Nuclear Bombs

Hardly a week has gone by that has not brought new evidence of Saddam Hussein's continued defiance of the U.N. cease-fire agreement. Last week's standoff in a Baghdad parking lot between Iraqi soldiers and a U.N. inspection team began when the inspectors uncovered documents showing Iraq was well on the way toward building a detonating device for nuclear bombs.Earlier, U.N. inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna found that Iraq had secretly produced enough weapons grade uranium to make several nuclear bombs.

For too long, many environmentalists have been ambivalent about nuclear energy. It conjures fears: meltdowns, cancers, Chernobyl, Fukushima, overtones of nuclear bombs. Yet, we also know that nuclear power provides 70 percent of all the greenhouse gas-free electrical power in the United States (hydropower, in which dams block many great rivers like the Susquehanna to fish migration, provides much of the rest). Neither does nuclear energy produce the nitrogen oxides of fossil fuels that are a major Chesapeake pollutant, or the mercury from coal plants that contaminate so much of our seafood.

WASHINGTON -- Nearly a half-century after a secret atomic experiment led to the development of a mammoth government nuclear weapons industry, the Bush administration announced plans yesterday to slash the complex to four production plants in the South and Midwest and a test site in Nevada.The new configuration means that an enterprise that once produced 5,000 to 6,000 nuclear warheads a year will, by 1996, be mainly responsible for maintaining the shrinking stockpiles and cleaning up the pollution it produced, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins said.

While America remains preoccupied with the war in Iraq, our nuclear nightmares are fast becoming more realistic. The potential risks are many, including a Middle East with multiple nuclear states, terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon from insecure stockpiles, and flaws in our own command and control procedures exposed by unauthorized B-52 flights with nuclear bombs. Current policies are not working. We need drastic change, and we need it soon. A new, comprehensive strategy is needed -- one that takes seriously the mission of preventing a nuclear 9/11, stops states from going nuclear and deters them from conducting a nuclear strike on America or assisting terrorists in acquiring the bomb.

Newly declassified documents show that while the United States was vowing publicly not to keep nuclear weapons in Japan, it secretly stored them on Okinawa and on the islands of Chichi-jima and Iwo Jima in the 1950s and 1960s and was prepared to do the same at other Japanese sites.An article describing the documents and what its authors say is the first comprehensive account of the largely secret history of the United States' use of Japan in its planning for nuclear war is being published in the January-February issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The world is a safer place because of Project Sapphire. Thanks to good teamwork by the U.S. Defense, Energy and State Departments, one of the gravest nuclear security gaps was plugged. Thanks to the wisdom and initiative of Kazakhstan's old Communist leader, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, one huge temptation is denied to the forces of terrorism, corruption and covetous rogue countries.It was a secret mission brought off with flare and efficiency worthy of the hottest days of the Cold War. A team of American nuclear specialists was spirited into a padlocked but insecure warehouse in Ust Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan.

The United States and North Korea, deadly enemies over the Cold War period, sign an agreement in Geneva today that holds promise of a genuine rapprochement but contains unfortunate precedents in the quest for nuclear non-proliferation.Whether the risks taken by the Clinton administration are prudent will not really be known for some five years, which is one of the problems. Short-term dangers of a military confrontation, however, have been averted.First, the big positives: the Pyongyang regime has agreed to halt the operations of a five-megawatt graphite reactor which the CIA believes has produced sufficient plutonium for one or two nuclear bombs.

Bill Clinton was elected to provide America with certain thing over the long term: Better health care. An improved economy. More jobs.But here is what Bill Clinton intends to give America in the short term: A resumption of nuclear weapons testing.Between July 1 of this year and Sept. 30, 1996, when nuclear testing must end by act of Congress, Bill Clinton wants to explode 15 nuclear bombs underground in order to test their "safety."A number of members of Congress are against this. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, says: "It is time for the world to stop all nuclear weapons tests."

Conventional wisdom holds that the Cold War is over. But is it? Consider the implications of Secretary of Defense Cheney's recent commitment to keep large numbers of American troops in South Korea, on the grounds that such defenses are required because North Korea is at the threshold of nuclear capability.Cheney didn't say so, but the implication is clear: The presence of 40,000 U.S. troops currently based in South Korea would deter North Korea from striking its neighbor with nuclear bombs.

THE NEWS that 380 tons of high explosives was left unguarded in Iraq, and has gone missing, is dumbfounding. Safer? Wasn't the whole point of the war in Iraq supposed to be about keeping weapons out of the hands of terrorists - to make the world a less dangerous place? Yet, as reported by The New York Times, here was this huge cache of extremely destructive explosives, kept under control for years by the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, suddenly available to anyone who wanted to pick it up - thanks to the anarchy unleashed by the U.S. invasion.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush recently returned from India and Pakistan burdened by yet another foreign policy headache of his own making. In an effort to build closer strategic ties with the New Delhi government, the administration has said Mr. Bush will ask Congress to make special exceptions to long-standing U.S. nonproliferation laws in order to permit the United States and other countries to sell nuclear materials and reactors to India. In exchange, India says it will implement a complex, phased plan to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and put many - but not all - of its power reactors under safeguards to ensure foreign assistance wouldn't directly contribute to its weapons program.

WASHINGTON - The World War II Allies defeated a common foe by harnessing two apparently conflicting forces: international cooperation and national self-interest. As world leaders gather in Moscow to commemorate the victory over Nazism, they should apply this lesson to repair a dysfunctional relationship. Three years ago, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin began the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, seeking to devote $20 billion over 10 years to dismantle many of the world's most dangerous weapons.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S approach to defusing the North Korean nuclear threat has failed. The administration was intent on not repeating the errors of the Clinton administration, which struck a bilateral deal with the North that left plenty of room for the North to cheat. But in Mr. Bush's first term, this seemingly perpetual crisis has gone from bad to worse. The North has kicked out international atomic inspectors and stalled efforts at Chinese-led multilateral talks, while moving rapidly toward weaponizing its nuclear material and peddling it around the world.

THE NEWS that 380 tons of high explosives was left unguarded in Iraq, and has gone missing, is dumbfounding. Safer? Wasn't the whole point of the war in Iraq supposed to be about keeping weapons out of the hands of terrorists - to make the world a less dangerous place? Yet, as reported by The New York Times, here was this huge cache of extremely destructive explosives, kept under control for years by the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, suddenly available to anyone who wanted to pick it up - thanks to the anarchy unleashed by the U.S. invasion.

WHEN PRESIDENT Bush identified the "axis of evil" a year ago, it was an infelicitous bit of rhetoric that is sure to provoke plenty of headaches in years to come - but it wasn't something he made up out of whole cloth. Iraq most likely does have chemical and biological weapons. North Korea does have a frightening nuclear weapons program. And Iran, as the Bush administration is now trumpeting, does have a reactor program that could produce enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs in the next few years.

The World A Russian transport helicopter designed to carry 80 but carrying 147, crashed in Chechnya, killing more than 100 soldiers and relatives. A huge collection of videotapes found in Afghanistan by CNN and CBS provided the clearest evidence yet that the al-Qaida terror network was developing chemical agents and had tested them on animals. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf single-handedly enacted 29 amendments to his country's constitution, giving himself near-dictatorial powers.

"Brain drain," much discussed during the 1960s when the Third World's best and brightest scientists were being lured away to the United States, carries sinister overtones when applied to nuclear technologists from the former Soviet Union. That's why the Americans are not the only ones trying to prevent it. Germany's Hans-Dietrich Genscher recently signed an accord with his Japanese counterpart, Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe, to support an international center that Americans have pushed to help the bomb specialists keep working while they convert to more peaceful pursuits.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush recently returned from India and Pakistan burdened by yet another foreign policy headache of his own making. In an effort to build closer strategic ties with the New Delhi government, the administration has said Mr. Bush will ask Congress to make special exceptions to long-standing U.S. nonproliferation laws in order to permit the United States and other countries to sell nuclear materials and reactors to India. In exchange, India says it will implement a complex, phased plan to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and put many - but not all - of its power reactors under safeguards to ensure foreign assistance wouldn't directly contribute to its weapons program.

For the first few days after last month's terrorist attacks, we worried about more commercial airplanes being hijacked and used as missiles. Now we are worried about a new, more deadly threat: bacteria and viruses raining from the sky over populated areas, infecting and killing millions of people. Even more troubling is the fact that the genetic engineering technology being used commercially in the fields of agriculture, animal husbandry and medicine today is potentially convertible to the development of a wide range of pathogens that can attack plant, animal and human populations.

NEW DELHI - The Arab-Israeli controversies that take center stage in the United States are off the front page in India. That's because Indians have their own festering sore that is a year older, has caused almost as many wars and in world terms is even more dangerous, because miscalculation could lead to a nuclear exchange. The open wound is the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was ceded to India after the British partition of 1947 instead of to the Muslim state of Pakistan because the Hindu maharaja chose India -even though the majority of the population was, and is, Muslim.