***************************************************************** 03/11/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.63 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 US: Secrecy complaints increasing NUCLEAR REACTORS 2 US: Officals worry about malfunctioning Three Mile Island sirens 3 Germ: Unique Brunsbuettel core spray was vulnerable to gas explosion 4 US: Nuclear plants remain vulnerable targets NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 5 US: Foul Play From the Yenisei to Yucca 6 US: GOP voices missing in dump opposition 7 US: Bush's calculus favors big states NUCLEAR WEAPONS 8 Pak: Nuke 'em! 9 Blair ready to begin spin attack in war over Iraq 10 UK: Bunker bomb will bust test ban 11 Globe Reacts to U.S. Nuclear Plan 12 US: Fundamental shift in US nuclear weapons policy 13 US: N-arms plan meant as a deterrent 14 US threatens Russia with nuclear attack 15 Iran Says U.S. Wants To Wreak Havoc On World 16 The intemperate rhetoric of George Bush 17 US: Bush advisers retreat on use of nuclear arms 18 US: Defense Dept. Won't Comment on Leaked Nuclear Weapons Review 19 Blair is destined for a turbulent few months on Iraq 20 US: US advisors say no nuclear attack proposed 21 AU: US scrambles to ease N-attack fears - 22 US: Bush Team Defends U.S. Nuke Plans 23 Madeleine Bunting: America's long shadow 24 US aims nuclear arms at terror US DEPT. OF ENERGY 25 Fusion Experiment Sparks an Academic Brawl 26 LANL cleanup: Plenty of work remains to be done 27 Findings by physicists likely to pop 'bubble fusion' ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Secrecy complaints increasing Monday, March 11, 2002 Fear of terror versus freedom of information By Dan Horn The Cincinnati Enquirer The e-mails from the government began arriving in Cincinnati a few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Be careful, the e-mails warned. Your business or agency might have information that terrorists want. Review your Web sites, computer files and public records. “Delete information that could be considered sensitive,” one e-mail suggested. In the six months since Sept. 11, those warnings have been heeded by state and federal officials across the country. Thousands of documents, maps, reports and photos are now off-limits to the public because of fears that terrorists might use them to plot more attacks. The move to limit public access was initially embraced by most Americans as a necessary concession to national security. But as the march toward greater secrecy continues, the debate over how to balance public safety with the public's right to know is growing louder. “In a free society, there's always a trade-off between freedom and security,” says Abraham H. Miller, a University of Cincinnati professor who specializes in terrorism. “Once you get a threat like Sept. 11, you look at realigning that balance.” So far, the impact of the new restrictions has been small. But it is spreading. Cincinnatians can no longer: • Read about how a catastrophe at a nearby chemical plant might affect them. • Peek at aerial photos of government facilities. • Find out if a water main runs past their homes. • Go online to study engineering innovations of bridges, military hardware or Ohio River dams. Soon, it may be harder to learn what kind of toxins local industry dumps into sewers or what kind of taxpayer-funded research goes on at universities. And if proposed laws are passed in Ohio and Kentucky, the public will be shut out of any government meeting related to “security issues.” Supporters of the new restrictions say the moves make sense. For the most part, they say, such information would be more useful to terrorists than to the general public. “We're being more restrictive with our data,” said Metropolitan Sewer District Director Pat Karney, who recently blocked access to information about a chemical storage site. “When you lay it out there so anyone with access to the Web can sit from any location in the world and pick out what might look good to them, that's crazy,” Mr. Karney said. But some think too much information is vanishing too quickly. They fear government and industry will exploit public fears and hide behind the veil of national security. “There is so much deference to the security argument today,” said Charles Davis, director of the [http://www.missouri.edu/~foiwww/] . ""People say we're just talking about maps of nuclear facilities. “No, we're not. We're talking about everything.” Potential misuse Many of the new restrictions are in response to formal requests from the government. An e-mail in January from the Ohio Emergency Management Agency warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network may use public records available on the Internet to identify targets. “Officials should ... remove any information from public access which could potentially be misused,” the e-mail stated. The request — and others like it — prompted massive internal reviews of public records. Some agencies shut down Web sites immediately. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, the National Archives and the Department of Energy stripped Web sites of information deemed too sensitive. The restricted information includes a report on lax security at chemical plants, research on liquified gas, maps of transportation networks and lists of toxins used at industrial sites. More recently, the Army Corps of Engineers blocked access to diagrams of locks and dams along the Ohio River. Engineers and students used to go online to study the diagrams, but after Sept. 11 the corps feared terrorists might do the same. “We did that to protect the American public,” said Corps spokeswoman Suzanne Fournier. The same concerns prompted the EPA to drop a rule that required chemical sites to publicly describe a “worst-case scenario” on their property. The purpose was to show residents near the site how a disaster might affect them. But some officials feared terrorists would use the data as a guide to vulnerable targets. “It was absolutely nuts,” Mr. Karney said. “It seemed to be nothing more than a catalog for terrorists to go through.” A need to know While few challenge the need to conceal schematic drawings of nuclear facilities, other moves toward secrecy have met with resistance. Officials in several states, including Kentucky and Ohio, have proposed laws that would allow elected officials to meet in private for security reasons. Others want to tighten open records laws that allow journalists and advocacy groups to obtain documents about everything from nuclear safety to the kind of toxins companies dump into sewers. “We're going to be more circumspect in releasing that stuff,” Mr. Karney said. “If I've got a choice between a lawsuit and a terrorist act, I'll take the lawsuit every time.” Critics say the public's need to know about environmental threats is far greater than any potential terrorist threat. “That kind of data does not present any kind of threat, except perhaps to the polluters who have to come clean about what kind of toxins they are exposing the public to,” said Glen Brand, spokesman for the Sierra Club in Cincinnati. For Mr. Brand and other critics, the talk of closing public meetings and sealing once-public documents is disturbing. They see too many opportunities for abuse. “It's very arbitrary,” said Cincinnati attorney Stan Chesley, who has fought several legal battles against industry and government contractors. “Secrecy under the guise of homeland security can be used by corporations as a means of covering up.” He said he encountered that kind of resistance in the 1980s during his legal battle with the government over health problems at the Fernald uranium processing plant north of Cincinnati. “My past experience tells me they will put things under a veil to protect themselves,” Mr. Chesley said. A clear danger The Freedom of Information Center's Mr. Davis compares the recent push for secrecy to The Perfect Storm, the story of how several unusual weather patterns suddenly collided to create a brutal storm. In this case, he said, conditions are perfect for greater secrecy because the Bush administration embraces the new restrictions, the terrorist threat is real and the public is willing to surrender its rights. That combination has emboldened government to keep unprecedented amounts of information under wraps, Mr. Davis said. “It terrifies me,” he said. Even some universities, which usually encourage the free exchange of information, are limiting access. Ohio State officials are reviewing the school's Web pages to determine if anything is too sensitive for public consumption. It's a difficult task. “This is an educational institution,” said OSU spokeswoman Amy Murray. “The free exchange of ideas is important in everything we do.” Already, some researchers are finding that their jobs are more difficult in such a security-conscious age. Bill Krantz, director of Membrane Applied Science and Technology at UC, recently sought information from the Army for research his students were doing on protective clothing. Before Sept. 11, the request might have taken a few weeks to process. This time, it took almost three months. “It's incredible how this is impacting us,” Mr. Krantz said. “We're not quite prepared to deal with the changes in the way we handle research and intellectual property.” Mr. Miller, the terrorism expert, said Americans should get used to living with more secrecy. “It is better to err on the side of security,” he said. “We do have a clear and present danger.” [http://cincinnati.com/copyright] 1995-2002. [http://enquirer.com] ***************************************************************** 2 Officals worry about malfunctioning Three Mile Island sirens Since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, Lou Sabold has learned to live with worries about the plant, which lies just across the Susquehanna River from the marina where he works. MIDDLETOWN, Pa. (AP) - Since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, Lou Sabold has learned to live with worries about the plant, which lies just across the Susquehanna River from the marina where he works. "You hope they're doing the best they can, and I guess for the most part they are," he said. "It's nothing I stay awake at night for, anyhow - except for the other night." That was early March 3, when a Three Mile Island warning siren near his Etters home malfunctioned and sounded for 50 minutes, prompting more than 300 worried residents to call 911. "When that goes off in the middle of the night, you jump out of bed," resident Beverly Shambeda said of the 1:45 a.m. alert. "It's deafening. There's no way to escape from it." "With the events of September 11th, it was a little more thought-provoking," she said. Over the past two months, the plant's warning sirens once failed to sound, then sounded accidentally, and then were confused with a malfunctioning automobile horn, forcing county emergency officials to scramble to investigate. Some local officials and a watchdog organization say the problems indicate the plant must improve its warning system, both to prepare for emergencies and to avoid upsetting residents. "I think it undermines the confidence of the public in the company's ability to adequately prepare for emergencies," said Eric Epstein, chairman of TMI Alert. "If you can't get your sirens working right, what does that say about your ability to operate a nuclear power plant?" Capital Area Communications, the contractor that runs TMI's warning system for plant operator AmerGen Energy Company, replaced the electrical system in the faulty siren on Wednesday and have since tested the siren. Officials with AmerGen and Capital Area Communications did not return calls seeking comment. "It's time for them to get their act together. It's concerning the community and they're calling me," said state Rep. Bruce Smith, R-Lewisberry. "They're upset and they're nervous, because they remember 1979." Smith, who represents many residents in the plant's 10-mile evacuation zone, was a Newberry Township supervisor during the crisis, and has been a critic of the plant ever since. The sirens failed to sound in January due to a computer that did not properly transmit signals to them. Officials said at first that the March 3 malfunction was the result of moisture in the electronic panel, but now think it may have been caused by a power surge. Two days later, a wailing that county emergency officials admitted sounded just like one of their sirens turned out to be a stuck car horn. Smith called the recent problems "a comedy of errors" and said AmerGen has to understand the lack of trust many residents feel as far as the plant is concerned. "The new owners of TMI might not realize the history, what the citizens around the plant went through," Smith said. "These sirens were created to alert the citizens there is a problem, and when they aren't functioning, people think there's a problem." TMI's Unit 2 was the site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear accident in 1979, when a portion of the reactor's core melted. GPU Energy sold Three Mile Island in 1999 to AmerGen, a partnership of PECO Energy Co. and British Energy Co. PECO and Chicago's Unicom Corp. later merged to form Exelon Nuclear Corp., which also owns the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant. York County Emergency Services Director Pat McFadden said all 34 sirens have been tested since the March 3 malfunction, and the contractor will spend the next two weeks manually checking and updating them. McFadden said, however, he would like a system that would allow county officials to know if a siren is sounding. Although emergency officials can turn the sirens on and off, they now have no idea if they are actually sounding. On March 3, they did not know one was malfunctioning until calls from residents began to come in. Plant officials also have no way of knowing an alarm is sounding "I would like a system that gives me the capability of advising me immediately if there's an alarm malfunctioning," McFadden said. Sabold, who lived through the 1979 emergency, said the recent problems have created a lingering doubt in the plant's system. "You're just not sure if it's the real thing or not," he said. "I'd be more at ease if I actually knew." Monday, March 11, 2002 ***************************************************************** 3 Unique Brunsbuettel core spray was vulnerable to gas explosion Preliminary findings in an internal investigation of all six German boiling water reactors, quickly ordered after a ruptured core-spray system pipe was discovered at the Brunsbuettel BWR on Feb 18, 2002, suggest that the 26-year-old unit's unique design was vulnerable to a hydrogen explosion inside containment which could have led to a serious loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA), German safety officials involved said. Design Faulted No L-Bends Core Design Faulted The core spray system at Brunsbuettel, one German insider said, "is a stationary system which was just waiting for radiolysis to generate enough explosive gas at some point to blow the whole thing apart. ''The rupture occurred in piping not in use in normal operation but connected to a valve at the top of the reactor vessel, which contains the radioactive fuel. Germany's top nuclear regulator, Federal Minister of Environment &Nuclear Safety Juergen Trittin, last week told safety consultants GRS to warn all other German reactor operating companies that the rupture, which occurred in December but was not discovered until February, might have safety implications for them. German safety experts at utilities, GRS, the Reactor Safety Commission [http://www.rskonline.de] (German language website), and inspectorate Technischer Ueberwachungsverein (TUeV) immediately examined the in-containment piping configurations at all other German BWRs. Experts have tentatively concluded that the Brunsbuettel design was unique but that, had the explosion occurred a few meters closer to the pressure vessel, the pressure boundary between the core spray system and the top of the vessel would likely have been breached. German industry officials queried this week and last unflinchingly described the event at Brunsbuettel as a very serious matter. "We've seen the language from (Trittin's ministry) BMU about the possibility of a LOCA. That came from their experts and is unprecedented. Trittin and the Greens didn't fabricate it,'' one safety consultant engineer said. Design Faulted The issues and questions which have arisen since the discovery are both technical and political. Safety experts are scrambling to understand what caused the explosion. At the same time, regulators in the state of Schleswig-Holstein charged last week that Brunsbuettel owner Hamburgische Electricitaets-Werke (HEW) [http://websrv01.hew.de/hde] (German language website) refused for a month to reduce power or shut the reactor to permit the containment area to be inspected. On Dec 14, 2001, while the reactor was operating at full power, monitoring equipment in the control room at Brunsbuettel registered a leak of radioactive steam inside containment. Based on several indicators, including pressure levels in piping systems, operators interpreted the event as a leak in a flange in the core spray system. Since that system is not used in routine operation, HEW said operators isolated the leak inside four minutes after its detection by adjusting remotely-operated valves in the system, and continued routine operation. In the more common General Electric-design BWRs, the two core spray systems (low- and high-pressure) are part of the emergency core cooling system (ECCS). That is not the case at Brunsbuettel. Officials said the plant's early Siemens design uses the system exclusively during shutdowns to reduce the time needed to cool the vessel by about two hours. The system has no safety function, they said. However, it is connected by an isolation valve to the pressure vessel. The valve, normally closed, is opened to allow injection of fresh coolant into the vessel during shutdowns. After a month of heated negotiations beginning in January between HEW and regulators at Schleswig-Holstein's Ministry of Finance &Energy (MFE), the utility finally agreed to lower the reactor power to 10% and conduct the in-containment inspection Feb 18. That was when shocked experts found that a 2.5-meter-long section of the core spray system piping, with a diameter of 100 millimeters, had ruptured and that pipe debris was scattered in a wide radius around the two ends of the rupture. Sources involved said monitoring equipment in the control room registered that, during the four minutes between the explosion and the pipe's isolation, about 260 liters of water was lost from the system. The explosion occurred 4.5 meters from the system's penetration at the top of the vessel. Had it occurred 2 or 3 meters closer, experts believe, it would have breached the valve and "led to a leak of pressure-boundary which could not have been isolated,'' one expert said. That event would have immediately actuated the ECCS. The LOCA scenario postulated by the loss of valve integrity is in the plant's design basis, and could be managed without radiation escaping. But the contamination inside the containment would likely be so heavy by the time that scenario was brought under control that the reactor would probably never restart. No L-Bends Safety officials said that it is believed the explosion was caused by radiolysis gases--hydrogen and oxygen--built up in the core spray system in amounts too great to be catalyzed back into water by recombiners in the piping system. The explosion occured at a point in the core spray pipe leading to the vessel where there are no recombiners nearby, officials said. Evidence indicates that the recombiners elsewhere continued to function as expected. Thus far, experts do not know why the explosion occurred at the location it did. At the point of the explosion the piping is vertical and straight; there was no L-bend or other configuration which might be assumed to have trapped gases. Metallurgical and other evidence so far suggests--contrary to initial postulation by Trittin's experts at BMU--that the pipe exploded within a small fraction of a second, and that the force was too great to create a pressure wave in the system. No signs of a pressure wave were found. "It is more correct to speak of a detonation, not a deflagration,'' one expert said. The pipe in which the explosion occurred is a vertical pipe leading up from the fresh steam system past a valve to the top of the reactor vessel. German experts thus far are clueless as to why the explosion did not in fact occur higher up in the system, closer to the top of the vessel. Experts pointed out that it would be reasonable to expect that gases, particularly light hydrogen, would have risen unimpeded through the straight section of pipe. Some experts are postulating that a water slug in the pipe may have prevented the gas from rising to the point where it would have exploded at the top of the vessel head, threatening a LOCA. "If that's the case then (HEW) can simply thank their lucky stars they didn't have a severe accident two months ago,'' one expert remarked. However, further up the pipe, near the critical valve connecting the core spray system to the vessel, there is another recombiner. "Whether that would have been enough to handle all the gas which had collected there is something I don't want to speculate about,'' one safety official said. Core Design Faulted In the wake of the event, experts have focused on--and faulted--the design of the Brunsbuettel core spray system. The unit went critical in 1976 and, according to information from other utilities operating Siemens-design BWRs, the design is unique. Experts pointed out that, during routine reactor operation, the core spray system at Brunsbuettel--unlike some other reactors--is neither completely isolated from the primary system nor filled with water, but is connected to the primary circuit by a valve which allows the system to fill with steam at primary temperature and pressure. The condensing steam is not routinely flushed out of the system by heat from the core as in some more modern BWRs. "In retrospect,'' one hydraulic engineer said, "this system looks like an accident just waiting to happen.'' He and other German experts said that, when the investigation of the event gets beyond determination of root cause and moves toward remedial action, Brunsbuettel's core spray system will be replaced with a new configuration, closer to those in newer BWRs. This article was published in Nucleonics Week Mar 7, 2002. Created: Mar 7, 2002. © Copyright Platts 2000-2002 [A Division of The McGraw-Hill Companies] ***************************************************************** 4 Nuclear plants remain vulnerable targets MetroWest Daily News.c o m - LOCAL NEWS By John Gregg Sunday, March 10, 2002 Six months after hijacked jetliners toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, nuclear power plants across the country remain vulnerable to attack, according to a MetroWest congressman and other critics of nuclear energy. A growing concern, they say, is the potential for an attack that sparks a fire in the radioactive spent fuel stored near the country's 103 operating nuclear reactors and several decommissioned facilities. New England is home to at least four active nuclear power plants, including Pilgrim Station in Plymouth; Vermont Yankee 15 miles north of Greenfield, Mass.; Seabrook in southern New Hampshire; and Millstone near New London, Conn. Another nuclear plant, Indian Point on the Hudson River in New York, is located just 35 miles north of New York City. Decommissioned plants in the western Massachusetts town of Rowe and in Maine also contain spent fuel, which anti-nuclear activists say could ignite if it loses its cooling water, sending radioactive fallout downwind. U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-7th, said a captured al Qaeda prisoner acknowledged that nuclear power plants had been a potential target. "As more information is gathered off the computers and out of the caves of Afghanistan, it's obvious that nuclear power plants are on the short list of high priority al Qaeda targets," Markey said. "Until a permanent federalized security force is put in place, and until (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) mandates the levels of security that could protect against the kind of attack which occurred on Sept. 11, then the level of security is not at a level that it should be." Gordon Thompson, an Oxford-educated mathematician who has analyzed nuclear safety issues for more than two decades, said nuclear plants never were designed to withstand attack or acts of malice. Spent fuel was also not expected to be stored on-site at most plants. "I think the industry and the NRC are in a state of denial, and the public and public officials around the country, not just New England, are not fully aware of the risks," said Thompson. "If the United States is planning to attack Iraq or other countries, it ought to think a little more about its domestic vulnerability." But proponents of nuclear power say safeguards are in place and argue that industry opponents are dramatically overstating the risks for political purposes. "We're talking about people who are trying to scare and frighten people, who are taking the events of 9-11 to frighten people and shut down nuclear power," said Dave Tarantino, a spokesman for the Pilgrim Station nuclear plant in Plymouth. The NRC last week also ordered nuclear power plants to further tighten security and add other safeguards with spent-fuel pools, according to NRC spokesman Victor Dricks, who said he could not discuss the upgrades for security reasons. "Our position is the fuel is being stored safely at those facilities. We have regulations to ensure that, and inspectors to verify that our requirements are being met," Dricks said. Many nuclear power plants store their spent fuel underwater, in large pools containing a stainless-steel liner and surrounded by concrete walls several feet thick. The water prevents the radioactive spent fuel from heating up, and possibly self-igniting. But unlike the reactors themselves, in many cases the roofs above the spent-fuel pools are made only of metal, which would not withstand an airplane crash. "If there was to be an attack from above, the roof would provide no protection," said Thompson, who runs the Institute for Resource and Security Studies out of his home in Cambridge. At a public forum last month in southern Vermont, Thompson said a sustained fire at the spent-fuel pool at Vermont Yankee could send radioactive material over almost a 25,000 square-mile area, roughly the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The location of the damage would depend mainly on weather conditions, but a wind from the northwest could send fallout from Yankee Rowe or Vermont Yankee toward Greater Boston. Likewise, a southeast wind could pose major public-health risks should disaster strike Pilgrim Station. And Markey in an interview this week said he remains concerned about spent-fuel fires, saying he feels the decommissioned Yankee Rowe plant in western Massachusetts needs a "dramatic upgrade" in protection. A spent-fuel fire, Markey said, "would be of uncertain size, and head in an uncertain direction, but in whatever direction it headed in, it would cause serious and perhaps catastrophic consequences for anyone exposed." Thompson, for example, said a fire at Vermont Yankee could increase the cancer fatality rate downwind by 2 percent, which he believes could render the land uninhabitable. But industry backers say the claims of safety flaws are overstated on a variety of fronts. One, they say spent fuel is being stored in ways that make it less vulnerable to fire, even if water is drained from the pool. Rob Williams, a Vermont Yankee spokesman, said Thompson was "out of date and out of touch" in asserting the spent-fuel could self-ignite if deprived of its cooling water because Vermont Yankee had rearranged its storage design after Sept. 11. "I'm saying even if we lost all water in the pool, for whatever reason, there is no possibility of a fire because of the arrangement of the newer spent fuel assemblies," Williams said. Secondly, nuclear backers dispute the odds of a hijacker being able to precisely target the spent-fuel storage area and crash through the roof of the cement-sided structure. "These big planes aren't designed like fighter jets, where you can drive them straight into the ground," said Tarantino. And Dricks, the NRC spokesman, said, "The spent fuel pools were not designed to survive the impact of a jetliner, but they are relatively small and it would be extremely difficult for an aircraft, even if they were trying to target one, to hit one." There are currently no federal "no fly zones" restrictions over nuclear plants, but the National Guard now patrols the perimeter of the Pilgrim Station plant, and a 1,000-yard boating restriction also is in place on the adjoining Plymouth Bay. Industry officials would not comment on whether anti-aircraft missiles are deployed at nuclear plants, but Tarantino said "there's a lot of security in place regarding the air space over Pilgrim... we're being watched very carefully, and we are very well protected." When most nuclear plants were designed and built - both Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee are 30 years old, for example - government officials thought the spent fuel was going to be stored elsewhere. But fears about radioactive contamination have thus far prevented the spent fuel from being shipped to a central storage area. The Bush administration is pushing ahead with plans to store the spent fuel at Yucca Mountain in a remote part of Nevada, but any transfer is still up to a decade away, several officials acknowledge. Markey, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he remains opposed to the Yucca Mountain site and asserts it was chosen because sparsely populated Nevada lacks clout in Congress. "The fuel has to stay where it is, until they find a permanent geologic repository that is safe for 10,000 years," Markey said. "Yucca Mountain is a congressionally selected location. It was not selected by scientists." But others say such arguments ignore the millions of dollar spent studying the site and determining its suitability for spent-fuel storage. "I think there's a lot of opposition to Yucca Mountain because it does resolve the (real) problem with nuclear power, which is what to do with the fuel," said Tarantino. Whatever the merits of various arguments, pressure is likely to mount for increased safety measures. "The nuclear industry has to accept heightened security as the cost of doing business," said Markey. "They have always resisted paying the price of additional security, because it makes nuclear-generated electricity less cost-competitive with natural gas or hydropower or other sources of electricity. However, a nuclear power plant poses a much greater risk, and as a result, they have to build in the costs of additional security as the price of generating additional electricity." © Copyright by the MetroWest Daily News ***************************************************************** 5 Foul Play From the Yenisei to Yucca http://www.moscowtimes.ru Monday, Mar. 11, 2002. Page 10 By Matt Bivens Having problems with nuclear waste? From Krasnoyarsk to Kansas, the solution is: just change the rules. The Nuclear Ministry, or Minatom, has long dreamed of importing spent nuclear fuel for cash. Never mind that a State Duma deputy two weeks ago waltzed into a Siberian spent fuel facility via a gaping hole in the fence, took pictures and left unchallenged. Minatom still plans a lucrative business turning Russia into the world's nuclear pay toilet. Few like the idea. In 2000, 2.5 million Russians signed petitions demanding a national referendum on it. Officials threw out 600,000 signatures, for "offenses" such as abbreviating the word "street" in a signer's address. Environmentalists tried again, and on Feb. 21, they were again stiffed: Officials in Krasnoyarsk, presented with 100,000 signatures, agreed to look at only 40,000 and then rejected 36,000 as invalid. But is this just "Russia's rocky transition to democracy?" Or is it, as the Russian environmental group Ecodefense! says, evidence "democracy and nuclear energy cannot exist at the same time and place"? Even as Siberia's bureaucrats were trashing signatures, President George W. Bush was announcing a historic decision to ship America's nuclear waste to a hole in Nevada. Twenty years ago, Congress had directed the Energy Department, (the U.S. Minatom) to find a place for such a dump. And recognizing that man-made waste containers corrode with time, Congress insisted the dump's geology be uniquely suited to holding hot waste on its own in case of leaks. Scientists suggested carving a depository out of salt, which keeps water out, or granite, which holds it in. Over the years since, the Energy Department has spent $3.6 billion studying Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and has pretty much proven the site unsuitable. The mountain is made of volcanic tuff riddled with cracks and fissures -- more a leaky sieve than a granite bowl. Over the past 20 years, there have been more than 620 earthquakes above 2.5 on the Richter scale (i.e., strong enough that you'd feel the ground shake and think "earthquake") within a 80-kilometer radius. One quake in 1992 registered 5.6 and cracked walls and windows at the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain field office. Warnings don't come much more bluntly than that, short of a burning bush in the desert that cries out, "Thou shalt not bury all the nuclear waste here!" Four dormant volcanoes are nearby, so scientists are grudgingly studying what would happen if lava blasts up through thousands of tons of radioactive waste. ("Grudgingly" because it's a highly unlikely scenario.) Selected for study because it seemed arid (and because Nevada is a political weakling), Yucca has turned out to be quite wet underground. Water moves through and under the mountain more rapidly and unpredictably than initially thought (and Nevada's cities depend on underground drinking water). It's almost beyond parody: Asked to pick a place to bury nuclear waste, who says, "there's earthquakes and volcanoes and it leaks and drips -- it's perfect"? The Congressional emphasis on geology had outlawed exactly this scenario. So in December, after 17 years with one set of rules, the Bush administration slyly issued a new set: No longer was it judging a geological site. Now it was judging an entire waste-storage package, in which some hair-raisingly expensive feats of engineering were plugged into computer models to mask the site's bad geology. Apparently whether it's Moscow or Moscow-on-the-Potomac, the rule is: If you can't win a fair fight, don't fight fair. 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 ***************************************************************** 6 GOP voices missing in dump opposition [RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL] March 12, 2002 Sen. Reid deserves our thanks and support. The debate over Yucca Mountain has reached a critical stage, and all Nevadans need to support Sen. Reid’s leadership role on this issue. Unfortunately, in recent weeks we have heard little from our Republican delegation concerning the proposed nuclear waste dump. With a Republican, pro-dump president, the House of Representatives controlled by Republicans, and Senate Republicans in favor of the dump being located in Nevada, one would think that Sen. Ensign and Congressman Gibbons would use their position within the Republican Party to influence their colleagues to oppose the dump. Ensign and Gibbons’ silence is deafening. Nevadans of all political persuasions should thank Sen. Reid for his vocal and steadfast opposition to Yucca Mountain. Ron Hunter, Reno Yucca Mountain is a financial disaster and now we are being told that the Republicans in the White House and in the majority in Congress have decided that it is time to screw Nevada. I seem to recall that President Clinton, whom I disagreed with on many subjects, vetoed any attempt to put the waste in the state. What’s the deal? Is our state Republican party so inept that they cannot influence their own party on the single issue that all Nevada politicians claim to work against? It seems that Sen. Reid has been the most effective and proactive opponent of the Yucca Mountain project. Thank you Sen. Reid, and to the Republicans who represent Nevada in Congress: Do you know where the White House is? Gary Petersen, Reno © Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Gannett ***************************************************************** 7 Bush's calculus favors big states By David S. Broder, 3/11/2002 WASHINGTON IF YOU NEED a favor from this administration, you'd better be from a big state that figures importantly in the president's calculus for reelection. That, at least, is the lesson that many politicians and political observers are taking from a pair of controversial decisions President Bush has announced in the past few weeks. When it came to approving a nuclear waste dump for the nation at Yucca Mountain, Nev., Bush was willing to forget the promises he and Vice President Cheney had made in the last campaign. Nevadans thought they had a commitment that the Republicans would not ship the radioactive junk to the ranch country outside Las Vegas unless all the scientific and safety issues had been resolved. But late last month, Bush signed off on an Energy Department recommendation that Yucca Mountain be the repository. Nevada had four electoral votes in 2000 and went very narrowly to Bush - in part because of the now-forgotten promise. Politicians in both parties say that if the decision sticks, he will have a harder time in 2004. But even with its rapid population growth, Nevada will have only five electoral votes next time. Big states do better. The question confronting the White House last week was whether to slap a tariff on imported steel, and Bush managed to rise above principle to please industry and workers in two much more important states, Ohio and Pennsylvania. His deviation from his avowed free-trade beliefs was described in a Wall Street Journal news story - not an editorial - as ''the most dramatically protectionist step of any president in decades.'' Bill Clinton, supposedly a more calculating politician, had twice refused union pressure to grant the same kind of tariff relief. Bush's decision was greeted with cheers in West Virginia, a normally Democratic state with five electoral votes that he carried last time. But it was not West Virginia's Democratic governor or its two Democratic senators who swayed the president. The real lobbying heat came from Ohio and Pennsylvania, both with Republican governors and Republican Senate delegations. Last time, Bush carried Ohio with its 21 electoral votes but lost Pennsylvania and its 23. In a close presidential race, a candidate who carries both is almost assured of victory; lose both, and you are likely to be toast. So when the economic side of the White House argued that tariffs on imported steel as high as 30 percent would invite almost certain retaliation from European and Asian governments and impede the broader international barrier-lowering initiative which Bush has espoused, their views were trumped by political advisers who count electoral votes. Predictably, our major trading partners are up in arms about the decision. The March 7 Financial Times headline read: ''World united to condemn US decision to impose 30 percent tariffs.'' Even the ever-loyal British prime minister, Tony Blair, called his Washington buddy's action ''unacceptable, unjustified, and wrong.'' There were political costs at home, too. Auto and appliance manufacturers who will have to pay more for the steel they use as a result of the Bush decision are important in states such as Illinois and Michigan. Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley worried aloud that farm exports vital to his state might be the targets of retaliatory action. But Illinois and Michigan and Iowa have been in the Democratic presidential column three elections in a row; their White House leverage is less. There was another option that the White House rejected. One reason the old US steel mills are struggling against their foreign competitors is that many such companies are burdened with pension and health care costs of retirees who worked for them when employment in the industry was much higher than it is today. The companies would have liked help from Uncle Sam in meeting those ''legacy'' costs, but with the federal budget again in deficit, Washington cannot afford any such obligations. So tariff relief was the consolation prize. The nicest touch in the Bush policy is its timing. Tariffs on most steel imports will begin at 30 percent, then decline to 24 percent and 18 percent in the second and third years. They phase out entirely three years from now. Let's see. Three years from now will be 2005, the year after the next election. If Bush wins, no one should be surprised if the steel industry finds itself jilted by the White House at that point. Just ask Nevada. David S. Broder is a syndicated columnist. This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 3/11/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. ***************************************************************** 8 Pak: Nuke 'em! The Frontier Post From Peshawar Pakistan Updated on 3/11/2002 1:41:09 PM A report in the Los Angeles Times reveals that the Bush administration, in a secret policy review completed early this year, has ordered the Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries. The countries in question include not only old cold war enemies such as Russia, China and North Korea, but also Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria. The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) as the secret document is called, was delivered to Congress on January 8. The report details three scenarios in which nuclear weapons could be used: against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack; in retaliation for an attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or in the event of "surprising military developments", a formulation that the NPR fails to explain.The NPR also asks the Pentagon to prepare for the possibility that nuclear weapons may be required in some future Arab-Israeli crisis. It includes calls for developing bunker-busting mini-nukes and nuclear weapons that reduce collateral damage. The document reveals evolving thinking in the Defence Department. While downgrading the threat from Russia and publicly emphasizing a commitment to the reduction of the number of long-range nuclear weapons, Defence Department strategists seek to promote tactical and so-called "adaptive" nuclear capabilities to deal with contingencies where large nuclear arsenals are not required. The call for developing new nuclear weapons that reduce 'collateral damage' is the most myopic of all, ignoring as it does the uncontrollable fallout of these weapons of mass slaughter, and their political, moral and military implications. The scenarios the Pentagon planners are asked to envisage are in the nature of what the PR calls "immediate, potential or unexpected" contingencies. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya are named as countries that could be involved in all three kinds of threat. According to the NPR's view, all these countries have long-standing hostility towards the US and its security partners, all sponsor or harbour terrorists, and have active weapons of mass destruction and missile programmes. China, because of its nuclear forces and developing strategic objectives, is listed as a country that could be involved in the immediate or potential contingency, for example a war between China and Taiwan. A North Korean attack on South Korea or an Iraqi attack on Israel or any of its neighbours are other scenarios for which the NPR requires making nuclear weapons a tool for fighting a war, rather than deterring one. The strategic thinking contained in the NPR dispenses with the long-standing doctrine that saw nuclear weapons more as a deterrent, or at worst as weapons of last resort. It will not be lost on the countries named as potential targets or for that matter the world at large that the NPR represents a doctrinal escalation in the development, deployment and use of nuclear weapons. Nor is memory so short that the US's use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II can be forgotten. The US enjoys the dubious honour of being the only country to have actually used nuclear weapons in a conflict. It does not therefore surprise one to learn from the recently released Nixon archives that the former US President contemplated using nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war. Aggressive militarism, including a Dr Strangelove kind of dementia, characterizes the US posture in modern times. Given the impermissibility by any canons of war, peace, morality or humanity of the use of nuclear weapons, it is alarming in the extreme that the arrogance of Washington since the comparatively easy victory over the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan has so emboldened the hawks in the American establishment that they have thrown all restraint and caution to the winds and are talking about this kind of insanity. The world is a much more dangerous place as a result of the US ascending to the position of sole superpower. It will require the will and united efforts of the rest of humanity to put a brake on its descent into unacceptable threatened mayhem globally. © Copyright 2001 The Frontier Post ***************************************************************** 9 Blair ready to begin spin attack in war over Iraq Irish News and Analysis TENSIONS within Tony Blair's Cabinet over US plans to "deal with" Saddam Hussein have been dramatically increased by revelations about the Pentagon's global strategy for using nuclear bombs. US Vice-President Dick Cheney is scheduled to meet Blair today to talk about the options for direct or indirect attacks on Iraq if, as most MPs at Westminster believe will be the case, the UN is unable to carry out satisfactory inspections of Hussein's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Blair is expected to assure Cheney that he fully supports US efforts to topple Hussein from power and the only question remaining is the best way of achieving this. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott protested yesterday that the Cabinet was not split over Iraq, but it is clear some of Blair's ministers, including Development Secretary Clare Short and Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, are worried about suggestions the UK may be asked to contribute 25,000 troops to a multinational attack on Iraq later in the year. Ministers like Short and Cook have no doubt Iraq has rebuilt much of its military power since the 1991 Gulf War, but they are sceptical about suggestions Hussein is a key backer of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida and doubt whether an assault on his regime will do anything other than underpin fundamentalist support for terrorism in other parts of the region, most importantly Saudi Arabia. The worries about Blair's evident rapport with President George Bush have escalated in the past two days with the leaking of a Pentagon analysis of the case for using nuclear weapons against chemical, biological or nuclear threats from no fewer than seven countries including not only Iraq, but Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. Documents released earlier this year showed that soon after he became president in 1960, John F. Kennedy was presented with the option of a strategic nuclear strike on China to eliminate its atomic warheads. The idea was rejected then, and many had assumed the concept of limited, tactical use of nuclear arms no longer formed part of Pentagon thinking. The worry for dissidents in Blair's inner circle is that the attacks on September 11 have given a new impetus to US right-wing enthusiasts for the pre-emptive elimination of external threats to Fortress America. Given the continued pressures in Afghanistan and the escalation of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the agenda for the Blair-Cheney discussions will be tense and crowded. If Blair does sign up to an invasion of Iraq, he will not be able to carry all of his Cabinet with him, and some of his backbenchers will also join the rebels. But Blair has such a large majority in the Commons that he need not worry about the protesters. His spin doctors are already preparing for a large-scale public relations campaign to convince voters there is sufficient evidence to support action against Iraq. Against the background of possible military action in the Middle East, the disarray in Whitehall and the rapid political decline of Transport Minister Stephen Byers seem unimportant. Top civil servants are hopping mad at the way Byers coerced his permanent secretary, Sir Richard Mottram, into going public on his behalf in the soap-opera row over rival spin doctors. Sir Richard's elderly mother is, according to none other than himself, profoundly shocked at the four-letter words he used when he realised the mess his minister had landed him in. The head of the Metropolitan Police Force in London, Sir John Stevens, does not use four-letter swear words, in public at least, but he was vitriolic on the chaos in the legal system. The prison population has gone over 70,000 for the first time yet and there is simply no space to lock up those the law does succeed in catching. In some parts of London, the use of cannabis has been informally de-criminalised because police reckon they can't spare the resources to deal with it. The Liberal Democrats want to go a stage further and have just voted to make it lega although dealers would still be prosecuted. Party leader Charles Kennedy managed to avoid being in the conference hall when the pro-cannabis votes were counted. The Lib Dems are hoping to pick up financial and moral support from trade unions who have been abandoning the Labour Party because of its near-Thatcherite commitment to workplace flexibility and its enthusiasm for lower taxes on business. Chancellor Gordon Brown infuriated unions last week by promising further tax relief for companies. Also last week, Brown got a remarkable letter from more than 20 top institutional investors in the City of London. They told him their confidence in investing in public-private deals had been shattered by thedecision to put Railtrack into the hands of receivers last year. It's only a matter of time before the man responsible, Byers, is demoted, but the cost to the Treasury of getting investment in government projects, is going to be permanently higher as a result of the Railtrack debacle. Nicholas Leonard, Westminister Watch © Copyright Unison ***************************************************************** 10 UK: Bunker bomb will bust test ban Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Julian Borger in Washington Monday March 11, 2002 [http://www.guardian.co.uk] Months before the September 11 attacks the Pentagon was formulating a nuclear posture review, part of a nuclear-weapons policy that is almost certain to collide with the comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT). The review is the work of a group of radical defence strategists appointed in the early days of the Bush administration. They include Stephen Younger, a former head of weapons research at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratories who wrote a policy paper in 2000 advocating the development of a new generation of low-yield nuclear "bunker-busting bombs". On September 1 he was made director of the defence threat reduction agency, responsible for anticipating future dangers to national security. The other members of the team are Stephen Hadley, now deputy national security advisor, Steve Cambone, special assistant to the defence secretary, and Robert Joseph, senior director for proliferation strategy at the White House. They jointly wrote a National Institute for Public Policy paper last year which echoed Mr Younger's arguments, portraying a nuclear bunker-buster as an ideal weapon against the nuclear, chemical or biological weapons stockpiles of rogue nations such as Iraq. Under the tutelage of Donald Rumsfeld, the new strategists argue that such a weapon will not deter a rogue regime if it is so big that the enemy can be fairly sure that the US will not use it. As Mr Rumsfeld said last year, the US nuclear arsenal would not deter Saddam Hussein "because he knows a US president would not drop a 100-kilotonne bomb on Baghdad". Deterrence would only work, so the argument runs, if the US had "mini-nukes" it might actually consider using. The nuclear posture review calls for development of these weapons to begin as early as next month, bringing forward the day when one of the new generation of tactical nuclear weapons will have to be tested, in violation of the CTBT. Although the Senate refused to ratify the CTBT the US, which signed it six years ago, has abided by its principles. But Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz have made it clear that they see such cold war treaties as unwanted burdens of another age, preventing new strategic thinking. "It is just a matter of time until they start testing again, and that's going to create an international firestorm," said Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Last year, the administration commissioned a study on how quickly mothballed nuclear test sites in the Nevada desert could be put back in action. General John Gordon, head of the national nuclear security administration promised he would work to improve their readiness. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 11 Globe Reacts to U.S. Nuclear Plan Las Vegas SUN March 11, 2002 MOSCOW- Russia demanded answers, China said it was "deeply shocked" and Iran likened the United States to terrorists Monday over reports that they had been targeted for nuclear strikes under a Pentagon contingency plan. A classified report sent by the U.S. Defense Department to Congress outlined the possible use of nuclear weapons against countries that possess or are developing weapons of mass destruction. The "nuclear posture review" identified seven nations: China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Russia and Syria. Explanations over the weekend by Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that the United States doesn't plan to use nuclear weapons didn't satisfy Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Russia, Ivanov said, expects answers from a "higher level" that would "make things clear and calm the international community, convincing it that the United States does not have such plans." If true, he said, the plan would "destabilize and exacerbate the situation." Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, en route Monday to Washington on a previously scheduled trip, said he would ask Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for an explanation. China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said "China, like other countries, is deeply shocked" to be in the group of seven. "The U.S. side bears the responsibility to make an explanation on this matter," Sun told the official Xinhua News Agency. Sun said China and the United States have an agreement not to target each other with nuclear weapons and said China's small nuclear arsenal didn't threaten any other nation. "Countries with nuclear weapons should undertake unconditionally not to be the first to use them, and not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear state or nuclear-weapon-free regions," Sun said. Iran - tagged by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil" - offered an immediate angry response. Government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said the report showed that America would never observe international laws on the use of nuclear weapons, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. "The Islamic Republic believes that the era of using force to push forward international relations is long past, and those who resort to the logic of force follow exactly the same logic as terrorists, although they are in the position of power," Ramezanzadeh told the news agency. Other countries named in the report were silent. The Iraqi newspaper Babil, owned by President Saddam Hussein's eldest son, reported on the U.S. move without comment and officials said nothing. Nations not cited in the U.S. report reacted gingerly. Japan, the only country ever to be hit by nuclear weapons, said it opposes the use of weapons of mass destruction, but was otherwise tightlipped. "We are not in a position to say anything about it because the document is classified," a senior Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity. Some world media also expressed fears that the plans could be destabilizing. "The return of the nuclear nightmare in an age when the world believed it had escaped it makes clear the weakness of the United States not only to convince people about the rightness of their views, but also to properly wield the power they have," the Athens, Greece daily TA Nea wrote in an editorial. The Times of London was more measured, saying the nuclear policy review was simply a theoretical exercise examining the circumstances in which nuclear weapons might be used. "This is less Dr. Strangelove than the territory that comes with superpower status," the paper said in an editorial. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 12 Fundamental shift in US nuclear weapons policy THE fundamental shift in US contingency plans for its 6000-warhead nuclear arsenal is consideration of "first use" of the weapons in a pre-emptive strike against countries with no proven atomic weapons of their own. The possibility of extending the American nuclear umbrella to defend Israel and Taiwan also crosses long-unspoken diplomatic lines, and can be seen only as an affront to the Arab world and China which could aggravate regional tensions. Inserting a catch-all clause of "surprising military developments" to extend the hit-list to justify the inclusion of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea, as well as Russia and China, merely underlines the new White House go-it-alone stance. Throughout the cold war, the firm understanding, even at the height of the nuclear standoff years, was that the West would not be the first to unleash atomic holocaust. Its warheads would be launched only in retaliation. That policy seems to have been demolished by the collapse of the World Trade Centre on September 11. New threats have prompted new response perceptions. Capability for mounting chemical and biological attacks - the "poor man's nuclear weapons" - is already in the hands of more than 70 countries. Two main factors have prompted the switch in US military contingency planning indicated by the leaked Nuclear Posture Review. The first is the realisation that the American homeland is vulnerable for the first time in its history to direct attack, and that the rapid development and spread of ballistic missile technology can only increase that vulnerability in the next decade. The second is the ability of states like Iraq, Libya and North Korea to research its new long-range hardware in deep underground facilities invulnerable to conventional bombing. -March 11th ***************************************************************** 13 N-arms plan meant as a deterrent The Seattle Times: Monday, March 11, 2002, 12:00 a.m. Pacific By David G. Savage Los Angeles Times WASHINGTON — U.S. officials, responding to reports that the Pentagon has drawn up contingency plans for expanded use of nuclear weapons, said yesterday they hoped the threat of nuclear retaliation will deter other nations from using biological or chemical weapons against Americans. International reaction, meanwhile, ranged from anger to incredulity. The Bush administration wants to "send a very strong signal to anyone who might try to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States," national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice said. "The only way to deter such a use is to be clear it would be met with a devastating response." Secretary of State Colin Powell described the report as "prudent military planning," not a plan for imminent attack. "There are nations out there developing weapons of mass destruction," he said. "Prudent planners have to give some consideration as to the range of options the president should have available to him to deal with these kinds of threats." The White House was responding to a Los Angeles Times story Saturday that revealed that the Pentagon has drawn up plans that arms-control experts say could signal a reversal of a decades-long policy. Responding to new threats realized since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration now wants to consider using nuclear weapons to respond to biological and chemical attacks, as well as nuclear strikes. They also are contemplating using smaller weapons that can better target new challenges faced in recent wars: deeply dug caves and reinforced bunkers. The classified Pentagon report cited five nations — Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria — as posing a new level of threat to the United States that could require a nuclear response. The report also cites nuclear powers Russia and China but makes clear that Russia is no longer considered a U.S. adversary. Administration officials went out of their way yesterday to assert that military planners have not targeted any nation for a nuclear attack but rather are preparing for how to respond if others resort to weapons of mass destruction. "Right now, today, not a single nation on the face of the Earth is being targeted by an American nuclear weapon on a day-to-day basis," Powell said. "We should not get all carried away with some sense that the United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in some contingency that is coming up in the near future. It is not the case." U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said the leak of the Pentagon planning report might serve as a warning to potential adversaries. "Frankly," he said, "I don't mind some of these renegade nations who we have reason to believe are working themselves to develop nuclear weapons to think twice about the willingness of the United States to take action to defend our people." The strongest international reaction came from Iran. While the Iranian government did not comment, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani accused the United States of trying to frighten other countries into submission. "America thinks that if a military threat looms large over the head of these seven countries, they will give up their logical demands," Rafsanjani said. Libya's African-affairs minister, Ali Abd al-Salam al-Turiki, said he found the report hard to believe. "I don't think this is true," he said. "I don't think America is going to destroy the world." Information from The Washington Post is included in this report. Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company ***************************************************************** 14 US threatens Russia with nuclear attack Pravda.RU Mar, 09 2002 US THREATENS RUSSIA WITH NUCLEAR ATTACK “The local” war in Afghanistan continues – this can be seen with the naked eye. “Operation Anaconda” has stifled itself in its own embrace. The American “blitzkrieg” Washington of spoke with such enthusiasm has not worked in Afghanistan. The Americans and their allies have suffered serious losses, while militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda have being annihilated in the hundreds, and, according to the Pentagon, do not intend to stop their resistance and even continue to advance. However, what is very strange is that the rusty Kalashnikov rifle is more effective than US vacuum bombs. The military campaign in the Afghan mountains has become one of the most difficult ordeals for the US Army since the war in Vietnam, BBC observer Johnatan Marcus stated. According to him, for the Pentagon, it is a serious test for the new information systems’ capacity to carry out military activities under very disadvantageous conditions. In previous military operations, the Gulf War and the war against Yugoslavia, the US preferred to rely on its aircraft. However, battles in the Afghan mountains are another thing. The Rangers and America's mountain divisions take part in them. This signifies America's attempt to transform its Armed Forces from a not very mobile military machine fit mainly for the Cold War into a more mobile army using the most state-of-the-art, modern technologies. However, America's activities in the mountains are complicated due to many troubles. It is difficult for helicopters to fly in the mountain air. While Al Qaeda has large reserves of grenade launchers. The Taliban and Al Qaeda militants seem to be more experienced in carrying out battles under such conditions: mountains and bad weather. That is why the battles are so violent. Americans are irritated with the militants’ resistance, and they are even ready to use nuclear weapons to finish such battles as soon as possible. The Americans wanted to use low-powered nuclear bombs, which were already used their war in Vietnam and, later, in Iraq. Therefore, why not no use them now, in another country? The United States is transferring nuclear weapons from storage to its battle arsenal and plans to use nuclear weapons against other countries. According to the Los Angeles Times, possessing a secret report of the Pentagon, there are seven countries among the potential targets of nuclear attacks: Russia, China, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. American military supposes that small nuclear weapons could be potentially used against these countries. Nuclear weapons could be used in the following cases: against objects that are able to withstand a nuclear attack; as a reciprocal measure to use of nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons; and in the case of an “unexpected development in a military situation,” the newspaper writes. Moreover, the newspaper reports that Washington plans to start the development of low-powered nuclear weapons. The Pentagon speaks of possible situations when the US might use nuclear weapons: war between China and Taiwan, North Korea attacking South Korea, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. It should stated that the report appeared just at the moment when the Bush administration declared a reduction of America's nuclear arsenal, while, as a matter of fact, according to the Los Angeles Times, it is looking for reasons to use it. “This is a dynamite,” – one of expert named Bolton said to the journalists. “I can only guess what these seven countries’ representatives would say at Council of Europe.” According to Bolton, Washington is not looking for a reason to use its nuclear arsenal against anybody. However, he stressed, “we will do our best to protect the population of America.” Dmitry Litvinovich PRAVDA.Ru Translated by Vera Solovieva Read the original in Russian: http://pravda.ru/main/2002/03/09/38051.html Copyright ©1999 by "Pravda.RU [http://www.pravda.ru/] ***************************************************************** 15 Iran Says U.S. Wants To Wreak Havoc On World [NewsMax.com] Patrick Goodenough, CNSNews.com Monday, March 11, 2002 Iran has responded angrily to its reported inclusion on a list of seven potential targets for a future U.S. nuclear attack. "The U.S. Administration is going to wreak havoc on the whole world in order to establish its hegemony and domination," the official Tehran Times said. The Bush administration has confirmed the existence of a report laying out nuclear options, but officials say it merely constitutes routine planning. The Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend that the report refers to contingency plans for the possible use of nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. Contingencies for potential use were: in retaliation for attacks with non-conventional weapons; for use against targets able to withstand conventional attacks; and in cases of surprise military developments. "The new plan not only runs counter to U.S. claims of advocating human rights, peace and world security, it could also engage the American nation in a long-term war which they totally disapprove of," the Tehran Times said. The Pentagon document reportedly said the U.S. should be prepared for the nuclear option in the event of an Arab-Israeli war, a war between China and Taiwan, a conflict between the two Koreas, or an attack by Iraq on Israel or another neighbor. Pointing to the reference to the Arab-Israeli situation, the Iranian paper said: "This once again shows the blind support for Israel by the U.S. administration, which is actually an accomplice in all the crimes and atrocities committed by Zionist forces against innocent and oppressed Palestinians." Also reacting to the reports, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told a meeting of police commanders Sunday the U.S. intended to create an "atmosphere of terror" in the world. "America thinks that if a military threat looms large over the heads of these seven countries, they will give up their logical demands," the Iranian news agency quoted him as saying. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday played down the reports. "We should not get all carried away with some sense that the United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in some contingency that is coming up in the near future," he told the CBS network. "It is not the case." Copyright CNSNews.com All Rights Reserved © NewsMax.com ***************************************************************** 16 The intemperate rhetoric of George Bush Asia Times Online [Asia Times Online] atimes.com By Ehsan Ahrari President George W Bush's depiction of Iran as part of the so-called "axis of evil" (along with Iraq and North Korea) during his State of the Union speech was both surprising and unanticipated. After all, despite the ongoing struggle between the Islamic hardliners and pragmatist groups in its domestic arena, Iran had demonstrated a remarkably positive attitude toward the United States's military campaign against the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda terrorist group in Afghanistan. After the uprooting of the Taliban, Iran not only endorsed the Bonn meeting that resulted in the interim government of Hamid Karzai, but it also pledged financial assistance for Afghanistan. The success of its military campaign in Afghanistan has created a euphoria of high proportions in the United States. The battle cry in government circles in Washington runs along the lines of the following: "Today Afghanistan, tomorrow the world. Let's see, where should we conduct the next military campaign? Iraq, Somalia, or Yemen? What about Iran?" The nexus between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was accused of altering the regional political status quo "from Tajikistan to Chechnya, and even in the Xinjiang province of China" through insurgency. Osama bin Laden's alleged involvements in the blowing up of American embassies in East Africa and in the attempt to blow up the USS Cole were ample reasons for the Clinton administration to fire cruise missiles in Afghanistan in order to terminate bin Laden and destroy his "terrorist university". The September 11 attacks on US soil turned out to be the proverbial last straw. The US government not only went after bin Laden, but, in the process, eliminated Taliban rule from Afghanistan. Thus, President Bush could maintain the support of a loose "international coalition", which, in reality, included countries that supported his military campaign, as well as those that only acquiesced in it. But expanding the scope of this "war" against terrorism might not be that easy. Yes, taking military actions of major proportions against Iraq, Iran, or even North Korea might not be difficult, considering the awesome military prowess of the United States. However, the international community will not give even the lone superpower a blank check to carry out the military aspect of that "war" wherever it wishes. The evidence of that reality was apparent in the international response to suggestions of potential US military action against Iraq. Saddam Hussein has plenty of enemies, even in the Arab world. But no Arab country would side with the United States if it decided to attack Iraq. Some US newspapers are reporting that a number of Arab heads of states "privately" agree with the proposition of dismantling Saddam's regime through military action. Since there is no way to verify expressions of "private support", there remains a credibility gap between the public position of those leaders and what they are supposedly saying privately. Such a gap only underscores the type of political difficulties the Bush administration is likely to encounter in the coming months - not only in the Middle East, but also in other regions of the world, if it insists on expanding its military campaign to other countries. Some major European allies such as the UK and France have been critical of Bush's "axis of evil" phraseology, with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw labeling it a "piece of domestic electioneering". Russia did not opt for such a euphemistic explanation when its foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, "insisted that America's military action in Afghanistan must not be extended to other countries". But a lot of countries were surprised by Bush's strident rhetoric regarding Iran. Iran responded with the show of utter contempt and anger when thousands of Iranians hit the streets with the usual slogans of "Death to America". The saddest part of Iran's response to Bush's intemperate rhetoric was that young Iranians, for whom the hatred of the regime of "America's Shah" was only a matter of history, went through the ritual of learning to hate the United States themselves. Aside from his ill-considered shrill rhetoric (or ill-advised phrase-making), the fact remains that there is no "axis" that unites Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. These are three very different political systems - one is an Islamic state, which is evolving into an Islamic democracy; one is a secular, atheist dictatorship, and one is a Stalinist state. The common factor among them is their strong predilection for building sophisticated missiles and developing nuclear weapons, and their continued rejection of American hegemony in their respective neighborhoods. North Korea does not take part in any transnational terrorism, and neither does Iraq. Iran is a supporter of the Hezbollah of Lebanon. That organization is in a major fight with Israel, since Israel still occupies a small portion of their homeland, and for that same reason, Hezbollah supports the Islamist groups operating within Israel. But none of these groups may be described as part of a transnational terrorist network a la al-Qaeda. One wonders why Bush went to the extreme of labeling Iran part of an alliance of "evil"? If his use of the phrase "crusade" against terrorism before the initiation of the Afghan military campaign was an observation of a president who was pretty much uninformed about the historical baggage that that phrase carries in the Islamic world, his decision to use the phrase "axis of evil" to denigrate a country that calls itself "Islamic Republic" cannot be dismissed as yet another faux pas, or, as British Foreign Secretary charitably characterized, part of domestic electioneering. Bush's presidency is facing the uphill battle of making its insistence that America's "war" on terrorism is not against Islam credible in the Middle East. But his characterization of an Islamic Republic as an axis of evil will only reinforce the arguments of Islamist groups that, his insistence notwithstanding, America's war against terrorism in reality is war against Islam. It will be some time before George Bush will learn the hard lesson that an American president cannot afford to indulge himself in glib and simplistic phrasemaking without causing problems for America's strategic interests, especially in the Middle East, which remains a region where pax Americana continues to face serious challenges. Ehsan Ahrari PhD, is a Norfolk, Virginia, US-based strategic analyst. (Copyright 2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 17 Bush advisers retreat on use of nuclear arms Administration tries to mitigate furor over 7 nations listed as possible targets [http://www.sfgate.com] [zcoile@sfchronicle.com] Monday, March 11, 2002 Washington -- Top Bush administration officials yesterday denied that the United States was pursuing a more aggressive nuclear weapons strategy and said the United States would only use its nuclear arsenal if attacked by a hostile nation with weapons of mass destruction. "We all want to make the use of weapons of mass destruction less likely," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "The way that you do that is to send a very strong signal to anyone who might try to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States that they'd be met with a devastating response." Rice and other administration officials were responding to a secret Pentagon report -- parts of which were leaked to the media this weekend -- revealing that the White House had asked the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against countries that have or are developing weapons of mass destruction. The classified "Nuclear Posture Review," which was sent to Congress Jan. 8, named seven countries as possible targets: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The report also suggested that the United States was considering resuming nuclear weapons testing and developing new, smaller nuclear weapons capable of blasting through underground bunkers that contain weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the review was prudent military planning, and argued that it did not indicate any shift in how the United States planned to use its deadliest weapons. "Right now, today, not a single nation on the face of the Earth is being targeted by an American nuclear weapon on a day-to-day basis," Powell said on "Face the Nation" on CBS. "We should not get all carried away with some sense that the United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in some contingency that is coming up in the near future. It is not the case." Powell also flatly denied that the United States planned to resume nuclear weapons testing or to develop new nuclear weapons. The revelations in the Pentagon report were greeted angrily in some countries that would reportedly be targets. "America thinks that if a military threat looms large over the head of these seven countries, they will give up their logical demands," former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani was quoted as saying by the official Islamic Republic News Agency. "They've brought out a big stick -- a nuclear stick that is supposed to scare us and put us in our place," Dmitry Rogozin, a leading Russian lawmaker with close ties to the Kremlin, said on NTV television. The United States has long pledged not to use nuclear weapons against countries that do not possess them. Nonproliferation experts say the United States would be abandoning that pledge by threatening a nuclear attack against nations that are in the process of developing weapons of mass destruction. "It would be a terrible policy because once we cross that line, other countries are going to jump across that line, too," said David Krieger, president of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a group that favors eliminating nuclear weapons. "It's going to bust the Nonproliferation Treaty wide open," he said on MSNBC. "Many, many more countries will say the same thing the United States is saying: We need nuclear weapons to protect our security, and that will create a far more dangerous world." Pentagon officials stressed that the review was only a contingency plan -- much like the detailed plans the military kept for years in the event of a Soviet missile attack, which were never used. "This preserves for the president all the options that a president would want to have in case this country or our friends and allies were attacked with weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear, biological, chemical or, for that matter, high explosives," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CNN's "Late Edition." Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would ask the administration today to clarify the policy to prevent increasing tensions with other nations, especially China and Russia. "We can make it explicitly clear that nothing in this report was designed to arouse in them a fear that they would be struck or that we would use (nuclear weapons) against them other than to repel the threat or the actual use of weapons of mass destruction," Warner said on CNN. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., also a member of the Armed Services Committee, said he believed the review was useful because it put nations on notice about the consequences of attacking the United States. "I don't mind (if) some of these renegade nations who we have reason to believe are working themselves to develop nuclear weapons, and I'm thinking of Iraq and Iran and North Korea here . . . think twice about the willingness of the United States to take action to defend our people and our values and our allies," he said. Chronicle news services contributed to this report. / E-mail Zachary Coile at [zcoile@sfchronicle.com] . ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle   Page A - 3 ***************************************************************** 18 Defense Dept. Won't Comment on Leaked Nuclear Weapons Review News from the Washington File Washington File [Washington File] 10 March 2002 (U.S. continues to plan for contingencies as deterrence strategy) (360) Responding to news reports March 9 based on leaked copies of a secret Defense Department review of U.S. nuclear weapons plans, the department refused comment on details, but said the review was the latest in a long series conducted ever since nuclear weapons were first developed. In a March 9 statement, DoD said it continues to plan for contingencies and threats, in order to deter attacks on the United States and its allies. Following is the text of the DoD statement: U.S. Department of Defense March 9, 2002 STATEMENT ON NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW We will not discuss the classified details of military planning or contingencies, nor will we comment on selective and misleading leaks. The Nuclear Posture Review is required by law. It is a wide-ranging analysis of the requirements for deterrence in the 21st century. This review of the U.S. nuclear posture is the latest in a long series of reviews since the development of nuclear weapons. It does not provide operational guidance on nuclear targeting or planning. The Department of Defense continues to plan for a broad range of contingencies and unforeseen threats to the United States and its allies. We do so in order to deter such attacks in the first place. Of particular significance in the new Nuclear Posture Review is President Bush's decision to reduce operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons by two-thirds, a decision made possible by the new strategic relationship with Russia. This administration is fashioning a more diverse set of options for deterring the threat of WMD. That is why the Administration is pursuing missile defense, advanced conventional forces, and improved intelligence capabilities. A combination of offensive and defensive, and nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities is essential to meet the deterrence requirements of the 21st century. For more information, see the Nuclear Posture Review foreword and the Jan. 9 DoD news briefing transcript and accompanying briefing slides. (end text) (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov) ***************************************************************** 19 Blair is destined for a turbulent few months on Iraq Times Online March 11, 2002 The Cheney Challenge The visit of Vice-President Richard Cheney first to Britain, and then several countries in the Middle East, is of enormous significance. While most American Vice-Presidents engage in overseas tours because they have little else to do, or are en route to or from funerals, the same cannot be said for Mr Cheney. He acts for and speaks for the President in a fashion that has no recent precedent. While not, as some have sought to pretend, the “real President”, he is an exceptionally important political actor. Tony Blair will have realised this and appreciates that his talks today are in effect the opening round of a conversation that will be extended when he flies to the Bush ranch in Texas next month. Mr Cheney’s tour has two objectives. The first concerns the continuing War on Terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the second relates to future action against Iraq. Mr Blair distinguished himself during “Phase One” of the campaign after September 11 and has reason to be pleased with, and confident of, future progress. The need to isolate Iraq and move to counter its aggressive pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is a more awkward matter. The Prime Minister has rightly shifted his own rhetoric and is preparing the ground for what he must now view as probable, rather than possible, military involvement. His willingness to participate, while not of huge military importance to the United States, is of considerable political value. For that reason, Mr Cheney will listen and not lecture. Any Anglo-American entente against Iraq will be immensely controversial, not merely inside the Labour Party but with a wide section of public opinion. The strategy which the Prime Minister appears to have adopted is to acknowledge that dissent exists and to attempt to deal with it now rather than allow it to fester and become an open sore only when actual conflict has been triggered. This is a sensible way of proceeding. The intelligence information on Iraq’s renewed efforts to acquire biological, chemical and nuclear material, alluded to by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, in The Times last week, needs to be offered to a wider audience. This is not simply a matter of soothing the feelings of a few Cabinet dissidents, such as Clare Short, or defusing awkward Labour backbenchers but reminding the electorate at large why Saddam is such a menace. That task will not, in truth, be assisted by the leak — courtesy of the Los Angeles Times — of a Pentagon planning document and the somewhat hysterical coverage it has received in this country. The report is part of a periodic exercise in which the United States attempts to envisage circumstances in which, theoretically, a war could break out in which the use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated. This is less Dr Strangelove than the territory that comes with superpower status. But those hostile to the US will doubtless seize upon this paper to argue that the United States is plotting nuclear attacks against several nations. This is immensely irritating for Mr Blair, but there is not much that he can do about it. He will shortly be better appraised of American intentions than any other foreign leader and on that basis can develop his own political strategy. He already knows that the Administration is serious in its intentions and is responding to a real international crisis. He will at least be spared the vacillation of the Clinton era. This is a theatre for genuine statesmanship which will rightly makes the various sagas concerning errant spin-doctors and embarrassing party donors appear irrelevant. It is an arena in which the Prime Minister has thrived before, and one in which he must again rise to the challenge. Copyright 2002 [http://www.thetimes.co.uk/section/0,,549,00.html] Times Newspapers Ltd. ***************************************************************** 20 US advisors say no nuclear attack proposed Contingency plans called a deterrent to armed enemies By Scott Lindlaw, Associated Press, 3/11/2002 WASHINGTON - President Bush's top foreign affairs advisers say the United States must be prepared to use nuclear arms to deter attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. But in an effort to ease alarm overseas, they said there were no plans to do so. ''We all want to make the use of weapons of mass destruction less likely,'' Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said yesterday. ''The way that you do that is to send a very strong signal to anyone who might try to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States that they'd be met with a devastating response.'' Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the United States has never ruled out using nuclear weapons against a nuclear-armed enemy, a policy he said should deter any would-be attacker. ''We think it is best for any potential adversary out there to have uncertainty in his calculus,'' Powell said. Rice, Powell, and military and congressional leaders were responding to reports over the weekend that the Pentagon has told Congress it is studying the possible use of nuclear weapons against countries that threaten the United States. The classified ''nuclear posture review'' sent to Congress says the Pentagon is producing contingency plans for using nuclear arms against countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction. The report identified seven nations: China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Russia, and Syria. On TV talk shows yesterday, administration officials sought to walk a line between asserting the United States' willingness to use nuclear weapons and calming the public and allies troubled by suggestions that the United States might be moving closer to employing them. The issue was especially sensitive on a day when Vice President Dick Cheney was leaving on a 12-country tour that includes stops in a number of Arab states certain to be upset about the targeting of Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Powell said on CBS' ''Face the Nation'' that the report emerged from ''prudent'' planning that must ''give some consideration as to the range of options the president should have available to him to deal with those kinds of threats.'' ''Right now, today, not a single nation on the face of the earth is being targeted by an American nuclear weapon on a day-to-day basis,'' Powell said. Powell acknowledged that the military was considering whether to ''update or change'' its weapons to meet new threats. Rice said on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' that the report emphasizes efforts to make the use of nuclear arms less likely through improved intelligence and conventional weapons. Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed that the report is ''not a plan.'' ''This preserves for the president all the options that a president would want to have in case this country or our friends and allies were attacked with weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear, biological, chemical, or for that matter, high explosives,'' Myers said on CNN's ''Late Edition.'' Senator John Warner of Virginia, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would ask the administration today to clarify its position. He and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut and a fellow committee member, painted the document as an outline of options. ''Frankly, I don't mind some of these renegade nations [thinking] twice about the willingness of the United States to take action to defend our people and our values and our allies,'' Lieberman said. But, he added on CNN, ''It's very important for the American people or people around the world not to overreact to the news stories.'' This story ran on page A2 of the Boston Globe on 3/11/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. ***************************************************************** 21 AU: US scrambles to ease N-attack fears - smh.com.au - World By Eric Schmitt in Washington The United States has sought to head off an international furore over a secret Pentagon policy review that identifies countries such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea as potential targets for future US nuclear attacks. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, were among the top officials who took to the airwaves to dampen fears among European and Middle Eastern leaders that the disclosure of the nuclear plans suggested a US nuclear attack was in the works. "We should not get all carried away with some sense that the United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in some contingency that is coming up in the near future," Mr Powell said on CBS. "It is not the case. What the Pentagon has done with this study is sound, military, conceptual planning, and the President will take that planning and he will give his directions on how to proceed." General Myers said on CNN: "This is, again, not a plan. This preserves for the president all the options that a president would want to have in case this country or our friends and allies were attacked with weapons of mass destruction." Few governments offered a public response as news of the report emerged over the weekend. The two nuclear powers listed as potential adversaries, Russia and China, made no official comment, but the unofficial response was often caustic. "I think this will be shocking to most people here," said Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Relations at Qinghua University in China. "The Bush Administration seems determined to go back toward a Cold War strategy." Among those who took the reports at face value, the reaction echoed the blunt assessment of one top Russian legislator. Since September 11, the legislator said, Americans "have somewhat lost touch with the reality in which they live". One expert said the disclosure was likely to prove a severe embarrassment to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who has given blanket support to the US anti-terror strategy. In Syria, another country listed as a potential target, the Foreign Minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, said his country would complain to the United Nations Security Council should the reports prove true. Iraq was typically defiant, saying the US was fixated not on controlling weapons of mass destruction but on eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein. In Iran, the cabinet spokesman, Abdullah Ramezanzadeh, said that while the US was "capable of attacking any country", Iran did not currently regard itself as a direct target. The New York Times ***************************************************************** 22 Bush Team Defends U.S. Nuke Plans Las Vegas SUN March 10, 2002 WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's top foreign-affairs advisers say the United States must be prepared to use nuclear weapons to deter attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. But in an effort to ease alarm overseas, they said there were no plans to do so. "We all want to make the use of weapons of mass destruction less likely," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday. "The way that you do that is to send a very strong signal to anyone who might try to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States that they'd be met with a devastating response." Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States has never ruled out using nuclear weapons against a nuclear-armed enemy, a policy he said should have deter any would-be attacker. "We think it is best for any potential adversary out there to have uncertainty in his calculus," Powell said. Rice, Powell and military and congressional leaders were responding to weekend reports that the Pentagon has told Congress it is studying the possible use of nuclear weapons against countries that threaten the United States. The classified "nuclear posture review" sent to Congress says the Pentagon is developing contingency plans for using nuclear weapons against countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction. The report identified seven nations: China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Russia and Syria. On TV talk shows Sunday, administration officials sought to walk a line between asserting America's willingness to use nuclear weapons, and calming the public and allies troubled by suggestions the United States might be moving closer to employing them. The issue was especially sensitive on a day when Vice President Dick Cheney was leaving on a 12-country tour that includes stops in a number of Arab states certain to be upset about the targeting of Iraq, Libya and Syria. Powell said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that the report emerged from "prudent" planning that must "give some consideration as to the range of options the president should have available to him to deal with those kinds of threats." "Right now, today, not a single nation on the face of the earth is being targeted by an American nuclear weapon on a day-to-day basis," Powell said. "We should not get all carried away with some sense that the United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in some contingency that is coming up in the near future," he said. "It is not the case." Powell acknowledged the military was considering whether to "modify or update or change" current nuclear weapons to meet new threats. Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the report emphasizes efforts to make the use of nuclear arms less likely through improved intelligence and conventional weapons. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed that the report is "not a plan." "This preserves for the president all the options that a president would want to have in case this country or our friends and allies were attacked with weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear, biological, chemical or, for that matter, high explosives," Myers said on CNN's "Late Edition." Sen. John Warner, R-Va., top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would ask the administration Monday to clarify its position. He and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., a fellow committee member, painted the document as an outline of options for the president. "Frankly, I don't mind some of these renegade nations (thinking) twice about the willingness of the United States to take action to defend our people and our values and our allies," Lieberman said. But, he added on CNN: "It's very important for the American people or people around the world not to overreact to the news stories." News of the report did trigger consternation and disbelief overseas. Libya's African affairs minister, Ali Abd al-Salam al-Turiki, told reporters in Cairo he found the report hard to believe. "I don't think this is true," he said. "I don't think America is going to destroy the world." Dmitry Rogozin, a leading Russian lawmaker with close ties to the Kremlin, accused Washington of deliberately leaking word of the report to intimidate Russia. "They've brought out a big stick - a nuclear stick that is supposed to scare us and put us in our place," Rogozin said on NTV television. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 23 Madeleine Bunting: America's long shadow Six months after September 11, it is no longer Islamist terror we are afraid of but the US nuclear hitlist Madeleine Bunting Monday March 11, 2002 The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk] It is six months to the day that Mohammed Atta stepped on to the Boston-LA flight that destroyed the World Trade Centre. The anniversary provides a deceptively neat sense of the conclusion of chapter one of America's response - the grief, the memorials, the celebration of heroism, the coalition building, the rooting out of the Taliban - and the beginning of chapter two. But be warned: if there were themes in chapter one you didn't much like, the latter will be very much worse, already characterised by determined vengefulness and unbridled opportunism: "Hey, had an enemy pre-September 11? Now's your chance to nuke them." It was revealed at the weekend that the US has contingency plans for a nuclear attack on seven countries - Russia, China, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. This revelation followed a week of speculation about war with Iraq. In preparation for this next stage of the war against terrorism, the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, will today present Tony Blair with his wish list - a 25,000-strong UK force prepared for an Iraqi trip. For the first time, one of the chief architects of America's response to September 11 is venturing abroad, and it prompts two questions. Will Cheney grasp the perception common outside the US that never has a nation squandered sympathy and moral advantage so quickly and with such wantonness? And if he does, will he care? Does America mind becoming a global hate figure? What happens to the mentality of a country when it's not loved, only feared? What patterns of aggressive defensiveness take root? These are the questions that trigger anxiety: as the memory of September 11 inevitably fades, it is not so much Islamist hijackers as US bombs that make the world feel a precarious place. Mr Cheney may be too insulated to feel it on his 12-country tour, but anti-Americanism can never have been so widespread and fed by so many different streams of political antagonism. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the centrepiece, but RW Johnson, writing in the current issue of Prospect on the Durban anti-racism conference last summer, is a reminder of the anti-Americanism that existed before September 11. Throughout the developing world, the "Washington consensus" is blamed for the imposition of economic policies. That chimes with a new and strident anti-Americanism from the anti-globalisation movement, and recharges older traditions of hostility to US power and its cultural hegemony, traditionally strong on the left and in Europe. All the evidence is that America is indifferent to international criticism, absorbed in a dialogue with itself. How else do we account for a week in which the US threatened a trade war over steel, while bombing Gardez, opening bases across central Asia, beating the drum on Iraq and preparing nuclear war? All that against a backdrop of a wholesale retreat from multilateralism in the past six months, whether on climate change, biological weapons, arms control, development aid, the international criminal court or peacekeeping. Compared with these, the Afghan war was a minor moral dilemma. It is already fading fast, relegated to downpage stories of squabbles between brutal warlords. America has become a problem, and every commentator is visibly wriggling around it, wrestling with how to accommodate George Bush's America with a lifetime of respect for American creativity, meritocracy and cultural vibrancy. It has become de rigueur among a generation of commentators such as Fred Halliday, Will Hutton and John Lloyd to castigate anti-Americanism before acknowledging their own concerns about US power. Storms have rocked teacups at both the London Review of Books and the New Statesman over this new debate. For it does feel like a new debate. This is not a question of reheating the leftovers from Vietnam or Chile. A new generation barely remembers either of them, let alone the cold war politics that underpinned them. Rather, this anti-Americanism debate principally concerns globalisation: first, the questions about how and whether this process can be managed and the multilateral institutions to do that; and second, how to respond to the violent and powerless political identities globalisation triggers, whether they be Hindu mobs in Gujarat or the Taliban. On both, the response of the world's only superpower is a combination of indifference and aggression, and it fails to acknowledge any responsibilities other than to its own electorate. So what can you do about it? Not much. It is impotence that charges this debate with a particular anguish. However much we rant and rail, American power is an immovable reality. Two freshly minted US statistics strike that point home: GDP per person is 54% more than in Europe, and the US spends $28,000 for every member of its armed forces on military R&D compared with Europe's $7,000. US economic and military supremacy is secure for at least a generation. So how does any country position itself in the Manichean worldview of Republican America, of good versus evil? Or as Newt Gingrich summed it up: "There are only two teams on the planet in this war - there are no neutrals." Mr Blair doesn't appear to have hesitated before signing up to the US team. Power is always seductive and particularly so to New Labour, which refashioned itself around the principle of gaining and keeping that precious commodity. That has translated neatly into a foreign policy of assiduously hanging on to US shirt tails, which gives Blair the chance of fried catfish on Bush's Texan ranch next month. Such tokens apart, what benefits has Britain reaped from its slavish support for the US since September 11? The answer is none, only a series of snubs on issues as diverse as peacekeeping in Afghanistan, development aid and steel. "Poodle" screamed the Mirror's front page at Blair last Friday. Are there any limits beyond which Blair would not go in support of the US? We have yet to get such necessary reassurance. Instead, Blair softens us up with anti-Iraq propaganda, and it becomes plausible that he might hitch his wagon of liberal interventionism - what David Marquand lavishly praises as "liberal patriotism" - to a US ground invasion of Iraq. That would be a fabulous act of political self-immolation. Unless Blair can show more results for his catfish, he will find a left wing in open mutiny - and they won't be fobbed off with fox hunting - not to mention his core constituency, middle England, whose lack of enthusiasm for a battle with Iraq was made clear in a survey in yesterday's Mail on Sunday. To middle England, Iraq is not their quarrel, and it is increasingly ill at ease with a sense of lost British independence of spirit, squeezed between Washington and Brussels. It is that latter sentiment - that fond British desire to be "one's own man" - which Iain Duncan Smith could richly exploit. Anti-Americanism, in its many manifestations, is rapidly becoming a political force to be reckoned with, and Blair can't rely on Disney and Florida package holidays to keep the British on side. m.bunting@guardian.co.uk [m.bunting@guardian.co.uk] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 ***************************************************************** 24 US aims nuclear arms at terror Irish Newspapers - AMERICA'S next generation of nuclear weapons should be smaller, "smarter" and aimed at destroying political dictators and military commanders, not centres of population, according to a leaked top secret report prepared by the Pentagon. The document makes clear that a stockpile of hundreds of missiles pointed at large cities in Russia and China was no longer so necessary. The Nuclear Posture Review, presented to senior members of the US Congress eight weeks ago, calls for the invention of nuclear bombs that can penetrate earth and rock to destroy the command centres of countries hostile to America, without endangering the surrounding population. In addition to the continued, but smaller-scale, targeting of Russia and China, America's nuclear capability is to be aimed at North Korea, Iraq and Iran, the three states that President Bush has identified as the "axis of evil." Syria and Libya are also named. Missiles with relatively small nuclear warheads that would plunge through rock, earth or concrete and then detonate underground in bunkers and tunnel systems are proposed. * Britsih Prime Minister Tony Blair's office denied media reports yesterday that the United States had asked Britain to provide 25,000 troops for a joint attack on Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein. "No decisions have been taken, let alone any requests made," said a spokesman for Blair's Downing Street office. ( Daily Telegraph, London and agencies) Ben Fenton in Washington © Copyright Unison ***************************************************************** 25 Fusion Experiment Sparks an Academic Brawl (washingtonpost.com) By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 11, 2002; Page A10 A small glass cylinder sits at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Partly filled with a form of acetone, the cylinder is closed at the bottom and at the top, with openings for a vacuum pump. A device that converts electricity into mechanical energy is stuck to the glass and sends sound waves into the acetone. A neutron generator sits nearby, to fire tiny particles into the liquid in time with the sound waves. The setup is smaller than most coffee makers, but the experiment being conducted with it rocked the world of physics last week and set off a quarrel among scientists that was the academic equivalent of a barroom brawl. Rusi Pesi Taleyarkhan at Oak Ridge said that the small glass structure replicated the nuclear fusion reactions that occur inside the sun and the stars, and that those reactions had previously been simulated on Earth only with gigantic particle accelerators, highly radioactive substances and the hydrogen bomb. While those systems have relied on powerful energy sources to slam atoms of hydrogen together, Taleyarkhan said he achieved the same effect by using a small force that was intensely concentrated. "It's the old karate chop effect," Taleyarkhan said. "If you increase the rate of change, it results in a more intense shock. You can use the same energy over a short time and crack a brick, when otherwise you would just be pushing it." A report on the experiment conducted by scientists at Oak Ridge, Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York and the Russian Academy of Sciences was published in the respected journal Science -- against the advice of at least three scientists who reviewed the paper for the journal: "I reviewed the paper twice, I rejected it twice," said William Moss, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. "I told Science you can't publish it because it's not right," said Lawrence Crum, a physicist with the Applied Physics Lab of the University of Washington at Seattle. "They say it was subject to stringent peer review, but does that mean it passed peer review?" asked Seth Putterman, a physicist with the University of California at Los Angeles, who also rejected the article. As the accusations and allegations increased, Taleyarkhan's supporters fought back. Russ George, a California scientist who has worked for many years on alternative energies, said the three critics were Taleyarkhan's competitors. "They are not happy that they are beaten to the prize," said George, formerly a visiting scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and at the Stanford Research Institute. "They have so much to gain by having Taleyarkhan fail." The idea of "tabletop" fusion, using substances that are widely available, cheap and safe, has long been a tantalizing dream in nuclear physics. By tightly controlling nuclear reactions, energy could be generated for ordinary civilian use, instead of for the uncontrolled explosions used for war and destruction. Conventional nuclear reactors do release controlled energy that can be used for civilian purposes, but they use highly radioactive substances, generate dangerous wastes and carry the risks of meltdown. The Oak Ridge experiment, by contrast, used substances that are cheap and safe and, if Taleyarkhan is correct, managed to produce heat as intense as that in the sun's interior in a small area for a few trillionths of a second. Because these "explosions" were invisible to the eye, researchers searched for telltale signs -- chiefly for neutrons and tritium, another form of hydrogen. Taleyarkhan's group said they found both. A second group of Oak Ridge scientists looked for the neutrons and couldn't find them, whereupon Taleyarkhan examined their data and concluded that they had made mistakes in their analysis. Many scientists will try to replicate the experiment, and Taleyarkhan said he will help them set up their experiments. While the technique used -- sonoluminescence -- has long been known, Taleyarkhan's group developed some novel improvements. When sound waves are sent through some liquids, they set up fluctuations in pressure. Taleyarkhan's neutron generator "seeded" especially large bubbles in the liquid. As the pressure changed from a powerful vacuum -- which caused the bubbles to expand -- to a powerful region of high pressure, the bubbles imploded with great force, creating the kind of heat that Taleyarkhan believes forced atoms of a form of hydrogen together. Scientists disagreed on almost every aspect of the "bubble fusion" experiment. Putterman said the Oak Ridge researchers may have detected tritium that was not produced in the experiment. "My concern was they've got tritium contamination in their lab," he said. But Lee Riedinger, deputy director for Science and Technology at Oak Ridge and Taleyarkhan's boss, said: "The tritium signal seems impressive. I cannot see anything wrong with the tritium signal." Riedinger himself was worried about the neutron signal. He asked a second group at Oak Ridge to look for the particles, and became concerned when they could not. "Scientists look at the same results and have different opinions," Riedinger concluded ruefully. He said he plans to get the two groups together and move the experiment from the Engineering Science and Technology building to the physics building at Oak Ridge, which is better designed for experiments involving the detection of sub-atomic particles. Kenneth Suslick, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he and Putterman would try to replicate the experiment using a laser instead of the neutron generator to seed the bubbles. In this way, he said, scientists would be sure that any neutrons they detected were not produced by the neutron generator. As with everything else, even this could prove controversial. Richard Lahey, a professor of engineering at Rensselaer and Taleyarkhan's co-author, said that lasers wouldn't work very well. He said scientists used neutrons to seed the bubbles because the neutrons produced at the end of the experiment could themselves seed new bubbles, thus setting up a chain reaction, which is essential if the technique is ever to produce usable energy. "I would say there is a 50-50 chance that fusion events did occur," said Don Steiner, a former scientist at the Oak Ridge fusion program and now director of nuclear engineering and engineering physics at Rensselaer. "Both experimental setups [at Oak Ridge] were not ideal," he said. "Both groups would admit [that] if they had open resources and could set up their definitive experiment, it would be different than the ones conducted." He estimated that 20 to 30 labs in the United States could replicate the experiment. Riedinger said he hopes scientists could give the public a verdict in six months. © 2002 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 26 LANL cleanup: Plenty of work remains to be done Santa Fe New Mexican Jeff Tollefson/The New MexicanMarch 10, 2002 Julie Graber/The New Mexican Steve Yanicak of the New Mexico Environment Department takes water from a spring near the Rio Grande to test for contaminants. LOS ALAMOS - Like many people here, Randy Smith works across the street from a radioactive-waste dump. Not the new kind, requiring hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental safeguards, decades of study and political capital extending all the way to the Oval Office. It's just an old-fashioned pit, where some of mankind's worst waste was bulldozed over with dirt, topped with a blanket of asphalt in places and surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. "It's kind of strange when you park your car 20 feet away from a radioactive dump site," Smith says, "but we've never had any problems. You see people out there testing, and you just have to trust that if there were a problem, it would get handled properly." Welcome to Los Alamos, birthplace of the atom bomb. Nuclear-weapons research and fabrication is a messy process: Everything from the usual industrial solvents and chemicals to standard explosives and radioactive materials has left its mark at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Twelve years and $700 million into its current environmental-restoration program, the lab has 839 sites where the question of contamination needs to be addressed. To date, the lab has gone about environmental cleanup largely on its own, working with and occasionally prodded by the New Mexico Environment Department. But things are about to change. State regulators are putting the final touches on an order that could, among other things, lay the foundation - and set a schedule - for cleanup throughout the 43-square-mile laboratory. That plan already faces challenges. The lab's cleanup funding has dropped by more than 50 percent in the last decade. Even at current funding levels, lab officials say, the lab will not be able to meet the state's expectations in the upcoming order, and DOE headquarters is proposing to cut the cleanup budget by another 37 percent next year. Using those figures, the lab would only be able to complete about half the work. "If they don't meet the terms of the order, then they are in noncompliance, and we will take enforcement action against them," says Greg Lewis, director of the Water and Waste Management Division at the Environment Department. This path leads into a legal morass that is not to be taken lightly. Ultimately, however, the state can assess $25,000 in fines each day for each violation until the lab comes into compliance. So says the law, anyway. Regardless of how that scenario might play out, such a legally binding order should significantly increase the state's leverage. If the lab is bound by law to clean up its mess, Lewis explains, DOE will be much more likely to request proper funding to complete the job. For reasons not entirely clear, New Mexico has never taken this step, although other states with DOE facilities have. "I think there's plenty of blame to go around," Lewis says. "We haven't been as aggressive as we should have been historically, and the lab has certainly been reluctant to be regulated." The department expects to release the document for public comment this spring. Cleanup hazards Notice: Underground Radioactive Material So read signs on a fence across the street from Randy Smith's hardware store, Los Alamos Home Improvement. DP Road ultimately leads to Technical Area 21, a now-defunct facility that processed plutonium after World War II. Over the years, the area developed into a commercial corridor. Not all that long ago, the fence wasn't there. Weeds grow from cracks in asphalt once used as a parking lot. Below: plutonium - like that specially packaged and sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad today - and who knows what kind of gunk. Lab officials hesitate when talking about cleanup. They don't know exactly what lies within this quarter-mile-long waste pit, innocuously dubbed Material Disposal Area B, running along the south side of DP Road. When testing, rather than tapping into the middle, the lab monitors below and around the pit for fear of disturbing the waste. To dig it up would be no small feat. Estimated cost: $1 billion for excavation of this and a few other pits at TA 21. Compare that to what the state spends every year from its general fund, for all functions from schools to prisons to public safety: $4 billion. The health threats are very real. Depending on the kind and amount of exposure, radiation can cause everything from birth defects and genetic damage to cancer. Chemicals like PCBs are also suspected carcinogens. But, at least in this case, officials know where the waste is. Removal would involve potential exposure to workers, not to mention the disruption of business along DP Road, according to Julie Canepa, who heads the lab's Environmental Restoration Project. Once you get it out of the ground, the waste would need to be repackaged and put back into the ground, presumably in a better-designed facility. "Where I think this is headed is, we are probably not going to be digging it up," Canepa says. "But then we have the long-term stewardship components as an institution." In other words, if you don't dig it up, how do you monitor for potential health hazards in the future? How do you ensure the contamination will stay put? Nature has a way of dispersing things. The same question will arise again and again as the laboratory looks at this and other waste-disposal areas. Twenty-six are on the current list, and more low-level radioactive waste is going into the ground at Area G each year. Questions remain about the state's role in regulating this disposal, as evidenced by the New Mexico attorney general's position that Area G has never been properly permitted and is thus out of compliance. State regulators plan to address that and other operations in an operating permit later this summer. Even the current disposal sites will go through the formal cleanup process, which includes investigation and possible remediation or further stabilization. Currently, the lab is conducting a pilot project at one disposal area to see how the sites can be addressed. Environmentalists, meanwhile, see it as a simple issue of priorities. Funding for the lab's overall operations has doubled since the Cold War, which indicates the money is there, says Greg Mello, who heads the Los Alamos Study Group, a local environmental and disarmament organization. If it were a choice between education or poverty-relief programs and digging up pits like the one along DP Road, Mello says, he would choose social programs. But it's not: DOE spends billions of dollars on bombs, Mello notes. "We have the money. I say dig it up." Identifying the problem A review that involved the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1990s turned up more than 2,124 "potential release sites." One by one, the lab's Canepa says, the laboratory has been investigating each. More than 500 sites were removed from the list; still others were consolidated. Although Mello and others fear the laboratory is conducting a cleanup on paper only, Canepa says many of those sites showed little or no contamination. The laboratory and state regulators have identified about two dozen sites that will require major investigations and cleanup. The state Environment Department has cited all the waste dumps as a primary concern. Although the federal government has sole jurisdiction over radioactive waste, the dumps also contain a host of solvents, heavy metals and other materials that are governed by the state, which enforces federal hazardous-waste laws. The waste dumps are on the top of bluffs that overlook myriad canyons at the base of the Jemez Mountains. But this is only part of the picture of contamination. Over the years, the laboratory has dumped contaminated sludges, liquids and solids directly into the canyons below. Much, though certainly not all, of the contamination took place before the passage of modern environmental legislation in the 1970s. Since then, state officials say, it has taken awhile for the law to catch up to the laboratory. In other words, until laws were passed, the lab often was not doing anything illegal. Such was the case at Acid Canyon, the site of the first pipe outfall for plutonium-processing facilities during the Manhattan Project. The land is now a public park. At least three cleanup operations have taken place there. The most recent was completed last year at the behest of state regulators who found numerous "hot spots" of plutonium contamination. The laboratory is conducting a lengthy process to characterize contamination in each of the canyons that traverse the area, beginning with Los Alamos and Pueblo canyons on the east side. So far, the lab has discovered nothing that would warrant immediate action, according to Mat Johansen, who oversees the lab's groundwater program for DOE. Natural percolation The problem has become more complex in recent years: Perchlorate and tritium, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear work, turned up in a drinking-water well that taps deep groundwater in Pueblo Canyon. Before these and similar findings, the laboratory had argued that monitoring the regional aquifer was unnecessary because the geology would prevent contamination from percolating deep into the earth, according to the Environment Department's Lewis. "That was the official stance until very recently," Lewis says. The Environment Department and the lab are now looking into possible perchlorate contamination in springs along the Rio Grande below White Rock. Lewis joined other department and lab officials on a recent trip to sample the springs, which the state believes are fed by deep groundwater below the lab. Earlier tests turned up positive for perchlorate, although the lab questions the results. Working with the state, the laboratory is now drilling wells into the deep aquifer to better understand groundwater movement in the area. Both state and federal officials say the program is necessary to understand both current and future dispersal of contaminants. Here again, the lab comes under criticism. Both state officials and activists question the costs. At $1 million - and much more, in some cases - drilling a groundwater-monitoring well at the laboratory can cost several times the industry average, critics contend. They argue the lab is wasting money on over-priced contractors, although lab officials say the wells are expensive because they include the costs of monitoring and sampling. For activists such as Mello, spending $70 million on the groundwater-monitoring program - more than the Santa Fe Public Schools operating budget - is just another way of delaying real cleanup. "What's happened is Los Alamos has turned its cleanup program into a research program," Mello says. "Everyone feels like a scientist if they can just get more data, but there's no end to this." The laboratory is well aware of this kind of mistrust. It cites the Acid Canyon cleanup as an accomplishment, as well as the $1.7 million removal of about 3,400 cubic yards of soil contaminated with PCBs at an old storage site. That waste went into Area G, the current disposal site. Another $25 million went into the recent cleanup of an old landfill in which fist-sized chunks of high explosives were littered among rubble from old buildings and the like. Canepa says the site was so dangerous that the major work was done with a remote-control backhoe. From Canepa's perspective, environmental remediation is always a slow and expensive process. Just figuring out what kind of waste is present at a particular site requires on-the-ground work and expensive analysis. Then comes the risk analysis, and finally cleanup, but each of those steps involves reams of paperwork going back and forth between the lab and state regulators. An air of mistrust Then again, it can be difficult to view the laboratory as an agency beleaguered by unfair criticism. Only five years ago, for example, the laboratory was dumping highly contaminated water without treatment at Technical Area 16. Technicians ran water over pieces of TNT and other explosives as they were ground down and shaped for proper combustion. The water was pink with TNT. Officials with the state's Oversight Bureau are only half joking when they say they were afraid to wear big boots near the outfall for fear of sparking an explosion. "Everything was literally red from TNT. Everything was dead. The trees were dead. The vegetation was dead," says Steve Yanicak, who heads the bureau in White Rock. And yet, he adds, the laboratory wasn't even testing the discharge water for high explosives. "They knew, but weren't doing anything," Yanicak says. "But again, there was no state oversight." This kind of fact-checking and fieldwork became the duty of the Oversight Bureau, funded by the DOE according to a 1990 agreement. For their part, lab officials say their discharge permit didn't require testing for high explosives, an admission that the lab was knowingly contaminating a canyon because nobody told them not to. The lab has since built a treatment plant to remove high explosives from the discharge water. But it should be obvious that it would have been much cheaper to stop polluting years ago. Cleanup, as the lab says, is expensive. As if to illustrate the long-term costs, the lab found traces of high explosives in the deep groundwater after drilling a well at Technical Area 16. Yanicak wasn't surprised, but the well project was so beset with problems that some people have speculated the contamination was introduced into the deep aquifer when the well was drilled. For Joni Arends, a Santa Fe activist with Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, the lab tends to use its technical expertise to undermine environmental discussions with citizens. One refreshing exception, she says, is the Community Radiation Monitoring Group, a lab-sponsored citizen group that tracks air emissions at Los Alamos. But establishing that group required a Clean Air Act lawsuit filed by Concerned Citizens in 1994. The group bypassed the lab's agreement with EPA, reached after the lab was found to be out of compliance at 31 of 33 facilities that emit radionuclides, and argued in federal court the lab was still failing to properly monitor emissions. Arends says the lab has since come into compliance and now pays for independent scientific review to help the citizens group understand and debate technical issues. She would like to see the lab take this approach on other issues. "It's an excellent model," Arends says. "Many times, if we don't speak in scientific terms, our concerns are dismissed." The environment and public health For the most part, lab officials say threats to public health do not appear imminent. The quality of well water is of concern to both Los Alamos County and San Ildefonso Pueblo, but thanks to its remote location, most of the current problems facing the lab are environmental. With proper cleanup and long-term monitoring, they stress, the public should be safe. Not everybody shares this view, of course. Practically speaking, radionuclides are forever. It's difficult to plan for that. Fred Brueggeman is the deputy administrator for Los Alamos County. He has been working on an effort to transfer more laboratory land into county hands for development. First and foremost comes an agreement that the lab will maintain responsibility for contamination found in the future, but just in case, the county is looking at environmental insurance as a second layer of defense against the unexpected. The current round includes land along DP Road, and many have suggested one day using the buildings at Technical Area 21 as an industrial-development area. Others want to use the waste pit along the south side as a parking lot. The latter possibility, at least, is not even up for consideration at this point, according to the lab's Canepa. "No one should use that land," she says. Sitting in his office overlooking Ashley Pond, once at the heart of the Manhattan Project, Brueggeman tells of the time contractors found a few 55-gallon barrels while relocating a sewer line at the high-school football field. As it turned out, they contained nothing dangerous, but you never know in a place like this. "I work here. I live about two blocks away, where they used to store nuclear materials," he says. "It's not the sites that we know about that I worry about. It's the unknowns." Copyright 2002 Santa Fe New Mexican ***************************************************************** 27 Findings by physicists likely to pop 'bubble fusion' By FRANK MUNGER OAK RIDGE - Upcoming experiments will likely burst the bubble on bubble fusion, according to two prominent Oak Ridge scientists who've already disputed the results published last week in Science magazine. Dan Shapira, an experimental nuclear physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said he would be surprised if research projects now being assembled around the world are able to independently corroborate the claims of Rusi Taleyarkhan. Mike Saltmarsh, also a nuclear physicist and former director of ORNL's Fusion Energy Division, agreed. "I don't expect it to be confirmed," he said. "If it happens, I would be amazed and excited." Taleyarkhan reported evidence suggesting he and his research colleagues may have achieved nuclear fusion by collapsing bubbles in a beaker of deuterium-laden acetone. News of the experiment attracted global attention last week when Science published the preliminary results. The magazine released its March 8 contents ahead of time because of intense interest in the work. The Science publication was controversial, however, in part because Saltmarsh and Shapira had already attempted to replicate the Taleyarkhan experiment and were unable to verify key parts of the evidence, such as neutron emissions associated with nuclear fusion. "There's no evidence of any fusion in this experiment," Saltmarsh said. "That's our basic conclusion." Shapira and Saltmarsh, in separate interviews, said they were asked by ORNL management to test the experimental results last summer in hopes of validating the extraordinary report. Both men said they wanted Taleyarkhan's assertions to prove true. "It would be a nice thing," Shapira said. "I don't think it would solve the energy problems of the world, but it would be a very nice discovery. We were hoping, but it didn't work out that way." Saltmarsh said he would like to have been associated, even in a small way, with such a breakthrough. "It looked really intriguing. We went over there hoping to help confirm that they'd found something." But, alas, they reported nothing unusual taking place in the cylindrical beaker of acetone. Shapira and Saltmarsh did not set up their own experiment in ORNL's Physics Division, where they normally do research. Instead, they were asked to go to Taleyarkhan's lab, which is located at the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility a dozen miles away, and monitor the experimental setup there. They brought their own neutron detector, which by most accounts is a more sophisticated device than the one used by Taleyarkhan. Taleyarkhan, a senior scientist in ORNL's Engineering and Technology Division, had devised his experiment to enhance the effects of sono-luminescence - a phenomenon in which sound waves produce bubbles that expand and collapse explosively, releasing light flashes and generating high temperatures. By using acetone, an organic liquid best known to many as the main ingredient in nail-polish remover, Taleyarkhan was reportedly able to prevent the bubbles from collapsing prematurely. His sound-induced bubbles were said to be 1,000 times larger than any previously achieved. The addition of deuterium permitted researchers to evaluate whether temperatures generated by the collapsing bubbles could invoke a fusion reaction among the deuterium atoms - so-called d-d fusion. Pulses of neutrons were injected into the beaker to help stimulate the reactions. Taleyarkhan has estimated that temperatures may have reached 18 million degrees Fahrenheit in small pockets of the acetone where bubbles collapsed. That would be enough for fusion to take place. During his experiment, Taleyarkhan was looking for two things: neutron emissions and the presence of radioactive tritium in the acetone. Both are indicators that a fusion reaction might be taking place. But the neutrons and tritium have to be at sufficient levels in order to make fusion sense, and the highest neutron emissions also should correlate with the light flashes - evidence that the reaction is tied to the collapsing bubbles. Taleyarkhan has reported that his research results met all three of those criteria. Shapira and Saltmarsh did not attempt to measure the tritium, essentially taking Taleyarkhan's measurements at face value. But they disputed the neutron results, saying they did not find sufficient numbers of neutrons and did not find emissions that correlated with the light signals caused by sono-luminescence. If the tritium data reported by Taleyarkhan was correct, then there should have been about a million neutrons per second coming from the experiment, Saltmarsh said. "If that occurred, we should have seen a massive signal during cavitation (collapsing of the bubbles)," he said. While it's impossible to measure all neutrons because they're coming off in all directions, Saltmarsh and Shapira said they didn't find numbers anywhere close to what would constitute evidence of fusion taking place. They also did comparison experiments - one in which acoustic cavitation took place and another in which it didn't. Saltmarsh said one of the experiments lasted 58 minutes and the other 65 minutes. After the results were adjusted for the time differences, the researchers found an increased neutron rate in the cavitation experiment, but it was so slight - about 1 percent - as to be insignificant. Also, Shapira and Saltmarsh did tests to evaluate the timing of neutron emissions with the light flashes that indicate bubble collapses are taking place. Because there are background nuclear particles in the air - as well as the neutrons associated with pulses used to stimulate the experimental reaction - it was expected that some neutrons would be detected simultaneously with the light flashes just by coincidence. When Shapira and Saltmarsh calculated the number of coincidences that would take place over an hour's time, the number of neutron-light correlations they detected fit the model almost perfectly. Shapira said the model predicted about 50 random coincidences, with an error range of 5 or 6. "Within an hour, we saw 51 coincidences," he said. Taleyarkhan claims that peak neutron emissions in his experiment were timed appropriately to the light signals from collapsing bubbles. "We didn't see that," Shapira said. "What we saw were random coincidences." Taleyarkhan has said he believes the Saltmarsh and Shapira data actually support his conclusions but that their information on neutron emissions was misinterpreted. "Shapira and Saltmarsh grossly overestimated the efficiency of their (neutron) detector," Taleyarkhan wrote in a March 2 response to their report. Those comments clearly rankled Shapira and Saltmarsh. "I have to say that both Dan and I have a fair amount of experience in counting neutrons, and we do actually know what we're talking about," Saltmarsh said. "We calibrated our detector very carefully," Shapira said, noting that Taleyarkhan didn't add a nuclear physicist to his research team until after he and Saltmarsh raised issues about the neutron counts. "We stand by our conclusions," he said. Asked if this was a friendly scientific disagreement, Shapira replied, "It used to be friendly. I don't know anymore if it's a friendly exchange." Saltmarsh also indicated there may be hard feelings. One of the reasons this Oak Ridge experiment has generated so much interest is because of comparisons being drawn to the 'cold fusion' debate in 1989. At that time, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah announced to the press that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature, making front-page news around the world. The purported breakthrough was soon discounted when other scientists were unable to reproduce cold fusion in their own experiments. Since then, cold fusion has become synonymous with scientific embarrassment, largely because Pons and Fleischmann reported results before the research went through the peer-review process. Unlike the cold-fusion debacle, Taleyarkhan's research underwent extensive peer review before being published in Science. But, still, some observers worry that if the research results ultimately are disproved that it will be a black eye for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Saltmarsh has an unusual perspective because he was involved, peripherally, in both situations. In 1989 he was asked to head ORNL's response to the reports of cold fusion, and he oversaw multiple Oak Ridge attempts to duplicate the Utah experiments. Asked if bubble fusion is similar to cold fusion, Saltmarsh replied, "Yes and no. I think, scientifically, it's not because this is not quite so far-fetched as cold fusion. But some of the aftermath is a bit like that. The world is going to divide itself into believers and non-believers. The time for discussion is not too rational. It'll all settle down, one way or the other, and the scientific process will eventually work its way through." Frank Munger can be reached at 865-482-9213 or twig1@knoxnews.infi.net March 10, 2002 The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 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. For more information go to: *****************************************************************