Local Police Request Quarantine Guidelines

The International Association of Chiefs of Police has voiced concern that its members lack guidelines for enforcing quarantines, USA Today reported today (see GSN, Nov. 23).

While federal agencies and the military would lead quarantine efforts following a bioterrorist event or naturally occurring disease outbreak, according to USA Today, the association has complained that local law enforcement officials lack basic information about their role in such a crisis.

“We’re the ones who are going to be the first to respond. ... I would have thought we would be further along than we are now,” said association President and Gaithersburg, Md., Police Chief Mary Ann Viverette. “We need some guidance.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed a model state law on quarantines following the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. The model has been used as the basis for 80 pieces of legislation in 32 states; 30 of those bills have become law, according to the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities.

These laws, however, have created a “patchwork-quilt of legislation” with few specific guidelines for local police, according to the chiefs’ group.

Ram Koppaka, associate director for policy and preparedness in the CDC Global Migration and Quarantine Division, said the agency would review the association’s concerns (Kevin Johnson, USA Today, Dec. 14)

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U.S. List of Potential Terror Targets 1 Year Late

The U.S. Homeland Security Department has yet to finalize a list of potential terror targets that was due in December 2004, USA Today reported today (see GSN, Dec. 9, 2004).

President George W. Bush in 2003 ordered preparation of the list, which is expected to include sites such as chemical facilities, bridges and skyscrapers.

Federal officials will use the database to determine security priorities for various locations. It will also support the security efforts of private business and local and state governments.

The delay is “appalling,” said Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. A Republican lawmaker also expressed frustration.

“We have heard, you know, this plan’s going to be coming out, it’s going to be coming out, it’s going to be coming out. We tend to look with a little skepticism,” Representative Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) said at a committee hearing in October.

Lawmakers previously have criticized the list for including miniature golf courses, water parks and other nonessential sites. Those have all been removed from the database, which should be completed in early 2006, said Homeland Security Infrastructure Protection head Robert Stephan. 

Stephan told lawmakers that “a sinking feeling rapidly came over me” when he saw the list after assuming his job in April, USA Today reported. “That thing really got under my skin,” he said.

Stephan blamed his predecessors for problems with the database, and said he is checking the 80,000 listed sites to see what should remain and what can go.

While Lungren expressed optimism about work on the project, Thompson said he had doubts about the value of the list when it is finished.

“The National Infrastructure Protection Plan strikes me as another governmental document doomed to be more of an intellectual exercise than a practical provider of security,” he said. “I’m afraid it will likely sit on a bureaucrat’s shelf next to the dozen or so other national strategies gathering dust and doing little to secure America,” he said (Mimi Hall, USA Today, Dec. 14).

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Denmark Warns of Terrorism Danger to Europe From Foreign Extremists Fighting in Iraq

Denmark’s military intelligence service has warned that foreigners collaborating with the insurgency in Iraq could build a terror network capable of conducting terrorist attacks in Europe, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 20, 2004).

The Danish Defense Intelligence Service referred to Iraq as “a magnet for foreign extremists” in its annual report, released yesterday.

The report says the networks created there could launch small-scale terror attacks in Europe. Large-scale events are possible, though less likely, the report adds.

The heightened movement of people and goods across borders as the result of globalization has also facilitated the proliferation of arms, including weapons of mass destruction, according to the agency.

The risk of large-scale chemical and biological weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, however, is relatively low, according to the report.

“On the other hand, there is a risk that terrorists will use simple chemical and biological arms, or radiological weapons, in terror attacks,” it says (Associated Press/Irish Examiner, Dec. 13)

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Hobson Vows Continue Opposition to RNEP

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — U.S. Representative David Hobson (R-Ohio) vowed today to continue opposing any present or future Bush administration attempts to revive study of a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (see GSN, Nov. 16).

Hobson, chairman of the House Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee, said during a Center for American Progress appearance that some in President George W. Bush’s administration would continue to support the project but that most members of Congress would oppose the nuclear “bunker buster.”

“I haven’t heard anything that they’re going to bring it back,” Hobson said, “although I must tell you, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld said, ‘You may win this year, but we’ll be back.’ I said, ‘Well, OK, I’ll still be here.’”

In late October, the House-Senate conference on fiscal 2006 energy and water appropriations denied a Bush administration request for $4 million to study the nuclear weapon. Lawmakers instead supported study of a conventional weapon that could be used against deeply buried and hardened targets.

“I think if we took a vote in the House today, you would not get support for the nuclear penetrator. The Senate, I don’t know,” Hobson said.

Global Security Newswire reported Nov. 4 that a National Nuclear Security Administration letter to a member of Congress indicated the administration hoped to go ahead with an impact test using a mock RNEP warhead, but with a different name and using Defense rather than Energy Department funding (see GSN, Nov. 4).

Hobson said repeated efforts to revive the project appear to have come mainly from the authors of the administration’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, while others in the administration have told him the penetrator is unnecessary. He said Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told him, “We don’t need the N-word,” and that retired generals have said, “We don’t need this.”

The chairman said the nuclear penetrator is not credible intellectually and would be a “waste of money.”

“I want to build the president a weapon that he can actually use,” he said, referring to the conventional penetrator.

Hobson said he was concerned about the deaths and environmental contamination the nuclear penetrator would cause but also opposed the project on strategic and geopolitical grounds.

“Our whole weapons complex … is still in the Cold War, and RNEP, in my opinion, is a prime example of living in the past and not the future,” he said.

“If you’re going to be a leader in the world,” he added, “I don’t think you can go out and propose a whole new weapon and then tell everybody else, ‘Don’t do it.’”

The congressman cautioned against attempts, which he said would be illegal, to spend money on a nuclear penetrator that was appropriated for other purposes.

“It’s dead. Forget about it.  Go conventional,” he said.

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Israel Warns of Iran Nuke Capability in Three Years

Israel warned yesterday that Iran could resume uranium enrichment by March and have a nuclear weapons capability within three years, Reuters reported (see GSN, Dec. 9).

Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz provided the assessment in a closed-door briefing for an Israeli parliamentary committee, according to Reuters.

“If the Iranians continue now then they will be able to begin enriching uranium at the start of March,” Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuval Steinitz quoted Halutz as saying.

“It would take two to three years” for Iran to produce a nuclear bomb, Halutz told the officials (Megan Goldin, Reuters, Dec. 13).

Meanwhile, in a new barrage of anti-Israel rhetoric, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today for the first time publicly denied the Holocaust, calling it a “myth,” the Associated Press reported.

Ahmadinejad said that if the West believed the Holocaust happened, “then give a part of your own land in Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to them so that the Jews can establish their country.”

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Berlin had summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires to make its protest “unmistakably clear.”

“I cannot hide the fact that this weighs on bilateral relations and on the chances for the negotiation process, the so-called nuclear dossier,” Steinmeier said. France, Germany and the United Kingdom have been preparing for renewed talks with Tehran.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Ahmadinejad’s remarks demonstrate “the mind-set of the ruling clique in Tehran and indicate clearly the extremist policy goals of the regime.”

“The combination of fanatical ideology, a warped sense of reality and nuclear weapons is a combination that no one in the international community can accept,” Regev said.

Even some Iranian conservatives have criticized Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric as damaging to Iran’s international image, according to AP. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, however, has supported Ahmadinejad’s calls for Israel’s destruction (Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press/Washington Post, Dec. 14).

Israel has the means to defend itself and will not allow a second Holocaust, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said today.

“Thank God, Israel has the means at its disposal to bring about the downfall of this extremist regime in Iran. There will be no second ‘final solution,’” Raanan Gissin told Agence France-Presse.

“We hope that these extremist declarations will make the world wake up to the nature of this regime — especially the fact that Iran’s nuclear program and its support of international terrorism, represents not only a danger for Israel but for the entire Western civilization,” Gissin said (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, Dec. 14).

Elsewhere, a senior Iranian official for the first time yesterday praised a Russian proposal to transfer Iran’s sensitive nuclear work to Russia, AFP reported.

“We salute all initiatives seeking to create an atmosphere of confidence, if Iran’s rights to peaceful nuclear activities are recognized,” said Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, the speaker of Iran’s parliament.

However, “during my visit, the question of uranium enrichment in Russia was not mentioned concretely,” said Adel, traveling in Moscow (Agence France-Presse/Khaleej Times, Dec. 14).

Ahmadinejad also criticized the United States for refusing to sell spare parts for civilian aircraft to Iran, AP reported.

Iranian officials have blamed a series of airline accidents on Washington, which maintains a general embargo on the country.

“No country is authorized to impose spare-part sanctions against another country. Nothing can justify this,” Ahmadinejad said.

He said the issue was at the heart of Iran’s distrust of Western promises to provide nuclear fuel, AP reported (Dareini, Associated Press, Dec. 14).

Ahmadinejad also vowed today not to compromise “one iota” on the nuclear dispute, AFP reported.

“We have experienced your attitude and we will no longer be duped by your lying propaganda,” he said (Agence France-Presse, Dec. 14).

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ElBaradei Warns of Potential for 30 Nuclear Powers

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said yesterday that up to 30 countries could possess nuclear arsenals within the next two decades, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Dec. 9).

“Either we continue to rely on nuclear weapons, and face the reality that in the next 10-20 years, 20 or 30 countries will have nuclear weapons, or each country must cease its nuclear weapons program and destroy existing nuclear arsenals,” ElBaradei said.

World leaders face “a fundamental choice,” ElBaradei told university students in Sweden.

“To continue to have the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is absolutely unsustainable,” he said.

ElBaradei said he was troubled by the United Nations’ failure to include nonproliferation in the reform plan passed at the international body’s summit in September.

“I thought, this is a world in denial,” he said. “If they think the problems are going to go away because we don’t talk about them, then they are living on cloud nine” (Mattia Karen, Associated Press/Scotsman, Dec. 13)

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North Korea Tells KEDO to Leave

The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization has been ordered to withdraw all workers from a nuclear reactor site in North Korea by early next month, the JoongAng Daily reported yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 23).

The order from Pyongyang will force the organization to abandon equipment and materials at the construction site for the unfinished Kumho nuclear energy plant, South Korean and KEDO officials told the newspaper. 

“We are talking with the North Koreans about how to withdraw,” said a South Korean Unification Ministry official (Ser Myo-ja, JoongAng Daily, Dec. 13).

Seoul today urged Pyongyang to resume multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations, the Associated Press reported.

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, the top South Korean envoy at bilateral talks on the southern resort island of Jeju, “stressed [that] maintaining the framework of the Sept. 19 joint statement was most effective for realizing common benefits,” said South Korean spokesman Kim Chun-sig.

The North Korean delegation “listened seriously” but offered no response, Kim said (Bo-Mi Lim, Associated Press/Pravda, Dec. 14).

A State Department official said Monday that an informal session of nuclear talks proposed for this month would not be held, Kyodo News reported.

“The Chinese said it is not going to happen ... so I think that is off,” the official said (Kyodo/Yahoo!News, Dec. 13).

Meanwhile, Pyongyang has called on the Bush administration to remove U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Alexander Vershbow for recent remarks in which he branded North Korea a “criminal regime,” Agence France-Presse reported today.

“Ambassador Vershbow is the most bitchy and malignant ambassador in history,” the official Minju Joson newspaper announced.

Many South Korean officials also objected to Vershbow’s comments, with one ruling party legislator calling on him to curb his rhetoric or leave, according to AFP (Agence France-Presse/Aljazeera.net, Dec. 14).

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U.S. Delivers Two F-16 Fighter Jets to Pakistan

The United States yesterday delivered two F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, the Xinhua News Agency reported (see GSN, Nov. 4).

“The two F-16s provided by United States of America have arrived in Pakistan, today,” the Pakistani air force said in a statement.

It was not immediately known whether the aircraft were part of a planned order for 70 F-16s from the United States. Islamabad last month announced that it would delay the purchase in order to focus on relief efforts following a massive earthquake in October, Xinhua reported (Xinhua/People’s Daily, Dec. 14)

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Pope Condemns Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism

Pope Benedict XVI yesterday addressed terrorism and nuclear disarmament in the annual papal message for peace, the New York Times reported (see GSN, Nov. 1, 2004).

Nuclear disarmament has become “bogged down,” Benedict wrote. He said the notion that nuclear arsenals keep countries secure “is not only baneful but also completely fallacious” (see GSN, Dec. 8).

“In a nuclear war, there would be no victors, only victims,” he said.

He also alluded to Iran’s nuclear program, according to the Times, referring to countries that “openly or secretly possess nuclear arms” along with “those planning to acquire them.”

Benedict called terrorism a fatal mix of nihilism and fundamentalism.

“The nihilist denies the very existence of truth, while the fundamentalist claims to be able to impose it by force,” he wrote. “Despite their different origins and cultural backgrounds, both show a dangerous contempt for human beings and human life, and ultimately for God himself” (Ian Fisher, New York Times, Dec. 14).

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Russia Receives Additional CW Disposal Support

Several nations have offered additional support for Russia’s efforts to eliminate its stockpile of chemical weapons, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said Monday (see GSN, Dec. 1).

The governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding formalizing their collaborative support for Moscow’s chemical munitions disposal under the 2001 United Kingdom-Russia Agreement.

Sweden is contributing $700,000 to help supply electricity to the Shchuchye disposal facility, according to an OPCW press release. The plant is scheduled to begin operation by 2009.

The Czech government also recently contributed $228,166 for electricity at the Shchuchye site (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons release, Dec. 12).

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Umatilla Destroys Half of Stored Sarin Rockets

The Umatilla Chemical Depot has eliminated half of the sarin-filled rockets stored at the Oregon facility, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 8).

There were 91,442 rockets at the site when disposal began in September 2004. All rockets are expected to be processed by the end of next year.

Umatilla also contains stockpiles of chemical bombs, projectiles, land mines and spray tanks, AP reported.

The Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility since September has destroyed 88 bombs containing sarin (Associated Press/KGW.com, Dec. 13).

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Radioactive Samples Removed from Georgia Tech

The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration removed 220 radioactive samples from the Georgia Institute of Technology to ensure that terrorists could not steal the material to produce a radiological weapon, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 13).

The samples had been used for research at the university’s Neally Nuclear Research Center on material science, genetics, radiation shielding and biological materials processing.

The material was shipped to the Nevada Test Site for disposal, AP reported.

The Energy Department agency has collected nearly 12,000 radiation sources for security purposes. The effort quickened following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States (Associated Press/Macon Telegraph, Dec. 13).

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Canada Installs First Port Radiation Detector

As part of a plan to install radiation detectors at all major ports in the country, Canada began operating its first at St. John in News Brunswick two week ago, the Canadian Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 8).

“It is the first port in Canada to have the equipment up and running,” said Jennifer Morrison of the Canada Border Services Agency. “It is designed to detect shipments of nuclear or radiological materials entering Canada.”

The detectors are part of Canada’s $150 million effort to boost maritime security following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, CP reported.

Detectors should be only the first step in blocking radioactive material from entering the country, one terrorism expert said.

“They’re looking for radiation and if something is really shielded, there will be no radiation and the stuff will get through,” said Douglas Ross, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University. “You need to X-ray all of the containers as well. If they were doing it simultaneously, using X-rays as well as radiation detectors, then we would be [in] much better shape. But they are not doing the full X-ray of each container as they go through.”

Ross said terrorists could look to detonate a nuclear or radiological weapon in Canada to spread fear in the United States.

“A blackmail strategy is potentially a real risk,” he said. “We have to take this seriously” (Chris Norris, Canadian Press/Canada.com, Dec. 13).

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