Subject: HEADLINES 13 February 1996

Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 19:08:15 -0500

      13 Feb 1996 (Reuter) - France denied that it planned to
store German nuclear waste, a move which environmental group
Greenpeace had said would violate French law and risked making
France an international atomic rubbish dump. Environment
minister Corinne Lepage, on a visit to state-run nuclear power
company COGEMA in La Hague, said that contracts between the
two countries on storage and treatment of nuclear waste would
respect French law.

      13 Feb 1996 (Reuter) - Belarus, the country worst hit by 
the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, put a $235 billion price tag
on dealing with its aftermath and Ukraine demanded faster
action from the West to close the stricken power plant. 
Belarus's Chernobyl Minister said foreign aid since the 1986
catastrophe provided a tiny fraction of what was needed to
clean up huge stretches of contaminated forests, resettle
thousands of people and tackle health problems.

      13 Feb 1996 (Reuter) - France's South Pacific nuclear
blasts were a success that will allow Paris to renew its
strike force in two decades with no further testing needed, a
weapons expert said. Jacques Bouchard, head of the military
department at the French Atomic Energy Centre and the
country's top nuclear weapons expert, said the tests had
fufilled their goal of giving France the capacity to simulate
blasts on computers.

      13 Feb 1996 (UPI) - The British engineering company at
the center of the "arms-to-Iraq" inquiry knowingly supplied
nuclear arms components to Baghdad, the Financial Times
newspaper said. The story came just two days ahead of the
long-awaited report by judge Richard Scott into the British
government's alleged role in secret military exports to Iraq
and the rules supposedly banning them.

      13 Feb 1996 (UPI) - Experts from several nations urged
India and Pakistan to device resolve their differences and
avoid risking a possible nuclear conflict in South Asia. At a
seminar on nuclear non-proliferation in Washington, experts
from the two South Asian nations expressed the need to reduce
defense expenditures in one of the world's poorest region and
to spend more on economic and social development.