Lockheed Martin Corp. bowed out of the competition to run Los Alamos National Laboratory in August, suggesting the troubled nuclear-weapons lab would require more time and energy to fix than the defense giant was willing to invest. The withdrawal of the nation's largest defense contractor jolted other potential bidders eyeing the New Mexico lab.
Los Alamos operations have been shut down since July following the latest in a series of security lapses. The disappearance of two computer disks believed to contain classified information prompted a furor in Congress and calls for immediate removal of the University of California as the lab operator. Also in July, an intern suffered an eye injury when she looked into a laser that was supposed to be turned off. Twenty-three employees were suspended, of which seven were disciplined, four were fired and one resigned.
The University of California has managed Los Alamos for the government since the lab was formed in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. But in the wake of continuing problems, the Department of Energy announced it would seek competitive bids when the current contract expires. DOE officials also will be seeking bids on the two other labs managed by U.C. — the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab founded in 1952 and the nonweapons Lawrence Berkeley lab.
Bill Madia, executive vice president of the not-for-profit Battelle Memorial Institute, operator of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Hanford and three other Department of Energy labs, underscored the risks for other would-be operators. "What a lot of folks are worried about at Los Alamos is, can you go in there under today's conditions and be successful? For Lockheed to walk away is a serious signal to the marketplace that this is a serious challenge and contractors need to be cautious in making this decision," Madia said.
Lockheed's decision was a blow to the University of California and the University of Texas, both of whom were talking to the Bethesda MD-based firm about teaming up on a Los Alamos bid.
Lockheed executives called counterparts at the two universities on August 6 — the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing — and ended those negotiations.
Lockheed Martin already runs Sandia National Laboratories, a nuclear-weapons lab in New Mexico and California, as well as Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, for the U.S. Department of Energy and is part of a three-way team running the sole British nuclear weapons lab at Aldermaston for the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Lockheed executives chose to focus on those labs, according to spokeswoman Wendy Owen.
Lockheed was hardly one of many equals. The universities were courting the firm because DOE had recently re-awarded its Sandia contract to Lockheed, and it was the only firm experienced in running a nuclear weapons laboratory.
Officials at the University of Texas and the University of California said they were talking to San Francisco-based Bechtel National and other defense, engineering, and security contractors to round out bidding teams. Texas A&M University, CH2M Hill, Northrop Grumman, Burns and Roe, and Washington Group-BWXT have also expressed interest in bidding.
Boards of the two universities haven't made the final decision on whether to bid, and probably won't until they see the bid specifications, expected soon. At the August meeting of the U.C. board of regents, Walter Kohn, a professor and Nobel laureate, told the board: "It is wrong for our university to help design, develop, and even manufacture nuclear weapons."
– edited from the Oakland Tribune and The Associated Press
PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2004
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
by Jim Stoffels
Following is Chairman Jim Stoffels address at the 23rd annual Atomic Cities Peace Memorial, August 9, 2004, John Dam Plaza, Richland, Washington.
For a year-and-a-half now, our country has been bogged down in a criminal war of aggression that, so far, has:
• taken the lives of more than 900 U.S. troops and wounded 6,000,
• killed 12,500 Iraqi civilians — give or take a thousand — and wounded 40,000 more,
• put our hugely indebted country another $150 billion further into debt, and
• according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has “accelerated recruitment” of al Qaida terrorists.
The war was sold to the Congress and a majority of the American public by the Administration with a false claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — specifically the kind characterized by “a mushroom cloud.” Ironically, the fear of terrorist action was exploited — and continues to be exploited — to maintain the threat of nuclear annihilation posed by our own nuclear arsenal.
The Administration's annual nuclear weapons budget — over $6 billion (not including delivery systems) — exceeds the peak spending level (adjusted for inflation) of the Cold War years. Instead of honoring the commitment to nuclear disarmament made by our government 32 years ago when it signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Administration today is doing just the opposite: building new facilities for plutonium pit production; resuming production of tritium for thermonuclear weapons; and developing new nuclear weapons frighteningly touted as “more usable.”
This hypocritical double standard of bad nuclear weapons — those our adversaries have, or might have — and good nuclear weapons — those we have — shows that we never learned the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even among other weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons have no equal in their power to wreak death and destruction. They are not weapons of discrimination ... but extermination.
And now, 15 years after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that produced our huge nuclear arsenals, there are still more than 25,000 warheads in existence — and each of them makes the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs seem puny.
On Friday August 6th and today August 9th, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki called for a Year of Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear Weapons-Free World, leading up to next year’s 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings. The goal is total nuclear disarmament.
With the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially the hibakusha — the suffering survivors of our atomic bombs, we demand that nuclear weapons be abolished. We refuse to terrorize the world with the threat of nuclear annihilation. We reject a false security for ourselves based on the morally abhorrent and inherently dangerous policy of nuclear deterrence — the “balance of terror.” We visualize a better, safer world for all human beings and for all life — a world without nuclear weapons, because:
“We can’t hug our children — or grandchildren — with nuclear arms.”
by Stephen Zunes
Stephen Zunes is professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He serves as Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus and is the author of "Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism" (Common Courage Press, 2003).
The release of Mordechai Vanunu from an Israeli prison on April
22, 2004, is an opportunity to challenge United States policy of supporting Israel's
development of nuclear weapons while at the same time threatening war against other Middle
Eastern states for simply having the potential for developing such weapons.
Vanunu, a nuclear technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear complex, passed along photographs he had taken inside the plant to the Sunday Times of London in 1986. His evidence demonstrated that Israel had developed up to two hundred nuclear weapons of a highly advanced design, making it the world's sixth-largest nuclear power. For his efforts, agents from the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, kidnapped him from Rome and brought him to Israel to stand trial in secret. He was convicted on charges of espionage and treason and sentenced to eighteen years in prison under solitary confinement.
Vanunu was forced to remain in solitary confinement until 1998, when ongoing pressure from human rights groups forced the Israelis to end his segregation, though he was still not allowed to talk with fellow prisoners. Amnesty International, for example, observed that the prolonged isolation of Vanunu constituted cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and violated international human rights law.
Though labeled a spy and a traitor, Vanunu was simply a whistle-blower. He never received any money for his act of conscience, which he took upon recognizing that Israel's nuclear program went well beyond its need for a deterrent. A former strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation observed that Vanunu's revelations about Israel's nuclear program demonstrated that: "Its scale and nature was clearly designed for threatening, and if necessary launching, first-use of nuclear weapons against conventional forces."
Vanunu, who has been referred to by Daniel Ellsberg as "the preeminent hero of the nuclear era," has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The European parliament, the Jewish Peace Fellowship, and many other prominent organizations and individuals long called for Vanunu's release. In contrast, the four U.S. administrations in office during Vanunu's confinement were unsupportive. This lack of U.S. support for Vanunu is one part of the long-standing U.S. acquiescence to Israel's nuclear program.
Although Israel has long stated
it would not be first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, it is generally
believed to have become a nuclear power by 1969. Then newly-elected Pres. Richard Nixon
and his chief foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger privately endorsed Israel's program
that year. They quickly ended the regular U.S. inspections of Israel's Dimona nuclear
center (see photo). The Nixon administration went to great lengths to keep nuclear issues
out of any talks on the Middle East. Information on Israeli nuclear capabilities was
routinely suppressed. The United States even supplied Israel with nuclear triggers and
supercomputers that were bound for the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
Under the Carter administration, which took the threat of nuclear proliferation somewhat more seriously than other administrations, the issue of Israel's development of nuclear weaponry was not raised publicly. When satellite footage of an aborted nuclear test in South Africa 's Kalahari Desert gave evidence of a large-scale presence of Israeli personnel at the test site, the Carter administration kept it quiet. Two years later, when a U.S. satellite detected a successful joint Israeli-South African atomic bomb test in the Indian Ocean, the Carter administration rushed to squelch initial media reports.
Top officials in the Reagan administration made a conscious effort to keep information on Israel's nuclear capability from State Department officials and others who might have concerns over nuclear proliferation issues. And the senior Bush administration sold at least 1,500 nuclear "dual-use" items to Israel, according to a report by the General Accounting Office, despite requirements under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that the existing nuclear powers like the United States not help another country's nuclear weapons program "in any way." Israel is one of just four countries — the others being Pakistan, India, and Cuba — that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that President Clinton wrote Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in 1998, pledging that "the United States will preserve Israel's strategic deterrence capabilities and ensure that Middle East arms control initiatives will not damage it in the future. The Clinton letter provides written — if secret — backup to the long-standing agreement between Jerusalem and Washington over the preservation of Israel's nuclear capabilities if Israel maintains its policy of ‘ambiguity’ and does not announce publicly that it has the bomb."
Meanwhile, Congress has for many years made it clear that it did not want to have anything revealed in an open hearing related to Israel's nuclear capability. A major reason is that there are a number of laws that severely restrict U.S. military and technical assistance to countries that develop nuclear weapons. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. arms exports, which are highly profitable for the politically influential arms industry.
In addition, given the huge cost of a nuclear weapons program of such magnitude, it would have been very difficult for Israel to develop such an advanced arsenal without it's tens of billions of dollars in unrestricted U.S. financial aid. Beyond simply employing a double standard toward nuclear weapons, the United States has, in effect, subsidized nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
To justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Pres. George W. Bush, Senator John Kerry, and others argued that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program in violation of U.N. Security Council resolution 687. (In reality, the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency had determined in 1998 that Iraq's nuclear program had been completely dismantled.) What both Republican and Democratic leaders have failed to observe, however, is that Israel remains in violation of Security Council resolution 487, which calls on Israel to place its facilities at Dimona under IAEA trusteeship. Despite bipartisan efforts in Congress to seek repeal of that resolution, it is still legally binding. Bush and Kerry, however, believe that U.N. Security Council resolutions, like nuclear nonproliferation, do not apply to U.S. allies.
Like Israel, the United States has acknowledged its willingness to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear adversaries. And as in Israel, there is an obsession with secrecy that allows the government to get away with dangerous and destabilizing policies that risk a nuclear catastrophe. As Daniel Ellsberg has observed, "the cult and culture of secrecy in every nuclear weapons state has endangered and continues to threaten the survival of humanity. Vanunu's challenge to that wrongful and dangerous secrecy must be joined worldwide."
– edited from Foreign Policy In
Focus
For the complete article, go to: www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0404vanunu.html
Editor's note: Mordechai Vanunu has stated that he would like to emigrate to the United States, but the Israeli government has imposed various restrictions on him, including a prohibition from traveling overseas. Authorities contend Vanunu remains "a significant danger to state security" because he is believed to still possess classified information. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported May 14 that Vanunu is preparing a petition to the High Court of Justice against the restrictions with aid of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
– PeaceMeal, May/June 2004
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Saudi Arabia, in response to the current upheaval in the Middle East, has embarked on a strategic review that includes acquiring nuclear weapons. This new threat of proliferation in one of the most dangerous regions of the world comes on top of a crisis over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.
A strategy paper being considered at the highest levels in Riyadh sets out three options:
• To acquire a nuclear capability as a deterrent;
• To maintain or enter into an alliance with an existing nuclear power that would offer protection;
• To try to reach a regional agreement on having a nuclear-free Middle East.
It is not known whether Saudi Arabia has taken a decision on any of the three options. But the fact that it is prepared to contemplate the nuclear option is a worrying development. Until now, the assumption in Washington was that Saudi Arabia was content to remain under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. has steadily worsened since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington: 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis. Riyadh is also worried about a string of apparent leaks in American papers from the U.S. administration critical of Saudi Arabia.
United Nations officials and nuclear arms analysts said the Saudi review reflected profound insecurities generated by the volatility in the Middle East, Riyadh's estrangement with Washington, and the weakening of its reliance on the U.S. nuclear umbrella. They also pointed to Saudi worries about an Iranian nuclear program and to the absence of any international pressure on Israel, which has an estimated 200 or more nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia is unnerved by the possibility of Iran and Israel both having nuclear weapons.
David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington thinktank, said he doubted whether the Saudis would try to build a nuclear bomb, preferring instead to try to buy a nuclear warhead. U.N. officials said there have been rumors going back 20 years that the Saudis wanted to pay Pakistan to do the research and development on nuclear weapons. Four years ago, Saudi Arabia sent a defense team to Pakistan to tour its secret nuclear facilities and to be briefed by Abdul Qader Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. A U.N. official said: "There's obviously a lot of restlessness in the Middle East. Regional insecurity tends to produce a quest for a nuclear umbrella. The Saudis have the money and could provide it to Pakistan."
Arab countries urged the International Atomic Energy Authority, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, to get tough with Israel to let inspectors assess its nuclear program in line with similar pressure on Iran. Oman's ambassador to the IAEA, Salim al-Riyami, speaking on behalf of the Arab League, said, "I think it's time to deal with this issue more substantively than before."
– edited from The
Guardian (UK), September 18, 2003
PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2003
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
According to the latest intelligence on North Korea, disturbing evidence indicates the possible existence of a second, secret plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium, complicating both the diplomatic strategy for ending the program and the military options if that diplomacy fails. Discovery of the new evidence, which one senior administration official cautioned was "very worrisome, but still not conclusive," came just as North Korea claimed July 8 that it had completed reprocessing 8,000 nuclear fuel rods, enough to make a half-dozen nuclear weapons. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun on July 21 dismissed the report of a secret plutonium production plant and expressed concern that such media accounts could hurt his country's economy.
American officials confirm that sensors set up on North Korea's borders have begun to detect elevated levels of krypton 85, a gaseous fission product released when spent nuclear fuel is dissolved to extract plutonium. What concerns analysts, however, is not simply the presence of the gas but its source. The computer analyses that track the krypton gas strongly suggest that it originated not from North Korea's main nuclear plant at Yongbyon, but from a second plant, possibly buried in the mountains.
American officials have long suspected that North Korea would try to build a second plant to protect itself against a pre-emptive strike by the United States. The United States even demanded an inspection of one underground site five years ago, only to find it empty.
Indeed, there may now be at least two hidden facilities with the capacity to produce material for nuclear weapons. In October, confronted with American evidence, North Korean officials admitted that they had clandestinely built a plant intended to produce enriched uranium, another nuclear bomb fuel. (That is the same approach Saddam Hussein tried in the early 1990's, and that Iran is pursuing today.) American officials say they have never found that plant, though they believe it is several years away from full-scale production.
The nuclear dispute flared up in October when North Korea reportedly told a top U.S. official that it had restarted a nuclear program in violation of a 1994 agreement with the United States. Nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a U.N. agency based in Vienna, were expelled in December shortly after North Korea dismantled U.N. seals and monitoring cameras installed at the country's nuclear facilities.
President Bush has vowed that he "will not tolerate" a nuclear North Korea. But the administration has suspected that some of North Korea claims's amount to bluffing, an effort to force the world to give it aid on its terms in return for re-freezing or dismantling its program.
North Korea vowed on March 29 to resist all international demands on the communist state to allow nuclear inspections or agree to disarm, saying Iraq had made this mistake and was now paying the price. "The DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea] would have already met the same miserable fate as Iraq's had it compromised its revolutionary principle and accepted the demand raised by the imperialists and its followers for nuclear inspection and disarmament," the ruling party daily newspaper said in a commentary.
The director of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, expressed grave concern July 18 about North Korea. The situation there "is currently the most immediate and most serious threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime," he said from his headquarters in Vienna. It is not clear if he was aware of the newest evidence when he spoke.
China has now become fully engaged in trying to come up with a diplomatic solution that would not cause chaos on its border with North Korea, or an influx of refugees. At issue is the administration's demand that South Korea and Japan be part of any negotiations with North Korea, which wants to deal only with the United States. But some administration officials, especially at the Pentagon, believe that negotiations, while necessary, will ultimately prove fruitless. They do not believe that North Korea will ever trade away all of its nuclear program, the only card the starving country has to play to compel the world's attention.
– compiled from The New York Times, Reuters, AP and MSNBC
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Iran's growing nuclear program has raised a storm of international controversy with the discovery of enriched uranium in environmental samples taken around a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz in central Iran, a site not known to nuclear experts until last year. Nearly 1,000 gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium are slated to go online in a pilot plant at Natanz over the next 18 months. A commercial-scale fuel enrichment plant also under construction will ultimately house over 50,000 centrifuges.
The environmental samples were collected and analyzed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations agency that monitors compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The significance of the results is still under review.
Highly enriched uranium can be used to fuel nuclear weapons as well as nuclear reactors. Iran has denied U.S. allegations that its nuclear development program is a cover for a nuclear weapons program. Iran maintains that the Natanz site is to be used only for peaceful generation of electricity.
"In the next 20 years, Iran has to produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity by nuclear plants and the launch of these two centers is aimed at producing necessary fuel for these plants," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said.
Iran's nuclear program is largely run by Russian experts using material left over from the Cold War. In the light of unanswered questions about Iran's intentions, Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 2 suspended the sale of all nuclear material to Iran.
In February, Tehran allowed IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei and IAEA inspectors into Natanz for a brief visit. The inspectors were reportedly "shocked" to see that the design of the centrifuges at Natanz were of Pakistani origin. "The question is, where is the factory that supplied the Iranian facility at Natanz?" a senior IAEA official said. "Is it in Pakistan, or is it in North Korea?"
The IAEA subsequently installed safeguards monitoring equipment at the Natanz facility and asked Iran not to introduce uranium into the facility. However, as a result of the February visit and a series of inspections in Iran, the IAEA issued a report June 6 stating that Iran has engaged in clandestine nuclear activity.
The report says that 1.9 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride — the material introduced into gas centrifuges for processing into reactor-grade fuel — is missing. The material was imported from China in 1991 and never reported to the IAEA. Iranian officials said the uranium was lost through leaking valves on a storage container, but intelligence sources in the Middle East said that Iran used the material to test four centrifuges at the Kalaye Electric facility to prepare for the larger facility at Natanz.
Questions about Iran's nuclear program extend beyond Natanz. In just months, a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant built with Russian assistance at Bushehr on the Gulf coast — will become operational. Unlike Natanz, Bushehr isn't a secret to the United States or to IAEA inspectors. Bushehr consists of light-water reactors whose spent fuel will be reprocessed into plutonium, not uranium.
CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in February, "No Iranian government, regardless of its ideological leanings, is likely to willingly abandon WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programs that are seen as guaranteeing Iran's security."
"I hope we get our atomic weapons," Shirzad Bozorgnehr, the editor of the Iran News, stated in May. "If Israel has it, we should have it." Hardliners in Iran have called for the government to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but Iran said July 21 it had no intention of doing so.
– compiled from Arms Control
Today, The Independent (U.K.), Reuters,
The New Republic and The New York Times
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Although the nuclear threat from Iraq proved to be nonexistent, the Bush administration's threat to make a shambles of nuclear arms control is on high alert. In its latest bid to frighten the planet into a constant state of shock and awe, the administration persuaded the Republican-controlled Senate to lift a decade-old ban on developing nuclear battlefield weapons, including a nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb.
By a 51-to-43 vote on May 20, the Senate turned down a Democratic amendment that would have preserved a prohibition on developing nuclear weapons with explosive yield less than five kilotons of TNT. The Nagasaki atomic bomb had a yield of 20 kilotons. Many modern nuclear weapons have an explosive yield of several hundred kilotons.
Republican advocates of easing the Congressionally imposed ban said such military alternatives might be needed in a changed international climate when adversaries can burrow deep into well-protected bunkers that conventional bombs cannot penetrate.
"In this new world, there could well be reason to have these weapons," said Senator Jon Kyl (Rep.-Arizona). But Senator Jack Reed (Dem.-Rhode Island) said that talking about low-yield nuclear weapons was like discussing a "small apocalypse." He questioned their military value and said they "shouldn't be confused with benign or, you know, casual weapons that we would use. These are atomic weapons."
Rep. John Spratt (Dem.-South Carolina), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and one of the ban's two authors, said: "Some in the administration and in Congress seem to think that the U.S. can move the world in one direction while Washington moves in another — that we can continue to prevail on other countries not to develop nuclear weapons while we develop new tactical applications for such weapons, and possibly resume nuclear testing."
The Senate action is another dangerous step backward for arms control. "To my mind, even considering the use of these weapons threatens to undermine our efforts to stop proliferation," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. She said repealing the ban "actually encourages other nations to pursue nuclear weapons by emphasizing their importance."
Faced with the reality that nuclear weapons are useful only for mass international suicide, every U.S. president since World War II has pursued a policy of nuclear arms control. Every administration, that is, until this one, which from its first days has made clear its inveterate hostility to arms control. It attacked the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and resurrected the corpse of the "Star Wars" nuclear defense program, even as Bush's first Nuclear Posture Review telegraphed the development of battlefield nuclear weapons and threatened their use against "rogue" nations.
In the long-held hawkish Republican dream of a "winnable nuclear war," nukes can be preemptively used against a much weaker enemy — millions of dead civilians, widespread environmental devastation, and centuries of political blowback be damned.
Sadly, no one will listen to the mayor of Hiroshima, who wrote President Bush in April to warn that new U.S. nuclear weapons development represented "a frontal attack on the process of nuclear disarmament."
But why listen to someone from Hiroshima?
– compiled from Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Guardian (U.K.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)