A U.S. B-2 Bomber, capable of delivering nuclear weapons, flies over Missouri in a 2002 training exercise. The Bush administration appears to be formalizing guidelines for the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons, according to reports (Getty Images/Tim Sloan). White House Readies Nuclear Pre-Emption Guidelines By David Ruppe Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — Contrasting earlier denials, the Defense Department appears to be formalizing military guidelines for seeking presidential approval to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively against suspected WMD facilities (see GSN, July 22)...Full Story

Negotiators Prepare for More North Korea Talks Negotiators are expected to arrive in Beijing today and tomorrow to resume talks on North Korea’s nuclear effort, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Sept. 9)...Full Story

U.S. Appeals to China, India, Russia on Security Council Referral for Iran’s Nuclear Program U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week appealed to China, India and Russia to back U.S. efforts to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions for its nuclear activities, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 9)...Full Story

	Monday, September 12, 2005

Lack of Emergency Planning Worries D.C. Officials U.S. Homeland Security Department and law enforcement officials said that Washington, D.C., does not have a comprehensive plan to inform residents of what do to during a large-scale emergency, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 24). The region is particularly vulnerable to a surprise terrorist attack, according to officials. “What we lack is a coordinated public information system in the event of a major incident,” said David Snyder of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments' homeland security task force. “What we need is a system that will function instantaneously and automatically every time. … That doesn't exist now.” Officials can’t be sure of what sort of event might occur. Responding to a tornado would be different than dealing with a WMD attack by terrorists, according to the Post. Officials in Washington are concerned about how the federal government would respond to an event similar to Hurricane Katrina. “For four years, we've been hearing from the feds that they are going to take charge so we can respond to any catastrophe that comes our way,” said Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan. “And here's the first major test, and it's a failure. … I've lost confidence in [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] to come in and be part of the solution.” Evacuation plans for the region have been planned and tested. More than 2,500 federal workers went to more than 100 secret locations last year in the first test of how to keep the government running after a catastrophic terrorist attack. Area hospitals have also been preparing for an attack, adding isolation rooms for highly contagious patients and staffing experts to treat them, the Post reported. Local governments have established vaccination sites and shelters for evacuees as well. The District of Columbia government has its own response plan, according to the Post. However, most planning has been focused on the period immediately following a disaster, said Washington Transportation Director Dan Tangherlini. “What happens on day two and day three and day four?” he said. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said tests of the emergency management system prove that the city is not prepared. “The tests we've had do not inspire confidence,” she said. Washington recently tested its evacuation plans for the first time. Following fireworks on July 4, hundreds of thousands of people were directed to seven evacuation routes.  Problems discovered during the test include: traffic signals not timed properly; troubles with Transportation Department radios; questions about responsibility; and lack of communication between officials and the public, the Post reported. Tangherlini said despite these problems the test provided valuable information. “There were some glitches,” he said. “But if we hadn't tested, we wouldn't have known. We made a lot of progress.” The 37 percent of D.C. households without a car is of concern to Tangherlini. The city is working on a “walk-out” plan for people without cars to get assistance, but fears that these gathering places could become terrorist targets are of concern. Tangherlini is also concerned that evacuation planning is taking too much time. He and other officials said that staying put after a chemical or radiological attack might be the best option.  The city plans to review emergency response plans in the coming weeks. However, Norton fears that the lack of warning of a terrorist attack could make planning difficult. “Osama will not give us two days' notice,” she said (Horwitz/Davenport, Washington Post, Sept. 11). New York also lacks a comprehensive evacuation plan for its 8 million inhabitants, the New York Times reported yesterday. “It would not be easy and it would not be pretty,” said Jerome Hauer, the city's former emergency management director. Evacuation plans developed during the Cold War called for using barges and other vessels on the East River. Underground shelters underground were also considered.  A mayoral panel concluded in 1955 that only 1 million people could be evacuated within an hour. “Until more efficient use of transportation and more than one hour's warning can be assured, about 3 million people, or 37 percent of the city’s 8 million population, might be balked in any attempt to escape the target area except by walking,” the panel found. Today, officials have developed escape routes from vulnerable neighborhoods, can mobilize a fleet of buses and have planned for contingencies like flooded subway tunnels, according to the Times. “It's very important to have a sense of order if you have an evacuation and we are able to mass 37,000 cops in the neighborhoods that need it, where people are poor or infirm,” said New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.  The city could evacuate 400,000 to 2 million people if a hurricane threatens, said Joseph Bruno, New York’s emergency management commissioner,. Early warning and better communications make this possible, according to the Times. “Would it be difficult to move two million people? Absolutely,” Bruno said. “I hope we never have to do it.” Evacuations of the entire city population would be an even more daunting a task, Bruno said. “We have plans for area evacuations, and if you take them to their logical conclusion an area could be the entire city of New York,” he said. “Those are doomsday type things, a nuclear attack. We're definitely not throwing our hands up. But it would be a catastrophic event that would be extremely difficult for New York City to have to deal with.” When asked how long it would take to evacuate the city, Bruno said, “I wouldn't even hazard a guess.” Hauer said that a nuclear explosion would complicate evacuations plans because of lingering radioactivity. “Rescue workers might, without any idea of protection, at the end of the day choose to stay out of the plume and I can't blame them,” he said. “Obviously, there'd be a lot of self-evacuation” similar to workers’ commutes in and out of the city (Sam Roberts, New York Times, Sept. 11). Elsewhere, officials in Cleveland are concerned that law enforcement personnel lack the training to respond to a terrorist strike, the Akron Beacon Journal reported yesterday. “You know how much terrorism training I've been given since coming onto the force (years ago)? Zero,” said a Cleveland beat cop. He said the only guidance he’s received is an electronic map with escape routes. The map is so small and complex that “I can't even figure it out, let alone tell everybody else what to do,” he said. A nuclear blast is unlikely, said Tom Stephens of SAIC, a scientific research firm who works on software that predicts fallout from a WMD attack. “It would be the toughest to pull off because of the technology required,” he said. “It's much cheaper for people to build the other types of weapons.” Stephens said an attack with a dirty bomb would be more likely to occur because the weapons are “just a bunch of radiological material blown up by a conventional bomb,” he said. A bomb like this could spread radiation over several city blocks, Stephens said (Bob Dyer, Akron Beacon Journal, Sept. 11). Back to top

White House Readies Nuclear Pre-Emption Guidelines By David Ruppe Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — Contrasting earlier denials, the Defense Department appears to be formalizing military guidelines for seeking presidential approval to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively against suspected WMD facilities (see GSN, July 22). The Pentagon disclosed the potential guidelines earlier this year with the Internet publication of a “final” draft of a new Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, produced by the Joint Staff.  The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is expected to review the document for possible final approval by the end of the year, according to a defense official, who asked not to be identified. The Washington Post in a story yesterday said the Joint Staff director could sign the doctrine in a few weeks. Differing from its two predecessor doctrines of 1993 and 1995, the document describes several scenarios in which U.S. military commanders might request presidential authorization for a nuclear strike against a suspected WMD threat. They are: — “an adversary using or intending to use WMD against U.S./international alliance forces and/or innocent civilian populations that conventional forces cannot stop”; — “imminent attack from adversary [biological weapons] that only nuclear weapons effects can safely destroy/incinerate”; and — “attacks limited to adversary WMD (e.g. against deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical and biological weapons or the C2 [command and control] infrastructure required for the adversary to execute a WMD attack) that could be employed against the United States.” Critics said the new guidelines reflect a shift toward an increasing role for nuclear weapons in Bush administration war planning, and argued that the public release of the new policy could foster insecurity in other countries and encourage nuclear proliferation. “What’s most troubling is the public visibility to it,” said Steve Fetter, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, who was assistant defense secretary for international security policy during the Clinton administration. The military has always had plans and the ability for conducting nuclear first strikes, he said, but detailing it in a public document “undermines our official diplomatic positions and policies related to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not to threaten parties to that treaty with a nuclear attack.” The document suggests that “we’re planning to use things first and when it does, if you’re a country like Iran, that’s a pretty good argument for wanting to get nuclear weapons,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a research fellow at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies. Recommending the use of U.S. nuclear weapons against suspected enemy WMD arsenals, Lewis said, would be reckless in light of difficulties the U.S. faces in determining whether a country has or is developing a weapon of mass destruction, where such a capability might be located, and whether there is any real intention to use it. “We simply don’t have the intelligence to launch pre-emptive strikes. … If we [had attacked] Iraq with nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t have known that they didn’t have WMD. And as bad as Iraq is because we got it wrong, imagine how much worse it would be if we had used nuclear weapons,” he said. U.S. defense officials have been fairly mum on the document, noting it is still in draft form and subject to changes. They say, however, that the existence of such guidelines would not necessarily make the use of U.S. nuclear weapons any more probable because the decision to use nuclear weapons is not one any president would take lightly. “As far as the nuclear policy, there isn’t a change. The president still has to authorize the use of any nuclear weapon,” the defense official said. Lewis argued the contrary. “If the president really wants to use nuclear weapons, I’d much prefer he’d have to sit down over maps in the Oval Office. I want to make it hard for the president to use nuclear weapons. And you know plans are designed to make it easy.” “What this sets the basis for are plans, operational planning, and it affects the way leaders, military as well as civilian, react in a crisis,” Fetter said. Expression, Not Creation of Policy Though copies are available elsewhere on the Internet, the Pentagon removed its version of the draft doctrine in the spring and classified it with a code word. “It just created too much controversy,” the defense official said. The proposed language, which remains under review, probably reflects a classified policy decision signed by President George W. Bush several years ago, said Lewis, a former staffer in the Pentagon’s defense policy office. “The White House drafts a national security presidential directive [NSPD]. Then the secretary of defense creates a nuclear weapons employment policy [NWEP], and then that kind of goes down into the bowels of the Pentagon and ends up with the SIOP [Single Integrated Operational Plan] and all the different plans that might exist,” he said. “This doctrine document is an unclassified publication for combatant commanders. So it doesn’t really establish any policies, but it should fairly accurately reflect the contents of the NSPD and the NWEP,” he said. The press reported on such a policy before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Military affairs analyst William Arkin in January 2003 published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times stating that the U.S. Strategic Command, following a December 2002 presidential decision memo, was preparing target lists for potential nuclear attacks against non-nuclear Iraq.  Attributing his information to documents and interviews with military sources, Arkin also wrote of planning for possible targeting of WMD capabilities in other countries, including Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Russia and China. Signs of movement toward the policy, he wrote, emerged in leaked excerpts of the administration’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which called for “deliberate preplanned and practiced missions” against hardened and deeply buried targets, including WMD facilities, and for developing improved capabilities for striking them. In 2002, North Korea justified its nuclear weapons program by saying it was concerned about nuclear pre-emption and appeared to cite the review, which listed that country, Iraq, and the other five noted by Arkin as countries where contingencies could rise requiring nuclear weapons use. Administration Denials While not denying the existence of such a policy or plans, U.S. officials said have said they had no intention of using nuclear weapons pre-emptively. In February 2003, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker said the administration had made no decision on listing North Korea for a possible pre-emptive nuclear attack. “This is a nonexistent decision and a total fabrication,” Rademaker said. The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration chief, Linton Brooks, several times last year denied the United States would conduct such an attack. On May 12, 2004, he said, “While no one wants to constrain a president’s options in advance, I’ve never met anyone in the administration who would even consider nuclear pre-emption in connection with countering rogue state WMD threats.” “Nuclear pre-emption with a low-yield weapon is fanciful,” he said at an Aug. 11, 2004 event, according to United Press International. “I’ve never heard anyone in the administration who could foresee circumstances under which we would consider nuclear pre-emption.” “It seems to me he’s either completely out of the loop, or extraordinarily economical with the truth,” said Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s exactly what they’ve been trying to come up with for the last five years, ways of doing that,” he said, citing for instance Air Force programs for a rapid, global nuclear weapons strike capability. “The first strike language you speak of is clearly not in the context of pre-emption in time of peace. Administrator Brooks stands by his statement and see no inconsistency,” NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said today. Back to top       Negotiators Prepare for More North Korea Talks Negotiators are expected to arrive in Beijing today and tomorrow to resume talks on North Korea’s nuclear effort, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Sept. 9). Despite a series of bilateral meetings during a five-week recess, North Korea and the United States seem to have maintained their entrenched positions, according to AFP. “What North Korea has to do is get out of the nuclear business,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator, said Friday. Hill and top South Korean envoy Song Min-soon were scheduled to meet tonight to coordinate positions, the Yonhap news agency reported. Six-party talks are expected to resume tomorrow (Agence France-Presse I/Yahoo!News, Sept. 12). The Russian delegation arrived today, while North and South Korean and U.S. teams were due in Beijing tomorrow, according to Reuters China today toned down expectations for a swift resolution. “We hope to see some progress, but we didn’t really expect too much ... because the process takes time,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao. “The basic problem existing, is still the lack of trust between the United States and North Korea” (Reuters, Sept. 12). Some analysts expressed moderate hope for a positive outcome in creation of a statement of principles for future negotiations, AFP reported. “Basically, we are looking at several possibilities in Beijing and it is hard to now which way the talks will go,” said Kim Tae-woo, a nuclear policy expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul. “First, [the talks] could be successful and we could be looking at an agreement. Second, we could see improvement.  Third, the talks could result in further aggravation and ill feeling. Fourthly, they could simply collapse,” “I would say the possibility for one and four is very slim so it has to be two or three, but it is very hard to say which,” Kim said (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, Sept. 11). Seoul, meanwhile, called for negotiation of a peace treaty to end the Korean War during talks tomorrow with Pyongyang, AFP reported today. The meeting between North and South Korean ministerial officials should “focus on how to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula,” said Kim Cheon-sik, spokesman for South Korea’s delegates (Agence France-Presse II/Yahoo!News, Sept. 12). Back to top       U.S. Appeals to China, India, Russia on Security Council Referral for Iran’s Nuclear Program U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week appealed to China, India and Russia to back U.S. efforts to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions for its nuclear activities, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 9). “Iran needs to get a message from the international community that is a unified message, and by this I mean not just the EU-3 and the United States, but also Russia and China and India and others,” Rice said. Russia, Brazil and 13 Nonaligned Movement countries are not expected to support Security Council referral, diplomats said. A senior nonaligned diplomat on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors, however, told AFP that “it is still too early. A lot can happen” in the week leading up to a meeting of that body, which is set to consider Iran’s case. “The NAM position is tentative, a taking stock as Russia and China oppose referral,” the diplomat said. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to meet at the three-day U.N. summit set to begin Wednesday in New York. There are no plans for Ahmadinejad to meet with officials from former nuclear negotiating partners France, Germany and the United Kingdom, according to AFP. The European Union is prepared to support Security Council referral for Iran as a “clear signal of concern” over Tehran’s resumption of sensitive nuclear activities, according to a confidential document circulated among IAEA diplomats last week. “This is highly official,” a senior EU diplomat said. The document says that the “European side sees reporting Iran to the Security Council as a means of reinforcing authority of IAEA resolutions and the diplomatic process.” Under a possible “phased approach,” the board would again call on Iran to cease nuclear fuel work, with Security Council referral only coming into play subsequently if Tehran refuses. The agency could set a deadline for the halt, according to one diplomat. Newly installed Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki yesterday warned of “consequences” for referring Iran to the Security Council (Agence France-Presse I/SpaceWar.com, Sept. 11). Tehran is planning construction of two additional power plants, Mottaki said. He also reiterated Iran’s refusal to resume its nuclear freeze. “There is no question of returning to a new suspension at Isfahan,” he said, referring to Iran’s uranium conversion plant (Agence France-Presse II/SpaceWar.com, Sept. 11). Mottaki added that Tehran wanted to resume nuclear negotiations with the European powers, Reuters reported. “There are some efforts to restart Iran-EU talks. We want those talks to restart without any preconditions,” he said (Parisa Hafezi, Reuters, Sept. 11). A former IAEA deputy director general has called on the Security Council to augment inspectors’ investigatory authority in Iran, the Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday. “It is reaching the point where it is beyond critical,” said Pierre Goldschmidt, who left the agency in July after leading the Iran team for six years. “The IAEA can only work on the basis of the facts that are presented to it, and there have been many serious omissions by the Iranians. The Iranians are exploiting all the loopholes in the international agreements. As to why they are doing this, you can draw your own conclusions.” “As it stands, the investigating authority of the agency is too limited with regard to Iran. To do its job properly it needs to have more authority than is currently available to it,” Goldschmidt said. He said inspectors should be allowed complete access to all Iranian scientists, military institutions and original documents relating to Iran’s nuclear program, as well as freedom to take environmental samples at all sites. Agency inspectors received that authority while investigating the Iraqi weapons programs under deposed President Saddam Hussein, according to the Telegraph. Goldschmidt also criticized IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s handling of the Iran dossier in the last two years. “ElBaradei says that any judgment about Iran should be made on their intentions. My view is that we should look at the indications, not the intentions, and then decide,” he said (Con Coughlin, Sunday Telegraph, Sept. 11). Meanwhile, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew has said that Iran’s human rights abuses — including the death of Montreal-based photojournalist Zahra Kazemi — damage Tehran’s credibility on pledges that its nuclear program is aimed only at energy production. “These are separate things, but they both reflect pretty nasty habits,” Pettigrew said in an interview with the CanWest News Service. Pettigrew hopes to confront Iranian counterpart Mottaki at the U.N. summit in New York and plans to condemn Iran’s nuclear ambitions, according to CanWest (Mike Blanchfield, CanWest News Service, Sept. 12). Back to top       Study Finds India Increasing Plutonium Stockpiles A recent report found that India is increasing its stock of weapon-grade plutonium, but cautioned that the estimate is highly uncertain, the Daily Times reported today (see GSN, Sept. 9). “It is assumed that almost all of the plutonium is successfully recovered during reprocessing. Any estimate of India’s weapon-grade plutonium inventory remains highly uncertain. Complicating any estimate is the mixture of solid and ambiguous information regarding India’s capabilities and actions. As a result, an analytical approach is used that specifically aims to capture varying and conflicting information about key parameters affecting estimates of the size of India’s plutonium stock,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, in a report released last week (see GSN, Sept. 8) Albright reached his conclusion by estimating the amount of plutonium produced by India’s Cirus and Dhruva reactors.   To calculate the plutonium in the those reactors, Albright used Indian statements on reactor capacity, although official pronouncements on output have varied, according to the Times. “These statements cannot be confirmed and interpreting them is difficult. Dhruva had a capacity factor less than 25 percent during its first few years of operation,” Albright said in the report. “Other problems may have developed in the reactor that lowered its lifetime capacity factor below 60 to 65 percent. Indian officials may be giving capacity factors for periods when the reactors operated well and ignoring periods when the reactors were shut down or operating at significantly reduced power. This practice is rather common when discussing nuclear power reactors. In this case, a capacity factor of 60 to 65 percent would more likely be a maximum lifetime capacity factor” (Daily Times, Sept. 12). Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to meet with French President Jacques Chirac today in Paris to ask for assistance in developing nuclear power, Agence France-Presse reported. Singh said in a statement yesterday that he hopes to expand civilian nuclear energy, trade, investment, defense, space technology, advanced science and cultural cooperation with France. In an interview published in Le Figaro today, Singh said that nuclear assistance provided by other nations would be kept apart from India’s military nuclear program. He also distanced India from its longtime rival, Pakistan. “India is a democracy that functions well. Our political system offers sufficient guarantees to ensure that we keep our promises” (Agence France-Press/Yahoo!News, Sept. 12). Back to top       Tritium Rods Arrive at U.S. Nuclear Installation for Future Extraction, Weapons Use The Savannah River Site in South Carolina has received rods containing the first tritium produced by the United States in 15 years in preparation for the material’s eventual extraction and use in existing nuclear weapons, the Associated Press reported Friday (see GSN, April 12, 2004). A radioactive isotope of hydrogen, tritium must be replaced in nuclear weapons because it decays at a rate of 5 percent each year, according to AP. The shipment recently arrived from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar nuclear reactor, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration. “This milestone is an important element to maintaining the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile,” NNSA Deputy Administrator Thomas D’Agostino said in a statement (Associated Press/Myrtle Beach Online, Sept. 9). Back to top

South African “Dr. Death” Eligible for Prosecution South Africa’s Constitutional Court on Friday said a lower court made a mistake when it ruled that the head of the country’s apartheid-era biological weapons program could not be tried because his alleged crimes did not occur in the country, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Feb 22). The decision allows for the prosecution of Wouter Basson, called “Dr. Death” by the South African media, for reputedly planning to use biological weapons against Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress, according to AP. The killings were allegedly to occur in Namibia, Mozambique, Swaziland and the United Kingdom. The court, in a unanimous decision, said that international law obligates South Africa to prosecute crimes against humanity. Basson in 2002 was acquitted of 36 charges, including theft, drug trafficking, murder and fraud (see GSN, Apr. 11, 2002). During the trial, witnesses testified that the Basson-led Project Coast tried in the 1980s to create antifertility drugs and deadly bacteria that would affect only blacks, and stockpiled HIV, cholera and anthrax. The charges also include allegations that Basson provided cholera bacteria to poison water supplies used by enemies of the government, AP reported. Prosecutors in February said that the trial could begin within three months if the court allowed the case to proceed (Associated Press/FindLaw, Sept. 9). Back to top       Report Finds Arkansas Misused Bioterrorism Funds Arkansas’ Health Department misspent a portion of $26 million in federal bioterrorism funding and did not accurately track how the money was used, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported Friday (see GSN, Aug. 12). A review by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general found that Arkansas used some of the money to pay the salaries of 16 employees whose salaries had previously been paid for by the state. This money was supposed to fund new bioterrorism response measures, according to the inspector general’s report. Of these employees, 10 said that they spent no more than 20 percent of their time working on bioterrorism preparedness. Paul Halverson, director of Arkansas’ new Health Division, in a July response to a draft of the report said that the state was using the money to block the elimination of positions needed for Arkansas’ bioterrorism preparedness.  The HHS report also said that the state could not locate two invoices for $35,000 in expenditures and did not submit final financial statements for two funding periods. Finally, Arkansas failed to spend $2 million of the $12.6 million in bioterror funding it received from August 2001 to August 2003, according to the inspector general. “Activities to be funded through the program are considered to be of core importance to the security of the country and … funded applications should be pursued vigorously, with as little time lost in startup as possible,” the report said. No indication is given whether the findings will affect future bioterrorism funding in Arkansas. The inspector general asked the state to respond to the report before any possible federal action is taken (Nell Smith, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Sept. 9). Back to top

Russia to Boost Chemical Weapons Disposal Spending Russia is expected to increase the amount of money spent on chemical weapons destruction by $250 million in 2006, ITAR-Tass reported today (see GSN, Aug. 1). “The budget financing of this program is to be increased by more than 50 percent next year,” said lawmaker Nikolai Bezborodov, a member of the State Chemical Weapons Disarmament Commission. “The draft 2006 budget envisages the allocation of [$641 million] for this purpose compared to [$391 million] this year.” Bezborodov said that Russia last year eliminated 145 tons of toxic agents and 6,532 tons of waste created during weapons processing.  “It is planned to commission this year several more facilities to scrap chemical weapons in Kambarka (Udmurtia) and the first section of the chemical weapons scrapping plant in Maradykonsky, as well as to continue work on the construction of scrapping facilities in Shchuchye, Leonidovka, Pochep and Kizner,” he said (ITAR-Tass, Sept. 12). Back to top

Padilla Can Be Held Indefinitely, Court Rules Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen suspected of plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb,” can be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday (see GSN, June 14). “The exceedingly important question before us is whether the president of the United States possesses the authority to detain militarily a citizen of this country who is closely associated with al-Qaeda, an entity with which the United States is at war,” Judge Michael Luttig wrote. “We conclude that the president does possess such authority.” Padilla has been jailed for more than three years. Defense attorney Andrew Patel said his client would probably appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Friday’s unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the court could have serious consequences, he said. “It’s a matter of how paranoid you are,” Patel said. “What it could mean is that the president conceivably could sign a piece of paper when he has hearsay information that somebody has done something he doesn't like and send them to jail — without a hearing (or) a trial” (Kristen Gelineau, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Sept. 10). Back to top       Columbia Wins Radiation Screening Grant Columbia University Medical Center received a five-year, $25 million federal development grant to develop technology to screen numerous people following a terrorist attack on a nuclear installation or detonation of a radiological weapon, the center announced Friday (see GSN, Aug. 18). The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funds are aimed at developing devices that can efficiently assess radiation exposure in hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days, according to a Columbia University press release. “Columbia University’s extensive work in disaster relief and preparedness, as well as our location in New York City, makes us the ideal institution to address this critical threat,” David Hirsh, executive vice president for research at Columbia, said in the release. “Rapid triage is especially important as some treatments for radiation exposure need to be administered within specific windows of time. The screening will also provide reassurance for the great majority of individuals who would not need medical intervention, while preserving valuable, limited resources for those who do,” said David Brenner, professor of radiation oncology and public health, in the release. The research is to be divided into the three areas: development of a high-speed automated image analysis device to examine tissue samples; development of an inexpensive mobile device for rapid molecular screening; and development of a noninvasive screening tool (Columbia University Medical Center release, Sept. 9).   Back to top

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