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                         NUCLEAR POLICY
 
1 [NYTr] Uranium from US "Broken Arrows" in Iran?
2 IRNA: Asefi: West wants Iran to revise decision on nuclear issue
3 Guardian Unlimited: Iran: Europe Proposes Nonaggression Pact
4 BBC: UK warns Iran over nuclear plans
5 FT.com: EU diplomats fear collapse of nuclear talks with Iran
6 Rueters: Iran to defy EU by resuming nuclear activity 
7 Reuters: Iran says ready to restart nuclear work 
8 Reuters: Iran and EU in dispute over nuclear issue                  
9 Guardian Unlimited: Iran threatens to restart nuclear activity
10 Guardian Unlimited: U.S. Envoy Says Korea Statement in Works
11 Guardian Unlimited: China Offers Draft Statement at Nuke Talks
12 Guardian Unlimited: Nuke Talks Focus on China Draft Statement
13 INSIDE JoongAng Daily: [EDITORIALS] The talks' steady progress
14 Daily Yomiuri: Japan to N. Korea: Let's talk 
15 Daily Yomiuri: U.S. may tolerate peaceful N. Korean nuclear program 
16 Las Vegas SUN: N. Korea Nuke Disarmament Talks Hit Snag 
17 Xinhua: DPRK to rejoin NPT if nuclear issue be resolved satisfactori
18 Xinhua: Heads of delegations end meeting on fifth day's six-party
19 Xinhua: Deadlocked nuclear talks extend into weekend   
20 ITAR-TASS: Rssn diplomat on prospects for passing final doc at Korea
21 Reuters: N.Korea talks envoys struggle for consensus on paper       
22 Reuters: Envoys clash as Korea nuclear talks seek consensus         
23 Reuters: North Korea nuclear talks enter uncharted territory        
24 Reuters: North Korea nuclear talks straggle into seventh day        
25 Reuters: N.Korea vows to rejoin NPT if nuclear issue solved         
26 Reuters: N.Korea rejects Seoul offer of energy aid -paper 
27 Reuters: Text of N.Korea foreign minister on nuclear crisis         
28 AFP: Talks resume as US says NKorea must also abandon civilian nucle
29 Guardian Unlimited: North Korea Nuclear Talks Reach 4th Day
30 US: Lake County Record-Bee: Leaving the gate open
31 US: Deseret News: Newly passed energy bill will help little, critics
32 US: WorldNetDaily: Media sycophant jailbird?
33 US: York Daily Record: Senate passes energy bill - 
34 US: UCS: Barton Investigation
35 US: Cato: Burning Money Produces Scant Energy
36 Sunday Times: Before the Fall-Out by Diana Preston - 
37 Herald-Leader: 60 years after A-bomb, we must face truth
38 Bellona: Electricity debt can mean lights out for Northern fleet bas
39 Sunday Herald: HIROSHIMA: THE LEGACY
40 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / An ugly end,
41 Courier-Journal: After the A-bombs
42 SF Chronicle: Shrines, temples create magic of Miyajima / 
43 SF Chronicle: Hiroshima at peace / Sixty years later, it's a city of
44 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Thank God fo
45 SF Chronicle: Killing a golden age of nuclear research / Why the U.S
46 Arizona Republic: The day we vaporized a city
47 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / 50,000 survi
48 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / How the U.S.
49 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Nazi nuke pr
50 SF Chronicle: TWO CENTS / Who will be the next to use a nuclear bomb
51 APP.COM: HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI: 60 YEARS LATER
52 toledoblade.com: 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
53 Courier-Journal: Louisville's Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemorations
54 US: South Florida Sun-Sentinel: The road that led to the bomb
 
                         NUCLEAR REACTORS
 
55 INSIDE JoongAng Daily: KEDO reactors an obstacle at six-party talks
56 US: SignOnSanDiego.com: Nuclear power poised for comeback
57 Sunday Herald: Nuclear industry demands new laws to ban protest brea
58 US: Concord Monitor: State official calls Vermont Yankee safe   
59 US: Keene Sentinel: Vt.-N.H. Yankee 
60 Sofia Morning News: Bulgarian Nuke Unit Shuts Down for Repairs
 
                          NUCLEAR SECURITY
 
61 Bellona: Russian legislators ratify accord with Canada that will hel
 
                          NUCLEAR SAFETY
 
62 US: Lake County Record-Bee: The face of our own savagery
63 Lake County Record-Bee: There are no victors
64 US: Herald-Tribune: Review beryllium program
65 US: Norwich Bulletin: Volunteers prepare for nuclear disaster
66 News.com.au: Hiroshima survivors speak 
 
                         NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
 
67 US: San Bernardino County Sun: Company renegotiating perchlorate cle
68 US: L.A. Daily News: Perchlorate vandalism?
69 US: Las Vegas SUN: Texas Family Fights Uranium Mining 
70 AU ABC: Senator claims NT offered waste dump 'sweetener'
71 US: Deseret News: Goshute member ordered to repay $17,300 to bank 
72 US: Deseret News: Idaho could be headed for another nuclear wastes
73 Las Vegas SUN: Yucca Mountain license application facing new delay 
74 US: Idaho Statesman: Ecology group enters waste deal
75 US: Herald-Tribune Tallevast ground-water cleanup won't start for at
76 US: Chillicothe Gazette: Pike stream to be tested
77 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Goshute dissident ordered to repay funds in
78 US: WIVB TV4 Buffalo: Did FMC Handle Radioactive Waste & Agent Orang
79 Pahrump Valley Times: Yucca advocates visit Nye County 
 
                           PEACE
 
 
                        US DEPT. OF ENERGY
 
80 Las Vegas RJ: HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE: Washington court: Initiative can
81 Tri-City Herald: Mitigation for reactors should be spent here 
*****************************************************************
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                         FULL NEWS STORIES
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 1 [NYTr] Uranium from US "Broken Arrows" in Iran?
 
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 05:45:45 -0500 (CDT)

 
	autolearn=ham version=3.0.4
X-Spam-filter-host: pascal.ctyme.com - http://www.junkemailfilter.com

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Excerpted from CounterPunch Diary - July 30/31, 2005
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07302005.html

Lost Nuclear Warheads from a B-52 Now in Iran?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Iran may have the weapons-grade uranium out of three nuclear warheads 
dumped out of a B-52 back in 1991. Or so at least the US government 
might have some reason to believe, according to a seemingly 
well-informed person talking to CounterPunch last week.

On February 3, 1991, this particular B-52G had been deployed to circle 
around Baghdad. It was armed with 3 SRAM missiles armed with nuclear 
warheads and fitted with rocket drives to push them 100 miles to the 
rear of the B-52 before detonating.

The B-52 was heading off to refuel when it developed very serious 
electrical problems, including the loss of navigational equipment.

Hoping to limp back to base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian 
Ocean, the crew were heading the plane south just off the coast of 
Somalia when fires in five of the engines threatened to detonate the 
heat sensitive fuse mechanisms of the SRAMS. Thinking they would plummet 
into deep water the crew dumped the nuclear bombs, and the B-52 crashed 
not long thereafter. Some members of the crew died, others survived and 
were picked up.

But, our informant tells us, the warheads in fact landed in shallow 
water, on Somalia's continental shelf. Three months later, in mid-May of 
1991, they were allegedly retrieved and passed into the hands of an arms 
dealer involved in other covert transactions in Somalia at the time.

The dimension of each warhead was 30" x 18" x 18", weighing 560 pounds. 
Because of sea-water contamination only the weapons grade uranium would 
be usable, either in a "dirty" bomb, or as the warhead for a new missile.

As the three warheads entered international arms-smuggling loops, the 
Bush-One and subsequently Clinton administrations dispatched various 
covert units to recover them, with no success.

As possible substantiation that the warheads may have ended up in Iran, 
CounterPunch's informant cites a hour-long BBC-TV Channel-2 documentary, 
broadcast on May 3, 2005,titled "Iran's Nuclear Secrets" in which they 
showed their TV-cameraman with UN weapons inspectors in Iran.

During those searches the inspectors found radiation traces in rooms 
left by the previous presence of weapons-grade uranium, with an 
enrichment of 40% to 60%.

The BBC program suggested that as local enrichment had not started then 
the Iranians must have held non-local black-Market material. The BBC 
concluded that with this material Iran was already perceived as a threat 
by Israel and the Scott Ritter's forecasted raids were a likely possibility.

If the US or Israel does launch an aerial attack on the suspected 
depository of the three warheads, or of uranium from them, the 
consequences could be lethal in more ways than one, if a "bunker busting 
" raid simply dispersed the nuclear materials into the atmosphere, with 
unpleasant consequences for all in the wind path.

Vice President Cheney, recently linked to speculation that he is eager 
to use any future 9/11 type attack in the US as a pretext to attack 
Iran, was Secretary of Defense back in 1991.

At the Pentagon lost nukes are called Broken Arrows. A few years ago, my 
coeditor Jeffrey St. Clair wrote a riveting account of how another B-52 
lost an H-bomb in the swamps near Savannah, Georgia. It still hasn't 
been recovered. You can find the story in his book Been Brown So Long It 
Looked Like Green to Me.
       
                                *
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*****************************************************************
 2 IRNA: Asefi: West wants Iran to revise decision on nuclear issue

Tehran, July 31, IRNA                                                                                                            

Iran-Asefi-Nuclear 

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi said here Sunday
that almost all European and non-European countries have called
on Iran to revise its decision on the nuclear issue, including
the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who held talks with Foreign
Minister Kamal Kharrazi in this respect.

 He added that Iran has been sufficiently patient with EU and
that it can no more wait.

 He also dismissed rumors about Iran's intention to occupy part
of Iraq's Kurdistan.

 "We believe that the Iraqis themselves should settle their
border disputes and establish security at their frontiers," he
said.

 In response to a question about the confiscation of three
Iranian motor launches and arrest of their crews in Oman
waterways and the Foreign Ministry's approach towards the issue,
he put the number of arrested sailors at 33 and said that they
were all set free through the efforts of the Foreign Ministry.

 "Six of them, who were sentenced to 39 months of prison, were
released on Saturday. Two of the three motor launches, which
were confiscated according to Oman's laws are to be returned to
their owners. However, there is no way the other one can be
returned, given that the Foreign Ministry was informed quite
late," he added.

 Thanking the Omani government for responding to our call on
time, he called upon the Iranian citizens residing overseas to
avoid attending foreign tribunals without being accompanied by a
lawyer and the Iranian embassy's representative, in case they
face any legal problems.

 Turning to the status of foreign investment in the country,
once the new government takes over and the situation of stock
market, he said that this should be announced by the government
spokesman, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh.

 "During our talks with the President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
he clearly declared that he does not intend to prevent foreign
investment.

 "According to the press, after the discussions held on the
stock market, measures have been taken to stop major drop and
balance is expected to be established. Thus, there is no reason
for concern," he added.

 About his status in the next meeting, Asefi said that he will
continue as the Foreign Ministry spokesman and referred to
himself and his colleagues as minor employees serving the ruling
system.

 "Our diplomacy acts beyond factions and parties and the
procedure to communicate with it is quite distinct from what is
common elsewhere," he added.

Sunday July 31, 2005
*****************************************************************
 3 Guardian Unlimited: Iran: Europe Proposes Nonaggression Pact
 
From the Associated Press        

[UP] 

Sunday July 31, 2005 12:01 PM

TEHRAN, Iran (AP)- Iran's top nuclear negotiator said his
European counterparts have proposed a guarantee that Iran won't
be invaded if Tehran agrees to a permanent halt on uranium
enrichment, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said on
Sunday. 

Hasan Rowhani said the proposal is under discussion by Europeans
and includes several important points such as ``guarantees about
Iran's integrity, independence, national sovereignty'' and
``nonaggression toward Iran,'' the agency reported. 

``If Europe enjoys a serious political will about Iran's nuclear
fuel cycle, there will be the possibility of understanding,''
the agency quoted Rowhani as saying in a letter to outgoing
Iranian president Mohammad Khatami. 
		 	 	   
      Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 4 BBC: UK warns Iran over nuclear plans
 
Last Updated: Sunday, 31 July 2005
 
[Iran nuclear facility]                                 

Iran says it wants to resume nuclear enrichment                                                               

The international dispute over Iran's nuclear programme appears 
to be escalating, with Tehran threatening to resume uranium 
conversion. 

The UK Foreign Office urged Iran not to take unilateral steps 
that could jeopardise talks with three European Union nations - 
known as the E3. 

The remarks came after a top Iranian official set a Sunday 
deadline for the EU to propose economic incentives. 

The UK - the current EU president - said these would be given in 
a week. 

This was in accordance with the decisions of the Geneva meeting 
in May between Iran and the three European countries - Britain, 
France and Germany - as well as the EU's foreign policy chief, 
Javier Solana, said a Foreign Office (FCO) spokesman. 

This is threatening to become a dangerous escalation, says the 
BBC's Jon Leyne. 

	

	
                                                        If we do 
not receive the proposal today [Sunday], tomorrow morning we will 
start part of the activities in Isfahan's uranium conversion 
facility                 [ src=] Ali Aghamohammadi Iranian 
spokesman       

	 

The US believes Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, but Iran 
insists its programme is for civilian use only. 

Iran suspended all uranium conversion and enrichment activities 
in November 2004 as a result of international pressure. 

However, it has always insisted that the suspension was temporary 
and that it would resume some of its nuclear activities 
regardless of EU proposals. 

The European states have threatened to refer Iran to the UN 
Security Council for possible sanctions if Iran resumes its 
nuclear activities. 

IAEA supervision 

The UK reaction came after Iran said it would resume nuclear 
activities at the Isfahan plant on Monday if the Europeans had 
not submitted their proposals. 

"If we do not receive the EU proposal today [Sunday], tomorrow 
morning we will start part of the activities in Isfahan's uranium 
conversion facility," Ali Aghamohammadi, spokesman for the 
Supreme National Security Council, told state television. 

We urge them not to take a unilateral step UK spokesman    

"This will be under the supervision of UN inspectors," he said. 

The FCO spokesman said this would be "an unnecessary and damaging 
step by Iran". 

"We are seeking clarification of Iran's intentions. We urge them 
not to take any unilateral step which would contravene the Paris 
agreement as that would make it very difficult to continue with 
the E3/Iran negotiations. 

"Should the Iranians persist, we will as a first step consult 
urgently with our partners on the board of the IAEA 
[International Atomic Energy Agency]." 

Iran appears to be hardening its position but it is not clear if 
this is just a way of putting pressure on Europe before the talks 
or a serious threat, says the BBC's Frances Harrison in Tehran. 

Earlier this week, outgoing President Mohammad Khatami said he 
hoped EU diplomats would allow for a resumption of enrichment 
activities, but that Iran would begin again in any case. 

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative former Tehran mayor who was 
elected Iran's president last month, has said he wants to 
continue the nuclear programme. 

Uranium enrichment can be used to fuel nuclear power stations, 
but can also provide material for nuclear weapons.                                                       



*****************************************************************
 5 FT.com: EU diplomats fear collapse of nuclear talks with Iran

By Daniel Dombey in Brussels, Gareth Smyth in Tehran and
Guy,Dinmore in Washington 

Published: July 30 2005 03:00 | Last updated: July 31 2005 17:52

[Iran nuclear] Iran could bring negotiations with the European
Union to a sudden end by resuming parts of its nuclear programme
as soon as next week, European diplomats have warned.

EU officials are working on the final details of an offer to
assist Tehran in the nuclear, economic and diplomatic fields, as
long as it turns its back on technologies that could be used for
nuclear weapons. But recent Iranian statements have stoked
European fears that Tehran could be about to resume activity at
its uranium conversion plant, with a preliminary role in the
nuclear fuel cycle.

Mohammad Khatami, Iran's outgoing president, said this week that
Iran would "definitely" resume work at this Isfahan plant
regardless of what France, Germany and the UK, which are leading
the EU effort, put on the table.

"Such a step would be a breach of the Paris agreement
[underpinning the talks] but until any action is taken, there
will be no further comment," said a British spokeswoman.

In such circumstances the EU would not put forward its offer,
which it plans to make soon after Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, a
conservative fundamentalist, is inaugurated as the new president
on Thursday.

However, Iran recently set Monday as a deadline for the EU
proposals. Buoyed by Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's landslide election
victory, opponents of Iran's freeze of uranium enrichment have
also noted the US's recent agreement to supply nuclear
technology to India, which developed nuclear weapons outside the
Nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

There is widespread expectation that Ali Larijani, former head
of state broadcasting, will take over as Iran's leading nuclear
negotiator. Mr Larijani once said Iran would exchange "a pearl
for a candy" if it gave up its nuclear programme in return for
trade concessions.

The European offer is intended to pave the way for the
transformation of relations between Iran and the west.  
  
Â© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005. "FT"
*****************************************************************
 6 Rueters: Iran to defy EU by resuming nuclear activity 

Sun Jul 31, 2005 2:15 PM ET                                                                                             

 By Parisa Hafezi

 TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Sunday it would resume sensitive 
nuclear activities at once without waiting for EU compromise 
proposals, a move that the EU said was "unnecessary and damaging" 
and could derail their talks.

 Iran said it was acting after the EU failed to meet a deadline 
set by Tehran to deliver an offer to break the impasse.

 But the British Foreign Office said the EU -- represented by 
Britain, France and Germany -- had informed Iran that "full and 
detailed proposals" would be delivered in a week.

 The EU plans to offer economic and political incentives in 
return for Iran's indefinite suspension of uranium enrichment, 
nuclear fuel reprocessing and related activities.

 "We urge them not to take any unilateral step which would 
contravene the Paris agreement as that would make it very 
difficult to continue with the ... negotiations," it said.

 A senior Iranian nuclear official told Reuters on condition of 
anonymity: "As we did not receive the EU proposals, naturally we 
will definitely resume work at the Isfahan plant tomorrow."

 The EU and the United States suspect Iran is trying to build a 
nuclear arsenal and say if Iran restarts uranium conversion or 
enrichment, they will ask the U.N. Security Council to impose 
sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

 Tehran insists its programme is peaceful and it only wants 
nuclear power to generate electricity.

 SANCTIONS?

 In Paris last November, Iran committed "on a voluntary basis, to 
continue and extend its suspension to include all enrichment 
related and reprocessing activities" and "all tests or production 
at any uranium conversion installation".

 The agreement also states: "The suspension will be sustained 
while negotiations proceed on a mutually acceptable agreement on 
long-term arrangements."

 It was unclear whether the EU would now submit its proposals.

 "Should the Iranians persist, we will as a first step consult 
urgently with our partners on the board of the IAEA 
(International Atomic Energy Agency)," the Foreign Office said.

 The IAEA board can recommend Iran be referred to the U.N. 
Security Council which could then vote to impose sanctions.

 But Iran said earlier it had little to fear from referral to the 
U.N. Security Council.

 "There is no legal basis for Iran's case to be referred to the 
U.N. Security Council. Besides, being referred to the council is 
not the end of the world. Some officials even believe it is 
better to be referred to the council," Iranian Foreign Ministry 
spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a news conference.

 Russia and China, which both hold a veto as permanent members of 
the council, have close trade links with Iran and are less keen 
on the idea of sanctions than other members.

 But an EU diplomat close to the talks said two years of 
hard-bargaining with Iran over nuclear activities it kept secret 
for 18 years had seen a closer consensus emerge among Security 
Council members on the possible need for sanctions.                                             

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 7 Reuters: Iran says ready to restart nuclear work 

Monday Sun Jul 31, 2005 7:32 AM ET               

By Parisa Hafezi

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said it would restart some nuclear 
activities on Monday unless it receives European Union proposals 
on Sunday to break a diplomatic impasse.

The EU is due to offer Iran some economic and political 
incentives in return for an indefinite suspension of uranium 
enrichment, nuclear fuel reprocessing and related activities.

If Iran resumes its activities, the EU says it will back U.S. 
calls for the Islamic Republic to be reported to the United 
Nations Security Council and face possible sanctions.

"If we do not receive the EU proposal today, tomorrow morning we 
will start part of activities in Isfahan's uranium conversion 
facility," Ali Aghamohammadi, spokesman for the Supreme National 
Security Council, told state television.

"This will be under the supervision of U.N. inspectors," he 
added.

A conversion plant near the central city of Isfahan takes 
processed uranium ore, mined in Iran's central desert, and turns 
it into uranium hexafluoride gas. This gas can be pumped into 
centrifuges that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium.

Enriched uranium is used in nuclear power plants, but if highly 
enriched can be used in atomic weaponry.

The EU and the United States suspect Iran's nuclear programme is 
a veil for efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Tehran insists it 
only wants nuclear power to generate electricity.

An EU diplomat familiar with the nuclear negotiations said any 
resumption of activities at the Isfahan plant would mean Iran 
would start down the road toward U.N. sanctions.

"We've been absolutely clear all along that if they did something 
like this it would be considered a breach of our agreement," the 
diplomat told Reuters. "But we will not react until they have 
actually done something."

DEADLINE

Iran set a deadline of 1230 GMT on Sunday for the EU to submit 
its package of incentives, but said it would continue talks with 
the bloc and would not resume uranium enrichment.

Iran has said the parties originally agreed on an August 1 
deadline for submission of the proposals, but the EU's so-called 
"Big Three" -- Britain, France and Germany -- had asked for this 
to be extended by six days. Tehran said it rejected any delay.

Diplomats in the EU's "Big Three" countries said they were not 
aware the bloc had committed itself firmly to August 1.

"We will hand them over when we are good and ready," the EU 
diplomat said.

They said there had been an agreement at talks with Iran in 
Geneva last May that the EU would submit proposals by the end of 
July or "early August".

Regardless of the date, diplomats have expressed little hope a 
deal can be done. The dispute over the deadline appeared to have 
more to do with who to blame when things go wrong.

Iranian hardliners would like to see any resumption of nuclear 
work come before reformist President Mohammad Khatami hands over 
office to conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on August 6.

"Restarting the nuclear facilities must be the last job of 
Khatami's government," the Jomhuri-e Eslami newspaper quoted 
National Security Council member Ali Larijani as saying.

Waiting until August 7 would allow the EU to present its offer 
after the inauguration of Ahmadinejad.

Analysts are uncertain what effect a new president will have on 
the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme but suggest negotiators 
take their orders directly from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali 
Khamenei, bypassing the government. 

(Additional reporting by Jon Hemming) 			 			

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 8 Reuters: Iran and EU in dispute over nuclear issue                       

Sun Jul 31, 2005 8:36 AM ET                                                                                                 

 By Parisa Hafezi

 TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said it would restart some sensitive 
nuclear fuel activities on Monday unless it received European 
Union proposals on Sunday to break a diplomatic impasse over the 
country's atomic programme.

 The British Foreign Office said on Sunday that EU members 
Britain, France and Germany had informed Iran that "full and 
detailed proposals" would be delivered in a week.

 The EU plans to offer economic and political incentives in 
return for Iran's indefinite suspension of uranium enrichment, 
nuclear fuel reprocessing and related activities.

 The EU and the United States suspect Iran wants to use these 
processes to make nuclear weapons and say if Iran restarts them, 
they will ask the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on 
the Islamic Republic. Tehran insists its programme is peaceful 
and it only wants nuclear power to generate electricity.

 "If we do not receive the EU proposal today, tomorrow morning we 
will start part of (the) activities in Isfahan's uranium 
conversion facility," Ali Aghamohammadi, spokesman for the 
Supreme National Security Council, told state television.

 The conversion plant near the central city of Isfahan takes 
processed uranium ore, mined in Iran's central desert, and turns 
it into uranium hexafluoride gas. This gas can be pumped into 
centrifuges that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium.

 Enriched uranium is used in nuclear power plants, but if highly 
enriched can be used in atomic weaponry.

 An EU diplomat familiar with the nuclear negotiations said any 
resumption of activities at the Isfahan plant would mean Iran had 
broken an agreement it made in Paris in November, 2004.

 According to the agreement Iran committed "on a voluntary basis, 
to continue and extend its suspension to include all enrichment 
related and reprocessing activities" and "all tests or production 
at any uranium conversion installation".

 The agreement also states: "The suspension will be sustained 
while negotiations proceed on a mutually acceptable agreement on 
long-term arrangements."

 The EU diplomat told Reuters: "We've been absolutely clear all 
along that if they did something like this it would be considered 
a breach of our agreement."

 DEADLINE

 Iran set a deadline of 1:30 p.m. British time (1230 GMT) on 
Sunday for the EU to submit its package of incentives, but said 
it would continue talks with the bloc and would not resume 
uranium enrichment.

 Iran has said the parties originally agreed on an August 1 
deadline for submission of the proposals, but the EU's so-called 
"Big Three" -- Britain, France and Germany -- had asked for this 
to be extended by six days. Tehran said it rejected any delay.

 They said there had been an agreement at talks with Iran in 
Geneva in May that the EU would submit proposals by the end of 
July or "early August".

 Regardless of the date, diplomats have expressed little hope a 
deal can be done.

 Iran said it had little to fear from referral to the United 
Nations. Russia and China, which both hold a veto as permanent 
members of the Security Council, have close trade links with Iran 
and are less keen on the idea of sanctions than other members.

 "There is no legal basis for Iran's case to be referred to the 
U.N. Security Council. Besides, being referred to the council is 
not the end of the world. Some officials even believe it is 
better to be referred to the council," an Iranian Foreign 
Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a news conference.

(Additional reporting by Jon Hemming in Tehran and Madeleine 
Chambers in London)                                             

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 9 Guardian Unlimited: Iran threatens to restart nuclear activity
 
Britain, France and Germany ask for week's grace as
Tehran claims it has offer of non-aggression deal 		
 		
Ian Traynor
Monday August 1, 2005
The Guardian 		
 		
Britain, France and Germany are to promise Iran that it will not 
face military attack if it abandons enriching uranium, the key to 
building a nuclear bomb, a senior Iranian official said 
yesterday.

With Tehran and the three EU countries engaged in a delicate game 
of brinkmanship as a new hardline Iranian leader is sworn in as 
president, Hassan Rowhani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, said 
the EU trio was to offer the non-aggression pledge as one 
incentive aimed at getting Iran to forfeit uranium enrichment.

Both sides in the long-running dispute upped the ante at the 
weekend, with Tehran saying yesterday that it would resume some 
nuclear fuel activities today.

"As we did not receive the EU proposal, naturally we will
definitely resume work at the Isfahan plant tomorrow," a senior
Iranian nuclear official told the Reuters news agency.

Meanwhile, Britain told Tehran it would need to wait another
week for the details of the incentives.

Under an agreement with the EU last November, Iran suspended its
uranium enrichment programme. The EU troika agreed to deliver a
set of political, economic and nuclear offers to Iran by the end
of July or early August.

The deadline passed yesterday, according to the Iranians. The EU
requested a week's extension because it wants to wait for the
inauguration this week of the Iranian president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, before revealing its hand and to see whether the
new head of state, viewed as a radical, plans any changes to his
nuclear policy or negotiating team.

British officials described the Iranian warning at the weekend
as damaging prospects for an overall agreement. Mr Rowhani's
disclosures about a non-aggression pact came in a letter on the
nuclear crisis to the outgoing president, Mohammed Khatami,
reported yesterday by Iran's state news agency. It is not clear,
however, whether Mr Rowhani, viewed as a moderate, will survive
in position. The same news agency reported last month that he
had resigned.

Mr Rowhani also suggested that Iran should bow to EU demands by
maintaining its freeze on uranium enrichment, a policy opposed
by hardliners.

The Rowhani statement supporting a more pragmatic Iranian course
may reflect an internal battle over the direction of nuclear
policy under the new administration.

Moderates in Tehran, including President Khatami, have indicated
they will preserve the enrichment freeze. But the authorities
are sending mixed signals. They rejected the EU request for the
extra week with the threat to restart part of the enrichment
work by resuming uranium conversion.

The Iranians insist the work at Isfahan - taking uranium
concentrate and converting it into uranium hexafluoride gas - is
not uranium enrichment. The Iranians are threatening to restart
the work at Isfahan today, an act that would be viewed
negatively by the Europeans and push the EU trio towards the US
position - to penalise Iran by taking the dispute to the UN
security council in New York.

The Americans and the Europeans view the Natanz enrichment plant
as the centre of a potential bomb-building capacity and want it
closed down.

Diplomats following the dispute said all sides were engaged in
manoeuvring. Most are pessimistic that a sustainable deal will
be reached and expect the dispute to escalate.
 	
 	 	
[UP] 

      Guardian Unlimited ¿ Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 10 Guardian Unlimited: U.S. Envoy Says Korea Statement in Works

From the Associated Press        

[UP] 
 	 
Saturday July 30, 2005 5:46 AM

AP Photo GFX266 

By BURT HERMAN 

Associated Press Writer 

BEIJING (AP) - The chief U.S. envoy to talks on North Korea's
nuclear program said Saturday delegates would start work on a
joint statement of principles taking the negotiations into a
``new stage,'' but an agreement this weekend was unlikely. 

Work on a statement of ``agreed principles'' came as six-nation
talks stretched into an unprecedented fifth day and after U.S.
and North Korean diplomats held four sets of one-on-one meetings
this week. 

Delegates from all countries at the negotiations - China, Japan,
Russia, the two Koreas and the United States - met Saturday
morning for 20 minutes, a South Korean official said on
condition of anonymity, due to the delicacy of the talks. 

``China has proposed a draft, based on which further
negotiations on the statement will take place among No. 2
delegates,'' the official said. The Chinese hosts ``must have
thought (negotiations) have developed to a degree where we can
start discussions on the statement.'' 

Earlier, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said
negotiators would be working on the statement but that ``it's
going to take a while.'' 

``It is not going to be finished today or even tomorrow, because
even though the texts will be rather brief, they're rather
important too,'' he said as he left his hotel Saturday morning. 

The negotiations, renewed this week after a 13-month hiatus,
have produced no breakthroughs and their most significant
achievement appears to be that the Americans and North Koreans
have continued to talk. 

North Korea hasn't publicly commented on the talks' progress.
But it has also refrained from issuing the confrontational and
sometimes bellicose statements that it has made during three
previous rounds of talks, which began in 2003. 

Hill said after a meeting Friday with his North Korean
counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, that they
remained split over the North's demand for U.S. concessions
before giving up its nuclear weapons program and its insistence
on having a peaceful atomic energy project. 

``The fact that they're continuing to talk to each other is by
far the most encouraging sign,'' said Peter Beck, the
Seoul-based director of the North East Asia Project for the
International Crisis Group, an independent think tank. 

Beck said the latest round of talks has continued because
neither the North nor the Americans seemed to want to be blamed
for scuttling the discussions by walking away. Talks this week
have been more flexible than previous rounds, which were rigidly
scheduled and limited to three days each. 

Still, Beck noted, ``we're no farther than we were after the
previous rounds of talks in terms of what they have to show for
their actions.'' 

Rather than focusing on substantive issues in this round, the
negotiators were trying to agree on a set of principles as the
foundation for later talks, Hill said Friday. 

``There is a growing consensus that where we end up is the
denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula - that is, no nuclear
weapons, no nuclear weapons programs ... no nuclear programs
that could conceivably be nuclear weapons programs,'' he said. 

However, he said there was still disagreement over
``sequencing,'' or the North's demand for aid and concessions
first before giving up its nuclear trump card. Washington wants
to see the weapons programs eliminated before it rewards the
North. 

The latest nuclear standoff with North Korea was sparked after
U.S. officials said the North admitted in late 2002 to running a
uranium enrichment program - which could provide fuel for atomic
bombs - in violation of a 1994 deal with Washington. 

North Korea has subsequently denied having such a program, and
Hill said Friday that its status was one of the sticking points
in a resolution. 

Hill said the North has also insisted it should have the right
to use peaceful nuclear technology for power generation if it
rejoins the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The United States
maintains the North shouldn't be allowed to do so because of
proliferation concerns. 

Russia's top delegate, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander
Alexeyev, headed back to Moscow on Saturday for business reasons
but was to return to China early next week, the Russian Embassy
said. Other members of his delegation were continuing to work at
the talks. 	 
		 	 	   
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 11 Guardian Unlimited: China Offers Draft Statement at Nuke Talks
 
From the Associated Press        

[UP] 

Saturday July 30, 2005 8:01 AM

AP Photo BEJ115 

By JOE McDONALD 

Associated Press Writer 

BEIJING (AP) - China proposed a draft statement Saturday in a
possible sign of progress at six-nation nuclear talks aimed at
convincing North Korea to disarm, but the chief U.S. envoy said
an agreement this weekend was unlikely. 

Work on the statement of ``agreed principles'' came as the talks
stretched into an unprecedented fifth day, and after U.S. and
North Korean diplomats held four sets of one-on-one meetings
this week. 

Delegates from all countries at the negotiations - China, Japan,
Russia, the two Koreas and the United States - met Saturday
morning for 20 minutes, a South Korean official said on
condition of anonymity due to the delicacy of the talks. 

``China has proposed a draft, based on which further
negotiations on the statement will take place among No. 2
delegates,'' the official said. The Chinese hosts ``must have
thought (negotiations) have developed to a degree where we can
start discussions on the statement.'' 

Earlier, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said
negotiators would be working on the statement but that ``it's
going to take a while.'' 

``It is not going to be finished today or even tomorrow, because
even though the texts will be rather brief, they're rather
important too,'' he said as he left his hotel Saturday morning. 

The negotiations, renewed this week after a 13-month hiatus,
have produced no tangible breakthroughs and their most
significant achievement appears to be that the Americans and
North Koreans have continued to talk. 

North Korea hasn't publicly commented on progress at the talks.
But it has refrained from issuing the confrontational and
sometimes bellicose statements that it made during the three
previous rounds which began in 2003. 

Hill said after a meeting Friday with his North Korean
counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, that they
remained split over the North's demand for U.S. concessions
before giving up its nuclear weapons program and its insistence
on having a peaceful atomic energy project. 

``The fact that they're continuing to talk to each other is by
far the most encouraging sign,'' said Peter Beck, the
Seoul-based director of the North East Asia Project for the
International Crisis Group, an independent think-tank. 

Beck said the latest round of talks had continued because
neither the North nor the Americans seemed to want to be blamed
for scuttling the discussions by walking away. Talks this week
have been more flexible than previous rounds, which were rigidly
scheduled and limited to three days each. 

Hill said that rather than get bogged down in detail, the aim of
the current round of talks was to secure agreement on a set of
principles that would provide the foundation for later
negotiations. 

``There is a growing consensus that where we end up is the
denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula - that is, no nuclear
weapons, no nuclear weapons programs ... no nuclear programs
that could conceivably be nuclear weapons programs,'' he said. 

However, there was still disagreement over ``sequencing,'' Hill
said. The North wants aid and concessions before giving up its
nuclear trump card while Washington wants to see the weapons
programs eliminated before it rewards the North. 

Hill said the North has also insisted it should have the right
to use peaceful nuclear technology for power generation if it
rejoins the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The United States
maintains the North shouldn't be allowed to do so because of
proliferation concerns. 

South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo daily reported that North Korea said
it wants to build nuclear reactors for energy in addition to
receiving electricity aid from South Korea. 

South Korea has said it would send 2 million kilowatts of
electricity annually to the North if it agrees to give up its
nuclear weapons program, an offer that helped lure Pyongyang
back to nuclear talks. 

However, Pyongyang has stressed that the aid should be a reward
for its decision to freeze its nuclear weapons program, and that
energy-related nuclear reactors should be provided if it agrees
on dismantlement, the report said, citing an anonymous South
Korean government official. 

A South Korean official in Beijing couldn't confirm the report. 
		 	 	   
      Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 12 Guardian Unlimited: Nuke Talks Focus on China Draft Statement
 
From the Associated Press        

[UP] 

Sunday July 31, 2005 7:16 AM

AP Photo BEJ116 

By BURT HERMAN 

Associated Press Writer 

BEIJING (AP) - Talks to persuade North Korea to abandon its
nuclear weapons focused on a draft statement that the main U.S.
envoy praised as a good basis for discussion, a sign of possible
progress as an unprecedented sixth day of meetings opened
Sunday. 

However, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill
stressed differences remained with North Korea on a resolution
of the 2-year-old nuclear standoff, which has raised regional
tension and concerns that it could spark an arms race in East
Asia. 

Hill has met five times with the North Koreans amid the talks
and said Sunday he would probably see them again. 

No end date for the talks has been set, and Hill said ``it's
going to take a while'' - noting the process requires
translating texts into five languages of the nations at the
talks: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean and Russian. 

``I want to caution everyone that it's a lot of work to look at
a document and go line by line by line,'' Hill said Sunday
afternoon at his Beijing hotel. ``Things are moving, we have to
see how it goes.'' 

The negotiations on Saturday focused on the draft statement,
proposed by China, host of the six-nation talks. 

``Today was the first opportunity, really, to take something
that could become the final document and try to see if we can
reach agreement on it,'' Hill told reporters Saturday. He would
not provide details, but said ``we think it's a good basis'' for
negotiation. 

The talks have focused on a definition of ``denuclearization''
of the Korean Peninsula. The North says that should mean removal
of alleged U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea as well
dissolving the American ``nuclear umbrella'' of security
guarantees to its longtime ally. Washington and Seoul both deny
the U.S. has nuclear weapons in South Korea. 

Hill held another meeting Saturday with the North, their fifth
such direct contact at the current fourth round of talks that
also include Japan, Russia and South Korea. 

There was a ``consensus on denuclearization'' between the
negotiators, but North Korea ``has an emphasis on some other
elements,'' Hill said. He declined to elaborate. 

``As much as I would like to talk about progress, you know it's
hard to talk about progress until you actually have an
agreement,'' Hill said. 

The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri, citing anonymous sources, said
delegates ``roughly agreed'' on a draft document that mentions a
safety guarantee and economic assistance for North Korea along
with a promise of normalized relations with the United States.
It does not detail how the North would abandon its nuclear
program or what it would get in return, the newspaper said. 

Hill said earlier that delegates disagreed on the sequence of
how disarmament would proceed. The North has demanded
concessions before totally dismantling its nuclear weapons
program, while the Americans want to grant concessions only
after verifying the program has been eliminated. 

Another issue of contention is the North's demand to be allowed
peaceful use of nuclear technology to remedy its electricity
shortage, a request dating back to an earlier nuclear crisis
that ended in a 1994 agreement with the United States. 

Under that accord, the North was to be provided with two
reactors that could not be used to make weapons. Construction on
those reactors was halted after the latest standoff erupted in
late 2002, when U.S. officials said North Korea acknowledged
running a secret uranium enrichment program - which it has since
denied. 

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, in Laos for a
regional conference, said Saturday the North still wants to
finish building the two reactors and also wants to receive
electricity directly from South Korea under a new aid proposal
made this year to help resolve the nuclear issue, South Korea's
Yonhap news agency reported. 

North Korea repeated its offer to return to the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty and admit international inspectors if
the talks are successful. The statement by the North's foreign
minister was reported by the country's official news agency
Sunday. 

The minister's remarks reiterated what the North Korean leader
Kim Jong Il told the South Korean Unification Minister Chung
Dong-young, when the latter visited Pyongyang in June. 
		 	 	   
      Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 13 INSIDE JoongAng Daily: [EDITORIALS] The talks' steady progress
 
August 1, 2005 KST 15:09 (GMT+9)

  The fourth round of the six-party talks on North Korea's
nuclear programs has been underway for a week now. So far, no
great strides have been made, but we feel there has been steady
progress. The third round last year gave rise to pessimisim,
because it failed to produce a joint statement. This time, a
joint agreement on a larger scale is being predicted. 

Actually, the current round is showing a new vitality in
bilateral meetings, not just between the United States and North
Korea, and in in-depth discussions among a small group of
working-level experts. The United States, which once refused to
sit down with the North, had done so five times as of Saturday,
each time for more than two hours. It seems that Washington
recognizes the North as a negotiating partner. North Korea is
also showing sincerity, a change from its past unconditional
retorts and one-sided insistence. 

The change in format, of course, does not in itself mean there
will be a practical solution. But it can be said that both
sides, however minimally, recognize the effectiveness of the
talks and are trying to narrow their differences. Pyongyang and
Washington must do their best to arrive at a practical agreement
by keeping this positive atmosphere alive. 

The United States must give the North Koreans the confidence
that its security will be better guaranteed if it gives up its
nuclear weapons. The North must make the strategic decision to
end this war of attrition by, for instance, dropping its
insistence on the light-water nuclear reactor project. The North
may fear change, but opportunities are made, not given. The
other participants must further coordinate their efforts, to
help Pyongyang and Washington make these strategic decisions.   
	  
  2005.07.31       

Copyright by Joins.com, Inc. Terms of Use |
*****************************************************************
 14 Daily Yomiuri: Japan to N. Korea: Let's talk 

Yuji Anai Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondent 

The Japanese government's efforts to hold bilateral negotiations
with North Korea on the abduction issue continues to hit a brick
wall with Pyongyang refusing to sit down with Japan on the
sidelines of the six-way talks here. 

This disappointment comes despite the support the United States
and China have expressed for such talks. The six-way talks began
in Beijing on Tuesday. 

At an informal meeting of Cabinet ministers in Tokyo on Friday,
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said, "The Japanese delegation
at the six-way talks has certainly expressed our opinion on the
issue of abduction of Japanese by North Korea." 

"The nuclear issue is important, and the abduction issue is also
important. We're trying to solve [various issues relating to
North Korea] comprehensively," the prime minister added. 

Koizumi's remark came after Education, Science and Technology
Minister Nariaki Nakayama expressed frustration over the
treatment of the abduction issue at the six-way talks. 

The chief Japanese delegate, Kenichiro Sasae, has repeatedly
brought up the issue during the talks. 

Sasae, the head of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian
Affairs Bureau, also has approached North Korean Vice Foreign
Minister Kim Kye Gwan on a daily basis. 

"Mr. Kim isn't freezing out Mr. Sasae. North Korea is
concentrating on the nuclear issue now," a senior Foreign
Ministry official said. "If progress is made on the nuclear
issue, they'd probably agree to Japan-North Korea talks." 

Within the government, there are concerns that if Japan pushes
too hard for bilateral talks, North Korea will use the talks as
a diplomatic trump card. 

The U.S. and Chinese sides have urged the North Korean
delegation to agree to bilateral talks with Japan. 

"The United States and China want to place priority on the
nuclear issue at the six-way talks, and they want the abduction
issue to be discussed in bilateral talks. That's their real
intention," a government source said. 

If the bilateral talks do end up taking place, the government
will focus on discussing the resumption of working-level talks
that have been stalled since they were last held in November. 

But because Kim is in charge of U.S. affairs, he would probably
consult with Pyongyang over resuming the working-level talks
before giving a response. (Jul. 31, 2005) 


 Copyright © The Yomiuri Shimbun.   
*****************************************************************
 15 Daily Yomiuri: U.S. may tolerate peaceful N. Korean nuclear program 

The Yomiuri Shimbun 

The United States told North Korea it would allow Pyongyang to
maintain a peaceful atomic power program if the reclusive state
rejoined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State Christopher Hill said Friday afternoon. 

The proposal was made during their fifth round of bilateral
talks aimed at bridging disagreement on the meaning of
"denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula. 

The U.S. envoy proposed possibly excluding North Korean nuclear
development for peaceful purposes, with certain conditions, from
the denuclearization. 

The U.S. compromise may lead to a breakthrough in the standoff
over North Korea's nuclear program. 

However, North Korea may demand that the United States normalize
diplomatic relations and provide other incentives before
Pyongyang scraps its nuclear program. 

Hill said the United States believed that North Korea had a
right to a peaceful nuclear development program if it ratified
the NPT. 

He also said the issue of peaceful nuclear development should be
mentioned in the joint statement, the drafting of which was
under way. 

North Korea announced its withdrawal from the NPT in January
2003, following the collapse of October 2002 senior
official-level talks between the U.S. and North Korea on its
uranium enrichment program. 

While North Korea says it has already left the NPT, the United
States has not recognized the withdrawal. 

Hill stressed the development of a joint statement was entering
a new phase. 

According to Japanese government delegates, the statement will
be discussed by chief delegates from the six participating
nations at the general conference beginning Sunday. 

However, the officials predicted it would take some days before
the statement was agreed upon, boosting the possibility that the
talks will continue into next week. (Jul. 30, 2005) 

 Copyright © The Yomiuri Shimbun.   
*****************************************************************
 16 Las Vegas SUN: N. Korea Nuke Disarmament Talks Hit Snag 

Today: July 31, 2005 at 17:7:25 PDT 

By BO-MI LIM ASSOCIATED PRESS 

BEIJING (AP) - 

North Korea's demands for what it should receive in exchange for
abandoning its nuclear weapons program snarled talks Sunday, but
the U.S. envoy maintained that "things are moving," with more
negotiations planned Monday. 

The negotiations ended their sixth day without an agreement on a
Chinese-drafted proposal, and South Korean Deputy Foreign
Minister Song Min-soon said talks Sunday focused on "what
corresponding measures other parties will take" in return for an
agreement by the North to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. 

The North has demanded concessions such as security guarantees
and aid from Washington before it eliminates its weapons
program, while the United States wants to see the arms destroyed
first. The North has also insisted that it be allowed to run a
peaceful nuclear power program, something Washington objects to
out of proliferation concerns. 

"We are trying to come up with an agreed statement which
contains all the key points that have been discussed so far, but
how long it will take remains to be seen," Song said. 

No details of the draft agreement have been released, but a
Japanese news report said it called for North Korea to abandon
its nuclear weapons programs and other programs that could
potentially produce such arms. The draft also addresses
normalization of U.S. and Japanese relations with the North,
Kyodo News agency reported, citing an anonymous source at the
talks. 

The Japanese side is dissatisfied with the draft proposed by
China - host of the six-nation talks - because it fails to
mention Japanese citizens the North has admitted to kidnapping,
Kyodo said. 

The chief U.S. envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher
Hill, earlier said the Chinese draft proposed Saturday was a
"good basis" for future negotiations. 

No end date for the talks has been set, and Hill said Sunday
that "it's going to take a while." He noted that the process
requires translating texts into the five languages of the six
nations at the talks: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean and
Russian. 

"I want to caution everyone that it's a lot of work to look at a
document and go line by line by line," Hill said. "Things are
moving, we have to see how it goes." 

Hill said earlier that delegates disagreed on the sequence of
how disarmament would proceed. Before totally dismantling its
nuclear weapons program, the North has demanded concessions,
which the Americans have declined to give before verifying the
program has been eliminated. 

Another issue of contention is the North's demand that it be
allowed peaceful use of nuclear technology to remedy its
electricity shortage, a request dating back to an earlier
nuclear crisis that ended in a 1994 agreement with the United
States. But Washington is reluctant to allow it any nuclear
programs that could be diverted to weapons use. 

The current round of disarmament talks with North Korea that
began Tuesday in Beijing is the longest since they began in
2003. Three previous rounds each lasted about three days. 

North Korea's foreign minister has repeated that the communist
nation could rejoin the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and
admit international inspectors if the talks are successful. The
statement Friday by the foreign minister while in Laos was
reported Sunday by the North's official news agency, echoing
remarks in June by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. 

Meanwhile, South Korea said Sunday it has agreed with the North
to hold an opening ceremony in late October for railways and
roads reconnected across the heavily fortified border dividing
the peninsula. 

Seoul has continued its engagement with North Korea despite the
nuclear standoff, which erupted in late 2002 after U.S.
officials said the North admitted running a secret uranium
enrichment program. 

In February, the North claimed it had nuclear weapons and has
since taken steps that would allow it to harvest more plutonium
for possible use in bombs. 

All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
 17 Xinhua: DPRK to rejoin NPT if nuclear issue be resolved satisfactorily

  www.xinhuanet.com

  www.chinaview.cn 2005-07-31 01:39:48   

    PYONGYANG, July 31 (Xinhuanet) -- The Democratic People's
Republic of Korea (DPRK) will rejoin the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and accept the IAEA inspection if
the nuclear issue can be resolved satisfactorily, the official
Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Sunday. 

    "If the nuclear issue finds a satisfactory solution, we will
return to the NPT and accept the IAEA inspection," Paek Nam-sun,
foreign minister of the DPRK said on July 29 in the ministerial
meeting of the 12th ASEAN Regional Forum held in Laos. 

    Paek said the DPRK's nuclear weapons are not meant to strike
the US and Pyongyang has no intention to keep them permanently. 

    "We will have neither reason nor necessity to possess even a
single nuke if the US agrees to completely remove its nuclear
threat to the DPRK and opens the relations of peaceful
co-existence with the DPRK," Paek said. 

    He said that peace and security on the Korean Peninsula is a
key factor of ensuring peace in Northeast Asia and the DPRK
government was making every effort to settle the present
unstable situation and achieve durable peace and stability on
the peninsula. 

    Paek expected the on-going fourth round of the six-party
talks in Beijing will prove fruitful by having an in-depth
discussion onthe ways of denuclearizing the whole Korean
Peninsula on the principle of respect for sovereignty and
equality under any circumstances. 

    "We proposed practical ways of completely solving the
nuclear issue at this round of the talks, calling for reaching
the common understanding that it is necessary to terminate the
hostile relations between the DPRK and the US, legally and
institutionally open the ties of peaceful co-existence,
eliminate all the nukes from the peninsula, and the US is
required to end putting nuclear threat to the DPRK," Peak said.

  Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 18 Xinhua: Heads of delegations end meeting on fifth day's six-party
nuclear talks   

  www.xinhuanet.com

  www.chinaview.cn 2005-07-30 13:03:39   

    BEIJING, July 30 (Xinhuanet) -- Heads of delegations to the
fourth-round of six-party talks concluded their meeting at the
Diaoyutai State Guesthouse Saturday morning. 

    Prior to this, the Chinese delegation held one-on-one talks
with the delegations of the United States and the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), respectively. 

    The US and the DPRK delegations also held their sixth
meeting Saturday morning. 

    The six nations will discuss a joint document, said US top
negotiator Christopher Hill earlier Saturday. 

    "We will have a lot of discussion about the text, and see if
we can come to some agreement today," said Hill. 

    The parties concerned were expected to work for drafting a
joint document at the meeting of delegation heads, said Japanese
delegation head Sasae Kenichiro. 

    The fourth round of the six-party talks on the Korean
Peninsulanuclear issue entered the fifth day Saturday, the
longest ever, as the past three rounds lasted three or four
days. Enditem   

  Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 19 Xinhua: Deadlocked nuclear talks extend into weekend   

  www.xinhuanet.com

  www.chinaview.cn 2005-07-30 01:28:30   

    BEIJING, July 29 (Xinhuanet) -- The delegations of the
United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(DPRK) to the six-party talks held two rounds of bilateral
consultations Friday,producing no exciting results. 

    The deadlocked talks itself also showed no sign of ending. 

    "The fourth round of six-party talks had a good start.
However,little progress has been made", said Liu Jiangyong, a
professor of the Institute of International Studies under
China's prestigious Qinghua University. 

    The delegations of the six-party talks on the Korean
Peninsula nuclear issue agreed Friday afternoon to continue
their meetings on Saturday as the parties concerned will
continue to work for narrowing differences. 

    The talks set no deadline for its duration since they
started on Tuesday at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing.
The talks involve China, the DPRK, the United States, the
Republic of Korea,Russia and Japan. 

    Now it is a critical moment for talks to score some
"exciting results", Liu added. 

    After the three-hour third meeting Thursday morning, which
was longer than the previous two meetings, the US and DPRK
delegations agreed "to continue consultations" on Saturday. 

    "It reflects the efforts from the both sides to narrow their
differences", said Jin Linbo, a scholar at China's Institute of
International Studies. 

    Christopher Hill, head of the US delegation, said Thursday
afternoon that the US and DPRK "had a lengthy discussion and I
must say there are a number of differences." 

    "On the other hand, on some points we have some common
understanding on how to proceed," he said. 

    "If we can say that in the former two meetings the two sides
had put out their attitudes and differences, then in this
meeting,they should begin a consultation of how to solve the
issue", Jin said 

    "This means that the talks have come to a substantial
phase," Jin added. 

    Liu said that only the US and the DPRK are decisive to the
success of the fourth round of six-party talks, stressing that
if the two sides will remain committed, some positive results
are expected to be made. 

    A Japanese diplomatic source disclosed Friday that all
parties concerned will begin to draft a common document on
Saturday that means the six-party talks enter a new phase. 

    "Even if we really have a common document at the end of this
round of talks, it does not mean breakthrough has been made",
Jin said, adding that the breakthrough on paper is easy,but
implementation remains quite difficult. Enditem 
  
  Copyright ©2003 Xinhua News Agency. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 20 ITAR-TASS: Rssn diplomat on prospects for passing final doc at Korea talks

30.07.2005, 13.33

BEIJING, July 30 (Itar-Tass) - Problem of the Japanese nationals
kidnapped by North-Korean secret services will not mar the
passing of a final document at the six-partite talks on North
Korea’s nuclear program, Valery Yarmolov, the deputy chief of
the Russian delegation to the talks said. 

“I wouldn’t say the issue is looming large, at least as far as
the draft document we received is concerned,” Yarmolov said. 

He declined to specify, however, how much Tokyo insisted on
including a provision on kidnapped Japanese in the final
document. 

“We don’t know the proposals either side made or the degree to
which they were heeded in the draft project or whether or not
the hosts of these talks raised any objections to them,”
Yarmolov said. 

       
© ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. You undertake not to copy,
*****************************************************************
 21 Reuters: N.Korea talks envoys struggle for consensus on paper                      

Sat Jul 30, 2005 8:19 AM ET                                                                                             

 (Updates with talks end for day, to resume on Sunday)

 By Jack Kim and Teruaki Ueno

 BEIJING, July 30 (Reuters) - Envoys taking part in tortuous 
six-party talks on the North Korea nuclear crisis broke for the 
day on Saturday, instructing lower-level officials to start work 
in earnest on Sunday on drafting a joint statement.

 "Basic differences in views among the parties concerned remain," 
one Japanese delegate told reporters in Beijing.

 "I believe our country and other countries as well want to 
narrow the differences and produce substantive results in the 
process of drafting."

 The fifth day of the current negotiating round began with China 
presenting a proposed draft document for discussion in the forum, 
which also involves the two Koreas, the United States, Russia and 
Japan.

 The main protagonists, the Americans and the North Koreans, 
appeared as entrenched as ever, diplomats said. Pyongyang is 
sticking to its demands for security guarantees and aid in return 
for abandoning its nuclear weapons development, while Washington 
insists the atomic programmes be dismantled first.

 The North is also demanding Washington remove nuclear weapons 
from the peninsula. The United States, which keeps some 30,000 
troops in South Korea, says it no longer has such weapons there.

 The North had even rejected a South Korean offer of energy aid 
in exchange for scrapping the programmes, the JoongAng daily 
said, citing an official in Seoul. North Korea wanted the energy 
aid but it wanted light-water nuclear reactors too, it said. 
There was no official confirmation of the report.

 Still, this first round of six-way talks in more than a year has 
seen an unprecedented level of bilateral contact between the U.S. 
and North Korean sides. They have met six times this week after 
sticking to scripted position statements in earlier rounds.

 DEEPER UNDERSTANDING

 One talks participant said he felt that Washington and Pyongyang 
had deepened their understanding of each other's positions after 
the hours and days of bilateral discussions.

 "Of course we cannot reach an agreement immediately," the 
Japanese delegate said after Saturday's session. "But the draft 
paper presented by China will serve as a basis for discussion."

 "Basic differences in views among the parties concerned remain," 
he said. "I believe our country and other countries as well want 
to narrow the differences and produce substantive results in the 
process of drafting.

 "It is important for us to secure commitments from North Korea 
to dismantling its nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons 
programmes," the Japanese delegate said.

 U.S. chief negotiator Christopher Hill said before Saturday's 
resumption: "Seriously, we will have a lot of discussion about 
text to see if we can come to some agreement among the six."

 "But I want to let you know it's going to take a while, this is 
not going to be finished today or even tomorrow because even 
though the text will be rather brief (it will be) rather 
important too."

 "It is not impossible to finalise the joint document on Monday," 
said one diplomatic source close to the talks. "But it may take 
longer."

 Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun said the joint statement would stop 
short of laying down a plan of action for Pyongyang to scrap its 
weapons, or of saying how it is to be rewarded if it does do so.

 NO SPECIFICS

 The leading daily, citing sources close to the negotiations, 
said the document would include only the points the various 
parties hold in common along with basic principles. It would not 
say how targets are to be achieved.

 The talks have come a long way from the early days of the 
administration of George W. Bush, when the president labelled 
North Korea part of an "axis of evil" alongside Iran and pre-war 
Iraq, or even from early this year when his secretary of state 
called Pyongyang an "outpost of tyranny".

 Unlike the three previous rounds of six-way nuclear talks going 
back to August 2003, this time the discussions have remained 
open-ended.

 The latest crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials 
accused Pyongyang of pursuing a clandestine weapons programme, 
prompting it to expel U.N. nuclear inspectors. North Korea 
announced last February that it was now a nuclear power.

 In Washington, U.S. officials said negotiators at the Beijing 
talks had presented North Korea with what is said was clear 
evidence of a covert programme to produce highly enriched uranium 
(HEU). Pyongyang admits only to reprocessing plutonium.

 Washington is demanding that Pyongyang dismantle all its nuclear 
activities, including the HEU programme. (Additional reporting by 
Lindsay Beck and Benjamin Kang Lim)                                                

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 22 Reuters: Envoys clash as Korea nuclear talks seek consensus                       

Sun Jul 31, 2005 7:20 AM ET                                                                                             

 By Teruaki Ueno and Jack Kim

 BEIJING (Reuters) - Tempers flared on Sunday at six-party talks 
on the North Korean nuclear crisis, with negotiators clashing as 
they strove to draw up a joint statement of principles that has 
eluded them for nearly three years.

 No one believed the document would contain ground-breaking 
commitments, but even outlining the basics was proving elusive.

 One Japanese delegate said Sunday's meetings had been "frank and 
constructive", adding: "Depending on the issues, there were 
scenes of fierce exchanges."

 Discussions on the draft were set to drag on into Monday, the 
seventh day of talks in Beijing. South Korean envoy Song Min-soon 
said that so far the six delegations had agreed only to establish 
a framework for denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

 Despite an unprecedented flurry of one-to-one meetings, the main 
protagonists, Washington and Pyongyang, still appeared far apart 
on the critical issue of how and when the North's nuclear weapons 
programmes should be dismantled.

 Chief negotiators from the two Koreas, China, the United States, 
Russia and Japan had left their deputies to haggle over the text 
of the draft statement put forward by China, with the aim of 
producing a joint document that all parties could sign.

 U.S. chief negotiator Christopher Hill told reporters: "It's a 
very lengthy, difficult process."

 The Chinese draft paper calls on Pyongyang to abandon its 
"nuclear weapons programme and related programmes", a diplomatic 
source close to the talks told Reuters.

 In return, the paper calls on the other five countries to 
provide "security guarantees" and economic aid and to normalise 
or improve ties with Pyongyang, the source said.

 But the draft does not say who should move first or if the 
parties should move simultaneously, avoiding the issue of timing 
that is the essence of Pyongyang's disagreement with Washington.

 Having any statement at all agreed by the six parties would mark 
a breakthrough for the Beijing talks, where past progress has 
been measured by whether they could agree even to reconvene. This 
round, the fourth since the crisis erupted in 2002, is 
open-ended.

 NORTH'S DEMANDS

 North Korean state media quoted Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun on 
Sunday as saying the North would be willing to rejoin the nuclear 
Non-Proliferation Treaty and accept international inspections if 
the standoff were resolved to its satisfaction.

 He set out several conditions for such a resolution, including 
North Korea's removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of 
terrorism, lifting all sanctions against it and removing U.S. 
nuclear weapons from South Korea -- weapons Washington says it no 
longer keeps there.

 Other recent North Korean demands have included American 
diplomatic recognition and conclusion of a bilateral peace 
treaty, half a century after the two sides fought each other to a 
standstill in the Korean War.

 Japan, meanwhile, wanted to include the issue of North Korea's 
abduction of its nationals in the document, a move analysts said 
could anger Pyongyang and torpedo any agreement.

 The diplomatic source said the draft text contained no mention 
of North Korean human rights issues or the abductions.

 But everything turns on the debate over timing.

 North Korea wants the aid, security assurances and diplomatic 
recognition before starting to dismantle its nuclear programmes. 
The United States wants it the other way round.

 Washington also demands verifiable destruction of Pyongyang's 
weapons programmes, which intelligence sources say have produced 
enough enriched plutonium for up to nine nuclear bombs, before 
any aid or guarantees materialise.

 After a hiatus of more than a year, the atmosphere at this round 
of talks has been far more positive, and marked by six lengthy 
bilateral meetings in as many days between Washington and 
Pyongyang. In the past such encounters were rare, brief and 
adhered to pre-written scripts.

 (Additional reporting by Benjamin Kang Lim and Li Huan) 			 			

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 23 Reuters: North Korea nuclear talks enter uncharted territory                       

Sat Jul 30, 2005 5:40 AM ET                                                                                             

 By Jack Kim and Teruaki Ueno

 BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korea nuclear crisis talks entered 
uncharted territory on Saturday, with host China presenting a 
draft joint statement for discussion by the six parties in the 
longest negotiating session yet.

 The main protagonists, the United States and North Korea, appear 
as entrenched as ever, diplomats say, with Pyongyang sticking to 
its demands for security guarantees and aid and Washington 
insisting the nuclear programmes be dismantled first.

 The North had even rejected a South Korean offer of energy aid 
in exchange for scrapping the programmes, the JoongAng daily 
said, citing an official in Seoul. North Korea wants the energy 
aid but it wants light-water nuclear reactors too, it said.

 Still, the first round of six-way talks in more than a year has 
seen an unprecedented level of bilateral contact between the U.S. 
and North Korean sides. They have met six times this week after 
sticking to scripted position statements in earlier rounds.

 "I have the impression that the United States and North Korea 
have deepened their understanding of each other's positions after 
hours and days of bilateral discussions," a Japanese delegate 
said on Saturday.

 "But I believe the two sides remain far apart. Our work to draft 
a joint document will get into full swing today," he said.

 A South Korean official said China had presented a draft joint 
statement for discussion. Previous rounds have failed to secure a 
common position.

 U.S. chief negotiator Christopher Hill said on Saturday: 
"Seriously, we will have a lot of discussion about text to see if 
we can come to some agreement among the six."

 "But I want to let you know it's going to take a while, this is 
not going to be finished today or even tomorrow because even 
though the text will be rather brief (it will be) rather 
important too."

 Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun said the joint statement would stop 
short of laying down a plan of action for Pyongyang to scrap its 
weapons, or of saying how it is to be rewarded if it does do so.

 The leading daily, citing sources close to the negotiations, 
said the document would include only the points the various 
parties hold in common along with basic principles. It would not 
say how targets are to be achieved.

 The talks have come a long way from the early days of the 
administration of George W. Bush, when the president labelled 
North Korea part of an "axis of evil" alongside Iran and pre-war 
Iraq, or even from early this year when his secretary of state 
called Pyongyang an "outpost of tyranny".

 This time the discussions involving the two Koreas, the United 
States, Russia, Japan and China have remained open-ended. If 
lacking in major concessions so far, they have featured a more 
thorough airing of viewpoints that the parties hope could point 
to possible consensus.

 The nuclear standoff erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials 
accused Pyongyang of pursuing a clandestine weapons programme, 
prompting it to expel U.N. nuclear inspectors.

 North Korea announced on February 10 this year that it had 
nuclear weapons and demanded that the United States provide aid, 
security guarantees and diplomatic recognition in return for 
scrapping them. Washington insists the nuclear programmes be 
abandoned first.

 In Washington, U.S. officials said negotiators at the Beijing 
talks had presented North Korea with data America says is 
evidence of a covert programme to produce highly enriched uranium 
(HEU). Pyongyang admits only to reprocessing plutonium.

 They said the evidence was obtained from disgraced Pakistani 
scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan whose secret network sold nuclear 
technology to North Korea.

 The United States is demanding that Pyongyang dismantle all its 
nuclear activities, including the HEU programme.

 All sides are committed in principle to a nuclear-free 
peninsula. The crux of the disagreement is over timing, whether 
Pyongyang should receive the security guarantees and aid before 
it moves to scrap its weapons programmes.

 Some diplomats suggest that whether or not a joint statement is 
reached this time, the parties can still declare success after 
the unprecedented level of North Korean-U.S. contacts.                                          

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 24 Reuters: North Korea nuclear talks straggle into seventh day                     

Sun Jul 31, 2005 6:02 PM ET                                                                                             

 By Lindsay Beck

 BEIJING, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Weary delegates to Korean nuclear 
crisis talks make fresh efforts on Monday to agree on a joint 
statement after weekend discussions left tempers frayed and the 
six parties no closer to a resolution.

 The Beijing talks have been marked by unprecedented contact 
between Washington and Pyongyang, the main protagonists in a 
crisis now nearly three years old, creating a more positive 
atmosphere than at three previous inconclusive rounds.

 But as the open-ended talks stretched into a seventh day, 
consensus even on basic principles still seemed elusive.

 A Japanese delegate called the talks "frank and constructive" 
but also said they were marked by "fierce exchanges".

 U.S. chief negotiator Christopher Hill said the process was 
"lengthy and difficult".

 The crux of the disagreement centres on timing, and whether 
North Korea should dismantle its nuclear facilities as a 
precondition to aid and security guarantees, as the United States 
wants, or whether the assurances should come first.

 South Korean envoy Song Min-soon said the six parties -- the two 
Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China -- had so far 
agreed after lengthy weekend discussions only to set up a 
framework for eventual denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

 Deputies were consigned on Monday to another day of trying to 
reach agreement on a draft document, initially presented by 
China, which would mark a talks breakthrough. Past progress was 
measured by whether delegates could even agree to reconvene.

 Also on Monday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick 
was due to take part in the first China-U.S. strategic dialogue 
in Beijing.

 Xinhua news agency said Zoellick met Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao 
on Sunday and discussed bilateral ties "and international issues 
of common concern".

 

WHO BLINKS FIRST?

 China's draft calls on Pyongyang to abandon its "nuclear weapons 
programmes and related programmes" in return for the other five 
providing security, economic aid and improved ties, a diplomatic 
source close to the talks told Reuters.

 It did not address who should move first or if the parties 
should move simultaneously, avoiding the crucial issue of timing.

 Washington also demands verifiable destruction of North Korea's 
weapons programmes, which intelligence sources say have produced 
enough material for up to nine nuclear bombs, before it will 
provide security guarantees and aid for the poor, diplomatically 
isolated country.

 The crisis erupted in 2002, when the United States accused North 
Korea of pursuing a covert weapons programme. The North responded 
by expelling U.N. nuclear inspectors.

 The stakes rose in February, when Pyongyang announced it had 
nuclear weapons and demanded aid, assurances and diplomatic 
recognition from Washington in return for scrapping them.

 Despite the lack of progress at the talks, the frequent 
one-on-one meetings on the sidelines between North Korean and 
American negotiators were a positive step and marked a change in 
policy from previous rounds that featured only brief exchanges.

 At past rounds of talks North Korea's delegation called news 
conferences to denounce the United States. This time its foreign 
minister announced that Pyongyang would be willing to rejoin the 
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if the standoff were resolved.

 But he listed several conditions for the resolution, including 
removing U.S. nuclear weapons from South Korea -- weapons 
Washington says it no longer keeps there.                                               

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 25 Reuters: N.Korea vows to rejoin NPT if nuclear issue solved                  

Sun Jul 31, 2005 1:09 AM ET                                                                                             

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea will rejoin the nuclear 
Non-Proliferation Treaty and accept international inspections if 
the current nuclear standoff is resolved, Radio Pyongyang said on 
Sunday.

The radio, monitored by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, said 
Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun told an Asia-Pacific regional forum 
in Laos that his country was patiently seeking a way out of 
conditions that forced it to arm itself with nuclear weapons.

Paek was speaking on Friday as North Korean delegates attended 
six-party talks in Beijing aimed at coaxing Pyongyang into 
scrapping its nuclear weapons programmes.

"North Korea will rejoin the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if 
the nuclear issue is soundly resolved and is willing to accept 
inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency," state 
radio quoted Paek as saying.

"For a fundamental switchover that would allow the 
denuclearisation of the entire Korean peninsula to take place, 
the fundamental element that forced us to own nuclear weapons 
must be removed," he added.

Paek's comments echoed his country's top leader, Kim Jong-il, who 
told a South Korean envoy on June 17 that Pyongyang would be 
ready to rejoin the NPT if its conditions were met.

In Beijing this past week North Korea has been sticking to 
demands for security guarantees and aid in return for abandoning 
nuclear weapons development, while Washington insists the atomic 
programmes be dismantled first.

Pyongyang's other conditions include its removal from the U.S. 
list of state sponsors of terrorism and the lifting of all 
sanctions against it.

Since March, it has also demanded that the six-party process be 
turned into disarmament talks that would also discuss U.S. 
nuclear weapons it says are deployed in South Korea. Half a 
century after the Korean War, Washington still keeps some 30,000 
troops in the South but says it no longer has such weapons there.

Pyongyang recently repeated calls for the United States to 
conclude a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the 
1950-53 conflict. They remain technically at war.

An unconfirmed Seoul newspaper report this week said the North 
had even rejected a South Korean offer of energy aid in exchange 
for scrapping the programmes.

The JoongAng daily, citing an official in Seoul, said Pyongyang 
wanted the energy aid but it wanted light-water nuclear reactors 
too.

The latest crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials 
accused Pyongyang of pursuing a clandestine weapons programme, 
prompting it first to expel U.N. nuclear inspectors and then, in 
January 2003, to withdraw from the NPT. North Korea announced 
last February 10 that it was now a nuclear power.

The six parties to the Beijing talks -- the two Koreas, the 
United States, Japan, Russia and China -- met for the sixth day 
on Sunday.

Delegates were attempting to thrash out the text of a joint 
statement of principles, hoping to set a course for ending 
Pyongyang's nuclear programmes in return for aid and security 
assurances.                                             

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
 			
*****************************************************************
 26 Reuters: N.Korea rejects Seoul offer of energy aid -paper 

Sat Jul 30, 2005 12:07 AM ET                                                                                            

 BEIJING, July 30 (Reuters) - North Korea has rejected a South 
Korean offer to supply it with electricity in return for 
scrapping its nuclear programmes and is demanding nuclear 
reactors as well, a Seoul newspaper said on Saturday.

 Seoul's proposal, presented this week at Beijing six-party 
talks, included supplying 2,000 megawatts of electricity, roughly 
equivalent to Pyongyang's total power output, once its nuclear 
programmes had been completely dismantled.

 North Korea's delegation to the talks, which are aimed at 
coaxing the reclusive state to renounce its atomic ambitions, saw 
the power transfer as the price for freezing, not scrapping, the 
programmes, the JoongAng daily said, citing an official in Seoul.

 Full dismantling of the nuclear programmes would require not 
only provision of the South Korean electricity but also 
completion of two light-water reactors offered to the North in 
1994 under a previous international attempt to halt its weapons 
ambitions, the official was quoted as saying.

 The reactor project, part of the terms of an "Agreed Framework" 
between Pyongyang and Washington, has been suspended for nearly 
two years and is faced with certain death.

 "The North says the electricity proposal is conditional on the 
dismantling of nuclear programmes and is no different from the 
existing (U.S) dismantle-first demand," JoongAng quoted the 
official as saying.

 A South Korean official in Beijing declined to comment on the 
report, saying the offer was part of the ongoing discussions 
between the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and 
Russia.                                                 

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
 			
*****************************************************************
 27 Reuters: Text of N.Korea foreign minister on nuclear crisis                  

Sun Jul 31, 2005 2:21 AM ET                                                                                             

 SEOUL, July 31 (Reuters) - North Korea will rejoin the nuclear 
Non-Proliferation Treaty and accept international inspections if 
the current nuclear standoff is resolved to its satisfaction, 
state media said on Sunday.

 Following is a partial text of an address by North Korean 
Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun to an Asia-Pacific regional forum 
in Laos on Friday, provided in English by Pyongyang's official 
news agency. Six-party talks are currently going on in Beijing in 
an attempt to resolve the standoff.

 (DPRK is the state's official name, Democratic People's Republic 
of Korea. NPT stands for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 
IAEA for the International Atomic Energy Agency.)

 Text begins:

 "The DPRK has exercised its utmost patience and flexibility in 
an effort to seek a peaceful negotiated solution to the nuclear 
issue on the Korean Peninsula. In order to bring about a radical 
turn in realising the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula it 
is necessary to remove the basic factor which compelled the DPRK 
to have access to nukes.

 Our nukes are not meant to strike the U.S. and we do not intend 
to keep them permanently.

 We will have neither reason nor necessity to possess even a 
single nuke if the U.S. agrees to completely remove its nuclear 
threat to the DPRK and opens the relations of peaceful 
co-existence with the DPRK.

 If the nuclear issue finds a satisfactory solution, we will 
return to the NPT and accept the IAEA inspection.

 The six-party talks should prove fruitful by having an in-depth 
discussion on the ways of denuclearising the whole Korean 
Peninsula on the principle of respect for sovereignty and 
equality under any circumstances.

 To this end, we proposed practical ways of completely solving 
the nuclear issue at the fourth round of the six-party talks, 
calling for reaching the common understanding that it is 
necessary to terminate the hostile relations between the DPRK and 
the U.S., legally and institutionally open the ties of peaceful 
co-existence, eliminate all the nukes from the North and the 
South of Korea, completely remove the possibility of introducing 
nukes and nuclear substance into it from outside and the U.S. is 
required to assure the DPRK of an unconditional non-use of nukes 
with a view to putting an end to the U.S. nuclear threat to the 
Korean Peninsula and its vicinity."                                               

© Reuters 2005. 
All Rights Reserved.                    
*****************************************************************
 28 AFP: Talks resume as US says NKorea must also abandon civilian nuclear programs 


Saturday July 30, 02:06 PM 

BEIJING (AFP) - The United States and North Korea have resumed
talks seeking a solution to Pyongyang's atomic ambitions as
Washington says it wants all nuclear programs, including those
for civilian use, abandoned. 

Six-party talks on the issue moved into an unprecedented fifth
day and while the US chief envoy hinted they could stretch into
next week, Japanese officials said work on a final text was due
to begin. 

Despite the US and North Korea meeting six times since the talks
began on Tuesday, they continue to disagree on key issues, with
Pyongyang concerned about the timing of any concessions and
rewards. 

The US insists North Korea pledge to dismantle -- not just
freeze -- all its plutonium and uranium weapons programs before
receiving "non-nuclear energy assistance," including oil and
food, as well as security assurances. 

Washington also made clear Friday that this included nuclear
programs for civilian use, after reports that the North was
pushing for the resumption of a project to provide it with
light-water nuclear reactors, which has been frozen for two
years. 

US envoy Christopher Hill suggested earlier the various parties
in the talks could not agree on whether to allow Pyongyang the
peaceful use of atomic power if it rejoined the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), aimed at capping the spread of
nuclear weapons. 

"We don't challenge the fact that they have the rights to this
under the treaty, but we challenge whether they should be
exercising these rights," he told reporters Friday night. 

"The question is how that will work and when that will work and
frankly how it will work with other parties," Hill said, adding
that it was a "very contentious" issue. 

The State Department said overnight "any nuclear program in
North Korea could potentially be a nuclear weapons program". 

Spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that "we're very clear
that we do not think that North Korea should retain the civilian
nuclear capability." 

North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003, three months after
Washington accused Pyongyang of running a clandestine nuclear
weapons program based on enriched uranium. Pyongyang has always
denied this. 

In June this year North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il said he would
rejoin the treaty and open up to international inspectors once
the nuclear standoff was resolved. 

North Korea declared on February 10 it possessed nuclear
weapons, maintaining they were needed as a deterrent. 

Japan's chief delegate Keinichiro Sasae said that once the North
Korea-US bilateral meeting was over all six-parties would start
work on drafting a common document to be adopted at the
conclusion of the talks. 

"While the talks between the United States and North Korea are
equally important, work involving the six parties is expected to
go into full swing from today," he told reporters. 

"This means of course that we will work for an agreement on a
final text." 

But he did not say what the document would say. 

An agreed joint statement failed to materialize at the three
previous rounds of talks that also involve China, South Korea
and Russia, 

Hill said a final agreement would likely still take time. 

"We will have a lot of discussions about texts to see if we can
come to some agreement among the six parties involved in the
negotiations," he said before leaving his hotel for the talks. 

"But I want to let you know it is going to take a while and it's
not going to be finished today or even tomorrow because even
though the texts will be rather brief, they are rather important
too." 

The New York Times reported Friday the US wanted the first two
principles on any joint document to be a commitment to a
nuclear-free Korean peninsula and a pledge that North Korea
would not transfer nuclear technology elsewhere. 

   Copyright © 2005 AFP. All rights reserved. All information
*****************************************************************
 29 Guardian Unlimited: North Korea Nuclear Talks Reach 4th Day
 
From the Associated Press        

[UP] 
         
        Saturday July 30, 2005 1:46 AM

AP Photo BEJ104 

By BURT HERMAN 

Associated Press Writer 

BEIJING (AP) - An improved atmosphere might be the most
significant accomplishment as six-nation talks on North Korean
nuclear disarmament stretched into their longest round Friday,
but the top U.S. envoy stressed ``this isn't going to be easy.'' 

After a fourth session of one-on-one meetings, American and
North Korean diplomats remained split over the North's demand
for U.S. concessions before giving up its nuclear weapons
program and its insistence on having a peaceful atomic energy
project. 

Nevertheless, ``I think all would agree that we have a
continuing good atmosphere,'' State Department spokesman Sean
McCormack said. 

Delegates were working on a statement of principles that could
evolve into an agreement, McCormack said in Washington. ``You
have all the parties agreeing what the goal of the six-party
talks is now: a denuclearized Korean peninsula,'' he said. 

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill's meetings
with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan have been a
marked change that has raised optimism over the talks, which
have been run more flexibly than the previous rigidly scheduled
negotiations. 

``The fact that they're continuing to talk to each other is by
far the most encouraging sign,'' said Peter Beck, the
Seoul-based director of the North East Asia Project for the
International Crisis Group, an independent think tank. 

Beck said the latest round of talks has continued longer than
previous rounds - which were marked by bombast - because neither
the North nor the Americans seemed to want to be blamed for
scuttling the discussions by walking away. 

Hill said the sides also hadn't come to terms on North Korea's
alleged uranium enrichment program or whether Pyongyang should
be allowed to have a peaceful atomic energy project. 

``Still we have a lot of differences that remain,'' Hill told
reporters Friday evening. ``I don't want to suggest for a minute
that this is going to be easy.'' 

Despite the apparent impasse, the No. 2 South Korean delegate,
Cho Tae-yong, said Friday's meetings ``were not lower than my
expectation.'' 

``It's too early to pack, or draw conclusions,'' he said. 

Talks were scheduled to resume Saturday and no date was set for
ending the meeting, which also includes delegates from Japan,
China and Russia. Three earlier rounds of talks each lasted
three days. 

Hill declined to speculate about the length of this round. 

Rather than focusing on substantive issues in this round, the
negotiators were trying to agree on a set of principles as the
foundation for later talks, Hill said. 

``There is a growing consensus that where we end up is the
denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula - that is no nuclear
weapons, no nuclear weapons programs ... no nuclear programs
that could conceivably be nuclear weapons programs,'' he said. 

However, he said there was dissension on ``how that's going to
be sequenced'' - a reference to the North Korean demand for aid
and concessions first before giving up its nuclear trump card.
Washington wants to see the weapons programs eliminated before
it rewards the North. 

The delegates hope to start drafting a joint document Saturday
on what they've agreed to so far, a Japanese official said on
condition of anonymity due to the delicate nature of the ongoing
talks. 

The latest nuclear standoff with North Korea was sparked after
U.S. officials say the North admitted in late 2002 to running a
uranium enrichment program - which could provide fuel for atomic
bombs - in violation of an earlier 1994 deal with Washington. 

North Korea has subsequently denied having such a program, and
Hill said Friday that its status was one of the sticking points
in a resolution. 

Also, Hill said the North has insisted it should have the right
to use peaceful nuclear technology for power generation if it
rejoins the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The United States
maintains the North shouldn't be allowed to do so because of
proliferation concerns. 

Meanwhile, the foreign ministers of the two Koreas adopted a
joint statement Friday at an Asian regional summit in Laos
calling for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear standoff and
better relations between the two countries, the North's official
Korean Central News Agency reported. 

The South's Ban Ki-moon and his North Korean counterpart, Paek
Nam Sun, called for ``substantial and constructive progress'' at
the nuclear talks, KCNA said. 

North Korea has insisted the United States remove any nuclear
weapons from South Korea as well as its ``nuclear umbrella'' of
security guarantees to its ally, but Hill said Friday that
Washington's alliance with the South ``doesn't depend on
relations with other countries.'' 

Hill raised the possibility that the talks might take a break or
be conducted at a lower level before resuming again quickly in
what he referred to as a ``second part of this round.'' 

``We don't want to have rounds where we walk away and see this
rock that we've been pushing up this very steep hill roll all
the way back to the bottom of the hill, such that at the next
round we have to start pushing it up to the top of the hill
again,'' he said. ``We want to make progress.'' 
		 	 	   
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*****************************************************************
 30 Lake County Record-Bee: Leaving the gate open

- Opinion
 
Article Last Updated: Saturday, July 30, 2005 -
 		   	 	
 Once again the board of supes has left the gate open, and will
be astonished when the horse gets out. I refer to the exhibit
scheduled for the schoolhouse museum depicting child victims of
depleted uranium exposure. 

Since when did our local museum become a forum for every
half-baked kookala that has an ax to grind? It doesn't surprise
me that Ed Robey and Lyn Fischbein are in favor of this exhibit
since they have made more left turns than Dale Earnhardt, and it
does has a certain amount of appeal for the "hate America" crowd.

 If we get "enlightened" by this exhibit can the crucifix in
urine and the Madonna portrait in dung be far behind? I am sure
that if this was an exhibit of pictures of the children of Iraq
going to school for the first time, or our troops repairing
schools, or water systems, there would be no room for it in our
museum. 

I commend the supervisors that stood against this exhibit and
think the ones that rode the fence should get the gate since
they are the ones that left it open.

 Marty Klier

 Lakeport

© 2005 Record-Bee.com 		   	 
*****************************************************************
 31 Deseret News: Newly passed energy bill will help little, critics
warn 

[deseretnews.com] 

Sunday, July 31, 2005 

Prices soaring, many goals unattained after years of effort 

By Sudeep Reddy 
Deseret Morning News 

DALLAS — As consumers struggled with rising 
energy costs, President Bush and Congress set out at the start 
of the decade to change the course of U.S. energy policy. 

Among the top priorities: reducing dependence on foreign 
suppliers, increasing domestic energy supplies and mitigating 
frequent price spikes. 

Today, consumers face even higher energy prices. And many 
of the long-sought goals may require another try. 

The energy bill that cleared Congress Friday — and that 
Bush is expected to sign next week — represents a major 
political accomplishment after years of failure. 

But the nation's first comprehensive energy legislation 
in 13 years, critics say, will do little to change the nation's 
energy course. 

"This bill represents essentially more of the same, with 
just more subsidy," said Jerry Taylor, director of natural 
resource studies at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think 
tank. 

Proponents of the legislation say it will boost energy 
production by offering subsidies for newer energy sources, loan 
guarantees for the nuclear industry and a host of other 
incentives to help oil, natural gas and coal projects. 
Conservation and efficiency measures are intended to mitigate 
demand. 

Comprehensive energy legislation was one of Bush's top 
policy goals when he took office in 2001 amid rising commodity 
prices. 

At the time, crude oil traded around $30 a barrel. Oil 
closed Friday at $60.57. 

The United States today imports 58 percent of its oil, a 
figure that's only expected to increase. Debate about energy 
policy has focused on the need to reduce dependence on oil 
imports for national security and environmental concerns. 

But even that goal may have been flawed, said Michelle 
Michot Foss, head of the Center for Energy Economics at the 
University of Texas at Austin. 

"It's an unrealistic expectation," she said. "The world 
of energy is an efficient place. It makes sense to have open, 
international trade to procure what we need." 

Environmental groups and many Democrats called the 
legislation a missed opportunity to address the transportation 
sector, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. oil 
consumption. Measures to raise fuel-efficiency requirements were 
voted down during energy-bill negotiations. 

Throughout the debate, most lawmakers have agreed that 
something needs to be done to deal with a volatile energy 
picture. Part of almost all solutions: measures to improve 
efficiency, produce more domestic supplies and address 
infrastructure problems. 

"There are a lot of things you've got to do," said John 
Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute. "The 
argument comes down to how much of each." 

One cause of the legislative gridlock: Energy policy 
hasn't broken down strictly along party lines, leading to 
regional debates about the best steps to take the nation forward.

Lawmakers from the Midwest often support wind projects 
and production of corn-based ethanol to replace gasoline, while 
those in Texas and other Gulf states are strong backers of 
offshore oil and gas drilling. 

Lawmakers from Michigan — home to the auto industry — 
often join automakers in opposing higher fuel-efficiency 
standards. 

In recent weeks, a provision to conduct an inventory of 
oil and gas resources off the coasts of Florida and California 
was strongly opposed in states where lawmakers feared 
environmental consequences. 

The bitter debate over drilling for new supplies in the 
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a top Republican goal — died 
during past energy debates but could resume in separate 
legislation in the fall. 

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 does take steps to address 
numerous infrastructure problems especially with pipelines and 
electricity transmission. The 2003 blackout demonstrated the 
need to update policies and upgrade reliability standards. 

Lawmakers who backed the legislation also say that it 
takes important steps to promote adoption of hybrid vehicles 
through tax cuts and back growth in renewables such as solar and 
wind power. The wind industry hailed the legislation for 
extending a tax credit, to the end of 2007, for production of 
electricity from wind. In recent years, wind companies have laid 
off thousands of workers and halted new investment because the 
provision expired before Congress extended it. 

"This is the very first time we're going to have a smooth 
upward trajectory without an interruption," said Jaime Steve, 
legislative director for the American Wind Energy Association, 
the industry's trade group. "We can achieve some further cost 
reductions in the supply chain because we're avoiding the boom 
and bust of the past." 

Of the energy bill's $14.5 billion price tag, renewable 
sources and conservation measures received some of the largest 
chunks of federal support. 

Wind, solar and other renewables receive $3.1 billion in 
support. Energy efficiency provisions for individuals and 
business draw $1.3 billion. 

By comparison, the coal industry received $2.9 billion, 
while the oil and gas sectors took $1.5 billion. 

Some lawmakers continue to push for broader changes that 
would help newer technologies offset pollution from fossil fuels.

More provisions to support renewable energy and tighten 
fuel-economy requirements could surface in debate over climate 
change and updating the nation's clean-air laws. 

One surprising result of the latest energy debate, 
analysts say, was that few lawmakers were pushing proposals for 
price controls. 

Most favored the notion of a market-based approach rather 
than massive federal projects like those seen in the late 1970s 
to set the nation on a new course through development of 
synthetic fuels. 

"The track record of government doing so is horrifically 
bad," said Taylor of the Cato Institute. "It's been tempted to 
do that in the past, and it's made a complete botch of things in 
the past." 

If nothing else, the latest legislation updates some 
policies and fixes some problems while nudging along newer 
technologies, said Foss of the University of Texas. 

"Our course is slowly changing, whether people realize it 
or not," she said. "One of the very true things about energy in 
the United States is that the market always moves faster than 
policy can move." 

© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 32 WorldNetDaily: Media sycophant jailbird?
 
  SATURDAY JULY 30 2005           
        
[Supercritical Thoughts] [Gordon Prather] 

Posted: July 30, 2005

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com 

Neo-crazy media sycophant Judith Miller of the New York Times,
an "embedded" reporter in Bush's war of aggression against Iraq
– and in the subsequent futile hunt for the "weapons of mass
destruction" she frequently "reported" Saddam Hussein had – is
currently embedded in jail for refusing to testify before a
grand jury. 

On July 6, 2003, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by
former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in which he claimed to have
been sent to Niger in early 2002 by the Central Intelligence
Agency in response to inquiries from Vice President Cheney to
investigate whether or not Iraq had recently been seeking to
purchase uranium from Niger. Wilson claimed that he had
conducted the requested investigation and reported on his return
that there was no credible evidence that any such effort had
been made. 

President Bush had gone to Congress in September 2002 seeking
"specific statutory authorization" to invade Iraq. Bush based
his case on the just-completed Top Secret National Intelligence
Estimate of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, which
was presumably informed by Wilson's report. 

According to Bush, the NIE contained positive proof that Saddam
had been reconstructing his nuke and chem-bio programs in the
several years since the end of inspections by the U.N. Special
Commission 

Now, on Dec. 16, 1998, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of
the International Atomic Energy Agency had made this final
assessment of Iraq's "nuclear' programs: 

  + There were no indications to suggest that Iraq was
successful in its attempt to produce nuclear weapons. 


  + Iraq was at, or close to, the threshold of success in such
areas as the production of highly enriched uranium through the
EMIS process, the production and pilot cascading of
single-cylinder, sub-critical gas-centrifuge machines, and the
fabrication of the explosive package for a nuclear weapon. 


  + There were no indications to suggest that Iraq had produced
more than a few grams of weapons-grade nuclear material through
its indigenous processes. 


  + There were no indications that Iraq otherwise clandestinely
acquired weapons-usable material. 


  + There were no indications that there remains in Iraq any
physical capability for the production of amounts of
weapons-usable nuclear material of any practical significance. 

Hence, when Bush "determined" on March 19 that no "further
diplomatic or other peaceful means will adequately protect the
national security of the United States from the continuing
threat posed by Iraq," most of us assumed Bush and our
"intelligence community" had discovered that Saddam had somehow
managed to acquire nukes. 

However, in his January 2003 State of the Union Address,
President George W. Bush merely stated: "The British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa." 

Sought? 

Big deal. 

Nevertheless, Bush, Cheney and Condi Rice all began warning of
the need to divest Saddam of "the smoking gun that could come in
the form of a mushroom cloud." 

Well, we learned – from the International Atomic Energy Agency –
just weeks before Bush invaded Iraq that the "documentary
evidence" that Saddam had sought to buy uranium-oxide
("yellowcake") from Niger were "blatant forgeries." Now, just
weeks after Bush invaded Iraq, Wilson was telling us that
high-level officials of the Bush-Cheney administration had known
the accusation was baseless for more than a year before the
invasion. 

In particular, the White House Iraq Group – which had been set
up in 2002 to plan public statements and to control such
high-level leaks about the upcoming war – knew that. So, WHIG
apparently swung into action, trying to make "Democrat" Wilson
and his CIA covert-agent wife the issue, rather than the
revelation that they had knowingly made false statements to us
and their media sycophants. 

Well, two years later, that and perhaps other WHIG activities in
the prelude to – and immediate aftermath of – Bush's war of
aggression against Iraq may be in the crosshairs of Special
Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald 

How else to explain Judge Tatel's opinion, which contained nine
"redacted" pages – presumably highly classified – of what
Prosecutor Fitzgerald has determined a person or persons,
unknown, has "leaked" to neo-crazy media sycophant Judith
Miller. Quoth the judge: 

WERE the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national
security or more vital to public debate, or had the special
counsel failed to demonstrate the grand jury's need for the
reporters' evidence, I might have supported the motion to quash. 

Because identifying appellants' sources instead appears
essential to remedying a serious breach of public trust, I join
in affirming the district court's orders compelling their
testimony.

 
Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy
implementing official for national security-related technical
matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and
Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office
of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr.
Prather also served as legislative assistant for national
security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking
member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate
Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had
earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National
Laboratory in New Mexico. 

[WorldNetDaily.com] 

webmaster@worldnetdaily.com
*****************************************************************
 33 York Daily Record: Senate passes energy bill - 

The legislation creates incentives for creation of nuclear power
plants. 

By STEPHEN NERY Medill News Service Saturday, July 30, 2005 

At bottom: · BACKGROUND WASHINGTON — The Senate passed the
energy bill Friday, ending years of pressure from the White
House and providing valuable incentives for the creation of new
nuclear power plants as part of the $12.3 billion legislation.

 	The legislation provides billions in tax breaks for new
energy, creates incentives for efficiency and establishes
industry guidelines. Energy bills have passed the House for four
straight years only to stall in the Senate.

 	No nuclear power plants have been built in the U.S. since the
Three Mile Island scare in 1979. Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for
the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the industry could not
guarantee there would be no repeats of the incident, but
security and knowledge-sharing have improved since then — which
was not a complete failure in itself.

 	“We have a defense-in-depth design which was proved at Three
Mile Island,” he said. “You had human error, but the facility
functioned like it was designed to.”

 	The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides up to $1 billion over
eight years to each of the first six new power plants built. It
also provides hundreds of millions of dollars in potential delay
costs for future plants, as well as an insurance pool in case of
emergency.

 	Industry experts do not expect a rush to build. Kerekes said
construction would start in 2012 at the earliest. Investors want
to see headway made in the creation of a national geological
depository for nuclear waste before committing to new plants.

 	Progress has been made in examining such a site in Yucca
Mountain, Nevada, but it still isn’t being used as a waste
depository 27 years later.

 	Craig Nesbit, a spokesman for Exelon Nuclear Operations, which
runs Three Mile Island, said the 103 reactors in the country
will likely only last for another 40 years.

 	Plants are granted a 40-year operating license upon creation,
with the option to renew for a 20-year term. After that, it is
unknown how well the plants will continue to operate.

 	“The U.S. is one of the only major industrial nations that
doesn’t have a nuclear power program going,” Nesbit said.

 
BACKGROUND
 
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 also provides tax breaks for
construction of cleaner-burning coal facilities, oil and natural
gas production and wind and other renewable energy sources. 

Copyright © York Daily Record 2005 122 S. George St., P.O. Box 
15122 York, PA 17405, (717) 771-2000
*****************************************************************
 34 UCS: Barton Investigation

[Union of Concerned Scientists]                                                       

  backgrounder
 Last-Gasp Attempt to Undermine Climate Science?
 Rep. Joe Barton's Misguided Congressional Investigation 

On June 23, 2005, Representative Joe Barton (R-TX), in his
capacity as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, sent
letters to three climate scientistsDrs. Michael Mann, Raymond
Bradley, and Malcolm Hughesas well as the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change and the National Science Foundation
questioning many aspects of a global warming study.  The letter
to the scientists requested a vast amount of data and
information related to their research conducted over the past 15
years. While Rep. Bartons request specifically targeted the
results of the so-called hockey stick study (a 2,000-year
record of Northern Hemisphere temperature), it also demanded a
significant amount of data irrelevant to that set of
peer-reviewed studies.  

While a spokesman for Rep. Barton claims he is only seeking
scientific truth, Rep. Barton seems to willfully misunderstand
that the findings of the study in question are only one among
thousands of pieces of evidence that support the scientific
consensus that global warming is under way and that human
activity is contributing significantly. In addition, the
principal finding of the study in questionthat the last 15
years were the warmest in a millenniumhave been supported
independently in numerous peer-reviewed studies. Rather than
basing his inquiry on a careful review of peer-reviewed
scientific literature or documents from leading scientific
bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, Rep. Barton cites
a Wall Street Journal editorial as his primary source of global
warming information. 

The scientific community has weighed in strongly. The National
Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the
Advancement of Sciencewhich rarely take stands on Congressional
investigationshave sent letters of concern to Rep. Barton, as
have 20 leading climate scientists. Fellow legislators of both
parties also have criticized Bartons approach as misguided and
illegitimate and a transparent effort to bully and harass
climate change experts who have reached conclusions with which
you disagree. Representative Boehlert (R-NY), chairman of the
House Science Committee, and Representative Waxman (D-CA),
ranking member on the House Government Reform Committee, both
have submitted letters protesting the tone and content of this
investigation.  

Rep. Bartons motivation for the investigation is unclear, other
than his long-standing ties to the fossil fuel industry and the
hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions he
has received from ExxonMobil and other companies with fossil
fuel interests.  

While the investigation is a nuisance to those scientists whom
Rep. Barton has chosen to target, its apparent attempt to
undermine global warming science stands little chance of
overwhelming the vast amount of evidence on global
warming. Major news outlets have already condemned his
investigation, including his home-state newspaper the Houston
Chronicle. In June 2005, the national scientific academies of 11
nations issued a joint statement that reads, The scientific
understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to
justify nations taking prompt action to reduce global warming
emissions. And at the G8 Summit in July 2005, President Bush
himself acknowledged that he accepts the overwhelming evidence
that human activity contributes significantly to global warming. 

It is encouraging to see the U.S. scientific community and
congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle stand together
and refuse to allow science to be threatened or manipulated for
political purposes. The Union of Concerned Scientists joins
these leaders in protesting Rep. Bartons attempt to intervene
in the scientific process and encourages our congressional
representatives to focus their attention on addressing the
serious challenges posed by global warming.   

 © Union of Concerned Scientists
 Page Last Revised: 07.29.2005	 	   

*****************************************************************
 35 Cato: Burning Money Produces Scant Energy

www.cato.org Cato Institute. 

July 30, 2005

by Jerry Taylor 

Jerry Taylor is director of natural resource studies at the Cato
Institute. 

So what are we to make of the 1,725-page, $14.6 billion-dollar
energy bill now racing toward the president's desk? In the main,
the legislation is devoted to production subsidies, tax
preferences, research and development projects, and production
mandates for a dizzying array of energy fuels, technologies, and
industrial sectors. It is built upon the assumption that
investors in energy markets are underfunding worthy projects;
that politicians have superior insights into these matters; and
that the best remedy is to rig the market so that political
preferences win out over market preferences. 

It's of course possible that investors are overlooking some
highly attractive energy technologies. But it's unlikely that
economically attractive investments will be overlooked for long
— they represent, after all, profit opportunities, and
capitalists are pretty good at spotting such things. How likely
is it that politicians know better than investors what
constitutes a "good bet" in energy markets? Based on both common
sense and past experience, the answer is —"not likely." 

But hope springs eternal. Recall that politicians once claimed
that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" and lavished
subsidies upon it. They then asserted that synthetic oil was the
wave of the future, and over $80 billion was subsequently
flushed down a black hole known as the Synthetic Fuels
Corporation. "Soft power" — solar, wind, geothermal, etc. — was
said back in the 1970s to be the wave of the future and the
likely source of at least 30 percent of our electricity by 2000.
We lavished subsidy upon those technologies as well, but today
they provide less than 1 percent of our electricity needs. Other
examples abound, but in short, there's nothing new about our
current infatuation with hydrogen-powered fuel cells, "clean"
coal or ethanol. We've been here before, but we seem to have
learned nothing from past journeys. 

The bill is also full of production incentives for oil and
natural gas. While more of both would be nice, what more
incentive does the energy industry need to produce when oil
prices are already flirting with $60 a barrel and natural gas
prices are triple what they were only a few years ago? There is
simply no reason to subsidize oil and gas production,
particularly when the companies on the receiving end of those
subsidies are at the moment making truly stunning profits. 

The same goes for conservation. With energy prices this high,
consumers have ample incentive to economize on use. Complaints
that the bill fails to do enough in this regard are complaints
that consumers are either too dumb or too shortsighted to spend
their money well. Some may well be, but on the whole, it's
unlikely that Congress can make more productive decisions about
how to spend our energy dollars than we can. Fuel-efficient cars
and appliances are out there if consumers want to take advantage
of them. 

This article originally appeared in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution on July 29, 2005. 

1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington D.C. 20001-5403
 Phone (202) 842-0200 Fax (202) 842-3490
 All Rights Reserved © 2005 Cato Institute   
*****************************************************************
 36 Sunday Times: Before the Fall-Out by Diana Preston - 

July 31, 2005                  

REVIEWED BY BRYAN APPLEYARD
 		   		 		
BEFORE THE FALL-OUT: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima

by Diana Preston Doubleday £20 pp438 

SHOCKWAVE: The Countdown to Hiroshima
by Stephen Walker
J Murray £20 pp352 

“I have two loves,” said Robert Oppenheimer, “physics and the
desert. It troubles me that I don’t see any way to bring them
together.” 

On July 16, 1945 in New Mexico, he brought them together
triumphantly when a colossal implosive force crushed a hollow
sphere of plutonium into criticality, producing an explosion
equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. The desert sands were turned
into green glass by the heat. Oppenheimer, a cultivated man and
the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, watched the
fireball of the Trinity test rise over the desert and thought
not of physics but of a line from the Bhagavad Gita — “I am
become death, the shatterer of worlds.” 

On August 6, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped an entirely different
design of atom bomb — it used uranium rather than plutonium —
from 31,000ft above Hiroshima and shattered the worlds of
140,000 Japanese. At Nagasaki, on August 9, they returned to the
plutonium design. 

These events ended the second world war in the Pacific theatre
and inaugurated the cold war — thanks to the spy Klaus Fuchs,
Stalin was already well into a nuclear weapons programme based
on Manhattan. They also gave human beings the power to destroy
the world in the name of one or other of their petty but
interminable tribal squabbles. Knowledge had always been power,
now it was the ultimate, the only power. 

How did it happen? Diana Preston’s marvellous Before the
Fall-Out provides the answer. Essentially, hers is the story of
the physics and the physicists. The phenomenon of radioactivity,
so familiar to us now, was, in the late 19th century, seen as a
deeply bizarre and exotic discovery. As scientists deciphered
its mechanisms, it became yet stranger. Elements emitted
particles and ultimately turned themselves into other elements.
In 1901, the great Ernest Rutherford saw the significance of
this when his partner, Frederick Soddy, pointed out that thorium
was transmuting itself into argon gas. 

“For Mike’s sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation,” he said,
“They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.” 

Transmutation of elements had been the dream of alchemy for
thousands of years. Modern science had scoffed, but
radioactivity showed that it happened in nature as a matter of
course. Alongside quantum theory and relativity, both unearthed
at about the same time that the Curies were demonstrating
radioactivity in Paris, this knowledge proved that nature was
not a cold, lucid Newtonian mechanism, but a shimmering field of
transmutations, warped time and uncertainty. God was not an
engineer, he was a sorcerer. 

For the next 40 years, a series of improbably brilliant men and
women turned 20th-century physics into a combination of the
School of Athens and Renaissance Florence. Einstein was the
emblematic figure, of course, but he was only first among
equals. Rutherford, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Ed Teller, Max
Born, Werner Heisenberg, Lise Meitner and countless others stalk
Preston’s pages, each brilliantly realised. Above all, there was
Niels Bohr, the Dane who landed in New York on January 7, 1939,
and, on the quayside, murmured the news to the American
physicist, John Wheeler, that the uranium atom had been split.
If the age of nuclear weapons can be said to have one beginning,
that was it. 

Preston’s book is studded with such moments of drama, combined
with, appropriately enough, fields of uncertainty. Did
Heisenberg, a patriot but not a Nazi, scupper the German bomb
project or did he just get the physics wrong? What did
Heisenberg tell Bohr when they met in Copenhagen and what were
his motives? And, later and crucially, would the Japanese have
surrendered in the face of a demonstration explosion and thus
saved Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 

Preston’s handling of her research is impeccable. But this is
far from being a merely scientific history. Throughout the book,
she keeps returning to Hiroshima. She tells us what was
happening there when the Curies were experimenting with radium
or when Szilard realised a bomb was possible while waiting for
the traffic lights to change in London’s Southampton Row in
1934. She tell us of the building of the T-shaped Aioi bridge
that was later to form the city-centre target for Tom Ferebee,
the Enola Gay’s bomb aimer. The effect is to demonstrate the
terrible convergence of events, Hiroshima and physics drifting
into the last, super-heated embrace. 

Furthermore, Preston is on top of the politics. If Roosevelt had
lived and not been succeeded by the more gung-ho Truman, would
the bomb have been dropped? Could the sudden Soviet declaration
of war and incursion into Japanese-held Manchuria have toppled
the Tokyo regime and made the bombing unnecessary? Preston does
not know, but she lays it out before the reader with absolute
clarity. 

And, finally, she speaks with her own voice when she utterly
rejects Marie Curie’s statement that “in science we must be
interested in things, not in persons”. For Preston, it is the
individual act that counts; the apparent impersonal progress of
her story is an illusion. Plutonium doesn’t exist in nature. We
made it. We chose to make it. Read Preston. This is a formidable
book.   	 		

After which, Stephen Walker's Shockwave comes as something of a 
letdown. Walker is primarily a television producer and it shows. 
The book is a mass of cinematic cuts and hackish tension-building 
devices. It is also written - or, rather, overwritten - in the 
style of a lowbrow thriller with too many adjectives, adverbs and 
much vulgar character analysis. Also, I think the reader can 
grasp that this is a big story, so we can't really be that 
interested in being told that the author was "shocked, disturbed, 
thrilled, appalled, entranced, amazed and deeply moved". Yeah, 
yeah, get on with it. And, last, this is the first non- fiction 
book I have encountered without a contents page or an index. What 
is going on here?

But Shockwave is well researched and it does tell you everything 
you could conceivably want to know about the Hiroshima raid. In 
addition, once he recovers from being shocked etc, Walker's 
thriller style does make for a pacey read. He has almost nothing 
to say about the wider meaning of the events he describes, 
although he does, evidently, sympathise with the American desire 
to avoid an invasion of Japan and save young lives as well as 
their need to avenge themselves on a singularly barbaric regime. 
Read Preston quietly at home; read Walker on a plane.

The mushroom cloud of Hiroshima will hang over us forever. We 
must stare at it, as did the tail gunner of the Enola Gay, for as 
long as we can. We might not learn anything, but then, as those 
fissioning atoms made clear, we may have already learnt too much.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First prices of œ18 and œ18 
(Shockwave) on 0870 165 8585 and 
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

websites:
www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/
Gateway to Hiroshima sites and images

Copyright 2005                 Times Newspapers Ltd.
*****************************************************************
 37 Herald-Leader: 60 years after A-bomb, we must face truth

Posted on Sun, Jul. 31, 2005  
   
[Mami Hayashida of Tokyo painted the banner, which says
truth, for this portrait. &quot;To know the truth is
to look at both sides,&quot; she said. Her work was part of an
exhibit called The A-Bomb and Humanity, which was sponsored by
the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice, the Clergy
and Laity Network of Kentucky and the Social Action Committee of
the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lexington. The exhibit
features 40 panels of paintings and photographs of the areas
bombed and of people who have been affected by the testing of
nuclear weapons.]   

  Brett Marshall/Staff   

  Mami Hayashida of Tokyo painted the banner, which says
"truth," for this portrait. "To know the truth is to look at
both sides," she said. Her work was part of an exhibit called
The A-Bomb and Humanity, which was sponsored by the Central
Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice, the Clergy and Laity
Network of Kentucky and the Social Action Committee of the
Unitarian Universalist Church of Lexington. The exhibit features
40 panels of paintings and photographs of the areas bombed and
of people who have been affected by the testing of nuclear
weapons.  

COMMENTARY

 
By Merlene Davis

 HERALD-LEADER COLUMNIST

 

Paul Harvey, the well-known radio personality who has given us
his opinion and "the rest of the story" for years, lamented last
month how America had sent soldiers to the Middle East but left
our best weapons at home in silos. 

He was referring to our nuclear bombs -- our weapons of mass
destruction. 

Fortunately, clearer minds are at work. 

In the 60 years since Americans dropped the first atomic bomb
over Japan during World War II, the proportion of people in
Japan and the United States who want to see that happen again is
declining. 

And there are some who want us to always remember the bombings,
to know of their-destructive power, in hopes those actions
aren't repeated. 

In Lexington, some of those people will be hosting an exhibit
called The A-Bomb and Humanity, part of "Never Again:
A-Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki." 

The exhibit, sponsored by the Central Kentucky Council for Peace
and Justice, the-Clergy and Laity Network of Kentucky and the
Social Action Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church of
Lexington, features 40 panels of paintings and photographs of
the areas bombed and of people who have been affected by the
testing of nuclear weapons since. 

The panels, which will be displayed at the Unitarian
Universalist Church August 6, 8 and 9, were a gift to retired
University of Kentucky business professor Andy Grimes from
Japanese associates. 

Mami Hayashida, 34, a Japanese doctoral student in music at UK,
said the panels and commemoration aren't meant to shame
Americans or praise the Japanese. 

"This event is not about the suffering of the Japanese," she
said. "It is about the suffering of human beings caused by
nuclear weapons, which are also created by human beings. It is
also about the horror of nuclear weapons." 

On Aug. 6, 1945, America dropped the first atomic bomb over
Hiroshima, Japan, followed three days later by a bomb over
Nagasaki. 

Hundreds of thousands of people died immediately and in ensuing
months, mostly non-military personnel. 

Japan surrendered Aug. 15, ending World War II. 

While questioning the use of the bomb, Hayashida said, some
Japanese also are critical of the Japanese government's war
crimes, of its attack on Pearl Harbor and of the Nanking
Massacre in China, in which 300,000 Chinese soldiers and
civilians were killed, and 20,000 women were raped by Japanese
soldiers. They also-decry the lack of aid for A-bomb victims in
Japan and neighboring Asian countries. 

"Those of us who regret Pearl Harbor the most and the Nanking
Massacre the most are the same people who are trying the hardest
not to let-Hiroshima and Nagasaki be-forgotten," Hayashida said. 

Some descendants of bomb victims in Japan, called hiba-kusha,
have a hard time finding jobs or marriage-partners because of
the-continued effects of radiation sickness, such as cancers and
gene mutations. 

The hibakusha also include victims of nuclear testing worldwide. 

A recent survey of-hibakusha in Japan revealed that 50 percent
blame the-United States and Japan-equally for their suffering. 

"I hear the necessity-argument a lot," Hayashida said of
dropping nuclear bombs in Japan. "'It was necessary,-inevitable
and justifiable.' 

"It's not just Americans who say that, but more than in Japan. I
do find some grains of truth in that, too. 

"But the thing is, though, with a lot of things that happen in
history, especially something like this, if we use
the-necessity-justifiability-inevitability argument, then we
didn't learn anything," she said. 

"There is a dark side,-negative consequences, people involved,"
Hayashida said. "To know the truth is to look at both sides and
not to ignore that dark side or things that make us feel
uncomfortable. 

"We need to know what it did, and it's probably beyond anyone's
imagination." 

Richard Mitchell of the-Central Kentucky Council for Peace
&Justice, who organized the event, said there are a few panels
he would recommend that little children not see. 

But adults need to see the long-lasting effects of the bombs. 

"We must not let our anger and outrage distract us," Mitchell
said of those who-witnessed Japanese aggression. "Crimes against
humanity-cannot justify other crimes against humanity. Sixty
years later, both Japanese and-Americans need to look at what we
have done and pledge to the world, 'never again.'" 

IF YOU GO:
'Never Again'
 

What: Commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the bombings
of-Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan;-includes The A-Bomb
and-Humanity, an exhibit of photos and paintings of people and
events since the bombs were dropped. 

When: 4-6 p.m. Aug. 6, 4-8 p.m. Aug. 8 and 9. 

Where: Unitarian Universalist Church of Lexington, 3564 Clays
Mill Rd. 

Special events 

4-5 p.m. Aug. 6: Children fold peace cranes; viewing of exhibit. 

5-6 p.m. Aug. 6: Brief program. 

7-8 p.m. Aug. 9: Closing ceremony. 

Reach Merlene Davis at (859) 231-3218 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext.
3218, or .   

*****************************************************************
 38 Bellona: Electricity debt can mean lights out for Northern fleet bases
 
The Russian Defence ministry does not finance regularly the
Northern fleet bases what led to significant electricity debts. 

2005-07-29 18:20

For example, Belomorsk navy base on the White Sea near
Severodvinsk is to pay $629,000 electricity bill. Severodvinsk
is the centre of Russian nuclear submarine shipbuilding. Similar
situation is at the other Northern Fleet bases. The navy
officials hope the electricity providers will not switch off the
electricity at the navy sites. In comparison, the Russian navy
bases on the Black Sea and Pacific are much better financed,
Rossia reported.   

  Publisher: , President: 
Information: , Technical contact: 
Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62  * P.O.Box
2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway




*****************************************************************
 39 Sunday Herald: HIROSHIMA: THE LEGACY

  Almost 60 years after the US dropped the first atomic bomb on
Japan, Torcuil Crichton speaks to the last survivors and hears
their message  of laughter and peace 
 
 MOST of us can only imagine death, but Sanao Tsuboi has a
memory of it. Standing on Miyuki Bridge in the middle of
Hiroshima, the very spot where he looked into the yawning maw
that had swallowed so many lives that morning almost 60 years
ago, he is separated from us by a veil of experience. We think
of Hiroshima and, in our minds eye, we see the symbol of
Armageddon, the sculpted mushroom cloud of the atomic blast: a
rising column with a fiery red core topped by a bubbling mass of
purple-tinged turbulence.

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, is what Robert
Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic age, quoted after seeing
the first smoky column rise above the New Mexico dawn of July
16, 1945, following the first ever nuclear explosion. Four hours
later, an atomic device was being shipped from America to the
Pacific in preparation for the deliberate terror bombing of
civilian populations.

The mushroom cloud is an awesome but abstract image, and as it
blistered above Hiroshima it was probably its very lack of any
human quality that caused Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola
Gay  the plane that dropped the bomb  to pound the pilots
shoulder and shout: My God. Look at that son of a bitch go! In
the mission log, he was more restrained, recording: My God, what
have we done?

It was August 6, 1945. What they had done, the crew of that B-29
Superfortress bomber, was drop the power of the sun on to the
Earth. At 8.16am, the uranium bomb dubbed Little Boy exploded,
slightly off- target, 580 metres above Shima hospital in
Hiroshima with a force of 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Massive
radiation and a fireball hot enough to melt stone, with the
thermal power to burn flesh at a distance of 3.5km, was
unleashed, followed by a blast of air that travelled at 28
metres a second, flattening everything in its path out to a
radius of 2km. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki suffered
the same fate through the 21,000 kilotonne blast of the Fat Man
plutonium bomb.

In Hiroshima, at least 40,000 people were killed instantly:
vapourised by the heat of the blast or burned by the fireball
that swept through the city. During the years that followed,
thousands more would die from radiation sickness. In fact, the
explosion that caused a moment of blinding light on that August
morning has been killing ever since. By the end of 1945, 70,000
had died from their injuries; a conservative estimate of the
death toll is 200,000.

Most of us only read history but Sanao Tsuboi, he is testimony.
As a 20-year-old student, Tsuboi stood little more than 600
metres from the centre of the blast: the original ground zero.
He was thrown back 10 metres and horribly burnt. People talk
about a mushroom cloud, says Tsuboi, but all I saw was a white
flash. Against the roar of rush-hour traffic on the bridge,
Tsuboi speaks, leading us on a journey back to the morning of
August 6 , travelling beyond the mushroom cloud and into the
very heart of hell . 

As an aide memoir, Tsuboi ponts to a photograph which was taken
here, beside the Miyuki Bridge, on that morning of reckoning,
three hours after the Hiroshima bomb heralded the most profound
change in the course of human history.

The camera came of age in the second world war, documenting the
Blitz, the cult of Hitlerism, the Dresden bombings, the horrors
of the death camps. But at Hiroshima there is almost a hole in
history; there are remarkably few images. Just five pictures
taken that morning by newspaper photographer Yoshito Matsushige
survive. Only two people in his Miyuki Bridge photo are still
alive. Tsuboi is one of them.

Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for 10 hours that day,
carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic
bombing, and two rolls of film with 24 possible exposures. He
could only bring himself to push the shutter seven times.

The black-and-white picture is grainy, the detail smeared by
long exposure, but it freezes the apocalypse that unfurled
across the city that morning. A young, shaven-headed Tsuboi can
be clearly seen cowering like a frightened animal among other
survivors against the parapet of the bridge.

I thought I would die here at the end of this bridge, so I wrote
the inscription, Tsuboi died here, with a stone on the road, he
says. My skin was so tattered, my hands so feeble, that the
writing didnt last. But that is what I thought: that this was
the end. This bridge was the border between life and death.

 Most of us think we feel pain but Sanao Tsuboi bears the scars.
The old man wears thick lines of blue kohl drawn across his
forehead where his eyebrows ought to be. It creates a slightly
comic effect that may be a deliberate distraction from his other
features. His ears look like wax that has melted in the heat and
then reset on cooling. His forehead is pink-scarred and the
backs of his hands are layers of candled skin. Twice he has been
struck by cancer and his heart has been weakened.

As you can see, I was severely exposed. My ears were torn off,
my face was burnt black. My skin came off  all of it. My mouth
was swollen, like a monster. Half the sleeves of my shirt were
blown away and my trousers were torn off below the knee. My
hands were burnt black and blood ran down my arms. Dark blood
ran from my upper hips to my legs.

 In the picture, nobody is looking into the camera lens as
Matsushige releases the shutter. It is difficult to tell if it
is ragged clothes or charred skin that hangs from their arms.
Matsushige, who could not focus through his tears, recalled that
children were screaming all around him. In the picture everyone
appears to stare mutely at the tornado of flame and smoke
rushing across the city, but as you study the image you can hear
their mewing pain.

Little wonder that Matsushiges eyes failed him in the ghoulish
darkness of that day. I was overwhelmed by the destructive power
of the blast,  says Tsuboi.  I saw terrible sights: people with
their eyes dangling out, people with their flesh stripped off to
the bone, people who couldnt walk. A woman in her 30s whod been
impaled with a stick which had been pulled out, taking her
intestines with it. She was trying to put them back inside her
body. Thousands of those miserable people I encountered.

There were seven rivers in Hiroshima and everyone, all the
people, jumped into the water, young or old, whether they could
swim or not, because they hurt so much from their burns. I saw
rivers full of corpses : thousands of bodies. 

Tsuboi survived with the help of many hands. He has no real
memory of the first 40 days during which he drifted in and out
of coma. Every day the doctor would come and look at me and
every day he said I would die.

By the following January , Tsuboi could not even walk. But he
would not die, either. I had lost my hair, I was bleeding from
my gums, I had a high temperature and I was infested by maggots.
My body was rotting. His mother picked all the maggots from his
suppurating wounds and eventually he crawled and then walked to
health. I say health but I have been hospitalised 10 times by
radiation diseases  three times declared critical and my family
called to my bedside. I have to admit I am getting bored with
death.

 There were years of bitter tears. The atom bomb changed my life
around 180 degrees. I kept thinking if there was no A-bomb  if
there had been no war  I could have pursued my dream of
inventing something. In that regard I hated the United States
and I was envious of those who escaped the A-bomb and made their
way in life.

The Hibakusha, as the survivors of the bomb are known, suffered
tremendous discrimination and were ostracised after the war. 

Medical opinion was that we would die early so nobody would
seriously contemplate marriage to someone like that, says
Tsuboi. He twists his scarred face into a gargoyle. If they were
disfigured, women especially confronted a much more serious
situation. Some are still single to this day. They have been
denied love. 

Having lost his first girlfriend in the A-bomb attack, Tsuboi
fell in love with another but her family would not approve
marriage. So we tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills but
I didnt know how many we should take and the attempt failed,
says Tsuboi. I felt so awful. I couldnt die. We couldnt get
married and we could not get to heaven together.

Like Jacob labouring in Labans fields, Tsuboi persisted for
another seven years until his sweethearts family relented. O ur
marriage, after all this hardship, never faltered. We have three
children and seven grandchildren, he says, grinning.

The immediate death toll of mass bombing raids on cities such as
Dresden and Tokyo, may have been higher, but the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki atom bombs kept on killing long after peace had been
delivered. At first, the Western press described the hitherto
unknown effects of radiation as a mystery illness, and as a
naive world struggled to find a moral context for the bombs
killing power, doctors were baffled by the soaring death rates.
Nobody knew  and nobody yet knows  how to treat the keloids, the
genetic mutations, bone-marrow destruction, the internal
bleeding, the cancers, the premature deaths, that follow
exposure to high-level radiation.

To begin with, nobody was overly concerned. The Pacific war had
been cut short, a $2 billion US gamble on the A-bomb had paid
off and the lives of thousands of US marines who would otherwise
have had to fight the Japanese army every inch of the way had
been saved. Confidence about the benefits of the new atomic age
was only tempered when the New Yorker magazine, in August 1946,
cleared an entire edition for a report by John Hersey, which
gave the still-dying bomb survivors a voice among the millions
of words of self-congratulation. 

The article crystallised a sense of moral unease about the use
of nuclear weapons. Later, there would be debates about whether
the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, would have surrendered anyway or
whether the bombs were just a live experiment to forestall
Russias entry into the Japanese theatre and prove Americas
dominance in the post-war situation. Details of Japans barbaric
treatment of prisoners and captured colonies and the fear of the
communist might of Russia served effectively as justification
against the doubters.

Moral qualms did not, however, prevent the world from embracing
the prospect of Armageddon. As the century progressed, the US
and Russia created massive nuclear stockpiles with the potential
to destroy each other . For a while, Dr Strangeloves, such as
Herman Kahn, tried to convince us that nuclear war was
survivable, but over Cuba, the superpowers stared into the
abyss, then blinked and withdrew from the brink. The threat of
destroying the world several times over only subsided in the
1980s when the communist system bankrupted itself and Mikhail
Gorbachev declared the nuclear poker game over. 

By then, Britain had spent billions of pounds pursuing an
independent atomic deterrent (and is about to do so again on a
new generation of Trident missiles from the US). Post-imperial
prestige, and seats on the UN Security Council, were purchased
through ownership, or leasing, of nuclear deterrents. France
also developed its own bomb and continued testing as late as
1996.

Voices of dissent were raised through the mass civic protest
movements against atomic weapons that began mobilising during
the 1950s . Like many from Hiroshima, Tsuboi has been around the
world campaigning against nuclear weapons. From New York to
North Korea, he has been astonished at how little the public
knows about the effects of nuclear weaponry , and he is driven
to do something about it by a sense of haunted responsibility;
even guilt. When the Japanese army arrived in Hiroshima, after
the bombing, the only people they rescued were young men trained
to use rifles. I still hear the voice of the soldier shouting at
me, Tsuboi recalls. Get this young man on a truck, he said. Its
then I realised how militaristic, how inhuman we had become, to
only help young men and treat everyone else as if they were
cabbage.

HIROSHIMA today is a modern city rebuilt from the ashes of the
military hub, with widened tree-lined boulevards that are home
to one million people and a centre for advanced manufacturing
and technical research.

It should be an ordinary city but the wounds inflicted by the
bomb remain very public. There is a museum, a peace shrine in a
memorial park, peace boulevards and the skeletal remains of the
A-bomb dome, the former Industrial Promotion hall that stands
witness to the destructive power of the worlds first A-bombing.

In the Peace Park, Japanese schoolchildren politely cajole
visitors into filling out questionnaires on such profundities
as: How do you feel about the 9/11 attacks on New York? and How
can the war in Iraq be solved? It is impossible, as a visitor at
any rate, to escape the baleful legacy that the bomb bequeathed
the city.

Late at night, with a heavy, yellow moon slung low in the sky
and the cicadas whirring in the trees, we are walking back to
our hotel when the paean of a trumpet draws us to the fringes of
the Peace Park. Below the illuminated A-bomb dome, Yoshitaka
Shimizu is practising his trumpet by the river.

In broken English, the young academic tells us he wants to be
like Clifford Brown, the black American jazz genius who died in
1956 in a car accident on the Pennsylvania turnpike. We ask why
he chooses to play here, in the shadow of such tragedy. My
grandmother died three years ago with cancer of the spine, says
Shimizu. She was in Hiroshima at the time of the bomb. I come
here so that my gran can hear my stuff.

In Hiroshima, the story of that day never ends, and parts of it
have never been told. The censored dispatches of Chicago Daily
News reporter George Weller from the blasted city were only
uncovered by his son earlier this year. Days after the attack,
he reported a mysterious Disease X, or radiation sickness, as
did Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett, who
successfully evaded the US censors.

Burchett began his dispatch: In Hiroshima, 30 days after the
first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people
are still dying, mysteriously and horribly  people who were
uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can
only describe as an atomic plague.

Hiroshima, he wrote, does not look like a bombed city. It looks
as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it
out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I
can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.

In another part of town, after much ritual bowing, smiles,
mutual nodding and offers of green tea, Aiko Kobi, a
nightingale-scaled woman wearing pale pink plumage, sits in the
alcove of an air-conditioned café. Time has shrivelled her, the
table top seems almost too high for her, but her personality has
not shrunk and her voice tinkles like a crystal glass behind a
broad smile, lipsticked to hide her scars.

For six decades she has carried a terrible story in her head.
Only now, with the gentle persuasion of her 25-year-old
granddaughter who sits by her side, is she ready to give it up.
Because she has experienced something that nobody ever should,
we ought to listen to her. She clears her throat with a chirrup
and we lean forward to hear words that she found unutterable for
six decades. 

I hesitated to tell my story because I wondered if I was
entitled to speak, says Kobi. I didnt suffer from severe burns
and all my injuries healed, although my lips still hurt even
when I was in my 50s.

There was no noise; just a flash, and in an instant she was
buried under a two-storey home that stood on this very corner
site where we now sip tea. 

It was pitch black, I couldnt see anything. I cried for help and
my father called out, telling me not to move my head. I followed
his instructions and, little by little, I was able to move out
into the garden.

In the open air, 1.5 km from the centre of the explosion, Kobi
was confronted by hell. The house was devastated; the one next
door was on fire. I was bleeding from shattered glass, and
shoeless. We started walking southwards, barefoot because there
was nothing else to do and no other way to go.

For some reason  common humanity, perhaps  she grabbed the hand
of a six-year-old boy she found crying in the rubble, and looked
after him for the next few days.

Being short-sighted and without her spectacles saved Aiko Kobi
from some of the horror. But she could not block out all of her
senses. The sound I remember most vividly is from the hospital,
she says. There was a boy who collapsed. He fell down in front
of us in his death throes. The boy crying: I still hear that,
and the smell of burned flesh . Its beyond description.

 There were other people with pitch black faces. Their skin was
burned off and their clothes were shredded; women stripped naked
by the blast. Their skin was peeled off. People walked like
ghosts with their arms stretched out in pain.

Kobi and the child spent that night in the mountains but,
unaware of the dangers of radioactivity, they returned to the
city the next day to search for the boys relatives . They didnt
find them. That six-year-old, Maso Yashida, died aged 43 of
liver cancer that spread through his body.

 Surviving the explosion was one thing. Then came the aftermath
. For months, recalls Kobi, my injuries were inflamed and
infected and didnt heal. There were few medicines and doctors
had to treat the burns victims first. Twenty years later, Kobis
father would still find shards of glass being pushed out from
his scalp. With their family destroyed, both father and daughter
considered retreating from society to become priests and tend
the family shrine. 

A year later, aged 21, Kobi married a man who had lost his wife
in the Hiroshima raid and became stepmother to his six-year-old
daughter. It was like starting from scratch. I had a new life, a
husband, a sister and a daughter. The couple had two other
children and their son inherited the family printing business,
building a modern eight-storey office with family apartments on
the site of the house that had been destroyed by the bomb.

Each year, Kobi would visit the various shrines in the city to
commemorate her dead cousin and her dead brother. Yet she never
revealed her own suffering. It was only when her granddaughter,
Maki Nakamoto, became a peace volunteer at the city museum that
the story, like the shards of glass from her wounds, surfaced.

I thought that without a special opportunity she wouldnt tell me
anything, so last August, on the anniversary, I went to the park
with her, says Maki Nakamoto, who shares her grandmothers bright
smile. As they walked together Kobi told Nakamoto what had
happened. I could tell how hard it was for her to talk about
this, says Nakamoto. She didnt complain but the tears started to
run.

There are hundreds of personal testimonies recorded on video and
audio in the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Echoing voices can be
recalled at the push of a button. But today, when Nakamoto shows
visitors around, she is imbued with the authority of her
grandmothers story. Maki Nakamoto, a third generation survivor,
provides a link with a disappearing past.

This coming anniversary may be the last major commemoration for
many of the Hibakusha, whose average age is now 72. But their
story will continue through people like Nakamoto who received,
after 60 years of silence, an oral history from the benign,
bruised lips of her grandmother. 

Its another one of those baking mornings in Hiroshima. Takashi
Hiraoka, a former mayor of the city, stands beneath the shade of
Japanese bead trees and Kurogane holly that survived the 1945
blast and have been replanted in a rocky grove along one of the
boulevards in the rebuilt metropolis. 

He worries that as the city prepares for this 60th anniversary ,
there is a danger that the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
which was bombed three days later, are being lost on
21st-century Japan.

We really have to ask ourselves if we live our daily lives with
our ideals in mind. Even in Hiroshima, children dont know what
happened on August 6, says Hiraoka.

As a two-term mayor in the 1990s, he promoted nuclear-free local
authorities, established a peace institute and grassroots
exchanges across the world; yet he doesnt feel he has done
enough. The danger of nuclear weapons has become greater. Look
at depleted uranium shells in Iraq; nuclear is now accepted as
conventional.

 In his grey linen suit, knitted tie and silver hair, Hiraoka is
a counterpoint to Japans new casual dress code promoted by Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi . He has little time for fads, he
says, or the Prime Minister and the empty rhetoric of the
Japanese government. 

Prime Minister Koizumi always says he prays for peace at the
Yakusuni war shrine. If he really does, he should reveal the
contents of his prayer to the people. If he is determined not to
start war he should withdraw his defence forces from Iraq.

Neighbours like China and South Korea, who remember Japanese
atrocities during the war, are furious whenever the Prime
Minister visits the controversial Yakusuni shrine for the war
dead, since those it commemorates include several condemned war
criminals . Asian countries say they detect the stirrings of
Japanese nationalism. The national anthem is being re-introduced
to schools, after 60 years in the deep freeze of atomic peace.

As the Chinese and Koreans, the abused of the Japanese empire,
grow in economic strength, so do their demands for contrition
that will only be expressed in empty terms. Each night, Japanese
television broadcasts another story about the threat of the
rogue nuclear state, North Korea . Through the distant lens, it
seems the Japanese media is cranking up the propaganda of fear.

Prime Minister Koizumis ambition for his country to play a
bigger international role, especially in military peacekeeping,
also worries nervous neighbours. 

His goal is to push through a revision of Japans constitution,
removing the ban on the threat or use of force, contained in
article nine of the peace constitution that was imposed after
the second world war. Japans constitution has already been
stretched to allow self-defence troops to first join the UN in
relief work overseas.

Then, in 2003, a law was introduced to permit troops to go to
non-combat zones in Iraq. Prime Minister Koizumi wants to give
the nation even greater powers and some conservatives have
called for nuclear weapons to be considered for self defence.
The mindscape of Japanese politics is a presumption that war
will be possible in the future. 

That idea conflicts with Hiroshimas call for peace and the
abolition of nuclear weapons across the globe. 

This is only an assumption but I think most people in Hiroshima
and in Japan would back the reforms, says Hiraoka. This city is
a conservative stronghold, the majority in the national assembly
is Liberal Democrat, so we are in a dangerous situation. Its
only an assumption, but if it comes true the words of the August
6 service every year will be empty.

 
31 July 2005 

  © newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 40 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / An ugly end, with or
without the atom bomb / Compromise unacceptable for Truman
 
Ronald Takaki 
Sunday, July 31, 2005

During the days before that fateful Aug. 6, 1945, Gen. Douglas
MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a
surrender. "We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender
daily," one of his staff members recalled. When he was notified
that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the general
was livid. MacArthur declared that the atomic attack on
Hiroshima was "completely unnecessary from a military point of
view." 

Why then did the president make the decision to drop the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima? 

Harry Truman was an accidental president. He had been sworn into
office only months earlier, when Franklin D. Roosevelt died
suddenly on April 12. Truman admitted to his wife that he had
little knowledge of foreign policy. Feeling inadequate to fill
the shoes of the great FDR, he had to face indignities and
sarcasm. In the streets, people asked, "Harry who?" and mocked
him as "the little man in the White House." But Truman hid his
insecurity behind a facade of toughness. Publicly, he presented
himself as a man of the frontier. He blustered: "The buck stops
here." 

Like many Americans, the president was swept into a rage for
revenge for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. This rage had
been racialized. Truman repeatedly blasted the enemy as the
"Japs." This racist term identified the enemy as the Japanese
people, a contrast to the term "Nazis," which refers only to the
followers of Hitler. Truman also dehumanized the enemy in the
Pacific war. Disturbed by Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death
march, Truman argued: "When you have to deal with a beast, you
have to treat him as a beast. " 

These dynamics drove Truman to rigidly insist on unconditional
surrender, a demand he had inherited from Roosevelt. But for
Roosevelt, it had been only a slogan to help rally the war
effort. 

Truman made the demand a policy. In July, he refused to heed the
recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of
War Henry Stimson that the president negotiate a peace by
allowing Japan to continue the emperor system. News of the
successful test of the atomic bomb boosted Truman's confidence
that he could bully Japan. In the Potsdam Declaration of July
26, Truman issued a fierce ultimatum: Japan must accept
"unconditional surrender" or face "utter devastation." 

Japan refused, and Truman ordered the atomic attack. The first
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6. As many as 75,000
people were instantly incinerated. Most of them were women and
children. Three days later, the second atomic bomb was dropped
on Nagasaki. 

But the Japanese government still refused to surrender
unconditionally. At that point, Truman decided to allow Japan to
keep the emperor. Had he made such an offer earlier, he might
have been able to end the war before dropping the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima. 

The atomic bombings were not widely accepted in the United
States. A poll conducted by Fortune magazine in December 1945
found that only 54 percent of the respondents approved of the
atomic bombings. The major news media also voiced apprehension
and disquietude. Time magazine wrote that "the demonstration of
power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a
bottomless wound in the living conscience." The New York Times
issued a sobering message: "We have been the first to introduce
a new weapon of unknowable effects which may bring us victory
quickly but which will sow the seeds of hate more widely than
ever. We may yet reap the whirlwind." 

The day after the devastation of Nagasaki, Truman privately told
a Cabinet member that "the thought of wiping out another 100,000
people was too horrible," and that he did not like "the idea of
killing all those kids." His anguish revealed a conflicted self.
The Japanese were not simply an enemy race, they were human
beings. Beneath Truman's toughness was also a thoughtful and
sensitive individual who saw the world hurtling toward an
uncertain and fearful future. 

On July 16, while waiting for the news of the atomic test, he
reflected in his diary on the "absolute ruin" of Berlin and the
long history of warfare, including Carthage and Rome. Turning to
the war before him, he ruminated: "I hope for some sort of peace
-- but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some
centuries, and when morals catch up perhaps there'll be no
reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a
planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet
there'll (be) a reckoning -- who knows?" 

Ronald Takaki, who wrote this article for Pacific News Service,
is professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and the author of
"Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb." Contact us at
insight@sfchronicle.com. 				

Page B - 1                      

The San Francisco Chronicle] 
*****************************************************************
 41 Courier-Journal: After the A-bombs
 
www.courier-journal.com

Sunday, July 31, 2005     
  
For area survivors, 60th anniversary carries personal meaning 

  + enlarge   An unidentified man stood next to a tiled
fireplace amid the rubble of a house in Hiroshima on Sept. 7,
1945. The bombs are largely credited with hastening Japan's
surrender on Aug. 14, ending World War II. (Stanley
Troutman/Associated Press) 

      ON THE WEB


+  For more details on the war in the Pacific, go to
www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/pacificwar/tline-bw.htm.


+  For more information on Mayors for Peace, go to
www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/mayors/english.


+  To share your memories of the bombings, go to
www.courier-journal.com.   


  + enlarge         Lilly Krohn lost her hair and appetite a
week after the blast. Years later she lost her uterus and her
stomach, both to cancer.   



+ enlarge   A few steel and concrete buildings and bridges were
intact in Hiroshima after the Aug. 6, 1945, bombing. This shot
was taken on Sept. 5. Lee Thomas Jr., now a 79-year-old
Louisville businessman, saw the city several weeks after the
bombing and said it “was absolutely flat.” He was a combat
soldier headed for the invasion of Japan, and when he saw the
destruction the bomb caused, he questioned its use, although he
said it saved his life.

 
"My position is very strongly against it (the bombs), but my
father fought his way across Europe and was going to be on his
way to Japan, and he himself believes the atomic bomb saved his
life. I have to acknowledge the honesty of that emotion."

  TERRY TAYLOR, executive director of the nonprofit Interfaith
Paths to Peace and current co-chair of the local
Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemoration Committee 

(Max Desfor/Associated Press) 

+ enlarge   A young man injured in the Nagasaki explosion lay
sick on a mat there in late 1945. The Nagasaki bomb, dropped
three days after the Hiroshima blast, killed about 70,000
people. (Associated Press) 

  
BStories by Katya Cengel
 kcengel@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
 
Lilly Krohn of Laconia, Ind., says a flat tire on her bicycle
saved her life the morning of Aug. 6, 1945.

 That was the morning the United States dropped the first atomic
bomb used against a human population. Krohn, whose unmarried
name was Yuriko Ishigaki, was supposed to be at her typewriter
in downtown Hiroshima.

 But she was at her home in the Japanese city's outskirts when
the bomb detonated at 8:15.

 She said her family's living room exploded around her seconds
later. She pulled her 3-year-old sister, who was unconscious but
alive, from the wreckage. Her parents, who have since died, also
survived the blast, as did her brother and a sister, who were
both out of town at the time.

 She said she eventually started to walk to work a mile away. On
the way she passed a woman with a baby on her back. "But baby
not all right, completely black and shriveled up," Krohn
recalled. The baby was dead; the mother died a week later.

 Krohn continued on, past piles of ashes and smoldering
buildings, to what had been her office. There she saw her
typewriter -- melted.

 Every day for a month, Krohn, then 20, returned to the spot to
look for fellow workers. At first she looked for survivors, then
for identifiable bodies.

 She never found any.

 On Saturday, it will be 60 years since the atomic bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima, killing 100,000 to 150,000 people and
directly affecting 210,000 to 250,000 more. Another atomic bomb
was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killing about 70,000
and affecting 200,000 more.

 But the suffering didn't end then. A week after the Hiroshima
blast, Krohn lost her hair and appetite. She came to America
after marrying Lloyd Krohn in 1955. Three years later, she lost
her uterus to cancer. In 1972 she lost her stomach, again to
cancer.

 "The consensus opinion is that the cancers and health issues
she has are largely attributable to her being in close proximity
to the bomb," said Dr. Michael Bonacum, who treats Krohn in
Harrison County, Ind.

 Doctors created a new "stomach" for Krohn out of intestinal
tissue by attaching the end of her esophagus to part of her
small intestine. Occasionally her esophagus closes and she uses
a dilating tube to open it.

 Still, she considers herself lucky. Although she lost her
husband three years ago, Krohn, 81, has a daughter and
granddaughter.Bomb debate

 The bombs are largely credited with quickening Japan's
surrender on Aug. 14 and the war's subsequent end. But more than
half a century later, the debate over their use rages.

 Robert Maddox, a World War II expert and Penn State University
professor emeritus, believes that, if they hadn't been dropped,
many more people would have died during the blockade, two
planned invasions and fire bombings.

 "If the bomb (on Hiroshima) hadn't been dropped, (the dead)
might have been up into the millions," Maddox said.

 Lee Thomas Jr., a combat infantry soldier headed for the
invasion of Japan, said the bomb saved his life, but when he saw
Hiroshima several weeks later he questioned its use.

 "It was absolutely flat," said the Louisville businessman, 79.
"I saw the enormous cost to the Japanese of saving my life."

 It's a cost Krohn and other local survivors don't want the
world to forget. In April they met Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi
Akiba, brought to Louisville by metro government and several
local groups, including Interfaith Paths to Peace, to talk about
nuclear disarmament.

 Terry Taylor, executive director of the nonprofit Interfaith
Paths to Peace and current co-chair of the local
Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemoration Committee, feels the bombs
should not have been used but respects the opinions of those who
fought in World War II and disagree with him.

 "My position is very strongly against it (the bombs), but my
father fought his way across Europe and was going to be on his
way to Japan, and he himself believes the atomic bomb saved his
life," Taylor said. "I have to acknowledge the honesty of that
emotion."

 Taylor added that there is one thing everyone seems to agree
on, and it is what Krohn and other survivors want the world to
understand: An atomic bomb should never be used again. 


2004 The Courier-Journal.
*****************************************************************
 42 SF Chronicle: Shrines, temples create magic of Miyajima / 

Island is officially in top 3 of Japan's most beautiful sites
 
John Flinn
Sunday, July 31, 2005

Miyajima, an island of shrines and temples near Hiroshima, is
one of the three most beautiful places in Japan. That's not my
loosely tossed opinion, or anyone else's -- it's official. It
was decided in 1643 by a wandering Confucian scholar named
Shunsai Hayashi and apparently is not open to debate. (The other
two are Matsushima in Miyagi and Amanohashidate in Kyoto.) 

You get to Miyajima (the name means "shrine island") by a short
ferry ride, and the first thing you see is a towering red-orange
torii gate, one of the world's largest, which seems to float on
the water. (At least it does when the tide is in. Otherwise it
rises out of the mudflats.) 

The island is sacred in the Shinto religion, and no one is
permitted to give birth or die -- or at least be buried -- on
it. For hundreds of years it's also been forbidden to cut down
trees there, and as a result the island is covered in virgin
forest, which supports dozens of bird species that are rare
elsewhere in Japan. 

When you step off the ferry you're greeted immediately by deer
-- deer that follow you around the village, sometimes a little
closer than you'd like, blinking their big eyes in hope of a
snack. "Stay away from deer with ANTLERS, " warns a sign. 

The island's most important Shinto shrine, Itsukushima, was
first built here in the year 593 and expanded to its present
size in 1168. Built on tidal land, it also appears to be
floating on the sea when the tide is in. The complex includes 55
subsidiary shrines, temples and other buildings, a stage for Noh
drama and dance, and a number of steeply rounded bridges linking
various buildings. Seven other shrines stand around the
periphery of the island, reachable only by boat. 

Not far from Itsukushima is a five-story pagoda, built in 1407
and rising more than 90 feet. Covered with a roof of cypress
bark, it combines Japanese and Chinese architectural styles. 

Elsewhere on the island are more secular pleasures -- an
aquarium, teahouses, dozens of gift shops and even stores
selling little bags of deer treats. 

I had only a couple of hours to visit, but others say it's worth
staying overnight: When the last ferry leaves for the mainland
and the big crowds of day-trippers depart, the island quiets
down and you get a much better sense of why it's officially one
of the three most beautiful spots in Japan. 				

Page D - 6                      

The San Francisco Chronicle] 

*****************************************************************
 43 SF Chronicle: Hiroshima at peace / Sixty years later, it's a city of serene
parks dedicated to remembrance and disarmament

John Flinn, Chronicle staff writer

Sunday, July 31, 2005

  [Origami cranes lie in chains at the foot of the memorial ...]
[The centopath frames a view of the iconic A-bomb Dome. Ph...]
[The A-bomb Dome stands across the river from Peace Memori...]
[A plaque marking the exact location of ground zero sits l...]
More... 

Hiroshima, Japan -- "Are you American?" asked a petite,
gray-haired Japanese woman. I couldn't tell if it was a question
or an accusation. 

We were in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, outside a small
theater showing almost unbearably gruesome footage of the day,
60 years ago, that my country dropped a nuclear bomb on her
city. 

I nodded yes and braced for what was coming. But the woman
merely smiled and led me around the corner to another theater
where the film was playing in English. She bowed, smiled again
and said, "Thank you for coming." 

To step off a train in Hiroshima as an American is to arrive
with heavy baggage. Earlier that morning, as my shinkansen
bullet train streaked west from Osaka at 164 mph, I'd felt a
knot tightening in my stomach as I wondered: What could I
possibly say to someone my nation once nuked? I would have
plenty of opportunities to find out. Today in Hiroshima, a city
of 1.1 million, there still live more than 50,000 hibakusha, or
A-bomb survivors. 

I expected my visit to be somber and sobering, and at times it
was. But I could never have imagined that I'd also enjoy myself,
that ultimately I'd come away from Hiroshima feeling uplifted.
Overall, the city seemed happy and whole, and no one made me
feel anything less than completely welcome. It wasn't just me: I
met several other American visitors who felt the same. Maybe we
shouldn't have been so surprised by a city that has devoted
itself for the past 60 years to peace and understanding. 

That was the idea from the moment Hiroshima began to rebuild,
and today it is one of the most pleasant of all Japanese cities,
with expansive parks, wide boulevards, riverside greenbelts and
floating restaurants specializing in Hiroshima's prized oysters.
With the exception of nearby Miyajima and a rebuilt castle I
never got around to seeing, the only bona fide tourist
attractions are the atomic bomb memorials. But they alone are
worth the visit. 

The centerpiece is Peace Memorial Park, which fills a large
swath of the island between the Honkawa and Motoyasu-gawa
rivers, a onetime residential and business district very close
to the "hypocenter," as the Japanese call ground zero. You get
there by crossing the unique T-shaped Aioi Bridge, which the
crew of the Enola Gay used as the target for the bomb. (They
missed by about 300 yards.) 

A day of horror 

I knew the most emotionally intense part was going to be the
museum, so I tackled it first. It lays out the city's history --
Hiroshima had always been a military center -- and points out
that in early 1945, as invasion looked increasingly likely,
Japan's imperial headquarters called for "100 million deaths
with honor." 

Both the museum and nearby Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims
acknowledge Japan's role in starting the war and the atrocities
committed against the Chinese and Koreans. But, judging from
comments in the guest book, they don't do it loudly enough to
satisfy some foreign visitors. 

There's also a small section devoted to reasons why America
decided to use its new atomic bomb on Japan. It notes that Gen.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, among others, strongly opposed it and
suggests it was done in part to justify the enormous expense of
developing the weapon and in part to block the Soviet Union's
imminent entry into the war in Asia. 

But these are only minor aspects of the museum. Rather than
attempt to fix blame, it evokes the unspeakable horror of that
day and seeks to ensure it never happens again. 

Statistics and aerial photographs of the devastation set the
stage, but the emotional wallop comes when the museum brings
nuclear apocalypse to the personal level: scorched and shredded
school uniforms, a child's burnt lunchbox with his meal turned
to radioactive ash, a melted tricycle, a photo of a kimono
pattern burned onto a woman's back. On display are the stone
steps of the Sumitomo Bank Building with the shadow of a
vaporized person -- 42- year-old Mitsuno Ochi -- etched into
them. A collection of photos of men, women and children with
their faces burned off was so gruesome I had to turn away. As I
did so, a Japanese child of about 5 burst into tears next to me. 

After a couple of hours in the museum, the feeling of serenity
in the park outside was palpable -- and much needed. It's filled
with more than 6, 000 trees donated from cities around the
world, the blossoming of which immediately dispelled the local
notion that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 75 years. 

More than 60 small monuments and memorials fill the park. The
focal point is the centopath, a granite arch that covers a stone
chest containing the names of all of the A-bomb victims,
including those who died later of radiation-related diseases.
"Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat
the evil," reads the inscription. There were 237,062 names in it
when I visited in May; more are added each year on Aug. 6. 

Symbols of peace 

The arch frames the view of the iconic A-Bomb Dome across the
river, the most visible symbol of the bombing. Originally the
Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall, it stood almost
directly beneath the exploding bomb. Preserving the shattered
shell of the building was deeply controversial; half the city's
residents wanted it torn down so it wouldn't serve as a
reminder. 

Throughout the park and all over Hiroshima, you see colorful
origami cranes, the poignant symbol of the city and the peace
movement. You see them hanging in store windows, draped over
benches and displayed in bank lobbies. You see them on
hotel-room pillows, where they're left each night in lieu of a
mint. You see strings of them knitted together and heaped in
enormous piles in front of the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound in the
park, where the ashes of tens of thousands of unidentified
victims rest. A few steps away, at the Children's Peace
Monument, immense chains of cranes fill nine large glass cases.
Maintenance workers clear them out by the armful to make room
for the thousands of new ones, folded by schoolchildren the
world over, that that arrive here every day. (The city sends 10
tons of cranes to the recycling center every year.) 

The tradition honors a girl named Sadako Sasaki, who was only 2
when the bomb exploded. Nine years later she developed leukemia,
known in Hiroshima as "the A-bomb disease." A friend told her of
a Japanese legend that anyone who folded 1,000 paper cranes
would be granted a wish. 

In bed at the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital, the young girl began
folding them ceaselessly, and some versions of the story leave
her heartbreakingly short of her goal -- she finished 644 in
some versions, 944 in others -- when she died in October 1955.
But the truth is that Sasaki folded more than 1, 000 in less
than a month, making them smaller and smaller as she progressed.
Dozens of her cranes are on display at the Peace Memorial
Museum, some as tiny as fishing flies. She had to fold them with
needles and a magnifying glass. 

Other than the Peace Memorial Park and the A-Bomb Dome, you
don't see many obvious reminders of the bomb in Hiroshima. But
walking around aimlessly one afternoon, I stumbled upon a few.
The Bank of Japan building is one of the few downtown structures
to survive largely intact; remarkably, it was open for business
two days later. But it wasn't open the day I was there. 

A block away, at the Fukuro-machi Elementary School, which
served as a relief station, the blackened walls in the stairwell
are covered with 60-year- old chalk messages desperately seeking
the whereabouts of survivors. These messages had long ago been
plastered over and were discovered only during a renovation in
1999. At the bottom of the stairs, the wooden ceiling beams were
turned to charcoal by the bomb. 

It wasn't easy to find the monument that marks the site of
ground zero. On a small, busy, side street, the plaque hangs on
a wall of the Shima Surgical Hospital, between a parking garage
and a convenience store. This is the exact spot where, 60 years
ago, the bomb called Little Boy exploded 1,800 feet overhead. On
the day I was there, no one on the street seemed to take any
notice. 

Stories of recovery 

Hiroshima's most moving symbols of the bomb, of course, are the
50,000 hibakusha, who, along with their counterparts in
Nagasaki, are the only living witnesses to nuclear war. Through
the city tourism office, I arranged to spend most of a day
speaking with three of them: Michiko Yamaoka, Yoshinori Obayashi
and Sakae Okuda, who were 15, 16 and 8 years old, respectively,
at the time. (For their stories, see Insight, B1.) 

"After the war I hated America," Yamaoka told me. "I hated
Japan, too. America was the country that dropped the bomb, and
Japan was the country that started the war. When I flew to
America for some surgery, I didn't smile at all. But then the
Quaker family I was staying with accepted me totally. When they
first met me, they said, 'I'm sorry.' I decided right then that
I wouldn't hate people, any people. I hate war. 

"Now, all these years later, I don't like to remember what
happened that day. But I need to keep telling my story so people
don't take peace for granted." 

Yamaoka's eyes welled up. "Really, I don't hate America," she
repeated. "What happened here happened because of war. We have
to make sure it never happens again." 

On my last night in town, craving a little normalcy, I went to a
Hiroshima Carp baseball game. The ballpark is directly across
the street from the A-bomb Dome, and Hiroshima has always viewed
the team as a proud symbol of its recovery. Unique in Japanese
baseball, it's owned by the people of the city (other teams are
owned by, and named for, corporations), and it began play less
than five years after the bomb. 

Alas, on this night, the first ever in Japanese interleague
play, the Carp's pitcher was getting shelled like an edamame
bean by the Seibu Lions. By the bottom of the sixth, the home
team was down 9-1. 

But then some magic happened. The Carp got a little rally going,
a couple of runs scored, and then center fielder Koichi Ogata
cracked one deep into the night, a tape-measure shot high over
the center field wall. 

The crowd leapt to its feet, and instinctively I turned to
high-five the man next to me. They don't do a lot of this in
Japan, but seeing that his neighbor was an American, he gave it
a try. 

It might have been one of the most awkward high fives in sports
history, but not for want of good will. That it happened at all,
barely 150 yards from ground zero, 60 years after the
unspeakable, was uplifting indeed. 

IF YOU GO
 
Word to the wise 

One of the biggest surprises about traveling in Japan is that
it's not nearly as expensive as you think. Outside Tokyo and
Osaka, hotels and meals generally cost no more than you'd spend
in the United States for comparable quality. 

Getting there 

There are no direct flights to Hiroshima from the United States.
From San Francisco, ANA, Northwest, United and Japan Airlines
offer one-stop connecting flights via Tokyo. Japan's shinkansen
(bullet trains) are fast, efficient and generally cheaper than
flying. 

Where to stay 

Hotel Sunroute, near Peace Memorial Park. 011-81-82-249-3600,
www.sunroute.jp(mostly in Japanese). Primarily a business hotel,
but it has an unbeatable location. Type "Hotel Sunroute
Hiroshima" into a search engine to reach several online
discounters who book rooms. Doubles, 10,000 yen (about $90). 

For other choices, visit the Hiroshima Convention &Visitors
Bureau Web site (below). 

Where to eat 

Okonomi Village, 5-13 Shintenchi, Naka-ku, Hiroshima. Okonomi
(sometimes translated as "whatever you want") is sort of a
multilayered Japanese tostada eaten at lunch counters. Okonomi
Village is a collection of dozens of these places. Everyone has
a favorite, but the fare is pretty much the same from counter to
counter. Lunch, 500 yen ($4.50). 

What to do 

The Peace Memorial Museum in Peace Memorial Park.
011-81-82-241-4004, www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp. Open daily at
8:30 a.m., closing from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. depending on date.
Adults 50 yen ($.45) children, 30 yen ($.26). 

Miyajima. To get to the "shrine island," either take a ferry
directly from Hiroshima (1,460 yen/$13, 22 minutes), or take a
train or streetcar from Hiroshima-eki (central railway station)
to Miyajima-guchi, and then a shorter ferry from there (170
yen/$1.50, seven minutes). 

For more information 

Japan National Tourist Organization, (415) 292-5686,
www.jnto.go.jp. 

Hiroshima Convention &Visitors Bureau, 011-81-82-244-6156,
www.hiroshima-navi.or.jp. 

E-mail Executive Travel Editor John Flinn at
travel@sfchronicle.com. 				

Page D - 6                      

San Francisco Chronicle] 

*****************************************************************
 44 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Thank God for the atom
bomb -- or not? / Historical reasons for, against use
 
William M. Burke 
Sunday, July 31, 2005

Several decades after the fact the noted literary scholar and
combat infantryman Paul Fussell wrote an article, "Thank God for
the atom bomb," in which he described his feeling of relief
when, in August 1945, he realized that he would not have to land
on some hostile Japanese beach after he had just come away,
limping, from a German battlefield. 

The question came up again 10 years ago, when the Smithsonian
Institution announced an exhibition featuring the Enola Gay, the
plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, plus a catalog containing
arguments (pro and con) regarding the wisdom of dropping the
bomb. But then Charlton Heston, the American Legion and most of
the Washington establishment jumped into the fray, denouncing
all the critical comments, so the exhibition was canceled and
the unfortunate curator who organized the event was out of a
job. 

Obviously, it's time to review some ancient history, beginning
with how we all arrived where we were in 1945. Actually, the
road to Pearl Harbor, and to Hiroshima, began in Berlin in 1918,
when Imperial Germany, which had seemed unbeatable, suddenly
felt the weight of wartime shortages and collapsed into a state
of chaos and famine. Japan's political and military leaders, who
had built their state on the German model, suddenly felt very
vulnerable and vowed to follow a policy of self-sufficiency at
all costs. But in their view, they could obtain self-sufficiency
only through economic and/or political control over the
resource-rich Asian mainland. 

Throughout the 1930s, Japanese armies rampaged through north
China, organized the puppet state of Manchukuo, and then, in the
summer of 1939, ran into a Russian army under Gen. Georgi Zhukov
at the Mongolian border town of Nomonhan. Staggering away with
17,000 casualties from that disastrous encounter, the Japanese
turned their eyes to more tempting opportunities to the south --
the orphaned French and Dutch colonies set adrift by Hitler's
European conquests. 

But throughout this period, Japan's leaders failed to see that
the military buildup associated with their self-sufficiency
drive made Japan economically dependent on the one country that
was bound to contest that buildup, the United States. In the
late 1930s, the United States provided practically all of
Japan's imports of critical materials -- 75 percent of its scrap
iron, 60 percent of its machine tools, 93 percent of its copper,
and above all, 80 percent of its petroleum imports. 

Japan seemed oblivious to the strong support throughout America
for the beleaguered Chinese government and failed to see the
conflict between its ever- greater dependence on American
supplies and America's rapidly growing need o bolster its own
rearmament program begun in response to Hitler's European
triumphs. 

At a July 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR agreed to impose export
controls and to freeze all Japanese assets in this country. The
system supposedly had some flexibility, but it soon hardened
into a full-scale embargo on all trade with Japan. To the
targeted nation, that was a casus belli. 

British and American editorialists had cheered loudly in 1904,
when the plucky Japanese began the Russo-Japanese War with a
surprise attack on Port Arthur in Manchuria. But editorialists
had a different response in December 1941, when the Japanese
fleet staged a similar surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. 

One military disaster after another quickly followed. As Winston
Churchill said in his memoirs, "The violence, fury, skill and
might of Japan far exceeded anything we had been led to expect."
Yet only six months after Pearl Harbor, the tide turned
inexorably. The Americans, who had broken the Japanese code,
sank four irreplaceable aircraft carriers, and from then on
Japan was on the defensive throughout the Pacific. 

If America's military and political leaders had been less
myopic, they would have realized from the outset that Japan, as
a resource-poor island nation, could not survive without access
to overseas sources of oil and the other ingredients for making
war. The best tool for cutting those supply lines was a
first-rate submarine service, but that (alas) was unavailable
for the first two years of war. 

Almost one-third of all submarine commanders were replaced
during 1942 because of their excessive caution. Early torpedoes
were useless, sailing below the target and failing to explode.
(Since they cost $10,000 apiece, they were rarely used in
training.) But finally everything came together, and by late
1944 Japan's fate was sealed. 

Aggressive sub commanders, using wolf pack tactics and very
effective weaponry, reduced Japan's bulk imports by half and its
oil imports to a trickle. With 140 submarines on patrol,
America's "silent service," accounting for only 2 percent of
total naval personnel, deserved a major share of the victory in
the Great Pacific War. Along with the other major events of late
1944 -- the capture of the Marianas and the Battle of Leyte Gulf
(the largest naval battle in history) -- the submarine victory
decided the course of the war. 

If American policy-makers had been more rational, in late 1944
they would have tailored their policies to Japan's true
situation as a defeated and isolated island nation. After the
small fleet of American submarines had gained its stranglehold
over Japan's lifeline, policy-makers should have suspended all
other operations and waited patiently for Japan to negotiate a
withdrawal from its overseas conquests. But considerations of
this kind were ignored during the invasion-planning sessions in
the Washington of 1945, and in the Smithsonian controversy in
the Washington of 1995. 

More than half of the 101,000 American battle deaths of the
great Pacific War occurred between the summer of 1944 and the
summer of 1945 -- a figure roughly equal to all American deaths
during the decadelong engagement with Vietnam. Japan's death
toll was 25 times greater, and the great majority of those 2.5
million deaths occurred in the final desperate months. 

The crucial actors during that period were Gen. Curtis LeMay's
bomber crews. A few years earlier, Americans had been outraged
when German pilots killed about 1,000 civilians in the Basque
town of Guernica -- the subject of Picasso's famous painting.
But then, in 1945, they cheered to the rafters when American
pilots turned hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians into
flaming torches with their firebombs in Tokyo and Osaka and
their atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

And then, with the emperor's capitulation, Adm. William Halsey
signaled the fleet, "The forces of righteousness and decency
have triumphed." But as Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida
noted in his first cabinet meeting, it is possible to lose a war
and yet win a peace. 

Among other achievements, the American occupiers imposed a major
land- reform program, which brought prosperity to the Japanese
peasantry and thereby made it possible for conservative
politicians to gain a one-party stranglehold over the national
government. The American occupiers also wrote, in a week's time,
a new Japanese constitution, which is now one of the world's
oldest (and most popular). It contains a prohibition against
most military activities. 

The American occupiers set Japan firmly on the road to postwar
prosperity. In 1949, they sent a Detroit banker to administer a
dose of root-canal economics, and the following year, with the
onset of the Korean War, they flooded Japan with military
contracts (Japan's "Marshall Plan"). The rest is (economic)
history. With its export orientation, Japan has delighted
generations of American consumers but brought despair to
generations of American manufacturers -- and in the process has
accumulated hundreds of billions of American IOUs. 

But all this could have been accomplished without the
firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Victory, and Japan's post-war success,
didn't require our compatriots 60 years ago to transform tens of
thousands of families on Tokyo's streets into blazing torches. 

William M. Burke, a retired Federal Reserve economist, served in
the Navy during the Normandy campaign and worked as a translator
in Tokyo during the occupation period. Contact us at . 				

Page B - 3                      

The San Francisco Chronicle] 
*****************************************************************
 45 SF Chronicle: Killing a golden age of nuclear research / Why the U.S. turned
against the man most responsible for building the bomb
 
Reviewed by Joshua Spivak 
Sunday, July 31, 2005

  [J. Robert Oppenheimer in April 1963. Photo from &quot;The
Ruin...] 

The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer 

And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race 

By Priscilla J. McMillan 

VIKING; 372 Pages; $25.95 

Collectively, they created the deadliest weapon known to
humanity, but for physicists and mathematicians, the World War
II Los Alamos nuclear program was Camelot. In the New Mexico
desert, some of the greatest minds in the history of science
gathered to solve the nuclear puzzle with minimal political and
social interference. Although the end of the war led to the
exodus of many of the great scientists, it was Cold War
politics, questions over technological priorities, debates over
the morals of nuclear weaponry and simple personality clashes
that brought about the end of a golden age. Now, 60 years after
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a plethora of authors
are revisiting this era, with a special focus on the leader of
the atomic project, J. Robert Oppenheimer. 

After shepherding this scientific community to its great
heights, Oppenheimer came under attack for his left-wing
political leanings, his 1930s flirtation with communism, his
occasionally lax security procedures and especially his
opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. With a
powerful array of enemies lined up against him, a great absurd
and tragic decision was reached in June 1954: The man most
responsible for the building of the bomb was stripped of his
security clearance. 

In "The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the
Modern Arms Race," Priscilla J. McMillan provides a readable and
concise discussion of the campaign against Oppenheimer, as well
as of the kangaroo-court hearing that led to his downfall. But
the author overreaches with her claim that the Oppenheimer
scandal was a major propellant in the growth of the nuclear arms
race. 

McMillan opens with the case against Oppenheimer. She makes a
cogent argument that although Oppenheimer had a radical prewar
record -- not unusual among intellectuals -- and had several
security lapses during the war, those problems were not serious
enough to justify his later humiliation. She blames a loose
amalgamation of motives and people for this shameful episode of
American history. Among the most noteworthy were Edward Teller's
personal grudges and grasping after glory; Atomic Energy
Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss' seemingly visceral dislike of
Oppenheimer; the McCarthyism hysteria; and rivalries between the
Air Force and the rest of the government. 

Chief among McMillan's villains is Teller, now known as the
father of the H-bomb and the Star Wars missile defense system
and the most prominent scientist to take the stand against
Oppenheimer. Teller is justly blamed for his backstabbing, his
grabbing the credit for a critical idea that was necessary for
the H-bomb and his willingness to sabotage a project if he was
not directly in charge of it. McMillan spends a large section of
the book detailing the flaws in Teller's proposed hyper (later
hydrogen) bomb and why the scientific community thought it was
both immoral and unrealistic to build. Supporters of the H-bomb
blamed Oppenheimer, a charismatic leader, for the scientific
community's opposition to the more powerful weapon. This event
was the trigger for the campaign against Oppenheimer. 

But McMillan's respectful detailing of the scientific
community's arguments for the impracticality of building the
hydrogen bomb comes across as a bit strange when she leaves out
the postscript: Teller was in fact correct about the feasibility
of the hydrogen bomb, even if he was wrong on many of the
specifics. Also, she glosses over any realistic discussion of
whether the Soviet Union would hold off building such a weapon. 

The book also attempts to make an obvious tie to the
contemporaneous McCarthy hearings. McMillan faults Eisenhower
for trying to use the Oppenheimer affair as a shield against
McCarthy's inquisitions but presents little evidence that
Eisenhower or his senior advisers were thinking so
strategically. Undoubtedly, the threat of McCarthy played a role
in the president's behavior toward Oppenheimer, but from the
case laid out by McMillan, it appears that Eisenhower, like many
presidents before and since, was mainly guilty of allowing one
of his appointees, Strauss, too much free rein. 

Among the many others coming in for criticism are the Bay Area's
Ernest Lawrence and the famed Lawrence Livermore Labs. Lawrence
is blamed for enabling Teller in his anti-Oppenheimer behavior,
and, according to McMillan, the Livermore lab diluted the talent
pool of physicists and helped create "the vast arsenal of
superfluous nuclear weaponry that curses us today." 

The book really hits its stride once the trial of Oppenheimer --
actually an administrative hearing of the Atomic Energy
Commission -- gets under way. The jury was stacked, and the
hearing is presented as a procedural fiasco, one that managed to
violate Oppenheimer's rights, not to mention all sense of
fairness. McMillan describes how, during the hearing, the FBI
put wiretaps on Oppenheimer's lawyers as they discussed the case
and gave the results to the prosecution. She details how the
commission trashed the national security policy that the whole
process was allegedly meant to preserve by publicizing many
national secrets. 

But even with the cards stacked against Oppenheimer, one of the
commissioners wrote a vigorous dissent to the majority opinion.
Indeed, McMillan's best work is her interviews with that
dissenting commissioner, physicist Henry Smyth, who had
proclaimed that he "was doing this for a fellow (Oppenheimer)
I've never liked very much," and her presentation of the
pressures that Strauss put on the other members to join him in
the assault on Oppenheimer. 

The book has aspirations beyond providing a new look at the
Oppenheimer trial, though. And here, in its attempt to link the
birth of the modern arms race with the downfall of Oppenheimer
and the building of the hydrogen bomb, McMillan falters. She
closes the first part of the book with the supposition that
there would be far fewer nuclear weapons, and the world would
not have been on the brink of annihilation, if only the United
States had attempted to negotiate with the Soviet Union rather
than publicly announce its intention to move nuclear technology
up a notch with the introduction of the H-bomb. 

However, the argument is not backed up with the facts that would
lead a reader to believe that such an approach would have
worked. In fact, McMillan says specifically: "As long as Stalin
was still alive, negotiations would not have been successful."
And when Harry Truman made the decision to go forward with the
H-bomb in 1950, there was little reason for him to predict that
Stalin would be dead three years later. But even with his death,
events such as the launching of Sputnik and the crushing of the
Hungarian government provided little reason to believe that the
Soviet Union would have relented on its austere Cold War policy.
McMillan, who is an associate at the Davis Center for Russian
Studies at Harvard, may very well be able to show that the
Soviets would have been amenable to more reasonable behavior,
but she does not provide that evidence here. 

"The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer" does a good job of
highlighting a disturbing episode of American history, and
showing how a critical figure and brilliant man was railroaded
by an out-of-control government agency. But because of a lack of
solid evidence, the work goes too far in trying to make a
broader point about America's Cold War policies. 

Joshua Spivak is an attorney and media consultant in Berkeley
and New York. 
				
Page F - 2 			

The San Francisco Chronicle] 
*****************************************************************
 46 Arizona Republic: The day we vaporized a city
 
[Arizona Republic Online Print Edition]     July 31, 2005   

Today we shall ponder Hiroshima.

 This can be a dangerous thing, rhetorically speaking. Say
"Hiroshima" and the battle instantly all but predictably begins.

 An unspeakable war crime, some assert. A pointless atrocity, a
mass murder, history's ultimate act of racism. 

Remember Pearl Harbor, comes the anguished reply. If Japan
didn't want Hiroshima to happen, Japan shouldn't have let Pearl
Harbor happen.

 Besides, didn't Hiroshima end the war? Terrible, yes. But maybe
Hiroshima died so others could live, countless others who'd have
died had the United States been forced to invade Japan's home
islands.

 These are vivid arguments pitched, sometimes in anger, across a
great, unbridgeable divide defined by generation, by ideology,
by national perspective. Arguments that kindle and crackle each
time we approach the anniversary of the first time an earthly
city ever lay vaporized by an atomic bomb.

 You should know at the outset, however, that this small
contemplation will be about none of that. It would serve no
purpose really.

 The men who made and dropped the bomb are all but vanished now.

 Even were they not, the deed cannot be undone.

 And who are we, anyway, to judge decisions made in the
unimaginable crucible of history's most ghastly war? We weren't
there. If we had been, who's to say we'd have done differently?

 So this is in regard to Hiroshima itself. Just Hiroshima. The
city. The people. To serve, because six decades now have passed,
as a reminder of what we humans have wrought from our incessant
habit of hating and fighting and killing one another. And a
warning of what yet could be.

 That is not to forget poor Nagasaki, whose suffering was no
less hideous. 

But it's Hiroshima that stands as precedent, humanity's
threshold into a nightmare world of the unthinkable.

 A confluence of singular wartime factors made it so, singling
out Hiroshima as the laboratory for the grimmest of all
experiments.

 With a few turns of the story here and there, however, it might
have been some other city, in some other land. It could have
been London, one supposes, had Hitler built a bomb of his own.
Or Berlin, had D-Day failed.

 What seems unassailable is that it was almost bound to have
been some city, somewhere.

 Once mankind began toying with this thing called radiation,
once the airplane was invented and married to a merciless new
kind of warfare that slew more civilians than soldiers, once the
world had been numbed beyond all sense by the horrors of two
global conflicts, once all that had come to pass, how could
Hiroshima possibly not have?

 But why ponder Hiroshima alone when firestorms of unfathomable
fury, touched off deliberately to terrify and immolate civilian
populations, already had ravaged London and Dresden and Tokyo?
Why ponder Hiroshima alone when so much of the Northern
Hemisphere lay in tears and ashes that stricken summer? When 50
million already had died? When six endless years of warfare
seemed only the precursor to yet more of it?

 Besides, did Hiroshima's dead suffer any more than the nameless
GIs who burned with their tanks in the Ardennes? Or the poor
Russians who starved in Leningrad? Or the skeletal victims of
the Bataan Death March? Or those who went up the chimneys at
Auschwitz?

 No, they did not. That must be admitted. Death is death, and
pain is pain.

 And for the fortunate ones in Hiroshima, if such be called
fortune, there was an all but oblivious passage to
non-existence, a vaporization so swift the nerves had no time to
scream what was happening.

 What made Hiroshima different, and what has clouded every day
since, is this:

 Before Hiroshima, it required the active efforts of many men
and many machines to deliver death en masse. It took hundreds,
thousands, of individual machine guns and individual gunners to
construct the vast piles of bodies that made World War I so
memorably awful. It took armadas of hundreds of airplanes to
drop enough incendiaries to level, say, a Tokyo. It took the
deliberate, organized efforts of an industrial society, a
massive infrastructure, thousands of participants and several
years for the Third Reich to perpetuate the Holocaust.

 All it took for Hiroshima, after all the preliminaries were
done, was one plane. And one bomb.

 The plane, a modified B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay, took off
early on Aug. 6, 1945, from a Pacific island called Tinian, one
of many the Americans had wrested from Japan during three years
of sanguinary island-hopping warfare.

 One plane.

 Who in Hiroshima that Monday morning would worry about one
plane, even an American one, when previous raids on Japanese
cities had required so many planes as to darken the sky?

 The bomb, 10½ feet long and 9,700 pounds, drifted downward by
parachute after dropping from the belly of the plane. It dropped
five miles toward the heart of the city as Enola Gay raced away
as fast as her huge engines could take her.

 One bomb.

 At 8:16:02 a.m. a cannon in one end of the bomb fired. It
hurled a "bullet" made of uranium-235 into a target also made of
U-235. Joining, the two lumps of U-235 achieved critical mass.
Instantly, trillions of atoms were pulverized and the cataclysm
was just as instantly expressed in a flash of blinding light and
sunlike heat, followed by a shockwave more powerful than a
hurricane.

 Just one bomb.

 It exploded in midair about a third of a mile above the
courtyard of a hospital. Nobody anywhere near the blast
survived. Nobody. The total death rate in those areas affected
by the initial flash of heat and by the blast and by the
firestorm that ensued was 54 percent, a far more efficient
reaping of human lives than had ever been achieved by
"conventional means," ghastly as many of those were.

 The histories break the overall picture down into one of myriad
individual ones, any of which could have leaped from a Stephen
King novel. A living man, holding his own eyeball in the palm of
his hand. A man with his feet blown off, walking on the bloody
stumps. A baby and its mother, dead of burns, the baby still at
its mother's breast. Legions of people, their burned flesh
hanging off in strips, heading to the river to die. Their
stories are in the books, in the archives, on the Internet. They
render Stephen King superfluous.

 More than that, author Richard Rhodes says in his monumental
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, it was civilization itself that
vanished that morning.

 "Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of
children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater
groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys clubs, girls clubs,
love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones,
temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates,
books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets,
telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses -
120 warhorses - musical instruments, medicines and medical
equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks,
family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees,
clocks and watches, public transportation, parents, works of
art."

 Just one bomb. In one instant of time.

 Being the perverse creatures we are, we - humanity in general,
that is - busied ourselves in the years that followed making
even more of these things. Thousands, tens of thousands more of
them, possessing ever greater sophistication and potential
deadliness.

 One thermonuclear device, tested in the atmosphere before such
tests were outlawed, produced a fireball - just the fireball,
mind you - 3 miles wide. What if one of those went off some
afternoon in the air over Phoenix? What if hundreds of them did,
above cities all over the world?

 Treaties notwithstanding, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
reported in 2002 that the world's nuclear powers still had
30,000 warheads stockpiled. About 17,500 were considered
operational.

 The Bulletin's famed "doomsday clock," which has measured the
scientists' assessment of the threat level since 1947, now
stands at seven minutes to midnight. A significant rollback
anytime soon seems unlikely, given the jittery state of things.

 What will come of it all? Maybe nothing.

 Maybe Hiroshima and its sister in death, Nagasaki, were just
aberrations. Maybe it will never happen again. Maybe these past
60 years of human survival mean we can just plunge indefinitely,
obliviously and blithely onward.

 Maybe.

 But to count on plain dumb luck to give us 60 more such years
hardly seems like policy. We have a right to expect more than
that from the smart characters who presume to lead us.

 Meanwhile, Hiroshima cannot be allowed to fade.

 For Hiroshima was more than a far-away city in a strange and
foreign land. Far more than just another casualty in a vast and
pitiless war. Far more than a historical accident, now of the
long ago and thence of no consequence.

 Hiroshima is humanity.

 Hiroshima is us.

Staff writer Gary Nelson can be reached at
gary.nelson@arizonarepublic.comor (602) 444-7969.

Copyright © 2005, azcentral.com. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 47 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / 50,000 survivors
Some Hiroshima residents still carry the scars of the living
hell that rained down on the city

John Flinn, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 31, 2005                      

  [Hiroshima. Chronicle graphic Todd Trumbull and Joe Shoulak]
[Victims of the blast wait for first aid in the southern p...]
[Michiko Yamaoka was 15 years old and walking to her job a...]
[The devastation in Hiroshima after an atomic bomb was dro...] 
 				   				 				 
Hiroshima -- At 8:15 a.m. , Michiko Yamaoka, 15, had just left
her home and was walking to her job at the Hiroshima Central
Telephone office, where she worked as a switchboard operator. 

There had been an air-raid warning earlier Sunday, Aug. 6, 1945,
but at 7: 31 a.m. the all-clear siren had sounded. Yamaoka
hurried through a corridor where homes and shops were being
demolished to create a fire break. American B- 29s had been
raining firebombs mercilessly on Japan's other cities, and no
one knew why Hiroshima had so far been spared. But everyone
believed an attack was coming. 

A mile away, on a little hill to the west, 16-year-old Yoshinori
Obayashi was bent over a lathe in a makeshift workshop,
fashioning parts for torpedoes. A senior in high school,
Obayashi and his classmates had been mobilized to work in
munitions factories. He'd just been transferred from the
Tenma-cho factory in the city center to the temporary shop in
Koi on the town's western outskirts -- a move that would save
his life. 

At the same moment, 8-year-old Sakae Okuda was flinging open the
front door of his home. Like other Hiroshima schoolchildren,
he'd been evacuated to the countryside, and he'd spent the last
few months living in a Buddhist temple at Hatsukaichi, 25 miles
away. His grandmother had been sent along to take care of him,
but she'd fallen ill. So early on the morning of Aug. 6, they
rode a train back to town and then a tram to their neighborhood.
Okuda's grandmother went immediately to the Furusawa Clinic next
door to their home, and the boy pushed open his front door and
called to his older brother. 

Today in Hiroshima, there live 50,000 people who were there the
day the atomic bomb exploded. Their generation is dying off, and
many refuse to speak about the bomb. Others are eager to tell
their stories as living witnesses of nuclear war. Three of them
recently spoke with a Chronicle writer. 

Hiroshima was one of four possible targets -- the others were
Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki -- but the skies over Hiroshima
were clear that morning. At 2:45 a.m., a B-29 bomber, the Enola
Gay (named for the pilot's mother), had taken off from Tinian
Island in the Mariana Islands with the chubby, 12- foot-long
bomb named Little Boy on board. 

At 15 seconds past 8:15 a.m. over Hiroshima, the Enola Gay's
bomb-bay doors swung open and out fell Little Boy, aimed at the
unique T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of the city.
Forty-three seconds later, the pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets,
recalled that he felt a tingling in his teeth -- what he
believed were his fillings reacting to the bomb's radioactive
forces. 

Hurrying to her job at the telephone company, Michiko Yamaoka
was half a mile from ground zero. "I heard an airplane overhead
and I looked up and put my hand up to shield my eyes from the
sun," she said. "Then I saw a tremendous flash of light -- a
bluish, yellowish flash. We called it pika-don -- flash and
sound. I don't remember hearing anything. But ever since then
I've been deaf in my left ear, so there must have been a sound."
Just as none of the five survivors interviewed by John Hersey
for his book "Hiroshima" remembered hearing the explosion, none
of those we spoke to could recall the sound, either. 

"Almost immediately my face started to bloat," Yamaoka said. "I
thought I'd been hit directly by a bomb and I was going to die.
I said to myself, 'Goodbye, mother!' " 

In Obayashi's makeshift factory, a mile and a half from ground
zero, someone shouted and Obayashi turned to look out the
window. 

"A pale color shone. It was double the intensity of ordinary
morning light," he said. "All of a sudden there was a tremendous
blast and I fell to the ground. I was knocked down as the
building fell in on top of me." 

Young Sakae Okuda's home was six-tenths of a mile from ground
zero. He had just walked in through his front door and called
out, "I'm home!" His brother, who was two years older, came out
from the back room and said, "Welcome home!" 

"At that exact moment I saw the flash," he said. "It was
reddish-blue. I was knocked unconscious. The house collapsed on
me, and later, when I came to, I had to struggle to get out of
the debris. 

"The sky was dark, and things were falling from it -- pieces of
roofs and debris. It was so quiet." 

Fifteen-year-old Yamaoka also lost consciousness for some time
-- maybe 15 or 20 minutes, she thinks. 

"Finally I heard someone crying, 'Help me!' and I knew I wasn't
dead," she said. "I was trapped under something. My legs were
sticking out of the debris. I cried, 'Help me! Help me! Mother,
teacher, help me!' 

"Then I heard my mother calling my name, and I yelled, 'Mother,
I'm here, I'm here!' She couldn't get me out by herself. I heard
someone yell, 'Lady, the fire's coming. Run for your life.' I
could hear the flames crackling. 

"But my mother wouldn't leave me. A soldier helped her move some
things and I was able to crawl out. 

"All around me was truly a living hell. The people didn't look
like human beings. They were naked, their hair was singed and
their skin was peeling off. I saw a person on the ground without
a head. People's intestines were spilling out of their bodies.
People were dying right in front of me. They were screaming,
'Give me water!' People were jumping into the river." 

The factory where Obayashi was working was flattened, but it was
a temporary building, a barracks, and the roof and walls weren't
heavy. As they fell, they were stopped by the heavy machinery.
Obayashi, unhurt, was able to crawl outside. 

"I looked back at the city and the mushroom cloud was rising up
so big, so high into the air. I was so close I couldn't see the
whole thing. The whole city was in flames. A little while later
people started arriving from the city center. Everyone was
horribly burned. We knew then that something terribly, terribly
bad had happened." 

As 8-year-old Okuda pulled himself out of the debris of his
fallen house and stumbled toward the streetcar tracks, he heard
his brother's voice. "He was still trapped under the house,"
Okuda said. "What could I do? I was just a little child. I
looked around for someone who could help. All around people were
lying on the ground. Their hair was burned and their faces were
black. Pieces of glass and wood were sticking out of their
blistered faces. Everyone was naked and burned. I couldn't ask
them to help my brother. 

"I could still hear my brother yelling, 'Please! Help me!' A
woman who was maybe 20 or 25 came by and took my hand and told
me I had to escape. I cried and asked her to help my brother.
She told me a big American bomb had just exploded. She didn't
know what kind it was. She was bleeding on her shoulder, and a
bone was sticking out. I tried to go back to my brother but she
didn't let me go. 

"Dazed people were walking with their arms extended out in front
of them, with the skin peeling right off their arms and the tips
of their fingers like zombies in the movies. Skin was hanging
off their faces. They were walking and crawling without saying
anything. 

"I tried to pull away, but the woman insisted I come with her.
'Maybe there will be another bomb,' she said. We passed a
streetcar engulfed in flames. People were crouching around it.
They didn't have the energy to move. I was scared. I saw so many
people terribly burned. The woman kept pulling me to go with
her, away from my brother." 

Yamaoka and her mother fled toward Hijiyama Hill, where there
was a military encampment. 

"I passed a friend and she didn't recognize my bloated face. It
was then that I started to feel the pain from my burns. When I
got to the military base I lay down and someone put tempura oil
on my burns. There were so many people on the ground who were
dead and dying that you had to call out, 'Help me!' to let them
know you were still alive. If you stopped screaming they assumed
you were dead. There were people all around me on the brink of
death, and already they were covered with maggots. 

"I told my mother I wanted to die at home on my tatami mat, not
here on the ground. She told me our house was gone. There was
nothing to go back to. People told me that if I drank the water
I'd die, so I drank lots and lots of it. I wanted to die." 

Half an hour after the explosion, a strange rain began falling
on the city. Soot and debris from the explosion had risen high
into the atmosphere with the mushroom cloud, mixed with
radioactive particles and then fallen back onto the city as a
thick, oily, sticky black rain. It was highly radioactive. 

Outside the remains of his factory, Obayashi and a co-worker
took shelter under a piece of tin roof. "It was a torrential
rain, falling in huge, black drops, and we didn't want to get
wet," he said. "We didn't know about black rain, didn't know it
was dangerous. Getting under that piece of tin probably saved
our lives." 

He tried to spend the night in a dormitory with other survivors,
but the stink of burned, rotting flesh was overpowering. "I
couldn't stand it so I went outside and watched the flames from
Hiroshima painting the sky. I stayed up all night looking at
it." 

The next day, he and some others went back to the city center to
distribute some rice balls they'd made. But they had to abandon
their cart because the streets were blocked with corpses. They
reached the Tenma-cho factory, where Obayashi had originally
been assigned to work, and found half- dead people, their skin
gone and flesh hanging off their bones, crouching under pieces
of tin and wood to escape the heat of the sun. 

"Someone yelled 'air raid!' and those of us who could hurried
into an air- raid shelter. I'll never forget it: Inside was a
pile of dead bodies. Their hair was standing on end, and their
skin was black and red. Their arms were stiff, the skin peeled
off, and their hands were reaching for the sky. We went to the
next shelter, and the next, and they were all filled with the
same thing." 

Okuda never was able to go back for his brother. Refusing to let
go of his hand, the woman walked him nearly 3 miles to the
Kusatsu elementary school southwest of the city center, which
was serving as an evacuation center. She turned the boy over to
the teachers and vanished. 

"Later, I looked for the woman, but I never saw her again, and I
never knew her name," he said. "If I could meet her today I'd
like to thank her for saving me. But I still cry when I think
about my brother." 

With most of his family dead or dying in Hiroshima's city
center, the 8- year-old stood all alone in the school's
playground that night and watched his city burn. 

Today Okuda, 68, looks the picture of health, with a full head
of black hair and a solid physique. 

But, like so many other Hiroshima survivors, the effects of the
radiation are still with him. Six days after the bombing, he
came down with a high fever and fell into unconsciousness for
four days. His hair fell out, he bled from his nose and gums,
and purple spots broke out all over his body. Many others died
from similar symptoms, but Okuda survived. He doesn't know why. 

Okuda went on to a prosperous career in sales for a construction
company, but 19 years ago he came down with liver disease and
jaundice. He had to have his gall bladder removed. A legacy of
the radiation? He doesn't know. 

Three days after the bombing, Obayashi, now 76, returned to his
family home, 20 miles outside Hiroshima. That night his father
died of tuberculosis, unrelated to the A-bomb. 

To care for his family, Obayashi went to work after the war for
a company that made rationing coupons for sake. 

His son lives in Los Angeles and works for Toshiba. 

Yamaoka, 75, is still scarred. Her fingernails curve off her
fingers at odd angles, and the skin on her hands is puffy and
red. She can't twist the plastic cap off a bottle of water, and
when someone snaps a picture of her, the flash makes her wince. 

"I can't help it," she said. "It always reminds me of that day."
She's undergone 27 skin grafts and other operations, in Japan
and the United States. Yamaoka developed breast cancer years
ago, and now has thyroid cancer. She has chosen to let it run
its course. "I just can't go through another operation," she
said. 

All three now spend their days working for nuclear disarmament,
lobbying world leaders, giving talks at the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum and telling their stories as living witnesses of
nuclear war. 

E-mail John Flinn at jflinn@sfchronicle.com. 				
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The San Francisco Chronicle] 
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 48 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / How the U.S. got to
Dr. Strangelove / Nuclear weapons changed the world

[San Francisco Chronicle] 
				 
William S. Kowinski 
Sunday, July 31, 2005

  [Robert Oppenheimer. Associated Press File Photo, 1963]
[Edward Teller. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress] [The
cruiser Indianapolis took the bomb destined for Hiros...] 

On July 16, 1945, the cruiser Indianapolis sailed from Hunters
Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, carrying one 15-foot
crate. Inside were the components for the first atomic bomb
destined to be dropped on a city. It was being shipped to Tinian
Island in the western Pacific, and its final destination a few
weeks later would be Hiroshima. It left San Francisco just four
hours after the first successful atomic bomb test in history, in
the New Mexico desert. 

Sixty years is a long time to keep even such an immense memory
alive, but several books published recently bring these events
into sharper focus than ever before. 

Several are biographies of key figures like Robert Oppenheimer
and Edward Teller, but one is billed as a biography of the bomb
itself. "The Bomb: A Life" by Gerard DeGroot (Harvard University
Press), professor of modern history at the University of St.
Andrews in Scotland, benefits from newly available records,
especially concerning the Soviet nuclear program. But mostly it
is a skillfully condensed narrative of the nuclear era,
fascinating in the selection of details and riveting in its
revelations of how possessing nuclear weapons changed those
involved, and changed America. 

On the day of that first test in July 1945, no one knew what
would happen. About half the scientists didn't think the device
would explode at all. Enrico Fermi was taking bets that it would
burn off the Earth's atmosphere. 

It did explode, with such brightness that a woman blind from
birth traveling in a car some distance away saw it. "A colony on
Mars, had such a thing existed, could have seen the flash,"
DeGroot writes. "All living things within a mile were killed,
including all insects." 

America was now in sole possession of the most powerful weapon
in history. The first effect of the bomb was in Potsdam,
Germany, where President Harry Truman was conferring with
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin,
premier of the Soviet Union, then an ally in the war against
Japan. After Truman received the news of the successful test, he
was "a changed man" and "generally bossed the whole meeting,"
according to Churchill. 

That the second bomb left San Francisco on the day the first was
tested suggests the momentum to use it. Whether dropping the
bomb was necessary to secure Japan's surrender before an
invasion became necessary is still being debated. DeGroot
believes that Japan was looking for a way to surrender in June
and July. But there were other considerations, mostly to do with
demonstrating American power, especially to the Soviet Union. 

Using the bomb quickly became a test of patriotism. "For most
Manhattan Project scientists the bomb was a deterrent, not a
weapon," DeGroot writes. Physicist Leo Szilard had done as much
as anyone to try to persuade FDR to develop the bomb because
Germany was doing so. But on the day after that first test, he
sent government officials a petition signed by 69 project
scientists arguing that to use the bomb would ignite a dangerous
arms race and damage America's postwar moral position,
especially its ability to bring "the unloosed forces of
destruction under control." 

The petition was ignored, and Gen. Leslie Groves, the senior
military official in charge of the project, began making a case
that Szilard was a security risk. It's a pattern that would be
repeated often. 

DeGroot places the decision to drop the bomb on Japan in the
context of the brutalization that occurred during the long years
of World War II, with an unprecedented scope of savagery on both
sides. The bombing of civilians and cities, morally unthinkable
in the West before the war, became a major feature of it by its
final years, long past the time many military targets were left.
Gen. Groves, he writes, was worried that Japan might surrender
before the bomb could be dropped. 

Hiroshima was selected as the primary target because it had no
allied POW camps. However, there were nearly 5,000 American
children in the city -- "mainly children sent to Japan after
their parents, U.S. citizens of Japanese origin, had been
interred." It seems likely some of those children were from San
Francisco. 

The nuclear era began with the secrecy of the Manhattan Project,
which is perhaps partly why it was accompanied throughout its
history by lies and denial. It began with Hiroshima. As many as
75,000 people died in the first blast and fire. But in five
years the death toll would reach 200,000 because of what the
U.S. government denied existed: lethal radiation. 

Even after the hydrogen bomb was developed in the 1950s (so
powerful that the first test vaporized an island and created a
mile wide crater 175 feet deep), the untruths continued. In
1954, Dr. David Bradley reported on 406 Pacific islanders
exposed to H-bomb fallout: nine children were born retarded, 10
more with other abnormalities, and three were stillborn,
including one reported to be "not recognizable as human." Such
information was denied or routinely suppressed through all the
years of testing, even on U.S. soil. Groves even told Congress
that death from radiation was "very pleasant." 

Even after the war, criticizing the bomb in any way became a
threat to national security, an act of disloyalty that only
helped the communist enemy. And so people were silent and
compliant, and streamed into air-conditioned theatres to see
movies about monsters created by atomic radiation. 

This extreme weapon prompted extreme and contrary emotions,
often within the same people. Some of the same Los Alamos
scientists who cheered madly at the first news of Hiroshima were
later shell-shocked with regret. Gen. Omar Bradley called his
contemporaries "nuclear giants and ethical infants." Yet he
pushed for developing the hydrogen bomb. 

This peculiar combination of denial plus the immense power of
thousands of bombs contributed to an era of deadly absurdities:
the age of Dr. Strangelove. Yet reality was not so different,
right down to the preposterously appropriate names: the head of
the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Tommy Power, gave his philosophy
of nuclear war in 1960: "At the end of the war, if there are two
Americans and one Russian, we win!" 

The warp in American political life created by the bomb might be
summarized in two statements. "In order to make the country bear
the burden," said President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of
state, John Foster Dulles, referring to the Cold War arms race,
"we have to create an emotional atmosphere akin to a wartime
psychology. We must create the idea of a threat from without." 

The second is more famous, but perhaps its connection to the
bomb and its effect on America has been forgotten: Eisenhower's
farewell address. "We have been compelled to create a permanent
arms industry of vast proportions," he said. "We must not fail
to comprehend its vast implications. ... We must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for
the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." 

William S. Kowinski is a writer in Arcata. Contact us at
insight@sfchronicle.com. 				
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 49 SF Chronicle: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Nazi nuke program
spurred U.S. A-bomb development
 
[San Francisco Chronicle] 
				 
Cynthia Bass 
Sunday, July 31, 2005

Intelligence mistakes are as old as government itself. Sixty
years ago this week, an example of botched intelligence about
weapons of mass destruction far more egregious than in Iraq led
to dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 

This tragic tale began in April 1933, when Nazi Minister of the
Interior Wilhelm Frick -- later hanged at Nuremberg as a war
criminal -- announced a batch of new laws designed to remove
non-Aryans from the civil service. This included all professors
at Germany's great universities. 

The result was a huge exodus of talent, as hundreds of
non-Aryans -- that is, Jews -- left for positions abroad, mostly
in the United States. The academic discipline most affected by
this diaspora was physics, where nearly one-fourth of all
instructors were Jewish or of Jewish heritage. These fleeing
German-Jewish physicists took with them a sizable chunk of the
major brains of the post-Newtonian revolution. They also took
with them a tremendous respect for German science and an equally
tremendous fear of the Nazis, who had so readily spit on them
and all their accomplishments. 

Even more importantly, they carried with them an unyielding
distrust of their Aryan physicist brethren who had failed to
utter a single protest over their dismissals. Of course, the
study of physics in Nazi Germany did not stop after the April
decrees. Far from it. For even if you kick out one-fourth of
your physicists, you still have plenty left -- and this meant a
lot of talent. 

Some of this talent -- Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and
Johannes Stark, for example -- were ardent and outright Nazis.
The majority, though, were politically neutral. 

The physicist epitomizing this neutrality was Nobel laureate
Werner Heisenberg, most famous for his insight into quantum
mechanics called the uncertainty principle (that it is
impossible to predict with absolute certainty where an atom will
be). An ardent nationalist, though never a Nazi (the Nazis
disliked him enough to sic the SS on him), Heisenberg not only
stayed in Germany when he could have easily left, he eventually
headed the Reich's atom bomb research. 

This neutrality displayed by their one-time compatriots greatly
disturbed the émigré physicists as they watched the Nazi
contagion spreading over their homeland. This concern turned
into near panic in early 1939, when articles in the German
scientific journal Naturwissenschaften and its English
counterpart Nature rocked physics. 

These articles concerned an experiment performed in Berlin on
Dec. 19, 1938, six weeks after Kristallnacht, by radiochemist
Otto Hahn. He had been bombarding uranium with slow neutrons,
expecting to produce radium. Instead he produced barium, a
totally different element. 

Confused, he sent his results to his former partner, Jewish
physicist Lise Meitner, now in exile in Sweden. 

Meitner was not confused. Realizing Hahn had split a uranium
atom, Meitner began to calculate the energy released by this
fission, becoming known as the Jewish Mother of the Atomic Bomb,
an honorific she despised. 

Meitner determined that the process released 200 million
electron volts, an enormous amount of energy from a single atom.
Both Hahn and Meitner published the following month. 

By the end of January, the details of both articles were known
throughout physics and had appeared in the New York Times.
Fission had been discovered. It now was theoretically possible
to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction -- and an
atomic bomb. 

The émigré physicists shuddered. Six years earlier, when the
Reich was still young and in the process of testing its own
power, their Aryan brethren had watched the expulsions in
silence. Surely they would not have the guts to stand up and say
no if asked by Hitler to build an atomic bomb. 

Thus did the fateful combination of respect for German physics
and distrust of German physicists drive Albert Einstein and his
compatriots, just as war erupted, to write a letter of warning
to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That led to the creation of
the Manhattan Project. the top-secret Allied effort to build the
atomic bomb before what the refugees feared most of all could
happen: that Hitler would build it first. 

For three years, Heisenberg and his Uranium Club made sporadic
progress toward a self-sustained chain reaction designed to
breed plutonium for an atomic bomb. But in June 1942, Albert
Speer, Minister of Armament and War Production, asked Heisenberg
pointedly whether this newfangled weapon, which was costing the
Reich a lot of money, was going to be ready anytime soon. In
typical fashion, Heisenberg dithered and said probably not --
but could he please keep getting the money anyway, just in case? 

From then on, the Uranium Club was engaged in research only. It
never produced a reactor, let alone an atomic bomb. 

But with no Allied spies inside the German bomb projects,
neither the émigré physicists nor the governments that had taken
them in knew how poorly the Nazi A-bomb project was doing. They
acted on what they did know (or thought they knew): The
brilliance of German physics, combined with the already
well-demonstrated compliance of German physicists, equaled an
excellent chance for a German nuclear arsenal. 

It was this intelligence failure that drove the Manhattan
Project. Confident the Germans were progressing rapidly in this
arms race and ignorant of the true state of their research, one
month after Speer's talk with Heisenberg, the Manhattan Project
was kicked into high gear. 

In May 1945, Germany surrendered, and soon afterward we learned
how hollow their bomb program was. But by then it was too late.
In July 1945, the United States successfully detonated a test
bomb. And on Aug. 6, 1945, the technical marvel that resulted
from this botched intelligence was dropped on Hiroshima. 

Cynthia Bass is an East Bay historian and author. Contact us at
insight@sfchronicle.com. 				
Page B - 3 			

The San Francisco Chronicle] 
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 50 SF Chronicle: TWO CENTS / Who will be the next to use a nuclear bomb?
 
[San Francisco Chronicle] 
				 
Sunday, July 31, 2005

Eugene Veklerov, Albany 

In this age of globalization, it must be an international
project. It will be conceived by Egyptians and financed by
Saudis. Equipment will be stolen by Russians, assembled by
Iranians and planted by Pakistanis. Most of the victims will be
Germans and the whole thing will be blamed on Israelis.. 

Gene Boscacci, San Francisco 

China. They disregard the environment, human rights, etc., in a
totalitarian government. They are an economic stalwart whose
agenda is to utilize resources to make them a dominant global
leader, with enough military power to defend a "first strike"
when they choose this alternative. . 

Parker Gibbs, San Francisco 

I think it will come from a terrorist cell and "God" will
somehow be behind it. Although you can never count out the North
Koreans. They are looking formidable in this event, and as long
as they have Kim Jong Il, they have a good shot to be next.
However, never discount the Americans. We were the first, and we
are still No. 1 when it comes to dropping the Big One.. 

Marilyn Cosentino, San Francisco 

Al Qaeda -- on Aug. 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima.. 

Paul Larudee, El Cerrito 

Only Israel can use nuclear weapons with impunity. It is
protected by the world's only superpower and is small enough
that neighbors would not want retaliation for fear of nuclear
fallout. If the U.S. plans to use nuclear weapons, it will ask
Israel to do so on its behalf.. 

Dan Yee, San Francisco 

Which countries have developed nuclear bombs recently? China,
North Korea and India. They have the capability to set off
nuclear weapons since they have not signed the pact to ban the
use of nuclear weapons for mass destruction.. 

Scott Asnault, San Bruno 

Some random freak who hates the world. Kind of like the random
guy in FX Networks' TV movie "Small Pox." No real allegiance to
anyone, just hates the world or whatever country she or he
happens to want destroyed. 

Two Cents is a pool of Bay Area residents we tap for comments
and anecdotes. Columns are a representative sampling of
responses to questions we pose via e-mail. To join the pool,
e-mail us at twocents@sfchronicle.com. 				

Page B - 2                      

The San Francisco Chronicle] 
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 51 APP.COM: HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI: 60 YEARS LATER
         
Asbury Park Press 

Sixty years ago, President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop 
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the Japanese 
surrender that ended World War II. In the first part of a two-day 
series, local veterans recall the devastation. Published in the 
Asbury Park Press 07/31/05 BY KIRK MOORE STAFF WRITER

  COMING MONDAY
 U.S. troops close in. 			   
    
Amid the frightening, desert-like landscapes and piles
of rubble, Americans who were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few
weeks after the nuclear attacks saw images that survive like
gruesome snapshots in their memories.

"There was a bridge over the river in Hiroshima. When we got
there, there was an image of a body burned into the concrete,"
said Roy Cohen, a former Navy photographer. In his old
black-and-white images of a blasted industrial building, "all
the steel was leaning, like in a strong wind."

"It was absolutely unbelievable. It scared the hell out of me.
We all felt the same way," said Cohen, 78, of Hazlet. "We were
just damned glad it was us who had dropped it and not them."

In the 60th anniversary year of the end of World War II, a
dwindling band of veterans now in their late 70s and 80s are the
last links to the great Pacific campaign. In a hopscotch of
bloody island battles, they brought American air power and the
world's first nuclear bombs — dropped on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki — within striking distance.

At Nagasaki, "there was hardly a soul around, just some Japanese
police. We set up our machine guns because we didn't know what
to expect," said Ralph Ruocco, who was a Marine gunner in the
first unit that landed in September 1945. Passing the city's
Mitsubishi plant, a primary target for the 22-kiloton bomb,
Ruocco noticed its bare, towering girders were all twisted,
"like drill bits that had come up through a piece of wood."

Marine Capt. Victor Campi remembered the most substantial ruin
he saw was a church, a reminder of St. Francis Xavier and his
16th-century mission that helped establish a substantial
Catholic population in Nagasaki. "In this one church, I thought
I saw the silhouette of a human being," he said.

In the hills above Nagasaki, the Marines found something else:
man-made caverns holding weapons factories, arms and ammunition,
and new aircraft the Japanese held in reserve for massive
suicide attacks planned against an anticipated American invasion
fleet.

An image in Ruocco's collection of books and photographs shows
Japanese aircraft stacked like logs, burning in an open field as
the Marines destroyed all the war materiel they could find. Like
other veterans, Ruocco, 79, of Hazlet, says his own experience
and recent histories of the last months of World War II leave
him convinced the atomic bombs saved far more lives than
historians' estimate of the death toll, between 100,000 and
200,000.

"On every island, they fought to the bitter end. So what could
you expect when you went to their homeland?" recalled Campi, 87,
of Little Silver, who'd started with the Marines on Guadalcanal
as they began pushing the Japanese back. The bombings "saved us
at least a million casualties," he said. "If it wasn't for the
atom bomb, I don't think I'd be here today."

President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop the bombs remains a
turning point in how Americans think about their history and
national character. Today, the debate even bubbles up in the
nation's left-right political divide, much as the Vietnam War
still hangs heavy.

Truman's decision was dissected again during the Vietnam War and
the late 1970s. Some alleged the 1945 bombing was symptomatic of
American racial antipathy toward Asians, or part of the coming
Cold War strategy to intimidate the Soviet Union.

"The justification for these atrocities was that this would end
the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan,"
historian Howard Zinn wrote in his 1980 "A People's History of
the United States."

"These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and
seemed to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings
which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more
people," Zinn contended, citing conflicting wartime estimates
that Japan might have collapsed by the end of 1945.

Facing death again

 In August 1981, University of Pennsylvania English Professor
Paul Fussell published an essay in The New Republic magazine
relating his own experience, as a second lieutenant wounded in
Europe who recovered, only to face death again in a planned
invasion of Japan.

Fussell's provocative title expressed what many veterans
thought: "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb."

In midsummer 1945, "Allied casualties were running to over 7,000
per week," Fussell wrote. "Two weeks more means 14,000 more
killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean
the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of
them."

After more than a year and a half in combat, Arthur Smith of
Ocean Township recalled how as a 19-year-old soldier he trained
with his Army heavy mortar unit in the Philippines for an
invasion of Japan.

"They issued us these burp guns" — .45 caliber M3 submachine
guns used in close-quarters combat, said Smith, 80. A week
before the war ended, the soldiers still were being attacked at
night by Japanese holdouts. They knew what fighting on Japanese
soil would be like, he said.

"They said we killed around 3,000 Japanese at Leyte" in the
Philippines, Smith said. "They just came on in banzai attacks.
It was crazy."

As secrecy classifications lapsed and wartime decoding secrets
became available in the 1980s and 1990s, historians could delve
again into what Truman and his military leaders thought about
the prospects for defeating Japan with conventional weapons.

Although decrypted Japanese diplomatic communiques lent support
to arguments that some officials in Tokyo favored peace,
Japanese military communications clearly showed accelerating
plans for a cataclysmic battle around Kyushu, the southernmost
major island of the Japanese homeland, according to author
Richard B. Frank in his 1999 book "Downfall: The End of the
Imperial Japanese Empire."

As for the much-debated calculus over how many lives were saved
on balance by ending the war in mid-August, Frank added another
projection. Besides the troops, prisoners of war and captive
civilians who were dying under Japanese occupation, tens of
thousands of Japanese civilians had already perished in massive
firebombings of their cities. Many more would have died in air
raids and from starvation had the air campaign and sea blockade
of the islands continued through 1945, Frank argued.

To American decision makers, "alternatives to the atomic bombs
carried no guarantee that they would end the war or reduce the
amount of human death and suffering," he wrote.

Teen gunner saw cloud

 Navy airman Edward Chapman of Barnegat was an 18-year-old
gunner and radioman on a Martin patrol bomber, or PBM — flying
boats whose crews were assigned to rescue downed pilots at sea.

"Landings in the open ocean were extremely difficult. When
you're up at 10,000 feet the sea looks flat, but when you got
down to sea level you could be dealing with 20- or 30-foot
waves," recalled Chapman, 78. If sea conditions didn't permit a
landing, the PBM crew could at least drop a life raft and circle
until a submarine arrived to pick up the survivor, he said.

On Aug. 9, 1945, Chapman's plane was patrolling between 30 and
50 miles off Kyushu. The crew didn't see the initial fireball of
the explosion, but as they drew closer, there was no mistaking
what had happened over Nagasaki, he said.

"We were at about 8,000 feet and flew all around that mushroom
cloud," he said. "We knew it was another atom bomb."

Capturing the northern Mariana Islands had given American forces
a base for the new B-29 bomber to strike directly at the
Japanese homeland. The Marines first landed on the island of
Saipan in June 1944, then turned their attention to Tinian — a
neighboring island about the size of Manhattan — as soon as
major resistance was quelled on Saipan, former Marines recall.

"It took us approximately 28 days to clean up Saipan," said
Walter Bernacki, 79, of Eatontown. Bernacki said he was wounded
in the hands by fragments from a shell that mangled the legs of
a Marine behind him. The injury didn't keep Bernacki out of the
assault on Tinian.

"The beach was only four amtracs wide," he said, referring to
the tank-like amphibious tractors the Marines rode into Tinian.
As Bernacki and other Marines scrambled up the beach, his amtrac
backed up over a mine, and was blown to pieces.

Right behind the Marines came Navy construction battalions, or
Seabees, to begin preparing Saipan and Tinian as bases. On
Saipan, machine gunner Ralph Ruocco patrolled the hills in
search of Capt. Sakae Oba, a Japanese officer who with a band of
survivors continued to elude and attack Marines before
surrendering four months after the war's end.

"From Mount Tapotchau we could see the B-29s taking off from
Tinian," said Ruocco, 79, of Hazlet. The atomic attacks happened
while he was on a two-week patrol.

"We didn't even know the war was over until we got down to the
base camp," Ruocco said. "It's very possible that one of those
planes we saw was the one that dropped the bomb."

Campi and his Marines had been practicing high-angle firing with
their cannons, anticipating the mountain-by-mountain fighting
expected on Kyushu. They were loading at Saipan for the invasion
Aug. 15, 1945, "when we heard a lot of loudspeakers in the
hills, telling whatever Japanese were in hiding . . .," Campi
said, "that the war was over."

Kirk Moore: (732) 557-5728 

the Asbury Park Press             

*****************************************************************
 52 toledoblade.com: 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

Article published Sunday, July 31, 2005
 
 1st use of the atomic bomb divides Americans
 Historians hasten to collect memories of aging veterans from
World War II
 
  [Photo] 
Retired art teacher Arthur Koskinen, 87, of Perrysburg fought in
World War II. 
( THE BLADE/ALYSSA SCHUKAR ) 

By JEREMY LEMER
BLADE STAFF WRITER
 

Arthur Koskinen remembers exactly where he was 60 years ago when
he learned that America had dropped the first atomic bomb on the
Japanese city of Hiroshima.



 He remembers the canvas tents at the camp on Guam and the men
of the 3rd Marine Division - men he had fought alongside during
the bloody battle for Iwo Jima months earlier - huddled around
their radios and the thoughts that flashed through his head when
President Harry Truman announced the news.

"It was a two-fold feeling," the 87-year-old Marine veteran and
retired art teacher from Perrysburg recalled of that moment in
World War II. "You knew the war was going to be over now, but
you couldn't help thinking about the people who were on the
receiving end of it. War is horrible anyhow."

Mr. Koskinen was among thousands of Toledo-area residents who
helped shape the events that led to victory over Japan in the
Pacific in early August, 1945, and the end of World War II.

Among them were research scientists trained at local colleges
who helped design the atomic bomb; battle-scarred combat
veterans like those of the 37th Army Division mobilized from the
Ohio National Guard; workers who churned out more than $3
billion in Jeeps, munitions, and other war supplies at area
factories, and average citizens who bought war bonds and
rationed gasoline and other items.

As the 60th anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima
approaches this week, however, fewer and fewer of those who have
been called members of what has been coined as America's
Greatest Generation are left. According to the Department of
Veterans Affairs, more than 1,100 of the nation's World War II
veterans are dying each day.

"It's important that we commemorate this [60th] anniversary,"
said Richard Baranowski, a local historian with Way Public
Library in Perrysburg who has been collecting oral testimony and
photographs from people who experienced the war first-hand. "At
the 70th anniversary, how many people will still be around?"

The personal, first-hand memories that breathe life into arid
historical accounts are fading away. Some still remain, frail
but vibrant like Milton Bracht, 84, who, as a 23-year-old
private in the Army, worked on the top-secret program to develop
a nuclear weapon known as the Manhattan Project.

Based at Oak Ridge, Tenn., one of the three sites that brought
together top scientists from around the world, Mr. Bracht played
a small role in the $2 billion project.

He used his electrical engineering degree from Toledo University
to help develop the fuel for the bomb by operating a sensitive
measuring device known as a mass spectrometer.

Despite hastily built laboratories that occasionally gave way
underfoot, Mr. Bracht and his colleagues worked their
instruments 24 hours a day.

"What with the circumstances of the war, we had to get done
quickly," he said.

And they did. By May, 1945, the first atomic bombs were ready
for deployment.

Debate over the bombs
 President Truman authorized dropping the bomb nicknamed "Little
Boy" over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. More
than 70,000 people were killed, and the world suddenly entered
the nuclear age.

  [Photo] 
George Taoka helped interrogate prisoners in Hiroshima,
including his brother-in-law, who had survived the bombing. 
( THE BLADE/LORI KING ) 

Three days later, a second bomb known as "Fat Man" was dropped
over the city of Nagasaki with similar results: Nearly 40,000
people were killed or injured and one-third of the city was
destroyed. On Aug. 14, 1945, Japan announced its surrender; the
formal surrender documents were signed on Sept. 2 aboard the USS
Missouri.

For many World War II veterans, the atomic bomb was a necessary
evil, one which saved hundreds of thousands of American and
Japanese lives - lives that would have been lost had the
American military been forced to invade the heavily defended
Japanese mainland.

"It was war," said Don Cleese, 79, a semiretired advertising
manager from Perrysburg, who manned a turret gun aboard a B-29
bomber and flew 39 missions in the South Pacific between January
and August, 1945. "Truman had to do it, and he did the right
thing."

Over the years, however, academics have been more critical of
the decision to use the bombs.

William Hoover, a professor of Japanese history at the
University of Toledo, said the usual balance drawn between the
cost of an American invasion and the damage inflicted by the
bomb is an unfair one.

"By August, 1945, Japan was surrounded," he said. "Her air and
sea power was virtually knocked out, as were her transport and
manufacturing systems. So there was no necessity to invade."

Pressure by conventional means could have resolved the war, Mr.
Hoover said.

But Mr. Cleese said he has little time for suggestions from
people who were not involved with fighting the war.

"The people who criticize really don't know the story," he said.
" I feel bad that so many people had to die, but [President
Truman and the military] had to do it. We didn't start the war."

George Taoka, a Japanese-American, was placed in an internment
camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo., at the start of the war but later
served as a military intelligence officer in the South Pacific.

For Mr. Taoka, who is retired after a long career as an
economics professor at the University of Toledo, the meaning of
the atomic bomb is far more ambiguous.

Surprise discovery
 Five months after the attacks, Mr. Taoka arrived in Hiroshima
to interrogate a Japanese suspect.

He was surprised to discover the detainee was his brother-in-law
but even more shocked by the utter devastation of the once
bustling city - a city that he had known as a young student
visiting relatives in April, 1941.

"The city was absolutely flat," the 89-year-old resident of the
Swan Creek Retirement Center in Toledo recalled. "It was
incredible."

The only building left standing in Hiroshima was the Industrial
Promotion Hall, which Mr. Taoka had visited in 1941.

The devastation took a personal toll also: Two relatives exposed
to the bomb's fallout died later from radiation sickness.

"Hindsight is pretty good," he said, "but if the war could have
been ended some other way, it would have been better."

Contact Jeremy Lemer at: jlemer@theblade.com or 419-724-6050.

 The Toledo Blade Company, 541 N. Superior St., Toledo, OH 43660
, (419) 724-6000 
*****************************************************************
 53 Courier-Journal: Louisville's Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemorations
 
www.courier-journal.com

Sunday, July 31, 2005     
  
+ Tomorrow: Book signing and discussion with Arch Taylor, author
of "Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima & Beyond: Subversion of Values," at
Carmichael's Bookstore, 2720 Frankfort Ave.


+  Tuesday: Poetry and music for peace, The Rudyard Kipling, 422
W. Oak St., 6 p.m. 


+ Wednesday: Concert for contemplation and nonviolence,
Cathedral of the Assumption, 443 S. Fifth St., 7-9 p.m.


+  Thursday: Action-day visit to offices of mayors and
congressional representatives. People do this on their own in
cities across the country. For those in Louisville who want more
information, call Terry Taylor, (502) 214-7322. 


+ Friday: Public reading of the book "Hiroshima" by John Hersey,
Fourth Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard, 11 a.m.-2 p.m.


+  Saturday: Silent prayer honoring the victims of Hiroshima, 8
to 9 a.m., Friends Meeting House, 3050 Bon Air Ave.


+  Saturday: Candle-floating ceremony, Cherokee Park Lake, 8
p.m. Also, bus trip to Oak Ridge, Tenn., for anti-nuclear action
at the Y-12 plant. Those making the trip must chip in for gas;
call Pat Geier at 454-0019 for details. 


+ Next Sunday: Soka Gakkai International Peace Conference,
University of Louisville Shelby campus, Shelbyville Road, 2-4
p.m.


+  Aug. 8: Anti-nuclear film "Sadako and the Thousand Paper
Cranes" and pizza, James Lees Presbyterian Church, 1741
Frankfort Ave., 6 p.m.


+  Aug. 9: Tolling of the bell in honor of the victims of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Christ Church Cathedral, 425 S. Second
St., noon.

All events are free and open to the public. For more
information, go to www.interfaithpathstopeace.orgor check with
Terry Taylor, (502) 214-7322 or at
director@interfaithpathstopeace.org

Copyright 2004 The Courier-Journal.
*****************************************************************
 54 South Florida Sun-Sentinel: The road that led to the bomb

  [Sun-Sentinel.com]
        
 	Posted 	July 31 2005 	 	
 
Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima. Diane
Preston. Walker & Co. $27. 379 pp.

Sixty years ago this summer, on Aug. 6, 1945, the United States
effectively won the war against Japan and the world changed
forever. In a terrifying way: That morning the U.S. B-29 bomber
Enola Gay, piloted by Paul Tibbets, dropped the atom bomb on the
city of Hiroshima.

The nuclear age was born to the sound of the death throes of
140,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians. Less than a
month earlier, as he witnessed the first successful test of an
atom bomb in the New Mexico desert, Robert J. Oppenheimer, chief
scientist of the Manhattan Project, had a prescient moment. A
passage from the Bhagavad-Gita flashed through his mind: "I am
become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

Focusing first and foremost on the fascinating people who
deciphered the secrets of matter and energy, this work by
historian Diana Preston tells the tale of five decades of
scientific discovery that led to that awesome morning. It is not
a linear story, nor one lacking in drama, irony or moral
ambiguity. 

For those with only a layman's understanding of the topic, this
study holds surprises. As late as the mid-1930s, for instance,
many of the world's most eminent physicists believed an atomic
weapon was not possible. The feasibility of a chain reaction was
first demonstrated conclusively not by one of the leading
physicists working at a top research center at Berkeley, Chicago
or Berlin, but by Leo Slizard, a Hungarian Jewish refugee
scientist working with borrowed money and equipment. 

It was Slizard who, in 1939, prompted Einstein, who did not yet
know that a chain reaction had been achieved, to write the
famous letter to FDR that ultimately resulted in the Manhattan
Project. And Roosevelt at first seemed to reject the idea; it
took a persuasive argument delivered over breakfast by a close
confidante to convince the president. 

In a book like this the science could easily obscure the
narrative or overwhelm the reader. That this never happens
speaks for the author's ability to interweave the physics with
the human element, the science with the political and military
machinations. We learn not only about the dead ends and key
insights on the way to the bomb, but also about the networks and
rivalries among top physicists and the sharply differing ways
leading figures in German science responded to the Nazi
persecution of their Jewish colleagues. 

Although we know the outcome of the race between the United
States and Nazi Germany to build an atomic weapon, Preston
manages to imbue even this side of the story with drama, as in
her depiction of the heroism of Norwegian commandos who
sabotaged German heavy water production not once but twice, as
well as her description of an aborted assassination plot against
German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Preston examines critically
the rationalizations that top German scientists gave after the
war to explain why they worked to build an atomic weapon for the
Nazi regime. She also recounts the pangs of conscience
experienced by some Allied scientists when they realized the
human consequences of having produced the ultimate weapon of
mass destruction -- and what they tried to do about it. 

This is a highly readable book about an important subject.

Max Castro is the co-author of This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants
and Power in Miami.

 Copyright 2005, Sun-Sentinel Co. & South Florida Interactive,
Inc.       
  
*****************************************************************
 55 INSIDE JoongAng Daily: KEDO reactors an obstacle at six-party talks
 
August 1, 2005 KST 15:09 (GMT+9)                                                         
                       
  August 01, 2005 ¤Ñ BEIJING ¡ª As delegates to the six-party
talks tried to hash out an agreement on a joint statement of
principles, the suspended light-water nuclear reactor project in
North Korea was emerging as an obstacle to progress.

 According to South Korean officials, both Seoul and Washington
are opposing a Pyongyang demand that work on the Korean
Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) reactors be
resumed in exchange for the North giving up its nuclear arms
programs. 

The KEDO consortium, tasked to build two light-water reactors in
the North for civilian use, was founded under the 1994 Geneva
Agreed Framework that resolved the 1993-94 standoff over the
North's nuclear arms programs. Work on the project stopped in
2003, after Washington charged that the North had continued its
work on nuclear weapons.

 The North's demand raises complications for South Korea.
Seoul's recent offer to supply substantial amounts of
electricity to the North ¡ª widely credited with jumpstarting
the stalled six-party talks ¡ª was based on the premise that the
reactor project be scrapped, with Seoul's financial
contributions to KEDO redirected to the electricity project.

 On Friday, Washington time, U.S. State Department spokesman
Sean McCormack said, "we're very clear that we do not think that
North Korea should retain the civilian nuclear capability."

Citing failed past agreements, Mr. McCormack said that "any
nuclear program in North Korea could potentially be a nuclear
weapons program." 

But it was unclear whether the North's five negotiating partners
planned to insist on a total ban on civilian nuclear power in
the North. Yesterday, deputy chief negotiators from all six
nations were working on a draft agreement offered by China.
According to a senior South Korean source, the draft's preface
includes a reconfirmation of the 1992 inter-Korean
denuclearization accord ¡ª which, while barring both Koreas from
manufacturing and testing nuclear weapons and building uranium
enrichment facilities, does allow nuclear energy for peaceful
use.

 Meanwhile, at the Association of South East Asian Nations
meeting in Laos, North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun
reiterated that the North would rejoin the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty and admit International Atomic Energy
Agency inspectors "if the nuclear issue is resolved smoothly,"
according to Pyongyang's state-run media. 

That report said Mr. Paek told his South Korean counterpart, Ban
Ki-moon, that Pyongyang greatly appreciated Seoul's electricity
offer, but was concerned that the North would become dependent
on the South for energy.

by Yoo Kwang-jong, Ser Myo-ja myoja@joongang.co.kr>   
	  
Copyright by Joins.com, Inc. Terms of Use |
*****************************************************************
 56 SignOnSanDiego.com: Nuclear power poised for comeback
 
Rising oil prices, fears about global warming play role

 By Dana Wilkie COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

July 31, 2005 

WASHINGTON  Nestled in the energy bill that Congress approved
last week is perhaps the most tangible evidence yet that nuclear
power, long shunned by many as a dangerous energy source, is on
the verge of a comeback. 

SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune The San Onofre Nuclear Generating
Station is one of 103 operating U.S. nuclear reactors.   

The broad energy plan includes billions of federal dollars to
jump-start production of nuclear reactors. The incentives, from
tax breaks to loan guarantees, come at a time when soaring oil
prices and increasing public concern about global warming have
forced even some leading environmentalists to rethink their
opposition to nuclear power as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to
traditional fossil fuels. 

"Nuclear (power), in combination with renewables, is the only
source of electrical energy that can replace coal and gas to a
significant degree," said Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore,
now chairman of Greenspirit Strategies of Canada, which helps
companies develop environmentally friendly policies. 

Should the government incentives prove enticing, the nation's
utilities are poised to order their first reactors since the
1970s. 

"We need a lot more electricity in this country in the decades
ahead," said Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy
Institute, a trade group for nuclear utilities. "Nuclear (power)
is not by itself the answer, but it's part of that diversity of
(sources) that will fill the gap." 

But the federal incentives spell trouble to watchdogs. They fear
that the bill doesn't do enough to promote other alternative
energy sources, such as wind and solar, and that more reactors
will mean more potential targets for terrorists and more nuclear
waste piling up at power plants. 

"Safety issues, waste, security  these issues still haunt the
industry, and they still haven't solved them," said Michael
Mariotte, director of the Nuclear Information and Resource
Service, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog that opposes atomic
energy. 

There are 103 operating reactors in the nation, including two in
California at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo.
But all were ordered before the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at
Three Mile Island, Pa., and the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl
plant in Ukraine, both of which led to widespread fears about
nuclear power and a hiatus in reactor construction. 

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reactors have
become a key security concern. Critics have raised the specter
of an attack that could release radiation and pose catastrophic
risks to those living nearby. Reactor designers are
incorporating features that would, among other things,
automatically cool a reactor in the event of an attack, said
Mark Wells, director of the Government Accountability Office,
during testimony before Congress in March. 

The United States is facing a power crunch, without enough
supply to meet projected demand. The Department of Energy
predicts that in the coming two decades, the nation will need to
produce an extra 350,000 to 400,000 megawatts of energy to keep
pace with demand. 

The country's reactors are capable of producing 98,000 megawatts
of electricity, about 20 percent of U.S. power needs. Reactors
generate electricity by using radioactive material to boil water
into steam to drive turbines. 

The nuclear power incentives in the bill passed by Congress
mirror President Bush's 2001 energy blueprint. The bill includes
$1.6 billion for research and development of nuclear power, $1.3
billion for a nuclear plant at the federal Idaho National
Laboratory to generate hydrogen fuel, and $2 billion in federal
insurance to cover construction delays caused by court
challenges or anything else outside normal business risks. 

The bill also promises up to $5.7 billion in tax credits for the
first six reactors to be built and unlimited loan guarantees for
up to 80 percent of the cost of those reactors. 

"The list of incentives is cradle to grave," said Michele Boyd,
legislative director for the energy program at Public Citizen,
another nuclear watchdog. "If this isn't enough to build new
reactors, there's nothing more the government can do other than
build them itself." 

A host of developments  political, environmental and economic 
have fostered renewed interest in nuclear power as an
alternative to fossil fuels, most surprisingly among leading
environmentalists who previously opposed it. Moore, once a
dogged foe of nuclear power, now considers global warming a
greater threat than nuclear waste or reactor meltdowns. 

"Climate change has . . . shifted my perspective," Moore said in
an e-mail message. His views on nuclear energy mirror those of
other notable environmentalists, including Stewart Brand,
founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, and James Lovelock, who
posited the Gaia theory of Earth as a giant self-regulating
super-organism, and now sees nuclear energy as key to the
planet's health. 

Nuclear reactors release some carbon dioxide, but only a
fraction of the amount produced by burning fossil fuels such as
oil, coal or gas, which many experts have blamed for global
warming. 

Political concerns also are a factor. Nations have to compete 
and pay top dollar  for a dwindling supply of oil and gas
resources that tend to lie in politically unstable nations. The
uranium that fuels nuclear reactors can be mined in stable
countries such as Canada and Australia. 

Finally, nuclear fuel is relatively cheap to produce, and its
price does not fluctuate, as does the price of natural gas.
Nuclear power costs 1.68 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with
5.87 cents for natural gas and 1.92 cents for coal. A
kilowatt-hour is enough to power 1,000 homes for an hour. 

The shifting winds on nuclear power are evident worldwide. There
are 25 reactors under construction in 10 countries, and 112 more
are planned or proposed. China is aggressively expanding its
nuclear energy program and has opened six reactors since 2002.
Finland is set to build a large nuclear power station this year.
France, which depends on nuclear reactors for almost 80 percent
of its electricity, announced this summer that it would help
Libya plan a nuclear energy program. 

Although orders for new reactors in the United States are not
expected until later this decade, the industry says it must take
the regulatory and financial steps necessary to pave the way for
new construction. 

Industry experts say this generation's nuclear reactors are
safer than ever, and that a Chernobyl-like accident is
technically impossible. Mariotte, of the watchdog Nuclear
Information and Resource Service, acknowledged that "on paper,
they do have safer designs." But he said that's to be expected
"considering the reactors we're using today were designed 50
years ago." 

Frank von Hippel, a nuclear power expert at Princeton
University, noted that "some safety improvements were made
following Three Mile Island." But he also said that "Nuclear
Regulatory Commission regulation at the moment is about as
unaggressive as one could imagine." 

Where to put reactor waste remains problematic. Most utilities
are running out of space to store spent fuel at their plants,
and a congressionally approved dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain
faces so many legal, political and technical challenges that it
probably won't be open until at least 2012. 

| Contact the Union-Tribune

 © Copyright 2005 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.   
*****************************************************************
 57 Sunday Herald: Nuclear industry demands new laws to ban protest break-ins -
                         
  By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor 
 
 A LOOPHOLE in the law which makes it perfectly legal to invade
a nuclear power station must be closed, the government has been
told by its chief adviser on nuclear security.

In a report to ministers, the UKs director of civil nuclear
security, Roger Brunt, has demanded new legislation to outlaw
unauthorised entry to nuclear sites. It is a deficiency of
serious concern which requires urgent action, he said.

His call is enthusiastically backed by British Energy, the
company that operates nuclear power stations. But it is rejected
by anti-nuclear campaigners as a ploy to suppress peaceful
protest.

Brunts annual report on the state of civil nuclear security in
the UK was slipped quietly on to a government website last week.
In it, he pointed out that high-profile incursions into public
buildings were an attractive tactic for protesters.

The lack of a legal deterrent to dissuade such action is a most
significant concern to me and addressing it is my highest
legislative priority, he said. He requested early action from
ministers to change the law.

But Brunts request was dismissed as preposterous by Pete Roche,
a consultant to Greenpeace. He is using current concern about
terrorism to hide the fact that he is simply stifling peaceful
protest, Roche claimed.

If terrorists targeted a nuclear power station with its stores
of dangerous radioactive material, they could spread fallout for
miles around. In the short term, the only answer is to improve
physical security, but ultimately we have to stop producing
nuclear waste.

Roche argued that there were already enough laws, including
breach of the peace and criminal damage, to deter people from
entering a nuclear site. The last time Greenpeace had tried it
had been relatively easy to gain access, he said.

In recent years, Greenpeace has organised two major invasions of
a nuclear power station at Sizewell in Suffolk. In October 2002,
more than 100 protesters  including several in Homer Simpson
costumes  occupied the site for more than 12 hours.

In January the following year, demonstrators climbed on to the
reactor dome after cutting a hole in the perimeter fence.
Sizewell is easier to get into than a Norwich night club, one of
them commented.

Brunts predecessor, Michael Buckland-Smith, last year accused
Greenpeace of diverting resources from counter-terrorism work.
Incursions by demonstrators into nuclear sites are irresponsible
and unjustified, especially when the threat of terrorist attack
is as high as it is at present, he said.

British Energy strongly supported making it illegal to gain
unauthorised access to its eight nuclear power stations,
including Hunterston and Torness in Scotland. The law should
allow for licensed nuclear sites to be brought in line with
other sensitive sites such as docks, airports, railways and
tunnels, said a company spokeswoman.

Ministers are now considering how to respond to Brunts request. 

Brunt is head of the Office for Civil Nuclear Security, a
secretive outstation of the Department of Trade and Industry at
Harwell in Oxfordshire. As well as highlighting the legal
loophole, his report reveals a huge backlog in vetting security
staff for nuclear stations.

Staff shortages caused partly by a major DTI downsizing exercise
meant that there were nearly 3000 people awaiting security
clearance at the end of March. This has caused delays in
confirming jobs and extra costs, Brunt said. 

Dr David Lowry, a nuclear security consultant, pointed out that
government plans to deal with nuclear waste would require
thousands more workers to be vetted. There seem to be no plans
to ensure these workers can be vetted in time, he said.

There is a real danger that pressure to deal with the waste will
lead to corners being cut in applying proper vetting procedures.
At a time when terrorist threats have never been higher, it
would be irresponsible to let unvetted or partially vetted
contractors move and manage radioactive waste.

Brunts report says there were 37 nuclear security incidents
reported between April 2004 and March 2004. Most of these were
disclosed previously in response to a request under the Freedom
of Information Act.

They included people climbing perimeter fences to take
shortcuts, using forged or borrowed passes and sending
restricted information over the internet. On one occasion, two
visitors made a genuine error and gained unauthorised and
unescorted access to a site.

The most serious incidents were thefts of sensitive material,
including two laptops stolen from private cars in March 2005.
The compromise of information in each case was not significant
but the fact that the thefts had occurred points to a growing
trend, said Brunt. Inspectors and security managers in the
industry are devoting great efforts to reverse this trend and
improve this disappointing lack of security awareness. 

31 July 2005 
  
  © newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 58 Concord Monitor: State official calls Vermont Yankee safe   

  He says shutdown notice badly handled     

 Concord Monitor and New Hampshire Patriot P.O. Box 1177 Concord 
NH 03302 603-224-5301

By ADAM GORLICK The Associated Press
 			 		 
-> July 30. 2005 1:56PM 

ORTHAMPTON, Mass. - The head of New Hampshire's emergency
management services said Thursday he's confident the Vermont
Yankee nuclear plant is safe, but he told its managers to do a
better job communicating with state officials and the public
when problems arise. 

There was an equipment failure Monday at the plant, but
operators detected the problem immediately and shut down the
reactor. The plant was started up again Thursday afternoon. 

But miscommunication between Vermont Yankee and officials in New
Hampshire led to confusion about what happened and how big the
problem was. 

"I'm not concerned about safety issues at Vermont Yankee," said
Bruce Cheney, New Hampshire's director of the Division of
Emergency Services. "I am concerned about having better
communications and more complete communications with them." 

As required by protocol, plant officials contacted emergency
managers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts to alert them to the
problem. The plant is located in Vernon, Vt., just across the
Connecticut River from Hinsdale and a few miles from the
Massachusetts border. 

The plant operator who notified Cheney said the problem was not
an emergency. But the plant's report to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission used the phrase "catastrophic failure." 

Media organizations seized on the phrase, and Cheney's boss, New
Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, accused the plant of failing to
disclose all the facts. He called for a full accounting of what
happened. 

Cheney met Thursday with Vermont Yankee's vice president, Jay
Thayer, during a previously scheduled conference in Northampton
that also was attended by emergency management directors from
Vermont and Massachusetts. 

Thayer said "catastrophic failure" is an engineering term used
to describe a piece of equipment that simply has stopped
working. 

"If something is broken, or it's come apart, it's a catastrophic
failure," he said. "What happened here happened in
milliseconds." 

He conceded that the phrase may have set off undue alarms and
pledged to better explain problems to state officials when they
arise. 

"We need to take things to a level of more common
understanding," Thayer said. "This type of language probably
needs a level of translation. 

"We're working with our control room operators to give better
descriptions than that," he said. 

The incident involved a high-voltage short circuit caused by the
failure of an electrical insulator in the switchyard that moves
power from the plant to the electric grid. Plant equipment
detected the problem automatically and shut down the reactor
immediately, officials said. 

The plant began making electricity at 2:32 p.m. Thursday after
workers replaced the insulator in the switchyard, plant
spokesman Robert Williams said. 

Randolph Blough, a director of reactor safety for the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, said equipment at the plant responded
appropriately Monday. He said he had no objections to the
Vermont Yankee plant coming back online. 

By ADAM GORLICK 

The Associated Press 		 		 	   	 	

   
Guide for details. Concord Monitor Online, P.O. Box 1177,
Concord NH 03302
 Phone: 603-224-5301 | E-mail: [ align=]   		   [ align=]     [
*****************************************************************
 59 Keene Sentinel: Vt.-N.H. Yankee 

Editorial 
	 		 	
Sunday, July 31, 2005

  								     							 						
We are assured that the malfunction that knocked the Vermont
Yankee nuclear plant off line Monday afternoon was no big deal.
But, for reasons that have nothing to do with the plant itself,
it actually was. 

The plants owners described the problem to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission as a catastrophic failure in its
electrical switchyard. An electrical insulator failed on a
high-voltage transformer. And, although the water level fell
sharply inside the reactor core, it rose again just as quickly.
The fuel was not exposed. No radiation was released. 

The most troubling aspect of the incident seems to have been
that a quick switchover to get electrical power from outside
sources didnt work as it was supposed to. But emergency power
did kick in. 

A Vermont Yankee spokesman indicated that press reports quoting
the adjective catastrophic were misleading. Thats just a term
engineers use, he explained. 

One wonders what term engineers use when things really go wrong. 

Of course, catastrophic is a term other people use as well. In
this case, according to an expert with the Union of Concerned
Scientists in Washington, it meant that an aging piece of
equipment blew up. That was catastrophic for the aging piece of
equipment, but fortunately not for the rest of us. 

These things happen. Vermont Yankee has been on line for more
than 30 years. During that time it has survived deliberate
construction flaws, a pretty serious worker error, a transformer
fire that sent flames shooting into the air, lost-and-found fuel
rods, various cracks due to aging, the failure of part of the
emergency-notification system, and a chockablock spent-fuel
storage pool. Its operating license is scheduled to expire in
2012, and it hopes to increase its power and extend that
license. 

What made Mondays incident unusual was the spirited reaction of
New Hampshire Governor John Lynch. 

Yes, the New Hampshire governor. 

We recall only two previous times when a New Hampshire governor
took note of Vermont Yankee. 

In the mid-1970s, Governor Meldrim Thomson took a broken
radiation monitor out of Hinsdale because he said the state
couldnt afford to have it fixed. 

During the 1979 incident at Three Mile Island, Governor Hugh
Gallen told the director of the emergency management office that
he would like to see a copy of the Vermont Yankee evacuation
plan for New Hampshire. She reported back that she couldnt find
one. 

The Vernon, Vermont, plant is just a few hundred yards from
Hinsdale. Five New Hampshire towns are in its
emergency-evacuation zone. Yet this states elected officials
have often ignored the plant, perhaps assuming the state border
would protect serve as some sort of radiation shield. New
Hampshires Washington delegation has been particularly
disgraceful in this regard, taking no interest in the
power-increase debate. 

To his credit, Lynch is signaling a different approach. On
Wednesday, he asked plant officials for a full accounting of
what went wrong. Its a big concern for me, he said, that
Vermont Yankee officials failed to notify New Hampshire of all
the facts surrounding the incident as it was unfolding. We need
a full accounting from Vermont Yankee of exactly what happened,
why New Hampshire wasnt notified and how we can be assured this
type of communication oversight by Vermont Yankee does not
happen again. We also need assurances that the plant is indeed
safe to operate in light of Mondays event. 

Vermont Yankee contends that the governor is mistaken and that
it followed proper notification procedures. That argument will
continue. But the people of southwestern New Hampshire can take
some satisfaction from Lynchs intervention. Plant officials are
now on notice that the government of New Hampshire is interested
in whats going on there. 

The Keene Sentinel 60 West Street Keene, New Hampshire 03431 
Phone: (603) 352-1234 or (800) 765-9994 (NH or VT) Fax: (603) 
352-0437 or news: (603) 352-9700 email: <font 
color="#ffffff">webmaster@keenesentinel.com</font> online: <font 
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 60 Sofia Morning News: Bulgarian Nuke Unit Shuts Down for Repairs

[Sofia News Agency]                                                           

Business: 30 July 2005, Saturday.

Unit four at Bulgaria's nuclear power plant Kozloduy, 200
kilometres north of Sofia, was switched off the energy grid
Saturday morning for conducting regular annual repairs and
refuelling. 

The repair works, scheduled to be completed by the end of
August, will increase the security and resource of the unit's
main equipment. 

Kozloduy's unit three also underwent its annual repairs. 

The first of the two oldest units at Kozloduy nuclear power
station was decoupled from Bulgaria's energy grid on December
31, 2002. The closure of Unit 2 started at midnight December 30. 

The decision for the final and complete closure of Kozloduy
Units 1 and 2 was under the act, which provided for releasing
credits for the upgrade of Units 5 and 6. 

It came after many years of concern over their safety, strong
pressure from the European Union, protests from the nuclear
lobby and opposition parties that the reactors are economically
necessary.[ width=] 

  novinite.com

 All Rights Reserved © Novinite Ltd., 2001-2005 - Copyright
&Disclaimer - Privacy Policy

Bulgaria news Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency -
www.sofianewsagency.com) is unique with being a real time news
provider in English that informs its readers about the latest
Bulgarian news. The editorial staff also publishes a daily
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 61 Bellona: Russian legislators ratify accord with Canada that will help
dismantle nuclear subs
 
On July 6, legislators in Russia's upper house of parliament
Wednesday ratified a Russian-Canadian accord that will help
Russia decommission nuclear submarines. 

2005-07-29 18:26

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that under the agreement,
which was signed last June and ratified by the parliament's
lower house on Friday, Canada will initially provide Russia with
about $300 million Cdn. 
The agreement is part of the Group of Eight wealthiest nations'
program on fighting the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. Under the program, Canada has agreed to provide a
total of $1 billion over 10 years. 

On July 1, Russian President Putin approved ratification of the
similar agreement with Italy. 
  

  Publisher: Bellona Foundation, President: Frederic Hauge
Information: info@bellona.no, Technical contact:
webmaster@bellona.no
Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62  * P.O.Box
2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway
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 62 Lake County Record-Bee: The face of our own savagery

- Opinion
 
Article Last Updated: Saturday, July 30, 2005 -
 		   	 	
 Congratulations to the 2-year-old twins Samantha and Shyenne
Olsen, winners of a national award for cute children in the
Record-Bee on Wednesday, July 27. Was anyone else as struck as I
was by the cruel irony of how that article was juxtaposed
against one about the exhibit of photographs depicting child
victims of depleted uranium (DU) weapons our government uses? 

When I was a young man trying to decide whether to become an Air
Force pilot shortly after the Vietnam War, a friend of mine took
me to see a film called "Hearts and Minds." The film depicted
the physical and psychological consequences of that war from all
perspectives. Early in the film a pilot who served in the U.S.
Navy described the thrill of putting his ordinance on target. He
spoke of the dance-like quality of precision bombing runs. 

Later, the film showed that same man weeping in reaction to
memories of photos he saw of children affected by the napalm he
dropped on villages. He cried for his two daughters shown
playing on a swing set in the background of the camera frame. I
decided not to become an Air Force pilot that evening. 

What disturbed me about the "controversy" over the photo exhibit
by Takashi Morizumi was the very controversy itself. I doubt a
film like "Hearts and Minds" would be shown these days to young
people in high school and college campuses besieged by military
recruiters. We should all be very afraid of a government that
does not allow its citizens to experience the reality of media
depicting the consequences of its actions because they are "very
disturbing," "horrific" or in "poor taste." 

Years ago we incredulously condemned citizens of Germany for not
being aware of their government's actions. What's our excuse?
How ironic ... it takes a Japanese photographer to show us the
face of our own savagery. 

Clovice A. Lewis Jr. 

Kelseyville

© 2005 Record-Bee.com 		   	 
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 63 Lake County Record-Bee: There are no victors

Opinion
 
Article Last Updated: Saturday, July 30, 2005 -
                        
 My sense of relief upon reading your 7/27 article entitled
"Board OKs photo exhibit" nearly brought tears to my eyes. I
feel privileged to live where most of our supervisors are
open-minded and so dedicated to free speech that they will
insist upon our right to view this photo exhibit that depicts
child victims of depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq. 

I believe Supervisor Anthony Farrington clearly understands the
gravity of this issue when he said, "This war touches soil
everywhere." 

DU has been used since the early '90s in the casings of our
bombs to help them penetrate their targets and provide a
"dumping ground" for byproducts of our domestic nuclear
reactors. 

When a DU shell is fired, it ignites upon impact. It vaporizes
into tiny particles of radioactive dust, which then blow with
the tiniest of winds, eventually to settle out many miles from
the explosion site. 

Once they are inhaled and in the lungs, they can be transported
by the bloodstream to almost anywhere and their radioactivity
can be felt indefinitely. A single particle of DU lodged in a
lymph node can devastate the entire immune system. It is
strongly suspected that many of the seemingly unrelated symptoms
of "Gulf War Syndrome" suffered by our vets since the early '90s
are, in fact, a result of exposure to depleted uranium dust. 

Fischbein's photo exhibit will surely be, as Farrington said,
"thought provoking." How will our own soldiers escape the
effects of that very same dust especially those who have seen
multiple tours of duty in the land of "shock and awe"? How
tragic it is that children, as yet unborn, on all sides of the
conflict, will bear the greatest brunt of this misguided "war of
choice." Surely, in this war, there can be no victors. 

Bill Barrows

 Hidden Valley Lake

© 2005 Record-Bee.com 		   	 
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 64 Herald-Tribune: Review beryllium program
                                       
Help all who suffered as a result of government contracts 

July 31st 2005

Southwest Florida's congressional delegation needs to intervene,
again, in the federal government's handling of medical claims
related to the now-defunct American Beryllium Co. plant in
Tallevast.

From 1967 to 1992, the plant near the Manatee-Sarasota county
line produced weapons parts for the U.S. military. The work
exposed workers to beryllium, a toxic metal linked to chronic
lung disease and other illnesses.

In the past year, federal officials have expanded medical
coverage for workers at the plant and others like it around the
nation. But it's abundantly clear that the assistance program
has numerous flaws.

Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Longboat Key, and Sen. Bill Nelson,
D-Fla., have helped score two key victories in Tallevast:


The y pushed to make all contract workers eligible for aid.
Previously, the program was only open to federal employees.


They urged a review to make sure that official records accounted
for all the years that the plant did government work. As a
result, aid eligibility was extended to employees who worked
over a 25-year period -- double the years previously identified.

More help is needed now, and Harris, Nelson and other members of
the region's congressional delegation need to step forward.

In the Herald-Tribune last week, reporter Kathleen Cullinan
recounted the story of Charlie Ziegler, a former janitor at the
plant who suffers from problems similar to berylliosis, the lung
disease linked to beryllium exposure. Yet, federal officials
rejected Ziegler's claim for aid because he has failed to test
positive for sensitivity to beryllium.

Obviously, officials shouldn't approve claims without persuasive
medical proof. But Ziegler's case and others like it raise
serious doubts about the reliability of the sensitivity tests.
If former plant workers suffer from illnesses similar to
berylliosis, their cases deserve a thorough review.

Equally troubling is the story of Ziegler's wife and
brother-in-law, who've tested positive for beryllium sensitivity
and may have been exposed to traces of it brought home by
Ziegler on his clothing. The federal program offers no
assistance to family members of plant employees -- or, for that
matter, to neighbors who also might have been exposed. Those
flaws must be addressed.

The United States owes a tremendous debt to the employees of the
Tallevast plant. Their health can never be fully restored. But 
our government has a moral obligation to help every single person 
whose health has suffered as a result of government contracts 
involving beryllium. 


Last modified: July 31. 2005 12:00AM 	 	 		 		 		 

Sarasota Herald-Tribune. All rights reserved. Starting first
*****************************************************************
 65 Norwich Bulletin: Volunteers prepare for nuclear disaster

www.norwichbulletin.com
 
   Sunday, July 31, 2005   
  

 Norwich hosts a drill simulating an emergency at Millstone.
 
By JESSICA DURKIN Norwich Bulletin 

Tali Greener/Norwich Bulletin
 
Patty Small of Norwich, a volunteer "victim," is measured for
radiation contamination by Laurel Hill firefighter Corry Aanerud
Saturday during a mock disaster drill at Kelly Middle School in
Norwich.   

NORWICH-- Patty Small hopes to never use a radioactive
decontamination unit, but should that situation occur, the
Norwich resident will know what to do.

 "I think we should all, as citizens, go and practice these
things, because I feel more scared for current world events,"
Small, a volunteer contamination "victim," said. "This could
apply for any emergency: dirty bombs, weather, attacks."

 Small was among a group of more than 100 emergency personnel
and mock evacuees who spent Saturday morning preparing for a
potential real-life disaster scenario: a breach in contamination
of radioactive particles from the Millstone Nuclear Power
Station in Waterford.

 The drill was staged by Emergency Management of Norwich in
concert with local and federal public safety officials at Kelly
Middle School in Norwich, the official destination for 39,000
emergency evacuees within a 10-mile radius of the Waterford
nuclear complex.

 Small was led through three different steps of radioactive
decontamination that lasted about one hour.

 First she had to walk through a radioactive detector, similar
to the airport security screening checkpoints. Emergency
personnel determined she was "contaminated" and then sent her to
a more rigorous detection process where workers waved a wand
across her body parts to locate the area of contamination before
sending her to one of two decontamination shower units set up
outside.

 Under real-life circumstances, Small would have had to disrobe
and be given a powerful shower, but the mock run did not include
the full shower activation. She then was told to go to a Red
Cross Station for final "observation" by paramedics before she
could leave.

 "I thought it was very professional, I thought the controllers
and the players were very knowledgable, very patient," Small
said.

 Norwich is one of five towns in Connecticut to host the drills
mandated by the Federal Emergency Management Administrationy.
FEMA requires a drill every year at one of the designated host
towns on a rotating basis.

 "This is not just 'Let's show up and do this.' There's a lot of
training," said Wayne Sandford, deputy commissioner for the
Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
Sandford was at the site as a drill evaluator -- the emergency
crews were being graded on preparedness Saturday -- and as a
citizen evacuee.

 "I never really understood the commitment the host community
made," Sandford said.

 For other volunteer contamination victims, the idea of such a
disaster was not far from their minds.

 "It's kind of scary because if it was real, just the
implications that could happen," volunteer contamination
"victim" Karen Aubin said. "But it's also kind of reassuring."

Originally published July 31, 2005 

 Copyright ©2005 Norwich Bulletin. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 66 News.com.au: Hiroshima survivors speak 

NEWS.com.au (30-07-2005)
 
	 July 30, 2005 			 From:   		 		 			 [Survivor chart] Survivors

WHEN an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it was apparent
there would be few if any survivors. Yet, against all the odds,
some are still alive today, including one man, Akihiro
Takahashi, who was barely half a kilometre from the epicentre.
Shunned for many years by the authorities, they hid their
suffering for decades. 

As the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the
bombing on August 6, 1945, which ended World War II, 65
survivors of Hiroshima have come together to photographed in a
unique testament to survival. 

When the bomb was detonated 580m above Japan's seventh-largest
city at 8.15am, 300,000 residents had no time to look for
shelter. 

Only a third if the population survived, mostly on the city's
outskirts. Some who went into the city to look for loved ones
were later to perish from the effects of radiation. 

About 3000 "hibakusha", or bomb-affected people, are alive
today. 

Photographer Gerard Rancinan tracked down 65
hibakusha for a series of photographs to mark the 60th
anniversary next Saturday, including Akihiro Takahashi, the man
who survived just 550m away from ground zero. 

Some of the stories are as tragic as they are remarkable. Yukio
Yoshioka, who, aged 15 at the time, was 1.2km away from the
blast's epicentre, had his molecular structure altered. 

"The radiation modified my DNA and destroyed my reproductive
system," he said. "I've never known what it is to be a man." 

The 12.5 kiloton atom bomb dubbed "Little Boy" that hit
Hiroshima destroyed almost everything in a 5km radius, with a
shockwave that moved faster than the speed of sound and a
searing fireball that reached 10,000C. 

About 200,000 people died in the blast that, together with the
attack on Nagasaki three days later, spelt the end of World War
II, but almost 3000 people who were in the blast zone have
survived to this day to tell their tales. 

Most of them, like Miyako Yano, who was the only survivor from
her school, have no idea why they were spared. 

Despite surviving horrific burns and the radioactive fallout,
Kenso Sakurai went on to have nine healthy children. 

Itoe Niimi, who was 18 at the time and 1.3km away from the
blast, was not so lucky. She had three children, two of whom
were born with heart and circulatory problems. 

For years the hibakusha felt shunned and many hid the fact they
were survivors, even from their closest relatives. 

"My entire life I hid the fact that I was a hibakusha from my
husband. He died without knowing," Yaeko Yamamoto said. 

Takashi Hiyama, who was 12 in 1945, returned to his parents'
home to find it in ashen ruin. He has had heart disease and
blood cancer ever since. 

"We treated our burns with potato juice. It was useless, but it
gave the impression that we were doing something," he said. 

The radioactive fallout was fatal within 500m of ground zero and
many of those between 500m and 5km away suffered cancers as a
result. 

The heat generated by the bomb killed most people within a 1km
radius of the epicentre in an apocalyptic fireball that was hot
enough to melt glass and tiles. 

The shockwave from the blast created winds that reached almost
1600km/h, blowing over wooden houses within 2.3km of ground
zero. 

The bomb was detonated at an altitude of 600m, placing enormous
downward pressure on buildings below. 

Many of the victims became trapped under fallen structures and
burned to death. 		  		 		 		Search for more stories on this

Copyright 2005 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT + 10). 
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 67 San Bernardino County Sun: Company renegotiating perchlorate cleanup

Article Published: Saturday, July 30, 2005 -
 		   	 	
By Nikki Cobb, Staff Writer

As a plume of perchlorate inches further into Rialto's
groundwater, the city is trying to make sure those responsible
for its being there don't get off the hook.

 The city is suing San Bernardino County, the U.S. Department of
Defense and 140 companies and contractors in connection with the
contamination of Rialto's water with perchlorate, a rocket fuel
additive thought to cause thyroid malfunction.

 One contractor, Goodrich Corp., is renegotiating an agreement
that has shielded it from enforcement by Rialto and other
affected cities and water agencies.

 Kurt Berchtold, assistant executive officer for the Santa Ana
Regional Water Quality Control Board, said Goodrich's agreement
was with the board and the cities of Rialto, Fontana and Colton.
Also included is the West Valley Water District, which serves
parts of all three cities as well as some unincorporated county
areas. 

In the arrangement, Goodrich awarded the cities and district
$4million. In exchange, the water board agreed not to take
action against the contractor for a two-year period that ended
in January.

 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was not party to the
contract and did require Goodrich to do some investigation into
the extent of the perchlorate problem.

 Now that the agreement with the cities, the board and the
district has expired, Goodrich is back at the table negotiating
its next step.

 Davin Diaz is a research and policy advocate for the Center for
Community Action and Environmental Justice in San Bernardino. He
said he worries the company will get off easy, offering money to
avoid the bigger mess.

 "Our concern is that Goodrich will fork out some more money.
Four million is not much. It's pennies in the bucket,' he said.

 Diaz said Goodrich could be instrumental in getting other
defendants in the lawsuit to start the cleanup in earnest.
Goodrich has already filed suit against one other contractor,
Emhart Industries Inc. But Diaz would like them to do more.

 "We want them to clean up the whole plume,' Diaz said. "They're
not going to do it themselves. They need to go after Emhart, go
after the Department of Defense take the pressure off Rialto,
off the water board.

 "The theory behind this is if we force them to provide
replacement water to the impacted community members, they
themselves will go after the potentially responsible parties.'

 Goodrich officials declined to comment. But they said in a
statement that the company, which did business in Rialto from
1957 to 1963, is working with the regional water board t o
assess the problem and determine Goodrich's responsibility.

 Meanwhile, the county is taking steps to remedy its part in the
perchlorate contamination.

 Though the county never polluted with perchlorate, it's
included in the suit because it bought some contaminated land
and allowed a contractor to build excavating ponds that
exacerbated the perchlorate seep, Berchtold said.

 The county is building a $5million treatment facility, expected
to be finished in December.

 The treatment plant will pull water from the ground before it
reaches Rialto's wells, remove the perchlorate, then inject the
water into Rialto's groundwater supply.

 "The real culprit, we say, is the federal government. This
(contamination) comes from them making munitions for defense,'
said Rex Richardson, spokesman for the county's solid waste
division. "We are looking to partner with the water companies,
with Rialto, to pursue federal money' for the cleanup. 		   	 	
			
        Copyright © 2005 Los Angeles Newspaper Group     
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 68 L.A. Daily News: Perchlorate vandalism?

Article Published: Saturday, July 30, 2005 -
 		   	 	
Toxic levels oddly high at development site

By Kerry Cavanaugh, Staff Writer

WEST HILLS -- The developer of a 151-home community says highly
concentrated perchlorate could not have flowed naturally from
the nearby Santa Susana Field Lab to his property, and he
suspects the rocket-fuel byproduct was placed there deliberately.

 Centex Homes officials analyzed 82 samples of soil and foliage
taken from the property on Roscoe Boulevard, east of Valley
Circle. They say the levels of perchlorate were too high, too
sporadic and too recent to have flowed down Dayton Canyon Creek
from the field lab.

 "It seems like it was so overdone. There's just no way for
62,000 parts per million (of perchlorate) to land on this spot
through any mechanism other than being placed there," said
Richard Scott, an analyst with Allwest Remediation, which was
hired by Centex to test the site. 

Officials with the California Department of Toxic Substances
Control concur that perchlorate was dumped on the site. They
have assigned experts from their Glendale office to oversee the
cleanup of the chemical rather than specialists in Sacramento
who are handling the field lab decontamination.

 "Right now we do not see a connection so we are handling both
separate," said Jeanne Garcia, a DTSC spokeswoman.

 But longtime critics of the field laboratory said regulators
are prematurely ruling out Rocketdyne, which used perchlorate in
its rocket-engine testing. The chemical was found in storm water
leaving the hilltop, triggering a massive cleanup effort at the
lab, located less than two miles uphill from the Centex site.

 "What surprises me is that every time perchlorate is found in
the area -- like at Ahmanson Ranch, Runkle Canyon, Simi Valley
-- they say it's not coming from the most logical source in the
area," said Dan Hirsch, with the Committee to Bridge the Gap.

 Hirsch and Ali Tabidian, a geological sciences professor at
California State University, Northridge, have speculated that
perchlorate could have flowed down the steep canyon in water
that pooled in the flatlands.

 When the water evaporated, it left behind high concentrations
of perchlorate, which can cause thyroid problems.

 But Boeing Co., which owns the lab, disputes that theory.

 "We don't see anything that suggests that. There is no evidence
that connects our site with the Centex development," spokesman
John Mitchell said. 

Independent experts said the spotty occurrence and extremely
high levels are very unusual and confound easy explanation.

 To get such high readings would take pure perchlorate on the
soil or, perhaps, concentrated perchlorate recently released
into the creek from uphill, said Thomas Young, an associate
professor of civil and environmental engineering at University
of California, Davis.

 "Perchlorate in the surface soil isn't likely to persist. It's
either going to get washed off or infiltrated," said Young, who
was not familiar with the specifics of the case.

 Allwest took a handful of random soil samples on May 26 --
three days after the Daily News reported on community concern
about the lack of environmental testing of the property.

 Expecting to find nothing, Scott was shocked when all five
samples showed very high levels of perchlorate -- from 320 to
62,000 ppm.

 That's up to 850 times more potent than perchlorate found at
the field lab and nearly 8,000 times the level allowed for
residential development.

 Allwest then tested the soil in different areas of the property
and dug into the ground, testing up to three feet deep. In all,
there were 82 samples and 23 showed perchlorate above the 7.8
ppm limit.

 The highest concentrations were clustered along Dayton Canyon
Creek, and the perchlorate decreased significantly the deeper
geologists dug. They found perchlorate on the surface of leaves,
but not beneath rocks and a log -- causing Scott to believe the
chemical was sprayed or sprinkled on the surface.

 Samples taken a few feet away found no perchlorate, and tests
taken up the creek, closer to the field lab, also showed no
contamination.

 That led Scott and DTSC officials to rule out Rocketdyne as the
source.

 Centex has committed to cleaning up all the contamination prior
to construction. The company is now developing a cleanup plan
and decontamination will be supervised by the DTSC.

 "To think you might be a victim of vandalism, it's been a
concern," said Jon Fitzpatrick, project manager with Centex Los
Angeles and Ventura Division. "We're confident science proves
it, but explaining it to the public is another thing." 

--
Kerry Cavanaugh, (818) 713-3746 		   	 	
     
Copyright © 2005 Los Angeles Newspaper Group     
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 69 Las Vegas SUN: Texas Family Fights Uranium Mining 

Today: July 31, 2005 at 17:42:35 PDT 

By LYNN BREZOSKY ASSOCIATED PRESS 

RICARDO, Texas (AP) - 

The extended Garcia family has lived for five generations in a
cluster of frame and trailer homes here that now has a sad
distinction: Their water is contaminated with uranium at levels
so high the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration has
told them to stop drinking it and see their doctors. 

State environmental officials and the company that has been
mining uranium in the area for much of the last 20 years say the
contamination is natural seepage from a vein of the radioactive
material that runs near their well. 

But the Garcias and other Kleberg County residents don't accept
that explanation and are fighting to prevent further mining. 

"That's weird that it's the only place and nobody else has it,"
Humberto Garcia said. "It just kind of raises questions. A
quarter-mile away we have relatives, and their well is OK." 

Lewisville-based Uranium Resources Inc. came to the area in the
1980s, sucking uranium-filled water from deep underground for
processing. But the activity was suspended on and off through
the late 1990s, when prices plummeted from more than $30 a pound
to about $7. Claiming financial problems, the company failed to
clean up the area or restore the water below. 

"The promise was they would take all the uranium and leave the
water clean," said Teo Saenz, president of STOP (South Texas
Opposes Pollution). "They didn't." 

Demand for uranium has increased recently, and URI has proposed
two new mines. Global stockpiles of uranium are dwindling and
several countries, including China and India, have plans to
build nuclear power plants. 

STOP members, who number about a dozen, say an engineer mapped
the underground for them in the mid-1990s and accurately
predicted that contamination from the mine field would migrate
first to the Garcia wells. They now fear poisoned water will
seep toward the water supply of nearby Kingsville, population
26,000. 

Mark Pelizza, a URI vice president, said those concerns are
unfounded. 

At a public hearing Monday, Garcia and other residents will make
their case against the company mining a new area, arguing that
since URI failed to clean up its former operations it shouldn't
be allowed to do more. The administrative judge will make a
recommendation to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. 

In October 2004, the Garcias received a letter from the EPA
informing them that water samples submitted by URI showed
uranium levels in their water were five to eight times above the
agency's standard for public drinking water. The letter said
they had an elevated risk for cancer, and that they should stop
drinking their water and see their doctors. 

Pelizza said URI has operated prudently and that the residents
can't see what cleanup they have already done. He said their
operations have nothing to do with the poisoning on the Garcias'
property. 

"I think the evidence is the uranium deposit underlies their
houses, and it is established that it natural," Pelizza said. 

STOP members hold little hope that they'll stop what will be
URI's third and fourth mines. Kleberg County officials reached a
settlement with URI in December that the company must show it is
cleaning old mines before beginning new mining activity. 

"The settlement basically says they will make a 'good faith
effort' to clean up the water," said Mark Walsh, a member of
STOP. "It was a very big blow to us." 

County Judge Pete De La Garza said the agreement, which requires
URI to pay the county $20,000 for an expert to monitor the
cleanup, was the county's best route toward getting at least $5
million worth of cleanup done. 

"We had two choices, the way I see it," he said. "The first
choice was just to not allow them to mine, let them go away and
leave our water dirty. The second I thought was more prudent -
to get our water cleaned up." 

But Kleberg County residents who leased land to URI say they
wished their families hadn't bought into promises 25 years ago
of easy royalties, regional prosperity and better-than-before
cleanup. 

"It's been how many years now that we cannot farm the land?"
said Elizabeth Cumberland, whose family leased land to URI in
1980. "I personally believe we have simply lost that land." 

All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
 70 AU ABC: Senator claims NT offered waste dump 'sweetener'
 
(ACST)Monday, 1 August 2005. 08:33 (AEDT)Monday, 1 August 2005.

 Country Liberal Party Senator Nigel Scullion has revealed the
Northern Territory was offered a "sweetener" in return for
hosting a radioactive waste dump. 

Senator Scullion says while the dump is intended for
Commonwealth waste, only an exception will be made for the
Territory. 

The Senator says a written offer was made to the Martin
Government for the transfer of radioactive waste from the Royal
Darwin Hospital and the Ranger uranium mine to the new dump. 

The Senator says the arrangement was probably intended to
encourage the Territory Government to accept the facility. 

"Well I'm not sure, you know, you can take it any way," he said. 

"I would suggest quite pragmatically that's probably the case.
That there is something in it for the Territory because you know
the building of a $30-40 million facility, [it is] self evident
that you wouldn't need to build your only level of amenity that
may be somewhat less than that, but still a considerable cost.
So no doubt it was a sweetener." 

He says the arrangement is a one-off and would not open the
floodgates for other states. 

"The Commonwealth has said very clearly that the only invitation
to extend the level of amenity is to the Northern Territory
simply because it's placed here...it's the intention to build a
facility just to that level of amenity, to no other," he said. 

Chief Minister Clare Martin is yet to comment on the offer.

*****************************************************************
 71 Deseret News: Goshute member ordered to repay $17,300 to bank 

[deseretnews.com] 

Saturday, July 30, 2005 

He and 3 others took tribal funds by using a fake court order 

By Geoffrey Fattah Deseret Morning News 

A federal judge Friday ordered a member of 
the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes to repay to Zions Bank funds 
that he admitted to inappropriately taking from a tribal bank 
account and using for things that did not directly benefit the 
band. 

During a restitution hearing, U.S. District Judge Tena 
Campbell ordered Sammy Blackbear to pay back $17,300 to the bank.

Last March Blackbear pleaded guilty to one count of theft 
of assets from an Indian tribal organization. Blackbear, along 
with three other band members, used a fake court order to 
withdraw bank funds, of which prosecutors say Blackbear was 
responsible for $25,000. 

Blackbear's attorney, David Finlayson, said Blackbear 
re-deposited $4,367 and used other funds to pay bills associated 
with the band. However, Finlayson acknowledged that $10,000 went 
into Blackbear's personal account for travel and other expenses 
and $7,300 went to pay attorney fees that were not authorized by 
the band. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Stanley Olsen said although 
Blackbear was charged with taking funds from the Goshute band, 
the band was made financially whole through a $44,000 settlement 
with Zions Bank, and that it is the bank that deserves 
restitution. 

After reviewing case law, Campbell agreed that 
restitution should go to the bank, although she called the 
$44,000 settlement amount too "murky" to use to gauge an exact 
restitution amount. 

Blackbear was charged in December 2003 along with fellow 
band members Marlinda Moon, Miranda Wash and tribal attorney 
Duncan Steadman. Those three have pleaded not guilty and await 
trial next September. 

Wash, Blackbear and Moon claimed they were elected tribal 
heads during an election in September 2001 that was not 
recognized by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. The group is 
part of a faction opposed to current Skull Valley Goshute Band 
Chairman Leon Bear. For the past several years, the band, who 
make their home in Utah's western desert, has been plagued by 
infighting and accusations of corruption. 

Last June, Bear was ordered by a federal judge to pay the 
IRS $13,101 in unpaid taxes and the Goshute Band $31,500 for 
duplicate stipends he billed the tribe. Bear was also placed on 
three years probation. 

Bear is best known for his support of storing high-level 
nuclear waste on Goshute land, which has raised cries of protest 
not only from other band members, but from state leaders. 

Finlayson said many tribal members have been frustrated 
by the infighting and the fact that there hasn't been an 
election in years. Out of that frustration, Finlayson said 
Blackbear and others tried to "reclaim" tribal funds they felt 
were not being used properly. 

Blackbear is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 13. 
Prosecutors say they will attempt to get further restitution for 
Zions Bank when the three remaining defendants go to trial. 

E-mail: gfattah@desnews.com 

© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 72 Deseret News: Idaho could be headed for another nuclear wastes
battle 

[deseretnews.com] 

Sunday, July 31, 2005 

By Christopher Smith 
Associated Press 

BOISE — A decade after cutting an unprecedented deal forcing the 
federal government to ship tons of highly radioactive refuse 
out-of-state for disposal, Idaho may be entering a new round of 
nuclear waste wars with the U.S. Department of Energy. 

State officials say they are concerned the Energy 
Department has been making conflicting statements whether it 
will transport waste produced by a proposed plutonium-238 
production plant at the Idaho National Laboratory complex to New 
Mexico for permanent burial in an underground repository. 

The scientist who oversees the department's Waste 
Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico initially told the 
Associated Press that the plant wouldn't take the Idaho material 
because it would be a a byproduct of civilian projects for NASA 
and national security agencies, and therefore wouldn't qualify 
as waste from "atomic energy defense activities." 

Only defense program waste is eligible for burial in the 
deep geologic salt beds near Carlsbad that Congress set aside in 
1979. 

But after conferring with department officials in Idaho, 
who have maintained in public hearings around the state this 
month that the 20 cubic meters of "transuranic" waste created 
each year — plutonium-contaminated gloves, tools, rags and other 
rubbish that would fill 96 55-gallon drums — will go to New 
Mexico for burial, the dump's chief scientist Roger Nelson said 
the Idaho waste would indeed be eligible for burial at the 
out-of-state defense waste dump. 

"Because the proposal calls for the use of plutonium-238 
in national security applications, we believe any potential 
transuranic waste would be eligible for disposal at WIPP," he 
said. 

A 1996 opinion by the department's then-general counsel 
Robert Nordhaus outlines which defense nuclear projects are 
eligible to deposit waste at the New Mexico dump. 

"A strict interpretation of the Nordhaus memo does not 
allow NASA applications to qualify," Nelson said in an earlier 
interview. Later, he and other department officials declined to 
specify how they subsequently concluded plutonium projects for 
NASA and national security agencies would actually be considered 
defense activities under the 1996 guidelines. 

"It would be premature to comment on any specifics 
because no decision has been made on the project at this point," 
said Tim Jackson, a spokesman for the Energy Department. 

Kathleen Trever, nuclear waste policy adviser to Gov. 
Dirk Kempthorne, R-Idaho, said the state is refraining from 
endorsing the $300 million plutonium project. 

"An important lesson we've learned is to make sure the 
disposal site says we can accept the waste," Trever said. "We 
won't be in full support of the project until it's demonstrated 
that a clear disposal path has been arranged for all the waste." 

Idaho has a high-profile history of squaring off against 
the federal government over nuclear waste storage at the 
890-square-mile complex, which sits above the Snake River Plain 
aquifer. The aquifer is one of the largest in the world, 
containing about as much water as Lake Erie, and is the major 
source of irrigation and drinking water for more than 10,000 
square miles of the southeastern corner of the state. 

In 1988, Democratic Gov. Cecil Andrus unilaterally 
forbade additional shipments of radioactive waste left over from 
nuclear weapons production in Colorado from entering Idaho. In 
1995, Republican Gov. Phil Batt forced the Energy Department to 
agree to remove all radioactive waste from the site by 2036 
under a series of strict timelines and to limit the amount of 
new waste brought into the state. 

While the Batt agreement has forced the department to 
ship tons of defense-related plutonium waste out of Idaho to the 
New Mexico repository, the federal government is struggling to 
meet the deal's quota requirement of 6,000 cubic meters removed 
from 2002 through 2005. At the end of last month, the department 
had only exported 1,235 cubic meters over the first two and a 
half years of the three-year period and appears unlikely to ship 
all of the remaining 4,765 cubic meters by Dec. 31. 

The Bush administration wants to consolidate in Idaho all 
the production of plutonium-powered "space batteries" that will 
be used for NASA space missions and unspecified national 
security applications. The batteries won't be used in any 
weapons, military satellites or missile defense systems, 
according to a draft environmental impact statement released 
last month. The current stockpile of plutonium-238 is running 
low, and the Energy Department wants to begin producing 11 
pounds of the highly radioactive material per year for 35 years 
beginning in 2011. 

The department's position that plutonium waste from the 
Idaho project would qualify for burial at the New Mexico dump 
could trigger a legal battle or a renegotiation of the terms of 
the federal land withdrawal deal between the agency and the 
state of New Mexico, said Anne deLain Clark, coordinator of New 
Mexico's task force on radioactive waste. 

"This does not sound like defense waste and from New 
Mexico's point of view, anything not already established in the 
current inventory increases amount of waste that comes into the 
state so we would definitely have concerns," Clark said. 

Because plutonium-238 is made from another fissile 
material, neptunium-237, department officials may argue that the 
"pedigree" of the Idaho plutonium is rooted in a defense 
application because that material was originally created for 
defense use at DOE's Savannah River complex in South Carolina. 

But Nelson, chief scientist at the New Mexico repository, 
said the 1996 Nordhaus memo doesn't address such situations. 

"If the material was born with a defense pedigree, then 
no matter what you do to it in the future is it still 
defense-related?" said Nelson. "We haven't been asked yet and if 
we are, that's going to take a lot of legal scrutiny to 
determine." 

© 2005 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 73 Las Vegas SUN: Yucca Mountain license application facing new delay 

Today: July 31, 2005 at 18:38:7 PDT 

By ERICA WERNER ASSOCIATED PRESS 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department likely will not submit
its license application to build Yucca Mountain until March 2006
at the earliest, several months later than the most recent
target date, according to an updated project timeline. 

The Energy department plans to update a Nuclear Regulatory
Commission licensing board on the timeline this week. An Energy
Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as
not to interfere with the licensing process, disclosed the
timeline to The Associated Press. 

Under Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, the Energy Department
cannot submit its license application to build the nuclear waste
dump until it publicly releases background documents for the
application. DOE must certify, six months before submitting the
license application, that all relevant documents have been
disclosed through a Web-based Licensing Support Network that can
be viewed by the public at http://www.lsnnet.gov . 

Under the updated timeline, the certification would not happen
until September or later, the official said. That would make
March 2006 the earliest date DOE could submit its license
application. 

DOE had hoped to submit the license application last December,
and it certified in June 2004 that it had made the background
documents available as required. That certification was rejected
as inadequate by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission board. 

After that setback, DOE said it would aim for this December.
That date has now slipped as well. 

The Energy Department official said no new date has been set.
The official emphasized that the department's priority is to
ensure that this time, the certification passes muster. To that
end, a two-step process has been established that will involve
review of the certification by a department manager and an
outside team. 

The official said the Energy Department has completed 85 percent
to 90 percent of the work of entering the millions of relevant
documents into the Licensing Support Network. 

Yucca Mountain, planned for 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has
been beset by a series of problems, including an appeals court's
rejection last year of the government's proposed radiation
safety standard for the dump. This spring, internal e-mails
became known suggesting government workers on the dump had
falsified data. 

The Environmental Protection Agency is still developing a new
radiation standard, and the contents of the e-mails are under
review, though DOE has concluded preliminarily that the
scientific basis for the project remains sound. 

Yucca Mountain is meant to hold 77,000 tons of nuclear waste for
10,000 years and beyond. 

All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
*****************************************************************
 74 Idaho Statesman: Ecology group enters waste deal

07-31-2005                

Statesman staff
 
Edition Date: 07-30-2005
 Email This ArticlePrinter Friendly Page 

US Ecology Washington Inc., a subsidiary of Boise-based American
Ecology Corp., has entered into a 10-year agreement with the
state of Washington to continue operating a radioactive waste
disposal facility on the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford
Reservation near Richland, Wash.

Terms include four 10-year renewal options and an annual,
inflation-adjusted rental payment of about $63,000.   







*****************************************************************
 75 Herald-Tribune Tallevast ground-water cleanup won't start for at least a year
 	 	 	 	 	
By SCOTT CARROLL
 
TALLEVAST -- It will be at least another year before Lockheed
Martin begins cleaning up ground water pollution here.

And the company may focus only on the area around the plant that
caused the contamination and not address the tainted ground
water that seeped beneath dozens of nearby homes.

Lockheed sent a report to the state Friday that details several
methods it is considering to clean up part of an estimated
130-acre plume of ground water pollution that leaked from the
former American Beryllium Co. plant on Tallevast Road.

Over the next year, Lockheed will test the methods, which
include pumping the tainted water through filters, treating it
with chemicals and heating it to break down the pollutants.

When those tests are completed, Lockheed will turn over the
results to the state Department of Environmental Protection,
which will determine which method, or combination of methods, to
use.

Most of the testing and actual cleanup will focus on the ground
water beneath the five-acre property of the former plant, where
the highest concentrations of trichloroethene, dioxane and other
potentially dangerous chemicals were found.

Outside the plant perimeter, the pollution is low enough that
the best cleanup method might be something called natural
attenuation -- basically doing nothing and letting the pollution
break down naturally over time, Lockheed said.

"We're looking at that treatment method off-site because the
concentrations are lower and it's less intrusive to the
community," Lockheed spokeswoman Meredith Rouse Davis said.

Tallevast community leader Wanda Washington dismissed Friday's
report, saying it downplays or sidesteps completely the really
important issue -- the health of residents.

"To me it's like reading a comic book. There's no truth in it,"
Washington said.

Lockheed and state and local governments should focus on moving
residents out of harm's way, and then worry about cleaning up
the pollution, she said.

"We've already established the fact the community is
contaminated," Washington said. "They need to stop all this s---
and move the people."

In addition to learning which methods are most effective, the
year-long round of tests will also shed light on how long the
cleanup will take and its cost, Davis said.

"We're going to make sure all the methods are safe, and the DEP
will review our recommendations to be sure we don't expose
residents to any potential problems," Davis said.

DEP spokeswoman Pamala Vazquez said she couldn't comment on the 
proposal because the agency hadn't reviewed it.

Vazquez also said while the agency won't hold public hearings 
before selecting a cleanup plan, the Tallevast community will be 
included in the decision-making process.

"The whole time with this project, every time we've moved forward 
we've shared information with the public," Vazquez said. "We 
incorporate them pretty much every step we take."

Davis also said Lockheed will have a say in the cleanup program.

"We are planning to work with the community, to talk through the 
options before we go forward," she said. "Their input is needed 
in the final decision. That's critical.

The American Beryllium Co. plant operated from 1961 until 1996. 
It processed beryllium, a light, strong metal, into parts for 
nuclear warheads. Many of the chemicals now in the ground water, 
including trichlroethene, were used as cleaning solvents at the 
plant.

Lockheed obtained the plant property in 1996 when it bought 
American Beryllium's parent company, the Loral Corp. Lockheed has 
since sold the property, but is responsible for cleaning up 
pollution left by the former plant.

Lockheed officials initially said early last year that the plume 
of ground water pollution covered about five acres. The company 
later said it was 50 acres, and recent tests put it at about 130 
acres.

Those tests have found levels of trichlroethene, which has been 
associated with cancer, at 10,000 times the state standard.

Washington and others in the predominantly black community of 
about 85 homes say the pollution is responsible for a 
higher-than-normal rate of cancer and other illnesses.

Another year of testing just means another year of uncertainty, 
Washington said.

"People don't feel safe here." 

Last modified: July 30. 2005 12:00AM                                                             

newspaper and SNN Channel 6 ©
Sarasota Herald-Tribune. All rights reserved. Starting first
*****************************************************************
 76 Chillicothe Gazette: Pike stream to be tested

www.chillicothegazette.com
 
   Sunday, July 31, 2005   

 State to gauge radiation levels to determine safety of Big Run
 
PIKETON (AP) - State officials will perform radiation tests of a
stream near a former uranium enrichment plant to determine
whether the water is safe.

Environmental groups have said their tests show the Big Run
stream near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in southern
Ohio is highly radioactive, but the federal government says the
water in the stream is safe.

The nearby plant, which once enriched uranium for weaponry and
nuclear fuel, was closed in 2001 when operations were
consolidated to Paducah, Ky.

A $1.5 billion facility to enrich uranium using a new technology
is expected to be completed in Piketon by 2010.

The U.S. Department of Energy launched a medical screening
program in 1999 for current and former workers at 13 of the
nation's most contaminated sites, including the Portsmouth plant
in southern Ohio.

Tests have been done on thousands of workers who may have been
exposed to asbestos, beryllium, plutonium, nickel, solvents,
acids and high levels of noise through their work at the plants.

Environmental groups say foam from two spots in Big Run, about
65 miles south of Columbus in Pike County, tested at least 100
times above background radiation levels.

The Portsmouth-Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and
Security and the RadioActivist Campaign, based in Hanford,
Wash., reported the high radiation levels earlier this month.
Ewan Todd, a member of the group, said the stream-radiation
readings show that the Energy Department and the United States
Enrichment Corp., which runs the plant, can't be trusted to
operate the new plant without recontaminating the environment.

The Energy Department and the enrichment facility say the water
is safe.

"The bottom line is there is not a reason to be concerned," said
USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency will perform radiation
tests, probably in August and September, as part of an ongoing
effort to measure stream health, according to Maria Galanti, the
EPA's project coordinator overseeing environmental cleanup at
the 3,000-acre Piketon site.

Galanti said she has questions about the testing methods of the
environmental group and of the federal government.

Big Run, a tributary of the Scioto River, was one of several
area streams that contained fish with elevated radiation levels
in 1992.

Radiation levels five times above the natural level showed up in
stream sediments along with increased levels of arsenic,
cadmium, chromium and mercury.

Originally published July 31, 2005 

 Copyright ©2005 Chillicothe Gazette. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 77 Salt Lake Tribune: Goshute dissident ordered to repay funds in
theft case 

Article Last Updated: 07/30/2005 12:30:02 AM 

Blackbear still faces sentencing; trials are set for others 
charged in the bank case 

By Judy Fahys The Salt Lake Tribune 

The power struggle within the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes 
landed in court again Friday. 

The latest round concluded with a federal judge ordering 
would-be vice chairman Sammy Blackbear to repay $17,300 in a 
theft case that sprung from the tiny band's ongoing leadership 
dispute. 

U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell ordered Blackbear to pay 
restitution to Zions Bank, the ultimate victim of Blackbear's 
crime, theft from an Indian tribe. 

Zions was one of three banks Blackbear and two other tribal 
members accessed, with the help of attorney Duncan Steadman, 
after a 2001 tribal election. 

Along with Steadman, Marlinda Moon as the supposed newly 
elected tribal chairman and Miranda Wash as secretary, Blackbear 
closed tribal accounts at Zions, Bank One and Brighton Bank to 
consolidate them into one they controlled. The funds amounted to 
nearly $1.4 million. 

But, the federal government alleges, the election was 
invalid and the group used phony legal paperwork to tap into the 
accounts. 

"He [Blackbear] simply had no authorization to spend on 
behalf of the tribe," Assistant U.S. Attorney Stanley H. Olsen 
told Campbell at the Friday restitution hearing. 

Moon, Wash and Steadman are set to stand trial in September, 
the week before Blackbear's sentencing. Besides having to pay 
restitution, Blackbear faces up to five years of jail time and a 
fine of up to $250,000. 

The original charges could have landed Blackbear in jail for 
more than five years and a fine of up to $250,000. But, in 
March, prosecutors reduced the theft charge and dropped five 
bank fraud charges against Blackbear in exchange for a guilty 
plea and his help in prosecuting their fraud and theft case 
against Skull Valley Chairman Leon D. Bear. 

Defense attorney David Finlayson told the judge Blackbear 
had used the money for travel and other expenses related to 
tribal affairs, such as paying past-due phone bills, attorney 
fees and a tribal child-welfare worker. 

Bear, who, with his niece, continues to lead the 171-member 
tribe, was sentenced last month to three years probation, back 
taxes and fines, and $31,542 in restitution for embezzling 
tribal funds and cheating on his taxes. 

Blackbear has been challenging Bear's leadership for years. 
He and his executive committee have been among Bear's harshest 
critics, and they believed they had won in the disputed 2002 
election. 

The dissidents also accused him of misusing funds from 
Goshute ventures, including revenues from the use of reservation 
lands for a multibillion-dollar storage site for high-level 
nuclear waste now awaiting a license from the U.S Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission. Blackbear and other dissidents have asked 
for help from state and federal courts, the federal Bureau of 
Indian Affairs and an NRC licensing panel only to have them all 
say the corruption allegations are beyond their jurisdictions. 

Under Bear's leadership, the tribe sued Zions, and in 
October 2002, Zions paid an undisclosed settlement that was 
slightly less than the $45,800 Blackbear's group had withdrawn 
shortly after the election. Because the bank had compensated the 
Goshutes, it was the bank that was owed money. 

Prosecutors are expected to seek more restitution for Zions 
in the September trial. 

fahys@sltrib.com 

Â© Copyright 2005, The Salt Lake Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 78 WIVB TV4 Buffalo: Did FMC Handle Radioactive Waste & Agent Orange?

(Middleport, NY, July 29, 2005) - - Recently-uncovered documents
concerning work at the FMC Corporation are raising serious
concerns with Royalton-Hartland school officials and some
Middleport residents. 

The documents indicate FMC, years ago, shipped out tons of
radioactive waste from the facility. 

Papers also claim FMC had contracts with the government to
handle two of the main ingredients used in Agent Orange, the
toxic herbicide used in Vietnam. 

FMC officials deny ever working with Agent Orange. 

Brian Vain, FMC plant manager, said, "However, we did in fact
handle, along with many other herbicides over our history, the
two herbicides that comprise Agent Orange -- 2-4-D and 2-4-5-T.
They are both regularly-available, commercially-registered
herbicides." 

FMC officials believe the Middleport plant might have used
low-level radioactive isotopes in research and development,
years ago, but they are long gone.   

  
Copyright 2000 - 2005 WorldNow and WIVB. All Rights Reserved.
*****************************************************************
 79 Pahrump Valley Times: Yucca advocates visit Nye County 

July 29, 2005

By PHILLIP GOMEZ PVT 

HORACE LANGFORD JR. / PVT

 Yucca advocates visiting the Pahrump Valley Times on Thursday 
included from left, Charles Pray, Maine State Nuclear Safety 
Advisor; LeRoy Koppendrayer, chairman of the Minnesota Public 
Utilities Commission; David A. Wright, South Carolina Public 
Service Commissioner; and David Swanson, interim director of Nye 
County's nuclear waste repository project office. Other members 
of the Yucca Mountain Task Force are not pictured.
 
The year 2005 is not an election year, but you would never know
it in Southern Nevada. 

With the House of Representatives passing a massive energy bill
on Thursday, the nuclear energy industry and its advocates are
rallying to make sure that nuclear reactor plant production is a
major part of the nation's energy strategy for the next century.
A new generation of nuclear power plants will need a secure,
well-funded site for radioactive waste disposal; and for a new
national task force working to that end, the targeted waste site
is Nevada's Yucca Mountain right here in Nye County.

 Five members of the Yucca Mountain Task Force, a lobbying group
representing the nuclear industry and state regulatory
authorities, visited Nye County officials and toured the Yucca
Mountain Repository. They also came by the Pahrump Valley Times
to promote Yucca Mountain and funding for waste shipping
initiatives. 

The task force is working with Nye County commissioners to form
a coalition to advocate for full Yucca Mountain funding in
Congress. 

"It's been studied, and studied and studied," said LeRoy
Koppendrayer, a task force member and chair of the public
utilities commission of Minnesota. "It's time to move forward."

 Although recently reported that the U.S. Energy Department
would submit its application for licensure to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission at the end of July, David Blee, executive
director of the U.S. Transport Council, said it would not be
submitted until September at the earliest, and possibly not
until after next year. The application will then be studied for
three or four years before the NRC makes a decision on Yucca
Mountain's safety design, Blee said.

 If given pre-approval, the repository could begin construction
by 2010 at the earliest, he said. It could begin accepting
nuclear waste by 2012.

 "That's an ambitious schedule," warned David Swanson, interim
director of Nye County's nuclear waste repository project office.

 The National Transportation Project through the Caliente
corridor could begin construction early, by 2007, Swanson said,
after completion of an environmental impact statement on the
railroad. All of that presumes that Congress approves the
railroad.

 But events may be working in favor of Yucca's success. Some 61
civil suits have been lodged against the Department of Energy
for failure to retrieve waste from nuclear plants as earlier
agreed upon, said Charles Pray, co-chairman of the task force.
The high-level waste is generated in 39 states, by both private
energy providers and the military. No such waste is generated in
Nevada. 

As for the court ruling last year questioning the Energy
Department's radiation standard, Blee said, "It's not a
showstopper." The Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled
to make a ruling in 

September, he said.

 The e-mail controversy last spring also doesn't deter the task
force. They're optimistic about the repository and gladdened
about its site crew's knowledge and enthusiasm.

 As for Yucca Mountain itself, "It's a resource," said David A.
Wright, co-chairman of the group. "It's not waste," he said in
reference to the anticipated future reuse of the radioactive
waste material.

 "We're very impressed with the (political) leadership out
here," said Wright. "They're incredible. There's lots of
similarity with (South Carolina's) Savannah River plant." 

The task force met with Nye County commissioners Candice
Trummell and Gary Hollis.

 "We often feel the naysayers get the most attention," said
Swanson, "but when we get people who are willing to help and
bring some logic and reason to the process, that makes me very
happy."

 The task force intends to provide "a fresh voice to the
critical importance of expeditious implementation of the Yucca
Mountain program, given its vital economic, energy and national
security considerations. - as well as the importance of progress
on Yucca Mountain to new nuclear energy plant operation,"
according to task force members.

For comment or questions, please e-mail
webmaster@pahrumpvalleytimes.com
Copyright © Pahrump Valley Times, 1997 - 2005 
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 80 Las Vegas RJ: HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE: Washington court: Initiative can stand 
 
Saturday, July 30, 2005
 
Waste ban might hold even if parts ruled unconstitutional 

By SHANNON DININNY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
 
YAKIMA, Wash. -- An initiative that bars the U.S. Department of
Energy from sending any more waste to the Hanford nuclear site
until all existing waste there is cleaned up might stand even if
a federal judge finds parts of it are unconstitutional, the
state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
 
 The federal government has sued seeking to overturn Initiative
297 on grounds that it violates the federal government's
authority over interstate commerce and nuclear waste. The case
is before U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald in Yakima, who will
decide the constitutionality of the initiative.
 
 The state, which is defending the measure, had asked McDonald
to allow the state Supreme Court to first decide if the entire
measure would be nullified if McDonald finds part of it
unconstitutional.
 
 The state justices held that even if the judge rules that some
parts of the initiative are unconstitutional, that does not
necessarily invalidate the rest of it.
 
 The state court did not decide on the constitutionality of the
initiative. The case now returns to McDonald for a decision on
that question.
 
 At issue are the federal government's plans for disposing of
waste from nuclear weapons production nationwide.
 
 The Energy Department chose Hanford to dispose of some mildly
radioactive waste and mixed low-level waste, which is laced with
chemicals.
 
 The south-central Washington site also would serve as a
packaging center for some transuranic waste before it is shipped
elsewhere for long-term disposal. Transuranic waste is highly
radioactive and can take thousands of years to decay to safe
levels. 
The initiative has not been enforced pending resolution of the
lawsuit, and waste shipments to the site already had been halted
under another lawsuit.
 
 The state also asked its highest court for clarification on
several issues, the first being the definition of "mixed waste"
under state law.
 
 The federal government had argued that the initiative expanded
the definition of mixed waste, and the high court agreed.
However, the court ruled that the state has clear responsibility
for characterizing waste in unlined trenches, which had been
another question that was raised.
 
 The state also questioned whether the initiative bars movement
of nuclear waste already on the site. The court ruled that it
does not.
 
 Still unresolved is whether the initiative affects waste at
Navy sites in Washington state.
 
 "We're disappointed that they didn't agree with us on a narrow
construct on the definition of mixed waste," said Sheryl
Hutchison, spokeswoman for the state Department of Ecology. "But
ultimately what we wanted here was clarity, which we have. Now
we can go back to federal court to argue the case."
 
 Washington state voters overwhelmingly approved I-297 last
November. The measure was sponsored by Hanford watchdog group
Heart of America Northwest.
 
 For 40 years, the Hanford nuclear site made plutonium for the
nation's nuclear weapons, beginning with the top-secret
Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. Today, it is the
nation's most contaminated nuclear site. Cleanup costs are
expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion, with the work to
be finished by 2035.
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
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 81 Tri-City Herald: Mitigation for reactors should be spent here 

Opinions

This story was published Sunday, July 31st, 2005 

The state's Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council can claim
technical compliance with an agreement on how to spend a $3.5
million pool of cash set aside to benefit our local environment. 

But claims that hinge on a technicality, rather than the spirit
of an agreement, ring hollow. Frankly, the council's actions
look like a cash grab to benefit favored projects of a handful
of state officials at the expense of the fund's intended use. 

It takes a minute to explain this raid on local resources, but
bear with us. It's our community that ends up short-changed if
local environmentalists, elected officials and others don't
rally to the cause. 

And they need to do it soon and loudly before nearly half of
money shifts to distant projects. 

Here's the problem. 

Two years ago, the Bonneville Power Administration agreed to pay
the state $3.5 million to help mitigate the effects on fish and
wildlife caused by additional delays in restoring the sites of
two unfinished nuclear reactors on the Columbia River north of
Richland. 

Because Benton County bears the brunt of any delay in completing
the cleanup, the agreement called for "the bulk of the funds to
be spent for mitigation in Benton County." 

So far, the money has been spent appropriately. Of the $685,000
purchase price for a 574-acre preserve atop Badger Mountain,
$485,000 was allocated out of the nuclear site restoration
money. 

It may even be reasonable to share some of the money, since it's
at least conceivable that bordering counties might suffer some
of the ill effects from the loss of habitat in Benton County. 

But the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council -- composed of a
chairman appointed by the governor and representatives of four
state agencies -- is interpreting "bulk" to mean the bare
minimum of 51 percent. 

Worse, the council seems to consider the range of where it's
justified to spend the mitigation money as just about anywhere
it pleases. 

How else to explain the group's decision to negotiate matching
grants to environmental projects in Kittitas and Walla Walla
counties in moves that could commit as much as $1.7 million of
the mitigation money . 

The smaller of the two proposals -- issuing a grant up to
$400,000 for a project to improve fish passage at Hofer Dam on
the Touchet River in Walla Walla County -- is the less
egregious. At least Benton and Walla Walla counties share a
stretch of the Columbia River. 

But the most of the money siphoned off from Benton County --
around 37 percent of the total mitigation fund -- is destined
for land purchases in Kittitas County. 

The proposal calls for granting up to $1.3 million to acquire
17,500 acres of critical habitat for bighorn sheep, deer,
steelhead, elk and sage grouse in and around the site of a
proposed wind farm near Cle Elum. 

It's a worthy project, connecting a mish-mash of private and
public lands at a total cost of around $7 million to benefit
fish and wildlife. 

But the state needs to find other sources of funding, not grab
money meant for Benton County just because it seems easily
accessible. The corridor state officials hope to create is about
a two-hour drive from the lost habitat the money is supposed to
help replace. 

Yes, $1,750,001, a buck more than a 50-50 split, would
technically constitute the "bulk" of the mitigation fund. But
the environmental damage from the unfinished reactors lies 100
percent within Benton County. 

A more reasonable definition would be a closer to 90 percent.
Benton County interests need to fight for their fair share. 

© 2005 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services
    
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