ready to provide the agency with the technical details of its decision, the officials said. The technical meeting was tentatively scheduled for Thursday, when Muhammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran's atomic energy agency, is expected to arrive in Vienna to lead the delegation that will clarify Iran's announcement, they added. The officials insisted on anonymity because their governments do not authorize them to talk on the record. I.A.E.A. officials declined to comment. Criticism of the Iranian decision continued Wednesday. "We regard the recent announcement by Iran of its intention to resume research and development activities with concern," Martin Jaeger, a spokesman for Germany's Foreign Ministry, said at a news conference in Berlin. "We would encourage Iran to abstain from unilateral steps." The French Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jean-Baptiste Mattei, told reporters that the announcement was "very worrying" and added, "We firmly call on Iran to revoke this announcement." On Iranian state television on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki insisted that "Iran is ready for negotiations with the European Union" this month. The next round of talks is scheduled for Jan. 18. But Britain, France and Germany, the three nations that negotiated the November 2004 nuclear accord with Iran, have said Iran's decision could jeopardize talks. ---- Cirincione: Iran's New 'Hard Line' President Pushing Iran toward Security Council Action on Nuclear Issues Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor Interviewee: Joseph Cirincione January 5, 2006 Council On Foreign Relations http://www.cfr.org/publication/9495/cirincione.html Joseph Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the increasing "hard line" of Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has pushed the Europeans and Amerians closer together in agreeing that Iran's continuing efforts to expand its nuclear program should be brought before the Security Council for possible action. But he says he does not know if sanctions will be agreed upon there. While Cirincione, an expert on nuclear issues, does not think Iran has yet made the decision to make nuclear weapons, he does think Iran wants to have the ability to do so in the future if circumstances demand. "I don't believe that Iran has a dedicated nuclear weapons program at this point, although they most likely did conduct some weapons-related research over the past eighteen years," he says. "It's more likely that Iran has undertaken a determined effort to acquire all the technologies that would be required for a nuclear weapon without crossing that threshold yet. And the reason is simple: They have years to go before they can perfect the technologies necessary for producing either enriched uranium for fuel rods or highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. It isn't in their interest to have a program under way that, if discovered, could provide the basis for either sanctions or military actions." Cirincione was interviewed on January 4, 2006, by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org. Iran has announced it's going to go ahead with its nuclear program again after a delay of several months. It's coming simultaneously with a growing apprehension in the West about Iran's overall policies and whether Iran is planning to develop a nuclear weapons program, not just a peaceful program that it claims to be doing. How do you see the situation now? The Iranian government seems to have concluded that its extended negotiations with Europe are pointless and that it can slowly resume its enrichment program without suffering either UN sanctions or U.S. military strikes. It's not quite full speed ahead; it's more like a steady acceleration of the nuclear program. Iran is proceeding very carefully here. It's trying to avoid a direct confrontation and has adopted "salami tactics" -- that is, Iranian officials move an inch at a time towards resumption of the program and each inch, they say, doesn't violate any treaties or commitments. Each step in and of itself is not related to any weapons work and each time they're testing to see whether the Europeans will back down, either by allowing their work to proceed or by failing to take any action, and each time they successfully implement one of these steps—for example, the uranium conversion they restarted last year, turning uranium ore into uranium gas—they're emboldened to go a step further. When we had our last interview about Iran, I think it was in June of 2005, you discussed at some length the fact that there was a kind of rivalry between the United States and Iran for the support of the European Union (EU) negotiators—from Britain, France, and Germany. Since then, of course, there's been an election in Iran and the new president has made a number of bellicose-sounding statements, particularly toward Israel and the United States, which have gotten the Europeans very angry at Iran. Is it likely this time the Iranians may be misjudging the EU attitude and that the United States may have won the battle for EU support? Yes. I think the Iranians are listening a little too much to their own propaganda. They insist that everything they're doing is peaceful and they're right under international treaties. But they may be underestimating the powerful impact that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speeches have had in Europe and the United States. Ahmadinejad has now successfully established himself as a dangerous demagogue. This is a man that many European capitals now feel they cannot trust. It's really a devastating setback for Iranian foreign policy aims. There was, last year, a contest between Tehran and Washington as to who could "win over" the Europeans to their side, and frankly, it looked like Tehran was doing a better job than Washington. But two things happened. One, Washington adjusted its own tactics, supporting the EU negotiations and softening its rhetoric towards Iran, and the elections in Iran brought to power a hard-line conservative. There was some hope that Ahmadinejad could be the equivalent of a Nixon going to China. That is, only a hard-line conservative would have the authority to broker a deal with the Europeans. But that hope was quickly dashed by a series of increasingly bizarre statements by the new president. The statements and the actions of Iran in restarting previously suspended nuclear work have hardened European opinion against Iran, increased the resolve of the Europeans to implement what they said they would do, that is to bring Iran before the Security Council for sanctions. We will probably see this crisis erupt in full form in January, perhaps at the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] Board of Governors meeting in mid-January, or perhaps in resolutions introduced directly to the Security Council. There was a report the other day in the Guardian, a British newspaper, quoting from what it says is a lengthy intelligence report by a "European" government that I would suspect, given the Guardian's origins, is probably British. It says very strongly that Iran is determined to have a nuclear weapons program even though Iran denies this. Do you think Iran is looking to develop a nuclear weapons program? I think that report almost certainly is a British document; there was a previous report back in October 2005 about a seventeen-page report from MI-6 that seems to be remarkably similar to this 55-page document now being circulated. I don't believe that Iran has a dedicated nuclear weapons program at this point, although they most likely did conduct some weapons-related research over the past eighteen years. It's more likely that Iran has undertaken a determined effort to acquire all the technologies that would be required for a nuclear weapon without crossing that threshold yet. And the reason is simple: They have years to go before they can perfect the technologies necessary for producing either enriched uranium for fuel rods or highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. It isn't in their interest to have a program under way that, if discovered, could provide the basis for either sanctions or military actions. Their strategy, I believe, is more cunning than that. They're following more of a Japan model, of acquiring the technology peacefully for the production of nuclear fuel. If successful, that would put them in a position sometime in the next decade of going over to production of nuclear weapons material if they then decided it was necessary. The Israelis have said recently—at least the head of Mossad—that Iran could have a nuclear weapons capability very soon. Is he accurate? If [Mossad Chief] Meir Dagan has any technical basis for that judgment, he should share it with the rest of the world. Israel has a history of exaggerating when Iran would get a nuclear weapon. For years, they've been predicting that a weapon or a weapons capability was a few months or a year away. They made similar claims in the mid-nineties and in 2000. I believe that Mossad is making the same methodological error with Iran that they made with Iraq. That is, in the absence of firm evidence, they are making a worst-case assumption. The only way you could get to Dagan's conclusion is by assuming that Iran has a still-hidden weapons facility that was far more advanced than anything that we know of, or any facility that the IAEA inspectors have looked at. That's the only way to justify a claim that Iran would, in a matter of months, be in an irreversible position to go ahead and make a nuclear weapon if they wanted. We now know much more about Iran's nuclear program than we did three years ago when these secret facilities were first revealed. We've had three years of inspections now. The program is sophisticated but still at a relatively early stage. They have not, for example, mastered the techniques of turning uranium into uranium gas, the uranium hexafluoride that's necessary feed stock for the centrifuges. Nor do they have enough centrifuges to enrich the uranium either for fuel rods or for weapons, nor have they gotten the test cascade of centrifuges that they've assembled to work properly. They still have a long way to go. One of the problems for Iran is that if they provoke a crisis now, if the Europeans just give up on Iran, impose sanctions either through the United Nations or through the EU, then Iran is going to be cut off from the main area of nuclear technology that's still available to it. It will take a lot longer to develop its indigenous capabilities that way. I think what Iran is hoping for is still to find some way to back the Europeans down, to get access to the enrichment technologies that it requires and to find some sort of compromise on its terms not on the Europeans' terms. In other words, they might look at the Russian proposal—the compromise proposal that Russian has tabled [that would send Iranian uranium to Russia for production and Moscow would send completed fuel rods back to Iran]—but they would want that to be a much more favorable proposal for them than it is now. When we talked in June, you mentioned the Russian proposal that was beginning to be talked about. Since then, it has become more formalized. In this case, the actual enrichment work would be done in Russia, right? Yes. What is it that the Iranians would want instead of that? Well, they've said that they want the enrichment to be done in Iran as well. What the Iranians want is to have access to the technologies they need to continue their enrichment program going, and to do that enrichment work in Tehran, at least partially in Tehran. So the Russian proposal is a compromise that would do all the enrichment work in Russia and perhaps give Iranians access to Russian enrichment technology there. That's not a bad deal from Iran's point of view, but they want more. They want the establishment of a facility in Tehran as well. That is completely unacceptable. No European government could agree to that at this point. Until now the thought has been that if the United States and the EU went to the UN Security Council, they couldn't get anything passed because Russia and/or China would block it. Do you think that's still the case? Well, part of the European and to some extent the U.S. effort over the last few months has been aimed at convincing Russia and China that Iran is blocking the compromise, not them. And so the Europeans have backed this Russian proposal hoping that either the Russian proposal would work or the Russians in their own negotiations with the Iranians would come to agree with Europeans and thus support referring Iran to the Security Council. That's not a bad strategy; the problem is that Russia has a lot of money on the table with Iran, both in construction of the existing Bushehr [nuclear] facility, further nuclear reactors that Iran would like to build, the provision of fuel for those reactors, at least for the next five years, and possible missile-related development programs. Moreover, Russia's own leadership has hardened its line over the past year or so. It's not at all clear which way Russia is going to tip. So we'll only know when there's actually a piece of paper on the table. Yes. It's still up in the air. I don't think anybody knows at this point. And of course if it's vetoed, that will be a tremendous victory for Iran, right? It will be, but if Iran gets brought to the Security Council, it's going to be seen as a severe loss of prestige. Iran will become branded as a pariah nation. And this is something that the Iranians don't want: one, because they don't see themselves that way, and two, they fear that it will complicate all their other foreign relations. If they then in addition get sanctions voted against them, that is the worst possibility of all. But it may be that under this new hard-line regime, Iran is willing to take those risks, in part because this plays well domestically. The government is not popular, the economy is miserable, the new president has failed to deliver on any of his economic reform promises made during the campaign. Under such a circumstance, it's always useful for a leader to "wag the dog," to help create an image of themselves as being the resolute warrior who will defend Iran from threats real and imagined. But the risk for Ahmadinejad is that if this backfires, he's seen as the one creating these international problems, not solving them. ---- Castro backs Iran's 'right' to peaceful nuclear energy HAVANA (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105163013.4mn6ez3d.html Cuban President Fidel Castro backed Iran's "right" to pursue a peaceful nuclear energy program following a telephone conversation with his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the official newspaper Granma said Thursday. Tehran's plans to resume nuclear fuel research have been criticised by the international community, particularly the United States, which fears Iran would produce nuclear weapons under the guise of developing a civilian nuclear energy program. "Iran, or any other country, has the right to produce atomic energy for peaceful means and to have access to modern technology for this purpose," Castro was quoted as saying. The report said the Iranian leader had thanked Castro for his support during their telephone conversation on Wednesday. On Thursday, Ahmadinejad -- talking to an audience in Qom -- said Iran would not bow to Western "bullies" which already have nuclear arsenals. "Those who have nuclear weapons and have used them in the worst way against people in the world have no right to prevent nations from achieving peaceful nuclear energy," the ultra-conservative president said. Castro's backing for Tehran to develop a civilian nuclear energy program came as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned in Washington that Iran could be hauled before the UN Security Council if it pursues its bid to resume nuclear fuel work from January 9. "In terms of the next phase, if negotiations have been exhausted, we have the votes, there is a resolution sitting there on the Security Council, we'll vote it," she said. In September 2005, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found Iran in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, paving the way for the matter to be referred to the UN Security Council if Iran does not halt nuclear fuel work and cooperate fully with IAEA inspectors. ---- Iran calls nuclear weapons story false Paper tells of search for parts, know-how John Daniszewski, Los Angeles Times Thursday, January 5, 2006 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/05/MNG1LGHEMM1.DTL London -- One day after Iran publicly confirmed it would resume nuclear research, a newspaper reported Wednesday that Tehran has been seeking components and know-how in Europe for nuclear weapons and missiles. Iran responded quickly to the front-page report in the Guardian newspaper based on a leaked European intelligence document. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the story was intended to harm Iran's "transparent" bid to obtain civilian nuclear power. The report seemed certain to add to high anxieties in the West about Iran's nuclear intentions. The Tehran government says it hopes to produce nuclear fuel for power-generating purposes only, but European governments and the United States have long feared Iran also is focused on obtaining the means to create nuclear weapons. Representatives of Britain, Germany and France have been negotiating with Iran for more than a year to establish limits on its nuclear activities. According to the Guardian, reporters were allowed to see a 55-page intelligence document drawing on findings of British, French, German and Belgian security agencies and assessing the Iranian nuclear activities. Dated July 1, the document concluded that Iran has been combing Europe for parts for weapons and a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, and that "import requests and acquisitions (are) registered almost daily," the Guardian reported. The newspaper said the document may have been leaked in response to mounting frustration at Iran's refusal to bow to Western calls to give up its program to produce fuel for its Bushehr nuclear power plant. The power plant on Iran's southern coast originally was planned before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. It has been under construction over the past decade with Russian help and now is nearing completion. "In addition to sensitive goods, Iran continues intensively to seek the technology and know-how for military applications of all kinds," the Guardian quoted the document as saying. The paper did not say who made the document available to its reporters, but said it was produced for European governments so they could warn industrialists to be careful about what they sell or export to Iran. It said Iran is using a network of front companies and agents to shop for technology in Europe and the former Soviet Union. Iran said Tuesday that it will resume nuclear fuel research next week and that it has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna of its decision. Iran delivered a letter to the atomic agency saying its nuclear body plans to resume research and development on its "peaceful nuclear energy program" on Monday, ending a voluntary suspension of such activities since late 2003. Asked about the Guardian report, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman told the Reuters agency that the story was intended to "negatively affect Iran's transparent measures and its cooperation with the IAEA." ---- Iran skips Vienna nuclear meeting ElBaradei acknowledges the right of Iran "to the peaceful use of nuclear technology." (CNN) Thursday, January 5, 2006; Posted: 4:42 p.m. EST (21:42 GMT) http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/01/05/iran.nuclear/index.html?section=cnn_latest (CNN) -- Iran's delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency abruptly left Vienna Thursday without attending a meeting in which delegation members were to explain the reasons behind Tehran's planned resumption of its nuclear program, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said. "The meeting today was supposed to be about the clarification of Iran's 'R&D' (research and development) intentions in restarting their nuclear program," Fleming told CNN in a phone interview. Iran's Atomic Energy Organization announced Tuesday it would restart its nuclear research program on January 9 to put idle atomic researchers back to work. An IAEA statement Tuesday said Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general, acknowledged the right of Iran "to the peaceful use of nuclear technology." "However, he continues to call on Iran to take the steps the IAEA requires to resolve outstanding issues regarding the nature of Iran's nuclear program," the statement said. "In the meantime, Dr. ElBaradei also calls on Iran to take voluntary measures to build confidence, and enable the resumption of dialogue with all concerned parties." Talks with France, Britain and Germany on Iran's nuclear activities were halted last year. Fleming said the IAEA still would like to get some answers before Tehran takes any action on its program. "We are still seeking clarification before they start these activities," she said. Iran's nuclear programs are a source of contention with the West. Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Sunday rejected a Russian offer to produce nuclear fuel in its plants for Iran, the latest effort to resolve a diplomatic impasse over Tehran's nuclear program. Iran's hard-line conservative government insists it has the right to restart nuclear facilities and enrich uranium for the production of nuclear energy, despite fears expressed by some nations -- including the United States -- that Tehran's true goal is to produce nuclear weapons. "Frankly, the patience of the international community is not infinite on this issue," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Tuesday. "Iran is trying to pursue nuclear weapons under the cover of a peaceful nuclear program. We do not think that should be allowed to happen." Should Iran take any further enrichment-related steps, "the international community will have to take additional measures to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions," he said. -- Journalist Shirzad Bozorgmehr contributed to this report ---- Iran rejection of nuclear deal becoming clear: Rice By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent Thu Jan 5, 2:34 PM ET (Reuters) http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060105/pl_nm/nuclear_iran_usa_dc_2 WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday Iran's resumption of atomic fuel research would signal its rejection of a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis, but stopped short of saying this would finally trigger a U.S. push for Rice said she hoped "diplomacy has not been exhausted," but added that it was "becoming clearer" Iranians are not accepting a diplomatic compromise that constrains their nuclear ambitions. Rice addressed State Department reporters after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday Iran would resume atomic fuel research next week despite warnings from the West that this would endanger efforts to find a diplomatic compromise. She said if Iran proceeded with sensitive nuclear research "it really will be a sign that they are not prepared ... to actually make diplomacy work." Rice refused to be pinned down on a timeline for tougher diplomatic action, but said Washington will take the case to the Security Council at "a time of our choosing." Another U.S. official, who is involved in nonproliferation issues but spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the diplomacy, told Reuters if Iran went ahead with the research on Monday as announced, the United States and its European allies likely would call an early meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors and push to have Iran's case referred to the Security Council, which could impose broad international sanctions. The IAEA board is due to meet in early March, but that meeting could be moved forward, maybe to February, the official said. MORE FLUID SITUATION A European diplomat described the situation as much more fluid. "The only thing I can say is we are intensifying our discussions but when and what kind of initiative will come out of it, it's still too early to say," said the diplomat, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. The diplomat and two U.S. officials said it remains unclear whether key nuclear states Russia, China and India would side with any U.S.-EU initiative. Russia and China have veto power in the Security Council. For two years, Washington has threatened elevating Iran's case to the Security Council but delayed forcing a showdown as other strategies were tried, or support from countries like Russia was lacking. "We've always said that when it's clear that negotiations have been exhausted that we have the votes -- there is a resolution sitting there (in the IAEA board) about the Security Council -- and we'll vote it," Rice said. A second European Union diplomat said resuming research would make it more likely Iran's case would go to the Security Council. But he stressed it would still be irresponsible to walk away from negotiations, especially if Iran did not actually begin enriching uranium for nuclear fuel. Iran says it needs nuclear technology to generate electricity and denies seeking nuclear weapons. Years of IAEA inquiries have unearthed no clear proof of weapons activity. However, Iran has acknowledged pursuing covert energy-related nuclear programs for 18 years and in September, the IAEA board found the state in noncompliance with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The EU 3 -- Britain, France and Germany -- have been trying with U.S. backing to resolve the conflict diplomatically. Moscow tried to sweeten the deal by proposing a joint venture with Iran to enrich uranium in Russia but Iranian officials described the proposal as unacceptable. ---- IAEA-Iran nuclear talks stumble as US threatens Security Council action Thu Jan 5, 12:53 PM ET (AFP) http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060105/wl_mideast_afp/irannucleareuiaeaus_060105175343 VIENNA - Talks at the UN atomic watchdog on Iran's nuclear program failed to get off the ground when Tehran's delegation abruptly returned home, while Washington again threatened to seek its referral to the UN Security Council. Iranian experts were due at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna Thursday to discuss Tehran's plan to resume atomic fuel research on January 9, but failed to turn up. "A delegation came from Tehran and went back," without any explanations, said an IAEA official, who refused to be named. The source said the delegation was led by Mohamed Saeedi, the vice-chairman of Iran's atomic energy organization. The planned talks came after Iran announced Tuesday that it would resume research for its "program for peaceful nuclear energy," suspended two years ago, adding that the move was "not negotiable." The IAEA called for talks to seek "clarifications" about the kind of research Iran planned to resume. IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei said Tuesday the council of governors, the executive branch of the IAEA, was asking that "Iran refrain from all activities linked to uranium enrichment as a key confidence-building measure." On Thursday, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the meeting "never took place" and "none is scheduled." "We still need clarifications before they resume (research) Monday," she added. Earlier, an IAEA official said talks with an Iranian delegation had begun Thursday. The Iranian mission to the UN in Austria refused to comment. Meanwhile, the United States threatened Tehran with UN Security Council action if it resumed nuclear research as planned. "It would really be a sign that they are not prepared to actually make diplomacy work," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters. "If negotiations have been exhausted, we have the votes, there is a resolution sitting there on the Security Council, we'll vote it," she said. The West fears Iran's civil nuclear program is a cover for developing a nuclear bomb. Tehran denies the accusation, insisting the program is designed solely to meet its electricity needs. Enriched uranium can be used as fuel in civilian reactors as well as the explosive core in nuclear bombs. The resumption of enrichment would be regarded by the West as a point of no return, triggering the implementation of a resolution referring Iran to the UN Security Council for violating the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The IAEA also wants to know whether Tehran is seeking to remove seals the UN atomic watchdog has placed on Iranian nuclear facilities, said an official. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated Thursday his country would not retreat from its nuclear program, echoing a statement by Ali Larijani, Iran's top official for nuclear issues, Wednesday that resumption of nuclear research was "not negotiable." Berlin and Paris warned Iran's latest announcement could delay future talks on the issue, due to begin again in Austria on January 18. France, Germany, and Britain are trying to wean Iran off its nuclear ambitions with economic and security incentives. The Europeans and the United States are backing a compromise offer from Moscow to enrich Iranian uranium on Russian soil, guaranteeing Iran's access to nuclear fuel but for peaceful purposes only. Iranian officials are to discuss the proposal with Russian officials Saturday. ---- Western Agencies Say Iran Out To Build Nuclear Missile London (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/news/Western_Agencies_Say_Iran_Out_To_Build_Nuclear_Missile.html Iran has been rebuilding its military forces for nearly two decades since the end of the Iraq-Iran War in 1988.Iran has been scouring Europe for nuclear bomb technology, a British newspaper said Wednesday, citing a report by Western intelligence agencies. Iranian scientists are hunting parts for a new ballistic missile capable of hitting Europe, with "important requests and acquisitions... registered almost daily," the 55-page assessment concludes, according to The Guardian daily. Pakistan and Syria have also been shopping for the chemicals and technology required to enrich uranium and develop rocket programmes, it reported. Chinese front companies have played a key role in North Korean arms procurement endeavour while Russia is identified as crucial to Iran's military programmes, The Guardian added. The newspaper said the document was dated July 1, 2005 and included material from British, French, German and Belgian agencies. It has been used to brief European government ministers and warn top industrialists to be vigilant when exporting expertise or equipment to "rogue states", according to The Guardian. Iran announced on Tuesday it would resume nuclear fuel research after a suspension of over two years, prompting the UN atomic watchdog to warn Tehran that it must maintain a freeze on sensitive nuclear work. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran would not "step back" on its decision to resume nuclear fuel work, state television reported. The United States accuses Iran of trying to master the civil nuclear fuel cycle as a cover for a military programme to obtain atomic weapons -- a charge vehemently denied by Tehran. The assessment says Iran has created a complex network of middlemen and front companies to obtain the training, expertise and equipment required to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons arsenals. "In addition to sensitive goods, Iran continues intensively to seek the technology and know-how for military applications of all kinds," it adds, according to the newspaper. The Guardian said: "It emphasises that west European engineering firms, germ laboratories, scientific think-tanks and university campuses are successfully preyed on by multitudes of middlemen, front companies, scholars with hidden agendas and bureaucrats working for the Iranian, Syrian or Pakistani regimes." It said the report came from a leading European Union intelligence service and seemingly represents the pooled knowledge of at least four major EU member states. It details "how countries such as Iran, Syria and North Korea operate a vast network of traders, phoney companies, state institutions and diplomatic missions internationally to procure the means to develop chemical, biological, nuclear and conventional weapons." Former Soviet states are targeted for their experts while western Europe is the principal place for purchases, the newspaper said. The assessment said Pakistan had been buying far more components and materials than were needed for spare parts in its nuclear programme. Iran, Syria and Pakistan are benefiting from North Korea's military strength and exports, the document reportedly asserts, noting that "the export of arms equipment is currently reckoned to be North Korea's most important source of income." Iran is set to have new talks about its nuclear activities with EU negotiators on January 18 but both sides have acknowledged that wide differences remain. -------- iraq / inspections Secretive military unit sought to solve political WMD concerns prior to securing Iraq, intelligence sources say Larisa Alexandrovna, January 5, 2006 Raw Story http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Secretive_military_unit_sought_to_solve_0105.html New allegations indicate that American civilian military leadership may have used an off-book quasi-military team to address political issues, placing those concerns above securing peace in the region, RAW STORY has learned. Three U.S. intelligence sources and a source close to the United Nations Security Council say that the Pentagon civilian leadership under the guidance of Stephen Cambone, appointed to lead Defense Department intelligence in March 2003, dispatched a series of “off book” missions out of the ultra-secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP). The team was tasked to secure the following in order of priority: fallen Navy pilot Scott Speicher, WMD and Saddam Hussein. While it is known that an authorized special operations unit was dispatched before the invasion of Iraq with similar objectives, sources say another team also operated on the ground in Iraq, primarily from the summer until the fall of 2003. This team appears to have been composed of 4-5 men. The Fallen Navy Pilot Lieutenant Commander Michael “Scott” Speicher was shot down over Iraq in 1991 during the first day of Operation Desert Storm. He was classified as Killed in Action (KIA) within a few months thereafter. Sources say that in order to convince the administration to invade Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, the discredited leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and poster boy for neoconservative hawks, claimed that Speicher was alive and being held as a prisoner of war. Chalabi -- considered by many to be a con-man and dilettante with a long history of scheming and dealings -- spun yarn after yarn about Iraqi WMD programs to hawks within the administration unable to find credible evidence of WMD from their own intelligence community in order to support a pre-emptive war. Known abroad for counterfeiting and bank fraud, Chalabi was convicted in 1992 by a Jordanian court and sentenced to twenty-two years of hard labor. The longtime Iraqi exile had his home and offices raided by US forces in May 2004 after allegations that he was passing classified US documents along to Iranian intelligence. He has since been appointed to head the oil ministry, despite being unable to win a single seat in Iraq’s December election. Sources from the US and foreign intelligence communities found Chalabi’s claims of WMD false, but administration hawks pushed for invasion using him as one of the primary sources. The New York Times’ Judith Miller also relied heavily on Chalabi for single-source information about a fictional Iraqi WMD program. Sources say that along with promises of Speicher and WMD, Chalabi also promised to deliver Iraqi tribal chieftains to support coalition forces on the ground. So called “swoop” teams of special ops forces deployed in the region prior to the invasion were assured that support on the ground from tribal leaders would be ready upon the arrival of US and British forces. But like the claims of Speicher and WMD, no such support materialized. Task Force 20 and other units The primary operational team responsible for the early activity on the ground in Iraq was Task Force 20, which was comprised of CIA, FBI, Green Berets, Delta Force operators, and commandos from the Navy's Special Warfare Development Group. Task Force 20 consisted of roughly a 40-man assault team and a private aviation unit provided by Special Operations Command. Sources believe this was the team tasked with the three objectives of securing the fallen pilot, the weapons, and the dictator. Other groups operating at this same time included the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a unit of roughly 900 specialists, made up of smaller tactical teams, who followed on the heels of TF20. Judith Miller was embedded with one of the units of the 75th. Sources say the Office of Special Plans deployed several extra-legal and unapproved task force missions prior to and after combat operations began. Under the supervision of Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the OSP ran largely unsupervised and operated in secrecy. According to those familiar with the plans, the off-book missions were approved by Feith -- himself currently under investigation by the FBI for allegations of passing US secrets to Israel and Iran -- Cambone and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. But the lines between what were considered sanctioned forces and those considered almost as rogue units began to blur shortly after the invasion. Whether this was done deliberately to misrepresent official military, CIA, and other operations missions in the region, or whether this confusion stems from a lack of coordination remains unknown. It is also difficult to establish whether or not TF20’s various sub-teams were used by civilian leadership to achieve other goals, not known to the primary unit. What is, however, apparent is that the Office of Special Plans’ teams were deployed in obscurity and on occasion even bumped into sanctioned special ops teams, creating a sense of unease among the various forces on the ground. Sources raised most concern about an alleged off-book 4-5 man team which operated in the summer through the fall of 2003. What this team was doing and under whose authority it operated is unclear. Yet at least one source close to the UN Security Council tells RAW STORY that the smaller team was acting on behalf of Office of Special Plans and Defense Department leadership, specifically under the guidance of Feith and in tandem with Cambone. Though most sources pointed to TF20 as the most likely to have spawned the clandestine force, one intelligence source disagreed. The source noted that by mid-2003 TF20 had been to nearly all of the major Iraqi installations without finding any evidence of WMD. One intelligence source says the Office of Special Plans’ off-book team was using Speicher and WMD as a pretext for whatever their real objective may have been. Secret team looked to ‘solve’ WMD problem? This smaller unnamed team was tasked with interviewing former Iraqi intelligence officers in hopes of securing help with a “political WMD” problem, a source close to the UN Security Council says. During the summer of 2003 through the fall of 2003, the team, whose members who were not named by sources, is said to have interviewed many Iraqi intelligence and former intelligence officers. The UN source says that the political problem discussed had more to do with solving the lack of WMD than anything else. “They come in the summer of 2003, bringing in Iraqis, interviewing them,” the UN source said. “Then they start talking about WMD and they say to [these Iraqi intelligence officers] that ‘Our President is in trouble. He went to war saying there are WMD and there are no WMD. What can we do? Can you help us?’” The source said intelligence officers understood quickly what they were being asked to do and that the assumption was they were being asked to provide WMD in order for coalition forces to find them. “But the guys were thinking this is absurd because anything put down would not pass the smell test and could be shown to be not of Iraqi origin and not using Iraqi methodology,” the source added. Former and current US intelligence officers explain that such forensics is essential and would have in fact proved if a weapons stash found was using Iraqi methodology. “A good example of how forensics is used can be found in the recent development around enriched uranium isotopes found on centrifuges in Iran,” one said. “Iran claimed to have purchased the centrifuges from Pakistan, but certain people pushing for war with Iraq were claiming that this was evidence of Iraqis reconstituting their nuclear weapons program. The forensics showed that the Iranians were telling the truth and that they in fact had purchased the items from Pakistan, a US ally.” -------- israel Israel Iran Nuclear Balance One of many places Israel is itching to bomb By Martin Sieff UPI Senior News Analyst Washington (UPI) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/news/Israel_Iran_Nuclear_Balance.html The most dangerous strategic nuclear arms race in the world today is the one between Israel and Iran -- far more complex than almost anyone realizes and vastly more dangerous. Ironically, the number of weapons involved on both sides are miniscule, not only by the standards of the U.S-Soviet/Russian Cold War nuclear balance, but also even compared with the much more limited strategic nuclear stand-offs centering around North Korea or India and Pakistan today. But that does not really matter: Far more important is the fact that the margin for error or miscalculation on either side is vastly smaller than in any other potential nuclear conflict in the world. And the danger that either party may react catastrophically to the fear that the other will attempt a devastating preemptive first strike is consequently far greater. I! srael today has a far greater proportion of its population protected by state-of-the-art ballistic missile defense systems than any other country in the world. But since Israel is so small and since such a disproportionately large part of its population is vulnerably concentrated in a single thermonuclear kill zone in and around Tel Aviv, that speaks less to the Jewish State's undoubted military and technological strengths than to its geographic and demographic vulnerabilities. As Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and an influential adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told UPI recently, 70 percent of Israel's total population and 80 percent of its infrastructure is concentrated in the Tel Aviv region. No other modern industrial nation has its population and key infrastructure so densely packed into such a small area, he noted. Ironically less than 60 years after the founding of the state in 1948 the Zionist dr! eam, far from creating a state where large numbers of Jews were safer and more secure than anywhere else in the world, has created one where millions of them are now at more immediate risk of nuclear incineration than anywhere else in the world. The reason for this is not merely Iran's relentless drive to acquire its own nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to carry them. It is the extreme rhetoric and truly unpredictable behavior of the new government in Tehran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. He has questioned the historic veracity of the Holocaust, the genocidal mass killing of six million European Jews by the Nazis through World War II. And at the same time, he has embarked on the systematic purging of the Iranian government and armed forces of more moderate officials. The combination of Israel's physical vulnerability with Iran's political extremi! sm has, therefore, produced a balance of terror that is now on a hair- trigger alert. No one knows for sure if Iran yet has any nuclear weapons of its own. The best available assessments suggest it is not yet in a position to make them and won't have them for a few years yet, but no one knows for sure. And there is also the very real possibility that the CIA cannot confirm but cannot rule out either that Iran may have acquired at least four nuclear warheads some years ago illegally from stocks decommissioned and inadequately guarded following the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. There is no doubt that Iran already has nuclear-capable delivery systems capable of inflicting a first strike that could kill millions of Israelis, perhaps over the half the population in a single attack. Its Shehab-3 intermediate range missile has been successfully tested and is being continually upgraded. It is certainly reliable. Also, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has confirmed that under the previous regime of President Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine quietly sold 12 nuclear-capable cruise missiles to Iran. They are far slower than the Shehab ballistic missiles but their computer-guided, ground-hugging unpredictable flight paths could make them far more dififcult to intercept and shoot down. To guard against these threats, Israel has already developed or bought a formidable BMD arsenal. Its Arrow system anti-ballistic missile interceptor, co-built with Boeing, is the most advanced system of its kind in the world and was recently successfully tested against a simulated Shehab-3 attack. Israel also has acquired many batteries of the Patriot PAC-3 system from the United States. Ironically, early Patriots got a raw deal in the press after they performed very impressively in defending Tel Aviv from Iraqi-launched SCUD missile attacks in the 1991 Gulf War. So! me U.S. analysts believe that this was encouraged by Israel to try and get more funding for the Arrow. But there is no doubt that for close-in ABM defense the Patriot remains the best interception system by far in the world. The Israelis are also aided by the limited amount of air space they have to defend. Still, like the Americans and the Soviets before them in the 1950s and '60s, the Israelis have come to the conclusion that no defense succeeds better than deterrence. As long as their own nuclear facilities -- the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert and Zacharias air force base south of Tel Aviv -- are limited in number and clearly known to their enemies, and since their main population is so concentrated and vulnerable, recent Israeli governments have recognized their need for a secure, survivable second-strike capability to guarantee a devastating response to any first strike, and they have deployed one. It e! xists in the form of three German-built and supplied diesel-engineered submarines, or U-boats, that carry nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Israel seeks to ensure that at least one of these vessels is on patrol at all times. Indeed, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government is seeking to broaden and deepen this second-strike force by acquiring two more submarines to add to it. The concept has impressed giant India so much that it has adopted it too as a second-strike deterrent against neighboring Pakistan. In India's case, the submarines are French-built Scorpenes. Will it be enough? Against any rational national government, the answer would be certainly "yes." But with Ahmadinejad, the jury for obvious reasons is still out. Ironically the Israelis and their strong friends in the Bush administration could yet prove to be their own worst enemies. For if there is one scenario where even previously rational national leade! rs, let alone extreme ones, might be tempted to press their nuclear launch buttons, it is when they are convinced that they are going to be attacked anyway and have therefore nothing to lose. Judged from this perspective, Israel's previous exercises carrying out mock air attacks against a scale model of Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor in the Negev desert, and the tough moves of the Bush administration to confront Iran on the nuclear issue, clearly run the risk of provoking the very thermonuclear nightmare they are meant to prevent: They could convince the government in Tehran that it is under imminent threat of U.S. or Israeli attack and thereby panic it into launching any nuclear weapons it already has. In that case, Israel's ultimate line of defense would be its Arrows and its Patriots. There is no doubt that operationally they will work well: The as-yet-untested question is whether they will work flawlessly with only seconds to spare an! d no margin for error whatsoever. The lives of millions will be on the line. -------- latinamerica Capsule Containing Radioactive Metal Missing from Venezuelan Oil Facility January 05, 2006 — By Associated Press http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=9600 CARACAS, Venezuela — A capsule containing a radioactive metal for industrial use is missing from a Venezuelan oil facility, authorities said Wednesday. Oil company B.J. Servicios de Venezuela told officials on Dec. 28 that the capsule containing Cesium-137 had disappeared from its facility in El Tigre, about 300 kilometers (190 miles) east of the capital of Caracas, public security chief Wolfgang Castillo told The Associated Press. Energy ministry official Angel Diaz Aponte told reporters Wednesday the material had likely been stolen to be sold, and he said similar material is used widely in Venezuela's petroleum industry. The capsule at El Tigre was meant for use in ground studies. Aponte said there were no signs of a forced break-in at the facility and that heavy equipment was needed to remove the capsule. Investigators urged the public to avoid contact with the capsule because its contents were "highly contaminating." Cesium-137 is a soft, silvery white metal widely found in devices such as gauges for construction and drilling, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. High exposure can cause serious burns and sometimes death. ---- Venezuelan Thieves Steal another Radioactive Unit REUTERS VENEZUELA: January 5, 2006 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34326/story.htm CARACAS - Thieves in Venezuela have stolen equipment containing radioactive material used in the oil industry, in the latest in a string of similar incidents, officials said on Wednesday. Angel Diaz, head of the energy ministry's nuclear affairs department, warned the Cesium-137 material could cause contamination if exposed. The equipment, used in oil prospecting, was stolen last week in eastern Anzoategui State. "If you take this material out, it could cause contamination," Diaz told reporters. Authorities arrested three police officers in December after they were linked to the robbery of a truck carrying a device containing Iridium-192, used to check oil pipelines. Two other capsules with Iridium-192 went missing in March through negligence in two separate incidents. Both of those capsules have since been found, one dumped in Lake Maracaibo in the west of the country. In neighboring Brazil in 1987, scrap-metal scavengers took a container with Cesium-137 from an abandoned radiation-therapy clinic. Children smeared the material on their faces and bodies because it glowed after the container was opened. Four people died and about 250 suffered from radiation contamination. -------- pakistan Pakistan Says Nuclear Network Dismantled By SADAQAT JAN, Associated Press Writer Thu Jan 5, 2006 9:54 AM ET http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060105/ap_on_re_as/pakistan_nuclear_1 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan said Thursday it had taken all "appropriate action" to break up the underground nuclear network run by its former chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri made the remarks one day after a British newspaper alleged Khan's network may still be in operation. The Guardian report cited an unidentified European Union source. "Pakistan is very sorry and is very upset and has taken all appropriate action in dismantling the underground network," Kasuri said. "Dr. A.Q. Khan has fallen from the high pedestal that he had," he said, adding that Khan had already been "treated very harshly." Kasuri was speaking after meeting Taro Aso, the Japanese minister for foreign affairs, in Islamabad. Khan, the founding father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, acknowledged in February 2004 that he gave sensitive nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. President Bush has labeled North Korea and Iran part of an "axis of evil" and analysts say both countries pose a potential nuclear threat. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned Khan in 2004. He has been under house arrest amid tight security in Pakistan's capital. Kasuri said Pakistan had already shared information with Japan, the United States and several European countries on Khan's network. The now disgraced Khan is still hailed as a hero by many in Pakistan for turning it into an atomic power to match rival India. Both countries carried out nuclear tests in 1998. During a two-day visit ending Thursday, Aso met Pakistan's prime minister and Musharraf. The two countries agreed to set up a working group for discussions on disarmament, nonproliferation, dual use technology, the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, nuclear safety and space technology, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. At their meeting, Kasuri and Aso also signed an agreement under which Japan will provide loans to Pakistan to aid recovery from the Oct. 8 quake that left about 87,000 people dead and 3.5 million homeless in northwestern Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Japan has provided $200 million in quake relief to Pakistan, Kasuri said. ---- Pakistan says other countries did not punish Khan nuclear network members ISLAMABAD (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105120554.2nodnr76.html Pakistan Thursday said it had dealt sternly with its disgraced nuclear hero who ran a clandestine proliferation network, but other countries had not taken similar action against other people involved. "Many scientists and people of other nationalities were involved in the underground network," Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri told a news conference jointly addressed by his Japanese counterpart Taro Aso. "There were maybe 80 or 90 or 100 people involved, (and) we have not seen similar action against them as we have taken against doctor A.Q. Khan," Kasuri said. Pakistan took the "strongest action and has put the network out of business," Kasuri added. Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, confessed in February 2004 to leaking secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya after a government probe into nuclear proliferation. The United States believes the technology has enabled Iran to enrich uranium to a level required for making nuclear weapons. Khan was later pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf but since then has been living under a virtual house arrest in Islamabad. Kasuri said the "harsh" treatment of Khan had sparked criticism of the government. "A.Q. Khan was regarded by a large section of Pakistanis as a national hero for bringing strategic parity in South Asia, (he) has been treated harshly and there are some critics of the government policy in Pakistan on that issue," he said. Kasuri said Pakistan strongly believed in non-proliferation. He said Pakistan wanted the Iranian nuclear issue to be resolved peacefully within the framework of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). Aso said Japan and Pakistan were exchanging information on the underground nuclear proliferation network and Khan. "We very much appreciate the information provided by the Pakistan government," the Japanese minister said. Earlier the two foreign ministers signed an agreement on an emergency earthquake loan of 100 million dollars. Aso announced an additional grant of 55 million dollars for Pakistan's quake-hit areas, bringing Japan's total assistance to 200 million dollars. A giant 7.6 magnitude quake on October 8 killed more than 73,000 people and made 3.5 million homeless in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and North Western Frontier Province. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- california NO ADVERSE EFFECTS TO ENVIRONMENT FROM LAB Thu, Jan. 05, 2006 Contra Costa Times East Bay Roundup -- Betsy Mason http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/sports/13554780.htm An annual environmental report on Lawrence Livermore Laboratory released Wednesday says there were no adverse effects to the environment found as a result of the nuclear weapons lab's activities in 2004. The report also details the results of a decade-long assessment of the lab's effect on public health, which came up clean as well. The results include monitoring of air, waste water, ground water, soil, vegetation and wine grape growth in the area for pollutants such as tritium, nitrate, perchlorate, high explosives, organosilicate oil, metals and depleted uranium. The additional total radiological dose for someone living near the highest exposure areas was 9,000 times smaller than a natural background dose an average person receives, according to the report. -------- massachusetts Plymouth asks more of nuclear plant Evacuation plan is termed inadequate By Raja Mishra, Boston Globe Staff | January 5, 2006 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/01/05/plymouth_asks_more_of_nuclear_plant/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+City%2FRegion+News A Plymouth report on safety concerns at the Pilgrim nuclear power plant says the town has grown so much in the 30 years of the plant's existence that the ''current evacuation plans do not pass any reasonable reality check." School buses evacuating children during a radioactive emergency at Pilgrim would get stuck in traffic, and bus drivers may not even show up, according to the report released Tuesday by the town's Nuclear Matters Committee. The report, which criticizes a host of other issues at the plant, was issued as its owner prepares to seek renewal of its federal license. But the looming battle between the town and the nuclear plant appears more about suburban growth, post-Sept. 11 politics, and compensation than about permitting. Citing evacuation problems during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to underscore their point, the citizens advisory panel said panic-stricken parents may contribute to the anticipated gridlock by leaving home or work in Boston and heading to the schools to pick up their children. Plymouth elected officials say the Entergy Corp., which owns Pilgrim, needs to pay for a new evacuation plan, compensate the town because the plant generates nuclear waste that could be the target of terrorists, and pay higher property taxes. ''The public is aware that the threats to these types of facilities have dramatically increased, given that our country is at a state of war," said Plymouth selectman Anthony R. Schena. ''That dramatically changes the playing field. We have a right to expect Entergy to address that concern. ''Times have changed. . . . The cost of doing business in the town of Plymouth has gone up and you need to pay us," Schena said. In an emergency, the report said, some residents may not be aware of the need to evacuate because the warning sirens in Plymouth, a town of 54,000, are not loud enough for all to hear. The report recommends that the town select specialists to prepare a new evacuation plan, which Entergy should pay for. The company, however, said that evacuation plans are a matter for state and local government. The current evacuation plan was designed and approved by state officals, with input from Plymouth. ''We feel the plan is solid," said Peter Judge of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. ''It's something we take very seriously." A company spokesman said Entergy officials were open to hearing lawmakers' concerns. Preliminary talks on a host of issues have already begun. ''We're a nuclear power plant, and we're in a community, and we certainly realize we need to pay attention to the community's concerns," said Entergy spokesman David Tarantino, who characterized the talks as ''very cordial." The report also criticized the nuclear fallout shelter system in place, community education on nuclear issues, and potential spent nuclear fuel storage problems. It concluded that Plymouth lawmakers should oppose renewal of the plant's federal license to operate, which expires in 2012. Entergy plans this year to seek to extend the license to 2032. Diane Screnci, spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said none of the issues raised in the report will affect relicensing, which will be narrowly based on plant upkeep and environmental impact. She added that Plymouth officials could raise the issues with the NRC anytime. ''They are issues they should bring to us now; they are issues that we look at all the time," said Screnci, noting that Pilgrim passed an NRC safety and security inspection in August. Plymouth lawmakers said they would hold a series of public hearings in coming months to discuss issues raised by the report. Selectmen interviewed said they were aware they had no ability to affect the NRC, which has never turned down a license renewal request, but said the town should be compensated by Entergy because more than 1 million pounds of nuclear waste are stored on the plant's grounds. They also believe that Entergy does not pay enough local tax on the plant property. The company estimates it pays about $1.5 million annually. Those concerns are being raised as Plymouth faces losing $10 million in annual revenue after 2008, when NStar, which once owned the plant, is scheduled to stop making payments in lieu of taxes it promised to the town when it sold the plant in 1998. ''We're going to have to replace that income," said Kenneth E. Tavares, chairman of Plymouth's Board of Selectmen. Tarantino, the Entergy spokesman, said the company would listen to all proposals. Raja Mishra can be reached at rmishra@globe.com. -------- north carolina Alleged lax security at N.C. nuke plant to be examined Thursday, January 5, 2006 (AP) http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060105/NEWSREC0101/60105005/-1/NEWSRECRSS RALEIGH — The federal agency in charge of regulating nuclear facilities plans to send a team to a nuclear power plant south of Raleigh to look into allegations of poor security. The nuclear watchdog group N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network filed a complaint last month with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and alleged problems with security at the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant. The Washington-based Union for Concerned Scientists joined in the complaint. "This is a special inspection related to concerns that have been raised about inadequate security measures at the plant," said Ken Clark, an NRC spokesman in Atlanta. Progress Energy, which owns and operates the plant, said its security is good and the plant is safe. The complaint said guards hired by a security firm worked while they were injured, slept during their shifts and cheated on licensing tests. The complaint, based on information from an unidentified guard, also said doors didn't lock properly because hardware was worn and that some equipment to detect intruders didn't work. Progress spokesman Rick Kimble said the company has reviewed the allegations and some problems have been dealt with. Kimble said doors with worn locks were fixed, but other allegations couldn't be confirmed. "We can't find anybody who will come forward with any sort of evidence," he said. "We believe very strongly that it never happened." -------- pennsylvania NRC denies petition to include non-profit daycare centers in emergency evacuation plan Associated Press Thu, Jan. 05, 2006 http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/13556134.htm HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled that no new regulations are needed to protect preschoolers in day care centers near Pennsylvania nuclear power plants because such protections already exist. The agency denied a petition by Larry Christian, a New Cumberland father of two, who asked the NRC to amend its rules to include day care and nursery schools in its emergency planning requirements. He had learn that the day care his children attended didn't have an evacuation plan. Pennsylvania law requires for-profit day cares and nursery schools within 10 miles of a nuclear plant to have evacuation plans but the law doesn't cover nonprofit centers. State officials have maintained that it is the responsi bility of day care operators to arrange transportation for their children. -------- us nuc waste Nuclear parts in S. Ga. January 05, 2005 WALB Georgia http://www.walb.com/Global/story.asp?S=4325951&nav=5kZQ Ashford, Alabama - Some unusual cargo will pass through South Georgia this weekend. Part of a nuclear reactor is en route from Ashford, Alabama to Utah to be destroyed. The reactor heads were heat exchangers at a Plant Farley. Tom Moorer is supervising the move. "The reactor head is enclosed in a specially designed, shielded shipping container. That shipping container is designed to shield any radioactivity present," says Moorer. The 150 ton heads will pass through several South Georgia waterways on their trip. They're outdated and had to be replaced. "To store it here on the site would require special precautions and special storage locations to be constructed. It makes more sense just to get rid of it," says Moorer. Think of the heads as the lid on a pressure cooker. Their radiation level doesn't pose a threat to wildlife or people, but there is a federally mandated contingency plan just in case. "If it were to fall off we'd have to mobilize special equipment to go down, recover it, put it back on the barge, get rid of it," says Moorer. From Alabama, the barge is going to travel about five miles per hour to Houston. From there it's going to be loaded onto a truck, where it'll be taken to Utah for disposal. "To put it simply, they're going to dig a big hole and put it in the hole and cover it up," says Moorer. The heads are scheduled to leave on Saturday, under the umbrella of a nuclear plant that's never had an accident. Plant officials say you could stand by the heads for 100 hours and receive the same amount of radiation as living in a large city. Feedback: news@walb.com?subject=NuclearReactorHeads -------- MILITARY -------- africa US bars Humvee sales to Ethiopia after post-election violence ADDIS ABABA (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105144918.l50hrhxt.html The United States has barred the sale of Humvee military vehicles to Ethiopia after Addis Ababa used previously purchased Humvees to quell political protests in violence that killed at least 85 people, a senior US diplomat said Thursday. Vicki Huddleston, the charge d'affairs at the US embassy in Addis Ababa, said the United States had been disappointed to see that several of 20 Humvees sold to Ethiopia in the past had been misused to "disperse demonstrations" and that future sales had been cancelled. "(These vehicles) were here only for use in anti-terrorist activities," she told reporters. "We have now decided not to sell any more Humvees to the Ethiopian army." Ethiopian security forces used Humvees as they moved to put down unrest by opening fire on crowds during protests in June and November against alleged fraud in the May 15 elections called by the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD). The government has said it regrets the deaths but has defended its use of deadly force as necessary to keep the peace. After the last explosion of violence it launched a crackdown on the CUD leadership and independent journalists seen as sympathetic to the opposition. Ethiopian officials accuse the CUD and its alleged allies of trying foment the violent overthrow of the government, and 131 opposition figures and journalists have been charged with various crimes including treason, genocide, conspiracy, and outrage against the constitution. Huddleston said the United States was concerned the trial, expected to resume next month, "could be divisive" and urged the authorities to make good on pledges to respect due process and the rule of law. -------- arms Lithuania to buy armoured trucks from Finns: defence ministry VILNIUS (AFP) Jan 05, 2006 http://www.spacewar.com/2006/060105142600.06nywqea.html Finland's Oy Sisu Auto has won a tender to supply the Lithuanian armed forces with armoured trucks, the Lithuanian defence ministry said Thursday after signing a deal with the Finns. The value of the deal is 20 million euros (24 million dollars), the ministry said in a statement. It did not specify how many trucks will be purchased, but said the first truck was due to be delivered in 2007. The Finnish company was selected from among eight companies from Europe and the United States. Lithuania joined NATO in March 2004, and members of its armed forces are currently serving in international missions in Afghanistan, where the Baltic state leads a NATO provincial reconstruction team, Iraq and the Balkans. -------- spies George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb? In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco Thursday January 5, 2006 The Guardian James Risen http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1678219,00.html She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency's spies in Iran probably didn't think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA's spy network. Just as she had done so many times before. But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran. Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to "roll up" the CIA's network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown. This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US - whether Tehran was about to go nuclear. In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration's public arguments. On the heels of the CIA's failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA's Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn't know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power. But it's worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: "Whatever happened to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?" The story dates back to the Clinton administration and February 2000, when one frightened Russian scientist walked Vienna's winter streets. The Russian had good reason to be afraid. He was walking around Vienna with blueprints for a nuclear bomb. To be precise, he was carrying technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block, otherwise known as a "firing set", for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon. He held in his hands the knowledge needed to create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core. It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short. The Russian, who had defected to the US years earlier, still couldn't believe the orders he had received from CIA headquarters. The CIA had given him the nuclear blueprints and then sent him to Vienna to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With the Russian doing its bidding, the CIA appeared to be about to help Iran leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon. The dangerous irony was not lost on the Russian - the IAEA was an international organisation created to restrict the spread of nuclear technology. The Russian was a nuclear engineer in the pay of the CIA, which had arranged for him to become an American citizen and funded him to the tune of $5,000 a month. It seemed like easy money, with few strings attached. Until now. The CIA was placing him on the front line of a plan that seemed to be completely at odds with the interests of the US, and it had taken a lot of persuading by his CIA case officer to convince him to go through with what appeared to be a rogue operation. The case officer worked hard to convince him - even though he had doubts about the plan as well. As he was sweet-talking the Russian into flying to Vienna, the case officer wondered whether he was involved in an illegal covert action. Should he expect to be hauled before a congressional committee and grilled because he was the officer who helped give nuclear blueprints to Iran? The code name for this operation was Merlin; to the officer, that seemed like a wry tip-off that nothing about this programme was what it appeared to be. He did his best to hide his concerns from his Russian agent. The Russian's assignment from the CIA was to pose as an unemployed and greedy scientist who was willing to sell his soul - and the secrets of the atomic bomb - to the highest bidder. By hook or by crook, the CIA told him, he was to get the nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. They would quickly recognise their value and rush them back to their superiors in Tehran. The plan had been laid out for the defector during a CIA-financed trip to San Francisco, where he had meetings with CIA officers and nuclear experts mixed in with leisurely wine-tasting trips to Sonoma County. In a luxurious San Francisco hotel room, a senior CIA official involved in the operation talked the Russian through the details of the plan. He brought in experts from one of the national laboratories to go over the blueprints that he was supposed to give the Iranians. The senior CIA officer could see that the Russian was nervous, and so he tried to downplay the significance of what they were asking him to do. He said the CIA was mounting the operation simply to find out where the Iranians were with their nuclear programme. This was just an intelligence-gathering effort, the CIA officer said, not an illegal attempt to give Iran the bomb. He suggested that the Iranians already had the technology he was going to hand over to them. It was all a game. Nothing too serious. On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear programme by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the blueprints and studied them, they would believe the designs were usable and so would start to build an atom bomb based on the flawed designs. But Tehran would get a big surprise when its scientists tried to explode their new bomb. Instead of a mushroom cloud, the Iranian scientists would witness a disappointing fizzle. The Iranian nuclear programme would suffer a humiliating setback, and Tehran's goal of becoming a nuclear power would have been delayed by several years. In the meantime, the CIA, by watching Iran's reaction to the blueprints, would have gained a wealth of information about the status of Iran's weapons programme, which has been shrouded in secrecy. The Russian studied the blueprints the CIA had given him. Within minutes of being handed the designs, he had identified a flaw. "This isn't right," he told the CIA officers gathered around the hotel room. "There is something wrong." His comments prompted stony looks, but no straight answers from the CIA men. No one in the meeting seemed surprised by the Russian's assertion that the blueprints didn't look quite right, but no one wanted to enlighten him further on the matter, either. In fact, the CIA case officer who was the Russian's personal handler had been stunned by his statement. During a break, he took the senior CIA officer aside. "He wasn't supposed to know that," the CIA case officer told his superior. "He wasn't supposed to find a flaw." "Don't worry," the senior CIA officer calmly replied. "It doesn't matter." The CIA case officer couldn't believe the senior CIA officer's answer, but he managed to keep his fears from the Russian, and continued to train him for his mission. After their trip to San Francisco, the case officer handed the Russian a sealed envelope with the nuclear blueprints inside. He was told not to open the envelope under any circumstances. He was to follow the CIA's instructions to find the Iranians and give them the envelope with the documents inside. Keep it simple, and get out of Vienna safe and alive, the Russian was told. But the defector had his own ideas about how he might play that game. The CIA had discovered that a high-ranking Iranian official would be travelling to Vienna and visiting the Iranian mission to the IAEA, and so the agency decided to send the Russian to Vienna at the same time. It was hoped that he could make contact with either the Iranian representative to the IAEA or the visitor from Tehran. In Vienna, however, the Russian unsealed the envelope with the nuclear blueprints and included a personal letter of his own to the Iranians. No matter what the CIA told him, he was going to hedge his bets. There was obviously something wrong with the blueprints - so he decided to mention that fact to the Iranians in his letter. They would certainly find flaws for themselves, and if he didn't tell them first, they would never want to deal with him again. The Russian was thus warning the Iranians as carefully as he could that there was a flaw somewhere in the nuclear blueprints, and he could help them find it. At the same time, he was still going through with the CIA's operation in the only way he thought would work. The Russian soon found 19 Heinstrasse, a five-storey office and apartment building with a flat, pale green and beige facade in a quiet, slightly down-at-heel neighbourhood in Vienna's north end. Amid the list of Austrian tenants, there was one simple line: "PM/Iran." The Iranians clearly didn't want publicity. An Austrian postman helped him. As the Russian stood by, the postman opened the building door and dropped off the mail. The Russian followed suit; he realised that he could leave his package without actually having to talk to anyone. He slipped through the front door, and hurriedly shoved his envelope through the inner-door slot at the Iranian office. The Russian fled the mission without being seen. He was deeply relieved that he had made the hand-off without having to come face to face with a real live Iranian. He flew back to the US without being detected by either Austrian security or, more importantly, Iranian intelligence. Just days after the Russian dropped off his package at the Iranian mission, the National Security Agency reported that an Iranian official in Vienna abruptly changed his schedule, making airline reservations to fly home to Iran. The odds were that the nuclear blueprints were now in Tehran. The Russian scientist's fears about the operation seemed well founded. He was the front man for what may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA, one that may have helped put nuclear weapons in the hands of a charter member of what President George W Bush has called the "axis of evil". Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states. Several former CIA officials say that the theory behind Merlin - handing over tainted weapon designs to confound one of America's adversaries - is a trick that has been used many times in past operations, stretching back to the cold war. But in previous cases, such Trojan horse operations involved conventional weapons; none of the former officials had ever heard of the CIA attempting to conduct this kind of high-risk operation with designs for a nuclear bomb. The former officials also said these kind of programmes must be closely monitored by senior CIA managers in order to control the flow of information to the adversary. If mishandled, they could easily help an enemy accelerate its weapons development. That may be what happened with Merlin. Iran has spent nearly 20 years trying to develop nuclear weapons, and in the process has created a strong base of sophisticated scientists knowledgeable enough to spot flaws in nuclear blueprints. Tehran also obtained nuclear blueprints from the network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and so already had workable blueprints against which to compare the designs obtained from the CIA. Nuclear experts say that they would thus be able to extract valuable information from the blueprints while ignoring the flaws. "If [the flaw] is bad enough," warned a nuclear weapons expert with the IAEA, "they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear" · This is an edited extract from State of War, by James Risen, published by The Free Press ---- NSA Destroyed Evidence of Domestic Spying By Jason Leopold t r u t h o u t | Report Thursday 05 January 2006 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010506I.shtml The National Security Agency, the top-secret spy shop that has been secretly eavesdropping on Americans under a plan authorized by President Bush four years ago, destroyed the names of thousands of Americans and US companies it collected on its own volition following 9/11, because the agency feared it would be taken to task by lawmakers for conducting unlawful surveillance on United States citizens without authorization from a court, according to a little known report published in October 2001 and intelligence officials familiar with the NSA's operations. NSA lawyers advised the agency to immediately destroy the names of thousands of American citizens and businesses it collected shortly after 9/11 in its quest to target terrorists in this country. NSA lawyers told the agency that the surveillance was illegal and that it could not share the data it collected with the CIA or other intelligence agencies. The lawyers said the surveillance could result in numerous lawsuits from people identified in the surveillance reports, two former US officials told the Houston Chronicle in an October 27, 2001, report, and was illegal despite any terrorist threat that existed in the days following 9/11. By law, the NSA cannot spy on a US citizen, an immigrant lawfully admitted to this country for permanent residence, or a US corporation. But, with the permission of a special court, it can target foreigners inside the United States, including diplomats. The revelation raises new questions about the legality of the NSA's domestic spying initiative, authorized by President Bush in 2002, which has come under intense scrutiny by Republicans and Democrats and will likely lead to Congressional hearings. The fact that the NSA has purged the names of thousands of Americans and businesses it collected after 9/11 suggests that at the time there were questions about the constitutionality of the agency's efforts to combat terrorism by secretly spying on Americans. Still, the intelligence destruction angered CIA and FBI officials as well as staff members of the House and Senate intelligence committees who feared that leads on potential terrorists would be permanently lost. "In heated discussions with the CIA and congressional staff, NSA lawyers have turned down requests to preserve the intelligence because the agency's regulations prohibit the collection of any information on US citizens," the Chronicle reported. The NSA, based in Fort Meade, Maryland, operates under the Department of Defense. It distributes analysis summaries of its intelligence-gathering to a certain number of senior US officials, but it doesn't share its raw data - transcripts from wiretaps - with anyone. The raw data is prized by intelligence analysts because it provides additional context and more leads than the watered-down summaries. However, those guidelines changed after 9/11 also. The NSA ended up giving its raw data to then Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton on at least 10 different occasions since 9/11. Bolton, nominated by Bush to be US ambassador to the United Nations, let slip during his confirmation hearings in April that he asked the NSA to unmask the identities of the Americans blacked out in the agency's raw reports, to better understand the context of the intelligence. However, evidence suggests that Bolton used the information for personal reasons, in direct violation of rules governing the dissemination of classified intelligence. During one routine wiretap, the NSA obtained the name of a state department official whose name had been blacked out when the agency submitted its report to various federal agencies. Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA official, revealed during the confirmation hearings that Bolton had requested that the NSA unmask the unidentified official. Fleitz said that when Bolton found out his identity, he congratulated the official, and by doing so he had violated the NSA's rules by discussing classified information contained in the wiretap. It turned out that Bolton was just one of many government officials who learned the identities of Americans caught in the NSA intercepts. The State Department has asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500 times since May 2001. At the time of the NSA purge in October 2001, US Rep. Charles F. Bass, R-NH, who served for four years on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested that the NSA routinely skirted the law by eavesdropping on Americans. "I think it could be the biggest information problem that we face," Bass told the Chronicle. "If somebody is abroad and they even mention the name of an American citizen, bang, off goes the tap, and no more information is collected." But what seemed to be a blatant violation of the law shortly after 9/11 was beginning to get a second look a year later, when Bush first authorized the NSA to spy on Americans, and lawmakers suggested that domestic spying was all but guaranteed to avoid terrorist attacks. Porter Goss, the former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said as much in a wide ranging interview with the Miami Herald on June 11, 2002. "The most critical question of all - how much spying on Americans do we want," said Goss, now the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What this comes down to is domestic surveillance [on individuals and groups], and I don't know how you do that without spying on Americans. I can't emphasize enough that that's the hardest part." Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t. ---- NSA whistleblower asks to testify By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES January 5, 2006 http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060104-114052-6606r.htm A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA. "I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency," Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times. The letters were sent the same day that the New York Times revealed that the NSA was engaged in a clandestine eavesdropping program that bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The FISA court issues orders for targeted electronic and other surveillance by the government. President Bush said Sunday that the NSA spying is "a necessary program" aimed at finding international terrorists by tracking phone numbers linked to al Qaeda. Mr. Bush said during a visit to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio that al Qaeda is "making phone calls, [and] it makes sense to find out why." Critics of the eavesdropping program, which gathered and sifted through large amounts of telephone and e-mail to search for clues to terrorists' communications, say the activities might have been illegal because they were carried out without obtaining a FISA court order. The Justice Department has said the program is legal under presidential powers authorized by Congress in 2001. Mr. Tice said yesterday that he was not part of the intercept program. In his Dec. 16 letter, Mr. Tice wrote that his testimony would be given under the provisions of the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which makes it legal for intelligence officials to disclose wrongdoing without being punished. The activities involved the NSA director, the NSA deputies chief of staff for air and space operations and the secretary of defense, he stated. "These ... acts were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs," Mr. Tice said. The letters were sent to Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican. Mr. Roberts is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Mr. Hoekstra is chairman of the House counterpart. Spokesmen for the NSA and the Senate intelligence committee declined to comment. Spokesmen for the House intelligence committee and the DIA said they were aware of Mr. Tice's letters, but had not seen formal copies of them. ---- Harman faults White House on NSA briefings Posted 1/5/2006 8:51 AM (AP) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-01-05-harman-whitehouse_x.htm WASHINGTON — The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee told President Bush Wednesday that the White House broke the law by withholding information from the full congressional oversight committees about a new domestic surveillance program. In a letter to Bush, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., said the National Security Act requires the heads of the various intelligence agencies to keep the entire House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States." Only in the case of a highly classified covert action can the president choose to inform a narrower group of Congress members about his decision, Harman said. That action is defined in the law as an operation to influence political, economic or military conditions of another country. "The NSA program does not qualify as a 'covert action,'" Harman wrote. Bush and his senior national security aides have said that appropriate members of Congress were briefed more than a dozen times about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance operations, which Bush first approved the month after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The highly classified sessions are known to include the "Gang of Eight," which is made up of the top Republican and Democrat in the House and Senate and on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. "We believe that Congress was briefed appropriately," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday in response to Harman's letter. Responding in writing to Harman, House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said Harman had never previously raised concerns about the number of people briefed on the program. "In the past, you have been fully supportive of this program and the practice by which we have overseen it," he wrote. "I find your position now completely incongruent." Many details about the scope of electronic surveillance program remain unknown. However, Bush and his aides have asserted the monitoring — without court warrants — is narrowly targeted to eavesdrop on calls and e-mails of people who are inside the United States and suspected of communicating with al-Qaeda or its affiliates. Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that the program helped to prevent possible terrorist attacks against the American people: "This program is critical to the national security of United States." Democrats who have been briefed on the program have raised serious concerns about its legality, but have not called for its immediate halt. Republicans and Democrats alike have called for hearings this year. ---- Gov't To Give FISA Judges Classified Briefing on Domestic Spying Democracy Now! Headlines for January 5, 2006 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/05/1454235 Meanwhile the Washington Post is reporting that Justice Department and intelligence officials will give a classified briefing on Monday to members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. President Bush has admitted he has bypassed the court and ordered the National Security Agency to conduct domestic spy operations without the legally required court-approved warrants. Last week one judge on the FISA court resigned in protest over the secret spying program. -------- us It Doesn't Pay To Be A Veteran By William A. Collins January 5, 2006 Newtown, CT, Bee http://www.newtownbee.com/Opinions.asp?s=Opinions-2006-01-05-15-18-04p1.htm Our blessed vets, We'd ne'er betray; As long as we, Don't have to pay. As a newly minted national board member of Veterans for Peace, my education in contemporary veteran reality is moving fast. You quickly learn that for most recruits there are only two well-compensated moments in their military career: when they sign up, and when they die. The signing bonus can be worth $10,000, since the Pentagon is so desperate for warm bodies. Getting killed is valuable too, worth $12,000 just now. Otherwise you're chopped liver. Or as commanders in Iraq are fond of referring to their new recruits, "red meat." Tours of duty can be extended at will, available equipment is notoriously uneven, and your task there is to suppress a population that wishes you were dead, or at least gone. Fun job. If you make it home in one piece you are finally free from roadside bombs, but other ambushes await. Military auditors scrutinize your accounts to make sure you turned in your knapsack and suspenders. Records are checked to assure that you were properly charged for your meals in the Army hospital. And in contrast to Haliburton, all your expenses are gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Collection agencies are on 24-hour call should anything be found amiss. If fate should lead you back to Connecticut, you may have dodged another bullet. Being in a geographically small state, you're never totally remote from a Veterans Administration hospital. Inconvenient perhaps, but not fatally. And now even the state's own ancient Rocky Hill Veterans Home and Hospital is finally wending its way at least into the 20th Century to care for a few additional lucky survivors. You'd think such homes might be a federal responsibility, what with Washington starting the wars and all, but that's not how it goes. The state often is left to pick up war's pieces. Connecticut also has a Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Fund (set up before we had airmen) to supply the basic charitable needs of some impoverished vets. This fund is run by the American Legion, which takes a third of its $3 million annual income for administrative expenses. At a rally organized by vets to protect this money - there are always budget-cutters who want to merge it into the general budget - the governor asked the assembled heroes to support the Groton submarine base. Everyone has their own agenda for veterans. For instance, the pharmaceutical companies. They've always been miffed that the VA is authorized to bargain with them as a single unit for all its clients. This drives down prices to levels like those in Canada. Not surprisingly, their lobbyists are pressuring Congress and the VA to further restrict eligibility so that more and more vets will have to buy their medicines in the shark-filled open market. There are lurking roadside health afflictions out there too, mostly ignored by Washington. Heavy ones include post-traumatic stress disorder (shell shock), and poisoning from such hazards as Agent Orange, toxic fumes, and depleted uranium. Research on these dangers has been grudging, as has treatment. Hartford alone serves 1,000 such discarded vets in its homeless shelters annually. And besides that, we've got thousands of old GIs still suffering from secret biological and chemical weapons tests used on them in the 60s that they weren't even told about. But none of this represents anything new to history. Soldiers have always been a disposable commodity. They are recruited as patriots, utilized as fodder, and discharged as a nuisance. Only World War II was different, being a "good" war. Later ones have had a more colonial cast, using either communism or "terrorism" as a cover. Each conflict soon displays disdain for its old troopers. The big losers are those patriotic (or desperate) youngsters who sign up to defend their country, and only later discover that their country has little interest in defending them. (Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.) -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- courts / tribunals Surveillance Court Is Seeking Answers Judges Were Unaware of Eavesdropping By Carol D. Leonnig Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 5, 2006; A02 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/04/AR2006010401864_pf.html The members of a secret federal court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases are scheduled to receive a classified briefing Monday from top Justice Department and intelligence officials about a controversial warrantless-eavesdropping program, according to sources familiar with the arrangements. Several judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said they want to hear directly from administration officials why President Bush believed he had the authority to order, without the court's permission, wiretapping of some phone calls and e-mails after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Of serious concern to several judges is whether any information gleaned from intercepts by the National Security Agency was later used to gain their permission for wiretaps without the source being disclosed. The court is made up of 11 judges who, on a rotating basis, hear government applications for surveillance warrants. But only the presiding judge, currently Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, was notified of the government eavesdropping program. One judge, James Robertson, who also serves on the federal bench in Washington, resigned his seat on the surveillance court in protest shortly after the wiretapping was revealed by the New York Times in mid-December. Kollar-Kotelly began pressing for a closed government briefing for the remaining members of the court on Dec. 19, the day she learned of Robertson's concerns. Other judges wanted to know, as Robertson had, whether the administration had misled their court about its sources of information on possible terrorism suspects. Kollar-Kotelly had privately raised concerns in 2004 about the risk that the government could taint the integrity of the court's work by using information it gained via wiretapping to obtain warrants from judges under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. On Friday, an attorney for Seifullah Chapman, one of the men convicted as part of the "Virginia jihad network," formally asked federal prosecutors in Virginia to determine whether warrantless NSA wiretaps were used to gain information about his client. Chapman, who is serving a 65-year sentence for conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist group, was the subject of a secret FISA warrant. "My feeling is they are a very professional organization. They would be equally concerned that my client's rights are protected, and they'll want to find out themselves," said John Zwerling, Chapman's attorney. Some judges who spoke on the condition of anonymity yesterday said they want to know whether warrants they signed were tainted by the NSA program. Depending on the answers, the judges said they could demand some proof that wiretap applications were not improperly obtained. Defense attorneys could have a valid argument to suppress evidence against their clients, some judges said, if information about them was gained through warrantless eavesdropping that was not revealed to the defense. Yesterday, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, sent a letter to Bush charging that the limited nature of congressional briefings on the monitoring program violated the National Security Act. The White House informed the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees and the two ranking Democrats about the program. The National Security Act requires the president to keep all members of the two committees fully informed of intelligence activities with the exception of those conducted covertly overseas. "In my view, failure to provide briefings to the full congressional intelligence committees is a continuing violation of the National Security Act," Harman wrote. Staff writer Dafna Linzer contributed to this report. -------- POLITICS -------- corruption How Did the U.S. Government Annihilate $1 Trillion of American Wealth? by Michael S. Rozeff January 5, 2006 http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff57.html Ask Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol. Ask Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney and George Bush. Ask the American Congress. They not only know how to extinguish vast amounts of American wealth, they have done it by attacking Iraq. Of this there is little doubt. They get A+ in destruction of wealth. They are fully qualified to teach a course in any university on the annihilation of wealth. Sad to say, they are not the only rulers and would-be rulers in many lands, past, present and future, who have been, are now, and will be summa cum laude at Terminator College. But we are Americans, and these are our homegrown leaders. They are ours, and we are theirs. They have pressed the buttons of war and can press them again. The bombs they have launched at our well-being deserve our immediate attention. Every American deserves to know what the price of terrorist reduction in Iraq is. Ask not what your leaders can do for the country; ask what they can do to the country. Ask what they already have done to the country. Ask how many more Saddams they’d like to take out. Ask what removing one Saddam has cost. Sad to say, I do not refer to the lives lost, the bodies wounded, and the minds scarred. As each day passes, these relentlessly add still more to the toll of damage done. I refer to the dollars and cents values that are reflected in markets for securities. On the eve of the Iraq War that officially began on March 19, 2003 but had actually been fired up two years earlier with aerial bombardments, three researchers produced a paper estimating that the stock market had already priced in the upcoming war with a decline of 15 percent in value. Leigh, Wolfers, and Zitzewitz provided evidence that $1.1 trillion in value had been shaved off the S&P 500 stocks because of the Iraq War. On September 30, 2002, Gary North wrote: "War is bad for stock market performance unless the war is clearly going to be short-lived. War transfers purchasing power from private consumer markets to weapons markets." He criticized Lawrence Lindsay’s view that regime change in Iraq would drive down oil prices and be good for the economy. (Mr. Lindsay was President Bush’s senior economic advisor.) North added: "The invasion may very well drive up the price of oil because of the fear of regional de-stabilization." The cost forecasts of Lindsay or any politician who favors war or any other government program whatever can always safely be tossed aside. A politician has no incentive to reveal the truth about costs, except that falsehoods might lower his chance of re-election. By the time elections roll around, the past words of incumbents are mostly drowned in a sea of noise, rhetoric, and memory loss. The middle-of-the-road apathetic voter pays little attention to promises broken or forecasts wildly violated. Given these facts, politicians have an incentive to play down and conceal the costs of any program. Salmon P. Chase, who was Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, estimated the dollar cost (to the North) of the War Between the States at $240 million. Excluding pensions, the government’s own estimate in 1879 was that the war cost the North about $4 billion. Chase was only off by a factor of 17. Estimates of Vietnam war costs were underestimated by orders of magnitude because the planners did not foresee the war’s length, among other things. On the eve of the Iraq War, Lew Rockwell demolished "the longstanding canard that war is good for the economy," pointing out that war "destroys capital, in the same sense that all government spending destroys capital. It removes resources from where they are productive – within the market economy – and places them in the hands of bureaucrats..." He observed that "The prospect of war is inhibiting recovery. The stock market is now at 1998 levels, with five years of increased valuations wiped out." How right both North and Rockwell were. Wars have to be paid for. They are paid for through taxes and borrowing that leads to future taxes. The taxes are direct reductions of the wealth of citizens. Having less to spend, they purchase less. This shows up in lower revenues to the sellers of products, such as corporations. This, in turn, shows up in decreases in the values of these companies. The value declines show up primarily as declines in the values of the stocks of these corporations. This means that war and its accompanying taxes make stock prices decline. It means that the size of the war costs can be measured by looking at the size of the declines in stock prices. What needs to be understood, emphasized, and underscored, what needs to be seen as clearly as possible, are the reality and the mind-boggling size of the wealth destruction that our leaders have caused Americans to bear. It is not believable that most Americans, presented with a choice between spending one trillion dollars or achieving the current status in Iraq, would have chosen to spend that sum. One trillion dollars is 100 million $10,000 bills. It is not believable that 100,000,000 families would have willingly given up $10,000 each for the results so far achieved by the Iraq War. I wonder if 10 million or even 1 million families would have given up half that amount. Where does this $1 trillion figure come from, and how can we be sure that it is accurate? The answers involve new but straightforward ideas and applications of finance. Leigh, Wolfers and Zitzewitz (LWZ) made their wealth destruction estimates by using a then-existing Saddam Security futures contract trading at TradeSports.com. These securities, which traded between 18,000–31,000 contracts a month, were contingent upon the ouster of Saddam by future dates. This was a market in the prediction that Saddam would be removed from office. In other words, the contract traded in the prediction of another Iraq War. For those who are unfamiliar with betting, stock, prediction, and futures markets, the pertinent facts are these. Speculative markets in general, whether they be horse races, bets on crop yields, futures markets in gold, or stock markets all allow individuals to trade upon and profit from information they might have about future events and outcomes. Individuals then have incentives to seek, collect, interpret and trade upon relevant information. The traders who are better at these activities tend to make money, while the worse speculators lose. Prices then come to reflect the best information known by the most successful traders. Because market prices aggregate diverse bits of information, the trading process causes speculative prices to forecast the future more accurately than other methods such as asking experts or taking polls. The Iowa Electronic Markets trade in bets on election outcomes, for example. They regularly beat voting polls. Studies of odds at horse races also show that they accurately forecast the chances of horses winning. Many investors do not appreciate the fact that markets are forward-looking. Prices today impound forecasts of what might occur in the future. They "discount" the future. Over 100 years ago, Charles H. Dow (of Dow-Jones fame) in his book Scientific Stock Speculation wrote: "The best way of reading the market is to read from the standpoint of values. [The market] represents a serious, well-considered effort on the part of far-sighted and well-informed men to adjust prices to such values as exist or which are expected to exist in the not too remote future...The thought with great operators is whether the value of property which they propose to buy will lead investors and speculators six months hence to take stock at figures ten to twenty points above present prices. "In reading the market, therefore, the main point is to discover what a stock can be expected to be worth three months hence and then to see whether manipulators or investors are advancing the price of the stock toward those figures...To know values is to comprehend the meaning of movements in the market." Dow’s comments unlock one of the major secrets of the stock market. Those "in the know" buy at wholesale with the intent of selling at retail "six months hence," or at some point in the future. That point is when the good news that they anticipated is made public. At that point, public buying enters and takes the stock off the speculators’ hands. This is why stocks very often sell off on the announcement of (anticipated) good news. Conversely, if bad news is anticipated, the speculators sell short. When and if the bad news materializes and the public sells, the speculators can buy (cover their short sales) at lower prices and profit. This is why stocks sometimes rally on the announcement of bad news. Please note. Speculative operations are far from foolproof. LWZ compared the Saddam Security with oil prices and found that a 10 percentage point rise in the chance of ouster corresponded to a $1 rise in oil prices. That meant that ouster implied a $10 oil price rise. Similarly, they found that a 10 percentage point rise in Saddam’s ouster chance lowered the S&P 500 index by 1.5 percent, implying that his ouster would lower prices by 15 percent, which translated into a $1.1 trillion loss to shareholders. William D. Nordhaus, a professor at Bush’s alma mater, estimated in October of 2002 that the war would cost anywhere from $121 billion to $1.6 trillion. He used a variety of economic estimates. At present, estimates of Congressional appropriations for the Iraq War are running about $231 billion. Because of the market’s ability to discount the future, much of the impact of the Iraq War on stock market values occurred prior to the war’s beginning. The pre-war time frame is when LWZ analyzed the Saddam Security and the S&P 500. This is when statements and actions by politicians and the government began to tip off shrewd speculators to a war in the making. This is the period when Washington insiders who possessed inside political information, unavailable to the public, could speculate in their private accounts. Knowing more surely than anyone else that a war was about to occur, they could more confidently build larger positions in assets destined to increase in price such as defense stocks or gold. They could buy put options in order to bet on declines in stock prices. To check up on LWZ’s findings and the estimates of Nordhaus, I use a traditional but different method than theirs. I directly examine the relation between a few key political statements of Bush and his close associates with changes in stock market values. This method is by no means perfect, but it works. When done in more detail, it becomes the "event study" found in many financial studies of the stock market. Jude Wanniski used this method in his book The Way The World Works in order to argue that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the stock market crash of 1929. If we look at the behavior of key defense stocks, they show just how early that the market may have begun to get wind of the Iraq War. They also show that what’s good for defense stocks is bad for the market in general, at least in this episode. War was definitely not good for the economy in general. Lockheed Martin (LMT) hit 16.50 on March 14, 2000, but at that point it made a bottom and began a strong climb that took it to 70 by mid-2002. (By the time that the war actually began in March 2003, LMT was back around 50. It has since rallied back to 64.) The price patterns of Northrop Grumman (NOC) and General Dynamics (GD) are very like that of LMT. GD reached its low on March 7, 2000 before commencing a rise from 36 to a peak of 111 reached on June 24, 2002. NOC’s low was on March 2. LMT peaked out on June 27, 2002 and NOC peaked on June 19, 2002. In all three cases, the lows of the stocks occurred in early March of 2000. After each stock had more than tripled, each peaked out toward the end of June of 2002. All three have since rallied back to the vicinity of their 2002 high prices. While defense stocks were rising, the S&P 500 was falling. In fact, the high for the index of over 1550 occurred in the third week of March 2000, in the same month when the defense stocks were making their bottoms. What’s good for defense stocks was apparently bad for stocks in general. Furthermore, the S&P 500 declined to a bear market low of about 780 in the third week of July 2002, within a month of the tops made by the defense stocks. Why did defense stocks top out in June of 2002? June/July of 2002 is the time frame in which the knowledge of the decision to go to war against Iraq began to be widely disseminated. This was the time when the bad news about the war (and good news for the defense stocks) was coming out publicly, the news that would propel the public to buy defense stocks. This was an opportune time for speculators who had bought earlier in 2000 and 2001 in anticipation of this good news to begin to liquidate their holdings. The defense stocks sold off on their good news. How do we know that the information about war was spreading at this juncture and becoming publicly available? A cluster of events occurred. On June 1, Bush addressed West Point and announced the preemptive war doctrine. On June 11, Rumsfeld was asked point blank at a press conference: "Are you planning for a new war against them?" Another question was "Is it true, as we feel, that the purpose of your visit is to gather support to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime?" Although he denied this, the questioners made clear that his strong previous statements about Saddam had left the impression that war lay ahead. On June 17, the New York Times wrote that the Bush administration was codifying the preemption doctrine and that "Iraq is clearly first on the target list." Reuters on June 20, after increased aerial bombardments in Iraq, mentioned "speculation that the United States might be preparing to invade Iraq..." Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department, says that he first learned that the war against Iraq was definite in the first week of July: "The moment was the first week of July (2002), when I had a meeting with Condi. I raised this issue about were we really sure that we wanted to put Iraq front and center at this point, given the war on terrorism and other issues. And she said, essentially, that that decision's been made, don't waste your breath. And that was early July." On July 7, the Guardian reported on U.S. military activity in Jordan. Its headline read: "US to attack Iraq via Jordan." Why did defense stocks bottom out in March of 2000? How did the market begin to learn that war was more probable? We need to review what Bush and others said and the market’s concurrent price action. We recognize that there are innumerable events impinging on stocks, but if we examine enough statements we see a pattern that can be explained by the information in these statements. On December 2, 1999, candidate Bush said he’d "take ’em out," referring, he clarified, to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The stock market rose about 0.5 percent that day. This goes against our hypothesis. On February 11, 2000, Bush said "...there won’t be any weapons of mass destruction left in Iraq if I’m the commander in chief..." The market closed down about 2 percent that day. On May 17, 2000, Bush reportedly told a group of Republicans of his intention to take out both Saddam and Iraq. The market closed down about 1 percent that day. On Sept. 29, 2000, the Bush-Cheney Comprehensive Energy Policy referred to ominous Iraqi threats to oil. The market closed down about 1.7 percent that day. In a debate on October 11, 2000 (after the market close), Bush said that the coalition against Saddam had "fallen apart or it’s unraveling..." He said Saddam had better not be developing WMD or there’d "be a consequence..." Bush was at that point in a comfortable lead over Gore. The market fell that day and the next, a total of about 3.6 percent. In retrospect, the evidence is quite one-sided. During the year 2000, defense stocks were rising as the probability of war against Iraq was rising. The speculation was also a bet that Bush would win the election. Speculation is not a sure thing. According to the Iowa Electronic Market history, Bush pulled ahead early and, after some wild fluctuations in September in which he was seen as a loser, regained the lead and kept it through the election. In February of 2001, at the onset of the Bush administration, the pace of public war-relevant statements and activities picked up. We also now know that during this month the administration drafted secret plans for the war and that the National Security Council’s first meetings focused on war against Iraq. Therefore, both Washington insiders and speculators attuned to political news were recognizing that war lay ahead. Here’s the documentation. The stock market rose on only 6 trading days in February. It fell on 13. The decline for the month came to about 9.5 percent. In particular, on Feb. 1 and again on Feb. 4 Powell said Saddam threatened his neighbors with WMD. On February 15, Woolsey said that Iraq may have been involved in the bombing of the World Trade Center. On Feb. 16, both U.S. and British planes attacked Iraqi targets outside the no-fly zone. The market dropped about 2.4 percent that day alone. On Feb. 20, Admiral Quigley said that the bombings would continue. The President on Feb. 22 said that he had been spending a lot of time on the Persian Gulf, that Saddam should be peaceful, that the sanctions were not working, and that the bombing was a message to Saddam. Between Feb. 15 and Feb. 23, the market dropped over 6 percent. Lest the influence of these war-related statements be thought to be coincidence, there were two occasions during this important month and another in March when administration officials made statements that lowered the odds of war and on all three occasions the market rose. On Feb. 11 with the market closed, Rumsfeld said that Saddam was not a nuclear threat and Powell said Saddam was much weaker. The next day, stock prices went up somewhat over 1 percent. On Feb. 24 (market closed), Powell said that Saddam had no significant WMD capability. The next day of trading saw stock prices rise well over 2 percent. On March 6, Powell said that the sanctions would prevent Saddam from acquiring a WMD capability (implying no war would be necessary). The market rose about 1 percent that day. If war statements and stock price movements were unrelated, the odds are close to zero that we would observe so many instances when more likely war news appeared with market declines and less likely war news appeared with market rises. The main alternative to explain the large February decline is economic news. On November 26, 2001, the NBER dated March, 2001 as the crest of a business cycle peak. It is possible that the stock market decline in February of 2001 was partly due to the recession that was starting. However, prices had already moved down from the 1530 level to the 1350 level, a drop of 12 percent, over the prior 5 months. As part of its usual discounting capability, the stock market typically declines in advance of recessions by a few months. Charles Dow in 1900 thought that the market looked ahead 3–6 months. Of course, in the months to follow, defense stocks continued to rise and the stock market continued to decline, even as the recession deepened and war became more likely. Although the stock market is difficult to interpret because of its forward-looking capacity and the multiplicity of information that affects it, the evidence in this case clearly supports economic logic. War destroys wealth. The Iraq War destroyed immense wealth. The trillion dollar estimate made by Leigh, Wolfers, and Zitzewitz, predicated on a 15 percent drop in the S&P 500 and derived from consideration of futures prices, is supported by my direct examination of stock prices. When Bush the candidate made statements that enhanced the chance of war and when Bush the President and his men made statements, initiated plans, moved troops into Jordan, and bombed outside the no-fly zone, stock prices dropped. Their actions are associated with drops in prices that cumulate to over 15 percent by March 2001. Our leaders not only annihilated a large portion of Iraq, the Iraqi people, and the Iraqi economy, but they also annihilated American wealth to a surprisingly large degree. January 5, 2006 Michael S. Rozeff [mailto:msroz@buffalo.edu] is the Louis M. Jacobs Professor of Finance at University at Buffalo. -------- us politics Bush Defies Congress, Makes Series of Recess Appointments Democracy Now! Headlines for January 5, 2006 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/05/1454235 Meanwhile Washington President Bush defied Congress on Wednesday and made a series of controversial recess appointments. Bush tapped former Navy Secretary and defense contractor Gordon England to become deputy defense secretary to fill the post once held by Paul Wolfowitz. He also appointed Dorrance Smith to become the Pentagon's chief spokesman assistant secretary for public affairs. In April Smith wrote a controversial article for the Wall Street Journal in which he claimed there is an ongoing relationship between al Qaeda, al-Jazeera and U.S. tv networks. He wrote "This partnership is a powerful tool for the terrorists in the war in Iraq." Bush also appointed Julie Myers to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau at the Department of Homeland Security. She is the niece of former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard Myers and the wife of the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. -------- ENERGY -------- alternative energy Toronto's Exhibition Place to Install Largest Solar System in Canada TORONTO, Ontario, Canada, January 5, 2006 (ENS) http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2006/2006-01-05-01.asp The City of Toronto is poised to install the largest solar power system in Canada on the roof of the Horse Palace at Exhibition Place. Scheduled for completion in the spring, the 100 killowatt system is expected to reduce the facility’s greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 94.7 metric tons per year. Exhibition Place, located just west of downtown Toronto along the shores of Lake Ontario, holds large-scale world-class events, including the Canadian National Exhibition, the Molson INDY, the Caribana Parade, the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, and World Youth Dayon on its 192 acres of parkland. Each year, 5.2 million people visit the site. The city has sent a letter of intent to buy the million dollar system from Carmanah Technologies Corporation of Victoria, British Columbia, a publicly traded company. “We’re extremely pleased to be selected as the technology partner for this very important solar power project,” said Carmanah CEO Art Aylesworth. “Carmanah will provide Exhibition Place with a complete turn-key package as a model of sustainable energy for the City of Toronto." Richard Morris, manager of the energy efficiency office at Exhibition Place, told the "Toronto Star" that if all goes well, Exhibition Place will expand the solar PV system to one megawatt or more in 2007. "What we'll end up doing is just covering that entire roof to the extent we can," he said. Carmanah’s solar power system will be tied to the electricity grid. It will use high-efficiency solar modules and a unique penetrationless tracking system. An educational lobby display will show the public how much power is being produced, give environmental conditions, and offer historical system performance data. Rob McMonagle, executive director of the Canadian Solar Industries Association (CANSIA), said the installation will help move Toronto toward a more sustainable future. “Solar energy will play an important role as part of Ontario’s future power generation," McMonagle said. "Toronto has a mandate for cleaner air and reduced dependence on fossil fuels. Carmanah’s installation at Exhibition Place will show how rooftops across Canada can be efficiently utilized for sustainable electrical generation." The Horse Palace project is being partly funded by grants from the Toronto Atmospheric Fund and the Green Municipal Fund. CANSIA applauded the Toronto Atmospheric Fund and the City of Toronto for launching the project, and McMonagle said he expects "many municipalities to follow their example.” Aylesworth sees the project as a model for other communities to follow. “With the successful implementation of this project, we will also set an example to other cities striving to reach their renewable energy goals," he said. Carmanah's core business has been solar-powered LED lighting systems for marine, transport and aviation clients. Municipalities such as Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago and London have bought the company's systems for bus shelters instead of digging up streets to install electrical lines. Last summer, Carmanah expanded into the broader solar market by acquiring Soltek Powersource Ltd., a supplier and manufacturer of larger solar systems. With Soltek under its corporate umbrella Carmanah was able to win the Exhibition Place project. The solar system on the Horse Palace roof will join other renewable energy systems operating at Exhibition Place, which is the location of the first city-sited wind turbine in Canada. A fuel cell demonstration project was introduced in 2003. A 10 million kilowatt trigeneration project is planned in partnership with the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. Trigeneration is the simultaneous production of cooling, heating and power, in one process. The project is expected to provide an annual reduction of 7,400 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. Exhibition Place's goal is to become energy self-sufficient by 2010, and ultimately to become a net exporter of clean electricity. The Board of Governors of Exhibition Place says it is "committed to advancing the environmental agenda to make Exhibition Place a showcase” within the City of Toronto to promote sustainable development and emergent green technologies in partnership with the private sector and climate change agencies. ---- Britain Seen off to Slow Start on Biomass, Biofuels REUTERS UK: January 5, 2006 http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34328/story.htm OXFORD - Britain has made a slow start in developing biofuels and biomass production, UK farming minister Lord Bach said on Wednesday. "I think we in the UK have probably been a bit behind the game in both biofuels and biomass. We are seriously trying to catch up now," he said at the annual Oxford farming conference. Biofuels, which are produced using agricultural products such as rapeseed oil, grain and sugar cane, can replace traditional transport fuels and supporters believe they have a role in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Biomass uses agricultural products to generate electricity. Britain is currently holding a consultation about how to develop its biomass production. Lord Bach said the government would come up with a biomass policy later this year, noting many controversial issues had been raised. A recent government report backed the use of biomass but faced criticism for failing to set any targets for its use by Britain's power industry and there remains considerable debate about how big a role it should play in meeting the country's future energy needs. Lord Bach added that the government was seeking a policy that was attractive to farmers and businesses and good for the country. "I have to tell you we are not there yet," he said. Britain recently announced a plan to promote biofuels use, setting a five percent target for its use to be met by late this decade. He noted the government was working to quantify the benefits of biofuels but said he would be "very surprised" if they were not beneficial to the environment. -------- ACTIVISTS Christian Peacemaker Team Activists to Fast Outside White House Democracy Now! Headlines for January 5, 2006 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/05/1454235 It has now been 40 days since four peace activists with the Christian Peacemaker Teams were kidnapped in Iraq. The group had been working in Iraq since before the invasion opposing the U.S. presence there and exposing detainee abuses. Members of the Christian Peacemaker Team in this country have announced plan to begin a public fast outside the White House beginning Friday. The group says it will continue its fast until President Bush agrees to meet with members. ---- Vietnam war 'deserter' charged Julian Borger in Washington Thursday January 5, 2006 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1678213,00.html In a possible message to would-be deserters in Iraq, the US marines have charged a pensioner for not going to war in Vietnam 40 years ago. Former marine private Jerry Texiero was found selling boats and classic cars in Florida under a false name. He was identified as a result of a fraud conviction in 1998, which he said was the result of wrongdoing by a former partner. Seven years later marine investigators from an "AWOL apprehension unit" compared his fingerprints with their records of deserters. He was first arrested by Florida police in August and handed over to the military on December 21. Mr Texiero, 65, is being held in Camp Lejeune, a marine base in North Carolina. No date has been set for preliminary hearings. If he is convicted of desertion in a court martial, he could serve three years in a military jail. His lawyers were due to discuss the case with him yesterday. Tod Ensign, the legal director of Citizen Soldier, an advocacy group representing conscientious objectors, wrote to Camp Lejeune's commanding officer, Brigadier General Robert Dickerson, asking: "Why are scarce marine resources being squandered on the prosecution of a senior citizen whose only 'crime' is refusing to fight a war that today is universally discredited? "Or is the corps warning marines in Iraq that they will pursue deserters to the grave? They have the burden of proof that he was not lawfully serving his time at the duty station. We're not going to concede it." Mr Ensign also called for Mr Texiero to be released from military custody while he fights the charges.