Ballistic Missiles

Shared SpaceWe heartily endorse your editorial "Why Build if You Can Renovate?" (May 15). Why indeed? When Beth Israel Congregation decided to move to Owings Mils, we weighed very carefully the cost/benefit of building versus renovation and came down on the side of renovation -- with a twist.Our new home is a former high-tech corporate headquarters with some 88,000 square feet of space on 10 acres.When renovations are completed, the building will house a 400-seat sanctuary (expandable to 2,200 seats)

VOLTAIRE, N.D. -- The wheat field outside Henry Frantsen's front door remains armed and dangerous.There is a silo burrowed 90 feet underground, hardened by concrete and steel, topped by a 110-ton hatch, a 20-foot antenna, and 10 yards of railroad track. And there is the missile, the one beneath the wheat, the one with the three nuclear warheads that each could wipe out a major city.For nearly a third of his 92 years, Mr. Frantsen, a second-generation North Dakota farmer, has lived side by side with the missile, a witness to a nuclear holocaust that never was."

ONE OF THE MOST powerful tools for understanding the present and thinking about the future is the use of historical analogy. For instance, one might argue that today's relationship between the United States and China is similar in many important ways to the one that existed between Great Britain and Germany at the end of the 19th century. In the latter case, the British-dominated international order was challenged by the growth of Germany and its demand for Weltmacht, or world power. While China is not nearly as far along today vis a vis the United States as Germany was a century ago vis a vis Great Britain, China has signaled its intention to challenge United States dominance.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration has been quietly pressing Russia for most of this year to stop Russian scientists and military institutes from helping Iran develop a new ballistic missile that could reach Israel, Saudi Arabia and American troops in the Persian Gulf, senior administration officials say.The Russian scientists' assistance has continued, officials said, even though President Clinton raised the matter with President Boris N. Yeltsin in...

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea threatened yesterday to resume ballistic missile tests, ratcheting up the crisis over its nuclear weapons programs. In another development, a North Korean diplomat suggested that the isolated Asian nation could soon start extracting plutonium from spent reactor fuel rods and restart a nuclear reactor to make even more material for nuclear weapons. Coupled with a new swell of angry rhetoric from Pyongyang, where 1 million people participated in a government-staged rally, the latest moves by North Korea appeared aimed at stepping up the pressure on President Bush to negotiate.

WASHINGTON -- China is the world's biggest source for technology used by Third World nations building ballistic missiles, chemical weapons or nuclear bombs, according to a report by the CIA.The unclassified, biannual report to Congress summarizes CIA efforts to track the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It listed China and Russia as the two largest exporters of such technology, with India, Iran, Pakistan and Syria as the biggest customers.Pub Date: 7/03/97

Arsenals of Folly The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race By Richard Rhodes Alfred A. Knopf / 400 pages / $28.95 In the mid-1950s, Winston Churchill advised Americans that if they continued the nuclear arms race "all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce." With 1,756 nuclear weapons in its stockpile, the United States had the capacity to detonate 192,000 Hiroshimas. Assuming a "greater-than-expected threat" from the Soviet Union, the Pentagon increased its arsenal to 18,638 bombs and warheads (1.4 million Hiroshimas)

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has prepared an arms control plan that would ban Israel from producing material for nuclear weapons and would require Arab nations in the Middle East to give up their chemical weapons, administration officials said yesterday.President Bush hopes to announce the plan, which is certain to cause problems with the Israeli government, in a coming speech.The announcement has been delayed pending the return of Secretary of State James A. Baker III from a peace mission in the Middle East.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence analysts have discovered evidence that South Korea is trying to develop longer-range ballistic missiles while keeping some of the program's key aims secret from Washington, U.S. officials say. U.S. spy satellites detected fresh evidence of the program's extent last year, and U.S. concerns intensified after a missile test this year, the officials said. The United States, South Korea's closest ally, has been tracking its missile research carefully for years.

When Iraq was growing anthrax and botulism diseases to use as weapons in the 1980s, it was embroiled in a seemingly endless war that it had started against a more populous country, Iran. When Iraq (it now says) dismantled these weapons, it was preparing a war of conquest against a smaller neighbor that it claimed had no right to exist, Kuwait.Iraq threatened at that time to invade a less populous but richer neighbor, Saudi Arabia. And it hurled ballistic missiles at population centers in still another country it maintained should not exist, Israel, in hopes of distracting Arab states from its own aggression against some of them.