***************************************************************** 12/03/01 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 9.284 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS 1 Bid to block Sellafield expansion rejected 2 Bid to block Sellafield expansion rejected 3 Lithuania unable to close nuclear power plant on its own - 4 Ukraine ready to hold talks with EBRD on funding for reactors - 5 UN tribunal gives ruling on Sellafield 6 Austrian Greens prepare for possible election 7 Gov. Guinn's reaction to Winston & Strawn's decision to withdraw 8 India to acquire 20,000 MW of nuclear power by 2020 9 Ireland loses bid to block Sellafield mox plant 10 Sellafield issue back on Anglo-Irish talks agenda 11 UN tribunal gives ruling on Sellafield 12 Sanders' hearing will put Yankee safety in spotlight 13 Ireland loses legal challenge against Sellafield 14 Nuclear plant may close early for inspection 15 Report casts doubt on the DOE's ability to pull it off 16 U.S. wants nuclear plant opened -- 17 Restarting a nuclear research reactor 18 U.N. court rejects Sellafield challenge 19 Quality of N. Korea Reactors Insured 20 KEDO Signs Accord With North Korea 21 IAEA Daily Press Review Date 2001-12-03 Number 230 22 Nuke Waste for Nevada? 23 Yucca foes foresee potential for nuke disaster 24 Meaning of nuclear power linked to finance 25 UNITED NATIONS TRIBUNAL JUDGEMENT COULD STOP UK PLUTONIUM PLANT NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS 1 Russian nuclear sub Gepard commissioning papers signed 2 BNFL employees are back at work 3 N.K. to allow nuclear lab inspection: report 4 Bush adviser says plutonium won't stay in S. Carolina 5 Nuclear scientist shot dead in Gaza Strip 6 Laser-beam blues at Livermore lab 7 U.S. Missiles Still on Alert 8 Wave of demonstrations expected as Government sidesteps protests 9 Time hasn't lessened mystique of Katy's Kitchen 10 War Without End 11 UK: Moving towards first strike use on weapons 12 Propaganda for Depleted Uranium - a Crime against Humankind ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Bid to block Sellafield expansion rejected news.telegraph.co.uk (Filed: 03/12/2001) A UN maritime court today rejected a bid by Ireland to block British plans to expand operations at its Sellafield nuclear waste re-treatment plant. Ireland had filed a motion before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in November to stop regulatory approval for a £470 million development at Sellafield on Britain's northwest coast, opposite Ireland. Britain has given the go-ahead for a mixed plutonium and uranium oxide (MOX) plant to go online at Sellafield, but still faces a suit by environmentalist organizations in London to block its operation. © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited ***************************************************************** 2 Bid to block Sellafield expansion rejected news.telegraph.co.ukLogin or Register | Headlines | Emailed News (Filed: 03/12/2001) A UN maritime court today rejected a bid by Ireland to block British plans to expand operations at its Sellafield nuclear waste re-treatment plant. Ireland had filed a motion before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in November to stop regulatory approval for a £470 million development at Sellafield on Britain's northwest coast, opposite Ireland. Britain has given the go-ahead for a mixed plutonium and uranium oxide (MOX) plant to go online at Sellafield, but still faces a suit by environmentalist organizations in London to block its operation. © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001. Terms & Conditions of reading. ***************************************************************** 3 Lithuania unable to close nuclear power plant on its own - premier BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Dec 3, 2001 Text of report by Lithuanian radio on 3 December The prime minister, Algirdas Brazauskas, says that he understands the wish of the European Union to decommission the Ignalina nuclear power plant in 2009. Yet during his meeting with the new British ambassador to Lithuania, Jeremy Hill, the prime minister said that after the nuclear plant is shut down, Lithuania would encounter a number of problems. According to him, there will be fewer jobs in the country and electricity prices might rise. The prime minister has also said that Lithuania is not able to decommission the Ignalina nuclear power plant on its own. Source: Lithuanian Radio, Vilnius, in Lithuanian 1200 gmt 3 Dec 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter ***************************************************************** 4 Ukraine ready to hold talks with EBRD on funding for reactors - president BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Dec 3, 2001 Text of report by Ukrainian STB TV on 3 December [Ukrainian President] Leonid Kuchma has commented on his statement in Moscow [made on 29 November] on cooperation with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development regarding the completion of reactors at the Rivne and Khmelnytskyy nuclear power stations [when he called on Russia to participate in the project as the terms of western loans are overly tough]. He stated that Ukraine is not rejecting this outright and said: some demands made by Europe are simply unacceptable for Ukraine and we are ready to get round the negotiating table in order to resolve all problem issues. Source: STB TV, Kiev, in Ukrainian 1200 gmt 3 Dec 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter All Material Subject to ***************************************************************** 5 UN tribunal gives ruling on Sellafield The Times - UK Abstracts; Dec 3, 2001 The United Nation's Law of the Sea Tribunal will decide today whether or not Britain's GBP470m Sellafield nuclear complex should be reopened. The Irish Republic requested an injunction from the tribunal over fears that radioactive discharge from the mixed oxide fuel processing facility could damage nearby Irish fisheries. However, Britain has asked for the case to be dismissed as the Irish government had failed to show "cogent evidence of a threat to the marine environment." A decision in Ireland's favour could severely hamper the UK government's efforts to make British Nuclear Fuels, Sellafield's operator, commercially viable. The plant gained government approval to reopen in September, some two years after a scandal over its quality control procedures. Abstracted from: The Times Copyright: Financial Times Information ***************************************************************** 6 Austrian Greens prepare for possible election (Grune wappnen sich fur mogliche Neuwahlen) Der Standard - Austria; Dec 3, 2001 Austria's Green party is preparing itself for the possibility of early general elections in view of differences between the two ruling coalition parties, the right-of-centre OVP and the right-wing FPO, over steps to be taken regarding Temelin, the controversial Czech nuclear power station. Green party leader Alexander Van der Bellen believes that a change in statutes must be considered, as these do not currently provide for a participation by the Greens. Mr Van der Bellen believes that the agreement reached in Brussels over Temelin has 'taken the wind out of the sails' of the FPO campaign for a referendum on the matter. Green environmental spokeswoman Eva Glawischnig has criticised the results of negotiations over Temelin, seeing the required safety measures as inadequate. Abstracted from Der Standard ***************************************************************** 7 Gov. Guinn's reaction to Winston & Strawn's decision to withdraw as DOE's legal counsel Governor Kenny Guinn FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: November 30, 2001 CONTACT: Greg Bortolin PHONE: 775-684-5670 FAX: 775-684-7198 Gov. Guinn's reaction to Winston & Strawn's decision to withdraw as DOE's legal counsel CARSON CITY - Gov. Kenny Guinn learned today that the law firm of Winston & Strawn has withdrawn its legal services from the Department of Energy. "This withdrawal strongly supports that there was a conflict on the part of Winston & Strawn, which was simultaneously performing work on behalf of the nuclear industry and on the Yucca Mountain Project," Gov. Guinn said. The Governor reiterated his request that DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham order the identification of all documents relating to Yucca Mountain. "In my letter to Secretary Abraham earlier this week, I asked that he identify all documents, reports and other materials the Winston & Strawn law firm had any part in preparing," Gov. Guinn said. "Because this material may be tainted, I believe they may be unsuitable in the Yucca Mountain decision-making process, which includes a licensing proceeding before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission." ***************************************************************** 8 India to acquire 20,000 MW of nuclear power by 2020 BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Dec 3, 2001 Tarapur, 3 December: India is all geared up to acquire 20,000 MW of nuclear power by the year 2020, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Dr Anil Kakodkar said Monday. By the end of the 11th plan, about 9,900 MW of nuclear power could be produced and all pre-requisites including the funds are being taken care of, Kakodkar said while addressing the reporters at the 18th Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) safety and occupational health professionals meet here. Talks are also on with private parties, including the Russians, with encouraging response, although it is at a preliminary stage, Kakodkar said. "We are planning for two units 500 MW in Tarapur, two units of 220 MW in Kaiga and Rajasthan each and two 1000 MW each at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu," he said. Dwelling on other energy activities of DAE, Kakodkar said desalination plant is in progress at Kalpakkam which will generate 6,300 cu.m. potable water per day and is expected to be commissioned next year. "This is a twin-technology of reverse osmosis and multi-stage flash," he said adding smaller mobile desalination units will be taken up by the department in the ongoing 10th plan to provide potable water in the water scarce parts of coastal India... Source: PTI news agency, New Delhi, in English 1252 gmt 3 Dec 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter ***************************************************************** 9 Ireland loses bid to block Sellafield mox plant Ananova - Ireland has lost its bid to block a controversial reprocessing facility at the Sellafield nuclear plant. [Sellafield (PA)] An international tribunal in Hamburg has rejected the Irish government's bid to force Britain to suspend a decision allowing the mothballed MOX plant to resume production of mixed-oxide fuel. The facility was closed down in 1996 because of financial and safety concerns. The Irish government wants an international arbitration tribunal to be established under a United Nations provision to resolve the dispute. Last month, it asked the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to order immediate suspension of the British decision pending conclusion of the arbitration. The tribunal has ruled, however, that "the urgency of the situation did not require the prescription of the provisional measures as requested by Ireland". Campaigners in the Irish east coast towns of Dundalk and Drogheda have alleged for years that citizens suffer a higher than average incidence of cancer, which they blame on Sellafield. Irish Attorney General Michael McDowell told a two-day hearing last month in Hamburg that "this is about protecting the Irish Sea from further radioactive pollution". The British government argued in a written submission that the court "lacks jurisdiction in this matter". Story filed: 11:24 Monday 3rd December 2001 CHECK FOR MORE ON: + Copyright © 2001 Ananova Ltd ***************************************************************** 10 Sellafield issue back on Anglo-Irish talks agenda Ananova - The Sellafield nuclear waste reprocessing plant - which exposed major differences between the London and Dublin governments at a prime ministerial summit - was again on the agenda at a conference involving British and Irish politicians this week. The Cumbrian complex, which lies just 70 miles from Dublin and has long been a bone of contention with the Irish government, is on the agenda for a session of the British-Irish Interparliamentary Body, which begins today in Bournemouth. The Prime Minister and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern agreed to differ on the issue when it came up for discussion during bi-lateral talks in Dublin last week at the end of a meeting of the British-Irish Council, one of the key bodies to emerge from the 1998 Good Friday agreement on Northern Ireland. But the Irish have pledged to continue their fight to force the closure of Sellafield, and halt the scheduled commissioning of the plant's new mixed-oxide (MOX) facility there. Dublin has stepped up its opposition to the concept by citing fears of a terrorist strike following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington and subsequent contamination threats. The BII, which features 25 members from each of the British and Irish parliaments, was founded in 1990 to foster better relations between politicians from the two countries. The highlight of the Bournemouth meeting of the body will be an address by Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid, who will also face a question-and-answer session. Story filed: 03:21 Monday 3rd December 2001 Copyright © 2001 Ananova Ltd ***************************************************************** 11 UN tribunal gives ruling on Sellafield The Times MONDAY DECEMBER 03 2001 BY CARL MORTISHED, INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS EDITOR THE future of the Sellafield nuclear complex is under threat as a United Nations tribunal rules today on a request by the Irish Republic that Britain be stopped from opening the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel processing plant. Ireland is seeking an injunction from the Law of the Sea Tribunal claiming that the £470 million MOX plant could discharge harmful radioactive material into the Irish Sea. The Hamburg tribunal has powers under the Law of the Sea Convention to order governments to take provisional measures to “preserve the respective rights of the parties to the dispute or to prevent serious harm to the marine environment”. Should the tribunal rule in Ireland’s favour, it could wreck the Government’s attempts to put British Nuclear Fuels, the operator of the Sellafield site, on a sound commercial footing. The MOX plant, which suffered a setback two years ago over fraud in its quality control procedures, secured government approval in September. Britain has asked the tribunal to dismiss the application, arguing that the Irish Government failed to provide “cogent evidence of a threat to the marine environment”. Ireland is concerned that a serious radioactive discharge from Sellafield would have a devastating effect on Irish fisheries. The Irish Government often points out that it has a greater interest in the site than its counterpart in Westminster, as “Sellafield is closer to Dublin than to London”. Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided ***************************************************************** 12 Sanders' hearing will put Yankee safety in spotlight By Associated Press, 12/2/2001 13:15 BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) People living around the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant are going to be able to tell state and federal regulators their concerns about the plant's security. On Monday, Congressman Bernard Sanders is holding the first congressional hearing on nuclear power plant safety since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. It begins at 7:30 p.m. at Brattleboro Union High School. ''The purpose of the hearing is to find out whether Vermont Yankee is doing everything humanly possible against a terrorist attack,'' Sanders said. While the congressman said the chances of a terrorist attack at Vermont Yankee are ''very, very, very small,'' the people of southern Vermont deserve answers, he said. ''I don't want to frighten anybody, but I would rather be safe than sorry,'' he said. ''You have to have the courage to look at a worst-case scenario.'' The timing couldn't be more embarrassing for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a report that found Vermont Yankee had flunked a ''force on force'' security drill this August. Vermont Yankee received the lowest mark of any nuclear reactor in the nation undergoing the drill in which the plant has to repel a mock attack. While the reactor immediately adopted corrections, and passed follow-up reviews, it will face escalated federal inspections if the preliminary findings aren't overturned in an appeal. Sanders said one other similar meeting about nuclear plant safety was held for Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, but that was open only to state officials. The public was not allowed to attend. At Monday's meeting, Hubert Miller, the regional administrator of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, will be on hand, as well as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Top state officials will also attend. Sanders said he would wait until after the hearing to decide whether to sponsor or co-sponsor legislation regarding nuclear power plant safety. ***************************************************************** 13 Ireland loses legal challenge against Sellafield By Matthew Jones Published: December 3 2001 12:49 | Last Updated: December 3 2001 14:21 Ireland on Monday lost one of two legal actions it is taking against a controversial nuclear fuel recycling plant at Sellafield, northwest England. Dublin applied last month to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg for a temporary injunction to halt the start of operations at a mixed-oxide plant owned by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). But the tribunal ruled on Monday that "the urgency of the situation did not require the prescription of the provisional measures as requested by Ireland." The move had been designed to give Ireland enough time to hold a full arbitration process after UK ministers refused to delay opening the plant beyond December 20. The tribunal ordered the two countries to submit written evidence by December 17, giving Ireland a window of just three days to resolve its complaints. Ireland is separately pursuing another international arbitration process under the Ospar Convention, which is designed to protect marine life in the north-east Atlantic. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the environmental campaign groups, are also waiting to hear the result of an appeal last week against a High Court ruling that backed the British government's approval of the plant. Ireland and environmentalists argue that the plant could be a target for terrorist attacks, that plutonium used in mixed-oxide fuel could be used to make crude atomic weapons and that the plant will pollute the Irish Sea with radioactive material. They also dispute the economic viability of the plant because calculations used by British ministers did not include its £470m build cost. BNFL is struggling to gain orders for mixed-oxide fuel from Japan, its most important customer, following a data falsification scandal that damaged its reputation in 1999. The UK government gave the plant the go-ahead in October after a study that showed it would be cheaper to let it open than to scrap it. The decision brought to an end four years of public debate on the issue. ***************************************************************** 14 Nuclear plant may close early for inspection Sunday, December 2, 2001 The Columbus Dispatch Associated Press OAK HARBOR, Ohio (AP) -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the operator of the Davis- Besse nuclear-power plant are discussing the possible early shutdown of the plant to inspect a vital safety feature. "There is no immediate safety concern,'' NRC spokesman Jan Strasma said yesterday. "Otherwise, the plant would be shut down today.'' The issue is fear of a crack in a safety feature on top of the reactor at the plant, which is about 25 miles east of Toledo. The discovery of a crack at a nearly identical plant in Jenkinsville, S.C., nine months ago raised concerns about Davis-Besse and 12 other plants identified by a research group as being most susceptible to having problems with equipment called control rod drive mechanism nozzles. The commission said 11 of the 13 plants provided it with enough documentation to continue operating until their next refueling outage. Another plant, near Benton Harbor, Mich., voluntarily agreed to shut down Jan. 19 to do more inspections. Davis-Besse plant operator FirstEnergy wants to wait until Feb. 16, when the plant will be shut down for refueling. FirstEnergy requested permission to keep operating the plant because in the three inspections it has done since 1996, it didn't find any reason to believe there are cracks, spokesman Richard Wilkins said. "NRC would not tolerate the unsafe operation of the plant and neither would we,'' he said yesterday. Strasma said the agency will decide in a week or two whether the plant should be shut down sooner. Even if something goes wrong with the equipment, the plant still could be shut down safely, he said. Control rod drive mechanism nozzles are inspected routinely when plants are taken off line for refueling. There typically are 69 nozzles in question on top of a reactor cap. They are important safety features in pressurized water reactors because they serve as passageways for control rod drive mechanism units. Those units are linked with long control rods that are plunged into the reactor core to absorb excess neutrons, a process that helps the nuclear reaction occur properly. Copyright © 2001, The Columbus Dispatch. ***************************************************************** 15 Report casts doubt on the DOE's ability to pull it off Monday, December 03, 2001 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal EDITORIAL: Good news on Yucca The General Accounting Office has confirmed what many Nevadans have known for years: When it comes to Yucca Mountain, the Department of Energy resembles a lost child groping to find his way in the dark. A newly released GAO draft report now notes that the DOE "is unlikely to achieve its goal of opening a repository at Yucca Mountain by 2010 and has no reliable estimate of when, and at what cost, such a repository could be opened." The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress -- but the report also reflects some of the views of the contractor overseeing the project. The study noted that Bechtel SAIC told the GAO that it still has years of work and hundreds of preliminary issues to resolve before the site could even be considered for designation and licensing. Of even greater concern to Nevadans, the report found that what residents of the state are being told will be built at Yucca Mountain "may not describe the facilities that DOE would actually develop." The GAO recommends that the Bush administration postpone the ultimate decision on the Yucca Mountain project. Nevada politicians jumped all over the report -- even as DOE officials offered a critical analysis. Sen. Harry Reid went so far to say, "I think it's the beginning of the end of Yucca Mountain." Nevadans can only hope. But before rejoicing, it would be wise to remember that there are scores of senators and representatives -- on both sides of the aisle -- who remain intent on making Nevada the nation's nuclear burial ground. In addition, the events of Sept. 11 have only increased calls for shipping the waste, now stored on site at 72 nuclear plants in 36 states, to a single site where some believe it could be more easily protected -- the GAO analysis could even renew calls for "temporary" storage here. Noted The Washington Post: "With conflicting concerns about the need for increased sources of energy and the importance of tightening controls over nuclear waste, experts say it is impossible to predict how Congress will eventually resolve the controversy." The report represents good news for Nevada. But exuberant optimism must be tempered by caution. They haven't dismantled the tunnel boring machines just yet. Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2001 ***************************************************************** 16 U.S. wants nuclear plant opened -- The Washington Times December 1, 2001 By Nicholas Kralev THE WASHINGTON TIMES A day after North Korea rejected a call from President Bush to allow weapons inspectors into the country, the United States yesterday urged Pyongyang to start cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "now." The State Department said a nuclear power plant in the Stalinist country cannot be completed unless there are "safeguards in place at certain stages in the construction." "In order to keep the construction on schedule, they have to have those verification procedures in place," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday. "You have to start early. It's not a matter of showing up the day before the containment vessel arrives; it's a matter of working over a period of something like three years." Although North Korea has made a commitment to cooperate with the IAEA, Mr. Boucher said it should do more to implement the agreement and allow access to weapons inspectors. On Thursday, North Korea rejected Mr. Bush's Monday demand and threatened to take unspecified "necessary countermeasures." The North Korean Foreign Ministry, in a statement carried on state-run Korea Central News Agency, also dismissed as "quite nonsensical" U.S. statements urging the communist state to do more to cooperate in measures against terrorism. "The U.S. is unreasonably demanding the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) receive an 'inspection' just as a thief turns on the master with a club," said the statement. It also said U.S. calls for arms inspections and criticism of North Korean human rights abuses and religious restrictions "goes to prove that some forces in the United States, in fact, do not want the dialogue for the solution of the problems." Earlier this month, North Korea, eager to get off a U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorism, signed two U.N. treaties designed to stem terrorism. North Korea's representative to the United Nations, Ri Hyong Chol, signed the treaties on Nov. 12, Kwon Sei-young, a director at the Special Policy Bureau in South Korea's Foreign Ministry, was quoted by wire reports as saying. Soon after signing the treaties Mr. Ri was replaced by another diplomat, Park Kil Yon, as the North's U.N. mission chief. North Korea said earlier this month that it would sign the 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the 1979 treaty against hostage-taking. • This article is based in part on wire service reports. ***************************************************************** 17 Restarting a nuclear research reactor By FRANK MUNGER Oak Ridge National Laboratory has received federal approval to restart its nuclear research reactor, which has been shut down for more than a year for maintenance, upgrades and repairs. Dr. James Roberto, an associate director at the laboratory, said the plan is to resume operations gradually over the next couple of weeks. Restart authority came from the U.S. Department of Energy late Friday, he said. The High Flux Isotope Reactor was built in the 1960s, but it's still considered one of the top nuclear-research facilities anywhere. "It has the highest thermal neutron flux in the world, which makes it uniquely useful for radiation experiments, for making special isotopes and for using those neutrons for neutron-scattering experiments," Roberto said. He said the reactor also is extraordinarily versatile, providing broad opportunities for research projects. During the long outage, workers replaced the beryllium reflector that is one of the reactor's most important components. The metal structure surrounds the reactor core and reflects the neutrons generated there, creating neutron concentrations sufficient for experiments and production of isotopes for medicine and industry. The reactor also has a new cooling tower and beam tubes that transport neutrons to experimental sites, and the waste system has been upgraded, partly in response to a tritium leak discovered in late 2000. Some additional improvements to the reactor's research capabilities are still under way, including the installation of a "cold source" that slows down neutron movement for special experiments. Although the reactor is more than 30 years old, Roberto said he believes the nuclear facility, with continued attention to the infrastructure, should be able to operate at a high level for another 30 to 35 years. All told, about $40 million has been spent to revitalize the reactor, which reportedly has a replacement value exceeding $1 billion. UT-Battelle, the contractor that manages the laboratory for the Energy Department, completed the maintenance and repairs to the reactor in the summer. Since then, the lab has undergone a lengthy "operational readiness review," which culminated with federal approval to restart the 85-megawatt reactor. (Contact Frank Munger of The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee at http://www.knoxnews.com.) December 2, 2001 The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 18 U.N. court rejects Sellafield challenge Reuters | Ananova | Sky News | Photos Monday December 3, 01:50 PM By Michael Hogan HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - A United Nations Court has refused Ireland's request for an injunction to halt the start up of a 472 million pound nuclear fuel manufacturing plant at Sellafield. The Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ordered the British and Irish governments on Monday to cooperate and exchange further information about risks to safety and pollution that would result from starting up state-owned British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL) MOX plant in Cumbria on the Irish Sea. "The court was disturbed by the lack of cooperation between the two countries. Our aim was to force them to cooperate," Judge Rudiger Wolfrum told reporters after the hearing. Ireland sought the injuction because it said it was worried about radioactive discharges from the plant which is set to begin operating on December 20. But the court was not convinced. "In the circumstances of this case the tribunal found that the urgency of the situation did not require the prescription of the provisional measures (injunction) as requested by Ireland," the ruling said. Ireland said it was pleased the tribunal recognised Britain had an obligation to "prevent pollution of the marine environment which might result from the operation of the MOX plant," Joe Jacob the Irish minister with responsibility for nuclear safety said in a statement. The court ordered the two countries to submit written reports to the Tribunal by December 17, 2001. Judge Rudiger Wolfrum said the December 17 date had been chosen deliberately so as to give Ireland a right of consultation about the MOX plant before it becomes operational. Asked whether BNFL would be allowed to start making MOX fuel, a mixture of uranium oxides and plutonium, after December 17, Wolfrum said: "We have not forbidden it." Jacobs said he wants Britain to delay commissioning the plant until an agreement has been reached on preventing pollution. Once Britain and Ireland have submitted their reports there will be informal discussions between the court, Ireland and Britain, but no more hearings. Jacobs said the Irish complaint is likely to go forward to the OSPAR tribunal which rules on the OSPAR convention on maritime issues in the north west Atlantic. The minister said it was possible Ireland might challenge at the European Court of Justice Britain's decision of October 3 allowing MOX to start up. No one was available for comment from the British government. Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited. A ***************************************************************** 19 Quality of N. Korea Reactors Insured Monday December 3 9:36 AM ET By JAE-SUK YOO, Associated Press Writer SEOUL, South Korea (news - web sites) (AP) - A U.S.-led international consortium signed an agreement with North Korea (news - web sites) on Monday guaranteeing the quality of two nuclear reactors it is building in the reclusive communist country, South Korean officials said. The construction of the reactors could be critical to the success of U.S.-led efforts to ensure the North uses its nuclear facilities to produce energy rather than weapons. The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization is building the reactors in return for the North's agreement in 1994 to freeze its suspected nuclear weapons program. The United States suspects North Korea amassed enough plutonium to make one or two atomic bombs before the 1994 freeze. North Korea has refused to allow a U.N. nuclear watchdog to investigate the suspicions until the new reactors are completed. But the completion of the reactors is expected to fall several years behind its 2003 target date because of funding problems and tension on the Korean peninsula. North Korea has even threatened to scrap the 1994 nuclear deal unless the consortium compensates losses caused by construction delays. The U.S.-led consortium, which includes Japan, South Korea and the European Union (news - web sites), has refused. Monday's agreement was signed in Pyongyang, the North's capital, between Charles Kartment, executive director of the consortium, and Kim Hee Mun, a North Korean government director, said the officials. Kartman, a former U.S. special envoy in dealing with North Korea, arrived in North Korea Saturday for his first visit to the country this year. The agreement stipulates the rights and responsibilities of North Korea and KEDO in taking part in quality inspections of the reactors under construction, said Kim Ui-do, a South Korean official of KEDO based in Seoul. It also guarantees the output of the 2,000-megawatt reactors and the supply of nuclear fuel to be used to start the reactors and other core parts, he said. When completed, the U.S.-designed light-water reactors would replace the North's Soviet-designed, graphite-moderated reactors, which experts say produce greater amounts of weapons-grade plutonium. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. agency based in Vienna, wants to immediately start inspection of the North's nuclear history before the 1994 freeze, a process that could take three to four years. The Korean Peninsula was divided into the communist North and the pro-Western South in 1945. The 1950-53 Korean War ended without a peace treaty. Copyright © 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 20 KEDO Signs Accord With North Korea Business - Associated Press Monday December 3 9:36 AM ET By JAE-SUK YOO, Associated Press Writer SEOUL, South Korea ( (AP) - A U.S.-led international consortium signed an agreement with North Korea on Monday guaranteeing the quality of two nuclear reactors it is building in the reclusive communist country, South Korean officials said. The construction of the reactors could be critical to the success of U.S.-led efforts to ensure the North uses its nuclear facilities to produce energy rather than weapons. The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization is building the reactors in return for the North's agreement in 1994 to freeze its suspected nuclear weapons program. The United States suspects North Korea amassed enough plutonium to make one or two atomic bombs before the 1994 freeze. North Korea has refused to allow a U.N. nuclear watchdog to investigate the suspicions until the new reactors are completed. But the completion of the reactors is expected to fall several years behind its 2003 target date because of funding problems and tension on the Korean peninsula. North Korea has even threatened to scrap the 1994 nuclear deal unless the consortium compensates losses caused by construction delays. The U.S.-led consortium, which includes Japan, South Korea and the European Union, has refused. Monday's agreement was signed in Pyongyang, the North's capital, between Charles Kartment, executive director of the consortium, and Kim Hee Mun, a North Korean government director, said the officials. Kartman, a former U.S. special envoy in dealing with North Korea, arrived in North Korea Saturday for his first visit to the country this year. The agreement stipulates the rights and responsibilities of North Korea and KEDO in taking part in quality inspections of the reactors under construction, said Kim Ui-do, a South Korean official of KEDO based in Seoul. It also guarantees the output of the 2,000-megawatt reactors and the supply of nuclear fuel to be used to start the reactors and other core parts, he said. When completed, the U.S.-designed light-water reactors would replace the North's Soviet-designed, graphite-moderated reactors, which experts say produce greater amounts of weapons-grade plutonium. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. agency based in Vienna, wants to immediately start inspection of the North's nuclear history before the 1994 freeze, a process that could take three to four years. The Korean Peninsula was divided into the communist North and the pro-Western South in 1945. The 1950-53 Korean War ended without a peace treaty. Copyright © 2001 Yahoo! Inc., and The Associated Press. All ***************************************************************** 21 IAEA Daily Press Review Date 2001-12-03 Number 230 1. Non-proliferation DPRK allows IAEA to inspect isotope production laboratory in Yongbyon: research facilities not target of nuclear freeze demanded by 1994 "Agreed Framework". US and Chinese officials hold productive talks on American concerns over Chinese compliance with agreement on curbing spread of nuclear technology, State Department announces. While President Bush is demanding that Iraq allow weapons inspectors back, US Defence Secretary says he doubts whether UN inspectors would find evidence of Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons programmes. US to test prototype missile defence shield by launching dummy warhead on prototype Minuteman 2 booster rocket and then bringing it down with interceptor missile. Media Resources: (BBC; FT; G; KOR; NYT - 1, 2/12) China; Dem. P.R. of Korea; IAEA; Iraq; United States of America 2. IAEA IAEA DG on combating risk of atomic terrorism: "We need to urgently identify the most vulnerable locations and see they get the necessary security upgrades," and adds: "We have the solutions; now Governments have to come up with resources." Media Resources: (FT - 30/11; 1/12) IAEA 3. Terrorism Chinese envoy explains at IAEA's Board of Governors his Government's stand on fighting nuclear terrorism. IAEA says that recent cases of illicit nuclear material trafficking show urgent need for better protection and control of radioactive material. US Members of Congress announce bill to create federal nuclear security force within NRC and to require stricter training, background checks and proficiency reviews of plant personnel. Media Resources: (The; Xin - 30/11) China; IAEA; United States of America 4. Nuclear power Numerous reports on Austrian/Czech dispute over Temelin NPP; despite recent accord, Austria's Freedom party says it is prepared to hold Czech Republic's EU bid hostage until it agrees to scrap plant. US says it is willing to tolerate "peaceful use" of nuclear power by Tehran as long as safeguards to protect against diversion of nuclear materials "are appropriate and are all inclusive." Media Resources: (DW; R; WSJ - 2, 3/12) Austria; Czech Republic; European Union; Iran, Islamic Republic of; Russian Federation 5. Radwaste, fuel Plan to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada suffers two setbacks: law firm hired in 1999 to advise DoE quits, and Congressional investigators say decision on plan should be postponed indefinitely. UN tribunal rules today on request by Irish Republic that Britain be stopped from opening the MOX fuel processing plant at Sellafield. Media Resources: (NYT; T - 2/12) UN; United Kingdom; United States of America 6. R Report on testing of US nuclear weapons which now takes place inside one of the world's fastest computers: IBM's Asci White. Media Resources: (BBC - 2/12) United States of America 7. Miscellaneous President Putin links sinking of "Kursk" nuclear submarine to Russian Navy and disciplines several high-ranking commanders. Media Resources: (IHT - 3/12) Russian Federation ***************************************************************** 22 Nuke Waste for Nevada? BW Online | December 3, 2001 | Nuke Waste for Nevada? All it would take is four terrorists and $10,000 worth of materials available at home improvement stores to attack and crack a single nuclear waste container heading to a Yucca Mountain repository, state and county opponents of Yucca Mountain said Saturday. Terrorism "is a genuine threat," Clark County transportation planner Fred Dilger said, referring to the federal government's plan for a repository containing 77,000 tons of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The remarks were made during a public hearing at the Clark County Government Center on a newly released draft report by the county on assumed local consequences of a nuclear waste repository being opened at Yucca Mountain. A chemical explosion could trigger a nuclear nightmare if it cracked open a container of nuclear waste anywhere on the way to a proposed repository, officials at the hearing said. Dilger noted that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh showed in his 1995 attack on the Alfred Murrah Federal Building the ready availability of explosive materials. The scenario of an attack on a nuclear waste shipment was in the draft report. The county has joined other public officials in Nevada to oppose the proposed dump. "If there is a worst-case scenario," County Commissioner Myrna Williams said, "it could affect most of the West." The county's effort was bolstered Friday by a federal report that raised serious questions on how soon a repository could open. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, in a draft report, said that the Department of Energy is not ready to build a Yucca Mountain repository. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham vowed on Friday that the DOE will continue its work at Yucca Mountain. "It's incredible the DOE would recommend Yucca Mountain by the end of the year," Sen. Harry Reid. D-Nev., said, noting that an analysis by the state and county would add details to the GAO's report. Using DOE computer models and facts taken from federal studies on Yucca Mountain, state and county officials are preparing a final report by January, Dilger said. Nuclear waste shipments are easy to spot for an attack, Dilger said. He cited a 1990 incident in which Chechen rebels seized a nuclear waste shipment. They tried but failed to turn it into a bomb in downtown Moscow. Up to 12 truckloads of nuclear waste a day could travel Nevada's highways over the 30-year period it would take to fill a Yucca Mountain repository, Dilger said. "We don't really know the route the DOE will use to transport nuclear waste, because they don't know themselves," Dilger said, noting the local studies use U.S. interstates and existing rail routes. DOE officials who attended the hearing did not comment. In meetings over the summer on transportation to Yucca Mountain, the DOE has said that nuclear waste could be routed on a new railroad track around the Las Vegas Valley. The latest estimates predict two transportation accidents a year with contamination at the surface of the shipping container, Dilger said. The DOE estimates it could cost $1.4 billon to clean up a square mile of contaminated land within five miles of a radioactive accident. If there were winds of between 10 and 35 mph, contamination could spread 20 to 40 miles, Dilger said. To clean up the accident scene, officials would remove the people, tear down the homes and crate the rubble for burial. "You just tear the houses down, crate them and bury them," Dilger said. The impacts the state and county experts calculated are consistent with other similar events studied by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, consultant Sheila Conway of Urban Environmental Research Inc., of Scottsdale, Ariz., said. The firm has been hired as a consultant to Clark County. All contents copyright 2001 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 24 Meaning of nuclear power linked to finance ireland.com - The Irish Times - IRELAND Monday, December 3, 2001 The true cost of nuclear energy, long fudged by the industry, is emerging, with British taxpayers facing a bill of £35 billion to clean it up, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor It's really all about power. Although electricity generated by Britain's nuclear power stations is likely to be twice as expensive by 2020 as electricity generated by onshore wind farms, the nuclear industry still manages to wield enormous power where it counts: in Whitehall. Even last week's announcement that British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) is to be broken up, with £35 billion sterling of its liabilities - including all nuclear fuel reprocessing operations at Sellafield - transferred to a new liabilities management authority, cannot be read as a serious setback. Although welcomed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth as marking the beginning of the end for reprocessing, the real agenda is to eliminate BNFL's liabilities and prepare the company for partial privatisation by 2005, when a 49 per cent stake in the company is due to be sold off. Whatever fears the public may have, the nuclear lobby in Britain is used to winning. Only once in its 50-year history has it been rebuffed, and that was in 1996 when the inestimable John Gummer rejected plans by UK Nirex to store radioactive waste in an underground dump near Sellafield. This was also a victory for the Irish government. After years of turning a blind eye to the expansion of reprocessing facilities in Cumbria, just across the Irish Sea, it put together a formidable case against UK Nirex's plans, not least because the chosen site lay in a geologically unstable area. Now the Government is trying to block Sellafield's controversial MOX reprocessing plant from going into production on December 20th, as authorised by the British Environment Secretary, Ms Margaret Beckett. One of the real fears, in the wake of September 11th, is that it could become a terrorist target. As a recent editorial in the Guardian noted, "Sellafield is nearer to Belfast than it is to Glasgow or Sheffield, and the new mixed oxide fuel plant there would be very much closer to the centre of Dublin than it would be to the centre of London". Its neighbours in Ireland, therefore, had legitimate cause for concern. However, in response to the Government's case before the Law of the Sea tribunal in Hamburg, the British side seemed more concerned about the financial implications of closing Sellafield than about safety considerations or what the Guardian called "the truly terrifying post-September 11th possibilities". The fact is that Sellafield has never made any money. BNFL lost £210 million sterling last year, of which £66 million was accounted for by the necessary decommissioning of old nuclear installations from the Windscale era, used to produce radioactive plutonium for nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s. The MOX plant, built at a cost of £472 million sterling, will mix spent uranium with plutonium to produce new fuel pellets for nuclear power stations. It is tacked on to the end of BNFL's £1.6 billion Thorp (thermal oxide reprocessing) plant, which was sanctioned in 1978 with no objection from the government here. The economic justification for bringing the MOX plant into production five years after it was finished is quite spurious. Characterised by its opponents as "voodoo economics", the alleged "benefit" only adds up if the capital cost of the plant is written off and BNFL's £150 million order book is treated as "future profits". British Energy plc, which runs most of the country's nuclear power plants, is trying to extricate itself from contracts with BNFL to reprocess spent fuel from its reactors. According to BE, this costs six times more than simply storing the spent fuel underground. At £300 million a year, it says, reprocessing is "uneconomic". If BE succeeds in abrogating its contracts, BNFL will have to fall back on foreign clients, notably in Germany and Japan, to make the MOX plant viable. But no firm orders have come in from the Japanese, who are still smarting over the revelation two years ago that specifications for the new fuel had been falsified. What happened, according to the Observer ***************************************************************** 25 UNITED NATIONS TRIBUNAL JUDGEMENT COULD STOP UK PLUTONIUM PLANT 3 December 2001 Hamburg - The UK government remained under pressure today not to begin operations at its controversial new Sellafield nuclear fuel plant after a ruling today by a United Nations Tribunal on a legal challenge by the Irish government which was based on concerns about radioactive pollution of the Irish Sea and dangers of terrorist attacks. Ireland had requested The United Nations International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, made up of 21 judges, to issue provisional measures (a form of injunction) against the UK government, including that the Sellafield MOX fuel plant (SMP)authorization should be withdrawn and that there be no nuclear transports into or out of Sellafield associated with the SMP. The Tribunal did not issue the measures requested by Ireland. However, in a move that will embarrass the UK government, the Tribunal did issue provisional measures that may have the same effect as those originally sought by Ireland: - the judges unanimously rejected UK claims that the Law of the Sea Convention Tribunal did not have jurisdiction; - the judges called on the UK and Ireland to undertake no action "which might aggravate the dispute" – for Greenpeace this means that BNFL should not proceed with MOX production, scheduled to begin around December 20th 2001; In terms of provisional measures, the Tribunal instructed: Both parties to "cooperate" and enter into consultation to exchange information with regard to possible consequences for the Irish Sea arising out of the commissioning of the MOX plant, to monitor risks or the effects of the operation of the MOX plant for the Irish Sea, and to devise as appropriate measures to prevent pollution of the marine environment which might arise from the operation of the plant. "The judges have recognized that the UK should not do anything that would aggravate the dispute between Ireland and the UK. The obvious point here is that turning on the MOX plant will certainly aggravate the dispute – the UK should therefore abandon its plans for MOX production to start at the end of the month," said Duncan Currie, legal counsel for Greenpeace International. "It also seems impossible to design appropriate measures to prevent pollution of the marine environment which might arise from the operation of the MOX plant once it is commissioned”. The provisional measures agreed to by the Tribunal will remain in force until the conclusion of international arbitration to be held under the auspices of the International Convention on the Law of the Sea. Hearings are expected to begin in early 2002. The Tribunal also stated that further measures could be passed by the Tribunal if necessary. Greenpeace is also encouraged by the views of seven of the judges that "the Tribunal has identified the duty to cooperate as a fundamental principle in the regime of the prevention of pollution of the marine environment under Part XII of the Convention and general international law." In terms of nuclear transports, BNFL will not be able to make any MOX transports into or out of Sellafield while the ITLOS judgment is in force. Perhaps of most significance the planned return of rejected MOX fuel from Japan to Sellafield, due in 2002, will now be under threat. The fuel was originally shipped by BNFL in 1999, but after admitting that it contained falsified quality control data, it was agreed by Japan and the UK governments to ship it back to the UK. BNFL hopes that its return will help secure new large contracts for the SMP with Japanese utilities. Ireland in its evidence to the Tribunal held in November, made the case that there were major safety and security issues involved in nuclear transports which the UK have not adequately addressed. The Tribunal has also established the right of states threatened by pollution from transports to be consulted – this is a major step forward for the rights of en- route states opposed to the transport of nuclear material, including high level waste and plutonium MOX fuel. "The UK government has to seriously reflect on today’s judgement. A plutonium business that makes no economic sense, leads to widespread contamination of the environment, whilst presenting a major proliferation and terrorist threat, deserves no future. The Tribunal has issued an important judgement today, the Irish government is right to be pleased by this judgement, and BNFL and the UK government know that this is a red not a green light to MOX production,” said Shaun Burnie nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace International. A Greenpeace/Friends of the Earth UK expect to hear within days the result of their lawsuit against the UK government’s decision to authorize the MOX plant. The Court of Appeal in London heard the case last week. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: - Shaun Burnie – Greenpeace International nuclear campaigns - +44 1557 814 288 - Duncan Currie – legal counsel for Greenpeace International - +64 21632335 Visit [http://www.britishnuclearfuels.org] Notes: Language of the Tribunal December 3rd 2001 1. Unanimously, Prescribes, pending a decision by the Annex VII arbitral tribunal, the following provisional measure under article 290, paragraph 5, of the Convention: Ireland and the United Kingdom shall cooperate and shall, for this purpose, enter into consultations forthwith in order to: exchange further information with regard to possible consequences for the Irish Sea arising out of the commissioning of the MOX plant; - monitor risks or the effects of the operation of the MOX plant for the Irish Sea; - devise, as appropriate, measures to prevent pollution of the marine environment which might result from the operation of the MOX plant. Unanimously, Decides that Ireland and the United Kingdom shall each submit the initial report referred to in article 95, paragraph 1, of the Rules not later than 17 December 2001, and authorizes the President of the Tribunal to request such further reports and information as he may consider appropriate after that date. Unanimously, Decides that each party shall bear its own costs. P.Chandrasekhara Rao,President. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES ***************************************************************** 1 Russian nuclear sub Gepard commissioning papers signed BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Dec 3, 2001 Text of report in English by Russian news agency Interfax Severodvinsk, 3 December: The papers on transferring and commissioning the Gepard, the first nuclear-powered submarine of the 21st century, were signed at the Sevmashpredpriyatiye state unitary plant in Severodvinsk in Arkhangelsk Region on Monday [3 December]. Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, Deputy Navy Commander-in-Chief Vice-Admiral Mikhail Barskov, and Sevmashpredpriyatiye general director David Pashayev were present at the signing ceremony, plant's sources told Interfax. It has been reported that the Northern Fleet will accept the submarine. The Gepard ranks as a third-generation, multipurpose nuclear- powered submarine. It is a modernized version of the Bars series submarines. Submarines of this class are the world's fastest and quietest... Source: Interfax news agency, Moscow, in English 0839 gmt 3 Dec 01 /BBC Monitoring/ © BBC. World Reporter ***************************************************************** 2 BNFL employees are back at work Oak Ridger Online --> Story last updated at 12:24 p.m. on Monday, December 3, 2001 by Paul Parson Oak Ridger staff The 350-plus workers who got temporary suspension notices last week from BNFL Inc. were back to work this morning, says a company official. BNFL issued the notices because of an unavailability of work created by the Department of Energy's decision last month to halt work involving fissile material, or uranium, at the Oak Ridge K-25 site. DOE's action was due to deficiencies in several key safety documents pertaining to K-25. "No one has lost any pay," BNFL spokesman Norman Hammitt said of the workers who got notices. Hammitt said BNFL hopes to have the safety-related problems worked out with DOE by this week. He said some changes have already been implemented, including the revision of safety procedures. "We have been working closely with DOE," said Hammitt, adding that he didn't anticipate BNFL's having to suspend any more work. DOE and BNFL Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels, signed a $238 million, six-year contract in 1997 to decontaminate and decommission three buildings at K-25: K-33, which totals 2.8 million square feet; K-29, 586,880 square feet; and K-31, 1.4 million square feet. K-25 was formerly used to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238 through a gaseous diffusion process. Problems with safety procedures at DOE's Oak Ridge facilities have been a hot issue over the last couple of months. Several of those problems have been pointed out by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal agency established by Congress in 1988 to provide safety oversight of the nuclear weapons complex operated by DOE. Paul Parson can be contacted at (865) 220-5533 or pparson@oakridger.com [pparson@oakridger.com] . All Contents ©Copyright The Oak Ridger ***************************************************************** 3 N.K. to allow nuclear lab inspection: report http://www.koreaherald.com North Korea is ready to permit foreign inspections of its nuclear laboratory despite threats to revive its suspected nuclear program, a report said Sunday. The North's isotope production laboratory in its Yongbyon nuclear complex will be open to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Yonhap news agency said. It quoted a South Korean government source as saying: "The North offered to open its the laboratory to inspection at talks with IAEA officials in early November." The laboratory has not been the target of inspections demanded by a 1994 accord under which the North froze its suspected nuclear program in exchange for nuclear reactors producing less weapons-grade plutonium. With its energy crisis ever worsening, the North has threatened to abandon the 1994 agreement, insisting Washington should compensate losses caused by delays in building new reactors. The report followed the arrival of Charles Kartman, executive director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), in Pyongyang on Saturday. Kartman leads a consortium funding the $4.6-billion project to replace the North's old graphite reactors. The new reactors were to be built by 2003, but delays have pushed back the finish until at least 2008. Groundbreaking on the new reactors started only two months ago. But the United States and the IAEA have complained of little progress in its effort to verify the North's past nuclear activities. They wants the inspections to begin now. Pyongyang is only required to admit inspectors when a significant portion of the project as defined in the agreement is completed. On Friday, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher warned the construction of new reactors might suffer further delays if the Stalinist state does not allow inspectors in to verify safety and security procedures. "This has to be done before they get to a certain stage in construction otherwise it can't proceed," Boucher said. "In order to do that on time, the schedule means that they have to start now." U.S. President George W. Bush has urged the North to permit foreign inspections to verify that it is not producing weapons of mass destruction. Pyongyang has accused Washington of "unreasonably" demanding foreign inspections. (AFP) ***************************************************************** 4 Bush adviser says plutonium won't stay in S. Carolina President said to be committed to finding a permanent storage facility elsewhere Sunday, December 2, 2001 Associated Press GREENVILLE - South Carolina will not be asked to keep spent plutonium permanently at the Savannah River Site, President Bush's chief domestic adviser says. Karl Rove said Friday the president is committed to finding a permanent storage facility outside South Carolina. "The long-term storage of plutonium will not be in South Carolina," Rove said. The federal government halted the planned October shipments to SRS, a former nuclear weapons facility near Aiken, for a year to make sure that a permanent plan is devised, said Rove, who was in Greenville to raise money for U.S. Rep. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. The president wants to create a plan that is in the "best interest of the nation and South Carolina," Rove said. SRS has been chosen to take plutonium out of weapons and process it into fuel for nuclear reactors and ship it out. But state officials, including Gov. Jim Hodges, worry federal officials won't fund processing the nuclear material, leaving it sitting at SRS forever. The Bush administration is "mildly disappointed" Hodges threatened to use the South Carolina Highway Patrol to block plutonium shipments, Rove said, but he understands politics. Hodges, a Democrat, has been critical of U.S. Undersecretary of Energy Robert Card overseeing the shipment of plutonium from Rocky Flats, Colo., to South Carolina because Card once headed the company that was paid to clean up the Colorado nuclear facility. But Rove discounted the criticism, saying he has confidence in Card and thinks everyone with expertise should not be disqualified. A federal panel has warned that plutonium should not be stored for 50 years at SRS. In a letter last month, John Conway, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board chairman, told the Energy Department that plans to store plutonium at SRS for five decades are impractical because the facility "was never intended to provide more than interim storage." Conway wrote the letter in response to Department of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who said his agency is "confident that properly stabilized and packaged plutonium-bearing materials can be safely stored for up to 50 years." While the Energy Department says it is committed to reprocessing the plutonium and shipping it out to another location, the letter shows federal officials aren't committed to the policy, the governor says. Copyright © 2001 Charleston.Net. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 5 Nuclear scientist shot dead in Gaza Strip [The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition] 19 Kislev 5762 19:51Monday December 3, 2001 By Margot Dudkevitch JERUSALEM (December 3) - Prof. Baruch Singer, a scientist from the Nahal Sorek nuclear research site, was shot and killed by two Palestinian terrorists dressed in IDF fatigues as he drove between Elei Sinai and Nisanit in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday morning. After ensuring that Singer, 51, of Gedera, was dead, the terrorists continued shooting at vehicles, and a gun battle with soldiers ensued until an IDF tank shell killed the terrorists. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, identifying the two terrorists as Jihad Musri, 17, and Muslama Araraj, of Beit Lahiya. Shortly after the attack, Palestinians fired three mortar shells at Nissanit. No one was hurt. According to residents of the area, Singer had driven his son, a soldier, to a nearby army outpost and was leaving the area when he was shot. His wife Nurit told Israel Radio he had called her to tell her he was driving on the road between the two communities and was shot. "Around 8 he called me and told me he was driving between Elei Sinai and Nisanit, and said he was wounded and told me to call the police. I asked him how to contact them and he said dial 100," she said. After lightly wounding Singer in the first burst of gunfire, the terrorists raced after his vehicle and shot him again, killing him. Sigalit Ben-Abu, a Nisanit resident, was returning from Ashkelon shortly before 8 when she spotted the two terrorists. "I saw two soldiers shooting at Israeli vehicles. They were positioned close to the edge of the road not far from the army's target practice area. It was only after that I realized the two 'soldiers' were in fact the terrorists. I was alone in the car and I bent down and continued driving," she told The Jerusalem Post. Arik Harpaz, a resident of Elei Sinai whose daughter was murdered with her boyfriend when terrorists infiltrated the community two months ago, was at home when the attack occurred. "We need a proper fence to be erected around the communities. That is the only thing that will keep the terrorists out. At my age, we are forced to deal with burying our children and their friends. I cannot sit quietly any longer, it's enough," he said. Singer, who is survived by his wife, three sons, and a daughter, will be buried at 2 this afternoon in the Gedera cemetery. In recent weeks, there have been a number of attempts by Palestinian terrorists to infiltrate Elei Sinai, Dugit, and Nisanit. Residents of the communities have demanded for a number of years that the government and army surround their communities with an electrified fence. After the attack in Elei Sinai two months ago, a decision was made to erect the fence, and work on it is currently under way. ***************************************************************** 6 Laser-beam blues at Livermore lab ContraCostaTimes.com Published Sunday, December 2, 2001 KAREN HERSHENSON: TIMES COLUMNIST THE IMPOSING National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab houses the world's largest laser, capable of producing temperatures equal to those of an exploding nuclear weapon, even the sun. It will ultimately generate, for an instant, 500 trillion watts of power, a thousand times the capacity of the entire United States. But did they select a potent palette for this ground-breaking project? Colors that declare we're bold, we're bad, we're nuke experts and you're not? Nope, they went with the muted Santa Fe decor of a suburban tract home: Adobe. Desert Sand. Dusty Rose. Lab wonks are reluctant to talk about it, but visitors to the $2 billion facility invariably ask not about the elaborate optical components or the cutting-edge science, but what the heck is up with those colors. An homage to California architecture, perhaps? A sly nod to Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico? Maybe it has something to do with birth, suggests a spokeswoman. To which a top scientist involved with NIF says no, no and no. Now retired and living in Florida, lab associate Allen Levy is intimate with the facility's interior design. As deputy manager for the project, he chaired the infamous Color Committee. "The most secret committee at the lab," muttered one scientist during a recent tour, his "NIF Is Not for Sissies" badge displayed proudly. "It has a very feminine feeling," he added, "a coordinated motif." So how did NIF, which will basically be used to simulate a nuclear explosion, wind up looking like your mother's living room? It's all about the soft sell: Take the red-hot issue of spending billions to maintain the nuclear stockpile (by conducting these tests) and package it in the soothing hues of a desert sunset. Just this summer, a Tri-Valley watchdog group erected a huge billboard questioning the project's purpose: "NIF is intended to train a new generation of bomb designers," it read. "Your mind is a terrible thing to waste." Levy concedes the controversy has some bearing on NIF's eye-pleasing colors, but more important, he says, was creating a soothing atmosphere for scientists destined to spend long hours there. Plus, they wanted the color scheme to provide visual guideposts not only for those working there, but for the constant stream of visitors. Scientists from around the globe are bucking to get a shot at those super-powered lasers, and the tantalizing prospect of fusion energy. The interior structures mimic the light spectrum the lasers cut through, from infrared, to green, to blue, to yellow. There's even a golden starburst pattern in the floor. "Remember, nuclear weapons are not necessarily the most calming influence that you have," says Levy. "Yet the reaction we get from visitors to the facility is, 'Wow.'... You want them to walk away with understanding." Touring NIF -- in geeky booties, hairnet, hard hat and protective eyewear -- I was impressed with the massive crystals cultured there, and the remarkably tiny "target" cylinder capable of absorbing all that laser juice. But I couldn't help thinking, as classical music wafted in the background, "Whoa, who picked out that teal blue?" Karen Hershenson writes about life and issues in the East Bay. She can be reached at 925-943-8252 or khershen@cctimes.com [khershen@cctimes.com] . headlines from ContraCostaTimes.com ***************************************************************** 7 U.S. Missiles Still on Alert Monday, Dec. 3, 2001. Page 10 By Matt Bivens NEW YORK -- De-alerting nuclear weapons means keeping them, but making them harder to use. It might start with a new presidential order -- "We don't launch until we've taken, say, five hours to think about it." A next step could be as prosaic as taking the launch keys away from the junior officers out in the ICBM silos. Over time, warheads could be taken off of missiles and stored. Candidate George W. Bush campaigned on de-alerting the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Enter the handshake in Crawford. President Bush agreed to reduce the U.S. arsenal from 6,000 nuclear missiles to as low as 1,700. But oddly, he also said it would take 10 years -- even though his administration has been quite specific that it is not scrapping the missiles, only "de-alerting" them -- which in this case apparently extends to removing and storing warheads. "Why that would take 10 years is beyond me," said John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World, a disarmament group focused on lobbying Congress. Simply by giving new orders and collecting launch keys, those 4,300 nuclear missiles could head into de-alert within 24 hours. And what of the remaining missiles? It seems they are not going to be de-alerted at all. A classified Nuclear Posture Review drawn up by the Bush administration should soon be in the hands of key members of Congress. Sources familiar with the report's contents say it keeps thousands of missiles ready to go in minutes. "They've categorically rejected de-alerting," says Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information. "[Bush] has reversed himself completely [from his campaign pledges]." Blair, speaking at a conference last week in New York, reminded us where we are 12 years after the Berlin Wall fell: America still has nuclear weapons aimed at 2,360 Russian targets and poised for launch in just minutes. U.S. reconnaissance planes still prowl the edges of Russian air space, looking for entry corridors for B-2 and B-52 bombers. "They fly around the borders checking the performance of air defense radars, assessing coverage, looking for where the holes are," said Blair. Several months ago, Blair -- himself a former Minuteman missile launch officer -- spoke with a flight crew in Nebraska that was fresh back from just such a border-probing exercise. The crew told him they hadn't seen a Russian fighter jet come up to challenge them in years. Meanwhile, a launch somewhere in the world just about every day sends NORAD, the strategic command outfit, into "three-minute huddles." They are supposed to emerge in that time period with an evaluation of the threat, if any, and recommendations for the president, if appropriate. On a recent visit to NORAD, Blair watched just such an emergency huddle in response to a Russian missile launch. It turned out to be a SCUD missile fired into Chechnya, he said. In Wyoming two years ago, Blair watched two junior officers performing the same job he had performed 30 years ago: rehearsing a launch. These men -- both in their 20s -- were capable of launching 500 nuclear warheads within just two minutes of receiving their orders. P.S. Victory over communism! My home county's don't-smoke-at-home ruling, which I wrote about last week, has been vetoed by the county commissioner. Even council members who had voted for it were relieved; as one put it, "everyone I ran into was enraged, to put it mildly." Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com [http://www.thenation.com] ]. [http://www.moscowtimes.ru ***************************************************************** 8 Wave of demonstrations expected as Government sidesteps protests © 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd By Geoffrey Lean and Severin Carrell 02 December 2001 Mike Ryan, in stricken Port Talbot, is this weekend rallying his team for a final stand against another industrial threat to his community. At the other end of the country, Brian Atkinson is leafleting householders on Tyneside. And Margaret Willmot in Salisbury is awaiting a reply to a detailed letter she has just sent the embattled Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers. The three are in the vanguard of an unprecedented wave of protest expected to sweep through the country as the Government embarks on a drive to build controversial incinerators, roads, housing developments, airport facilities – and, possibly, nuclear power stations. The protests will be sharpened by plans, to be announced by ministers this month, to remove the public's right to challenge the need for many of the developments at public inquiries. The developments will often breach promises on which Labour was elected in 1997, and analysts believe that the ensuing local rows are likely to cost it seats at the next election. For now, however, Mike Ryan's eyes are fixed no further ahead than Friday, when the Environment Agency is expected to decide on whether to give the go-ahead to a rubbish-burning incinerator just 250 yards from his home. He and his neighbours in the South Wales town – hit three weeks ago by a fatal accident at its Corus steelworks – fear that dioxins and other pollutants from the plant will cause cancer and birth defects, He says: "I have two small children, and I am worried about their health." A 43-year-old unemployed former miner, he bought himself a computer and taught himself about the issue through the internet, and with some 200 others has led a spirited local campaign. The protesters have blockaded the plant, set up a protest camp at its gates and chained themselves to cranes and bulldozers. They are now planning a new protest outside the Environment Agency's local offices on Friday. Protests like theirs are expected to become common. Environmentalists have counted 50 new incinerators being planned round the country from Maidstone to Manchester and Dumfries to Devon. Road protests are also increasing as the Government abandons its 1997 election promise to build them only as the "last resort". Mrs Willmot is fighting a piecemeal revival of the controversial Salisbury bypass, which Labour scrapped on coming to power as a statement of its new policy. Mr Atkinson is campaigning against a second road tunnel planned to go under the Tyne. Twenty-nine major road schemes have been proposed by local authorities this year; the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) has concerns about 12 of them. And there is pressure to build Britain's first 14-lane motorways on parts of the M25. The CPRE also expects 900,000 new homes to be built on greenfield sites over the next 15 years. Meanwhile, a new airport is planned at Finningly near Doncaster, a major expansion is scheduled for Stansted, and the Government is considering a new runway in the South-east. And ministers are considering building up to 14 new nuclear power stations. This month, ministers will publish plans to stop the public challenging the need for major national projects such as roads, nuclear power stations and airports. Public inquiries will be restricted to local issues such as landscaping, while the Government whips approval for the schemes through Parliament. Henry Oliver, the chief planning campaigner for CPRE, said: "This massive wave of development is likely to lead to unprecedented outrage across the country. It will be much worse if the Government is seen to remove people's right to have their say on major projects in their areas at public inquiries." ***************************************************************** 9 Time hasn't lessened mystique of Katy's Kitchen For about a year following World War II, an underground bunker camouflaged to resemble a barn was used to store Oak Ridge's cache of U-235. The clandestine operation was a temporary home for the precious material until it could be sent west for use in the nation's budding arsenal of atomic weaponry. A nearby "silo" was actually a guardhouse with armed police in the turret ready to fire on unwanted visitors. The war was over, but the United States was desperately guarding the atomic knowledge and ingredients that had brought the war to its conclusion. With Oak Ridge's role in the bomb-making Manhattan Project a matter of public discussion, the post-war security strategy took a new turn. At the time, of course, this little storehouse was one of Oak Ridge's best-kept secrets, and even today relatively few people have seen the historic site a few miles from the campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's not a part of visitor tours, and that probably won't change given the new security restrictions put into place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That's really a shame because the fortified bunker - best known as Katy's Kitchen - remains a uniquely interesting part of Oak Ridge's nuclear past. I visited the facility the other day for the first time in a long time. The basic structures remain in place, although a pre-fab building was attached to the bunker years ago to expand the space for environmental researchers. The historic dignity of the place is obscured but not destroyed. The bunker itself, including the actual vault once used to store enriched uranium, is now used to store environmental and biological samples. The past is not totally forgotten. In the office area, declassified architectural drawings of the once-secret facility are mounted on the walls. Luther Agee, who designed the ultra-secure structure, died this past summer, but he proudly recounted his work on numerous occasions. He accompanied me on a visit to the site in 1984 and talked about how he was shocked to be given the important assignment. Agee was a 26-year-old draftsman at the time, not an architect or engineer. "I don't know how I got picked," he said. But Agee moved over to the main administration building in Oak Ridge for work on the classified project. The idea was to provide a successor to the storehouse that had been used at the Y-12 plant, where enriched uranium was extracted with an electromagnetic process during the wartime effort. After World War II, the U-235 separation work in Oak Ridge was transferred to K-25's gaseous diffusion operation. "The reason they wanted the new facility was that the old one (Building 9213 at Y-12) was known," Agee said. "It wasn't camouflaged. They wanted something they could hide. That was back when security was really tight." Numerous barns and other farm structures were commonplace on the federal reservation - remnants of the time before the government confiscated the land for use on the WWII A-bomb work. Thus, it was decided to disguise the secret facility to look like another abandoned farm. A weathered barn was placed on top to conceal the bunker, which was built into the hillside. The barn doors opened up to a long room that allowed trucks to enter, backing in to load or unload their nuclear cargo. The inner structure was built to bank-vault specifications. The concrete walls were 18 inches thick and reinforced with steel plates. Inside the vault were metal storage cubicles for the bomb materials. The Oak Ridge installation was only used for about a year in the late 1940s, but during that time Agee and others familiar with the project were required to regularly take polygraph tests to make sure that the secrets were still held. Installation Dog was the code name for the project, but the facility also was known as Building 9214. Over the years, however, the name that stuck was Katy's Kitchen. That unofficial title came from a later period when ORNL's Analytical Chemistry Division used the facility for work with radioactive materials. The anecdote is that a secretary named Katherine "Katy" Odom used to eat lunch there with some regularity. The old, weathered barn is long since gone from the site about a mile off Bethel Valley Road. The security silo is stripped bare to its concrete structure, with wasps and rodents the only regular visitors. And the entrance to the concrete bunker is now accessible only by going through the adjacent research facility. But, more than 50 years after its national-security mission, the historic facility is still there, largely intact, and that's pretty cool. Copyright 2001 The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. ***************************************************************** 10 War Without End Printed from http://www.thenation.com © 2001 The Nation Company, L.P. by A.C. THOMPSON In early November, as American B-52s pummeled Taliban positions, a team of United Nations scientists surveyed the wreckage of the world's last major bombing campaign, the 1999 siege of Kosovo. Since the seventy-eight-day NATO bombardment, researchers with the UN Environment Program have scoured the fractured Balkan landscape, checking shell fragments for radioactivity, sampling well water and testing the soil of bomb-pocked corn fields. The results of these studies are grim. The battle created severe "environmental hotspots" that pose "acute health risks" to the residents of four major cities, reports UN team leader Pasi Rinne. In the eyes of Rinne and his fellow researchers, a "new type of complex humanitarian emergency" is unfolding in post-war Kosovo. A key concern for the UN is the use of depleted uranium (DU) shells, 30,000 of which were fired during the battle for Kosovo. The UN fears that DU rounds, which unleash clouds of toxic, mildly radioactive uranium particles--and have been dubbed "the Agent Orange of this era" by greens--may be contaminating drinking water in the region. Just as the ecological damage done to Kosovo has been largely ignored by the American media, few have considered the long-term environmental consequences of the conflict in Afghanistan. Military analysts expect the Pentagon to employ DU in the Afghan theater, but in lesser amounts than in previous wars. "You won't see that much depleted uranium used because there just aren't the targets," says Philip Coyle, a senior adviser at Washington, DC's Center for Defense Information. But that doesn't mean this war is an eco-friendly affair. Just ask Charles Cutshaw, a former Army intelligence officer and Vietnam vet. "A lot of the chemicals in these weapons are toxic," explains Cutshaw, who now works as a consultant for Jane's Defence Weekly. "I've seen battlefields and they are very dirty places." Even purely conventional munitions, good-old fashioned bombs and missiles, are packed with toxins that will be cast to the wind on detonation. The metal components include heavy metals like lead, a neurotoxin, and cadmium, which causes lung disease and organ damage. Then you have the explosive charges, compounds like cyclonite, a probable carcinogen used in a wide range of ordnance. And don't forget perchlorates, a family of thyroid-damaging chemicals used in rocket propellant. The most significant threat, however, is probably posed by the targets hit by these weapons. In Yugoslavia, NATO bombs obliterated dozens of industrial facilities--oil refineries, electrical transformers, chemical plants, a car factory--located along the Danube river and its tributaries. The strikes sent up plumes of noxious smoke and spilled hundreds of tons of hazardous chemicals into waterways. Here, culled from a 1999 report by Pristina's Regional Environmental Center, is a brief index of the poisons dumped into the Danube: several hundred tons of oil, 1,000 tons of ammonia, 330 tons of caustic hydrochloric acid and 1,400 tons of ethylene-dichloride, a chemical that causes cancer in lab rats. Unsurprisingly, the result of all this was catastrophic. Dead fish were strewn along the banks of the river for miles. Scientists think the water contamination reaches all the way to the Black Sea. The city of Pancevo, ten miles outside Belgrade, suffered a Bhopal-type disaster when NATO planes incinerated a major petrochemical complex. The complex, which included a fertilizer factory, an oil refinery and a chemical plant, burned for five days, as 80,000 tons of oil and 460 tons of dioxin-laden liquid plastic went up in smoke. Rain the color of coal fell on the town of 80,000 people. The air was filled with an array of lethal chemicals, one of which, a liver poison, clocked in at 10,000 times above safe levels. The horror continues. According to a grisly dispatch from Pancevo that ran in the British Guardian this May, eating root vegetables is now banned because of soil contamination, dogs are coming down with a rare bone cancer, young people are reporting heart problems and about 100 of the emergency workers who rushed to the fire are ailing from permanent, disabling lung damage. Wracked by twenty years of conflict, Afghanistan doesn't have the modern infrastructure of pre-war Yugoslavia--but the United States is going after the the country's remaining industrial targets. In early November the BBC reported that American bombs knocked out one of Afghanistan's biggest power plants, and in press briefings the Pentagon has said it is aiming for Taliban oil reserves and fuel depots. "The cleanup problems will be extreme," says Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a San Francisco-based group focused on the military-environment nexus. "Afghanistan as a country has no capacity to deal with the environmental impacts of this campaign, and as a result, people who aren't yet born will be paying the price. This war will create second- and third-generation victims." ***************************************************************** 11 UK: Moving towards first strike use on weapons BRITAIN risks being dragged towards development and potential first strike use of tailor-made nuclear "bunker-buster" weapons on the coat-tails of an increasingly aggressive US military stance, a controversial analysis claims this week. The 82-page study, drawn up by the British American Security Information Council, an independent think-tank based in London and Washington, calls for the urgent restoration of full parliamentary scrutiny of the UK's strategic nuclear policy. It says traditional Whitehall secrecy and lack of public accountability mean that access to information on atomic weapons and their possible use is more difficult to obtain under the current Labour government than it was even under the Tory administrations of Margaret Thatcher or John Major. It also claims Labour has quietly abandoned the UK's 50-year-old policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons to enable it to fall in line with America's determination to retain the right to launch pre-emptive attacks to prevent a biological or chemical repeat of September 11. The report, due to be published on Wednesday, highlights Britain's total reliance on the US for supply and servicing of the Trident D5 intercontinental ballistic missiles used by the Royal Navy's four Vanguard-class nuclear submarines based at Faslane on the Clyde. It also examines the increasingly close co-operation between scientists at the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in England and the three main US laboratories responsible for the design, testing and maintenance of warheads and their future development to meet emerging threats. "The biggest change in Labour Party thinking on nuclear weapons has been the abandonment of the no-first-use policy. This was discussed before Labour came to power, but was quietly dropped after the 1997 election," the study says. "Similarly, although committed to strengthening security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states while in opposition, the Labour government has signalled that the use of nuclear weapons to deter chemical or biological threats has not been ruled out, following the US line of deliberate ambiguity. "The so-called sub-strategic role for Trident has been particularly linked with deterrence of these threats." That option, fashionable after the end of the cold war, left Britain with a £10bn submarine deterrent and no clear enemy to justify the expense, envisages fitting smaller, highly-accurate tactical warheads to the Trident missiles as a reduced but still credible and flexible response to likely threats. The war in Afghanistan has meanwhile accelerated work on options for "low-yield" nuclear warheads designed specifically to penetrate and destroy deep cave complexes impervious to even the most powerful conventional bombs. These could be used not only to wipe out terrorist boltholes in remote mountain areas, but also to target underground chemical, biological and nuclear state-run facilities in Libya, Iran and Iraq. An influential nuclear lobby in Washington is pushing for the restoration of tailor-made atomic weapons as the heart of US strategic policy rather than the move towards surgical strikes with precision-guided high explosives. Adoption of that course would, the report says, have profound implications for Britain and Nato. It would also probably signal a restart of underground nuclear tests and could trigger a new arms race. The UK's four Trident missile boats are dedicated to Nato, with the only "independent" national use of their firepower reserved for response to a direct attack on Britain itself. Nato's supreme allied commander in Europe is always a US general, and British deterrent patrols are already tied in to the overall US strategic nuclear attack blueprint, known as the "single integrated operational plan". If Labour disagreed with US policy, the future of the UK deterrent would be doubtful and current plans to keep the four missile boats in service for 30 years with a secret option for a 12-year extension would be in jeopardy. It might also cost Britain membership of the official "nuclear club" which makes up the permanent five-nation section of the UN's security council, and drastically reduce Downing Street's role and influence in world affairs. The Basic report sees this as "a collision course", but argues that Britain has been presented with a unique opportunity to further the cause of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. The Trident boats could be converted to carry large numbers of conventionally-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles instead of the 48 nuclear warheads which make up the usual patrol payload. Basic's analysts say Britain should use its influence to coax the US to abandon its resistance to binding international treaties regarded as a threat to its place as the world's only superpower, and to join Russia and France in a joint effort towards enforceable reductions in nuclear weaponry. Mark Bromley, one of the co-authors of the Basic study, said yesterday: "Designing so-called low-yield weaponry lowers the threshold for their use. "The British taxpayer is entitled to know what the UK government's position is on this and the future of Trident as a whole." -Dec 3rd ***************************************************************** 12 Propaganda for Depleted Uranium - a Crime against Humankind Piotr Bein, PhD and Peda Zoric. MSc Vancouver, Canada International Conference "Facts on Depleted Uranium" Praha, November 24-25, 2001 Key words: information warfare, NATO, DU, crimes against humankind Summary Based on material in the public domain, the paper considers the structure, strategy and tactics of military Information Operations concerning depleted uranium (DU). The analysis reveals a deep involvement of US and other NATO country governments in misinformation and cover-ups of horrible effects of DU. Nuclear and DU weapon industries, as well as media are intimately woven into the misinformation operations, so it is logical to refer to government-military-industry-media complex. DU facts have been clear for at least two decades, according to NATO countries military and government documents. The truth is tragic and incriminating, but the perpetrators chose to cover their deeds up and misinform the public, instead of helping the civilian and military victims, and cleaning up the contaminated environment. While Middle East, Gulf and Balkan DU victims still remain neglected, a new DU war is in the making in Afghanistan, possibly with the largest DU bombs ever, to "neutralize bin Laden". NATO misinformation on the effects of DU weapons targets foreign and domestic public, governments, and intelligence, in order to influence their perceptions and actions in support of national and strategic goals. Propaganda at first justified that DU ammunition provides "military advantage" over the enemy without own losses. In the last decade, fatal consequences of DU emerged on a mass scale in veterans of DU battles and in civilians whom NATO terrorized with toxic-radioactive DU weapons. Consequently, propaganda for DU evolved to save face and skin of the guilty. It is driven by the fear of multi-billion dollar litigation, and by the attempts to escape responsibility for crimes against humanity. Cleanups of DU battlefields, shooting ranges, and DU storage sites around the world would also be extremely costly. The military, the government and the defense industry continue misinformation operations which have expanded from US and UK to all NATO allies and candidates, including CEE. DU cover-ups evolved into manipulations of inquiries of international health and safety organizations: WHO, UNEP, ICRP, IAEA. Institutions, individuals in high positions and their "reports" on DU became a laughing stock. Special operations reminiscent of the Stalinist era are employed -- sometimes in an absurd and grotesque way, in relation to the clarity of DU facts that incriminate NATO. US and NATO DU propaganda strategy proved counterproductive. DU ammunition was not advantageous in Kosovo against Yugoslav armour, but contaminated the region. Desperate, angry victims left without medical care and material help grow into generations harbouring resentments against US and NATO. The public has little doubt about the risks of DU weapons and who the perpetrators are. Moral credit of the USA and NATO was tarnished everywhere. People in former Soviet block who invested hopes for a better world led by US and NATO are disappointed and angry. USA is harming its own national long-term interests. CEE nations are very concerned that DU weapons could move into their military ranges, after being expelled from the West by domestic protests.. DU is in ammunition, and in armour as in Leopard II tanks, but also in the ballast of cruise missiles, flying bombs and military and civilian aircraft. Apache AH-64 (two crashed in Poland during exercises in October 2001) has 100 kg of DU in its rotor blades. It is not clear yet how much DU was in the planes that rammed into WTC and Pentagon. The "WTC cough" might be a symptom of DU dust inhalation. The public must take a vigorous stand to protect present and future generations from DU. Propaganda is a weak point of the military-government-industry complex. However, the public does not question mainstream media and does not have capacity to seek and understand information about DU, so alternative information is generally rejected.. Biased messages from the government-military-industry information warriors undermine freedom of opinion and the right to know the truth. Covering up information regarding DU crimes against humanity are crimes themselves. The public's self-preservation instinct emerged during successful protests against nuclear mania, and gives hope for countering DU propaganda and cover-ups. Introduction Analysis of reporting in "free world" media on US-led NATO attack on Yugoslavia opened our eyes on politics, militarism, and propaganda. Depleted uranium (DU) is one of the most scandalous issues of NATO involvement in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans, although military use of the weapon started with Israeli tank battles in the 1974 Yom Kippur war. Exploiting the North Atlantic Pact to dilute responsibility and to legitimize immoral interventions, US and UK spread low-intensity radiation and toxicity on battlefields and exercise ranges around the world. No wonder that "terrorists" want to pay back. We are very concerned about US and NATO irresponsibility. The homeland of one of us was contaminated with DU, while the other's may be used by NATO for exercises with DU weapons that were chased out from the West by growing protests. Crashes of two DU-capable Apache AH-64 helicopters during exercises in Poland in October 2001 are of great concern. NATO propaganda is keeping a tight lid on Polish adventures of AH-64 and also on Leopard II tanks, that might be shooting with DU bullets on Polish ranges. The ranges are located in pristine areas, including the Green Lungs of Europe in northeast Poland. We support a nation's right of defense. We are very concerned, however, that our countries of birth and adopted Canada participate in NATO misinformation and cover-ups of weapons of mass destruction and against humankind. DU weapons indiscriminately harm civilians, not only soldiers. Information warfare Beside combat, diplomacy, and economic sanctions, propaganda is one of the four instruments of power. PsyOp (psychological operations) are the most conspicuous of the tools of information warfare. Bein postulated in November 2000 that the DU subject is controlled by the information warfare [www.du-watch.org/bein/psyops.htm]. The hypothesis proved itself during the "Kosovo" DU scandal that followed only a few weeks later. Every information warfare operation could be observed then, including intimidation of vocal victims of DU, and of anti-DU activists in the West and in the CEE countries. The Supreme US Commander General Dwight Eisenhower was responsible for drafting a plan for integrating every aspect of civic life with the military. His last presidential speech in 1946 warned against growth of the military-industrial complex. Today, half of American federal taxes during peacetime go into military spending, including information operations. The military-government-industry complex battles for our minds, using mass media for delivery of doctored information. They draw on techniques described by Hitler in "Mein Kampf". His information minister G”bbels perfected them during Nazi rise to power and WW2 genocide of Slavs, Jews, Gypsies and Jehovah Witnesses. US Department of Defense (DoD) and other military specify the structures and methods of Information Operations. War engages behavioural science, mass media and high technology, as laid out, for example, in the US Field Manual [2]. DoD targets foreign nations and groups, including foreign governments. DoD actions "convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning; and to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels." [3] DoD management of the foreign perceptions, "combines truth projection, operation security, cover and deception, and psychological operations." NATO PsyOp are directed to "enemy, friendly and neutral audiences in order to influence attitudes and behavior affecting the achievement of political and military objectives." NATO country military and media act like clones of Pentagon. Critique comes mainly from outside the Pact, where political and military objectives are different, but not better. It seems that the only audiences that yielded to Pentagon and NATO DU propaganda are allies in the North Atlantic Pact. Public Affairs (PA) "provides objective reporting without intent to propagandize" and disseminates information internationally [4]. PA involves press releases, media briefings and statements by the military that "are based on projection of truths and credible message [that serve to discredit] adversary propaganda or misinformation against the operations of US/coalition forces [which] is critical to maintaining favorable public opinion." [2]. PA use propaganda - white (telling the truth), gray (ambiguous) or black (lying) - often through Public Relations (PR). In "Selling a conflict - the ultimate PR challenge" NATO spokesman Jamie Shea told a Switzerland forum that "he won the war" in Kosovo by carrying out daily briefings in a PR style. It was not the first use of PR at a high level in the Balkan conflict. A deep control of the global media by military-government Information Operations to demonize the Serbs was perhaps the most "successful" aspect of that war. Information operations prepared the world opinion for NATO engagements in Iraq and the Balkans by demonizing the leaders and the peoples. These campaigns subordinated mass media through PA of PsyOp. Censorship was an attribute ascribed to "commies" during the Cold War. Today, in a world free of Soviet communism and censorship, NATO applies PsyOp. Its PA prepare a pot of misinformation soup that is then served to all official news brokers. From there, the propaganda flows to TV, radio, and the press outlets. No wonder that a standard end line in news and stories repeats Pentagon position, for example, "Numerous studies into the effects of DU, a heavy metal used in anti-armour munitions because of its high penetrating power, have not revealed any connection between the metal and cancer." Independent journalists do not have a chance to publish in mainstream media, since NATO information operations subtly control chief editors. Consequently, It is difficult to find independent opinions on DU in the official media. Several types of special services integrate to achieve information warfare objectives. The commanders decide who are the right people for a mission and what units should be used in addition to PA and PsyOp. US Special Operations are engaged. It is a joint command that can assemble teams of experts in different fields from the different services of NATO countries, as the mission requires. Attacks on anti-DU activist, Dr. Doug Rokke, former Pentagon expert on DU, were likely steered by US Special Operations in a broader campaign of "fighting" the truth about DU. More recently, the military and government authorities forged death certificates of Balkan DU military victims. NATO special operatives use Stalinist-like intimidation methods in the CEE and the West alike, to keep a lid on DU truth. In March 2001, "unknown" criminals broke into the home of Mrs. Riordan, the widow of a Canadian veteran of the Gulf War. The criminals destroyed her PC and stole medical certificates of uranium presence in the body of her husband who died in 2000. Royal Canadian Mounted Police refused to investigate, because the criminals "did not leave any traces." Implemented by a military-bureaucratic structure, information warfare produces blunders. PsyOp then attempt to cover the blunders up with more blunders, amazingly but tragically. An imperative to hide the truth drives the guilty and their operatives -- Special Operations, PA, PsyOp, spokesmen, official media, pseudo-scientists -- into intricate thought contraptions and staged events that are supposed to "convince" the audience. The Balkan DU case has the following information warfare features. Mission: i) avoid government-industry-military liability, including storage of DU waste and past uses of DU weapons in the Gulf, Balkans, and on testing ranges; ii) maintain a terrorist weapon. Target audience: domestic and foreign leaders and public opinion. Psychological objectives: alienate, dilute, delay, eliminate global public opposition to DU. Timing: i) until US and international laws ban the military use of DU; or, ii) until a world tribunal sentences persons responsible, whichever comes first. Theme: "Effective against enemy armour, protects our own troops", "As harmless as a handful of dirt" - Pentagon; "Radiation no higher than in a household smoke alarm." - British MoD. Partners: US and British departments of defense, NATO member and candidate country politicians and military, DU industry, corrupt institutes and international organizations, such as UNEP, WHO, IAEA, ICRP. Development: i) communication through spokesmen, "scientific" reports, and mass media; ii) intimidation of key anti-DU activists with "special" methods. Filtering: (I) emphasize "friendly" reports, (ii) suppress independent research results, (iii) deceive by applying pseudo-science. Damage control: i) suppress scientific evidence and hide casualties; ii) change emphasis to possible other causes of Gulf and Balkan syndromes, iii) special operations against victims of DU and anti-DU activists. Blunders: i) contradictory own reports; ii) delays in divulging location of DU use over Yugoslavia; iii) failure to warn and protect NATO and UN forces, foreign workers and local civilians, iv) special operations obvious and objectionable to public opinion; v) DU military use cover-ups necessarily extend to civilian applications, causing unnecessary risk to NATO country own civilian populations. Predictable by amateurs PsyOp are also predictable, as events since Gulf War proved. In 1999, Bein predicted cover-ups of Balkan DU, based on post-Gulf War experience [www.eco.pl/zb/147/; www.eco.pl/zb/internet/nato/zuran2.htm]. Events in 2001 proved that amateur Bein was accurate. If NATO is so predictable, it is not worth our taxes. Bein's 1999 predictions were: - Understate the amount of DU weapons used. - Belittle, change emphasis, dilute, deny. - Manipulate reports and scientific evidence, including those from previous campaigns that used DU. - Censor DU information in mass media. - Blame "Milosevic" and "his" secret manufacture, storage and use of biological and chemical weapons. - Coerce old and new Yugoslav government to withhold the truth. - Blame other causes, such as pre-war or general pollution. - Partially blame DU used by the Yugoslav forces and KLA. All of the above points (except the last one -- when would it be coming to your TV screen and local paper?) came true in some form, as is described in this paper. A book exhausts the topic of censorship in the context of NATO involvement in the Balkan wars [1]. Numerous comments about PsyOp and DU can be found on www.du-watch.org. Several of them were selected by other websites: Antiwar, Yahoo, Indymedia, Balkanpeace, and other. There are reasons to believe that NATO coerced old and new Yugoslav governments to supress DU casualty information. Patricia Axelrod's report [11] indicates that Yugoslav de-contamination units were deployed during NATO bombing, while the government likely concealed NATO DU casualties in military hospitals.. If the Yugoslav authorities knew about DU contamination and risk, why there were no reports on Yugoslav Army and civilian DU casualties from outside Kosovo where the Yugoslav authorities were not impeded by NATO? After new Yugoslav foreign minister visited Lord Robertson in the beginning of 2001, Yugoslavia tested soldiers for DU "negative," as in NATO member and candidate countries . One experienced Yugoslav military doctor who was not allowed to take part in the tests, commented, "Tested by whom and by what methods?" Dangerous at any speed Like many other texts on radioactivity, professor of physics Tadeusz Niewiadomski wrote in 1991 "Medycyna naturalna" (natural medicine), published by the Polish Medical Publishing House: "A thin piece of paper or the exterior, dead layers of skin can stop alpha particles [...] Thus they are not dangerous to the body, provided they remain external to it. However, if they are inhaled or enter the body with food or through open wounds, they become exceptionally dangerous, since they emit much energy to each cell, seriously damaging it. Although beta particles penetrate tissue to the depth of several centimeters, the resulting biological damage is significantly smaller compared to that of alpha particles. Gamma and X-ray radiation [...] is weakened by the tissue only to a small degree [...] The biological effect of one absorbed quantum of this radiation in the tissue is the same as from one quantum of beta radiation." Niewiadomski also mentioned long-term effects of accumulated small exposures, which transfer to future generations: "...every dose is harmful and can cause cancer or genetic changes after years, therefore one must always avoid unnecessary exposure and maintain doses in smallest quantities possible. It is not merely a common sense requirement, but also the letter of Polish law." Objective DU reports from US and UK governments do not say differently. Read after years of information warfare on the DU topic, they prove that USA and the world knew about the health and environmental consequences of DU weapon use. They documents have been warning about toxic-radioactive effects of DU, as follows, - In 1984, US Federal Aviation Agency document cautioned the investigators of aircraft crashes against the hazard from DU in counterweights of civilian airplanes: particles inhaled or ingested are toxic and can cause long-term irradiation of the internal tissue. - Six months before the Gulf War, a Science Applications International Corporation report wrote, "Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer." - In the early nineties, UK Atomic Energy Authority warned that if all of the DU fired by tanks in the Gulf War was inhaled, "there could be half a million deaths as a result by 2000." Tanks fired only about 8% of all DU used in that war. - 1993 US General Accounting Office report GAO/NSIAD-93-90 stated, "Inhaled insoluble [DU] oxides stay in the lungs longer and pose a potential cancer risk due to radiation. Ingested DU dust can also pose both a radioactive and toxicity risk." - 1995 US Army Environmental Policy Institute report warned, "Toxicologically, DU poses a health risk when internalized. Radiologically, the radiation emitted by DU results in health risks from both external and internal exposures [...] If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences " - In 1999, a Los Alamos Laboratory memo said that there were concerns about the environmental consequences of DU. Thus, in order to protect the DU weapons from becoming politically unacceptable and removed from the arsenals, reports from the Gulf War should be edited accordingly. Another memo stated that alpha particles emitted from DU dust created from exploded DU ammunition pose a health risk, but beta particles from DU shrapnel and from intact DU bullets are a serious hazard to health. - January 2001, leak: UK Ministry of Defense was secretly testing for radiation poisoning among British soldiers just months before it sent troops to Kosovo. At the time the ministry was refusing screening for Gulf War veterans. The disclosure went much further than an earlier leak that showed only that officers knew 4 years earlier about the risk of developing lung, lymph and brain cancers from DU shells. - In January 2001, a leak implicated former Republican Senator Warren Rudman and retired Rear Admiral Paul Steinman who biased and censored a serious inquiry into Pentagon's handling of Gulf War illness, run by Dr. Bernard Rostker. Managing the process Portugal science minister Dr. Mariano Gago told reporters DU was a "false problem." His team did not find "the smallest shred of radioactivity in any part of Kosovo." Dr. Fernando Carvalho, waving a Geiger counter, told the reporters that no radiation at all was found. Alpha radiation is not detectable with an ordinary Geiger counter. The politicians spoke before scientific results were in. "Was it a pre-taste of things to come from NATO and UN investigations?" -- asked Bein in part 3 of "DU Cover-up Saga" on January 19, 2001 [www.du-watch.org]. The answer is, "Definite yes!" NATO propaganda "manages the process" as DU issues emerge onto the public arena. The goal is to brainwash the public about DU (and the Pact's) innocence. The propaganda applies "damage control" when DU issues get out of hand. It then suppresses evidence, and emphasizes "other factor" causes of Gulf and Balkan syndromes. In the "Kosovo DU" scandal, NATO cited chemicals in wood handled by the soldiers, and benzene with which they allegedly cleaned guns. The media also cited natural asbestos deposits and lead contamination of Kosovo appeared in order to divert attention from DU. Amidst the Balkan DU debate, Associated Press dispatch from Kosovo named lead, untreated sewage, dust from a cement plant, and toxins from neglected factories. As if to add insult to injury, this "environmental advocacy" also served to justify a military takeover of the Trepca mines by KFOR for billionaire George Soros. US Army Col. David Lam announced, "If there is in fact a health risk resulting from services in the Balkans, I think we need to look at all possible causes, such as other pollutants and hazards, and not focus only on DU." Dr. Milan Orlic, president of the Nuclear Sciences Society at Vinca Institute, said at a January 2001conference in Athens that Balkan syndrome was more likely correlated with other agents present besides DU. A recent article blamed kidney diseases in the Balkans on well water contamination by toxins seeping from coal deposits [12]. A disinformation tactics of the "other factor than DU" was adopted after the Gulf War. Pentagon and NATO will likely pursue it for Balkan DU, once cancers start taking a high toll. Inoculations and pills did not enter the stage, yet. It would help the propaganda, if "Milosevi‡" set oil wells and refineries on fire, squashed a rebellion with chemical-biological weapons, or if anthrax inoculations were administered in the Balkans. Unfortunately, it was NATO who set Pancevo and Novi Sad refineries on fire. Even if "Slobo did it," the wind blew the smoke away from Kosovo. Non-DU nuclear material is also subtly suggested to the public opinion. Srda Popovic, advisor for ecology to the Serb Prime Minister, told Radio B92 on November 22, 2001, that a smelter in Bor, Serbia, melted nuclear waste in late eighties, causing radiation level in the area 150 times higher than allowed [http://news1.beograd.com/english/archive.html]. B92 is a known outlet of NATO propaganda. It spread lies about "Milosevic crimes to Yugoslavs. "If it is true, this is an ecological crime and genocide against inhabitants of Bor, and someone will have to take over the responsibility. If we prove that the waste has been imported, which is against our laws, the sanctions would be considerable. We must investigate who has imported it and how, what about customs control, who has received it here and ordered melting, leaving the by-products somewhere near the town. I repeat, the Government of Serbia will do its best to investigate the allegations and, if they were valid, to find and punish persons responsible for it," said Popovic to Radio B92. The radio did not go on record for exposing NATO crimes during 1999 air raids, and was also silent to date about NATO DU genocide of Gulf and Balkan populations. Someone at the Fort Bragg headquarters of US Special Operations Command (that include Information Operations) apparently sits at a "Milosevic" desk. The mission statement of his/her office is something like, "Blame "Milosevic" and "his" secret biological and chemical weapons." Hungarian "intelligence sources" said that Milosevic planted DU nuclear and chemical pollution while NATO was carrying out its humanitarian mission in Kosovo, and earlier in Iraq (by teleportation?) and in Bosnia. Portuguese Gen. Barrento accused the anti-DU journalists and the father of dead KFOR soldier Hugo Paulino of being on the payroll of pro- Milosevic forces. Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova dismissed Europe's concerns over DU for he believed they were raised by people trying to drive KFOR out of Kosovo. He did not mention "Milosevic-friendly" but it could be implied. DU PyOp use simple, but ridiculous ideas and phrases to appeal to Joe-in-the-street, according to two basic rules of propaganda: (i) repeated lie becomes accepted truth, (ii) the public accepts outrageous lies more readily. DU misinformation operations, - create pseudo-science where science proves DU is risky, - emphasize toxicity of DU at the expense of its radioactive risk, - co-opt international organizations, research institutes, and universities, in order to lend "authority" and "independence" to deceiving statements and reports about the effects of DU, - launch tightly controlled "investigations" while suppressing mounting evidence of DU-induced illness and death. The propaganda tactics is 3-d: deny, delay, deceive. The risk of DU in Kosovo was absolutely denied at first. A NATO document warned member countries participating in KFOR about the toxicity from DU weapons in July 1999. The KFOR troops and UN workers entered Kosovo 2nd week of June 1999. The release of DU site information was delayed for almost 2 years. When it came out, it was understated (see "Not good at math or ...geography"). Finally, a barrage of lies, half-truths and nonsense was engaged to defend radioactive DU. Similar phases could be traced on the issue of U-236, plutonium, and other "impurities" in DU. Lord Robertson claimed that NATO warned "without exception" all countries in KFOR about DU toxicity.. Portuguese army denied categorically. Their contingent was placed in Kosovo's worst DU areas. US troops kept out of contaminated areas while European troops were sent in - without adequate information. In countries whose military claimed they received NATO warning, rank and file soldiers protested. German defense minister Scharping lied about preparation of soldiers for DU before they arrived in Kosovo. According to him, the use of uranium in the war had been made public in May. Actually, the ministry did it on July 2nd, 1999. Who warned Kosovo Albanians, for whom Germany stood under arms for the first time since WW2? Seeing how NATO disrespects their life and health, KFOR troops of many countries mutinied, while volunteers withdrew. NATO "research" fails to promptly test the exposed military and civilians, a starting base for any serious inquiry.. When "testing" is instituted, it is controlled by the military who are subordinate to NATO command. Results of independent tests are concealed. The Portuguese defense ministry refused to hand over Hugo Paulino's body who died from leukemia. The ministry deliberately camouflaged his death, citing "herpes of the brain" and refused to allow his family to commission a post-mortem examination. This practice was reminiscent of cover-ups of Gulf syndrome among US, UK, and allied troops. The veterans had to self-organize to defend their right to health. According to independent veteran organizations in the US and UK, out of about 750 000 Gulf War veterans, reportedly well over 30 000 died already, and almost 20% have the syndrome. The doctors diagnose "post-combat" stress and prescribe Prozac. The authorities push the sick veterans around, deny them proper medical care and compensation. Sick and disabled, they are left without means to survive. Desperation drives many to suicide and assaults on the bureaucracy. Testing of veterans authorized by NATO does not measure the right things. DU can be detected in urine - some soluble form of DU always accompany insoluble one, but somehow government tests cannot detect it. Normal levels of uranium in urine do not mean absence of danger and disease, either. Only chemical analysis of lymph nodes from dead victims could confirm the lymphatic cause, but, not surprisingly, there had been no government reports of such autopsies. Radiation at DU sites is measured with the Geiger counter, which is insensitive to alpha particles, the primary radiological hazard from DU. UNEP study was unable to detect any wider area of contamination "with the Beta and Gamma radiation measurements" because the team was not adequately equipped to measure for alpha radiation. NATO "experts" in a study for European Commission were unable to observe" the health effects below 100 mSv, a low-level, but dangerous effect of a DU particle in the tissue. Dr Bertell commented, "It should be obvious that one changes instruments as measurements become more fine [...] One uses a micrometer to measure the width of a piece of paper, not a metre stick." DU cover-ups have co-opted major international organizations and institutions that the public regards as respectable, objective and independent. DU information operations evolved into manipulations of inquiries done by international health and safety organizations: UN Environmental Program, World Health Organization, International Commission on Radiological Protection, International Atomic Energy Authority, and other. The activities are carried out within the government-military-industry-media complex. Independent scientists widely criticize UNEP reports on DU. Experts of WHO decided to investigate the effects of DU in Iraq 10 years after the Gulf War! ICRP has been suppressing low-level radiation data since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. IAEA, the only UN agency under obvious influence of a private sector (nuclear industry in this case) has a monopoly on dealing with radiation aspects of DU, leaving WHO the authority over the toxic aspect, only. Under an agreement with the IAEA, WHO is obliged to limit the scope of its activities to the toxic effects of nuclear materials. Health issues arising from radiation are the exclusive domain of the IAEA. This is no bureaucratic freak, but a deliberate institutional tool of the civil-military nuclear complex control and cover-up of all irradiation issues around the world. Countless journalists and numerous professionals, researchers, professors and persons in responsible positions help with NATO deception and misinformation about DU. Those individuals broke their own professional ethics of primary allegiance to public good, and, more importantly, colluded in crimes against humanity by spreading lies and distortions about the fatal effects of DU in military and civilian applications. These apparently intelligent people don't seem to understand that radioactive DU particles may sooner or later affect them and their offspring. Not good at math ...or geography Pentagon admitted in May 1999 that it used DU ammunition in Kosovo, but US Army assistant secretary Dr. Bernard Rostker said he did not see any reason why the US should tell anyone where DU was used. After much maneuvering, 19.5 months after the refugees started returning to Kosovo after NATO bombing, and several years after Bosnia war, NATO reluctantly published the DU sites. At the end of 2000, NATO set up web pages [www.nato.int/du/] with information on DU sites in Kosovo and Bosnia. Lists of coordinates accompanied the maps, but the data was useless: the coordinates were given in cryptic military convention, while the map files could not be read even from our powerful PCs. Was it intended by the NATO webmaster? Repeated by NATO propaganda, "31 thousand DU bullets" were only at the sites with records. Many entries in the list of DU sites indicated "unknown number" of bullets. Probably Yugoslav and Russian army estimate of 50 thousand bullets in Kosovo campaign was closer to the truth. Zoric [8] analyzed NATO Kosovo list. Out of 112 sites, NATO knew DU quantities for only 89 sites. The rest was "unknown". The known number was 30 523 DU bullets, which represented a total mass of about 9 metric tons. One 30 mm bullet contains just under 0.3 kg of DU metal. Using an average from the sites with known quantities, Zoric estimated 7 888 additional DU rounds at the "unknown" sites, adding up to a total of 38 411 [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/files/nato%20du%20kosovo.xls]. The number might be higher still, if NATO used large or very large quantities at some sites. This could be the reason NATO hid true quantity from the start, with a view on bagatelizing the problem through propaganda. Zoric also discovered that majority of rounds were fired at the very end of the aggression. In June's 11 days of attacks, some 20 000 rounds were fired, and from May 29 to the end -- some 23 500. Yugoslavia accepted the "peace deal" on June 3, and the war officially ended 7 days later. Yet NATO records show that DU was still fired on June 11. Out of 3 270 DU bullets fired in Serbia outside of Kosovo and Metohija, almost 2 000 were shot in June. At Plackavica near Vranje, A-10 shot at a rock -- for exrecise or nuclear-toxic terrorism?. Yugoslav professor Jaksic [5] discovered that there were at least 115 locations in the Balkans which were stricken by DU rounds during NATO Kosovo campaign, and that the NATO list "hides" 26 locations in Macedonia, 16 in Albania and one in the Adriatic Sea. Neither NATO nor Yugoslav government mentioned the sites. They clustered around the airports in Skopje and Rinas (near Tirana), which NATO used for emergency landing and support bases during air raids on Yugoslavia in 1999. Bein postulated that the clusters resulted from dropping DU ammunition before emergency landing of damaged NATO aircraft. The cluster in the Adriatic Sea might have been around an aircraft carrier. A comical situation arose when Zoric pointed out to UNEP that sites they tested for a major report were not on official list of NATO DU sites. UNEP answered: "Some of the coordinates given on the website are effectively wrong, but we can assure you that our teams went to the sites mentioned on the NATO table. You can check this from the sample coordinates that the teams went through large areas surrounding the NATO given coordinate. The coordinates given in the website will be corrected immediately." [10] This statement alone is proof that UNEP did not measure at NATO given locations, but in the surrounding areas. DU witchcraft NATO creates DU "science". We would not expect cigarette companies to produce objective studies on tobacco-induced cancers, would we? Supposedly a physicist and professor of public and international relations at Princeton, Frank von Hippel was cited in January 15, 2001, New York Times as saying DU is not a radioactivity hazard because much of it has been removed. Is "public and international relations" in his title related to NATO "Public Affairs"? Most likely, since von Hippel's "work" is featured on NATO DU website www.nato.int/kosovo/010110du.htm. The website spins pseudo-science produced on PsyOp demand. There is no other explanation, since DU facts have been clear for years. The perpetrators are accomplices in a crime against humanity, and will be held responsible. The NATO DU site is yet another evidence of corruption at international organizations, research and strategic studies institutes, universities, and mass media. Pentagon's own objective reports will not be found there, but on many DU websites that are linked to from www.du-watch.org, for example. A 1999 RAND "report" was designed to divert attention to drugs that Gulf War soldiers received as protection against a nerve chemical. UN after-war reports on war pollution in Kosovo showed everything except the truth. One report said there was no risk of DU in Kosovo and the population could go on living as usual. More recent UNEP reports don't say differently. See "Service to humankind." Instead of being as harmless as a "handful of dirt from your backyard," the DU turned out to contain radioactive-toxic additives that according to specifications should not be there. Maybe for this reason NATO meant the majority component of DU, uranium 238, is "not a health concern". Relatively, the other components are, so the risks from U-238 fade by comparison. NATO told the truth, but not the whole truth. "Impartial" groups were quick to jump on the bandwagon. WHO expeditiously compared DU-like illness incidence in Kosovo before and after NATO bombing. Statistics are incomparable, because it is a completely different population in the province today. 300 or 400 thousand opponents of Albanian extremism and separatism left Kosovo, but many more immigrants came from Albania. Pre-1999 Kosovo Albanians boycotted the Yugoslav state health care system under Milosevic, so the statistics quoted by WHO are fragmentary at best. After 2 weeks of"controversy" the alliance said in mid-January 2001 that its chief medical officers compared evidence and found no serious health risk from DU weapons. The true evidence includes all DU-related cases of dead and sick soldiers that were hidden from public scrutiny -- tens if not hundreds of thousands in NATO countries, and an order of magnitude more civilians. If DU is so vigorously covered up in the West, how much easier it must be in the CEE countries where, for example, the tobacco companies bribed a professor with a trip to Hawaii for lying about the effects of nicotine, and reporters were paid off to write lies about cigarettes. PsyOp enlisted top nuclear and medical experts from CEE. Poland is a typical case. Polish nuclear "scientists" made nonsense statements, some in team with Western "professors" [www.du-watch.org/bein/apologists.htm]. Instead of giving own scientific opinions, Polish nuclear "experts" maintain "DU has nothing to do with the Gulf War illness." They neither participated in any studies of this kind, nor specialize in this field of research. Prof. Jaworowski of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw discredited himself by siding with the nuclear lobby. In a joint article with a Dr. Roger Bate from Cambridge, "professors" underestimated the risk from DU by a factor of million [7]. Jaworowski and Bate also rejected "Kosovo leukemia" as occuring too early. In fact, many KFOR soldiers with leukemia in 2000 and 2001 served in 1994-1995 Bosnia war, where DU was used. The rest were the earliest, most vulnerable victims of leukemia among KFOR and UN police from 1999 DU in Kosovo. Jaworowski and Bate compiled from the press the number of deaths among KFOR and UN Kosovo policemen and compared them with leukemia morbidity for average UK population -- an absurd, since: (I) the accounts of Kosovo leukemia were certainly incomplete; (ii) average population is not comparable with the young and healthy social group of soldiers, and; (iii) the authors applied a biased procedure of the ICRP which is known to ignore empirical data of morbidity and mortality due to low-level radiation, nuclear reactor catastrophes and uranium mining and processing. The chairman of the Polish Nuclear Agency, Prof. Niewodniczanski insulted the public with irresponsible statements about DU. He got away with his crime, for an average Pole obtains information from the TV, billboards and tabloids. Another "NATO expert", Prof. Zag¢rski from the Institute of Chemistry and Nuclear Technology in Warsaw, compared radioactivity from 300 t of DU in the Gulf to 1953-1977 emissions of "natural uranium" over the entire area of the USA, implying that since it did not harm Americans for so many years, why would it be dangerous in the Persian Gulf region! He also insisted one can safely sit on DU rounds for 2000 hours! DU is known to give on contact in one hour a dose thrice the annual allowable limit. Service to humankind Toxic and radioactive effects of DU do not need to be "studied" and "proven". The sick and dead Gulf War veterans in US and UK are sufficient proof that scientific reports from the military and governments were true. Though there were about 6 major factors contributing to mortality and morbidity of own troops, scientists do not doubt that DU was one of them. The statistics are not yet known for Balkan war veterans. If details of DU effects are uncertain, they should be resolved by qualified research institutes, but not on involuntary human subjects exposed by NATO to internal alpha radiation. From precautionary principle, any potentially harmful effect should be prevented at all cost. Normal scientific assessment of DU effects follows a standard risk analysis chain: products of DU use - fate in a place over time - exposure to people and nature - dose received - morbidity and mortality effects. NATO "scientists" tinker with every step of the analysis. What would one expect? A criminal will not investigate his crimes. NATO "scientists" notoriously do the following: 1. Fail to mention that the concentration of uranium in DU makes it orders of magnitude more hazardous than naturally occurring uranium that is mixed with other minerals in the ground in a steady-state, chemical and radiological equilibrium. 2. Concentrate on the "pure" DU comprising mainly U-238 and a minimal proportion of U-235. Contrary to industry specifications, real DU contains U-236, U-234, plutonium, americum and other isotopes from nuclear reactors. 3. Skim over the risky products of DU (U-238) military use: soluble uranium oxides (as short-term toxic agents) and insoluble ones (long-term toxic and radioactive), also in ceramic form 4. Conceal the fact that ingested or inhaled DU particles are the main problem, not the external radiation from DU metal on the human body. 5. Calculate the exposure to DU over areas thousands of times larger than areas actually contaminated. 6. Spread DU doses over kilograms of internal organs, instead of grams of affected tissue -- a falsification also by a factor of 1000. NATO dose is thus millions times smaller than the actual risk from DU [7]. 7. Ignore an activity in the lungs, which moves particles into the lymph glands, and adopt the optimistic picture of DU passing from the body. 8. Ignore the fact that elimination of soluble uranium overwhelms the kidneys. Insoluble uranium oxide and ceramic uranium oxide may move through the kidney slowly and not cause serious renal toxicity. 9. Do not emphasize that just one dose on a DU battlefield is bad for the lymph nodes, but a veteran may be present at many such events. 10. Project morbidity and mortality from ICRP curves that are invalid for internal doses of low-level radiation and insoluble DU particles. 11. Pass over in silence the fact that DU radiation, - causes cancer directly, and - promotes cancers from other factors (the early Balkan cancers could be radiation-promoted). 12. Compare erroneously estimated incidence of cancers among veterans to statistics for general population. The latter is an incomparable group. Official epidemiological statistics are biased downwards, "background" radiation includes gradual accumulation of global radioactive pollution. Allowable exposure standards are steadily being adjusted downwards by international institutions responsible for public health and nuclear safety. NATO "scientific" propaganda concentrates on the less harmful aspects of DU. Defending the military use of DU is then much easier. When critics mention the other aspects, DU pseudo-science says, "No evidence exists". In all cases sufficient evidence exists to the contrary. In uncertain cases, the precautionary principle decides about avoiding the risks of DU use. US Government has recently admitted that 50 years of uranium fuel manufacturing has not led to serious epidemiological studies. Previous studies focused on cancer death as a biological endpoint, while ignoring chronic illnesses, deformed children, and other veteran medical problems. Internal radiation dose was never calculated in the A-bomb studies, hence it cannot inform on the biochemical pathways of a ceramic DU particle in the body. Yet, ICRP analytical apparatus relies solely on the false data. NATO "scientists" apply ICRP estimates concerning uranium dust from nuclear industrial processes, and not from aerosols (including ceramic) produced from DU ammunition. Analogies of DU particles to nuclear industry situations and encoded into ICRP data are invalid, because of cover-ups in the industry. Also, inhalation of uranium dust cannot reveal all of the biochemical intricacies of inhalation of ceramic uranium. The propaganda exploits general ignorance of the complexities of DU risks. From a uniform "depleted, spent U-238" DU suddenly turned out to contain highly radioactive and toxic uranium 234, 236 and plutonium in the beginning of 2001. European allies of the US were furious that they were not informed prior to DU use in the Balkans. Pentagon stealthily planted the information on the NATO DU website in December 2000. On February 17, 2001, the Swiss radio announced that a Swiss lab has found only minute traces of plutonium in NATO DU weapons used by NATO-led forces in the Balkans [www.enn.com]. The lab report had signs of a PsyOp hand [9]. "Minute traces" read "no traces" a few lines on. "Highly toxic plutonium" of course was not radioactive at all. The "additives" to DU were deemed "no more dangerous than purely DU arms," i.e. as innocent as a "handful of dirt." An official Swiss government document [www.nato.int/du/docu/d010125a.htm] posted at NATO DU site raises a number of questions. DU weapons were tested in tunnels in Switzerland from 1960 to 1980, then the tests were "brought to an end." Why would one need a tunnel if the weapon were not a health risk? In August 1999 a Swiss agency conducted research in Serbia on spent DU ammunition. "All results concerning health hazards were negative." They only discovered radioactivity and shells buried into the ground, for example around the radio tower at Vranje. There were no medical tests on the population. In January 2000, when world public opinion was still waiting for NATO to tell where and how much DU was used in Kosovo, a Swiss defense contractor AC-Laboratorium Spiez (ACLS) "determined through analysis conducted as of April 1999 that the health hazards related to DU are negligible." In April 1999 the USA announced DU would be used in Kosovo. In January 2001, Swiss authorities introduced voluntary tests for all Swiss military and civilians engaged in the Balkans, past and present. However, "spent ammunition samples collected against regulations in the field and brought home illegally by some soldiers" was "collected by Army services" who "offered help" to the soldiers concerned. Help with what? DU was not harmful said the Swiss ACLS report. Swiss concern was not limited to own soldiers: "the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation has contacted UNMIK, the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as UNEP to inquire about steps taken to safeguard civilian populations." On January 17, 2001, the Swiss minister of defense tasked ACLS with testing spent DU ammunition for plutonium. On the next day, the Swiss president suggested to propose that the December 2001 Geneva CCW Review Conference take up the matter of a ban on DU ammunition. Why ban it if the prime Swiss defense contractor to NATO ascertained DU was not harmful? Former secretary-general of NATO, later EU foreign and security policy chief, Javier Solana was heading NATO ad hoc investigation to prove to the public that DU was safe. With a PsyOp script Solana stated -- before any serious investigating began -- that there was "no evidence of a link between the illnesses reported by NATO personnel and the use of DU ammunition." A meeting of the ad hoc committee comprising top medical experts of NATO included Mark Laity, NATO spokesman who during the "Kosovo DU controversy" upheld the traditions of Jamie Shea from your 1999 TV screen. The meeting declared, "We cannot identify any increase in disease or mortality in soldiers who have deployed to the Balkans as compared to those soldiers who have not been deployed." The meaning of "ad hoc" came out. With a lightning speed, the committee "examined" thousands of soldiers who served in IFOR, SFOR and KFOR, and not a trivial number of policemen sent at various times to the Balkans. Then DU could not be a problem to civilians, either. When Italy and Portugal raised serious concerns about the DU risk to their veterans, European Commission asked an unspecified "group of independent experts" whether "hundreds, if not thousands" of EU personnel and contract employees who have worked in the Balkans might face health risks from exposure to DU "slight radioactivity". On March 6, 2001, the report was in. The "experts" turned out to be not health professionals, but theoretical physicists who know little about toxicology or biophysiology. They know only how to apply recommendations of ICRP which also fails to have Occupational or Public Health professionals on its Main Committee which makes all recommendations. The public hoped the EU report would clarify the DU "controversy" but the "experts" repeated unsubstantiated propaganda: - "radiological exposure to DU could not result in a detectable effect on human health," and - "there was no evidence to support" a hypothesis that exposure to toxic and carcinogenic chemicals could combine with radiation. Independent scientists S. Kaiser and R. Bertell called the opinion, - "useless for the protection of either the veterans or the public, contrary to the expressed intent," - "out of touch with facts and depends on dubious theory for its answers," - "a basic physics paper using theoretical (and often inadequate and incorrect) models," and concluded that it "added little to the concerned dialogue about DU." On October 30, 2001, Pentagon released "Depleted Uranium Environmental and Medical Surveillance in the Balkans" [http://deploymentlink.osd.mil/du_balkans/index.html]. As if posed to fend critics of possible use of DU in Afghanistan, or of opposition to NATO DU weapons on Polish military ranges, the paper has "not found any connections between DU exposure in the Balkans and negative health effects." Most of the work cited in the paper was from "independent" organizations: UK Royal Society, WHO, UNEP and ACLS. Playing with words Attempts by DU propaganda to deceive, confuse and play with words are most amazing. Undoubtedly, these ideas breed in Fort Bragg and other seats of PsyOp, from where they radiate to influence the language and opinions of those to whom society looks up. Anti-war publicist George Szamuely called it "an orgy of lying." Propaganda says "depleted" to highlight "neutral" DU that encyclopedias assert is toxic and radioactive. Polish NewSpeak artists even tried to call DU "disarmed uranium". The silver metal is better than "neutral": soldiers are safer against radiation from space in a tank made of DU than outside, on the battlefield. US defence secretary William Cohen said DU was no more dangerous than "leaded paint". A US Army briefer advised reporters DU was safe enough to eat! If DU refuses to "evaporate" and "disappear", the propaganda says that the dust is too heavy to fly anywhere. Basic environmental science classes teach that fine particulates remain airborne, no matter how heavy they are. If the audience is still skeptical, NATO says that DU "saves lives" of soldiers, because it knocks out enemy armour from a "safe" distance. DU particles don't steer away from NATO troops. Once created in the battlefield, they travel freely. Many NATO soldiers got sick and died of DU after their vehicles were hit with friendly fire. Many more were contaminated from burning DU ammunition stores. NATO spokesmen and medical experts compared DU to "glow-in-the-dark type of watch," and maintained that DU poses "negligible hazard." "Smoking 2 cigarettes a day or having a series of bowel X-rays can cause more radiation exposure than an hour of deliberate handling of a DU penetrator round." The penetrator bullets are just "tipped" or "coated" with DU. 30 mm rounds contain almost 0.3 kg DU core, and 120 mm rounds -- 4 kg. GBU 28 bunker buster, which contains 2 metric tones of "dense metal ballast" is being readied for possible use in Afghanistan. VIPs were remarkable. While heading an ad hoc "investigation" to prove Kosovo DU was not risky, former NATO political chief Javier Solana stated, "The evidence points in the other direction." "Is DU is a health benefit?", wondered a reader in a January 22, 2001, letter to Washington Times. Madelaine Albright was original, "There's absolutely no proof" of a DU-cancer connection. Then she does not need to answer if who-knows-how-many children dying of DU exposure in Iraq's Basrah were "worth it." Lord Robertson defended the "proven [DU] technology that has been independently tested": 'We cannot possibly act on the perceptions of people or on the view of a word such as 'uranium'." For the relevance of "perceptions" to information warfare, see www.du-watch/bein/psyops.htm. German defence minister Scharping compared radioactivity of 1 gram of DU with that present in "10 litres of bath water" and called Balkan syndrome a "hysteria syndrome". Chancellor Schr”der who had a "healthy skepticism" about DU-cancer connection, suddenly became "skeptical about the use of munitions that could lead to dangers" to German troops. The "dirt" that everyone walks on is compared to "harmless" DU. "There is more natural radioactivity in homes in many parts of the US (and Europe) than inside and M1 tank," wrote a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC. When the armour is pierced by friendly fire and DU sandwiched between the steel of armour burns and disintegrates, then NATO has a big problem, not just inside the damaged tank, but in the region. Most victims of Gulf and Balkan syndromes were not even close to A-10 plane or DU tank. They did not handle any DU rounds. Those who handled DU bullets, shells or shrapnel exposed themselves to some 300 millirems per hour. The Nuclear Regulatory Commisssion allowable limit is 100 millirems ...per year. However, most of the civilians and soldiers with Gulf or Balkan syndrome breathed DU-contaminated air, or took in DU particles through water, food, or open wounds. They also brought DU particles home. Storing military gear from the Gulf War at home of a Gulf War veteran made his child sick. His wife also contracted the Gulf syndrome, and then miscarried a baby. Of the fifth kind In the 1990s, the US and the UK at the head of the "international community" added legalistic warfare as the fifth kind of instrument of power. It concentrates on made-up allegations against "regimes" that violate "human rights" and obstruct "democracy", "freedom" and "free market economy" around the world, starting with Yugoslavia. Ridiculous "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" allegations are put forward by "international tribunal" in the Hague that claims to deal with "crimes against humanity". Nuremberg Chapter, Geneva Conventions and protocols Additional to Geneva Conventions.define war crimes and crimes against humanity. DU weapons fail tests derived from the laws, as follows - they cannot be contained to legal fields of battle; - they continue to act after hostilities are over; - they are inhumane, since they kill long after the combat is over; - they cause genetic defects in children born after the war; - the use of the weaponry is genocidal by burdening gene pools of future generations, and; - they cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment. UN Sub-Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights resolved in 1996-1997 that DU weapons were incompatible with existing humanitarian and human rights law. A weapon that is illegal by existing law and customs of war, is illegal for all countries. A treaty banning DU is not necessary, but preparations for one could be exploited by the US and UK to duck responsibility. Any treaty could be broken anyway, especially by US and NATO, as recent history proves. NATO prosecution of "Serb perpetrators" instead of NATO crimes including DU could be regarded an arm of the propaganda warfare. All sides committed atrocities in Yugoslavia, but mostly "Serbs" fill the cells of the tribunal. Broadcasts from Hague show "uncooperative Milosevic". The allegations are made up from speeches of a legion of consumers of PsyOp bulletins for highest political level. Hundreds of "reporters", while violating their code of ethics, swarmed on the topic with anti-Serb bias, if not war-mongering [1]. Criminals don't investigate and try own crimes. The court's chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte refused to prosecute NATO for causing DU risk in Bosnia and Kosovo. On January 14, 2001, she said her tribunal would act "if coherent results emerge directly linking the use of DU ammunition with health problems." What other answer would one expect from a court that, - was founded and is funded by NATO countries that are biased against "Serbs" instead of being independent, - has a track record of violating civilized rules of justice procedures; - despite appeals from international groups, including lawyers, dismissed proven NATO crimes, one being the conscious, repeated bombing of a passenger train near Grdelica in southern Serbia. US and UK used the DU ammunition at home and abroad, and are responsible for: (1) military and civilian victims from the Persian Gulf and Balkan wars; (2) civilian victims of DU use at military exercise ranges all over the world; and (3) pollution of the environment by toxic-radioactive DU. NATO say they use DU weapons for tactical advantage over enemy armour at a low cost, and lower own casualties. Equivalent bullets made from tungsten (toxic, heavy metal ore of wolfram), are more expensive. There are several objections to NATO claim: - The additional expense on tungsten would be negligible in the total military spending. - The DU weapons are not effective [6]. - Victims of "friendly fire" suffer from acute poisoning and radiation sickness, instead of ordinary wounds. - Longer-term casualties among own troops and civilians are substantial. It is unlikely that US and NATO insist on DU weapons just for cost-effective military advantage. The military does not apply full social cost calculus, so all damages to people, including own soldiers, do not enter the equation. If they did, DU would have been given up years ago. It is also unlikely that DU weapons use up significant quantities of the total mass of DU waste. DU weapons are not effective, either. DU-capable aircraft must fly low to hit armoured targets, so NATO losses among these aircraft were high. But NATO Operation Allied Force was effective at bombing refugee convoys and other civilian targets in Yugoslavia with DU. Independent/Guardian reporter Robert Fisk witnessed the aftermath of one attack, recognizing fragments in craters to be like those from DU weapons used in the Gulf. Fisk and Scott Peterson of The Christian Science Monitor saw children play around DU sites, and adults recover parts from vehicles hit by DU. Civilian casualties of DU in Iraq, Bosnia and Yugoslavia are ignored in official reports on the Gulf and Balkan syndromes. It is cynical on the part of the democratic, humanitarian West. Women and children are most vulnerable to DU. As if contamination of people and their environments was not a bad enough crime, the victim nations were subject to economic sanctions at the time when they most needed medical help, fuel and bread . The sanctions included medicine and medical supplies. Considering that the US and NATO governments knew about the consequences on civilians, it follows that DU was used in the regions to terrorize civilian populations. It follows that DU weapons persist due to institutional inertia, or because changing to other types of weapons would indirectly admit the risks of DU. Also, war-mongers have discovered that DU is an effective terrorist weapon that can stealthily and slowly damage present and future generations without public stigma associated with nuclear arms or with other weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction. References 1 Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (editors), Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, Pluto Press, London, 2000 2 Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual 100-6: Information Operations, USGPO, Washington DC, 27 August 1996 3 Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense, JCS Publication 1, Glossary Department of Defense Military and Associated Terms, 1987. 4 Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3-53, Joint Doctrine for Psychological Operations, USGPO, Washington DC, 10 July 1996 5 Predrag Jaksic and Vladimir Ajdacic, Discovering the full truth about the use of DU during the NATO air-strikes in Yugoslavia, Proc. Eco Conference 2001, Novi Sad, Sep 26-29, 2001 6 Venik's Aviation, Health Risks of Using Depleted Uranium, Philadelphia, November 03, 2001, www.aeronautics.ru/venik.way.to 7 Piotr Bein, www.du-watch.org/bein/apologists.htm 8 Peda Zoric, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/message/543, February 21, 2001 9 Piotr Bein, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/message/500 Feb 17, 2001 10 Peda Zoric, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/message/740 0Patricia Axelrod, On the road to Kosovo: Yugoslavs are paying the price for NATO's war, August 1999, www.emperors-clothes.com/news/pay.htm 1Jeff Hecht, Coal may be cause of poisoned Balkan groundwater, 19 November 2001, www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991581 ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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